The Carp Castle

by MacDonald Harris

  When she doesn’t answer he goes on, “I put some Tono-Bungay on mine.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s some stuff that smells like camphor that you buy in the pharmacy. A pharmacy is called an Apotheke in German. There’s one just around the corner from the hotel.”

  He is always trying to give her German lessons and explain to her things he doesn’t think she knows. She is annoyed with him now for wanting to steal her affliction (the wasp-stings) and make it his too, but one that he as a man and therefore cleverer than she can easily dispose of.

  “The devil with your Tono-Bungay. I don’t really have a headache anyhow. It’s just a feeling as though a headache may come on.” She adds in a conciliatory tone, “It’s a thing that I get now and then. Women do. It’s a way that we have.”

  He is silent at this, awed by this mystery, this small recurring plague, one of several experiences denied to him and others solely on account of their sex; the others are childbirth, the feeling of silk stockings, and the possibility of changing your personality by dyeing your hair.

  “Does that mean,” he inquires, worried, “that we can’t …”

  “Oh,” she bursts out in exasperation, “it isn’t that. It’s just a headache. Nothing more. And I don’t even have it.”

  He is nonplussed again, and she is annoyed at him for bringing up this unpleasant subject, and at herself for hinting at it. Romer adjusts his coat collar against a trickle siding down in some way from the inside of the umbrella. He considers the idea of turning that side of the umbrella around to her, but rejects it. It’s a large black thing lent to them by the hotel and it probably has a lot of holes in it.

  Because of the weather, only a few pedestrians are coming the other way on the avenue: a boy carrying a flat package which he holds over his head as a rain-hat, a man in a military overcoat hunched up to his neck, and a pair of hurrying jades who have probably given up for the night and are headed back to the shelter of their squalid sex-warren.

  Eliza can’t help glancing at the girls over her shoulder. “You know,” she tells Romer after a moment, “I’ve just remembered something. It was when we were—you know—in the woods. Just as we were—just as we were finishing—I don’t have the vocabulary for all this, Romer, it’s a new subject for me. Just when I came to my wits, I felt a chill. Things went dark and funny. As though a cloud had passed over. And there was a buzzing.”

  His Cheshire-cat smile hangs in the darkness. “It’s a well-known sensation of women their first time. It’s called the tremor deflorans. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it.” She has the impression that he’s making fun of her for some reason. “You should have looked up,” he goes on. “It might have been only a cloud.”

  “I didn’t feel like looking up. I had my eyes closed. I opened them after a while and saw you hopping around looking for your socks. It was a ludicrous spectacle, I can tell you.” She makes a short sharp laugh, a thing she does at unexpected times and which seems out of character for her, a sound made by a cynical and raucous Eliza totally different from the Eliza he knows from other evidence. “You looked like a long skinny bunny-rabbit with a worm hanging from his belly.”

  “Please.”

  “And when you bent to pick up something, you presented a rear I won’t even attempt to describe. What did you pick up anyhow?”

  “Nothing. Only a pretty stone.”

  “What a strange time to pick up a stone.”

  “It was a strange time all around, don’t you think?”

  They are coming to the railroad station where she arrived earlier this same day, a million years ago, it seems. It is not a very savory neighborhood; there is an odor of something dead, probably a rat under a heap of rubble. Its rich musk mingles with the fresh scent of the rain.

  “Come on.” She turns and pulls him by the hand. “We’ll go this way. There’s a nice café where we can sit on a terrace and look out over the city.”

  She has just made this up in her mind, but she is sure that if she believes in it hard enough, it will come to pass. They go up a twisting street, around a church, past another and smaller train station that also smells of dead rats, and find themselves climbing a hill with a park on top of it.

  “It’s up here.”

  “But you don’t know the town any better than I do. This is just the Stadtpark. There’s no café up here.”

  “Romer, don’t be such a know-it-all.”

  “Doesn’t climbing this hill hurt your stings?” His own limp has become more pronounced.

  “Yes, and it also makes my headache come on. Now it’s really in my head, not just lurking. Come on!”

