Arslan

Chapter 14

The third night, in the early quiet after the lights were out, while the nervous house settled its boards uneasily, Leila came to my bed. She turned back the quilt and began to slide in beside me. “No,” I said positively. In the dimness her smoky small face showed the pale light of a smile. “Arslan,” she explained.

I turned my face away into the pillow, disabled with regret, finding it pitiful that he had sent this child to me. In his mind, would an obligation be discharged—or at least deferred? Did he recognize obligation? He was Arslan. He might have chosen to punish me for my presumption, to punish me with the smallness of her cool narrow arms; I should not have dreamed of obligation. “Arslan?” I said, talking into the pillow.

She came sometimes early in the night, sometimes when I slept, sometimes in the dawn. She came always silent as a dream, appropriately fairylike in her smallness, miraculous in her power. The laying on of hands. And I understood, and I was reconciled, and the bitter buds of pity and regret opened peonylike into gratitude and joy. It was a gift—a gift that Arslan had put into her hands to give to me. It was exquisite, it was glad; and I wept, and I laughed, and her delicious small body and her lithe wise fingers lit multicolored joys through all my nerves. And “Arslan,” I sang silently into her hair, “Arslan, Arslan,” against her smooth brown body. This came, too, this unexpected universe, under the heading of the small word sex. This was pleasure, a thing I had never known, a thing pole-distant from the black urgencies that Arslan knew how to rouse, the blinding explosions that resolved them in wreck.

He had no business of state in Kraftsville now. He had come to give me this, and to tell Franklin a lie. I have succeeded. But when the dust-colored regiment had settled in the ruined camp, and the bodyguard of hawk-eyed Turkmens hovered devoutly in the house, he announced, “The last pockets of fertility are in South America.”

“In other words, you lied to me.”

“A simple deterrent, sir. I was relatively unarmed, and I wished to avoid unprofitable complications.” Franklin, too, no doubt, wished to avoid complications. Arslan had eaten reclined on the couch—his old place, his old style—served by his bodyguard, attended by Leila, while blithe Sanjar dined with us in the kitchen, bubbling questions and information. Now Sanjar had taken Leila to show her the camp, and I had brought in the cold keg. I looked into my mug and considered beer. I was very grateful for beer. How much ease there was in it, and after all, how much strength. There were still pockets of fertility. Arslan was a pocket of fertility.

“Is South America giving you trouble, General?”

“Yes, sir. It is the jungles—the extent of the jungles. The more accessible areas present no worse problems than other continents.” He dipped more beer from the open keg. He was affable, conversational, informative. “I have dealt with jungles elsewhere, of course. But the methods that worked in Burma and the Congo are not working well in Brazil. And not to work well is not to work at all. Ah, you look hopeful, sir. But it is very probable that I shall succeed. The areas are large, but they are isolated. It may be necessary to use more severe methods.” He broke off, looking at Franklin’s face, and in a swelling rush of exuberance he flung out his arms, half rising, and burst into a chortle of merriment. “Do you remember, sir, the night I left Kraftsville?”

I laughed. He flashed his look of all-knowing glee upon me, a moment’s mutual touch that left me motionless. Franklin leaned back in his chair, his face dark. And Arslan cried (turning upon himself that eager vivisectionist interest which was like mockery), “I have lost my pain.” He subsided smiling into the cushions. “Somewhere between Athens and Stalingrad.”

“That’ll be fine news for Morris Schott’s widow.”

Arslan watched from the bastion of his amusement. “You no longer put flowers on the graves.”

“Only on Decoration Day.” Franklin stretched his legs pontifically in front of him. “That’s our custom, General. We decorate all the graves then.”

“And Rusudan’s?” Arslan asked softly. “And your wife’s?”

Franklin’s voice, when he answered, was heavy. “My wife’s, yes. Rusudan hasn’t had any mourners around here lately.”

The eyes hooded, but the telltale dimples of the invisible smile remained. It was touching—or horrible, or ridiculous—that Arslan should have dimples. They were unobtrusive, they were faint, they were perhaps deniable; but I saw them. “How did your wife die?”

“Are you asking for information, or just for entertainment?”

“For information, sir.”

“All right, then, General, I’ll tell you. She died for lack of some of those drugs you once assured me would be manufactured locally. She died of pneumonia. A simple dose of penicillin would have saved her.” (Although he had talked bitterly enough of ready-made excuses for doctors’ mistakes.) And he added, a gratuitous bonus of non- entertaining information, “It’ll be two years this November.”

Arslan lifted his drink with a motion like a shrug. “But you have managed well.”

“That’s right,” Franklin said savagely. “Considering the circumstances. Now I’d like some information. What was your idea leaving the Russians here as long as you did and then pulling them out the way you did?”

“The way I did? Why do you ask this, sir?”

“I mean secretly. I think I can understand why you sneaked out with your headquarters, and I think I can appreciate it. But why bother to leave the Russians here all winter, with nothing to do but watch the border and fraternize with us natives? And then why go to all the trouble of sneaking them out by night?”

Arslan gave him a meditative half-smile. Just beneath my diaphragm I felt the interesting beginnings of fear. Nizam’s reports had not satisfied him; I was doomed to describe to him personally those months of fruitless intrigue. “They were needed elsewhere. They had fraternized too much. Also, sir, it is my habit to move without advance notice. Every habit involves a weakness; what is predictable is exposed to attack. But by its nature, a habit of unpredictability is less dangerous than most.”

“And then it turns out not to make two cents’ worth of difference whether the border’s sealed or not. We get goods and we get news from pretty far up the Mississippi and the Ohio, too, General, but I don’t see where we’re any better off than before the Russians left.” Or, in short, Plan One was a posthumous success. He leaned back in his chair and fixed Arslan with a monitory stare. “We could live with the Russians. They earned their keep.”

It had always been entertaining to observe their conversations: Franklin truculent and unbending, unabashedly asking his impertinent questions; Arslan with his accidental air of courtesy and his deliberate candor, forever expatiating his profoundest secrets as if there were nothing outrageous in the counseling of conqueror with conquered. It was like old times—the bitter truce, the threadbare couch, the presence (quiet, full of signification and portent) of the soldiers. Like old times, except that we all drank together, though independently; except that I was almost a quarter-century old; except that there were thread-like lines of gray in Arslan’s coarse hair, and webs of lines about his eyes, and the straggle of beard, and the white freckles on his right cheek where phosphorus had splattered; except that Franklin Bond was Mayor of Kraftsville and Supervisor of Kraft County.

Chapter 15

Now what had been our real life was suspended. Arslan was here; we existed in relation to Arslan. Franklin and I passed in our orbits, speaking like hostelers, all discussions adjourned, all quarrels in abeyance. Kraftsville receded, a cycloramic setting for Arslan’s movements. The little war that had so occupied me for seven seasons lost all personal interest. Kraftsville would kill no more of my horses; I rode Arlan’s horses again.

Yet, expectably, chance set me alone with Franklin after a late supper, Sanjar and Leila abed, Arslan and his bodyguard on some midnight errand, and nothing petty to talk about. “He’s changed,” Franklin said.

Not even to my physical sight, since that first night of his return. Arslan’s mouth and Arslan’s eyes were unscarred and unaged. But there was a difference around him. “He’s over the hump,” I said.

“That may be partly it.” He snorted thoughtfully. “It’s all over but the dirty work.” Franklin L. Bond, ever fair. But his convictions were otherwise. “And of course,” he added, “he was very young then.”