Nowhere: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  “Those are typical Blond tastes and traits?”

  He grimaced. “They really are a pack of baboons. I say that without prejudice, of course. They are welcome to any advantages they can wrest from decent people.”

  “Do they have much of a resistance movement?”

  He laughed and used another locution that must have derived from an old Hollywood production on a rube theme. “Gee whillikers, I wouldn’t see any reason why. They’re the happiest bunch you’ll ever see, and why not. They don’t do any work.”

  “They lie around and play the banjo?”

  He frowned. “No. They play things like the cello and bassoon. Really dreary stuff. They’re very boring people and much too lazy to want to change a social arrangement that suits them more than it does the rest of us.” He looked at the cable form. “If you’re going to leave us soon, you should make the most of your remaining time here.”

  “What would you suggest?”

  He seized the pencil stub I had put back on the counter and put its end in his mouth, which explained the toothmarks on it. “Well, the Lido, if you like to swim. Longchamp, if you bet on the ponies. The Prater can be fun if you enjoy carousels. A cruise through the canals is a pleasant way to spend the afternoon. Picnicking in the Bois can be delightful, as is motoring to the nearby countryside to see the Summer Palace, the Greek amphitheater, or the great mosque erected during the Turkish Occupation, which is now the Museum of Quilts. Or may I suggest a visit to the Bourse. In the third cellar below the trading floor one can find Roman baths, their reservoirs and conduits still in working condition, their mosaics exquisite.”

  I said, with obvious irony, “Saint Sebastian is then a microcosm of Europe? Surely you have as well your own Versailles, Brandenburg Gate, and Erechtheum with a Caryatid Porch?”

  He shrugged in satisfaction. “We are peculiarly blessed, I must admit. For that reason we Sebastianers are not great travelers.”

  “Also, on leaving the country one’s overdraft and credit balance must be paid, no?”

  “In fact that would be against the law.”

  “To leave the country?”

  He shook his head. “No, no: to discharge one’s debts in toto.”

  “Can you be serious?”

  The clerk spoke gravely. “It would be a profession of lack of faith in one’s countrymen. No crime could be more heinous. Every Sebastianer has a God-given right to be owed money by others. Only in this way does he establish the moral pretext for running up his own large debts. Else our economy would collapse.”

  The dismal science has never been my strong suit. Whenever I’ve tried to understand how, in the same world, filled with the same people, buying and selling the same things, there can be regular periods of great prosperity, followed immediately by recessions, my brain spins on its axis (this would make sense only if the good times resulted from the purchase of Earth goods by visitors from Mars, who however on the next occasion took their business to Jupiter).

  “If you say so,” was my response. “But tell me: who makes these policies and/or laws? Not the prince?”

  “Golly all get out,” said the clerk, in an as usual without-warning resort to vintage-film idiom, “I think they must come down from the old days, most of them, but there is a legislative body that probably does something, though don’t ask me what. Oh, and there are some ministers. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, you should stop at Government Square, just around the corner.”

  “All right, I shall.” Ordinarily I’d walk a mile to elude the so-called social studies or those who practice them, but until officially relieved I was on a fact-finding mission—and I had no strong interest in seeing the derivative sights aforementioned (which suggested too strongly for me those scale models of the Taj Mahal, the Sphinx, the Eiffel Tower, and so on, constructed to lure tourists to otherwise colorless American backwaters). “Just tell me two more things. If the churches have been transformed into movie houses, what’s become of the clergy? Yesterday I saw a man in priest’s garb, riding a bicycle.”

  “They’re now projectionists,” he said enthusiastically.

  “I suppose those at the top of the hierarchy, the bishops and so on, are film critics.” I was joking only by half.

  “Certainly not. That’s illegal in Saint Sebastian! Anyone saying more than that he either liked or disliked a movie would be arrested and flogged.”

