Eyeless In Gaza (60 page)

She slipped the card into her bag, and without waiting to listen to his suggestions, turned her back on the two men and walked quickly away.

‘Helen!' Ekki called after her. But she paid no attention. He did not call again.

It was cold; but the sky was a clear pale blue, the sun was shining. And suddenly, emerging from behind high houses, she found herself beside the Rhine. Leaning over the parapet, she watched the green water hurrying past, silent, but swift and purposive, like a living thing, like life itself, like the power behind the world, eternally, irresistibly flowing; watching it, until at last it was as though she herself were flowing along with the great river, were one with it, a partaker of its power. ‘And shall Trelawney die?' she found herself singing. ‘And shall Trelawney die? There's twenty thousand Cornish men shall know the rea-ea-eason why.' And suddenly it seemed certain that they would win, that the revolution was only just round the corner – there, after that first bend in the river. Irresistibly the flood drove on towards it. And meanwhile what a fool she had been to be cross with Ekki, what an
absolute beast! Remorse gave place, after a little, to the ecstatically tender anticipation of their reconcilement. ‘Darling,' she would say to him, ‘darling, you must forgive me. I was really too stupid and odious.' And he would put one arm round her, and with the other hand would push back the hair from her forehead and then bend down and kiss her . . .

When she walked on, the Rhine was still rushing within her, and, unburdened of her offence towards Ekki, she felt immaterially light, felt almost as though she were floating – floating in a thin intoxicating air of happiness. The starving millions receded once more into remote abstraction. How good everything was, how beautiful, how exactly as it ought to be! Even the fat old women were perfect, even the nineteenth-century Gothic houses. And that cup of hot chocolate in the café – how indescribably delicious! And the old waiter, so friendly and paternal. Friendly and paternal, what was more, in an astonishing Swiss-German that made one want to roar with laughter, as though everything he said – from his commentaries on the weather to his complaints about the times – were one huge, continuous joke. Such gutturals, such neighings! Like the language of the Houyhnhnms, she thought, and led him on, with an unwearying delight in the performance, to hoick and whinny yet again.

From the café she went on at last to the picture gallery; and the picture gallery turned out to be as exquisitely comic in its own way as the waiter's German. Those Boecklins! All the extraordinary pictures one had only seen on postcards or hanging, in coloured reproduction, on the walls of pensions in Dresden. Mermaids and tritons caught as though by a camera; centaurs in the stiff ungainly positions of race-horses in a pressman's photograph. Painted with a good faith and a laborious lack of talent that were positively touching. And here – unspeakable joy! – was the
Toteninsel.
The funereal cypresses, the white tomb-like temples, the long-robed figures,
the solitary boat on its way across the wine-dark sea . . . The joke was perfect. Helen laughed aloud. In spite of everything, she was still her mother's daughter.

In the room of the primitives she paused for a moment, on her way out, before a picture of the martyrdom of St Erasmus. An executioner in fifteenth-century costume, with a pale shell-pink cod-piece, was methodically turning the handle of a winch – like Mr Mantalini at the mangle – winding the saint's intestines, yard after yard, out of a gash in the emaciated belly, while the victim lay back, as if on a sofa, making himself thoroughly comfortable and looking up into the sky with an expression of unruffled equanimity. The joke here was less subtle than in
Toteninsel
, more frankly a knockabout; but excellent, none the less, in its own simple way. She was still smiling as she walked out into the street.

Holtzmann, it turned out, lived only a few hundred yards from the gallery, in a pretty little early nineteenth-century house (much too good for a man with sweaty hands!) set back from the road behind a little square of gravel. A large car was standing at the door. Holtzmann's? she wondered. He must be rich, the old pig! It had taken her so little time to come from the gallery that it was hardly a quarter-past twelve as she mounted the steps. ‘Never mind,' she said to herself. ‘They'll have to put up with me. I refuse to wait one second longer.' The thought that, in a moment, she would see Ekki again made her heart beat quickly. ‘What a fool I am! What an absolute fool.' But how marvellous to be able to be a fool! She rang the bell.

It was Holtzmann himself who opened – dressed in an overcoat, she was surprised to see, as though he were just going out. The expression with which he had greeted her at the station reappeared on his face as he saw her.

‘You are so soon,' he said, trying to smile; but his nervousness and embarrassment amounted almost to terror. ‘We had not awaited you until half-one.'

