The Bastards' Paradise Read online

  —by Istvan, who now leaves the urinous cab for a bus, then his own two feet to carry him more swiftly through the narrowing hen’s-foot streets, hat tugged low, wary to watch those who watch him as warily—why such a plumy pigeon in such a drab part of town?—as he reaches at last his destination: a humble door to a humbler dwelling, four floors of a workingman’s hostel, day laborers and broken soldiers and men one purse away from the poorhouse, several dozing right there on the stairs as he climbs to the fourth-floor garret, one room with one washstand and one bed, where by the bare window, in a wooden chair to watch the hidden stars, Rupert turns his head to greet him, smelling of good whiskey, drowsy to ask “Did you find them?” and “I did,” shrugging off the jester’s jacket, wedging the second chair beneath the door’s rude knob. “And I brought you a sweety,” taking from the case the pastry, “from Mab, of course. She sends her love, they all do.”

  “Just the three of them, still?”

  “And the boys, fewer than before; one or two I knew. Oh, and the child,” lighting one last cigarette. “Strapping youngster, he’s got a chest like a bull’s.”

  “Blue eyes, like hers?”

  “I didn’t notice.” Istvan sets down his case to sit atop it, beside Rupert’s chair, sharing the cigarette in careful puffs; their hands link. “The place isn’t half what it should be—and the puppets, Christ!—but one gathers times are hard.”

  “Very hard, looks like. And we’re foxed, messire, the papers here say playing’s no longer allowed—”

  “Really?” with a little smile; someone curses, down the stairs; someone else begins to sing, a drunken, circular song with no words and no end. Finally Rupert rises, to journey to the mattress and its coarse blanket, where in moments he falls to sleep, while Istvan douses the lamp and lies wakeful beside, as his wounded hand throbs and the stars retreat, until dawn strikes the window to show the mingled etchings of dust and frost, and he too at last crosses over into dream. Mr. Loup waits, eye closed or open it is impossible to say, there in the case with its wee fit-up and teakwood freight, the only luggage in the room beyond a heavy leathern bag and cane, a fine gentleman’s cane topped by a griffin’s head worked in silver; as in the corner, on drab hooks meant for hat and coat, Misters Castor and Pollux hang silked in silent tandem, returned in reprise to this city once their home, past a journey still unfurling in the twinned shadows of war and the god of the train station, his theatre now nameless, yet an outpost of paradise all the same.

  A tale tells itself to itself, as any actor worth his salt and dash makes the play for the pure sake of playing, love in one hand and the black slapstick in the other, a truth learned long ago by these men who lie back, now, bare and damp and satisfied, in a field of winter wheat beat down from recent threshing, their coats combined to make a cot against the shorn and stabbing stalks of shocks, the tickling chaff. Above is a sky of sun and clouds and wheeling birds, what sort of birds? and See those crows! says Istvan, pointing up but Those aren’t crows, Rupert offering the wineskin, sharp wine as black as the birds’ feathers, sole payment for the afternoon’s playing.

  They’re rooks.

  Past a swallow, How do you know?

  The monks taught so: “If it’s more than one crow it’s rooks, if a rook’s alone it’s a crow.” And the rooks wear trousers, like—

  Like you don’t, reaching to squeeze him, to make him blush, even after the love just past: taken just as they used to, trousers shucked as the heat rises, like boys again on the road, though silver streaks temples and beards that no barbering can now conceal, and muscles ache that never did before, while the evening’s cold is harder to shake, especially from Istvan’s scarred shoulder, and the weight of the cases more a trial for Rupert to bear. Yet if that road seems more rutted and woeful than once it was, even here amongst the farmers and sheep-grazers, the women in dirndls their mothers might have worn and likely did; if their audience some days is barely greater than those grazing sheep, and the old men who have seen too many wars, and the shoeless children who screech at the puppets or sometimes cry, still the journey curls like a ribbon around the daily gift of gaiety, the sharing that makes hardship just another sort of play as Scholar Mouse! Istvan’s teasing smile. You learned aplenty from your old monks, but you didn’t learn that, yeah?

