At this point I am going to leave Timothy for a while, not because his story is ended, but because I have brought him to his first and only encounter with Conrad Dehmel, an almost accidental meeting that was to have terrible effects on us all.
Again it is early June. My seventy-sixth birthday is coming and this year we had a good spring, with the lilacs a week earlier than usual. It is true what the scientists predicted when I was young – that the climate would grow colder, but it has been much less cold than they said it would be and in these parts as erratic as ever. When we least expected it, lovely weather came in the middle of May and it is still here. It is so beautiful that I’m afraid it will turn cold again in August. And another thing has made me happy. André and his wife now have a little boy and they let me play with him.
From where I sit I can see the backs of those three old men and I wonder without interest what they’re talking about. The last time it was about sex and they were telling each other that the young of today – they never meet any, of course – know nothing about it. The oldest of them is in his eighty-third year and he still smokes grass. He even cultivates a patch of the stuff near by. For a long time he has been in his second childhood and he lives entirely in the past – so far back that he’s always talking about the great days when he was leading student demonstrations and parading around the streets carrying his placards. “Did I ever tell you about the time,” I’ve heard him say a hundred times, “when we made the president of the university crawl under his desk and the President of the United States shit his pants?” He was born in the old United States and came up to this northern country to escape the military draft in that war that Timothy was so excited about. He insists he’s going to live past ninety because both of his grandparents lived that long. What became of his father and mother he neither knows nor cares, but he still has enough energy to hate them and to blame them for what went wrong with his own life, which was just about everything, even before the real troubles hit us all.
I’m also watching a robin on the same patch of grass and wondering whether he is the same one I watched last spring or one of the little ones that were fed in the lilac bush. The chipmunk that used to come to my hand has disappeared and I don’t know whether he was taken by a prowling cat or died in hibernation. I miss him. Though it was cruel cold in January and February, my health was better than it had been in years and my only complaint was an annoying arthritis in the left wrist that made typing painful when the weather was harsh. It’s gone now, with the warmth.
It is just over a year since André turned these papers over to me and the people I have met in them are as real as any I have ever known. I was too young to have been involved in their time on the stage, but it was in the last years of their world that I became what is known legally as a man. I wonder if they sensed that they themselves were symptoms of what was going to happen to us all? It seems to have been automatic with people like Timothy to hate their elders and to put them down on every possible occasion, but I and my friends didn’t feel that way. Now I can better appreciate the enormousness of the tragedy implicit in André’s question about Conrad Dehmel last year – “If there were men like him with all that knowledge, why couldn’t they stop what happened?”
Among Dehmel’s notes I found this passage and it was written several years before he appeared on Timothy’s program:
“In the relatively rare periods in the past that we call civilized, people understood that a civilization is like a garden cultivated in a jungle. As flowers and vegetables grow from cultivated seeds, so do civilizations grow from carefully studied, diligently examined ideas and perceptions. In nature, if there are no gardeners, the weeds that need no cultivation take over the garden and destroy it.” Then followed a sentence that seemed to me quite terrible, even though I must ask myself whether it is true or not. “During my lifetime too many of the men who thought of themselves as civilization’s gardeners, in nearly everything they did from the promotion of superhuman science to superhuman salesmanship, devoted the ambiguous genius of their programmed brains to the cultivation of the weeds. They watered them with the jungle rains of the media. The klieg lights of the studios were their hothouses. They did what they did, and they still do it, with the best of intentions, because they cannot believe that the creative energy of the universe will never interfere with human ingenuity. If anyone said to them, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’ they would reply with a polite and pitying smile.”
Is this overloaded? Had I read it fifty years ago I would have thought so.
But what of André Gervais and the small coterie of his friends? I cannot claim really to know them, merely to delight in them and in the way of an old man to love them. They feel sure that a time will come when human beings will be let alone to follow their own bents, to be joyful and adventurous, to entertain gracious thoughts and be responsible for their own actions and the work of their hands. They are discovering entirely on their own the excitement of moral philosophy. They are marvellously, beautifully ignorant of what men are capable of when they grow disappointed, sour, tired, or merely indifferent. Can they really succeed in ignoring the miserable remnants of the present Bureaucracy, which is the feeble descendant of the Second Bureaucracy, which in turn was the blindly barbarous successor of the Smiling Bureaucracy which controlled us when I was a boy? They are amateurs. They are sure that in time a bright new city will rise on the ruins of Metro. All I can say to them is God bless you, I hope you’re right. All I can say to myself is that they have nothing to lose by trying; for we, without trying, lost everything.
