"You want to do me a favor?" shouted Staefler. There was no answer from the boy. "Reach into my back pocket there, no, the other one, yeah, and get out that list they gave me. See if there's a Utopia 3 office in this town." Staefler felt the boy pull the mimeographed sheet from his pocket. He heard the soft rustle of the paper in the sharp wind. Then he felt the boy stuff the list back into the pocket. Staefler swore out loud and reached around to secure the paper deeper in his pocket. There wouldn't be a Utopia 3 center in Ljubljana. "How come there's never one of those offices where we're going?" he thought.
The sun made the chimneys golden or rust red. The haze made the city beautiful, in a way that would not be remembered when the day was older. Staefler and the Arab kid sped through the rough, grimy streets on the edge of the city, past warehouses, factories with railroad sidings, occasional houses put together from stolen sheets of corrugated metal and warped planks and cardboard cartons, past ruined automobiles abandoned well before the citizens of Ljubljana abandoned everything else. They drove through narrow alleys paved with red brick that set up a deep, resonating hum beneath the wheels of the motorcycle. After a while, the city's industrial ghosts were left behind, and the roads and buildings took on an even more depressing atmosphere. The residential streets of the town, tree-lined, quite as empty as every similar quarter Staefler had seen in Utopia 3, only underlined the sense of complete surrender. Each house, every front door of crystal and colored glass, every degenerate lawn marked the sudden interruption of many lives. Staefler slowed the motorcycle, the better to see any slight clue that Ljubljana was at all different; he felt an unaccustomed sympathy for the displaced families, a morbid anger directed toward those human failings which made such a drastic experiment as Utopia 3 necessary at all. The mood didn't last, and in a few minutes, when they reached the bank of the Ljubljanica River, and discovered there the older, more sedate and more formal heart of the city, Staefler could think of nothing other than his own hunger.
Above the town, high on a hill, was an old, old castle. "It is a great deal like many other castles we have seen," said Staefler, while he parked the motorcycle and chained it to a street lamp. "But in some ways it is different, I guess. That's what makes Europe so fascinating. In some ways." He walked up Mestni Trg, the old street at the base of the castle's hill, past dark, unlocked shops, some filled with dusty merchandise, others stark and bare. Behind him followed the Arab kid, once again compelled to drag the suitcase along.
"And this is the mythical Hotel Ilirija," said Staefler, shaking his head. "Famed in song and legend. Let's go in and see what they've left us to eat." He pushed open the hotel's door and walked in. The lobby had a foul, musty smell, but it was the kitchen that Staefler was looking for.
* * *
A reflection of the slender crescent moon shimmered in the dark waters of the Arno. "It's pretty," said Moore. "The river, I mean."
"You know what?" said Brant, gazing at the ripples which fractured and distorted the moon's white gleam. "I always thought that water at night looked like grape juice. The Mississippi looks like grape juice at night, lapping up against the levee. The water rats have to climb up the boulders so they won't get all sticky. If you take the Staten Island ferry in New York, it feels like you're riding across a harborful of grape juice."
"It doesn't look like grape juice to me."
Brant laughed. "There, you see?" she said. "We don't really have so much in common."
"The whole relationship is off, I guess," said Moore.
"What relationship?" Brant didn't seem to be making a joke, and Moore remained silent. "Well," said the woman at last, "here we are in Firenze."
"In Florence," said Moore.
"Whichever. We're going to have to make an arbitrary decision, whether to use the English names or the local names."
"It's easy," said Moore. "When I'm here, I'll use the English. When you're here, you use the local."
Brant bent down and picked up a rock; it was about the size of her fist, smooth and black in the darkness. She pitched it out over the water. They both heard the splash, though neither could see where it fell in. The white edge of the moon on the river's surface was even more disturbed a moment later. "And like now, when we're both here," she said, "we'll have to do something else. Let's take a vote. Do it democratically."
"Secret ballot."
"Of course."