  At the top of the hill they find themselves in the park, on a grassy knoll bordered with a balustrade. There are no lights except those glowing from the streets below. Overhead, the clouds tear by with stars showing in their rifts. There is less rain now, although the wind is starting to make it fall at a slant.

  “Here’s the café,” she says abruptly, bringing it into existence with these words. It is called An der Favorite, whatever that means, and this name glows in tiny white lights on the front. They push through the door, dripping. The waiters haven’t expected anyone to climb to the top of the hill on such a rainy night; they’re clustered near the door to the kitchen smoking cigarettes and gazing morosely at the unoccupied tables. They hardly seem to cheer up very much when two water-soaked ragamuffins arrive, and they become gloomy again when Eliza insists on being served outside on the terrace, where the tables aren’t set and drops of water fall on them from the leaky awning.

  A sullen gypsy of a youth in a white jacket mops off the table and brings them coffee and pastries. The coffee is black as the pit of Hell; they put more and more sugar in it to convert it to a kind of liquid candy. Eliza feels as though she’s on a childish escapade; they’ve escaped from their elders and are being naughty in as many ways as they can think of, starting with missing the arrival of the dirigible and playing hookey from the séance. She feels that her womb, including its pains, is tied to Romer across the table by an invisible current of voluptuousness. The terrace has a hedge around it in the French manner; it looks out to the east where the sky seems to be clearing, although it’s still raining where they are. Eliza’s shoes squish when she moves her toes, and her skirt is soaked. She could never have dreamed that under these conditions she could feel so blissful.

  “It was as though an angel passed,” she tells him.

  “What was?”

  “The tremor deflorans, as you call it.”

  After a moment of thought he tells her, “There’s no evidence that angels attend the deflowering of virgins.”

  “Oh, I forgot you did your dissertation on angels.” Another of his lectures is imminent, she knows. She sighs.

  “And they don’t make a humming noise and darken the sky when they pass. They may speak to people, but they mainly communicate through dreams, signs, and intuitions. They seldom appear as visions or visitations, although they sometimes manifest themselves as hallucinatory voices.”

  “You’re talking like a professor again, Romer. They manifest themselves! Suppose I said, Romer manifested himself in the hall of the hotel.”

  At this he sulks and falls silent.

  “Anyhow,” she says, “I only mentioned angels as a metaphor. I said it was as though an angel passed. You seem to be talking about them as though they really exist.”

  “Of course they exist,” he says, emerging from his slump and becoming animated. “They exist in our minds.”

  “Oh, what nonsense! What kind of existence is that?”

  “But,” he explains painfully, as though to a freshman, “everything else exists only in our minds too. You exist only in my mind.”

  “What do you mean?” She is a little suspicious.

  “I mean,” he tells her, “that I can only be sure of my own mental life. There is no question that I am thinking, or more precisely conscient, as a philosopher would say, m
eaning that all my five senses are working. I’m conscient of you. But I can’t really be sure that you’re there, only that I’m conscient of you. It’s the question of the Ding an Sich which philosophers have debated over for centuries. According to the German idealists, we can never know the Thing in Itself, only our thoughts about it.”

  “Are you conscient of having screwed the living daylights out of me in the woods this afternoon?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Eliza, you carp at everything I say. You won’t admit I know anything,” he bursts out in exasperation, perhaps because he knows himself that he’s been talking like a dissertation, but that’s the only way he knows to talk about such things, which he thought would interest her.

  Another silence ensues. She feels a clutch of remorse for her vulgar outburst, and thinks that perhaps she ought to ask him some more questions about the Ding an Sich (which sounds to her like a Thing which he, Romer, puts in Herself) and German Idealism. Instead she says, “All this argument is making my headache worse.”

  “That’s because you’re a neurotic and a silly little twit. Drink your coffee. That might make the headache better. And don’t try to blame it on me!”

