R.H.I. Read online

  ‘The grief I then had to endure was the most painful experience of my life, though it did not persist indefinitely as a later similar experience has. Life lost most of its value, or at least savour. The acuteness of the pain had the effect of bringing out all the gentleness and kindliness in my nature. I felt that with such possibilities of pain in the world it behoved everyone, or at all events those who knew of them, to be as kind as they could be to their fellows. If only mankind could learn that lesson!’

  37. In Japan the group at Pana Wave Laboratory warned of the catastrophic dangers of electromagnetic radiation. They expressed concerns that the arctic seal found in Tokyo, thousands of miles from its natural habitat, had been set off course by the accumulation of radio and other waves emitted by our technology. The seal, frequently sighted in the river and for some time a popular attraction, was a warning and a sign of the dangers—it was OUT OF PLACE and as such could act as a kind of REMOVED KEYSTONE, one that would lead to the collapse of the entire structure. Dressed all in white to eliminate, as far as possible, the wave threat, they planned to capture the seal and return it to Arctic waters. But such incidents could only increase. On 15 May, the group announced, a previously unknown planet would come close to the surface of the earth, causing catastrophic earthquakes that would destroy most of the world’s population. The group’s premises were raided by police on 14 May. It wasn’t until almost the end of the year, Boxing Day to be precise, that an earthquake killed around half the population of the city of Bam, Iran. The scale of the tragedy led to a temporary thaw in relations between Iran and the United States.

  38. ‘What were you waiting for?’

  ‘An opening.’

  ‘Pana Wave Laboratory were also waiting for an opening.’

  ‘They were imagining the end of the world.’

  ‘Were they pathological?’

  ‘What they were doing made sense to them. They had no way of knowing who was right about what. They had no reason to think they were wrong. They were in a hurry.’

  ‘Were you like them?’

  ‘I had no reason to do anything other than what I was doing.’

  ‘You had no time for anything else?’

  ‘It wasn’t really about time. Perhaps after all it was about the torrent of events that the archive had sheltered me from, and the web of interconnections that seemed constantly to tighten—the noise of the world.’

  39. After his wife’s death Jones couldn’t bear to return home to London; nor could he simply stay in Wales. So I wandered about spending a few days with various friends, with the Trotters in London, with Bernard Hart at the famous shell-shock hospital at Maghull, with the Flugels on their farm in a remote corner of Yorkshire.7 Jones found himself face to face with a soldier. They were sharing a train compartment on one of Jones’s trips across the country. The man was wearing an invalid’s uniform. How could there be any kind of recognition between them? Did the soldier remember holding Jones’s photo? Had he committed the face to memory? We can’t say. Was it the same man?

  ‘Is it true?’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry—?’

  ‘I heard from one of your colleagues that the war will soon be over.’

  ‘I haven’t been in active service for some time. But, yes, so they say.’

  ‘Your comrade said that the Germans had given up hope, and that he could sense it in them.’

  ‘Oh? I haven’t heard it put like that. But I’m mostly involved in administrative tasks.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I’m sorry to disappoint.’

  ‘Disappoint?’

  The soldier laughed. ‘My lack of experience.’

  ‘I suspect you’ve experienced rather a lot.’

  ‘My lack of experience of how the war is really proceeding. It’s as much hearsay for me as it is for you.’

  ‘But do you think it’s true?’

  ‘Most probably.’

  ‘I mean, do you think it’s true you can feel it? In the enemy?’

  ‘Feel it? Oh, I can imagine what he might have meant.’

  ‘You have a kind of second sight about how the enemy is feeling?’

  The soldier laughed. ‘That’s a grand way to put it. No—the enemy only comes across in the form of bullets. But you start to read them. You learn to read the gaps between the volleys. Or you think you do. Sometimes there’s the slightest gap, say, that seems like hesitation or uncertainty.’

  ‘And you’re sure you’re not over-interpreting? Interpreting something in their shots that’s more about you, yourself?’

  ‘That’s quite possible. As I say, I haven’t been in active service for—’

  ‘Oh but you must remember! What a thing, to be in battle!’

  ‘Yes. People say that.’

  ‘You must be glad it’s over.’

  ‘Yes. If it is. But those gaps—you learn to listen to the sound of the attacks because you’ve made them and you’ve wondered each time you’ve pulled the trigger.’

  ‘I imagine there’s some satisfaction.’

  ‘Satisfaction?’

  ‘In pulling the trigger. Some aggression, something deep within you.’

  ‘Oh, yes. No. No maybe more of a game, everyone thinking about the other side. I hardly remember having time for satisfaction.’

  ‘But there must have been some.’

  ‘It was like a conversation, like a long deep talk conducted with bullets and lives and gas. Forgive me if that sounds strange. It’s almost like this war, it was a long talk across the trenches in which we, um, bared our souls.’

  ‘You could have died.’

  ‘Oh yes!’

