by M J Engh
It wasn’t the impersonal fact—I had anticipated, imagined, and armed myself against such taunts, indeed much worse, even to violence—but the source of it, which so unstrung me. Gene and Bud were not among the jackals from whom I had expected such, nor quite among the friends whom I was prepared (having lately learned the ruthlessness of self-defense) to forgive it. They represented the rational and indifferently sympathetic Better Class my bitterest apprehensions had assumed; and that they had turned upon me demonstrated, with mathematical finality, that all the world at large was hostile.
It was one of the turning points. Not my turn, since I had not altered in self or in direction, but the world’s turn. I was only the pivot pin upon which the visible universe wheeled. And feeling cramped and restless for a pin, I resorted to merely physical motion. That was the first time I walked boldly, so to speak, into Arslan’s stable and saddled and harnessed one of Arslan’s horses, and mounted and rode off, wordless before the mock salutes of my watchers. Not one moved to stop or question me. And on the road I leaned the horse slowly into a flying, floating gallop that eased my chest. I quartered the town, tattooing down Bud’s street and down Gene’s, making long corner loops along the country roads. Then I rode back, the horse and I heaving together, to gather the fruit of my first disobedience.
Yet I was so obtuse, the universe so little visible to me, that eight weeks later I walked like a lamb to my father’s house. And lamblike I was bewildered and surprised when the club fell. “You are a Goddamned hypocrite,” I said—the valor of the lamb—and walking back through the forbidden dark, I heard the rifle crack and felt an outrageous thrust drive through my thigh.
I had been taught that there were good people and bad people. The good subscribed to certain theoretical tenets and abstained from certain actions. The bad faulted in one way or both. There were also rumors of peculiarly loathsome creatures, the worst of the bad, who pretended to subscribe to the required tenets, the better to perform the forbidden actions with impunity. Scorn and righteous indignation were fired at these absent monsters from the batteries of pulpit and school-book fiction, but none were ever pointed out to me in the flesh. For Kraftsville’s ancestral piety had not been shaken by the seisms remaking the face of America. The Sunday School literature spoke fashionably of society’s sins, and the Social Studies books confessed that westward expansion had been a little hard on the Indians; but what citizen of Kraftsville could have questioned that Kraftsville citizens were nice people, and that nice people were good?
So it took a convulsive effort to realize that it was exactly the good people, it was especially the better people, who were the loathsome hypocrites. My father and my mother, and all the other reasonably intelligent, reasonably nice, reasonably successful people I had ever known—they were the ones who spoke out so dogmatically for truth, beauty, and goodness, while with every action of their lives they cast votes for falsity, ugliness, and corruption. And Mr. Bond, of course—Mr. Bond was a particularly prime specimen, because he made his living teaching hypocrisy to children.
It was Arslan who showed me the possibility of living honestly. Even his deceits were straightforward—tools as simple in purpose and exquisite in design as the guns he equally loved. He lied; but he did not pretend.
“You give me much pleasure, Hunt.” Yes—except that I gave nothing; he took, took with both hands. The stuttering metaphors of my mind were silent before the concentrated consciousness he brought to bear upon his pleasure-taking. It was this—not his deeds, but the passionate and concerned intelligence that powered them—which struck me dumb and helpless, naked before his ruthless interest. Brutal but un-animal, wholly aware, wholly deliberate, he probed again and again for one more pocket of resistance, one more unwillingness from whose bursting another spurt of pleasure would flow. That was what I saw of him. It did not occur to me that he had other concerns as well.
