A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

Efficient and muscular administration would be required if one were to achieve a plan of such … A legion of servants would have to serve.

What remained of RSHA Department IV B4 had been torn down in the sixties. And a number of people must have planned and some other people must have given appropriate permissions for and some further people must have built and then maintained and some other people must still be making the customary inspections of what now stood in its place. It was a fairly pleasant hotel in which to house temporary visitors who might be unaware of the site’s past and might also not be infected with fatal levels of obliviousness, although no enquiries were made into guests’ moral character, there were no formal vetting procedures and acceptance of bookings was based solely on apparent ability to pay.

Jon hadn’t slept properly during his Friday night at the Hotel Sylter Hof. This was partly because, stretched out in the dark of an anonymous bed, he could still hear, to a degree, the neat ruffling of terrible file cards and the clean peck of ribbon typewriters, summoning in filthy things. They disturbed. As did the thoughts of easy canteen chatter, boredom, office gossip and faraway corpses.

He had lain and checked — fastidiously — that he was the man he thought, who tried to do his job well and to think well, while keeping his grip on wider historical perspectives. Jon always tried to remember how wrong life could go, because that was in his nature and also because, possibly, he came from the humanities. He’d been a European-history specialist. And hiring graduates from the humanities had once served a purpose for the civil service: it had perhaps intended to gather a workforce used to doing more than bouncing along the surface of a subject — or even personnel not unfamiliar with the concepts underlying humanity. Specialists could be called on when necessary: accountants, mathematicians. That had been the way.

IT providers … they were specialists, although Christ knew what purpose they specially, actually served — it seemed one simply fed them money and, some while later, they converted it into insecure shit, uninformative shit, unworkable shit and, in general, shit. And economists — why did you need them? Economics was not a humanity. It was not now, as currently practised, a science. It involved little more than submission to a cult. It made him long for maths, the inarguable truth and perfection of maths.

And he’d always hated maths.

The only mathematical form that I can appreciate is music. Which transcends maths — and a person has to be transcendent somewhere … even me.

Howlin’ Wolf wasn’t thinking of maths when he played. He just felt it. He could feel.

‘Heard the whistle blowin’, couldn’t see no train. Way down in my heart, I had an achin’ pain. How long, how long, baby how long.’

You could see what he felt, know it, share it, taste it.

It was pure in him and strong.

And Howlin’ Wolf was also an orderly man and a good boss — in him that was compatible with letting feelings out, with letting himself out. He could burn and sweat and shudder and wail and wail and wail when he needed it for the music. He could keep safe otherwise.

And he could feel the blues. Deep blues.

Which is, naturally, not about safety. But he squared the circle and certainly circled the square.

Jon felt that he was an orderly man and a good boss — his assessments did not undermine this belief.

Perhaps it is the blues I am feeling.

Jon grimaced swiftly. Like hell. I am all square and no circle, no matter what I try.

But I’m not a bad man. In my own way. I am not.

This is because I keep asking myself if I’m not. And I listen out for ribbon typewriters in the night. And I do, I do, I do what I can.

Typewriters, as we know, are these days the most secure option. They produce traceable, hard to access, discrete documents. The Russians ordered up thousands straight after Snowden. India followed. Germany. Wise beasts everywhere have shipped them in.

Taptaptap.

Peckpeckpeck.

Me, too. Back at home.

Tocktocktock.

The sound of modern caution.

The sound that I don’t hear at work.

Only in my dreams.

Taptaptap.

I am sorry for the hotel, Becky. I am sorry that I have these blues — these uptight white overcomfortable blues … and that’s the worst kind, baby.

But the hotel hadn’t really been his problem — not his pressing problem — the fight he started with his daughter on the plane had troubled him more. That’s what stole his sleep.

It was so plainly imbecilic as a course of action: get your only child alone and immediately criticise her boyfriend. No, not immediately. I mentioned that her shoes were great and that she looked well and wouldn’t this be fun and that we didn’t often get the chance. Then I started in with the ill-advised comments. Just after we were allowed to unfasten our seatbelts. Idiot.

‘You don’t like him.’

‘I’m not … that’s not what I’m saying.’

‘No, it’s what I’m saying. You’re barely civil to him. What about at my birthday party?’

‘At your …? I wasn’t … Did I do something wrong at your birthday party?’

‘You didn’t say one word to him.’

This seemed unlikely. Jon scrabbled back to an afternoon of blustery wind and having a headache on Becky’s little balcony, feeling sick due to unforeseen events — lots of her friends inside and shouting. It was good that she had so many friends. Otherwise you’d worry. Loud friends. ‘I … Didn’t I? It was an odd day. I think. Stuff was going on—’

‘At the office. That office eats you.’

‘I’m nearly done.’

‘Nobody stays as long as you have, not any more. You could have retired. You could be resting. You could be doing something you might like.’ She’d begun to change the subject and for some reason he hadn’t let her, even though stopping her was insane.

‘Well, you don’t …’ A gulp when he swallowed — this was his throat attempting to prevent him from screwing up, yet on he went. ‘You don’t … It’s that when you’re with him and with me, when we’re the three of us and having a meal, or something of that sort … I notice … It’s that …’

‘It’s that what?’

And he shouldn’t ever mention this, except she is his daughter and he does, he does, he does — in his veins and in his breathing and in his blue and buried heart — he does love her and that makes her happiness matter. ‘It’s that when you’re with him you seem not to speak. You stop saying things.’

‘Go on.’ Her tone a clear warning that he ought to jump out of the plane before doing any such thing.

But on he had stumbled. ‘Darling, it’s just that I have been around, alive, for a while and seen relationships — I’m not talking about mine, this isn’t anything to do with mine — seen what happens when the man does all the talking, when either partner does all the talking. I’ve seen what that suggests has happened already between two people … what it means when the woman can’t get a word in sideways and the guy …’ She was condemningly quiet and so he continued to dig his own grave — speaking while she did not and aware of the irony. ‘My generation of men, we had a hell of a job getting it right — the feminism thing — but we tried, we absolutely, not all of us, but we backed up what women were doing and we had no maps and that was — I’m not saying we did well — but that generation, men and women, attempted to change how partnerships went, or some of us did, and it wasn’t, it wasn’t about beautiful and intelligent women with wonderful futures sitting next to blowhard young men and just listening as if they haven’t a thought in their head—’