Nowhere (13 page)

Whether or not I was supposed to take him seriously, I decided that these were the most unattractive people I had met thus far in Saint Sebastian. Indeed, the Blonds, though cretins, were, all in all, the nicest. When I went on the attack, the waitress had slipped out of the room. Now I espied her peeping from the swinging door that obviously led to the kitchen. I had not previously seen her face straight on: it bore a notable resemblance to those of Olga and Helmut.

When she determined that the soup course was so to speak over, though most of it had been splattered across the table, she re-entered the dining room, transporting, with high-held wrists, a large trayful of loaded plates. So as to keep the peace—for despite their avowals of friendship I did not trust this lot—I waved off the dish she was about to place before me.

“You don’t care for roast stoat?” asked Hinkle. “They can probably rustle you up something else, then: perhaps some of yesterday’s badger.”

“Actually, I’ve already eaten and within the hour,” said I. “I shouldn’t have taken the soup. But please go ahead, all of you. I’m here as an observer. Don’t mind me.”

I cannot justly complain, for I had told them to proceed, but I must say they fell to their plates with an ardor, even a ferocity, that astonished me. For a few moments the table was a mise-en-scène of flashing cutlery and gnawing teeth. Juice dripped from chins, fragments of food fell from flying forks. Boggs’s knifework was so savage as to wound his index finger, and his blood dribbled to join the other fluids staining the tablecloth. With closed eyes one would have heard a troop of hyenas demolishing a carcass. Before I had completed an ocular circuit of the company, those first served were displaying empty plates.

I addressed Hinkle, who had long since devoured the last morsel of his own portion. “You fellows are quite the trenchermen. Do you work up such appetites at writing?”

He patted his protuberant belly. “I’ve never made up my mind about the chicken or the egg: maybe gluttons are naturally attracted to the profession, for some reason. If so, bless me if I can see the connection.”

The waitress was now going around with red wine. After every four persons, she began a new bottle, for the glasses were large and she filled them to the rims.

I asked, “Do you people drink a lot?”

“Not during the week, except after eleven
A.M.
” said Hinkle, lifting his goblet and emptying it in one long draught. When he lowered the glass he looked around for the waitress. She was detained. Barnswallow’s hand was between her legs.

“And sex?”

“Yes,” said he, “with anything.” He gestured with his glass at the waitress.

“By the way, don’t you have any female authors in Saint Sebastian?”

“If you can call them that. They write nothing but pornography.”

“Are you serious?”

“Is that so surprising, given the filthy imagination of the typical woman?” Hinkle was now growing annoyed with the failure of the waitress to fill his glass, but Barnswallow was working ever more furiously under her skirt, to which activity she seemed indifferent, whereas he was gasping stertorously. It was an ugly spectacle to me, but his colleagues were seemingly oblivious to it.

I wasn’t eager to start more trouble, so I made gentle application to Hinkle.

“It isn’t her fault. Why don’t you ask Barnswallow to unhand her?”

Hinkle shrugged. “We’re never critical of one another in such a situation.”

“You were only just throwing things and insulting each other!”

“That was only personal,” said he. “This is principle. Can’t you see that? A Blond’s a Blond!”

I turned in my chair, so that I could not see Barnswallow from the corner of my eye. “I suppose it’s none of my business.... Tell me, what do you write?”

“I do children’s books. Each of us has his own specialty. Boggs for example does books and articles explaining how things happen in the natural sciences: how the porcupine throws its quills, how the basilisk paralyzes its intended prey with a fixed stare, and so on. Buzzle’s latest work is a series of profiles of three great men who were afflicted with chronic diarrhea: Mohammed, Molière, Marx.”

I frowned. “Just a moment. Can that be true? How does he—”

Hinkle made a superior smile. “Pure assumption. Else we
couldn’t
say, according to Buzzy. Molière, for example, was awfully cunning at it, leaving not a shred of evidence.”

“Neither, I should imagine, did the other two. Also, I happen to remember from my scouting days that a porcupine certainly does not throw its quills, and that a basilisk can paralyze with a glance is a quaint old delusion of the Middle Ages, if I recall the footnotes in my college edition of Shakespeare.”

