André Gervais said to me, “I want to know where the truth is.” I wonder how much truth I can find for myself, much less for him.
The next part of Conrad’s story becomes so murky that I can barely follow it. I’m sure he told my mother only episodes of what he was involved in during those days. He kept very irregular diaries in that time when it was dangerous to tell the truth even to yourself. Much of what he wrote that has come down to me was written long after the events. It is certainly enough to have brought me to new dimensions in my belated discovery of the stepfather I called Uncle Conrad. It also brings him very close to me.
When I was young I knew little about the Germany of Conrad’s youth and early maturity. I knew that most of its famous cities had been blasted into moonscapes and charnel houses, the decomposing ruins of hundreds of thousands of human beings stinking in the ruins for nearly a year. Yes, I knew this had happened, but I knew it only as a fact. When I went to Germany thirty-five years after that war it was hard to believe what had happened there. The cities had been completely rebuilt and many of the finest buildings were exact duplicates of the historic ones that had been destroyed. I have now discovered that Conrad himself played a small part in making this possible.
Now I am forced to link up my own experience of total destruction with his, and Germany is the touchstone.
When I first went to Germany it was the most prosperous and efficient country in the whole of Europe and this gives me some real hope for the aims of André and his generation. Any recovery they may make is sure to be much slower than Germany’s because they will have to develop a technology, yet I am sure that long after I am dead there will be real civilization on this planet, better than the one in which I was born. I had several German friends when I was young, including a big blonde girl from Hanover with a majestic figure who once spent a skiing holiday with me. She made love with such gusto that I thought I had slipped a disk in my back, for it went into total spasm and for a week I was almost helpless. She was a physiotherapist by profession and our holiday ended with her giving me treatments mornings and evenings and spending the rest of her time on the slopes by herself. She was a grand girl. I was genuinely fond of her as she was of me, though the fondness never grew into love.
What seems important to me now is that all my German friends had been born after an appalling catastrophe and that none of them even mentioned the Hitler years. Nor did I ask about them. They would have had little to say if I had, for their parents had drawn a veil over their horrors just as André’s had drawn a veil over ours. For years I have taken it for granted that nothing that ever happened in this world was as terrible as what happened to us. Now I believe that on a purely personal level it was even worse for people like Hanna and Conrad.
I lived through the erosion and the final self-destruct of the vastest human complex that could ever have existed in the entire Galaxy. None of us dazed survivors knew, or ever can know, whether this had to happen. People had been making doomsday prophecies for years, but they didn’t really believe it would end as it did. How could they?
Some time ago I tried to write about the Great Fear, but I don’t think I was successful in describing it. What I wrote was true so far as it went, but what were the actual facts?
Right up to the beginning of the Fear, the Bureaucracy continued to smile at us. Their computers computed us, their pollsters polled us, their con men conned us. They even conned themselves. Behind them moved in the shadows those faceless men who juggled what they called the world’s economy. Slowly, we came to realize that the true power was seldom in the hands of our governments, but there was always plenty of beer and sex, the stadiums were crowded, and the action spilled out into the living rooms of everyone with a television set, which in my country meant about ninety percent of the population. The Deer Park of the old French king had become democratized and it was at least more salubrious than the original one, for most of us washed and didn’t have to use civet to drown our body odors. Decadent? We were constantly called so. Yet I’m reasonably sure that it wasn’t decadence that brought on the Great Fear.
About ten years after Uncle Conrad’s death, whole peoples in what the journalists called the Third World began to erupt. We saw them on our screens, mobs as large as a million or more, packed body to body like swarming insects, some of them blasting off with the guns our businessmen had sold to their former chiefs. We knew nothing about these people, but anyone could see they were screaming support for the usual Savior who was promising them a new life. All this would not have mattered to us if they weren’t sitting on top of an ocean of oil. Without oil our System could no longer continue as a System. So naturally their Saviors thought they had us by the balls.
They pretty well did. Soon our money went out of control. People who had labored for years when money was worth something now found themselves desperate. A murmur circled the world multiplied by hundreds of millions of murmurs – “What is going to happen to me? What can I do?” All we could think of doing was to blame the politicians we ourselves had elected. Now that it was clear to us that our leaders were as helpless as ourselves, we felt we were living in a vacuum and it was in the vacuum that the Great Fear was spawned.
Nature, I was told in school, abhors a vacuum. Soon a handful of unknown individuals silently moved into it. They had taken a hard look at our bureaucracies and had decided they would be gutless because for years we had insisted that they be gutless. These operators began a new kind of terrorism that made our old-fashioned kidnappers, skyjackers, and bombers look like bush-leaguers. It was obvious that they were highly educated, because no ignorant person could have done what they did.
The first cell built and planted a bomb in a great city and demanded an enormous ransom in gold and diamonds. They gave the Bureaucracy a time limit of only twenty-four hours to pay up. If the Bureaucracy refused, they said the bomb would be exploded by remote control, the city destroyed, and perhaps a million people would be killed. The communiqué issued by this cell was so precise in its scientific details that the experts knew they weren’t the usual run of kooks. Later, when the bomb was found and disarmed, it turned out to be exactly as the communiqué had described it.
