Ranko Marinkovic - Cyclops

“A beer, Herr Professor, or perhaps a glass of wine?”

Kurt’s reading my lips, blast him — or is he telepathic or something?

“Did I say ‘beer,’ Kurt?” he asked suspiciously.

“Well you can always have wine if you prefer — at least that’s something there’s plenty of in this country. But beer goes better with a schnitzel, doesn’t it?”

Yes, beer goes better with hmm … a schnitzel. Maestro knows this: it goes better with a schnitzel — hence his beer-drinking.

“And they call themselves intellectuals. Heavens!” Kurt launched into his lament. “Vulgarities and nothing else. You can’t say a word to them. As if they were from another planet.”

“Out on a spree,” said Melkior, bored. “Celebrating something, no doubt.” He wanted to get rid of Kurt and give some thought in peace to the matter of blood … on the thresholds of the institution …

“And then I say to her, here, let me whisper something in your mouth, baby, heh, heh …”

“And you got one across the snout, right?”

“I did, yessirree. Mind you, I said it dead cool, but I did.”

“There you are, Herr Professor, that’s their idea of humor,” said a scandalized Kurt, rubbing together his moist, pudgy-fingered hands. “Nothing but vulgarities. My sister no longer sits with them. Upon my word, the NCOs are better men. Uncouth but well-behaved. When my sister sits at their table, you don’t hear a single coarse word. One of them is in love with her as a matter of fact, he wants to marry her, hm, hm,” smiled Kurt, forgiving the man his presumption. “Actually he’s not a bad man at all, he’s nice. We wouldn’t mind him being an NCO — after all Else’s not so educated herself — but what kind of future is there in it? An NCO in a weak army, what can you expect? And anyway, how much longer is that going to last? The war’s practically here. It’s only a question of months … if not days,” he whispered confidentially.

He knows, he knows, he’s got his pudgy fingers in all sorts of pies … Melkior had the impression of having felt inside him, in some tangential and accidental way, something like a fear of Kurt. Or … how to explain it? A presence of the fearsome — and he caught himself developing unconscious cunning designed to keep himself inside the circle of Kurt’s goodwill, to retain his confidence, with a view to squeezing that Future a bit more clearly out of Kurt, learning the precise day, the day … It would be a good move to contradict him just a wee bit, to voice the tiniest doubt … to make an ahh-who-knows-there’s-no-telling-when-it-will-happen gesture to provoke Kurt’s in-the-know-ness.

But he did not make the gesture. He merely gave a foolish flattering smile and felt silliness daubed all over his face like a congealed cosmetic mask. And hung his head in shame over the table as if lost in thought, thus to convey himself to Kurt as the picture of indifferent equanimity in the face of destiny. He wanted Kurt to take his behavior for the lofty indifference of a man who simply keeps out of such matters and understands nothing of the whole business.

“After all, who knows, Herr Professor?” said Kurt with a helpless sigh. His mother called him from the kitchen. He was presently back with the food and a glass of foaming beer. Melkior fell to greedily, his stomach thanking him with a low murmur, enjoying itself. Kurt, too, was enjoying himself seeing how well the distinguished guest liked their cooking. A Wiener schnitzel on a meat-free day. It’s-a-dream, it’s-a-dream, it’s-a-dream. Melkior began to dance a Viennese waltz inside: tra-a-lala, tra-a-lala. “By the way, I’ve asked Father — it’s plain old acetic acid,” whispered Kurt all of a sudden, leaning over close to Melkior’s ear. “You soak a cigarette in it and allow it to dry. And you smoke it, as fast as you can, right before the physical. It’ll have your heart pounding like mad, there’s not a specialist in the world who can see through this one. … And there are no harmful aftereffects, everything’s back to normal in twenty minutes. People used it to get out of combat duty in the Great War. Father was an Einjährig-Freiwilliger , nobody liked the idea of getting killed … for an Austro-Hungarian emperor. The Hapsburgs were a disaster for Germanic thought. It’s a good thing the devil took them. The waltz-politics of Vienna ‘On the Beautiful Blue Danube’ are finished once and for all. It’s only today that the Austrian Province has found its true place, within community of the Third Reich. Don’t you agree, Herr Professor?”

Melkior muttered something through a mouthful. His body was getting drunk on food, receiving Kurt only on some auxiliary wavelength of consciousness and registering him as a tasty addition to the music of smell and taste and chewing and swallowing. The Wiener schnitzel, Strauss in the mouth. He chewed in three-quarter time and smiled imperially.

“I’m glad you like our food, Herr Professor.”

Oh yes, oh yes, I like your sister, too, and your mother as well, and all their chops and steaks and stuffed cabbage and escalloped veal. … He felt the cannibal theme approaching and thrust it away in fear. There goes Kurt again, inspiring the meaty cannibal blowout. Oh courteous Kurt!

I left them vomiting nearby in the jungle. The agent is in a very bad way. He lies on his back and howls in pain. His friends are pushing their fingers down his throat, sitting on his stomach, choking him, strangling him, the better to make him spew it all out. They would have preferred to strangle him to death! He has drawn the keepers’ attention. One of them has already gone back to the village to report the incident. “They’ll kill him,” says the doctor in confidence to the first mate.

“Who will? Our …”—“… hosts. That’s what all farmers do to sick cattle.”—“Why don’t you help him?”—“Impossible. It’s stress-induced colic. If grazing cattle were suddenly to begin thinking, the same thing would happen. Perhaps he should be told openly that his spasms are taking him straight to the cauldron.”—“Well, tell him, then.”—“You tell him. He won’t believe me. Apart from that, you can break it to him more gently.” The first mate measures him contemptuously head to toe. He approaches the group clustered around the agent and stops the entire revive-the-drowned-man exercise with a single gesture. He leans over the patient and says to him solemnly, “Sir, they do not eat the sick, they burn them alive immediately, to prevent contagion. You must therefore be healthy if you mean to survive … at least for a time.” This does the trick. The agent looks at him, composed, his face pain-free, and stands up right away. He even gives him a polite smile, as a sign of a confused gratitude. “And now when they come to take a look at you, eat as heartily as you can, it is your only hope.” But now everyone else throws themselves at the only way out: they fall furiously to devouring the fruits (like men just saved from drowning …) and the doctor mutters to himself: ptui, the anthropoid apes! and spits in disgust.

“It can’t be!” ejaculated a horrified Kurt. “Not a hair, is it?” It was as if he had been present at the feeding of an underage crown prince.

“A hair? What hair?” said Melkior, surprised.

“In your food?” Kurt was apprehensive. “That’s impossible.”

“Whatever made you think … Why a hair?”

“Well, you sort of … expectorated a bit,” explained Kurt, with tactful hesitation.

“Oh, that?” laughed Melkior. “I spat at something I was thinking about.”

Kurt was relieved. “Another beer, Herr Professor? On the house.” That was to celebrate the absence of the hair. “No, thank you, Kurt. I’ve got to go.”