The Mercury Waltz (3 page)

As he writes, the café empties around him, the others gone off one by one to their offices and workrooms, quiet descending as the sun lifts past the apartment houses’ Oriental spires, sets the pigeons and the woodlice moving, fills the street briefly with sharp noon light. Having advanced the knight as far as he will go for this day, Rupert sets down pen and cup to take up hat and coat, passing the café owner at the till, who asks with his usual unction if “All was to your satisfaction today, Herr Bok?”

“It was,” noting as he speaks the girl’s reappearance, industrious to clear away his table. “That girl—she’s new here, isn’t she?”

“To the city, too,” nods the owner. “
Folle-farine,
you know, the chaff blown in from the street, Russian, Prussian, who knows? She says she came from Paris,” but it must be the Paris of the alleys and the sewers, she has that look about her, that scuffler’s tension; how many girls like her has he met on the roads, turned away from the Poppy? so “Give her this,” Rupert says, bill in hand, pitching his voice so she must be sure to hear. “With my compliments.”

Then Rupert is gone and she is on the man like a terrier, both hands out: “Give it, give it! He meant it for me—” so “Take it then,” says the owner with some regret: a small bill, bread-and-butter as they say, still he could have used the extra; to her of course it will be a fortune. “But hey, Tilde, don’t think you’ll earn more by making eyes at that one! I know him, he comes here nearly every day, he’s queer.”

The girl Tilde does not bother to reply beyond a rude gesture, waiting till she reaches the kitchen to refold the bill around a little scrap plucked from the floor, Rupert’s stiff handwriting—
In the hills it is so fair, Herr Knight—
and slip both into her skirt, her little thief’s sleeve of hoarded treasures: a chamois sack of mongrel coins, francs and pence and shillings; the Taroc cards; the flat-faced cameo on a twist of fading blue tulle. Tipping the chocolate pot to find like a rind, yes, still a thimble’s-worth of sweetness, the smooth half-bitter dregs that she pairs with a heel of rye bread, a tiny luncheon even the owner, that skinflint, will never miss. In Paris she had all the bread she wanted, and
chocolat,
too, for a while: “
Šálek cokolády,
” her murmur, before she thrusts the thought away: why think of it ever, Paris is gone.

Across town, at the city’s railway terminus, trains depart for Paris and for elsewhere as others arrive, disgorging in steam and soot a moving frieze of passengers, all greeted or dispatched by a marble statue of Mercury, grime on his white helmet, winged feet adroitly poised between Olympus and the bootblacks and the stall that sells the apple-flavored snuff. Here a medaled old campaigner munching at his beard, there several loitering blue-capped tea boys, now a sallow society matron leading a trio of trunk-laden porters, as, just below the god, a young man waits with a newspaper, lean and trig in a boldly stylish plaid suit, hair as pale as French champagne beneath a coal black bowler. The young man pretends to scan the headlines—
GERMAN
MINISTER
TO
VISIT
THE
PREFECTURE
—as he watches the matron hurry toward an anonymous cabriolet, its windows thickly curtained and its doors unmarked. Just as she steps off the curb, a tea boy with an empty tray darts up to block her, grubby fingers snatching at her sleeve—

“Tea, ma’am, hey, ma’am, you want a cup?”

—the matron shrinking back to no avail, the boy avid as a rat to climb her skirts until “Madame,” the trig young man suddenly at her elbow, “do allow me,” to briskly cuff the boy sprawling and reach for the door of the cab, his helpful hand at her wrist to conduct her, his gaze meeting that of the man inside—a professionally handsome gentleman, thick pomade and Latinate, in no way the matron’s husband—who instantly blanches and slams the door. The porters fumble with the luggage as the young man steps back into the crowd, palming as he goes the matron’s bracelet of heart-shaped sapphires and “That’s got you,” he says pleasantly to no one, “you liverish bitch—”

—as the urchin pops up grinning like a jack-in-the-box alongside another, wide-eyed boy and “Here,” says the young man, two coins to the false tea boy and one to the real. “Spiff play, both of you.”

