Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003

by Howard Waldrop

  He breathed heavily, and put out one hand toward the wall, as if reaching for a curtain or to close a window.

  “Comrade Minister,” asked Dichter. “What is?”

  He turned his head toward her. His eyes shone with fear, or something more.

  “Karl . . .” he said. “Karl Marx was standing there, wearing his last suit and trailing the rope they hanged him with!”

  Only then did the Peoples’ Minister of Culture lie down, like a man lowering himself into his usual bed at home, stretch himself out full-length on the floor of his office, and die with a small sigh.

  Since this involved the head of the Department of Culture, and one of the original Revolutionaries, the Peoples’ Department for Security was called in.

  In this case, me.

  I went back to Department headquarters to make my initial report to my boss.

  I boarded Peoples’ Traction Company Tram #4 at the corner of Tann-häuser Boulevard and Street of the Peoples, on which all the government departments were located. I looked over my notes of interviews with six Culture workers, and the doctor who had treated the Peoples’ Minister for the last twelve years.

  Workers on bicycles, a few pedicabs, and one vehicle based on the eastern rickshaw, pulled by two sturdy proles in tandem, passed the steam tram. It was true what people said; Dresden was a more beautiful, quieter, and hygienic city since horses had been banned three years ago, freeing half the street cleaners for more important jobs. (Rome, 2000 years ago, had taken a halfway measure, forbidding the city to equine traffic between sunup and sundown, which meant only that it was noisier, and you stepped in road-apples in the darkness.) Here and there one of the new self-propelled vehicles sputtered by, giving off whale-oil fumes.

  It was late in the year with a hint of snow in the air under the gray sky. Not the picture people have of Dresden. It was warm in the tram, how-ever, the few blocks I rode, thanks to the new electrical heating coils over the seats.

  I stepped out; the Peoples’ tram moved away, and I went in and reported to my Section chief.

  2

  The Union We of All Who Work

  Dirkmann had his booted feet up on his large desk. It had once belonged to some minor functionary in the Old Regime.

  “So?” he asked, cocking his head to one side so his good eye was on top.

  “The Minister of Culture died of a coronary, or a cerebral hemorrhage. He had been in poor health. Evidently it was triggered when Karl Marx, whom he had known, or rather the figure of Karl Marx, stepped out of his bookcase.”

  Dirkmann raised his eyebrow, the one over the bad eye. He took down his feet and sat upright slowly in his chair.

  “He saw Karl Marx.” It wasn’t a question.

  “According to the chief clerk.”

  Dirkmann reached into his desk files and came up with four blue pneumatique letters.

  “That makes one Marx, one Engels, and now three Wagners in the last week.”

  “So . . . ” I said. “A—”

  “—Spectre is Haunting Europe,” finished Dirkmann. “Or, spectres. And Dresden, if not the whole of the continent.” He looked over the blue forms. “All to current or former officials who knew them. Your case is the only one involving death—the woman who saw Engels has been put to sick-bed by her doctor, though. I’ve sent copies upward—yours will join them. At least the Leader will not have just statistics to read, if the copies get that far. Right now I need a three-paragraph summary. Then go home. Tomorrow,” he said, “don’t come here. Go directly to the Peoples’ Archives. Start learning everything you can about Wagner.”

  “But,” I said, “surely the Department has some expert, someone it can call on?”

  “It does,” said Dirkmann. “He saw Wagner Tuesday.” He pointed to one of the blue letters. “He’s been quite drunk since.”

  “I’m not the least bit musical,” I said. “I can’t carry a tune, or whistle. Others who can would be better.”

  “There’s irony for you, Comrade,” said Dirkmann. “Someone named Rien-zi who can’t whistle! I said, research everything. The music was only about one-tenth the man. Work your way through that on momentum. I want you to know as much about the man as anyone who wasn’t there. Talk to whomever you must. Find out why this is happening after twenty-three years.”

  “Surely you can’t believe . . .”

  “Ah, yes!” said Comrade Dirkmann. “The Peoples’ Federated States of Europe does not believe in ghosts or goblins! It believes in the innate perfectibility of Man! There’s your Hegelian dialectic in a nutshell. We no longer have the Church’s Heaven and Hell; we have the Worker’s Heaven on Earth!”

  “Very well. Why would you be interested in this, then?”

  Dirkmann looked at me with his bad eye.

  “It’s personal,” he said. “These ghosts are messing with my town.”

  Every school, gymnasium, and university student thinks they know Wagner’s story. I thought I did, too, until I was handed this case.

