Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  One autumn my friend Arild took me here, so that I could write this for you; thus I seem to see our Trench Ghost settling in the planked underchamber on whose ceiling huge brown spiders, slumbering, were awakened by Arild’s flashlight, and writhed furiously, as if about to plop down on our heads. We found cylinders of what might have been poison gas; and if that is what it was, the Trench Ghost must have been happy, because Germans were even better at the manufacture of that than Italians.

  A guru once advised me: Find what is it that never sleeps and never wakes, and whose pale reflection is our sense of “I.” So I looked and looked; I hoped to discover the Trench Ghost, or at least to learn what his name might be—for it has always struck me that one defines oneself in part by naming others. What did he call himself, or what should I call him?— Arild said: From what I’ve read, ghosts cannot name anything. That’s one of the things that keep them dead.

  In the rubber waders that my friend provided, following his flashlight, slopping in stinking mud or clambering over some farmer’s rotting pallets, I descended various flights of concrete stairs to where the grasses and flowers ended, then came into the entrance tunnel which soon angled sharply right, then straight, then left, then straight again, to make it easier for the defenders to knock an intruder on the head. I groaned, then hooted like an owl; but the Trench Ghost did not reply. Each bunker was different, probably so that intruders could make no plan. And in each bunker, my painful feeling worsened. It was a nastiness in the chest, foul and cold, wet and evil; I could not get enough air. Failing to find the Trench Ghost (although Arild promised that he had seen him), I returned out into the sweet smell of manure and moss.

  9

  In the evenings he pretended to wet his feet in the oily puddle within the square parapet of the command bunker’s viewing-tower. Of course he had found the pit for the murdered slave laborers; sometimes he sank down there, “to get ideas” as he put it. He wondered whether any of his toy soldiers at Redipuglia had outfought the others, in which case the form or attitude of that survivor might teach him something about himself. He considered waging wars of one against many, and many against one, of riot, confusion and slaughter, because, as the ancients have said, the pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless. He hoped for a perfect realization as sharp as the knife-ridge along the top of an old helmet, or, failing that, for the expansion of his understanding, like ivy growing up between the snake-toes of a great fig which is busily cracking a Triestine courtyard’s flagstones. That three-angled slit of meadow and sea, sunk in the grass, seemed like a place to sink or even dig in, but no matter how deep he descended, he never found anything but dirt and stone. Concentric ring-tracks of concrete around the base of the vanished cannon led him to himself. Under a hill, a certain square concrete tunnel, closed up with stones by a farmer, tempted him to play at soldiers. Instead, he rose up under the grey sky, imitating a blackened pillbox. He asked himself: Am I this?

  Floating down the wet, rock-heaped steps into mud and rubbish, he said to himself: Where the grass, moss and dandelions stop, the darkness begins.

  He asked: Am I that?

  In an old map room from which the benches had not yet rotted, he read the German instructions and warnings painted on the walls. He tried to take them to heart.

  Sometimes he felt almost homesick for Redipuglia’s masonry of tiny karstic stones rather than these German slabs, but he told himself: I am not that place, at least not anymore.

  One foggy night as he hovered over the sea he wondered how it would be to return to Redipuglia and bury the enemy general deep beneath a concrete slab. By then he had read a waterlogged German field manual, so he comprehended that by some standards that action would render him as wicked as the father who buries his son alive. He had tried to be good, without certain result; so maybe he should be wicked. In the end he stayed at Tungesnes half a hundred years, building ever larger gamepieces whose faces he pretended were his.

