Walcot

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘What’s the food like, Uncle?’

  ‘Not too bad.’ He laid his head back on one of the pillows that were propping him up. He looked weary. His moustache drooped. But for the moustache, his might have been a woman’s face; he was still masculine, but age and defeat had taken away his maleness.

  The nurse he had been talking about came in smiling, carrying a little tray.

  ‘Here’s your Bovril, Bertie dear,’ she said, setting the tray down on the table beside the pear. With a surprisingly quick movement, he seized her hand in his weak grasp.

  ‘You’re a darling, Marya,’ he said. ‘How about eloping avec moi?’

  ‘And you’re a naughty old man!’ Her bright little thin face broke into a radiant smile.

  When she had gone, he said, ‘I’ll drink that stuff when it’s a bit cooler. They always make it too weak. My throat’s so dry.’ He lit another cigarette. ‘Do you want one? Player’s Navy Cut. You see, we went to war over the Poles, and much good it did them. We bit off more than we could chew, I’d say. When you think about it, who won the war? It was the bloody Russians, wasn’t it? Or perhaps it was Adolf Hitler. He bit off more than he could chew there – he conjured up the monster in the Kremlin who went on to swallow up half of Europe, in –’ – a bout of coughing made him pause. He took a sip of the Bovril before continuing – ‘including Poland. That’s why she’s here, Marya. She’ll never go back to Potsdam, where she came from. Sorry, Poznan. She’ll never go back there now. She reckons the British were too nice to fight properly. That’s what she said, too nice. Whereas the Germans and the Russians, well, terrible lot of hooligans … She knows all about it, does Marya.’

  You recalled the group of old men in Wehrmacht uniforms whose lives you had spared in the Ardennes struggle. This little nurse in her white overalls probably knew more about the real horrors of war than you did.

  Bertie went on talking about her. He was still talking when the nurse looked in again. ‘You haven’t drunk your Bovril up yet, you old scamp! It’s good for you!’ Turning to you with a smile, she said, ‘Oh, what a terrible trouble is this one. Never does he what he’s told.’

  When she had gone, to prevent any more monologue about the war, you asked Bertie, ‘Do you think much about Auntie Violet these days, Uncle?’

  He peered at you in a vague way. ‘I bit off more than I could chew there, old boy.’

  You felt an affection for him then you had never felt before; he had summed up his life’s situation in a well-worn phrase. Bertie was defeated – after all, defeat was not an unusual fate for the old – yet seemed reasonably cheerful. And he enjoyed the good fortune to have happened on a nurse who was evidently fond of him, and of whom he could be fond.

  11

  Flight to Austin, Texas

  You were flying from Washington to Austin, Texas, to attend a meeting on museum technology, to be chaired by Professor Tony Pekhovich. You were pleased to find yourself seated next to Pekhovich in business class. The year was 1983.

  You took two bottles of vodka from the air hostess and began to talk, idly at first and then more intently when you discovered you had both been involved in the war in Europe, almost forty years ago, in 1944.

  Tony Pekhovich was a small, neat man with a goatee beard now threaded with white. He had dark eyebrows and grey, penetrating eyes. He was pleasant in appearance and spoke with a deceptively languid delivery.

  ‘I served in Intelligence under General Patton,’ he said. ‘We were more scared of Patton than we were of the Germans, madman that he was. I never hated the Germans like I hated the Japanese. My brother, Devlin, he was prisoner of the Japs, taken prisoner on Bataan. He’s four years my junior, but you’d take him for a much older man, thanks to the way those little yellow cocksuckers treated him.’

  You told him that although you were fifty-nine, you felt younger now than you had done during the final months of the war.

  ‘Now there’s more trouble on our hands,’ said Pekhovich. ‘President Reagan has been taunting the Soviets again, calling them the “Evil Empire”. It surely only stirs up more trouble. I don’t like it, but maybe that’s on account of my family being of Russian descent.’

