Russell Hoban - Fremder

‘So she took off the top of Izzy’s skull and went to work on him. Do you know how he died?’

‘Can I tell this my way or is your concentration span too short?’

‘Sorry. Tell it your way.’

He poured himself another drink, gulped it down, had another coughing fit, then continued. ‘I was working in the Physitronics Lab in 2022. She was alone then — Izzy had died in April. On the fifteenth of May she rang up my department wanting help with a Broca relay modification and they put the call through to me. Did you ever hear a recording of her voice?’

‘Yes. “ Wie eine Frucht von Süssigkeit und Dunkelheit .” Like a fruit of sweetness and darkness.’

Sixe let off what sounded like a little burst of steam: ‘Puh!’

‘What?’

‘You’re assuming that I don’t understand German.’

‘Do you?’

‘No. But if you already assume that, why don’t you simply say the sodding thing in English to begin with? Helen was always doing that — she’d say something in German or French and then translate it for me. Bloody show-off.’ He poured the last of the Glenfiddich into our glasses and looked at me defiantly.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Helen needed a full-time assistant, and when her new grant came through she got me assigned to her. I lived in her house until that night in September when I came home and found her gone.

‘Did I say that August was always a bad month for her? Well, it was. That August she was six months pregnant and that didn’t make it any easier. Three years before, the twenty-first of August 2019, was the night the Shorties and the Clowns raped her and crippled Izzy. Seven of them: two twelve-year-olds and five of the others. The Clowns were the worst of it, she said — that she could be used like that by less-than-human things. She said to me, “In an infinite number of possible worlds there must have been one in which I had a gun and shot the lot of them. The quantum wave just happened to collapse in the wrong universe for me.”

‘“Helen,” I said to her, “you’ve got to put that behind you, it’s in the past.”

‘She said, “No, it isn’t, it’s happening right now and it keeps on happening, it doesn’t go away. They made an Auschwitz with their cocks and they made me live in it. ‘Jewish bitch,’ the Shorties kept calling me, ‘Jewish bitch,’ while they defiled me.” She went on about how it excited them to call her that while they did what they did to her, how in her mind they were still doing it; how her grandparents had their Auschwitz and she had hers that she lived in every day and every night. Then she said,’ “At eventide, Lo, terror! By morning it is no more.”’

‘I said, “What is no more, the terror?”

‘She said. “No, Lowell. This world is no more, not for me — I’ll find another one.”’ He spat on the ground. ‘Fucking Richard Soames.’

‘Who’s Richard Soames?’

‘He’s the one she wanted to go to the May Ball with when she was eighteen.’

‘Did she?’

‘No, she didn’t. Richard Soames had his pick of the prettiest daughters of the Twenty CC

‘What’s the Twenty CC?’

‘Families who had company cars twenty years or more before Gridlock.’

‘And you think if Richard Soames had taken her to the May Ball it would have made a big difference in her life?’

‘Yes, I do.’ He shook his head as if baffled by my obtuseness.

‘She hadn’t much luck with men, had she?’

‘She had me, whatever kind of luck that was, from the time we met until the end. Best part of my life. What’ve I got now? Shit. Where was I?’

‘You were saying she said she’d find another world.’

‘Right: another world. She said to me, “You think I can’t do it?”

‘I said, “I don’t know.”

‘She said, “I can do it. It takes a Jew to do it, to find the magic door, the quantum exit. Einstein, Oppenheimer, Teller — all Jews.” Then she told me how back in the sixteenth century in Prague this rabbi saved the Jews in the ghetto when the Gentiles were after them. He’d studied the Cabbala and that sort of thing and he made a big figure out of clay, what they called a golem . Then he wrote the name of God on its forehead and he whispered in its ear and the golem went out and sorted out the Gentiles. When things quieted down again the rabbi took the golem up to the attic of the synagogue and he told it to lie down and go to sleep. Then he wiped the name off its forehead. Then, according to Helen, the golem stayed there in the attic of the synagogue all covered with dust and cobwebs and batshit until the Nazis killed six million Jews, at which time Rabbis Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Teller plus one or two honorary rabbis wrote the name of God in a new way on the golem’s forehead and it woke up much bigger than before and got busy again. I said to her, “Helen, that golem killed Japanese. What did the Japanese ever do to the Jews?”

‘“They were allies of Germany, weren’t they,” she said. “Anyhow, retribution doesn’t necessarily work in parallel — sometimes it’s just an exchange of volumes. Millions of one kind are slaughtered in one place so millions of another kind get slaughtered in another place; evil action gets passed along the same as good. Shit happens, that’s the first law of Nature, and it happens to Jews again and again. Don’t talk to me about the Armenians and the Kurds and the native Americans — it isn’t the same thing for them. Nobody keeps circulating The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Kurdistan or stories about the Armenians and the native Americans ritually sacrificing Christian babies.”

‘She said this world had become a place in which the unspeakable was allowed to happen while everybody looked the other way. She said that her world wasn’t the same as mine: I lived in a world in which it had happened to them and she lived in a world in which it had happened to us .

‘There wasn’t much I could say when she got like that. I said to her, “Still, we’ve got each other.” She said yes but not as if it mattered a whole lot. She was never a very happy woman and August was always a bad month for her. You know about her suicide attempt?’

‘Yes, that was in the newsfax at the time — I’ve seen it at the library.’

‘I oughtn’t to have left her alone but she was hell to live with around then and sometimes I just had to get out of the house for a while. On the night of the twentieth I came back from a walk and found her drowning in her own vomit; she’d swallowed most of a bottle of Nepenthol and half a bottle of gin. Her note said: “MAYBE NO WORLD IS BEST.”’

‘She was a lot of laughs, my mum. It was wonderful doing my pre-natal time with her.’

‘I turned her over and got her to heave up most of it and when the paramedics arrived they pumped out her stomach right away so we got her through that one alive but of course she succeeded the next time.

‘She spent a couple of days at the SNG Rest and Reassessment Centre and had a little therapy and some tranquillisers and when she came home she was the cheerfullest I’d ever seen her. So we got back to work.

‘Our cover project was sensory remotes and we always had experimental prototypes and a lot of paper for the Review Board to look at. That June the Sheela-Na-Gig had appointed a tough Top Exec named Irene Heale Head of Project Review.’

‘I just met her today, she’s head of R & D now.’

‘That’s right — sweet-looking lady, isn’t she. “Iron” Heale, everybody called her back then. She and Helen had been at Elite Poly together and they’d both been working on brain mapping. Helen was Number One in her year; Heale was Number Two and it bothered her a lot. She wanted to team up with Helen on a joint project but Helen preferred to work alone and she won the Rousseau prize that year. Heale claimed that Helen had stolen some of her research and Helen denied it. There was a tribunal and the adjudicators cleared Helen.