Forgotten Life. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 a foot of each other, staring straight ahead.

      Clement could not resist it. He winked as they were passing.

      The wink was to say, ‘Bourgeois Man, you wear your silly thick jacket, even in a heatwave. Right down to your soul you’re over-dressed.’ It was also to say, ‘Aren’t we comic, carrying on this silly feud when we are neighbours?’

      It was also to say, ‘I believe I’m superior to you because I can see the funny side of all this …’

      The wink was not returned. Stony-faced, the banality of the Here and Now marched on by. Clement turned in at his own gate.

      His house, like many of the others in this most superior road, was an example of bland but condescending English architectural manners, with no one feature overwhelming another. Nor did it vie with the neighbouring houses – with the Farrers’ house, for instance. All the same, its essential features had been assembled in such a way that it appeared different from any of the others in the street, and the facade was crowded with too much detail, the windows too large, the porch too heavy, the gables too pointed, for complete discretion. I’m prosperous, the house said, as Clement went in, and I think you should know it.

      When he entered the building, he found his wife sitting in the kitchen by the Aga, in a familiar attitude when talking, with one arm bent and tucked behind her head, chatting over the phone to a friend, recounting the ardours and triumphs of the American tour. A cold cup of coffee stood on the table by her. It took Clement only a moment to deduce that the friend at the other end of the line was Maureen Bowler; internal evidence suggested as much. Sheila used a special voice when talking with her feminist friend.

      Sheila was wrapped in her blue towelling robe, resting her bare feet on the table. She smiled and waved at Clement without interrupting the flow of her conversation. She was saying, ‘I told them that my idea of the fantastic was not just yesterday’s fantastic, which has become familiar through constant use – unicorns and all that – but something really fantastic, like a whole world on which every living organism has achieved consciousness … Yes, that’s it, like the planet Amarnia in Kerinth Invaded. And then Larry Ivens got up and tried to argue that nothing was fantastic any more—’

      He went over to the refrigerator and put the herring and ice-cream in it. Going to the walk-in larder, he took a bottle of white wine from the stone floor. Uncorking it, he poured two glasses, one of which he passed to Sheila. They made toasting gestures to each other and drank; Sheila in addition waggled her toes.

      He took his glass upstairs, where Joseph’s papers awaited him. It was noticeably warmer on the second floor. He stood about, opened a window, and then switched on the radio. From Radio Three came the sound of a fellow with an abnormally high voice singing about somewhere called Wenlock Edge. Clement switched him off again, and stood surveying the collection of papers and boxes accumulated here.

      His American trip had merely postponed a decision he must now make. He must decide to what use to put his brother’s life now that his brother had finished with it. There was also Joseph’s flat in Acton, with all СКАЧАТЬ