It was then I bit the grass.
I remember it clear as day now. I’d never eaten grass before. There I was, flat on my belly in the mud of the motherland, when suddenly I found myself eating grass. I’d bitten into the mud. I could taste the clay. I don’t know what was up with me, the devil alone knows … I’d no idea. All the same there I was, chewing the grass and the mud like an animal with rabies or like someone who’d drunk too much strong coffee so it drove him mad. I bit the grass, the way they say someone bites the dust in battle, like they’ve crossed over and joined the other heroes in heaven. What caused it? Being pushed around so long in the morning? Who knows. And now I’d taken a bite of home soil. That’s when I realized what I was doing.
It didn’t last long, and I soon came to my senses. But I was in shock. The grass and the earth together tasted more bitter than the Champagne the president had lavished on us in the bar.
Here was the border of my lovely little country, it was night, it was muddy, and the stars were out. I was an animal. But not only an animal. I was a man, and for the first time in my life I was conscious.
As you yourself know, then and before, there was a great deal said about our national soil. Others were chewing on that soil long before I was, and I don’t mean literally. They were bringing up “our national soil” at the national assembly, scattering it round in parliament, and shoveling it in handfuls from soapboxes. There was a stream of comrades coming to the village to explain to the people that the land was ours now. Before, it was four acres for Papa, and four thousand acres for the count. And all the vast spread of land everywhere in the country, all that soil, was ours … I heard it when I was a kid in diapers and have carried on hearing it ever since. The moment I first drew my boots on, they told me, “That’s national soil, comrade — the land is yours.” But now I realized I’d never really understood when they said, “The land is yours.” What was the soil? The land? The country? The nation? All I remember is that there were always shortages, always the sheer slog. When the count skipped it shortly after they carved up his estate, what was left to me of his land … when dad was spitting out his broken teeth in the village hall because they put his name on the kulak list and he didn’t want to sign his acres away to join the collective … what did the land mean then? The soil? The country? My head was spinning. It was like waking from a mixed-up dream.
I lay there on my belly on the land, on my country’s land, like a freshly washed corpse, the thoughts in my head whizzing round and round like a carousel. There was a song we used to sing when I was a kid at the village school. “If Earth is our Lord’s Easter bonnet / We’re the sprig of flowers on it …” The words came back to me. But however I tried I couldn’t pick up the smell of flowers. Maybe because the meadow we were crawling across was partly marsh … The wet mud, the marshy feel of it, brought back a lot of memories. I was sorry to lose my drumsticks. I’d left them in the bar. They were good sticks, made of hazelwood. You couldn’t get the like in Rome. I don’t need them in New York, because they won’t let me play. I can’t practice my art. Lying there in the mud, I was wondering what else I’d left behind … What, after all, did it mean to have a country, a homeland? This country in particular?
Life is hard, friend. I remembered what I’d been there. First it was “Yes, Your Worship” and “Dirty prole.” Then I discovered I was the nation, the people, and that everything was mine now. But the fact is nothing was ever mine. This hadn’t occurred to me before. Not that I’d ever ranted on about my homeland this and my country that. I didn’t think anyone owed me a living. But now, there on the border, it all came back, all mixed up. It seemed to me there were different notions of my country. They explained to me that it used to belong to the gentry. But now there was a different country that belonged to the people. But what did I have, me as myself? What was my country? And if I did have one, what had happened to it? Suddenly it had slipped from under me and, frankly, I didn’t know whether it really existed anymore, and if it did exist, where it was. It must have existed somewhere, because I could smell it right here, in the mud where I lay. Much later Sweetheart told me — it was late at night — that when she was a girl she slept in a ditch, and dormice and squirrels used to scamper over her. The smell of that ditch must have been something like the smell of the marshy meadow I was lying in. It was the smell of mud she must have breathed in when she first found herself in the ditch, the ditch that was her home, her soil, her motherland. It was what I could smell as I was leaving it behind. But it was different from the smell that I wanted to escape in the bar. It wasn’t a choking smell like that, but something more familiar, like our own smell. Because that’s me, that’s how I smell. It’s an earth smell, and that earth smell had followed me all the way to the border. It was as if that was all that remained of home for me.
Now that everything was changing I knew just one thing, that once I was over the field there wouldn’t be that foul smell in my nose, the stench I first noticed in the bar. The stench that remained in my nose and had soaked through my skin. It was like sleeping with a whore and still smelling of her in the morning so you have to scrub and scrub to smell clean again. All I knew is that I didn’t feel like playing the drums for any of them. I wouldn’t sing like a canary for them. I’d sooner be stretched out in the mud, on the border.
It was dawn when the searchlights went out. The Swabian, who’d started out digging wells, had become a gamekeeper, then, finally, a kind of one-man business smuggling undesirables, gold coins, in fact anything that could be moved, across the border, now gave the signal. We went on all fours, like dogs, scurrying like that out of the country. I left the country covered in mud — in every sense. The rest was routine. I’d coughed up five hundred as a deposit, and now that it was over I gave him another thousand as agreed. The Austrian cop who came across us was already bored, because, day and night, there were countless numbers of us crawling out of the woodwork, people screwed by the people’s democracy. But in the end it was all quite simple. They put us in a camp first, but I didn’t stay long. After eight weeks I got the visa from Rome. My brother sent it, the one who’d left me with the revolver. I got the work permit because dagos respect artists and there was a constant need for drummers there. By fall I was drumming in a bar.
Wait, a lady customer. Welcome, my fair lady. Just a martini dry, as usual? You are served, lady.
Take a good look at her without her noticing, because you rarely see anyone like her. They say five years ago she was well known on Broadway. She played in the theater next door, big place, where they don’t sing, just talk. She was a hit like you wouldn’t dream of. She’d run up and down the stage in a black wig because she was supposed to be bananas and raved in English at her husband that he should liquidate the houseguest who happened to be an English king. She rushed around here and there with a knife in her hand and she was supposed to be, it said on the program, Lady Makebed or some such thing. So then she got the call from Hollywood because they told her she’d make a stash there, she’d be Miss Frankenstein. But they had ideas … first they took out her teeth, then they started reshaping her private parts, and that was all okay, but then they wanted to monkey with her face, and the plastic surgeon was a fraction out in his measurements, so she got fixed with this permanent half-smile, there, as you can see … She can’t do anything about it, it’s like she was greeting you with a smile, her mouth half-open. There weren’t going to be any parts for her with a mouth like that, but they got her a return ticket and sent her back to New York. Here they told her she couldn’t speak the parts with a half-open mouth, she was all wrong for them. Ever since then she’s been coming to this bar. She’s sold the fur. After the third martini she gets sentimental and starts weeping. But her mouth is so fixed she still looks as though she’s laughing. She parties and weeps like our happy forefathers, the Hungarians of old. Don’t look at her or she’ll be over immediately in case you don’t mind paying. I’ve put a dozen martinis in the book for her, all on credit, but I’m not going to say anything. We artists got to stick together when we’re broke. Another for you? What you looking at?