“That’s Weinraub, without the f. Certainly. Would you care for a drink?”
Czerny smiled his commercial smile. “No, thank you. This new religion of mine doesn’t allow it. But look, M. Weinraub, I wonder if you realize the service you could render, in the time you spend idly here?”
Ernst was slightly annoyed. Surely Czerny wanted something, and his patronizing attitude wasn’t going to help him get it. “What service do you mean, Monsieur Czerny? I doubt if I have anything that you might envy.”
“It is your talent. As you know, the Jaish is still small in numbers, even smaller in resources. I have been doing my limited best to help, but for our purposes even all my savings would be too little.”
Ernst finished half a bowl of the liquor in one swallow. He raised his hand for M. Gargotier. “What are these purposes?” he asked.
“Why, liberty for all, of course,” said Czerny, disappointed that Ernst had need to ask. “We distribute leaflets at all parades. Surely you’ve seen them.”
“Yes,” said Ernst, “but not read them.”
“Ah, well. Perhaps if they were composed in a better style….”
“Might I ask who has the task now?”
“A young man of great promise,” said Czerny proudly. “Sandor Courane.”
Ernst leaned back, lifting the front two legs of his chair off the pavement. “M. Czerny,” he said slowly, “that is very interesting, but I must embarrassedly admit that you have chosen an inopportune time for this interview. This afternoon I have something of an assignation, and so….” Ernst settled his chair, smiled drunkenly, and shrugged.
Czerny looked angry. He rose from his seat. “M. Weintraub, I will return later. I believe it is time that you considered such matters as duty and honor. Perhaps this evening you will be more of a mind to discuss this. Good day, and have a gratifying…assignation.”
“Weinraub,” whispered Ernst, as Czerny strode away. “Without the t”
Czerny walked swiftly along the eastern edge of the square until he came to a parked limousine. It was one of the very few automobiles in the city; Ernst did not doubt that it was Czerny’s private car. The driver got out and handed Czerny a gray uniform coat, taking the wealthy man’s more expensively cut jacket in return. “Ah,” thought Ernst, “at least I rated a change of clothing. We shall see whether or not the same thing happens this evening. It is sad that so frequently the scheme of great men may be deciphered by such paltry tokens.” Czerny put on his uniform coat and waited until the driver opened the rear door of the limousine for him. Then he entered; the driver walked around the car and disappeared inside. In a moment the vehicle moved slowly away from the curb, its siren crying shrilly and the pennants of the Jaish whipping in the breeze. The car drove down the length of the square, turned along the north side, and went on for a short distance. Then it stopped again, and Czerny spoke with two figures on the sidewalk. From that distance Ernst could not recognize them.
“If I were you, Czerny,” he thought, “I would not involve myself too deeply with the people of this city. There is always the danger that you may find people to like or, most deadly of all, to love. What should you do, having fallen in love with some rare woman, and then find yourself betrayed? Ah, I anticipate your outraged reply. We are both too far along to have that happen to us again. Perhaps you are right, though one can never be too careful. But what if you are not betrayed, eh, Czerny? What then? No final demarcations, however painful. You have forgotten that. Nothing to chop it off before weariness sets in. Lifetimes go by that way, Czerny. Boredom and angry frustration are only the first symptoms. No mistresses for you, no other men’s wives, no playful daughters of police commissioners. We find that we need them, sooner or later. And that is the first of the body’s spasms of death. Years, years, years in this city, with the same faces, yours and hers. Years, years, years. Do not stop for them, Czerny. Tend to your army.”
Czerny’s car drove away, and after a few moments Ernst saw that one of the two people walking toward him was the girl, Ieneth, without her knife-sharpening equipment. With her was another girl, taller and darker. Ernst rose from his chair by the railing, and the two girls joined him at his table. M. Gargotier, evidently expecting that Ernst would soon depart, did not come to take an order. He stood glaring in the bar’s doorway, obviously resenting the presence of the two lower-class women. Ernst made a flamboyant gesture to summon the proprietor. He switched his drinking to absinthe, and the girls ordered wine.
“What is her name, Ieneth?” he asked, staring at the new girl. She looked shyly at the table.
“She is called Ua. In her language it means ‘flower.’ She does not understand our speech.”
