Aslan Norval

by B. TRAVEN

  “Yes, as I said, you win. First: Your Past—the Despair of Your Present—is that the correct title?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And then dinner.”

  “And then dinner,” she repeated.

  He happened to glance at a big, brightly illuminated clock in the middle of a towering advertisement for nail-buffing cream.

  “We have thirty minutes till the movie,” he said. “What about a cup of coffee?”

  “Wonderful,” she agreed, “we might get thirsty, since the movie is at least an hour and forty-five minutes.”

  In the café, as he was stirring in the sugar, he said without looking up, as if nothing in the world interested him more than his coffee: “Your Past—the Despair of Your Present. So, you think it will be a sexy film?”

  “I’m sure. Two of my girlfriends who saw it told me that there were a couple of times during the film when just couldn’t contain themselves.”

  Silently Beckford thought: Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to see this film with her, even if it’s terrible. Provocative. That’s exactly what she needs tonight.

  This thought gave him back his aggressiveness from that afternoon. He felt his embarrassment waning slowly. In any case, I’m the boss, he assured himself, and as her boss I don’t need to let her intimidate me. I’m the one who’s meant to intimidate her. She lives off of me. I pay her salary. Then he realized that he also depended on Aslan’s money.

  I don’t actually care where the money is coming from. I must be worth the money and the office to her, or else she wouldn’t spend it so easily on me. Therefore, I earn it honestly. I didn’t ask her to furnish an office for me and to leave such a large sum of cash in the safe. And I still don’t have a clue what she really wants from me. It’s possible that this new company in which I am apparently to play an important role is designed to be a gigantic haul in which five hundred idiotic honest men get robbed blind and left outside of the fence. And then I as the general manager will be saddled with the blame for the entire fraud. Then I’ll sit comfortably in prison for five years, and when I get out—

  Suddenly he realized that Amy was looking critically at his face. “What are you thinking about, Mr. Beckford? Business worries? These days we all have worries, even if we don’t own a business and have to live off a salary instead. Forget your worries for a few hours.” She glanced at her watch. “It seems that it’s just about time to get to the theater.”

  “You guessed right, Miss Amy. I do indeed have grave, very grave worries, fears, and sorrows. All right, let’s get to it. Maybe the past of a woman who is completely unknown to me will distract me from my own present.”

  Amy laughed. “How cleverly you transfer the title of the movie to your personal circumstances!”

  “If only you knew, dear Miss Amy, how I—”

  He meant to say how I suffer, to spark and possibly keep her interest. He expected that such feelings would help overcome the resistance she was sure to put up against him. But he failed. She didn’t ask about what he had wanted her to know. For a few seconds he considered whether he should just leave, pretending that he did not feel well. However, his curiosity about how the evening would end outweighed his desire to get rid of her immediately.

  Now they were sitting in the movie theater. Nestled into soft, deep armchairs. Surrounded by darkness. In front of them was the innocent screen, which a group of experienced and trained engineers had used to create an illusion. In a businesslike and coldhearted manner, they were attempting to uncover the background and internal discord of an utterly shattered human life. They uncovered it so brutally and nakedly that even a mentally disabled street sweeper would be forced to understand that life happened like this and in no other fashion.

  The armchairs were incredibly comfortable. It felt good to sit there and watch those on-screen struggle fiercely.

  But these comfortable armchairs had one disadvantage. Apparently, they had been created for people who had been married for more than forty years and who only remembered every three months that smoldering-hot love had gotten them into marriage in the first place.

  Beckford had imagined everything beautifully. He had allowed Amy to convince him to go to the movies only because of the seats. The seats alone had convinced him. Usually seats in the movie theater allowed you to lightly touch your female neighbor’s knee to interest her in more after holding hands had lost its initial appeal. If she returned the pressure of the knee, at first only very gently and then as if by coincidence, you increased your own pressure. If the female knee did not retreat in a pout, then that was already proof of her thoroughly weakened resistance.

