The Carp Castle

by MacDonald Harris

  Along with the map the Captain has the whole shape and design of the League of Nations in his mind: the complex skeleton of girders, rings, and wires, the sixteen immense gas-bags of linen and goldbeater’s skin, the large vanes mounted at the tail which turn the airship right and left, up and down, the stainless-steel cables running through the hull to control them, the four Maybach engines of eight hundred horsepower churning the air with their wooden propellers twenty feet in diameter, each mounted in its bean-shaped gondola with room for a mechanic inside. There are accommodations for a crew of thirty, including cooks and dining-room waiters, and forty passengers. There is a completely equipped galley and every amenity of a luxury hotel. The Captain himself has a monk-like cell of aluminum in the crew’s quarters, with a washbasin but no bath or toilet. In any case, the flight from Friedrichshaven to Frankfurt takes only about two and a half hours, and the Captain does not even have to urinate in that time. He is a military man and has trained his body to do just what he wants it to, no more and no less. He expects the same from his crew. Anyone who requests to leave his station in flight is told, “Do it in your pants.”

  Captain von Plautus is forty-one and a veteran of the Great War. He is wearing the uniform of a German naval officer, with the jodhpurs and boots that are customary in the air service. On his cap is the emblem of the civilian Zeppelin Company. He is blond with a neatly trimmed mustache and a small beard of the kind called an imperial. His customary expression is one of slightly amused pessimism. Right now he is looking not at the terrain below but at the back of Erwin’s sturdy neck, his haircut which ends an inch below his cap, and the cap itself set at a slight tilt like the heeling of a pretty sailing-ship. Erwin’s hair is as white as flax and so are his eyebrows. The Captain breaks the silence in another attempt to get some human response from Erwin, whose taciturnity goes beyond the traditional Nordic to the sheerly malicious or pathological. Erwin is twenty-eight (he was eighteen when the Captain first encountered him in the Zeppelin service during the War) but seems only a boy, a distortion caused perhaps by the Captain’s erotic imagination. But Baltic Germans are immature, he tells himself with the emphasis of irritation.

  “Erwin.”

  “Ja, Herr Kapitän.”

  “Do you think we get wiser as we get older?”

  “Nein, Herr Kapitän.”

  “Do you think we get more beautiful?”

  Erwin goes on staring at the compass; he doesn’t turn his head. “Nein, Herr Kapitän.”

  It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t turn his head, because the back of his neck is the part of him that the Captain prefers looking at anyhow. “I have to agree with you. Our actions, at least. They do not get more beautiful. I don’t mean what we are doing now, the running of this airship. That is professional. That is beautiful. That has some point to it. But the personal element. All this rushing around and fumbling and grasping in the dark and quarreling and desiring and hungering and despairing. What’s the point of it. Eh, Erwin?”

  “I don’t know, Herr Kapitän.”

  “What does it signify, Erwin?”

  “Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten,” says Erwin, unconsciously quoting a well-known poem by Schiller. No getting anything out of him. Perhaps he learned the Schiller poem in school.

  Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten

  Pass ich so traurig bin.

  A gloomy sentimental poem, just the kind of thing that the Captain detests about German culture. The word traurig. So mournful, so self-pitying, with its long drawn-out diphthong. Trow-ow-ow-rig. Like a dog howling, it is. Compare the English sad; just a short statement of fact. The French triste. Now there is a word! It’s almost a pleasure to be triste. The Captain starts to translate the Schiller poem into French (Quelle est donc la significance que je suis tellement triste) but decides this would distract him too much from his duties and leaves the task for another time.

  He and Erwin have been speaking German, partly because Erwin knows no other language and partly because of the presence of Starkadder, but who knows whether the pesky Englander has learned some German in school.

  “Ho, Starkadder. Sprechen sie Deutsch?”

  The young English turns his thin intelligent face to him in incomprehension.

