Jack Faust - Michael Swanwick

by Unknown Author

  "How terrible for him to be caught up in this. I suppose he'll be deported?"

  Cavarocchi shrugged. There was a hardness to him that she had not noticed yesterday—the hardness of a pirate, a highwayman, an adventurer. She was confirmed in her earlier opinion of him: a chameleon. The emotions came and went too fast, and did not leave any trace behind them.

  "Can I do nothing for you?"

  "Nothing," Margarete said. Then, "No, wait! The woman you would have left in my place—you can pay her the money promised and tell her it comes from a friend. You can draw upon my resources. I'll write you out a note."

  She ground out her cigarette and reached for a pen.

  When he took the paper, she seized Cavarocchi's hand and kissed the back of it.

  He drew it away, startled. "What was that for?"

  "To express my gratitude. I thought I had given up my old ways—I'd hoped I had—but I was not sure. It is so easy to repent when there is no other choice. Now you have tested my resolve, and I know that my repentance is genuine. Go, and take my blessing with you."

  The next day Dreschler's two packages arrived. The first contained a neatly folded packet of paper with some two dozen white pills within. The second was an old copy of Die Zeitung. The one with the photo expose of pollution from her film factories.

  She had never actually looked at the pictures. She studied them now, the flippered hands, the twisted spines. The faces of the parents. This one ancient mother bathing her son—how eloquently her face bespoke an unending life of despair. This is Hell, it said, and here I have long dwelt.

  Afterwards she tried to pray. She still did not believe that there was anybody listening. But she had been wrong about so many things. Perhaps she could dare hope to be wrong about just one more?

  Knowing that her guardians could be bribed, it was the easiest thing in the world to arrange the privacy she required. In preparation, she got out her prayer-book and placed ten crisp bank-notes at even intervals within its pages. They made for a substantial sum. Whatever Cavarocchi had paid, it was less than this.

  Jangling keys, heavy tread, slow-opening door: Ochsenfelder. He entered and with habitual gravity said, "I have good news. Your trial has been postponed/'

  "Oh." Margarete's mind was a blank. She could not think of an appropriate response.

  "Your agent—not Dreschler, but the Italian, Cavarocchi— has petitioned for an extension in order to bring in two witnesses from the lowlands who will testify to the circumstances leading up to your rape."

  "My what?"

  "Child, you should have mentioned this terrible event at the beginning of your testimony. It strongly argues for leniency in the means of your execution."

  "There are no such witnesses. I was never raped—never! Anyone who says such a thing perjures himself."

  "Lady." Ochsenfelder looked pained. "Why do you do this to yourself? Your prosecutor will not be half so hostile to your case as you are now."

  "It is the simple truth. Why would anyone—?"

  She stopped. The trial had been delayed so that Faust could reach her in time. Of course. Wycliffe knew the depth of her feelings. Faust was a kind of intoxication to her; she could not think clearly in his presence. Where persuasion would not suffice, Wycliffe's people thought, the touch of his hand upon her skin would. And they were right.

  It made her shiver. "What a foul and conscienceless world this is," she murmured.

  "Young lady!" Ochsenfelder said. "You should quake to have such thoughts and speak such words. You stand now in the shadow of the gallows and if your life cannot be saved, think then of your immortal soul! I have been gentle with you, and perhaps that was wrong. Pray! Now! Get down upon your knees and beg for forgiveness, rather than—"

  "You!" she cried, all in a fury. "Who are you to talk to me? Why should I be imprisoned and you not? I made my choices in the darkness of fear and ignorance—I call them choices, but what choices did I have? You, you have betrayed—"

  She was crying now. Flinging an arm over her eyes, she turned and put her head against the wall and sobbed until she had emptied herself of tears.

  Ochsenfelder stood to the far side of the cell, saying nothing. He never came near to her if he could avoid doing so, and he never turned his back on her. It was reflexive, he had told her once, from decades of watching over felons. When she asked if he were frightened of being overpowered, he had replied that what he feared most was injuring a foolishly ambitious escapee.

