The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios. Yann Martel

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СКАЧАТЬ Japan declares war on Austria.

       Austria declares war on Belgium.

       Russia declares war on Turkey.

       Serbia declares war on Turkey.

       Great Britain declares war on Turkey.

       France declares war on Turkey.

       Egypt declares war on Turkey.

      I tell Paul 1914 was the year the Panama Canal was opened and wouldn’t it make for a more pleasant story?

      “Your history is biased,” he replies.

      “So is yours,” I shoot back.

      “But mine is the correct bias.”

      “How do you know?”

      “Because it accounts for the future.”

      I can’t understand it. I have read of people who have AIDS who live for years. Yet week by week Paul is getting thinner and weaker. He is receiving treatments, yes, but they don’t seem to be doing much, except for his pneumonia. Anyway, he doesn’t seem to have any particular illness, just a wasting away. I ask a doctor about it, nearly complain about it. He’s standing in a doorway. He listens to my litany silently—he’s a big, unshaven man and his eyes are red—and then he doesn’t say anything and finally he says in a low, measured voice, “We’re—doing—our—best.”

      It’s my turn. I must be careful. I refuse to invoke the war. I would like the extension of suffrage to women in Denmark. But a story of reconciliation would not please Paul. I consider the publication of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. It’s too dark. I must neither give in to Paul, nor ignore him. I must steer between total abstraction and grim reality. I don’t know what to do. I go for the ambiguous.

      1915—Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist and geophysicist, publishes The Origin of Continents and Oceans, in which he gives the classic expression of the controversial theory of continental drift. Wegener postulates that a mother landmass, which he names Pangaea, broke up some 250 million years ago, the pieces drifting apart at the rate of roughly an inch a year, thus producing the continents of today.

      “An inch a year?” Paul smiles. He likes my story, too. But he won’t be stopped.

       1916—Germany declares war on Portugal.

       Austria declares war on Portugal.

       Romania declares war on Austria.

       Italy declares war on Germany.

       Germany declares war on Romania.

       Turkey declares war on Romania.

       Bulgaria declares war on Romania.

      More tests. Paul has something called cytomegalovirus, which may account for his diarrhoea and his general weakness. It’s a highly disseminating infection, could affect his eyes, lungs, liver, gastrointestinal tract, spinal cord or brain. There’s nothing to be done. No effective therapy exists. Paul is speechlessly depressed. I give in to him.

      1917—The United States declares war on Germany.

       Panama declares war on Germany.

       Cuba declares war on Germany.

      Greece declares war on Austria, Bulgaria, Germany and Turkey.

       Siam declares war on Germany and Austria.

       Liberia declares war on Germany.

       China declares war on Germany and Austria.

       Brazil declares war on Germany.

       The United States declares war on Austria.

       Panama declares war on Austria.

       Cuba declares war on Austria.

      For 1918 Paul wants to use further declarations of war—Haiti and Honduras declared war on Germany, he informs me—but for the first time I use my power of veto and declare these fictionally unacceptable. Nor do I accept the publication of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, in which Spengler argues that civilizations are like natural organisms, with life cycles implying birth, bloom and decay, and that Western civilization has entered the last, inevitable stage of decay. Enough is enough, I tell Paul. There is hope. The sun still shines. Paul is angry, but he is tired and he submits. I think he was expecting my censure, for he surprises me with a curious event and a fully prepared story.

      1918—After an extensive study of globular clusters—immense, densely packed groups of stars—Harlow Shapley determines that the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy, our galaxy, is in the Sagittarius constellation and that our solar system lies about two thirds of the way from this centre, some thirty thousand light years away.

      “Isn’t it grand,” I say.

      “Aren’t we lonely,” he replies.

      His story—of Orlando, of alcoholism—is ugly.

      1919—Walter Gropius becomes head of the Bauhaus, a school of art, design and architecture in Weimar, Germany. Under his leadership, the teachers at Bauhaus break with the past. They emphasize geometrical forms, smooth surfaces, regular outlines, primary colours and modern materials. Just as importantly, they take to mass-manufacturing techniques, making their functional, aesthetically pleasing objects affordable to everyone. Never before have objects of daily life looked so good to so many.

      “This AZT is exhausting,” says Paul. He is anemic because of it and receives blood transfusions regularly.

      In 1920, I forbid the publication of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which Freud posits an underlying, destructive drive, Thanatos, the death instinct, which seeks to end life’s inevitable tensions by ending life itself. Paul changes historical events while keeping the same Roccamatio story.

      1920—Dada triumphs. Born in Zurich during the depths of the First World War and spread by a merry, desperate band of writers and artists, including Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Richard Hulsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters, Francis Picabia, George Grosz and many others, Dadaism seeks the demolition of all the values of art, society and civilization.

      Paul tells me over the phone that he’s developing Kaposi’s sarcoma. He has purple, blue lesions on his feet and ankles. Not many, but they are there. The doctors have zeroed in on them. He will be put on alpha interferon and undergo radiation therapy. Paul’s voice is shaky. But we agree, we strongly agree, with what the doctors have said, that radiation therapy has been found to be successful СКАЧАТЬ