The Carp Castle

by MacDonald Harris

  “Bonsoir then, Herr Leutnant, or may I say Georg? Comment ca va? Eh? And one really, doesn’t say bonsoir at this time of the day, I suppose, but we don’t have any other expression for it. Ordinary decent people are tucked into bed at this hour. Guten Abend, gute Nacht, schlaf’ under dem Dach. If you have a roof. Nowadays people are sleeping under bridges, Herr Leutnant. Times are bad.”

  “It’s our own fault for getting in that damned War and letting them beat us,” muttered Georg.

  Albertino said, “Still there are a few pleasures left to us. Art museums, for example.” He drew on his cigarette holder and looked at him narrowly.

  “You mean here?” said Georg. “It’s a pleasant enough place.”

  “You’ve come to the right spot here, eh, Herr Leutnant. There’s plenty of what you’re looking for here.”

  Georg inspected his expression. He seemed friendly enough and there was nothing mocking in his manner, instead it was offhand and confiding. After a moment Georg said, “Yes. The trouble is, it’s all for sale, it seems, and I can’t afford it.”

  Albertino ran his hands over his deluxe skull to smooth the air. “Why, Herr Leutnant-may I call you Georg? You see, I too have been an officer in the past, in my own way, so you’ll excuse the familiarity. Why should you pay for anything? You’re still young and good-looking. I could introduce you to any number of people who would be your good friends, some of them right in this room at the moment.”

  As one example, he pointed to an old Graf sitting at a table by himself, a man of seventy as stiff as a rake, dressed all in black, with tobacco-stained mustaches and brown bags under his eyes. “He has millions, and I mean dollars not marks. He only needs to be skillfully kissed, to have someone as handsome as you bend his head over him, to be a happy man.”

  Georg stood up, stared at Albertino for a moment undecided whether to slap him, then left the cabaret, hurried away to his lodgings behind the zoo, and threw up; he was too proud to do it in public. After he was done he wiped his chin with toilet paper and looked at himself in the mirror. There was no plumbing in his room and he was standing in the small lavatory at the end of the hall, with a bare light bulb overhead and a mirror gray with patches like an antique map.

  The mirror did its usual trick, reflecting back a little movie of somebody or other. Who was that? Not he. The mirror reversed the part in his hair and put his ring on the wrong finger. It was a doublet of himself, a facsimile whose vantage on the world was switched end for end, and no doubt his thoughts too. This creepy-looking character was probably the one who was capable of fucking Mitzi. He cursed his fate for afflicting him with this desire for the wrong half of the human race. But then he reflected that ordinary men are afflicted in just the same way; they happen to be afflicted with a desire for the right half of the human race, but the situation is just as unsatisfactory, torturing, and demeaning, with the additional disadvantage that they (the proper lovers, husbands, and papas) don’t have the satisfaction of being special, of membership in a kind of cursed and tormented elite. Why would he want to be like them? His soul stiffened and he threw away this temptation. Better to remain as one of the Miltonic outcasts, the dark angels who, in congress with their own kind, plotted rebellion against Heaven. Still standing before the mirror in the lavatory, he saw himself as a petty German Beelzebub, an officer on half pay donning dark wings from a costume shop.

  The Devil take it! He went back to his room, threw off his clothes, and slept for what was left of the night. He dreamed deeply. In the dream, Georg penetrated into the jungle of his own richly flowering soul, finding there a wisdom he could only grasp in fragments, like particles of fog. He wandered over faint tracks in the grass, through thickets and clearings, coming back often to places he had been to before, only slightly altered. His lover, his adversary, the Other he was looking for, concealed himself cleverly. He, the Other, moved through the jungle when it was night, with no weapons except his skin, his hands, and his erect penis. He wore the skull of some animal over his head, an okapi or a stag. The only way was to trick him, to pretend that it was night when it was day, or to put something over his own head to conceal his soul, to protect his brain from the insects that swarmed around it as he walked. What he found was a human skull. Wearing it, he maneuvered with shrewd trickery until he managed to see the Other coming toward him down the path. The two shapes merged for an instant, Georg felt the warm embrace of a shadow, and then he was alone; he turned and clutched at the thin fog that lay over the jungle but there was nothing. The bitter taste of fear lay in his throat.

