V. (39 page)

IV

"Kurt, why do you never kiss me any more?"

"How long have I been sleeping," he wanted to know. Heavy blue drapes had at some point been drawn across the window.

"It's night."

He grew aware of an absence in the room: located this eventually as an absence of background noise from the loudspeaker, and was off the bed and tottering toward his receivers before realizing he'd recovered enough to be walking at all. His mouth tasted vile but his joints no longer ached, gums no longer felt as sore or spongy. The purple spots on his legs had gone.

Hedwig giggled. "They made you look like a hyena."

The mirror had nothing encouraging to show hint. He batted his eyes at himself and the lashes of the left one promptly stuck together.

"Don't squint, darling." She had a toe pointed toward the ceiling and was adjusting a stocking. Mondaugen leered at her crookedly and began trouble-shooting his equipment. Behind him he heard someone enter the room and Hedwig begin to moan. Chains tinkled in the heavy sickroom air, something whistled and impacted with a loud report against what might have been flesh. Satin tore, silk hissed, French heels beat a tattoo against the parquetry. Had the scurvy changed him from voyeur to ecouteur, or was it deeper and part of a general change of heart? The trouble was a burned-out tube in the power amplifier. He replaced it with a spare and turned and saw that Hedwig had vanished. Mondaugen stayed alone in the turret for a few dozen visitations from the sferics, this being the only link remaining with the kind of time that continued to pass outside Foppl's. He was awakened from a light sleep by the sound of explosions to the east. When he finally decided to climb out the stained-glass window to investigate, he found that everyone had rushed to the roof. A battle, a real one, was in progress across the ravine. Such was their elevation that they could see everything spread out in panorama, as if for their amusement. A small group of Bondels huddled among some rocks: men, women, children and a few starved-looking goats. Hedwig inched her way across the roof's shallow slope to Mondaugen and held his hand. "How exciting," she whispered, eyes huger than he'd ever seen them, blood crusted on her wrists and ankles. Declining sunlight stained the bodies of the Bondels to a certain orange. Thin wisps of cirrus floated diaphanous in a late afternoon sky. But soon the sun had turned them blinding white.

Surrounding the besieged Bondels, in a ragged noose, were whites, closing, mostly volunteer except for a cadre of Union officers and noncoms. They exchanged occasional gunfire with the natives, who seemed to have only half-a-dozen rifles among them. Doubtless there were human voices down there, uttering cries of command, triumph, pain; but at this distance only the tiny pop-pop of gunshots could be heard. To one side was a singed area, streaked with the gray of pulverized rock and littered with bodies and parts of bodies which had once belonged to Bondels.

"Bombs," Foppl commented. "That's what woke us up." Someone had come up from below with wine and glasses, and cigars. The accordionist had brought his instrument, but after a few bars was silenced: no one on the roof wanted to miss any sound of death that should reach them. They leaned toward the battle: cords of the neck drawn tense, eyes sleep-puffed, hair in disarray and dotted with dandruff, fingers with dirty nails clutching like talons the sun-reddened stems of their wine goblets; lips blackened with yesterday's wine, nicotine, blood and drawn back from the tartared teeth so that the original hue only showed in cracks. Aging women shifted their legs frequently, makeup they'd not cleaned away clinging in blotches to pore-riddled cheeks.

Over the horizon from the direction of the Union came two biplanes, flying low and lazy, like birds wandered away from a flock. "That's where the bombs came from," announced Foppl to his company. So excited now that he slopped wine on the roof. Mondaugen watched it flow in twin streams all the way to the eaves. It reminded him somehow of his first morning at Foppl's, and the two streaks of blood (when had he began to call it blood?) in the courtyard. A kite lit lower down on the roof and began to peck at the wine. Soon it took wing again. When had he begun to call it blood?

The planes looked as if they would come no nearer, only hang forever in the sky. The sun was going down. The clouds had been blown terribly thin, and begun to glow red, and seemed to ribbon the sky its entire length, filmy and splendid, as if it were they that held it all together. One of the Bondels suddenly appeared to run amok: stood upright, waving a spear, and began to run toward the nearest part of the advancing cordon. The whites there bunched together and fired at him in a flurry of pops, echoed by the pop of corks on Foppl's roof. He had almost reached them before he fell.

