Children of the Sun

by Max Schaefer

  ‘I think it’s more about masculinity,’ said Adam quietly.

  ‘Same difference,’ I replied. ‘Anyway.’ We were silent after that. For my part I was wondering, rather late, if what I had accused Adam of did not apply more accurately to me. From the moment I had entered Sean’s flash-looking, tin-engine car, through our arrival in his Barratt home with its oversize telly and no bookshelves, I’d had the mounting sense of his being, frankly, unbearably petit-bourgeois. Perhaps what had repelled me in Sean’s line about showers, I now thought, was less his appeal to any mutual heritage than the aspiration I could taste in it. Though blindfolded, I had seen him then with terrible clarity: imitation cut glass on his parents’ table; his mother’s careful study of the Mail; his unremarkable provincial school, its house names chosen as if from a catalogue in imitation of the grand old establishments for which his masters could not hide their hankering; such petty ambitions, passed on to the boys, shown eventually in phenomena like Sean’s cheap, whining car. If he had been a squaddie, it might have worked out.

  *

  The next morning Adam told me:

  ‘What you said last night, about me. Your whole . . . class analysis. You’ve never asked me about the first time I had sex.

  ‘When I was a kid we used to go and stay at my uncle’s in the country. He had this huge house — massive garden, a paddock, horses, the whole thing. My cousin was older and I had a serious crush on him. I mean emotionally; I must have been about seven at the time, he was thirteen, fourteen. Maybe more. He’d definitely hit puberty. So we’re playing some game, I can’t remember the details, but we’re running around outside the house. I think I’d nicked something of his and he was chasing me. So I went into the stables; there was a dead-end corridor round the side where they stored the equipment, saddles and so on, and I ran into it. Come to think of it I must have known it was a dead-end, so there you go. And of course he comes running in after me, and jumps me and takes back whatever it was, I think it might have been an air rifle, not loaded or anything, and we’re sort of play-fighting and rolling around, and at some point he just pulled out his knob. I can still see it, my first close-up erection. And he said, “Suck it.” And I did.’

  Adam stopped. He lay on his back, with me on my side facing him: his leg between mine, my head on his shoulder.

  ‘Jesus, Ads,’ I said. ‘That’s child abuse.’

  ‘We did it three times every visit for the next five years. Then he got a girlfriend. Anyway, I don’t think that’s why either.’

  Later, as he pulled me into the tight cuddle with which he usually followed his orgasm, he told me his flatmate was going back to Denmark and asked if I wanted to move in with him.

  The Chamber of the Sun

  Niven calls. He says: ‘You’re needed.’

  At the pub it is only Tony and Dave. Niven buys drinks. He seems excited: the pints slop in his hands.

  He tells them: ‘We’re having a visitor.’ He will not say who.

  He says: she.

  She is very important. She is passing through England, a rare visit. There are elements that would be very interested in this, and must not find out.

  It is best if she moves around. She does Niven the honour of staying at his house for two nights. For this time she needs protection. Also, she is elderly. On Saturday Niven and his wife will be unable to attend to her. They have a prior engagement, a gathering at his in-laws’. (He intimates revulsion.) Dave and Tony will therefore spend the day with Niven’s guest, at his house.

  He says they must remain alert, and respectful. He calls them an honour guard. He says this is important. He says: an important mission.

  His cheeks twitch with anticipation.

  It is Tuesday, 12 October 1982.

  *

  They meet Niven on Friday morning and drive with him to Dover. He asks, ‘Who’s sitting in the front?’ and ‘How’s your map-reading?’ He pays officious attention to the speed limit and indicates diligently when he wants to overtake. There is some confusion finding the ferry terminal and he criticizes Dave’s navigation. Niven says, ‘You’ll need to be a damn sight sharper than this when the war starts.’ Dave says, ‘Just turn left. Left!’

  Dave and Tony stand by the car while Niven goes inside.

  ‘Bet you it’s his mum,’ Tony says.

  Eventually Niven emerges, struggling manfully with two large, old leather suitcases, and attentive to the frail figure beside him.

