Middle C (56 page)

Then why is—

Then why is his face still floating about the base of the dish, though it’s been emptied of soup and every other info?

 … puff and bray … puff and bray … puff and bray …

Professor Skizzen is only a memory. He is a disguise. His nose, his cheeks, his eyes, are made of a broth that others spoon into themselves. Hear that sound as they suck in bits of carrot and some peas. So I pass into their lives. I become them. I contrive what they shall see: me me not I, no not I. I guess you have the right to devour me, because you have made me possible: you picked me out of a basket, a mere folder, a sheaf of assertions; you saw fit to believe each lying page; you gave me a contract; you seasoned me like a stew; and you gobbled up much time in my life—committees, classes, study, civic service; you ate with your eyes closed. If I am a fake, so are you. If I am ignorant of some things, you are unaware of more. To you, a counterfeit is more acceptable than a real bill, the shade of a shade more important than the tree.

 … smirk … bluff … heat … wash …

You never liked Schoenberg. You play the piano as if your fingers were broken. You live with your mother. You read the wrong books.

Think of the hours I devoted to my other selves: how often I had to
dodge dangerous questions; commit to memory enlargements of one myth or other, rehearse sequences, qualities, effects; practice timing as though I were playing a concert, disguise my incompetence in that regard; pick a professorial wardrobe, choose a cap, grow a goatee; keep calm in the face of disclosure, which I cannot say I am doing very well right now …

 … cheat and bleat … bow and scrape … preen and prate …

Okay, fire Professor Skizzen, for he has deceived you; erase Joseph from your memory since he has surprised you; Joey will teach the class, meet alumni, attend meetings, earn the livelihood. I have no more “me.” I have my mother I must care for. You won’t find a trustworthier chap. She is the only
M
left in my life. When asked, I recommended to the Woodbine Literary Club the best books about opera, even though one of my colleagues, whose name I will protect better than he will mine, warned me that the club was but a coven of old hags. I talked to little clouds of high school students about coming to Whittlebauer College even though they would very likely be better off elsewhere. At committee meetings I nodded when it was hoped I would. I didn’t steal coffee cups from departmental offices, and I showed up for the stuffy lectures of dreary invitees; I made my bow before other notables and attended the performances of safely out-of-date plays. Oh, yes, and to chapel went I now and then, sober as the hymnal.

This is the way we smirk and sigh, lurk and spy, favor buy

this is the way we smile and lie

to prepare for the faculty meeting.

Oh dear, no, I can’t beg Palfrey to be kind. Joey must not soil himself with the academy’s hypocrisies. Your face, Prez, is not otherwise fat, but you have the jowls of a hound dog. Your handshake is an impersonation of a spit rag. You play with the emotions of widows. You constantly pretend to be concerned for the welfare of one, the forlorn status of another, and continually broadcast your love of the Lord, because that’s what you are paid to do. Why should I be singled out for scorn? I lie small-time. No door squeaks when I slide by. Whose life was damaged by my subterfuges? What harm did I do teaching music? Just a little art and less craft to enable my girls to pass a leisure moment of the day:
such as a bit of knitting, threading a needle, brushing watercolor flowers into bloom, rendering a dear old tune. Yes … yes … I taught mostly future’s ladies. Ditto your classes in French. It’s said you love sinners. My small sins were made for forgiveness. Like forgiving a twenty-nine-cent debt.

Here, in this place, Schoenberg could not have begun the least measure of a career. Here, no one minds if you prefer Delius, a man who caught syphilis in Florida where he tried to grow oranges, and with whose work Thomas Beecham insisted on waxing the public ear. Once, when I pretended to be a fan, one of my colleagues, whose name I shall protect better than he will mine, followed me into this absurdity like an antelope fleeing danger with his flock, grateful to believe I had finally given up on Maestro Twelve Tones, because, had I maintained my interest, the copycat would have had to sustain his … an unpleasantly taxing fate. Was not my Delius period a generous gesture?

You never liked Schoenberg.

My life has been full of generous gestures. I never put myself forward. I loved background better than Romeo did Juliet. My opinions, sirs, were used merely to warn trespassers away. To secure myself from quizzers and their quizzes. Even so, with my colleagues I was able to play touché.

