No Doors, No Windows

Nine: The Children’s Hour

Don’t say it didn’t happen. Of course, it happened! Don’t you ever learn? I was there when it happened. It was a thing of quiet terror, and in its own way, beautiful. How can you ignore the fact that it happened!

The United Nations building stands on the edge of the East River. It is an incredibly thin, wondrous structure all glass and fine stonework. Beside it is a smaller structure, the General Assembly building. If you were to look down from a window in one of the offices of a building on, say, East 45th Street, the top of the General Assembly building might look to you like a fat man with goggles in a bathtub. The dome and stacks do it very nicely.

But the Secretariat Building, that nearly unbroken face of windows that reflects back the Manhattan skyline on clear days, is nothing humorous.

In it, the work of the world is done. In it, the plans and dreams and frustrations of billions of men and women are studied and catalogued and interoffice memoed. I work in that building.

For the record — and there will be a record, I’m certain — my name is Wallace Edmondson. I am an interpreter. I speak three languages in addition to English: Italian, French and German, all three flawlessly, idiomatically. My job with the UN has been a simple one, nothing romantic, nothing full of intrigue and disaster. I have never been outside the United States, and so my curiosity about the rest of the world has gone untended, save for information culled from periodicals and the people around me.

Unfortunately, I was present at the greatest disaster that ever befell the human race. I’ll tell you about it; there is truth in what I say; and perhaps truth will help.

God knows — nothing else will now.

The General Assembly that day — it was a Tuesday, the 3rd of June, 1995 — was a madhouse. The agenda was up to its title page in trouble. We had ten different, imperative conflicts on our hands, and any one of them could have been the one to start the big war. The big war that would make World War II seem like a street fight.

We had been drunkenly teetering on the razor-edge for years. June 25th, 1950 had been the starting date, as well as anyone could remember. That was the day the Republic of Korea was overrun by 60,000 North Korean troops spearheaded by 100 Russian-built tanks. It lasted till 1953 and no one really won. We didn’t know it till 1954, but the first hydrogen device explosion had taken place at the AEC Eniwetok proving grounds. In August of 1953 the USSR detonated theirs. Dien Bien Phu and its French garrison fell to Ho Chi Minh’s army in May of 1954. And it all began to accelerate. 1956: the Polish revolution in Poznan; Egypt seized the Suez Canal; the Hungarian uprising; Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula. Not even the establishment of our UN international police force in November to supervise the Middle East truce could slow the rush toward war.

1957: racial violence in Arkansas; 1958: Arab nationalist rebels seized the Iraqi government and killed Faisal; 1959: the civil war in Cuba came to a bloody end and Castro assumed power; 1960: the U-2 reconnaissance plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers was shot down in the USSR; 1961: the terrible Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by American CIA-subsidized rebels ended in slaughter; East Germany built the Wall across Berlin; Dag Hammarskjöld, our beloved Secretary-General, our best hope for peace, was assassinated in a rigged air crash; nuclear blasts of 25 and over 50 megatons were set off by the USSR; 1962: the Cuban missile crisis, and war was narrowly averted; by the end of 1963: 15,000 US troops in Viet Nam and the war was on; John Kennedy was assassinated; 1964: civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi; the Communist Chinese exploded their first atomic bomb; 1965: civil rights violence in American cities culminating in Watts riots in Los Angeles; minority white regime took power in Rhodesia; Dominican Republic revolution; 1966: Charles Whitman sniping from a Texas tower killed 14; Nkruma overthrown in Ghana as the African continent began to seethe; 1967: brush wars in sixteen separate locations; my wife and daughter were killed in an auto accident; the 6-day Israeli-Arab war; Johnson and Kosygin met to try to avert further saber-rattling; 1968: Pueblo seized; further white-black violence in America; Martin Luther King assassinated; French students rioted and civil violence reigned for a month; Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations invaded and crushed Czechoslovakia.

Between 1969 and 1975, a mere six years, the noose was drawn tighter and tighter: two million lives were lost in the Nigerian civil war as millions more starved to death in Biafra; the Manson murders set the tone of the times; civil war in East and West Pakistan; Brazil systematically proceeded with the slaughter of their native Indians; India invaded Pakistan; the religious war began in Northern Ireland; Watergate set the tone of the times; Black September terrorists machine-gunned Olympic athletes in Munich; upheavals and political murders in Afghanistan, Greece, the People’s Republic of China and nine emerging African nations; the fourth and biggest Arab-Israeli war in 25 years; violence escalated in Japan, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, the Spanish premier was assassinated in Madrid, Israel and Egypt poised on both sides of the Canal, Iran and Iraq clashed, rebellion in Portugal, slaughter in Turkey, Argentina, Northern Ireland, Ethiopia, Cyprus …

And on and on. Tuesday, June 3rd, 1995.

It all broke loose at once. The people’s Republic of China invaded Japan. The United States sent atomic subs to within miles of the Russian seaport of Murmansk and shelled coast defenses. The Israelis moved back into positions they had recently vacated in the Sinai and did not stop. Six nations declared war on Israel.

It was as if a platoon of giants had suddenly gone mad. And as if … if it was going to be war, then all the little countries, all the secondary powers … they wanted their shares.

