Homo Conscius

by Timothy Balding

  She was no longer in the kitchen when he returned. Christ, he thought! He cleared his throat noisily and said loudly, “Hello, hello. Are you there? Need the bathroom?”

  He soon found her. In the dining room. Sitting on a chair in front of Yorick, who was examining her attentively. The towel still lying over her head.

  “Ah, so you’ve discovered my little friend?”

  The woman said nothing.

  “This is Yorick. He’s an African grey, you know.”

  The woman said something to the bird. Victor didn’t quite catch it, but it sounded, perhaps, Russian? She repeated her words, so softly, so gently. No, he thought, Czech, or Slovak—or perhaps they were the same language? He’d have to check.

  Yorick seemed mesmerized by this woman’s kind voice and gentle words. Like a snake with its charmer, thought Victor.

  And as though he wanted to give her something in return, Yorick said suddenly: “God is dead!” Three times.

  The woman turned her face to Victor—he found it suddenly beautiful, in a twisted kind of way—and then back to the bird and said, in English now: “No one to turn to.” And then, “No one to help.”

  “No one to turn to?” asked Victor. “That’s sad.” What an idiotic thing to say to her, he thought. And as if to compensate: “Can I help in any way?”

  “No one to turn to … God is dead,” said the woman.

  “Oh, I see,” said Victor awkwardly. “Sorry, misunderstanding.” And then, since he couldn’t think of anything else at all to say to her: “I’ll just go and get the drinks.”

  He left her by the cage and went to the kitchen. As he prepared a tray with the bottles and glasses, he could hear Yorick screeching this and that, followed by peals of laughter from the woman. Bloody show off, thought Victor. But it’s certainly nice to hear her so cheerful.

  Yorick was hopping up and down excitedly when he returned to the room and shrieking through his repertoire, even his personal variations. “Every man is Provisional,” “God is an island,” and other nonsense. The woman, her head still covered by the towel, repeated gaily each phrase as he offered it to her. What a strange duet, thought Victor.

  “I’m happy,” said the woman suddenly. “Vodka, please.”

  Victor handed her a glass, but as she tried to tip some into Yorick’s water container, he was obliged to stop her and did so simply by touching her arm with his hand, pursing his lips and shaking his head. She didn’t insist.

  “I’m Victor, by the way,” he said.

  The woman took a great slug of vodka and smiled happily from under the towel over her head.

  “Yes, God is dead,” she laughed. “We are all islands …” And then: “Nothing to do about it! No one to turn to.” All this rather addressed to Yorick than him.

  “What’s your name?” asked Victor.

  She mumbled a name that he didn’t quite catch. Medven, perhaps?

  “Medven?”

  The woman laughed again and said more clearly this time: “No, ‘madwoman.’ That’s what they call me. I don’t argue with them”.

  “But what should I call you?” asked Victor.

  “Madwoman is fine with me,” she said in a tone that showed she didn’t care one way or the other.

  Victor stopped his prying there. He never contested what people said about themselves or their desires and wishes and above all never moralized to anyone’s face. Though he was rarely repaid in kind, he believed that this respect for the other’s vision of him or herself was essential. After all, he thought, it’s already difficult enough to come to any conclusions about oneself, any clarity, any certainty at all, that one can’t have other people barging into our consciences and telling us that we have it all wrong. People must have time, plenty of time, Victor thought, and kindness and the opportunity to consider the possibility of other perspectives without pressure or, God forbid, hostility or humiliation.

  Yorick finally became bored or tired with his jests and abandoned his comic performance to stick his beak into his food bowl.

  “Bon appétit,” said the woman, becoming sober again after all her laughter. “Bon appétit, wise Yorick.”

  The woman moved her chair back from the cage to the table and hung her head once more. Covered still by the towel, her face again became hidden from Victor. She was still holding her glass, now empty.

  “Can I give you a refill?” asked Victor, who was still standing, at a loss at what to do or to say.

  The woman didn’t answer. And then, a minute or two later, her whole slumped body jerked violently as though transpierced by an electro-shock, and she stood.

  “Going,” muttered the woman, as she walked from the dining room into the hall and out of the front door, a silent Victor a few steps behind her. She turned as she left the house and said: “I visit him again.” He watched as she walked across the street and soon disappeared around a corner. It was still raining.

  The Meaning of Life

  At school, though his memory had been solicited to remember and to recite information, he had never been called on to express an opinion. He had not been singled out for this negligence. It was the general rule and he wondered now whether the teachers lacked time for it or whether they simply didn’t care what the pupils thought. Looking back, Victor would have readily exchanged swathes of time learning historical, geographical and scientific facts for a few hours a week of simple discussion around a handful of ideas. Perhaps the teachers might even have devoted time to the basic mechanics of thinking, if something was known about that, and to their own thoughts, if they had any, about life and the world and what living meant.

