John Hawkes: The Cannibal

“Good evening, Editor,” said the Census-Taker, “and how are you tonight?”

“Sit down for a moment,” I said.

We always talked for an hour, then left together. We drank together and our pale eyes took in the cobwebs and then we would think of songs now unsingable. But we knew that there was something to do after our few words. We could talk of nothing and yet there were smiles hidden under our faces. We adjusted our clothes, drank slowly and carefully, both knowing we would leave when the time was right.

“Well, we still have no government,” I said. My eyes looked over the steel glasses.

“My friend, I can only think of plenty tonight. I remember festive costumes and bright lights. But you are right, we have nothing.”

We both smiled, legs stretched limply before us, smoke rising from saved cigarettes. The kerosene burned low and problems were as flimsy as its slight flames. We heard our own breathing. I sometimes thought of Jutta’s husband, who had been a good fellow, of spring and beerhalls, but more often I thought of the Pastor I had shot to death, of perfumes and earrings, and the keys that would not work, words that would not come. We heard the distant sound of the low water in the canal, felt our hunger growing stronger. The shadows grew larger in the printing office. “Shall we go?” asked the Census-Taker. He could feel the warmth creeping upon him. I strapped the pistol under my arm, blew out the lamp, and we left.

Jutta’s girl was named Selvaggia and she was like a small white statue when she was undressed. Her widespread eyes were always afraid, even though the only person she feared in all the world was Herr Stintz. That man, one floor below, was playing a dirge on his tuba, his shiny head reflected from its bell, the sounds falling chromatically down and down. The mother held her child at arm’s length, and the child seemed to grow like the pit of a fruit from the dotted kimono sleeves, straddled, as if she could never fall, on the woman’s knee. The mother was starved for food, a woman who had gorged herself on nuts, cream, shanks of meat and chocolate, but now filled herself at night in a way that her daughter, or son, could not. Her head belonged to a man, but though the face was male, her breast was still a woman’s. The flat couch filled almost all the room and became her larder. Jutta was like her father, a Prussian mouth, a Roman nose, strong legs now, years after her illness, but her daughter was unlike any of them, a child on a poster. Stella Snow resented Selvaggia and her brother for bearing no resemblance to the family, and they would not speak to her. Jutta hated Stella from the first day her small man’s face looked up from the crib to see her older sister staring down, mouth too filled with tongue to speak. The candle flickered and Jutta and child heard the double pairs of boots on the stairs, heard the sound clumping up like drummers’ flams out of the silence. Selvaggia ran off to the second room to wait alone for her brother. She was wide-awake. She heard the opening of the door, the words “Guten Abend,” then shut them all out of her mind. In the next room the three of us lay on the couch.

Madame Stella Snow combed her half-white, halfgold hair, hung her black gown from a hook on the wall and crawled into the bed. A resident of the town for twenty years, knowing them all more closely than the Mayor, she felt the pain more acutely than he, even with her heart more like stone. Even though there was no Post, even though no one came or went and they all had lived or died for many centuries, even though there was no wireless, she felt the vastness of community that was like burial, spreading over all borders and from family to family. No drainpipes, chemicals to cleanse, flames to heat, no word, no food for the young or old, she was puzzled. Despite her years she could not find where it had all begun, for she was aristocratic to the end. Stella was capable of anything with a cold heart, but she could not bear the mutilation of any part of her. So she would not see her son. Distorted trees and rattling windows, dirty uniforms and an individuality that meant death flowed in a dangerous stream through das Grab . Even she, feeling the hunger, sometimes hesitated bringing the goblet to her lips. She had spent an oddly sexual decade and was now more unlike her sister than ever. Limbs of trees scraped against the window; she remembered that her sister’s boy was still out in the night. She lay in the dark. Then she heard the scratching at the cellar door.

All Germany revolved around Balamir. His feet were in the boots of an Emperor’s son, he felt the silver sword of time and tide and strength against his hip. Growing weak and cold, he was the result of commands coming down out of the years. From the farm where he was born to the institution and munition works, he felt that people bowed as he passed. How he sought to be that image, how the Kaiser’s ghost needed him, how he would be Honor in the land he had become. But how well he knew it was a reign of terror and felt like pulling his beard as his father would have done. Potentate of the north, he scowled on his subjects, the trees, the chips of broken glass, brass casings and beaten fuse ends, but alone he smiled on his castle walls. He was the true and unknown Prince of Spitzen-on-the-Dein , followed by the castrated and the disillusioned, guided by an unknown hand around the signs of the skull and cross-bones planted above the mines. He had crept about the door of the Duke’s apartment, watched the tall man come and go. He used to walk in the institution’s garden, and now, in the last days of the decline of his kingdom, he was befriended in the home of twittering birds.

The vapors of the canal grew stronger, the Duke gained a hundred feet and eased his pace, cracks and holes in the earth filled with night dew.

I unstrapped my pistol and put it on the floor.

More insistently Balamir’s fingers scratched at the door, and hunched on the top step he thought of a balcony and an armored knight. Germany lay below in the darkness.

“Come in, you poor creature,” she whispered, and the trenches of the countryside were suddenly seen by the light of her candle.

To countenance the sickle over the wheat, to sweep out of the years the mellow heartbreak or the grand lie, to strike forward barehanded to a very particular and cold future, a diminutive but exact ending, a final satisfactory faith that is cruel and demonic, is to suffer the highest affection and lose it, to meet the loss of life and the advent of a certain reality. Madame Snow, having once reached the full period of life with her husband Ernst, and having fallen, alone, from such a richness, had met and lingered on this exact desolate end. Whereas Jutta, kin in place only, having spent a barren rigid past, was just now reaching the turn in the road where nakedness seemed to hang like a hundred apples, pink, wet, and running with sweet stiff worms, and she would probably never in her own time recognize the lifeless segments of Germany threaded on a string before an open window. She indulged herself where her sister Stella had entered with daring.

The Census-Taker, stretched full length on the flat of his back, attuned to every breath over the bed and with his soul dissociated from the actual room, felt a persistent gentle quiver through the sheets, a rippling noise from the most infantile spaces. The curtains that hung over the window, not around it, the covers that hung from the foot of the couch, were not at all princely, but were washed clean and sparse. They were passed over many counters, spun from an ordinary thread. He had no heart for rebellion, still wearing the blue cap of an official crushed under one ear, had no ability to desire or to crush the tingling noise or presumptuous motion. While Jutta and I needed, in a skinned momentary manner, this vague ordeal, he was only able to absorb some faintly gross misunderstanding of already abnormal passions, some slight frightening tendency toward reversion, darkness and pleasure. The single globe overhead, burning at the end of a current without direction, diffused a light through the wings of moths, yellow, soft — a reality clear enough to see. The floor was swept clean for the children. Jutta did not seem to know of the Census-Taker’s presence, did not feel his cold shoes against her bare feet, or the rough stubble on the back of his hands, but moving in an artifice, a play she well knew, pursed her lips into an act, an act to rid herself.