A Fable

‘Now,’ the old general said. ‘Take my car. If you can drive at all, the pennon on its bonnet will carry you anywhere in Europe west of the German wire; if you can drive well, the engine beneath it will take you to the coast—Brest or Marseilles either—in two days; I have papers ready to pass you aboard any ship you choose there and command its captain. Then South America—Asia—the Pacific islands; close that window fast; lock it forever on that aberrant and futile dream. No no,’ he said quickly, ‘dont for one second suspect me of that base misreading of your character—you who in five minutes Monday voided that war which the German himself, the best soldier in Europe, in almost four years has never quite nudged from stalemate. Of course you will have money, but only that balance exactly matched to freedom as the eagle or the bandit carry theirs. I dont bribe you with money. I give you liberty.’

‘To desert them,’ the corporal said.

‘Desert whom? Look again.’ His hand appeared in a brief rapid gesture toward the wan city unsleeping below them—a gesture not even contemptuous, not anything: just a flick, then gone, already vanished again within the midnight-colored cloak. ‘Not them. Where have they been since Monday? Why with their bare hands, since they have enough of them, have they not torn down brick by brick the walls which far fewer hands than theirs sufficed to raise, or torn from its hinges that one door which only one hand sufficed to lock, and set all of you free who had essayed to die for them? Where are the two thousand nine hundred and eighty-seven others you had—or thought you had—at dawn Monday? Why, as soon as you were through the wire, didn’t all of them cast down their arms too and simply follow you, if they too believed you were all weaponed and bucklered out of the arsenal of invulnerable human aspiration and hope and belief? why didn’t even that mere three thousand then—they would have been enough—erase the bricks and wrench away that door, who believed in you for five minutes anyway enough to risk what you anyway knew you risked—the three thousand that is lacking the twelve who have been locked inside the same incommunicant bricks with you ever since. Where are they even? one of them, your own countryman, blood brother, kinsman probably since you were all blood kin at some time there—one Zsettlani who has denied you, and the other, whether Zsettlani or not or blood kin or not, at least was—or anyway had been accepted into—the brotherhood of your faith and hope—Polchek, who had already betrayed you by midnight Sunday. Do you see? You even have a substitute to your need as on that afternoon God produced the lamb which saved Isaac—if you could call Polchek a lamb. I will take Polchek tomorrow, execute him with rote and fanfare; you will not only have your revenge and discharge the vengeance of the rest of those three thousand whom he betrayed, you will repossess the opprobrium from all that voice down there which cannot even go to bed because of the frantic need to anathemise you. Give me Polchek, and take freedom.’

‘There are still ten,’ the corporal said.

‘Let’s try it. We will remain here; I will send the car back with orders to unlock and open that door and then for every man in that building to vanish from it, oblivious of all to which they themselves will be invisible—quietly unlock that door, unlock that gate, and vanish. How long before that ten will have denied you too—betrayed you too, if you can call that choice betrayal?’

‘And you see too,’ the corporal said. ‘In ten minutes there would not be ten but a hundred. In ten hours there would not be ten hundred but ten thousand. And in ten days——’

‘Yes,’ the old general said. ‘I have seen that. Have I not said I dont so basely misread your character? oh yes, let us say it: your threat. Why else have I offered to buy my—our—security with things which most men not only do not want but on the contrary do well to fear and flee from, like liberty and freedom? Oh yes, I can destroy you tomorrow morning and save us—for the time. For the length of my life, in fact. But only for the time. And if I must, I will. Because I believe in man within his capacities and limitations. I not only believe he is capable of enduring and will endure, but that he must endure, at least until he himself invents evolves produces a better tool than he to substitute for himself. Take my car and freedom, and I will give you Polchek. Take the highest of all the ecstasies: compassion, pity: the orgasm of forgiving him who barely escaped doing you a mortal hurt—that glue, that catalyst which your philosophers have trained you to believe holds the earth together. Take the earth.’

‘There are still ten,’ the corporal said.