Stanley Elkin - Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

Once on land he did what the other tourists did. Although he found it necessary to engage his rooms in increasingly less expensive hotels, he shuffled with them through the public buildings and sat beside them in the restaurants, picking experimentally at the strange food. Frequently, however, he traveled alone into the interior, stopping at the homes of farmers who eagerly rented their spare rooms to him, or finding a place in languishing rural inns. He accustomed himself to the sounds of many languages and was surprised at his facility of soon picking up enough of the local speech to hold reasonably complex conversations in almost any place he found himself. Soon, though, he began to feel a jarring uneasiness. It was not boredom, for he found that he could respond to everything that each country held out to him; it was rather a gradual conviction that his very freedom hindered him, that other places held what he mistakenly looked for in the country he was in. When this happened an old wild nervousness mounted in him again, and soon he was aboard another vessel, outward bound another time.

It was an exciting year, and he learned many things he had never known at home with Khardov. The dark back rooms he had grown up in came increasingly to seem more dingy, and he had despondent visions of himself lying alone in his room, naked, turning dissatisfied in the troubled bed, one hand clutching the medallion like a hope.

The more he traveled the more he came to resent Khardov’s sly patronage. It was not enough to make seductive hints, carefully couched allusions, circumspectly to unreel information to him as one feeds slack to a fish. The old man’s air, he realized now, had been meretricious, yet oddly professional, his casualness carefully arranged, like a dressing gown around a whore. He was sure now that the medallion was the truth about himself. Khardov should not have made him wait so long. He felt that it was this, his difference from others, that counted. Even in the foreign countries he visited he could feel the difference. He looked at other young men, men his own age, who held down their jobs, dissatisfied, restless, the average ones dulled, jaded, surrender glowing dully in their eyes like the rheum of age, the smarter ones impatient, somewhat too loud, too forward, just looking for the chance to break free, and who would find the chance, he knew, only on violent roads, in gas stations held up, houses broken into, in the freely flowing blood of old men hit on their heads with heavy instruments, the blood staining the crowns of their Panama hats. He had seen them cruising on Saturday nights in their open cars, shouting at girls or staggering from bars, their arms around each other in a foolish, wasted camaraderie. Sometimes, he had to admit, they frightened him, their aims so different from his own, their faces clouded with a dissatisfaction they could not explain, which perhaps they even felt was a part of the way things were supposed to be. At these times he took a fierce pride in his medallion, felt it as a surety of what he had learned from the old romances: that blood, blood itself was the talisman, that it wheeled, despite submersion and the tricks played upon it by villains, steady as a star toward its ultimate fate.

He walked alone into quarters of the cities where other tourists did not dare to go, down narrow streets that twisted in a kind of chaos, the buildings mismated, humped together like a string of freight cars of different shapes winding about a curve in the tracks. He stared at the bitter, wizened people he found there and sensed the hardness of their lives. They wore despair like open, unbandaged wounds upon their faces. But even as he nodded to them, smiling patiently at their bewildered responses to his unexpected greetings, he felt ashamed. He knew he cheated them. He was like a general from far behind the lines come forward to review his troops during a lull in the fighting. It was safety he felt like a sheet of thick armor, even its clumsy heaviness comfortable with use. It was immunity he experienced. He might embrace them, roll with them in the gutters, kiss their leprous sores, but their diseases would be helpless against him.

Once he was stopped by four young men. He recognized the fierceness in their eyes.

The leader grabbed his arm, sheathed in the heavy wool. He looked at it sneeringly, as if it were the flag of an enemy country. The others ringed themselves about him.

“What hour is it?” the leader asked.

He told him.

“That is late to be about these streets.”

The one standing behind him said, “There are gangs. Don’t you read the papers?” He felt the words, forced contemptuously from the fellow’s chest, stir the hairs on the back of his neck.

“I fear no gangs,” he said. “It is not late for me.”

“A foreigner,” the leader said, discovering the alien in the sound of his voice. “I’ve never killed a foreigner,” he said seriously. “Have you boys ever killed a foreigner?”

The others laughed easily.

“Give us your money, foreigner,” the leader said.

“I have no money,” he said.

They came forward and were about to begin the gentle nudgings, the subtle insult of elbow and knee that would gain momentum slowly as they gathered courage until at last they would all be upon him, flailing him, caution abandoned, soiling him with their anger and hate. As the leader moved toward him he did not step back. “I am the prince of my country,” he said distinctly, feeling a proud joy as he said the words.

The leader hesitated. “What’s that?” he said.

He told him again. The leader looked to the others, questioning them. Already they stood uneasily, ready to run.

“You lie,” the leader said.

With quick movements he pulled the medallion from beneath his shirt. Holding it in one hand, as far forward as the chain would allow it to reach, he thrust it toward the leader’s face. With his heel and toes he made a series of quick right faces, pausing before each of the men positioned about him, letting them see. Again he faced the leader who now backed away from him deferentially. “Forgive us, your honor,” he said. “We didn’t know. Forgive us, your honor.” He broke and ran. Instantly the others were with him.

He could not, of course, miss the ludicrous aspect of this encounter, but ludicrous or not, they had accepted his claim. It had been easy. The medallion had clinched things, but the assertion itself had been almost enough. Something he had missed before now occurred to him: there was a reputation to be made among the people. The implications startled him. There was a reputation to be made among them. What the boys felt, others could be made to feel. The simplicity of the truth amazed him. He had it in him to be a conqueror. It was not impossible, but he would not do it; he would not usurp where he felt he had no rights.

But the incident forced him into making a decision. He had been in the world a year. His money was almost gone, but he was still no closer to the truth about himself than he had been at home with Khardov. He could waste no more time. He had to invent some system less unwieldy than the random, capricious one he now followed.

The next day he purchased a large folding map of the world and a cheap, second-hand history book, outdated but for his purposes still usable. He sat on the bed in his room and systematically eliminated those countries which he knew would be valueless to him: the perpetual republics; nations which had long since abandoned royalty and where the traces of descendent kings were by this time so adulterated by alliances with ignoble stock that almost any man might claim some sort of tenuous kinship with authority; countries which though still living under the monarchical forms were made up of people obviously alien to his own racial strains. When he had done this he was surprised at the number of countries which had disqualified themselves; as he penciled through each eliminated possibility, he felt that even here, in the small, cramped room, he was somehow coming closer, making his presence felt, bringing about a restoration which would change things in the world.