Now the planes could be heard: a snarling, intermittent sound. They swooped clumsy in a dive toward the Bondelswaartz position: the sun caught suddenly the three canisters dropped from each, turned them to six drops of orange fire. They seemed to take a century to fall. But soon, two bracketing the rocks, two among the Bondels and two in the area where the corpses lay, there bloomed at last six explosions, sending earth, stone and flesh cascading toward the nearly black sky with its scarlet overlay of cloud. Seconds later the loud, coughing blasts, overlapping, reached the roof. How the watchers cheered. The cordon moved rapidly then, through what was now a pall of thin smoke, killing the still-active and wounded, sending bullets into corpses, into women and children, even into the one goat that had survived. Then abruptly the crescendo of cork-pops ceased and night fell. And after a few minutes someone lit a campfire out on the battlefield. The watchers on the roof retired inside for a night of more than usually riotous celebration.

Had a new phase of the siege party begun with that dusk's intrusion from the present year, 1922, or was the change internal and Mondaugen's: a shift in the configuration of sights and sounds he was now filtering out, choosing not to notice? No way to tell; no one to say. Whatever it arose from, health returning or simple impatience with the hermetic, he was starting to feel those first tentative glandular pressures that one day develop into moral outrage. At least he was to experience a for him rare Achphenomenon: the discovery that his voyeurism had been determined purely by events seen, and not by any deliberate choice, or preexisting set of personal psychic needs.

No one saw any more battles. From time to time a body of horse-soldiers might be noted in the distance, tearing desperate across the plateau, raising a little dust; there would be explosions, miles away in the direction of the Karas mountains. And they heard a Bondel one night, lost in the dark, scream the name of Abraham Morris as he stumbled and fell into a ravine. In the last weeks of Mondaugen's stay everyone remained in the house, getting only a few hours' sleep per twenty-four-hour period. Easily a third of their number were bedridden: several, besides Foppl's Bondels, had died. It had become an amusement to visit an invalid each night to feed him wine and arouse him sexually.

Mondaugen remained up in his turret, working diligently at his code, taking occasional breaks to stand out alone on the roof and wonder if he would ever escape a curse that seemed to have been put on him one Fasching: to become surrounded by decadence no matter what exotic region, north or south, he wandered into. It couldn't be only Munich, he decided at some point: nor even the fact of economic depression. This was a soul-depression which must surely infest Europe as it infested this house.

One night he was awakened by a disheveled Weissmann, who could scarcely stand still for excitement. "Look, look," he cried, waving a sheet of paper under Mondaugen's s slowly blinking eyes. Mondaugen read:

DIGEWOELDTIMSTEALALENSWTASNDEURFUALRLIKST

"So," he yawned.

"It's your code. I've broken it. See: I remove every third letter and obtain: GODMEANTNUURK. This rearranged spells Kurt Mondaugen."

"Well, then," Mondaugen snarled. "And who the hell told you you could read my mail."

"The remainder of the message," Weissmann continued, "now reads: DIEWELTISTALLESWASDERFALLIST."

"The world is all that the case is," Mondaugen said. "I've heard that somewhere before." A smile began to spread. "Weissmann, for shame. Resign your commission, you're in the wrong line of work. You'd make a fine engineer: you've been finagling."

"I swear," Weissmann protested, hurt.

Later on, finding the turret oppressive, Mondaugen exited through the window and wandered the gables, corridors and stairways of the villa till the moon was down. Early in the morning, with only the nacreous beginnings of a dawn visible out over the Kalahari, he came around a brick wall and entered a small hopyard. Hanging over the rows, each wrist attached to a different stringing-wire, feet dangling over young hops already sick with downy mildew, was another Bondel, perhaps Foppl's last. Below, dancing about the body and flicking its buttocks with a sjambok, was old Godolphin. Vera Meroving stood by his side and they appeared to have exchanged clothing. Godolphin, keeping time with the sjambok, launched quaveringly into a reprise of Down by the Summertime Sea.