It was against my will—it was against my very flesh—that I read Tamburlaine to him. I did not know the story. I had never heard of Timur the Lame, I did not dream that Arslan had paced the polished floor of Timur’s own tomb with pudgy legs, his hand in his father’s. But before I had read far, the words thickened in my mouth, and I saw Arslan doubled, before me on the couch, before me on the page. Surely to read this to him was to pour oil upon the fire that was devouring me. Over my zenith hang a blazing star That may endure till heaven be dissolv’d, Fed with the fresh supply of earthly dregs … Yet he listened with an earnestness that might have been anxiety if it had not been calm. Later, out of silence, he would speak the word that had touched him. “Triumph. Triumph is public, is it not?” I nodded doubtfully. “Yes. And it is temporary, Hunt.” His eyes were very quiet, very open. “I do not deceive myself. I have finished my triumph.” It was spring, his lush first Kraftsville spring. I was very young, I did not guess that he was more and less than Tamburlaine (the conquering shepherd, invincible by sheer intent, noble by sheer brutality, marching forever forward to new wars). “Now there is only work.”
Those were words I forgot, for months, for years, while I remembered all the standard, stirring taglines of Marlowe’s limpid bombast. Come, let us war against the powers of heaven And set black streamers in the firmament … No, Arslan would need no second triumph. His triumph was with him forever.
No doubt it was grievous to be unable to respond, practically, to inquiry or assertion, friendly or hostile. Yet, on the whole, response seemed to me frivolous. There was nothing to say; or the things sayable there was no point in saying. “Arslan says you’re free to go,” Mr. Bond informed me. That was communication, and valuable, or at least effective. But Go where? would have been the only feasible response, and it could have evoked no effective answer. Therefore I gazed, and was silent.
And in the dusty music room—though I felt such a sweet stab into my vitals that everything inside me was, in a moment, dissolved and flowing—I only listened. The room was so small. Exactly here (or there, or there; my memory ran liquid and swirling as the eddies of spring creeks) the instrumental scores had been kept, here the vocal, in those two cabinets the school’s instruments (the dingy, dented brass, the dilapidated woodwinds, the new drums we had been so proud of); there, in that corner, I had kissed Patty Cummings after the year’s first basketball game, because I liked the wild grace of her and because she teased me—my first kiss, my only kiss, except the hundred that Darya had demonstrated to me, except the condimental tendernesses with which Arslan spiced his assaults.
I had been a good trumpeter, by Kraftsville standards. And it was that thought, ramifying, that brought tears to my eyes while I listened to my mother. My mother, Hunt Morgan’s mother, Mrs. Morgan, Mrs. Arnold Morgan, Jean Morgan—in any aspect, not a woman to sentimentalize. She was all business; but the sentiment was notably present—very neatly boxed, very properly veiled, very ostentatiously unmentioned—a thing set as on a table between us.
She looked so thin and so old—not truly old, of course, but I had never before recognized the marks of time upon her, or imagined she could be subject to them. It surprised me (I was still that young) that she had actually and physically suffered. Parents were immutable.
“What became of my trumpet?” I asked her.
She radiated stifled pleasure. “It’s in your room. As far as I know, it’s as good as it ever was.”
And it had been a good trumpet. “What ever happened to Patty Cummings?”
Now she was surprised—staggered, in fact. Was it good or bad for me to ask about Patty Cummings? Good, for me to express interest in anything; good, for me to be interested in a girl as opposed to Arslan; good, for me to speak at all. But bad, for me to be more interested in a girl than in my long-awaited homecoming; bad, for me to have any interest that implied sex, however innocuously; bad, for me to be interested specifically in Patty Cummings, an empty-headed innocent without family prestige or intellectual pretension.
“Patty Cummings? Nothing, that I know of. All the Cummings girls are
still living at home.”
Living at home. What a world of homeliness that phrase implied, a world enormous, solid, and sweet, in which “home” had a meaning beyond “the place where I live.” I had forgotten. I gazed at her, staringly, touched and awed, and the word Mother came to me, and I thought that I understood it. And I wished, knowing it an adolescent wish, that she would ask me some important question to which I could answer, “Yes. I am coming.”
But she talked of mealtimes and underwear, of my father’s health and my old dog’s death, presented me with a pseudo-leather toilet bag and advised me how to pack it, tucked her handkerchief into her well-kept purse and adjourned the meeting. She was a grown-up.
