Had she wanted me to, I would have taken her every night to a movie or play or concert or to see friends. But it wasn't staying home that I enjoyed; it was the routine of love. The life I had led with my mother had had its perfectly orchestrated and functioning routine, but it was cold. Routine had also been part and parcel of the life I had led on my own: if a bulb burnt out, there was one to replace it; supplies were renewed before they ran out; broken appliances went immediately to the repair shop; no suit I might want to wear was unpressed, no shirt unwashed. I was so efficient that even when I seemed to be biting off more than I could chew I managed to fill my self-imposed quota by the end of the day. But much as I needed routine, much as I suffered from the years of chaos with Veronika and Max, I was never content at the end of those super-efficient days: there was a coldness about them. Only the weeks with Max and the summers with my grandparents had combined the two: routine and warmth. And now I had found a routine of love. What could be better!
After a time, however, the happiness of my routine with Barbara put the unhappiness of my routine at work into stark relief. I had to force myself to go in each morning, to sit at my desk, to read and answer my mail, to edit my manuscripts. And even worse than the doing of it all was the knowledge that there was no change in sight.
Yet change did come. It took a different form from the one I had fantasized about: I did not move from one publishing house to another; I went off on a different tangent altogether. My whole life changed.
It began with the most everyday of everyday occurrences in the life of an editor: a book proposal. The fact that it was accompanied by the book itself rather than a manuscript did not make it any the less ordinary: it was in English, and the publisher was interested in its appearing in German. Since my idea of starting a series of monographs had died on the vine, I did not pay much attention to the letter. My secretary sent out our standard reply but put the book on my desk.
There it lay, a Cambridge University Press hardcover complete with pale-blue dust jacket featuring a blurry picture of an ancient ship, its oars in the water, its sails billowing. The author, title, and publisher were in dark blue. The title was The Odyssey of Law, the author John de Baur.
14
THE PUBLISHER HAD inserted a copy of The New York Times review of the book, which provided biographical information. The author had been trained as a lawyer and while too iconoclastic to be teaching at one of the major law schools, he was important enough to have landed a position in the Political Science Department at Columbia. He had studied under Leo Strauss and Paul de Man and was the founder of the deconstructionist school of legal theory. For some time now he had exerted his influence more through his teaching than through his publications: his Tuesday seminars were legendary. The Odyssey of Law was his first book since With Rousseau at the Opera, an innovative reinterpretation of Rousseau's philosophical oeuvre on the basis of the structure of his early operas. I had no idea what deconstructionist legal theory might be, had never heard of Strauss or de Man, and did not know that Rousseau had composed operas. I opened the book.
The introduction was about The Odyssey, not the law. It described it as the prototype of all homecoming stories. Throughout all his adventures and misadventures Odysseus remained true to himself. Home at last, he found a combination of brazen opposition and true love; he also found the weapon to overcome the opposition and bring the love to fruition.
Leafing through the book, I found bits and pieces of a history of law. It concentrated on mythical and epic, magic and rational law, on punitive and compensatory justice, and on legitimate rule, collective utility, and the happiness of the individual as the goals of law.
There was a chapter dealing with “cycles” of the law: the major cycle, in which the law serves one goal after another over the centuries only to come back to the original goal and start again, and the minor cycle, in which the fabric of the law is constantly being woven yet also unwoven, like Penelope's shroud. Societies that failed to unweave the fabric of law, that wove it ever thicker, were destined to suffocate in it.
There was also a chapter dealing with the role of truth and lies. Truths are often lies and lies truths; erudition means nothing more than shattering one ideological view of the world to make way for another. We make our own truths and lies and are responsible for deciding what is true and what is false. We are likewise responsible for deciding what is good and what is evil and whether evil should be given free rein or forced to serve the good. But something more than and different from making decent decisions is involved. The demand for intellectual decency earns nothing but scorn from de Baur: what matters to him is not a person's decent intentions but the consequences of that person's act. The decision to use evil for the sake of good requires that the decision-maker be willing to bear the brunt of evil.
There was much I could not grasp, but what I grasped immediately was that this was the iron rule all over again. The willingness to bear the brunt of evil as a prerequisite for the use of evil—it could be nothing else.
In one chapter I came upon a story from book twenty-four of The Iliad. After Achilles kills Hector, old man Priam, king of the Trojans and Hector's father, enters the Greeks' camp and asks Achilles for his son's body. Achilles, who is nothing if not rash and merciless, takes pity on the old man: he gives him the body and even tries to console him, telling him that at Zeus' door there are two urns, an urn of good and an urn of evil, and if Zeus gives a man only evil he totally destroys him; if, however, he sends him a mixture of good and evil, then he will have good luck and ill by turns. De Baur points out that the image of the two urns reappears in Plato: when speaking of good and evil in the Republic, Socrates discusses whether Zeus really has two urns at his door or only one, and he quotes the Iliad passage word for word. But he makes one slip: he does not say that the man who is totally destroyed receives his share only from the urn of evil; he says he receives it from only one urn. In other words, if Zeus does not give him a mixture of good and evil, if he draws from only one, either the urn of evil or the urn of good, then the recipient will suffer untold affliction all his days on this earth. That is philosophy's fulcrum for de Baur: unlike religion, philosophy rests on the equal status of good and evil; good without evil is as unsuited to mankind as evil without good.
