“From there,” Louis wrote, “we could see it all. That unearthly spectacle: London burning! But so removed were we from it up there, it seemed to be happening like it does in one of my visions—or like in a dream. The sort that, without any clear interruption of logic, seems to move backward rather than forward—proving itself as it goes.
“Soon enough, it became obvious I was not the only one who felt this way. I looked at Ouspensky and saw he had already begun traveling along those ill-used, back routes of the mind toward the distant past. It was the expression on his face that told me this was so—an expression I have seen on no living man but that I instantly recognized when I saw it as one I must have worn myself on the few occasions that I, too, had traveled that way. But then—I can hardly bring myself to write it. Suddenly—his face changed. He appeared to be physically jolted by something. Then he turned very pale. Even in the low light I could see the way his face blanched; how his eyes widened in confusion and fear. It was not the sort of jolt one might receive through the consideration of some psychological or intellectual dilemma—it was an actual, physical jolt, as though he had run into a wall. He looked around, first toward us—we, who sat, anxiously waiting for what he would say; for a sign, any sign at all, of what was to come. Then his eyes drifted past us. They scanned the horizon where London spat and popped and roared in the distance like a vision of hell.
“This—he said, finally—I cannot remember.”
AFTER THAT, LOUIS’S LETTERS, which had slowed to one or two a month, stopped abruptly; Sutton’s own letters went unanswered. On good days, she surmised that this sudden silence was only a sort of attempt to move their love (the one thing she had never once—since that first day in Louis’s apartment—seriously questioned; even when first one distance, then another, intervened) finally past the “naturalism” on which it had so far been based. She tried to abandon her longing for some material trace of him as best she could; to train her mind instead toward some more abstract method of communication—but these sorts of exercises, whenever she attempted them, always left her cold.
Then, in February 1941, Sutton was distracted temporarily from her growing anxiety over Louis’s prolonged silence. The Judge suffered a massive stroke, leaving him paralyzed—unable to speak. Directly, Sutton sent news to Alden, but by the time her letter arrived he had returned to Paris; the letter never reached him. His reply, when it finally came, therefore, never mentioned their father at all, and responded only to her previous letter about Louis’s adventures with Ouspensky into the “beyond,” which she had related to him.
“I am reminded,” Alden wrote, “of that hideous tale of Wells’s, do you know the one? The Island of Doctor Moreau. Moreau is a sort of alchemist—intent on remaking animals into human beings. He inflicts on them untold suffering in order, he says, to ‘burn out all the animal’ in them. When the experiment fails (he only manages in the end to lend his animals a very few human characteristics; at root, their natures remain unchanged), he is forced to admit that he has succeeded only in creating ‘a problem’ … ‘I wanted,’ he says, ‘it was the only thing I wanted—to find the extreme limit of plasticity in a living thing.’ Isn’t this quest for immortality that Ouspensky and his lot are invested in a quest along these lines? To ‘burn’ from the human all his ‘animal’ tendencies—even the tendency toward death—in order for him to become … but, what? Something yet to be defined … Anyway, I wouldn’t worry too much over him. These ideas have been fashionable for some time, and among plenty of people who are considered—mistakenly or not—quite sane. Wells himself, you know—and Gorky. Yeats, Eliot, and the rest. They were even at the root of the revolution in 1917. Have you heard, for example, of something they called Bogostroitel’stvo? It can be literally translated, I believe, into something like ‘god-building.’ Imagine! Having a whole revolution to do away with God just to build him up again!”
It was true, Alden went on, that the “god” imagined by “the Commissar of Enlightenment” employed by the Bolsheviks was humanity itself—but not as it could have been conceived of, then. It was, instead, a humanity of the future—a humanity purified; all its “animality” burned out.
