This is all going to be over soon, Professor, said Klemperer, I promise, so just try to relax. I’d offer you weed but we can’t smoke it on the job. Sudden laughs choked me, stopped me from answering. I closed my mouth, clamped my teeth together, I rocked on the jump seat. Now, Professor, there’s no need for that, Klemperer went on. Luxemburg said: Can’t you see he’s upset, asshole? Klemperer, his eyes canine and moist in the mirror, apologized. I didn’t mean anything by it, Professor. Ruts opened in the road beneath us. Luxemburg’s black boots reflected the empty, tree-edged sky flowing outside, in the so-called world. Dampness leaked through my shirt. He’s all sweaty, said my benefactor. No kidding, said Klemperer. And it’s going to be a hot one today, right, Professor? Luxemburg was lifting another thermos. I leaned forward; she took the butt from my lips, and replaced it with the thermos. This one held cold, sweet tea, and I drank it with the same speed I had consumed the papaya juice. A news announcer started to speak, a woman with a sculptured voice, but Klemperer switched back to the jazz station before she could finish a word.
An abrupt chain-link fence rose from the auburn dirt, and Klemperer slowed. When we stopped, Luxemburg got out and opened the door for me, watched me step down. I stumbled as I made contact with the earth, and she grabbed my upper arm to keep me from falling. Klemperer, without preamble, climbed out and unzipped his fly. The air smelled like rue and cortaderia, as well as asphalt and exhaust. DSP signs (sky-blue letters on white) bolted to the fence rattled in the wind. In the fence, a gate, on the gate a padlock, beyond the gate, with no visible preamble, a beaten dirt track began in the tangle of rue. I could see nothing beyond the waving plants except taller grasses deeper into the field. Klemperer’s urine splashed luxuriously.
In the van, a service radio chimed. Luxemburg leaned in through the passenger window to answer it. Static blurred what her fellow officer or superior was saying (I imagined, stupidly, that it was Sanchis Mira, I summoned up that mighty mustache) but she understood it or pretended to, and she assented. Yes, roger that, she said. Roger that, cried Klemperer, as he shook his dick (I’d turned my head to keep it out of my vision, but I saw his foreskin sliding back into place over his broad, bright-purple glans). Luxemburg trotted around the blue van, now carrying the shovel, her whistle thumping lightly against her chest. She unlocked the padlock and Klemperer motioned me to walk forward. I had reached the door when he said, Okay, that’s good. Luxemburg came up behind me. I thought she was going to hit me with the shovel, but instead I heard its blade strike the earth and felt her fingers on my wrists. The handcuffs opened. Klemperer told me to pick up the shovel and get walking. I didn’t obey, at first, I was staring at the waving leaves of a cinquefoil plant next to his spreading urine. Come on, Professor, get going, said Klemperer. He unholstered his gun. The metal sighed against the leather. Two wet spots darkened the gusset of his sky-blue pants. The serrated, silvered leaves trembled. The dust soaked up his urine.
Klemperer, as he shuffled along behind me, hummed a phrase from the Dog Symphony. More than twelve hours had passed without my hearing it, I calculated as I inhaled the sweet, high smell of the rue, the grass growing among its stalks, the earth itself. As I followed the single, sinuous path, I imagined we were approaching a facility, one that resembled the Parque Presidente Sarmiento, with its swimming pool (I don’t know why I thought there would be a swimming pool but I did, I unquestionably did) and its bizarre red-brick colonnade. I called over my shoulder (the shovel’s still-cool edge brushed my face) to ask Klemperer where we were going. He said not to worry, that this was Department property and no one would bother us, we’d be finished here in a few minutes. The grasses rose higher and higher, and I saw that we’d reached a deep thicket of Cortaderia selloana, the famous Argentine pampas grass. Watch out for the Pampas hares, cried Klemperer. I laughed, and my laugh vanished like smoke under the faultless sky. No clouds, no birds, not a single plane visible, just a vacant, hard blue that the tips of the tallest grasses seemed to touch.