  “Never mind, Starkadder. Carry on with your duties. Keep your eyes on the inclinometer. Dead level. Altitude eight hundred feet.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “You don’t need to go to the bathroom, do you, Starkadder?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good, good.”

  The navigator, sticking his head out of his cubbyhole, calls out a latitude and longitude.

  “All right. All right.” Through the windscreen the Captain sees the silver-gray snake of the Rhine twining off to the north. He is exactly where he expected to be. The Captain has got the airship headed not toward Frankfurt, his eventual destination, but a little to the left, so that he can make a turn at the end and approach the aerodrome up-wind.

  “East wind, Erwin. Keep a little right rudder.”

  Fifty-eight knots airspeed, sixteen knots east wind; the League of Nations is clawing crabwise through the air at an angle of nineteen degrees. In addition to the other things he knows, the Captain has a large part of the trigonometry tables by heart. If he really wanted to know what the drift was, he could drop a smoke-bomb from the rear of the control car and train a theodolite on it through a little door. Or rather the quartermaster could; but the quartermaster is not present, and anyhow the Captain knows from the weather report that the wind is sixteen knots and from his nerves that the drift is nineteen degrees. Besides, why alarm the harmless Hessian peasants by dropping a smoke-bomb on them?

  “Jawohl, Herr Kapitän,” says Erwin, and gives a touch more right rudder, unnecessarily, to show that he understands and is carrying out his orders impeccably, even to excess. A true German, Erwin, in spite of his snow-white Danish eyebrows and his Baltic neck.

  “No need for smoke-bombs, eh Erwin?”

  “Nein, Herr Kapitän.”

  “Erwin. D’you ever think about women when you’re standing there turning that wheel hour after hour?”

  “Nein, Herr Kapitän.”

  “What do you think about?”

  “I don’t know what I think about, Captain.”

  “But what are you thinking about right now, Erwin?”

  “Begging your pardon, I’m not thinking of anything, Captain, a person can’t be thinking about something all day long.”

  The Captain contemplates the back of Erwin’s head. How I envy you, you fortunate creature, he thinks. Now for us intellectuals, those of us who have been to high school, it’s quite another thing. The native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, he quotes to himself with a gloomy voluptuousness, for he knows English literature as well as he knows the trigonometry tables. He goes on with the scene. Soft you now, the fair Ophelia! The girl coming in stops the Prince from thinking all right. He wonders if Erwin has a girlfriend. He probably does, but if so the Spanish Inquisition with meat-hooks couldn’t drag the fact out of him. From Hamlet and Ophelia he goes on to think of Hamlet’s mother, a creature for whom he has always had a certain sympathy, in spite of her murderous and incestuous inclinations. He can imagine himself having a little conversation with her. O Hamlet, speak no more, thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul, and there I see such black and grainéd spots as will not leave their tinct! The Captain thinks of mothers in general (a race rendered imbecile by love) and of his own mother, who was no Gertrude but had her peculiarities, and whom he loved much. This mother of his—well, she died in the influenza epidemic that swept over Europe in 1918, murmuring in her last moments only the single word “Zhorzh.” She was French and his father Prussian, and they each had their own ways of pronouncing his name: his mother Zhorzh, with the voluptuous vowel in the middle and something soft and moist at each end, like a French kiss, and his father Georg with the hard German G’s, so that it
began with a blow and ended with another. From his mother he inherited his lucidity and logic, his finer sensitivities, his love of music, languages, and art; from his father his practicality and self-control, and his aplomb. As an admirer of the works of Thomas Mann, he associates himself not with the moony aesthete Tonio Kröger but with Thomas Buddenbrook, a man of integrity, imperturbably resisting the artistic and erotic forces that seethe within him and threaten him with the final disease of decadence, the Götterdämmerung of the soul. All his life he has had to fight against the notion that Germans, particularly of the officer class, are on the one hand rigid and authoritarian and on the other hand romantic. He is just the opposite of both of these. As an officer in the War he had to respect obedience, but it was the obedience of a player in a game to a fellow player who has been temporarily elected captain. The next day, it might be the other way around.

