As they dressed he related to D how the deposed prime minister had killed himself in his cell, taking the coward’s way out. There hadn’t been any rope or sharp implements at hand, so it did have to be conceded that the son-of-a-bitch was tougher than one would have expected. Initially, it seemed that the deposed prime minister had tried to knock a piece of stone off the wall, probably so he could cut his wrists. But he’d just managed to break the bones in his hands. His second attempt had gone better: he successfully drowned himself in the cell’s commode. “Certain poetry there, I suppose,” said her lieutenant. “The guards should have stopped him, obviously. Rule of law. They must have been deaf.”
“Must have been,” said D.
In the provinces, meanwhile, their artillery had shattered the main body of the government’s forces. It would be done in a couple of weeks, a month at most. Elections could take place before the new year began. Her lieutenant was walking around staring at the ground. “Oh, and I dropped in next door. They are holding some prisoners there—overflow from the jails—but what we saw, the bag? A dog. Belonged to someone at the embassy. Bastard left his dog behind and it went crazy, rabid probably, so they had to put it down. Shit, I can’t find my button. Do you see it? It’s gold.”
Their mother asked questions. People had seen D’s brother with the butcher, the vividly disreputable one who sat in the chair in his bloody apron with his boots off and his fat, pale feet sticking out onto the walk, laughing at everything that anyone said to him.
This annoyed her brother. “Most people are gullible,” he said. “It’s a survival instinct. Because they aren’t strong like we’re strong. The thing she can’t see is that for actually wanting to know, she’s one of the stupidest ones.”
Sometimes, watching her brother, their mother wore the queerest expression, a mix of confusion and irritation, as if she did not quite know what who he was, what to call him, how they were related, or how he had ended up sitting on the couch in the living room in his gray school suit and cap even on a Sunday, carefully oiling the strap of his slingshot with a cloth, but the answer was right there, so close, she could almost catch it in her fingers.
“What’s that butcher to your brother?” their mother wanted to know. She jerked the hairbrush through a snarl in D’s hair.
“I don’t know,” said D, trying not flinch, and answering honestly, even as she hoped, that if she were loyal, he would eventually tell her.
They departed the Museum together, splitting up outside: her lieutenant to the left, toward his next committee meeting, and D, to the right, to the tram stop, and the line that would take her home to the apartment she shared with a girl who studied at the Medical College. D’s path brought her past the wreck of the Occult Collection building. In the lean-to of fallen beams, inside the conjurer’s closet, she saw an unidentifiable animal scurry. The stench of smoke had dissipated.
While she waited at the stop, a street performer, a man with a rubbery face and a stovepipe hat, strummed a guitar and made everyone laugh by singing a song about a penguin and waddling. Miss Clarendon, the teacher with the sheet of auburn hair and the missing fiancée, approached. D greeted her. The teacher said hello, but sat down at the end of the far bench, head low over her purse, snapping and unsnapping it, as if she hoped that some lost thing might materialize if she searched enough times. It occurred to D that maybe Miss Clarendon had been following her, though she couldn’t say why, except that the teacher had come from the same direction. The tram arrived, dragging a limp corkscrew of steam from its exhaust pipe.
A few nights later D couldn’t sleep. She left her apartment and returned to the Museum.
Screams from next door at the former embassy: “Please!” someone begged and there was a crack of gunfire, and no more was heard from that voice. Other voices cried out, but following two more cracks there was silence.
There was a game her brother invented called, “Stray Cat.” In this game, he would wait in a dark place—behind a door, say—and then, when either their mother or father or the nurse passed by, leap out and yowl and paw at their legs. If they hit you to get you off, you won.
