Leonard Fischer spoke English with a strange accent, a hybrid of Hungary and New York. He ushered Emmett into a one-room suite to introduce him with a wave of the hand to half a dozen students, some of whom Emmett recognized from his classes. There was one woman among them, lovely and dark-haired.
It looked like a smoky, offbeat university seminar. Students strewn about on the floor or the bed, in the one upholstered chair. A sink full of scummy water, an icebox, a hot plate, books stacked on the floor or piled on shelves of two-by-sixes and bricks; magazines, newspapers, clippings, a chrome hubcap that served as an ashtray, out-of-date calendars with pictures of sexy girls wearing American sailor hats, 1942. It was grubby, and indicated a sense of anti-style, detritus, broken kitsch. The one artful object was a framed pencil drawing of a Junker 88 bomber, Luftwaffe; Emmett stumbled over someone’s foot, drawn toward it.
He felt Leonard’s hand on his shoulders, smelled coffee on Leonard’s breath as Leonard spoke into his ear, a warm current of compassion: “Sit, my friend, why don’t you,” the thick fingers pressing him down. He landed beside the dark-haired girl; her full upper lip, black, abundant hair curling around her shoulders, her round arms. Leonard said, “My cousin Rachel. Touch and die.” Then he laughed.
Leonard had a compact body, a dense, compressed mass. He never sat, he paced, blowing his nose into a blue handkerchief, saying little, while the young men in the room did most of the talking, glancing at Leonard for approval. Their conversation was intense, in what seemed like a special language. Emmett felt the envy of an outsider. He heard what seemed like magic phrases — the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, dialectical materialism, the inevitability of communism, the workers’ democracy — and he was embarrassed at having been so narrowly preoccupied with his own small concerns, his new loves, his abstract study of Shakespeare and British history. These young men and lovely Rachel seemed to be entranced by something brutal. “The bourgeoisie is incompetent and unfit to rule,” pronounced one of the earnest students; “We must create a stateless, classless society,” his eyes darting to Leonard to see if he’d made an impression. Leonard wasn’t listening; he didn’t see or didn’t care that the others needed his approval. But Emmett felt the words ricochet through him, tantalizing, challenging his most cautious instincts. We must create a stateless, classless society . To dare to consider this — no state. He was struck by the notion that here was an idea, an ideal, grand enough to help him evade the fate of the vet who can’t recover from the war. To rid himself of the state that had made him its dupe, a murderer.
The window in Leonard Fischer’s single room looked down at a park. Leonard slowed there and looked out, as if restlessly hungering for things outside. He called Emmett over and asked, “You know what that is?” pointing down to the park. A man wearing a white shirt without a tie strolled slowly across an expanse of grass, his muscular body full of health, his empty hands swinging at his sides. “Boredom,” Leonard said. “Beautiful, peaceful boredom. The kind of boredom we can only dream of, working in the capitalists’ machinery. Becoming machines.” Emmett was aware of a sudden lull in the students’ conversation while they strained to overhear Leonard, who was pulling Emmett’s head close, his voice softly rumbling, “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” He squeezed Emmett’s neck. “Walter Benjamin wrote that.” Emmett admitted he didn’t know who Walter Benjamin was. “You speak German?” Leonard asked quite indifferently — he was obviously a good teacher; he had a way of asking questions that permitted ignorance.
Emmett admitted that no, he did not speak German. The memory of molten fire beneath his plane, flames from a burning German city, sizzled into his mind and down into his gut, a choking sensation that augured weeping. But he was okay, he was calm. He didn’t know what John Norfield had told Leonard but guessed that John had relayed nothing of his breaking down that first night they’d met, and nothing about the air force. He wanted to present Leonard with something. “I speak Japanese,” he said.
Leonard laughed, deep and phlegmy. “That, my friend, would put you on the far side of the planet.” He gripped Emmett’s head between his hands and made as if to throw it, as if his head were a football, a loving gesture. “Glad to know you.”
Leonard’s cousin Rachel brushed her dark hair from her eyes and gave Emmett a scornful look.
