Remembrance Day

by Brian Aldiss

  Unruffled, stroking Ursula’s thigh, Vasili said, ‘Oh, God Above you mean? I do believe in Comrade Lenin, and Lenin has charge of God Above.’

  ‘Wait,’ squeaked Dominic, terrified at his own courage in disagreeing with this eloquent giant. ‘That can’t be right. Surely Comrade God – I mean—’

  Vasili swept away the objection with a dismissive hand. ‘It has recently been scientifically proved in laboratories in Sverdlovsk-Petrovsk that Comrade Lenin thought about considerably more things than God Above; for instance, the rise of the proletariat. Whereas God Above in the main concerns himself throughout eternity with moral problems which by now are obsolete anyway. As the Kirghiz admirably put it, “Eternity is a hell of a long time.” Why else are we waging this war? Say if my lamb’s annoying you … But to continue with the main thread of my discourse, how many of those seven special times, those key times, have you already wasted in your short life?’

  When no answer came from the boy, Vasili continued in his same calm, remorseless way, raising his voice only to counteract the terrible roar of the train, so closely resembling the sound of planes taking off from Heathrow. ‘Your silence tells me that you have no awareness and no feeling for destiny. Our great Comrade Lenin had charge of destiny. He went aboard a train much like this one in order to deliver the Russian nation from its decadent capitalist Tsarist fetters. You will observe how easily victory fell into his hands. That was because Lenin had seized one of those seven vital times, those key times – recognized it and seized it, as I in a lesser way seized upon this tremendous Ursula here when I came upon her –’

  ‘And raped her …’

  ‘– And raped her repeatedly. Women on the whole dislike the act of rape, it being a violation of their bodies, particularly if it happens regularly. Ursula, however, has a very special attitude towards her body and, I must add, towards the bodies of men, regarding any embrace as a mystic union fore-ordained which, if accepted in the right spirit – and by that I don’t mean with old-fashioned prayer, such as neither she nor I believe in, nor even in the spirit of any ideology, not even Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism – but rather in the sort of mystical purgative spirit such as was understood in the Ancient World, long long ago – You understand my meaning, boy?’

  ‘Not entirely, no. You mean she liked what you did to her?’ Dominic glanced anxiously at Ursula as he made reference to her, but she remained immobile as ever inside her furs, not speaking, not moving, regarding him much as she might have regarded, say, her next meal.

  ‘Ah, now there you touch on an entirely different matter. Suppose I take up this rifle –’ Dominic had long been uncomfortably aware of the weapon Vasili now hefted in his leathery hands – ‘and proceed to blow your brains out with it, with a single bullet – no, let’s for vividness of argument say with a whole stream of bullets – then we would not say you enjoyed the experience, or could enjoy it, but you might nevertheless, if imbued with the spirit – thank you, meine liebchen …’

  Ursula had suddenly roused, selected two black cigarettes from a silver cigarette case, lit them, and passed one to Vasili, which he stuffed into his mouth with the hand not balancing the rifle, while scarcely interrupting his discourse.

  ‘… accept the metal into your person, which is to say your cranium, with a calm and positive spirit, embracing, so to say, the experience, turning negative force to positive.’

  ‘As in the Ancient World?’

  ‘Long long ago, boy, before men and women were ever thought of … Now how could I demonstrate the truth – the revealed truth – the positive force – of all this to such an ignorant unborn lad as yourself? Possibly the best way would be for Ursula to exhibit to you her sexual quarters, which are of a formation and beauty unrivalled, capturing entirely the great spirit of which I speak. No queen, not even Queen Cleopatra, who ruled over the lands of the Nile in ancient times, could boast such exquisite sexual quarters. Ursula, meine liebchen, show this young boy here your sexual quarters.’

  The woman rose languidly from the bench, blinking her violet eyes against the smoke from the cigarette gripped between her lips. Balancing herself against the jolting of the train, she hitched her skirt still higher to reveal an absence of knickers. Dominic stared at her sexual quarters as if hypnotized; though bereft of speech, he felt inclined to agree that here was something monumental.