  You rattled the ice cubes in your plastic glass and took a sip. ‘You may have heard we have a new prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. She’s apparently as warlike as Reagan. The nation’s in bad shape. To my mind, she needs to look to the country and forget about international affairs.’

  ‘You think so?’ He regarded you musingly. ‘I’m no isolationist, unlike many of my colleagues, and I see all the world as uncomfortably united – the way two boxers are united in the ring.’ He lowered his voice to say, ‘You may have heard the US Embassy in the Lebanon was blown up in April. We were taken off guard; the embassy was all but destroyed and over fifty people were killed.’

  ‘By the Russians? Surely not.’

  ‘By Muslims; Shi’ites. Well named, you might think. There’s more trouble brewing up everywhere.’

  A trolley was approaching along the gangway. ‘Here comes lunch. Eat, drink, and be merry. Tomorrow we die.’

  ‘Isaiah, I believe,’ he said. It was tortillas for us, and Tony ordered champagne. You tried to pay but he insisted that you were his guest, from what he called, ‘an almost foreign country’.

  So you were convivial and, as befitted those who frequented museums, went on to consider the past; in particular, the past with all its follies and wickedness, such as the war you had both soldiered in. The question arose of how human wickedness could be conquered. Tony Pekhovich asked you if you had read H. G. Wells’s Time Machine. You admitted you had not done so.

  ‘Good health!’ he said, and you both raised your plastic glasses. ‘It’s a fine book, published less than ten years after Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. And what do these two short books have in common? They are both about the duality of man – the good and the bad. Wells raises the stakes by showing us the whole of Victorian society bifurcated. Eloi good, Morlock bad. This has always been taken for social criticism, but I believe it goes deeper. We all have the good and bad in us. Do you want a crackpot theory, Steve?’

  It was the first time he had used your Christian name. You looked out of the window at the plains of Oklahoma below, unsure whether or not you wanted a crackpot theory. But Tony had bought you both champagne.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  He leaned slightly towards you, to speak confidentially. ‘Not only do I prize the past, where forgotten human life is preserved in museums, I look to the future, as well. In the museum in Austin there is a precious little relic, it has a showcase of its own. Floodlit, it rests on green baize, so’s you can view it best. It is the first lens that Galileo Galilei ever ground, in order to construct his occhiale, his telescope. You know what the Medicean stars are?’

  His habit of asking such questions was a minor irritation. This time you knew the answer. ‘Galileo ground his own lenses for his telescope. When he turned the telescope towards Jupiter, he saw four small bodies in orbit about the giant planet. For his own protection, he named them after the powerful Medici family.’

  Tony nodded vigorously. ‘That’s it exactly. Four moons of Jupiter! Which was proof that the Copernican theory of Earth’s rotation round the Sun was a fact. That perception is one of the tender shoots that formed our modern world.’

  You smiled, unable to discourage him. ‘And those Medicean stars we now know as Io, Europa, Callisto and, what’s the other one, the largest moon?’

  ‘Ganymede. Now for my theory: I foresee the day when men – and women, we hope – will make a landing on Ganymede, establish a colony there. That’s not too far-fetched. Think how unlikely the walk on the Moon would have seemed in Galileo’s time. And Ganymede is the size of a small planet.’

  ‘We’ve yet to walk on Mars, don’t forget.’

  ‘Hear me out, I am talking of the future. The Ganymede settlers would be lit by Jupiter, as well as generating their own power.
Think how beautiful the night skies would be. And, the settlers would be distant from our turbulent Sun. What a difference that would make! They could live calm lives. My belief is that it’s our Sun that affects us with aggression; no one has ever thought about that before. I am making notes towards a book on the subject.’

  At which point, a man in the seat ahead of you rose up, turned, and glared down at you, red-faced. ‘Gentlemen, I’m hearing what you are saying, and it is all hogwash. To leave this planet on which we were born is against God’s teaching. You are defying all that the scriptures say. Does the Bible mention this Ganymede? No, no way. So cease to blaspheme, okay?’

  Tony Pekhovich was calm, saying mildly, ‘What are you doing on this plane, friend? Have you not left this planet? Progress is unstoppable; sit yourself down and think about it.’

