Dreamers of the Day (33 page)

That reply was an opening for me to express the one real reservation I had about the shortened story. He’d left out the emotional climax of
Seven Pillars:
the incident in Deraa. Some people say it never happened as he described it, but something awful did; whatever it was, it scarred him deeply. “I can understand why you would prefer to leave ‘the difficult section’ out of the abridgment,” I wrote, “but that seems to me like skipping the third movement of Mahler’s Ninth. Until you’ve struggled to understand the third movement—with its pileup of polyphony, the crazy complexity that nearly tips into madness—well, I don’t think you can truly appreciate the beauty and consolation of the fourth movement.” I believe he took my point, though nothing came of my suggestion. The abridgment was published with improved punctuation but without reference to Deraa.

And then one morning in 1935, I read the headline:
LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, DEAD AT 46.
He had been out on his motorcycle, speeding along a country lane, when he swerved to avoid two boys on bicycles. It was reported that Colonel Lawrence had suffered a compound fracture of the skull, a hemorrhage of the brain, a broken leg, and many internal injuries.

From the first, his doctors were pessimistic, but even in middle age Lawrence was a man of great physical stamina—like a bull, as Karl once described him. He survived the crash for nearly a week, raising hopes for his recovery, but it was not to be.

You can imagine the shock. You, too, have experienced the sudden and unexpected passing of someone vital and attractive and world famous. Whatever distress their private lives hold, the public lives of such charismatic figures seem charmed, almost magical. Their deaths are all but impossible to comprehend. Many people refuse to believe that something as ordinary as a motoring accident could claim such a luminary.

For years afterward, sightings of Lawrence were reported and conspiracies were rumored. His death was a hoax, some said, providing cover so that he could sneak into northern India and foment rebellion among the Muslims there. I permitted myself to believe these notions for a while, but they were all nonsense.

After his death, his brother Arnold published a book of remembrances by those who’d known Lawrence best. I think I told you that earlier, didn’t I? Anyway, Mr. David Garnett was not alone among Lawrence’s friends in finding “something clerical and celibate” about him. Despite, or perhaps because of, the fervent evangelism of his mother, Lawrence was not religious, but the monastic life in the Royal Air Force had suited him, and he was genuinely happy there. As an elderly Miss el-Akle recalled years later, Lawrence “used all his gifts, great or small, in service to others.” Her observation might seem at odds with what some took to be a shameless seeking after fame, but Winston Churchill agreed with her assessment. “Home, money, comfort, fame, and power meant little or nothing to Lawrence,” he wrote.

In my opinion, Lawrence’s celebrity was as much a tool as his clothing. He used whatever he had to advance causes he believed in, and made himself insignificant otherwise. He was actually quite consistent about that. To work among comrades, doing something useful with his mind and his hands—that was God’s work to him.

When I read about the accident that killed him, I thought, It was a good life, well lived. I wept, on and off, for days.

You might be surprised that Winston Churchill was the last person who came to mind as I cast about for someone who could assist Karl’s family. When you know that Churchill led Britain through the dark days of the Second World War, it’s hard to keep in mind that he spent the years between the two global conflicts without much influence. His party was out of power, and he was relatively unimportant within it. Even among Tories, it must be said, Winston was widely disliked.

In France and Britain and America, we were simply sick of war. Our dead soldiers needed no freshly slaughtered company. Governments around the world were strapped for cash and beset by troubles, left and right. The Depression had impoverished so many; most people were struggling day by day to keep body and soul together. As odious as Herr Hitler was, the very thought of another war with Germany was unbearable. And frankly, so was Winston’s tedious insistence that such a war was inevitable and that it would be better undertaken sooner than later.

Unlike some war lovers I could name, Winston had actually served under fire; unlike most combat veterans, he had relished the experience and never washed his war paint off. You will say that he was right about Hitler, that appeasement was wrong; in the end, the Second World War was a necessary struggle. Too true, but you should also know that going to war was always Winston Churchill’s first resort. Even a stopped clock gives the time correctly twice a day, as the saying goes. You’re still better off with a clock that actually works, in my opinion.

