Ernst sipped more of the liqueur. He dipped three fingertips into it, and flicked the dark fluid at the backs of the people crowding against the railing. Spots formed on the clothing of a man and a girl. Ernst laughed; the too-loud noise sobered him for a moment. “You’d be ugly, Eugenie,” he said, “and I’d be drunk.” The heat of the African noon enveloped him, and the stillness made it difficult to breathe. Ernst struggled out of his old worn jacket, throwing it onto the chair across the small metal table from him.
“Marie, you don’t matter. Not now. Not here. Africa would be perfect for Eugenie, but you, Marie, I picture your destruction among the million mirror shards of Paris or Vienna. So forget it, I’m talking to Eugenie. She would come right across that square, scattering the pigeons, the pedestrians, the damned army just the same, marching right across the square, right up to this cafe, to my table, and stare down at me as if she had walked the Mediterranean knowing where I was all the time. But it won’t work again. She wouldn’t have thought that I could catch up to her laughing crime, that I’d still be the same rhyming idiot I always was. And she’d be old, older than I, lined and wrinkled, leaning, tucked in, shaking just a bit in the limbs, aching just a bit in the joints, showing patches and patterns of incorrect color, purples on the legs, brown maculae on the arms, swirls and masses on the face beneath the surgery and appliances. Then what would I do? I would buy her a drink and introduce her to everyone I know. That would destroy her surely enough, speedily enough, satisfyingly enough, permanently enough. Oh, the hell with indifference. I really can’t maintain it.” Ernst laughed again and hoped some patrician in the Jaish’s audience would turn around, bored by the mock military show, and ask Ernst what amused him. No one did. Ernst sat in glum silence and drank.
He had been in the Fee Blanche all morning and no one, not even the most casual early strollers, had paused to wish him a good day. Should he move on? Gather “material” in another cafe? Have a sordid experience in a disorderly house, get beaten up by a jealous gavroche?
“So, Sidi Weinraub! You sit out under all skies, eh?”
Ernst started, blinking and rapidly trying to recover his tattered image. “Yes, leneth, you must if you want to be a poet. What is climate, to interfere with the creative process?”
The girl was young, perhaps not as old as seventeen. She was one of the city’s very poor, gaunt with years of hunger and dressed in foul old clothes. But she was not a slave — she would have looked better if she had been. She earned a trivial living as a knife sharpener. Behind her she pulled a two-wheeled cart, dilapidated and peeling, filled with tools and pieces of equipment. “How does it go?” she asked.
“Badly,” admitted Ernst, smiling sadly and pulling a soggy bit of scrap paper from his pocket. “My poem of yesterday lies still unfinished.”
The girl laughed. “Chi ama assai parla poco,” she said. “‘He who loves much says little.’ You spend too much time chasing the pretty ones, no? You do not fool me, yaa Sidi, sitting there with your solemn long face. Your poem will have to be finished while you catch your breath, and then off after another of my city’s sweet daughters.”
“You’ve seen right through me, Ieneth,” said Ernst with a tired shrug. ‘You’re right, of course. One can’t spend one’s entire life chasing the Muse. Wooing the Muse, I mean. If you chase the Muse, you gain nothing. Wooing becomes a chief business. It’s like anything else — you get better with practice.” He smiled, though he was dreadfully weary of the conversation already. The necessity of keeping up the pretense of sexual metaphor annoyed him.
“You are lucky, in a way,” said the girl. “Pity the poor butcher. What has he in his daily employment to aid him in the wooing? You must understand your advantage.”
“Is there a Muse of Butchery?” asked Ernst with a solemn expression.
“You are very clever, yaa Sidi. I meant, of course, in the wooing of a pretty girl. Were a butcher to approach me, a blood sausage in his hands, I would only laugh. That is not technique, yaa Sidi. That is uninspired. But these poems of yours are the product, as you say, of one kind of wooing, and moreover the weaponry of another sort.”
“So poems still work their magic?” asked Ernst, wondering if this meeting were, after all, better than simple boredom.
“For some young girls, I suppose. Do you favor many young girls with them?”
A sudden cry from the crowd on the sidewalk prevented Ernst’s reply. He shook his head in disgust. Ieneth interpreted his expression correctly, looking over her shoulder for a few seconds. She turned back to him, leaning on the railing near his table. He, of course, could not invite her to join him. There were only two classes of people in the city, besides the slaves: the wealthy and those like Ieneth. She was forbidden by custom to intrude on her betters, and Ernst was certainly not the crusading sort to sweep aside the laws of delicacy. Anyway, he thought, her people had their own dives, and he surely wouldn’t be made welcome in them.
“Ah, I see you disapprove of the Jaish,” said Ieneth. “At least your expression shows contempt, and its object must be either our army or myself.”
“No, no, don’t worry, I have nothing but affection for you,” said Ernst. He was amazed by his facile speech; generally he would have been reduced to unpleasant sarcasm long before this. In point of fact, he felt even less than mere affection for the girl. He felt only recognition; he knew her as another resident of the city, with little to recommend her in any way. He didn’t even feel lust for her. He rather wished that she’d go away.
“Then it’s the Jaish. That’s a shame, really. There are several very nice gentlemen involved with it.” She smiled broadly. Ernst felt certain that she would wink, slowly. She did.
Ernst smiled briefly in return. “I’m sure there are,” he said. “It’s just that I’m not one of them, and I have no interest at all in making the acquaintance of any, and I wish they’d stop spoiling my afternoons with their juvenile tin-soldiery.”
“You should see the larger story,” said Ieneth. “As long as they spend their time marching and carrying broom rifles, you will have no competition for the company of their mothers and daughters.”
“You mistake me,” said Ernst, “though you flatter me unduly. Surely it is hopeless for such a one as I, with such, ah, cosmopolitan tastes.”
“I would not agree,” she whispered. Ernst became aware that he had been staring at her. She reached across the railing and touched him confidentially on the shoulder. The motion exposed her wonderful breasts completely.
Ernst took a deep breath, forcing himself to look into her eyes. “Do you know what I mean then?”
“Certainly,” she said, with an amused smile. She indicated her little wagon. “I know that sometimes men want their scissors sharpened, and sometimes their appetites. And anyone may have a lucrative avocation, no?”