Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (22 page)

"How so?"

"Well, for instance, here. You say, 'Private Commongold walked ahead of me, very steadily, toward the fighting.' "

"That's how it happened. I was careful about the phrase."

"Too careful. A reader doesn't want to hear about someone walking steadily.

It's not dramatic. You might say, instead, 'Private Commongold ignored the shot and shell exploding all around him to such devastating effect, and strode with fierce determination straight into the beating heart of the battle.' You see how that livens it up?"

"I guess it does, though at the expense of a degree of accuracy."

"Accuracy and drama are the Scylla and Charybdis of journalism, Adam.
³⁴

Steer between them, is my advice, but list toward drama, if you want a successful career. In fact, 'Private Commongold' is a little tepid, regarding rank, though the name itself is good—so let's promote him. Captain Commongold! Doesn't that have a ring to it?"

"I suppose so."

"Leave these papers with me," Dornwood said, casting a glance at his typewriter, which had been silent lately, perhaps due to his consumption of fiery spirits. "I'll give the subject further thought, and render you more useful advice next week. In the meantime, Adam, in the event of further military action, please repeat the exercise: write it up, as dramatically as the facts allow, and bring it to me. If you do that, I may be willing to show you how to work that typewriter you love to stare at, since you're an aspiring writer of some talent. How does that sound?"

"Excellent, Mr. Dornwood," I said, all unsuspecting.

The fighting continued up the Saguenay, and things were mainly quiet around Montreal. There was occasional skirmishing, of course, for Mitteleuropan forces remained scattered through the Laurentians, and they would sally forth now and then for a little fun and distraction. I duly wrote up these exchanges for Theodore Dornwood, in return for literary advice; but there was very little to it. During this time Julian distinguished himself by holding a vital artillery position when it came under heavy fire from the Dutch; and his reputation among the men steadily improved—while Major Lampret's continued to decline.

But what mattered most to me that summer took place in the City of Montreal, during the weekends on which, after Lampret lifted the ban, we were offered leave.

"So," Lymon Pugh said, his sleeves rolled up to expose his hideously scarred and muscular forearms, which often frightened strangers, and of which he was very proud, "only the two of us left."

We were in Montreal, and we had just entered a tavern on Guy Street.

Lymon was there to get drunk; but it was the sort of establishment that served food as well as liquor, and I meant to smother my sorrows in a beef-steak, while Lymon drowned his in a bucket of beer. (As for drink, I took a dipperful of plain water from the ceramic jug by the door as we entered. The water was brackish and tasted of tobacco—perhaps one of the previous customers had mistaken the jug for a spittoon.)

"Only the two of us left," Lymon repeated—by which he meant that Sam and Julian had gone off to separate entertainments this Friday night.

Summer was a fearfully hot and humid time around the City of Montreal. The horse flies, which the locals called Black Flies, had lately come into season, and they patrolled the streets in brigade strength, alert for human flesh. The day had been overcast, and the air was thick as butter, and although we were fresh from camp our shirts were already sodden. We wore what scraps of civilian clothing we still possessed or had recently purchased, so that we would not be mistaken for men on active duty, and would blend in more closely with the local population.

But as I had learned on previous expeditions into the city, a soldier is never quite at home in Montreal. The local citizens did not hate us exactly—at one time they had been under garrison by the Dutch, and the memory of that unhappy time persisted, and the Army of the Laurentians was a more comfortable master than Mitteleuropa had been, taken all in all. But we
were
 their masters, at least nominally, for Montreal was under military law, and many of its citizens chafed at the constraints imposed upon them. The Catholic clergy were especially volatile, still smarting over the Dominion's interference in their affairs; and local men of Cree descent had been known to challenge soldiers on the street, out of some grievance never fully explained to me.

But it was not difficult to avoid the worst of such unpleasantness, and the obverse side of that coin was the generous hospitality of the less po liti cal residents of Montreal, including restaurant-own ers and barkeepers. We had been given a good table in this tavern, which was called the Thirsty Boot, and we ordered what we wanted from a pleasant woman in an apron, and we were otherwise left to ourselves.

