The Cannibal: Novel Read online

  However, I was forced to leave the town for a short time and while away I made a compromise. For I have told our story. The things that remain to be done weigh heavily on my mind, and all the remarkable activity of these foreign cities cannot distract me. At present, even though I enjoy it here, I am waiting, and at the first opportunity I will, of course, return.

  PART ONE–1945

  ONE

  Beyond the edge of town, past tar-covered poor houses and a low hill bare except for fallen electric poles, was the institution, and it sent its delicate and isolated buildings trembling over the gravel and cinder floor of the valley. From there, one day in the early spring, walking with a tree limb as a cane, came Balamir, walking with a shadow and with a step that was not free, to fall under the eye and hand of Madame Snow. All of Balamir’s demented brothers, in like manner, had been turned out to wander far from the gravel paths, to seek anyone who would provide a tin plate or coveted drink. Madame Snow made room for him, setting him at work digging in the basement, in the bunker, and the black air closed in about the piles of debris and he was homesick. His feeble brothers were gradually absorbed, whole corps at a time, into the yawning walls, mysteriously into the empty streets and outlying dark shuttered farms, were reluctantly taken off the streets. And yet the population had not grown, the same few brown forms prowled in the evening, the same tatters of wash hung for weeks in the same cold air, and the Census-Taker sprawled, thin and drunk, blue cap lopsided, behind his desk. The town had not grown but the institution had become empty, officials and nurses gone for distant lands, their eyes tight and faces drawn, and over the high narrow buildings no sound could be heard. Every day from the hill, thin children looked down on the empty scorpion that was all that was left of the ordered institution.

  A single spire of notched steel hung high above the town, devoid of banners, un-encased by building walls, sticking up above them all in the cold blue evening. Steel rungs hung crookedly exposed all the way up the spire, and steel slabs were driven across the narrow open cellar window where Balamir paused, his white skin wet in the still evening light. Piles of fallen bricks and mortar were pushed into the gutters like mounds of snow, smashed walls disappeared into the darkness, and stretching along the empty streets were rows of empty vendors’ carts. Balamir was unprotected from the cold. He found that the wind swept around his wide forehead and parched throat, flew bitterly into the open mouth of his rough upturned stiff collar. He found, in the damp frozen hollow of the cellar, that he could not unearth the wooden bench, the monstrous curling vase, the moldy bureau, or any of the frozen pots in uneven jumbled piles, littering the earthen floor and reaching to the rafters. He found that the earthen padded walls muffled his long howls at night and left the sound only in his own ears. While he worked, picking with the coal shovel, or sat staring up at the window, paper-wrapped feet shuffled overhead, and in the inhabited kitchens of the town the candles flickered, cans of thin soup warmed over flickering coals, and the children whined. Bookstores and chemist’s shops were smashed and pages from open books beat back and forth in the wind, while from split sides of decorated paper boxes a shoft cheap powder was blown along the streets like fine snow. Pâpier-maché candies were trampled underfoot. In outlying districts, in groups of four and five, Balamir’s brothers chased over the rutted and frozen ground after the livestock, angry and cold, their thick arms wagging, or clustered around the weak fires, laughing and cold. A small number of these men, after flinging hatchets or raging momentarily in the dark with stained knives, walked back and forth in the cells of the town jail, beating themselves and damning incoherently. The rest, including Balamir, did not realize that they were beyond the institution’s high walls. The population of the town remained the same and thieves from the jail went home to keep the balance.

  Madame Snow, owner of the building, living on the street floor above the cellar room, would have been a grandmother had not her son’s child died, no bigger than a bird, in an explosion not a block away. In the still morning air, the frosted fields about the town had cracked with the infrequent thudding of small explosions, and those that had discharged in the town had left a short useless whistle in her ears. But the children of Madame Snow’s sister had survived, to crawl sexless and frightened about bare rooms. Time after time, for months before Balamir had come, Madame Snow had watched the thin men climbing down from boiling trucks, waiting to see her son’s return. When he had finally arrived with his stump and steel canes, with special steel loops circling up about his wrists for extra support, he had not added even one bare number to the scratched-out roster of the drunken Census-Taker. He had returned to his wife and rooms in a corner of the moving picture house, and from then on, worked with the black machine in the hot projection room, showing each day the same blurred picture to no audience. Madame Snow did not see him after that. She busied herself as janitor, arguing with the residents or giving comfort; or sat in the large gilt chair tying rags together and infrequently pulling the heads from small fowl. The halls no longer smelled of roasting swine or boiling cabbages, no longer rang full with heavy laughter, but remained dark and cold, streaked with mud from the roomers’ boots.

