Life in the West

by Brian Aldiss

  As the tourists disembark from the coach, clattering with cameras, past the smiling slant-eyed hostess, night comes on and geopolitical constellations wheel overhead.

  Even for the a-political state, time is running out. The lights of Europe may be guttering, but the USSR too is low in the westering sky. As for those stars of lesser magnitude in South America, their light is eclipsed by the brightness of the North American galaxy, which now burns at the zenith. The configurations of the Middle East presage no greater ascendancy for them.

  Meanwhile, over the northern horizon, the bulk of that vast planet China continues inexorably to rise, tawny, magnificent, and fringed with an ever-increasing number of satellites.

  10

  Slatko

  Ermalpa, September 1978

  A gleaming band of light out to sea separated day from night. Although it was not yet entirely dark, a few stars shone. Thursday was sinking without trace into Ermalpa harbour.

  It was possible to stand on the seaward side of the Via della Cala and gaze across a low concrete wall at the old port. Among a muddle of derricks and sheds, the masts of a sailing ship could be discerned. Beyond the masts was the sea, the Mediterranean.

  Squire stood with his hands in his pockets, looking across the wall. He let the memory of other seas refresh his mind, but thoughts of the difficulties he faced, here and at home, stayed with him.

  Pedestrians brushed past as they hurried home. He glanced at his watch. It was almost time for the last session of the day, at which his friend Herman Fittich would speak; for Fittich’s sake, he would submit to being incarcerated again in the mirrored conference hall. As he turned to make his way back to the Grand Hotel Marittimo, he caught sight of Selina Ajdini walking towards him; accompanying her was one of the more cut-glass young Italians, Enrico Pelli, who had earlier delivered a prolix paper on ‘Psychiatry and the Popular Understanding of Prehistory’. Ajdini saluted Squire with some eagerness in her gesture, and the customary mocking note in her voice.

  ‘Are you looking for more flying saucers, I suppose?’

  ‘In search of the miraculous? Waiting for a sign?’

  She laughed. ‘I’ve seen too many signs in my life. They all point different ways.’

  ‘Ha! “What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws? Passion and reason, self division cause.” ’

  If she recognized a couplet from one of Aldous Huxley’s favourite poems, she gave no sign, saying cheerfully, ‘If you are about to turn back to the hotel, Signor Pelli and I will walk along with you.’

  He smiled warmly at her, suddenly full of affection, loving that naked face, and reflected again on the beautiful curvature of her lips, only made possible by the topography of her lower jaw. How long would you have to live with Selina before you failed to notice those affecting proportions? Enrico was no doubt under the spell of them. He had given Squire no greeting. His face was clouded, his heavy brows drawn together, his back rigid. As he moved reluctantly to walk beside Ajdini and Squire, the latter thought, ‘So he’s been propositioning her hard, and had no luck.’

  And, as his gaze rested on her, ‘I wonder what luck I’d have?’

  ‘There’s a sailing boat moored by the harbour,’ he said, walking on the other side of Ajdini from Pelli, and addressing her left profile. ‘How pleasant to sail away now, before the moon is up, to forget all your responsibilities… To discover a little sunlit island no one had ever happened across, with a golden beach and no footballers…’

  ‘Footballers! How did they get there?’

  ‘They didn’t.’

  ‘And on the island…?’

  ‘Coconut palms…’

  ‘Your dreams are so standard. Better natural products are oil, wheat and whisky…’

  ‘I wasn’t planning to work or get rich.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘I’m not a bad sailor.’

  Outside a bar in a side alley, a broken sign burned, advertising a Belgian lager with the words ‘STELLA ART’ in blurred mauve neon. He took it as a good omen: there were islands somewhere, even if not readily accessible.

  ‘ “All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by…” ’

  ‘It would be a good alternative to listening to Herman Fittich, I’m sure.’

  ‘I like the man. I’m confident he will have something interesting to say.’

  She gestured. ‘His perpetual irony I cannot stand. A defeated man. But I don’t like the Germans in any case.’

  ‘They did make themselves a bit unpopular a few years ago.’

