Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Ranko Marinković

  “Oh Master, teach me to achieve life eternal!” He then puffed out his chest boastfully: “At least I am a Superpig! That is something, after all! What matters is being above average. I hate the average, even the porcine average. But where were you dashing off to, Eustachius the Purest? Wait, there’s something I have to tell you! It’s important. It is about her.”

  In vain. Melkior had taken off at a brisk trot and hopped aboard a tram that was just pulling away from the stop.

  He could not resist looking back. Ugo was not watching the tram move away. He was walking purposefully toward the corner, entering the street where Melkior had left Viviana. He was going to run into her there. He did not need the mercy of Chance; he was guided by the smiles of angels. Black envy darkened Melkior’s thoughts. He fumbled, like a blind man, through the previous night’s uncertainties—but his tentacles found nothing. Nothing that the imagination could offer as a visual document of Ugo’s sortie. The studio flat. A projection of his ex-girlfriend Mina’s studio: the shortwave radio always on—the nocturnal green eye of the basilisk lulling the beauty to sleep on the chest of the weary hero, the display panel with its tiny illuminated windows KALUNDBORG—HILVERSUM —MOTALA—NWDR—GLW—SWF—GLW—HöRBY… oops, this was the wrong film. Melkior was booing, I’ve been swindled, I want my money back! Show aborted. House lights up. Imagination threading in another reel … Now presenting GENTLE BREATH, b/w, love story/pornographic exploit, starring BLACK FILLINGS and VIVIANA PUTTANA —directed by MELKIOR—produced by TRESFILM—stunts by UGO—masks: DON FERNANDO … and that’s it. The film proper never begins. The same opening credits keep running again and again: starring … directed by … produced by …

  “Tickets please?”

  But the show hasn’t even started! protested Melkior in the darkened auditorium. The voice had golden wings on its hat, with the heraldic arms of the city between. A dignitary of the tram line in visitation. Each of the faithful receives a blessing and absolution upon presentation of a ticket. Melkior, too, presented his credentials with due contrition and received blessing and absolution. And he felt pure and worthier of continuing his ride on the City Transport system. The sheer satisfaction of it! A clean-shaven ticket inspector in a dark blue uniform, with gold on his hat, a strong, tall man moving from one passenger to the next, distributing indulgences: May I see your ticket? Thank you. May I see your ticket? Thank you. … Te absolvo in nomine tramcar, amen. Te absolvo in nomine tramcar. Amen … Hallelujah, hallelujah, respond the passengers while wheels under their feet sound Bach fugues. And the sun shines on the honorable tram windows … Melkior felt a traveler’s piety in his weary heart and said contritely to himself: what a joy it is to be alive once you’ve settled your accounts with the electric tram.

  But what about the iron mammoth, what about the big oaf? It’s a sly challenge to the big benefactor who would never—and this deserves repeating—never entertain the idea of running someone over. Never trust the scoundrel-automobile. But the Tram …

  Rolling on, rolling on … one tram, one way, tram-tram … bus-bus trambus, the lyre on the roof thrumming way, the wheels drumming tram-tram … But the rhythms shaking his body went for nothing; his thoughts kept stealing back to Viviana. Now that’s love. What on earth am I to do? He knew that tonight and tomorrow and the day after and all the days of his brief civilian life until the day Pechárek howled dwaftees! he was going to be searching for her … Roaming street after street, just hoping we’ll meet, and when at last we do I’ll give my heart to you … his thought itself gave forlorn and dejected voice to the banal tune, and a welling of pain rose in his throat. He fought back sobs. He leaned his forehead on the window pane and sought to disperse his thoughts by paying attention to the world around him.

  A drunk was speaking loudly:

  “I’m taking no orders and that’s final!” he gave a formidable hiccup and reared to his full height, driven by the spasm in his stomach, making it all look like the position of attention, clicking his heels and raising his arm in salute:

