by Amis, Martin
‘No one who knows anything about it thinks so. But most Americans believe it’s retaliation. Invading Iraq constitutes rightful payback for September 11.’
As it turned out, the levelling of the Twin Towers – together with the mauling of the Pentagon – did find a place in the strained rationale for the war in Iraq: raisons d’état demanded it, to assert American resolve and credibility. After September, Kissinger reportedly told George W. Bush in 2002, ‘Afghanistan is not enough’; and a second Islamic nation would have to be made to yield.
You’d have thought that March 2003 was perhaps rather late for a wild overreaction to September 2001. Most of us got our wild overractions to September 2001 out of the way in September 2001. And as mere civilians we did it with no investment of blood or treasure; we did it in seclusion, in the privacy of our hearts and minds.
*1 Although etymology is a notoriously poor guide to meaning, it makes its contribution to the weight, feel, and flavour of a word. ‘Cute’ is a shortening of ‘acute’ (shrewd). And as for ‘pretty’: ‘ORIGIN: OE praettig (in sense “cunning, crafty”, later “clever, skilful”), from a W. Gmc base meaning “trick” ’. By contrast, ‘beauty’ regally proceeds – via ‘OFr beauté’ – from Latin bellus ‘beautiful, fine’…There is something remarkably undesigning about beauty. Although no one really understands it (and I include scientists who study nothing else), everyone knows it when they see it. Beauty isn’t shrewd or crafty and it is not a trick. Beauty, perhaps, is more like a force of nature.
*2 The Anti-Defamation League has produced a compelling world map of anti-Semitism. Some scores for Europe: 4 per cent of Swedes are anti-Semitic; in Britain the figure is 8 per cent (though in Ireland it is 20), in Germany the figure is 27, in Austria 28, and in France 37 (and in Greece it is a near-Middle Eastern 69). The ADL’s findings are dated 2015; in that year over 8,000 Jews left France (mostly for Israel), compared to 774 from Britain and a mere 200 from Germany.
*3 Meaning the H. G. Wells creation so thrillingly serialised on TV when I was a boy. And now that same boy looked like the Invisible Man – not as you saw him in company or in public (a tweed-jacketed and roll-necked mummy in dark glasses), but as he was when he went on his missions, invisibly naked except for a pair (or so Martin, aged eleven in South Wales, had automatically supposed) of invisible underpants. In the nightclub it was as if I wasn’t there. It was a moment that broke the illusion described by Tolstoy: our feeling that time was something that just moves past us while we stay the same…
*4 By the year 2060 (we had read) most Italians will have no sisters, no brothers, no aunts, no uncles, and no cousins. Yes, Italy.
*5 For an evocation of co-identity, I again turn to Tolstoy. In the novella ‘Family Happiness’ (sometimes called ‘Happy Ever After’) Tolstoy gives us the nocturnal imaginings of the orphaned seventeen-year-old Marya as she reviews the attentions paid to her by her guardian, Sergei: ‘I felt that my dreams and thoughts and prayers were living things, living there in the darkness with me, hovering about my bed and standing over me. And every thought I had was his thought, and every feeling his feeling. I did not know then that this was love – I thought that it was something that often happened…’ Tolstoy is the presiding spirit of this chapter. Who else has made happiness swing on the page?
*6 On the night after Pearl Harbor, Churchill said that for the first time in years his insomnia withdrew, and he slept the sleep of ‘the grateful and the saved’; he said he hoped that the sleep of eternity would be as soft and as pure.
*7 America went through exactly the same routine after the First War, targeting the Germans, and we had ‘liberty cabbage’ and even ‘liberty measles’. Except that Germany was a foe, while France, now, was just a carping ally. This freedom–liberty business, I later discovered, predates the birth of America. The domestic alternative to the heavily taxed tea of the Boston Tea Party was an ‘unappetising potion called Liberty Tea’, writes Barbara Tuchman in The March of Folly.
