Mother Night (16 page)

“My truth goes marching on,” I murmured.

“What?” said Wirtanen.

“I can’t even tell you what the plot of ‘The Goblet’ is,” I said.

So Wirtanen told it to me. “A blindingly pure young maiden,” he said, “guards the Holy Grail. She will surrender it only to a knight who is as pure as herself. Such a knight comes along, and is pure enough to win the Grail.

“By winning it, he causes the girl to fall in love with him, and he falls in love with her,” said Wirtanen. “Do I really have to tell you, the author, the rest?”

“It—it’s as though Bodovskov really did write it—” I said, “as though I’m hearing it for the first time.”

“The knight and the girl—” said Wirtanen, continuing the tale, “they begin to have impure thoughts about each other, tending, involuntarily, to disqualify themselves from any association with the Grail. The heroine urges the hero to flee with the Grail, before he becomes unworthy of it. The hero vows to flee without the Grail, leaving the heroine worthy of continuing to guard it.

“The hero makes their decision for them,” said Wirtanen, “since they have both become impure in thought. The Holy Grail disappears. And, stunned by this unanswerable proof of their depravity, the two lovers confirm what they firmly believe to be their damnation with a tender night of love.

“The next morning, confident of hell-fire, they promise to give each other so much joy in life that hell-fire will be a very cheap price to pay. The Holy Grail thereupon appears to them, signifying that Heaven does not despise love like theirs. And then the Grail goes away again, forever, leaving the hero and the heroine to live happily ever after.”

“My God—I
did
write that, didn’t I?” I said.

“Stalin was crazy about it,” said Wirtanen.

“And the other plays—?” I said.

“All produced, all well-received,” said Wirtanen.

“But ‘The Goblet’ was Bodovskov’s big hit?” I said.

“The book was the biggest hit of all,” said Wirtanen.

“Bodovskov wrote a book?” I said.

“You wrote a book,” said Wirtanen.

“I never did,” I said.

“Memoirs of a Monogamous Casanova?”
said Wirtanen.

“It was unprintable!” I said.

“A publishing house in Budapest will be amazed to hear that,” said Wirtanen. “I’d guess they’ve printed something like a half-million copies.”

“The communists let a book like that be published openly?” I said.

“Memoirs of a Monogamous Casanova
is a curious little chapter in Russian history,” said Wirtanen. “It
could hardly be published with official approval in Russia—and yet, it was such an attractive, strangely moral piece of pornography, so ideal for a nation suffering from shortages of everything but men and women, that presses in Budapest were somehow encouraged to start printing it—and those presses have, somehow, never been ordered to stop.” Wirtanen winked at me. “One of the few sly, playful, harmless crimes a Russian can commit at no risk to himself is smuggling home a copy of
Memoirs of a Monogamous Casanova
. And for whom does he smuggle it? To whom is he going to show this hot stuff? To that salty old crony, his wife.

“For years,” said Wirtanen, “there was only a Russian edition. But now, it is available in Hungarian, Rumanian, Latvian, Estonian, and, most marvelous of all, German again.”

“Bodovskov gets credit as the author?” I said.

“It’s common knowledge that Bodovskov wrote it, though the book carries no credits—publisher, author, and illustrator supposedly unknown.”

“Illustrator?” I said, harrowed by the idea of pictures of Helga and me cavorting in the nude.

“Fourteen plates in lifelike color—” said Wirtanen, “forty rubles extra.”

“I
F ONLY
it weren’t illustrated!” I said to Wirtanen angrily.

“That makes a difference?” he said.

“It’s a mutilation!” I said. “The pictures are bound to mutilate the words. Those words weren’t meant to have pictures with them! With pictures, they aren’t the same words!”

He shrugged. “It’s pretty much out of your control, I’m afraid,” he said, “unless you want to declare war on Russia.”

I closed my eyes wincingly. “What is it they say in the Chicago Stockyards about what they do to a pig?”

“I don’t know,” said Wirtanen.

“They boast that they find a use for everything about a pig but his squeal,” I said.

“So?” said Wirtanen.

