A Grain of Wheat

by Joseph Jacobson

  But his thoughts of her were not just confined to that role. His lonely heart was being drawn to this unexpected source of womanly warmth in his life. He was finding himself thinking about her outside of all reference to issues of any kind. When he pictured her pretty head cocked to one side and looking up at him from beneath the maple trees as he approached her, something stirred in his long dormant clay. It pleased him that her hair was always slightly disheveled because of the breeze and because of the way she leaned her head back on the tree trunk, but it was ever the same lovely satiny brown. Corresponding to her trim five-foot one-inch frame, her facial features were small and neat and her eyes were kind and twinkly. But what really got to him was the harmony between her heart and her voice, the eager generosity of her soul that expressed itself so perfectly in the clear smooth soft texture of her tone of voice. Perhaps this touched him so deeply because he had been so long deprived of the comforting sound of a woman’s voice.

  Although he held nothing back from the Katherine Kunstler of his imagination, he was careful to expose only bits and pieces of his thinking to the Katherine Kunstler he met under the trees, for fear of becoming too morose with her. He was thankful enough to have her as his confidante in the secret chambers of his mind. He had no desire to jeopardize their friendship by unloading himself on her out in the open. He was glad that she took the initiative in the short conversations they had under the trees. He was never made to feel that he was on the spot just because he couldn’t think of something appropriate to say. What she said was sensible and pleasant to hear, never prying or threatening. He would stay with her there for only five or ten minutes each day so that she wouldn’t tire of him and would welcome him back.

  As the days went on, it became a struggle for Dr. Pearson to maintain the distinction between the two Katherines, the one to whom he unburdened himself entirely in his mind on the porch of his cabin and the one to whom he did not do so under the trees. It was hard not to discuss the one thing that was always on his mind with the one and only person to whom he regularly spoke about anything. And besides, he was beginning to believe that she could handle it, given her own experience. She always appeared judiciously open to him, as though she were gently inviting him to dive into whatever it was that was on his mind and to make her a sharer in it. Furthermore, his leave-of-absence from his present employer was due to end in two more weeks, so it was now or never. With this in mind, he let small bits escape from his mind out into the open with her on Monday through Thursday.

  And on Thursday she said to him, “Steve, you can come clean with me. Tomorrow is Friday. Why not spill it all out to me right here tomorrow, or as much as you can in one evening? We still have a whole week. You don’t have to do it all at once.”

  He looked her straight in the eyes. “You really mean that, don’t you?”

  “With all my heart, I really mean it.”

  He turned his eyes away from her, took a deep breath, got to his feet, swung around and headed back home by the way he had come. He had gone about ten paces when he stopped to have another look back at her. She hadn’t taken her eyes off him.

  “Tomorrow, then,” he repeated.

  She nodded. Twice.

  The next day he arrived early. Miss Kunstler was already sitting in their usual trysting place beneath the maples, but this time she had no papers.

  “I have the whole weekend to correct them, and that gives us the whole evening together here. All I want now is to listen to you. I trust your wisdom.”

  “My wisdom?” Dr. Pearson shook his head. “Wisdom is based on having a well-chosen standard and consistently orienting one’s thoughts and actions toward that standard. At the moment, I have neither. No standard and no sure orientation.”

  “There is little certainty anywhere in the world today. I don’t think most of us are sure we have legs under us to walk on any more.”

  “Or any place to go if we did have.”

  “True.”

  Staring off into the distance, Dr. Pearson shook his head and marveled, “Isn’t it a wonder that we can even talk like this? What is wrong with us humans? Just look at that peaceful panorama right in front of us. So orderly. So calm in its sprouting, growing and dying. So sure of itself. If it weren’t for us humans, the world would be a paradise. Only man, of all creatures, can touch everything around him. No other creature can do that. But our touch is so often the touch of death. Instead of letting ourselves be shaped by the goodness of the created world, we give free reign to our twisted wills and we destroy it. Why are we so out of whack with the goodness all around us? Why? Miss Kunstler, I don’t want to put you on the spot, but do you think that any permanent good was achieved by the war?”

  Her head dropped into her hands. She took a long moment before responding.

  Then she looked up at him and said, “We are being perfectly honest with one another, right?”

  “Perfectly honest.”

  “When I was in war-torn Europe, that was the question I couldn’t escape. The war was a total commitment, a titanic effort, on both sides. The price paid for it in human lives lost, and other lives destroyed, was incalculable. I was looking for some evidence that all of this was not a gaping waste. True, some love and some care came out of it, but they seemed to be overwhelmed by the emptiness, the hatred, the urge to get even on the part of so many, on both sides. Permanent good? Crazy as it may sound, I don’t have an answer for you.”

