Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Ranko Marinković

  “What’s there to think about?”

  “Oh, quite a bit—you must get them to come together. Here, take two from one side and two from the other,” he held up two fingers on each hand. “Now then, which two will join the other two? Why should one pair do the approaching while the other stands idle? They’re equal, right? Ma-the-matically equal, so why should either pair approach the other? Well, they may be equal in terms of mathematics but not in terms of character. One set is perhaps too proud, or believes themselves to be a better sort, a higher class, and they prefer to keep themselves to themselves, and you have to waste your time arguing with them! And all for a four. But what can you do when they don’t want four? See what trouble it is? You might say: they can meet each other halfway, come to an agreement … All very well, if they want to, but they seldom do. … You’d have to waste so much time waiting.” He looked into Melkior’s eyes with curiosity. “You’re probably wondering at this, thinking I’m talking about people. No, I’m really talking about pure numbers, I majored in math at the university.” Melkior was silent, looking at the floor to avoid embarrassing the other with his gaze. “Try playing roulette or buying a lottery ticket and you’ll see numbers for what they are—all whimsy and deceit.”

  “All right, but how do they make five?”

  “The madmen?” smiled the Melancholic in commiseration. “They take twice two fingers of the same hand, and since they’re all connected with each other they bring the fifth—the little finger—along … so as not to leave him alone. Hence the misconception.”

  “You majored in math—but what do you do in life?”

  “I’m a traveler. I pick hawthorn berries.”

  “And count them?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Something tells me …”

  “Something tells you my foot. You must’ve read it in the papers. They wrote about me.”

  “So how do you ‘get them to come together’ when you count?”

  “In my pocket. I have a hard time of it. Up to a billion. Want me to count your head hairs? I’ve counted his,” he gestured at Rover. “Know how I do it? I divide his head in sectors … I had a pencil, but the Tartars took it … and then I work by sectors, easy as pie. Only I didn’t finish—he wouldn’t sit still.”

  “How will you do me if you haven’t got a pencil?”

  “There’s another method—plucking. Only ten hairs a day. But you’ll have to wait until it has grown back in. What is it they say—don’t let grass grow under your …” All of a sudden, as if he had remembered something, he caught Melkior by the elbow and whispered in confidence: “See those windows across the way? Take a good look: three stories, five windows each. Tonight I’ll show you something I’m quite keen on. Now hush, pretend you don’t know me.” He went off “craftily” and, walking up to his bed, suddenly raised his arms high above his head, crying out: “On Ombrellion, the barren mountain, spake he!” then lay down and closed his eyes.

  Time had begun to peck at him. The day was now endlessly long, the third day among the insane. The Melancholic had taken him briefly back to the world of living words, then thrown him back into silent solitude again. Aroused by the sound of a human voice, his hearing now found the deaf silence more difficult to bear than during the previous two days. The Melancholic had left him with the fifteen windows across the way and a promise for tonight … But tonight was a long way off. Outside and up high, the day was still shining in the sky among tattered clouds, and above him (to make things worse) floated the sun in a glory of autumn blue. He hated the sun in the square of the sky and the clouds and the light and everything that made up the day. He was yearning for words, words to the hungry ear! Any words, any kind of words, just as long as it was the sound of a human voice!

  He tried to listen to himself. But what should he say? Romans, friends, countrymen … But what if they responded? Polyphemus the Cyclops, the beast … No, he could not enunciate that either. Then it came to him in a flash merely to say Parallelikins, as if it were a name. Melkior said it aloud.

  The Lord Chamberlain leapt up, cut to the quick. It was as if he had been awaiting that very word to get his terrible excitement going. Has someone dared utter it? was what his astounded look meant. Using a finger he sicced Rover on Melkior. Rover was off like a shot. He turned around with catlike speed and, hands outstretched, scampered toward Melkior.

  “I am Rover, the eldest of five,” he snarled at him.

  Melkior remembered the Melancholic’s trick of … He hastily tore two buttons off his striped robe and repeated his words:

  “Don’t do that, Rover—I’ll give you these two four-rupee pieces …”

  “Hah, two buttons!” leered Rover derisively. “Get them sewn on your own! Surrender!”

