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Slow Birds: And Other Stories

Page 17

by Ian Watson


  For a while, a conspiracy of mutual silence seemed to prevail between the German officers and the British passengers. And I wondered whether I, alone of all the passengers, guessed what had actually happened …

  We had been at sea for an eternity, and had traversed as great an infinity as you can find on Earth – but the next day we should arrive in the roads outside Panama, where we would see ships again, queuing up to traverse the Canal.

  And so Fräulein Jünger’s birthday had arrived. And she was twenty-one.

  The celebration was to commence as soon as it was evening, marked by the dipping of the sun below the horizon. The signal for the popping of the champagne corks would be no launching of fireworks into the sky – which, this close to the convergence of the shipping lanes, might be misinterpreted as the firing of distress maroons. Not fireworks, then, but a remarkable natural phenomenon, which we hoped would repeat itself this sundown. (And if it didn’t, never mind! It was hardly an omen …) I refer to the ‘green flash’. On cloudless, calm, hot days such as this one in the Pacific, if you gaze at the horizon just after the north pole of the sun has sunk, because of some atmospheric characteristic a bright green light flashes low along the sea horizon, for no more than a second or two.

  We all gathered to watch for it: passengers, officers, and the Fräulein. We had seen the green flash faintly, perhaps three times in the past few weeks – and the search for it had taken on a kind of ‘mystical’ significance, as though that flash of light was racing across the whole of the Pacific from Asia, to catch up with us; as though, could we film it and slow it down incredibly, we might see in that flash images of pagodas and jungles, paddy fields, Mount Fuji, Angkor Wat – as if this was the oceanic equivalent of a desert mirage, of mountains reflected from far away.

  ‘There!’ cried Mrs Hetherington, pointing unnecessarily – since all our eyes were peeled.

  It was the brightest that the green flash had ever been. And already it was gone; the sea horizon was as ever.

  The first champagne cork promptly popped; and a jet of froth leaped the rail.

  Soon all the glasses were full, and the Captain made a little speech. We all toasted Fräulein Jünger, and she laughed merrily, her chocolate box face wreathed in smiles.

  Herr Jünger produced a round box – like a hat box – and presented it.

  The Fräulein tore the ribbon off, letting it flutter away into the sea. It coiled on the water, like a red snake rushing sternwards.

  From the box the Fräulein pulled out a long black wig. It dangled black and glossy, rich and full.

  ‘Ooh!’ she exclaimed, and rushed inside to try it on before a mirror, returning perhaps five minutes later, transformed. And then the party really got under way.

  We all drank too much, even the British.

  Fortunately – or unfortunately – it was then time to eat dinner. Some ballast.

  ‘Oh wait,’ called Fräulein Jünger, as we filed around the table. She caressed her long new hair. ‘I think I do not wish to get flesh-juice on this.’

  ‘Gravy,’ the Captain corrected her. ‘Fleischsaft is translated into English as “gravy”.’

  ‘Of course,’ agreed her father. For this special occasion he had brought Friedolin in and placed him in the centre of the tablecloth, to preside. ‘Friedolin would be so unhappy. That is a very special wig, for a very special daughter. It is not a mongrel, made of many different people’s hairs. It is all from the head of one woman, whom I paid well. I bought it specially, and had it made up specially for you, liebchen.’

  The Fräulein rushed away to deposit her new hair in her cabin, while we took our seats.

  Two minutes later she returned, frowning. She still wore the wig. The apples of her cheeks were blanched.

  ‘But I can’t get it off!’ She surveyed the British passengers. ‘What joke is this? Someone has poured glue inside it.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Herr Jünger. ‘You felt the inside, before you put it on. It slips off easily.’

  ‘But it won’t come off.’

  ‘Let me. Maybe it’s a little tight.’

  He tried, while Herr Grünewald hovered, impatient to serve the evening’s flesh. The Fräulein’s father wrestled with his daughter’s head; and she cried out in pain.

  ‘Stop!’

  Tugging your own hair, is it?’ asked Mrs Hetherington, with a semblance of sympathy.

