Nowhere (15 page)

“What you just said to Helmut was at the threshold of intelligibility for me. It seemed some combination of several modern European tongues.”

Olga was staring at me, a new emotion behind the lenses of her severe spectacles. She said, “You are not altogether unattractive.”

“Uh, thank you, Olga. Neither are you. In fact, you’re beautiful, even as you’re dressed right now, which I gather is supposed to be antiseptic.”

“You don’t have one of those New York diseases, do you?”

“Pardon?”

“Herpes or that peculiarly virulent new strain of gonorrhea?”

“Good heavens, no!”

“Then I want to screw.” She began to remove her clothing. “This may not be impeccable revolutionary practice, because you really must get off that cable without delay, but I have normal sexual appetites, and who knows when such a moment will come again?” Her long skirt was already off and hanging over one of the chairs. I noted for what it was worth that irrespective of her outer attire, the overabundance of the revolutionary’s garb or the brevity of the stewardess’s uniform, underwear was unknown to Olga.

I was about to protest in the name of my natural modesty when it occurred to me that such a moment as this would beautifully suit my intention to escape. In another instant Olga would be starkers, whereas I had not yet even pretended to begin to undress, a lack of preparedness which she had not yet, in her egocentricity, noticed.

But the fact was that when Olga had stripped to the altogether, she was not as easy to leave as I had anticipated. Indeed, in a sexual career of some dimension, I had not seen the like of her body, for which “magnificent” would have been an inadequate term. I began, all but involuntarily, to remove my own clothes.... Having no intention of catering to those who hold a book in one hand, I omit the details of the succeeding moments, except to say that Olga proved to be even more of a handful than she looked: I might even go so far as to say that her performance led me to question whether I had ever previously had any encounter which could be called carnal.

I was not aware of how much this experience had taken out of me until I heard a snapping of fingers and an impatient voice saying, “Come along, Wren. The Revolution can’t wait while you snooze,” and opened my eyes and saw that Olga was all dressed while I still lay on the tabletop, feeling as though I were a half-melted stick of butter. It was chagrining to me to remember that not so long before I had been planning to jump her while I was dressed and she was naked!

I creakily climbed down and retrieved the clothes I had dropped on the floor. Bending my back was an exercise in anguish.

“Let’s go,” she nagged.

“You’re stronger than you think,” I wincingly murmured as I secured my belt, which now could be cinched one hole further on the skinny side.

However, once I was attired, I reflected that we were on terra firms now, and not in the horizontal situation in which she had a natural advantage (please, no feminist outcries: whoever
contains
another is perforce boss!). She was big and strong, but I was wiry and had studied the martial arts for at least four sessions with an Oriental whose dojo shared the second floor of a ramshackle Garment District building with a bathhouse staffed by his female countrymen, adepts in that art of pressure-point massage called
Shiatsu,
which is not obscene (I should say, not
necessarily
obscene) and had the polka-dotted belt to prove it.

I assumed the fighting stance taught me (not sans pain) by my slant-eyed
sensei,
and said, “I’m not going to be kept your prisoner, Olga, but I will promise, after only a little more investigation—for frankly I’m eager to get home—to return to the USA and make a thorough report to my superiors on Saint Sebastian. Be assured that your argument will be well represented, if you’ll answer only a few questions. First, if you Blonds are as clever as you obviously are when you drop your masks of subservience, why have you taken so long to make your move? So far as I can see, the prince does little to enforce his will on the populace. Such power as he possesses seems to be used exclusively for self-protection. The security measures at the palace would bring bliss to a paranoiac. I have not encountered any soldiers or any policemen but a couple of low-comedy municipal constables. So who enforces the tyranny of which you complain?”

Olga’s face had taken on a very bland, very blond mien. “And what else would you like to know?”

