Trust: A Novel Part 38

Me: What cla.s.s?

Enoch: The one you were born into. Your husband's.

Me: It would take pretty powerful missionary ways to bring me back to William's ways!

Enoch: The opposite of powerful. Helpless. Illiterate. Ignorant in toto. There's your missionary, mewling in its box.

-He meant the baby, which was so funny and absurd that I had to laugh, but Nick didn't. I don't see how a baby can influence you in anything-you control it, not the other way around, after all. The reason I put in about "William's ways" for you to see is that I want you to understand positively that I don't mind about the blue dots. I know you think it's a disgrace to be divorced, just because n.o.body else in our families ever was before; but I don't mind, I wish my mother had sent blue dots to my father, instead of those horrible suspicious half-crazy letters she nearly sent. I'd rather be an Incompatible Adulteress than dead in Scarsdale, with gladioli on the window-sills and no guru in the mattress. And in spite of what Enoch says, it's not on account of the baby I'm going home, it's because I'm sick of this place, and it's so cold, and Nick's gone, and the baby's a nuisance without a nurse for it. I'm sure I can find a nurse-girl in London (they call them Nanny like in Peter Pan) when you start sending the money. I hope you start sending it very soon. It was awful having the baby, but really it's even worse taking care of it. I thought you would send the money after it was born, that's why I wrote you about it; but in a way there were two births in this cottage, you know?-one the baby, and the other Adam Gruen horn, which is an alias Enoch thought up in the summer once when he was here and reading Adam Smith. (Nick made fun of him for that, but Enoch said Adam Smith was in effect the Karl Marx of the Mercantile Era. I don't know what that means, maybe you do.) The Gruenhorn part is sort of silly-nice, it comes from a little green horn-a cut-off bit of branch all covered over with moss-that sticks out from the tree's belly. Nick used to hang the garland of red poison-berries on the green horn whenever we didn't want Enoch to come in, and sometimes when he was just fresh doWn from London and saw it there he went right off and stayed with an old lady down the road who had a spare room, and never came round till the next afternoon. He was really very good about it, even once when he had to keep away three whole days in a row because the red berries were on the green horn all that time. "Enters the intruder," he said, "because you let your garland down." And everyone laughed, it was so theatrical to hear Enoch trying to do a pun. He has no sense of humor, except in certain unexpected cases. For instance, right now, you see, it's not Enoch who's in jail, it's only Adam Gruenhorn. That has all kinds of metaphysical implications concerning Ident.i.ty. It's what Enoch calls an Ontological Question. I mean if you're not able to pretend you're someone else, then what are you? Sometimes I like to pretend I'm married, really married, and then I begin to feel splendid, as though I owned someone beside just myself. Freedom isn't when you own just yourself, it's when you own somebody else. Enoch and I were discussing that, just before he left here to go to jail-he had an appointment with them, they were very nice and gave him two entire days on his honor before he had to go back to get incarcerated. He said anyway he was just as free inside a prison as out of it, because he didn't have any human relations.h.i.+p that counted one way or the other.

Me: That's the first unpolitical thing you've ever said.

Enoch: Not at all. Freedom is the most political subject there is.

Me: But you weren't talking about political freedom. You were talking about freedom in human relations.h.i.+ps. That's what you said.

Enoch: Oh, in human relations.h.i.+ps by definition there is no freedom.

