Night of the Aurochs

by Dalton Trumbo

  When at last the peasant found his voice he managed to croak; “What’s it any business of yours?”

  At this point Paul Koch intervened, almost, it seemed to me, in the voice of Stefan George: “Because birds don’t belong to you or anybody else and nobody’s got no right to kill ’em!”

  “Then you take ’em, you little son of a hitch!” said the peasant. “They muck up the place, and this is my place, and I don’t want it mucked up.”

  Gunther beside me pointed to the pigpens. “There’s no muck from swallows that compares to your damned pigs,” he said.

  “You’re bums and tramps and beggars,” said the peasant. “You’ve none of you never done an honest day’s work in your life. Get off my property before I take this spade to you instead of these damned shit-drippers.”

  He turned his back to us, lifted his spade, and knocked down a full three feet of nests. The swallows redoubled their protests; the children hopped with renewed delight from one murder to the next and the next and the next.

  With something between a howl and a roar, Fenri leapt into the still-falling debris and kicked a barrel from beneath one end of the bird-killer’s plank; the peasant pitched face forward into a jelly of dead birds and feathers salted with barnyard filth and guano and soaked with stale rain matter. The children once again froze, gaping with stupefied disbelief at the sight of their hideous father now so astonishingly brought low. Fenri hurled himself astride the peasant and began to tear at the rope that served as a belt tor his trousers.

  “Strip his ass and turn him over a barrel,” he yelled. “Give him the same medicine he probably gives his snot-eating kids and his shit-eating wife if he’s got one.”

  Suddenly all of us were on top of the peasant, stripping him of his boots, socks, trousers, his unbelievably filthy underdrawers. A woman rushed screaming from the hut at the end of the clearing, the pigs set up a deep-throated gabble, the peasant fought back with grunts and curses, and the children, staring imperturbably, sucked snot. By the time the woman joined us, her man, naked from the waist down, lay neatly pinioned over the barrel, held down by the four of us, while Fenri, using his own broad belt, applied good hot leather to his hindside. The peasant grunted with each slash, while the woman screamed, “Stop it! He’s a good man! You have no right! He tries to keep the place clean, that’s all—he just tries to keep the place clean!” and the children simply stared, utterly immobile save for the pistonlike flicker of their snot-sipping little tongues.

  At the first streak of blood Fenri withheld his belt. “Turn the bastard loose,” he said. In doing so, we flipped him off the barrel and onto the ground on his back.

  One arm was folded over the upper half of his face. To the astonishment even of his dreadful children, he was sobbing bitterly.

  “Heinrich,” moaned his wife, “oh Heinrich, Heinrich…!”

  Angrily, almost convulsively, the peasant turned himself over onto his belly. “Shut up!” he said. “Go away! Leave me alone!”

  Fenri dropped quickly to his knees beside him, seized the back of his neck, and turned him once more belly-upward.

  “Count those nests!” he said, not to the peasant but to all of us. “Count ’em on both ends and the other side too.” “You count too,” he said to the gaping children, and then, to their mother, “and you. Be sure you don’t miss a one. We’re going to the top of the Hoher Meissner and we’ll be back in exactly three days, and if there’s one nest missing”—he shook a forefinger directly between the peasant’s eyes—“just one single missing nest, do you know what you’re going to do? You’re going to smack your lips and run your tongue around the edge of them to make sure you didn’t miss a single little piece, and then you’re going to dip your snout in for the next course. Do you understand?”

  The peasant, whose eyes were still flooded with tears, gulped twice, found enough voice for a grunt, and nodded.

  “Then say you understand. Say it!”

  The peasant fought for breath. Then, in a voice that sounded astonishingly like a child’s, he said, “I understand.”

  Fenri said, “Good.” Then, followed by the rest of us, he started briskly across the barnyard toward our point of entry. The children still stood like statues, although the woman rushed forward and sank to her knees beside her sobbing husband. We could hear her voice crooning to him as we crossed the barnyard. Then, as we started into the undergrowth at its edge, a child’s cry caused us to turn and look back.

  Everything had changed. Now it was the woman who lay on the ground. Her peasant-master, half-naked but on his feet and howling imprecations, belabored her with a heavy stick. The children, weeping loudly and snotting more copiously than ever, vainly tried to stay his hand. Although I presume I should have felt sorry for them, it seemed to me that for the first time since we had broken into their lives they were dealing with a situation that every one of them had been born to understand.

  ♦ 10 ♦

  “For their vine is the vine of Sodom, and of the fields of Gomorrah: their grapes are clusters of Gall; their clusters are bitter”

  July 13, 1913: “Last night I had my way with Gunther Blobel.”

  Those are the first lines of a diary which I began on the morning of July 14,1913, and have continued intermittently ever since. I say “intermittently” because there were periods of several weeks during which I neglected it entirely, while at other times it required fifteen or twenty pages to empty myself of the feelings which gushed forth to fill its pages when I least expected or even wanted them to.