  The usual précis goes something like this: Born, 1813, Leipzig, his stepfather perhaps his true father; brothers and sisters; bad academia and gambling; desire to write poems and plays, then opera: Die Feen; Das Liebesverbot; Rienzi; Der fliegende Holländer; Tannhäuser; Lohengrin; the start of one on Jesus and one on Buddha; some notes about the Norse. While writing and composing these, a series of itinerant jobs as choral and orchestral leaders in Prague, Riga, and elsewhere. Marriage to the actress Minna Planer; poverty in Paris; escape from creditors in the night, to end up as kappelmeister to the Court of Saxony, 1846; eventual conversion to the revolutionary party, the Vaterlandsverein, 1847; hero of the Dresden Revolution, May, 1849; First Leader of the Peoples’ Federated Revo-lutionary State, 1849–1853 (during, and just after which, all Germany became a Peoples’ Republic); adoption of a son, 1852; execution by the Prussian forces of the Counter-Revolution, 1853; disinterment and entombment in the Wall of Martyrs, Dresden, 1854, following the collapse of Prussia. In other words, idol and fount from which all European (with the exception of Britain) revolutions and Peoples’ Republics sprang.

  The night before going to the Archives, I reread Hannebolt’s Richard Wagner: Peoples’ Martyr (we’d all had to read it at University), made some notes, and took them with me the following morning.

  The chief archivist seemed surprised when I presented my credentials and told him what I was here for.

  “Except for a few foreign scholars, sent by their governments to look for specific things Wagner might have said about their countries, hardly anyone comes here looking for anything. Most of it, you know, has been printed somewhere—the State Publishing House did forty-nine volumes —copies of those are here, too—and it has been twenty-three years since his martyrdom. For what specifically are you looking? The papers of the Provisional Government? His writings on music theory?”

  “I suppose I want to look at it all,” I said.

  The archivist laughed. “Excuse me, Comrade.” He gestured for me to follow him. We walked down a short hall and turned. He unlocked the door, revealing four rooms, one after the other, extending into the darkness. There were floor-to-ceiling shelves in the first room, with four reading desks near the door, and in the far corner boxes and map files, all labeled.

  “Where would you like to start?” he asked.

  I looked at my notes. “His letters to friends, 1849–1850. The official papers by him on the Erfurt Crisis of 1851. Records of the Prussian Counter-Revolution in Dresden of 1853. Some of the music.”

  The archivist pushed a button. Three clerks appeared. He rolled off a series of numbers; they scurried away. He seated me at one of the desks and turned on its new Ruhmkorff lamps, bathing the reading table with a soft blue glow.

  “You may leave anything here when you’re done for the day,�
� he said. He handed me a dozen red ribbons. “Place these on anything you wish kept out for tomorrow. The others I shall return to the stacks myself. If you wish more, or anything, press the button. The taza de alivio is the first door on the left. Enjoy your research,” he said, and departed.

  In a few minutes the clerks had put a dozen boxes, ledgers, and notebooks on the desk, then they too departed.

  I was alone with Wagner and history.

  3

  Fruits of the Peoples’ Works Are Buried

  In the writings of one of the lesser-known of the original Revolu-tionaries, I ran across the following:

  Of course, revolutions are fun! You can drop a piano from a fourth-floor window onto some poor conscript—caught between shooting at you, and being shot for not shooting at you—and watch him pop like a tomato. There is a sense of great personal satisfaction—I did my part in the collapse of some nodding Charles or Louis or Roderigo, even if it were just to kill some poor fool who’d rather be up here throwing furniture down on me. He is dead—Long Live the Revolution! It was not his fault he was the tool of backwardness and repression; it is not my fault I am the agency through which the Forces of Destiny work themselves out. Might as well execute Bösendorfer for making the piano in the first place! I work for a world where people will never have to make a choice between shooting me and being shot for not killing me on sight.

  August Roeckel, 1850

  The third day of the Revolution, everyone knows, Wagner borrowed a cart and took his wife, his dog Peps (a monster that could have pulled a cart), and a parrot to his sister’s house in Chemnitz, forty kilometers away. He was on his way back next morning when he started meeting refugees from Dresden, telling him to turn around, the Revolution has failed. Then he met the owner of the cart, who was in another with his household goods and two grown sons. Wagner returned his cart and weary horse to the man, and continued on foot back toward the city. He met more and more people, including members of the Revolutionary Council, who told him the Prussians were coming.

  What most don’t know is that he continued on for another kilometer before his will faltered; that he had in fact retraced his path for two kilometers back toward Chemnitz when he spied, coming in from a side road from the direction of Poland, a large group of armed men, singing and yelling.

  They had come from Bohemia to aid the Revolution and had heard no news yet. More than half were drunk—they had come upon an abandoned wagonload of wine two villages back.

  Heartened, Wagner told them he was a member of the Revolutionary Council, out scouting for the reinforcements—and here they were! He put himself at their head, and marched them back into the now-burning city, singing “La Marseillaise.” What remained of the Revolutionary Council – that being Bakunin and Roeckel—came out to meet them.

  And less than an hour after taking their places on the barricades, word came that their king, the King of Saxony (safely twenty kilometers away), had accepted the crown of the constitutional monarchy offered by the Frankfurt Assembly, in the name of the Peoples’ Federated Revolutionary States.

  The fighting went on for another two days—the Poles at the forefront —then a miracle. The Prussians were recalled to put down a minor revolution of their own, leaving only the battered army of the Old Regime to withdraw to the nearest border to await developments.

  Wagner threw a last grenade at the hindmost of the Saxon army stragglers, from his nest in the bell tower of the Kreuzkirche, and yelled, “Good riddance, running dogs of the bourgeois lickspittles!”

