The Cannibal (10 page)

“Across the road, over there.” She leaned closer to see.

When Gerta was kissed, she clung to his shoulders and looking over towards
the light, saw the child’s face. It pointed, laughed and jumped out of view. And old Herman,
fully awake, touched the soft fur with his mouth and felt the wings through the cotton
dress, while in the far end of town a brigade of men passed shallow buckets of water to
quench a small fire. Herr Snow did not recognize the
Sportswelt
and did not know
that he was kissing Stella’s nurse. A rough golden forelock brushed his cheek.

Then old Snow stopped kissing, and for a moment his lips worked uneasily
with no desire to speak, and he leaned back, his rough chin raised higher than the blunt
nose. He smelled the breath of unsweetened soap, the odor of the comb issued by the
government, and all about him were the grey backs, the crackling shoes, the children whose
dead brothers were from his own regiment. Old Snow, sitting with a friend he’d never met in
the
Sportswelt
he no longer knew, with small bright bugs still pestering his legs,
had no right to be tired, no more right to look torn and drab than all the rest. For though
he could not remember, bare shell of a man, his eyes and face wore the look on one who knows
where he is going—
size without substance, his expression was yet
determined. It was the determination on those ugly features, the fact that he took a stand
in the consideration of his own fate, that made him contemptible, that marked him as second
rate, only a novice at the business of being a civil servant.

When he laughed it was the last laugh, and his whole mouth quivered as if
the paper lips had been touched with feathers. Gerta laughed, but quickly, and looked
through his belongings on the table once more. His once black shining boots, once steel
padded and reinforced, once scorching in the sun, were now down on one side, scraped and
shredded with long bare patches between the seams; tufts of mud and grass stuck to and
raised the heels so that the squat man rolled as he walked on the city streets but sank and
plodded in the valiant fields. A civil employee must not sink and plod.

“It’s a good thing we met …,” her mouth torn between desires, “it certainly
is.” She pulled back, stole a glance at the darkening windows, looked down at her thin
hands. Somehow the woman, a little more sallow, a little more old, felt herself more than
lightly touched. All the preceding boys she couldn’t count, all the brilliant days with the
city filling every hour with friends, friends, their sudden departure from the dark cold
working hours, all this gaiety, the train arrivals sprinkled with glittering medals and
redcross flags. All of it was brilliant and time consuming. But meeting the red-bearded man
was a little different. She thought he was different and he was, with his sunken chest; he
was, with his palsied fingers; he was, with his short hair shaved for medical reasons. But
most of all because he had a sense that the stiff-marching, girl-getting fight was
out of him. Now it was time for the father to have the son take over,
time for the new horse, the milk-fed horse, to take the reins and buck, to trot up the
mountain that was now too steep, the going too difficult with the snow. But Herman didn’t
know he had a son named Ernst, and there was no new horse, only time to try once again. Old
Snow would try and try, sinking downwards in a landslide of age that would never end, until
in the night, near the death of his son, he would try once more and fail.

“Come now,” she said, “aren’t you going to bring me close?” While the
laughter faded from her voice and it wheezed, the old man seized her in the darkness and was
neither surprised nor disappointed to find that there was almost nothing there.

There were no lights in the
Sportswelt
. For a long while, the old
patriots were silent, the vandals and depressed soldiers about them were silent, telling
stories in hushed voices, readying themselves for sleep on the great hall floor. The
children were gone. And then a lone policeman on patrol, his spiked helmet dull and gleaming
in the pale moonlight, himself short and thin, defenseless but warmed with beer, stood on a
box and flashed his torch into the
Sportswelt
depths.

“My Lord,” Old Snow realized by the light of the torch, “she has black
stockings on her legs,” and they were stretched, thin and taut, across his broad useless
lap.