“Ta, Haden!” chirps the urchin, handing back to the other boy his official cap and tray, turning to the chestnut kiosk to slap down the price—“Hot bag, quick it!” —as “That’s Haden St.-Mary?” the real tea boy asks. “You work for him?”

“Fucking right I do,” says the urchin proudly. “An’t he pay bona? And he can kick the piss out of a wooden horse.”

Meanwhile the young man, who calls himself Haden St.-Mary, has passed back beneath the god’s column through a drifting litter of ticket stubs, lost gloves, chestnut hulls, and pigeon shit, the noon sun lighting his way through a rusting ironwork arch as he flags the first hack waiting, down the nudge and roll of the congested avenue, patchwork of cobblestones and concrete, larch and faintly greening elm, muddy Carousel Park and the beggars in their aprons crying “
Pitié, pitié
” and squinting their liquor-bright eyes. As he goes he yawns—the night just past was a long one, dealing faro till dawn in a French laundry, a boy on his lap tipping him sips from a brandy flask—and whistles through his teeth “
Qu’a-t-il fait?
”, all the boys of the avenue are singing it just now. His whistle is slightly marred by the scar that cleaves the sulky fullness of his lips, a scar he gnaws when he is anxious or angry, a scar a discarded bedmate once called the mark of Venus, revenge from the jealous goddess of love upon a man who loves no one at all.

If he, or for that matter the pedestaled god, had turned his head only a few degrees, he might have noted a family trio dodging a trolley at the curb: a dark young man in second-best businessman’s suit shepherding an older couple, rabbit-fur mantle and muff for the mamma, tightly held train tickets and nervous checking of the pocket watch by the papa, somber then to shake hands: “The time is too short. I should have liked to meet your employers, who work a young man so strenuously.”

“Especially,” sighs the mamma, “since they won’t allow you to travel—Cousin Albertine will miss you at her wedding! And to speak of weddings,” squeezing his arm, “we
must
set the date. Dear Marie has been so patient.”

The dark young man bites the inside of his cheek: “I know, Mamma,” at a kind of loss, “we will. But things are always so busy here,” as her face puckers, then smooths, she smooths one plump hand down his coat front, a futile, loving gesture, then is led away into the surge of the station crowd by her husband, already on the lookout for sly snatchpockets and other city-dwelling ne’er-do-wells.

Released, the dark young man turns back for the street, the nearest milk-and-tea shop, where he treats himself to
gebackene Mäuse,
“baked mice,” and a cup of caravan tea, reading, while he eats, the theatre column in the
Clarion,
a putative colleague whose tastes in entertainment are only slightly less offensive than his prose:
For an evening of sheerest delight, one shouldst see again
She Wouldst Not
!
The church bells begin to ring from St. Mary of Dolors; he bows his head a moment, eyes closed, then puts aside his emptied plate and hurries out past some shouting street boys, checkered scarves and dirty hands—

“Give a penny, sah, give a penny for some tea?”

“Suck for a fiver, sah? Half a fiver? Come on, fucking cheapjack!”

—to merge like a native into the purposeful scrum of businessmen and clerks and shopgirls: Frédéric-Seraphim Blum, dutiful son, absent fiancé, devotee of theatre and good writing and God; and another servant, if all unwitting, of that railway god whom the Greeks called Hermes, that rascal lord of thresholds and of journeys, of thievery and hard commerce, of ecstasy and lies.

See time as a deck of cards, the gods’ cards call them: each card a year, or a moment as momentous, each figure thereon an actor in the branching spread of the whole.
See the men of the Mercury; as children they were lovers: a thin dark boy in a black cap and jacket dropping pebbles into the gutter, one, two, half a dozen, before dropping himself from the sheltering ledge and heading off into the rain; solitude seems to suit him, this orphan, even at the monks’ school he was alone. But sometimes, as now, when the rain makes a certain murmuring sound, or he hears a certain kind of wistful song—
Come with me, my darling, my darling, come with me into the hills—
what can those words mean to him who knows nothing but the road and wants nothing more, no, yet why should his heart hurt so and he long to gather and keep safe, to have and to hold,
my darling, my darling
—

