Voices in Time

by Hugh Maclennan

  The evening after this attack was published, he was sitting at his desk in the studio when a messenger handed him a sealed envelope. It was marked “Personal” and when he recognized the handwriting he was pretty sure what was inside the envelope. It was Esther’s formal resignation from the program. “And when I read those cold, official words, the walls of the room began to shake as though in an earthquake. Truly I had never believed she would go as far as this or do it in this way.”

  He phoned her apartment but there was no answer. He went out and walked the streets and felt the high-strung tension in the few people he passed. He made calls in one phone booth after another until at 2300 hours he finally found her home. He begged her to come back but at first all he could hear was her heavy breathing at the other end of the wire.

  “Esther, I’m forlorn. Please come back. Please speak to me, anyway.”

  He heard her say, “I’m sorry, Timmie.”

  “Say something, Esther. Anything.”

  “Some of it has been my fault,” she said.

  “Then you’ll speak to me again?”

  He had always known there was power in her, but now he sensed something deeper than ordinary power – “Thousands of years of experience built into the genes of this woman’s ancestors – a cataract of images that once had been facts – the lustful faces of the barbarian goys of the Middle Ages, the lustful faces of the Cossacks and the priests, the lustful faces of some of their own Jewish employers.”

  Still she remained silent and the two of them listened to each other’s breathing translated over the wire.

  Finally she said, “You’re in danger, Timmie. I have to tell you that.”

  “In danger from what?”

  Again all he heard was her breathing and he thought that the armor was built into her while he had no armor at all.

  “From what am I in danger?”

  “A lot of this – not all but some of it – it’s been my fault.”

  “Answer me, for God’s sake! What am I in danger from?”

  “Yourself,” she said.

  “Isn’t everybody?”

  “No, not everybody.”

  “Then tell me who I am, for I don’t know any more who I am.”

  Another silence.

  “For Christ’s sake, do I really deserve this? I didn’t manufacture this crazy world.”

  “I said I was sorry, Timmie.”

  Then he begged her to let him send her air tickets to Nassau or Antigua. He told her that she was simply tired out and needed a change. He was not suggesting that he accompany her. She could take anyone she wished for a companion. He stopped talking when he realized that he might be sounding like a newly rich husband talking to a neglected wife.

  Then she spoke to him. “I’ll always think of you. How can I not? I loved you and I still do. Probably you’re the only man I’ll ever love. It’s not all your fault, what happened. What I told you at the beginning about not being able to marry a gentile. If I hadn’t said that, perhaps – but I did say it. All along I knew it couldn’t be permanent and I didn’t believe you wanted it to be permanent. You don’t want it now, not really.” She paused, then said quietly, “Please understand that what I’m feeling is much worse than sadness.”

  Timothy recorded that when she told him this a coolness came over him and he felt something a little like peace. He told her quietly that perhaps he understood her at last. He told her that he had truly loved her.

  “You tried to,” she said gently. “So did I try to help you love me.”

  “I’m not hanging up on you,” he said, “but now I’ll say good night.”

  “Is it good-bye?”

  “If you’ve decided to live with it. Yes, Esther-good-bye.”

  He hung up and realized that he was standing in a phone booth on the corner of Crescent and St. Catherine; also that it might just as well have been any street corner in any city in the world.

  He knew he would be unable to sleep if he went home and began to walk the streets and he recorded that it was uncanny. A few cars whirred softly along empty pavements though it was close to the heart of the city, and this city was not one where everyone went to bed early. Occasionally he heard the screams of distant police sirens. They were still searching and finding nothing. There were supposed to be sixteen different cells but how did anyone know that? So far only two had struck. While he was standing on a corner a prowl car slowed down and the policeman who was not driving rolled down his window and stuck his head out to look Timothy over. Timothy guessed he had been recognized because the cop half turned and said something to his mate behind the wheel. Then he turned back and stared “with the kind of expression cops mobilize when they don’t like you.” Timothy turned away and continued to walk, it having occurred to him that if he continued to stand he might be arrested for loitering. The car drove past him, then picked up speed, and he heard the whir of its tires diminish in the distance.

  “This town is like a herd of zebras smelling leopards,” he said aloud to nobody and walked slowly home.

  FOUR

  It was four in the morning before Timothy finally fell asleep and four hours later he woke with the phone ringing. When he picked it up the voice on the other end was his father’s.

  “Yes,” he said, “what is it?”

  “What is it? What the hell do you think it is?”

  Of all the many people he did not wish to talk to at that moment, including the police, his father came first on the list. Half asleep and half awake, he hung up on him. Not in the three years since his program began had his father spoken to him or written a word to him.

  “That poor little thing I had done – he had never acknowledged its existence. In those three years only one member of my proliferous family had ever spoken to me and even that occasion was accidental. A year ago I had collided physically with my second cousin Eunice in the nether parts of the Ritz, I coming out of the men’s room and she on her way to the Maritime Bar. We had stopped, stared, and laughed. Eunice was a cool little piece, conventional even in her discreet sleeping around with older men, and the last thing she wanted was to have her cosy little world blown apart by political nationalists. I invited her to a drink and she told me she was on her way to lunch with somebody else.

