The Clowns of God (32 page)

As Jean Marie passed along the gravel led walk, one of the children broke away from the group and ran towards him.

She slipped on the verge and fell almost at his feet. She burst into tears. He picked her up and carried her to the woman on the bench, who dabbed at her grazed knee and offered her a lollipop to soothe her. It was only then that Jean Marie noticed that the child was a mongol as indeed were all the others in the group. As if sensing his shock, the woman held the child towards him and said with a smile:

“We are all from the Institute across the road. This one has just come to us. She’s homesick; so she thinks every man is her papa.”

“And where is papa?” There was a touch of censure in the question.

The woman shook her head.

“Oh, no, it isn’t what you think. He’s been recently widowed. He feels, quite rightly, that she is safer here with us. We have about a hundred children in the Institute. The patron lets us bring the little ones here to play. Her only child was mongoloid but it died early.”

Jean Marie held out his arms. The child came to him willingly and kissed him, then sat in his lap and began playing happily with the buttons of his shirt.

He said: “She’s very affectionate.”

“Most are,” the woman told him.

“People who are able to keep them in the family group find that it is like having a new baby in the house all the time. But, of course, it is when the parents age and the child comes to adolescence and maturity that the tragedies begin. The boys may become very rough and violent. The girls are easy victims to sexual invasion. The future is dark for both parents and children. It’s sad. I am so very fond of them.”

“How do you maintain the Institute?”

“We have a grant from the government. We ask fees from parents who can pay. We solicit private charity. Fortunately we have some wealthy sponsors like Monsieur Duhamel, who lives close by He calls the children ‘les petites bouffonnes du bon Dieu’ .. . God’s little clowns

…”

“It’s a gentle thought.”

“You know Monsieur Duhamel perhaps? He’s a very important man, the President’s right hand, they say.”

“By repute,” said Jean Marie carefully.

The child slipped from his knee and began tugging his hand to make him walk with her. He asked: “May I take her down to the pond to see the fish?”

“Of course. I’ll come with you.”

As he moved away his breviary fell from his pocket on to the bench. The woman picked it up, glanced at the title-page, then laid aside her embroidery and followed him, book in hand.

“You left your breviary, father.”

“Oh! Thank you.”

He shoved it back in his pocket. The woman took the child’s other hand and fell into step with Jean Marie. She said:

“I have the strange feeling I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

“I’m sure we haven’t met. I’ve been away from France a long time.”

“A missionary, perhaps?”

“In a way, yes.”

“Where did you serve?”

“Oh, several countries, but mostly in Rome. I’m retired now. I came home for a vacation.”

“I thought priests never retired.”

“Let’s say I’m on retreat for a while. Come on, little one!

Let’s go see the goldfish.”

He swung the child up on his shoulder and began singing a song from his own childhood as he marched her down to the pond. The woman dropped back and stood watching them from a distance. He seemed a most pleasant man, obviously a lover of children but when a priest, still vigorous, was retired so early, there had to be a reason.

Punctually at eight, Pierre Duhamel was knocking on the door of the suite. He must be gone by eight forty-five, since he never failed to have dinner at home with his wife.

Meantime he would drink a Campari and soda with Jean Marie, whom he seemed to regard with bleak amusement as a highly memorable survivor, rather like the hairy mammoth.

“My God! They really pegged you out and ran the steamroller over you! Frankly, I’m astonished to see you looking so healthy. What have you done now that makes them lean so hard on you? Of course, that big splash in the press didn’t make you any more popular with the French hierarchy. The Friends of Silence are very strong here. Then I heard that your friend, Mendelius, had been the victim of a terrorist bomb attack.”

“A bomb attack, yes. A terrorist action, no. The thing was planned and executed by an agent of the C.I.A.” Alvin Dolman.”

“Why the C.I.A.?”

“Why not? Dolman was their agent-in-place. I think it was a neat piece of work by the Americans for the Bundesrepublik. It was designed to rid them of an influential academic who was bound to cause trouble once the call-up for military service was implemented.”

“Any proof?”

