Hopeful Monsters (28 page)

When Watson had gone I said to my mother 'I came across this girl in the north of England - '

My mother said 'I knew it!'

'What did you know?'

'I knew as soon as you came in that you were going to be horrible to me!'

I said 'This girl is nine or ten. She has difficulty speaking.'

My mother said 'You looked so pleased with yourself!' She laughed.

I thought - Freud did not get round to seeing that Oedipus might have wanted to give some sort of nasty shock to his mother?

I said 'This girl has been involved in an incestuous relationship with her father. It seems that this has affected her, and her ability to speak, traumatically. I wondered - this is your line of business - if you could help me do something about her.'

After a time my mother said 'Why do you think this?'

I said 'Why do I think what? That she has had some incestuous relationship with her father?'

My mother said 'My point is, what are you yourself doing when you are telling me this now?'

I thought - If my mother has been drinking, this is simply dull.

Or - If she goes on thinking I am talking about her and me, I can use this?

I said 'What do you mean, what am I doing when I am telling you this?'

She said 'It is not for me to tell you what you are doing.'

I said 'Look, I came here to talk to you about a nine-year-old girl who either is, or acts as if she is, deaf and dumb. You know special schools, don't you? You know people who are involved in child analysis?'

My mother said 'You want to rescue her from her terrible father - or mother?'

I said 'The trouble with psychoanalysis is that it is an evasion of responsibility. Analysts turn any request for help back on to a question of the motives of the person requesting it. I think this is perhaps what causes the real traumas in children: what Freud called the "death wish".'

My mother said 'I see.'

I said 'What if the people being analysed just turned all questions back on to the motives of the analyst? They would usually be too kind - or too sober.'

My mother said 'Get out.'

I said 'But these are facts, not fantasies. What are you going to do about facts?'

My mother said 'You want me to be responsible for a nine-year-old girl?'

I said 'She has to be got away from her father.'

She said 'Like you have to be got away from your mother.'

I said 'We all have to grow up. Will you help this girl?'

My mother said 'You find her attractive, do you, this nine-year-old girl?'

I said 'Did you find me attractive when I was ten?'

My mother said again 'Get out.'

As I went to the door I thought - But I have handled this badly. Then when I was going out of the room my mother called 'Come back!'

I thought - So now we are coming to something interesting in this experiment?

I said 'I'm sorry.'

She said 'What are you sorry about?'

I said 'I don't know. I wanted to say I'm sorry.'

She said 'Of course there is always something attractive about helplessness.' Then - 'But you do know now how to put the boot in, don't you!'

I had come back into the room. I thought - So here is the great goddess Deva, or Kali, dancing in her circle of fire. I said 'I just wanted to help this girl.'

My mother said 'All right I'll help you. What do you want me to do?'

I said 'Is there anything practical you can do about getting her into some special school? She is being looked after at the moment by nuns.'

My mother said 'Nuns are sometimes all right.'

I said 'Will you pay?'

She said 'Yes.'

I said 'Thank you.' Then - 'For God's sake, let's both get sloshed.'

I was standing in front of my mother. She took me by the hand and pulled me towards her. She said 'You stay away the whole summer: you come back and insult your old mother - '

I thought - Yes, this sort of thing -

I said ' - And then I turn up with a ten-year-old bride - '

She said 'You noticed I was tiddly?'

I said 'Yes.'

She said 'How brave of you to tell me!'

I said 'How brave of you to say, how brave of you to tell me - '

She said 'Ah, you see, you're quite fond of your old mother!'

There was a day when I went on my bicycle into the countryside. I was reminded of the time when, as a boy, I had gone to the ruined boathouse: there had been that itch, that pressure, like a demand to be put to the test: to suffer heroically for some phantom: to perform experiments on myself concerning the interactions between creation and destruction. This pressure was here again: I thought - So what do people do: start revolutions, win empires, sail round the globe: pull down roofs over their heads, break up orderliness within atoms. I went on the road which led to the ruined boathouse (one looks at one's childhood from time to time in order to imagine one might be free of it?) but I found that the huge country house had been demolished; there were tractors on the path going down to the lake and the boathouse; this part of my childhood was being erased. I thought - This pressure comes out somewhere, but where, if not in a ruined boathouse on a broken chair? I bicycled on to a country pub and got some beer and sat on a bench outside in the autumn