“How charming she is, and how lovely her name. Truly a flower. Convey to her my sincerest compliments.” Ieneth did so. “What language is that?” asked Ernst.
“It is a strange dialect, spoken by the black people beyond the desert and the mountains. It is called Swahili.”
“Black people? How interesting. I have only heard stories. They actually exist?”
“Yes, yaa Sidi,” said Ieneth.
“And how did she learn the tongue? And you, also, for that matter?”
Ieneth closed her eyes, fluttering her painted lashes, and smiled.
Ernst turned to Ua. “What is this called?” he said, pointing to her foot. Ieneth translated, and Ua replied.
“Mguu,” she said.
“And this?” said Ernst, pointing now to her ankle.
“Kifundo cha mguu.”
“What is this?”
“Jicho.” Eye.
“How do you say ‘mouth’?”
“Kinywa.”
Ernst sipped his drink nervously, although he labored to seem casual and urbane. “This?” he asked.
“Mkono.” Arm.
“This?” Ernst’s fingers lingered on her breast, feeling the rough material of the brassiere beneath the cotton blouse.
Ua blushed. “Ziwa,” she whispered.
“She is indeed very lovely,” Ernst said.
“And worthy of reward for her, ah, agent?” asked Ieneth.
“Certainly,” said Ernst absently, as he moved his hand down past Ua’s stomach, stopping at the juncture of her thighs. “Now, my love, what could this be?”
Ua said nothing, staring at the table. She blushed fiercely while she played with the base of her wineglass.
“Ask her what the word for this is,” he said. Ieneth did so.
“Mkunga,” Ua said at last, removing Ernst’s hand.
Ieneth laughed shrilly, clapping her hands. Tears ran down her cheeks as she rose from her seat. “Ah, your cosmopolitan tastes!” she said.
“What is so amusing?” asked Ernst.
“Mkunga!” said Ieneth. “Mkunga is the word for ‘eel’ Oh, enjoy your hour together, yaa Sidi. You and she will have much to discuss!” And she went out of the cafe, laughing as she walked away from Ernst’s disconcerted and savage glare.
It was late afternoon, and already the sun was melting behind the hotel across the street. Ernst sipped wine now, for he appreciated the effect of the slanting sun’s rays on the rich, dark liquid. He had discovered this by accident when he had first come to the city, strolling along the walled quarter’s single, huge avenue. He had seen the red shimmers reflecting on the impassive face of a shopworn working girl. How much better, he had thought then, how much better it would be to have that singularly fortunate play of light grace a true poet.
“It may be a bit naive of me, nonetheless,” he thought. “After all, if these loiterers of the city lack the verbal sophistication to appreciate the verses themselves, how can I expect them to have any greater regard for the wielder of the pen? But I must defeat that argument by ignoring it if by no more rigorous means. I cannot allow myself to be pulled down into the intellectual miasma of these Afric prisoners. The sun must burn out all wonder and delight at an early age; it is only we unlucky travelers who can deplore their sand-worn ignorance
.” He took some more of the wine and held it in his mouth until he began to feel foolish. He swallowed it and pushed the glass away.
While Ernst sat there, sucking the taste of the wine from his teeth, a young boy walked by on the sidewalk. He was small, nearly hairless, and quite obviously had strayed from the neighborhood of his parents. He stopped when he saw Ernst. “Are you not Weinraub the wanderer, from Europe?”
“I am,” said Ernst. “I have been, for some time. Has my fame then spread as far as your unwashed ears?”
“I have heard much about you, yaa Sidi,” said the boy. “I never believed that I’d really see you.”
“And are your dreams confirmed?”
“Not yet,” said the boy, shaking his head. “Do you really kiss other men?”
Ernst spat at the boy, and the dark boy laughed, dancing into the street, hopping back on the sidewalk. “Come here,” said Ernst, “and I’ll wrap this chair around your skinny neck.”
“It was only a joke, yaa Sidi,” said the boy, not the least afraid.
“A joke. How old are you?”
“I am nine, yaa Sidi.”
“Then you should know the danger of mocking your betters. I have the power to do you great harm: I may draw a picture of you. I may touch you with my left hand. Your mother will beat you dead when she hears.”
