Let it destroy you, p.1
Let It Destroy You, page 1
Praise for Let It Destroy You
“Reading Harriet Alida Lye’s prose is to be given the delicious gift of sinking deeper into the human experience. Let It Destroy You offers us this gift through the remarkable story of June and August, lovers fraught with passion and tension that comes alive on the page, as their pursuits of love and science collide spectacularly. This is a story of how the atomic bomb was born, but it’s also a tender and intelligent exploration of two people trying to understand who they are—and what they’re capable of—through the lens of one another, and the daughter they share. Lye’s singular observations about life and exquisite characterizing details tell us so much about a person, a moment, a feeling. This stunning novel cements her as one of my very favourite writers. Let It Destroy You is exceptional.”—Ashley Audrain, international bestselling author of The Push
“The paradox of loneliness in marriage, the shockwave of parental love—staged against history’s most devastating invention, the story of August and June Snow is a tender, anguished duet, glimmering with intelligence and grace.”—Sarah Henstra, Governor General’s Award–winning author of The Red Word
“Let It Destroy You is a strikingly intimate novel with profound reverberations. August and June’s love feels as touching as it is cruel, and their determination to protect their daughter will remind you of the staggering potential of science and our search for those little bursts of light in our darkest hours.”—Ellen Keith, bestselling author of The Dutch Wife
Praise for The Honey Farm
“An aura of mystery, faintly tinged with menace, permeates Lye’s sensuous debut novel.”—Publishers Weekly
“Each lyrical line feels like a gift left at the reader’s altar. A honey-mouthed debut ruminating on creation, possession, and faith.”—Kirkus Reviews
“With a strong command of tone and a haunting sense of atmosphere, Lye’s first novel will transfix readers. At times lyrical, biblical, and otherworldly, The Honey Farm is a suspenseful and well-crafted story.”—Booklist
“Mysterious, suspenseful, and unnerving, The Honey Farm offers a thrilling narrative that examines the distorted realities and conflicting perceptions that often exist in the quietest places.”—Iain Reid, award-winning author of We Spread
Praise for Natural Killer: A Memoir
“Never have I read a more moving book on the fragile filament of life…Harriet Alida Lye has no truck with fantasy or faith or folderol. She is a star witness to the bloom of life that surrounds death, and her work demands access to our unsentimental hearts.”—Michael Winter, award-winning author of Into the Blizzard
“Natural Killer is less a cancer memoir (though it is that) as a wise and heart-affirming reflection on the ties that bind us to one another…[A] truly original work of autobiography.”—Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017
“Gorgeous, brutal, a meteorite of a book. Natural Killer holds the sheer force and radical beauty of the miracle it depicts.…Lye writes with the wisdom and measure of a young Didion. To read this memoir is to be changed by it.”—Claudia Dey, author of Heartbreaker, a Paris Review Staff Pick
Copyright © 2023 by Harriet Alida Lye
Trade paperback edition published 2023
McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
While this story is inspired by history, it is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data is available upon request.
ISBN 9780771000423
Ebook ISBN 9780771000430
Cover design by Jennifer Griffiths
Interior design by Matthew Flute, adapted for ebook
Cover art: (couple) George Marks / Getty Images; (gold foil texture) More Images /Adobe Stock; (burst) valeriya_dor / Adobe Stock; (gold flecks) banphote / Adobe Stock
Interior art: ulimi / DigitalVision Vectors / Getty Images
McClelland & Stewart,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,
a Penguin Random House Company
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I
August
June
August
June
August
June
August
June
Part II
August
June
August
June
August
June
August
June
August
June
August
June
August
June
August
June
August
June
Part III
June
August
Ten Commandments
Author’s Note
Thank You To
About the Author
For Arlo & Lucy
Do not destroy what you cannot create
—Leó Szilárd
I
AUGUST
My name is August. I was born on February 11, 1898. Today is August 12, 1945, which makes me forty-seven years old. You have likely not heard of me, though there is a chance that my work has saved your life, or one day will.
I am innocent.
I stand at the window in this holding cell, watching the rolling hills in the distance disappear as night encroaches. Encroach—the word has always reminded me of cockroaches. I imagine the dark-black, shiny back of the Night Cockroach crawling westward, pulling his nocturnal cloak behind him. He is a few miles away yet. The sun sets late this far north; it is after nine o’clock. For the moment, the sky is a bright, deep indigo against which I can see what looks like lightly falling snow. But it is late summer, and what falls is not snow, but ash. The ash is the reason I am here. It is why they are calling me a war criminal.