Again, there is this notion of André’s that there is a growing passion for books among the young people now. I suppose it’s possible. But the poor boy cannot grasp the magnitude of what has been lost. He can’t understand that the middle-aged of today, including his own parents, were worse casualties than I was, for they had no experience of anything before the Great Fear.
But to return to the books – and here I’m speaking only to myself. So many million tons of printed matter had been accumulated and stored away even before I was born that nothing short of the destruction of the entire planet could have obliterated all of it. So far as I know, most of the city libraries went up in flames. Even before that, the Second Bureaucracy had processed vast quantities of printed matter for fuel and animal foods. Certainly some books survived these holocausts. I was lucky enough to have saved many of my own books; luckier still to have found and collected several thousand others. I used to pick them up in odd places when I was still young enough to wander and when no authority was strong enough to care about me. One of the most precious of them all has been a magnificent encyclopedia in a single large, heavy volume. I know it almost by heart. But I still must ask myself how many of the young people will have André’s enthusiasm and will want to read books.
André told me – I had not known it – that a few years ago circulating libraries began to appear and that there was one close to where I live. I visited the place and it was pathetic. I don’t know what some of the others are like but this one reminded me of a library I had seen long ago in a small-town Sunday school where the shelves were crowded with a mishmash of books cast off by summer tourists or picked up from farmhouses after the old people had died. I saw a Gideon Bible, probably recovered from a rural hotel. Gulliver’s Travels was there, and a battered collection of Shakespeare’s plays, but the rest was junk. The young woman in charge was proud of the place, but when I asked her how she liked Shakespeare she told me she couldn’t understand the language. I was trying to think of something tactful to say when she asked me if I had heard of a book called The Idiot by an author with a peculiar name she could not pronounce. The room nearly spun around. So Dostoyevsky had survived! The man who had foreseen so much of what was going to happen after his death was still with us!
“Where did you find The Idiot?” I asked her, and she told me that one of her friends had lent it to her. She did not know where her friend had found it and she had not liked the book well enough to read more than a few chapters. Her only comment was that it seemed a very queer book written about very peculiar people.
I was not surprised to learn that this was the only novel she had ever seen, for the Second Bureaucracy had been animated by a ferocious logic of the very kind Dostoyevsky had been the first to describe and understand. Unlike previous tyrants, they had not worried about ideas, knowing that there were so many ideas of all kinds floating around that they were bound to cancel each other out. But novels deal with individual lives, and they had hunted them down and destroyed them as though they were carriers of a plague.
To be fair to André, by no means all the surviving books were commonplace. The Destructions and their aftermaths were just as unselective as those ancient barbarians we read about in school who plundered the old Roman Empire. André and his friends were very lucky, for they possess some beautifully illustrated books and commentaries about the art and architecture of the old Italian Renaissance. God knows where they were found, but originally they belonged to a private library. When André showed them to me I even recognized the name of the owner written on the flyleaf. I think he was a friend of my grandfather. Possibly his children sold them when they had no money left.
André asked me if I would agree that he and his friends are beginning a second Renaissance, and what could I say to that? With all respect and affection for him, I can’t see my young friend as a second Leonardo. Conrad Dehmel used to describe the original Renaissance as a mutation, and mutations are supposed to take centuries. Truly I can’t estimate what is going on now or even guess what it will amount to. But I’m sure of one thing. Any rebuilding that will occur is not going to resemble the gigantic reconstruction programs of the cities of Germany and Japan after the world war that ended before I was born. The same technological system that destroyed them was able to rebuild them in record time. There is no system like that today. No power like that.
Often when I lie in bed unable to sleep, trying to understand what I am too old to understand, it comes to me that André and his friends now in their mid-twenties are younger in spirit than I was when I was eight years old. When I was a boy nothing seemed really new to me, none of the big events at all surprising. The famous moon landing, for example. Our whole school watched it on television but there was no element of surprise in that show. We all knew that if the Control had not been certain of success it would never have risked it. As for information, there was so much of it that we all seemed to be living in an international airport with nobody knowing anyone else and loudspeakers barking thousands of directions in several different languages twenty-four hours a day. Well, that’s all past now, and André’s hopes are yet to come. The time is overdue to return to Conrad Dehmel.
