—When I remember the Peace Ship, I smell onions. I peeled onions to help my mother for dinner. I was fifteen, just like the century. The boy I loved went already into the service and I knew I wasn’t to be seeing him again. And I didn’t.
Hearing her talk, I realized how unlearnable are a language’s idioms. I concentrated on her sense, not her words.
—My father came in with an evening news. He was Socialist then, only secretly, to keep his job on the police. He used dinner to criticize government in privacy. Politics is Europe’s sport. Here, we have baseball, there, talk.
She mimed the swing of a bat and then the flap of a mouth, laughing at the ludicrous equation of the two. When memory again invaded her, she quieted and continued.
—But that day’s news had him nervous. Father sat us to dinner and said the prayer. Then he told us—my mother, two brothers, sister, I was the young one—how the great Henry Ford was sailing by Europe to stop the war. The War: total war, they called it; total meant against the people too, and the full work of the nation, with guns bigger than houses and guns in the air and water and under the water, and who knew if it went on another year or forever? At the start, they said three weeks, then three weeks and another three weeks, then three weeks of three weeks, and no one believed anymore that it would end ever.
—But people believed Ford could end it?
—Who is people? Probably no. But for my father, Ford was like a god. For the Socialist, because he built a factory around the time and size of the worker, where the machine came to the man and men worked together on one production. He raised up the worker. So he promised this thing about the ship, and people would laugh him to the ocean bottom, but not my father. Because it was Ford who spoke, and because every person with sense wanted to end the war the same way, even stupidly. My father believed; at dinner—still onions to me—he said the Peace Ship needed only enough listeners and they would be heard. Each day for a week, my father reads another piece of news on the passage.
Involved in her story, I sat on a stuffed chair and nervously fingered a coin bank fashioned after Jack and the Beanstalk. Jack held out beans to his mother, who cried into her hands. When one dropped coins into the hidden slot, Jack dropped the beans, a stalk began growing out of the soil, and Jack’s mother looked up, smiling. Still another machine I had overlooked in my count.
Fidgeting with the machine, I hung on each word of her story. I didn’t care a cent for Ford or diplomacy. I wanted to know what would happen to this policeman and his daughter.
—We follow the news each day on that ship. More people talk and hope, so others begin to talk and hope. Then something happened, I don’t know what. The news talked about fighting on the boat. Some said this; others said the other. What was it? They had different plans for peace. Then even my father, who always held the belief, knew it was all up. If the doctors and ministers and famous folk on a country just the size of a boat could not keep from fighting, what hope for the sons of bakers and butchers on the bigger map?
She sat silent, hands in her lap, with only an apologetic grin betraying any sign of life.
—The news made a mockery big enough to put their own disappointment in. They laughed the Peacemakers through Holland all the way to their committee. The word “committee” killed the last hope. My father grew bitter. He blamed all—the news, the governments, the peacemakers, too. Everyone but himself and the man who made cars. He stayed a Socialist for twenty years until dying by a broken heart.
A subtle shift in posture and she no longer talked about history but about experience, direct personal experience, that commodity that grows more endangered daily.
—To have my hopes disappear into committee was not the last disappointment. Three weeks after the Peace Ship came in, the boy I wanted to make a life by, who went to the front without even enlisting, gets killed by his own side and buried into a ditch. When or where, nobody knows. For a long time, I blame the Peace Ship for not being sooner or stronger. Ford was the enemy. Not for the laughable, but because he was not even more laughable. I hated everyone I saw, because they were not laughable enough to act. And myself, too, for many years, became the enemy.
—But what could a handful of private citizens do against a war forming for . . . ?
My own voice surprised me, and I broke off, sick of the old debate between fatalism and activism. I had no fresh line, nothing to add, no peace plan for the hundred-year war between the private citizen and the mechanized state, no argument that Mrs. Schreck, who had seen sights well beyond argument and counter-argument, could use.
—Forming for how long? Two years? Since 1870? Since gunpowder or sticks? You are right, friend. Which is why you didn’t come to talk about the Peace Ship at all. You came to get out of the snow, stop a blood-nose, and see if I will show you what you are too lazy to walk to the library to see.
Instantly she regained her playful composure, her mercilessly sly look. Just as quickly, she was on her feet pulling at my arm and dislocating my shoulder socket. She would allow no resistance; I’d have to see the photo now. And if my memory had so altered the image since I first saw it, if I could find nothing of the old urgency in the print, then memory would simply have to change to match the facts.
Bringing me to vertical, she shoved me along until we entered a perfect example of those ancillary bedrooms found only in the homes of the very old. Always impeccably clean, always aromatic, with floors that slope in places. The bedspread of white chenille with embroidered knobs gets changed once a week, metronomically, on the canopied bed that waits for one who will never sleep there. The room always adjoins the dining area, through a door invariably three-quarters closed. Inside is always a twilight of heavy curtains and dark mahogany.
