The Enemy of the Good

by Michael Arditti

  ‘They couldn’t be more different.’

  ‘Maybe not, but they’ve both asked her to play the same little-wifey role.’

  ‘Come on, Ma, you know very well that people are more complicated than that… and Susannah certainly is! I can remember hysterical scenes when she accused us all – not just you – of somehow suffocating and neglecting her at the same time.’ Marta smiled faintly. ‘So please, no more talk of bad mothers. You were the best.’

  ‘Thank you, darling. You’re very sweet.’

  She was doubly grateful for his ‘best’. Her own mother had been killed in the war. She herself had survived by dint of a cunning beyond her years. She sometimes feared that, having been forced to grow up so fast, she had lost the ability to relate to her own children, crediting them with a resilience for which, in the gentle English countryside, they had had little call.

  Age made her increasingly aware of her vanished childhood. There were no portraits or letters or diaries or objects, let alone people, to fill in the gaps. All that she had were archive pictures to give her a vicarious authenticity. The loss had been compounded by the need to disown her past on coming to England. It was not that people were cruel or that she suffered the prejudice which had blighted survivors in other parts of Europe, but that they had no wish to dwell on the horrors. The most precious reward of peace was peace of mind. It was safer to picture Hitler as a murderous psychopath than as an astute politician who had legitimised a nation’s – or, worse, a race’s – darkest fears. The truth was particularly painful for Edwin, whose faith had been rocked by the revelation of the camps. She had conspired in the reticence, as tight-lipped on the subject of her life before reaching Dover as the most fervid Little Englander. Yet now when, after more than sixty years, she found herself sharing her solitude with the sights and sounds of the ghetto, she wondered if, the spectre of Edwin’s Alzheimer’s notwithstanding, the real horror of growing old was not to lose one’s mind but to doubt one’s memories.

  ‘There were two photographers filming the ceremony,’ she said. ‘I found them intrusive, but I’m starting to see the point. They make up for the defects of memory.’

  ‘That from the woman who claimed that what we didn’t remember was as significant as what we did!’

  ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘I remember it word for word. Ha! You said we remembered what mattered to us and forgot the rest, or else our minds would be as stuffed as a storeroom.’ She tried to recall if she had meant it seriously or if it had been a stock formula to comfort a child. ‘These days people are so insecure, they’re more concerned to record events than to experience them, living not in the here and now but in some imaginary future. It’s sick!’

  ‘Darling, it was just a wedding video. Photographs by another name.’

  ‘It goes far deeper than that,’ he said, sinking back in his chair and flinging his right leg over the arm in a posture that looked as uncomfortable as it was ungainly. ‘Memory lies at the heart of what it is to be human. In fact I’d go further: it’s the reason we both need and respond to art. It’s the part of our brain that creates and shapes narratives, that filters images, that draws analogies and chucks away inessentials.’ Marta rejoiced to see him roused from his torpor. ‘What do you think, Ma? Can it be an accident that, at a time when we’re trusting less and less to our memories, we’re growing less and less discriminating about art? We’ve lost the power of selectivity and substituted choice. We may have a world of information at our fingertips, but we’ve got fewer and fewer ways to assess it.’

  ‘Then we’ll find more. The human brain is endlessly inventive.’

  ‘Not when it’s dumbed down. In any other context, virtual means almost… not entirely; on the Web, it’s become synonymous with truth. We no longer rely on our memories to retain the things that matter but delegate the function to a machine. Even if the motive is pure, the process is corrupt. When everything’s recorded, nothing can be valued.’

  ‘Don’t you mean evaluated?’

  ‘In this case, it’s the same.’

  Despite the eloquence of his argument, she yearned for an album of childhood photographs to substantiate her memories. All she had been able to preserve was a single highly charged but painfully equivocal family portrait, so devoid of any frame of reference that she had no way of knowing which of the two little girls in the foreground was her.

  ‘Even an imperfect record is better than a fading memory,’ she said. ‘I sometimes wonder if my sister existed at all.’

  ‘I didn’t think you liked talking about Aunt Agata.’

  Her heart soared at the spontaneous gift of the aunt. ‘The truth is that we weren’t very close. I’d find it easier if we’d been more like you and Mark.’