A half-hour before the ultimatum expired, the Bureaucracy surrendered. Its front man came onto the screens and informed the world that the crisis was over, but this time he was too scared and shaken to smile at us. I happened to be in Paris at the time, sitting with a girlfriend in a brasserie and looking at the screen. The French people were tense and silent, some of them were white-faced, and the atmosphere in the little brasserie was acid with fear. The front man’s speech was translated into French, but what interested me most was his face. He looked like an ordinary, well-intentioned man who had just discovered that the ground on which he thought he had stood all his life had vanished from under his feet. All I can remember of his speech is something like this: “While it is intolerable, and in the future must not be tolerated, for a great civilization to be blackmailed in this fashion, the facts speak for themselves. We were given no time to track these people down. We were presented with a brutal choice between gold and diamonds and the lives of a million people. What else should we have done?”
Most of us agreed that there was nothing else they should have done.
During the next year there were bomb blackmails in five more metros and only in the fifth did a bureaucracy refuse to surrender. The bomb exploded and killed half a million people. The bureaucracy that had defied the terrorists was execrated and forced to resign. Then we were all on the roller coaster. Money did not merely decline, it collapsed, and what we called the Western world went into hysteria. This was the climax of the Great Fear.
God knows my friends and I had despised the Smiling Bureaucracy. To jeer at our so-called rulers was part of what we called our Life Style, but never would we elect a bureaucracy that would compel us to change our ways. As I said to André soon after I met him, who will stop the music when everyone is having a ball?
But there were others who thought differently; there were millions of others who thought very differently. Suddenly people like us discovered that we had become targets. Those unknown millions we had dismissed as red-necks felt against us a rage deeper than anything they had felt against the bombers. Furious voices spewed out hatred and loathing against my whole generation. We were the spoiled brats who had been responsible for all their woes. We were the ones who had destroyed their authority over their children and foisted our own laziness and sensuality onto everyone else. We were the ones who had insisted on abolishing capital punishment, had sneered at the police, had sympathized with the murderer and not with his victim, had pretended that crime is the fault of society as a whole and not of the criminal.
They turned with especial fury against our women and some of them bellowed from street corners that they were all whores. Their hatred was soul-shrivelling. These people who roared for law and order – and they craved order far more than they craved law – now took to bombs and guns themselves. Their first target was the Smiling Bureaucracy, which had ceased smiling for some time now. Even in my own small nation two cabinet ministers were assassinated. They also went berserk against others – against the men who had made millions by saturating us with sex magazines; against the millionaire kings of the rock music; against actresses who had become sex symbols. Some of them were beaten up. A girl who had been advertised as “The most luscious sexboat in the world” was found in her New York apartment with her throat cut. I met a man who claimed to have known her and he told me the whole thing was crazy. She was just an ordinary girl of humble parentage who had been conned into the act by some agents who had pocketed about ninety percent of the profits.
Though at the time I did not understand it, I know now that this was no ordinary political revolution. It was an upboiling of subterranean wrath that had been seething for years. Against this fury the Smiling Bureaucracy was helpless and was swept into the discard, to be replaced by what I have called the Second Bureaucracy. This was a coalition of several so-called governments and after a summit meeting of its front men it was given international powers. It cracked down everywhere. Millions of private homes were searched, hundreds of thousands were thrown into jails without trial, and the masses applauded. When two of the blackmailing cells were caught, the authorities announced that they were composed entirely of intellectuals. They were publicly executed. These executions did not happen in my country, but we saw them on our screens.
I could not believe that what was happening was real, neither could my friends. One day Joanne and I were walking hand in hand in the city and she was wearing slacks. She was so graceful in them, they outlined her exquisite little figure so precisely, that it was a joy merely to look at her. Suddenly a police siren screamed, a car slammed to a stop beside us, two cops jumped out and grabbed Joanne. When she struggled, one of them slapped her face so hard he broke her glasses and without them she was half blind. When I tried to help her, the other cop back-elbowed me, cracked my septum, and knocked me rolling. By the time I got to my feet with my nose gouting blood, they were driving off with Joanne in their car.
I knew where their station was and fifteen minutes later I arrived on foot with my nose still bleeding. I was confronted by the same pair of cops who had arrested Joanne, both of them with sneering grins on their square faces. Without a word they frog-marched me into a back room, pushed me down onto a wooden chair, and shaved off my beard with cold water and ordinary kitchen soap. Then they cut my hair so short it was only a fuzz on my skull. They made me look at myself in the glass and for the first time they laughed. Then they jostled me out the doorway and sent me stumbling into the outer room where I saw Joanne very pale and dressed in a long, drab skirt and a smock of some coarse brown material.
