“How could you be in it if you didn’t believe in it?” Elise asked.
“My views were not consulted,” Jerome said. “They didn’t ask me, they told me. But I still had my inner belief, which was that I didn’t believe in it. I was in the MPs. I rose through the ranks. I was a provost marshal, at the end. I once shook down an entire battalion of Seabees, six hundred men.”
“What is ‘shook down’?”
“That’s when you and your people go through their foot lockers and sea bags and personal belongings looking for stuff they shouldn’t have.”
“What shouldn’t they have?”
“Black market stuff. Booze. Dope. Government property. Unauthorized weapons.” He paused. “What else didn’t I believe in? I didn’t believe in the atom bomb but I was wrong about that. The unions.”
“You were wrong about that too,” said the other man, Frank. “I was a linotype operator when I was nineteen and I was a linotype operator until I was sixty and let me tell you, mister, if we hadn’t had the union all we would have got was nickels and dimes. Nickels and dimes. Period. So don’t say anything against the trade union movement while I’m sitting here, because I know what I’m talking about. You don’t.”
“I didn’t believe in the unions and I didn’t believe in the government whether Republican or Democrat,” Jerome said. “And I didn’t believe in—”
“The I.T.U. is considered a very good union,” Elise said. “I once went with a man in the I.T.U. He was a composing-room foreman and his name was Harry Foreman, that was a coincidence, and he made very good money. We went to Luchow’s a lot. He liked German food.”
“Did you believe in the international Communist conspiracy?” Frank asked Jerome.
“Nope.”
“You can’t read,” Frank said, “you’re blind.”
“Maybe.”
“I haven’t decided about whether there is an international Communist conspiracy,” Elise said. “I’m still thinking about it.”
“What’s to think about?” Frank asked. “There was Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia says it all.”
Some street people walked past the group of senior citizens but decided that the senior citizens weren’t worth asking for small change. The decision was plain on their faces.
“When I was a girl, a little girl, I had to go into my father’s bar to get the butter,” Kate said. “My father had a bar in Brooklyn. The icebox was in the bar. The only icebox. My mother sent me downstairs to get the butter. All the men turned and looked at me as I entered the bar.”
“But your father bounded out from behind the bar and got you the butter meanwhile looking sternly at all the other people in the bar to keep them from looking at you,” Elise suggested.
“No,” Kate said. “He was on his ass most of the time. What they say about bartenders not drinking is not true.”
“Also I didn’t believe in the United Nations and before that I didn’t believe in the League of Nations,” Jerome said. “Furthermore,” he said, giving Kate a meaningful glance, “I didn’t believe women should be given the vote.”
Kate gazed at Jerome’s coat, which was old, at his shirt, old, then at his pants, which were quite old, and at his shoes, which were new.
“Do you have prostate trouble?” she asked.
“Yes,” Jerome said, with a startled look. “Of course. Why?”
“Good,” Kate said. “I don’t believe in prostate trouble. I don’t believe there is such a thing as a prostate.”
She gave him a generous and loving smile.
“You mean to tell me that if you put the piece of paper with the boy’s name on it in your shoe on the first day of the month he invariably came around?” Elise asked Kate.
“Invariably,” Kate said. “Without fail. Worked every time.”
“Goddamn,” Elise said. “Wish I’d known that.”
“There was one thing I believed,” Jerome said.
“What?”
“It’s religious.”
“What is it?”
“My pal the rabbi told me, he’s dead now. He said it was a Hasidic writing.”
“So?” said Elise. “So, so, so?”
“It is forbidden to grow old.”
The old people thought about this for a while, on the bench.
“It’s good,” Kate said. “I could do without the irony.”
“Me too,” Elise said. “I could do without the irony.”
“Maybe it’s not so good?” Jerome asked. “What do you think?”
“No,” Kate said. “It’s good.” She gazed about her at the new life sprouting in sandboxes and jungle gyms. “Wish I had some kids to yell at.”
Tales of the Swedish Army
SUDDENLY, TURNING a corner, I ran into a unit of the Swedish Army. Their vehicles were parked in orderly rows and filled the street, mostly six-by-sixes and jeeps, an occasional APC, all painted a sand color quite different from the American Army’s dark green. To the left of the vehicles, on a big school playground, they had set up two-man tents of the same sand color, and the soldiers, blond red-faced men, lounged about among the tents, making not much noise. It was strange to see them there, I assumed they were on their way to some sort of joint maneuvers with our own troops. But it was strange to see them there.
I began talking to a lieutenant, a young, pleasant man; he showed me a portable chess clock he’d made himself, which was for some reason covered in matchstick bamboo painted purple. I told him I was building an addition to the rear of my house, as a matter of fact I had with me a carpenter’s level I’d just bought, and I showed him that. He said he had some free time, and asked if I needed help. I suggested that probably his unit would be moving out fairly soon, but he waved a hand to indicate that their departure was not imminent. He seemed genuinely interested in assisting me, so I accepted.
