by Keith Korman
Great leaders, such as Napoleon, are both Man and God,- they are Mangod. Inspiring devotion, worship, sacrifice — the divine privilege of sacred beings. But Mangods also inspire savagery, war, and chaos — prerogatives of Men. And when such beings pass from their thrones, when the mantle of heaven is lifted from their shoulders, so too their works slowly pass into dust. Their deeds fade, or are forgotten. Even the tales about them shift and change, casting strong men as weaklings — and cowards as strong…. While the stone prizes of war remain like the Egyptian obelisk in the Place de Concorde. For the fallen Mangod leaves monuments in the cities of his followers and hateful memories in the Trojan fields of his slaves. Their godly reign, a twilight extending for long years, an endless sunset of affection from the grandchildren of his Palace Guard, beneath a bitter pall of spite from the widowed daughters of the vanquished, a Götter — a Götterdämmerung. The slow-falling dusk of their godness.
The pen hovered in his hand. Tor the fallen Mangod leaves monuments in the cities of his followers and hateful memories in the fields of his slaves….” He loved that last phrase. The carved neolithic stones of pregnant women were such monuments, surviving artifacts of a Götterdämmerung — but what of the memories that went with them? The memories were gone. The mouth-to-ear chain of storytelling long broken, garbled, confused. A charred jawbone in the dead ashes of time. With no one left to remember the stone woman’s tales. How had she died? The same way the Sphinx died. When a Mangod unraveled her riddle. Long ago some Mangod had divined the secrets of the stones, only to replace them with mute silence. If her original secrets had remained unfound, she would have continued as a god. When had men decided to cast their stony mothers down to hell? How could women have let them do it? Ah, but women were always letting men get away with things…. With half a smile on his face, that he might finally write something worthwhile, he set pen to paper:
But even though the monument of one Mangod may outlast his memory and his deeds, yet there may be a second life for them, a coming sunrise after the endless night….
He hesitated, putting down his pen. An annoying itch prickled his skin. Two flies raced about the room, one on the back of the other in copulation. He looked about for a flyswatter. Where had he left it? The prickling humming came again. His skin crawled. Where was the damn flyswatter?
He found it under a stack of dusty books on Stonehenge, untouched since last summer. His eyes flitted about the walls. Come, come my young friends, show yourselves…. ja, he knew them. The first bold flies of spring, eager little fornicators with nothing on the brain but an urgent glow that said, Hurry up and fuck and populate the lakeside with a plague of swarming children. He fancied he could read their minds. They had simple minds, with simple thoughts. Like: ME FLY/YOU NOT FLY and FOOD/NOT FOOD.
But now, as it was their season to reproduce, all thoughts were superseded by the one great thought: HE FLY TO SHE FLY.
And so they flew, one glued to the other, oblivious to everything else. Therel On the windowsill! He crept toward them, hardly daring to breathe. He raised the flyswatter…. The two fat bluebottles shuttled sideways as if to make themselves more comfortable, the top fly rubbing his front legs together. He batted them both into the stone without the slightest feeling of remorse. More stunned than crushed, they sprang off and lay dead, hooked together like Romeo and Juliet.
Hah! He flicked them over the window ledge and sat down at his desk again. His mind felt completely refreshed. He stared eagerly at the paper with the word “Götterdämmerung” on it. The word meant nothing to him now. He had lost his train of thought.
As if to torment him, the silvery whine came again. More flies? He slashed the swatter back and forth, peering frantically about the room. His ear itched as if a fly were licking the salt off his skin. He snapped the swatter, spastically hitting the side of his face. His head sang. Something flicked by his desk, but when he turned to stare directly, all he saw was the corner of a book with the sun on it. He lost his temper.
“Where are you? I’ll slap you! I'll smack you! I’ll crucify you on a needle and watch you die! Come out, you buggers! Come out!”
