Arslan (25 page)

“Therefore I shot him.” And, patient and cold (it was the previous sentence that had chilled me), I looked at him. It was the first time such words had been addressed to me, and to my ignorance they sounded abnormal. But the logic was real. Arslan had enforced his answer.

It was, of course, desperate. He had begun the plunge, the crimson sky-dive of Macbeth. If Kerbabayev, too, “did not accept,” where could he turn to find his next sacrifice? Isolated in that still room as in the hurricane's eye, he had no weapon but murder, no exit but triumph. A second Glukhovsky would have defeated him. But if there had been two Glukhovskys, he would not have attacked.

And Kerbabayev, of course, had accepted. Doubtless it had seemed to him a dazzling gambit. The goaded muscles would move, more suddenly than decision alone could make them, and the whole momentous bulk of his nation be set upon the path of righteousness. As for Arslan, without question he could be eliminated or neutralized; or (questioned) at worst he, Kerbabayev, would be able to keep a hand on the reins; and if all somehow failed, if the path were missed, or led awry, then Arslan should be sponge enough to sop up all the guilt.

He had made the call. He had delivered the ultimatum. The mountain had been climbed because it was there. No doubt the world's end would have been different if there had been no red telephone—or, say, no Arslan, or no human race. The evolution, at least, would have been longer.

But these things came to me later, far later. Beside Arslan, in the lamplight, nothing stirred in me—nothing until the sullen slow warmth of an unexpected resentment (disappointment? shame?—some degradation product of a residual patriotism I had thought I never had) roused at his casual disposal of my country's honor. “The United States, of course, capitulated.” Why
of course?
Why was all the uncertainty, all the risk, in Moscow? I looked down at my hands in my lap, and Arslan, hunching toward me, laughed. A momentary pulse of desire to argue rose in my throat, beat once, and died. Later, in the still hours before sleep, I was to cherish that little urgency as one more hopeful twitch of my paralyzed soul.
Confusion of the deathbed over
... There was still a future tense.

Chapter 17

Measuredly, by a gentle gradation of brutal degrees, I was being weaned away from slavery. He took me hunting, and I breathed. He struck me, and I spoke. He left my door unlocked, and I was afraid. It was not night I feared (
Come, seeling night
), but the great ghost-filled day. Daylight and Kraftsville swelled and swirled around the house, infiltrated the staircase, eddied outside my door. Tendrils snaked and vined through cracks and keyholes, every exit and entry let in a puff, and I sat bleak as Arctic stone in the knowledge that I would have to go out into it, out into all of it.

At first I went only with him, at special order. “Come, Hunt.” It would be no farther than the yard. The horses were ghosts to me. I looked through them, or looked away. I had learned to ride, seriously, two summers before. He caressed their solidity with a touch luxurious and sure, feeling for faults. From the outside Mr. Bond's house looked alien or unreal. Warm breezes rustled the dusty flowers. Yellow sunlight poured in heavy swathes from the exhaustible sun. It was simply hot.

“Come, Hunt.” It was not an invitation; he merely commanded my attendance.
Thousands at his bidding speed, And post o'er land and ocean without rest
. I also served, apparently; though for what, in the sunlight, was obscure.

“Come, Hunt.” In the newly finished stable, in the good smells of horses and raw lumber, he talked his plausible Russian, criticized equerriel architecture by eye and hand, and turned on me with a sudden order to mount. The horse stood just-saddled; the Russian groom was laughing. I muffed it, naturally. But once in the saddle, hot with shame and dread, looking down at Arslan (a fantastic viewpoint), I felt my body take over. I remembered how it was to ride. He looked at me—looked up—and laughed. And looking down I smiled my first smile.

And still later, Mr. Bond's gentlemanly and unpronounceable lieutenant was deputized to chaperone me. I liked his worried expressions and his diluted devotion to Arslan. He regarded me with the eyes of a conscientious nursemaid who didn't much like children. He was a mild challenge, a natural object for harassment; but I wasn't up to it. I was debilitated, the good invalid child glad of its leading-strings.

He led me, on Arslan's precise instructions, farther and farther into the ghost-filled day. Two blocks south (the stables, to fetch the horse of Arslan's whimsical choice); four blocks east (Nizam's headquarters, to deliver some trivial, perhaps nonexistent, message; to look, or not to look, one block onward to my father's house); three blocks north (shorter but farther, a different neighborhood, to Gullick's the harness-maker, for a rather interesting modification of a halter). And outside Gullick's house he courteously instructed me to wait a few minutes for him, and turned the nearest corner.