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sun. I thought - You mean, as we grow up, there are less harmless methods of destruction and creation? There were one or two couples in the bar of the pub; I had not paid much attention to them as I had ordered my beer. Now, looking through a window, I saw two men moving quickly and quietly to a door at the back of the bar: one of them was Mullen. The other was a short man with a round bald head wearing a brown suit. Mullen glanced in the direction of my window as he went through the door: it was as if he had seen me when I had been at the bar, and was now trying to avoid me. The other man had looked like a Russian. I thought - But of course, I would want to imagine he is a Russian! Then - But don't be taken in by this, he really might be a Russian. The two of them had gone out through the door at the back. I thought - Or are they just going to the gentlemen's lavatory, to do just whatever people like Mullen do in gentlemen's lavatories. I went through the garden round the side of the pub; there was a yard at the back, yes, with an outside lavatory; there was no one in it; there was the sound of a car starting up on the road. I was sure that Mullen must have seen me when I had ordered beer. I thought - Well, what if that other man really was a Russian, and they wanted to avoid me? You see what you want to see perhaps; but what do you know? I went round to the front of the pub. There was no car on the road. I thought - This is it, this pressure: other people than myself become involved in images, plans, of destruction and creation.

I had a letter from you, my beautiful German girl. There was the address in your neat, formal handwriting that was like something cut on stone.

Dear Max,

I could not have waited. I told you I had to return to the bus.

Your pastor did not tell me you were coming back. He suggested that you might be away some time.

The child was standing by the building when I arrived. She seemed to know who I meant when I asked for you. It seemed she had some connection with you. Yes, she spoke to me. She said she hoped to see you.

Yes, I remember how when we left each other at that castle you were going off with a child.

I did not enjoy my visit to England. I made my party come the whole way across England to see you.

I am thinking of joining the Communist Party. Here, with the

danger of the Nazis, one has to be either one thing or the other. It is not good trusting any longer to chance.

No, I do not suppose I will be coming again to England. Of course, I would love to see you if you come to Germany.

I am glad that this girl you are taking an interest in is being taken care of by your mother.

I think there has to be some commitment to the struggle. I do not understand what you seem to be interested in in England. You could have telephoned me in London if you had liked.

No, I do not know the painting you refer to of a closed door at the back of a courtyard.

With love from Eleanor

I thought - Oh God damn you, my beautiful German girl!

- I did telephone you in London! But you had gone. Then - It is true I might have telephoned earlier -

- But I will go to Germany and put things right!

At this time all these people circling round me - Peter Reece, Melvyn, Mullen, now even my beautiful German girl - seemed to want to commit themselves to something like suspending themselves from an unbreakable beam in the ceiling -

- While I, what was I, falling, falling, in empty space -

- Committing myself not to the struggle, but to chance?

There was a day not long after this time - it was just before Christmas; I had been getting somewhat depressed: I had been thinking - It is all very well, yes, to be on the look-out for this world that is said to be unobservable by the observer: the world of pure, but unknowable, chance and effect -

- But what is love; what is home? There must be something more than the suspension of disbelief, as it were, in a ruined boathouse -

There was a day when I was at Cambridge and I had been lying on my bed and becoming depressed like this, when there was a knock on my door and I said 'Come in' and someone put their head round the door whom for a second I did not recognise and then I saw that it was the girl called Suzy. She said 'Am I allowed to come in?' I said 'I don't know, are you?' She said 'I mean, what are the college rules?' I said 'Oh the college rules!' She had had her hair cut short. I said 'I was just thinking about you.' She said 'Were you?' I said 'Yes, but I didn't know it was you.' She said 'What were you thinking?'

I said 'I was wondering whether, if you came in now, we might possibly - '

She said 'Were you really?'

I said 'But if I had known it was you, you might not have come in/

She came and sat on the edge of my bed. She was very young and pretty and healthy-looking. She said 'Half the time I don't understand what you're saying. But never mind, you seem to do the trick.'

I thought - But what's the trick?

I said 'How's Paris?'

She said 'Very well, thank you.'

'Why aren't you there?'

'I'm here for Christmas, then I'm going back.'

I said 'And what's the trick?'

'My father still thinks I'm in love with you.'

'And aren't you?'

