Three
Monologues
I dream I
pain, and in dreams
and pain I seek the truth. Not that in an age that considerers F.A. von
Hayek a great thinker and Irving Kristol a mountebank of courage that
I'm going to find it...I take the rope in my hands and pull it taut and
my mind turns to my McClaurin's series and differential equations and
then turns to my mother, dead with Anglican plastic roses over her
coffin where you could still hear her gently muttering my least
favourite Grimm's fairy tales...the vestibule is a wretched soulless
turquoise and I swing the rope just beyond my left elbow...twist it
over...and then take my right hand to tie it into a
tourniquet.
I tie it tighter and the coffin is
lowered into
the grave with the tombstone already there, conveniently labeled
"Mrs.Rudman" right by
my father, also conveniently labeled, "Mr.Rudman." A seventh
order
equation...two weeks to my next assisted lecture...and a radio
jingle: "Louis Ferdinand Celine Dion's greatest hits:
`Where does my heart
beat now,' `The Last to Know,' and `If you Asked Me too, I'd kill all
the Jews.'" Iintroduce myself at my first visit to the synagogue,
with
patent, tactful embarrasment: "Constantine Rudman"...Celine is
God...he
should have joined Norman Vincent Peale: "Thanks to the Glory of
God, the American Way, Anglo-Paxton achievement, and Western
Civilization as a whole I've used this horsefaced illiterate to bilk
you out of millions...and you deserve it, you scum...Crucify me, you
bastards." But he had too
much honour, the filthy Jew-baiter...he'd never beg to write for
Encounter...and the hypocrities would never let him...Diem, Salazar,
Botha, Pinochet, Somoza, Videla, Thieu, Smith, Lon Nol, Papadopolous,
Rhee, they'd keep their mouths shut for these murdering bastards,...but
confront them with a real writer, goddamn it, and the firm of Kristol,
Kristol, Lasky, Spender and Angleton, specializing inmoral cliches,
feigned idignation, and hot wet sopping cants...well, all right not
Spender, and not Kermode...but the others, they need a symbol of their
`bold, courageous, defiant, unorthodox' opposition to
totalitarianism...not that the NDP would let him write him in the party
papers and intellectual journals...first because we don't have any
party papers...second, we don't have any journals, just
nicey-pansy-nanny pulp selling fashionable middlebrow pap...try telling
my sister about Dr.Destouches "No, Lucy, I don't mean the mediocre
Quebecois singer that neither of us can stand, and no I'm not going to
play your silly game and call you Lucian"...and god, Thomas Harding,
MP,met him at a
party function, and I asked him about Celine and he said "Excuse me,
Constantine, but wasn't he an Anti-Semite?" Well of course, he was a
fucking anti-semite, and I know about Beethoven's bastards, and that
Faulkner was permanently pissed and I can probably give you some dirt
on
O'Neill if you asked me too,
`if-you-asked-me-too-woobely-woobely-woo"...well, fuck you...where's
the fucking knife?
Chelmnickon...Vivian Chelmnickon...God
she's
tight...Professor Vivian Chelmnickon, Professor of philosophy and
theological studies...formerly of the University of Warsaw...a member
of All Souls at Oxford...who came here five years ago with his wife
(whom his old Polish crony...what was his name...he said she was a
drunken...Copse, wasn't it?...drunken bitch...I've got it, Oliver
Corpse...it was Oliver Corpse who told me at a dinner for some
deceitful cabinet minister that Mrs. Vivian Chelmnickon was a drunken
bitch and that Chelmnickon was a saint for staying with her).
Open the drawer, see what you find...Chelmnickon writes for Encounter,
or wrote for it. Chelmnickon the honoured exile...when Gierek and
his gang got Warsaw
U to remove his doctorate, was immediately rewarded twelve honorary
ones...though he had the grace to refuse the one that Seoul
University was going
to give him before the police tear-gassed the convocation
ceremony.
The best thing, the only thing, that Carleton University, Ottawa,
Canada...VISIT the university where Vivian Chelmnickon teaches!...even
the
veterinary department hawks him in their brochures...I think it's
around here...Chelmnickon is a philospher...I could have been a
philospher, but I thought I do so much better at mathematics...why not
take it instead and get an easy doctorate...so far, so good, I'm only
two and a half years away and there are three professors here so bloody
senile they have to be wheeled from class to class by cart...I mean
there are big huge vultures, fat as horses, circling around the
department of Mathematics, stuffed to the tits with the swarm of the
ravens that are also here...aha!
Yes it's sharp, black spartan handle, no
fancy
insignia...twist it around, think about using it to attack the sliver I
got earlier this morning and couldn't get out...go to the living room
and spread out some of the Citizens that I never get around to throwing
out...can't make a mess on the carpet...perhaps I should clean up some
of those crumbs, over those, under my writing desk...go to the bathroom
and get the bandages and the rubbing
alchol...alchohol...Chelmnickon...fucking Chelmnickon...read another
bloody puff piece review...people like him get it so easy...all this
crap about "political correctness"...when was the last time you
saw a real harsh, real nasty review of some central European writer...I
mean it's
not as if one of them said that the moon was made of green cheese,
everyone would consider it a bold new cosmological theory...of course
not...they're too fucking moderate...but if one of them plagiarised the
Liberal Party Statement of Principles and Grilled Cheese Sandwich
Cookbook and retitled it "Irony, Contiguity (really hot word) and Civil
Society in Czechoslovakia" and--my bloody Jesus Christ-it's the second
coming of Alexis de Toqueville! Come to throw the
deconstructionists out of the temple! Antipolitics, stinking
antipolitics...old cheap tory windbag game...what us being
political? "The free market isn't political, it
came down from heaven and it's above debate, and everybody wants it,
everybody including the working class, (and if they don't want it, and
cause us any trouble, well they're just Stalinist bastards, Nazi
cowards as well, but they do want it, so you should be goddam grateful,
we don't just let them rip out your bloody Commie balls) so shut your
fucking mouth, your fucking little elitist, because if you don't think
Milton Friedman and the IMF have got all the answers, you're just a
shitty little intellectual, who just couldn't wait to break Babel's
neck, and 80 million other necks, and you never complained, and you
never talked, you just sat there and let Stalin and Lenin and Mao
murder and rape and butcher and torture 80 million people, like all the
other intellectual shit. Besides didn't Edmund
Burke, Holy Protestant and Apostolic Burke, with such a "complex"
attitude
to relatives bilking from the treasury, he said "the laws of economy
are the laws of nature and therefore the laws of God." Bloody
Hell.
What have I
got...I've got nothing...so bloody
nothing... I mean I got no sex life...no profession...I working at a
course of study, when I think all the professors are cowards...I've got
nopolitics...everything's crap...no Marxists at Carleton...one piece of
crap after another in TLS...Pipes, Conquest, Laqueur, Stone and
Chelmnickon all get to review each others books on Russia...everyone of
them wrong on Gorbachev, and everyone given a chance to cover their
ass...some new revisionist crap on French Revolution, whining about
Terror as if they never heard of Hiroshima or Vinegar Hill...can't even
count the Vendee right...and on the left, Good God...just talk about
fuzziness and bargain basement bhuddist Indians...and in the NDP... MP
Thomas Edward Harding slowly stuffing my ears with porridge.