  “Humbly report, I’m taking no orders from anyone! That’s first—and most important. Secondly … if you want to put me in the cavalry, the answer’s yes. Then I’d be a cavalier, right? Make me see the horse’s ass. So what. Like the Sergeant used to say—horse’s ass. To me. And there I was serving King and country at the fortress in Petrovaradin. And the Sergeant had Mitzi a singer across the river in Novi Sad. Fine, but old Mitzi needed to be kept in her liqueurs … So … who was chosen to do the honors? Yours truly, of course. With the blue Danube out in front of me. But they never asked Can you handle it, soldier? oh no, it was Forward, march! (that’s what must comes from—march or bust, get it?) But who should I get killed for, eh, a horse’s ass? Ever seen the Danube?” this to Melkior, his sole listener. “No? Well, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t. It’s water plain and simple. Common or gar-(hic)-den variety water. Flowing all the way from Germany. And I pissed in it at Petrovaradin. Heh heh. But that was before Hitler’s time, just to be perfectly … I’m not the kind to muddy a Führer’s waters. No, it’s just I wanted to send something of mine to the Black Sea, get it? If only the Danube ran upstream, eh? Wouldn’t that be something, eh? Got your call-up papers yet?” he suddenly asked Melkior, dropping his voice confidentially. “No? I have. So will you. Anyone with two arms and two legs will be served. I’m in a Camouflage Company, camouflage kit to cover your shit. That’s the long and the short of it. Reporting tomorrow. Oh what a brave fighting man I am …” he sang in a magpie voice, twisting his neck derisively this way and that, as if defying someone in the tram.

  Melkior jumped off the tram before it stopped. He was not far from home and hurried along, the sooner to shut himself up in his room … unless the Stranger is back, he thought morosely … to think about everything in solitude, in the peace and quiet of a horizontal stretch on his back, reading from the white ceiling the invisible letters spelling his idiotic fate.

  Approaching the Cozy Corner, he saw Kurt waving to him from afar. As he came closer, Kurt told him in confidence he was going to have a roast heart for him tonight, do come, Herr Professor, and we’ll have a nice long chat, it’s always a pleasure talking to you. He said yes to Kurt. Courteously. He had no intention of going there. Those cigarettes soaked in the acetic acid, Father’s recipe, had him upset again. Isn’t that some kind of … And the stupid-oaf sergeants coming for the sake of Else the purest of virgins … He felt a patriotic rage mounting. Offering me a heart for tonight. A pig’s heart. The derisive servility. The symbolic heart. Roasted. With cigarettes in vinegar. All for the heart. My aching heart is torn apart. I don’t give a fart, he added to himself and laughed on realizing that he had done so unconsciously, for the sake of the rhyme, having simply been led on by the baa-ing inspiration. Baaa … he bleated angrily at the whole world.

  All I need now is to find that fellow upstairs, he muttered walking up to his room.

  “Oh no, he’s out,” said ATMAN, who was standing there in front of him in his black housecoat and white scarf and bowing. “He went out, oh, about two hours ago.”

  “Who’s out?” What’s this—can he read thoughts? Melkior was amazed, he was not aware he had been thinking aloud.

  “Why, your friend and dear guest!” exclaimed ATMAN. “A very nice chap, too.”

  “How do you know?”

  “That you have a guest?”

  “That he’s nice!” shouted Melkior impatiently.

  “Oh, you can always tell. We exchanged greetings. Quite cordially, too. Right here, on this very spot.”

  “What do you mean, ‘cordially,’ when you don’t even know the man?” Melkior was upset. How on earth could he have forgotten about the magician when he spoke to Pupo?

  “Does that matter? I wished him a good morning, he returned the greeting in a civil way. What of it?”

  “You went out on purpose to see who was coming down?”

  “No, quite accidentally—that is to say pour faire pipi, w
hich of course is hardly accidental. There, see how low we’ve let our conversation drop, Mr. Melkior!” ATMAN reproached him.

  “You’re as curious as an old biddy, Mr. Adam,” snarled Melkior.

  “Curiosity is the beginning of wisdom, said … well, you know who said it. You know so much—I know nothing. Hence the curiosity. You must allow me that much, if only in view of my occupation.”

  “Allow you to poke your nose into other people’s affairs?”

  “What affairs, Mr. Melkior? I say good morning to your friend and suddenly I’m poking my nose into things! Whatever’s the matter with you?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t concern yourself with the people who come to visit me!” But even as he spoke he realized he was talking drivel in anger and that the whole business was getting out of hand. What now? ATMAN was standing innocently in front of him. I may have led him on myself, acting so silly … Damned Mandrake! Now I’m going to have to mend things. There was nothing for it, he’d have to mend the damage. ATMAN felt it and offered his earnest help.

  “Mr. Melkior, you seem to mean … No, you’re wrong. Discretion is part of our professional code. Doctors and us … Incidentally, I can tell you doctors are even less circumspect. My dear sir, I could write novels—novels you wouldn’t believe … But do come in, won’t you, we can have a cup of coffee if you have the time. No point in discussing this kind of topic out here on the landing.”

  Melkior gave a fairly agreeable nod and followed him. Topic? What kind of thing are we discussing? Did he say that just to have the word heard from his lips? Or did he really have a “topic” in mind? Melkior sat down worriedly and it took him some moments to notice he was sitting in the same place he’d sat the day before—next to her. He stroked the spot next to him, inadvertently. ATMAN seemed to notice that, too.

  “She was so sorry yesterday when you left. Me, too, as a matter of fact. You, too, I’m sure. Why did you get up so abruptly? I’d laid it on a bit too thick, had I? Well, you realized it was all for her benefit—I mean, you did give me a soccerlike signal or two under the table. A bit rough, if I may say so, even painful, heh,” ATMAN gave an unpleasant smile with his wide-set teeth.

  “You had mixed me rather too liberally into that marmalade of yours,” Melkior smiled, too.

  “Ah, marmalade, that’s a good one,” laughed ATMAN in his turn for the sake of the friendly, “manly” atmosphere. “Every now and then I smear some over that pretty mug of hers—let her have a lick. When she’s licked it clean she comes back again.”

  “She won’t be coming back,” said Melkior with a wistful sadness.

  “She told you so this morning?”

  “Whom were you spying on: me or her?”

  “Neither. I knew you’d be looking for her after yesterday.”

  “Mf, I wasn’t looking for her. I ran into her accidentally.”

  “Well, there you are—you are allowed to run into people ‘accidentally’ yet you won’t grant me the right to do the same. That’s fine, don’t get angry, I believe you, I do. Never mind, she will be back … when she’s finished with the marmalade, heh-heh … They all come back, it’s a law of nature. It’s what my trade is founded upon. It’s more reliable than any doctor’s office. The time will come when people will pick up pills at their chemists’ on their own … but women will keep on coming to our poky rooms and offering us their palms to read and turning their coffee cups over on the saucers, anxious about what we’ll say, trembling at our words. They will come back, if only to scoff and say we were ‘all wrong,’ to parade their contempt, their superiority. Which is, by the way, what they are always doing, especially the intellectuals among them, they put up a fight, heh-heh … Then they go away calm and meek like cats newly impregnated, full of joy and hope. Happy about their future happiness. And that’s how it is, over and over again. The confessionals will vanish from the churches, but women will keep coming to us for confession, that I guarantee. Novels? What novels! Leo Tolstoy himself couldn’t imagine what manner of things they prattle to us about. The secrets of marital and extramarital beds. Especially extramarital. Such salacious details! Maestro offered me a fifty-fifty deal—I’d supply the material, he’d write it up—and I would never have to work again. A chronicle of scandals—there’s nobody wouldn’t go for it, right? Plus Maestro’s filthy stuff as dressing on top … An all-time winner, I tell you! But I didn’t accept, oh no,” ATMAN shook his head decisively, as if he had only just decided definitely to reject Maestro’s idea. “And you tell me I poke my nose into things. They push the stuff under my nose themselves, of their own free will, so what am I to do? Sniff I must, and sniff I do … enjoying it in my own quiet way, I admit. But it’s all in total confidence, all between myself and God.”

  “You think He concerns Himself with such things?” Melkior threw him a derisive look.

  “He must, seeing that He made them to be that way. Sowed those charms all over, stuffed them with hormone glands and whatnot—that’s why they’re like that, spongy.”

  Melkior was laughing. Maestro had clearly had his fingers in this in a big way.

  “And you … believe in God?” he asked just for the fun of it.

  “Of course I do,” replied ATMAN eagerly. “That’s the foundation of my belief in Fate. How else would I be able to go on with my work at all?”

  “So your faith is ‘businesslike,’ then, is it?”

  “It’s practical! I must believe. I need Fate as a kind of down payment. All is risk. On the other hand, you’ve got to put something down in advance. Everyone, of course, invests according to ability; I invest stupidity for lack of wisdom.”

  “Well … that’s not much of a risk, is it?” Melkior took up ATMAN’S malicious game. “Win-win.”

