The Cannibal: Novel Page 7

  A half-dozen birds, caught in the leaves, tried to make themselves heard and far down the hall she could hear Gerta talking to her father who was trying to dress. The air was like honey to wave beneath her nose; she called forth her own pleasure, plucked anywhere from the moving number of summer sensations. She waved her hand, even on the opening day of war, the public’s day, and a gentle lusty swell crowded her head, shoved the half-dozen murmuring birds out of reach. In winter, the snow fell where she wished, in great dull even flakes, in smooth slightly purple walls where far in perspective she was held like a candle, warm and bright. In summer, alone, it was she that breathed the idea of naked moonlight swimming—divers together in the phosphorescent breakers, leaves as clothes on the silver beach—she that breathed the idea of brownness, smoothness into every day of June, July, August, who created hair over the shoulder and pollen in the air.

  Her mother, a long mound beneath the sheets, had lost all this, terribly aged with a cold pallor, strong and indolent, unhappy in the oppressive heat. The mother lay in bed day after day, the spring, summer, years dragging by, with only her head two hands long above the sheets, her eyes fastened together, motionless until some forgotten whim, surge of strength, drove her from the bed. And in that hour she would shop. When she shopped, she ventured on the streets in gowns from another date, walked in steady steps, and took Stella along. She never liked the world she saw and her old husband never knew she was out of the house.

  A hundred strokes, a hundred and five, the hair quivered in the space of gold; she changed hands, her skin as soft as the back of a feather. Her brothers, a pair of twins, fifteen-year-old soldiers dressed in stiff academy blue and trimmed in brass, walked past her open door, eyes ahead, arms in parallel motion, and she heard their miniature spurs clanking down the wide stairs. The boys never saw their parents, since the old man and woman had been the age of deaf grandparents at the time of the brothers’ remarkable conception. The brothers ate and lived alone. The jingling sound hung in her ears, one of the birds had become audible, and she thought of a parakeet with long sharp nails bathing in a blue pond where the green grass swayed and the sun was orange. There was no shock in the day, but the same smothered joy crept up with the morning’s trade and old flags that were unfurling along the guarded streets.

  “Breakfast, breakfast!” Gerta called, wearied and harassed, from the center of the first floor lobby, lips drawn down, clutching a fist of silver, calling to wake the whole house into an even greater activity. The shabby crowd was growing restless, howling with round faces scrubbed cheery and proud, while inside the high walls the elaborate process of serving the isolated meal began. Twenty thousand feet in the sky, a sheet of wind flashed over the city cold and thin, while below, warm air rolled over the lake in the park, and swans opened their necks and damp feathers, bumping softly together in stiff confusion.

  The old man, always seated first at the table, held his head high and rigid so that it trembled, pure white eyes staring and blinking from a skull like a bird’s, the whole area behind the thin tissue eaten away and lost. Sometimes he ate his melon with the fork, or spoon, or knife, or pushed it with his pointed elbow so that it fell to the floor, pits and meat splashing over his black curled-up shoes. The moustache fell to his high collar in two soft sweeping strands of pale gold, his long legs were a mass of black veins. His face, narrow and long, was covered with bark and was deep scarlet, and clots of blood formed just under the glaze of fine hair; and he would fall, slipping and breaking in every part at least once a week. But each time the clots would dissolve and be churned away, down the grass-smelling passages, and he would recover.

  The table was so short, with the twelve leaves piled out of sight in dust, that she could almost smell his breath, with scarcely a bare foot of candelabra, bowls, tongs, green stems and silver trays between them. When she sat down, his head, like a brittle piece of pastry, tried to swim over the breakfast things, searching as every morning, but was blocked by a twisted maze of fern in an azure vase and a pyramid of butter patties topped with dark cherries. “Stool,” he said in a high voice because he could no longer pronounce her name. They sat close together in the middle of the long dining room, the man with his ninety years and the young girl with her peaches, while overhead, set in one of the domes, a large clock struck eleven. Gerta hurried in and out pushing a little cart laden with napkins, rolls, knives, sauces of all kinds and pans of under-done, clear boiled eggs. “Poor man,” she said, dabbing at a long run of fresh egg water on his tunic, turning now and then a look of wrath on Stella as if the poor girl herself had shaken his freckled hand and made the long translucent string slide off onto his chest. Stella frowned back, scattering crumbs over the little table and knocking the goblet so that a mouthful of water sizzled on the coffee urn.

