From the tall roof MAAR announced urbi et orbi its glittering standard of living. Its mighty acoustics had all but drowned out a blind peddler’s feeble supplication issuing from a dark doorway, “Shoelaces, black, yellow—two dinars; ten envelopes, letter paper inside—six dinars …” The blind man’s monotonous litany sounded tired and unconvinced; the pathetic bit of verbal advertising aspired only to mask the begging, that much and no more.
Melkior took refuge in the doorway with the blind man and fell to watching: what can this MAAR thing hope to accomplish? The viewer stands entranced with his head thrown back and drinks in, henlike, the filmed comfort of well-being. From his earthbound condition he watches MAAR’s looming mirage, listening to this voice “from the other world” and is already intoxicated by the luxurious illusion of his eternal longing to be pampered—and then there comes the voice of the accursed petty things—the shoelaces, black, yellow, for two dinars … and he fingers his two dinars in his pocket and his petty need for shoelaces, black or yellow as the case may be. Tungsram-Crypton’s glare has dimmed … and what do I need the Flit grenadier for … and I see this business with Napoleon is just a ruse. … The evening has gone down the drain. To think that he was actually willing to die for the sake of First Croatian! Can’t they have blind people weaving baskets or something instead of letting them beg like this? Melkior felt the thought himself, through irritation with the beggar’s plea. Why indeed can’t they open a center with heating provided, for the poor blind people to gather, think of the savings on electrical lighting … he made to redress his cruel thought, even bought a pair of yellow shoelaces (although he needed black) and generally cast about for a way to help the blind man. … He dropped a silver piece on the ground, picked it up again, and asked him, “You lost this coin, didn’t you?” “Could be, I’ve got a hole in my pocket,” replied the blind man half-jokingly, just in case, but he did, eagerly, accept the coin.
The quaint act of charity moved a person nearby. A clerical collar around his neck, the man had cast only a passing, sadly indifferent glance up at MAAR’s magic tricks as he squeezed through the throng. Then his spirits soared with a “true glow” when Melkior found a way (and how Christian a way!) of being charitable to the blind man. “When giving alms, no need to make a show of it.” He patted Melkior on the shoulder and, giving him an approving smile, dipped into the crowd again. Melkior only managed to catch a glimpse of his head, wrinkled, sad, wrung between the hands of some terrible misfortune, and a pair of large ears thereupon, jutting grimly out on either side. He was astounded by how oddly large they were, so similar to a very familiar and well-remembered pair. … But back in those days the head had been ruddy and full, young and terrifying, with those selfsame batwing ears amid waves of thick hair which protected them from ridicule.
“That pale scrawny neck!” cried Melkior in a low voice, “is it possible?”
After him, then! He had to see those ears again!
But who is to know whether or not ears have a hiding place for their memories? A secret spring-catch drawer from which at night, when they burrow into solitude, they take out trinkets to caress and sob over?
Melkior launched into a romantic tale about the mysterious soul of a priest roaming through the urban hustle and bustle seeking peace and salvation. … But the romantic tale is something else. … Those ears carry with them a different secret, one that darkened his entire childhood. He still wears the catechistic slaps, riddlelike, on his cheeks. And all that subsequently befell Dom Kuzma was cobbled together by his imagination into a story of a man apart. He was even ready to proclaim Dom Kuzma a martyr, for all that the martyr had whacked a pair of red-hot slaps on his darling cheeks. (The older ladies used to say at the time how “that child” had such darling cheeks—and they would kiss him, even nibble at his cheeks, the old maids.)
All the pupils in Melkior’s school, including the tiny first-graders who didn’t even know how to write an i, knew how to draw an ear. They all, everywhere and at every opportunity, drew ears. Ears on the blackboard, on the classroom desktop, on the floor, on the roadbed, on fences, on walls, on any wall near which they happened to have a piece of charcoal handy. All the books, the notebooks, were doodled over with ears. Ears on agave leaves, on the beach sand. There sprang into being a secret sect of otosists, aurists, ear maniacs, in hoc signo vinces. Ears everywhere, like early-Christian fish. A large, huge, outsize ear on any potatolike head. The head did not matter, what mattered was the ear … to draw it as well as possible. To master the technique and the cliché. The older lads did the Charleston in trendy bell-bottomed trousers; the small boys drew ears fanatically. They did not know why it had to be the ear. Their parents, their teachers, asked, “Why ears?” “Everyone is drawing them,” the child would reply, puzzled that this, too, should be forbidden. “An epidemic,” people shrugged, “the measles.” And the local gendarmerie post received a telegram from higher up: had the phenomenon anything to do with the Communists?