  ‘Easier to talk perhaps. Not to carry on living.’

  ‘You can’t imagine how happy it made me to see you together. I remember when you tied yourself to his waist and made out you were Siamese twins.’

  ‘Then you’ve forgotten how much Mark loathed it. He tried to rip off the cord but only managed to tie himself – and me – in knots. He hated any suggestion that we were freaks – or even curiosities, threatening to beat up anyone who stared at us at school. He longed for nothing more than to be ordinary. He felt better once I’d told him there were twenty million twins in the world.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Of course, or I wouldn’t have said it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said quickly. ‘But that’s the population of a small country.’

  ‘I know. I spoilt it all when I proposed that we should found one. Twinsylvania.’

  He fell silent, and she took advantage of the lull to think of Mark. For all her awe of Clement’s artistic talent and respect for Shoana’s executive skill, she remained proudest of Mark’s social conscience. She hesitated to admit it, even to herself, but, with his adolescent schemes for changing the world and adult schemes for feeding it, he had been the child closest to her heart. Life would have been very different had he survived. First and foremost, she would have had grandchildren. It was one of the bitterest ironies of growing old that intellectual triumphs paled beside family ties. Nothing made her feel more inadequate than hearing her friends talk about babysitting. She had even caught herself gazing jealously at photographs of bone-weary Africans caring for grandchildren orphaned by aids. So intense was her longing that she barely stopped to wonder if the children themselves were healthy. She was brought back to reality by the sight of her own infected son.

  ‘There’s one photograph I don’t need to spur my memory,’ she said, moving across to his chair and taking his hand. ‘I see his face every time I look at yours.’

  ‘What as? An aide-memoire or a memento mori?’ Clement asked.

  ‘I didn’t mean – ’

  ‘Not to worry, Ma, I’m glad to be good for something. What hurts most is not having felt that psychic tremor when he died – that sense of someone walking over my grave times a thousand – which a surviving twin’s supposed to feel. I was probably drinking or drugging or sleeping around.’

  ‘Or working,’ she countered, refusing to collude in his self-disgust.

  ‘But the sense of loss – as sharp as an amputated limb – I felt that all right. I still do. The better part of myself cut off.’

  ‘You’re your own best self.’

  ‘You don’t understand! Think of the closeness you feel towards Susannah or me and square it. We were part of each other from the start. Not just the same womb but the same egg!’

  Reluctant to risk a reply, she broke away and drifted around the room. As she gazed out of the window, she felt a pressing need for fresh air. With Clement unwilling to accompany her to the park, she suggested a stroll in the garden. She strove to curb her impatience as he searched for his sunglasses, which the gathering clouds were rapidly making redundant, and threw a jacket over his sweater. By the time he was finally ready, the sky was leaden and there was a distinct nip in the air, neverthe
less she was determined not to shiver and so give him an excuse to turn back.

  The moment she stepped through the door, she saw the reason for his procrastination. Instead of the usual elegant vista, she was facing a wilderness: the patio unswept and the paths mossy; bindweed choking the pergola and a rambling rose buckling the fence; a few hardy perennials trapped in a tangle of dead heads and withered stalks. Only the lawn showed any sign of recent care.

  ‘That’s Mike’s domain,’ he said, as she challenged him. ‘I’m in charge of the bed department.’

  ‘Then I suggest you wake up to your responsibilities,’ she said, ignoring the innuendo. ‘This is a disgrace.’

  ‘I don’t have the energy. No, it’s nothing to do with the virus,’ he said quickly, as if his physical health were her only cause for concern. ‘I used to love coming out here in the evenings. The perfect way to wind down after a day in the studio. Now I’ve stopped painting, there’s no point.’

  ‘There’s a simple answer to that.’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s more at stake than a few flowers.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Roxborough really changed things for me. Not just what happened to Pa. Though you said yourself he hasn’t been the same since.’

  ‘Your father’s eighty-three. He wouldn’t have been the same anyway.’

  ‘But stirring up all that hatred.’

  ‘Blinkered, twisted people. The hatred’s in them. You simply brought it to light.’

  ‘Perhaps. But I can’t fight it any more.’

