Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

But the Colonel ignored him. The fellow had gone too far, it was clear to all (nobody was laughing anymore), his authority was being challenged … He approached Little Guy.

  “What about you, young man? Are you all right?”

  “Quite all right, sir, thank you.”

  “Mama still bringing those cheese pastries?” he asked with avuncular bonhomie. “It’s the pastries you like, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yes, sir, I do …” Little Guy was expecting Mama today and felt uneasy at the mention of her.

  “There, there, liking pastry is nothing to be shy about,” the Colonel stroked his head, “I like a nice piece of fresh baked cheese pastry myself. What about this one?” he gestured at Melkior with his goatee. Melkior was looking at him with respect and awe, as if he had just … like Mitar said.

  “He’s new, Colonel.”

  “I can see that for myself,” the Colonel was already losing patience, “but what is he doing here? What unit is he from?”

  “Transport Training Course,” replied the Major patiently.

  “Draftee?” said the Colonel as if disgusted by the question.

  “Yes.” The Major was restrained and cold.

  “So what?” asked the Colonel in a pronouncedly superior-officer tone.

  The insult flashed across the Major’s face for a moment: a dark cloud flitted over his intelligent calm.

  “Seriously enlarged hila,” he said in his unruffled way. “The X-ray view of the left lung shows what may be a focus with typical fibrous staining and a shaded area. …”

  “Any jerk shows enlarged hila!” the Colonel interrupted him rudely.

  She fluttered her eyelids in embarrassment. The Four snickered under their covers.

  “The patient is a fully mature young man …”

  “The patient is fully eligible for a court martial! Why, this is tantamount to desertion!” The Colonel was looking at Melkior with loathing (and he looked at the Colonel … as instructed by Mitar).

  “Additionally … would you uncover yourself, please,” said the Major to Melkior, “we have here a case of serious asthenia. Would you observe, sir, the rib cage, the arms, the shoulders …”

  “Sir, the army does have some men who are not like Hercules!” the Colonel raised his voice in rebuke. “In my book, a finger on the trigger is all a soldier needs! That is how I see it.”

  “If you please, Colonel, here’s the patient’s chart.” She handed him Melkior’s record. “Nurse, has he been x-rayed?”

  “Yes, Major,” she lied readily, her gaze slithering over Melkior (he kissed that expanse of air above him), “but the film has not yet been developed; it will be in twenty minutes.”

  “Then file it here,” said the Major dryly, ceding to the Colonel his place at Melkior’s bed.

  The Asclepian’s giving me up, next to approach is the cannibals’ medicine man. Melkior’s gaze sought Mitar, a last-minute appeal for help. Mitar offered help by way of an encouraging smile. But Melkior saw Caesar’s bared teeth, heard horseshoes on the stone floor … The Colonel had stepped closer (his spurs making a ritual jangle). The Medical Corps officer leaned over Melkior showing his large yellowed teeth … He’ll bite into my head first, thought Melkior … But it was a smile, a seemingly benign one, the smile of a saint who comes to children at night and tucks presents into their bed. Meaning he won’t bite, Melkior hoped. A grave case of asthenia. Here, Uncle, just look at those arms and shoulders and rib cage … skin puckering, bones bulging, ribs rattling … Melkior was feeling himself all the while under the covers, thin dry skin stretching in his palm. No, the Colonel’s not going to bite, there’s nothing here but a case of serious asthenia. But he was (just in case) looking at the Colonel with fear as if he had … as Mitar had put it.

  “What’re you looking at me like a shitty dog for?” the superior-officer’s voice boomed over him. “An intellectual, eh? Thinking you invented gunpowder all by your lonesome. Let’s have it: did you invent gunpowder? Well? Did you or didn’t you?”

  What do I do now, Numbskull? Would barking help? Presumably it works only when there’s electricity involved. When it comes to gunpowder, it’s Mitar’s advice that applies: don’t answer, look at him with respect and fear as if you’ve done that thing in bed; and Melkior went on looking at the Colonel as advised by Mitar: with respect and … and all the rest—he only added a bit of the manner of a dog in that kind of predicament.

  “Not answering, eh? Despising me? You’re thinking: what’s this? we’re both men with University degrees, but he still speaks with me in an informal tone! What a dolt of a soldier! That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? What an untutored lout in uniform!”