15
I AM SLOW TO REACT. I neither rejoice when something wonderful comes my way nor despair when I meet a setback. It is not that I have self-control; it simply takes time for things to register. At first it is only an intellectual fact, and I can go on with my work or go home as usual or go to the movies as promised.
So I made my final run-through of the journal, checking the proofs and the mock-ups and entering page numbers in the table of contents. But my heart wasn't in it. Nor was I good company for Max at the pizzeria after the movie. I got away as soon as I could and went back to the book, reading with the same haste and lack of concentration that had plagued me earlier in the day. It was late, I was tired, I could barely keep my eyes open, but I had to get through the book even if I was missing half of it. I simply had to.
Once we have set aside such ancillary issues as premeditation, duplicity, and the gruesome nature of the act, murder amounts to ending a person's life without his will. Without, not against: outsmarting a person or breaking his will introduces ancillary issues of its duplicitous or gruesome nature. In its pure form murder is the ending of a person's life in his sleep.
A person loses his life. A person commits a mad, desperate, or courageous act which costs him his life. A murderer “steals” a person's life. We speak of it as if afterward the person were standing before us without his life—still standing, only without his life—as if he were rubbing his eyes in bewilderment over having mislaid it, as if he could make a fuss about having it stolen, as if he could mourn for it.
But the person is no more. He is not bewildered, he can make no fuss, nor can he mourn. He no longer suffers from what he suffered while alive: loneliness, illness, poverty, stup
idity. A person never suffers from his death: he does not suffer before his death, because he is alive, or after his death, because he is no more. By the same token, a person does not suffer from being murdered. Death and murder are the transition from a condition perfectly natural for a person to another condition equally natural for him. After all, what could be unnatural for him if he is no more? Predicates sans subjects are homeless and senseless.
We do not punish a murderer because he has ended a person's life without his will. There is nothing punishable in that. No, we punish the duplicitous, gruesome nature of the act, that is, the disappointment and pain he has caused the victim before his death. Then why do we punish murder when these ancillary issues do not obtain, that is, why do we punish murder in its pure state? Not for the victim's sake, no, but for the sake of the wife who has lost her husband, the husband his wife, the child his father, the friend his friend, that is, for the sake of all those who depended upon the victim and are now deprived of him, for the sake of the order of things, on which we all depend and which tells us that life and death have their natural times.
That is why suicide was regarded as a sin and attempted suicide as a punishable offense: it deprives these same people in nearly the same manner of the perpetrator. That is why murder was punished according to the value the victim's life had for others: the life of the son or daughter for the father, the life of the slave for the master. That is why the white man who killed a black man received a milder punishment than the black man who killed a white man: it was not that the perpetrator deserved greater mercy; it was that the victim had a lower value. That was why genocide could so often be committed with a clear conscience: it left no one behind to feel robbed of the victims. The prerequisites are the following: that the people in question be isolated, that it not be involved with other peoples in the ordering of a world, and that the methods employed be radical.
How many peoples, how many people go to make up a world? The way we cut up the worlds in which we live and the order we impose on them is our doing, not the murderer's. He does not commit the murder; we do.
16
I WOKE UP because Barbara was shaking my arm. She was sitting next to me on the couch, the book in her lap, staring at me in amazement. “This is evil.”
I looked at my watch. It was one thirty. “Where have you been?” I asked.
“After the rehearsal we went to the Sole d’Oro and had a bite. Then we tore the whole production apart and redid it from scratch.” She was still high from the evening with her amateur theater group, so alive and glowing that I couldn't get it into my head that she was mine. “You've never stayed up with a book so long that you fell asleep over it. What is it anyway?” She looked down at the pages she had just read.
I stood up. “How about some tea? Mint, peppermint, chamomile?” She nodded. I went into the kitchen, put the water on, poured the leaves into the strainer, and placed it in the teapot.
Barbara followed me in with the book in her hand. “Do you know him, this John de Baur?”
“I think he's my father. He changed his name from Debauer to de Baur when he got to America. Or somehow got a passport with that name before he left. He was good at that kind of thing: he got my mother a Swiss passport in Breslau from the gauleiter or the Reich security officials or for money. He called himself Vonlanden for a while and Scholler for a while. Before the war he wrote for the Nazis, after the war for the Communists. He's also the one who wrote the novel that brought us together.”
“Didn't your mother say your father was dead? Didn't she see him get killed?”
