“That’s it,” said Ernest. “A big house will come crunching down from outer space and smash us all.”
“Ah,” said the midget. “The Representative.”
“You remember, I’m sure. We’re all going to die.”
“All in good time, my little pretty. All in good time. Unquote. The Wicked Witch of the West.” Ernest decided to leave. Vladieki interpreted his guest’s mood, and replied with another of the Witch’s lines. “Going so soon?” he said. “Why, I wouldn’t hear of it!” His dry, forced cackle made Ernest shudder.
“I do have things to do,” said Ernest. “My last will and testament, you know. One last night out with the boys.”
“Just a moment, please,” said Vladieki, in a pitiable tone of voice. “Come back! Don’t go without me! Please, come back!”
Ernest stopped, his hand on the doorknob. He didn’t turn around. The two men waited, each involved in his own particular anxiety. If Ernest could have separated himself from the evening, from the sour news, from the loveless world that made everyone so uniquely insane, he might have hated the ancient midget. And, similarly, if the old man could have looked beyond his own fortress of dreams, he might have had a stranger’s contempt for Ernest and his petty, unoriginal problems. But it was not the case for either man; they cared for different things, they lived for different goals. It was as though they existed in mutually invisible worlds: it is not only parallel lines that never meet. Lines skewed in space have neither intersection nor the minimal interest of equidistance. As with Ernest and Leonard Vladieki, so it was with everyone. No points in common, no relationships to share.
Ernest looked up at the Emerald City. Under close inspection it was blurry and indistinct, a barely comprehensible hexagonal pattern of dots—white, gray, and black, red, yellow, green, blue. He turned slowly to face Vladieki. “You know,” he said, “it’s a little unhealthy, this attachment you have.”
“Unhealthy?” asked the old man, his voice strained, pitched too high. “You can listen to that television and tell me I’m unhealthy? With all that’s going on in the world? You call me sick for building a little room of peace, where I can rest from the depravity around me?”
“You’re not resting,” said Ernest. “You’re hiding.”
Vladieki laughed again. “Since when have you been the prince of the activists, Mister, uh…”
“Weinraub. Never mind. At least I don’t have my whole life centered around one single moment. At least I haven’t shut off my input like you have. Have you experienced anything at all in the last fifty years, for God’s sake?”
The tiny man just stared. His hands hung at his sides, quivering with a palsy of age. His head shook in slight, involuntary jerks. He indicated a chair for Ernest, and took another himself. “Tell me, then,” he said, “what you have at the center of your life. Is there anything there?”
“Yes,” said Ernest angrily, “a perfectly good set of genitals that haven’t been getting as much exercise as they should, and now probably won’t get much more, if the Representative doesn’t come through for me.”
“Ah,” said Vladieki, relaxing. “The Representative again. How often he intrudes on your thoughts.”
Ernest was a little amazed. The old midget had indicated that he had listened to the Representative’s broadcast; yet, Vladieki didn’t appear to have digested the importance of the announcement. “Sometimes,” said Ernest, “rarely, I admit, I get to thinking about this grand old world of ours. I think about what the Representative said tonight, and I imagine what a sorry place it would be without me. And, then, how sorry I’ll be without it. That’s all.”
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” said Vladieki, with his unnerving rustling cackle.
“What?”
“That’s what the Wizard said to Dorothy and the others when he was revealed pulling the levers and things.”