  But clearly these chairs had been designed and enforced by some kind of anti-vice committee, who did not tolerate any kind of fun. They had designed these chairs so cleverly that it was difficult, if not impossible for Beckford to use his usual art of seduction. For that simple reason, the movie lost all appeal that it might have originally had for him. It was not even possible to whisper something into Amy’s ear. The distance was too far due to the ridiculously wide armrests.

  No wonder Beckford was in a bad mood. Even the provocative scenes left him cold. Since Beckford had no interest in these steamy scenes, he observed Amy at his side and realized that she kept shifting in her seat. He remembered that she had told him that her girlfriends also had not been able to sit still during certain scenes of the movie.

  It was not the movie that excited him but Amy’s continuous movements. Finally, earsplitting brass music announced the end with deafening noise.

  “Well, how did you like the movie, Mr. Beckford,” asked Amy, pulling on her gloves and slowly ambling toward the exit.

  “The movie wasn’t bad. Better than I expected. Especially the scene when he threw her across the bed, though he probably could’ve been gentler with her…”

  “Don’t you think? That roughness was totally unnecessary. I thought the same thing when I saw that.”

  In the meantime, they had reached the street and she took his arm. “Do you agree with many others and especially the clergy, who claim that it is one of the most immoral movies shown in New York in the last few years?”

  “No, I don’t think so at all. On the contrary, I think it is a rather tame movie. Nothing immoral about the whole story. This is what life is like.”

  “That’s what I say. The movie isn’t immoral at all. It’s rather educational. Every day you can read more about immorality and rape in the newspaper. Did you know, Mr. Beckford, that it is illegal to screen the movie in Massachusetts and Connecticut under penalty of six months’ imprisonment?”

  “I really pity the people who are not allowed to partake in this educational film.”

  Beckford tried to speak in the monotone of a preacher thinking it would most impress Amy. Though he had barely seen half of the movie and had only been interested in Amy’s restlessness, his suspicions had been confirmed: this film was trash of the cheapest and most miserable kind.

  Nevertheless, he enthusiastically corroborated whatever positive thing Amy said about the movie. If you wish to conquer a woman, don’t argue with her, he thought. You will only lose precious time, and nothing will come of it. Your life is complicated enough. When it comes to women, agreeing with them will get you to your goal faster and with fewer detours.

  However, he failed completely. In this particular case, his philosophy did not hold true. He did not know enough about the independent character of an intelligent girl like Amy, who stood on her own two feet and earned her daily bread honestly.

  8.

  After Beckford’s interminable years in Korea, where he had had to ask himself every hour whether he would live to see another day, he was living in a furious frenzy upon his return home. He imagined that a healthy, normal young man who was finally released from the tough discipline of his military service should live it up, so as to reassure himself that he had returned from hell. For him, his regained freedom meant that he should have his way with
any and all women in uninhibited and uncritical fashion. An inexplicable urge drove him to regain his inner balance, which he thought he had lost in Korea. Without exception, the girls Beckford had been with since his return from Korea had been easy conquests. He did not choose carefully. Usually he did not choose at all, but took whichever girl crossed his path. Tall and short, fat and skinny, blond, brunette, and indeterminate, black and white, young and barely sober enough to remain standing. Nothing mattered to him as long as she possessed the only thing that mattered to him.

  In the lecture halls of the Technological Institute, he had planned to become a useful member of society instead of a destructive one. But he found he could only concentrate on the lessons with great effort. His thoughts often digressed far away from the formulas and hieroglyphics written on the chalkboards. He saw instead the dismembered bodies of his compatriots and of others, who were not. He saw the long rows of miserable human beings: men, women, and children dressed in rags, collapsing from hunger, forced to flee their homelands.

  To avoid these terrible images, his thoughts turned to sex. Thinking about sex was the only thing that gave him relief. Sometimes he looked for girls or met them randomly, and they’d smile invitingly at him. If such an evening proved successful, he felt that he had finally come back to life. It was not an anesthetic per se, nor a narcotic, but for him, it had become the only tranquilizer that freed him from his memories.

