On one occasion even Mills has been singled out.
“Think,” the Soup Man had said in what passed among them for public occasions, the boring convocations of garrison life, “of George Mills, who sniffled a man to death and then ransacked his guts for booty, who plundered a pal’s bowels as a highwayman might go through his pockets. Think of Mills, whose blows were blows and for whom another man’s flesh was of no more consequence than a handkerchief. Think of Mills’s ingenuity and cough your enemies into submission. Drown them in your blood, smart their wounds with your tears. Disease and contagion them. Give them your colds and your cancers and, when you fall, fall on them. Rupture them with your weight. Recall George Mills, my treasures, and remember that cruelty is as real a legacy as the family silver.”
Fearing reprisal, he’d shuddered. But there was no reprisal, is none. True enough, he gets the shit details, but since when has a Mills been without shit details? So, to answer Bufesqueu once more, he was in the spirit of things and, if he couldn’t claim actually to enjoy the jobs that fell to him — he loathed them, they insulted his nostrils as much as the prayer cycles in which he found himself — there was that ancient business of the family curse, his old hereditary hardships like recipes in his keeping. Perhaps what he prayed for down on that rug was for them to keep it coming, to keep the pressure on, to keep it up. Perhaps all he wanted out of life was to do his duty. (He was not yet twenty-one years old.) It was, he understood, what most men wanted, the difference between himself and others being that he left it to others to define that duty. Demanded they define it. As if, like any truly despairing man, he would do anything, anything at all, just to get the chance to thunder his smug, contemptuous There, you see? at them. He was, that is, at home only in his outrage. And he almost hoped aloud as he awaited the Meat Cut’s orders that it would be an officer this time, that it would be the Meat Cut himself whom he’d have to follow, soap in hand, to the huge soup kettles in the barracks square.
Imagining the conversation:
“Tonight is the eve of the Rabaran, Mills.”
“Sir! The eve of the Rabaran, sir!”
“In my village, when I was a boy, husbands would bathe their wives, wives their husbands, parents children, children pets. Even the old, even the poor, had their bath partners. It was a community scour, Mills. I was still Christian then of course and had no more understanding of this ceremony than the Muslims had of our saints and martyrs. Indeed, I was a sneaky, oafish sort of boy, not even a very good Christian, and I took the occasion to satisfy my lustful curiosity. Together with other gentiles of my age and sort, I snuck off to the river, where many Muslim families went for their ritual cleansing. There we would deploy ourselves behind boulders and trees and spy on the women as they unpinned their chadors, the young girls who rubbed handfuls of lather into their clefts. I didn’t understand then that even if we’d been discovered they’d never have driven us off, that we’d have been invited to find our own bath partners and join them. That on the eve of the Rabaran the cleanliness that must not be hidden from God need not be hidden from men, even from foolish, curious children. Do you understand what I’m telling you, Mills?”
“Sir! I understand what you’re telling me, sir!”
“That there’s nothing shameful in a holy scour. That the cleanser is blessed as the cleansed. That it’s a privilege to brisk and shine another’s affairs, to polish his business as one would one’s own.”
“Sir! I understand, sir!”
“Of course you do. Others mightn’t, but you do.”
“Sir! I do, sir!”
“Who stuck his hands past the wrists into a colleague’s intestines. Now there’s no need to blush. There’s no reason to go all girly on me, George.”
“Sir! No reason, sir!”
“Of course not. You were doing your duty. You were doing your duty in his duty. Do I have it? Is that about it?”
“Sir! You have it. That’s about it, sir!”
“Well of course. And we understand that if it weren’t the eve of the Rabaran I wouldn’t be asking you to bathe me?”
“Sir! We understand, sir!”
“And that even if it is Rabaran eve we still wouldn’t ask if these were places we could comfortably reach ourselves?”
“Sir! We understand, sir!”
“And that I choose you only because you’ve been there before?”
Requiring that he — the Meat Cut — speak to him in ways that even the King George IV himself would never speak to him. And requiring that Mills answer in ways that King George wouldn’t, indeed couldn’t, ever permit himself to demand. Already aggrieved. Hoping if it weren’t the Meat Cut then some lesser officer, or noncommissioned officer perhaps — a Waiter or Busboy — or even someone from the ranks, a Paradise Dispatcher like himself. Or something to do with the mascot — maybe the mascot was his best bet — Mills commanded to entertain it, to throw sticks for the old blind dog and fetch them himself when the arthritic animal wouldn’t move. (And could imagine that conversation too, not conversation, really, just plain boorish ragging: “Would you look at the bloody-minded beast? Do you see him frolic? Did you e’er see such pep? When Shep goes we won’t even have to replace him. What do you think, Konia? Mills for mascot when old Shep gets demobbed?” “There’s advantages and disadvantages.” “Well I see the advantage. Shep could fetch good as any when he was healthy, but he never did get the hang of throwing. What disadvantage could there be?” “Well, there’s his age.” “His age?” “A human’s lifespan is seven to one compared with a dog’s. Shep’s ninety right now in human terms. Suppose Mills is made mascot, suppose he enjoys it, suppose he takes it in his head he’s only technically human, that only some rare vagary of Nature put him in pants in the first place? My God, don’t you see? He could will himself beast. He’s already five sixths of the way there. On a dog’s diet he could live to be three hundred and fifty!” “There’s that,” Konia’s collaborator admits. “There’s more.” “More, Konia?” “This one don’t have Shep’s temperament. He’s vicious.” Because he’s a living legend by now, so accredited ever since the day the Soup Man chose to single him out for his deeds — of yes, deeds, lifted forever beyond anything as normal as actions or reactions — which is all they were finally: reactions, hard, simple, knee-jerk — and into rhetoric, semiofficial shoptalk, regulation Lister bag company scuttlebutt whenever men stopped by for a cool drink of water — along with Van and Abl Erzuz and Tchambourb and Godukuksbabis and all the rest of that Star Chamber lot of cutthroat bullies.)
A living legend? A living joke.