  She walks slowly, with evident difficulty, her right leg trailing. She is dressed in white, thin cotton wrapped around her head and body. A sari.

  Tony mutters, ‘You’re taking the fucking piss.’

  Dave puts the cases in the boot and Tony opens the passenger door. As Niven guides the old woman towards it, Tony sees that the right side of her mouth hangs in a droop, as if someone snipped its muscle. She edges forward, brushing his thigh. Her eyes look lost and liquid. One is dead; the other stares confused and urgent through a film of milk. When it meets his gaze it blinks, and as Tony helps her into her seat she whispers: ‘Heil Hitler.’

  The next morning she is sitting in an armchair in Niven’s front room, nudged curiously by dust motes that hover in the sunlight. Tony watches her from the sofa. He cannot tell if she is asleep: every now and then she opens her eyes without shifting or saying anything. He feels like he has been here for hours: where is Dave? He checks the clock: ten-forty-five.

  On the way back from Dover she seemed tired, responding only briefly to Niven’s conversational gambits and making the odd disjointed observation. At one point, staring at the road ahead with her one struggling eye, she asked: ‘Did you see what the Jews did in Lebanon?’ and her voice, though thickened by the vagaries of her slumped right lip, was sharp, almost harsh.

  Niven said, ‘Disgusting,’ and nodded. Tony wondered if he was bluffing.

  At eleven-fifteen Dave arrives. The old woman does not react to his doorbell. Still, he and Tony are quiet as they discuss her in the kitchen.

  Tony says, ‘I can’t even watch telly in case it wakes her up.’

  ‘Sounds like fun.’

  ‘Want to hide in their bedroom and get pissed?’

  Dave laughs. ‘We could see if she’s up for it.’ Then he says, ‘Actually, I was going to ask:’

  There is a rally today for this new British National Party and a lot of BM lads are going. Dave says: ‘I don’t want to take the piss but it don’t look like she needs two of us. Would you mind? I’ll tell you how it goes. The only thing is they’re redirecting from Trafalgar Square soon.’

  By a quarter to twelve he has gone and Tony is back on the sofa failing to concentrate on the Nivens’ Reader’s Digest and watching their cat make the rounds of resting feet. The sun is bright through the window and he can feel his crotch under his jeans. He rests his hand on it, wonders about finding somewhere for a wank. Also, he is getting hungry. Niven’s wife told him, ‘Apparently she’s vegetarian! There’s plenty of cheese in the fridge, and celery and things, and the end of the nut roast we had for dinner. I’d stick to cheese if I were you, the nut roast played all sorts of funny with me. Oh, and she doesn’t drink tea, she drinks coffee.’

  The cat keeps brushing against his boots. Tony is properly hard now and glances over at the old woman as he moves his thumb a bit under his fingers, feeling the tag of his zip. There was a photo of Nicky up at the Last Resort last time he was round there that he can still picture.

  Quite suddenly the cat jumps into the old woman’s lap. She gives a small jolt and instantly relaxes again. Her hand moves to the settling animal. Tony’s moves to his thigh.

  ‘Puss,’she says.‘Puss, puss.’

  Tony says, ‘It’s like he knows you.’

  ‘Oh, nearly all animals — and especially all cats —“know” me.’ Her fingers probe the indents behind its ears. “They feel that I love them. Intuitively, and’ — she looks him — ‘with absolute certainty.’

  After a pause she adds, ‘I fed
stray cats in the war, you know. There was a famine in Bengal, and I would go down twice a day, with rice, fish and milk, to two or three courtyards where they’d gather.’

  ‘How many did you look after?’

  ‘About a hundred and fifty.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  She smiles. ‘Not at all. Twice a day. And every evening, along the winding iron staircase that led to my terrace, there would be such a great queue of cats, kittens and all, waiting to be fed. I had thirty-five in my house alone! Everyone knew me as the cat memsahib.’

  ‘Always been more of a dog man myself.’