Moore took an old piece of paper from his pocket. "Here," he said, "we can use this. I used to collect little scraps of paper with phone numbers on them. I'd always forget whose numbers they were. Once a year I'd clear out my wallet and throw them all away."
"A good many ships passing in the night."
"A lot of great lost romances," said Moore. "Do you have anything to write with?"
"A stub of a pencil. Here. You go first. Disguise your handwriting, but number your ballot."
Moore took the pencil and put a Roman numeral one in the upper left corner of the paper. He wrote FLORENCE in block letters below that. Then he tore the paper in half, gave the blank bottom half and the pencil to Brant, and folded his ballot twice. After a moment, Brant finished marking her ballot. She handed it to him, and he held them both cupped in his hands. "I'll shuffle them a little," he said. He shook his hands.
"Open them, read them to me, and I'll keep track," she said.
"All right," said Moore. "The first one says FLORENCE. The second one is FLORENCE, too. It's unanimous."
"That's the only way to be," said Brant. "This city is the treasure chest of Europe."
"Thank you. That was very nice of you."
"That's all right," she said. "I don't care about losing the small ones. Just as long as I win the big ones."
* * *
Autumn began tempering the Florentine air with coolness. Welcoming it, alone in the city, Eileen Brant studied with a certain measure of scorn the ancient trophies of the Tuscan dynasties. She had found an English language guidebook in a forsaken newsstand and, following the suggestions of the book, had begun an organized tour and forage among the relics of the Italian Renaissance.
Brant waited until early afternoon to commence her search, principally because the book recommended to her the soft light upon the nearby hills. She sipped some sour wine from a dusty bottle while she waited. As soon as she saw the golden sunlight touch those hills, she got up and headed for the church of Santa Croce. She turned to look once more at the hills and remarked to herself that, yes, indeed, they were very lovely.
Inside the church were the tombs of Galileo, Machiavelli, and Michelangelo, as impressive a trio as any European country might assemble. Brant paused, wondering how long it had been since the golden light that lit the hills had touched the contents of the stony, smooth tombs. It would not be a difficult thing to calculate, for the dates of the great men's deaths were a matter of public record; but Brant decided to leave that for some time in the future. There were better things to be done with the city. She sincerely hoped that she would never be so bored that such a project would seem attractive. The tombs were, nevertheless, wonderful, just as the golden light on the foothills of the Apennines had been.
Within that same church were some of the world's greatest art treasures, including a series of frescoes by Giotto, of whom Brant had heard many good things, and a sculpture of the Annunciation by Donatello. She viewed these invaluable items with sufficient respect, hoping that she might recall them in her later years. With the stub of her pencil she underlined the name of Giotto in her guidebook, because she really enjoyed looking at his pictures, and she wanted to remember to look for others that he might have elsewhere. She left the church after she had seen enough; her high-heeled shoes made an awkward clacking noise across the tiles of the floor, and the sound echoed too loudly for the sacred setting.
She walked along the tiny Via Pinzochere to Michelangelo's own house, where her book told her the original sketches for the Sistine Chapel were kept. She decided at the last minute to pass this museum by, having
once seen excellent slides of the chapel's ceiling in color, which she felt to be far more representative of the master's talents than any meager sketch.
She crossed a bridge at the bidding of her guidebook and dutifully turned to look downstream toward the Ponte Vecchio. So her day was passed viewing the many fascinating paintings, sculptures, and buildings that Florence had to offer the few people who inhabited Utopia 3. Even before she inspected the real attractions, the Uffizi gallery and the Pitti Palace, she was grateful that Florence had been included in Utopia 3. Still, though, she felt glutted with beauty.
As it got later, Brant realized that she had to find a place to stay, as long as she was determined to remain in Florence. She chose the Pitti Palace, one of the world's finest galleries. It had formerly been the residence of the Medici family and later the residence of the House of Lorraine. It was the official residence of King Victor Emmanuel II, during the few years in the latter part of the nineteenth century when Florence was the capital of Italy. All this Brant learned while wandering through the palace's dusty corridors, reading her guidebook, and drinking a can of warm diet soda.
