The Pet was one life into nine when I met him, more as we went along. Somewhere along the line he'd begun to believe himself to be some kind of embodiment of the real deal, and now he felt impervious to danger.
“Where are we going?” I asked the Pet.
“Brementown,” he said. “Bremen's where we're always going, until there's no Bremen to go to. If we ever get to Bremen, you'll know we've touched the end of things.”
I didn't know where Bremen was, but it seemed as good a destination as any. I wanted something other than death. I wanted life and a wife. I wanted to play music in rooms with fireplaces. I didn't want to be killed at Christmas.
I followed the white cat in his stolen green, and we made our way down the road.
The first time I resurrected was a few months later. I died for a while, then concluded I hadn't died, and thought I must not have been shot at all. When I looked beneath my vest I found a bullet wound, and inside it a bullet, still hot from the gun. The police had found me with a lot of money from one of the taverns we'd just left, and decided I should be dead. I wasn't.
Soon thereafter, the wound was gone, and I wasn't bleeding from anything. I wiped the blood away and looked at the new pink skin. The Pet, whose fault the whole thing was, green-gazed at me, shrugged, threw back another drink, and ordered a platter of sausages.
“Eight lives left, fuckface,” he said, as I touched my own chest in bewilderment and awe. “Now you're part of my band.”
I'd never been close to immortal before. I'd never been anything but the son of a very good accordionist, and the failure at the family farm. There was a pucker where the bullet had entered, and a whirring inside my body where the bullet had been, but the cat was correct. I was whole, and there was nothing to do but stab my fork into the sausages, wrap my fingers around the beer, and sing our repertoire of German folk songs.
Once I'd stopped starving I wondered again why I stayed with him, but he was a genius when it came to music, and it was no sorrow to have a companion, even a mad one. This is how I became part of The Pet's band.
PART TWO: Quem Quaeritus?
“Whom do you seek in the sepulcher?” asked The Pet in every town. “Whom do you seek in the sepulcher, oh followers?”
The Pet was pretending to be religious. Religion meant doors, and doors meant nice ladies, and nice ladies meant milk, honey, and money in the mattress. He wasn't opposed to curling himself beneath the bed if someone seemed wealthy. When I met him, he was in the process of adding to his repertoire, and for that we needed other musicians.
Our miracle plays required three Marys: the Virgin, the Magdalene, and the Sister of Lazarus, and we acquired them one by one, in towns with crumbling buildings and no telephones. They were all dark-eyed girls who were pretending to be somewhat other than they were. Peroxide in the river. Sometimes I wondered if we were bleaching the scales of fish downstream, if we were singing our songs to fish bones.
Mag played a fiddle someone had made of a hanging tree, and the Virgin played bass. Lazarus’ sister played a banged up trumpet, with her sweet soft mouth and her notes so loud and high they hurt people in the corners of bars.
The Pet told each one of them of a festival to take place in December, an attempt to lift the world out of cold. There would be fire, feasting, and sacrifices. None of the Marys was surprised. This was how the world was after the War and before the War. They'd been things other than this, but now things were reduced to musicians and farmers.
I thought sometimes about the time when I'd thought to be a poet, how I'd sat in a classroom filled with scholars, listening to them recite competitively, about how I'd played my accordion only as a lark, in the bar at night. My father's accordion was the one I played now. There were collapses and then there was mine. I'd been scraped from the floor of a tavern, shamed by my inability to complete even a sonnet. The world was made of walking now.
“They'll kill you at Christmas,” The Pet told each one, and each Mary stood at the front gate of the house she'd come out of and nodded in resignation. Our Marys were extra mouths, but none of them were fools. They had blistering senses of humor and could fight like men.
“Will they burn me on a pyre of green pine needles?” asked the Magdalene. “Is that their idea, Cat?”