  ‘No.’ The Fräulein held her head. ‘Not my hair. It’s as if wires are in my head. Sticking in my brain. Like live nerves. I’m confused. My thoughts are crazy – they’re not human words! I can’t stand the pain when you pull.’

  The wig wouldn’t come off at all. It was as though the green flash, from Asia, had welded the wig to her head.

  The Fräulein had to be given a sedative, and taken to lie down.

  That evening, uniquely, there were no second helpings of flesh – though Friedolin watched over the soured feast with undiminished, tubby joviality.

  Nor would the wig come off the next day, either. It clung like a black leech.

  We had arrived at Panama, and we floated on a flat blue expanse behind several other merchant vessels, all pointing towards the cleft of the Americas.

  The Fräulein sat out on deck in the sunshine, which was so much hotter now that we were close to land. An old sheet was wrapped round her. One of the crewmen, an electrician who doubled as ship’s barber, had been ordered up with his shears to cut the alien hair from her head. Somehow it seemed very important to throw every last strand over the side into the ocean, to drift back towards Asia, before the Lübeck quitted the Pacific for a different sea.

  As the barber made the first cut, Fräulein Jünger screamed out terribly.

  ‘No!’ She snatched the shears from him, then clutched her head. The pain! It’s alive. It’s like cutting my flesh with fire! Her hair is living. It’s put down roots. She’s dead – I know she’s dead. But she’s alive in it! Her soul flowed into her hair – like Samson, his strength!’

  Then she babbled in tongues for a while, as though talking to herself with two voices.

  It couldn’t be true, but … Appalled, there was nothing that any of us could think of to do or say. Except, perhaps, to beg forgiveness of something. Or of someone, whose language we couldn’t speak.

  The ship tooted.

  ‘We have to move, to sail through,’ the Captain said. ‘Now. The pilot’s coming. Herr Jünger, please!’

  Fräulein Jünger dragged the torn sheet around her like the thinnest peasant robe. She still clasped the shears in one hand – and I wondered whether the very same shears were borrowed by Herr Jünger from the electrician, six months ago. She stared ahead wildly towards the green jungle fringe of Panama, the Asia of the Americas haunted by natives in their rags. Her mind deranged, by another dead mind.

  And I was guilty too. As guilty as anyone. For I had drunk champagne at the Fräulein’s birthday. And I had not stepped overboard, weeks ago, into the warm oblivion of the Pacific;

  How lush and rich the Fräulein’s hair was. How it thrived on her. She looked like a new woman. And she would be alone with us all in the Sargasso Sea, then the Atlantic, for another month, almost.

  How would Friedolin survive that journey?

  Or any of us. Or any of us.

  The Mystic Marriage of Salome

  How many times have I railed against the sterile depravity of this palace! And now that I am at last dragged inside, in chains, how true were all my words of condemnation!

  Every surface glitters with enamel or gold leaf, with glazed polychrome brickwork or tiled arabesques, with onyx mosaics or mother-of-pearl marquetry, with lozenges of lapis lazuli. Gems encrust chests and other items of furniture as though these are coral reefs. If this palace were ever sacked, the besieging soldiery would hardly be able to stagger away under all the weight of prised-out treasure. Everything gleams and coruscates and shimmers prismatically.

  Yet gloom pervades the whole – as if, from all these
burning fires of jewelled beauty, soot is constantly rising into the air, drifting like black snow into the lee of any shadows.

  Well I remember the tale about how the greatest of the pyramids was completed. Many years had passed by in the building of it since the court astrologers had first settled on the most propitious date for the future funeral rites of the pharaoh, who was already lying embalmed in his sarcophagus. The patterns of the planets and the constellations on that future day were already written into the twists and turns of the stone passages leading to the funeral chamber itself, which was piled higgledy-piggledy with rich ornaments and golden vessels. A granite maze mapped the shape of the sky on that future occasion into the entrails of this artificial mountain, and was fixed irrevocably by the weight of a million tons of stone. Yet the final decorations were still lacking when the chosen day arrived. Therefore the master craftsman was sealed up in the funeral chamber on the day, to complete the design. Granite plugs were hammered into place. The slaves who hammered these were put to the sword by the élite guard, so that they should not whisper any secrets, years hence, to the grandfathers of tomb robbers. When the elite guard emerged into the open air, they too would be waylaid and run through by yet other guards …

