After Dachau (13 page)

MALLORY
, never predictable, seemed almost preternaturally calm as we tramped down the school’s echoing hallways and out to the parking lot. She still hadn’t spoken by the time we were in the car and headed back the way we came. Unable to think of anything else, I lamely told her I was sorry she’d had to go through that.

“There’s no need to be sorry,” she said. “Have you ever had a sliver in your hand?”

“Of course I have. I’ve led a sheltered life, but not
that
sheltered.”

“The last thing you want is anyone digging around for it, but once it’s out, all you feel is relief. You can look at this tiny splinter of wood, see it for what it is, and throw it away. I knew there was a sliver there—I’ve known that from the first
day I woke up in the hospital as Mallory Hastings—but it was so huge I was afraid it would tear me apart if it ever came out.” She watched the scenery flow past the window for a while. “Now it’s out and it’s gone, and I feel sort of empty—but not torn to pieces. I’m relieved to know who I am and where I am, and how I got here.” After a bit she added, “But I do feel sort of empty.”

I left her alone and drove on. When we connected with the highway to Oneonta, she asked me to pull over.

“This is probably a silly question,” she said when we were stopped, “but I have to know the answer anyway. Are you a not-see?”

“A not-see? What’s that?”

She laughed. “Not a not-see.
This
is a not-see.” She repeated the sign she’d used earlier to characterize me, snapping her fingers together in front her eyes and tossing them away. “
Not-see
is a sign-language pun.”

“I don’t get it.”

“
Not-see
equals
Nazi
—N-A-Z-I.”

“I still don’t get it. What’s a Nazi?”

Her eyes widened in amused disbelief. “The Nazis were the collective ‘heroes of Dachau.’ Hitler was the leader of the Nazis—he was their saint, their
beau idéal
, their knight in shining armor.”

“I see. But that still doesn’t tell me what a Nazi is.”

“It’s short for
National Socialist
—I assume it comes from the original German.”

“Okay. That part rings a bell. National Socialism was popular all over Europe for a time—but never in the U.S.”

“But you still managed to murder your Jews.”

“Is that the real meaning of the word
Nazi
—Jew-killer?”

“Yeah, I guess it is.”

“And this is why you call me a murderer?”

She nodded.

I thought about the charge for a while, then said, “The greatest library of the ancient world, full of unique and unreplaceable manuscripts, was in Alexandria. Near the end of the fourth century, the Roman emperor Theodosius had it burned so as to rid the world of all those horrid pagan works, most of which were lost to us forever, since they existed nowhere else. Did you feel guilty about this act of barbarism when you were alive as Gloria MacArthur?”

She shook her head. “Feeling guilty isn’t the issue. Certainly it isn’t the issue with those little girls and their teacher. As far as they’re concerned, killing millions of people was like getting rid of fleas on a pet dog—just an unpleasant but necessary chore.”

There was nothing to say to that. After a minute of silence, I started the car again.

“Don’t do that,” she told me, and I turned it off. She continued to stare out the window on her side of the car. Finally, she said, “What happened to you people?”

“What do you mean?”

“When I was alive back in the twentieth century—back in
my
twentieth century—people imagined that a great new age was just ahead. All the work was going to be done by robots. Everybody would have personal helicopters and live like kings in a kind of gadget-filled paradise. But in fact nothing’s changed. Everything’s exactly the way it was two thousand years ago. What happened?”

“I wish you’d asked this question back at the Academy. Then you could have heard the ‘official’ answer.”

“And what is that?”

“That the frantic desire for ‘progress’ that drove your nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a product of Jewish greed. The Jews wanted people to buy a whole set of new products every spring and then throw them away for a ‘better’ set in the fall. Nothing was supposed to last. Everything was designed to fall apart so it could be replaced by something ‘better.’ That’s the answer I learned in school. That’s the answer Mallory Hastings learned in school—and that you forgot during your period of unconsciousness.”

She shook her head impatiently. “You’re trying to have it both ways. First you tell me the Jews were behind the
lack
of progress in the Middle Ages, now you tell me they were behind the
rush
of progress in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Which is it?”

“It’s both. Do you want to hear how Ava or Nanette would explain it?”

“I guess I can work it out on my own. But it still doesn’t explain the utter stagnation of your Aryan paradise.”

“Doesn’t it? Think about it. We don’t believe in novelty for the sake of novelty. Novelty for its own sake is a
Jewish
thing, you see. We believe in making good things to start with—things that
last
. And we believe in making them as good this year as we did last year—as good as they were in my grandfather’s day and in
his
grandfather’s day. The basic systems that make this automobile function haven’t been improved for two thousand years because they don’t
need
to be improved. We’re
proud
of this, you understand. This is an
Aryan
car, not a Jewish car that starts falling apart as soon as you take it out of the showroom. This is the explanation we heard from our parents and they heard from their parents
and they heard from their parents and they heard from their parents, all the way back to the signing of the Aryan Council Charter.”

“I see.”

“Does the explanation make sense?”

“I guess it does, if you accept all those premises about Jews and Aryans.”

“Do you think the girls in Miss Crenevant’s classroom question it?”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Certainly not. And why should they? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this good, solid, boring Aryan automobile, after all.”

“Okay. But is this true of everybody? Doesn’t
anybody
question it?”

I had to give that some thought. “I think everyone questions it—but only with about one percent of their minds. We’re ninety-nine percent sure that what we have is truly a wonderful Aryan paradise, as you call it. But then there’s that other one percent that makes us wonder what the hell is
wrong
with us.”

“Don’t you ever try
answering
that question?”

“No, because maybe we couldn’t stand hearing the answer. We’re afraid to know what’s wrong with us.”

