The Cannibal (4 page)

“They’re dancing tonight,” I said, paper stuck to my lips, “let’s go, I
still have a few hours.”

“Tanzen?”

“Yes. Let’s go, just for a while.”

She dressed in a pale blue gown that sparkled in the wrinkles, stepped into
the shoes of yesterday’s walk and washed again. I wore no tie but buttoned the grey shirt up
to my throat, rubbed my eyes, and reaching over, shook the Census-Taker by the foot. The
hallway was completely black and ran with cold drafts. We went slowly from the fifth to the
fourth, to the third, the second, the Census-Taker leaning with both arms on the rail.

“The Duke’s,” said Jutta, nodding.

“Ah, the Duke’s.”

The little girl heard the door slam shrilly far below her
vigil at the window.

“What’s all this about dancing?” asked the Census-Taker, his hands held
tightly over his ears from the cold, his raised elbows jerking in peculiar half-arcs with
his stride. We walked quickly to the hill that rose much higher in the darkness.

At night the institution towered upward crookedly, and fanned out into a
haphazard series of dropped terraces and barren rooms, suddenly twisted walls and sealed
entrances, combed of reality, smothered out of all order by its overbearing size. We walked
at an average pace, feeling for each other’s hands, unafraid of this lost architecture,
unimpressed by the sound of our own feet. There was no food in the vaulted kitchens. Offices
and conference rooms were stripped of pencils, records, leather cushions. Large patches of
white wall were smeared with dilating lost designs of seeping water, and inner doors were
smeared with chalk fragments of situation reports of the then anxious and struggling Allied
armies. The institution was menacing, piled backwards on itself in chaotic slumber, and in
segregated rooms, large tubs—long, fat and thick edges ringed with metal hooks that once
held patients on their canvas cradles—had become sooted with grey, filled with fallen
segments of plaster from the ceilings. Strange, unpursued animals now made their lairs in
the corners of the dormitories where insulin had once flowed and produced cures. And this
was where the riot had taken place.

Each of us walking through this liberated and lonely sanctum, past its now
quiet rooms, heard fragments of recognition in the bare trees. For once it had been both
awesome and yet holy, having
caused in each of us, silent marchers, at
one time or another, a doubt for his own welfare and also a momentary wonder at the way they
could handle all those patients. Once the days had been interrupted by the very hours and
the place had passed by our minds new and impressive with every stroke. But now the days
were uninterrupted and the shadows from the great felled wings sprawled colorless and
without any voice about our ever moving feet. Then, scudding away through the maze, new,
unkempt and artificial, the low clapboard storehouse emerged, champing of strange voices. It
heeled, squat beneath its own glimmers of weak light, a small boarded place of congregation,
hounded by the darkness of the surrounding buildings.

Without slacking pace, we neared the din and fray above the scratching
needle, the noise of women dancing with women, and men with men, shadows skipping without
expression across the blind of a half-opened door. They ceased to whirl only for a moment
and then the feet shuffled again over the floor boards, and we, walking towards the
building, smelled the odor of damp cinders and felt for a moment the black leaves settle
about our ankles.

Jutta, the Census-Taker and myself, emerging from flat darkness into light
that was only a shade brighter, bowed our heads, fending off the tinted glare that filled
the spaces between the rigid dancers. Close together, we stood for a moment sunken in the
doorway. Figures stepped forwards, backwards, caught in a clockwork of custom, a way of
moving that was almost forgotten. Gathered in the storehouse, back to back, face measured to
face, recalled into the group and claiming name instead of number, each figure, made
responsible, appeared with the
same sackcloth idleness as Jutta. They
swung out of the mist and appeared with pocketed cheeks and shaven heads. They seemed to
dance with one leg always suspended, small white bodies colliding like round seamless pods,
and fingers entwined were twice as long as palms. They danced continuously forming patterns,
always the same, of grey and pale blue. The beauties were already sick, and the word
krank
passed from group to group over devious tongues, like the grapevine current
of fervent criminal words that slide through wasted penal colonies. The smallest women had
the roundest legs that bounced against jutting knees, and the seams of their gowns were
taken up with coarse thread. High above their shoulders towered their partners’ heads,
loose, with cold whitening eyes, tongues the faded color of cheeks, curled back to the roots
of forgotten words. Several girls were recently orphaned when Allied trucks, bringing German
families back from hiding, had smashed, traveling too fast along the highway, and had
scattered the old people like punched cows in the fields. Some of these danced together,
stopping to see which way the other would turn.

