The Cannibal (8 page)

Her room nearest the slate roof was warm, the seascapes, spaced regularly
over the walls, filled it with blue, the birds had become silent under the window. Jutta, an
ungainly eleven-year-old child, was taking her nap at the end of the corridor in a cubicle
small and low that might have belonged to a boarding school or nunnery white and bare. Her
mouth was open and she breathed heavily, thin legs apart as if she were riding a horse.
Stella fastened the bonnet with pink and yellow ribbons, drew on her white gloves, started
down the stairs, and stopped to listen to the low ugly noises of the sleeping child. Outside
she found herself caught in front of the house in the
silence of the
crowd, and all eyes looked upward. There on the narrow balcony, squeezed side by side, was
her father still leaning on Gerta who smiled, laces fluttering against his uniform. All at
once he spoke, and the single word fell upon them hushed and excited. “Victory.” For a
moment they waited for more, watched, listened and then broke out in screams of appreciation
while the old man was led back inside the house. They did not realize that he thought the
war, which had just begun, was over, and they took up the word and sent it flying along the
street from one startled citizen to the next. Stella began to walk, her parasol catching the
shade of the enormous line of trees.

Men tipped their hats, drays rolled by with heavy rumps nodding majestically
between the shafts, chains clattering, whips stinging; small flags hung limply in shops as
if it were a holiday. A tremendous stuffed fish grinned out at her, sunlight skipping
between its blue fins, small clams grey and moist piled about like its own roe on the
chopped ice. An awning covered part of the street with orange, passers-by parted into even
chattering lanes, and children going to the park grinned, tugging ahead. In the Krupp
manufacturing works, huge steel barrels were swung by chain and arm, covered with pale green
grease and pointed through barred skylights towards the summer sky. In the jail, prisoners
looked out into the white limestone yard, carriages skimmed by on frail rubber wheels, and
lapel after lapel spotted with a white flower passed by her side. In the thrill of this
first warm exciting day with posters going up all over the city and mothers proudly patting
their sons’ heads, Stella’s aunts and uncles, less fortunate cousins and acquaintances,
fanning themselves in desolate
drawing rooms or writing down the date in
diaries, wondered how the beginning of hostilities would affect her father’s position, and
donning bright colors, prepared to call.

A swallow dipped suddenly down into the center of traffic, and up again,
successful. It was then that the headache began. It came as a dull burn might come in noon
hours on the beach, a soft sensation in her eyes; pleated under the yellow hair, it coursed
slowly down the small of her neck, and made mouthfuls of spit shimmer above the policeman’s
white-lady gloves. She held her hand to her breast because the headache was so tiny and
almost caught in her throat. “Oh, yes,” she said to herself, “I’ve seen so many artists,”
and indeed she had once passed a man slumped over a table scratching the fleas. The
seascapes about the walls of her room reminded her of the warm south, of islands where the
white sun hurt the eyes, of pebbles like the tips of her fingers that were pearl grey. She
could never laugh at anyone, a velvet shoulder brushed quickly by, sharp blues and reds
hurried along the street. “Your father was a wonderful brave loving man,” her mother would
say. Dogs barked and howled, she glanced from yellow walls to white, creating as she walked
small impressions which remained precious and a source of continual inspiration, catching a
swift dark eye of possible European fortunes, pitying the shoe with the twice normal heel.
The buildings, low, gilded, with their spires thrust a ludicrously short way into the sky,
all trying to fall upon the street, protected by iron spikes, cast a yellow fog against the
clouds. When her face was serious, when she watched the drays or passing blurred numbers cut
into stone, watched the street as it moved, when her face was vacuous, it was
a little flower, as if the larger girl had walked away to find Father. But when she
smiled the mouth was tense, desire lost upon the waving of her arms. Gerta, when the moon
was starting to sink, used to carry her away from the mother’s bedside; and, awake with the
nursemaid guarding the door, she could hear the old man snoring fitfully somewhere in the
corridor. The sun hurt her eyes; it was certainly more difficult to hear now that her head
hurt her so. “Your father was a tall man and we went to the mountains before they had
railroads.” When, infrequently, she talked to her mother, she was speaking through her, as
through a black unsteady ear-trumpet, to a very old man who sat listening, pallid in a
rocking-chair, some thirty or forty years ago. Now in his toothless eye she was to him some
rifleboy with a sack of powder at the hip. “Victory,” somebody shouted, and a boy came
running down the smoke-filled street without his cap.