  His father was not a bad fellow at all and always treated him decently. He was a mild devout man who enjoyed life in the country and loved animals. He had done his duty for Kaiser and Fatherland by mounting a horse in 1869 to trample over the French and rub Napoleon III’s nose in the mud (it was during the Prussian occupation of Nancy that he met his future wife), but he preferred to remain on his large estate near Friedland where he raised miniature Icelandic horses and knew each one of his three hundred peasants by name. He regarded his only child as another one of the animals he loved: something to be spoken to in an affectionate but mechanical intonation, to be nourished and housed, kept warm in the winter and doctored when sick, but not someone whose opinions were to be taken seriously. Georg’s mother on the other hand was witty, brilliant, lucid, a little willful at times, with flourishing chestnut hair which she brushed back and tied in a knot to reveal her pale and faultless complexion; she heartfeltly hated some persons (sullen servants) and passionately loved others (a favorite maid, her husband, a sister in Nancy whom she almost never saw, her son). Her husband, the Junker Adelbert, she tied to her with knots of French dexterity in bed; to her spoiled maid she gave her old gowns, to her sister in Nancy she wrote clever and satirical letters in the style of Madame de Sévigné, and her child she snatched from his crib to smother him in kisses and cry his voluptuous name with the eagerness of a votary; she dressed him in frills and lace, she fed him brandied chocolates, and she taught him to play Chopin with his pudgy fingers when he needed two cushions under him on the piano seat.

  Georg grew up a contented and pampered boy. When he was not playing écarté with his mother (a travesty of a game in which she kissed and embraced him whenever he won a hand, or let her win one) he roamed the fields and barns and snared rabbits in the woods with traps he made from willow twigs. Yet all was not well, something in his secret soul knew, even at that young age. In addition to the Little Soldier, his father’s son, and the Good Boy, his mother’s son, there was also a Bad Boy who showed his pink pipette to the peasant lads in return for seeing theirs, and learned from the miniature Icelandic horses, erroneously, that the proper approach to a beloved object is from the rear. Georg the Bad Boy lived a rich private life of his own, in which reveries of creatures unclothed, tied up with ropes, or spread-eagled over barrels succeeded one another with the dizzying splendor of a kaleidoscope. When he got to the point where these visions produced spurts of a milky elixir in his pants, he realized that they were seriously wrong, but this only redoubled his shameful enthusiasm, so that he took up a pencil and made drawings of the unfortunate victims of his imagination in a notebook which he successfully concealed from the world, thus combining a not inconsiderable artistic talent with another of the skills of a military officer, the secrecy of documents. He played the cello and tried his hand at translating Maeterlinck’s Pelleas et Melisande; he learned to shoot quail and partridges, and he went with his father on a stag-hunt in Brandenburg where he was not allowed to carry a rifle himself but watched while his father brought down an enormous animal with a chest like a steam-boiler and a seignorial set of antlers, who lay on his side puffing and blowing blood from his mouth until the forester dispatched him with a pistol-shot. His father daubed blood on his head and said, “Next year you will have one of your own.”

  But he never did. A strange and magic visitation intervened which was to be the turning point of his life. The next summer, when he was out on one of his boyish raids in the countryside looking for some mischief to do, a frog to torment or a little girl to jeer at, there came up over the horizon a strange pear-shaped object as big as a house, red with a broad white stripe around its girth. Suspended under it was what looked like a basket draped with grain-bags, and a tiny puppet looking out over the rim. It approached slowly and swelled as it came, until he could make out the cordwork that held up the basket and enclosed the red-and-white bag like a lady’s hairnet, the figure of the balloonist who had a mustache and was wearing a flat British cap, and the fat linen tube that hung down from the tapered belly of the balloon.

