Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (60 page)

He shaved and bathed. I don’t smell bad anymore, so where are you?

He took a tour of the entire ward … but
she
was nowhere to be found. Downstairs in the examination room now sat Nurse Olga, accompanying the Major on his rounds was Nurse Olga, temperatures were taken by the grave and austere Nurse Olga.
And She is no longer here. In the air fade the locks of her hair, on the floor, in the dust of my pining, her footprint is no longer there.
… He spoke automatically, but with the piety of a past, imagined happiness, which he believed in to the tears.
I have closed the window the more to be alone, with you to be alone
… and he watched himself meanwhile invent that poetic window, yet nevertheless closed it with a vast sorrow, as if nailing himself shut, and a torrent of weeping broke through the constricted throat.
Getting dark. Those are black shadows drinking my tears
… and Melkior dissolved into soundless sobs in the twilight of the hospital room.

He is saying
Can you hear me?
in an ugly voice, but the little girl doesn’t seem to hear. She is standing in the middle of a deserted street staring straight ahead, meekly and somehow patiently, as if she trusts nothing but silence.

She is standing still like a big expensive doll with deep-set dark eyes. An arrow is embedded in her small plump back, all the way through, from one shoulder to the other, with a small caesura in the middle where it crosses the dimple in her back. The girl is standing slightly hunched, the better, presumably, to adapt her stance to the steel fibula that has pierced her back; her arms hang down her sides and her head is thrust forward in a kind of humility.

“Hey? Can you hear me?” he shouts, in fear this time, for he is thinking the little girl needs urgent care. But what is to be done? Still she is silent and motionless. He doesn’t know whether he ought to touch her at all. Is she dead?

“Please tell me: does it hurt?”

“It hur … urts,” he barely hears the little voice, frightened but somehow sustained and multiplied in echoes sounding from several directions simultaneously, as if a children’s choir has sung it in canon. … It is only then that he looks around, his gaze sweeping the breadth of the streets. There are seven or eight more little girls, equally transfixed with arrows, equally motionless and silent and slightly hunched, with their heads thrust forward. And they are all staring straight ahead humbly, as if patiently expecting something. … Or … perhaps they expect nothing any more, having already surrendered to a horrible enchantment, motionless, pierced, abandoned like dolls after a mad, cruel game.

He tries to find out who has done it and why, and why little girls, but there is nobody to be seen. He sets off in search of someone, to call for help, for it is appalling to see the little girls standing there, staring humbly ahead with arrows in their small, innocent flesh. How strange, he thinks, there’s not a drop of blood on them anywhere! And their wounds are not serious or fatal, as if this was done deliberately, so they could live, and they
are
alive and I could almost say healthy, they could move, pull the arrows out of their bodies and run back home to their Mamas. … Why are they standing still like that? This frightens him and he sets off down the streets in search of someone. But there is nobody to be seen anywhere in town. The town is empty.

The Alligator! flashes the most terrible thought of all.

“That’s right,” the Melancholic confirms from somewhere, invisible, “he passed through here this morning.”

“This morning? And what time is it now?”

“Night. But the Sun stood still to light his way. He’s a son of the Sun, being a victor. All victors are sons of the Sun.”

“So those little girls have been standing there like this since this morning?”

“Hee, hee, the little dolls … stayed behind.” That is Rover’s animal smell, it is by his smell that Melkior knows him. “The Tartar archers passed through, everybody ran off, they shot the little dolls, hee, hee … and left.” Shot and left … he repeats, but cannot understand why Rover is laughing like that, almost lasciviously. The poor little innocent ones … But he has no time to feel sorry. He hurries back: they must be helped as soon as possible. The arrows must be plucked from those small bodies, the little girls must be freed from the terrible reptile’s thrall and returned to life. And then I’ll tell them an amusing adventure story for children to entertain them. … Running back, he is singing the Paternoster … but when he reaches
the
street again the little girls are gone. From an old dilapidated house where living redbrick flesh is exposed under the crumbling front he hears the unruly laughter of women. The women are standing at the windows in various stages of undress, some of them quite naked, and laughing at him, tipping him winks and beckoning him upstairs. Draped over the windowsills are bedclothes put out to air: white sheets; amber, blue, and scarlet silk eiderdowns; large white pillows trimmed with lacework; foamy, transparent, insubstantial negligees; lain-in, slightly rumpled pajamas that have retained the outlines and fragrances of those female bodies. … Lust’s props with living naked laughing flesh sway luxuriously above his head.