But shoved into this room, I noticed none of these details. For on a heavy bureau sat a glass frame making a square-foot shrine. Enough adrenaline rushed into my limbs to prime me for a fistfight. Two perpendicular creases, where the photo had been folded into quarters a half century ago did not mar its identity: my Detroit photo, to the smallest shade of remembrance and halftones.
If anything, the three farmers on their way to the dance that was the year 1914 shocked more than on first viewing. Just as Rivera’s murals prepared me then, so the year of guesswork, research, and delay leading to the snowstorm and Mrs. Schreck’s private narrative filled the Sander photograph with an even greater urgency. The moment had come to name these farmers.
Mrs. Schreck did that for me for all time by placing a palsied finger on the left-hand trailing figure in the parade of three, the rumpled, old-mannish boy with cigarette hanging from mouth at a dangerous angle.
—There. That’s him. My Hubert Schreck. The person who in a ditch bittered me to all the Peace Ships and the world.
The skin on my skull tightened into gooseflesh. My voice was not all under control.
—Schreck? But I thought you said . . .
—That he died before we married? He did. What am I doing with his name? I stole it. I got it by Ellis Island, when I came over. I land. This big fellow in police jacket asks for the name. I give him my father’s name, my birth name, but he frowns and says, “Too long.” So I give him the first name coming into my head, which is always Hubert’s, even years afterward. He wrote the “Mrs.” down; all good women in this country are married.
—Then you’ve been single your whole life?
Her face filled with dry, mock opprobrium.
—I wouldn’t say that.
I looked back at the photo, seeing facial detail I had not before noticed.
—He looks like a roughneck. Was the photo taken near your hometown? How long before the war? Where was Hubert headed that day?
—Oh, but it’s not truly him.
Again the gooseflesh. This time I looked so alarmed that Mrs. Schreck had to sit down for laughing. Trying to look contrite, she attempted explanation.
—I confuse you, I know. But I never meant it was really my Hubert. I got this picture
after the war, after Hub died. I went by the Westerwald for a last trip before America. An odd German fellow on bicycle stops me and my sister by a dirt road and asks us for taking our picture. We are so suspicious until he put out other photos on the roadside to prove he was a photographer. Here I saw this photo the first time. Boys the right age, taken at the right time, and this figuring looking maybe a little like the man I lost to Henry Ford’s failing. But you have to make your eyes like this:
She squinted exaggeratedly and held the picture within an inch of her face. She had a natural talent for burlesque.
—I had to have it. I didn’t want anybody for the whole world to see it, only me. I pay so much for this and a second copy he showed that I didn’t have enough for my own picture. I burned the second and folded up this one to put in my day book, one, two. No one to see it but me. Later I learn about photographs. He could make a hundred, thousand . . .
—Hang it in museums . . .
—Ja.
That “ja,” silent and resigned, communicated a life. She invited me to fill the monosyllable with meaning, to make it an affirmation equal to her photo-affirmation of the lost Hubert. History, Hubert, had disappeared before she’d ever once handled his would-be portrait. As I worked, in my mind, toward the same conclusion, she said, without a trace of accent:
—No one owns a print. The machine just makes another.
She curled her finger against the plate glass, scratching as if to develop out some further picture. But her finger-rubbing neither produced nor removed anything. The simple portrait, worshiped for half a century, most of a lifetime, had no real connection to her except as an act of imagination. She did not know the actual boys pictured there, but had, rather, invented, out of her own need, a whole story linking them to herself by means of the pliable image. After years of trying to monopolize the print, she had at last to surrender the question of authenticity not to the photographer nor even to the indiscriminately reproducing machine, but to the tampering darkroom of each viewer’s imagination.
I understood at last that if we have sacrificed the old aura, the religious awe of a singular work of art, we have, in mechanical reproduction, gotten something in compensation. If the photographer is as powerless as we viewers in giving authenticity to a print, then we viewers are at least as capable as the photographer of investing a print with history and significance. Mrs. Schreck had done so; I would have to also. What matters is not the slice of history on the emulsion, but our developing it.
When Mrs. Schreck broke the silence, her accent had returned to its full thickness.
—The photo has not once, not even once told me who my young man would have become. I had to do it all. In here.
She held a finger to one aged eye. In her complaint was the suggestion that nostalgia can be cured only by taking more pictures, that living is the process of preparing to join the permanent archives.
Outside, the snow continued to lay a quilt on the courtyard. Children poured outdoors, eager to put down tracks and mark the place with their presence. One lay in a drift and, waving arms and legs, made the time-tested shadow of a snow-angel. Several overstuffed coats of uncertain sex planned a bombard by stocking up snowballs. Everyone was in a hurry to enjoy the storm, conscious that it could not last long so close to spring.
Mrs. Schreck’s manner brightened. Sensing I was about to go, she offered to give me the photo. But the idea of owning the thing now, depriving her of husband, even an imagined one, horrified me.
—But you must take something with you, and one thing more each time you come back to visit, or all this junk will squeeze me out until I live on the back porch.
I timidly suggested the piano roll about Ford and the overdue Model A. She gave it up gladly. Seeing my interest in the player, she suggested we give it a whirl. First, she warned:
—A mouse ate a hole in the blower, so we must pump hard.