He paced in circles, batting the swatter through the air. After a few seconds he sank to the chair, exhausted. A line of dribble ran down his chin. He wiped it off with the back of his hand. A dull silence fell on the room. He shaded his eyes against the glare coming from the window. His hand twitched. Now look at him! With a rattan fly-swatter stuck in his fist, striking it smartly against his thigh like a swagger stick. The flyswatter stung his leg, but he couldn’t stop. As though a stranger were swatting him and he had to let him do it —-wanting just to keep on hitting and hitting. He closed his eyes against the glare. A page turned in his mind….
A story he liked to tell himself. He was an infant again … mysteriously outcast from his real family. In the cold gray dawn they took him from the house in swaddling. Who carried him? He did not know. A servant perhaps, on orders. Who gave those orders? Someone who wanted him taken off, carried off to die.
The servant bore him for miles, high into the mountain meadows where the air ran thin and cold. Then at last they stopped. The servant set him on the grass and went away. He was alone.
The sun climbed to the zenith and down once more to the empty blue that borders on purple. He quivered and shook and cried, and the sound of his tiny voice vanished into the light of the early stars. And then suddenly he stopped crying: a deeper, evil dread came over him. The meadow was hushed.
He heard a growling, a snuffling, and a long howl that echoed against the craggy peaks. At the edge of the meadow a wolf came up on the horizon. And then another. He tried to crawl, to hide, to bury himself in the grass, but he was too small, too cold, too weak…. The first wolf looked up and cried at the stars. Then all the others sang with him, howling their hunting song, a song of torn flesh, cracked bones, and tongues in warm blood…. Leaving nothing behind but a stain on the grass when the sun came over the mountains in the morning.
Suddenly the wolves fell silent. What were they waiting for? One by one, each wolf slunk below the lip of the meadow and vanished. The faint sound of tinkling bells came to greet him. The gawky shapes of goats with bells tied around their necks trotted up the dark swath of grass. He heard the friendly bark of a dog and then another…. They were marching the goats: telling them to “Get along there, Graybeard!” “Stop dawdling, Missy!” “Keep in line, Curly!” And the goats bleated back, saying: “Oh, stop pushing.” “You needn’t snap!” “Watch it, Fleabait, or I’ll punch your snout!”
How he understood the language of animals he did not know. But it seemed so sensible how the goats and the dogs got along. The dogs barking orders and the goats complaining as though they’d been ill-used.
Two dogs sprang across the last stretch of grass. Stopping short a few feet away to smell him very seriously. Both their minds thought at once: Mot a wolfcub. Their lolling tongues lapped him around the ears and neck, their noses colder than the air. And then they both laughed as dogs laugh, with smiling jaws, and began to dance. Sending up a chorus of barks, crying: “Mancub! Mancub!”
Quick feet swished across the grass, and he was lifted into another pair of arms. Strong, clean-smelling arms. A shepherdess had found him.
He was safe.
His fat face pressed into her sweet-smelling flesh. The cold flowed out of him like steam. Her fingers touched him in a place that made him warm and swollen,- spreading coils through his body…. Her sweet-smelling flesh hung above his face,- he was putting his lips to it, greedily sucking the life from it, and the life flowed down his throat. He was swollen and erect, pointing at the face hovering above the flesh he sucked. An olive-skinned face. Her eyes deep like pieces of amber, dark like the dilated silky brown nipple he sucked in urgent gasps. There was a mole on her lip, and his pudgy hand left off clutching her breast, fingers reaching up to touch the mole. Her dark lips were smiling at him and he smiled back, letting her breast fall from his mouth. Sh
e was his. His alone. Mother. Lover. Goddess. She was the Sphinx.
Chapter 3
The Stag King
At last his thigh became so painful he stopped striking it. Two more flies had appeared on the windowsill to torment him. The swatter fell from his hand. While he stared dumbly at his empty fingers, the two flies, glued in love, darted from the sill and dropped smartly into his palm. He could have closed his fingers on them if he wanted, pulled their wings off if he wanted…. Part of him loathed the mating flies, part of him had no urge to crush them. Old man Jung felt as if he had finally plucked at the spool of a personal truth. And if he drew it to him, like Ariadne’s thread from the labyrinth, he would draw from oblivion not the slayer of the bull, but the bull monster instead. No child could do that.