I have a glass of water in my right hand—no other beverages were provided, which surprised me: I would have thought they’d want me a little dulled in the morning—and my left hand is in my pocket, turning over a nickel that the authorities neglected to confiscate. I’ve never known what to do with an empty hand.
In the gleam of the windowpane, I see my reflection superimposed upon the landscape. My face is like many faces; even before it was all over the papers, you would have thought I looked familiar, like someone you’d met before. The long, sloping line of my nose, the straw broom of my eyebrows, my ears sticking out like handles. My cheeks, sagged into bulldog jowls. Looking for my eyes, I notice after a few moments that they’ve disappeared against the sky. Funny. They must be the very same purplish blue. I turn my head side to side, observing the effect. I look hollow, or omnipotent; it’s unnerving. I stare and stare, knowing the satisfaction that comes from empirical evidence, trying to find the line to show where my eyes begin and the sky ends, but cannot. Until the cockroach comes closer, the sky and I are the same.
* * *
—
When I was young, I wanted to be a composer. I listened mostly to Ravel, Vivaldi, Grieg. There was this lightness, a peculiar innocence to their melodies, and the way they continue to hold the power to haunt for centuries—I wanted that. Years ago, a whole lifetime ago, when I was completing my doctorate, I borrowed a two-seater plane and taught myself to fly. I’d look out the windows at the cleaving hills, the sharply rising cliffs, the staccato of evergreens in their own organic pattern, and I could hear a symphony come from the movement of it all. No, it was more than hearing, it was a sensation that was new to me; it was as though I could physically feel the swooping, soaring notes. I composed music with every touch of my controls, every slant of my gaze. The patterns of the mountains created the melody of my song.
It’s been years since I’ve flown, and so my compositions have changed in nature. I’m a scientist. Or I was, until now. The judges’ decision won’t change my identity, but regardless of what is decided, I will certainly no longer be able to work. Already it has been difficult. Perception is everything.
Tomorrow morning, someone—perhaps the same man who dropped me here, tall and dressed entirely in white—will come to fetch me. I will walk the long, undecorated corridors in this formally neutral complex, and stand before the International Criminal Court. There will be no jury. The prosecutors will be caustic and provocative; they will, I have been warned, make this personal.
Some of the newspapers are making me out to be some kind of evil genius, as if this—what, global destruction?—was my plan all along. For the ash falling now to be simply the foreshadowing for the end of it all. Imagine! No parent could want that. I read it all, naturally, but I am rather surprised to find myself unaffected by the criticisms. I have been known to be quite vain. But all of that doesn’t reflect me, after all: I am just a prism through which opinions refract. There are journalists who defend my name (just the genius, no evil), but for the most part, the ones controlling the newspapers are against me. If it was June in the public eye, it would be much worse for her.
And then I have my fans, some of whom I saw with their homemade placards on the drive in from the airport. I’d say there were at least a hundred of them, most of them younger than me. I noticed one man, dressed quite smartly, holding a sign that said DO NOT DESTROY WHAT YOU CANNOT CREATE, each letter a thick black brushstroke. This is a line from a speech I gave against nuclear weapons several years ago, and thus represents a rather niche and zealous fandom. I hadn’t expected such a welcome; many of them must have come from a long way away. We don’t know how long the trial will go on, so how long, I wonder, do they plan to stay? I imagine the families they left behind, the jobs, the sums of money they must be spending on their sad little hotel rooms—and for what? What do they expect of me? What outcome would they find the least disappointing?
* * *
—
My room smells of damp wool. It hasn’t rained today; the dampness must be coming from the humidity of the water; though I can’t see it from here, I know. The walls are grey-painted bricks, and I immediately noticed a chip in the paint revealing the rust-coloured rock beneath. The criminals who stay in this room aren’t here long enough to require a fresh paint job, nor are they in a position to complain. It’s a tiny room, but I’ve been living in hotels, or in transit, for most of my life. I can’t leave, but I don’t feel trapped. My mind has always been free.
I know that what you’re interested in is the bomb, but I can’t tell you about that without telling you about everything that came before. I may as well start at the beginning.
* * *
—
Children are born with an inquisitive mind, which is to say the mind of a scientist, and I assume that I became one because in some ways I remained a child. I can see myself as I was then: the same dark eyes, the same curly hair, but of a shade so dark it absorbed colour rather than presented it, unlike the bright grey I live with now. I can inhabit my young body and feel its smallness. I can see my hands, half the size of these hands, and move them around—playing with my toys, cutting up my breaded chicken with a knife and fork. I was very sensitive and somewhat high-strung. It wasn’t easy for me to be around people I hadn’t met before. My first years of school were especially hard.