And of course, there's so much
wrong...tried to
visit a synagogue...doing it rather often actually for services, and
one day it really got to me...I mean I could take the greeting card
liturgy, and the desexualized divinities, though I don't see why we
should mangle the greatest monuments in English and Hebrew...and German
as well come to think of it...just to satisfy abunch of illiterate
feminists who don't even come to church in the first place...as I was
saying, I was getting over it...when suddenly it came...this smell,
this nasty little odour, I almost began to get sick, I mean the Jews,
my fellow congregants, they were like
Orwell Wigan Pier Proles, they actually stank...I mean I couldn't get
rid of the odour, I mean I was walking in the hall on Monday and I
bumped into Chelmnickon and we started to talk about something and he
said "Excuse me,
do you smell something," Excuse me, do you smell something, well of
course
I did, but I wasn't going to tell him what it was. And it's not
as if my sense of smell was very good, because I spent most of my
adolescence picking my nose...and for the scent to last that long...and
what was it?...it was sort of like sweat, but it couldn't be...
something liquid, aqueous, leaving dust behind...and the worst thing is
that it smells so familiar...this Jew smell I've known before...I've
known it, in a weaker form, for years...and for the past few months, it
reminds me of someone...but I can't remember who...and the thing is,
the smell is still with me.
Poland.
Glorious, strong, betrayed, assasinated, Catholic intolerant,
partitioned, massacred, self-pitying Poland.
Okay on your knees...Poland, most victim of the nations, victim stock
higher than Ireland, better than the blacks, not so good as the Jews,
but relations seem to be reaching a new state of mutual euphemism...and
god knows the Latvians were worse... Protestant Lativia...hunting the
Jews down like dogs...God my arms, really feeling faint...can't
think...hallucinations,
perhaps? In your dreams. Friends...Poland
needs friends...Poland
partitioned and betrayed...it's not free speech, or secularism or
pacifism, or reading Voltaire that makes the Liberals go round and
round. It's Poland.
Support for a free and independent Poland.
That's the perfect litmus test...someone should go out and patent it,
and sell it to all your friends...Adrian Verrall, nephew of some Polish
Tory MP, Lucy's got her eyes on him, so she dresses up like a five feet
and a half dwarf and calls herself Lucian, and Harding, Charles
Harding, son of Thomas Edward Blabbermouth. Charles Harding used to be
my closest friend, and it's not as if we were enemies or something, I
mean I was so close to him when I still thought T.E. Harding would be
just what the country needed, back in the day when I thought Trotskyism
and the Greens would solve all our problems and Walter Mondale would
probably make a pretty good president.
"Chuck" Harding...oh God, the smell...the effortless sexuality of the
fifteen year old, hoping it would rub off on my nervous naked fourteen
year old bleached white Anglican skin...we were swimming, and he could
do it so well, his strong arms weaving up from the water, making an arc
and down and again and his black hair glistening in the sun and azure,
while my thin lanky nearsighted body did horrible dives, mediocre
butterfly strokes and excellent bobbing-up-and-down-like a cork.
He and his girlfriend, Elizabeth Concrete, so full of charm and
vivacity, Vanity Fair sense of humour, and always so fashionable.
Shouldn't have argued with them, though
he's
gracious enough to talk to me, after what I did, after recommending too
many books that he hadn't read, and which I implied that I had. I
hadn't of course...because I'm a filthy liar and a poseur. It's
amazing how much I haven't read. No Balzac, no Turgenev, no
Sentimental Education, couldn't read more than eighty pages of the
Rabelais I gave to Lucy for Purim because I was too disgusted, no Gogol
(but I'll remedy that)...all the Proust I've read has
gone through me like a sieve, no Melville, no Trollope, no Goethe, only
"Death in Venice" from Mann, a petty prejudice against Hesse, and
muddled memories of Siddahtra, no Musil or Boll or Broch or Zamyatin or
Maghouz (I'll remedy that), no politically correct Carpentier or
Cortazar...no politically incorrect Vargas Llosa or Infante, no
Fuentes, too much Garcia Marquez, too much Rushdie, too high an opinion
of The Flounder, too low an opinion of The Scarlet Letter, I couldn't
even begin to read Tristram Shandy...no Cervantes, nor Calderon, no
Spanish writers to speak of...Holland, Portugal, Greece, Norway, Sweden
and Denmark, countries that just glaze off the conciousness...no Tale
of the Genji, no Dream of the Red
Chamber, no Dazai, no Mishima, little Kawabata, not enough Tanizaki, no
Achebe, Gordimer, Coetzee or even Brink, barely any Chekhov... no
Virgil, no Lucian, no Horace or Ovid or Terrance or Seneca, only shards
of Aristophanes, no Aeschylus, Euripidies or Sophocles, never even seen
any Sappho...and all my reactions to Hardy are cheap and
sentimental...God I could go on and on about my mediocrity,and I am in
such a state of cheap masochism and inflected feeling I will...no Hasek
or Capek or Reymont or Oz or Yeshoua or Pasternak or Taytanya Tolstoy
or Sinyavsky...I can't even be bothered to read Hugh Maclennan or James
Gould Cozzens to find how much I'd hate them...God, I stink and smell
reading off names like a pederast and worm of the world's
libraries...only damp squibs of Faulkner, no Fitzgerald, no Naipaul,
and as for drama, can't bear to read it...I never got around to reading
anything by Pirandello, no Brecht, no O'Neill, Ibsen, Strindberg,
Garcia Lorca, Synge, O'Casey...Lucy's got all the drama in the
family...and as for poetry, I'm a complete loss...I gave a volume of
Baudelaire that's only gathering dust, and heaven knows I haven't read
any...Rimbaud, Mallarme, just fashionable names...must admit that I've
read enough Vallejo, and even some Paz, but no Neruda or Mistral, nor
come to think of it Machado de Assis as well...no Garcia Lorca again,
no Pasternak again, I don't even try to read Akhamatova, Bely and Bunin
(who isn't a poet), or Mandelstam, or Pinyak (who also isn't a poet) or
Zoschenko (ditto)...God I know more about purged and murdered
literatures than Alice Concrete, `Reform' MP...no Naipaul, no Bellow,
no Vonnegut (well, no great loss), not even any Pynchon in a
pinch...though I'm glad to say I never wasted any time with Salinger or
Steinbeck (a lie, my high school pushed Steinbeck like cheap
amphetamines)...not even bothered to read On Human Bondage so I go and
tell everyone it's complete crap...no Cavafy, nor Pindar, no Wallace
Stevens (why Wallace Stevens? Is he going to come out and bite you?),
no W.C. Williams, no Pound, no Ashberry, enough Eliot, a little less
Yeats, not at all enough Hardy...thank God no Longfellow...no
Dickinson, none of the Jews that have contributed two out of Canada's
greatest three poets, come to think of it, contributed two out of
Canada's only three poets...I can't tell Housman from Hopkins...no
Villon, Verlaine or Valery...well I did read "Narcissus weeps,"...I say
that with some
of the cheap half-price discount Central European irony, the kind where
Catholic Europe turns a skeptical, alienated Kafka, into a great
European and a model Jew, given the Simon Wiesenthal Award along with
General Videla's Irish press secretary...turns Kafka's infinite God of
mystery and terror into a squalid manageable little despotism that
obligingly goes boo and says I'm a big nasty totalitarian...with
enormous tits...of course no
Goethe, no Dryden, not nearly enough Shakesperean plays, only three of
the Canterbury Tales...some Montale I am proud to confess, but no Saba
or Quasimodo or Ungaretti or Unanonamo...God no Persian or Indian
writers to think of...only some Lu Xun, not enough Wen-I-To and his
Dirty Water...and obviously no Schiller or Heine. And no
Rilke. No bloody pagan,
tory,
Christian, Czech, German Rilke. They used to say about Austria
that its greatest achievement was to make the world think Beethoven was
Vienese and Hitler was a German, one could say about Czechoslovakia
that its greatest achievement was to pass off Rilke and Kafka as
Czechs...`National Socialists' no doubt while Novotny and Husak were
really Russian, and
Jaroslav Hasek was a model liberal...after all, didn't he found "The
Party
of Moderate Progress within the Bounds of the Law"...demanding tougher
regulations for welfare and promising every elector a free pocket
aquarium...and no doubt you could say Hasek was a premature
anti-Slanskyist...But, oh God, back to Rilke...the way my head is
spinning the Virgin Mary is going to drop in shortly...I hope she
doesn't retch at the way I smell...Rilke, Rilke, Chelmnickon wrote an
article about Rilke, two articles he wrote actually...one that he
recommended to me...the other where he fairly and accurately described
all the other Rilkeans who disagreed with him...such a saint, but he
can't stop Rilke running rampant through my head...