  Georg woke up, shuddered, got out of bed, and drank a cup of coffee. But was he really awake now or was all consciousness only higher and lower levels of his dream? The world about him, when he went out into the streets, seemed evanescent and thin, changing constantly, slipping away from his grasp when he reached for it. In Träumerei Strasse, near his lodgings, he saw a female dog lifting her leg to piss against a tree. In the Pinakothek the boys dressed as girls and the girls dressed as boys. If a plumb-bob hangs sideways, Georg thought, it probably means that something is wrong somewhere.

  He threw away the erotic magazines, he no longer went to cabarets and slept all day, and for a week he sat in cafés reading newspapers. In one of them he finally found the sign he had been waiting for, in a single word that sprang out at him from the banal rectangle of newsprint.

  Luftschiffbau.

  Now he remembered-it was incredible that he had forgotten his first love, the one true love of his life, which had seized him even before his voice had deepened and his groin sprouted hairs. In a fever of excitement he read the rest of the article. In Friedrichshaven, in the south of Germany on Lake Constance, the Zeppelin Gesellschaft GmbH was once again into the business of building dirigibles. The Treaty of Locarno, recently signed, had removed the last obstacle to Germany’s building airships large enough to be capable of crossing the oceans.

  Taking with him only what he could carry in a traveling case, Georg abandoned his room without locking the door and caught the first train to Friedrichshaven. With his qualifications as a wartime Zeppelin commander, he was offered a position as advisor to the company, which was laying plans for the building of the LZ-126, a passenger dirigible capable of crossing the Atlantic at seventy knots. Its commander was to be Hugo Eckener, the managing director of the company and the most skilled dirigible pilot in Europe. The new ship was to be finished in only a few months. To Georg was held out a vague promise of a position as a watch officer, or perhaps as its second in command.

  He took a room in the Kurgarten Hotel in Friedrichshaven and commuted every day on a bicycle to his work in the big hangar on the lakefront. He could hardly believe his luck that, after all his travails and troubles, he was once more back in his beloved world of airships. His duties were mainly symbolic; he spent most of his days watching the assembly of the gargantuan structure in the hangar and pretending to supervise it. All about him was aluminum, finer to him that silver or gold; he had the machinists make him a ring of the precious metal which he wore on his left hand as if it were a wedding band.

  When the four Maybach engines arrived he peered through the openings of the crates to catch a glimpse of them, trim like racing engines with their vee-pattern cylinders and their superchargers. He passed his hand over the steel bottles of hydrogen stored at the end of the hangar: the Divine Element, the purest and simplest of the atoms, a single electron spinning around a single nucleus. Even the danger of hydrogen fascinated him, its propensity to explode with immense force if ignited with the proper mixture of air. He stood in the half-finished control car, with nothing but open girders around him, and imagined the placement of the controls in minutest detail, the rudder wheel forward and the elevator wheel on the left, the compass tilted up perkily at the helmsman, the engine telegraphs overhead on the right; the neatness, sparseness, and efficiency of this silver cabin from which the largest airship ever built would be controlled.

  In these weeks a
t the factory he lived in a continuous heat of boyish fervor and joy, which he concealed as best he could from the others around him. Only one cloud hung in the summer sky of his happiness: that it was Dr. Eckener who would command the LZ-126 and not himself. This was an arrangement perfectly logical and just on the face of it, since Dr. Eckener had flown airships when he, Georg, was still a schoolboy in Friedland, and was the chosen heir and successor of the old Count for whom the company was named. It was an irrational feeling but it sprang up in him anyhow; we are not responsible for our emotions, only for our actions. Eckener (a plague take his doctor’s degree) was a civilian, an engineer not an officer, one who didn’t belong to the brotherhood of those who had raided London and Paris and steered their ships through the deadly roses of the anti-aircraft fire. This jealousy was a novel feeling for Georg. With a taste of bile in his mouth he struggled in the grip of this powerful green monster. It was, he found, a passion almost equal to that of sex, and one that like sex could be subdued by stern acts of character. No one ever suspected it, just as no one ever suspected his boyish elation over his return to the world of airships.