  He had read that philosophy was an obligatory subject in French secondary schools, and he thought that this was sensational. The first philosophy sessions were even now being introduced into maternity schools! He couldn’t for the life of him understand why this was not the case everywhere, in every country and every education system. A handful of questions would do the trick, just to get the thinking machine started as early as possible. Nothing very complicated. ‘What is life?’ for example. ‘What is happiness?’ ‘What’s worth living for?’ ‘What do I hate? Why?’ ‘What do I love? Why?’ ‘What do you mean by good?’ ‘What do you mean by bad?’ Nothing very controversial or political or unsecular.

  Victor would have very much enjoyed confronting these questions, or any others, come to that, in his formative years. Just to be forced to think about them. Even to hear what his classmates had in their heads, if anything. But it was not to be. Never had an idea crossed the blackboard in the class sessions which had almost killed him with boredom.

  He imagined himself a teacher for a moment. If he had now, at fifty, one wisdom, a single lesson to share, what would that be? Or, better, one question to ask his pupils? Because one should not, of course, believe for an instant that children, or even adults, could or would adopt an idea, however brilliant and truthful, simply because they had been exposed to it. No, he understood that much at least. One has to be ready for an idea in order to understand and embrace it, one must have done much of the work oneself already, one must be ready for the question. Otherwise, it might as well be expressed in Chinese.

  So, what one simple truth might have made a difference to him had it been shared and discussed back in that distant past? It came to him quite quickly, though he had never before expressed it to himself. It came like a shaft of sunlight breaking through a gap in the clouds on an overcast day. Yes, I’ve got it, Victor said to himself. How can I put it? It precisely has to do with the question: ‘What is life?’

  He had suddenly realized that he had been laboring since his childhood under a terrible misunderstanding, an awful misapprehension about the sense, the signification of the very thing expressed in that nice, pretty and sharp little word ‘life’. He had heard throughout his existence a thousand opinions about ‘life’. It was good, it was bad; it was an adventure, it was a bore; it was trivial, it was profound; it had a sense, it signified nothing;
it was too long, it was too short; to live was to suffer, to live was to enjoy oneself; I love life, I hate life. He had personally spent an inordinate amount of his spare time, years of time, perhaps decades, trying to answer for himself the questions: Is life worth living? Is life a good thing? As though it were an object external to him about which he must make a judgment and act in consequence.

  And now he saw that human ‘life’ did not at all have any meaningful existence ‘in itself’, as philosophers might have obscurely put it. That it was perfectly useless and unhelpful to express an opinion about it as though it were a physical object that one held up to the light for assessment and examination. What we actually meant, what we were all trying to say was that ‘MY life’ or ‘YOUR life’ or ‘HIS or HER life’ was this, that or the other. That life only consisted in the relationship which each individual human being was able to create with him or her self and the world in all its manifestations. In their interaction, if you like.

  What a terrible mistake I’ve being making, thought Victor sadly. To have assumed all this time that ‘life’ was a fixed and external phenomenon with which I had to come to a working agreement and about which I was called upon to pass sentence. To have behaved as though I had been thrust at birth into a club where all the rules had been fixed since time began and to which I was obliged to adhere on its terms. What a fool, an idiot I’ve been! Perhaps I have been alone in this misunderstanding? One never knew. Perhaps everyone else already realized that life had no independent existence and that it was by definition a personal question, an invention of each and every man and woman? He’d have to check. Perhaps with Harry. “My soul mate,” Victor laughed to himself. But, whatever. Despite his error, he thought that he could advance the notion that now, in his new life—and here the word took on its true sense—he was fast becoming a happy man.

  Awakening from a Dream

  In the course of his diplomatic career, Victor had met several remarkable men and women. It was without question these encounters which had stimulated him the most over all those years of work. And to the extent that he had been able to help a handful of them, had also been the activity that he had found most rewarding.

  He sat alone in his living room, a glass in his hand and a bottle of whisky at the foot of his chair and thought back, as he often did, about several of these people, particularly those who were now dead. Murdered.

  There had been Anna Politkovskaya, the fearless Russian journalist who had exposed time and time again the abominable conduct of the Russian regime and its puppet administration in Chechnya, their ruthless acts of abduction, torture and murder. She and her little newspaper, almost alone, while the stars of Russian media had either ignored her or scoffed at her and turned their eyes away from the filthy events to the south of the federation, had stood out against the crowd and continued to publish their accounts of the horror.

  Over a breakfast meeting, Politkovskaya had shaken and almost terrified Victor with her brutality towards him; she had savaged him mercilessly, as though he had been personally responsible for the foreign policy of his country with regard to the Russian regime, as though he was its servant and lapdog. Which Victor was, of course, prepared to accept. She had been murdered, shot in the entrance to her apartment building, shortly after their encounter.

  There was also Gebran Tueni, a Lebanese politician and media owner. Gebran was an old friend, a highly attractive, ambitious, clever and vivacious man who had taken up the cause of kicking the Syrians out of his country in the early 2000s. The Syrians and their pals didn’t fool around with these questions; they had killed the Lebanese Prime Minister and many other prominent figures who failed to be grateful for their patronage.

