Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (27 page)

Now it began to happen that the enemy general would conquer the Trench Ghost's troops, and pose upon that mound of dead metal skulls, with the splayed legs and upraised arms of a gladiator triumphing over his victim. Whenever the Trench Ghost won, he allowed his new lieutenant-general to take the credit, and then that metallic personage would preen himself like a flame-winged red-ocher demon painted on plaster. He too got stronger and crueler. By the time the oak trees got taller, the armies fought finely without any guidance from their maker. They still needed him to breathe them back into coherence after they were broken.

Another dawn whose cloud-grey was bluer than the machine guns had ever been, even when they were new, surprised the Trench Ghost into a sort of flush, as if he had been caught at something, or, far less likely, as if some spirit-fever had caressed the back of his neck; and once yellow lagoons of light began to afflict him from between those clouds, he felt still warmer, and sank down into the black mud below the concrete, where not even winter frogs could go. There he lay like a small child pretending to be asleep. Successive moments suffused and departed him no more quickly than they would have for you and me. Therefore, on account of his immortal consciousness, they tortured him. But he had long since learned how to be mad. All day, and each day, he suffered without understanding, which was how he endured it. At night, fancying himself refreshed, he rose up into his own sort of church where high barrels of thought once aimed outward, greyly shining.

The Trench Ghost's victories brought him no increase in the introspective joys he already experienced (drifting above his battles, he wore the dreamy smile of a Nereid in the arms of a feminine deity). As for his defeats, they neither soured him against the enemy general, whom he never thought to name, nor did they give him any pride in the intelligence of
his creation. Perhaps it would be best to say that they made him wonder what else he might do. There were evenings when his two armies ranked upon their separate window-ledges awaited his pleasure, while he existed elsewhere, experiencing that cool dank dampness deep within the hollow of his heart. Lolling in his high window seat, looking through the white-arched embrasures into the sunny forest, he learned, then forgot, how twig-shadows twitched upon the pale tan earth at breast height. It was mid-morning, the rectangular window now sighting on gravel, grass and leaves. He seemed to remember the cool moldy smell of a certain old church whose Madonna elongated herself into near-phantasmic proportions. He was gazing up above the altar's fresh flowers to the Crucified One eternally perishing; and behind Him the daylight, white as linen, glowed through the three tall slit-windows. The Trench Ghost experienced something more refined than pleasure. He nearly flitted into the forest. He felt an impulse to pick flowers and lay them here.

Wandering this way and that through his round-ceilinged trenches set deep into the grass, he played at soldiers, one of the new-made recruits now slumping forward while standing with his hands over his steel belly, bowing grimly forward, his snout dripping sand-grains like tears; beside him, a soldier whose hands were visegrips stared at his god with a doglike look, as if he could possibly hope for something. But the Trench Ghost barely paid attention, because the sunset clouds now put him in mind of the way that some bronze helmets express verdigris in beautiful patches of turquoise and white, still leaving the bronze color here and there. Emerging from an embrasure, he hovered over his trenches' round spines. There was lichen on them, and moss. Ivy climbed the lovely trees below them. He wandered down there in order to look back up at the skyline where his trenches lay invisibly. He listened to a blackbird. He was alone in the young forest. He liked to look up and count leaf-shadows. Soon he had gone all the way to the boundary, which was a certain helmet-topped grave.

He declined to believe that this was all there could be. Another slow-growing oak spread its arms above and away from the trench.

The smell of wild thyme, the ugly rounded galleries black-lichened and crackling, the pools of rainwater rapidly sinking into the karst meadow, these entered his essence, and so he carried the enemy general and his own lieutenant-general out into the sunlight, to warm them and see how they were affected, but they never did anything. He exhaled upon them very slowly. They faced off, and began to fight to the death, while he floated into the new forest, just above the railroad tracks, keeping exactly between the two tracks in the deep rock-groove there at Redipuglia. He picked a leaf and watched it fall. He stared into the sun. Looking about him, he decided:
I am not this.

The Venus-crowned hairpin grew warm. Presently she tumbled out of his heart. Leaving her in the grass, he said to himself: She does not pertain to me.

