Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Ranko Marinković

  “Come on, Eustachius, get up and let’s go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Why, out, to watch the war. That kind of thing you only get to see once in a lifetime.”

  “And what do you think you’ll see?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what’? Everything’s changed now. My Kalisto put in a large supply of salts and ten packets of toilet paper first thing in the morning. There’ll be a shortage of them, says he. In addition to Eros, he’s a great worshipper of his anus. You should see how piously he breaks wind—word of honor, you’d swear it was Saint Francis talking to the pigeons. It’s easy for you to laugh, but I have to live in that atmosphere.”

  Melkior was not laughing—he appreciated Mr. Kalisto’s worries. There, at least he’s concerned about the future, if only in that way, whereas his son …

  “And another thing,” the son was saying, “it’s fun to watch the bourgeoisie lose their composure. With their shops out there, their houses, and the bombs dropping from above. Making a rush at the banks, trying to withdraw their deposits, only to find the banks are closed—it’s Sunday. They’ll be buying chocolate and toothpaste tomorrow. There’s a war on, sir. My mother tearfully says there’ll be a shortage of flour and soap (you’re familiar with her cleanliness complexes), and my Kalisto, ahh, he is hoarding toilet paper! So much for the war as reflected in my family. In the street, everyone walks sniffing at the air, as if the war were exuding a smell—and a pleasant one, too. And everyone’s looking up at the sky … That’s where the main celebration is expected to come from. People say they landed last night outside the city, they’re all over everywhere in plain clothes.”

  “And they’ve poisoned the water,” smiled Melkior nervously, his jaw trembling.

  “Laugh on, do. … But the language of Johann Wolfgang Goethe is to be heard abundantly all over town, and the women—the perfumed ones—are pricking up their ears in cafés at guten Tag. I’ve already stunned one with a line of poetry, plus two tears for good measure, well, you know me … O Grille, sing, die Nacht ist lang … and after that, in another line, there’s this word unbedacht—know what it means? Well, never mind, we’ll be chirping about that lyricism tonight, the night is long. …”

  “Oh,” Melkior’s throat constricted, “what about our (sure, ‘our’) er … the one you used … October’s gentle breath …?”

  “The one I used gentle breath? What do you mean?”

  He knows, the brute, he knows all right—he’s just being … “The one I called Viviana … don’t tell me she’s looking forward to guten Morgen, too?”

  “She’s off to meet them halfway, I think,” said Ugo casually. “But it hurts, mournful Eustachius—she went away without a goodbye kiss, without leaving me two hairs or at least a nail-paring to remember her by forever …”

  “Went away … with Freddie?”

  “Does it matter? She’s gone, the dove’s fluttered away.”

  “Unless it’s with ATMAN?” wondered Melkior aloud.

  “Batman who?”

  “The palmist … the one living downstairs …”

  “Hah, ATMAN. Was it you who first gave him that name? Or the late Maestro? Tell me, you were actually with him the night he … scorned technological progress? Anyway, the idea was … you must admit … What symbolism—to piss on electric current! Worthy of a … of that Greek who threw himself down the crater of Etna.”

  Maestro couldn’t remember the name of the Socrates’ pupil, either. … “The one who tried to persuade him to flee.”

  Melkior’s head was still hanging over the edge of the bed. He was no longer looking at his slippers, he had his eyes closed. He saw Maestro’s dead arms dangling from the railing; stretched out, long, straight, as if—extended toward the Earth—they wished to show their scorn for the sky above. Arms … with no head; the head had been swallowed by the jacket—it had slid down and devoured Maestro’s head. That was the image in the blurred grayness of Melkior’s memory.

  “Death most likely instantaneous” was the sentence on Maestro’s “City Page” with which Melkior tried to console himself. A minute or two—how long was that to a dying man? Perhaps a vast and emotion-laden duration … which the City Desk reporter had slashed to zero—“instantaneous”—presumably to make it all seem easy and simple, no thought, no hope. A consolation for his own future? And yet Maestro had remembered reading about a man who survived electrocution! Seven minutes afterward, a huge chance! “So it appears all is not lost after the jolt, you can survive … provided someone turns their hand to it, right, Eustachius?” Yes, massage the heart … my dead soul!