-I don't know whether I agree with that or not, because marriage is a human relations.h.i.+p, isn't it?-and I think if I were married, I mean to Nick, I'd feel free. I wouldn't have to go do anything, I'd just sit still and be happy, and now I have to move around and go to London and then America and pretend it's on account of War Clouds I'm doing all that, when it's not at all, I don't care about war or no war, I hate patriotism exactly the way you hate Roosevelt, because it deprives you of personal self-interest and possibilities you can make up for yourself. I think about being married practically all the time. I mean married to Nick. That time I went to Cape Ann with you I thought it would be a certain way, full of eternity and freedom and Sacred Beauty and a very, very delicate sort of owning. I thought it would turn out like that no matter whom I married, it would come just from being married. Like the Doctrine of Grace the way your mother once read it from a sermon in a book she had. Also I believed everything felt should be stated. That's why I took along the Sh.e.l.ley-to state it. But I was dry all the time. I was just dry, so I threw Sh.e.l.ley in the water and watched him drink, but still I was dry in myself, and I never felt Grace till. Nick, and without being married, so it proves you don't need to be married to feel it. But still I wish I were: not because I'm a nail and want to nail him into my side. But it would be a Statement, do you see? Oh, I want to be married to him! All day long and all night through I think how it would be, Greek if he wants it Greek, Pagan if he wants it Pagan, Socialist if he'll let me, and free, free, free, the baby in a little cart of its own being pulled up a hillside all furred with daisies and susans and marigolds and smoky-headed dandelions, though I suppose after a while it would grow up, and start running around on its own. The question is what am I to do all the time it's growing up? I can't just sit and watch it, I'm not the type to carry off loneliness by naming it motherliness, I don't know what to do. That's why I'm coming home, to think out what to do, and where he's gone. He's gone, he's gone, I don't know where, Sicily he was thinking of. If I came to talk it out with you it could be fixed up for a legal thing, couldn't it, finding Nick? I could say he ought to marry me on account of the baby, I could say it didn't matter before, but now it really does, wherever he's gone, maybe Italy, maybe not. I thought you could know how to find him, you could send him a warrant or whatever they use, you could call it Desertion or whatever they call it, you could call it Abandonment. I'm abandoned, I'm deserted, it's a desert here, n.o.body here, n.o.body, just myself abandoned. It sounds terrible to say that word, like people who live in the slums, but what's legal is legal for all cla.s.ses, and it can't be legal for Nick to go off to Italy when there's a baby left behind, can it? There must be something in International Law that you would know about, something strict and stern about paternity and infants, I know in law there aren't lovers, so let it be fathers and daughters, whichever way you want to do it: the trick you did when you fixed up Incompatibility instead of Adultery, fix it up fathers and daughters instead of lovers, which ever way you want to do it. Only help. You have to help, you can't help helping, it's part of the trust that you have to help, isn't it? I asked Enoch if he'd watch the baby for me, the tiniest sort of vigil while I went to Italy to look myself, to look for Nick wherever he is, but Enoch thinks whatever can be done you'll know how to do best, because of the trust. It means he doesn't like the baby, but after all he's right, he doesn't think you'll mind-I told him I don't believe you have very bad thoughts about me, at least not the way I have terrible and evil thoughts about Nick. About Nick I have terrible and evil thoughts. I want to put a nail in him till he bleeds. Into his eyes: even that, even there. The trouble with a person who has impressive and extraordinary eyes is that they never look distracted-they're all eye, and all aye and yes yes yes, and all Now This Minute, and later on you find out it's nothing but a sickening fraud on you and they were plotting an Afterward that disgorges you. Plain average eyes can't dissemble like that, they're too naked, if they leave you out you know it right away, a smudge of color and a lid and a look and that's it, no horrible deadly polish on them like the sun if the sun were blue all around and inside itself and throwing the blue of itself on itself. What I'm saying is he didn't betray a waver and he didn't waver when he betrayed, he just walked off right in the center of happiness and took it with him. Afterward when it was nearly night and I had your blue dots and there was nothing but a tin of tuna fish and pabulum I felt blind, it was like all at once turning blind. He took away his eyes and I couldn't see. That's the truth, even though it's only a metaphor. And now the first thing is I have to go to London and stay in Enoch's room-he owes me a hideout he says, but oh it's a haven I need, and such a tiny room it is-I stayed there once with Nick. The baby's box would take half of it. That's because it's a greengrocer's box; a chemist's box Enoch thinks would be more compact, in certain ways he's very practical, so I'll get one. I put the address at the top of this letter, in case you finally decide to answer-don't forget to put c/o Adam Gruenhorn, not Enoch Vand. It feels so queer here right this minute, I can't explain. I don't really mind packing and unpacking, so long as it's done thoroughly, all moved in or all moved out, everything settled and nothing by halves: it's what I pack that kills. For instance, a print I got in Moscow of this fantastic old basilica with domes like onions that's a museum now, I just put it fiat at the bottom of a suitcase and stared straight down at it, which sort of turned it into a photograph, with that archaic look even recent photographs get pretty soon. There weren't any people in the print but I saw people, all by thinking it was really a snapshot-Nick and Enoch and Hugh and d.i.c.kie" Sparrs and me bundled together trying to keep warm in the plaza in front of this gigantic oniony church on the day we had that awful quarrel-I wrote you about it, Enoch saying we hadn't any loyalty and were damaging the Movement by going off, and Nick arguing he'd be more useful as a contact in different places, and Enoch answering that was Hugh's job, because Hugh's a linguist-it was almost autumn, and all our breaths were standing still in the air in front of us. I remember that because the moment I was actually in the middle of that incident, with everybody's voices all mixed together full of meanness, and foreign fiat-nosed Tartar faces going by giving us mean and hostile looks, it felt like a snapshot. I thought: this is me, this is Moscow, this is Nick, we don't dare sway or we'll blur. The print is sort of blurred anyway, it's got that mistiness of line artists use when they want to make a thing seem very remote and ideal: it's as though they're withholding, they're not really telling. But to me a thing isn't real until you tell it. (That's why I brought the Sh.e.l.ley that time.) Enoch said: The Movement doesn't care who anybody