  The diary was my father’s idea. “All men of any intellectual substance realize that what seem the most trivial moments of their lives often serve to introduce or explain or even foretell the most important. Dates and hours and places and associates carry such significance that records of them should he preserved as carefully as one records the state of one’s financial affairs, the degree of one’s service to the state, or the regular functioning of one’s body. What an absurdity it is (and one that happens all the time, incidentally!) that an ordinarily intelligent man should lose a legal action or suffer the brunt of scandal because of a memo not written or a diary note not made.

  “A man must live his whole life on the assumption that no matter how close his friendships with other men may be, or even with those bound to him by the most sacred cords of consanguinity, there may and probably will come a time when he finds himself under oath in magistrate’s court confronted by the false testimony of his former friend or present kinsman. If, in this supremely important moment, he is unable to produce a note or memorandum or even a diary notation—one perhaps recalled after the fact and jotted down in its proper place—he is very likely to lose his case.

  “The oath to speak the truth in such matters has no practical value at all because it’s our natural assumption that both sides are lying. The side which enters the courtroom without substantiating physical evidence of some kind is generally considered too foolish to be granted the presumption of innocence and probably too guilty to claim it. However, the litigant with a decent white collar, a set of well-filled diaries, and a case bulging with documents obviously knows what he’s about and generally wins not only the case but public approbation as well.

  “Therefore keep a diary wherever you go. No matter how trivial, write something in it every day including the Sabbath. Particularly on warm summer Sabbaths, because they have lately become notorious for criminal seduction and other offenses of like nature.”

  I opened my diary with an account of that remarkable night on Hoher Meissner because, although my father had given it to me on Christmas, and although I accepted his opinion of the importance of detail (as I respected most of his opinions), nothing had happened during the first half of 1913 that seemed important to record even as detail.

  Indeed, it was not until much later, when in the midst of what promised to be an interminable sexual drought, that I realized my adventure with Inge in that town and at that time had been one of those rar
ities which are almost never appreciated or understood until tried a second time. Only then does one realize that such games are almost always lost, and must be handled with the utmost delicacy even when hope has surrendered to the infuriating knowledge that one’s purpose would just as successfully be achieved by a swift slap across the cheek as by presentation of the Koh-i-noor itself in a platinum case.

  Sexually, my life had been a blank since that fatal afternoon, which now seemed so many years ago, when I misjudged my powers over Inge and lost her altogether. Indeed, my whole relationship with Inge had resulted from the accidental coincidence of propinquity and good luck, which I daresay happened to no more than two or three members of my generation; for in Forchheim and its neighboring communities sex without wedlock carried with it the same connotation as leprosy, and the measures taken to stamp it out were almost as maniacal.

  Aside from finding them with an extra pair of drawers of the wrong sort, as I was caught with Inge’s (something not to be expected every day), the parents of adolescent boys had a much easier time of it than those of pubescent girls. Threats, lectures, deprivation of privileges, and an occasional thrashing were generally considered sufficient to discourage all but the most persistent symptoms of male amatory enterprise.

  Beyond this, the fathers of Forchheim went no farther. Being males in a community entirely governed by red-nosed, fat-bellied, thick-necked, beer-swilling males with limp white collars, sweat-circled armpits and drooping crotches, the idea of masculine beauty itself, much less of any even moderately intelligent woman being tempted by it, never entered their minds. They believed that women are drawn not to males with the handsomest features or the best-proportioned bodies, hut to those with the most authority, the fewer relatives in the unhappy event of inheritance disputes, and the smallest list of personal debts.

  Thus, the boys had the better time of it by far. Since the mere sight of them was not assumed to be aphrodisiacal to the opposite sex, they were permitted, except on Sundays and in the wintertime, to expose a great deal more of healthy flesh to open air and water and summer breezes and the ripe sun-stricken languor of autumn afternoons than was ever possible for their contemporaries of the opposite sex.

  For the girls, of course, everything was covered. In this respect I have often felt that our elders came as close to Purdah as they felt they could without provoking open rebellion. From the age of eleven to the day of their marriages the sight of bare female skin above the elbow or below the clavicle was so rare as to set young men’s skin twitching for hours at a stretch. What made the matter even worse from the boy’s point of view was the sight of each Monday morning’s wash hanging from every clothesline in Forchheim—long black or white stockings, underpanties, garter belts, bloomers, beribboned petticoats, winter underwear, laced corslets, dresses, skirts, flour sacks cut and sewn into four-inch padded squares with tie-cords attached, which were understood to serve the most erotic purposes imaginable—all of these feminine secrets were displayed, even flaunted, before our yearning eyes fifty-two times a year, and yet what they touched each day as a matter of casual necessity we were forbidden to touch or even think about without risking spiritual perdition and sometimes physical assault of the most brutal sort.

  It was not at all uncommon for a young man to be almost famished with the desire to touch the tip of his finger to a girl’s cheek and still not dare to, even though he knew that the underpanties she wore were either white with little pink ribbons, pink with white polka dots, blue with lace edges, or pale yellow with elastic bands, and that her menstrual cycle had ended three days before.

  Thus, at fifteen, I was a virgin, and so was Gunther Blobel and most others of our age with the possible exception of the nobility, who were reputed to have their pleasure not only of barmaids an d servant girls, but often of girls of their own class.