Returning to his toy combatants, he found the enemy general standing atop the lieutenant-general's decapitated remains. Although the latter continued to struggle, as insects often will even after central ganglia have been removed, its motions were to little purpose. The Trench Ghost lifted the enemy general away. Angrily, it stabbed him in the leg. The Trench Ghost felt vaguely proud. Surely whatever he was had to do with this place in which he had found himself and these things he had made.

Since he could see through dirt and rock, he found a round-cheeked child's head made of marble—her nose broken off, her cheeks pitted—and a one-armed naked marble soldier who held his chin high. He left them underground, reasoning: They too have nothing to do with me.

Wandering through the reinforced connecting tunnels, he gazed up past the concrete and counted the roots of the young oaks and wild thyme bushes. From his visits to the mass grave he remembered brass epaulettes with gilded tentacles, a corroded canteen in a woven sack whose fibers now were atoms, a scrap of ribcage, a cross attached to a ribbon of gelato-colored stripes, and a blue case of visiting cards which to anyone else would have looked like mud. More roots groped deep
through all that. He posited that things which grow downward might somehow relate to him.

Looking up between the inclined rusty rails of an artillery carriage (
cannone da 149G,
projectile weight thirty-five kilograms, maximum distance nine point three kilometers), he seemed to remember a sergeant inserting a child's head into the barrel's loading-hole, or perhaps only a loaded shell had gone in; and then two soldiers had manipulated the great wheel against the recoil-springs, in the name of great Madre Italia. Another memory appeared to be wedged behind the angled slabs of metal. In Trieste a woman was rising away from him, lifting her lips from the earth. Perhaps she was the one who had once lain beside him under the blue curtain. Then an Austrian shell was caressing a church whose wall-shards danced marble-white and bare-breasted like Nereids. He knew how the great barrel moved in its track; he had seen its birth from a vertical ovoid slit, and when the gun began to fire, destroying over months the pines that the Austrians had planted in better days, he had been there, too, all over the strategic zone demarcated by Peteans, Isonzo and Sdraussina.

He could not realize anything beyond all that, until one night when he was playing at soldiers, all the gamepieces on both sides attacked him. Smiling, still supposing that he was proud of them, he swiggled himself down, and permitted them to stab, cut and shoot his flesh, until he sent them to sleep with a long puff of breath. Then he said to himself: That they who come from me did this to me implies something about me. Yes, I'm sure that's so.

Then he removed himself, standing alone like a machine gun lost in the grass.

People who think they know about ghosts often suppose that a ghost is tied to its place of death, burial or unwholesome love attachment; and while this may well be the rule, as evidenced by the famous Moaning Lady whom I hear in the next room whenever I visit my favorite whorehouse, the Trench Ghost remained as free, in his own estimation, as you or I; so presently, in the interests of discovering who else he might be, he flew north, where the blue-grey sea showed itself through the slit
windows in the concrete pillboxes at Tungesnes, which naturally means Tongue Ness; and here the rounded blackened foredomes of old Nazi bunkers awaited the Allies who had tricked them by landing at Normandie instead. The rusty iron rebar pleased the Trench Ghost; it resembled sunset at Redipuglia. Belowground the ceilings were sometimes brilliantly corroded ribbons of steel, sometimes simply concrete, which stank far worse than his trenches; certainly all these chambers were fouler than the nearby Viking graves. Of course not every corpse had been disinterred, much less every beetle-ridden scrap of yellow-grey bone. But that wasn't the reason it stank.

One autumn my friend Arild took me here, so that I could write this for you; thus I seem to see our Trench Ghost settling in the planked underchamber on whose ceiling huge brown spiders, slumbering, were awakened by Arild's flashlight, and writhed furiously, as if about to plop down on our heads. We found cylinders of what might have been poison gas; and if that is what it was, the Trench Ghost must have been happy, because Germans were even better at the manufacture of that than Italians.

A guru once advised me:
Find what is it that never sleeps and never wakes, and whose pale reflection is our sense of “I.”
So I looked and looked; I hoped to discover the Trench Ghost, or at least to learn what his name might be—for it has always struck me that one defines oneself in part by naming others. What did he call himself, or what should I call him?— Arild said: From what I've read, ghosts cannot name anything. That's one of the things that keep them dead.

