Trust (62 page)

"It is loosened," he contradicted Siegfried, who did not comprehend. He meant he had loosened the ropes. He meant he was free of the Party. He meant he was done with the idyll of trust in heroic governments. Henceforth he would oblige himself to stick to history, which knew where it had been, and could neither promise nor betray, and was clean of hope.

It was, in fact, one of those moments of spiritual clarity men like Enoch tend to be skeptical about. But spiritual clarity is nothing more mystical than disillusionment, and no more magical than the separation of dUpe from charlatan. The Red Sea, we are informed, went to all the fuss and inconvenience of dividing itself only to make the same commonplace point: simply that a man must abandon what has enslaved him. If he does not, then he has acquiesced to evil, in the manner of the Christ when he rendered unto Caesar Caesar's evil unmodified, and when he condoned the blow by turning toward it a second time, and aided the torment by aiding the tormentor. Ah: I should have mentioned long ago that even in that early time my stepfather was flatly against Christ. Christianity, along with piety in general, he equated with the Normal Behavior of Mankind, and so had a rather pleasurable contempt for it. But Christ was one of Enoch's great villains, and for a reason competitive rather than theological. He believed the divine ought to keep hands off, and not send messengers to meddle with affairs they know nothing of: he insisted God ought to stay what he is, a principle which it is blasphemy to visualize. And he chose Christ for enemy not merely for his cruelty in inventing and enforcing a policy of damnation, but more significantly for his removal of the Kingdom of Heaven to heaven, where, according to Enoch, it had no business being allowed to remain, by the Saviour or anyone else, and ought instead to be brought down again as rapidly as possible by the concerted aspiration and fraternal sweat of the immediate generation. A Kingdom of Heaven stowed away in heaven is a perfectly useless fact, though pretty, and can do no good for anyone who does not happen to feel the force of such a fact; meanwhile, he observed, oppression and murder continue below with exactly the same frequency as though there had never been a Saviour.

So Enoch was—as I have said—against Christ; against Romance; against Imagination. Not these but the Ideal, with its unforgiving knowledge of human nastiness and its aversion to prettifying it or blinding it fancifully out of being with a phantom sheen of generalized love or pretending it can be redeemed by anything other than the personal and individual act of a man covenanting on his own behalf, had drawn him to the Party. And the Ideal, when at last it was forfeited by the Party, which gave to a conspiracy of subjection the name of peace, drove him out: and he was left like Adam to know his shame. Still, even in a moment of spiritual clarity, even in the press of crisis, one has to say something.

Enoch said again: "It is loosened."

"But I have just fastened it. It is quite secure," the servant objected.

"Oh look, I'm not talking about that damn lock on that damn trunk. Didn't you just say it yourself? You can't have an attachment or a commitment in the light of that. It
has
to be loosened."

Siegfried did not comprehend, and blamed his slippery grip on the English language.

"Oh God damn it! Trust! You said it yourself! Trust is a firing squad! You said it yourself a minute ago, didn't you?"

Siegfried admitted he had said what was attributed to him; but he did not comprehend.

"You said God is a germ."

"Oh nein! From me this thought never," Siegfried responded excitedly, though he considered emphasis and emotion to be unbecoming to a servant, and in his opulent fiat in Wien had always been cool to his own when he caught them trembling, "nicht Gott, aber das Schicksal, ist ein Keim!—Fate I think you say? I express fate to be the germ—"

"They're not the same? Fate and God?"

"So unequal my Englisch, nicht possible to give out myself," and gave himself out forthwith to be a faithful second-generation Lutheran who prayerfully hoped he would be saved through belief; who despised Moses as a worldly legalist; who felt extreme moral shock at hearing the Christian God indelicately compared with that microscopic saprophytic wolf which was ravaging his wife; and who was, as a natural consequence of the foregoing, puzzled at being beaten for a Jew. "Bitte, bitte, sehr schwer für mich the Englisch, my wife only has many tongues, in Portugal she has spoken once many times—"

"Your wife," said Enoch, "has lost her tongue and will die. So they are the same, fate and God."