'I don't know.'

I thought I might say - Then let's find out.

She said 'But I think I have to do a bit more to convince my father.'

I said 'Then let's do the trick.'

While we undressed she said 'You don't sound very enthusiastic'

'I'm struck dumb.'

'That's unlike you.'

'I'm practising.'

We were like people about to go swimming from a pebbly beach. I thought - But of course, I hardly dare believe this.

She said 'I wanted to make love with someone before I went back to Paris.'

I said 'Why?'

She said 'Never mind.'

I said 'Then aren't I lucky.'

I thought - I mean, luck is when you have not imagined what you would or would not mind.

Afterwards she said 'That was nice. Thank you.'

I said 'Thank you too!'

She said 'Aren't you going to say you love me?'

'No.'

'Why not?'

'Perhaps I do, and it'll go away.'

That means you don't.'

4 No.'

•Why not?'

'I haven't said it.'

We lay like babies in a pram underneath the leaves, the shadows.

She said 'Have you got a girlfriend?'

4 Yes.'

'Do you love her?'

'Yes.'

'Does that mean you don't?'

'No.'

'But you said it.'

'I said it to you.'

Then I thought - Why don't I go to Paris and settle down with this lovely English girl? I am tired of all the tricky stuff: though of course if it were not for the tricky stuff I would not be with this lovely English girl -

She said 'Why not come to Paris?'

I said'Perhaps I will.'

'Who is your girlfriend?'

'She's German.'

'How often do you see her?'

'Not often.'

She said 'Well I'm not going to ask you why not.'

I thought - But this tricky stuff is all right, isn't it, in the end; I mean it is all right for us, my beautiful German girl?

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From Heidelberg I went to Berlin. I wanted to visit my mother. I had not been to Berlin for nearly two years. My mother was still an active member of the German Communist Party. I was thinking, as I told you, of joining the Communist Party myself. I wanted to be committed, all-of-a-piece. I did not want to be a particle with neither velocity nor location.

I said to my father 'I don't know when I'll see you again.'

He said 'You will give my love to your mother?'

I thought - My father has not seen my mother for - what? - four, five years? Yet there is a sense in which he does not feel separate from her.

When I arrived in Berlin there were processions of Nazis with torches in the streets. They were dead-faced, sweating men as if on their way to light some funeral pyre.

In the elections of the summer of 1932 the Nazis had become the largest single party in the Reichstag; it seemed inevitable that they would get power. No other party seemed to have the will to get power, yet still on the brink people dithered. Von Papen became Chancellor, then von Schleicher became Chancellor; what a jump in the dark it would be for Hitler to become Chancellor! People seemed to be standing on the edge of a cliff and closing their eyes and holding their noses.

Certainly the Communists did not seem to want to get power. They imagined that they had been told by Karl Marx that, before a true socialist society could be achieved, the death-throes of capitalism had to be gone through - this was an inevitability of history -and the death-throes of capitalism were represented by Fascism or Nazism. So the Nazis had to be accepted - in an 'objective' sense to be encouraged even - so that the proper historical way could be paved for the Communist revolution. In another sense, of course, the Nazis remained the enemies: in the 'concrete situation' they had to be fought in the streets. There was something slightly mad about Communists at this time; they were like archaic statues smiling and walking forwards, one side of the brain not quite letting the other know what is was doing. This was called, in the jargon, the 'dialectic'. As well as madness, of course, it could be seen as a form of esoteric knowledge like that at the heart of the philosopher's stone.

When I got to Berlin, the Communists were so reconciled to the prospect of the Nazis getting power that they were preparing to go underground. I did not know what to make of this: how can you

objectively be on your way to a true revolution if you are standing smiling on the edge of a grave and are waiting to be pushed in? It did not occur to me that people might feel at home in this sort of thing.

I found my mother at work in the building behind Alexander-platz: she was in her small office next door to where printing machinery clattered and whirred. Her desk was littered with papers, cigarette ash, dust, shavings from pencils. She was like a bird who has been trying to build a nest, and has failed.

I thought - I must have been a cuckoo in her small, fierce nest: but it was herself, and not me, that was pushed out.

She said 'Hullo.'

'Hullo.'

'Is that fancy dress you are wearing?'

'No, it's a skirt I bought when I was in England last year.'

