The Carp Castle

by MacDonald Harris

“But I’ve already prepared myself. I have taken a doctorate and written a dissertation.”

  “That’s of no importance. There are plenty of other matters to be investigated. Theosophy. Transcendentalism. Mysticism. Meister Eckhardt. Jacob Boehme. Madame Blavatsky. And especially Swedenborg.”

  “And you say I’m to go to …”

  “Heidelberg.”

  There was no help for it. Romer fell into despair as he contemplated being separated from the almost daily spiritual solace of the séances (they took place on the average of four times a week) and the delights and agonies of his pursuit of Eliza. He suspected that this was only a device of Moira to keep them apart for a while, or keep them out of mischief. Still, Eliza would be only in Geneva; he was not sure how far that was from Heidelberg. Meanwhile it was said that Moira, along with Aunt Madge Foxthorn, had gone to Lake Constance in Germany to supervise the arrangements for transportation.

  *

  In Heidelberg Romer acquired a room in a rooming-house, an oil lamp to make tea on, a studentesque cloak suitable for a production of Faust, a collection of books in Latin, and a second-hand Italian motorbike, a faded red except for the rear fender which had been replaced by a black one. His landlady’s name was Frau Matelas, his mentor was Herr Professor Doktor Armin von Arnehm, he took his meals in an establishment called the Schwarzer Pudel just down the lane from his lodgings-house, and he acquired another suitcase so closely resembling his old one, even to the cracks in the cardboard and the moss-colored brass fittings, that he imagined for a time it had somehow been miraculously transported from the shabby closet or attic in Ann Arbor where he was sure it had ended up. (After his months of association with Moira and her group his power of skepticism had been severely damaged). Once again he sat in dusty lecture halls while voices droned on about things that didn’t need saying because they were easily found in textbooks written by the speakers; once again he hid himself in the dimly-lit corners of tired libraries where he amused himself by distinguishing among the farts of his badly-nourished fellow students, and once again he set himself wearily to writing ponderous monographs in which he dissected tiny, almost invisible fleas in the hope of finding even tinier fleas inside them. A dreary visit it was to this Land of Cockayne, the world of unnecessary words and empty dogmas, of endless complicated apparatuses to stultify the imagination and reduce the brain to a word-grinding machine, of the fruitless bickerings of pinched paper souls over prerogatives, privileges, and titles (his aged mentor claimed the right to be called Herr Professor Doktor Doktor, since he had two Ph.D.’s). All German philosophy at this time was under the influence of Husserl, who taught at Freiberg that there could be no certain knowledge of the so-called objective world; what we call objects were always structured by the operation of idea. He also read, by command, the mystical texts of Swedenborg and H.P. Blavatsky, but found only dry accounts of what he had experienced in Moira’s séances in the living and burning flesh.

  Sometimes after midnight, leaving his studies, he came out from his cramped room with its smell of the lamp and looked in silence at the stars; and then the recollection of Eliza and Moira came to him, their two persons superimposed as they always were when he thought about them not in their presence; and a great Weltschmerz (which his landlady, an ignorant old woman, called a Weltschmalz) swept over him and he despaired that he would ever find his way back to the Eden where Moira had spoken of the Sixth Sense and the raccoons had crept over them in the dark.

