Attractively rouged M’sieur Pierre bowed, bringing together his patent-leather boot tops, and said in a comic falsetto:
“The carriage is waiting, if you please, sir.”
“Where are we going?” asked Cincinnatus, genuinely not understanding at first, so convinced had he been that it must happen at dawn.
“Where, where …” M’sieur Pierre mimicked him. “You know where. Off to do chop-chop.”
“But we don’t have to go this very minute, do we?” asked Cincinnatus, and was himself surprised at what he was saying, “I haven’t quite prepared myself …” (Cincinnatus is that you speaking?)
“Yes, this very minute. Good heavens, my friend, you have had nearly three weeks to prepare yourself. One would think that’s sufficient. These are my assistants, Rod and Rom, please be kind to them. They may be puny-looking fellows, but they are diligent.”
“We do our best,” droned the fellows.
“I almost forgot,” continued M’sieur Pierre. “According to the law you are still entitled to … Roman, old boy, would you hand me the list?”
Roman, exaggeratedly hurrying, produced from under the lining of his cap a black-bordered card, folded in two; while he was getting it out, Rodrig kept mechanically tapping his sides, and seemed to be searching in his breast pockets, without taking his imbecile eyes off his comrade.
“For the sake of simplicity,” said M’sieur Pierre, “here is a prepared menu of last wishes. You may choose one and only one. I shall read it aloud. Now then: a glass of wine; or a brief trip to the toilet; or a cursory inspection of the prison collection of French postcards; or … what’s this … number four—composing an address to the director expressing … expressing gratitude for his considerate … Well, I never! Rodrig, you scoundrel, you have added this yourself. I don’t understand, how you dared. This is an official document! Why, this is a personal insult especially when I am so meticulous in regard to the laws, when I try so hard …”
In his anger M’sieur Pierre flung the card to the floor; Rodrig immediately picked it up, smoothed it out, muttering guiltily, “Don’t you worry … it wasn’t me, Romka was the joker … I know the regulations. Everything is in order here … all the desires du jour … or else à la carte …”
“Outrageous! Intolerable!” M’sieur Pierre was shouting as he paced up and down the cell. “I am not well, and in spite of that I am carrying out my duties. They serve me with spoiled fish, they offer me a disgusting whore, they treat me with unheard of disrespect, and then they expect clean work from me. No sir! Enough! The cup of long suffering has been drained! I simply refuse—do it yourselves, chop, butcher as best you can, wreck my instrument …”
“The public idolizes you,” said obsequious Roman. “We beseech you, be calm, maestro. If something was not just right, it was the result of an oversight, a foolish mistake, an overzealous, foolish mistake, and only that! So please forgive us. Won’t the pet of women, the darling of everyone, put aside that wrathful expression for the smile with which he is wont to drive to distraction.…”
“That’ll do, that’ll do, smooth talker,” said M’sieur Pierre, relenting a little. “Anyway I perform my duty more conscientiously than others I could name. All right, I forgive you. But we still have to decide about that damned last wish. Well, what have you selected?” he asked Cincinnatus (who had quietly sat down on the cot). “Come on, come on. I want to get it over with, and the squeamish don’t have to look.”
“To finish writing something,” whispered Cincinnatus half questioningly but then he frowned, straining his thoughts, and suddenly understood that everything had in fact been written already.
“I don’t understand what he is saying,” said M’sieur Pierre. “Perhaps someone understands, but I don’t.”
Cincinnatus raised his head. “Here is what I would like,” he spoke clearly, “I ask three minutes—go away for that time or at least be quiet—yes, a three-minute intermission-after that, so be it, I’ll act to the end my role in your idiotic production.”
“Let us compromise at two and a half minutes,” said M’sieur Pierre, taking out his thick watch. “Concede half a minute, won’t you, friend? You won’t? Well, be a robber then—I agree to it.”
He leaned against the wall in a relaxed pose; Roman and Rodrig followed his example, but Rodrig’s foot twisted under him and he nearly fell, casting a panic-stricken look at the maestro.
“Sh-sh, you son of a bitch,” M’sieur Pierre hissed. “And anyway, why are you making yourselves so comfortable? Hands out of your pockets! Look out!” (Still rumbling he sat down on the chair.) “Rod, I have a job for you—you can gradually begin cleaning up here; just don’t make too much noise.”
