Ten Days in the Hills (34 page)

“I told you,” said Elena. “I told you he was in support of the war.”

“Most people are,” said Charlie.

“Most Americans may be,” said Elena. “That’s not the same as most people. Most
people
are not in support of the war, and view Americans as a greater danger to the world than Saddam Hussein. Americans have biological and chemical and nuclear weapons and have used them. Most
people
think they could use them again. A couple of months ago, there was an article in some paper about how the Pentagon was trying to decide on possible nuclear targets in Iraq.”

“I can’t believe that,” said Paul.

“She showed me the article,” said Max. “It said that the Pentagon has changed the classification of nuclear weapons so that they are now considered ‘conventional’ rather than ‘special.’”

“It’s not like she’s making it sound,” said Charlie. “There might be targets—”

“Like Nagasaki,” said Elena. “There was a good target. Hiroshima, too.”

“Now you’re bitching about the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima? They were military cities! It’s not like they bombed temples or something like that—”

“Well, they firebombed Tokyo and Kobe. Kobe was full of temples. When they firebombed Tokyo, they killed a hundred thousand civilians.”

“I saw this anime movie a couple of years ago about that,” said Simon. “It was called
The Grave of the Fireflies.
It was a cartoon about these kids who were orphaned in the firebombing of Kobe. The guy I was with couldn’t stop crying. We thought it was going to be like
My Neighbor Totoro
or something like that.”

“What is wrong with you?” exclaimed Charlie, jumping up from the table. “The Japs attacked first. They attacked Pearl Harbor!”

“They didn’t attack Honolulu, did they? They didn’t attack, oh, Lihue?”

“But they attacked Nanking! What they did in Nanking makes Rwanda look like a walk in the park! Are you saying that the U.S. should just stand by?” Charlie walked around the table, waving his spoon.

“Well,” said Zoe, “the U.S. did stand by and not do anything about Nanking. I don’t think the bombing of Tokyo, Kobe, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki had anything to do with Nanking.” She glanced at Paul, who was gazing at her—encouragingly, Isabel thought. It was a little irritating.

“I can’t believe you said that, Mom,” said Isabel.

“Why not?” exclaimed Zoe. “There was a five-year time lag between Nanking and Pearl—”

“No. I mean, I can’t believe you know anything about it.”

“Well, Mom read that book. Didn’t you read that book, Delphine, by that girl?”

“
The Rape of Nanking,
by Iris Chang. I read most of it. It was pretty hard going.”

“Well, I read some of it, too,” said Zoe. “I picked up the main points. You always treat me as if I were a total ditz.”

“Oh,” said Isabel. But she thought, Just a ditz, not a total ditz. There’s a difference in degree that should be noted.

“That book was on the best-seller list for weeks and weeks,” said Delphine.

Charlie opened the front door and went outside. The door slammed behind him. Simon rubbed his hands over his head and said, “Don’t come back in.” Isabel, and, she assumed, everyone else, could hear Charlie striding around on the deck, and then the door opened again. Simon said, “Whoops. Came back in.”

Charlie’s face was red. He looked at Max, but he clearly was talking to Elena. He said, evenly and clearly, as if explaining this one more time, but this was going to be the last time, so help him God, “Where
were
you on 9/11? Did you not see what happened? Did you not see those towers fall and those people die? Is that why you propose that we sit around waiting until it happens again?”

“Charlie, they weren’t Ira—” said Elena.

“Who do you think the ‘great Satan’ is?”

“Those were Ira—”

“What’s the difference? Nobody has been able to explain to me the difference. This extremist mullah comes from Iran, this extremist mullah comes from Egypt, this extremist mullah lives in Saudi Arabia, this one moved from Pakistan to England twenty years ago. But they are all calling for the end to America. You want to go down without a fight? You want to say, Oh well, you’re entitled to your point of view? They want you dead. Why don’t you want them dead?”

“Saddam isn’t a mullah.”

“But he’s funneling them money and weapons.”

“He says he’s not. Lots of people say he’s not, because the mullahs hate him and he hates them.”

“You believe that? You hate Tom DeLay and Randall Terry on religious grounds, I’m sure, but if it came time for one of them to call out the Air Force and the Coast Guard to defend the country from attack, wouldn’t your religious differences fall by the wayside?”

