Arslan (23 page)

It had always been entertaining to observe their conversations: Franklin truculent and unbending, unabashedly asking his impertinent questions; Arslan with his accidental air of courtesy and his deliberate candor, forever expatiating his profoundest secrets as if there were nothing outrageous in the counseling of conqueror with conquered. It was like old times—the bitter truce, the threadbare couch, the presence (quiet, full of signification and portent) of the soldiers. Like old times, except that we all drank together, though independently; except that I was almost a quarter-century old; except that there were thread-like lines of gray in Arslan's coarse hair, and webs of lines about his eyes, and the straggle of beard, and the white freckles on his right cheek where phosphorus had splattered; except that Franklin Bond was Mayor of Kraftsville and Supervisor of Kraft County.

Chapter 15

Now what had been our real life was suspended. Arslan was here; we existed in relation to Arslan. Franklin and I passed in our orbits, speaking like hostelers, all discussions adjourned, all quarrels in abeyance. Kraftsville receded, a cycloramic setting for Arslan's movements. The little war that had so occupied me for seven seasons lost all personal interest. Kraftsville would kill no more of my horses; I rode Arlan's horses again.

Yet, expectably, chance set me alone with Franklin after a late supper, Sanjar and Leila abed, Arslan and his bodyguard on some midnight errand, and nothing petty to talk about. “He's changed,” Franklin said.

Not even to my physical sight, since that first night of his return. Arslan's mouth and Arslan's eyes were unscarred and unaged. But there was a difference around him. “He's over the hump,” I said.

“That may be partly it.” He snorted thoughtfully. “It's all over but the dirty work.” Franklin L. Bond, ever fair. But his convictions were otherwise. “And of course,” he added, “he was very young then.”

Very young? I closed my eyes against it. Very young, when he crushed me beneath him on the green couch in the school gymnasium, and I heard him laugh in my ear, and smelled the ugly smell of him, and blazed and all but burst and splintered with hate? No, Arslan had never been very young. But I, I had been very young.

I was so young, indeed, that a little after, when I began to pull together my lacerated soul, I thought,
So that's how it's done;
and only later I learned, with surprise, that that was not necessarily how it was done at all among genteel modern homosexuals. But Arslan was not a genteel modern homosexual. He was outlandish, archaic, indifferently male.

That was the easy time. I lived quietly in hell, and things were done to me. But already within a few weeks something was required—my single, ludicrous, several-times-daily act: to catch the book that sprang from the flashing bow of his arm. Reading was not an action. It was rest, it was restoration—sore labor's bath, balm of hurt minds, the compensation that was granted for my laborious sleep. Night after night I climbed the same desperate mountains, thorny crags that crumbled and stabbed, staggering, crawling, naked and hideously torn. I woke disordered, with jerking nerves and quivering heart, to traverse the equally unsure footing of reality. I was learning his looks, his movements, as a downed flyer on a raft might urgently learn the looks and movements of the cryptic sea. There were the keen smiles, joyous when I had shown pain against my fruitlessly stoic will, eager when he was about to inflict it. (Later he was to tell Franklin Bond very soberly that he had never been cruel, that the pain he gave was incidental, a waste product of the process that gave him his victory or his pleasure. But if he abstained from the crasser crudities of sadism, it was because I suffered enough in the course of simple violent perversion. A byproduct, perhaps, but never waste.) There was the concentrated look with which he turned to a map or a soldier or a thought, releasing me for some moments or hours; the swinging, dancing stride that meant he would tease me a little before he laid me; the deliberate, gentle motion with which he reached for my shoulder when his desire was serious. Among them all, the one that lightened my heart like a fair breeze, a shower of pure rain—the whiplash flick of his forearm that sent a book spinning toward my hands.

I considered, with serious and equal care, the cultural requirements of tomatoes, the stagnation of seventeenth-century Russia, the artillery of hell. My soul was restored. I mounted up with wings as of, say, a pigeon. But soon, risking glances from under the flimsy protection of my eyelids, I learned that there was something I could do. I had the power to produce, by my own action, an actual result in Arslan; the reading pleased him. And, by a retroactive casuality, reading became act.

