The Bastards' Paradise

by Kathe Koja

  “She is not a harlot!” Lucy shouts, as “Holy wedlock means nothing to a type like you,” cries Mrs. Blum to Tilde, her eyes narrow and dry, as though she has never shed a tear in her life. “And no true church would wed you! But,” as a new and even more miraculous solution occurs, “perhaps you two were never wed at all, and my son is not the father of— Swear it! Swear to me,” turning on Frédéric, her hand up as if brandishing like a brick an invisible Scripture. “Swear this moment, to our Savior and Lord, that you are the father of her child!”

  No one speaks. Frédéric’s cheeks begin to burn, his forehead reddens and “This is quite incredible,” says Mr. Blum, looking to Samuel Ridley in his bowler as the only possible point of connection in this immoral madhouse, Samuel Ridley who looks back thinking how much Mr. Blum resembles those upright mandarins of the brothel painted by that Frenchman, who is it? Lautrec? as “I’ll swear for him,” says Haden stepping forward, Haden whose motives for the lie would doubtless be approved by that Savior, with His penchant for the adulterous and dismay for those who so eagerly cast a stone. “And who’s anyone’s father anyway— God, an’t it? So how’s it matter?”

  “You can’t swear,” Mick blurts, placing himself as a shield before Tilde, plucking up Ru as if he might on the instant be torn away. “I’m his father.”

  “And now this ruffian? Do you,” cries Mrs. Blum, “even know the father’s name?” as Tilde’s face goes white, a pure and bloodless hue, but “Father!” Ru points emphatically to Rupert: for there is climbing and running and bell-ringing and thumb-your-nose to do today, Mamma has said so and Gran Lucy has said so, and best of all Hay has said so! So why must they all shout and waste time in talk? And his father, Sir the knight, is smiling at him, a very happy smile, Hay laughs out loud so Ru smiles too, glad the foolishness is over, ready to get on with the frolic—

  —while Mr. Blum looks again to Haden, for there is something here he still does not comprehend, something that has nothing to do with the child or its crooked parentage, something unsavory and, yes, criminal, so “Who are you,” asks Mr. Blum of Haden, “what have you to do with my son? Be aware that there’s a constable just outside that door,” but “You ought go now,” says Frédéric to his father, man to man; the flush has gone from his cheeks, he is tempered and calm as a soldier. “Take Mamma, and go.”

  Mr. Blum considers this statement and its bearing on the cocoa warehouse, the endless tasks of management, the dwindling inheritance, a life’s work to be handed on now to whom? as Frédéric looks back at him so steadily, with his blacked eye and fussy red cravat, like a tropic flower that chose somehow to bloom beneath his chin, what sort of man wears a rig like that? No businessman —

  —as Mrs. Blum hurls down the dauphin hat, its bright twist of ribbon askew and “You are not our son! You cannot be our son!” and “Mister!” the constable’s bawl from the avenue. “Lend a hand, mister, they’re pinchin’ the cab!” to bring Mr. Blum and Samuel Ridley rushing to the door and the street, Mr. Blum and the constable defending the cab and its resigned driver from a trio of so-called stable men, Samuel Ridley to kindly assist Mrs. Blum in its eventual victorious boarding, even though she flings away his hand as if it will contaminate her indelibly—“Don’t touch me!”—as finally, painfully, the tears begin: her miracle in ruins, her plans in tatters, her heart so broken by this rejection from her once-beloved son that all she can do is weep, and press her wet cheek to the window—

  —of the cab, then the chilly terminus with its unsavory begging orphans, then the train so slow to arrive and even slower to go, departing in stall and halting progress the station, the city, and the life of Frédéric Blum: observed in that departure by the statue of Mercury, wearing along with his usual grime a slippery mantle of ice, broad shoulders bare to the veiling snow begun again to fall as promised upon the righteous and unrighteous alike: the bourgeois merchants and the thieves, the defeated stablemen and the constable who pockets his illegal wage, the pretty chorister called Jilly in her monk’s-hood gown, who accepts a light from a friendly foreigner, his red mouth spilling nonsense just as pretty as he fires her smoke and then his own, so she might have a few fortifying puffs before descending into the jerry-built Hell. The snow accompanies the uniformed Prefect Konstantin as he climbs the Cathedral steps, one step behind the wall-eyed and magnificent Cardinal in gold and tasseled scarlet, the Monsignor in penitential purple, and the mayor with folded hands, followed by Commissioner Martin Eig, and Morris Robb, and Theo Richter sans his wife, leading the long procession of men who hold the frightened city’s welfare as closely as the chiseled marble Virgin holds the Babe, whose birth shall be celebrated not long after this roundelay of judgment and wry devilry, the mighty bells and soaring voices and the smell, beneath the snow, of something burning, something somewhere is always burning, as every fable is in some way punctuated by blood —