Anyway, I did write to him about helping “my friend Miss Sarah Weilbacher and her mother.” Several weeks later, he replied with a promise that he would see what he could do. “Clemmie sends her regards,” he wrote in closing, “and Thompson says it’s been too long between riots. Do visit, if you can.”

I never heard from him again—not surprising, considering what he had on his plate as war came closer. Nor did I hear from Fräulein Weilbacher after the spring of 1940. I continued to write to her, apprising her of my continuing efforts on her behalf, trying to keep her spirits up. When I wrote in April, the letter was returned marked with the German equivalent of “Addressee unknown.”

Perhaps Karl’s widow and daughter did make their way to safety in Palestine. Perhaps Sarah married and had children. Maybe now, when she tells her
sabra
grandchildren stories about her escape from Nazi Germany, she mentions the American lady who convinced Winston Churchill to help her get to Israel, and that’s why my name is remembered. I know the odds are horrifyingly against it, but I would like to think that’s how things turned out.

If she survived, Sarah must be quite elderly now. Even the youngest of my little library friends are getting on in years. I don’t have much time left, I expect, and to tell the truth? That’s fine with me. Even General Bonaparte has stopped being smug about the longevity of his fame.

You see, we seem to have a sort of aerial view of the world from here. There’s nothing much to do, so we spend a great deal of time watching human history as though it were a sort of film projected on the shifting misty air around us. It was fascinating—at first.

I was sadly amused, for example, to observe how things turned out for the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s. Relentlessly unlucky with the history they were born into, they fought two world wars and bore the brunt of the Depression. With their savings wiped out, many were forced in old age to move in with their grown children. Ancient flappers and decaying swells would shake their heads as their serious sons and respectable daughters raged at teenagers for dabbling in illicit drugs, thoughtless sex, “jungle” music, and lewd dancing.

“Why, we used to drink until everyone was falling down, peeing-on-the-carpet, puking-in-the-streets drunk!” the Lost would mutter, recalling the bootlegging, the jazz, and the parties that went on all night. “How could we have raised such stiffs?”

I myself lived long enough to see the defeat of the tyrants of World War II. Before I died, I thought that people had learned some enduring lessons from the stupendous carnage of that war. The United Nations was formed, and it appeared that the world’s wisest men and women would gather together and find ways to bring reason to bear on their differences. After all that suffering and destruction, I honestly believed people had finally learned to value peace and progress and prosperity.

When I expressed such sentiments in the afterlife, General McClellan laughed at me. (Oh! I forgot to mention it, but he’s here, too. Did you know George McClellan had a great interest in the Middle East? He visited the region shortly after the American Civil War and drank from the Nile during a barge excursion to Luxor.) “You just watch,” he said cynically. “It’ll turn out to be a swindle.”

Francis agreed, with a weary sigh. “Usually the next war is being planned before the ink on the treaty is dry.”

“Peace is the womanish pursuit of cowards,” Ptolemy declared. “My sister put an asp to her breast and died for love. She should have murdered Marc Antony and fought to reclaim Egypt’s glory.”

“At least you died fighting,” General Bonaparte said. “Real men,” he informed me, “will always choose peril and power.”

Not always, but consistently enough. Observing human history has turned out to be a terrible exercise in monotony.

As Mr. Mark Twain observed long ago, there’s hardly a square yard of land anywhere on earth that’s in the possession of its original owners, and I suppose that’s true. The dead don’t blush, but I would if I could when I think how I lectured Winston about colonialism, for my own country rests on the whitening bones of countless Indians. Nobody’s hands are clean. We might not rape and kill and pillage personally, but an awful lot of us were happy to inherit the stolen goods.