It was the first time I had been alone in the open, and I was at a loss. I dangled Arslan's halter and admired the air. Did a colt feel the same dull resentment at being trained? Or, for that matter, the same dull satisfaction? I would perform my lessons, accept the bit, follow the reins. The line of least resistance, spidery clue through the funhouse labyrinth of actuality.

And alone in the open air, perceiving the world leafy and flowery, full of space in which the displaced personality could spread arms and turn about, sun-shone, solitary, I felt myself grow cheerful. Future tense aside, there was most definitely a present—a present in which it was possible to move, smile, respire, ride horses, understand harness, study Latin.

The tranquil street was unpeopled but alive. Hadn't there always been people on the streets, before Arslan? No, I remembered now, and the scene around me sharpened into a keener focus, unmodifiable, indescribable in its realness and rightness; lovely and real. It had been exactly like this before Arslan, on such a sidestreet, on such a summer day—the life and quiet bustle all in the houses and the trees, only an occasional flitter-between or resident-on-threshold (passer-by, porch-chatter, rug-shaker, harness-customer, tomato-picker), nobody in very much of a hurry. Nothing had changed. And I felt for the first time a wholehearted homesickness for my own people (cracked, contused, lacerated, but whole) and in it, temporary but stabbing, an instant ache for fellowship, for the kids of Eighth Grade, Room One.

And on cue, real and right, with the coincidental inevitability of fate-in-the-dice, two figures emerged from the green shadows of the next cross-street north, coming my way on the other side of the street. They were Gene Michaels (not, indeed, of Room One, but he had played first trumpet beside me) and Simon Teffertiller, universally known as Bud, kind-eyed and potato-faced. They were in eager conversation. I stood and waited until they were nearly opposite me. Then, “Hi,” I said, and lifted my hand.

They were very, very busy with their conversation. Not until they were definitely past did a half-glance come my way, and Bud exclaimed, in a voice that filled the attentive universe, “Hey, Gene, do you believe in fairies?”

I waited, hot but frozen, very busy in my turn with the harness, until they turned the corner, and then while I counted ten, twenty, forty-seven; and considering this a sufficiently angular and realistic number to justify me before any lingering atoms not yet convulsed in snickers, I turned and walked slowly—to very hell with instructions—back the long three blocks to Mr. Bond's house. Some part of my brain (was it the cerebellum?) had cravenly deserted under fire, leaving the management of all my muscles to my unpracticed consciousness, so that I traveled in jerks and wavers where all should have been smooth but firm, and stubbed my toes.

It wasn't the impersonal fact—I had anticipated, imagined, and armed myself against such taunts, indeed much worse, even to violence—but the source of it, which so unstrung me. Gene and Bud were not among the jackals from whom I had expected such, nor quite among the friends whom I was prepared (having lately learned the ruthlessness of self-defense) to forgive it. They represented the rational and indifferently sympathetic Better Class my bitterest apprehensions had assumed; and that they had turned upon me demonstrated, with mathematical finality, that all the world at large was hostile.

It was one of the turning points. Not my turn, since I had not altered in self or in direction, but the world's turn. I was only the pivot pin upon which the visible universe wheeled. And feeling cramped and restless for a pin, I resorted to merely physical motion. That was the first time I walked boldly, so to speak, into Arslan's stable and saddled and harnessed one of Arslan's horses, and mounted and rode off, wordless before the mock salutes of my watchers. Not one moved to stop or question me. And on the road I leaned the horse slowly into a flying, floating gallop that eased my chest. I quartered the town, tattooing down Bud's street and down Gene's, making long corner loops along the country roads. Then I rode back, the horse and I heaving together, to gather the fruit of my first disobedience.

Yet I was so obtuse, the universe so little visible to me, that eight weeks later I walked like a lamb to my father's house. And lamblike I was bewildered and surprised when the club fell. “You are a Goddamned hypocrite,” I said—the valor of the lamb—and walking back through the forbidden dark, I heard the rifle crack and felt an outrageous thrust drive through my thigh.