  As it happened, Dr. Eckener turned out in the end to be his friend and benefactor. One day when the frame of the 126 was almost finished he was called to the Director’s office and found a ruffled and distracted Eckener shuffling through the papers on his desk.

  “Ah! There you are, Von Plautus. Sit down. Have a cigar. A drop of brandy? Very well. I know you’re an ascetic, a stoic, a Prussian, a man who doesn’t permit himself any pleasures of the flesh. Ha ha! Von Plautus, I need to have a little talk with you.”

  Georg the pessimist was sure that he was going to be fired.

  “An American lady has been visiting the works, Von Plautus. It seems that she’s immensely wealthy. And a little gaga. But no matter. The point is that she wants to buy the 126.”

  “Buy it!” Georg could hardly believe his ears. “Why don’t you tell her to go about her business?”

  “But you see she offers very attractive terms.” Eckener was embarrassed. “We still have all the jigs and forms to use on the next ship, and the Maybach plant can make more engines quickly. It would delay us a year or so, no more, in building our own ship.”

  A year! Georg began to doubt that he would ever set foot in a dirigible again. Many things could happen in a year. He saw his improbable dream fading, turning to mist in his hands like the Beloved Enemy in his dream.

  “An American lady! What does she want to do with it?”

  Eckener took the cigar out of his mouth and examined it as if it were something he was very interested in. “Go about the world in it, I imagine, spreading her Divine Message.”

  “Her what?”

  “You see, she’s religious, of a sort. I’m not sure what message it is that she’s spreading, but she’s a formidable person, and she seems to have made a lot of money out of her religious venture, if that’s what it is.”

  “Herr Direktor, this is crazy.”

  “Yes, isn’t it. You see, Von Plautus, the fact is that the Zeppelin Gesellschaft is badly short of capital. The Kaiser is no longer paying the bills as he was during the War; he’s chopping wood in Holland. We’re a commercial enterprise now. We wouldn’t be able to finish the 126 unless we raise more money, and we don’t know where it would come from. This contract will enable us to start immediately on an LZ-127, with the certainty that we have enough money to finish it.”

  “Contract?”

  “Yes, we signed it this morning. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about, Von Plautus. The reason I sent for you is that this lady, Mrs. Pockock is her name, has also asked me to help her in assembling a crew, and I’ve suggested you as her commander.”

  Hope sprang in Georg like a leaping dolphin. “Me?”

  “She wants an international crew.” He looked at Georg as though he hoped Georg knew what this meant. “A kind of brotherhood of nations, so to speak. But I persuaded her that for the commander and a few key personnel she needs Germans who are Zeppelin veterans, who have …”

  “Steered their ships through the deadly roses of the anti-aircraft fire.”

  “Exactly.” Eckener looked at him a little queerly on account of this excursion into poetry. “Of course there are British too who have rigid airship experience now. You have no objection to the British?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “And I daresay some Italians and French. What languages do you have, Von Plautus?”

  “English, French, Italian, and a little Spanish. I don’t suppose you’d count Latin.”

  “You don’t say. Well then, your qualifications seem complete. Mrs. Pockock—she doesn’t call herself that, by the way, but that’s what we’ll call her between you and me—wants to settle all this immediately. I’ve found that Americans are like that. They plunge right ahead and take no account of the difficulties. She’s leaving Germany tomorrow. If you don’t mind, we’ll go around to her hotel and you’ll have a chance to meet her. And she you, of course.” Eckener still had the air of a man who was struggling with great difficulties inside himself and could only partly share his attention with the other person in his office. “She’s staying at the Majestic in Konstanz. I’ll call my car.”