  Slowly the months went by, the weeks, the days, and at last Romer was out in the muddy lane adjusting his motor-bike, which was to whisk him to the hotel in Mainz and the long-awaited rendezvous with Eliza; and then Newton’s obsolete old clock speeded up, pricked on by Einstein, and Romer looks out through his eyes and sees straight in front of him, no more than a hand’s breadth away, the gray speckled surface of the beech tree, Fagus sylvatica. It is the same moment; it lingers still, which it might well do, since it is the only moment, at least for the breadth of a midge’s eyebrow. With a snap it is gone; Romer narrowly averts smashing his brow on the tree-trunk, he swerves and plunges, almost loses his footing, and finds himself locked in the next moment, in which he sees framed in his vision a triangular opening in the green wall of vegetation beyond the beech tree, like the open door of a tent, and in the triangle the pale and bifurcated rear projection of Eliza disappearing into the leaves. He is pleased to find that his Wagnerian hero’s erection has lasted all this time, through the interview at the university in Ann Arbor, the fateful first séance in the Amity hall, the complicated subsequent history of his consecration to Moira and her band, and the weeks and months of pursuing Eliza across the erotically glowing four corners of America; and also that his academic and technical obsession with the uniqueness of the passing instant has been broken in some way, perhaps by the imminent collision with the beech tree, so that the moments are now succeeding each other in his mind in the normal way enjoyed by the rest of the human race. Some white glimpses of Eliza flutter like a small school of birds past the openings in a patch of leaves, and she emerges in her full and unconcealed Botticelli-nymph form in the meadow beyond, glances over her shoulder with a coyness that threatens to make his desiring organ burst like fireworks, and curves around on her small flashing feet to lead him back in the direction they have come, since if they continue south along the river in this way they will soon come down onto the well-traveled highway from Nierstein to Schornsheim. The length of a tennis court apart, they flit from woods to meadow, from meadow to thicket, plunging through vines and past berry-bushes, along paths traced by shepherds, wayward children, or countless other lovers like themselves, over the Hessian gardenland. As though the stage has been rolled around on a pivot, there now come into view again the toy villages they passed on their motorbike on the way out from the hotel; Hechtsheim, Laubenheim, Bodenheim, Hackenheim, Marxheim, Ebersheim, Zornheim, and Selzen. Beyond is the skyline of Mainz itself, the six towers of the cathedral, the nine other churches, the pink Kurfürstenpalast, the palace of the Grand Duke of Hesse, the theater, the arsenal, and the government buildings with bizarre towers and German bric-a-brac, looking like a collection of medieval musical instruments, hautboys, bassoons, and sackbuts, a whole trash of archaic woodwinds thrown into a barrel, and on the outskirts of town a half-fallen Roman aqueduct loop-the-looping through the trees.

  Eliza looks around again and offers him a somewhat frantic version of her Botticelli sguardo, since she finds herself in a kind of cul-de-sac of tree trunks where there is no way out except to turn and plunge directly at him, so that perhaps this is to be the great peak and climax of it all; the single-moment-that-exists rushing at him will be the most supreme of all moments, and all his cerebrations and cogitations over instantaneity and the unique existence of the moment will not have been in vain. Whirling, she bumps hard into something hanging from a tree, a bag or a satchel, probably left by a peasant and full of truffles, mushrooms, or nuts. It begins humming and spewing out vigorous dots that soon fill the air around her. Eliza changes her motions abruptly. She still dashes, twists, flees, circles, and flings her red hair around to look in this direction and another, but now her aim is not, as it was previously, to flee from Romer and at the same time to entice him to continue pursuing, but to escape these humming spots that fill the air around her, now rising in a swarm, now diving to orbit her ankles. At each sting she gasps; a sharp intake of air; the exclamation “Ha!” in reverse.

  She dashes out into the clearing, followed by the wasps and then by Romer. She twists, writhes, rolls in the grass, and scrambles up, followed always by the humming cloud of needle-points. Romer, still pursuing, only an arm’s length from her now that her flight is so badly coordinated, manages to touch her bare shoulder with the tip of his finger and at the same instant his hand is stabbed painfully by one of the tiny stilettos jiggering in the air. He makes the same sucking “Ha!” that she has made several times. He has not realized before that anything could be so painful;
it is as though each of the dots swarming in the air were a fundamental particle of pain, analogous to the fundamental particles of matter that make up the physical world. He gyres, writhes, and slaps himself, then continues in pursuit of Eliza who is now describing a wide circle over the green carpet of the meadow. He reaches her again, seizes her upper arm, and is stung again, this time in the crease of his thigh, which makes him double up around the sensitive focus of his groin. The notion of his manhood being stung by a wasp, on the very opening of its tip, moist and pink, is so frightful to him that it drives all reason out of his head. There is only one way to protect the organ in question from this horror; it will be safe the moment it is inside Eliza where it belongs. An instant and it is done; the two white forms roll knee and elbow over the greensward, flop over one last time with him on top, and lie like two pale frogs stretching and writhing their eight limbs against the green of the grass. Eliza is making sounds of ambiguous meaning; no doubt they are meant to express both ecstasy and agony, or perhaps in the end (les extrêmes se touchent) there is little difference between them.