  Melkior shuddered. Why didn’t I see it at the time? He moved his head to the pillow; he looked at Ugo with wondering and irritation and again closed his eyes.

  “Had a bad dream, sir?”

  “He’d worked it out ages ago, drinking beer, practicing,” Melkior was saying without opening his eyes. “‘A pure death.’ Against bodily mutilation as performed by scoundrels and rogues … He’d sold his cadaver, too …”

  “Yes, ‘Snip,’ we do remember, ‘Anatomy, or My Person on Sale’ … Ahh, our poor bug! He knew all the animals in Dostoyevsky. So, Eustachius … did he really … aim and hit at his first go?”

  Melkior scowled in disgust and made no reply.

  “Don’t frown, I have serious reasons for asking.” Ugo’s face was really serious, even thoughtful.

  “You and your ‘serious reasons’—bah!” Melkior dismissed him scornfully.

  “All the same, dear Eustachius …” smirked Ugo mysteriously, “perhaps I do possess certain facts, eh? Why did he choose that very night for his great outpouring of scorn, eh? Now, now, don’t get upset, it has nothing to do with you. He only took you along as a witness to the … gesture, for the sake of his legend … But try to remember: what state was he in when you found him outside the Corso? Yes, all right, ‘illumined,’” Ugo replied immediately to his own question, “but that was hardly unusual—he’d been, as you know, inebriating himself with that joy before … but what other state was he in? Bloody, or rather bloodied … and do you know who’d done that to him?”

  “Why, Freddie the actor, of course.”

  “Oh no—just goes to show how much you’re in the dark. That is, it wasn’t Freddie alone, and that crowning, bloody blow was not Freddy’s doing, he hasn’t got such a remarkable hand. It was a heavy, bony hand, shovel-like, that did that. You must know,” Ugo lowered his voice theatrically, “Maestro was at the Corso that evening on assignment, to borrow a phrase from the parlance of revolutionaries.”

  Melkior gave an angry snort:

  “You’re out of your mind!”

  “No, you are! Did you hear what he was bellowing in there?”

  “No I didn’t—I came too late.”

  “Well, I did! I didn’t want to miss the spectacle.”

  “So you knew all along?”

  “Naturally. I’d spent the whole afternoon at the Give’nTake assisting in rehearsals for the feat. That’s where it all began. He accused Thénardier, too: you’re an informer, you’ve sold your soul to the fifth column; he gave him a squirt of soda from a siphon right in the eye, massacred rows of enemy glasses on the bar … And so, presumably enraged by the tinkle of broken glass, he went off to carry out the assignment.”

  “What assignment, God strike you?”

  “His assignment … presumably patriotic … He was to draw public attention to the suspicious characters at the Corso … but it turned out all wrong. While on the spot, old wounds reopened—love wounds, as you know—and instead of sowing panic among the fifth columnists, stirring the public to action, in a word, instead of striking terror into the hearts of the spies he got his proboscis bashed in by a heavy and bony hand.”

  “By a hand …?”

  “… well known for its cracking finger joints …”

  “ATMAN!” Melkior shook with rage. Now it was all becoming clear to him.

  “You said yourself you c
alled the magician by that name.”

  “But why did Maestro think it was the actor who struck him?”

  “Yes, well, he wasn’t far from wrong. He’d been shouting at her and him and the entire clientele that they were blackguards, spies, traitors, fifth columnists … he knew the litany by heart. Given that there was a lady present, Freddie only offered him a couple of slaps in the face and pushed him into the dark behind the cloakroom, into the magician’s hands. Thus did Fredegarius the actor shine in yet another supporting role.”

  “Now, those … slogans—that assignment, rather—it was Don Fernando’s doing, wasn’t it? Pre-ventive action …” added Melkior and gave a malicious smile.

