The Squire Quartet. Brian Aldiss
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 merchandises 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.’
They crossed the Via Milano dangerously. She turned an angry face on him.
She opened her mouth, revealing her beautiful lower teeth, her tongue bedded in its clear juices. He was blind to screaming traffic.
‘You, what are you doing? Trying some damned Freudian rubbish on me? You know I hate and despise it! Telling me that what I see clearly before me is all in my head! Fool, sentimentalist, bloody Freudian!’
On the pavement, she moved towards him with an attacking movement, then veered so that Pelli bumped into her. Pelli, with no idea what the row was about, tried to grasp her again. Ajdini smacked his hand and almost ran for the hotel door.
‘Selina, Marx is a dead duck – neither he nor his creed can help you. He’s a damned sight worse than Freud. It’s the miraculous – that’s what you need!’
She was already hastening through the revolving doors.
Squire turned and looked at the glowering Pelli.
‘Life’s a bugger, isn’t it, chum?’ he said.
The traffic screamed by him. What were the drivers all so mad about? Was all of Ermalpa a conspiracy by the Fiat Motor Company?
She fled. One of the displaced, the uprooted, one of the mourners … Branded just as surely as the concentration-camp victims.
The modern generation, the generation of his son John, didn’t know about that branded generation of which he himself was one in ways hardly less decisive than Ajdini. They might one day have to learn the bitter way.
What was that curious statement of Marcuse, uttered in One-Dimensional Man? ‘Auschwitz continues to haunt, not the memory but the accomplishments of man – the space flights, the rockets and missiles, the “labyrinthine basement under the Snack Bar”…’
Just as the harsh peace terms imposed on Germany at the end of the First World War had paved the way for the second, so the nightmare induced by the second was building up shock waves which would culminate in the third. His inward response to Ajdini’s tale of the meshing of German and American pharmaceutical industries had been to exclaim, ‘Yes, that’s it, that’s how the evil gains,’ remembering William Burroughs’s comment that the paranoid is the man who has just discovered what’s going on. What real panacea, what escape, was there, except to advise people not to suffer, and to delight in what they could while they could?
That was no certain way. Pleasure was often the forerunner of trouble. It would be a pleasure to go to bed with Selina, if she was not just a tease, but the unhappy repercussions might be many, as had been the repercussions of his pleasure with Laura Nye in Singapore and elsewhere a year and a half ago. There was no Sure Way. The way of the mystic was not his.
As the civilized world, so called, expanded, driving out the animal kingdom, the labyrinthine chain of cause and effect grew more complex. People became so confused, not understanding the cause of their confusion, that any false prophet like Billy Graham or Karl Marx or von Daniken who came along offering them a thread through the labyrinth was received rapturously by millions. It was not so much the truth the millions cared about, but the thread itself. Something to hold on to.
Thinking his melancholy thoughts, Squire was more inclined to go in search of Ajdini – would she be lying weeping face down on her bed, or smoking a cool cigarette with d’Exiteuil? – rather than listen to Fittich; but a desire to support his German friend drove him into the hotel and towards the conference hall.
‘Squire, you’re useless. Too well-meaning. It’s weak to be well-intentioned. Why don’t I face up to how blackly corrupt the world is, and junk my pathetic thé dansant optimism? Why not just go and screw Selina, never mind her troubles, get some joy myself, which is what I really want to do, and to hell with Laura and the rest. As for Tess … it’s just my fool optimism makes me think she cared in the first place …’
He went and sat down in his place, between d’Exiteuil and Vasili Rugorsky. The two men were laughing together. Rugorsky said, ‘Dr d’Exiteuil owes an apology to you, Thomas.’
D’Exiteuil said, ‘You were right about the miraculous, in saying that it can happen. I believe you did observe a UFO earlier today.’
He produced a copy of the local evening newspaper. It featured a photograph of rooftops and a blurred object in the sky. Black headlines proclaimed, ‘Flying Hardware over Ermalpa – Have they Come from Outer Space?’
‘You see,’ said d’Exiteuil, reading, ‘Hundreds of people leaving their offices and factories at midday saw bright objects in the sky over the centre of the city. An Alitalia DC-9 landing at the airport sighted a flight of three flying beneath the plane and heading along the coast in the direction of Palermo. The objects were capable of staying stationary and then of moving off at colossal speeds.
‘Some of the objects were cigar-shaped, others the more familiar saucer shape. There were similar previous sightings a month ago. The Air Force is correlating all reports and would be glad to receive any photographs of the flying hardware.’
Squire stared at the print and the photograph in silence.
‘It’s a form of madness,’ Rugorsky said. ‘You see, these people are well-meaning, but they want to make a drama, like all under-developed people. One child’s balloon floating in the sky and they can feel free to imagine an air force of extra-terrestrials. Theatre rules them, not reasoning.’
‘But Squire saw one. You didn’t want a drama, did you, Tom?