The Avram Davidson Treasury (22 page)

The persimmons of Peking are not like the American persimmons; they are larger and flattened at each end. In order for the flavor to be at its best, the fruits must have begun to rot. The top is removed and cream is put on, heavy cream which has begun to turn sour. This is food fit for a god and I was the only one present who was eating it. The Russians thought that persimmons were only for the Chinese, and the Chinese did not eat cream.

There was an American at the next table, in the guise of an interfering angel, talking about famine relief. The fool did not realize that famine is itself a relief, better even than war, more selective in weeding out the unfit and reducing the surfeit of people from which swarming areas such as China and India are always suffering. I smiled as I heard him, and savored the contrast between the sweet and the sour on My spoon, and I heard her draw in her breath and I looked down and there was the old Chinese, in his smutty robe and with some object wrapped in grimed cloth next to him as he squatted on the floor. I heard her murmur something to him in Chinese; she greeted him, called him
lau-yay—
old master or sir—and something else which I knew I knew but could not place. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and cheap scent. The fool at the next table threw the old man some money and gestured him to begin.

His appearance was like that of any beggar, a wrinkled face, two or three brown teeth showing when he smiled in that fawning way. He unwrapped his bundle and it was an empty chinaware bowl and two wooden wands. He covered the bowl with cloth again, rapped it with wands, uncovered it, and there was a goldfish swimming. He covered, he rapped and rapped and whisked away the cloth and the bowl was gone. I darted My foot out to the place where it had been, but there was nothing there.

The American at the next table spread out a newspaper on the floor, the old man rolled his sleeves up his withered, scrannel, pallid-sallow arms; he spread the cloth, struck it with his sticks, and then removed it, showing a much larger bowl with the goldfish, on top of the newspaper. So it had not come from some recess in the floor, nor from his sleeve. I did not like to see anyone else exercising power; I spoke roughly to the old man, and he giggled nervously and gathered his things together. The fools opposite began to protest, I looked at them and their voices died away. I looked at
her
, to see if she would still presume to call him
old master;
but she was My creation and she laughed aloud at him and this pleased Me.

My powers increased; with drops of ink I could kill and I could make alive. The agents of the men of Yenan came to Me at night and I wrote things for them and they left offerings of money on the table.

Infinitely adaptive, I, polymorphous, porphyrogenitive, creating iniquity, transgression, and sin.

But sometimes at night, when they had left and we had gone to bed and I pretended to sleep as others, sometimes there was a noise of a faint rattling and I saw something in the room turning and flashing, like a flash of gold, and the shadows loomed like the shadow of an old man. And once it came to Me—the meaning of the Chinese words she had used once. They meant
father-in-law,
but I could not remember when she had used them, though distantly I knew she had no more husband. I awoke her and made her worship Me and I was infinitely godlike.

When was this? Long ago, perhaps. It seems that I do not remember as well as formerly. There is so little to remember of present life. I have withdrawn from the world. I do not really know where I now am. There is a wall of some sort, it extends everywhere I turn, it is white, often I press my lips against it. I have lips. I do not know if I have hands and feet, but I do not need them. The light, too, has an odd quality here. Sometimes I seem to be in a small place and at other times it seems larger. And in between these times something passes overhead and all goes dark and there is a noise like the beating of heavy staves and then it is as if I am nothing…no place… But then all is as before and there is light once more and I can move freely through the light, up and down; I can turn, and when I turn swiftly I can see a flashing of gold, of something gold, and this pleases and diverts Me.

But when I am still I cannot see it at all.

I
NTRODUCTION BY
P
ETER
S. B
EAGLE

Having reached the stage of life where I am perfectly willing to believe
anything
of academics, I take a special personal delight in this lesser-known tale of Avram’s. Its libelous suggestion of the lengths to which a museum director might go to protect his career isn’t, of course, the only reason that I’m so fond of this story. I love its central notion, which I find hauntingly credible, as so many of Avram’s modest proposals and almost-theories so often are. (For further reference—not to mention a lifetime’s worth of truly wondrous delight—get at any cost, financial or moral, a copy of
Adventures in Unhistory,
published by George Scithers’ Owlswick Press in 1993.)