“You’re not afraid of the Representative’s news?” “Once, right after we finished Oz, this guy called Reverend Slight was going to organize us Munchkins and take us on a tour of the United States. We were going to clean up. Twenty-six cities. One concert in each town, packed audiences, enough money for everybody for years. So we all signed contracts. I mean, none of us had agents or business managers or anything. We weren’t actors, just midgets. We had all been rounded up at the last minute to be in the movie. We didn’t know any better. We didn’t stop to think that MGM owned all the costumes and the sets. Hell, they probably could have gotten a court order to keep us from appearing anyway, exploiting their movie. And, anyhow, we couldn’t sing. All the Munchkin songs in the picture were dubbed later. A lot of the midgets couldn’t even speak English. We all invested in Reverend Slight’s enterprise, he vanished, and I’ve lived here ever since. Nobody’s ever done that to me again, because I haven’t given them the chance. Except the bastard kids that deliver my groceries. But even that’s been a kind of game. Look.” He opened a drawer of the bureau and brought a heavy object wrapped in white linen. He unfolded the yellowing material; inside was a large gold frame. He handed it to Ernest. It was a photograph of Judy Garland as Dorothy, asleep in the field of poppies. She was absolutely beautiful. The inscription read: Lance—there is a magic land of Oz, if we know where to look for it… Your love and friendship have shown me the way… con amore, Judy. The handwriting was cramped and almost illegible. Ernest noticed that it was the same as that on the portrait of Roberta Quentini. They were both obviously forged.
“I think this trouble will be a good thing for you,” said Ernest. “Something like this, to shock you out of your numbness. It’s almost like doing you a favor.”
” ‘Come, soothing death.’ “
Ernest put the framed picture of Judy Garland on the floor. “That’s not what I meant,” he said. “If the threat of extinction doesn’t drive you out, back into the world, nothing will. And of course, if nothing will, then, well, I hate to say it, but it seems that might be the best thing. My boss Sokol would love to have your modapt slot.”
“Was he a Munchkin, too?” asked Vladieki sarcastically. “I seem to remember a Sokol. He wasn’t in the militia, I think. But there were others. We had a whole drunken revel scene, too. That was cut out very early. I’m glad. It wasn’t thematically sound.”
Ernest waved at the wrinkled midget impatiently. “If nothing means anything to you, why did you bother even listening to the announcement?”
“I love the Representative,” said Vladieki. “Because of the wonderful things he does. Because of the wonderful things he does.”
“I will leave you now,” said Ernest, standing, moving again toward the door. “I don’t have anything else to say. I don’t want to listen to anything else you have to say. But thanks, anyway, for taking away the bad taste of my wife’s hysteria. Now I have to go out and get ready all over again.”
“I’ll see you to the door,” said Vladieki, walking slowly across the room. “I’m really sorry you have to go. I have a tape here of all of the songs from Oz, and a lot of the dialogue. I know it all, of course. Every word, every sigh.”
“A harmless hobby,” said Ernest. “Good night.”
“I’ll never see you again, you know,” said the very old man. “I’ll be dead soon. And either you will be, too, or you won’t. But Dorothy will live on. That’s what you don’t realize.”
“Good night, good night,” said Ernest wearily, stepping out into the hallway, back into the dim world, into the night of tangible woe. It smelled like garlic and urine.
“I’d give anything to get out of Oz altogether,” said Vladieki sadly. “That’s what Dorothy said, at the end.”
“Good night.”
Meanwhile 2
As the clock moved on toward midday, the rain stopped. Ernst leaned back in his chair and waited for the sun to draw pedestrians from their shelters. He signaled to M. Gargotier, and the proprietor brought a rag from the bar to mop the table. Ernst left his seat to check his appearance in the Fée Blanche
’s huge, cracked mirror. His clothes were still soaked, of course, and in the growing afternoon heat they clung to him unpleasantly. He ran his hand through his hair, trying to give it a more raffish, rumpled look, but it was far too wet. M. Gargotier returned to his place behind the bar, ignoring Ernst. There were voices from the patio; Ernst sighed and gave up the bar’s muggy darkness.
Outside, the sun made Ernst squint. His headache began to throb angrily. He went back to his usual table, noticing that a crowd had collected beyond the café‘s rusty iron railing. A few people had come into the Fée Blanche, preferring no doubt to witness the unknown affair from a more comfortable vantage. It was nearly time for Ernst to change to mashroub ra-why, his afternoon refreshment, but M. Gargotier was busily serving the newcomers. Ernst waited impatiently, his tumbler of anisette once again empty. He stared at the people lining the sidewalk, unable for the moment to guess what had attracted them.
