Nowhere: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  “Well, what do you want me to do, for God’s sake?” Hinkle asked. “Change it to Spang so that your usage is legitimized?”

  The flabby-cheeked man smirked. “Well, aren’t we getting toplofty?”

  I looked towards my neighbor on the left, but he did not return the favor. He was a beetle-browed sort, with a hard-looking jaw. He stared malevolently into his sherry.

  No one did anything about getting me a glass. The librarian had taken a silent leave.

  I began, “You see, my own work has been for the theat—” but was interrupted by a curly-headed author across the table, one of the younger men.

  “Leave it to you assholes to make an issue of something so inane. Who cares who’s Spang and who isn’t?”

  Hinkle said, “You wouldn’t be happy if someone got your name wrong, Boggs.”

  “I couldn’t care less!”

  “All right, then, I’ll call your bluff. From now on, I’ll refer to you as Sprat.”

  The curly-haired man frowned. “Now, wait a minute. That’s insulting. I don’t have to take that sort of thing.”

  “You phony,” Hinkle growled in disgust. “It’s simply a name I made up out of the blue. What’s insulting about it?”

  “It’s the name of a tinned fish, as you very well know!”

  Some of the others were sniggering now. A well-constructed young Blond waitress appeared behind a serving cart full of soup bowls. She began to distribute the soup, starting with me, then moving on in a counterclockwise direction towards Hinkle.

  “You’re being oversensitive, Boggsy,” said a man whose dark hair was plastered flat to his scalp and parted in the middle. “My name is Merkin, but I’ve never been embarrassed by it. It was good enough for my old dad and it’s good enough for me.”

  “Of course that’s an archaic word,” said the only man yet to have addressed me, viz., he who had directed me to a seat. “You’d feel different if you were called Cunthair. I think Boggs has a point.”

  “Well,” said Merkin, “ ‘bog’ meant ‘shit’ in the olden time, did it not?”

  Someone else asked, “Verb or noun?”

  I saw with astonishment that the large-nosed author next to Hinkle had slipped his left hand up under the skirt of the waitress as she bent to place his soup before him, and was obviously massaging her buttock. No one but me, including the young woman, paid any attention to this.

  When I looked again at Boggs, he was plucking up a roll. He proceeded to hurl it at Merkin. Merkin with amazing speed lifted a fending palm, and the roll bounced off it and soared to fall into the soup which the waitress had placed before the large-nosed man while he was fondling her behind.

  The victim seized the nearest basket of rolls and began to hurl them one by one at Boggs, who ducked some but was hit by several. When the fusillade had ended, Boggs asked the man next to him to pass the boat-shaped glass dish that held olives, black and green, and sticks of celery.

  The author with the flabby cheeks protested. “Now, hold on, Boggs. I’m fond of olives and don’t want to eat them off the floor.”

  Boggs carried the dish to this man and emptied it on his head. “Eat your fill, then, Buzzle.”

  The waitress had now reached the man on my left, but the cart was empty. There had been just enough bowls for each of the regulars. My presence had thrown off the count. With an extended finger she enumerated the bowls she had served, shook her head, and burst into tears.

  Buzzle had been furiously gathering up as many of the olives and celery sticks as he could, after they had rolled and bounced off his head, no doubt with an angry intent to launch them at Boggs, who had returned to his seat, but the weeping girl distracted everyone for the moment.

  Hinkle was first to speak. “You idiot,” he cried to her, and then he shook his head at various of his colleagues and even at me. “It’s an outrage that almost every day our meal is marred by some stupidity on the part of that Blond.” He addressed her again. “You fool!”

  She sobbed into her hands and then peeped out with two blue eyes. “Is brinkink twelf as alvays.”

  Merkin shouted, “Count them, you silly bitch!”

  When she did as instructed, most of the writers joined her in pointing at the bowls and announcing the numbers aloud, in chorus. They arrived at twelve.

  “I don’t understand it,” said Hinkle. “There are enough bowls.” They repeated the process, this time without being joined by the waitress, who stood silent and humble alongside her cart.