The infant knew only the dark life of the nipple, wanting it utterly and irrevocably. The warm nipple in his mouth to suck. The amber eyes. The smile. But in time even the dark nipple began to fade, a lost fragrance from her yielding self. So dim and vague a memory, he wondered if it had been real at all….
Then at last he became a grown-up boy of four. The lost nipple had changed into a full person, and he knew so many things about her. That she was his Nanny Sasha, a farm maid from up-country, Piz Sardona in the Glarner Alpen. That she was twenty and unmarried. That his mother kept her in the house long after she stopped giving him her breast, because “He was so easy with Sasha. And no matter what anyone said, Nanny really was a good girl.”
Who said? He didn’t know.
She had tucked him into bed for the night, but he had gotten out to look for her. And now he wanted her to tuck him in again. He walked the long, gloomy hall past the kitchen. The white porcelain sink shone ghostly pale, like the flesh of a fish. He listened for the Scuttlers, who always came out of the dark. The Scuttlers, who crouched along the walls or under the dining room chairs, like black water bugs in a coal cellar. Ready to swarm out of the shadows with their thin snatching pincers.
The dining room was empty too,- a sliver of moonlight reflected on the surface of the oily walnut table. Then he suddenly came to his parents’ study. A panel of blue pleated drapes stretched along one wall of the book-lined sitting room. Behind the curtains stood a pair of glass-paned French doors. And behind those doors, his parents’ bed. A quivering came over him, till it felt like a strong hand grasping him between the legs. Where was she?
“Here!” she whispered, clasping him over the mouth. He wriggled in delight at the closeness of her body. A naughty current passed between them — of being where they weren’t supposed to be. “Shhhhhhh,” she warned. And with both hands, she pushed him into the cloaking folds of the curtains. Slowly she drew him closer to the panes, forcing him to look. Her hand caressed his shoulder, and he pressed it back. A warm glow flooded the bedroom, a single candle burning on the nightstand. His parents were entangled on the bed, locked together. The man was struggling with his mother. His face hidden, but not hers. Her eyes gazed blankly at the ceiling. As she lay passively, his father grunted. “Here … No, wait. Yes!”
Nanny Sasha had called his mother “noble looking” once, but all the spirit seemed to have fled her features: staring up from the pillow with her light hair thrown back, her face flattened, mouth open slackly. His father’s struggle pressed down harder. “Help …," he begged. Then weakly, “… why don’t you help … ?”
His mother shrugged her shoulders as if that might do it, and the struggle began once more. Then Nanny Sasha tugged him back through the blue curtains. The last thing he saw through the glass was his mother, turning her head. Moodless eyes staring at the burning candle. Yet not with flame or light, but blackly. Dark marbles of hate.
Back in his bedroom, Nanny Sasha’s cheek grazed his as she tucked him in. Questions. Questions. Did mother hurt? Was it father’s fault? Or his? But instead he asked, “Do you love me?”
The mole on her lip touched his forehead when she kissed him. “That’s why Sasha’s here …”
He stared at the four walls of his room for a long time after she was gone. A parade of painted animals marched along the top border. A duck in a waistcoat with a gold watch fob, a spotted cow in a pink tutu, a rooster in boxing gloves and trunks, a fat white pig in a butcher’s apron, holding a cleaver in his knuckles … A band of three gray mice played flutes, and a not-so-fierce Doberman in a policeman’s uniform offered a bunch of flowers to a coy lady poodle with ribbons in her hair. All the animals looked so natural in their human clothes, he wondered why ducks never wore waistcoats when he saw them in the farmer’s pond. And then he fell asleep.
When he looked along his body, his hands seemed miles away. Out the bedroom window he saw the moon against the sky. Beyond the house he felt the deep cold of winter, the tree branches naked and swaying in the wind. A shape passed across the face of the moon. Not a cloud but like the groping fingers of a hand, passing before a pale face. Then he saw the shape more clearly.
They were antlers.
A stag stood outside his window,- the animal’s antlers silently searched the face of the moon like the fingers of a blind man. He heard the beast’s scraping hooves on the frozen ground. He wanted to cry out for Nanny Sasha, but no sound came no matter how hard he twisted his mouth to shout.
