Stanley Elkin - George Mills

It is just then that the muezzin calls from his tower and the Janissaries sink to their bellies as if shot. Only Mills, the pagan, gentile infidel, fails to prostrate himself at once. Then he too lowers himself, but he cannot remember the prayers. All that rings in his head is a nursery rhyme from childhood. He recites, first to himself and then aloud, “Little Jack Horner.”

It was meaningless as the violence in Punch-and-Judy shows. One man had fallen that day. Hardly anyone had escaped injury. There were no doctors. They didn’t take prisoners and they didn’t have doctors.

“ Sir! ” Mills says smartly as he reports to the Meat Cut.

The Soup Man and Latrine Scrub drift over. Seeing that it is Mills who has been singled out, other officers join the group. The Superior and Inferior Scullions, two Water Carriers, a Cook and Pastry Cook, the Salad Man and three Steam Table Men. There are a handful of noncommissioned officers as well — Waiters and Dining Room Orderlies, Dishwashers and Busboys.

Mills waits for the Meat Cut’s instructions, and though he does not know what the man will say to him he knows it won’t be pleasant. Perhaps he will be ordered to dredge latrines. Or work the potato gardens. Or clean prayer rugs. Or groom the mascot. Or stuff the mattresses. Or bathe officers.

Neither the officers nor the troopers have forgotten — or for that matter understood — his actions on the day of the practical when first he sneezed Khoraghisinian to death and then prospected his friend’s body, as he himself doesn’t understand much of the hocus-pocus of his position or the official status of the Corps. As he barely understands the parodic kitchen or menial nomenclatures of the officers’ titles. Steam Table Men, Meat Cuts, Pastry Cooks, Inferior Scullions, Latrine Scrubs, Butcher Boys and all the rest. As he barely understands the reasons for eschewing ordnance, guns, bows and arrows, weapons even the most modest armies have at their disposal, savage tribes do. Or comprehends even the mission of the Janissaries. There has not been a major engagement in years, and although there have been “incidents,” most of these have been political, demonstrative in nature, militant, bloody and editorial, often in support of the Sultan’s policies but just as frequently in opposition. (He knows now that Mahmud II is not an emperor at all but a sultan and somehow this knowledge has altered something important in his life. He had been the loyal subject of a king. The King had had his reasons — which Mills not only retrospectively understands but actually respects — to question his loyalty and had tricked him into what George thought of — Ottoman Empire had sounded grand to him, Ottoman Emperor had — as a lateral subordination, a sort of transfer of allegiance, collateral and fixed as the equivalency of currencies or the official provisions for exchanging prisoners, diplomats. But the subject of a sultan? For all that he has seen Yildiz Palace, George feels somehow desertized, sand-abandoned, wrapped in Persian rug, the lavish and decadent wall hangings of a tent. And though, except for patrols, bivouacs and marches, he can’t have been away from the fort for ten weeks altogether, he feels oddly nomadic. It is because he works for a sultan, sheiks and pashas, and thinks of the solid fortress, the brick barracks in which he sleeps, as an oasis, of the water he drinks, though it’s sweet and plentiful as water from any English lake, as collected, trapped, sluiced toward his mouth and throat and belly by gates and gravity, by a sort of clever and desperately engineered husbandry. Somehow, since the Emperor became a sultan, he is always parched now.) Nor is their function ceremonial. They rarely parade and when they do it is chiefly before the reviewing stands of other Janissaries. Never do they make a contingent in the pomp and pageantry of the Court. Their officers (for all the queer deference of their official designations) do not much talk to them or offer explanations, so they have no very clear idea either of short-or long-term goals. Newspapers and periodicals are not permitted inside the fort, and all they really know about what is expected of them relates to style, history. Whenever the Soup Man addresses the Janissaries (since the day of their bloody practical the one-time recruits are full-fledged Janissaries, integrated with troops who have spent years in the Corps), it is to remind them of their odd traditions, the queer pantheon of their heroic bullies.

“Remember,” he says, “Godukuksbabis who slaughtered all the cows in the village of Szarzt. Pray for Tchambourb, of blessed memory, who villained the women of Urfa and drove their goats twelve miles through dangerous country to drown them in the Euphrates. Recall Abl Erzuz who captured the children of Tiflis, stripped them of their clothing, and led them on a forced march up the icy, precipitate slopes of Mount Ararat, where they fell thousands of feet to their deaths in nameless crevasses and lost, lonely fissures. Celebrate Van and all his glorious brother Janissaries who stole everything of value in the city of Plovdiv and bequeathed a life of poverty to all its inhabitants.”

On one occasion even Mills has been singled out.

“Think,” the Soup Man had said in what passed among them for public occasions, the boring convocations of garrison life, “of George Mills, who sniffled a man to death and then ransacked his guts for booty, who plundered a pal’s bowels as a highwayman might go through his pockets. Think of Mills, whose blows were blows and for whom another man’s flesh was of no more consequence than a handkerchief. Think of Mills’s ingenuity and cough your enemies into submission. Drown them in your blood, smart their wounds with your tears. Disease and contagion them. Give them your colds and your cancers and, when you fall, fall on them. Rupture them with your weight. Recall George Mills, my treasures, and remember that cruelty is as real a legacy as the family silver.”

Fearing reprisal, he’d shuddered. But there was no reprisal, is none. True enough, he gets the shit details, but since when has a Mills been without shit details? So, to answer Bufesqueu once more, he was in the spirit of things and, if he couldn’t claim actually to enjoy the jobs that fell to him — he loathed them, they insulted his nostrils as much as the prayer cycles in which he found himself — there was that ancient business of the family curse, his old hereditary hardships like recipes in his keeping. Perhaps what he prayed for down on that rug was for them to keep it coming, to keep the pressure on, to keep it up. Perhaps all he wanted out of life was to do his duty. (He was not yet twenty-one years old.) It was, he understood, what most men wanted, the difference between himself and others being that he left it to others to define that duty. Demanded they define it. As if, like any truly despairing man, he would do anything, anything at all, just to get the chance to thunder his smug, contemptuous There, you see? at them. He was, that is, at home only in his outrage. And he almost hoped aloud as he awaited the Meat Cut’s orders that it would be an officer this time, that it would be the Meat Cut himself whom he’d have to follow, soap in hand, to the huge soup kettles in the barracks square.

Imagining the conversation:

“Tonight is the eve of the Rabaran, Mills.”

“ Sir! The eve of the Rabaran, sir! ”

“In my village, when I was a boy, husbands would bathe their wives, wives their husbands, parents children, children pets. Even the old, even the poor, had their bath partners. It was a community scour, Mills. I was still Christian then of course and had no more understanding of this ceremony than the Muslims had of our saints and martyrs. Indeed, I was a sneaky, oafish sort of boy, not even a very good Christian, and I took the occasion to satisfy my lustful curiosity. Together with other gentiles of my age and sort, I snuck off to the river, where many Muslim families went for their ritual cleansing. There we would deploy ourselves behind boulders and trees and spy on the women as they unpinned their chadors, the young girls who rubbed handfuls of lather into their clefts. I didn’t understand then that even if we’d been discovered they’d never have driven us off, that we’d have been invited to find our own bath partners and join them. That on the eve of the Rabaran the cleanliness that must not be hidden from God need not be hidden from men, even from foolish, curious children. Do you understand what I’m telling you, Mills?”