The Clowns of God

by Morris West

  There was a chorus of approval. The President shuffled uneasily.

  “I told the Minister that while we were all conscious of the need for—ah—adequate security in a critical time, we were—ah—at least equally concerned to preserve the—ah—principles of academic freedom.”

  “Oh, Christ!” Dahlmeyer exploded.

  There was an audible groan from Brandt. Mendelius stood up. He was white with anger but he spoke with quiet formality.

  “I wish to make a personal statement, sir. I hold tenure to teach in this place. I do not hold, nor will I accept, a commission to investigate the private lives of my students. I am ready to resign rather than do so.”

  “I would point out, Professor”—the President was cold—“that I have conveyed a request, not a ministerial order; which would, in the present circumstances at least, be illegal. However, you must understand that in conditions of national emergency, the situation may change radically.”

  “In other words”—Hellman from Organic Chemistry was on his feet—“we have a threat, as well as a request.”

  “We are all under threat, Professor Hellman—the threat of armed conflict, when civil liberties must inevitably be curtailed in the national interest.”

  “There’s another threat, which you should also consider,” said Anneliese Meissner. “Student revolt, expressing total loss of faith in the integrity of the academic faculty. I remind you of what happened to our universities in the thirties and forties when the Nazis ran the country.… Do you want to see that again?”

  “Do you think you will not see it when the Russians come?”

  “Ah! So you have already committed yourself, sir.”

  “I have not.” The President was fuming now. “I told the Minister I would refer the request to my staff and report their reactions.”

  “Which puts us all straight into the computer bank of the security service. Well, so be it! I’m with Mendelius. If they want me to spy on my students, I’m out!”

  “With respect to the President and to my esteemed colleagues.” A small mousy fellow stood up. It was Kollwitz, who taught forensic medicine. “I suggest that such a situation can be avoided very simply. The President reports that his senior faculty is unanimously against the proposed measure. He does not have to give names.”

  “It’s a good idea,” said Brandt. “If the President himself stands firm with us, then we’re in a strong position: and other universities may be encouraged to follow suit.”

  “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.” The President was obviously relieved. “As usual, you’ve been most helpful. I’ll give some thought to—ah—an appropriate answer to the Minister!”

  After that no one had very much to say and the President was eager to be rid of them. They left the coffee dregs and the last of the apple cake and straggled out into the sunlight. Anneliese Meissner fell into step beside Mendelius. She was snorting with fury.

  “God Almighty! What an old humbug!… An appropriate answer to the Minister!… Balls!”

  “They’ve got his balls in a nutcracker,” said Mendelius with a sour grin. “He’s only two years off retirement. You can’t blame him for trying to compromise.… Anyway, he’s got a united faculty behind him. That has to give him some courage.”

  “United?” Anneliese snorted again. “My God, Mendelius! How simple can you get? That was just choir practice—all of us noble souls chanting ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’! How many will stand firm when the security boys really put the pressure on?… ‘Isn’t it true, Professor Brandt, that you’ve been laying little Mary Toller?… And you, Dahlmeyer? Does your wife know about your Saturdays in the Love Hotel in Frankfurt?… And for you, Heinzl, or Willi, or Traudl, if you don’t cooperate we’ve got some lovely filthy jobs—like sanitation scientist or bath attendant in the nut-house… !’ Don’t make any mistake, my friend. If we get three out of ten in the final count, we’ll be damn lucky.”

  “You’re forgetting the students. The moment they hear of it, they’ll be up in arms.”

  “Some, yes! But how many will still be standing up after the first baton charge, and the tear gas and the water cannon? Not too many, Carl! And there’ll be fewer still when the police cut loose with live ammunition.”

  “They’ll never do it!”

  “What have they got to lose? Once the propaganda machine starts blaring who will hear the shots in the alley? Besides, one itty-bitty atom bomb on Tübingen and the slate is wiped clean.… Will you have lunch with me? If I eat alone I’ll probably get drunk.”

