A Fable

  ‘Yes,’ the corporal said. ‘Go?’

  ‘Now,’ the old general said. ‘Take my car. If you can drive at all, the pennon on its bonnet will carry you anywhere in Europe west of the German wire; if you can drive well, the engine beneath it will take you to the coast—Brest or Marseilles either—in two days; I have papers ready to pass you aboard any ship you choose there and command its captain. Then South America—Asia—the Pacific islands; close that window fast; lock it forever on that aberrant and futile dream. No no,’ he said quickly, ‘dont for one second suspect me of that base misreading of your character—you who in five minutes Monday voided that war which the German himself, the best soldier in Europe, in almost four years has never quite nudged from stalemate. Of course you will have money, but only that balance exactly matched to freedom as the eagle or the bandit carry theirs. I dont bribe you with money. I give you liberty.’

  ‘To desert them,’ the corporal said.

  ‘Desert whom? Look again.’ His hand appeared in a brief rapid gesture toward the wan city unsleeping below them—a gesture not even contemptuous, not anything: just a flick, then gone, already vanished again within the midnight-colored cloak. ‘Not them. Where have they been since Monday? Why with their bare hands, since they have enough of them, have they not torn down brick by brick the walls which far fewer hands than theirs sufficed to raise, or torn from its hinges that one door which only one hand sufficed to lock, and set all of you free who had essayed to die for them? Where are the two thousand nine hundred and eighty-seven others you had—or thought you had—at dawn Monday? Why, as soon as you were through the wire, didn’t all of them cast down their arms too and simply follow you, if they too believed you were all weaponed and bucklered out of the arsenal of invulnerable human aspiration and hope and belief? why didn’t even that mere three thousand then—they would have been enough—erase the bricks and wrench away that door, who believed in you for five minutes anyway enough to risk what you anyway knew you risked—the three thousand that is lacking the twelve who have been locked inside the same incommunicant bricks with you ever since. Where are they even? one of them, your own countryman, blood brother, kinsman probably since you were all blood kin at some time there—one Zsettlani who has denied you, and the other, whether Zsettlani or not or blood kin or not, at least was—or anyway had been accepted into—the brotherhood of your faith and hope—Polchek, who had already betrayed you by midnight Sunday. Do you see? You even have a substitute to your need as on that afternoon God produced the lamb which saved Isaac—if you could call Polchek a lamb. I will take Polchek tomorrow, execute him with rote and fanfare; you will not only have your revenge and discharge the vengeance of the rest of those three thousand whom he betrayed, you will repossess the opprobrium from all that voice down there which cannot even go to bed because of the frantic need to anathemise you. Give me Polchek, and take freedom.’

  ‘There are still ten,’ the corporal said.

  ‘Let’s try it. We will remain here; I will send the car back with orders to unlock and open that door and then for every man in that building to vanish from it, oblivious of all to which they themselves will be invisible—quietly unlock that door, unlock that gate, and vanish. How long before that ten will have denied you too—betrayed you too, if you can call that choice betrayal?’

  ‘And you see too,’ the corporal said. ‘In ten minutes there would not be ten but a hundred. In ten hours there would not be ten hundred but ten thousand. And in ten days——’

  ‘Yes,’ the old general said. ‘I have seen that. Have I not said I dont so basely misread your character? oh yes, let us say it: your threat. Why else have I offered to buy my—our—security with things which most men not only do not want but on the contrary do well to fear and flee from, like liberty and freedom? Oh yes, I can destroy you tomorrow morning and save us—for the time. For the length of my life, in fact. But only for the time. And if I must, I will. Because I believe in man within his capacities and limitations. I not only believe he is capable of enduring and will endure, but that he must endure, at least until he himself invents evolves produces a better tool than he to substitute for himself. Take my car and freedom, and I will give you Polchek. Take the highest of all the ecstasies: compassion, pity: the orgasm of forgiving him who barely escaped doing you a mortal hurt—that glue, that catalyst which your philosophers have trained you to believe holds the earth together. Take the earth.’

  ‘There are still ten,’ the corporal said.

