Jack Faust - Michael Swanwick

by Unknown Author

  The baby yawned and made a soft gurgling noise. Faust solemnly tapped a fingertip on its tiny nose. Then he handed it to the mother. She clutched it to her breast, automatically comforting it with a slight jiggling motion. "Your kind has been banned from Nuremberg. Surely you know what would happen if you were discovered?"

  "I swear to you, sir, our chore here is an honest one," the man said. "It will take but a day or two to accomplish, and then we will be gone."

  Faust removed his wet coat, and draped it over the oven door. He turned on the gas with a twist of a knob, lit it with a skritch of the friction lighter, and turned the flame down low. "Your great-grandfather, Israel ben Simeon," he said, "was a silversmith in this city. When the city fathers, resenting the prosperity of their Jews, conspired to seize their properties, he was too proud to sell his house for a fraction of its value to men he considered thugs and criminals. Others, wiser than he, did so and fled to Spain, Italy, Ruthenia. He stayed and, out of stubbornness, did not send any of his wealth away."

  "You—know something of this?" The merest hint of avarice entered Nathan's round, fearful face.

  "Most assuredly I do. Your great-grandfather had a Christian friend named Boehm, a crippled choirmaster who had several times been the secret recipient of his quiet charity. This choirmaster came one night to warn that he was to be arrested in the morning. He escaped with only his wife and daughter, enough gold to bribe their way to Prague, and as many jewels as he could swallow. Do you follow me?"

  Nathan nodded.

  "Israel ben Simeon's most treasured possession was a magnificent silver ewer, worked with an unequaled representation of Judith holding the head of Holofernes. It was his masterpiece; a year of his life had gone into its making. Every metalworker who came to town, be he Jew or Christian, called to see it and study its craft. It was priceless. Alas, it was too large to take away with him, and so he filled it with jewelry and other valuables, and buried it behind his house, at the base of the chimney."

  "This is exactly what I have always been told," Nathan said wonderingly.

  "The location of the Nuremberg hoard old Israel confided to his daughter's husband, your grandfather, upon his deathbed, and he in turn passed it on to your father. Who spoke of it often to both you and your brother Avram."

  "This is no man, but the devil himself!" cried the woman.

  "No, no, no—you flatter me, Rachel. I am nothing of the sort." Faust chuckled to see how she started when he spoke her name.

  "What do you intend here?" she asked.

  "Nothing bad, I assure you. Calm yourselves, be at ease. I need a cup or perhaps a glass." Faust went over to the gently hissing oven and drew the bottle of Communion wine from his greatcoat. He thumped it down on the table, and drew up a chair. Then, sharply, he said, "Well?"

  Silently, Rachel brought him a tumbler.

  "Pour," he told Nathan.

  The man obeyed.

  Faust drank.

  "Where was I? Your brother Avram. Who, as first-born, naturally received the bulk of your father's estate. Who, when you both wanted the same woman for wife, surrendered his claim in exchange for half of your own inheritance. And who (against your advice, incidentally) invested heavily in the plastics industry at a time when nobody knew an isomer from a polymer. How his prosperity oppresses you! He wears silk suits and dines on caviar. He keeps a chauffeur. His condescending smirk is like a lash across your back.

  "A poor man has no honor in this world. When you went to beg for his cast-offs, Avram made you enter by the tradesmen's gate. He would not even lend you use of his automobile; you returned home through the streets bent under your load like a rag-picker. Everyone saw it! Only wealth could erase such shame. So, in the extremity of your folly, you thought of the family legend."

  "It is more than a legend, though! You have verified as much."

  "Oh, Nathan, Nathan, Nathan—bad enough for you to come here alone. How could you have led your wife into such terrible peril?"

  "I insisted," Rachel said. "I would not let him go without me."

  Faust scowled. "Since when do women make such decisions? Your husband feared to leave you in his brother's care. Am I wrong? Eh? No, I am not. Nathan knows only too well how that lecherous goat still desires you. The baby's asleep again. Put it back in the cradle."

  She did so, but remained protectively crouching over her child, back bent in a lovely and vulnerable curve.