So it was with a kind of triumph that I would see his taut face lighten, his deep eyes grow live with intent concern. I, I had done this. It was insignificant that his concern was for the battle of Poitiers or of Jericho, the poisonous principles of the Umbelliferae, black little Pip a-bob in the white-toothed sea; it was my act, my voice, my reading that had roused the concern. I could do something. I could do something to Arslan.

In early summer he began to take me hunting. The first time, it was to the abandoned woods just east of town. The old Karcher place. The name of it came to me as a recollection of another era. Childhood revisited. We walked into the woods—Arslan and I, and his bodyguard fanning out behind us. Arslan himself put the rifle into my uncomprehending hands, that almost let it fall before they grasped it. “Do not shoot me, Hunt.” It was not a joke, but a command. Lightning-struck, I took it. Such an invitation smashed down walls on every side. Wild light and stormy winds poured upon me. We went into the woods.

It came to me slowly, as I stalked beside him, that I would not be permitted to shoot him. There would be half a dozen bullets in me before I could pull the trigger. Arslan watched me with interest. He was considering the way I held the gun and my face, gauging how much I wanted to kill him, calculating the probability of my trying to do it. The soldiers were to keep me harmless while he made his observations.

And presently he was so well satisfied that he sent them away.

I did not shoot that day—not at Arslan, not at the game we started. There were no closed seasons for him, no licenses or limits. His smooth face shining with a happy lust, he took squirrels, rabbits, doves, a bemused daylight possum, two brown thrashers, a curving mink—filling his bag and loading me with the excess, cursing sweetly in Turkmen when he missed a shot. But he missed few. (Once, later, Mr. Bond asked him why he never used a shotgun, even for birds, and he laughed: “Sir, if I could, I would carry the bullet in my hand.") He was a good marksman—of course, of course; but through that summer and fall I watched his marksmanship improve.

Sometimes he brought one or two of the hunting dogs, but evidently more for their education than for his pleasure, and I understood that he preferred not to share his attention between the dogs and me.

It was not the first day, it was a near one, when the first question was thrust to me, and necessarily I had no answer. We were alone in Karcher's woods (after the first hunt we were always alone, though two of his bodyguards waited, bored and smoking, in the jeep), and we were looking for deer. We made no kill that day; but in the dew and innocence of sunrise, on the heartbreaking plush of moss below the oaks and in the shelving shales and sandstones of the creekbanks, we tracked the spoor of a harem of whitetails. And while the dew exhaled and the gold sun undid the pink and grayness, and the mosquitoes gave way to gnats, and the birds bustled from matins into business, we tracked them slowly yet.

Arslan a little ahead and left of me went with grave eager eyes and ready gun. Suddenly he paused and touched my arm, a touch to stop and still me. I turned to him; and he gave me a gentle, smiling look, a look of such intimacy that my heart and my whole being turned and stirred, and I understood at last and saw as beautiful that verse in the Song of Solomon whose meaning had been cramped into the vulgar dialect of my childhood. It was a look of shared secrets, a look that drew me toward him more powerfully than ever his savage embrace had repulsed. I felt that he was offering me something dear to him—he who gave nothing, to whom nothing was dear. Then he turned his eyes, showing me which way to look, the motionless gesture of a soldier, of a hunter. And I looked, motionless too, looked into the dense, always quivering congeries of leaves, heard the sizzling hum and rustle of young summer, saw the oak branch that swept downward on our left, the tangled arches of bayberries, the scraggy cedar seedlings like discarded Christmas trees, the limp, blistered, delicately apple-colored leaflets of poison ivy. His fingers still lay upon my sleeve, without warmth, almost without pressure. I looked at him again, and now he was waiting for my response, for the look that would tell him I had understood, had received and accepted his treasure. And I was molten with longing to accept; but I had not received.

I was thirteen. All else ignored—as you might ignore the earth beneath your feet—he stood beside me a man, a grown man and a soldier, offering me with that smiling look a comradeship to dazzle any boy.

And seeing that I had not seen, he smiled a new smile, kindly withdrawing the offer; kindly, but so certainly that I caught my breath and leaned, stumbling at the verge of speech. But I had nothing to say to him.

