Authors: Helen de Witt
I said
What about Raoul Wallenberg?
He said
What?
I said
Raoul Wallenberg. The Swedish consul in Budapest who handed out Swedish passports to Jews. This man is a Swedish citizen.
He said
You mean the one the Americans and the Swedes abandoned to the Russians because on top of saving 100,000 Jews he did a little spying for the Americans on the side and neither of them wanted to admit it? He was grand but it’s enough to make you sick
I said
Well what about Szegeti?
And he said
That charlatan?
Mother Theresa? I said.
That nun?
Jaime Jaramillo?
He said Jaramillo was all right. He said
But I haven’t seen it. What I’ve seen is
He said
You go into these situations as a journalist and you keep thinking you should stop reporting and just help. You have to be professional. You tell yourself you’re helping by letting people know what’s happening.
Well, they know what’s happening but it doesn’t do any good. You try to get some people out before it’s too late and you run into a blank wall of officialdom, and nothing does any good. And then it’s not just that you’ve seen stupid thugs with another language and a foreign uniform commit atrocities, but someone pretty much like yourself say I’m sorry there’s nothing I can do. If you’re lucky the person says Well, I’ll write to the Minister.
He said
I don’t want to go on. If I’ve got 50 years ahead of seeing the eye and the leg and the girl and the rest and the best I can hope for is someone promising to write to the Minister I’d be better off if I were out of it now.
I know it will cause a lot of people a lot of pain. Can I go on for 50 years so they can go comfortably on saying I’ve adjusted?
People tell me, you can’t let them win. You made it this far. If you kill yourself they’ve won. But it’s insane. Who the fuck is they? How the fuck does it
defeat
them if I wake up howling every night?
He said
Maybe reporting does a little good. But does it do
enough
good to justify living this way? There are plenty of others who’d be glad of my job and could do it well.
I said
Well just as long as you stay off paracetamol.
He said
What?
I said
You should never try to kill yourself with paracetamol. It’s a horrible way to die. People think you just pass out, but actually you don’t lose consciousness, you think nothing’s happened but then a day later your organs shut down. It destroys the liver. Sometimes people change their minds, but it’s too late. I’m not saying you would change your mind; but almost anything is better than dying of paracetamol poisoning.
He laughed.
Where did you pick all that up? he said. He laughed again.
I said
My mother told me.
I said
A guillotine is very quick and pretty painless, though they say the head can be conscious for a minute or so before the blood supply to the brain is drained off. I made a miniature one when I was five with my Meccano set. I think it would be pretty easy to make a big one. Of course, it would be a bit gruesome for the person who found the body. You could call the police if you didn’t want to upset a family member. There’s no way they could reach you in time to stop you.
He laughed. I’ll bear that in mind, he said. Do you know any other good ways?
I’ve heard that drowning is pleasant at the end, I said. A friend of my mother’s was rescued when she was going down for the third time. She said it hurt at first, when her lungs filled with water, but then it was drowsy and lovely. It hurt when they pulled her out and forced the air back into her lungs. That might not be too bad. You could jump off a Channel ferry at night, or maybe it would be nicer to jump off an outboard motor in the Aegean and drown in blue. There might be a few problems for your family if the body wasn’t found, but I expect it would be all right if you left a note.
Yes, he said. He was smiling. That would probably be all right. I’m going to have a drink. What do you want? A Coke?
Thank you, I said.
I followed him downstairs to the kitchen.
You seem to know a lot about it, he said.
I’m better on mechanics than pharmaceuticals, I said. I can make a noose. You want to break the neck rather than suffocate, if possible; apparently that’s quite difficult to achieve with a sheet. My mother thought I should know how in case I was ever put in prison and tortured—I’m terribly sorry.
That’s all right, he said. He drank a lot of the drink. She’s probably right. It’s not a bad thing to know—if you’ve use of your hands. I was tied up the whole time, so it wouldn’t have helped.
Except when you played chess, I said.
No, I was tied up then too. He made my moves for me. Sometimes he’d deliberately move a piece to the wrong square and pretend not to understand if I objected. You wouldn’t have thought I’d have cared, with everything else, but it made me absolutely furious. I’d refuse to play, and he’d beat me. Or he’d beat me if he lost. He didn’t beat me if he beat me.
He said
He was kind of split up. He’d be quite friendly when he brought out the board, and he’d
smile
. That would last for a few moves and then sometimes he’d start to cheat, and sometimes he’d lose his temper and hit me with the gun, and sometimes. The friendliness was the horrible part, because he’d be hurt, genuinely
hurt
, when I wasn’t pleased to see him or took offence because he’d beat the shit out of me the day before. And now that I’m back that’s all I see. That horrible friendliness everywhere. All these people who simply don’t
realise
, it just doesn’t
occur
to them that
He said
That’s what I mean about the ordinariness. That’s why it’s not enough. It’s not enough to stand up to what’s there, but people go on smiling pleasantly
My wife smiles and I see that horrible friendliness on her face. My children disgust me. They’re delightful, extroverted, confident. They know what they want, and that’s what interests them, and it disgusts me. They allowed me two weeks to be a bit strange, and then they all came to me separately.
