Cornel Adam Lengyel
THE STEEL STATUE
Alexander Golt wanted to be remembered
for at least a thousand years. A refugee from Munich, he was a
short, homely, bad-tempered little artist, without friends, patrons
or relatives. He had one shrunken black suit to his name and a worn
portfolio crammed with drawings and blueprints. He spoke broken
English; when excited, he stuttered badly.
His ambition was not unique. The most unlikely people may
develop an itch for immortality. As children they carve their names
in school desks or living trees. As grown men they invent gadgets,
run for office, beget sons or daughters, in the hope that for a
space of days they will be remembered, that even after death a
trace of their earthly doings will not be completely
dissipated.
In Golt this common itch had become a persistent rage, a hidden
fire which put a glitter in his eyes and a restlessness in his
bones. He had been pushed around since early childhood. Soon after
his arrival in San Francisco, he learnt that his widowed mother had
been liquidated in a gas wagon and that his only sister had
disappeared in Ravensbrueck. Knowing that if he had remained at
home, he would no longer be alive, he felt an even greater urgency
to impress the true meaning of Alexander Golt on the hard surface
of the world.
Up to the age of thirty he had not done anything to distinguish
himself. A moody, unsocial fellow, he had earned his living as a
part-time draftsman for various engineering firms. In his leisure
he read Also Spach Zarathustra, made surrealistic studies of
insects and constructed complicated abstractions of blown glass and
copper wire. He had held several exhibits which passed unnoticed.
Golt did not mind, he was biding his time: for nearly a decade he
had been groping for one irresistible idea and the one
indestructible medium.
Golt wanted to be sure of durable fame. He despised the ordinary
means of acquiring and keeping it. "Libraries are burnt," he would
point out in debates with himself. "Museums are bombed. Murderers
are sanctified. History is written by liars!" He could not depend
on posterity. Weren't there great poets among the Babylonians whose
epics were lost forever? Gilgamesh was but one of a hundred heroes.
Words were fickle as air. He knew for a certainty that one day the
English men spoke so glibly would become a dead dialect, like
Sanskrit or Aramaic, and that fragments of Hamlet would be
painfully deciphered by new Senegalese sages.
Golt knew that there had been saints as wise as Gautama or the
Nazarene, yet no one alive heard of them. Old wisdom lost its
meaning. Men's thoughts and tongues changed. Their doctrines were
unstable as the wind. Surely, Atlantis had its Plato; Lemuria, its
Aristotle?
Golt had no use for heroes. Men of action who messed around in
the entrails of the here and the now, dealt in a most uncertain
element. Who remembered the Sumerian conquistadors and their
earth-shaking deeds? Sargon, Akbar—their true deeds were soon
falsified into legend, and after hardly a thousand years the legend
faded into thin air.
Monuments and marble temples were also perishable. Troy itself
was built on the top of seven towns. As for Baalbek, who knows how
many ruined cities served for its foundation? Those who painted
delicate images on canvas were most careless of their fame. In a
few generations their colored dreams would fade, dissolving in a
little dirt. Who remembered the great artists of ancient China or
India—artists greater than Praxiteles or Leonardo? Golt had
little faith in men's memories. What they preserved was but a tiny
fraction of what had happened, a fragment of the great and
wonderful works which men of genius had created. No, he could not
trust his fame to perishable paper or marble or legend. He had to
be sure that nothing would destroy his work.
After much speculation in the New World, Golt dreamed a giant
dream. He, Alexander Golt, would build a statue of a new metal,
stainless steel, unaffected by the elements; a statue taller than
the Empire State Building, heavier than a battleship, and more
enduring than the Sphinx! It would stand on Mount Tamalpais,
overlooking the Ocean and San Francisco Bay. It would serve as a
beacon to both East and West, a counterpart of the Statue of
Liberty.
Golt saw the details of the stupendous silver figure clearly as
in a vision. He saw the smiling upturned face, enigmatic, sublime,
at times half-hidden by enormous sea clouds. He saw the radiant
arms outstretched in a universal embrace, a gesture of brotherhood
toward the Far East where lived hundred of millions of
much-troubled children, the submerged half of mankind. Pacificus,
he called his statue; it symbolized world peace. Men who flew and
men who sail ships would see it scores of miles off the coast.
To build his colossus, Golt knew, would require not only
financial resources, but also monstrous gall and cunning.
Carefully, he laid his plans of attack. Working in a little
furnished room off Montgomery Street, for nearly three years, he
constructed diagram after diagram, changed his blueprints, revised
his estimates.
One spring morning, after the capitulation of France, he felt
his hour had come. Portfolio under arm, he called on San
Francisco's most prominent rabbi. Stuttering, he unfolded his great
pain. The rabbi listened to him, perplexed. Was the little man mad
or was he touched with the authentic fire.
Golt became rhapsodic.
"More than two thousand years ago, Hosea said, 'The swords shall
be beaten into plowshares!' But are they? I ask you, are they? No!
My ears are deaf with the rattling of swords! But it can be
stopped! It must be stopped!" He pointed dramatically to the
blueprints. "My statue will put Hosea's vision before the world's
eyes. Out of a million swords I'll cast his right arm: out of a
million bayonets I'll build his feet! Rabbi: will you help me make
the prophet's words come true?"
To get rid of him, the rabbi sent him to a trustee of the
synagogue, one of the city's wealthiest financiers and a patron of
the arts. Golt went. He displayed his diagrams and estimates. Bland
and watchful, the rich man listened to him with a skeptical
smile.
"I need a thousand tons of stainless steel," announced Golt. I
need cement and machinery. I need 300 artists, 600 metal workers,
800 helpers and apprentices. I'll give them work for seven years.
Your name will be remembered as the greatest of patrons.
Generations will bless your memory!"
The financier remained skeptical. "It's beyond my means," he
said. "Your project requires the resources of the Federal
Treasury." He gave Golt a check, however, and letter to a
congressman.
Everything was going according to plan. Golt left, sure of his
mission. He flew to Washington. He harangued congressmen and
senators. He faced committee after committee. He saw the President.
"America is the world's greatest power and its greatest hope,"
Alexander Golt proclaimed. "America stands for peace and
brotherhood! My statue will be a symbol of what America stands
for!"
The government yielded eventually. Funds were appropriated; a
commission was organized; the work could begin.
Every nerve in his body singing with silent ecstasy, Golt took
charge of the project. Mount Tamalpais was cleared. An army of
workmen built barracks. Surveyors came; the foundations for the
colossus were laid. Ordinary men now looked on Alexander Golt with
awe. He himself was awed by his triumph. Generations would rise and
perish like the grass, but he, Alexander Golt, would be remembered
for a thousand years!
A year later came Pearl Harbor.
A telegram from Washington canceled the project. The giant legs
of Pacificus were dismantled. The steel was needed for tanks and
battleships. Fortifications were installed on Mount Tamalpais.
Before long, Alexander Golt himself received greetings from the
President. Presently, he sailed out the Golden Gate, seaman second
class, bound for Tarawa. His ship was plated with steel from his
unfinished statue. Torpedoed in the South Pacific, she sank within
a few minutes and her entire crew was lost.
