Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  On the road to Beirut, she sat in the back, the two men in the front. Yizhar said to them, ‘I have to repeat that this is dangerous country, although we are in a non-military vehicle. Even though we’re staying in the Christian zone, it’s still dangerous.’ He was not in uniform, but on the floor were his machine gun and a military radio from which static and scratchy voices spoke occasionally on the network in Hebrew. From time to time, Yizhar would lean down, take up the radio and speak.

  They passed tanks and all sorts of military vehicles going north – water tankers, petrol tankers, canvas-covered troop trucks, tanks on low-loaders – and refugees crowded on any moving vehicle, going south.

  She had seen all this before, at least twice in her life – Spain and France – the artillery and tanks on trains crossing Europe in the night, draped in tarpaulins with leather-capped barrels. She had seen the bright faces of young troops leaving and waving on troop trains; she had seen silent, sullen, exhausted faces on their return. And refugees fleeing, bicycles and hand-carts.

  She drifted in and out of the present. When she was in Beirut before the war, her clothes, she remembered, had been the most stylish of her life.

  She looked at Ian, who seemed to be enlivened by the chaos surrounding them, as they drove their space capsule through it all, leaning out the window to take photographs. Silly photographs that would be miniature images without the dust, without the smell, without the sweat, without any flavour.

  He leaned down and picked up Yizhar’s machine gun, a new-looking Uzi.

  Yizhar said, ‘I hope you know something about guns, if you’re going to play about with it.’

  Ian said he’d had cadet training. ‘Isn’t the Uzi being phased out?’ he asked, showing his warrior credentials.

  She too had an urge to hold the machine gun, and asked if she could see it. Ian glanced at Yizhar, who nodded, and Ian handed it gingerly back to her.

  Something so lethal yet with a balanced and compact aesthetic. And, yes, shapely.

  Yizhar said that the Uzi was still used by rear-echelon troops and officers as a personal weapon – ‘and artillery and tanker drivers; personnel like that’.

  She let the men be the know-alls. She recalled herself lecturing the pacifists at the time of the World Disarmament Conference in 1932. ‘To those of you women here today, I say that we must not surrender these deliberations to those who say that military matters are men’s matters. Pacifists – which I know many of you are – have to learn about machine guns and grenades and artillery, and not turn away in moral disgust.’ When democracy or the world was shaky or in danger of collapse, good people had to take up arms, learn the skills of defence. Non-violent resistance would not have worked against the Nazis or any immoral authoritarian state. With them, it was submission or resistance, leading to death of oneself or of many others who did not wish it. One hoped that the submission was temporary and would be relieved by some dramatic change of circumstance.

  Of all human ingenuity and design, it was the design of weapons that was the most transfixing and horror-filled, and yet, still, a highly intricate product of intelligence.

  ‘Just don’t touch the trigger, Edith,’ Ian said.

  The two men went on talking guns.

  Her pistol had come from a strange admirer, an eccentric American showman who wanted to support the League and had come to Geneva with a troupe of showgirls to ‘promote’ the League; she had joined his procession – a naive mistake – but still, back then she had thought it a rather splendid advertising idea for the League. Très modern. Ambrose had taught her to shoot the pistol. After a time, there had been an armoury in the Palais des Nations at the League for the concierges and guards. She sometimes did some target-shooting there in the basement.

  ‘Of all the weapons, the machine gun is most full of evil intent,’ she said, firmly handing back the machine gun. ‘But with a shapely beauty.’

  They didn’t comment; too much was happening outside.

  There was no beauty to the A-bomb, even in its geometry. Scraper, now dead, would have something to say about its geometry and its relation to the universe. She could not yet see the will or the machinery in the IAEA or elsewhere that could stop some final mad destructive use of these weapons, and the partial destruction of the planet. There had for a long time been a dream that one day the weapons would be so powerful that no one would dare use them, and they would bring about a permanent stalemate – perfect deterrence.

  Had the second half of her life – devoted to the peaceful use of uranium – been yet another lost cause? Was the world too hard to manage sensibly? Did it always move on towards its own destruction? Were we the one species that wished to become extinct? Were we destined for extinction as part of the order of things? Or were the destructive ones always ultimately successfully contested and defied by those who were driven by impulses of enhancement, progressive amendment? Was there a balance of deterrence here? Was the evolutionary direction of all species towards survival?

  Armaments were the ultimate instrument of distrust; that was the wisdom inherent in armaments. And, Gandhi aside, armed rebellion by citizens was sometimes the only answer to tyranny.

  On they drove through Sidon, past the refugees with scarves and bundled possessions, who were piled like baggage on their carts and cars and utilities. Some were sitting in the open luggage compartments of cars. ‘When I was here before the war, I never travelled down to the south. We went to the mountains.’

  Some lines from Othello came to her mind:

  Soft you; a word or two before you go.

