He tried to listen to himself. But what should he say? Romans, friends, countrymen … But what if they responded? Polyphemus the Cyclops, the beast … No, he could not enunciate that either. Then it came to him in a flash merely to say Parallelikins, as if it were a name. Melkior said it aloud.
The Lord Chamberlain leapt up, cut to the quick. It was as if he had been awaiting that very word to get his terrible excitement going. Has someone dared utter it? was what his astounded look meant. Using a finger he sicced Rover on Melkior. Rover was off like a shot. He turned around with catlike speed and, hands outstretched, scampered toward Melkior.
“I am Rover, the eldest of five,” he snarled at him.
Melkior remembered the Melancholic’s trick of … He hastily tore two buttons off his striped robe and repeated his words:
“Don’t do that, Rover — I’ll give you these two four-rupee pieces …”
“Hah, two buttons!” leered Rover derisively. “Get them sewn on your own! Surrender!”
“All right, I surrender — here,” Melkior put his hands up. What’s this? They won’t accept their own currency any more? “I surrender, Rover, take me prisoner.”
“What’ve you got? Gimme a ten spot!” Rover stood facing him, short but broad-shouldered.
“Haven’t got a ten spot — the Tartars took it,” Melkior made another attempt to make some headway using the formulas of this weird world. But it suddenly appeared as if none of that worked any longer. Even the Melancholic laughed:
“Heh, how can there be any Tartars here?”
“Well, you said yourself they took away your …”
“I only said it … tan-gen-tially,” specified the Melancholic and set up an ugly cackle, which Rover took up in a modified, animal version. Even the Lord Chamberlain laughed, a dignified and dry laugh.
Why, they are genuinely insane! thought Melkior, taking offense, now they’re mocking me in the bargain. He went across to the Melancholic and sat down on his bed. The man used his foot to warn him to get off. This offended Melkior further; he now wanted to clear things up at all costs.
“Very well, I’ll say it to you from here. You mentioned Tartars twice, and now you’re laughing? Are you laughing at your own madness then? Unless you meant ‘doctors’ when you said ‘Tartars.’”
“Since when do doctors have anything to do with Tartars?” laughed the Melancholic derisively. “I may be mad, but I’m not daft. Listen,” he spoke to the other two, “doctors and Tartars — do they have anything to do with each other?”
All three were laughing at Melkior.
What’s this supposed to mean, he thought in embarrassment, madmen laughing at me? And he was already prepared to think it was all just a con game played by disbelieving malingering clowns, a test to see whether his presence was not a trap devised by the army authorities, but their laughter suddenly stopped and all three pricked their ears in fright at a strange sound from the corridor.
Indeed, even Melkior could hear a kind of distant mournful wail, like the howling of a sick dog. Melkior tried to approach the door, to peek through the keyhole or at least put his ear to it — what was it that had frightened them so much? — but Rover blocked his way in a soundless leap and gave him a terrified look telling him to stop.
“Hssst, don’t move,” whispered the Melancholic, quaking.
“Why not?” Melkior whispered himself, without realizing it.
“Wolf,” whispered Rover inaudibly, between his palms. “He’s hungry.”
“A wolf … here? If there are no Tartars, there are no wolves either,” Melkior defied them.
“There is one … in Number Sixteen,” the Melancholic implored him to believe. “We also thought at first … But later on I saw it: all black and warty. The tail … the teeth …!” he shivered like a man in a fever. Using his index finger he confidentially invited Melkior to come closer, and whispered in his ear: “You’re right, there can’t be a wolf in here — he made it up, the primitive. The only animals he’s ever heard of are wolves and bears. He’s never heard about alligators, so … never mind the moron. It’s an alligator in Number Sixteen,” whispered the Melancholic in an even lower voice, “a dreadful one, huge, nine meters long, needs ten beds to sleep on, I saw it with my own eyes …” Now what was heard was a terrible roar. “Aha! Can you hear it?”
“But what’s it doing in here?” asked Melkior in feigned confidence.
“Hah, ‘what?’ There’s one in every town. A secret weapon. They crunch everything with their teeth, not even a tank can hurt them.”
The Melancholic was speaking with the certainty of a man in the know. A silly kind of joy came to life inside Melkior: a momentary, quaint illusion derived from a mad story. A flash of hope. Against Polyphemus the cannibal there rose the dreaded Alligator. Samson, Achilles, the Golem, the national giant, crushing everything underfoot, invincible! … And his imagination began narrating to Melkior The Great Victory—an epic at the Central Military Hospital Neurology Department — fiddling all day long to the vengeful joy of the defenseless.
And when night fell and the smell of boiled cabbage died behind the locked door, in the lightless room, in that madmen’s dark, there resonated the dignified sleep of the Lord Chamberlain and Rover’s vehement snore. That was when the Melancholic crept out of his bed on a secret mission and quietly approached Melkior on tiptoe.
“Here, take a look,” indicating those windows, “think I forgot? See?”
A window or two was lit on each floor.
“You mean, some of them are lit?”
“Some? Ha-haaa,” he knew more, which was why he was laughing. “Try to remember which ones are lit now … it’ll be quite different later.”
“Of course it will — people go in and out, turn lights on and off …”
“Hah, in-and-out … And why do they go in-and-out at certain times only, eh? At night, hah? All night long. I’ve been watching it for a long time. While I had my pencil I took notes, well, now I memorize. About that other business … doctors, Tartars … I had to step in or that fellow would have killed you. It mustn’t be known they’re here, that’s the whole thing. Hah, they took away my pencil but I deciphered it without one! Ha-ha, you Tartar bastards …” laughed the Melancholic with strange contempt. He mused for a moment, then spoke up again, offhand; it was as if he had not been saying what was really on his mind: “Do you like to smoke? I like to watch the ember in the dark … when I’m talking with someone. You know you’re talking to a living man then; when he inhales, the smoker, his face gets lit up, his eyes shine, and all the darkness comes alive. All very well, but how are you to come by a cigarette in here … that is to say, you could get one, but the matches … They won’t let madmen use fire or they’d burn the whole … One thing I’ve never understood is why it says ‘Safety Matches’ on the box. Why are they afraid of a fire if it’s ‘Safety’? And Nero set fire to Rome without matches. How do you suppose he went about it — rubbed sticks together? But it takes time, which means it was malice aforethought. Or used a flint and tinder … but that, too, is malice aforethought. Now, I like fire in general, I like to watch the flames … Devils dancing, sticking their long tongues out at each other. Licking and stroking each other, perhaps even in a sexual way (there’s always a she-devil or two there), cracking and crackling, enjoying the fire all the time, damn them … Wait! Look out!” he suddenly took a firm hold of Melkior’s arm and squeezed it tight in a state of expectation. He was looking at the windows opposite, really waiting for something: “Of course. There, I-3’s off … III-5 is off next, and II-2 goes on, of course, exactly by the system!”