  In the first weeks after his return, he had tried to use tobacco to self-medicate. But tobacco did not work at all for that purpose. It caused insomnia and affected his nerves to such an extent that he sometimes had to stop himself from screaming in the middle of the street. He swore never to touch tobacco again for he feared that he might irrevocably become its slave. He ran into a former comrade who invited him to get drunk. The comrade told Beckford that nightly blackout drunkenness was the only way he found he was able to resist committing suicide.

  Beckford followed his advice and got drunk every day. Not in a bar. That was too expensive. He bought a bottle and drank all of it in his cheap hotel room in the evenings. The only thing this achieved was a terrible headache until about ten the next morning. But it did allow him to better focus on his studies.

  Mostly, after half a bottle, he felt as if he were back in Korea and he’d begin to cry like a baby, grieving his fallen comrades. And again, he would endure the terrible images.

  “No more! I can’t stand it anymore! Help me, Lord, help me!” he would scream in this state. Then he would down an entire glass and the nightmare would let up a little.

  Religion could not save him, either, since he had lost his childhood faith in Sunday school, where they had hammered the catechism into his head. Whatever had remained in terms of faith, he had lost on the battlefields of Korea, where Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant men of faith blessed the soldiers, their machine guns, flamethrowers, hand grenades, and tanks before battle. Often, they blessed them all again after the battle to convince the farm boys from Minnesota, Idaho, Indiana, Nebraska, Dakota, and Wyoming that theirs was a holy war, and that God was on their side.

  The only anesthesia that worked eventually was his exploits with women. A woman brought him relief and erased the memories of Korea without the side effects that tobacco and alcohol had. All the women he sought out and collected gave him what he needed. But nothing more than that. Nor did he ask for more.

  He never spoke of love. Not even in his thoughts. “Love” was only a word to him. A mere word and nothing else.

  And now Beckford and Amy were sitting in an elegant restaurant that he had chosen to impress her. He hoped it would make the conquest easier. She was supposed to think that he dined in restaurants of this caliber every day, as if he were at home here. The prices were high. They were purposely high to keep away a certain kind of undesirable guest since their patronage could damage the restaurant’s reputation significantly. Judging by the prices, the food had to be exquisite.

  Back in the movie theater as they were watching the film about despair, Beckford had quietly calculated how much the evening with Amy would cost him. She was not the kind of girl one could tell in a pinch: Sorry, I don’t have a lot of money with me tonight. Two burgers and two beers are good enough.

  Not Amy. Not her.

  He had realized tonight that although she was a secretary, outside of work she was a lady. You had to treat her as a lady if you wanted to get anywhere with her.

  The waiter bowed slightly when he handed Amy the menu, then seemed to remember suddenly that he was an American and stopped in the middle of the bow. Only his head remained slightly bowed, which made him look as if he were glancing at Amy’s hands.

  Without reading the menu, Amy placed it back on the table, pulled off her gloves, and said with a gentle smile: “I’d just like a ham sandwich and a coffee.”

  “Is that all you’d like, Miss Amy?” asked Beckford with surprise, as if he had expected she would buy the entire restaurant. He was disappointed as he increasingly realized that she would not be as easy as he’d thought that afternoon in the office. Suddenly he felt as if he were meeting her for the first time.

  “Yes, that’s right, Mr. Beckford. That’s all I’d like you to order for me. I don’t usually eat a heavy dinner. I sleep better with a light stomach, you know?”

  Beckford’s intention, however, had been to eat well and plenty this evening, as an excuse to extend the date as long as possible. He was hoping that with the help of some good wine he could maneuver the conversation to the only thing he was interested in, the only thing that had convinced him to suffer through the horrendous film.

  Thinking of the movie, as Amy was slowly nibbling on her sandwich and he was poking at his steak, he said: “Do you have a past, Miss Amy?”

