Peter Temple - In the Evil Day

But not words for dying.

No, not words for dying. They didn’t need words for dying. They were going to die.

The tape recorder was on the table. He went to the study and fetched the box of tapes. He went back and forth on the one with 2 written on it, circled.

You were talking about Kate yesterday.

Oh. Yes. Kate was a Jew.

Who’s Kate?

Our cousin’s wife. I’ll show you her photograph. Beautiful girl, lovely. A Jew.Nominally. Her family. Not in a religious sense. I don’t think they had any religion to speak of. We, of course, we thought of ourselves as Christians. But all we did was observe the traditions. We only went to church on Christmas day, to the Landeskirche, just a family tradition. And of course we had the most wonderful Christmas Eves, the Feuerzangbohle , the presents, my dear, the wonderful presents.

What about Kate?

Moritz was abominable. Isn’t that a lovely word? Abominable. English is a lovely language. Stuart used to call all kinds of things abominable. Do you know about the creature of the snows? In the Himalayas? Where do you place the stress in that? I’ve never been comfortable with the word.

About Kate? Moritz?

Moritz said we should put the Sturmer sign on the entrances to the family businesses. Such a stupid and dreadful thing to say… What sign?

Oh, you know, Juden sind hier nicht erwunscht . He was talking about how Germany needed to be cleansed of Jews, it was a matter of hygiene, nonsense like that, he had obviously been drinking.

Kate heard that?

Your great-grandfather didn’t like that kind of talk. We dealt with many Jews.He was an old-fashioned person. Well, he was old. Not that old, I suppose…as old as I am now, I suppose. Good heavens. I would need to work that out. How old he was. One forgets.

This was just before the war?

You looked like Moritz when you were a boy, do you know that? A little bigger, he was thin. But your eyes and the hair and the chin.

No. Did many people you knew feel the way Moritz did?

About Jews? People said things. But the Nazis, we had contempt for their rubbish. We all did. The people we mixed with. The old merchant families. We had all travelled, you see, we were…worldly, I suppose that’s the word. ‘That Man’, that’s what we called Hitler. That Man. A vulgar person.They were all vulgar, the women were all…well, I shouldn’t. He was Austrian too, not German.

Moritz. What happened to him?

I remember when you came to this house the first time. Lucas was quiet, he didn’t move from your mother and you just ran around madly and Einspenner was so taken with you, she took you into the kitchen and showed you the cellar… Before he went to bed, Anselm made a cheese omelette, ate it with toasted five-day-old bread. He wasn’t hungry, just a duty the mind owed the body. In the study, he saw the American Defense Secretary on television. He was behind a desk, Michael Denoon, a hard-faced man, boxer’s scars on his jaw and right cheekbone. Through the pancake, the lights caught them, thin lines where skin and flesh had been jammed against bone and split open. But his nose was straight, no one had got through to his nose.

A CNN woman came on, lots of hair, eyes wide open, and a big cone-shaped mouth. She said:

Pressure on US Defense Secretary Michael Denoon to enter the presidential race intensified today when Newsweek reported that an informal poll showed 155 of 222 Republican members of the House of Representatives would support Denoon’s candidacy.

Republican Senator Robert Gurner is thought to be unelectable since the disclosure three days ago of his two-year homosexual relationship with New York actor Lawrence Wellman.

Denoon again. He put his head to one side, ran a hand across his hair, modest, straightened, looked at the camera.

Of course I’m deeply honoured by this expression of confidence by people who speak for millions of ordinary Americans. I’m humbled too. This nation bears deep wounds from the great sacrifices it has made in faraway places to fight evil and promote freedom and democracy. Now we need calm, peace and prosperity. We need to renew ourselves, to put America first, to see clearly our place in the world. But whether I am fit to take up this great challenge is a matter for long and careful thought.

Anselm went to bed and thought about America. He tried to remember what it had been like to feel wholly American, to look at the world as an American. He knew he had once but he could not recapture it. Over the years, moving from war to war, horror to horror, his nationality had been bled from him. The more he saw of the world’s conflicts, of people dead, wounded, mutilated, raped, dispossessed of what little they had, the more unreal America seemed, the more the cruel naivete of America embarrassed him. That was partly why he was drawn to Kaskis. Kaskis didn’t expect America to behave sensibly and so he wasn’t disappointed when it didn’t. He remembered sitting in a dark bar in San Francisco with Kaskis. It was the mid-1980s. He was about to go to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Kaskis had just come back.

‘The CIA wants to fight this one to the last dead Afghan,’ Kaskis said. ‘More CIA in Islamabad than in fucking Langley. Bill Casey’s got this hick from Texas, he’s the point in Congress. The prick’s been up in the hills hanging out with the mojahedin. He thinks we give them the right stuff we can do a reverse Vietnam. And for nickels and dimes. This time we stay at home and our proxies kill Russians. Lots of Russians. Fifty-eight thousand would be a nice number.’

Kaskis had stubbed out his cigarette, fished for another. ‘I weep for my fucking country,’ he said. ‘Everywhere we go we sow dragon’s teeth.’

On the long slope towards sleep, he saw Kaskis, saw his face as he was taken away, the look back, the lift of his dark-stubbled chin, the wink. Anselm tried to shake the image away, dislodge it, but it clung, tenacious.

The dark eyes of Kaskis, the flash of his teeth. In all of it, Kaskis had never shown a sign of fear.

Before dawn, Anselm woke in a foetal clutch, straightened his body and lay on his back, stretched his arms and legs. I haven’t woken myself by crying out loud for a while, he thought. I haven’t woken wet with sweat to find tears on my face.

…LONDON…

The man on the front page of the newspaper was overweight, middle-aged, naked. He was looking at the camera, standing, flabby. Sagging teats, hairy belly out, engaged in a sexual act with someone lying face down. The detail had been obscured. A big headline said:

WELL, I’LL BE

BUGGERED,

MR BRECHAN!

Niemand took the newspaper from the next table when he sat down with his breakfast on a styrofoam tray. The story was about a politician called Brechan, filmed having sex with someone called Gary. Gary was quoted as saying: ‘Look about fifteen, don’t I? That’s why they like me. I’m twenty-two. Believe that? Anyway, Angus passed me on to this other bloke. Not a clue till I saw him on telly. Oh my god, I said to…’ Niemand ate the scrambled eggs, powdered eggs, and the small tasteless meat patty and the piece of extruded bacon. He didn’t mind food like this. It was assembly-line cooking, reasonably clean. They couldn’t risk people getting ill. Counter-productive. Easier to be hygienic. Just like the military.

He turned the page. The story went on. Three politicians were involved but the others weren’t named. The writer said they would be: tomorrow.

The writer’s name was Caroline Wishart. There was a picture of her above her byline. She had long hair and her nostrils were pinched as if she were drawing a big breath, sucking in air. He sat and thought, eyes on the street. London was much dirtier than he remembered, more poor people, more junkies.