Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess Read Free Book Online Page B

‘it’s got to be total war. War means fighting an enemy, and the enemy isn’t necessarily somewhere out there. He can be at home, you know, and he’s at his most insidious then. But,’ he conceded, ‘do you think that anybodyreally enjoyed having to send great brains into exile? They wouldn’t be argued with, many of them. Impossible, a lot of them, to convince. And time was very short.’
    I was going to say something about ends not justifying means, but I remembered that it was right for prisoners-of-war to drop razor-blades into the enemy’s pigswill and that, if they’d bombed Coventry, we’d bombed Dresden. That if they’d been wrong we’d been wrong too. That killing babies was no way to kill Hitler, who’d had to kill himself anyway at the end. That history was a mess. That Fascism had been the inevitable answer to Communism. That the Jews could sometimes be as Father Byrne had portrayed them. I shuddered. Was somebody brainwashing me? I looked at Brigitte, but she, replete, glowed only with sex. I clenched my teeth, wanting her on the floor then and there, Roper looking on. But I merely said: ‘You’ve joined Father Byrne in condemning the warmongering English. And, of course, the money-grubbing Jews. You two would get on well together now.’
    â€˜That horrible Church,’ said Roper passionately. ‘Jewish meekness, turning the other cheek, draining the blood from the race. Nietzsche was right.’ Brigitte nodded.
    â€˜What the hell do either of you know about Nietzsche?’ I asked. ‘I bet neither of you’s ever read a word of Nietzsche.’
    Brigitte began: ‘My father –’ Roper said, mumbling a bit: ‘There was a very good summary of his philosophy in the
Reader’s Digest
.’ He was always honest. ‘– at school,’ ended Brigitte. I said: ‘Oh, my God. What do you want – blood and iron and black magic?’
    â€˜No,’ he said. ‘I want to get on with my work. The first thing is to get my degree. And then research. No,’ he repeated, somewhat dispirited now (perhaps that was overeating, though: he’d tucked away half a chicken and a slab of ham and a bit each of the four kinds of cheese, all with bread in proportion). ‘I don’t want anything that causes war or could be used to make war more terrible than it’s been already. All the dead, all the innocent children.’
    â€˜My father,’ said Brigitte.
    â€˜Your father,’ agreed Roper. It was as though they were toasting him. And for a moment it was as if the Second World War had been conjured expressly to kill off Herr Whoever-he-was.
    â€˜Yes,’ I said. ‘And my Uncle Jim, and the two children evacuated to my Aunt Florrie’s house who found a bomb in a field, and all the poor bloody Jews and dissident intellectuals.’
    â€˜You say right,’ said Brigitte. ‘Bloody Jews.’
    â€˜We must never be allowed to start another war like that one,’ said Roper. ‘A great nation in ruins.’
    â€˜Not starving, though,’ I said. ‘Plenty of Danish butter and fat ham. The best-nourished bastards in Europe.’
    â€˜Please,’ said Roper, ‘do not call my wife’s people bastards.’
    â€˜What is that word?’ asked Brigitte. ‘Many strange words he knows, your fiend.’
    â€˜Friend,’ I amended.
    â€˜A great nation’s bones picked over by Yanks and Bolshevists,’ said Roper, ‘and the French, a rag of a nation, and the British.’ Strangely, two cathedral choirs sang in my head, antiphonally:
Babylon the Great is fallen – If I forget thee, O Jerusalem
. I said: ‘You always wanted a unified universe. Tautology and all. Remember that no science now can be wholly for peace. Rockets are for outer space but also for knocking hell out of enemies. Rocket fuel can speed man into the earth or