Youth Without God

by Odon Von Horvath

  “I’m so glad I’ve run into you,” I said. “I’ve got several things we can talk over.”

  “By all means, sir.”

  He nodded politely.

  “There’s not enough quiet out here in the street—can I invite you to have an ice with me somewhere?”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  We took our places in a café, where my companion ordered a lemon and strawberry ice. Even as he was eating it, the smile seemed to remain on his face. And suddenly I began.

  “I wanted to have a word with you over the trial.”

  Unperturbed, he dug his spoon into his ice-cream.

  “D’you like it?” I murmured.

  “Yes.”

  We paused.

  “Tell me,” I went on, “do you think it was the girl who murdered N?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So you don’t think that another boy could have done it?”

  “No. She only invented that to wriggle out of it.”

  And we paused again—until he put down his spoon for a moment and looked up at me doubtfully.

  “What do you really want of me, sir?”

  I spoke slowly, into those round eyes.

  “I thought you might have an idea as to who the boy was.”

  “Me? Why?”

  I risked it.

  “Because I know that you’re always spying,” I said.

  “Yes,” he replied quietly. “I have observed—various things.”

  He smiled again. Had he known all along about the box?

  “Have you read the diary?” I asked.

  He met my eyes.

  “No. But I watched you, sir, when you slipped out of the camp and eavesdropped on Z and the girl.”

  I felt very cold under his stare.

  “You touched my face. I was standing behind you. You were terribly frightened, but I wasn’t at all.”

  He took up his spoon again.

  And suddenly it occurred to me that he wasn’t relishing my confusion. From time to time he threw me a thoughtful glance, as if he wanted to learn something from me.

  Curious—I thought of a hunter watching with infinite patience, and then, when certain of his mark, pulling the trigger. A hunter who found no thrill in his sport.

  But why should T turn hunter?

  “Were you on good terms with N?” I asked.

  “Yes. Very good terms.”

  How dearly I should have liked to ask him why he had struck N and killed him!

  “You’re speaking to me, sir,” he told me suddenly, “as if I were the other boy—as if I’d killed N. Although you’re aware that no one knows what the other boy looks like—if he exists at all. Even the girl can only say he had eyes like a fish—and I haven’t. They’re more like the eyes of a doe, my mother and everybody says so. Why do you smile, sir? I should say that rather than me, it’s you who’ve got eyes like a fish—”

  “Me?”

  “Don’t you know, then, sir, the nickname you’ve got in school? Haven’t you ever heard it? It’s ‘the fish.’ ”

  He nodded as he smiled.

  “Yes, really, sir—because you always have such an expressionless face. One never knows what you’re thinking—or whether you really trouble about anyone. We always say the teacher just looks on, a man could be run over in the street, and he’d just watch him lying there and he wouldn’t do a thing, even if the other fellow were dying—”

  He came to a sudden stop, as if he’d said too much, and for a fraction of a second there was fear in his eyes as he glanced at me.

  Why fear?

  Ah, you almost had the hook in your mouth, but you didn’t bite, for you saw the line, and you swam down into your depths again. But if you aren’t hooked, you’ve given yourself away and I’ll catch you yet …

  He got up.

  “I must go home now, sir, my lunch will be waiting. If I’m late, I’ll get into a row.”

  With a word of thanks for the ice, he left me. I watched him out of sight, and could hear the girl crying.

  31. A FLAG DAY

  ON WAKING NEXT MORNING, I SEEMED TO emerge from a mist of amorphous and forgotten dreams.

  The Greatest Plebeian’s birthday meant a holiday today, and the town was decked out with flags and streamers. Through the streets marched the young girls who had searched for the lost airman, the boys who would have left the negroes to die, and their parents, who believed the lies inscribed upon their banners. Even the sceptical joined in the march and kept time with the rest—spineless divisions under an idiot’s command. As they marched, they sang—of a bird fluttering upon a hero’s grave, of a soldier suffocating in the fumes of poison gas, of brown girls and black girls who lived on filth, of an enemy that only existed in their minds. With their songs, the liars and the debased celebrated the day on which the Great Plebeian had been born.

  From my window too, a flag was waving. I noticed it with a certain gratification: I had hung it out the night before. For if you are ruled by the lawless and the debased you had better adopt their methods or they might flay you alive. You must drape your home with flags—even if you’ve a home no longer. When submissiveness is the solitary trait in the human character that those who rule will tolerate, truth flies away and lies creep in—the lies that engender sin. But don’t wait—hang out the flags. Better bread than death.

  But had I forgotten that my own position in the high school had been suspended? I committed no perjury, I told them the truth about the box. I could hang out my flags, grovel in the dust before that filth and tell what lies I liked—it wouldn’t alter the fact that my bread was lost!

  Don’t forget, I whispered to myself, that you’ve come to know a higher authority than those who reign out there. Your house, your room, isn’t quite the one you’ve known. It’s part of another dwelling now and within it the very furniture has changed.