  “Watch what you’re doing,” snapped Gerta, her slippers padding angrily on the rug.

  This morning he was able to get the pink slices between his fingers, but, slipping through their own oily perfume, they constantly fell back to the tablecloth in irregular heaps of quivering jelly. Stella thought of Ernie and smiled across the floral table at her father, looked with delightful interest at his slippery hands.

  The boy didn’t realize what he said, 1870, it would take many dead men to encircle Paris, and the responsibility, that’s what he didn’t understand or no one could speak in such a manner, pride on the heights. “War,” her father said, and there was a terrible fire in his eye through the ferns. “War,” and he leaned slightly forward as if to strike her, but his arm only raised part way, shivered, and dropped back on the plate. She stopped smiling.

  “Where is the railroad station?” he asked.

  Stella watched his questioning face for a moment then continued to eat. She was sorry.

  “He only wants to go to the bathroom,” said Gerta, and throwing herself under his thin erect frame she led him out, the white lace duster fluttering on her head. The two boys clanked by in the hall, stepped in a single motion out of the way. The cook worked frantically to heat more rolls in the oven like a boiler, kept a flame under the pot of coffee, ran from cupboard to cupboard collecting more juices and spices, threw a large ham on the spit. Stella pulled the long brocaded sash and heard the bell jingle out amid the clatter of pans, the swirl of water. Gerta’s friend came in, still wearing her brown shawl and hat covered with violets, still clutching the paper bag with grease on her fingers.

  “More toast,” said Stella.

  “Ah, toast,” said the woman and disappeared.

  Stella thought that her father suffered very much. Some parts of the day she would walk with him up and down the beautiful quiet hallways, his hand resting only lightly on her arm, a smile about his shriveled lips. Sometimes she suffered herself, though usually in the evening in the blue shadows of her room, never in the morning, for she knew that at dusk she would see him half-hidden and in full stately dress behind the tall lighted candles. The dining room walls darkened with nightfall, the silverware lighted by the flames, the immense shadows falling over him from white flowers instead of ferns, covered him with an illusory change that frightened her. In these evenings Stella remembered how, when she was a small girl, he had talked to her, before his voice disappeared, and she heard his voice talking of sieges and courtships, and emerald lands, and she wished him to be a father still. At night she could not tell. From a few long talks with her mother she knew that for five generations the men had been tall, handsome, discreet and honorable soldiers, all looking exactly alike as brother eagles, and all these men had died young. Her father had so outlived the features of those other men and his family that he no longer existed and could not even speak. The man hidden behind the candles made her wonder for all his years.

  “You don’t have to tell me where he needs to go,” she murmured, and Gerta’s friend returning with the toast was confused by her words.

  The hair nearest her neck was hazel, the rest lemon, and when she walked it was fitfully gliding as if s
he were already there—there in the mausoleum where he lay in plaster, where rose petals were swept under her prayer. For in the hottest part of the noon, the house was withered away and his white face was in a lasting repose, the idiot of breakfast, the marshal of dinner, become an old masked man in the heat of the sun wherever she walked. She would gladly cut the epitaph herself for just one glimpse before they latched the door—the noon heat made her feel the marble dust as if it were fresh. Never in the world could she know him, only scraps from her mother’s carefully guarded chest. Sometimes, when Stella looked most beautiful, she felt that she would collapse with the house around her when he finally left.

