Oberheim (Voices): A Chronicle of War by Christopher Leadem (to read list txt) 📗

long time he did not look at his reflected image in the closet mirror, holding his head in his hands, incapable of purity of thought or emotion. He felt little outside his own fatigue, but also a slow strange stirring of the soul.

He looked up, studied his features in the soft, forgiving light of his lover. The face that he had never associated with himself….. His eyes were drawn downward to the wiry muscles that reached from his chest to his arm. Always slender and taut, they now looked almost famished, layered rope wrapped stranding and twine after strand into nothingness. What were they for? And the rage inside him. Could he tear down the walls? Could he dive through the mirror and come to the place where his wife lay needing him, distraught, possibly frightened and in torment?

And suddenly the image changed, becoming sinister and spectral. The remembrance was almost audible.

"And how would you judge me while a Belgian officer was raping your wife?"

Caught in a trap of near despair, simultaneously hit by a rush of dizzy sickness—-a lethal virus had, in fact, attacked his stomach—-his mind and courage reeled in a half physical, half emotional torment. Snatches of conversations with Dubcek came back to him, echoed and enforced, made indisputable by the darkness that hung thick and menacing around him. They dove and swirled like insane, angry birds. His spirit palled before them.

"You must learn to be cynical"

"Some day you will be hurt very badly"

"It is the key to all truth"

"Forget your fairy-tale notions"

"While a Belgian officer was raping your wife"

"You will be hurt"

"Very badly"

"Raping your wife"

"Raping your wife"

"Raping your wife—-"

"Stop it!" he cried in answer. "Get away from me!"

A foul nausea engulfed him as he staggered toward the bathroom, falling to his knees and retching violently into the toilet. Hardly able to breathe, feeling the very soul torn out his throat, he fell back against the wall and tile as wave after wave of hot sweat dizziness broke over. Finally, as if the agony that raped him had expended itself he was left, a forlorn and shivering ball on the floor, hopeless and friendless and lost.

But now the cold truth of it was clear, needing no help from the physical assault. She was gone from him forever. She had been too beautiful, too spirited. At best she was the unwilling mistress of a bastard animal. At worst she was dead. Dubcek was right. There was no unseen God to protect her, no Comforter to see him now and ease his pain. He had been a fool, and now he would pay for it. He should have told her to evacuate. They should never have come here. Fool! Fool! Fool!

He wept no tears and shivered and struck the wall weakly with the side of his fist.

"Dear God don't let it be. Don't leave her! Don't leave me here….."
 He sobbed. "Don't leave me."

Not much like a prayer that his mother might have taught him, but still he spoke it with all his soul. A young ensign, hearing his cries, came in from the hallway and found him there. Putting his head through Brunner's crooked arm, he lifted him and took him to the Infirmary.

The doctor had to be wakened, and did not come at once, so that he was left in a half-lying sit in a bed behind a wrap-around screen, given time, as it were, to gather himself. He felt nothing but weakness and a blank mental stupor. That things had gone too far he knew, but to whom should he address this complaint? He felt as low, though less bitter and sharp-edged, as he had ever been in his life.

He had prayed, and not in the moment of fear and anguish, but in their afterglow. This in itself was enough to show him that Dubcek had not won a convert, though he was still probably right. But this sense of wrongness and self-deprecation began to bring back bitterness. He shut it off.

I'm sorry, Ivan, he said to himself. You're a good man and I know you tried to keep me from being hurt. But I can't see the world through your eyes, or I despair….. And I cannot do that yet. Not while there is any hope.

With this a ghost inside him seemed to rest more easily. Or something. The doctor drew back the screen and with a sleepy, objective and infinitely forgettable manner began to examine him and ask him questions, mildly rebuking him for not coming sooner.

"It is obvious that you are suffering from acute anxiety as well as the virus, and that the two feeding off one another have brought you to this state. I have been told you are here searching for your wife and that is all fine and good, but you must take better care of yourself or you will be of no use to anyone. I am going to give you an injection for the virus and prescribe lozenges to help you sleep. Yes, yes I know you do not like to take drugs into your body and if you sleep on your own you will not need them. I want you to have them anyway. You are to spend this night in hospital and the next two days off duty then you may do as you like but if you have any sense you will put from your mind what is beyond your control and guard your health more closely. You are not the only one with problems and concerns in this time of unrest, and though you are young….."