  “All right, I surrender—here,” Melkior put his hands up. What’s this? They won’t accept their own currency any more? “I surrender, Rover, take me prisoner.”

  “What’ve you got? Gimme a ten spot!” Rover stood facing him, short but broad-shouldered.

  “Haven’t got a ten spot—the Tartars took it,” Melkior made another attempt to make some headway using the formulas of this weird world. But it suddenly appeared as if none of that worked any longer. Even the Melancholic laughed:

  “Heh, how can there be any Tartars here?”

  “Well, you said yourself they took away your …”

  “I only said it … tan-gen-tially,” specified the Melancholic and set up an ugly cackle, which Rover took up in a modified, animal version. Even the Lord Chamberlain laughed, a dignified and dry laugh.

  Why, they are genuinely insane! thought Melkior, taking offense, now they’re mocking me in the bargain. He went across to the Melancholic and sat down on his bed. The man used his foot to warn him to get off. This offended Melkior further; he now wanted to clear things up at all costs.

  “Very well, I’ll say it to you from here. You mentioned Tartars twice, and now you’re laughing? Are you laughing at your own madness then? Unless you meant ‘doctors’ when you said ‘Tartars.’”

  “Since when do doctors have anything to do with Tartars?” laughed the Melancholic derisively. “I may be mad, but I’m not daft. Listen,” he spoke to the other two, “doctors and Tartars—do they have anything to do with each other?”

  All three were laughing at Melkior.

  What’s this supposed to mean, he thought in embarrassment, madmen laughing at me? And he was already prepared to think it was all just a con game played by disbelieving malingering clowns, a test to see whether his presence was not a trap devised by the army authorities, but their laughter suddenly stopped and all three pricked their ears in fright at a strange sound from the corridor.

  Indeed, even Melkior could hear a kind of distant mournful wail, like the howling of a sick dog. Melkior tried to approach the door, to peek through the keyhole or at least put his ear to it—what was it that had frightened them so much?—but Rover blocked his way in a soundless leap and gave him a terrified look telling him to stop.

  “Hssst, don’t move,” whispered the Melancholic, quaking.

  “Why not?” Melkior whispered himself, without realizing it.

  “Wolf,” whispered Rover inaudibly, between his palms. “He’s hungry.”

  “A wolf … here? If there are no Tartars, there are no wolves either,” Melkior defied them.

  “There is one … in Number Sixteen,” the Melancholic implored him to believe. “We also thought at first … But later on I saw it: all black and warty. The tail … the teeth … !” he shivered like a man in a fever. Using his index finger he confidentially invited Melkior to come closer, and whispered in his ear: “You’re right, there can’t be a wolf in here—he made it up, the primitive. The only animals he’s ever heard of are wolves and bears. He’s never heard about alligators, so … never mind the moron. It’s an alligator in Number Sixteen,” whispered the Melancholic in an even lower voice, “a dreadful one, huge, nine meters long, needs ten beds to
sleep on, I saw it with my own eyes …” Now what was heard was a terrible roar. “Aha! Can you hear it?”

  “But what’s it doing in here?” asked Melkior in feigned confidence.

  “Hah, ‘what?’ There’s one in every town. A secret weapon. They crunch everything with their teeth, not even a tank can hurt them.”

  The Melancholic was speaking with the certainty of a man in the know. A silly kind of joy came to life inside Melkior: a momentary, quaint illusion derived from a mad story. A flash of hope. Against Polyphemus the cannibal there rose the dreaded Alligator. Samson, Achilles, the Golem, the national giant, crushing everything underfoot, invincible! … And his imagination began narrating to Melkior The Great Victory—an epic at the Central Military Hospital Neurology Department—fiddling all day long to the vengeful joy of the defenseless.

  And when night fell and the smell of boiled cabbage died behind the locked door, in the lightless room, in that madmen’s dark, there resonated the dignified sleep of the Lord Chamberlain and Rover’s vehement snore. That was when the Melancholic crept out of his bed on a secret mission and quietly approached Melkior on tiptoe.

  “Here, take a look,” indicating those windows, “think I forgot? See?”

  A window or two was lit on each floor.

  “You mean, some of them are lit?”

