Germany invaded Denmark. Now he tried through some friends in Belgium, and Belgium was invaded. Then he tried Italy, where one of his professors knew a willing convoy in Milan, but the day Tola set off to meet the liaison there Mussolini declared war on Britain and she was turned back at the Italian border. This was the last Rotblat heard of her.
That evening, when I relayed this story to Maddie, she sounded distant and unmoved. When I pressed her, she remained silent for a moment and then cleared her throat and said something about how, once we know the end of an unfortunate story, it’s tempting to ask why its protagonist did not do better to swerve his fate.
Or do you think it’s all up to God? she asked a moment later, in a voice that did not invite the affirmative. God’s decision? God’s will?
And if I did?
That I didn’t see the end of me and Maddie coming seems impossible to me now. But at the time I had this notion that even though my own feelings for my girlfriend had begun to cool not long after the spectacular prize of her was attained, to part ways on this basis would be as much an act of infidelity toward myself. It unsettled me that the Amar of a year ago could be so inconsistent with the Amar of today, and I suppose that in my determination to pretend, at least, that nothing had changed—that I was not so fickle and vain as to want a woman only until she had been won—I did not sufficiently entertain the possibility that Maddie herself was capable of changing, too. Then, on the last Sunday before Christmas, Sue Lawley announced her castaway that week to be the English comedian Bob Monkhouse. Amazed, I picked up the phone and dialed the many digits that were Maddie, but there was no answer.
Stormy Weather started up, and I tried her again. Vaughn Monroe, Racing With the Moon. Ravel. Barber’s Adagio for Strings. During You Have Cast Your Shadow on the Sea, performed by Monkhouse and Cast, I tried her a fourth time, my hangover compounded now by my bilious anxiety over why my girlfriend of three and a half years was not answering her cell phone at six forty-five Eastern Standard Time on a Sunday morning.
What about your book? Sue Lawley asked.
That would be the complete works of Lewis Carroll.
What if you could only have—
One?
—one bit of Lewis Carroll?
Well, Hunting of the Snark, I suppose, is my favorite piece of work by Lewis Carroll. But then again, I couldn’t do without the characters in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Now would it be . . . Can I please have the Complete Adventures of Alice?
I could see why she thought me hypocritical. On the face of it, it’s paradoxical to be so cautious in life, so orderly and fastidious, while also claiming to place one’s faith in the ultimate agency of God. Why give up cigarettes if He has already written you off in a bus accident next week? But theological predestination and free will are not necessarily incompatible. If God has a definite power over the whole of existence, one can imagine this power extending to His ability, whenever He wills, to replace any given destiny with another destiny. In other words, destiny is not definite but indefinite, mutable by the deliberate actions of man himself; Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves. God has not predetermined the course of human history but rather is aware of all its possible courses and may alter the one we’re on in accordance with our will and the bounds of His universe. Or, as I’d put it to Maddie the week before: Think of a bumper cars rink. Seated in a bumper car, you’re free to steer yourself in any direction you like, while at the same time your vehicle is connected by a pole to a ceiling that supplies energy to the car and ultimately limits its movements to those predetermined by a grid. Similarly, with his enormous bumper cars rink, God creates and presides over the possibility of human action, which humans then take it upon themselves to carry out. And in so doing—turning left or right, advancing or reversing, slamming into your neighbors or respectfully veering clear of them—we decide what we shall become and assume responsibility for these choices that define us.
I could tell