Museums and Women: And Other Stories Page 16

  In 1895 the amir Abdur Rahman, with British complicity, on the provocation that the Russians might annex the area, sent his gigantic commander Ghulam Haider Khan on a campaign to convert the Kafirs by the sword—the last such conversion in history. The Kafirs succumbed, and the region was christened Nuristan, “The Country of Light.” However, one pocket of resistance remained, in the remote valley inhabited by the Shīgar tribe. Winter snows sealed the valley off, and the legions of Ghulam Haider Khan turned back. In celebration, the Shīgars, who numbered not more than twelve thousand, gave their chief, my tennis friend’s great-grandfather, the name Gish Imra—as if we were to call a President Thor Jehovah. Probably the Shīgar chieftains were already semi-deified. The ancient ceremony, for instance, whereby on the day of the vernal equinox the chief would take for himself as much treasure (lapis lazuli from Badakhshan, rubies from the famous mine in the Jagdalak Pass, and, in recent times, wrist-watches from Switzerland) as he could hoist with a straight right arm onto an altar five feet high has many analogues in Frazer.

  While the religious antecedents of this throne are obscure, its modern political career is a matter of record. The first Gish Imra was a prodigious brute who maintained his tribe, of necessity, in a state of impregnable ferocity. No European traveller or Moslem emissary is known to have returned from an audience with him, and in Nuristani art he is always represented simply as the sun—with blank features, circular face, and stylized radii. His son, who succeeded him in 1915, travelled with a bodyguard of two thousand men to Kabul to exchange rugs, pledges, and mulberry butter with the amir Habibullah, who had recently extended leniency to the Ghilzais and Mangals of Khost. Thus begins the recognized autonomy of the Shīgars under the amir. Shīgar tribesmen fought beside Amanullah in his war with the British in the summer of 1919, but remained aloof when, ten years later, his excessively progressive regime collapsed under pressure from the fanatical south. The second Gish Imra died, at the age of ninety-three, in 1946, whereupon his son, who in the nineteen-thirties had enjoyed a position in the League of Nations and in café society, succeeded him. An unhappy and thoroughly Europeanized man, the third Gish Imra, when he was not wintering in Cannes or Menton, fortified himself against the tireless machinations of the amirate with perhaps excessive helpings of American advice and French cuisine. Our mission in his court, headed by the shadowy “Major Damon,” was never officially acknowledged, and Congressional investigations ran dry in the sands of obfuscation. The French foodstuffs, including truffles and goose livers, were imported into the fastnesses of the Hindu Kush on the backs of goats organized into fragrant caravans.

  My friend had been tutored at home, schooled in Bern, and sent to Harvard as a political gesture, much as his father had gone to Oxford. His tennis, learned in Switzerland, was stronger from the backcourt than at the net. His backhand was slightly wristy, his serve loopy and fat; but his forehand, administered with a powerful straight right arm, came off the bounce with a pace that constantly surprised me, for Gish Imra could not have weighed more than one hundred and fifteen pounds. He drove a little red MG with numerous gears, and it was in this car that we went, on one occasion, into Boston, still in our tennis whites, to have dinner together. It was late in the spring, and perhaps the approaching end of our senior year had prompted his unexpected invitation. Gish kept habitually aloof, and after his sophomore year did not have roommates. I had met him when we were both freshmen, working off our physical-education requirements with tennis, which I had learned on some pitted public courts in Pennsylvania. My game, then as now, in I suppose the American style, disdained solid ground strokes for a hopeful mishmash of reckless, glamorous “gets” and satisfying overhead smashes. Despite his smaller size and soft serve, he beat me as often as I beat him. We were well matched, and each spring, until we graduated, on one of those sudden soft days when the classroom window is thrown open above the bust of Emerson and the Radcliffe girls venture down to the Charles with books and blankets, he would call me up and in his formal, faintly mischievous voice offer to renew our competition. I was pleased to accept. After a winter of sitting I needed the exercise, and I suppose, having this dim sense of his “divinity,” I was flattered.