At this point Barnswallow finally released the waitress. She came to Hinkle with the wine bottle.

I asked her for her name.

“Inga.”

“You’re not by chance related to Olga and Helmut?”

Her answer did not take me by surprise. “Sure.”

Hinkle was not offended by my negative comments. Still smiling proudly, he went on. “Hozenblatt, over there, is our modern historian. He is best known for his comprehensive study of the concentration camps in which the Jews exterminated the German and Austrian Gentiles, 1938 to ‘45. Currently he is at work on a book in the same vein, this one concerned with the Siberian forced-labor camps in which anti-Communist zealots confine benevolent secret policemen.”

I retrieved one of the overturned sherry glasses and asked Inga to fill it with table wine. “Thank you,” I told her, and added, sotto voce, “I’m your friend.”

She made her blue eyes into veritable saucers and asked in a loud voice, “You vant to screw?”

But no one, including Hinkle at my other elbow, showed any sign of having heard this. I still had not got used to the utter lack of sexual shame in Saint Sebastian.

“No, thank you,” I told Inga, and turned back to the writer of children’s books. “Tell me, Hinkle, what kind of thing do you write about for kids?”

He was pleased by the question. “All manner of informative subjects, actually, from economic theory to contraception. Then, on the entertainment side, surveys of nightlife around the world, the
caves
of Paris, the after-hours joints of New York, the transvestite bars of Istanbul, and so on.”

“And do the children understand this material?”

“Well, of course,
nobody
understands economics,” said Hinkle. “I expect they get some profit from the rest of it. But if they don’t, what does it matter? They’re just kids.”

“Some of you have British-sounding names: Merkin, Boggs,
et al.,
and everybody in the country speaks fluent English, though so far as I know, you’re a considerable distance from Great Britain.”

Hinkle narrowed his eyes. “You’re not speaking derisively, are you?”

“Certainly not!”

“Because an awful lot of people do, if they know you’re an author. Which is why we all of course use pseudonyms, some of which are British. As to the use of the English language throughout the country, you’d have to look in the
Encyclopaedia Sebastiana
for the whys and wherefores. But my understanding is that at some time in the early nineteenth century the then reigning prince decided to simplify the matter of language, the choice of which in conversation had become trendily arbitrary. It was chic, especially among the better class of ladies, to address a person in an exotic tongue. The other would of course endeavor to one-up the first by replying in an even more obscure language. The universal use of English seemed the answer, for what is it but a compound of many other tongues, beginning as German, taking on Latin from the Romans, then French from the Normans, and so on, and eventually even collecting such exotica as
pajama
from Persian by way of Hindustani and
goober
from Bantu?”

During the course of the foregoing remarks I had emptied my glass. I rose now and pursued Inga, who was at the turn of the table with her bottle. While she poured, I was addressed by the nearby Hozenblatt.

“I say, Wren, perhaps you could settle this argument I’m having with Smerd. I maintain that Montenegro is a peak near Kilimanjaro in Africa, whereas he insists it’s a very dark wine of the Jura. What do you say?”

“Neither. He was a Latin American singer of the bossa-nova era, now almost forgotten.”

Smerd was a husky, powerful-looking man, whose constant expression seemed to be a scowl. I asked Hinkle what sort of thing Smerd wrote.

“He’s our muckraker. He exposes people, often literally, as when he’s researching the prevalence of dirty feet. He’s not above knocking you to the ground, tearing off your shoes and socks, and prying your toes apart, looking for toe jams.”

I glanced again at the author in question, but my eyes were attracted to a man on his left, a big fat jolly writer with a high-colored face and watery eyes. He had taken the bottle away from Inga, a new bottle, and putting its mouth to his, lifted its base into the air.

I asked Hinkle who that was.

“Riesling,” said he. “Our literary critic.”

When I looked again at Riesling I saw him emptying the bottle unto the very last drops, to catch which, on his protruded red tongue, he held the neck perhaps a foot overhead. Then without warning he hurled the bottle at Merkin, who however caught it easily. Riesling roared-wept with laughter.

