Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

The persimmons of Peking are not like the American persimmons; they are larger and flattened at each end. In order for the flavor to be at its best, the fruits must have begun to rot. The top is removed and cream is put on, heavy cream which has begun to turn sour. This is food fit for a god and I was the only one present who was eating it. The Russians thought that persimmons were only for the Chinese, and the Chinese did not eat cream.

There was an American at the next table, in the guise of an interfering angel, talking about famine relief. The fool did not realize that famine is itself a relief, better even than war, more selective in weeding out the unfit and reducing the surfeit of people from which swarming areas such as China and India are always suffering. I smiled as I heard him, and savored the contrast between the sweet and the sour on My spoon, and I heard her draw in her breath and I looked down and there was the old Chinese, in his smutty robe and with some object wrapped in grimed cloth next to him as he squatted on the floor. I heard her murmur something to him in Chinese; she greeted him, called him lau-yay— old master or sir — and something else which I knew I knew but could not place. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and cheap scent. The fool at the next table threw the old man some money and gestured him to begin.

His appearance was like that of any beggar, a wrinkled face, two or three brown teeth showing when he smiled in that fawning way. He unwrapped his bundle and it was an empty chinaware bowl and two wooden wands. He covered the bowl with cloth again, rapped it with wands, uncovered it, and there was a goldfish swimming. He covered, he rapped and rapped and whisked away the cloth and the bowl was gone. I darted My foot out to the place where it had been, but there was nothing there.

The American at the next table spread out a newspaper on the floor, the old man rolled his sleeves up his withered, scrannel, pallid-sallow arms; he spread the cloth, struck it with his sticks, and then removed it, showing a much larger bowl with the goldfish, on top of the newspaper. So it had not come from some recess in the floor, nor from his sleeve. I did not like to see anyone else exercising power; I spoke roughly to the old man, and he giggled nervously and gathered his things together. The fools opposite began to protest, I looked at them and their voices died away. I looked at her , to see if she would still presume to call him old master; but she was My creation and she laughed aloud at him and this pleased Me.

My powers increased; with drops of ink I could kill and I could make alive. The agents of the men of Yenan came to Me at night and I wrote things for them and they left offerings of money on the table.

Infinitely adaptive, I, polymorphous, porphyrogenitive, creating iniquity, transgression, and sin.

But sometimes at night, when they had left and we had gone to bed and I pretended to sleep as others, sometimes there was a noise of a faint rattling and I saw something in the room turning and flashing, like a flash of gold, and the shadows loomed like the shadow of an old man. And once it came to Me — the meaning of the Chinese words she had used once. They meant father-in-law, but I could not remember when she had used them, though distantly I knew she had no more husband. I awoke her and made her worship Me and I was infinitely godlike.

When was this? Long ago, perhaps. It seems that I do not remember as well as formerly. There is so little to remember of present life. I have withdrawn from the world. I do not really know where I now am. There is a wall of some sort, it extends everywhere I turn, it is white, often I press my lips against it. I have lips. I do not know if I have hands and feet, but I do not need them. The light, too, has an odd quality here. Sometimes I seem to be in a small place and at other times it seems larger. And in between these times something passes overhead and all goes dark and there is a noise like the beating of heavy staves and then it is as if I am nothing…no place… But then all is as before and there is light once more and I can move freely through the light, up and down; I can turn, and when I turn swiftly I can see a flashing of gold, of something gold, and this pleases and diverts Me.

But when I am still I cannot see it at all.

Having reached the stage of life where I am perfectly willing to believe anything of academics, I take a special personal delight in this lesser-known tale of Avram’s. Its libelous suggestion of the lengths to which a museum director might go to protect his career isn’t, of course, the only reason that I’m so fond of this story. I love its central notion, which I find hauntingly credible, as so many of Avram’s modest proposals and almost-theories so often are. (For further reference — not to mention a lifetime’s worth of truly wondrous delight — get at any cost, financial or moral, a copy of Adventures in Unhistory, published by George Scithers’ Owlswick Press in 1993.)

And then there’s the damn language again… It isn’t so much that Professor Sanzmann endearingly says “Chairmany” for Germany, or “walley” for valley. It’s that he refers to “the nexten walley,” and to peasants who “huddle fearingly together,” as he would if he were translating himself directly from the German as he goes along. Avram is never wrong about stuff like that, not even when the translation is from a language that doesn’t exist. I know I keep saying it, but when it comes to pure sensitivity to the human use of words, the man has few peers and no equals.

Without wishing to give away the kicker of the story-within-a-story that propels “The Ogre,” let me say that in recent years similar speculations, developed at lumbering wide-screen length, have become something of a cottage industry. For poignancy and provocativeness, I’ll back this small jewel of a tale against any of them.

WHEN THE MENACE OF Dr. Ludwig Sanzmann first arose, like a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, Dr. Fred B. Turbyfil, at twenty-seven, had been the youngest museum director in the country; and now at thirty-five he was still one of the youngest. Moreover, he had a confident, if precarious, hold on greater glories to come. High on the list of benefactors and patrons, Mr. Winfield Scott H. Godbody was an almost-dead (in more ways than one) certainty to will most of his substance to what would then become the Godbody Museum of Natural History: Dr. Fred B. Turbyfil, Director. The salary would be splendid, the expense account lavish and tax-free, and the Director would have ample time to finish his great work, at present entitled Man Before the Dawn— recondite, yet eminently readable. There were already seventeen chapters devoted to the Mousterian, or Neanderthal, Era alone. (It would be certain to sell forever to schools and libraries: a big book, firm in the grasp, profusely illustrated and done in so captivating a style that even a high school senior, picking it up unwarily in search of nudes, would be unable to extricate himself for hours.)

Mr. Godbody was a skeptic of the old-fashioned sort. “Where did Cain get his wife?” was a favorite cackle, accompanied by a nudge of his bony elbow. “Found any feathers from angels’ wings yet?” was another.

He had pioneered in supplying cotton prints to flour millers for sacking. The brand name washed out, the figured cloth was then used for underwear and children’s dresses by the thrifty farmers. This had made him a wealthy man, and increased his devotion to Science — the Science which had destroyed the cosmogony of the M.E. Church, South, and invented washable ink.