“Tell you what—give them to me!” He suddenly snatched the oranges from Numbskull’s hands and shoved them down his shirt. “Right. Not too big, are they? No, they’re just right,” and patted his chest, insanely, girl fashion. “Then I’ll put my belt on à la Récamier (that was a good idea you had!), it’ll hold them in place. Ha-ha, what do you say? I’ll keep the skirt … I really ought to be there when they let it out … and then I’ll run down the corridors and shriek, shriek, a frightened Foolish Virgin. Tell me, how does that strike you as an idea? Is it good?” He trained his wide-eyed stare at Numbskull.
“Fine, fine …” Numbskull was backing in fear toward the door. All the same, just in case, he asked: “When they let out what?”
“The Alligator. Shhh, it’s a terrible secret. Crunches everything in sight, not even a tank can hurt it,” he whispered to Numbskull in the strictest of confidence.
“Watch out now, here comes a Tartar, pretend you don’t know me …” Numbskull went out tearful and broken. Melkior saw it. He was broken up himself by inner tears over the friendship he had so crazily rejected. A belated discovery. Oh Lord, allow me to trust at least one man!
He felt the “silly” breasts against his body. A smile played on his lips, but his entire soul suddenly went dark and he wished, in fear, to run after Numbskull and shout “wait, I was only joking,” to flee from the darkness … But there were already someone else’s steps in the corridor—the orderly was returning. Fifty percent is certainly there, in these breasts, fifty percent pure madness, he thought in haste before the orderly came in, as if hurrying to hide a terrible secret.
“Brother gone?” asked the orderly.
“Gone.” Melkior took an orange out from his shirt. “Here, take one. Look, I’ve only got one tit left,” he was cracking jokes, establishing “relationships,” giving the world back its banality.
The orderly gave him a weary look.
“What the hell did you go and kiss the Colonel for?”
“I don’t know, really … Like he was a father to me.”
“You were disrespecting him. Now you’re rotting in here for it. As punishment. ‘Under observation.’ What’s to observe, you nasty no-good? You could have got court-martialed.”
The orderly was peeling the orange. A holiday fragrance filled the bare room. “You came out of it all right, considering—you didn’t even get the showers.”
“What showers?”
“The cold showers. Shocks … to bring you back to your senses.” He was wolfing down the orange segments. Melkior watched his Adam’s apple bobbing inside his throat and nostalgically remembered ATMAN, Ugo, Viviana—the far-off beings from “that other world.” “I think your Major put in a good word for you … else you would’ve really been in for it.”
“How do you know he put in a good word?”
“I just know. He spoke to our Major about you. They won’t keep you in here much longer, just long enough for the Old Man to forget about you. They’ll send you back to the barracks then.”
“Why to the barracks? I’m not fit,” complained Melkior and shivered at the dreadful image of Caesar. “Here, look at me,” and he showed the orderly his arms bared to the shoulder.
“Don’t know about that. Maybe they’ll post you … Let’s get a move on …” The orderly motioned him out with his head and followed in step.
They had sent him back to “his” Major. They took him directly to the examining room. She was not in the anteroom. She knew they were bringing me here, she doesn’t want to see me … and that made it easier for him to harbor a feeling of suffering when he came before the Major. On top of that, he was filthy, in need of a shave, and so unkempt and miserable that he could not even imagine how he looked. He had refused to check out his reflection in the passing windows. I probably smell bad, too, it’s better she shouldn’t be here, really …
“Well now, what are we to do with you?” the Major tried to lend some military sternness to the question, but his warm, worried eyes betrayed him.
“I don’t know, Doctor,” said Melkior indifferently, at the moment he was indeed all but unconcerned for his life.
“Get you posted to the Quartermaster Training Course (there are no horses there, he added with a smile) … or perhaps send you home?”
“Whatever you think best, Doctor,” said Melkior with uneasy shame as his heart started beating faster at the word “home,” which showed ingratitude in a way … But he may only be testing me, he thought all the same, just in case.
