Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003

by Howard Waldrop

In the tumult of the last few days there had not been time, nor had it been safe enough, for a large crowd to gather, but there was now a respectable and respectful one; some of the men with their hats off; some people holding up children so, as they said according to political leanings, they could see and remember either the death of a peoples’ hero, or the just desserts of a rabble-rousing villain.

  The firing squad was a handpicked group of Saxons, though the officer was a Prussian.

  “Are there any last words, Herr Wagner?” asked the interim bailiff, after reading the death warrant.

  Wagner, it is said, had difficulty clearing his throat. His voice was weakened from shouting orders this last week of fighting, and of arguing in court the day before. It barely carried past the firing squad, but then, the first part of the speech was addressed only to them.

  “Remember . . .” he said with great trouble, “Remember me, when you, yourself, stand here.” And then his voice rose to take in the crowd. “Lady Liberty!” he said. “Show us your tits!”

  And then they shot him.

  In the crowd stood Eisenmann, with a newly shaved head and a fake beard, and from that moment on his resolve was set.

  It took a year of large struggles, small defeats, and then the Consoli-dation, before the geopolitics of revolution were settled, and the Peoples’ Federated German Republic was a reality, with Eisenmann at the head of the Peoples’ Council, and later the Republic’s Leader.

  It took a further three years before his first order as head of state came to fruition.

  One by one the soldiers who executed Wagner were sought out and arrested, if still in Germany, and brought to the Old Jail, which had miraculously stood through all the strife since 1849. Two men were extradited from Switzer-land; one from the new Polish state to the east. One was kidnapped from Paris, when legal means failed, from under the nose of the Sûreté, put on a barge as cargo, and pulled up rivers and down, back to Dresden.

  The coffin containing one who was dead was dug up from the burying ground of a small riverside hamlet thirty kilometers away.

  At last there were eleven of them, in jail with the coffin, and they were taken out to the wall behind the Municipal Building.

  Eisenmann himself read out the death warrants.

  One of them yelled, “But what did I do? I was only following orders!”

  Then Eisenmann read Roeckel’s account of Wagner’s last day, ending:

  “It is said, with difficulty his last words came. His voice, weakened with shouting the last week, and from speaking in court, barely carried past the firing squad, but the first of his speech was addressed to them only.

  “‘Remember . . .’ he said, ‘Remember me, when you, yourself, stand here.’”

  Then they understood history.

  Then the firing squad shot them, and the coffin.

  5

  Behold Them Seated in Their Glory

  The lettering on the office door stated:

  Peoples’ Department on the Former Monarchy

  Hours Mon-Wed, Fri 0900-1500

  Thurs 1000-1400

  I knocked.

  “Come,” said a voice.

  I went in. It was a one-person office, no clerk; just a desk, some shelves full of documents, a State-issue wastebasket that needed emptying, and a stein full of nibbed steel pens beside an inkwell.

  “Comrade Rienzi, from the Peoples’ Department for Security.” I was wearing my uniform today. “To interview you about Wagner.”

  “Ah! Yes. I have your letter . . . somewhere here . . . I’m afraid I knew him only as a small boy, as you are no doubt aware, being able to do the math.”

  “No matter, Comrade King,” I said. “Perhaps some small memory will be of help to us.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. He wore his hair in the old fashion. “The poor Minister of Culture and suchlike.”

  I gave him a look.

  “Oh, we have our sources,” said Comrade King. “You’d be surprised how much there still is to do, twenty-seven years on. There are still lawsuits and bills of requisition from my grandfather’s time. They had a very relaxed view of justice and economics in those days, before the Revolution. We still hear things, of the here and now.”

  He settled himself in his chair. “I shall miss the Minister of Culture; he was, as they say, a cultured man. He was of great service to the State. I worked closely with him cataloging the palace contents several years ago.”

  “But you did know Comrade Wagner?”

  “Yes. What I mostly remember was his height. He had none. Yet he was the only adult who never bent over, or kneeled down, to talk to my sister and me—of course he didn’t have far to go, but he treated us as adults, worthy of a conversation. More so than with my father, who you know was something of a scatterbrain. The one kingly thing he did was accept the Constitution of the Frankfort Assembly. And he knew it. He and Wagner worked closely for the three years remaining to Wagner’s Provisional Government. My father’s the one you really should have talked with, the poor man.”

  “Wagner was originally kappelmeister to your father’s court?”

  “Wagner was first and foremost for Wagner. I read quite a bit about him as I grew up–but after himself he loved music. I’ve read his proposal for reorganizing the Court Musicians and Theaters—sometime around 1847 or so—quite a thorough piece of work; rejected though by my father’s advisors of those times. I’m sure what he really wanted was a good orchestra so his operas could be performed—both the ones he’d already written, and those great whapping things he was always threatening to do.”

  “A perfectly logical conclusion,” I said.

