Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Ranko Marinković

  “No more? And you keep wondering why women shun you. I devote my whole life to them!”

  They walked in silence past well-lit shops through the evening throng. Melkior was thinking about Enka. Half an hour? Well, that was precisely how she liked it. Ugo had lifted his moist, runny, funny nose, miming an offended wisdom.

  “I could have taken a different approach back there. For example: What, this character? (Pointing at you): I’ve seen him collect money from them. He works for the you-know-who, of course. Or: I know him as well as he knows my pocket. He’s robbed me blind, too. How much did he steal from you, sir? Or: hold him, gentlemen, and I’ll get the police. (To you): Are you aware she’s about to give birth, you scoundrel? She’s my sister, gentlemen, a teenager, her whole life ruined. Or: who did he claim to be—Napoleon or Mohammed? It all depends on which way the wind is blowing. (Taking the audience into my confidence): We’ve been looking for him for six days, the Head of Psych’s beside himself with worry. Or would you have preferred me to introduce you to the honorable citizenry as a pervert, an escaped convict, a forger, a crazed arsonist, a grave robber, a fratricidal maniac, a paralytic, an epileptic, a phantom ripper, the founder of a sect of cut-off ears collectors, a cannibal … ? I could have done any of those things, but I saved you from a certain lynching instead. And how do you thank me? By dumping me in the street, that’s how. Got to nip over for half an hour. A half-hour secret? Some damned secret! Ptui!” and Ugo spat forcefully on the window of a gourmet cafeteria famous for its delicate delicacies. But presently, as if regretting the gesture, he went inside following his “mad inspiration,” and for Melkior’s benefit (who had remained standing at the door in bewilderment) he performed an impromptu pantomime:

  He selected the fattest customer, one with a hunting hat atop a fat head who was bent religiously over his plate. Ugo approached him from behind; nobody noticed. Using both hands, he lifted the hat off the man’s head, solemnly, like a priest lifting the monstrance at Mass, and gave him a brotherly and very loud kiss on the denuded and shiny pate. He then covered his kiss with the hat, still ritually serene as if concealing a holy secret beneath it, bowed to the bar—the main altar—crossed himself meekly and went out into the street, his face piously upturned, his gaze directed skyward.

  The scene had taken no more than half a minute, but everyone was too surprised to utter a sound. Even the “kissee” did not protest: he was taken so much by surprise as to “comply,” he even helped Ugo so as not to spoil the performance of the rite. It was only a moment or two later, when Ugo was already outside, that they realized something odd had occurred. Whether it had been a lunatic or a joking rascal was now being loudly discussed. There was laughter, too.

  “Now that’s an acte gratuit,” said Ugo didactically, “not treading on someone’s foot for London.”

  “I wasn’t trying to …” Melkior cut his sentence short: he realized he was “explaining himself.”

  “Yes, yes, you sought to avenge mankind. To squash Hitler on someone’s corn.” Ugo was poking provocative fun at him. “Petty malice was all it was.”

  “What about the kiss on the thinker’s head then? What was that?”

  “Nothing. I kissed Stupidity, through one of its models, if you must have ‘meaning.’ Kiss thy neighbor rather than tread on him, my dear Eustachius. That’s how we reveal our true nature—by those small acts in moments of inspiration. You’re inspired to tread on feet: a future dictator. Did you at least tread on him good and proper, Eustachius the Purposeful?”

  “Go to hell! I’ve no time for your shenanigans!” Melkior was terribly irritated; he was wishing he could shake free of Ugo and dash home, but how, how? He was raging. “I’ve got to go, do you hear me, I’ve got to go back to my place … to see if my papers have come,” he lied in the end.

  “You have your evening papers delivered?” smirked Ugo. “How nice.”

  “My call-up papers, blast you! I’ve been out all day. I wish you would stop hanging on to me like a … Leave me alone!”

  “Think very carefully, unreasonable Eustachius—do you mean precisely what you say?”

  “Yes, I damn well do!” yelled Melkior, now quite beside himself. “I’ve had enough of your damned romping around, understand? I have serious business to attend to. Get lost!”

