A Chorus of Stones Read online

  I am looking at a photograph of British Air Marshal Arthur Harris. During the Second World War he was known as “Bomber Harris.” He was the man who commanded the bombing of Dresden. The photograph is on the cover of an old copy of Life magazine. It is dated April 10, 1944, ten months before that famous air raid took place. The air marshal is wearing his uniform in the photograph. There are many uniformed figures in this issue of Life, General Stilwell in Burma, several New Zealand infantrymen in Cassino, Sergeant Berkley Willis at a canteen in Hollywood, Chili Williams in a helmet and boots exposing her legs, an unknown model dressed in a naval officer’s uniform, recommending Colgate toothpaste. A uniform would have been a ubiquitous sight that year.

  The air marshal simultaneously holds a telephone and takes notes while he sits at his desk. He wears half-rimmed reading glasses, peering out over the top of them at the photographer. Now, as I look back through time and into his eyes, I am not convinced. Is this really a moment from history? The photograph seems posed. It has a flat and arranged feeling. I know the marshal would have had no time for any elaborate staging; still, the lighting is too perfect, the angle straight on, and his gaze is so clearly directed at the camera.

  He is of course very well cast for the role. A broad and manly chest, graying hair and mustache, and a stern fatherly expression. One imagines his voice will be gruff, not corrugated like Bogart’s voice, but somehow eroded, as if exposed to harsh elements over time. If he plays his role well, it is after all one he has prepared for, in one way or another, since the earliest days of his childhood.

  Opening the pages of Life, the drama begins to seem more real. There is the map showing cities targeted in Germany, the figures totaling Allied losses in January, February and March, the photograph of an aero-engine factory at Limoges before and after bombing, a section of Berlin reduced to rubble by the Royal Air Force.

  In still another photograph, the air marshal himself is looking at pictures. He is studying portraits, taken from the air, of cities that have been bombed. He looks at these images through a small aperture in a wooden box called a stereopticon, a device which adds a third dimension to what he sees. Through this instrument, a two-dimensional, gray landscape suddenly reveals gaping craters, heaps of rubble, burned out buildings with the walls still standing, acres and acres of roofless buildings.

  On the opposing page, the air marshal leafs through his famous Blue Book, a huge document he has prepared to impress the leaders of the Allied effort with the efficacy of strategic bombing. It contains maps of several German sites which he has marked, according to Life, for emasculation.

  I am, of course, stopped by this last word. The author has placed it in quotations, as if it were Harris’s language, or the choice of the RAF. What is meant by this word? Is it the implicit unmanning of the vanquished by conquering armies? Or is it that emasculation which occurs when one man’s women and children are harmed by another man? Or both of these. And of course there is the obvious meaning, the loss of a part of the body, the sexual body by which a man is defined. But even this literal reading moves to a larger implication, the loss of identity itself. That stripping away of every extraneous layer, of every role we play in life, which one suffers when faced with unmitigated terror.

  The concept began earlier in the century during the First World War: the suggestion then that a war might be won by destroying the economic stability of the enemy, and by terrorizing its civilian population. In the discussion that ensued the issue of masculinity was implicit. Various groups considered less stalwart than well-bred Englishmen—the English working class, women, the civilian population of France as a whole—would, it was believed, crumble quickly under the strain of an enemy attack.

  And then there was the other emasculation. The nations which fought in the First World War were literally unmanned; a whole generation of young men had died on the battlefields. With a change in planning, death might be spread more evenly among the people: women as well as men, old as well as young, weak as well as strong.

  The air marshal’s famous mentor, Sir Hugh Trenchard, the man known as the father of the RAF, began as a critic of strategic bombing. German planes had bombed London and the public cried out for retaliation in kind. Trenchard wanted airplanes to be used on the battlefield. But this brief opposition ended in 1917 when, near the end of the First World War, he was put in charge of strategic bombing for the Allied forces. Then he began to imagine the gradual destruction from the air of the inner strength of the enemy. He wanted as many new four-engine Handley Page bombers as factories could produce. With these he planned to destroy Berlin. After this destruction, he reasoned, there would be many refugees who would flee to neighboring cities. It was then he argued that Allied bombers should destroy those cities too. And as the ranks of refugees grew, every city to which they might escape should be destroyed until they had no place to hide. Trenchard asserted that it was by this means alone that the war could be won. But the war ended by other means. Stalemate, exhaustion, the introduction of fresh troops from America. There was an armistice. He would have to wait nearly three decades to see his plan put into action over Dresden, a city designated as a free port, and into which refugees were evacuating from all over Europe.

  I am imagining Air Marshal Harris now a year after he appeared on the cover of Life. He has in his hands photographs of Dresden after the bombing. He is passing them through the instrument by which he can see the true dimensionality of the destruction. But despite this technology, there is a depth in the field of his vision that is missing. There are details too small to be caught in the lens. Stains. Discarded clothing. The smell of fires unseen. And perhaps, if he were there, in the place itself, he might feel something from the fragments of stone which must have absorbed the atmosphere of this event, strangely quiet as they are. Though still, a certain kind of silence is a common effect of catastrophe.