  There was no sound to be heard in the room, not even the squeak of a shoe. There was no ingratiating laughter. The Major was looking at the window, baffled, bright red with shame and, possibly, anger. She never raised her eyes from the charts as if checking something with her pencil. The shaven faces were serious and somehow mournful; the Four, too, were silent in their beds.

  The silence was what got the Colonel irritated, fanning the desire to show them all! Introducing certain manners in here, are they?

  He bent over the bed, bringing his face quite close to Melkior’s frightened face. Melkior felt the odor of the yellowed teeth, words were spilling all over him but he no longer understood them. He watched the teeth coming closer … look, no fillings, all in a regular row, yellow but healthy … thanks to cheese pastry …

  “Now, sir … in case you think I have no manners …” said the Colonel in a low voice from quite an intimate proximity (Melkior could see the close-grown short hairs in his nostrils), “why is it, sir, that you do not wish to serve in the military? What is it that your esteemed mind dislikes? Is it perhaps that you have a different opinion of the way this country is run? Feel free to tell me what it is you object to! We’re hateful, is that it? Rude soldiery, clods, backwoods types? You don’t like my face either, I can tell. Very well—go ahead and slap it!” the Colonel placed his cheek provocatively, at exactly arm’s length, and stood there, waiting. “Well, what’re you waiting for? Why don’t you slap it? Oh, I see—you say my cheek isn’t worthy of your palm. Tarnation! All right, spit on it then!” and, lowering his cheeks all the way down to Melkior’s mouth: “Go on, why aren’t you spitting? I’m waiting!” shouted the Colonel, quite beside himself by now, at Melkior’s calm. Perhaps it was his shout that jerked Melkior out of his lethargy. His head, like that of a dead man come back to life, moved, went up, and before the Colonel could pull back, he hit his cheek with his lips in a flash—and gave it a clearly audible smack. Right. Instead of the Major. Was that a proper acte gratuit, Parampion? No, that was not an acte gratuit, said Parampion. It was much more than that, replied Numbskull.

  “Wait! … What’s this? …” shivered the Colonel, frightened, taken aback, stroking the kissed cheek, wiping off the weird shame.

  “What is the meaning of this, Major?” he addressed the Major sternly, but he was looking at all of them, shooting anyone who would dare laugh now. But it was all right, no one was laughing, they were all gaping in amazement. “Major, I asked you what this means!”

  “I don’t know, Colonel,” replied the Major indifferently.

  “‘I don’t know’ and that’s that? Well, I’m not having it!”

  “Perhaps the boy was trying to say he loves you …” the Major tried to explain, an invisible grin twinkling in a corner of his mouth.

  “Permission to speak, sir?” spoke up Tartuffe.

  “Go ahead.”

  “We think he’s not sane, sir. Yesterday he kissed the sister …”

  “Sister? Whose sister?”

  “Ours, sir … the nurse.”

  “It was when he was dreaming, Colonel,” she blushed all over.

  “In his dream? What were you doing in his dream?”

  “I leaned over to see if he was asleep and he suddenly raised his arms …”

  “… and thmack! wight o
n the mouth,” Hermaphrodite completed the sentence with gusto.

  “Shut up, you bastard!” snapped the Colonel at him. “Sorry you didn’t do it, is that it?”

  “That’th wight, thuh,” guffawed Herma, “I’m not thaying I’m not thowwy …”

  “Stop clowning,” spoke up Menjou, “this is serious business. Sir, we think the man’s really crazy …”

  “Crazy? He’s an idiot!”

  “… and we would not like him to remain here with us,” finished Menjou.

  “With you? Get this man transferred to Neurology straight away!” commanded the Colonel, striding out at the head of the procession.