“They will,” said The Pet, and nodded sagely. “They've got a goose as well. They plan to roast her and drink her fat. You'd be better off coming along and joining this band. This is Bruno. He plays the accordion. He's good enough, though he was born fucked and stayed fucked til he found me on the road to Moscow.”
“I'm Bruno,” I said. “They were going to kill me at Christmas, but The Pet took me into his band.”
“It's been going that way in these parts,” Mag said, tied up her hair in a red scarf, lit a cigarette, put on her coat, and slung her fiddle case over her shoulder. “When the war came through here, they took all the women with them and hung them in the trees. They knew what women were. They knew they'd be killed in their sleep if they left the mothers standing. The soldiers didn't burn me and they didn't hang me, because I was their cook, and then because I was their comfort. I crouched at their fire and spitted their meat. I fed them and fucked them and here I am, alive.”
She spat in the dirt, and looked up at me, her eyes glowing like her cigarette in the dark. For a moment she reminded me of the soldiers, and then I shook that from my mind.
“But, Bruno, listen. Now when I walk in the wood, I hear singing from the nests. Some of our sisters were eaten by birds and they hatched in spring. Now they're fledglings. Others were eaten by bears, and others by foxes, and when the cubs and kits came, they had the voices of our mothers. And the birds the soldiers made plucked out the soldier's eyes on the hill over there, while they were sleeping. And the bears they made ate their entrails. And the foxes they made gnawed their bones, and still they slept. They'd eaten of my cooking. I'd made them venison stew.”
She smiled, jerked her head in the direction of the mountains, shoved a second smoke in my mouth and lit that cigarette from her own. Then she took it from me.
“I lived through that, but I'll come with you. I hear another war is walking toward us. This is something better than the death I could find anywhere.”
I hung my head over my accordion, feeling out of place. I'd only been walking a year. I'd lost my family, but not my name. The Magdalene had black freckles across her cheekbones, and when I got the courage to ask about them, she told me they were not freckles, but gunpowder that had driven itself into her skin when she shot.
“Will they drink mulled wine over my bones?” asked the Virgin, when we met her a hundred miles later.
“They will,” said The Pet. “And turn you to broth.”
The Virgin smoked one of Mag's cigarettes, and bound her breasts with a long length of cloth before she put on her sweater.
“Then I'll come with you, Cat,” she said. “In the war before this war, I stood on the roof and watched the soldiers marching toward us. It was only my family here, and we could see their dust for miles. When they came, I was at the bottom of the well, and I could hear water freezing underground. They pitched their tents on our land, and ate from our cellar. They stole even our cups. I heard one man say that God was with them, and another say that the thing that was with them wasn't God. They said they'd seen a white thing in the woods, and one told another that she was the woman meant to make them into saints. I laughed from the bottom of the well, and they thought I was that woman, but I had no powers of forgiveness left, and so they forgave themselves. I listened to them do it, one by one, around their fire, absolving themselves of their sins. When they moved on, I came up from the well, and found my family in the fireplace, bones and char. Before that, I was a novice. I'd thought to be a nun, but we needed hands, and we needed feet, and the war came walking onto our land. My mother had a strong back, and my father had a voice that could rattle the bottoms of anyone's lungs, but that was the end of streng
th and song.”
The Pet played on a fiddle he'd pulled from his knapsack.
“Will you join this band?” he asked The Virgin.
“It's better than the death I may find anywhere,” she said, twisted a blue cotton scarf around her head, tugged on a pair of britches that had belonged to one of the dead men of her family, and tied her double bass to her shoulders. It wasn't an easy instrument to travel with, but the Virgin was taller and stronger than most men.
Seven hundred miles later, we found Lazarus Mary, who was only ten, and who had nothing to say about her history.
“Will they call me to minister to them, no matter their sins? Will they dip their spoons into the soup and curse me? Will they ask me for salvation and then make me witness their resurrection?”
“They'll kill you at Christmas,” said The Pet, and shrugged. “Unless you join us.”