The Pitti Palace had been converted to house several separate museums, and when Utopia 3 had usurped the Florentine area, many cherished works of art within the palace were left behind by the adoring public. Now these famous things hung only for Brant, and as she inspected her treasure she pretended that she was a Medici princess. She walked more slowly, elevating her head. When she finished the diet soda, she left the empty can on a magnificently carved oak cabinet ascribed to the fifteenth-century Tuscan master, Jacopo Verri.
"You know," she thought, "I really wonder about that Norman Moore. I really do."
* * *
It was without any bitter emotions evident in his thoughts that Staefler wandered into one of Salzburg's oldest taverns. The beer hall was an immense, dark, high-ceilinged chamber, easily and rather inadequately ]describable as a vault. The walls near Staefler were lit by the last filtered beams of the afternoon sun; those across the great room were black and featureless. All were paneled in darkly stained wood, bordered with intricate designs carved by unknown, forgotten Bavarian craftsmen. Staefler stumbled drunkenly over a chair lying tipped over on the floor. "You knock down that chair?" he called loudly. There was no one to answer. He bent down to rub his leg and spilled a stream of warm beer from the bottle he carried. "Filthy kid," muttered Staefler. He threw the bottle, which shattered in the darkness.
He passed among the tables, deeper into the shadows, bruising his thighs on the edges of the furniture. Clouds of dust drifted into the air, and his stinging eyes irritated Staefler. It was nearly dusk, and as the sun dropped steadily toward the western horizon, far away beyond the ancient walls of the tavern, the feeble light within the beer hall gradually disappeared. "It is dark in here," thought Staefler. Someone less drunk might have noticed that much earlier. "It's as dark as the mines. But there's no beer in the mines. Just salt." Staefler imagined that he was down in the Durrnberg salt mines, about fifteen miles from Salzburg. Staefler and the Arab kid had visited the mines on their way into Salzburg, taking the suggestion of a crudely painted signboard on the highway. Durrnberg had been a minor tourist attraction, with guided tours of the mines themselves. Now, of course, there was no one around to show Staefler the sights and no one to operate the devices which provided convenient access to the mines and safety within them. The man and the boy had followed the main tunnel for a few hundred yards and then, frightened, had hurried back from the dense, choking blackness into the cool Austrian air. Now, in his drunkenness, Staefler pictured himself trapped below the surface of the earth, running helplessly, lost, with great, gaping death traps waiting in the floor all around him. His feet tangled in the legs of another chair on the beer hall's floor, and he fell, weeping and struggling. He hurt his knee. It was a while before Staefler calmed down enough to stand again.
When he got up and began walking once more, still confused in the total, silent darkness, he felt sick. He staggered until his outstretched hands struck a wall. "Follow it," thought Staefler. "Follow it out of here." He traced the wall with one hand, the other held out before him to warn of tables or other obstructions. He knew that if he followed the wall along, never taking his hand from it, sooner or later he would reach the exit. After a few tense minutes, however, he bumped into something. "Table," thought Staefler, and gave it a shove. It wouldn't move. "Heavy," he thought. "Too heavy." He felt the shape of the thing and it was oddly familiar, taller than a table ought to be, boxlike, cold. He felt the short knob of the spring plunger, the smooth, slanting plane of the glass top. It was a pinball machine. Staefler felt an ugly thrill and shuddered. He wondered what model it was. "It couldn't be," he thought. "There's hundreds of different kinds of pinball machines." He searched his shirt pockets, and then those in his torn trousers; at last he found a pack of matches and lit one. He held the tiny point of fire to the vertical Scoreboard: H-I L-O E-X-P-R-E-S-S. With an angry gesture he flung the match away. The pinball machine, invisible again, reflected the brief arc of the flame on its polished metal and glass body. Staefler took a deep breath, spat, and reached out to find a chair. He dragged it near the machine and sat down.
