Neither Man Nor Dog

by Gerald Kersh

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  Neither Man Nor Dog

  by

  GERALD KERSH

  VALANCOURT BOOKS

  Dedication: For Ann Dvorak

  Copyright © 1946 by Gerald Kersh

  First published in Great Britain by Heinemann in 1946

  First Valancourt Books edition 2015

  Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia

  http://www.valancourtbooks.com

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the copying, scanning, uploading, and/or electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitutes unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher.

  Cover design by Lorenzo Princi/lorenzoprinci.com

  Neither Man Nor Dog

  One day I asked Adze if he had ever known what it feels like to have a friend. “I have had a friend; one friend, once,” he replied.

  “Whom you loved?”

  “Loved?” He paused. “Well, yes: whom I loved.”

  “A woman?”

  Adze sneered. “A woman!”

  “A man, then.”

  “Man? Tfoo! Men are dust and ashes.”

  “Not a child, I suppose?”

  “Children! Ptoo!” He spat. “People are weeds, and children are the seeds of weeds.”

  “I should have guessed,” I said. “Horse or a dog.”

  “Horses and dogs are as bad as men. They like men! They admire men! Fools! Ketcha!” He seemed about to burst with pent-up scorn.

  He was silent for a while; for as long as it takes to smoke a cigarette he said nothing. There was always an oppressive and threatening quality about the silences of Adze. They made you think of lifeless wildernesses of broken stones: there was death and desolation in them. Then he laughed, and his laughter was short and harsh, like something splitting in a bitter frost. “Friend!” he said. . . .

  Friends are for cowards. You have friends because you are afraid to be alone. You value your friends because they are a kind of mirror in which you see reflected the best-looking aspects of yourself. Friends! And as for women, bah! What is there in a woman that a man should lose his head over her? A woman is impossible to live with. She is always talking. You support her, and she expects you to be devoted to her body and soul. She smells. She gets fat. She whimpers like a pup, that she is all yours . . . and the moment your back is turned her lover comes out from under the bed. Listen to me. I am a very old man. I have known a lot of men and women, but never any to whom I could offer either love or friendship. No, I am alone, me! Yes, I have known everybody, high and low, in all parts of the world . . . in fine houses and in gutters, on mountains and plains, in forests and on the sea, but I have always been alone, alone with myself.

  Always, except just once. This was more than fifty years ago. I left Russia from Vladivostok, working on a stinking ship that sailed for the South Seas down past the Sea of Japan and the Riu-Kiu Islands. The name of the ship was The Varvara. The captain was a pig, and the crew also were pigs. The purpose of the voyage was to trade among the Islands. We had tobacco, beads, hatchets that would not cut, and some barrels of alcohol. This rubbish we intended to exchange for such things as pearls—because our white women loved to hang their necks with these little white sicknesses out of the bellies of oysters, and the South Seas are full of pearls and other nonsense.

  Well, it was an unlucky voyage. Before we were out of the Sea of Japan we hit a storm, and the ship was rotten and the cargo was badly stowed, so that we were in a bad way when the winds died down. Everybody said that it was madness to go on, but the Captain swore that he would put a bullet into the guts of the first man who might dare raise a voice. I did not care. I had a feeling that, whoever died, I should live. So we repaired the Varvara as best we could and went on. And so we came to grief. Do not ask me where we were, because I do not know. Another wind came, howling like a devil out of hell, and it seemed to smash us like a bomb. The end of the matter was, that the crew, pigs and fools that they were, gave up hope. They cracked one of the bottles of vodka, and drank it out of their cupped hands, as the ship foundered. They died singing of sweet kisses, blue-eyed maidens, and love in the meadows, while the sharks were crowding round them like Society ladies around a millionaire. That was the end of them. Good. But the Captain, as I foresaw, had taken care of himself. He and the first mate got into the one remaining boat. Needless to say, I got in with them. They had half a mind to toss me out, only there has always been something in my face which makes men think twice before playing such games with me. The sea was heaving, but growing still now. Our little boat went up in the air like a cork and then down again between cliffs of green water. Yes, the sea is very powerful. The last I saw of our ship was a kind of scum of bits of wood. Good. Then I was alone with the other two men in the boat, and they were fast asleep exhausted. So I slept too. That was just before dawn. I awoke with the sun on my face. It was like the open door of a blast furnace when they let out the molten iron. The Captain awoke too, and said: “Open that locker behind you and pass me the water.”

  I did so; that is to say, I passed him one of two water-kegs in the locker, and also took out a little barrel of biscuits. He and the mate drank like fishes, and then handed me the keg. I also drank. Then we ate some biscuits. The sun rose higher. We lay and gasped. There was only half a gallon of water left in the keg, and the devil knew where we were. I said nothing. The day passed, and then the night, and then another day. The keg was drier than bones in a desert.