*8 At one point in Ron Rosenbaum’s classic Explaining Hitler, Yehuda Bauer, the dean of Holocaust studies, tells the author that French anti-Semitism was ‘far worse, far more virulent, deep-rooted and bitter than Germany’s in the pre-World War I period’. Bauer cites the highly regarded historian George Mosse, who said that ‘if someone
had come to me in 1914 and told me that one country in Europe would attempt to exterminate the Jews, I would have said then, “No one can be surprised at the depths to which France could sink.” ’ Bauer and Mosse are both serious men, but I find myself starting back from this and shaking my head. For one thing, I can’t imagine the Holocaust translated into French – a language without tonic stresses. ‘Sortez! En dehors! Vite! Plus vite!’; these words have none of the plausibility and menace of ‘Raus! Raus! Schnell! Schneller!’
*9 The toll was 642. The Germans machine-gunned 190 men in sheds and barns; 247 women and 205 children were confined to the church, which was set on fire. The village was looted and razed; there were six survivors. This happened in Oradour-sur-Glane, and it was the wrong village, with no connection to the Resistance. Apparently the SS wanted Oradour-sur-Vayres – just under twenty miles away.
*10 The coralling – its manner, its dot-the-i cruelty – also followed the Nazi example. Before being herded on to cattle cars bound for Auschwitz, 13,152 people, including 4,051 children, were held for several days at the Vélodrome d’Hiver (a bicycle track in the middle of Paris, unventilated for the occasion) in July 1942; according to some reports, all the toilets were sealed and there was only one tap.
*11 It would be some years before Christopher wrote, ‘A Holocaust denier is a Holocaust affirmer.’ Though not nearly as rhetorically satisfying, ‘Holocaust endorser’, I told Christopher, would make the point less ambiguously.
*12 One day, in about 1997, I was confronted in a kitchen by two glass bowls of white crystals, sugar and salt, and it took me quite a long time to establish which was which. Another day, in about 2000, I noticed that my tongue had gone black. It turned out to be nothing that half an hour with a toothbrush and a bar of soap couldn’t put right. But it did occur to me that pretty soon I’d probably have to start thinking about cutting down.
Chapter 2
September 11
1: The day after
Wound
We begin with the day after – September 12, 2001.
I was in my rented workplace (kitchen, study, bedroom, bathroom, in a mews off Portobello Road), standing at the sink and attending to a wound. It was on the back of my right hand – just beneath the knuckle of the middle finger; about the size of a thumbnail, it was a wound upon a wound (there was a wound there already – sustained in mid-July). I gazed at it, I listened to it (I sometimes imagined I could hear the faint fizz of traumatised tissue), and I dabbed at it with a ball of cotton wool drenched in disinfectant…That morning, when I awoke in the marital bed, my pillow was haphazardly badged with blood; instantly I thought of three, no four possible outlets (mouth, nose, ears, eyes) until I remembered, with shallow relief. Of course: it was my right hand.
Now I crossed a doorway and activated the answering machine. Using the rewind button I found the message I wanted, which was logged at around eight o’clock that morning. Martin. It’s your old friend Phoebe here. I have something to tell you. Something to pass on to you. It’s been bothering me for twenty-four years and I don’t see why it shouldn’t start bothering you. Expect a communication. Goodbye.
It was her vendetta voice: not wholly unamused, but seriously embittered, with authentic grievance in it, something narrow-eyed and white-lipped (seldom the case when she taunted shifty suppliers of office furniture, evasive bookies, and the like). So authentic, indeed, that I felt the urge to consult my conscience about Phoebe Phelps. But before I could consult it, I would first have to find it…Twenty-four years: 1977. I thought for a moment and wondered, Was it that business wit
h Lily? Surely not: that business with Lily was something I got away with. Wasn’t it?
Well, I would find out.
The coffee cup, the ashtray, the open exercise book…He sat slumped at his desk. To repeat, it was September 12, 2001; and for the time being his work in progress (a novel) seemed neither here nor there – nor anywhere else. The way he now saw it, this particular fiction, and for that matter fiction itself (Middlemarch, Moby-Dick, Don Quixote, etc.), was demoted to nonentity – by World War III or whatever it was that announced itself the previous day.
He would soon learn that all the novelists (and all the poets and dramatists) were being asked by the Fourth Estate to write about September 11. Ian had already written about it (and Christopher, of course, had already written about it). Salman and Julian would be writing about it. All of them were asked, and all of them said yes. What else was there to write about? What else was there to do?