That was one day. And that night he had a girl—I forget which girl. But there were other days. And I began to learn that the eddying stream of time brings round and round again not the same opportunity, but, over and over, opportunities for the same answer—like a thousand billion waves, each new, each different, each formed by its own causes, and yet all recognizably one.

There was always death, sometimes sickening, sometimes so neat and sweet that he gathered the body in his hands like a sleeping pet, running his fingers caressingly through the fur of coon or cottontail, squirrel or possum. I had hunted before, though never much—with my grandfather, with my country cousins. I had shot rabbits myself, and doves, and missed squirrels. I had fished every summer since I could remember, and gigged frogs since I was old enough to stay up after dark. And I had been soft-hearted and a little squeamish by the savage standards of boyhood—but not really squeamish, not really soft-hearted. Now everything was different. Now every pain I witnessed, I felt; and with every dying I cringed nearer to my death. As the hook went through the minnow's back, I felt the rending stab in my own. Before the threshing of the wordless deer, my own limbs ached with thwarted jerks, and the red heat of the bullet lay burning within my chest. It was a curious malady, which I tried to conceal; and though he knew that these things bothered me, I thought—it pleased me to think—that he never knew exactly how.

There was death in his hands, the gentle hands with which he hurt me, and death in the still eyes that watched the deer. But there was another death that filled the summer air, that made each breath an exercise in tension. At first I wondered what he found in the hunting that made it worth the risk, or if (he was a man, a soldier, a general, he knew so much more than I) there was really no risk worth considering. Then I saw the electric pleasure that kindled in him with his first shot, saw how he stalked more cautiously after each kill than before it, and I understood that the joy of the hunt was precisely in the risk. These woods, which had been tame as gardens to me all my life, were suddenly perilous as jungles. He was alone, except for me; armed, yes, but unprotected, vulnerable in the green mazes of the unconquerable woods; and with every shot advertising himself to all the vengefulness of the countryside.

So he moved, tense with his mortal pleasure, hunting, hunted, between two levels of death; William Rufus in the Saxon forest. And after the shot that brought our first deer staggering down upon its neck, he reached across the gun and laid his stilling fingers again on my arm. And I, hunched with the crushing pain in my neck and shoulders, turned to look at him, and found again the offer in his eyes. “Look,” he whispered.

What was it I was to see? Was there some animal crouched among the leaves? Some spoor I should have noticed? I shook my head at last—explicit answer to the explicitness of his word. So, at least, the time might come when we could talk.

There were other days. There were other moments. But it was not in the woods, it was in my bed, alone, in the room that had been Mr. Bond's son's, holding in my hands the soft pelt of a rabbit, that I understood.

When I was a child, we had had a sort of formal garden behind the house, and I had always rather liked it—liked it, in fact, a great deal more than I had ever admitted. It was exactly the formality of it that I liked; and the flaw, the secret reason for the real contempt for which I feigned other reasons, was that it failed in its formality—it was incomplete, inconsistent, too small or too open. But in midsummer and in fall, coming into it from the south side, I had momentarily loved it. It was calm. Calm. Beautiful in its calmness. The healing, smooth, content, contained, closed endlessness of the circle. And with the downy softness of the fur against my face, I knew, and quivered with hopeless regret for my dullness, that it was this he had offered me—the very calm of the circle.

Too late. Too late. The waves had ceased to flow. I sat up in the empty bed, clenched all over like a fist.
Our strange and self abuse is the initiate fear that wants hard use. We are yet but young in deed.
And I, indeed young, abused, initiate, got up and pounded on my door, pounded and did not answer the sentry's objection, pounded until my fists felt numbed and pulpy and Arslan's own hands turned the key in the lock and pushed me back. Afterwards we would talk.

Chapter 16

It wasn't to understand Turkistani that I began to study it, but to understand Arslan. In time I would grow fond of that hot, smooth tongue, and proficient enough to silence his gossiping officers with my presence. But their cabals bored me. It was more interesting, and more significant, that what was officially called Turkistani was in fact Uzbek; that Arslan spoke by preference the Turkmen of his hand-picked bodyguard, and spoke it like a common soldier; that it was Colonel Nizam who spoke the elegant Uzbek of the schools.