  “The other keg,” the Captain said.

  I looked at him, and said: “There is no other keg.”

  At that, they looked at each other like criminals in a cellar when they hear the police kicking down the door, and a sort of despair came down upon the mate, and he put his face between his hands and wept—only he was too dry to have any tears left. The night was a hundred years long, and the next day came like a flame-thrower, and the mate went mad, and jumped overboard, and the sharks were very pleased to see him. And t
he Captain raved and gasped and, for the first time in his life, cried for water. Then he too went. He thought, all of a sudden, that this blue sea was some stream or other where the women of his village used to go and do their washing, and leaned over the side of the boat. Sharks have a habit of leaping up and snatching. They leapt up. They snapped. His name, if I remember rightly, was Avertchenko. But who cares?

  So I was alone in the boat. I used the keg of water that I had hidden, sip by sip, and ate the biscuits. I do not mind being alone. I do not enjoy company. But then being imprisoned in that little boat, rising and falling and rising and falling, with nothing left but a sky like a house on fire, and a sea that covered the whole world . . . why, then, suddenly it seemed to me that I wanted company. I never felt like that before, and perhaps it was the sun that made me feel so. I kept looking out of my burnt-up eyes, and seeing nothing but this damned emptiness everywhere, this rotten emptiness for fire and salt . . . and it seemed to me that a hole had been bored in my chest, and some of this silence and emptiness had leaked into me.

  I lay like this for days, drinking my water drip by drip. And then I was down to the last pint of water and the last biscuit, and also the last thread that held me to the world. In one day I knew that I also would start singing and babbling about snow and grass and trees. But I broke this last biscuit, determined to keep alive as long as I could, for it is a man’s duty to save himself. I broke this biscuit, I say, and a cockroach crawled out. I watched it. It ran across my hand, dropped to the bottom of the boat and tried to find a place to hide. I followed it with my eyes, put out a finger and headed it off. It crawled up my finger, ran up into my palm, and stayed there, doing something or other with its feet. I put up my other hand to shelter it from the sun, and there it stayed. I made crumbs of a little biscuit and—devil take it—I actually moistened these crumbs with a finger dipped in water. I wanted that cockroach to stay with me. I wanted it to stay alive. Yes, of all created things, that thing is the only one which I wanted to live with me! It made me feel that the whole world was not dead, and that, somehow, there was land beyond the sea, the salty and murderous sea.

  So the madness that was coming on me went away, and the night came with cooler air; and still the cockroach rested on my hand, which I did not dare to move for fear of frightening it away; and that night passed quickly until it cracked—my last night—cracked like my last biscuit and let in the dawn. And for the one time in my life, just for an instant, I felt that I also was small and resting as it were in the palm of some hand powerful enough to crush me.

  I looked over the water; it was calm as glass, and saw a sail. It belonged to a Norwegian clipper-ship, but I was too weak to signal. My head went round and the darkness fell down, and I knew nothing more until I tasted water, and found myself lying on a deck looking up into the face as round and red as the sun, the face of a man with a yellow beard. There were men all around me, all offering me clothes, blankets, food, drink, sympathy. But I looked at the palm of my hand. The cockroach was gone. I had been lost and alone on an empty sea in an empty boat for forty days and forty nights. But when I saw that my cockroach was gone, then, for the first time in my life, I felt lonely.

  Uncle Kuzma

  When I think of Uncle Kuzma I feel somehow, a sense of loss. He came from the land of the plains, down by the Black Sea. He was a fine, hospitable, generous man.

  He had a way of talking that made things seem fresh and clear. He hated little, evasive people and things.

  “What!” he would say. “Do I put spectacles on to look at an elephant? Whatever is worth seeing makes itself seen. What! Is anything that is beautiful ashamed to be seen? Does that which is good disguise itself? A tiger makes itself look like grass. An insect makes itself look like a leaf. Bah! Tigers! Tjooptchah! Insects! Ptchut!

  “Nice clean things are to be seen and known. Take them or leave them, there they are. Does good grass try to look like tigers? Do nice leaves try to look like bugs and flies? Thus are men, boychik.”

  Boychik was his way of saying Little Boy. He would call a doctor a Doctchik. Everything was little to him; he was a vast man, and a simple one. He knew only two symbolic colours: black and white. He would never compromise between good and evil—as he saw good and evil.

  Bad was black. To him all criminals were Black Criminals, and I have heard him call a red rose a White Rose. White, to him, was the same as Good. He always wore a white hat and white trousers.

