Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

  “Cold dishes only,” said the cold voice above them with an important flick of the napkin across the table.

  “Sardines, cheese, and some salami,” ordered ATMAN in the manner of a distinguished guest.

  “No sardines, cheese homemade, cow’s milk, low-cal salami only,” said the pale man indifferently and again flicked his napkin at some invisible morsel on the tabletop.

  “I won’t have anything to eat,” said Melkior. “I’ll only have a hot brandy.”

  “Excellent idea!” cried ATMAN. “I’ll have one, too.”

  “So, nothing to eat, just two hot brandies,” said the pale man ambling off. “With customers like you, who needs enemies,” seemed to be what he meant.

  “More or less,” ATMAN called wittily after him. “And his wife’s reading Secrets of the Russian Imperial Court in the kitchen. Stupid fool, buying a business at a time like this.”

  “Oh, so Kurt has … ?”

  “Natch. What’s the use of holding on to it, now? You heard the man, ‘cheese homemade, cow’s milk.’ They say there’s going to be a shortage of wine, too, things are going to … well, you know where to. Anyway, the Cozy Corner has … cozened its guests … in every way.” ATMAN put a particular stress on the last words, training his small derisive eyes onto Melkior’s. And Melkior got confused, foolishly, not having yet caught ATMAN’S drift.

  “And why did you ask for my address in the army?” he asked suddenly, so that it appeared in some way connected with what ATMAN had been telling him.

  “Ah-ha,” blurted ATMAN unawares, as though a little bird had got snared in his trap. “I wanted to write you.”

  “Why … and what about?”

  “Well …” ATMAN was smiling like a man hesitating before revealing something momentous, “… nothing special. I wanted to drop you a line, send you a parcel perhaps. It was her idea that we should send you a parcel.”

  “Viviana’s?” All of Melkior’s nerve fibers quivered, but everything subsided again presently, he’s lying! ATMAN’S lying! and aloud he said, “I don’t believe you.”

  “Why not? She’s got a kind heart. She even knitted you a pair of woolen gloves herself. That is to say, her Aunt Flora did, but she bought the wool and generally saw to it … But there was no address, so she gave them to me—here they are.” ATMAN produced a pair of gray knitted gloves from his pocket and put them on the table as evidence. “Here, take them, they’re yours after all. Only you’ll find the fingers too long, she took the measurements from my hands, and I have long fingers, heh-heh, look,” and he put his hands on the table—bony, heavy, with unusually long, hard fingers. Terrible hands. Poor Numbskull, thought Melkior, that must have hurt something awful. …

  “I see you don’t like my hands.” He bunched his fingers, making his joints crack with an ugly sound. “Neither do I, believe me. I saw a film, a silent one, long ago, where Conrad Veidt played a famous pianist. He’d lost his hands in a railway crash. It so happened that a vile murderer was executed at the same time and the surgeons … I really have great respect for surgeons, they’re the only ones I appreciate in the entire medical profession … grafted the murderer’s hands onto the pianist’s arms. That’s where his suffering begins: wearing the hands of a murderer. He goes on playing, true—but with a murderer’s hands! On top of which the murderer visits him in his dreams demanding his hands back. Now there’s surgical charity for you! Must appreciate them all the same, don’t we?” ATMAN gave Melkior a barely noticeable wink, then suddenly thrust his hands at him and laughed with an ugly cawing sound: “Horrible, aren’t they? As if they’d been taken off a murderer. By surgeons. And the worst thing is I have to wear them all the time. Caressing and embracing women with these! That may be why women dislike me. You’re all right. Not only are you able to caress them with words, you also have fine, white hands with delicate fingers … That’s why they go for you so much, thinking they’d like to send you parcels, and gloves for your gentle hands. And yet—shame on you—you don’t write to any of them. Not even to … hm … so she came around for a bit of soothsaying. But what could I say? The surgeons have been mobilized, too, called up for exercises, that is, the army’s taken away all the joys: men, food, automobiles, the lot.”

  “Who came to see you? Why should I care about your customers anyway?”

  “Unh-unh, this one you should, er … and it’s only proper that you, er … I spoke to her in the … is it correct to say ‘rosiest’? Well, those are the terms I spoke to her about you in … all flowery and rosy. When abandoned by men, these kinds of desperate women are apt to do anything.”