  ‘Have I forgotten them?’ the old general said. ‘Have I not said twice that I have never misread you? You dont need to threaten me; I know that they, not you, are the problem; not you but they are what we are bargaining for. Because for your profit, I must destroy all eleven of you and so compound tenfold the value of your threat and sacrifice. For my profit, I must let them go too, to be witnesses to all the earth that you forsook them; for, talk as much and as loudly and as long as they will, who to believe in the value—value? validity—of the faith they preach when you, its prophet and instigator, elected your liberty to its martyrdom? No no, we are not two Greek or Armenian or Jewish—or for that matter, Norman—peasants swapping a horse: we are two articulations self-elected possibly, anyway elected, anyway postulated, not so much to defend as to test two inimical conditions which, through no fault of ours but through the simple paucity and restrictions of the arena where they meet, must contend and—one of them—perish: I champion of this mundane earth which, whether I like it or not, is, and to which I did not ask to come, yet since I am here, not only must stop but intend to stop during my allotted while; you champion of an esoteric realm of man’s baseless hopes and his infinite capacity—no: passion—for unfact. No, they are not inimical really, there is no contest actually; they can even exist side by side together in this one restricted arena, and could and would, had yours not interfered with mine. So once more: take the earth. Now, answer as I know you will: There are still ten.’

  ‘There are still that ten,’ the corporal said.

  ‘Then take the world,’ the old general said. ‘I will acknowledge you as my son; together we will close the window on this aberration and lock it forever. Then I will open another for you on a world such as caesar nor sultan nor khalif ever saw, Tiberius nor Kubla nor all the emperors of the East ever dreamed of—no Rome and Baiae: mere depot for the rapine of ravagers and bagnio for one last exhaustion of the nerve-ends before returning to their gloomy deserts to wrest more of the one or face at home the hired knives of their immediate underlings thirsting to cure them of the need for both; no Cathay: chimaera of poets bearing the same relation to the reality of attainment as the Mahometan’s paradise—a symbol of his escape and a justification of its need, from the stinking alleys or fierce sand of his inescapable cradle; nor Kubla’s Xanadu which was not even a poet’s rounded and completed dream but a drug-sodden English one’s lightning-bolt which electrocuted him with the splendor he could not even face long enough to describe it down;—none of these which were but random and momentary constellations in the empyrean of the world’s history; but Paris, which is the world as empyrean is the sum of its constellations,—not that Paris in which any man can have all of these—Rome Cathay and Xanadu—provided he is connected a little and does not need to count his money, because you do not want these: have I not said twice now that I have not misread you? but that Paris which only my son can inherit from me—that Paris which I did not at all reject at seventeen but simply held in abeyance for compounding against the day when I should be a father to bequeath it to an heir worthy of that vast and that terrible heritage. A fate, a destiny in it: mine and yours, one and inextricable. Power, matchless and immeasurable; oh no, I have not misread you:—I, already born heir to that power as it stood then, holding that inheritance in escrow to become unchallenged and unchallengeable chief of that confederation which would defeat and subjugate and so destroy the only factor on earth which threatened it; you with the power and gift to persuade three
thousand men to accept a sure and immediate death in preference to a problematical one based on tried mathematical percentage, when you had at most only a division of fifteen thousand to work on and your empty hands to work with. What can you not—will you not—do with all the world to work on and the heritage I can give you to work with. A king, an emperor, retaining his light and untensile hold on mankind only until another appears capable of giving them more and bloodier circuses and more and sweeter bread? Bah. You will be God, holding him forever through a far, far stronger ingredient than his simple lusts and appetites: by his triumphant and ineradicable folly, his deathless passion for being led, mystified, and deceived.’

  ‘So we ally—confederate,’ the corporal said. ‘Are you that afraid of me?’

