I had dreamed, asleep and awake, so many variations of his return. I had even considered the possibility of not recognizing him. And when he came at last, the only shock I felt, standing unnoticed in the twilit doorway, was at seeing a stranger in our living room. Then the question arose in my mind, as it were abstractly, Is this Arslan? Yes, I answered, and felt nothing. I saw that he was not a large man—something I had known before, but not realized. His face was plain—a face without attraction or notable characteristic, a face with nothing special in it. Then he turned his head a little, and I thought definitely, No. Not Arslan. Not only his anonymous countenance but his whole build seemed different. The Arslan who inhabited my nightmares was a more massive person. Then he spoke to Franklin, and his voice was strange to me, and then, in the same moment, all familiar, and I knew him. And still I felt nothing. Or, rather, I felt an empty excitement, an emotion without content; aroused, but to nothing; awaiting the contact that should fill me with fear or with desire.
He was ugly. He had gotten a little stringy beard like Genghiz Khan, and his right hand and arm were horribly mutilated, transformed into a scar-striped claw.
And then he looked at me.
Ah, that was what I had forgotten—had thought I remembered, remembering only words; when Arslan looked at you, he looked at you altogether, and anyone else’s most penetrating stare was a casual glance in comparison. I felt his look go through me like an X-ray (that burned, pierced and burned, sweet as Liebestod); and knowing everything he wanted, he smiled at me, his inescapable smile, all joyfulness. “Hunt,” he said. And he said, “Sanjar is with the horses. Help him bring in the saddlebags.”
If I could have refused him, he would not have commanded me. I went out in the blue dusk to the shed and found Sanjar watering a gorgeous pair. In the twilight their coats were slatey-black; bays, perhaps. He must be nine now. I would never have recognized him. “I saw you go by a minute ago,” he said. “We got some things for you in the bags.” He looked very tired, but he grinned merrily at me. He was a beautiful boy; and, seeing that, I saw how like Arslan he was; and Arslan was beautiful to me again. “Don’t you have any horses?” he asked.
“Not this year.”
He frowned with quick concern and gestured around the shed."Did they die?” I noticed that he had served the horses from our chickens’ supply of oats. Not, however, prodigally.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Nothing contagious.” And he smiled again, a very winning, open smile. He stood hardly higher than my waist. “How was he wounded?” I asked. Soon I must say Arslan aloud again; but not yet.
“Phosphorus,” he answered cheerily. “North of Athens. That was the only real fighting we got, that and in Canada. We got these"—he patted a sleek flank—"from Nizam in Ontario. Your corn looks good. When are you going to harvest?”
“About two weeks.” I wondered if he talked so easily to everyone, or if he thought of me as an old friend.
“They’re tired,” he said fondly. He was so tired himself that when he picked up a pair of saddlebags his arms trembled. “We rode from Marshalltown since daylight. We left the regiment at Colton.” I picked up the other pair of saddlebags. “Look.” He steadied his against the doorframe and flipped one open. “We’re going to learn Spanish.” He pulled out two small books and handed them over to me. They were beautiful—leatherbound, printed in Madrid; one volume of Lope de Vega, and one of Garcia Lorca. I had to smile. Yes, he was real; he was altogether Arslan, unqualified and undeniable.
A little girl lay curled asleep in the corner of the couch. Arslan opened the saddlebags beside her, displaying his largesse triumphantly. “Salt; the baggage train will bring more. Seeds: tea, barley, opium poppy, rice. Vodka: two liters only. Needles. Cloves. Whetstones. Penicillin. And this for you, Hunt.” It was a packet of notebook paper. “Novocaine. Solder.” The salt aside, they were all luxuries, the most useful and satisfying luxuries, the very things whose lack we had cursed a thousand times.
He laid his left hand on Sanjar’s shoulder. “Now sleep,” he said.
Sanjar stood up, with that clear smile, and all the rest of him hazy with weariness. “Upstairs?” The true crown prince.
Arslan nodded. “The old place. Do you remember?”
“I remember.” They grinned together, a contact very beautiful.
Franklin rose, grim and displeased, to lead the way upstairs. It was an act of—what? compassion? conspicuous gallantry?—that he did not detail me for the job of chambermaid. And I was alone with Arslan and the sleeping girl.
“Come here,” he said, and I came. I was afraid that he would touch me first with his ruined right hand; and, seeing my dread, that was what he did. But after all, it was a hand that could be lived with. The last two fingers were gone, and the next stiffly hooked, but it was still Arslan’s hand. He curled it around my bare forearm, and looked at me. When I began to tremble, he smiled and let me go.
I went back to my chair. He flipped one of the little books at me, and I caught it, and he was pleased. Yes, oh yes, now I remembered; it was exactly for this that I had loved and hated Arslan, those eons ago—that everything pleased him, like a child, or like a child intensified and exaggerated. “Read to me,” he said.
“I can’t read Spanish.” The first words I had spoken to him in five years.
This time he laughed aloud in his pleasure. “Hunt,” he said. And he rocked forward a little, laughing at me. “Read,” he said.
It was the Lorca. There was a little introduction, and I began with that. Of course I knew no more about Spanish than how to say mañana. But to be made ludicrous by Arslan was an old, accustomed thing; and, after all, I had undertaken to teach myself Latin once, and Turkmen, without total failure. So I read, as intelligently as I could, and he listened, serious and intent as ever he had listened to Mommsen, or Milton, or Samuel Eliot Morrison. Franklin was back before I had finished. He stood almost between us, looking first at me, then at Arslan, with impersonal, expressionless interest—the principal’s look, only a trifle pallid now in the comparative presence of Arslan. And having weighed and measured me to the pound and foot, Arslan to the milligram and millimeter, he nodded with judicious frown and asked brusquely, “Will you have a glass of beer?” And Arslan—soberly, soberly—with glowing eyes and lifted brows, replied, “This will please me very much, sir.” A decision of state.
Did Arslan ever offer toasts? None that my broken memory showed, yet now he lifted his mug smilingly toward Franklin. “To you, sir.” A singular you.
“We have our little brewery in the basement,” Franklin said explanatorily.
“Is this a change of principles, sir, or only of practice?”
“Only of practice. We’ve always said a little moderate drinking was all right in Biblical times, because of the different conditions. I figure conditions have changed back again.”
Arslan chuckled. “Thus you permit yourself to drink—good. But to drink with me?”
“I’m not going to fight you, General, unless I have to.”
“Ah. And you command here?”
“I’m Mayor of Kraftsville and Supervisor of Kraft County.”
“And no doubt relatively better armed than when we parted. Why not arrest me now, sir?”
“It’s a possibility.”
“Then I must discourage you. Earlier, my death would have had significant consequences for the world. This is no longer true.”
“Why not?”
“Because I have succeeded.”
Now break, break, break, on thy cold grey stones, O sea. Franklin sat still, large, and ominous. Arslan had spoken. I have succeeded. The universe adjusted itself.
“I didn’t know we were talking about your death,” Franklin said. The granite cliff hadn’t flinched.
“You don’t kill prisoners yet?” He smiled the old sweet smile. “If you try to manipulate my troops by using me as a hostage, you may have some temporary success. But of course I have left orders to cover this possibility. Does the prospect satisfy you, sir? Have you anything to gain now that is worth the risk of—of what, I do not tell you?” He studied Franklin eagerly, humor bubbling in his look. “But you will do as you wish, sir. Now it is immaterial what you do, or I, or any man.”
“Not to me. Not to Kraftsville.”
He shrugged and drank. “No. Doubtless no. But it is immaterial to the world. You can play out your games as you like, now. The course of the world is fixed. You have no power to destroy it.”
Franklin considered him drily. “It’s not immaterial to you either, General. You told me once that at the end you had to fight. I imagine that still goes.”
Arslan smiled appreciation. “Abstractly it is immaterial to me. Practically, no.” He looked whimsically into his drink. I knew the look; the pleasure that stirred him now was almost too much to contain. “I, too, play my games. And at the end, yes, I fight. Therefore consider carefully, sir. As for Sanjar"—his look tilted ceilingward; he shone with pride—"Sanjar is my aide-de-camp and my bodyguard. Do not expect to manipulate me through Sanjar.” He drank deep. “I’ve had beer much worse than this, sir.”
“Hunt’s the brewmaster.”
I braced myself for Arslan’s look. But his eyes only flicked me weightlessly. “So you still have a food surplus.”
“We don’t still have one, we have one again. This has been the first good crop year since you left.”
“An omen?” He drained his mug, and I rose to pour him more before he could demand it.
“How long are you here for?” The principal’s voice, definitely a tone sterner than the supervisor’s.
“Don’t worry, sir. I am not taking Kraftsville from you. I am on my way to South America.”
“What are you up to there?”
“It is a tour of inspection.” He looked up into my face as I filled his mug. I kept my eyes fixed on the gushing beer. It was warm beer from the kitchen. There was a keg cooling in the wellhouse, but that was outside the sound of his voice. “Nizam has given me a very favorable report of you, sir.”
“Nizam? Don’t tell me he’s been skulking around in the bushes somewhere!”
“Rest assured that he has kept several eyes on you. Now, sir; what is the condition of the camp?”
“Annihilated,” Franklin intoned with relish. “After the Russians pulled out, people had a field day out there. Everything’s been burned or smashed or hauled off. Didn’t Nizam tell you that?”
Arslan only grinned. I put down the pitcher carefully and looked at him with fresh consideration. That he had appeared thus, unheralded and frivolously unprotected (And, save his good broadsword, he weapons had none. He rode all unarmed and he rode all alone) did not in itself surprise me; he had his games to play. But why should he ask about the camp unless he intended a second occupation? And something in me surrendered, resolved into peaceful tears that did not rise or fall, and I abandoned myself hopelessly to hope.
The child stirred, kittenlike, on the couch beside him, and in a fond, absent gesture he ran his maimed right hand along her leg. Till now I had not thought of her, except to note her presence. But I found, with distant amusement, that I had assumed what now his casually obscene caress confirmed. I observed her: my rival, my replacement. Her features were hidden in the snuggling crook of a thin arm and a tumble of hair; but that hair was alienly black as Arslan’s own, and her skin a color not made by sun. Where had he found her? India, perhaps, or North Africa.
“Unnecessary, sir.” (I had not heard, with any part of my brain that counted, what they had just been saying. Adult talk. For the past five years I had functioned as a real person in a real world; it had only required Arslan’s entrance to reduce me again to the irrelevance, to the freedom, of a spectator, of a child.) “Leila sleeps with me.”
“Not tonight,” Franklin stated definitively. “When you’ve got an army to back you up you can turn my house into a pigsty. We’ve seen that. But not tonight.”
Arslan ran his good hand under the sleeping child’s back and scooped her upright. She swayed like a heavy vine, her head tilting and swinging, flutters of darkness showing where her eyes fought to cope with the light. He looked, incredulous but tolerant, from her to Franklin. “As you like, sir. But you should consider two points. One, I desire only sleep tonight. Two, Leila is a professional, indeed an expert.”
“And three,” Franklin said equably, “tomorrow you’ll have your army to back you up again. But tonight she sleeps on the couch.”
The third night, in the early quiet after the lights were out, while the nervous house settled its boards uneasily, Leila came to my bed. She turned back the quilt and began to slide in beside me. “No,” I said positively. In the dimness her smoky small face showed the pale light of a smile. “Arslan,” she explained.
I turned my face away into the pillow, disabled with regret, finding it pitiful that he had sent this child to me. In his mind, would an obligation be discharged—or at least deferred? Did he recognize obligation? He was Arslan. He might have chosen to punish me for my presumption, to punish me with the smallness of her cool narrow arms; I should not have dreamed of obligation. “Arslan?” I said, talking into the pillow.
She came sometimes early in the night, sometimes when I slept, sometimes in the dawn. She came always silent as a dream, appropriately fairylike in her smallness, miraculous in her power. The laying on of hands. And I understood, and I was reconciled, and the bitter buds of pity and regret opened peonylike into gratitude and joy. It was a gift—a gift that Arslan had put into her hands to give to me. It was exquisite, it was glad; and I wept, and I laughed, and her delicious small body and her lithe wise fingers lit multicolored joys through all my nerves. And “Arslan,” I sang silently into her hair, “Arslan, Arslan,” against her smooth brown body. This came, too, this unexpected universe, under the heading of the small word sex. This was pleasure, a thing I had never known, a thing pole-distant from the black urgencies that Arslan knew how to rouse, the blinding explosions that resolved them in wreck.
He had no business of state in Kraftsville now. He had come to give me this, and to tell Franklin a lie. I have succeeded. But when the dust-colored regiment had settled in the ruined camp, and the bodyguard of hawk-eyed Turkmens hovered devoutly in the house, he announced, “The last pockets of fertility are in South America.”
“In other words, you lied to me.”
“A simple deterrent, sir. I was relatively unarmed, and I wished to avoid unprofitable complications.” Franklin, too, no doubt, wished to avoid complications. Arslan had eaten reclined on the couch—his old place, his old style—served by his bodyguard, attended by Leila, while blithe Sanjar dined with us in the kitchen, bubbling questions and information. Now Sanjar had taken Leila to show her the camp, and I had brought in the cold keg. I looked into my mug and considered beer. I was very grateful for beer. How much ease there was in it, and after all, how much strength. There were still pockets of fertility. Arslan was a pocket of fertility.
“Is South America giving you trouble, General?”
“Yes, sir. It is the jungles—the extent of the jungles. The more accessible areas present no worse problems than other continents.” He dipped more beer from the open keg. He was affable, conversational, informative. “I have dealt with jungles elsewhere, of course. But the methods that worked in Burma and the Congo are not working well in Brazil. And not to work well is not to work at all. Ah, you look hopeful, sir. But it is very probable that I shall succeed. The areas are large, but they are isolated. It may be necessary to use more severe methods.” He broke off, looking at Franklin’s face, and in a swelling rush of exuberance he flung out his arms, half rising, and burst into a chortle of merriment. “Do you remember, sir, the night I left Kraftsville?”
I laughed. He flashed his look of all-knowing glee upon me, a moment’s mutual touch that left me motionless. Franklin leaned back in his chair, his face dark. And Arslan cried (turning upon himself that eager vivisectionist interest which was like mockery), “I have lost my pain.” He subsided smiling into the cushions. “Somewhere between Athens and Stalingrad.”
“That’ll be fine news for Morris Schott’s widow.”
Arslan watched from the bastion of his amusement. “You no longer put flowers on the graves.”
“Only on Decoration Day.” Franklin stretched his legs pontifically in front of him. “That’s our custom, General. We decorate all the graves then.”
“And Rusudan’s?” Arslan asked softly. “And your wife’s?”
Franklin’s voice, when he answered, was heavy. “My wife’s, yes. Rusudan hasn’t had any mourners around here lately.”
The eyes hooded, but the telltale dimples of the invisible smile remained. It was touching—or horrible, or ridiculous—that Arslan should have dimples. They were unobtrusive, they were faint, they were perhaps deniable; but I saw them. “How did your wife die?”
“Are you asking for information, or just for entertainment?”
“For information, sir.”
“All right, then, General, I’ll tell you. She died for lack of some of those drugs you once assured me would be manufactured locally. She died of pneumonia. A simple dose of penicillin would have saved her.” (Although he had talked bitterly enough of ready-made excuses for doctors’ mistakes.) And he added, a gratuitous bonus of non-entertaining information, “It’ll be two years this November.”
Arslan lifted his drink with a motion like a shrug. “But you have managed well.”
“That’s right,” Franklin said savagely. “Considering the circumstances. Now I’d like some information. What was your idea leaving the Russians here as long as you did and then pulling them out the way you did?”
“The way I did? Why do you ask this, sir?”
“I mean secretly. I think I can understand why you sneaked out with your headquarters, and I think I can appreciate it. But why bother to leave the Russians here all winter, with nothing to do but watch the border and fraternize with us natives? And then why go to all the trouble of sneaking them out by night?”