“For years I lived like a man in the jaws of a shark” – this sentence I found among Dehmel’s notes and thought to myself, “So what is new?”
However, it was certainly a new idea to me to discover that when he was alive I knew hardly anything important about him except that he was my stepfather. I was much too young to know such a man, and my sister and I were away at schools in the country for most of the short time he and Mother lived together. I liked him well enough, though I thought he could be pretty ponderous at times. My sister Charlotte disliked him intensely, and ruined every attempt he made to be her friend.
For instance, the day she came home with a second-hand guitar and Uncle Conrad was so pleased.
“Why Charlotte,” he said beaming, “you never told me you liked music. This is splendid. Let me get you a violin and arrange for you to take lessons.”
As if a girl like Charlotte had any intention of spending hours a day learning a tough instrument like the violin! Looking back on that sister of mine she really comes out as the Bitch Original and how Mother produced anyone like her I never could understand. As we used to say, it must have been in the genes somewhere. But again I must return to Conrad Dehmel.
When he was murdered we thought it was because of the crazy politics in our city at that time, but even I doubted if this was the real explanation. Politics were crazy everywhere, because the world was going out of control. The same story day after day all over the world – kidnappings, hijackings, skyjackings, hit men, individual kooks blasting off with submachine guns on street corners, eminent people and unknown people dropping dead for no reason the doctors could explain, several new strikes every week, money losing its value year after year, arson incorporated as a recognized technique in the building industry, arson a pastime for sexually frustrated individuals, organized crime the second-biggest industry in the richest and most powerful nation in what we called – Christ, what a word for it! – the Free World. We took all this for granted and it was marvellously exciting. Through it all the Smiling Bureaucracy continued to smile whenever they appeared on the screens.
Charlotte and I were at school when Uncle Conrad was killed and his death made no sense whatever. Charlotte was an unfeeling girl and she said, “Oh hell, it was just one of those things. Maybe somebody mistook him for somebody else.”
How appalling it is for me, a man older than Conrad Dehmel ever lived to be, to discover only now that Charlotte, without knowing the first thing about what she was talking about, was probably right.
For Mother, Conrad’s death was an appalling thing and it almost broke her. Literally, she turned her face away from the world and this meant that she lost all control over Charlotte and me. Or is even this accurate? For we two were already going along with the wave. Charlotte had her first boy when she was barely fourteen, which was not unusual then, except that in her case the boy was a married man of forty-two who knew Mother, had tried to make her and got nowhere, then had turned to Charlotte as easier pickings. How unusual was that? André would be shocked at it, and now I am not so much shocked as horrified at it. This man, whoever he was, left Charlotte as soon as he got tired of her and she told me afterwards she was grateful to him because – the words are hers – “He was a first-class sexual technician, and he taught me so much that now the boys can’t get enough of me.” About six months after my twin was launched I had my first girl, and neither of us were sexual technicians. We were two scared, clumsy kids who thought we’d be out of it if we didn’t start. Soon random sex became a habit with me like cigarettes. Charlotte and I knew we were hurting Mother and only now do I understand that she was far more sexual in nature, profoundly so because of her love of children, than either Charlotte or I could ever be. But she was too old-fashioned to talk to us much about sex. It had never occurred to her that we would go on the town in our teens.
I loved Mother. I truly did, but I was too young to understand how precious she was. Charlotte’s behavior to her seemed to me at the time atrocious. I remember Mother looking at her in shocked despair – or was it the plain, honest contempt of a naturally great lady? – and saying: “So the serpent said to Eve as he coiled around the branch, ‘Don’t worry, little girl. I have the pill in my mouth and you can do anything you like. Look at me,’ said the serpent smiling, ‘in my mouth is the pill.’”
All Charlotte could do was to shrug and say, “For God’s sake grow up, Mummy. I know what I’m doing. I’m safe as a boy.”
Mother said sadly, “If only you did know what you’re doing!”
She looked so wounded we both felt ashamed and guilty, but guilt was out of fashion for our generation so we became defiant and angry. We told each other it wasn’t our fault if the world Mother had brought us into was not a world to her taste, or one that didn’t give a damn what a woman like her thought about anything. There was a general feeling that our parents’ generation had squandered the right to teach their children anything in the way of morals, and this explains why Timothy’s program was so popular.