  ‘One time, in Calcutta Zoo, I put my whole arm into the cage of a Royal Bengal tiger. I wanted to stroke it. I still remember how it looked at me for a moment, as if making up its mind, and then just half closed its eyes, like so, and rubbed up close to me against the cage. And it purred,’ she stagily confides to the animal on her lap, ‘like an enormous cat.’

  Tony says, ‘A friend of mine when I was young, his mum had a thing for cats. She was a bit deaf and her husband wasn’t around no more. She adopted strays a few times. I think she found them reassuring you know? Liked the company. Mind you she only ever had three or four. Not a hundred and fifty.’

  ‘Where’s the other young man?’

  ‘Dave? He’s not here yet.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ she replies, ‘he came and went.’

  Tony looks at her. ‘Thought you was asleep.’

  ‘Sleep, at my age, is no longer the same thing.’

  Tony pauses. ‘He’s gone to a meeting. Don’t tell Arthur though, he’ll shit— Pardon me. He thinks you need two men to look after you.’

  The old woman smiles, stroking her intuitive friend. She sings to it quietly: ‘Nanda, Nanda,’ it sounds like. ‘Nanda, Rani.’ Then she asks: ‘What meeting?’

  Tony sees no reason not to tell her.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she says. ‘John Tyndall’s new alliance. We were talking about it last night Of course, I remember the old British National Party, the original. I was here in 1961 — in London. I was teaching in Lyons and I came at Easter, to see the same dear friend I am visiting tomorrow, when I leave here.

  ‘I used to hate London.’ The way this is said makes clear it is not hyperbole. ‘I was here at the time of the so-called Nuremberg “Trials” …’

  She pauses and Tony, to show he is paying attention, says, ‘The war-crimes tribunals.’ He is pleased with this knowledge.

  She snorts. ‘The greatest infamy in world history! The martyrdom of the Eleven, after months of moral and physical agony. And in the name of justice! Oh, the wild hatred of this ugly, Jew-ridden world … they killed them, you know, on one of their festival days. Such persecution. What was I saying?’

  ‘You were telling me why you hated London.’

  ‘Oh! Well, I was in London on that dismal day. Everywhere you went, the atrocity-campaign was at its height. Signs on Oxford Street: “Nazi Horrors. Entrance, one shilling and sixpence.” Ha! Hypocrisy, stupidity everywhere. “Pity the starving German children,” cry the makers of the phosphorus bombs! And in England — England, which should never have gone to war with Germany.

  ‘But in 1961, after fifteen years of the most vicious anti-Nazi propaganda, what should I read about but demonstrations — in Trafalgar Square! — by a new party loyal to Nazi ideals. A British National Party, turning back immigrants at railway terminals and standing up to the Jews, a party dedicated — I still remember the words — to “a racial nationalist folk state … embodied in the creed of National Socialism and uniquely implemented by Adolf Hitler”!

  ‘Of course I wrote to them, and that summer we had a camp in the English countryside, with songs and ale round the fire. But when I was back in France, Arthur wrote to me that John had been betrayed. The BNP was embarrassed by the mention of Hitler, they thought Nazism a political liability.

  ‘And now John is starting a new BNP — a new cycle begins. And there will be more people, more every time, ready to face the sickness of this world and defy it with their every gesture. And every time more, many more, young ones — like you! — without even the personal memory of Hitler’s great days to sustain them. Yet still they come. And still, and still, we will come.’

  She leans back her head, closes her eyes, and recites: ‘When justice is crushed, when evil reigns supreme, then I come. For the protection of the good, for the destruction of the evil-doers, for the sake of firmly establishing righteousness, I am born, age after age.’

