He was satisfied. Melkior saw his chin tremble slightly with a happy smile, but he would not let his face glow with visible pleasure. He had to sustain his role of sufferer.
“Demanding sacrifice,” Maestro went on, taking evident satisfaction in the malicious pathos of his own voice and filled with an urge for contrariety. “Put your fingers on Future’s anvil so we can smash them! So we can tear off your arms, fracture your legs, use your skull for a flowerpot! Be a martyr! We shall give your name to the gigantic hydro-temple of our God, ELECTRON! My dear Eustachius! But I’m an atheist! I don’t fall for ditties sung to marching tunes.”
Maestro was laughing bitterly, staring sardonically into Melkior’s eyes as if challenging him. His hair stood up like the plumage of a rooster enraged.
His eyes were quite glazed, demented from drink; his nose featured a cracked crust of dried blood, his face swollen, red, with purple blotches and a dense web of swollen capillaries. Faces like this loom in imagination’s horrible projections before sleep, thought Melkior.
“Please lie down, Maestro,” (if only he would, he’d fall asleep). “I’ll be sitting here and talking to you. Let me open your bed …”
“No, Eustachius,” Maestro raised a resolute hand, “I won’t have it. If I lie down I’ll fall asleep like a foolish virgin. I must be awake, Eustachius, I’m not giving up this night. I want to share it with you like Socrates with … the one who tried to persuade him to flee. But you’re more like the other one … what was his name? … the tearful disciple. Socrates was killed by hemlock and I’ll be killed by the invisible God ELECTRON! What an honor, ha-ha … God strike me! God nothing!” Abruptly he was angry, it seemed. “Nnoo, this is no honor! Some God, coming from resin, amber (the ancient Greeks called it elektron); we would therefore render it as Gum God, my kind Eustachius. By gum, I’ll come to a sticky end, I will.”
Melkior was alarmed:
“What are you saying, you lunatic?”
“What’s wrong, Eustachius? Heh-heh, afraid of me shaking your faith? We can’t even tie a shoelace any more without believing in something. Don’t be afraid, most kind one, there will always be one sort of bait or another in front of your nose, just close enough to tease your sense of smell, but your teeth will never reach it. Well, go ahead and believe in that Eternal Sausage (Melkior remembered Kurt and shuddered), follow it … but bear in mind: you will never sink your teeth into it.”
“Perhaps I’m not after anything,” Melkior tried to justify himself, at the same time irked: “If you think I’m a fool …”
“You’re no fool, wise Eustachius, but you don’t know how to live in in-dif-fer-ence.”
“And you do?” said Melkior, irritated.
“Don’t be angry, Eustachius, even heads wiser than ours didn’t know. They’ve left behind temples, children, pyramids, symphonies, books … mummies. You, too, would leave a mummy behind, even if it is only this big, so long as the embryo of your glory reaches the Future in a jar of alcohol. Ambitious types like you imagine …”
“Leave me out of this!” interrupted Melkior angrily: had he not himself thought about …
“All right, not you — the … others, the fu-tu-ristic lot,” conceded Maestro, in a placating tone, “picture the Future as a Final Ceremony, a Grand Parade: everyone will be there, sporting their decorations … and afterward — nothing, just a dream. Everything will stop in incantation, in apotheosis — something like Gundulić’s dream, painted on the stage curtain at the Zagreb Opera House, a tableau vivant, for eternity. Ha-ha, most kind Eustachius, the picture of Judgment Day is every bit as naïve, but at least there’s some dynamic and fear in it, something earnest … Oh why didn’t I have the acquaintance of all men!” sighed Maestro with pathos.
“What use would that be now?” laughed Melkior. “So you could leave them a memory of you?”
“All I wish to leave them now is my undamaged skeleton, Eustachius,” said Maestro gloomily and, it seemed, with reproach, “as stipulated in my contract with the Institute … So that students may study me and become doctors, eventually to become skeletons themselves. There’s equality and fraternity for you, Eustachius!”
Maestro’s head then dropped with fatigue and drink, first to his shoulder, but finding no support there it slid powerlessly forward and thumped against the bare wooden tabletop. The sound was dull and probably painful, but he seemed to feel nothing anymore.
He’ll drop off now, hoped Melkior. He watched the dried mud on Maestro’s bare pate: “the grimy bald spot.” They threw him about and beat him before her very eyes. Freddie thrashed him and she, in all probability, enjoyed it. Viviana.
Melkior pronounced the name with mournful scorn and this concluded all he had to think, completed all he had to say. Over and done with. Shot dead. He ordered the volley himself. Fire! He repeated the punishment with a listless and miserable despair.
He was tired. How long the nights still are in March … His eyes closed of their own accord, they had nothing to see anymore, they longed for sleep. But the head is not abed … he repeated mechanically inside, yet the words remained meaningless, in-dif-fer-ent.
He noticed that, too. Maestro is not moving: dead or alive? — everything is now in-dif-fer-ent, as if this were a dream. And the words were an echo from a fast forward, agitated image sequence on the borderline between fancy and dream … a park with a dead man in white floating in a pool … a jet of water spouting between his legs … a silent screening, no splashing to be heard. (The rain had stopped.)
Dogs barking: night agitated; train squalling: faraway places sobbing; a young, vernal wind sighing outside Maestro’s balcony. … Melkior was explaining everything to his numbed senses.
Zee-zee-zee … piped up outside the house in its nocturnal, homely hum, like the Dickensian cricket, It, the Powerline.
“Can you hear that, Eustachius,” spoke Maestro all of a sudden, sullenly, without lifting his head, “can you hear the siren song? Plug my ears … with wax, Eustachius.”
“Go back to sleep, Maestro,” Melkior reassured him, “it’s the breeze, soon it will be day.”
“The proper phrase is a new day, Eustachius … for the sake of ex-pec-tancy and mi-ni-mum optimism …”
He stood up and stretched, in a seemingly sober way.
He wasn’t asleep, concluded Melkior, he was only resting his thoughts on the knotty tabletop. Embossed on his forehead was a starlike imprint of a knot in the wood: there, he’s one of the marked … a star on his forehead, a sparkle in his eye … thought Melkior by way of the poet’s line.
Maestro opened the balcony door, fragrant fresh air burst into the close, smelly room.
“Can you smell the breath of spring, Eustachius?” he asked with concealed irony. “That’s why I feel the torrents of spring inside me. I’m not partial to Turgenev, are you? I’m off to point my hose, Eustachius,” he said going out onto the balcony, “perhaps I’ll touch Eternity with my arc. Adieu, adieu! Eustachius, remember me …”