I touched Jutta’s hand and we walked into the center of the floor while,
leaning against the wall, the Census-Taker watched, trying to recall each passing couple.
Jutta leaned and pushed, hung to my hand, stepped now upon my own foot, now upon another’s,
and the stiff waltz whispered out of the machine. The Czechs, Poles and Belgians danced just
as she, their wooden shoes sticking to the floor, wearing the same blue dresses with faded
dots, some with bones broken off-center, some with armpits ringed as black as soot. For it
was not the Germans who thought of coming together when there was
nothing
to say, when no one could understand the vast honored ideal swept under; it was the rest of
Europe—bedridden with idleness, dumb with tremendous distance, unhealthy in confinement,
these gathered in the storehouse—who had begun this dance in the evenings. A few true
Germans were scattered among them. Men wandered through, seeking a girl they had lost. These
men, startled and old, still wore unironed hospital gowns as shirts, moved ready to push the
others aside with delicate arms, walked with their feet in sandals and with smoke-white
faces. A young girl, sitting on a bench, gently rubbed her hands over an Italian officer’s
trousers while he leaned back, his eyes closed, and she, smiling, watched the circle of
dancers and smelled the boneless herring on his breath.

There was no drink to be had in the storehouse. The smell of pasteboard and
dust hovered over the walls, Russian ex-soldiers grinned at each other like Mongolians in a
corner, a half-French girl with tangled colorless hair, pregnant with a paunch beneath her
belt, looked ugly and out of place; all were spiritless from the very strangeness of the
country and so they crowded themselves, unwanted, into this end of town. All of them slept
in the back rooms on hay that should have been fed to the herds.

In the brick building nearest the storehouse, Balamir had lain half-awake,
sometimes in the mornings, or in the late afternoons when flowers were closing, in one of
the large tubs, all but his head submerged in water the temperature of blood, and behind him
had heard the waiting nurse who flipped the pages of a magazine. The evenings sidled through
the long green shade, towels hung like mats from the walls. He was surprised to find that
his
hands floated. And always the pages flipping one on the other, pages
beating just behind his head. The water gurgled out of the tub, disturbing the peace and
quiet, the shaded air of the small room.

Through the minutes, the dancers were the same long lines of inmates
stamping time to the phonograph, dancing in block-like groups with arms that were too long.
In the back rooms, a few figures sprawled on the bunks overcome with an inexcusable
exhaustion, weak and helpless under the low makeshift roof of the storehouse. Overhead the
stars were clear.

“Shall we rest?”

“I only have a while more. Let’s dance.” She followed me. Jutta did not know
that she looked like the others, that here in public no one knew the dress was washed, that
her face, ribboned with long hair, was just as unkempt and unpleasant as the other tottering
faces. If I had left her for a moment and then returned, she would not have known who her
partner was, but looking over shoulders that were all alike, she would have danced on.

“Is it going to be difficult?”

“No.”

I, Zizendorf, like all men, was similar to her husband who had been
captured, but it was something indefinable that made me particularly similar. The other
men’s sleeves were too short, their heads too thin and bare, all actually unlike her
husband; yet they were similar in a way, because seeing them she had started on the long
glorious path, then had forgotten a great deal. But I was different from them all and was
better for her than her husband.

