Jenean McBrearty

The February ‘Future or Ruin’ Speech

 

 

Kurt’s first word was Dada. Most children, because of the way the mouth grips the teat-nipple, utter Mum (which becomes Mama) and soon associate it with kindly eyes and gentle touches. But Kurt began his life contrarily. When only a year old, he saw his elder brother, Vance, picking at a scab on his knee, and slapped his hand away. 

 

Bawling like a hungry lamb, Vance ran to Mother. He’d been told he shouldn’t hit anybody smaller than he, and cried tears of frustration very time Kurt poked or cuffed him. “Just stay away from him,” she advised the boy. “In sixteen years, you’ll be the same size and you can have it out with him.”

 

By 1914 it was alright to smack someone smaller than you. Nations did it all the time. Big countries believed they were inherently stronger than small ones. Yet, if it was so, it shouldn’t matter when the smaller realm had friends, some of whom were very fierce and created art to prove it.

 

Vance returned from the Great War half blind from the gas and shell-shocked, unable to have it out with anyone. “A waste of good aggression,” Kurt said of him as he drank coffee with the young men who escaped the carnage by the luck of birth order. “Men shouldn’t strive alone in the dark. Better to rejoice in good company.”

 

“We must be the voice of the present,” Hugo said. “We must avoid the pitfalls of patriotism, save our passion for sex and art, and live twice as hard for men with half-lives devoid of meaning or lust.”

 

“Raucous stoicism, that’s my motto. Resignation to the void needn’t be dull or reverent. Dread needn’t be sluggish or quiet. Noisy anguish is a perfectly fine expression of tortured perfection. Isn’t it grand,” he said to Hugo, “that new social inventions are called movements? We watch horseraces and battles with the same amusement, and when they’re over, we can keep the action going forever, if we’ve filmed it. When I have sex, my mind watches my movements, and because I’m more conscious of myself and my actions, my screwing has improved considerably because of it.”

 

Hugo laughed. “Perhaps in your mind you’re a better lover, but what evidence do you have that it’s true?”

 

“Lulu says I’m a perfect lover.”

 

“Lulu? You can’t take her seriously. She’s in love with you. When you talk of art and politics, she glows with external admiration, but internally she’s dreaming of babies and luncheons with the friends she believes envy her.”

 

Kurt bolted from the café, and went to Lulu’s house. Hearing gaiety noises, he went to the backyard where Lulu sat with Marie, Etienne, and Paula drinking tea at a black iron table. He saw Lulu caress the heart-shaped locket he’d given her to wear around her neck. Paula took it from her fingers, and held it in the palm of her hand. “It has the words, love forever, engraved on it,” she squealed. “That’s the most divine gift a man can give a woman, isn’t it? Eternal love.”

 

There were sighs and nods of agreement. Hugo was right. Dada was a movement meant to be lived, not discussed and discarded. He decided immediately, at Lulu’s back gate, half-hidden by low-hanging branches of a cherry tree, never to marry. 

 

It was a momentous decision for a man of eighteen. The 20’s were roaring in Berlin as well as New York, Paris and London. Vance had been released from hospital almost a year and only occasionally ventured out. “He isn’t wounded, why does he walk so slowly?” he asked his mother. 

 

“He’s waiting for his body to catch up with his old soul,” she said.

 

It was an unsatisfactory answer. Kurt went swimming, the water let him move and think at the same time. There was nothing he could do to make Vance’s old soul young again, but he could move. Swim. Walk. Run. Outdistance age and death in a sprint. He gave up smoking and drinking, and saved his money. “I’m the only Dada-devotee to abandon social insanity by pursuing well-disciplined chaos,” he told Hugo. 

 

“What do you mean?” Hugo said. 

 

“No true Dada asks for explanation or seeks meaning. Answers to questions are for those who seek certainty. Since there is no tomorrow, there is no certainty.”

 

Eventually, Vance did help create a sailing team with his war buddies. Not real exercise, Kurt decided, but he would return from the lake with wind-kissed pink cheeks, tousled hair, and a hearty appetite. “My pals tell me I need a holiday,” Vance said to his mother. “They want me to visit Munich with them.”  

 

She packed him a valise full of clean underwear and a rosary. “Maybe your brother can buy some hope in Munich, Kurt. You should go with them,” she said. 

 

“And listen to them complain for hours about lice and life in the trenches? Absolutely not,” Kurt said.

 

“You know Vance has episodes. The war is still with him. It is still with me.”

 

“I’m not a babysitter,” Kurt said, but stuffed his wallet full of the marks she handed him.  

 

On the train, however, no one talked about the Great War. 

 

“The socialists are running things now,” Jon Razner explained. “They say they’ll make things better, but with the Versailles payments, it’s hopeless. We’re the only ones who can save Germany.”

 

“You friends are dangerous,” Kurt told Vance when they’d retreated to the privacy of their compartment. “They speak of bullets with beer-thick tongues as the only remedy. And who is this man, Hitler?”

 

“A veteran with an Iron Cross,” Vance said.

 

“An upstart from the gutters of Vienna! Worth thirteen pennies, for both.”

 

Vance stared at his own reflection in the window. “I see well enough to know we cannot survive with such divisions inside our country. Liquor may loosen their tongues, but what the tongues say is true. I want to hear the solutions the Austrian proposes.”

 

“To turn streets into battlefields?”

 

“To end anarchy. To give work to everyone who wants it. Idleness is dangerous …  and exhausting.”

 

Kurt saw Vance’s pistol hiding in his holster. Vance was lonely as well as idle, picking at scabs that hid lethal infection; he needed a Lulu to give him purpose and roots. Vance leaned over and placed a calm hand on Kurt’s arm. “I’m not afraid to die. The trouble with Dada is that it’s full of cowardly men who are afraid to die, acting out childish panic attacks in the ashes of defeat. Hitler is Germany’s phoenix.”

 

Why did things look the same, Kurt wondered? Bolshevism looked like religion, without God. Dada looked like depression without suffering. And nihilism looked like hope whether it wore a like a uniform or a choir robe. How odd that the brothers left Berlin as strangers, and left Munich as believers because they’d been given a choice between a future or ruin.   

 

 

 

Jenean McBrearty is a graduate of San Diego State University, who taught Political Science and Sociology. Her fiction, poetry, and photographs have been published in over two-hundred print and on-line journals. Her how-to book, Writing Beyond the Self; How to Write Creative Non-fiction that Gets Published was published by Vine Leaves Press in 2018. She won the Eastern Kentucky English Department Award for Graduate Creative Non-fiction in 2011, and a Silver Pen Award in 2015 for her noir short story: Red’s Not Your Color. She lives in Kentucky and writes full time when she’s not watching classic movies and eating chocolate.