“There seem to be no birds in this city,” thought Ernst. “That is reasonable. For them to abide in this vat of cultural horrors, they must first fly over that great, empty, dead world beyond the gates. Sand. What a perfect device to excise us from all hope of reentering the world. We are shut up like lepers, in a colony across the sand, and easily, gratefully forgotten. The process of forgetting is readily learned. First we are forgotten by our families, our nations. Then we are forgotten by those we’ve hated, our enemies in contiguous countries. At last, when we have alighted here in our final condition, we forget ourselves. Children must be hired to walk the streets of this city, reminding us of our names and our natures, otherwise we should disappear entirely, as we have dreamed and prayed for so many years. But that, after all, is not the reason we have been sent here. We have come not to die, but to exist painfully apart. Death would be a cleansing for us, a discourtesy to our former friends.” Ernst looked around him. The twilight made pleasant shadows on the stone-paved street around the square. Some of the shadows moved. “Hey!” shouted Ernst experimentally. The shadows burst, flew up, flapped away in many directions. “Pigeons,” thought Ernst. “I forgot pigeons. But that hardly ruins my thesis. Pigeons are a necessity in a city. They were sitting here, asleep on the sand, when the first parched exiles arrived on this spot. The abundantly foolish idea of building a town must have occurred to those unwanted knaves only after seeing the pigeons.”
The city was certainly one of immigrants, thought Ernst. As he had escaped from a crazy Europe, so had Czerny. So had Sandor Courane. Ieneth and her false flower, Ua, had fled from some mysterious wild empire. Could it be that every person sheltered within the city’s granite walls had been born elsewhere? No, of course not; there must be a large native population. These must be the ones most stirred by the absurd wrath of the Gaish, for who else had enough interest? Ernst lived in the city only because he had nowhere else to go. He had stopped briefly in Gelnhausen and the nearby village of Frachtdorf. From Bremen he had sailed to the primitive Scandinavian settlements that bordered the northern sea. He had resided for short terms in England and France, but those nations’ murderous nationalism made him run once more. Each time he settled down, it was in a less comfortable situation. Here on the very lip of Africa, the city was the final hope of those who truly needed to hide.
A small voice whispered behind Ernst. It was Kebap, the young fraud. “I knew of another city like this one,” said the boy. “It was in Armenia. Of course, there wasn’t sand all around to keep us in. This town was imprisoned by its own lack of identity. There were perhaps fifty thousand Turks living there, of which several may have been my true father. Indeed, ‘several’ hardly does justice to the whiteness of my mother’s eyes, or the perfection of her skin, at least in those days of a decade past. But I must be modest in all accounts, so that later claims may be made with greater hope of acceptance.”
“You are wise beyond your years, Kebap,” said Ernst sadly.
“That is not difficult at the age of nine,” said the boy. “Nevertheless, I continue. There were perhaps a tenth again as many Armenians, and some Greeks. Persians passed through often, bearing objects which they could not sell. These men rode on the backs of bad-smelling horses and camels of a worse reputation, and we always deviled them continuously until they departed again.
“The houses in this Armenian wonder had flat roofs above stone walls, and it was the custom to grow grass upon the roofs. Naturally, with the best fodder in the neighborhood up there, our sheep and calves grazed above our heads. When we stood on the hillsides not far from this town, the houses were invisible against the surrounding plain. I forget what the name of this city was. One day my mother and several of my uncles took me on a long walk; we packed a lunch of cold meat and water, for the Persians had arrived early that morning and we wanted to escape their presence. We climbed far into the hills, so that it was almost time for evening wagib when we stopped. I was asleep, carried by an uncle, on the return journey. I was told the next day that our city could not be found. Every time a herd of sheep was investigated, it was discovered to be firmly on the ground, not upon our familiar rooftops. We wandered the hills and the nearby country for weeks, searching for that disguised city. At last, we arrived here.”
“Your tactics were shrewd, Kebap,” said Ernst. “That is very difficult to believe.”
“It is fully documented.”
