“My night,” said Rat, turning from his reflection and tucking into breakfast, “was not out of keeping with the others, though I wonder if I haven’t seen something similar on Star Trek. I was an Oriental girl.”
“Indeed, sir?” said Cummings. “How inscrutable.”
“A bit of a brain,” said Rat, with his mouth full.
“You must have found it a novel experience, sir.”
Rat cocked an eyebrow at his large-headed retainer. “I’ll overlook that, Cummings.”
“Sorry sir. A feeble attempt at humor and a liberty that I should not have allowed myself. My apologies.”
“Listen!” said Rat, feigning listening. “Hear that?”
Cummings listened intently. A variety of tropical birds amidst the flora were exercising their vocal chords to no particular purpose. A balmy breeze was meandering through the palms, slapping insouciantly at the leaves. In the distance, a volcano hissed like a hatbox full of snakes. These were all familiar sounds. There was nothing new.
“I hear nothing, sir,” he said.
“Exactly,” said Rat, returning his full attention to his breakfast. “That your attempt at humor is met with silence this soberingly profound must tell you something.”
Cummings left earlobe reddened slightly. “Point taken, sir. Once again, I—”
“Stow it, my good man,” said Rat. “We live and learn.”
“So we do, sir. An observation I shall take to heart.”
“You would do well to do so.” Rat fell into thoughtful mastication. “Or is that so to do?”
“Grammarians, sir, would mark the latter with a gold star.”
Rat chewed and nodded, which action aided the absorption of this tidbit by his mental paraphernalia. “As to last night; it’s left me more to distill than a Russian peasant with a cartload of potatoes.”
“Indeed, sir?”
Rat nodded and chewed. “It’s got me thinking about God.”
Cummings arranged a bundle of bracken in a corner by the window. “I am sure He is pleased with the attention, sir.”
“What do you make of Him, Cummings?”
Cummings stopped what he was doing and turned toward his master. “I confess to having deliberated the matter a good deal since my arrival upon the island, sir. One is apt, when faced with such . . . exigencies . . . to mull the purposes of the Eternal Mind. I find two axioms most illustrative of my conclusions, as of this date. First, that He is all in all. Second, of more contemporary vintage, that He works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.” He returned to his work. “Either of these may, of course, be dismissed as cliché, which they are. But what is cliché but truth oft repeated? I find them, nevertheless, descriptive of my feelings on the matter.”
“All in all,” Rat echoed. “That seems the pit at the center of this latest bit of fruit. All in all. Undefined by borders of any kind. Spanning dimensions, and time, and levels of perception as completely as the Wide World of Sports spans the globe. I mean, if He isn’t everywhere, He’s nowhere. Right?”
“I would not challenge the assertion, sir. If there is anywhere He isn’t, then that is a place without God, which would give the lie to the statement that He is all in all.”
Rat ate a potato. “There was a lot about technology, too. It has no limits of its own, you know.”
“Unlike water, or fire, or air, which are governed by the principles that define them, you mean, sir?”
“As far as I follow you, yes.” said Rat. “Technology can be defined as that before which natural boundaries fall. I mean the boundaries we imagine the natural world to impose. Once it was pretty widely agreed that man couldn’t fly or remove a Band-Aid from its paper wrapper without the aid of the little red string. Would you say?”
Cummings allowed this with a slight nod.
“I’m not sure its unchecked, unbridled expansion is a good thing.” The room had shape-shifted once again. A warm Mediterranean breeze sifted through the open windows. There were a few faded photographs on the rust-colored wall. A crucifix hung over the bed. An odd, outward-reaching spiral had been painted beside it, and completing the triumvirate, a ragged-edged Testa di Moru, the national flag of Corsica. Cummings was folding his charge between the sheets. The mattress, stuffed with aromatic leaves of asphodelus fistolosus, crinkled invitingly. “I’ll have to give it some thought.”
“Always a commendable response when confronted with weighty matters, sir,” said Cummings. He swept crumbs of naturally aged goat cheese from a small table of acacia wood at the bedside into his gloved palm.