The silly puerile manias. Collecting stamps was all right—adults did it, too, philatelists, postal-oriented thinkers. But carob beans!—that was for seminarians (the independent faction). Melkior had kilos of the things. He threw the lot away when sock knitting caught on. The socks naturally never reached the length of the heel; the boys were ignorant of either the utility or the futility of work.
The ear-drawing was an outburst and it spread like the plague. Later on, measures were taken (by the educational authorities), but they served only to fan the epidemic: they helped to reveal the meaning of The Ear … which previously no one might have divined.
When he learned the reason Melkior thought it seriously insulting and undignified, and he never drew an ear again. But Dom Kuzma’s hand eventually reached him nevertheless. After the physical pain subsided he felt ashamed before the catechist, he claimed his part of the guilt. Shame made him stop going to school, lest he meet Dom Kuzma again. Which he did not … until tonight. (But in such pathetic shape!)
Dom Kuzma brought too much passion to his struggle to prevail. What he did was senseless, even mad; he seemed to want to wipe all those provocative “ears” around him with his bare hands (or, slaps). He went in for mindless collective face slapping in his classes, for purely preventive reasons. His vengeful fervor, brandishing a heavy hand, reached everywhere, like God’s punishment.
Vengefully, he gave every pupil a zoological nickname. Or two, in tandem. He used the names of curious animals so that he could ridicule a person, to provoke laughter. … But there was no laughter, only the low cunning of children: how to weather the blows.
Dom Kuzma spied a bumpkin sitting at his desk and, wiping his avian nose on his sleeve, the thatch of his hair overgrowing his neck and (remarkably large) ears:
“What is hope? … you there, Andean Condor!”
The ornithological individual felt the two bright swords of Dom Kuzma’s gaze on his avian countenance and promptly identified with that large predatory bird of the Andes.
“Ho- … hope is … hope is when …”
“Come here, I’ll whisper it … in your ear.”
The Condor approached the lectern, hand on ear (as though unsure of his hearing), but Dom Kuzma smacked him on the other ear with his meaty hand. A boy with a funny nose, which gave him a permanent grin, instinctively flinched at the blow to the Condor’s ear. That is why Dom Kuzma chose him:
“And what is love, you … Duckbilled Platypus?”
“L-love … love is … when …”
“… when you get one across that snotty duckbill,” Dom Kuzma finished for him, while the Platypus’s nose made a wet and hollow sound under the blow, letting out a trickle of blood as proof of its virginity.
“Now then. I want you, Seal Penguinsky, to tell him what love is.” It was a shortish attentive boy who could not open his mouth for terror. His large eyes suspiciously followed the movement of Dom Kuzma’s hands: he was mustering all his scanty cunning to dodge the blow. … But it suddenly happe
ned that the boy resolutely raised his head and fixed an impertinent stare on Dom Kuzma’s ear. The ear was clearly ashamed at the stare. It began to change color, going pale, reddening, more and more violently, angrily red, into scarlet, purple, the colors of a stormy sky. Thunder and lightning were imminent. The entire class dropped their eyes, hugged their desks, they knew what was coming next. In their minds they were each drawing a terrible, vengeful, murderous ear: everyone knew, now, what was behind the ear-drawing craze. … But the ear began to darken into a leaden blue-gray, to a gloomy indigo: the rage had died inside it, leaving only dead, beaten blood. Dom Kuzma let his hands drop to his sides, turned around, and went out of the classroom.
Melkior nearly applauded. What an example of human greatness! He felt curiously unburdened of a grueling thought about Dom Kuzma: all the cruelty of the man’s fate was revealed to him in an instant, dimly and darkly. It was indeed the first time that the word had made itself known inside him; soundlessly he said Fate and felt moved almost to tears.
