Numbskull was right, and Melkior admitted it. Perhaps there really was in the little guy that curious kind of honesty which searches impatiently for a man so he can offer him both hands in friendship. Looking at the glass pane set in the canteen door, he saw a truly weird scarecrow in it. Two days earlier he had dressed in the company storeroom picking up from the smelly rag pile, without any particular intent, the first thing that came to hand, indifferently, what the hell, it didn’t matter what he put on, it was all foul humiliation and dirty travesty. The pieces of dismembered bodies, olive drab greasy-soiled, drenched with the sweat and pain of the poor deceased. From the shambles of the army storeroom of massacred clothing emerged Monster (previously known as Melkior), assembled from various parts of other people’s bodies, himself amazed to be walking on two legs like a man.
The Quartermaster Corps second lieutenant, an effeminately pretty and dandified young man, gave a giggle when Melkior came in to sign for his kit and asked him in an offhanded tone: wasn’t there anything better in there? Melkior replied: no there wasn’t, and set off, with a sleepwalker’s feeling of absence, across the empty parade ground, as if walking across some strange world invented by a cruel mind.
Encountering an officer there, he nodded and said, “Good morning, sir,” his hands dangling from the too short sleeves. The officer, a portly good-natured soul, burst out laughing and returned the greeting: “And a very good morning to you, lad. New boy, eh? My word, do you look elegant!” and gave another burst of laughter.
A father, thought Melkior with emotion. Perhaps he has a son, a gangling galoot like me … He didn’t realize he was now smiling as he thought back to the officer father. …
“Having a quiet chuckle, eh?” spoke Numbskull at his side. “Think I don’t know what I’m talking about, is that it? All right, just mark my words when you get yours, that’s all.”
“Not at all, sorry, it’s something I remembered …” He’s taken me under his wing! thought Melkior, but stifled the smile. “But what if you got yours? You keep fussing over me … Nettle could ‘read’ you ‘like a book,’ too.”
“Me? … unh-unh,” he shook his head with conviction. “I’m in his ledger as Numbskull, he doesn’t even waste his time reading me. Not interesting, tabula rasa. But you, now you’re a book, attractive reading, a chance for self-assertion: ‘watch me whup the bejesus out of the teacher.’”
“Well, you’re an intellectual, too — you attended the university …”
“Three semesters of chemistry, and even that wasn’t … I don’t even know all of the stuff with H-2 … But the University of Life, hah, now that’s something else again! … I had this pal, he was a real character! Lady walking a dog in the park, lets it off the leash, a bit of exercise, so good for iddy bitty’s digestion. So the doggie romps about, enjoying itself, and my pal gets to barking, lures it into a bush, tosses it into a sack … and sells it in another part of town. It became quite a case in the end, got into the papers, you might’ve read about it. Well, he taught me to bark. He was an expert at doing impressions, he could do anything: idiots, animals, a squeaking wheel, bedsprings, an oil lamp fizzing out, you name it. We spent a winter in an abandoned barge on the Danube. Ice all around, we’re sitting there frozen to the bone, and he starts doing mosquitoes and summer bugs, conjuring up summer, God strike him (and He did) — and sure enough, it got warmer and somehow brighter, cheerier, as if it was a scorcher of a day outside. He could even do impressions of moths eating his ‘cold weather apparel.’ Will you listen to me: ‘cold weather apparel!’ Matter of fact, we had only a smelly sheepskin shepherd’s coat, Gosh how the fleece stunk, it had people running away from us, we wore it on an alternating basis, you put it on only when it was your turn to go out and scare up some grub. Grub meaning vittles — well, food.”
“So what happened to your pal? He’s no longer with us?”
“Probably not. He went over to this towboat — a boatman was giving a party for his saint’s day — and I never saw him again. Fell into the Danube drunk, maybe dragged off by the current?” Numbskull was speaking with indifference, as if about a lost bauble.
“But I still think he got out of the country — stowed away in the towboat. He had a fine singing voice — baritone — it was a treat to listen to him sing this Czech song ‘Water Flowing, Flowing’ … I’m thinking he cleared off for Czecholand up the Danube, got rid of me, well, I’d only have been a hindrance to him …”
“And you were left alone in the barge?”
“I went respectable. Got a job. Had a paper route, a milk route. Worked in a nightclub later, dress suit and all that, assistant to their magician, learned the tricks, coaxed watches off people’s wrists … set up in the watch-coaxing business on my lonesome, got locked up. ‘Water Flowing, Flowing’ … I was a circus ticket vendor, spare clown, too, the full understudy bit; I knew the program inside out but generally I was the one who got the pie in the face and the box in the ear — for real, I mean; no tricks. But that doesn’t matter. Love, love was my undoing. The prima donna Marie, star acrobat, missing her little finger — hang it all, which hand was it? Funny, I can’t remember anymore, a polar bear did it. She thought, What a lovely fur coat! And stroked him, and the fur coat went zap! and bit her pinkie off. But she was so clever at hiding it I can’t remember which hand it was. Well, left or right, it doesn’t matter, neither ever reached for me, for all that I would’ve loved to kiss all ten of her fingers. Well, nine.”
“The magician in the night club … by any chance would his name have been Adam?” asked Melkior, just to ask.
“Where did you pull Adam from? Hang on! Yes, it was Adam! How did you know? That’s right, his name was Adam, and he had some kind of artiste-style tag to it. Brahmaputra or something, I forget which. Adam, of course, that’s why they called his wife Eve.”
“Did she also work in the circus?”
“Ticket girl, one heck of a looker, that’s why the manager stuck her in the ticket booth. And this character Adam followed her — joined the circus himself. Oh, Eve rolled into everyone’s bed like a fragrant ripe quince. The whole troupe had tumbled with her in turns, down to the seal and the monkey, and finally it was my turn. I forgot my (heh, ‘my’) angel Marie and got going with Eve the ticket girl. Brahmaputra got to suspecting the fidelity of his lady wife, well, it was the talk of the dressing room after all, everyone knew, except himself of course, which was only to be expected, and she, the mega-whore, ‘confided’ in her husband, which again was only to be expected, told him I kept bugging her, she was at her wits’ end how to defend herself and people were starting to talk, if he hadn’t heard he’d hear soon enough … Of course he couldn’t believe such a beauty would fall for me, the failed son of an unknown father and a random mother, looking like they’d made me in a dustbin.