“Well, what’s puzzling me is, I haven’t yet met many examples nor have I seen much evidence of a Sebastiani middle class. In America, even in New York, most of the people you see at any given time, unless you constantly frequent the venues of the lumpenproletariat or the watering places of the plutocrats, are those in the middle: they work at something during the day and come home at night; they are usually married and probably have offspring; it is they who give the plurality to whichever presidential candidate, after he and his rivals have so strenuously curried their favor. The news is published and/or broadcast for them. Most kinds of entertainment are offered with them in mind, and cars, refrigerators, and home computers are designed to meet their existing needs or create new ones. This kind of people has been conspicuous by its absence thus far in my Sebastiani experience. I’ve seen a few jeering urchins; a clutch of scholars, a gaggle of authors; some hotel personnel,
et al.,
and most recently, a band of revolutionaries. But where are the ordinary folks, the regulars, the normal population, the crowd, the mob, the herd, elevated over the centuries of growing enlightenment in the Western countries, from Spenser’s ‘rascal many’ to ‘the people’ of the social reformers, and finally, at least in the US, to the sort of human beings who fill the stands at the Super Bowl—which as you undoubtedly know, flying to the States as you do so often, is the major public event of any year in my country.”

Exhausted by speaking so long while standing in the karate position, thighs at right angles to my calves, fists at the ready, I straightened up to receive Olga’s answer. But as soon as I was off guard she kneed me in the stomach and, as I buckled, struck me with a right cross that would have felled any of the current contenders. I blacked out as I fell, but came to not long after meeting the floor.

Olga stooped, lifted me to her back, and with the fireman’s carry transported me along the tunnel to the overhead trapdoor. Riding comfortably along on her back, I expected her to carry me up the ladder with the same ease in which she had negotiated the tunnel, but my awakening was rude. She put me on my feet, back against the ladder, and continued to slap my face long after it should have been obvious I had regained consciousness.

“Will you stop?” I cried, fending off her hands. “And don’t attack me again! I subscribe to an ancient moral code by which a man cannot strike a woman. I tell you it was a better world when that was in force.” I woozily, sorely climbed the ladder to the room where the women were making giant firecrackers. No doubt it was from this source that the makings had come for the bomb that destroyed my home.

Olga emerged and then closed the trapdoor behind her.

“Wasn’t it careless to have left that open all this while?” I asked.

“No. They would never come in here. They’re scared of the gunpowder.” She hooked her arm through mine. “We’re going to the cable office now. Don’t try to escape unless you want to be permanently crippled.”

She had been an animal when undressed. I still felt half lame. I was disinclined to test my strength against hers once more. Beyond this consideration, it was not unpleasant to be so closely clutched by such a woman as she: her right breast rubbed my left biceps at each step, and occasionally I was brushed by the arch of her Lachaise hip. Hers was the most generous body with which I had ever been intimate. I believed it unfortunate that she was so obsessively political.

We walked through the town. I cannot explain why our route was more or less flat when the rickshaw ride had been as if on a roller coaster, unless it was that Helmut had taken a circuitous and undulating journey for the purpose of flexing his muscles.

I tried again to talk to Olga. “I wish you would give me some explanation as to why you Blonds are in the existing situation. You are all splendid physical specimens of humanity, and I suspect that the members of the Revolutionary Council are not the only intelligent members of your breed. How is it, then, that you are servants to those whose masters you should be? Are you aware that only a half-century ago a dictator named Hitler, in a country not too far from here, made your type his ideal?”

At last I had said something that provoked a response from her. “And was not Hitler himself dark-haired, sallow-skinned, narrow-shouldered, and pudgy-bellied? And were any of his close associates blond or, for that matter, even physically fit?”

“But is it your implication that attractive, healthy, fair-complexioned persons are at natural disadvantage in Europe or, for that matter, the human race? I don’t think that blonds are losers in Scandinavia, or in American show business.”

But Olga had returned to silence. Perhaps she was the woman-of-action type, to whom matters of rationale were boring. I’ll admit that despite my job (which I always think of as temporary), I tend to look for a theoretical place in which to file each phenomenon. We made an odd but complementary couple.

