The Tyrant

by Jacques Chessex

  But his students gave admiring shouts from the other side of the ramp. The girls called to him; he went around the pits and joined them before an odd and cunning spectacle that made him forget the image of the bloody scene. A big she-bear good-naturedly nudged three cubs with her snout. The white-collared cubs trotted, rolled over, jumped on one another, tripped one another, abruptly ran away, galloped, came back under the paws and snout of their mother with obvious pleasure. The she-bear swung her head right and left, watching over her offspring, apparently laughing. Yes, everyone could see it: she was laughing, her muzzle opened for a blissful enchantment that delighted the onlookers. A swipe of her paw sent one of the young flying like a ball against the sandstone: astonished, perhaps in pain, the cub gave a raucous bellow and sat, dazed, in the sun, when its mother called to it with a kind of plaintive bleat.

  Jean Calmet stopped looking at the animals to turn towards his students. Leaning over the edge, glued to the stone, their nails instinctively digging into it, they followed the animals’ movements with extraordinary curiosity. Suddenly Jean Calmet felt himself grow pale; he was cold, nausea hurled a handful of acid into his stomach: on the other side of the Pit, outlined against the sky, intertwined, marvellous, Marc and Thérèse had appeared. They stood there, hugging each other; their hair streamed in the breeze, their well-attuned bodies looked alike, their heads leant one towards the other before the sparkling sky… Jean Calmet was unsteady. He closed his eyes. He opened them again. The couple was still there, as if to remind him of his failure the first time that he had slept with Thérèse. As if to remind him of his age. To keep him away from the little room in La Cité. To forbid him to see the girl again…

  Despondent, he felt in his heart and his mind all the knives of jealousy. It made him ashamed, because he was really in love and because he had tender feelings towards Thérèse and Marc. Yes, he was ashamed, that shame grieved him, but a confused clamour within him cried things that grew distinct, that became hard, that solidified disgustingly: “Impotent! Useless! Jealous! What are you waiting for to get out of the way once and for all?” He staggered under the insults. “To get out of the way! Do you hear, imbecile? You should have got it through your head long ago!”

  They gathered, they started to walk again through the little streets. The afternoon was turning a sepia gold: in the sky a tint of brown sugar, heavy, a bit soporific. They were about to reach a bridge guarded by obelisks when the class stopped and stared at a stupefying monument. Shouts and laughter mingled. Jean Calmet, who had been walking like a somnambulist for a moment, lifted his eyes and was struck with amazement: an Ogre was sitting at the top of the shaft of a fountain, devouring an already half-swallowed child whose bare buttocks and little dimpled thighs thrashed about on his bloody chest! Jean Calmet screwed up his eyes to see better: the scene was dreadful. Thick-set, his face broad, his mouth distended, immense, his wide-spaced teeth planted in the child’s back, the Ogre showed mute pleasure, and his flat nose, his blue eyes, the whole rictus of his face insulted the passers-by compelled to witness his crime. One realized, to see him so sure of himself, greedy and vigorous, that nothing could stop his odious banquet. The monster was comfortably seated, wearing a blood-red tunic and green breeches spotted with horrible, rust-like spatterings. His right elbow raised on high, with his huge paw he held the naked kid in his gaping, crimson mug. Under his left arm, a supply of fresh flesh: a plump little girl with long hair, her face distorted by screams and tears; poor little victim, all ready to be gobbled up at the next meal. In the Ogre’s belt, still on the left, a sack from which emerged the torsos of crying boys and girls. They were very pale, and their skin made a strange contrast with the killer’s coppery hide. The little boy had managed to get out of the basket as far as his belly, he was trying to escape, he made a terrific effort, he clung to the Ogre’s leg to help himself, and this useless attempt, the tears, the little body that was writhing added to the horror of the giant, whose feast nothing could stop. Another kid was hung from his belt, to the right, next to the butcher’s knife. This child also struggled, lashing out with his little legs against the knee of the monstrous character, who must have liked this gesticulation, who enjoyed it, who was impatient to taste that nice living flesh which was twisting in its bonds and in its baskets: that is why he always had his larder with him, securely lashed to his belt; the fresh meat lived and moved on his own hip, against his own skin, whetting his appetite, provoking his laughter. The Ogre’s mirth! For Jean Calmet had just made an appalling discovery: the Ogre looked like his father. Could the Ogre be his father, a new image of his father risen up from the crematorium to warn him again and persecute him? It was the doctor all right, those broad shoulders, that strong back, that jovial, cruel thickness of his whole body. It was him all right – that confidence in the face of disaster, that insolent voracity, those blue eyes defying the world like all-powerful fires, that laugh on his face and on his wide-spaced teeth under his big lips. Jean Calmet remembered the evening ritual, the hissing of the sharpened knives one against the other:

  “That child is so cute I’d eat him. I’m going to gobble him up raw!”

  And the grunts, the drools, the mimicry of impatience and appetite accompanied ferociously the sharpening, and the doctor’s big hand squeezed Jean Calmet’s throat, immobilizing him on knees as hard as those of the dirty statue…

  Jean Calmet realized that he had forgotten his students. They were having fun splashing one another with the water from the fountain; others, at the stand across the way, were buying postcards of the scene: Kindlifresserbrunnen they spelled out diligently. The Fountain of the Devourer of Small Children! The Fountain of the Cannibal! And Jean Calmet remembered Chronos, who had devoured his offspring alive, the fantastic Saturn swallowing his offspring alive, Moloch thirsty for the blood of innocent young men, the terrible tax of fresh meat that Crete paid to the divine Minotaur at the bottom of his labyrinth streaming with haemoglobin. Jean Calmet’s father had devoured him, too. Wolfed him down. Reduced him to nothing. He was filled with violent hatred for the Ogre-doctor, for all the other ogres who had massacred their sons, their children, the tributes constantly renewed with young flesh, minced meat, flesh of pleasure, cannon fodder, all that flesh that they had appallingly sacrificed generation after generation to live on, to enjoy, to thrive on, to aggrandize themselves! Gilles de Rais! Elizabeth Báthory, marten thirsty for wailing! And you, huntsmen of Leipzig and of Mayence, lying in ambush in your haunts and staring at the night with a pink eye; you, the cutters of girls, the prowlers of operating rooms, the robbers of children, whom you shove into your game bags in the dusk of the evening! You, marrow-swallowers, blood-suckers, all the vampires, all the butchers, dismemberers, sawyers, cutters of chubby big-bottomed kids, lickers of bloody dimples, slaughterers of angels, disembowellers of virgins sticky with vermilion! Staring at the statue of the killer, Jean Calmet saw stretching out a whole gallery venomous and foaming with red. And his father was the last monster of that abominable line! And Jean Calmet had had to be handed over as youngest son, bound hand and foot, completely at the Ogre’s mercy, weak, motionless, impotent!

  Impotent.

  That was it all right. By terrifying him, devouring him, seizing him like an object that he ground up, that he bled as he pleased, the doctor had tried to sterilize him to keep his potency as father, as hard authoritarian chief, which he had to retain at any cost. His brothers had fled. His sisters had fled. He had remained in the Master’s power, he, Jean Calmet, and he had been murdered.

  Now the young people were growing impatient; evening was falling on the city. They headed back to the station. Turning around, Jean Calmet threw a last look at the Ogre, who went on imperturbably with his ignoble feast.