  I raised my brow. Now and again the ways of this country were not altogether foolish. “My last question concerns the language I heard some people speaking. In fact they were Blonds. What might that be?”

  “It’s some slang used only by Blonds. We call it Sebastard.”

  “It has ancient origins?”

  “Naw,” sneered the clerk. “They invented it so we wouldn’t understand them when they spoke to one another in front of us. But who would want to know what a Blond was saying anyway?”

  He gave me directions as to how to reach Government Square, and I left the cable office. The square proved to be that in which the concierge of my hotel had been pilloried, which I had seen when McCoy drove me back from the palace. The punitive device had another occupant today: shockingly, a boy who looked to be no more than nine or ten.

  I stopped and spoke in commiseration. “You poor lad. What could you have done to deserve that?”

  “Played hooky,” said he in his voice of high pitch. “But I’m sick of Ken Maynard movies, and anyway I didn’t want to sit in school all day in this nice weather. I wanted to go down to the river and mess around, fish or something.” He had a saddle of freckles across his nose.

  “I used to catch tadpoles when I was your age. I have degenerated since. You want me to let you out of this thing?” The gates of the pillory were secured with loose bolts that looked as if easy to dislodge.

  He shook his head, on which the hair was cut high above the ears. “I could get out any time I want, these holes are so big.” Wiggling his hands and feet, he demonstrated that fact for me. “But they’d just catch me again, and next time the punishment would be worse. Know what it is? You have to eat pesto!” He made a horrible face.

  I continued across the square to what in New York would have been a multiple dwellingplace of modest size. With its half-dozen stories, it was the largest building hereabout. I could see some sort of placard on its front doors. If government was to be found on the square, this seemed most likely to be where.

  When I reached the sign, which was crudely made of cardboard and inscribed in felt-penned capitals, I read:

  W.C.—3RD FLOOR FRONT

  CHAMBER OF LEGISLATORS—3RD FL. FRONT

  MINISTRIES—ATTIC

  COURT OF JUSTICE—CELLAR

  Nearby, on the wall of the building, was a proper brass sign which discreetly proclaimed the presence, in the same edifice, of Dr. C. Moritz, Podiatrist; Mellenkamp & Co., Novelties; The Brockden School of Ventriloquism; and the House of Costumes.

  Of the governmental tenants, the Court was most quickly reached from the ground floor. The one-car elevator at the rear of the little lobby seemed indifferent to my button-pushing, and therefore I went beyond it to a staircase and descended to a dank basement corridor, which was dimly lighted by a naked bulb of small wattage that hung from the ceiling on a badly frayed wire. I groped my way along the hallway, trudging here and there through pools of standing water and more than once hearing scurryings that could have come only from rodents of a fairly substantial size.

  I had begun to assume I was in the wrong cellar for the Court, or else the handwritten sign outside had been the work of a practical joker with unfathomable motives, and was about to turn back when a door opened in the crepuscularity just beyond me, and an ancient man, with a parchment skull around which were a few unruly wisps of white hair, shuffled forth. His judicial robes were tattered.

  I was amazed that he could see me, given his rheumy eyes and the feeble available light. “Now you come,” he said peevishly. “Now, when I’ve got to go pis
s. Well, you’ll just have to wait while I go to the toilet, which means climbing the stairs, for the lift is once again out of order, and then at my age you have to stand there till the prostate gland decides what to do, holding that shriveled wick that’s no earthly good for any other function.”

  “I was simply going to observe the court at work,” I said. “Please don’t feel any need to hurry on my account. I’ll just go in and sit down. Is anyone else there?”

  “Certainly not,” said he. “We dispense swift justice here and don’t make people wait around.”

  “Then I’ll come upstairs with you and look in on the other branches of government while you’re in the toilet.”

  He made a gesture of indifference. Going up the stairs at his side required more patience than I had anticipated, so slow and tottering was his climb, but when I offered him a hand or arm, his rejection, with a horny elbow, smote my ribs that were still sore from the calipers of Olga’s steel thighs.