  She flashed him a reproving expression.’ Don’t you start on the irony. You were safe in Britain when the Germans were killing off Europe. Me, I am Yugoslav by birth, or half Serbian and half Turkish, plus a dash of Persian.’

  ‘So you have reason to hate the Germans.’

  She gave a curt nod, and tossed her head.

  ‘I was a tiny girl when the damned Nazis invaded my homeland. Everyone fought them, young and old. No country was more brave, more determined, than Serbia. My father was killed by the Bosch, then my elder brother. So I can’t help hating them. An uncle and I escaped to the United States after the war, but one does not forget those times. They leave a mark.’

  Pelli said something to her angrily in Italian, but she silenced him with one of her quelling glances.

  ‘The Americans understand little of the rest of the world,’ she said. ‘But you see I am not like that, although I have American citizenship.’

  ‘Yugoslavia’s a magnificent country. If you’re so Left Wing, and you dislike the States as much as it seems you do, why don’t you return to Yugoslavia?’

  She appeared to undergo a sudden change of mood. As if dismissing the subject, she slipped a slender arm on which bracelets clattered through his arm, and made him look with her in a small lighted shop window. Pelli stood awkwardly by, hands impatiently on hips.

  ‘That handbag’s not bad, eh? I bet it was made in Milano. You know Yugoslavia, don’t you? You have lived there?’

  ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘There are more job opportunities for me in the States.’

  ‘Thank democracy for that, Selina. Be grateful for what you’ve got.’

  She sighed and they walked up the street in silence.

  ‘Well, dear, dear. You see, Tom, I do really quite fancy you — much more than I fancy this sulky young man who wants only to go to bed with me and fortunately does not talk English. Well, I go to bed with whom I feel like and maybe tonight I feel like you if you are so inclined. So I don’t want to offend you. But you are — oh, so simple. The British are like Americans, they do not know the real world. Okay, there are more job opportunities in the States, but that’s only your debating point to be scored. You don’t see why there are all those jobs more.

  ‘Jobs are what capitalism’s all about — getting people to work for the bosses. That’s really why I hate capitalism, because it is just a huge business and industrial machine gone mad, with all the stupid “free citizens”, as they call themselves, really mere consumers, chained for life to support the machine, proud of their sharing.’

  He seized her wrist and shook it till the bracelets jangled, laughing in irritation. ‘At the risk of being left off your visiting list tonight, let me tell you that you are the victim of propaganda — outdated propaganda at that. If the world was as you say, it wouldn’t be worth living in! You’ve got a silly argument, like Krawstadt with his pinball machines. Work’s okay, work gives us identity. And do people cease to consume, to need goods, under other systems than capitalism? It’s just that other systems are less efficient at producing the goods.’

  ‘That may be, and the other systems may have their faults, but it is the efficiency of the capitalist system I also dislike. It exploits the world for the privileges of a few. Who needs an electric carving knife? That efficiency is itself a crime; I’ll give you an example.’

  She had got her wrist free from his grasp, and sank her long crimson nails in
to his arm with a sort of humorous cruelty.

  ‘We were talking about the Nazis. Okay. In the First World War, Germany had three important chemicals firms, Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst. You know all the names today. The Germans managed to synthesize ammonia and nitric acid in a successful industrial process. The British and Americans got millions of tons of natural nitrates needed for high explosives from Chile, and so their chemical industry fell behind Germany.

  ‘The three firms united to become I.G. Farben, a conglomerate which totally identified itself with the Nazi cause. It employed slave labour, it ran its own concentration camp, it manufactured Zyklon B to gas Jews with, as well as manufacturing the usual agents of mass-destruction. I could say its products killed my father and brother.

  ‘The bosses of I.G. Farben were tried at Nuremberg after the war, but they just got cynical sentences of two or three years’ imprisonment. Farben was dissolved, but Hoechst, Bayer, and BASF started up again. What’s more, they and their subsidiaries got reparation settlements from America, millions of dollars.

