Mother Night

38: Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life ...

About the raid —

About Resi Noth —

About how she died —

About how she died in my arms, there in the basement of the Reverend Lionel J. D. Jones, DJD.S., D.D. —

It was wholly unexpected.

Resi seemed so in favor of life, so right for life, that the possibility of her preferring death did not occur to me.

I was sufficiently a man of the world, or sufficiently unimaginative — take your choice — to think that a girl that young and pretty and clever would have an entertaining time of it, no matter where fate and politics shoved her next. And, as I pointed out to her, nothing worse than deportation was in store for her.

'Nothing worse than that?' she said.

'That's all,' I said. 'I doubt that you'll even have to pay for your passage back.'

'You're not sorry to see me go?' she said.

'Certainly, I'm sorry,' I said. 'But there's nothing I can do to keep you with me. Any minute now people are going to come in here and arrest you. You don't expect me to fight them, do you?'

'You won't fight them?' she said.

'Of course not,' I said. 'What chance would I have?'

'That matters?' she said.

'You mean — ' I said, 'why don't I die for love, like a knight in a Howard W. Campbell, Jr., play?'

'That's exactly what I mean,' she said. 'Why don't we die together, right here and now?'

I laughed. 'Resi, darling' I said, 'you have a full life ahead of you.'

'I have a full life behind me — ' she said, 'all in those few sweet hours with you.'

'That sounds like a line I might have written as a young man,' I said.

'It is a line you wrote as a young man,' she said.

'Foolish young man,' I said.

'I adore that young man,' she said.

'When was it you fell in love with him?' I said. 'As a child?'

'As a child — and then as a woman,' she said. 'When they gave me all the things you'd written, told me to study them, that's when I fell in love as a woman.'

'I'm sorry — I can't congratulate you on your literary tastes,' I said.

'You no longer believe that love is the only thing to live for?' she said.

'No,' I said.

'Then tell me what to live for — anything at all,' she said beseechingly. 'It doesn't have to be love. Anything at all' She gestured at objects around the shabby room, dramatizing exquisitely my own sense of the world's being a junk shop. 'I'll live for that chair, that picture, that furnace pipe, that couch, that crack in the wall! Tell me to live for it, and I will' she cried.

It was now me that her strengthless hands laid hold of. She closed her eyes, wept. 'It doesn't have to be love,' she whispered. 'Just tell me what it should be.'

'Resi — ' I said gently.

'Tell me!' she said, and strength came into her bands, did tender violence to my clothes.'

'I'm an old man — ' I said helplessly. It was a coward's lie. I am not an old man.

'All right, old man — tell me what to live for,' she said. 'Tell me what you live for, so I can live for it too — here or ten thousand kilometres from here, Tell me why you want to go on being alive, so I can go on wanting to be alive, too!'

And then the raiders broke in.

The forces of law and order plunged in through every door, waving guns, blowing whistles, shining dazzling lights where there was plenty of light already.

There was a small army of them, and they exclaimed over all the melodramatically evil goodies in the cellar. They exclaimed like children around a Christmas tree.

A dozen of them, all young, apple-cheeked and virtuous, surrounded Resi, Kraft-Potapov and me, took my Luger away from me, turned us into rag dolls as they ransacked us for other weapons.

More raiders came down the stairs prodding the Reverend Dr. Lionel J. D. Jones, the Black Fuehrer, and Father Keeley before them.

Dr. Jones stopped halfway down the stairs, confronted his tormentors. 'All I've done,' he said majestically, 'is do what you people should be doing.'

'What should we be doing?' said a G-man. He was obviously in command of the raid.

'Protecting the Republic,' said Jones. 'Why bother us? Everything we do is to make the country stronger! Join with us, and let's go after the people who are trying to make it weaker!'

'Who's that?' said the G-man.

'I have to tell you?' said Jones. 'Haven't you even found that out in the course of your work? The Jews! The Catholics! The Negroes! The Orientals! The Unitarians! The foreign-born, who don't have any understanding of democracy, who play right into the hands of the socialists, the communists, the anarchists, the anti-Christ and the Jews!'

'For your information,' said the G-man in cool triumph, 'I am a Jew.'

'That proves what I've just been saying!' said Jones.

'How's that?' said the G-man.

'The Jews have infiltrated everything!' said Jones, smiling the smile of a logician who could never be topped.

'You talk about the Catholics and the Negroes — ' said the G-man, 'and yet, here your two best friends are a Catholic and a Negro.'

'What's so mysterious about that?' said Jones.

'Don't you hate them?' said the G-man.

'Certainly not,' said Jones. 'We all believe the same basic thing.'

'What's that?' said the G-man.

'This once-proud country of ours is falling Into the hands of the wrong people,' said Jones. He nodded, and so did Father Keeley and the Black Fuehrer. 'And, before it gets back on the right track,' said Jones, 'some heads are going to roll.'

I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.

The boss G-man concluded wrongly that there were no teeth on the gears in the mind of Jones. 'You're completely crazy,' he said.

Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.

Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell — keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year.

The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.

The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information —

That was how a household as contradictory as one composed of Jones, Father Keeley, Vice-Bundesfuebrer Krapptauer, and the Black Fuehrer could exist in relative harmony —

That was how my father-in-law could contain in one mind an indifference toward slave women and love for a blue vase —

That was how Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, could alternate over the loudspeakers of Auschwitz great music and calls for corpse-carriers —

That was how Nazi Germany could sense no important differences between civilization and hydrophobia —

That is the closest I can come to explaining the legions, the nations of lunatics I've seen in my time. And for me to attempt such a mechanical explanation is perhaps a reflection of the father whose son I was. Am. When I pause to think about it, which is rarely, I am, after all, the son of an engineer.

Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself — will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows, some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history —

But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, 'This fact I can do without.'

Howard W. Campbell, Jr., praises himself There's life in the old boy yet! And, where there's life —

There is life.