  Up in the tower with Wagner was a new arrival—he’d entered Dresden while Wagner had been turning around for Chemnitz before meeting the Poles. His name was Emil Gaspard, later known to history as Eisenmann.

  The first thing Wagner did the next day was send for Engels, who was in Frankfort, and Marx, who was of all places in Prussia. They came, toots sweet.

  From Wagner’s personal notebook:

  Last night, troubled by bad news from just everywhere, I fell asleep on my campaign bed while reading dispatches. I had a strange dream, uplifting and nightmarish at the same time.

  I was in a strange city filled with water—it must be Venice though I have never been there—and I was an old man. When I moved, my joints ached and my heart was as heavy as lead.

  But the strangest aspect was that the woman I was with— Minna was nowhere about—who must be my wife, was Liszt’s daughter, whom I met when she was eleven years old five years ago, in 1848; now a grown plain but stylish woman.

  I was at a desk in a sumptuous apartment in some villa. And I was writing not party essays or speeches, but music once again, music such as I nor the world had ever heard before! I knew it was my masterpiece. I wrote the last note of the last bar. And at that moment my heart ruptured and I died. Liszt’s daughter saw and rushed toward me; her hands grabbed me as all faded to black—

  I awoke with a start to find my glasses broken where I had rolled onto them in my sleep, and myself crying—and then Bakunin barging in, singing, already smoking the vilest cigar to be had, and behind him Marx, Engels, and Roeckel, all full of plans for the relief of Erfurt . . .

  One day nineteen years before Wagner’s revolution, Emil Gaspard (now known as Eisenmann, the Leader of the VDDR) turned a corner in Paris and witnessed a soldier shoot Emil’s neighbor, Monsieur J-P Fleury, right between the eyes.

  Emil had been heading for his father’s boulangerie when he heard a great tumult in the street ahead. He’d run and leaned around the corner just in time to see the act.

  The fact that M. Fleury had been raising his walking stick at the soldier did not change the violence of the act that ensued.

  Immediately several other civilians beat the crap out of the soldier. Then they stepped back to a handy pile of paving stones three meters away and stoned him with enough bricks to make the foundation of a small shop. Someone took his rifle, cartridges, and bayonet, and ran away.

  There were sounds of firing up the street; smashing furniture, the screams of women and men, the neighing of horses cut short by musketry. Emil ran toward his father’s place of business in time to see soldiers roll a cannon around a farther intersection, then fire it into a mob that crossed from a side street, tearing away limbs and heads, covering the walls with blood and offal.

  A second cannonade tore into people beside the bakeshop. Flames spewed from its shattered facade. Emil ran to the shop, slipping on a boot and foot. The back door to the place stood open; his father and the baker-boys must have gotten away.

  Soldiers marched down the street then, serried out in a wedge, cannon foremost, trundling it before them. Heat and flames grew around Emil.

  An officer walked slowly by. Emil grabbed a dough-paddle bigger than himself and stepped out behind the man. Emil brought the paddle down with such force that he was lifted from the ground. The officer sank to his knees.

  Emil grabbed the two pistols and holsters with their cartridge box from the wounded officer. When he tried to pull the man’s saber from its scabbard, it proved too heavy and unwieldy.

  “What do you think you’re doing there, boy?” asked a sergeant, stand-ing over him, a rifle in his hand.

  Emil shot him right between the eyes and grabbed his rifle before it fell to the ground. He ran off toward the end of the street where a barricade was going up.

  It had been a hot July day in Paris in 1830, and Emil was ten years old. As he ran down the street, he caught a glimpse of three men watching him from a balcony.

  After Charles X had slunk out of the city, and the July Revolution ended, a servant showed up in the Gaspard home with a visiting-card from a famous painter.

  So it was that Emil found himself posing beside a half-naked lady, and a student in the green top hat and red velvet coat of the National Guard, while M. Delacroix painted his famous picture “Liberty Leadin
g the People, 28 July 1830,” a few days before the painter left on a long-planned trip to Algiers.

  Emil was quite bored, standing there in this fashion fifteen minutes at a time, holding up the two pistols, trailing the cartridge box, with that ridiculous beret on his head. But at the end of three days he was paid what amounted to his father’s income for a month, and that was the only income the family had seen since the shop had burned down.

  As he said goodbye, he realized M. Delacroix was one of the three men who had watched him from the balcony.

  From Wagner’s personal notebook:

  Bakunin said one night: “This revolution’s over. I’ve got other cities to be burning, other soldiers to be depressing. My work here is done; it has been for at least a year, but I’ve stayed on from good comradeship and a vast sense of accomplishment.

  “A toast, comrades” he said. We stood.

  “To further revolutions in the minds of men . . .” We all lifted our glasses to each other, and placed our hands over our hearts.

  It was the saddest, and at the same time, most encouraging leave-taking I have ever had.

  4

  For Justice Thunders Condemnation

  They marched Wagner out to the wall behind the Municipal Building the day after they hanged Marx and Engels.