  ‘There’s amplitude,’ said Vasili, admiringly, and indeed Ursula appeared to the boy’s untutored eye to be generously endowed, not least with a curly mat of brunette hair, entangled like honeysuckle between the pale portals of her upper thighs.

  ‘Aryan,’ said Vasili, winking and giving one of the curls a tug. ‘Pure Aryan. It gives you a new respect for Adolf Hitler.’

  In order to demonstrate her delights more fully, Ursula, wreathing her head and shoulders in a fresh puff of smoke, opened her legs slightly. An index finger went down into the brunette curls. She hooked the finger into her nether mouth. Dominic was privileged to glimpse the pink satin lining thereof, though he could not avoid a notion that the lip involved was wrinkled in a sneer at his lack of manliness.

  He gasped and leaned back in his seat. ‘It is a beauty, miss,’ he said, addressing Ursula for the first time while colouring slightly. ‘It reminds me a bit of Mum’s old tom cat.’ She continued to regard him, skirts still hitched, smoke pouring from her nostrils as if she was afire with sexuality. ‘I hope I can find one like that somewhere when I grow up. It is a real beauty.’

  ‘But who are you to judge, young man?’ asked Vasili, his voice growing slower and deeper. ‘Judgement is evidently beyond you. You have asked me enough questions. It’s my turn to ask you a few.’

  Ursula smoothed down her skirts and resumed her seat, staring out of the train window as if she had lost all interest in the proceedings now that her part in them was over.

  Leaning forward, Vasili grasped Dominic’s shoulder to steady him for the questions. ‘Do you see yourself, in your relationship with Fenella, as a man walking alone down a street or as a splendid horseman, a Kirghiz, let’s say, amongst whom I spent many memorable years, galloping over the steppe?’

  ‘Well, put in those terms … It’s hard to say …’

  ‘Come, boy, no shilly-shallying. You’ll grow up one day and have to face Fenella, realize that. It’s fated in the cards, as Kirghiz women say. Which is it, street or steppe?’

  ‘I’m no horseman.’ He felt oppressed by the authority of this huge man, feeling instinctively that he would never grow up to be as formidable, or to recognize when they turned up those key times of which Vasili spoke. He would be the sort of fellow even lambs piss on. Looking miserably out of the window, he was not surprised to see that the little black figure of his mother was still there in the Polish field, disappearing, disappearing, for ever disappearing.

  ‘I’d probably buy myself out of trouble.’

  Vasili laughed and made rasping noises down his cheek. ‘As I thought. Just as I thought. You’re your mother’s boy, or will be. You’ve no fight in you. Now, mark well what I’m going to say.’ He grasped Dimitri by the throat, the better to secure his attention.

  ‘Follow my example. Be ruthless. Never mind if you get shot in the end, like me. Defy circumstance. Seven times, seven key times.’ He shook the unborn boy seven times.

  ‘This is one of those key times. You have to kick Fenella off the train, Dimitri, that’s what you have to do … Are you OK?’

  A terrible knocking sounded in Dominic’s right ear. At first he imagined that the monstrous clock was falling on him. He struggled to get free. When he looked out of the window, there was only a small anxious face staring in at him, rapping on the glass. ‘Are you OK?’ it asked again. ‘Are you OK?’

  The advice came once more, chilly now with distance: ‘You have to kick Fenella off the train, Dimitri.’

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. His mouth was dry. He pressed a button and the car window slid down, allowing a gust of cool damp air to his cheek
s.

  ‘Are you OK, mate?’ A small man in a porter’s uniform stood against the car, looking in with an expression of concern: a normal English careworn face with no additional extras in the way of features. He jerked his head in the direction of the bulk of the hospital behind them. ‘I was coming off duty like. I saw you slumped over the wheel like … A lot of people get took bad after they’ve been visiting.’

  ‘Thanks, I’m fine,’ Dominic said. ‘Thanks very much. Just a nap like. It’s time I got home.’