And Arslan, also, was a grown-up. Grown-ups might give, at unpredictable intervals, anything else; but not drama, not dignity, and not freedom. He did not come to see me go. With neither congratulation nor recrimination, with nothing but a pseudo-leather toilet bag, I stepped into the cool sweet air of the first breeze of evening. Yet, in the end, all the drama and all the dignity were on Arslan’s side; and there was no question of freedom. Hot and sour I walked back through the bitter night, ballasted with incredulity and contempt (which would be worse, that they had forgotten the curfew or that they had remembered?), waiting for the bullet. And when it came I staggered, less with physical shock than with the strong wash of relief, of satisfaction, of preconceived anger now justified and released—and, later, with the dragging undertow (annoyingly real) of fear.
And Arslan was there to see me come back, there to heal me with his hands. It had been a false departure, a real return. When the time came for true departures, he would be there.
He threw himself stomach-down on the bed where I lay, and my own stomach contracted in the accustomed cold cramp. Propped on his forearms, a very boyish posture, he dragged a fingertip across my chest. “You understand, Hunt, that I make a whirlpool around myself. There is no one who can come to me”—he considered for a word—“naturally. I must always deal with people who are in a condition of strain with regard to me.”
I felt a small smile detachedly form itself on my face. He looked at me with confident expectation. “A condition of strain.” My voice sounded to me husky and childish.
“Greater or lesser,” he said, grinning, and laid his palm on my diaphragm by way of demonstration.
“Rusudan,” I said, and the blackness her name roused in me was, in comparison, soothing.
His other hand flicked; the knuckles caught me under the chin, snapped my mouth shut very effectively. Not, with regard to Arslan, what you could call a blow. Just a mild warning, a touch of the lion’s paw. Just a gesture to inform me that I must not contradict his dogma with the fact of Rusudan. She was not a part of the world which I was permitted to consider.
“Therefore I discount the strain,” he said, “in one who would be a friend without it. Do you understand?”
I investigated with my tongue for blood before I spoke. I had a notion that the sight of blood excited him. “I don’t know.”
“You say to me, ‘I hate you.’ But without the strain you would have said something different. I consider that you have said the something different. Hunt, I tell you this tonight for a reason.”
I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to hear his reason. But I was too vulnerable in that blindness; I had to look at him again.
“I return to Bukhara,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
Instantly the world flashed and rang, as if I had been colorblind, tone deaf, for a season, and those few words had cured me. My heart sprang; my lungs drew one delicious breath of pure freedom, like pure oxygen, before everything shifted, like one of those optical illusions in which high is suddenly low and low high, and I felt myself abandoned in a world to which I had been made a traitor. Christ had volunteered; but the scapegoat was a conscript.
“I want you with me,” he said.
So it was back into the frying pan, and nothing had been given me but the prospect of old tortures with new instruments. And falling back into the crumpled husk of myself, I felt tears under my eyelids. I closed them. “And if I say no, I suppose you’ll consider that I said yes?”
He was silent, until I had to open my eyes and look at him. At once he smiled and spoke. “I am not asking you to choose, Hunt. You come with me. When I ask, I do not dictate the answer.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Okay.” I closed my eyes again, going down for the third time. And this time (elementary tactics, invite a relaxation of vigilance and then strike) his hands shut like steel on my upper arms and I felt his breath on my ear as he said softly, “Remember.”
CHAPTER 18
And I remembered. Through the four terrific years, the fast years, the years of my true initiation (for what happened in Kraftsville had been only the test, the preliminary ordeal, which I had passed, because I had survived), I remembered that he did not accept my hate; he returned it to me, so to speak, unopened. I remembered that he chose not to endow me with free will. I remembered, seeing her for the first time the day he brought her to the palace, that my mouth was incompetent to speak her name. Seeing him look at her, I remembered the taste of his tongue. Seeing him rock with laughter, hearing her passionate shouts of anger and of joy, I felt again the little tap that had clapped my jaws together; and I thought—small, sour, spiteful, old-man’s thought—Well, I was right. Rusudan did not exist in a condition of strain.
