The Weight of Numbers (26 page)

There, on the landing, a handsome carved mahogany bookcase with glass doors sums up in little the Society's pre-occupations:
Science and Sanity
by Alfred Korzybski; a slim pocket hardback called
You Can Speak With Your Dad
.

Anthony Burden, intrigued, goes to fetch this book – only to discover, with a chuckle, that he has misread the title. This misprision of his is something he might mention to the doctor, a revealing ‘Freudian slip' which may afford them a minute or two of entertainment, and perhaps an insight or two, before the paddles are applied.

Dr Loránt Pál is not a psychoanalyst, but in the year he spent in Vienna studying brain-behaviour relationships, he learned a trick or two. Take, for example, his consulting room. Pál has transformed his
modest upstairs space at the Society into something which resembles the retreat of an elderly gnostic: antique rugs, shelves crammed with cryptic
objets
; framed photographs of a middle-European city.

The machineries of his therapy, by contrast, are wonderfully explicit. Turning the brass wheels underneath a narrow table, padded with horse hair and upholstered in red leather, adjusts the height and angle of the pads on which Anthony lies down, ready for his seizure. Anthony, seeing this table for the first time, imagines a rack. This impression is not lessened by the rasping tightness of the leather straps with which he is bound, the chill kiss of paddles at his temples – metal paddles, with small wooden handles, like library stamps – and the unforgettable taste of the rubber gat that keeps him from swallowing his tongue.

The spasms he endures exhaust him. Several days, sometimes, may pass before he can move without discomfort. Of course, Rachel is worried.

Sighing, John Arven agrees to do his part, as a friend of the family, to put her mind at rest. ‘But for goodness' sake, Anthony, what are you doing to yourself? I never expected – I mean, is all this still necessary? Why do you keep putting yourself through this mill?'

Anthony, sprawled blear-eyed and exhausted across his couch, blinks up at his faithful old friend as, from the very bottom of a surprisingly comfortable warm well, one might blink up at the shaft's daylit opening. ‘What mill?' The tiredness brought on by his treatments feels positively healthful. After his spasms it is as if – having never knowingly taken a day's exercise in his life – he has run a heroic distance. He could take any amount of this physical ‘punishment'.

He is fascinated by the way Dr Loránt's machine dims certain memories; even, in some happy cases, erasing them. His mind is losing its tackiness. It is losing its purchase on the pure everyday. It is becoming more and more polished, more glossy, more adamantine.

Of course, Dr Loránt's ‘massage of his diencephalic centres' doesn't come without its sacrifices. The music Anthony loves is losing its power
now. Palaces no longer ascend in handsome etched volutes up to the ceilings of his mind. At the resolution of a particularly difficult modulation, no Brunelleschi dome sphincters at nipple's point. All is flat, a grey landscape, a Friesen island of the mind, where fallow fields dribble off in gorse and dunes towards a spit of sand that slides, with aching slowness, beneath a shallow sea.

Dr Loránt is delighted. ‘Our enemy,' he tells Anthony, ‘is
evasion
. I see this clearly now. You are
evading
your
inversion.
You are trying to turn it into something that you can control. This is not the solution. Tell me, Mr Burden, do you dance?'

Anthony, fascinated, shakes his head. ‘Never could stand it,' he concedes.

‘You see?' the doctor laughs. ‘You are afraid that if you dance to music, you will take the woman's part. So you turn music into architecture – into something you can control! These gifts of yours are veils, behind which you protect yourself from direct experience. I will go further (I think you are ready for this): I believe your
inversion
is itself an
evasion
! But what is it that you are evading? What are you running from, that the anus makes for you a hiding place? This is what we must discover!'

So Anthony, drunk on an orgy of self-annihilation, waves himself goodbye. His work means nothing to him now. He cannot understand it. He boxes up his exercise books and is carrying them out to the bin when he remembers the Society where Pál has his consulting rooms. The irony of it tickles him. He will donate his books to the Society. Cataloguing them will give Miriam Miller something to do during these long, lonely winter nights.

That same evening, when he returns home, Anthony embraces Rachel and bursts into tears.

All evening he stumbles over what he has to say. That he longs to participate in the muscular future of her people, with its hardships and setbacks. ‘Our future lies in Palestine,' he says. ‘You have been right all
along, my darling. Any life worth living belongs to the land. Land you can grow things in. Land you can be buried in.'