  The wasps have disappeared. It is possible that they are repelled by perspiration, or that the musky odor of their four mouse-pits is repugnant to their sensibilities. Romer lies for some time, basking in the afterglow of his pleasure, while the two red spots on his body shout their protest. Thank God not there. Tucking it out of harm’s way was one of the cleverest things he has ever done in his life. The air becomes cooler and the light weakens; a cloud has drifted over the sun. It is late afternoon. The sweat cools on his body, causing a shiver of pleasure to pass over him. He extricates himself from Eliza, producing a final moan more stretched-out than the others, and rotates himself onto his back, feeling the stiff grass prickle against his spine. Staring vacantly upward while the honey of satisfaction creeps through his body, he becomes aware that the cloud that has chilled the air above him is not a cloud. A great silver shape has moved up from the west and blotted out the sun. It is immense. It seems to fill the whole sky, to dominate and magnetize the spreading earth beneath it. It brings with it a sound, a murmur or hum, that seems to come not from the shape itself but to accompany it in the surrounding air. It is not very high; it is almost as though he could reach up and touch it. As it comes toward him it turns, the nose drifting slowly to the left so that it will pass directly over him. Along its flanks, stuck out on struts, are four small lozenges with spinners that seem far too tiny to propel it through the air. Now it is almost directly over him; he looks up into its belly and sees the tilted windows that line the cabin on the sides, now and then catching a flash from the sun behind it. The drone of the engines is louder now, but still subdued and leisurely, like a sound heard in a dream. The immense shape comes on, nosing through the air, pushing it aside so deftly, so gently that it makes no ripple in the atmosphere. The air passes away behind the fish-tail with its four fins and closes on itself as though nothing has happened, except that it has been rendered imperceptibly phosphorescent by the silver that has passed through it.

  Romer is filled with a rush of good spirits, a wave of emotion. He glances at Eliza, hoping to share the moment with her, but her eyes are still closed. These are machines, his soul tells him, that have never been seen before and will never be seen again. In the future, men will not believe in them. They will not believe that mere wisps of gas could lift such heavy burdens into the air. Primitive men, seeing this shape hovering over their heads and hearing its hum, would take it for a god. And for me, he thinks, it is much more likely that this is the shape of God than the shape of God as we imagine it; it is more likely that God is an enormous shiny spindle with fins than a nomadic patriarch whose beard needs trimming.

  He raises himself, propped on one elbow, to watch it move away to the east in the direction of Frankfurt. He sees now that it is sinking gradually. The four fins of the tail are pointed directly at him; from the rear it is only a circle quartered by two intersecting lines. He watches, unable to take his eyes from it. When it is only a small silver ball touching the horizon he comes to himself and sits up on the grass. His two stings, one on the hand and the other in the crease of his groin, twang like plucked harp-strings and he looks around for some grass or herb to rub on them. Dock-leaves are good, he thinks, although perhaps that’s for nettles. Eliza sits up too and begins fussing with her hair, not looking at him. She has apparently not noticed the passing of the dirigible.

  “I don’t blame you for this, Romer.”

  “Blame me?” He glances to the east where the silver ball, now even smaller, glints on the horizon.

  “First of all, the thing gave me a transcendental pleasure far beyond what I’ve imagined in my wildest reveries, and I shall be grateful to you for this afternoon for the rest of my life. That said, it seems to me that you might have arranged things better. I know nothing about this part of Germany,” she says, forgetting that he too knew nothing about this part of Germany before he arrived the day before on his motorbike, “but there are probably lots of nicer places. Old deserted farmhouses, quiet streams shaded by willows. I’ve always imagined it happening under a weeping willow at the brookside, where there’s a smell of cress and the current tugs gently at the water-lilies.”

  She says she doesn’t blame him, but she does.

  “And I don’t suppose it occurred to you that going down a bumpy road sitting on the rear mud-guard of a motor-bike isn’t the best thing in the world for the part of the female anatomy that’s to be honored that day.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t own a car.”

