RATH WAS A MOUNTAIN. Fat squeezed his eyes into a perpetual, artificial squint of a smile. He was the only man one could imagine to be more of a mass than Brand. These elder statesmen of the Academy seemed to have been chosen for their presence. He wore eyeglasses with thick lenses and kept pressing them to his forehead with one finger, peering out at me as if I were miles away.
He spoke in a kind of guttural English. “Your assistant has made some unpleasant charges.”
“They weren’t true,” I said quickly.
“Weren’t?”
“Aren’t true.” I consoled my sense of truth with the thought that I had merely slipped on the ice.
“Let’s have it out quickly,” he said. “I don’t really care if you have been biased on the side of returning people alive. What matters is what has to be done. Yes? No?”
“I don’t understand.”
“There is probably much you don’t understand,” he said. “For one thing, do you understand that this is not a non-profit organization? I was called in because I had succeeded in making Europe’s Academies earn a profit. And this one was in trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” I asked stupidly.
“The usual: money. Losing money.” He was lying, of course. But I had to play it out to the end to find out why.
“How are you solving that?”
“Think a minute, Walker. What’s the single biggest source of income for us?”
“Bequests?”
“Precisely! And if we allow a kind of inborn passion for life in general to affect the balance of input and outflow—”
“That’s Gilliatt’s lousy propaganda.”
“—and with fewer deaths there are fewer wills. With fewer wills there are fewer bequests, and so on down and down and down.”
“But I’ve seen figures on gifts from grateful guests who returned.”
“Don’t give me that Brand’s crap! Talk about propaganda. That’s his line—he’s trying to sell the Board and me on it. He thinks there’s money in life.”
“Well—”
“Naïve garbage. Look, Walker, believe me in this matter. Go along with me—and I’ll see to it that everything goes beautifully this afternoon. At the meeting.”
“Go along with you on what?” I tried to put some ring of sincere ignorance into my voice, even though I had a slowly growing sense of another disgusting proposal about to be made.
“It’s essential that we move to a position of—”
“Don’t tell me,” I said drily. “I’ll guess. Of negative choices.”
“But that’s just what’s wrong. Those words. We’re going to have to re-define them. No? Yes? I mean some deaths are positive and some lives are almost entirely negative.”
Tricky, I thought. Watch him.
It was impossible to do anything else but. He filled the eye with bulk. He was so much there that I was physically oppressed into a listening silence. He walked up and down before me, clumping over space as if he were claiming and reclaiming it. His face creased and uncreased in nuances of fat, a counterpoint to his words.
“We’ve oversimplified for too long,” he said. “Do you know that the skies over the various Academies at which I’ve served, all over Europe, all of them had special configurations and—get this—resulted in different configurations of suicides, both in number and in style. I mention skies because I know you have a relationship to them. Yes? No? I’ve done my homework for our little meeting. Them I said, for the sky. The plural is correct in my experience. At the Academy in Florence, for example. Firenze, my beautiful Firenze. Wolf, you wouldn’t believe how I loved it there. Of course, the Germans and the English have been worshipping Italy for centuries. And if you think you have a tough job, try running a Suicide Academy in a Catholic country. I was a Director like you in those days. It was the most complex job in the world. The skies over Florence have a kind of clustered openness—especially in the spring—a sort of running commentary to what happened below. Clouds bunching up and blowing apart, sometimes regardless of whether there was any wind or not. On the days when the skies cleared, do you know the rate of final suicides went down. Oh, God, the skies of Europe. In Copenhagen it was quite the opposite. When those big, fluffy, blustery black and white bastards you get there in the winter gave way to a flurry of little white rounded ones with a spilling of bright blue between them—maybe only for a day at a time—well, the unexpected would happen. The finals would go up. Yes, it was in Copenhagen that I learned to love a certain kind of inevitable suicide—the kind that all their lives would not take yes for an answer—and were damned if they were going to do it now, bright blue skies or no. So, they were damned—in all their purity. Those were my beloved positive-negatives. I’m sure you’ve come across the phrase in Academy literature. Those skies and those p-n’s taught me that a new terminology is needed.”