  To make some use of this time I asked him about the court: was it civil or criminal?

  He grunted disagreeably. “What a dumb question. Criminals have no place in a court! They are dealt with by the police.”

  “But is it not possible that the police might sometime punish the wrong man?”

  “It’s also possible that a person might be struck by lightning or have some other kind of ill fortune, contract a mortal illness, and so on, but that sort of thing is not an occasion for a resort to a court of justice.”

  “Then what does your court deal with? Civil lawsuits?”

  By now we had climbed perhaps four steps, each of which the old jurist gained in a most precarious way, teetering interminably on the metal binding at the edge of the tread and arresting a backwards fall with a desperate grasp of the rail, applied only at the last moment it could have been effective. After witnessing this procedure repeatedly I at last took my heart from my mouth: he was actually in no danger of falling.

  “I don’t know what that term means,” said he. “What I adjudicate are private differences between individuals. For example, a man acquires a new possession, say a pocketknife, and proudly shows it to a friend. The friend disparages it, so the owner of the knife hauls him into court on a charge of envy. The defendant, on the other hand, tries to prove that his criticism of the knife had to do only with objective standards of quality: the workmanship is shoddy by comparison with other knives sold for the same amount of money.”

  “Suppose you decided in favor of the plaintiff in this example?”

  “If the decision went against the defendant, he would be obliged, for a certain length of time, to wear a placard on his back announcing to the world that he was an envious person.”

  “The same kind of thing, then, that the person arrested for rudeness must undergo.”

  “Not at all. Rudeness is a crime against the state,” said the old judge. “Envy is a personal matter. An envious man is not put into the pillory.”

  I couldn’t see the distinction. Therefore I asked him another question. “Do you have insurance companies in Saint Sebastian?”

  “No,” said he. “It is against the law to wager on someone else’s misfortune.”

  “Then what happens to the man on whose sidewalk a pedestrian slips and breaks his collarbone and subsequently sues the property owner: a routine occurrence in the States—?” Something like that happened to a retired postman who lived next door to my uncle’s sister-in-law’s second cousin’s friend: the uninsured ex-mailman was the defendant; the victim claimed he had dislocated his spine; I never learned of the outcome.

  “Yes,” said the old man, toiling up the third-to-last step to the ground floor. “The victim would surely be sued by the property owner.”

  “Can I have heard you correctly? The victim would be sued? Wouldn’t he be doing the suing?”

  His glare suggested such annoyance that I was concerned lest he become distracted and lose his tenuous grasp of the railing and plunge backwards down the stairs. “Are you trying to bait me?”

  “Forgive me, sir. I’m honestly trying to understand the workings of your law, so different from ours. In America, and I think many other places, the injured party is the plaintiff.”

  “And so with us,” the old man told me, his anger subsiding, or rather turning into what would seem contempt. “In the episode you have projected, the property owner would have been humiliated by someone’s having been injured on his sidewalk. It would only be right that he sued the fellow who was responsible, viz., he whose back was injured.”

  “But what of the victim? First he hurt his spine and is perhaps permanently disabled, and then he is sued. Is that justice?”

  The judge’s brow descended. “Yes,” said he. “The person you speak of sounds as if he might definitely be the kind of unfortunate whose specialty is making the people around him totally miserable. One more such outrage might well prove him to be the kind of troublemaker we would want to eliminate from our society.”

  I repeated, “Eliminate?” The problem with ingenious systems of justice is that they inevitably have their ugly aspect.

  “It’s often the only answer,” said he. We had at last reached the lobby, where he stood sourly contemplating the door of the out-of-service elevator. “And Gezieferland, believe it or not, dotes on such people: they’re always after us to send them more losers. Sometimes they even threaten to go to war. The idea there is that we’d beat them savagely and thus their entire population would again suffer the kind of loss they live for.”