  “You could have rented one. It’s interesting,” she says, “that there’s no need to hang the bedsheets out the window, since I bear the badge—the numerous badges—of my defloration on my face where everyone can see them.”

  There are ruby carbuncles all over her body, several on her face and one on her breast so close to the nipple that it produces in Romer an echo of the same shiver that struck him when he imagined his own most delicate point being stung. He feels a warm flow of sympathy for her, of affection, a higher and more worthy form of love than the raw lust that afflicted him only a few minutes before. He has an impulse to embrace her again, not so brutally this time and with a little more delicacy and sensitivity.

  “I don’t like the word defloration. It sounds as though I did something nasty to you.”

  “You did. You did something nasty, and I enjoyed it very much. It was the most wonderful climax of my life. I just wish you’d arranged the details a little more poetically.”

  “You mean you’ve had climaxes before?”

  “Well of course. Everybody has, old dumbbell Romer.”

  This disconcerts him a little. But probably she is only speaking of her finger, not a lover.

  “I suppose,” she goes on, “that if I ever hope to have another experience of this kind, with you at least, I’ll first have to find a wasps’ nest and knock it open and then wallow on the grass while the beasts sting me. In that case, I’ve left the Marquis de Sade far behind and I’ll probably end up famous in the casebooks of psychopathology.”

  “Maybe I could just bite you, or flog you with thorns,” he says gloomily.

  “Oh Romer, I didn’t mean that. It’s not your fault. I do love you. I really do.”

  They both fall silent. She catches his glance and tears well in her eyes, perhaps only from the stings. For the present, the fact is that they are both stark naked and there is not a single one of their garments in sight, either his or hers. There lies before them a far-flung search to be carried out before nightfall, and it’s likely in any case that their costumes will be incomplete as they head back to Mainz on the motorbike. He arises to his feet, reminded by a twinge of the sting in his groin, and begins searching around aimlessly and without any real purpose in the stiff grass of the meadow. Eliza, to his surprise, gets up and goes immediately to her round linen hat, a few yards away on the path that leads to the villages, and puts it on. He finds his shoes and a single sock; th
ese, as he remembers, were cast off at an early stage in their chase, as was her hat, and they will have to continue much farther on down the path and into the woods to retrieve the rest.

  He catches sight of something gleaming in the grass and stoops to pick it up. It is a lady’s gold wristwatch, tiny and fragile with an articulated gold band, set with dozens of tiny gold jewels, a single diamond the size of a bug at the place where the hands join. It is still running and indicating the correct time. At first he thinks it must be Eliza’s, then he remembers that she has a large man’s wristwatch on a leather strap. It must have fallen out of the dirigible when it passed, he thinks. He keeps it to put in his pocket, when he finds a pocket.

  TWO

  Captain Georg von Plautus stands in the control car looking out at the landscape rolling up toward him from the northwest. In addition to the Captain there are three men in the control car. At the rudder wheel in the front, by the windscreen, is Erwin, dressed in the uniform of a German naval rating except that the band on his cap bears the legend League of Nations, which seems ludicrous to the Captain and would irritate him if he were not so good-natured. At the elevator wheel, at the side of the car, is a young Englishman named Starkadder (the crew is international), who is also dressed in a German sailor’s outfit. There is a navigator tucked into a little booth at the rear, who has almost nothing to do because the Captain prefers to do his own navigation. These four men are all that is needed to fly the airship in peacetime, when there is nothing complicated to do like landing, or dealing with a squall.

  Through the windscreen, which is bent forward as though it is looking at the ground, the neat squares of the Württenberg landscape go by at a rate that seems slow if you look ahead but fast if you look directly down; the airspeed is fifty-eight knots. A few minutes ago the town of Mannheim passed on the right; Heidelberg is behind. The Captain has studied the map of this part of Germany until he knows it by heart and he seldom has to consult the chart on the navigation table. Passing on the left is Worms; he scarcely turns his head to gaze on the cartwheel-shaped old town where Liebfraumilch comes from and where Luther confronted the Diet. There is no sound but the cello-note of the engines, and now and then a murmur from one of the two maneuvering-wheels as the operator turns it.