Genghis

Genghis

       by Intruding Trudy Trust

                        the line between faith and fear is drawn

                        and too between the great and small

                        we could do with one between the thoughts

                        that somewhere out there someone cares

                        if i get to the wedding

                        that i so much wish to see

                        some six hours drive from here

                        but can't afford to buy another car

                        since mine broke down completely

                        just this week oh lord won't you

                        just see to it that i get there just

                        listen to me please your grateful servant

                        and your faithful fearful one

                        who prays so steadfastly

                        for each and every one who live in doubt

                        and, that the real is not observable

                        but flits past us with whirling misty speed

                        and all is just interpretation

The Nuremburg trials linger through only the one image: Eichmann, slight, bent forward, with glasses and thin hair, looking rather like a German Woody Allen, sitting very still in a chair facing a panel of judges. In the galleries about, hundreds of dark-suited men and women watch him. The tv is black and white. It must have been the late fifties, early sixties. That makes it about a dozen years after armistice. Hardly enough time for history to turn or spurt. By now it has. Most of the killers dead. Time has sent Ali McBeal. Temptation Island (no episode of which lingers in my mind because not yet watched, though it will be). The luscious and limby at lavatory or libation lean out.

       As you can tell by now, no moral voice here. Nothing to teach the reader. No uplifting or inspirational morals. Once upon a time fiction moralized to instruct and edify. Exhortation, essentially. That meant that people wanted it, higher law, needed it more. Victorians, less inured to moral life then. Now, it does or must or will give them to the traditionalist among the authors for inspiration. Moral world historically now past, authors (training so long at their jobs, their duties) write unobtrusive morals morally in order not to teach but to nurse. Nurse themselves. Nursing a sadness to make it better. There, there. That is the essence of early twenty-first century fiction. Was not for Chaucer. Was maybe already for Swift. Frost, H.D., Eliot, the Canadians, all worrying a similar bone. Even Atwood. Even Kroetsch. Certainly Brandt. As you can tell from my opening sentence, it's me and Chaucer. We're the only ones who are simply in love with life and have no other thought but to write such with intelligent joy. Slight apologies for my arrogance. Put that in my autobiography and smoke it. If you look at the photo below, though, you will immediately see that I have ample reason for vanity.

       Genghis took one look at the three thin men before him and turned from them. These men, Chinese men from the city of Vlodochoi, and in that city now, had stepped forward as spokesmen for the Khan whose imminent death meant that he had a few urgent duties to perform: speak with respect to his killer; entreat mercy from him; and, show no fear in the little time he had left. Genghis's men had the gallows ready. Khan's wives, in their sweetest finery, lace gloves and filmy fans and new shoes, stood already before the steps and the rope awaiting the Khan's arrival. His three men spoke the necessary words. He, Genghis, the king, stepped down from his caravan door and walked to the Khan with head drooped in respect. The Khan spoke a few words to the great man before him, "Still you do not understand!" and climbed the steps up to where he would discover the meaning of space. The rope circled his neck and down he fell. His wives walked, stylish, their dignity delicate and neat, with Genghis, then, to his private quarters, his caravan, just outside the city walls. They, too, would climb these stairs tomorrow, next week, a month from now, but not before the king tired of them and their daughters.

       Now it was the turn of the citizens of the city. They for the most part took their dying with less repose and acted not nearly as well as had the Khan. Where his few words forgave what could not be avoided, their words, squeaking out in fright or anger, called down death and destruction on their neighbors from the steppes. Kill every mother's son of them, they prayed and shouted to their god. Where he had bowed his head and let his malefactors spit on him and hit him, they snarled and bit at any hand or face that approached. They were not the Khan and he had not been them.