  —as in the clang of those bells and all the mysteries they herald, not excluding those of the Pile ou Face and the bastards’ paradise, that mingling-board Eden of the broken and the never-alive, its current emissary smokes to the end of his cigarette, frees his jinx, and goes to work, steps timed to the deep ascending groans of the organ, pope’s hat and mask one shadow on the choir loft wall. In the street below a dark man is steadily approaching, his stride long and his breath puffing white, a concertina bagged beneath one arm; the slouch hat has been exchanged for a pecan-colored topper that hides his face from no one, nor his keen glance behind the spectacles, nor his slight, expectant smile.

  If the hours of that pageant day may be viewed as a manner of medieval psalter, illuminated pictures arrayed to tell the story and sort out its deliberate obfuscations, the first might be of a young gypsy at an iron café table: strange, for all the gypsies have been long driven from the city, yet there she is with her scarves and cards, a mother and daughter in matching capelets sitting spellbound as the gypsy affirms that their dead father and grandfather watches benignly over them still: “He sees you,” says the gypsy, her wool curls itching. “He is smiling at you, he has great white mustachios.”

  “But Grandpapa never—”

  “He has them now. And he wants you to have this,” sliding across the table one of the cards, not a fortune telling card after all but a very odd picture of a man on stilts, leading with strings another costumed man and “Whatever can this mean?” asks the mystified mother but “He means for you to play,” says the gypsy, then pockets their tip and takes herself off: to another little half-empty café; to the straggled horsemeat line at a butcher’s shop; to the boatmen circling a trash bin fire at the Bridge—to them she gives a card showing what seems truly a mermaid! For the men are half certain such exist—seeding through the city Ridley’s old collection, those cartes-de-visite from another world, until all of the pictures are gone. Then she ducks behind a deserted barricade to pull off the gypsy’s weeds and irritating wig, and emerge frater minor in trousers and red pin and snug black cap, Tomik Bok at once accosted by a beggar who might also be a thief, but “Save it for Skipjack,” Tomik advises, kneeing that man briskly in the sack before trotting off, humming a certain tune—

  —as through the bedraggled Park, past some Russian-mumbling monks and a baker’s apprentice throwing moldy bread to the crows, Alban Cockrill makes his way, towing along the refurbished Mrs. Gawdy. She bows to the constables when they halt her handler, to check his pin, then laugh and mock—“An’t you Cockcrow, who plays for the kiddies? Once you had that fancy showplace, but an’t much of a girl you got now,” and “You must like ’em quiet,” smirks the other, “when you stuff ’em!”—Cockrill smiling meekly to share in the joke against him and his puppet, whose bosom bears barely a loose thread, though she has been opened and closed at the heart twice already, with one more surgery yet to come: as her freight of jewels, those brooches and cameos and stickpins, is replaced by a growing lump of lucre, the wrinkled blue bills of the city, some francs and clinking sterling, a shekel or two of true gold. On one
carved hand she wears what looks so much like a real ruby that it clearly cannot be; that ring, tucked inside an envelope (itself tucked with letters that the Magistrate van Symans, dead these many years, would have been greatly vindicated to read), is later received by his youngest daughter, whose astonishment at its arrival is amplified by that arrival’s mode, the ruby slipped again onto her finger as “You say,” searchingly to the door maid, who received the packet from the guard at the wrought-iron gate, “it was brought here by a man with a puppet? Was he— Was he a very handsome man?”

