All this happened a very long time ago. And it’s hard now to argue that what happened so far back wasn’t inevitable. If the elephant hadn’t died, there wouldn’t be, on top of the old swimming pool, the playground that originally had some other name but quickly became known as Elephant Park; and the Little Fork High School football team would not be the Mammoths; and Stanley Tack wouldn’t have stayed in town, and the son he had with the Beedleman girl (she was expecting already that day of the windstorm, she just hadn’t told him yet) wouldn’t have married Eloise Miller, and today the town of Little Fork wouldn’t be half-full of Tacks of various generations, all descended (though they none of them know it) from a fire eater.
Jack Hewlett might not have given up the cloth and returned home to be with his girl, with Annette, who’d waited for him even after her letters stopped — only to be drafted two months later, no longer clergy, no longer exempt from war. He might not have died in France, a bullet through his lung. But who’s to say that the outcome of that battle — even of the entire war — hadn’t hinged, in one way or another, on the bravery of one man? He was, after all, an exceptional soldier. He took orders well.
Or at least it can be said: This world is the one made by the death of that elephant.
The Sunday following the storm, Reverend Hewlett looked out from the pulpit at his battered congregation. There were black eyes and broken arms from the wind, and the women with husbands stationed overseas were exhausted from cleaning up their own yards and their elderly neighbors’ besides. It was a good town that way. These people believed in things. Eloise Miller, unhurt and pink, slept in her mother’s arms through the service. A green bonnet framed her face.
Hewlett, under his robe, was thin. He’d lost five pounds that week. His stomach felt empty even when it was full, so why bother to fill it?
Stanley Tack held hands with the Beedleman girl. For the first time, he joined the hymns. He opened the book of prayer.
Stella Blunt looked pale and tired. Hewlett tried to catch her eye. He felt he owed her at least a look, one she’d be able to interpret later, tomorrow morning, or whenever it was that the citizens of Little Fork would find the parsonage deserted.
If he owed anything to Stanley Tack, he’d already given it. Hadn’t he handed the man his own faith? It was in safer hands now than his own.
He said, “Let us read from Paul’s letter to the Romans: Whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.”
He said, “Let us lift up our hearts.”
OTHER BRANDS OF POISON (FIRST LEGEND)
Whether or not there were, at that moment, Jews hiding in the house at the lake, no one can now remember. The point is that there had been, and there would be again; and even if there was not now a human ballast holding that house to the shore, surely there were other things as incriminating. Likewise, it is unclear from this far in the future if the soldiers were even German, or if they were the Russian liberators who so soon became the Russian occupiers. That summer, in that part of Hungary, both were equally likely.
The soldiers pounded at the door looking for whatever it is nineteen-year-old boys in uniform are always looking for: food, lodging, sex, warmth, inebriation, water. In other words: the closest subconscious approximation of their mothers.
They found at this particular house an eight-year-old boy, and a woman too formidable to rape. They found kohlrabi soup and ate it, and they found the boy’s swing set, a four-legged frame standing right in the water, with a swing to jump from and a slide that ended beneath the surface. They left their clothes on the shore and swung from the top bar and broke the whole thing. If no one has exhumed its bones, it is still at the bottom of Lake Balaton. When night fell and there was insufficient firewood, they tore books apart and threw those on the fire. They demanded socks. The woman said, “Would you prefer a lady’s size or a small boy’s?”
That boy stood half-inside a kitchen cabinet, his fingers curled around the handle, his heel kicking the canned fruit he hoped they wouldn’t take. If the story is hazy, seventy years later, that is because it is his. If the details are strangely specific — the dialogue, the type of soup — that is because they are mine.
By the time their flasks ran out, the soldiers were drunk enough to insist on more alcohol, but the woman told them she herself was out and her son did not drink. They began a Russian drinking song, or perhaps a German one, depending on your version of the story.
One undisputed fact: They saw on the kitchen table the large bottle of black ink that had been the boy’s birthday present — a rare gift, dearly bought — and the drunkest soldier announced he had found the alcohol.
The woman told the truth. “That is ink,” she said, “you idiots.” But the soldier opened the top, got an astringent whiff, and declared her a liar and a slut. With his friends pounding the table, he guzzled the entire bottle, and then — friends laughing, pointing, demanding a camera — sputtered black and coughed black and wiped black ink down his arms.
The woman said, “I am a writer. I have plenty more such drinks for you upstairs. Perhaps you’d like a typewriter ribbon.”
The soldier cursed her with black teeth and tongue and lips, his face an abyss. He was already ashen as he stumbled to the door.
My grandmother claimed for the rest of her life that she once killed a soldier with a bottle of ink. Is it possible he did more than empty his stomach in the bushes? I could ask a doctor the effects of eight ounces of cheap ink on top of alcohol and months of hard living.
But if this were your family legacy — this ridiculous assertion of the might and violence of ink, this blatant and beautiful falsehood — could you change it? Would you dare?
THE BRIEFCASE
He thought how strange that a political prisoner, marched through town in a line, chained to the man behind and chained to the man ahead, should take comfort in the fact that all this had happened before. He thought of other chains of men on other islands of the earth, and he thought how since there have been men, there have been prisoners. He thought of mankind as a line of miserable monkeys chained at the wrist, dragging each other back into the ground.
In the early morning of December 1 the sun was finally warming them all, enough that they could walk faster. With his left hand, he adjusted the loop of steel that cuffed his right hand to the line of doomed men. He was starved, his wrist was thin, his body was cold: The cuff slipped off. In one breath he looked back to the man behind him and forward to the man limping ahead, and knew that neither saw his naked, red wrist; each saw only his own mother weeping in a kitchen, his own love on a bed in white sheets and sunlight.
He walked in step to the end of the block.
Before the war this man had been a chef, and his one crime was feeding the people who sat at his tables in clouds of smoke and talked politics. He served them the wine that fueled their underground newspaper, their aborted revolution. And after the night his restaurant disappeared in fire, he had run and hidden and gone without food — he who had roasted ducks until the meat jumped from the bone, he who had evaporated three bottles of wine into one pot of cream soup, he who had peeled the skin from small pumpkins with a twist of his hand.
And here was his hand, twisted free of the chain, and here he was running and crawling, until he was through a doorway. It was a building of empty classrooms — part of the university he never attended. He watched out the bottom corner of a second-story window as the young soldiers stopped the line, counted ninety-nine men, shouted to each other, shouted at the prisoners in the panicked voices of children who barely filled the shoulders of their uniforms. One soldier, a bigger one, a louder one, stopped a man walking by, a man in a suit, with a briefcase, a beard. Some sort of professor. The soldiers stripped him of his coat, his shirt, his leather case, cuffed him to the chain. They marched again. And as soon as they had passed — no, not that soon; many minutes later, when he had the stomach — the chef ran down to the street and collected the man’s briefcase, coat, and shirt.