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He had to acquire the iron discipline of the soldier who works with the government—the ability to stand in the same room with stupidity a
nd say nothing, show nothing.
The real danger was not losing his temper, however. For in the second year of his studies, he realized that he was beginning to treat some of the most absurd ideas as if they had some basis in truth. It was Goebbels in practice: If you tell the same lies long enough and loudly enough, even people who know better will despair and concede the point.
We are tribal animals. We cannot long stand against the tribe.
Thank heaven he could go home to Cecily every day. She was his reality check. Unlike the ersatz Left of the university, Cessy was a genuine old-fashioned liberal, a Democrat of the tradition that reached its peak with Truman and blew its last trumpet with Moynihan.
It was part of the insanity of their marriage—the reason his father kept asking him, right up to the wedding itself, “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”
Because not only was Reuben committed to conservative values, he was also a Serbian by ancestry and upbringing—an Orthodox Christian with a native knowledge of the language of Serbia because his parents made sure of it.
And Cessy was Croatian—Catholic, yes, but also of the tribe that Serbians hated more than any. Once Serbs and Croats had been the same people. But the Turks had long ruled Serbia, while Croatia was sheltered within Catholic Austria-Hungary. What did Croats know of oppression and suffering? And when the Nazis came, they collaborated with the conquerors, and the price of their perfidy was paid in Serbian blood.
Nobody forgot things like this in the Balkans. Such injuries were nursed generation after generation. So when Reuben came home from Ohio State with a Croatian girl, and then left her with his family while he went off to begin serving his ROTC obligation to his country, his parents were appalled.
She won them over completely. It was hard to believe that anyone could get past Father’s cast-iron hatred of Croats, but Cessy had insisted that she’d do just fine, now go off and be a soldier for a while. And when Reuben came home on leave the first time, it quickly became clear that not only did his family like Cessy, they liked her a lot more than they liked Reuben. Oh, they said they still loved him best, but he knew it was just to make him feel better. They adored Cessy.
And that was fine with him. “You should be our U.N. ambassador,” he told her on that first leave. “You could get Hutus and Tutsis to be friends. You could get Israelis and Palestinians to hug and kiss. Hindus and Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, Shia and Baha’i, Basque and Spaniard—”
“Not Basques and Spaniards,” she told him. “That dates back to when there were still mastodons in Europe. That’s practically like Cro-Magnon versus Neandertal.”
“I want our babies to be as smart as you and as tough as me,” he said.
“I just want them to look like me,” said Cessy. “Because having daughters that look like you would be cruel.”
Their daughters did look like Cessy, and their sons had Reuben’s lean, lithe body, and all in all, their family life was perfect. That’s what he came home to every day from school; that was the environment in which he studied. That was his root in reality that kept calling him back from the brink of getting seduced into the fantasyland of academia.
Until Averell Torrent decided he wanted Reuben’s soul.
Reuben had been goaded by professors before. He goaded them by wearing his uniform to every class on the first day. They took it as a personal affront. Why shouldn’t they? That’s how he meant it.
Some of them simply ignored him the rest of the semester—until his coursework forced them to give him an A. Others declared war on him, but their ham-handed attacks on Reuben always backfired, winning him the sympathy of the other students as Reuben answered all the attacks with unflagging courtesy and quiet good sense. Many of the others would begin defending him—and, by extension, the military. Thus Reuben would quietly lose all the classroom battles for the hearts and minds of the students, but win the war.
With Torrent, though, as they worked their way through the ancient long-lived empires—Egypt, China—and the ancient republics—first Athens, now Rome—it became for the other students a class in watching Torrent and Reuben spar with each other. They weren’t angry at Reuben—they knew that Torrent always initiated their long, classtime-consuming exchanges—but they still resented the fact that Reuben Malich had hijacked their only class with the great man.
Can’t help it, Reuben silently answered their huffish attitudes. He calls on me. What am I supposed to do, cover my ears and hum loudly so I can’t hear his questions?
Though he was getting tempted to do just that. Because what Torrent was saying about America and empire made perverse sense. While the other students sidetracked themselves into a discussion about whether Torrent’s statements were “conservative” or “liberal,” “reactionary” or “politically correct,” Reuben could not shake off Torrent’s premise—that America was not in the place Rome was in before it fell, but rather in the place where Rome was before civil war destroyed the Republic and led to the dictatorship of the Caesars.
So when Torrent had finally silenced the other students’ attempts to put his remarks into one or another of present-day political camps, Reuben was ready to speak.
“Sir,” he said, “if civil war is a necessary precursor to the end of democracy—”
“The façade of democracy.”
“Then it means our republic, such as it is, is safe. Because we don’t have warlords. We don’t have private armies.”
“You mean ‘so far,’ ” Torrent said at once. “You mean ‘that we know about.’ ”
“We aren’t Yugoslavia,” said Reuben—the most obvious example, for him at least. “We don’t have clear ethnic divisions.”
Again, a storm of protest from the other students. What about blacks? Hispanics? Jews?
They debated that for a while, but Reuben was determined to stay on track. “We can have riots, but not sustained wars, because the sides are too geographically mixed and the resources are too one-sided.”
Torrent shook his head. “The seeds of civil war are always there, in every country. England in the 1600s—nobody would have believed that those pesky Puritans could provoke a Royalist versus Puritan civil war, and yet they did.”
