25. Battles

The smell of coffee caught him looking at his feet: it was eight twenty-four in the morning and he was barefoot, dressed but barefoot, ready to go have breakfast after his long walk, wondering rather vaguely and indirectly, due to an imprecision that was plaguing him, about the possible need for another itinerary to seek the assurance that he had lost something insignificant at some point, a little thing that had interrupted the rhythmic mechanical movement that was his life. It was insignificant, barely a wedge, axis, or valve, something wholly unsuspected due to its size, as banal as the last toe on that left foot, and yet it had held him captive in front of the biggest fountain in Krieger Park waiting for the sun to rise or sitting on the bed breathing in the smell of coffee and looking at his bare feet. As always, he still trusted the darkness; he believed that there in the shadow, without moving, he could better overcome a sudden attempt by blood to leave his body, who knew if it was because shadows were dark like blood in battles, like platoons of dead men scattered on a hill or sunk into a delta that no one had to worry about anymore. He felt he must continue to contain not only his blood but all liquids within his unfaithful body, not let them escape, not permit them, once spilled, to reunite in the growing outer darkness, to protect himself and help his body withstand lengthy hours and days. And yet, if he were to cross the corridor diagonally toward the side of the house that faced the garden, he would leave the darkness and find the light from the glass door and nothing more: nothing more and it would be the wrong move, like having amassed an impulse that would never be resolved with action. He would review battles in the library at the first desk to the right, he would reconsider them from the point of view of the winners and the losers, and correct positions and plans. He would compile this into a book, the battles of the world by General Rainer von Gerthmann, which would show how it would have been possible to win the ones that had been lost, and to win those that had been won better, faster, and with fewer casualties; he would do it, put on his shoes, go have breakfast, and then be ready to begin the exposition of the first battle: first he would make a detailed description of his own tough, strong body entering the little grove of birch trees by the east flank, blindly determined and with no need to give it excessive attention but accidents in the terrain will no doubt require an earlier exploration with hands, fingers, their soft fragile gloveless tips touching each stone, each fountain, each lobe, each eyelash, and above all the navel, where, they say, orientals drive in their curved sabers to disembowel their despicable bodies and fall laboriously forward to die on a cushion of blood and viscera. To lie down on a cushion of blood like the dead who might not have died in battle: it takes five men to move, aim, and fire a cannon and they must not be killed, five well-fed, well-clothed, healthy men free of desire or resentment, each one’s eyes on his assigned mechanism and nothing else; tough, impassioned men ready for the endless toil of war machines, of armored vehicles, the plumed hat for saluting the multitudes, men like him given to cut through the fabric of dreams and guard each hour so that not a minute would be lost beside the fountains in Krieger Park in the deepest dark of the dawn of day. Without a doubt leaving Mr. Kämpfer behind with his eyeglasses and smile and always-clean pens ready to make notes in blank books at the library, entire populations evacuated and Mr. Kämpfer with them, so he could reconnoiter the terrain like someone on the lookout for victory, but that could wait because once the enemy was decimated, its leaders captured, lesser prisoners exchanged for some man who had fallen into their hands because that was also inevitable, a few tortured as a lesson, flags flying, new maps drawn, the results of lightning conquest or disaster reported, he could leave and eat the breakfast that was getting cold on the table and, barely warm, it would reach his lips, tightly closed so blood would not try to escape, bubbling up in the pure night and overcome by the strength of old discipline. Once the enemy was dead, there would be no pity compassion mercy pardon or sympathy, dead weaklings and fools and barbarians and those who wear pearls and offer greetings with gloved hands and bend at the waist in a bow to fall dead with the curved saber slashed through a neck, tearing through flesh fine as paper, and eyes that he would have wanted so many times to see open in just the instant when he jumped from shadow to shadow, like the one in battle who is always the first to snatch the flag of mortification. Dead and nothing remains of them, not even memories or hints upon waking when the inescapable actions of every morning are undertaken, and for the first time the key ring is not where it ought to be, where it has always been every morning, even the gloomy ones going back years and years, he would never know how many nor did he want to try to calculate them because it was impossible to count the years: cadavers could be counted in fields tainted by fires, by red moons, by whirlwinds of smoke, and by boasts that would seed future wars, but not the years that were lost, confused by the haste of minutes and the predicaments of hope, years that began long and clear and passed in a single speech with knells and young wine, ingenious convictions, pillage, and arrogance, to end waving arms and stamping feet in the depth of nightmares, magnificence under a park pavilion, the drone of water given shape by a basin, the inexplicable intruding woman rising up in the fog of breath.

A book that would enumerate weapons and make an inventory of the virtues of soldiery, that would have a section dedicated to the undesirable aspects of the enemy, where surly looks and transparent silhouettes could be erased, which would forever annihilate jumbled words and synoptic charts and maps and ink sketches and above all prohibit the most bloody hours of the night and also the time, five after eight, to enter the dining room in the morning after the hike to Krieger Park and back. A book that would clearly state the ways to fight, the ways to take eyeglasses out of the interior pocket of a jacket, the ways to die, to erect fountains that collect water from geysers, to forget for no reason, to describe apt bodies for victory fluttering down alert from eagle nests, to put on shoes, stand up straight, kill oneself, enter the dining room again, the library, the vestibule as if nothing had happened nor as if ice were rising in crags there, prepared to accept the wounded body covered by scabs, etched by scars, opened and finally stitched up so it might serve in another winning battle from the shelter of the door that leads to the dining room at five after eight in the morning in the house on Scheller Street.