  I recall our dinner imperfectly. I remember that it was still daylight outside, that the restaurant was the old Nile, long since vanished, and that the manager had frowned at our bare legs as we walked in. I remember the glow of the jukebox selector on my left, and the thoughtful pallor of my companion’s face, and the startling ease with which he downed two very dry gimlets. But I do not remember the conversation that led up to the brief exchange I will never forget. It must have been by way of “Cross-currents.” Though he was a Government major and I in Mathematics, we were, that year, taking one course in common—a popular Comp. Lit. concoction designated “Cross-Currents in Nineteenth-Century Thought.” The course, taught by a beetle-browed ironist from the University of Chicago, dealt with four thinkers—Nietzsche, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevski—who with their different strokes had paddled against the liberal, progressivist mainstream of their century. I dimly recall expressing to Gish my enthusiasm for Kierkegaard, and perhaps I confessed, in passing, the fact that I, like Kierkegaard, was a Lutheran.

  He looked at me sharply; there was not much amiability in his face. Though his skin was as fair as mine, there was something taut and flattened underlying his fine features. “Do you believe in it?”

  “I don’t know. Part of it, I suppose.”

  “Which of it?”

  I began to blush. I realized that in a primitive by-way of my being I had “revered” my slight friend and had regarded him, for all the times I had victimized his backhand, with what used to be called “superstitious awe”; so that I felt unworthy and embarrassed in the face of his questioning.

  He insisted, “Do you believe in personal immortality?”

  I assumed that, being a god, he was certainly pious. I said, “Why not? It can’t be disproved.”

  “I can’t see it,” Gish said.

  Though the remark seemed addressed, calmly, more to himself than to me, my heart sank, and kept sinking, through the depths of this somehow authoritative denial.

  “But it’s not supposed to be seen,” I pleaded. “It must be believed. Belief is the option we’ve been given.”

  He shook his head, regretfully, inexorably. His voice was small and high-pitched, yet his enunciation was firm. “I agree with Marx,” he said. “It’s a hoax. It’s a method whereby the powerful keep the ignorant from rebelling.”

  I was shocked; the ground lurched under me. Not until then—could it be?—did I realize by how much some of my classmates were older in spirit than I. Out of the blankness of my fright arose the sword-thin laugh of this other, and his voice saying to me, “Do you want to hear a Kafir legend? This is how the belly of the ibex became white. When God made the Great Flood, when you say Noah built his ark, the ibex ran into the mountains. The waters kept rising, and the ibex went from mountain to mountain, until at last he came to the highest of all, to Tirich Mir, and there he stood, waiting. The water rose to his feet, to his knees, to his belly; and then it subsided.” Gish showed me, with slender hands and wrists flat like female wrists, the soft motion of the subsiding. “And that,” he said, “is why the belly of the ibex is white. That is why you think you believe. The waters have not yet closed over you.” His voice was gentle and bitter and the light in his gray eyes was, yes, gay.

  Though the class report, for all its crimson bulk, has nothing in it but a Kabul forwarding address, the newspapers have printed a little about Gish’s postgraduate career. Becoming king (if that is what it is) upon his father’s violent death, the fourth Gish Imra has reversed all liberal trends in the Shīgar state. Contact with the south and the Kabul administration has dwindled; radios were destroyed by tribal decree; strangers venture into the region at their own risk and may expect to be robbed. Certain brutal aspects of the cult of worship, which had fallen into disuse, have been r
evived, in the name of cultural autonomy. My friend, seeking a policy, “can’t see” the reign of his unhappy father and looks toward his grandfather, who left the mountains amid two thousand bodyguards, and even beyond, toward his great-grandfather, the inexorable sun.

  Under the Microscope

  IT WAS NOT HIS KIND OF POND; the water tasted slightly acid. He was a cyclops, the commonest of copepods, and this crowd seemed exotically cladoceran—stylish water-fleas with transparent carapaces, all shimmer and bubbles and twitch. His hostess, a magnificent daphnia fully an eighth of an inch tall, her heart and cephalic ganglion visibly pulsing, welcomed him with a lavish gesture of her ciliate, branching antennae; for a moment he feared she would eat him. Instead she offered him a platter of living desmids. They were bright green in color and shaped like crescents, hourglasses, omens. “Who do you know here?” Her voice was a distinct constant above the din. “Everybody knows you, of course. They’ve read your books.” His books, taken all together, with generous margins, would easily have fitted on the period that ends this sentence.