  "Such a dreadful, dreadful waste. For four generations your family has pursued a mirage. I tell you this as a friend." He raised his voice in a mocking nasal whine. " 'Someday, my son, we will return to Great-Grandfather's house and reclaim our heritage!' Well, here you are, and what have you to show for it?"

  "Perhaps ... you know something that would help us?"

  "I am here for no other reason." Faust drained his glass, and nodded for more. "You came to Nuremberg looking for the old Jews' quarter, and could not find it. You sought a house with a unique chimney—one with a brickwork salamander laid into its design—and could not find it. It should have been easy, yet it was not. Would you care to know why?"

  Silently, Nathan nodded.

  For a long moment Faust did not speak, deliberately drawing out the tension. Then he said, "The house of Israel ben Simeon no longer exists. The Jews' quarter was razed five years ago to make way for the railroad station. The rubble was bulldozed and carted away for landfill. But here's the ironic part: Even if you'd come beforetime, you wouldn't have found the treasure. It was dug up two nights after its burial by Gustav Boehm—the very same choirmaster who warned your great-grandfather to leave!"

  Rachel put an arm over her eyes. Her husband looked stricken.

  "The ewer, which was priceless but known to many, Boehm hammered into a lump and had melted into an ingot worth—well, it would make you laugh to know how little it brought. The rest he pawned, the money he wasted, and what now remains of your great-grandfather's legacy? Only your memories. After you die, it will be as if he had never been."

  "Listen to me, please." Nathan contrived to place himself between Faust and his family. "Whatever you want, whatever you've come here for... spare my wife. Spare my innocent child."

  "What a position you have put yourself in! Yet you were comfortable enough back in Poland. You had food, clothing, money for coal in the winter. Would you have gambled your family's lives on such a chimerical quest if you had not been eaten away with spite and envy?"

  "Please. You have no idea how we've suffered—"

  "What does a Jew know of suffering?" Faust spat on the floor. "So much for you—and more than you can do!"

  Nathan stared unhappily down at his feet. "It's a Christian superstition," he said, "that in punishment for the crucifixion, Jews can only slobber. I can spit as well as any man."

  "A scholar, are you? Well then, Rabbi, let's see you. Spit in my face! Let's see if you dare. Do you dare? Eh? Eh? No, I didn't think you would." Faust stood. He opened the drawer by the sink and took out a knife.

  "What are you doing?"

  "What does it look like I'm doing?" Faust slammed the knife into the table top. He dragged it heavily toward him, digging a deep gouge in the wood. "I trust you know the story of Abraham and Isaac." He cut a second gash at right angles to the first, so that they formed a cross. "There. I have made you an altar."

  He proffered the knife, hilt first.

  Nathan, horrified, shrank away from it. "I don't know what you think of me. But I swear, I could never harm my own son."

  "You brought him here, didn't you?" Faust took a long drink from his glass.

  "I didn't know this would happen!"

  Disgusted, Faust flung the knife across the room. It clattered into the sink.

  "The unconscious mind," he said, "is a tricky thing. It wants what the conscious mind cannot admit to. A man who is obsessive about his wife's fidelity, for example, might actually be acting out his desire to see her proved unfaithful." He sucked on a molar. "There's no need to look s
o shocked. I know the unconscious. I know what you secretly want."

  Nathan hung his head. "All men are sinful by nature," he conceded. "But—"

  "You'd like me to fuck your wife, wouldn't you?" Faust stretched out a leg and kicked the cradle until the baby wailed. Rachel fearfully snatched the baby up. The upstairs neighbor pounded on the floor again, but Faust ignored him. "Say you would!"

  Eyes squeezed tight against tears of humiliation, Nathan said, "I want you to fuck my wife."

  "Beg me to do so."

  "Please."

  "You want me to fuck her until she bleeds. Say it!"

  Nathan was weeping openly now, the tears flowing down his cheeks. "Why? What evil have I ever done to you to deserve this? Why are you doing this to us?"