Arslan gave him a meditative half-smile. Just beneath my diaphragm I felt the interesting beginnings of fear. Nizam’s reports had not satisfied him; I was doomed to describe to him personally those months of fruitless intrigue. “They were needed elsewhere. They had fraternized too much. Also, sir, it is my habit to move without advance notice. Every habit involves a weakness; what is predictable is exposed to attack. But by its nature, a habit of unpredictability is less dangerous than most.”
“And then it turns out not to make two cents’ worth of difference whether the border’s sealed or not. We get goods and we get news from pretty far up the Mississippi and the Ohio, too, General, but I don’t see where we’re any better off than before the Russians left.” Or, in short, Plan One was a posthumous success. He leaned back in his chair and fixed Arslan with a monitory stare. “We could live with the Russians. They earned their keep.”
It had always been entertaining to observe their conversations: Franklin truculent and unbending, unabashedly asking his impertinent questions; Arslan with his accidental air of courtesy and his deliberate candor, forever expatiating his profoundest secrets as if there were nothing outrageous in the counseling of conqueror with conquered. It was like old times—the bitter truce, the threadbare couch, the presence (quiet, full of signification and portent) of the soldiers. Like old times, except that we all drank together, though independently; except that I was almost a quarter-century old; except that there were thread-like lines of gray in Arslan’s coarse hair, and webs of lines about his eyes, and the straggle of beard, and the white freckles on his right cheek where phosphorus had splattered; except that Franklin Bond was Mayor of Kraftsville and Supervisor of Kraft County.
Now what had been our real life was suspended. Arslan was here; we existed in relation to Arslan. Franklin and I passed in our orbits, speaking like hostelers, all discussions adjourned, all quarrels in abeyance. Kraftsville receded, a cycloramic setting for Arslan’s movements. The little war that had so occupied me for seven seasons lost all personal interest. Kraftsville would kill no more of my horses; I rode Arlan’s horses again.
Yet, expectably, chance set me alone with Franklin after a late supper, Sanjar and Leila abed, Arslan and his bodyguard on some midnight errand, and nothing petty to talk about. “He’s changed,” Franklin said.
Not even to my physical sight, since that first night of his return. Arslan’s mouth and Arslan’s eyes were unscarred and unaged. But there was a difference around him. “He’s over the hump,” I said.
“That may be partly it.” He snorted thoughtfully. “It’s all over but the dirty work.” Franklin L. Bond, ever fair. But his convictions were otherwise. “And of course,” he added, “he was very young then.”
Very young? I closed my eyes against it. Very young, when he crushed me beneath him on the green couch in the school gymnasium, and I heard him laugh in my ear, and smelled the ugly smell of him, and blazed and all but burst and splintered with hate? No, Arslan had never been very young. But I, I had been very young.
I was so young, indeed, that a little after, when I began to pull together my lacerated soul, I thought, So that’s how it’s done; and only later I learned, with surprise, that that was not necessarily how it was done at all among genteel modern homosexuals. But Arslan was not a genteel modern homosexual. He was outlandish, archaic, indifferently male.
That was the easy time. I lived quietly in hell, and things were done to me. But already within a few weeks something was required—my single, ludicrous, several-times-daily act: to catch the book that sprang from the flashing bow of his arm. Reading was not an action. It was rest, it was restoration—sore labor’s bath, balm of hurt minds, the compensation that was granted for my laborious sleep. Night after night I climbed the same desperate mountains, thorny crags that crumbled and stabbed, staggering, crawling, naked and hideously torn. I woke disordered, with jerking nerves and quivering heart, to traverse the equally unsure footing of reality. I was learning his looks, his movements, as a downed flyer on a raft might urgently learn the looks and movements of the cryptic sea. There were the keen smiles, joyous when I had shown pain against my fruitlessly stoic will, eager when he was about to inflict it. (Later he was to tell Franklin Bond very soberly that he had never been cruel, that the pain he gave was incidental, a waste product of the process that gave him his victory or his pleasure. But if he abstained from the crasser crudities of sadism, it was because I suffered enough in the course of simple violent perversion. A byproduct, perhaps, but never waste.) There was the concentrated look with which he turned to a map or a soldier or a thought, releasing me for some moments or hours; the swinging, dancing stride that meant he would tease me a little before he laid me; the deliberate, gentle motion with which he reached for my shoulder when his desire was serious. Among them all, the one that lightened my heart like a fair breeze, a shower of pure rain—the whiplash flick of his forearm that sent a book spinning toward my hands.
I considered, with serious and equal care, the cultural requirements of tomatoes, the stagnation of seventeenth-century Russia, the artillery of hell. My soul was restored. I mounted up with wings as of, say, a pigeon. But soon, risking glances from under the flimsy protection of my eyelids, I learned that there was something I could do. I had the power to produce, by my own action, an actual result in Arslan; the reading pleased him. And, by a retroactive casuality, reading became act.
So it was with a kind of triumph that I would see his taut face lighten, his deep eyes grow live with intent concern. I, I had done this. It was insignificant that his concern was for the battle of Poitiers or of Jericho, the poisonous principles of the Umbelliferae, black little Pip a-bob in the white-toothed sea; it was my act, my voice, my reading that had roused the concern. I could do something. I could do something to Arslan.
In early summer he began to take me hunting. The first time, it was to the abandoned woods just east of town. The old Karcher place. The name of it came to me as a recollection of another era. Childhood revisited. We walked into the woods—Arslan and I, and his bodyguard fanning out behind us. Arslan himself put the rifle into my uncomprehending hands, that almost let it fall before they grasped it. “Do not shoot me, Hunt.” It was not a joke, but a command. Lightning-struck, I took it. Such an invitation smashed down walls on every side. Wild light and stormy winds poured upon me. We went into the woods.
It came to me slowly, as I stalked beside him, that I would not be permitted to shoot him. There would be half a dozen bullets in me before I could pull the trigger. Arslan watched me with interest. He was considering the way I held the gun and my face, gauging how much I wanted to kill him, calculating the probability of my trying to do it. The soldiers were to keep me harmless while he made his observations.
And presently he was so well satisfied that he sent them away.
I did not shoot that day—not at Arslan, not at the game we started. There were no closed seasons for him, no licenses or limits. His smooth face shining with a happy lust, he took squirrels, rabbits, doves, a bemused daylight possum, two brown thrashers, a curving mink—filling his bag and loading me with the excess, cursing sweetly in Turkmen when he missed a shot. But he missed few. (Once, later, Mr. Bond asked him why he never used a shotgun, even for birds, and he laughed: “Sir, if I could, I would carry the bullet in my hand.") He was a good marksman—of course, of course; but through that summer and fall I watched his marksmanship improve.
Sometimes he brought one or two of the hunting dogs, but evidently more for their education than for his pleasure, and I understood that he preferred not to share his attention between the dogs and me.
It was not the first day, it was a near one, when the first question was thrust to me, and necessarily I had no answer. We were alone in Karcher’s woods (after the first hunt we were always alone, though two of his bodyguards waited, bored and smoking, in the jeep), and we were looking for deer. We made no kill that day; but in the dew and innocence of sunrise, on the heartbreaking plush of moss below the oaks and in the shelving shales and sandstones of the creekbanks, we tracked the spoor of a harem of whitetails. And while the dew exhaled and the gold sun undid the pink and grayness, and the mosquitoes gave way to gnats, and the birds bustled from matins into business, we tracked them slowly yet.
Arslan a little ahead and left of me went with grave eager eyes and ready gun. Suddenly he paused and touched my arm, a touch to stop and still me. I turned to him; and he gave me a gentle, smiling look, a look of such intimacy that my heart and my whole being turned and stirred, and I understood at last and saw as beautiful that verse in the Song of Solomon whose meaning had been cramped into the vulgar dialect of my childhood. It was a look of shared secrets, a look that drew me toward him more powerfully than ever his savage embrace had repulsed. I felt that he was offering me something dear to him—he who gave nothing, to whom nothing was dear. Then he turned his eyes, showing me which way to look, the motionless gesture of a soldier, of a hunter. And I looked, motionless too, looked into the dense, always quivering congeries of leaves, heard the sizzling hum and rustle of young summer, saw the oak branch that swept downward on our left, the tangled arches of bayberries, the scraggy cedar seedlings like discarded Christmas trees, the limp, blistered, delicately apple-colored leaflets of poison ivy. His fingers still lay upon my sleeve, without warmth, almost without pressure. I looked at him again, and now he was waiting for my response, for the look that would tell him I had understood, had received and accepted his treasure. And I was molten with longing to accept; but I had not received.
I was thirteen. All else ignored—as you might ignore the earth beneath your feet—he stood beside me a man, a grown man and a soldier, offering me with that smiling look a comradeship to dazzle any boy.
And seeing that I had not seen, he smiled a new smile, kindly withdrawing the offer; kindly, but so certainly that I caught my breath and leaned, stumbling at the verge of speech. But I had nothing to say to him.
That was one day. And that night he had a girl—I forget which girl. But there were other days. And I began to learn that the eddying stream of time brings round and round again not the same opportunity, but, over and over, opportunities for the same answer—like a thousand billion waves, each new, each different, each formed by its own causes, and yet all recognizably one.
There was always death, sometimes sickening, sometimes so neat and sweet that he gathered the body in his hands like a sleeping pet, running his fingers caressingly through the fur of coon or cottontail, squirrel or possum. I had hunted before, though never much—with my grandfather, with my country cousins. I had shot rabbits myself, and doves, and missed squirrels. I had fished every summer since I could remember, and gigged frogs since I was old enough to stay up after dark. And I had been soft-hearted and a little squeamish by the savage standards of boyhood—but not really squeamish, not really soft-hearted. Now everything was different. Now every pain I witnessed, I felt; and with every dying I cringed nearer to my death. As the hook went through the minnow’s back, I felt the rending stab in my own. Before the threshing of the wordless deer, my own limbs ached with thwarted jerks, and the red heat of the bullet lay burning within my chest. It was a curious malady, which I tried to conceal; and though he knew that these things bothered me, I thought—it pleased me to think—that he never knew exactly how.
There was death in his hands, the gentle hands with which he hurt me, and death in the still eyes that watched the deer. But there was another death that filled the summer air, that made each breath an exercise in tension. At first I wondered what he found in the hunting that made it worth the risk, or if (he was a man, a soldier, a general, he knew so much more than I) there was really no risk worth considering. Then I saw the electric pleasure that kindled in him with his first shot, saw how he stalked more cautiously after each kill than before it, and I understood that the joy of the hunt was precisely in the risk. These woods, which had been tame as gardens to me all my life, were suddenly perilous as jungles. He was alone, except for me; armed, yes, but unprotected, vulnerable in the green mazes of the unconquerable woods; and with every shot advertising himself to all the vengefulness of the countryside.
So he moved, tense with his mortal pleasure, hunting, hunted, between two levels of death; William Rufus in the Saxon forest. And after the shot that brought our first deer staggering down upon its neck, he reached across the gun and laid his stilling fingers again on my arm. And I, hunched with the crushing pain in my neck and shoulders, turned to look at him, and found again the offer in his eyes. “Look,” he whispered.
What was it I was to see? Was there some animal crouched among the leaves? Some spoor I should have noticed? I shook my head at last—explicit answer to the explicitness of his word. So, at least, the time might come when we could talk.
There were other days. There were other moments. But it was not in the woods, it was in my bed, alone, in the room that had been Mr. Bond’s son’s, holding in my hands the soft pelt of a rabbit, that I understood.
When I was a child, we had had a sort of formal garden behind the house, and I had always rather liked it—liked it, in fact, a great deal more than I had ever admitted. It was exactly the formality of it that I liked; and the flaw, the secret reason for the real contempt for which I feigned other reasons, was that it failed in its formality—it was incomplete, inconsistent, too small or too open. But in midsummer and in fall, coming into it from the south side, I had momentarily loved it. It was calm. Calm. Beautiful in its calmness. The healing, smooth, content, contained, closed endlessness of the circle. And with the downy softness of the fur against my face, I knew, and quivered with hopeless regret for my dullness, that it was this he had offered me—the very calm of the circle.
Too late. Too late. The waves had ceased to flow. I sat up in the empty bed, clenched all over like a fist. Our strange and self abuse is the initiate fear that wants hard use. We are yet but young in deed. And I, indeed young, abused, initiate, got up and pounded on my door, pounded and did not answer the sentry’s objection, pounded until my fists felt numbed and pulpy and Arslan’s own hands turned the key in the lock and pushed me back. Afterwards we would talk.
It wasn’t to understand Turkistani that I began to study it, but to understand Arslan. In time I would grow fond of that hot, smooth tongue, and proficient enough to silence his gossiping officers with my presence. But their cabals bored me. It was more interesting, and more significant, that what was officially called Turkistani was in fact Uzbek; that Arslan spoke by preference the Turkmen of his hand-picked bodyguard, and spoke it like a common soldier; that it was Colonel Nizam who spoke the elegant Uzbek of the schools.
I had learned by that time, too, the tactics he used to make his command of English seem greater than it was. No, not his command—for he commanded it truly and superbly—but the range and accuracy of his understanding. I had been reading to him for weeks when he first began to ask me the meanings of words—sometimes words he himself had used earlier. He never, as far as I could tell, admitted ignorance of an English word to anyone else. Confronted unignorably with a phrase he was unsure of, he would turn it back, with a straight face, in question, threat, or provocation, to elicit more data. I thought, too, that one reason for his inscrutable looks, his reluctance to show surprise or annoyance or enthusiasm, was a simple fear of betraying misunderstanding by an inappropriate reaction. In his own tongue he behaved as in his own bedroom—responsive as quicksilver, eager, impatient, and irritable, throwing off little explosions of scorn and admiration.
In that crowded, bustling house I lived alone and silent. The raucous poultry of the yard, the thick-tongued soldiery, alike confident of their validity, filled day and night with urgent communication. Betty—Miss Hanson to me before my promotion to auxiliary adulthood—emitted signals of agony and ecstasy from Arslan’s room. Mr. and Mrs. Bond communed conjugally, upon a band narrow but apparently clear. Cats wove their intricate society through the useful obstacles of humankind and its hounds. The monkey, sui generis, scratched his piglike skin and pattered forth rattling streams of helpless exhortation. Individuals addressed communications to me: Darya sang, in a language whose very sounds I never grasped; Mrs. Bond presented to me kindnesses, fruit pies, clean linen; Arslan’s soldiers delivered retailed orders and original mockery; Mr. Bond kindly preached; Arslan laid upon me his light hands, his heavy body, his intolerable informations. I did not respond. Only in certain roseate darknesses—the laughably, pitiably frail virginness of dawn, the dying violent power of sunset, the glory that attended midnight in Arslan’s sweated bed—did I speak, give answers, question, and then to Arslan alone. A certain mechanical heaviness invested otherwise my speech centers.
“Light, Hunt,” he said. I lit the lamp: the match blared its small headstrong explosion; the patient wick took the fire quietly and lifted a tall pale flame, ravelling into a tangle of dark smoke. I set the chimney, fixed in its perfect curve, over the equally perfect and ever altering curves of combustion. The flame settled; the smoke vanished; the room was lit. “Is not light beautiful?” Arslan said.
I considered. All the all-but-infinite hues of the spectrum were beautiful; and every intensity, from the coalmine dark to the retina-searing brilliance of a star unmasked, had its peculiar beauty. He took my wrist as I returned, and I sat beside his neatly sprawled body on the bed, and nodded. How, then, could any visible thing be unbeautiful?
“Yes, beautiful,” he said—the voice that swam in dark sweetness, that purred, that without music sang. “And strong, Hunt; light is strong. Do you know the laser?”
Personally, no. I nodded anonymously.
“A beam of light of such—” his hand groped air until he found the perfect word—"integrity that it pierces steel.” He loosed my wrist and turned to me on his elbow, his face eager and exhorting, Arslan’s native posture. “As a weapon it is only a weapon—you understand? It has its own limits—of range, of speed, of accuracy, of maneuverability. Another weapon, Hunt, nothing more. But every new weapon has its hour, the period when its power is multiplied by its newness. Therefore to use a weapon most efficiently, it is necessary to strike during its hour.”
