Georg Letham (16 page)

Headline: Night of Horror. Over Three Hundred Prisoners Burned Alive. Wire from New York. April 22. Late yesterday afternoon a conflagration broke out in the Ohio State Penitentiary in the city of Columbus, taking hundreds of prisoners locked in their cells by surprise. Terrible, he said. Please read more clearly! Or are you tired? Do you still have your algebra to do? Then don't let me keep you, I don't have to know everything. I continued: While some of the prisoners were reached in time through the prison yard, those housed in the old cell block were cut off by the flames. The guards and the prisoners . . . No, he interrupted, there's a part you left out. You're not that interested, I see! How had the old bastard guessed? And
how much
this extract from the annals of real life did interest me! I could not face losing the benevolence of the Almighty and the comfort of our Savior, I wanted to unite His divine mercy with some idea of reality. I wanted to be able to pray in good conscience! What was I to do? I went back to what I had skipped. Two hundred fifteen fatalities were announced at eight p.m. By nine p.m. the number had risen to three hundred five. We're going to
pray for their souls, said my father, looking at me ingenuously. He knelt on the fine soft carpet, took a small wooden triptych altarpiece from his desk (behind it was a small microscope), and set it down in front of him. I was standing next to it. I did not kneel. I read on: The guards and the prisoners joined forces in attempting to extinguish the flames on their own. The fire department arrived one half hour following the outbreak of the fire. However, it was too late to free the unfortunates who occupied the four old cell blocks. In large print: Machine Guns Turned on Rescuees. Several hundred prisoners being held for minor offenses who were housed in a large common dormitory and three thousand additional prisoners from blocks somewhat farther away were led into the prison yard and kept in check by machine guns. My voice faltered, I had to stop. I could see it all. My father pretended not to notice. Just horror stories all the time in the yellow press, as though there were nothing uplifting. Enough brutality! The world isn't such a vale of tears. Speaking of chess, would my dear son have any interest in a game? We can play blind, or I will, anyway. Because I don't want to strain my eyes unnecessarily.

What was I to do? I controlled myself. So fully equal was I to the task he set me that not only was I able to hold my own for an hour in a game against him, a strong player, but I even finished with a draw. I have forgotten how he rewarded me for this triumph. Had I demonstrated enough detachment? Had I looked reality in the eye? Who knows? But I do know one thing, that the following Sunday I did not accompany him and my mother to Mass. There had to be another series of toughening experiments before I was outwardly master of myself, before I could dissemble, put on a face as pious and submissive to God's will as his own.

In his school, human nature and methods of managing people were subjects of vital importance. Here again he used practical examples, not books, and he put all his cold intelligence and diabolical humor into it. He refused to classify people as good or evil, humane or inhumane (he had a justifiably low opinion of this distinction), or again as successful or unsuccessful, for there was no accurate way to measure success at any given time, nor yet as smart or stupid, for the two are inextricably combined in everyone, but rather asked me quite casually whether people might perhaps be classified as frogs or–rats. At school we had just gone through Homer's poem “The Battle of Frogs and Mice” (a highly contested work, by the way). He had no interest in mice, to him they were colorless as characters, but rats he knew, rats he hated from the bottom of his heart, they were vivid to him, for they had shown their colors. The rats were the sticky personalities, the frogs the slippery ones. The first the murderers, the second the swindlers. The first cold, the second hot. He said there were few pure exemplars of either type among human beings; one must therefore attempt to figure out how much frog and how much rat a person had in him. A rat, according to my father, was a monarchist, a rat was a fighter and killed at the drop of a hat. A rat likes food and drink and lets others live provided he has enough himself. He acknowledges masters and leaders but would rather play the master and the hero himself, loves ardently and respects family; he is courageous, does not spend much time hissing but sinks his teeth right in. But the frog is a republican, he favors equality for all. He prefers to do the safe thing, even if it provides a living only after a fashion. He is therefore unambitious, praises the Lord, but lies and dissembles night and day, deep down believing in nothing greater than his own froggy majesty. He deposits his spawn quietly and
doesn't know his children in a crowd. But he doesn't eat them, either, as rat fathers sometimes do. The rat thinks nothing of danger and faces it; the frog is always croaking his own name and jumps into the water at the moment of danger, saying it was too hot outside. The rat is bold and shows himself just as readily alone as in a crowd; the frog is shy and gives no thought to his fellows, shrugging his narrow shoulders. The frog has the more dangerous intellectual pride and would prefer to do nothing and have the stupid rat work for him, which the rat will not do. Unless he has to.

