Beauty. Surely from Zululand, where you have such an abundance of unclothed bodies to gaze on, you must concede, Blanche, that there is nothing more humanly beautiful than a woman's breasts. Nothing more humanly beautiful, nothing more humanly mysterious than why men should want to caress, over and over again, with paintbrush or chisel or hand, these oddly curved fatty sacs, and nothing more humanly endearing than our complicity (I mean the complicity of women) in their obsession.
The humanities teach us humanity. After the centuries-long Christian night, the humanities give us back our beauty, our human beauty. That was what you forgot to say. That is what the Greeks teach us, Blanche, the right Greeks. Think about it.
Your sister, Elizabeth
That is what she writes. What she does not write, what she has no intention of writing, is how the story proceeds, the story of Mr Phillips and their Saturday-afternoon sittings at the old folks' home.
For the story does not end as she said, with her covering herself decently and Mr Phillips writing his thank-you note and her quitting his rooms. No, the story picks up again a month later, when her mother mentions that Mr Phillips has been to hospital for another dose of radiation and has come back in a bad way, very low, very despondent. Why doesn't she look in on him, try to cheer him up?
She knocks at his door, waits a moment, enters.
No mistaking the signs. Not a spry old fellow any longer, just an old fellow, an old bag of bones waiting to be carted away. Flat on his back with his arms spread out, his hands slack, hands that have in the space of a month become so blue and knobbly that you wonder they were ever fit to hold a brush. Not sleeping, just lying, waiting. Listening too, no doubt, to the sounds inside, the sounds of the pain. (Let us not forget that, Blanche, she thinks to herself: let us not forget the pain. The terrors of death not enough: on top of them the pain, crescendo. As a way of putting to a close our visit to this world, what could he more ingeniously, more devilishly cruel?)
She stands at the old man's bedside; she takes his hand. Though there is nothing pleasant in folding that cold, blue hand in her own, she does it. Nothing pleasant in any of this. She holds the hand and squeezes it and says 'Aidan!' in her most affectionate voice and watches the tears well up, the old-folks' tears that do not count for much because they come too easily. Nothing more for her to say and nothing, certainly, for him to say through the hole in his throat, now decently covered with a wad of gauze. She stands there stroking his hand until Nurse Naidoo comes around with the tea trolley and the pills; then she helps him to sit up to drink (out of a cup with a spout, like a two-year-old, the humiliations have no limit).
The next Saturday she visits him again, and the next; it becomes a new routine. She holds his hand and tries to comfort him while marking with a cold eye the stages of his decline. The visits take place with a minimum of words. But there is one Saturday when, a little more chipper than usual, a little more spry, he pushes the pad towards her and she reads the message he has spelled out beforehand: 'A lovely bosom you have. I'll never forget. Thank you for everything, kind Elizabeth.'
She returns the pad to him. What is there to say? Take leave of what thou hast loved.
With crude, bony strength he tears the page from the pad, crumples it and drops it in the basket, and raises a finger to his lips as if to say, Our secret.
What the hell, she thinks to herself a second time. She crosses to the door and turns the latch. In the little alcove where he hangs his clothes she removes her dress, her brassiere. Then she crosses back to the bed, sits down side-on where he can get a good eyeful, and resumes the pose of the painting. A treat, she thinks: let's give the old boy a treat, let's brighten up his Saturday.
There are other things she thinks too, as she sits on Mr Phillips's bed in the cool of the afternoon (no longer summer now but autumn, late autumn), such cool that after a while she has even begun to shiver lightly. Consenting adults: that is one of the things she thinks. What consenting adults get up to behind closed doors is no one's business but their own.
That would be another good place to end the story. Whatever the true nature of this so-called treat, it does not need to be repeated. Next Saturday, if he is still alive, if she is still alive, she will come by and hold his hand again; but this must be the last of the posing, the last of the bosom-offering, the last of the blessing. After this the breasts must be closed up, maybe closed up for good. So it could end here, with this pose held for a good twenty minutes, she would estimate, despite the shivers. As a story, a recital, it could end here and still be decent enough to put in an envelope and send to Blanche without ruining whatever it was that she wanted to say about the Greeks.
But in fact it goes on a little longer, by five or ten minutes, and this is the part she cannot tell Blanche. It goes on long enough for her, the woman, to drop a hand casually on to the bedcover and begin to stroke, ever so gently, the place where the penis, if the penis were alive and awake, ought to be; and then, when there is no response, to put the covers aside and loosen the cord of Mr Phillips's pyjamas, old-man's flannel pyjamas such as she has not seen in years – she would not have guessed one could still find them in shops – and open up the front and plant a kiss on the entirely flaccid little thing, and take it in her mouth and mumble it until it stirs faintly with life. It is the first time she has seen pubic hair that has turned grey. Stupid of her not to have realized that happens. It will happen to her too, in due course. Nor is the smell pleasant either, the smell of an old man's nether parts, cursorily washed.
Less than ideal, she thinks, withdrawing and covering old Mr Phillips up and giving him a smile and patting his hand. The ideal would be to send in a young beauty to do it for him, a fille de joie with the plump new breasts old men dream about. About paying for the visit she would have no qualms. A birthday present, she could call it, if the girl wanted an explanation, if going-away present were too chilling a name. But then, once you are past a certain age everything is less than ideal; Mr Phillips might as well get used to that. Only the gods are for ever young, the inhuman gods. The gods and the Greeks.
As for her, Elizabeth, crouched over the old bag of bones with her breasts dangling, working away on his nearly extinct organ of generation, what name would the Greeks give to such a spectacle? Not eros, certainly – too grotesque for that. Agape? Again, perhaps not. Does that mean the Greeks would have no word for it? Would one have to wait for the Christians to come along with the right word: Caritas?
For that, in the end, is what she is convinced it is. From the swelling of her heart she knows it, from the utter, illimitable difference between what is in her heart and what Nurse Naidoo would see, if by some mischance Nurse Naidoo, using her pass key, were to fling open the door and stride in.
That is not what is uppermost in her mind, however – what Nurse Naidoo would make of it, what the Greeks would make of it, what her mother on the next floor up would make of it. What is uppermost is what she herself will make it of, in the car on the way home, or when she wakes up tomorrow morning, or in a year's time. What can one make of episodes like this, unforeseen, unplanned, out of character? Are they just holes, holes in the heart, into which one steps and falls and then goes on falling?
Blanche, dear Blanche, she thinks, why is there this bar between us? Why can we not speak to each other straight and bare, as people ought who are on the brink of passing? Mother gone; old Mr Phillips burned to a powder and scattered to the winds; of the world we grew up in, just you and I left. Sister of my youth, do not die in a foreign field and leave me without an answer!
6. The Problem of Evil
She has been invited to speak at a conference in Amsterdam, a conference on the age-old problem of eviclass="underline" why there is evil in the world, what if anything can be done about it.
She can make a shrewd guess why the organizers picked on her: because of a talk she gave last year at a college in the United States, a talk for which she was attacked in the pages of Commentary (belittling the Holocaust, that was the charge) and defended by people whose support for the most part embarrassed her: covert anti-Semites, animal-rights sentimentalists.
She had spoken on that occasion on what she saw and still sees as the enslavement of whole animal populations. A slave: a being whose life and death are in the hands of another. What else are cattle, sheep, poultry? The death camps would not have been dreamed up without the example of the meat-processing plants before them.