In the rubber waders that my friend provided, following his flashlight, slopping in stinking mud or clambering over some farmer's rotting pallets, I descended various flights of concrete stairs to where the grasses and flowers ended, then came into the entrance tunnel which soon angled sharply right, then straight, then left, then straight again, to make it easier for the defenders to knock an intruder on the head. I groaned, then hooted like an owl; but the Trench Ghost did not reply. Each bunker was different, probably so that intruders could make no plan. And in each bunker, my painful feeling worsened. It was a nastiness in the chest, foul and cold, wet and evil; I could not get enough air. Failing to find the Trench Ghost (although Arild promised that he had seen him), I returned out into the sweet smell of manure and moss.

In the evenings he pretended to wet his feet in the oily puddle within the square parapet of the command bunker's viewing-tower. Of course he had found the pit for the murdered slave laborers; sometimes he sank down there, “to get ideas” as he put it. He wondered whether any of his toy soldiers at Redipuglia had outfought the others, in which case the form or attitude of that survivor might teach him something about himself. He considered waging wars of one against many, and many against one, of riot, confusion and slaughter, because, as the ancients have said,
the pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless.
He hoped for a perfect realization as sharp as the knife-ridge along the top of an old helmet, or, failing that, for the expansion of his understanding, like ivy growing up between the snake-toes of a great fig which is busily cracking a Triestine courtyard's flagstones. That three-angled slit of meadow and sea, sunk in the grass, seemed like a place to sink or even dig in, but no matter how deep he descended, he never found anything but dirt and stone. Concentric ring-tracks of concrete around the base of the vanished cannon led him to himself. Under a hill, a certain square concrete tunnel, closed up with stones by a farmer, tempted him to play at soldiers. Instead, he rose up under the grey sky, imitating a blackened pillbox. He asked himself: Am I this?

Floating down the wet, rock-heaped steps into mud and rubbish, he said to himself: Where the grass, moss and dandelions stop, the darkness begins.

He asked: Am I that?

In an old map room from which the benches had not yet rotted, he read the German instructions and warnings painted on the walls. He tried to take them to heart.

Sometimes he felt almost homesick for Redipuglia's masonry of tiny karstic stones rather than these German slabs, but he told himself: I am not that place, at least not anymore.

One foggy night as he hovered over the sea he wondered how it would be to return to Redipuglia and bury the enemy general deep beneath a concrete slab. By then he had read a waterlogged German field manual, so he comprehended that by some standards that action would render
him as wicked as the father who buries his son alive. He had tried to be good, without certain result; so maybe he should be wicked. In the end he stayed at Tungesnes half a hundred years, building ever larger gamepieces whose faces he pretended were his.

Since the Second American Civil War is one of my favorite periods, I am happy to end this story then. The victory of the Afro-Creole Matriarchy, which resulted in the castration of all white American males below the age of twelve, and the liquidation of the rest, was cruel enough, no doubt, but my interest is limited to historical regalia, and you must admit that the ankh-medallions and bright pink uniforms of the Matriarchs, not to mention their sky-blue marching-banners of rampant Erzulie, deserve to be collected. At any rate, by the time the Second American Civil War began, the Trench Ghost had taught himself how to make giant steel soldiers which filled whoever commanded them with dreams of victory. Of course he helped both sides, and got rewarded as he deserved. The last I heard, he was overhovering a munitions factory in China. But since eternal stories do have a way of becoming tedious, it seems best to fire up some final episode which pretends to define the Trench Ghost in his “soul,” for his existence, like yours or mine, assumes a sort of self-discovery.

During the Siege of Pocatello, which had now become a redoubt of white male power, the Trench Ghost was floating in the darkness, laughing, weeping and rubbing his hands. The chaplain, one-armed and marble-white, raised his bleeding head, staring out across the electrified wire, and the Trench Ghost imagined that he had seen him before. Indeed, perhaps he had, for, if people only knew, there are ghosts everywhere. A shell came screeching into the field hospital, while on all sides the Matriarchs chanted:
Erzulie, Erzulie!
— Another shell now killed the general. The chaplain lifted the microphone and shouted to the survivors:
It is the body that is in danger, not you.