Night of the Aurochs

  He saw the blow coming. As my bootheel descended, that frightful scream leapt forth once more, shrill as the highest note of the faintest flute in heaven, choked off at its peak by the gentler sound of small bones blending liquidly with brains and eyeballs, with blood and fur and pine needles, with earth. I snatched up my gun and ran toward the town.

  When I reached home my father saw tearstains on my face and asked their cause. I told him.

  He frowned for a moment and said, “But where is the squirrel?”

  I told him I’d left it behind.

  “Then you must go back for it,” he said. “I won’t have you killing things for wanton pleasure. One kills for a purpose or not at all. Find the squirrel and bring it home. It won’t be properly bled but the meat’s still fresh. Mama will make a soup.”

  I returned through twilight shadows to the forest. My squirrel lay where I’d left him, a lonely twisted, clotted little corpse, stiff as a lump of chilled pie dough, one side flat and matted with blood and crumbs of earth and sharp pine needles, the other a bas-relief of pain’s distortion bejewelled with a dangling eyeball and sharp white teeth. I picked him up and carried him home. In the backyard I skinned and cleaned him by lantern light and the next day I ate him.

  From that moment to this I have not with wasteful intention killed a single living creature. I have killed, of course, but always for food or for a social purpose higher than my own desires. As further penance for the sufferings of my little squirrel, I have never since pulled a trigger without the certainty of a clean kill.

  Many years later, when I, with others, was privileged to be invited by His Excellency, the Reichsmarschall and General-feldmarschall Hermann Goering (acting in his capacity of Chief Forester of the Reich and Master of the German Hunt) to shoot at Karinhall, his country estate in Brandenburg near Berlin, I brought down two stags and an aurochs the first day out, and only one of them required to be given the coup de grâce. Their meat was donated to an orphanage for the children of German soldiers fallen in battle.

  Still later, in the midst of a spiritual crisis of the most appalling nature, the memory of that small horror in the forests of my youth opened my mind to fresh apprehensions of truth without which I could not have retained my sanity. Recalling how at first the squirrel lay at my feet so serenely devoid of fear, dying placidly because quite unaware of death, equally unaware of himself as victim as of me as killer, I came to understand that any life is more painful than any death; that fear of death is worse than death himself; that death-fears come only when the face of death is revealed; that he who conceals death’s presence and speeds him swiftly to his target partakes of the nature of God’s own mercy.

  So much for killing when one has to kill. It’s a lesson which sooner or later all men must learn. There exists on this earth no government which does not command the killing of human beings as the citizen’s first duty in time of war, or as a matter of legal justice in those brief intervals between wars which, for want of a better word, we call peace.

  For the latter, I will only say I thank God that in today’s truncated German state no gas chambers operate and strict laws forbid the killing of people by any means in any circumstances, although it is well known that American gas chambers are public institutions, fiercely defended by popular opinion, and generously used. So much for changing times. So much for humane killing. I mention this in hatred of no one.

  There is still another kind of killing which broods in those shadowy borderlands of the human heart where everything becomes its opposite in that slow-circling moment when darkness covers sin and the blood turns hot and thick and deadly. My first experience of it came not long after my murdered squirrel; in my second, after it had lain dormant for years, it sprang up like a wakened beast to consummate that welter of pain and foulness which was my middle-life. I speak of an urge to kill which comes in tenderness and terror from a lover’s passion to absorb the beloved to the last drop of her juices, to the last atom of her flesh, to the last faint suspiration of her spirit’s breath; an ecstasy of desire so pure, so poignant, so irresistible that the adored can be taken only through passion’s apotheosis when blood stings the tongue like a whip and pity dies and pleas change to sobs and sobs to a sigh, and her life flows silently into yours, and all that was corruptible in her then belongs to death.