“Then this is something better than the death I could find anywhere,” said Lazarus Mary, and picked up her dented trumpet. She was wearing two braids wrapped around her head, and in them there were vertebrae formerly belonging to snakes and mice. Her face was like carved wood, but when she opened her mouth we could see she was missing a milk tooth.
Sometimes the three Marys bathed in rivers as we went, hanging their clothes on a tree, and the cat and I watched the fire, working on things we could play without them. The Marys each had blades they sharpened daily, and Mag had a fine pistol she'd bought off a luthier who'd been occupying himself since the first War by building a violin ten feet tall, something meant to shake the foundations of hell with its lowest notes, its bow long as a crosscut saw, its strings thick as rope.
It was a living, the mystery play circuit. We'd started in Russia but now we toured Moldova, Serbia, and Croatia, Hungary, Macedonia, the edge of the Black Sea to Istanbul. All of them were murderers, just as The Pet was. I didn't know about myself. I was a dropout, but I knew how to hotwire an engine. We stole a bent-axled red Trabant, the worst of all vehicles, and piled ourselves into it, laps covered in instruments, the bass sticking out the window, The Pet driving hideously.
All the while the war walked behind us. We didn't know from where they marched, but we passed through villages that were packing their belongings, and in the distance we could see the blood-fed trees on fire, and explosions that flattened whole cities.
PART THREE: I See Mourning for My Soul in You
The first time the Virgin resurrected, she was in the middle of a miracle play, and someone in the audience bellowed in rage, and tried to wring her neck. Or did wring it. None of us were quick enough to get to her. She fell backward as though off a building, and on the ground she was limp and strange. I gasped, and leapt the bar to get to her, but it was done. She was dead. Her eyes rolled to white and blood dripped from the corner of her mouth.
“How is it anyone believes in anything?” the murderer screamed. “There is no philosophy to encompass this! There's nothing to make this world right!”
The Virgin opened her eyes, and sat up, cursing.
“Have we got seven lives left, then?” she asked The Pet.
“Yes,” the Pet said. “Remember, they'd have killed you for Christmas. You've lived a longer life with me. Now you win the war.”
The Virgin looked at The Pet for a long time, and finally nodded, her broken neck healing as she did. She leaned forward to the man who'd killed her, his mouth agape at her resurrection, and stabbed him in the heart.
PART FOUR: The Cat Is My Henchman
The Pet, the three Marys and I roved across countries, showed up in bars, sat down, and announced that the band had arrived. Drinks would be brought, fish and pies would be placed before The Pet, and he'd launch into a folk song, interspersed with a bit of miracle ballad. He could play any instrument, and anyone who could play with him was the beneficiary of busk and bread. We ate well on our rounds from country to country, bribing the borders and sleeping in haylofts.
The cat had seven lives left and so did we, now that we were part of his band. We would live as long as he did. Our lives weren't our own. He was our bandleader.
In Belgrade we sang tender love songs in a bar until The Pet gave a frenzied political rant and nearly got us all thrown into the prison.
“What are you doing with a filthy animal like that?” the barkeep asked us, not unreasonably.
“He's a miracle,” said the Virgin, and everyone looked at her a little longer than necessary, because though she was not beautiful, she was one of those people made peculiar by belief. The Virgin believed in God, and it called to strangers who thought they might be divine. None of them were, but she was proposed to by every man in a thousand miles, each with their flask of booze, each half her height, each with their dream of noodles and paprika. Lazarus Mary would play her bent trumpet into the faces of everyone who tried to marry The Virgin, twisting her long false-blonde curls into a knot, looking into their eyes, and blowing hard enough to peel back their skin. No man liked a trumpet-playing woman, even though they thought they might tolerate it. Lazarus Mary was only a girl, but she was frightening.
“We're in a traveling band,” Lazarus Mary would tell them, “We can't put down roots.” Then she'd add, politely, “I saw my brother murdered with a stake through his heart, pinned to the fence and his skin written all over with slogans in his own blood. I killed the men who killed him, each one with my little fingers. I worked my nails into their throats, until I felt their veins against the quick, and then I twisted.”