  “That’s what I mean, ma’am. There’s a first difficulty, and then there’s a second difficulty, and I don’t know which is the greater. When your confidence in the rightness of what you are fighting for is strong and you are certain that goodness stands to gain from the expedients on which you are working to preserve it, it is hard enough to visualize the horrors you are creating for others—‘the enemy’—in the service of your good cause. At least you have the Ultimate Good to rivet your eyes on, as each day you work with others to perfect the means of the destruction needed to safeguard it. But after the war is over and the dust has settled and cities are left in ruins and cathedrals are turned into heaps of rubble and families are shattered and lives are in shreds, then comes the second difficulty. You look around at the what is happening in the world you have helped to chastise so brutally, you look for evidence of lessons learned, and a terrible doubt invades you in the form of a question: ‘Has the horrible destruction you created done anything to establish the good which was your only reason for creating it?’ The question haunts you for an answer. You have brought harm to so many people. Have you actually helped anyone? You look around in the world, I say, and you cannot answer, ‘Yes.’ You cannot! You cannot….”

  “But,” she begged cautiously, “all humanity shares in the guilt. We must bear it together. It doesn’t all fall on one person.”

  “But can we believe that? Do you really? If it were true, if we all really knew how guilty we are, something good would have come out of the war, a lesson would have been learned that would guarantee that such destruction and human tragedy could never happen again. People everywhere would find contentment in ‘cultivating their own garden,’ not envying somebody else’s. War would never again be seen as a means to achieve anything good. Humanity would be in the business of learning how to love, not hate, if we all felt guilty for the war. If we humans really knew how to come to grips with the great evils of our past, those very evils would goad us on to better things in the future. We might even be able to pardon those who met one evil with another evil in the past, and left the world the worse for it, because they were not able to see clearly what we see. But, Miss Kunstler, I am coming to see with dreadful clarity that most people fight because they are cowardly, not because they are defending noble ideals, not because they are serious about replacing evil with good. One man kills another and another and another more to save his own skin than to save democracy. Men fight when their personal safety is threatened, and rarely otherwise. If the Japanese had not attacked Pearl Harbor and the Nazis
had not festooned our seaways with submarines, we would have let the rest of the world solve its own problems. The true knight-in-armor was a rare fellow, even in the Middle Ages.

  “You are too young, my dear little friend, to recall the first Great War. For a good many years folks in this country sort of took it for granted that the forces of evil had spent themselves in it, and the world was now rid of them. It was thought that the horrors of that war had taught us all a lesson we would never forget. In fact, the whole thing had been such a revolting experience that we Americans all turned our backs on it in disgust. We were dead sure that we were now pointed in the direction of progress. I’ll wager that this happens to people after every serious conflict. The rank and file just want to return to ‘normal life.’ Which just sets them up for the next war.”

  “Dr. Pearson, you may well be right. History, especially recent history, seems to bear out what you have just said, particularly now that the means of waging war have gotten so out of hand. I mean to say no one would march into battle unless he felt that his gains would outweigh his losses, except in self-defense. And he slinks away from the battlefield, if he is a man of conscience at all, whether victorious or defeated, under the accusation of his heart that no gains could have outweighed the losses. Yet, what is it about us human beings that allows that same soldier to haul out his old uniform and join the ranks again as soon as there is a new call to battle?”

  “One could say,” he replied, “that there is no such thing as a lesson severe enough to teach us mortals anything permanent. The forces of greed, cowardice, and blind passion, driven by some demagogue’s megalomania, are more natural to our race than those favoring peace and good sense.”

  “So it seems.”

  “And therefore there is no excuse for those who, having learned nothing from the overwhelming evidence of our past, choose to sacrifice the lives of their fellowmen in a fruitless effort to cram good sense down the throat of a world that just vomits it back out.”

  “Except the excuse of ignorance. Our ignorance before the fact of what we learn only after the fact surely mitigates our guilt.”

  “Yes, yes. Mitigates it, perhaps, but it doesn’t erase it. I have to tell you exactly how I see it on the basis of what I have been put through these past few years. It may sound extreme to you. Do you mind?”

  “Of course not,” she said, reaching over and caressing him on the arm.

  “Our trusted leaders are guilty of thinking they can control history without understanding it. If they had any misgivings at all, they beat them into submission with a totally inadequate and simplistic rationale that appealed to the fears and loyalties of their followers. They chained their minds to the fate of a larger soulless cause whose course and result were a foregone failure. They refused to give reason the freedom it requires to be reasonable. It was tailored to solicit the public support needed to pursue their cause. They foresaw the horror of what they were concocting and chose to close their eyes to the sight of it. We cannot call them, or any of their co-opted associates, guiltless. All of them closed their eyes, knowing full well what they would have seen if they had opened them. Now, after Dresden and Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the force of circumstance has pried them open, and what a bewildering mixture of responses we see in them! Artful justifications abound, at every level. But bitter remorse is gushing into the heart and conscience of some of them, especially into the co-opted associates, who are now compelled to call into question everything they were taught to see with their eyes shut. They regard themselves now as having been dumb oxen treading round and round a millstone which they were told not to examine. ‘Just keep on grinding away, and leave the results to us,’ they were told. And now that the grinding is done, most of these poor oxen have lost their ability to walk in a straight line. They chose to be dumb oxen in ‘a worthy cause.’ Of course, being dumb oxen carried with it a lot less personal responsibility for what you were doing than being real men would have. The men up there, who had the full picture, were constantly singing assurances into our ears: ‘You’re doing beautifully. Just keep on walking round and round that millstone and keep on giving us what we need in the name of rescuing humanity, civilization, and progress. Let us worry about whom we are supplying as grist for your mill.’ No, all of us who allowed ourselves to surrender our own moral sense to the will of our leaders, to be their dumb oxen, are far from guiltless. For me, Miss Kunstler, it meant sacrificing eventually, by slow and painful degrees, the one real treasure in my life. Can you imagine what it has cost me to give her up?… I don’t expect you to understand. But sacrificing her to the cause of the war has left me bereft of everything. I have nothing left.”

