by Ned Beauman
‘They were women and children. You admitted that.’
‘It wasn’t our land anyway. It was mostly in Poland. “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God.” Remember that? Romans, I think. “Leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written—”’ But then the Bible quoter cuffed him in the mouth.
Ever since he was in the SS, it had been an unwavering part of Meinong’s toilet each morning to slide a razor blade inside the left wing of his shirt collar instead of a silver stay, and at Erlösungfeld he hadn’t given up the habit any more than he had given up brushing his teeth. Now it saved his life. He waited until the noose had been tested and a stool put beneath it. When the Bible quoter on top of him shifted his weight in order to haul Meinong up, Meinong got one hand free. He slid the blade out of his collar, reached behind his head, and blindly made three quick slashes where he thought the Bible quoter’s face and throat might be. The Bible quoter shrieked and fell backward. Then Meinong was off and running through the cane fields.
He had assumed the Erlösungfelders would turn back once he was off their land. But they were like bushmen chasing an antelope. Never could he have imagined he would have to flee for so long. Minutes turned into hours, hours into days. He grew almost wistful for the embrace of the Soviet army. The chase became the house in which he lived: he ate there and rested there and once, at the height of his delirium, masturbated there. Sometimes he was almost sure that the farmers must have given up, but then a ruckus in the distance would tell him they hadn’t. They made no attempt at stealth, and sang hymns to keep their spirits up, so that he would hear them even when he was so far ahead that he couldn’t understand how they could possibly have stayed on his trail.
The end didn’t come until the afternoon of the sixth day. By then they were deep in the jungle, deep enough that you could feel the pressure of it rising in your eardrums. Instead of trying to lose the farmers in the wilderness, he wished he’d aimed for La Ceiba and taken the risk of trying to escape on a boat. The dirt and sweat and dried blood seemed to hang on him heavy as flannel, the skin beneath a Proterozoic mudscape of cuts and blisters and swellings and bites, an organ on his outside more livid and tender than any on his inside. Apart from the ants he picked off his arms there was nothing to eat around here but a few unripe papayas on the trees; yesterday he hadn’t been able to keep any food down, but today he didn’t seem to be throwing up any more, which he thought might be a bad sign, like when you’re so cold you stop shivering. He knew he couldn’t go on much longer. Every single step now was an epic in itself, a coin stolen from God’s inside pocket. His pursuers were close enough behind him that there was no question of sitting down against a tree to recover his strength. No question at all. But he did anyway.
When he opened his eyes again, the farmers were no more than twenty yards away, their number somehow reduced from four to three. He wondered about the death they would give him, and was grateful that because of their clumsy hands and limited imaginations it couldn’t possibly be as slow and precise and almost fugal as some of the deaths he had helped to give others.
Then bang, bang, bang, bang, and all three of them fell down. The reports sounded not unlike a Mauser. From out of the trees rose a feathery shockwave of birds.
Two small men came into view. They were clearly savages, with mahogany skin and black hair and bare chests decorated with necklaces. But they wore khaki field trousers and leather boots and carried bolt-action rifles. In a few seconds they would see Meinong. He had to get up. He had nothing left, absolutely nothing, and yet he refused to die. So he levered himself to his feet and, with the gait of a puppet being dragged across a stage, he shambled away. He heard more shots as he went, and he half-hoped one would hit him, but he kept running.
And so at last he came to the temple.
There was some sort of shanty town here, or perhaps two shanty towns – one spread up the stepped hypotenuse of the temple and the other across the flat field beside it – and dozens of people, fully clothed Caucasians, moving among the huts and lean-tos like peasants in the ruins of Rome. He could smell wood fires and stewing meat. The existence of the great stone wedge out in this impossible place might have inspired some awe or confusion in Meinong if he hadn’t been so distracted by the figure at the very top. Even from down here there was something about the figure’s posture that made it obvious he or she hadn’t just gone up there for the view.
‘Who are you?’