Concentrate...it's not easy to
concentrate when
you've got a tourniquet around your right arm...at least my blue
bouncing ball is out for the night...I mean there's a reason why you're
doing this...come to think it's probably wise to tie the tourniquet
after you cut your right arm...or it would be if you had the extra
hand...roll up the sleeve...christ, it's already going blue...or is it
purple?..take the knife in your left hand...you've said a lot of bad
things Rudman about Poles that you've never met who've never done you a
bit of harm...you said you got tired about their whining, while women
were being raped and tortured and
mutilated in Guatemela...you sneered at how Popieleusko's murderers
were in jail six months after they done the deed but that it'll be a
cold day in hell that they find the murderers of Ruth First, or even
Stephen Biko or even Dr.Aggett...stupid putz Worthington, shedding
tears for Daniel, dead in prison...and then saying that Botha would
make sure that Mandela would
never die in prison...while forgetting Aggett, his body lies a rotting
in the grave...and you sneered about the Polish Peasant Party...saying
Poland, and certainly Romania wouldn't be any richer if they and not
the Communists had taken power...and that the financial argument
against totalitarianism was self-pitying crap...and God you haven't
read any books about the
Soviets, not even the Gulag Archipelago, but just gloomily accept
figures of 50 or 60 or 80 million dead while sneakingly and in bad
faith try to ease your sleasy social democratic conscience looking for
consoling figures of 10 to 20 million dead...and you haven't read
enough books and you wouldn't have the nerve to say what you really
thought to any Eastern European because you'd slink off you coward and
wouldn't dare to open your lying filthy mouth...because you can't,
because you can't say anything with all this blood with all these
rivers of blood, flowing down and around, and drowning every one of us,
in their size, rivers of blood flowing down the Thames, rivers of blood
flowing through everyone of us...
Blood again. It's always
blood. It's
always the most obvious and stupid and vile things you think
up...atrocity...
murder...massacre...rape..the first resort of the well paid hack
horrorist...the fashionable comic book writer...and the most pernicious
middlebrow serios who squeeze good reviews from the Hamilton Spectator,
or fuck, The Globe and Mail...I mean there's no nuance to blood being
ostenatiously spewed around...I mean there should be something more
complex, like instead of "Having been viciously attacked and having
unspeakable things done to her left elbow, her blood-drenched corpse
was
found at the back of Warsaw's best hotel" you could have "Having
sprained her left ankle and having to bribe the man who gave her decent
meat, her body was covered was a less potent, less disgusting fluid
which reflects her anomie and malaise"...what would it be like?...the
colour would be blue...real blood isn't blue...and it would have a more
neutral smell...not
like my own smell...stinking up good synagogues like I do...it could be
like disinfectant...and you sweat or cut it to get at it...it would
sort of coalesce from the atmosphere...you could call it "perqua" or
something...time for the first cut.
No, not the
damn vein you idiot, you could bleed
yourself to death...on the side, yes like that...all right, drop it on
the
newspaper...you have to have a fairly good size puddle...I've got to
remember to get that Latin dictionary...this ritual would be so much
more impressive if I could say what I was saying in Latin...all right,
here goes..."By this blood I shed" ...I, a selfish Anglican bastard who
doesn't know anything about suffering..."I ask you to forgive me, and
accept this offering as a purge of my guilt"...oh God! How my
blood
stinks!..."To those who have suffered murder and genocide and holocaust
and dictatorship, that I, as a Canadian, cannot begin to understand."
Can't think, got to concentrate...I could bleed to death or get
gangrene if I pass out, "please accept this blood and my pain as a sign
of my good faith, and if this pain, voluntarily inflicted as it is, is
merely a lie and a deception, send a sign for me to end this deceitful
life." The
smell, the smell, use your left hand and...reach for the matches on
your writing desk...ordinarily you got to use two hands to light a
match...okay pulll out the matches...with your hand, it's rather
tricky...and strike it against the radiatior...oh good, it lit the
first time, I don't know how
I'd do it if it didn't...take the flame up to the tray on your table,
covered with flammable ashes...be quick about it, you don't want to
burn your only currently operative fingers...not too quick, because you
don't want to accidently blow the light out...okay set it
down...touchdown!...it's aflame...all right, is the puddle large
enough?...yes it is...don't faint now...make the first letter...you
know there are only five...the first is a straight vertical line...the
flames cast quite a shadow...dip your left index finger in your own
blood...good, make the line...up...on the newspaper...on the right side
of the line, halfway up make two lines going at 45 degress in both
directions...the odour...yes...the first letter...K...can't bear the
smell...make the second
letter...in memoriam...it is better to have loved and lost than to have
read Alfred, Lord Tennyson...here is the second letter...yes...A...the
smell is always there, it's always been there...if I could only get rid
of it...If I could only get rid of it...come on, only three more
letters...not too far to go...dip your finger...it's not the odour,
it's not the odour at all...it's that the smell's so
unclean...defaming...back to the paper...a vertical line and a
horizontal line...horizontal lines on the bottom...no, it's on
top...the smell making me tear...and I'm getting a headache...make the
letter...yes...T now the next letter is a right angle, on top of a
bisecting line...the smell, need something sharper...yes here it
is...Y...that was so simple...one more letter...how to describe
it?....parallel lines?...need the smell to be replaced with somemthing
odourless...something purer...something sweeter...yes here's the
letter...N...KATYN...and not a moment too soon...time for the rubbing
alchohol and the bandages...and I can remove the tourniquet in two
minutes...but the odour...replaced...purged...with something
sharper...something shiny...something near...purer...cleaner...
heavier...and deadlier...like lead.
* * *
Vivian Chelmnickon was sitting in his office
one evening, drinking bad coffee and writing notes for an essay on Karl
Jaspers. As he wrote, as the volumes of
Scholastics,
Freudians, Wittigensians, Marxists, Voeglinites surrounded him in his
office
and isolated him from the vulgar world, he remembered.
He remembered being only slightly more than a
boy, hiding in the ruins of Warsaw in the last three months of the war,
going
out with his three companions only to scavenge for food, and spending
the rest
of the day (on average, fifteen hours) with nothing to do but hide in a
cold cramped
underground ruin with nothing but a copy of The City of God. There,
for three months, Chelmnickon would read St.
Augustine
fourteen times while trying to convince his companions that paper had
no
nutritional value whatsoever, and that the yellowing pages would make
even
poorer toilet paper. He remembered his
first meeting with Oliver Corpse, the blubbery boy who had already
gotten a
certain infamy at having gained thirty pounds after the Warsaw
uprising. Corpse
was not his dearest friend, for in the deepest experiences of
Chelmnickon's
life, he was not, could not have been there, but Oliver had been with
him the
longest and had never betrayed him. He
remembered the first day of his marriage that his wife was unable to go
to work
because she was completely drunk, he remembered the day in 1947 when
the old,
small, almost a hut, of his family's home had been replaced by the
first
building of large concrete the colour of, not death, but the dead, he
remembered the cold insults and cheap innuendos that his more cowardly
colleagues in the Warsaw Department of Philosophy gave him as the tide
turned
so very slowly from the days of August when the workers controlled the
streets
to the rise of the Moczarites; but most of all he remembered the
miracle.