  Her room nearest the slate roof was warm, the seascapes, spaced regularly over the walls, filled it with blue, the birds had become silent under the window. Jutta, an ungainly eleven-year-old child, was taking her nap at the end of the corridor in a cubicle small and low that might have belonged to a boarding school or nunnery white and bare. Her mouth was open and she breathed heavily, thin legs apart as if she were riding a horse. Stella fastened the bonnet with pink and yellow ribbons, drew on her white gloves, started down the stairs, and stopped to listen to the low ugly noises of the sleeping child. Outside she found herself caught in front of the house in the silence of the crowd, and all eyes looked upward. There on the narrow balcony, squeezed side by side, was her father still leaning on Gerta who smiled, laces fluttering against his uniform. All at once he spoke, and the single word fell upon them hushed and excited. “Victory.” For a moment they waited for more, watched, listened and then broke out in screams of appreciation while the old man was led back inside the house. They did not realize that he thought the war, which had just begun, was over, and they took up the word and sent it flying along the street from one startled citizen to the next. Stella began to walk, her parasol catching the shade of the enormous line of trees.

  Men tipped their hats, drays rolled by with heavy rumps nodding majestically between the shafts, chains clattering, whips stinging; small flags hung limply in shops as if it were a holiday. A tremendous stuffed fish grinned out at her, sunlight skipping between its blue fins, small clams grey and moist piled about like its own roe on the chopped ice. An awning covered part of the street with orange, passers-by parted into even chattering lanes, and children going to the park grinned, tugging ahead. In the Krupp manufacturing works, huge steel barrels were swung by chain and arm, covered with pale green grease and pointed through barred skylights towards the summer sky. In the jail, prisoners looked out into the white limestone yard, carriages skimmed by on frail rubber wheels, and lapel after lapel spotted with a white flower passed by her side. In the thrill of this first warm exciting day with posters going up all over the city and mothers proudly patting their sons’ heads, Stella’s aunts and uncles, less fortunate cousins and acquaintances, fanning themselves in desolate drawing rooms or writing down the date in diaries, wondered how the beginning of hostilities would affect her father’s position, and donning bright colors, prepared to call.

  A swallow dipped suddenly down into the center of traffic, and up again, successful. It was then that the headache began. It came as a dull burn might come in noon hours on the beach, a soft sensation in her eyes; pleated under the yellow hair, it coursed slowly down the small of her neck, and made mouthfuls of spit shimmer above the policeman’s white-lady gloves. She held her hand to her breast because the headache was so tiny and almost caught in her throat. “Oh, yes,” she said to herself, “I’ve seen so many artists,” and indeed she had once passed a man slumped over a table scratching the fleas. The seascapes about the walls of her room reminded her of the warm south, of islands where the white sun hurt the eyes, of pebbles like the tips of her fingers that were pearl grey. She could never laugh at anyone, a velvet shoulder brushed quickly by, sharp blues and reds hurried along the street. “Your father was a wonderful brave loving man,” her mother would say. Dogs barked and howled, she glanced from yellow walls to white, creating as she walked small impressions which remained precious and a source of continual inspiration, catching a swift dark eye of possible European fortunes, pitying the shoe with the twice normal heel. The buildings, low, gilded, with their spires thrust a ludicrously short way into the sky, all trying to fall upon the street, protected by iron spikes, cast a yellow fog against the clouds. When her face was serious, when she watched the drays or passing blurred numbers cut into stone, watched the street as it moved, when her face was vacuous, it was a little flower, as if the larger girl had walked away to find Father. But when she smiled the mouth was tense, desire lost upon the waving of her arms. Gerta, when the moon was starting to sink, used to carry her away from the mother’s bedside; and, awake with the nursemaid guarding the door, she could hear the old man snoring fitfully somewhere in the corridor. The sun hurt her eyes; it was certainly more difficult to hear now that her head hurt her so. “Your father was a tall man and we went to the mountains before they had railroads.” When, infrequently, she talked to her mother, she was speaking through her, as through a black unsteady ear-trumpet, to a very old man who sat listening, pallid in a rocking-chair, some thirty or forty years ago. Now in his toothless eye she was to him some rifleboy with a sack of powder at the hip. “Victory,” somebody shouted, and a boy came running down the smoke-filled street without his cap.