And then there’s the damn
language
again… It isn’t so much that Professor Sanzmann endearingly says “Chairmany” for Germany, or “walley” for valley. It’s that he refers to “the nexten walley,” and to peasants who “huddle fearingly together,” as he would if he were translating himself directly from the German as he goes along. Avram is never wrong about stuff like that, not even when the translation is from a language that doesn’t exist. I know I keep saying it, but when it comes to pure sensitivity to the human use of words, the man has few peers and no equals.

Without wishing to give away the kicker of the story-within-a-story that propels “The Ogre,” let me say that in recent years similar speculations, developed at lumbering wide-screen length, have become something of a cottage industry. For poignancy and provocativeness, I’ll back this small jewel of a tale against any of them.

OGRE IN THE VLY

W
HEN THE MENACE OF
Dr. Ludwig Sanzmann first arose, like a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, Dr. Fred B. Turbyfil, at twenty-seven, had been the youngest museum director in the country; and now at thirty-five he was still one of the youngest. Moreover, he had a confident, if precarious, hold on greater glories to come. High on the list of benefactors and patrons, Mr. Winfield Scott H. Godbody was an almost-dead (in more ways than one) certainty to will most of his substance to what would then become the Godbody Museum of Natural History: Dr. Fred B. Turbyfil, Director. The salary would be splendid, the expense account lavish and tax-free, and the Director would have ample time to finish his great work, at present entitled
Man Before the Dawn—
recondite, yet eminently readable. There were already seventeen chapters devoted to the Mousterian, or Neanderthal, Era alone. (It would be certain to sell forever to schools and libraries: a big book, firm in the grasp, profusely illustrated and done in so captivating a style that even a high school senior, picking it up unwarily in search of nudes, would be unable to extricate himself for hours.)

Mr. Godbody was a skeptic of the old-fashioned sort. “Where did Cain get his wife?” was a favorite cackle, accompanied by a nudge of his bony elbow. “Found any feathers from angels’ wings yet?” was another.

He had pioneered in supplying cotton prints to flour millers for sacking. The brand name washed out, the figured cloth was then used for underwear and children’s dresses by the thrifty farmers. This had made him a wealthy man, and increased his devotion to Science—the Science which had destroyed the cosmogony of the M.E. Church, South, and invented washable ink.

There was, at the moment, a minor hitch. Old Mr. Godbody affected to be shaken by the recent revelation of scandal in the anthropological hierarchy. From this respectable group, whose likenesses were known to every school child, long since having replaced Major and Minor Prophets alike in prestige and esteem, from this jolly little club—judgment falling like a bolt of thunder—the Piltdown Man had been expelled for cheating at cards. If Piltdown Man was a fake, he demanded querulously, why not all the rest? Java Man, Peiping Man, Australopithecus tranvalensis—all bone-scraps, plaster of Paris, and wishful thinking? In vain, Turbyfil assured him that competent scholars had been leery of H. Piltdown for years; ugly old Mr. Godbody testily replied, “Then why didn’t you say so?” Having lost one faith in his youth, the textile print prince was reluctant to lose another in his old age. But Dr. Turbyfil trusted his patron’s doubt was only a passing phase. His chief anxiety, a well-modulated one, was whether Mr. Godbody’s health would carry him over the few weeks or months necessary to get past this crochet.

In sum, Dr. Turbyfil was about to reap the rewards of virtue and honest toil, and when he reflected on this (as he often did) it amused him to sing—a trifle off-key—a song from his childhood, called “Bringing in the Sheaves.” Prior to his coming to Holden, the museum—an architectural gem of the purest late Chester A. Arthur—had been headed by a senile, though deserving, Democrat, who had been washed into office on the high tide of the Free Silver movement.
And
the museum itself! Dr. Turbyfil found that every worthless collection of unsalable junk in the state made its way thither. Postage stamps of the sort sold by the pound on Nassau Street, stuffed and moldering opossums, tinted photographs of wall-eyed pioneers, hand-painted “china,” unclassified arrowheads by the gross, buttons from Confederate uniforms, legislative gavels, mounted fish, geological “specimens” collected by people with no faintest knowledge of geology, tomahawks—oh, there was no end to the stuff.

