Hopeful Monsters

by Nicholas Mosley

  Rudi said to Walburga 'Can you please go away. We are discussing important business.'

  Walburga said 'Elena has told me about you two! You are the idiots who tried to kill my precious in the Sahara!'

  I found that in the presence of the others I was not wanting to open the letter. I felt that wild devils or angels might fly out.

  I said to Walburga 'Did you find out about Franz?'

  She said'Yes.'

  I said 'Where is he?'

  She said 'Aren't you pleased to see me?'

  Rudi said 'What do you mean, we can have our share?'

  I said to Walburga 'Yes, it's lovely to see you.' I said to Rudi 'I mean, you two can have your share of the diamonds.'

  Walburga said 'Franz is not far from here.'

  Rudi said 'When?'

  Walburga said 'He's in that house, you know, his family have got in the Black Forest,'

  I thought - Yes, I went there once.

  Stefan said 'Where are they?'

  I said to Stefan 'They're with my things at Kusnacht.' I said to Walburga 'Have you got a car?'

  Walburga said 'I left it on the other side of the lake.'

  I said 'Could you get it?'

  Walburga said 'If you like.'

  I said That's very good of you.' I thought - Now, I will open the letter. Rudi said 'Will you pay attention!' I said This letter is from my father.'

  My beloved Leni,

  I saw your mother briefly before she died.

  When I was arrested I asked if I could be detained in Sachsen-hausen Camp because this was where, I believed, she was. My request was laughed at. Then I was told that it might be granted if I was classified as a Jew. I said that this was agreeable to me.

  In Sachsenhausen men and women were housed separately but I managed to catch several glimpses of your mother. I am almost certain she saw me and knew who I was. There were good reasons perhaps for her not to show too much that she recognised me. When she no longer appeared, I made enquiries, and I was told that she had been taken to the prison hospital. Later I was told that she had died. I think this information was reliable.

  I wanted to tell you this, my beloved Leni, because now we must look to the future. Will you understand what I mean. The age of sacrifice is over. There has to be, I believe there is, a new dispensation.

  The children of light will have to be as wise as serpents: wiser than the children of darkness.

  I believe I have a means of getting this letter to Franz.

  Will you trust -

  Your ever loving, ever trusting,

  Father

  When I had finished reading this letter I folded it and put it in my pocket. It was as if I were still standing where I had been standing before but the world had flipped over, and on again, in a circle. I had been, briefly, in the presence of huts, watchtowers; now I was again with ladies and gentlemen in their masks. I said to Walburga 'Can I borrow your car?' She said 'What do you want it for?'

  I said 'I've got to see Franz. To find out about my father.' She said 'Now you mustn't be angry with your father!' Rudi said 'Will you please answer our questions.' I said 'You can have the diamonds when I get back.' Rudi said 'I want them now.'

  Walburga said 'You two ought to be in jail.'

  Rudi was sitting, Walburga and Stefan and I were standing, at the table in the cafe. I thought - Oh but I will be once more on a journey in the Black Forest!

  Stefan said 'But you may not come back.*

  Walburga said 'Can I come too?'

  I said 'No, I think I must go alone.'

  I thought - But indeed I may not be able to get back!

  Rudi said 'How do we trust you?'

  Walburga said 'All right, I'll fetch the car.'

  I said to Walburga 'Has my father been working with Franz?'

  Walburga said 'You know he's been working for the government?'

  I thought - But of course I trust you, of course you can trust me, and all that is happening, O my father!

  That was at lunchtime. Since then I have been writing this in the Gasthaus. Walburga will be back here by midnight. I will set off in the morning. Or will the war have started? So how, in fact, will I get back. I will leave this notebook in my suitcase addressed to you. Something of me will get back - to my angel in England!

  Take care of yourself, my beloved.

  I think I glimpse how things work: will we ever be able to describe this?

  Thank you for being more to me that what I am to myself.

  Sit on the gasworks: keep them warm for me.

  Tollington Park, Norfolk August 1939 My darling Eleanor, my Angel,

  This is the enormous country house we have been evacuated to: I think I am supposed not to tell you where it is.

  Donald is here, and some of the people from Cambridge. The idea is that we will be away from the likelihood of bombs. What irony!

  Please take care. Please don't go into Germany; and come home, if war seems certain.

  I am supposed to say nothing of the work we are doing here. I will write to you in this notebook.

  We have imagined that we might send each other messages, you

  and I: of course, there would be no means of describing exactly what these were.

  Practising.

  This is an enormous country house in the baroque style. It consists of a central block and two wings. The central block has been empty, which is where we are to set up our laboratory. In one of the wings lives a very old lady who is the owner of the house: she was supposed to have moved out when we arrived, but then she became too ill, and so she stays on with a cook and two nurses. No one sees her.

  I have a room on the top floor of the opposite wing. From my window I look out across parkland. The landscape is very beautiful: there are sheep and groups of deer dotted here and there; the trees stand out from the paler green like things that contain their own shadows. It is like a landscape into which man has not yet come.