It was near the end of 1967, a few months
before he would be expelled from his position and a couple more before
he would
be compelled to emigrate to All Souls. The
noose had been tightening ever since the return of Gomulka, and the
signposts
could be counted off with ludicrous ease: the
fate of Pasternak, the first Russian
"anti-Zionist" campaign, the General Secretary's clumsily veiled attack
on none other than Vivian Chelmnickon, Kuron's arrest, the banning of
Solzeheinitsyn's second novel, the arrest of Daniel and Sinyavsky, the
dismissal of Oliver from his psychiatry post, and his subsequent
emigration,
the Arab-Israel War. Looking
back Chelmnickon could see the
compromises that he had made, conscious or unconscious, and it made him
despise
the system, the Marxism he had taught, and the teacher who had taught
it even
more. So it was in this most
unpropitious atmosphere in November 1967, that a leading colonel in the
army,
Shurg, had decided that would he take graduate seminars at Warsaw. There were immediate problems, since Shurg
had not even finished high school, much less graduated from a
university of any
sort, that and the fact that he was asking to enter a course which had
started
several months earlier, made Chelmnickon and his colleagues distinctly
nervous.
So it was one day in November that Colonel Shrug, dressed in not quite
full uniform,
entered Chelmnickon's evening class in Marxist philosophies. The evening did not go well, the Colonel made
some boorish comments in not so good humor at Chelmnickon's comments
about
Stalin, and for the next few weeks he made Chelmnickon the unwanted
subject of
his attentions. These meetings, when
Shrug would meet Chelmnickon about three times a week on the university
campus,
were more serious. Chelmnickon was
indeed somewhat surprised that Shrug actually took the neoStalinist
propaganda
with sincere devotion, something that none of his colleagues ever did. He explained with patience and tact why
nobody in Poland
believed the party line that the Nazis had murdered the soldiers at
Katyn, that
everyone remembered the deportations, that contrary to what Shrug might
believe
atheism was most certainly not busting out all over Poland,
that the party papers were not really deserving of respect for their
meticulous
accuracy. Detailing these facts caused a
revelation for Shrug, which was a small miracle in itself, and
Chelmnickon gave
Shrug a few non-Marxist books. The first
ones, about Nietzsche, were not a success since Shrug crudely remarked
that if Nietzsche
was so smart he would not have ended up in a madhouse with syphilis. But slowly, over that winter Chelmnickon
introduced Shrug to Freud, to Maritain, to Simone Weil, to summaries of
Arendt
and other totalitarianists, and he spoke of the ironies of revolution,
of how
terms like liberalism and humanism were being purged of all real
content, of
the quest for social unity, for the need for universal myth, and for
the subtleties
and caution that one must go along with that, for the sense of
community that
had existed before the Enlightenment and for the limits of that
community, and
after three months of irony, dialectics, and contiguity Colonel Shrug
of the
Army of the People's Polish Republic stepped into the offices of the
Ministry
of Defense, announced that he was resigning his military commission,
abjured
all his positions in the party, declared that he was selling all his
possessions and giving them to the poor, or at least some worthy
charity,
pledged himself to a totally selfless life to the care of other people,
and
stated that, henceforthwith, he was going to become a Buddhist.
Having spent the past twenty-five years in the
constant company of Russians, Shrug was somewhat isolated from Poland's
problems and gave all his money to Chelmnickon under the misconception
that he
would know best how to dispose of it. Chelmnickon had enough problems
already
than having a large gift of money from an ex-colonel, so he promptly
gave it to
one of the more conservative lecturers who gave it to the deputy
minister of education
with the express proviso that it be given to a fund to help translate
great
works of literature into Polish. This
the deputy minister did so, taking only a 40% cut to give as a bribe
for his
mistress. Meanwhile,
Colonel Shrug, quickly finding that
he could not set up a Buddhist temple without money and few followers,
was kindly
directed to the Indian Embassy. There,
he discovered mediation, to the complete consternation of the entire
Embassy
staff. In order to carry out their
business
they had to hide the continually moaning convert first in the guest
bedroom,
then in the attic, then in the basement, then in the broken
watercooler, then
in the Embassy safe, then in the kitchen oven, and were now seriously
considering turning the oven on when one employee got the bright idea
of
smuggling him out of the country by diplomatic parcel.
By the end of the year Chelmnickon and his
wife had also "left" Poland,
to be greeted at Heathrow airport by delegates of the Polish emigre
community,
various Marxist historians, representatives of a dozen major
intellectual journals,
an assortment from the press (including a News of the World reporter
who
instantly commented what an ugly woman Mrs. Chelmnickon
was), various well-wishers, but not Oliver
Corpse, who two months
ago had started a charming, chaste love affair with a small Welsh poet,
and had
to be rushed to hospital because he had since then lost sixty pounds. His wife, Chelmnickon thought, had adapted to
the absence from the mother homeland and the entry into a new and alien
world,
with too much pleasure and relief. She
would never see her relatives again, or her friends (except for Oliver,
who
wasn't really a friend of hers), never see the city she had spent
almost all
her life in (except for the winter of 1944), almost never again read a
book in
Polish, hear Polish conversation, see Polish movies, listen to Polish
songs or
imbibe silly Polish sit-coms; yet the first years in London were the
happiest
in her life, and Chelmnickon could easily understand why this was the
case. To live in a country where only the
cabbies,
waiters and bellhops demanded bribes, and who never asked for more than
10%, to
live in a world where there were no censors, to live in a city of the
past and
not in a sea of vomit colored concrete, to live where the policeman
were all
ostentatiously marked and who didn't even carry weapons to boot, to
live where
the houses were so much larger and where there was so much more money
and so
much more to buy that at first she didn't know what to do with all
their
newfound wealth (she soon solved that problem), to live in a place
where the
condoms were cheap, durable, comfortable and plentiful, to live where
there was
too much irreverence and blasphemy and obscenity, and not too little,
to live,
so she said to her husband, in a country where one did not have to go
to church
as a sign of social protest (her attendance dropped alarmingly), to
live where
even the Communists complimented her husband and turned shamefully away
from
his gaze, where everyone considered her husband a genius and paid empty
compliments to her, the charming host.
There was, of course, the greater risk of
violent crime, but she was amazed at how easy it was to get lethal
weapons, and
when she accidentally maced a harmless Indian beggar, she was
astonished at how
sympathetically the police force treated her. There
was also the rain, something that Chelmnickon could
never really
stand, and it was one of the factors that dictated his moving to Ottawa,
upon Corpse's request years later. But
it was better than the Warsaw
pollution, and on one Saturday afternoon in May while in a London
downpour they were walking back to their apartment, soon to be replaced
by a
grand house near Oxford Campus, that his wife was seized by a fit of
euphoria. She dropped her umbrella, took
off her raincoat,
threw it and her sweater into the nearest large puddle and started
jumping and
dashing into the sewer drains, under the runoff from the roofs and into
the
splashes caused by driving taxis. She
took her raincoat and used it to scoop water at a helplessly protesting
and increasingly
angry Vivian, but then he saw his laughing, drenched wife, and she
briefly
looked fifteen years younger, as she begged and demanded him to make
love to
her right there. And so he did, and his
wife claimed that was the happiest moment of her entire life, though
all that
Chelmnickon got out of it were nightmares about being discovered by
Playboy
models who were actually ugly fat Polish secret agents in cunning
disguise, as
well as a bad, mildly life-threatening case of pneumonia.