“But,” I wedged myself between his overpowering body-speech and myself, “isn’t the result the same? Either a dead body or a living human being?”
He didn’t take a beat. “Superficially, yes. But in this profession you can never jump to the other side of the grave or you’re finished. Yes? No? You’re not convinced? Example! Whether it’s murder or suicide there’s no difference after the fact. But before the fact … I’m sure you’ll agree that while there’s some kinship there’s still a hell of a lot of difference. No? Yes! Example. My mother—dear Hilda Steinert Von Rath. She and Mister (Herr) Von Rath—as she called him until her dying day—were at each other’s throats for thirty years. She used to tell my brother Werner and I that when we grew up she would divorce my father. She took up bookkeeping at night so as to have a trade. Then when we grew up and it became clear that she did not have the strength to take such drastic action she would tell us that soon she would have her revenge: she would kill herself. She did, finally A most expensive way of divorce … to pay for it with the only life you have. Of course she’d been paying, like so many, on the installment plan, so that it must, at the end, have seemed like a bargain. Yet all those years, when my father would lose his temper completely and would scream at her that he would put an end to his misery by putting an end to her by, in short, murdering her, she used to laugh at him—while we children shuddered. Now, do you mean to tell me that it would have made no difference if he had taken her life rather than she, herself? Yes? No? I think you’ll agree it’s best to stay this side of the grave in our work. Let’s leave the other side to those who know even less about it than we do—the theologians.”
It was “our work” and “we,” now. Rath my colleague, both of us in this problem together. Then, as suddenly, he turned on me. With that bulk hovering over me it was an awesome sight.
“Ah,” he said, “you damned starry-eyed liberals make me sick! You take a simple thing and you make a big deal out of it. You’re the cruel ones. It’s so simple. Someone hurts. You let him have the anesthetic! Is that crueler than your mystical search for the real thing? Oh, I know there are exceptions. The temporary ones. There has to be an estimation of a certain amount of seriousness involved. I mean, you must realize this isn’t a country club. But if we can increase the daily quota of negative choices we’ll be truer to the spirit of our original charter.”
I stood fast, staring him down. I could see him figuring: the tough guy approach didn’t work—now what? Behold Rath the scholar, erudition as vast as his girth.
“All we really have to offer is a straight line. A way out of the circle. Shetzler, in his eight-volume work on the role of the circle in human affairs, speaks of the Academies as great circle-breakers—since all suicides are merely present points on their own circular orbits of self-destruction.
“The first Academies were all laid out in straight lines, the buildings all in a row, the gardens landscaped straight as a plumb line. Then in 1900 Allen Rhoad pointed out in his essay on The Naturalization of Nature that a straight line is the one design element never found in nature. That was the beginning of the first Academy reform: and the end of the straight line imitation period. (Rhoad, by the way, claimed that he was misinterpreted: that just because the straight line is not found in nature, we should use it in architecture, and design …)
“The circle, you see, is at the heart of all human anguish. The sundial and the clock prove that if there were no circles there would be no time. If there were no time there would be no death. Thus—no circles, no death. Use your own observation, Walker. Most of our guests come to us suffering from circle fatigue. Repetition, full revolution and more repetition. When the fool persists in his folly he does not become wise—only more skillful at fooling himself. Imagine the wheel of Karma: the misery of endlessly repeated painful lives. Then imagine the joy of the straight line: forward movement, change. Even if the straight line leads straight down into the earth. Think of it! An end to circles!”
He was weaving before me; an hypnotic flesh-pile. He was hypnotized by his own rhetoric. But the sight of so much living flesh preaching erudite death was nauseating to me. He and Brand deserved each other. (And I had my suspicions about Gilliatt.) I wanted out. Theirs were two interpretations of the same bad dream. That distant early morning of this difficult post-New Year’s Day seemed years away, an innocent time when dreams sang “reviens” and return became suddenly possible.
I stood up so abruptly that Rath backed off. One finger pressed his spectacles made of thick fun-house glass against the bridge of his nose. He gazed at me as if to guess my next move. Then, by some subtle sag in his deeply buried bones, I knew he’d come to a decision.
