The Untouchable Read Online Free PDF

their tips and gazed off in the direction of the window, where light and shade were still jostling for position. I was born to be a lecturer. “The Stoics denied the concept of progress. There might be a little advance here, some improvement there—cosmology in their time, dentistry in ours—but in the long run the balance of things, such as good and evil, beauty and ugliness, joy and misery, remains constant. Periodically, at the end of aeons, the world is destroyed in a holocaust of fire and then everything starts up again, just as before. This pre-Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence I have always found greatly comforting, not because I look forward to returning again and again to live my life over, but because it drains events of all consequence while at the same time conferring on them the numinous significance that derives from fixity, from completedness. Do you see?” I smiled my kindliest smile. Her mouth had fallen open a tiny way and I had an urge to reach out a finger and tip it shut again. “And then one day I read, I can’t remember where, an account of a little exchange between Josef Mengele and a Jewish doctor whom he had salvaged from the execution line to assist him in his experiments at Auschwitz. They were in the operating theatre. Mengele was working on a pregnant woman, whose legs he had bound together at the kneesprior to inducing the onset of the birth of her child, without the benefit of anaesthetics, of course, which were much too valuable to waste on Jews. In the lulls between the mother’s shrieks, Mengele discoursed on the vast project of the Final Solution: the numbers involved, the technology, the logistical problems, and so on. How long, the Jewish doctor ventured to ask—he must have been a courageous man—how long would the exterminations go on? Mengele, apparently not at all surprised or put out by the question, smiled gently and without looking up from his work said, Oh, they will go on, and on, and on … And it struck me that Dr. Mengele was also a Stoic, just like me. I had not realised until then how broad a church it was that I belonged to.”
    I liked the quality of the silence that fell, or rather rose—for silence rises, surely?—when I ceased speaking. At the end of a well-made period I always have a sense of ease, a sort of blissful settling back, my mind folding its arms, as it were, and smiling to itself in quiet satisfaction. It is a sensation known to all mental athletes, I am sure, and for me was one of the chief pleasures of the lecture hall, not to mention debriefings (a term that never failed to elicit a chuckle from Boy). It rather took the shine off my bliss, however, when Miss Vandeleur, of whose mousy yet persistent presence I was beginning to tire slightly, mumbled something about not having known the Stoics were a church. Young people are so literal-minded.
    I stood up. “Come,” I said to her, “I want you to see something.”
    We went through to the study. I could hear her leather skirt creaking as she walked behind me. When she first arrived she had told me her father was an admiral, and I had misheard her to say that her father was admirable. Although this piece of filial piety had struck me as disconcertingly supererogatory, I had hastened to assure her that I had no doubt that he was. There followed an inadvertently comic exchange which at the end subsided into one of those awful, sweaty silences that such glimpses of the world’s essential absurdity always provoke. I remember at one of Mrs. W.’s stiflingly grand occasions conversing with the lady herself as we made our way slowly up an interminable, red-carpetedstaircase behind the ample back parts of the Dowager Duchess of Somewhere, and both of us noticing at the same instant, what the Duchess herself was magnificently unaware of, that on her way into the Palace she had trod in corgi-shit. At moments like that I always felt grateful for the difficulties of leading a multiple life, which