  His heart was full of bitterness and rage. What an indignity. Thérèse and Marc were walking ahead of him. They had their arms around each other’s waists. Jean Calmet watched their slim buttocks move in their identical jeans, their slender, muscular legs,
their tread. For a moment, he imagined the two young people handed over to the priests of Moloch or Baal. He saw Thérèse, half-naked, gesticulate in the Ogre’s wicker pack. He heard Marc’s cries as the giant squeezed his throat, crushed it, as Saturn does in his cavernous maw! The boy’s legs moved grotesquely in mid-air; streams of his precious blood ran over the tunic of the famished executioner! And if he doesn’t die as an executed prisoner, he will wind up as dust, like the others, or in a hole, rotten; his limbs will come off and sink in the wet earth. Poor Marc. It’s just a question of years. Baal or the scythe…

  With these sad thoughts, Jean Calmet recognized his jealousy, and he was humiliated by their baseness. Thérèse had not said a word to him all day. Nor given him a single look. He came back to his loneliness as to an inborn defect. Who would ever give him back his life? He became an ogre in his turn. He began to muse over sacrifices, he heard the cracking of the bones of the ones who had rejected him, he buried them nastily… He was afraid, he was cold. They reached the station. The street lights went on. The beautiful children sang as they boarded the train.

  Part IV

  The Immolation

  I have said to corruption: Thou art my father…

  Job 17:14

  ONE EVENING, SOME TIME LATER, Jean Calmet was drinking a beer alone at the Lyrique when the café door opened on a person he avoided seeing, and whom he pretended not to recognize, afterwards, when the other, from his seat, would not stop looking at him, trying to attract his attention. The fellow had ordered a beer, too; he drank with a hurried look, paid, slipped back into his raincoat: just as he was leaving, he made a sudden turn and came up to Jean Calmet, his hand outstretched.

  “You remember me, don’t you?”

  Jean Calmet remembered him all too well.

  It was that skinny fellow, George Mollendruz.

  Mollendruz, the leader of a tiny Hitlerian group that had had trouble with the police.

  Mollendruz, who put out – at his own expense – a little neo-Nazi newspaper, The True Europe, in which a few persons, nostalgic for the pomp of pre-war Nuremberg and for the final solution, belched forth.

  Annoyed, Jean Calmet stretched out a reticent hand to him. The other took it – his palm was moist – and sat down without waiting for an invitation.

  “You’ll have a beer, won’t you, Monsieur Calmet? This round is on me!”

  His voice attempted cordiality, but, for a few moments, Jean Calmet felt an anguish that continued to grow: Mollendruz’s faded eyes were staring at him with disagreeable curiosity, his hands trembled continually… Mollendruz made sad company: people took him for a miserable, feebleminded character. Jean Calmet had known him in the bistros when he was a student. They were about the same age. In those days, Mollendruz campaigned in a Lake Léman section of the Arrow Cross Party, and he had displayed photos of Hitler before the eyes of mocking groups of people. Nobody knew exactly how he made a living nowadays: a reporter, he sent articles to extreme-rightist newspapers in Belgium. He had been fired from several private schools, where he had persisted in preaching fascism and European revolution to the sons of nabobs of the automobile and pharmaceutical industries who had just flunked their bac in Lausanne. To subsist, he must have given some sort of private lessons at his home…

  Mollendruz forced a smile.

  “You’re still at the Gymnase?”

  Jean Calmet was horrified by that question.

  “They still haven’t fired me,” he replied, without pleasure. It seemed to him that Mollendruz was soiling his students by making him talk about his work.

  “Have you read our newspaper lately, Monsieur Calmet?”

  Jean Calmet had not read it.

  “That’s odd,” resumed Mollendruz. “We send it to all official buildings, and, what’s more, each teacher gets his own copy at home. That’s what you call information, don’t you agree?”

  He added with a fishy smile:

  “We’re forced to struggle against the leftist propaganda that barrages the teachers’ room all day long…”

  Jean Calmet listened to that language with amazement. The other man continued, screwing up his eyes, his hand trembling:

  “There’s just a handful of us, but I have confidence – our day will come! We can’t let Europe go to ruin because of the undermining of irresponsible Maoists and anarchists who are governing under Nixon’s protection. Just about everywhere, groups like ours are organizing or reorganizing. In Paris, in Brussels, in London and, of course, in Germany, people are reacting, people are becoming aware, they’re arming, they’re answering, they’re taking a stand! No submitting any more, Monsieur Calmet! What we need is a core of determined men, militants who aren’t afraid of violence. Remember the friends of Hitler and the SA in Munich when they organized their propaganda meetings in the beer halls. There were machine guns in the four corners of the hall, Monsieur Calmet; opposing parties were beaten unmercifully! They didn’t waste any time! When I think that any little communist hooligan can get up and speak wherever he wants…”

  In his excitement, the shrill voice rose in pitch, the little bat eyes gleamed in their ugly pink lining.