  He had always lived on the brink of terror, in fear of the things he was forced to remember and those he was unable to remember. The imagery of the speeding train, of Vasili with his gross desires, and of his mother-to-be lost in the snows of a foreign field – these were in part no more than embodiments of a submerged something greater than all of them, of which his translation across Europe had been an enactment. The great predatory train sped along a line of betrayal operative before his birth.

  Sitting alone in his offices in Shreding Green, Dominic understood why he had been afraid to confide in Clement Winter. That submerged thing could not be allowed to see the light of day: it was a hatred of life itself, with all its inevitable betrayals.

  This was why he had buffered his abridged week of consultation with a narrative which involved – no, not his own toils – the toils of his mother’s drama before he had been born or conceived in a Dresden garret. His motives? Yes, self-protection certainly, to guard against some ultimate dissolution of self of which that submerged thing was a vital component. But also because his emotional life seemed to begin and end with a simple and terrible story of a defenceless woman being cast out into a foreign field.

  That incident held a living meaning for Dominic. It foreshadowed what, years later, Lena had done to him. He had been left by her as callously as she by Vasili. Dumped on the wife of the man she was running away with.

  He turned over these old coins of his existence, still not defaced by constant circulation.

  The wonder was that he – well, not unlike Lena – had been spared. For the woman his mother had betrayed, Daphne Mayer, had proved a good woman: even in a Biblical sense a Good Woman. In her dwelt a legendary disinterested goodness. She had not acted out on that small deserted boy the anger and misery she must have felt.

  It had been a kind of miracle. He owed everything to Daphne Mayer.

  Now here he sat, contemplating leaving Fenella and his son. That was the next instalment of the narrative. He was about to act out the very essence of the drama of which he had fallen a victim: the compulsion to do so was strong enough to override any ethical scruple. And no less strong because it had as much to do with the past as with Fenella’s difficult nature. The past never died, even the past he had not lived.

  To his labouring thoughts came a memory of what he had read concerning child abusers. No crime was more despicable than a sexual crime against a child. Yet who were these profane people? Why, those who had been themselves abused in childhood. People under compulsion.

  The undertow of his reflections brought him back to the psychodrama he had endured in the hospital carpark. It was a mistake to humiliate Lucy Traill by throwing money at her. Or had his real motive been to pay her off, so that the temptation to break free of his sterile marriage would be lessened? To leave Fenella would be to humiliate her further. He could wrestle with the submerged thing in himself: it was familiar, his familiar. But Fenella – she had locked her incubus away inside her, had no communication with it. One day that fury would erupt. As cancer?

  Shying away from the thought, he said to himself: But what ails her is a mental cancer. I hoped to assuage it. Perhaps I can yet. Or perhaps I can’t. Either way, what do I matter? What if the future’s as bleak as that Polish field … I can throw myself away without regret, yah.

  Someone had to be by Fenella’s side to help her. If not for her sake, for Malcolm’s. He was that one, self-chosen. He had married her.

  This was one of those key times of which the phantom Vasili spoke. He had to struggle against his natural compulsion to escape. He must not throw her from the train of marriage.

  Oh, he believed in divorce. But not for those filled with self-hatred. He could forgive himself only if he stayed with her.

  This decision was reached slowly. By agonized catechism. Throughout a sleepless night.

  Next morning, he phoned Daphne. At the weekend he drove to see her.

  The Islington house was still the same. The front door was still the same. He recognized some of the scuffs on its paintwork, where children had kicked the door impatiently to get home to warmth and tea.

  But the street had changed. A comfortable little corner shop had gone, making way for an office block. The large houses on the other side of the street, facing the terrace where the Mayers lived, had been turned into some sort of council flats. As Dominic parked, he saw a nurse come out of one of the flats and walk briskly down the street in the direction of the Angel Underground station.

  Soon he was in No. 11, and his arms were round his adoptive mother. He always kept in touch with Daphne, had written to her occasionally, phoned her occasionally, given her and the children lunch in a restaurant occasionally, but it was almost three years since he had seen her. He had become too fascinated by the game of making money.

  ‘I look an awful mess, Dom. Come and see what I’m doing.’