  The building slanted crookedly and silent in a row of black stained fronts and the canal drained past the back fence; on the corner where the side street met the empty thoroughfare was the rising jumble of the steel spire. When a boy with black peaked martial cap, leather braces and short trousers walked past the drawn curtains, Madame Snow would peer hungrily out and then go back to the darkness. On the third floor of the house was the apartment of the Census-Taker, who left his dripping cape flung in the downstairs hall. Herr Stintz, a one-eyed school teacher, lived on the fourth floor, and above him, with her children and bleached plants, lived Jutta, the sister of Madame Snow. Herr Stintz, ex-member of the band, played his tuba late into the night, and the notes fell on the cobblestones, recalling the sound of fat marching feet. But the roomer who lived on the second floor was out.

  “Come,” said Madame Snow to Balamir, “come in. The room gives no heat really, but off with your coat. You’re at home.” Balamir knew he was not at home. He looked at the small table with the rows of playing cards and single gilt chair, looked at the bright figures where Madame Snow played alone. He carefully looked about the room of court and puzzled about the oaken whorls above the curtained door and the highness of the spidery black ceiling. “Sit down,” said Madame Snow, afraid to touch his arm, “sit down, please.” But he would not. He would never sit when anyone could see him. So he stood in the middle of the floor and a dwarfed cat rubbed against his leg. The attendant, hat pulled over his face and rubbers thick and too large, gave a sheaf of worn papers to Madame Snow and left like a shadow.

  “Will you drink tea?” He looked into his hands, saw steaming water and watched a single star-shaped leaf turning slowly around near the bottom of the cup. He saw a pale color slowly spread, creeping up the china towards his fingers, watched the star turn and the cup dip like the moon. But he would not drink. The little woman watched him from the side of her eye, the light almost gone. His hair was rough and shaggy and he would not drink her tea. Down in the cellar Balamir put the coat on again, standing until she hurried back up the stone steps, for he could feel the cold. “Good night,” she said and turned the brass key.

  Jutta’s child, shoes undone and lips white, ran along a path through the rubble, stumbled over stones, passed overhanging iron ledges and shattered windows, tried to weep, and fled on. A man followed, swinging a cane, craning into the darkness. The child passed a wall spattered with holes and the fingers of a dead defender, and behind him, the man coughed.

  A butcher shop was closing and a few cold strands of flesh hung unsold from hooks, the plucked skin and crawling veins uninspected, hanging, but without official sanction. Wire caught the child’s knee.

  The town, roosting on charred earth, no longer ancient, the legs and head lopped from its only horse statue, gorged itself on straggling
beggars and remained gaunt beneath an evil cloaked moon. Rattling trains turned back at the sight of the curling rails blossoming in the raw spring on the edge of town opposite the hill, and fields, plummeted with cannon balls, grew stained with the solitary need of beasts and men. As the old families returned to scrub again on the banks of the canal or walk singly dressed in black, the prisoners filed out over the hills, either as names on a ticket, or if the ticket had been lost, simply as uncounted numbers. When an old man was gripped dying in a terrible cough, Jutta was betraying her lost husband and bearing child again. The town, without its walls and barricades, though still a camp-site of a thousand years, was as shriveled in structure and as decomposed as an ox tongue black with ants.