Let no one say that Pasternak regards himself as above manual labor. I had a shovel. This meant: digging. The ground sloped, this I knew too, though I could not tell if it sloped upward or downward. At times it seemed we were ascending and at times descending. The unchanging, smoothed sky prevented me from developing any real idea. Klemperer called me over; he kept the gun ready. The grasses closed above us, only a narrow, oblong strip of sky could be discerned.
I used the shovel edge to chop down the harder stems blocking our path and Klemperer called out approvingly. That’s good thinking, Professor, no wonder you did so well in academia. He understood, of course, what the shovel meant to me, what I knew it to mean. He understood as well the absurd and obscene fantasies that it inspired. And he regarded these fantasies as nothing. He even began to whistle again, to feign absorption in his whistling, rigidly keeping his face averted from me, the shovel in my hand, alive with sun as his whistles reached an intolerable fluidity and pitch — his mastery of the music was incredible; a born whistler, a man whose whistling outstripped all his other talents. He did not stop whistling as he unzipped again and started to piss. This time he fully turned his back, lifting his chin skyward and whistling. His cap fell to the grass and revealed the crown of his head. A nude pink spot among the luxurious hair surprised me. And I did nothing, I hacked away at a thick stem with my shovel. The shaft raised welts on my palm, and these had already begun to blister. I watched Klemperer piss, I heard the splashing urine form a counterpoint to his mighty whistling, and the grave, the earth, closed over my head, Pasternak — that’s what you thought.
I didn’t recognize the swift grayish object that flashed out of the thicket. Neither did Klemperer. Its speed so great, its presence so numinous, that he gave a small, sweaty cry of terror and leaped back. The gray creature scurried between his legs and he tried to dodge again, but this time he missed his footing and fell to the grass. I moved before I knew I was moving. That’s how I overcame the insult. That’s the only way. Pasternak leaped forward and struck Klemperer’s face with the shovel.
The gun fell from his hand. He whistled, he whistled some more, yes. A whistling cry. My first blow opened a deep gash across his cheeks and nose, and I saw within the gash the pearly darkness that had also flowed from the torn lips of the woman Klemperer struck. The second blow destroyed Klemperer’s left eye. His right eye trembled and rolled as he thrashed beneath me. The third blow (and here my transcription becomes more precise) penetrated his skull, and gelatinous gray matter spattered my hands and face. Which is to say Pasternak’s hands and face. Which is to say the face and hands of Boris Leonidovich. Then Klemperer stopped whistling, but I did not stop striking. I raised the shovel and struck again, again, again. With each blow more pearly darkness flowed upward into the light, with each blow this darkness diluted itself, until I could no longer discern the difference between this pearly darkness and the hard sunlight. Klemperer soon stopped moving entirely. The mild, broken hitching of his chest ceased. I kept striking. His skull began to lose its structure. Now bright arterial blood decorated my arms and my face. Droplets flew into my mouth.
The gray creature, the Pampas hare, had observed all this. When I was finished with Klemperer, I raised my eyes to find it crouched, staring, its eyes fiery yellow, its pupils deep, velvety black, its paws and belly cloud-white. I dropped the shovel. The hare stayed there, utterly still, and then darted away. I watched its massive hind legs, its long ears (one notched from a predator’s bite), and its flame-like tail as it vanished. After that, quiet. No more whistling, no more pissing. No sound at all from Pasternak, which is to say me. I picked Klemperer’s gun from where it had fallen. A Browning; as noted, I knew its design. I thumbed the safety off — he had not yet done this, so great was his confidence in the departmental insult and its success — and leaned back against the unbroken stretch of grass thicket. The stiff stems supported me. The problem was clear. Luxemburg. I could not at first decide on the best way to deal with her. If I waited long enough she would arrive but she would arrive suspicious. If I fired a shot, to simulate my own execution, that would provide me with philosophical camouflage, and I could creep back along the path we had broken and attempt to shoot her by the side of the road. That was much riskier, as I could not guarantee my approach would be silent. The method I settled on was simple and stupid. I walked back toward the fence, pushed myself into a deep, dense area of the grass thicket halfway between the gate and the zone where Klemperer lay, and started shouting Luxemburg’s name.