—until he is breathing fast, until the rain becomes a torrent and a viaduct looms, someone hunkered there already so he loosens the stick at his belt: then sees it is a boy even younger than he, plastered to the skin and pinched at the lips, how long has he been sitting there, and how long already on the dodge for him, the frail mother and ragged small sister, and he the gutter peacock prince who sings songs and makes jests for the gents who sometimes pay, the first words he offers now are a show:
See this,
making a scrap of old velvet into a mouth, a hungry mouth, it spits out six pennies and then gobbles them back up, spits again, gobbles, overcome each time by such greedy surprise that now Rupert is smiling, now the two boys are sitting side by side, now he gives his name, lstvan, just that and no more, what more does he need with that laugh, and those eyes, and a boast to make a play of anything, this scrap, that shadow, if Rupert will only watch awhile he will see—

—and that is the start of it, the heart of it, the two of them bound from that viaduct as one, as the pennies are carried in Rupert’s pocket and the velvet scrap becomes a hat for a little figure of wood, stub body and arms unmoving, carved out by Rupert with a stolen knife, the skill passed to Istvan who learns so easily and so well, who takes great delight in the pert little man, who in turn teaches Rupert how a show can be a game, can be all sorts of games, can make friends and open doors and urge the coins from one hand to another, their hands, their shows—

Try again, Mouse, take a breath. It’s easy if you try, yeah?

Not for me. I can’t do as you do,
change his voice or throw it, or so command the attention of a crowd, it seems all Istvan must do is choose a stump to stand on and people, children, men will stop in their tracks to watch. But he can pick up stories from the streets and sing, a tenor that one day will drop into a handsome baritone; and pass the hat and guard the coins, already he hits well enough to break a man’s bone, and has…. So thus they go, the King of Staves and the Jack of Puppets, those grimy streets the first of all their stages, and hearts trump in every game, every time, no matter what the playing stakes or the reckoning at the end.

But not every boy, wild boy on his own, so sweetly finds his way. Let the cards fall again in a different year, and see another boy beside another gutter, holey boots and knotted spotted neckerchief, flipping rocks at a tavern window, playing a game with himself. Shortly two others, youngsters with bare feet and dripping noses, wander up to watch him,
What you doing, Haden?
and
There’s a man in there,
says Haden,
says he’ll give me tenpenny if I can knock a bottle off the bar. But these stones I got,
showing them in his fist,
can’t even crack that old glass that’s broken anyway.

The urchins consult, then
I got these,
pulling from a pocket a palmful of lead marbles.
But you got to give me fi’penny if you win.

If I win, I’ll tell the man it was your stones.
Arm cocked for the sling, two hard marbles at once and at once the window shatters, the tavern keeper erupts and
They did it!
Haden laughing in flight as the slapstick descends, as the urchins howl, as the men inside shake their heads at the petty foolishness of boys when the times are so dire, their own parish in the path of war already: and already, as the sun goes down, the fires begin in the streets.

The flames dance like a lurid show past a cellarside window—this one broken, too, though half mended with stuffed rags, everything in this town is broken or mended—and
Oh! Come away from there!
his mother’s wail, she is always wailing, he has learned to pay her no mind. They say she is a harlot, they say she gave herself to a wandering spirit to birth this boy with his tangled pelt of hair and eyes yellow as a goat’s, the master of all goats, Pan himself upon some hillside made of foxglove and iron. But truly he is not a bastard, though his father is permanently elsewhere, a so-called soldier of fortune who left behind only a half-flat purse and a half-remembered name, Mundy, and the boy’s own name from a general of the greatest wars.

This war is not a great one, though it is large enough to consume several townsfolk as well as the town’s bakery in the smell of roasting yeast, and send rude men tramping through its streets: like this one in a greasy uniform jacket and suspiciously elegant trousers, half a gentleman’s rig, but this man is no gentleman, nor the men that he calls his soldiers, as he calls himself a corporal: calling to Haden watching from the barred doorway of the tavern
You, boy! Show me where’s the jenny-house in this place.

For tenpenny I will,
and, paid, he leads the way to the whores’ tired two-room, with its reek of arnica and beetle-browed madam. While his men troop inside, the corporal waits in the street, passing the time with a deck of playing cards, old French cards of hard-waxed paper, flipping through simple tricks as Haden stands beside him, rapt:
Keep a good watch on that pale knave, now! Where’s he hiding at, eh?