Had the pace she set not been so demanding, I might have enjoyed the walk more as we passed a series of colorful open-air markets. At the largest of these, all manner of food was for sale, great wheels of golden-fleshed, red-rinded cheese, plump artichokes, sleek aubergines, striped melons, blushing pears, wicker-encased demijohns of ruby-red wine, jugs of foaming cider, and eviscerated pheasants, woodcock, and hares, suspended from boothfront hooks. The food stalls were attended by out-sized women, with great thick red arms and strong, raucous voices, in which they exchanged abuse and cried the virtues of their wares, which included generous displays of the fruits of the sea (though so far as I knew, Saint Sebastian was nowhere near saltwater): bins of corrugated green oysters, blue-black mussels, the little marine hedgehogs called sea urchins, living langoustes and crayfish, huge crosscuts of tuna, tiny prawns, tentacular squid...

In a contiguous square was a riotously multicolored flower market. Here the vendors were winsome girls in the years of pubescence, their faces fresh as the blossoms they sold. Then on into an entire street lined on either curbing with birdcages, tended by short black-haired men of cheery mien, who exchanged whistles, chirps, squeaks, with the fowl that were their wares: minuscule finches, high-crested cockatoos, peevish-eyed parrots, a laughing magpie, and warbling canaries.

But one conspicuous lack distinguished each of the markets from those elsewhere in the world: no customers were in evidence!

“There you are,” I said to Olga. “Who buys the goods offered for sale by these merchants? Again I ask, where is the
public?
”

By now we were turning into the familiar street in which the Hotel Bristol was situated. We had passed no fellow pedestrians during a twenty-minute walk, and no vehicle had used any of the nearby roads.

Olga’s response was to nod towards the hotel and jerk my arm. “There’ll be time enough to send the cable. I’m feeling lustful again. You’re not as sexually ineffectual as I supposed, though probably part of your allure for me is simply that you have dark hair and are puny.”

I overlooked the slur in my amazement at her appetites. Perhaps she had revealed her exploitable weakness. After the workout she had given me in the underground room, such legendary satyrs as Victor Hugo and John Paul Jones would have needed time for recuperation, and therefore it was not likely that I would be capable of soon again being distracted from an intention to escape.

So I showed a burst of false enthusiasm, brought her arm more tightly against my side (where a rib was still sore from the pressure of her steel thighs), and insofar as it was ever possible with Olga, pretended to take the initiative in a vigorous stride into the hotel.

When the concierge saw Olga his face contorted in revulsion, and he said to me, “Blonds are not permitted to enter the hotel except in the role of a servant.”

I was caught by surprise, but Olga said immediately, “I am nurse.” She reached into one of the capacious pockets of her coat and produced a small purse, which in turn yielded a document encased in glassine. “Is license.” She showed this to the concierge, who waved it away in disgusted assent. Yet Olga found it needful to go further. “Will give enema,” said she. “He has tourist constipation.” No doubt it could have been predicted that in Saint Sebastian the complaint suffered by visitors to other countries would be reversed.

No sooner had the elevator doors closed on us than Olga seized and opened my belt buckle and pulled my trousers to my ankles. I defended my drawers, but with two quick hands at the elastic in back, she was rapidly baring my fundament. The last-named was pressed against the rear wall of the car, and it could anyway not answer her needs, so soon she abandoned that phase of the assault and went again to my groin, this time with a combination of feint and brute power, and succeeded in exposing it just as we reached our destination, the fourth floor, and the door opened on Clive McCoy.

“I see it hasn’t taken you any time at all to go bad in a permissive society,” said he with a dirty smirk.

Olga pulled me off the elevator and in the hallway continued to try to undress me as though we were alone and behind a closed door. She was utterly devoid of shame. I suppose it was the presence of my alcoholic countryman that gave me the strength to hold my own against her for a few moments, and then, when the tide was turning back in her favor, to knock her out with a punch to the jaw that almost broke my knuckles.

McCoy had stayed in the hall to watch the ruckus, and when Olga was down he gave me a hand of applause. I pulled up and secured my clothing, and was immediately contrite: I knelt and examined my opponent for serious damage. I found none. She breathed regularly.