Arslan (30 page)

Those nights, he broke upon me like a tempest, waves of lust and fury that overran each other and died not in satisfaction but in collapse. I was roused and tumbled, buffeted with the excitement of the gale that is past pain and near to glee. And in the spent surf of such a dying storm he turned on me a look of so much gentleness that I sank, desolate, forlorn past hope at last. He cared for me; somehow, in some sense, I was of importance to him, a subject for tenderness, a source of joy. Therefore I was lost.

Chapter 21

Somebody's child came idling down Pearl Street, in grave pursuit of this season's resident tomcat; an older child than Sanjar, without Sanjar's aggressive grace. He looked apprehensively at the raw palings of the new fence—fences were not common in Kraftsville—drubbed his fingers experimentally along them for a moment, and stooped for a throwing stone. The cat sprang without visible effort, like a sailplane rising on a sudden thermal, posed a brief second on the gatepost, and descended, ponderous and lithe, upon Franklin's front walk. The boy flung his stone side-armed toward the other side of the street and trotted past. The cat paced halfway down the walk, turned, seated himself, and began to wash. He was impressive in rear view—thick-necked and chunky-shouldered, like Arslan.

“What do you call that one?” Franklin's memory for the names of cats was short.

“Bruce,” I said huskily. “Robert the Bruce.”

“I'm glad we put the fence in.” He ran his hand approvingly along the porch rail and turned back toward the front door. “You call me when you get that paint mixed, and I'll help you paint it.”

What was it Hesse had said in
Der Steppenwolf
? Something in scorn, or perhaps in envy, of the Faust who complained merely because he had two souls struggling within his breast. (Every book I read had seemed to me momentarily the fated answer to my question, before I learned that literature was an insignificant sham, shallow to its very depths—that there was no vicarious experience, none; that I knew nothing I had not felt in my own flesh.) One of the sparse benefits of having an indefinite number of souls was that one or more of them could find some glint of silver in almost any catastrophic cloud. So that there was a small pleasure in being abandoned by Arslan, an enemy alien in my home town. It was challenging. It had its aspects of unaccustomed freedom, somewhat like being parachuted alone into a jungle. I did not realize at once that he had exactly fulfilled his threat; he had thrown me to the jackals.

One thing I had already learned: it was useless to ask for help unless you didn't really need it. There were no free gifts possible in a functioning universe. Those who gave, took payment; and as the truly helpless had nothing to tender but their helplessness, they could pay only with their suffering, or (if they had the luck to petition a lover of responsibility) their dependentness. Long ago I had asked for help, in every way possible to me, from Mr. Bond—this at a time when I was in physical pain and spiritual anguish and simple desperate daily fear of death, while he, my host and my principal (ex officio protector and automatic father image), was the only man in Kraftsville with will and power to stand against Arslan. I had begged for mercy (surprising how readily one was reduced to begging for mercy, that contemptible self-confession of schoolbook dastards) from Arslan himself. And I had received, in response or in inattention, kindly exhortations to have courage (I would have been glad to have it) and sweetly mocking laughter. (But Mrs. Bond, from whom I had asked nothing, had given me eggnogs and offered me hot compresses; and though I had gagged on the first and declined the second, I appreciated their practicality. It was, however, vain.) I had asked for bread from my father, and he had given me a stone. Only much later, when my soul had healed and grown strong, like the terrible cripples of folklore, did I receive what I no longer required.

Therefore now I pressed my tenders with the firmness of desperation. I must run with the jackals or be torn. Arslan had taken all and given all; but Franklin Bond did not batten upon suffering. To him and his KCR I offered myself as a non-aligned Mephistopheles, one of hell's rejects, a useful servant at a minimum wage. To my parents I presented myself politely as the independent son, in business for himself but well disposed toward his origins.

I saw them, now, merely as two more citizens of Kraftsville. They had made their own adjustments. My father was a pillar of the respectable branch of the non-KCR anti-Arslanists (so far had sectarianism advanced). As such he had weathered the variable gales of the past years, unscathed, secure in his harmless intransigeance. He was Kraftsville's independent lawyer. Arthur Kitchener (tenuously, if at all, related to the equally notable Leland) was the KCR lawyer, and Greeley Simms had once been Nizam's entry, until the KCR had quietly bankrupted him.

