The Cannibal (5 page)

I followed, far ahead of them, the clay contours of the railroad tracks,
crossed the wooden scaffold
over the canal, smelled the rivulets of fog,
heard the slapping of deflated, flat rubber boats against the rocks, made my way across ruts
and pieces of shattered wood. I knew that soon the American on the motorcycle, the only
Allied overseer in this part of Germany, would be passing through the town, shivering with
cold, mud-covered and trembling, hunched forward over the handle bars, straining with
difficulty to see the chopped-up road in the darkness. The main highway, cracked badly from
armored convoys, crossed the town at a sharp bend where the low wet fields faced the abrupt
end of a few parallel streets of shapeless brick houses. A log lay across the road, heavy
and invisible. For a moment, I remembered my true love, and then I was following the rough
line of the log, leaving the town behind, and slipping in haste, I dropped down beside the
two soft murmuring voices and leaned against the steep embankment.

“He’ll be here soon.”

“Ja, der Tod
.”

Backs to the road, we looked out across the endless grey fields and almost
expected to see barrels of smoke and the red glare of shooting flares through the twisted
stunted trees.

Jutta could not believe that I was in danger, but some dull warning voice
seemed to try to speak from the leaning buildings, and the Census-Taker babbled in her ear;
some voice, a consideration, tried to force its way through her blunted journey. As she
passed the building where Balamir had once been kept, she felt this new twist in things and
did not want to lose me. Years before she would have seen the face pressed to the window and
would have heard from his lips what was in her heart: “I don’t want to see those birds
smashed!” Balamir first
screamed so long ago to his startled nurse. Jutta
hurried, pushing the drunk man in front of her towards the hill, and began to think that
Stella was a strange woman to take a man crazy with the stars into the house, while out in
the cold, I, her lover, had to wait for the puttering of the motor-bike, for the saddlebags,
the prize.

“Stella sings like an angel,” cried the crowd, and the Bavarian orchestra
played all the louder. Some of them were shocked, some annoyed, others opened their big
hearts and wanted to join in the chorus, while some looked out into the sultry night. The
largest of them were eager waiters whose black jackets showed here and there with darker
patches of velvet from stains, whose stout arms bore platters of beer and who paused near
the kitchen doors to hear the new singer. The officers in their new grey tunics were
slightly smaller and the girls were smaller yet—but still were Nordic women, straight,
blonde, strong and unsupple. Even the vines on the trellises were thick and round, swaying
only slightly out in the heat. Heads nodded close together at the tables in the garden. In
the brightly-lit room the wooden chairs and tables were uncarved, unornamented, and the
white walls and pillared ceiling were remote. It did not seem possible that enough blue
smoke and shadow could rise to make the hall alluring. The men talked together, the clatter
of cups intruded. Their backs were straight, they nodded cordially, and the light gleamed on
undecorated chests. But it was only ten, still dusk, still formal. They smiled. Stella
twisted the handkerchief in her fingers, squeezed it strongly into her damp palms and
continued to sing and to smile. Then she found it simple, found that her throat opened and
her head could turn and
smile, that she could move about and thrust into
her shoulders the charm of the song. They listened, turned away, then listened again, and
like a girl with breeding and a girl with grace, she made them look and sang to them. First,
sadly, then with her eyes bright and her shoulders thrust backwards:

Some of them laughed and twisted in their seats. She shook her hair
loose, she felt like telling them they could come to her, that they could send flowers.

“Must I then, must I then come back to your heart And smile again?”

She moved as if she had a sunflower just beneath her bosom, as if she
could draw them sailing on a sacred lake, and first a crackling chicken, then a duckling,
then a head of cheese fell under her swoop. But always she looked directly over into their
eyes startled from eating, or eyes large from some private imagination. Her bosom, larger
than her hips, swayed with pleasure. And only a moment before she had stood in the left
wing, hidden by dusty curtains and sheets of music, feeling that never in the world could
she face the lights and attention of the drinking hall. The
Sportswelt Brauhaus
,
austere and licensed, patronized and rushed upon, coldly kept her out for a moment, then
with a smart burst from the accordion, drew her down, deeply as possible, into the fold.
After the summer broke, she had come, and tonight she stood before them all, her body slowly
showing through the gown, more and more admired for her stately head, singing,

They clapped, chuckled, and slowly the undecorated chests slid open, the
lights swirled about in the fog, while Stella, arm around the accordion player, sang
anything at all that came to mind. Her ancestors had run berserk, cloaked themselves in
animal skins, carved valorous battles on their shields, and several old men, related thinly
in blood from a distant past, had jumped from a rock in Norway to their death in the sea.
Stella, with such a history running thickly in her veins, caught her breath and flung
herself at the feet of her horned and helmeted kinsmen, while the Bavarians schnitzled back
and forth in a drunken trio.

