Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Betrayer Betrayed

Death has a particular form of cruelty for the living - the impossibility of explaining one’s mistakes to the dead, and, therefore, of continuing to enrol them in the convenient fictions of one’s life. If death is also the moment when all mutual resentments are finally revealed, a point of total truth and and expression of all the secret fantasies never spoken about, it becomes a nightmare for the living. Jewish ethical wisdom summarises the situation neatly: it is the victim who needs to forgive transgression; but the dead have no capacity.

Betrayal can be a subtle art. It is most subtle, and most rationalised, when it occurs incrementally as a series of seemingly innocuous steps none of which can be called treacherous, but which taken collectively are decisive. The sin becomes all the more severe when the sequence of steps is in fact predicted by a draft fiction, written long before events, in which real intention is unwittingly stated. Found and edited by one’s spouse just before her death, her commentary makes that intention obvious. But, of course, this is not obvious to the perpetrator who can’t see his own crime - until, that is, he can no longer offer an explanation to the one he has betrayed.

The finality of death is most terrible because one can not convince the dead of anything. The fact that an explanation may be necessary is a potential source of embarrassment, rage and despair in the living. There is neither forgiveness nor forgetting. The threat is that one’s entire life has been a disastrously hidden lie which has been decisively and unanswerably exposed. An interpretation has been made. And the judgment is final. There is no appeal, no chance to ask for clemency, no mitigating circumstances are admitted. The brute facts have spoken.

Leaving draft fiction about for one’s wife to find is the pre-internet equivalent of publicly cataloguing one’s web site visits. Spiritually, we are our first drafts, or our web logs. It’s no use objecting that either are accidents, much less research. These things demonstrate intention, intention of which we may be only unconsciously aware. Consequent action is only incidental and dependent mainly on opportunity not virtue. Someone once said ‘if you want to know who you really are, look at your chequebook.’ This is no longer true since many of us no longer need them. But the sentiment is correct. It’s the hidden records of our existence that show who we are.

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