The tail end of the park was a narrow stretch of scrubby green caught
tightly between high walls in the center of the city, an acre where the sun rarely fell, and
low office men smoked at all hours. Strangely enough, today it was bright in the sunlight,
and there were more clerks than ever, black and limpid. Stella walked up and down between
two benches that left slat marks on shiny britches. Twisted black toes of shoes, stuck by
the loungers into the narrow path, touched the hem of her gown, her head fluttered beneath
the ribbons, pained worse, and a huge dog with black and white spots trotted by. The sky
would darken for a moment with a smudge of cream, then would roll back to sheer white,
turning the patches of grass to straw. Once she had hidden from Gerta beneath her mother’s
skirts, had felt the overpowering
comfort of her ruffles, and that was a
strange experience. The mother had thrust heavy hands under the folds, caught the wriggler,
and handed the daughter over to the nurse, who always gave bad advice, to be secured in a
strict manageable grasp. “Your father wouldn’t like you to behave like that.” Stella shut
out all the city but this one pasture, shut out all the light but that which ached in her
head, and high above the whispering clerks realized she loved Ernst very much. City and
keeps and roadways in the heat, he, by a forest of young hair, protected from that which is
dying. She waited patiently.

“My God, simpleton, why don’t you sleep?” The mother spoke from a throat
puffing over the edge of the sheet drawn tightly above her bosom with both hands. The
father, back in the shuttered room with his tunic unbuttoned, wandered more bent and drawn
around the three sides of the bed, his fine Roman nose twitching with excitement, the top of
his scalp a sullen red. The room was sheltered, warm, an auburn fuzz glowed through the
shutters and darkness. The old woman was white and still in the bed and about her the black
wood was inlaid with bits, broken wings, of silver. The father was in one of his reveries,
counting very slowly some outlandish or important number on his yellow fingers that would
never total. Though one body was heavy and the other frail, though one voice bullied and the
other barely mumbled, though the man wavered in agitation and the woman lay in state, they
both were very much the same, because on both the hair had receded and become pale, leaving
the foreheads, eyes and mouths expressionless with old age. A palmist looking at their hands
would have seen no life for all the mazes of fine-drawn yellow lines, overlapping soft pads
and
untaken crowding roads. “If only he would slip off into the light of
Heaven,” she thought. “Sit down,” she said, but he paid no attention, and she could hear
only the long-legged rustling of his uniform, the unbearable sun pressing above them on the
roof.

Jutta awoke and the room was filled with black shapes.

The heat seemed to grow more determined, even the clerks panted, whispering
closely in each other’s ears, and Stella believed the sun would never fall flaming through
the torpid clear sky. She wondered how the strange wild cannibals on tropical islands or on
the dark continent, running with white bones in their hair, dark feet hardened in the
shimmering sand, could bear, in only their feathers, this terrible sun. For the headache
made her drowsy. She saw those men, carrying victims high over their heads, as tall,
vengeful creatures who sang madly on their secret rock, who even at night slept on
glistening pink stone in fire, who stretched their tall bodies whether in repose or in
chase, and who kept wives bare from the waist up. Their ears were pierced, insects buzzed
low over the children, the islands kept rising up out of the sea. Even when she was tired
and desperately warm and even in such a trembling state, she loved him. Her temple throbbed,
the clerks were watching. Her fired heart and sweltering faith were beginning to fall away,
swept by impatience. She was tired of this park filled with noise, so close to the passing
horses that wore skull caps with holes for the ears. She was afraid of being left alone.
Then, before she had a chance to meet the image come too sudden before her, before she had a
chance to guard against this reflection which she had searched for in all the shop windows,
and guard against the terror of herself,
she saw him running across the
street and up the path, turned half sideways, thin, excited, smiling wildly through the
fresh bandages round his head.