  Before Georg could object, he was in the Direktor’s sedan and they were on their way around the lake to Konstanz. The driver was a young man with a broad neck and a black chauffeur’s cap. Georg knew that neck very well.

  “Why, you’re Erwin Giesicke,” he told him from the back seat. “You were in my L-14 during the War.”

  “Begging your pardon, Herr Leutnant, I am that same person,” said Erwin without turning his head.

  “What have you been doing with yourself all these years?”

  “With your permission, Herr Leutnant, for the last couple of years I’ve been employed here at the Zeppelin works.”

  “Giesecke,” said Eckener, who now seemed embarrassed in a new way, “would like very much to be a member of your crew in the 126. Mrs. Pockock, by the way, has told me that it’s to be called the League of Nations. I’ve told him that he should talk to you.”

  “Later,” said Georg. “I haven’t agreed yet that I’m going to do this thing.”

  They arrived at the hotel and were handed out of the car by a doorman dressed like a Swiss admiral. It was the best hotel in Konstanz. They were shown into a suite on the second floor (Erwin remained below, standing by the car with his jodhpurs crossed and his cap set exactly square on his head), and after a few minutes’ wait there appeared in the doorway a woman with green eyes and golden hair, wearing a simple linen gown that came to her feet. Behind her was another woman clad in black, taller than Mrs. Pockock, with a tumor in her forehead like half an egg.

  Mrs. Pockock was an extraordinary creature. She was preternaturally thin, but her thinness gave the impression not of emaciation but of an extraordinary spiritual discipline, a reduction of her physical flesh to the minimum needed to sustain life. Her fragile neck and the finely modeled bones of her face were those of a woman of great beauty, yet the effect that she gave was not that of sexual attraction. Or it was sexual, but it went beyond male and female to the very center of human desire and beauty; it represented the sublime inner goal that sex attempts to achieve, not the mere surface attraction of sex itself. Georg felt that he was in the presence of something rare and potent, something that transcended the limits of his ordinary experience. At the same time, the skeptical part of him saw the ridiculousness of the situation: the theatrical staging of the meeting, the bizarre dress of the two women, their sudden appearance in the doorway like two apparitions, the glow that emanated from Mrs. Pockock’s face as though she had rubbed it with powdered phosphorous. He saw now that Mrs. Pockock’s gown was embroidered all over with little M’s, in the same color as the stuff so that they were almost invisible.

  “Mrs. Pockock. Lieutenant von Plautus,” murmured Eckener.

  Mrs. Pockock remained silent. It was the other
woman who spoke. “What is your full name?” she asked Georg.

  He gave her the benefit of a Prussian bow with heel-click. “I am Georg von Plautus.”

  “In the Guild of Love we call people by both name and surname,” said the tall woman. “For women, it’s demeaning to be labeled either Miss or Mrs., and men too we call by their full names, just to be symmetrical. And so you are Hugo Eckener and you are Georg von Plautus. But Moira is not Moira Pockock, but just Moira.” After a moment she added, “I am Aunt Madge Foxthorn.”

  So far Moira had not spoken; she only stared at the two Germans out of her unsettling green eyes. A formidable person to have for an enemy, Georg thought. She probably had no need of friends. But she has a dirigible, the thought flashed with ardor in his mind. When she spoke at last she came to the point immediately, without preliminaries.

  “Do you believe in the Invisible, Georg von Plautus?”

  Some intuition told him that his future happiness, his very existence, depended on his finding the right answer to this question. “I believe in the visible world. And since we speak of things that are visible, there must also be things that are invisible.”

  He seemed to have said the right thing, whether it came from inspiration in some way or just out of chance. Moira said, “Exactly.” She asked a few more questions. Was he married? Did he believe in equality for women? Did he believe in the equality of races? Did he believe in Free Love? Was he a member of a religious organization with a fixed dogma? (The correct answer to the last one was no, to all the others yes). Could he steer an airship to any place in the world? He explained that a dirigible had two steering wheels and that other people would manage those, but that he was capable of commanding (he felt that this translation of kommandieren was not quite English) an airship to any place in the world.