A Change of Skin (42 page)

Ulrich again, panting, exhausted, in his undershirt, with the suitcase in his hands. Franz asked him if anyone had seen him. The boy shook his head. Franz told him that they must hurry, but hurry cautiously. Those who pursue always expect those who flee to travel at top speed and they themselves move all the swifter; slow flight might deceive them. He had just dreamed this, Franz told him, the way to escape. The boy did not answer. He stood with the suitcase in his hands. After a moment of silence, Franz nervously took the suitcase and opened it. He looked up at the boy and the boy knew that he would have no other opportunity to be commanded, to obey orders; he stood stiffly at attention and stared straight ahead without blinking. Franz thought: some day this child too will throw his hand to his cap in salute, click his booted heels together, drink too much beer while singing songs ripe with sentimentality. He wondered if the boy had already looked into the suitcase and seen what it contained: the uniform of a Luftwaffe general, the complete uniform, gray-green, gold buttons, black belt, black velvet collar, insignia of rank, cross pinned to the chest. It was the Ritterkreuz, proof of courage and loyalty. And it had been abandoned in the forest.

“Whose uniform is this?”

The boy did not blink an eyelash.

“Whose?”

The boy lowered his head.

“Did you see him run away? Was he wearing civvies?”

The boy nodded without looking at Franz.

“Was a woman with him? And before he left, did he order you to notify the reserves that the Americans were closing in? Did he tell you and the other boys that the glory of the Fatherland demanded you must fight to the end? That you must die?”

The boy nodded and grimaced as he held back his tears. Then at last he wept without restraint, throwing himself into Franz's arms, tears of frustrated bravery, of confusion, inability to understand. Franz felt like crying too, dry tears, hidden, as he thought of Germany's leaders in flight with their women and their wealth and their works of art while the old men and the children were given hand grenades and left behind to be the final line of defense, the last show of pointless courage; and if he knew now that it was pointless, later they would all know it; indeed, they had known it all along, and for months later, as he walked and walked across the destroyed land trying to make his way back to Prague without knowing anything or learning anything, he would tell himself that in the end the only patriotism worthy of reward is that of simply sinking into the war-torn earth and serving as a stone in a highway or as seed or fertilizer, lost forever beneath the wheels of trucks and tractors. Dressed in a stolen suit that was too small for him, worn at the elbows, the knees threadbare, the seat thin, the cuffs frayed, he wandered across fields where abandoned trucks and rusting bazookas lay deep in the winter mud, deep beneath the autumn straw, through dead cities where the burned-out shells of cathedrals still rose above the slap of bare feet, the scurrying of beggars and prostitutes, obsessed with only one idea, to see Prague again and discover some certainty even if that certainty should be a name on a tombstone in the Jewish cemetery.

“Come on, Ulrich. We have to get out of here. We'll leave the suitcase.”

He took the boy by the hand. They couldn't go to his home, Ulrich said, that town had by now been taken by the Americans. We're going there to surrender, Franz said quietly. He told the boy to put his tunic on again. They would surrender in uniform. He took him by the hand and they climbed down from the loft and went past the old forge out into the May fields, walking toward distant slopes where the sound of guns could be heard, artillery, tanks. The earth was covered with clover and daisies. The sun insisted on seeming benevolent and joyous, the sun, the earth his parents had wanted to preserve. Out in the open, Ulrich was transformed. He squeezed Franz's hand and told him that when they reached his home, he would give him food. He began to talk about his schoolmates, to wonder what had happened to them. They had been formed in groups and sent to defend the highway and the bridge, and some of them, like him, had been sent to join and notify the reserves, and now maybe they would all come safely home again if it was true, as some peasants had told him on his way back to the barn with the general's suitcase, that the war was over. But many didn't know it was over yet and many others had been told time and again that even if they heard the war was over, they must go on fighting until the last man fell, not one German soldier was left alive. That was what they were told, the boy repeated; the enemy must not find one single German still alive. They walked on, the boy leaning against Franz for support because of his leg, following the winding course of the river, for that would lead them to the town. It came to Franz that in this way, suddenly, everything could have ended a long time ago; and now there was no possibility of going back to that moment. They walked along a slope above the sleeping river and he asked the boy for a drink of water. The boy pushed back a lock of yellow hair and opened his canteen. He laughed and turned it down; it was empty. “Wait,” he cried, and laughing as he ran with difficulty, his sprained knee obviously hurting, he went down toward the river through a bank of thistles, the thistledown rising around him like a cloud of tiny butterflies. He reached the bank of the river and knelt and dipped the canteen. There were two dry rifle shots. The boy cried out and pitched forward, face down, into the water and lay still. For the first time during the war, Franz screamed. He ran through the thistles, ran summoning something to his aid, asking the earth, the thistles on the breeze, the sun itself to save a little life for that guiltless child. He knelt beside the boy's body. Two American soldiers appeared, their short combat boots sinking into the mud, their rifles cradled in their elbows, as Franz lifted the boy's head from the water and kissed his cheeks and temples. One of the Americans knelt too. He shook his head and said, “Goddammit, just a kid.”