  That’s right: not a madman—an idiot! Confirmed from the top! Melkior was glad to have been reduced to an impersonal this man. And so to Neurology … But what is it exactly? Presumably a madhouse, which might turn out to be interesting … meeting Napoleon and Martin Luther. I’ve already had the honor of being introduced to Caesar … er, from afar. Kissing the Major wasn’t required for the idiocy degree; after all, this gesture was far more chivalric, magnanimous in a way: you’re urged to spit into a face (we’re not children), but you plant a kiss on it instead. You could smell the odor of the dentures. At night, the yellow false teeth submerged in the glass snarl at the Colonel from the night table, and he lies in his bed with his goatee, small, meek, sans stars, sans gold on shoulders, powerless and toothless like a newborn—can’t even say zzz. His poor wife is forgetful due to menopause, possibly also squeamish and fearful and superstitious for her special reason, so she hasn’t changed the crocodile’s water for three days, and it consequently has a spit-in-my-face smell. And he, a high-ranking Medical Corps officer, Head of the Pulmonary Department and generally a prominent man, a soldier who knows Menjou’s father the Guards general and all the other fathers, goes fishing with his index finger in the water glass in the morning, already buttoned up to his chin and with his boots on. Fishing for the yellow false teeth using his index-finger hook. The falsies somersault wriggle evade capture flip over, will not leave the comfort of their murky water for the smacking slimy mouth in which to masticate a freshly baked cheese pastry. And when they are angry enough in their water they nip the Colonel’s stern index finger. In the end the Colonel nabbed them after all and slid them into his mouth with an irritated movement of his hand, disgusted, as if being made to eat a cold frog. But one day the yellow teeth will bite his index finger off and there will be one soldier fewer—a finger on the trigger is what makes a soldier, he said so himself, and he stood by what he said, stood firm as a rock, we’re not children, damn it all.

  “Pity, weally,” said Hermaphrodite, “it’th going to be dead bowwing in here with him gone.”

  “You thick bastard, you think it’s funny, a nutcase sassing the Colonel?” Menjou was getting riled.

  “He wathn’t thathing him, he only kithed him, hoo-hoo-hoo … Nithe.”

  “What, you think he kissed him because he loved him?” Tartuffe joined in.

  “It would be ‘nithe’ for you to shut your trap, you moron!”

  “Mowwon, eh? Then you’wwe a cwetin!” flared Herma. “The Old Man wath hathling him, wight, and he kithed him, foww that? Would you have had the gutth? I know I wouldn’t … tho I thay to him ‘bwavo! bwavo!”’

  His anger provoked laughter. (Melkior laughed, too, inside.)

  “The Old Man was ‘hathling’ him, eh? Bwavo!” Everybody laughed.

  “I thaid ‘hathling,’ not ‘hathling,’ you thilly thap! You’wwe the nutcathe, not him! It’th you they ought to put undeww obther-wathon …”

  “Stop it, don’t get all riled up,” spoke up Little Guy in the low voice of a repentant. “I made all this happen.”

  “Made what happen?”

  “Him kissing the …”

  “You mean it was another one of your suggestions?”

  “Yes,” admitted Little Guy like an incorrigible sinner.

  “Oh, go and … eat your mother’th cheethe pathtry!” said Hermaphrodite, his patience cracking at last, and there would probably have been a fight if Mitar had not at that moment entered the room followed by a huge, muscular young man in white who displayed awe-inspiring biceps under his rolled-up sleeves.

  “Which one?” asked the young man.

  “This one,” Mitar indicated Melkior. “Come on then, get your gear. You’re off to Neurology.”

  “So they got you then, eh?” he was asked by one of the three on the third day after he was moved into a vast white room with barred windows. Even now the person who asked was not looking at Melkior. He was looking at the wall behind Melkior’s bed. Floating in his eyes was a dim look with which he dreamily stared at the bare walls, even at the empty space of the room, as if he had prepared himself for a patient and tedious existence for the rest of his days.

  The other two had not yet spoken. The short chesty one went up to the window from time to time and snarled irately through the bars, and the endlessly long and lean type, in contrast to him, lived in exalted calm and dignity. His food was eaten by the short chesty one while he himself solemnly marched up and down the room, clearly performing an important function.

  There were only four beds in the room (the fourth having been brought in for Melkior), one in each corner, bolted firmly to the floor, and nothing else, no other objects: bare white walls and emptiness. The acoustics of bare empty space, horrible, hopeless.