Rachel, dumbfounded, stares down at him, sprawled exhausted on their couch. ‘Has this something to do with your accident?'

He opens his mouth, but there are no words.

‘Why do you shut me out?' she says.

He can only shake his head.

‘Tell me,' she says. ‘I will understand.'

Of that he has no doubt. Oh, it is hopeless, hopeless… ‘My love,' he sobs, and tells her everything.

Afterwards he closes his eyes, spent, content, and waits for his world to end.

Of course, it does not.

He opens his eyes.

Rachel, her brown eyes full of a terrible love, bends over him and strokes him behind his ears.

Now they have a project to work towards, hand in hand, Anthony and Rachel are able to behave more freely towards each other. The air between them is clear. Rachel does not have to value Anthony's work. Anthony no longer pretends to find Rachel attractive.

Their marriage is empty, and therefore powerful: Anthony's honesty has created a vacuum which the future rushes to fill.

As the war in Europe ends, Rachel's friends are making their way to the Protectorate. They send the couple literature from the United Workers' Party. They send photographs of themselves brandishing guns from the Scda Arms Works in Czechoslovakia.

Anthony says they should go. It is exactly what he needs and wants. ‘You see, I used to think we were all just bits of some greater whole, a sort of Leviathan. Maybe that's true. I realize now, though, it is up to each man, how he lives. We each decide what we are a part of, and what we stand apart from. For the first time in my life, I feel ready to make
that choice. I feel ready to let go, and live my life at a human scale at last. To dig. To hoe. Think of it! To breed…'

‘Once you are better, my love,' Rachel promises, still not quite able to understand him. ‘As soon as you're quite, quite well.'

In 1950, the Migdal Tikvah kibbutz, founded by the Kibbutz Artzi movement in 1930, consists of two long accommodation buildings, an armoury, a school and a canteen. There are no roads, just gaps between the buildings, tracks of beaten earth, and here and there a puddle of concrete to plug a pot-hole. The concrete is all broken up, making stones which the children kick about, viciously, as though they were harrying small animals.

The kibbutz is built on a hillside some way above the tree-line. There is no natural shade to speak of – only the mathematical trapezoids of darkness cast by the squat buildings. Anthony Burden's dazzled eyes cannot adapt to the darkness of these dangerous metallic shadows. He is afraid to approach them. He imagines children in them, watching him with wide, unblinking eyes made dull by dust.

In the machinery store, the muscular men of the kibbutz work in silence. The middle-aged ones made Aliyah here in the 1920s. The youths, barely pubescent, are their children. An intermediate generation fled here as teenagers during the world war. Anthony imagines the stirring letter he will write this evening to Sage:

… They come from Bucharest, from Krakow, from Berlin and from Pécs. They speak Yiddish, German, Hebrew, whatever tongue will serve. They communicate with each other by means of strong, muscular gestures, miming the actions at which they are habitually engaged: ploughing, hoeing, planting, digging, driving, wrestling, shooting. They are miming out a new life for themselves, all the while expecting Soviet forces to roll in from the north, to help them realize their final vision.

Anthony raises a hand to these sons of toil.

They do not respond.

He gives them an ameliorating little wave.

Nothing.

He will write: ‘
Give my love to Rachel
.'

He comes to the lip of the ledge on which the kibbutz is built. Fields edge up the lower slopes of the hill opposite in a half-hearted, experimental manner. There is nothing cooling or vegetable about those squares of malarial green. They look more like swatches, trial colours for a better creation. Here and there the earth is reddish orange, in other places it is yellowish-orange. Mostly it is greyish-orange.

He misses his wife.

Oranges are the kibbutz's speciality. The oranges of the Migdal Tikvah kibbutz grow from green pips to rock-hard little fruit the size and weight of limes. Unspeaking and unsmiling, the kibbutzim teach Anthony Burden how to prune and how to tend.

The oranges swell. Ditches are dug, cisterns are cast, sacks of concrete and buckets of sand are lined up ready for mixing. Lorries arrive bearing lengths of clay pipe to feed the new cisterns, and pumps that never work, so that the old men spend the day deep in the metallic shadows, stripping the pumps, while Anthony and men younger than him work under the blazing sun among the parched trees.