“Enough for me. Not enough to raise a public outcry.”

“Very soon,” Pierre Duhamel stirred the drink with his finger, “very soon you’ll be able to boil your mother in oil on the Pont Royal and nobody will blink an eye. What is being done to you is only a pale shadow of what is being planned for the repression of persons and the suppression of debate.

The new propaganda chiefs will make Goebbels look like a schoolboy amateur. You haven’t been back in the world long enough to feel the impact of their methods but my God, they’re effective.”

“Which means you agree with them?”

“Sad to say, I do. You see, my friend, on the premise that an atomic war is inevitable and that’s our military projection and your own prophecy, remember! the only way we can control and offer any sort of protection to large masses of people is by an intense conditioning programme. There’s no way we can protect the people of Paris from blast and radiation or nerve gas or a lethal virus. If we announce that nasty fact, tout court, we’ll have instant panic. So we have to keep the cities working as long as we can at all costs. If that means sweeping the streets with tanks twice a day we’ll do it.

If it means pre-dawn raids on dissidents or too-vocal idealists we’ll have them out in their night-shirts and shoot a few to admonish the rest. Then if we need some diversions bread and circuses and orgies on the steps of the Sacre Coeur we’ll turn those on, too! And there’ll be no debate about any of it!

We’ll all be Friends of Silence then; and God help anyone who opens his mouth at the wrong moment. That’s the scenario, my friend. I don’t like it any more than you do; but I recommended it to my President just the same.”

“Then for pity’s sake,” Jean Marie pleaded with him, “don’t you think you should look at the scenario I suggested?

Surely anything would be better than the primitive brutality and bacchanalia you’re prepared to offer.”

“We’ve done our homework,” Pierre Duhamel told him with wintry humour.

“We’re assured on the best psychiatric authority that the oscillation of tactics between violence and bacchic indulgence will have the effect of keeping the public both puzzled and amenable to authority especially as the facts can only be evidenced by hearsay and not by reliable report in the press or on television.”

“That’s monstrous.” Jean Marie Barette was furious.

“Of course it’s monstrous.” Pierre Duhamel gave an expressive shrug.

“But consider your alternative. I have it with me.”

He took out his wallet, extracted a carefully folded square of newspaper and smoothed it open. He went on: “This is you, as Gregory XVII, quoted in the Mendelius article. I have to presume the quote is authentic. This is what it says:

“… It is clear that in the days of universal calamity the traditional structures of society will not survive. There will be a ferocious struggle for the simplest needs of life food, water, fuel and shelter. Authority will be usurped by the strong and the cruel. Large urban societies will fragment themselves into tribal groups, each hostile to the other.

Rural areas will be subject to pillage. The human person will be as much a prey as the beasts whom we now slaughter for food. Reason will be so clouded that man will resort for solace to the crudest and most violent forms of magic. It will be hard, even for those founded most strongly in the Promise of the Lord, to sustain their faith and continue to give witness, as they must do, even to the end. How then must Christians comport themselves in these days of trial and terror?

“Since they will no longer be able to maintain themselves as large groups, they must divide themselves into small communities, each capable of sustaining itself by the exercise of a common faith and a true mutual charity.”

“Now, let’s see what we have in that prescription. Large scale disorder and chaos in social relations, to be balanced by what? Small communities of the elect, making seminal experiments in the exercise of charity and the other Christian virtues. Is that a fair summary?”

“As far as it goes, yes.”

“But whatever government or leadership still exists at that time will have to take account of the barbarians first. How is it going to do that, except by the violent measures we envisage? After all, your elect not to mention the elect of all other cults! will take care of themselves; or the Almighty will! Let’s face it, my friend, that’s why your own people cast you out. They couldn’t argue with the principle. It’s a beautiful thought: God’s people planting their garden of graces, as the monks and nuns of old did in the dark ages of Europe. But, at bottom, your Bishops are cold pragmatists.

