John Banville - The Untouchable

“So, then,” he said to me slowly, with a judicious tilt of the head, “you are opposed to the bourgeois interpretation of art as luxury—”

“Bitterly opposed.”

“—and consider the artist to have a clear political duty.”

“Like the rest of us,” I said, “the artist must contribute to the great forward movement of history.”

Oh, I was shameless, like a hoyden set on losing her virginity.

“Or…?” he said.

“Or he becomes redundant, and his art descends to the level of mere decoration and self-indulgent revery…”

Everything went still then, subsided softly to a stop, and I was left hanging in vague consternation; I had thought we were in the middle and not at the end of this interesting discussion. Hartmann was looking at me directly for what seemed the first time, and I realised two things: first, that he had not for a moment been taken in by my stout declarations of political rectitude, and, second, that instead of being disappointed or offended, he was on the contrary gratified that I had lied to him, or at least that I had offered a carefully tinted version of what might be the truth. Now, this is difficult; this is the nub of the matter, in a way. It is hard for anyone who has not given himself wholeheartedly to a belief (and I say again, Miss V., that is how it is: you give yourself to it, it does not fall upon you like sanctifying grace from Heaven) to appreciate how the believer’s conscious mind can separate itself into many compartments containing many, conflicting, dogmas. These are not sealed compartments; they are like the cells of a battery (I think this is how a battery works), over which the electrical charge plays, leaping from one cell to another, gathering force and direction as it goes. You put in the acid of world-historical necessity and the distilled water of pure theory and connect up your points and with a flash and a shudder the patched-together monster of commitment, sutures straining and ape brow clenched, rises in jerky slow motion from Dr. Diabolo’s operating table. That is how it is, for the likes of us—I mean the likes of Felix Hartmann, and myself, though not, perhaps, Alastair, who was essentially an innocent, with an innocent’s faith in the justice and inevitability of the cause. So when Hartmann looked at me that day, in the lemon-and-blue light of Psyche’s sun-dazzled garden in Cambridge, as the Falangist guns were firing five hundred miles to the south of us, he saw that I was exactly what was required: harder than Alastair, more biddable than Boy, a casuist who would split an ideological hair to an infinitesimal extreme of thinness—in other words, a man in need of a faith (No one more devout than a sceptic on his knees— Querell dixit), and so there was nothing left to say. Hartmann distrusted words, and made it a point of pride never to use more of them than the occasion required.

Alastair suddenly stood up and began fussily gathering the teacups, making a great show of not treading on our toes, and walked off, muttering, with a sort of resentful flounce, bearing the tea tray aloft before him like a grievance: I suppose he too was a little in love with Felix—more than a little, probably—and was jealous, now that his matchmaking exercise had proved so successful so quickly. Hartmann, however, seemed hardly to notice his going. He was leaning forward intently, head bowed, with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped (it must be a mark of true grace to be able to sit in a deckchair without looking like a discommoded frog). After a moment he glanced up at me sideways with a crooked, oddly feral smile.

“You know Boy Bannister, of course,” he said.

“Of course; everyone knows Boy.”

He nodded, still with that fierce leer, an eyetooth glinting.

“He is going to make a journey to Russia,” he said. “It’s time for him to become disenchanted with the Soviet system.” By now his look was positively wolfish. “Perhaps you would care to accompany him? I could arrange it. We—they—have many art treasures. In public galleries, of course.”

We both laughed at once, which left me feeling uneasy. It will sound strange, coming from me, but the complicity suggested by that kind of thing—the soft laugh exchanged, the quick pressure of the hand, the covert wink—always strikes me as faintly improper, and shaming, a small conspiracy got up against a world altogether more open and decent than I or my accomplice in intimacy could ever hope to be. Despite all Felix Hartmann’s dark charm and elegant intensity, I really preferred the goons and the thugs with whom I had to deal later on, such as poor Oleg Kropotsky, with his awful suits and his pasty face like that of a debauched baby; at least they made no bones about the ugliness of the struggle in which we were unlikely partners. But that was much later; as yet the eager virgin was only at the kissing stage, and still intact. I smiled back into Felix Hartmann’s face and with an insouciance I did not fully feel said that yes, a couple of weeks in the arms of great Mother Rus might be just the thing to harden up my ideological position and strengthen my ties of solidarity with the proletariat. At this his look turned wary—the Comrades never were very strong in the irony department—and he frowned again at his shiny toecaps and began to speak earnestly of his experiences in the war against the Whites: the burned villages, the raped children, the old man he had come upon one rainy evening somewhere in the Crimea, crucified on his own barn door, and still alive.

“I shot him through the heart,” he said, making a pistol of finger and thumb and silently firing it. “There was nothing else to do for him. I see his eyes still in my dreams.”

I nodded, and I too looked grimly at my shoes, to show how thoroughly ashamed I was of that facetious reference to Holy Mother Russia; but just below the lid of my sobriety there was squeezed a cackle of disgraceful laughter, as if there were an evil, merry little elf curled up inside me, hand clapped to mouth and cheeks bulging and weasel eyes malignantly aglitter. It was not that I thought the horrors of war were funny, or Hartmann completely ridiculous; that was not the sort of laughter that was threatening to break out. Perhaps laughter is the wrong word. What I felt at moments such as this—and there would be many such: solemn, silent, fraught with portent—was a kind of hysteria, made up of equal parts of disgust and shame and appalling mirth. I cannot explain it—or could, perhaps, but do not want to. (One can know too much about oneself, that is a thing I have learned.) Someone has written somewhere, I wish I could remember who, of the sensation of gleeful anticipatory horror he experiences in the concert hall when in the middle of a movement the orchestra grinds to a halt and the virtuoso draws back his arm preparatory to plunging his bow into the quivering heart of the cadenza. Although the writer is a cynic, and as a Marxist (am I a Marxist, still?) I should disapprove of him, I know exactly what he means and secretly applaud his baleful honesty. Belief is hard, and the abyss is always there, under one’s feet.

Alastair came back. Seeing Hartmann and me sunk in what must have looked like silent communion, and perhaps was, he grew more cross than ever.

“Well,” he said, “have you decided the future of art?”

When neither of us responded—Hartmann looked up at him with a vacant frown as if trying to remember who he was—he threw himself down on the deckchair, which gave a loud, pained grunt of protest, and clamped his stubby arms across his chest and glared at a bush of shell-pink roses.

“What do you think, Alastair?” I said. “Mr. Hartmann—”

“Felix,” Hartmann said smoothly, “please.”

“—has offered me a trip to Russia.”