My wife said she knew what I’d been through but this was hard on the children. My daughter came to see me and said it was hard on Mum, I didn’t know what they’d been through. My son said it was hard on his Mum and sister.
So then I think, this is bloody ridiculous. It’s unfair. They’re perfectly OK. It’s not their
fault
. What do you
want
? Do you want them to be shell-shocked and dreaming of horrors? You
want
them to be safe from all that. You want all the rest to get away to be
ordinary
. And I think, we’ve got so
much
. Let’s celebrate
life
. We’ve got each other, we’re so bloody lucky. And I throw my arms around them with tears in my eyes and I say, Let’s go along the canal and feed the swans. I’m thinking, we can walk straight out of the house, there’s no one to stop us, and we can walk by the canal because there are no land mines and no one’s shelling us, let’s not
waste
this. And they all look absolutely appalled because it’s such a totally wet thing to do, but they come to humour me, and of course it’s awful.
He said
When you’ve seen things, or things have been done to you, this badness gets inside you and comes back with you, and then people who’ve never been near a war, people who’ve never struck an animal never mind tortured anyone—people who are completely innocent—get hurt too. The torture comes out as disgust, and it comes out in that gush of sentimentality that chokes them. I see that but I can’t kill the badness, it just sits inside like a poison toad.
He said
Is it really doing them any good to keep the toad alive? Or even if it is can I go through a lifetime of it?
I said
It would obviously be better to die before rather than after years of suffering; no one would condemn an innocent man to a life sentence to make someone else happy; the question is whether it is really the case that nothing will blot out these memories and that nothing could be good enough to make it worth undergoing them. If that’s the question you can’t seriously expect me to know the answer.
He began laughing again. Could I give you a word of advice? he said. Don’t ever apply for a job with the Samaritans.
He could hardly speak for laughing.
My mother, I said, called the Samaritans once and asked whether research had been done on thwarted suicides to find out whether they had spent the time after the incident happily.
What did they say?
They said they didn’t know.
He grinned.
I said
Sibylla said
He said
Who?
I said My mother. She said they should recruit people like Oscar Wilde, only there isn’t anyone like Oscar Wilde. If there were enough people like Oscar Wilde so that you could staff Samaritans with them, no one would want to commit suicide anyway—they would joke themselves out of a job. You could call and someone would say
Do you smoke?
And you’d say
Yes.
And they’d say Good. A man needs an occupation.
My mother called once and the person kept saying Yes and I hear what you’re saying, which would have been reassuring if my mother had been worried about being inaudible.
So my mother said
Do you smoke?
And the Samaritan said
Sorry?
And my mother said
Do you smoke?
And the Samaritan said
No
And my mother said
You should. A man needs an occupation.
And the Samaritan said
Sorry?
And my mother said
That’s all right. It’s your life. If you want to throw it away, fine.
Then she ran out of 10p coins.
I said
It’s your life, but you should give things a chance. You know what Jonathan Glover says.
He said
No, what does Jonathan Glover say? And who is Jonathan Glover?
I said
Jonathan Glover is a modern Utilitarian, and the author of
Causing Death and Saving Lives
. He says before committing suicide you should change your job, leave your wife, leave the country.
I said
Would it help to leave your job, leave your wife and children, leave the country?
He said
No. It would help a little not to have to fake it all the time. But wherever I went I’d see the same things. I used to think I’d like to see the Himalayas before I died. I thought I’d like to see Tierra del Fuego. The South Pacific—I’ve heard that’s beautiful. But wherever I went I’d see a child clubbed to death with the butt of a rifle and soldiers laughing. There’s nothing I can do to get it out of my mind.
He looked at his glass.
He said
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
That weighs upon the heart
He said
Therein the patient
Must minister to himself
He put his head on his hand.
He said
It is a pretty story.
He said
The world would be quite a pretty place if the only people tormented by atrocities were those who’d committed them. Would you like another Coke?
I asked whether I could have orange juice instead.
He went to the refrigerator with his glass. He came back with the glass and a can of Coke.
He said
I don’t mean it wasn’t hard on my wife. She had to shoulder responsibility. She had to write a lot of letters to people who weren’t very helpful. She had to keep going for the sake of the children.
I said
Does she want to die?
He said
I don’t think so.
He said after a pause
It changed her a lot. She became much less
He said
Or rather she became much more
He said
That is she turned into the kind of person who
He said
That is she developed a lot of skills. She organised a successful campaign, you know, that is she organised a campaign that was successful as a campaign, it had a lot of supporters who gave money when she wrote to ask them for money and went on demonstrations when she told them there was going to be a demonstration and wrote letters to their MP when she said everyone should write to their MP. The papers published her letters when she wrote letters and they covered the demonstrations when there were demonstrations, and she got interviewed on radio and TV on a regular basis. That kind of thing doesn’t just
happen
, you know. Anyway once it happens you become quite confident that you can get that kind of thing to happen.