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  The cyclops modestly grimaced, answered “No one,” and turned to a young specimen of water mite, probably Hydrachna geographica, still bearing ruddy traces of the larval stage. “Have you been here long?” he asked, meaning less the party than the pond.

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  “Long enough.” Her answer came as swiftly as a reflex. “I go back to the surface now and then; we breathe air, you know.”

  “Oh, I know. I envy you.” He noticed she had only six legs. She was newly hatched, then. Between her eyes, arranged in two pairs, he counted a fifth, in the middle, and wondered if in her he might find his own central single optic amplified and confirmed. His antennules yearned to touch her red spots; he wanted to ask her, What do you see? Young as she was, partially formed, she appeared, alerted by his abrupt confession of envy, ready to respond to any question, however presuming.

  But at that moment a monstrous fairy shrimp, nearly an inch in length and extravagantly tinted blue, green, and bronze, swam by on its back, and the water shuddered. Furious, the cyclops asked the water mite, “Who invites them? They’re not even in our scale.”

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  She shrugged permissively, showing that indeed she had been here, in this tainted pond, long enough. “They’re entomostracans,” she said, “just like Daphnia. They amuse her.”

  “They’re going to eat her up,” the cyclops predicted.

  Though she laughed, her fifth eye gazed steadily into his wide lone one. “But isn’t that what we all want? Subconsciously, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  An elegant, melancholy flatworm was passing hors d’oeuvres. The cyclops took some diatoms, cracked their delicate shells of silica, and ate them. They tasted golden brown. Growing hungrier, he pushed through to the serving table and had a vol-vox in algae dip. A shrill little rotifer, his head cilia whirling, his three-toothed mastax chattering, leaped up before him, saying, with the mixture of put-on and pleading characteristic of this environment, “I wead all your wunnaful books, and I have a wittle bag of pomes I wote myself, and I would wove it, wove it if you would wead them and wecommend them to a big bad pubwisher!” At a loss for a civil answer, the cyclops considered the rotifer silently, then ate him. He tasted slightly acid.

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  The party was thickening. A host of protozoans drifted in on a raft of sphagnum moss: a trumpet-shaped stentor, apparently famous and interlocked with a lanky, bleached spirostomum; a claque of paramecia, swishing back and forth, tickling the crustacea on the backs of their knees; an old vorticella, a plantlike animalcule as dreary, the cyclops thought, as the batch of puffs rooted to the flap of last year’s succès d’estime. The kitchen was crammed with ostracods and flagellates engaged in mutually consuming conversation, and over in a corner, beneath an African mask, a great brown hydra, the real thing, attached by its sticky foot to the hissing steam radiator, rhythmically swung its tentacles here and there until one of them touched, in the circle of admirers, something appetizing; then the poison sacs exploded, the other tentacles contracted, and the prey was stuffed into the hydra’s swollen coelenteron, which gluttony had stretched to a transparency that veiled the preceding meals like polyethylene film protecting a rack of dry-cleaned suits. Hairy with bacteria, a simocephalus was munching a rapt nematode. The fairy shrimps, having multiplied, their crimson tails glowing with hemoglobin, came cruising in from the empty bedrooms. The party was thinning.

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  Suddenly fearful, fearing he had lost her forever, the cyclops searched for the water mite, and found her miserably crouching in a corner, quite drunk, her seventh and eighth legs almost sprouted. “What do you see?” he now dared ask.

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  “Too much,” she answered swiftly. “Everything. Oh, it’s horrible, horrible.”

