Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“Maybe you should have thought of that,” Mills said hoarsely.

“Because you can never get enough,” Bufesqueu said, not hearing him, not listening. “Because you can never get enough. Not if you lived till the end of the world. No one can. Not if you were Sultan Mahmud II himself and all his helpers. Not if you were not only irresistible to quiff but positively necessary to their welfare, like air or money. Because you can never get enough. Not if you were dying and the priest was already giving you last rites. Hell,” Bufesqueu said, “you’d already be in bed anyway, wouldn’t you? What would be the point of wasting perfectly wonderful machines like a bed and pillows, sheets and covers, on anything drab and ordinary as death? Maybe that’s why they ad min ister last rites — because you’re in that damn bed all alone, and even if you know you can’t ever get enough it’s a sin not to try.”

“It’d be worth your life to try in this place,” Mills scraped.

Bufesqueu looked at him. “Listen to him,” he said. “His voice is cracking on him all over again. Well, why not? He’s in this harem a week and it’s a new puberty. I shouldn’t wonder if my own voice didn’t start to do duets with itself. Not to worry,” he said abruptly, heartily. “We’ll get it all straightened out. Weren’t we grand? Weren’t we grand though?”

He meant their two-man invasion of Constantinople, the pair of them taking the city by storm. Mills smiled. They were grand. No Mills since the first George Mills had been grander, and even if his own had only been a sidekick’s grandeur — briefly he wondered if it were enough to lift the curse — a crony henchman’s auxiliary one, Bufesqueu couldn’t have done it by himself. It had been his name, the living legend’s, that had been passed in the street. George was satisfied. They had taken Constantinople together.

They’d done more, and this was something else he couldn’t get over.

The Janissaries no longer existed. When Mills and Bufesqueu had been ordered to town, when Bufesqueu’s defiant war cries had first rung in the streets and panicked the Ottomans, there’d been a fire storm of alarm. Rumors had flashed from street to street like signal fires. Before Mills and Bufesqueu even spotted the abandoned Overland, the Sultan had heard of the incursion at Yildiz Palace. Malamud’s information had been no sounder than anyone else’s of course, and when he’d been informed that the Janissaries had overturned their soup kettles the Sultan convened the chiefs of staff of the entire military. What he was thinking was how best to save Yildiz. But by this time the story had taken on additional detail, an oblique verisimilitude. It was rumored that the soup had actually been at the boil, that most of an entire phalanx of Janissaries had been scalded along their shins and calves in the effort. In the hasty consultation that followed, the outraged Sultan advised his advisers he now concluded that because the soup had been still hot when it had been spilled, the action had to have been a precipitate one, an angry gesture of the moment. He was heartened, too, by news of the scaldings, and was supposed to have said: “They haven’t thought this one out. Some incendiary must have roused them. We must counterattack now. While their passion prevails over their strategy. Before their third-degree burns heal. Send in the cannon. Reduce the fort to rubble!”

So they were feeling pretty good, Mills and Bufesqueu. Splendid, in fact. Two reluctant recruits who not only had conquered a major world capital but in the act of conquering it had turned round and conquered by way of ricochet the very force in whose name they had done it. And if five thousand men had died in the Sultan’s surprise bombardment — if, indeed, a week after the event, perhaps a couple of hundred of their former comrades were still smoldering — it was nothing either of the condemned men cared to take on his conscience. Bufesqueu because he genuinely believed the other Janissaries had repudiated women, Mills because he had not once chosen in all the time he had lived.

Fatima came in for towels and looked, in passing, in the direction of Mills’s crotch. She shook her head sadly. “Please stop that,” Mills said, and Fatima stared at him, clapping her hands to her mouth in astonishment.

“It’s grown back? ” asked the superstitious woman.

“Sure,” George said, “you think they can keep a good man down?”

So, though he didn’t know it, among certain of the staff at least, he continued to be a living legend.

Bufesqueu, of course, was in seventh heaven. “In the country of the blind,” he liked to say, patting his pants and winking, “the one-eyed man is king.”

But so far neither Bufesqueu nor George had come within even hailing distance of the Sultan’s harem girls, let alone seen one. If this was a torment to the former, to the latter it was something of a comfort. George had not so far forgotten his danger as to lose respect for it entirely. He complimented himself on his Millsian ability to appreciate and honor a taboo. If he had swallowed whole whatever guidelines his Janissary superiors had laid down for him, if his credulity had kept him down range of the black marketeers who Bufesqueu said visited their fort almost daily to take orders for the cold comforts they dispensed for bribegold and a portion of a Janissary’s small pay, he had at least managed, if innocently, if ignorantly, to abide by the rules, to live within the letter, to the last crossed t, to the last dotted i, of the laws of appearance. This, Mills thought, was what preserved them. To view things otherwise was subversive not only to those who held power over them, and not only to their own sort, but more importantly to themselves, to one another, to every Mills who’d ever lived under the curse of kind. He understood what was permitted and behaved himself.

Now a sultan’s harem, Mills thought, a sultan’s harem was just the last place on earth one should think about running amok. And if that sultan also happens to be one of your emperor sultans, as this one is, with sway not only over entire countries and populations but over entire climates as well, from deserty Africa to the frozen Kush, then that sultan is one hell of an important man; and if, without batting an eyelash, he can cannonade a complete elite corps off the face of the world simply because it was rumored that they might have spilled some soup, and if he’s gone to the trouble of becoming a sultan emperor in the first place with all the expense of men and materiel that takes just so he can have dibs on two or three hundred of the prettiest girls in all those respective countries, populations and climates, and if he’s taken the additional pains to house them all in one place where he can keep his eye on them, and in a style like this where the girls themselves don’t do a thing, not wash a bowl, dry a dish, make a bed, fix a meal, rinse something out in the sink of an evening or even just pick out their own clothes, what they think suits them best, shows off their color or makes them less hippy; and if he’s gone to the further bother of training up specialist surgeons who have nothing better to do than cut the nuts off fellows who themselves have nothing better to do than see to it that the two or three hundred girls don’t either, then that sultan is not only one hell of an important man but one hell of a jealous one, too. And I for one, Mills thought, who changed my life and sealed the fates of maybe five thousand others because I happened to throw him a salute with the wrong hand, I for one, who already have, don’t want any part of him. I already took those vows to stay on the wagon. What harm will it do me to keep them? No sir. It don’t bother me that I may be losing Bufesqueu’s respect, or that old Fatima used to think of me as just one more steer around this place. I don’t want no part of him, and I don’t want no part of them.