  ‘Then the forces of darkness will win. Don’t you remember evil triumphing when good men do nothing? You’re a good man, Clement.’

  ‘Your faith in human nature is admirable. It’s almost enough to restore my own.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  ‘I said almost.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘It’s still more extraordinary given everything you were called on to witness.’

  ‘Don’t forget that even then there were flickers of hope. I saw people who risked their lives to protect their families, their friends, and sometimes even total strangers. You may think it was a futile gesture, pitting a weak human body against batons and bullets and jackboots. But it wasn’t. Quite the reverse. Because in the memory of the survivors – and I’m one of them – not to mention the world memory, that sacrifice remains. Not a Jewish sacrifice to honour God or a Christian sacrifice to redeem man, but a simple sacrifice to the ideal of humanity.’

  ‘What about a Muslim sacrifice?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know enough about them to comment.’

  ‘I do. At least about one of them. Rafik, my model.’

  ‘Your Christ?’

  ‘I can’t get any news of him. The British authorities bundled him on a plane home and now they’ve washed their hands of him – a phrase which is horribly apt under the circumstances. I’ve rung the Embassy in Algiers. I asked them to make inquiries. I explained he was in fear of his life. But no joy! He’s a success story, a repatriated asylum seeker. What happens next is none of their concern.’

  ‘Then you must confront them through your painting. When you’re blessed with a talent like yours, it’s a crime to waste it.’

  ‘You’re not consistent, Ma. In The Eden People, you described how the Hadza have no art. Your ideal society has no use for Bellini and Caravaggio or Shakespeare and Bach, let alone Granville! Who knows? Maybe discord and dissatisfaction came into the world with the cave painters: the primal egotists. Suddenly, there was a new breed of people eager not to do but to document, whether it was the hunt or fertility dances or, as we’re now told, erotic fantasies. Yes, that would be fitting, wouldn’t it: if I’m the heir to ancient pornographers?’

  ‘True, the Hadza don’t need art,’ Marta said, brushing aside the hyperbole, ‘but for those of us exiled from Eden there’s no greater source of enlightenment.’

  ‘I used to think so. Pa once said that human beings were uniquely poised between Whipsnade Zoo and Chartres Cathedral, but that what tipped the balance towards Chartres was art. Then Mike, who favours the zoo, told me about penguins who not only search for precious stones to decorate their nests but choose their mates on the basis of the decoration. At a stroke, he destroyed any notion of art as a divine spark and equated it with prostitution.’

  ‘I can’t speak for penguins,’ Marta said, keen to lighten the mood, ‘but, with humans, we’re talking imagination not greed.’

  ‘After much deliberation, I’ve concluded that the whole point of art – the reason governments don’t just tolerate but sponsor it – is to give people like you and me, the educated but powerless, the fantasy of control. We read books to gain a privileged insight into other peoples’ minds; we sit in theatres to watch their lives played out in front of us; we go to exhibitions so that, even though we can’t influence the bigger picture, we can weigh up smaller ones.’ She flinched as he kicked a pebble into a flower bed. ‘You, of all people, should appreciate Auden’s despair at the failure of his poetry to save a single Jew from the gas chambers.’

  ‘Like so much despair, it strikes me as self-indulgent,’ she said pointedly. ‘How can we be sure that there wouldn’t have been more Nazis without his poetry? Come to that, do you know how much of it was even translated?’

  ‘I’d go a step further and say that artists actively assisted the Nazi programme. I don’t just mean the Riefenstahls and Furtwänglers and Strausses with their compromised loyalties, but the Mozarts and Beethovens. Listening to the concentration camp orchestras at night gave the guards the peace of mind with which to murder more inmates the next day. They applauded the music while treating the players as lower than the sheep who supplied the strings for the violins.’

  ‘Have you considered that the music might have brought peace of mind to the players as well? To know that, even if they died, it would live on. Art is the part of us that will survive.’

  ‘Art is an illusion, Ma. And the most absurd illusion of all is the illusion of permanence. When the microbes inherit the earth, do you suppose they’ll be experts on Titian?’

  Weighed down by his misery, Marta sank on to a nearby bench where she soaked up the residual warmth of the cushion. Clement stood beside her, fighting a losing battle with a fly.