Chelmnickon looked
up from his work at Jaspers
and seeing the small digital clock that was partially hidden by a
statue of the
Black Madonna that John Sienkewicz, M.P., had given him as a gift,
realized
that it was four in the morning. He
would have to get to sleep at no later than nine o'clock this evening,
but
rather than face the embarrassment of telling his wife how he had
systematically avoided her, decided to delay that inevitable
confrontation, and
take advantage instead of one of the rooms at the Philhellenon club. As he twisted his chair to retrieve another
volume of Jaspers works that was lying in the shelf above him right
behind his head,
he suddenly knew something.
"Ooo, what a nasty, horrible, unpleasant,
unlovey, unsilly, painey cut!"
"Don't worry, Ball. It's
not really a problem. See, I've already
got some bandages on. I'll just have a
cheese sandwich and a good
night's rest, and I'll be as good as new in the morning."
"Well, let me sing to you first.
Mary had a little lamb-little lamb-little
lamb. Mary had a little
lamb-bounce-bounce-bounce-bounce-bounce!"
It was a remembrance of something that could
only have occurred a few hours earlier. Chelmnickon
could not recognize the participants, though one very clearly looked
like a
large blue rubber ball. This was not the
first time these sudden flashes of knowledge had occurred to him. The first flash was at a cocktail party ten
years ago when he was being bored by some endlessly vain Don Juan and
he
suddenly realized that guilt had rendered the man completely impotent. An innumerable number of these revelations
had happened to him since then. None of
them possessed the slightest importance, the most typical being the
sudden
realization that his newsagent's favorite novelist was Irwin Shaw. More complex was the realization that a
theology student that he had passed in the hall had helped pay for his
education by writing pornographic novels that contained extremely
complex
allegories of Russian Orthodox dogma, which had been edited out by the
bored
publisher. Another time Chelmnickon
realized that a computer student had created a program that could
create up to
two and a half million erotic novels with appalling ease.
The first time he felt these thoughts, he
thought that his mind was playing impudent and cynical tricks on him,
but
slowly he came to the revelation that all of the mercury flashes were
completely true. But if true, what
purpose did they serve?
Two separate memories came to mind; the first
time he met his wife, while Stalin was still alive, in what could be
described,
though not really, as the University of Warsaw disco. In these anti-Sex
League
Discos, regulations set by vindictive non-Jewish Jews, who had won a
monopoly
on suffering, Chelmnickon listened to cheap propaganda songs that were
already beginning
to grate, some rather humorous, off-colour anti-imperialist skits, and
popular
songs bled white of Polish content, when he saw the woman who would
become his
wife. Around her neck were two
crucifixes; the first, hanging over her bosom was a typical red wooded
one with
a Byzantian Christ splayed upon it, though with a chain made of rainbow
colored
rosary beads. The second crucifix, which
she kept under her shirts and which she showed to Chelmnickon when he
noticed
its presence, was a "Galczynski Cross," named after Comrade Delta. It was made when the government was trying to
make anti-clericalism a fashion, and it consisted of a handsome young
man, in
whom Chelmnickon detected a resemblance to the beardless Christs that
had been
swamped by Byzantine iconography, copulating somewhat graphically with
a woman
who clasped her hand to the beam of the cross and wrapped her legs
around the
stem for dear life. While the first
cross would be worn for important religious holidays, for confession,
and for nothing
else, Chelmnickon never knew a time when she did not wear the second
one. She wore it every day of her marriage
and
everytime they made love, often in such positions that Chelmnickon's
chest was
gouged by the female figurine. This was
especially so on Good Friday when his wife became either a willing
victim of
"the curse" or became sexually insatiable, or both, and when she had
managed to drag Chelmnickon into the bedroom one Good Friday when they
were
still in Poland, Chelmnickon tried to argue that since this was the
second
holiest day of the year, and since, even granting enormous public
pressure that
had been forced on the state on the past, there might come a time when
the
government would not look kindly on university professors and party
members who
attended mass too many times, and since, in good conscience, they
really
shouldn't be having sex now or in any other time during Holy Week, and
since
the cross was named in the honor of a man, who, while undeniably
possessed of
sincere popularity from his fellow countrymen, had been more than a bit
of a toady
to the worst of the regime, shouldn't he, Vivian Chelmnickon, her
nominal lord,
and actual loving and very patient husband, be allowed to remove the
offending
cross from her... Whereupon Mrs. Chelmnickon gave her husband such a
powerful
blow that when he attended the Easter Monday reception with the
Minister of
Education who couldn't wait to tell him how poorly the Central
Committee
thought of latest book, the first thing that Oliver Corpse said to
Vivian,
right in front of the minister and his various sycophants, was "Oh
dear,
Vivian, what a large black eye. However
did you get it?"
The second memory was much later, in London. In the first days of exile he had always been
treated with respect, though as he moved away from Marxism, as his
always
existing Augustianism became more manifest, as he moved to a notably
anti-Marxist view, arguments and points of principle became louder and
more
defined. But after the publishing of his most famous work The Successes
and
Limits of Hegelian Analysis, his most mature Marxist opponents kept
their views
more to themselves, feeling no doubt that it would be improper and
petty to
criticize a man who had known too much about actually existing
socialism, and
they showed polite interest as his work began to a move to a "return to
religion," as the middlebrow columnists called it.
(A phrase which never failed to irritate
Chelmnickon; he was the holder of a degree from a prestigious
university from a
great civilized Catholic country, and as such he had supped long and
hard and
well at all the intellectual feasts this century could provide. As such
he had
read every "agnostic" "atheist" and "secular"
viewpoint and after finding much that was rewarding, ultimately judged
them
wanting. He was not some half-educated,
badly shaven Eastern Orthodox cretin peddling amazingly simple
solutions to
amazingly simpler right-wing periodicals.) But in the early days
everyone
treated him with respect and admiration. He
remembered one day in Oxford in March 1972, listening
to a student
from Derry talking about the coming Black Power revolution, the
infamies of
Zionism, and how the Catholic Proletariat in Ulster were struggling on
Classical Marxist Lines for a United Ireland. And just after the young
man had
made some dimwitted comment on Angela Davis, he turned to Chelmnickon
and said
"And of course, I've learned so much from your own books" and
presented him was a copy of The Ironies of Socialist Humanism to
autograph. Somewhat taken aback by this
unexpected irony
Chelmnickon clumsily did so. But later when he and his wife were
leaving the
campus that afternoon, and another Catholic student from Derry, this
time a
rather silly young brunette, entangled Chelmnickon in the same stupid
conservation, made the same idiotic comment about Angela Davis, and
presented
the same book for Chelmnickon to autograph, he bluntly refused and said
that
the young woman was a stupid, thoughtless, fashionable fool and before
he
autographed anything she should read a lot more before she opened her
mouth
again.
A year and a half later Chelmnickon would
again meet the young woman. It
was in the worst downpour Oxford
has seen for years, Oliver had begun his first visits to Canada
that would eventually lead him to emigrate there, and Mrs. Chelmnickon
was out
of the house, when Vivian heard the buzzer ring and then a sharp scream. He opened the door and the young Catholic
fell onto the rug, then got up and limped over to the chesterfield, and
once
there gave an abrupt cry. For the next
two minutes it was as if she was in a fit, before she lolled herself on
to the
couch.
