by Andrew Ervin
There was silence, and then a faint knocking on the door. A young priest entered, without invitation, and gestured for them. “Tessék,” he said. Harkályi stood before Magda, before the radiant image of his own mother. She brushed lint from the shoulders of his coat. The stone he carried felt weightless. It released him from its servitude. He lifted it into the fluorescent light of the small room. “Put this in your purse, Magda. It once belonged to your father. One day I hope you will understand what it is.”
She took the stone from his hand, then smiled, though only faintly this time, confused, and kissed him on both cheeks. He was glad to be free of it.
“We should not keep them waiting any longer,” Harkályi said.
The door was opened. In a single moment, no more than that, he would enter the swelling concert hall, the heart of this cold church, to accept the adulation of a thousand strange, howling faces, their teeth bared. Only then will he feel that he has arrived safely at what he might call home.
BROOKING THE DEVIL
1.
Brutus waited in the mess-hall line for twenty minutes, collected his grub, and sat facing the windows. He often went for days without speaking voluntarily to another soldier.
The men and women behind him, organized by race into table-sized ghettos, laughed and belched. He ate much too quickly and returned to his room. In the lull after breakfast the barracks remained more or less still while everyone shaved and shat or masturbated, if they could. The Army was putting something in the food. The huddled masses of soldiers and spies and torturers dissipated every morning at this time, quieting the hubbub almost to the point of nonexistence. Sparky was out, so Brutus had the room to himself. His bunkmate was a former seminarian from Massachusetts, and a punk. It came up on oh eight hundred and the sun still had not shown its ass. Five U.S. Marines were visiting from Budapest, and Brutus had to go fraternize, even though it was his only free day that whole week. But he had a few minutes, so he turned on the radio.
Brutus paid little attention to the Army Corps of Weather Prophets. They weren’t calling for snowfall, but then again, they weren’t calling for more war in the Balkans either. Or in the Middle East, for that matter. The government-sponsored stooges came on Armed Forces Radio with news of pending sunshine and brokered deals, sounding just like the spring training reports emanating from Florida. Hope sprang eternal. Back home, the Phillies signed another number-four starter; here, the Serbs signed another piece of anti-landmine legislation. Neither, Brutus knew, would last the season. The disembodied Voice of America also provided five minutes of English-language news at the top of every hour. It spoke of the lingering effects of a cyanide spill that had polluted the Tisza River and “devastated the livelihoods” of fishermen and chefs of Szeged’s famous fish soup; there was an update on the ongoing debate, unresolved after a decade of legal mumbo jumbo in the Hague, about a dam on the Hungary-Slovakia border; and of course there was talk of more summits and of the bright prospects for eternal peace next door in the once and future Yugoslavia. America was at war with terror.
“Asshole,” Brutus said, and switched the radio off.
In the eyes of the politicians and international tribunals, the prospects of long-term peace in the Balkans bore little relationship to the ongoing efforts of the civilian populations to establish their newly capitalistic lives—or to the army’s perpetual presence here in the middle of nowhere. The ground rules changed after 9/11 and no one knew what to expect anymore. Oversight of the few U.S. Army bases remaining in Eastern Europe—far from the active theaters—fell through the administrative cracks. Things worked differently here, if they worked at all.
Brutus had been in Hungary for almost seven months and in all that time had not stepped foot out of Taszár. He didn’t have clearance. The rec room had a high-def TV with a satellite hookup and a computer lab with e-mail and internet access, but letters from his sister Joan remained his main source of news from home. The rest of it was straight-up propaganda. She wrote once a week and sometimes sent books or magazines, which arrived with greasy thumbprints, or worse, pages sticking together. With a few minutes to spare, he reread her most recent letter. According to the postmark, it had only taken five days to reach him. People said that the frequent letters he sent home took about ten.
Joan’s letter was handwritten in purple ink. “Dear Fancy Lad,” it began.