  Had he been drinking? wondered Jean Calmet. No, it’s his nerves, he believes everything that he’s saying. I’m going to leave. I’m going to stand up, refuse to shake hands, walk out of this café! Awful guy. That is what Jean Calmet was thinking, but, nevertheless, he did not stand: oppressing confusion insinuated itself in him, began to weigh heavily, immobilized him under Mollendruz’s gaze. The Lyrique was crowded, it was hot, the conversations and laughter had created a hubbub in which Jean Calmet was paralysed like an insect in birdlime. Mollendruz had fallen silent now. Jean Calmet lined up some coins on the table.

  “Leaving so soon?” said Mollendruz with regret. “Really? Won’t you come up to my place for a drink? Between colleagues… I live right nearby, you know. You haven’t even let me pay for my round.”

  What was it about Mollendruz? Baseness? Jealousy towards a fellow teacher in the public-school system? A fear charged with emotion, above all, a shabby terror, a trembling at the centre of his being that made him throw pink-eyed glances around him, quickly inspect the back of the café, spy on a neighbour, glance towards the glass partition of the telephone booth; then his eyes would come back to Jean Calmet and stare at him for a fraction of a second with a pitiable, interrogatory malice. That was it, all right. Mollendruz wondered if his act was going to work. A quarter to twelve. The café door was open on the rain, the waiters were asking people to pay their bills, the last customers put on their overcoats at the exit. Mollendruz persisted.

  “Come on up to my place for a quick beer!”

  Bad feeling. Embarrassment. Anger towards himself. But from a kind of unconscious mimicry that he was the first to despise in himself, Jean Calmet found himself unable to oppose Mollendruz, or even to leave him then and there. The other tagged along. They went out together.

  “Really, I live right nearby,” repeated Mollendruz in the cold rain. “Just a quick glass of beer…”

  They climbed the Avenue Georgette. The last trolley buses were going back to the depot, their tyres splashing the pavement.

  Two minutes. They reached Villamont.

  “It’s here,” said Mollendruz, and he pushed open the door of a building, the ground floor of which was occupied by a florist’s shop. As he went by, Jean Calmet noticed the horrible flesh-coloured hothouse cyclamens under the two floodlights of the shop window.

  Mollendruz opened his door, turned on the light, pulled his guest by the arm to the threshold of an office and showed him in with ceremony.

  “Look, Monsieur Calmet, look! All that must mean something to you, right?”

  Jean Calmet stood there stunned, unable to move forward, while the sweat began running under his arms and on his brow.

  At the back of the room, under a Third Reich flag topped by an eagle with outspread wings and the swastika, was a huge photograph of Hitler with an extraord
inarily vivid expression. Then he saw a collection of trophies and decorations, among which he noticed military crosses, battalion flags, weapons, photographs, several insignia of principalities…

  Mollendruz had put his hand on Jean Calmet’s shoulder:

  “Well, Monsieur Calmet, does my little museum astonish you? Look at that. Extremely rare. I know some people who’d give a fortune for that item.”

  And he spread out on the table a black armband edged with silver over which were traced Gothic letters of greyer silver:

  SS – Schule Braunschweig

  “One of the two schools of the Waffen SS, Monsieur Calmet. Think of that!”

  And he caressed the black fabric, ran his fingers lovingly over the relief of the sharp-pointed letters, held out the armband to Jean Calmet, who shivered as if he had touched a snakeskin, and put it back on the small table hurriedly.