It was venereal disease; she said it was
syphilis, but when she pulled up her skirt and he saw the black
putrefying
patches of flesh that had almost reached her knees he realized it was
much
worse. She said it was even worse under
her panties, but Chelmnickon had no curiosity to look.
The
young woman told him that her lover, a Protestant, was dead, murdered
by the
UDA, the IRA would kneecap her for being a whore ("and for other
reasons"),
she couldn't dream of telling her parents, so instead she went to the
man who
had been the first to call her what she really was, a vulgar slut.
"That's not what I said," but then
she started having her fits of pain again, and he moved to the
telephone. Because of the storm, however,
there were
intermittent power shortages affecting the lines, and he realized that
he would
have to spend a couple of hours at least with this hysterical woman. Thinking that if she was swallowing something
she wouldn't be screaming, Chelmnickon asked her if she wanted a drink. She asked for Cream Soda, which he did not
have, so he improvised by taking some cooking sherry and dumping three
tablespoons of sugar in it. He gave it
to her and she sipped it peacefully.
"Do you think," she asked "that
the Lord would cure me, if I made a vow of chastity?"
"God does not accept bribes." said
Chelmnickon who returned to trying to get a doctor.
After about twenty minutes of this she spoke
to him again:
"If I made a vow of chastity, and
promised that I would enter a monastery and never come out, would you
forgive
me?"
Chelmnickon thought about this and replied
"If you were that desperate I suppose I'd have to."
He then went back to the telephone and managed
to get someone to come to the Chelmnickon house. After
he put the phone down the young girl started
screaming again in palpable agony. In a desperate desire to stop her
screams he
asked her if there was anything he could do.
"When I was child, my mother sometimes
rubbed baby powder on where I hurt myself."
The Chelmnickons had no baby powder, of
course, so he tried some baking soda instead and, averting his eyes,
spilled it
generously on her maggot ridden calves. Shortly
thereafter an ambulance arrived, and when the orderly examined her
before
taking her away Chelmnickon was stunned at how the disease had receded. In three days an expert on venereal diseases
examined
her and found her completely cured, and discharged her.
The specialist wanted to examine the case
more closely, but the girl had already entered a monastery and
Chelmnickon had
no interest in telling his wife that he had let a woman into the house
in her
absence. Nobody, not even Oliver, would
know about this second miracle.
Chelmnickon blinked and realized where he was. He reached out for the digital clock, but in
his drowsiness he knocked it off his desk. As
he awkwardly tried to lean over his desk to retrieve
it, the
telephone rang. As
he picked up the receiver he realized, he
knew what the message would be that Senator Pierre Veniot, leading
representative of Manitoba's francophones, for sixteen years a member
of
Parliament for Sainte Boniface, for nine years a holder of various
petty
positions in Liberal cabinets; that Senator Veniot, who, along with
fellow
member John Seinkewicz, MP, had sponsored Chelmnickon for membership in
the
Philhellenon club, who had tried to get Chelmnickon awarded the Order
of Canada
and nearly succeeded and was about to personally announce the imminent
honor to
the press until some bureaucrat realized that Chelmnickon still held a
British
passport and had no Canadian citizenship whatsoever, that Senator
Veniot had
been found, dead, at the bottom of one of the elevator shafts of the
Castlereagh Hotel, with a suspicious stain on his spectacles.
* * *
In a burst of anger, I throw The
Handmaid's
Tale across the room where it hits the latest book by Germaine Greer on
the top
of the bookcase. It has not been an easy day. When
I went to get groceries today, there was this strange woman, with
this raving French accent who kept following me, and said that the
niggers
should be all be sent back to Africa, that all
the male
niggers should be castrated, and all the female ones sterilized, and
that all
the pimps and whores should be purged in acid, and all the children
should have
their large radios and their videogames taken away from, no matter how
much
they cried and cried and cried, and even if they held their breath and
turned
purple, or muddish, considering their skin colour, no, all the games
and all
the radios had to go away. It would have
been even more embarrassing had there actually been any black people in
the
store, but there were some Indians (from India)
who thought she was referring to them. Someone
got security and they caught up to her while she was following me down
the
pickles aisle. She said she hadn't meant
anything against the Indians, that they were a cultured and civilized
race and
they could go anywhere they wished, that they could turn her house in a
Hindu
mosque if they so wished, and indeed she promptly broadcasted that
offer across
the supermarket for all to hear, though if they did so they would have
to give
lectures on St. Thomas Aquinas. But
about the "niggers," she said they just had to go.
Perhaps they didn't all have to go back to Africa. Perhaps they could be given a lot of money to
go to Brazil,
where they could get nice tans. Or they
could go the West Indies, or even the East
Indies, or perhaps we could drop them on Saddam Hussein
when he
wasn't looking, or best of all, because it was such a squalid and
corrupt and
depressing, and worst of all, Eastern Orthodox country, Romania
could be stuffed like sardines with niggers. Of
course the men would be given a copy of The Imitation
of Christ and
the women Pascal's Pensees before leaving, but their immoral way of
life was
going to attract a plague of gryphens, so they just had to go. As she was bundled out of the building by
security she waved to me and said "It was nice to talk to you. Goodbye
Ms.
Wilentz."
"What did you just say?" I said
startled.
"I said goodbye, Vanessa Wilentz.
That is your name, is it not?"
"Yes, but how could you know it? I've
never met you before in my life." But before I could say anything she
had
already spotted that annoying prat Adrian Verrall across the parking
lot and
rushed over to him to share her crackpot views. It's
unnerving, to say the least, to be in the presence of
a madwoman,
and what made it even more disturbing was that while I was moving my
cart to
the check-out counter I heard the sound of soft singing somewhere, as
well as a
regular bouncing sound. Unnerving, as I said, and the letters and
Peter's visit
made everything more disturbing.
The first letters were ludicrously short and
formal: "To M.Wilentz: I take the opportunity to utilize penmanship to
declare myself to yourself as ANONYMOUS." "To V.N. Wilentz: my last
letter, while possessing the admirable and always, within reasonable
limits,
desirable virtues of brevity, tactiturness and directness, was perhaps
(though
you may have a different opinion and you would not be foolish to have
that
opinion) a trifle vague. To this I can
only state a perfunctory statement of apologies and declare myself
ANONYMOUS." "To V.N. Wilentz: RE: the weather. It's a nice day today. Sincerely, ANONYMOUS." "To the
occupant who isn't Elizabeth Concrete, daughter of Alice Raymond
Concrete MP: Hello,
sincerely ANONYMOUS (P.S. Elizabeth Concrete, to whom this letter is
not being
sent to, is also the daughter of Hector Concrete, the distinguished
mortician.)
Naturally, Elizabeth
learned about the letters and teased me in a good natured way, saying
the
letters were obviously a declaration of love by a secret admirer. She said this to Charles, her boyfriend, and
claimed it to be perfectly hilarious, that Vanessa Wilentz, a
woman-who-did-not-tolerate-fools-gladly-and-had-kicked-enough-shins-to-prove-it,
who had said to her first boyfriend "I didn't really expect an orgasm,
but
it's a bit much to be regaled with cheap cliches afterwards" should
have a
secret admirer. Perfectly priceless.
I didn't think so. The
thought that someone is paying attention
to me from afar, watching me in secret, can only make me nervous. One doesn't have to be a "Jewish
lesbo," as Adrian Verrall said when he didn't know I was listening at a
party and then later tried to pick me up and got kicked hard in the
shins for
his pains. It's not as if the letters
were obviously threatening, it's perfectly understandable that Elizabeth
should find their ludicrous convolution, prolix prose, and almost
touchingly
chaste sentiments a point of amusement, but all the same I had better
contact
my uncle in the next few days...or why not just this afternoon and ask
for his advice. I mean it's not as if my
uncle was a better
human being than my parents, or even better than my brother, but I
don't want
centuries old matchmaking tips, I just want to know.