  What is it in us that makes us cruel when we long to be kind? Where is that point of no return at which caresses become torment and love’s satiety shrieks for death? Why is the good in us so fatally bound to evil, and why in the end does evil always triumph? For it does. I have seen it. As inevitably as the equinoctial processions good turns to evil, desire to lust, love to hatred, life to death. Why is the exception so cruelly hidden from us? Or is there no exception? I, who searched so long, have found none at all, nor have I ever known the man who did. There is something wrong in the world. Dark days, black nights, and the endless singing of loss in the blood…

  ♦ 4 ♦

  I inhale the summer perfume of Inge’s loins and am driven by it to murder

  Next door to my father’s house, separated from it only by the width of a narrow brick wall, stood the Kulig house, identical with our own. Herr Kulig was a notary and grain broker whose tireless wife had presented him with an unbroken sequence of daughters. How many there were in all I cannot now remember, although certainly there were six or seven at the very least. The one who most captivated my childhood dreams was little Inge.

  I don’t precisely recall how old she was when the event, which now concerns me, happened. Since I was twelve, she must have been ten at least, possibly even eleven. As I peer at her now through mists that have drifted far in fifty years or more, she seems small for her age and quintessentially feminine, with straw-colored hair and ice-blue eyes and slim black-stockinged nettle-catching little legs. More than anything else I remember her smell: an odor so delicately acrid of musk, so modest, so humid, so challenging that even now its evocation tightens my breath and speeds the flow of my blood—vain tribute to those surging storms of unrequited sensuality which once emanated from her small person as naturally as thunderbolts from Jove.

  It was one of those hot, glaring summer afternoons at the tag of a three-day foehn when anything can happen. Inge and I sat together on the grass in the shade of her house, protected from spying eyes by a thick hedge of laurel. We were engaged in that one childhood game which is never undertaken innocently, and particularly not by a lad approaching thirteen: We were playing house. As father and mother we sat absorbed in the task of persuading our children to nap quietly beneath doll quilts in their separate beds.

  Inge’s child was a tom kitten, mine a new-weaned doe rabbit given to me by my mother’s sister. She was the most beautiful rabbit I’d ever seen, a soft pulsing bundle of white fur topped by a jaunty grenadier’s cockade of golden seal-brown ears. I loved her more than any pet I’d had before, and, now that I think of it, more than any since.

  Cats being sensuous by nature and easily seduced with caresses, Inge had greater success with her kitten than I with my rabbit. By and large, her child lay resignedly on its side, head against pillow, thoroughly tucked inside its quilt, giving small trouble aside from an occasional wail against the unnatural warmth of its situation or, when it sensed a lapse of Inge’s vigilance, a savage lunge, after which it was instantly retrieved, admonished, stroked, hypnotized, and returned to its downy womb.

  My rabbit was a different matter. She considered it unnatural to lie on her side like a cat, while the mere touch of quilt to her back, triggering instinctual fears of enemies that pounce, threw her into paroxysms of struggle. Sheer exhaustion occasionally forced her to yield for a few seconds and lie quietly, her lovely brown ears limp against the pillow, her eyes gigantic and luminous with appeal. But the instant her strength returned she sprang to her feet and leapt from the bed in a movement swifter than my hand could match. That I recaptured her each time did not in any way diminish her expectations of ultimate escape.
br />   While laboring to control our beastly offspring we grumbled against them monotonously, as parents will. This one had wet her panties, shame-shame, the other had defiled himself even more shockingly; this one had been caught with a nasty word on her lips, that one had peeked on his mother while she lay in her bath. Thus we sat, thigh to hot thigh, voicing patient desperation as their conduct, passing from lewd to obscene, approached the fetid brink of sheer depravity. Where have they heard such language, we asked, how can they even imagine these things, much less commit them openly before our eyes? What can we do but spank them? We spanked gently, however, not wishing to inhibit them completely from carnal appetites. I suggested that father spank mother, and vice versa if necessary, as atonement by example for the children’s indecencies, but Inge objected. Mothers never spanked fathers, she explained, and could not themselves be spanked by fathers in front of their children. She would have none of it.