  "Forgive me," Margarete said, when she had cried herself out. "Forgive me. I did not realize I was so—"

  "I understand."

  "Tell the city fathers that they need not delay the trial on my behalf. There are no witnesses coming who can save me.

  I will swear that into the record, if necessary."

  Ochsenfelder solemnly bowed his head.

  Margarete took a deep breath. "And take this," she said, handing him her prayer-book, "to remember me by."

  Her jailer left with a sad smile and a small bow. It had been a trying encounter for him, but he was clearly pleased by its outcome.

  She waited.

  Not long after, he returned to her cell, pale and unhappy. "I—" he began. He swallowed. Then: "Is there anything I might... do for you?"

  "Yes. I wish to be alone and undisturbed for the rest of the night. See to it that nobody comes to my cell before morning."

  He nodded, turned away, turned back. "Please, I must explain something to you," he said all in a rush. "All my life I have been, as you thought me, an honest man. But then my wife, whom I love so much, made a foolish mistake, you see, and invested her—"

  She stopped him with an uplifted hand. "Please don't," she said. "It's not that I am unsympathetic. It's just that I've heard so many sad stories in my lifetime. I don't think that I could bear to hear just one more."

  There was a good side to almost anything. The one gift that imprisonment had given her was time to think. The abortion had been decided upon in a panic. For all her agonized emotion, there had been neither time nor presence of mind to think things through. There had been only denial.

  She thought for a long time about the miners gassed, the children born deformed, Anna Emels's suicide, and a hundred things more. Once you accepted the possibility of guilt, it seemed, there was no bottom.

  She did not blame Jack, though the decisions had been his, but herself for letting him make such decisions for her. He had placed his mouth between her legs and insinuated his tongue so deep inside her that when she spoke his words had come out of her mouth.

  I do not know what right is anymore, she admitted to herself, only that my hands are not clean.

  Consequences never stopped. Even now. She thought of dear, sweet, unhappy Aunt Penniger, who had come to visit her every day until the stroke, and of her parents as well. What a terrible blow this would be to all of them! It really was dreadful how few things would be resolved by her death. Dreadful how the consequences would continue to cascade onward.

  She took one last long look at Jack's photograph. She loved him so much, so deeply, so dearly. She only wished she had proved worthy of him. For a long time she studied the lineaments of his image. How stiff he looked, how stern, how totally unlike himself!

  She regretted that lost life in England. It would have been so pleasant to lie with Faust again, to rub her face against his chest, simply to hold hands with him. It was hard to think that she would never again smell spring flowers or cool her ankles in a country stream. Most of all she regretted little Wilhelm. Darling child, she thought, what a dreadful thing it is to deny you existence. There were so many levels of irony in the thought she could have choked upon them.

  If only Jack were here!

  But she could not have it both ways. If he were here, she would go with him. She could never say no to him. Yet the comfort he offered had too high a price; she could not accept it.

  She turned the frame facedown. She couldn't do this thing with him watching.

/>   If the end justified the means, then when did the end arrive? Tomorrow? Next year? A century from now? Or was it like the horizon, receding with every step, always ahead and never here, transfinite and irrational?

  No, the end was a permanent condition. It was always arriving. It was always here. Every moment stood upon the requirement to justify itself.

  Very well, then, Margarete thought. Justify yourself.

  She opened the square of paper and laid out the pills in three neat rows of eight. Then she filled a glass tumbler with water. At first the water was white with tiny bubbles, but it soon calmed into transparency. She placed the tumbler beside the pills.

  The trick to taking barbiturates was to be methodical. She had to take them one after the other, with little sips of water in between to get them down. If she took them too fast, she might throw up. Too slow, and she'd fall asleep before she'd taken enough to do the job. Luckily, she'd always been methodical. She felt the task was well within her capability.

  She raised the first pill to her lips.