  10

  Since the Second American Civil War is one of my favorite periods, I am happy to end this story then. The victory of the Afro-Creole Matriarchy, which resulted in the castration of all white American males below the age of twelve, and the liquidation of the rest, was cruel enough, no doubt, but my interest is limited to historical regalia, and you must admit that the ankh-medallions and bright pink uniforms of the Matriarchs, not to mention their sky-blue marching-banners of rampant Erzulie, deserve to be collected. At any rate, by the time the Second American Civil War began, the Trench Ghost had taught himself how to make giant steel soldiers which filled whoever commanded them with dreams of victory. Of course he helped both sides, and got rewarded as he deserved. The last I heard, he was overhovering a munitions factory in China. But since eternal stories do have a way of becoming tedious, it seems best to fire up some final episode which pretends to define the Trench Ghost in his “soul,” for his existence, like yours or mine, assumes a sort of self-discovery.

  During the Siege of Pocatello, which had now become a redoubt of white male power, the Trench Ghost was floating in the darkness, laughing, weeping and rubbing his hands. The chaplain, one-armed and marble-white, raised his bleeding head, staring out across the electrified wire, and the Trench Ghost imagined that he had seen him before. Indeed, perhaps he had, for, if people only knew, there are ghosts everywhere. A shell came screeching into the field hospital, while on all sides the Matriarchs chanted: Erzulie, Erzulie!— Another shell now killed the general. The chaplain lifted the microphone and shouted to the survivors: It is the body that is in danger, not you.

  Astonished, the Trench Ghost asked himself whether that could be true. He decided that it was.— In that case, he decided, I’ll never be in danger. I have no body.

  The next shell atomized the chaplain. The Trench Ghost said to himself: That man was in danger. Something happened to him. But nothing will ever happen to me.

  Then he asked himself: If that man was more than a body, then where is he? Why can’t I see him? Can he see me? Is he where I am now?

  And he began to search for the chaplain, as if he could hope for something. That was what led him all the way to China. How much more blood has darkened that dirt? In another century or two he might return to the Canal Grande in Trieste, because they say that every dead thing ends up in there . . .

  THE FAITHFUL WIFE

  1

  If you have never loved with such luminous fidelity as to await a dead lady at a crossroads at midnight, then the question of why it is that Romania produces fewer vampires now than in old times must seem insoluble to you. Timidity becomes its own excuse; and perhaps you have not dared even to see your own spouse naked, much less encoffined. Many there are nowadays who refrain from kissing a dead forehead. A wife dies alone in a hospital bed, in the small hours when the nurse sits down to sleep, while the janitor rests his chin on the handle of his mop. At mid-morning the husband peeks in to identify her; next comes the undertaker to nail her up, or, as may be, the coroner to slit her open. Ashes to ashes, promises the minister, but should she refrain from decaying in that fashion, who will be apprised of that wondrous miracle except for the true heart who comes to the crossroads at midnight to share a kiss? Satan, they say, can speak even from a rotting skull—a mere assertion seized upon by you who have never loved bravely. Insisting over the sad sighs of your conscience that you would not be able to distinguish her from Satan, you decline to visit your own wife, forgetting that loneliness is the Devil’s work—and what could be more lonely than a beautiful dead lady returning to the cemetery without a kind embrace from anyone? Let me tell you this: In Romania it was once not entirely unheard of for female vampires to glide home to their children; and in Greece the cobbler Alexander of Pyrgos died, became one of those swollen-bellied leather-brown monsters whom they call vrykolakas, and then, relying upon the discretion of a moonless night, crept back into the doorway of his much-adored wife, for whom he drew water untir
ingly. In the daytime, so that the children would not be afraid, he slept inside a certain oblong trunk which leaned up against the back of the closet; every night as soon as the young ones were all asleep his dear wife let him out, and he bent over his bench, returning their tiny shoes into good trim. As for him, he went barefoot and naked; his clothes had long since rotted off him; his yellow toenails were indistinguishable from hooves. Perhaps his skill had declined somewhat; he now lost tack nails or sometimes drove them in crooked, but his heart, let’s say, was correct. Sitting at his bench, counting scraps of leather with unmoving lips, he did as much as he could. One night when he stood at the well for his wife, with a bucket over each shoulder, the moon dashed out from the clouds to betray him; and so the neighbors came at high noon with blunderbusses, scythes, stakes and pitchforks. At that hour he was helpless, of course. They built a pyre outside the house, burned him, box and all, hacked up his curiously elongated bones, and raked everything down into that well, which they supposed his exertions must have cursed. They similarly disposed of his tools and stock (although one lad couldn’t help keeping a handful of shining rivets; he soon died of a nightmare pox). Next went the children’s shoes, and even the dried bouquet which this Alexander had first brought home from the graveyard. The way some tell it, his wife was tearless; the children had been having nightmares anyhow. It is reported when the saviors came in (not very politely, I’m afraid), she even might have pointed to the closet—wordlessly, in case he could hear. On the other hand, it could have been that her love for this Alexander survived his demise, in which case she knew enough to stay on the good side of the Church.— At any rate, a week after the vampire’s removal there came a plague to Pyrgos. How could anyone blame Alexander’s harmless ashes? Besides, nobody dared to drink from that polluted well, which, so some asserted, emitted a miasmatic cloud (people can always be found to speak badly of the dead).

