Recovery and the Return of Ethan Hart

by Stephen Benatar

  The stupid bitch.

  Oh, God! Was it because the word rhymed? Bitch? Witch? I saw a woman tied to a stake and standing in the midst of fire. Even as I glanced, the flesh was turning to charred meat. I had to close my eyes. Me! Press my hands against my ears. It didn’t help. I threw up on the grass.

  Then people stared at me and backed away and I realized I’d been dreaming. I felt asinine—ashamed. Went hot, cold. Unsteady at the knees. But, Christ Almighty! It was like the heat of those flames had been licking at my own body. I hardly dared look down. Half thought my garment would be scorched.

  I made an effort, though. Huge effort. Controlled myself. Wiped my mouth clean. Cast out my own demons. I wasn’t a weakling. I wasn’t the kind of man demons should ever think to mix with. My God, I’d show ’em!

  The stupid bitch, I said, looking back at his mother. Stupid bugger, I said, looking back at him. And for fully a minute I managed to enjoy his sweaty contortions almost as much as I had hoped. I remembered the insolence he’d shown towards my master when asked outright, “Are you the King of the Jews?” I bet he was wishing now he’d been a bit more diplomatic.

  But then it happened again!

  This time I saw a man on another kind of gibbet, only this time he was white-skinned like the burning woman (I think she was white-skinned!), pale-complexioned like all the strangely garbed spectators struggling now to get a closer view. Yes, white-skinned and writhing, with a rope around his neck (but not pulled tight, not yet; or do I mean, not any longer) and there was this…hangman? executioner?…playfully pricking out upon his stomach the journey which he meant his knife to take… Dear Lord! I felt the blade slice into my own gut, turn amidst my own entrails, cause the blood to run between my own outstretched fingers.

  Yet there I was—still standing on the grass on Golgotha—thank God, oh thank God: me savagely scraping across the back of one hand with the fingernails of the other. I looked towards Jesus of Nazareth. But again! It wasn’t him I saw. It was two street children in Guatemala City (which wasn’t any place I’d ever heard of, I’m not an educated man, how could I be, just a slave in the governor’s palace)—urchins whose eyes were burnt out by police cigars, their tongues torn from their heads with pliers.

  And I cried out.

  No more. No more. Please stop.

  I wailed.

  I don’t know what cigars are, or pliers, or police, I don’t know any country but this, or any customs but ours, or any times but the times I live in.

  I’m not sure who I cried out to—though one thing’s certain: I didn’t expect an answer. When I got one I fainted.

  “No, as yet you don’t know them! But wait. Other customs and other countries—yes, and other times, as well. Oh, yes, Cartophilus! You’ll most certainly get to know them!”

  10

  It was several days before he commented. He had our exercise books piled in two heaps in front of him.

  “Shall I give them back, sir?”

  “No, Nesbitt. Not yet. Later.”

  “Oh, go on, sir, let me do it now.”

  “I said—later.”

  “Please…” Nesbitt, already on his feet, clasped his hands in piteous supplication. He looked like Al Jolson about to sink onto one knee before a picture of his mammy.

  “Sit down!”

  Nesbitt sat down—on the floor between two desks. The titters turned to laughter. There came, too, a smattering of applause.

  I myself stood up.

  “Oh, Andrew, stow it! It isn’t funny. We want to hear about our work.”

  The ensuing hush was one of amazement. At that moment nobody looked on me with favour, not even the master. But I suddenly drew my shoulders back and thought, Oh what the hell, I know I’m doing right, surely I’m doing right! And the reflection steadied me and helped me stand my ground—do so, moreover, with an air of assurance even Gordon might have envied. I felt I was making my bid for top dog in the Mafia.

  “Thank you, Hart,” said Mr Hawk-Genn. “That’s more than good of you, I’m sure.”

  His irony appeared ungracious but at least if I wanted to be noble the laughter of the class was now with him rather than against him.