And if there was nothing at which to strike? But Arslan could create his own victims. Now he tamped his pillow into a solid backrest. His shoulders curved against it as he lit a cigarette (swiftly, impatient of his self-interruption). “Consider, Hunt. If the United States had struck, intelligently and with decision, at the hour when she alone possessed nuclear weapons and her delivery capability exceeded the defensive power of every other nation, she could have conquered the world.”
I looked at him, interested at last in the content of what he was saying. He touched me, and thus unspellbound I asked, “Did you do it with lasers?”
He let his head fall backward, draped from the rolled pillow, not in indolence but in enjoyment. He talked around his cigarette; gentle rivulets of white smoke accompanied his words. “The laser had been developed as a defensive weapon. Unfortunately its offensive potentialities will never be realized. But consider, Hunt! When two men face each other with drawn knives, who will live longer? He who wears armor. The shield was as decisive an invention as the sword. And what is the shield against the sword of full-scale nuclear attack? Either a counterstrike force too massive and dispersed to be neutralized, or a defensive network that is virtually one hundred percent effective. Nothing less is adequate. The advantage of the laser, the beauty of the laser, Hunt, is its speed. The antimissile missile has one chance to destroy its target: the laser has four, five, six! No, nothing is perfect—but we can approach perfection as a limit. Given a complete defensive network of lasers, the damage that can be inflicted by a nuclear strike approaches zero. Most certainly, for a large country, it falls within the limits of acceptable damage. Therefore—” he half straightened, jabbing his cigarette toward me—"your country and the Soviet Union competed for years to perfect an antimissile laser—competed quietly.” He smiled at me, the playful smile. “Conveniently for me, the Soviets succeeded first. Do you understand now?”
He touched me nowhere; but my whole right side was warmed because of him, the principal heat exchange occurring in the region of my right hip. He reached past me to tamp out his cigarette; returning, his arm brushed across me, his hand caught gently below my armpit. “A little,” I said.
He chuckled lowly. “A little,” he mocked. “A little, little. Hunt,” he said, urgently if cavalierly. His fingers sank into me (five bruises tomorrow) and I said, mightily aloud, “I want to understand.”
He paused, his fingers still tight in my side, eyeing me with humorous surprise. “You want,” he said interestedly. “Good. I shall tell you.” His gripping hand eased slowly. “I knew—and your government knew, Hunt, in much more detail than I could know—that the Russians had perfected an antimissile laser. It followed that they were installing a laser defense network as rapidly as possible. Do you understand, Hunt? It is very simple. The shield—the first shield—is a weapon of offense.” I understood. It was very simple. “I went to Moscow to talk to the Chinese, yes, as the papers said, but much more as an escort to Nizam.” His eyes, unmoving, withdrew from me a moment. It was dull and cold to realize that he thought more of Nizam than of me. Recollection united them, occupation welded them. They were made one by years (five? ten? fifteen?) of shared effort, intense not with love but with life and death. Conspiracy and combat—two fields as far beyond me (considered as a point infinitesimally distant from the neutral center) as, say, experimental biochemistry and steamfitting—were the elements of their weathered intimacy. “Nizam was a student of the Soviets,” he said reminiscently. “Therefore he was able to apply appropriate modifications of their own methods to themselves. We were half certain before we set out for Moscow, almost certain before we reached Moscow, entirely certain before we finished a week in Moscow, that the Russian laser defense network was complete. No, Hunt, you could not have known. Certain parts of your government knew that the Russians had perfected the laser, and were installing it, but how far the installation had proceeded they did not know.” He sank his head back into the pillow. His face rounded and sweetened; his smile played like summer upon earth. “There were two men,” he said.
There had been two men. I remembered them very well from eighth-grade Current History. Their names were Glukhovsky and Kerbabayev, and it was hard to keep in mind which was the technical head of state and which the leader of the Party. I remembered the stout businessman face of one, soulless and broad, and that the other was a little man. But as Arslan spoke, low and luxuriatingly, the blurred pictures sharpened and came alive to me. Two men. And I shuddered, stroked with the razor-edge of actuality. It was more strange and thrilling that the man beside me had seen, conversed with, dealt with those miraculous beings—men and yet powers—who had swayed nations, destroyed lives, inspired headlines, than that he, Arslan, was himself such a being raised to a higher power. For I touched him, I knew the taste of his breath and its sound in sleep, his flesh had wounded mine, I saw him yawn, scratch, spit, his stomach rumbled, he repeated himself and mispronounced words; he was Arslan to me, absolute Arslan, but he was familiar to me as the potent air.
It was Glukhovsky, the man with the business face, who had been Chairman of the Supreme Soviet and thus effectively Tsar of all the Russias. “Ah, he was good, Hunt. Good!” Good: praise from the cockleshelled lancer for the featureless wall-face of the turning whale, backed with kilotons of oiled muscle and buoyed with the endless ocean. “It was the hour of the laser, and of Russia. The world was hers to take, if she had the courage. It could be a long hour for her, perhaps. But for me, Hunt, the hour was very short. It was necessary to do two things. First, to encourage the Russians to take this world that they had earned. Second, to persuade them to give it to me. Not so difficult, Hunt—not so very difficult. There was a disagreement within the Russian government.”
And in blazoned clarity I saw the scene: the two Russians with distrustful eyes, the smooth wood of the table, the smooth faces of the Chinese, the red telephone ominous and ludicrous, and Arslan, Arslan in his hour. I saw the tiger glint of his prowling eyes, the crouched short-muscled power within (born for the stalk and spring, not the long lope of pursuit), the glow of joy that made his squat solidity beautiful as Praxiteles’ gods. “Nizam,” he said, “had made these things possible.” Nizam making the ways straight. I looked for Nizam in that picture, and distinguished a shadow on the outskirts. “He had—isolated—insulated—the room. Thus I could make my proposal without interruption. And could enforce an answer.”
He spoke Russian, presumably well. “Enforce an answer how?” I asked him: Gem-eyed Arslan, two thousand miles behind enemy lines, armed with a silent whip named Nizam, enjoying himself. Arslan at climax, all but imperceptibly quivering, alight, afire, ablaze. Shabby princeling of a beggar state, stretching his hand to manipulate the crowned chessmen of world politics: “With a gun,” he said.
I would have laughed, if laughter had been among my current capabilities. At least I registered the words as amusing. I could enforce an answer: Enforce an answer how? With a gun. Premier Arslan Khan of Turkistan in the capital of the world’s vastest nation—and, for the hour that might have been long, the world’s most powerful. “Naturally our belongings had been searched; but I had carried it always on my person.” Arslan’s bedmate, Arslan’s bathmate. “Naturally we had been examined electromagnetically; but there are convenient devices, which were known to Nizam, that defeat such examination. Thus I had the gun with me in the conference room. It was necessary only to point it.”
But already the scene was fading. It had been merely a projection of colored light, not one of the etchings of the mind. The red telephone would not have been in that room, probably not the Chinese. I frowned, trying to follow the legend he unrolled for my education, trying to regain the interest I had felt or claimed to feel. He had pointed the gun. He had made his proposal: that the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet deliver to the President of the United States an immediate ultimatum demanding immediate response—capitulation (though not in that unacceptable term) or nuclear war. “And in either event, Hunt, I asked for myself only the command of the armed forces. More than that I could not hope to be given.” That was all he asked. Later he would not need to ask.
“It was not unreasonable, Hunt.” No; insane but not unreasonable. Silent-eyed Glukhovsky had heard all the reasons long before he faced Arslan’s pistol. And brisk little Kerbabayev, who watched them both with equal attention, burned with belief in those reasons: There had been a disagreement within the government. Irony: somehow the word had always brought me the picture of some unidentifiable curio, carved in ivory. It was a beautiful irony that Kerbabayev should hear urged upon Glukhovsky at pistol point, by the premier of Turkistan, the very act that he had been urging for weeks past: It was reasonable, reasonable. It was the terminus of all the logic of defense and counterdefense, of strike and counterstrike. For what else (excepting only the great ends of Communist teleology) had they worked, contrived, expended, sacrificed, risked? How could they lack the final courage now to take the final risk, a risk so much less than many they had triumphantly run? Thus he had surely argued. And now they would take that risk perforce: Arslan was the gadfly to drive them into the promised land, and then be brushed away.
Or, alternatively, to be crushed at once, before the heavy thews began to move. And Arslan’s audacity, if it failed of success, would have ended the arguments forever: He, Kerbabayev, would be silenced with the same blow that destroyed Arslan.
And the man who faced the pistol—had he been charmed, somewhere within, by this swift brash grace and youthfulness, the outrageous speed and ease with which this trivial opportunist had pierced the guarded heart of their strength? Or had he only raged, Philistine confronting the minuscule host of inspiration, at all the petty, irrevocable stupidities, of his underlings, predecessors, colleagues, that had left him suddenly at catastrophe’s brink? Or, executive to the last, had he been weighing truths and consequences all this while, premeditating the muscular actions that should inflect his face, produce words from his breath, explode or petrify the world?
“He did not accept.” So there had been a man, a member of my very species, who had refused Arslan—a character as unreal, in that aspect, as Arslan’s mythical parents, as the teachers in whose classrooms he had presumably sat, as the woman for whose love he had considered committing follies. Why had he not accepted, that man? I did not well understand, then or later, his teleology; perhaps to him it implied the necessity of the current phase of international relations. Or, ideology aside, did the status quo appear, in the curled computer of his brain, more advantageous than the newborn risks and harvests of a new world conquered? Or, simply and humanly, was he unwilling to exchange the ritual of his daily problems for the cataclysm of a revealed truth?
“Therefore I shot him.” And, patient and cold (it was the previous sentence that had chilled me), I looked at him. It was the first time such words had been addressed to me, and to my ignorance they sounded abnormal. But the logic was real. Arslan had enforced his answer.
It was, of course, desperate. He had begun the plunge, the crimson sky-dive of Macbeth. If Kerbabayev, too, “did not accept,” where could he turn to find his next sacrifice? Isolated in that still room as in the hurricane’s eye, he had no weapon but murder, no exit but triumph. A second Glukhovsky would have defeated him. But if there had been two Glukhovskys, he would not have attacked.
And Kerbabayev, of course, had accepted. Doubtless it had seemed to him a dazzling gambit. The goaded muscles would move, more suddenly than decision alone could make them, and the whole momentous bulk of his nation be set upon the path of righteousness. As for Arslan, without question he could be eliminated or neutralized; or (questioned) at worst he, Kerbabayev, would be able to keep a hand on the reins; and if all somehow failed, if the path were missed, or led awry, then Arslan should be sponge enough to sop up all the guilt.
He had made the call. He had delivered the ultimatum. The mountain had been climbed because it was there. No doubt the world’s end would have been different if there had been no red telephone—or, say, no Arslan, or no human race. The evolution, at least, would have been longer.
But these things came to me later, far later. Beside Arslan, in the lamplight, nothing stirred in me—nothing until the sullen slow warmth of an unexpected resentment (disappointment? shame?—some degradation product of a residual patriotism I had thought I never had) roused at his casual disposal of my country’s honor. “The United States, of course, capitulated.” Why of course? Why was all the uncertainty, all the risk, in Moscow? I looked down at my hands in my lap, and Arslan, hunching toward me, laughed. A momentary pulse of desire to argue rose in my throat, beat once, and died. Later, in the still hours before sleep, I was to cherish that little urgency as one more hopeful twitch of my paralyzed soul. Confusion of the deathbed over… There was still a future tense.
Measuredly, by a gentle gradation of brutal degrees, I was being weaned away from slavery. He took me hunting, and I breathed. He struck me, and I spoke. He left my door unlocked, and I was afraid. It was not night I feared (Come, seeling night), but the great ghost-filled day. Daylight and Kraftsville swelled and swirled around the house, infiltrated the staircase, eddied outside my door. Tendrils snaked and vined through cracks and keyholes, every exit and entry let in a puff, and I sat bleak as Arctic stone in the knowledge that I would have to go out into it, out into all of it.
At first I went only with him, at special order. “Come, Hunt.” It would be no farther than the yard. The horses were ghosts to me. I looked through them, or looked away. I had learned to ride, seriously, two summers before. He caressed their solidity with a touch luxurious and sure, feeling for faults. From the outside Mr. Bond’s house looked alien or unreal. Warm breezes rustled the dusty flowers. Yellow sunlight poured in heavy swathes from the exhaustible sun. It was simply hot.
“Come, Hunt.” It was not an invitation; he merely commanded my attendance. Thousands at his bidding speed, And post o’er land and ocean without rest. I also served, apparently; though for what, in the sunlight, was obscure.
“Come, Hunt.” In the newly finished stable, in the good smells of horses and raw lumber, he talked his plausible Russian, criticized equerriel architecture by eye and hand, and turned on me with a sudden order to mount. The horse stood just-saddled; the Russian groom was laughing. I muffed it, naturally. But once in the saddle, hot with shame and dread, looking down at Arslan (a fantastic viewpoint), I felt my body take over. I remembered how it was to ride. He looked at me—looked up—and laughed. And looking down I smiled my first smile.
And still later, Mr. Bond’s gentlemanly and unpronounceable lieutenant was deputized to chaperone me. I liked his worried expressions and his diluted devotion to Arslan. He regarded me with the eyes of a conscientious nursemaid who didn’t much like children. He was a mild challenge, a natural object for harassment; but I wasn’t up to it. I was debilitated, the good invalid child glad of its leading-strings.
He led me, on Arslan’s precise instructions, farther and farther into the ghost-filled day. Two blocks south (the stables, to fetch the horse of Arslan’s whimsical choice); four blocks east (Nizam’s headquarters, to deliver some trivial, perhaps nonexistent, message; to look, or not to look, one block onward to my father’s house); three blocks north (shorter but farther, a different neighborhood, to Gullick’s the harness-maker, for a rather interesting modification of a halter). And outside Gullick’s house he courteously instructed me to wait a few minutes for him, and turned the nearest corner.
It was the first time I had been alone in the open, and I was at a loss. I dangled Arslan’s halter and admired the air. Did a colt feel the same dull resentment at being trained? Or, for that matter, the same dull satisfaction? I would perform my lessons, accept the bit, follow the reins. The line of least resistance, spidery clue through the funhouse labyrinth of actuality.
And alone in the open air, perceiving the world leafy and flowery, full of space in which the displaced personality could spread arms and turn about, sun-shone, solitary, I felt myself grow cheerful. Future tense aside, there was most definitely a present—a present in which it was possible to move, smile, respire, ride horses, understand harness, study Latin.
The tranquil street was unpeopled but alive. Hadn’t there always been people on the streets, before Arslan? No, I remembered now, and the scene around me sharpened into a keener focus, unmodifiable, indescribable in its realness and rightness; lovely and real. It had been exactly like this before Arslan, on such a sidestreet, on such a summer day—the life and quiet bustle all in the houses and the trees, only an occasional flitter-between or resident-on-threshold (passer-by, porch-chatter, rug-shaker, harness-customer, tomato-picker), nobody in very much of a hurry. Nothing had changed. And I felt for the first time a wholehearted homesickness for my own people (cracked, contused, lacerated, but whole) and in it, temporary but stabbing, an instant ache for fellowship, for the kids of Eighth Grade, Room One.
And on cue, real and right, with the coincidental inevitability of fate-in-the-dice, two figures emerged from the green shadows of the next cross-street north, coming my way on the other side of the street. They were Gene Michaels (not, indeed, of Room One, but he had played first trumpet beside me) and Simon Teffertiller, universally known as Bud, kind-eyed and potato-faced. They were in eager conversation. I stood and waited until they were nearly opposite me. Then, “Hi,” I said, and lifted my hand.
They were very, very busy with their conversation. Not until they were definitely past did a half-glance come my way, and Bud exclaimed, in a voice that filled the attentive universe, “Hey, Gene, do you believe in fairies?”
I waited, hot but frozen, very busy in my turn with the harness, until they turned the corner, and then while I counted ten, twenty, forty-seven; and considering this a sufficiently angular and realistic number to justify me before any lingering atoms not yet convulsed in snickers, I turned and walked slowly—to very hell with instructions—back the long three blocks to Mr. Bond’s house. Some part of my brain (was it the cerebellum?) had cravenly deserted under fire, leaving the management of all my muscles to my unpracticed consciousness, so that I traveled in jerks and wavers where all should have been smooth but firm, and stubbed my toes.
