John Hawkes - The Cannibal

Ernie squeezed his left hand, the hand with the last two fingers gone from a hatchet stroke, into his pocket tight with bills, and turned back towards the light, towards the free men of the hall. He would sit on a worshipped pile of granite, a small duelist in the hall of kings. The Merchant tried to follow but, like a laboring hind, slipped and fell, his fat body dragging along over the stones. He could not call out and each time he moved he slid deeper. Ernie heard his thudding fall and walked faster, trying to find again a place for light and song. He measured his steps and seemed to tread upon the whole world of Germany as he walked, half-consciously, back near the aurora of tabled clans, disciplined faces, and all the irony and fellowship of his men-at-arms. A man in grey staggered past, ready with malice or with a bow at the waist, and far in the back of the alley Ernie heard him trip against the fallen Merchant, heard a muffled word against the background of summer nightbirds.

Ernie, because of the fingers gone from his hand and the ugly sight of three remaining claws, could never ride a black mare into the din of volleying balls, or crawl hand over hand through the wet fields of Belgium. He touched the middle and forefinger with the thumb and heard the woman’s voice crying out to the men young in soul. Inside he sat at his father’s table under the shadows and far to the rear, and melting into the crowd became nondescript, feigned to strike out with ignored curt expressions.

Stella, like her father, held them at bay; and, losing one by one those traits that were hers, absorbed more and more the tradition that belonged to all. She did not lisp when she sang, but boomed the words in an unnatural voice. And the gestures she developed came with ease. She walked from the archway of her father’s house to the audience of the Sportswelt transgressing natural thought as clearly as she passed the stages of the months. She, the sorceress, sent them boiling and held them up for joy, feeling pain only in the last moment before sleep, half-dressed, on the bedroom floor. Gerta, the nurse, thought the Devil had come a long way from the forest to find her. Every dress she owned, every male plate of armor, every bone comb and silken ban, was stamped with the seal of the camp follower, and screaming in nightmares to the dead ears of her sleeping father, she followed the weeks of 1914. Beneath her eyes she had painted indigo stains as if she had been beaten, and her eyes swept from tall black trees to the glaciers of dead warriors, green with the tint of pine trees, sober with a longing that came of eighteen years of summer patios and a partition of a princely nursery.

After the last chorus of the song, she bowed straight-legged from her flaring hips, flushed to their applause, and made her way to old Herr Snow’s table, storing appreciation up in her heart, storing each face beside the photograph of the white flaking head of Gerta, the nurse. Blue smoke floated above the sawdust and the tide of conversation rolled in the lion cage. She sat where Herr Snow, with his red beard, indicated, felt his wrists slide her smoothly forward until she touched the table. She looked from face to face. “You were excellent,” he said. “This is my son, Ernst, who enjoys your singing so much.” Ernie, thin and more alive with beer, pushed back his chair and nodded, fixed her as he might have fixed a rosy-cheeked sister, adult and come alive from his free past. “And,” said Herr Snow, “this is Mr. Cromwell, a guest of mine.” Mr. Cromwell smiled with an easy drunken grace and filled her glass. He did not miss the charm of London or of the English countryside rollicking in summer but slept late and heard no cocks crowing in the early dawn.

“You’re English?” asked Stella.

“Yes, but I particularly like Germany. The lakes and cities seem like vistas cut into the ice age. You sing well.”

Herr Snow was proud of Ernie because his other son, a boy of nine, forever wore his head strapped in a brace, and the words that came from the immovable mouth came also from a remote frightening world. Old Snow, prosperous and long owner of the Sportswelt , looked with hard admiration on Ernie’s face, saw his own eyes and nose staring resentfully back. With mute excitement, Stella followed each jagged crevice of the scars, noticed how they dug beneath the cheeks highlighting the bones, how the eyes were pressed between encroaching blocks of web-like tissue. She waited for the three claws of the left hand to close talon-like just above her knee, grew warm to the close-kept face down in its corner. The orchestra filled out the room behind her, roasted apples fell from the bosom of an oracle, burnt and golden, and gradually the three men drew closer, warm with all the taste of a chivalric age. She covered the glass before her with the golden hair and saw for a moment in its swirling depths, the naked cowardice of the fencer, the future fluttering wings of the solitary British plane leaving its token pellet in the market place, her mother’s body rolling around it like a stone stained forever, the stain becoming dry and black as onyx.

The rain had begun to fall and the summer thunder drifted over the wet leaves, coursed over the darkened glistening steeples. The carriage rocked to and fro, water splashing from the wheels, dripping from the deep enclosures of passing doors. They traveled slowly down die Heldenstrasse , hearing only the soft rain, the chopping of the steel hoofs, the smooth movements of leather. Oiled gunmetal springs swung them easily through the June night while Mephistopheles, crouching in a choir-room, circled this eighteenth day of the month in red. He, in his black cowl, called the sleeping swans to pass by them on the lake in the park and the coachman flicked the whip over the horse’s ears.

“Why did you want to take me home?” she asked.

“I’m fond of the color of your hair and eyes.”

Stella felt nothing near her, could feel no man or beast or spirit lurking under the rain, no hand crept towards hers. She could not even feel or hear his breathing, only the steady turning of the axletree. No man in the world, sitting as Cromwell sat, soft felt brim curling with rain, fine straight features and wide nostrils drinking in the lavender, no such man or leader of men could have caused a single ripple in her even tone.

“Why didn’t you stay home, in your English home?” Her hair was becoming damp and heavy.

“Home? Why I don’t really have a home, and in fact, I don’t believe anyone has.” Now, with a change of wind, she could smell his scented breath, but he was foreign, unreal, was a humor she could brush away with her white hand. “I feel that I am one of those middle-aged men whom, in a little while, people will call an expatriate.” In full light he looked a little old, resembled a smart but tottering wolfhound guarding its own grave. And Cromwell, like a change of mind or a false impression, like an unexpected meeting or a mistake in the dark, filled Ernie’s place and caused in Stella a fleeting disbelief; she expected to see the lacerated face aloof in the corner of her carriage. He rode as an Archduke, unconsciously wiping the rain from his waistcoat, smiling slightly with lonely intoxication. Stella looked beyond the figure of the fat coachman to see the angular street unwind.

“I think that everyone has a home.” Her voice was musical like the axletree.

When he spoke, it was not quite as if he wanted to talk to her. His throat was hidden by an upturned flowing collar.

“I, for one, don’t even remember my mother’s face. England is a land of homeless people, but the Germans, though just as homeless, are a little slow in realizing it. And besides, they have a beautiful capacity for ideals of conquest, a traditional heroism.” His mouth was becoming heavy with a very sour taste of sleep, a taste of finding it still dark beyond the raised shade, the sourness accumulated from many unwanted meals, and still he kept his head in a smiling manner, looked into the flowering darkness with a pleasant friendly way of practiced youth.