Helen laughed. ‘I hadn't awaited myself,' she explained. ‘But I got here quicker than I thought.'

She made a movement to step across the threshold; but Holtzmann held out his arm. ‘We are not yet ready,' he said. His face was flushed and sweating with embarrassment. ‘If you will return in a quarter hour,' he almost implored. ‘Only a quarter hour.'

‘
Nur ein Viertel Stündchen
.' Helen laughed, thinking of those embroidered cushions on the sofas where the Geheimrats slept off the effects of noonday eating. ‘But why shouldn't I wait indoors?' She pushed past him into a dark little hall that smelt of cooking and stale air. ‘Where's Ekki?' she asked, suddenly overcome by the desire to see him, to see him at once, without another second's delay, so that she could tell him what a beast she had been, but how loving all the same, how adoring in spite of the beastliness, and how happy, how eager to share her happiness with him! At the other end of the vestibule a door stood ajar. Calling his name, Helen ran towards it.

‘Stop!' Holtzmann shouted behind her.

But she was already across the threshold.

The room in which she found herself was a bedroom. On the narrow iron bed Ekki was lying with all his clothes on, his head on one side, his mouth open. His breath came slowly in long snores; he was asleep – but asleep as she had never seen him sleeping.

‘Ekki!' she had time to cry, while a door slammed, another voice joined itself to Holtzmann's, and the vestibule was loud with violent movement. ‘My darling . . .'

Then suddenly a hand closed on her shoulder from behind. She turned, saw the face of a strange man within a few inches of her own, heard somewhere from the background Holtzmann's ‘
Schnell, Willi, schnell!
' and the stranger almost whispering, between clenched teeth,
Schmutziges Frauenzimmer
'; then, as
she opened her mouth to scream, received a terrible blow on the chin that brought the teeth violently together again, and felt herself dropping into blackness.

When she came to herself, she was in bed in a hospital ward. Some peasants had found her lying unconscious in a little wood five or six miles from the town. An ambulance had brought her back to Basel. It was only on the following morning that the effects of the barbitone wore off and she remembered what had happened. But by that time Ekki had been over the frontier, in Germany, for nearly twenty hours.

ANTHONY HAD SPENT
the morning at the offices of the organization, dictating letters. For the most part, it was a matter of dealing with the intellectual difficulties of would-be pacifists. ‘What would you do if you saw a foreign soldier attacking your sister?' Well, whatever else one did, one certainly wouldn't send one's son to murder his second cousin. Wearisome work! But it had to be done. He dictated twenty-seven letters; then it was time to go to lunch with Helen.

‘There's practically nothing to eat,' she said, when he came in. ‘I simply couldn't be bothered to cook anything. The unspeakable boredom of making meals!' Her voice took on a note of almost malevolent resentment.

They addressed themselves to tinned salmon and lettuce. Anthony tried to talk; but his words seemed to bounce off the impenetrable surface of her sullen and melancholy silence. In the end, he too sat speechless.

‘It's just a year ago today,' she brought out at last.

‘What is?'

‘Just a year since those devils at Basel . . .' She shook her head and was silent again.

Anthony said nothing. Anything he could say would be an irrelevance, he felt, almost an insult.

‘I often wish they'd killed me too,' she went on slowly. ‘Instead of leaving me here, rotting away, like a piece of dirt on a rubbish heap. Like a dead kitten,' she added, as an afterthought. ‘So much carrion.' The words were spoken with a vehement disgust.

‘Why do you say that?' he asked.

‘Because it's true. I
am
carrion.'

‘There's no need for you to be.'

‘I can't help it. I'm carrion by nature.'

‘No, you're not,' he insisted. ‘You've said it yourself. When Ekki was there . . .'

‘No, I wasn't carrion then.'

‘What you've been once, you can be again.'

‘Not without him.'

He nodded. ‘Yes, if you want to be, you can. It's a matter of choosing. Choosing and then setting to work in the right way.'