  “The guard an’t say, madame,” says the door maid, whose imagination has been sorely tested in keeping up with this day’s realities: first some old beggar with a doll, if you please, who came not to beg at all but to deliver; then a Missus Do-good with a mob of orphans who never asked alms or stopped at their gate, choosing instead to cross the avenue to the Richters’s townhouse, la-di-da!—

  —that do-good lady in her striped wrapper and dowdy wool bonnet, leading her pious cadre of lads up and down the city’s better avenues, the littlest lad at her side to grin adorably at those they pass, and blink his big blue eyes as “Poor boy, he’s an orphan,” says the lady; she shifts the modest tote sack she carries, with its bagged correspondence, beside her loaded muff. “All these young fellows are, isn’t it a sin and a shame? Oh no, madame, many thanks but we’re not asking coin. Only prayers,” stopping right there in the street to bow their heads with the lady of the moment, as one of the lads surreptitiously drops an envelope at an address across the avenue, while another scouts the way to the next address, and the next, whistling through his teeth as he goes, a song the whole city will come to know before this day has ended —

  —as two young men, one burly and festively dressed, the other sober in beadle-black, cross together to halt below the clock tower, whose timepiece hands remain unstiffened by the cold, and “Situate here,” says the beadle. “I want you where both my eyes can see you…. See, there he comes,” as from the opposite direction a capped lad approaches, wheeling a faded red hand-barrow. The beadle recedes to become a curbside guard for the young man beneath the tower, who begins to sing in a fine strong voice, an old song with fresh lyrics—“In the post! In the post! You’ll open and you’ll read/In the post! In the post! It has all the news you need!”—while the first wooden man he produces from the barrow jingles his cheery lapel-bell to start this turn-the-clock party, as Pipper, who ferried that barrow, edges past the tower doorman distracted by the singing, to climb and climb: his ascent to startle, then stop, then frighten the passersby, that lean living figure—surely he is alive, for see him smile and wave! as he waltzes with a woman not alive, meeting face-to-face with the iron citizens of the clock, and for a short time force time to stand still—

  —while in a building once devoted to heat and frivolity, now hushed with chill and disrepair, that same song is whistled off-key as the angle of light is debated and flash powders are prepared, Blitzlicht to show to best advantage those actors whose arrival is awaited with excitement by a man whose name shall be made along with these pictures, collected in his own, its own, psalter of puppets and puppeteers. Only one member of the current production shall not take his place in that portrait, that fact still unknown to its maker—

  —that man the expedition’s general, also in beadle-black, concertina sheltered now by the hat he has removed. He wipes his mouth, then takes a drink, a long one, from the bottle in his coat, before making his way courteously through the hushed and crowded nave, the choir’s Latin recalling the memory of the monks, their harsh melodious chants; as he goes he murmurs inwardly a different Latin phrase, taught to him in private by the young man now mounting the steps outside: Dum spiro te amo, As I breathe I love you —

  —that young man about to begin his task, bare-headed, light-headed with exhilaration, the first two fingers on one hand bandaged tight, like a little white baton to mark the rhythms of his oration, “Pan’s Salvation” offered to all. He thinks of the bell on the puppet’s jacket, the great bells in the towers high above, the sanctus bells at golden rest beside the marble altar: and he lifts his eyes to the hills made of buildings, feeling, before he plunges into the first lines, a sense of mystery enormous but so diffuse that it is as if this show is operating fully on its own, some great hilarious play taking place, taking shape beyond anyone’s direction, even M Istvan’s, playing out its own devices with himself, with them all, as its actors, to its own ends, and all that is required is surrender.

  So when his declamation has ended and the reading of the letter has begun, and he is halted in that reading by an usher, then an angrier usher, then a pair of constables, he has no fear, he turns to those symbols of authority and says, quite mildly, to them and to all who have stopped to listen, to observe the actor fellow collared ignominiously on the saintly steps, “This letter was written by the mayor’s own father. Look for yourselves,” showing the signature, sowing confusion amongst those men: for if the mayor’s father wrote it, perhaps it is part of the pageant? and so is meant to be read out loud, and themselves in peril for the stopping of it? Though the writing seems to have nothing to do with anything beyond sending money to other men whose names the constables and ushers have never heard; yet those names are another kind of holy writ to many of the men inside the cathedral, including the Cardinal—