'It makes you look like a child.'

I thought - You do not want me to look like a child? You do not want to hear about my visit to England last year?

I said 'I wondered if you had any work for me here.'

She said 'Work for you here?'

'For the Party.'

'You want to join the Party?'

'Yes.'

My mother had a cigarette which she was trying to keep alight on a small metal tray on her desk. She worked at it, puffing, then put it down carefully on the tray; then she coughed and watched it roll off on to her papers.

'We can't pay you, you know.'

'I know. I've got a little money from Father.'

'You've got money from your father?'

'Yes.'

My mother had got this habit, which I had not noticed in her before, of repeating what I had just said in the form of a question. I thought - This is what people do when they feel they have to protect themselves: when one side of the brain feels itself threatened by the other?

I said 'It doesn't matter if you haven't got work for me here. I can go and stay with Bruno, who is living in something called the Rosa Luxemburg Block.'

My mother said 'Bruno is living in the Rosa Luxemburg Block?'

My mother had a photograph of Rosa Luxemburg on her desk.

Rosa Luxemburg was the bright-eyed, slightly crooked-nosed lady that I had know as a child; she had come to our apartment, had held me to her breast, then had been hit on the head and thrown into a canal. In the photograph she was wearing one of her flowered hats. I wondered - Did one side of her head have time to know, suddenly, what the other was suffering?

My mother said 'You're seeing Bruno?'

I said'Yes.'

'You should be careful.'

'You know he's now a member of the Party?'

'We're having a certain amount of trouble with the people in that block.'

I thought I might say - You're having a certain amount of trouble with the people in that block?

My mother managed at that moment to catch the attention of a man who was passing in the passage with his arms full of papers: she spoke to him; he stood still, and as if long-suffering, with the papers in his arms. I thought - This is like those times in our apartment in Cranachstrasse when Helga the parlourmaid came into the dining-room and whatever of interest might be being said had to stop: it was as if servants were censors between one side of the brain and the other. Now instead of servants it seemed that my mother for this purpose had her cough, her cigarettes, and just any comrade in the passage who happened to be passing with his arms full of papers. After a time my mother stopped talking and the man went on.

Mother said 'Sorry - ?'

I said 'As a matter of fact Bruno has been doing some very interesting work for the Party: he has been involved in the editing of some of the early manuscripts of Karl Marx. Do you know about these early manuscripts of Karl Marx?'

My mother was chewing the inside of her lips and looking at the photograph of Rosa Luxemburg; it was as if she were carrying on a conversation with Rosa Luxemburg just inside her head.

I said 'These early manuscripts seem to be very interesting because they are saying that true socialism, or Communism, is not to do with argument, with reason, which is often playing with words, but with the work one does with one's hands. I mean a person has a sense of the aesthetic value of himself only in relation to the work that he is doing with his hands - '

My mother began coughing and her cigarette rolled off its tray

on to her papers: she began beating at her papers, and ash flew over her desk. I thought - To create a diversion, she might be a bird that would set fire to its nest.

I said 'And what is interesting is that this idea in Karl Marx is almost exactly the same as what Heidegger has been saying, who has now been taken up by the Nazis. Do you think it is because of this that - '

My mother said 'This is what Bruno has been telling you?'

I had been going to say - Is it because of this that we are not taking our opposition to the Nazis seriously? But I thought - If I say that I will be playing tricks with words.

The man with his arms full of papers came back along the passage. He paused by the door and looked in at my mother as if to see whether he was needed.

I said 'No, someone else told me that.'

My mother said 'Who?'

I said 'Franz.'

My mother pulled a piece of paper towards her and rummaged about on her desk; she looked through the door but the man with the papers had gone.

My mother said 'Franz is a Nazi.'

I said 'Apparently.'

'And Bruno's family are Social Fascists.'

'They're Social Democrats.'

'Socialists who are not with the Party can be called Social Fascists.'

I said 'They're Jews!'

I thought - But I must be careful here: though surely there is a way in which to talk of such things without tricks.

I remembered of course the argument that, in an 'objective' sense, Communists should feel more hostile to the Social Democrats than to the Nazis because Social Democrats appeared to be trying to delay the death-throes of capitalism and so were making it difficult for true Communism to arise from Fascism's ashes. I thought - But surely you can see the ugliness of the trick that calls left-wing Jews Social Fascists!