  He began running toward it, even though it was coming in his direction and would be overhead in a short time. In the event he had to turn and run back the other way, because the balloon passed directly over his head and went on at the speed of a trotting dog, drifting lower until it almost touched the meadow, and even skipped and bumped as it passed over a low hillock and sank down on the other side of it. Georg ran on over the hillock and arrived puffing and excited at the point where the wicker gondola was resting on the grass with the large red-and-white bag standing over it, tilting a little to the breeze, and its owner, the aeronaut, out of it holding the wickerwork with one hand and trying to drive a stake into the ground with the other.

  “Here, boy,” he cried as he caught sight of Georg, “hang on to this thing while I mend a hole in it, some sausage-eating bugger of a peasant has shot a bullet through it, probably thought it was a devil of some kind, this is an ignorant and benighted part of the world I must say, but it will take only a little patch and a brushful of glue, so here I go.” Whereupon he left Georg holding the rim of the gondola, which pulled upward with the force of forty-six eagles, while he scrambled agilely up the diamond-patterned network of cords with a brush and patch in one hand; finding the hole, he mended it, then calculated mentally where the antipodes of the spherical surface was (Georg imagined a geometry lesson in school, a straight line intersecting a sphere) and fixed that leak too.

  Clambering down, he said that he was Thistlethwaite (a tongue-twister even for Georg who was an expert linguist) and that he was most grateful for his assistance. He was a thin reddish scruffy fellow with tufts of hair sticking out from under his cap and an untidy mustache; he had a scholarly air about him and Georg thought he might be a professor, but he never found out.

  “There, that’s that. Where d’you come from lad, and what’s this part of the country called?”

  Georg said that it was East Prussia and that the town of Friedland was not far away.

  “D’they have hydrogen there?”

  Georg didn’t know. He said that he lived yonder, pointing to the barns of the estate and the old scrollwork house with its wide verandas a couple of miles away.

  “There? Why, that’s right downwind. Carry you there in a trice. Give a surprise to the pigs and goats. Hop aboard.”

  Georg got in and looked around him with fascination. The gondola was an intricate and beautiful thing made of wicker with polished darkwood rails and brass fittings. It seemed curiously old-fashioned; it had an air about it of an antique ship or some fanciful contrivance to be towed through the air by geese in a children’s book. The ropes leading down from the gas-bag were tied to tiny wooden belaying-pins, there was a small brass compass that looked like a toy, and fixed in brackets was a collapsible spy-glass of the kind used by pirates. Thistlethwaite got in too, took a closer look at Georg, calculated that a stripling German boy was equivalent to two bags of ballast, and let the sand fall to the meadow. Obediently the balloon began to rise and the light breeze from the east caught it; Georg watched the meadow going by li
ke a canvas strip in a diorama worked by rollers. A hundred feet in the air, the magic contrivance floated toward the cluster of farm buildings in absolute silence except for the creaking of the wicker. In a quarter of an hour they passed between the house and the horse-barn and were over the yard; Thistlethwaite pulled one of the ropes to release a little gas from a valve overhead.

  The balloon sank down gracefully in the exact center of the farmyard, sending the chickens and ducks scattering. The maids came out flapping their aprons, the face of his mother appeared mysteriously in a window, his father strode up in boots and put his fists on his hips, and a dozen or so of Georg’s peasant-boy companions ran up and stood around the balloon as though bewitched. It took them a little while to realize that the second of the aeronauts standing in the wicker basket was their own Georg. Thistlethwaite looked around benignly and took off his cap to mop his moist head with a handkerchief. Georg saw that the ginger wisps that protruded from the cap were all the hair he had; the rest of his head was bald. The balloon seemed to stir as though it wanted to take off again, rising and bumping on the packed dirt of the yard, and Thistlethwaite appointed a pair of peasant boys to seize the rim of the gondola and hold it down with their strong brown arms. The boys stared at Georg with an admiration totally free from envy; his position, first of all as scion of the estate and second as balloonist, was too much above them even to aspire to. It was enough that they had seen the balloon. This they could tell to their children.

  The admiration of Georg’s father seemed a little more limited.