In turn ravished, perverted, abandoned, and brutalized, the school stood dirty and forlorn. Undismayed, my mother went on teaching. She had gathered two classes of vocal students, separated by age, and gave private lessons in piano and a few other instruments. Things wore out, things atrophied; and yet so much of Kraftsville remained, essentially intact.

“Come see my primary chorus, Hunt. You know, the little ones really have better voices than the older kids; it's always that way. Your dad will be home for lunch, and then you can stay and listen till you get bored.” And so I lunched with them, and stayed and listened. The children arrived promptly, in clusters, obviously experienced pupils—feral out of doors, noisy but tractable as soon as they crossed the threshold. It was true that their voices had not yet lost the sweet clarity that their souls, being human, had never had; and she had schooled them into a lusty approximation of accuracy and order. They sang “John Peel” and “Auld Lang Syne” and “I've Been Workin’ on the Railroad.” They sang, pristinely as an inspiration:

Oats, pease, beans, and barley grow,

Oats, pease, beans, and barley grow.

Do you, or I, or anyone know

How oats, pease, beans, and barley grow?

I stayed longer than I had expected. They sang “America the Beautiful.”

How long since I had heard that song, or any such song? At least ten years, it must have been. I tried to recall some real or plausible last occasion from my disintegrated memories of the Time Before, and could not. And since that lost last time, my ears had been filled with the sad, wild anthems of the sterile plateaus.

Oh, beautiful for heroes proved

In liberating strife,

Who more than self their country loved,

And mercy more than life.

And suddenly a real beauty trembled vainly up from the foolish words, and I was homesick, soulsick, for those alabaster cities that had never been and would never be. There people lived whose right name was
patriots
, and fed upon the golden wine of pride, the snowy bread of love. But there had never been a past from which that future might have come.

Had there been? I had been a child, too young to do anything real, too young really to understand; and when I began to understand, and to be old enough, it was too late for doing. That was easy to say.
They
should have done it: the grown-ups, the genuine citizens, the ones with the newspapers from which to understand and the votes and money with which to act. But that was too easy. Every citizen had had his own helplessness. Where had the power been? Could there be responsibility without power? Free will without free action? The responsibility and the power were easy to locate now; Arslan had taken them upon himself. (Unto himself? What was the word?
The king, the king's to blame.)
But taken them from where—from whom? Children and ignorant, we had been responsible then, I as much as any. We should have understood. We should have found a way to act. If we had not, that was our fault, not Arslan's—our fault not collectively, but individually. I was to blame for Arslan.

We have turned every one to his own way. And the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.
We were free now; the drunken freedom of the slave, of the cog, of the world rolling in its orbit. Our sins were as white as wool. But I shook with belated anger at myself, at all other lethargic cowards and all zealous imbeciles.
Mock mockers after that, Who would not lift a hand maybe
... Was one responsible for the past? Could there be any responsibility for what did not exist? I had been responsible
then
, when no one had called me to answer. Now I was ready to present my true account (One talent: Lodged with me useless); and the books were already closed.

Oh, beautiful
. This woman who had been my mother, honorable and brisk, freckled but tidy—was it still beautiful for her? Possibly so. Mrs. Jean Morgan, last surviving singer of “America the Beautiful.” I looked at her, with her mouth vigorously open, and I was touched. She was a kind and honest lady. The cruelties and falsehoods she had inflicted on me were no more than the duties of motherhood.
I did love you once
. Kind lady, she would do better to forget that beauty. These were the last children, loud and docile, with their uncertain throats and visionary eyes, that she would have to teach; and already these were not Americans. Where but in bitterness could she lodge all that good will and courage, when the children were gone and the beautiful stillborn nation was forgotten?
Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners
?