We kicked in unison, each taking a pedal. I had never heard the tune before, and felt disconcerted to see the keys go down automatically in perfect, unpremeditated chords. We kicked it hard, trying to move the tempo-gauge needle to Presto, but could not. Letting the needle slip to Allegro, Andante, and finally Adagio, we watched the punched dots roll past, each mapping a key. The tune changed considerably at each new tempo. For all its being a preordained thing, we varied it greatly with our kicking.
—Here, boyo. Try this. Put your fingers light to the keys. Then, when one goes down beneath you: baf! It’s almost like playing.
I did. And it was.
Chapter Twenty-Three
No Such Thing as No Chance
Write anything. Truth or untruth, it is unimportant. Speak but speak with tenderness, for that is all that you can do that may help a little.
—John Berger, G.
So Peter’s association with those who called themselves that which is the avant-garde ended before it could result in any found masterpieces. Yet he would always thank the reality modulators for accidentally putting him onto the Ford peace delegation. Aside from his run-in over the corpse photograph, nothing newsworthy had happened on or behind the static front for ten months. Here at last, in the Ship of Fools, was something worth talking about.
Peter wrote to the home office in Maastricht. At this point in his journalistic career he could almost spell, and with a little help put together a fee proposal. He received an enthusiastic reply with enough of an advance to get to Oslo and become the self-appointed welcoming committee to the self-appointed diplomats.
He arrived in Norway before the Oscar II. While he waited for the Peace Ship to come in, Peter was amazed to find both journalistic and civilian interest in the matter eroding daily. Of course, there had been the wireless reports of the on-board squabbling, picked up and ridiculed in all the world’s newspapers, but Peter failed to see how that altered or detracted from the worth of the mission.
Then it occurred to him that most people measured this crossing of the Atlantic in a small boat strictly on its prospects for bringing about a true and lasting peace. Peter, who had visited the front and photographed its by-product, found this hope laughable. He had now reached the advanced stage of thinking that considered peace as nothing more than the continuation of wars by subtler tactics. From the beginning, Peter had never laid great odds for two hundred clergy, industrialists, and students against mustard gas, massed infantry, and repeating rifles. The Peace Ship had from the start signified one and only one thing to him: a chance to meet the man who had automated the automobile.
On that May Day when, impatient with how long it took to reach the dance by foot, Peter had teased Adolphe about his shiny car back in the Netherlands, he’d lied. There had been no auto then or ever. But he had loved the concept of speed so greatly, had spent so much time gratis under the hoods of friends’ machines that he had, in truth, become a first-rate amateur mechanic. In his more poetic moments he imagined a bright, metallic future where goods and services whipped instantly from origin A to need B.
Even in his first days as Theo Langerson, when reporting names, dates, and places had bored him to distraction, he still generated enough interest and expertise in the new military hardware to become fluent in the vocabulary of makes, mechanisms, calibers, torques, velocities, firepowers, chambers, and gauges when many of his colleagues still kept an eye out for the apocalyptic cavalry charge. The home office duly criticized his copy for its lurid fascination with the species and capabilities of weaponry.
In Norway, he was to come face to face with the greatest machinist of the day. Peter had read about the world-famous automated factory—the machine that made other machines, while workers served as midwives in the act of reproduction. He imagined it—across the sea in the American Canaan—as a mechanical hay-baler. On one end, conveyors fed in a steady stream of sand, coal, iron ore, and black paint. At the other, people queued up as if for an amusement park ride, paid their five hundred dollars, and drove off as each car plunked down the exit ramp.
And he, i
gnorant Dutchman, was to interview the genius who had brought about this miracle. Peter briefly wondered whether the genius Ford—capable in his mind of just about any trick—might not, in fact, be sailing to unveil some secret, self-replicating peace-machine. That altruistic hope gave way to the daydream that the world war—Louvain, Tannenberg, the Sopwith, the Lusitania—might be the means to his first very own auto.
By the time the Oscar II docked, most of the reporters sharing Peter’s vigil had settled into the cynicism of crushed hope. Peter alone saw in this mission of sanity a cause that every day seemed more ridiculously sublime. A pack of newshounds turned up on the docks to hunt for additional burlesque. Ford came aground shaken, ashen, and even more gaunt and tubercular than usual. A cadre of bodyguards whisked him off, promising the jackals of the press a news conference the following day.
Those of the already incredulous press corps who understood English were in no way prepared for what came out at the conference. Ford threw them all a Yankee spitball by starting out:
—Those of us who came out to see what we could do about this murdering want to thank those of you who backed us by turning out.
What was this fellow saying? Did it have anything to do with the catastrophe facing all Europe? One year before, these same reporters had had a field day with the unofficial French plan of war called “le système D”, for se débrouiller, or muddling through; now this American tinkerer was proposing a peace “Plan A,” for “All for peace, stand up and holler.” Only those few of the conference attendees with a more global sense of history knew that this was not the first time that the fate of nations depended on the emperor’s clothes syndrome.
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance Page 34