Nuns and Soldiers (3 page)

‘It was the oracular voice. We felt it had to be true.’

‘Yes.’

‘A philosopher’s thought suits you or it doesn’t. It’s only deep in that sense. Like a novel.’

‘Yes,’ said the Count. He added, ‘Indeed.’

‘Linguistic idealism. A dance of bloodless categories after all.’

‘Yes. Yes.’

‘But really, could I be happy now?’

‘What do you mean?’ said the Count. He was always, now, frightened that even in these sterile conversations something terrible might be said. He was not sure what he anticipated, but there could be something dreadful, a truth, a mistake.

‘Death is not an event in life. He lives eternally who lives in the present. To see the world without desire is to see its beauty. The beautiful makes happy.’

‘I never understood that,’ said the Count, ‘but it doesn’t seem to add up. I suppose it’s out of Schopenhauer.’

‘Schopenhauer, Mauthner, Karl Kraus - what a charlatan.’

The Count looked surreptitiously at his watch. The nurse put a strict time limit on his conversations with Guy. If he stayed too long Guy began to ramble, the abstract moving on into the visionary, the mind-computer beginning to jumble its items. A little less blood to the brain and we are all raving lunatics spouting delusions. Guy’s ramblings were to the Count unspeakably painful: the helpless still self-aware irrationality of the most rational of minds. What was it like within? It was the pain-killing drugs, of course, the cause was chemical. Did that make it better? It was not natural. But was death natural?

‘Language games, funeral games. But - the point - is -’

‘Yes?’

‘Death drives away what rules everywhere else, the aesthetic.’

‘And without that?’

‘We can’t experience the present. I mean dying does -’

‘It drives away -’

‘Yes. Death and dying are enemies. Death is an alien voluptuous power. It’s an idea that can be worked upon. By the survivors. ’

Oh we shall work, thought the Count, we shall work. We shall have time then.

‘Sex goes, you know. A dying man with sexual desire - that would be obscene -’

The Count said nothing. He turned again to the window and rubbed away the misty patch which his breath had made upon the glass.

‘Suffering is such muck. Death is clean. And there won’t be any -
lux perpetua
- how I’d hate that. Only
nox perpetua
- thank God. It’s only the -
Ereignis
-’

‘The -’

‘That one’s afraid of. Because there is - probably-a sort of event - half an event - anyway - and one does wonder - what it will be like - when it comes -’

The Count did not want to talk about this. He cleared his throat but not in time to interrupt.

‘I suppose one will die as an animal. Perhaps few people die a human death. Of exhaustion, or else in some kind of trance. Let the fever run like a storm-driven ship. And in the end - there’s so little of one left to vanish. All is vanity. Our breaths are numbered. I can see the imaginable number of my own - just coming - into view.’

The Count continued to stand at the window staring at the huge slow illuminated snow flakes showering steadily out of the dark. He wanted to stop Guy, to make him talk about ordinary things, and yet he felt too: perhaps this speech is precious to him, his eloquence, the last personal possession of the breaking mind. Perhaps he needs me to make possible a soliloquy which soothes his anguish. But it’s too fast, too odd, I can’t play with his ideas like I used to. I am dull and I can’t converse, or is my silence enough? Will he want to see me tomorrow? He has banished the others. There will be a last meeting. The Count came to Ebury Street every evening now, he had given up his modest social life. Soon there would be no more tomorrows anyway. The cancer was advanced, the doctor doubted whether Guy would last till Christmas. The Count did not look that far ahead. A crisis in his own life was approaching from which he carefully, honourably averted his eyes.

Guy was still rolling his head to and fro. He was a little older than the Count, forty-three, but he seemed an old man now, the leonine look quite gone. His mane of hair had been cut, more had fallen out. His scored forehead was a dome from which all else fell away. The big head had shrunk and sharpened, accentuating his Jewish features. A glittering-eyed rabbinical ancestor glared out through his face. Guy was half Jewish, his forebears Christianized Jews, wealthy men, Englishmen. The Count contemplated Guy’s Jewish mask. The Count’s father had been ferociously anti-Semitic. For this, and for much else, the Count (who was Polish) did constant penance.

Trying at last to assert ordinariness the Count said, ‘Are you all right for books? Can I bring you anything?’

‘No,
The Odyssey
will see me out. I always thought of myself as Odysseus. Only now-I won’t get back-I hope I’ll have time to finish it. Though it’s so awfully cruel at the end ... Are they coming this evening - ?’

‘You mean - ?’

‘Yes, I imagine so.’

‘They flee from me that some time did me seek.’