  Look out of the window, see how far beneath you that procession looks now, how diminished. And those rich plebeians—how poor they look! And those flags, how faded and bedraggled. The message inscribed on those banners is too far away for you to read, the radio drones too faintly, and Eve’s lightest sob can quell it. But her sobs have died, too, into hushed tears …

  Her tears were all I heard.

  32. ONE OF THE FIVE

  I WAS JUST CLEANING MY TEETH WHEN MY landlady knocked.

  “There’s one of the high school boys outside,” she said. “He’d like to see you.”

  “Just a moment.”

  She left me. I put on my dressing-gown. It had been a Christmas present from my parents.

  “You can’t live without a dressing-gown,” they said—so they’d given me this one: green and mauve, for they’ve no taste.

  There was a knock at the door. Which of the boys could it be? T?

  “Come in,” I said.

  He entered with a little bow. I didn’t recognize him for a second. It was B. Of the five B’s in my form, this was the one I had noticed least. What did he want with me? How was it that he wasn’t out there, marching with the others?

  “Sir,” he began, “I’ve been wondering for a long time whether it was worth telling you or not—and now I’ve decided to.”

  “Yes?”

  “The mystery over the compass—I’ve had no peace of mind—”

  “The compass?”

  “Yes, sir. I read in the papers that by the side of N they found a compass, and nobody knows who it belongs to.”

  “Well—?”

  “I know who lost it, sir.”

  “Who?”

  “T.”

  T swimming up out of his depths once more? Showing his head above the dark surface—?

  “How do you happen to know this compass belonged to him?” I asked my young visitor, trying to put on a show of indifference.

  “He was looking for it everywhere—we had the same tent, sir.”

  In the silence that followed, he averted his eyes. Then:

  “Do you believe that T co
uld have done it?” I said.

  He stared at me; then:

  “I’d believe anything of anybody, sir.”

  “But not murder?”

  “Why not?”

  And he smiled. But not with scorn: with sadness.

  “But why should T have killed N? Where’s the motive?”

  “T was always saying that N was a fool.”

  “Well, there’s not much ground there—”

  “No, sir. But you know T is horribly inquisitive, he always wants to know—how things really are—and he told me once, he would like to see someone die.”

  “What!”

  “Yes, he would like to see the reality of it. And he’s always imagining what birth would be like: he’s said he would like to see a child coming into the world.”

  Speechless for the moment, I went over to the window. The children and their parents were still marching by—and it struck me suddenly—why was B here?

  “Why aren’t you out marching with the others?” I asked him. “It’s your duty.”

  “I said I didn’t feel well.” He grinned.

  An understanding glance passed between us.

  “I won’t give you away,” I reassured him.

  “I know!”

  How much do you know of me? I thought.

  “I don’t want to do any more marching, and I can’t stand being ordered about—with fellows yelling at you just because they’re a year or two older. And those eternal speeches, the same trashy rubbish that we’re sick and tired of.”

  I had to smile.

  “It’s to be hoped that you’re the only boy in the form that thinks so.”

  “Oh, no, there’s four of us already.”

  Already?

  “Do you remember, sir, when you said that about the niggers—last Easter term, before the camp? We all signed that letter that we didn’t want you to teach us any more. But I only did it under compulsion—of course you were right about the negroes! And one by one, I got hold of three others who thought so too.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I can’t tell you, sir. Our rules won’t let me.”

  “Your rules?”

  “Yes, sir. We’ve founded a club. We’ve got two more now, but they’re not schoolboys. One’s a baker’s apprentice and the other’s an errand boy.”

  “A club?”

  “We meet once a week and read everything that’s forbidden.”

  “Aha!”

  What was it that Julius Caesar had said? “They read everything in secret, but only to pour their scorn on it. Scorn is their ideal. Cold times are coming.”

  I put it to B.

  “And so you sit there in your club pouring your scorn on everything, I suppose?”

  “Oh, no! Scorn is absolutely forbidden—that’s in rule three. There are some, I know, who’ve only got contempt for everything—T’s like that, for one, but we haven’t. We meet and talk over everything we’ve read.”

  “What then?”

  “Then we go on to discuss how things should be in the world.”

  I pricked up my ears. How things should be! I heard Z’s words again, to the President: “Our teacher is always telling us how things should be in the world and never how they really are!”

  With my mind’s eye, I saw T’s face too. What had Eve said? “N fell down. The other boy bent over him and watched him. Then he dragged him into the ditch.”

  And what had B said just now? “T always wanted to know how things really are.” Why did he want to know? So that he could make everything the object of his contempt? Yes, cold times were coming.

  B was speaking again.

  “One can tell you everything, sir. That’s why I came along to you, to tell you of my suspicions, to talk it over with you and consider what we ought to do.”

  “Why did you come to me?”

  “In the club, yesterday, when we read about your confession and the broken box—we all said you were the only grown-up person we knew who had any love for the truth.”

  33. THE CLUB STEPS IN

  TO-DAY I WENT ALONG TO THE MAGISTRATE with B. Yesterday, his office was naturally closed on account of the festivities.

