Ranko Marinkovic - Cyclops

“ These characters are mostly me,” explained the palmist with a pride of sorts. “You are so kind, kitten, thank you very much. But at least I know what compensation is — which Freddie for one does not, I’ll stake my life on that.”

“Freddie’s a dolt,” she said in irritation. “And so are you. You only differ from him as much as a melon differs from a pumpkin.”

“Well, at least that makes me the melon. Admit it — I’m the melon, right?”

“No, you are not!” She showed her beautiful teeth, spitefully. “Melons are sweet.”

“There you are, I’m not even a melon. Did you hear her, Mr. Melkior — not even a melon.”

ATMAN placed a small coffee table near the sofa, laughing brightly. Melkior noticed the table had already been set with three teacups. So everything had been planned ahead, premeditated. This actually alarmed him: what are they up to with me?

“So Freddie’s the sweet one, then,” prattled the palmist brightly, laughing, fetching butter, liver paste, sliced sausage, cheese, bread, doing it all with hostlike, familiar alacrity, with measured, feminine motions. “Whereas I’m the pumpkin, ha-ha. A squash.” He poured out the fine fragrant dark amber tea, smiling at some unspoken thought of his. “Shall I spread some páté for you, kitten? It’s genuine liver paste, fat-free. Do help yourself, Mr. Melkior. I recommend the sausage, it’s very good indeed. A bit on the spicy side, just the thing for us men.”

Melkior’s beast gave a start and trembled with hunger. It fell to voraciously gobbling the food with its eyes. But Reason gave the beast a bash on the maddened snout and calmly proclaimed:

“No, thank you very much, Mr. Adam, I’m straight from lunch … Just a cup of tea will be fine. Thank you.”

“Straight from lunch? You’ve given up then? A wise thing, if you ask me. I mean, what’s the use? I keep asking myself if it really made sense. That treatment you’re in for, as it were. Women go through it for their figure, which is also …” he gave a hopeless gesture and a benevolent smile.

“Yes, I heard that, too, about you undergoing a treatment. But I don’t think you should really, you’re far too thin.” Her teeth sank into a thick layer of páté. She bit off a mouthful and fell to chewing daintily.

“Who told you that?” Melkior asked fearfully. “Ugo? He’s made up some sort of cock-and-bull story about me and is peddling it about in the Cafés. He’s mad.”

“Ugo? Ugo who?”

The one you slept with last night, you bitch! She read some such thought in Melkior’s look and her eyes flashed with malice for an instant, but she drove it all away with a very surprised smile.

“Mac, do I know this Ugo character?”

“By my method of reckoning time you’ve known him since last night,” mumbled ATMAN through a mouthful of food, vengefully. “The wounded guy last night at the Give’nTake, the one you ministered to.”

“Oh, the one Freddie clouted?” she remembered very convincingly. “The poor man, he had blood all over his mouth. That brute packs a punch.” She laughed aloud, throwing back her head on the sofa backboard. “But he was absolutely brilliant, poor Ugo. I had no idea what his name was.”

So much the worse. An unknown with an unknown. Perhaps even … Ugo’s meaning was now clear. An unknown physiognomy steps into our lives, out of nowhere. Our smooth (smooth, eh?) sailing is boarded by a mysterious passenger who instantly steals our entire sense of reality. Sucks our willpower dry, and our secret wanderings begin. Through a terrain of illusions.

Melkior was already feeling helplessly drawn into this woman’s magnetic field. He did not even know her name yet. The damnation — the sense of letting go, the senseless fattening of one’s vanity. The words which issued from the charming mouth to sail through space following the most pedestrian auditory patterns assumed higher significance in our intricately distorted mind. We readily spread underneath them our ridiculous expectations, our hopes, for each word to drop where we chose. To cover, cleanse, comfort, delight, stroke, caress, to bite, cut, to draw blood and inflict pain, for that, too, now and then, is something our vanity needs.

Do I love her? And he glanced at her in step with the question … as if to make a snap check. Don’t speak to me of love! Here, if she were to fall on her back right now in death throes, mouth frothing and body in torment, if I were to see death in her eyes — would I go out of my mind with fear, with despair at the loss? And there surfaced, by way of reply, an entirely cold, cynically grinning wish that this should actually happen, that she should die right here and now, in agony. There’s love for you!

He hated her. He hated her with a motivated, cruel hatred, which was taking its revenge in advance for the future. His future. For there had already sprouted a shoot of pain inside him, he knew it had, and he was watching his tender stalk sway its bitter fruits.

“He’s a poet as well, isn’t he?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “He recited me some poetry. I don’t remember any of it, but it was very beautiful. I mean, soulful,” she corrected herself, noticing an ironic twitch of Melkior’s lips. “I believe Ugo’s an excellent actor. Better than Freddie anyway.” ATMAN gave Melkior a look: what did I tell you? His face shone with professional triumph.

“Better as an actor, too, did you hear that, Mr. Melkior?” ATMAN’S face dissolved into ambiguity: two conflicting expressions were mingling there like two opposing winds on a water surface; his face was slightly shivering both with hatred and a genteel smile. “So Freddie’s quite without talent, is he?”

“Do you know what he did to him?” she turned to Melkior for help. “It was the opening night of I forget which play and Freddie was having this wonderful scene all to himself, and this Othello here …”

“That’s not true!” the palmist interrupted her, alarmed. “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me.”

“It was you, yourself!” she outshouted him. “You eat pigeons.”

“What’s this got to do with me eating pigeons? I ask you, Mr. Melkior! She’s crazy, is she not?”

“Crazy, eh? You know what he did? Freddie was just into his big scene, dramatic pause and all, you know how it goes. Everyone was dead silent, you could have heard a feather drop, and at that very moment this man …”

“I told you it wasn’t me. It was his fellow actors who did it, out of spite.”

“And this man, would you believe it, lets loose a pigeon from the box where he is sitting! You must have been there, surely you remember?”

Yes, Melkior did remember the pigeon. Freddie’s soliloquy had indeed fallen flat. The women protected their hairdos, believing the assailant to be a giant bat. The pigeon kept hurtling into the darkness of the box, into the galleries, terrified, miserable, panicking for its columbine life. There was a pigeon hunt on all over the place, nobody took any further interest in the play. The hunting interlude went on for a long time before it occurred to the pigeon to make for the stage and up to the dome where at last it settled down.

“There you are, Mr. Melkior, is she possessed by the devil or is she not? Even the devil himself wouldn’t have …”

“… could have come up such a nasty prank,” she completed his sentence with malicious glee.

“But I tell you it wasn’t me. I would have owned up, now. I might have done it if I’d been able to think of such a thing, but I’m afraid I’m not as clever as you. I’m just not. The pigeon must have flown in on his own through a hole in the roof — they have their nests up there …”