  She swallowed.

  It went quicker1 than she had expected. Swallow, sip, find the next capsule. Swallow, sip, find the next capsule. Her fingers closed upon nothing, and for a panicked instant she scrabbled across the empty desktop with both hands looking for the missing capsule. Then, realizing that she was done, she settled back in her chair with a complacent sense of having done her duty.

  It was all over now.

  Shortly before the pills took their final effect, Margarete had a waking hallucination.

  It seemed there was a message for her. She knew there was. She imagined the messenger from Faust's long-ago sermon finally arriving, in leather gloves and helmet, removing his motorcycle goggles before extending her the Emperor's parchment, a crisp square folded into quarters, with seals and ribbons still intact. His expression was stern, and yet she dared hope there was compassion in it as well. Am I forgiven? she wondered. I have repented—but is repentance enough?

  She unfolded and looked at the parchment. For an instant the words were strange, in a language and script with which she was unfamiliar. Then they came into a more conforming mode, and she knew that she could comprehend it simply by concentrating just a little bit harder.

  The letters swam into place, and she began to read.

  * * *

  THE MESSAGE

  * * *

  ASHES

  Margarete was dead.

  There was no reason to stay; there was no reason to keep moving. There was no place he wanted to be; there was no place he did not want to leave behind.

  Mere momentum carried Faust on to Nuremberg.

  He arrived at sunset. A statue had been reared in the center of town to Mathes Behaim: the inventor of the radio, father of the condensing coil, and creator of the vacuum tube, who had died a martyr to science when an array of acid batteries exploded during an attempt to establish infinite conductivity. This was human glory—a sad and exhaust-darkened memorial for good citizens to ignore and drunks to piss upon on their way home from the brothels. Here was the omega-point of all ambition.

  Faust left his automobile at the foot of the monument, there to block traffic and be discovered by the police in the morning and confiscated. He did not care.

  A single heavy drop of rain fell on the cobbles by his feet. The storm that had been threatening for days had arrived at last. He turned up his collar and strode on.

  Here, in the old part of town, where electrification was still incomplete, people kept country hours and went to bed with the cows. Street-lights existed only at prominent intersections. Radios, played however quietly, were strictly forbidden after dark. Faust looked around him with distaste. "I had forgotten how quiet it gets here."

  "Pish! Tosh! We'll soon liven things up," said a voice from somewhere over his shoulder.

  "I've had about enough of you and your—"

  "Oh, Faust, believe me: I will never lie to you again. All such tricks and deceits are things of the past. Think of them as a teacher's little guiles, ways of coaxing on a willful child who does not wish to learn his lessons. I swear by my very being I shall never employ them again." Mephistopheles snickered and lowered his voice insinuatingly. "After all—if I may be permitted to gloat—what need have I for lies? The truth is ugly enough to serve my purposes."

  Faust stared vaguely about, not listening. "I need a drink."

  "The Cellar Imp is just around the corner and down the way. For a nominal sum the landlord will keep it open past hours, so long as you're reasonably quiet. When you start raving and breaking furniture, I know of other places we can go."

  An hour-some later Faust looked about him with an obscure feeling that something was missing. He thought for a while, then said, "Where is Wagner?" He was not actually drunk, but emotion made him feel as if he were. Sorrow, loss,

  anger—these were as good as a bottle of the very worst gin.

  "Don't you remember? You left him behind in Heilbronn. I chanced to remark that the Occupation forces had despatched a squad of cavalry to overtake you. That incident with the Provo halftrack and the Venetian mercenaries? So you ordered him to lock himself in a church tower and shoot at the passersby, to delay pursuit. He paced the thing well; it was four hours before he ran out of ammunition and the soldiers dared break down the door. By which time you were well away. Oh, don't look so distressed. Think of it as a sacrifice to your greatness."

  "A sacrifice." Faust imagined Wagner dead at his feet, like a faithful hound, and felt a special fondness for the obsequious little toady.