  In fact, this is a part of the country where some of the earliest traces of humans have been found: primitive humans settled here not because the soil was good but because it was poor - and so did not encourage predators. And just under the ground there were flints, which humans could mine and so make weapons to keep out what predators there were. Oh humans have to use cunning in the face of adversity!

  To be cunning, to be wise, humans of course have had to get out of the Garden of Eden.

  Near to this house there is being built an enormous army camp: the uncluttered landscape is seen as providing a perfect training ground for soldiers. And the soldiers might be useful in protecting us scientists, I suppose, from anyone who might be jealous of our chance to destroy the world - or of giving it a chance of survival.

  As a matter of fact it is now thought that our work may take several years: a particular uranium isotope has to be separated if there is to be a chain reaction. And this, as Donald has always said, will require complex engineering and much money. To find a moderator to slow the reactions down we are beginning to experiment with both graphite and heavy water: but it is difficult to make the former sufficiently pure, and almost no supplies are available for the latter. So there are still many who say that the thing can't be done: in which case who cares - so long as it can't be done by Nazis. But there are other ways of destruction; there may not be other ways for survival.

  Perhaps you will have been able to see Franz? The Nazis are the

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  only people I can imagine who might be glad to blow up themselves along with everyone else: what could be more glorious than such a Gotterddmmerungl But if we learn to look at and live with the implications of such a Bomb, self-destruction might seem less glorious.

  The Russians have seemed not to mind killing or being killed: but they have not made out that there is much glory in destruction and self-destruction.

  Is there any news about your father?

  I sit at my window here and try to imagine what you are doing. I see you on the edge of your l
ake: perhaps a bird comes flying across; perhaps it has a message in its mouth, like the twig of a tree.

  What do you think that Tree of Life looked like that those people never came across in their Garden of Eden?

  A young girl has come to stay with the old lady in the opposite wing of the house. She is the old lady's granddaughter. She comes wandering on to the stone-flagged terrace in front of the house -past the orangery, the antique bowling-alley, a huge ornamental fountain. She has long fair hair. Of course, I have invested her with the lineaments of a fairy story! She is like someone in exile from a future country. So can I tell you this? Do you remember the idea that there is no mathematical reason why messages should not exist from the future as well as from the past; it is our structuring in accordance with time that would prevent us from recognising these. This girl also reminds me of myself that summer, years ago, when I was at home and had nothing to do; my school had burned down; I used to go out on my bicycle to look for lost landscapes, lost gardens. I found a lake and a ruined boathouse. This was the summer when I tried to make a perfect setting for my salamanders. This was not to show the possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics - God forbid! - but to see whether from a setting that was aesthetic something new and beautiful might grow - something like a visitor from the future, do you think? This was the sort of experiment, I imagined, that had been performed successfully by Kammerer. So I collected my ferns and crystals, my rare alpine plants, my white sand and coloured stones. And in the event I achieved - but how did I know what I had achieved? - I glimpsed, yes, that something beautiful had grown; but I hardly stayed to check; I had to go back to school; or did I not really want to check? Was not what I had wanted to achieve just such a glimpse of

  something beautiful? And if I had stayed to check might it not have gone; was it not safer in my mind, whatever it was - something secret, even sacred. Or perhaps, after all, I had just imagined it! Who wants the responsibility, after all, to have brought to birth something new, something beautiful: what a lifetime would be needed to look after it! How much easier to have done what was expected: to have gone back to school. Certainly no one else seemed to want to know, let alone to nurture them - my hopeful monsters!

  Perhaps they and their offspring lived: perhaps they all went into the dustbin.

  Now, I would wish to have the chance to look after something like them.

  But what would this mean?

  In those days I had at least loved enough to have brought an offspring into existence: though in reality, of course, the birth could have had quite natural genetic causes. But still, what a miracle!

  Here our equipment has not yet arrived. So I have time to sit at my window and let my thoughts go on journeys.

  Donald is playing croquet with some of the men from Cambridge on the lawn.

  I am thinking -

  If it is radioactivity that at random causes a mutation - and this has become part of the definition both of a mutation and of what is called 'random' -

  - And if it is consciousness that brings into existence a particular activity out of potentialities that I suppose could be called 'random' -

  - Then why should not a state of consciousness be the environment that might favour a mutation?

  This lives: that dies -I loved my salamanders.

  And I can write this stuff to you, my angel, because for reasons of what is called 'security' it may never be posted. Testing. Testing. I shall go for a walk in this aesthetic landscape.

  September ist 1939 There is a track that goes down from the house through the park and over a hill and then on and on through this strange landscape until it reaches a cluster of houses, a miniature village, all uninhabited: this is where people who worked on the estate must once have

  lived; they were moved out, I suppose, in preparation for the area becoming a playground for soldiers; or perhaps they had left earlier, such has been the state of farming recently in England. I had not walked as far as this before. I found the place faintly alarming. The impression from ruined houses is of the impermanence of humans; of the way in which humans play with fire, burn themselves, blow themselves up; of the way in which humans will one day be no more.