The sandy-haired fellow who stood in front of him had spoken in English. Kurt tried to remember the name on his forged ICRC papers. But he couldn’t. He was just too tired. ‘I am Hauptsturmführer Kurt Meinong,’ he said in a voice wizened almost to nothing by thirst.
‘Where did you come from?’
Kurt gestured behind him.
‘You came from the jungle?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you’re a white man. I mean, where did you come from before that? Did you come from … out in the world?’
‘Yes.’
‘We haven’t seen anyone from out in the world since … Well, since we got here. Eight years. It’s so damned strange to see you … So if you’ve been out there, you know what’s happened? Since we left?’
‘Yes.’
The fellow looked panicked for a moment. Called upon to ask a question, any question, his mind had naturally gone blank. ‘Uh, what about Hitler and Czechoslovakia and all that stuff?’ he said at last. ‘Was there a war? When we left they were saying there might be a war. You sound European. We haven’t had any news.’
‘No news?’ said Meinong, beginning to understand that this conversation might have consequences. To match the final physical and spiritual efforts he had just made, he would have to launch a final mental effort. He thought of a history of the Siege of Paris he’d read in which it was recounted that the worst trial wasn’t the famine or the shelling but simply the isolation from whatever was going on outside the city’s walls. ‘You’ve had no news? For eight years?’
‘Nothing whatsoever.’
‘Yes, there was a war,’ Meinong said carefully. ‘Russia invaded Poland in 1939. Then Japan made a surprise attack on the United States. Together Stalin and Hirohito hoped to take over the world.’
‘What happened?’
‘We beat them back.’
‘You fought? You personally?’
He wasn’t going to make the same mistake he’d made at Erlösungfeld. ‘For the German–American Alliance, yes. It was a long, awful war. At least fifty million dead.’
‘My God.’
Before this fellow could ask any more questions, Meinong pointed up at the top of the temple. Now that he’d completed the infernal triathlon, he was going to faint, and he wanted to know if anyone was going to intervene in the suicide. ‘Are you aware that—?’
But then the figure leaped out into empty air.
* * *
Around the same time Kurt Meinong arrived at the site, Elias Coehorn Jr. was holding a special evening breakfast in his bungalow. His three dining companions were his friend Irma Kittredge, New York Evening Mirror reporter Leland Trimble, and Walter Pennebaker, the former head bookkeeper from the Lollipop on 47th Street and the closest thing Coehorn had to a Secretary of the Treasury. The intimate gathering was to toast Pennebaker’s departure. Tomorrow he was going back to New York. For the very first time in the eight years they’d spent here, Coehorn was sending someone home. It was the cognac that had given him the idea.
If you didn’t count the vibration purges he used to undergo every two weeks in New York to guarantee a charmeuse complexion well into middle age, Coehorn had only ever made one long-term investment. One snowy afternoon in 1936, back when among his father’s templar order of personal accountants there were still at least a couple who could be tricked into advancing him cash, he’d been on his way to meet a friend whom he’d promised to compensate handsomely for kindling a symbolic funeral pyre in her apartment during her birthday party in o
rder to emphasise some rhetorical point that could not now be recalled. But on Park Avenue he’d bumped into another, older friend, freckled Brimslow Rennie. The Rennie family had lost everything after Black Tuesday and Coehorn hadn’t seen Brim in years.
Brim explained that the following morning he was sailing for France because he’d just purchased a small cognac distillery in Charente-Inférieure from its bankrupt alcoholic owner. ‘I’m going to turn the place around,’ he said through his lisp. ‘I’ll be in profit in four or five years for certain. The first thing I’ll do is buy back Mother’s pearls.’ What Rennie didn’t yet have, however, was money to replace the distillery’s rusty stills with modern equipment, and having found no investors in New York he was hoping that somehow he’d be able to raise it from his fellow passengers on the steamship. When Coehorn asked what he could expect in return for six crisp bills he happened to have in an envelope in his pocket, his friend replied that a three hundred dollar stake would get him six cases of cognac every New Year’s Eve for life, starting in 1946, the first year that the 1936 eau de vie would have aged in the barrels long enough to be worth drinking. Judging that if anyone could make a success of this, diligent Brim could, Coehorn handed over everything he had on him, went home pleased with himself, and then forgot about it for several years.
