Anthony Burgess: Tremor of Intent

'My husband,' said Brigitte, 'studies the sciences.'

'Your husband,' I said, 'will be a very important man.' Roper was eating too hard to blush with pleasure. 'Science is going to be very important. The new and terrible weapons that science is capable of making are a great priority in the peaceful work of reconstruction. Rockets, not butter.'

'There is much butter on the table,' said Brigitte, stone-facedly chewing. And then: 'What you say I do not understand.'

'There's an Iron Curtain,' I told her. 'We're not too sure of Russia's intentions. To keep the peace we must watch out for war. We've learned a great deal since 1938.'

'Before you should have learned,' said Brigitte, now on the cheese course. 'Before England should this have known.' Roper kindly unscrambled that for her. 'It was Russia,' said Brigitte, 'that was the fiend.'

'Enemy?'

'Ja, ja, Feind. Enemy.' She tore at a piece of pumpernickel as though it were a transubstantiation of Stalin. 'This Germany did know. This England did know not.'

'And that's why Germany persecuted the Jews?'

'International Bolschevismus,' said Brigitte with satisfaction. Then Roper started, eloquently, going on at length. Brigitte, his teacher, listened, nodded approval, cued him sometimes, rarely corrected. Roper said: 'We, that is to say the British, must admit we have nearly everything to blame ourselves for. We were blind to it all.

Germany was trying to save Europe, no more. Mussolini had tried once, but with no help from those who should have helped. We had no conception of the power and ambition of the Soviet Union. We're learning now, but very late. Three men knew it well, but they were all reviled. Now only one of them is living. I refer,' he said, to enlighten my ignorance, 'to General Franco in Spain.'

'I know all about General bloody Franco,' I said coarsely. 'I did a year in Gibraltar, remember. Given the chance, he would have whipped through and taken the Rock. You're talking a lot of balls,' I added.

'It is you who talk the balls,' said Brigitte. She picked up words quickly, that girl. 'To my husband please listen.'

Roper talked on, growing more shiny as he talked. There was one thing, I thought in my innocence: here was a man who, when he got down to research, as he would very shortly, would be quite above suspicion – a man who would be susceptible to no blandishments of the one true fiend. What I didn't like was this business of England's guilt and need to expiate great wrong done to bloody Deutschland. I took as much as I could stand and then broke in with: 'Ah God, man, how can you justify all the atrocities, all the suppression of free thought and speech, the great men sent into exile when not clubbed to death – Thomas Mann, Freud-'

'Only the smutty writers,' said Brigitte, meaning schmutzig.

'If you're going to wage war,' said Roper, 'it's got to be total war. War means fighting an enemy, and the enemy isn't necessarily somewhere out there. He can be at home, you know, and he's at his most insidious then. But,' he conceded, 'do you think that anybody really enjoyed having to send great brains into exile? They wouldn't be argued with, many of them. Impossible, a lot of them, to convince. And time was very short.'

I was going to say something about ends not justifying means, but I remembered that it was right for prisoners-of-war to drop razor-blades into the enemy's pigswill and that, if they'd bombed Coventry, we'd bombed Dresden. That if they'd been wrong we'd been wrong too. That killing babies was no way to kill Hitler, who'd had to kill himself anyway at the end. That history was a mess. That Fascism had been the inevitable answer to Communism. That the Jews could sometimes be as Father Byrne had portrayed them. I shuddered. Was somebody brainwashing me? I looked at Brigitte, but she, replete, glowed only with sex. I clenched my teeth, wanting her on the floor then and there, Roper looking on. But I merely said: 'You've joined Father Byrne in condemning the warmongering English. And, of course, the money-grubbing Jews. You two would get on well together now.'

'That horrible Church,' said Roper passionately. 'Jewish meekness, turning the other cheek, draining the blood from the race. Nietzsche was right.' Brigitte nodded.

'What the hell do either of you know about Nietzsche?' I asked. 'I bet neither of you's ever read a word of Nietzsche.'

Brigitte began: 'My father-' Roper said, mumbling a bit: 'There was a very good summary of his philosophy in the Reader's Digest.' He was always honest. '-at school,' ended Brigitte. I said: 'Oh, my God. What do you want – blood and iron and black magic?'

'No,' he said. 'I want to get on with my work. The first thing is to get my degree. And then research. No,' he repeated, somewhat dispirited now (perhaps that was overeating, though: he'd tucked away half a chicken and a slab of ham and a bit each of the four kinds of cheese, all with bread in proportion). 'I don't want anything that causes war or could be used to make war more terrible than it's been already. All the dead, all the innocent children.'

'My father,' said Brigitte.

'Your father,' agreed Roper. It was as though they were toasting him. And for a moment it was as if the Second World War had been conjured expressly to kill off Herr Whoever-he-was.

'Yes,' I said. 'And my Uncle Jim, and the two children evacuated to my Aunt Florrie's house who found a bomb in a field, and all the poor bloody Jews and dissident intellectuals.'

'You say right,' said Brigitte. 'Bloody Jews.'

'We must never be allowed to start another war like that one,' said Roper. 'A great nation in ruins.'

'Not starving, though,' I said. 'Plenty of Danish butter and fat ham. The best-nourished bastards in Europe.'

'Please,' said Roper, 'do not call my wife's people bastards.'

'What is that word?' asked Brigitte. 'Many strange words he knows, your fiend.'

'Friend,' I amended.

'A great nation's bones picked over by Yanks and Bolshevists,' said Roper, 'and the French, a rag of a nation, and the British.' Strangely, two cathedral choirs sang in my head, antiphonally: Babylon the Great is fallen -If I forget thee, O Jerusalem. I said: 'You always wanted a unified universe. Tautology and all. Remember that no science now can be wholly for peace. Rockets are for outer space but also for knocking hell out of enemies. Rocket fuel can speed man into the earth or off it.'

'How did you know about rocket fuel?' asked Roper, wide-eyed. 'I never mentioned-'

'just a guess. Look,' I said, 'I think I'd better be going.'

'Yes,' said Brigitte very promptly, 'be going.' I looked at her, wondering whether to be nasty back, but her body got in the way. Perhaps I'd said enough already. Perhaps I'd been discourteous. I still had fragments of Uncle Otto's ham in my back teeth. Perhaps I was ungrateful. I said to Roper: 'It's a messy sort of journey back where I'm going.'

'I thought you were in Preston.'

'No, a country house some way outside. A matter of a last bus.'

'Well,' he said unhappily, 'it's been nice having you. You must come again some time.' I looked at Brigitte to see if she would corroborate that in smile, nod, word, but she sat stony. So I said: 'Danke schön, gnädige Frau. Ich habe sehr gut gegessen.' And then, like a fool, I added: 'Alles, alles über Deutschland.' Her eyes began to fill with angry tears. I got out without waiting to be shown out. Jolting on the bus into town, I kept seeing Brigitte's great Urmutter breasts wagging and jumping inside their white cotton blouse. Roper would undo a button, and then the catechism would start: 'Whose fault was it all?'-'England's, England's' (most breathily). It would continue, intensifying, to the point where she would lose interest in catechising. I turned myself into Roper. Oh yes, cupping a fine firm huge Teutonic breast I too would breathily revile England, would blame my own mother for the war, would say, preparing for the plunge, that not enough Jews had been plunged into gas-chambers. And afterwards I would take it all back, though not in any chill disgust of post coitum: rather I would call her an evil bitch, very hot, and strafe her. And then it would start again.