“I think I told you that the Mambo has been talking about moving down South,” his sister had written. “Do you remember that old bitch Blue Moon? Well she sold the house she was renting out over in Roxborough and bought a shop of some kind down in Florida. She offered the Mambo a job and a place to live for free so I think she’s going to go. She hates all this snow and cold weather here as much as I do. You’re crazy the way you like this weather. Ha Ha Ha. I’ll send you her new address when she gets down there but you should call her soon!
“Me and the boyz will be moving into her house and there’s a room for you when you come home. James put all your books in boxes and they’re already over there in the basement up on some wooden pallets for when it floods!”
The barracks came back to life and disrupted his concentration. Someone in the adjacent room shouted obscenities over his country music. Brutus stood up and locked the door. The footsteps and fag jokes and hillbilly guitar licks annoyed the living fuck out of him. All he wanted to do was read a goddamn letter. He looked at his watch. It was getting close to time.
“J. J. loves the backyard and he asks every day when you’re coming over to play catch. I tried to get him to give up the army T-shirt like you asked me to but he wouldn’t. His school has uniforms now though so he only wears it to bed and sometimes on weekends anyhow. James got a promotion and now he’s learning how to make web pages. Did you get the e-mail he sent?”
Brutus checked his watch again and saw that he was going to be late.
Fuck it.
“I ran into Elvin and those guyz over at this new Mexican joint and they all said hello. He got a job now down at the casinos in A.C., not as a dealer but something like that he said. He was high but I think it was just some weed.”
Brutus replaced the letter in the envelope and stood up. “Time to meet the marines,” he said. In his jacket pocket he carried a paperback copy of The Wretched of the Earth; the Magyar Posta and many re-readings had tattered its corners and broken its spine.
Lieutenant Colonel Sullivan had invited a vanload of jarheads down from Budapest for what he billed as an informal information session. An unusual Big Brother program where troops from another service who had been in-country longer got to lead seminars on Adapting to Life in a Cinderblock Barn at the End of the Known World. Another group of marines, new arrivals from the Middle East, were temporarily stationed across the way in the base’s restricted area, where by all unofficial accounts they were beating up Arabs in ways that made those Abu Ghraib photos look like souvenir shots from Sea World. Brutus wanted to get in there to see for himself.
Outside, there was no distinction between the clouds and the sky. They had a different kind of cold in Hungary than in America. A dry freeze penetrated everything and sucked all the moisture from his skin. The fatigues were useless, but Brutus didn’t really mind the cold, not as much as most people. It was definitely going to snow.
Word on the street was that these marines from Budapest had the coziest gig in all of Europe, which was to say the coziest gig in the world. They patrolled the embassy in a city that wasn’t exactly a hotbed of international terrorism—not yet anyway—and lived in some kind of mansion up on Castle Hill that overlooked the Danube and the parliament building. Apparently they had their own private bar complete with American whiskey and a pool table with red, white, and blue felt. Brutus had to hand it to the Hungarians: talk about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. He found himself sympathizing more and more with the natives as his dissatisfaction with his own government grew. He took exception to the army’s division of labor and, as an i
ntellectual exercise, even flirted with Marxism now and then, but had yet to consummate the relationship. His presence in Hungary provided further evidence of capital’s international expansion. That he had learned to appreciate the Manifesto while in the army made him understand why so many brothers had converted to Islam while in prison back in the sixties.
The marines were out of uniform but neatly dressed. They walked like roosters in a mating ritual, and each carried a big bottle of Jack Daniel’s and grease-stained paper bags from McDonald’s. There were five of them—a white guy, a Latino, and two brothers, along with a white staff sergeant, who said a few curt words of introduction. Brutus did his best to appear engaged. When the staff sergeant got done flapping his gums, everyone divided into groups and went inside. Though it wasn’t expressly discussed, they split up along racial lines. The Latinos went to one room, the two sets of black people to two others. The staff sergeant and all the white men took the generals’ executive lounge. Brutus followed an Uncle Sambo Marine named Doornail down the hall.