  “Would you be interested to know who dined with us last night?” she said.

  “Should I be?”

  “I think so. Your father and stepmother, no less. When I mentioned your name he turned the color of a turkey cock after his seventh double Scotch.”

  “You should have told him not to do that. He might get a heart attack.”

  “What a funny boy you are, Timmie. Apparently you don’t know that he’s already had one.”

  I forced a smile and asked her if it was serious.

  “Apparently not very, but his doctor’s made him slow down.”

  “So Father watches my show?”

  “We all do. It’s very clever. Your father says it won’t last much longer. Will it?”

  “The ratings say so.”

  “But can’t they change very quickly?”

  “I’m afraid they can.” I looked at her: a neat figure, a neat face, cool eyes, a sensual mouth. “Why don’t you go out with one of our concitoyens, for a change? That’s where the real action is these days. Or haven’t you learned to speak French yet?”

  “I speak French quite nicely, thank you. And since you’re so interested, I’m having lunch with one of them now.”

  “Will you be speaking French or English?”

  “English, of course.”

  “Is he rich?”

  “Much richer than your father, I believe. And is it necessary for you to be as objectionable in private as you are in public?”

  Timothy was still remembering this incident when the phone rang again, and he let it ring three times before he picked it up. It was his father back at him and he lay there with his father not talking to him, but at him. “He did not know that I had rigged a tape
recorder to my phone which I suspected (rightly, as I later discovered) was tapped by the police. It is to this tape that I, as well as the police, am indebted for a recorded conversation that did credit to neither of us.”

  And I, more than sixty years later, am indebted to the same recording.

  “If I’ve taken the initiative in making contact with you,” his father began, “you may be sure it’s important. But first of all let me tell you something –” and for several minutes Timothy listened to his father telling him a lot of things, with particular emphasis on his performance with General Sprott, for which Colonel Wellfleet said he had apologized in a personal call to Washington. While Timothy reflected that his father was like a dinosaur haranguing a baby lizard that had learned to grow his claws into embryo wings, the Colonel ended, “Why don’t you answer my question?”

  “How can I, when you haven’t asked me a question?”

  The Colonel had to stop because of a coughing fit and after a final sputter he cleared his throat.

  “This is awful,” he said, and another cough checked him. Then his voice steadied. “Do you – or do you not – know what happened last night?”

  “I suppose a lot of things happened. Why don’t you get down to it, Father?”

  “What happened to Conrad Dehmel – do you know it?”

  “What happened to who?”

  Timothy’s reply must have been purely defensive, for there was a quaver in his voice. His father let out a roar, then spoke in that lethally quiet voice Timothy had always hated.

  “Are you under drugs?”

  “Is it really essential for people like you to believe that everyone you dislike is under drugs?”

  “Dislike you? I’m your father. I despise what you’ve been doing and you make me ashamed to show my face, but I don’t dislike you. Haven’t you taken in the name I just gave you?”

  “Of course I know who Dehmel is, but what’s he got to do with last night?”

  “Oh, I see. So you don’t know what happened last night. Well, you’d better brace yourself.” Another pause. “Dr. Conrad Dehmel was murdered last night. He was shot and killed and I’m almost certain this would never have happened if it hadn’t been for that show of yours. A crazy man did it. You’re vicious pretty often, but I never saw you as vicious as you were with him. You were out-of-this-world horrifying with him. I couldn’t believe it, what you accused him of. Poor Stephanie was with him last night. She loved you when you were a child and she was with him when he was murdered.”

  “Stephanie?” Timothy was dazed. “What’s she got to do with Dehmel?”

  His father gasped. “You – you really mean what you’ve just said?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “My God, for once I have to believe you. You didn’t know!”

  “Didn’t know what?”

  “That Stephanie was Conrad Dehmel’s wife. The man you’ve almost certainly destroyed was Stephanie’s husband. The country is full of crazy people these days and you zeroed this maniac right in on him.”

  Timothy recorded that this hit him with the shock of a bullet. His mouth and throat were dry and he stammered.

  “How could I know that? I haven’t seen Stephanie for years. I never knew she was married to anyone.”

  The colonel-businessman’s voice went cold, factual, and very unpleasant.

  “Now I know this world is completely out of control if an irresponsible fool like you is allowed to perform on a national network. You – the great authority and judge of the nations – you didn’t know that the only human being you ever really cared for in your entire life had at last found some security and happiness. Conrad Dehmel was a splendid man. Indeed, I thought him a wonderful man – which was just enough to entice a jealous little viper like you to strike your fangs into him. He came onto your program trusting that you’d be decent because of Stephanie. He had a note from her that he gave you and still you did it. I’m partly responsible myself, for when Dr. Dehmel asked me about accepting your so-called invitation, I told him that if Stephanie told you who he was, you’d behave yourself.”

