by Stephen Fry
He explained that students went from freshman year to sophomore year, from sophomore to junior until finally they arrived at senior year, the fourth and last. We were both, apparently, at the end of our junior year and known therefore by our “class year” of 1997, the year we would graduate. Steve was majoring in physics, but he wanted to be something else, not a scientist. A writer, maybe, he thought. He had taken courses in history and poetry and thought they were neat.
A great deal more local lore was fluently given out as we walked.
He pointed to an elegant, ivy-clad building ahead. “An early governor of New Jersey, Jonathan Belcher was instrumental in bringing Princeton College here. If it weren’t for his modesty, Nassau Hall there, which is celebrating its two hundred and fiftieth birthday this year, would actually be known as Belcher Hall, which would be kind of embarrassing. George Washington drove the British from Nassau Hall way back in 1777, and five years later Princeton became the capital of the United States for a short while, and we are granted to this day the rare privilege of being able to fly the Stars and Stripes at night. Washington returned here to receive the thanks of the Continental Congress for his conduct of the war, and on October thirty-first news arrived at this very spot that the Treaty of Paris had been signed, formally ending the American Revolution. Visitors are requested to keep off the grass. Interior flashlight photography is not permitted. Thank you for your attention.”
“How the hell do you know all this?” I asked.
“I use to take round tour parties in my sophomore year. There’s groups going round all the time. You used to do it too.”
“I did?”
“Sure you did. Lots of students do. Good way to earn some dough. That’s Stanhope Gate over there. You pass through it on graduation, so it’s considered real bad luck to use it. It’s gotten to be a kind of a superstition that no one goes out that way, except on the day they leave.”
I said I would rather look at the buildings that he considered would be the most familiar to me.
“’Kay,” said Steve, “we’ll go find out who’s in Chancellor Green, you spend a lot of time there. Let’s see what I can remember on the way. Oh, yeah, suck on this. In the old days the land around a university was called a yard or a green, okay? Then in the late seventeen hundreds the president of Princeton, Jonathan Witherspoon, he decided, being as how he was a classical scholar, to call the fields around Nassau Hall ‘the campus,’ which is like Latin for ‘fields’ and that’s why all school grounds everywhere are called ‘campus.’ Great, huh?”
I agreed that it was great. He seemed pleased with my calm progress.
“Now, something else,” he said. “There’s two theories about why the top schools in America are called Ivy League, ’kay? For one, on account of how each graduating year at Princeton used to plant ivy along the front of Nassau Hall. They stopped doing that some time this century, round about forty-one when the whole building was covered. So now, when you graduate you plant ivy under the class plaques at the rear. So, Ivy League, you see? On account of the ivy.”
“Makes sense,” I agreed. “But you said there were two theories?”
“Right. The second theory is that to start with, in like the mid-eighteenth century, there was Harvard, Yale, Princeton and . . . one other, either Cornell or Dartmouth, I guess. Just four schools. And the Roman numeral for four is the letters I and V, so they were like the IV Schools. Eye-vee, get it?”
“I like that theory best,” I said after some thought. “And what about the place where I woke up? What’s that called?”
“Oh, that’s Henry Hall, a dorm on the west side of campus, in what we call the Slums.”
“The Slums?”
“Yeah, actually it’s very picturesque. We call it the Slums on account of it’s a long walk from the center of campus where all the upperclassmen eating clubs are. But it’s a neat place to dorm, handy for University Place where the Princeton University Store is, and the McCarter Theatre and the Wawa Minimart, which is like a neat market. And this here,” said Steve, indicating a small ornate building in front of us, “is the Chancellor Green Student Center. Guys hang out here a lot. There’s food and games and stuff in the Rotunda. Maybe you recognize it?”
I was hardly listening, for coming out of the door was something, someone rather, I most certainly did recognize. The very sight of him caused a massive bolt of memory to surge into me like hot RAM uploading into Johnny Mnemonic. Johnny Mnemonic . . . Keanu Reeves . . . Keanu Young, PhDude . . . Jane . . . little orange pills . . . so much returned at once I felt I might overload.