  “What I remember most was that he loved Beethoven, especially the Ninth. He performed it every Palm Sunday from 1846 until two weeks before the Counter-Revolution. Every time he did it he came alive, conducting, not like his usual State concerts. Of course, during the original Revolution the Opera House (and so much more) burned down; the next year it was performed in some barn of a place. It was still wonderful. And the Peoples’ Federated Revolutionary State was still new. I believe that was when the nation came together, that Palm Sunday of 1850. It’s the first time I felt that this thing might really work. All the leaders took some part, including Roeckel–the father of the present State Conductor—who was a musician. I forget what Marx did—but they all sang on ‘Ode to Joy,’ we all did, in the audience too. It was quite wonderful. I wish every citizen, now, could have been there then, like I was.”

  “Do you remember Wagner, or Engels, or anyone mentioning the occult?”

  “Well, Wagner’s early stuff was full of fairies, and magic swans and such. I heard he always wanted to do one about the Norse gods, and was always reading Wolfram von Eschenbach. But the real supernatural? I don’t think so. He was more of a mystic than anything. As I said, what he believed in was Wagner.”

  I rose. “Thank you for your time, Comrade King.”

  “Glad to do it, Comrade Rienzi,” he said, walking me to the door. “It was nice to get my head out of these musty legal papers this little while.”

  We shook hands, and I left.

  There was a message from Dirkmann at my apartment:

  The wind is from the west.

  This meant I had to go see him, as the office of the Leader, Eisenmann, had asked him a question, which he had to ask me.

  6

  “No Rights,” she says, “Without Their Duties.”

  To celebrate this, their Centennial Year of 1876, the United States of America had driven out its witches, warlocks, and demons, in other words, atheists and spiritualists. Which meant that Europe, and especially the Peoples’ Federated States of Europe, was full of them.

  Obviously they were all being watched.

  I nodded to the polic
e informant on duty at the corner of Engels and Bakunin. He discreetly ignored me. I felt the pressure of his gaze on the back of my neck as I went down the walkway on Bakunin and turned up the path to the second house.

  The door had one of the new electric bells. A plate, still new, in the middle of the door, read: Mrs V.C. Woodhull—Sittings and Advice. Be-low this was an engraving of an ancient Greek—Demos-thenes, or I miss my guess.

  A foreign domestic received me. I presented my card–an assumed name and address, one of the standards issued by the Department. On it I had written, My soul is troubled. May I have a sitting? The domestic receded farther into the house like a cuckoo returning to its clock.

  I looked around the spacious parlor. There were many photographs, including one of Commodore Vanderbilt and the current American President James G. Blaine (who had evidently been of no help to Mrs. W. in the matter of deportation). Perhaps exile makes the heart grow fonder. On the bookshelves were numerous editions of Demosthenes, both in the original and many foreign translations.

  The domestic reappeared and presented me with a folded note on an American Flag tray. Please join our circle at 2000 hours tonight, it said, and was signed, Mrs. Vict. C. Woodhull.

  I went back to the Peoples’ Department for Security, and went through a few files.

  Perhaps it was another police spy on the corner that night, playing a hurdy-gurdy and with a baboon on a chain. Perhaps not.

  The baboon walked up to passersby, nudged them in the sides, and held out its hand. When it received a coin, it tipped its cap, and took the coin to the bucket next to the player. Were the man a spy, it was understood he got to keep all the money the ape collected.

  * * *

  The séance room was on the second floor, in a heavily curtained and tapestried open landing at the top of the stairs.

  Seven people were there, three of whom I recognized; two couples I did not. The domestic brought us small cakes and bitter Russian tea. Two of the men waiting, I discerned, had fortified themselves beforehand.

  And then Mrs. Woodhull appeared from farther down the landing.

  “Welcome,” she said, “for any troubled in heart, for those longing for advice from those who have crossed over.”

  She was a stunning woman for whom, in a bourgeois society, middle-age would hold no terrors. Her clothes were somber gray and black; she wore a demure necklace from which hung a simple medallion of hammered bronze. Her hair was swept up and back in the new fashion, but it did not give her a severe appearance, as it did most women.

  She looked at each of us in turn.

  “Many years ago,” she said, “while I was in Cleveland, in the United States of America, I was very troubled like yourselves. As I sat at my desk, a man dressed in a toga appeared to me and told me to go to 17 Great Jones Street in the city of New York. I asked him who he was, and he told me Demosthenes, and then he dematerialized.

  “I immediately took my family by train to New York; we arrived at the house with all our baggage, and with no idea of what the future held.

  “We knocked, and a woman answered the door, and asked ‘Did you come about the house?’

  “We entered. The house was furnished but had been emptied of all personal effects of the previous owner. In the entry hall were many bookcases, all empty except one, which had a single book lying open upon one shelf.

  “I went to it. It was The Orations of Demosthenes.

  “From that moment my future changed, always for the better, and now I find myself many thousands of kilometers away, helping those who are troubled as I was before the spirit of Demosthenes appeared to me, and pointed the way.”

  (Conveniently, I thought, leaving out the ten years of scandal, and exile from her native country.)