  Melkior had spent two days on his bed as if he were on a raft, in absolute peace, alone with himself. The bed with ancient blankets, with no sheets, filthy, uncared for, with the condensed smells of the bodies which had been releasing their fumes there before him. But the stench had by now acquired his familiarity and warmth. He had adopted the despised and abandoned smells of the other people and drawn them with fraternal cordiality around his shoulders, like a beggar does a chanced-upon overcoat.

  Skunk fashion, bedbug fashion, he had wrapped the stench around him and was now challenging all and sundry, derisively, like the Asclepian on the cannibal island: Come on, you delicate noses, approach if you can this impregnable circle of revulsion, this armor of safety, this halo of holy stink! He felt the stench on his person like a life belt before a storm, like the inebriation with a folly which made him light, transparent, invisible. If only I were no more! If only I were the smelly air hiding my existence so reliably!

  “How did they get you?” the dreamer asked again, still looking at the wall above Melkior. “Were you making petals?”

  “What petals?” asked Melkior politely.

  “I don’t know. It was something … I don’t remember what.” He lapsed into thoughtful silence, then heaved a sigh and cried out bitterly: “On Ombrellion, the barren mountain, he spake! I’m a melancholic, they say, the Tartars. What about you—are you mad?”

  “No. I’m a complete idiot,” replied Melkior gravely.

  “What’s that mean? Do you fight people?”

  “No, I’m peaceful. I stink.”

  “They wanted to cut me in half over there. I was in the Artillery infirmary, where the hack-hack guns are, understand? Hack-hack, with a hyphen, you know, to hack one in two … one-two, left-right, one-two, three, four … I can count up to a billion. That’s the count of the hairs you have on one half of your head, multiplied by two. Down with the King and Queen!” this last he added in a whisper, watching the beanpole fearfully who was doing his march past.

  “Which queen?” asked Melkior.

  “The King’s wife.”

  “He hasn’t got one.”

  “Down with his sister then.”

  “He doesn’t have a sister either.”

  “Well, there has to be some female at court—so down with her then. You know,” he slunk up to Melkior and whispered confidentially, pointing at the beanpole, “you can’t say things like that in his presence—he’s the Lord Chamberlain,” he added with sly irony.

  “At which court?”

  “This one … the Royal Saccharinic Court,” t
he Melancholic gave a cunning smile. “He’s privy to court secrets. But he confers only with the top-rankers. Watch.” The Lord Chamberlain was having a pleasant chat with the King, riding in the royal carriage (the King was sitting on his pillow), but the only intelligible words in the entire conversation were “Your Majesty,” uttered with enormous respect; the rest was a highly confidential whisper. The Lord Chamberlain, with a sweet smile on his face, was waving to the people, pointing meanwhile, for the King’s benefit, at various prominent persons in the cheering crowd. The carriage came to a sudden halt in one place, the Lord Chamberlain’s index pointing resolutely at the Melancholic.

  “It wasn’t me, Your Saccharinic Sweet Majesty!” said the latter in fright, “It was he (pointing at the Short Chesty) who ate your bread and cabbage.” But the Lord Chamberlain’s index finger never left him. Moreover, the Lord Chamberlain hooted hoo! at which the Short Chesty yelled bloodthirstily:

  “I am Rover, the eldest of five, let me at him, I’ll skin him alive!” and snarled at Melkior showing small close-set teeth.

  “Don’t do that, Rover—I’ll give you a two-rupee piece,” the Melancholic held out a small white button with two holes, “and I’ll let you have a four-rupee one tomorrow.”

  “Get it sewn on your own tomorrow! Gimme now!”

  “I haven’t got one now, Rover, I’m expecting one from my brother tomorrow. What you can have now is a bit of my fingernail.”

  “Gimme.”

  Rover quickly sawed off the Melancholic’s thumbnail with his small sharp teeth and displayed it to the Lord Chamberlain. The latter nodded with satisfaction, dismissed Rover, and drove the horses on.

  “You have to act like that with them,” explained the Melancholic to Melkior, apparently in some embarrassment.

  “Listen,” said Melkior hopefully, “you can square with me: you aren’t actually …”

  “Mad?” the Melancholic smiled sadly. “Well, no, not in the way they are. Different category. They think … the Lord Chamberlain thinks (Rover doesn’t know a thing) two and two make five; I know they make four (see?) but it’s too much of a bother to think.”