“How does your little friend look now?” one of my two cops said and guffawed. As his fist was clenched I knew he was hoping I would answer him back. However, to keep the record straight, I must admit this much: Our local cops had become mean and rough with their fists and sometimes their boots, but they never went in for the systematic, refined tortures that were commonplace in some other countries.
They released us with jeers. Holding my arm, Joanne walked with me to her apartment where she kept another pair of glasses. Her hands were cold and she could not stop shivering. She was like a woman frozen and I was like a man frozen.
The kind of life we had always known now closed down like a summer bungalow when the winter comes. International travel was banned except for some of the Bureaucracy and the huge tourist industry ceased. Strict morality laws were passed. Sexual promiscuity was forbidden, though this was a law they were not too successful in enforcing. To be found with drugs of any kind meant a prison sentence. To be caught selling hard drugs was death. But this was not the end. Indeed, the Great Fear abated now that the mass of the people believed they were under an authority strong enough to rule them.
When the end finally came I was incredibly fortunate, if to survive was really a good fortune. I had a cottage in the hills outside Metro and in it were all my books, most of which I still have. I was planting vegetables when the earth where I was kneeling hit me with a shock that struck up through my knees to the top of my skull. I got to my feet and staggered about as the earth continued to pulsate against my soles. I thought it was an earthquake. Then far off in the area of Metro I saw towers of flame and smoke rising into the high sky. Soon came a surging sound roaring in a profound bass as though the firmament had become a colossal, sonorous drum. I don’t know how many minutes passed before the shock waves of air arrived. They knocked me off my feet. I saw the trees bending, screeching as though in a terrible agony as the wind tore them and broke them. Distant flames continued to billow up into the sky and with them a vast smoke that covered thousands of square kilometers. The darkness for a time was so intense that the sun was entirely eclipsed and so it remained for several hours. Toward evening the sun reappeared as a lusterless disk in the sky.
For many years, indeed from before I was born, people had dreaded what we called the nuclear bombs, which would have produced results like this but would also have contaminated the entire earth for as long as a century, so that all living creatures in the hemisphere, even those who had survived the blasts, would die of disease, and life would come to an end on our little planet. Something profound and mysterious, something blessed and almighty in the genes of humanity, had created a taboo against these bombs. Trillions of dollars were spent on them, but no bureaucracy used them. André Gervais will never understand the genius of our scientists. They were sincere men, pure-minded men, devoted to their countries and even to mankind. They bypassed the taboo. They invented what were called “clean bombs,” which had a destructive power less than that of the nuclears but nevertheless tremendous. These were the bombs that did the trick.
This was the end as I experienced it and I can’t even remember the date on the old calendar. It was so quick, so colossal, and pretty well so universal that my best guess is that the huge computer networks of the rival bureaucracies had become so overloaded with conflicting data, some of it fed into them by panic-stricken or merely incompetent technicians, that they suffered the equivalent of a collective nervous breakdown. I can think of no other explanation. The rival bureaucracies had been playing chicken with each other for a half-century, but none of them wanted it to come to this. Anyway, the underground and undersea hardware began flying to and fro across the globe and this, as we used to say, was it. And if what I believe happened actually did happen, it was so impersonal that there was no more malice in it than in a combined earthquake and volcanic explosion on a global scale.
That is why I’m sure it was worse on a personal level for people like Conrad and Hanna than it was for us. To have your world annihilated by a computer balls-up is not the same as to be strapped naked to a table in a police basement and have your backbone and rib cage stripped by steel whips, your fingernails and genitals torn out with red-hot pincers, or your brain blown by electric shocks so powerful that an ignorant policeman can reduce the world’s greatest genius to a screech of agony, all these things being done by men as human as yourself. This man Hitler made everything personal. Whether he was the worst man who ever lived I do not know – there has been plenty of competition for that title – but it was Admiral Canaris’s opinion that he was not so much a human being as a universal catastrophe.
As I try to follow this mild-mannered, silver-haired sailor flickering through Conrad’s story I can hardly believe him real. Conrad wrote that he was the most morally brave man he had ever met, and in another context that only Germany could have produced him. He had been a successful spy long before anyone had heard of Hitler, so I suppose he enjoyed that kind of work. There can be no question about his courage. He was a realist who knew that his ultimate chances of escaping death by torture were bound to be precarious. According to Conrad, he had deliberately chosen to live in a maze of contradictions – on the one hand, to do what he could to prevent Hitler from winning the war, on the other to save Germany from the mindless vengeance of enemies who had come to hate her worse than any nation had ever been hated in human history. Double games, triple games, multiple games. I can see now that the work of all those intelligence agencies, plotting deceptions more complex than the chart of the world’s weather systems, had a great deal to do with the fin de siècle into which I myself was born. The techniques developed during that war became endemic after it. They lingered and bred in the bloodstreams of the nations and no moral antibiotic was discovered to neutralize them. The deliberate murder of truth led to the murder of people. In our case it led to the self-murder of a civilization.