Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

  “Ach, Herr Professor” (he addressed Melkior as Herr Professor to elevate the level of the conversation or, more likely, his own image), “I’m sick and tired of it all, you know. You toil and toil—for what? You work for a living. And why do you live? To work. It’s a circulus vitiosus, Herr Professor, an absurdity. Did you ever think, Herr Professor, that we all go around and around in an absurd circle, that there is no way out, none at all,” and Kurt rested his sizeable hands on the table next to Melkior’s plate. Ten fingers, fleshy, sausagelike. Melkior had just made the first incision in his sausage, but now granted it free pardon, gave up the idea of slaughtering it after seeing Kurt’s fingers on the table. And again there surfaced an idea of cannibals, of the destroying body which may give rise to appetites in another body and become its food. And all the thoughts harbored by that “food,” its ideas, appreciation of a blue-and-yellow color scheme, of the tragedy of King Lear, welling tears, anxiety in the diaphragm, fear across the scalp, daydreams about a certain walk, a certain sway of the hips, “a little smile on dear lips, a bunch of flowers in a water glass” … all this is contained in the food, in the destroying body.

  “A circulus, Herr Professor. I mean: you, I, these two gentlemen, the soldiers over there, we all talk. But what can we accomplish? Can we do something with our bare hands to change the world? We talk. That’s all we’re good for.”

  “Tell ya shomp’n, buddy,” says the little old man to the giant. “Dey’re treshpassherzh, poacherzh. And dere’zh no shatishfaction in dat. Did I tell ya how I shlept? I wazh shound ashleep …”

  “By God! You can ask Else if you like. Here, Else, did I or didn’t I down fifteen brandies last Saturday? And did it show? Hah! Got up, buckled on my belt and: about face, forward march, direction the barracks. The old legs steady as all get-out, sparks flying from the cobblestones, you’d say I was marching in review on the First of December.”

  “I don’t hold with guzzling for the sake of it. Not me. What I drink for is my mood. You knock back a couple and it puts you at ease, like. Take me. When I come in here of an evening I just sit there like some damned plaster saint. Like I had nothing to say. But let me have a shot and whee! I could even kiss Else there and then. Get my drift? That’s what a good jolt does for you.”

  “For example, Herr Professor, suppose we build a dam and then a flood comes along and sweeps it all away. What’s the sense of it all, Herr Professor?”

  “I wazh shound ashleep when all of a shudden dere wazh tap-a-tapping at the winda. Sho I got up, got out of bed that izh, and what did I shee? Moon shining azh bright azh day and a dove on the winda-shill.”

  “Rrruh,” goes the giant, agreeing or belching, it was difficult to say which.

  “What did ya shay, bud? Well, I’m no good at reading the dreamzh. And the dove jusht went on tap-a-tapping at the winda. And if I’d opened it, who knowzh, it might have turned out to be a shoul, eh?”

  “Grg, no,” replies the giant briefly and assuredly.

  “It wazhn’t, eh? Yesh, well, I’m no good at dat short of thing. But it wazh funny, how it went tap-a-tapping … I shaw a film the other day about the Emperor Mackshimilian and how the Communishtsh murder him in Meckshico, shee. And hizh wife the Empresh wazh at Miramare near Trieshte. When the Emperor gave up the ghosht …”

  “And what about having children? You’re not married, Herr Professor? Sensible. There’s no such thing as a friend. When they tell you ‘friend’ you think, What does he want from me?”

  Well, well, thought Melkior, so Kurt’s philosophy is expanding! He had heard Kurt out on dams before, but his views on children and friends …

  “When the Emperor gave up the ghosht hizh shoul went to the Empresh right away like shome dove. Shinging, Open the window, my shoul izh …” (the little old man sang that part). “And you shay, bud, that it wazhn’t a shoul?”

  “Nah,” rasped the giant. “That’s just cinema.”

  “Far, far awaaay from us, down by the seeea …” nostalgically wails a Sergeant Second Class, throwing his head back and closing his eyes.

  “No, no, please,” Else implores him to keep the peace. “We can be fined for this. We have no music license.”

  “What do you mean, music? This is national, a folk song. It’s not dance music or anything.”

