Franz set off down Foundling Strasse, that is, down a track tamped into the rough brick dust. There was no moon, and the stars were overrun by clouds which moved forward like invaders across a map. The earth has a phosphorescence all its own. The crutch, the cane, and the iron tip of the prosthesis added nothing to the scattered sounds of solitude. Stones fell of their own accord. The nocturnal rustlings of the city were like those of a forest: they filled the silence with a minute tremor that was the very substance of silence. The vibration of a spring night in the Black Forest orchestrates the beating of wings, the cries of animals seeking one another out or simply expressing their joy to be alive, the pricking of deer hooves along paths known only to them, the fall of dead branches, the hum of the wind… And there can be no doubt that the respiration of leaves, the radiance of the stars, the thrust of roots through the soil, the rising saps must chime in with subtle, essential descants on this enchanted frequency. What’s got into you, Minus-Two, dreaming of the Black Forest as you haul yourself, gasping, over the rubble? Fairly stinks around here, sure enough there’s a family of refugees asleep in that cavity underneath, if you can call it sleeping, rotting’s more like it… An arresting clash of odors made him stop and sniff the air. He was in a bulldozed clearing where the Fraüleins Hahn-Simmelholz had once presided over their drugstore, the Scented Herb. One of these ladies might still be alive, if she could live without her sister, her Siamese cats, her potted plants, her window display; the other was last seen as a pool of guts caramelized by acids, essences, medicinal potions, and Lord knows what else. All of the esoteric liquids stored in the basement had run or burned or melted, hissing and fizzing through everything in their path, including Fraülein Mitzi’s plump chaste tummy. Around the tidied rubble (for it had happened in the far-off days when there were still enough sweepers to meet the demand, who were even paid a meager wage) blew cloying, faintly heady fumes. The old biddies had kept quite a respectable stock hidden under their hats, “to save for a rainy day, hooray” tootled Franz cruelly, and he gave a laugh, balanced on a chaotic tumulus that rose seven feet above this extravagant landscape. He laughed because he was remembering a lecture on the redistribution of stocks in wartime, which he’d heard at his advanced course in Work Reinsertion Training for the Maimed in Action. This was a compulsory sprint through economic geopolitics or geopolitical economics, otherwise known as the art of selling a moon of green cheese by promising world domination to a bunch of cripples at the very moment when our invincible army, instead of taking Suez, was taking it on the chin at El Alamein… Behold the theory:
Grandparents save. Parents save. “In saving lies the strength of nations,” says the Great Economist. The Fraüleins Hahn-Simmelholz save. An elite division is goose-stepping by; the Fraüleins Hahn-Simmelholz, throwing thrift to the winds for the sake of patriotism, ply the boys of the division with sandwiches and pretty gifts; the next day, there are a few pfennigs added to the price of the perfumes the factory girls buy before going to bed with their boyfriends, home on convalescent leave… This young soldier was in fact decorated for destroying a boutique identical to the one run by the Misses Hahnkowski-Simmelkowski — in Warsaw. And down comes a bomblet straight from the United States: adieu savings, thrifty sisters, declared inventory, hidden inventory! From out of his tall silk hat, the professorial magician pulls a hilarious monster with a death’s-head and seven flaccid limbs and introduces him to the audience: Herr Geopolitik! Wild clapping from the audience, which continues to save…
Franz, still chuckling to himself, started to applaud, but you need two hands for that. He smote his cane against the ground with contained fury. Men are insane, Franz! Their destructiveness will not be sated while anything exists, since the magician-professor is probably still teaching his course, people are still alive in the cellars, I am still here to watch the show. The horizon was quieter now, the fighting had moved elsewhere. Not yet the end, goddammit!
He clearly saw a big human bat drop silently between two walls, as though fallen from the stars. A quadruped that was part bear, part pig, part jackal, and part outlaw slunk close to the ground, paused to test the air with its snout, wiggled its rump grotesquely, and disappeared… “Ha ha! Geopolitik, my friend, geopolitics! I know where you’re headed: toward a bullet in the ass. I’d give something to know where you crawled out of: Bosnia, the Volga, Normandy, Zeeland, or Neukölln, like me? Fugitive, looter, deserter, parachutist, Black Front, dead white all over, d-d-death penalty, my good friend. Same goes for me if I don’t report you. If I do report you, your pals will take care of me instead. If we happen to bump into each other ten minutes from now, it could go either way…” Franz did not quite know what he was doing. But then what’s the use of knowing that?
Before following the animal shadow, he let himself be distracted listening again to Altstadt breathe. Pieces of cornice broke off and skittered down with a noise like tiny landslides. A door was banging emptily. A tinkle of shattered glass, a cock crowed. Somewhere a tank column was rumbling along on metal treads. Two muffled whistle blasts chased each other from one constellation to another and were gobbled up by a fat fish of cloud. A child started crying, where? Franz pressed his eye to a crack in a wall and saw a white-haired woman stretched out, reading a book bound in black, the New Testament presumably. What light was she using to read by, the witch? He put his lips against the slit in the brickwork and lowed, spectrally: “The good Lord protect us!” He looked again. The old lady was beaming and nodding, their eyes met but she could not have seen him, she must have thought the voice had been sent from heaven above, the end was nigh! Franz considered following up with a ripe rosary of imprecations, before deciding it was too much trouble.
The manhole through which his four-legged quarry had just vanished made him hesitate. The ladder was twisted, and he would never be able to crutch his way down without being heard. But the warren below probably connected with the old brasserie cellars; some, considered inaccessible, were probably inhabited. Franz found the way in. He moved along as nimbly as a spider. He dragged himself over the sharp stones of a tunnel, making only surreptitious use of his torch. The tongue of light licked at a seething of white maggots in a viscous, purplish slick. He was glad not to have stuck his hand in it, even with his canvas glove on. Just what you’d see if your personal idea of fun was crawling beneath a graveyard. As he was about to turn back, thinking he was lost, the murmuring of voices reached him. He had only to raise his head in order to see. The cellar was open to the sky: a jagged hole in the vault let in the unreal glow of the cloudy heavens. There were human shapes down there, talking low, each in turn, holding council; a poised female voice said something in a language he couldn’t identify — Czech, Russian, Serbian, Polish? He was watching from above, through an oblong hole the size of his hand. If he’d had his revolver on him, it would have been easy to knock down those four opaque forms and collect the four rewards, not to mention a Civil Defense Merit Badge, yes sir. He trained two fingers on the sitting, thinking ducks, one by one, click-clack, your worries would be over my dears. The game amused him. And it was a good job he’d left that gun behind, because the temptation would have been strong: the ingrained habit of killing, the urge to do the right thing, the spirit of fraternity! The incentive of the reward: human motivation is nothing if not complex. Down below, the woman struck a match over a sheet of paper. Franz had a glimpse of slender fingers, an oval face, chestnut-ash hair above the brow. The match went out, but the vision of that stern countenance, youthful yet aging, had imprinted itself so well upon the cripple’s retina that he seemed still to see it in the darkness. Gleefully he prepared his throat for his spectral voice, waited for a silence, and pronounced: “Lady, gentlemen…”