Mondaugen this time withdrew, preferring at last neither to watch nor to listen. Instead he returned to the turret and gathered up his log books, oscillograms and a small knapsack of clothing and toilet articles. He sneaked downstairs and went out by a French window; located a long plank at the rear of the house and dragged it to the ravine. Foppl and guests had been somehow alerted to his departure. They crowded the windows; some sat out on the balconies and roof, some came to the veranda to watch. With a final grunt Mondaugen dropped the plank across a narrow part of the ravine. As he was working his way gingerly across, trying not to look down at the tiny stream two hundred feet below, the accordion began a slow sad tango, as if piping him ashore. This soon modulated into a rousing valediction, which they all sang in chorus:

Why are you leaving the party so early,

Just when it was getting good?

Were the crowds and the laughter just a little too tame,

Did the girl you had your eye on go and forfeit the game?

O tell me

Where is there music any gayer than ours, and tell me

Where are wine and ladies in such ample supply?

If you know a better party in the Southwest Protectorate,

Tell us and we'll drop on by

(Right after this one)

Tell us and we'll drop on by.

He reached the other side, adjusted the knapsack and began to trudge toward a distant clump of trees. After a few hundred yards he decided to look back after all. They still watched him and their hush now was a part of the same that hung over all the scrubland. The morning's sun bleached their faces a Fasching-white he remembered seeing in another place. They gazed across the ravine dehumanized and aloof, as if they were the last gods on earth.

Two miles further on at a fork in the road he met a Bondel riding on a donkey. The Bondel had lost his right arm. "All over," he said. "Many Bondels dead, baases dead, van Wijk dead. My woman, younkers dead." He let Mondaugen ride behind him. At that point Mondaugen didn't know where they were going. As the sun climbed he dozed on and off, his cheek against the Bondel's scarred back. They seemed the only three animate objects on the yellow road which led, he knew, sooner or later, to the Atlantic. The sunlight was immense, the plateau country wide, and Mondaugen felt little and lost in the dun-colored waste. Soon as they trotted along the Bondel began to sing, in a small voice which was lost before it reached the nearest Ganna bush. The song was in Hottentot dialect, and Mondaugen couldn't understand it.

chapter ten

In which various sets of young people get together

I

McClintic Sphere, whose horn man was soloing, stood by the empty piano, looking off at nothing in particular. He was half listening to the music (touching the keys of his alto now and again, as if by sympathetic magic to make that natural horn develop the idea differently, some way Sphere thought could be better) and half watching the customers at the tables.

This was last set and it'd been a bad week for Sphere. Some of the colleges were let out and the place had been crowded with these types who liked to talk to each other a lot. Every now and again, they'd invite him over to a table between sets and ask him what he thought about other altos. Some of them would go through the old Northern liberal routine: look at me, I'll sit with anybody. Either that or they would say: "Hey fella, how about Night Train?" Yes, bwana. Yazzuh, boss. Dis darkey, ol' Uncle McClintic, he play you de finest Night Train you evah did hear. An' aftah de set he gwine take dis of alto an' shove it up yo' white Ivy League ass.

The horn wanted to finish off: he'd been tired all week as Sphere. They took fours with the drummer, stated the main theme in unison and left the stand.

The bums stood outside like a receiving line. Spring had hit New York all warm and aphrodisiac. Sphere found his Triumph in the lot, got in and took off uptown. He needed to relax.

Half an hour later he was in Harlem, in a friendly rooming (and in a sense cat) house run by one Matilda Winthrop, who was little and wizened and looked like any elderly little lady you might see in the street going along with gentle steps in the waning afternoon to look for spleens and greens at the market.

"She's up there," Matilda said, with a smile for everybody, even musicians with a headful of righteous moss who were making money and drove sports cars. Sphere shadowboxed with her for a few minutes. She bad better reflexes than he did.

The girl was sitting on the bed, smoking and reading a western. Sphere tossed his coat on a chair. She moved over to make room for him, dogeared a page, put the book on the floor. Soon he was telling her about the week, about the kids with money who used him for background music and the musicians from other bigger groups, also with money, who were cautious and had mixed reactions and the few who couldn't really afford dollar beers at the V-Note but did or wanted to understand except that the space they might have occupied was already taken up by the rich kids and musicians. He told it all into the pillow and she rubbed his back with amazingly gentle hands. Her name, she said, was Ruby but he didn't believe that. Soon: