Daddy Lenin and Other Stories (29 page)

But to Jack’s disappointment, Daddy had no interest in reminiscing. He preferred to talk about some stupid Mediterranean cruise he was off on in October. Not as a holiday-goer but as staff. For four autumns now Daddy had had a gig giving onboard lectures about the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome to what he described as “a bunch of baseball-capped, pot-bellied smorgasbord-foragers and women of a certain age who have selected purple, fuchsia, and lavender as the colours for their sunset years. Whenever I think of
S.S. Change of Life
and all who will be sailing on her, I am sorely tempted to pack an AK-47 and do a Columbine.”

How Jorgensen had managed to keep intact his invincible sense of superiority all these years while in freefall down a garbage chute that had landed him in a basement squat reeking of mouse shit and sewer gas was a mystery to Jack. But Daddy had never suffered from self-doubt. Running into Jorgensen three days ago had been like time travel; Jack had found himself just as intimidated by Daddy’s patronizing attitude as he had been in his student days.

“Well,” said Jack, “I guess we’ve both had a come-down. You and me.”

Daddy carefully set his plate on the coffee table and said, “Have
we
? Really? Fucking
we
, is it?”

Jorgensen’s anger startled Jack. True, they had both put down a lot of whiskey and that turned certain temperaments aggressive, but he still couldn’t see how Daddy could take offence to what he had said.

“All I mean is we were pretty much linked once,” said Jack. “Identified with each other, so to speak. And when you fell, you brought me down with you. I mean, in the eyes of the department.”

“Empires
fall
,” said Daddy. “Guys like you don’t fall. Because your feet never touched the first rung on the ladder, Jackie. You can’t fall from the ground floor.” He paused and raked Jack with a hard look. “And you can give it a rest. I mean, the innocent guise. It hardly matters anymore. It’s been forty years. And I didn’t
fall
, as you so dramatically put it. My legs got chopped out from under me. I’ve got a pretty good idea who chopped them. You. Because you wanted revenge for Linda.”

“You’re wrong,” said Jack. “I only found out about you and Linda after you left town. That’s when the rumour reached me.”

“Really?” Daddy slung one long leg over the other, leaned back in the sofa. “I wish she were here,” he said. “Then the lovely Linda could confirm your story. Or not.”

Jack said, “Ernest somebody or other was the one who ratted you out. Not me. Stoyko told me about him. Ernest consulted with Stoyko about what he should do.”

For a moment Daddy looked uncertain. “Ernest? I can’t picture him.”

“He wasn’t a guy anyone noticed. I don’t remember much about him except that he had enormous aviator glasses. I think he was studying to be some kind of Protestant minister.”

Now Jorgensen was truly baffled. “A theology student? Why would I let a theology student into my seminar?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you let him in because you sniffed him giving off moist, sticky, Christian idealism. You liked knocking the illusions out of people and what better target than a Martin Luther King fan? But Ernest had a trick or two up his sleeve.” Jack could scarcely stop himself from grinning at the thought of Daddy undone by Ernest. “Earnest Ernest the mole, the secret agent man. Never raised an objection to what you said in class, just sat there looking troubled and pained, until his social conscience got the better of him. Until he asked himself what would Martin Luther King do in such a morally compromising situation? Gandhi? Bonhoeffer? It happens to people in the caring professions, those crises of conscience. Apparently Ernest was a very caring guy.”

“Ernest somebody or other,” Jorgensen said softly to himself. “Macdonald would never give me the name of the student who brought the accusations against me. Macdonald said he wanted to keep everything as friendly and informal as possible.”

When Ernest had mentioned to Stoyko how disgusted he was at having to read Drumont’s
La France juive
in Daddy’s seminar, Stoyko had encouraged him to take the matter to the head of the department. And that’s exactly what Ernest had done.