Everyone attacked everyone else. Suddenly, the world was one vast battlefield, from pole to pole. From South Africa to Tanzania, from Somalia to Ghana, the African continent was aflame with black and white tearing out each other’s throats. Russia, even while massing its defenses in the north, moved on Finland in the west. Argentina invaded Chile.

Who could doubt: it was the apocalypse.

Madness prevailed. Men who had formerly been cool and logical now screamed for the death and destruction of the men and states that would kill them if given the chance.

It was more than panic that ruled the UN that day: it was a sense of impending terror and death that would overrun the world like nothing since the hordes of Genghis Khan. Every man there was stark of face; every face there held threats and warnings and accusations and most of alt — fear.

The Secretary General — a Latvian named Rezekne — used his gavel, and the session was brought to order. I won’t trouble with the affairs that were taken up during the first two hours, except to note that the Russian delegation made a surprise move and did not walk out when the Ethiopian representative made his appeal for justice and peace for his land. What happened during those first two hours does not matter any longer.

I was translating M. Louperc’s harangue against the German Triumvirate, a few minutes into the third hour of the session, when we all heard a great sound from the hall outside the chamber. I was not alone in hearing it; heads began to turn in the delegations as the sound grew louder. M. Louperc stopped speaking, and turned to the men beside him for some explanation. I saw Montgomery of England spread his hands in confusion. I took off my earphones, and stood up so I could see through the window of my booth more clearly, and just then the huge doors at the rear of the chamber flew open, and they came in, by the hundreds.

I might have expected anything.

Striking workers, or invading Martians or conquering armies, any of them might have seemed apropos. But not what came through that door.

Children.

Of all sizes and colors, clad in every conceivable style of ethnic dress, all different, but none older than ten or twelve, as best I could tell; and the only thing they shared beyond their presence in that hall was their solemnity. There was not one smile, one laugh, no jostling or childish games as they flooded into the General Assembly chamber. Some time I will ponder at length on how they got together. There were obviously Berber children and French schoolgirls and fur-clothed children from Lapland and little mutation Russian cossacks from the Steppes in that great herd. How they got together, perhaps no one will ever know; how they got to the UN buildings, perhaps no one will ever know.

But there they were, and they were jammed into the aisles with their faces quite clean, and their eyes quite bright, and their little hands quite still.

They were quietly terrible. For these were not the children we had known; there was no singing among them, and no whispering, and no giggling between even the closest friends, and no shying of eyes and no shuffling of feet.

They stood very, very still, and they looked at the Secretary General.

Then one of them came forward. It is fitting that I tell this story; I knew the child who came forward. My name is Wallace Edmondson, and the child was mine. My son, Barry. Ten years old; who had been reading comic books the night before, and — yes, now that I thought of it — looking at his toybox full of guns and war weapons with a strange light in his eyes. My son, Barry, who now walked forward and mounted the steps to the speaker’s platform.

I could not speak. I could only watch, as all the others watched, as this one child from among so many went to the front of the chamber and climbed those stairs.

When he was behind the speaker’s podium and had taken down the microphone and had moved aside — for the podium quite blocked him off from sight — he began to speak.

This is what he said … and I interpreted into German, as my colleagues interpreted into other languages.

“We want you to stop fighting. We are scared, and we have waited and waited, but no one will do anything. If you knew how you scare us all the time with your fighting, you wouldn’t do it. But you do, and we are here to tell you, if you don’t stop right now, right away, we are leaving.”

That was all Barry said.

He put down the microphone, and he left the platform, and the children began to mill around as he descended. Then he joined them and, as a unit, they left the General Assembly chamber.

In a few minutes, they were gone, as quickly as they had come.

What happened next was pandemonium. A pandemonium of laughter. The Russian delegation began, and in a few moments it had spread till the entire room was a bonfire of mirth. The Russians begged to speak and when their representative rose he said this was a poor, shabby trick for the Americans to pull, and that it changed no one’s mind, except that perhaps the Yankees were greater fools than the world had thought.

The US representative accused the Russians.

The Chinese accused the British.

The French accused the Germans.

Bedlam was the order of the day.

And the next day …

And the next …

But on the fourth day, there was no bedlam, because the wars in Europe, Africa and Asia simultaneously escalated. They didn’t last long, however. On the same day, wherever anyone might have been … whether in a bathtub, or on a desert, or in a jungle, or on a mountain-top, they heard the sounds.

The sound that came from everywhere, and nowhere and no place all at the same time. The sound that might have been monstrous ships of space, though no one ever saw them, or saw fire trails in the sky, or anything else. The sound that might have been space tearing and shifting and warping to allow passage.

The sound might have been anything.

Though no one cares too much to find out; no one has been able to think straight since it happened.

On that day, they left.

Where, we do not know. How, we do not know. But they made good their warning. We played the Pied Piper, and we played the wrong tune.

Our children have gone.

It has been a long, long time, and I have not seen my son. It was inevitable that there would be no more sons … or daughters … no children born; that seems to fit, ironically.

We have no children, and we miss them, but we haven’t too much time to worry about it now. After all, there is a war on.