Barbary Shore (19 page)

This made her furious. “You want to live?” she asked, flinging my arm away. “You can’t, you don’t know how to.
You can’t.” She intoned this with a rhythmic blow of her fist against my chest. “You came to me because I was easy, and you thought it would not cost you anything.” Again her fist thumped me. “But we never buy anybody without paying the price.” Her blows stopped, her body trembled.

“You’re not telling the truth,” I muttered furiously, taking her shoulders again. “You give me no credit,” I said, “I try. And you don’t try, Lannie. You don’t try at all.”

This crumpled her. She swayed lightly, and with a gesture of concealment turned her head away and began to sob. “Yes yes, yes yes yes,” she said rapidly.

“Lannie,” I said. I touched her with my finger tip. “Lannie.”

She fumbled her way into my arms weeping piteously. I might have comforted a child. Her tears soaked into my shirt, close to my flesh, and I held her and rocked her slowly.

“I need you, Mikey,” she cried, “I need somebody … I need protection.”

We were not lovers, but father and child, and yet for me who had fathered nothing, this was man’s estate. I held her, I comforted her, I smoothed her hair, and as she subsided, I felt rising within me that most savory of emotions, a certain small affection for myself.

If only it could have lasted.

But a vista opening to all that was impossible. She slipped out of my arms, and stood with her back to me, her shoulders drawing together in an attempt to achieve composure. “I told you it was no use,” she said quietly.

I did not answer, and when she spoke again, she had succeeded in masking herself. No more would we talk directly to one another.

“Oh, so many things in the world,” said Lannie, “and do we ever stop to count them, or would we be statisticians if we did? And are they the same once counted?” She darted toward
the armchair where she had left her purse, and picked it up to examine the inside, holding a piece of paper aloft. “There’s so little you know, and it would be so difficult to educate you. Last night, or was it the night before, or when was it? I sat down, and I felt some words, and I wrote them down.”

Before my bewilderment, she laughed. “Here, here read this, you may as well. Even the dunce must not always sit in the corner.”

She had written in a sprawling hand which followed no pattern. One line crossed another, and the letters would slope to the left or right as the whim seized her. I read it with great difficulty, and in the middle, when I realized who was the hero of her piece, I must have moved my body suddenly for I heard her laugh.

This is what was on the paper:

When I had finished, I read it through again, and handed it back to her without a word.

“He told me this, he was very proud of it,” Lannie said. “And I was proud of him as well, for he is so slim and his muscles are so hard.”

“I see,” I mumbled.

“No, you don’t.” She fingered a cigarette. “You can’t understand the peace of being with a man who looks at you as if you do not exist, so that slowly you’re beaten beneath him and everything whirls and you’re not there at all, and love has finally come the only way I want ever to see it when it is smoke and I am in the opium den and thugs beset me, but I do not care for I feel nothing any more.”

“When did it happen?” I asked with a dry throat.

“I don’t know. I don’t add time, I don’t feel bondage.”

“Was it here?”

“Oh, was it? Who knows? For this house is like the last one I was in, and he has been with me … oh, maybe it is two days, and maybe it is all of this summer. And he tells me what to do and then I do it, and so everything is very simple now.”

“And you like this?” I said very slowly.

“There is a man of extreme turpitude,” she said with great detachment, “and we are here to punish him for his sins. I opened the door, and now I must close it, and he will pay.” Passion came into her voice for an instant. “And you will try to interfere for you know nothing, and you will not succeed for we are righteous people.” With that she closed her eyes as though to banish me, and I could think of nothing to answer. All that had been gained was lost again.

D
URING
the war, if I am to assume that I was in it, there must have been a period when I was part of a squad, for I recall a series of marches with intermittent combat, and at the end of a month we had crossed a border and were in the enemy’s country. That night the squad was assigned a guard post in the loft of a barn which overlooked a field of grain. We set our machine gun to command the field and a row of trees at the end of it, and each of us sprawled out in the hay to sleep until it was our turn to watch.

We slept, however, very little. The farmer’s daughter, appropriately enough, came to see us with a pail of hot water, and our washing completed, stayed to collect the chocolate bars and loose cigarettes we could turn from our pockets. So that night the farmer’s daughter kept company with seven travelling salesmen, and at dawn with the literal cock of the crow she slipped back to her house, and we took up our march again.

I had been with her somewhere in the middle of the night, and although it was too dark to see her face, she must have been a beefy girl for her limbs were heavy. I had lain upon her to the accompaniment of snores and giggles, even as there had been snores and giggles for the men before me, and would be for the men after. There was moonlight on the field, and I
made love from the hip and looked across the meadow with open eyes, for I was also on guard. I never saw the girl. Above my head in magnification of myself the barrel of the machine gun pointed toward the trees, and once, hearing a noise, my fingers stole up to the trigger handle, and I was surprised to find it cold.

My ration consumed, I went back to the hay and stretched out in a nervous half-sleep which consisted of love with artillery shells and sex of polished steel. By the next afternoon we were ten miles away, and the following night we had no such luck, for the company assembled and we dug holes at the outskirts of a small city preparatory to the attack. There are times when I have the idea I was wounded in the action which followed.