  I also had the impression that I had been in this place before, or perhaps that I would come here again: there is a theory that this is to do with some split in the memory system of the brain. But what sparks this off in the outside world? We understand very little about memory systems; and indeed what do we understand of the outside world except what comes in through the brain. And there are those areas of the brain for which we seem to have no present use: well, might they not be waiting for some understanding of- what does it mean, the question 'Have I not been here before?' the pattern 'Might I not come here again?'

  There was a path going down from this derelict village into a small dell with trees. The path was overgrown with nettles but a way had been made recently by someone trampling through. Now it is true that on a previous occasion I had noticed from my window in the house the girl with fair hair walking this way over the hill: it had seemed that she might be on her way to some rendezvous -with a lover? But was she not too young? Or she might simply have wanted, as I had done years ago in the ruined boathouse, to be alone. But then - had there not also been those intimations of death, of self-destruction, in the ruined boathouse! And had not this girl seemed to be as I had felt myself to be then, an exile in a foreign country? And was not this deserted village now heavy with an air of the impermanence of humans; of death.

  The path through the nettles led down into the dell. I went down this path and into an area of trees; in the middle of this there was a clearing. In the clearing there was a very small and low thatched cottage: it was, yes, like something in a fairy story. Across the roof of the cottage had fallen a large branch of a tree; the cottage was like an animal in a trap with its back broken. The path through nettles went from the edge of the clearing to the door of the cottage. The door was half open and half off its hinges. It seemed that there might be someone inside. I stood underneath a tree at the edge of

  the clearing. It was as if I might be waiting for - what? - something from the past? The future?

  The girl came out from the cottage. She carried a saw in her hand. The saw was one of those that are shaped like a bow. She went to the end of the large branch that had fallen across the cottage, to where the lesser branches of the tree rested on the ground. She began to climb up into the branches. She wore a dress with a short yellow skirt. I had the impression that she might have seen me where I was standing at the edge of the clearing. She climbed till she reached the main branch of the tree then crawled along this and sat astride the ridge of the roof of the cottage. Then she began to saw at the thick branch. After a time her saw got stuck. She pulled, but failed to get it loose. Then she looked at me.

  I said 'Can I help you?'

  She said 'Can you?'

  I walked across the glade. I said 'You may have to saw from underneath, since the pressure from the branches on the ground is such that if you saw from the top the saw may always get stuck.'

  She said 'How can I saw from underneath when the saw is now stuck and, anyway, the tree is resting on the roof?'

  I said 'That's true.'

  When I got close I saw that there was a second saw stuck in the main trunk of the tree close to the first.

  The girl said 'What I should have done, I see now, after the first saw had got stuck, was to saw further away from the roof from underneath with the second, but I did not see this at the time.'

  I said'Yes.'

  She said 'So what shall we do now?'

  I looked round on the ground. I thought - She said 'we'. I said 'What we can do is to look for a suitable lever which we can put under the branch where it's on the roof, then I can raise the tree so that the pressure will be taken off the saws and you can free them, and then we can use them to cut the branches which are on the ground and the pressure will be such that we may not even hav
e to cut the main branch from underneath.'

  She said 'But can you find a suitable lever?'

  I said 'I don't know.' Then - 'And anyway, the lever might go through the roof.'

  She said 'So what are you going to do?'

  I climbed up the branches of the tree. I pulled at the saws but they would not come out. I sat facing the girl on the ridge of the roof. I

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  thought - It is as if we are on the back of an elephant, which is on the back of a tortoise, which is on the back of the sea.

  I said 'What I will do is to try to get my back underneath the tree and raise it so that like this the pressure is taken off and then you can free the saws.'

  She said 'Like Atlas.'

  I said'Yes, like Atlas.'

  She said 'But what if you go through the roof?'

  I said 'That is the sort of risk you have to take in this business.'

  I got my back underneath the main branch of the tree. I was on my hands and knees on the sloping roof; I was like some strange female animal. I thought - You see, perhaps I am giving birth.

  - To what? At least, to some sort of language like that of those people who were building a tower to heaven?

  I said 'Now!'

  She said 'There!'

  I said 'And now the other saw.'

  She said 'Got it!'

  I lowered the branch of the tree and crawled backwards. We sat side by side, the girl and I, facing the same way, on the ridge of the roof, our legs hanging down.

  She said 'I've seen you at the house.'

  I said 'Yes, I've seen you.'

  She said 'What work are you supposed to be doing?'

  I said 'We're not supposed to tell.'

  She said 'Well, I'm supposed not to tell what I'm doing here.'

  I said 'The work I've been doing up to now, which is not secret, has been to do with discovering what might be a suitable moderator for the irradiation of uranium so that a nucleus might split and produce further neutrons.'