by Mike Bond
“C'est un arabe. We will deal with him according to law.” The colonel waved his hand at the exercise yard. “You're lucky you're French and deportable.” The soldier tugged at Cohen's arm. Pain soared up his neck.
“He's a boy!”
“Forget him. Do not establish contact.” The colonel pointed at the soldiers. “I've told them to shoot if you run.”
Cohen turned. “I'm sorry. About the shirt.”
“Shirt?” The colonel smiled at the soldiers. “I know nothing of any shirt.”
THE LAND ROVER bounced over the quay to where the paquebot had dropped her mooring cables and lay churning at her stern waters. “Billet, quatrième,” a soldier said to the clerk who was closing the gate where the forward gangway had been.
“Too late,” Cohen mumbled.
“Your money?” the clerk asked.
Cohen handed him the hundred-franc note. The man gave him change and leaned over the quayside to call down at the water. The paquebot was perhaps two hundred yards out, her bow swinging northward, stacks smoking, froth building up behind her screws.
The clerk led them down the stairs under the quay, flicking on a switch that illuminated the corridor and its series of compartments. He unbolted a door. As daylight jumped into the compartment, Cohen saw dark circles on the concrete where the boy's finger had bled.
A dory pulled alongside the compartment; a soldier pointed to it. “Depeche-toi!” He planted his rifle butt in Cohen's back and shoved him into the dory. It lurched away, forcing him to sit. One of the soldiers laughingly saluted him.
The dory putted to the side of the paquebot. The door in the hull was opening. A rope ladder uncoiled to water-line. Heads were silhouetted above at the rail, small ovals against the sky. He mounted the ladder one-handed. Sailors pulled him through the door. “Merci!” he called, but the dory had already pulled away, its engine sputtering in the roil of the paquebot.
“Billet?” A sailor regarded him impassibly. “Quatrième?” the sailor snorted. “Là-bas.” He pointed down. Another sailor took him down a foul companionway to a slatted bulkhead door that he opened with a key, shoving Cohen inside. “It's for the animals,” he said, and locked it.
Cohen stood at the edge of a wide, low room. The moist, unswallowable air reeked like an abattoir. The hot metal walls vibrated unevenly. Beyond him, figures shuffled mechanically in the jaundiced light.
14
HE TOOK THREE STEPS down into the hold. Cold water sloshed obscenely round his ankles; he backed up the stairs. A woman's laugh. “No illusions here, mon brave,” she called. “It's not First Class.”
The water in the hold rocked gently with the to-and-fro motion of the hull. Mounds of straw floated in it amid bulging, dark globes. Out of sight from the far side came a braying followed by shrill laughter. Cohen sat on the stairs.
“One must not station oneself there,” the woman said. “It's an exit, in case of fire. Or need to abandon ship.”
“Where can I sit?”
“Demand of the master. Perhaps he'll favor you with a chair such as mine, for only ten francs.”
From the obscurity came a tall, bowed Arab in an undershirt, pajamas rolled to his knees. His bony feet unleashed wavelets under the straw. He grinned, spittle sliding down the corner of his mouth.
“You are fortunate,” he said, distending his jaw to twist a tooth deeper into the gum, and led Cohen down an aisle between rows of chairs. In each chair was an Arab, some old, some young, some with children clinging to the chair arms. As they moved further from the light the room closed around them with Arabic gutturals, the whine of a child, the lap, lap of water on chair legs. The laugh burst out again.
“He's caught it, too,” Cohen said. “From Isom.”
“Far enough,” the master answered. “How lucky: the last chair. Your ten francs?”
Cohen fished the pieces left-handed from his pocket. One coin splashed at his feet. He knelt fumbling in cold ooze for the coin. A scream spiraled up a staircase of frenzy and burst around them. He jumped and dropped the coin again. The scream cascaded from laughter into silence. Once more he found the coin. “Who's that?”
The master's fingernails scratched his palm. “A passenger, taken from his native land to work out his days in France.”
“Why do you laugh?”
“Why not? It's so serious, life? Here you'll have a good seat for the circus. To hear the elephants when they shit.” The master guided him by the elbow to a canvas deck chair and sloshed away through the gloom.
