Cloud Atlas (60 page)

The arrest of Lloyd Hooks two days ago was seen as vindication of this newspaper’s support for Luisa Rey’s exposé of this major scandal, initially dismissed by William Wiley as “libelous fantasy culled from a spy novel and wholly unworthy of a serious response.” … 
Cont. p. 2, Full Story p. 5, Comment p. 11
.

“Front page!” Bart pours Luisa’s coffee. “Lester would be mighty proud.”

“He’d say I’m just a journalist doing my job.”

“Well, exactly, Luisa!”

Seaboardgate is no longer her scoop. Swannekke swarms with reporters, Senate investigators, FBI agents, county police, and Hollywood scriptwriters. Swannekke B is in mothballs; C is suspended.

Luisa gets Javier’s postcard out again. It shows three UFOs zooming under the Golden Gate Bridge:

Hi Luisa, it’s OK here but we live in a house so I can’t jump across balconies when I visit my friends. Paul (that’s Wolfman but Mom says I can’t call him that anymore though he kind of likes it when I do) is taking me to a stamp fare tommorrow, then I can choose what paint I want for my bedroom and he cooks better than Mom. Saw you again on TV last night and in the papers. Don’t forget me just because you’re fameous now, OK? Javi

The other item of mail is an airmailed package from Megan Sixsmith, sent in response to Luisa’s request. It contains the final eight letters Robert Frobisher wrote to his friend Rufus Sixsmith. Luisa uses a plastic knife to slit the package open. She removes one of the yellowed envelopes, postmarked October 10, 1931, holds it against her nose, and inhales.
Are molecules of Zedelghem Château, of Robert Frobisher’s hand, dormant in this paper for forty-four years, now swirling in my lungs, in my blood?

Who is to say?

ZEDELGHEM
10TH—X—1931

Sixsmith,

Ayrs in bed for three days, fogged with morphine, calling out in pain. V. distracting and distressing. Dr. Egret warns J. and me not to confuse Ayrs’s newfound joie de vivre in music with actual health and forbids V.A. to work from his sickbed. Dr. Egret gives me the creeps. Never met a quack whom I didn’t half-suspect of plotting to do me in as expensively as he could contrive.

Buried in music of my own. Cruel to say it, but when Hendrick arrives at breakfast and tells me, “Not today, Robert,” I’m almost relieved. Spent last night working on a rumbling ’cello
allegro
lit by explosive triplets. Silence punctuated by breakneck mousetraps. Remember the church clock chiming three
A.M
. “I heard an owl,” Huckleberry Finn says, “away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die.” Always haunted me, that line. Next thing I know, Lucille was ballooning sheets of bright morning by the window. Morty Dhondt was downstairs, she told me, ready for our excursion. Thought I was dreaming, but no. My face was crusted over, and for a second I couldn’t have told you my name. Grunted I didn’t want to go anywhere with Morty Dhondt, I wanted sleep, I have work to do. “But last week you arranged to go motoring today!” objected Lucille.

I remembered. I washed, put on fresh clothes, and shaved. Sent Lucille to find the houseboy who’d polished my shoes, etc. Down in the breakfast room, the amiable jewel merchant was smoking a cigar and reading
The Times
. “Don’t hurry,” he told me, when I apologized for my tardiness. “Where we’re going no one will notice if we’re early or late.” Mrs. Willems brought me some kedgeree, and J. breezed in. She hadn’t forgotten what day it was and gave me a bunch of white roses, tied with a black ribbon, and smiled, just like her old self.

Dhondt drives a claret 1927 Bugatti Royale Type 41, a real spanker, Sixsmith. Goes like a greased devil—nearly fifty on the metaled highway!—and boasts a Klaxon hooter that Dhondt fires off at the least provocation. Beautiful day for a grim journey. The nearer to the Front one goes, naturally, the more blasted the countryside becomes. Beyond Roeselare, the land grows crater-scarred, crisscrossed with collapsing trenches and pocked with burnt patches where not even weeds take root. The few trees still standing here and there are, when you touch them, lifeless charcoal. The skein of green on the land seems less nature revivified, more nature mildewed. Dhondt shouted over the engine’s roar that farmers still daren’t plow the land for fear of unexploded ordnance. One cannot pass by without thinking of the density of men in the ground. Any moment, the order to charge would be given, and infantrymen well up from the earth, brushing off the powdery soil. The thirteen years since Armistice seemed only as many hours.

