Making History

MAKING MOVES

Leo captures a pawn

I sat there for a bit, at the kitchen table, feeling seriously cheesed.

I fade from Hollywood screenplay format to dull old, straight old prose because that’s how it felt. That’s how it always feels in the end.

I said it before and I’ll say it again: books are dead, plays are dead, poems are dead: there’s only movies. Music is still okay, because music is soundtrack. Ten, fifteen years ago, every arts student wanted to be a novelist or a playwright. I’d be amazed if you could find a single one now with such a dead-end ambition. They all want to make movies. All wanna make movies. Not write movies. You don’t write movies. You make movies. But movies are hard to live up to.

When you walk along the street, you’re in a movie; when you have a row, you’re in a movie; when you make love, you’re in a movie. When you skim stones over the water, buy a newspaper, park your car, line up in a McDonald’s, stand on a rooftop looking down, meet a friend, joke in the pub, wake suddenly in the night or fall asleep dead drunk, you’re in a movie.

But when you are alone, dead alone, without props or co-stars, then you’re on the cutting-room floor. Or, worse, you’re in a novel; you’re on stage, stuck inside a monologue; you’re trapped in a poem. You are CUT.

Movies are action. In movies things happen. You are what you do. What’s inside your head means nothing until you act. Gesture, expression, action. You don’t think. You act. You react. To things. Events. You make things happen. You make your history and your future. You cut the wires that defuse the bomb, you lay out the villain, you save the community, you throw your badge into the dirt and walk away, you fold your arms around the girl and slowly fade to black. You never have to think. Your eyes might dart from the alien monster to the fizzing power cables as a plan comes to you, but you never have to think.

The perfect stage hero is Hamlet. The perfect film hero is Lassie.

Your history — ‘back story’ they call it in Hollywood — only counts insofar as it informs the present, the now, the Action of the movie of your life. And that’s how we all live today. In scenes. God is not the Author of the Universe, he is the screenwriter of your Bio-pic.

Lines you always hear in movies:

Don’t talk about it, just do it.

I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

Gentlemen, we have a situation here.

I don’t have time for a conversation.

Move it, mister.

Lines you always read in novels:

I wondered what he meant.

He knew in his heart it was wrong.

She loved, above all, the way his hair stuck up when he became agitated or excited.

Nothing made sense any more.

So there I sat, in a state, in a novel, in a kitchen, rhythmically tugging at my hair and staring with dead eyes at the dead note. No action possible, only contemplation.

This time I mean it.

I had planned — that was the joke — I had planned to tell Jane all about everything that very morning. No, not tell her all about everything. I would avoid mention of her little pill. The thing would be dressed up as an experiment, something that Leo and I were doing as it were in vitro. An investigation of time and historical possibility. A project undertaken for fun and scholarship. This would explain my unusual sleeping patterns, my abstraction, my air of barely suppressed excitement, my spaced-outness, without hinting at danger or recklessness.

The weird thing was that Jane had not once, over the past week or so, asked me what I had been up to. She had not stood, arms folded, at the kitchen door, tapping her slippered foot on the floor with a what-time-of-the-night-do-you-call-ffo-then kind of an air. She had not stared me down with a fearsome ‘Well?’ nor breathed heavily out through her nostrils nor, in pretending to ignore me, had she hummed jauntily to annoy as lovers often will.

Nothing. Just a faint, sighing distraction, a sad distance.

And now she was gone. For good. Or ill.

Maybe, I thought, maybe destiny was clearing the decks for me. Emptying my present life of connections so that I could embark on the new life that Leo and I were preparing to create.

It was insane of course. I knew that. It couldn’t possibly work. You can’t change the past. You can’t redesign the present. Hell, you probably can’t even redesign the future. Hitler was born, you can’t make him unborn. Crazy. But what a test of my knowledge. I — who knew more than anyone about Passau and Brunau and Linz and Spital and all the other tedious details of little Adolf s squalid upbringing — was being tested on that knowledge like no one ever had been before. The historian as God. I know so much about you, Mr So-Called Hitler, that I can stop you from being born. For all your clever-clever speeches, and swanky uniforms, and torchlight parades, and death-dealing Panzers, and murdering ovens, and high and mighty airs. For all that, you are entirely at the mercy of a graduate student who has boned up on your early life. Eat it, big boy.

For Leo, of course, it was a mission with meaning. The real truth of that mission, the blinding shock of it, came out two days after Jane left me.

I had tried to find her, naturally. As before I had gone to her laboratory in search of reconciliation. I would dance a charming, silly dance and Jane would pat and patronise me and all would be well. Ish.