HE WOKE SHIVERING. His clothes felt chilled and outgrown. The crash of his skull against the bulkhead door echoed in his temples. The shoulder pain was awesome but alien, beyond personal concern. Faces danced before him like horses on a carousel: the colonel, Hassim, Isom, his mother wiping troubled hands on a flowered apron. “All the good ones die,” he said to them. “Who doesn't?” they grinned in response. Weird laughter rolled toward him, a monstrous wave erupted inside him, burst out to meet itself, tears watering his cheeks. Pain cut it short.
“It's just Isom.” He rubbed his face, astonished at its asperity. A rumbling spatter filled the darkness with a foul, sweet odor. It subsided in random droplets on the straw. He held his breath until his forehead pounded but the smell remained. Eleven days, Paul. Easy now. Last quarter. Almost.
Lulled by the engines he dreamt of glaciated granite ridges cleft by green rivers, where dogwoods dropped white petals in rushing, lucid water. The petals tossed boatlike on the current over shoals of golden mica and stringing algal tresses. Small cutthroats flexed red gills behind crumpled boulders. Gratefully he leaned down to drink. The reflection rising to meet him was a deer's, luminous brown eyes in which his features were miniaturized. He jumped back. Claire sat on a downed log, her hair tied up.
“You'll drown,” she said, loosened her hair and unbuttoned her blouse until he could see the diamond heart winking like a beacon.
“I saw that,” he said. “The coast of Africa.”
“It was a passing ship.”
“Isom said…”
“You're a fool, believing what's false, ignoring what's true. Life's truly too complex for you.”
She was gone. Ash leaves rustled across him. He waited for the coolness of the wind but it did not come. A leaf tickled his neck. He raised it to the light. Its feelers wavered; its legs pushed against his finger.
He tossed the roach into the water, brushed at the others. They ran up his trouser legs and down his collar. The water was flecked with straw to which roaches clung like sailors to the flotsam of a shipwreck.
A sink was bolted in the corner by the bulkhead. As he approached it a man was drinking from the faucet. When he had finished he hitched up his djellabah and urinated into the sink. He nodded to Cohen as he stepped past. Globules of urine lingered in the sink and spattered up as Cohen turned on the faucet. The water tasted of dead fish and old boilers, reminding him of the closet on the Petr Vyazemski. He vomited into the sink, drank more water, and was sick again.
He brushed roaches from his chair and sat. At once he stood, unbuttoned his jeans, and squatted in the shifting straw by the elephant cage. “Transitory, no mind.” A child was whimpering beyond the elephants. Cohen wiped himself with soggy straw and hitched up his jeans.
The whimper came from a large cage. He lit a match. Beyond the bars, monkeys huddled in thigh-deep water, their eyes rubied by match light. In the middle, a smaller monkey clung to a dark blob that he saw was the body of an older one. “Get him,” he whispered to the other monkeys baring their teeth and clinging to the bars. “Get the baby!”
In the further cages an elephant defecated again with a rumbling splash. With each shift of the hull, waves of bilge water broke over the young monkey's head and knocked it from the corpse. Each time, it flailed screaming at the water, found the corpse, and clambered back. Cohen pounded the bars, but the lock would not budge. He crossed to his deck chair and pulled a strut from the canvas, returned to the monkey ca
ge and inserted it through the bars. The monkeys jabbered. The young one was unable to keep its head above the water, was washed again from the corpse and fought back to it. “Here,” Cohen hissed. “Take it!”
The monkey found the corpse and pulled itself up. Cohen extended the strut. The match fell into the water. The strut jabbed the monkey in the ribs; it leaped howling from the corpse, thrashing the water with tiny hands, mouth stretched wide against the water. Cohen reached out blindly, dropped the strut to light another match. The monkey was underwater, a foot from the corpse, the swell eddying over it. “Get it!” Cohen screamed at the other monkeys; he battered the bars with his fists, picked up the strut and threw it but it landed short and sank. The match went out. “Master!” Cohen called, shaking the bars. He lit another match. The corpse nodded sedately in the flow; the crimson eyes of the other monkeys glared back at him from the sides of the cage.