In an alley behind the hall timbered with consecrated ash, the darkness and
odor of wet stone rose in spirals of steam as from below a horse on a winter’s day. The
sound of the violin, jumping dangerously along the length of the alley walls, merged with
the basso wheezing of a lascivious merchant and swept overhead into the heat of the
garden.

Ernie, the
Brauhaus
owner’s son, shuffled his feet to two dry
spots, leaned his shoulder against the slippery rock, and steadied his face covered with
dueling scars, down into the green darkness. Stella’s unknown, unnamed voice, beginning to
reach the crown of her triumph, leaped straight from the small bright window behind his back
and fell about the heads of those in the garden, dumb with love. Ernie wiped his hands on
his trousers, leaned back and looked up into the sweltering night, his pockets stuffed with
hundred mark notes, his eyes blind to the flickering sky. He saw only emptiness in the
day’s returns, felt the scratches from a skillful bout burn on his cheek.
His tongue was thick and numb with beer. The Merchant, barely afloat in the humid
atmosphere, still cradling jade and ivory blocks in his arms and girded with a Turkish robe,
made a perfect soft target in the darkness. Ernie breathed in and out on the same air, the
pig’s tail lay heavily on his stomach, and he gave no thought to steel blades or the
Merchant’s fat bulk. Howls of laughter were muffled inside the hall, low voices floated over
the garden wall in tones that said there was something to hide, and the heady smell of
tulips, roses, German-valor-petals, hydrangeas and cannon flowers sank into the pea-green
pit of stench at his feet. The flowers turned their pistils out to catch the rain if it
should come, the Merchant’s breath drew closer, and the moon shone once in the heavens,
loaded like a sac with water.

Ernie squeezed his left hand, the hand with the last two fingers gone from a
hatchet stroke, into his pocket tight with bills, and turned back towards the light, towards
the free men of the hall. He would sit on a worshipped pile of granite, a small duelist in
the hall of kings. The Merchant tried to follow but, like a laboring hind, slipped and fell,
his fat body dragging along over the stones. He could not call out and each time he moved he
slid deeper. Ernie heard his thudding fall and walked faster, trying to find again a place
for light and song. He measured his steps and seemed to tread upon the whole world of
Germany as he walked, half-consciously, back near the aurora of tabled clans, disciplined
faces, and all the irony and fellowship of his men-at-arms. A man in grey staggered past,
ready with malice or with a bow at the waist, and far in the back of the
alley Ernie heard him trip against the fallen Merchant, heard a muffled word against
the background of summer nightbirds.

Ernie, because of the fingers gone from his hand and the ugly sight of three
remaining claws, could never ride a black mare into the din of volleying balls, or crawl
hand over hand through the wet fields of Belgium. He touched the middle and forefinger with
the thumb and heard the woman’s voice crying out to the men young in soul. Inside he sat at
his father’s table under the shadows and far to the rear, and melting into the crowd became
nondescript, feigned to strike out with ignored curt expressions.

Stella, like her father, held them at bay; and, losing one by one those
traits that were hers, absorbed more and more the tradition that belonged to all. She did
not lisp when she sang, but boomed the words in an unnatural voice. And the gestures she
developed came with ease. She walked from the archway of her father’s house to the audience
of the
Sportswelt
transgressing natural thought as clearly as she passed the stages
of the months. She, the sorceress, sent them boiling and held them up for joy, feeling pain
only in the last moment before sleep, half-dressed, on the bedroom floor. Gerta, the nurse,
thought the Devil had come a long way from the forest to find her. Every dress she owned,
every male plate of armor, every bone comb and silken ban, was stamped with the seal of the
camp follower, and screaming in nightmares to the dead ears of her sleeping father, she
followed the weeks of 1914. Beneath her eyes she had painted indigo stains as if she had
been beaten, and her eyes swept from tall black trees to the glaciers of dead warriors,
green with the tint of pine trees, sober with a longing
that came of
eighteen years of summer patios and a partition of a princely nursery.

After the last chorus of the song, she bowed straight-legged from her
flaring hips, flushed to their applause, and made her way to old Herr Snow’s table, storing
appreciation up in her heart, storing each face beside the photograph of the white flaking
head of Gerta, the nurse. Blue smoke floated above the sawdust and the tide of conversation
rolled in the lion cage. She sat where Herr Snow, with his red beard, indicated, felt his
wrists slide her smoothly forward until she touched the table. She looked from face to face.
“You were excellent,” he said. “This is my son, Ernst, who enjoys your singing so much.”
Ernie, thin and more alive with beer, pushed back his chair and nodded, fixed her as he
might have fixed a rosy-cheeked sister, adult and come alive from his free past. “And,” said
Herr Snow, “this is Mr. Cromwell, a guest of mine.” Mr. Cromwell smiled with an easy drunken
grace and filled her glass. He did not miss the charm of London or of the English
countryside rollicking in summer but slept late and heard no cocks crowing in the early
dawn.