  Victor had lunched with Gebran one day while he was living briefly in exile after numerous assassination threats. Almost as they sat down in the restaurant, Gebran had grinned broadly and told him: “I’ve got something very funny to show you.” Upon which he produced a letter from a United Nations investigator who told him that he had moved to the top, to the number one slot, on the list of Syrian enemies to be disposed of.

  Gebran had been so proud of this distinction, remembered Victor. “Number one pain in the arse for those bastards,” he had joked.

  A week later, he had returned, despite the threats, to Beirut, and within twenty-four hours had been blown to pieces by a bomb which awaited him and his car by the side of the road.

  Yes, I have met many remarkable, courageous people, thought Victor. For whom truth and justice were higher values than their own lives. That was the long and short of it. Would he die in pursuit of the truth if he were aware that his death was almost inevitable? He suspected not, though one never knew. But even in Victor’s modest personal pantheon one man stood out. And not because his life was ever really threatened. This man was Wei Jingsheng, whom Victor had met several times and talked with at length.

  The son of low-ranking Communist Party bureaucrats, as an adolescent Wei became a fanatical Maoist. Enrolling as a Red Guard at sixteen, he lived among workers and peasants in rural areas in the north of the country. It was they who told him about the famines and deaths during Mao’s Great Leap Forward, and it was this that compelled him to question the system under which he lived. He said later of these moments: “I felt as if I had suddenly awakened from a long dream and that everyone around me was still plunged in darkness.”

  When he was twenty-three and working as an electrician at Beijing Zoo, Wei had milled with others around Democracy Wall, a popular venue on Xidan Street near the busy bus terminal where citizens were able to publish their ideas and opinions on posters. Within the limits, of course, of what was tolerated and encouraged by the Party and its ubiquitous police. At the time, Deng Xiaoping was promoting the Four Modernizations, defined as goals to develop the country’s industry, agriculture, science and technology, and national defense.

  One night, Wei asked a friend to paste up on the Wall an essay he had written called “The Fifth Modernization: Democracy,” signing it with his name and providing his address. He had written that political pluralism and other freedoms must themselves be a modernization objective for China. “We want to be the masters of our own destiny,” he declared in his essay. “We need no gods nor emperors and we don’t believe in saviors of any kind. We do not want to serve as mere tools of dictators with personal ambitions for carrying out modernization. We want to modernize the lives of the people. Democracy, freedom and happiness for all are our sole objectives.”

  Wei had paid heavily for his insights and his cheek. Eighteen years in prison and labor camps—the Chinese gulag, the ‘laogai’—which had ruined his physical health. He had spent a lot of that time writing letters, to Party leaders, government and prison officials and his family.

  Victor went over to his bookshelf and took down his collection of Wei’s letters, published in a volume called The Courage to Stand Alone, not the best title he thought, since it missed the essential point about Wei, though Victor knew that his opinion on this was of no importance whatsoever to anyone. Yes, he had been extraordinarily courageous, but there was something even rarer which defined him.

  In the old days, when dealing with China had been part of his responsibilities, Wei’s book had lain permanently on Victor’s bedside table. It had been a necessary and effective antidote to the highly sophisticated political, economic, social and cultural studies and research which flowed into his office from the best analysts money could buy. It had been even more essential to thoroughly wash his mind and spirit in Wei’s words after meeting any Chinese government official.

  He flicked through the book once more and reread some of his favorite passages from Wei’s prison letters to Deng Xiaoping, Li Peng, Jiang Zemin and other Party leaders. They were full of very rude and very funny commentaries on the speeches and declarations and plans of these luminaries and, at the same time, the keenest analysis of a wide range of current political and economic issues and reform programs. In Victor’s judgment, both t
hen and still now, they also contained the most compelling and lucid exposure and condemnation of the fraudulent rhetoric of the Chinese regime about human rights and democracy.

  Victor had finally met Wei for the first time shortly after his release from his second prison term and his banishment abroad. His letters had already been published in the West. He had found Wei at the agreed meeting place, enveloped in a huge cloud of his own tobacco smoke, halfway through drinking a liter of green tea on the table beside him and visibly in crippled health.

  Victor had at that time considered that the most mysterious and rare quality he had ever encountered in a human being was charisma. Whoever can explain the essence of this phenomenon is a better man than I, thought Victor. Charismatic people were as few and far between as bearded women or three-eyed horses. Wei was such a man. Victor was instantly bowled over by him. And as he listened while Wei, with great patience and warm irony in his eyes, answered all his questions, Victor realized that this man had one other extraordinary quality which was as rare if not rarer. He was a man who had come to his conclusions about life and the world uniquely from his own experience and his own thoughts. He spoke simply and had simple ideas. And his words had the startling quality of absolute truth. He had seen, he had been witness; he had thought about what he had seen and what he had witnessed; he had considered what he had heard and what he had read; what he had been taught and what had been absent in his teaching; he had reflected on all this in the light of what others said and wrote and taught in contrast with his own observations. And without any other duty than to get to the heart of the matter, without obstruction from his prejudices or his personal woes and fate, without hindrance from his education or the fatuous arguments and lies and propaganda of his environment, in the black night of China’s information and opinion control, he had come as a free man to his uniquely personal and unarguably true values and views.