  I finally said, “May I explain? You see, I am the ex—” At this point Buzzle hurled two handfuls of olives at me, and Merkin began to pelt me with rolls. I was also the target of odd names as terms of abuse: “Barber!” “Dentist!” “Accountant!” And so on.

  For a moment I was taken aback to be so treated when I was supposed to be their guest, and I crossed my arms across my face and sank beneath the table, out of the line of fire. But then, since I hadn’t really been hurt, indignation soon became my dominant emotion. I came up fighting. I lifted my bowl and hurled the soup across the table into Boggs’s face. I picked up from the floor some of the rolls thrown at me and fired them at Hinkle, Merkin, and Buzzle. I snatched up olives and celery and dashed them into the face of the grumpy-looking man on my left, though in truth he had not been one of the aggressors against me.

  “You shits!” I cried. “You call yourselves writers?” Perhaps this had nothing to do with the issue at hand, but surely one need not justify what one says when exercised.

  Eventually it struck me that from the moment I went on the offensive, the authors became peaceable, and by the time I had committed several acts of violence against them they had begun to assume expressions I could not but identify as admiring, perhaps even downright obsequious. For example, the man on my left wiped his face with a napkin, rose, and came meekly to me.

  “Sir,” said he, “please accept my apology for having offended you as apparently, though without intention, without indeed having, to my memory, been aware of your presence until this moment—unless, to be sure, it was that very ignorance for which you gave me what was surely a merited punishment and if not was yet no doubt deserved according to that principle enunciated by the Bard, videlicet, which amongst us could escape the noose were justice to be honored more in the observance than the breach?” He offered his hand. “Your servant, sir. I am Barnswallow.”

  “Wren,” said I. I transferred to my left hand the roll I had been holding and shook with him: he had a weightless but clinging sort of grip, which one half expected to have to scrape away.

  “Welcome to our little convocation,” he said. His paunch hung over his belt. It now occurred to me that all these authors wore matching navy-blue three-piece suits, most of which were rumpled, stained at the vest, and sprinkled with dandruff at the shoulders and even the lapels. Barnswallow was one of those whose vests were unbuttoned so as to offer a modicum of liberty to their extra flesh.

  Hinkle was next to offer his welcome. The others around the table were beaming and intoning, “Hear, hear.”

  I finally lowered my roll to the tabletop. I was not yet prepared to be extravagantly genial, but I did say, grudgingly, “Well, all right, I suppose I can accept the apology. But I’ll strike back if I am the recipient of any more aggression. I realize I am an uninvited guest, but you might simply have asked me to leave.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Wren,” said Hinkle. “It would have been rude by our lights to ask you to go, you see. As it was, we proved you were welcome by treating you as badly as we treat one another!”

  Again the “Hear, hears” were sounded around the table.

  “All right,” said I. “I’m willing to put the misunderstanding, if such it was, behind me. Now please resume your usual activities. I assume these lunches are normally the occasions for discussion of your works in progress?” I sat down now, as, following my lead, did those writers who had sprung up earlier.

  “Actually,” said Boggs, across the table, after
the chair legs had stopped squeaking, “we talk almost exclusively about inconsequential matters, as it happens. Never do we mention to any of our colleagues what we’re working on at the moment, lest he steal the idea and complete the work before the man can whose original idea it was.”

  “Then you don’t trust one another?”

  Buzzle snorted. “Certainly not! We writers are the most unscrupulous people in the country. We’re well known for that. Not only will we steal one another’s ideas. We mingle with the crowds in the marketplace, shoplifting and picking pockets. If someone is still naïve enough to invite any of us to dinner, we’ll swipe what we can: silverware, family heirlooms small enough to slip into a pocket, dirty underwear from the bathroom hamper—

  “Male or female underclothing?”

  “Either,” said Boggs. “As long as it’s been worn recently.”