  “It’s interesting it should be you,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “My saviour.”

  It occurred to me this really had to be an error, his admission that he’d needed saving, hadn’t been in control. But the silence remained absolute: everyone caught unawares by such an unexpected development—on top of which it seemed blessedly certain that, whether or not I was now in the running to replace Legs Diamond, I was no longer any candidate for Teacher’s Pet.

  “I just wanted us to get on, sir.”

  “And that’s what I find interesting.”

  “Why, sir?”

  I was still standing and, even if puzzled by the sarcasm, still feeling competent to handle things.

  But I suddenly wondered why I’d stood up in the first place. Had it been courtesy? Or had it been arrogance?

  “Well, Hart, let me put it this way. There are those who didn’t do the work—and I shall have a thing or two to say to them. Osborne, for instance, Whittaker, I trust you’re both listening. I trust you both have convincing explanations. Also Simmons, Brown, and…” (he ran his finger down the register) “…ah yes, you, Wilkins! Why have none of you done the work I asked for?”

  The silence lasted while each of these in turn made his poor pathetic excuse. And though each in turn played to the gallery, each in turn found his material less rib-tickling than he’d envisaged.

  “Well, enough of this. Unless your work is handed in without fail by lunchtime tomorrow—and unless it’s of a considerably higher standard than most of what I have in front of me at present—then you can make your excuses to the headmaster and that’s it. You may all sit down again. No, Hart, not you. Where’s Yardley?”

  The boy who was more often known as Lavender stood up.

  “Yardley, well done. If we have time, I may ask you to read it out. But pay attention to my comments at the bottom.”

  Lavender smirked a bit and sat down.

  “Nesbitt, give him back his book. No—give it, don’t throw it!”

  Nesbitt walked to the back of the class, pulling faces as he went, and returned Lavender his book.

  “Fletcher?”

  Simon stood up.

  “Fletcher, your spelling is appalling and your grammar at times odd. But the story was good fun. I enjoyed reading it. Thank you.”

  Simon was a shy boy and didn’t look round for appreciation. I took to him nowadays much more than I had used to.

  “Aarons? One or two interesting ideas quite pleasantly expressed. Try to keep that up. Leonard? May I ask how long you took to do this work?”

  “I don’t know, sir.” Now we did get a low ripple of laughter and Gordon glanced behind him. He had been bragging about how he’d scraped in under seven minutes, according to his father’s stopwatch.

  “Half an hour? More than that? Less?”

  “Maybe slightly less.”

  “Twenty minutes?”

  “Not sure, sir.”

  “I see. Well, Leonard, how about rewriting it for me this weekend? The idea of your tree house—I found that appealing—perhaps because I grew up in the middle of a big city. Will you try to take a lot more care this time and do yourself some justice?”

  Gordon shrugged. Again he glanced round at the rest of us. Whatever—quite—had happened, he encountered a pretty thin response.

  He said in a mumble: “I suppose so, sir, if you like.” He was permitted to sit down. I was the only one left standing, except for Nesbitt, who had returned Johnny’s and Simon’s books and now returned Gordon’s.

  “All right, Nesbitt, you may hand back the rest. But while you’re doing so I want to say this to the majority. Don’t let it happen again! Do you understand?”

  I didn’t understand. I had tried over mine and surely he must have been able to se
e that. No, perhaps I hadn’t actually tried. But at least there’d been a prior determination to do so.

  My book wasn’t amongst the others.

  “Which leaves us merely with our friend here.”

  If my book was lost I’d have been singled out with those who hadn’t handed anything in. So was it a case, I wondered, simply of his having been shocked by what I’d written? I myself had been shocked by what I’d written. But not so much on account of its sensationalism or its crude blasphemy. Nor, come to that, on account of its less crude blasphemy: the idea that God could have so disregarded his son’s anguished entreaty from the cross, Father forgive them; could, besides, have had so little understanding of what had turned Cartophilus into the brute he was; could in fact have overreacted as he had, by dishing out a punishment so wildly disproportionate—no, I was shocked not so much by the content of what I’d written, as because I couldn’t think where any of it had come from.