‘On the contrary,’ said the Count, ‘if there is anyone whom you would like to see, I can guarantee that that person would like to see you.’ He had picked up from Guy a certain almost awkward precision of speech.

‘No one understands Pindar. No one knows where Mozart’s grave is. What does it prove that Wittgenstein never thought we’d reach the moon? If Hannibal had marched on Rome after the battle of Cannae he would have taken it. Ah well.
Poscimur.
It sounds different tonight.’

‘What does?’

‘The world.’

‘It’s snowing.’

‘I’d like to see -’

‘The snow?’

‘No.’

‘Manfred?’

‘No.’

‘It’s nearly time for the nurse.’

‘You’re bored, Peter.’

This was the only real remark which Guy had addressed to him tonight, one of the last precious signs, in the midst of that appalling privileged monologue, of a continuing connection between them. It was almost too much for the Count, he nearly exclaimed with pity and distress. But he answered as Guy required him to do, as Guy had taught him to do. ‘No. It isn’t boredom. I just can’t pick up your ideas, perhaps I don’t want to. And not to allow you to lead the conversation - would be fearfully impolite.’

Guy acknowledged this with the quick grimace which was now his smile. He lay quiet at last, propped up. Their eyes met, then shied away from the spark of pain.

‘Ah well - ah well - she shouldn’t have sold the ring -’

‘Who - ?’

‘De s’enivrer solitairement ou de conduire les peuples.’
The Count completed the quotation, one of Guy’s favourites.

‘Everything’s gone wrong since Aristotle, we can see why now. Liberty died with Cicero. Where’s Gerald?’

‘In Australia with the big telescope. Would you - ?’

‘I used to believe my thoughts would wander in infinite spaces, but that was a dream. Gerald talks about the cosmos, but that’s impossible, you can’t talk about everything. That one knows anything at all ... is not guaranteed ... by the game ...’

‘What - ?’

‘Our worlds wax and wane with a difference. We belong to different tribes.’

‘We have always done so,’ said the Count.

‘No - only now - Oh - how ill’s all here. How much I wish I could -’

‘Could - ?’

‘See it -’

‘See?’

‘See it ... the whole ... of logical space ... the upper side ... of the cube ...’

 

 

Through the door which Guy’s wife Gertrude had quietly opened, the Count could see the Night Nurse sitting in the hall. She rose now and came promptly forward, smiling, a sturdy brunette with almost dusky red cheeks. She had changed her boots for slippers but still smelt of the open air and the cold. She gave out an unfocused friendliness, her fine dark eyes rather vaguely danced and twinkled, she was thinking of other things, satisfactions, plans. She tossed and patted her wavy dark hair, and had a little air of capable self-satisfaction which would have been pleasing, even reassuring, in a situation which admitted of hope. As it was there was something almost allegorically sad about her detachment from the misery that surrounded her. The Count stood aside to let her in, then raised a hand to Guy and departed. The door closed. Gertrude, who had not entered with the nurse, had already gone back to the drawing-room.

 

 

The Count, it should be explained, was not a real count. His life had been a conceptual muddle, a mistake. So had his father’s life. Of remoter ancestors he knew nothing, except that his paternal grandfather, who was killed in the first war, had been a professional soldier. His parents and his elder brother Jozef, then a baby, had come to England from Poland before the second war. His father, his name was Bogdan Szczepanski, was a Marxist. His mother was a Catholic. (Her name was Maria.) The marriage was not a success.

The father’s Marxism was of a peculiarly Polish variety. He grew to consciousness in a wrecked post-war Poland, drunk with independence and with having asserted its nationhood in the best possible way by smashing a Russian army outside Warsaw in 1920. Bogdan was politically precocious, a follower of Dmowski, but an admirer of Pilsudski. His patriotism was intense, narrow and anti-Semitic. He left his mother and a house full of sisters at an early age. He thought of becoming a lawyer, and was briefly a student at Warsaw University, but was soon involved in politics. (Possibly he worked as a clerk.) His hatred of Rosa Luxemburg was only second to his hatred of Bismarck. (He hated a great many people, past and present.) An early memory was of his mother saying that Rosa Luxemburg deserved to be murdered because she wanted to give Poland to the Russians. (His father, whom he could scarcely remember, had of course performed a first paternal duty by telling him that all Russians were devils.) Yet, though he never stopped hating Rosa Luxemburg (and was mildly cheered up when she eventually was murdered), some hard absolutist streak in his nature led him towards Marxism. He felt himself destined by fate to be the creator of a pure Polish Marxism. He had a cousin who was a member of the small illegal Polish Communist Party, and with whom he had fierce arguments. Although the party was not only pro-Russian but also full of beastly Jews, the youthful Bogdan was curiously drawn to it. There was an intensity, an absolute, in Marxism which attracted him. It was a ‘short path’. It was idealistic, anti-materialistic, violent, and did not promise ease. Surely Poland demanded no less than such a total dedication. Yet, as he later told his son, his particular patriotism did not allow him to become a communist. He remained a furious isolated idiosyncratic Marxist, the only man who had really understood what Marxism meant to Poland.