Poor Francis has witnessed the cycle for centuries. Armies arrive and lay claim to somebody else’s land. Generations suffer humiliation, theft, and murder. The dispossessed call upon their gods to witness this injustice; theirs is a righteous anger and so retaliation is sacred, for it is meant to redress an affront to all that’s holy. “Savages!” the conquerors cry then. “These rebels are devoid of human morality. We have no choice but to hunt them down and kill them like the wild beasts they are.” They always claim that they have no choice, but what are they doing there in the first place?

“You can see why God weeps,” Francis often says. “How sad, to grant free will and see it used so poorly.”

I haven’t told Francis, because he might be upset by the idea, but I’ve come to pity God, who has observed our kind for millennia, not merely decades, as I have, or centuries, like Francis. The good Lord must find our world a brutally disappointing place.

If He exists at all…

I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but apart from the steadfast faith I see in Francis, there is no sign here of the deity my sister, Lillian, worshipped. Far more in evidence are the gods of war, whom I once assumed were merely mythical: Mars, Ares, Thor. Indra, Guan Yu, Wotan. Ogun. Ashur, the Morrigan. Huitzilopochtli, Bishamon, Sekhmut…All of them are real, and in their numberless hordes, they watch human history with gleeful satisfaction.

Here, along the Nile, Mentu the Falcon-Headed seems to be in charge. “The children of men may prate of peace and mewl of love, but anyone can see the truth,” he roars, lifting his great feathered arm toward his legions. “They worship us!”

I wish I could argue, but the twentieth century certainly didn’t provide much evidence to deploy. I’ve come to believe that Mr. William James was right. (He’s not here, by the way. I just remember what he wrote.) Most people welcome war. Rare and precious as it is, peace seems boring and banal by comparison. People believe easily that battle is a sacrament with young men the necessary sacrifice. They believe darkly that without war’s mystical blood payment, society goes soft and rots from within. And most of them can be swayed by lofty rhetoric and crafty slogans. As war approaches, Mr. James wrote, nations experience a vague, religious exultation. That’s when the blood-red gods begin to dance. “I am Empire,” Mentu howls as the others whirl in ecstasy. “I am the King of Thieves!”

The irony is that each new war begins in hope: hope of restoring lost honor, hope of redressing injustices and reclaiming tarnished glory, hope of a grand new world. Each war ends with the black seeds of the next war sown: honor newly lost, injustice freshly inflicted, a world more broken than before. Always, someone steps forward, ready to water and weed and harvest those black seeds, dreaming of the day when they will bring forth their bounty of vindictive vindication. Into that dreamer’s ear, a blood-red god whispers, “Offer flattery in one hand, fear in the other. Rule or be ruled! Dominate or disappear!”

The rationales warp and twist and shift. The closer war comes, the simpler and stupider the choices. Are you a warrior or a coward? Are you with us or against us?

“All men dream,” Colonel Lawrence wrote, “but not equally. Those who dream by night wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”

“It’s the dreamers who do all the damage,” I decided as we watched yet another reckless rush toward calamity. “I swear, the world would be better off without them! You know what I’m starting to think? If you meet a dreamer of the day, you should wait until he sleeps again, and then just—just shoot him in the head!”

Francis stared, not so much aghast as disappointed.

“Well, that’s what the Bible tells us,” I said, defending myself. “It’s in Deuteronomy. ‘If there arise among you a dreamer of dreams, a false prophet who arises among you, thou shalt not harken unto him and neither shall thine eye pity him, but thou shalt kill him!’”

With half-closed eyes, Francis began to recite, “I have a dream…I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day all of God’s children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—”

“—will join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’” General McClellan finished with him.

“Oh, my,” I said.

“There were those who believed the Reverend King was a dangerous man,” Francis reminded me, “and someone killed him for his dream.”

“All right then, what about Hitler?” I said.

“Gandhi,” Francis countered.

“Pol Pot!”

“Mandela.”

“So how can we tell the false prophets from the true?” I asked.

“By their deeds shall you know them,” George McClellan said. “Wait and see.”