  “Some? Ha-haaa,” he knew more, which was why he was laughing. “Try to remember which ones are lit now … it’ll be quite different later.”

  “Of course it will—people go in and out, turn lights on and off …”

  “Hah, in-and-out … And why do they go in-and-out at certain times only, eh? At night, hah? All night long. I’ve been watching it for a long time. While I had my pencil I took notes, well, now I memorize. About that other business … doctors, Tartars … I had to step in or that fellow would have killed you. It mustn’t be known they’re here, that’s the whole thing. Hah, they took away my pencil but I deciphered it without one! Ha-ha, you Tartar bastards …” laughed the Melancholic with strange contempt. He mused for a moment, then spoke up again, offhand; it was as if he had not been saying what was really on his mind: “Do you like to smoke? I like to watch the ember in the dark … when I’m talking with someone. You know you’re talking to a living man then; when he inhales, the smoker, his face gets lit up, his eyes shine, and all the darkness comes alive. All very well, but how are you to come by a cigarette in here … that is to say, you could get one, but the matches … They won’t let madmen use fire or they’d burn the whole … One thing I’ve never understood is why it says ‘Safety Matches’ on the box. Why are they afraid of a fire if it’s ‘Safety’? And Nero set fire to Rome without matches. How do you suppose he went about it—rubbed sticks together? But it takes time, which means it was malice aforethought. Or used a flint and tinder … but that, too, is malice aforethought. Now, I like fire in general, I like to watch the flames … Devils dancing, sticking their long tongues out at each other. Licking and stroking each other, perhaps even in a sexual way (there’s always a she-devil or two there), cracking and crackling, enjoying the fire all the time, damn them … Wait! Look out!” he suddenly took a firm hold of Melkior’s arm and squeezed it tight in a state of expectation. He was looking at the windows opposite, really waiting for something: “Of course. There, I-3’s off … III-5 is off next, and II-2 goes on, of course, exactly by the system!”

  “What system?”

  “Secret code. They’re doing it again, damn them …”

  “The Tartars?”

  “Shhh! Don’t interrupt!” whispered the Melancholic sharply, his gaze absorbed by the windows opposite: “One-five, five-two, five-four, ah-ha, five-five, two-five, ah-ha, ah-ha, ah-ha, of course, one-three, of course, that’s what I thought, they’re signaling about the Alligator.”

  “What? Signaling what?” asked Melkior eagerly.

  “Arranging for the day … of release. That’s why they are keeping it in here!”

  “Why, isn’t it ours?” asked Melkior apprehensively, while taking note of his own stupidity in action again, stripping away the selfsame hope it had offered him just hours before. He was not going to give up easily …

  “Nah, we have no use for such a monster. It would eat us up along with everything else. We don’t know how to control it …”

  But he didn’t seem to feel so strongly about the issue. He was too busy deciphering the signals in the lit windows to pay any attention to Melkior. He was muttering ciphers, delighting in his edifying discoveries.

  Melkior saluted this bright morning: joy was twittering in his chest. She’s here, she’s here to see me! That was his first thought, the wave of happiness that had reared up inside him and was standing there, tense, looming, ready to engulf him whole. Darling, darling, he responded to the echoes of the long white corridors, to the footsteps of the burly dull male nurse walking behind him. C’mon, get up, you have a visitor—with these words the man had got him out of bed and into this bright motion. The trip seemed endless, and Melkior rejoiced at the small eternity of expectation. At this right-left, as the male nurse directed him, with her presence resonating around each corner and each window pouring on him another reason for joy.

  On top of it, there was in the windowpanes some autumn sun, softly ruddy, there were little birds screeching on dried-up boughs, a rooster was greeting the morning from afar … all to her glory, all to her glory …

  “Through here,” the male nurse showed him a door, “your visitor’s inside. I’ll be back later to pick you up,” he said walking on down the corridor.

  Standing and waiting in the middle of the room was Numbskull.

  Melkior’s wave broke at once, as if all life had left it, and all of the promised happiness spilled away. A wretch’s sigh was conceived in his breast and fluttered timidly, wishing to be born and to fly out of his mouth like a small luckless angel, but Melkior immediately strangled it and blew its soul through his nose, angrily.