  Out of mercy as much as appetite, he ate her. She felt prickly inside him. Hurriedly—the rooms were almost depleted, it was late—he sought his hostess. She was by the doorway, her antennae frazzled from waving goodbye, but still magnificent, Daphnia, her carapace a liquid shimmer of psychedelic pastel. “Don’t go,” she commanded, expanding. “I have a minuscule favor to ask. Now that my children, all thirteen million of them, thank God, are off at school, I’ve taken a part-time editing job, and my first real break is this manuscript I’d be so grateful to have you read and comment on, whatever comes into your head; I admit it’s a little long, maybe you can skim the part where Napoleon invades Russia, but it’s the first effort by a perfectly delightful midge larva I know you’d enjoy meeting—”

  “I’d adore to, but I can’t,” he said, explaining, “my eye. I can’t afford to strain it, I have only this one.…” He trailed off, he felt, feebly. He was beginning to feel permeable.

  “You poor dear,” Daphnia solemnly pronounced, and ate him.

  And the next instant, a fairy shrimp, oaring by inverted, casually gathered her into the trough between his eleven pairs of undulating gill-feet and passed her toward his brazen mouth. Her scream, tinier than even the dot on this i, went unobserved.

  During the Jurassic

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  WAITING FOR THE FIRST GUESTS, the iguanodon gazed along the path and beyond, toward the monotonous cycad forests and the low volcanic hills. The landscape was everywhere interpenetrated by the sea, a kind of metallic-blue rottenness that daily breathed in and out. Behind him, his wife was assembling the hors d’oeuvres. As he watched her, something unintended, something grossly solemn, in his expression made her laugh, displaying the leaf-shaped teeth lining her cheeks. Like him, she was an ornithischian, but much smaller—a compsognathus. He wondered, watching her race bipedally back and forth among the scraps of food (dragonflies wrapped in ferns, cephalopods on toast), how he had ever found her beautiful. His eyes hungered for size; he experienced a rage for sheer blind size.

  The stegosauri, of course, were the first to appear. Among their many stupid friends these were the most stupid, and the most punctual. Their front legs bent outward and their tiny, beak-tipped, filmy-eyed faces virtually skimmed the ground; the upward sweep of their backs was mountainous, and the double rows of giant bone plates along the spine clicked together in the sway of their cumbersome gait. With hardly a greeting, they dragged their tails, quadruply spiked, across the threshold and maneuvered themselves toward the bar, which was tended by a minute and shapeless mammal hired for the evening.

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  Next came the allosaurus, a carnivorous bachelor whose dangerous aura and needled grin excited the female herbivores; then the rhamphorhynchus, a pterosaur whose mu
ch-admired “flight” was in reality a clumsy brittle glide ending in an embarrassed bump and trot. The iguanodon despised these gangly pterosaurs’ pretensions; he thought grotesque the precarious elongation of the single finger from which their levitating membranes were stretched, and privately believed that the less handsomely underwritten archaeopteryx, though sneered at as unstable and feathered, had more of a future. The hypsilophodon, with her graceful hands and branch-gripping feet, arrived escorted by the timeless crocodile—an incongruous pair, but both were recently divorced. Still the iguanodon gazed down the path.

  Behind him, the conversation gnashed on a thousand things—houses, mortgages, lawns, fertilizers, erosion, boats, winds, annuities, capital gains, recipes, education, the day’s tennis, last night’s party. Each party was consumed by discussion of the previous one. Their lives were subject to constant cross-check. When did you leave? When did you leave? We’d been out every night this week. We had an amphibious babysitter who had to be back in the water by one. Gregor had to meet a client in town, and now they’ve reduced the Saturday schedule, it means the 7:43 or nothing. Trains? I thought they were totally extinct. Not at all. They’re coming back, it’s just a matter of time until the government … In the long range of evolution, they are still the most efficient … Taking into account the heat-loss/weight ratio and assuming there’s no more glaciation … Did you know—I think this is fascinating—did you know that in the financing of those great ornate stations of the eighteen-eighties and nineties, those real monsters, there was no provision for amortization? They weren’t amortized at all, they were financed on the basis of eternity! The railroad was conceived of as the end of Progress! I think—though not an expert—that the key word in this overall industrio-socio-what-have-you-oh nexus or syndrome or bag or whatever is “overextended.” Any competitorless object bloats. Personally, I miss the trolley cars. Now, don’t tell me I’m the only creature in the room old enough to remember the trolley cars!