“Gorky himself believed,” he continued, “that the highest state of man would not be physical at all. Everything around us would, instead, at some future time, be transformed into a collective body of thought—a single, pure and inclusive, psychical energy. He reportedly had a few heated discussions over it with the poet Blok, who was horrified by Gorky’s vision— protesting quite rightly that all the known laws of the universe contradicted it. According to trusted scientific accounts, the universe is, if anything, compressing. Everything pressing in, at every moment, more densely and solidly than ever before. It is my guess, therefore, that if we unite at all and in any form, it will be as a small asteroid firing at a distant planet. But that cannot be proved, and even if it could would not stop the majority of the world—regardless of their religion or creed, or lack thereof—from believing nonetheless in some sort of afterlife, thereby, in large and small ways, succeeding once again in undermining the present, and pitting us against one another and ourselves in the most inhuman ways. All in the name of a cause or a thought or an idea of a future that exceeds us. That, indeed, has no knowledge of our existence at all and probably in itself does not exist— or, if it does, does so at such a remote distance from any of our more pressing concerns as not to warrant any part in the discussion of our immediate affairs.”
One thing to be said for Stalin on this point, according to Alden, was that it was he who was finally able to diminish the hold religion still played (through Lunacharsky’s Bogostroitel’stvo movement) during Lenin’s time. Even Lenin himself believed apparently that one day electricity would take the place of God. “Let the peasant pray to electricity,” he said, “let him feel the power of the central authorities more than that of heaven!” Like Wells’s dystopia, the idea—hardly straying very far from the overtly religious—was to deliver humanity from the clutches of nature; from the clutches, in essence, of itself.
It was in order to move closer to this goal that human beings themselves were liquefied: “the statistics,” Alden wrote, “we heard rumored over the years are if anything too low an estimate to account for the sort of absolute death that was visited upon that country, and in the most unspeakable forms, according to those who have seen it with their own eyes. I have heard rumors of things I can hardly even bear to write down. From one man, who worked as a statistician, for example—they are very diligent there, as here, about keeping good records—I’ve heard it is general policy for the hands of those prisoners who had frozen to death to be chopped off, in order that their fingerprints might be used for the files. Someone else recently told me of her employment fabricating loaves of bread out of plaster of Paris during the famine of 1933. Do you remember the optimistic accounts of the Soviet state we read at that time? The confident reports that rumors of hunger, and worse, had all been fabricated by the Americans? And this woman was fashioning bread out of plaster, displaying it for all the journalists who trooped through the idyllic villages of the ‘beautiful and fertile Ukraine’ to see! Ah, the plastic arts! The endless malleability of the human mind!
“There was the case, for example, of the parapsychologist Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev, whose research into the scientific basis for the immortality of the soul had begun during the reign of the tsars, and continued under Lenin. In fact, on several occasions, Bekhterev had acted as Lenin’s personal psychologist. The purpose of this life, he said, was to develop the human spirit in such a way as to actually effect a change upon the species—a sort of Darwinian ‘All-Spirit’ or ‘Overman.’ Where, previously, humanity had been bound to those limitations imposed by personal flaws and inhibitions, by uncoordinated desires, it was possible—Bekhterev (like Ouspensky, after him) claimed—to systematically surpass those limitations. Electricity would not merely replace God; man himself would become electricity! As it was—
and this was a viewpoint he presciently maintained, well before the days of the revolution—humans were not directed by conscious choices but instead by the mechanics of chance, which played them for toys or ill-fitted machines, destroying or creating things willy-nilly around them based on nothing more than the associative power of suggestion. Whole civilizations had been built, then crumbled and fallen, in just this way—to say nothing of individual lives. And indeed, Bekhterev’s own life was destroyed according to just such a whim.