“Double Eddie!” I yelled. “Jesus, Double Eddie!”
Double Eddie looked towards me, then over his shoulder as though he thought I must be addressing someone else.
I broke from Steve and ran up to him. “Bloody hell,” I said, breathlessly. “Am I glad to see you! How are you? Have you any idea what the hell’s going on?”
He stared at me blankly. “Excuse me?”
I put a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, don’t fuck about, Eddie. It is you, isn’t it? I’d know you anywhere.”
Eddie looked from me to Steve who was hurrying up behind.
“Think maybe we’d better be getting a move on, Mikey,” said Steve.
“I know this guy,” I said. “You’re name’s Double Eddie, right?”
Double Eddie shook his head. “Sorry, man. It’s Tom.”
The American accent stung me to rage. “No!” I shook his shoulder roughly. “Please don’t do this to me. You’re Edward Edwards, I know you are.”
“Hey, cool it will you? Sure, my name is Edward Edwards. Edward Thomas Edwards, but I don’t know you.”
Steve gently pulled my hand away from Double Eddie’s shoulder. I could sense rather than see him making some gesture towards Eddie from behind me. Tapping a finger to his head, probably. Please excuse my loopy friend.
“But when you were at Cambridge,” I said desperately, “you were Double Eddie then. Your lover was James McDonell. You had a row and I picked up all your CDs. Remember?”
Double Eddie went very red and stood back. “What is this crap? I don’t know you. Get off my case, will you?”
“I’m sorry . . .” I said, running my fingers through my short hair. “I didn’t mean . . . but can’t you remember? St. Matthew’s? Your CD collection? You and James, you lived in F4, Old Court. You had a bust up but then you got back together again and everything was fine.”
“Fuck you, you calling me a queer?” Double Eddie, scarlet in the face, pushed me hard in the chest. I fell back against Steve.
“Hey, hey, hey!” said Steve. “Just forget it, okay? Mikey here, he had an accident. He banged his head. His memory’s gone kinda funny. He don’t mean nothing by it. Let’s just calm down, what do you say?”
“Yeah?” said Double Eddie. “Well you get him to shut up with that filthy queer shit, okay, or I’ll maybe bang his head some more.”
“Phoo-eee!” said Steve as Eddie walked away. “You gotta go easy, boy. You just can’t go round saying stuff like that.”
“It is him,” I said, watching Eddie’s departing back and remembering so clearly that grand stalk across Old Court and the petulant shedding of the CDs along the lawn. “I know it is. Besides, what’s with the homophobia?”
“The what?”
“I mean what’s so wrong with being queer?”
Steve stared at me. “You serious?”
“Well, I mean in America of all places. I thought it was hip. You know, fashionable. He acted like some kind of macho squaddie.”
There was real fear in Steve’s eyes. “I think maybe the best thing is if we get you back to Henry. Get some shut-eye before you see this Professor Taylor. Keep you from upsetting anyone else.”
“Yes,” I said. The new memories triggered by the sight of Double Eddie were washi
ng around inside me so violently that I could almost feel them lapping around my teeth. “You’re right. I need to be alone.”
REWRITING HISTORY
Sir William Mills (1856-1932)
Gloder sat alone at his desk, waiting for darkness to fall.
In front of him was a letter announcing his official award of an Iron Cross, First Class, Diamond Order. He smiled at it once more and then pushed the paper from him, towards the top of the desk. Everything was going so wonderfully well, so entirely beyond what he felt he could have managed by the force of will alone. Gloder was not a fanciful man, not a man given to belief in the power of an unaided providence, nor in the ineluctability of an individual’s ordained fortune. Gloder was a balanced man, he believed that somewhere between the two, between will and fate, existed the space in which a man might construct his future from the materials granted by destiny.