This would make the men go away.
Here, in the bar in Belgrade, the police were summoned.
The Pet shouted “The cat is my henchman, I shall not want!” which caused the bar to conclude that we were dissident atheists. The Pet dropped his green flight goggles over his wicked eyes, pulled out his pistols, and subsequently got knifed by an old man. He died loudly, and then resurrected, and we were all relieved, as we'd suddenly lost count of which life he was on. We'd been, by then, traveling for some time. Six lives left.
The Marys and I had to carry him to the car, and he railed against philosophers and saints, doing nothing to keep us safe from further murderers. The Virgin stitched him up with catgut, while he complained bitterly of the problems with that. Mag played a murder ballad on her fiddle, and sang new lyrics about cats, foolish tongues, and curiosity killings. The Pet purred. He enjoyed a scolding nearly as much as he enjoyed a hot fire. The Pet was monstrous. I knew it, and still I stayed, because the world was broken, and at least The Pet let me play my father's accordion.
PART FIVE: What Will You Seek in the Sepulcher?
The first time Lazarus Mary resurrected, we found her crucified and hanging from a tree. We heard her shouting, and when we found her, she was very angry, her hands nailed to the branches with iron spikes. She was only a little girl, but her voice carried. Beside her there was a scroll that said something about trumpets and about angels, something about how proper miracles never happened in this world we lived in now, and how there was only black bread to pray over, never any fishes.
“Who will come out of the cave?” That's the line I remember best from that screed. There were shreds of old religions all over the place, and some of those religions included the worship of plastic spoons, and others included the worship of witches.
“Somebody grabbed me from behind while I was pissing,” said Lazarus Mary. “I didn't do any damage to them. I didn't even see them. I regret it. How many lives left, Cat?”
“Enough,” said The Pet, and pried out the spikes with his claws, splashing Lazarus Mary's wounds with vodka as he went.
PART SIX: That Very Fish Soup
We were in Estonia when I got separated from the band by a woman I'd met in a town in the Sinimäed, the blue rock hills. I wasn't certain she was a real woman at all. The town was full of ghosts, but I'd ceased caring. She said “I'm real enough for you,” and I put my hand up her skirt and agreed with her. The band banged on her bedroom door for a wh
ile when they'd finished their meat pies, and I shouted back at them. They then drove on and abandoned me, as was their policy.
The Pet left me an envelope, “BRUNO” written in something that wasn't ink, and tacked to the shack's front door. The note inside was a map, saying HERE. The HERE he indicated was four hundred miles away. There was a drawing of a fish and a ferry, and the words That Very Fish Soup written in The Pet's claw calligraphy.
I hitchhiked for a week, until I got to the river. It was an unmarked crossing, but I could see the ferry platform on the other side, small and pitiful. It was just like The Pet to refuse a bridge. He didn't trust them. The ferryman looked to be the last person left from the town that'd once been here.
“I'm hunting a big cat,” I said.
“Are you that cat's henchman?” the ferryman asked me, and I knew I was on the trail. “That cat's a cutpurse, but he'll pay. The war's on this side of the river. You have no business over here.”
I paid the ferryman double, and on the other side of the river there was no road, nothing but levee. I walked it, listening to the far off sounds of untuned instruments, and explosions in the distance.
I passed the Trabant, broken down as was its usual way. The Marys were with the car. I found them doing their laundry on the banks of the river, and saying that the cat was the worst companion, but who'd play without such a one. There was an old rooster strapped to the roof.
“The Pet is drunk,” the Virgin told me primly. “He's notorious filth, and has been shitfaced for days.”
“Why seek ye the living?” Mag said, and played a long moan on her fiddle. “You don't want that cat. Let's drive on without him.”
“Why haven't you?”
The Girlfriend's Guide to Gods Page 49