  “They tell you when they are dirty,” he said. “Roll in mud,” he would tell me, “swim in mud, go to bed in the dustbin. But know that there is mud and dust, and afterwards wash it away in nice white water. Grey is a bad colour because it is mediocre. Grey is the colour of compromise. It is neither here nor there. It is made to hide dirt. There are many men whose minds and souls are grey. Be careful of grey. It always looks respectable. But shake it! Shake it and see . . .”

  He could fight like a terrier, drink like a fish, and sleep like a bear. He bought himself a bit of landed property in Hampshire, some half-dozen acres of useless, ragged wilderness overlooking a stretch of lifeless beach and shadowy sea.

  The local peasantry never knew what to make of him, but the children followed him.

  He was the grave of God knows what dead romance; worshipped women from afar, behaved in their presence like an old-fashioned serving man with a repressed adoration, but never (as far as I know) had a love affair.

  He remained faithful to a ghost enclosed in a gold locket which he wore round his neck. I opened it once. He had fallen asleep and I knew, somehow, that he would not wake up for an hour or so.

  In a thin gold case there lay the likeness of a young woman who was neither ugly nor beautiful, a dark-haired woman smiling into a camera.

  I clipped the locket shut and replaced it on his chest, where it had lain by the second button of his open flannel shirt. This happened when I spent a holiday with him.

  My holiday with Uncle Kuzma was the finest I ever spent. I was a timorous child then, having recently recovered from a long illness. Uncle Kuzma taught me to fear no man, devil or beast.

  He loved running for the sake of running, and made me run with him over the grass: taught me the technique of a knockout punch. Whenever I hit him in the right place he fell down: this gave me confidence.

  He told me that he, also, had been a sick child, but that he had become a strong man by wrestling with a tree. First he tried to pull it over, then he tried to push it over, and in five years he developed the torso of a wrestler.

  I wish I knew more about him. I only know what I saw, and what I saw I loved. When I went away from him I kissed him. I never even kissed my mother: kissing people embarrassed me.

  But kissing Uncle Kuzma gave me a certain sense of exaltation. It was all I could do to thank him, and I felt he—who had claimed that everything good was comprehensible—he, Kuzma the giant, understood and was pleased.

  My departure, if I remember rightly, was on a Friday. In that case, the Banquet must have taken place on the previous Monday.

  Uncle Kuzma had been invited to some dinner. Never ask me what it was: I never knew, and even if I did know I should have forgotten the ins and outs of it.

  He met thirty or forty local gentlemen, and had a pleasant evening. They asked him to speak. If there lives, now, any ancient gentleman of Hampshire who was present at that dinner, and happens to remember a white-headed man who had to squeeze himself through most doors—a phenomenally immense man of about sixty-eight, with a flaming face and a heavy white moustache, who talked queer English in a queer staccato singsong and beat tables with his fists when he talked—if anybody lives who was there, I should be glad to know what he said.

  It is certain that he ended by inviting everybody present to eat with him on a certain Monday. This is the Monday of which I want to tell you.

  Uncle Kuzma had about ten dozen of a very fine old Burgundy, and some bottles of exceedingly ancient brandy. There had been a time when he used to drin
k wine and judge it with the best.

  He devised a magnificent meal. The weather was hot, so he hired a marquee, and borrowed a table—or series of tables on trestles—about twenty feet long.

  Places were laid for more than thirty people. A cook was found. Waiters—one for every three guests—were brought from the nearest town. He even had a major-domo in a pink coat.

  You understand that he assumed that everybody would come, since he had invited everybody. Uncle Kuzma was a man of simple instincts and plain mind. The food was superb.

  I remember the ices most clearly; there were five different kinds. He had arranged a menu of ten courses—he was a hospitable soul who loved a lavish spread and the sight of people enjoying themselves. As if all this were not enough, he hired a band at awful expense—a seven-piece band to play while the meal was being eaten.

  And for the occasion he dressed himself all in white. It was summer. I thought that Uncle Kuzma looked astonishingly beautiful, with his white clothes and his scarlet face and white hair and moustache.

  The band came, the waiters came, and everything was made ready for the Banquet at midday. Twelve struck. The guests had been invited to take luncheon at twelve.

  But no guest appeared. I don’t think that his invitation had been taken seriously. They were ceremonious folk: Uncle Kuzma came from a desolation dotted with farmhouses, where a word was enough.

  I watched his face. I had a habit of watching faces even when I was a child.

  One o’clock struck. The cook came out gesticulating.

  Nobody was coming.

  Uncle Kuzma laughed, asked me to wait—as ceremoniously as if I had been an honoured guest—and went away. Fifteen minutes or so passed and he returned, but not alone.

  He had about twelve men and women with him, but they were people such as I had never seen before. Some were in rags.

  Most of the men were bearded; but I remember at least one who had a moustache and no beard—a superb moustache, nearly a foot and a half long, redder than fire.