Probably I dreamed of other things the night of the salesmen’s convention. I may have thought of the girl at the seashore resort, perhaps I even carried a letter from her in my pocket. I know that after leaving Lannie, I brooded about that girl I would never see again, and as Lannie had recalled the farm girl to me so she could recall the other. I had been so happy, I told myself now. She had fallen in love with her body, and I had been the cause. The room came back in all its warmth. A lamp was on and our bodies were golden, we smelled of each other in a bouquet of glowing flesh. Soon we would embrace, loving the taste of our mouths, and we would exist only in what we could hold within our arms.

Where was that girl and what did she look like? I wanted her so badly I was almost ill. Frustration put me on the rack, and with the frustration came something worse. For I would never meet that girl, and if I did I would not remember her and she would not recognize me. And if all these impossibilities one by one were to be solved and the wheel presented a double miracle for the same chip, then undoubtedly the girl and I, having changed, would be magical no more to each other. So that was done and that was dead. There would be no solutions from the past nor duplicates found in the present, and I could
have cried out in resentment against the implacability of this logic. To be presented my present regimen without a single luxury? I resisted myself and knew in all hopelessness that whatever I was to find could not come from the past.

Therefore I stayed up late, determined to work. After hours of intermittent effort during which I would finish a few lines and punctuate them by lying on the bed or walking the floor, I succeeded at last in completing a page. The next followed less slowly, and from early in the morning until dawn I wrote with more facility than I could usually find.

When the sun was up I went for breakfast, came back to my room and slept till evening. I scribbled again through the following night, and in the morning feeling comparatively fresh, decided I would not go to bed until dark. During all this time I hardly thought of the people in the rooming house, and scarcely cared how long I did without their company. Everything which had been at cross-purpose seemed to resolve itself in my work, and for those two days I was not unhappy. I had another meal before the city awoke and strolled over the bridge in the cool of an early summer day, content with myself and my labor. I thought of going to the beach, or visiting somebody.

Yet neither appealed to me, and on the walk home as a hint of depression to follow, I entered upon a long calculation as to how much money I had still in the bank, and how great an inroad had been made already into both time and cash. As I trudged through the old gully of standard worry and preoccupation, I knew by the time I reached the house that I had been deceiving myself, that my indifference had evaporated, and what I wanted at heart was to see Lannie and McLeod again. Delayed in its appearance and multiplied in its power, came a reminder of Lannie as I had left her in the chaos of her room, and an image of McLeod as he had strolled off into the darkness beyond the bridge. So I returned, lay down on my bed, and as time passed, my fancy had free run until I began to imagine the most
exceptional events, and even the silence of my cubicle became oppressive.

As though to mock me, my mind pushed forward a familiar question. What were the phenomena of the world today? If I knew little else, I knew the answer—war, and the preparations for new war—but out of an irritability which could not find its itch, I was hardly satisfied. There would be millions asking and millions answering the same question, and that side lay idiocy. “Do we want to suffer a hungry belly?” they would be asking, “Do we want to be blown to bits?” and put the reply in the negative with a passion to deceive the question. For wanting the opposite they would swindle themselves, assume that by the sole force of their desire, they could shape the result.

That side lay idiocy, that side lay the hair which became the snake and the cow-flop which cured the heart. That side lay all the answers which men could read daily and dutifully repeat: It is the fault of our leaders or their leaders, ours who are stupid or theirs who are evil; it is due to the unfathomable ways of the Almighty; it is because we are selfish; it is because we are generous; it is because we live with machines, it is because we have not enough machines; it is because we have lost the way, it is because the others have not found it; it is … it is without an answer. Only patriotism is left and anger to burnish it. The enemy is at fault, the enemy is the destroyer of peace.

One enters the argument of The Only Recourse. The thing to do is to be more selfish, or less selfish; to have more liberty, or less liberty. We need a big army, and lower taxes; diplomats must meet, we must break diplomatic contact; it is our duty, it is our danger; our ideas are superior, we need ideas … so we will swallow simples for nostrum.

I think of a soldier who is not inordinately fond of killing, who hates his officers, and is weary to death of the particular war in which he finds himself. Nevertheless, he kills as opportunity demands, he obeys his officers, and he does not desert. His ideas
move in one direction, and the sad feet which belong to society move in the other. Thus the actions of people and not their sentiments make history. There was a sentence for it, a sentence I had pondered through what experience I could remember and through much that was lost, and as it came to mind it left its trail of books I had once studied. “Men enter into social and economic relations independent of their wills,” and did it not mean more than all the drums of the medicine men?

I had come this far, remembered this much, and felt again a faint glow of the ardor with which I had waited for the inevitable contradictions to burn the fuse. The proletariat which crawled to glory beneath the belly of a Cossack’s horse, the summer flies of Vyborg, I could see it all again, and know with the despair which follows fervor that nothing had changed, and social relations, economic relations, were still independent of man’s will.

Except for myself. I lived, and was it I alone, in relation to nothing? The world would revolve, and I who might exercise a will for so long as money lasted, exercised nothing and dreamed away hours upon my bed. Now, the silence about me could become doubly oppressive. I started up and crossed the hall to McLeod’s door, knocked upon it as if I could summon him to be present. There was no answer, and when I knocked again, the door gave before my fist, swung slowly open.

My eyes were drawn immediately to the table which had been placed in the center of the room and was bracketed by two wooden chairs which stared blankly at one another across its empty surface. Adjacent to one of the chairs was set a floor lamp so arranged that it would shine into the eyes of whoever sat on the other side of the table. Everything else had been pushed to the side.