“After Lenin’s death he was invited to the Kremlin in order to meet with Stalin—presumably over the question of whether or not it should be permitted to publish Freud’s work in Russia: Stalin was opposed to the idea; Trotsky supported it. Bekhterev had voiced his doubts as to the scientific basis of psychoanalysis even as he pursued it—he always hoped to move beyond it, into the physiological. Perhaps it was indeed in order to discuss this issue that Bekhterev was invited to Stalin’s quarters on that day in 1927, or perhaps it was that Stalin wished for the sort of consultation Bekhterev had provided for Lenin in his final days. Whatever the reason for the visit, Bekhterev’s opinion of it was clearly recorded by his colleagues. ‘Diagnosis is clear,’ he reported afterward: ‘typical case of heavy paranoia.’
“The next day Bekhterev was found dead, his body swiftly cremated. His eldest son was executed, his wife sent to a prison camp, and the rest of his children to the state orphanages. Soon afterward, his name was removed from his books and manuscripts, and his research was burned.
“That,” wrote Alden, “was the judgment visited upon Bekhterev.”
—
MARY KELLY HAD ALREADY LONG SINCE DEPARTED BY THEN —LATE November 1941—for her last, permanent “rest” holiday, at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, just outside the city. She spent her days peacefully, looking out over the Potomac River from her second-story room, and contemplating the days during the Civil War when the grounds had still been used to house large animals brought back by the Smithsonian Institute from South America, Africa, and the Philippines. Sutton visited when she could, but it was not often—and even when she did, her mother hardly knew her. It was as if she had been plunged into a deeper memory—one that extended far beyond the Gulf Coast of her childhood. One that reached back, finally, to the sub-Saharan plains of East Africa and the humid jungles of southern Campeche: the respective origins of her imaginary animals, which grazed the hospital lawns. She would chatter endlessly about the details of her own feeding and bathing rituals as she stared—past Sutton—out the window; as though her daughter, barely recognizable to her, were only the slightest imperfection on the otherwise unblemished hospital glass.
Visiting Judge Kelly, it was just the opposite. Though he could no longer speak, he remained as alert—as much “the Judge” as he ever had been. Sutton could feel it: the way he continued to peer out from behind the paralyzing hold his body had on him with the same fierceness she remembered from her childhood. This power—abstracted from any ability to actually wield it—made him at once both more terrifying and more sympathetic. As they sat together in the Judge’s study (where, throughout that final year, he remained: propped up with blankets and pillows in his usual chair, his chapped and swollen feet resting on a low ottoman and his blank gaze riveted toward his own open window, which watched the street), Sutton felt that, perhaps—for the first time—they understood each other.
She rarely spoke during her visits—though Germaine, who had stayed on at the house all that time, reminded her often that she must.
He understands everything, she said. There’s no mistaking it, he absolutely does.
But when Sutton did attempt to speak in his presence, her words always came out thick and strange. More than that—they felt extraneous, and perhaps a bit unfair. If her father and she were finally going to confront each other after all this time, it should at least—she thought— be on the same terms. No more than in her professional career did she want to be considered at any advantage.
The only time she spoke, therefore, was to give him news of Alden— and that came very rarely. Even when it did, there was never much to report. Thanks to the efforts of an American friend, he’d been repatri-ated; was back in Paris now. He did not think it possible, or at any rate advisable, to return to the United States due both to the delicate situation in France and his various responsibilities to those who had arranged his release—the details of which he never made clear. There were difficulties, of course, he admitted, owing to food shortages and the constraining effects of the occupation and the war, but these difficulties were common to all, and, if anything—he always insisted in closing—he was faring better than most.
It was only when Sutton spoke out loud—of Alden—that her father’s eyes would darken and burn, and, forgetting himself, he would make an effort to speak. Then, cowed by failure, he would retreat once more into silence—his eyes flashing with an anger that had, over the years, been refined to such a point that it had, anyway, become too pure, too powerful for words.