  ‘Now they have bought themselves into the American pharmaceuticals industry, so that Bayer, for instance, has forty per cent of its assets in the US. Isn’t that an international conspiracy? You see how criminality, murder, become legal as long as they serve the system. Big money is always linked with death in capitalism.’

  Squire shook his head. As he stared into the aquarium of the shop window in which five handbags drowned, her words brought a sort of helplessness.

  He had a vision of her honed beauty as being formed by flight. In her mind, early terror had separated brain from will. Now the brain worked without further external referent and, seizing on its giant excuse, the shattering experience of war, projected an image of the evil which had destroyed her father leaping from country to country — from Serbia to Germany, from Germany to the USA, ever in pursuit of her. Where would safety be but in the country that had wished to exact vengeance from Germany after the war, and to de-industrialize it entirely?

  This interpretation came to him with sudden persuasive power.

  The stain of Ajdini’s personal bitterness had extended until it coloured her outlook on the whole world. America had become an uncaring step-mother, exchanged for the mother she loved and had left; every pretext which served to bolster her hatred was welcome. The tone of her voice indicated as much.

  Tearing his eyes from the sunken handbags, he clasped her arm with his arm and said, ‘That’s a false perception. A lie. Everyone merchandizes death. Don’t think otherwise. Supposing your facts are roughly correct — I expect you’re loading them — then it proves nothing, nothing except that firms like nations go through good periods and bad. Are Bayer still manufacturing Zyklon B? Ask yourself that.’

  ‘Christ, I give you proof of the evils of capitalism and you don’t listen. BASF and the American firm Exxon were linked by trade even in wartime. But you can’t see. You’re conditioned. It’s like living among robots, talking to you people!’

  She pulled her arm away and started to march up the street. Pelli caught at her other arm but she beat his hand down.

  Falling in beside her, Squire said urgently, ‘You told me earlier that you had a belief in the miraculous. Perform a miracle on yourself. You’re a splendid woman, Selina — knowing you only two days, I can see such qualities in you.’ He was saying more than he had intended, and almost drew back, but the sight of that taut bone-like countenance spurred him on. ‘You’re poisoning yourself with hatred, somehow, I don’t know how, but I sense it.

  ‘Face the fact of your father’s death, see it simply as a bitter misfortune of war — and war not as an organized system but as a pandemic at this stage of human development. Try to blame no one! Hate cripples us. Don’t erect that death into a great structure which will eventually overpower all your happiness and wisdom.

  ‘You’ve lived in peace in the United States. Try to love it, to accept its vastness — and your own vastness. See the two processes as one. Forgive, let go, accept. Invest in the miraculous. There’s no way you can get revenge — from what, dear Selina? — except on yourself.’

  They crossed the Via Milano dangerously. She turned an angry face on him.

  She opened her mouth, revealing her beautiful lower teeth, her tongue bedded in its clear juices. He was blind to screaming traffic.

  ‘You, what are you doing? Trying some damned Freudian rubbish on me? You know I hate and despise it! Telling me that what I see clearly before me is all in my head! Fool, sentimentalist, bloody Freudian!’

  On the pavement, she moved towards him with an attacking movement, then veered so that Pelli bumped into her. Pelli, with no idea what the row was about, tried to grasp her again. Ajdini smacked his hand and almost ran for the hotel door.

  ‘Selina, Marx is a dead duck — neither he nor his creed can help you. He’s a damned sight worse than Freud. It’s the miraculous — that’s what you need!’

  She was already hastening through the revolving doors.

  Squire turned and looked at the glowering Pelli.

  ‘Life’s a bugger, isn’t it, chum?’ he said.

  The traffic screamed by him. What were the drivers all so mad about? Was all of Ermalpa a conspiracy by the Fiat Motor Company?

  She fled. One of the displaced, the uprooted, one of the mourners… Branded just as surely as the concentration-camp victims.

  The modern generation, the generation of his son John, didn’t know about that branded generation of which he himself was one in ways hardly less decisive than Ajdini. They might one day have to learn the bitter way.

