Bluebeard (47 page)

I flicked on the switch.

There was a moment of silence, and then Mrs. Berman gasped in wonderment.

“Stay right where you are,” I told her, “and tell me what you think of it.”

“I can’t come any farther?” she said.

“In a minute,” I said, “but first I want to hear you say what it looks like from here.”

“A big fence,” she said.

“Go on,” I said.

“A very big fence, an incredibly high and long fence,” she said, “every square inch of it encrusted with the most gorgeous jewelry.”

“Thank you very much,” I said. “And now take my hand and close your eyes. I am going to lead you to the middle, and you can look again.”

She closed her eyes, and she followed me as unresistingly as a toy balloon.

When we were in the middle, with thirty-two feet of the painting extending to either side, I told her to open her eyes again.

We were standing on the rim of a beautiful green valley in the springtime. By actual count, there were five thousand, two hundred and nineteen people on the rim with us or down below. The largest person was the size of a cigarette, and the smallest a flyspeck. There were farmhouses here and there, and the ruins of a medieval
watchtower on the rim where we stood. The picture was so realistic that it might have been a photograph.

“Where are we?” said Circe Berman.

“Where I was,” I said, “when the sun came up the day the Second World War ended in Europe.”

     
I
T IS ALL PART
of the regular tour of my museum now. First come the doomed little girls on swings in the foyer, and then the earliest works of the first Abstract Expressionists, and then the perfectly tremendous whatchamacallit in the potato barn. I have unspiked the sliding doors at the far end of the barn, so that the greatly increased flow of visitors can move past the whatchamacallit without eddies and backwash. In one end they go, and out the other. Many of them will go through two times or more: not the whole show, just through the potato barn.

Ha!

No solemn critic has yet appeared. Several laymen and laywomen have asked me, however, to say what sort of a painting I would call it. I told them what I will tell the first critic to show up, if one ever comes, and one may never come, since the whatchamacallit is so exciting to the common people:

“It isn’t a painting at all! It’s a tourist attraction! It’s a World’s Fair! It’s a Disneyland!”

It is a gruesome Disneyland. Nobody is cute there.

On an average, there are ten clearly drawn World War Two survivors to each square foot of the painting. Even the figures in the distance, no bigger than flyspecks, when examined through one of several magnifying glasses I keep in the barn, prove to be concentration-camp victims or slave laborers or prisoners of war from this or that country, or soldiers from this or that military unit on the German side, or local farmers and their families, or lunatics set free from asylums, and on and on.

There is a war story to go with every figure in the picture, no matter how small. I made up a story, and then painted the person it had happened to. I at first made myself available in the barn to tell anyone who asked what the story was of this person or that one, but soon gave up in exhaustion. “Make up your own war stories as you look at the whatchamacallit,” I tell people. I stay in the house here, and simply point the way out to the potato barn.

That night with Circe Berman, though, I was glad to tell her any of the stories she wished to hear.

“Are you in there?” she said.

I pointed out myself at the bottom and right above the floor. I pointed with the toe of my shoe. I was the largest figure—the one as big as a cigarette. I was also the
only one of the thousands with his back to the camera, so to speak. The crack between the fourth and fifth panels ran up my spine and parted my hair, and might be taken for the soul of Rabo Karabekian.

“This man clinging to your leg is looking up at you as though you were God,” she said.

“He is dying of pneumonia, and will be dead in two hours,” I said. “He is a Canadian bombardier who was shot down over an oil field in Hungary. He doesn’t know who I am. He can’t even see my face. All he can see is a thick fog which isn’t there, and he’s asking me if we are home yet.”

“And what are you telling him?” she said.

“What would
you
tell him?” I said. “I’m telling him, ‘Yes! We’re home! We’re home!’”

“Who is this man in the funny-looking suit?” she said.

“That is a concentration-camp guard who threw away his SS uniform and stole the suit from a scarecrow,” I said. I pointed out a group of concentration camp victims far away from the masquerading guard. Several of them were on the ground and dying, like the Canadian bombardier. “He brought these people to the valley and dumped them, but doesn’t know where to go next. Anybody who catches him will know he is an SS man—because he has his serial number tattooed on his upper left arm.”