  “We can’t have that, can we?” Mendelius hooked his arm through hers and drew her thick body close to him. “There’s only one consolation, girl: every university in the world is probably facing the same pressure at this moment.”

  “I know! Philistines of the world, unite! The eggheads will be crushed at last! My God, Carl! Your Jean Marie wasn’t too far wrong!”

  “Have you listened to the tapes I sent you?”

  “Over and over. I’ve been doing a lot of reading, too.”

  “And… ?”

  “And I’m not going to say another word until I’ve got a big drink inside me. I’m a bitch, Carl—cynical and old and too ugly to believe in a God who makes monsters like me.… But now, I’m so damned scared I could cry.”

  “Where do you want to eat?”

  “Anywhere! The first Bierkeller we find. Sausage and sauerkraut, beer and a double schnapps! Let’s join the happy proletariat!”

  He had never seen her so upset. She ate ravenously and drank with a desperate determination; but even after a liter of beer and two very large schnapps she was still cold sober. She called the waitress to clear the dishes and bring another shot of liquor, then announced that she was ready for a rational discussion.

  “About you first, Carl…”

  “What about me?”

  “I understand you better now. I like you more.”

  “Thank you.” Mendelius grinned at her. “I love you, too!”

  “Don’t make fun of me. I’m not in the mood for it. Those tapes shook me up. You sounded so damned desperate, trying to come to terms with the impossible.”

  “What about Jean Marie?”

  “Well, now, that was another surprise. Your portrait of him was too vivid to be a fake. I had to accept that it was authentic… I saw him. I felt him.”

  “How did you judge him?”

  “He’s a very lucky man.”

  “Lucky?”

  “Yes!… I spend half my life dealing with sick minds. Leaving aside organic defects, most cases boil down to a fragmentation of the personality, a loss of identity. Life—interior and exterior—is a jigsaw, with the pieces scattered all over the table.… The clinician spends his time trying to create a condition of self-recognition—a condition in which even the confusion makes sense. The patient has to see that the jigsaw is designed to make you work at putting it together.… Whatever happened to your Jean Marie had just that saving effect. I made sense of everything—conflict, failure, your rejection, even his present darkness.… God! If I could do that with my patients, I’d be the greatest healer in the world. If I could do it with myself, I’d be a hell of a lot happier than I am now.…”

  “I’d say you were a pretty integrated personality.”

  “Would you, Carl? Look at me now—half drunk on cheap liquor, because I’m scared of tomorrow and I hate the fat frog my mother brought into the world!… I’ve learned to live with me, but not to like me—not ever!”

  “I’m proud to know you, Anneliese,” said Carl Mendelius gently. “You’re a dear friend and a great woman.”

  “Thanks!” She closed up again instantly. “I told you I’ve been doing a lot of reading: comparative religion, the basis of mystical experience in various cults. It’s still strange country to me; but the idea of salvation begins to make sense. We all experience pain, fear, injustice, confusion, death. We struggle to stay whole through the experience. Even when we fail, we try to salvage our sel
ves out of the wreckage. We can’t do it alone. We need support. We need more—a module or exemplar to show us what a whole human being looks like.… Hence the prophet, the Messiah, the Christ figure. The same thing applies to the communities of believers. The Church—whatever church!—says: Truth is here; light is here; we are the chosen; join us!’… Yes or no, Professor?”

  “Yes,” said Mendelius. “But the important question is, which module do you choose, and why?”

  “I don’t know yet,” said Anneliese Meissner. “But I do know that the final assent is simple, as it was for your Jean Marie. The catch is that you have to be absolutely desperate before you make your submission. The patient I can help quickest is the desperate one who knows he’s sick.… The best candidate for the cults is the person at the end of his rope.”

  “Which brings us to the next problem.” Mendelius reached out to touch her hand. “What are we going to do, you and I, about the situation at the University? If the President sells us out to the politicos, as he probably will, if half our colleagues surrender to the witch-hunters, what then?”

  “We go underground.” Anneliese Meissner had no doubts on that score. “We start organizing for it now.”