"Blast your eyes," he said. "You lousy thief, leaving me like that wasn't bad enough for you, was it?" He pushed the flipper buttons, but there was no sound, no movement from the machine. There was no electricity in Salzburg; the game was dead. Staefler stood up and slammed his fists on the glass top. "Serves you right," he said. The pinball machine was cold against the heels of his hands as he hit the game, like the Arab children had, as though there were a ball spinning in the darkness, bouncing from bumper to bumper.
"No, I don't mind anymore," said Staefler softly. "I could break you now." He felt a tear rolling slowly down his cheek, an annoying sensation. He swiped it away angrily. "Really, I don't care. I never beat you, though, did I? No, and I can't now. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. There has to be a way. I'll ask Utopia 3. They'll help me. They won't take you away again, they wouldn't do that to me again, not after what they said. So it's not so bad. It's like I was back in that African city, like I never left. Like no time ever passed. We can start all over. That's what you want, isn't it? You want me to pretend nothing ever happened." Staefler was sobbing, and the whole cold, dark room began to turn around and around until, still wet with tears, Staefler fell unconscious to the filthy floor.
* * *
"How wonderful, to get away from everyone!" thought Moore drunkenly, as he walked through the deserted streets of Zakopane, a Polish town near the Czechoslovakian border, only twenty-five miles within the eastern boundary of Utopia 3. "But then," he thought, "that doesn't mean that I am grateful for the absence of other people. That's directly opposed to the intentions of this project. I can feel the growth of good wishes within me. The area where tender feelings reside is no longer dormant. No, it's not the solitude and silence that I treasure. It is the peace. Soon, I hope, I will realize that peace is all around, not only in Czechoslovakia, Austria, and parts of Italy and France. If I learn to live with myself, to love myself selflessly, I will discover that I'm no different than anyone else. I will see that anyone else is no different than I, that, thus interchangeable, it does not matter that I am in Utopia 3 and everyone else outside. My spirit will be filled with a peace that cannot distinguish among the, uh, the... ." He paused in confusion. "What was I starting to say? I don't know. Whatever it was, I can't wait for it to happen."
Zakopane was hidden among the Tatra Mountains, surrounded by a beautiful region of wooded hills and mountain lakes. The Polish government had maintained hiking trails through the countryside, all well-marked for the casual hiker. Moore recalled that his own heritage was partly Slavic. He observed the unspoiled beauty with a wistful pride. "I shouldn't feel this way," he told himself. "It's a false nationalism, identifying with a group I'm not a member of. I am, or was, an American. That kind of identification is contrary to the goal
s of Utopia 3. If I am proud of these scenes, it should be only the pride of a man, any man, as he views the wonders of his world. Not his country, his world. It's something I'll have to work on."
There was a medium-sized mountain in front of Moore; a sign said GUBALOWKA 1123 m. He saw that there used to be a cable car to the top, where there was a restaurant advertised to have a splendid view. He did not doubt that, but he knew that he wasn't up to a strenuous climb. Moore made vague plans of getting the Utopia 3 office to advise him on how to get the cable cars running again, using generators and motors and pulleys and things like that. Meanwhile, on the ground at his feet there were many tiny blue flowers. Moore stopped to examine them. He felt that he ought to be delighted. He heard the song of a bird nearby, a song that he couldn't identify. The trees around him provided a sweet though subtle fragrance, and the cool breeze relaxed him and made him sleepy. He was very happy, something that he could never have imagined would happen to him in Poland.
* * *
In Zurich, Switzerland, on the day when results of the popular referendum regarding Utopia 3 were published, there occurred in the streets of that historic city a kind of spontaneous holiday. The residents, almost unanimous in their thinking on the matter, were overjoyed to participate in the grand project. Although such details as the final boundaries and the disposition of the citizens had yet to be solved, the Swiss began celebrating. Utopia 3, to them, was a vastly civilized and idealistic plan which, only incidentally, meant their own displacement. They gave little thought to what inconvenience the future might require of them. They, like their neighbors in France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, were more than willing to make whatever sacrifice seemed necessary for the establishment of a district of perfect harmony.
Death in Florence Page 4