  “I beg your pardon?” affected Ugo, while bursting with suppressed laughter. “With your permission, Eustachius, I will refrain from making any declarations or comments. I offer only my observations. I may add, for what it’s worth, that the Central European thinker just referred to by you was monitoring the diversion from the phone box faking a telephone conversation. Unless he was really reporting the development of the operations to some headquarters or other. … This of course I add with great reservation.”

  “But how did he drive him into it?” mused Melkior aloud. “What did he lure him with?”

  “Despair, Eustachius,” replied Ugo somberly, “medicinally pure despair. And with shot after shot. He’d been feeling … you know how … to begin with, and when he saw her with Frederick the Hollow in the bargain … well, you don’t need me telling you—you followed the squashed bug’s last twitches yourself. That’s why he selected that very day: two birds, one stone, adieu!”

  “He was looking for you afterward, sent me in to scout the Give’nTake …”

  “For the big farewell scene. He was a theater lover. A pathos-ridden individual.”

  Melkior was now hating the tone of glib irony. They were discussing a man, after all, a mutual acquaintance, the “Mad Bug,” the noble Maestro! He wished to raise the memory to the level of his present state of mind. Maestro had started the cycle. “Now it’s your turn.” Melkior shuddered.

  “Anyway, who knows what’s written in the stars about us?” said Ugo looking “tragically” out the window. “Did you ever ask your star-gazer to read your destiny for you? Who knows … well, you’ve seen his eyes.”

  She doesn’t need dead men, remembered Melkior, and he said nothing.

  “Come on, get up,” said Ugo with sudden impatience and tried to pull the blanket off of Melkior again. “You’re behaving like a sickly dauphin being told in bed there’s a war on.”

  “You go on ahead, I’ll catch up,” Melkior defended himself with all his might. “I’ll look for you at the Give’nTake,” he promised without meaning it, just to get Ugo to leave.

  “At the Give’nTake? Where do you live, my child?” said Ugo in theatrical consternation. “You don’t know that Thénardier the monster has issued a reward for my insolvent head? Apart from that, there has appeared at the Give’nTake an ad for Bayer aspirin to replace the jovial tippler with the snifter of Courvoisier.”

  Melkior laughed absentmindedly.

  “Don’t laugh—I’m in no mood for joking in these critical times!” Ugo wished somebody would believe in his “earnestness” if only once … “Aren’t these dangerous symptoms? Weird metamorphoses are going on there, everything’s already stinking of the most glaring Fascism.”

  “I’ll look for you somewhere else, then,” said Melkior.

  “Perhaps at the Theater Café. … Because there’s no room for us at the Corso; the headquarters of The Concerned is in permanent session there, and we are just … well, magpies …”

  “At the Theater Café, then …” The leech! fumed Melkior, latching onto every word you say.

  “Why ‘then’?” (There he goes again.) “Planning to stand me up?”

  “All right, strike the ‘then’ and see you later, damn you!” flared Melkior in the end.

  “Well, is it see me later or damn me?” Ugo bared his black fillings above him. “Come to think of it, you’re right: damn me if I know if anyone can hope to see anyone else later, in times such as these …” He made a skeptical grimace and went out, launching into a vehement whistled rendition of the Radetzky March on the stairs.

  These streets were already lying down in submission. Waiting patiently for the tramp of army boots. “They’ve already occupied Varaždin,” he heard in passing a snatch of conversation between the windows.

  The gray, cold, colorless April Sunday was blinking, ill-tempered, at the betrayed city. Down the arbored avenue the bare trees were too anxious to bud; they were returning the sap to the wretched Earth beneath: no, thank you, I really can’t accept … (Poor mother, why did you ever give birth to us?) They did not wish the sun to warm them: please don’t bother; they were returning their green to the sunlight. We don’t want to make a triumphal arch over their heads, do we? Let’s hibernate a bit longer, they were saying to the spring.

