Thus toward the middle of the morning on December 21, 1933, a naked Nubar Wallenstein, sole heir to the largest oil fortune in the Middle East, sucking his thumb and shivering violently in a swirling fog, left his fetal position in the master bedroom of his spacious Venetian palazzo and wandered into the corridor on the second floor, in search of clothes to wear on what would be the longest day of his life, under his arm a stack of incoherent journals, bewilderingly contradictory, titled The Boy.
It was dark in the corridor, the chandeliers having all been removed months ago. Nubar sucked his thumb and worked his way along the wall. Behind him the fog from his bedroom billowed out into the corridor in impressive clouds.
Fog. Ahead to the left a feeble yellow glow came from what had once been the music room. Nubar tiptoed over and peeked in.
A gang of about a dozen servants and their relatives were milling around the room with torches and heavy crowbars, arguing loudly about who should hold the torches and who wield the crowbars to pry up the marble flooring.
One of the women had left a battered old pair of brown galoshes outside the door. Nubar stepped into them. They were torn and cracked and much too large for him, about twice the size of his small feet, but at least walking on rubber would be better than going barefoot on the cold marble floors.
Nubar shuffled forward, slowly moving away from the weak yellow glow that already seemed dimmer.
Behind him the demolition crew in the music room erupted into passionate Italian curses as they bumped into one another and knocked each other down, suddenly unable to see what they were doing because of the thick fog rolling into the room from the corridor.
Somewhere back there a voice screamed, followed by a different scream and a third. Crowbars were striking something solid with heavy thuds. Heads being broken? A falling-out over loot? Why not, the thieves deserved it. Nubar sucked his thumb and giggled. He skated over to the top of the grand staircase, where a torch had been jammed into a hole in the wall.
He removed the torch and examined his finger. It was still bleeding slightly. He put the thumb back in his mouth and waddled down the staircase toward the grand entrance-hall on the ground floor, the volumes of The Boy pressed tightly against his sunken chest.
Disorder on every side. Holes in the walls, craters in the floors. Here and there flickering corners heaped with chunks of rotting bread and gnawed bones and the glittering skeletons of chickens picked clean, stinking salami wrappers and twisted olive-oil tins and mounds of rigid tangled pasta, the debris his servants had left around the makeshift cooking fires they had hastily set up and abandoned on their destructive migrations through the palazzo.
Rampaging Visigoths, thought Nubar. Marauding Ostrogoths. The fools. Didn't they realize that when they pillaged him they were pillaging the very foundations of Western civilization? Idiots. When would they ever learn?
Nubar picked his way carefully around the smoldering campfires toward the lofty devastated space that had once been the salon, through the desolate wasted savanna that had once been the library.
Mad savages, he muttered as he shuffled forward, his destination a small room behind the kitchen where the cooks had once changed into their uniforms before coming on duty, months ago when that was still done. He thought there might be some clothes there but when he finally reached the small room, now a murky cave with assorted shards and bones scattered around the entrance, he found only some underwear hanging on a hook, women's underwear, monstrously large even by Italian working-class standards.
Women's underwear. Monstrous. Nubar poked through the huge damp articles and found mold everywhere. They must have been hanging there for months, at least since the rains of the previous spring.
Still, he had to have something to wear.
An enormous pair of thick brown stockings, too big for him to use as stockings. A scarf? Nubar wound the stockings around and around his neck, making a thick scarf for himself.
Enormous brown bloomers. Nubar stepped into them and found that the waistband came all the way up to his armpits. He wound the bloomers around the top of his chest, tying knots, three or four times around his chest and dozens of knots before the bloomers would stay up. He sucked his thumb and studied the next article.
An immense brown canvas corset, boned. The corset was also big enough to go around him three or four times. Nubar looped the corset ties over his shoulders and knotted them under his armpits. The corset reached down below his knees and was pleasantly warm. Because it restricted his legs he found he had to take small mincing steps, but no matter. He had to take small mincing steps anyway because he couldn't lift the large brown galoshes off the floor, only push them forward a little bit at a time.
A brown canvas brassiere, each cup large enough to held a man's head.
Nubar giggled.
Why not? His ears were aching from the damp cold of the fog that had followed him down the main staircase from his bedroom. Impenetrable fog. Soon it would become so thick it would obscure all the rooms on the first floor as well.
Nubar pulled one of the brassiere cups over his head and fitted it snugly around his ears, tying the strap under his chin. With half of the brassiere now a warm skullcap enclosing his head, the other half hung on his back shaped like a roomy rucksack.
Why not? thought Nubar. He tied the strap from the lower half of the brassiere to an eyelet in the corset, so the rucksack could be steady and not dump out its contents when he moved.
Steady. Nubar floated into the pantry and removed the wooden canteen he kept hidden there behind a broken wagon wheel. Then he filled the canteen with mulberry raki from a demijohn he kept hidden under the decomposing carcass of a sheep that looked as if it had been slaughtered for ritualistic purposes.
Barbarians. You couldn't be too careful. Anything of value had to be hidden from these pillaging hordes.
Steady. Voices approaching. Perhaps a patrol?
Nubar pressed himself against the wall in the pantry and held his breath as a wrecking crew of servants trooped through the kitchen shouting loudly to each other, apparently coming from the direction of the main dining room with something long and heavy, perhaps a beam, going toward the back door. The noisy gang passed no more than a few yards away but Nubar, dull brown and immobile, was able to escape detection in the thick fog.
He dropped the canteen into his rucksack and entered the scullery, there to make his most spectacular find of the morning, a long greasy housecoat propped up on a pole, like an animal skin, beside the dead embers of a campfire, no doubt left behind by some woman vandalizing another wing of the palazzo.
Nubar pulled it down and found that the housecoat was a fine garment in faded violet with a large floppy collar, the collar very soft to the touch after years of being nibbled and chewed. The greasy violet housecoat had a deep pocket on each hip and a smaller pocket on the chest.
Long and warm and greasy, what could be better on a cold winter day? Nubar went through the pockets to see what might turn up.
A large brownish rag, stiff with what looked like dried blood. Nubar closed his eyes and sniffed.
Raw horsemeat, there was no mistaking the smell. Raw horsemeat had been wrapped in this rag.
Probably it had been carried under the saddle of a Tartar horseman as he came wildly galloping out of the steppes of central Asia, the heavy sweat of the animal and the weight of the rider tending to cure the raw meat so the horseman could rip off a digestible hunk at the end of the day for his meal. Barbarians.
Disgusting.
A nearly full packet of Macedonian Extras with a box of matches.