  Each time she shifted position to care for her child, small puffs of air escaped her pinafore—exhalations warm and rich from the summer hollows of her body, sweet with the marshy tang of sweat and skin and femininity. She infused the whole world with her fragrance. Visions and mysteries drifted like clouds from her presence; fantasies shimmered fivefold at each turn of her thousand horizons; the very universe swooned to the spell of her sun-distilled essence, turned languid, drowsed sweetly, dreamed.

  “Ing-eh!”

  From the back stoop a mother’s voice summoned her child to food. I put my hand on her knee and begged her not to answer. We would run away, we would hide for a while, we would play delicious games where no one could see us, we would touch each other in secret places, concealing nothing, discovering all. For a long moment she appeared to listen, her eyes dreaming the words as I whispered them. Then, with a smile that fell between regret and mockery, she gave a prim shake of her head and rose to her feet. Fiercely I clasped her small unfleshed hips in my arms. She turned against the embrace. The salt of her thigh touched my tongue. I pressed a cheek where tongue had tasted. We locked in silent, undulating struggle, she on her feet, I on my knees. In the midst of this, Frau Kulig’s voice called again. Inge twisted, laughed softly, squirted from my arms like a fish, flashed to the corner, and disappeared.

  I was alone. I was lost, forsaken, abandoned, a burning point of desolation marooned forever in the boundless immensity and breathless silence of summer. In the circle of my arms where Inge had stood, there now lingered only quiet air which had been intimate with her and still carried the taste of her skin.

  How long I knelt in that posture of prayer I do not know and what happened thereafter I cannot explain. I do not excuse myself for it. I cannot apologize for it. I cannot understand it. I do not like it and I did not like it then. Nonetheless it happened. I write it here because it is the truth, and truth at this age in my life is more important than anything else. It must be faced up to and admitted if it is ever to be understood. I feel time running away with me, carrying me off to far places without my consent. I must leave everything behind, the bad as well as the good; all must be declared and sworn to, even though not explained.

  A sound so soft I couldn’t be sure I heard it broke the enchantment. I turned. My little doe again had leapt for freedom. I sprang to my feet and rushed her. One slave had escaped, the second would not so easily thwart my love. I pounced harder than I’d intended to. The impact against shocked lungs burst deep in her throat as a squeal, instantly choked by her gulping need for air.

  I picked her up and buried my face in her belly, slowly exhaling warm breath against her skin to soothe her, to convince her of loving intentions. Then I returned her to the bed, nestled her into it, turned her again on her side. Before drawing the quilt I petted her from brow to tips of hindpaws in long, lingering, gentle strokes. She gave no sign of acceptance. My caresses turned heavier, pressing her against the mattress, mesmerizing her, as I hoped, to a state of weariness so profound that she would lie quietly at last and fall asleep.

  She sighed in apparent resignation. Her eyes drooped. I continued stroking her, confident now that she liked it. Perhaps I pressed too hard. Perhaps her passivity was merely feigned. I did not feel the subtle contractions her body—those secret marshallings of tensile energies hitherto reserved—until they exploded against the pressure of my hand. With the speed of a single gasp she flipped in the air, stiffened, and came down on all fours to face me, flanks quivering like a nervous colt’s, pink nose-tip signaling her heart’s alarm—a tiny metronome gone wild in beating out the broken, mindless rhythms of mindless terror.

  I caught her as she leapt again. Securing her forepaws in my right hand, her hinder in my left, I lay her in the bed once more on her side. And then, her paws still in my grip, I began slowly to stretch her body end against yielding end. Her head arched backward until the gold-brown ears drooped limp against her spine. She gasped for breath. I diminished the pressure. Relief only galvanized her to new frenzies, wilder and fiercer than all which had gone before. I began once more to draw her extremities against each other.

  Her head and ears sank again to her spine. Slowly, madly she permitted her body to grow longer, leaner, less resisting, released her rib case to plunge forward as her belly sank to a crescent, summoned her lungs to thunder against her palpitant heart as each struggled to fulfill a function without which the other could not live. Only a little more, I felt; only a few more seconds and drowsiness would come. I pleaded softly with her: she must stretch, she must relax, she must grow languid and drowse, she must sleep.