It wasn’t the impersonal fact—I had anticipated, imagined, and armed myself against such taunts, indeed much worse, even to violence—but the source of it, which so unstrung me. Gene and Bud were not among the jackals from whom I had expected such, nor quite among the friends whom I was prepared (having lately learned the ruthlessness of self-defense) to forgive it. They represented the rational and indifferently sympathetic Better Class my bitterest apprehensions had assumed; and that they had turned upon me demonstrated, with mathematical finality, that all the world at large was hostile.
It was one of the turning points. Not my turn, since I had not altered in self or in direction, but the world’s turn. I was only the pivot pin upon which the visible universe wheeled. And feeling cramped and restless for a pin, I resorted to merely physical motion. That was the first time I walked boldly, so to speak, into Arslan’s stable and saddled and harnessed one of Arslan’s horses, and mounted and rode off, wordless before the mock salutes of my watchers. Not one moved to stop or question me. And on the road I leaned the horse slowly into a flying, floating gallop that eased my chest. I quartered the town, tattooing down Bud’s street and down Gene’s, making long corner loops along the country roads. Then I rode back, the horse and I heaving together, to gather the fruit of my first disobedience.
Yet I was so obtuse, the universe so little visible to me, that eight weeks later I walked like a lamb to my father’s house. And lamblike I was bewildered and surprised when the club fell. “You are a Goddamned hypocrite,” I said—the valor of the lamb—and walking back through the forbidden dark, I heard the rifle crack and felt an outrageous thrust drive through my thigh.
I had been taught that there were good people and bad people. The good subscribed to certain theoretical tenets and abstained from certain actions. The bad faulted in one way or both. There were also rumors of peculiarly loathsome creatures, the worst of the bad, who pretended to subscribe to the required tenets, the better to perform the forbidden actions with impunity. Scorn and righteous indignation were fired at these absent monsters from the batteries of pulpit and schoolbook fiction, but none were ever pointed out to me in the flesh. For Kraftsville’s ancestral piety had not been shaken by the seisms remaking the face of America. The Sunday School literature spoke fashionably of society’s sins, and the Social Studies books confessed that westward expansion had been a little hard on the Indians; but what citizen of Kraftsville could have questioned that Kraftsville citizens were nice people, and that nice people were good?
So it took a convulsive effort to realize that it was exactly the good people, it was especially the better people, who were the loathsome hypocrites. My father and my mother, and all the other reasonably intelligent, reasonably nice, reasonably successful people I had ever known—they were the ones who spoke out so dogmatically for truth, beauty, and goodness, while with every action of their lives they cast votes for falsity, ugliness, and corruption. And Mr. Bond, of course—Mr. Bond was a particularly prime specimen, because he made his living teaching hypocrisy to children.
It was Arslan who showed me the possibility of living honestly. Even his deceits were straightforward—tools as simple in purpose and exquisite in design as the guns he equally loved. He lied; but he did not pretend.
“You give me much pleasure, Hunt.” Yes—except that I gave nothing; he took, took with both hands. The stuttering metaphors of my mind were silent before the concentrated consciousness he brought to bear upon his pleasure-taking. It was this—not his deeds, but the passionate and concerned intelligence that powered them—which struck me dumb and helpless, naked before his ruthless interest. Brutal but unanimal, wholly aware, wholly deliberate, he probed again and again for one more pocket of resistance, one more unwillingness from whose bursting another spurt of pleasure would flow. That was what I saw of him. It did not occur to me that he had other concerns as well.
It was against my will—it was against my very flesh—that I read Tamburlaine to him. I did not know the story. I had never heard of Timur the Lame, I did not dream that Arslan had paced the polished floor of Timur’s own tomb with pudgy legs, his hand in his father’s. But before I had read far, the words thickened in my mouth, and I saw Arslan doubled, before me on the couch, before me on the page. Surely to read this to him was to pour oil upon the fire that was devouring me. Over my zenith hang a blazing star That may endure till heaven be dissolv’d, Fed with the fresh supply of earthly dregs… Yet he listened with an earnestness that might have been anxiety if it had not been calm. Later, out of silence, he would speak the word that had touched him. “Triumph. Triumph is public, is it not?” I nodded doubtfully. “Yes. And it is temporary, Hunt.” His eyes were very quiet, very open. “I do not deceive myself. I have finished my triumph.” It was spring, his lush first Kraftsville spring. I was very young, I did not guess that he was more and less than Tamburlaine (the conquering shepherd, invincible by sheer intent, noble by sheer brutality, marching forever forward to new wars). “Now there is only work.”
Those were words I forgot, for months, for years, while I remembered all the standard, stirring taglines of Marlowe’s limpid bombast. Come, let us war against the powers of heaven And set black streamers in the firmament… No, Arslan would need no second triumph. His triumph was with him forever.
No doubt it was grievous to be unable to respond, practically, to inquiry or assertion, friendly or hostile. Yet, on the whole, response seemed to me frivolous. There was nothing to say; or the things sayable there was no point in saying. “Arslan says you’re free to go,” Mr. Bond informed me. That was communication, and valuable, or at least effective. But Go where? would have been the only feasible response, and it could have evoked no effective answer. Therefore I gazed, and was silent.
And in the dusty music room—though I felt such a sweet stab into my vitals that everything inside me was, in a moment, dissolved and flowing—I only listened. The room was so small. Exactly here (or there, or there; my memory ran liquid and swirling as the eddies of spring creeks) the instrumental scores had been kept, here the vocal, in those two cabinets the school’s instruments (the dingy, dented brass, the dilapidated woodwinds, the new drums we had been so proud of); there, in that corner, I had kissed Patty Cummings after the year’s first basketball game, because I liked the wild grace of her and because she teased me—my first kiss, my only kiss, except the hundred that Darya had demonstrated to me, except the condimental tendernesses with which Arslan spiced his assaults.
I had been a good trumpeter, by Kraftsville standards. And it was that thought, ramifying, that brought tears to my eyes while I listened to my mother. My mother, Hunt Morgan’s mother, Mrs. Morgan, Mrs. Arnold Morgan, Jean Morgan—in any aspect, not a woman to sentimentalize. She was all business; but the sentiment was notably present—very neatly boxed, very properly veiled, very ostentatiously unmentioned—a thing set as on a table between us.
She looked so thin and so old—not truly old, of course, but I had never before recognized the marks of time upon her, or imagined she could be subject to them. It surprised me (I was still that young) that she had actually and physically suffered. Parents were immutable.
“What became of my trumpet?” I asked her.
She radiated stifled pleasure. “It’s in your room. As far as I know, it’s as good as it ever was.”
And it had been a good trumpet. “What ever happened to Patty Cummings?”
Now she was surprised—staggered, in fact. Was it good or bad for me to ask about Patty Cummings? Good, for me to express interest in anything; good, for me to be interested in a girl as opposed to Arslan; good, for me to speak at all. But bad, for me to be more interested in a girl than in my long-awaited homecoming; bad, for me to have any interest that implied sex, however innocuously; bad, for me to be interested specifically in Patty Cummings, an empty-headed innocent without family prestige or intellectual pretension.
“Patty Cummings? Nothing, that I know of. All the Cummings girls are still living at home.”
Living at home. What a world of homeliness that phrase implied, a world enormous, solid, and sweet, in which “home” had a meaning beyond “the place where I live.” I had forgotten. I gazed at her, staringly, touched and awed, and the word Mother came to me, and I thought that I understood it. And I wished, knowing it an adolescent wish, that she would ask me some important question to which I could answer, “Yes. I am coming.”
But she talked of mealtimes and underwear, of my father’s health and my old dog’s death, presented me with a pseudo-leather toilet bag and advised me how to pack it, tucked her handkerchief into her well-kept purse and adjourned the meeting. She was a grown-up.
And Arslan, also, was a grown-up. Grown-ups might give, at unpredictable intervals, anything else; but not drama, not dignity, and not freedom. He did not come to see me go. With neither congratulation nor recrimination, with nothing but a pseudo-leather toilet bag, I stepped into the cool sweet air of the first breeze of evening. Yet, in the end, all the drama and all the dignity were on Arslan’s side; and there was no question of freedom. Hot and sour I walked back through the bitter night, ballasted with incredulity and contempt (which would be worse, that they had forgotten the curfew or that they had remembered?), waiting for the bullet. And when it came I staggered, less with physical shock than with the strong wash of relief, of satisfaction, of preconceived anger now justified and released—and, later, with the dragging undertow (annoyingly real) of fear.
And Arslan was there to see me come back, there to heal me with his hands. It had been a false departure, a real return. When the time came for true departures, he would be there.
He threw himself stomach-down on the bed where I lay, and my own stomach contracted in the accustomed cold cramp. Propped on his forearms, a very boyish posture, he dragged a fingertip across my chest. “You understand, Hunt, that I make a whirlpool around myself. There is no one who can come to me"—he considered for a word—"naturally. I must always deal with people who are in a condition of strain with regard to me.”
I felt a small smile detachedly form itself on my face. He looked at me with confident expectation. “A condition of strain.” My voice sounded to me husky and childish.
“Greater or lesser,” he said, grinning, and laid his palm on my diaphragm by way of demonstration.
“Rusudan,” I said, and the blackness her name roused in me was, in comparison, soothing.
His other hand flicked; the knuckles caught me under the chin, snapped my mouth shut very effectively. Not, with regard to Arslan, what you could call a blow. Just a mild warning, a touch of the lion’s paw. Just a gesture to inform me that I must not contradict his dogma with the fact of Rusudan. She was not a part of the world which I was permitted to consider.
“Therefore I discount the strain,” he said, “in one who would be a friend without it. Do you understand?”
I investigated with my tongue for blood before I spoke. I had a notion that the sight of blood excited him. “I don’t know.”
“You say to me, ‘I hate you.’ But without the strain you would have said something different. I consider that you have said the something different. Hunt, I tell you this tonight for a reason.”
I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to hear his reason. But I was too vulnerable in that blindness; I had to look at him again.
“I return to Bukhara,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
Instantly the world flashed and rang, as if I had been colorblind, tone deaf, for a season, and those few words had cured me. My heart sprang; my lungs drew one delicious breath of pure freedom, like pure oxygen, before everything shifted, like one of those optical illusions in which high is suddenly low and low high, and I felt myself abandoned in a world to which I had been made a traitor. Christ had volunteered; but the scapegoat was a conscript.
“I want you with me,” he said.
So it was back into the frying pan, and nothing had been given me but the prospect of old tortures with new instruments. And falling back into the crumpled husk of myself, I felt tears under my eyelids. I closed them. “And if I say no, I suppose you’ll consider that I said yes?”
He was silent, until I had to open my eyes and look at him. At once he smiled and spoke. “I am not asking you to choose, Hunt. You come with me. When I ask, I do not dictate the answer.”
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Okay.” I closed my eyes again, going down for the third time. And this time (elementary tactics, invite a relaxation of vigilance and then strike) his hands shut like steel on my upper arms and I felt his breath on my ear as he said softly, “Remember.”
And I remembered. Through the four terrific years, the fast years, the years of my true initiation (for what happened in Kraftsville had been only the test, the preliminary ordeal, which I had passed, because I had survived), I remembered that he did not accept my hate; he returned it to me, so to speak, unopened. I remembered that he chose not to endow me with free will. I remembered, seeing her for the first time the day he brought her to the palace, that my mouth was incompetent to speak her name. Seeing him look at her, I remembered the taste of his tongue. Seeing him rock with laughter, hearing her passionate shouts of anger and of joy, I felt again the little tap that had clapped my jaws together; and I thought—small, sour, spiteful, old-man’s thought—Well, I was right. Rusudan did not exist in a condition of strain.
She was not beautiful, no. She was garish, she was cheap, she was third-rate Technicolor—not even nouveau riche, as Arslan so patently was, but overpriced toy of nouveau riche. Yet she was whole; she was integral. And I, a disarticulate collection of fragments, awash in the bile of envy, watched. She was the only person with whom I had ever seen him quarrel. With the rest of the world his arguments were rational, his angers dictatorial. But with her he struggled and raged. With her he was unjust, brutal, indignant.
I thought I understood. She was, in some way, his unique equal—the one living being with whom it was unnecessary for him to condescend, to explain or domineer. Not even Nizam the Ineluctable Shadow merited abuse or importunity—how much less I. I watched at first with bewilderment and shame, but later with admiration. No, it would not occur to him to muffle his noisy struggles; there was no danger of rousing revolt or contempt, for it was inconceivable that any other could dare stand against the flashing force of his confidence. All the openness of his furies, his frustrations, his delights, said to the world, My weakness is stronger than your strength.
Bukhara was a trap. In those bleak halls, under that blank sky, Arslan’s retinue drew into itself, re-formed, transmogrified, and spread netlike around him, a fullfledged court. In the exercise yard he wrestled with soldiers from the garrison, challenging one after another, embracing every man who gave him a fall. Cigarettes drooping, eyes askance, the jealous majors stirred and shifted. They were aligned in only two things, distrust of Rusudan and devotion to Arslan. The world was divided and distributed every day in the casino, while Arslan, sweating and tousled, dictated endless orders in the radio room, scribbled his maps with ever-spreading lines like crackling glaze, shoved away his lukewarm coffee and called violently for hot.
He was happy. This was his home. He had his woman, the chosen vessel. Never yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love thee, O Eternity! She was eternal, at least, in her pestiferousness. She mocked, interrupted, scolded, demanded. It was unnecessary to understand the language of her complaints. So-and-so had insulted her. She wanted new clothes, more jewels. The cook must be replaced. Arslan shouldn’t drink so much.
He drank more. He began with coffee and raki at lunch. The steel schedule of Kraftsville—a long day’s driving work, an evening’s intense debauch, a short night’s childlike sleep—crumbled and vapored away. More coffee, to be gulped or forgotten. More raki, until light-foot Arslan slipped and scrambled on the treacherous marble floors.
It was the traitor’s hour. In this palace, the bloody powers of Bukhara—emirs and viziers, and all the Turkish generals who had anticipated Arslan by half a millennium—had succeeded each other upon waves of treason. Generations of his forefathers’ betters had caroused here to their own undoing. But there were no traitors among Arslan’s men. The schemers were faithful. They came and went, dispatched to this sector or that, still plotting. The cook stayed. Rusudan was arrogantly pregnant. Arslan knocked a lieutenant down the stairs for bringing him the wrong report. But after the three-day carouse that left him immobilized for the fourth day and night, while the palace buzzed with varying tones of dismay and frenzy, he reformed by the unexpected expedient of cutting himself to three cups of coffee per day.
In the winter of Bukhara, the great wind flowed like a tide across the plain. Wild flights of snow boomed like storm birds around the minarets; sprays of coarse, dry flakes spewed through unsuspected crevices and scattered down the barren halls. (There were no comforts among the marble luxuries of Bukhara; small wonder that Arslan had settled so complacently into the meager ease of Kraftsville.) In the streets, the shivering dogs chewed the snow hopefully. Symbolic more than real, it stated winter and disappeared. But the wind rolled on, the cold sank ponderously through the blankets, the dull pink bricks of Bukhara were hazed with an arid and delicate frost.
At his orders, I gave English lessons to his officers. I, whose classification in life, for as long as I could remember, had been “pupil,” found myself elevated to full professor, an authority and source of knowledge looked up to and earnestly consulted by the commanders of regiments. All my ineptitude and confusion to the contrary, it was very steadying. Rusudan came a few times, curious and impatient—jealous, perhaps, of the alien language into which he withdrew from her—eager, most of all, to show herself off to me. Rusudan, at least, did not reject my hate.