He pulled his chair from the water and sat. His fists stung from battering the bars. Laughter from the monkeys rose around him. “They've caught it,” he said, and fell asleep.
A MONSTROUS SPIDER descended upside down before him, its brown legs wriggling up over an orange stomach. A harsh voice issued from it. Something touched his shoulder and he jumped at the pain. The spider lisped at him, swinging closer.
A hand shook him gently. A second set of brown legs encircled the spider's orange belly and tore away its skin. Falling skin hit Cohen's knee. Inside, the body was lighter orange, serrated. The legs tore it apart, carried a section to his mouth.
Orange sweetness stung his lips and squirted down his throat. The face of the master regarded him. “You were speaking to no one,” he said. He broke off another section and pushed it between Cohen's lips.
Time passed or did not pass; he could not tell. It seemed he dreamed the same dream over and over: Sylvie turning her head to look at him, an orange in her hand, the side of her face cut by a line of dark hair, asking, “T'en veux plus?” But each time he went to answer her the dream faded, and so he never knew what his answer would be. Perhaps I only dreamt I dreamt it many times, while it was just once. I'm going mad, forget what I'm dreaming.
Twice more he sloshed across the hold to drink at the sink; innumerable times he crouched in the corner by the elephants. Often the laughter of the monkeys awakened him from something that he had resolved to remember.
VOICES took spark, feet pattered through the water. The Arabs clustered by the door, women chirping lightly. The shudder of the hull had silenced. He crossed the hold and followed the last Arab up a cliff of stairs toward a bright oblong that became the hull door giving on a gangway to the blue resplendence of Marseille.
HE LEANED AGAINST a lamp pole at the end of the dock and counted the money in his palm. Fifty-three francs were left from what the colonel had given him. There were the now-useless dinars Hassim had pushed back at him across the bar of Les Champs Elysées, a few centimes. It was shocking to think how meaningless centimes had once seemed: flat, light, and tinny, in mute testimony to their own worthlessness. Now, with so little company in his palm, they had more weight. “Liberty, equality, brotherhood,” they said.
La Canebière pointed northward from the Old Port like a cannon. In the first side street was an open market. He picked out a banana. “Fifteen centimes,” a kerchiefed woman said. He put it back. “And take your roaches with you,” she called.
In the next street he found two bananas for ten centimes at an Arab shop and sat wolfing them on the curb. “Where is a cheap hotel?” he asked the shopkeeper.
“French, or Arab?”
“Somewhere to sleep.”
“La rue Thubaneau, two blocks. If you reach la Providence,” the Arab called, “you've gone too far.”
La rue Thubaneau had grim facades and narrow sidewalks; paper rustled in the gutters. An old woman swept flashing glass into the street with a straw broom. “Good morning, grandmother,” he said. “Do you know who has a cheap room to rent?”
She peered up at him, fingers gnarled on the broom handle. A thimble-sized wart bristled on her chin. “You're not my grandson. One would not find him on this street of whores and Arabs, stinking like a dead mullet! Beat it!” She shook the broom.
“Does he shit, this grandson of yours? If he does, he's surely like you,” Cohen laughed, dodging the noisome swipe of her broom. Further along the street, a slip of cardboard hung in a window: “Chambre meublée – à tout confort.” A spare woman in black answered the bell.
“It is how much, this room with every comfort?”
“Ten francs the day, fifty the week.”
It waited atop four perilous flights, the banister tempting but unreliable, the tin-edged treads shifting under his steps. Its door had recently been punched in and had three planks nailed across it.
It was L-shaped, filled by a bed and a dresser, a chipped sink backed into the corner between them. A four-paned window cast cobwebbed light over fissures in the dresser's veneer. The mattress was slitted and stained. “There are no blankets?”
“Ten francs deposit, each.”
He tested the faucet. The water was tan-colored.
“It's not drinking water, that,” she said. “I bring one bottle each day.” She indicated a dusty wine bottle on the floor by the bed. “Extra water, five centimes the bottle.”
“I'll take it for a week, if you throw in the blankets.”
“You have a Carte? You don't look French. You must register downstairs. No food in the room. W.C. in the hall. No toilet paper in the toilet – it blocks the flush. No fights in the room.”