But on December 31st, 1945, during preparations for that night’s masked ball, it occurred to him for the first time that he hadn’t left any instructions to forward the cognac to Spanish Honduras. In fact, if he was out of touch for long enough, Rennie might conclude that Coehorn’s cognac could just as well be sold to someone else. And that was what got Coehorn wondering about what else had been going on his absence. He was now almost thirty-four and by now most of the padlocks would have come off his trust fund. Also, he was pretty sure that every five years or so his father was in the habit of updating his will. Before another New Year’s Eve passed he wanted to reassure everyone in New York that he was still absolutely in the process of exporting the temple to Braeswood and that as soon as he was finished he would return like Odysseus to take his revenge on the cognac’s other suitors and enjoy what was his.
Even if all he mailed north was some chunk of corbel that had broken off during the initial deconstruction, a paperweight of Mayan limestone, at least no one could deny that he’d made a start on the job. Like erosion by the elements it might be slow but it was also irreversible. All this time, he’d refused to allow even a single member of the expedition to leave the site, since Whelt already had a dangerous advantage of numbers, and he knew that if one guest slipped away from your dinner dance with the air of having something better to do then all the others would soon follow. But these days his rivals seemed so pallid and threatless, quivering up there on the steps like a cat stuck in a tree. So when it occurred to him that by employing Pennebaker as a courier he could be rid of him for a few months, that decided matters for good.
‘The question, obviously, is how he should present the history of the expedition when he gets back to New York,’ said Coehorn to his guests. ‘We can’t go into so much detail that it gets boring. We can’t narrate every minute of the eight years we’ve been here. Especially that early period – ’38, ’39 – there was so little of interest going on.’
* * *
December 2nd, 1938
Carrotwood Hospital
5600 Samuell Boulevard
Dallas, TX
United States
My love,
The last time I wrote you, they were still telling us they were going to take a sack of mail back to San Esteban which is the little town we came through on the way here where I met that bleaty witch lady I told about before, & they’d have it sent north. But now with everything that’s been going on Mr Rusk says there won’t be any mail going back to San Esteban for the time being. So I guess I’m just going to have to fold this letter up & file it in my jewelry box next to the first one.
In any case, I don’t even know if they let you read the letters I send, I’d venture they probably don’t, in fact I’d venture they certainly don’t, & even if they did I don’t know whether you’d be disposed to read them or whether on the contrary you wouldn’t even want to burn them in the fireplace in case by accident you took a breath of me in the smoke. So I can imagine you saying, Why for heaven’s sake do I even bother to write. Well, my love, my sweet Emmy Emmy Emmy, for the same reason I talk to you in my head most all the time, because I’d rather talk to you, not there to hear it, than talk to anybody else in the world, there to hear it or otherwise.
We’ve been here more than three weeks, & the shoot was only supposed to take two. So the real [illegible] of it is that if the folks from New York City had only let us put the temple back together temporary like we asked we could’ve been finished by now & everybody could’ve gone whistling on their way. But Mr Coehorn won’t budge. That poor perjinkity boy Mr Whelt looks like he’s stretched on a rack & every minute we fall behind schedule is another turn of the roller, & Mr Rusk ran out of smokeless tobacco a week ago so now he just chews leaves from the forest & they make his tongue swell up. I like Mr Rusk, he’s blunt most of the time but when you ask him about his old mother & her Persian cats waiting for him back home in Los Feliz you can see he’s got a soft heart underneath ha ha.
Mr Rusk says the insurance doesn’t cover more than a week of delays, so we’re out of the state of grace, & if there are any accidents now with the cast or the crew or the equipment then Kingdom Pictures won’t be compensated & the whole production might be in trouble, or even more trouble than it already is. But he says there’s still enough money in the budget to pay all this overtime, though he won’t say how much longer that’ll last & we all know Mr Coehorn’s daddy has more money than Kingdom Pictures & the Lord God put together so if it comes down to that sort of contest we can’t win.