The cool night breeze flowed over the bed, and he heard a distant thundering. The Stag! Running right at the house, right at the open window. Too big, too big! Break the whole wall. Crush and trample him!
The thunder ceased, and the Stag leaped over the bed on a breath of cold air. A graceful, silent, languorous leap. So slow and heavenly he had plenty of time to watch, to see its sleek belly arch over, mottled brown and white. What terrible fluid strength. Legs that could run for miles. Leap over anything. Crush anyone. The Stag landed on the floor without a sound.
He followed it into the hallway, down the black stairs, the hooves of the beast striking quietly before him. A white tail darted around the corner. Sickeningly, he heard the Scuttlers hurrying up behind him. He glanced back into the darkness. Yes, they were chuckling and laughing, pouring thickly into the hall like a crowd of black beetles to snatch him and catch him and pick him apart. He stumbled into his parents’ sitting room, a great dread crawling up his legs. A certain knowledge of what he would see. At his heels, thousands of Scuttlers swarmed all over themselves to get at him. And then he saw:
The Stag and his Mother. She had her thighs wrapped around the animals belly, her face pressed to his neck. She clung to him, holding herself off the ground. And the beast was struggling into her, just as his father tried before. Only this time the woman urged him on, hands reaching to touch the curved horns. Teasing them, toying with their sharpness. She was going to turn her face from the animal and look in his direction. Eyes begging him to come and help Mama, begging him to mount the Stag as the beast galloped into her. Riding her stud as he rode her. To help them. Urge them. Whip them along!
He fled down the hall, barging over the Scuttlers, trampling their insect heads, breaking their shells, squishing the liquid guts out of their backsides. He yanked at his bedroom door. He pounded it. It wouldn’t open! He couldn’t —
Wake!
His eyes snapped open in bed. The sheets were real. The window part open. No moon. He heard the rustle of leaves in the trees,- he felt the warm breeze of a summer night. The painted border at the top of his walls stared down as ever. He slipped quietly out of bed and peeked into the hall. No Scuttlers.
Candlelight burned within Nanny Sasha’s room, casting a red outline around her shut door. He heard murmurs and rustlings. And the familiarity of it dawned on him as though he’d heard it in his sleep. He kept telling himself to leave now: don’t touch the doorknob, don’t turn it, don’t —
The door opened by itself…
Two bodies twined on the bed. She was urging him on as his mother had the beast, her hands reaching above the headboard for a plaque that hung on the wall. A hunter’s trophy. Stag horns …
She grappled for the
horns as the man struggled between her legs. Her fist clenched one antler. Nanny Sasha moaned, or was she sobbing? She broke the deer horn from the plaque. The man lunged into her, and she drew the sharp points across his back. Lines of sweat and red welts. The candle flame jumped as she cried out. The horn clattered to the floor.
Then suddenly her cry ceased and she was sighing. The bed rocked still. A silence … The man was his father.
He went back to his room and was sick in the chamber pot. Weak dawn crept in at the window. He walked grim-faced to his parents’ bedroom just as daylight threw blue shadows across the study.
He tugged back the curtains. Light dashed across his father’s face. The face looked slack and pale, his beard rough. His eyes opened,-he put a finger to his lips. “Shhhhhhh …” A glimmer of a smile on his face. “Go back to bed.”
And then his father rolled over, throwing an arm over his sleeping mother. The man’s back shone white and unmarred. No scratches. No welts. He turned from the French doors with a black smoke in his gut. Back to Nanny Sasha’s room. And once again the door was shut against him. She still slept in bed, wrapped in her sheets. Just one breast exposed, the dark, distended nipple beckoned him. He wanted to run to the bed and touch it. When he looked to the wall, his heart stopped.
The antlers on the hunter’s trophy were intact, unbroken. Both horns fixed to the varnished wooden shield. They pointed at him like accusing fingers, saying, It never happened, it was in your mind, you made it up …
She stared at him. Pouting a little, eyes roving over him from head to toe. He fought to stare her down, but she unwound the sheets from her limbs, slowly asking in a husky voice:
“Did you have a bad dream?”