When she left Brunner turned his head to one side against the hard pillow, still half upright, and let his thoughts and feeling sink down like stirred silt in a stream. NILEMUD AND CROCODILES. He remembered the phrase from "Portrait." What the hell did Nilemud have to do with anything? And why was Joyce always writing about himself? Did he imagine he was the only one who suffered? And why call Ireland a sow that eats its fodder? Like murdering a sick patient.

Joyce. That was the Colonel's name as well. He wondered if they were related, or how a Joyce had come to settle in Leningrad. THE Leningrad. He compared his perceptions of the two.

Thus his mind vomited what his body could not, passing time in words, until he started to feel dizzy again and another rush of anguish folded over him. He endured it, and with almost unselfish reserve except for the thought, again, that it was too much. Any one of the things he had felt in the past months, heightened now by nearness, might have been bearable singly, or even in bunches of two and three. But all at once and one after another was like an endless trap, with no escape from the steady flow of consciousness. But for sleep, which of late had become a fickle and untrustworthy ally.

Unbroken flow of consciousness. Perhaps that was what Joyce had been after (he suspected the thought was not original). Certainly his self-endowed character Stephen had been trapped, feeling rare moments of freedom and longing for the sky, but always coming back to himself in a dirty world. More trapped in the human shell than in Dublin. Did he ever truly fly? Certainly the rambling phrases were incoherent…..

And so at long length his thoughts become more natural and sleep came back to him, and shutting his eyesmind and heart, he passed through a thick black night without dream.

*

The next morning after some time alone and a second examination, he returned to his rooms. Someone had extinguished the candle for him but it was still there, the igniter beside it. He resisted the urge to contact Mandlik and ask him how many hours, or had they yet been discovered. There was no reason, he knew, to go looking for a fight. It would come to him. He had had time to work things through, and believed he now possessed a clearer understanding.

The first few moments in that place were difficult, for all his renewed spirit of resolve. To be left here in this state, weakened and sick….. He still feared for the future, which he knew stalked him inexorably. At stake, no more and no less than his spiritual life and death. It was no use trying to prepare himself against all contingencies. If his wife was not there, or was dead or unaccounted-for, a part of himself would die forever, and the tiny flame of faith to which he clung would be lost beyond recall. Even now it flickered feebly in that dark place, shivered by the cold winds of doubt.

He mastered his trepid nature as best he could, and stayed there. He lay down and read for many hours, somewhat heartened by his mind's endurance, and by the sudden turn from hopelessness he perceived in Joyce's work. 'Exiles.' It filled all his mind with true thought and carried him for a time from himself, and he loved in those moments both the medium and the man, so beyond his understanding.

Moved as it were to make some account of himself he rose, wrapped the robe about him, went to the desk-table and, without looking at the verses he had scrawled the day before, wrote a simple, passionate poem to his wife.

But the feelings went too deep and he could not yet read back what he had written.

He called and a nurse brought him a soft and frugal meal, and before she left he looked into her face and said sincerely, "Thank you," for she had reminded him that other lives existed outside his own.

After he ate for a time he was unwell, and lay down in the bed and waited for the aching nausea to pass. Weariness and exhaustion came over him when the other left, and having little choice, yet also wanting to trust, he surrendered. And after a further time he slept.

He did not wake until late in the evening. Without looking or even thinking about the clock he went to his writing desk and flipped over the written pages of the pad. A thought had come to him, whether in dream or rising from it he could not recall, nor did it matter. He had his answer. He wrote on a blank sheet of paper with a quiet warm peace inside him:

If you believe in too much, or nothing at all, either way you will be hurt.

With this he became calm and thoughtful. What was the use of despair, or endless worry? Running around wildly, trying by one's own efforts to turn back an imagined tide of evil and malicious fate, or believing, at the most, that life was nothing but a primal struggle without order or lasting hope. If there truly was nothing beyond man and the grave, then what was the use of trying at all? when the bravest and most determined lives must eventually end in ruin and death? In this sense even the existentialists were wiser than the proponents of human will and self-made destiny.

And on the other side of the coin, were those who put their faith and trust in Gods and religions they did not understand, accepting without trial or common sense the narrow dogmas of fearful (or even wise) old men. MEN. What made their observations and conclusions more enlightened than his own, or those of anyone who sought with both heart and mind, using Nature and experience as a guide?

It was all so obvious and clear; how could anyone not see it? Yet now he, Olaf Augustine Brunner, must take this lesson and apply it to that Universe, often cold and unreasoning, OUT THERE. He did not know if he was equal to the task. He only knew that he must try.

His mind and confidence thus piqued, he turned back to the poems written earlier, hoping, perhaps, to find some further sign of his own understanding—-something to set against the huge, dark uncertainty beyond his