Chapter Six
Emmett Jones was reading Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. And there, in the first chapter of the first thing he’d ever read by Marx, he discovered the source for John Norfield’s mysterious and witty aphorism that night they had first met. “All great world-historic facts and personages appear twice . . . the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
Emmett was surprised to discover Herr Marx so lively and sardonic. He wondered what the old philosopher would make of him, and of the students lounging on the floor of Leonard’s apartment, and imagined that Marx would burst into laughter at the comfortable Canadian communists.
He was amazed at the power of Marx’s memory, his visceral grasp of history and economics, witty, caustic. Reading this stuff made him feel again the exquisite sensation of time running through him, a river of light passing, almost painful, joyful in a ruthless sort of way.
Light travels six and a half trillion miles in a year, which was a fact that had stuck in his head from his schooldays; the stars’ explosions hurling light. Light from the eighteenth century, from the French Revolution, that very light is striking earth now. Late from the homesick stars. The world is belated. An uncanny homelessness resides in things: a button with a bit of white thread lying on the windowsill in the sun, abandoned in the river of time.
What did she tell him, Sachiko, his father’s mistress, in her female, singsong Japanese? She said, “Mono no aware ni kizuku.” Be aware of the strangeness of things. Her melodious platitude, “Mono no aware o satoru.” Be light-stricken as the world is light-stricken, be time-stricken as the world is time-stricken.
This was a Japanese cliché. She might have been saying, Wake up and smell the coffee. And besides, weren’t the Japanese light-stricken? Now weren’t they just as stricken as they could be? A great white brutal light.
Emmett’s father’s constant mistress, Sachiko, a silk cocoon, was the estranged wife of a diplomat stationed in Australia, which is where she’d learned English. She had a young daughter who had stayed in Australia because she’d chosen her father over her mother when they divorced. Sachiko never apologized for living so far from her child, but even as a boy Emmett could sense her dissatisfaction, her unhappy boredom, her pessimism. Emmett was a restless kid who discovered stillness visiting her, staring at her where she reclined, like fate, he thought, pleased with his own intellect. He thought, She has the body of a woman but the soul of a man.
Sachiko wasn’t old then, he knew that now, but she was older than his mother, she coated her face in rice powder. She reclined on a chaise longue in the sunroom at the back of the house in Shioya, at James-yama Estate. Not her house: the house Emmett’s father leased on her behalf, a short walk from the house he leased for his wife and son. His father travelled between the two women, and the younger Jones travelled too. At that time in his life, young Emmett exercised disloyalty to his mother as he exercised his body — healthily, casually cruel. He loved his mother, she was his first friend, but the pain that he inflicted on her confirmed him as separate, with separate will. Anyway, his mother’s weakness proved that she deserved to be betrayed, as if he could uproot his own potential for weakness by hurting her.
There was nothing to do at Sachiko’s house, and Emmett never took a schoolmate there with him. But he liked to go to sit with her, straddling a footstool to be near her, lying on his stomach to drag his boy-limbs over the Chinese carpet, mesmerized by boredom. Sachiko never felt obliged to talk or to read or even to embroider. She sat like a clock.
He preferred the way his family lived, in two houses, with two very different women, and he p
itied his friends’ conventional arrangements, preferring his father’s courtly handshakes to ordinary fathers’ hugs and feint punches; the other fathers’ tussles and bad jokes seemed desperate, stupid. His father was tall, as tall as Emmett was now; he was dignified and self-reliant; he was never compelled to explain himself but kept his own counsel.
When his father contracted TB, his mother tried not to let anyone know. It seemed to shame her even more than his having a mistress did — or his mother used the shame of TB as surrogate for the shame she felt over the mistress. TB was widespread in Japan, yet it was also a source of deep disgrace. When Emmett began to show symptoms, she took him out of the country so suddenly he never had a chance to say goodbye.