From the window across from the sawmill she watched the soldier—the bare-chested one from before—lug out another large bag, and another, and a third bag. This time he wore his shirt. Though it was dark she could tell that the shirt was sticking wetly to his torso. He stopped by the retaining wall, the bags piled at his feet. D thought he was listening, aware of her, but she didn’t move. Why don’t you move? she asked herself, and stayed right there, continuing to not move. D realized, then, that she wanted to see his face, and the desire was more important to her than any sense of self-preservation; because even though she had seen it before, seen his great beard and caught a flash of his deep-set eyes, D had the sudden implacable feeling that if he were to look up now, raise his face to find her in the window, there would be no face, just a black hole. The idea held her still, while at the same time, inside, she felt like she was tipping forward, turning fast and tilting forward, like a spun coin.
He went back inside the former embassy without looking up at her window.
D wandered the museum. On the third floor she examined the splayed pelts tacked to the walls of the animal skinners’ hut; the fur was as brittle as the teeth of a comb. Close by, the skinners, burly waxwork men draped in furs, ate waxwork meat off the waxwork bone and warmed themselves at a black pit that had never held fire. Seated cross-legged in a nest of hemp strands in a corner of the fourth floor was an old woman waxwork. Her ragged dress was spread around her and she was contentedly winding rope. D bent to study the ancient grooves in the cordeur’s fingers, the webs of wrinkles that radiated from her bright eyes. There were no unhappy workers at the Museum.
She found herself at the massive, oaken, glass-topped display case of drill bits. There were keys to all the display cases on the key ring that her lieutenant had given her when she took over as curator. D opened the case of drill bits. She ran her fingers along their threads. The biggest bit was as long as a sword and as thick as a lamppost; FOR BORING MINE SHAFTS, read the label. The smallest was as thin as a toothpick. Its label said, FOR TAKING SAMPLES FROM SMALL METEORITES. D took this tiny bit without thinking, slipped into her pocket, and locked the case again.
On the basement level there was a bunkhouse diorama. She pushed aside the waxwork of the sleeping fruit picker in the bottom bunk and slid under the wool blankets.
In the morning the three bags were gone from the courtyard. Flies circled around a dark splotch on the ground where the soldier had dumped them.
On both of his hands there were long, crimson scratches, puffy and infected-looking. “What happened?” D asked.
“It’s nothing. I just got a little too close,” her brother said, and yawned. He never worried, so D never worried.
Too close to what, though? A little after that was when he came down with the cough that was the first sign of his illness.
Never more than a dozen visitors passed through the National Museum of the Worker each day. D approached them with a basket to collect donations. Most of the visitors were old, meticulously choosing a penny or two from their wallets and plunking them into the bowl. They swayed in front of the exhibits and blinked, sometimes clearing their throats and nodding to themselves. It was, D thought, like they were running down a list in their heads of what they needed to do, but the list must have been short because the same elderly museumgoers came back day after day. She saw the anxiety in the way one scarecrow of a man stared and nodded and sniffled with a light cold, and at the same time rubbed the lapel of his worn jacket.
The coup itself had been almost entirely bloodless, more a pageant than a fight, the revolutionaries arresting the quivering state officials and tearing down statues in the parks, but now the military convoys rolled past all day. For the sake of her lieutenant D tried to think about the re
volution, to feel enthusiastic about it. It was hard, though—not that she cared about the old government. In the orphanage, after her parents died, a fat, rooster-legged personage with medals on his shoulders and a gold-tipped cane visited them. He had been a vice-mayor. They lined up in the dining hall so he could inspect them. He roughly ran his hand across a few of the children’s scalps, as if he could read them, like a phrenologist. With his cane’s gold tip the vice-mayor had raised the shirt of a skinny boy to grunt at the sight of his scrawny body. “You might teach them how to smile,” the man snapped to the mistress of the orphanage when he reached the end of the row. The vice-mayor had undoubtedly choked to death on a bone, or drowned in some pudding, or otherwise farted his last years ago, but she didn’t doubt that there were plenty of others like him in the government who wore medals on their shoulders and treated people like livestock, and if men of that type were having an uncomfortable few months, that was fine with D. But when her lieutenant talked about the Struggle, she couldn’t help flashing back to her first meeting with him. Before he had a rank, before he was Robert or Bobby or anyone particular, he had been a skinny boy pulling on his unruly hair with one hand, while he frantically ran the index finger of his other hand along the spines of books on a shelf in the university library, and moved from side to side and peered up and down, as if they were an optical illusion he was trying to solve.