  “Tell me something, Hart. Precisely what sort of a fool do you take me for?”

  “I don’t take you for any sort of fool, sir.”

  “I think you must.” He had now conjured up my book from between the pages of his register. “I don’t know yet what source you’ve copied from but rest assured that if you don’t tell me I shall find out. You really had the gall to believe you could pass this off as your own work? Well, let me advise you, I do not take kindly to plagiarism! Who can tell me what plagiarism means?”

  But he was too worked up to allow enough of a pause for anyone to tell him anything.

  “I’ll tell you what it means. It means copying, often word for word, what somebody else has written. In effect, it means lying. Cheating. Taking low advantage.” (Robin Baines—in the middle of the front row—shook his head and tut-tutted.) “Doesn’t it, Hart? Isn’t that the proper definition? Or have you a slightly different one?” He stared at me and defied me to contradict him.

  I was not enjoying this. I said: “I try not to tell lies, sir. I don’t believe I ever have.” I realized that ‘ever’ was relative but reckoned they’d all assume that I meant only the past eleven and a half years. “And I don’t cheat.” (Or was it cheating to have Johnny help me with my maths and try to help him with his English?) I wasn’t sure about taking low advantage. “In any case I’m not a plagiarist.”

  But that was showing off again and it was showing off which had brought me to this present pass. I was assailed by self-distrust.

  The silence continued. I faced the master with what I hoped was a total lack of priggishness but merely having that thought go through my mind had possibly reduced my chances of success. Luckily the bell went. It startled me; maybe most of us. Perhaps Mr Hawk-Genn had never known his pupils so reluctant to take their leave. It was the final period of the afternoon.

  He had told me, crisply, to remain behind.

  “Come over here,” he said, when finally the room was empty. “Sit down.”

  On the teacher’s dais he’d placed another chair.

  “Please look me in the eye.”

  I did.

  “Ethan, I shall ask you only once.” My full name, of course, was written on my book, as well as in his register. “Tell me the truth and we won’t say another word about it but if you persist in—”

  “Sir, I didn’t copy so much as one syllable. I’ll swear it on the Bible if you like. But I really do promise.”

  He sighed.

  There followed a long silence.

  I hated anyone to imagine I told lies.

  “I suppose in that case,” he said, “I shall simply have to believe you.”

  I don’t know if it had been the passion in my voice or something that he might have seen in my expression.

  “Although—I’ve got to add—contrary to every conceivable expectation!”

  He wiped a hand across his brow.

  “But if all this is pure invention…then I don’t know what to say.” His eye travelled down the first couple of pages. “Clearly it’s powerful stuff. Practically uncanny coming from a lad of eleven. Do you mind if I smoke?”

  He used his matchbox as an ashtray.

  “You are only eleven?”

  It was ridiculous, I didn’t even like to nod. But in any case the question was rhetorical.

  “Ethan, where do you get your vocabulary? The adult way you phrase things?”

  “Couldn’t it be, sir, that I read a lot?” I indicated the essay, added uncomfortably, “I’m sorry about calling the Virgin Mary a bitch and Jesus a—”

  “Yes, well, that wasn’t you, was it? It was the character you wrote about.” He drew lengthily on his Senior Service and gazed for a moment at its burning tip. “What gave you the idea of writing about the Wandering Jew? I gather from Mr Marne that in Scripture at present you’re dealing with King David.”

  I hesitated.

  “The Wandering Jew?” I asked.

  “Didn’t you even know who Cartophilus was?”

  “No. The whole thing, you see…the whole thing sort of wrote itself. In a way all I did was hold the pen.”

  “But obviously you’ve read about him?”