  As I remembered from Olga’s remarks, Gezieferland was another little country, north of Saint Sebastian. “Are you saying that you exile these so-called losers to your northern neighbor?”

  He nodded, and proceeded to refer to the southern neighbor mentioned by Olga. “Swatina takes off our hands anyone who makes a public menace of himself: say, walks along the street speaking violently to an invisible companion or exposes a part of himself that might disgust others, such as a back covered with pimples or an enormous belly. There are scoundrels, male and female, who will commit this crime at the beach and play portable phonographs and eat gluttonously while dripping with sweat. Lying to the south of us, Swatina has a warmer climate than we and consequently a longer beach season. Indeed, the visitor to that wretched country sees nothing but striped umbrellas and hideous naked bodies.”

  My physical impatience was making me uncomfortable. I could not endure creeping up two more floors in his company. Therefore, with thanks to him for helping me to a new understanding of Saint Sebastian, I hastened to a narrow flight of upward-leading stairs and climbed to what Americans would have called the second floor, but which, in the European style, was the first: of this I was reminded by the painted 1 on the wall of the landing. This meant that the old judge would have an even longer climb to the toilet than I had first supposed.

  It seemed nonsensical that the governmental agencies would be put on the upper floors when a costume business, a school of ventriloquism, and the novelties of Mellenkamp occupied the more accessible offices. I thought that on the route upstairs I might just stop off at one or more of these establishments and talk with the people who worked there, but on each landing there was a locked door between the stairway and the business floor, as well as a sign forbidding entry and warning the would-be trespasser that attack dogs patrolled the premises at all hours.

  At the third (actually the fourth) floor, the door to the landing stood open. To shut it would have been preposterous: it consisted of an empty frame from which the panels had been removed. I went along the corridor, passing the toilets (which had no doors whatever and therefore no designation as to the sex of their users). I arrived at a door marked CHAMBER OF LEGISLATORS. I opened it and stepped inside.

  What I saw was a largish room filled with canvas cots of the folding, Army type, each of which contained the recumbent form of a markedly shabby man. The odor of the place was very unpleasant. As I stood there, surveying the place, I felt a hand pluckin
g at my trousers in the area of the knee. It was the man on the nearest bunk.

  “Hey, buddy,” said he, continuing to yank at me, “gimme some dope.” He seemed not much older than I, but he was in miserable physical condition, and he obviously had not washed his face in time out of mind: the dirt was ingrained.

  “I don’t have any,” I said, and pulled away from his grasp.

  “How about a drink?” When I shook my head, he asked, “Then have you got a cigarette at least?”

  “Sorry, I don’t smoke.”

  “Then what have you got for your legislator?” he asked. “It better be good, if you want me to scratch your back.”

  “I’m a visitor, a foreigner. Are you really a legislator?”

  “If you’re not one of my constituents, go fuck yourself,” said he, letting his head fall back on the unspeakably filthy pillow.

  As it happened I was not offended, but I was curious. “You have no interest in maintaining friendly relations with other countries?”

  He replied without bothering to raise his head. “I might or might not have, according to my needs at the moment, but being nice to you would have nothing to do with the matter in any event.”

  “You mean because I come from a country that has a long record of rewarding those who insult it?”

  “I don’t know or care which country you belong to,” said the recumbent legislator. “I’m speaking universally. And that has exhausted me.” He closed his eyes and almost immediately began to snore, denying me the opportunity to ask him a final question.

  Therefore I put it to the man in the next bunk, a person quite as filthy as the first and as disagreeable, who sneered at me and said, “Keep going. I heard what you said to Filtschmidt.”

  “I merely wanted to ask why you have no fear of being arrested for rudeness.”

  “Because we’re legislators, you cretin. Why should we create a law to which we ourselves are subject?”

  By now these people had succeeded in irking me. “According to my information,” I said with a sneer of my own, “you have no power whatever.”