Trust (61 page)

So there were two tricks played that day: one to get hold of my mother's letters; one to get hold of Europe. Perhaps it will be claimed the latter is really wicked, the former not very. Yet power motivates great and small. It is something to slice up Europe like a whipped-cream cake, through which the brute knife flies. But it is also something to steal the letters of a woman who will not marry you, though the mouth of a new May has swallowed the old May's tail, by pretending that she will.

The letters disappointed. They stimulated in him no sense of power over her privacy; he felt only the sort of obliging and embarrassed pity one accords a vaudeville act that fizzles. They were the last of her letters he was ever willing to read, including those numberless texts and tracts that afterward came to him legitimately, and came, and came, and came. In the first place, he saw at once that her letters were not really private. She had composed them not for William, who would be blunt to their experiments, but for that multitudinous readership we call Posterity, as though it, unlike our poor selves, cannot be startled by the irrational and the sudden. Those abstractly creeping dialogues, as whimsically intrusive in the life of the letters as a rumor of lava, were certainly for Posterity: they were stiff and priggish, as if to say: "What clever young men I was acquainted with in my prime!" She had left out all the profanity. She made everything arid, respectable, and tidy. She had contrived to have Enoch sound like a silly philosopher, so that her lover would show up juicy by comparison. But all the same he did not emerge as juicy: Posterity, being better-read than Allegra, would tick off all the influences; it would label Nick "derivative" and toss him off as a husk. Even his Greeks were not
his
Greeks; he had picked them up along the way. The dryad was gypped from an English novelist. All the effects were staged. The romance was Romantic. The jeering was puerile, and was unrelated to humor. The wit was a bore. The only note of reality was the baby, which had somehow eluded inhabited trees, garlands, spooks, and even myths about the sanctity of beauty, to come out of it all still a baby, leaky and unpleasant but at least not illusory. It had vomited over his leg while a lightning screech of toothache slammed the innermost nerve of his skull. The baby was real beyond all. Everything else was Imagination, which is useless in society, and weakens the Ideal by infecting it with its own unreality. But Enoch had determined that the Ideal is the opposite of myth, because it always belongs to the future, and owns thereby the reality of the possible; he took Ideal as a synonym for Real, and scorned that frailty in Allegra's mind which had chosen for a Golden Age a tawdry little episode called Brighton. Imagination entered her second-hand from Nick, who himself had it third-hand, because Romance meanders from peddler to peddler, holding itself out for what it is not and defrauding the be-glamoured and credulous world. Here was Enoch coming down from London once upon a time covered with carbon-smuts the dirty train had liberated into its passengers' pockets and lungs; he arrives dusty, tired, but undefrauded; and when, hoping for a cot and a meal and a tease from Allegra, he sees instead that absurd sticky circlet of berries hung upon the tree, he does not think: "Ah, Romance." He does not think: "Ho ho, Imagination." He does not think: "Aha, an idyll, pastoral or otherwise." He thinks: "Sex, damn it, and it's me shut out and bound for the old robber-witch who keeps roomers down the road," and would in fact have turned back to London if he were sure his best friends there weren't likely to sell him to the police for a license to storm the Cenotaph, and if there were in London a square of earth he could line his fingernails with. He was in Brighton to dig up weeds and scheme a future: nor was he deluded by the notion of a future which can compel lion to lie down with lamb.
That
is Imagination,
that
is Romance, and offends against the given genius of lion and lamb, which the Ideal, scrupulous and preoccupied with the Real, will never do. Ideals and idylls do not recognize one another. An idyll twists nature, and spins us lawns and pipers where life delivers a marsh and toilers, and, ignoring a rapacious commerce in slaves testifying to other things, gilds us a Greece of athletes, leaf-crowned, beautiful. But the Ideal is tougher than hoaxing Romance, and was never designed for the gullible or the stupid, and works in anger with the grain of nature, rotted grey, split and splintered, old, old, hammered, tragic. The tragic grain of nature! The Allegra of the letters missed it; she thought sadness a lustrous form, like an objet d'art, a vase with its dark dread hole kept secret and small, and the round sides all one and all dazzlingly patterned, and all fathomable; and the whole to be held to the light for an unimaginable and always absent flaw, the eye never to be put to the lips of the black entrance, as though nature had no bloody underside, and grief had no ugliness, and fact had no dirt in it. The stiffness of a thumb: that was death to her: that and nothing else: carcass: not unintelligible unspeakable affront committed by a criminally Godless universe. He sat amazed at the untextured flatness of her vision. The culpability in her innocence snagged and rubbed him: that very smoothness of her apprehension was precisely what he acknowledged to be the coarseness in the grain. Meanwhile the walls of her flat, where he had come directly from the bank as part of the gesture of settling and seeing to the traces of her departure, were broadened by a spill of sunset, which increased the volume of everything. Nearby the head of the servant seemed huge and golden; the diffused blaze perched for a moment on a bristle half-visible inside his nostril, and thickened it into a brazen bar. He was folding sheets into a trunk, urging one knee against a leather hassock. "Siegfried," said Enoch, "you look like an armorless knight I hate to see a man kneel. A passerby might take it for worship instead of packing." "Bitte, nicht so schnell zu sprechen," muttered Siegfried, matching corners; he pouted a cigar upon his lip, a practise his employer had forbidden: it gave his jaw a mournful slant "I need a box," Enoch said, "for a hundred fat letters. A parallel action to yours: a trunk for these sheets. Ein Sarg, you see? Find one." "Bitte?" "A box. To keep dead things in. Nice and roomy, you understand what I mean?" The head veered into shadow and was reduced to that of a sullen man: "Ja, here is somewhere one she finishes yesterday," and vanished into what two days before had been Allegra's bedroom. The door opening like a sail pressed out an acute startling perfume. "This will be?" asked the man, too deferential, presenting a fine deep fancy cardboard cube: "so much letters she has made, there are also others empty-standing should you require." "No, just right; this one. The perfect coffin. —Siegfried, what will you do now?" "Bitte?" "You'll stay till the paid rent runs out?" "Ja." "And you'll bring your little boys?" "Nicht possible, they are residenced already with Englisch families, I give for this monthly the money, also for my small child." "But you'll bring your wife all the same?" "Nicht möglich." "Ah, too bad. She's got a job somewhere, is that it?" "She is in hospital." "Filthy place to work," Enoch remarked, concentrating on cramming a fool's letters into a cavity. "Nein. She will die there," said Siegfried, but contradiction was not in his voice: he had with a whole heart entered the servant class.

