The Bastards' Paradise Read online

  —barely feeling, in that first moment, the blade stick into his leg, slice into his thigh as Tilde brings up her knife with all the force she can muster, its handle slippery with sudden blood as the man shouts in pain and shoves her sideways, he sags backward, she is freed—

  —to stick him again, this time in the belly, the breath high and airless in her throat, making a sound she does not hear or recognize as the man sits down hard in the alley, face blank, nearly comical the shock: and Tilde grabs up the poke and runs, knife jammed to her pocket, the telltale blood begun to stain through as someone cries out after her—“Thief! Thief!”—and heads turn, a fruit-stall keeper’s and a pair of constables extorting figs, as she hurtles past, the constables immediate in pursuit. A sidewalk shouter tries to seize her but she wrenches off, running for her life now, crying without knowing she does, the poke bag swinging as she skids toward a trio of still-lighted doorways: a shabby dry goods already closed, a hat shop whose latch falls tight at the sight of her, a windowless tobacconist’s—

  —busy with the evening’s last customer, the shopkeeper alarmed at this staggering urchin, gasps and tears and, is that blood? so “No,” scrambling from behind the counter, “no no no, out of here! Out of here!” with broom held high as if to rout vermin, the customer sharp to say “Jesu, stop! The lad can’t breathe,” one hard and kindly hand to catch at her elbow as her vision blurs, her knees nearly give way —

  —and her heart leaps, she makes a wild cry and hurls herself into the man’s arms, Rupert’s arms, Rupert rearing back till he sees the boy’s eyes, blue eyes, no one else in all this city, all the world has eyes so blue—and he sees the blood, too, shucks his coat and “Here’s for the smoke,” he says, hand hasty to his pocket—

  —as the tobacconist flinches, staring now at them both as if he has fallen into some evil charade, none of which is his fault, all of which will be blamed on him if someone should see such in his shop, if constables should see so “Out!” he cries. “You too, miscreant!” raising the broom again with a shaking hand, Rupert contemptuous to take and toss it to the floor, with a look that sends the man cowering back behind the counter, as he pivots Tilde on her heel and “Your hair,” urgent, “where’s your hair?” but she is already ripping at the cap, tearing her braids to fall Medusa-like about her face—

  —so when the constables come around that corner, aided by citizens swept along by a pack’s alacrity—“There! He went in there!”—all they see is a man shepherding his weeping daughter, his coat draping her to the heels, Tilde’s hands to her face to hide the spirit gum mustache, Rupert shouting at those constables “Down that way! He tried to stick my girl, go after him!” and they do, they go, followed by several of the braver gawkers, while the rest disperse back into the city’s darkness and their own—

  —while Rupert steers Tilde into the first friendly alley, where at once he enfolds her, and she clings with all her might, arms tight around his neck, to the passing dismay of an aged burgher couple, the man shielding his wife from the sight of this foreigner in braces and the boy-whore with the mustache and hair halfway to his knees—“What is it?” the wife asks, but the husband only shakes his head, this cursed city is growing more repugnant by the day!—as “Sir,” the boy sobs, while the tall man slowly strokes the tangled braids. “Sir, oh Sir, I found you.”

  While this impromptu street play reaches its unusually felicitous conclusion, another is being plotted, though “plotted” is not the word chosen by Frédéric, teapot gone cold at the backstage table: he has his play-book open, he has been paging through and making notes. No, what Herr Krystof proposes is both a story and a manner of tract, an edifying manifesto—which makes him smile, an unhappy little smile as he recalls his origins in this city, the lies he told to seek and find and follow what he thought to be his better angel, and fall in love—helplessly, utterly in love—with that other angel, his Hadrian, Haden who has gone so far from him, now, that they barely inhabit the same roof. How does one pass from stern poetry and shared rigors and the passionate play that turns both to joys, turns a man into an angel and a devil and a mayor and a king, whatever he decides to be, everything he has ever dreamed of—what sorrow’s alchemy sours all such down into the kind of niggling, nagging, pinprick arguments that drive a man to distraction and worse? One moment it is those nauseous candies—

  How can you bear to chew such?

  What, the horehounds? They’re good for the toothache. And anyway what difference?

  The difference is I won’t kiss you whilst you eat them.

  —the next it is the songs, those chansons réaliste, hooting and chanting and though he is no prude—demonstrably no prude! Would a provincial prude write the fiery tales that he does?—still is it necessary to teach not only Pipper and Alek and the others that “poetry of the pavement,” but little Ru as well? And everyone smiling while the child parrots the trash, even Miss Tilde, who as his mother should know better, and especially Haden, who is coolly unrepentant—

  Don’t be a prig, he knows all those words already.

  It’s not—artful.

  Time enough for art when he grows a set.

  —though these and every other irritation are only a kind of masking, a camouflage upon a deep divide, made even deeper by the madness of the city that seems to Haden to be just another variant of, what is the phrase? “business as usual,” yes, endless the plague and ferocity and nothing to do for it but drink and read poems and—and find solace, yes, there never was or could be any solace any sweeter than the moments, hours, nights spent entwined and breathless, Haden like flung silk across the bed, his beauty a pageant and panoply, hard-muscled legs and soft scarred lips, those eyes half-mast with bliss given and taken, closing at last to sleep in the murmur of a wordless song…. There is heaven, and haven, and if he lives as long as Methuselah still he knows that he will never, ever be happier than he has been with Haden in that bed.

  But no one can stay in Paradise forever. And even as they rise, and dress—

  That shirt’s as stinky-pink as a girl’s basket, must you wear it? Bad enough on the stage.

  Must you be so vulgar? Not all of us wish to dress as if we’re soldiers.

  La-di-da, milord. And I’m not a fucking soldier.

  —the felicity is ruined; yet to preserve it, what could he do that is different, except betray what he knows must be his duty on this earth, to shout the truth of this city’s wrongs? And he cannot play such shows alone, cannot write and stage and wear all the costumes, so the lads—is it not better for them to learn this way to read and declaim, swing a hammer or sing on cue, keep out of the gutter, and keep Haden from it, too? This writing he means to do for Felix Krystof—and here he turns a page, notes a note, recasting in his mind that interview: not secret, no, there is no real need for secrecy. And yet when he learned he was the only writer so summoned, into that study like a bank vault of letters and books, its stolid unfriendly manservant to serve the tea and gebackene Mäuse —

  Why, this is a surprise! I’ve not seen this treat since before the war.

  It’s a favorite of yours, I believe, Herr Blum.

  —it seemed odd, somehow, to sit so with the gleaming fork while the manservant stood in the corner by the window and watched, as Herr Krystof spoke of the newspapers’ scrum and confusion, how much has changed since the time of the Visionary, and before that the Muse and That editor, Hebert, you remember him?

  And Herr Konrad, yes, of course. You’re very well-informed, sir, feeling again that uneasiness, echoed in the manservant’s stare, black eyes encircled with sleepless brown, dispelled somewhat when Herr Krystof went on to detail the offered commission—

  It’s a—goodly sum. Yet you’ve asked only me?

  For a fearless moral examination of the city? Already you do so in your plays, with those young actors, and your friend—oh, have no fear on my account, I’m a great admirer of your work. But tell me, how many come to see those plays?

  Very few, ad
mittedly. The law—

  “The letter killeth—!” But I can provide you with a wider pulpit. Not those papers meant for telegraph boys and washerwomen, or the ones whose editorial minds are set in stone—we needn’t mention names, you and I both know who these editors are, none of them will print a word you write. But if what you write is a tale, say—like M. Poe, or M. de Maupassant, you have read both of those authors? I have a letter, there, from de Maupassant to his cousin Bernard…. Although their work, fine as it is, seems to lack an essential, what’s the word? Not a religious view so much as—godliness, a quality of—

  The spiritual, you mean?

  —and from there it was easy to see that Herr Krystof and he were in full agreement: of the form the work should take, its eventual performance and then publication. And if he himself grew a bit too passionate—once or twice he heard the manservant grunt—it seemed to confirm to Herr Krystof that he had made The right choice, shaking hands before the manservant handed him the envelope, Herr Krystof’s avuncular smile to indicate that John Abram, here, is available for you, whatever aid you might need beyond this first installment—

  —that envelope whisked back into his pocket as the key turns, rousing sleepy Pipper from the bowl of the wheel and Ru from his contented nest, costume rags and newsprint hats, both of them rising for Haden, Haden who of course must be told about this new venture; and is it not better for Haden, too, this shared bearing of their monetary burden, to wean him from the danger he courts at the card tables? Let alone scrambling up and down on slippery roofs?

  But Frédéric sees at once that Haden is not alone, is accompanied by the photographer fellow Ridley, though not by his assistant, what is that young lady’s name? Miss Tilde always sniffs at her (and where is Miss Tilde? She has been gone for hours, the child is long past his supper) as “I can’t deny myself a moment longer,” says Mr. Ridley; he wears a flat top derby that looks brand new and an old stained duster of a coat, chemicals splashed and burned into its weave, he tugs at his mustache in emphasis until it points like two small brown fangs. “And you won’t deny me, will you, gents—I did just as I said I would with the puppets, didn’t I, those fancy little devils?” with a nod toward their silent stage. “Now I swear I won’t show a soul, I’ll print them in purest secrecy, but I must take some photographs of Monsieur Hilaire, or Marcus, the name doesn’t matter, but the attitudes he takes—nothing like it! Is he here?” as if Frédéric might be concealing Istvan alongside Ru beneath the draping tablecloth. “Gents, you can’t tell me no.”

  “We’re not his keepers,” Haden says, though with a friendly shrug. “Find him yourself, ask him yourself.”

  “He’s not staying here?” a question Frédéric answers by a headshake, though Haden’s silence seems to mean the opposite, they look to one another then as “In Paris,” Mr. Ridley taking a seat uninvited, “there’s a cabaret called the Pied Pony, they do plays there—not like yours, Herr Blum, popular plays, with circus dancers and marionettes. One was called ‘A Fugitive from Bohemia,’ it quite made the eyes pop! Such as when that other fellow was here, that play he and M. Marcus did, of the volcano—”

  “It was a mountain,” says Frédéric, as Ru trots to Haden, to be given the pictures from Haden’s left pocket and a nearly fresh pear from his right; Pipper yawns and takes out his knife to peel the pear, Pipper who in some lights has the same drooping lip and magnificent nose of a former city commissioner, retired to the country now, what was his name? Mr. Ridley considers with half an eye as he goes on about the volcano, and that other show, what was it called, the wolf who ate up the king, and of course their final performance—“So tragic,” although the part of Mr. Ridley that is mostly, mainly, entirely an eye recalls the great black spectacle of it, like a carnival of damnation, the flashing Wheel and the youths in their devil-masks and the lurid flames, and that body falling like Lucifer—terrible, of course, but still, what a sight to see!

  —as the key turns again, this time admitting Tilde, herself such a spectacle—hair half-braided and half-loose, trousers bloodied, wearing a man’s greatcoat and a fierce and private smile—that everyone must stop to stare, even Ru, whom she seizes in an embrace so all-embracing that he wriggles back in alarm, Ru whom she kisses on both cheeks, a hard Parisian-style smack, then releases as she calls to Pipper, “Is the kettle on? Quick it, now,” bustling past the men and up the stairs, both flights, they can hear her boot heels busily crossing and recrossing the third floor chamber —

  —as in another, much finer chamber, the overheated loge still moist with the sweat of desperate dancing girls and the smell of dying flowers, packed by an avid audience of several dozen, Stephanos Marcus reaches the climax of his evening’s entertainment: working the ragged angel produced from his shoulder sack, like a louche Père Noël in his own weeds nearly as ragged, though with the mocking ornament of a cravat borrowed from the audience and the black wink of kohl, that angel singing a song that Haden or his lads would have recognized, a dirty little ditty picked up an hour past at the faro game—such an excellent outing! Win after effortless win, if he had not known absolutely better he would have suspected the kit of throwing the cards his way—as Portia’s boots beat excited time on the Aubusson and Roland sits, chin on fist, his face a pleasant mask, his heart hot in his eyes. The angel lights now on this shoulder, now that, now right in the lap of the former van Symans daughter who thinks—is it? No. But could it possibly be?—that she recognizes this man from long ago, when he or someone very much like him played in the squares of Brussels, in her family’s salon, much younger of course and more handsome, though when he looks at her, locks eyes with her—“And you, lovely Madame,” the angel’s croak, “where is your heaven, whose charades will you wager there?”—she feels that look in her fluttering heart and several regions more recondite, and when that angel pecks her cheek, she nearly swoons.