  She tells him of the cycle of ages, the Yugas, as laid down in the great epics of the Aryans, which repeats through all eternity. She traces the inexorable decline from the Krita Yuga, the Age of Truth — the Golden Age, whose memory all cultures, from the Greeks and Japanese to the Sumerians and Romans, somehow preserve — to the current, fourth, Dark Age, the Kali Yuga, the Era of Gloom, in which human selfishness and conceit allows man to overrun the planet while its once-thick mantle of forest declines. Whole species of proud wild creatures are killed off, replaced by an obnoxious and expanding stream of dreary, vulgar, worthless two-legged mammals, and everything is done to encourage that mad increase in number and loss in quality. Everything is done to keep the sickly, the crippled, the freaks of nature, unfit to work and unfit to live, from dying. Thousands of innocent, healthy animals are tortured in search of ‘new treatments’, so that deficient men, whom Nature has anyhow condemned to death, might last a few more months. The healthy are made unhealthy through joyless work, overcrowded homes, lack of privacy, unnatural food, their brains softened by advertising and propaganda. Lies are called truth and truth falsehood, and the speakers of truth, the God-like men, are defeated, their followers humbled, their memory slandered, while the masters of lies are hailed as saviours.

  And she tells him of Kalki, the last One, the Destroyer, destined to clear the ground for the building of a new age of truth. It was Kalki of whom, with that unfailing cosmic intuition, the Führer said, ‘I know that Somebody must come forth and meet our situation. I have sought, and found him nowhere; and therefore I have taken upon myself to do the preparatory work; only the most urgent preparatory work.’ She tells him that Kalki, unlike Hitler, will act with unprecedented ruthlessness. He will spare not one enemy of the divine cause: not one outspoken opponent, nor even one of the heretical, the racially bastardized, the unhealthy, hesitating, all-too-human: not a single one of those who, in body or in character or in mind, bear the stamp of the fallen Ages.

  ‘And we like to hope,’ she says, ‘that the memory of the One-before-the-last — of Adolf Hitler — will survive, at least in songs and symbols, in that long Age of earthly Perfection which Kalki, the last One, is to open. We like to hope that the Lords of the new Time-Cycle, men of his own blood and faith, will render him divine honours, through rites full of meaning and potency, in the cool shade of the endless regrown forests, on the beaches, or on inviolate mountain peaks, facing the rising sun.’

  Tony helps her through to the kitchen for lunch. She holds his left arm like a bird grips a branch. Her near leg trails forward with him when he moves, so he has to stop and start alternately with the stronger one. He lowers her on to the hard kitchen chair, puts cheese and butter on plates, slices bread.

  Across the table, she peers at him. ‘And what is that by your eye?’

  ‘This?’ Tony fingers the tattoo. ‘A “barrier to decent employment”, they tell me.’

  ‘It looks like one.’

  ‘Where’s yours?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Tony points to his forehead. ‘Aren’t you meant to have a dot here or something?’

  She smiles. ‘No.’

  She puts the buttered corner of a slice of bread to her mouth and severs it. She chews impossibly slowly. Her face is a village hit by a mudslide: one side remains standing, functional.

  When she has finally swallowed she asks: ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-six.’

  ‘And how lo
ng have you been one of us?’

  The question makes him pause. ‘I’ve been politically active for about six years now. But I’ve always been patriotic.’

  ‘And what have you read?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You call yourself “patriotic”. Either you are talking in a needlessly roundabout way, or even after six years you have not embraced the entirety of our faith — so I wonder what you have read.’

  ‘I don’t really think of it as a faith.’

  ‘A faith—the faith — is exactly what it is.’ She considers him. ‘And you have it, even if you will not admit it yet.’

  He says: ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I learned to recognize it long ago.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘To Linz, where the Führer spent his boyhood. To Leonding, to his parents’ burial place. Braunau am Inn, where he was born. To Berchtesgaden, Obersalzburg, Munich. To Landsberg am Lech. To Nuremberg.’

  ‘This was after the war?’

  ‘Eight years after. I had been several times, the first in 1948. My English friend, the one I am visiting tomorrow, was once a theatrical costumier. She found me work with a travelling dance troupe, the Randoopa Dancing Company, and I went with them to Stockholm. There I stayed up for two nights, and I wrote out by hand 500 leaflets—’

  ‘Got enough energy haven’t you?’

  ‘I took the Nord-Express through Germany; and from its windows I distributed my leaflets to the people I met, hidden in packets of cigarettes and food.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘They said, essentially: We are the pure gold which can be tested in the furnace. Nothing can destroy us. Heil Hitler.’