A sink was set into a rough, board shelf across from the bed, and above this was the mirror in which the image of his soul was slowly absorbed by that of a swarthy man of advanced years. A man with pale blue eyes.
“May I be of any further service, sir?”
Rat was drifting slowly, inexorably, beneath the pool of slumber. “Did we have a good day?”
“An excellent one, sir,” Cummings replied. Was it Rat’s imagination or was he smiling?
“You’re not taking pictures, are you?”
“I would do no such thing, sir. Even if I possessed the necessary apparatus, which I do not.”
“That’s a comfort.”
“May your journey tonight be a pleasant one, sir,” said Cummings. He placed an aspirin bottle on the table. “Good night.”
Already Rat was thinking in Corsican. Speaking, actually. Swearing. Cursing his hands that trembled with the painful infirmity of arthritis, and the demonic science that had created the child-proof cap. He wondered, would he have time, in the throes of death, to sing a paghjella*, his . . .
Requiem for an Aspirin Bottle
The twelfth night
Petro Penciolleli was a tailor. A man of peace. Yet his heart, mind, and flesh were deeply engraved with ineradicable marks of violence. His long life had been defined by this insatiable disease. It opened and closed every chapter in the book of his life. Every precious memory was a monument to its waste, as voiceless and vacuous as the Stantara, the prehistoric menhirs that one came upon in the wild reaches of the island, staring at the world with sightless eyes. Violence had first taken his father, a shepherd, who had been tending his flock in the hills above Montemaggiore when bad fortune placed him in the way of a Clandestine’s bullet. It had infected his sons with the mad lust for revenge and, ultimately, impaled them on their own hatred. It had consumed his daughter and his wife, hurling them into early graves of heartbreak. Maurice, his closest friend, had been taken by it, victim of the blind, tribal rage of Mafiosi power-struggles.
It was a ravenous demon he knew well, in all its shades, all its clothing, cloaks, and veils. He knew its perverse music, from the schoolyard taunt, to the drunkard’s patriotic panegyric, to the ominous cadence of jackboots. He knew its unique percussion—the thump of the canon and the death-dealing rattle of the machine gun—the macabre accompaniment of hatred peeling back thin, brittle veneers of civilization to reveal the bloodlust beneath.
When the war came, violence put on a costume toward which he could amass all the hurt and fury that nightly shook the columns of his soul with impotent fists of rage. It was no longer a deranged abstract that might erupt anywhere at anytime, but a violence he could hate with a pure hatred, distilled and refined. A violence that proclaimed itself with flags and banners emblazoned with swastikas.
Petro enlisted with the Free French to fight it, not with a gun, but with the bandage, suture, and scalpel. When the 234th Quartermaster Battalion arrived in Aversa, Italy, he was already there. None of the Americans asked him if he was a doctor. They appreciated his ability to amputate swiftly and cleanly. He had a special facility for identifying which bloody body part belonged to which wounded soldier, and his skill with a needle and thread was almost miraculous. In a short time he absorbed the surgeon’s orthopedic knowledge and was, in every way, their equal.
Month after month, as the Allies drove northward up the boot of Italy, Petro followed.
Days on end he labored without sleep in the moonscape of foxholes or in makeshift surgical tents and, in his fatigued brain, the notion formed that he was battling evil itself; that with every operation he was somehow exorcising the cancer of violence from humanity, pursuing it through endless buckets of viscera and oceans of blood to its fountainhead: the madman in Berlin. When one army would hold back—to retrench, regroup, or resupply—he would attach himself to another contingent that was pressing on toward that goal.
Petro was with Hodge’s First Army when, amidst withering fire from concrete machine gun emplacements high on the opposing shore and nonstop aerial bombardment from the Stukkas and 88s, it finally crossed the bridge at Remagen. No one questioned him. They called him “Dr. P.” The twenty-three year old Corsican surgeon had become a legend. He patched and stitched and healed his way through the decimated countryside, learning passable German along the way, with but one goal in mind.