  ‘I can’t bear to see you like this,’ she said. ‘Are you doing nothing useful with your life?’

  ‘One evening a week, I volunteer on an immigration helpline, but it’s hardly taxing. If only I were more New Agey, I could pretend I was working on myself.’

  ‘And everything’s fine with Mike?’

  ‘Oh Ma, even after all these years, you locate every problem in the bedroom!’

  ‘Thank you, Clement!’ To her surprise, she felt herself blushing.

  ‘To answer your question: no, it’s not. He’s such a dynamo. He thinks lassitude is a class thing I inherited along with the house.’

  ‘Depression can damage the immune system.’

  ‘Really? Is that so? Perhaps we can play a game to help me snap out of it?’

  ‘There’s no call to be sarcastic, darling. I’m only thinking of you.’

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that things haven’t been easy.’

  ‘I’ve been reading up on the literature. They say that HIV and AIDS are now no different from diabetes. You can lead a perfectly normal life.’

  ‘Do you remember Oliver?’

  ‘Oliver who?’

  ‘Oliver, my ex.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ It had been so long since he mentioned him that she had supposed him to be as taboo as Shoana’s Chris.

  ‘Although, actually, it’s Newsom. He’s changed his name.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I don’t know. Ask Shoana! I think he needed a new vibration or something. He has AIDS. We’ve been in touch again this past year.’

  ‘Isn’t that hard for Mike?’

  ‘On the contrary, he considers it a part of my communal responsibility. Newsom has anal can
cer and a blood clot on his lungs that won’t respond to treatment. Meanwhile, friends who’ve been on the drugs for years are suffering heart attacks and strokes. So it’s not quite diabetes… not yet.’

  ‘But you told me you were fine,’ she said, panicking at the prospect of further revelations.

  ‘Oh yes, the clinic’s blue-eyed boy. At least for now. But seeing Newsom so sick has set me thinking. If I should reach a stage where I become more of an illness than a person, then I don’t want to linger on.’

  ‘You may change your mind when the time comes… which I’m sure it won’t.’ She clasped his hand.

  ‘Perhaps. But for the moment I’m not in any doubt. When my own quality of life is destroyed and what’s more I’m destroying the people around me, I want to make a dignified exit.’

  ‘What about your faith? How can you take the life God has given you?’

  ‘It’s precisely because of my faith that I don’t have a problem. I’ve always thought suicide must be harder for an atheist. I believe God gave me free will, which is to be exercised even in extremis. Besides, unlike the priests who hold that I’ll rot in Hell for the sin of despair or Carla with her fear of being reborn as a hungry ghost, I know I’ll be welcomed into the hereafter.’ His face lit up and, for the first time during her visit, she saw traces of the old Clement. ‘I’ve talked it over with Mike. He said that, if the crunch comes, he’d be willing to help me.’ She was not surprised that their relationship was under strain if that were the gist of their pillow talk. ‘But, if for some reason he wasn’t around, would you do it?’

  ‘There’s nothing worse than outliving your children. I’ve been through it once, Clement. I couldn’t bear to go through it again.’

  ‘You told me you loved me more than life. I know you meant your own life, but what about mine? That’s the 64,000-dollar question. Could you love me more than my life, Ma?’

  ‘It’s turned chilly. I’m not wearing as many layers as you. I’m going back indoors.’

  2

  Reeling from her encounter with Clement, Marta returned to the hotel to find that Edwin had spent the whole day in bed. He refused to recall the doctor, insisting that he had just been catching up on sleep and his headache had all but disappeared. He was so anxious not to upset Shoana that she agreed to go to the party alone, in return for a promise that, come what may, they would leave for home in the morning. To cheer herself up and challenge the company, she decided to wear her new red and white polka-dot dress, thrilling to both the coolness of the close-fitting silk and the defiance of her naked arms. She kissed Edwin’s forehead as gently as if he were a child, assuring him that she would not be late, and, with a sigh at his innocent ‘Enjoy yourself!’, made her way down to the lobby, where the doorman hailed a cab to take her to Hendon. She settled back in the lumpy seat, shutting her eyes in anticipation of a wearying evening, only to wake up with a start half an hour later as they rattled through the drably uniform streets of north London.