"Will it mean trouble—here, I mean?" asked his mother, taking hold of his arm.
He shook his head. "I've no idea. We're pretty close to the Japanese concession now. Maybe we should go back and speak to Father?"
She was silent. She liked to make the decisions. But the political situation had never interested her. She always found it boring. Now she had no information on which to base a decision. "Yes, I suppose so," she said reluctantly. "That was gunfire, wasn't it?"
"It was something exploding." Karl suddenly felt an intense hatred for the Japanese. With all their meddling, they could ruin Shanghai for everybody. He took up the speaking tube. "Back to the Bund, Hank, as soon as you can get out of here."
They entered a wider thoroughfare and Karl saw the crowds part as if swept back by invisible walls. Through the corridor thus created a Chinese youth came running. Hank had pulled out into the street and now the car was blocking the youth's progress.
Behind the youth came three little Japanese policemen with clubs and pistols in their hands. They were chasing him. The youth did not appear to see the car and he struck it in the way that a moth might strike a screen door. He fell backwards and then tried to scramble up. He was completely dazed. Karl wondered what to do.
The Japanese policemen flung themselves onto the youth, their clubs rising and falling.
Karl started to wind down the window. "Hey!"
His mother buried her face in his shoulder. He saw a smear of powder on his lapel. "Oh, Karl!"
He put his arm around his mother's warm body. The smell of her perfume seemed even stronger. He saw blood well out of the bruises on the Chinese boy's face and back. Hank was trying to turn the car into the main street. A tug went past on the river, its funnel belching white smoke which contrasted sharply with the oily black smoke rising over Chapei. It was strange how peaceful the rest of the tall city looked. The New York of the Orient.
The clubs continued to rise and fall. His mother snuffled in his shoulder. Karl turned his eyes away from the sight. The car began to reverse a fraction. There was a tap on the window. One of the Japanese policemen stood there, bowing and smiling and saluting with his bloody club. He made some apology in Japanese and grinned widely, shaking his free hand as if to say "Such things happen in even the best-run city." Karl leant over and wound the window right up.
The car pulled away from the scene. He didn't look back.
As they drove towards the Bund again, Karl's mother sniffed, straightened up and fumbled in her handbag for a handkerchief. "Oh, that awful man," she said. "And those policemen! They must have been drunk."
Karl was happy to accept this explanation. "Of course," he said. "They were drunk."
The car stopped.
— There is certainly something secure, says Karl, about a world which excludes women. Which is not to say that I deny their charms and their virtues. But I can understand, suddenly, one of the strong appeals of the homosexual world.
— Now you're thinking of substituting one narrow world for another, warns his friend.—I spoke earlier of broadening your experience. That's quite different.
— What if the person isn't up to being broadened? I mean, we all have a limited capacity for absorbing experience, surely? I could be, as it were, naturally narrow.
Karl feels euphoric. He smiles slowly.
— No one but a moron could be that, says the black man, just a trifle prudishly.
A girl you know has become pregnant.
You are almost certainly the father.
The girl is not certain whether she wants the baby or not. She asks you to help her to decide.
Would you try to convince her to have an abortion?
Would you try to convince her to have the baby?
Would you offer to support her, if she had the baby?
Would you deny that the baby was yours and have nothing further to do with the girl?
If she decided to have an abortion and it had to be done privately, would you offer to pay the whole cost?
Would you tell her that the decision was entirely up to her and refuse to be drawn into any discussion?
12
Memories of Berlin: 1935:
Dusty
King Alexander of Yugoslavia was assassinated at Marseilles yesterday. M. Barthou, the French Foreign Minister, who had gone to the port to greet the King, was also murdered.
The assassin jumped on the running board of the car in which the King, who had only just landed, was driving with M. Barthou, General Georges, and Admiral Berthelot, and fired a series of shots. The General and the Admiral were both wounded. The murderer, believed to be a Croat, was killed by the guard.
King Alexander was on his way to Paris for a visit of great political importance. It was to have been the occasion of an attempt to find means, through French mediation, of improving relations between Yugoslavia, the ally of France, and Italy, as preliminary to a Franco-Italian rapprochement.
A policy of keeping the United States "unentangled and free" was announced here today by President Roosevelt in his first public utterance recognizing the gravity of war abroad...
The general advance of the Italian armies from Eritrea has begun. At dawn today 20,000 men in four columns crossed the Mareb River which forms the Ethiopian boundary. Groups of light tanks operating ahead covered the crossing. Airplanes hovered overhead and long range guns fired occasional shells to discourage opposition. Italian planes bombed Adowa and Adigrat...
The Italian government is capable of almost any kind of treason.
He looks up into the cloudy eyes of his friend. You seem quite pale, he says.—Why doesn't anything happen? Karl wipes his lips.
— That's none of your business, says the black man. I feel like a drink. Do you want one? He turns and goes to the table where the waiter has arranged a variety of drinks.—What do you like?
— I don't drink much. A lemonade will do.
— A glass of wine?
— All right.
Karl accepts the glass of red wine. He holds it up to a beam of moonlight.— I wish I could help you, he says.
— Don't worry about that.
— If you say so. Karl sits down on the edge of the bed, swinging his legs and sipping his wine.—Do you think I'm unimaginative?
— I suppose you are. But that's nothing to do with it.
— Maybe that's why I never made much of a painter.
— There are lots of different kinds of imagination.
— Yes. It's a funny thing. Imagination is man's greatest strength and yet it's also his central weakness. Imagination was a survival trait at first, but when it becomes overdeveloped it destroys him, like the tusks of a mammoth growing into its own eyes. Imagination, in my opinion, is being given far too much play, these days.
— I think you're talking nonsense, says the black man. It is true that he looks paler. Perhaps that is the moonlight too, thinks Karl.
— Probably, agrees Karl.
— Imagination can allow man to become anything he wants to be. It gives us everything that is human.
— And it creates the fears, the bogeymen, the devils which destroy us. Unreasoning terror. What other beast has fears like ours?
The black man gives him an intense glare. For a moment his eyes seem to shine with a feral gleam. But perhaps that is the moonlight again.