Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (58 page)

“They wanted to cut me in half over there. I was in the Artillery infirmary, where the hack-hack guns are, understand? Hack-hack, with a hyphen, you know, to hack one in two … one-two, left-right, one-two, three, four … I can count up to a billion. That’s the count of the hairs you have on one half of your head, multiplied by two. Down with the King and Queen!” this last he added in a whisper, watching the beanpole fearfully who was doing his march past.

“Which queen?” asked Melkior.

“The King’s wife.”

“He hasn’t got one.”

“Down with his sister then.”

“He doesn’t have a sister either.”

“Well, there has to be some female at court—so down with her then. You know,” he slunk up to Melkior and whispered confidentially, pointing at the beanpole, “you can’t say things like that in his presence—he’s the Lord Chamberlain,” he added with sly irony.

“At which court?”

“This one … the Royal Saccharinic Court,” the Melancholic gave a cunning smile. “He’s privy to court secrets. But he confers only with the top-rankers. Watch.” The Lord Chamberlain was having a pleasant chat with the King, riding in the royal carriage (the King was sitting on his pillow), but the only intelligible words in the entire conversation were “Your Majesty,” uttered with enormous respect; the rest was a highly confidential whisper. The Lord Chamberlain, with a sweet smile on his face, was waving to the people, pointing meanwhile, for the King’s benefit, at various prominent persons in the cheering crowd. The carriage came to a sudden halt in one place, the Lord Chamberlain’s index pointing resolutely at the Melancholic.

“It wasn’t me, Your Saccharinic Sweet Majesty!” said the latter in fright, “It was he (pointing at the Short Chesty) who ate your bread and cabbage.” But the Lord Chamberlain’s index finger never left him. Moreover, the Lord Chamberlain hooted
hoo!
at which the Short Chesty yelled bloodthirstily:

“I am Rover, the eldest of five, let me at him, I’ll skin him alive!” and snarled at Melkior showing small close-set teeth.

“Don’t do that, Rover—I’ll give you a two-rupee piece,” the Melancholic held out a small white button with two holes, “and I’ll let you have a four-rupee one tomorrow.”

“Get it sewn on your own tomorrow! Gimme now!”

“I haven’t got one now, Rover, I’m expecting one from my brother tomorrow. What you can have now is a bit of my fingernail.”

“Gimme.”

Rover quickly sawed off the Melancholic’s thumbnail with his small sharp teeth and displayed it to the Lord Chamberlain. The latter nodded with satisfaction, dismissed Rover, and drove the horses on.

“You have to act like that with them,” explained the Melancholic to Melkior, apparently in some embarrassment.

“Listen,” said Melkior hopefully, “you can square with me: you aren’t actually …”

“Mad?” the Melancholic smiled sadly. “Well, no, not in the way they are. Different category. They think … the Lord Chamberlain thinks (Rover doesn’t know a thing) two and two make five; I know they make four (see?) but it’s too much of a bother to think.”

“What’s there to think about?”

“Oh, quite a bit—you must get them to come together. Here, take two from one side and two from the other,” he held up two fingers on each hand. “Now then, which two will join the other two? Why should one pair do the approaching while the other stands idle? They’re equal, right? Ma-the-matically equal, so why should either pair approach the other? Well, they may be equal in terms of mathematics but not in terms of character. One set is perhaps too proud, or believes themselves to be a better sort, a higher class, and they prefer to keep themselves to themselves, and you have to waste your time arguing with them! And all for a four. But what can you do when they don’t want four? See what trouble it is? You might say: they can meet each other halfway, come to an agreement … All very well, if they want to, but they seldom do. … You’d have to waste so much time waiting.” He looked into Melkior’s eyes with curiosity. “You’re probably wondering at this, thinking I’m talking about people. No, I’m really talking about pure numbers, I majored in math at the university.” Melkior was silent, looking at the floor to avoid embarrassing the other with his gaze. “Try playing roulette or buying a lottery ticket and you’ll see numbers for what they are—all whimsy and deceit.”

“All right, but how do
they
make five?”

“The madmen?” smiled the Melancholic in commiseration. “They take twice two fingers of the same hand, and since they’re all connected with each other they bring the fifth—the little finger—along … so as not to leave him alone. Hence the misconception.”

“You majored in math—but what do you do in life?”

“I’m a traveler. I pick hawthorn berries.”

“And count them?”

“How did you know?”