  An alert air hostess came and asked the challenger to sit down and fasten his safety belt, since you were about to enter a region of turbulence.

  ‘A region of turbulence, yes, that’s one of the reactionaries we have to cope with.’ Tony looked undisturbed, but he changed the subject, abandoning the future to talk again of the past.

  So you amused yourselves until reaching Austin, without offending the man in the seat ahead. And in Austin, Mrs Annie Pekhovich was waiting to greet her husband at the airport. They had met in London, during what he described, laughingly, as ‘that much maligned World War’. She greeted you warmly. She had been born in Ilford, Patricia Ann Evans. The days of that conference were more enjoyable for their company.

  What did you make of the man Pekhovich’s remarks?

  I’d quite forgotten old Tony. And his wife. Very pleasant couple, I met up with them on another occasion, with Verity.

  Never mind that. What did you make of his remarks?

  I haven’t thought of them from that day to this. My apologies, this is not at all a day –

  Pekhovich made a prediction about mankind settling on Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede. I step beyond the bounds of my instructions to tell you that Professor Pekhovich was not the superficial man you may have thought him. The time came when human beings indeed settled on Ganymede. His prediction was correct.

  Oh? He never published the book he planned. What happened to Tony?

  He died of Alzheimer’s disease.

  Oh shit. It may visit us all in the end. And did that distance from the Sun bring those benefits of peace he anticipated?

  His Sun theory was nonsense. The settlers fought one another for every kilometre of that barren moon.

  You feel ashamed of the human race?

  I am ashamed of our bad programming.

  12

  The Future of the World

  The time came when you had to go to West Berlin to deliver your lecture to the Geological Institute. It was winter and you and Verity were busy moving into your new house in Maidenhead, where the Thames flowed by at the bottom of your garden.

  You were met in Berlin by a small delegation that escorted you to your hotel. In your room, you found a note addressed to you; it came from a Frau Heather Pieck.

  You read it hastily. ‘I am interested to learn that you will be in West Berlin. I am curator at the Geological Museum here. My name was Heather Lambert. I married a German guy six years ago – my mother was German, as if that explains our love for one another. (I write that to warn you!) We used to know each other at Ashbury, many years ago. I will attend your lecture and will be curious to meet you again and introduce Helmut, if that is possible.’

  Heather had signed the note with a flourish.

  She was curious. So were you. Smiling to yourself, you recalled making love to the young woman in a hole in the ground. The affair had been consummated either there or later in your room; memory was a little vague on that detail. It would be instructive to learn what she had been doing with her life; one advantage of growing old was that you found out what had happened to people you once knew, and how character and circumstance had worked together to weather the other.

  You showed Verity the letter; she read it over and handed it back. ‘Yes, you knew Heather quite well in those days. It’ll be interesting to meet her again, I hope you won’t be too disappointed.’

  ‘You knew about our brief affair?’

  She gave one of her abridged laughs. ‘The whole school knew about your brief affair!’

  ‘And you’re not jealous?’

  ‘What! It’s a bit late to be jealous, isn’t it?’ This time her laughter was unabridged. ‘Besides, your Heather may turn out to be a Flora Finching.’

  You recognized the reference to the character in Dickens’s Little Dorrit, which you had read together with Verity the previous summer.

  A limousine collected you and drove you to the Institute. You were warmly received and escorted to a smart anteroom where drinks were served. You toyed with a glass of tonic water while chatting to your confrères. It was the 9th of November, 1989, and the geologists wanted to talk about nothing but the Aufregung in the DDR, where there were mass demonstrations against the Communist government of Erich Honecker; Honecker had just resigned.

  ‘And now they demonstrate just across the Wall in East Berlin,’ said the chairman. ‘It is really most unprecedented –’ He was an old man, and portly, with a florid friendly face across which a white moustache was draped.

  ‘All because of Gorbachev,’ said his secretary, butting in – a fair-haired young man by name Edschmid, who was keen on promotion.