  The master craftsman worked on, painting his frescoes of the Land of the Dead by the light of the oil lamps left to him, eating sparingly of the bread and water measured out for his sustenance. And when that was gone, he would starve or stifle. But this did not worry him. His only fear was that he would finish his work just at the moment that the last lamp gutted out, so that he would die beside his supreme completed masterpiece in darkness, without ever seeing it himself …

  That’s what this palace puts me in mind of: of that infinite weight of the pyramid pressing down, and of the smoke from the oil lamps, and of the stifling air – an air of death. It puts me in mind of this, even though here are vast chambers opening into chambers even vaster, and halls running on into other halls in a jewelled maze of interior space. Space, yes. Yet outside all this, beyond the walls which have no windows – for the palace is lit by lamps and jewels – may as well be a million miles of black stone: a solid void.

  Perhaps I’m anticipating the dungeon underneath the palace. Perhaps I’m fearing that dark oubliette into which they will press me, and seal with a slab: that lowest drain hole, the run-off of piss and shit from the other prisoners?

  No. It is the palace itself which is a necropolis, a dead place – despite all the iridescent peacock’s pride of hues, despite all the garish filigree, the bijouterie and tinsel work.

  My footsteps – the slappings of my sandals – echo against the vaults and cupolas as my guards hustle me along. Their own steps are silent, either from perfect training or because theirs are the steps of dead people, of ghosts of flesh. Their frequent blows hurt me, though. The blows, too, are silent.

  Shall I preach to them about the pride of the peacock?

  ‘Where is everybody?’ I gasp out, instead.

  One of the guards slaps me across the mouth. But the other tells me tersely, ‘Throne Room, scum. It’s his birthday. Or conception day. The old boss’s. The virgin daughter’s going to dance for him. Same every year. Inflame his loins, the old dried up prune. Ought to be a holiday for us. Except for you, you bugger. Preaching against lust. Raving on about purity of heart. Can’t have that, today! Don’t you hear the music?’

  I do, faintly. Very faintly. Wild riffs on a guitar, far away.

  The brass-bound dungeon door swings open. Whether from residual compassion, or simply as per regulations relating to equipment, the guard who addressed me unlocks my fetters and slings them over his shoulder before I am tossed inside, on to piles of straw with hard knobs of human dung in them.

  I’m alone in the dungeon, after all. No other wretches are imprisoned here, not in this place.

  Yet I’m not entirely alone. For this guitar music is much closer and wilder now. I realize that by some taunting trick of the architecture this dungeon is located adjacent to the Throne Room, though on a slightly lower level. A high slit of an embrasure is the only source of air or light. Or sound. I scramble up the rough wall to it and cling. At the vent, a balm of burning incense and perfumes, sprinkled or spilled extravagantly, masks the foul odour of this insanitary cell. Shinning up further, I behold the jewelled throne of the King.

  Oh yes, the dungeon is deliberately positioned here. The vent allows prisoners whose limbs are still intact to spy on the opulence of the ruler who holds them so carelessly captive. In their starvation and their thirst it lets them be tormented by the sight of rich meats and wine. No wonder my fetters were removed …

  The King wears a gold-laced white robe and a great turban with an emerald and ruby tiara set round it. He hunches, wizened and intent. His thin, lined, beard-streaked face is a waxen mask of impotence and lust.

  Below him sits the Mother of the virgin, in red and gold and blue brocaded robes: a guest at the King’s feast. She has brought her maiden daughter to perform the dance of the veils before him.

  The guitarist squats at the other side of the throne. A woman as richly costumed as the Mother herself, she is performing arabesque cadenzas upon her inlaid instrument by means of finger plectrums on her nails. Each chord tears at my flesh – as I imagine it will be torn before this day is out, with my screams from the dungeon vent accompanying her music as the incoherent vocal line. That may happen, when the dance is over. When their capacity for pleasure is sated, when it can only be revived by another’s pain.

  The guards stationed in the Throne Room itself are an abomination, neither he nor she. Their faces half-hidden by cloths, they lean on the pommels of long sabres.