“Stella!”

“Ernst!”

They walked for twenty minutes under the yellow and green leaves and passed
the cool pond as clear as the sky, smelled the berries cultivated by the park authorities, a
few beautiful dripping flowers, and passed babies who screeched, dwarfed in the carriage.
Then he took her home, left her, feeling at last the approach of twilight, feeling his heart
full and as vague as water.

By the end of the next week the first thousands were far into enemy land,
ammunition trains roared all through the night, the city burned late in tumultuous but
magnificent organization, and the house was full of callers trying to pay respects to her
parents in the bedroom. All seeking on their padded feet to scale these, her walls, to climb
over them in a house that was no more hers than theirs, to seek out the mother, flies over
the white sheet, for knowledge of the venerable man, they crawled exactly as she crawled.
She caught, unwittingly, scraps of words, part of love during the seven days and forgot
about the cannibals. “We met in a beautiful copse on a summer’s eve, smelling the dew.” But
through the hours, while Gerta stamped about serving tea to them in the anteroom, where they
still wore their monstrous hats, she felt for some reason as if these short-winged
creatures, all but strangers, had come to mourn, and that mourning, visiting with the dead,
was the last desperate attempt, the last chance for gossip. She felt that they were taking
away the joy of sunshine, casting a blot, like an unforgivable
hoard, on
the very search and domestic twilight peace that she did not understand. The seascapes lost
their color, in the midst of this remarkable mobilization she began to feel cheated. Ernst
was gone for that week, and the old house was sealed tight though they squeezed through the
doors and windows. Jutta was more rude than usual.

The seventh morning was freakishly cool. All the light was gone, the fruit
flat, the clatter of servants obtrusive and harsh, bands playing in the park were loud and
off key. They settled down. The old man beat about the empty halls quicker than usual, the
brothers whispered, the entire ring of dark chambers was gathered, not wistful but strained,
unhappily into the tight present. Men were pushed first on one shoulder, then on the other,
off into the grey line, and the whole house from rafters of teak to chests of wine began to
shiver. That morning the mother stepped out of the bed as if alive, stared for one moment
about her in the unpleasant shadows and with exact stoic movements began to dress and
became, gradually, monstrously large. She was dressed in a long black gown, heavy grey
gloves, a tight ruffled collar, and a hat with an enormous drooping brim that made the dark
patches around her eyes and in the cheeks more prominent, more like injuries to hide. At one
time, years ago, the mother had left the father and had come back three months later thin as
a rail, lovely. Now her age hung upon her in unlovely touches, though she stepped out today
as if to make one last effort to slough them off. Her black patches were fierce and when it
was known that she was up, the house fell into silence, though the father still moved
fitfully, getting in the way, as if something were wrong. The mother had somewhere forgotten
about morals, self-conquest and the realm to come. She was too weighted
down, it was time to go, for age filled in the lacking spaces.

Stella carried the deep basket, the streets were empty, a few luminous
clouds blew hastily across the horizon beneath a smoke-black overcast thousands of feet
higher. She took her mother’s arm in a gesture, warmly, of confidence.

“I will have those lemons, please.” The bald-headed man dropped them in,
flapped his apron at a pink-nosed dog. Flies hung over the blue meat.

“Potatoes.” They rolled among the lemons in dust. The silly girl spilled the
money on the counter, it grew darker.

“Apples.” From the trees, the branches, sprinkled with water, green leaves.
The basket began to fill, the vendor limped.

Live fowl in a dirty cage were silent, claws gripping the rods caked with
lime, eyes blinking at each movement.

“Melons, your father likes melons.” They were scarred and green and made the
basket heavier. The grocer’s boy peeped out from behind a hogshead of cheese, red tongue
wagging, bare feet scuffing the sawdust.

The mother and girl began to cross the street.

Behind them one of the chickens began to scream, and a speck appeared in
the sky.

“I think I must stop and buy some flowers.” A few loiterers got out of their
way, the old woman considered her list.

“You don’t want to make yourself tired, Mother.”

