7) Victory
Events moved swiftly to their close from the moment the Grand High
Führer of Unified Europe stepped out of his car and strode through the gates of
the Sheldonian Theatre. He set up his new headquarters there, from which he
could stretch out his military tentacles and grasp at all the free world.
There were no emotional goodbyes, no final gatherings of the four
literary spies, no hurried hand-shakes and last lingering glances. No. The
Nazis liked their enemies isolated, solitary, preferably sobbing for mercy or
cursing their God.
So they were glad when Charles Williams collapsed in the street,
gripping his stomach in agony. His old intestinal complaint had flared up, and
he writhed on the pavement unceremoniously. By the time the Gestapo had him
locked in a military hospital, he was unconscious.
The Nazis were also pleased by the flutter of papers through the
air when the bashed down the door of Barfield’s office, scattering their work,
battering his colleagues, clapping him in handcuffs, and burning the building.
As they stuffed him in the back of a car, he saw he office explode, and the
last ashes of the British Secret State’s legal position disappeared in a dark
conflagration against the bright morning sky.
They were happy, too, that they got to watch Lewis’s face crumple,
its jovial red fading, as he ran smack up against them in the High Street and
practically tumbled into their hands. They smirked and joked—with him, not just
themselves; they were human, after all—as they tossed him into solitary
confinement, as he shivered with the cold, as his substantial flesh quivered at
the anticipation of starvation, as his ample mind shrank from isolation, as
they forbid him paper and pen and watched his spirit break. That part was fun.
It was even more fun for them when they caught the dapper don, the
famous Professor Tolkien, and interrogated him for hours on end in a gray
concrete cell. They made a game of it, seeing in how many languages they could
ask him the same questions, over and over, about the letter he had sent a
German publisher in 1938, refusing to prove his Aryan ancestry, calling the
Jews a “gifted people,” insulting the Pure Race by suggesting it was of
Indo-Iranian origin, mixed with Hindustani, Persian, and—horrors!—Gypsy
ancestry. They called in one expert linguist after another, tormenting him with
vain repetition in many tongues.
The Nazis were tickled by Owen Barfield’s staunch statements of
loyalty as they shipped him off to Germany and gave him into the hands of
counterintelligence agents, whose job was to break him and turn him into a
double agent. They chortled as they settled in for the long process of
brainwashing, erasing and reshaping his mind. They delighted in the back-and-forth,
the repartee, the psychological pressure, the faked executions, the sleep
deprivation, the endless hours of recorded propaganda playing in his cell day
after day. They praised his intellect and his rhetorical skill. They were
impressed by his logic. They admired his tenacity. And after a while, they
stopped laughing. Then they stopped smiling.
On and on it went, and he would not budge. No matter what the
conditions, he behaved as if he were giving closing arguments in the courtroom
or debating theology with Lewis in a pub, demanding that they make logical
distinctions, clarifying fuzzy categories, insisting that they define their
terms. Eventually, they left him to a slow starvation in a solitary cell, and
he lawyered his way into eternity, making St. Peter define everything and
interrupting his most dogmatic pronouncements with subtle distinguo’s
until that Apostle opened the pearly gates in sheer exhaustion.
They were not quite as cheerful as they watched Williams slide in
and out of consciousness, suffering extreme agonies in his intestines and
bowels, as his insides fell apart and infection spread. Gestapo officers didn’t
like to see people dying of natural causes. They gave him modern medical
treatment, of course, but they didn’t let his wife visit, nor did they even
tell her where he was. Michal stood in Oxford in the rain in South Parks Road,
outside the last house where her poet-lover had lived, and she could feel his
soul slipping away. It had never really been hers, and now it was going far, far
out of reach. But it was exulting, chanting, declaiming great verse, as it
mounted to the heavens. In his hard, metal hospital bed, Williams suddenly
flashed into consciousness, sat up and raised his right arm. Powerful rhythms
rolled out of his mouth, the great iambic lines of the past, and he named the
ascending virtues of the Sephirotic tree as he drew near perfection, and he
called upon Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton as he stepped unashamed into
their great company. The German doctor bowed his head, then moved forward to
close the luminous eyes and lay the rigid figure down on the bed.
It even amused them that Tolkien almost always replied, that he
knew all the languages they so abused, and that he sat upright, debonair and
dignified, unmoved, as they mocked him in manifold phrases, and that he refused
to cry out, even when the torture began. Instead, he retold them their own
noble legends, in their own noble speech—as they deprived him of sleep,
immersed him in freezing water, and administered electric shocks—about
dragon-slaying warriors and heroic last stands. They laughed even harder when
he began babbling nonsense, as they thought, about ‘Sauron’ and ‘Mordor’ and
‘Gollum.’ Poor old professor, they said to one another: his mind is wandering. Then
he slipped into songs about the elves, and drifted away from the Grey Havens as
Ilúvatar gave him the gift of death.
But it wasn’t the SS officers who were laughing as they
frog-marched Lewis out into a courtyard, set his back to a wall, and blindfolded
him. No, they weren’t laughing. No one bit. But he was. He was roaring, his
beefy face red with delight, his jowls shaking in amusement, his still stocky
figure aquiver with joy.
“Further up and further in!” he shouted. “This is the first step
on the last great journey, the first chapter in the great story where all myths
come true, all evil comes untrue, and all questions are answered at last. And
you!”
He thrust a stubby finger in the direction of the firing squad he
could not see.
“I jeer and flout at you devils to drive you out. You cannot
endure to be mocked, and so I mock at you. And yet….” His voice softened, and
the firing squad squinted at him, waiting for their orders, waiting to hear
what he would say.
“And yet, I pity you, poor puppets of the Kingdom
of Noise. Your dance on this little stage will be so very short, and then you
will be jerked away by your strings, the boards cleared, the work of God begun
again.”
At
this, the commander shook himself, scowled at Lewis, and growled:
“Time
to shut this one up. We don’t need his pity.”
Suddenly,
Lewis bellowed: “I want to look you in the eyes! I want to square up to death
and stare him in the face!”
He
struggled, his hands bound behind him, scraping his blindfold against the wall.
The officer leaped forward, but the blindfold fell from Lewis eyes and he
stared the German down, steadily. The man stepped back, turned to the fire
squad, and barked out:
Ready!”
“Soon
it will begin,” Lewis said, in a lower voice, almost dreamily. “There will be a
sudden clearing of my eyes. Just think what I will feel at that moment! Scabs
falling from the old sores, emerging from a hideous old shell…”
“Aim!”
shouted the officer.
“What,
then, of this final stripping, this complete cleansing? This release, this glorious
freedom! I wonder—”
“Fire!”
came the command.
Jack’s
eyes opened wide, and his face broke into an enormous grin.
“Of
course!” he said.
THE
END
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