Czerny banged the little table with his fist. The table’s metal top flipped off its three legs, dumping Ernst’s wineglass to the ground. Czerny didn’t appear to notice. He talked on through the crashing of the table and the breaking of the glass. “Useful? You want to talk about useful? Have you ever read anything about politics? Economics? You know what keeps a culture alive?”
“Yes,” said Ernst sullenly, while M. Gargotier cleaned up the mess. “People not bothering other people.”
“A good war every generation or so,” said Czerny, ignoring Ernst, seeing him now as an enemy. “We’ve got authorities. Machiavelli - he said that the first cause of unrest in a nation is idleness and peace. That’s all this city has ever known, and you can see the results out there.” Czerny waved in the direction of the street. All that Ernst could see was a young woman in a short leather skirt, naked from the waist up. She met his glance and waved.
“Ah,” thought Ernst, “it has been a long time since I’ve been able just to sit and watch those lovely girls. It seems that one should have thought to do that, without fear of interruption. But there is always war, disease, jealousies, business, and hunger. I have asked for little in my life. Indeed, all that I would have now is a quiet place in the Faubourg St. Honore to watch the Parisian girls. Instead, here I am. Observing that single distant brown woman is infinitely preferable to listening to Czerny’s ranting.” Ernst smiled at the half-naked woman; she turned away for a moment. A small boy was standing behind her. The woman whispered in the boy’s ear. Ernst recognized the boy, of course; the boy laughed. It would not be long before Kebap learned that even industry and enterprise would avail him nothing in that damned city.
“You cannot afford silence,” Czerny was saying loudly.
“I hadn’t realized your concerns had gotten this involved,” said Ernst. “I really thought you fellows were just showing off, but it’s a great deal worse than that. Well, I won’t disturb you, if that’s what you’re worried about. I still don’t see why you’re so anxious to have me. I haven’t held a rifle since my partridge-shooting days in Madrid.”
“You aren’t even listening,” said Czerny, his voice shrill with outrage.
“No, I guess I’m not. What is it again that you want?”
“We want you to join us.”
Ernst smiled sadly, looking down at his new glass of wine. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t make decisions anymore.”
Czerny stood up. He kicked a shard of the broken wineglass into the street. “You’re wrong,” he said. “You’ve just made a very bad one.”
Dusk settled in on the shoulders of the city. The poor of the city happily gave up their occupations and hurried to their homes to join their families for the evening meal. Along the city’s avenues, merchants closed their shops and locked gated shutters over display windows. The wealthy few considered the entertainments and casually made their choices. The noises of the busy day stilled, until Ernst could hear the bugle calls and shouted orders of the Jaish as it drilled beyond the city’s walled quarter. The day’s liquor had had its desired effect on him, and so the sounds failed to remind him of Czerny’s anger.
“There seem to be no birds in this city,” thought Ernst. “That is reasonable. For them to abide in this vat of cultural horrors, they must first fly over that great, empty, dead world beyond the gates. Sand. What a perfect device to excise us from all hope of reentering the world. We are shut up like lepers, in a colony across the sand, and easily, gratefully forgotten. The process of forgetting is readily learned. First we are forgotten by our families, our nations. Then we are forgotten by those we’ve hated, our enemies in contiguous countries. At last, when we have alighted here in our final condition, we forget ourselves. Children must be hired to walk the streets of this city, reminding us of our names and our natures, otherwise we should disappear entirely, as we have dreamed and prayed for so many years. But that, after all, is not the reason we have been sent here. We have come not to die, but to exist painfully apart. Death would be a cleansing for us, a discourtesy to our former friends.”
Ernst looked around him. The twilight made pleasant shadows on the stone-paved street surrounding the square. Some of the shadows moved. “Hey!” shouted Ernst experimentally. The shadows burst, flew up, flapped away in many directions. “Pigeons,” thought Ernst. “I forgot pigeons. But that hardly ruins my thesis. Pigeons are a necessity in a city. They were sitting here, asleep on the sand, when the first parched exiles arrived on the spot. The abundantly foolish idea of building a town must have occurred to those unwanted knaves only after seeing the pigeons.”
The city was certainly one of immigrants, Ernst thought. As he had escaped from a crazy Europe, so had Czerny. So had Sandor Courane. Ieneth and her false flower, Ua, had fled from some mysterious wild empire. Could it be that every person sheltered within the city’s granite walls had been born elsewhere? No, of course not; there must be a large native population. These must be the ones most stirred by the absurd wrath of the Jaish, for who else had enough interest? Ernst lived in the city only because he had nowhere else to go. He had stopped briefly in Gelnhausen and the nearby village of Frachtdorf. From Bremen he had sailed to the Scandinavian settlements that bordered the northern sea. He had resided for short times in England and France, but those nations’ murderous nationalism made him run once more. Each time he settled down, it was in a less comfortable situation. Here on the very lip of Africa, the city was the final hope of those who truly needed to hide.
Ernst had often tried to write poems or short, terse essays about the city, but each time he had given up in failure. He couldn’t seem to capture the true emotions he experienced, feelings different in subtle, unpoetic ways from the vaguely similar emotions he had known while living in Europe. The poems could not reflect the pervasive sense of isolation, of eternal uncleanness, of a soul-deep loss of personality; these things descended upon a European, only hours after arriving at the dune-guarded gates of the city.
He had early on made the mistake of showing some of these frustrated scribblings to M. Gargotier. The proprietor had read them politely, muttering the words under his breath as he traced his progress down the page with a grimy finger. When he finished, he had handed the paper back to Ernst without a word, and stood silently, evidently uncomfortable but unwilling to make a final judgment. Soon Ernst stopped asking M. Gargotier to read them, and both men seemed happier for it.
A small voice whispered behind Ernst. It was Kebap, the young fraud. “I know of another city like this one,” said the boy. “It was in Armenia. Of course, there wasn’t sand all around to keep us in. This town was imprisoned by its own lack of identity. There were perhaps five thousand Turks living there, of which several may have been my true father. Indeed, ‘several’ hardly does justice to the whiteness of my mother’s eyes, or the perfection of her skin, at least in those days of a decade past. But I must be modest in all accounts, so that later claims may be made with greater hope of acceptance.”
“You are wise beyond your years, Kebap,” said Ernst sadly.
“That is not difficult at the age of nine,” said the boy. “Nevertheless, I continue. There were perhaps half again as many Armenians, and some Greeks. Persians passed through often, bearing objects which they could not sell. These men rode on the backs of bad-smelling horses and camels of a worse reputation, and we always deviled them continuously until they departed again.