“Believe me, I have no one to fight.”
“I believe no one who says that.”
He awoke at dusk, head throbbing with hunger and fever, shoulder aching. He drained the water bottle, tugged on the light and stared at the flecked paint. Voices and car noises bounced up from the alley below the window. Vespers bonged out of the vermilion west through the cracked window of the W.C.
What was I dreaming? Oh God if I could be in Montana now. April and the snow gone from the south-facing meadows of the Tobacco Roots, the streams high and full of rainbows, achingly cold. The grass starting so shiny, and new green pushing out the tips of the lodgepoles, delicate outfolding leaves on the aspens, the willows already in leaf, green-tipped cottonwoods standing haughty as Blackfeet along the arroyos, elk feeding on the bright grass below snowline, the sleek swift patter of coyotes over last year's leaves.
He stared out the window. Silence is Montana. The freedom of silence has nothing to do with humans and everything to do with life. That's why I left Montana, too – I couldn't stand to watch it die. Couldn't go back to the forests where we'd hunted sun-gilded elk through cool towering pines, where now there's only chainsawed stumps and sun-charred bulldozed earth. While the Senators, Congressmen, Forest Service, and loggers divide up the public forest like the Mafia divide up some heroin network in the Bronx…When once Montana was God's magnificent gift to the entire universe, His most precious, beloved jewel… Why's the world like it is? No – why are we humans what we are? When we don't need be?
He spread his money on the dresser top. Eight francs, twenty-one centimes. He ran water into the sink, stripped, and washed. Yellow pus and a nauseous odor ran out of the cut in his shoulder. Exhausted by the effort he fell back on the bed. After a while he sat up and slapped his good knee. “I need food. Paris in ten more days.”
In the darkening street a woman watched him from a doorway; a cat hissed and ran behind a garbage can. A truck passed, “A. Trimestre, Carcasses and Tallow,” painted on its door. In an Arab café at the corner he ate bifteck frites for three francs fifty. The horsemeat was tough but juicy, gone before he knew it. “Do you have any work to be done?” he asked the austere owner.
The man put his hands flat on his apron. “Alain,” he called.
A head, roughcut and weepy-eyed, jumped through the kitchen window. “Oui,” it said.
“This one seeks work.”
�
�Voilà,” said Alain. “So do we all.”
Slowly, like an old man, Cohen walked along la rue Thubaneau. “Allô, mon mec,” a voice called from his shadowed doorway. He looked up, expecting the tall concierge. “Have some fun?” the woman said. She was dark and overweight, breasts sloping down her dress. He slipped past her down the half-lit hall.
As he reached the fourth landing a door slapped open and a man in a sailor suit sprawled into the hall. His sailor's hat rolled across the landing and bounced bounced bounced down the stairs. He lifted his head. “Cheap cunt,” he said, yelling as a booted toe caught him amidships, below the ribs.
“Beat it, pansy!” The woman turned fierce eyes on Cohen. “So you think he should have his money back when he can't get it up?”
“I think he's crazy if he can't get it up with you. I'll show him how.”
She snorted. “Not without your fifty francs, just like him.” She kicked the sailor again, who rolled away.
“I'll owe you fifty francs,” Cohen offered. She was slight and pretty, sable hair trailing over one shoulder, breasts nipping up into her blouse, a green slit skirt accentuating the length and promise of her thighs above her calf-length boots. “I'm getting a job tomorrow,” he added.
“Come see me tomorrow, then.” She stepped over the sailor, who grabbed her ankle.
“Return my money,” the sailor moaned.
“Let go, or I call the dog.”
“Even a dog couldn't get it up for you!”
“Wait a minute,” Cohen said. “She's my sister.”
The sailor sat up. He scratched his thin reddish curls, felt round for his cap, stood. He belched. “Thy sister pisses blue,” he said evenly, unzipping his fly.
Cohen gave him a quick left-handed tap and he toppled in a slow, inebriated backward handstand down the stairs. His feet came up and went over his head and he crashed against the third floor landing wall.
“You killed him?” she whispered. “Shit, that's trouble.”
The sailor sat up and vomited.
“Creep,” she spit. “Faggot bastard. Maricon!”