Such had been the long afternoon of the Hitch. But now, in the hotel restaurant, he was giving a display of perfect equanimity (in the gaps between his uncomplaining visits to the bathroom), and paying affectionate and solicitous attentions to Blue and to their daughter Antonia (while rearranging the scraps of food he sometimes tried to swallow and keep down). Early on I lightly wondered,
‘Has anyone noticed? On planes, they’ve started calling passengers customers.’
Blue, at least, had certainly noticed it, and thought it comical; and for a while we found some diversion in a word-replacement game of the kind we often played…
‘ “The passenger is always right.” “Michelangelo Antonioni’s sensitive study of alienation, The Customer”. “He’s an ugly passenger.” “Only fools and customers drink at sea.” “When you are –” ’
‘This won’t work,’ said Christopher. ‘It’s not subversive enough.’
I said, ‘Mm. Insufficiently subversive. But why’re they doing it? Who benefits?’
He said, ‘Americans – that’s who. You take it as an insult, Mart, but for an American it’s a compliment. It’s an upgrade.’
‘How d’you work that one out? Jesus, I don’t understand this goddamned country.’
‘Well, here in the US, passengers might be freeloaders, you know, lying hippies and scrounging sleazebags. Whereas customers, with that discretionary income of theirs, are the lifeblood of the nation.’
‘…All right. But doesn’t it go against the grain of American euphemism? And uh, false gentility? Even in supermarkets they call us guests. Well here’s one thing nobody’ll ever say. The plane crashed into Mount Fuji, with the loss of sixteen crew and just over three hundred customers.’
‘The customers died instantly. No. That would be subversive. If it kills you, I’d say – I’d say that once you’re dead, you go back to being a passenger.’*3
The talk became general and familiar, and it went on being spirited. Looking back from seven years on, I see that there was some reason to be buoyant. The shadow was of course always there (the shadow on the negatives of Christopher’s scans); but this weekend would mark the dethronement of that hated quackery, chemo, and the elevation in its place of radiotherapy in the futuristic form of the Proton Synchrotron. So we would put our faith, for now, in science fiction.
‘That sad chemo,’ I said. ‘It feels antique. Like leeching.’
‘Or like ritual sacrifice. Or like prayer.’
‘Mm, like prayer.’ The two of us were having a nightcap and a final smoke on a bench at the back entrance of the hotel. My body clock said 6 a.m., but I’d had a less tiring day than the Hitch. ‘Months ago you were saying that it messed with your concentration.’ And at dinner I noticed how he very slightly glazed over now and then, no doubt in suspicious communion with his viscera, just before disappearing for five or six minutes and then keenly returning and resuming. ‘But you were great – you delighted the girls, and me too.’
He lifted a hand for silence and briskly threw up into the flower bed. He wiped his mouth and I said,
‘You know how chemo got started? World War I. There were a couple of things about mustard gas that the medical boffins thought might be useful…Sorry, Hitch – let’s get off anything medical.’
After a quiescence we drifted towards the summer of 1914…Now I fancied I knew a thing or two about that, and I kept pace with him as we went through it – Franz Ferdinand murdered in Sarajevo in late June, the equivocations of Belgrade, the hardening of Vienna’s position, Germany’s assurance to Austria (known as the blank cheque), the Austrian ultimatum, the Russian mobilisation, the artillery of August…
All this had me sufficiently tested and stretched, but now Christopher said, ‘Those were the precipitants. As for the origins…’ And at that point I reached for my notebook and ballpoint.*4
So: the savage regicide in Belgrade in 1903; the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908; the formation of the Serbian Black Hand (Ujedinjenje ili smrt! – ‘Union or Death!’) in 1911, and the Agadir Crisis four months later; the Italian attack on Libya in 1912; the gradual Ottoman retreat from Europe, and Germany’s gradual displacement of England as the guardian of the Turkish Straits (‘the Sublime Porte’ being a permanent Russian obsession); the wild overestimation of Russian strength, fuelling German hastiness and fatalism…
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘if you want to start nearer the beginning you’d have to go back to 1389.’
‘1389?’
‘1389, and the final humiliation of Serbian forces at the hands of the Turk. On the Field of Blackbirds in Kosovo.’
And I thought, If Hitch had time we could go all the way back to the beginning of everything – to Cain and Abel, to Adam and Eve.
‘Kosovo Field. A wound in the Serbian psyche that Slobodan Milošević chose to reopen in 1989 in Kosovo, Little Keith – six hundred years later, to the day.’
Yes, or we could go forward. Through the Second World War, the Cold War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the end of Communism, September 11, the Iraq War, et cetera – all the way to where we were now (if we had time), sitting on a wooden bench at the back entrance of a Texan hotel in the third month of 2011.
During dinner Blue and I were briefly alone at the table and I said,
‘The synchrotron – it doesn’t hurt, right?’
‘Not at the time…The truth is, they’re nearly going to have to kill him to kill it.’ She looked at me steadily. ‘But he’s an ox.’
I said, ‘You’re right. You’re right. But he’s an ox.’
Day of rest
Even the most dedicated Texan must see that the Lone Star is not a good name for an ambitious modern hotel. In fact the Lone Star was at least a