I don't know where he got these comparisons, nor can I judge how much of this was accurate. But for a time every visitor to the house came in for a diagnosis by my father, while he winked at me. Rats were supposed to have hot, dry hands and be unwilling to release the hand extended to them while they continued to look one brazenly in the eye. Frogs on the other hand would rather have their cold, moist mitts back even before they gave them, and looked away into a corner or toward the door.

It was best, said my father, who was the minister's left hand (the right one could never be allowed to know what it was doing), to be on good terms with both types of people. But if this should turn out to be impossible, you had to let a rat have it immediately, right on the head, and not even let him start taking too much for granted. You should deal with a frog by embroiling him in protracted negotiations, exploit him, tire him out, disparage him. If necessary, neutralize him by stabbing him in the back. True masters of their craft knew how to elicit the embrace reflex in these cold-blooded animals (imagine it's a woman, my father joked)–if you stroked a frog's little chest or belly with a finger at the right time of year (I saw the experiment done once), he would close his little paws
around your finger with the most heartfelt froggy passion. He took it, the human finger, for a female frog. But not one in a thousand was cut out for such tricks! The frog was usually tractable when he realized he had been seen through, whereas the rat, when his vile behavior had been found out, only responded with still greater effrontery.

I recount this as it now runs through my mind: on the dock, chained to a silent man. As wretched as my situation is, I have to laugh. My laughter shakes me and my handcuffs, and I wake the handsome lad next to me without meaning to. He gives a start and looks at me with eyes wide. He does not join in my quiet chortling. I so much like to imitate the laughs of other people. He probably has no need of that, he has enough gallows humor of his own and a merry disposition no matter how serious the situation . . . He was simply brought up differently and has a different nature.

The entire town, rising concentrically on a few hills, is now becoming a twilight tableau. The windows of a lighthouse on the north rim of the harbor glint now and again, unexpectedly, unpredictably, like heat lightning. Just reflections, not real beacons.

The sun is just at the horizon, so that great quantities of light are radiating eastward almost flat across the smooth ocean. The air is darkening rapidly. A bright expanse of crumpled fabric, gradually releasing its jumble of wrinkles and drinking in color, first at the center, then at the darker, sinking edges.

The brass instruments of the military band glitter distantly through the evening dust. The streetlights have come on. The band leader's baton waves: sharp eyes like mine can see it. The solid citizens, the officers,
and the townsfolk stroll peacefully beneath the palms to the accompaniment of an evening concert of classical and modern works. Now the band delivers a high, triumphant trumpet note. The citizenry applauds.

The wind is not carrying in our direction and only the strongest notes seem to stand out. They fly through the air like severed heads. Grisly, yet comical, like everything bona fide in life.

Wretched as we are, a good many here within the guard cordon are proud not to be like all the rest out there. We broke through the cordon once. That happy accident must have been quite uncommon. Otherwise would we be made to pay so dearly for it?

Satisfaction of the scientific impulse can also afford exceptional happiness, of which the good citizens and officers can have no notion. But, of course, that happiness is not to be had for nothing, either.

The cordon that surrounded us all day has suddenly opened in front of me, an avenue is cleared, and before I realize it I am down at the breakwater with my companion and some other brothers in affliction. Hands full of baggage, pushed this way and that by the guards, we board the pontoon, which is supposed to be uniformly laden. Why does almost everyone hold on to the stern, look back toward the harbor?