Rudi believed himself also to be a generous man, one who, on recognizing the talents he had been born with, had instinctively known that they were not his alone, to be wasted on cheap pleasure or crude self-advancement. Since he could remember, he had known that he must use his gifts to lead his fellow men, the vast mass of whom had none of his insight and knowledge nor a tenth of his powers of endurance, concentration and thought.
In another man, such certainty might be regarded as arrogance, monomania even. In Rudi, they could be interpreted as a kind of humility. There were few men, none certainly in this hell of war, to whom he could explain this. He had once tried to write it down.
“Picture a man,” he had written, “whose hearing is so acute that no sound escapes his ears. Every whisper, every distant roar, comes clear to him. Such a man must either be driven mad in the frenzy of noise that constantly assaults his brain, or he must devise ways of listening, ways of dividing the barrage of noise into patterns that he can understand. He must turn all these world sounds into coherent form, into a kind of music.
“So it is with me: I see, hear, feel and know so much more than the generality of my fellow man that I have devised a system, a general music of the world that would be incomprehensible to anyone else, but which gives shape and structure to all that I understand. Every second of every day, new sensations and insights feed into this music and so it grows.”
He did not think it overweening or unrealistic to describe himself as so far above the common run of man. There were, of course, men he had met with sharper academic intellects. Hugo Gutmann, for example, had read more and was quicker in ways of abstract philosophical thought than Rudi. But Gutmann had no sense of people, no skill with the stupid, no ability (carrying on this musical metaphor) to sink himself into the rougher tunes of humanity, the swinging Bierkeller songs of the enlisted man or the sentimental ballads of the bourgeoisie. Besides, Gutmann was dead. There again, Gloder had met men more skilled in mathematics and the sciences than he could ever be, but such men had been devoid of any sense of history, imagination or fellow feeling. He had encountered poets, but such poets had no relish for facts, for figures or for the logical procession of pure ideas. Philosophers he had known or read, deep in their mastery of the abstract, yet such men had no knowledge of hunting the stag or setting the plow. What is the use of fixing the four hundredth decimal place of pi, or nailing the ontology of the human mind, if you cannot exchange talk with a countryman on the best time to bring down a herd from the high pastures or stand easily with a friend picking out whores? For that matter, what use is the common touch that allows you to access the hearts and minds of the masses, if you cannot also weep at the death of Isolde, where human love stretches out into the finest point of pure Art and then attenuates further into spirit and transcendental nothingness? Such was Gloder’s view.
He stood and went once more to the door that communicated with his little bedroom. Hans Mend was stretched out on the bed, his dumb eyes staring hard at the ceiling as though he were trying to recall a lost childhood memory or calculate a difficult sum.
Gloder refused to berate himself for the stupidity of having left his diary in an unlocked drawer. The time one wastes in self-recrimination is better spent in learning. The mistake had not been fatal and would never be made again. Indeed, it might be turned to advantage. From now on his new diary (the old smouldered in the grate) would be a document that would welcome discovery.
Rudi could also feel a kind of satisfaction in the intensity of Mend’s shock and betrayal. Such a deep sense of hurt could only come from one who had invested his whole heart and soul in a belief in Hauptmann Rudolf Gloder and his great worth. Mend was among the less stupid of the enlisted men, and if such a man could have sunk himself so entirely in worship, then how much more so would the Neanderthals in the other ranks?
The moment itself had been almost entirely comic.
“An entertaining read, I trust?” Rudi had said from the doorway, choosing his moment to place the remark, as a comedian chooses the precise instant to drop his punch line.
Hans jumped to his feet in stark panic like a schoolboy caught reading the filthy sections in the Greek anthology.
“Don’t you know that it is impolite to read a man’s diary without asking permission first?”
Poor Hans had stood there for what had seemed like a full minute, his mouth working and his face white with outrage and fear. In reality, Rudi knew, they had faced each other for no more than three seconds, but time misbehaves on these occasions. Even under such pressure, Rudi had taken a moment to consider the works of Henri Bergson and the operation of interior time.
He had crossed over to Hans during this short moment and picked up the diary from the desk quite calmly.