  Whether or not I was supposed to take him seriously, I decided that these were the most unattractive people I had met thus far in Saint Sebastian. Indeed, the Blonds, though cretins, were, all in all, the nicest. When I went on the attack, the waitress had slipped out of the room. Now I espied her peeping from the swinging door that obviously led to the kitchen. I had not previously seen her face straight on: it bore a notable resemblance to those of Olga and Helmut.

  When she determined that the soup course was so to speak over, though most of it had been splattered across the table, she re-entered the dining room, transporting, with high-held wrists, a large trayful of loaded plates. So as to keep the peace—for despite their avowals of friendship I did not trust this lot—I waved off the dish she was about to place before me.

  “You don’t care for roast stoat?” asked Hinkle. “They can probably rustle you up something else, then: perhaps some of yesterday’s badger.”

  “Actually, I’ve already eaten and within the hour,” said I. “I shouldn’t have taken the soup. But please go ahead, all of you. I’m here as an observer. Don’t mind me.”

  I cannot justly complain, for I had told them to proceed, but I must say they fell to their plates with an ardor, even a ferocity, that astonished me. For a few moments the table was a mise-en-scène of flashing cutlery and gnawing teeth. Juice dripped from chins, fragments of food fell from flying forks. Boggs’s knifework was so savage as to wound his index finger, and his blood dribbled to join the other fluids staining the tablecloth. With closed eyes one would have heard a troop of hyenas demolishing a carcass. Before I had completed an ocular circuit of the company, those first served were displaying empty plates.

  I addressed Hinkle, who had long since devoured the last morsel of his own portion. “You fellows are quite the trenchermen. Do you work up such appetites at writing?”

  He patted his protuberant belly. “I’ve never made up my mind about the chicken or the egg: maybe gluttons are naturally attracted to the profession, for some reason. If so, bless me if I can see the connection.”

  The waitress was now going around with red wine. After every four persons, she began a new bottle, for the glasses were large and she filled them to the rims.

  I asked, “Do you people drink a lot?”

  “Not during the week, except after eleven A.M.” said Hinkle, lifting his goblet and emptying it in one long draught. When he lowered the glass he looked around for the waitress. She was detained. Barnswallow’s hand was between her legs.

  “And sex?”

  “Yes,” said he, “with anything.” He gestured with his glass at the waitress.

  “By the way, don’t you have any female authors in Saint Sebastian?”

  “If you can call them that. They write nothing but pornography.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Is that so surprising, given the filthy imagination of the typical woman?” Hinkle was now growing annoyed with the failure of the waitress to fill his glass, but Barnswallow was working ever more furiously under her skirt, to which activity she seemed indifferent, whereas he was gasping stertorously. It was an ugly spectacle to me, but his colleagues were seemingly oblivious to it.

  I wasn’t eager to start more trouble, so I made gentle application to Hinkle.

  “It isn’t her fault. Why don’t you ask Barnswallow to unhand her?”

  Hinkle shrugged. “We’re never critical of one another in such a situation.”

  “You were only just throwing things and insulting each other!”

  “That was only personal,” said he. “This is principle. Can’t you see that? A Blond’s a Blond!”

  I turned in my chair, so that I could not see Barnswallow from the corner of my eye. “I suppose it’s none of my business.... Tell me, what do you write?”

  “I do children’s books. Each of us has his own specialty. Boggs for example does books and articles explaining how things happen in the natural sciences: how the porcupine throws its quills, how the basilisk paralyzes its intended prey with a fixed stare, and so on. Buzzle’s latest work is a series of profiles of three great men who were afflicted with chronic diarrhea: Mohammed, Molière, Marx.”

  I frowned. “Just a moment. Can that be true? How does he—”

  Hinkle made a superior smile. “Pure assumption. Else we couldn’t say, according to Buzzy. Molière, for example, was awfully cunning at it, leaving not a shred of evidence.”

  “Neither, I should imagine, did the other two. Also, I happen to remember from my scouting days that a porcupine certainly does not throw its quills, and that a basilisk can paralyze with a glance is a quaint old delusion of the Middle Ages, if I recall the footnotes in my college edition of Shakespeare.”

  At this point Barnswallow finally released the waitress. She came to Hinkle with the wine bottle.