“You’re English?” asked Stella.

“Yes, but I particularly like Germany. The lakes and cities seem like vistas
cut into the ice age. You sing well.”

Herr Snow was proud of Ernie because his other son, a boy of nine, forever
wore his head strapped in a brace, and the words that came from the immovable mouth came
also from a remote frightening world. Old Snow, prosperous and long owner of the
Sportswelt
, looked with hard admiration on Ernie’s face, saw his own eyes and
nose staring resentfully
back. With mute excitement, Stella followed each
jagged crevice of the scars, noticed how they dug beneath the cheeks highlighting the bones,
how the eyes were pressed between encroaching blocks of web-like tissue. She waited for the
three claws of the left hand to close talon-like just above her knee, grew warm to the
close-kept face down in its corner. The orchestra filled out the room behind her, roasted
apples fell from the bosom of an oracle, burnt and golden, and gradually the three men drew
closer, warm with all the taste of a chivalric age. She covered the glass before her with
the golden hair and saw for a moment in its swirling depths, the naked cowardice of the
fencer, the future fluttering wings of the solitary British plane leaving its token pellet
in the market place, her mother’s body rolling around it like a stone stained forever, the
stain becoming dry and black as onyx.

The rain had begun to fall and the summer thunder drifted over the wet
leaves, coursed over the darkened glistening steeples. The carriage rocked to and fro, water
splashing from the wheels, dripping from the deep enclosures of passing doors. They traveled
slowly down
die Heldenstrasse
, hearing only the soft rain, the chopping of the
steel hoofs, the smooth movements of leather. Oiled gunmetal springs swung them easily
through the June night while Mephistopheles, crouching in a choir-room, circled this
eighteenth day of the month in red. He, in his black cowl, called the sleeping swans to pass
by them on the lake in the park and the coachman flicked the whip over the horse’s ears.

“Why did you want to take me home?” she asked.

“I’m fond of the color of your hair and eyes.”

Stella felt nothing near her, could feel no man or
beast
or spirit lurking under the rain, no hand crept towards hers. She could not even feel or
hear his breathing, only the steady turning of the axletree. No man in the world, sitting as
Cromwell sat, soft felt brim curling with rain, fine straight features and wide nostrils
drinking in the lavender, no such man or leader of men could have caused a single ripple in
her even tone.

“Why didn’t you stay home, in your English home?” Her hair was becoming damp
and heavy.

“Home? Why I don’t really have a home, and in fact, I don’t believe anyone
has.” Now, with a change of wind, she could smell his scented breath, but he was foreign,
unreal, was a humor she could brush away with her white hand. “I feel that I am one of those
middle-aged men whom, in a little while, people will call an expatriate.” In full light he
looked a little old, resembled a smart but tottering wolfhound guarding its own grave. And
Cromwell, like a change of mind or a false impression, like an unexpected meeting or a
mistake in the dark, filled Ernie’s place and caused in Stella a fleeting disbelief; she
expected to see the lacerated face aloof in the corner of her carriage. He rode as an
Archduke, unconsciously wiping the rain from his waistcoat, smiling slightly with lonely
intoxication. Stella looked beyond the figure of the fat coachman to see the angular street
unwind.

“I think that everyone has a home.” Her voice was musical like the
axletree.

When he spoke, it was not quite as if he wanted to talk to her. His throat
was hidden by an upturned flowing collar.

“I, for one, don’t even remember my mother’s face. England is a land of
homeless people, but the
Germans, though just as homeless, are a little
slow in realizing it. And besides, they have a beautiful capacity for ideals of conquest, a
traditional heroism.” His mouth was becoming heavy with a very sour taste of sleep, a taste
of finding it still dark beyond the raised shade, the sourness accumulated from many
unwanted meals, and still he kept his head in a smiling manner, looked into the flowering
darkness with a pleasant friendly way of practiced youth.

“The bedclothes, curtains, my mother’s gowns, the very way I looked as a
child, were always unfamiliar. Unfamiliar.”

The slight layer of accent beneath his perfect speech began to disrupt her
isolation. The soft ribbon of street started to break up into glaring bricks, into actual
corners, into black patches of shadow against the curb, the horse stumbling and nodding. The
rain shook in the linden trees.