  The waiter sticks his head around the corner to see what all the noise is about. Eliza feels a sinking heart. It was a mistake, she thinks, for us to try to talk about something so deep. What can anyone know about such things! We’re like two blind people feeling the same elephant. And I was trying to blame my headache on him. Of course, it was his fault. No it wasn’t. She feels a pang of affection for him. He can’t help lecturing anymore than a donkey can help braying.

  They look at each other guiltily. Neither of them says a word; he’s feeling the same thing that I am, she thinks. He loves me. Why can’t we say it? Why can’t we say I love you? Why can’t we ask the waiter if the café has rooms? Instead they look out gloomily into the darkness. Beyond the hedge the hillside falls away into an abyss. A few lights glimmer through the rain-stung air. Below them, invisible, is the Rhine with its barges creeping along like ferrets.

  In a low-ceilinged cellar in Frankfurt a lot of men are sitting around smoking and talking too loudly. On the walls are portraits of Germany’s great airmen, from the Zeppelin heroes Strasser and Mathy to those rabid dog-fighters of heavier-than-air craft Voss, Boelke, and Von Richthofen himself, the famous Red Baron, all of them dead now. From the ceiling hangs a model of Richthofen’s red triplane with Maltese crosses on the wings. In a prominent place opposite the door is a large photograph of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1838-1917), wearing a white naval officer’s cap, a greatcoat with the order Pour le Mérite on it, and a pair of bushy white mustaches.

  Waiters in white shirts and black vests hurry through the smoke, bringing people beer in large tankards, the kind made of blue-and-white porcelain with hunting scenes, with a lid on the top worked by a thumb-lever so that if you don’t know what else to do you can flip it open and see how much beer you have left. In the Captain’s opinion, these were invented for beer halls that have a lot of filth floating in the air.

  The waiters have put several tables together to accommodate the League of Nations crew in addition to their ordinary customers. The Captain is sitting at a table with Erwin next to him; on the other side of the table are Chief Engineer Lieutenant Harald Günther and several other crewmen. Most of them are veterans of the War, but not all. Naturally they are all Germans. The foreigners have not been invited to this nostalgic reunion. Günther is a mottled-faced man who wears his cap indoors; a little pouch encloses his meaty head, with a short visor in front and a persimmon-colored band. His head is clean-shaven and there is a mole like a small burnished fly on the nape of his neck.

  He clanks open his tankard, drinks, and lets the lid fall shut. “They hate us, the French,” he goes on. “That was clear in the War. They started it, of course. It was on account of their lost provinces, Alsace and Lorraine. They couldn’t get over them, even though they lost them fair and square in the war of ’70. But those places are not French, you know. Everybody in Strasbourg speaks perfect German. I have been there, gentlemen, and I can assure you.” Joch, the radioman, nods sagely. “They’re a treacherous lot, the French. A cousin of mine was shot by a franc-tireur. He was up a tree and he didn’t even have a uniform on. They dealt with him, I can assure you, when they got him down.”

  “Did your cousin die?”

  “No, but he was unable to marry on account of his wound.” He leaves a respectful pause after this, and then goes on. “The next time we’ll take no prisoners. And we’ll burn down their precious Paris. That’s the thing that keeps them going, you know. They tell themselves, Paris! Paris! and this inspires them to shoot people from up a tree.”

  The Captain, who is listening to this conversation but not participating in it, omits mentioning that his mother was French.

  “I met some French prisoners in the War, you know,” puts in a mechanic. “I learned to prattle a little of their lingo. They’re just chaps like us. Good soldiers. Doing their duty. It’s their leaders, swine like Clemenceau, that cause all the trouble.

  “They’re all sons of the same bitch,” says Joch. “The next time we’ll bomb Paris, not London. The English are all right. They just go to Paris too much and that addles their brains about things.”

  Another crewman, speaks up, a mechanic named Loewenthal. “We bombed London all right. We gave it to them.” The Captain stares at him. He has a face like a fox and lips as pink as a girl’s. He is too young to have been in the War.

  “Still, there’s a good deal to admire in the French,” says the mechanic who prattles a little French. “Their wine. Their women. Their poets.”