He was sixteen. There’d been a small incident, a rift between him and his father. Emmett had taken a job on the estate, gardening work, cleaning yards. His boss was an old retired British field marshal. One day, the old man complained to Emmett’s father about Emmett’s “shoddy” work. In response, his father had, coldly furious, told Emmett that he’d “failed him,” he’d said that he was “disappointed” in such a son; he’d gone on at some length, declaring that because Emmett was so lazy, he was bound to fail in life. His father was a thoroughly rational man and he had a thoroughly rational way of articulating his disgust.
Emmett was bitterly hurt. His work had been shoddy that one time; the old Brit had been right. Emmett sulkily avoided his father for weeks. Even when he knew that his father was really ill, Emmett held out, he never entered the darkened bedroom to see him. Then Emmett’s mother swept him out of the country. He’d never had a chance to make things right with the man whom he loved beyond everyone. It had been a stupid argument. He would never see his father again.
When he got out of the sanatorium in Vancouver, his mother moved with him into a house there, insisting it was too dangerous for them to return home. Emmett didn’t have any money of his own, and he couldn’t make contact with Japan because it was wartime; he was kept by his mother. When his father was reported dead, Emmett, guilty, angry, enlisted in the RAF. His mother suffered a fatal heart attack while he was in the war. At the time, he refused to mourn. Under the circumstances, flying night raids as he was then, grief would have tripped him up. He stored grief in his bones. Rage inspired him, sharpened his sight, his mind, setting fire to the German cities and towns. A delicious hatred of the enemy gave him courage. He was proving — to his dead father — that he would not fail.
Grief leached out of him now. As the excitement of the war receded, grief seemed to release itself in waves that washed back over him, shaking him so deeply he might fall to his knees, just as he’d done that night in Norfield’s bookstore. A fit of weeping could overcome him on a streetcar, or as he bent over to tie his shoe. He wept in his sleep, awakening wet with tears. He learned that grief is a medley of rage, pity, regret, and hunger, starvation; he was starving for his father, to see him again, to hear his voice, to be forgiven.
He couldn’t afford to regret what he’d done in Bomber Command, it would cost him too much. It had been blind, well blooded, obedient action. A luscious poison in his veins that had won the commander’s praise. The bombing, all that burning was too great, much too great. Regret would destroy him. He had to redeem his life.
When he recalled his father, it was often a memory of the man angrily turning away from him; the image of his father turning his back recurred in Emmett’s mind obsessively. Turning his back in disgust or, Emmett wondered now, turning his back out of his own sense of inadequacy, a man who had failed his family. Emmett began to see mortality there, in a memory of the lonely shape of the living man. Maybe his father had been uncertain, unhappy, driven by fears and desires he couldn’t control. A man who’d chosen to live outside the normal family strictures, seeking a certain self-invention and finding himself trapped, failing.
Chapter Seven
Emmett thought about Suzanne McCallum almost all the time. Her skin, her blue eyes, her confident stride, her place in the world. A rich man’s daughter from Forest Hill, Toronto.
Suzanne was seeing John Norfield. A poet. A communist, or so he claimed. Compelling in a way that Emmett never could be. Norfield seemed to know everything; he could remember the names of every revolutionary, every philosopher, writer, and artist who had ever lived. Emmett didn’t know anyone else who knew so many names, and he was impressed. John never again spoke directly about Hong Kong; he talked about oppression, the violence of the state, and they argued over the differences between German and Japanese fascism. Emmett listened to the slightly British cadence and thought, It’s Toronto aristocrat.
Of his several new friends so affected by the war, Emmett was the only one who had killed. And he had killed, or helped to kill, tens of thousands. He had seen too much. Yes, the eyes are nerve endings.
In the company of his friends, Emmett felt a weight taken from him, a lessening of anxiety and tedium, and a new radiance, an ideal. If anybody had asked him in 1946 what he believed in, he might have said communism. A grand idea, a sublime system that would eliminate war and poverty, create a true democracy, stateless, without manipulation, no Bomber Command murdering civilians. Airplanes flew over the city, carrying not bombs but passengers. He looked up at the planes’ underbellies and felt starved, abandoned, thirsting.