  I saw it in Gurda. She could recite all the events that had happened to her and her family since they left their home. But there was a quality of flatness in her voice. It was the Russian advance they feared first. History had taught them this. So, after the Stalin-Hitler pact, when the German armies arrived in 1939, they were welcome. But Gurda had given birth recently, and the strain of events reached her. She was hospitalized for the stress of it. Then, out the hospital window, she saw truckloads of children leaving the city. And this sight gave her an inexplicable fear. I pulled myself together, she told me, because I knew we had to leave.

  She stayed pulled together in that way for the duration of the war, as a refugee without papers, hunting for castoff food, stealing from the fields at night, teaching her children not to cry out or scream lest this reveal them to their hunters. And in the same way, even before she reached Dresden, she herself learned not to cry, or to fall apart, to dull the full dimension of her feeling.

  Thinking again now of the air marshal as he gazes at the ruins he has commanded into creation, I find myself wondering if perhaps the brief portrait I have drawn of him is also lacking in depth. The training he has received, not to respond in any way except as a soldier, has become so habitual, he hardly has to remind himself now to stay calm. No hand goes over his mouth to silence him. He is steady. Unblinking. But still, despite the success of years, some trace of descent into a less ordered region of himself must exist.

  How many small decisions accumulate to form a habit? What a multitude of decisions, made by others, in other times, must shape our lives now. A grandmother’s name is erased. A mother decides to pretend that her son does not drink too much. A nation refuses to permit Jewish immigrants to pass its borders, knowing, and yet pretending not to know, that this will mean certain death. The decision is made to bomb a civilian population. The decision is made to keep the number of the dead and the manner of their death a secret.

  But wherever there is a secret there is a rumor. After the bombing of Dresden, the Propaganda Ministry of the Third Reich purposely produced a leak, sending out whispers of a government doc
ument which exaggerated the numbers of the dead. It was not to save lives that Goebbels created this rumor, but rather to cause fear of a monstrous death-dealing enemy so that this fear might inspire resistance against the Allied invasion. Yet I am certain there was another reason for the creation of this rumor, a reason seated deeper in the mind than ordinary consciousness lets us see. For deep in the mind we know everything. And wish to have everything be told, to have our images and our words reflect the truth. Goebbels must have known that the end was near. And just like polite society which pretends not to know about indiscretion, and yet gossips, Goebbels could see his own divided consciousness reflected in declaration and in rumor. He could have the right hand, and the left, and keep them divided.

  I go to look at my face in the mirror. I have my mother’s jaw but my father’s eyes, those lids with a double fold. My father died at the age of forty-nine; crossing a street, he was struck by a car. It was just at sunset and the light was blinding. I do not honestly think he meant to die that way. But the event has haunted me with the knowledge of a despair he always carried within him, a despair covered over with a smile, an outward cheer.

  Before his funeral friends told me not to look at the open casket, and so I waited at the back of the church while everyone else filed by him. A funeral director, proud of his work, urged me to join the other mourners, saying that they had repaired his body and made him as good as new. Though I would not look, inadvertently he had brought home to me the violence of my father’s death. Even today, my body tenses with fear every time I cross a street. What at one time one refuses to see never vanishes but returns, again and again, in many forms.

  Now that I have heard these stories from my family history, the past and this present moment seem more alive to me. What was blurred in both is now clearer, and a sorrow that was in the background has come forward to claim my attention.

  It is December 24, 1968. A spacecraft, set in orbit by a rocket, hovers near the moon. It carries three men who pilot the vehicle as it makes a slow circle around the lunar surface. From an entirely new perspective, these men watch the moon and the earth bright against a dark space.

  II

  CLYTEMNESTRA’S MEMORY

  The first forms of life, simple single-celled creatures, develop in water. These cells have the same fundamental form as will human cells which come into being after several billion years.

  It is a hot summer day in Tennessee in the midst of the sixth decade of this century. The girl has climbed the fence to get to the swimming hole she has visited so many summers of her life in the time before this part of the land was enclosed. She stands now at the edge of it. Her body is sticky with heat. The surface of the water moves slightly. Sunlight shimmers and dances in a green reflection that seems as she stares at it to pull her in even before her skin is wet with it. Drops of water on the infant’s head. All the body immersed for baptism. Do these images come to her as she sinks into the coolness? The washing of hands before Sunday’s midday meal. All our sins washed away. Water was once the element for purification. But at the bottom of this pool, There is no telling what is there now. This is what the girl’s father will say to her finally: corroded cans of chemical waste, some radioactive substances. That was why they put the fence there. She is not thinking of that now. The words have not yet been said, and so for her no trouble exists here. The water holds up her body. She is weightless in this fulsome element, the waves her body makes embracing her with their own benediction. Beneath her in the shadowy green, she feels the depth of the pond. In this coolness as the heat mercifully abates, her mind is set free, to dream as the water dreams.

  It is in the first century A.D. that a ballista is used as a weapon in the Greco-Roman Empire. By pulling down and then suddenly releasing a long wooden arm, the ballista hurls a stone toward city walls.