The fact that he’d been done in by somebody he had no memory of seemed particularly galling to Jorgensen. “I
remember the day Macdonald called me into his office for a scolding,” he said. “He had a copy of
La France juive
on his desk, passages bookmarked. He insisted on reading each one out to me. When he finally finished, he said one of my students had come to him to object about the book. Macdonald said he was inclined to sympathize with the objection. He wanted my justification for exposing students to such slanderously anti-Semitic statements.” Daddy smiled. “I said to Macdonald, ‘I, for one, have never
said
anything that could be taken to be anti-Semitic. I have never said anything
slanderous
. The opinions expressed in the written material assigned by me are the author’s, not mine.’ ”

“How politically astute. Playing lawyer, splitting hairs with the head of the department,” said Jack.

Daddy ignored that. Some inner compulsion to revisit his struggle with Macdonald seemed to have gripped him. Daddy said that he had told the head that he had assigned
La France juive
because understanding Drumont’s influence on French public opinion was absolutely necessary to provide a context for the Dreyfus Affair.

He went on to say that Macdonald had wondered out loud if it might not have been wiser for him to summarize Drumont’s views and point out to students how baseless they were. He said the unsophisticated among those who were required to read Drumont’s work could very easily misinterpret, think they were being forced to consume anti-Semitic propaganda. That certainly was what one member of the class thought.

Daddy retorted that he couldn’t be held responsible for what an idiot thought. And as for giving the members of the
class a neat and digestible version of What They Should Think, wasn’t it the policy of the department to encourage the future historians they were training to use original documents and primary sources from which to draw their own conclusions?

None of this went down well with Macdonald. Tottering towards retirement at the end of a career that could not in any sense be described as distinguished made him doubly touchy and resentful at being talked back to by a junior colleague. “He turned nasty just like that,” said Daddy. “If I wouldn’t take the hint then he was going to bring me to heel with the choker chain. You know what the old prick said to me? That above all else he valued a ‘culture of cooperation’ in the department. This was the sort of situation that could very easily get out of hand. The complainant had made threats about contacting B’nai Brith to inform them that an anti-Semite was being given free rein to spread his poison in the university. If I refused to remove
La France juive
from my reading list there would surely be ‘consequences for someone who demonstrates so little concern for the reputation of his colleagues.’ Toe the party line or else was his message. He made it clear that if I didn’t do as I was told, I would have no supporters in the department when I applied for tenure.” Daddy fell into a long silence. Then in a quiet voice that Jack had to strain to hear he said, “I couldn’t do it, Jackie. I couldn’t back down. Not to that fucking mediocrity. Out of the question.”

The living room was almost completely dark now, crowded with shadows. It seemed to Jack that Daddy might be prone to regrets, just as he was. Until that minute he would never
have entertained the idea that Jorgensen could harbour second thoughts. He said, “So you slapped his face. Well, you always liked to slap faces. Although I still don’t know why you had to slap mine. Linda, I mean.”

“There you go being dramatic. Dramatic and bourgeois. Linda and I had a bit of fun. That’s all. I wasn’t slapping your face.”

“But she was my wife. Didn’t that mean anything to you? Why did it have to be her?”

“Why Linda? I don’t know. It’s like when they asked the guy who had decided to climb Mount Everest why he wanted to do it, and he said, Because it’s there.” He shrugged. “Linda was there.”

“That’s your fucking reason?
Because she was there?
”

“Not entirely. Linda always had something about her.”

“Oh really. There’s an excuse for bad behaviour.
She had something about her
. You want to help me understand? Explain to me, as far as you were concerned, what exactly that something was.”

“If you can’t see it, I can’t tell you what it is.”

“Okay, if you can’t explain what your
something
was, explain this,” said Jack, struggling to feign composure. “You wanted to supervise my thesis. You
courted
me. I was the one who was always at your side in the Apollo Room. You counted on me. You believed in me. So why treat me like shit?”

“
Counted
on you?
Believed
in you. Do you think there was something special about you?” Daddy shook his head in disbelief. “Let me explain it to you. The truth is, unlike the rest of the graduates from Bumfuck High and Podunk Comprehensive who made up the student body of this
Harvard of the flatlands, you could read French just competently enough to research a thesis on modern French history. I had to make do with what crooked timber I could lay my hands on. That’s it.”

