Brutus paid little attention to the Army Corps of Weather Prophets. They weren’t calling for snowfall, but then again, they weren’t calling for more war in the Balkans either. Or in the Middle East, for that matter. The government-sponsored stooges came on Armed Forces Radio with news of pending sunshine and brokered deals, sounding just like the spring training reports emanating from Florida. Hope sprang eternal. Back home, the Phillies signed another number-four starter; here, the Serbs signed another piece of anti-landmine legislation. Neither, Brutus knew, would last the season. The disembodied Voice of America also provided five minutes of English-language news at the top of every hour. It spoke of the lingering effects of a cyanide spill that had polluted the Tisza River and “devastated the livelihoods” of fishermen and chefs of Szeged’s famous fish soup; there was an update on the ongoing debate, unresolved after a decade of legal mumbo jumbo in the Hague, about a dam on the Hungary-Slovakia border; and of course there was talk of more summits and of the bright prospects for eternal peace next door in the once and future Yugoslavia. America was at war with terror.
“Asshole,” Brutus said, and switched the radio off.
In the eyes of the politicians and international tribunals, the prospects of long-term peace in the Balkans bore little relationship to the ongoing efforts of the civilian populations to establish their newly capitalistic lives — or to the army’s perpetual presence here in the middle of nowhere. The ground rules changed after 9/11 and no one knew what to expect anymore. Oversight of the few U.S. Army bases remaining in Eastern Europe — far from the active theaters — fell through the administrative cracks. Things worked differently here, if they worked at all.
Brutus had been in Hungary for almost seven months and in all that time had not stepped foot out of Taszár. He didn’t have clearance. The rec room had a high-def TV with a satellite hookup and a computer lab with e-mail and internet access, but letters from his sister Joan remained his main source of news from home. The rest of it was straight-up propaganda. She wrote once a week and sometimes sent books or magazines, which arrived with greasy thumbprints, or worse, pages sticking together. With a few minutes to spare, he reread her most recent letter. According to the postmark, it had only taken five days to reach him. People said that the frequent letters he sent home took about ten.
Joan’s letter was handwritten in purple ink. “Dear Fancy Lad,” it began.
“I think I told you that the Mambo has been talking about moving down South,” his sister had written. “Do you remember that old bitch Blue Moon? Well she sold the house she was renting out over in Roxborough and bought a shop of some kind down in Florida. She offered the Mambo a job and a place to live for free so I think she’s going to go. She hates all this snow and cold weather here as much as I do. You’re crazy the way you like this weather. Ha Ha Ha. I’ll send you her new address when she gets down there but you should call her soon!
“Me and the boyz will be moving into her house and there’s a room for you when you come home. James put all your books in boxes and they’re already over there in the basement up on some wooden pallets for when it floods!”
The barracks came back to life and disrupted his concentration. Someone in the adjacent room shouted obscenities over his country music. Brutus stood up and locked the door. The footsteps and fag jokes and hillbilly guitar licks annoyed the living fuck out of him. All he wanted to do was read a goddamn letter. He looked at his watch. It was getting close to time.
“J. J. loves the backyard and he asks every day when you’re coming over to play catch. I tried to get him to give up the army T-shirt like you asked me to but he wouldn’t. His school has uniforms now though so he only wears it to bed and sometimes on weekends anyhow. James got a promotion and now he’s learning how to make web pages. Did you get the e-mail he sent?”
Brutus checked his watch again and saw that he was going to be late.
Fuck it.
“I ran into Elvin and those guyz over at this new Mexican joint and they all said hello. He got a job now down at the casinos in A.C., not as a dealer but something like that he said. He was high but I think it was just some weed.”
Brutus replaced the letter in the envelope and stood up. “Time to meet the marines,” he said. In his jacket pocket he carried a paperback copy of The Wretched of the Earth; the Magyar Posta and many re-readings had tattered its corners and broken its spine.
Lieutenant Colonel Sullivan had invited a vanload of jarheads down from Budapest for what he billed as an informal information session. An unusual Big Brother program where troops from another service who had been in-country longer got to lead seminars on Adapting to Life in a Cinderblock Barn at the End of the Known World. Another group of marines, new arrivals from the Middle East, were temporarily stationed across the way in the base’s restricted area, where by all unofficial accounts they were beating up Arabs in ways that made those Abu Ghraib photos look like souvenir shots from Sea World. Brutus wanted to get in there to see for himself.
Outside, there was no distinction between the clouds and the sky. They had a different kind of cold in Hungary than in America. A dry freeze penetrated everything and sucked all the moisture from his skin. The fatigues were useless, but Brutus didn’t really mind the cold, not as much as most people. It was definitely going to snow.
Word on the street was that these marines from Budapest had the coziest gig in all of Europe, which was to say the coziest gig in the world. They patrolled the embassy in a city that wasn’t exactly a hotbed of international terrorism — not yet anyway — and lived in some kind of mansion up on Castle Hill that overlooked the Danube and the parliament building. Apparently they had their own private bar complete with American whiskey and a pool table with red, white, and blue felt. Brutus had to hand it to the Hungarians: talk about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. He found himself sympathizing more and more with the natives as his dissatisfaction with his own government grew. He took exception to the army’s division of labor and, as an intellectual exercise, even flirted with Marxism now and then, but had yet to consummate the relationship. His presence in Hungary provided further evidence of capital’s international expansion. That he had learned to appreciate the Manifesto while in the army made him understand why so many brothers had converted to Islam while in prison back in the sixties.
The marines were out of uniform but neatly dressed. They walked like roosters in a mating ritual, and each carried a big bottle of Jack Daniel’s and grease-stained paper bags from McDonald’s. There were five of them — a white guy, a Latino, and two brothers, along with a white staff sergeant, who said a few curt words of introduction. Brutus did his best to appear engaged. When the staff sergeant got done flapping his gums, everyone divided into groups and went inside. Though it wasn’t expressly discussed, they split up along racial lines. The Latinos went to one room, the two sets of black people to two others. The staff sergeant and all the white men took the generals’ executive lounge. Brutus followed an Uncle Sambo Marine named Doornail down the hall.
Everyone in the military got a nickname in basic training; it was one way to strip a man of his identity and replace it with one incapable of independent thought. No different than a slave being forced to adopt his master’s name. Brutus already had his nickname when he signed up, and somehow it got picked up on the inside. His friends had called him Brutus as long as he could remember. The name was the only thing that he ever got from his father, but that didn’t prevent Joan from calling him Fancy Lad, on account of what she considered his anal retentiveness, but what Brutus thought of as simple self-respect. He hated Doornail immediately for that very reason. No self-respect. He was another military nigger, America’s modern equivalent of the house slave. Shuckin’ and jivin’—and all too often dying — for the Man.