  ‘I already respect you; I dont need to fear you. I can do without you. I shall; I intend to. Of course, in that case you will not see it—and how sad that commentary: that one last bitterest pill of martyrdom, without which the martyrdom itself could not be since then it would not be martyrdom: even if by some incredible if you shall have been right, you will not even know it—and paradox: only the act of voluntarily relinquishing the privilege of ever knowing you were right, can possibly make you right.—I know, dont say it: if I can do without you, then so can you yourself; to me, your death is but an ace to be finessed, while to you it is the actual ace of trumps. Nor this either: I mentioned the word bribe once; now I have offered it: I am an old man, you a young one; I will be dead in a few years and you can use your inheritance to win the trick tomorrow which today my deuce finessed you of. Because I will take that risk too. Dont even say——’ and stopped and raised the hand quickly this time from inside the cloak and said: ‘Wait. Dont say it yet.—Then take life. And think well before you answer that. Because the purse is empty now; only one thing else remains in it. Take life. You are young; even after four years of war, the young can still believe in their own invulnerability: that all else may die, but not they. So they dont need to treasure life too highly since they cannot conceive, accept, the possible end of it. But in time you become old, you see death then. Then you realise that nothing—nothing—nothing—not power nor glory nor wealth nor pleasure nor even freedom from pain, is as valuable as simple breathing, simply being alive even with all the regret of having to remember and the anguish of an irreparable wornout body; merely knowing that you are alive—Listen to this. It happened in America, at a remote place called by an Indian name I think: Mississippi: a man who had committed a brutal murder for some base reason—gain or revenge perhaps or perhaps simply to free himself of one woman in order to espouse another; it doesn’t matter—who went to his trial still crying his innocence and was convicted and sentenced still crying it and even in the death cell beneath the gallows still crying it, until a priest came to him; not the first time of course nor the second nor perhaps even the third, but presently and in time: the murderer at last confessing his crime against man and so making his peace with God, until presently it was almost as though the murderer and the priest had exchanged places and offices: not the priest now but the murderer the strong one, the calm one, the strong calm steadfast rock not even of tremulous hope but of conviction and unshakable faith, on which the priest himself could now lean for strength and courage; this right up to the very morning of the execution, toward which the murderer now looked with a sort of impatience almost, as though actually fretting a little for the moment when he could doff the sorry ephemeral world which had brought him to this and demanded this expiation and accepted his forgiveness; right up to the gallows itself: which at Mississippi I understand is out-of-doors in the yard of the jail, enclosed temporarily in a high stockade of planks to shield the principal’s departure from earth from the merely morbid and curious anyway; though they would come: in their carts and carriages for miles, bringing box lunches: men women children and grandparents, to stand along the tall fence until the bell, clock, whatever it was to mark the passing of the soul, struck and released them to go back home; indeed, able to see even less than the man who stood beneath the noose, already free this whole week now of that sorry and mortal body which was the sorry all which penance could rob him of, standing calm composed and at peace, the trivial noose already fitted to his neck and in his vision one last segment of the sky beyond which his theology had taught him he would presently be translated, and one single branch of an adjacent tree extending over the stockade as though in benison, one last gesture of earth’s absolution, with which he had long since severed any frail remaining thread; when suddenly a bird flew onto that bough and stopped and opened its tiny throat and sang—whereupon he who less than a second before had his very foot lifted to step from earth’s grief and anguish into eternal peace, cast away heaven, salvation, immortal soul and all, struggling to free his bound hands in order to snatch away the noose, crying, ‘Innocent! Innocent! I didn’t do it!’ even as the trap earth, world and all, fell from under him—all because of one bird, one weightless and ephemeral creature which hawk might stoop at or snare or lime or random pellet of some idle boy destroy before the sun set—except that tomorrow, next year, there would be another bird, another spring, the same bough leafed again and another bird to sing on it, if he is only here to hear it, can only remain—Do you follow me?’

  ‘Yes,’ the corporal said.

  ‘Then take that bird. Recant, confess, say you were wrong; that what you led was—led? you led nothing: you simply participated—an attack which failed to advance. Take life from me; ask mercy and accept it. I can give it, even for a military failure. The general commanding your division will—he already has—demand a sacrifice, not in the name of France or of victory, but in that of his blemished record. But it’s not he, it’s I who wear this hat.’