“That’s how I feel right now—” I said, “like a pig
that’s been taken apart, who’s had experts find a use for every part. By God—I think they even found a use for my squeal! The part of me that wanted to tell the truth got turned into an expert liar! The lover in me got turned into a pornographer! The artist in me got turned into ugliness such as the world has rarely seen before.

“Even my most cherished memories have now been converted into catfood, glue and liverwurst!” I said.

“Which memories are those?” said Wirtanen.

“Of Helga—my Helga.” I said, and I wept. “Resi killed those, in the interests of the Soviet Union. She made me faithless to those memories, and they can never be the same again.”

I opened my eyes. “F—all,” I said quietly. “I suppose the pigs and I should feel honored by those who proved our usefulness. I’m glad about one thing—”

“Oh?” said Wirtanen.

“I’m glad about Bodovskov,” I said. “I’m glad somebody got to live like an artist with what I once had. You said he was arrested and tried?”

“And shot,” said Wirtanen.

“For plagiarism?” I said.

“For originality,” said Wirtanen. “Plagiarism is the silliest of misdemeanors. What harm is there in writing what’s already been written? Real originality is
a capital crime, often calling for cruel and unusual punishment in advance of the
coup de grace.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Your friend, Kraft-Potapov, realized that you were the author of a lot of things Bodovskov claimed to have written,” said Wirtanen. “He reported the facts to Moscow. Bodovskov’s villa was raided. The magic trunk containing your writings was discovered under straw in the loft in his stable.”

“So—?” I said.

“Every word by you in that trunk had been published,” said Wirtanen.

“And—?” I said.

“Bodovskov had begun to replenish the trunk with magic of his own,” said Wirtanen. “The police found a two-thousand-page satire on the Red Army, written in a style distinctly un-Bodovskovian. For that un-Bodovskovian behavior, Bodovskov was shot.

“But enough of the past!” said Wirtanen. “Listen to what I’ve got to tell you about the future. In about half an hour,” he said, looking at his watch, “Jones’ house is going to be raided. The place is surrounded now. I wanted you out of there, since it’s going to be a complicated enough mess as it is.”

“Where do you suggest I go?” I said.

“Don’t go back to your flat,” he said. “Patriots have taken the place apart. They’d probably take you apart, too, if they caught you there.”

“What’s going to happen to Resi?” I said. “Deportation is all,” said Wirtanen. “She hasn’t committed any crimes.”

“And Kraft?” I said.

“A good long stretch in prison,” he said. “That’s no shame. I think he’d rather go to prison than home anyway.

“The Reverend Lionel J. D. Jones, D.D.S., D.D.,” said Wirtanen, “will go back to prison for illegal possession of firearms and whatever else of a straightforward criminal nature we can pin on him. Nothing is planned for Father Keeley, so I imagine he’ll drift back to Skid Row again. The Black Fuehrer will be set adrift again, too.”

“And the Iron Guardsmen?” I said.

“The Iron Guardsmen of the White Sons of the American Constitution,” said Wirtanen, “are going to get an impressive lecture on the illegality in this country of private armies, murder, mayhem, riots, treason, and violent overthrow of the government. They’ll be sent home to educate their parents, if such a thing is possible.”

He looked at his watch again. “You’d better go now—get clear out of the neighborhood.”

“Can I ask who your agent in Jones’ house is?” I said. “Who was it that slipped the note into my pocket, telling me to come here?”

“You can ask,” said Wirtanen, “but you must surely know I won’t tell you.”

“You don’t trust me to that extent?” I said.

“How could I ever trust a man who’s been as good a spy as you have?” said Wirtanen. “Hmm?”

I
LEFT
W
IRTANEN
.

But I hadn’t taken many steps before I understood that the only place I wanted to be was back in Jones’ cellar with my mistress and my best friend.

I knew them for what they were, but the fact remained that they were all I had.

I returned by the same route over which I had fled, went in through Jones’ coalbin door.

Resi, Father Keeley, and the Black Fuehrer were playing cards when I got back.

Nobody had missed me.

The Iron Guard of the White Sons of the American Constitution was having a class in flag courtesy in the furnace room, a class conducted by one of its own members.

Jones had gone upstairs to write, to create.