Four years ago, the Japanese police reported that his father had jumped out of the window of the police station. Emmett doubted this was true. His father would have been very sick with TB then. The police would be happy to get rid of a foreigner infected with the disease, especially a westerner who was intimate with a Japanese woman. He must have been pushed. It was wartime, a time for killing. The police would have pushed him to his death without giving it much thought.
Passenger planes droned overhead. The city was growing; houses were going up for the returned vets having families. He hated the way the small hours of peace needed tending. “Peace is relentless,” Emmett once said, realizing too late how terrible it was to say this to Leonard. Leonard, his sorrowful brown eyes filled with mockery, dryly responding, “Take arsenic, why don’t you. Put yourself out of your misery.”
With the war over, sex was again indexed to real estate —that’s what Leonard said. “A wife,” Leonard argued, “is private property, a slave to her husband. Who in turn is a slave to his banker and his boss.” Somehow it all could be traced back to domesticated farm animals, according to Leonard, who said he’d learned this from Friedrich Engels, but Emmett wasn’t clear how it all worked. Leonard patiently explained. “The vets are breeding like rabbits. But unlike rabbits, they must breed with only one rabbit for their whole lives, which actually sounds okay with me. That way, the male rabbit knows for sure that the baby bunnies are his when he wants to write his last will and testament. The women and children are his slaves, but he’s their slave too. The war might be kaput, but the soldiers are still in service. Pretty soon, they stop thinking altogether. Just hump and then work like crazy to feed all those kids.”
Leonard was always agitated during their conversations about sex and communism. “Fucking is the original division of labour,” he liked to say. Emmett understood that this obsession was partly because Leonard didn’t have a lover and would obviously very much like to have one. This made their discussions unsettling, Leonard vulgar in one moment and sentimental the next.
Emmett, reading Marx’s The German Ideology, was weary of Marx’s style, that hectoring voice. Toronto wasn’t ripe for revolution. He noticed that Leonard’s disciples were often quoting the people whom Marx was satirizing, getting it backward. Leonard’s cousin Rachel, for example, liked to rub Emmett’s earlobes between her forefinger and her thumb, a perfectly sensuous and sisterly fondling, resting her satin bosom against his chest and in a milky mezzo she would drawl, “My life is a continuous process of liberation.”
Emmett thought that the Toronto communists were a hip club, a costume party. But thanks to Leonard Fischer and John Norfield, he had a life again,
and he was elated. “O Mensch! Gib Acht! Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?” Leonard said. “Ich schlief, ich schlief — aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwarcht.” O Man, take heed! What says the deep midnight? I slept, I slept — from a deep dream have I awoken.
Leonard Fischer’s references, like his accent, were adopted from the US — the Bomb, the military budget, the arms trade. Leonard talked a lot about racial hatred in the South, while the Holocaust could be mentioned only in terms of redemption, as proof for the necessity of “revolution.” Emmett listened in silence to Leonard and Rachel name the family that had been murdered — exterminated. Rachel’s parents had taken her with them to Canada, to Toronto, in 1933, but everyone else had been rounded up. Leonard’s parents were individually murdered in gas chambers, as were his two sisters, his grandparents, another uncle and his wife, their four children, his cousins, second cousins, friends that Leonard had made in the camp. “One by one, child by child, every day there were less of us. Do you understand?” Leonard said. “Of the six million killed, one and a half million were children. Each one of them died alone.
“Lenin understood,” Leonard said, “he saw it coming, the evil, the beast of anti-Semitism. Lenin knew the nature of the beast. The Germans were bankrupt. They were told to hate the Jew, so they worked overtime, making bullets to kill him. The factory owner will always get rich on fear. Harness hatred and fear, you get very rich. It’s exactly what Lenin predicted. The nightmare came true.”
Leonard yearned to go to Russia, utopia, a classless society. The Russians had “cleaned up” Eastern Europe. Leonard claimed that Stalin was a good friend of the Jews. Emmett didn’t argue with him very much on this point because he loved Leonard and knew that Leonard needed to believe in someone, and because Emmett himself wanted a world without any kind of state at all, no Stalin, no Truman, no generals and prime ministers, no ministers of war.
Mr. Jones Page 4