“Petro, there you are, old man! Come! Come tell these good people what you keep in the box under your bed!” Maurice loved it when tourists who had never heard the story came to the village. His jovial taunt beat about the town square with the exuberance of an untied balloon, rushing out to greet Petro in spirit long before he arrived in the flesh. He had become slow in his later years, and the walk from his house down the rugged cobblestone path told tales of his age and arthritis to his ankles, which listened fervently and believed everything they heard. Petro didn’t mind Maurice’s jibes. They were music to him. Not well-tuned. Not particularly lovely, but familiar and homey, like a good sauce from a reliable recipe.
“Omu di vino, non vale quatrino!” Petro invariably would yell from the corner by the church garden. “A man who drinks is worth nothing!”
“A chi beve sempre finisce cu a ranocchie in corpu!” Maurice invariably replied. “He who drinks only water ends up with a belly full of frogs!”
They would both laugh as if they hadn’t told the joke a million times before. The tourists laughed. The townsfolk laughed. Maurice would hold up a cup of whatever he was drinking, Muscat or Pastis, and offer it to Petro as he sat in the shade of the huge acacia that umbrellaed most of the square. Petro would sit in the warmth and sip and smile, and the tourists would sense that each of the finely-carved lines on his face held a story, echoed with a distant laughter, ran with tears.
“Tell them, Petro!” Maurice would say impatiently, adding in an aside to whatever new arrivals were at hand—in the seldom frustrated expectation of a free round of drinks—“wait ’til you hear this. Go on, Petro. What is in the box beneath your bed?” A nudge and a wink at the nearest.
“Evil,” said Petro, as casually as if he was talking about dirty laundry or the family photo album.
“See!” Maurice would cry. “See!” Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink. “I told you, eh? He keeps evil in a box beneath his bed! And you sleep well, Petro. Don’t you? You sleep well with evil in a box under your bed?”
Petro would smile, take a leisurely sip from his glass and wait until Maurice was about to explode. “Much better than I would if it were free to roam the countryside, Maurice. Yes. I am comfortable knowing the evil in that box will never again plague mankind.”
“But, there is evil everywhere,” one of the tourists would venture tentatively, falling into the script as naturally as if it had been written for them.
“So there is!” Maurice would say, or something similar. “How do you explain this, Petro? There is evil everywhere, as this Frenchman says. And who would know better than a Frenchman?” He would laugh. He always worked that sentiment into the conversation. “How so, if evil is in the box under your bed?”
“I did not say all evil is in the box,” Petro would reply in his turn. No one knew that better than he. Having contained the evil under his bed in a box hadn’t saved his family. There would have to be other boxes for those evils. “It is merely an evil. A terrible one.”
“Under your bed?”
“Under my bed.”
And so, after a little season of good-natured laughter, other topics would weave themselves into the conversation, until the original thread was no longer recognizable among them.
Then Maurice had been murdered and the game came to an end.
If only, Petro thought, the box under his bed had been big enough to hold all the evil in the world. Better yet, if it were the cover of a hole in which all evil could be buried, sucked to the center of the earth and burned in molten fires. But it wouldn’t bring back the voices whose fading echoes called to him in the infirmity of his senses. At eighty-five, he was the only one of his generation left in town. His walks to the cafe only reminded him now that he was alone. Maurice’s chair was occupied by others who knew nothing of his secret. Who cared nothing for him or his losses. Who talked too loudly of things that didn’t matter and seldom looked you in the eye and who, if told of his battle with the aspirin bottle, would only laugh uncomfortably, thinking it was a joke.
His own home town was no longer home. He stopped going to the square, except for necessities every other week or so. Otherwise, his world was circumscribed by the little stone fence that kept the sheep and chickens out of his door yard. He tended his onions and tomatoes in the shade of the peach trees that had grown up to shut off the view of the hills and the distant sea. They were growing a living coffin about him and the cursed aspirin bottle, and the box under his bed.