Helen shook her head. ‘They ought to have killed me. If you only knew how I disgust myself!' She screwed up her face into a grimace. ‘I'm no good. Worse than no good. Just a lump of dirt.' After a pause, ‘I'm not even interested in Ekki's work,' she went on. ‘I don't like his friends. Communists. But they're just beastly little people, like anyone else. Stupid, vulgar, envious, pushing. One might as well have the fun of wearing a chinchilla coat and lunching at Claridge's. I shall probably end by selling myself to a rich man. That is, if I can find one.' She laughed again. Then, in a tone of more bitter self-contempt, ‘Only a year today,' she resumed, ‘and already I'm sick of it all. Utterly sick of it and pining to get out of it. I'm disgusting.'

‘But are you entirely to blame?'

‘Of course I am.'

Anthony shook his head. ‘Perhaps it's also the fault of the work.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Organized hatred – it's not exactly attractive. Not what most people feel they really want to live for.'

‘Ekki lived for it. Lots of people live for it.'

‘But what sort of people?' he asked. ‘They're of three kinds. Idealists with an exceptional gift for self-deception. Either they don't know that it's organized hatred, or else they genuinely believe that the end justifies the means, genuinely imagine that the means don't condition the end. Ekki was one of those. They form the majority. And then there are two minorities. A minority of people who know that the thing's organized hatred and rejoice in the fact. And a minority that's ambitious, that merely uses the movement as a convenient machine for realizing its ambition. You, Helen – you're neither ambitious nor self-deceiving. And, in spite of what happened this day last year, don't really want to liquidate people – not even Nazis. And that's why the chinchillas and the orchids seem so attractive. Not because you actively long for them. Only because this particular alternative is so unsatisfactory.'

There was a silence. Helen got up, changed the plates and set a bowl of fruit on the table. ‘What
is
the satisfactory alternative?' she asked, as she helped herself to an apple.

‘It begins,' he answered, ‘with trying to cultivate the difficult art of loving people.'

‘But most people are detestable.'

‘They're detestable, because we detest them. If we liked them, they'd be likeable.'

‘Do you think that's true?'

‘I'm sure it's true.'

‘And what do you do after that?'

‘There's no “after,”' he replied. ‘Because, of course, it's a
lifetime's job. Any process of change is a lifetime's job. Every time you get to the top of a peak, you see another peak in front of you – a peak that you couldn't see from lower down. Take the mind-body mechanism, for example. You begin to learn how to use it better; you make an advance; from the position you've advanced to, you discover how you can use it better still. And so on, indefinitely. The ideal ends recede as you approach them; they're seen to be other and more remarkable than they seemed before the advance was begun. It's the same when one tries to change one's relations with other people. Every step forward reveals the necessity of making new steps forward – unanticipated steps, towards a destination one hadn't seen when one set out. Yes, it lasts a lifetime,' he repeated. ‘There can't be any “after.” There can only be an attempt, as one goes along, to project what one has discovered on the personal level on to the level of politics and economics. One of the first discoveries,' he added, ‘one of the very first one makes, is that organized hatred and violence aren't the best means for securing justice and peace. All men are capable of love for all other men. But we've artificially restricted our love. By means of conventions of hatred and violence. Restricted it within families and clans, within classes and nations. Your friends want to remove those restrictions by using more hatred and violence – that's to say, by using exactly the same means as were the original causes of the restrictions.' He smiled. ‘Can you be surprised if you find the work a bit unsatisfying?'

Helen looked at him for a little in silence, then shook her head. ‘I prefer my chinchillas.'

‘No, you don't.'

‘Yes, I do. I'd rather be a lump of dirt. It's easier.' She got up. ‘What about some coffee?' In the little kitchen, as they were waiting for the water to boil, she suddenly started to tell him about that young man in advertising. She had met him a
couple of weeks before. Such an amusing and intelligent creature! And he had fallen violently in love with her. Her face brightened with a kind of reckless, laughing malice. ‘Blue eyes,' she said, cataloguing the young man's merits, as though she were an auctioneer, ‘curly hair, tremendous shoulders, narrow hips, first-rate amateur boxer – which is more than you ever were, my poor Anthony,' she added parenthetically and in a tone of contemptuous commiseration. ‘In fact, thoroughly bedworthy. Or at least he looks it. Because one never really knows till one's tried, does one?' She laughed. ‘I've a good mind to try tonight,' she went on. ‘To commemorate this anniversary. Don't you think it would be a good idea, Anthony?' And when he didn't answer, ‘Don't you think so?' she insisted. ‘Don't you think so?' She looked into his face, trying to detect in it the signs of anger, or jealousy, or disgust.