  Timothy was reeling and almost sobbing with grief and shame. “Note? What note?”

  “You mean you didn’t receive a letter from him?”

  Then he remembered. “Wait a minute, let me look.”

  He had not worn the suit he used that night since he returned home from the studio. When he urinated against the door of the garage in the alley he had wet his pants and had thrown his suit aside and forgotten it. He found the suit, reached into its pockets, and discovered the letter, unopened. He recognized my mother’s precise handwriting. He had not even looked at the envelope when Conrad gave it to him before the program. He returned to the telephone.

  I have mentioned several times that there was a kind of desperate endurance in Timothy and it held him together now. He did not collapse and sob with his father on the line. Instead, he controlled himself and said quietly, “Tell me exactly what happened.”

  His father did tell him exactly what happened. As the whole country was informed by the press what happened, I knew this much myself. But in all this time, I never knew until I translated Conrad’s final narrative why it happened. Here is the cold, factual story, which I myself read as a boy in the newspapers.

  FIVE

  About a week after Timothy’s program, Conrad appeared in a public debate on the moral issues of the current crisis in our city and province. He had agreed to this debate several weeks previously, and as I later discovered, my mother was so appalled by what Timothy had done, and so fearful that a demonstration would be made against him, that she begged him to cancel the engagement. Of course he refused to do this, because if he had cancelled, it would have been equal to an admission that Timothy had been right in naming him as a war criminal. There were three other speakers on the platform, two of them separatists. One of the separatists spoke first, but when Conrad rose the demonstration against him was deafening.

  The student activist Jason Ross, the one who had given Timothy the paper implicating Conrad as a Nazi and a member of the Gestapo, was there with a large claque of neo-Marxists, and they made such an uproar insulting him that he could not speak. After five minutes of this, the chairman shouted over the loudspeaker that the meeting was dismissed. Mother was sitting in the front row and she joined Conrad when he left the platform. They went out the back door of the building escorted by the chairman, for if he had gone down into the audience he would have been mobbed. When they reached the street the situation was still ugly, but a car was there ready to take them home, and then it happened.

  Out of the crowd came a white-haired man with a pistol in his hand. He reached Conrad in five steps, stared at him, and screamed.

  “Heinrich! You killed my wife and my children and you tortured me. I thought you were dead and then I saw you.”

  He pulled the trigger and shot Conrad through the heart. Conrad fell on his back and Stephanie went down on her knees beside him. The killer also went down on his knees, pushed Stephanie aside, and stared closely into Conrad’s face. Then he leaped to his feet and people who saw him said that his face revealed not insanity but horror.

  “My God!” he screamed in Yiddish. “You’re not Heinrich! My God, I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

  The shock was great, there were no police to take over, and nobody moved. The man looked down at Mother cradling Conrad’s head and she later told the police that he bent down and cried at her with such heartbreak in his voice that she pitied him.

  “Kind lady – kind lady – forgive me!”

  Then he put the pistol into his mouth and pressed the trigger a second time.

  I will continue to be factual. Conrad’s murder sent a shock through the whole country and was reported in many other countries besides ours. It caused a violent reaction against the popular baiting of public men and it brought an abrupt end to Timothy’s program. The letter he received from the network cancelling
his program crossed his own letter of resignation.

  A memorial service for Conrad was held in the university chapel and the Prime Minister himself, who was a personal friend of Conrad, attended it. The police arrested Jason Ross, who denied Timothy’s statement that it was he who had given the information that Conrad was a member of the Gestapo, so it was his word against Timothy’s. Ross was released, but his hour in the sun was extinguished and soon everyone forgot about him.

  Meanwhile, Timothy’s father had gone into action. Immediately after speaking to his son, he and Stephanie went to Conrad’s office in the university and collected all his papers and files and placed them in the Colonel’s house. Mother would never have thought of this, but the Colonel had once served in Intelligence and he was taking no chances that some document might be found by the wrong people. So it was he who secured most of Conrad’s papers, which he later turned over to Mother.

  The record of the assassin was searched and there was no mystery in it. He was a Polish Jew whose family had been murdered by the Gestapo and had himself been tortured and put into a camp. After the war he emigrated to Canada and had been living for years in a small town on the British Columbia coast. His name was Dobrovsky and by trade he was a master carpenter. He had told the local people his story and that he was waiting for the gas chambers when the Russians liberated him. They simply let him go along with the others and he walked away. He entered Czechoslovakia and from there he contacted Jewish friends in America. An international organization furnished him with enough funds to emigrate to the New World, and he had gone as far away from Europe as he could.

  Dobrovsky lived the rest of his life as a widower and had been highly respected. Everyone said he was a very quiet man. After his suicide, one of the townsmen told the police that on the night of Timothy’s show, Dobrovsky had been in his house and they had watched it together. Suddenly, when Conrad was being harassed by Timothy – when he was accused of being a member of the Gestapo – Dobrovsky had turned pale and leaped to his feet and pointed.

  “That’s Heinrich!” he had shouted. “That’s Heinrich! They told me he was dead!”