“I’d be afraid too, if I were you,” Mallory said, and opened the passenger door.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going back to Oneonta,” she said, getting out. “I’ll hitch a ride.”

“Don’t be silly.”

She started to close the door, then paused, evidently
thinking of something to add. “Speaking of my being silly, do you remember your concern about my ‘mother’?”

“What do you mean?”

“You didn’t want to take me to New York City without getting her permission.”

“Right. I remember.”

“Do you know how many times she’s called since I got out of the hospital? Zero times. Her one and only concern about me was the possibility that my being in the hospital might reflect badly on her. Her only concern was to get me out of there so I’d stop embarrassing her. Which I knew well enough at the time, and you didn’t.”

“Okay. So?”

“So you should shut up about me being silly. You’re no expert.”

“Okay, I take it back. I apologize. But there’s no reason why you should hitch a ride to Oneonta. I’ll be glad to take you there.”

“Your gladness doesn’t enter into it. This is something I’m doing because I want to do it. Understand?”

“I understand,” I said, and she slammed the door and walked away. I considered hanging around till she got a ride. I also considered hanging around till she got a ride, and then following her northward to Oneonta to make sure she got home safely. But in the end I knew this would only infuriate her, so I turned the car around and headed back to Manhattan.

WHEN I WOKE
the next morning after a pleasant evening with my parents, I realized I’d become a man without a plan or a purpose—something new to me (and not altogether unpleasant). For the first time in a long while, I wasn’t getting ready to do something or waiting for someone else to do something. I was in a position to behave like one of the idle rich: go shopping in elegant stores for unneeded things, meet similarly idle friends for lunch or cocktails, catch a show or a concert in the evening, all of which I somewhat dutifully attended to on that day, a Wednesday.

The following morning, with no clear plan in mind, I went for a walk and ended up in a bookstore, where I wandered listlessly for an hour, fingering novels and collections of short stories, looking for escapist reading. I felt out of
place and a trifle guilty, because in fact I’m not much of a reader. I was afraid some clerk would offer to assist or make a recommendation, and I’d be revealed as an ignorant philistine. At last I selected three novels, paid for them, and fled, feeling like a lapsed alcoholic sneaking out of a liquor store with a bottle under his arm.

Not caring to go back home so soon, I took my acquisitions to the Metropolitan, which is the only thing the Tulls mean when they speak of “the club.” It has the odd (and probably undeserved) reputation of having been founded in ancient times to cater to an especially worldly and wicked clientele, who are certainly nowhere in evidence today. Still, it’s not quite as stuffy as such establishments tend to be and is stocked with all the usual clubby amenities, though the only ones I wanted were a comfortable chair, a good light, and an occasional glass of sherry at my elbow.

I wasn’t doing research. Nothing could have been further from my mind. I was making an earnest effort to amuse myself for a few hours, and the novels I’d chosen at the bookstore were presumably written for exactly this purpose. I opened one, read for half an hour, then set it aside in favor of a second—which I also read for half an hour and set aside. I picked up the third and, in a state of bemused distraction, wandered into the dining room for lunch. I pondered matters over a cocktail, spent fifteen minutes reading, then set the third book aside as well when my entree arrived.

Without intending any such thing, I’d made what was (for me) a remarkable discovery. I’d told the girls at the academy that Napoleon considered history “just an agreed-upon fiction.” An hour’s reading in the work of three different authors revealed an unsuspected dimension of truth in this
description. It was clear that all three had studied with Miss Crenevant (or one of her clones), though there isn’t a trace of historical reference in their books. All had a contemporary setting, featuring characters that could be said to be just like me. Not one of us questions the verity that the human race is exactly congruent with the Aryan race—and was “meant” to be congruent with the Aryan race from the foundation of the universe. Not one of us gives a moment’s thought to the absence of “other” faces in our midst. Like me, the characters in these books travel the world, knowing with absolute assurance that the people we’ll see in Tokyo or Shanghai or Johannesburg or Bombay will be as uniformly white as the people in Paris or Chicago or Sydney. For us, indeed, white is the color of people, the way yellow is the color of bananas. To see a red man in Santa Fe would be as startling as to see a lavender lion in Africa. White is the suitable color for people, as tawny yellow is for lions.

Like me, all these authors and their characters occupy a world in which the Great War is essentially the stuff of legend, as the Trojan War must have seemed in Gloria MacArthur’s day. The Jews have hardly more reality for us than the dragons of the Middle Ages, and the Merchant of Venice inhabits the same fairy-tale universe as the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

We don’t live in a world that is
stagnant
, as Mallory dubbed it. We live in a world that is
stable
—wonderfully stable, blessedly stable, as it
deserves
to be for the race that is the pinnacle of cosmic development.

Mallory seemed to think I should live in sackcloth and ashes because my ancestors exterminated the original inhabitants of Asia and Africa to make room for people like me. I
made a mental note to ask her if Jackson Pollock lived in sackcloth and ashes because his ancestors exterminated the original inhabitants of North America to make room for people like him.

It isn’t just
our
history that is an agreed-upon fiction.

When I got home
, I was informed that Mother was waiting for me with a guest in her study. This wasn’t food for thought, since my mother receives dozens of visitors a month, none of whom would miss a chance to pat the young master on the head. I was therefore startled to see that Mother’s guest was Mallory, dressed for the city in a dark suit and white blouse. She stood up when I came in, disconcerting me further. What was she expecting? My mother cocked an eyebrow at me in amusement, needing only a millisecond to register my uncertainty. I decided that if Mallory was going to play Lady Caller, I’d have to play Gentleman Host, so I stepped forward and gave her an awkward embrace, punctuated with a peck on the cheek.