In the evenings he pretended to wet his feet in the oily puddle within the square parapet of the command bunker’s viewing-tower. Of course he had found the pit for the murdered slave laborers; sometimes he sank down there, “to get ideas” as he put it. He wondered whether any of his toy soldiers at Redipuglia had outfought the others, in which case the form or attitude of that survivor might teach him something about himself. He considered waging wars of one against many, and many against one, of riot, confusion and slaughter, because, as the ancients have said, the pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless. He hoped for a perfect realization as sharp as the knife-ridge along the top of an old helmet, or, failing that, for the expansion of his understanding, like ivy growing up between the snake-toes of a great fig which is busily cracking a Triestine courtyard’s flagstones. That three-angled slit of meadow and sea, sunk in the grass, seemed like a place to sink or even dig in, but no matter how deep he descended, he never found anything but dirt and stone. Concentric ring-tracks of concrete around the base of the vanished cannon led him to himself. Under a hill, a certain square concrete tunnel, closed up with stones by a farmer, tempted him to play at soldiers. Instead, he rose up under the grey sky, imitating a blackened pillbox. He asked himself: Am I this?
Floating down the wet, rock-heaped steps into mud and rubbish, he said to himself: Where the grass, moss and dandelions stop, the darkness begins.
He asked: Am I that?
In an old map room from which the benches had not yet rotted, he read the German instructions and warnings painted on the walls. He tried to take them to heart.
Sometimes he felt almost homesick for Redipuglia’s masonry of tiny karstic stones rather than these German slabs, but he told himself: I am not that place, at least not anymore.
One foggy night as he hovered over the sea he wondered how it would be to return to Redipuglia and bury the enemy general deep beneath a concrete slab. By then he had read a waterlogged German field manual, so he comprehended that by some standards that action would render him as wicked as the father who buries his son alive. He had tried to be good, without certain result; so maybe he should be wicked. In the end he stayed at Tungesnes half a hundred years, building ever larger gamepieces whose faces he pretended were his.
Since the Second American Civil War is one of my favorite periods, I am happy to end this story then. The victory of the Afro-Creole Matriarchy, which resulted in the castration of all white American males below the age of twelve, and the liquidation of the rest, was cruel enough, no doubt, but my interest is limited to historical regalia, and you must admit that the ankh-medallions and bright pink uniforms of the Matriarchs, not to mention their sky-blue marching-banners of rampant Erzulie, deserve to be collected. At any rate, by the time the Second American Civil War began, the Trench Ghost had taught himself how to make giant steel soldiers which filled whoever commanded them with dreams of victory. Of course he helped both sides, and got rewarded as he deserved. The last I heard, he was overhovering a munitions factory in China. But since eternal stories do have a way of becoming tedious, it seems best to fire up some final episode which pretends to define the Trench Ghost in his “soul,” for his existence, like yours or mine, assumes a sort of self-discovery.
During the Siege of Pocatello, which had now become a redoubt of white male power, the Trench Ghost was floating in the darkness, laughing, weeping and rubbing his hands. The chaplain, one-armed and marble-white, raised his bleeding head, staring out across the electrified wire, and the Trench Ghost imagined that he had seen him before. Indeed, perhaps he had, for, if people only knew, there are ghosts everywhere. A shell came screeching into the field hospital, while on all sides the Matriarchs chanted: Erzulie, Erzulie! — Another shell now killed the general. The chaplain lifted the microphone and shouted to the survivors: It is the body that is in danger, not you.
Astonished, the Trench Ghost asked himself whether that could be true. He decided that it was. — In that case, he decided, I’ll never be in danger. I have no body.
The next shell atomized the chaplain. The Trench Ghost said to himself: That man was in danger. Something happened to him. But nothing will ever happen to me.
Then he asked himself: If that man was more than a body, then where is he? Why can’t I see him? Can he see me? Is he where I am now?
And he began to search for the chaplain, as if he could hope for something. That was what led him all the way to China. How much more blood has darkened that dirt? In another century or two he might return to the Canal Grande in Trieste, because they say that every dead thing ends up in there…
III
THE FAITHFUL WIFE
If you have never loved with such luminous fidelity as to await a dead lady at a crossroads at midnight, then the question of why it is that Romania produces fewer vampires now than in old times must seem insoluble to you. Timidity becomes its own excuse; and perhaps you have not dared even to see your own spouse naked, much less encoffined. Many there are nowadays who refrain from kissing a dead forehead. A wife dies alone in a hospital bed, in the small hours when the nurse sits down to sleep, while the janitor rests his chin on the handle of his mop. At mid-morning the husband peeks in to identify her; next comes the undertaker to nail her up, or, as may be, the coroner to slit her open. Ashes to ashes, promises the minister, but should she refrain from decaying in that fashion, who will be apprised of that wondrous miracle except for the true heart who comes to the crossroads at midnight to share a kiss? Satan, they say, can speak even from a rotting skull — a mere assertion seized upon by you who have never loved bravely. Insisting over the sad sighs of your conscience that you would not be able to distinguish her from Satan, you decline to visit your own wife, forgetting that loneliness is the Devil’s work — and what could be more lonely than a beautiful dead lady returning to the cemetery without a kind embrace from anyone? Let me tell you this: In Romania it was once not entirely unheard of for female vampires to glide home to their children; and in Greece the cobbler Alexander of Pyrgos died, became one of those swollen-bellied leather-brown monsters whom they call vrykolakas, and then, relying upon the discretion of a moonless night, crept back into the doorway of his much-adored wife, for whom he drew water untiringly. In the daytime, so that the children would not be afraid, he slept inside a certain oblong trunk which leaned up against the back of the closet; every night as soon as the young ones were all asleep his dear wife let him out, and he bent over his bench, returning their tiny shoes into good trim. As for him, he went barefoot and naked; his clothes had long since rotted off him; his yellow toenails were indistinguishable from hooves. Perhaps his skill had declined somewhat; he now lost tack nails or sometimes drove them in crooked, but his heart, let’s say, was correct. Sitting at his bench, counting scraps of leather with unmoving lips, he did as much as he could. One night when he stood at the well for his wife, with a bucket over each shoulder, the moon dashed out from the clouds to betray him; and so the neighbors came at high noon with blunderbusses, scythes, stakes and pitchforks. At that hour he was helpless, of course. They built a pyre outside the house, burned him, box and all, hacked up his curiously elongated bones, and raked everything down into that well, which they supposed his exertions must have cursed. They similarly disposed of his tools and stock (although one lad couldn’t help keeping a handful of shining rivets; he soon died of a nightmare pox). Next went the children’s shoes, and even the dried bouquet which this Alexander had first brought home from the graveyard. The way some tell it, his wife was tearless; the children had been having nightmares anyhow. It is reported when the saviors came in (not very politely, I’m afraid), she even might have pointed to the closet — wordlessly, in case he could hear. On the other hand, it could have been that her love for this Alexander survived his demise, in which case she knew enough to stay on the good side of the Church. — At any rate, a week after the vampire’s removal there came a plague to Pyrgos. How could anyone blame Alexander’s harmless ashes? Besides, nobody dared to drink from that polluted well, which, so some asserted, emitted a miasmatic cloud (people can always be found to speak badly of the dead).