  “You see?” Mendelius chuckled and lifted his glass in salute. “Even you, Frau Professor, are prepared to bury the sacred scrolls and take to the mountains!”

  “Don’t count on it, Carl. It’s the drink talking.…”

  “In vino veritas…” said Mendelius with a grin.

  “Oh, Christ!” Anneliese Meissner glowered at him. “We’ve had more than enough clichés for one day! Let’s walk awhile. It’s stifling in here.”

  As he strolled homeward through the placid streets of the old town, Mendelius found himself faced with a new dilemma. In a pointless conflict, a war that would be fought to extinction, where did a man’s loyalties belong? To the blasted, sterile earth that had once been a home-place? To the men who rode the juggernaut chariot, heedless of the victims under its wheels? To the nation-state, soon to be as meaningless to the living as to the dead? To race, blood, tribe, tradition, Gott und Vaterland? If not to these, then to what? And when should Carl Mendelius begin to disengage himself from the system of which he had been so long a beneficiary?

  Katrin and Johann would be called to the colours before the year was out. How should he advise them to answer? Yes, to the mad imperative? Or no, we will not serve, because there is no possible end but catastrophe? Once again, childhood memories rose up to haunt him: the bodies of boy soldiers hanged from lampposts in Dresden because they had given up a hopeless cause, in the last days of a crazed despot.

  Now he was truly caught in the closed circuit of Jean Marie’s predetermined cosmos. So long as you could still flip a coin on a 50–50 chance, you could live, at least, in hope. But once you discovered that the coin had two heads and the Creator wasn’t offering any odds at all, when you were in a gull’s game, and the quicker you got out, the better… So which do you think it is, Herr Professor? Continuity or chaos? And if you opt out of coming chaos, on what far planet and with what remnant creatures will you build your new Utopia?

  It was a treadmill argument and he was soon weary of it. He needed distraction; so he turned down a narrow lane, pushed open a worm-eaten door and climbed three flights of stairs to the studio of Alvin Dolman, onetime master sergeant in the U. S. Army of the Rhine, onetime husband of the Bürgermeister’s daughter, now happily divorced and working as an illustrator for a local publisher. He was a big, laughing fellow with ham fists and a game leg, the result of an accident on the autobahn. He also had a shrewd eye for old prints; and Mendelius was one of the regular clients to whom he served Rhine wine, knackwurst and gratuitous advice on women, politics and the art market.

  “… You’ve come at the right time, Professor. Trade is so goddam slow, I’m thinking of going into the porno business.… Look at these! I spotted them in a junk shop in Mannheim—three pen-and-ink drawings by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld.… See! There’s the signature and the date, 1821. Beautiful draftsman, isn’t he? And the models are pretty, too.… How about five hundred marks for the lot?”

  “How about three hundred, Alvin?” Mendelius munched happily on his knackwurst.

  “Four—and it’s a steal!”

  “Three fifty—they’re foxed anyway.”

  “You’re taking the bread out of my mouth, Professor!”

  “I’ll throw in a rye loaf.”

  “You’ve got a deal. Do you want ’em framed?”

  “The usual price?”

  “Would I steal from a friend?”

  “His wife, maybe,” said Mendelius with a grin. “But not his watch. How is life with you, Alvin?”

  “Not bad, Professor! Not bad!” He splashed wine into his glass. “How’s the family?”

  “Fine! Fine!”

  “That young fellow—your daughter’s boyfriend—he’s got the makings of a good artist. I’ve been giving him lessons in drypoint. He learns fast.… It’s a shame, though, what’s going to happen to these kids.”

  “What is going to happen, Alvin?”

  “I only know what I hear, Professor. I keep in touch with our soldier boys in Frankfurt, sell ’em a print or two occasionally, when they’re drunk enough. There’s lots of war talk. They’re filtering in fresh troops and new equipment. Back in Detroit they’re switching to military vehicles.… I’m thinking of pulling up stakes and heading home. It’s nice to be the artist-in-residence in a university town—but hell!—who wants to get his ass shot off for the sake of the Fräuleins! If anything happens, Tübingen will be a battle zone inside a week. But then, so will Detroit, I guess.… Help yourself to the wine. I want to show you something.”