Grotesque among the pilasters, in rooms designed for cushions and hangings but bare now as new-built prisons, stood the last emir’s gestures toward technological civilization (or was it Arslan’s father who had installed them, or even Arslan himself?): a nonfunctioning air-conditioner, a stereo console with ready-made collection of unplayed records. For the first time there came home to me, exiled in Bukhara, the banal horror of Arslan’s great work. One could not honestly grieve for the loss of future Mozarts—there would have been no more Mozarts in any case; but Arslan had destroyed forever what I, backwatered in Kraftsville, had never known: the whole ebullient and evanescent world of performance. There would be no more concerts.
In Kraftsville, Mr. Bond had left beside my bed his little record player and a stack of records in shabby jackets. Now and again, Arslan had pulled a random disc from the pile and thrust it at me—background music for the sports of the evening. Otherwise they had sat unconsidered, silent, accumulating the dust of that uncleaned room. Rigoletto, Don Giovanni, Fidelio. In Kraftsville I had not noticed. But in Bukhara I remembered and was moved. “Do you think the electricity will ever come on again, Hunt?” Mrs. Bond had inquired anxiously, at a slightly later epoch. “I know he misses those records. It’s the closest thing he’s ever had to a hobby.” Mr. Bond, the self-contained, self-satisfied, the Gibraltar on whose stolid crags my new-born soul had steadied its bruised first footsteps—had he offered me, like Arslan in the woods, drink from the very springs of his own strength? Had he once bowed, as I did now, intently over the music, searching out the rich phrase that should nourish him through another day? And pell-mell, simultaneous perhaps, regret and resentment welled up, and I burned against him, remembering with momentary hatred his lofty shoulders and rock-rough face, remembering Kraftsville with hatred, because he had not been my father.
In Bukhara, the music seemed miraculous to me, the machine no less so. Nightlong I would sit hunched beside it, touching my budding beard with small proxy caresses, while the floating tone-arm softly bobbed and gradually pivoted, spinning great ripples of sound from a flat black circle. The tremendous swag and sway of Verdi, the joyous patternings of Mozart, gave back to my memory now the odor of Arslan’s lust, now the concerned and disapproving eyes of Franklin L. Bond. In the morning there would be coffee, raucously strong; and at midday I would lie flat, spread-eagled on a blank bed, my teeth locked tight and fragments of arias furiously rotating through my brain.
I was lonely. In Kraftsville three people had been kind to me: Mr. Bond with his mute gifts and unseasonable advice, Mrs. Bond with her promiscuous motherliness, Darya with her harmless corruptions. In Kraftsville I had had Arslan, inexorable and close, a surrounding presence in which I struggled warmly. But it was in Bukhara the pale city that I felt the first doomed stirring of desire.
He had not touched me in Bukhara. And at first, thankful, I had shied away from every chance of touch. But I looked now with an abstract cupidity upon those blunt, soiled hands, seeing in them my only hope of human attachment.
As in Kraftsville, so in Bukhara, he purveyed me a girl. I didn’t want her. I was incapable of the simple prophylactic contact with which Arslan’s bachelor officers solaced themselves; and affection for one of Arslan’s poppets was futile, futile. Where now was Darya?
But she was billeted in my room ("Hunt, I have given you a girl"); she was serious, gentle, and persistent. Her name was Chalyu. Dutifully I studied, not the art, but the mechanics, of lovemaking. Two drinks, taken in a period of forty to forty-five minutes, and with her help I could manage it, like a diligent paraplegic lover. It had been better with Darya. I tried to teach her English, which she tried to learn. We talked in a halting pidgin Turki. She was sixteen. She didn’t know where America was. She admired Arslan.
One night she was gone. I sat on the bed and practiced rolling cigarettes while I waited. I had finished seven when he came. He walked straight to the bed, his hands coming out to take my shoulders. “Now, Hunt,” he said.
Rusudan was five months pregnant. It would have been consistent, I thought, for Arslan to retire her from his bed, to put her in storage until the heir was safely born. Instead, he had retired Chalyu from mine. I never saw her again, and I asked no questions. I was busy. For what opened around me now was a new world: Arslan’s Bukhara, the inner sanctum of a universe, the pale city I had seen hitherto through the veils of solitude.
We talked. In the exercise yard, now, he called me, too, to wrestle with him. To me they were desperate battles, fought in fury and shame under the hooting laughter of his troops. He expounded maps to me. He appointed one of his best pilots to teach me to fly. For hours in the denseaired night he interrogated me on the intrigues of his court. I had become his spy. Under the caravan stars he schooled me in his language, rich and simple as a poem. And when, dizzy and defeated, accepting that I myself must be the traitor, I plunged the knife with all my force, and fell back stricken as Arslan’s veritable blood welled upon his naked side, it was in his own language that he cried furiously, “You dirty little fool, you don’t know how!” Indeed I had done very badly. I had had to get up to get the knife, and by the time I struck he was awake, twisting out of the way. There was plenty of blood to set the palace buzzing again in the morning, but the wound was, as he said, “very inadequate.” I learned that night that I had never before been thoroughly afraid. In the end, when he kicked the broken knife away, he came back to English, leaning over me in one last blaze where I cowered like a quivering hound, jerking his own knife from the tumbled clothes beside the bed. “Next time” (lilting the words) “use a better one.” And I took it from his bleeding hands.
There were gifts. There were recompenses. I had not expected (I had not considered it) that piloting a light plane would be the opening of a new world. A New World. And I understood at last (the realization flashing in and out of existence at first, then steadying, focusing, becoming examinable) something of what that phrase must have meant to Europeans of 1500, to Columbus himself. A New World. As one might say, a new universe. No. A new continuum. No. There was no word, since the beginning of the era (just ended) of multiplication and renewal, so final and whole as world had been.
To fly: the consummation of the most exquisite longings, the reality of the most delicious dreams. The whole globe of the world showed itself to me two-dimensional but enveloped in the perfect third. I bent myself to learn, to be quickly rid of my instructor. To fly—it was by definition to be alone.
It was flying in the dazzling void of the desert air that I came to terms with death. All the mortal hardware that surrounded Arslan had given me a brief mechanical thrill, like that of a carnival ride; the bullet wound in my thigh had been interesting but trivial, disappointing as much as pride-engendering; the bodies in the dump had seemed fraudulent. For the rest, I had poeticized suicidally, misusing Keats to ease my own midnights, and pondering the merits of knife and noose. It was suicide, not murder, I had meant when I dreamed in Kraftsville of shooting Arslan (the most certain suttee), though I had earned my new knife another way. But under all the romantic frenzy my unperturbed and patient self had known that I had other engagements. And the silent slogan with which I greeted the days and the nights—I wish I were dead, I wish I were dead—was as hollow, and as comfortable, as the Now I lay me of my childhood.
Yet always when I look death in the face,
When I clamber to the heights of sleep,
Or when I grow excited with wine…
I had smiled at what seemed to me Yeats’ boastful simplicity, the casual implication of daily encounters with extinction. But now, above the Black Sands, in the enormity of the humming air, I had my daily encounters. For the first time I teetered on the knife edge, not merely of possibility, but of temptation. Nothing held me up. Nothing above, nothing below. Sometimes a miniature cloud crawled forlornly along the outskirts of the tremendous sky. Otherwise I was alone. It was only a straining, groaning, quivering, squealing effort, a frantic laborious whirling, that kept me precariously aloft from moment to moment. It was easy, it was inevitable, for me to lift the plane’s nose into the unbounded blue, until she stumbled and hung, a momentary floating star, and the uselessly flailing propeller growled a new tune, and suddenly hollowed I was falling, backward into the nothing below.
It was enough. “Nobody dies of a stall,” my instructor had taught me; “only of fear.” I tilted the plane’s nose downward … downward … still downward … Whimpers rose in my throat, and my neck and arms prickled helplessly. Against the stiff resistance of my wrists I pushed the plane’s nose still farther in the direction of death. Still downward … And now she caught the air, and I was flying again.
My hands on the wheel trembled. I was running sweat, and in the cold blue sky I was chilly within a moment. I turned the plane and climbed slowly, in wide circles, wheeling my way, with an eye on the fuel gauge, gradually back to Bukhara.
It was to become an exercise. I learned half a dozen ways to stall and recover. I learned to dive toward the scorching sands and pull out when it was almost too late. It was very calming. I looked with new eyes upon death, knowing now what Arslan’s very existence should have taught me; shrugging off, unregarded, the destruction of multitudes, myself among them. Myself among them. There was no more to learn. The door of my death stood ajar, and a touch would open it. Beyond, Arslan’s hands and soldiers’ laughter did not enter.
On foot, once past the towers and foliage of Bukhara, the cloudless sky of Turkistan oppressed me. I would stare at the unqualified blank (the inside of the small end sliced from the cosmic eggshell), trying to remember that what I saw was itself a cloud—not clear space, but a tangle of bewildered light, the blue rays lost and hurtling among thickets of jiggling dust. But it was useless—the polished shell remained; and I was hungry for the buttermilk skies of Kraft County, dawns as rosy-fingered as any Homer could have dreamed, sharp-edged and layered sunset clouds like the stone-made sediments of past ages.
Bukhara was a fever. In the dense shade of the trees, the oven air baked, the furnace breeze seared. It was surreal to pluck a peach from the tortuous branches and bite into that exquisite juiciness, while my eyes ached with drought. Arslan’s deep laugh burst like fireworks bombs. The reports flowed in, the maps were netted with ever finer meshes, Rusudan was approaching her time. He was parched and hard, with gleaming eyes. He would never leave. Here was his home, the root of his nourishment, the hard nest of all his loves.
Who had noticed or cared, in eighth-grade Current History or the labyrinths of the CIA, that the Republic of Turkistan was developing one of the world’s most efficient armies? “It is a question of men, not of money; of morale, not of equipment. This is not wishful thinking, Hunt; I have proved it. Also,” he added pensively, “we were not badly equipped.” It was the Russians who had re-equipped them—not badly, but not well—as their British arms fell obsolete. It was Arslan who had ordained that men outweighed equipment. “It is not important—not for long—that a man should be trained to use this tool or that one. It is important that he should know that he can learn quickly to use any tool.” Supple and proud, they were a far cry from the tindery battalions of most of the third world. And to their suppleness and their pride he had added the crucial third ingredient. “A soldier is alone, Hunt, more alone than other men. Do you understand? Because he lives with death.” The trite phrase was new in his mouth, making him smile with pleasure and knowledge. Yes, as I died with life. “But also, if he is truly a soldier, he is never alone. His army is always with him.” Even unto the end of the world. It was unjust that Arslan’s eyes, brilliant and treacherous, overshadowed his mouth. It was a mouth worth watching, supple and proud. “They are good, Hunt. Good,” he said, and his lips curled fondly about the word, telling me that they were his children, his brothers, his lovers, his creatures. The cadres of the army he had inherited as dictator’s son had been unremarkable—half trained, half experienced, half rebellious, and thoroughly venal. It was not the least of his feats that he had, in that subterranean era before the revolt that made him Premier of Turkistan, infected every one of them (every one, at least, who had survived) with what in the interests of accuracy, might have been called love. I tried to imagine a world in which Arslan’s ruthless enthusiasm was contained in so small a scope: to train—to create, rather, an army that would make him unqualified master of a certain arid acreage in Central Asia. “I had seen the Russians and the Chinese, Hunt. I knew what I must measure myself against.” He was talking about armed forces, and he was serious. First, it had been necessary to neutralize his father’s air force; but his immediate next move had been to take firm possession of his country’s ill-defined borders. He had fought a little, unnoticed war with Afghanistan—a war that could have tempted him into conquest, but had not. Through the vacancy of the Black Sands, where the Soviet Union had been content to leave an uncertainty for future exploitation, he had drawn his emphatic line of fortifications and patrols—and Moscow, startled but sanguine, had given him vodka and confirmed the line by treaty. On the east, he had sat down with relish to some four years of skirmish and argument. That—the Chinese border—had been his recreation. Within the boundaries, bidding East against West for oil rigs and teachers and irrigation projects, stockpiling his silky cotton while the mills went up, he had not neglected his first loves; the army was never idle. Like emirs and sultans before him, he had pacified the tribal Turkmens with bribes. ("My father’s people, Hunt. A difficult people.” Arrogant, irascible, joyous, and cruel, a people dear to his heart.) All other tribes had been pacified Roman fashion. Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellent. The Kurds and Kalmucks, still following their ancient feuds and herds, contemptuous of boundaries, had been corralled, decimated, partitioned, and resettled with staggering speed and thoroughness. The nomads of old Turkistan became part of the growing proletariat of Bukhara and Merv and Khiva, and Arslan’s troops added rural and urban riot control to their list of practiced skills.
So that when his great hour came, unexpected but destined, he was prepared. It was not in vain that he had sworn the oath of blood-brotherhood with Nizam—Argus-eyed Nizam, whose foresight provided the corps of interpreters through whom Arslan’s officers were to command the world’s troops. And the army had shared. The songs that rose from the Kraftsville grade-school gym had been true paeans.
It had been his feast of Persepolis, the single hour of triumph. And if, more moderate for once than Alexander, he had ignited no city (his conflagrations were later, measured and purposeful), he had had no less his accidental sacrifice; it was I who had been consumed in the peripheral blaze of his glory.
And only now I began to understand what lightning stroke had changed Kraftsville from a crossroads bivouac to the capital of the world (for Bukhara could never be more than the capital of Turkistan). He had driven west—the instinct of Timur, the inverse of Alexander—into the physical vastness of his untried conquest, leading his personal army into the heart of mid-America as he had drawn his personal gun in the Moscow conference room. It was not yet a matter of baiting the incipient resistance—there could be no resistance until the conquest was real. It was a challenge, a risk, an exploration; he did not yet know what he had done, nor what he would find. The world (there, there was the rub, the nub—I beat my palm against my brow and cursed like Hamlet over Hecuba) the world had still been free to choose its answer to him.
But driving west on Illinois 460, he had received the answer. Nizam had caught up with him, bringing the confirmation that he could accept from no one else: Moscow was docile, Washington was well in hand; those generals who had shown themselves uncooperative had been rendered harmless. For the first time (perhaps the last), Muzaffer Arslan Khan knew himself the master of the world. The place where he found himself became the universe’s center.
So that the Arslan I first saw—swaggering down the aisle of Mrs. Runciman’s eighth-grade class, face aglow and body afire and the hand that touched my shoulder vibrating steel—was not, as I had assumed, the normal Arslan of his everyday past or his everyday future; just as the Kraftsville he saw that day, and all that it contained, were illuminated by an incandescence not their own.
Again, again, again; my muscles would bunch, my blood leap, and for the instant it would seem determined that I was about to plunge, simply and physically, for whatever freedom my legs could find. Assaults of escapism, they took me more often and more keenly in Bukhara than they had in Kraftsville. They were pangs of returning life, not spasms of dying (so, at least, I concluded); perceptions of reality, not rejections of it. Between convulsions, I was growing unsteadily more aware that flight was not so much impossible as pointless. Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place; for where we are is Hell; And where Hell is, there must we ever be. Milton’s Satan was a general; Marlowe’s Mephistophilis knew what it was to march in the ranks.
He moved always with the urgent skill of a professional. His plans were as secret as the wrestler’s in the ring; the movement announced the decision to move. The child was to be born. Rusudan’s plans were elaborate. Yet, “Hunt,” he said, “you will come with me.” I thought it would be to India, where the great camps were—the labor camps where, contrary to all his announced doctrine, the surplus rice crops were grown, the medical supplies mass-produced. There were always problems with those camps, and with the sterilization program that accompanied them—this the overt, even publicized sterilization program, using only surgical methods, that busied his henchmen for a time in India as in China. And indeed we were to visit some of those camps before our journeying was done. But first, out of a pink dawn, our jet tilted downward to the convoluted islands that had been Japan.
I saw now, as we sank roaring through the air, one of the beautiful horrors of which he had told me—an invested city. Through the outskirts of Tokyo ran an irregular band of devastation, a knotted black sash binding the city against the sea. In places it merged into broader spots of wasteland—the love-knots of Arslan’s ribbon. Well-set fires and well-planted bombs had drawn that siege line. Tokyo, caught in a tightening belt of flame, and inspired by memories of old conflagrations, had saved herself (other cities had been less skillful or other-starred), to strangle more slowly in the cordon of blackness. Here, it had been Chinese troops who patrolled the perimeter, shooting down fugitives from the city. At certain checkpoints, a citizen could buy his way out with any deadly weapon. (In Tokyo, guns were scarce, but swords were equally acceptable.) Such people were packed off to the farm districts being laid out in Mongolia and Siberia. There were escapes, of course. There were sorties, organized and otherwise. In the depths of the city, there were riots, new fires, cannibalism. When the Chinese marched in at last, there was very little resistance.