  ‘I suppose you nearly did.’ Jones knew that he needed only indicate the uniform with a dip of his eyes.

  ‘I don’t know any more.’

  ‘But yes, yes I see what you’re saying. That we negotiate our innate aggressions through violent interchange, and that this, this could be conversation as easily as war. Yes.’

  ‘You might be right. Can I ask what your interest in the matter is?’

  ‘Oh, just a concerned citizen, like everyone. But conversation itself is a kind of war that opens us up to each other in dangerous ways, and makes us put up defences, quite literally.’

  The soldier nodded. He looked to one side, out the window. ‘Oh, yes. Though I prefer to think that conversation isn’t quite so deadly.’

  Jones laughed. ‘It is! It is deadly!’

  ‘Should I be careful talking to you then?’

  He laughed again. ‘Well, it has real effects. It changes things. We know that much—medical science knows that much.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘There is nothing free and equal.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘And if we accept that, then we can work with it—’

  ‘Are you still talking about the war?’

  Jones paused. ‘You might say that.’ The conversation with the soldier, and the sense of the train’s speed, made his head feel light for the first time since Morfydd’s death. Did he understand suddenly that her death was also part of a conversation, and so part of a war? What conversation was it part of? What war?

  He said, ‘This war—I can’t help thinking it’s not ending properly. The Germans losing heart? Some negotiated end—that won’t do.’

  It was necessary to push through to the end. Joan had been sent to Freud. Jones had married Morfydd—and, next, she had died. Something was finished.

  ‘The war will not be finished if it is not finished properly—it will keep going, under the surface. If the Germans aren’t properly … well, they will just rise up again. A war has to end and leave nothing hanging. Maybe it’s less like a conversation than like a story, yes, with dialogue and characters, and the sense that the story must end, must be made to never pick up and carry on. How can we be happy with a story that doesn’t do that?’

  It wasn’t good enough to leave things hanging. The soldier’s breathing was heavy, and his gaze was still focused o
n an unmoving point outside amidst the landscape that moved past. The soldier said, ‘I don’t think I can agree. I remain pleased not to have been finished off.’ Jones, however, couldn’t be stopped—he found himself unable to stop, to finish his talk of finishing.

  1 Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, The complete correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones 1908–1939, ed. R. Andrew Paskauskas (Belknap Press: Cambridge, MA: 1993), pp. 453–4.

  2 ibid. p. 464.

  3 ibid. pp. 465–6.

  4 ibid. p. 468.

  5 ibid. p. 470.

  6 ibid. p. 475.

  7 Jones, Free Associations, p. 256.

  Part 2. H

  Ein Grundriss. Soldiers distributed themselves into the rooms of the city as if still playing by the codes of an administered warfaring, their limbs operating as if by the orders transmitted from desks elsewhere. Even their shouts, their relief, were acts of routine. K found herself face to face with a soldier. The window frame had no glass or wood, and the room was damp, with a pool of water in the corner. The family she stayed with hadn’t used it for some time, and it was bare of furniture apart from the soaked and broken remains of an old sideboard standing opposite the coal heater. If he spoke to her, she didn’t understand his words. He was short and wiry, and looked tired, looked at her. Though nothing, for a minute, passed between them, and though she tried to stand facing him as naturally as possible in an unnatural situation, her hands behind her back, he understood what she had concealed in one of them. When she in turn realised what he had understood, a whole world of communication opened up between them, communication of abstractions that built themselves into looks, into positions each of them occupied. Fascism and communism were the only two options in this game of looks; and he had his Red Army uniform. His couldn’t be called a look of hatred as such, but rather a look that perceived in her everything that her country had represented. It lasted as long as neither of them moved. They stood like figures on a movie poster. Then he moved toward her, breaking it all, making them simply into people again—she backed off, and took the knife out from behind her back, held it in front of her. It stopped him for a second, the view of it. This was not what she had expected when she looked forward to the arrival of the Soviets. She had only looked forward to the end of war, and of course the end of Hitler; she hadn’t expected to be made into his representative; she hadn’t expected to be holding out a knife, steadily, between herself and a Red Army soldier. She knew the knife wouldn’t really serve to defend her. He had his gun, after all—though he didn’t show any indication that he might use it or threaten her with it. Actually, she might have liked to talk to this man. They might have found themselves agreeing about things. He might have been the kind of man with an appetite, for food and alcohol, the kind of man she liked under different circumstances. Would those circumstances return? He reached quickly and grasped her wrist where she held the knife. His hand was about her arm like a firm cuff. He came closer only slowly. His eyes were on the point of the knife. Her hand was immobilised around it. She did whisper to him, to excuse her. It was a word he might have understood. She didn’t really mean it. It was the kind of simple word that arises in this kind of situation. It was a situation in which time stood still, a moment stretched out horribly, but there was no time, no air, with which to utter anything more complex. Even if he would have understood. What was going on in his eyes? They were still focused on the knife, but they were looking at it, not with fear exactly. Some process was taking place in him. He was her liberator! They both knew that the knife was inevitable; they both wanted to begin the situation again without it. No. Did they both want it there between them after all? It seemed like an instrument for writing.