“All right, we’ll see,” concluded the Major. “Now go upstairs to the ward, report to Nurse Olga. And clean yourself up, man!” added the Major informally. “You look a hideous mess! We do have a hospital barber … there’s a bath available, too …”
Melkior reddened. I clearly reek … Good thing she’s not here …
“I’m sorry I’m in such a …” he stammered, “… over there I simply had no opportunity to …”
“Yes, yes, I know.” The Major stood up and, dropping a hand on Melkior’s shoulder, said in an intimate and “confidential” tone: “Why are you ruining yourself? You’re still a very young man, for God’s sake, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you,” then turned around and went out almost angrily.
A man feels his stench as a personal, homely, tamed odor. An atmosphere of confidence. The nose steeped in one’s particular smell: olfactory solidarity—let’s be helpful to one another … That was what Melkior was saying as he went up the stairs on his way to the ward, but his thoughts were not with the words. He was thinking: he has read me through and through. He’s not sending me back to Her, but to Nurse Olga, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you, man! Let Olga be your life, man, and let Her be spared from your life which you’ve got in front of …
In front of you, see, is a female body, a rustling one, with the broad cheeks of a saint on an icon. Her eyes are mournfully surprised and she has a regulation voice as if it had been laid down in the Minaeon:
“Are you the one from Neurology?” Nurse Olga was saying with a wooden face. “Come with me, this way,” and she set off down the corridor in the opposite direction from Room Seven.
Melkior had a feeling of being defeated in battle, on his way to a place of exile. The dirty, smelly prisoner of war, long unshaven, had been hiding out for days among lunatics … Numbskull “found me out.” Perhaps he arranged my transfer with the Major. I’ve got my life ahead of me!
He sneered bitterly at his momentum. Oh where have they hidden her? Her presence will rustle any moment now around this corner, where the corridor bent with a fresh little hope. He stopped at a few doors: he thought he heard her voice in there in the cacophony of rasping, coughing, hawking, and spitting, he peeked through doors left ajar, but she was nowhere to be seen. She was nowhere to be found anymore.
“We’ll put you in here … for now,” said the white icon.
Two long rows of battered white beds with a lot of haggard pale faces above the army blankets. A rotten reek encountered his olfactory sense as the local worldview. Now to readapt. To tame this general smell, too, make it his own, familiar … he almost said “belief.” Struggle for survival through olfactory adaptation. And he lay down immediately, the sooner to make the dirty rags reveal themselves to him, to exchange touch and warmth with them, to establish a close relationship. Melkior was settling in to live there, his whole life was ahead of him, man!
He shaved and bathed. I don’t smell bad anymore, so where are you?
He took a tour of the entire ward … but she was nowhere to be found. Downstairs in the examination room now sat Nurse Olga, accompanying the Major on his rounds was Nurse Olga, temperatures were taken by the grave and austere Nurse Olga. And She is no longer here. In the air fade the locks of her hair, on the floor, in the dust of my pining, her footprint is no longer there. … He spoke automatically, but with the piety of a past, imagined happiness, which he believed in to the tears. I have closed the window the more to be alone, with
you to be alone … and he watched himself meanwhile invent that poetic window, yet nevertheless closed it with a vast sorrow, as if nailing himself shut, and a torrent of weeping broke through the constricted throat. Getting dark. Those are black shadows drinking my tears … and Melkior dissolved into soundless sobs in the twilight of the hospital room.
He is saying Can you hear me? in an ugly voice, but the little girl doesn’t seem to hear. She is standing in the middle of a deserted street staring straight ahead, meekly and somehow patiently, as if she trusts nothing but silence.
She is standing still like a big expensive doll with deep-set dark eyes. An arrow is embedded in her small plump back, all the way through, from one shoulder to the other, with a small caesura in the middle where it crosses the dimple in her back. The girl is standing slightly hunched, the better, presumably, to adapt her stance to the steel fibula that has pierced her back; her arms hang down her sides and her head is thrust forward in a kind of humility.
