Louis Begley - Wartime Lies: A Novel

For my mother

T AKE a man with a nice face and sad eyes, fifty or more winters on his back, living a moderately pleasant life in a tranquil country. He is a bookish fellow, the sort you would expect to find in a good publishing house or at a local university teaching how to compare one literature with another. He might even be a literary agent with a flair for dissident writing: texts bearing witness against oppression and inhumanity. Sometimes, in the evening, he reads Latin classics. There is no question anymore of his being able to do a version. He learned Latin in great globs to pass whatever examination happened to be blocking his path, always in the very nick of time; his knowledge was never precise. Fortunately, the power to grasp meaning and to remember has remained. He reveres the Aeneid. That is where he first found civil expression for his own shame at being alive, his skin intact and virgin of tattoo, when his kinsmen and almost all the others, so many surely more deserving than he, perished in the conflagration.

He takes care to keep the metaphor at a distance. His native town in eastern Poland was no Ilium, and even if some SS black-shirt, imperturbably beating an aged former human being with a riding crop, is a pretty good stand-in for Pyrrhus slaughtering Priam, where, in that senseless tableau, are the contending golden-haired gods and goddesses? He has seen such a beating, administered to a totally bald man forced to kneel, the blows aimed at the top of the head, the mans hands folded behind his back, unable to wipe the blood streaming down his face. What insult to what goddess was avenged by that outrage? Did Jove, sulking, order into action the detail of old Jews so usefully engaged in cleaning street gutters, also on their knees, under the supervision of Jewish militiamen, long staves held at the ready?

Now he caresses the metaphors. When Aeneas plays the tourist in Carthage, thoughtfully enveloped in a cloud by his immortal mother, his astonished eyes behold scenes of Trojan slaughter portrayed artfully on Didos palace walls. Did not our man himself, quickly after his war ended, see in the first books of photographs of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald naked, skeletal men and women alive and staring at the camera, corpses lying in disorderly piles, warehouses of eyeglasses, watches and shoes? Where is the sense of his survival? Father Aeneas fleeing Troy with little lulus fulfills an immutable promise: he will found eternal Rome; by the will of Jove and a twist of the tongue, Ascanius-Iulus will become the forebear of the Julian Caesars. Our man, sea-tossed, hollowed out and bereft, thinks he has no discernible destiny. His memorable scenes are the stuff of nightmares, not myth.

Our man avoids Holocaust books and dinner conversations about Poland in the Second World War even if his neighbor is beautiful, her eyes promising perfumed consolation. Yet he pores over accounts of the torture of dissidents and political prisoners, imagining minutely each session. How long would it have been before he cried and groveled? Right away, or only after they had broken his fingers? Whom would he have betrayed and how quickly? He has become a voyeur of evil, sometimes uncertain which role he plays in the vile pictures that pass before his eyes. Is that the inevitable evolution of the child he once was, the price to be paid for his sort of survival?

A different affinity draws him to Catullus, a beacon flashing across black water. He imagines the poets childhood near Verona, the charming Sabine villa, the swift yacht. A tender father accompanies Catullus to Rome and sees to his establishment there. The poet loves Lesbia, beautiful nymphomaniac Lesbia, loves her not as the common run of men love a girl but as a Roman loves his sons and sons-in-law. Alas, love for Lesbia is a sickness. Lesbia, whom Catullus loves more than himself and all his tribe, turns tricks in doorways and alleys. The poet no longer wishes her to be faithful, even if that were possible. He wants to heal, to be well, to throw off the foul sickness that has robbed him of his enjoyments. Ipse valere opto et taetrum hunc deponere morbum. The lines have haunted our man for years, he thinks he knows Catulluss sickness to the bone, he too has wanted to heal and to be well regardless of all else. Only this metaphor, too, fails. His disease lies deeper than the poets. Catullus never doubts he was born to be happy and to have pleasure in past good deeds, benefacta priora voluptas. The gods owe him as much for his piety. O di, reddite mi hoc pro pietate mea. The man with sad eyes believes he has been changed inside forever, like a beaten dog, and gods will not cure that. He has no good deeds to look back upon. Still, it is better to say the poem over and over. He will not howl over his own despair