  I have done the state some service, and they know’t.

  My allegiance, she thought, has always been to the republic of the mind, not to a country or the state.

  She blocked the rain of memories and returned to the present. Was she beginning to live in the past, as it was said of the old? Was much of her knowledge and experience now out-of-date? She had fought against this happening.

  Something caught Yizhar’s attention and his face tightened. He pulled the car over and stopped, leaving the engine running, and said to Ian, ‘You’d better drive, I’ll ride shotgun for a while. Remember, no matter what happens, keep driving. There are no traffic police here, no rules. If we hit anything or if anyone tries to wave us down, just keep driving.’

  He got out and came around to take Ian’s passenger seat as Ian slid across.

  She looked out the window but could not see what had caught Yizhar’s attention.

  Of course, she should have made her life with Ambrose. She had been disloyal to him and to her values of open free-love. She had witnessed great events and participated in great events. She had met and talked with fascinating people who had made history, but the thing that the outsider could not see was how she had bungled her inner life. Only Ambrose would see that. She wished he would have been more insistent that she go back with him to London. But he must have known that nothing would have changed her mind. Her mind had been locked by passion. Passion promised everything but assured nothing. She had done her self-recrimination, though. That was over now. She would silently lament without recrimination. Perhaps she could join up with him again. There was a good possibility of a position at the IAEA – Sigvard would find her something. Ambrose and she could live in Vienna. They both liked Vienna. You did not have to be born in Vienna to be Viennese; you were Viennese if you simply lived there.

  She recalled another line from Othello, and said aloud or in her head, she was unsure – there was now a good deal of noise coming from the disorder around the car – ‘One that loved not wisely but too well.’ She had loved not too wisely, nor too well. But she had tried with all her might.

  Yizhar raised the Uzi from his lap and clicked off the safety catch. Ian slowed, but she couldn’t see what the problem was.

  ‘Keep driving,’ Yizhar said, forcefully but in a cool voice. ‘Whatever happens, don’t stop. Speed up.’

  Ian accelerated.

  She heard the p
ock-pock of shooting not far off – she knew it was shooting – but she couldn’t see who was shooting. Or at whom.

  Ian said with a controlled voice, ‘We’re hit.’

  She heard a thud behind her, turned and saw a starburst crack in the back windscreen, then felt and heard the thud of another bullet entering the upholstery of the seat beside her. She looked down at the torn seat. The pock-pock of more gunfire. She felt she was falling backwards in time. She saw a handsome Ambrose in a silk dressing-gown, leather slippers, a cravat, sitting on a sofa in their rooms at the Hotel Canberra, a brandy glass in hand. He was smiling. He was about to tell her a secret.

  Her heart stopped.

  EPILOGUE

  Soft you; a word or two before you go.

  I have done the state some service, and they know’t.

  No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,

  When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

  Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,

  Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak

  Of one that loved not wisely but too well.

  William Shakespeare, Othello, Act 5, Scene 2

  POSTSCRIPT

  EDITH AND AMBROSE: THE RETURN TO AUSTRALIA – THE UNTOLD STORY

  Ambrose was in Australia not only as Edith’s husband, perhaps not because of her at all, but as a placement by the British SIS.

  Between 1945 and 1948 there was a serious situation in the Australian Department of External Affairs, which was both a cause of concern in the UK and the US and a significant breakthrough in their intelligence-gathering. The Soviet Union’s code system had been broken because of sloppy procedures in the USSR’s Canberra embassy, which in turn had revealed that the USSR had established a spy network in Australia using members of the Australian Communist Party.

  Because of these leaks, the British SIS helped to establish ASIO in Australia in 1949 under the Chifley Labor government.

  It seems that the Communist Party had five members working in the Department of External Affairs who had been recruited to spy for the Soviet Union. They gave their information to a key Party official, Wally Clayton, who then gave the documents to a Soviet intelligence officer in the Canberra embassy, Semën Ivanovich Makarov. The leaked documents concerned secret American and English postwar foreign-policy planning, to which the Australian government was privy.

  Ambrose had supplied material for British intelligence during the League period before the Second World War. After the war, the SIS asked the British Foreign Office to place Ambrose in Canberra at the High Commission to gain additional access to communist spy activities there.

  Fortunately for the SIS, Edith had already formed a desire to return to Australia to find work there, preferably in the Department of External Affairs. This did not come about.

  Ambrose’s work in this area was limited – described as SIS’s ‘ear to the ground’ – but it was something of a serendipitous coup when two members of the Party, Frederick and Janice, turned up in Edith’s life. Although not much of value was imparted, either informally or unintentionally, through this relationship, it was encouraged and condoned by the SIS and the High Commission.

  Little of this context could be revealed to Edith by Ambrose at the time, and nor did it really need to be revealed.