The bigger hitch is the canned food we brought with us ran out pretty quick & we don’t have any natives to butler for us. So Mr Rusk is organizing posses to go out into the forest & get our food that way, which is just what the New Yorkers are doing too, except we go south & they go north. Lucky for us we have Bit Sewald the prop man, who made the bows & arrows on a caveman movie last year, but he doesn’t know a thing about hunting, & we also have Amos Fleming the actor, who doesn’t know a thing about making bows & arrows, but he’s been hunting since he was a baby he says.
I hear the New Yorkers sometimes come home with nothing but baskets of rotten fruit. But yesterday we got a slumgullion the cooks said was venison except then I heard a rumor that really it was some little wild piggies called tapirs rhymes with papers. Folks don’t like to be ignorant of what all they’re eating, especially for instance Miss Thoisy who plays Marla & wears her mink stole even in this heat. She was pitching a fit to Mr Rusk saying, Do you really expect us to eat whatever filthy offal you’ve dragged out of that forest. Thank heavens for Mr Aldobrand the Brit who plays Miss Thoisy’s ex-husband. Everybody likes him & he always smoothes things over. By the time he finished giving his speech everybody had decided it was real fun to eat like we were on a camping trip.
In any case I heard a whisper that back in Kansas our high-tone Miss Thoisy once nearly went to jail for stealing cabbages off a truck so she isn’t one to complain about making do, & believe you me the ones who say at seven o’clock they’d rather starve by half past eight they’re gobbling anything that’s left. It’s a little bland though because the natives took our salt & pepper.
Forgot to tell you we got a new recruit. Miss Burlingame who’s a Brit like Mr Aldobrand & an archaeologist or an anthropologist I can’t remember which or maybe both. She’s a sweetheart but so jumpy that sometimes you can’t even talk to her. She told me she came out here with the New Yorkers to study the temple but when she found out they were shipping it home she decided that wasn’t right, like those ladies from the Association for the Preservation of Southern Antiquities. She was hoping to study the natives too but there aren’t any so she told me sh
e’s studying us Americans instead, & I couldn’t tell if she was joking about that or not, probably not because she doesn’t make many jokes.
She wouldn’t be the only one studying. Mr Trimble’s always paying close attention. He’s the gossip man who came along to cover our shoot but he’s from New York & he doesn’t seem disposed to pledge allegiance to either of the flags. The first time you meet him you can’t help but take a liking to his applesauce but pretty soon you feel like a sucker that he ever fooled you like that. When there’s a mosquito in your bedroom & all night you think it’s crawling on your neck even when it isn’t there, well that’s how it is after you catch Mr Trimble watching you while you were unawares just once.
Oh Emmy do you remember the last time before they caught us. When the man on the radio was talking about all the ritzies in New York dancing the Half Doodle & we tried to dance it ourselves but we didn’t know the steps so we just swung each other around & I ended up on my back &
Better leave off because there’s a girl sitting there sewing & she’ll see me blush. But I promise I’ll write again soon. Even if I can’t send it. I love you Emmeline Sapp.
Yours forever,
Gracie
… Jervis Whelt sketches a plan for a second, bigger heliodon to calculate the position of the sun with respect to the position of his camera and his actors … Elias Coehorn Jr. lies prone in his hammock letting an ice cube melt on the back of his neck … sound engineer Wayne Dutch tries to sculpt, from memory, the head of his ex-fiancée out of wet clay … Leland Trimble strolls through the New York camp beside clarinetist Sandy Mitchell, reminiscing about New Orleans, a city he has never visited … crane operator Fales Apinews argues with crane steerer Emil Berg about whether it was William Powell or James Cagney who starred in The Public Enemy … Kermit Rusk braids liana bark into rope … Joan Burlingame feels guilty for biting her fingernails … assistant wardrobe ‘man’ Gracie Calix folds up the letter to her niece and puts it in her jewelry box …