Yet I wonder now, indeed have wondered for years, just how much I myself squandered of the drive created by juvenile curiosity by satisfying while still a small boy what to a growing youth is the supreme curiosity. Without intending to, Charlotte and I made Mother feel that her entire life had been futile. When we were very young she had never lost her temper with us; she had been firm, but her love for us was always clear and wonderful. It was different now. She began to quarrel with us, and especially with Charlotte. One day she really took off against Charlotte for the kind of life she was living, but Charlotte came right back at her. “You had your fun, Mummy, and you were careless. I’m having mine now and I’m being careful. That’s all the difference there is between us, so stop being self-righteous.”
Mother’s normally gentle face turned white and so stern I felt scared. But Charlotte glared right back at her.
“It wasn’t fun I was having,” Mother said, “I loved your father. When I knew I had conceived, even though it was only then that I was told there could be no marriage, I thanked God.”
Charlotte may or may not have been feeling ashamed. I neither know nor care what she felt. But I remember what she said.
“That must have been a great day for God,” she said over her shoulder and I felt like smacking her. But already she had stalked out of the room.
Now I am much older than Mother ever lived to be and it is an anguish to remember a scene like this. Poor Mother lacked the education to reason with us and this was her father’s fault. He was a lovely gentleman but he tried to ignore the twentieth century. He did not believe that girls should go to college and compete with men, but he did believe they should be trained to be thoughtful of others, to have good manners, and to know how to keep a house and rear a family. He would have had no trouble if he had been born three-quarters of a century earlier. No matter what Timothy said against his own father, if it had not been for Mother’s Uncle Greg, who bought Grandfather’s house, Mother and her parents would have been destitute. It was a huge happiness for her when she married Uncle Conrad and had a home of her own. Mother sat erectly and spoke and walked like a great lady who is also kind and she had no petty pride at all. More than once I noticed her looking at her hands. They were very small hands but they were marked by years of hard housework. “These two hands,” I remember her saying, “have nothing to be ashamed of. They have earned their living.”
Now she had neither husband nor home nor children who would let her care for them. After that developer destroyed her old home, she was reduced to a two-and-a-half-room apartment overcrowded with the antique family furniture she loved so much. And it was about this time that I did something pretty stupid, but I’m still proud that I did it.
I found out where that developer lived and one dark evening I rode out to the place on my bicycle. He lived in the most expensive area of the city, though hardly its best part, and he had one of those low-lying houses with huge windows they called ranch houses. This one was shielded from the street by a hedge that must have been at least two and a half meters high. The man had installed it fully grown and charged it off as a business expense.
There was nobody in sight, so I hid my bicycle in the hedge and crawled through to the other side and came out onto a wide lawn with a fountain in the middle of it and colored lights playing on the water. There was a blaze of light from those long, low windows and I walked up and looked in. A cocktail party was going on. About a hundred expensive-looking guests were standing around with glasses in their hands and servants in white jackets were shuffling through them refilling the glasses and passing trays loaded with canapés. I recognized the developer from his picture in the newspaper. He was standing near a big fireplace with artificial logs and pointing to a big oil painting that looked like an old master and may even have been genuine. I looked at his clumsy round face with round eyes and a mouth that also seemed round, and the worst thing about it was that it looked like a boy’s face that had gone bad. His hair was sleek and very thick and black and I noticed that his hands were abnormally small and dainty.
Next door to this property was a new construction site. He and his kind had been thumbing their noses for years at the zoning laws by the usual expedient of bribing officials, and if this didn’t work, they let loose batteries of lawyers against any citizens’ groups that tried to keep them out, and if that didn’t work, sometimes they hired arsonists to burn the place down. I went to the site and came back with two large stones. From a distance of only eight meters I threw them one after another through the window and the crash of the breaking glass was beautiful. It was nothing like so beautiful as the behavior of the developer and his guests. He and at least half of them dropped their glasses and fell flat on the floor and I saw some of them crawling like caterpillars to get behind the furniture. They must have thought a machine gun was going to open up on them. Then I remembered that this man was sure to have bodyguards and I didn’t wait any longer. I skipped back through the hedge, pulled out my bicycle, and pedalled down the nearest side street to the first lateral avenue below. Nobody chased me and when I searched the newspapers the next day there was no mention of the incident. Men like that son of a bitch didn’t want to give other people any ideas.