The tremendous scroll letters, so thick and difficult to read, blurring and
merging and falling off in the darkness, profuse and graceless on the ornate pine walls,
advertising inns that were dark, posts no longer to be filled, tours that no longer existed,
plays that were done, loomed outmoded and intricate
overhead as they
passed in the street. Gerta pulled him along, curls slightly askew, pushing, holding back,
intent upon guiding the soft cumbersome elbow. The street, partially emptied of his
comrades, twisted fluidly and darkly ahead, an inopportune channel, street of thieves.
Tenaciously she drew him on between the banks, led him down into the gathering arches, and
for a moment old Herman saw his brother’s barge, and on the pillows in the stern a gross
unrecognizable female who kept him in tow on the warm musky evenings. He smelled the oil on
the water and the powder sprinkled lightly on her pink curls.

“Wait,
Liebling
, please, not here on the corner, just wait a
moment, only a moment.” Nevertheless Gerta was flattered and this momentary flicker of life
raised, deep within her, very false hopes.

He forgot the barge, but the smell of the sea lingered on until they stood
before the sharkskin house, larger, darker, more out of date, more boarded up, than
ever.

Within the whitewashed walls of the
Saint Glauze
nunnery, a
figure, held mesmerized by the four uneven corners, gazed ruefully about her cell’s inner
haven. Jutta sat upon the cot’s unbleached single sheet, hearing from below the tinkle of
bells and creak of leather where the sisters walked around and around in precise timeless
honor of the evening prayer. The veils were heavy over the young girl’s face, they smelled
of linen and were not scented with the fresh new rose, did not smell of the garden or
heavenly pine or oil-softened hands. They had been laid on quickly and protectively, after
the face was washed. The birds and squirrels were thin near the
nunnery,
theirs was only the fare of rain and prey of lower insects; the high walls were old and
bare. She heard the women rustling unevenly in line, heard the soft devout invocation of
Superior who was the only one to speak. From down below in Superior’s room she heard the
occasional stamping of the
Oberleutnant’s
boots. She knew that he was standing
straight and tall by the narrow window, smiling, patient, watching the revolution of the
humble ring. Now and again she heard his voice.

“Now, Superior,” he would say in his unnatural tones, “it is time again to
invoke the Heavenly Father’s love for our men in the field. Battery C is in a difficult
position, you know.” And the Mother’s voice would intone once more. The
Oberleutnant
had recently been relieved of active duty and given the political
position of director at the nunnery where he improved the routine and spirit a good deal. He
walked fretfully himself in the garden when the nuns were asleep, at their frugal meals, or
at their indoor prayers. Jutta, the young girl, imagined him directing the almost perfect
prayers of Superior, could see the old woman glancing out of the tight crowded ring at the
man’s face hidden deep in the recess. A supply officer, he was secretly included in the
older sisters’ prayers, and when he walked, bent with rank and tension, he gave the
impression of deep concern and all knew he was worried about the welfare of Battery C.

With the old man dead, her mother dead, her two young brothers lost to the
Fatherland and her sister Stella gone to marry in the mountains, Jutta was left alone while
the city was gradually corrupted into war. It was Gerta, in the last days before her flaming
debauch, who took her in long arms and presented
her, with reverence, to
the nuns. And after the family was no more, swept into the great abyss by the ancestral
tide, and Gerta had no more chores, nothing but red paint and the empty house, her friend
with the buns sent a note of sympathy trimmed in black. But by the time it arrived, Gerta
was on the street and it remained in the leaking mailbox with all the other dead unopened
letters. After that the postman stopped calling and the old house shrank tighter, where once
the Grand Duke came to call. The street fell into ruin.

One by one she heard the feet shuffling through the gravel to the sanctum
door, and as each stooped woman entered into the darkness of a century of peace, the sounds
in the garden stilled. The circle unwound until the sisters of charity were no more and she
could hear only the
Oberleutnant
humming as he paced rapidly back and forth,
replacing the characteristic tone with heresy and haste. Not a bird sang anywhere, but a
small bell jangled the sisters to board and thanksgiving. Their prayers for the evening meal
echoed through the damp plaster corridors and up to her unmolested cell.