  “Oh, so we’ve come to damned this and damned that,” grinned Ugo, taken aback. “This can only mean things are very serious indeed. Couldn’t you grant me pardon all the same, Eustachius? Mercy please!” and he attempted a laugh, his lead-dark fillings managing to elicit a kind of sad sympathy in Melkior. But he would not give in. Indeed his rage flared afresh.

  Ugo had felt the new outbreak coming and took care to weather it in the shelter of his resourcefulness.

  “All right, Eustachius dear one, all right.” He spoke feelingly, his voice drenched with invisible tears. “I shall remove my disgustingly feather-brained self from your sight, perhaps forever. Perhaps indeed in a way that will make you sorry when you have learned all the details. Farewell.” He turned and walked off.

  “Wait, you crazy Parampion, wait!” Melkior ran after him and spun him around. There were genuine wet tears rolling down Ugo’s face. For all that he well knew all the many sources of Ugo’s tears, Melkior fell again for the old trick of Ugo’s, which after all was not entirely false. Ugo had the knack of instantly imagining himself the most wretched creature in all the world: a down-at-the-mouth, despised, rejected orphan suffering from solitude, hunger, and cold, driven from pillar to post in this cruel world and having no recourse but to “end it all,” that is to say take his own life. But the most moving part (and that was where the tears flowed most copiously) was watching “from beyond” the doings of his set, who had been “spared.” There: it is evening, the Give’nTake has come to jovial and noisy life, but he is no longer there. The girls are pretty (well, females, generally speaking—he preferred the more mature, plumper variety), they think of him and of the times they had while he was … But there is nothing to be done—he is gone. As for the fiancée, she already married “the monkey man”—Mr. Romp—and thinks of Ugo no more. Only his aged mother, silver-haired and despondent, weeps at dusk … and the tears flow on and on …

  “My dear Parampion. Listen,” said Melkior, moved in some silly way himself, “wait for me here, at the Cozy Corner. I’ll be back in a flash.”

  “Wait at the corner …” repeated Ugo in a childishly artless voice.

  “That’s right, sit at a table, have a drink …”

  “Sit how, dear Eustachius?” sobbed Ugo, his manner quite infantile now.

  “On your behind, dear boy, sit on your behind … until I’m back.”

  “Money,” stammered Ugo in a paroxysm of sobs, “I’ve got no money. I was trying to sell my old nappies today … the ones I had as a baby … Kikinis wouldn’t buy them.”

  “On me,” said Melkior on his way off. “Tell Kurt to put it on my account.” “He invented this nappy business to make himself cry. His old nappies … the ass …” he laughed inside with relief.

  Strangely enough, he did not run into ATMAN on the landing. He skulked past the palmist’s door cautiously, on tiptoe, holding his breath, then hurried up the stairs three at a time and lurched breathlessly into his room. His guest was not there. He locked the door behind him without turning on the light. He sank, exhausted, on the first chair he came to and, propping his elbows on the table, dropped his head between his palms. He felt his face under his palms, finding it a curious sensation: it’s as if I were fending off slaps in the face. … At school, in Dom Kuzma’s class … what is love, Seal Penguinsky? … Dom Kuzma’s slaps burned his cheeks with a new, “adult” shame as though he had just brought them, still fresh, back to his room. He felt the heat of his cheeks on his palms. Slaps. So insignificant the physical pain, so lasting and incurable the burn! A slap is the fault of the victim, that is what makes shame indelible.

  There begins The Great Recapitulation, but the entir
e sense of shame clenches itself spasmodically and makes the leap into the present day. Once here, it latches onto Viviana. He notices it latching onto her, notices, too, the phrase onto her with which he has zeroed in on his thought, and feels a tickling current down his back. He pounces upon her vengefully (to hell with hesitation!) and falls mindlessly to embracing her (at last!), pawing and kissing her, pressing impatient hands up and down her dress, undressing her … preparing her, in the rough masculine way, for “surrender.” She puts up a “demure” resistance to the onslaught (oh, what are you doing? Whatever will you think of me?), being refined (for greater triumph), resourcefully fanning his lust. But just at that moment Dom Kuzma enters the field of vision: he is crossing the street; he is headed for the invalid’s machine, his black hat pushed way down (to make the ears less conspicuous), his lips moving—talking to himself. And Viviana’s marvelous body falls apart, melts into defeated anguish. All that remains is a virginally empty skirt and arms embracing ruined desire. And Dom Kuzma’s lackluster eye, full of life’s bitter pain, leans paternally over the broken wave of yearning and speaks in a moralizing way in despair: that’s right, son, that’s right. To have is not victory. To renounce is victory. “Sour grapes!” shouts Melkior into Dom Kuzma’s large ear, “Sour grapes!” and the Ear falls to caressing his face compassionately, panting with deathbed breath: haughty is the fox, haughty. Let the birds of the air peck the grapes that ripen on high, let them carry the grapes back to their nests; they sow not, nor do they reap … so be it! And the son of man … let him travel through the vale of gloom that is this earthly existence—continues Melkior in poetic anguish—over thorns and stones, driven from pillar to post … And when tears come to his eyes he lets them run down his cheeks and lets the poet’s whispered words weep on their own from within:

  and his feet are bloody,

  and his heart is wounded,

  and his bones are weary

  and his soul is stricken …

  … and Melkior the son of man holds his head in both hands and shakes it vigorously like an enraged Demiurge shaking the skies in his fury. Galaxies shake, scattering stars and setting up a new order in the universe. But Melkior creates no new order with the shaking: all he does is to bring about a crazy whirl of circles around his weary eyes and a dull ache in his bent head. And when somebody knocks at his door the pain in his temples wakes in a muted throb.

  The knocking came again as the voice of inanimate things in the hungover dawning of wakefulness and the word, fully awake by now, found itself in Melkior’s mouth. The Police. Down beneath his feet he felt the palmist’s foul existence (he had himself, for a joke, dubbed him ATMAN the Great Spirit) and some dull indifference set him moving toward the door. He unlocked and opened it without fear, giving himself totally over to his lassitude.

  Swaying at the door was Four Eyes. First there issued from him a cellarlike breath, a whiff of barrel and mingled smells, and then the herald spoke, gesturing hurriedly.

  “Things have taken an interesting turn over yonder … that, if I’m not mistaken, is what I was told to say over here.”

  “Who … ? Over where?” asked Melkior, upset by the inklings. He thought of his guest and quaked.

  “At the Corner is where things have taken this turn,” said Four Eyes with his foul breath; the words were barely audible, “and the message is from Parabrion, is that it? I can remember names even more difficult—Periplectomenos, Batrachomyomachy—from high school. They really force-fed us with the drivel. Your immediate presence is required, everything’s up for grabs. May I go back reassured?”

  “Yes, you may.” Melkior was relieved—it was only Ugo “doing his thing.” He leaned against the doorframe in exhaustion.

  Four Eyes was still swaying in the doorway.

  “All right, what is it?” asked Melkior tiredly.

  “What shall I take back over yonder as your reply? Because things have taken … like I said.”

  “Tell them I’m coming. I’m coming,” said Melkior impatiently.

  “Straight away, isn’t it? Coming straight away, coming straight away,” and Four Eyes went hopping down the stairs with idiotic glee.

  Come out, come out,

  See the drunken lout

  Being thrown out,

  On his ear, out of here …

  the drunkard, was saying, gesturing tragically. He went into the Cozy Corner with his recitation still ongoing, but shortly he came back out—or rather flew out back first and sat down on the pavement. Behind this piece of action were Kurt’s strong arms. Melkior saw his silhouette against the yellow curtain: immobile, sleeves rolled back, at the ready.

  “As I said, out of here, on his ear … correction, on his bum. Well, who cares, it’s still the same old fun.” The drunkard was not getting up from the pavement or speaking to anyone in particular: he was now explaining an important and very complex point under his nose, using small, myopic gestures like someone doing lacework.

  Inside, things seemed to have got out of hand. One of Ugo’s favorites, Spare the Horses, Driver, could be heard, a number from The Russian Balalaika; Ugo’s solo passages alternating with a ragged chorus (of the sergeants, probably), destroying the song with drunken disorder.

  Out in the street Melkior laughed at Kurt’s silhouette, standing at attention guarding unwavering sobriety amid the crazed orgy of Russian song. And when Melkior, after hesitating for quite a while, was finally driven by his sensitive conscience to enter the Cozy Corner, Kurt took this as a ray of sunshine. He immediately abandoned his post at the door and all but licked Melkior’s hand, wagging an invisible tail.