  Dr. Pearson had said everything he could say at that moment. He stared dumbly into the ground in front of him.

  Miss Kunstler was left speechless. Seeing his ashen pallor sent a wave of cold fear through her, leaving her trembling and shivering. He saw that.

  “Please forgive me, Miss Kunstler. I really don’t want to put you through all this. I am being selfish and old and terribly unkind.”

  “Please, sir. I would consider it an honor if you would call me Kay.”

  Dr. Pearson’s eyes rose to meet hers. He looked at her, puzzled, even confused. Her eyes were aglow with expectancy.

  “Kay,” he replied. “Yes, of course…. Thank you! And I am Steve for you from now on, a strange old man to come and darken your youth with such deep shadows before your time.”

  “Steve, you’re not old, not at all. You have lots of life in you yet.”

  “I wish you were right, my little friend.”

  Steve got up to leave even though the evening was young. Kay seemed a little disappointed.

  “You don’t know what it means to me, Kay, that you have given me the opportunity to do this with you this evening. I am so grateful.” He hesitated, clearly wishing to say more.

  “It feels like … like poison has been drawn out of my system.”

  “Steve,” she said, rising to her feet. “If you don’t come back here on Monday to release more of that poison, I’ll die of anxiety for you. I really will.”

  “You needn’t worry about that.”

  She took his hands and squeezed them.

  And he squeezed hers.

  She thought she noticed a slight spring in his step as he left her, a spring she had never noticed before. There was a definite spring in her step as she set out for home.

  XV

  Over the weekend all the issues that Dr. Stephan Pearson had been accustomed to dealing with one by one came avalanching down upon him all together. He was in the hurry of a conscience-stricken man who, having found at long last someone with whom he felt free to share his crushing load of sin and guilt, was impatient to connect with her again to unload the rest of it.

  He skipped his usual Saturday and Sunday hikes, and also his Monday morning hike, and instead paced round and round his cabin as the pressure built up inside him.

  Monday evening came at last. He left early on his hike and arrived early in front of the school. Just the same, he was relieved to find his little friend there already under the trees waiting for him and beckoning him to come and share the bank with her. As he took his place beside her, he greeted her self-consciously and struggled to think of a pleasant way to begin their conversation. Kay shared his nervousness, wondering what to expect and how to respond helpfully.

  It was a different sort of day. Clouds had been building up since noon but had never quite reached the stage where their clean-cut towering billows fan out on top in broad indistinct anvils of ice and snow. Billow had simply been piling up on billow and swell on swell until they were balancing precariously high in the air, ready to topple over at a touch. But now the sky overhead was clear and blue as the clouds had moved off to the south and west directly in Steve and Kay’s line of vision.

  “You know, Kay, I can never look at massive clouds like those without thinking that what nature does so peacefully, we do so violently. Th
ose massive clouds bless us with cooling rains, a few puffs of wind, and a little harmless lightning and thunder. The mushroom clouds we have created rain down fire and destruction and human misery.”

  They studied the imposing and ever-shifting cloud formations in silence. Kay’s heart was so full of confusing hopes and contradictory feelings that she scarcely dared to open her mouth for fear of what might come pouring out of it. Carefully now she planned each word she would say.

  “Educated people keep telling us that man’s mind has been set free at last from the ancient taboos that once prevented him from investigating whatever he felt like investigating. Now he may venture anywhere he pleases without running into man-made road blocks. I suppose that’s basically good. But there is something to be said for the taboos if they were holding us in awe of forces that are too big for us to control properly, if they were sparing us the global menace we’re facing now.”

  “Ah, but Kay, it’s inevitable. We are naturally curious creatures, and so our knowledge is bound to expand in all directions. Some people are content to learn what is already known, but others have to push beyond the current limits to our knowledge and venture into the unknown. The urge in them is so strong that they would die if they didn’t. It’s inevitable, Kay, inevitable…. But is it good? That’s what plagues me. Is it good?”

  “You mean, what if it’s inevitable and evil?”

  Kay’s eyes were as big as saucers.

  “Yes. You can call it potentially good, which implies that we can’t just expand our knowledge without also taking responsibility for how it will be used. But who’s doing that? And based on what criteria? Or else you can call it always evil, which implies that the more we learn, the more trouble we get ourselves into. Or you can dodge the issue and keep plunging blindly ahead, hoping for the best. My dilemma is this: I can see what we need to do to make it good, but I can’t see any sign that enough of us are willing or able to do it to make a difference.