His name was Bengt and he was from Uppsala, I’d been there so we talked about Uppsala, then about Stockholm and Bornholm and Malmö. I asked him if he knew the work of the Swedish poet Bodil Malmsten; he didn’t. My house (not really mine, my sister’s, but I lived there and paid rent) wasn’t far away, we stood in the garden looking up at the rear windows on the parlor floor, I was putting new ones in. So I climbed the ladder and he began handing me up one of the rather heavy prefab window frames, and my hammer slid from the top of the ladder and fell and smashed into his chess clock, which he’d carefully placed on the ground, against the wall.
I apologized profusely, and Bengt told me not to worry, it didn’t matter, but he kept shaking the chess clock and turning it over in his hands, trying to bring it to life. I rushed down the ladder and apologized again, and looked at it myself, both dials were shattered and part of the purple matchstick casing had come off. He said again not to worry, he could fix it, and that we should get on with the job.
After a while Bengt was up on the ladder tacking the new frames to the two-by-fours with sixteen-penny nails. He was very skillful and the work was going quickly; I was standing in the garden steadying the ladder as he was sometimes required to lean out rather far. He slipped and tried to recover, and bashed his face against the wall, and broke his nose.
He stood in the garden holding his nose with both hands, the hands as if clasped in prayer over his nose. I apologized profusely. I ran into the house and got some ice cubes and paper towels and told him I’d take him to the hospital right away but he shook his head and said no, they had doctors of their own. I wanted to do something for him so I took him in and sat him down and cooked him some of my fried chicken, which is rather well-known although the secret isn’t much of a secret, just lots of lemon-pepper marinade and then squeezing fresh lemon juice over it just before serving. I could see he was really very discouraged about his nose and I had to keep giving him fresh paper towels but he complimented me very highly on the chicken and gave me a Swedish recipe
for chicken stuffed with parsley and butter and stewed, which I wrote down.
Then Bengt told me various things about the Swedish Army. He said that it was a tough army and a sober one, but small; that everybody in the army pretty well knew everybody else, and that they kept their Saab jets in deep caves that had been dug in the mountains, so that if there was a war, nothing could happen to them. He said that the part I’d seen was just his company, there were two more plus a heavy-weapons company bivouacking at various spots in the city, making up a full battalion. He said the soldiers were mostly Lutherans, with a few Presbyterians and Evangelicals, and that drugs were not a problem but that people sometimes overslept, driving the sergeants crazy. He said that the Swedish Army was thought to have the best weapons in the world, and that they kept them very clean. He said that he probably didn’t have to name their principal potential enemy, because I knew it already, and that the army-wide favorite musical group was Abba, which could sometimes be seen on American television late at night.
By now the table was full of bloody towels and some blood had gotten on his camouflage suit, which was in three shades of green and brown. Abruptly, with a manly gesture, Bengt informed me that he had fallen in love with my sister. I said that was very curious, in that he had never met her. “That is no difficulty,” he said, “I can see by looking around this house what kind of a woman she must be. Very tall, is she not? And red hair, is that not true?” He went on describing my sister, whose name is Catherine, with a disturbing accuracy and increasing enthusiasm, correctly identifying her as a teacher and, furthermore, a teacher of painting. “These are hers,” he said, “they must be,” and rose to inspect some oils in Kulicke frames on the walls. “I knew it. From these, dear friend, a great deal can be known of the temperament of the painter, his or her essential spirit. I will divorce my wife immediately,” he said, “and marry Catherine as soon as it is legally possible.” “You’re already married!” I said, and he hung his head and admitted yes, that it was so. But in Sweden, he said, many people were married to each other who, for one reason or another, no longer loved each other . . . I said that happened in our own country too, many cases personally known to me, and that if he wished to marry Catherine I would not stand in his way, but would, on the contrary, do everything in my power to further the project. At this moment the bell rang; I answered it and Catherine entered with her new husband, Richard.
I took Bengt back to his unit in a cab, one hand clutching his nose, the other his heart, the remains of his chess clock in his lap. We got there just in time, a review was in progress, the King of Sweden was present, a handsome young man in dress uniform with a silver sword, surrounded by aides similarly clad. A crowd had gathered and Bengt’s company paraded by, looking vastly trim and efficient in their polished boots and red berets, and a very pretty little girl came out of the crowd and shyly handed the King a small bouquet of flowers. He bent graciously to accept them, beautiful small yellow roses, and a Rocky Mountain spotted-fever tick leaped from a rose and bit him on the cheek. I was horrified, and the King slapped his cheek and swore that the Swedish Army would never come to visit us again.
The Abduction from the Seraglio
I WAS sitting in my brand-new Butler building, surrounded by steel of high quality folded at ninety-degree angles. The only thing prettier than ladies is an I-beam painted bright yellow. I told ’em I wanted a big door. A big door in front where a girl could hide her car if she wanted to evade the gaze of her husband the rat-poison salesman. You ever been out with a rat-poison salesman? They are fine fellows with little red eyes.
