Brian Aldiss - Life in the West

She flashed him a reproving expression.’ Don’t you start on the irony. You were safe in Britain when the Germans were killing off Europe. Me, I am Yugoslav by birth, or half Serbian and half Turkish, plus a dash of Persian.’

‘So you have reason to hate the Germans.’

She gave a curt nod, and tossed her head.

‘I was a tiny girl when the damned Nazis invaded my homeland. Everyone fought them, young and old. No country was more brave, more determined, than Serbia. My father was killed by the Bosch, then my elder brother. So I can’t help hating them. An uncle and I escaped to the United States after the war, but one does not forget those times. They leave a mark.’

Pelli said something to her angrily in Italian, but she silenced him with one of her quelling glances.

‘The Americans understand little of the rest of the world,’ she said. ‘But you see I am not like that, although I have American citizenship.’

‘Yugoslavia’s a magnificent country. If you’re so Left Wing, and you dislike the States as much as it seems you do, why don’t you return to Yugoslavia?’

She appeared to undergo a sudden change of mood. As if dismissing the subject, she slipped a slender arm on which bracelets clattered through his arm, and made him look with her in a small lighted shop window. Pelli stood awkwardly by, hands impatiently on hips.

‘That handbag’s not bad, eh? I bet it was made in Milano. You know Yugoslavia, don’t you? You have lived there?’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘There are more job opportunities for me in the States.’

‘Thank democracy for that, Selina. Be grateful for what you’ve got.’

She sighed and they walked up the street in silence.

‘Well, dear, dear. You see, Tom, I do really quite fancy you — much more than I fancy this sulky young man who wants only to go to bed with me and fortunately does not talk English. Well, I go to bed with whom I feel like and maybe tonight I feel like you if you are so inclined. So I don’t want to offend you. But you are — oh, so simple. The British are like Americans, they do not know the real world. Okay, there are more job opportunities in the States, but that’s only your debating point to be scored. You don’t see why there are all those jobs more.

‘Jobs are what capitalism’s all about — getting people to work for the bosses. That’s really why I hate capitalism, because it is just a huge business and industrial machine gone mad, with all the stupid “free citizens”, as they call themselves, really mere consumers, chained for life to support the machine, proud of their sharing.’

He seized her wrist and shook it till the bracelets jangled, laughing in irritation. ‘At the risk of being left off your visiting list tonight, let me tell you that you are the victim of propaganda — outdated propaganda at that. If the world was as you say, it wouldn’t be worth living in! You’ve got a silly argument, like Krawstadt with his pinball machines. Work’s okay, work gives us identity. And do people cease to consume, to need goods, under other systems than capitalism? It’s just that other systems are less efficient at producing the goods.’

‘That may be, and the other systems may have their faults, but it is the efficiency of the capitalist system I also dislike. It exploits the world for the privileges of a few. Who needs an electric carving knife? That efficiency is itself a crime; I’ll give you an example.’

She had got her wrist free from his grasp, and sank her long crimson nails into his arm with a sort of humorous cruelty.

‘We were talking about the Nazis. Okay. In the First World War, Germany had three important chemicals firms, Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst. You know all the names today. The Germans managed to synthesize ammonia and nitric acid in a successful industrial process. The British and Americans got millions of tons of natural nitrates needed for high explosives from Chile, and so their chemical industry fell behind Germany.

‘The three firms united to become I.G. Farben, a conglomerate which totally identified itself with the Nazi cause. It employed slave labour, it ran its own concentration camp, it manufactured Zyklon B to gas Jews with, as well as manufacturing the usual agents of mass-destruction. I could say its products killed my father and brother.

‘The bosses of I.G. Farben were tried at Nuremberg after the war, but they just got cynical sentences of two or three years’ imprisonment. Farben was dissolved, but Hoechst, Bayer, and BASF started up again. What’s more, they and their subsidiaries got reparation settlements from America, millions of dollars.

‘Now they have bought themselves into the American pharmaceuticals industry, so that Bayer, for instance, has forty per cent of its assets in the US. Isn’t that an international conspiracy? You see how criminality, murder, become legal as long as they serve the system. Big money is always linked with death in capitalism.’

Squire shook his head. As he stared into the aquarium of the shop window in which five handbags drowned, her words brought a sort of helplessness.

He had a vision of her honed beauty as being formed by flight. In her mind, early terror had separated brain from will. Now the brain worked without further external referent and, seizing on its giant excuse, the shattering experience of war, projected an image of the evil which had destroyed her father leaping from country to country — from Serbia to Germany, from Germany to the USA, ever in pursuit of her. Where would safety be but in the country that had wished to exact vengeance from Germany after the war, and to de-industrialize it entirely?

This interpretation came to him with sudden persuasive power.

The stain of Ajdini’s personal bitterness had extended until it coloured her outlook on the whole world. America had become an uncaring step-mother, exchanged for the mother she loved and had left; every pretext which served to bolster her hatred was welcome. The tone of her voice indicated as much.

Tearing his eyes from the sunken handbags, he clasped her arm with his arm and said, ‘That’s a false perception. A lie. Everyone merchandizes death. Don’t think otherwise. Supposing your facts are roughly correct — I expect you’re loading them — then it proves nothing, nothing except that firms like nations go through good periods and bad. Are Bayer still manufacturing Zyklon B? Ask yourself that.’

‘Christ, I give you proof of the evils of capitalism and you don’t listen. BASF and the American firm Exxon were linked by trade even in wartime. But you can’t see. You’re conditioned. It’s like living among robots, talking to you people!’

She pulled her arm away and started to march up the street. Pelli caught at her other arm but she beat his hand down.

Falling in beside her, Squire said urgently, ‘You told me earlier that you had a belief in the miraculous. Perform a miracle on yourself. You’re a splendid woman, Selina — knowing you only two days, I can see such qualities in you.’ He was saying more than he had intended, and almost drew back, but the sight of that taut bone-like countenance spurred him on. ‘You’re poisoning yourself with hatred, somehow, I don’t know how, but I sense it.

‘Face the fact of your father’s death, see it simply as a bitter misfortune of war — and war not as an organized system but as a pandemic at this stage of human development. Try to blame no one! Hate cripples us. Don’t erect that death into a great structure which will eventually overpower all your happiness and wisdom.

‘You’ve lived in peace in the United States. Try to love it, to accept its vastness — and your own vastness. See the two processes as one. Forgive, let go, accept. Invest in the miraculous. There’s no way you can get revenge — from what, dear Selina? — except on yourself.’