  "Fool. There is no why. The very word is a semantic fallacy. Ask me how and I can lay out for you cause and effect, one thing leading to another, the alcohol acting on a grieving man's mind, the door inadequately guarded, the people within isolated from the common lot of humanity by the dreadful secret of their ancestry." He rattled his glass.

  Nathan refilled it.

  Faust drank.

  "But to ask why," he continued, "implies that things happen for a purpose, and they do not. There is no purpose, no direction, no guidance to events. Nothing means anything. The world is a howling desert of meaninglessness, and reason is useless before it. There is only blind event."

  He stared off into the bleak landscapes of the future while Nathan refilled his glass and refilled his glass and refilled his glass.

  He saw so clearly now, without delusion or hope. It was a crystal night of the soul.

  When he awoke, the Jews were gone. They had taken what they could carry in their arms and fled into the night.

  He felt dreadful, but not so much as he would have expected. Drink some water and you'll feel better, he thought, you've slept for twenty-eight hours. Surely that was Mephistopheles speaking to him? There had been a time when he could easily distinguish between the demon's thoughts and his own. It pained him to think how naive he had once been.

  At Mephistopheles's prompting, he drank water, washed his face, drank more water, adjusted his clothes, and went to a pharmacist's. There he bullied the proprietor into compounding a variety of drugs and vitamins into an elixir that by noon had restored vigor to his body. Still, his spirit lagged impossibly behind.

  A walk would clear out the cobwebs.

  "Very well."

  Obediently, Faust took a street-car to the edge of town. From the terminus/he followed a winding road out into the countryside. Pavement gave way to dirt. A mile or three into the farmlands was a trail which led through a copse of black oaks and into a meadow.

  He followed it.

  Crickets greeted him with song. Small white and yellow lepidoptera sought among the thorns and spiky husks of dead vegetation for flowers yet living and similarly clad in autumn's colors. Bees droned. The sky was blue and flocked with a gentleman farmer's sufficiency of clouds. It was unseasonably warm.

  Rest, he thought. Sit and take your ease.

  Faust sank down into the fragrant sweetness of green grasses, the Arabian sweetness of dry grasses, the dark sweetness of putrefaction. Brown stalks rose up about him. He waited, though for what he could not say. He was totally without ambition. He might sit here forever.

  Damn Gretchen! Damn that filthy bitch to Hell forever! He had given up everything—everything!—for her. Yet, driven by who knew what sluttish and unhealthy philosophies, she had willfully taken her own life, when forces were in place to bring her away free. Abominable! Such was the unspeakable perversity of women—that given the opportunity, they would inevitably choose death over life.

  But what use? It was done, it was over, it was beyond recall. All the weariness in the world flowed into Faust. He leaned back on his elbows. There, in the shape-shifting meadow, where reeds turned to fairy spears and leaves dried and curled into cocoons, he listened to the complex chords of insect chirps, chitters, and stridulation. With such cries and a variety of pheromonal lures, the delicately savage combatants vied to trick one another into ambushes, murder, and sex.

  All about him nature was having one last long and leisurely war. Voles burrowed for grubs. Spiders threw webs between towering stalks. A hawk circled speck-small among the clouds, hunting for a fur-clad and tremulous heart. The year had come to fullness and food was running out. Bees and wasps were already beginning to starve. Ants scoured the earth for summer's last gleanings. Predators expanded their range. Everything was dying.

  Everything was dying, yet death did not suffice. Life had hidden resources. In a thousand ways it was concentrating strength, hoarding its energies in seed, chrysalis, and nectar, preparing for the warrior sweep out of exile that would undo the defeat of winter. Spring was implicit.

  There was a crashing in the woods.

  Faust sat up.

  A young woman burst from the trees and ran into the meadow.

  She saw Faust and stopped as suddenly as a startled doe. By her expression, she was amazed to see him there. Her clothing—clean, well-made, old-fashioned in a modestly fashionable way—marked her as being from a good family.

  Faust had by the merest fraction begun to lift himself from the grass when, blushing, she raised a hand to her shoulder and unfastened one strap of her dress. The cloth fell away. Awkwardly, she undid three buttons of her blouse and then pulled it aside, baring a breast.

