'Fascist murderer,' screamed Chinanda, and pulled the trigger of his automatic. Bullets spat boles across a chart on the kitchen wall which had until that moment announced the health-giving properties of any number of alternative herbs, most of them weeds. Eva regarded the damage balefully and the quads sent up a terrible wail.
Even Flint was horrified. 'Did you kill her?' he asked, suddenly conscious that his pension came before personal satisfaction.
Chinanda ignored the question. 'So now we deal. You send Gudrun down and have the jet ready in one hour only. From now on we don't play games.'
He slammed the phone down.
'Shit,' said Flint. 'All right, get me Wilt. I've got news for him.'
Chapter 20
But Wilt's tactics had changed again. Having run the gamut of roles from chinless wonder to village idiot by way of revolutionary fanatic, which to his mind was merely a more virulent form of the same species, it had slowly dawned on him he was approaching the destabilization of Gudrun Schautz from the wrong angle The woman was an ideologue, and a German one at that. Behind her a terrible tradition stretched back into the mists of history, a cultural heritage of solemn, monstrously serious and ponderous Dichter und Denker, philosophers, artists, poets and thinkers obsessed with the meaning, significance and process of social and historical development. The word Weltanschauung sprang, or at least lumbered, to mind. Wilt had no idea what it meant and doubted if anyone else knew. Something to do with having a world view and about as charming as Lebensraum which should have meant living-room but actually signified the occupation of Europe and as much of Russia as Hitler had been able to lay his hands on. And after Weltanschauung and Lebensraum there came, even less comprehensibly, Weltschmerz or world pity which, considering Fräulein Schautz's propensity for putting bullets into unarmed opponents without a qualm, topped the bill for codswallop. And beyond these dread concepts there were the carriers of the virus, Hegel, Kant, Fichte, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche who had gone clean off his nut from a combination of syphilis, superman and large ladies in helmets trumpeting into theatrical forests at Bayreuth. Wilt had once waded lugubriously through Thus Spake Zarathustra and had come out convinced that either Nietzsche hadn't known what the hell he was on about or, if he had, he had kept it very verbosely to himself. And Nietzsche was sprightly by comparison with Hegel and Schopenhauer, tossing off meaningless maxims with an abandon that was positively joyful. If you wanted the real hard stuff Hegel was your man, while Schopenhauer hit a nadir of gloom that made King Lear sound like an hysterical optimist under the influence of laughing gas. In short, Gudrun Schautz's weak spot was happiness. He could blather on about the horrors of the world until he was blue in the face but she wouldn't bat an eyelid. What was needed to send her reeling was a dose of undiluted good cheer, and Wilt beneath his armour of domestic grumbling was at heart a cheerful man.
And so while Gudrun Schautz cowered in the bathroom and Eva stumbled across the threshold downstairs he bombarded his captive audience with good tiding. The world was a splendid place.
Gudrun Schautz disagreed. 'How can you say that when millions are starving?' she demanded.
'The fact that I can say it means that I'm not starving,' said Wilt, applying the logic he had learnt with Plasterers Two, 'and anyway now that we know they're starving means we can do something about it. Things would be much worse if we didn't know. We couldn't send them food for one thing.'
'And who is sending food?' she asked unwisely.
'To the best of my knowledge the wicked Americans,' said Wilt. 'I'm sure the Russians would if they could grow enough but they don't so they do the next best thing and send them Cubans and tanks to take their minds off their empty stomachs. In any case, not everyone is starving and you've only got to look around you to see what fun it is to be alive.'
Gudrun Schautz's view of the bathroom didn't include fun. It looked uncommonly like a prison cell. But she didn't say so.
'I mean, take me for example,' continued Wilt. 'I have a wonderful wife and four adorable daughters...'
A snort from the bathroom indicated that there were limits to the Schautz woman's credulity.
'Well, you may not think so,' said Wilt, 'but I do. And even if I didn't you've got to admit that the quads love life. They may be a trifle exuberant for some people's taste, but no one can say they're unhappy.'
'And Mrs Wilt is a wonderful wife?' said Gudrun Schautz with advanced scepticism.
'As a matter of fact I couldn't ask for a better,' said Wilt. 'You may not believe me but '
'Believe you? I have heard what she calls you and you are always fighting.'
'Fighting?' said Wilt 'Of course we have our little differences of opinion, but that is essential for a happy marriage. It's what we British call give and take. In Marxist terms I suppose you'd call it thesis, antithesis and synthesis. And the synthesis in our case is happiness.'
'Happiness,' snorted Gudrun Schautz. 'What is happiness?'
Wilt considered the question and the various ways he could answer it. On the whole it seemed wisest to steer clear of the metaphysical and stick to everyday things. 'In my case it happens to be walking to the Tech on a frosty morning with the sun shining and the ducks waddling and knowing I don't have any committee meetings and teaching and going home by moonlight to a really good supper of beef stew and dumplings and then getting into bed with an interesting book.'
'Bourgeois pig. All you think about is your own comfort.'
'It's not all I think about,' said Wilt, 'but you asked for a definition of happiness and that happens to be mine. If you want me to go on I will.'
Gudrun Schautz didn't but Wilt went on all the same. He spoke of picnics by the river on hot summer days and finding a book he wanted in a secondhand shop and Eva's delight when the garlic she had planted actually managed to show signs of growing and his delight at her delight and decorating the Christmas tree with the quads and waking in the morning with them all over the bed tearing open presents and dancing round the room with toys they had wanted and would probably have forgotten about in a week and...Simple family pleasures and surprises which this woman would never know but which were the bedrock of Wilt's existence. And as he retold them they took on a new significance for him and soothed present horrors with a balm of decency and Wilt felt himself to be what he truly was a good man in a quiet and unobtrusive way, married to a good woman in a noisy and ebullient way. If nobody else saw him like this he didn't care. It was what he was that mattered and what he was grew out of what he did, and for the life of him Wilt couldn't see that he had ever done anything wrong. If anything he had done a modicum of good.
That wasn't the way Gudrun Schautz viewed things. Hungry, cold and fearful, she heard Wilt tell of simple things with a growing sense of unreality. She had lived too long in a world of bestial actions taken to achieve the ideal society to be able to stand this catechism of domestic pleasures. And the only answers she could give him were to call him a fascist swine and secretly she knew she would be wasting her breath. In the end she stayed silent and Wilt was about to take pity on her and cut short a modified version of the family's holiday in France when the telephone rang.
'All right, Wilt,' said Flint, 'you can forget the travelogue. This is the crunch. Your missus is downstairs with the children and if the Schautz doesn't come down right now you're going to be responsible for a minor massacre.'