  The Signalman, girded with a blanket in a wicker chair, smoking a pipe like a porridge bowl, commanding the railway station and a view of empty benches, no longer raised the red arm or pulled down the yellow, and no more lights blinked before his fat eyes to disturb his memories of the war of 1914. He had nothing to eat and nothing to say, and black men in large hats and capes were painted all over the walls of his station. Relics of silver daggers were looted from the nunnery and stored in trunks with photographs, or taken off to foreign lands. The bells never rang out. Fires burning along the curbs and dung heaps smoldering on the farms filled the air and alleys, the empty shops and larders with a pungent smell of mold.

  The Mayor, with his faded red sash, was too blind to tend the chronicles of history, and went hungry like the rest with memory obliterated from his doorstep. Their powerful horses of bony Belgian stock, dull-eyed monsters of old force, had been commandeered from the acre farms for ammunition trucks, and all were gone but one grey beast who cropped up and down the stone streets, unowned, nuzzling the gutters. He frightened the Mayor on black nights and trampled, unshod, in the bare garden, growing thinner each day, and more wild. Children took rides on the horse’s tail and roamed in small bands, wearing pasteboard Teutonic helmets, over the small confines of the town, their faces scratched and nails long. The undertaker had no more fluid for his corpses; the town nurse grew old and fat on no food at all. By mistake, some drank from poisoned wells. Banners were in the mud, no scrolls of figured words flowed from the linotype, and the voice of the town at night sounded weakly only from Herr Stintz’s tuba. Bucketfuls of sand kicked up by minor grey duds had splattered against flaking walls and trickled onto worn doorsteps where chickens left frightened tracks. Rotting sandbags killed the weeds, filled the air with the must of burlap, and when they fell to nothing, left white blotches over the ground.

  The townspeople had watched the bands of men march off and later come back with venereal diseases or their ears chopped from their skulls. One night startled eyes watched the coat of arms on the castle wall go up in smoke and flame as if an omen that they were expected to rally round for their sons or weep bitter tears. The Mayor lost at cards, had witnessed executions with his eyes closed, and in the marrow of his thick bones, the town shrank. All bartering was done by hand, the flowing script was chipped from the fat walls of the bank and the barred windows of the institution grew dense with cobwebs. An overturned tank on the north road still crawled with ghosts who left it at night and hung over the canal walls for drink.

  The Signalman, his mouth clamped shut, sitting behind the postered window of the station, saw the boy dashing over the torn rails and saw the man with the cane coming behind, his shadow lengthening in the station’s candle light. Jutta waited with her hungry little girl bouncing up and down, riding her knee. The damp smell of the river rolled over soldiers’ leggings and trousers that had been left in doorways, and a cow lying dead in a field looked like marble. In the tenuous light of day, Madame Snow hunched over her cards, and the silver platters, goblets and huge bowls grew black with tarnish and thick with dust. The merciless light showed each house a clear red or flat sand color and long burned beams and ashen barns were black. The green of cabbages had turned to white, and small automobiles, stalled and punctured to the side of the road, were blood red. Everyone wore grey, and over their shoulders were hitched empty cartridge belts. They begged while queuing for food and pounded their foreheads with their fists.

  Throughout these winters Madame Snow could not believe that the worst would come. All her faith was in the knuckle bones of a worthless currency, in the right of the victorious, a coinage covered with the heads of high-spirited men. Bits of gauze were pushed into the clay and women wore coats with epaulettes and brass buttons. In the early days when the patients had rioted at the institution, it was the women who beat them down with clubs, while girls with spirited eyes and bare knees lured officers to a night of round-the-world. Arms and armies and silver blades were gone, the black had come out of the realm of kings, and butterflies and grass were left for children. Freight trains were hit and burned and no more came, and the keys of all machines were welded together. Wohin gehen Sie? cried the devils, and the clatter of boots died out of the barracks.