  “Come,” she said, pointing. “Let us go to the Table of Confidence, where we may ask for surcease from worldly torments and doubts.”

  We went to that Table; beneath its fringed cloth covering, I noticed it was made of oak, and its legs were quite hollow.

  7

  What Have You Read in All Their Story?

  I returned to my room to find Dirkmann sitting in my desk chair, his feet up, reading one of my volumes of Hegel and smoking a Turkish cigarette. He didn’t have a key to my place.

  He brought his feet down, brushed ash off the blotter.

  “Remarkable man, that,” he said, closing the book and putting it back in its place on the shelf. “He should have lived to see the Revolutions. Or stayed around and talked to Marx, after Marx got out of knee-pants. I’m sure he had no idea of the fires he lighted in the minds of men.”

  “To what do I owe this honor?”

  “You remember our little talk yesterday, no?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m to take you somewhere.”

  “What if I hadn’t come home?”

  “I knew where you were. Learn anything of use?”

  “That maybe the Americans had the right idea. I’ve rarely seen a better cold reading, and a perfect one for the name I used, which implies seven hours of research on someone’s part. Also, of everyone else there, I believe there was no more than one stooge out of the eight. The usual noisy accouterments and dim manifestations. Very impressive, with the intellectual content of a good fart.”

  “So I’ve heard,” said Dirkmann. “No disturbances in the ether? No impending catastrophes? No Day of Judgement coming down on us like a lowering pot lid?”

  “Not as far as Frau Woodhull has seen.”

  He stood up. “Follow me.”

  It was near 0300 when we stood before an unmarked door. We’d gone through a series of basement corridors, from our Department, to the Depart-ment of Justice, to somewhere across the street, and down a couple of blocks, until I assumed we were in or near the Peoples’ Department of Agriculture.

  Dirkmann knocked once, then twice more. We went in.

  Other than a guard in the corner, he was alone.

  There was a pitcher of water on the desk, one glass, and a bowl of grapes (grown no doubt in the chemical nurseries somewhere upstairs– they say there’s a fine experimental wine about to be put on the markets).

  We came to attention and Dirkmann saluted for us both.

  He waved his hand.

  “Your report?” Dirkmann asked me.

  “Comrade Leader,” I said, for it was he before me. “I’ve found no reason to believe Peoples’ Martyrs Wagner, Engels, or Marx had interest in the occult or expressed any desire to return to this Earth. Of course they all met violent, quasi-legal ends, as you yourself witnessed. Former Leader Wagner was somewhat mystical—but it seems a backward-looking view at the past glories of the German peoples, before becoming leader of the forward-looking Revolution. You may or may not know he wanted to write an opera about it.”

  He nodded.

  I didn’t know whether to go on or not.

  “Your report on the spiritualists?” prompted Dirkmann.

  “As far as the séances I attended, Comrade Leader, business seems to be as usual. I have visited two spiritualists in two nights, the last of whom has a huge foreign reputation as the best and most skilled. There seems to be no disturbance among them—the usual ploys to gain confidence or financial advantage.”

  His eyes moved to Dirkmann again.

  “We have no explanation for the visitations,” said Dirkmann. “Other than the medical and the mental.”

  Comrade Leader sat back, spread his arms and shrugged his shoulders.

  “The only conclusion we could come to,” said Dirkmann.

  Comrade Leader opened his hand toward the door.

  We turned smartly and left.

  Comrade Leader Eisenmann had looked exactly like his posters. He had been portrayed since his thirties as being somewhere in
his early forties, so he now looked only a few years older than the official portraits; gray at the temples, hair thinning some at the top (he was not wearing his usual Peoples’ Guards hat tonight). His eyes were still the same as those in the Delacroix painting. The rest of his face was hardened by time, but still recognizable as the French baker’s son.

  We were halfway back through the Knossos-like maze of corridors and hallways when I asked Dirkmann, “Does he ever speak?”

  Dirkmann lifted his shoulders and sawed his levelled hand back and forth in a sometimes—yes sometimes—no motion.

  The next morning the arrests began.

  8

  No Claims on Equals Without Cause

  There have been many arrests before, hundreds of them. That’s why there is a Peoples’ Department for Security.

  News of the arrests was on the street when I awakened. Bullermann, Erkheit, and Sensucht. All members of the Peoples’ Committee; all in the original Revolution alongside Wagner, Marx, and Engels. Erkheit and Bullermann were in the Vaterlandsverein before Wagner, even. Intellectuals all.

  The rumor had it that there would be a trial on very grave charges.

  Meanwhile, they were being held in our cells, not over at the Depart-ment of Justice.

  The smart ones always end up in our jail.

  I entered the headquarters and nodded to the senior officer on duty in the lobby. My gaze went up to the large official State-issue painting on the mezzanine above. It and one other painting (“Night Watch in the Kreuz-kirche Tower”) were in every government building, and had been reproduced countless times in lithographs and engravings for homes.