The Cannibal (6 page)

“You should have stayed home,” she said. Stella thought that she was too
precious for this journey and counted, one by one, the statues of Heroes that lined the
street on the park side and wished she could recognize the stone faces. They seemed like
metal behind an angry crowd, as if they might step out to march up the stifling street, rain
falling from their foreheads. Almost like man and wife they plodded along in silence, the
late night growing smoky, their clothes wet as if they had been playfully wading in the park
lake. How wonderful that they had all liked her singing, that they had clapped and looked
after her, that she could sing to State heroes. Somehow she thought that Cromwell had not
clapped at all. Again she could almost feel the three claws just above her knee, would offer
her firm leg
to their frightened touch. Cromwell, though he seemed to be
easily considering the black early morning, found that he could not settle back, resigned to
the rain, easily riding in the Duchess’ carriage, but felt a vague general pain as if the
Heroes followed him. He wondered what the Krupp gun would do to Europe, saw the Swiss
sliding down the mountains on their seats, saw the English bobbing in the Channel, and saw
the rest of the nations falling in line like a world-wide pestilence.

She had seen Ernst for the first time a few mornings ago, out in the empty
garden behind the
Sports-welt
, watching the blue shadows give place to the bright
rising sun, neither English, Swiss nor German, but a fighter without his trappings, dangling
his legs from an upturned chair. She knew he was a coward when the old man screamed out of
the window, “Ernst, Ernst,” in a loud bellowing unhappy voice that did not have to command
respect. But he jumped, stared at the quiet blank wall of the building, and then she knew
that it might have been she herself who called, and she laughed behind the shadow of the
open window when it bellowed again, “Ernst, Ernst,
kommst du hier.”
She could tell
by the way his head moved that his eyes must be frightened, that all his frail arms and legs
would be trembling. He was magnificent! She watched him throw the foil from him and it
rolled into a flower bed, lay beneath the drooping petals. But she knew that his face was
tough, she could see that the blood would be rising into his head, that his ugly hand would
be twitching. The garden became Valhalla, he could kill somebody with a single quick
movement, and she wanted to be with him in Valhalla. She heard the door slam and the old
man’s voice rolling angrily out. The
flowers turned very bright in the
sun; she could, at that moment, sing her heart out. When she saw Herr Snow a while later he
was perfectly calm.

The musty odor of the wet carriage mixed with the lavender of Cromwell’s
hair, the Heroes passed out of view.

“I don’t think you should have come with me,” she said into the coachman’s
back.

“You must give me a chance,” Cromwell answered, thinking of the vast
Rhineland, “after all, I’m homeless.”

On a few isolated occasions in his life, Ernie had been swept into
overwhelming crisis, and, after each moment of paralysis, had emerged more under his
father’s thumb than ever. He remembered that his mother, with her tight white curls and slow
monotonous movement, had never succumbed, but had always yielded, to the deep irritable
voice. Her kind but silent bulk had slowly trickled down his father’s throat, easing the
outbursts of his violent words, until at last, on a hot evening, they had laid her away in
the back yard, while his young brother, head already in the brace, had crawled along at
their sides, screaming and clutching at his trousers. His father loved him with the
passionate control of a small monarch gathering and preening his five-man army, and only
used him as a scapegoat to vent an angry desire for perfection. The old man would have wept
in his hands if anything had happened to Ernie, and, as ruler of the
Sportswelt
and
surrounding Europe, had given him every opportunity for love. Ernie, dwarfed at his side,
sat every evening at the back table in the hall, until, when the stately patrons rolled with
laughter and the father became more absorbed in them than in his son, he could slip
away and match swords with those as desperate as himself. “You’ll get
yourself killed,” his father would say, “they’re cutting you apart bit by bit.”

His father had forced one of the few small crises himself the only time he
saw his son in combat. They were fencing in a grove several miles from the city, the sun
raising steam about their feet, fencing with a violent hatred and determination. They were
alone, stripped to the waist, scratches and nicks bleeding on their chests, heads whirling
with the heat. The Baron, young, agile, confident, drove him in and out of the trees to
stick him a thousand times before actually wounding him. Ernie was sick, fought back, but
saw blades through the fogged goggles. Herr Snow came upon the scene like a fat indignant
judge, his face white with rage. He wrenched the weapon from the Baron’s hand and beating
him without mercy across the shoulders and buttocks, drove him screaming from the grove,
tiring his thick arm with the work. “You’re a god damn fool,” he told his son.