There,
says Haden.
No, now he’s there.

You’ve sharp eyes
, the corporal considering the comely face, that strange gaze
Like a cat’s, eh? Little tomcat, what’s your name?
but like a wary cat Haden then departs—

—to reappear as the brigands’ band leaves town, falling into step beside the corporal as if he is used to a martial gait: neckerchief and red-tasseled shawl, his mother’s shawl knotted up into a bindle and
Hola,
says the corporal,
it’s the tomcat! What, you want to join up with us?

With you,
and with no more ceremony than a nod and a drink from a wineskin, sour Rheinish gulped down like mother’s milk, he leaves the weary little warren that has been his only home; he never sees it, or his mother, again. Now he is called the corporal’s son.

As a son he has certain liberties: to drink when he will from that wineskin, to wear a fine black-braided kepi, to eat his fill of coarse and bloody brazier-cooked meat, roughmeat the soldiers call it, but the corporal only shrugs:
Wild cats, they eat what they can get. And he likes it, don’t you, Haden?
The corporal likes that he has had a bit of schooling, can spell his name and read after a fashion, but there is always more to learn: how to ride pillion when a horse can be had, how often a grown man takes his pleasure, how to play all sorts of games—lansquenet, Shut-the-Box, hazard, he shows an especial talent for the cards, with his quick gaze and long fingers
Just like a lass’s,
sneers one of the soldiers, a ruddy-faced drunkard.
He’s already your sweet little lass, an’t he, sir?
The other men hoot, and the corporal smiles, offering no defense of Haden who says nothing through the laughter, who waits until the ruddy soldier is fast asleep to straddle and piss in his snoring mouth, a vengeance unpunished but frowned upon by the corporal:
Now, now, that’s not how a man does.

It’s how I do,
and there the matter rests, though he keeps a wary eye on the ruddy, grudge-holding soldier until a knife fight takes that chore from his days; cold days, now that winter has come, and the fires he is tasked to build grow harder and harder to manage, the foraging, too. Everyone is tired of soldiers, tired of the war, the housewives and maids not so free with their charity, even to a hungry boy in the rags of a uniform—but a hungry, wandering boy in the rags of a red-tasseled shawl, his dear old aunty’s shawl, his poor lost sister’s…. To be given bread is one thing, to steal it is another, but to win it by pure dissembling is something else again.

And more than just crusts and cheese rinds, by this game he earns his first taste of Irish whiskey, and fine clodhopper boots free of any holes, and a curious wafer of silver on a silver chain, he thinks to barter that for better but
No,
insists the corporal,
you keep that:
a medallion of St. Christopher,
patron of travelers, of men who carry mystery on their backs.
You wear it, hear? It will make you safe.

He shifts inside the corporal’s heavy arms.
I thought you were to make me safe.

When at last the fighting stops, the soldiers celebrate in the smoky streets of the last town raided, waving their bayonets and laughing, the corporal laughing with them, then frowning, then growing very drunk: he insists Haden sit on his knee, kisses his mouth, kisses him hard and
Little tomcat,
he says,
you’ll be fine,
though the sour salt merchant to whom he then indentures the boy—
Can’t take him with me, I’ve whelps of my own at home
—finds him nothing but sullen and rebellious, a poor and balky toiler, a mocker, in fact, of salt, the very substance of life itself—

Where would we be without it, ha? Tell me that! Our Lord Himself called his disciples “the salt of the earth”
—

Then get Him to sweep out your fucking storeroom,
easily evading the clout before it comes; he is quicker than ever, more treacherous, too, the salt merchant waking one morning to find a deal of money gone along with a half-bottle of calvados, a bad-smelling kepi crammed into the counterbox, while Haden himself, bareheaded and brandy in hand, heads alone up the mucky road. As he walks he tells himself that all the salt merchants of the earth can go and fuck themselves standing, and all the armies and their corporals, too. With the cards he carries he will make his own way, he will make his fortune and then some, just like the card he most favors, the knave of diamonds with his back-crossed fingers, a crown of broken arrows, and a painted, tilted smile.