Everyone in the military got a nickname in basic training; it was one way to strip a man of his identity and replace it with one incapable of independent thought. No different than a slave being forced to adopt his master’s name. Brutus already had his nickname when he signed up, and somehow it got picked up on the inside. His friends had called him Brutus as long as he could remember. The name was the only thing that he ever got from his father, but that didn’t prevent Joan from calling him Fancy Lad, on account of what she considered his anal retentiveness, but what Brutus thought of as simple self-respect. He hated Doornail immediately for that very reason. No self-respect. He was another military nigger, America’s modern equivalent of the house slave. Shuckin’ and jivin’—and all too often dying—for the Man.
Brutus had joined the army in the first place because he had heard that it was easier for a black man to excel in the military than in any other profession. Without a college degree, he couldn’t find decent work back in Philly, so he had enlisted. He did his research. The military was the first American institution to get completely desegregated, and it was just about the only occupation where someone could advance on the basis of ability, regardless of race. But that was before he had read Fanon and Captain Blackman. Of course things didn’t pan out the way the government had promised. Racism ran uncontested in the military just like everywhere else. Brutus had been passed over for promotion a bunch of times while white and even Latino soldiers of lesser talent moved past him. He came to realize that the army was just the Man’s personal bodyguard, obligated to take a bullet so privileged college kids could continue to make money working at their daddies’ offices and car dealerships. But he wasn’t going to play the game, not like this Doornail punk in his Ralph Lauren shirt and pressed khakis. A rich-ass polo player riding a horse and swinging his stick at someone. Branded right on the black man’s chest no less. Or the red, white, and blue of those Tommy Hilfiger clothes brothers wore in deference to the flag that kept them hungry. These men in their preppy clothes looked like white minstrel entertainers in blackface, but that was simpler for them than creating their own identities. The easy way out was the only way out for most of his friends back home. Join the army. March and dance for the Man.
And he fell for it.
Doornail placed the whiskey and cheeseburgers on the center conference table and the soldiers swarmed on them. The bottle got passed around despite the hour, and people talked about where they were from and what they thought of Europe so far. The marine baited them, trying to get them loosened up enough to talk shit about Sullivan. “I hear he’s a punk,” he said, but no one went for it. Brutus wanted to be back in his room. He didn’t touch the food, but he helped himself to the whiskey when it came his way. He hated the implicit assumption that he could be made to feel at home by this marine’s shit talk and fake jive. Semper fi? Semper idem, motherfucker. He could hear the staff sergeant and the white soldiers’ laughter through the walls.
Then it was his turn to speak. “I’m from Philadelphia.”
“Yo, Philly.”
“No. Nobody in Philly calls it ‘Philly’ except people who aren’t from there. It’s ‘Philadelphia.’” That wasn’t entirely true, but he liked the idea of messing with him. “And as far as being in Hungary, well I ain’t really seen shit yet.”
Some of the others nodded in assent.
“You’ll get your chance,” Doornail said. “How ’bout you?” he asked another man. “Where you from, soldier?”
The conversation went on like that, and they hung on every word. Doornail took tiny sips from the whiskey and pretended to get tipsy. Once they went around the whole group, he riled them with stories about the titty bars in Budapest and the hot-blooded Hungarian girls. “Goddamn! Springtime in Budapest is a glorious sight! Play your cards right, toe the line, and I bet your man Sullivan’ll hook you up with a pass to come visit.”
The other soldiers bought the fake camaraderie like a five-dollar blowjob. One of them asked Doornail how he got the name.
“Back in O-Town … I mean, Oakland,” he said, looking at Brutus. “I got it when I was a teenager, and it just stuck.” He practiced his little laugh. “When I was sixteen I moved into my own crib. Sure, O-Town had a bad rep, but I never felt endangered in any way until then. I get there and I can tell right away that some of the folks in the hood were waiting to fuck with me.”