  ‘Not the mighty Gorbachev alone,’ said the chairman, to keep the youngster in his place. ‘The DDR is bankrupt, financially and morally.’

  ‘But the immediate cause for this disturbance,’ said Edschmid, excitedly, ‘is because the Hungarians have opened up their borders with Austria. Did you not see it on the television? This has enabled many thousands of East Germans – our dear friends and enemies – to make the escape to the West, where they can enjoy the benefits of democracy, and pornography, and decent food – not necessarily in that order.’

  ‘We had best to move into the council chamber now,’ said the chairman, stiffly. ‘There I will introduce you.’

  The council chamber was thinly attended. ‘I fear that politics have intervened, as so often in the course of our German lives,’ said the chairman, with a sad wit.

  You rose to speak when the introduction was over. You had already identified Heather Pieck; she was seated in the front row of chairs. Her husband, Helmut Pieck, sat next to her, a reedy little man in a neat suit, his sandy hair receding, his hands clasped together on his knee. Heather had spread. She wore hornrimmed glasses and was refulgent in a long, bright dress, possibly chosen carefully for the occasion. She gave you a tiny wave as you stood to speak, hand against an ample bosom so that others would not notice.

  ‘The disciplines of the geologist and archaeologist represent a remarkable combination of the workings of scientific method, together with the imagination, in which the public have largely collaborated. Most educated people now accept the vast, geological time-scale, and its division into eras and periods, which has been created only over the last century and this century. Many eras, such as the Mesozoic and, before that, the Permian and Carboniferous, have become vivid to our understandings. And of course, movies about the Jurassic period and its large reptiles are popular. Children take pink felt tyrannosauruses to bed with them.

  ‘Yet we must understand that it is the painstaking study of rocks, together with a mere truck-full of bones – not more – which has delivered this awesome panorama of past Earth over many eons. The patient delver in an arid-seeming rock stratum has his training and his imagination as guide, but not only that. The work of many men and women now deceased provides the foundation on which he builds. This represents the essence of our culture: continuity, that continuity which insures the allied labours of science and imagination.

  ‘So much for context. Now I shall be more specific, more technical, and speak regarding our work in the Chicxulub crater, which may prove to b
e –’

  You were interrupted by a messenger, who entered the chamber and thrust a note into the chairman’s hand. The chairman read the note and looked flustered. Then he caught you by the sleeve – just a tweak on the cuff. ‘Oh, do please excuse me, Dr Fielding.’ His countenance, already rubicund, had flushed bright red. ‘It’s most incorrect to interrupt our speaker, but it’s most unprecedented, most – most – beispiellos, yes, unexampled.’ Turning from you, he addressed the sprinkling of audience. ‘Fellow colleagues, the Berlin Wall is being attacked from the east side!’

  Cries and shouts came from the audience. All immediately stood up, looked round for reassurance, and then began to rush from the chamber.

  ‘I’m so sorry about this,’ said the chairman. ‘So sorry, but history, well, you know all about history …’

  ‘Yes,’ you said. ‘And sometimes it happens when you are standing talking.’

  Although you sought to hide it, you were considerably annoyed by the interruption. You felt your speech was important; how could an attack on the Wall be of equal or more importance? After all, the Wall must have been attacked many times. So you were annoyed with the chairman, and annoyed with Mr Gorbachev, who had stirred up trouble in the Communist states.

  Later on, when you discovered the momentousness of the situation, you were annoyed with yourself. But for the time being, you cold-shouldered the chairman.

  Out on the steps of the Institute, Heather was waiting for you, her reluctant husband beside her. She was wearing a light coat over the bright dress. She put an arm round your neck and kissed the air by both cheeks before introducing Helmut. He was polite, verging on frostiness. A little man in a brown suit, with long artistic hands and fingers, his handshake was a weak, limp grasp.

  ‘You have become very celebrated, Steve,’ she said, her eyes gleaming behind her spectacles. Her manner was slightly flirtatious; you wondered if you remembered it.