A broom was handed Rodrig through the door and he set to work.
First of all, with the end of the broom, he knocked out the whole grating in the recess of the window; there came a distant, feeble “hurrah,” as if from an abyss, and a gust of fresh air entered the cell—the sheets of paper flew off the table, and Rodrig scuffed them into a corner. Then, with the broom, he pulled down the thick gray cobweb and with it the spider, which he had once nursed with such care. To while away the time Roman picked up the spider. Crudely but cleverly made, it consisted of a round plush body with twitching legs made of springs, and, there was, attached to the middle of its back, a long elastic, by the end of which Roman was holding it suspended, moving his hand up and down so that the elastic alternately contracted and extended and the spider rose and fell. M’sieur Pierre cast a sidelong cold glance at the toy and Roman, raising his eyebrows, hastily pocketed it. Rod, meanwhile, wanted to pull out the drawer of the table, tugged with all his strength, budged it, and the table split in two. At the same time the chair on which M’sieur Pierre was seated emitted a plaintive sound, something gave, and M’sieur Pierre nearly dropped his watch. Plaster began to fall from the ceiling. A crack described a tortuous course across the wall. The cell, no longer needed, was quite obviously disintegrating.
“… Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty,” counted M’sieur Pierre. “That’s all. Up, please. It’s a fine day, the ride will be most enjoyable, anyone else in your place would be in a hurry to start.”
“Just an instant more. I find it ludicrous and disgraceful that my hands should tremble so—but I can neither stop nor hide it, and, yes, they tremble and that’s all. My papers you will destroy, the rubbish you will sweep out, the moth will fly away at night through the broken window, so that nothing of me will remain within these four walls, which are already about to crumble. But now dust and oblivion are nothing to me; I feel only one thing—fear, fear, shameful, futile fear …” Actually Cincinnatus did not say all this; he was silently changing his shoes. The vein on his forehead was swollen, the blond locks fell on it, his shirt had a wide-open embroidered collar, which imparted a certain extraordinarily youthful quality to his neck and to his flushed face with its blond quivering mustache.
“Let’s go!” shrieked M’sieur Pierre.
Cincinnatus, trying not to brush against anyone or anything, placing his feet as if he were walking on bare, sloping ice, finally made his way out of the cell, which in fact was no longer there.
Twenty
Cincinnatus was led through stone passageways. Now ahead, now behind, a distracted echo would leap out—all its burrows were crumbling. Often there were stretches of darkness because bulbs had burned out. M’sieur Pierre demanded that they go in step.
Now they were joined by several soldiers in the regulation canine masks, and then Rodrig and Roman, with the master’s permission, went on ahead, with long, pleased strides, swinging their arms in businesslike fashion, and overtaking each other. Shouting, they disappeared around a corner.
Cincinnatus, who, alas, had suddenly lost the capacity of walking, was supported by M’sieur Pierre and a soldier with the face of a borzoi. For a very long time they clambered up and down staircases—the fortress must have suffered a mild stroke, as the descending stairs were in rea
lity ascending and vice versa. Again there were long corridors, but of a more inhabited kind; that is, they visibly demonstrated—either by linoleum, or by wallpaper, or by a sea chest against the wall—that they adjoined living quarters. At one bend there was even a smell of cabbage soup. Further on they passed a glass door with the inscription “ffice,” and after another period of darkness they abruptly found themselves in the courtyard, vibrant with the noonday sun.
Throughout this whole journey Cincinnatus was busy trying to cope with his choking, wrenching, implacable fear. He realized that this fear was dragging him precisely into that false logic of things that had gradually developed around him, but from which he had still somehow been able to escape that morning. The very thought that this chubby, red-cheeked hunter was going to hack at him was already an inadmissible sickening weakness, drawing Cincinnatus into a system that was perilous to him. He fully understood all this, but, like a man unable to resist arguing with a hallucination, even though he knows perfectly well that the entire masquerade is staged in his own brain, Cincinnatus tried in vain to out-wrangle his fear, despite his understanding that he ought actually to rejoice at the awakening whose proximity was presaged by barely noticeable phenomena, by the peculiar effects on everyday implements, by a certain general instability, by a certain flaw in all visible matter—but the sun was still realistic, the world still held together, objects still observed an outward propriety.
