Free Nuns and Soldiers by Iris Murdoch Page A

stretched to breaking, it was an accident of war, the Count thought sometimes as he tossed sleeplessly to and fro. (Why had Hannibal not marched on Rome? For the same reason.) His father had been unjust to Gomulka. Those men were patriots who had tried, who still tried, to construct ‘a Polish way to socialism’. What else could they do but play the precarious game which kept the Russian tanks from revisiting Warsaw? The Church still existed, a precious evidence of a freedom kept. Ought his father to have returned home? What was this ‘ought’ and this ‘home’? The eternal ‘what should have happened’ of the human being in the face of morality and chance and the eternal malice of events. But then the Count returned to the horror of it all. What did it avail, the suffering of the virtuous, the death of the brave? Had any country ever been so malignantly vowed to destruction by its neighbours? The English had ruined Ireland, but casually, thoughtlessly. While History, like Bismarck, seemed dedicated to ‘tear up Poland by the roots’.
    The Count had, he felt, no illusions about the present state of his country, no sentimentality about what was in obvious ways a bad state. Fear of Russia had to be lived with, life under communism was another world where moral problems appeared with a difference. All states have a background which is partly evil. There the evil was evident, stronger. He saw the corruption, the hardened heart, the bureaucratic cruelty which could not be simply blamed on History or Russia. He constantly endeavoured to know who was in prison and why, who was trapped, who was intimidated, who was silenced. He could not have endured to live in Poland. But he could not help believing (perhaps this was sentimentality?) that his country had in spite of everything a spiritual destiny, an unquenched longing for freedom and spirit. There was some old unique indestructible entity over which the red and white flag could still proudly fly. (Often it appeared that that proud flag was being firmly held in the capable hands of the Roman church.) And he connected in his mind this ideal symbolic Poland with the sufferings of oppressed people everywhere, and the dogged dissenters who refused to compromise with tyranny, who wrote pamphlets and made speeches and carried posters until they were put away in prisons and labour camps where after their brief and apparently useless struggle for freedom and virtue they rotted quietly away into a slow anonymous death.
     
     
    The Count went into the kitchen and put on some potatoes to boil. He liked potatoes. He opened a tin of ham, and when the potatoes were almost ready he made some soup out of a packet. At the table in his sitting-room he drank the soup out of a mug, ate the ham and potatoes, and finished up with a slice of ginger cake. He drank a little red wine mixed with water. He read some more of Carlyle’s Frederick the Great. The slaughter-house of history, mediated by Carlyle’s style, could be an object of contemplation. ‘The war was over. Frederick was safe. His glory was beyond the reach of envy. If he had not made conquests as vast as those of Alexander, of Caesar and of Napoleon, if he had not, on fields of battle, enjoyed the constant success of Marlborough and Wellington, he had yet given an example unrivalled in history of what capacity and resolution can effect against the greatest superiority of power and the utmost spite of fortune. He entered Berlin in triumph ...’ The radio was telling the Count what was going on in Cambodia. Then it told him about the life-cycle of the fruit fly. Then there was a programme of Renaissance Music. Then there was a Labour Party political broadcast on race relations, the Count even knew the man who was speaking, an M.P., a friend of Stanley Openshaw. After that there was a funny programme, then the news. The Count was apparently able to listen to the radio and to read Carlyle at the same time. He was also able to do all