“I shall have to examine your records someday.” Ernst turned to see the boy, but there was no one there. “He is a quick monster indeed,” thought Ernst.
The city held many sorts of wonderful things, objects rare in Europe and prized by the slaves and the poor. There was a large colony of artists, and their pottery and sculpture was famous all over the world, though not so much so that it attracted either tourists or trade. At this time of day, the craftsmen of the city would be heading for the bars with their day’s earnings, eager for the less tangible beauties of wine and poetry. Ernst was bored by clay pots, and he had little enough of his own art to trade.
He had often tried to write poems or short, terse essays about the city, but each time he had given up in failure. He couldn’t seem to capture the true emotions he experienced, feelings different in subtle, unpoetic ways from the vaguely similar emotions he had known while living in Europe. The poems could not reflect the pervasive sense of isolation, of eternal un-cleanness, of a soul-deep loss of personality; these things descended upon a European only hours after arriving at the dune-guarded gates of the city.
He had early on made the mistake of showing some of these frustrated scribblings to M. Gargotier. The proprietor had read them politely, muttering the words under his breath as he traced his progress down the page with a grimy finger. When he finished, he had handed the paper back to Ernst without a word, and stood silently, evidently uncomfortable but unwilling to make a final judgment. Soon Ernest stopped asking M. Gargotier to read the things, and both men seemed happier for it.
Dusk settled in on the shoulders of the city. Ernst sat at his table with his bits of paper and his little supper of cheese and apples. Around him the city prepared for night, but he didn’t care. Customarily each evening after supper, he declared the day productive; reaching this point, he ordered bourbon and water.
“It is time to relax, now,” thought Ernst. “It is time to pack away for the day the tedious, essential hatreds and hopes. It is time to sit back and bring out my informal thoughts. How I am growing to despise these memories, even more than their subjects. The very issue of my thoughts is soiled by this city, so that had I known the dearest saint of Rome in my youth, I could not think on her now with anything but scorn and malice. I am not intrigued by my musings, and their temper is becoming too acid for my unpassionate self.
“Eugenie, you seem to be suffering the most, though even now, at this unofficial time of day, I can still summon up nothing but a tepid dislike. You must hold a special position of disfavor in my heart; that is your fate, grow used to it. Marie, you look lovely tonight. A constellation of false memories enriches you. If I do not look at them too closely, I can successfully pretend a few moments of joy. Permit me this indulgence, Marie. I will do the same for you, if ever I’m given the opportunity.”
The people on the sidewalk were rushing by now, their faces marked by an intensity of purpose that was never apparent during the day’s business hours. In the city, one pursued amusement relentlessly, as a plague victim might follow a hapless doctor in hope of miracles. At night, with only the cold cosmetic of darkness, the city slipped on a shabby mask of gaiety, but no one criticized. Ernst smiled to himself, nodded to the grim-faced celebrants, observed in a clinical fashion the desperate snatchings after diversion.
It was a dangerous thing to pray that a lasting release might be had from the day’s troubles. Each day was so like every previous day that the pleasures pilfered during the night cheapened with the sun’s rising. It was as hopeless a thing as the Bridge of the Crazy Berber,
who cried for many years to the people of the city that a bridge should be built—a gigantic bridge, the world’s largest suspension bridge, an engineering marvel to catch the imagination of all civilized people. It would rise from the north gate of the city, span the immense waste of sand, cross the distant range of mountains, the short strip of barren plain, the rolling leagues of the Mediterranean Sea, to end at last, abruptly, curiously, on the island of Malta. Of course, the bridge would not be built directly northward, in the shortest line possible; to reach Malta, the bridge would have to stretch diagonally across many hundreds of miles of Africa’s dead face. It would be a hardship, indeed, for anyone traveling along that bridge. The Crazy Berber chose Malta as the terminus evidently only because that island had been the birthplace of his mother.