Allegra never knew. She would have considered a cook with a dying wife the worst of all morbidities; she would have dismissed him. Often enough she accused him of releasing a morbid atmosphere into the house; she said refugees brought a morbid atmosphere wherever they appeared. She would certainly have dismissed him, so he hinted at nothing, and pretended muteness was his character, though he wished that earlier, when it mattered, he might have had his oldest boy to live with him. He would have reined him and held him very still, but she would not agree. She feared he would ask to bring the younger pair, as if he did not know they were too little and difficult and as if he would think to keep them. But in the evenings he would have taken the oldest child to see the mother. How expensive in England simultaneously to die and to board boys! At first their tragedy was formal and decorous and even mincing; there was no haste in it; the woman in the bed described the processional of her suffering as segmented, like the parts of a stained glass window, each invented shape of agony added to and confirmed by the previous one but separated from it by a leading of morphine: a mosaic of bright pains. That was her first joke in English (at home she was the family clown); she kept English children's books, whirling with colored illustrations, in the bed with her to learn the language well, until all language unlearned itself in the wall of her shocked mouth. "The boy can come
now,
" Enoch said, "there's no obstacle to his coming now." No use: she was never conscious, two weeks already never awake at all. How expensive in England to breathe like grass and to be drugged and to wait! He intended to wait in this great carpeted apartment until the dry breast stopped its subtle journey of fractional ascent and hesitant descent; meanwhile would wait below a high ceiling not very different from the ceilings of Wien, under which his incredible stews had glowed and serving-maids fled to fetch trays of pastries lambent with spiced honey. The view was not the same; in Wien fountain after fountain after fountain, but they had robbed him and forced him naked to play underwater like a whale for them. How a country is traitor to a man! A whole nation turned seditionist! A government betraying its own citizen! Then the escape, bribes, Switzerland, Italy, a filthy boat, Portugal, England, the man, the woman, three sons, alive, alive. Survival!—stilettoed by what? fate? irony of fate? fate sans chivalry? Never trust. Trust is a word for the firing squad. In the end a germ is fate. Dessenungeachtet, as a servant (he did not say as a man: what is man?) he was grateful as a dog to his employer for the gift of allowing him to remain without paying in this grand place. It was a bed to sleep in. He would prepare himself for his orphans. Poor Rudi! Leon! Berni! Berni with his six little teeth! The rent he saved would be the price of the coffin. "She has told me she has offered to a friend this flat, but he would not take it, he has not wished it, for me how fortunate, where should I in the last hours go?"—kneeling to lock his employer's trunk. The lid swept down with a wheeze, setting off a fidgety dance of the grit on the window-sill: it lifted and stirred and rained itself down once more. Grit is one of the eternals. The chimneys heave their laden bladders, the grit is spawned out of a domestic cloud in the lowest air, the black footless ants appear on the sill. Brush away, mop away, empty buckets with zeal; grit returns. Everything is flux; grit is forever. Futility is day after day. Time is not what we suppose, moments in an infinite queue, but rather a heavy sense that we have been here before, only with hope, and are here again, only without it. "Your luck will not change," says Time. "Give up, the world has concerns of its own," says Time, "pain is biologically discrete," says Time, "woe cannot be shared," says Time, "regret above all is terrifyingly individual." And Time says, "Take no comfort in your metaphysics of the immortality of the race. When your species has evolved out of recognition grit will be unspoiled. There will always be grit. It alone endures. It is greater than humanity."