  “A past? I have several, Mr. Beckford. And all of them with excellent references. You can check out each of my pasts easily. I could go back to any office where I have ever worked and I would be hired with a raise immediately.”

  Checkmate, Beckford said to himself, miserable checkmate. Is she making fun of me or is she really so stupid that she does not understand what I mean with “past”? Aloud, he said: “I mean a different kind of past, Miss Amy.”

  “Oh, now I understand. You want to know about my childhood and my family.”

  She looked at him naively as she said this.

  “My father owns a hardware store in Eldersville, Kansas, where I was born. And here in New York, I lived with my aunt at first while I was attending vocational school. Now I live in a small, modest apartment: it has a tiny comfortable living room, a bedroom, a small kitchen, and a bathroom. That’s about all I can report about my past and my present.”

  “It appears then,” said Beckford with a fake laugh, “that you aren’t particularly troubled by your past.”

  “That’s right, Mr. Beckford. I’m pretty happy with my life right now.”

  How wrong you were, Beckford thought, but in the office this afternoon, when I invited her, she was talking as if she couldn’t wait for me to have her.

  He said now: “Miss Amy, I hope we will work together for a long time. What we need in our business is a secretary like you.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Beckford, thank you. Did you know that I am also studying French now? I already learned Spanish in high school.”

  “Excellent. That is indeed excellent, Miss Amy. With those language skills you will be of great use in our business.”

  “I hope so, Mr. Beckford.”

  Half an hour later, Beckford took her home in a taxi. At her door, he made one last effort.

  “Don’t you want to invite me up for a cup of coffee, since, as you said, your home is so comfortable, Miss Amy?”

  “I am terribly sorry, Mr. Beckford, but it has gotten pretty late. I get up very early to be at the office at nine o’clock sharp, as you know.”

  “Well, since I am your boss—okay, tomorrow you can come in at one o’clock—because you will invite me to coffee now, Miss Amy.”


  “No to coffee and no to the coffee. My job starts at nine.”

  “But you have noticed that nothing important is happening at the office, I assume?”

  “My work begins at nine, Mr. Beckford,” Amy answered stubbornly, “and thank you for an enjoyable evening. It really was very entertaining, you know, because I go out so rarely. Again, thank you so much.”

  She held out her hand. Beckford attempted a lukewarm hug so he could kiss her, but she pushed her key in firmly and slid through the door into the house like an eel. Then she pulled the door quickly and energetically shut.

  Beckford hailed an approaching taxi and rode to a nightclub where he found what he urgently needed within half an hour.

  When he got back to his hotel late that night and counted his money he said to himself: “Goddamn it, this was quite an expensive evening.”

  Sitting down on his bed, he continued to make calculations, including taxis and tips.

  Well, I have to admit that was almost a hundred dollars if I include all the little things. And whose fault is that, damn it? Amy’s, of course. If she had invited me for coffee into her virginal—well, let’s say more or less virginal—home, I would have probably, actually most certainly, saved a nice little heap of beautiful, kissable dollar bills. Of course: That is today. Only today. Because Amy’s cup of coffee from last night would have most certainly turned into the most expensive cup of coffee anyone had ever heard of. The moral of the story: The earlier you start saving, the more likely it is that you will die a rich man one day. You have to spend money at the right time, wherever it’s most useful and when it’s good for your soul at the same time. If I look at it from this perspective, I have to admit: Today’s expense, while it hurts, was my first step on the road to being more frugal. So help me God!

  9.

  Indonesia’s government was planning to build a wide network of modern airports, and they sought out well-known companies in Japan, England, Holland, and the United States for this purpose. Holved submitted plans and cost projections. His proposed budget was seven and a half percent higher than that presented by the Japanese firm. It was also higher than that of the companies from the other two countries. Nevertheless, Indonesia signed with his company. They did not do so because they loved the U.S. in particular, but simply because they hated the other countries more.