FINALLY, ON THE THIRD of December, 1941— just days before the attack on Pearl Harbor signaled the United States’ entry into the war—Sutton received a telegram from Germaine in New York. The Judge was dead. She traveled back to Washington that night in order to make the final arrangements for the burial, and her father’s estate. And so she was there— in her father’s house, in his study, in fact (his bed had been moved there, under the window), which had once seemed so impenetrable, when it was announced that the United States had entered the war. She had waited so long to hear that announcement, convinced she would feel just as she had in its anticipation: filled, in equal parts, with excitement and relief. So it was a surprise to find—sitting with Germaine at the edge of her father’s bed after it had been stripped of its linens and every trace of his presence, which had once been so overpowering—how simply and terribly sad she felt then, and how empty the President’s voice sounded to her in that moment, as it echoed through the room, promising “absolute victory.”
Less than six months later—due to the sudden dearth of male reporters, what with the war on—Walker’s concerns over the lack of women’s “facilities” at the front, which had been plaguing him for years, were briefly forgotten, and it was agreed that Sutton would be sent overseas.
Nearly six more months passed before she managed to secure all the proper press credentials and arrangements could be made. Finally, though, on the eighth of December, 1942, she shipped out along with over ten thousand American troops, to Gourock, on Scotland’s southwest shore. From there she was to travel to Lowestoft, where she’d be sent on to Holland in a week. That left (as she had been careful to arrange) just enough time to see Louis, to whom—through a mutual contact, Shep Stewart, another foreign correspondent at Life magazine—she’d finally managed to get word.
So, they met. The week before Christmas. At a shabby restaurant, suggested by Louis, in Lambeth, where holiday decorations had been strung up on the lampposts—contrasting strangely with the ruined streets. Sutton arrived before Louis did, and ordered a glass of red wine, with which she hoped to still her nerves.
Her fingers trembled as she lifted the glass. What if he didn’t come? She felt a sudden, visceral panic shudder through her at the thought.
But then—there he was. Looking exactly as he always had; what had she expected? Still—it was surprising. How absolutely … himself he was. All the unnecessary details of his particular human existence, which she had forgotten, apparent again: the lines on his face (had they deepened? Not significantly, if so), the wrinkles in his clothing, the way he nodded his head ever so slightly, apologetically, with each step—a nervous motion that belied his otherwise confident pose.
Sutton did not rise to greet him. She could not. He leaned in, therefore, to kiss her on the cheek.
He would have written, he said, after he had settled across from her and ordered scotch and soda. But then … He paused. Shifted in his seat; ran his fingers through his hair.
Yes, Sutton said.
—who could remember whole episodes of her past lives, when for the rest of us they come only in the briefest of flashes? The one who spoke in French, Russian, Old English, and—once—in an ancient Hopi dialect, which would have gone unrecognized except for the fortuitous discovery of a local ethnologist who had, in the early 1920s, spent time studying the American Indians of the Southwest?
Yes, Sutton said. Yes. I remember.
Louis raised his glass to his lips with one hand and with the other, once again, ran his fingers through his hair.
She had, he explained, become pregnant. The child was his. Though it was difficult for both of them, he knew (he said) that Sutton would understand. There were certain responsibilities that were (weren’t they?) quite simply … impossible to avoid. Even, therefore, after the war ended, he’d resolved to stay on.
Sutton had become light-headed from the wine, which she’d drunk too quickly. At first all she could think to say was: The end of the war? Is this something that you—or Cécile (she pronounced the name with heavy emphasis on the accented first syllable) have foreseen?
He shook his head and laughed self-consciously. Oh, no, he said. It’s the past Cécile can see most clearly, not the future, and I myself have only the briefest of revelations—even of the past. No, no—again he shook his head. I base my prediction instead, he said, smiling, on what I read this morning in the Daily Telegraph.
Oh, Sutton said, and put down her drink, which she had drained. You know, don’t you, you shouldn’t believe everything you read.
Louis laughed good-naturedly, and stirred the ice in his drink, which was melting fast. Mechanically, Sutton reached for her hat and umbrella, which she had leaned on the back of her chair. Louis half raised himself, but she waved him away.
Quartet for the End of Time Page 31