“You are wrong,” said the boy, laughing again. “You are a Nazarene, yes, or a Jew. But I am no rug-squatter. Touch me with your left hand, yaa Sidi, and I will gnaw it off. Do you wish me to fetch your supper? I will not charge you this time.”
“I tend to doubt your offer. In any event, I have a regular boy who brings my food. What is your name, you young criminal?”
“I am Kebap,” said the boy. “It means ‘roast beef in the language of Turkey.”
“I can see why,” said Ernst dryly. “You will have to work hard to take the place of my regular boy, if you want this job.”
“I am sorry,” said Kebap. “I have no wish to perform that kind of service.” Then he ran away, shouting insults over his shoulder.
Ernst stared after him, his fists clenching. “Ieneth will pay for her joke,” he thought. “If only I could find a vulnerable spot in these people. Without possessions, inured against discomfort, hoping for nothing, they are difficult indeed to punish. Perhaps that is the reason I have stayed in this capital of lice so long. No other reason comes quickly to mind.”
He sipped his wine and stared at the smudged handwriting on a scrap of paper: an ebauche of his trilogy of novels. He had done the rough outline so long ago that he had forgotten its point. But he was certain that the reflected light from the wineglass shifted to good effect on the yellowed paper, too.
“This was the trilogy that was going to make my reputation,” thought Ernst sadly. “I remember how I had planned to dedicate the first volume to Eugenie, the second to Marie, and the third…? I can’t remember, after all. It has been a long time. I cannot even recall the characters. Ah, yes, here. I had stolen that outstanding, virtuous fool, d’Aubont, put a chevalier’s outfit on him, taken off his mustache, and renamed him Gerhardt Friedlos. How the fluttering feminine hearts of Germany, Carbba, France, and England were to embrace him, if hearts are capable of such a dexterous feat. Friedlos. Now I remember. And there is no further mystery as to why I can’t recall the plot. It was nothing. Mere slashings of rapier, mere wooings of maid, mere tauntings of coward. One thousand pages of adolescent dreams, just to restore my manly figure. Beyond the dedications, did I not also represent Eugenie and Marie with fictional characters? I cannot read this scrawl. Ah, yes. Eugenie is disguised in volume one as the red-haired Marchioness Fajra. She is consumed in a horrible holocaust as her outraged tenants wreak their just revenge. Friedlos observes the distressing scene with mixed emotions. In volume two, he consoles himself with the contrasting charms of Marie, known in my novel as the maid Malvarma, who pitiably froze to death on the great plain of Breulandy rather than acknowledge her secret love. Friedlos comes upon her blue and twisted corpse and grieves. I am happy, I am very, very-happy that I never wrote that trash.”
Ernst took his short, fat pencil and wrote in the narrow spaces left to him on the scrap. My scalp itches, he wrote. When I scratch it, I break open half-healed sores. I have a headache; behind my right eye my brain throbs. My ears are blocked, and the canals are swollen deep inside, as though large pegs had been hammered into them. My nostrils drip constantly, and the front of my face feels as if it has been filled with sand. My gums bleed, and my teeth communicate with stabbing pains. My tongue is still scalded from the morning tea. My throat is dry and sore. This catalogue continued down the margins of the paper, and down his body, to end with, My arches cramp up at regular intervals, whenever I think about them. My toes are cut and painful on the bottom and fungused and itching between. And now I believe that it pains me to piss. But this last symptom bears watching; it is not confirmed.
On a napkin ringed with stains of chocolate and coffee, Ernst began another list, parallel to the first. The very continents shudder with the fever chills of war. Europe, my first home so far away, cringes in the dark sickroom between the ocean and the Urals. Asia teeters into the false adolescence of senility, and is the more dangerous for it. Breulandy rises in the north and east, and who can tell of her goals and motives? South of the city, Africa slumbers, hungry and sterile, under the cauterizing sun. The Americas? Far too large to control, too broken to aid us now.
Oh, and whom do I mean by “us”? The world is fractured so that we no longer know anything but self. My self finds symptoms everywhere, a political hypochondriac in exile. Perhaps if I were still in the numbing academic life of old, I would see none of this; l’ozio e la sepoltura dell’uomo vivo—“inactivity is the tomb of the vital man.” I have time to make lists now.