In the haste of departure, I was too distracted to glance about me. It was already dusk when we got to the pontoons–people were crowding us, low voices were heard, there were hands waving at us in the shadowy twilight, and other hands were seizing our coats. Could I have made anyone out in the darkness? My old father, for example? I would have recognized my brother. Could he have spent the day waiting for this moment of departure, unseen among the “loving hearts” on the dock? As unlikely as it is–I hug myself at the thought. Unlikely?
Impossible . . . Just the same . . . I follow the example of another of my companions and wave, wave back toward the shore of my homeland, with a (formerly) white handkerchief.

The pontoon pushes off. The rudder blades pitch heavily into the water. We move toward the
Mimosa
.

Gulls have accompanied our transport, screeching indignantly. The illuminated portholes of the
Mimosa
are close now. Lone officers in white can be seen aboard the ship. Lone, every man for himself. Prisoners in dirty brown crowded into a mass.

A Jacob's ladder snakes down from above, black and glistening, either steel or rope that has absorbed seawater. Rope would give a better hold.

The houses of the town are already low and distant, somewhere far away, at my feet. In a valley of the sea. The church bells ringing for evening Mass reach us only very faintly. Fishing boats slip by. The patched sails rustle as they catch the light breeze; the tautened lines creak. The boats heel over. A bearded young man at the side of a barge lets his hand trail in the water. His cigarette glows. He does not look at us.

We are now directly beneath the
Mimosa
. Above our heads a galley worker shakes food leavings out through a round porthole. He holds the white enameled bucket away from him to keep the refuse off the clean dark gray hull of the ship. The scraps pelt into the still water beside us, crusts of bread, chicken wings, empty tins, fruit and peelings. The gulls, which have been flying around us in ever tighter circles, plunge into the sloshing water covered with white foam, pecking about them with their bills. They fight, pushing each other away from the food, screeching and scolding like market women. They seize the morsels with one
slash of their bills and launch themselves into the air and away, or push them on the surface in order to eat them in peace at a safe distance. Their strong wings slap the water. Finally only a few champagne corks remain, floating in the light from the ship above.

I return to my father.

Among my father's subordinates at his office was a certain La Forest, whose brother was the aforementioned secular priest and religion teacher at our grammar school. I have forgotten what my father's reason was for casting odium upon this man. He, La Forest, must have shown himself superior to my father at some highly inopportune time. How, why, this did not become public knowledge. But my father detested him as he detested rats. Yet at the same time the man was virtually indispensable to him. He was a person of unusual abilities–energetic, discreet, and knowledgeable, possessed of indefatigable industriousness, unshakeable composure, very great and yet utterly controlled pride, and amply blessed with a dry sense of humor along with everything else, a combination rarely met with. He partook of neither rat nor frog. He was a man.

For a long time my father was unable to get rid of the rats in his old house. They defied all efforts to exterminate them, but he did not give up the fight. Later on I will recount the final chapter of this fight. At this point he had set himself another goal, to expel young La Forest (young–about thirty–for the high rank that he already held) from the office. And this was to be an opportunity to expose me, his son, already long familiar with the intrigues and horse trading of the Ministry, to one more example of practical anthropology and management
of people. Ill-gotten gains profit nothing. But for my father, to whom La Forest was too virtuous, even fairly gotten gains could prevent one from profiting.

The goal was to induce La Forest to realize that there would be no point in staying on in the office and take his leave on his own.

My father's first approach to this problem was to question La Forest's colleagues about him (pledging them to the strictest discretion) while he was away on vacation. My father said nothing about the reason for these inquiries; the intent could just as well have been to further La Forest's more rapid advancement as to oust him. But subaltern creatures have a sharp nose for the unexpressed wishes of their superiors; the office guessed what my father wanted, and, by the time La Forest returned from his pleasant days off, the sentiments of his staff had turned against him and he had difficulties to contend with in his department. Important documents were sent to the wrong places. Periodically collected statistics went undelivered, and when matters became urgent, the subordinates excused themselves by saying that they had been waiting for La Forest to give them a specific instruction and had not wanted to remind him.