He got married in 1936. Then Stalin intervened in his life. The Polish Communist Party had never been more than a puny inefficient instrument in the hands of the great Russian leader. Polish communists would be displeased by a Russo-German rapprochement. Besides, they were infected by the virus of patriotism, and could play no role in Stalin’s plans for Poland which could not be better played by the Red Army. So, with that calm purposive clear-headed ruthlessness, so characteristic of his policies and of their success, Stalin quietly had the Polish Communist Party liquidated. Bogdan’s cousin disappeared. Bogdan himself, a self-confessed maverick Marxist, an intellectual, a typical trouble-maker, was now in danger. In 1938 he arrived in England with his wife and son. In the summer of 1939 he decided to return to Poland. However events had moved too fast for him and he was incarcerated in England, to be the frenzied and miserable spectator of the subsequent fate of his country, and to be tormented ever after by the terrible guilt of not having fought on Polish soil.

The Count was born just before the war and his first awareness was that he had had a brother, but the brother was dead. The brother had been wonderful. The Count, though lesser, must be a comfort, a substitute for his exiled parents. With the dawn of consciousness the fact of exile came too. The Count’s first perception was of a red and white flag. The wonderful brother had been killed in an air raid. Warsaw had been destroyed. These were the Count’s first data, clearer to him almost than his parents were. Bogdan, cheated of his return home, and now, again quite illogically, an ardent admirer of Sikorski, had joined the Polish Air Force, now being formed in England under the aegis of the government-in-exile. He wanted to get into the Parachute Brigade, and dreamt of returning home from the sky as a liberator, soon to become a leading statesman in the independent post-war Poland. However he never left the ground, since a stupid training accident returned him early to civilian life. He took employment (again probably as a clerk) with the Polish government in London. Here he consumed his heart and his time in hatred of Russia (hatred of Germany was taken for granted, that was scarcely an occupation) and in vain attempts to penetrate the high-level scheming which obsessed his more powerful compatriots. He (of course) offered his services as a courier to the underground Home Army in Poland, but was refused. (The Count never doubted that his father was a very brave man who would eagerly have given his life in the service of his country.) He was able to follow in some detail (and later often rehearsed to the Count who as a child was maddeningly indifferent to the fate of the Pripet Marshes) the agonizing diplomacy whereby, after Sikorski’s death, Mikolajczyk attempted to please Britain by placating Stalin, without giving away Eastern Poland to Russia.

The Red Army had of course entered Poland in September 1939, as agreed with the Germans. The news that the Russians had then secretly murdered fifteen thousand Polish officers was one of the shocks which Bogdan’s consciousness had to withstand and his ability for hatred to digest in the earlier part of the war. By this time too there were tales of how the Germans were managing their part of Poland. In the words of the German governor, ‘the very concept
Polak
will be erased for centuries to come, no form of Polish state will ever be reborn, Poland will be a colony and Poles will be slaves in the German empire’. Rage, hate, humiliation, passionate love, mortally wounded pride so contended in Bogdan’s soul that it sometimes seemed he might die of sheer emotion. When young the Count (forced to relive these horrors and determined not to be damaged by them) marvelled at his father’s lack of realism. Could he not see how helpless and unimportant Poland was? How could Churchill and Roosevelt have been expected to care about the Polish frontier? Obviously history intended, and had always intended, Poland to be subservient to Russia. In fact Poland had not done too badly out of the war as far as territory was concerned. Later, about all these things, the Count felt differently. Bogdan’s war, and in some ways perhaps his life, ended on October 3, 1944. The Warsaw Rising, the great insurrection for which all Poles had been waiting, began on August 1, when the guns of the Red Army were rattling the windows in the city. The Poles in Warsaw began to fight the Germans. The Russian advance paused. The Red Army did not cross the Vistula. The Russians withdrew. The Soviet Air Force disappeared from the skies. Unhindered German bombers skimmed the city roof tops. Meagre supplies of arms were dropped by the British and Americans. Desperate appeals for help, to Moscow, to London, went unheeded. The Polish Underground Army fought the Germans alone for nine weeks. Then they surrendered. Two hundred thousand Poles were killed. The departing Germans blew up what was left of Warsaw.