“Now,” thought Ernst, “if I look closely enough, I will be able to recognize the backsides of every person I’ve ever known. How tedious the world becomes, once one realizes that everyone in it can be divided into a dozen or so groups. That young woman there, ah, a fairly interesting knot of black hair, attractive legs, a thick waist. If she were to turn around, her face would be no surprise. Heavy eyebrows, no doubt, full lips, her upper front teeth protruding just a little. Large breasts hanging, her shirt cut to expose them, but it is ten years too late for that. It is too boring. I have no interest even in seeing if I’m correct.”
Ernst smiled, realizing that he was deliberately avoiding any real observation. It was nonsense, of course, to think that twelve physical types might be enough to catalogue the shabby mass of people that filled the city. He had exhausted that particular entertainment, and rather quickly; what remained was the more tiresome prospect of actually describing the crowd. Perhaps M. Gargotier would arrive soon, interrupting the intellectual effort, scattering the energy, mercifully introducing a tiny but vital novelty.
“An interesting point,” said Ernst aloud, imagining himself a lecturer before dozing students in some stifling European hall, “a genuine philosophical point that we can all grasp and taste for truth, is that there is nothing in the world quite like the opportunity of seeing someone make an ass of himself. Free entertainment is, after all, the Great Leveler, not death, as we have often been told. In the case of death, the rich are often able to regulate its moment of victory, staving off the final instant for months, even years, with purchased miracles of medicine. The poor take what they are given. But free entertainment is democratic!
No one may say when a spectacle may arise, may explode, may stumble. And then, when that moment comes, every man, rich or poor, must take advantage as best he can, elbowing aside the crowds all together at the same time. So, by sitting here, I have conquered them all, diversion and audience alike. And I can delude myself with my own analogies, considering death a lesser antagonist, and applaud my own immortality.”
In a while Ernst heard a ragged ruffle of drums, and a high-pitched voice shouting orders. Only the Gaish, thought Ernst with disappointment. It was only the new Citizens’ Army; there would be little chance here to advance his position. He did not care for the local folk and their sudden and silly politics; his own sort of people would not be long entertained by the fools’ parade. He called M. Gargotier in a loud, rude voice. “Bring me some of that ugly Arab drink,” he said. “It’s noon, isn’t it?” There was not a word from the proprietor, not a smile or a nod.
The people on the sidewalk, however, were having a wonderful time. Ernst could hear the beating of the snare drums, playing a syncopated, unmilitary cadence. The several drummers had evidently not had much practice together; the strokes rarely fell together, and with a little attention one could identify the different styles of each man. The slapping of the marching feet against the rough stones of the pavement was likewise without precision. Ernst frowned, looking at his own frayed, stained suit. If things could be arranged according to merit, then certainly he would be granted a better situation than this. He remembered the white linen suit he had owned when he first came to the city. He had worn it proudly, contemptuous of the city’s natives and their hanging, shapeless garments, all darkly sweat-marked, torn, and foul. That suit had not lasted long. It, along with the white wide-brimmed hat and his new boots, had been stolen within a week, while he indulged himself at the Sourour baths. He had never returned to that establishment, nor any other in the Arab quarter. Now he looked much like those he had disdained on his arrival, and, strangely, that brought him a certain pleasure as well. At least he didn’t seem to be a mere tourist. He had been initiated. He belonged, as all the cityful of mongrels belonged.
So the time passed with Ernst trying mightily to ignore the exhibition in the street. Often the movements of the crowd opened spaces and he could see the garishly outfitted militia. The workmen and slaves of the city cheered them, and this annoyed Ernst even more. He swallowed some of the local liquor in a gulp, holding the small wooden bowl on the flat of one palm. What good is that army? he wondered. The Gaish had no weapons. An army of no threats. And, beyond that, thought Ernst as he waved once more to M. Gargotier, they have no enemies. There was nothing on all the sand but the single city. “Just bread and circuses,” muttered Ernst, observing the crowd’s excitement. “Just an entertainment for the groundlings.” He had other things to consider.