“She was wrong. Or she lied. It wouldn't be the first time.”
Barbara put her hand on my back. “Wow!”
The kettle began to whistle, and I poured the water into the teapot. Barbara gave me a questioning look. “When I was a little girl, I would dream of being a foundling and learning that my real parents were a king and queen or, later, famous movie stars or artists or millionaires. Did you ever have dreams like that about your father?”
“No, never. Maybe I should try.” Should I try to see de Baur as a king who will save me from a pitiable fate? My fate was far from pitiable.
She turned the book over. “Too bad there's no picture of him.”
“Read the testimonials. Apparently he's an important figure in America. Famous even.”
Barbara read one aloud. “I don't understand a word, but it sounds good, doesn't it?”
“Your first reaction was, ‘This is evil.’ ” I was annoyed by her interest in John de Baur and by how easily she had changed her mind about the book. I was even annoyed she had read out the testimonial.
“Yes, what I read of it was bad.” She poured herself some tea, added honey, and stirred. “Shall we take the tea into the bedroom?”
But once in bed I was unable to sleep. Barbara had snuggled up to me, her head on my shoulder, her right breast and arm on my chest, her right leg over my stomach. How many nights had I savored the weight of her body on and against mine, grounding me almost. But this time it bothered me: there was too much of it, it was too heavy, too close. Besides, there she was, sleeping away. Didn't she care about my state of mind? Couldn't she have kept me company until I fell asleep? I wished I had my own bed so I could be alone with my anger. I was not hurt by my father's having cleared off and taken no interest in me, not disappointed by a lie of a conceivably much greater magnitude than my mother's lies; I was not depressed. I was angry; I felt a frustrated, defiant anger that I could not turn against the people who had caused it. Taking a few days off, flying to New York, and accosting an elderly gentleman who had apparently found a way to forget his past, accosting him with my anger—ridiculous. Confronting my mother and squeezing a bit more of the truth out of her, though no more than she felt it absolutely necessary to reveal given what I now knew—a waste of time. Nor did I want to vent my anger on Barbara or let it poison our relationship or direct it against myself. But what should I do with it?
17
I HAD A HARD TIME sleeping the next few nights too. The anger of that first night was joined by hurt and disappointment and a tenacious aggressivity that would not be soothed. I did not believe that I would have been a happier child had I known that my father was alive but wanted to have nothing to do with me. Or that I would have been happier later on had I had the chance to decide whether to confront him. Or that I would have led my life any differently had I known about his activities—except that I would not have wasted so much time looking for the author of Karl's story. Or that I would have written to him or visited him or asked him about how the story ends. But that did nothing to appease my anger.
I took out books on deconstruction and deconstructionist legal theory from the university library. I learned that deconstruction is the separation of a text from what the author meant it to say and its transformation into what the reader makes of it; I learned that it went even further to reject the notion of reality in favor of the texts we write and read about reality. This does not tally well with the binding nature of legal and moral rules of civility. If one wanted to insist that the only possible model was the existentialist one, an article I read predicted that de Baur and deconstructionist legal theory would lead to a renaissance of existentialism. Perhaps I should have read up on existentialism as well, but I had had enough. As far as I could make out, if texts are not about what the author meant to say but what the reader makes of them, then the reader, not the author, is responsible for the text; if reality is not the world out there but the text we write and read about it, then the responsibility for murder falls on neither the real murderers nor their victims—they having lost their existence—but on their contemporaries who lodge the complaints and prosecute the plaintiffs. Exactly how to get from there via existentialism to a demand for the willingness to expose oneself to what one exposes others to I could not yet see. But if the others are probably going to die and one is relatively safe oneself, what was the point of it all?
He had
remained true to himself. With the playful levity I had found so enjoyable in the novel and so abominable in the letters to Beate and the war essays, he kept several balls in the air: reality and its representation, responsibility, and the roles of author and reader, of perpetrator and victim. I could imagine what the articles he wrote for Nacht-Express looked like: they would follow the line set forth by the Soviet major, yet in the de Baur style, now praising what was supposed to be reviled, now reviling what deserved to be praised, and occasionally transfiguring the power he was serving into an ethical principle. What was left? What was left at the end of his life and the end of The Odyssey of Law?
I did not like my father, and I did not like his theory: it freed him of all responsibility, the responsibility for what he had written and for what he had done. At the same time, I was fascinated by how he had made his way through life, getting involved in whatever came his way, then moving on, and in the end creating a theory to justify it all. Yes, his playful levity fascinated me, so much so that I found it hard to condemn it out of hand. After all, I had been only too happy to sit playfully, frivolously in the waiting room of history.
No, I did not like my father. But that did not diminish my aggressive feelings: I was not comforted by the idea that I had missed nothing by losing a father I did not like. That a person who had given no thought to me had thought of no one but himself made me feel even more aggressive.
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