Forgotten Life. Brian Aldiss
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of the spectacles.
‘Oh, her tour went like a bomb. She’s good on television, and they’re respectful to the English accent, you know. Especially in the south. She’s a bit exhausted – no wonder.’
‘Should think so. She likes America?’
‘Very much so. Whiskey sours. And of course she is so popular there. The Americans have an enthusiasm we lack.’
‘They’re not so critical, are they?’
Clement found this rather an unfortunate remark, but all he said, as he sat down, was, ‘You and Cheri must come round again soon. Sheila will tell you all about it.’
The last time Arthur and Cheri had come round to Rawlinson Road had been quite a success. He had read a couple of Green Mouth novels; no doubt the essentially conservative nature of epic fantasy had its appeal. Clement had spent much of the evening talking to Cheri. It had not been unpleasant. He remembered now that at sight of the tiny swimming pool she had said brightly, ‘I must bring my costume next time.’
Arthur was still postponing a move towards the table.
‘Er, I was reading about Zola in one of the weeklies.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Emile Zola … Seems as if when he was writing his novels he was transported into a sort of totally different thingey – state of being. Rather like being possessed – a state of possession. Terrible visions, intense nightmares, dreams of er, sexual ecstasy, intimations of murder. Quite different from his normal life. A different plane of being … I wondered if – excluding the murder business, of course – if other writers also experienced that kind of transformation … A different frame of mind entirely.’
Clement laughed briefly. ‘You’d have to ask my wife that question.’
Something in Clement’s tone caused Arthur to fall silent. He retreated to his own desk. His trainers made squeegee noises on the parquet flooring.
This was a signal for Clement to resign himself to work. He pulled various items from his briefcase, arranging them on the table before him.
The main bulk of work on Adaptability was already finished, although some chapters required last-minute revision. There were appendices to be drawn up – mainly Arthur’s task – the vexatious notes to be gone over, and various references to be checked. He would be only a few months over his publisher’s deadline. Yet, he realized, the trip to the States, the appearance at the symposium – where American full professors seemed to lead such affluent lives – and the outing to see his wife in action at Fantacon XIX, had unsettled him. He regarded the cordilleras of paper before him without appetite. They certainly would not be printed up in an edition of 1.5 million.
He found himself thinking again of his dead brother. He owed Joseph something. Consanguinity could not be denied.
Sighing, he began to sort through some newspaper cuttings which Arthur had amassed while he was away. One of them caught his attention. It was a brief account, cut from the Independent, of a massacre which had occurred in the Lisenitsky Forest, on the outskirts of Lvov, in the Ukraine, in September 1943.
The details were brief but clear. Following the fall of Mussolini, Italy surrendered unconditionally early that September. Italian forces were still fighting alongside the Nazis. Many of them were left politically and physically stranded by the armistice. 229,000 Italians were serving on the Eastern front. 89,000 of them were killed or disappeared without trace. The Germans were hard-pressed by the Russians after the failure of their Sixth Army to take Stalingrad. When 2,000 Italians refused to fight at the front and demanded repatriation, the Germans, ruthless as ever, simply rounded them up in a sand pit and shot them all. Trees were then planted over the site to conceal it. Over forty years later, the site had been discovered by some children from Lvov.
It was only a small incident in a long war; but it touched closely on the theme of Clement’s book, the break-up of families and relationships throughout Europe as the result of two world wars. In his years in Berlin, Clement had counselled women whose husbands or sons had disappeared into the vast battlefields of the Soviet Union, never to be heard of again.
Making a precis of the facts on a file card, Clement handed it over to Arthur to store the entry in the computer. After some thought, he scribbled a line to the Independent correspondent in Moscow, asking for verification and, if possible, amplification of the facts. The sole witness to the massacre, according to Tass, quoted in the paper, was a woman who had been a schoolgirl of sixteen at the time.
This was only one of a number of similar massacres. In Babi Yar, outside Kiev, the Nazis had massacred 200,000 of their so-called enemies. In Katyn, near Smolensk, Russians had murdered over 4,000 Polish officers.
What had that schoolgirl been doing, wandering innocently in the woods near Lvov? And what effect had sight of that massacre had on her later life? According to her testimony, some of the Italian soldiers had been playing guitars. He saw her through the double-glazed windows of his room, wandering among the willows on the banks of the Isis. She had crept nearer to see who could be playing guitars so happily in the middle of a war. Then came the rifle shots and the cries. She stood behind a tree, fearful. Then she had run for home and not dared to speak of what she had heard and seen.
Clement received these destructions with binocular vision. They happened a long time ago in a distant place. They were also contemporaneous, happening close at hand. Violence remained in the air. Most people in Europe were governed by force. It was inevitable that savagery would break out again. Even understanding was no defence against that.
Since that schoolgirl witness had been born, Hitler’s evil empire had been destroyed. Other evils had sprung up. Her own town, Lvov, had passed from Poland to become part of the Soviet Empire. The century had produced new states of doubtful legality. The new states raised armies which marched or clashed along the shifted frontiers. The victors exacted duties, levies, and taxes – above all a moral tax – on those within their borders.
He sighed and turned back to his desk. Under all his horror at the massacres lay a fascination he sought to conceal even from himself. The fascination kept him at his work. Such massacres as the schoolgirl witnessed represented a rare time when life became greater than the imagination. Generally, the reverse was true.
Over coffee in the common room, Clement bumped into Harry Raine, Master of Carisbrooke. Raine, tall, decrepit by design, spare, thin of jowl, began to talk immediately about problems of invigilation. ‘The day of examining and being examined is upon us. You timed your return from the feverish charms of the New World well,’ he told Clement, with his ghostly smile.
He dislikes me, Clement thought, because my wife makes a lot of money from her writing and I never say a word against it.
He was not sure if this were really so, since Harry sometimes gave the impression – it was something in that ghostly smile which displayed the strangely grouped grey teeth – of disliking everyone. But he never asked after Sheila.
She’s too much a challenge to his antiquated set of values, Clement thought. And he doesn’t like women either. Hence his hugely pompous manner – enough to put off any sensible girl.
Going home that evening, Clement Winter walked to the shops in Summertown, met a few acquaintances, chatted, and collected from the delicatessen smoked herring, bean salad, and a brand of walnut ice-cream which Sheila particularly enjoyed. He was aware that he was probably duplicating Michelin’s efforts earlier; but he wished to reassure his wife that the good things of life had not necessarily stopped just because they were back in England again.
As he entered Rawlinson Road, he passed his neighbour, John Farrer. Farrer was short and bald and given to tweed suits and heavy lace-up shoes when not wearing city clothes. He was ‘in insurance’, and his whole demeanour from the plodding walk onward summed up the banality of the Here and Now, in Clement’s opinion. This would have been insufficient to stop the Winters from speaking to him; it was John Farrer who had decided not to speak to, and even to ignore the existence of, his neighbours. They passed by on the pavement, within