  It was flesh made perfect: plump, pale, and without blemish. Subtleties of color, from cream to peach-flush, tinted the skin more exquisitely than any water-colorist could have managed. The nipple, surrounded by a halo of faintest pink, was delicate and brown and emphatic as a berry.

  Kneeling, the gill offered her breast to Faust's mouth.

  Solemnly, he parted his lips. For the briefest instant that virginal nipple was in his mouth, sweet, warm, ever so faintly salty .. . and then gone.

  All in one swirling motion, the maiden had drawn back, stood, rebuttoned, turned, and was running away again, back into the woods, a wild thing, braids flying.

  Green shadows swallowed her and were silent.

  Faust stared wonderingly after this inexplicable nymph. She seemed the personification of all that was fresh and unspoiled, a spark of green nature in a weary and corrupt world.

  Did it surprise you, Faust?

  "I was amazed. I... I felt like a virgin confronting his first whore. Great vistas opened before me. It seemed that there was so much that was possible, so much that. . . might happen."

  Come. It's time to return to the city.

  Faust stood. Together he and his internal guide retraced the path through the woods and past the still, pesticided fields, over the road and down along the Pegnitz's rusted shore. What few plants grew among the smashed machines, bricks, and plastic bottles there were brown and dying. Bright swirls of effluents from the Reinhardt Industries plant to the east curled and uncurled in its currents. The trees fell away. Smoke and sparks belched into the sky from the mouths of thunderous foundries.

  Faust shook his head. "I still cannot—the incident with the young girl. It was so ... remarkable. My head buzzes with it."

  There is a simple enough explanation.

  "Then don't tell me," Faust said harshly. "I don't want to know."

  Can this be my little Jack Faust? This, the scholar who was from earliest memory the humble slave of truth? The scientist who would have sold his soul, were there such a thing, for knowledge? The philosopher who swore that whatever simply was, whether fair to him or abhorrent, was of necessity superior to the most beautiful imaginings? Does the truth mean nothing to you anymore?

  "Truth," Faust said bitterly. "What is truth?"

  Truth is whatever you have the strength, the wit, and the will to make it be.

  "What are you talking about?"

  Politics, Faust. Has it never occurred to you that Germany needs a leader?

  "We already have an Emperor."

&n
bsp; Yes, a feeble old man who by his very existence keeps Germany shattered, fragmented, and weak. Were this dotard not occupying the throne, some strong man or iron duke would inevitably arise to claim that office by fire and conquest, and in so doing subdue and unite the quarreling subnations into one mighty and unstoppable colossus that would stand astride the world, crushing its rivals underfoot and imposing its just tyranny upon all the inferior lands and races of the Earth.

  "There is something to what you say," Faust mused. "But—not I. I am no statesman or ruler or conqueror. I wouldn't know where to begin."

  You'd begin with my advice. Let me show you.

  He returned to Nuremberg by air, flying high above the stratocathedrals and cumulofortresses of the clouds. "Fasten your belt, we're beginning the approach," said the pilot with a flash of teeth and he saw the narrow streets and orange roofs of the city laid out below him like a clever child's diorama.

  "Look!" The pilot pointed. Along the Pegnitz crept a narrow column of marchers. Where roads merged, they were joined by more marchers. Then more. And more. Their numbers grew, swelled, multiplied, and did not stop, until all the roads were thronged with human bodies. They looked like nothing so much as ants swarming.

  'They're all coming for your rally!"

  Nuremberg was not large enough to hold such numbers. So the organizers had appropriated a region outside of town nicknamed for its size and flatness the Dirigible Field. Bleachers had been built, support-buildings, toilets, reviewing stands. Gargantuan banners were raised, roads asphalted, entire groves of pines transplanted for background. The work that had gone into this weekend rally would have sufficed to build a small city.

  A car carried him in triumph through the agonized screams of adoration, the outstretched arms and bared teeth of citizens like werewolves leaping and snapping to reach him. "Wave!" cried the strangely familiar driver. "They love you!"

  He was brought to the Dirigible Field and installed upon the reviewing stand. The dignitaries all stood up straighter in his presence.

  "What should I tell them?" he asked.