  I informed him that quite possibly B knew to whom the compass belonged. But he waved my explanation politely aside and told me that the question of the compass had now been settled. It had been established beyond all doubt that the instrument had been stolen from the mayor of the little town which lay near the camp. Presumably the girl had dropped it, or if not the girl, then at any rate one of the boys of her gang—and perhaps on an earlier occasion when he was passing the same spot; for the crime had taken place close to their home, the caves. The compass was out of it now.

  B did not conceal his disappointment as we left.

  But was the compass really out of it? Hadn’t it proved the reason for B’s visit to my rooms yesterday?

  Perhaps I had changed my way of thinking: I was waiting for connecting links now. For the slightest thing could play its part; and I was aware of strange forces at work …

  On the steps of the building, we bumped into the defending counsel. He greeted me warmly.

  “I wanted to write and thank you,” he told me. “It was only your fearless and unselfish statement that made it possible for me to clear up this tragic affair.”

  He informed me in a word or two that Z had been completely cured of his infatuation, and that the girl was suffering from attacks of hysteria, and was now lying in the prison hospital. “Poor devil,” he muttered as he hurried off, perhaps to clear up more tragedies. As I watched him disappear round the corner, I heard B’s voice:

  “I’m sorry for that girl.”

  “I too,” I answered.

  We went down onto the street.

  “We ought to see what we can do,” he went on.

  “Yes.”

  I was thinking of her eyes—and of those still pools in the little woods of my homeland. Still the clouds passed over the prison hospital where she lay—the silver-hemmed clouds. I tried to remember whether or not she had nodded to me, in the court-room, before she came out with the truth. But T had said she was only trying to lie her way out.

  I hated T.

  I stopped short suddenly.

  “Tell me, B—is it true that I’ve got a nickname in my form—‘the fish?’ ”

  “Why, no! That’s what T said. You’ve got a different one altogether.”

  “What is it?”

  “We call you ‘the Nigger.’ ”

  We laughed.

  We had reached the pavement now.

  “Sir,” said B, grave once again. “Don’t you think it could have been T, even if the compass didn’t belong to him?”

  What should I answer to that? What ought I to answer—“Perhaps”? “Possibly”? “Under the circumstances”—?

  “Yes,” I said. “I think he’s the culprit.”

  B’s eyes lit up.

  “He was! And we’ll catch him!”

  “Let us hope so.”

  “I’ll put a motion through in the club, that we’ve got to help that girl. Paragraph seven says we don’t just meet to read books, but to live by them.”

  “What’s your motto?”

  “Justice—and truth.”

  He was quite worked up. The club would keep track of T’s every movement, day and night, and report to me daily.

  “Fine,” I said, though with an involuntary smile. We used to play Indians too, when I was a boy. Our happy hunting-ground was an imaginary one.

  But to-day it is real.

  34. TWO LETTERS

  NEXT MORNING I RECEIVED A VERY UPSETTING letter from my people. They were beside themselves with grief because I’d lost my job. Hadn’t I given them a thought when I’d made that entirely unnecessary confession about the box? Why on earth did I have to make it?

  But I hadn’t forgotten them: and I knew we needn’t worry; we shouldn’t starve.

  “We couldn’t sleep the whole night,” my
mother wrote, “for thinking of you.”

  And my father—“What have we done to deserve this?”

  My father is a retired foreman, and he has his pension.

  I thought of God: He still might not dwell with them, although they went to church every Sunday.

  I sat down to answer their letter.

  “My dear parents,” I began, “You mustn’t worry, God will see us through …”

  But for some reason or another, I couldn’t go on. They knew I had never believed in God. “Things are going against him now,” they’d think, “so he remembers Him again.” I didn’t want anyone to think that. It would shame me. I tore up my letter, for I was proud still. During the rest of the day, I was determined to write to my parents, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get beyond the first line or two, and write down the word “God.”

  When evening came, I felt sudden fears of my room again. It was so empty. I went out, with the vague intention of going to the cinema, but instead I found myself in the little bar—with Julius Caesar, its figure-head. He beamed when he saw me.

  “Wonderful of you to speak up about that affair of the broken lock. I’d never have done it. The most admirable thing for ages.”

  We talked about the trial over a drink. He was all ears when I told him about the fish.

  “Of course it must be T,” he agreed. He smiled. “If I can be of any use to you in catching him, I am at your service, for I too, my friend—I too have my connections—”

  Our little talk was interrupted from time to time, for others would come up to Julius Caesar, with the same object as myself. They valued his advice, for they knew him for a wise and understanding fellow. He was hail-fellow-well-met with them all.

  Despair seized me. What were we all but weeds?

  Avi, Caesar, morituri te salutamus.

  I felt a sudden yearning for the decadence I saw at my side. How I’d like to have worn an illuminated death’s head in my tie!

  “Be careful—you’ve dropped a letter out of your pocket,” said my friend.