  “Such as hang themselves,” said Melkior vengefully, malice oozing from his eyes, “and when you take them off the rope they hang themselves around your neck.”

  “Heh-heh, some truly are like that,” ATMAN gave a flattered laugh. “Allusion understood—and a valid one it is. Only she’s not really hanging around my neck; your informant (is that the right word?) was exaggerating just a bit. Anyhow, it’s wise to have someone on hand for our physical ‘needs,’ and we are well able, are we not, to keep the dirty and vulgar stuff separate from our i-de-als, we who know ideal love—Platonic, if you’ll permit. It’s an entirely different kettle of fish from physical need … off the rope: We’re masters of that pitiful parade there, indeed we are tyrants with terrible demands. We torment those she-apes of ours, do we not, Mr. Melkior, and enjoy seeing it make them even crazier about us. And then we take the notion—out of sheer caprice—to start ex-pa-ti-ating (God, what a word, I’ve got my tongue all twisted) as if we resent their being unfaithful to Coco—with anyone but us. Because we’re but a guiltless instrument of their sordid will in the whole affair; pretty nearly innocent victims of their lust, too.”

  He squeezed all this out of her, fool, Melkior fumed at Enka, he milked her dry. …

  “You are so experienced in the matter.” He resolved to respond in kind. “You must have suffered terribly over Eve.”

  “Over … Eve?” ATMAN was momentarily flummoxed and his forehead went a shade pale; his lower jaw trembled slightly, as though with fear or a sour memory; but he presently accomplished his derisive smile and stretched it over his face like a mask. “Heh, because my name’s Adam? Your catechist taught you well, that must be why you’ve remained so loyal to him.”

  “Unh-unh, I was not referring to the biblical Eve,” triumphed Melkior at embarrassing ATMAN. “But it is true they called her Eve because of your name being Adam.”

  “Ah, so …” ATMAN almost said “… you know”; he was effecting a tactical retreat. “Stories from the Olden Days. It is a small world indeed.” ATMAN was at a loss all the same, the fount of his eloquence had gone dry; he fell silent and seemed to be lost in thought. Melkior was sorry he’d told him—he might have done better to save this trump card for a more decisive moment, or simply to have kept his silence. He preferred ATMAN speaking to ATMAN silent. He was now afraid of the silence, who knows what the fellow might be up to?

  “Ah, here comes the hot brandy at last,” stirred ATMAN. “That was a good idea of yours—I’ve been feeling all frozen … inside.”

  They sipped the hot brandy in tandem, blowing “haah” from their warmed throats.

  “Perhaps it wasn’t nice of me to bring that matter up,” began Melkior; he wanted to break ATMAN’S strange silence.

  “Nice or not … you wanted to get your own back at me,” smiled ATMAN by way of a grimace. “All right, so be it. Did they at least tell you Eve was beautiful, very beautiful?”

  “Like a goddess!” exclaimed Melkior jokingly.

  “Goddess nothing! All the goddesses I’ve seen, in paintings and so on, are poorly built—childbearers, every last one, with no waist to speak of. Now she was well-filled yet slender; the legs, the bosom, the eyes, everything … no, she was a magnificent woman, if that isn’t a ridiculous way of putting it.”

  “Why did you break up, then?”

  “She was too beautiful for me,” sai
d ATMAN uncertainly, looking at Melkior with suspicion: does he know more by chance? He probably saw some tiny ironical twitch on Melkior’s face; that was why he went on straight away, though not readily: “There were certain incompatibilities in our characters … For all that we were what I may well call madly in love, I suffered. Her beauty was simply too much for me to bear. She knew it and liked to torment me. Just for fun, on a whim, as women amuse themselves. She said such things were inevitable in a happy marriage. She used to tell me about men from our circle of friends molesting her, laughing at me behind my back. … She had me at odds with everyone. I had truly become suspicious and horrible. There was a boy I beat to within an inch of his life. She had complained about him propositioning her brazenly in public, what would people think of her, and once the rumors got started I was going to end up believing them myself, no, honestly, it had gone past being a joke, after all she didn’t want me to be everyone’s laughingstock, and so on … and I went and beat the hell out of the cur, or rather the pup—he was small, frightened, and miserable.”

  Poor Numbskull.

  “What did you beat him with? A dog whip?” Melkior broke out in goose bumps.