  “No, singing is forbidden as a general rule,” says Else meekly, almost abashed, as if someone were trying to kiss her.

  “Armies are for war, aren’t they, Herr Professor?” Kurt then dropped his voice to a whisper and assumed a somewhat confidential air, so that a thought crossed Melkior’s mind, almost alarming him. “See for yourself, Herr Professor: that type of mentality” (he nodded in the direction of the sergeants), “is it fit for waging a war? It’s only fit for barroom brawls. Fifteen brandies, that’s his brand of heroism. War is a science these days. And his idea of a good soldier is sparks flying underfoot. That’s the type of mentality I mean. My poor sister has no choice but to listen to the drivel, because it’s good for business. It’s what we make our living at. And so it goes …”

  “What? There ain’t no man alive like our major. To see him facing the ranks on the parade ground, you’d think he’s going to eat your liver for breakfast—but he’s all heart. Word of honor. I went up to him once, sir, says I, you know how it is, a soldier’s life, there’s this gal waiting in town, ‘Any good?’ says he and gives me one of his winks, ‘Welll …’ says I, wondering if I should tell him she’s crème de la crème, ‘Off you go, then,’ says he, ‘and mind you don’t disgrace the battalion,’ and he does his spit ‘n’ snort routine like he was sending me out on a patrol. He’s all heart, honest.”

  “And have you ever sheen canariezh kishing, bud? I have. It’sh a lovely shight, their kishing, and mosht interesting, too. You’d never have thought, they being shuch tiny creaturezh …”

  “Or take your own case, Herr Professor … You’re a man of intelligence—it’s so stupid!”

  “What’s stupid?” Melkior understood immediately and was seriously afraid.

  “That lowlifes like that should suck the blood of a man like yourself for nine months! Can’t you think of a way out?” And Kurt became very confidential again. “Herr Professor, my father knows a trick, you see, but it’s nothing dangerous and has no harmful aftereffects. He picked it up in the Great War, it’s a very simple thing to do and there’s no professor of medicine who could suspect a thing. You dip two cigarettes in … in I don’t know what, you dip them in whatever it is and smoke them before your physical. They’ll send you home with tears in their eyes. My Vater got hundreds out that way. What is it you dip them in now? … He ought to be back any minute. If you would care to wait we’ll ask him, all right?”

  Melkior was upset by the come-on-we’re-partners intimacy with which Kurt was assailing his innocent fear of history. You know, it’s something altogether different, Kurt, what you have in mind, Kurt, this thing you … in his mind Melkior had started stammering some kind of apology to his conscience.

  “Leaving already, Herr Professor? I wanted to ask Vater. What on earth do you dip them in, Christgott? Never mind, I’ll ask Vater for you. Herr Professor. A very good night to you.”

  “G’niiight!” Else automaton-like sang her little tune at Melkior’s departure, politely and with a touch of blush in her cheeks.

  He climbed to his third floor with difficulty, as though his pockets were filled with stones. That’s exhaustion, he thought, brought on by fasting.

  Kurt’s sausage had been his first meal since noon the previous day. He had not even finished the sausage, in view of Kurt’s fingers. “Cannibalism” was the thought he had found in the second half of the sausage. And he had left that half to the surprised, even offended, Kurt. “Horses are more expensive than pigs or cattle,” Kurt had said. “There’s no horsemeat in it.”

  There is man-meat, Kurt, in our imagination.

  He slipped his hand inside his shirt and grabbed a fistful of his hairy chest.
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  Man-meat. A useful addition to your vocabulary … and to your diet, too, in some parts of the world. Cannibals. Reclining on his bed, in the dark, he sailed out again on the Menelaus, a Pacific cargo liner. Cannibals. That was to be the title of a play he had been contemplating. Of the grotesque, in fact, with cannibal howls, dances, and native rites to the deafening rumble of drums around a cauldron over a large fire.

  The cauldron is offstage, of course, because such high-impact scenes in the theater always take place offstage. Simmering in the cauldron is a white man, a fat cook, the plumpest of the seven survivors from the shipwreck Menelaus. You thought of it as a symbolical piece of satire or something. … Anyway, it does not matter what it was to have been, seeing that nothing had come of it save the momentary flash of an idea that came to you again at the Cozy Corner when Kurt brought the sausage to your table.