  Posies, bouquets and nosegays are strewn about the floor, to be trodden into fragrance by the dancer’s feet – and perhaps to stop her from slipping. As for the daughter herself, her I can hardly bear to look at. So beautiful she is. So white as alabaster. So intoxicatingly veiled, over her near-nudity – which I cannot help but visualize, as though I have been tempted by this same dance many times before in my haunted dreams, and here is – and will be – at last merely the abominable confirmation of them.

  Jewelled gauze and brocade heap her body for the moment, and upon her piled jet-black hair is set a bees’ hive of light-buzzing gems. Bangles clasp her arms. Yet underneath, ah shamefully underneath, her breasts will be plumped upwards by a begemmed corselet. And her hips will be girdled as richly, though in scantier style, with a thick pendant hanging down between her legs to hide her mount of Venus. Oh yes, oh yes. Robes and veils wrap her still, but I know that underneath is a body which will drive men mad!

  As though the King has been waiting for this precise moment when I gain my precarious peephole, he claps his hands feebly upon his lap. The Mother crooks a finger at the virgin. The guitarist swings into a throbbing dance routine.

  At first the virgin dances slowly, but then ever more frenetically – prancing, arching, dashing to and fro, undulating like a feasting python, working up an acrid, lascivious sweat that gleams on her as musky oil. One heavy garment after another tumbles from her; then one jewelled veil after another slides away, like so many snake skins. Until she is clad only in hoops of wire crusted with diamonds and sapphires – and one frail cloudy veil. It is as I foresaw.

  The King pants, gazing furtively. The Mother regards the performance with a smug serenity.

  And somehow as I cling here, staring through this crack in the wall, it becomes obvious to me that this dance of enticement is directed at me, as much as at the King! The aged King may well lust for the virgin’s body, yet only a youthful stallion could burst the hymen to impregnate her.

  Can this be what the virgin anticipates? That a young prisoner should be dragged from the dungeon, to bed her on those crushed petals?

  Ah no. She wills sterility. Therefore the flow of blood from her hymen will be transmuted into the flow of the prisoner’s blood before her eyes …

  Sterility, indeed! The st
erility – of incest! And androgyny. For King and Mother and eunuch guards and the lolling, glaze-eyed guests alike all look remarkably like brothers and sisters. Worse, many of the male guests present resemble fey virgins as much as debauchees. And as for the virgin, in spite of the thrusting snow-apples of her breasts I fear that the heavy pendant might be lifted from her loins to disclose a lolling thin male organ between her thighs!

  She bows at last. The King beckons: with a simple clutch of his fingers, burrowing deeper into his own robe-lapped loins. Maybe he has ejaculated at the climax of the virgin’s dance? Since his expression is so furtively chill now. In which case: consummatum est. Except that the virgin remains unpenetrated. The blood of Hymen must be shed …

  Briefly, she glances directly at me, hidden here in the gloom. Her glance is bold and taunting. Then she approaches the throne. She whispers.

  I can maintain my grip no longer. I slide down the stones into the soiled straw. The guitar riffs again – and now there is discord in the music.

  The dungeon door swings open as I lie here, unwilling to move. My arms are still aching from the effort of shinning up to see the dance. My vulnerable flesh, sworn to chastity, also aches from the sheer taunt of that sight.

  The guards march in. From behind them comes the tallest of those eunuch throne guards. A long red skirt hides his nether regions. In his right hand he holds a sword almost as tall as he is himself. In his other hand he balances a golden salver.

  ‘He’ is a eunuch – or an androgyne. Sterility is everywhere. So how can offspring possibly be born in this place? How can there ever be an heir to the throne, except maybe by adoption?

  The King, I realize, can only mate … by proxy. And it is with the Mother that he wishes, by proxy, so to mate …

  As the eunuch approaches ever so slowly, pace by pace, I realize the significance of the virgin’s parting glance at me. It is I who am the groom. That, and no other reason, is why I was hauled here from preaching in the infested gaudy bazaar. For my face is favourable, and has long been spied on from the ramparts of the palace while I inveighed against it; and I am young and wholesome; and my locks are long and golden.

 

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