The Generals (14 page)

Colonel Pigafetta
: Yes, do that, Endicott.

Captain Endicott
: I apologise.

Colonel Pigafetta
: Accepted.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Velder! Look me in the eye! Stand up straight! Do you regret what you have done?

Velder
: Yes, sir. I regret what I have done.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: I don’t believe you.

Velder
: What, sir?

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Don’t speak until you’re spoken to. I don’t believe you, Velder. You’re lying and trying to get out of it. Admit that you’re lying.

Velder
: I’m telling the truth. I am prepared to reply truthfully to all questions.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: You’re lying straight in the face of both myself and the presidium.

Velder
: Sir, I assure …

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Are you out of your mind? You break in on me, you almost interrupt me. When are you to speak? Answer me!

Colonel Orbal
: Why does he keep shouting like that, Carl?

Major von Peters
: Don’t keep fretting, Mateo. This is just what Velder needs.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Answer me, man! When are you to speak?

Velder
: When I’m spoken to, sir.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Admit now that you’re lying. For your own sake. Turn to face the presidium.

Velder
: I assure you that I’m not lying. I have during recent years, thanks to a man called Gerthoffer, learnt to be aware of the faults I have been guilty of. I regret them truly. I also feel ashamed.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Faults? You have the face to call these monstrous offences faults? It’s unheard of. Stand to attention, Velder. You’re not even capable of accepting the simplest disciplinary axiom. You’re hardly worthy of the word human!

Velder
: No, sir.

Major von Peters
: Why don’t you say anything, Bratianu?

Lieutenant Bratianu
: I leave the case with the court.

Major von Peters
: Granted.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: I request thirty minutes’ adjournment of the session in order to give the accused the opportunity to collect himself before the presentation of the next charge. This concerns section seventy-seven, the charge to which Velder still pleads not guilty.

Colonel Orbal
: Must you shout so loudly, Bratianu?

Lieutenant Bratianu
: I assure you that there will be no reason to raise my voice during the rest of today’s proceedings, sir.

Colonel Orbal
: That’s good.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: I requested a pause in the proceedings.

Colonel Orbal
: Oh, of course. Granted. The parties may leave.

Major von Peters
: Brilliant prosecutor. He’s achieved five times as much as Schmidt in a fifth of the time.

Colonel Orbal
: Have you got any beer in the mess, Pigafetta?

Colonel Pigafetta
: Yes, there’s beer in the mess.

Colonel Orbal
: Then let’s go there. The session is adjourned for thirty minutes.

*   *   *

Major von Peters
: He makes a really good prosecutor, Bratianu does. He’s …

Colonel Pigafetta
: I hope you’re not going to say yet again that he’s achieved five times as much work as Captain Schmidt has, and in addition in a fifth of the time …

Major von Peters
: Pity we didn’t have him from the start. It would all be over by now, presumably. It’s extremely annoying, not least because I’ll miss a good official trip. It would have started the day after tomorrow.

Lieutenant Brown
: Is this extra-ordinary court martial prepared to continue the proceedings?

Colonel Orbal
: Now all that gassing starts again.

Tadeusz Haller
: I don’t think it’ll be too bad.

Colonel Orbal
: What? What d’you mean?

Tadeusz Haller
: Anyhow, not if my interpretation of Bratianu’s intentions is correct.

Colonel Orbal
: I don’t know what you mean by that. Let the parties in, Brown.

Lieutenant Brown
: Sir, honoured members of the presidium. Charge number seventy-seven. Fornication, obscene behaviour and bigamy. Does the accused plead guilty? No, you may remain seated, Velder. Let the Defending Officer bring your case.

Captain Endicott
: Velder owns to the behaviour as fact but does not admit to the criminality of it.

Colonel Orbal
: Did you say bigamy? Then he married two people?

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Yes, sir. It is a matter of bigamy. In addition to that, of an extraordinarily unpleasant and detestable kind. This is the main point of the charge. If I understand you correctly, Captain Endicott, the accused does not admit to the criminality of the charge.

Captain Endicott
: The accused pleads not guilty.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: He does not consider himself liable to lawful punishment.

Captain Endicott
: No.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: The accused’s attitude forces me to go to the root of the case. I request to be allowed to call Justice Tadeusz Haller once again as witness.

Colonel Orbal
: What about it, Haller?

Tadeusz Haller
: The situation gives me no choice.

Colonel Orbal
: Granted.

Lieutenant Brown
: You have already taken the oath, Mr Haller. As a formality, I must remind you of the significance of the oath.

Tadeusz Haller
: Naturally.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: To bring some order into the complex of offences which are included in charge seventy-seven of the case, I consider it appropriate to assail the task with a starting point from the moment when the circumstances were first discovered. About a month after the event with the helicopter, Velder came in to the Council with a letter, didn’t he?

Tadeusz Haller
: That’s correct. His letter was one of many which people sent in to the Council. They were collected in a heap, so to speak, in the office and then read by one of the Council members. In most cases, it was considered that the person who happened to receive a letter was also capable of dealing with it. It may seem unlikely, but this system functioned for more than five years.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Which of the members dealt with Velder’s letter?

Tadeusz Haller
: The letter happened to come into Janos Edner’s hands. He read it and clearly found the contents so remarkable that a few days later he took the matter up at a meeting, at which apart from himself, both Aranca Peterson and myself were present.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: The letter has not been kept. Do you remember how it ran?

Tadeusz Haller
: I don’t remember it word for word, but I do remember the contents. To avoid obscurity, I should first like to point out—as in previous circumstances—that there existed means of proclaiming a marriage, or as it was called, manifesting mutual affinity between two people. In time the most usual way became to send a letter to the Council, who then placed the names on a public register. People who wished to separate often did the same thing and their names were struck off. The number of separations, however, was astonishingly low.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: And now to the contents of the letter, Mr Haller.