  "I have answered so many questions for you over the years," Mephistopheles said. "Will you answer one for me?" He did not wait for an assent. "You will, as all men must, someday die. Who, in all the burgeoning masses of fools and villains that constitute the human race, is there that you do not loathe? Who among them does not deserve immediate death? Who would you wish to outlive you?"

  Faust did not even have to think. "Nobody."

  "Well, exactly! I can't tell you how delighted I am to hear you say so. At last we have a meeting of minds!"

  The burly landlord of the Cellar Imp closed his wine cabinet with a slam, twisted the key, and turned his brutal face toward Faust. He had not much liked Faust's constant muttering, but his patience had held well enough until Faust had set fire to a drunken mechanic's coat and driven the man, ablaze, from the tavern. Now, it seemed, his hospitality was exhausted.

  With a grumbling sigh, Faust stood.

  He opened the door into a cloudburst. The rain had grown in strength while he was inside. It was cold as ice-water, and came down so hard it stung the flesh. He stepped into it and was immediately drenched to the skin.

  It was easy to break into the church. There was a small door to the rear for the priests and Mephistopheles showed him where an axe had been left under a tarp flung over the rectory's woodpile. Three blows, each coinciding with a thunderclap, sufficed to break the lock.

  Dripping puddles onto the stairs, Faust descended into the basement. He made straight for the cabinet where the Communion wine was kept. Again he employed the axe. If the noise disturbed the pastor's dreams of plump choirboys, his unease was not sufficient to bring him out into the night and rain.

  When he'd slipped a bottle into his coat pocket, tucked another under his arm, and smashed the rest, Faust started back up the stairs. But then he dropped one of the bottles and in his confusion took a wrong turn, and somehow he wound up before the main altar, under the crucifix.

  He gazed stupidly up at the milk-skinned Nazarene. The wracked limbs and agonized expression spoke eloquently of the pleasure the artist took in the torment of the flesh. The rolled eyes and nauseated mouth—how well they conveyed the Savior's loathing for the material world! Faust's eyes welled with tears of sympathy. "You too, old Jew?"

  He had for many years thought of Christ as a rival in greatness. Now he realized they were both brothers in misery. Their enemies were identical: the howling mob, the fea
rful, the inferior, the baying hounds of conventional morality. He wished he could kill them all and dump the corpses at the feet of their crucified victim.

  "Excuse me," Mephistopheles said. "Would you like to have some fun?"

  The devil led Faust to an undistinguished tenement door. The rain still hammered down. He tried the latch. Locked.

  (The room within held a gas-oven, a sink, a bed, a chamber pot. There were also a table, two chairs, a travel-trunk, a cradle. These few poor items took up almost all the space there was.)

  He pounded on the door.

  A fearful voice said, "Who's there?"

  "Nathan, I need your help!"

  "There is no one by that name here. Who are you?"

  "A friend."

  "Go away, before we call the police."

  (There were two adults and a nursling. The man was stout and had a short beard. The woman's hair was long and black. Neither was particularly tall.)

  "Nathan, don't you remember the time when you were young and lost yourself in the forest, hunting for mushrooms? Night fell, there was no moon, and you heard wolves. In desperation you knocked on the door of a woodcutter's cabin. He was not a landsman, yet he let you in. Do the same for me now."

  A brief hesitation, the rattle of bolts. The door opened.

  Smiling, Faust strode in. He went straight to the cradle, scooped up the baby, turned, and said, "You are both Jews."

  With a shriek, the mother rushed at him. Fending her off with one hand, he brandished the sleeping infant over his head with the other. "Careful! The baby will fall! The baby will drop!" Then, as the husband seized his wife to hold her back, "The baby will have its fucking brains spattered out against the wall, if you don't behave."

  Somebody in the apartment overhead angrily thumped the floor.

  They all three froze.

  "What do you want with us?" Nathan whispered. His wife turned pleading eyes toward him, but stood back.