  It is after nightfall, April 6, 1945. Following instructions from Wernher von Braun, his assistant, Dieter Huzel, drives the first of many trucks to an abandoned mine shaft, twelve kilometers north of Dörnten in the Harz Mountains. The trucks are filled with cartons of documents, green for design and development, blue for manufacturing, red for testing, which detail the production of rockets in Germany. Each carton will be carried into a vaulted room in the mine. And the next day an explosion will seal the shaft so that even the most curious will not ask what is inside.

  Four or five billion years ago, when the earth first came into being, the temperature and the atmosphere could not sustain life.

  Does anyone in his hurried plans stop to contemplate the subtler meanings of this geography? The drama of the current moment perhaps supersedes such speculation. Just now American and Russian troops cross over German borders from two directions. As part of his scorched earth policy, Hitler has ordered that all records of rocket research be destroyed. Can Von Braun, who has dreamed for so long of reaching the moon, have time to consider the polarity that history requires? All his knowledge of flight through space hidden deep in the recesses of the earth?

  A medieval siege weapon, the trebuchet, uses a heavy counterweight that falls to provide the power to hurl stones for great distances.

  It is the first week in May. The Americans have reached Garmisch-Partenkirchen. They race against time. Since the Allies are partitioning Germany, rockets, designs, scientists must be assembled quickly. The research facilities at Peenemünde and the missile factories at Nordhausen will soon belong to the Soviets. The first of many interrogations have begun. To show his cooperation with his captors, Dr. von Braun begins to write a paper. It is entitled Übersicht, Survey of Previous Liquid Rocket Development in Germany and Future Projects. He is looking to the future. His paper contains two prophecies. One that men will soon reach the moon. And the other that a mastery of rockets will change the world as much as the invention of airplanes.

  Slowly an atmosphere of hydrogen, methane and ammonia was transmuted into oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen which would be able to nourish a living organism.

  Waiting for his American captors to reach a decision, does the scientist turn his head and gaze out his window into the night sky? Is he staring at the moon? Despite all the chaos of shifting borders, mingling languages, troops in different uniforms, lost husbands, wives, children, and all the secrets, questions, revelations so urgently hunted here, there is a certain aimlessness. The scientists exist in a shadowy world, belonging to no nation in particular, suspended as if outside time, outside history. For hours on end they play Monopoly, making the game more complex with their own rules. Von Braun’s brother Magnus, also a scientist, directs a production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Do the male scientists play female roles? Everything seems to be fluctuating. Is this what Von Braun thinks as he looks out his window? How everything on earth and in heaven is in a state of flux? Perhaps it can never be measured, this moon whose face constantly changes. Glowing through the clouds and then darkened, then shining again, this is all that remains to be charted. Every other place, Africa, Asia, jungles of South America, North and South Poles are part of the known, except this body, explored, unknown, just out of reach, floating between sun and earth, luminous, belonging to no one yet.

  It is in the late fourteenth century that a breech-loading cannon which fires steel balls first appears. It is the first weapon which has enough power to destroy the walls of fortifications and render cities vulnerable.

  Was there a time in his earlier years when he gazed at the moon from the famous observatory of the University of Berlin? This is located not far from Berlin in a city called Potsdam, the city where Frederick the Great built a famous château, and the same city the Allies have chosen for their meeting now. They are assembled to discuss the map of Europe: who shall occupy Germany, what will be the fate of Central Europe, who will invade Japan. It is July 16, 1945, in the early evening when President Harry Truman, in Potsdam for just over twenty-four hours, receives a coded message. Operated on this morning, the message reads. Diagnosis not yet complete but results seem sati
sfactory and already exceed expectations. He knows immediately what this means. He had postponed the meeting at Potsdam so that now it coincided with the experimental deployment of a secret weapon at Alamogordo. If it explodes, he reasoned,… I’ll certainly have a hammer on those boys. Stalin has been a formidable negotiator. Two days later, in the midst of the first plenary session, he receives another coded message. The blast of the weapon could be heard fifty miles away and was seen from a distance of two hundred and fifty miles. Now he returns to the negotiations with a new fortitude.

  Over millions of years molecules of oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen were transformed by the sun’s heat into amino acids, fats and proteins, and the essential nucleic acids of the cell came into being.

  There are those who think a story is told only to reveal what is known in this world. But a good story also reveals the unknown. Of its nature, of course, the unknown cannot be fully depicted. It is there perhaps just in the tone of voice, or a style that is loosely knit, and admits thus of other possibilities. If, when a character and a situation meet, the outcome is already determined, the story lacks dimension. For it is the unpredictable outcome, the transformation of expectations, that points us in the direction of deeper insights. It is perhaps then possible that a weapon, so powerful as to be unimaginable, will not be used, except as a demonstration, an inducement to peace, and that, in the future, as some of the scientists who invented the weapon suggest, the knowledge of this power be shared. Or the story need not follow this unpredictable course, but only indicate that it existed as a possibility, as in a tragedy, when the hero or heroine, so set on a path that we in the audience can see leads to doom, cannot or does not turn to see the opening, the patch of spontaneous space, just behind, just over the shoulder, and beautiful even in memory.