"Nein; nein; ich bedaure, in diesem Punkte mich Ihrer Meinung nicht anschliessen zu können!" exclaimed the refugee: "Not the same. God is good. Surely he is good. The bad germ which kills is not the God, it is the fate which is bad."

"I understand," said Enoch. "Fate is what we experience. God is what we do not experience. Fate is certainty, it is what really happens to us. God is legend, and has never happened," but did not laugh, not out of tact—he had no tact—but because it came to him then that he stood outside his old home; that there is no Eden without its secret coil of treachery; that he had ruined his brain by fastening it to a legend, and never to fate. It was loosened; he had loosened it now; and where was his fate, and where should he in his last hour go, and what was there for him to do in the broken world?

He did the thing that was left for him to do: he married.

He did not think it could be accomplished immediately; and it was not accomplished immediately. But in the end, curiously enough, he did not have to persuade. For a year he had tried to persuade, and with no success: she had refused him and refused him. The letter she wrote on the queen-ship came; a fool's letter; he grumbled in his little room (it was addressed as usual to Adam Gruenhorn, who no longer existed), and threw it in the fire. On the day Hitler sank the first boot into Poland she sent him a cable, but so garbled by the overseas frenzy of rushing messages that he could not read her meaning; it was enough to see that she did not mention the war; and that satisfied him. No war was hers, neither moral nor actual wars. She represented for him not earnestness but—he had already explained it to her—spree, and wars are not the province of fools, whatever the pacifists may think. But he felt himself eclipsed, because war eclipses a man who is not in his own country in exactly the same way a man is made to seem a child when he must speak introspectively in a language that is not his own.

So he attached himself (in the blatant argot of my mother's salvaged clippings) to an heiress. It was what he had intended, and he was surprised to see that his intention, privately arrived at, was publicly observed. She had money, that was the point of it; she would always have money, it was uncountable, it was undiminishable, it was not even money in the ordinary sense, it had survived the Crash, it would survive stock-markets both as temples and as concepts, it was likely to survive everything. Here is the charred waste of this piteous planet, and here nevertheless are Allegra's money and the carbon grits that danced on the sill for Siegfried, companions in ineradicability. Both are mercurial elements, and readily change their guises, and follow Einstein's law of conversion—or call it instead Enoch's rule of animadversion. He hated money; had never had it; objected to thinking of it. It bothered him to think of it. Far behind him lay a black Chicago alley. In the Party he would have found the liberty that money famously confers useful. Out of the Party he found it imperative. In the Party it was possible to go on writing pieces for seedy encyclopaedias. Out of the Party it was necessary to stand on a foundation. ("It is necessary to stand on a foundation," he said to himself.) In short: he required money in order not to require it. That is a commonplace, not a subtlety. The disillusioned will understand. When hope is gone, it is good to be able to fall back on money.

And he did not even have to persuade her.

"She did it for the status of the thing," William told me. "There was the child, of course. She had to marry
someone.
Still, it was not like being married at all. They took him, you see, for the Office of Strategic Services—"

"O.S.S.," I said familiarly. "I've heard he began there. The Order of the Secret Spies was it?"

"Dirt. Unsavory stuff. Most people wouldn't have touched it. He had all those unpleasant connections over there, everybody under foolish aliases, nothing respectable, undoubtedly just what they require in intelligence. No one denies the war made patriots and heroes out of the worst malcontent element. One imagines they had to have them for jobs of that character. Misfits, sly types."

"You like him now, don't you?" I countered.

He let this slip by, whether for acquiescence or demurral I could not tell. "In Washington they thought well of him. I had to shuttle back and forth myself in those days, and I would hear things. There was a general down there who said he didn't dare violate security to tell the thing, but in view of a certain incredible incident he'd stake the country on Vand. (He's retired now; General Tassel; he's one of the witnesses the Senate wants.) Lord knows what he did in those years over there. Whatever it was, it was grisly. He got to be one of their key men. General Tassel told one of the Senators recently how Vand used to answer everything with a maybe, and then bring it off. That's just the gist of it—the full statement was given to me in confidence by the Senator. The relevant fact is that he was over in Europe almost the whole time. He had one trip back—that's when they married-. In fact from '42 to '44 they never met at all."

I thought this over. "Was there a wedding?"