Model’s Army Group B disintegrated before the furious onslaught of the Allies. As the Anglo-American juggernaut hammered through enemy lines, Petro was there, picking up the pieces and sewing them together as best he could. Always, though, his eyes were on the horizon where, in his imagination, he could see smoke from the far away fires that seemed to burn perpetually at the heart of the dying Reich. He had a job to do. No one else would do it. Indeed, they would prevent it. He must be first. Before the Allies. Before the Russians. Before the Fuhrer’s own generals and henchmen.
It was difficult to wade through the dying. There were so many of them; too many people lurching toward him without their legs, calling after him without their lower jaws, reaching for him without hands or arms; too many men and women and children who were merely gaping holes surrounded by charred flesh; too many hearts beating in the open. Too much humanity, too violently exposed.
The courage of Hausser’s Army Group B, trapped on the west bank of the Rhine, dissolved like sugar in hot coffee. The remnants of the terrible machine that had once been proud, arrogant, and eager for blood hobbled across the smoldering countryside under cover of darkness in hopes of beating the bullets home.
Few made it.
Petro made every effort to save those of the enemy who came under his knife. But if they died, he felt no remorse. That the violent should meet a violent end seemed just. It was they who had inspired the violent reaction of benign nations, bovine in their lassitude. Even at so young an age he came to acknowledge the cruel paradox that violence left unopposed by men of peace is, in itself, an act of violence against the innocent who suffer it; that, while the violence of the conqueror is destructive, with an eye toward domination, the violence of the liberator is surgical, with an eye toward salvation. Both are bloody procedures, indistinguishable in the fever of battle.
His was the violence of the surgeon, striking at the root of the cancer to cut it out.
Late one night, shortly after the front line embraced the burning suburbs of Berlin, he removed his uniform and replaced it with that of a dead German private, a large boy, no more than fifteen or sixteen years old who had died with the Fuhrer’s name on his lips. Thus attired was not difficult to make his way through the seething rubble from one bombed-out building to the next toward the heart of the city.
Petro had little trouble inserting himself into a cadre of Hitler Youth, the oldest of whom was no more than sixteen. For days, now, they had been without the clear direction of Artur Axmann, their leader. Petro allowed them to believe he was Vichy French and, in true Teutonic fashion, they yield
ed quickly, eagerly, to his easy authority. From them he discovered that Axmann was in a bunker beneath the Chancellery garden, not a hundred yards away, with Hitler, Bormann, Goebbels, and others. The Fuhrer was resolved to kill himself rather than surrender to the Russians at whose hands he feared a share in the ignominious fate of Mussolini—Il Duce, only days earlier, had been machine-gunned by partisans and hung upside down, together with his mistress, from a lamp post at a gas station in Milan; an object of ridicule—the same Russians who, with every passing hour, tightened the noose around General Manteuffel’s Third Panzer division, the city’s only remaining defense.
This was the critical moment. Petro watched and waited, bandaging and mending the Hitler Youth, the final generation of the Thousand-Year Reich, which collapsed about their shoulders in dust and ash. With no ammunition with which to fight and very little food among them, the boys feasted on bravado and rumor, neither of which were in short supply. One moment the Fuhrer was going to awe the world by unleashing a terrible secret weapon, the next he was said to be at death’s door, frothing at the mouth, his left hand and arm shaking so violently he couldn’t sign his name. Then they heard he was marrying Eva Braun, his long-time paramour. Certainly this said something! Certainly this meant the soothsayers were right when they declared that the fortunes of war would turn at the end of April! Hitler must have a plan, one in which he had every confidence of success. He had overcome the odds before, how many times? Always he had managed to seize victory from seeming defeat. Always he had emerged, Phoenix-like, from ashes and desolation.
A few days later, amid a barrage of Russian artillery, now in the very precincts of the bunker, Artur Axmann arrived, dragging a folded canvas. It contained, he said, the skull and ashes of the Fuhrer, and that he had been commanded to bury it in a secret place. One day, he assured them in the face of their desolation, “these bones and ashes will form the foundation of a New Reich. We are not defeated. We are merely stalled. Another will arise and, with the power and authority vested in these remains, build upon the dream they embody a Reich that will last two thousand years! Ten thousand years!”
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