Question 7

by Richard Flanagan

Paul Harteck (physical chemist): We might have succeeded if the highest authorities had said, “We are prepared to sacrifice everything.” Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker (physicist): In our case even the scientists said it couldn’t be done. Erich Bagge (physicist): That’s not true. You were there yourself at that conference in Berlin. I think it was on 8 September that everyone was asked—Geiger, Bothe, and you, Harteck, were there too, and everyone said that it must be done at once. Someone said, “Of course it is an open question whether one ought to do a thing like that.” Thereupon Bothe got up and said, “Gentlemen, it must be done.” Then Geiger got up and said, “If there is the slightest chance that it is possible—it must be done.” That was on 8 September ’39…[2]

One of Chekhov’s earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov’s question 7 is typical:

Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?[3]

You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer? And why do we do what we do to each other? That’s question 7.

Each of us has a public life and private life. But beyond both is a secret life that baffles us. Perhaps the only reply that can be made to Hiroshima is to ask question 7. If it is a question that can never be answered, it is still the question we must keep asking, if only in order to understand that life is never binary, nor reducible to cant or code, but a mystery we at best apprehend. In Chekhov’s stories, the only fools are those with answers.

He saw the world aslant. It was for him a great tragicomedy in which the comedy was made poignant by the tragedy and the tragedy rendered bearable by the comedy.

You went under alone but together you could survive. When someone was down you helped, not out of altruism, but an enlightened selfishness: this way we all have a chance. The measure of the strongest was also the only guarantee of ongoing strength: their capacity to help the weakest. Mateship wasn’t a code of friendship. It was a code of survivors. It demanded you help those who are not your friends but who are your mates. It demanded you sacrifice for the group. Is that a convict idea? Is it an Indigenous idea? Is it both things merged? It’s not a European or an American idea. It is, though, a deeply old, serious idea of humanity.

“Money,” my father would say, “is like shit. Pile it up and it stinks. Spread it around and you can grow things.”

My parents were frugal not simply because they had to be careful, but because they saw little reason for making life about money. The notion of any relationship being what is now termed transactional, the idea of monetising aspects of your very life, would have seemed to them like some sort of emotional sickness or mental illness.

Money was good, as the old joke ran, if only for financial reasons.

Tasmania was full of the descendants of machine breakers, swing labourers, Luddites, Chartists, trade unionists, slave revolt leaders and Māori chieftans exiled to Van Diemen’s Land, as the island was known, the gulag of the British Empire—people united in their various failed efforts to give shape to the revolt against the enclosing capitalism reshaping the world and them with it.

Whenever I hear the babble of nonsense with which politicians dress up the horrors of war, I am once more that seven-year-old child, shocked, bewildered and deeply ashamed. War, my father told me decades later, is the ultimate obscenity.

Of the many necessary illusions that enable a writer to write, two are paramount—one, the vanity they can write a good book, and the other the conceit that a good book will be read by good readers, people with the insight to recognise what is good within it.

When asked his opinion of Szilard and his Bund, Albert Einstein replied that Szilard was “a genuinely intelligent man, not generally inclined to fall for illusions. Perhaps, like so many such people, he tends to overestimate the role of rational thought in human life.”

Nearing the end in her little room in the nursing home, I would often take my mother’s hand, pushing its leathery, crusty skin folds back and forth. I later wrote in a novel of a character who, similarly sitting next to their dying mother, finds some hand cream and rubs it into the back of her mother’s hand. I never did that. I made it up. I made it up regretting that so much of my thought had gone into my writing a novel about loving people around you and so little into loving the people around me. Maybe that’s what the past is. Making it up so we can keep moving along. Perhaps the past is where we are going and have never been. My mother had asked me if she and my father might come and live with me. Begged me. It was when, in her nineties, she understood they would soon have to move into a home unless some other arrangement could be made. And I, who had always thought I would say yes, said no. I had my reasons. I could not have worked and been the full-time carer my parents needed. I could have been that carer and forsaken work. But was that even possible? Perhaps, perhaps not. There is no memory without shame.

My illiterate grandfather understood something fundamental. “If you don’t have principles,” he once told my father, “you may as well jump off the end of the jetty.” Inscribe that above every parliament and board room entrance. “Crayfish to no man,” Tom, my father’s brother and a labourer all his life, once said. Tattoo that on every politician’s and journalist’s forehead.

maths and science completely and grow bored. Only US politics piques their interest because it defies understanding. And what was US politics or any politics for that matter but the irrational expressed as a system?

In July 1945, the American Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, commissioned a study on the human cost of an invasion of Japan. It estimated between 1.7 million and four million Allied casualties with 400,000 to 800,000 dead and between five and ten million Japanese dead. So many Purple Hearts (awarded to US soldiers wounded or killed in combat) were manufactured in preparation for the invasion and its expected feats of death—some half a million—that the stockpile has not been exhausted to this day, many wars and nearly eighty years later.

Tragedy is sometimes understood as the conflict of one good against another. A more nuanced form of this idea is that tragedy is the conflict between what is perceived to be a lesser evil against what is perceived to be a greater evil.

And I realise writing this that memory is as much an act of creation as it is of testimony, and that one without the other is a tree without its trunk, wings without a bird, a book without its story.

Chekhov’s line that “both the strong and the weak fall victim to their own relationships with one another”

“If you can meet with triumph and disaster,” he said finally, reciting Kipling, “and treat those two imposters just the same.”