The day was peculiarly uninteresting, a deliberately cold day with all the
summer bugs taken to cover, a few shrubs turned under and splashed dismally with a final
blue, all open windows shaded, sleepers uncomfortable, a few omnibuses swaying to and fro,
empty, unhurried.

“I think I’ll get … ,” said the mother, but spoke nothing more, looking with
the utmost distaste upon her desolate native avenue, facades smothered with an uneven hand,
scant twigs swept into the drains, not a single mortal. That was all.

The policeman’s call faded into nonsense, into unutterable confusion as the
speck fell quickly from the sky, two small leathered heads trapped in smoking holes, the
engine, no larger than the torso of a man, blasting, whistling, coughing stupidly. It
swooped over mother and girl, flapped its fins once, and crashed, typically English, on the
other side of the
Platz
. Paper and wood burned quickly, consumed the flyers,
leaving the isinglass still intact over their eyes. In so falling with its mechanical
defect,
the plane sent a splinter flying into the mother’s breast that
knocked her down.

The policeman kept pushing Stella by the shoulder while the half-dressed
crowd asked again and again, “What happened to the old trumpet?” What happened was that they
stumbled out into the street and came upon an old dead woman, kicked around, bent, black.
“What are you pushing me for?” The sweet grass burned back in the passageway of the street,
the old medium was so wrapped in smoke that the father’s second voice, this mother, was
choked, mute, with cinders in the cleft of her chin and above the open lips.

“Gavrilo,” Stella murmured, “what have you done?”

The birds twittered in angelic surmise, reeled high and low, fed, nested,
called beyond the curtains in gentle mockery, and the days passed by with the temperate
clime of summer stones. The marble dust fell in rest; leaded curtains, lately drawn, hung
padded and full across the sunlight, keepers of the room. The seascapes were gone, no
shadows were on the walls, silver flukes that seemed arisen from the past hushed their soft
seashell voices and at every dead night or noon, she missed the chiming of the bells. Her
mourning was a cold wave, a dry flickering of fingers in departure, a gesture resting softly
in her throat that barely disturbed the gentle shift of light passing on its way. It was
always dusk, rising, waking, falling with indolence, resounding carefully in her sleep,
reporting the solitude of each day
past. Stella thought the bier was
close by. That perpetual afternoon clawed about her knees, each day the spirit grew more
dim, sheltered behind the heavy lost mask of falling air, the thick south receding.

Those ships that had once rolled in on the breakers were cold and thin and
had traveled far beyond her sorrow. The mother’s hands were crossed, the wrinkles had
strangely deepened until the face was gone, the flowers were turning a cold earthen brown.
Her black collar was aslant on the neck, her own mother’s ring before her was tucked into a
hasty satin crevice by her side, wrapped in paper. They sprinkled water about trying to keep
the air fresh, and the trimmings began to tarnish. In the evening the face changed color.
Sweetness arose from the little pillows; she wore no stockings or shoes and the hair,
brittle and thin, clipped together, was hard to manage. The eyelids swelled and no one
visited.

Stella waited, awake on the chair, listening to the hushed footsteps, her
face in the constant pose of a circus boy, misshapen, cold, her isolation unmoved with
memory, numb with summer. The mourning of the virgin, as if she were swept close, now, for
the first time, to the mother’s sagging breast for her first dance, was heightened in a
smile as the orchestra rose up and they glided over the empty avenue, the old woman in
starched collar leading, tripping. Those dry unyielding fingers brushed her on, poised,
embarrassed by the face that never moved. She did not stop, seeing many other eyeless
dancers, lured through her first impression of this season, clear and rare, but she waited,
sitting, hour on hour. Those fingers rustled in the dark. She heard the perpetual scratching
feet of insects who walked over the coffin lid with their blue wings, their dotted eyes, and
an old bishop mumbled as he ran his fingers over the rectangle of edges closed with wax.
They tried to
curl the hair, but the iron was too hot and burned. Her
nostrils, rather than dilated in grief, were drawn closely, dispassionately together, making
two small smudges on the apex of her nose.