Asked that morning by the Guardian to write about September 11, he said yes. And so he turned to a fresh page and scrawled ‘September 11’ at the top of it. He wrote his fiction and his journalism in the same exercise books, so he just turned to a fresh page and began to unearth his parallel self: the one that wrote about reality, in editorial (or op-editorial) mode.*1 He usually made this switch with reluctance, even with some self-pity; but that morning he went about it with numb resignation. Then he just sat there, numbly smoking.
The part of him that produced fiction, he felt, was in any case shutting down for ever. And how did it feel? If you took its pulse, that day, it felt like a very minor addition of grief, to be tacked on to the grief that was due to the thousands of dead (no one yet knew how many thousands – eight, ten?) and most particularly, most essentially, to those who found themselves leaping from the Towers: leaping out into the blue, and dropping seventy, eighty, ninety floors rather than stay for another instant within. They fell at the rate of thirty-two feet per second squared, and, as we later heard with our own ears, exploded like mortar shells when they hit the ground; they were not suicide bombers; these people, they were suicide bombs; and some of them were themselves already on fire…
So no fiction, thank you (he couldn’t be doing with fiction), because fiction was partly a form of play – and reality was now earnest.*2
With his stiffened (and throbbing) right hand he reached out and wrote 1) all over again the world seems bipolar. And, yes, it really did…One day in the very early 1990s Martin made an announcement to Nat and Gus (they were perhaps seven and six). ‘I’m so glad you won’t have to live out your childhood under that shadow. As I did.’ He meant what he said and they peered up at him, all meek and grateful…The shadow he had in mind derived from the Cold War and the equation E=mc2: in other words (in Eric Hobsbawm’s words), the forty-year ‘contest of nightmares’. And that shadow did go, or it receded – to be replaced, yesterday, by another shadow. And what did that shadow derive from?
‘It’s an ideology within a religion,’ said Christopher on the phone. ‘This is fascism with an Islamic face.’*3
In any event one thing was plain enough. The twelve-year hiatus – beginning on November 9, 1989, with the abdication of Communism – the great lull, the vacuum of apparent enemylessness (during which America could cosily devote a year to Monica Lewinsky and another year to O. J. Simpson), came to an end on September 11, 2001. And he already sensed that the new hatred, like the old, was somehow inward looking and self-tormented, and that its goals were unachievable and therefore unappeasable. Planetary agonism had resumed; and all over again the other half of the world (very roughly speaking, but so it felt) was out to kill his kids.
The doorbell sounded.
Special delivery
The doorbell sounded. Which would be a shattering development at any time. He wasn’t expecting anyone (he very seldom expected anyone); and besides London on that Wednesday morning, yes, distant London, an ocean away, had an inert and abject air to it, sparse, silent – in fact sick to its stomach (even the buildings looked squeamish and tense), with few people in the streets, and all of them going where they were going because they had to, not because they wanted to (the idea of pleasure had withdrawn, had gone absent. It was not yet clear that the assailants were in general the armed enemies of pleasure).
When he didn’t expect anyone and the doorbell rang, he crept to the window in the disused bedroom; here you could look down at an angle and see your callers on the doorstep as they stood there erectly blinking and composing themselves…He had often been struck by the fact that people who are monitored in this way tend to diffuse an aura of innocence. Now he thought he knew why: they are at that moment comparatively innocent, innocent compared to their furtive observer. And the woman outside did indeed seem innocent, considering she was Phoebe Phelps.
…And not Phoebe as she would be now, in 2001 (getting on for sixty), but Phoebe as she would’ve been then – in say 1978, or even 1971 (Tycoon Tanya), before he ever knew her. Seen from his vantage, seen from above: the slanted profile, the straight no-nonsense nose, the level chin out-thrust. But it was her shape, her form, her outline that ignited his recognition: she and Phoebe displaced exactly the same volume of air.
He went down and opened the door and said,
‘Hello – I know you. You’re Siobhan’s girl.’ There was an easing, and he continued, ‘Maud. We took you out to tea at Whiteley’s when you were ten.’