Tadeusz Haller
: Velder asked, quite politely actually, that the Council should register his marriage and family. Up to that point, everything was part of the routine of the times. The remarkable thing was that he asked if it was all right if he registered a marriage
à troise
, consisting of himself and two women. The two women were sisters, he wrote, and all three of them had lived together for some time, how long for I do not know. He had children by both of them, how many I do not remember.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: What reaction did the letter bring about?

Tadeusz Haller
: Well, I seem to remember that I made the remark that the man must be insane. Janos Edner seemed slightly thoughtful. Even Aranca Peterson, to whom it always seemed to be a point of honour to beat all records in so-called freedom of prejudice, was hesitant. After a while, she shrugged her shoulders and said: ‘Why not? Register them.’ I remember that despite everything, she didn’t sound all that wholehearted. Naturally I was strongly opposed to it. We didn’t discuss the matter either thoroughly or for any length of time. The whole thing ended by Janos Edner saying: ‘As soon as I get the time, I’ll go there and see how things are with them.’

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Did all the members of the Council know Velder at the time?

Tadeusz Haller
: Yes and no. He had been in on everything from the beginning and naturally we knew him in so far as we had spoken to him many times and knew who he was. The person who
saw most of him was naturally General Oswald. But none of us knew anything about his private life. In those days, anyhow, very few people had the opportunity to observe other people’s home circumstances. That was one of the many unspoken principles.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: Did Janos Edner ever visit Velder and what he called his family?

Tadeusz Haller
: It appears so. I know for certain that he did, actually, because about a week later he wrote a letter to me on the matter. He and Aranca Peterson were to go abroad and the point of the letter was to inform me and the others, in case the matter had to be dealt with during their absence. That didn’t happen then, of course.

Lieutenant Bratianu
: This letter is news to me. It is no longer in existence, I presume.

Tadeusz Haller
: I have in fact got it in my pocket. It was kept among my papers and yesterday I suddenly remembered it and hunted it out. It is well worth reading out, in contrast to many other documents, because it gives a summary which would otherwise be difficult to achieve. Lieutenant Brown, you are the authorised reader, please would you …

Lieutenant Brown
: If the presidium will permit …

Colonel Orbal
: Yes, I want to hear it.

Tadeusz Haller
: The beginning isn’t especially interesting.

Colonel Orbal
: I want to hear it all.

Lieutenant Brown
: Old friend, herewith some information on the little I know about Velder, the man with the two sisters. I went there yesterday evening. They live in the northern section of the town, so I had to walk right through it. It was unusually warm last night, that kind of soft dry heat which is pleasant because you don’t sweat. You probably don’t see much of that sort of climate down in Marbella. As I walked through the streets in this silent upside-down science-fiction town which we’ve achieved, it struck me for the umpteenth time that Oswaldsburg really is a success. Stoloff is a genius. Just think of the way he shortens all distances with his mysterious apartment system. But back to Erwin Velder. I had carefully made my intended arrival known two days beforehand, and you could see at once they’d made some preparations. They live in a pleasant and spacious dwelling, and of course in a
good position, like everyone else here.

All of them were at home. Velder was clearly off duty from his job as daddy to Oswald and was trotting around in his stockinged feet and smoking a pipe. He seemed perfectly relaxed and thank God wasn’t taking it all that seriously. The women seemed rather more cautious. The children, three of them, all looked about the same age, two or three, or thereabouts. They came in in their nightshirts to say hullo and then went off to bed. As he has children by both these women, two of them must belong to one, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask which. The women are sisters, twenty-seven and twenty-nine, eighteen months difference between them in age. They were in some way a fascinating sight, dark, well-built women, mature, almost beautiful. Both of them seemed intelligent, even by our standards. They are astonishingly alike in appearance and build, but after a very short while with them, you could see their characters were different in essential points. The elder is more joyful, livelier, much more spontaneous and optimistic than the younger one, who often frowns and thinks, and who also occasionally had a glint of doubt in her eyes. Both of them have brown eyes, by the way. Both seemed to have a sense of humour and are quick-thinking to an equal extent. All of them seemed almost foolishly harmonious. They seem to get up to all sorts of things, different hobbies; they like working with their hands and they’ve a big workshop in the basement which is full of model boats and model planes and batik dresses. It turned out to be impossible to find out who did what, though strangely enough, it seemed to be Velder who mostly made the dresses. What’s so strange about that, anyhow? Tade, we must constantly be on our guard against thinking in cliches. When I’d got over my initial feeling of distaste—this business of inspecting another person’s home—reason soon prevailed. They assured me, almost in chorus, how happy they were. I gradually realised that this registering business meant a great deal to them. In parenthesis, this seems to be a deeply rooted instinct which we hadn’t reckoned with at first. Velder gradually became very unreserved. He told me he’d first been with the elder one, then with the younger one, and then with the elder again. He said that they were so alike that he was constantly muddling them up, but that they both had small traits, not least physical, which he always missed, whichever
one he tried to live with. Neither of the women had been able to adapt herself to living without him, and after a colossal amount of toing and froing, dotted with unspoken tragedies, all three of them had moved in together. This had solved the problem like a magic wand, they said. Since then they hadn’t even quarrelled. I think they were telling the truth. Why
shouldn’t
they be? I was there for about two hours, had some tea and something to eat—one of them seems to be more domestic than the other, by the way. And had some whisky. When I left and saw Velder standing there with his two (almost) identical wives, it was on the tip of my tongue to ask if they had a communal bedroom. I didn’t, of course, but just said goodnight. On the way home I noticed how the thought of these two (almost) identical women set my imagination whirling. Enough of that. My attitude should be clear. See you next Monday. Hi, Janos.