“How can he prove a negative? No one can prove a negative. You’ve got him in a position where you have made an accusation, and because he has to prove a negative, your accusation automatically becomes a conviction. The inspectors are going around doing their job, but the administration doesn’t want them to do their job.”

“You’re giving Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt? After he gassed the Kurds? After he’s purged his own population?”

“He used American gas to gas them! Rumsfeld was shaking his hand. He did what they wanted him to do!”

“I don’t believe that. I believe that he was like a rogue or a renegade. He did not do what they wanted him to do, and now they have to take him out.”

“I think,” said Delphine, “that we’ve gotten away from Nanking and Nagasaki and the Germans.”

“What does that mean?” said Zoe.

“The people being bombed aren’t Saddam Hussein. He’s in a bunker somewhere. They might catch him and they might not—”

“Exactly,” said Elena. “We know Al Qaeda people blew up the Twin Towers, but we’re punishing Saddam Hussein. That’s like I have two kids who are cousins and who hate each other, and I know that one of them blew up the kitchen, so I say to that one, ‘Jimmy, you blew up the kitchen, so, just to teach you not to do that anymore, I’m going to give Johnny here, who had nothing to do with it, a whipping.’ It makes no sense. Jimmy hates Johnny. Jimmy’s glad Johnny gets a whipping. He won! He manipulated me and he got back at the hated cousin.”

Simon said, “Go, Mom!”

“That’s not what I was getting at,” said Delphine. “What I was getting at was the idea of whether there are actually any innocent civilians or not. Are you an innocent civilian, Elena?”

Elena looked at her, a little nonplussed. Then she said, “Well, no. We’re all implicated in what the administration is doing. That’s what makes me so mad.”

“So, if you’re implicated, that means, in an extreme case, that firebombing you is justified, because if it turns out that your government is seen by someone else as a rogue government that needs to be stopped at all costs, all costs may include your life.”

“Well, I—Yes. I agree with that.”

“So what about the Iraqis? Lots of them have left. That means that lots of them had a chance to leave and decided to stay and accommodate Saddam in some way. Most of them have reasons. Let’s say one reason is trying to change the regime from within. That’s what you’ve been doing.”

Isabel had to admit that she found this line of reasoning a little shocking, but she suspected that Delphine was just making a point.

“Yes,” said Elena, nodding.

“So—the Iraqi population, like the German population and the Japanese population and the American population, is not made up of innocent civilians. It’s made up of people who saw more or less what was happening and decided for various reasons to take their chances.”

“Yes, but—” said Zoe.

“Yes, but what about the children? That’s what you’re going to say,” said Delphine. Isabel did not think Zoe was going to mention the children, but Isabel herself might have. “That’s what I was wondering about when I read that piece about Germany. Five hundred thousand casualties and only about fifteen percent of them children. That seems low to me. Where were the children? It must have been like in England during the Blitz. The children got sent away because the parents knew something was going to happen. I don’t think that, in terms of guilt and innocence, you can factor the children in or factor them out. They share their parents’ conditions even of guilt and innocence until they are, say, fifteen or so. Then they can make their own choices. Anyway, whenever you decide to take your chances, you have to live with chance, and chance might be that you’ll get firebombed. So I disagree with the tone of that article, about the poor Germans. Didn’t they see
Triumph of the Will
? Couldn’t they tell that Adolf Hitler was up to something? Why didn’t they stop him? And when the soldiers came home on leave from Nanking, wasn’t anyone horrified at what they reported? And if they didn’t report anything, wasn’t that because they knew they’d committed crimes?”

“Exactly,” said Charlie.

Now Delphine turned to him. “I guess you consider yourself an innocent civilian,” she said.

“Uh-oh,” said Simon. “Run for the hills.”

Isabel smiled. She saw that Max was smiling, too. Paul was eating kiwifruit.

“Welllll,” said Charlie, recognizing a potential trick, “no one is innocent. But I suppose I consider myself a not-guilty civilian. My guilt has not been proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, and so I am at liberty.” He smiled at his own cleverness, and Zoe said, “I see that.”

“But you voted for Bush in 2000,” said Delphine.

“Of course, but I didn’t expect him to start a war. I voted for him for other reasons.”