  Patriotic trees! spoke Melkior with comic pathos walking under the bare black boughs which were shivering in the cold. Each beech, oak, and elm that none can o’erwhelm! he recited under the bare boughs, seeking strength in words, with a sour smile playing around his lips. … And brushwood and brambles … all the brackens across the land … Melkior felt comically moved by the piece of nonsense and gave a mournful laugh. He nevertheless raised his head in honor of the sumptuous plane tree in front of the University building: “Your Imperial Majesty,” he said to it and thought of Empress Maria Theresa. Sparrows were chasing each other all over it in what looked like raucous merriment. A prominent old professor of theoretical physics was coming down the stairs; he, too, noticed the sparrows’ festivity. Melkior saluted him, lifting his hat. “Having a time of it,” he said to him. “Yes—at just the right moment, too,” replied the professor, raising his soft black hat “Good morning.”

  From a side street came the newspaper hawker’s nasal chant; he was selling his Morning News with mechanical apathy.

  “Oh look, ‘Situation Improving,’” laughed a man gesturing with his chin at a banner-type headline on page one of his paper, “‘Certain signs suggest …’ ha-ha!”

  Melkior responded with a vague smile—who knows what he meant? And when he turned around for another look at the man (what a funny … sweeping walk), he bumped into a soldier who was in great hurry. The soldier took hold of his shoulders and held him at an arm’s length:

  “Watch out: eyes to the fore!” The man was smirking. Melkior stared at the familiar face, his mouth agape, but it was a bit odd … dressed like this …

  Pupo, in a private’s boots and rough cloth but with the epaulettes of a reserve lieutenant. He smelled of military storerooms: mothballs, leather, urine … Of course, he had to tack on the political lesson, noted Melkior morosely. But he instantly felt a surge of joy at the encounter: there, a fighting man, in boots … no glasses …

  “You’re a soldier?” he said in confused, senseless amazement.

  “Well, what would you want me to be … a seducer?” retorted Pupo haughtily, with self-importance. “We’re all soldiers now. So will you be, too … if you want to live!”

  “Live?” repeated Melkior mechanically. Which pigeonhole did he pull that cliché out of? Somewhere it must’ve been decided to … “What’s the use—they’ll be here by tomorrow.”

  “What about us—won’t we be here, too?”

  “Be here like this … with epaulettes?” Melkior cast a derisive glance at the gold on Pupo’s shoulders.

  Pupo turned his head to glance at it, too, but nevertheless with a hushed pride: “This? These are just the necessary rigmarole. This kind of gold’s very precious right now,” he added with a smile.

  “You can command men,” teased Melkior.

  A cloud of rage flashed through Pupo’s eyes. He was about to say something hard, insulting, but he changed his mind, gave a patient smile: “It has its points, too … if it’s useful for the cause I serve.�
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  “What you do is always useful.” Melkior did not want to talk this way, but something inside him was rebelling against the respect he held for Pupo, a vicious and cynical voice … as it had against what he felt moments ago for the trees. Brushwood and brambles …

  “Look, I’m in a hurry,” Pupo got moving all of a sudden, taking leave of the incurable one. Still, out of habit, he did not fail patiently to donate a warning at least: “If you’re doing nothing, at least don’t deride those who are doing something.”

  “Well, what am I to do?” Melkior gave a helpless shrug. “Spit on Hitler’s tanks?”

  “You seem to think only in large-scale terms …”

  “What, should I go after their tanks with something small-scale?” laughed Melkior spitefully. “Like the Polish nobility with their spears at Kutno?”

  “Stop flailing about with desperate gestures,” Pupo cautioned him with all-but-spent patience. “What the hell do you think I’m doing? Going from one barracks to another, speaking to the men, preparing them for combat! That’s why I wear these stars on my shoulders …”

  “What combat?” smiled Melkior hopelessly. “It’s a complete rout already. They’ve occupied Varaždin!”

  “The real combat is yet to begin,” said Pupo with muted pathos. “The thing to do is to stow away as much equipment and weapons as possible. I’m getting my hands on rifles, grenades, boots, that’s what I’m doing, small things, fair knight; and as for Varaždin … sorry, not my department.”

  Collecting bees, thought Melkior, and right now we need the honey. I’d rather believe in the Melancholic’s alligators …

  “By the way, that chap I put up … do you know where he is now?”

  “What do you want with him?” said Pupo sternly. “I don’t know where he is … and it doesn’t matter, anyway.”