Ernie walked in a dark trimmer’s night for a long while and in the
Sportswelt
heard the bees buzzing with a low vicious hum. Since he was a Shylock,
his face grew tight and bitter and Herr Snow took to keeping a lighted candle by his bed.
Even asleep, Ernie’s feet jiggled up and down as they had danced in the grove, the bulk of
the noble crushing swiftly down on him, and in a frenzy Ernie jabbed quicker and quicker at
the raging white face of his father, fell back weeping beneath the heavy broadsword.

“Well,” and the words pushed themselves over the end of a wet sausage, “why
didn’t you take her home yourself? You’ll not get any women just sitting with me.” Ernie
made a move to leave.

“Wait. Just let me tell you that once your mother
looked
at me, there was no other man.” He held the stein like a scepter. “You want to go for
these,” his hands made awkward expressive movements around his barrel chest. Herman Snow had
not only used his hands but had made tender love to the silent woman and asked dearly for
her hand on his knees that were more slender in those days. He thought her sad face more
radiant than the sun, and worshipped her as only a German could. On the evenings when she
had a headache he stroked her heavy hair and said,
“Ja, Liebling, ja, Liebling,”
over and over a hundred times in his softest voice. They had taken a trip on a canal barge
owned by his brother. Herman had propped her in the stern on coarse pillows, away from the
oil-smeared deck forward and the guttural voices of the crew, and she had looked warmly with
interest on the passing flat country as if they were sailing on the Nile. Herman gazed into
her face, held one of the strong hands.

“A little aggression is needed,” said the old man. Ernie lost his head in
the stein and remembered the fat Merchant, like Herman, like papa, sprawled out in the alley
with a string of women behind him and children gorging themselves on attention, sprawled
like a murdered Archduke, his face in the bile. The hall was finally game, the troops
screamed and stamped feet, dolls with skirts drawn above pink garters perched on elephant
knees suggesting the roar of mighty Hannibal. Old Herman made fast excursions into the
crowd, urging, interested. “Hold her tighter, more beer, more beer,” and returned to the
stoop-shouldered Ernie with his face alive in enjoyment. Several times Ernie thought he
could hear Stella’s voice above the howling, and like an assassin under floodlights, he
shivered.

“Don’t be such a fearful
Kind,”
said Herman,
puffing with excitement, “join the chase.” He smiled momentarily at his son above the
strenuous noise of the orchestra. When he left the table again to encourage a maenadic
blonde and an old general, Ernie rushed from the prosperous Valhalla.

Rain filled his eyes with warm blurred vision, filled his outward body with
the heat of his mind, and running until his breathing filled his ears, he clattered past
opulent swaying wet branches, past windows opening on endless sleep. “Ernst, Ernst,” the
summer evening cried and he dashed zig-zag up the broad boulevard, raced to outrun the
screaming, raced to catch the dog who rode with her away, raced to coincide with Princip in
Sarajevo. He ran to spend energy, tried to run his own smallness into something large, while
far in the distance he thought he heard the carriage wheels. If he could spread before her
the metal of magnificence, if he could strike lightning from the sky, if he could only
arrest her for one brief moment in the devotion he felt whirling in the night. But then the
past told him the Merchant, or the Baron, or Herman would steal her off to a nest of
feathers—before he could speak.

He felt that his belt would burst, and so, just before reaching the line of
Heroes, he stopped in the park. He thought that his mother would see, would stand looking at
him in the dark, so he pushed behind the foliage, behind a bush that scratched at his
fumbling hands. The rain became stronger and stronger and still he was rooted behind the
bush, desperation on his face to be off, to be flying. Then he was running through the
shadows like a flapping bird. When he passed the line of statues, each Hero gave him a word
to harden his heart:
love, Stella,
Ernst, lust, tonight, leader,
land
. He felt that if old Herman ran at his side, he would tell him to get her in the
britches. Already the guns were being oiled and the Belgians, not he, would use that
Merchant as a target.

“Tomorrow you’ll wake up and find we’re in a war,” said Cromwell. The
carriage was turning the last corner, he turned his ready benevolence on the cruel castles,
thought he’d like to tell his old father, but that was impossible.

“Then you’ll go home?” she asked.