"I swear I don't know what those two do with their time," Lymon Pugh was saying. "For instance, what on Earth does Sam want with all those damned Amish?"

"Amish?"

"You know—those black-hatted and bearded men he consorts with whenever we come into the city."

Lymon was laboring under a misapprehension. Judaism was legal in Montreal, and the city had a substantial community of very devout Jews, with whom Sam had begun taking religious ser vices. It was true that the men in that part of town often sported beards, and wore wide black hats, or small ones that sat on their scalps as if glued there. But they weren't Amish. "I think the Amish live in Pennsylvania, or Ohio, or somewhere like that," I said.

"You mean to say those men aren't Amish? They fit every description I ever heard."

"I think they're Jews."

"Oh! Then is Sam a Jew of some kind? He don't resemble them in his dress."

Sam had not made any public announcement about his unusual religion (though neither had he gone to any lengths to disguise his association with the Jews of Montreal), and I could not bring myself to indict him quite so frankly. "Perhaps he's fond of their cuisine. The Jews have their own special menu of foods, just as Chinamen do."

"The sight of all those beards might inhibit my appetite, if it was me," said Lymon, who was religious (figuratively) about shaving his chin, "whatever they eat for dinner. But to each his own."

"Julian wears a beard," I pointed out.

"What, that fringe of his? Yellow as a female's wig, and just about as ridiculous. Speaking of Julian Commongold, I'm confused about
his
 habits, too. Once again he's gone to that
coffee-shop,
 or what ever they call it, down in the narrow streets by the riverside. Did you get a look at the other customers there, Adam? Frail, loose-limbed types—I don't know what he sees in them.

The place is called Dorothy's, and I'm sure I don't know who Dorothy is—perhaps the only
woman
 ever to visit the establishment."

"Philosophers," I said.

"What?"

"Julian has made friends among the city's Philosophers, just as Sam has made friends among the Jews."

"Those are philosophers? I suppose that means Philosophers also have their own particular foods, and that Julian is partial to Philosophical dinners?"

"Yes, in a sense, though it's more likely the
conversation
 than the
food
that attracts him. Philosophers discuss Time, and Space, and the Purpose of Humanity, and such topics as that, in which Julian is deeply interested."

"They have enough to say about those subjects to carry over more than a few minutes? I doubt I could talk about Space any longer than a second or two before I ran out of thoughts altogether. In any case, I overheard two of those Philosophers who followed Julian into the coffee-shop, and their discussion was all about some musical review that opened here in town."

"I don't know all the details," I confessed, "but Julian says there are Aesthetes among the Phi los o phers, who are more concerned with Art than with human destiny."

"They seemed more concerned with the fellow who played the romantic lead in the piece."

"I imagine that's a legitimate subject of debate among Aesthetes."

"Well, it's all beyond me," said Lymon Pugh, and he called for another pitcher of beer. "You, too, Adam, if you don't mind me saying so—
you're
 a mystery! You come into a city as fine as this one, with all its sinful opportunities, and you wander from church to church like a Godstruck pilgrim, though it's not even Sunday."

This wasn't a topic I cared to discuss. "I was looking for someone," I said.

Of course the person I had been looking for since Easter was Calyxa. But I had not been able to find her. When I approached the choirmaster at the Cathedral where I had first seen her, he explained that the Easter chorus had been put together specifically to sing to the troops. The Church's own choristers refused to entertain "occupying forces," as they called us; and the choirmaster had been forced to hire substitute singers at fifty cents an hour plus a free lunch. But the names of these women had not been recorded. That led me to make inquiries at several other grand Churches, of which the city possessed a dizzying number—all without success. "What about you, Lymon?

Since you find our pursuits so unrewarding, what are your plans for the weekend?"

"Well, to get drunk, first of all ..."

"That's a noble ambition—or at least easily achieved."