Sometimes she thought she had waved. She saw the ship’s poop inching its way
farther into the distance on the flat water, a few unrecognized faces staring back, and
smelled for a moment the odor of fish. The sea rolled noiselessly away, and walking back,
all the paths choked with marble dust, the air smelled of linen, of dead trees. And all
Stella’s forebears had finally made this journey—the ocean was filled with ships that never
met. No matter how much powder they sprinkled on the mother’s face, the iron grey color would
lie stiffly under the skin the following morning. At night they placed a lamp beside her
chair, and in the first light took it away again, its flame brushing the stiff folds of her
dress, shining weakly as the smooth disturbed crests of the waves, almost extinct. Each
morning she sat just as straight, as if she did not know they had prowled all about her
during the midnight hours, beyond the globe of the lamp. She would never see them sailing
back, and this most distant visitor, lying in state nearby, asleep day and night, so changed
by the assumption of the black role, seemed waiting to bring her to the land of desire,
where her weeping would cover all the hill above the plain. Stella’s face became gradually
unwashed, her arms grew thin, the fingers stiff, her mouth dry, trying to recall this
person’s name. The attendants and sudden last visitors perspired. The old woman grew damp as
if she fretted.

Finally they took the coffin out of the house.

On that day Ernie sat at her feet, and again it was so hot that the birds
buried their heads in the shade
under their wings, the fountains were
covered with chalk, the room close. They heard the scuffling in the corridor and on the
stairs as the coffin made its way out of the house, and the servants milled about in the
lower hall, talking, weeping, holding the doors. Ernie wanted to open the curtains but did
not dare.

“You don’t even have a cross,” he said. His beloved was silent. “You don’t
even have any candles, no face of Christ, no tears. What can I say?”

Then she began to murmur and he was astonished.

“I’m sorry. I will believe in the eternity of souls, I am bereaved. I will
see those places where death talks solemnly to the years, where the breakers roll over their
sins and their regrets, where the valley of Heaven lies before the crag of immortality, and
I will believe my mother has gained peace. I have lost her. Has anyone felt such terrible
grief, known that for all earthly time the eyes shall never see, the heart never beat except
with her shadow? What an unhappy loss, the candles are gutted, and the face wanes for this
immortality. I have lost my mother.”

This was her only glimpse of Heaven, and she wept so much that he was
afraid. Finally she held his hand. The two brothers fired the cannon at the burial.

That night Stella went to live in her father’s room, since he could not be
left alone, and he watched her with troubled suspicion as she slept, filling only half the
invalid’s ponderous space. She walked amid heaps of soiled nightdresses, rows of enameled
pots for the old man, the stale smell of bones and flies, emptied the deep drawers of food
he had hidden, awoke in the gloom and confusion of yesterday’s air. She sang him lullabies
well after midnight, fed him with a spoon, scrubbed the pale face and neck,
fought with Gerta over his mad words, and still he could not keep alive. The odor of
sweet grass again became heavy, and one morning she found him, tongue rolled under, the top
of his head a brilliant swollen red, clutching a feathered helmet across his breast. She had
not even awakened.

Where is the railway station?

The leaves turned heavy on the branches, birds coursed away, forgotten, and
the cold chill of a new season descended on the city with rain and late fever.

The great ring of chopped ice rumbled thousands of feet below them without
moving. Jagged and slender like headless flowers, like bright translucent stems, the
quivering clear stalks of ice shot rays of sun back and forth over the soundless field. It
was as if the hotel’s foundations were buried finally so far below in this unreal brilliant
bed that the sudden sensation of holiday traveled up and down the polished floors to the
center of the clear colorful ice, that the wine flowed first pink and then golden in sheer
chasms where little men in feathered hats filled it with song. With pick, rope, spike and
red shirts they climbed in the afternoons, hung waist to waist over the most treacherous
graves in Europe, and at night it snowed, or the moon rose ringed with a faint illumination
in the darkness. The mornings climbed upwards from the valley in violent twists and turns,
leaping from one shelf of ice to the next, turning the flat grey blades into brilliant
shattering arms of light until they finally rose above the gasping mouth of the hotel in
cold transparent wings of color, holding them motionless, suspended in gravity amidst an
unanchored spectrum.