  I even learned Latin, Rupert’s shrug, though I couldn’t say you any now. There was a lad there, dark like me, who could give the Pater Noster backways and front, the monks liked that. May be he grew to be a monk himself. “Frater maior,” he used to call me.

  Not truly your brother? You never told me such.

  I never knew such, as Rupert roots through their tumbled clothing for a leathern bag from which he extracts a bent cheroot, the tobacco dreadful, he coughs more than he smokes until Istvan passes him the wineskin for a recuperative draught. I barely had a mother. She was dark, too…. Decca said, once, that your mother favored you best.

  The name sits Istvan straighter, lowers an eyebrow and How not, with her as the other choice? as he too reaches into the bag, to bring forth a knife and a knobby little creature, nascent face carved with one eyehole and no smile at all, unsmiling himself as he sets to work. And why keep resurrecting her? I’ve no wish to think or talk of Ag, you know that.

  Forgiveness is a virtue.

  Save it for the monks.

  Overhead the rooks exchange opinions, raucous as a grog-shop band, as a man in a vegetable wagon pauses his horse at the noise; does he glimpse the men beyond the shocks, will he think to harry or abuse them, call them names as others have and do, threaten to have their sausages on a plate? Lately there has been more than the usual share of such trouble, as if the disputatious world must seek war on every front, even in the fields and little eating-houses, even past the threshold of welcome: their play for Vater the knife man, now a kind of semi-squire at his sister’s Black Sea village, nearly ended in such disaster, as the sister’s hymn-singing husband, himself no cosmopolitan, had to be schooled in the proper duties of a host by the knife man himself —

  Shut your mouth, Taras, don’t be as stupid as you are!

  You let them in here! You let them dirty bungers into my house—

  —as the wife and sister wept and bundled together the clothing her husband had flung and trod, Istvan’s last best vest with a sad new hole that she insisted on mending, a poor job if a heartfelt one; it was for the vest as much as the disrespect that Rupert punched the husband numb, the knife man’s dog fastened blind and growling to an ankle, as the knife man shook his head and Istvan watched. As they then departed, Vater by way of apology slipped into the leathern bag a pint of slivovitsa, last store of a long-held cellar, and a droll chip of steel on a twist of black cord: a right-sized weapon for the puppets, whose safety too has sometimes been in doubt on these travels, travails repeated that very afternoon, some shouter with a grudge at the edge of the crowd, thrusting up afterward to “see the workings” and handle the puppets, barely dissuaded by Istvan’s soothing insults and Rupert’s stare over the concertina. The whole comedy recalls the near-demise of Marco, Istvan to tell that tale once again, in the scent of new splinters and shavings as It took some work to make him whole, after those curbside bullies finished pounding us both—and still he broke apart, his hands in mine, in some grande dame’s boudoir. What a rout! Even the butler laughed, damn him.

  Rupert, dozy now in the chaff, opens an eye. The laughing butler…. How many of those stories do I know, messire?

  How many would you know? as that too is a gift of this road, all the stories spun of all the times spent apart, sad or harrowing, darkly hilarious, and which are fully factual or not, who could fully say? as that road unites the present and the past, yesterdays summoned by sights seen today—a pair of linden trees beside a greenish pond, a swampy harbor busy with tramp ships, a riotous Byzantine courthouse, all curlicues and staring eyes of Justice, Like the, what was it? That gingerbread jail, you remember and Istvan’s nod, Je me souviens—as if they travel i
n two worlds at once; perhaps they do; or perhaps it is three, that third sphere the stage that surmounts all time, being itself timeless and eternally new, bits from one show bobbing up inside another, a sally begun in one story finding its laugh in the next, or the next—