Zonnebeke is a ramshackle village of semirepaired ruins and the site of a cemetery of the Eleventh Essex of the Fifty-third Brigade. The War Graves Commission told me this cemetery has the best chance of being where my brother was laid to rest. Adrian died in the charge of July 31 on Messines Ridge, right in the thick of it. Dhondt dropped me off at the gates and wished me luck. Tactfully, he told me he had business nearby—we must have been fifty miles from the nearest jeweler’s—and left me to my quixotic quest. A consumptive ex-soldier guarded the gates when not tending his sorry vegetable plot. He also worked as a groundsman—self-appointed, one suspects—and waved a donation box at me, for “upkeep.” Parted with a franc, and the fellow asked in tolerable English if I was looking for anyone in particular, as he had committed the entire cemetery to memory. Wrote down my brother’s name, but he did that Gallic mouth droop that indicates, “My problems are mine, and yours are yours, and this one is yours.”

Always felt I would divine which
KNOWN UNTO GOD
was Adrian’s. A glowing inscription, a nodding magpie, or just a musical certainty would lead me to the right plot. Utter tripe, of course. The headstones were uncountable, uniform, and arrayed as if on parade. Coils of brambles invaded the perimeter. The air was stuffy as if the sky were sealing us in. Along the aisles and rows I searched the F’s. Long odds, but one never knows. The War Office makes mistakes—if war’s first victim is truth, its second is clerical efficiency. In the event, no Frobisher was resting in that plot of Flanders. The closest was “Froames, B. W., Private 2389 18th (Eastern Division),” so I laid J.’s white roses on his stone. Who is to say? Maybe Froames asked Adrian for a light one tired evening, or cowered with him as bombs rained down, or shared a Bovril. Am a sentimental fool and I know it.

One encounters buffoons like Orford in your college, who wear an air of deprivation that the war ended before they had a chance to show their mettle. Others, Figgis springs to mind, confess their relief not to have been of service age before 1918 but a certain shame that they feel this relief. I’ve often banged on to you about growing up in my legendary brother’s shadow—every rebuke began with an “Adrian never used to …” or “If your brother were here now he’d …” Grew to hate the sound of his name. During the runup to my forcible ejection from the Frobishery, it was all “You’re a disgrace to Adrian’s memory!” Never, ever forgive the parents that. Remembered our last send-off one drizzly autumn afternoon at Audley End, Adrian was in uniform, Pater clasping him. Days of bunting and cheering were long over—later heard Military Police were escorting conscripts to Dunkirk to deter mass desertions. All those Adrians jammed like pilchards in cemeteries throughout eastern France, western Belgium, beyond. We cut a pack of cards called historical context—our generation, Sixsmith, cut tens, jacks, and queens. Adrian’s cut threes, fours, and fives. That’s all.

Of course, “That’s all” is never all. Adrian’s letters were hauntingly aural. One can shut one’s eyes but not one’s ears. Crackle of lice in seams; scutter of rats; snap of bones against bullet; stutter of machine guns; thunder of distant explosions, lightning of nearer ones; ping of stones off tin helmets; flies buzzing over no-man’s-land in summer. Later conversations add the scream of horses; cracking of frozen mud; buzz of aircraft; tanks, churning in mud holes; amputees, surfacing from the ether; belch of flamethrowers; squelch of bayonets in necks. European music is passionately savage, broken by long silences.