  2

  The story now turns to Bohemia, where a sad paterfamilias named Michael Liebesmann, with three young daughters in attendance, watched his dear wife’s coffin descend into the grave. All the neighbors were there, of course; even the butcher was weeping; I wonder if she owed him money? The priest gave a particularly fine sermon, and in signification of another kind of future consolation, there was visited upon Michael the full-lipped yet narrow smile of his widowed neighbor Doroteja, who wished to become his second wife. At the end, as was customary in their region, the members of the bereaved family masked themselves, and returned home circuitously, in order that the abandoned corpse could not follow them.

  According to the astrologers, on that very night the moon had entered her seventh mansion, called Alarzach, which is good for lovers. And just before it set, while the children slept and Michael sat sadly in his doorway, his wife flitted back to him.

  3

  Among the reasons we ought to be grateful to death is that not until we lose the one whom we love can we feel how much we’ve loved her. Grief’s wound lets light in! According to the Book of Revelation, it is a very particular species of light. I refer you to that certain half-hour on a summer’s mid-morning in Torino when the charwomen are all finishing along the Corso Re Umberto, so that the floors of those squarish passageways they’ve tended, be they marble, mosaic-tiled or ordinary concrete, all glisten with comparable preciousness; and the walls, painted in burgundy and Naples yellow, achieve greater brilliance than they ever will again (until tomorrow, tomorrow); this goes especially for their far ends, which hint of sunlit courts. For we dwell within ourselves, losing sight, as Plato says, of the darkness; and when Death creeps up silently behind us on his bony tiptoes, strangles our cohabitant, and wrenches her outside of our flesh, we cannot but see that golden morning beyond us, which most of us fear more than Death himself. The light is nameless, while the wound is called loneliness. In time we teach ourselves to forget the light, straightening up within our bodies so that our soul-faces resume residence within our skulls; and that clotting gash in the chest (not mortal this time, evidently) admits the light only vaguely now; anyhow, it’s so far below our chins as to pose no inconvenience;* and the charwomen set down their buckets, stretch, massage their aching hips, shield their gazes with dirty sweaty hands and peer down those corridors which they’ve mopped for ever so many thousands of times; and while the light remains as hurtful as ever, the tunnels and corridors have dulled now, and the charwomen turn back into themselves, permitting me to do the same; in short, I follow a pair of immaculate policemen as we cross the Piazza Solferino untroubled by the red traffic signal. Such is light; such is life; and so the philosophers explained to me while we sat beneath Italian flags in Torino; and a double-chinned lady trolled through her magenta purse without looking, while a man in very dark sunglasses picked her pocket.

  4

  In short, Michael was lucky to get his wife back after bereavement taught him how to value her. But could he remember how precious she was?