“And God saith …,” Dom Kuzma was saying majestically; he was creating the world before their very eyes. “And there was light!” Again saith the Lord … but Adam and Eve ate the apple and God banished them from Paradise. Dom Kuzma was personally banishing them from the classroom, pointing his forefinger at the door. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread! And that was where human suffering began. Cain slew his brother Abel; Absalom rebelled against his father David; Jacob fled from his brother Esau and his brothers sold his son Joseph to the Egyptians; Potiphar’s wife tempting Joseph; Joseph testing his brothers; Benjamin. The three young men in the fiery furnace; Daniel in the lion’s den; Jonah in the whale’s belly; David slaying Goliath; the terrible story of Samson who slew thousands upon thousands of Philistines with an ass’s jaw but was subdued by a fallen woman who delivered him to the mercy of his enemies. At the point where the accursed Delilah was shearing Samson’s hair Dom Kuzma’s face was transformed, his words hobbled by bitterness, his eyes veiled with sorrow. Melkior pictured Dom Kuzma standing shorn and blinded in the center of the Philistine temple, his ears protruding in solitude among the pillars. … But then Samson, in desperation, called unto the Lord and said, Oh Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, Oh God, that I may be at once avenged on the Philistines for my two eyes. And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and of the other with his left. And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people who were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.
Melkior saw tears of vengeance in his Bible teacher’s eyes and, moved and overwhelmed by the story, driven by a passionate desire for the vengeance to be complete and terrible to the end, he asked excitedly in innocent elation, purely out of a feeling of justice:
“Was Delilah there in the temple, too?”
That was when his darling cheeks were slapped.
Melkior interrupted his primary education. He did not want to face Dom Kuzma again. Because of the shame and the humiliation. Because of the fatal misunderstanding. He had not meant to mock the tears in Dom Kuzma’s eyes, which may have been there, after all, only in his imagination. … But how was he to explain that now? How was he to say, having been slapped in the face, “I was feeling sorry for Samson myself, Father. I only wanted that cow Delilah to be punished, too. That’s why I asked … Why did you hit me?”
But something strange happened to Dom Kuzma shortly thereafter and he mysteriously disappeared. Gossip had it that he had been dispatched to Rome for a rigorous confession, since only a cardinal (indeed, according to others, the Holy Father himself) could absolve him from certain abominable sins. Later on the word went around that he was with the Benedictines at Monte Cassino, doing penance, and later still that he had been “seen” at the Trappist convent in Mostar, wearing a white rope girdle with severe-denial knots, mortifying his flesh by hunger, thirst, and vigils, and making the fabled Trappist cheese in absolute silence.
Melkior had himself heard a thing or two about the cheese … as well as some other things which had elevated Dom Kuzma to biblical martyrdom. Delilah’s identity was never fully established. Some suspected the pretty tobacconist who smiled secretively at men; others said it was the spinster schoolmistress who had fallen in love with Dom Kuzma’s virility (which she made no effort to conceal). Then again, perhaps neither of them was the despicable traitress. It may have been a third woman, angel-faced, who snipped off seven locks of Dom Kuzma’s hair while he slept and sent them to the bishop himself, with a letter in her own hand, as evidence of his sinful ways. The letter is supposed to have said, “Look how his bare ears stick out now.” A terrible piece of mockery.
But why seven locks, no more and no less? Why seven? Might Dom Kuzma have told her, too, in love’s sated ease, chuckling with his masculine superiority, how perfidious Delilah stripped Samson of his strength? The omnipotent male would have had his fun while in the arms of the fragile female, relaxed his tired strength, and cynically launched into the story of the mighty Samson and the scheming little bitch … and fallen asleep. And she, the tobacconist or the schoolmistress … or the third … would have leaned over the sleeper’s repose and thought: “Look how helpless my Samson is now! Why don’t I …” and she would have found in the story a wonderful recipe for her long-contemplated revenge. On top of which she might have been after that silly superiority poor females fall prey to only too often …
The unknown woman had thus deprived him of all his strength, exposed him to horrible shame. And there he was, the wretch, plodding along in the autumn dusk, emaciated and pale as if he had spent all the intervening years in a dark basement, sharing his crust of black bread with mice and asps and drenching it in bitter tears. His once-strong neck whose veins would writhe furiously when he was angry was now a thin, fragile twig bearing its wrinkled desiccated fruit with the two vast ears as though doing penance.
Melkior moved with effort through the dense throng that spilled across the city on this pleasant warm evening. The fragrance of autumn made itself felt in the freshness of ripe fruit coming from the open windows of fruit stands: odors wafted down the streets like a mild hint preceding a momentous farewell. A yellowed leaf or two fell in the alley, rustling sadly like an old letter from a past happy romance.
Autumn, autumn … To the tune of the season’s hit the summer had danced away—Addio, mare. Autumn had come in on little cat feet over the lawns and greens, the wilted courtesan in rustling silks had walked the parks, her breath making the birches shy like innocent little girls.