Jutta remembered the ladies in plumed hats and velvet gowns with distaste,
remembered Stella’s sailing around the ballroom with malice, and the thought of her dead
parents, so many years too old, left her unfeeling. The old memories came but briefly, as
brief as the desire to own anything or to own the black trousers, and when they did come,
she summoned down her pride to fight the witchery.

She heard the soup spoons in the bowls, the soldier’s quick steps.

The black skirts were held down about her ankles by long thin arms, frail
from the disease that calmly
ate at the calcium in her bones and drank
the humbleness out of her system. As yet she did not know that her brothers had died howling
in retreat, and for herself, all of them could go that way. The half-hours went by and the
sky grew cerulean, the ointment was under the pillow but she couldn’t reach it. She leaned
forward, head over the knees, and it took all this effort at balance to keep from toppling
over in a black heap. With ankles now as thin as wrists, the disease was cutting deeper, and
there was no one to sit her up again if she fell. So she sat as still as she could, her thin
fingers clamped firmly with effort.

Her father, the old general, in the days when he could talk and she could
sit on his knee, wanted her in the civil offices. But from the first, she was determinedly
an architect, she built towers with blocks and barns of paper, built them where they could
hardly stand on the thick rugs, built them with childlike persistence; and the smile of
completion was always one of achievement rather than pleasure. As she grew older she did not
smile at all and hid her queer angles and structures in her little whitewashed room, grew
more and more serious, objected rationally to the public documents and taxpayer’s history
fostered on her by the old general. Carefully she designed herself inwards, away from the
laughing women, closeshaven men, away from tedious public obligation, until she was finally
accepted, one steaming afternoon, into the Academy of Architecture.

It was almost time for Superior to start her rounds, to observe, to praise
and to condemn the girls who were bad physically or bad spiritually. Superior would stand in
the doorway with her face that was neither a man’s nor a woman’s, blocking out the last
bit of light with her stiff fan-like hood and robes. With her steel
spectacles, pink face and sharp black eyes, Jutta thought of her as the doctor who walked so
slowly and stayed, while probing, such a long while. Down below she heard the
Oberleutnant
sit heavily on one of the benches and from down the hall came the
sound of an old woman putting Superior’s desk in order. While no one in the city even knew
the date or what was taking place, knew neither of the blockade at sea nor of the battles in
the empty forests, Superior did. Every morning, after her consultations, she sat at her desk
composing, in tiny script, a long laborious letter of protestation to the President of the
United States. She objected to the starvation and spreading illness. It grew dark, and Jutta
could not move to light the candle.

In the Academy Jutta often saw the young men lined up with their brown
torsos and tight grey gymnasium trousers. At first they often smiled at her in the cold
corridors and looked over her shoulder at the drawing board. But all of them now, as far as
she knew, had swords and spurs like her brothers. Winning the favor of her professors, she
did not have to force herself to look at them. They passed out of reach and a long line of
nurseries and fortresses took their place. Besides devising a new triumphal arch and
scraping hard pencils on her sanding block, she studied history. Volume after volume passed
under her close disciplined study. She knew all of the Hapsburgs, knew that the Austrians
and Germans were all one blood, knew that the light and life was in the East. Her fits of
temper were gone, the sabers were no longer within range, but were only of use, like her
brothers, in the fields far away.

Superior was coming up the worn stairs, the
Oberleutnant
, back in his room, stepped out of his trousers. Jutta felt weaker,
more weak than ever before, and down in the city the policeman put away his torch and left
his beat to go to sleep.

Her remaining isolation had been debased. The General couldn’t talk, the
mother was absurd in his unmade bed, Stella flew off again and again until she finally met
the one with the puckered face and flew for good. There was no one to give clear-headed
praise, no one to admire or respect her diagrams of mechanical exultation, no one to
recognize, even at thirteen, her great skill. But it was not the language of the dumb, the
old, that made the declining days a treachery and not a triumph, not the dead in the streets
and silence in the house that drove her to the nuns.