Outside the third gate the carriage was waiting. The soldiers did not accompany them further, but sat down on logs piled by the wall, and began taking off their cloth masks. The prison staff and the guards’ families pressed timidly and greedily around the gate—barefoot children would run out, trying to get into the picture, and immediately would dart back, and their kerchiefed mothers would shush them, and the hot light gilded the scattered straw, and there was the odor of warm nettles, while off to one side a dozen geese crowded, gobbling discreetly.
“Well, let’s get going,” M’sieur Pierre said jauntily and put on his pea-green hat with a pheasant feather.
An old, scarred carriage, which listed with a groan when springy little M’sieur Pierre mounted the step, was hitched to a bay nag with bared teeth, with lesions shiny from flies on its sharply protruding haunches, all in all so lean and so ribby that its trunk seemed to be enclosed in a set of hoops. There was a red ribbon in its mane. M’sieur Pierre squeezed over to make room for Cincinnatus and asked if the bulky case that was placed at their feet were in his way. “Please, my dear fellow, try not to step on it,” he added. Rodrig and Roman climbed on the box. Rodrig, who was playing the coachman, snapped the long whip, the horse gave a start, was unable to move the carriage immediately and sank on its haunches. A discordant cheer inopportunely rang out from the staff. Rising and leaning forward, Rodrig gave the horse’s nose a lash, and, when the carriage moved spasmodically off, he nearly fell backwards on the box from the jolt, drawing the rein tight and crying “whoa!”
“Easy, easy,” said M’sieur Pierre with a smile, touching Rodrig’s back with a plump hand in a smart glove.
The pale road coiled several times, with evil picturesqueness, around the base of the fortress. In places the grade was fairly steep, and then Rodrig would hastily wind tight the scrunching brake handle. M’sieur Pierre, his hands resting on the bulldog head of his cane, gaily looked around at the cliffs, the green inclines between them, the clover and vines, and the whirling white dust, and, while he was at it, also caressed with his gaze the profile of Cincinnatus who was still engaged in his inner struggle. The scrawny, gray, bent backs of the two men sitting on the box were perfectly identical. The hoofs clipped and clopped. Horseflies circled like satellites. At times the carriage overtook hurrying pilgrims (the prison cook, for instance, with his wife), who would stop, shielding themselves from the sun and dust, and then quicken their pace. One more turn and then the road stretched out toward the bridge, having disentangled itself from the slowly revolving fortress (which already stood quite poorly, the perspective was disorganized, something had come loose and dangled).
“I’m sorry I flared up like that,” M’sieur Pierre was saying gently. “Don’t be angry with me, duckie. You understand yourself how it hurts to see others being sloppy when you put your whole soul into your work.”
They clattered across the bridge. News of the execution had only just now begun to spread through the town. Red and blue boys ran after the carriage. A man who feigned insanity, an old fellow of Jewish origin who had for many years been fishing for nonexistent fish in a waterless river, was collecting his chattels, hurrying to join the very first group of townspeople heading for Thriller Square.
“… but there’s no point in dwelling on that,” M’sieur Pierre was saying. “Men of my temperament are volatile but also get over it quickly. Rather let us turn our attention to the conduct of the fair sex.”
Several girls, hatless, jostling and squealing, were buying up all the flowers from a fat flower vendor with browned breasts, and the boldest among them managed to throw a bouquet into the carriage, nearly knocking the cap off Roman’s head. M’sieur Pierre shook a finger.
The horse, its bleary eye looking askance at the flat, spotted dogs, extending their bodies as they raced at its hoofs, strained up Garden Street, and the crowd was already catching up—another bouquet hit the carriage. Now they were turning right, past the huge ruins of the ancient factory, then along Telegraph Street, already ringing, moaning, tooting with the noise of instruments tuning up, then through an unpaved, whispering lane, past a public garden where two bearded men in civilian dress got up from a bench when they saw the carriage, and, gesticulating emphatically, began indicating it to each other—both dreadfully excited, square-shouldered—and now they were running, energetically and angularly lifting their legs, toward the same place as everyone else. Beyond the public garden the corpulent white statue had been split in two—by a thunderbolt, said the papers.