Many of the people hurried along the avenue to the south, toward the Chinee quarter, where another eccentric resident of the city, a weary, stranded Breulen duke, had long ago built a fantastic parody of various memorable sections of Singapore. Like many things in the city, this dollop of Asia seemed romantic at first, but soon distressed the observer with a richness of unwholesome detail. The Breulen nobleman had loved Singapore, the story went, or at least, according to other accounts, had been fascinated by written descriptions and never actually visited the island at all. In any event, he, like so many others of his class, at last took up residence in the lonely African city. His project to reproduce the more spectacular attributes of Singapore was no less mad than the Crazy Berber’s bridge, but in this case the duke had the wealth to accomplish his goal.
Now, the new Singapore wore the decaying garments that clothed all the city. The imitation Tiger Balm Gardens were uncared-for—a tangle of brittle growths perverted from their natural forms by the arid climate, the heat, and the genius of the city itself. There was a tumbling-down replica of the Raffles Hotel, but there was no mystery there—merely the scorpions scuttling across the littered parquet. Street dining stalls after the Singapore fashion once dominated a narrow alley, which was now used as a public open-air toilet. The Breulen duke died during the construction of a likeness of Singapore’s Happy World; he was to have been buried beneath the joget platform, all of the park which was finished at the time of his death, but his corpse was never located.
Following the avenue to the north, the strollers would reach the amusement quarter, where models of more familiar scenes from other lands dug at their buried homesickness. Ernst could see the brightly colored strings of lights go on, shining through the gaps between trees and buildings, diffused by mist and distance.
A canal ran parallel to the avenue beyond the affluent section. On its farther bank were restaurants, bars, and casinos. Women danced naked in all of them, though they attracted few patrons. Diamonds were sold by old men in tents, and every building had a few young whores in the front window. There were areas set aside for dozens of different sports: bocci, tennis, and miniature golf facilities were the most popular. Everything prohibited from sale within the central city was available here: fine leather goods, lace, gold and silverware, expensive woods made into furniture—alone or in combination with steel or plastic—perfumes, silks, rugs, every sort of luxury.
Floodlights went on, illuminating models of the ruins of Rome, Staeca, and of Athens. The replica of the Schloss Brühl opened its gates, complete with exact representations of the ceiling painting by Nicholas Stüber, and the furnishings in white and gold of the Dining Room, Music Room, and State Bedroom upstairs. The large beggars’ marketplace of the city was lit by torches. Though containing little merchandise of value, it was famed for its bouillabaisse.
Ernst had never seen any of this, but he had heard stories. He preferred to spend his evenings dedicated to serious drinking.
CHAPTER 11
Ernest was alone. In the midst of a crowd of thirty million people—a crowd that extended from him and ran down Myrtle Avenue to Flatbush in an unbroken stream, across the Manhattan Bridge to that island borough, up to the Bronx, back down through Queens to meet the same crowd again in Brooklyn—squeezed down among all those people, Ernest was more alone than he had ever dreamed he could be.
“This is a terrific way to spend an afternoon,” he said aloud. He was moving along the edge of the mob, only a few feet from the apartment buildings across the sidewalk. These were not the modern modapt containers, but the pre-modular, fixed-site tenement houses of the middle twentieth century, built for and still rented to low-income families. While these projects had been acceptable dwelling units three quarters of a century before, they had since deteriorated into the worst sort of slum. Ernest had never seen so much decay and poverty concentrated into so small an area. He would never have come into the neighborhood but for the pressures of the crowd and his own growing madness.
“You could always go home,” said a man who had walked next to Ernest for some time.
“I doubt that,” said Ernest. “I’d have to fight this crowd about thirty blocks.”
“I think this is a fitting way to close out our earthly reign,” said the man. “When the age of reptiles came to an end, it was like the final episode after eighteen seasons of Crime Nurse. We’re doing it all in one flashy stereo spectacular.”
“God knows I didn’t do anything to deserve this.”
“Of course not,” said the man, laughing. “The idea of sin and retribution is just an attempt to hide behind the shield of superstition. You are trying to find rational causes where there aren’t any. If you or I do not get tokens, it won’t be because we are more evil than those who do get tokens. My wife, here, had some thoughts on that subject a few hours ago. Honey, I’d like you to meet Mr., uh, Mr.,…”
“Smith,” said Ernest.
