Resurrection Blues by Arthur Miller Page A

General let this man escape?
    HENRI: It was a complete surprise to him. I spoke to him shortly after it happened; he was absolutely shocked . . .
    Â 
    SKIP: But he had him locked in a cell.—We’ve made a large down-payment, you know. . . . Or may one appeal to logic in this country?
    Â 
    HENRI: This is why I thought you and I ought to talk.
    Â 
    SKIP: About what?
    Â 
    HENRI: Have you any interest in history? Or philosophy? Where did you go to school?
    Â 
    SKIP: Princeton. But my interest was business, frankly. No philosophy, no culture, mainly the market.
    Â 
    HENRI: Oh, but poetry and the stock market have a lot in common, you know.
    Â 
    SKIP: Poetry and the market!
    Â 
    HENRI: Oh yes. They are both based on rules that the successful never obey.—A few years ago I spent some time in Egypt . . . you’ve probably been there?
    Â 
    SKIP: Egypt?—I’ve shot commercials all over Egypt . . . Chrysler, Bayer Aspirin, Viagra . . .
    Â 
    HENRI: . . . Then you know some of the wall paintings and sculpture.
    SKIP: Of course.—What’s this about?
    Â 
    HENRI: I want to tell you about a surprising discovery I made there. I am far from expert on the subject, but . . .
    Â 
    SKIP: What are you, a businessman or an academic?
    Â 
    HENRI: I retired from the pharmaceuticals business some years ago. I still breed fighting bulls but I’m getting out of that too; I’m basically a scholar now. In Egypt . . .
    Â 
    SKIP, takes out a cell phone and punches numbers from notebook: Excuse me.
    Â 
    HENRI: If you’re making a local call . . .
    Â 
    SKIP: The General’s office. To tell him I’m here.
    Â 
    HENRI: Doubt that’ll work . . . Glances at watch . . . . this close to lunch.
    Â 
    SKIP: Good god, why don’t they fix it?
    Â 
    HENRI: They? There is no “they” here; hasn’t been in most of the world since the fall of Rome.
    Â 
    SKIP, snaps his phone shut: What can you tell me about this guy’s escape?
    Â 
    HENRI:—I know how absurd this is going to sound, but I ask you to hear me out. Slight pause . I had a very distinct feeling at the time they found him gone, that he had never been in that cell.
    SKIP: But they had him, they’d captured him.
    Â 
    HENRI: They believed that, yes.
    Â 
    SKIP: What are you talking about?
    Â 
    HENRI, considers: . . . It struck me one day in Egypt . . .
    Â 
    SKIP, starting to rise: Look, I have no interest in Egypt . . .
    Â 
    HENRI, voice hardly raised : This may save your neck, Mr. Cheeseboro! Do sit; please.—
    Â 
    Skip goes still.
    Â 
    It struck me one day; that there were lots of images of the peoples the Egyptians had conquered, but none showing Jewish captives. I am far from expert in the subject but I couldn’t find more than one or two menorah—candelabra—a vague star of David . . . almost nothing, really. Which is terribly strange when the Jews are supposed to have drowned the whole Egyptian army, don’t you think? And Joseph was the Pharaoh’s chief adviser and so on? It would be, let’s say, like writing the history of Japan with no mention of the atomic bomb.—
    Â 
    SKIP: But what is the connection with . . . ?
    Â 
    HENRI: One day the thought hit me—could the whole story of the Jews in Egypt have simply been a poem? More or less like Homer describing magical cattle, and ravenous women and so on? Ancient peoples saw no difference between a vivid description of marvels and what we call reality—for them the description itself was the reality. In short, the Jews may never have been literally enslaved in Egypt; or perhaps some had been, but the story as we know it may have been largely fictional, an overwhelmingly powerful act of the imagination.
    Â 
    SKIP: If you’re telling me this guy doesn’t exist, I’m . . .
    Â 
    HENRI: That depends on what you mean by “exist”; he certainly exists in the mind of the