To steal cheap seeds. How low to stoop.

I must say the college is a lousy landlord. It let that small mansion become a big shack. You bribed me with its formerly grand piano. My mother and I are not responsible for the mess you might find if you ever examined the premises, for your neglect encourages ours. I could give you a list, given a little time, of the ways in which it’s wanting, the repairs that need urgently to be made. I can’t afford to make them at the salary I’m paid.

Your mother had to garden with a screwdriver and a spoon.

And the piano is a bad joke. Keys are chipped. One is silent. The rest are out of tune. I think faculty should be allowed to take recordings home. The library doesn’t carry Jacques Barzun’s book on Hector Berlioz. In the winter, the damn steam radiators clang and clatter in the midst of my class listening to “Clair de Lune.” By the way, you don’t have David Oistrakh’s violin version.

You never liked Schoenberg.

I did so. At least two-thirds of me did. That’s more than most people.

You hate humanity. You are an opponent of man’s natural way of life. What have you finally to say?

I don’t know if beauty is still possible in this world.

41

It was not strictly kosher, but Professor Skizzen managed to run off thirty copies on the college Xerox machine of the following list he had, over years, composed. Although he was, himself, in no hurry to advertise the existence of the Inhumanity Museum, in case of death or injury he might change his mind and allow a few special friends and respected visitors limited access. All of his careful notes, literally hundreds, were on small, easily filed, but not easily copied, cards. Whenever he undertook to classify all the ways human beings have killed or injured one another, he felt dizzy from the impossibilities that faced him. If wars were human necessities or at least habits of long standing, how could he call them unnatural, inhuman, or basically unethical. Could the inevitable be immoral? It would be like saying it was wrong to have two arms.

A SELECTION OF NEWS ITEMS ON 2 × 5 CARDS

416 b.c. Athens besieges the island colony of Melos, an ally of Sparta, during the Peloponnesian War. Melos is chosen for its particular weakness and to prove to others the power of Athens. The Melians refuse to surrender because it would look bad on their résumé (they were a shame society) and result in slavery for their citizens. The Athenians decimate the population by killing the men and boys, taking the women into
service, and later repopulate the place with their own kind.

149–146 b.c. Weakened by its victory at Cannae during the Second Punic War, the Romans, who simply outlasted their foe, burned Carthaginian ships, the pride of the sea, in their own harbor, then murdered the men, raped the women, and rampaged each street. Fifty thousand were sold into slavery, although, with such a plentiful harvest, prices could not have been advantageous. Emptied of all contents, the city was razed and left in shards and shatters, but scholars (the pen exceeding the sword once again) waited until the nineteenth century to salt the very earth the city once stood on. It made for a better story. I can only agree.

339. Because, among the Jews and the Magi, the number of Assyrians was, in clear evidence, multiplying, a firman was issued (possibly called a fatwa now) that doubled their taxes. Mar Shimun, head of the Assyrian cities of Seleusa and Ctesiphon, refused to enforce this levy, so it was carried out by collectors of particular violence and brutality in the hope that the Christians would abjure their religion in order to escape taxation and mistreatment. Just in case they did not, on the morning of Good Friday, 339, he had Shimun arrested for treason, all Assyrian vessels seized by the government, priests and ministers put to the sword, and churches torn from their moorings in the earth.

1200 et passim. Genghis Khan carried out mass murders in many of the cities he conquered, Baghdad, Samarkand, Urgench, Vladimir, and Kiev among them. Afterward, he appeared in several inferior films I have been forced by my mother to see.