"But not
stinking
 drunk. Not so drunk I can't navigate. Then it's off to the Shade Tree Hotel." The Shade Tree was one of those establishments in which "women sell their virtue for money, and throw in their diseases free of charge," as Major Lampret had put it in one of his sermons. I asked Lymon whether he was not afraid, as Lampret had also put it, that he would come back "absent those three essential possessions of any decent man: his health, his savings, and his hope of salvation."

"The women at the Shade Tree are pretty clean," Lymon said earnestly.

"And what I'm
afraid
 of is that I'll come back absent what I came to
get,
 which is the satisfaction of a man's deepest need, the
unsatisfaction
 of which can
also
make him sick, or at least surly."

He clenched his scarred fists as he said this, and I told him he was probably correct in wanting to avoid any condition that left him surly. "But shouldn't you brace yourself up before you begin such an adventure? And I don't mean with liquor. Have something to eat."

"I am a little hungry," he admitted, and I watched with a quiet pride as he puzzled out the items on the menu board. He was surprised that the word

"eggs" did not begin with
A
, as it was pronounced—but by this time he had become resigned to the inevitable inconsistencies of the written language, and accepted them without rancor.

Both of us ordered meals, and we enjoyed them as the tavern grew busier around us. Lymon had just made quick work of a plate of boiled eggs and stewed onions when he detected an expression of astonishment on my face and said, "You look like you've been ambushed."

And, in a sense, I had.

She didn't recognize me; but—of course—I recognized her.

She had been sitting just yards away, hidden by the crowd of coarsely-attired men and women who shared her table. It would have been easy to miss her altogether. But right now she stood up, and strode through billowing pipe smoke light and humid air to the tavern's small stage; and I knew her at once—Calyxa!

She wasn't dressed as she had been at the Cathedral.
If that Calyxa had seemed unworldly in her white surplice, this Calyxa was entirely earthbound, in a man's black shirt a size too big for her and stiff denim trousers.
³⁵
The easy confidence of her walk suggested that she was at home in this place, and as she took the stage to genial applause I was sure of it.

"Look at that! That one's a fireplug," Lymon Pugh said. "Do you suppose she means to sing to us?"

"I hope so," I said, annoyed.

"Her pants are cut too short, though. Pretty enough face, but look at the thick ankles on her."

"I'm sure I don't need to hear your opinion of her ankles! Her ankles are her own business."

"They're right there hanging off the ends of her legs—as much my business as anyone's, I'd say!"

"No one's business, then! Please be quiet."

"What bit you?" Lymon asked; but he subsided, for which I was grateful.

Calyxa did begin to sing, then, in a voice that was pure but also precise and pleasingly workmanlike. She did not adopt trills, tremolos, theatrical asides, illustrative whistles, or any of those musical furbelows so common among contemporary singers. Instead she sang the songs as they had been composed: plainly, that is, deriving all her nuance from the words and melodies, and not their decorations.

Nor was she wildly demonstrative in her singing. She just clasped her hands, cleared her throat, and went at it. This was too subtle for some of the audience, judging by the occasional cries of drunken critics; but I took it as an expression of her natural modesty—a striking contrast to the songs themselves.

She performed five songs before she was finished, most of which had verses that would not have been out of place aboard the Caribou-Horn Train, or wherever less respectable people gather. At first I was dismayed by this. But I was reminded—perhaps for the first time truly convinced—of Julian's doctrine of
cultural relativism,
 so- called. For these songs, which had sounded so corrupt in other voices, were purified in hers. I reflected that Calyxa must have been raised among people for whom such songs and sentiments were, in effect, their daily bread, and not counted as obscene or irregular in any way. In other words her innocence was
innate
, and not compromised by the vulgarity of her upbringing—it was a kind of indestructible
primal innocence
, as I came to think of it.

Two of the songs she sang were not in English, which astonished Lymon Pugh. "That's some nerve on her part, to sing a song in Dutch!"