“The little girls … Where are they?” he asks, and hears repeated salvos of their laughter.

“It hur-urts, hee-hee-hee,” the window women laugh
cantabile
, in canon. Above them, high up, coming out from the top floor, the coloratura laughter of a birdlike voice stands out by dint of its penetrating trills.
She
is beautiful, the most beautiful of them all. She has plumped out her lovely full bosom on the sill like two ruddy peaches and is performing her laughter with a kind of manic perseverance.

The laughter has been planted there by
ATMAN
as bait to the passenger through the deserted town. And she has been given the birdlike warble as a sign of his particular benevolence. She is Head Mermaid, the Honorable Mother in this house of sin for Tartar archers, the victors.

“Viviana, Viviana,” he tries to call out to her from down below, in a pious whisper as if he were praying, but his voice is soundless, it is only a dead breath of his terrible grief.

He would have cried out loud had he been able to. He looks for the entrance to the house, but finds none. He then flaps his arms, powerfully, like a swimmer, like an eagle, dun-feathered sky-dweller, and up he flies, leaving the ground below him. …

“Look, this one’s flapping his wings,” somebody said, “he’ll be crowing next.”

And Melkior indeed crowed for all he was worth, in a desperate scream, as if shaking off the night. Then he heard tittering. Earth was laughing at him.

“Morning, Mr. Rooster!” Mitar was giving him a dull matutinal look from above. “What’s the matter, did you give her one in your sleep?”

The heads above the blankets laughed flatteringly in honor of Mitar’s witticism.

“Say what?” Melkior was still listening to Viviana’s laughter.

“You were mounting a hen by the look of you,” Mitar was consolidating his success like an actor. “Flapping your wings, crowing …”

“Oh, I was flying …” Melkior thought aloud, tying up the threads of dream and reality.

“And they say dreams mean nothing!” Mitar sat down on the edge of his bed and bent over his ear: “I’ve got it right here,” he was pressing the top pocket of his white coat with his hand, “your ticket. You were dreaming about flying, well, it’s come true. You’re going home.”

“Home?” repeated Melkior mechanically, but, oddly enough, he was not moved at all. He marveled at his indifference. Look, the “private” cannibal story had come to a sudden end! The redheaded Asclepian had assumed power, with no bloodshed, literally with love, and the castaways were saved. Very soon afterward the natives came to realize how fortunate they were not to have eaten them. Instead of the pleasure of several meals which they would have soon forgotten, they began to enjoy the lasting benefits of the small-scale civilization which those wise and experienced men soon established in the primitive conditions of the savage island. Melkior had no time at the moment to enumerate their achievements in full—

Mitar was watching. And shaking his head in offended amazement: what’s the matter with the madman, it’s as if he doesn’t care …

Yes, why is it, in fact, that I don’t care? The first mate no longer chews narcotic leaves: he has devoted all his time to the study of winds; he watches the clouds float and the stars fall (useful for hunting and agriculture) and composes verse which he presumably gets from heaven. And no one any longer despises the body or curses “the voracious animal.” It has now become “human pride” (in its token garb of what used to be called the
fig leaf
), it has been reaffirmed as the source of the most glorious pleasures known to man. The native girls are able, through woman’s intuition (congenital in the queen bee and Messalina alike), to assess properly certain skills peculiar to these unusual males. And the redheaded Asclepian, to cut a long story short, gets married! He concludes a political marriage with the chieftain’s youngest daughter. He thus enters the ruling dynasty, first as an adviser and the ruler’s son-in-law; later on, when the chieftain retires to devote all his time to his monkey tail collection, the doctor assumes full power. He proclaims himself king, subsequently to change his title to Emperor, of the state he called Asclepia in honor of his protector. While he does assign his former friends from the
Menelaus
to ministerial posts, they still have to pay full imperial homage to him and address him as Your Imperial Majesty or, on informal occasions, simply Sire. But Emperor Asclepius the First rules with a benevolent hand, all under the helpful influence of “our Major” who brings the story to a happy, if somewhat abrupt, end.