It was from such cities, docile with agony, that Arslan had drained off all the surviving males. All evidently pregnant women and mothers with male infants were ghettoed in convenient prisons and hospitals. Their men and boys were marched or shipped away, to farm the unappealingly virgin lands of northern Asia or Australia, or sometimes—if they passed the scrutiny of Nizam’s agents—to serve Arslan more directly, as drivers, mechanics, technicians, clerks, interpreters, administrators, seamen, soldiers. In such a city, only the inmates of the inevitable brothels required sterilization. It was, on the whole, an efficient way to dispose of several million people.
There in Japan, to my relief, I fell ill. I was to learn on that zigzag journey that the health of mankind had already deteriorated. A surprising variety of plagues afflicted the concentrations of population, plagues that Arslan accepted gladly and manipulated with growing skill. Under the circumstances, diagnosis and prognosis of my ailment were alike uncertain, and not worth bothering with. I was content with the indefinite consolation of a schooldays phrase, “just a bug that’s going around.” The practical result was that I was spared setting foot on the barren ground of Tokyo. But after a few days of helpless peace I was well again.
And by that time he had finished his dispositions in Japan ("It is very simple here, Hunt. But there are problems elsewhere"), and we were ready to put still more distance between our backs and Bukhara. But ere the circle homeward hies, Far, far must it remove. The route was circuitous, not circular, and in the end we were to come back to Bukhara from east, not west. But I took care not to anticipate any return.
I was seeing the world. What surprised me was that it was indeed a world—globular, and covered all over with seas and continents. The sun went around and around it (Copernicus was irrelevant), and a mouse or a human being might go around and around it, too—by rocket, by plane, by ship and train, by swimming and walking if he chose. Maps could be drawn of it. Beams of electromagnetic energy could be bumped along its surface. It was real; it was finite.
Finite, and not only divisible but already divided. Water was Arslan’s ally: the great rejecting oceans; rivers that cut nation from nation; the final ice of the mountains and the poles, blank, white, and perfect. And I was pleased. What Arslan was doing was fitting. I began to see the tangled web of twisting, heaping life in which this globular world was awkwardly netted. And I saw how Arslan with his square-nailed fingers worked at it, stretching and cutting and piecing and smoothing, so that someday, the scraps discarded, the web should fit neatly over every painted continent.
Lying in alien beds, awaiting the dull tides of shallow sleep that would flow and ebb across the mudflats of my mind, I was oppressed by the futility of all my hours. Remembrance, anticipation, experience, all were shadows in the night. Nothing was real to me but weight, the resistance of the dark medium in which I moved. And in Delhi, Marseilles, Kinshasa, it appeared to me still in images of Kraftsville summer: days filled with linty wisps shed from the cottonwoods, like the lung-muffling waste from some industrial process, nights with the horrid blunderings of gross beetles, junebugs monstrous in pathetic stupidity. And a passing jet, mysterious and purposeful in the night, that in other times would have relieved awhile the pressure on my heart, now only grindingly moved and mumbled, crossing the sky with a long tearing sound, and left for a little a rasped furrow upon the flesh of mind.
Worm-belly skin of the creeping oceans beneath us, clouds repurified of life beyond our wingtips. “You will see, Hunt. All wounds heal. The world will heal very quickly.”
“All?”
“Death heals the last.”
King’s fool or kempery-man, I served in other functions. Aimless, jerked idly along his hectic track, I carried his books and listened. Dimly I glimpsed, perhaps, what it would be to call Arslan my friend.
He took care, after all, to be on hand for the birth of the child he had never so much as mentioned, except in his battles with Rusudan. Sanjar; the name came from out of the air, or from some secret sanctum, immediately and unmodifiably. There was never any talk of “the baby.” Once, before we left Bukhara, Rusudan had followed him into my room to scream at him, and he had turned to her a face coarsened with rage, while I stood widening myself in futile imitation of an angry cat. It was a violation that roused in me resentments and disgusts I thought I had lost—and in fact they melted in the warm pleasure of their recognition. It was good to feel outraged; but since it was pointless to object to the outrage, I relaxed and observed it. The woman’s face streamed and dribbled (when Rusudan wept, she wept wholeheartedly), her wild hair, beautiful sometimes in its munificence, was fuzzed and snarled now; and yet her body, like Arslan’s, and for all the topological distortions of cramming one human being inside another, moved and held and moved with the authority of beauty. What she alternately begged and demanded was that she be allowed to name the child. He did not argue; he called her whore, bastard, beggar, sow, and a good deal else that got past me. And all the while, untainted by their strained ugly faces and guttersnipe voices and stupid peasant spite, their bodies played out a ballet of majesty and grace. It was one of the times when I thought I understood.
Arslan’s son. Rusudan’s baby. I made an effort, once the birth was accomplished, to consider the child as a human being. Surely the offspring of these parents must be torn apart, wrenched by two such forces. And yet, apparently, he was not torn. Arslan accepted, as he accepted the hyperbolic weather of Bukhara, all the pampering jujuism with which Rusudan’s overheated court of handmaidens featherbedded their infant master. He insisted only on his right to claim Sanjar at any time of day or night and to handle him without interference. I found to my fleeting horror that it was I, not Arslan, who felt and showed the traditional discomposure of the male confronting the infant. It was so small, so frangible, and so irreparable. It seemed made of rice paper and jelly, a miniscule misrepresentation of humanity, at once exquisite and obscene. But, “Come, Sanjar,” said Arslan, and tucked the silken monsterlet into his bent arm with all the quick casual care he extended to his guns and his animals. Rusudan shrilled at him from her bed (deprived, for the time, of her body, she was all ugly now), and her women fluttered quietly like a border of voiceless birds. They were abandoned disconsolate.
Day by day, month by month, in the crook of his father’s arm, perched on his father’s shoulders, dragging with pudgy-footed stumbles from his father’s hand, Sanjar was introduced to his profession. He was accustomed, in order, to every branch of Arslan’s transport system, from the ponderous cargo jets to the stony-footed mules of the mountaineers. Weaponry and communications were the meadow of his infant play. I always, and I only, spoke English to him—Arslan’s educational scheme, designed to promote native and uncontaminated bilingualism. “Paperwork,” Sanjar explained to me solemnly, burying his slight arms in the day’s unclassified residue from Arslan’s wastebasket—a phrase I did not remember having given him, and which he might well have constructed for himself. He was quick-witted, sometimes thoughtful, delighted to please—traits that boded well, to my ignorance of little children, for his future development. I was not very patient, but I was not spiteful with him. He was so very small.
Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio; sed fieri sentio, et excrucior.
I claimed the right to be young; to be moved by Catullus. I was trying to translate that poem—my first exercise in authentic Latin. The story of my life in two lines. “I hate and I love.” Those words were the data, incapable of alteration. Odious, amorous; yet the verbs of English had their taproots in deeper soil. “Why I do that, perhaps you ask. I don’t know; but I feel it to be done.” Et excrucior: another datum. If I could translate that, the rest of the poem would be merely bricklaying. But if there was any direct English equivalent, I had so far failed to find it.
“I hate and I love. Why, you may ask. I don’t know; but I feel it being done.” The passive infinitive (the inactive indefinite; or, say, the suffering unlimited). Fieri sentio: “to-be-being-done I feel.” I sense the happening. Et excrucior. “And I am crucified.”
But that was wrong, both in its literal inaccuracy and in its lack of a certain refinement. Or was it falsely that “excruciate” tinted excrucior for me? Was it indeed a fact (one of those observable concepts of which the world and science were constructed) that the greatest pains were the fruit not of bludgeons but of needles—not the crushed bone, but the delicately raveling nerve—so that, in the tortuous course of two or three millennia, what had meant simply the extremity of pain had come thereby to connote exquisiteness? What had Catullus felt? That (I had read) was the true translator’s question. Well, the cross was an instrument combining the principles of bludgeon and needle.
The ex troubled me. My knowledge and my books were inadequate to explain it. Excrucior: “I am taken down from the cross"? Or had ex, like per (thoroughly, thoroughly), its aspect of completeness? Outerly, utterly; “I am crucified out-and-out"?
But it was futile. (Another Latin word; futilis, futile, it would be. But what exactly did it signify? What was futility after all—one of the basic states of human existence, undefinable except by pointing, part of the impenetrable bedrock of etymology?) For crucifixion, since the Crucifixion, was irreversibly changed, dyed with the purple of sacrifice and glory. What Catullus had felt, rereading his stylused words, I could not feel. The shadows of his world were different, the punctuation different, and crucifixion as commonplace and as repugnant as hanging. And to translate from his mind, rather than his words, would be to write a new poem, or the poem anew—impossible, unless I were Catullus.
Futile, all futile, when in truth I could barely scratch out the literal meaning. Futile to be concerned with shades of skin color before I knew the structure of the skeleton. Grammar (knobby, articulated, concealing in stone-walled cells the leaveny life within), grammar refuted my pink and slovenly misshapes.
“I hate and love.” I had never seen him comfort or soothe or tend a woman—not even Rusudan; least of all Rusudan. That sort of tenderness he reserved for his soldiers, for men wounded in body and spirit. I had had a few flashes of it, in Kraftsville and in Bukhara; but then I was certainly his man, and certainly I was wounded.
And in time of crisis, what woman would cling to Arslan for comfort or protection? No; if they turned to him, it was as a tracking antenna to the missile that will smash it. And a wave of regret and pity went through me, to think that of all the women who had felt the pressure of that hard chest against their breasts, not one had clung there for security; and I was sorry for Arslan, my poor and terrible Arslan.
“I hate, I love. You may ask why I do it.
I don’t know; but I feel it done, and it tortures me.”
He had spoken so often and so matter-of-factly of our returning to Kraftsville that I had long since ceased to believe him. “When we go back…” he would say, as if Kraftsville were his point of origin as much as mine. “When we go back, we will show Sanjar the cave in the hill.” My mind set sullenly. That had been my cave, one of my secret places, only big enough for one boy. “When we go back, Hunt, you will be useful to Nizam.” Not, You can help Nizam; willy-nilly, active or passive, I would be useful. Used. In the beginning, my heart had twisted at each of his magical go back’s; but it no longer occurred to me to consider them as real possibilities. Thus, though no doubt my potential usefulness had increased (I had lost scruples, gained cunning, advanced linguistically and diplomatically), I did not bother to imagine how I might be used. The only point worth examination was Arslan’s motive in rasping the skin of my soul with this particular tool on this particular day.
So that when Rusudan’s bustle of packing began, I speculated with the ludicrous sobriety of a three-in-the-morning drunk. He was preparing to send her somewhere out of the way (and certainly at the last minute he would keep Sanjar with him); or we were all embarking on a royal progress of his dominions; or he was preparing to lead an actual campaign or defend against a threatened coup, and Rusudan and the child were to be sent elsewhere for safekeeping or, contrarily, as bait; or no one was in fact going anywhere, and all the preparations were one of Arslan’s smokescreens for some gigantic or minute maneuver. I failed to consider that the announced schedule might be simply true. And even when we reached Kraftsville, realization had not overtaken skepticism, so that I labored with feelings of belatedness and surprise, and perceived what I looked at only after a moment’s delay.
Everything was altered. I had left as a victim, contemptible but pitiable. I returned as a henchman. To fulfill the role Kraftsville had assigned me, I should have died, or escaped, or found refuge in suicide, murder, or madness. It was ungrateful of me to have reappeared, intact and even cheerful, at Arslan’s side.
Everything was altered, from my viewpoint as from Kraftsville’s. There was the trite and tediously inevitable change of perspective known, no doubt, to every returned native; but I myself had changed, so that the difference lay not only in point of view but in organs of perception. I too had thought myself a victim and seen myself fail in that role. But my conclusions were not Kraftsville’s.
Mr. Bond, the image of a wise disappointed father, was glad to see me and offered no recriminations. It was he who introduced me to the practical realities of Kraftsville life. “We’ve had a lot of trouble with the deer.”
I could resolve the sounds into words, but not into meaning. I smiled inquiringly.
“Of course, we don’t have anything to shoot them with. We’ve turned into pretty good Indians—but you know something, Hunt? I don’t believe the Indians ever kept the deer down very well, either.”
It was true, if ludicrous: a good deal of Kraft County effort was devoted to the serious business of “keeping the deer down.” Or, considered more constructively, of keeping the district in good meat. Kraft County had moved a long way toward a hunting economy, though it still had far to go. Venison had practically replaced beef; and yet deer were, in popular opinion, vermin. “The deer seem to have adapted better than Homo sapiens,” I said. Although better was a matter of definition.
“They’re thriving, that’s the truth.” But “thriving” was not necessarily the same as adaptation; and in fact, hadn’t the deer been always better adapted, even in Homo sapiens’ heyday? They had done more than survive; they had kept the balance. It would have been valuable, once, to know their secret.
Already on the first day, Mr. Bond began the offer of his pastime intrigues. He was to play Good Angel to my Faustus; but it was, of course, too late to burn my books. I had made that attempt, in Kraftsville and in Bukhara, without celestial prompting; and the first time he had dissuaded me (there were politics in heaven), and the second—when I needed whatever I could get, dissuasion or assistance—he had not been there to save me from proving myself incompetent. So that now I could be titillated, but not seduced. (Raped virgins, in St. Augustine’s opinion, were as pure as any.) Still, his tone opened old and new possibilities.
My usefulness to Nizam was wholly passive. When I was full, he squeezed me, and the pores of my mind, dutiful not to the greater glory of his Turkistan but to the principles of elasticity, gave up their drops of stored observation. But to serve Franklin L. Bond would have required activity. I had no doubt that he led the most powerful, at least, of whatever submerged forces moved beneath the dull ripples of Kraftsville’s mud-dark surface. It was tempting to think of offering my services—tempting but impossible. No man could serve two masters. That was not a moral prohibition, but a statement of fact. I could not choose to betray Arslan.
No, nor conceive betrayal, however I struggled toward it. Meshed in his heavy nets, all maneuverings were futile. For all roads led to death, all species evolved toward extinction.
Bukhara the Pure, Bukhara the Mine of Wisdom. So is every wise man a Bukharan. I had not realized, in the deep fever of Bukhara, what it was that he displayed to me so proudly, with such love. His city, yes. It was in Bukhara that I heard him called Al Hadj and learned that he had made the Great Pilgrimage with his mother when he was very small. But it was complacently, almost with pride, that he assured me he knew no Arabic. Bukhara the Dome of Islam, the Crown of the True Faith, the City of Many Mosques. His city, his country. “For four years I worked hard…” He had left the mosques still standing, as the churches of Holy Russia had still stood in the Soviet Union. But the light had gone out of the dome. And in Kraftsville I recognized at last that the Bukhara through which he had led me, his left hand locked on my wrist and his eyes luminous with joy, was already a ruin. He had cut, methodically, remorselessly, his own roots. And the nourishment he planned for his heir was drawn from other soil.
It was part of his scheme of education that Sanjar should learn, willy-nilly, all the prowess of Huckleberry Finn. For that, too, I was useful. Arslan did not hunt this year, nor the next. (Had it been only a summer’s sport, a bachelor’s game?) It fell to me, Chiron to his infant Achilles, to initiate Sanjar into the art of killing. We were not very successful at hunting together—he was impatient and noisy, too small to help, too young to care—but I supposed he had fun in the woods. “I seen a bluebird, Hunt! I seen roses!” He mimicked my turns of phrase and Arslan’s (diversely stilted), but his grammar was pure Kraft County.