“Hello,” said the man’s wife. She looked completely exhausted. She was staggering beside her husband, leaning on him now and then, staring from side to side dazedly. “Let us speak today of goodness,” she said. She spoke in a dull, toneless voice, as if she were giving a recitation. Ernest wondered how often during the day her husband had urged her to repeat her speech. “Does anyone still believe in it? Can anyone cite me an example of goodness?” Here, she trailed off into an unintelligible mutter. Just as suddenly her voice rose again, startling Ernest. “God has given over the rule of the world to his subordinate angels, and they have proven to be traitors. The very seat of goodness has been overthrown. We must make the best of what we have. Order has gone. Morality is irrelevant. All that is left is us.” Again, for a few uncomfortable seconds, Ernest couldn’t make out what she was saying. After a while she continued, this time nearly shouting her words. No one nearby in the multitude seemed to notice, though. “There is only teleology. [Muttered phrase.] Life without further goals beyond selfish pleasures. [Muttered phrase.] All that we do, all work, all play, all cultural, organizational, intellectual, bestial activity represents nothing more than an effort to rid ourselves temporarily of that oppressive fact. [Long muttered passage.] Hope. And hope is an illusion, a romance. The universe is emptier than we are, my friends. There is no universal Good waiting for you to pass your scabby human trials. There is no Good at all.” She dropped her clenched fists to her sides. She began to weep, and her husband stroked her hair, light blonde hair worn in tight curls.
“Your wife looks pretty beat,” said Ernest. “My wife wouldn’t even come with me. She’d rather sit home and pretend she wasn’t ever going to die. I kind of admire your wife’s courage.”
“Courage sometimes isn’t enough,” said the man angrily. “Some people just aren’t born with the right defense mechanisms. Like my wife. She never learned that there are always jokers like you around, trying to take advantage of her. She’s a good person, but she never learned to say no. Look at her. She’s almost hysterical, because people like you keep sniping at her. Isn’t this lousy farce bad enough, without your petty, malicious tricks?”
“Mister, you’re crazy,” said Ernest. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
The
other man didn’t answer. He glared furiously at Ernest, and began flailing at him with both fists. Ernest tried to step back, but the people around him wouldn’t move. There wasn’t enough room either to fight or retreat. The stranger was making small, odd noises in this throat; Ernest was sickened, but he had to defend himself. He caught one of the man’s wrists, and with his other hand punched the man’s throat. The stranger doubled over, choking. His wife cried out and collapsed on her husband’s struggling body.
“What did you do that for?” shouted a woman walking behind them.
“He’s a psycho,” said somebody else. “There’s bound to be a bunch of them around today.”
“He damn well better keep away from me.” The voices around Ernest were rising—louder, angrier, full of contempt and loathing. He had become, after all, a target. He was shoved and beaten; he bent over, trying to protect himself. He fought to stay on his feet, knowing that only death would result if he fell to the ground beneath the uncountable feet of the crowd. The mob was taking out its day’s worth of frustration on him, and all that Ernest could do was try to get away. But the crowd was too big; there was no getting away, nowhere to go. Instinct drove him to the edge of the sidewalk, where the fringe of the rabble was thinner. Already those who had been involved in beating him were making their way down the street, passing him by in their aimless, massive search.
Ernest was hurt and bleeding. He rested against the side of one of the tenement buildings, huddled up to the wall in order not to be swept along with the slowly moving masses. He took a couple of deep breaths, trying to clear his head. He looked up; the sky was still dark and overcast, though the storm that threatened had never happened. Above and behind him was a broad picture window, the sort of luxury that had disappeared with the coming of the more mobile apartment modules. The first floor window was just a few inches above his eye level; standing behind the glass was a young black woman, naked, pressed against the window. Her arms were spread out wide, and her head was turned and pushed tightly to the glass. Cloudy smudges obscured parts of her face. Ernest moved back toward the street a little. He stared up at her and smiled.
Relatives Page 16