  “I suppose I must have.”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “No, sir, but I think it might have been the radio.” Indeed, it almost had to have been; either the radio or some article in a newspaper or magazine, interesting at the time but quickly forgotten. That’s what I’d been telling myself over the past few days and on the whole it satisfied me. If I’d ever read a book on the subject, whether five years ago or even twenty-five, surely I’d have realized.

  “Your parents talk to you about such things?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And hanging, drawing and quartering…?”

  “I know I’ve read of that. I almost wish I hadn’t.”

  He lifted a shred of tobacco off his tongue.

  “And why on earth Guatemala City?”

  I shrugged.

  “Ethan, has it ever happened to you before, anything of this sort?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did you tell your parents?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And yet you brought the work to school? Presented it for assessment?”

  By now, of course, I was wishing I hadn’t. And I didn’t even understand what had made me—again, this unconquerable urge to flaunt my cleverness? Or a feeling that, because I’d had no control over what I had written, it might have been intended to be made public.

  For if I hadn’t brought it to school I could so easily have replaced it. After all, it was only fifty minutes I had lost, except perhaps in one sense—that the exercise had depleted me. I couldn’t have written anything else that same evening.

  He gave another sigh.

  “What worries me, Ethan, is where all these awful images proceed from. Are you in any kind of trouble, or torment? Do you often think about such things as burnings and torture and crucifixions?”

  “No, sir. No more than most.”

  “I’m not sure that at your age you should think of them at all. Ever have bad dreams; anything like that?”

  He must have seen me falter.

  (Yet at the same time I found it consoling I could still hear a whisper in my mind: appreciate the present! You’re sitting here in bright September sunlight, in a haze of ever-swirling chalk dust, facing a man who’s deeply well-intentioned but ridiculed and unhappy and who’ll have killed himself in less than twenty years’ time. Don’t let this moment pass you by.)

  “Well, do you?” he persisted.

  “Only one,” I said. “Occasionally.”

  “What do you dream?”

  “I dream I’m drowning someone.”

  “My God. Why? Do you know why?”

  I bit my lip but then said carefully: “I once saw a man drown.”

  “And is this the person who figures in your dream?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you believe you were responsible?”

  “Pa
rtly. But, sir. I’m coping with it. If you told my parents it would only upset them and there’d be nothing they could do.”

  He stubbed out the cigarette. We watched its thin, expiring gasp of smoke. He almost took another, then looked at me, decided not to.

  “I will say this. You certainly have the air of somebody who’s coping. Except for…” He tapped the book on his knee.

  “And please don’t mention it to Mr Saunders.”

  “No. If I do speak to the headmaster it will only be because I think you have exceptional gifts.”

  “Because of that one essay? No, sir, you’ll soon find out it wasn’t typical. Some kind of aberration.”

  I wasn’t being modest. I didn’t have exceptional gifts, other than the one I’d received nearly twelve years earlier. Neither in this life nor in my last had I shown any particular aptitude for writing, nor ever possessed the sort of imagination which could reach out beyond the limits of my own experience. (Except to have me flying on a magic carpet and suchlike.) The only card I still had up my sleeve was the shape of things to come—and even then I wasn’t sure I could describe it well enough to interest readers unaware it was a bona fide revelation.

  “Well, anyway,” he said, “we’ll see. Whatever happens you mustn’t feel pressured.”

  He stood up and put his smoking materials back in his pocket.

  “I suppose you wouldn’t like to talk to a doctor about this other thing—this drowning? You don’t think it might help?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Fair enough. But if ever for any reason you want to change your mind…” Then, oddly, he held out his hand. As I shook it he said: “Sorry about all the unpleasantness in class. I hope you’ll be able to forgive that.”

  I told him with conviction that it hadn’t been his fault. “And you know, sir…in a way I’m even glad this happened.”

  “Yes, I am, too.”

  I held the door open and we said goodnight.

  11

  If only he had died more gently…

  A terrifying notion came into my head. In March of 1992 would I be called upon to drown him for a second time?

  I couldn’t.

  I wouldn’t.