What goes through this man's (or is it a
woman's) mind? The fifth letter just sort of stutters to a halt: To the
person
who lives in Chatterdon Passy who isn't the Siamese family on the floor
above,
or the young handsome physics student on the floor below, or the empty
apartment right beside them, or the homosexual couple on the other
side, or the
strange, big-breasted philosophy student opposite, and who isn't the
offspring
of Alice Raymond and Hector Concrete: oh-bother-I've botched
it-nevermind. Sincerely ANONYMOUS." The
sixth letter
is more personal: "To Miss Vanessa: There are rumours, not that I take
rumours seriously, or as a matter of course, listen to them, though I
am not
one of those people who condemn the very concept and concaetanation of
rumours
out of hand, but am willing to use them in a proper and pragmatic way,
but as
it is arguably necessary to repeat, though perhaps this clause and the
preceding one are arguably redundant and irrelevant, there are rumours,
that
there are certain aspects, certain phenomena, certain happenstance,
certain
unique situations, certain idiosyncrasies, that were they were to be
measured
by certain standards, such as the classical ones, purged of vulgar,
petty and fashionable
Pelagian and Secular influences, would be revealed, would instead stand
revealed as being above average, statistically speaking, in terms of
certain
things which ancient, medieval and some, though not nearly enough, of
the
modern civilizations consider to be the worthy parts of this life; and
to wit,
it would appear, there would be some evidence, perhaps even strong
evidence,
though it would be rash to conclude without further examination, that
these
certain aspects, certain phenomena, certain happenstance, certain
unique situations,
certain idiosyncrasies, are in someway correlated, in a truly
ontological
fashion, with certain necessarily existing phenomenon, the most
important of
which, if I may be so bold to make such an assumption without proper
evidence
and without even the process of a full and complete examination, the
most
important of which is the current vital existence of the object of this
communicative memorandum. It could even
be specified, if one were to do so, that one of these phenomenon,
choosing this
one above all others for merely the most arbitrary and least important
reasons,
can be said to be analogous, in a bold, flattering way, even identical,
with
the process and cumulative product of a certain sense-perception, that
is to
say the object in the epistle can be claimed to be identical with the
most
potent sense-production of the reproductive organs of a small plant
which, notwithstanding
its small size, can be said to have notable, even memorable colours,
and that
this plant has been noticeably visited by classes, orders, families,
genuses,
species, subspecies, reproductively isolated regional categories, and
dare it
be said actual individual members of the wasp and bee platonic type,
and that
such small plant can even be identified, classified, systematized, and
that the
object of the letter can be said, without fear or favour, to be
strongly
resembling, to cause strong connotative reactions, to be absurdly
identical to
the most attractive parts (based on true Scholastic and Aesthetic
standards) of
this flower, to wit, the Chrysanthemum." Sincerely, Anonymous.
Sweet smelling indeed. Everyone
knows about the nasty little smell that's
always hanging around me and just in case I forgot Peter happened to
come by
yesterday on one of his rare visits. He
came to Chatterdon Passy, smelling, as always, of turpentine, creosote,
lye,
quicklime, lavender, vitriol, bleach and photocopier fluid, and
following him
was his secretary from the accounting firm, Montserrat,
pumping the air full of paraquat.
"That's your brother? He's old enough to
be your father."
"That's not quite fair. He's
only eighteen years older than me."
Peter Wilentz had never smiled in my presence,
nor, as far as I could know, in our parents' presence.
He took one look at Elizabeth
and said nothing, but his unchanging expression conveyed one thought:
typical. Peter Wilentz, a symphony in
black and
repression, who had wore nothing but a black suit, ostentatiously high
collar,
black gloves and smart black hat for every year I had known him since I
was
four, when, one year at Purim he still wore the same clothes, but had
managed
to seriously hurt himself when setting the tables for me, him, our
father Franz
Wilentz, our mother, Rebekah Wilentz, and the sixteen other, always
empty,
never used places settings that our parents had set every morning and
every
night of their lives from Peter Wilentz's second birthday until my
fifteenth. On that Purim Peter was setting
the knives,
grumbling as he did so, and had somehow managed to not pay attention to
what he
was doing, fell, cut himself, and his mother had to roll up his sleeve
to
examine the wound, and for the first, and last, time Vanessa got to see
the
dove colored arm of her brother, only briefly stained by that extremely
paled
red. He never forgave me for what I saw.
"I suppose," he said with infinite
contempt as Montserrat's pumping filled the air
with a
slow asthmatic wheeze, "that you are still taking literary
criticism?"
"Yes, I've already received my masters
and..."
"And what does that degraded creature
over there do?" referring to Elizabeth,
whose head who stuck in the refrigerator looking for something to eat. "Am I to presume that she too, takes
literary studies?"
"Yes, and psychology as well..."
"No doubt. How
dreadfully predictable. Have you not taken
a single philosophy
course?"
"Well, there is a
sort of dual English-philosophy
course that I'm taking right now. It's
being taught by Pr. Vivian Chelm..."
"I could not care less. Do
you have heard any news about our dear cousin?"
He was referring to Natasha Wilentz, the
daughter of our uncle. Strictly speaking
he could have been referring to the twelve children of our Aunt Sarah
in Israel,
but he could not care less about them. "I
haven't heard any news since her divorce from that French doctor."
"Ttth. Really, my
dear sister, I already know it as a fact that
she has since
remarried Giles Seinkiwicz, but nothing has been heard of her since. My poor pathetic sibling, you are obviously
aware of how much your scent fills me with loathing, such that the
presence of
poor Montserrat here is absolutely necessary
for my
composure. When I look back at the
absolute
uxoriousness of our dear father, and when I consider the pettiness of
the aim
that he and our mother made to be their life's work, I can only shudder
at the
result. And when it is realized that our
parents were patently unsuccessful in achieving their goal, the easiest
of
achievements, my contempt for them grows exponentially.
Now if neither you, nor our dear parents, nor
our wretchedly whining aunt can provide any information about the one
member of
our family with any charm or grace, I will have to cut my connection
with you
entirely, especially because it is our parents' anniversary tomorrow.
Oh, one
more thing. I present to you, a card
from the Alekhine Turpentine Consortium, granting you the opportunity
of taking
thirteen turpentine baths to remove you of your foul odour. I would grant the same gift to our parents
but they would have to be permanently pickled before it did the
slightest bit
of good."
"My friends do not mind my odour, or any
other part of my presence (Well, at least when I'm not kicking them in
the
shins.) They do not go on and on and on about how I smell, because
undoubtedly
they can't tell the difference."
"Actually my dear sister they undoubtedly
can. But because they are not Jewish
they are too polite to comment. Also,
because they are not accountants, your friends are all very stupid, and
they
have probably done irreparable damage to their olfactory system by
sniffing
cocaine. However, as a Jew, and your
brother, I can honestly say that both you and our parents are smelly,
stupid
people not worth wasting my time. Montserrat?"
"Yes, sir?"
"We're leaving. Squeeze
five pumps directly into my sister's
face before we go."
So its fairly obvious that no-one has ever
compared me to a chrysanthemum. But that
wasn't the only mistake that my secret admirer made.