They know that if you want law and order, you must demonstrate how bad chaos can be. If you want morality back again, you have to have Satan in the streets, large as life, so you can shout him down in full view of the terrified populace. In every country in the world it’s the same story;

because no country can prosecute a war without a willing and conforming public. Your own Church has adopted the siege mentality: no debate, back to the simple kitchen moralities, and let’s have everyone at Mass on Sunday so that we give public witness against the ungodly! The last thing they want is some wayward prophet howling doom among the gravestones!”

“Even though they know the doom is coming?”

“Because they know it! Precisely because they know it!

They cannot, any more than we, cope with the unbearable before it happens. That’s the whole reason for the Friends of Silence and their counterparts in secular government!” Suddenly he was laughing.

“My friend, don’t look so shocked!

What did you expect from Pierre Duhamel a tranquilliser and a spoonful of soothing syrup? The Roman Catholics aren’t the only ones who are opting for conformity. All the other big cults which have membership and property in the Republic have assured the government of their loyalty in the event of national emergency. The reason they’re all holding to the old models of experience and culture is because they have no time now to test new ones, or accustom their people to live with them.”

Jean Marie was silent for a long moment. Finally he said quietly:

“I accept what you tell me, Pierre. Now answer me one question. What preparations have you, personally, made for the day when the first missiles are launched?”

Duhamel was not smiling now. He took time to frame his answer.

“This is a day in our scenario called R Day R for Rubicon. If any one of half a dozen actions is taken by any major powers, then the chemistry of conflict will become irreversible. War will be declared. A global conflict will follow. On R Day I shall go home. I shall bathe my wife. I shall cook her favourite meal, open the best wine in my cellar and take a long time to drink it. Then I shall carry my wife to bed, lie down beside her and administer a poison pill to us both. We’re agreed. Our children know. They don’t like the idea. They have other plans and other reasons; but they respect our decision. My wife has suffered enough. I would not want her to endure the horrors of the aftermath and to face them without her would be, for me, a pointless masochism.”

He was being challenged and he knew it. It was the same challenge Carl Mendelius had made to him in the garden at Monte Cassino: “I have met good people who would prefer eternal blackness to the vision of Siva the Destroyer.” Pierre Duhamel was an even more formidable inquisitor, because he had none of Mendelius’ inhibitions. He was still waiting for his answer.

Jean Marie Barette said calmly: “I believe in free will, Pierre. I believe a man is judged by the light which has been given him. If you choose a stoic end to an intolerable situation, I may condemn the act; but upon the actor I can pass no verdict at all. I would rather trust you, as I trust myself, to the mercy of God. However, I have one question.”

“Ask it,” said Pierre Duhamel.

“For you and for your wife, everything ends on Rubicon Day. But what about the helpless ones your little Clowns of God, for example? Oh yes, I saw them in the garden this afternoon! I talked with their gouvernante who told me you were one of their most important sponsors. So, in the bad times, what will you do? Leave them to die like chickens in a barn-fire, or toss them out as play-things for the barbarians?”

Pierre Duhamel finished his drink and set down the glass.

He fished out a handkerchief and dabbed at his lips. He said, with rueful formality:

“You are a very intelligent man, Monseigneur; but even you do not see the whole future. My little clowns are already provided for. Under a series of most secret political directives, persons who, by reason of insanity, incurable infirmity or other gross disability, will be a burden on the wartime state, will immediately on the outbreak of hostilities be discreetly eliminated! Hitler gave us the blueprints for that one. We have updated them to include a compassionate rather than a brutal disposal. I shock you, of course?”

“What shocks me is that you can continue to live with this secret.”

“What do I do? If I try to publicise it, I am branded a madman like you with your vision of Armageddon and the Second Coming. You see, we are both in the same sad galley.”

“Then let us see how we get out of it, my friend.”

“First,” said Duhamel, “let’s look at your problem. You are, as I said, officially untouchable. You will find it increasingly difficult to circulate. Certain countries will hesitate to give you a visa. You will be harassed at every point. Your bags will be rifled. You will have lengthy sessions with frontier officials. You will be surprised at how uncomfortable life can be. So, all in all, I think we have to get you a new passport in a new name.”