  “Are you angry I came?” Numbskull asked him with shyness, humbly.

  “No. Only surprised,” Melkior tried to explain himself, and a kind of lonely poignancy grabbed him by the throat. He let the sigh be born—stillborn. “How did you find me?”

  “I have a brother over there in Pulmonary, he’s a lab tech …”

  “Mitar?” said Melkior in surprise. “He sent you for his money?”

  “Money, heck! I came to see you … he told me they’d transferred you over here …”

  “I got myself transferred,” Melkior specified proudly.

  “You kissed the Colonel? An interesting idea,” admitted Numbskull, “but how are you going to get out of here?”

  “Well, even if I don’t … it’s an interesting enough place. I don’t care if I die here, I’ve been abandoned by everyone,” Melkior put tattered tragedy on and felt like a good cry. All on my own shall I … his throat constricted, he was unable to finish the sentence even in his mind.

  “Interesting my foot. I don’t see anything interesting …” Numbskull looked around the room in mournful wonder. “You’ll go to ruin in here, my old friend, that’s what’s interesting.”

  “Who sent you?” Melkior suddenly asked with aggressive suspicion. “Own up, who sent you?” He appeared to be pressing for a name. He shook Numbskull’s greatcoat sleeve impatiently.

  “Shake on—you’ll shake out a heck of a lot,” said Numbskull indifferently. “The Mikado of Japan sent me to say hello and to bring you these oranges from his own orchard,” he took out an orange from each greatcoat pocket. He was already speaking to Melkior seriously, as one does to a madman.

  Melkior was tempted to take up the manner. A thought was smiling fetchingly at him: it was she who sent them, in strictest secrecy … and he suddenly said like a certified lunatic: “I thank the dear Mikado! Give him my regards and tell him I kiss his hand.”

  Numbskull was watching with suspicion: is the fellow playing a game, or teasing me, or what? … or is he really off his …
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br />   “Look here, pal,” he lost his temper after all, “let’s cut this out, all right? Will you stop playing silly games with me—I’m not Nettle, you know.”

  “Very well, seriously now: did she give these to you in person?” and he indicated the oranges.

  Numbskull was silent for a moment, watching Melkior with no hope at all, now. “What do you mean, she? The grocery girl across from the hospital?”

  “Not … the nurse? …” Numbskull had shattered his last illusion. He hated him for it. This is the end, thought Melkior. He offered Numbskull his hand with the oranges in it: “Here, take them back, I don’t need them,” and took a deep breath to quell a sob.

  Numbskull put his hand on Melkior’s shoulder and, being short, looked in his eyes from below: “What the heck’s the matter with you, man? They’ve driven you right off your rocker. You’ve got to get out of here double quick! You’ll go nuts. As for the oranges, I bought them—I didn’t get you any cigarettes … Throw them away if you don’t want them, but talk to me, will you?”

  “I don’t need anything,” said Melkior tragically. “A cubic centimeter of water (dirty water! he specified vehemently) to live in like a microbe, that’s all.”

  “A microbe, he says … You’re an intellectual, a clever man,” Numbskull fussed over him. “Gosh, if only I had a grain of your salt in my head …”

  “What would you do with it?” asked Melkior brusquely.

  “Do? … I don’t know … all kinds of things. Write books, think, explain things to dolts; salt the stupid world, in short. I’d be erudite … did I get that right?” he looked at Melkior in fear: was the man laughing at his ignorance?

  Melkior was not laughing. He was angry at having to be embarrassed. He was pursing his lips as if about to spit on something.

  How do I get rid of this “believer”—he thought cruelly—without disappointing him … unless he’s doing a masterly job of pulling my leg? What is it he sees in me? Or was he sent to see what’s wrong with me? By those from the barges … Then again, he may have come as a “follower.” God, I’d now have to assume a role for his benefit, playact in public, be an ideal, a leader. … Rubbish! But what if he’s mocking me? Trying to mount me on Rocinante … and canter on his donkey behind me, laughing and showing me up to the Medical Corps? Why, I’ve asked him after Dulcinea already! A dangerous idea flashed in his mind: were the oranges sent by her or by …