John Hawkes: The Cannibal

We pay tribute to the soul of Cromwell of the first war, who, realizing the power of the Goths and forsaking his weakened England, instigated the Germanic Technological Revolution. It is on his inspiration that the East looms gloriously ahead, and on his creed that the Teuton hills and forests will design their Native Son.

From the ruins of Athens rise the spires of Berlin.

I put down the tweezers. Without a word, but quivering with excitement, Fegelein locked the stick in place and the press murmured louder. Stumpfegle watched unmoved as the sheets, hardly legible, began to fall, like feathers, on the delivery table. Actually, I had never seen Berlin.

Madame Snow heard the animals rummaging in the shed, heard the foreign clatter disturbing the night.

“Ah, poor creature,” she said, looking at the sleeping Kaiser’s son, “they’ve come for you again.” But Balamir did not understand.

Madame Snow’s son eased himself laboriously back into bed, very much awake and excited with the effort of climbing, one leg, part of a leg, straight ahead, pulling as if it knew the way back up the stairs. The actress’s face, just as bright as an usherette’s, sniffed and startled, a smile on her lips, in the darkness. He pulled the covers up over his undershirt, leaned the canes against the bed. His wife did not breathe heavily enough to disturb him. He remembered with fixed pleasure, that night in the shed behind the boarding house and the girl from out of town with braids, who was pretty as a picture. She lost her pants in the shed and left them when the old Madame called and they had to run. In the late night he thought it was delightful, a skirt without the pants beneath.

“I haven’t felt this way,” he thought, with the Duke and child in the back of his mind, “since that ambulance ride four weeks after losing the leg. It was the bouncing of the car then, the driver said. Tonight it must have been jumping up and down the stairs.”

Leg or no leg she’d lose them again. The boy certainly deserved the cane.

“Can’t you wake and talk?” His voice was high and unnatural.

Balamir awoke with the sound of the engine in his ears and the arms of the Queen Mother holding him close. He wore his inevitable black trousers and black boots, the uniform that made the crowd in the streets bow down before their Kaiser’s son, the black dress of the first man of Germany. For a moment he thought he was in the basement, in the sealed bunker , for the plaster of the walls was damp. But the Queen’s hands, cooled with the mountain snow, touched his shoulder and the royal room, he laughed to himself, could not be mistaken for the cellar where he was sheltered in the first days. She had taken him from hiding, had evidently held his enemies at bay. Tonight the cabinet was reformed, the royal house in state, and the crisis, for the nation, passed. The Queen Mother herself had sent the telegrams, the car would be waiting, and the Chancellor would arrive with reports of reconstruction.

Something kept Madame Snow awake and now the poor man himself, after his peaceful sleep, looked up at her with those spiritless eyes and the impossible happy smile. She felt that powerful forces were working in the night and despite the fact that his presence was an extra obligation, she was thankful for him now. Perhaps he was like a dog and would know if strangers were about, perhaps his condition would make him more susceptible than ordinary men to the odd noises of the night. Would he whine if a thief were at the window? Madame Snow hoped, covering his shoulders more with the robe, that he would make some sort of noise.

The Duke, standing alone on the hillside in the hour before dawn, drew his sword with a flourish. The bottoms of his trousers were wet and ripped with thorns. He had lost his hat. His legs ached with the weariness of the chase, the silk handkerchief was gone from his sleeve, he stumbled in the ruts as he went to work. It was a difficult task and for a moment he looked for the moon as he cut the brush from the fox and found he had cut it in half. Looking up, lips white and cold, he could barely see the top of the hill. Over the top and through the barbed-wire was the rough path home. He hacked and missed the joints, he made incisions and they were wrong as the point of the blade struck a button. The fox kicked back and he was horrified. He hated his clumsiness, detested himself for overlooking the bones. Men should be precise either in being humane and splinting the dog’s leg or in being practical and cutting it off. He would have preferred to have a light and a glass-topped table, to follow the whole thing out on a chart, knowing which muscles to cut and which to tie. Even in the field they had maps and colored pins, ways were marked and methods approved. The blade slipped and stuck in the mud, while his fingers, growing thin and old, fumbled for a grip, and his ruffled cuffs and slender wrists became soiled and stained. He should have had a rubber apron like a photographer or chemist, he should have had short sharp blades instead of the impractical old sword cane. The whole business bothered him, now after three or four hours of running about the town in the darkness. For the Duke was an orderly man, not given to passion and since there was a ‘von’ in his name, he expected things to go by plan. But the odds of nature were against him, he began to dislike the slippery carcass. It took all his ingenuity to find, in the mess, the ears to take as trophy, to decide which were the parts with dietician’s names and which to throw away. At one moment, concentrating his energies, he thought he was at the top of it, then found he was at the bottom, thought he had the heart in his hand, and the thing burst, evaporating from his fingers. He should have preferred to have his glasses, but they were at home — another mistake. It was necessary to struggle, first holding the pieces on his lap, then crouching above the pile, he had to pull, to poke, and he resented the dullness of the blade. The very fact that it was not a deer or a possum made the thing hard to skin, the fact that it was not a rabbit made it hard to dissect; its infernal humanness carried over even into death and made the carcass just as difficult as the human being had itself been. Every time a bone broke his prize became mangled, every piece that was lost in the mud made the whole thing defective, more imperfect in death., It annoyed the Duke to think that because of his lack of neatness the beast was purposely losing its value, determined to become useless instead of falling into quarters and parts with a definite fore and hind. It lost all semblance to meat or fowl, the paw seemed like the foot, the glove the same as the shoe, hock and wrist alike, bone or jelly, muscle or fat, cartilage or tongue, what could he do? He threw them all together, discarding what he thought to be bad, but never sure, angry with his lack of knowledge. He should have studied the thing out beforehand, he cursed himself for not having a phial for the blood, some sort of thermos or wine bottle perhaps. He set something aside in a clump of grass and went back to work. But before he could lift the blade, he dropped it in indecision and searched through the grass. The piece he found was larger, more ragged. Perhaps the other was valuable and sweet, this was not. Tufts of the red fur stuck to his palm, a part of the shirtsleeve caught on his fingers. He wished for a light, a violent white globe in a polished steel shade, but this was the darkest part of the night. The task was interminable and not for a layman, and the English, he realized, never bothered to cut their foxes up. They at least didn’t know as much as he. He sliced, for the last time, at a slender stripped tendon. It gave and slapped back, like elastic, against his hand. It would be pleasant, he thought, to pack these tidbits, be done with them, on ice. Someday, he told himself, he’d have to go through a manual and see exactly how the thing should have been done. The Duke put the blade back in its sheath and making a cane, he hooked the handle over his arm. The organs and mutilated pieces gathered up in the small black fox’s jacket, he tied the ends together, used his cane as a staff, and trudged up the hill, his long Hapsburg legs working with excitement. Behind him he left a puddle of waste as if a cat had trapped a lost foraging crow. But the bones were not picked clean and a swarm of small cream-colored bugs trooped out from the ferns to settle over the kill.