lives with, just so long as it's a.s.sured what he's living for. If he's living for the cause, we're not interested in his cohabitations. In spite of that Nick and I left, we needed to-though I made us go with Hugh, so Enoch would see we weren't leaving the Movement, just the crowd. And for months and months afterward we helped with all the rallies, and Nick wasn't against it because at first I was getting enough to cover taking trains to different places very comfortably, but then you cut the money down to practically nothing and we had to sit still in one niche, so we came to Brighton and were glad after all. Not that Nick wasn't really immense at these rallies-sometimes he had absolutely brilliant and fantastic ideas, like the amazing incident I told you about that happened in that hall on New Oxford Street-but he said the Movement cramped individual invention, and he was right, for instance I didn't touch Marianna for a year or more while we were marching in parades and things. And he said it was foolishness to march in parades anyhow, and he was tired of it. So I said the Greeks had parades, and Nick said they weren't ordinary agitating parades, they were religious processions for Dionysus and Demeter, and when the ancient Greeks dealt with agricultural output they meant wine and fertility instead of bloodless ideas like land value and commodities per capita, and when they dealt with industrial potential they were thinking of Penelope at the loom, patient for the return of Odysseus. And he said the Greeks weren't afraid of getting drunk, like Enoch and all the other Jews. And he said he didn't like Athens, where Socrates was always wandering around the streets lecturing people, but cared only for the G.o.ddess of the coppice, and that's how we began to throw darts at the tree I told you about, to make her cry out. And sometimes, if you closed your ears with your palms and listened hard, she did. And all the while it was really only Brighton we were in, so we hung the print of the oniony Moscow church on the wall, to remind us how some people in the world have to live without dryads watching their doors. The frame is only celluloid, and cracked, so I haven't packed it-still, it's odd how an empty picture frame on a cold white wall, with the screw showing exactly where it snakes into the plaster, seems spooky when you're all alone in a place you're not accustomed to being sad in. It got sad toward the end. You never sent the money and the baby kept screaming, and Nick swore it was screaming Money Money with the consonants left out; it really sounded like that, and then out of the blue he went off, while I was writing all about how love in bed makes you feel, private and all sweet. That's the part I've put in here for you to read after you finish this letter. And he took away my ENCHIRIDION-my lovely tiny book full of poison flowers, and lovely perfect drawings of the red hard s.h.i.+ny waxy berries we used to hang on the green horn to make Enoch go away, and he went away. I don't know why he took it, I guess it just happened to be in his summer-jacket pocket, and he went out wearing his summer-jacket under his overcoat, because of the cold; the last time we went walking to get berry-twigs it was still October a whole year since we left Moscow to go everywhere together and amaze ourselves with ourselves. That's Nick's, that part: "we'll amaze ourselves with ourselves," and it came true, and now he's in Italy, or maybe not, with my flower book I bought in Southampton coming into England in his pocket, and out the window there's nothing on the tree but an old stuck dart with dirty snow on its tail, and I think how happy and gorgeous it was here, all green, and how it was with the tree and us and the coppice-G.o.ddess, as though there could be a G.o.ddess in Brighton, or a dryad! So Brighton's the place I hate, in the whole world I hate Brighton most of all, you always hate the place you were happiest in. Poor William, poor you, I guess there isn't any place for you to hate like that. But you're lucky too, it means you don't hate any person either. I told Enoch I'm sure you don't hate me, you only have contempt for me, but that's your religion and you can't help it, you think I'm fallen. And you know what Enoch said?-Presbyterians have contempt, but Pagans have babies. In spite of not having a sense of humor or laughing much, Enoch doesn't really take anything very seriously, except Social Justice. He feels about Social Justice exactly the way Nick feels about Sacred Beauty and ancient Greece, but Nick laughs all the time, he laughs the most marvelous lonesome laugh, as though he were seeing visions n.o.body else ever saw. It's silly to keep imagining he left his laugh behind in this room (oh I hate this room) when it's only the baby that's awake and jiggling some walnut sh.e.l.ls Nick twisted into a paper bag for a rattle. Rustle, rustle, it could be Nick's laugh but it's only the baby playing, he took his laugh with him and his eyes with him and my little ENCHIRIDION with him, everything, and I think of him right now on that Island of Sicily, spread out on a beach in the sun the way I used to watch him spread out on Brighton beach in the sun and getting practically as black as Hugh, or rowing around in a boat with a foot overboard in the water, and I get so full of wish, wish, wish I begin to believe wish, wish, wish will break whole out of my skeleton and work on him, on his long foot in the water and his long hand trailing in the water. I mean I wish he would die. After that boy, I can't describe my feelings but this even you can take in exactly and give it out again without a lawyer's lie, after that dead boy and what I saw, and how it happened because of the trust, the trust made it happen, I really did swear (just as though I believed in G.o.d) I would never again wish anybody's dying. Because before then I sometimes used to wish people would die: I wished my father would die, and he died, but left that horrible horrible trust, that murdering trust that killed a boy with its inflexibility. The trust killed that Armenian boy. And that weird widow-girl who came and took the knife, as though the knife killed him!-I told you you should have given her the trust to take home instead of the knife, but instead you went to the funeral, all because you thought it was the right and proper thing, on account of his family's being poor; and you tried to give them money, I know you did. Wergeld!-That's what Hugh said it was called, paying off the family for the body. The body was awful. I remember the hands up at the neck, like the baby's when it's asleep, there and not there, because I touched one of them, just the fingers, just the dead thumb really, and how it was. And even in spite of that, even in spite of that, I feel it now, in spite of that I feel it again, wis.h.i.+ng a dying for someone, because there's Nick all black-skinned in a boat down there, laughing and laughing in that hot place full of sun that goes down there right through the water, s.h.i.+mmering dropped through the water spread-winged, and after everything me here freezing alone after Brighton after freezing after everything it's no wonder, I don't wonder in spite of that boy I wish he dies, I hope he drowns, for all I care let him drown down deep there. Because of Brighton Brighton Brighton. Because of Brighton.

