He shaved and bathed. I don’t smell bad anymore, so where are you?
He took a tour of the entire ward … but she was nowhere to be found. Downstairs in the examination room now sat Nurse Olga, accompanying the Major on his rounds was Nurse Olga, temperatures were taken by the grave and austere Nurse Olga. And She is no longer here. In the air fade the locks of her hair, on the floor, in the dust of my pining, her footprint is no longer there. … He spoke automatically, but with the piety of a past, imagined happiness, which he believed in to the tears. I have closed the window the more to be alone, with you to be alone … and he watched himself meanwhile invent that poetic window, yet nevertheless closed it with a vast sorrow, as if nailing himself shut, and a torrent of weeping broke through the constricted throat. Getting dark. Those are black shadows drinking my tears … and Melkior dissolved into soundless sobs in the twilight of the hospital room.
He is saying Can you hear me? in an ugly voice, but the little girl doesn’t seem to hear. She is standing in the middle of a deserted street staring straight ahead, meekly and somehow patiently, as if she trusts nothing but silence.
She is standing still like a big expensive doll with deep-set dark eyes. An arrow is embedded in her small plump back, all the way through, from one shoulder to the other, with a small caesura in the middle where it crosses the dimple in her back. The girl is standing slightly hunched, the better, presumably, to adapt her stance to the steel fibula that has pierced her back; her arms hang down her sides and her head is thrust forward in a kind of humility.
“Hey? Can you hear me?” he shouts, in fear this time, for he is thinking the little girl needs urgent care. But what is to be done? Still she is silent and motionless. He doesn’t know whether he ought to touch her at all. Is she dead?
“Please tell me: does it hurt?”
“It hur … urts,” he barely hears the little voice, frightened but somehow sustained and multiplied in echoes sounding from several directions simultaneously, as if a children’s choir has sung it in canon. … It is only then that he looks around, his gaze sweeping the breadth of the streets. There are seven or eight more little girls, equally transfixed with arrows, equally motionless and silent and slightly hunched, with their heads thrust forward. And they are all staring straight ahead humbly, as if patiently expecting something. … Or … perhaps they expect nothing any more, having already surrendered to a horrible enchantment, motionless, pierced, abandoned like dolls after a mad, cruel game.
He tries to find out who has done it and why, and why little girls, but there is nobody to be seen. He sets off in search of someone, to call for help, for it is appalling to see the little girls standing there, staring humbly ahead with arrows in their small, innocent flesh. How strange, he thinks, there’s not a drop of blood on them anywhere! And their wounds are not serious or fatal, as if this was done deliberately, so they could live, and they are alive and I could almost say healthy, they could move, pull the arrows out of their bodies and run back home to their Mamas. … Why are they standing still like that? This frightens him and he sets off down the streets in search of someone. But there is nobody to be seen anywhere in town. The town is empty.
The Alligator! flashes the most terrible thought of all.
“That’s right,” the Melancholic confirms from somewhere, invisible, “he passed through here this morning.”
“This morning? And what time is it now?”
“Night. But the Sun stood still to light his way. He’s a son of the Sun, being a victor. All victors are sons of the Sun.”
“So those little girls have been standing there like this since this morning?”
“Hee, hee, the little dolls … stayed behind.” That is Rover’s animal smell, it is by his smell that Melkior knows him. “The Tartar archers passed through, everybody ran off, they shot the little dolls, hee, hee … and left.” Shot and left … he repeats, but cannot understand why Rover is laughing like that, almost lasciviously. The poor little innocent ones … But he has no time to feel sorry. He hurries back: they must be helped as soon as possible. The arrows must be plucked from those small bodies, the little girls must be freed from the terrible reptile’s thrall and returned to life. And then I’ll tell them an amusing adventure story for children to entertain them. … Running back, he is singing the Paternoster … but when he reaches the street again the little girls are gone. From an old dilapidated house where living redbrick flesh is exposed under the crumbling front he hears the unruly laughter of women. The women are standing at the windows in various stages of undress, some of them quite naked, and laughing at him, tipping him winks and beckoning him upstairs. Draped over the windowsills are bedclothes put out to air: white sheets; amber, blue, and scarlet silk eiderdowns; large white pillows trimmed with lacework; foamy, transparent, insubstantial negligees; lain-in, slightly rumpled pajamas that have retained the outlines and fragrances of those female bodies. … Lust’s props with living naked laughing flesh sway luxuriously above his head.
“The little girls … Where are they?” he asks, and hears repeated salvos of their laughter.
“It hur-urts, hee-hee-hee,” the window women laugh cantabile, in canon. Above them, high up, coming out from the top floor, the coloratura laughter of a birdlike voice stands out by dint of its penetrating trills. She is beautiful, the most beautiful of them all. She has plumped out her lovely full bosom on the sill like two ruddy peaches and is performing her laughter with a kind of manic perseverance.
The laughter has been planted there by ATMAN as bait to the passenger through the deserted town. And she has been given the birdlike warble as a sign of his particular benevolence. She is Head Mermaid, the Honorable Mother in this house of sin for Tartar archers, the victors.
“Viviana, Viviana,” he tries to call out to her from down below, in a pious whisper as if he were praying, but his voice is soundless, it is only a dead breath of his terrible grief.
He would have cried out loud had he been able to. He looks for the entrance to the house, but finds none. He then flaps his arms, powerfully, like a swimmer, like an eagle, dun-feathered sky-dweller, and up he flies, leaving the ground below him. …
“Look, this one’s flapping his wings,” somebody said, “he’ll be crowing next.”
And Melkior indeed crowed for all he was worth, in a desperate scream, as if shaking off the night. Then he heard tittering. Earth was laughing at him.
“Morning, Mr. Rooster!” Mitar was giving him a dull matutinal look from above. “What’s the matter, did you give her one in your sleep?”
The heads above the blankets laughed flatteringly in honor of Mitar’s witticism.
“Say what?” Melkior was still listening to Viviana’s laughter.
“You were mounting a hen by the look of you,” Mitar was consolidating his success like an actor. “Flapping your wings, crowing …”
“Oh, I was flying …” Melkior thought aloud, tying up the threads of dream and reality.
“And they say dreams mean nothing!” Mitar sat down on the edge of his bed and bent over his ear: “I’ve got it right here,” he was pressing the top pocket of his white coat with his hand, “your ticket. You were dreaming about flying, well, it’s come true. You’re going home.”
“Home?” repeated Melkior mechanically, but, oddly enough, he was not moved at all. He marveled at his indifference. Look, the “private” cannibal story had come to a sudden end! The redheaded Asclepian had assumed power, with no bloodshed, literally with love, and the castaways were saved. Very soon afterward the natives came to realize how fortunate they were not to have eaten them. Instead of the pleasure of several meals which they would have soon forgotten, they began to enjoy the lasting benefits of the small-scale civilization which those wise and experienced men soon established in the primitive conditions of the savage island. Melkior had no time at the moment to enumerate their achievements in full—