  “Whip nothing—I used these instruments,” he thumped his dreadful hands on the table. “She admitted later on she’d made it all up. Why? Well, she wanted me to thrash someone over her.”

  “But why the young man, of all people?” asked Melkior with an internal smirk.

  “Because, would you believe it, she liked him!” replied ATMAN, as if still perplexed. “He was the most polite of them all—sort of admired her from afar. That was precisely what put her in jeopardy … and she wanted to remain faithful to me. That way she averted the danger …”

  Oh how very classical it all sounds, as if Racine himself had had a hand in it, gloated Melkior.

  “You seem to be smirking, Mr. Melkior?” ATMAN was looking at him inquisitorially. “I know what you’re thinking. But if I’d beaten her up—’to be on the safe side’ as you like to say …”

  “I didn’t say a word.”

  “Oh come on now, Mr. Melkior, I can see your brain laughing in there. But if I’d beaten her up I would’ve had to claim what I could never prove. Coco never has proof. It would all have been reduced to the classical ‘He said—She said …’ and so on to eternity. I didn’t want to live under such conditions, did I? I’m a practical man, I wanted to go on living with her. Shall we have another round? Sir, same again please.”

  Poor ATMAN, thought Melkior in a moment of weakness. He watched the palmist twiddle his shot glass around and around in his long, hard hands, studying it carefully as though something were being revealed to him in the simple optics of the smudged glass. His eyes had come fearfully close to each other with a kind of grave concern, nearly fusing into a single Polyphemic Cyclopean eye. Who is this man to whom I gave the chiromantic name ATMAN as a joke? Once again Melkior felt a kind of queasiness at the question.

  “It goes without saying, Mr. Melkior,” spoke up ATMAN, still peering with concern into the empty glass he was rolling between his hands, “after all you have learned about my sen-ti-mental life, that you should raise the question (please don’t protest, I can see it in your eyes for all that I’m not looking at you): how is it that I dare again … you know.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Oh, don’t lie, Mr. Melkior, we understand each other only too well. I know I’m not at all … oh hell, it’s hard to say bad things about oneself … well, not particularly attractive to women. No, no, I do have a mirror, you know. It breaks my heart to look at my reflection. Funny how the eyes mostly look at themselves in the mirror. Now what’s there for my eyes to see in themselves? If only they could see my heartbreak! That, and my fear of the image of my hideousness, the miserable insecurity before women’s critical eyes! But not a bit of it! When I’m on the job they quake at my gaze, like trapped birds … and that’s all the com-pen-sation I get. But they then see me not as a male but as a god charting their destiny. She asked you—remember?—what com-pen-sation meant. Now when she wants to unsettle me she stares with her beautiful eyes at my simian ones … and that, it appears, is Destiny’s way of warning me. But I defy it, you see … I fight back.”

  And Melkior again felt sorry for ATMAN.

  “No, honestly, there is something evil in my eyes, as if they were forever scheming to commit a crime,” went on ATMAN in desperate lamentation. “I’ve noticed you, too, avoid looking into my eyes—you’re afraid of offending me. This kind of eyes, naturally enough, are to be found in apes and owls … and born criminals. On account of them (and my hands, of course) your Don Fernando would immediately sentence me to death ‘to be on the safe side,’ according to his theory of killing. Then again, who knows, perhaps I really am dangerous. Don Fernando may be right, perhaps I really ought to be put to death … ‘to be on the safe side’; what do you think?” grinned ATMAN provocatively.

  “You’re talking gibberish, Mr. Adam; what on earth do you mean by the ‘theory of killing’?” Melkior was alarmed: where the hell did he get that from?

  “Why, it’s Don Fernando’s theory. Hasn’t he set it out for you? I don’t believe he hasn’t—he takes you for one of …”

  “I know nothing of it.”

  “Nothing, you say?” smiled ATMAN suspiciously. “Truth to tell, Don Fernando’s thinking is not entirely insane. Many an innocent man would go to the wall, but quite a few of the ‘dangerous’ ones would be eliminated as well. Through … what’s the word for doing something to forestall an evil? Acting … how?”

  “Preventively.”

  “That’s it—through preventive killing. According to Don Fernando, that was—pre-ven-tively—how Hitler should have been done in, while he was still walking the Earth as a private citizen. As well as the others Don Fernando suspects—they ought to be done in, all of them …”

  “Where did you get this all from? Did he tell you?”