There was a biology textbook that he needed for “a very, very important test,” he said.
D found it for him immediately: right there, filed in the correct spot, a finger tip away, but turned wrong, spine inward and pages out. The young man’s outrageous shout of relief—“That’s it!”—caused D to laugh in surprise and a hundred students had glanced up from their book-strewn tables to shame them down with a thunderous “Shhh!” The book was right there, though. They had wonderful ideas, D supposed, her lieutenant and his comrades, but what if they couldn’t see what was right in front of their faces?
“Mother asked me about the butcher again. What should I tell her?”
“Whatever you like.”
They arrived at a wide, low building with a blue door. Painted on the door was a silver triangle. There was a sign posted at the foot of the path that led to the up to the door: National Occult Collection. It was spring and the breeze was scented with the rhododendrons and crocuses that spilled from the window troughs of the embassies and the government buildings that made up the neighborhood. Her brother told her to wait.
D watched him knock on the door. The door opened, and her brother handed the book he had been carrying to an unseen figure within. When he came back, he read D’s expression. “We have an arrangement, all right.” He sounded amused.
“What sort of an arrangement?”
“He lets me use his alley.”
“For what?”
“To practice my slingshot.”
“Will you take me there?”
Her brother flexed his hand. The scratches had swollen to up to purple seams. He caught her gaze and jammed the hand into his pocket. “Sure.”
The alley was back in their neighborhood, running alongside the butcher shop. Out front, as was often the case, the butcher was perched, barefoot, on a stool with his leg crossed over his knee. “Not a bad day, eh?” he winked at her brother. The butcher’s toenails were the color of lemon rinds.
“Oh, I guess it’ll do,” said her brother and made a large, open-handed gesture, like a conjurer who has made something—a handkerchief, a coin, a lady—vanish into the air.
The butcher went heh-heh-heh and D’s brother led her into the alley. Damp leaves of newspaper were plastered across the floor of the alley. There was a bucket set by a back door. D peered inside. There was a small pile of gray bones soaking in cloudy water.
“Were they cows or pigs?” D asked.
Her brother broke out coughing. He made a brushing gesture. “You’ve seen. Run home now. I have things to do.”
Next door in the ruins Salvador the Gentle’s closet stood black inside the grip of the fallen beams. On clear days, in the late evening, the lowering sun cast its shadow out from the wreckage, like a clock hand with the arrow snapped off. D wondered how the randy old sleight-of-hand artist had done it, created the illusion of the switch, made love to his volunteers.
Set inside a tall glass cabinet was a model foundry. You inserted a coin, pressed a button, and watched as painted figures on rails raked the coin onto a fire, where it melted down; at which point another team of painted figures tipped the molten stream into a mold shaped like a cat, and a last group of mechanical ironworkers doused it with water from tiny buckets. It took about five minutes. The machine ejected the little cast metal cat for a souvenir. D thought the cat resembled a mouse at least much as it did a cat. She used the donations to make herself a pack of cat-mice and set them along the base of her bed in the bunkhouse, where she had begun to sleep most nights. In front of the bunkhouse diorama D had drawn a curtain and pinned up a CLOSED FOR REPAIRS sign.
Some nights there were more screams from the former embassy and sometimes laughter now, too, mighty bellowing laughter, the kind of laughter you heard at weddings during the toasts. Other nights there were dull, distant thumps—cannon fire. There was a homesteading exhibit in the Museum; here visitors could test their mettle by using a wooden mallet to drive a wooden pike into a bed of sand, like a real fence builder. The invisible explosions sounded like a muffled versions of such strikes, but D could only imagine what the blasts were hammering into the ground. They came from the south, close against the hills the ringed the city.