I never told Mother about this because it would have upset her. If anyone had tried to enter her own house and there was a child in it, Mother would not have stopped at killing the man to save the child. But what I had done was an act of vengeance, and in her nature there was never any vengeance. But I’m still glad I did it. If a System won’t punish people who ruin others – well, as a lot of us put it then, to hell with the System.
Uncle Conrad had not worked long enough at the university to build up an adequate pension and living costs were rising at the rate of twelve percent a year. He had published many learned articles, but there had been no real income from these. Fortunately one of his books on the history of the Roman Empire remained in print. Later it even went into a paperback and shortly after his death enough people wanted to read it that they supplied Mother with a small income which at least kept her off welfare. She also got a job in a settlement house for orphans and the children adored her, but Charlotte and I had to be withdrawn from those two country schools. The feeling between Charlotte and Mother was now too bad to be mended and they seldom saw each other. Charlotte moved from one petty job to another and lived with a succession of boyfriends and this routine went on for nearly ten years until she shacked up with a pyschotic who strangled her. For myself, after throwing those rocks through the developer’s window, I finally began to behave better.
It was no grief for me to have to leave that boarding school. I had always detested it, and I now moved in with Mother and finished my last two years in a city high school and worked over the weekends to help out with the bills. I still made love to a few girls without really loving any of them and at home Mother’s sadness was like a weight on my chest.
There was one night I have never forgotten, for it accentuated her withdrawal from the world. I had come home late after spending the evening with a girlfriend and I found Mother in a chair, not reading or listening to music but just sitting there. Her face was young and radiant and when I came in she looked at me in that surprised way of hers.
“I’ve been daydreaming,” she said, and I asked her what about.
“It was that Christmas morning in your grandfather’s big house when all was well with us all. We children got up early for the tree, but your grandmother said, ‘No, you children must eat your breakfast first.’ And that’s what we did. After breakfast the whole floor of the living room was covered with the wrappings we took off our prezzies and everyone was so happy. But the best came after that. Your Aunts Rosalie, June, and Louise and I put on our warm clothes and sat down on a big toboggan with me in the front because I was the youngest and the smallest. Then we coasted down the hill with our arms full of presents for Granny. Granny lived lower down on the mountain. It was so lovely! The snow was pure white and the sun made the whole world glisten for the birthday of our Lord. It was the purest heaven.” Then her face clouded over and she looked older again. “Poor John, if only you could have been young in the years when I was young. If only you could have known how sweet life can be.”
I thought to myself, though I didn’t say it aloud, “Oh God, Mummy, please don’t think like that. There are so many exciting things if only you’d give yourself a chance.”
So there were Mother and I, two hopeless misfits in the international airport our world had become. I had always known that Uncle Conrad’s death had been a catastrophe for her, but it was only after reading his papers that I learned that quite possibly it was an even worse disaster for myself. I was naturally an eager student, though lazy and unsystematic because I found no stimulus in the teaching system. By the time I was twenty I’m sure I could have appreciated Uncle Conrad more than I did when I was a child. He might have given me some mental armor for what lay ahead, perhaps even some moral armor. Not many of us had either. In my last conversation with André Gervais I told him that there may never have been a time in the past five centuries when young people were as defenceless as in those very years when we were told that the young had never been so free. Perhaps we were, but nobody told us something that Uncle Conrad understood – that freedom has to be paid for and is the most expensive thing in the world.
Shortly before he died, Mother persuaded Uncle Conrad to write the story of his life and this I did not know because she never told me. That’s what she meant, of course, the time she cried out, “All our lives were in those boxes.”
At first Uncle Conrad refused to write his story because he did not think it would interest anyone and he was afraid that his training as a professional scholar would make it impossible for him to write in an intimate style. But Mother was a determined woman and she finally got her way. So here am I, more than half a century later, left with what he began and was not allowed to finish.
Conrad Dehmel has given me a much more difficult problem than I had with Timothy because some of the most important part of his story is written in German. I could speak German when I was young but had forgotten much of it. Fortunately I have a dictionary and a grammar and finally was able to translate it into English. In his methodical German way he had accumulated an arsenal of information in the form of notes, diaries, and personal letters. He had the scholar’s tendency to play down dramatic incidents, but at times the drama could not help getting the better of him. From the way he begins I think he intended this record solely for Mother’s eyes, but I can’t be sure even of that. At any rate, his opening is characteristic of the man I remember and no more professorial than he usually was in a relaxed mood. Now for a time I can sit back and let him speak for himself.