But Melkior was not made happy by the ending. Indeed, he watched Mitar with a tinge of hatred for bringing him his ticket like that,
in his pocket.
The happy ending in the pocket of a white coat.

“What’s the matter—isn’t that what you wanted?” Mitar was offended by his silence. Not to mention the look in his eyes …

“Of course it is … thank you so much …” but it came out unconvincing.

“Thank your sainted aunts! Think I would’ve bothered if I hadn’t promised my brother? Well, you can …”

“Numbskull asked you to … ?” Ah, Mitar is expecting his
fee
, as the deal stood.

“That’s right, call him names! And him pleading for you like a brother. Hadn’t been for him, you’d still be rotting at the funny farm. He went to see the Major about you.”

“The way I heard it, it was
she
who … asked the Major …” lied Melkior, wishing to be able to believe it.

“Acika?” laughed Mitar. “Oh sure, she was falling all over herself to help you. Never ate a bite, never drank a drop, never slept a wink … She went away ages ago! I think she left the same day you were transferred
over there.”

All may be well, say some characters in Shakespeare when they have lost all hope, thinks Melkior. Of course she left!!! They’d been treating me so inhumanely … What could the poor girl do?

“What did the poor girl do?” he listens to the echo of his romantic imagination. “Where’s she now?”

“On the rolling main. Sailing. Honeymooning.” Mitar was grinning maliciously.

“What? She got married?”

“To a seaman, ship’s officer, whatever the word is. Merchant marines. Longtime romance, she’d been waiting for him faithfully. Nobody knew anything about it, except perhaps the Major …” said Mitar with an insidious smile.

“How come you know it all?” Melkior felt betrayed, what’s all this now, out of the blue?

“She writes to the Major, sends postcards, Naples, Alexandria, and that island down there—not Sumatra, it’s … you know … the Greek one, statues with no arms … Well, whatever it is, I don’t give a … Anyway, that’s where she is.”

To the first mate, the castaway from the
Menelaus
… He doesn’t chew narcotic leaves anymore. Another happy ending. Oh why didn’t I let the cannibals cook the happy flesh in their cauldron?

In an instant he shrugged off the “hypocritical head cold,” Atchoo! (he mocked her in passing), as if he had never met her, and Viviana lit up again with a distant life-saving glow. The lighthouse beacon after a shipwreck. He was fond of “shipwrecking” thoughts at the moment. … Down there, around Calypso’s Ogygia, there must remain some of the vicious Aeolian winds which Poseidon had set in motion against Odysseus for blinding his one-eyed son, Polyphemus. …

He surprised himself with his malicious, vengeful hope and felt ashamed of his Love which had now turned its monstrous face to him. There’s love for you: be mine or …

“Right, here’s your century!” he threw the hundred-dinar note to Mitar with a kind of scorn.

“Taking it out on me, eh?” Mitar refused the money, leaving it on Melkior’s night table: “Here, I want you to keep it. Have good food and drink, celebrate your return and good health to you! Put some meat on those bones.”

“When do you think they might discharge me from here?”

“Tomorrow morning. Then you go back to the barracks, hand in your gear, and you’re as free as a bird.”

Melkior nearly chirped. He felt tremendous joy at the idea of going home. He abruptly felt freedom in his legs, in his arms, and an irrepressible instinct of motion propelled him from his bed. “Let’s go” he said to Mitar and, hastily donning his greatcoat, all but ran out of the room.

“Wait up, what’s the hurry?” Mitar couldn’t catch up, he was lugging that great belly out in front of him, see?

“Let’s knock back a couple downstairs in the canteen. I’ve got my ticket in my pocket. We’re saying our farewells, Mitar.”

“We are, but not like this, not on the run,” gasped Mitar. “Also, I’m on duty, listen, I’m telling you …”

But there was no stopping Melkior. “Shot to shot—two shots,” he shouted to the canteen-keeper from the door. She gave Mitar a questioning glance, and he signaled her with his eyes to get pouring. Pouring The Good Stuff, of course.

“You know what I regret? No, I really really regret it … No, you don’t believe me, but I do regret it …”