  The idea first came to you one night on a train, on the hard bench of a third-class compartment. You had the entire compartment to yourself, a privilege bought from the conductor for a pittance. As you tossed sleepless on the hard slats the idea slowly took shape as the memory of stories you had heard in your childhood by the sea from lying old seamen who had not only been captured by cannibals but had also each of them seen the one-eyed giant whose eye each of them had gouged out. But why on the train that night the sudden return of those boastful geriatric odysseys, on that hard bench, accompanied by the horrible clatter of wheels under your ear? At one moment you found one of your hands on your knee and the other on your shoulder, you felt the hard and knobby bones overlaid with taut, dry skin; you poked your fingers into the joints, the holes in the bones, the gaps between the tendons, you separated one from another, registering each one in turn, unconsciously, by touch, by touch alone, as foreign, alien objects, not even thinking about them, and now, in hindsight, everything had fallen into place. You were dreadfully emaciated at the time from fear of events that had a claim on your body (the journey was in fact undertaken to settle some army-related business) and, touching your knobby bones, you suddenly felt a great instinctive pleasure, or rather a kind of perverse and derisive joy over these bones of yours, over the traveling skeleton, bearing your name, that had cleverly bought from the conductor this separate little compartment where it could lay down its bones and feel them and register: look, the knee bones, the shoulder blade, the clavicle, the ribs … in a word, where the skeleton could assert the frightening articulation of a skeleton slyly thinking of itself as such: this is I all the same, I who know my name, I who am smoking here in the dark above the clatter of the wheels and—entre nous soit dit—I who hope to wriggle free, to wriggle free … Hush, hush, mum’s the word!

  That scrawny body! That scrawny body of yours had gone underground inside its skeleton, hidden itself, insinuated itself into the bones and there felt the security of a snail, of a mouse in its hole, a hedgehog underneath its prickles. The body had simply proclaimed, I’m not there! And then later on, in the sanctuary, during a moment of respite between two fears, there began to germinate the idea of cannibals and castaways, as a lark, in a sunny and almost wanton way, such as when we indulge in the profligate waste of food after satisfying our hunger.

  And tonight at the Cozy Corner, to the accompaniment of Kurt’s plangent chant, over the sausage and Kurt’s fingers, there resurfaced the wanton largesse of a skeleton which served fresh live man-meat to cannibals while itself feeding moderately and carefully lest some flesh appear on it, lest the body peek out. That was where the notion of cannibals resurfaced. The ship already had its name: the Menelaus. It had been sailing, after ten nights or so of its dangerous wartime voyage, through the Tonga archipelago (called the Friendly Islands by the Europeans) between the islands of Wawau and Tongatabu, making for Tutuila—or, more specifically, for the port of Pago-Pago—there to take on a load of copra for oil extraction. The previous night the captain had studied the charts of the archipelago (what a pretty word, archipelago) and that night it’s That’s all, folks, there’s a war on, the Menelaus is going down.

  Having been hit by a torpedo, the Menelaus—husband to Fair Helen (the whore, the whore, of the Trojan war)—goes down. But never mind the ship, it’s the people that matter … there are only seven survivors. Six, actually, because the seventh, an old seaman with a pipe, is captured by Polynesian cannibals hours after the rest, thus arriving barely in time to see the cooking of the ship’s cook. But—as Hamlet would have put it—not where he cooked but where he was being cooked, at a merry cannibal party complete with folk dances that have conquered Europe, via America, and, in the process of the Hellenization of cannibal culture, have become more universal and thrilling than Aeschylus or Sophocles. That is when the ship’s cynic, a doctor by profession, declares that the cook had been dispatched to the dark world of cannibal gourmanderie with honors rather too high for his sheep’s brains—which, incidentally, he had fixed splendidly aboard the Menelaus.