  She was redecorating the bedroom where her two sons, Bill and Reggie, had slept. They were gone now. She explained that she hoped to rent out the room to a lodger.

  ‘Do you need to take in a lodger, Ma?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, you know how I like looking after people …’ She laughed. ‘I’ll get someone nice. They’ll be company.’

  It gave him pleasure to recognize a Daphne Mayer response when he heard one. The real answer to his question was everywhere about him. Since he was last here, the house had grown smaller, dingier, and darker. At least there was objective reason for the increased dark. Daphne had to have an electric light burning in the kitchen; the new office block cast its shadow over the whole terrace.

  Daphne was a plump, comfortable woman. Like her body, her face seemed based on the curve; she had round cheeks, a plum for a mouth, and a button nose. Perhaps she had never been beautiful, but it was a face he delighted to look upon again. She was now in her fifties, but – as he told her – still strong and as active as ever. Although she laughed at the remark without contradicting, he saw when they sat down together on the kitchen sofa with mugs of tea that she was tired. She still taught German at the local school. She also worked part-time in the local doctors’ clinic.

  Forgetting his own troubles, he gradually uncovered hers. She placed no blame on the authorities, but the fact remained that teachers’ pay had not kept pace with rising inflation. She was a good deal worse off than she had been. Eric had ceased to send her money. She had no idea where he was, or if he was still with Lena.

  Both Bill and Reggie had had problems finding work. Bill went from job to job, indifferently taking whatever came; he was hoping to get married – if he got a better job, ‘if things improved’.

  ‘He told me it would be better under this new government, but it’s worse.’

  Reggie had soon given up the struggle to work. He was now living – well, she was not sure where. Last she had heard of him, he was living in a squat in St Albans with some sort of pop group. Relating this, Daphne kept her gaze fixed on the carpet on which Dominic had once played on his hands and knees.

  He could read her mind: she believed that Reggie had needed a man in the house to steer him through his early years.

  ‘How’s Crystal?’

  Oh, Crystal was fine. She had the same job as before and the company was doing well. She earned quite good wages. No, she had no boyfriend at the moment – the last one had been a bit of a flop. Crystal worried about her firm’s legality, fearing she might end up in court. The company sold armaments on the international market. Its relationshi
p with the Foreign Office was rather dodgy. But the Department of Trade and Industry continued to give out licences. Crystal suspected the directors of handing out bribes. What Crystal and Daphne, loyal citizens both, found it hard to believe was that apparently the government was quietly breaking its own arms embargo and permitting firms like Crystal’s to sell to countries in the Middle East.

  Daphne was a scrupulous person, going into this complex matter of her daughter’s firm in some detail until Dominic grew bored. He made a fair percentage of his money from Israel and the Arab states, and believed in selling them anything they were foolish enough to purchase.

  She perceived his restlessness and talked of other things. ‘Do you remember when we took a trip to Yarmouth, just you and me?’

  ‘Of course, Ma.’ They beamed at each other. ‘I painted a picture. I’ve still got it.’

  She laughed. ‘You ought to have kept up your painting. You could have been an artist. Crystal is quite artistic. Oh, I love Yarmouth – all those miles of lovely sand. And the Pleasure Beach. I suppose that’s still there.’

  ‘I had a ride on a donkey.’

  ‘Best fish and chips in England. I’m sick of London, tell you the truth, Dom. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in Yarmouth? Retire there? See the sea every day.’

  ‘You’d never look at it if you lived there.’

  ‘You were such a good kid. Have a little boarding house on the front. All painted white. Easier to keep things clean there …’ She roared with laughter at the thought.

  ‘No more German.’

  ‘No more marking grubby exercise books. A dog perhaps. I always liked those little – what are they called?’

  ‘Rottweilers?’

  ‘No, you chump. Jack Russells. Cheeky little dogs. You know.’

  Crystal came home. She was the child among the Mayer offspring who most resembled her mother, with her pretty round face and sparkling eyes. Once, she had teased the life out of Dominic. Nowadays they were on a different footing. She was twenty-three and attractive to him. On impulse, he invited her and her mother out for a curry at a nearby Indian restaurant.