“I don’t believe that. Not for a second.”

“Indulge yourself. What you need to believe is nothing to me.”

In silence, Jack watched Jorgensen roll a cigarette. Focusing on the fastidious way he manipulated the tobacco and paper helped Jack to put the brakes on his brain, helped stop it from testing the truth of his memories against what had just been said. Daddy began to roll another cigarette; when he finished it, he passed it to Jack. Was this a kind of apology? Jack accepted the cigarette and Daddy poured them each a drink. They lit up, curtaining the room in smoke. After a bit, they started to talk again; stepping back from the past they spoke of nothing but inconsequential things: Jorgensen’s upcoming cruise, the possibility that Jack might take some Spanish lessons come winter. They chatted like retirees sketching lives chock full of small, discreet pleasures.

At about nine o’clock Jorgensen began to exhibit signs of restlessness; a short time later he announced it was time for him to go. At the door, the two men shook hands clumsily. “We’ll have to do this again,” said Jack. It was the sort of thing that he had said to guests a hundred times. The words left his mouth without a thought.

“I don’t think so,” Daddy replied. His face grew sombre under the door light. “Tell Linda I was sorry to have missed her. Good luck when she gets home.” With that gnomic warning, he went down the steps and waded into the darkness.

Jack returned to the living room, stretched out on the suitably hard and penitential Danish mid-century sofa. What had he hoped to gain by bringing up all this old business about Linda? What would an apology or explanation from Daddy be worth? Piss all. Nothing would change. Besides, even in the unlikely event Jorgensen understood his real reasons for acting the way he had all those years ago, he wasn’t a man to make excuses or give away anything he didn’t want to. Years ago, he had stood firm and refused to remove
La France juive
from his class syllabus. His attitude had been fuck the head of the department and fuck the department too. Curiously, there had been none of the consequences his colleagues had feared, no public scandal. In the end, righteous Ernest had apparently lost his nerve and decided not to denounce the most popular professor on campus. He simply dropped the class.

There were, however, consequences for Daddy. By defying Macdonald, he had made sure he would never get tenure. He had no alternative but to hand in his resignation and begin the search for another job. Jack faced consequences too. Jorgensen’s resignation left him sitting high and dry, without a supervisor, and with a thesis topic now irrevocably tainted.

Naturally, Jack had wondered if Ernest hadn’t been right when he accused Daddy of being a rabid Jew-hater. It had seemed conceivable, maybe even likely. Why else had Jorgensen been so insistent that Jack examine the legal proceedings that had condemned Robert Brasillach to death if it wasn’t to discredit them? Why had Daddy been so fascinated with a man who was no more than a minor footnote in a terrible period of French history?

Jack saw another possibility now. Maybe it was only the Brasillach persona and the Brasillach style that had meant anything to Daddy, maybe the man’s opinions had been immaterial to him. Certainly Brasillach had been everything Daddy had longed to be. Brasillach was a genuine boy wonder, reigning
enfant terrible
of French letters, savage annihilator of literary reputations, a real force, not somebody striking bad-boy poses at a second-rate university. Like Daddy, Brasillach had hated everything and anything middle-class, everything and anything that smacked of compromise and caution. Like Daddy he had had an insatiable hunger for attention, and nothing attracted attention like outrageous opinions outrageously expressed. What was more uncompromising and outrageous than fascism? It strutted, preened, scoffed, slandered, and insulted. It dismissed and denied boundaries.

Even when on trial for his life Brasillach couldn’t stop pretending there were no boundaries when it came to him. He refused to take back a single word, refused to show contrition for anything he had said or written. At thirty-five, he was executed for being Robert Brasillach.

With Brasillach as his
beau idéal
, with Brasillach as his emotional doppelgänger, could Daddy do anything else but choose self-destruction too?

Right now, Jack was contending with his own doppelgänger. The one he had seen floating on his fridge door just hours ago was now hovering in his peripheral vision. Trying to see it more clearly did nothing but lure him into sleep.