“Something tells me …”

“Something tells you my foot. You must’ve read it in the papers. They wrote about me.”

“So how do you ‘get them to come together’ when you count?”

“In my pocket. I have a hard time of it. Up to a billion. Want me to count your head hairs? I’ve counted his,” he gestured at Rover. “Know how I do it? I divide his head in sectors … I had a pencil, but the Tartars took it … and then I work by sectors, easy as pie. Only I didn’t finish—he wouldn’t sit still.”

“How will you do me if you haven’t got a pencil?”

“There’s another method—plucking. Only ten hairs a day. But you’ll have to wait until it has grown back in. What is it they say—don’t let grass grow under your …” All of a sudden, as if he had remembered something, he caught Melkior by the elbow and whispered in confidence: “See those windows across the way? Take a good look: three stories, five windows each. Tonight I’ll show you something I’m quite keen on. Now hush, pretend you don’t know me.” He went off “craftily” and, walking up to his bed, suddenly raised his arms high above his head, crying out: “On Ombrellion, the barren mountain, spake he!” then lay down and closed his eyes.

Time had begun to peck at him. The day was now endlessly long, the third day among the insane. The Melancholic had taken him briefly back to the world of living words, then thrown him back into silent solitude again. Aroused by the sound of a human voice, his hearing now found the deaf silence more difficult to bear than during the previous two days. The Melancholic had left him with the fifteen windows across the way and a promise for tonight … But tonight was a long way off. Outside and up high, the day was still shining in the sky among tattered clouds, and above him (to make things worse) floated the sun in a glory of autumn blue. He hated the sun in the square of the sky and the clouds and the light and everything that made up the day. He was yearning for words, words to the hungry ear! Any words, any kind of words, just as long as it was the sound of a human voice!

He tried to listen to himself. But what should he say?
Romans, friends, countrymen
… But what if
they
responded?
Polyphemus the Cyclops, the beast
… No, he could not enunciate that either. Then it came to him in a flash merely to say
Parallelikins
, as if it were a name. Melkior said it aloud.

The Lord Chamberlain leapt up, cut to the quick. It was as if he had been awaiting that very word to get his terrible excitement going. Has someone dared utter it? was what his astounded look meant. Using a finger he sicced Rover on Melkior. Rover was off like a shot. He turned around with catlike speed and, hands outstretched, scampered toward Melkior.

“I am Rover, the eldest of five,” he snarled at him.

Melkior remembered the Melancholic’s trick of … He hastily tore two buttons off his striped robe and repeated his words:

“Don’t do that, Rover—I’ll give you these two four-rupee pieces …”

“Hah, two buttons!” leered Rover derisively. “Get them sewn on your own! Surrender!”

“All right, I surrender—here,” Melkior put his hands up. What’s this? They won’t accept their own currency any more? “I surrender, Rover, take me prisoner.”

“What’ve you got? Gimme a ten spot!” Rover stood facing him, short but broad-shouldered.

“Haven’t got a ten spot—the Tartars took it,” Melkior made another attempt to make some headway using the formulas of this weird world. But it suddenly appeared as if none of that worked any longer. Even the Melancholic laughed:

“Heh, how can there be any Tartars here?”

“Well, you said yourself they took away your …”

“I only said it …
tan-gen-tially,”
specified the Melancholic and set up an ugly cackle, which Rover took up in a modified, animal version. Even the Lord Chamberlain laughed, a dignified and dry laugh.

Why, they are genuinely insane! thought Melkior, taking offense, now they’re mocking me in the bargain. He went across to the Melancholic and sat down on his bed. The man used his foot to warn him to get off. This offended Melkior further; he now wanted to
clear things up
at all costs.

“Very well, I’ll say it to you from here. You mentioned Tartars twice, and now you’re laughing? Are you laughing at your own madness then? Unless you meant ‘doctors’ when you said ‘Tartars.’”

“Since when do doctors have anything to do with Tartars?” laughed the Melancholic derisively. “I may be mad, but I’m not daft. Listen,” he spoke to the other two, “doctors and Tartars—do they have anything to do with each other?”

All three were laughing at Melkior.

What’s this supposed to mean, he thought in embarrassment, madmen laughing at me? And he was already prepared to think it was all just a con game played by disbelieving malingering clowns, a test to see whether his presence was not a trap devised by the army authorities, but their laughter suddenly stopped and all three pricked their ears in fright at a strange sound from the corridor.

