John Hawkes: The Cannibal

Her face was so flushed, overjoyed with night, that I disliked leaving.

“I’ll be back soon,” I said, and she turned the other way to go to sleep. I heard the rustling again in the room below.

Stintz expected the knock on the door and said, “Come,” almost before he heard it.

“Zizendorf,” he said without turning, “come here.”

The tuba lay on the floor between the visitor and host, instrument of the doleful anthem, puckered to the school-teacher’s thin lips, battered and dull with long, tremulous, midnight sobs. Stintz still looked out of the window, as if to look all night and talk in the morning, alive and gaping over the streets he could never help to smooth and make prosperous, laughing and useless, watching the scenes of other people’s accidents and deeds.

“What do you see?” I picked up the tuba and stood by the black-frocked teacher’s side. I hated the braying sounds of the horn.

“Look. It’s out again. The moon’s out from behind the cloud. Look at him, he sees everything, Zizendorf. He watches the lonely travelers, he hangs heavy over demons, terrible and powerful. The just man.”

The edges showed white and distant for a moment and then the moon was gone. So faint, just a patch of grey in an unpleasant sky, that most people would not have looked at it a second time. Only the pious, with an inward craving for communion, would bother to crane their necks and strain their souls. I noticed that Stintz’s neck jutted far out of the window, the bony face held rigidly upwards. The musty smell of textbooks lingered on the black coat, his arms were paralyzed on the sill.

The moon, the moon who knows everything, seemed to me like the bell of the tuba, thick and dull, awkward in my hands.

“You like the moon, don’t you, Stintz? It seems frail to me, weak and uncolorful, tonight. I wouldn’t put my faith in it.”

His room should have been filled with clammy little desks, with silent unpleasant children to make faces.

“See here, I don’t think I like your tone, you yourself may not be out of its reach, you know. There’s retribution for everyone in this country now, justice, and it doesn’t roll along a road where it can be trapped. Someone always knows , you really can’t get away with anything …”

I swung the tuba short. I should have preferred to have some distance and be able to swing it like a golf club. But even as it was, Stintz fell, and half-sitting against the wall, he still moved for a moment.

Two things were wrong; there was the lack of room and I had misjudged the instrument itself. Somehow thinking of the tuba as squat, fat, thinking of it as a mallet I had expected it to behave like a mallet; to strike thoroughly and dull, to hit hard and flat. Instead it was the rim of the bell that caught the back of Stintz’s head, and the power in my arms was misdirected, peculiarly unspent. I struck again and the mouthpiece flew from the neck and sang across the room. I was unnerved only for a moment and when finally out in the hall, thought I would have preferred a stout club. Stintz no longer moved.

Stumpfegle and Fegelein were already encamped in the chicken coop, in the shed where the Colonel’s jeep had been. I could hear them working as I walked across the yard behind the boarding house, their slight scuffle barely audible above the trickling of the canal. The pink pants and the plank that served as workbench had been tossed out into the darkness, and the shed was almost ready for the composition and the printing of the word. However, the cart was still loaded. I was disturbed to think that the press was not yet set up.

It was a heavy job to clear away the coating of chicken debris. The walls were thickly covered with the white plaster-like formations, hard and brittle, the effort of so many hens, less and less as the grain became scarce, finally water, with nothing left but the envied heaps of better days. Here and there a pale feather was half sealed in the encrustation. It would wave slightly, without hope of flight, embedded in the fowl-coral reefs of the wooden walls. The odor of the birds was in the wood, not in their mess; secretly in the earthen floor, not in the feathers. It was strong and un-removable. Fegelein hacked with a rusty spike, Stumpfegle slowly with the dull edge of a hoe, their dark suits becoming slowly speckled with calcium white.

I stood in the open door, trying not to breathe, allergic to the must-filled air, brushing the feathers and white powder from my jacket. I remembered the white women and darkness of Paris.

“I got rid of the traitor.”

“But, Leader, that’s magnificent.” The foreign arm of justice, with its conundrums, lynchings and impeccable homes, lifted from Fegelein’s brow, and the hard chicken foam gave with greater ease.

“It’s one less fool to worry about, at least. And by tomorrow, we will have our public, proclaimed and pledged, every single one of them incorporated by a mere word, a true effort, into a movement to save them. Put into the open, the fools are helpless.”

“Ah, yes,” said Fegelein.

Stumpfegle hated the shed so much that he had no time for our talk. The odor of the flown birds, the stench, seemed like the country to him, and he was meant for the city, the shop with machines. “Birds piddle so,” he thought, “it’s unhealthly and unreal except for the smell.”

“Success is almost ours.”

Finally the shed was almost clean, with only a few globs left, and after quickly whitewashing the walls, they brought in the press, the stapler, the rollers and the reams of cheap paper. The three of us were spattered with the wash, became luminous and tired. Stumpfegle stood by the delivery table, Fegelein by the feed table, while I, the Leader, the compositor, put the characters, the words of the new voice, into the stick. I wrote my message as I went, putting the letters into place with the tweezers, preparing my first message, creating on a stick the new word. The print fell into place, the engine sputtered, filling the shed with the fumes of stolen gasoline. I wrote, while my men waited by the press, and my message flared from the begrimed black type:

INDICTMENT OF THE ALLIED ANTAGONISTS, AND PROCLAMATION OF THE GERMAN LIBERATION:

English-speaking Peoples: Where are the four liberties of the Atlantic Charter? Where is liberty and humanity for the sake of which your government has sent you into this war? All this is nothing as long as your government has the possibility of ruling the mob, of sabotaging Peace by means of intrigues, and of being fed with a constant supply from the increasingly despairing masses — America, who has fostered you upon a bereaved world, only turns her masses of industry against that world, the muzzles of her howitzers of insanity and greed against a continent that she herself contaminates.

While you have been haranguing and speculating in Democracy, while you have branded and crucified continental Europe with your ideologies, Germany has risen. We proclaim that in the midst of the rubble left in your path there exists an honorable national spirit, a spirit conducive to the unification of the world and poisonous to the capitalistic states. The rise of the German people and their reconstruction is no longer questionable — the land, the Teutonic land, gives birth to the strongest of races, the Teutonic race.

People of Germany: We joyfully announce that tonight the Third Allied Commander, overseer of Germany, was killed. The Allies are no longer in power, but you, the Teutons, are once more in control of your futures, your civilization will once more rise. The blood that is in your veins is inevitable and strong. The enemy is gone, and in this hour of extermination of our natural foe we give thanks to you, your national spirit that has flown, at long last, from Western slavery.