William's answer: February 14, 1938. Your inordinately diffuse letter and enclosure, marked "Air Mail," due to insufficient postage for its weight arrived by s.h.i.+p. Consonant with my duties as trustee, I am ready to make immediately available to you whatever funds, in accordance with the arrangements separately attached, you may authorize, from the date of this letter forward. Pursuant to this I have asked Mr. Connelly to set forth in detail necessary procedures for you to follow. You will find, together with his explanations, a list of thirty-two European cities, including London, in which various banks are now open to your signature. Mr. Connelly has, I believe, antic.i.p.ated any questions that may arise, particularly in the matter of drawing checks and opening further accounts. Mr. Peat and Mrs. Charlottine of Nothham, Peat and Mr. Charlottine of New York will a.s.sume direction of the properties listed on the enclosed sheet marked with their letterhead. In all other categories I have retained personal discretionary powers, according to the terms of the trust, and continue to stand ready to aid and advise in all fiduciary and financial matters. Yours sincerely.

Allegra to William: March 22, 1938. About the nursemaid. Mrs. Amy Mealie. She's Welsh. I want to bring her home with me when I decide to come but don't know how to do it and what she's got to do to come. She's already applied for a pa.s.sport. Will there be some stupidity about bringing in an immigrant? She says the baby's been starved, I wasn't feeding it right. I knew that, alter all. She took it to a specialist, there's something wrong with its inner ear, that's how come it pukes so much, but it's supposed to get better gradually as it grows up. It might be a hereditary condition, not from me. Mrs. Mealie gives it liquid vitamins. Connelly didn't write how to fix it so Mrs. Mealie can write checks on her own when I'm not around. Because sometimes she needs things in a hurry and she's very strict in her morals and doesn't believe in credit and meanwhile there I am away and out flying all over London in different places doing this and seeing that, and everything's just the opposite of how it used to be when we came just to march. I ride around in a hired car the whole day and my hair is cut very short (in Brighton it got to be like a serpent) and you can't tell me apart from any old eccentric Countess. And last week Enoch went to Spain. It's to a.s.sa.s.sinate some Fascists there, not that I think he can really shoot anyone, even though I saw his gun. It's tiny and black and looks fake, but isn't, which is very sinister. He went as a sort of correspondent for this Liverpool paper that wants biographical sketches of the Falangist leaders for a column they have, called "Notes from the Land of Quixote." They print maps and follow the war from day to day. Enoch thinks if he can get to some of these Fascists through this job he can shoot them. It's terribly dangerous and naturally he's very brave but honestly I think war is too stupid to bother with. Sometimes I feel I'm the only real pacifist left in the world. Enoch used to be the most pa.s.sionate pacifist you'd ever want to meet and was always talking about beating swords into ploughshares and all of that, and now he's not a pacifist even about Spain. None of the pacifists are any more, it's peculiar. You don't say anything about finding Nick. I keep waiting for you to say something about looking for him. Please note the new address above. It's a very nice flat, very big-it has so many rooms the whole Spanish Civil War could be fought in it and you'd never notice. I hired a man to cook. He cooks Viennese, he's a refugee from over there, not that he's a real chef or anything, in fact he used to have a china factory, but they always gave dinner parties and he was what in German he calls a praisecook, it's a gourmet who cooks to get the applause of his guests. Everything is always a bit greasy, but otherwise he's all right. He wanted me to take his wife on for the baby, but I already had Mrs. Mealie who's very good and besides I didn't like the look of the wife, too withdrawn and fragile. As you can imagine they were well off over there and one could see she didn't care for being a servant only on account of Hider. The cla.s.s-consciousness of the bourgeoisie is the most offensive sort, they despise work. Two different Jewish families in Manchester took in their boys and I don't know where the wife is now, he never says. You find refugees scattered all over London with their horrible broken English, and they're not cheaper, they're more expensive, in fact. I'm glad about the money, but you should have sent it before, in Brighton.