My mother seemed to be having a conversation inside her mouth with the photograph of Rosa Luxemburg.

I said 'But I don't see the point of this playing about with words. We may think it's inevitable that the Nazis will get power, all right;

but shouldn't we be fighting them for the sake of what will come after?'

My mother said 'Bruno says it is inevitable that the Nazis will get power?'

'No, I thought it was the kind of thing you were saying.'

'I never said it!'

'But you're preparing to go underground - '

'Do you know how many of our people have been killed in the streets?'

I thought - But either this conversation is mad, or is it in fact a good dialectical trick that one side of the Party's brain should not admit to the other that the Nazis should get power?

I said 'But surely it's important, on some level, to admit to yourself at least what you're doing; to give a hint perhaps to other people that you know - '

My mother said 'I don't know what you're talking about.'

I said 'I see.'

I thought - It may be that I am a child in all this: but what is this style that has no regard for a child -

My mother said 'Perhaps it would be useful, after all, to have someone in the Rosa Luxemburg Block. You can let me know what the people with Bruno are doing.'

I said 'Why, what are they doing?'

She said again, as if it were a phrase in which she had been rehearsed 'We're having a certain amount of trouble with the people in that block.'

I thought - You want me to be a spy?

I said 'You mean, you think there may be spies or traitors in that block?'

My mother said 'Have I said anything about spies and traitors?'

When I was out in the street I thought - Perhaps, after all, this is normal in politics: you have to make out you do not know what you are, so that when things go wrong it can be believed that you have not known what you were doing -

- Otherwise you could not bear it?

- But things will come round, in the end, on the curve of the universe; and they either will or will not hit you on the back of the head.

In the streets of Berlin there was something of the same atmosphere as there had been when I was a child: a sense of aftermath, of premonition, of things in suspension here and now. When I had

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been a child there had been the impression of enormous events round some corner: these had manifested themselves only perhaps when the soldiers going out through the Brandenburg Gate had turned and fired on the crowd. But now there were these lines of Nazis coming marching from around their corners: it was as if they were the urgent heralds, harbingers, of enormous events to be unveiled; they had none of the tricks or innocence of people who did not know what they were doing; with their sweating faces and flaming torches they were simply people out to light funeral pyres.

I thought - Or they are like long lines of shit, these Brownshirts, churning in someone's insides -

- Will not the inevitability of natural history mean that they will have to dump themselves as muck on the world outside?

That evening when I left my mother I made my way to the Rosa Luxemburg Block. This was a workers' tenement building now occupied mostly by left-wing students and intellectuals - 'intellectual' being a word to describe any Party member not of working-class origins. People gather together according to type at times of crisis, and it was true that in the summer there had been dozens, even hundreds of Party members killed in street fights with the Nazis. But people in the Rosa Luxemburg Block seemed to be far more conscious of their own danger than, for instance, the people in the building where my mother worked: they sheltered behind barricaded doors and shuttered windows. I wondered - Is this because as 'intellectuals' they are more frightened or more in the forefront of the street-fighting with the Nazis? Or is it just that it has traditionally been the role of intellectuals to be picked on by both sides as potential enemies or traitors; so indeed there might be reason for their apprehension of danger?

When I first arrived at the Block I was taken into a guardroom at the side of the barricaded front door: there was a girl sitting on a mattress on the floor cleaning a rifle; a man and a woman were keeping watch through slits in the boarded-up window. I was made to stand in the middle of the room while I was questioned by a man in a Trotsky-style cap: the others pretended not to notice I was there. I thought - But these people are like actors; they are acting what they have learned from films about people keeping watch through slits in the window; they have had to learn to act, because they are not working class.

The man with the cap said 'You are looking for Bruno?'

'Yes.'

'You have information that Bruno is here?'

I said 'I have a letter from Bruno. He suggested I might join him.'

I held out to the man in the cap a letter that I had had from Bruno when I had been with my father in Heidelberg. Before he took the letter the man looked as if for instructions at the girl who was sitting on a mattress on the floor cleaning the rifle. The girl did not look up. After a time the man took the letter.

I thought - It might have been a better shot, in a film, if the girl had leaned forwards in a disinterested manner and put a drop more oil on the rag with which she was cleaning the rifle.