Читать онлайн "Model of a City in Civil War" - Day Adam - RuLit

The signal was a girl’s raised gloved hand to her red hair. So, it spread along the rye fields, through the alfalfa and dusty roads, to our homes, like birds barking in the hollows of the hills. We were rebels; or when generals were killed, the generals. Sometimes the military were better rebels. We were the products of our own ideas: being rough is a game. Unseen loudspeakers drowned protest in canned laughter and waltzes. Men patched wounded women; like pregnancy it was an unfair competition. Captured or capturing, condemnation followed upon execution. What’s lovely about war is its devotion to thoroughness and order. It keeps count. At the end we got down and tasted the forest floor, holding the place where someone was before, stood in dead shoes, understanding the mathematics of it, the finite sets of odd cardinality, below the pirated nest of a titmouse and eight pink-white eggs.

There is Mussolini in his tight, rough-wood coffin, shirtless on pine shavings. One eye opened. Swollen face pancaked, his mouth a singed, lipless stretch.

“Despisal of the bourgeois is the beginning of virtue…,” wrote Flaubert. and wondered why we laugh at affliction. Maybe it’s because that thing that sits with us at breakfast— that eland — and looks back at us from the bathroom mirror, and sleeps even in our coat pockets, that thing intimate and unfamiliar, a someone unknown who we will enter or be entered by, is, finally.

The miniature American flag waves from the blue, snow-stranded Bronco’s antenna.

The fascists were hung by their feet — like the crooks and embezzlers of medieval times— from the girders of an Esso gas station in the Piazzale Loreto. A far cry from the Mussolini who sat in a chair at cocktail parties holding his thumb out for women to bite down hard on. Closer to Goya’s Suerte de Varas whose arena is littered with gored horses, and a picador frozen amid a frenzied crowd who stare at the bull, its wounded shoulder a bloodburst, balancing against stupor. Out of decency before the crowd in the Piazzale abused the bodies, Clara Petacci’s skirt was tied tightly around her knees.

My great grandmother’s death was communicated to me by phone through an impatient orderly—“Mrs. has expired”— as if she were a side of beef or an embrace between lovers in an English gazebo.

Flaubert also said: “The most beautiful woman isn’t beautiful at all on the dissecting table, with her bowels on her face, one leg flayed, and an extinct cigar reposing on her foot.”

Turn the picture upside down and the seven hanging fascists with their arms outstretched look much like their excited countrymen screaming for a goal at the Stadio San Siro.

Fritz Haber whose fertilizers increased the world’s food supply sevenfold—Brod aus Luft; whose gasses strangled allied troops in the trenches of Ypres—Tod aus Luft; whose wife, soon after, shot herself in the heart with his service revolver, and the bullet passing through her made a sound like the gulls baying outside.

There are men on the Esso station’s girders, communist partisans, looking down the bodies of the hanging dead, as relaxed as steelworkers arguing baseball, lighting cigarettes on a single steel beam, seventy stories above Manhattan in Ebbets’ Lunch on a Skyscraper. It’s the curling fingers that give the dead away as if in reaching for snow instead they found sandpaper.

A gull with one wing dragging like a banner humps down the ice-skinned cove. A thinning man among the raw-boned cows, nostrils wide, salt burn. Lung-colored water breaks like one hundred doors slamming, shrinking shingles, and away. Fat snow butts a fallen gutter. The overlong cold-droozed grass slips from chapped hands thickening in the naked wind, falling asleep at the line, sliding darkly into pockets. As the eyes loosen their bluish hold on the horizon, killdeer cut over the dunes — the sky’s market light, the sun kneeling between clouds in thin complicated continents.

Deer herd in the icy fields. The mayor in sky-blue socks hugs a chestnut, biting the bark like a cube of sugar between his teeth, but no tea coming, just polite hatred, holding the place where someone else had been, too dumb even to scream. No one will ever love him as that cat loved him. In this place night vanishes men from the world; it’s no safer, nor more attractive, but it’s improved appreciably.

Morning ferry after a night of carnations, a deserved toast. Now, the rail station burning. Too much wind and cigarettes. Green night in my hair. Eyes all over.

I was the theatre of a fairyland restored to life. When the waltz ended, the two soldiers disengaged themselves. And each of those two halves of a solemn and dizzy block hesitated, and happy to be escaping from invisibility, went off, downcast, toward some girl for the next waltz.

So small my neighbor last autumn. Shadow lake. Moon half. Light save us. Shade his backlit outline. His dead ages. Who’d fail his girl of sixteen— his son, Vietnam, god, reason? He’d sit out there in the wind, come dark. Long dead.