  —who at this very moment has begun his own oration of the eternal hell that awaits the mocker and the disbeliever, the frequenter of spirit-parties, those who refuse to recognize the holiness of true authority. As he thunders, the demons in the pen begin to writhe on cue, to beat their hands against the wooden bars, their sad cries for mercy ignored by the angels in the blue and lilied heaven, several of whom now clandestinely sniff and look about: something is burning somewhere, the choirmaster smells it, too. None of them note the shadowed man whose sudden laugh disrupts and swivels the back row of singers, and whose aspect frightens them all, for what sort of apparition is this? in miter and mask, carrying some strange little, ugly little tool or doll, stepping to the very ledge of the loft and “If thine eye offend thee!” roars the puppet, Mr. Jinks’s sole and memorable, echoing line as he is swung like a censer on a chain, Mr. Jinks whose little body smokes from a tucked and burning cigarette, Mr. Jinks who, once the puppeteer has put his back into it, flies free, nearly as high as the great domed ceiling, the frescoes and round-eyed virgins, over the heads of the congregation and its civic royalty, over the head of Martin Eig—who will be the first to conflate that outlaw toy and the murderous freight of letters—as that small devil lands not far from the altar, to catch nearly at once the flammable hem of a kneeling server’s vestment. The poor acolyte leaps up screaming like a girl, his fellows rushing to douse the fire, stranding the Cardinal mid-oration—

  —as “We have come,” calls a voice, midway between doom and paradise, “to judge the living and the dead,” rousing a rising spatter of shrieks, as a man approaches up one of the side aisles, outlandishly dressed, masked to hide his face but not his smile. “Who better than the old heroes? For we respect the mysteries more than you, who seek to tame Mystery itself, and call it like a finch to your finger! That’s a fine blasphemy, eh, monsieur?” to the rigid Cardinal, to whom he tips his hat as if in professional courtesy, his smile, Istvan’s smile widening as a strange and ragged, blithe little tune begins, cutting through the hubbub as the man who plays it advances up the great main aisle, chanting rather than singing, to save his breath— “In the post, in the post! You’ll open and you’ll read!”—his voice, Rupert’s hoarsened voice holding a lifetime of love, of pain, of humor, even, and cherishment and joy: and hearing it, Istvan must draw a breath, a secret, plunging breath of his own joy, his own wonder that such can still be so: Mouse still Mouse, after all these years! —giving a small and perfect bow, a public honor, as Rupert joins him there before the altar.

  Now a stylish frau gasps and points from the foremost pew, a gaunt matron sways in the pew opposite, toppling
into the Mayor beside, a half-dozen ushers already reaching for the twain but “Noli me tangere, or him either,” Istvan calls; he is laughing, dangerous, radiant, he raises Mr. Loup from his coat, that smaller celebrant sending a flinch through those ushers, as if he is a weapon in truth. “Worse than a spirit play, to stop the play of spirits! The story’s brief, and most you can read for yourself. And we’ll wager that you will,” Mr. Loup nodding with vigor, while Morris Robb, in the second pew, visibly blanches at the sight of Herr Bok, a man known to be deceased! yet plainly not deceased, unless it is not Herr Bok? But it is, for see him now give his nod to banker Robb, with a gravity proper to a resurrected man…. Rupert’s spectacles have fogged a bit in the building’s heat, Istvan in that glance all haloed, and Rupert’s heart beats with a passionate gratitude to stand again together this way, making their play in peril and pleasure, pain too as something new twists inside his chest, precipitous, ominous, though it does not prevent him punching the usher who grabs at Istvan’s elbow—“But a story’s only as true as its telling—” that usher crumpling right below the Cardinal’s pulpit, the squeezebox making an autumnal moan from the blow, the laughing puppet to shout above that noise “So we tell you true, this story’s ours! Here, there, and everywhere, even in the stars!”

  —as the Cardinal’s cry, “Sang-dieu!” prompts Monsignor Elfred’s tardy scramble, Prefect Konstantin’s determined exit from his pew, as pandemonium rises in the hayish stink of burnt silk, that chaos superceding the one on the steps, thus drawing inside those ushers and constables —