  What was that curious statement of Marcuse, uttered in One-Dimensional Man? ‘Auschwitz continues to haunt, not the memory but the accomplishments of man — the space flights, the rockets and missiles, the “labyrinthine basement under the Snack Bar”…’

  Just as the harsh peace terms imposed on Germany at the end of the First World War had paved the way for the second, so the nightmare induced by the second was building up shock waves which would culminate in the third. His inward response to Ajdini’s tale of the meshing of German and American pharmaceutical industries had been to exclaim, ‘Yes, that’s it, that’s how the evil gains,’ remembering William Burroughs’s comment that the paranoid is the man who has just discovered what’s going on. What real panacea, what escape, was there, except to advise people not to suffer, and to delight in what they could while they could?

  That was no certain way. Pleasure was often the forerunner of trouble. It would be a pleasure to go to bed with Selina, if she was not just a tease, but the unhappy repercussions might be many, as had been the repercussions of his pleasure with Laura Nye in Singapore and elsewhere a year and a half ago. There was no Sure Way. The way of the mystic was not his.

  As the civilized world, so called, expanded, driving out the animal kingdom, the labyrinthine chain of cause and effect grew more complex. People became so confused, not understanding the cause of their confusion, that any false prophet like Billy Graham or Karl Marx or von Daniken who came along offering them a thread through the labyrinth was received rapturously by millions. It was not so much the truth the millions cared about, but the thread itself. Something to hold on to.

  Thinking his melancholy thoughts, Squire was more inclined to go in search of Ajdini — would she be lying weeping face down on her bed, or smoking a cool cigarette with d’Exiteuil? — rather than listen to Fittich; but a desire to support his German friend drove him into the hotel and towards the conference hall.

  ‘Squire, you’re useless. Too well-meaning. It’s weak to be well-intentioned. Why don’t I face up to how blackly corrupt the world is, and junk my pathetic the dansant optimism? Why not just go and screw Selina, never mind her troubles, get some joy myself, which is what I really want to do, and to hell with Laura and the rest. As for Tess…it’s just my fool optimism makes me think she cared in the first place…’

  He went and sat down in his place, between d’Exiteuil and
Vasili Rugorsky. The two men were laughing together. Rugorsky said, ‘Dr d’Exiteuil owes an apology to you, Thomas.’

  D’Exiteuil said, ‘You were right about the miraculous, in saying that it can happen. I believe you did observe a UFO earlier today.’

  He produced a copy of the local evening newspaper. It featured a photograph of rooftops and a blurred object in the sky. Black headlines proclaimed, ‘Flying Hardware over Ermalpa — Have they Come from Outer Space?’

  ‘You see,’ said d’Exiteuil, reading, ‘Hundreds of people leaving their offices and factories at midday saw bright objects in the sky over the centre of the city. An Alitalia DC-9 landing at the airport sighted a flight of three flying beneath the plane and heading along the coast in the direction of Palermo. The objects were capable of staying stationary and then of moving off at colossal speeds.

  ‘Some of the objects were cigar-shaped, others the more familiar saucer shape. There were similar previous sightings a month ago. The Air Force is correlating all reports and would be glad to receive any photographs of the flying hardware.’

  Squire stared at the print and the photograph in silence.

  ‘It’s a form of madness,’ Rugorsky said. ‘You see, these people are well-meaning, but they want to make a drama, like all under-developed people. One child’s balloon floating in the sky and they can feel free to imagine an air force of extra-terrestrials. Theatre rules them, not reasoning.’

  ‘But Squire saw one. You didn’t want a drama, did you,

  Tom? I don’t know, there were sightings over Paris recently. I begin to think there must be something in it after all. I mean, this has been going on for years…’

  ‘There are sightings everywhere. It’s a cargo cult merely.’

  ‘I think it’s good publicity for the conference. I shall phone the newspaper. Excuse me.’

  As d’Exiteuil left, Squire told the Russian, ‘I know I saw something. Since I don’t know what I saw, it belongs in the category of You-Foe. But now that I see this report in the newspaper I confess I find my belief weakening. Perhaps, as you say, it was a child’s balloon — first hanging motionless, then swirled away in an updraught.’