Indeed, even Melkior could hear a kind of distant mournful wail, like the howling of a sick dog. Melkior tried to approach the door, to peek through the keyhole or at least put his ear to it—what was it that had frightened them so much?—but Rover blocked his way in a soundless leap and gave him a terrified look telling him to stop.

“Hssst, don’t move,” whispered the Melancholic, quaking.

“Why not?” Melkior whispered himself, without realizing it.

“Wolf,” whispered Rover inaudibly, between his palms. “He’s hungry.”

“A wolf … here? If there are no Tartars, there are no wolves either,” Melkior defied them.

“There is one … in Number Sixteen,” the Melancholic implored him to believe. “We also thought at first … But later on I saw it: all black and warty. The tail … the teeth … !” he shivered like a man in a fever. Using his index finger he confidentially invited Melkior to come closer, and whispered in his ear: “You’re right, there can’t be a wolf in here—he made it up, the primitive. The only animals he’s ever heard of are wolves and bears. He’s never heard about alligators, so … never mind the moron. It’s an alligator in Number Sixteen,” whispered the Melancholic in an even lower voice, “a dreadful one, huge, nine meters long, needs ten beds to sleep on, I saw it with my own eyes …” Now what was heard was a terrible roar. “Aha! Can you hear it?”

“But what’s it doing in here?” asked Melkior in feigned confidence.

“Hah, ‘what?’ There’s one in every town. A secret weapon. They crunch everything with their teeth, not even a tank can hurt them.”

The Melancholic was speaking with the certainty of a man in the know. A silly kind of joy came to life inside Melkior: a momentary, quaint illusion derived from a mad story. A flash of hope. Against Polyphemus the cannibal there rose the dreaded Alligator. Samson, Achilles, the Golem, the national giant, crushing everything underfoot, invincible! … And his imagination began narrating to Melkior
The Great Victory
—an epic at the Central Military Hospital Neurology Department—fiddling all day long to the vengeful joy of the defenseless.

And when night fell and the smell of boiled cabbage died behind the locked door, in the lightless room, in that madmen’s dark, there resonated the dignified sleep of the Lord Chamberlain and Rover’s vehement snore. That was when the Melancholic crept out of his bed on a secret mission and quietly approached Melkior on tiptoe.

“Here, take a look,” indicating
those
windows, “think I forgot? See?”

A window or two was lit on each floor.

“You mean, some of them are lit?”

“Some? Ha-haaa,” he knew more, which was why he was laughing. “Try to remember which ones are lit now … it’ll be quite different later.”

“Of course it will—people go in and out, turn lights on and off …”

“Hah, in-and-out … And why do they go in-and-out at certain times only, eh? At night, hah? All night long. I’ve been watching it for a long time. While I had my pencil I took notes, well, now I memorize. About that other business …
doctors, Tartars
… I had to step in or
that fellow
would have killed you. It mustn’t be known they’re here, that’s the whole thing. Hah, they took away my pencil but I deciphered it without one! Ha-ha, you Tartar bastards …” laughed the Melancholic with strange contempt. He mused for a moment, then spoke up again, offhand; it was as if he had not been saying what was really on his mind: “Do you like to smoke? I like to watch the ember in the dark … when I’m talking with someone. You know you’re talking to a living man then; when he inhales, the smoker, his face gets lit up, his eyes shine, and all the darkness comes alive. All very well, but how are you to come by a cigarette in here … that is to say, you could get one, but the matches …
They
won’t let madmen use fire or they’d burn the whole … One thing I’ve never understood is why it says ‘Safety Matches’ on the box. Why are they afraid of a fire if it’s ‘Safety’? And Nero set fire to Rome without matches. How do you suppose he went about it—rubbed sticks together? But it takes time, which means it was malice aforethought. Or used a flint and tinder … but that, too, is malice aforethought. Now, I like fire in general, I like to watch the flames … Devils dancing, sticking their long tongues out at each other. Licking and stroking each other, perhaps even in a sexual way (there’s always a she-devil or two there), cracking and crackling, enjoying the fire all the time, damn them … Wait! Look out!” he suddenly took a firm hold of Melkior’s arm and squeezed it tight in a state of expectation. He was looking at
the windows
opposite, really waiting for something: “Of course. There, I-3’s off … III-5 is off next, and II-2 goes on, of course, exactly by the system!”