“It is for them,” Eisler said, rising slowly and handing Connolly the magazine. “It will be over for the rest of us very soon. You think perhaps they have a secret weapon? A new rocket for London? Well, it’s an idea. Convenient, certainly.”
“Convenient?”
He took off his glasses and rubbed them slowly with a handkerchief. “If there are Nazis, we don’t have these inconvenient moral questions. But what shall we do with this bomb if there are no Nazis?”
“I don’t know,” Connolly said, at a loss.
“No,” he said, smiling. “None of us do. Sometimes I wonder what we have been thinking. Maybe the Nazis did that to us too. But you must excuse me. You came to hear the music, not to discuss-well, what do we call it?”
Outside, the music had begun, the precise lilting phrase of a Bach partita.
“German music,” Eisler said ironically. “Such beautiful music. You must admit, we are an extraordinary people. Or were.”
Connolly felt again that he was eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation. Eisler might have been talking to Weber, not a stranger holding a magazine. His shy face seemed to be looking elsewhere, at some invisible sadness.
“Something always survives,” Connolly said, not even sure what he meant.
“Yes, we survive,” Eisler said gently, opening his hand to indicate the house. “Americans now. Oh, I can see you think I’m being sentimental. You’re right, of course. That’s very German too. But our culture is over. Perhaps it had to end this way-killing ourselves. Very German. The end of the world. But now it is really over. There won’t be any more music, you know. It’s finished. Only this bomb is left-our last gift. I wonder what you will do with it. Perhaps you’ll become Germans too. Everybody can become monsters now.”
Connolly felt claustrophobic, as if he had stepped into Eisler’s self-absorption and couldn’t find his way out. Los Alamos had struck him as some overgrown international campus, everybody’s project, but that seemed irrelevant now. To Eisler, the Americans, the Hungarians, the Italians, the whole polyglot community were simply spectators to some violent national drama.
“If someone has to have it, I’m glad it’s us,” he said finally.
The blunt pragmatism of the answer roused Eisler, and his faraway milky eyes gleamed with attention. “Why? Because we’re not monsters? I say we. I’m American now too. But perhaps I don’t trust us quite so much. Once, perhaps. Not now. We have all learned to be monsters in this war. I wonder, are those lessons we forget? I don’t think so.”
“Nobody ever won a war being nice.”
“Fire with fire. Shall I tell you something? I am from Hamburg originally. You read about the firebombing there. The number of houses. The docks. Even the casualties. But what was it like? Most people don’t want to read that. The fire so high that it sucked in all the oxygen. For miles. You can do the calculations with slide rules. So you step out of the house and your lungs collapse. No escape. You jump into a canal and you are boiled alive. They found people trying to cross the street. Their feet were stuck in the melting asphalt, so they just stood there-screaming, I imagine-until they burned to death. Thousands. What difference, the numbers? Everybody.”
Eisler glared at him as if he knew Connolly had rewritten those first dispatches, headlining the statistics of victory. A payback for London.
“We didn’t start the war,” Connolly said stupidly, a reflex.
“Mr. Connolly, neither did my friends in Hamburg.”
“That was an English raid, you know.”
“Now you are splitting hairs with a vengeance. Tokyo was all yours. That was even worse, if there is such a thing. What do we do now, argue over degrees of terror? You think there is a hierarchy of suffering?”
Connolly was quiet. “I don’t know what point you’re trying to make.”
Eisler sighed, his shoulders slumping in a kind of apology. “Forgive me, please. I’m not myself.” And he seemed then physically to return to his earlier manner, his face growing gentle and sensitive, a young boy too polite to offend. When he spoke, he was distracted, as if he were examining his own outburst. “My point. What was my point? I’m sorry, my point was not to disturb you. I suppose only this-be very careful when you fight monsters. Be careful what you become.”
Connolly held out the magazine. “We’ve never done this.”
“No.” Eisler’s voice sank in defeat. “Not that. So,” he said reflectively, “they make it possible for us to make the bomb. Now what else will they allow us to do?” He hung his head.