“Hey? Can you hear me?” he shouts, in fear this time, for he is thinking the little girl needs urgent care. But what is to be done? Still she is silent and motionless. He doesn’t know whether he ought to touch her at all. Is she dead?
“Please tell me: does it hurt?”
“It hur … urts,” he barely hears the little voice, frightened but somehow sustained and multiplied in echoes sounding from several directions simultaneously, as if a children’s choir has sung it in canon. … It is only then that he looks around, his gaze sweeping the breadth of the streets. There are seven or eight more little girls, equally transfixed with arrows, equally motionless and silent and slightly hunched, with their heads thrust forward. And they are all staring straight ahead humbly, as if patiently expecting something. … Or … perhaps they expect nothing any more, having already surrendered to a horrible enchantment, motionless, pierced, abandoned like dolls after a mad, cruel game.
He tries to find out who has done it and why, and why little girls, but there is nobody to be seen. He sets off in search of someone, to call for help, for it is appalling to see the little girls standing there, staring humbly ahead with arrows in their small, innocent flesh. How strange, he thinks, there’s not a drop of blood on them anywhere! And their wounds are not serious or fatal, as if this was done deliberately, so they could live, and they are alive and I could almost say healthy, they could move, pull the arrows out of their bodies and run back home to their Mamas. … Why are they standing still like that? This frightens him and he sets off down the streets in search of someone. But there is nobody to be seen anywhere in town. The town is empty.
The Alligator! flashes the most terrible thought of all.
“That’s right,” the Melancholic confirms from somewhere, invisible, “he passed through here this morning.”
“This morning? And what time is it now?”
“Night. But the Sun stood still to light his way. He’s a son of the Sun, being a victor. All victors are sons of the Sun.”
“So those little girls have been standing there like this since this morning?”
“Hee, hee, the little dolls … stayed behind.” That is Rover’s animal smell, it is by his smell that Melkior knows him. “The Tartar archers passed through, everybody ran off, they shot the little dolls, hee, hee … and left.” Shot and left … he repeats, but cannot understand why Rover is laughing like that, almost lasciviously. The poor little innocent ones … But he has no time to feel sorry. He hurries back: they must be helped as soon as possible. The arrows must be plucked from those small bodies, the little girls must be freed from the terrible reptile’s thrall and returned to life. And then I’ll tell them an amusing adventure story for children to entertain them. … Running back, he is singing the Paternoster … but when he reaches the street again the little girls are gone. From an old dilapidated house where living redbrick flesh is exposed under the crumbling front he hears the unruly laughter of women. The women are standing at the windows in various stages of undress, some of them quite naked, and laughing at him, tipping him winks and beckoning him upstairs. Draped over the windowsills are bedclothes put out to air: white sheets; amber, blue, and scarlet silk eiderdowns; large white pillows trimmed with lacework; foamy, transparent, insubstantial negligees; lain-in, slightly rumpled pajamas that have retained the outlines and fragrances of those female bodies. … Lust’s props with living naked laughing flesh sway luxuriously above his head.
“The little girls … Where are they?” he asks, and hears repeated salvos of their laughter.
“It hur-urts, hee-hee-hee,” the window women laugh cantabile, in canon. Above them, high up, coming out from the top floor, the coloratura laughter of a birdlike voice stands out by dint of its penetrating trills. She is beautiful, the most beautiful of them all. She has plumped out her lovely full bosom on the sill like two ruddy peaches and is performing her laughter with a kind of manic perseverance.
The laughter has been planted there by ATMAN as bait to the passenger through the deserted town. And she has been given the birdlike warble as a sign of his particular benevolence. She is Head Mermaid, the Honorable Mother in this house of sin for Tartar archers, the victors.
“Viviana, Viviana,” he tries to call out to her from down below, in a pious whisper as if he were praying, but his voice is soundless, it is only a dead breath of his terrible grief.