“All right,” he said. His tone gained about fifty pounds and drooped heavily. “Enough of this. If you’re going to be stubborn …” He opened the door. “Get Brand,” he bellowed. Under the sonic stress his face divided itself into a series of jowls, one fading into the other. It was as if the fat were a disguise, but what it hid was also fat. In any case the sense of role-playing was gone and with it any hint of the benign.
When Brand entered he seemed to have caught the mood, long-distance. “Let’s get to it,” he said. “Sit down.”
Startled, I did. Rath half-turned away, his hands fidgeting in his pockets.
“Did you and Gilliatt have a plan?” Brand asked.
“What?”
“Yes,” he said, as if I’d answered his question. “Be cooperative. We mean no harm. You’ve had military service?”
“Yes.”
Rath joined in. “You are a championship ice skater?”
“No …”
“But you do well on the ice. Don’t you?”
That one was apparently rhetorical because Brand butted in with, “You were married on the eighth of September?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know it’s not permissible for a Director of the Academy to subscribe to theories like astrology?”
“I don’t.”
“Have you memorized the names of all the Jews who come here?” Rath re-entered. “Goldberg,” he said, “Feldman, Schwartz, Finkelstein, Smythe …”
“Smythe?”
“They change their names.”
“I could never memorize names and dates in school,” I said. I must have hoped to lighten the atmosphere.
“Couldn’t you?” Brand said.
“How are your childhood memories? What about the secret fellowship you belonged to?”
“It wasn’t secret. Just private.”
“Then you did join?”
“It wasn’t something you joined. It was just there.”
“Were you married on November the eighth?”
“September the eighth.”
“Have you ever taken clandestine dancing lessons?”
“Let me explain …”
“Didn’t you used to recite certain Hebrew prayers when you were alone and frightened of the dark, and then tell people you didn’t believe in God?”
“Yes …”
“Aha!”
“I was nine years old.”
“Ten!”
“Well—yes, ten.”
“You’ve been having an affair with a guide named Barbara.”
“That’s my affair.”
“Cynically, without regard for her feelings.”
“Now look—”
“Tell us about your dreams. Are they in color? Are there musical accompaniments?”
“I don’t dream often.”
“You’re right,” Brand stuck in. “It’s not safe.”
“At crucial moments do you ever find yourself speaking backward. As if forward language wasn’t enough to express what you mean?”
“That was years ago—an experiment.”
“That us give don’t.”
“Who’s running the day’s activities while you’re lying around here having fun?”
“Gilliatt and the staff. I’ve organized—”
“Your prick,” Rath said.
“What?”
“Your prick. How big is it?”
“Big enough.”
“How do you know?”
“I know,” I said with grim, flat stupidity.
“Did you ever see your dad’s? Now there was a prick.”
“We’d test you now, but it’s not fair. It’s bigger because you have to pee.” Rath bent down over me. His flabby face smelled shaving-lotion-sweet.
“Hey,” he said, “he’s drunk.”
“Hell, he’s drunk.”
“That’s right. Drunk!”
“Can you beat it. He’s drunk! As a skunk!”
“Not true,” I said, trying to control my words more carefully than usually. “I am not drunk.”
“Walker, have you been stealing liquor from mad husbands of ex-wives?”
“Confiscating,” I said. “And he’s not her husband.”
“You’re an actor, right?”
“I was an actor.”
“Then let’s hear something. How about Troilus and Cressida?”
“I never played it.”
“No Troilus?”
“Sorry.”
“Just some of the first act?”
“No!”
“Then sing us some lieder. Fauré. Revien, reviens …”
“Where do you stand on the Romantic question? Do you believe love is intimately connected with death?”
Brand giggled. “The French call it le petit mort.”
“Don’t joke about le mort,” Rath said to him.
“I suppose that’s something only Germans understand, is that it?” Brand sniffed his artificial breath.
“Stick to what you know,” Rath said. “Administration. Let me do the advance planning.”
“The hell I will. You plan so well there’ll be nobody left …”
Somehow I found the strength and presence of mind to slip from my chair. I left them in the deepening swamp of their verbal tussle—two behemoths snatching life and death back and forth from each other’s pudgy paws.