Looking around him as he works, Anthony sees that the young kibbutzim tend the trees with the same unsmiling seriousness with which they fire their guns at targets set among the rocks. The faces of his comrades look as though they have been carved out of thorn. They looked oiled, no,
resined
. They look as if the sun might set them alight. Burning, they might crack open like seed-pods revealing new, even more brightly burnished faces. He can no more look at the faces around him than he can look into the sun reflected off a polished metal mask.

At first Anthony supposed that these young, fit, handsome men must resent the sweaty hours they have to spend among the trees – that they
would sooner be at target practice. He was wrong about this. When the muscular young men take up their guns and fire at the rocks, they have it in mind to prune the very stone, to tend it with a savage love into the shapes they require, until no stone is left unshaped, and the whole land has the even solidity of the bunkhouses in which they sleep.

He cannot speak to them. His rusty schoolboy German barely allows him to ask directions, never mind converse. On their arrival it was left to Rachel, his wife, the conscientious student who had already picked up the rudiments of Hebrew from night classes in London, to teach the ancient tongue to her husband. Her sudden decision to return to England has left him deaf and mute.

In his infrequent letters to friends, he puts on a brave face.

… In this deserted land the people of Migdal Tikvah are shaping a socialist Eden. Soon the Czechoslovakians will be here themselves, in arms with their comrades the Russians, to realize this latest outpost of edenic Soviet futurity, here in ancient Palestine. For now they send guns and promises, and the muscular young kibbutzim of the Migdal Tikvah kibbutz practise among the orange groves, shooting at targets crudely stencilled on the rocks.

The inclusiveness of this vision – the rallying call to a common cause – is illusory. These are not and never were his politics. It is just that he has learned to ape his wife's opinions. This is not his battle; it is hers – or was.

Bad enough that she should have abandoned her dreams; did she really have to leave him trapped in their wreckage?

Since Rachel left him, Anthony has learned to resent this nation. He resents the rocks over which he stumbles, and the sunlight which swells and reddens his skin, so that he looks ever more like a sunburnt child. However hard he works, he has a dilettante's face. A soft, exquisite face: he probes and prods its schoolboy redness and hopes in
vain for it to acquire a metallic sheen.

He resents, finally and overwhelmingly, the orange trees themselves. This is their first commercially viable fruiting, and the elder settlers, entering the groves, weep to see this sweet fraction of their dreams realized. As he labours and stirs the cement for new cisterns, Anthony wants to dash the men's tears from their eyes with his fists.

Now it is time for the kibbutzim to harvest the oranges; crate them; transport them; worst of all, eat them. For the next month, at the Migdal Tikvah kibbutz, oranges will be the only fruit. Glasses of the corrosive syrup are served at every grainy, garlicky meal. Migdal Tikvah's orange juice eats into Anthony's gums like battery acid. It drills a line of tiny holes across the tip of his tongue and plants a row of ulcers there. It bloats him like a toxin. At night, it bubbles through the lining of his stomach, eating holes in him that he can locate precisely, that he can count. Its colour, drunk out of a tin mug, is as brilliantly artificial as car paint, and it discolours the tin, leaving little black patches that no amount of scrubbing will remove.

Each morning, Anthony rolls his bloated stomach out of the dormitory pallet, the stomach that does not seem to belong to him any more. It has become something apart from him, some unit of production intimately connected with the economy of oranges. He enters the canteen and there, beside every bowl of gruel, sits a plate heaped with oranges. Then he shambles, with the strange crab-like gait he has developed since his therapy, down the hill to the terraces marked with huge boulders that the original settlers, now old men, have spent their youth moving aside – by main force, they would have you believe, by donkey and hemp rope and pulley and finally with their bare hands. He pauses a moment, looking over the rough, rusty land beyond the hill, imagining that every square foot is covered in discarded orange peel, peel gone rusty, peel bleached in the sun and soft and rotten in shadow, so that flecks of green here and there are a thin penicillin-like mould growing over the discarded peel covering the earth. Then, hearing the
tractor, he comes away from the edge and goes and takes a corner of tarpaulin and helps spread it over the ground, and then the young men take their hooks and scissors and ladders and they harvest the oranges, which fall to the ground with a soft, complacent thump. These are the poorest of the crop, the bruised runts that he will eat this afternoon, because the kibbutzim, drunk on oranges, these emblems of their success, have stopped the midday bread-making in order to make room for more delicious oranges.