  But before being cooked, the castaways are stripped naked and taken before some sort of board just like recruits. (Another twenty-odd days and there would be a fresh summons, the seventh so far: draftee Melkior Tresić is to present himself at the Recruiting Center for a physical examination to determine the degree of his fitness for service. … The medical board would be chaired by flat-footed ex-Austro-Hungarian army colonel Pechárek. First the speech: “Bwave soldiers and you gwaduate dwaftees … In dese gwave times yo’ King and countwy ex-pect in-twepid duty” … The naked men shivering with cold, nerves, timidity; some covering their hanging gardens with their hands, the more audacious among the “bwaves” lifting them to tickle the frightened, goose-pimpled backsides of the shy ones in front. For the seventh time draftee Melkior Tresić would have the height-measuring bar insultingly dropped on his head, inhale-exhale, I’ll cheat them of a few liters of air again, the captain with the snake of Asclepius on his epaulettes would probe his bicep with two fastidious fingers: serious asthenia, deferred service. … But there could no longer be any deferment, either-or time is here! A hushed argument at the other side of the table. Pechárek would not release his morsel. Emaciated, gaunt, nothing but skin and bones, says Asclepius, but no matter, the skin will do for King and countwy, not to mention the bones, for the skin’s got thoughts buried inside, skin and bones, well, get them into olive drabs, the skin and bones, top them off with an army cap and let them sizzle quietly underneath as per King’s Regulations—all four parts, by Jove!) The cannibal tribe’s Pechárek with a ring through his nose, cook or butcher, perhaps even the king himself, expertly appraises the briskets, rumps, sirloins on the naked men and designates the cook to be dinner with a single gesture of his hand. The second fattest, the company agent, faints. The others watch their destiny with horror. Only the ship’s doctor (the redheaded, freckled cad!) keeps his intelligent curiosity separate, making his appraisal as if he, too, were on the council, dressed in the naked brown skin that confers upon one the privilege of recruiting meat. With care, almost with tenderness, he sends his anatomical gaze gliding over the broad, brawny back of the chief engineer, crawling down his obese frame, orbiting flylike his arrogantly jutting belly, embracing his thighs with what is nearly loving tenderness and pronounces “number three” inside his head with perfidious certainty.

  Poor chief engineer! Feeling the rat’s cold snout on his skin, and painfully aware of his place in the terrifying chronology, he is unable to conceal his envy of the doctor’s physical repugnance.

  That is all the snake of Asclepius needs to corroborate his conclusion. Among these aristocrats of the flesh, the doctor is a miserable, stinking creature which has suddenly sensed its advantage. Out there, in that “other world,” his body has had him consigned to a hell of loneliness. In the world of fragrances, where the standard smells are confined to special establishments, there to be flushed by water and battered by concoctions of chemicals and perfumes, he has to carry with him that very establishment with his quite unconventional, nonpatented, somehow original smell, hor
ribly aware that his condition is definitive. He yearns for company, friends, women. Even women he pays for refuse to suffer his presence any longer than the job requires. In Shanghai he was told by a fat Romanian woman, who stank of sweat herself, that he had such a strange smell. … “Oh God, I smell bad, I stink!” He is convinced that he stinks all over, that his walk stinks, his motions, his gaze, his voice, that his speech spreads an insupportably foul atmosphere in which people choke.

  He finds his own smell rank. He has soaped, scrubbed, washed himself, he has doused himself with fragrant fluids and oils, he has bathed in the sea, exposed his body to wind and rain, baked it in the sun, but the treacherous thing only developed a bran-colored rash and vile red spots, living wounds. His kinky red hair, his stubbly, sparse, barely visible eyebrows, everything, has been seared, demolished by hot water, soap, and the most shocking cosmetic hoaxes to which the wretch falls prey only too readily. Like a leper, he is aware of being eternally excluded from anything social and human, enjoyable and beautiful, from anything that is accessible to everyone else.

  The poor ship’s doctor!

  But look: for all that he is a captive of Polynesian cannibals, facing the cauldron of death, draftee Melkior Tresić suddenly envies the doctor! He feels an awful pleasure at the man’s repugnant body, at his stench, at his poor outcast physical person! They will smell him out, he will get away—he is inferior man-meat for the gourmands.

  Watching the captain’s plump, well-rounded curves, the chief engineer’s strong, meaty shoulders, and the first mate’s delicate, pale dreamer’s flesh, the doctor comes to feel a certain cannibalistic pleasure at the tasty tidbits, at the superior flesh which had relished food, renown, respect, and love to the full. He is now certain of holding last place, or at worst of being tied for last with the crusty old seaman.