“In a moment we shall be driving past your house,” said M’sieur Pierre very softly.
Roman began fidgeting on the box and twisting around to Cincinnatus, cried:
“In a moment we shall be driving past your house,” and at once he turned away again, bouncing up and down, like a pleased urchin.
Cincinnatus did not want to look, but still he looked. Marthe was sitting in the branches of the barren apple tree waving a handkerchief, while in the garden next door, among sunflowers and hollyhocks, a scarecrow in a crushed top hat was waving its sleeve. The wall of the house, especially at the spots where leafy shadows had once played, had peeled strangely, and part of the roof—But they had driven past.
“Really, there is something heartless about you,” said M’sieur Pierre with a sigh and impatiently stuck his cane into the back of the driver, who rose slightly and, with frenzied lashings of his whip, achieved a miracle: the nag broke into a gallop.
Now they were driving along the boulevard. The agitation in the city continued to mount. The motley façades of the houses swayed and flapped, as they were hastily decorated with welcoming posters. One small house was especially well decked out: its door opened quickly, a youth came out, and his entire family followed to see him off—this day he had reached execution-attending age; mother was smiling through her tears, granny was thrusting a sandwich into his knapsack, kid brother was handing him his staff. The ancient stone bridges arching above the streets (once such a boon to pedestrians, but now used only by gawkers and street supervisors) were already teeming with photographers. M’sieur Pierre kept tipping his hat. Dandies on their shiny clockwork cycles passed the carriage and craned their necks. A person in Turkish trousers came running out of a café with a pail of confetti, but, missing, sent his varicolored blizzard into the face of a cropped fellow who had just come running from the opposite sidewalk with a bienvenue platter of “bread and salt.”
All that remained of the statue of Captain Somnus was the legs up to the hips, surrounded by roses—it too must have been struck b
y lightning. Somewhere ahead a brass band was scorching away at the march “Golubchik.” White clouds moved jerkily across the whole sky—I think the same ones pass over and over again, I think there are only three kinds, I think it is all stage-setting, with a suspicious green tinge…
“Now, now, come on, no foolishness,” said M’sieur Pierre. “Don’t you dare start fainting. It’s unworthy of a man.”
And now they had arrived. There were as yet relatively few spectators, but they continued to flow in endlessly. In the center of the plaza—no, not quite in the center, that precisely was the dreadful part—rose the vermilion platform of the scaffold. The old electrically powered municipal hearse stood modestly at a slight distance. A combined brigade of telegraphers and firemen was maintaining order. The band was apparently playing with all its might, since the conductor, a one-legged cripple, was waving furiously; now, however, not a sound was audible.
M’sieur Pierre, raising his plump shoulders, climbed gracefully out of the carriage and immediately turned, wishing to assist Cincinnatus, but Cincinnatus got out from the other side. There was some booing.
Rodrig and Roman hopped off the box; all three pressed around Cincinnatus.
“By myself,” said Cincinnatus.
It was about twenty paces to the scaffold, and, in order that no one might touch him, Cincinnatus was compelled to trot. Somewhere in the crowd a dog barked. Upon reaching the crimson steps, Cincinnatus stopped. M’sieur Pierre took him by the elbow.
“By myself,” said Cincinnatus.
He mounted the platform, where the block was, that is, a smooth, sloping slab of polished oak, of sufficient size so that one could easily lie on it with outspread arms. M’sieur Pierre climbed up also. The public buzzed.
While they were fussing with the buckets and spreading the sawdust, Cincinnatus, not knowing what to do, leaned against the wooden railing, but a slight tremor was running all through it and some curious spectators below started to palpate his ankles; he moved away and, a little short of breath, wetting his lips, his arms folded somewhat awkwardly across his chest, as if he did it for the first time, he began looking around. Something had happened to the lighting, there was something wrong with the sun, and a section of the sky was shaking. Poplars had been planted around the square, but they were stiff and rickety—one of them was very slowly…
Invitation to a Beheading Page 17