The word “fuck” sounded funny coming from him, like when an American solider spent too much time with the few remaining Brits and started saying shit like “bloody” and “wanker.”
“It’s a predatory thing in Oakland, and I was the new kid. Like you men here.”
Brutus paid a little more attention. He watched Doornail’s eyes as he spoke, but he couldn’t get any read.
“Day I move in, I pick up this dead rat out back. Big sucker. And I nail it to my front door, bam bam bam. I wanted to send a message to the neighborhood. You know, don’t fuck with me. Sure enough, I get up next morning and the rat’s gone. Somebody came up and stole it right off my door. Now this is a tough neighborhood! But you know what? No one messed with me after that. People didn’t shy away. I mean, they couldn’t let me be a badass by crucifying a rat on my door, but they didn’t mess with me neither.”
When the staff sergeant knocked on the door, everyone stood to shake Doornail’s hand. “Next time, I’ll see you men up in the city,” he told them, and exited like a rock star.
2.
Brutus picked up the Fanon book and then put it back down in frustration. The unorthodox visit from the marines was little more than another thinly veiled threat, a demonstration of Sullivan’s far-reaching influence, of the width and breadth of his might. Army life consisted of continuing battles of the will and the establishment of petty superiorities over one’s fellow man. He witnessed the ill-natured competitiveness most often in the mess hall and on the shooting ranges. Sullivan was the reigning champion of the big-dick contests, none of which had been mentioned at the recruiter’s office on Broad Street, under the gaze of that Quaker-ass William Penn.
The constant threat of terrorist attacks on American targets at home and abroad required Brutus to carry his firearm at all times, and his needed a good cleaning. The army was training the goddamn Iraqi police there on the base. That was what they called it. “Training” them in the fine art of torture, to be sure. Private jets landed every couple of days on an airstrip built specifically for the base’s restricted zone.
Doornail’s story stayed with him longer than he would have preferred. The image of the dead rat lingered on the periphery of Brutus’s thoughts, slightly out of focus but vivid enough to unsettle everything around it. There was a lesson in it—something foreboding, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He was taking apart his weapon when someone banged on his door. He didn’t answer it, but the knock came again. “Private First Class Gibson? You’re to report to Sullivan’s office immediately.”
Probably ju
st a couple knuckleheads busting his balls.
“Hold up.” He clanged the pieces of his pistol together loud enough that they wouldn’t think he was jerking off.
A pair of Latino soldiers stood in the doorway, sending an elongated, fun-house shadow into his room. An open window backlit their helmets like two metallic haloes—a carefully cultivated effect. Brutus made a show of keeping his hands out in the open. He had grown suspicious of cops long before his arrival in Europe.
“You Gibson?”
“Yeah.”
One of the soldiers shifted his weight, sending a blinding light directly into Brutus’s eyes and rendering himself invisible. “Sullivan wants to see you.”
“Right now?” He looked back at the row of metal that had recently been a pistol. Regulations forbade him from leaving without it. He could go to jail for having an unsecured weapon in a barracks room.
“No, when your gold-plated invitation arrives,” the other guy said.
The authorities there were just as witty in Budapest as they were in Philly.
“Hold up.”
Brutus considered putting the pistol back together first but decided to forget it. He grabbed his wallet from his desk and followed the M.P.s out, pulling the door locked behind him. A dozen minor infractions of protocol committed over the past few days came to mind, none of which warranted a personal summons from Sullivan.
Brutus refused to be the first to speak. He allowed the cops to feel that they had adequately established their authority. Unfortunately, they weren’t just fronting—he really was more or less at their mercy. There were all kinds of stories about out-of-uniform soldiers dragging men from their rooms, taking them behind the latrines, and treating them like Rodney King for a day. Brutus wasn’t about to make the first move.