  “You mean that losing stupidity is a win? Because stupidity is not merely a lack of cleverness—intellectual poverty, as it were—it’s worse than that, it’s something like an endless deficit. … But that’s only how things look to you wise men. To us, it’s everything, all we’ve got; what do we have left once we lose it?”

  “Malice,” blurted out Melkior, losing his patience.

  “Oh no, that’s out of bounds for us. Wise men may be malicious, geniuses may even be criminals, but we …”

  “You people may be small-time crooks, schemers, writers of anonymous letters, libelers, seducers …”

  “Oh yes, oh yes,” ATMAN took this up with eager pleasure, sporting the smile of a good-natured loser, “it’s all according to one’s ability. This is easy-peasy to you intellectual moguls! Your capital is inexhaustible. You break off a piece of your intellect, a biggish one if need be, and plunk it down as your stake. You couldn’t care less if you lose—the capital is undiminished, while your greatness only grows. Meaning, you become tragic characters. Heroes, victims, exiles, sufferers, generally accepted martyrs, and so on … up to and including sainthood. Streets are named after you, towns, factories, even stars and celestial bodies. That’s in case of so-called personal failure while you’re alive … But what if your undertaking succeeds, eh? … That is to say, what if the sneaking up- and downstairs and clandestine accommodation in other people’s rooms and nocturnal meetings in attics should give birth to a great historical act …”

  “Then what?” asked Melkior with impatient sharpness.

  “Then that’s a good thing, is it not?” ATMAN bared his teeth in a strange grimace of derision. “Yes, but a good thing how? Because your wise man himself begins to believe in something which is no longer the mind, heh, heh …”

  “What is it, then?” Melkior was suddenly worried. ATMAN’S words were buzzing quite unmistakably around his thoughts, the ones that were now flashing on and off in panic, like an alarm light.

  “What?” said ATMAN with an enigmatic Chinese smile. “Sometimes it’s an overly powerful organ in the body of the wise man. A good stomach, for instance, complete with ample appetite, a good nose for gauging situations, or a special virility. He’s renounced it all for
the moment, hermitlike, all for the sake of the mind, but what happens when the machinery starts running, in peacetime, in comfort, eh?”

  Melkior stood up at the eh, as if at a signal for the last train home. But where am I to find him now? He pushed his hands into his pockets in deep thought. You’ve got to make arrangements in advance when dealing with them. If only I could find Pupo … but where?

  “You’re not leaving, are you?” ATMAN looked at him in sham consternation. “And I invited you for coffee only to forget it! I’ll have it ready in no time. Look, there’s the coffee machine, takes only a minute to do the job. I brought it back from Germany.”

  “You’ve been to Germany?” and Melkior gave an incautious start.

  “Austria, actually,” replied ATMAN nonchalantly. “But it makes no difference after the Anschluss. Yes, funny, that—no more Austria. Vienna with swastikas. Ridiculous.”

  “Please don’t bother, Mr. Adam, I really must be going.” The reasons for leaving had grown very serious. But where am I to find them now? Under no circumstances is he to spend the night upstairs … under no circumstances …

  “And what do you propose to do up there? Pace the room and think about things, that’s what. What’s the point of it all, Mr. Melkior? And why are you looking at me that way, like a sick man staring at a thermometer?” Adam’s two curiously close-set eyes had come even closer, almost becoming a single, small and fearsome, threateningly squinting eye in the middle of his forehead.

  Polyphemus the one-eyed Cyclops … thought Melkior: in a momentary fading of consciousness he had seen in front of him a symbolic hideous specter, and he rubbed his eyes to regain his senses.

  “That’s the way, Mr. Melkior, do it more often,” ATMAN was seeing him to the door with a jeer. But he added right away, solicitously: “You’ve lost too much weight, my dear fellow, far too much. You’re starting to see spots before your eyes.”

  Yes, it could well be down to hunger. His knees trembled as he went up the stairs, his head lolling as though he were drunk. I’m not doing it for myself, word of honor, I’m doing it for … he assured someone as he entered his room, finding nobody there. But what if ATMAN … ? No, it’s impossible!—Then again … I’ve been left in charge of a small child, and I’ve just learned something about would-be kidnappers. And the child’s gone for a walk, alone, without its nanny, who knows where it might be now? But tonight, when everyone’s asleep, here they’ll be! … like with the Lindbergh infant. This is no time for joking, he reproached himself. The kidnapper’s name was Hauptmann …