Fishing was better. “Later he may hate me,” Arslan had said to me. “There will be hard times for him.” But Sanjar would croon his little wordless songs and jiggle contentedly the line I had set for him, or sink absorbed into some private game at the water’s edge, while I gazed bemused on the running ripples, a little eased to think that the brown cowponds of Kraft County were moved with the urges of the Pacific. The wavelets of these flowing breezes, baffled on every side, were the very image of those immeasurable surges swept by the Trades around the endless curve of ocean. And I would gaze until, broken from my roots, I felt myself, and the bank I sat on, running like a ship athwart the motionless ripples.
But if motion was relative, could it be real? And anchored by doubt, my bank would brake abruptly, and the ripples run again. Drop fused with drop, the inseparable crumbs of water swung in their trivial orbits, here as in the open sea, a fall for every rise, a retreat for every advance, no particle escaping its tiny province; so that what flung itself at last, heaping and rending, against the helpless shore, was not a thing so much as a force. It was like the headlong incessant lunge of mankind, transmitted by the feeble and frustrate circlings of an infinity of atoms, unendurable in its strength.
That was what made Arslan unique, human but not merely human. How could he be a bobbing droplet in the waves, he who was himself the waves embodied? He would sweep on, carrying all before him, pounding the wreckage of his enemies against the stubborn cliffs of earth until they crumbled at last and the restless waves swept past. He and his own.
Queen of the universe; mistress of its sole master, mother of its sole heir. Tenderness aside, Rusudan stood now, in Kraftsville as never in Bukhara, within the full circle of Arslan’s embrace. They were comrades, bound by a kinship deeper than love, bounded by Kraft County’s alien fields. And I, disconnected and withering on my home soil, felt here as never there the stifled anguish of the concubine. Laden with Arslan’s disregard, goaded by Rusudan’s contempt, I plodded my treadmill way, deeper into desperation. Dutifully I uttered my drops of useless treason (what could I tell Nizam that Arslan did not already know?) and dutifully begrudged them. For the sponge remains wet, the last drops are always unexpressed.
It was possible to look into the chill air for a long time without realizing that rain was falling. Only the whitish blurring of a thin mist intervened, like a dingy windowpane, between eye and landscape. Then, refocused, the ever-falling drops showed faint and cold, like delicate beaded chains sliding and slanting across the blue.
Again, it was spring. Weary and irreversible, again the world heaved round. Autumns were falsely sad, patting the fat tears of success. But spring rose always again like a beaten fighter stumbling from his corner for still another round. There was nothing to say to the universe; it was; one could only turn away.
But could not. I breathed, and the air was spring. In Karcher’s woods, the trees stood definite and angled as black crystals; yet a scattered few were hazed with mists of color that showed, through the white rain, uncertain as illusions—faint green, fainter pink, like the pastels of an impressionist. I stood under the stable eaves, leaning and waiting. Arslan might come with Sanjar, to ride in the young rain. Or might not. And my mouth made the small, standard smile of acknowledgment, for I felt the weed of hope rising again, for one more spring.
Rusudan lay dead on Franklin Bond’s couch. Awkward with fear, an apprehensive covey of women jostled behind Arslan. He had sent the guards beyond the doors. He bent deliberatively over Rusudan and began to strip her of her clothes.
First one, then two, then all, the women shrilled. They wavered; the boldest stepped forward to offer help. Arslan turned on her with a voiceless animal sound, lips shrunk back from his teeth, and she dissolved into wailing cries. He bent again to his work. The women swayed and shrieked, willows with tambourines and sirens. What did it express, this racket of anguish? Perhaps nothing more or less profound than their ache to perform the last offices of their mistress. Perhaps grief, certainly shock. I was shocked myself.
He examined her very thoroughly, and he took care not to obstruct our view of her. Or was “it” the proper term for one so emphatically dead? No; Rusudan was unalterably female. For the first and last time I saw her naked, and the sight stirred something within me, though not (as I had mildly dreaded) necrophilia. I was surprised by the broad aureoles of her nipples; I was impressed by the solid curves of her breasts; and I was strangely touched by the dark turf of hair, scanter than I had expected, at the vulnerable meeting point of thighs and belly—the tender crotch where Arslan’s hands had lain, into whose recesses he had rubbed himself with the authority of love. Now he soberly examined the dead flesh for bruises. It was with a kind of medical-student coarseness that he flopped her broken limbs. And with each manipulation of the silent corpse the women screamed, as though Rusudan’s nerves functioned now in them.
When he had finished, he went to one of the women—the nearest, and also the oldest, who keened a desperate and ritualistic cry—and struck her. She tumbled backwards, all dignity abased. He said to me, moving his mouth laboriously, like one to whom speech returns as a lesson forgotten, “Bring in two men.” I stepped onto the porch. “The general wants two men,” I told the Turkmens in English. It would have been presumptuous now to present myself as anything more than conquered alien. They were accustomed to me as Arslan’s messenger, but they gave me this time the hard looks that uniforms were invented to authorize, the looks that warned, Everything you have ever said is already held against you.
Arslan had covered what he could of Rusudan with the filthy dress he had peeled from her. “For Colonel Nizam,” he said, consigning the women with a gesture. One guard escorted them. Arslan turned to me. “Tell me everything. Everything. Everything.”
Far less prepared for this inevitable moment than for that of death, I felt my eyes go wide, my tongue stiff. All my innocence and ignorance, so valid a minute before, crumbled and evaporated, and I was cowering again in Bukhara, incompetent even in guilt. Stumblingly I told him everything I could remember or imagine that might serve, not to solve his mystery or assuage his pain (helpless with fear, I had instantly forgotten that such purposes might exist), but to protect me from his violence. His eyes blazed out of some distant enmity. He listened, he questioned, and at the end, “Upstairs,” he said to the remaining guard, nudging his head at me. It was the command I had known a hundred times before I understood it literally and grammatically. I was surprised that my heart did not grow cold at the sound of it. But I was chill enough already.
So again I sat the long hours on the bed’s edge, listening, drifting. But I was older now, and knew how to hope for a better thing—that when reality came through the door again, it would be with what I had earned, the possibility of contact, of mutuality. So that when in fact it came, nights later, after Arslan’s hands and heels had wrought the execution that was, for a time, to lose him Kraftsville, there was another hope to be crushed down.
He came to me, those nights, with the unplanned, unplanning, conscious intensity of an elemental. I remembered that démodé phrase, “crime of passion,” and understood it in a new light, glaring and garish. For they were crimes that he wrought upon me in the narrow room that had been Mr. Bond’s son’s, crimes in intent and therefore in effect. It was not sadism, in the pure sense, that struck me from my waiting sleep and wrenched my joints into a new and still a new distortion; it was revenge, that Satanistic atonement. He pressed from me not only the immemorial noises of the wounded, but speech, but argument. For I was wounded by his cruelty, but I was outraged by his unreasonableness. It was not appropriate to Arslan to snarl accusations, to sneer insults. Threats were something else again; but it was wrong for him to whisper them. “Your mother, too—she is one of them. I will deal with her personally—personally. Do you wish me to tell you how?” I lay quietly outside my listening body and waited for him to finish, to sleep, to go away, to kill me. “Do you think that you are one of them, Hunt? Wait, wait until they have drained you dry. I protect you now, while you plot with them, while you crawl on your belly to do their errands, and pour for them your little drops of information. But wait, wait until I throw you to them, these jackals. When they have finished with you, then I will destroy them. And perhaps I will take what is left of you again. Perhaps.”
Those nights, he broke upon me like a tempest, waves of lust and fury that overran each other and died not in satisfaction but in collapse. I was roused and tumbled, buffeted with the excitement of the gale that is past pain and near to glee. And in the spent surf of such a dying storm he turned on me a look of so much gentleness that I sank, desolate, forlorn past hope at last. He cared for me; somehow, in some sense, I was of importance to him, a subject for tenderness, a source of joy. Therefore I was lost.
Somebody’s child came idling down Pearl Street, in grave pursuit of this season’s resident tomcat; an older child than Sanjar, without Sanjar’s aggressive grace. He looked apprehensively at the raw palings of the new fence—fences were not common in Kraftsville—drubbed his fingers experimentally along them for a moment, and stooped for a throwing stone. The cat sprang without visible effort, like a sailplane rising on a sudden thermal, posed a brief second on the gatepost, and descended, ponderous and lithe, upon Franklin’s front walk. The boy flung his stone side-armed toward the other side of the street and trotted past. The cat paced halfway down the walk, turned, seated himself, and began to wash. He was impressive in rear view—thick-necked and chunky-shouldered, like Arslan.
“What do you call that one?” Franklin’s memory for the names of cats was short.
“Bruce,” I said huskily. “Robert the Bruce.”
“I’m glad we put the fence in.” He ran his hand approvingly along the porch rail and turned back toward the front door. “You call me when you get that paint mixed, and I’ll help you paint it.”
What was it Hesse had said in Der Steppenwolf? Something in scorn, or perhaps in envy, of the Faust who complained merely because he had two souls struggling within his breast. (Every book I read had seemed to me momentarily the fated answer to my question, before I learned that literature was an insignificant sham, shallow to its very depths—that there was no vicarious experience, none; that I knew nothing I had not felt in my own flesh.) One of the sparse benefits of having an indefinite number of souls was that one or more of them could find some glint of silver in almost any catastrophic cloud. So that there was a small pleasure in being abandoned by Arslan, an enemy alien in my home town. It was challenging. It had its aspects of unaccustomed freedom, somewhat like being parachuted alone into a jungle. I did not realize at once that he had exactly fulfilled his threat; he had thrown me to the jackals.
One thing I had already learned: it was useless to ask for help unless you didn’t really need it. There were no free gifts possible in a functioning universe. Those who gave, took payment; and as the truly helpless had nothing to tender but their helplessness, they could pay only with their suffering, or (if they had the luck to petition a lover of responsibility) their dependentness. Long ago I had asked for help, in every way possible to me, from Mr. Bond—this at a time when I was in physical pain and spiritual anguish and simple desperate daily fear of death, while he, my host and my principal (ex officio protector and automatic father image), was the only man in Kraftsville with will and power to stand against Arslan. I had begged for mercy (surprising how readily one was reduced to begging for mercy, that contemptible self-confession of schoolbook dastards) from Arslan himself. And I had received, in response or in inattention, kindly exhortations to have courage (I would have been glad to have it) and sweetly mocking laughter. (But Mrs. Bond, from whom I had asked nothing, had given me eggnogs and offered me hot compresses; and though I had gagged on the first and declined the second, I appreciated their practicality. It was, however, vain.) I had asked for bread from my father, and he had given me a stone. Only much later, when my soul had healed and grown strong, like the terrible cripples of folklore, did I receive what I no longer required.
Therefore now I pressed my tenders with the firmness of desperation. I must run with the jackals or be torn. Arslan had taken all and given all; but Franklin Bond did not batten upon suffering. To him and his KCR I offered myself as a non-aligned Mephistopheles, one of hell’s rejects, a useful servant at a minimum wage. To my parents I presented myself politely as the independent son, in business for himself but well disposed toward his origins.
I saw them, now, merely as two more citizens of Kraftsville. They had made their own adjustments. My father was a pillar of the respectable branch of the non-KCR anti-Arslanists (so far had sectarianism advanced). As such he had weathered the variable gales of the past years, unscathed, secure in his harmless intransigeance. He was Kraftsville’s independent lawyer. Arthur Kitchener (tenuously, if at all, related to the equally notable Leland) was the KCR lawyer, and Greeley Simms had once been Nizam’s entry, until the KCR had quietly bankrupted him.
In turn ravished, perverted, abandoned, and brutalized, the school stood dirty and forlorn. Undismayed, my mother went on teaching. She had gathered two classes of vocal students, separated by age, and gave private lessons in piano and a few other instruments. Things wore out, things atrophied; and yet so much of Kraftsville remained, essentially intact.
“Come see my primary chorus, Hunt. You know, the little ones really have better voices than the older kids; it’s always that way. Your dad will be home for lunch, and then you can stay and listen till you get bored.” And so I lunched with them, and stayed and listened. The children arrived promptly, in clusters, obviously experienced pupils—feral out of doors, noisy but tractable as soon as they crossed the threshold. It was true that their voices had not yet lost the sweet clarity that their souls, being human, had never had; and she had schooled them into a lusty approximation of accuracy and order. They sang “John Peel” and “Auld Lang Syne” and “I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad.” They sang, pristinely as an inspiration:
Oats, pease, beans, and barley grow,
Oats, pease, beans, and barley grow.
Do you, or I, or anyone know
How oats, pease, beans, and barley grow?
I stayed longer than I had expected. They sang “America the Beautiful.”
How long since I had heard that song, or any such song? At least ten years, it must have been. I tried to recall some real or plausible last occasion from my disintegrated memories of the Time Before, and could not. And since that lost last time, my ears had been filled with the sad, wild anthems of the sterile plateaus.
Oh, beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life.
And suddenly a real beauty trembled vainly up from the foolish words, and I was homesick, soulsick, for those alabaster cities that had never been and would never be. There people lived whose right name was patriots, and fed upon the golden wine of pride, the snowy bread of love. But there had never been a past from which that future might have come.
Had there been? I had been a child, too young to do anything real, too young really to understand; and when I began to understand, and to be old enough, it was too late for doing. That was easy to say. They should have done it: the grown-ups, the genuine citizens, the ones with the newspapers from which to understand and the votes and money with which to act. But that was too easy. Every citizen had had his own helplessness. Where had the power been? Could there be responsibility without power? Free will without free action? The responsibility and the power were easy to locate now; Arslan had taken them upon himself. (Unto himself? What was the word? The king, the king’s to blame.) But taken them from where—from whom? Children and ignorant, we had been responsible then, I as much as any. We should have understood. We should have found a way to act. If we had not, that was our fault, not Arslan’s—our fault not collectively, but individually. I was to blame for Arslan.
We have turned every one to his own way. And the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. We were free now; the drunken freedom of the slave, of the cog, of the world rolling in its orbit. Our sins were as white as wool. But I shook with belated anger at myself, at all other lethargic cowards and all zealous imbeciles. Mock mockers after that, Who would not lift a hand maybe… Was one responsible for the past? Could there be any responsibility for what did not exist? I had been responsible then, when no one had called me to answer. Now I was ready to present my true account (One talent: Lodged with me useless); and the books were already closed.
Oh, beautiful. This woman who had been my mother, honorable and brisk, freckled but tidy—was it still beautiful for her? Possibly so. Mrs. Jean Morgan, last surviving singer of “America the Beautiful.” I looked at her, with her mouth vigorously open, and I was touched. She was a kind and honest lady. The cruelties and falsehoods she had inflicted on me were no more than the duties of motherhood. I did love you once. Kind lady, she would do better to forget that beauty. These were the last children, loud and docile, with their uncertain throats and visionary eyes, that she would have to teach; and already these were not Americans. Where but in bitterness could she lodge all that good will and courage, when the children were gone and the beautiful stillborn nation was forgotten? Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?
It was with the Bonds that I lived on familial terms, in various senses. I was not yet the household menial—that was to come later—but I was Franklin’s instrument in his gestures of worried kindness toward his wife. “Hunt, would you carry out that laundry for Mrs. Bond?” On the other hand, she fulfilled for me (as, I increasingly thought I saw, for Franklin) the role of devoted and honored servant, privileged to criticize, to manage, and to share, but neither to initiate nor to command. It was the sort of personal relationship that one might have with a beloved animal, and in that way, I concluded, very like most maternal relationships.