For a start I do not have a handsome physics student
in the apartment below mine. There is a
female student who for some reason has cut her hair absurdly short,
wears only
grey-purple Alekhine suits, has padded her chest with the complete
monographs
of Werner Heisenberg, and her britches with a mousetrap, and has had
her name
changed by deep poll to Lucian Rudman. She
drinks charcoal and milk of magnesia to lower her voice, uses rouge and
lipstick to make her hands look rougher, stuffs the boxes up her
sleeves to
make her look more muscular, and spends all her time hanging around
with Adrian
Verrall. She's actually very good at it,
apparently she's convinced four of her teachers that she's really a
man, though
come to think of it Professor Chelmnickon wasn't fooled for an instant.
There are two woman in the floor above me. One of them could be Asiatic enough to be
Thai, though I think she's the maid. But
the other one's a white woman, slightly older than me, with a loud Ottawa
accent. I hear enough of their muttering
upstairs to guess that the mistress can't speak a word of Thai, and I
strongly
suspect she's never been in the country. Yet
she has a genuine bonafide Thai passport, just as a
few months
earlier she had a real Syrian passport, and a few months before that a
real
Rumanian one as well. And before that
she had one from Sierra Leone,
one from Peru,
one from Finland,
one from the principality of Andorra,
and even one from the Palestine
Republic,
but I think she threw that away when she learned that Canada
didn't recognize the PLO. She is also a
Canadian citizen, and as far as I know can only speak English. I can only think of one possible reason why
she should go around with a Thai passport. Apparently
she likes the apartment moist, full of dirt,
and sprinkled
with fertilizer so she can grow marigolds in the carpet.
I know that, because her gardening causes so
many holes in the roof that one night the fertilizer dripped on
Elizabeth and
Charles while they were making love in the bedroom. Every month when
the
landlord comes for the rent and complains about what she's doing to the
floor
Roda Ellen van P---- gives him a batch of marigolds to ward him off,
and when
that doesn't work she immediately calls up the Thai embassy, squawks at
some
poor fool over the phone that if he doesn't come immediately and
protect her
rights as a Thai citizen she will scream blue murder to the opposition
and to
the former communists about the bribes, the insider trading on the Hong
Kong stock exchange, and about the suspiciously large
number of
brothels near the house of the minister of Civilian and Democratic
development,
who is a well fed and well-fated colonel who has never fought anything
more
dangerous than a protest demonstration of eight year old Catholic girls
whose
lunch money was cut for reasons of financial restraint and monetarist
principle, and then directly deposited into the Minister of Justice's
swiss
bank account, with a gratuity for three great Von Hayekian economists. Naturally the assistant from the Thai embassy
came around, got promptly swatted on the head by van P--- for calling
it to
"the Thai embassy" when Siam
is the real and more inclusive name for the country, tried to have sex
with the
Siamese maid with whom he wants to marry, was swatted on the head with
the
complete works of Walter Gropius and then firmly directed to the
landlord. There a schedule of rent,
marigolds, assorted
other flowers, bribes and gratuities and Thai whores are agreed upon by
landlord and civil servant. The landlord demanded for his personal
pleasure six
whores a month. The embassy official
offered precisely none a year. They
worked out a compromise, where the landlord would get no whores for the
next seven
months, and I can tell from what's going on overhead the embassy
official is
about to make the grand concession of no whores for only the next ten
months.
Occasionally I get the suspicion that the
reason that R.E.van P---- is planting marigolds in the carpet and
placing them
in special saline solutions in her bathtub (which is not the smell that
Peter
complains about) is that she can listen to me and Elizabeth through the
holes. Certainly that's the suspicion of
Aquilla
Rogers, the aforementioned big breasted philosophy student in the
apartment
across, who regales the two of us with her opinions, looks rather
moonily at
Charles whenever he comes by, and circulates a petition for getting rid
of van
P---- and in particular her Siamese maid. "She's
a good sort," said Elizabeth
a few days ago, "what she really needs is a good man to cheer her
up." "Fortunately," said van P----, who with the maid was
planting a few obligatory tulips seeds above us, "a good man is hard to
find." And drops of dirty chlorine fell through the holes in the
ceiling,
staining Elizabeth's books.
The seventh letter came yesterday: "To
the person who lives under R.D. van P---- who isn't etc: Doesn't the
office of
the Deputy Minister of the department of Transport, an intriguing,
mysterious,
unusual, and arguably even, (though this may be a bold and unsupported
assertion), romantic? Sincerely, extremely sorry for the trouble:
ANONYMOUS."
I showed it to Elizabeth
and to
Charles who had just stopped over here. Elizabeth
had to go to the bathroom while Charles moved over to comfort me. I noticed a blue-green button on his coat, not
the same colour as the other buttons, but somehow more in common with
them
because of that. It had a strange series
of lines and patterns on them, as Charles said Other people don't
really
understand you and Perhaps you could come to this party we're having
around the
School Paper, and an image appeared to my mind, an image of children,
hundreds
of them, ragged, laughing, singing hymns, holding crosses, wearing
medieval
clothing going out on a children's crusade, and they saw some Jewish
boys, very
small ones, only four or six, swimming in a pond by the road, and they
could
tell they were Jewish because, of course, they were circumcised, so the
crusaders said Jews, and the little boys said Jews, and the five and
four and
three year old girls, the girls who were so small all they could do
were carry
the pansies and crocuses, because they had left in late March and
couldn't find
any better flowers, because presenting flowers before the walls of Jerusalem
would do more than arrows and pitch, said Jews, and the leader of the
Crusade stopped
the march, and all the boys, even the smallest ones, gathered stones
while the
girls just sat and watched and then began to sing hymns, and when they
had
gathered enough they threw them at the Jewish boys, the girls kept
singing
hymns, and they kept throwing them, until the boys were dead, and they
kept
throwing them until they all got the chance to throw rocks into the
bloody
corpses, and Charles was saying This doesn't have to happen again, and
Things
can be better and I saw a world, a world of gardens, of large white and
black
houses, of nice adults named Gilbert, of large happy Labradors
and watercress sandwiches, and this world is So Much Nicer said
Charles, and I
saw Croquet games like Tenniel illustrations, the nice clean lettuce of
Prince
Edward Island Protestants, the clear sharp reds of turn of the century
building
blocks, the happy dances and ballets of little girls awash in white
lilac and
calico, of red ribbons and streaming blonde hair, almost as pure as Elizabeth's,
kites flying above in pleasantly clouded skies, a world of innocence,
of
children who have not already spilled blood upon them and on their
children, of
bicycle races and three-legged races, and county footraces and good
clean
sexuality, and Charles said Can you See them? can you see The Doves,
flying
from branch to branch, like dancing snowballs, and I see the doves and
they fly
in arcs above the children and I know what hateful, vicious beasts
doves are, because
my mother once criticized a poem I wrote about them, saying I should
use more
Jewish animals, and Charles says Aren't they lovely, and he looks right
at me
and I get so extremely angry that I brace myself and kick him as hard
in the
shins as I've ever done. At this point Elizabeth
got out of the bathroom and saw Charles limping around.
"Vanessa, what have you done? What just
came over you?"
That was more than twelve hours ago. After Charles regained his balance he and
Elizabeth left for the evening, and they have not come back yet. At about three
o'clock this morning I decided I couldn't sleep and decided
to read
one of Elizabeth's books,
but after
four hours of reading it, I got so annoyed that I tossed it against the
wall. I showered, got dressed, collected
my books,
my notes for Professor Chelmnickon, and the secret notes that keep
getting sent
to me, and I put them all in my oh-so-feminine briefcase, and I walked
out into
the gloomy November morning, in a special state of spiteful cynicism
that
followed me all the way to the philosophy department, as if I was under
the
shadow of leaden wings.
Next: The
Philhellenon Club
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