  For the rest of us, however, this widespread plague of adolescent male virginity naturally brought out the worst in our incurably carnal natures. Instead of treating girls as objects of desire (or at least of consideration) we tormented them unmercifully, dipped the tips of their blond braids into inkwells, crept after school hours into their toilets to decorate their walls with lewd doggerel and obscene drawings, arranged for occasional dribbles of water to appear on the floor beneath their classroom chairs, cribbed shamelessly from their examination papers despite their vindictive efforts—elbows outspread on their desks like the wings of brooding hens—to conceal their work from our craning necks and spying eyes.

  And then, of course, we masturbated.

  Today, the young people I watch from my front stoop are entirely different, both in attire and, I am convinced, in their sexual relations with each other. God knows, with the Russians breeding like cats on one side of us and the French like rabbits on the other, the more sound German breeders we can raise the more secure our fate will be in years to come.

  I go into such detail about sexual practices among those of my age in a time which seems already passing into ancient history to emphasize that there was a difference between then and now, and that one cannot possibly pass fair judgment upon either the present or the past without at least a beginner’s knowledge of what the past was like.

  It also explains, I think, the extraordinary sexual experience which befell Gunther and me on that first magical night at Hoher Meissner—an experience I shall never regret nor forget as long as I live.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In Chapter 10 (which is unfinished), amidst the dying campfires and fading songs atop Hoher Meissner, Grieben seduces Gunther in what will be the only homosexual experience of his life—although not of Gunther’s.

  THE SEDUCTION OF GUNTHER:

  FRAGMENTS INTENDED FOR CHAPTER 10

  A thousand campfires glowed that night on Hoher Meissner, more than ever before, we were told by those who had made the pilgrimage in earlier years; a thousand campfires and ten thousand wanderers and seekers and finders. After consuming our portion of Schleim from the community pots together with what bread and sausages we had stuffed into our duffel bags or abstracted from generous but unknowing peasants en route, we washed our utensils and ourselves in the pools and cataracts of the clear and swift-flowing mountain stream called “Tears of the Virgin,” which descended the northern side of the mountain in its tumultuous passage to the river Main; and then the real purpose of our convocation got under way.

  A mist had begun to diffuse what an hour earlier had been the sure brilliance of an autumn moon while farther out—millions and billions and trillions of light years into time—a sparkling of silver had already dusted the luminescence of more distant galaxies with celestial trash, which since the beginning of time had circled the moon’s gigantic orb until man, with the simple pinch of thumb and forefinger, had reduced it in a fit of mathematical madness to the size of a mummified pigmy.

  It was I who brought up the subject, not Gunther.

  “Do you remember that afternoon in the woods outside Forchheim?”

  “What afternoon?” he asked.

  “With Inge.”

  “Sure I remember.”

  “Pretty, wasn’t she?”

  “She sure was.”

  “Yeah. With the hair just beginning to grow between her legs. It was so soft. Do you know something?”

  “What?”

  “I used to put my hand between her legs before there was any hair there at all. Just soft white skin with that little slit up the middle of it.”

  “If we had done it to her that afternoon do you think it would have hurt her?”

  “Hurt her! Of course not! I used to stick my finger up her cunt clear to here. Her tits would get hard as little rocks. She would wiggle like it was tickling her and move her bottom up and down and pant like she had been running. Do you think she would do it if it was hurting her? Of course not! She loved it. They all do. Although they have to pretend differently, they want us to fuck them. They think of getting fucked as much as we think of fucking them!”

/>   “Were you fucking Inge all that while? I mean before she had any hair growing there at all up to the afternoon when you took her pants off?”

  “Of course.”

  The lie, which by now I had to make, sent a stab of regret through my heart, so poignant that I felt nothing but gratitude for the darkness of night that dulled the moisture which suddenly filled my eyes.

  ALTERNATE BEGINNING

  A thousand campfires glowed that night on Hoher Meissner, more than ever before, we were told by those who had made the pilgrimage before; a thousand campfires and ten thousand wanderers and seekers and finders. A pallid crescent moon hung high in the eastern sky while above it and farther out, millions and billions and trillions of light years into time, a sprinkling of silver had already begun to dust the luminescence of more distant galaxies with celestial trash.

  Far below and to the north gleamed the lights of Kassel, to which the first emperor of the new German Reich had sent Napoleon III after the French defeat at Sedan. To the south a glimmering trail of isolated farm lights traced the wandering course of the Fulda. From the dark side of the forest […] the light from a woodcutter’s hut.

  ♦

  “Do you think we will always be friends as we are now?”

  “Of course. Why not?”

  “Things change. People change. Friends change.”

  “We don’t.”

  “Do you remember Inge?”

  “Of course. What do you mean?”

  “How just before she ran away you told her you were going to let me touch her anywhere I wanted to? I mean, after her clothes were off?”

  “Sure I remember.”

  “Would you have let me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why?”

  “Because—we are friends. If I could touch her, why shouldn’t you be able to?”

  “Do you think she would let me?”