  He tightened his grip and moved. He pulled her hand towards him. Her hand, warmed with a glove of his blood. Now he let her go. Had she cooperated? She didn’t know. Had she pushed the knife into his stomach so that it separated muscle, opened the walls of organs, disrupted all the fine liquid machinery of the man? Pushed while he pulled? The moment didn’t let up, but stayed immobile, a tableau of murder or suicide so surprising to her that she kept hold of the knife in him.

  Then she pulled the knife from his body. He was lying on the ground, having slumped to the side. She threw it hard out the window and it clattered against the courtyard wall then fell amongst a pile of brick, broken concrete and rusted metal. The sound of it intruded on the soundlessness of the events. The door to the room was shut, and for a moment she had no idea who was home—the whole family? She shouted out to them to help. Were there other soldiers in the building? She put a hand over her mouth. She stood for a minute against the door, listening and holding it shut. There was only, still, the sound-memory of the knife’s clatter. It was impossible to count moments. She couldn’t, in any case, hold the door shut against Herr Kaltenbach if he wanted to enter, or another soldier for that matter. Instead, she moved away from it against the thought of it opening, and climbed out the window into the yard, under the mid-morning view of all the apartments around and above. She ran from them out onto the street, then stopped. At the end, out on the main road, was a Red Army truck with people crowded around it and soldiers standing off to one side. More people—the Kaltenbachs?—were converging on it, accompanied by more soldiers. Was it bread? In any case, she ran the other way, holding her hand to her body. Someone called, ‘Are you hurt?’ She ran past and on, north, for no reason, and then, keeping to the minor streets, west. It was easy to remain small, to avoid the soldiers stationed here and there, to use her urgency as a way to slip past them. There was nothing furtive about her. When she finally emerged on the field of destruction—an area of the central city destroyed by the bombs, something she hadn’t yet, in all the last months, stopped long enough to see—she was not surprised by it, by its closeness and the depth of the transformation wrought on it. Buildings, where they were standing at all, gaped their insides at her. The ground was scarcely passable. The people here scurried; the soldiers just stood. What she felt, stopping here, was that this was now the landscape she would occupy. Even as she refused another step towards it, its form struck her as the form of the crumbling nothing in which she would have to find her home.

  Denkraum. Reading over the notes I took in the course of my travels and researches, I am surprised how much I have forgotten. It is as if the notes were taken by someone else, a stand-in for me; and, moreover, it is as if this forgotten person is someone I can dress myself in, using the words I myself have written in an act of ventriloquism. The notes are both by me, and by someone else. Needless to say this is a strange experience, though probably not an uncommon one. My notes record, in part, that I found myself in the presence of ‘floating agents’ as I called them, most notably the architect H, and that I would enter into relationships of a sort with these agents. It’s hard to say what I meant by this, and how literally to take it. It’s possibly just a shorthand meant for no one but myself. Many of the documents give voice to these ‘people’ or ghosts, record conversations with them or between them, and so forth. Sometimes—as with H himself, and perhaps always—they were real people who had existed at one time or another, and in these cases a degree of research is evident. Did the sense of a PRESENCE simply grow out of my research? I should be clear that I absolutely do not believe in ghosts, or in any kind of special paranormal sensitivity on my part—these documents are the products of an ordinary person, and at times seem like simple diaries, at others like works of fiction, and at others still like the rough notes of a historian or biographer. That they were produced is perhaps not so surprising—ordinary people constantly come up with extraordinary things, record them in small books or sketch pads, build them, imagine them, create whole worlds. Nothing is more ordinary. Notes and sketches and ideas made for oneself, as a private reminder and thought, are sometimes released into the public or into archives and libraries. The books and sketch pads and imaginations and worlds, we might say, can then seem to take on a life of their own. This, p
erhaps, is also part of what I meant by ‘floating agents’.

  H entered my consciousness because of what he left behind—the buildings, the city, the products, not only of his thoughts (as if the city had sprung up out of his mental image) but of something else: his struggle, indeed the working out of something over the course of his life. Left to himself, if there is such a thing as a person left to him- or herself, he would have imagined a quite different city. The impression given by my notes is that he can be ‘met’ by walking through the city, that he is progressively met as one walks around its streets, that the streets of the city themselves play out his internal drama. He was still alive the first time I visited the city, and I occasionally wondered (according to my notes) what it would have been like to meet him. At that earlier point, however, I was very young and travelling around Europe using the Mitfahrzentrale, ending up here or there according to the availability of rides. I wasn’t yet taking notes—this first visit is present only in the memory of the later note-taker, and also to a lesser degree in my own current memory. I hadn’t thought that I might return to the city and attempt to understand, through its forms, the character or person of H. According to what opportunity would a young antipodean traveller have encountered someone like H, have thought about him?