  —as the knife man’s village is left behind, a blowsy posy plucked to hide the scar on Istvan’s vest, and their walk resumed to everywhere and nowhere, seemingly without a map, though the larger cities must be avoided, the places where two men and their puppets might be recognized by friends or enemies, even though it makes the way more difficult, and the wallet Rupert carries grows lighter with each brief hamlet that pays only in a sack of pears or an evening’s supper, a roof in the chilly morning, a bottle to wet the throat along the way. Still the ongoing wisdom of this course is underscored one night in a crowded rathskeller near Hamburg, a half-drunken actor fresh from a tent show Richard III, one of the Tower murderers insisting tableside to Istvan that You, you’re that Poppy fellow, hey! What’s your name again?

  M. Marcus, gaze cast beneath his lashes, Rupert glancing up from his newspaper and foamy bock but No, no, says the actor, that’s not it—you’re the fellow from the whorehouse, and you, too, sir, I remember you both! One on the stage, one on the door! Tell me true, is that place still open?

  I’ve been in more than one whorehouse, Istvan’s silken, iron smile, as Rupert leans back in the chair, one hand on his knee, the other closer to his pocket. Perhaps you have, too, for you’re quite mistaken.

  Oh, no mistake—you’re the puppetman from Under the Poppy! There was a girl there could suck the seeds from a sour apple, she surely did the job on me. And I recall that wooden horse she rode, while you dragged it round the stage, the one with the carved-up pecker. And the other one, the singing one—louder and louder, heads turning in interest now mild, now sharpening as May be, says Istvan, you could tell us more outside, an arm companionable around the actor’s shoulders, that same arm to choke his air to frantic sips past the door’s dark threshold, Rupert’s voice in his ear to advise immediate amnesia, leaving him wobbly on the cobbles with wet trousers and a new appreciation for life, though his tongue wags ever faster of the Poppy men who popped up one night with a bag of puppets and almost slew him for no reason, and never said, did they, if the place was still open or not.

  The road grows rougher still as they pass through zones of conflict, of men who look askance at other men who wear no uniform, who carry no visible weapon beyond wit and a repertoire of tunes; Rupert’s fists must stay ready, though the fighting has long become less a lark and more a chore, as Istvan keeps a sharper eye than ever upon the venue door, to avoid as much as they may the hubbub and the blood. And that road, with its wet and cold and wet again, rouses up again in Rupert the cough that rumbles maddeningly, so he has to squeeze the squeezebox harder than ever to drown himself out. Some foolproof cures have been suggested—boiled potato water drunk through cheesecloth, a night’s slumber taken standing up—and one beetling beldame even paid for their playful take on a local legend (“The Bear and the Bishop,” a tale much beloved by the clergy-haters in town, ending as it did with one devouring the other all the way to his popey paper hat) by offering a fresh-made batch of The Queen’s Asthmaticum, see? My old papa used to drink it all the time, it did him wonders.

  Wonders indeed, Istvan sniffing the brew, and visions too, no doubt. What’s in it, Madame, if it’s not too impertinent to ask? to bring forth a complicated list of aniseed and tartar, oil of camphor, oil of benjamin and Spirits, just a drop or two. You drink that, young man, and see if it doesn’t help!

  Many thanks, says Rupert with a bow.

  Oil of Benjamin, says Istvan, squeezing back the cork.