Allegra to William: April 12, 1938. Did you find out anything about Nick? I saw d.i.c.kie Sparrs two weeks ago and he heard Hugh was in Sweden. He doesn't think Nick ever joined Hugh in the first place, since Hugh hasn't been in Sicily since August. d.i.c.kie's mother mails him The New York Times wherever he happens to be, with messages along the sides of the international-news columns telling to watch out for this and watch out for that, and not to go here and not to go there, and to avoid getting mixed up socially with Hitler and Mussolini and Franco and Stalin, so that's how I saw the announcement about your engagement. I didn't know Sarah Jean too well at Miss Jewett's, she was part of a clique that stayed out of everything except Sat.u.r.day afternoon horses. I remember she used to be very religious, especially about the New Testament. Once when I asked her to demonstrate against something with us she said render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. I didn't agree with her then but I do now, on account of what happened to Enoch. It's too stupid, he didn't get to see the Falangist leaders or anybody. Going across the border they attacked the bus he was in and stole his gun and kicked in all the windows and fought with pieces of window gla.s.s and cut practically a pound of flesh from his left arm. It wasn't even Fascists that did it, it was Loyalists. There was a person on the bus they wanted to kill and they killed him. Somebody fixed a tourniquet after they left or Enoch would be dead now. It's really too stupid. Marching is one thing, but after all when you think how many innocent babies there are in the world, on both sides of any cause, no cause seems worth killing either side's babies for. Nick once told me the reason he was against the Movement was that it judged the world by every possible value except the personal ones, which are the only sort that count. (Not that he's acted as though they count to him.) And you know my thought on this? It's that surely nothing is as personal as a baby-something I've just learned, and I learned it by myself. Enoch's opinion is that I got sentimental about the baby the very minute I stopped having anything to do with it-he gives Mrs. Mealie the credit for my caring about All the Innocent Babies in the World (he's very sarcastic about it). He and Nick always used to disagree about Personal vs. Abstract. Enoch said swords-into-ploughshares was an abstraction, and the greatest idea on earth; and Nick said Jesus-raising-Lazarus was a personal happening, and the greatest idea on earth.

Enoch: Off earth, you mean. It certainly didn't happen here. Maybe it happened in heaven.

Nick: Here, says the story.

Enoch: Heaven isn't here, you'll agree to that.

Nick: Modest! Only until you fellows bring it, I suppose.

Enoch: We fellows aren't such ninnies as to want to duplicate the Christian notion of heaven. It would obligate us to infer h.e.l.l, and having inferred it to condone it. We're not that barbarous-at least not so barbarous as the average preacher, you see. Besides, the answer to Jesus and Lazarus is dust unto dust.

Nick: Some state the same thing vice versa, and call it just as true. The answer to dust is resurrection.