Red-haired Donald was there. The grotesque lump of his Adam’s apple bounced up and down in his white neck as he gulped his embarrassment.

‘Jane has…er…sort of, you know…gone off.’

‘Eggs go off. Pints of milk go off. Bombs go off. What are you talking about?’

‘Princeton. A research grant. She didn’t tell you about it then?’

‘Princeton?’

‘New Jersey.’

Great. Fucking A.

‘No phone number, I don’t suppose?’

Donald lifted his bony shoulders a couple of times.

I looked at him with loathing. ‘What’s with that? Semaphore for her dialling code?’

He pushed back his spectacles with a thumb. ‘She particularly asked…’

I started towards him. His eyes widened in fear and he flung up a hand. But I knew the type. Can’t get me on that. Thin, weedy, brainy, knobbly, weak. They are the ones to look out for. The mulish obstinacy of the weak is harder to break than the determination of the strong.

‘Bollocks!’ I shouted into his face. ‘Tell her, bollocks. If she asks after me, tell her I said bollocks.’

He nodded, the cold ivory of his anaemic cheeks patched with highlights of mucky orange pink.

I put my hand to a row of neatly labelled test-tubes.

He croaked in alarm.

Then everything in me slowed. I saw the blue veins on Donald’s throat twitch and his mouth fall wetly open. I felt the muscles in my arm gather for a huge push that would send the test-tubes flying across the laboratory floor. I heard the blood in my ears roar as it was sent surging to my brain by the tornado of anger in my chest.

I pulled my arm suddenly back as if I had been burned. On each test-tube a blue meniscus swayed with faint relief and Donald’s dry throat swallowed with a rasping gulp.

Maybe I was a cunt on the inside, but not on the outside. Just couldn’t do it.

I walked from the room whistling.

§

Leo affected a complete lack of surprise.

‘She’ll write you,’ he said. ‘You can bet on it.’

He was concentrating on his remote chess, tugging at his beard and frowning at the position laid out on the table in front of him. Just a couple of kings and rooks and a pair of pawns.

‘Same game?’ I asked, plucking at the horsehair leaking from the arm of my chair.

‘It comes to a crisis. Endgame. The chamber music of chess it is called. In my hands, more like the chamber pot of chess. I find it so hard to make the right moves.’

Stick to physics, I thought to myself, eyeing his self-satisfied giggle with disgust, and leave the jokes to others.

‘Who’s the guy you’re playing?’ I asked.

‘Kathleen Evans, her name is.’

‘She a physicist too?’

‘Sure. Without her work I could never have built Tim.’

‘She knows about Tim?’

‘No. But I think maybe she is working on something similar with her colleagues at Princeton.’

‘Princeton?’

‘The Institute of Advanced Studies. Not connected to the University.’

‘Still. All the same. Princeton. I hate the fucking place.’

‘Einstein went to Princeton. Many other refugees too.’

‘Jane is not a refugee,’ I said coldly. ‘She’s a deserter.’

‘You know Hitler made a great mistake there,’ Leo said, ignoring me. ‘Berlin University and the Gottingen Institute contained most of the men who invented modern physics and a large number of them fled to America. Germany could have had an atom bomb in 1939. Earlier maybe.’

I rose impatiently and scanned the books again. ‘What’s with Jews and science anyway?’ I said.

‘Half the scientists here today are Asian. Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, Korean. Something to do with being an alien maybe. No cultural roots, no place in society. Numbers are universal.’

‘This Princeton babe you’re playing chess with, this Kathleen Evans. She’s not an alien by the sound of it.’

‘She is British, so in America, yes, she is an alien.’

‘Another deserter.’

Leo did not dignify this with a response.

‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘You should at least be able to crush her at chess.’

‘How so?’

‘You Jews are brilliant at chess. Everyone knows that. Fischer, Kasparov, those guys.’

‘You Jews? Leo looked up from the board in surprise.

‘You know what I mean. You Jewish people, if you prefer.’

‘Ah,’ he said softly. ‘You haven’t understood have you? It’s my fault of course.’ He rose from his chair and came up to me in front of the bookcase and placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘Michael,’ he said. ‘I am not a Jew. Not Jewish.’

I stared at him. ‘But, you said — ’

‘I never said I was a Jew, Michael. When did I ever say I was a Jew?’

‘Your father. Auschwitz! You said…’

‘I know what I said, Michael. Certainly my father was at Auschwitz. He was in the SS. That is what I live with.’