Free Memoir From Antproof Case by Mark Helprin Page B

pod, viewed from the side, resembles.) Tell me why it is that, later, as I flew patrols over the Mediterranean and returned to a base in Tunisia, she, her husband, and her two girls were put in a cattle car and sent to their slaughter in a death camp on the plains of Poland not far from the place where she had spent her infant childhood?
    That is, I suppose, part of the reason that my love for her has grown, and keeps on growing, and why I love her as a believing Catholic loves a saint. But even before the war, when we could not imagine her fate, I loved her with a seriousness and melancholy that was unusual in a boy.
    And then I was seventeen, which is not to say that I skipped fifteen and sixteen but that those years passed very fast and in a near-continuum of falling snow, terrible storms, and brilliant Alpine days (the very opposite of the climate here), and that I passed these strenuous days and nights in the company of monks, nuns, and the inmates of an insane asylum. I myself was not insane. What I had done was entirely justifiable and in self-defense. The problem, it seemed, was that the result was so horrific it called for some sort of reaction from the system of justice.
    You hear a lot about the reasons for crime, how it comes from unrelieved suffering, and is in its greatest part a tragedy. But that is not so. Crime—and I should know—is first and foremost a phenomenon of opportunity. One commits a crime not to avenge oneself upon a world that has treated one cruelly, but, rather, for a sense of accomplishment, for the joy of getting something for nothing, for the thrill and the risk, for the freedom of exiting the social structure, and, most of all, I think, for the unparalleled and incomparable elation of
escape.
    If your crime involves great skill and meticulous planning, so much the better, but, as I believe I have said, crime is unpardonable and inexcusable if it wounds. The only decent crime is that which strikes against evil. Otherwise it is detestable. For example, robbing banks in Kansas hurts innocent people, whereas robbing banks in New York does not.
    I have always thought that the theft of immensely expensive jewelry, as long as it involves no physical harm, is no more immoral than a good game of Capture the Flag. With apologies to the various dukes, duchesses, and movie stars who have connected with some of my very agile colleagues, million-dollar stickpins are easily insolent enough to make them fair game. Oh, yes, I know ... the economics of it is that the fool with the million-dollar stickpin has freed his money to work for someone else, who might buy an asparagus farm and provide real pleasure for ten thousand Belgians, or invest in a mine from which will come the metal that will form the arm that holds the massive silvered light by which a team of surgeons saves the life of a child. But, even if the thief takes the diamond, the money is still free to work.
    Most people like me are the way they are because they find themselves warring against the social system from the outside. Pity them not, however, for in the vast majority of cases it has been their choice and they have committed some despicable and harmful act.
    I, however, was set apart by a series of entirely coincidental events that elicited from me an entirely justifiable response. In those days we had the electric chair and it was used. I ought to know: for a few months I thought I was going to sit in it, and the most notable of these contraptions was in. the town where I grew up (so to speak). Nonetheless, my ultimate disposition, despite a physical attack (before the sentencing) upon the judge who sentenced me, was to be sent to what turned out to have been perhaps the finest prep school in the world. It certainly had the best view and the most favorable student-teacher ratio of any academy on earth. What it lacked, I suppose, was what I have always lacked—the society of fellows.
    In some ways, I prefer the company of