Do wonder if my brother liked boys as well as girls too, or if my vice is mine alone. Wonder if he died celibate. Think of these troopers, lying together, cowering, alive; cold, dead. Tidied B. W. Froames’s headstone and went back to the gates. Well, my mission was bound to be futile. Groundsman was twiddling with twine, said nothing. Morty Dhondt collected me bang on time, and off we hurtled back toward civilization, ha. Passed through a place called Poelkapelle or some such, down an avenue of elms lasting mile after mile. Dhondt chose this straight to push the Bugatti as fast as she would go. Individual elms blurred into a single tree repeated to infinity, like a spinning top. The needle was nudging top speed when a form like a running madwoman ran out smack in front of us—she hit the windscreen and spun over our heads. Heart popped like a gunshot, I can tell you! Dhondt braked, the road tilted us one way, shrugged us the other, the tires screamed and singed the air with hot rubber. We had run out of infinity. My teeth had bitten deep into my tongue. If the brakes hadn’t locked in such a way that the Bugatti continued its trajectory along the road, we would have finished our day—if not our lives—wrapped around an elm. The car scraped to a halt. Dhondt and I jumped out and ran back—to see a monster pheasant, flapping its broken wings. Dhondt blew out an elaborate oath in Sanskrit or something, and gave a
ha!
of relief that he hadn’t killed some
one
that also expressed dismay at having killed
something
. Had lost the power of speech, and dabbed my bleeding tongue on my handkerchief. Proposed putting the poor bird out of its misery. Dhondt’s answer was a proverb whose idiocy may have been deliberate: “To those upon the menu, the sauce is no concern.” He went back to try to coax the Bugatti back to life. Couldn’t fathom his meaning but walked up to the pheasant, causing it to flap ever more desperately. Its medallion breast feathers were matted with blood and fecal spewings. It cried, Sixsmith, just like a two-day-old baby. Wished I had a gun. On the roadside was a stone as big as my fist. I smashed it down on the pheasant’s head. Unpleasant—not the same as shooting a bird, not at all.

Wiped its blood off the best I could, using dock leaves plucked from the roadside. Dhondt had the car running, I hopped aboard, and we drove as far as the next village. A no-name place, as far as I could see, but it had a miserable café-cum-garage-cum–funeral parlor shared by a gang of silent locals and many flies who wheeled through the air like drugged angels of death. The hard braking had misaligned the Bugatti’s front axle, so M.D. stopped here to have it seen to. We sat alfresco on the edge of a “square,” in reality a pond of cobbly mud with a plinth plonked in its navel whose original inhabitant had long ago been melted down for bullets. Some dirty children chased the only fat hen in the country across the square—it flew up to the plinth. The children began throwing stones at it. Wondered where the bird’s owner might be. I asked the barman who had formerly occupied the plinth. He didn’t know, he was born in the south. My glass was dirty, so I made the barman change it. He took umbrage and was less talkative from then on.

M.D. asked about my hour in the Zonnebeke cemetery. Didn’t really answer. Mangled, bloodied pheasant kept flashing before my eyes. Asked M.D. where he’d spent his war. “Oh, you know, attending to business.” In Bruges? I asked, surprised, hard put to imagine a Belgian diamond merchant prospering under the Kaiser’s occupation. “Good God, no,” answered M.D., “Johannesburg. My wife and I got out for the duration.” I complimented his foresight. Modestly, he explained, “Wars do not combust without warning. They begin as little fires over the horizon. Wars approach. A wise man watches for the smoke, and prepares to vacate the neighborhood, just like Ayrs and Jocasta. My worry is that the next war will be so big, nowhere with a decent restaurant will be left untouched.”

Was he so sure another war was coming?

“Another war is
always
coming, Robert. They are never properly extinguished. What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions, and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation-state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be. War, Robert, is one of humanity’s two eternal companions.”

So, I asked, what was the other?

“Diamonds.” A butcher in a bloodstained apron ran across the square, and the children scattered. Now he had the problem of luring the hen down from its plinth.

The League of Nations? Surely nations knew laws other than warfare? What of diplomacy?

“Oh, diplomacy,” said M.D., in his element, “it mops up war’s spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents. Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots, and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war.”

The reductio ad absurdum of M.D.’s view, I argued, was that science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity’s powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilization drives itself to extinction. M.D. embraced my objection with mordant glee. “Precisely. Our will to power, our science, and those v. faculties that elevated us from apes, to savages, to modern man, are the same faculties that’ll snuff out
Homo sapiens
before this century is out! You’ll probably live to see it happen, you fortunate son. What a symphonic crescendo
that’ll
be, eh?”

The butcher came over to ask the barman for a ladder. Got to end here. Can’t keep my eyes open any longer.

Sincerely,
R.F.