Ranko Marinkovic - Cyclops

Patriotic trees! spoke Melkior with comic pathos walking under the bare black boughs which were shivering in the cold. Each beech, oak, and elm that none can o’erwhelm! he recited under the bare boughs, seeking strength in words, with a sour smile playing around his lips. … And brushwood and brambles … all the brackens across the land … Melkior felt comically moved by the piece of nonsense and gave a mournful laugh. He nevertheless raised his head in honor of the sumptuous plane tree in front of the University building: “Your Imperial Majesty,” he said to it and thought of Empress Maria Theresa. Sparrows were chasing each other all over it in what looked like raucous merriment. A prominent old professor of theoretical physics was coming down the stairs; he, too, noticed the sparrows’ festivity. Melkior saluted him, lifting his hat. “Having a time of it,” he said to him. “Yes — at just the right moment, too,” replied the professor, raising his soft black hat “Good morning.”

From a side street came the newspaper hawker’s nasal chant; he was selling his Morning News with mechanical apathy.

“Oh look, ‘Situation Improving,’” laughed a man gesturing with his chin at a banner-type headline on page one of his paper, “‘Certain signs suggest …’ ha-ha!”

Melkior responded with a vague smile — who knows what he meant? And when he turned around for another look at the man (what a funny … sweeping walk), he bumped into a soldier who was in great hurry. The soldier took hold of his shoulders and held him at an arm’s length:

“Watch out: eyes to the fore!” The man was smirking. Melkior stared at the familiar face, his mouth agape, but it was a bit odd … dressed like this …

Pupo, in a private’s boots and rough cloth but with the epaulettes of a reserve lieutenant. He smelled of military storerooms: mothballs, leather, urine … Of course, he had to tack on the political lesson, noted Melkior morosely. But he instantly felt a surge of joy at the encounter: there, a fighting man, in boots … no glasses …

“You’re a soldier?” he said in confused, senseless amazement.

“Well, what would you want me to be … a seducer?” retorted Pupo haughtily, with self-importance. “We’re all soldiers now. So will you be, too … if you want to live!”

“Live?” repeated Melkior mechanically. Which pigeonhole did he pull that cliché out of? Somewhere it must’ve been decided to … “What’s the use — they’ll be here by tomorrow.”

“What about us — won’t we be here, too?”

“Be here like this … with epaulettes?” Melkior cast a derisive glance at the gold on Pupo’s shoulders.

Pupo turned his head to glance at it, too, but nevertheless with a hushed pride: “This? These are just the necessary rigmarole. This kind of gold’s very precious right now,” he added with a smile.

“You can command men,” teased Melkior.

A cloud of rage flashed through Pupo’s eyes. He was about to say something hard, insulting, but he changed his mind, gave a patient smile: “It has its points, too … if it’s useful for the cause I serve.”

“What you do is always useful.” Melkior did not want to talk this way, but something inside him was rebelling against the respect he held for Pupo, a vicious and cynical voice … as it had against what he felt moments ago for the trees. Brushwood and brambles …

“Look, I’m in a hurry,” Pupo got moving all of a sudden, taking leave of the incurable one. Still, out of habit, he did not fail patiently to donate a warning at least: “If you’re doing nothing, at least don’t deride those who are doing something.”

“Well, what am I to do?” Melkior gave a helpless shrug. “Spit on Hitler’s tanks?”

“You seem to think only in large-scale terms …”

“What, should I go after their tanks with something small-scale?” laughed Melkior spitefully. “Like the Polish nobility with their spears at Kutno?”

“Stop flailing about with desperate gestures,” Pupo cautioned him with all-but-spent patience. “What the hell do you think I’m doing? Going from one barracks to another, speaking to the men, preparing them for combat! That’s why I wear these stars on my shoulders …”

“What combat?” smiled Melkior hopelessly. “It’s a complete rout already. They’ve occupied Varaždin!”

“The real combat is yet to begin,” said Pupo with muted pathos. “The thing to do is to stow away as much equipment and weapons as possible. I’m getting my hands on rifles, grenades, boots, that’s what I’m doing, small things, fair knight; and as for Varaždin … sorry, not my department.”

Collecting bees, thought Melkior, and right now we need the honey. I’d rather believe in the Melancholic’s alligators …

“By the way, that chap I put up … do you know where he is now?”

“What do you want with him?” said Pupo sternly. “I don’t know where he is … and it doesn’t matter, anyway.”

It doesn’t matter … Again there was that something that put him off of Pupo. What a perfect dutiful instrument! That other man was quiet, modest, sensible, presumably he was dutiful enough, yet in addition to that he had a strange expression of concern in his eyes … “If I didn’t work, I wouldn’t believe …” Pupo would be unable to muster such a thought.

“So,” concluded Pupo with a smile, “don’t meddle in things which don’t concern you … and find your place in these times. You’re an honest man,” he added before leaving and shook Melkior’s hand firmly: he understood and forgave.

Melkior took the handshake as an insult; that, too, was dutiful … as was the “You’re an honest man.”

At the main entrance he was greeted by a familiar cap with large golden letters on it spelling PORTER. Behind the large glass panes of the courtyard building it was dark and quiet, no lead was running into moulds, the print rollers were lying still on their axles. The clock in the porter’s lodge had stopped.

“Your clock stopped,” said Melkior to the Cap.

The smooth red face with a thick yellow moustache and golden eyebrows (which had earned him the nickname of Carrot) nodded worriedly:

“Everything’s stopped today, my dear sir. For the first time in the twenty seven years I have been sitting here.”

“What, are we having the day off?”

“We haven’t come out with an edition at all. Did you see the Morning News—‘Situation Improving …’ and the capital city gone! They’re all laughing about it upstairs.” He laughed himself, loyally. “You going up? They’re all there. Rooms full of cigarette smoke, everybody smoking like … Nobody’s doing anything. The compositors went and got drunk first thing in the morning.”

“So the situation’s …”

“… ‘bloody offal,’ as our Russian gal likes to say.”

“Carrot, don’t tell me you, too, are propagating defeatism!” Coming down the stairs was a tall cowboyish individual, the Foreign Affairs Editor. His head was unsuitable for any kind of hat and stood out with an air of importance, vast and bare as it was. While still on the stairs he attacked the red-headed porter: “I’ll shove that damned cap down your throat, gold letters and all! Already preparing to serve the new masters, are you?” He then spoke to Melkior with unspent rage, which had made his head swell further still: “Send the lot of them out to the border, let them spout their shit there! Defeatist damned nits! Already watching out not to get off on the wrong foot with the new masters, fifth-column scum!” His strong hands seemed to be looking for something to break and crush … and they unconsciously crushed between their fingers an innocent little Morava cigarette.