Stella and Ernst found themselves in the midst of healthy
guests, the men giants, the women tanned with snow, even the old venerable and strong
because they were not too old. A few children chased each other about the lobby and bowed
when approached by adults. Their short rasping voices were small and unawares out of doors,
and there was a fear that they would fall into the ice floes. “It’s a great mistake,” Stella
said, “to think that the youngest children are the most lovely—they’re not.” And yet she
thought these children, the sons and daughters of the straight athletes, were beautiful. She
watched them romp with hostility, and yet they flowered before her, danced and played. “The
younger they are the more they demand, the more helpless they are. They’re capable of more
than we think, especially when they can’t talk.” They lit their cigarettes and passed out of
earshot of the children. Ernst was bundled to the throat in a jacket of bright fur and
smiled and nodded at all she said, the tufts of long hair rubbing against his neck. Now that
he was on the heights and all below him was gone, he walked always with spikes on the soles
of his feet so he would not slip. Hearts in their hands, he slung the rope on his shoulder
but never went down, for they wanted to be alone, high, in this one place. The whiteness
flashed up, clearing away the last traces of summer, and Stella, looking over such a
profound staged landscape, clung to his arm as if he would fall. But he was nearer God.

Every afternoon the old horse stood wheezing by the porte-cochere, trembling
slightly with head lowered from the terrible exertion of the long climb. The sleigh would be
empty, a rug dragging on the packed snow. The horse appeared blind, so limply
hung the head, so blank the closed lids, and little drops of frost grew in his nostrils
and on the bit, clung embedded in the sparse mane. He was cold, black and thin and hung with
red trappings that did not fit, that swung against his damp hide with each painful bellow of
air. Stella always tried to feed a piece of sugar to the flabby lips and slime-covered
steel, but always the dumb groping nose knocked it from her palm. “Ah, the poor beast,”
Ernst would say, looking over the sucked-in tail and fragile hocks. “You could count his age
on all the ribs.” Then the driver would come out, sinister eyes rolling over his muffler,
followed by the departing families with their skis. The black horse stumbled down the hill,
and the couple continued their honeymoon, two golden figures in the setting sun.

Behind those flat drooping lids, the horse’s eyes were colorless and
strangely out of shape, but they were deep, shy, inhumanly penetrating. The knees shivered
both backwards and forwards.

This was the upper world. Some of the guests whisked in the morning down to
the lower and with each sharp descent in the process, the pitch of their enjoyment dropped,
until it was too low to bear. And quickly as possible, they laboriously began the crawl back
upwards to the clear air, waiting to laugh until they had reached the point where they could
turn and let their eyes glide down in cool recreation over those falling fields. The upper
world was superior. In the lower, tufts of grass poked dangerously through the snow;
snarling dogs ran under foot; the snow turned to rain on the lowest fields, and the isolated
huts were grey and sodden. The laughter was above, the easiness that was tense with
pleasure, the newness poured itself over the winged guests in
sudden,
unexpected delight, for a few days or weeks. The cooking was excellent. The black horse
thrived better in the lower world. He was the same horse the students rode, shivering with
the cold, tied alone to suffer the night. And yet he carried them, their switches flicking
in the wind.

Here in this beautiful forest of burnt furniture, amidst the pale coolness
of the wide-flung windows, in the crackling of parlor fires, in the songs beyond the thick
rustic walls and the love inside, it did not matter that Herman said he was sorry to see her
go, that the
Sportswelt
would miss her. The remembrance of the old house and the
old parents, her sister, Jutta, was a far-off thing.

The hotel, from its highest porch where Ernie hid himself to watch all those
who approached, to its gradually widening foundations where the mountain flowers shriveled
and curled against the stone, was the center of a small acre of snow-packed land, was the
final peak of a mountain. During the long rail trip they had watched the winter arrive, the
smoke from squat chimneys more grey and thick. The snow fell, first in warning flurries,
settling more coldly on the weaving branches and huddled animals. Winter was near the
hotel.