Читаем The Last Samurai полностью

My wife smiles and I see that horrible friendliness on her face. My children disgust me. They’re delightful, extroverted, confident. They know what they want, and that’s what interests them, and it disgusts me. They allowed me two weeks to be a bit strange, and then they all came to me separately.

My wife said she knew what I’d been through but this was hard on the children. My daughter came to see me and said it was hard on Mum, I didn’t know what they’d been through. My son said it was hard on his Mum and sister.

So then I think, this is bloody ridiculous. It’s unfair. They’re perfectly OK. It’s not their fault. What do you want? Do you want them to be shell-shocked and dreaming of horrors? You want them to be safe from all that. You want all the rest to get away to be ordinary. And I think, we’ve got so much. Let’s celebrate life. We’ve got each other, we’re so bloody lucky. And I throw my arms around them with tears in my eyes and I say, Let’s go along the canal and feed the swans. I’m thinking, we can walk straight out of the house, there’s no one to stop us, and we can walk by the canal because there are no land mines and no one’s shelling us, let’s not waste this. And they all look absolutely appalled because it’s such a totally wet thing to do, but they come to humour me, and of course it’s awful.

He said

When you’ve seen things, or things have been done to you, this badness gets inside you and comes back with you, and then people who’ve never been near a war, people who’ve never struck an animal never mind tortured anyone—people who are completely innocent—get hurt too. The torture comes out as disgust, and it comes out in that gush of sentimentality that chokes them. I see that but I can’t kill the badness, it just sits inside like a poison toad.

He said

Is it really doing them any good to keep the toad alive? Or even if it is can I go through a lifetime of it?

I said

It would obviously be better to die before rather than after years of suffering; no one would condemn an innocent man to a life sentence to make someone else happy; the question is whether it is really the case that nothing will blot out these memories and that nothing could be good enough to make it worth undergoing them. If that’s the question you can’t seriously expect me to know the answer.

He began laughing again. Could I give you a word of advice? he said. Don’t ever apply for a job with the Samaritans.

He could hardly speak for laughing.

My mother, I said, called the Samaritans once and asked whether research had been done on thwarted suicides to find out whether they had spent the time after the incident happily.

What did they say?

They said they didn’t know.

He grinned.

I said

Sibylla said

He said

Who?

I said My mother. She said they should recruit people like Oscar Wilde, only there isn’t anyone like Oscar Wilde. If there were enough people like Oscar Wilde so that you could staff Samaritans with them, no one would want to commit suicide anyway—they would joke themselves out of a job. You could call and someone would say

Do you smoke?

And you’d say

Yes.

And they’d say Good. A man needs an occupation.

My mother called once and the person kept saying Yes and I hear what you’re saying, which would have been reassuring if my mother had been worried about being inaudible.

So my mother said

Do you smoke?

And the Samaritan said

Sorry?

And my mother said

Do you smoke?

And the Samaritan said

No

And my mother said

You should. A man needs an occupation.

And the Samaritan said

Sorry?

And my mother said

That’s all right. It’s your life. If you want to throw it away, fine.

Then she ran out of 10p coins.

I said

It’s your life, but you should give things a chance. You know what Jonathan Glover says.

He said

No, what does Jonathan Glover say? And who is Jonathan Glover?

I said

Jonathan Glover is a modern Utilitarian, and the author of Causing Death and Saving Lives. He says before committing suicide you should change your job, leave your wife, leave the country.

I said

Would it help to leave your job, leave your wife and children, leave the country?

He said

No. It would help a little not to have to fake it all the time. But wherever I went I’d see the same things. I used to think I’d like to see the Himalayas before I died. I thought I’d like to see Tierra del Fuego. The South Pacific—I’ve heard that’s beautiful. But wherever I went I’d see a child clubbed to death with the butt of a rifle and soldiers laughing. There’s nothing I can do to get it out of my mind.

He looked at his glass.

He said

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow

Raze out the written troubles of the brain

Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff

That weighs upon the heart

He said

Therein the patient

Must minister to himself

He put his head on his hand.

He said

It is a pretty story.

He said

The world would be quite a pretty place if the only people tormented by atrocities were those who’d committed them. Would you like another Coke?