“But are you on board for all of his policies, and in addition to that, do you agree with all or most of them?”

“Yeah, I would say so.”

This answer sounded honest to Isabel, like the sort of cocky answer a detainee might unwittingly make to his interrogators early in the questioning process.

“But a lot of his policies are pretty risky. Like this tax-cut thing. Big tax cuts are going to raise the deficit, and if he makes them permanent, some economists think that could put the U.S. in danger of having something happen here like has happened in Argentina and those places, where the economy has collapsed and the middle class has disappeared. What if that happened?”

“Well, I would hope that wouldn’t happen. Lots of economists say—”

“But they disagree. It’s a risky thing to do, and the gamble could fail, right?”

“Well, I guess. Yeah. For the sake of argument.”

“So, if the economy failed, and you were implicated in its failure by voting for and agreeing to administration policies, what would that mean for you?”

“Well, I’ve got my pension plan and some other investments and—” But he stopped there. “Take the Fifth.”

“Money overseas,” said Cassie.

Charlie didn’t say no. Then he said, “But I’m permitted to save myself.”

“Are you?” said Delphine. “Are you permitted to promote risk for others and keep some security for yourself?”

“Well, that’s a natural human thing to do—”

“But we’re not talking about natural. We’re talking about guilty or not guilty. What you’re saying is that you are justified in getting away with what you can get away with, right?”

“I guess, right.”

“So in that you’re in agreement with the administration, too, right?”

“In some sense, right. I admit that.”

“So, since a lot of people around the world disagree with the policies you support, you are more or less in the same position as a German civilian or a Japanese civilian before the Second World War. Your ideas could work out, but they might not. Are you ready to pay the price if they don’t, and you can’t get away with it?”

“Oh, this is a stupid argument—”

“Answer the question,” said Zoe. “I think it’s a good question, don’t you, dear one?”

Everyone looked at Paul, but he looked at Charlie.

Finally, Charlie said, “No. I’m not. First of all, I don’t think there is going to be a price to pay, and, second of all, if they want it, they’re going to have to come and get it.”

“So,” Isabel heard herself say, “we’ve established that Charlie doesn’t care that much about guilt or innocence.”

Cassie folded the paper and set it neatly beside her plate. “From a certain perspective, though, what’s wrong with lots of people dying? Thirty-six million people died in the Second World War, and—boom—they just turned up again, thicker than ever, like cockroaches that get resistant to some pesticide. What was that Greek myth, the Hydra? You cut off a head, and two grow back. Well, you kill a person, and two pop up. The two new ones are a lot more expensive than the original one ever was. The two new cockroaches are bigger, hungrier, and more aggressive than the one you poisoned. It’s evolution at work. They talk about technology all the time—technology and human imagination and creative thought are going to save us. I say, what if they actually do? I see those things as a form of mutation, like the mutations in mosquito populations that allow them to carry a virus without succumbing to it. Like humans, they just get more and more lethal.”

Max was gazing at Cassie with an amused look on his face. He said, “Easy for you to say.”

“Well, of course, so shoot me.”

Delphine grinned.

“No, I mean it. Shoot me. I’m seventy-six years old. Personally, I think that birth control hasn’t worked. It hasn’t slowed or controlled population growth, and it’s just changed the composition of the population in a negative way. I think upon retirement you ought to have to apply to continue to exist. You ought to have to show that your life is worth something and that you have something to contribute. If you can’t show that, then off you go. Complainers and worriers and crabby old men could be given an ultimatum—mind your manners, get some self-knowledge, or be translated to a higher plane sooner rather than later.”

“Present company excluded, right?” said Max.

“No, present company included. Me included, Delphine included, you included, Charlie included. Declare what you have to offer or step aside! What’s stopping you? The only thing besides custom and inertia that’s stopping you is that it’s so hard to do. There’s always a mess. When an individual decides to do it, it’s a pretty big mess. I think that’s actually what stops a lot of people. When there’s any kind of mass killing, like a war or an epidemic, it’s a huge mess, and everyone who survives is traumatized, but if you had a system where it was understood beforehand that you could live if you accepted certain rules, and one of them was that your life would only be so long—say, sixty-five or seventy years—then you could do your thing, prepare for the end, and go. What could be bad about that? The alternatives are showing themselves to be worse.”