  The bottle is stowed away in the traps, as Rupert keeps the less perishable gift of “The Bear and the Bishop,” its playing leading his concertina on another sort of journey, back to the old tunes and fables: some rousing, some wistful, all simple as a folktale is simple, as grand opera is simple, as the spun tale of the spinning world is a simple one really, the story of Cain and Abel and the snake watching from a branch on the tree. And the simplicity itself adapts the stories: “The Maiden’s Prayer” for her lover’s return becomes a knockabout dance between the wooden misters; “The Knight and His Knave” recalls the knight and his trickster, with fine heroic results; and the raucous “Thumb-Your-Nose” needs no updating, with its cheering, jeering chorus and its exhortation to treat all men as brothers, that is, with the same helpful disregard, enacted to hoots and stamping boots nearly every place they play it. In one town, that playing even sparks a minor revolution, as the puppets insert, via Istvan’s ear for dice-game gossip, the names of two locals much disliked, and suggest that instead of paying medieval tithes to this mayor and his crony, the people of the town ought “Thumb your nose! Thumb your nose! At Walter and Grigor/Thumb your nose and tell them that of coin they’ll get no more!” those coins tossed instead to the puppeteer and his musician, not much and most of it spent in the town’s one decent café; but the song’s effects linger, the puppets are remembered, and when several of the town’s young men are punished for their singing, and that punishment leads to an even greater insurrection, “Thumb your nose!” becomes a rousing battle cry.

  To Istvan, the baiting of Walter and Grigor seemed, or seemed to seem, merely a pleasant small divertissement, a joke played on locals by locals with the help of the twins, brothers, lovers, with no stake in the matter themselves; their own path, as always, lay elsewhere and onward. But Rupert was moved to ponder, in the villages they visit and the cities they skirt, the ways this world now tells itself that ancient tale, as so much is lost from the past to the past, and so much of the new—the glittering Expositions and cinemas fantastique, balloon flights and sleek phaetons and ubiquitous bicycles, even the women ride them now, trussed in bloomers and helmeted in hats—and the increasing and furious speed at which all moves, is just fresh gut for old strings, while the tears and the struggles never lessen or end. The bishop’s bear and the knightly knave, at least, have seen that world spin times enough to make them wiser, and it is not nothing to remind a man he must thumb his nose from time to time, even if it ends in a beating or worse.

  Now Istvan bundles back the puppet and knife, reaching again for the wineskin as A dry throat’s no good for stories, while Rupert, sleepy from the sunlight, lies back half-dreaming: of a tall green hill and a knight atop it, another lesson from those long-ago monks, who taught a God severe and disinclined to love or gaiety, the monks he left after he learned to cipher and counted all the beatings he received. It was a brave story, though, that saintly knight, what was his name? who helped where help was needed, who halved his fine cloak to give to the poor and naked beggar—

  —as a naked body lies suddenly warm atop his own, the smile an inch from his lips and You can sleep, Istvan says, when it’s nighttime—as the vegetable cart trundles off down the road, as the rooks and the sun and the kisses make a glory of the moment unmatched even by the saints in heaven above, even by the martial saint Martin, in some vernaculars Marco, namesake to Marco the puppet, whose own name will change again and again in the hands of his handlers, as his first handler’s does and has and will again, as necessity requires and circumstances suggest; though his companion keeps his name the way a knight keeps his shield, a constant blazon against the world, with only the boy turned man beside him to glimpse the shy watchful heart of the mouse.

  That their own names have, in some quarters, turned themselves into a kind of fable, sticks and songs and the moral depending on the venue—if you were to ask the late Mr. Entwhistle, say, or the piano player Jonathan Shopsine, the versions would differ so greatly that neither could seemingly have credit, for how could the same men be so perfidious and so kind?—that fable is a fact with its own momentum, quite independent of the men and their wooden brothers-in-arms. And if there are those who know more of the tale than others, themselves already deep in its telling—Mrs. Lucy Pimm, tatti
ng a pretty mask for a lady puppet as she sits by her husband’s bed; the widow Mattison, counting out another evening’s tally; Tilde Bok, sometimes called Mrs. St. Vitus, turning over her sapient cards—their versions await a fuller amalgamation, as lines of verse become a poem, or strung sentences a letter, or saved letters a packet to address both the future and the past.

  From a letter, JAVIER ARROWSMITH, Esq., to DUSAN

  Marked as “Private”

  …and if you recall me, let it be as one who honored your skill and your invention, for the world you made upon the stage so often and so fully trumped the world beyond the theatre doors.