“It ain't our fault they make their kids fight.”

The American who had spoken first shook his head again. “I was just practicin'. How the hell did I know I could get him at that range?” He fitted a new cartridge into his clip. “Going to frisk him?”

“Naw, what would a kid have?” With the butt of his rifle the American prodded Franz's shoulder. “I'm sorry, Buster, if that helps. Come on with us. The war's over.”

Franz fell sobbing on the boy's body and knew no more.

*   *   *

Δ   “Not only madmen were locked up in the Charenton asylum,” Javier said as the four of you turned your backs on the scene below. “They also kept libertines and spendthrifts there.”

“Look,” said Isabel, glancing at the patients a last time. One of them was trying to tie his shoes and was laughing at his futile efforts. “My God, the way he shows his teeth.”

Franz ran his finger along the stone balustrade, heaping a little pile of dust. “That's what happens to you when you're locked up long enough. You grab everything that happens as an excuse for laughter. And usually nothing is very funny. It just happens to be unusual, to break the monotony.”

“There's rather more than that to it,” said Javier. “Notice how furiously he laughs. Habitually he is sad, and now he laughs as if he wanted to destroy whatever is amusing him.”

“He knows the amusement won't last long, that's all,” you said, Dragoness. “Come on, let's go, please.”

“Let's go into the pyramid,” said Isabel, passing her hands through her silky long hair.

“Maybe madness is worse there,” you said.

The four of you walked slowly down.

“The lunatics in Charenton were put on show,” Javier said quietly. “They were paraded before the good citizens of Paris as a spectacle, and the good citizens went home again with quiet consciences. They could congratulate themselves that they weren't like the patients.” He looked at you. “Every writer must be afraid that he is doing much the same thing. He displays the horror of life and character, only to have his banker-reader sigh and say, Thank God, I am not one of those monsters. The poor writer can well think that he is scandalizing the bourgeoisie, but he isn't. What a laugh. Following
L'âge d'Or,
the bourgeoisie developed defenses. Do you think that Tennessee Williams shocks anyone? No, he just makes them feel comforted, like the lunatics of Charenton.”

From the plaza came music, dance tunes dedicated to the young ladies of the city.

“The ancient Germans,” Franz said, as though he had not heard Javier, “were permitted to kill their children if they were insane or deformed.”

