Manchurian Books

A certain innate scepticism, I think, explains it and
a certain inaptitude for sympathetic assimilation. My father, I believe,
was a sceptic; my mother was certainly a hard woman.
I was an only child, and to this day I do not know whether my father
is living or dead. He fled my mother's virtues before my distincter
memories began. He left no traces in his flight, and she, in her
indignation, destroyed every vestige that she could of him. Never a
photograph nor a scrap of his handwriting have I seen; and it was, I
know, only the accepted code of virtue and discretion that prevented her
destroying her marriage certificate and me, and so making a clean sweep
of her matrimonial humiliation. I suppose I must inherit something of
the moral stupidity that would enable her to make a holocaust of every
little personal thing she had of him. There must have been presents made
by him as a lover, for example--books with kindly inscriptions, letters
perhaps, a flattened flower, a ring, or such-like gage. She kept her
wedding-ring, of course, but all the others she destroyed.


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