“Cats, you have not convinced me. Not at all.” But they either don’t hear me or prefer to pretend that they don’t hear me. They keep moving forward chanting another of their endless litanies: “He crossed the courses of the stars…” And I would like to jeer at them. To tell them to their faces that they have lied to me. Haven’t they boasted that they play life’s little game alone? That they accept the world as the world is, and that all of us are in one way or another guilty of everything that any one of us is guilty of? I would like to throw those words back at them, but all I can think of at this moment is Isabel … of you, little Pussycat, locked in Javier’s arms in a cheap motel on the road to Toluca.
“He put back the times of the sea…”
They come toward me slowly, shuffling, dancing, chanting, rolling their mushroom-clouded eyes. And I stand before them opposing their hallucinations with my uncertain sanity. Then forgive him, for God’s sake, forgive him, keeping in mind that he also has loved and breathed and …
“He killed the fruit in its seed…”
But today he harms no one. He has been pardoned, time has pardoned him. Javier is ten times less a man, a hundred times more a criminal. He deserves punishment at least a thousand times more. Eh, Dragoness? Enough? Let’s just say that this is a detective story and we have come to the moment when the rewards must be doled out and we do not have to reward sinners as if they were men of justice.
“He has corroded the child’s mouth with the mother’s milk, he has gone into heaven to defile it, he has descended into hell to deliver it from subjection…”
Isabel in a cold motel room with her absurd Proffy, whom she does not seem to find absurd. And White Rabbit is not mine, either. She will never be mine and she is the only desire I have felt this entire night. Shit, shit. That goddamn kiss. And the very convincing way she insulted her make-believe husband. She showed old habit there. Then Jakob, caressing her, holding her in his arms. The tenderness with which he protected her. The way he led her so gently to the fireplace. Jakob is my rival, that’s clear enough.
“He bade the moon to shed poison…”
I can’t tell them my doubt and misgiving. She, pale White Rabbit, may never be mine anyhow, but it’s damn sure she will never be mine if I seem unsure of myself. So adiós, Franz. And after you make your departure, I’ll tell them they were wrong. Not now. Now I shall shout with them that you must not be pardoned, for to pardon you would be to deny forgiveness of all meaning. Only later will I insist that you didn’t deserve to die, that you have paid the price of whatever may have been your crime, paid with twenty-five long years of decency and honesty. Javier and Elizabeth have maintained their hell, heaping more fuel to it day after day. Not you, Franz.
“He bade the air to fall in flame…”
No longer do I stand in their way. I stand against the wall. Let them pass, let them pass. The single candle has been blown out by someone and in the darkness I try to sense them, feel them, smell them. I would like to reach out my hand as White Rabbit goes by. Touch her and stop her and explain my doubt to her and insist: damn it, what did he do? And what difference does it make now to anyone? I shan’t do it. I can’t do it. The six Monks file out and start down the spiral stairs. I know her answer. What Franz did or didn’t do doesn’t matter, man, it’s just that he is the old and we are the new, and the old must shake over out of the way. Yes, the cycle has ended and the new pyramid must be built upon the tired shell of the old. And Franz is that tired shell and so must die. What did he do? Much, little, nothing, it makes no difference. I would still like to know, though. Maybe it’s written somewhere in one of the notebooks, on one of the scraps of paper that I haven’t found yet in the drawers of the trunk. For there are so many of those little drawers. There are thousands. And now I don’t have time.
I gave up the fight, Dragoness, and joined them. Not with much enthusiasm, that’s true, yet with a certain feeble excitement that was enough to swing the balance. I wanted to say, with them, to hell with the old. To hell with my forties. Back to a memory of youth, if not back to youth. You would have done the same. Middle age is not bitching. It’s merely a bitch. So I followed them down the stairs and across my half-assed garden and out into the alley and across the Beltway to the street where their old Lincoln was parked, and I stood as they gathered in a semicircle before the door and pointed to the six small black swastikas pasted there. Five of them bore large X crosses, like the crosses made on fighter planes to show the number of the enemy the pilot has downed. In turn, one by one, each of the Monks stepped forward and put a finger to one of the crossed-out swastikas and curtly explained it:
“Oberscharführer Heinrich Kruger. Organizer of the transportation of the three thousand Jews whose lives were taken in revenge for the murder of the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.”