Kraft, the Russian Master Spy, was reading a copy
of
Life
that had a portrait of Werner von Braun on the cover. Kraft had the magazine open to the center spread, a panorama of a swamp in the Age of Reptiles.

A small radio was playing. It announced a song. The title of the song fixed itself in my mind. This is no miracle of total recall, my remembering the title. The title was apt for the moment—for almost any moment, actually. The title was “Dat Old Golden Rule.”

At my request, the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of War Criminals has run down the lyric of that song for me. The lyric is as follows:

Oh, baby, baby, baby,

Why do you break my heart this way?

You say you want to go steady,

But then all you do is stray.

I’m so confused,

I’m not amused,

You make me feel like such a fool.

You smile and lie,

You make me cry.

Why don’t you learn dat old Golden Rule?

“What’s the game?” I said to the card players.

“Old Maid,” said Father Keeley. He was taking the game seriously. He wanted to win, and I saw that he had the queen of spades, the Old Maid, in his hand.

It might make me seem more human at this point,
which is to say more sympathetic, if I were to declare that I itched and blinked and nearly swooned with a feeling of unreality.

Sorry.

Not so.

I confess to a ghastly lack in myself. Anything I see or hear or feel or taste or smell is real to me. I am so much a credulous plaything of my senses that nothing is unreal to me. This armor-plated credulity has been continent even in times when I was struck on the head or drunk or, in one freakish adventure that need not concern this accounting, even under the influence of cocaine.

There in Jones’ basement, Kraft showed me the picture of von Braun on the cover of
Life
, asked me if I knew him.

“Von Braun?” I said. “The Thomas Jefferson of the Space Age? Sure. The Baron danced with my wife once at a birthday party in Hamburg for General Walter Dornberger.”

“Good dancer?” said Kraft.

“Sort of Mickey Mouse dancing—” I said, “the way all the big Nazis danced, if they had to dance.”

“You think he’d recognize you now?” said Kraft.

“I know he would,” I said. “I ran into him on Fifty-second Street about a month ago, and he called me by name. He was very shocked to see me in such reduced circumstances. He said he knew a lot of people
in the public relations business, and he offered to talk to them about giving me a job.”

“You’d be good at public relations,” said Kraft.

“I certainly don’t have any powerful convictions to get in the way of a client’s message,” I said.

The game of Old Maid broke up, with Father Keeley the loser, with that pathetic old virgin still stuck with the queen of spades.

“Well,” said Keeley, as though he’d won much in the past, as though a rich future were still his, “you can’t win them all.”

He and the Black Fuehrer went upstairs, pausing each few steps to count to twenty.

And then Resi, Kraft-Potapov and I were alone.

Resi came over to me, put her arm around my waist, laid her cheek against my chest. “Just think, darling—” she said.

“Hmm?” I said.

“Tomorrow we’ll be in Mexico,” she said.

“Um,” I said.

“You seem worried,” she said.

“Me worry?” I said.

“Preoccupied,” she said.

“Do I look preoccupied to you?” I said to Kraft. He was studying the picture of the swamp again.

“No,” he said.

“My good old normal self,” I said.

Kraft pointed to a pterodactyl that was winging over
the swamp. “Who would think a thing like that could fly?” he said.

“Who would ever think that a ramshackle old fart like me would win the heart of such a beautiful girl, and have such a talented, loyal friend besides?” I said.

“I find it very easy to love you,” said Resi. “I always have.”

“I was just thinking—” I said.

“Tell me your thoughts,” said Resi.

“Maybe Mexico isn’t exactly what we want,” I said.

“We can always move on,” said Kraft.

“Maybe—there at the Mexico City airport—” I said, “maybe we could just get right on a jet—”

Kraft put his magazine down. “And go where?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Just go somewhere very fast. I suppose it’s the idea of movement that excites me; I’ve been sitting still so long.”

“Um,” said Kraft.

“Moscow, maybe,” I said.

“What?” said Kraft incredulously.

“Moscow,” I said. “I’d like very much to see Moscow.”

“That’s a novel idea,” said Kraft.

“You don’t like it?” I said.

“I—I’ll have to think about it,” he said.

Resi started to move away from me, but I held her tight. “You think about it, too,” I said to her.