I was playing with my forty-three-foot overhead traveling crane which is painted bright yellow. I was practicing knocking over the stepladder with the hook. I was at a low point. I’d been thinking about bread, colored steel bread, all kinds of colors of steel bread—red yellow purple green brown steel bread—then I thought no, that’s not it. And I’d already made all the welded-steel four-thousand-pound artichokes the world could accommodate that week, and they wouldn’t let me drink no more, only a little Lone Star beer now and then which I don’t much care for. And my new Waylon Jennings record had a scratch on it, went crack crack crack across the whole width of Side One. It was the kind of impasse us creative people reach every Thursday, some prefer other days. So I figured that in order not to totally waste this valuable time of my life, I had better get on the stick and bust Constanze out of the seraglio.
Chorus:
Oh Constanze oh Constanze
What you doin’ in that se-rag-li-o?
I been poppin’ Darvon and mothballs
Poppin’ Darvon and mothballs
Ever since I let you go.
Well, I motored out to the seraglio, got blindsided on the Freeway by two hundred thousand guys trying to get home from their work at the rat-poison factories, all two hundred thousand tape decks playin’ the same thing, some kind of roll-on-down-the-road song
rollin’
rollin’
rollin’
rollin’
I been poppin’ Darvon and mothballs
but there wasn’t just a hell of a lot of actual forward motion despite this hymn to possibility. The seraglio turned out to be a Butler building too, much like mine only vaster of course, that son of a bitch. I spent a little while admiring that fine red-painted steel that you can put the pieces together of out of a catalogue and set her down on your slab and be barbecuing your flank steak from the A. & P. by five o’clock on the same day. The Pasha didn’t have any great big doors in his, just one little tee-ninesy door with a picture of an unfed-recently Doberman pasted on it, I took that as a hint and I thought Constanze, Constanze, how could you be so dumb?
The thing is, and I hate to admit it, Constanze’s a little dumb. She’s not so dumb as a lady I once knew who thought the Mark of Zorro was an N, but she’s not perfect. You tell her you heard via the jungle drums that there’s a vacancy in Willie Jake Johnson’s bed and her eyes will cut to the side just for a moment, which means she’s thinking. She’s not conservative. I’m some kind of an artist, but I’m conservative. Mine is the art of the possible, plus two. She, on the contrary, spent many years as a talented and elegant country-music groupie. She knows things I do not know. Happy dust is $1,900 an ounce now, I hear tell—she’s tasted it, I haven’t. It’s a small thing, but irritating. She’s dumb in what she knows, if you follow me.
Chorus:
Oh Constanze oh Constanze
What you doin’ in that se-rag-li-o?
I been sleepin’ on paper towels
Sleepin’ on paper towels and
Drinkin’ Sea & Ski
Ever since I let you go.
The Pasha is a Plymouth dealer, actually. He has this mysterious power over people and events which is called ten million dollars a year, gross. About the only thing we share in the way of common humanity is four welded-steel artichokes, which he bought right from the studio, which is where he saw Constanze. The artichoke is a beautiful form, maybe too mannerly, I roughen mine up some, that’s where the interest is. I don’t even mind the damn Plymouth, as a form, but what I can’t stand is a dealer. In anything. I know that this is a small picky-minded dumb-ass prejudice, but it’s been earned. Anyhow the Pasha, as we call him, noticed that Constanze was some beautiful, in fact semi-incredible looking, with black hair. He turned her head, as used to be said. He’d got to the left of flank steak, and he employed that. If we’re having Neiman-Marcus time, I can’t compete. (In all honesty I have to concede that he is fairly handsome, for a Pasha, and excels in a number of expensive sports.) He put her in a Butler building just to mock me and because she’s not so dumb she’d be caught dead in a big fancy layout in River Oaks or somewhere. She’s got values. What I’m trying to suggest is, she’s in a delicate relation to the real.<
br />
I can’t understand this. She is so great. When we go partying she always takes care to dance with Bill Cray’s four-year-old girl, who’s a fool for dancing. She made me read War and Peace, which struck me at first glance as terrible thick. She renews my subscription to the Texas Observer every year. She contributes regularly to the United Way and got gassed in great cities a time or two while expressing her opinion of the recent war. She’s kind to rat-poison salesmen. She’s afraid of the dark. She took care of me that time I had my little psychotic episode. She is so great. Once I saw her slug a guy in a supermarket who was whacking his kid, his legal right, with undue enthusiasm. The really dreadful thought, to me, is that her real might be the real one.
Well, I opened the door. The Doberman came at me raging and snarling and generally carrying on in the way he felt was expected of him. I threw him a fifty-five-pound reinforced-concrete pork chop which knocked him silly. I spoke to Constanze. We used to walk down the street together bumping our hipbones together in joy, before God and everybody. I wanted to float in the air again some feeling of that. It didn’t work. I’m sorry. But I guess, as the architects say, there’s no use crying over spilt marble. She will undoubtedly move on and up and down and around in the world, New York, Chicago, and Temple, Texas, making everything considerably better than it was, for short periods of time. We adventured. That’s not bad.
Chorus:
Oh Constanze oh Constanze
What you doin’ in that se-rag-li-o?
Donald Barthelme Page 61