  Günther says, “Their writers are all fairies, like Gide and Proust. And Ravel is just a disciple of Wagner.”

  “The next time. The next time,” mutters Joch.

  Günther says, “Speaking as an engineer, the next time we’ll need more and better dirigibles. D’you know the trouble with the ones we had? It was hydrogen. If you go floating around in the sky with a high explosive in a bag over your head and fellows shooting at you from down below, you can expect to be set on fire. Helium’s the thing we’ll use next time, gentlemen. It won’t catch fire and the Americans have got lots of it.”

  “The Americans are all right,” says Joch. “I met some of them after the War. Decent enough fellows. The ones I talked to didn’t care for that snively schoolteacher Wilson any more than we did. Self-determination! The Fourteen Points! Be kind to little countries! God only had ten points, but Wilson needed fourteen! He laughs, a loud ha-ha that rings from the vaulted ceiling.

  But Günther is not paying attention any more. Beef-colored from the heated conversation and the warmth of the room, he gets up from the table and stands by it for a moment, then wheels away, perhaps to go to the lavatory. But no! he is headed for the piano. This old upright is a feature of the Heldenkeller dating from the wartime days, with yellowed keys and a thump instead of a note when high C is struck. No matter! It is a monument to Art, and important part of the culture for which the Heldenkeller stands. Günther seats himself on the stool and sets his fingers into the jaundiced ivories. The piano can scarcely be heard over the racket of conversation in the room. He begins with the overture to Tannhauser, which he transposes to the black keys so the high C will not be needed. Only a few of the men in the room are listening; they lower their heads and brood thoughtfully over their pipes. The rest of them go on chattering and drinking, although Günther has the conviction that the music of the greatest of all artists is somehow subliminally penetrating their hearts. He himself is moved by his own performance even under these conditions, this ludicrous wreck of a piano and this smoky room full of din. To the world he is an engineer, but deeper inside himself he is an artist, a poet. He has felt this vocation from the earliest dawn of his consciousness, when he prattled songs to himself in his crib. He has taken violin lessons and tried his hand at painting and sculpture. Surreptitiously, excha
nging his military uniform for the blouse and flowing tie of a bohemian, he has frequented the galleries of Europe and attended the festivals of the Master in Bayreuth. Art is his secret vice, as others may have perversion or drugs. He doesn’t mind if he is taken by the world for a dilettante; that is a role he savors. Inside he is the creator, the poet. With vibrant fingers he works his way through the overture, with particular attention to the powerful sounds in the bass, the marching eighth-notes. The Pilgrims wind under the Wartburg; their chant swells into a mighty outpour and finally passes away. A rosy mist floats up. Dawn breaks; the echo of the Pilgrims’ song is heard again in the distance.

  He looks around the room; the hubbub seems to have diminished a little. Transposing again into E flat this time, he launches, softly at first, into the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. A few more heads turn at this; he now has the attention of a dozen people out of the forty in the room. Rising to moderato, then to forte, he progresses to the high erotic climax of the duet. First him! Then her! Then both together! The chords crash together in a Niagara of exquisite harmony. They die away, and Günther’s fingers remain in the keys for a moment as he muses.

  As the Wagner recital comes to an end, for a few moments there is a little less noise in the place. The Captain turns to the right and attempts to start a conversation with Erwin. He is not sure how this will go, because he is no longer in the control car where he is in charge. He begins craftily, “Erwin. Tell me something. Did you sign on for this tour of duty because you knew I was going to be Captain?”

  To his surprise Erwin answers this question in a friendly, respectful, and even loquacious way. He says, “Well, you see, Captain, it was like this. I’ve always admired you as an officer and a man. You brought us through the War safe and sound. A lot of other fellows in the Zeppelins didn’t come back. Their Captains let their ships get shot down. So I owe a big debt of gratitude to you.”

  The Captain would not have imagined that a formal phrase like “debt of gratitude” was in Erwin’s vocabulary. Definitely there is a new Erwin, one whose existence he has never suspected. Of course, he has never before talked to Erwin except in the course of duty.