I had been taught that there were good people and bad people. The good subscribed to certain theoretical tenets and abstained from certain actions. The bad faulted in one way or both. There were also rumors of peculiarly loathsome creatures, the worst of the bad, who pretended to subscribe to the required tenets, the better to perform the forbidden actions with impunity. Scorn and righteous indignation were fired at these absent monsters from the batteries of pulpit and schoolbook fiction, but none were ever pointed out to me in the flesh. For Kraftsville's ancestral piety had not been shaken by the seisms remaking the face of America. The Sunday School literature spoke fashionably of society's sins, and the Social Studies books confessed that westward expansion had been a little hard on the Indians; but what citizen of Kraftsville could have questioned that Kraftsville citizens were nice people, and that nice people were good?

So it took a convulsive effort to realize that it was exactly the good people, it was especially the better people, who were the loathsome hypocrites. My father and my mother, and all the other reasonably intelligent, reasonably nice, reasonably successful people I had ever known—
they
were the ones who spoke out so dogmatically for truth, beauty, and goodness, while with every action of their lives they cast votes for falsity, ugliness, and corruption. And Mr. Bond, of course—Mr. Bond was a particularly prime specimen, because he made his living teaching hypocrisy to children.

It was Arslan who showed me the possibility of living honestly. Even his deceits were straightforward—tools as simple in purpose and exquisite in design as the guns he equally loved. He lied; but he did not pretend.

“You give me much pleasure, Hunt.” Yes—except that I gave nothing; he took, took with both hands. The stuttering metaphors of my mind were silent before the concentrated consciousness he brought to bear upon his pleasure-taking. It was this—not his deeds, but the passionate and concerned intelligence that powered them—which struck me dumb and helpless, naked before his ruthless interest. Brutal but unanimal, wholly aware, wholly deliberate, he probed again and again for one more pocket of resistance, one more unwillingness from whose bursting another spurt of pleasure would flow. That was what I saw of him. It did not occur to me that he had other concerns as well.

It was against my will—it was against my very flesh—that I read
Tamburlaine
to him. I did not know the story. I had never heard of Timur the Lame, I did not dream that Arslan had paced the polished floor of Timur's own tomb with pudgy legs, his hand in his father's. But before I had read far, the words thickened in my mouth, and I saw Arslan doubled, before me on the couch, before me on the page. Surely to read this to him was to pour oil upon the fire that was devouring me.
Over my zenith hang a blazing star That may endure till heaven be dissolv'd, Fed with the fresh supply of earthly dregs
... Yet he listened with an earnestness that might have been anxiety if it had not been calm. Later, out of silence, he would speak the word that had touched him. “Triumph. Triumph is public, is it not?” I nodded doubtfully. “Yes. And it is temporary, Hunt.” His eyes were very quiet, very open. “I do not deceive myself. I have finished my triumph.” It was spring, his lush first Kraftsville spring. I was very young, I did not guess that he was more and less than Tamburlaine (the conquering shepherd, invincible by sheer intent, noble by sheer brutality, marching forever forward to new wars). “Now there is only work.”

Those were words I forgot, for months, for years, while I remembered all the standard, stirring taglines of Marlowe's limpid bombast.
Come, let us war against the powers of heaven And set black streamers in the firmament
... No, Arslan would need no second triumph. His triumph was with him forever.

No doubt it was grievous to be unable to respond, practically, to inquiry or assertion, friendly or hostile. Yet, on the whole, response seemed to me frivolous. There was nothing to say; or the things sayable there was no point in saying. “Arslan says you're free to go,” Mr. Bond informed me. That was communication, and valuable, or at least effective. But
Go where?
would have been the only feasible response, and it could have evoked no effective answer. Therefore I gazed, and was silent.

And in the dusty music room—though I felt such a sweet stab into my vitals that everything inside me was, in a moment, dissolved and flowing—I only listened. The room was so small. Exactly here (or there, or there; my memory ran liquid and swirling as the eddies of spring creeks) the instrumental scores had been kept, here the vocal, in those two cabinets the school's instruments (the dingy, dented brass, the dilapidated woodwinds, the new drums we had been so proud of); there, in that corner, I had kissed Patty Cummings after the year's first basketball game, because I liked the wild grace of her and because she teased me—my first kiss, my only kiss, except the hundred that Darya had demonstrated to me, except the condimental tendernesses with which Arslan spiced his assaults.