She was not beautiful, no. She was garish, she was cheap, she was third-rate Technicolor—not even nouveau riche, as Arslan so patently was, but overpriced toy of nouveau riche. Yet she was whole; she was integral. And I, a disarticulate collection of fragments, awash in the bile of envy, watched. She was the only person with whom I had ever seen him quarrel. With the rest of the world his arguments were rational, his angers dictatorial. But with her he struggled and raged. With her he was unjust, brutal, indignant.
I thought I understood. She was, in some way, his unique equal—the one living being with whom it was unnecessary for him to condescend, to explain or domineer. Not even Nizam the Ineluctable Shadow merited abuse or importunity—how much less I. I watched at first with bewilderment and shame, but later with admiration. No, it would not occur to him to muffle his noisy struggles; there was no danger of rousing revolt or contempt, for it was inconceivable that any other could dare stand against the flashing force of his confidence. All the openness of his furies, his frustrations, his delights, said to the world, My weakness is stronger than your strength.
Bukhara was a trap. In those bleak halls, under that blank sky, Arslan’s retinue drew into itself, re-formed, transmogrified, and spread netlike around him, a full-fledged court. In the exercise yard he wrestled with soldiers from the garrison, challenging one after another, embracing every man who gave him a fall. Cigarettes drooping, eyes askance, the jealous majors stirred and shifted. They were aligned in only two things, distrust of Rusudan and devotion to Arslan. The world was divided and distributed every day in the casino, while Arslan, sweating and tousled, dictated endless orders in the radio room, scribbled his maps with ever-spreading lines like crackling glaze, shoved away his lukewarm coffee and called violently for hot.
He was happy. This was his home. He had his woman, the chosen vessel. Never yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love thee, O Eternity! She was eternal, at least, in her pestiferousness. She mocked, interrupted, scolded, demanded. It was unnecessary to understand the language of her complaints. So-and-so had insulted her. She wanted new clothes, more jewels. The cook must be replaced. Arslan shouldn’t drink so much.
He drank more. He began with coffee and raki at lunch. The steel schedule of Kraftsville—a long day’s driving work, an evening’s intense debauch, a short night’s childlike sleep—crumbled and vapored away. More coffee, to be gulped or forgotten. More raki, until light-foot Arslan slipped and scrambled on the treacherous marble floors.
It was the traitor’
s hour. In this palace, the bloody powers of Bukhara—emirs and viziers, and all the Turkish generals who had anticipated Arslan by half a millennium—had succeeded each other upon waves of treason. Generations of his forefathers’ betters had caroused here to their own undoing. But there were no traitors among Arslan’s men. The schemers were faithful. They came and went, dispatched to this sector or that, still plotting. The cook stayed. Rusudan was arrogantly pregnant. Arslan knocked a lieutenant down the stairs for bringing him the wrong report. But after the three-day carouse that left him immobilized for the fourth day and night, while the palace buzzed with varying tones of dismay and frenzy, he reformed by the unexpected expedient of cutting himself to three cups of coffee per day.
In the winter of Bukhara, the great wind flowed like a tide across the plain. Wild flights of snow boomed like storm birds around the minarets; sprays of coarse, dry flakes spewed through unsuspected crevices and scattered down the barren halls. (There were no comforts among the marble luxuries of Bukhara; small wonder that Arslan had settled so complacently into the meager ease of Kraftsville.) In the streets, the shivering dogs chewed the snow hopefully. Symbolic more than real, it stated winter and disappeared. But the wind rolled on, the cold sank ponderously through the blankets, the dull pink bricks of Bukhara were hazed with an arid and delicate frost.
At his orders, I gave English lessons to his officers. I, whose classification in life, for as long as I could remember, had been “pupil,” found myself elevated to full professor, an authority and source of knowledge looked up to and earnestly consulted by the commanders of regiments. All my ineptitude and confusion to the contrary, it was very steadying. Rusudan came a few times, curious and impatient—jealous, perhaps, of the alien language into which he withdrew from her—eager, most of all, to show herself off to me. Rusudan, at least, did not reject my hate.