That is, there had been no end to the stuff until the appointment of Dr. Fred B. Turbyfil…the trash still continued to come in, of course: there was no tactful way of stopping that. There were still many people to whom it seemed, when Uncle Tatum died, that the natural thing to do with Uncle Tatum’s “collection” was to ship it to the Holden Museum. Dr. Turbyfil had developed his own technique of handling such shipments. He had then arranged—at night—in as many showcases as might be needed, prominently labeled with the donors’ names; then he had the works photographed. To the contributory family, a gracious letter of thanks. To their local newspaper, a copy of the letter. To both family and paper, a Manila envelope of glossy prints. And then, for Uncle Tatum’s musty nonsense, tomahawks and all, the blessed oblivion of the cellars. (“We are recataloguing,” Dr. T. explained to the few inquirers.)

(But you couldn’t put Dr. Sanzmann in the cellar, could you?
)

The letters of thanks were worded in phrases as unchanging as a Buddhist litany. They extolled the career of the dead pioneer, gave proper credit to the sense of public interest displayed by his heirs, and hoped that their concern for the Important Work of the Holden Museum would be shared by others. The liturgical response was seldom wanting, and took the form of a check, the amount of which was, as Dr. Turbyfil had lightly pointed out, Deductable From Income Tax.
Om mani padme hum!

Ah, that was a day when they opened the Hall of Practical Science! The governor, the senior U.S. senator, university presidents, hillbilly singers, and other public figures—scores of them. There was a real oil pump that pumped real oil, and a genuine cotton gin that ginned genuine cotton. It was the machines which set the tone for the exhibits, but Dr. Turbyfil was proudest of the huge photographic montages, mounted to give a three-dimensional effect. There was one of Mr. Opie Slawson (Slawson Oil and Natural Gas) pointing to the oil pool on the cross section (in natural color) of a typical oiliferous area. There was another of Mr. Purvie Smith (P.S. Cotton and P.S. Food Products) watching his prize steers nuzzle cottonseed cake while replicas of the lean kine of Egypt stared hungrily at a clump of grass. There were others. And how the checks had come in! And continued to come!

(
But Doktor Philosoph. Ludwig Sanzmann was coming
,
too.)

Months of preparation had gone into what was, after all, really just a prestige exhibit—the display of Bouche Perce Indian life before the Coming of the White Man. A huge semi-circular backdrop gave the illusion of distance. Buffalo grazed conveniently not too far away, and wild horses galloped along a hill crest. The primitive Bouche Perces ground corn, played games, scraped hides, wove weavings, put on war paint, rocked papooses, and received the non-socialized ministrations of the tribal medicine man. There were authentic wickiups, simulated campfires, and a bona fide buffalo skull.

The Bouche Perces (who were “Oil Indians”) drove up in their Packards from miles around, and received such a boost in tribal pride that they shortly afterward filed suit for thirty million dollars against the Federal Government. (They were finally awarded a judgment of four million, most of which the Government deducted to cover the expense of itself in allowing the Bouche Perces to be swindled, cheated, and starved for the three generations preceding the discovery of oil.) The Tribal Council voted to make the museum the custodian of its ceremonial regalia, and Dr. Turbyfil received several honorary degrees and was made a member of learned societies. The only opposition to his efforts on behalf of American Indian culture came from the oldest (and only surviving pure-blood) Bouche Perce. Her name was Aunt Sally Weatherall, she was a prominent member of the Baptist Ladies Auxiliary, and she steadfastly refused his offer to be photographed with her in front of all them Heathen Reliets and Nekked Women. She also added that if her old granddaddy had ever caught any Bouche Perce a-weaving
Navaho
blankets like that huzzy in the pitcher, he’d of slit her wizzand.

The trouble was that Aunt Sally Weatherall
wouldn’t
come, and Dr. Sanzmann
would.
Any minute now.

Dr. Turbyfil had been expecting this visit for years. Dr. Sanzmann had mentioned it at every meeting. Sometimes his tones were bright and arch, sometimes they were gloomy and foreboding and sometimes they were flat and brusque.