*   *   *

Δ   What didn't occur to you, Dragoness, was that the asylum attendants were like priests. Priests have always watched over madmen, giving them versions of life and the world that they can comprehend, changing their hatred into love, finding peace for them, providing them with the exaltation and the calm that a lunatic needs to go on following his thread. The priest, the writer, the artist, the politician, everyone who supplies the world with images of itself, artificial, false images, interpretations, incantatorial psalms, all of them know that they are manipulating their lunatics. But the madmen, for example my friend Tristram Shandy, don't even hear the rhetoric. They laugh at their mentors and at the same time gradually transform them into the lunatics of lunatics. Which doesn't matter: the artful artificers go right on, don't give up, the idiots. They refuse to recognize that what was reason has become insanity and they disguise it with eroticism or military glory or statism or our need for eternal salvation. The madmen cooperate willingly, for they know that by feeding the lunacy of those who attend them, they make it possible for their own lunacy to go unnoticed. And this is the point, Dragoness: the illusion of rationality must be preserved in order to preserve the illusion of life. Our hall of mirrors again. Baudelaire, hip as they come, decks the corpse out in the myth of Eros, while Nietzsche's trolley bus parades as the power of Will. Withered old Marx is concealed behind the promise of a second terrestrial paradise (and hold up, comrades, our first paradise was one too many) and great Daddy Feodor Mihailovitch lurks under the advent of that Third Rome which somehow or other escaped Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya. Your countryman Walt Whitman provides us with his optimistic hope for a new, democratic, egalitarian world (We Shall Overcome and the walls will come tumblin' down), while our vampire-friend Rimbaud assures us of the divinity of words alone. But look what we have come to. Candy, Lolita, torture, the crematorium, the Moscow trials, Trotsky's assasination, the Bay of Pigs, police dogs loosed against the Negroes in Montgomery. Buy it and use it and look more beautiful than ever, my Pepsicoatl. That's the trick of it, too. For you see, Elizabeth, in the age of Victoria and Porfirio, neither Prometheus nor Caesar nor Medea nor the Cid is two persons; even old Don Quixote, with his madness, ends up the poor, defeated shamed old man, Alonzo Quijano, never that other, his secret double. The Dane himself smelled rottenness but had to wait more years than are numbered in heaven, on earth, or in hell, nor dreamt of in anyone's philosophy, simply to light the fuse of that old cracker Voltaire who believed that the unity of the religious world once smashed, an equally united lay world could be supported; and so off we go: virtue without witness and evil without witness are unthinkable, and when God ceased to be our spectator, we had to create another looker-on, our alter ego, Mr. Hyde, or William Wilson, our double. So we see that Blake was not bleary:
Thou art a Man, God is no more; Thine own humanity learn to adore;
and that Kleist was riding the wave when he stood up:
Now stop beside me, God, for I am two: I am ghost and I walk through the night.
And the hell of it is that this also became a
vieux jeu
when Pirandello and Brecht closed the circle. Drop dead, corpse; every character is another character, himself and his mask, himself and his counterpart, himself and his own looker-on, victim and executioner at once. And haven't you read Swinburne, the consecrator of English vice? “The day's spider kills the day's fly, and calls it a crime? Nay, could we thwart nature, then might crime become possible and sin an actual thing. Could but a man do this; could he cross the courses of the stars, and put back the times of the sea; could he change the ways of the world and find out the house of life to destroy it; could he go into heaven to defile it and into hell to deliver it from subjection; could he draw down the sun to consume the earth, and bid the moon shed poison or fire upon the air; could he kill the fruit in the seed and corrode the child's mouth with the mother's milk; then had he sinned and done evil against nature. Nay, and not then: for nature would fain have it so, that she might create a world of new things; for she is weary of the ancient life: her eyes are sick of seeing and her ears are heavy with hearing; with the lust of creation she is burnt up, and rent in twain with travail until she bring forth change; she would fain create afresh, and cannot, except it be by destroying: in all her energies she is athirst for mortal food, and with all her forces she labours in desire of death. And what are the worst sins we can do—we who live for a day and die in a night?”

*   *   *

Δ   You stood before the narrow entrance to the tunnel at the base of the pyramid. There were steel rails on which ran the little cars used to remove the excavated earth. Isabel gestured into the tunnel. “Shouldn't we go in?”

“I'm tired,” Franz said.

“And I'd like to take a bath,” you said, Dragoness. “I wish we were already at the sea.” You walked toward the small store with an icebox beside its door and got a soft drink while Franz moved to the car, parked a little way from the pyramid. You drank your pop and Javier and Isabel opened drinks also. Franz, in the car, turned on the radio. He moved the knob all the way across the dial, quickly passing commercials, Afro-Cuban music, mariachis, the sound of surf, and stopped at a voice: “… performed by the Symphony Orchestra of Vienna, under the direction of Wilhelm Furtwängler…” He raised his hands, covered his eyes with his handkerchief, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He stuck his head out the window and called, “If you people plan on getting to Veracruz tonight…” He pressed the starter and nothing happened. Javier paid for your drinks and you walked toward the car. Franz was moving the gearshift lever back and forth.