  5

  Her eyes shone dully at him like copper coins in an algaed pool. She seemed very weak. Her cerements were stained with dirt, urine and blood. He took her hand, which resembled cool yellow marble. No one else was out, it being, appropriately, the witching hour. Tenderly he conveyed her to a secret place in the river-reeds, stripped her and himself, and bore her into the water, squatting down to lay her across his knees, with his right arm cradling her neck and his left supporting her ankles, and so he held her, singing her name to her while the filth oozed out to darken the water downstream. He rocked her in his arms, combing clean her long hair. Frantically kissing her drooping, bloody wrists, supporting her drooping head, he whispered loving secrets into her ear. Finally, he carried her to the grass and laid her across his lap. He massaged her with chicken-fat, arnica and lavender. Then he pulled her Sunday dress back over her, lifted her into his arms, and conveyed her into the hayshed where the children would not see her. In the corner where the forage was freshest and softest he laid down a bedsheet, which he tucked around her, then walled her away behind heaps of hay. Her eyes shone like candles, because she knew how much he loved her.

  6

  He kissed her and kissed her, fearing that she had fled him. At last she reopened her eyes.

  He asked what death was like, and, just as the lid of an anthropoid Egyptian coffin slowly levitates, at first proffering nothing but a wedge of darkness, no long brown mummy-fingers yet, she parted her lips to speak. Terror poisoned him. She said, almost angrily: Are you sure?

  Yes, Milena, I wish to know—for your sake . . .

  Very well. You’ll find yourself choking in your tomb, however large it might be. Even an Emperor learns that his sepulcher is no refuge.

  What is it, then?

  A torture chamber to kill the dead.

  Upon her breath was the bitter smell of sand. As he stood appalled, she sought his hand, whispering: Save me; don’t make me go back there! Do you promise?

  I promise.

  Thank you, husband.

  Now tell me what happened to you.

  Nothing.

  And then what?

  Then suddenly I missed you so much that it was worse than dying. I was blind and paralyzed, but aware. I wanted to be dead and not yearn for you, but I couldn’t be, and if I had been, the grave would have begun torturing me again. Then I felt a pain in my right breast as if a rat were eating me; and worms bored into my eyes. Through the holes they had made, I could see, and through the hole in my breast, my heart could drink from the moon. So I came to life again. See, Michael—feel my heart!

  She laid his hand on her yellow-white breast, smiling pitiably.

  Can you feel it beat?

  Yes, he lied, kissing her blue lips.

  Michael?

  What is it, darling?

  I think the sexton stole my wedding ring.

  Let him keep it.

  What will we do?

  I don’t know, he said. But he d
id know the following: Since he loved her, he would not return her (at least not prematurely) to that, her coffin-prisoned head staring up forever into vile darkness.

  7

  But then matters got worse, for Milena said: It’s about to get light. I need to hide—

  God’s sake, what do you mean?

  To sleep in my grave, until nightfall.

  With the coffin-lid pressing on your face?

  Yes. But I won’t know it.

  If I make you a new coffin, can you sleep at home?

  Yes, but if anybody finds out—

  I can’t bear to be apart from you, and you under the earth.

  Yes, yes; I’m going now. Michael, I love you; I’m going now . . .

  That night she returned to him. By then, he had built a wooden box to her measure, which of course he knew by heart.

  8

  Usually she awoke shortly before dusk, but she preferred not to be present until the Blessing of the Lamps. They had agreed not to tell the children, at least not until they were older.

  Sometimes he peeped in on her in late afternoon, when he could not bear to wait anymore. At that time her open eyes wore that lost gaze pertaining to the faces of marble statues. Taking her thus unawares gave him an erotic feeling he could hardly resist, but as he bent down to kiss her, she seemed almost to squirm and grimace, as if his presence were disturbing her; her mouth gave off a bad smell. In the morning, as he discovered, she presented a far more hideous appearance. It was as if at dawn she relapsed into an utterly corpselike state, then slowly over the daylight hours regained whatever it was she needed to live. Once he understood this, he would no more have spied on her (at least, not too often) before the sun was waning than he would have watched her in the outhouse.