“No. I think I’ll stay. It is pleasant, in moments such as these, knowing
with certainty an approaching catastrophe, to view the whole incident that will probably
extend fifty years, not as the death of politics or the fall of kings and wives, but as the
loyalty of civilization, to realize that Krupp, perhaps a barbarian, is more the peg where
history hangs than a father who once spoke of honor. If I could get into my father’s house,
past his fattening memory, I would tell him what’s coming and leave him something to carry
away with him.”

“I, on the other hand, star of maidenhood, having found love, want to tell
my father nothing, and if your prophecy should fall on our heads, could do nothing but
protect my own. If in this hour of crisis, we must ride side by side, I will become, as you
wish, your Archduchess for the people, but where your eyes and theirs cannot look, I am
arrogant.”

They were none the closer when they heard his running footsteps, when they
looked in fear, back to the road they had just traveled, looked quickly over the low rear of
the carriage. He ran up to them gasping out of the darkness, clutched the side of the
carriage as if to hold it in his hand, and at that
moment a bevy of
disturbed birds chirped vividly in fright. They did not recognize him, did not speak, and
for a moment, Cromwell waited to see the short muzzle of the pistol, to feel his ears
enveloped in concussion, and on impulse almost took her in his arms for the last time. But
the carriage continued, the coachman sleeping, and the assailant was dragged, half-running,
half-stumbling, veins exploding around his eyes. Then, in great deliberation, she leaned and
touched his fingers.

“Come, get in,” she said.

“No, no, I cannot.”

Cromwell was a fool. He wouldn’t move, but back straight, hat over his eyes,
he sat and waited. His gloved hands trembled on his knees. “I’ll come back,” Ernst said and
once more took to his heels as the carriage reached the curb and a crowd seemed to gather.
Stella knew, in this dark disrupted haze, that she was somewhere near her greatest love.
Francis Ferdinand lay on the seat of the carriage, his light shirt filled with blood, his
epaulettes askew and on the floor lay the body of his departed wife, while the assassin,
Gavrilo Princip, ran mad through the encircling streets. Obviously the advent of the great
war would not throw them all together, make them friends, or even make them enemies; Ernie
was ready, even in the throes of love, for a goal of religious fanaticism; Cromwell simply
longed, desperately, to fit into the conflict somewhere; and Stella knew only that she was
climbing high and would someday lose him. It all started as simply as the appearance of
Ernie’s dangerous, unpleasant face. When the people found out, the people of Bosnia,
Austria, and the Hapsburg monarchy, they caused a silent, spreading,
impersonal commotion over the body of Ferdinand.

“Thank you,” said Stella.

“Oh, I’ll be around.” She did not turn to watch Cromwell go back to the
carriage.

The University was black, impressive, most of its archives and bare rooms
encased in a drawn restless wine-stupor, part of its jagged, face grey, menacing, piled
backwards on itself in chaotic slumber. The rain came down in broken sheets covering first
one roof, then a ledge, then splashing against a swinging door, sluicing down the crumbling
channels, smothering dust-filled caves crawling with larvae. The center of revolution, dogma
and defeat, it drew the city into its walls with a crushing will; and behind its ancient and
topheavy porticos and crags, behind small windows and breathing flues, lodged the
uninhibited, the young, the old. Ernie crossed a hollow court, dodged down ecclesiastical
alleys past flowing fonts, made his way past stone connecting arches and hybrid walls,
hastened beyond a mausoleum of brain to where the stone eruption gave way to a wooden comb
of corridors. Resolved to upset his dying fall, he finally lunged at a solid door, smelled
the dank unvarying stench of huddled students and counted forward five doors while the
summer rain rolled thickly down the stained windows, and his footfalls still called back
from the stone. The door was covered with the prints of ancient nervous fingers, was damp
with the palms that had slipped in and out for centuries. Heavy furniture and eaten rug,
iron candle holders and unused loving chair, were pushed into dust-covered heaps lining
three walls, leaving the
scarred floor a wide cold arena, colorless
beneath the only lamp that burned in the University, peopled by the only waking men. They
slouched, sleepless, like a band of raiders in a thick wood, drinking a colorless water that
caused the lungs to heave, the skin to burn, that brought violent images before the eyes.
The single light threw stiff unyielding shadows on the horse-collared masks, on the molding
chest mats, protective of bowels, front and loins, covered with dry rust and rattling
buckles, grey wire-like stuffing from rough slashes.