  “Ach, Herr Professor, Herr Professor! Would you just look at what’s going on—this is sheer Bolshevism,” whispered Kurt confidentially, as one sober man to another. “Nevertheless I didn’t call the police. We got word from you. I was sure you would come …”

  Ugo was standing on the table among overturned glasses and waving an unsheathed saber like a leader of the insurgents, and the sergeants around him were screeching, insolently, in a mutinous mood, “iamshchik, ne goni …” a Russian song. Four Eyes was kneeling piously on a bench at Ugo’s feet and following, with marveling fear, the swish of the saber above his defenseless head. Else had retreated to her mother behind the bar and the two of them were counting the broken glasses in strictest secrecy.

  “Caliban, you sluggish fish, can’t you see who’s here?” said Ugo to Four Eyes, interrupting his singing for an instant.

  “I’m swimming, my Lord and Master, swimming,” and Four Eyes swam, his fingers splayed at his hips in imitation of fins.

  “Bow low, hideous son of Mistress Barrel, and pour a wassail for my friend Eustachius. Eustachius the Magnanimous, I leave you in the charge of my cup-bearer.”

  “But there’s nothing to pour, oh Lord and Master,” whined Four Eyes, holding the bottles up to the light, “the wellsprings have gone dry. Mother’s corked the barrel!”

  “Crawl, you turtle, over to Mama Cork and knock your useless head on the stone floor until you’ve softened her heart,” said Ugo, sovereign, and was swept up in a fresh song with the sergeants: Chubchik, chubchik, chubchik kucheriavyi …

  “There, you see, Herr Professor,” lamented Kurt in a lowered voice. “He’s quite mad. He’s driven our regulars away and brought in this guttersnipe instead. They’ve broken a lot of glasses, too. … I’m very sorry, Herr Professor, but the bill is going to be rather steep.” Kurt noticed Melkior’s baffled face and hastened to explain:

  “He said it was all to go on your account. Otherwise we wouldn’t have served him. I’m sorry, Herr Professor. I hope there won’t be a fine to pay as well. We haven’t got an entertainment license you see.”

  “I told him only to have a drink for himself …”

  “… and he went and started ordering drinks for everyone, as you can see. And breaking things! Tsk-tsk-tsk …” said Kurt in dismay at the appalling display.

  Melkior watched Ugo savor his madness. Go
d, the sheer amount of energy this madman blows off—into the air, into the smoke of the night! He tried to imagine him old, tired, spent, slouching in a café and playing a one-handed game of dominoes, coughing slightly every now and then. The row of dominoes progressed, but instead of Ugo he found himself, his own shriveled hands, lining up the tiles. And he chuckled at his imagination’s deception. He’ll die as he is: he’ll be stupidly, accidentally killed in the drunken euphoria of a night like this … or take his own life. The animal setting this force in motion will not be able to languish in the cage of old age.

  “Gentlemen centurions,” Ugo addressed the sergeants, the saber whistling playfully over their heads, “gentlemen centurions of the 35th Legion, may I now request a song for Fraülein Else of Germany. Enough of the Russian steppe and swirling snow. A song for the Fraülein now, as befits your military dignity. If you please!” and Ugo, dipping the saber in a formal way, launched into song: Adieu, mein kleiner Gardeoffizier … But the song was unfamiliar to the sergeants and Ugo sang it through on his own, ceremonially facing Else with Junker-like dignity.

  Four Eyes was ranging about happily like a drunken dog under the table, where he had been lapping spilt wine off the linoleum and making clicking noises with his tongue in derisive rhythmic accompaniment.

  And when the sergeants saw the honorary smile on Else’s face (for manners and female vanity required it, let Kurt say what he liked) they, too, unsheathed their sabers and, at the final adieu, adieu, crossed them above Ugo’s head in an operetta-style apotheosis.

  The tableau with the sabers (there was some military order to it after all!) managed to move even the angry Kurt: “That was a very good display the rascals made, wasn’t it, Herr Professor?” and he gave an admiring smile. But his sober gravity returned presently and his sober worries got hold of him again: “Well, this, I take it, concludes the show. Well done, gentlemen, bravo!” and he applauded artfully.

  “And now it’s time, gentlemen, please, we’re closing, that’s it for tonight, gentlemen, if you would be so kind …”