Enoch: The most successful religions are those that tell lies in the most picturesque way.

Nick: At any rate the answer to swords and ploughshares is rust unto rust. And when a man lets his Things rust, he slips back into prehistory.

Enoch: Only into the prehistory of Things. Only into the prehistory of h.o.m.o faber. h.o.m.o sapiens-which is to say man when he has acquired moral possibilities-has no prehistory, he has history only. Technology progresses. A flint hammer becomes a bomb. A cave becomes a skysc.r.a.per. This is h.o.m.o faber progressing-man the maker. We call the Things we don't remember his making, prehistory; and the Things we seem to remember, because he described them for us, history. But h.o.m.o sapiens doesn't progress. He is always the same. He was modern from the very beginning. We date him from the moment he learned that killing, which didn't bother him, and being killed, which did, were really the same act That moment is when human history began. It began when h.o.m.o faber became h.o.m.o sapiens-when manufacturing man became moral man. Having made, he thought about what he had made, and what he ought to do and ought not to do about what he had made. Moral man has no prehistory, because before history there was no man, there were only beasts. One never speaks of the history of beasts, though some, like the beavers and the birds, are very fine manufacturers of their own environment.

Nick: A beast can't mae a telescope.

Enoch: It's only a beast who does. A telescope is the eye sharpened. But it is only the eye. It isn't something other-it's the beast extended. The naked eye is the telescope's prehistory. You won't discover the nature of man in the little bundles he carries with him always-they're only his mess of pottage. His birthright is something else.

Nick: His birthright is personal-you can't deny that

Enoch: It belongs to him personally, he personally must act on it, but in itself it's an abstraction. His birthright is a message against killing; against killing as a theory and a methodology. Of course you can't prove that the message is there, the way the telescope can prove the distant stars are there. That's because we don't know whether the message proceeds out of ourselves, the way the telescope proceeds out of ourselves.

Nick: Watch it you're on the margin!

Enoch: The margin of what?

Nick: Arguing for G.o.d.

Enoch: G.o.d is an abstraction that can't be proved.

Nick: G.o.d is a person who was never born.

Enoch: Now you're on the margin. You're about to make out a G.o.d as tangible as a mess of pottage. I call that idolatry.

Nick: So do I, and gladly. But a G.o.d like a mess of pottage isn't tangible enough-he's too mushy. I want a G.o.d I can touch with a clang! That's why I've had to settle for G.o.ds. There's one Allegra knows about, in the tree, a G.o.ddess with a hide as firm as metal. We haven't seen her, but we've felt her. We've struck her. She's there, all right.

Enoch: Mess of pottage.

Nick: Better than a pot of message.

-I still laugh when I think of that! They used to talk like that on summer nights sometimes, always like that, and it's queer that afterward Nick was quick to leave tree and me, and Enoch was just as quick to buy his little black gun. And all in spite of how they talked. I remember what they said, but I can't remember how except through a kind of membrane. I don't know what the membrane is, maybe time, maybe only having had to listen to them through the baby's crying. It never cries now, and looks smooth and healthy, and sometimes even bleats out a noise that sounds like me-me-me, which Siegfried says stands for Mrs. Mealie. It's still not awfully good-looking but Siegfried (the cook) thinks it shows high intelligence and is going to begin talking very early. I don't know whether he means it or not, he's very sly and says things just to ingratiate himself. He hasn't mentioned his wife again but now what he wants is to bring his oldest boy to live here, there's a school nearby that's offering scholars.h.i.+ps to refugee children of a certain age. He promises he would keep him in the kitchen and quiet and out of sight, but I've had to decide against it, it's the old story of the camel and the Arab's warm tent, pretty soon it would be his wife and the two other boys (who I understand are practically only babies -you can imagine what a nuisance that would be), and there wouldn't be room for us to breathe in. Mrs. Mealie wouldn't like it either. They're awfully pushy people, I have to admit you used to be right about that aspect. Of course Enoch is different. When I told Enoch about Siegfried, you know what he said?-Moses was really an Egyptian, Jesus was really a Samaritan, so Siegfried must be really a Jew.

Me: But they're all Jews, I know that much. Siegfried especially.

Enoch: Especially Siegfried, since he's absolutely indistinguishable from any other Viennese of his cla.s.s. Nothing is what it seems-that's the first rule of tyranny-and if it seems to be what it is, then it ought to be disproved by logical schemes grounded in false premises. Better yet, it ought to be abolished by force.