John Hawkes - The Cannibal

The building slanted crookedly and silent in a row of black stained fronts and the canal drained past the back fence; on the corner where the side street met the empty thoroughfare was the rising jumble of the steel spire. When a boy with black peaked martial cap, leather braces and short trousers walked past the drawn curtains, Madame Snow would peer hungrily out and then go back to the darkness. On the third floor of the house was the apartment of the Census-Taker, who left his dripping cape flung in the downstairs hall. Herr Stintz, a one-eyed school teacher, lived on the fourth floor, and above him, with her children and bleached plants, lived Jutta, the sister of Madame Snow. Herr Stintz, ex-member of the band, played his tuba late into the night, and the notes fell on the cobblestones, recalling the sound of fat marching feet. But the roomer who lived on the second floor was out.

“Come,” said Madame Snow to Balamir, “come in. The room gives no heat really, but off with your coat. You’re at home.” Balamir knew he was not at home. He looked at the small table with the rows of playing cards and single gilt chair, looked at the bright figures where Madame Snow played alone. He carefully looked about the room of court and puzzled about the oaken whorls above the curtained door and the highness of the spidery black ceiling. “Sit down,” said Madame Snow, afraid to touch his arm, “sit down, please.” But he would not. He would never sit when anyone could see him. So he stood in the middle of the floor and a dwarfed cat rubbed against his leg. The attendant, hat pulled over his face and rubbers thick and too large, gave a sheaf of worn papers to Madame Snow and left like a shadow.

“Will you drink tea?” He looked into his hands, saw steaming water and watched a single star-shaped leaf turning slowly around near the bottom of the cup. He saw a pale color slowly spread, creeping up the china towards his fingers, watched the star turn and the cup dip like the moon. But he would not drink. The little woman watched him from the side of her eye, the light almost gone. His hair was rough and shaggy and he would not drink her tea. Down in the cellar Balamir put the coat on again, standing until she hurried back up the stone steps, for he could feel the cold. “Good night,” she said and turned the brass key.

Jutta’s child, shoes undone and lips white, ran along a path through the rubble, stumbled over stones, passed overhanging iron ledges and shattered windows, tried to weep, and fled on. A man followed, swinging a cane, craning into the darkness. The child passed a wall spattered with holes and the fingers of a dead defender, and behind him, the man coughed.

A butcher shop was closing and a few cold strands of flesh hung unsold from hooks, the plucked skin and crawling veins uninspected, hanging, but without official sanction. Wire caught the child’s knee.

The town, roosting on charred earth, no longer ancient, the legs and head lopped from its only horse statue, gorged itself on straggling beggars and remained gaunt beneath an evil cloaked moon. Rattling trains turned back at the sight of the curling rails blossoming in the raw spring on the edge of town opposite the hill, and fields, plummeted with cannon balls, grew stained with the solitary need of beasts and men. As the old families returned to scrub again on the banks of the canal or walk singly dressed in black, the prisoners filed out over the hills, either as names on a ticket, or if the ticket had been lost, simply as uncounted numbers. When an old man was gripped dying in a terrible cough, Jutta was betraying her lost husband and bearing child again. The town, without its walls and barricades, though still a camp-site of a thousand years, was as shriveled in structure and as decomposed as an ox tongue black with ants.

The Signalman, girded with a blanket in a wicker chair, smoking a pipe like a porridge bowl, commanding the railway station and a view of empty benches, no longer raised the red arm or pulled down the yellow, and no more lights blinked before his fat eyes to disturb his memories of the war of 1914. He had nothing to eat and nothing to say, and black men in large hats and capes were painted all over the walls of his station. Relics of silver daggers were looted from the nunnery and stored in trunks with photographs, or taken off to foreign lands. The bells never rang out. Fires burning along the curbs and dung heaps smoldering on the farms filled the air and alleys, the empty shops and larders with a pungent smell of mold.

The Mayor, with his faded red sash, was too blind to tend the chronicles of history, and went hungry like the rest with memory obliterated from his doorstep. Their powerful horses of bony Belgian stock, dull-eyed monsters of old force, had been commandeered from the acre farms for ammunition trucks, and all were gone but one grey beast who cropped up and down the stone streets, unowned, nuzzling the gutters. He frightened the Mayor on black nights and trampled, unshod, in the bare garden, growing thinner each day, and more wild. Children took rides on the horse’s tail and roamed in small bands, wearing pasteboard Teutonic helmets, over the small confines of the town, their faces scratched and nails long. The undertaker had no more fluid for his corpses; the town nurse grew old and fat on no food at all. By mistake, some drank from poisoned wells. Banners were in the mud, no scrolls of figured words flowed from the linotype, and the voice of the town at night sounded weakly only from Herr Stintz’s tuba. Bucketfuls of sand kicked up by minor grey duds had splattered against flaking walls and trickled onto worn doorsteps where chickens left frightened tracks. Rotting sandbags killed the weeds, filled the air with the must of burlap, and when they fell to nothing, left white blotches over the ground.

The townspeople had watched the bands of men march off and later come back with venereal diseases or their ears chopped from their skulls. One night startled eyes watched the coat of arms on the castle wall go up in smoke and flame as if an omen that they were expected to rally round for their sons or weep bitter tears. The Mayor lost at cards, had witnessed executions with his eyes closed, and in the marrow of his thick bones, the town shrank. All bartering was done by hand, the flowing script was chipped from the fat walls of the bank and the barred windows of the institution grew dense with cobwebs. An overturned tank on the north road still crawled with ghosts who left it at night and hung over the canal walls for drink.

The Signalman, his mouth clamped shut, sitting behind the postered window of the station, saw the boy dashing over the torn rails and saw the man with the cane coming behind, his shadow lengthening in the station’s candle light. Jutta waited with her hungry little girl bouncing up and down, riding her knee. The damp smell of the river rolled over soldiers’ leggings and trousers that had been left in doorways, and a cow lying dead in a field looked like marble. In the tenuous light of day, Madame Snow hunched over her cards, and the silver platters, goblets and huge bowls grew black with tarnish and thick with dust. The merciless light showed each house a clear red or flat sand color and long burned beams and ashen barns were black. The green of cabbages had turned to white, and small automobiles, stalled and punctured to the side of the road, were blood red. Everyone wore grey, and over their shoulders were hitched empty cartridge belts. They begged while queuing for food and pounded their foreheads with their fists.

Throughout these winters Madame Snow could not believe that the worst would come. All her faith was in the knuckle bones of a worthless currency, in the right of the victorious, a coinage covered with the heads of high-spirited men. Bits of gauze were pushed into the clay and women wore coats with epaulettes and brass buttons. In the early days when the patients had rioted at the institution, it was the women who beat them down with clubs, while girls with spirited eyes and bare knees lured officers to a night of round-the-world. Arms and armies and silver blades were gone, the black had come out of the realm of kings, and butterflies and grass were left for children. Freight trains were hit and burned and no more came, and the keys of all machines were welded together. Wohin gehen Sie? cried the devils, and the clatter of boots died out of the barracks.