“How will I ever know that they really know me?” I asked my mother, who was beautiful like a drawing from a children’s book.
She said: “You’ll never really know, August, you just have to try. You have to send a little boat across the water, from your island to theirs.”
I tried this. I trusted her. This is what I thought of every time I met a new person for many years, until the conscious thought became so learned by my body that it was unconscious habit. I was the island, and I was the boat.
My mother had a way of loving us that didn’t get in the way. Her love was something I never had to worry about. For all that I would give to bring her back, I am grateful she isn’t here now to see what has become of me. I wouldn’t be able to explain.
She used to read my brother and sister and me these tales of apocalypse, dark stories that inculcated us with a fear of the future and an addiction to truth. Her voice was so gentle but the worlds she conjured were so terrifying. Children’s stories, like any religion, are trying to teach morality. Both lend themselves to terror. There are the good and there are the evil: it is black and white. I closed my eyes and followed along intently as my mother spoke, not yet knowing how to read for myself, seeing the story vividly play out on the screen of my eyelids. I learned in these stories that everything could fall apart. The parents could die, and the monsters could come out from under the bridge, and the witches could try to eat up the good children. I listened closely, because I needed to know: When this happens, what is the way to survive? It seemed to me that there could only be one way, and I needed to know the correct path.
My mother and father, Tekla and Louis, were religious. This is how the rest of the world defined them, but for me, it wasn’t even secondary. I had the privilege, at the time, of not considering it at all. Hungary was welcoming to Jews, or at least more so than much of the rest of Europe at the time. We were free to worship, or not, and observe the high holidays. There were kosher delis and bakeries. But as we grew up, while the city was still accommodating, people started to turn against us. You might not think there’s a difference. There is. The structures were in place to support us; the businesses, the synagogues, the schools were still there. Our community still had its place. But people run systems, and so this soon changed.
When my parents went out at night, to the theatre, or the opera, which they both either loved or pretended to, I could not fall asleep until they were home. I imagined all the ways they could die, and my imagination was so strong that I couldn’t believe that what I’d seen in my mind wasn’t real. When they finally, inevitably, always returned, I’d cling to their legs and need my mother to lie in bed next to me until my eyelids finally fell and my breath slowed into the pace of dreams. I didn’t have nightmares, just vivid reconstructions of my days.
I heard my mother tell my father that I was too concerned with the abstract. But everything is abstract, or starts out that way. Love, death, fear; electricity, mornings, family; everything is purely conceptual. Then she said I had no sense of proportion, but to this I’d say that my dear mother was naïve to the vastness of evil that existed.
My family’s first home was an apartment in Pest. I was born shortly after the unification of the three parts of the city, but even then, it was still considered by most to be its own town. Pest, distinct from the bourgeois Buda. The city was beautiful, as if built piece by piece by a benevolent god showing off. But I’d say it’s more impressive to know that it was made not by a higher power, but with human hands.
My city was full of beauty for its own sake. Ornate sculptures on the rounded corners of buildings at the turn of a corner, carved stone; brightly painted trams running up and down the streets for as long as people were awake, which was, it seemed to me as a child, forever. Looking up, one’s view of the sky was interrupted with tram lines, street lamps, smoke. I had such love for it, a childlike love that was part admiration and part fear. Fear because it was so much bigger than me, and I was afraid it would reject me.
Down by the river, where I wasn’t allowed to walk by myself, the Chain Bridge to Buda looked like stone giants standing knee-deep in the water, paths of metal running into their mouths. The oil lamps on the bridge glowed copper in the dusk; the fog absorbed the light as it rolled along the Danube. My father designed bridges, but not that one, so I could appreciate it differently, with mystical reverence rather than trying to comprehend the mathematics of it. I held my mother’s hand and I felt the glow, as if I were just another lamp becoming illuminated. I haven’t seen my city, or my mother, since I left; sometimes my longing for both gives me an ache that feels like heartbreak and it knocks me down like a wave.
For my tenth birthday my father gave me a chemistry set and it set something off inside of me. I read the little bound book that came in the box until I had memorized its contents. There were four different types of chemical reactions. Four, only four! A whole world, and only four possibilities! What a relief, to be able to trust in science to hone the vast chaos of this world into a predictable, specific outcome!