But it is not greater than humanity; it is the same. We join the particles in their dance on the sill. It is the magnificent Criminal plan, to shove us into the side of a hill, mulch us until we are dissolved into something more useful but less spectacular than before, and send us out again in the form of a cinder for some churl of a descendant to catch in his eye, cursing. The tragic grain of nature! The sadistic whittler, insane with repetition and muddy bungled extirpation! Contemptuous of decent extinction! Who can revere a universe which will take that lovely marvel, man (after all the fierce mathematics that went into him, aeons of fish straining toward the dry, gill into lung, paw into the violinist's and the dentist's hand), and turn him into a carbon speck? Imbecility of waste and conservation!—every atom of matter economically converted for miserly reuse, and the single unrecoverable unduplicatable mind switched out of existence unlike a dream, less than a dream, for a dream will sometimes recur; thrust out of being as if pulse and kidney were all. Is mind a neural synapse? Is this smudge on Siegfried's knuckle as he leans on the window-ledge for traction in pressing the trunk-lid tight the total remainder of a thought Adam had when he beheld the angel with the flaming sword? Siegfried, wiping the dirtied back of his hand on his trouser-leg, erases Helen's emotion during Paris' caress. Meanwhile the carbon specks are still gyrating on the sill; high on a wave, while the seasick baby vomits, his employer in the saloon of the queen-ship is already writing to Enoch to learn whether the bank has been settled and seen to; the banker over his five o'clock tea is still pleasuring in gossip of the Pact which the dictators have fashioned for cunning peace; secretly one of the dictators is already mobilizing to trample Europe and the other dictator to ash; and exhausted Europe curls under her fields with her belly slack, a receptacle for a million million carbon specks about to be manufactured by the apparatus of Romance.

And in that moment Enoch sees.

"It is fastened," said Siegfried, straightening himself.

Enoch saw. Put it that he saw. He saw the refugee shutting Allegra's trunk to send it to America. He saw Europe open, open: an impatient trench. He saw May Day pledged to Walpurgisnacht. He saw not Lucifer but all of Paradise fallen. He saw the inkblot and the bear's elbow foamy with the same lustful brew. He saw commissars and storm troopers linked. He saw—to state it in the unhallucinated prose he later told it in—a number of obvious political facts, and understood that he had been duped, like all the rest: not, like Allegra, by the sham temporal delight of those high-flung shouts and banners, the sober martial evangelical exhilaration of the parades, the camps, the songs, the whole lovely lore of Utopian idolatry, the gods like darling grandfathers, the liturgy the sound made by sheaves of wheat in the instant of their scything, the bodies of youths in rings round squares, statues, pillars of parliamentary office buildings, picketing with long sturdy cheerful yells intending to warn the millennium it was about to be scabbed by human glory: not Enoch! He did not hang from those shining strings, being (he thought) himself puppeteer, and acquainted with the artifice and danger of philosophy applied. But duped all the same; duped every bit as much as the lightest head in the parade; duped and fooled by fraud, hoax, and duplicity.