“Eugenie,” he thought, “magnificent horror of my youth, I would trade my eternal portion to have you with me now. How old you must be! How like these cheap dorsal identities I see before me, without personality, without more than the instantaneous appetites, without the barest knowledge of me. They, who have drifted here from the living world, have been charred slowly to that condition. They have greedily accepted their lot, their badge of grime, their aristo suppuration, their plebeian filth. They left Europe as I did, to change slowly and by degrees of privation, like a slow sunset of amnesia, into this life of utter exhaustion. Never again will my eyes, my nose and mouth, the wet hairs of my body be free of grit and sand. The wealthy and I have had to labor to attain such an existence. But you, Eugenie, you had it with you all the time. You would be queen here, Eugenie, but you would be as ugly as the rest.”
Ernst sipped more of the liqueur. He dipped three fingertips into it, and flicked the dark fluid at the backs of the people crowding against the railing. Spots formed on the clothing of a man and a girl. Ernst laughed; the too-loud noise sobered him for a moment. “You’d be ugly, Eugenie,” he said, “and I’d be drunk.” The heat of the African noon enveloped him, and the stillness made it difficult to breath. Ernst struggled out of his old worn jacket, throwing it onto the chair across the small metal table from him.
“Marie, you don’t matter. Not now. Not here. Africa would be perfect for Eugenie, but you, Marie, I picture your destruction among the million mirror shards of Paris or Vienna. So forget it; I’m talking to Eugenie. She would come right across that square, scattering the pigeons, the pedestrians, the damned army just the same, marching right across the square, right up to this café, to my table, and stare down at me as if she had walked the Mediterranean knowing where I was all the time. But it won’t work again. She wouldn’t have thought that I could catch up to her laughing crime, that I’d still be the same rhyming idiot I always was. And she’d be old, older than I, lined and wrinkled, leaning, tucked in, shaking just a bit in the limbs, aching just a bit in the joints, showing patches and patterns of incorrect color, purples on the legs, brown maculae on the arms, swirls and masses on the face beneath the surgery and appliances. Then what would I do? I would buy her a drink and introduce her to everyone I know. That would destroy her surely enough, speedily enough, satisfyingly enough, permanently enough. Oh, the hell with indifference. I really can’t maintain it.” Ernst laughed again and hoped some patrician in the Gaish’s audience would turn around, bored by the mock-military show, and ask Ernst what amused him. No one did. Ernst sat in gl
um silence and drank.
He had been in the Fée Blanche all morning and no one, not even the most casual early strollers, had paused to wish him a good day. Should he move on? Gather “material” in another café, have a sordid experience in a disorderly house, get beaten up by a jealous gavroche?
“So, akkei Weinraub! You sit out under all skies, eh?”
Ernst started, blinking and rapidly trying to recover his tattered image. “Yes, Ieneth, you must if you want to be successful. What is climate, to interfere with the creative process?”
The girl was young, perhaps not as old as seventeen. She was one of the city’s very poor, gaunt with years of hunger and dressed in foul old clothes. But she was not a slave—if she had been, she would have looked better. She earned a trivial living as a lens grinder. Behind her she pulled a two-wheeled cart, dilapidated and peeling, filled with pieces of equipment and tools. “How does it go?” she asked.
“Badly,” admitted Ernst, smiling sadly and pulling a soggy bit of scrap paper from his pocket. “My poem of yesterday lies still unfinished.”
The girl laughed. “Chi ama assai, parla poco,” she said. “You spend too much time chasing the pretty ones, no? You do not fool me, akkei, sitting there with your solemn long face. Your poem will have to be finished while you catch your breath, and then off after another of my city’s sweet daughters.”
“You’ve seen right through me, Ieneth,” said Ernst, with a tired shrug. “You’re right, of course. One can’t spend one’s entire life chasing the Muse. Wooing the Muse, I mean. If you chase the Muse, you gain nothing. Wooing becomes a chief business. It’s like anything else—you get better with practice.” He smiled, though he was dreadfully weary of the conversation already. The necessity of keeping up the pretense of sexual metaphor annoyed him.
“You are lucky, in a way,” said the girl. “Pity the poor butcher. What has he in his employment to aid him in the wooing? You must understand your advantage.”
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