Ranko Marinkovic - Cyclops

“There are other, more robust raptures, more than ‘sensitive,’ amounting to a force, a mighty force indeed! One capable of standing up to …” Melkior was speaking with the conviction of personal experience: he had in mind the Stranger in his room.

“Where are they? Show me!” shouted Don Fernando, irate. “Show me these ‘robust raptures’! Haven’t they left us high and dry? Have they not ‘signed a pact’? They’ve given the murderers the green light!”

“The question is, for how long?”

“Until you and I bite the dust!” Don Fernando gave a malicious laugh.

“So you really are afraid?” Melkior looked at his face: it was red with anger.

“Have I ever hidden that? I told you just now I’m afraid. Yes, I fear for my hide, and very ‘selfishly’ at that. More selfishly than even you, because I aim to defend my hide! Not protect it— defend it, by all and any means, whatever you choose to call them! Who’s the ‘robust rapture’—somebody at a secret meeting selling me the idea that ‘individual terrorism is no solution’? What is the solution then — those two ‘historical’ signatures on that pact of Hitler’s? When I’ve been betrayed and brought to despair, I act desperate, damn it. What do I care now for Michelangelo or your casuistic problems: David or the news vendor? to hell with both! I call for terrorism, for extermination of tomorrow’s murderers in our midst. That’s why I wanted to publish the article. …”

Don Fernando had grown tired. He sensed his failure to convince his man. I spoke badly, in haste, in rage, helter-skelter … he thought angrily.

“I’ll make this into a novel one day … if I have the chance,” he said after a longish silence. “I didn’t explain the main thing well enough — what it is like when your teeth really chatter …”

He fell silent, somehow sapped and empty. He looked straight ahead in solitary disappointment, gloomy. He kept taking off his hat and waving it strangely about in an unconscious gesture as if shooing away invisible bats: the bitter thoughts were still buzzing around him, preventing him from getting his face to resume its small superior smile behind which he normally hid the false divinity of his inaccessibility. But there he was — he had thrown the tabernacle wide open, the divine bird had flown the coop! What was there left to hide? He hated Melkior for his own failure.

Hell, was he being serious about “preventive killing”? Melkior was suddenly offended by a fresh thought: the man wants a Smerdyakov! An executioner! That’s why he’s been telling me all this! He doesn’t want to get his hands dirty. He, the founder of “new values”! The intellectual instigator … acting from the rear. He thinks I, a desperate man, would …

Melkior shuddered. He looked “up” at Don Fernando’s face (for all that they were of an equal height Don Fernando’s head had always seemed to him to be “up above”) and saw the likable mask, but the eyes … the eyes radiated a dark, evil look. Why, he’s a murderer, he thought fearfully, a murderer by his own definition. With his personal safety guaranteed. “To provoke the killer … to jerk his murderous wishes awake.” Is that having your teeth chatter? … And there I was this morning defying a tram! What a delusion!

Melkior laughed, commiserating.

“Imagine a man on tram tracks …” but Don Fernando had left him without a word. He had set off, with his long hurried stride, through an alley lined with trees which had majestically woven their branches into a triumphal arch … This is how rulers are saluted, said Melkior with an affronted sneer. That head deserves it, and he turned unconsciously to follow the needle of his love’s compass, toward the Theater Café. It’s not too early, she might have come out by now …

Restless is the autumn air … restless is the autumn air … he kept repeating stupidly, suddenly saddened to the bone.

Coming from afar was the news vendor’s pitiful, nasal voice Mawnen ooze, Mawnen ooze , as if the man were begging for mercy. Don Fernando’s already grabbed hold of the man’s ear, thought Melkior, and is dragging him off to hold him accountable. For Michelangelo’s David. You’re one of the crowd of nasty little men who’ll draw together around the heap of vomit! One of the chosen freaks just off the leash. “Kill, slaughter, is that it? You’re one of them! You hideous little creep!” The poor man has no inkling of his hide being (theoretically!) at stake.

Mawnen ooze …

Quiet, you wretch! Don Fernando Karamazov walks the streets dreaming of his “preventive murder” theory. Looking for a Smerdyakov, an executioner. To murder you — or Hitler, it’s not yet clear which. But one of you has got to confirm the theory; that much is clear. People of all countries, dehumanize. Preventively. Whatever the cost. Tragedy is no more. It has been abolished by skepticism.

He was parodying Don Fernando’s thoughts with malicious glee. Bitter.

The day was absurdly clear and warm; a capricious October scherzo, as if summer were coming back. Melkior walked toward the Theater Café slowing the eagerness of his search: I won’t find her. He feared her absence as if it were an attack from ambush. The terrace was lively and noisy — no Viviana.

He poked his head into the café proper: the emptiness grinned at him hopelessly. But from one of the corners cawed Maestro’s brandy-inflamed gorge:

“O, Eustachius the Outpoured! You’re like water for watering flowers. But in this flower garden there is no Lily, or Ljerka, stemming from Lilium candidum or white lily. The lily hasn’t opened its petals yet, the white flower’s still sleeping. Come closer that I might kiss, or rather lick slick, your feet which brought you here.”

He was well and truly drunk. His head was a fit-to-burst red and his eyes had a madman’s glaze. Sitting at his table were several junior reporters from the office; among them Freddie, sporting an offended smile. He was not, as even Melkior could see, at the center of attention; this was in fact why he was angry and offended. “Let’s have your opinion, Eustachius the Metaphysical, for this is indeed a metaphysical point. I keep saying so to our protagonist but he will only give me a derisive smirk, as you can see there on his physical physiognomy — he doesn’t even know what metaphysics is. We’re just talking about the fate of various tiny animals, metaphysically. I don’t see why people shouldn’t talk metaphysically about the fate of tiny animals. A worm in an apple, for instance. Living alone like a curmudgeon, a hypocritical hermit in a solid full universe. Board and lodging, possibly with a bit of light entertainment thrown in — vermicular masturbation, for all we know. Happiness we can’t even begin to fathom. Yes, but how long can it last? Until some god or other feels like an apple. Tooth or knife, it makes no difference which, rending and laying waste to the vermicular world like dreadful inexorable fate. Reaching the worm, tearing it in half … Or not reaching it, huh? That is the question. To be or not to be — for a worm. That is beneath a Hamlet — am I right, oh Exalted One?” and Maestro squinted derisively at Freddie. He then spoke to Melkior, pointing his cigarette at the actor: “Pestering them up at the theater to cast him as Hamlet, but he hasn’t even read that bit about the worms mediating between king and beggar, or rather the beggar’s bowels; he skipped it, it was so yuck! He only reads the soliloquies. You, Frederick, are as hollow as a bamboo stalk.”

Freddie swung a fist at Maestro, but the reporters grabbed and held his arm midair. He was pale and trembling. So Maestro’s protasis had been going on for some time then, thought Melkior with pleasure. I hated him a minute ago in conversation with Don Fernando; he was now wondering at it, was even ready to defend him from Freddie if necessary.