  He rummaged in a cupboard and brought out a small square package, wrapped in oilcoth. He unpacked it carefully to reveal a small duplex portrait of a sixteenth-century nobleman and his wife. He set it on the easel and adjusted the light.

  “Well, Professor, what do you say?”

  “It looks like a Cranach.”

  “It is. Lucas Cranach the Elder. He painted it in Wittenberg in 1508.”

  “Where the devil did you get it?”

  Dolman grinned and laid his forefinger along his nose. “I smelled it, Professor—in a woman’s bedroom if you want to know. She was so happy with my company she gave it to me. I cleaned it up and—presto!—a ready-made insurance policy! No way I’m selling it in Germany though. It goes home with me.…”

  “What about the lady? Doesn’t she share the profits?”

  “Hell, no! She’s beautiful but dumb; and her husband’s got money running out of his ears. Besides, it was a fair trade. I made her very happy.”

  “You’re a rogue, Alvin.” Mendelius chuckled.

  “Aren’t I though!… But with inflation the way it is, an army pension hardly buys pretzels!”

  “If things get bad, maybe they’ll pull you back into the Army.”

  “No way, Professor!” Dolman began rewrapping his treasure. “I’m out and I’m staying out! Next time it won’t be a war, just one big firestorm and then—bingo!—I’ll be back to painting buffalo on the walls of a cave!”

  “… The fear is everywhere, Jean…” Mendelius was at his desk writing, while Lotte sat quietly knitting in the corner and listening to a Brahms concerto, broadcast from Berlin. “It is like a dark mist rising from the marshes, spreading through the streets, permeating every dwelling place. It taints the most casual talk. It enters into the simplest domestic calculation.

  “Our faculty members are now asked to report to the security service on the political affiliations of our students. So, this most elementary of relationships is corrupted and may be utterly destroyed. I have already given notice that I shall resign if the request is made an order. But you see how subtly the corruption works: if I rely on the police for personal protection, how can I, with sound reason, refuse them my cooperation in a national emergency? The answer is clear to me. It will be clear to a very
few others, when the propagandists raise what Churchill called ‘the bodyguard of lies.’

  “… But if fear is an infection, despair is a plague. Your vision of the end of temporal things obsesses us all; but the rest of it—the final redeeming act, the ultimate demonstration of divine justice and mercy—how does one express these, in terms that will keep human hope alive? Your closed-out cosmos, my dear friend, will be a terrible place without it.…”

  The telephone rang. Lotte laid down her knitting to answer it. Georg Rainer was on the line. When Mendelius picked up the phone Rainer launched immediately into monologue.

  “I’m in Zurich. I flew up just to make this telephone call. I couldn’t trust the Italian circuits. Now, listen carefully and don’t make any comments at all. Do you remember, at our last meeting, we discussed a list?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have it close by?”

  “Upstairs. Hang on.”

  Mendelius hurried up to his study, unlocked the old safe and fished out Jean Marie’s list. He picked up the receiver. “Right. I have it in front of me.”

  “Is it arranged by countries?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to mention four names from four countries. I want to know whether the names are on your list. Clear?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “U.S.S.R.… Petrov?”

  “Yes.”

  “U.K.… Pearson?”

  “Yes.”

  “U.S.A.… Morrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “France… Duhamel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. That means my informant is reliable.”

  “You’re talking in riddles, Georg.”

  “I sent you a letter from the General Post Office in Zurich. It will explain the riddles.”

  “But you’re coming here on Wednesday.”

  “I know. But I’m a pessimist. I hope for the best and prepare for the worst. Somebody’s had a tail on me since Saturday. Pia thought she spotted a changeover at the airport which means we could be under surveillance in Zurich as well. So we’re going to try a little evasive action and come overland instead of by air. Can you accommodate both of us? No way I would leave Pia alone in Rome.”