  Balamir came eventually to think of himself as Madame Snow’s Prince. But for a long while he worked by himself, still smelling drugs and fighting with the terrible shapes that leaped from drawers. He longed to be in the mountains, to leap from crag to crag, fly about the snow fields and find gold at the foot of stunted trees. He longed to tend the sheep and be a gangling black dog racing at the herd over green slopes. He longed to live in a cave. Icicles hung between the slats of the cellar window at night, and Balamir began to think of the jewels hanging from the ears of Madame Snow, began to listen for the turning of the key. He listened for the only accordion in the town and the notes traveled down the rain pipe, over the slate, but no voices sang to the crashing of the steins. There was nowhere to eat in Spitzen-on-the-Dein, and tables were piled on one another, chipped with bullet-holes. Sometimes Balamir heard sleigh bells that jingled in the valleys of the Alps, and he flung himself on piles of cold rubbish and earth as on a snow heap. He slept on an army cot, longed for the fir trees, and as he grunted and threw his weight every day into the frozen articles of chairs, springs and picture frames, he felt that his strength was falling away. He remembered photographs of the vicious tigers and the days when all men wore spats or silver braids, and from the mountains to the Brauhaus, camps and meeting halls sprang up, precision glasses were trained. He thought of a pigtailed donkey and the bones of men ground into food. But now the guardhouse was empty, his father, who had been the Kaiser, was dead, and the nurses had been taken from the institution as corporals. He began to sit at the top of the stairs waiting for the door to open.

  Madame Snow, Stella Snow in the days of laced boots, parasols and Grand Balls, had loved white prancing horses, square-shouldered men with spikes rising from their helmets, and sleek sausages that bulged like pig’s hind legs, hanging in the kitchen large as a palace. She had breasts for a young girl, and had sat many times in a golden opera box, her legs growing rigid as if she were posing for a picture. The food in her father’s house was served encased in layers of fat and from a basket at the side of her bed she had eaten a hybrid kind of giant pear. She went out with young men dressed in black who could ride a horse up to the point of death on a winter’s day and leave him to freeze, feeling the hand of hell’s angel, or went with moustached students with orange bands about their caps. She craved candies imported from France and Holland, heard lovers sing in raucous voices, and punting, seemed the image of the passing swan. She had a mouth that inverts envied, and when the first thuds of cannonade rocked the country, the mouth closed and she began to read. She loomed like a waxen noncommittal saint when her mother fell before her in the street from marketing, a piece of metal jutting from the bosom, while the airplane crashed. The policeman blew his whistle and people ran from every hole, looming like roaches before her startled eyes. It was then that she imagined marble bannisters and the candelabra of several generations before, and saw strange men embarking in ice-covered ships. Machine guns slowly rattled in the raked forests. Her sister, young and sullen, tore p
ages from books and leaped in the snow. Stella took to cards, gambling, to singing, and finally back to cards, and in the meantime crossed barbaric swords hung over her head and she swept through ironclad centuries, a respected crone.

  Doors clamped shut and single lamps were lit. Jutta fondled the unformed girl while her son, awkward as a doll, ran over the cold earth. Many boys had been crushed under the tread of monsters and there were no martial drums to roll, though women pulled up their skirts to catch the tears. The shadows about the child seemed like beasts of the circus, groaning out of the empty doorways with nothing to mangle in their jaws. About him the wind began to scream as through the slots of airplane wings. The child ran, but only a sharp eye would have told that he was a boy, for his face, hands and hair were as flat as his sister’s, and the light from his eyes was as limpid and sullen as the night. Still, the Duke hooked his cane over his arm, adjusted his suede gloves, and followed, his trouser cuffs becoming wet with mud. The child ran all the faster when the light went out of the butcher shop.

  The shutters on the Mayor’s house were closed as they had been ever since the time of air raids. The collar of his nightshirt was dirty and tom and he pulled the covers over his head. He smelled damp wood, the stone, goose feathers. And when he heard the footsteps running in the street below he shivered; for as a Hun, only he knew responsibility and the meaning of a coat of arms, the terror of a people left without tribunal and with privation. The Duke walked past the Mayor’s house, unafraid of a hand in the dark, whistling softly to himself, but his eyes were sharp and he was keen on the scent. Then out of the blackness came a man, fresh from an alley, his hands still wet, breath strong with spirits. He reeled and they bumped below the Mayor’s bedroom window. It was the drunken Census-Taker. He stepped back, looked up at the tall figure. “Ah, Herr Duke,” he said, and his eyes searched the face. “You are mistaken,” said the Duke and pushed on.