“I must apologize for any lack of artistic merit herein, my dear Mend,” he had said in the tones of a tired gentleman-scholar. “The pressures of wartime, you know. It is not always possible to achieve the first style of literary elegance in the cannon’s mouth. I see that you are not in the least impressed.”
He had taken the diary, valuable tree-calf leather as it was and, his back to Mend all the while, dropped it into the fireplace, sprinkled paraffin all over and set a match to it. “A harsh critical judgment,” he had sighed, still without turning to look at Mend, whose labored breathing he could plainly hear behind him, “but no doubt a fair one.”
He stirred the burning pages with the tip of a highly polished boot and then turned to see Mend advancing on him. Luger in hand.
“Devil!”
Mend’s voice rose no higher than a hoarse whisper.
“I am not, I hope,” said Rudi, “unduly attentive to the petty rules and protocols that bedevil our lives here. I do feel bound to point out, however, that the use of sidearms is reserved for the officer class. Rifles for men, pistols for officers. A foolish custom no doubt, but I feel one must cleave to these traditions, however regretfully, lest indiscipline break out like typhus all around us.”
“Don’t worry, Hauptmann,” spat Mend. “This pistol is for you.”
The look of puzzlement on Mend’s face as he had squeezed the trigger was comical and—Rudi was not inhuman after all—rather pathetic.
“Kaput,” said Rudi, tapping the holster that contained his working Luger.
Mend stood foolishly in the center of the room, the trigger repeating its dull springing smack as his finger pulled and pulled. At length he dropped the pistol on the floor and stared at Rudi as if he were in a dream, all the fury drained from his face.
Without a word, Rudi approached, both arms stretched out in front of him like a sleepwalker, or perhaps like a French Maréchal preparing to offer a formal parade-ground embrace. His thumbs found Mend’s neck without resistance and pressed inwards on the throat with ease.
Mend said nothing and his body made no move to protect itself. He had not the wit to bluster out a curse or scream for help. All the while his eyes, flooded with tears, were fixed on Rudi’s. The look in those eyes migh
t have been disconcerting, shaming even, were it not for the passivity—no, more than passivity—the longing, submissive welcome that was written there. The ganglions and sinews of his throat were as soft and yielding as a woman’s breasts. In the moment of dying, his eyes protruded beyond their well of tears, but with the last forced breath they shrank back like swollen mud bubbles that have not enough force of marsh gas inside them to burst out.
Rudi had laid the body on his bed, closed and locked the connecting door and then run from his office, clattering along the corridor, envelope in hand, huzzahing and bellowing with laughter.
“Look what Stabsgefreiter Mend left on my desk!” he had cried, bursting into Eckert’s office. “Where is he? When was he here? To the messenger the first nip of brandy!”
Eckert had remembered Mend arriving with the afternoon bag some two hours previously.
“But never mind him,” said the Major. “Congratulations to you, Hauptmann Gloder! And may I be permitted to say that never have I enjoyed more the privilege of endorsing such a recommendation? I know that this goes for the Colonel also.”
Rudi had grinned bashfully and given a small, modest gulp. “Sir, you are too good to me. All of you, far too good to me. I hope, grand strategy allowing, I may be allowed to invite as many officers and men as can be spared to a celebration this weekend? Chez Le Coq d’Or? This award belongs to the regiment, and the regiment should be rewarded. Officers and men alike.”
“You’re a good fellow, Gloder,” said Eckert, “but may I suggest that while your comradely relationship with the other ranks does you nothing but credit, too much fraternization doesn’t quite do in an adjutant? Especially,” he added with an arch smile, “in an adjutant in line for promotion?”
“Herr Major!” Rudi drew in his breath in amazement.
“Well, well! It’s no secret that Staff headquarters have had their eye on you for some time. Now, I know what you’re going to say—” Eckert put up a hand to stop Rudi’s protest, “—you want to stay at the front; you want to be with the men. All very fine, but the fact is intelligent men with proven experience are sometimes more useful behind the lines.”