It was with the Bonds that I lived on familial terms, in various senses. I was not yet the household menial—that was to come later—but I was Franklin's instrument in his gestures of worried kindness toward his wife. “Hunt, would you carry out that laundry for Mrs. Bond?” On the other hand, she fulfilled for me (as, I increasingly thought I saw, for Franklin) the role of devoted and honored servant, privileged to criticize, to manage, and to share, but neither to initiate nor to command. It was the sort of personal relationship that one might have with a beloved animal, and in that way, I concluded, very like most maternal relationships.

Between her husband and me, the intimacy was of a different order. (It did not occur to me to be surprised that it had not, apparently, occurred to Kraftsville to impute any variety of improper relationship to us. Such unsuspicion was a tribute, from Kraftsville and from me, to the force of Franklin Bond's character, or at least reputation.) For a long time now, I had argued with him from the privileged position of the favored graduate student. But our daily contacts were on a rawer and more urgent level. Who was to water the horses? How were the corn borers to be stopped? Why was the septic tank in danger of overflowing—and what, and by whom, was to be done about it? And after Mrs. Bond had failed us for the first time, by inconsiderately allowing herself to die, all our dealings were aggravated and exasperated. The last courtesies crumpled from our theoretical discussions as the last distances were squeezed out, and though “I never argue about religion” was one of his mottoes, we were more and more embroiled in savagely impatient disputes on immortality, the nature of dogma, the roles of reason and revelation. I could recall only darkly a time when I had believed in some divinity; and yet I found myself beginning so many heated sentences with “Granted the existence of God...” shifting my ground again and again and yet fighting for every inch of that batable and marshy terrain. In mundane matters, he was as shrewd an organizer as Arslan (if a more open and unsubtle one) and scarcely less hard a master. Irregularity offended him, neither abstractly nor practically, but in his personal feelings. An esthetic reaction, perhaps. Or a memorial of affection. Mrs. Bond had been regular. I was not. “I thought we'd agreed that if we're going to keep this house together, we've
both
got to do our jobs!” I bowed before his dams as before Arslan's floods.

Yet sometimes, unexpectedly, Franklin touched me with a perceptive kindness. “Where have you been, Hunt?”

My clothes were saturated with dust, my eye swollen all but shut, my shirt torn and a little messed with blood. “Walking,” I said, “in the corn.”

I liked to walk in the corn. From August on, when the great stalks stood higher than my head, the corn fields were a world apart, a world aloof and alien as pale Bukhara. I walked in the corn alone, or sometimes with a dog as a convenient switch by which to connect myself now and then with reality. After a late-summer rain, the field steamed. I walked in a dense green heat, my feet in the mud, my body and soul washed with sweat. Midges and mosquitoes twinkled. My ears hummed. And all around me the enormous grass-leaves hung and crowded, rubbing their moist rough blades against my clothes, shouldering and slapping as I pushed through the rows, spilling their drops upon my hair.

But it was in waiting autumn that I liked best to walk in the corn. It was dry then, colored like the yellow dust, a gold without luster. The blades still curved and drooped in the easy postures of life; but with every stir of air they clashed faintly, a sound of thin brass. Their edges cut, cruel grating cuts like those of stiff paper. I paced slowly through the dusty stillness, surrounded, surrounded—ahead, behind, to left, to right, above—by the great tawny leaves, alone in the harsh ripe corn.

I was teaching myself to see and hear in the dim world of the corn, as Arslan had taught me in the woods, and in the dazzling nights and colorless days of Bukhara. In the lion-colored noonday dusk of the corn, the eye lost itself. The brazen rustling had the very quality of silence. It was easy to drift in a hot, buzzing dream, down aisles cross-laced with ragged swords. But I was learning. So I heard, in the unresonant clangors that ran like muffled alarms through the corn with the changing breeze, a more purposeful rustle. I stood at gaze. Ahead, behind, the tall files closed in. The blades clashed. The bronze shadows crossed and waved. I walked on, stirring the blades carefully out of my way.

Again. But this time it was the wind. Again. A mist of gnats hung quivering in the heat. Dogs ranged sometimes in the corn. I waited.