  Afterward, when the last song is sung and the puppet folded back into the sack, the champagne is opened and the guests come rustling closer, silk skirts, damp hands, throaty chatter as they dwell still in the private spell of this man, whose conversation is as titillating as his performance, as the glances he gives, the little insinuating shrugs: “I had thought the theaters here were all shut down—? But this is not a theatre, is it, and so remains open.”

  “Not a theatre? What else could it be?” asks the husband of the van Symans daughter, a wiry half-German financier and “Why,” says Istvan suavely, “it’s a brothel. I should know, I’ve been in plenty,” as the joke that is not a joke brings laughter that is more than laughter, as a councilman’s wife puts a supplicating hand to Portia’s arm—Arrangements must be made at once for a performance in her loge, this guest for her game!—Portia whose smile is all triumph and cream, whose gaze flicks again and again to Istvan so that he seems to feel it like an insect landing, an unpleasant crawl to send him balconyside to smoke, Roland there at once with the match-light, with the discreet and lovely, perfect gift—

  “For me?” Istvan says. “I see,” taking without opening the box, slipping it into his own pocket without demonstrable interest, causing a pang in the heart of Roland Smalls, who has never felt anything like such a pang before—it is amazing, really, just to stand this way with M. Marcus, Stephanos, the two of them lightly screened by the smoke, is a mingling of ache and pleasure so consumingly vital that he understands with, almost, an inner smile—See the still waters boiling! See the man who never loved, in love at last!—though the smile on his lips is half a tremble, if he does not quickly speak of nothing he will say everything, so “That’s a bit of a strange adornment,” he murmurs, indicating the silver glove. “It looks quite antique.”

  “What, this? This is the hand I twist my strings with,” with a look both so intimate and so cold that Roland’s face goes instantly red, a telltale and unappetizing flush as Istvan turns back to the watching group, makes a bow with a flourish of the cigarette and “This angel is due home to paradise, now,” he says, plucking up
his cloak and jerking his chin at Portia, a flat commanding gesture lost on no one, Portia who hoves at once to his side, hisses urgently in his ear—

  “Charades—she’s just about to start! And she wrote one specially for the two of you to play!”

  “Give it.”

  “But she—”

  “Give it,” brutally brusque and pitched a notch louder, they both know that next will come the shout: so into his gloved palm she presses the folded payment, a fairly thick fold, will he shame her further by counting it here? For a moment it seems he means to, he weights in his hand—then slips it beneath his vest, puts his lips to her ear—“You smell like a granny, with that eau de toilette”—before giving her a very courtly bow, another to the assembled, and a little wink to Roland, who has remained by the balcony’s edge, striving for calm, as “Good evening, then, gentlemen and ladies. And don’t forget to say your prayers,” rousing one last collective chuckle, the van Syman’s daughter’s defrauded yip as he steps out of the loge and lets the door slam to, lets his shoulders drop and his face relax, takes a deep puff on the cigarette, then throws it down without bothering to crush the coal. The carpet on the stairway is old but sturdy, it only smolders until a passing servant sees and quickly douses the fire, but a mark is already left there, a burn as black as the mask on the face of a little demon, as indelible as Armageddon—

  —as Istvan exits into the larger dark, whistling softly, alone with the city and the parting clouds like hurrying ghosts, the smell of the river fecund with flung garbage and clumped newspapers and the cold sturgeon that sleep in its depths, crossing Crescent Bridge past one lone brave pickpocket, cutting down avenues and up alleys, to reach the dreary hostel and slip inside—

  —and find Rupert on the bed, half bent and coughing into a soiled handkerchief, in the smell of whiskey, the Queen’s Asthmaticum and “Cigars,” Istvan throwing the glimpsed packet to the floor, “for Christ’s sake, Mouse!” but “I’m not a child,” finally, dry and breathless, “or—an invalid, messire. I have—a God damned cough. Let me be.”