She guessed that the hall might become empty soon and she would be alone. The
shoulder was hard
under the cloth, her back began to feel stiff and it
was difficult not to go to sleep. A figure in a tight green suit kept changing the record,
wiping it with a piece of rag. And in one of the back rooms smelling of flour that had long
since been hauled away, where some sprawled or sat by windows streaked with dirt, a girl
crouched on all fours, her head hanging forward, face covered with hair, the back of her
neck shining like a small round coin, and clutched the sides of the bunk in motionless
indecision. Down the corridor we danced, trooped like men about to change the guard, voices
low and serious. White heads in pairs that were the same size, shape, identical bony
structures, came together in the damp place and kissed. The girl lost her hold, fell forward
and, face buried in a wrinkled grey shirt, tried to sleep.

Under my arm I felt the pistol, in my head faintly heard the shrill music,
and dancing with Jutta, I felt as well as I ever felt. Naturally my eyes looked from face to
face, beyond the back of her head, followed the girls that were hugged along and passed from
dry smile to smile. It stirred a memory of burnished Paris women and silver bars during the
second part of my visit, of murky waters stirred with blinking lights and faint odors of
flowers on street corners. I bumped a man and no words were spoken, then I was pushed
backwards into a girl and tried to recall the sensation—while all about me moved the bundles
of rags, grass sticking to their collars.

The Census-Taker had lost us and squeezed on the end of a narrow bench that
sagged with girls whose fingers were chewed at the ends. He looked with distaste from one
red knee to another. He hooked his fingers in his shirt and tried to rest his
back, felt something soft and loose pushing into his side and pushed away. An Italian
with long hair down his neck looked from the Census-Taker to the girl, and catching his eye,
shook an olive head “no,” in a meaningful way; the Census-Taker shut his eyes.

The lilt and strain moved back and forth in an endless way, foreshadowed and
stunted in careless glances, in the unexcited hang of a dress, with words partially exposed
to hearing, with all their mixed nationality running out in shuffling footsteps. Something
inside me motioned to hold her closer, and I did so, the scratching close now to my ear. I
lit a cigarette with one arm hooked around her neck, the flame close to her hair, spaces
black between my teeth as I exhaled. Two of the white heads hung together in a corner with
breaths stifled, while the music rested on the constant low scuffle of wooden shoes.

“I must leave,” I said. My hand rested on the middle of her back; I looked
at her kindly. Something about my person could still be called
soldat
but not the
crawling, unshaven
soldatto
filth of the Italians who wriggled dog-fashion.

“Yes,” she answered. In the Census-Taker’s disturbed sleep, the white
handkerchief, recently blown into, fluttered down like a child’s parachute to the
ground.

“You must get him back to the rooms. Be careful not to fall. Get some sleep,
you look tired. I’ll come and see you in the morning after it’s done, and remember, there’s
no danger.” She smelled a breath of tobacco as my cheek touched her forehead for a moment,
and I stepped off, no longer recognized, among the grey masqueraders. Alone, Jutta followed
the length of three walls, past outstretched thick feet,
past bodies
hanging arm in arm, until she found where the Census-Taker was sitting, the last in a row of
tallow girls. Gently, holding beneath one arm, she made him rise until his strong breath
fumed about her throat, until his red eyes were narrowed full on her face, and speaking
softly, she propelled him along. Feeling the narrow doorway, they found themselves out in
the night air, alone. In the receding storehouse, the dancers massed together in the cold
tart atmosphere to perform, couple by couple all night, some distasteful ritual, whereby
those with uncovered bellies and tousled hair walked in their midst as easily and unnoticed
as the most infected and sparkling damsel.

Jutta’s son, the fairy, fled for his life, his knees the size of
finger-joints whirling in every direction like the un-coordinated thrashings of a young and
frightened fox.

The Duke continued to prod and tap with the gleaming cane, drew the coat
tighter about his chest.

Jutta’s daughter watched in the window, her golden curls tight like a wig
about the narrow face.

Jutta herself, with the Census-Taker heavily against her shoulders, started
down the cinder path, while over all the town and sty-covered outskirts hung a somber,
early, Pentecostal chill. She moved slowly because the man mumbled thickly in her ear and
his feet caught against the half-buried bricks that lined the path. Finally she could no
longer hear the music and was quickly back in the thick deserted kingdom of crumbling
buildings and roosting birds, the asylum all about her. She wanted to get home to sleep.