Of course he found sad significance in the two inventories when he completed them. He shook his head sorrowfully and stared meditatively at his wineglass, but no one noticed.
Ernst folded the paper with his trilogy synopsis and the first list, and returned it to his pocket. He skimmed through the second list again, though. “‘I have time to make lists now,’” he read. “What does that mean? Who am I trying to distress?” Just beyond the railing, on the sidewalk bordering the Fee Blanche, sat Kebap, the little boy named “roast beef.” The boy was grinning.
“Allo, Sidi Weinraub. I’m back. I’ve come to haunt you, you know.”
“You’re doing a fine job,” said Ernst. “Do you know anything of poetry?”
“I know poetry,” said the boy. “I know what Sidi Courane writes. That’s poetry. That’s what everyone says. Do you write poetry, too?”
“I did,” said Ernst, “in my youth.”
“It is lucky, then, that I cannot read,” said Kebap. He grinned again at Ernst, evilly. “I see that your usual boy hasn’t yet brought your supper.”
“Why are you called ‘roast beef? I doubt if you’ve ever seen any in your whole life.”
“One of my uncles called me that,” said the boy. “He said that’s what I looked like when I was born.”
“Do you have a lot of uncles?” asked Ernst maliciously.
Kebap’s eyes opened very wide. “Oh, certainly,” he said solemnly. “Sometimes a new one every day. My mother is very beautiful, very wise, and often very silent. Would you like to meet her, yaa Sidi?”
“Not today, you little thief.” Ernst held up the annotated napkin. “I’m very busy.”
Kebap snorted. “Certainly, yaa Sidi. Of course.” Then he ran away.
“Good evening, M. Weinraub.” It was Czerny, still dressed in his gray uniform of the Citizens’ Army. Ernst saw that the tunic was without decoration or indication of rank. Perhaps the Jaish was still so small that the men had only a handful of officers in the whole organization. And here was the man again, to persuade him that the whole situation was not foolish, after all.
“You are a man of your word, M. Czerny,” said Ernst. “Will you join
me again? Have a drink?”
“No, I’ll pass that up,” said Czerny as he seated himself at Ernst’s table. “I trust your appointment concluded satisfactorily?”
Ernst grunted. It became evident that he would say nothing more. Czerny cursed softly. “Look,” he said, “I don’t want to have to go through all these stupid contests of yours. This isn’t amusing any longer. You’re going to have to choose sides. If you’re not with us, you’re against us.”
Perhaps it was the heat of the afternoon, or the amount of liquor he had already consumed, or the annoying events of the day, but Ernst refused to allow Czerny the chance to make a single argumentative point. It was not often that someone came to Ernst with a request, and he was certainly going to enjoy it fully. That in doing so he would have to disappoint and even antagonize Czerny made little difference. If Czerny wanted Ernst’s help badly enough, Czerny would return. And if Czerny didn’t mean what he said, then, well, he deserved everything Ernst could devise.
Ernst was amused by the man’s grave talk. He couldn’t understand the urgency at all. “Who are you going to fight? I don’t see it. Maybe if you paid them enough, you could hire some nomad tribe. But it’s still a good distance to ask them to ride just for a battle. Or maybe if you split your tiny bunch in half, one part could start a civil uprising and the other part could put it down. But I really just want to watch.”
“We will get nowhere, Monsieur,” said Czerny in a tight, controlled voice, “until you cease treating my army as a toy and our cause as a tilting at windmills.”
“My good Czerny,” said Ernst slowly, “you reveal quite a lot when you say ‘my army.’ You reveal yourself, if you understand me. You divulge yourself. You display yourself, do you see? You expose yourself. There, I see that I must say it plainly. You expose yourself, but in this locality, at this time, that seems to be a most commendable form of expression.”
“Damn it, you are an idiot! I’m not asking you to be a dirty goundi. We can get plenty of infantry just by putting up notices. If we could afford to pay them. If we could afford the notices. But intelligence is at a premium in this city. We need you and the others like you. I promise you, you’ll never have to carry a rifle or face one. But you have to be man enough to cast your lot with us, or we’ll sweep you aside with the rest of the old ways.”
Budayeen Nights Page 27