He would have cried out loud had he been able to. He looks for the entrance to the house, but finds none. He then flaps his arms, powerfully, like a swimmer, like an eagle, dun-feathered sky-dweller, and up he flies, leaving the ground below him. …
“Look, this one’s flapping his wings,” somebody said, “he’ll be crowing next.”
And Melkior indeed crowed for all he was worth, in a desperate scream, as if shaking off the night. Then he heard tittering. Earth was laughing at him.
“Morning, Mr. Rooster!” Mitar was giving him a dull matutinal look from above. “What’s the matter, did you give her one in your sleep?”
The heads above the blankets laughed flatteringly in honor of Mitar’s witticism.
“Say what?” Melkior was still listening to Viviana’s laughter.
“You were mounting a hen by the look of you,” Mitar was consolidating his success like an actor. “Flapping your wings, crowing …”
“Oh, I was flying …” Melkior thought aloud, tying up the threads of dream and reality.
“And they say dreams mean nothing!” Mitar sat down on the edge of his bed and bent over his ear: “I’ve got it right here,” he was pressing the top pocket of his white coat with his hand, “your ticket. You were dreaming about flying, well, it’s come true. You’re going home.”
“Home?” repeated Melkior mechanically, but, oddly enough, he was not moved at all. He marveled at his indifference. Look, the “private” cannibal story had come to a sudden end! The redheaded Asclepian had assumed power, with no bloodshed, literally with love, and the castaways were saved. Very soon afterward the natives came to realize how fortunate they were not to have eaten them. Instead of the pleasure of several meals which they would have soon forgotten, they began to enjoy the lasting benefits of the small-scale civilization which those wise and experienced men soon established in the primitive conditions of the savage island. Melkior had no time at the moment to enumerate their achievements in full—
Mitar was watching. And shaking his head in offended amazement: what’s the matter with the madman, it’s as if he doesn’t care …
Yes, why is it, in fact, that I don’t care? The first mate no longer chews narcotic leaves: he has devoted all his time to the study of winds; he watches the clouds float and the stars fall (useful for hunting and agriculture) and composes verse which he presumably gets from heaven. And no one any longer despises the body or curses “the voracious animal.” It has now become “human pride” (in its token garb of what used to be called the fig leaf), it has been reaffirmed as the source of the most glorious pleasures known to man. The native girls are abl
e, through woman’s intuition (congenital in the queen bee and Messalina alike), to assess properly certain skills peculiar to these unusual males. And the redheaded Asclepian, to cut a long story short, gets married! He concludes a political marriage with the chieftain’s youngest daughter. He thus enters the ruling dynasty, first as an adviser and the ruler’s son-in-law; later on, when the chieftain retires to devote all his time to his monkey tail collection, the doctor assumes full power. He proclaims himself king, subsequently to change his title to Emperor, of the state he called Asclepia in honor of his protector. While he does assign his former friends from the Menelaus to ministerial posts, they still have to pay full imperial homage to him and address him as Your Imperial Majesty or, on informal occasions, simply Sire. But Emperor Asclepius the First rules with a benevolent hand, all under the helpful influence of “our Major” who brings the story to a happy, if somewhat abrupt, end.
But Melkior was not made happy by the ending. Indeed, he watched Mitar with a tinge of hatred for bringing him his ticket like that, in his pocket. The happy ending in the pocket of a white coat.
“What’s the matter—isn’t that what you wanted?” Mitar was offended by his silence. Not to mention the look in his eyes …
“Of course it is … thank you so much …” but it came out unconvincing.
“Thank your sainted aunts! Think I would’ve bothered if I hadn’t promised my brother? Well, you can …”
“Numbskull asked you to … ?” Ah, Mitar is expecting his fee, as the deal stood.
“That’s right, call him names! And him pleading for you like a brother. Hadn’t been for him, you’d still be rotting at the funny farm. He went to see the Major about you.”