  She stiffened in spasm. Her head plunged farther back, farther and still farther, twisting slowly until one temple strained flat against her haunch in a position that directed her stunned eyes full at my face. Her mouth flew open, wide and pink and trembling; her lungs strained convulsively to expel the last pocket of breath still trapped in them; her throat quivered against the lingering passage of a sigh that held in its heart a memory of lost infants mewling in chorus through distances unknown and time unmeasured—a sigh of intolerably sweet relief which went on and on and on and did not stop until her body turned limp in my hands.

  I knew what had happened, but admission even to myself would have been too frightful to endure. I pretended not to understand at all. Above the roar of storms and the crash of thunders at the horizon of my unconscious I heard the sustained vibrato of an E-string plucked or broken—a single note, high and fine as spun glass, lingering in my ears only as a sustained resonance that grew fainter, higher, sweeter until it died on those dark incoming tides of lethargy and torpor and regret that bore me at last to nepenthe and the golden lassitudes of absolution.

  Moving now in a trance I placed my little doe once again on the bed she had so tragically refused. This time she yielded. I smoothed her pale head against its pillow. I stroked her limp, golden, seal-brown ears. I drew up the covers, kissed her brow in farewell, turned silently away, and fled on tiptoes to my parents’ house. I entered the front door unseen, crept past my father’s studio-rooms (a student was tuning the E-string to insecure flats and sharps—he had no sense of pitch), slipped up the stairs and into the cool shadows of my room.

  I disposed myself on my cot with all the care of a clerk at inventory making sure each part of the whole is complete, undamaged, in proper relation to all others. Cautiously I relieved my lungs of stale air (I have always held my breath in moments of stress or expectancy) and filled them with fresh, repeating the action slowly, regularly. Once their natural rhythm had been restored I lay still, entirely composed, waiting for the sound I knew must come, the bell that would toll my loss and proclaim my innocence.

  Silence merged with time, and time with life. Sounds from the kitchen below, sounds from the bleak fiddle of that wretched student, sounds of my father’s voice in anger and reproach, sounds of a dray lumbering the afternoon street, sounds of beams and walls and timbers relaxing against each other, sounds of shadows in slow retreat from the sun. I lay perfectly still, allowing no muscle to
move. Although filled with the most delicious languor, my consciousness still remained alert, expectant.

  Then it came—a wild clamor below, staccato of small feet drumming the stairs, crash of door thrown open, image of Inge proclaiming tragedy.

  I jumped from my cot. I ran from that room, ran down those stairs, ran out of that house, ran across that garden space through clattering gates, ran to that other house and there, behind that other hedge, I knelt at last before the bier of murdered love. Only then could I weep as I’ve wept ever since in my dreams, as I know I shall weep in the hour of my death, and through it, and beyond it. Tears for the beauty of life while it lives; for its loss when it leaves; for the guilt of those left behind, unloved, untaken by death.

  How does a bird feel when it dies? A fish, a bug…the infinite worm?

  I think it weeps.

  ♦ 5 ♦

  “It was the just and vengeful sorrow of Frija for the murder of Balder, her son, that drowned Valhalla’s golden towers in the blood of dying gods and filled the world with darkness”

  When I wasn’t dreaming of Inge and the perfume she exuded into the motionless summer air, and that incredible instant when I had clasped her hips and touched my tongue for the barest instant to the salt-sweet taste of he: skin, I spent most of my time with Gunther Blobel, who was my best friend. He was a tall, slim lad with blue eyes and the gentlest smile I have ever seen. He was the only son of Herr Heinrich Blobel, the undertaker.

  With the exception of Count Firsky, who was ninety-three and slowly liquefying with age, Herr Blobel was reputed to be the richest man in Forchheim. This was only natural, since he dealt in a universal necessity, and there was no way to avoid availing oneself of his services without moving bag and baggage out of his jurisdiction into the territory of some other “mortician”—a word just coming into use—and there was none closer than Bamberg or Erlangen.