I can never forget my father’s cries of misery and remorse. He howled like a dog over mother’s dead body.
Exhaustion set in among the struggling factions. The war finally petered out. Days came when no shells were fired at us.
A party of the enemy arrived in a truck, waving white flags, to announce an armistice. The leader of the party was a smartly uniformed captain, wearing incongruous white gloves. Quite a young man, but already bemedalled.
It was the chance our men had waited for. They rushed the truck. They set upon the soldiers with rifles and knives and bayonets, and carved up the party, all but the captain, into bloody pieces. They rubbed the face of one man into the broken glass from the vehicle’s windscreen. They set fire to the truck. I stood in the broken street, watching the massacre, enjoying it, thrilling to the screams of those about to die. It was like a movie, like one of my Biker stories.
The captain was dragged into a burned-out factory down the road. He was stripped of his gloves and his uniform, made naked. Some of Splon’s women were allowed -or encouraged – to hack off his testicles and penis and ram them into his mouth. They beat him to death with iron bars.
I was curious to see what was going on in the burned-out factory. A man stopped me from entering. Other boys got in. They told me about the atrocity afterwards.
Next day, a Red Cross truck rolled into town. My father and I were evacuated. My father had lost his will to live, dying in his sleep some weeks later. That was in a hospital in the German city of Mannheim.
While I was laid low in hospital these past memories returned vividly to mind. I was forced to relive them as I had rarely done before. In fear of the horrors of that awful period, I recognised my strong desire for a better ordered society, and for a time and place where reason reigned secure.
Mary and I sat up in bed. She listened sympathetically as I told my tale. Tears, pure and clear, escaped from her eyes and ran down her cheeks.
Perhaps the riddle of Olympus had brought on my horrors. The mood under that vast carapace could be one of regret, rage even, at the way the life forms had had to imprison themselves in order to survive as the old free life died. A billion years of rage and regret…?
Several visitors came while I was recovering. They included Benazir Bahudur, the silent teacher of children.
She said, ‘Until you recover fully your ability to move, dear Tom, I will dance for you to remind you of movement.’
She danced a dance very similar to the one I had watched once before. In her long skirt, with her bare arms, she performed her dance of step and gesture, as supple and subtle as deep water. Life is like this and this. There is so much to be enjoyed…
It was beautiful and immensely touching. ‘You manage to dance without music,’ I said.
‘Oh, I hear the music very clearly. It comes through my feet, not my ears.’
Another welcome visitor was Kathi Skadmorr. She slouched in wearing her Now overalls and perched on the end of the bed, smiling. ‘So this is where Utopias end – in a hospital bed!’
‘Some begin here. You do a lot of thinking. I was thinking of dystopias. Presumably you think about quantum physics and consciousness all the time…’
She frowned. ‘Don’t be silly, Tom. I also think a lot about sex, although I never perform it. In fact, I spend much time sitting in the lotus position staring at a blank white wall. That’s something I learned from you lot. It seems to help. And I also recall “I saw a new heaven and a new Earth: for the first heaven and the first Earth were passed away.” Isn’t that what you Christians say?’
‘I’m not a Christian, Kathi, and doubt whether the guy who wrote those words was either.’
She leaned forward. ‘Of course I am fascinated by scientific theory – but only because I would like to get beyond it. The blank white wall is a marvellous thing. It looks at me. It asks me why I exist. It asks me what my conscious mind is doing. Why it’s doing it. It asks if there are whole subjects the scientists of our day cannot touch. Maybe daren’t touch.’