  “Of course he did … not me, we haven’t met, but someone else. Perhaps an ‘executioner’ who … Because now he’s looking for ‘executioners,’ naturally—he doesn’t want to dirty his hands. And of course he’s looking for them among desperadoes who no longer care whether they live or die—they’ve already sold their body to the Faculty of Medicine.”

  Maestro! it dawned on Melkior, Maestro told him all this in his cups. But could it be that Don Fernando had settled on Maestro? … no, Melkior couldn’t bring himself to believe it.

  “Very strange, is it not, Mr. Melkior, to sentence a man to death because of his ‘appearance’?” ATMAN propped his chin on both palms and trained his terrible and (somehow) dirty gaze on Melkior: “I know I’ve been blacklisted on account of the look in my eyes, take a look, Mr. Melkior,” he pointed both his index fingers at his eyes, “only the ‘executioner’ is missing, ha-ha … The man who was subjected to the prop-a-ganda did not take the ‘preventive killing’ theory seriously. He is, well, an irresponsible, crack-brained man. He promised to go through with it, for a joke (he doesn’t care, he’s going to kill himself anyway), only to sit down with the ‘victim’ and have a good laugh at the customer, ha-ha-ha … All right, but it wasn’t merely ‘we had a chuckle—end of story,’ oh no!” finished ATMAN in a somehow threatening way, yet laughing still.

  “So what else was it? Come on!” Melkior was purposely feigning anger. “What would make you ‘dangerous’ in anyone’s book and why should anyone have you on a blacklist?”

  “Why? The expression in my eyes, that’s why! according to the theory,” cried ATMAN, too, almost boastfully. “And I do know I’ve been blacklisted! If you want to know, there’s a contract out on me …”

  “‘A contract’ out on you,” laughed Melkior nervously, “as if this were Chicago! You seem fond of crime stories—that, or the ‘shot-to-shot’ lush has been feeding you his drivel.”

  “What lush, Mr. Melkior?” asked ATMAN with a fetching smile. “You know I can’t abide drunks—I’m having this bran
dy at your suggestion, to ward off a cold, for medicinal purposes really. That’s why I only appreciate you of all of your crowd—for not drinking, for being a serious, sober, and concerned man. Quite frankly, I’m disgusted with the whole Give’nTake mob. Did you know,” he suddenly remembered, “that Maestro recently injured Ugo? He smashed glasses on his head—there are cuts all over his face.”

  “Did she tend to him again?” asked Melkior with hidden anguish.

  “No. She wasn’t there. She’s not to be found there anymore.”

  “Oh?” went Melkior, his heart fluttering with excitement.

  “Yes, didn’t I tell you? You’re next. I want it to happen as soon as possible … so that it can be over with as soon as possible. As you know, I help events come … and pass …”

  “So you know I’m next …” Melkior gave a nervous laugh.

  “I do. She’s like a gourmet—she must taste every dish. Come on, Mr. Melkior, don’t scowl, I’m sorry but you’re not just any old dish. I wonder why I keep speaking in terms of food. You would indeed be dessert for such a woman—in the intel-lec-tual sense, I mean. You saw it yourself—she’s primitive, a real spiritual orphan, so much so that she even takes pity on me sometimes—and you know my level such as it is. We are exemplars, she and I, that’s why we belong together. But I’ll go on waiting … until she comes to realize it, too.”

  “What if she never does?”

  “Never … that’s impossible,” said ATMAN with conviction. “Perhaps later, perhaps quite soon, but one day she will have to. I rather think that will be very soon … because there won’t be any other options left.”

  Melkior shuddered at ATMAN’S chilling prophecy. The old fear made itself known again: a raven croaking above its small consoling wakefulness. In an instant he dreamed again the deathly dream of his cannibal motif: facing the teeth of Polyphemus the Cyclops, the one-eyed beast. And he wondered, bitterly, where that eternal companion of a thought had been hiding these last few days.

  Fear began to shake Melkior (“because there won’t be any other options left”); his mournful gaze did a round of all the walls and objects in the establishment: here, all this will persist and the little old man will be here with that slurring speech of his (he’s beyond “the dwaft,” of course), I shay, bud, it’sh …