"Thank God no. Sandy Clemens did it. District Court Judge he was then. Appeals now."

"Formerly of Miss Lamb's," I guessed, taking on his abrupt and angry eye.

"Don't smirk. As a matter of fact the entire party was of a piece—call it a piece of Miss Lamb's if you like to be pert—all but the groom. He was bright-eyed enough—grasping well beyond his shabbiness and even open about it. Fat little figure, starting one of those bookish paunches, looking down and out and every bit insensitive to the criminal absurdity of it. My wife and I stood as witnesses: Vand requested it. Oh, astonishing; I'm exactly aware of it. It was both obvious and sly of him—and in combination disgusting. On Allegra's account we had to consent, though my wife came to the ceremony without her gloves. She always shows her point of view. If he expected to grab an identity for himself out of it he was mistaken. Sandy did a quick job of it and had the delicacy to leave out the amenities. I believe he was as much repelled, really, as any clergyman in his shoes would have been, though he wasn't very fond of clergymen in those days. He's come round since, of course. Quite naturally
they
didn't dare think of a minister."

"Maybe Enoch didn't want one," I said. "Because of his religion."

"His religion! My—dear—child, are you obtuse? Or merely vulgar? Would you have expected your poor mother to join him under a greasy Oriental canopy to be jabbered over by a little whiskered Shylock of a rabbi? His religion! The man was an atheist."

"Well if he was an atheist he wouldn't have wanted a rabbi either. You can't be a Jew if you're an atheist, they're mutually exclusive, aren't they?"

"Not having mastered their Talmud, I don't know," William said, backing his cold formidable head away from the light. "I assure you Vand managed to be aggressively both. I was against the marriage, I won't conceal it from you. My wife and I were both against it. And on the practical side, I may say, your mother was left without any protection to speak of. He went right off. He had no address. For months at a time she never heard from him. It was not—as I have said—not really a marriage. It was quite as though there were no marriage at all," he reiterated. He now seemed extraordinarily revivified. "I took the opportunity occasionally to call on your mother to inquire after her welfare, and I may add that except for the attentions of this office her interests were virtually neglected. She was practically abandoned."

"But it wasn't anyone's fault. It was just the war, wasn't it?"

"She was well-warned beforehand."

"About his being in the war?"

"It wasn't the war which separated them," William said. "It was more than the war."

"I can't think of anything that's more than a war," I said.

"You have very little experience. There are matters which precede and exceed war. One, he didn't come from anywhere. Two, he was a Jew."

"Three, my mother didn't care."

"Ah yes,
she
had had experience, hadn't she?" he said in a tone that (had the words been mine) suggested we were once again on ground he would have termed "coarse."—"It wasn't merely that she didn't care. She had actually a positive opinion. If he didn't come from anywhere, she supposed that was all the better: it gave him somewhere to go. She confessed to the attraction of ambitiousness. As for the Jew-thing: agreed that they are reported famous for the stickier paternal qualities—one sees them kissing adult sons in the streets: oh, manly!—still she had to have it that they're 'family men,' unquote. That was presumably for you. —She married him, you see, for
your
sake."

"Enoch's not interested in family," I interposed.

"More to the point, he's not interested in you. He never took to you. Oh, as a marriage-motive you were a great failure," William said with satisfaction. "And as to family! Let me not enter upon what his family might be! The Senator recalls some source or other on the father: one of these usual immigrant items, the little Yid tailor; Tassel corroborates, and adds night-watchman besides; no opinions on anything, grubbed midnight and morning, died at an age younger than the son is now, probably of insufficient sleep (that's Tassel's joke); and five offspring to boot. —Oh look here, let's not touch on family!"

"My mother doesn't care about all that," I repeated sullenly. and privately counted William's offspring. They came to five.

"Put it that the Senators care," William said. "Every trifle, you understand, has been gone into with diligence and without scruple, rag or tag, well in advance of the public hearings. These things are not worn on the lapel, after all. You will observe how considerably I understate when I say that all in all it is not precisely the kind of 'background' one hopes for in a United States Ambassador. One hopes rather for more typicality. Representativeness, portrayal of the general culture of the sending nation—"