  By the time Ambrose was recalled, Western security services had sealed off the leaks to the USSR embassy and the CPA membership was dwindling, as was its influence in the trade- union movement and its financial strength, which came mainly from the USSR. The Party was also infiltrated by ASIO.

  No Australian members of the Communist Party were charged with espionage after the Petrov Royal Commission, either because of insufficient evidence or because legal action would have required the revelation of how they had been detected, and hence would have revealed to the Soviet Union that their codes had been breached.

  Ambrose had, quite early in their relationship, established that neither Janice nor Frederick were involved in the spying and that they had no knowledge of it. Edith thought he had enjoyed their company because they were outcasts and he himself was another sort of secret, covert, inner outcast.

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  These notes, and the Who Is Who in the Book that follows them, were compiled by the author from standard sources or other sources that the author considered reliable.

  THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

  The League of Nations (1920–1946) was the world’s first effort at permanent, organised, worldwide international cooperation to prevent war and promote human wellbeing. Its headquarters were in Geneva and from 1936 housed in the Palais des Nations, the first building built and owned by the world.

  THE BRITISH SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE

  The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) is responsible for supplying the British government with foreign intelligence. Together with the internal security service (MI5), the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS), it operates under the formal direction of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). It is frequently referred to by the name MI6, first used during World War II. The existence of MI6 was not officially acknowledged until 1994.

  THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

  On 10 December 1948, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to which Australia is an original signatory.

  Australia has also ratified the mechanisms that give individuals the right to complain to United Nations bodies about violations of their rights.

  GROUPERS AND THE SPLIT

  In 1945, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) set up Industrial Groups within the trade union movement to oppose communists in union elections. Around the same time ‘The Movement’, a largely Catholic, secret, anti-communist organisation led by Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria, came to dominate many of these Industrial Groups and built up increasing influence within the Labor Party itself.

  Between 1954 and 1957, supporters of The Movement were expelled from the ALP, which led to the formation of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP). This left the ALP in a weakened position electorally and it was out of government for twenty-three years after the defeat of the Chifley Government in 1949.

  BLOOMSBURY

  Historically, the London district of Bloomsbury is associated with the arts, education, economics, feminism, pacifism and social theory through the Bloomsbury group, a collective of friends and relatives who lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury and who met there in private homes through the early twentieth century. It was also influentially active in the early days of the BBC.

  The Bloomsbury group opposed repressive practices of sexual inequality, and attempted to establish a social order based upon liberation from conventions and prevailing morality.

  Several of its members had more than one sexual relationship simultaneously and practised experimental parenting and education theories.

  Among its best known members were Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Desmond MacCarthy, and Mary (Molly) MacCarthy.

  They were a bohemian elite who were advocates of much social change. Most of them lived well but led unconventional lives.

  FIRESTONE

  Shortly after her death, Edith’s major investment in Firestone Tyres became next to worthless because of a massive blunder with their faulty radial tyre 500, which caused at least thirty deaths and many other car accident injuries. Four million tyres had to be recalled. Firestone was heavily fined and its reputation seriously damaged, however it did eventually recover.

  RATIONALISM AND HUMANISM

  Edith and her mentor John Latham were both members of the Rationalists’ Association of Australia, which grew out of the parent organisation in the UK formed at the end of the nineteenth century.

  Rationalist Associations were formed in Melbourne in 1906, in Brisbane in 1909, Sydney in 19
12, and Perth and Adelaide in 1918. Rationalists stated their position as the adoption of ‘those mental attitudes which unreservedly accept the supremacy of reason’ and aimed at establishing ‘a system of philosophy and ethics verifiable by experience and independent of all arbitrary assumptions or authority’. They saw religion as their main opponent.

  There were no doctrinal tests for membership and members included Julian Huxley, Somerset Maugham, Bertrand Russell, Arnold Bennett, Georges Clemenceau, Clarence Darrow, Sigmund Freud, J. B. S. Haldane, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Albert Einstein, Professor L. Susan Stebbing, Havelock Ellis and Professor V. Gordon Childe.

  The British Rationalist Press Association was responsible for the creation of the Thinker’s Library, a series of 140 books published between 1929 and 1951.

  In the 1960s, the association dwindled and many of its members moved to the Humanist Society, which continued to espouse many of its values and causes.

  NUCLEAR TESTS IN AUSTRALIA

  Between 1952 and 1963, Britain conducted twelve atomic weapons tests and numerous nuclear weapons trials in Australia, which spread plutonium and other radioactive material over the test sites, particularly the Maralinga range in South Australia.

  During the trials, many of the participants and, inadvertently, local Indigenous people were exposed to radioactivity.

  In the 1990s, as a result of the McClelland Royal Commission, the Australian government received $45 million from the British to rehabilitate the sites, and paid $13.5 million in reparations to the Indigenous people affected by the tests.