  The tail end of the park was a narrow stretch of scrubby green caught tightly between high walls in the center of the city, an acre where the sun rarely fell, and low office men smoked at all hours. Strangely enough, today it was bright in the sunlight, and there were more clerks than ever, black and limpid. Stella walked up and down between two benches that left slat marks on shiny britches. Twisted black toes of shoes, stuck by the loungers into the narrow path, touched the hem of her gown, her head fluttered beneath the ribbons, pained worse, and a huge dog with black and white spots trotted by. The sky would darken for a moment with a smudge of cream, then would roll back to sheer white, turning the patches of grass to straw. Once she had hidden from Gerta beneath her mother’s skirts, had felt the overpowering comfort of her ruffles, and that was a strange experience. The mother had thrust heavy hands under the folds, caught the wriggler, and handed the daughter over to the nurse, who always gave bad advice, to be secured in a strict manageable grasp. “Your father wouldn’t like you to behave like that.” Stella shut out all the city but this one pasture, shut out all the light but that which ached in her head, and high above the whispering clerks realized she loved Ernst very much. City and keeps and roadways in the heat, he, by a forest of young hair, protected from that which is dying. She waited patiently.

  “My God, simpleton, why don’t you sleep?” The mother spoke from a throat puffing over the edge of the sheet drawn tightly above her bosom with both hands. The father, back in the shuttered room with his tunic unbuttoned, wandered more bent and drawn around the three sides of the bed, his fine Roman nose twitching with excitement, the top of his scalp a sullen red. The room was sheltered, warm, an auburn fuzz glowed through the shutters and darkness. The old woman was white and still in the bed and about her the black wood was inlaid with bits, broken wings, of silver. The father was in one of his reveries, counting very slowly some outlandish or important number on his yellow fingers that would never total. Though one body was heavy and the other frail, though one voice bullied and the other barely mumbled, though the man wavered in agitation and the woman lay in state, they both were very much the same, because on both the hair had receded and become pale, leaving the foreheads, eyes and mouths expressionless with old age. A palmist looking at their hands would have seen no life for all the mazes of fine-drawn yellow lines, overlapping soft pads and untaken crowding roads. “If only he would slip off into the light of Heaven,” she thought. “Sit down,” she said, but he paid no attention, and she could hear only the long-legged rustling of his uniform, the unbearable sun pressing above them on the roof.

  Jutta awoke and the room was filled with black shapes.

&n
bsp; The heat seemed to grow more determined, even the clerks panted, whispering closely in each other’s ears, and Stella believed the sun would never fall flaming through the torpid clear sky. She wondered how the strange wild cannibals on tropical islands or on the dark continent, running with white bones in their hair, dark feet hardened in the shimmering sand, could bear, in only their feathers, this terrible sun. For the headache made her drowsy. She saw those men, carrying victims high over their heads, as tall, vengeful creatures who sang madly on their secret rock, who even at night slept on glistening pink stone in fire, who stretched their tall bodies whether in repose or in chase, and who kept wives bare from the waist up. Their ears were pierced, insects buzzed low over the children, the islands kept rising up out of the sea. Even when she was tired and desperately warm and even in such a trembling state, she loved him. Her temple throbbed, the clerks were watching. Her fired heart and sweltering faith were beginning to fall away, swept by impatience. She was tired of this park filled with noise, so close to the passing horses that wore skull caps with holes for the ears. She was afraid of being left alone. Then, before she had a chance to meet the image come too sudden before her, before she had a chance to guard against this reflection which she had searched for in all the shop windows, and guard against the terror of herself, she saw him running across the street and up the path, turned half sideways, thin, excited, smiling wildly through the fresh bandages round his head.

  “Stella!”

  “Ernst!”

  They walked for twenty minutes under the yellow and green leaves and passed the cool pond as clear as the sky, smelled the berries cultivated by the park authorities, a few beautiful dripping flowers, and passed babies who screeched, dwarfed in the carriage. Then he took her home, left her, feeling at last the approach of twilight, feeling his heart full and as vague as water.