“And these two?” she said.

“Yugoslavian partisans,” I said.

“This one?” she said.

“A sergeant major in the Moroccan Spahis, captured in North Africa,” I said.

“And this one with a pipe in his mouth?” she said.

“A Scottish glider pilot captured on D-Day,” I said.

“They’re just from everywhere, aren’t they?” she said.

“This is Gurkha here,” I said, “all the way from Nepal. And this machine-gun squad in German uniforms: they’re Ukrainians who changed sides early in the war. When the Russians finally reach the valley, they’ll be hanged or shot.”

“There don’t seem to be any women,” she said.

“Look closer,” I said. “Half the concentration camp people and half the people from the lunatic asylums are women. They just don’t look much like women anymore. They aren’t what you might call ‘movie stars.’”

“There don’t seem to be any
healthy
women,” she said.

“Wrong again,” I said. “You’ll find healthy ones at either end—in the corners at the bottom.”

We went to the extreme right end for a look. “My goodness,” she said, “it’s like a display in a museum of natural history.” So it was. There was a farmhouse down at the bottom of both ends: each one buttoned up tight like a little fort, its high gates closed, and all the animals in the courtyard. And I had made a schematic cut through the earth below them, so as to show their
cellars, too, just as a museum display might give away the secrets of animals’ burrows underground.

“The healthy women are in the cellar with the beets and potatoes and turnips,” I said. “They are putting off being raped as long as possible, but they have heard the history of other wars in the area, so they know that rape will surely come.”

“Does the picture have a title?” she said, rejoining me at the middle.

“Yes it does,” I said.

“What is it?” she said.

And I said: “‘Now It’s the Women’s Turn.’”

“Am I crazy,” she said, indicating a figure lurking near the ruined watchtower, “or is this a Japanese soldier?”

“That’s what he is,” I said. “He is a major in the army. You can tell that from the gold star and two brown stripes on the cuff of his left sleeve. And he still has his sword. He would rather die than give up his sword.”

“I’m surprised that there were any Japanese there,” she said.

“There weren’t,” I said, “but I thought there should be one there so I put one there.”

“Why?” she said.

“Because,” I said, “the Japanese were as responsible as the Germans for turning Americans into a bunch of
bankrupt militaristic fuckups—after we’d done such a good job of being sincere war-haters after the First World War.”

“And this woman lying here—” she said, “she’s dead?”

“She’s dead,” I said. “She’s an old queen of the Gypsies.”

“She’s so fat,” she said. “Is she the only fat person? Everybody else is so skinny.”

“Dying is the only way to get fat in Happy Valley,” I said. “She’s as fat as a circus freak because she’s been dead three days.”

“‘Happy Valley,’” echoed Circe.

“Or ‘Peacetime’ or ‘Heaven’ or ‘the Garden of Eden’ or ‘Springtime’ or whatever you want to call it,” I said.

“She’s the only one who’s all alone,” said Circe. “Or is she?”

“Just about,” I said. “People don’t smell too nice after they’ve been dead three days. She was the first stranger to arrive in Happy Valley, and she came all alone, and she died almost right away.”

“Where are the other Gypsies?” she said.

“With their fiddles and tambourines and brightly painted caravans?” I said. “And their reputation for thieving, which was much deserved?”

Mrs. Berman told me a legend about Gypsies I had never heard before: “They stole the nails from the
Roman soldiers who were about to crucify Jesus,” she said. “When the soldiers looked for the nails, they had disappeared mysteriously. Gypsies had stolen them, and Jesus and the crowd had to wait until the soldiers sent for new nails. After that, God Almighty gave permission to all Gypsies to steal all they could.” She pointed to the bloated Gypsy queen. “She believed that story. All Gypsies do.”

“Too bad for her that she believed it,” I said. “Or maybe it didn’t matter whether she believed it or not, since she was starving to death when she arrived all alone in Happy Valley.

“She tried to steal a chicken from the farmhouse,” I said. “The farmer saw her from this bedroom window, and took a shot at her with a small-caliber rifle he kept under his feather mattress. She ran away. He thought he had missed her, but he hadn’t. She had a little bullet in her abdomen, and she lay down there and died. Three days later, the rest of us came along.”