“No doubt, despite his jovial appearance, he wields a savage pen?”

“Not at all,” said Hinkle. “He writes only praise.”

“Surprises keep coming,” I said. “What kind of thing does he write about?”

“Poetry is his great specialty.”

“There are many Sebastiani poets?”

“Not one,” Hinkle said.

“How’s that?”

“Riesling writes essays, even long books, about great poetry that has never been written.”

“Nobody ever tries to write poetry?”

“They’d keep it a secret if they did,” Hinkle said with feeling. “Riesling had sworn to murder anyone who tries. Even Smerd, strong and brutal as he is, is scared of Riesling in that regard.”

My second glassful was now gone. I twitched a finger at Inga, and when she came to me with a newly opened bottle, I took it from her and tried to ape Riesling’s stunt. But for the life of me I couldn’t swallow in consecutive gulps more than about a third of the contents. The critic really was a remarkable talent.

As I drank, Hinkle identified the rest of the authors and their genres. As it happened, only Blond women wrote fiction, and according to him it was all obscene.

“Explicit hardcore sex, eh?”

He snorted indignantly. “There’s no normal, decent crotchwork, if that’s what you mean. This is real
filth.
The heroine is saved from some peril by the big, handsome, and wealthy nobleman, who then asks for her hand in marriage. The one I read made me puke my guts out. I wouldn’t want one to get into the hands of any daughter of mine, I tell you.”

When he had finished, I asked, “Are there many Sebastianers who read books? If so, where do they get them? Not at the library.”

“Various places,” Hinkle said. “Whichever would be appropriate to the theme of the particular book. My own, for example, are distributed where children congregate: playgrounds, birthday parties, and so on. Hozenblatt’s tomes, being so heavy, are stacked in gyms used by weight lifters. The female porn is made available at hairdressing salons.”

“And Riesling’s criticism?” The large, jovial man fascinated me. It looked as though he seized life and made it groan.

Hinkle shrugged. “The fact is, it’s never been printed.” He leaned closer to me. “Some say, never been written. None of the rest of us has ever seen it, I know that.”

“Remarkable! But he seems happy enough, doesn’t he? Is he telling us something?” I took another swallow of wine. “And does anybody do playwriting, which I raffishly call my own racket?”

“No one,” said Hinkle.

“Then the art would be another good subject for Riesling!” I cried. I was feeling the wine now. I looked across at the critic. He had got Inga to bring him another enormous plate of food, great forkfuls of which he was shoveling into his open mouth. His eyes were closed in bliss.

“Hey, Riesling!” I shouted. He opened his watery eyes but continued to eat. “Catch!” I hurled the bottle at him. With horror I watched him do nothing whatever to seize or deflect it. It struck him squarely in the forehead and bounced off as if it, or his skull, were made of rubber. He closed his eyes again and went on eating.

I shouted his name once more, and then:

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely, and more temperate...”

The critic immediately dropped his loaded fork, went to his armpit, and brought out a large automatic pistol. His first shot broke the glass in front and slightly to the right of me; the slug continued past my forearm with a hideous whistle.

I didn’t wait for another. I plunged to the floor and left the room on running hands and feet. I hurled myself down the stairs and dashed out the door of the pink house and leaped into the waiting rickshaw, ordering Helmut to depart on the double.

But, looking back, I saw I was not pursued. The life of the Sebastiani authors, however intramurally passionate it was, never crossed the threshold to make contact with the great world. And no doubt that was best for the country.

Once we were beyond the Street of Words, I directed Helmut to pull over to the curb. Riesling’s attack had returned me to sobriety. I realized that I should sit quietly somewhere and try to make some sense of what I’d seen and heard since arriving in Saint Sebastian. I might use Helmut as a sounding board. He was so stupid that I would not appear foolish no matter what nonsense I bounced off him; also, he had no personal axe to grind.

We were on a street of low wooden sheds, each separated from the next by some distance; no people were in view or in hearing.

“Here’s how it looks to me,” I said towards Helmut but really to myself. “The prince is a pervert, an eccentric, and so on, but as rulers go, he’s far from being the worst imaginable, because he has no effect on the country.”