  I asked her for her name.

  “Inga.”

  “You’re not by chance related to Olga and Helmut?”

  Her answer did not take me by surprise. “Sure.”

  Hinkle was not offended by my negative comments. Still smiling proudly, he went on. “Hozenblatt, over there, is our modern historian. He is best known for his comprehensive study of the concentration camps in which the Jews exterminated the German and Austrian Gentiles, 1938 to ‘45. Currently he is at work on a book in the same vein, this one concerned with the Siberian forced-labor camps in which anti-Communist zealots confine benevolent secret policemen.”

  I retrieved one of the overturned sherry glasses and asked Inga to fill it with table wine. “Thank you,” I told her, and added, sotto voce, “I’m your friend.”

  She made her blue eyes into veritable saucers and asked in a loud voice, “You vant to screw?”

  But no one, including Hinkle at my other elbow, showed any sign of having heard this. I still had not got used to the utter lack of sexual shame in Saint Sebastian.

  “No, thank you,” I told Inga, and turned back to the writer of children’s books. “Tell me, Hinkle, what kind of thing do you write about for kids?”

  He was pleased by the question. “All manner of informative subjects, actually, from economic theory to contraception. Then, on the entertainment side, surveys of nightlife around the world, the caves of Paris, the after-hours joints of New York, the transvestite bars of Istanbul, and so on.”

  “And do the children understand this material?”

  “Well, of course, nobody understands economics,” said Hinkle. “I expect they get some profit from the rest of it. But if they don’t, what does it matter? They’re just kids.”

  “Some of you have British-sounding names: Merkin, Boggs, et al., and everybody in the country speaks fluent English, though so far as I know, you’re a considerable distance from Great Britain.”

  Hinkle narrowed his eyes. “You’re not speaking derisively, are you?”

  “Certainly not!”

  “Because an awful lot of people do, if they know you’re an author. Which is why we all of course use pseudonyms, some of which are British. As to the use of the English language throughout the country, you’d have to look in the Encyclopaedia Seb
astiana for the whys and wherefores. But my understanding is that at some time in the early nineteenth century the then reigning prince decided to simplify the matter of language, the choice of which in conversation had become trendily arbitrary. It was chic, especially among the better class of ladies, to address a person in an exotic tongue. The other would of course endeavor to one-up the first by replying in an even more obscure language. The universal use of English seemed the answer, for what is it but a compound of many other tongues, beginning as German, taking on Latin from the Romans, then French from the Normans, and so on, and eventually even collecting such exotica as pajama from Persian by way of Hindustani and goober from Bantu?”

  During the course of the foregoing remarks I had emptied my glass. I rose now and pursued Inga, who was at the turn of the table with her bottle. While she poured, I was addressed by the nearby Hozenblatt.

  “I say, Wren, perhaps you could settle this argument I’m having with Smerd. I maintain that Montenegro is a peak near Kilimanjaro in Africa, whereas he insists it’s a very dark wine of the Jura. What do you say?”

  “Neither. He was a Latin American singer of the bossa-nova era, now almost forgotten.”

  Smerd was a husky, powerful-looking man, whose constant expression seemed to be a scowl. I asked Hinkle what sort of thing Smerd wrote.

  “He’s our muckraker. He exposes people, often literally, as when he’s researching the prevalence of dirty feet. He’s not above knocking you to the ground, tearing off your shoes and socks, and prying your toes apart, looking for toe jams.”

  I glanced again at the author in question, but my eyes were attracted to a man on his left, a big fat jolly writer with a high-colored face and watery eyes. He had taken the bottle away from Inga, a new bottle, and putting its mouth to his, lifted its base into the air.

  I asked Hinkle who that was.

  “Riesling,” said he. “Our literary critic.”

  When I looked again at Riesling I saw him emptying the bottle unto the very last drops, to catch which, on his protruded red tongue, he held the neck perhaps a foot overhead. Then without warning he hurled the bottle at Merkin, who however caught it easily. Riesling roared-wept with laughter.