1850–1890. Having infected the natives of America with smallpox, pushed them from their hunting grounds, thrashed them thoroughly in small engagements over many years, broken numerous treaties and agreements, the colonists resorted to death marches and emaciating dislocations over a period of nearly fifty years (the Trail of Tears that followed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 rid us of four thousand). Feeling a bit ashamed about collecting more scalps than the barbaric tribesmen, the white man made amends with bad booze, attic rugs, and baby rattles. The final indignity, in our present age, is permission we have given to the tribes to oversee and profit from tawdry gambling casinos erected on their reservations. Liquor and various drugs are available at cut rates, especially near borders. Speaking of borders, Dominican dictator Trujillo ordered all cattle-rustling Haitians, living close to the republic’s legal edges, be eliminated. Twenty to thirty thousand were—more than the number of cattle. Haitians speak a sort of French, Dominicans a pretty good Spanish, but the nationalities may otherwise be indistinguishable. The test chosen by their murderers was to require their suspect to identify a sprig of parsley: what is this? Instead of our present choice of curly or flat, Haitians would either say
persil
or
pèsi
instead of the Dominican
perejil
. Nazis were no doubt similarly inspired to inspect their prey for circumcisions. Australians treated their indigenous populations rather as Americans did. They began with measles and smallpox, concluded with sabering, burning, and shooting. Tasmanian aborigines were nearly exterminated, but, like the buffalo, have since made a comeback, so all is well. Some claim our pacification program in the Philippines (1902–13), using cholera to do most of the damage, killed more than a million Filipinos, some of whom were actually dissidents. Nazis were no doubt
similarly inspired by these advances in germ warfare to encourage families of malarial mosquitoes to set up shop in the Pontine Marshes where they produced ninety-eight thousand cases in only two years. Nazis were no doubt similarly inspired by their own example in German South-West Africa. They gave to history its first case, it is claimed, of state-organized genocide, led by a man perfectly named for it—General Lothar von Trotha. Two ethnic groups made up the colony’s population. The general removed 80 percent of one but scarcely 50 percent of the other. [Required two cards]

1639–1651. Cromwell’s army invaded Ireland to deny Royalists their farms and to put many of these properties in Protestant hands, at the same time preventing them from serving as a base for the return of the Crown to England. Colonization was indeed a British habit. When the French explored the New World they built outposts to facilitate trade; when the Spanish did so, after the initial slaughter, they settled in among the natives, often marrying them; but when the British arrived they drove the Indians away and built houses for themselves and handsome sideboards for their manners. This was not a new strategy but a successful one, except in Ireland’s case. Nazis were no doubt similarly inspired to repopulate Poland, as the Israelis to enlarge Zion. The Irish were encouraged to remain bitter by British behavior during the potato famine of 1845–49. The Brits outpaid the Irish for their own crop, vesseled the potatoes away, and left the people to starve. Stupid, stubborn, slippery: the British do not own these qualities, but in England’s case, they built an empire with them. The Irish moved to big-city America where they became cops. In their spare time, some rioted with German immigrants over saloon hours.

1793–1796. A part of France called Vendée was a persistent arena of religious conflict. It is difficult to separate the killing and maiming that takes place during a war with the sort that qualifies for the Inhumanity Museum. They didn’t want to pay taxes. (I’ve heard that before.) This time the tax was to be paid by their church. Economics and religion will always set a place blazing. At first, supporters of the church and Crown prevailed, the insurgency seemed on the point of success; but the new bloodthirsty Republican state sent a huge army to “pacify” the region by killing most of the people in it. Until these ruffians arrived, there was not enough “inhumanity” to qualify it for membership. Women and children, houses and municipal buildings, flags and symbols, were all equally eradicated. Beliefs had sharp queries run through them, but beliefs, however stupid or foolish or bizarre, have no more material a body than God himself. They cannot be so easily destroyed, and always outlive their believers, if only in quaint volumes and old tomes. There they lie until some half-wit gives them animation.

What was truly shocking about his collection was not how many humans were reported murdered, but how many murderers were humans. Some of their victims were shot by revolvers in the safety of the home, others were run over by cars, still others knifed when knives were the instruments of choice, or poisoned by fouled water because feces were as popular as mustard. A special salute was due those who were allowed to lie down in the rows of their infertile fields and left to starve. How about the accommodating who hung themselves in closets—quite a few—both victim and victor, hardly fair. Rope should be forbidden, the pistol people felt, in order to prevent the advantage hanging has, but bullets can be bitten, even chewed, when triggered by a resolute finger. Walk into a pond with rocks in your pocket. It is a laundered death. Best of all, a few pills in a water glass can be counted on to shroud consciousness with a milky cloud. You die of kindness. Millions of us seem to find
ordinary life so foul we must soften our sorrows with drugs or drink or acquisition, perhaps Madame Mieux’s pillows were her condolences, kept nearby like pets whose silk purrs when stroked, or her stashes of grass that comfort when smoked with their smoke.