“Ruby Richter, SS guard in charge of the women’s baths at Auschwitz.”
“Lieutenant Malaquias von Dehm. Participant in the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto.”
“Lisbeth Fröhlich, trained nurse. The preparation of poisoned marmalade for the physically and mentally defective children sent to Treblinka.”
“Lorenz Kemper. Factory machinist. The manufacture of cylinders for the gas known as Cyclon-B.”
Who these people were, I don’t know. You’ll find out for me, Isabel. You will make Franz talk and tell you, and then you will tell me. You will help me fill out the file. But I do know that these people are dead, and I know who killed them. Maybe it would be better not to know who they were. Just to forget those hazy years, years of my childhood and adolescence that are fused together in a mosaic, still strangely unfaded, of movies and newspaper headlines and radio reports and crime stories and cracked phonograph records, the written and heard debris of which half our lives is composed. No, I want to know. So you will learn and tell me, Pussycat. I still have you, despite your insistence that you were psychoanalyzed in your nitwit mother’s womb. Yes, I still have you. And somewhere out of sight a distant voice is singing, and far away out of sight on the other side of the fat round world, dawn is rising. Not so far, perhaps, after all, though I have no idea what time it is. The six Monks surround me and we gaze somberly at the swastikas on the door of the Lincoln, the five that bear X’s, the one that remains unmarked. And I say to myself: Of sand water is born, and of water, fish.
“He found out the house of life and destroyed it.”
Did he? Well, maybe he did, maybe he did.
His stand-in, blond Boston Boy, opens the trunk of the old car and quickly slips the bundle he has carried inside his coat into a nest of clothing and rags, a small bundle as alive as I am, moaning, wriggling, resisting. He slams the lid down so that whatever the bundle is cannot escape, cannot attack him. And I had thought, unimaginative shell of the old that I am, that the contents of my prize steamer trunk were rather unusual. I haven’t the slightest idea what Boston Boy is up to. Why should I? The irrational is not to be explained. I shrug. Everyone has relaxed now. The last act has ended. We return now to our real names, whatever they are, to our real being, whatever that is. Brother Thomas smiles and drags a match across his buttocks, across the embroidered silver eagle and serpent. His joint glows. And now we will take another trip, man. We’re going to fly high, cats. High and far, swinging loose, swinging crazy, casting spells, shaking demons, rocking and twisting and always going, going, going, man, going. Let’s hit it, man, let’s split. The road is very long.
* * *
Δ Elizabeth and Javier remained facing the wall of locust gods. They did not look at Franz. They looked at each other, into each other’s eyes. Javier started to say something but Elizabeth closed his lips with her hand and they went on looking at each other. The sea took the light of the sun and reflected and filtered it and sent it back transformed to the sun. The sea of green and blue and violet stripes, colors of the water of life. It overpowers the land of hazy mountains that are like shoulders thrown up from the depth of the sea, pale and blue, that are the backbones of the tired old monster of the sea. And in the harbor of Rhodes, the ship is about to leave. Elena, wrapped in a black shawl, Elena, wrinkled and brown as a nut, but with shining eyes and teeth, stands among the women shouting up at the sky and now and again praying. The women weep, yet laugh between their sobs. Their men are sailing away from them today. Leaving the island to find work in Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, wherever laborers are needed. They will cease to be peasants and become servants and mechanics. Black-clad wives weep, old grandmothers, wrinkled and white-haired, thin-lipped, young cousins. All of them have their pictures taken in a group. They stop crying at once, smile for the photographer, curse the clumsy old woman who at that instant crosses in front of the camera. All of Rhodes laughs and cries and makes jokes and shouts farewells. Venders of sesame bread and meat pies. Old women wearing black turbans. Shrieking children. Whistles and shouts of stevedores loading and unloading. The jostling of the porters.