‘Yes, that’s me all right. I remember. You had very long hair.’ For a moment she smiled unreservedly; but then the smile was quickly shelved or put aside, and she straightened up. ‘Uh, Mr Amis, sorry to bother, but Aunt Phoebe asked me to pop this round, person to person. She doesn’t trust the post. She says what they don’t lose they steal. Or burn. Or in this case sell.’
‘Sell? Who to?’
‘There was mention of the Daily Mail…’
She held out the envelope and he took delivery – just his name (scornfully dashed off). ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘This’ll be my anthrax.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Anthrax. It’s just hearsay. Last night I talked to a friend who lives in Washington DC, but for now he’s stranded in Washington State. Seattle.’
‘No flights?’
‘No flights. Every non-military plane in America is grounded. And he says anthrax. You know,’ Martin went on (it was a grey morning but harmlessly mild), ‘the first thing they did, yesterday in New York, was test the air for toxins. Chemicals and spores. Anyway it’s just hearsay, but anthrax is meant to be next.’*4
‘This isn’t anthrax. It’s just a letter.’
‘Well, thanks. Thanks for your trouble.’
‘It’s no trouble. My office is just round the corner. But…’ She gave a soft wince. ‘The thing is I’m supposed to wait while you…She expects an answer.’
‘…Oh.’ This was a forcing move, he later realised. He said, ‘Well come on up.’
It was lovely and warm in his flat but it was warm for an unlovely reason. Each September he put the heating on a few days earlier in the month. The flesh thins, the blood thins; the horizons slip their moorings and drift a little nearer; and the creature slowly learns how to cover up and ‘creep into its bedding’ (Saul).
So his kitchen was tepid with the aroma of Cold Old Man – or so he resignedly presumed as he watched Maud slide off her leather jacket and hook it over a chair and blow the fringe clear of her brow. The white shirt, the soon unbuttoned charcoal waistcoat, the mauve skirt – businesswear for another kind of business (she worked for the PR firm called Restless Ambition in All Saints Road). Yes, she was very like Phoebe, very like Phoebe in her movements and address, the light, quiet step, the way she seemed to coast through the air…
He said, ‘I’ll read this next door. How long will I be gone would you say?’
‘Oh no more than ten minutes. Fifteen. But then you’ll have to do your reply.’
‘…
I’m sorry – there’s some fresh coffee there.’
‘Ooh, that’d be brilliant.’
‘Take a seat. And here are the papers.’ Headlines were spread out on the kitchen table. TERROR IN AMERICA…A NEW DAY OF INFAMY…ACT OF WAR…BASTARDS! ‘Have you read it? The letter?’
‘I’ve listened to it. A couple of times. There were uh, different versions.’
‘Go on, give me a hint.’
‘Well, the names didn’t mean much to me. But I could see why she was worried about the media getting wind of it.’
He left the room holding the envelope between finger and thumb.
What was he expecting Phoebe to tell him? About the slow-acting but fatal social disease he had unknowingly transmitted, about the college-age triplets he had unknowingly sired…He took out the two stiff sheets and read. And reread. And emerged from his study saying,
‘Maud, Phoebe doesn’t expect an answer. There’s no answer to this. She just wants you to tell her how I took it.’
‘…Your hand.’
‘Oh, Christ.’
The plaster on his knuckle, loosened (again) by the mobility of the joint, now dangled like the tongue of a dog while blood dribbled on to his palm and down his wrist. He woodenly moved to the sink and engaged the cold water, and flapped around with his other hand for the box of Band-Aids. She said,
‘Let me do it…Mm, that looks quite nasty.’
Maud came up and stood close; she scrolled the dressing over his graze, scrolled it tight. Girls’ hands, each finger with its own intelligent life; and his own hands, webbed, quivering, undefined…
He thanked her, and she took half a step back and asked him with a new kind of brightness, ‘Do I remind you of her?’ When he nodded she went on, ‘People say we’re very alike. The figure too, don’t you think? Slim, but…’
‘Vaguely,’ he said – though for a moment he had definitely felt Phoebe draw near (her body weight, her force field with its orbs and planes).