Between her husband and me, the intimacy was of a different order. (It did not occur to me to be surprised that it had not, apparently, occurred to Kraftsville to impute any variety of improper relationship to us. Such unsuspicion was a tribute, from Kraftsville and from me, to the force of Franklin Bond’s character, or at least reputation.) For a long time now, I had argued with him from the privileged position of the favored graduate student. But our daily contacts were on a rawer and more urgent level. Who was to water the horses? How were the corn borers to be stopped? Why was the septic tank in danger of overflowing—and what, and by whom, was to be done about it? And after Mrs. Bond had failed us for the first time, by inconsiderately allowing herself to die, all our dealings were aggravated and exasperated. The last courtesies crumpled from our theoretical discussions as the last distances were squeezed out, and though “I never argue about religion” was one of his mottoes, we were more and more embroiled in savagely impatient disputes on immortality, the nature of dogma, the roles of reason and revelation. I could recall only darkly a time when I had believed in some divinity; and yet I found myself beginning so many heated sentences with “Granted the existence of God…” shifting my ground again and again and yet fighting for every inch of that batable and marshy terrain. In mundane matters, he was as shrewd an organizer as Arslan (if a more open and unsubtle one) and scarcely less hard a master. Irregularity offended him, neither abstractly nor practically, but in his personal feelings. An esthetic reaction, perhaps. Or a memorial of affection. Mrs. Bond had been regular. I was not. “I thought we’d agreed that if we’re going to keep this house together, we’ve both got to do our jobs!” I bowed before his dams as before Arslan’s floods.
Yet sometimes, unexpectedly, Franklin touched me with a perceptive kindness. “Where have you been, Hunt?”
My clothes were saturated with dust, my eye swollen all but shut, my shirt torn and a little messed with blood. “Walking,” I said, “in the corn.”
I liked to walk in the corn. From August on, when the great stalks stood higher than my head, the corn fields were a world apart, a world aloof and alien as pale Bukhara. I walked in the corn alone, or sometimes with a dog as a convenient switch by which to connect myself now and then with reality. After a late-summer rain, the field steamed. I walked in a dense green heat, my feet in the mud, my body and soul washed with sweat. Midges and mosquitoes twinkled. My ears hummed. And all around me the enormous grass-leaves hung and crowded, rubbing their moist rough blades against my clothes, shouldering and slapping as I pushed through the rows, spilling their drops upon my hair.
But it was in waiting autumn that I liked best to walk in the corn. It was dry then, colored like the yellow dust, a gold without luster. The blades still curved and drooped in the easy postures of life; but with every stir of air they clashed faintly, a sound of thin brass. Their edges cut, cruel grating cuts like those of stiff paper. I paced slowly through the dusty stillness, surrounded, surrounded—ahead, behind, to left, to right, above—by the great tawny leaves, alone in the harsh ripe corn.
I was teaching myself to see and hear in the dim world of the corn, as Arslan had taught me in the woods, and in the dazzling nights and colorless days of Bukhara. In the lion-colored noonday dusk of the corn, the eye lost itself. The brazen rustling had the very quality of silence. It was easy to drift in a hot, buzzing dream, down aisles cross-laced with ragged swords. But I was learning. So I heard, in the unresonant clangors that ran like muffled alarms through the corn with the changing breeze, a more purposeful rustle. I stood at gaze. Ahead, behind, the tall files closed in. The blades clashed. The bronze shadows crossed and waved. I walked on, stirring the blades carefully out of my way.
Again. But this time it was the wind. Again. A mist of gnats hung quivering in the heat. Dogs ranged sometimes in the corn. I waited.
He was two rows away from me, a dark shape without outline. I wiped my hand carefully and drew Arslan’s knife. One row. It was the dark Russian uniform. I stood with the knife held behind me. He stepped into my aisle, four yards away, perhaps. I had seen him before, I thought—a middle-aged lieutenant, big-eared and stupid-faced. I discarded my experimentally friendly greeting. All doubts were removed by the light in his pale eyes, the clubbed pistol in his red hand.
The corn slashed at me as I ran—head down, to save my eyes from the blades and my feet from the roots. I heard, over the pounding of my steps, the slower pounding of his. It seemed not unnatural to be hunted in the corn, and it seemed to follow (seemed, with the distorted clarity of heat waves) that if I could escape from the corn, the hunt would be over.
A stunning shock thudded my back, between my right shoulder and the base of my neck, a blow outrageously hard and heavy. I was scrabbling angrily in the hot-smelling dust. He must have thrown the gun at me; ergo, the gun was somewhere near. But my right arm refused to act, my neck and shoulders were heavy as stone. I heaved myself over, seeing the prop roots of the near stalks standing out like flying buttresses. The Russian plunged upon me like a falling cloud, and I realized that I had lost the knife.
I was initiated long since in the actuality of physical contact; it was old familiar business, serious, deliberate, and there could be nothing more real. He had the advantages of weight and position. But I had been thrown by Arslan. I knew all the art of the underdog.
He had my left wrist. Before he could gain the right, I got a grip on his left thumb, and bent, and as his right hand twisted and crushed, we strove in mutual torture. With furious joy I felt my wrist spring free. I writhed, gouged, suffered his clubbing fist. I was tipped—folded, rather—upon my side, my still-free hand (the immediate jewel of my soul) crushed under our double weight. He pulled busily at my clothes. My left eye was in the dust; my right contemplated a blond cornstalk. A terrific decision enacted itself: no! And I exploded in the self-forgetful fury that had burst me in the beginning so long ago. And though it had failed me then (even in total war somebody loses), now the Russian hunched backward off me, grunting. I spraggled up to knees and elbows. Arslan’s miraculous knife winked in the dust. My hand sprang to meet it, and I crouched and panted.
He backed away, shaking his head, grinning, stumbled on his gun (to each his own), paternally dusted and holstered it, and disappeared gradually through the successive curtains of the corn, still backing, still grinning, still shaking his head.
I tidied myself triumphantly. My nose was bleeding. (Had he his hurts before? Ay, on the front.) I sat among the shattered stalks and nursed it patiently, while the long shafts of sunlight broke among the corn.
Franklin looked at me with care. He didn’t ask, “What happened?” He didn’t ask, “Who was it?” He didn’t ask even, “Are you all right?” He set his chin and turned away into the kitchen, his back broad to my gratitude. “Why don’t you wash up,” he said, “while I fix the fire?”
Winter came, passed, with the beautiful ashes of wood fires under the grate, to be carried out and shed like hushed snowflakes or blessings on the frigid earth; with dried corn, hard and dimpled, the seeds that could not sow themselves (corn, that hapless species, reproducing only by the service of man). The deer pushed thicker into the easy browsing of the fields and fencerows, and were shot with our clumsy arrows. And the Russians departed, sudden and noisy as a migration of purple martins, with great pretense of secrecy. Spring came, speciously wholesome, feeding eyes and tongues while winter-lean bellies grew leaner still. Merely, winter rains changed to spring rains. Yet it was true that the skewed earth thrust us ever deeper, for a time, into the sunshine; and it was presumable that these green shoots would bear again the golden fruits of their fathers.
After the long, vague days of mist, I loved the sleek sky; loved especially the clear and brilliant clouds, truest white on their heights and ridges, shadowing their own slopes with the blue of ashes. They stood pure and definite like piled snow, unneatly firm as some engraving by William Blake. What had Blake said about line? Outline is reality. He had said it Blakishly, of course. Standing in far air, the real clouds shone and shadowed. But at close range they would be edgeless, lineless—a vague mist, obscure and obscuring. Yet that very obscurity was the sum of myriad surfaces, the entangled glitter of a billion crystal spheres, each comprised in a bounding line of mathematical trueness and demonstrable reality; so that (unless, as was probable, my grasp of Newtonian physics was infirm) the slovenly gray of Kraftsville’s mists and heaven’s exploded clouds was only, in generalized form, the radiant precision of the misty rainbow.
I watched the nobility of the ranked clouds, passing, with that stateliest motion perceivable by human eyes, across the high hemisphere of Heaven. Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud. Well, it was not the thorns of life that had drawn my blood, and I was, to all perception, tame, slow, and humble; but certainly I could feel my leaves falling. (Oops, there goes another—hectic red, that one.) Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth. Alas, poor Shelley. It took more than withered leaves. And no doubt Pluto, as much as Earth, had its forever-sequent spring.
Patterns of leaves upon the wind, billowing flights that went nowhere, sails of green lace that moved nothing, moved me. Through March and April I drifted, my horse unguided, along fencerows and woods’ margins. As burnist silver the leaf onglidez That thick con trill on everich bough. The little leaves, furred with their delicate birthcoats, colors of silver, colors of wine, and the hearttouching innocence of young green, misted the great elastic branches that surged and sprang in ponderous sweeps above my head. Every species had its shape—the lifting fountains of the dying elms, the broad layered pyramids of oaks, the rustic bouquets of the little blossoming redbuds. Already the eager maples spread broad leaves, like flocks of green stars, upon the wind.
They were not my friends, the trees. My friend was the chestnut horse that moved under me, warm in the sterile air. But I admired the trees, those static galleons, rooted like me in the graves of their ancestors. They drank the traveling air, the dead radiance of a star. They shadowed their shapes upon the passing wind and light. Every leaf held its place, a stitch of the tapestry, disordered by every breeze, primly returning with every calm. And when at last it fell, its one flight, spinning and beautiful, bore it to the grave of its birth. Year by year the epicycles wheeled. The trees remained. They bent; they broke at last; but they did not budge.
Under the trees, my chestnut’s hooves among the thick gold stars of dandelions, I took relief in the slow, traveling spiral of the world, the great pacific resultant of how many billion impassioned problems, the moving equilibrium of all forces. Humanity was a plague. Locustlike, we ripped holes in the world’s fabric. The locusts met their controlling limits—birds and starvation, fungi and disease—and the fabric healed itself; and mankind had met Arslan. But as the plague was more ravaging, so the control was more drastic.
Passive and exquisite as the fretwork of Taj Mahal, the viruses laid their irrefutable pattern upon the world. Whatever we saw was through that screen. Yet by what perversion of language was passive the opposite of active? The viruses did not suffer, did not allow, were not done to. It was they that, without action, performed: performed their existence and their replication upon the struggling active world. Passive, impassive, unpassional, they cancelled the activity of passion. And passionate men who suffered and inflicted would, marked with that multiplying pattern, vanish in incorrigible uniqueness.
Royal in nothing else, I forgot nothing, I learned nothing. All my meditations moved around him, returning to their premises unimproved. Other things faded, leaves in seasonal decline; the trunk remained, imperceptibly enlarged, armored in fissuring scabs.
“I have made you ashamed,” he had said. Shame was a trivial word for it. He had looted me of boyhood, manhood, freedom. The key to my door was in his pocket. “But someday, Hunt, you will be able to say, ‘Arslan is my friend.’ And you will be proud.”
He would be drunk when he said these things to me—the real drunkenness that closed down upon him after the second bottle was opened, when for a moment anger flickered in his eyes and he weighed once more the hazards of uncontrol in the scales of his enormous Realpolitik, and relaxed with a small but total shrug. Or it would be passion, the real desire that was to his everyday lust as moon to morning star. “There is a woman that I have loved.” His look was luminous, his hands as steady as a singing string. “Do you understand?” No, I did not understand. “That was a year ago—eight thousand miles away. But I shall see her again. And if I love her again, that will be good. That will be good, Hunt.” I did not understand, I could not conceive, what such a verb as love might mean to Arslan. Had he held her, that fabulous woman, against his square, blunt body, and said into her ear the actual words, “I love you"? No; it would have been another language, eight thousand miles away. What language—and what intonation? Had he looked into her eyes? But he would not have spoken. Lying with his bare feet cocked on the bedpost, his drink neatly clasped on his belt buckle, “I have been afraid to father a child,” he said. His seed was sown like the cottonwoods’; battalions of his children must have sprung already from the raped planet. “Because I loved her.” Father, then, was a word he understood better than I. But afraid? “Rusudan,” he said. “Her name is Rusudan.”
Love. The word became transparent to me, and I saw it empty of all signification. A sound so used and misused should have had a multitude of meanings—contradictory, by nature, imprecise, but real. Yet it stood in my mind as uncontaining as a nonsense syllable, and I puzzled seriously and honestly at it. Verb transitive: I love—but what, or whom? No feeling I could find or imagine in myself seemed to couple me as subject appropriately with any object.
Rusudan. They were syllables in a void, and yet the name was dark with meaning and power. He would not have spoken to Rusudan of friendship. Did I want ever to say, “Arslan is my friend"? No; I wanted him in some relationship utter and forthright—lover or master or enemy—nothing so complex and temperate as a friend.
Yet it was Arslan and Rusudan who put content into that dry vessel for me at last; so that, returned from Bukhara, I could tell Franklin Bond, “I love him.” They were complete, those two, each alone; but when they touched, they struck fire. That was what I saw; and what my greedy heart asserted (I can so ride no hands, and my bike is just as fast as yours) was, I can feel that, too.
My place in the pattern of things was, apparently, to serve beside the throne, one of the perquisites of royalty in Kraft County. Franklin had inherited, by force of some cosmic law of survivorship, the position for which he had been born, meshing the rusty gears of civilian government to the subterranean motor of his KCR. But his ambition was closed in its own nutshell. His kingdom was an enclave in the unbounded universe of Arslan’s curved world.
It was after Mrs. Bond’s death that my floating position in Kraftsville solidified (obscure insect in posture of flight, suspended for inspection in clear plastic). It was more than a year later, after the troops’ withdrawal, that the last veils fell away from it. I was (since the Russians, faithful in their fashion, had taken the brothel with them) the only visible vestige of Arslan’s regime. I had notably failed to repudiate him and all his works. I had declined the helping hand of Kraftsville custom. I was queer. Neither my parents’ virtue nor my patron’s power could shield me from the fallout of outraged propriety. There was a certain civility in my reception by the adult population, ranging coldly from the Cut Courteous through the Snub Outright. My horses were less fortunate.
The first was shot from ambush, and I assumed that the arrow was meant for me. Indeed, perhaps it was—the local standard of accuracy was not high—and the campaign may thus have launched itself accidentally. The second was lamed by a simple pit-trap. Then I understood, and became cautious. It was months before the third was killed, and that by a somewhat desperate night attack whose perpetrator I almost caught. (But the mare was crying, her belly slashed, and in Arslan’s absence I had forgotten the trick of turning from one pain to inflict another.) Winter favored me; but with the spring my last mare and her foal were hamstrung, and a little later the four-year-old chestnut I had bought from the Munseys was poisoned. I was resigned. I would keep no horses that year. Next year I would be ready; I studied my defenses and began, very slowly, to prepare my counter-offensive. But with rich September came Arslan, and touched me with his marred right hand.
He stayed for four weeks and three days, an exact month of the calendar. And closely and distantly, in and out of focus, I considered him. Sometimes he presented himself to me as a mathematical diagram, the Platonic idea of Arslan, sometimes as a reality of close and radiant flesh. He was, take him for all in all, a man—menschlichallzumen-schlich—and I was also, oddly enough, a man.
When he went, there was no talk of my going with him. What was perhaps the first genuine and independent action of my life was wholly negative, passive, and imperceptible—all the more genuine for that. Out of turmoil and dread, joy of Leila, jealousy of Sanjar, I collected a quietness, I enacted a decision: I did not choose to go with him.
Sanjar and Leila were all his household now. I had canceled Rusudan, as she me, and that in itself was a victory more honorable than triumph. For the first time I began to see the past as past, the future as possible. The probability that he wanted me with him approached the infinitesimal, but that was irrelevant. I did not choose to go; therefore he would not ask, still less command me. Hourly, momently, my world refocused, my eyes blinked off dry tears and fading illusions. I acknowledged truth after truth—the shabby usefulness of his depleted regiment (pockets of fertility, unarmored and feebly arrowed, lurked in the dilapidating jungles of a broken world), the convenience of Kraftsville (a road, a memory; rest and recreation, the playing out of games), the aptness of his shrunken meiny and shriveled hand (the perfect end of Arslan’s success must be inglorious).
It was a wholesome feeling. I had made the elementary discovery that marked, perhaps, the beginning of maturity as of childhood: This is myself. I am separate.
Through that month, knowing that he would go but not knowing how soon, I schooled myself for his departure. It was educational. I understood now how deeply I had counted on his return, and what little grounds I had had to expect it. Like a jilted lady of romance, I had staked my life on the farthest of outside chances, resigned myself with enthusiasm to a oneway journey into the ultimate pale realms of fantasy. He had come and halted me. He had put a body of solid flesh into my bed—and if it was not his body, it was all the more certainly real. He had come, and refocused the world for me, and he would go again. So far was certain. But not even the most heterodox predicted a third coming.