Her lieutenant related that the revolutionary brigades had suffered a series of setbacks in the field. In rural areas many of the uneducated people were inexplicably loyal to the aristocracy. “They’ve poisoned wells,” he said, “killed their animals, pulled apart sections of train track—” The lovers had fucked on the glass surface of the creek bed where nearby smiling waxwork prospectors panned, boot-deep in the fake water, and on the bank, their smiling waxwork women draped laundry on boulders. D had almost enjoyed it for once. Her lieutenant had been unusually subdued, not once telling her what a lovely whore everyone thought she was, or how after the fighting was over he ought to become a teacher, and lecture to great halls on the proper way to fuck her, or any of the other things that D mentally predicted he would say. Now they were lying on their sides atop the glass. She pondered the pebbles beneath the transparent floor, studded with bits of false gold, and twisting past, hung by bits of white wire, tiny brown minnows with dusty black eyes.
The same sickness took her parents soon after. Men removed them in sheets, too, her mother’s hair dangling from the end of one bundle, like the rotted silk from the end of a cornstalk. But the sickness had not wanted D. Her time to know—what her brother hunted, what he had come too close to and been wounded by, whose face he glimpsed—did not arrive. So, D waited: waited first in the orphanage halls where the weak girls cried and fought and made treasures of worthless junk just to have something for themselves, and waited then at the college, in the highest, deepest stacks of the library, where the oldest books were made from animal skins and even the deans could not translate them; and she waited now, while the stuffed fish hung from wires just on the other side of the glass.
“—like my parents, too stupid to understand that the government leaves them just enough to live, and when the crops are poor, not even that—”
“—hey,” said D, “get dressed, I have an idea. Something fun.”
She showed her lieutenant how the heads of the waxworks were mounted on posts that protruded from the necks. D then demonstrated how, if you unhitched the clasp, they came right off.
“Why hello there, young fellow,” he said to the head of a prospector she had plopped into his hands. “I think you would look very nice on—yes! On her!” Her lieutenant plucked off the head of a burly washe
rwoman and stuck the prospector’s head on the female body. D giggled and clapped her hands. “Let’s do them all!” They dashed from exhibit to exhibit, their arms full of waxwork heads, swapping the heads of lumberjacks planing logs at the sawmill with the heads of miners riding in a coal cart; changing out the seamstresses’ heads for the shipbuilders’ heads; the shipbuilders’ heads for the bricklayers’, and the bricklayers’ for the seamstresses’.
To amuse each other, they conducted conversations with their creations, ventriloquizing for the waxworks:
Her lieutenant spoke with a bricklayer who found himself stuck on a matron’s body: “Well, word ye jes look at me wunnerful tits!” “Yes, well, they’re very nice, but let’s not get distracted. You’ve got a lot of sewing to do.” “I b’lieve I’ll sew me a bag fer my tits and take ’em home!” “Listen here, you devil! You’ll do no such thing. Those are museum tits and the museum is a national trust. Those are the people’s tits.” “No, no, no! My tits, is what they is! Mine what to swaddle an ah’dore to me art’s cont’en!”
D tried to calm down the seamstress who found herself on a scaffold, tapping pins into a bulwark: “What’s this then now, a damn boat? I don’t e’en like to cross a bridge, now do I, and I’m s’posed to make a boat?” “I know you’re upset, madam, but we’ve all got a job to do. Everyone works their share now.” “My share’s all well and good, it is. Trouble is, if’n you put me in charge of boats, people’ll be gettin wet or drownt.” “I’m sure if you just listen to your supervisor’s directions everything will be fine.” “My sup’rvisor! Her up there? That’s Matilda! Why, she’s no better’n me when it come to water! Matilda don’ e’en warsh but once a week, now do she?”
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 31 Page 8
