Chapter Sixty
The next morning, Frau Hühnerbeinstein made clear to Bartoff her reaction. She knocked on his door, bearing a glass of milk. Though surprised, he let her in; Mifkin was off with Aloysius, plotting Voot’s downfall.
Bartoff offered Gilda a seat (just to sit in for the duration of the visit; not to keep).
“I would rather stand, thank you.” Her bearing and sense of righteousness were formidable: she stood, tall and stock-still, holding the glass to her chest in both hands, as if she were a nun and it, her candle.
“You’re quite welcome; don’t mention it.” As should be obvious by that last remark, he felt a tad uncomfortable and didn’t know what to say.
“Would you like a glass of milk?” she asked.
Bartoff had been wondering about this prop. “No, thank you, frau,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Are you quite certain?”
She could see he was wavering. “It’s very nice of you to think of bringing me some milk, Frau Hühnerbeinstein, but no, thank you, I think I will pass.”
“Sure?”
“Oh all right then!” He grabbed the glass and dried it in one gulp, then burped. “Excuse me, madame.” He bowed.
“Milk is a pure thing, don’t you think?” she asked, motionless.
“Well,” he answered, taking the question, for some reason, seriously, “not if you’re the cow, it’s not.” He swayed on his feet and began stepping here and there in nervousness.
“Whatever do you mean?” she asked.
“Pardon?” He turned around, having, for the briefest of moments, forgotten she was there.
“I asked what you meant.”
“What—you, still here?” he asked, then realised that it might have come off as rude.
“I haven’t gone anywhere.”
“Of course not! Ha! I was just. . .making a little joke, madame. For your amusement; for no reason other than that.” Here he bowed. How best to expel her from the room?, he wondered. With simple, brute force—no warning, no mercy?
“So about the milk—”
Bartoff now seized the opportunity to display to the discerning lady the elocutionary agility of which he was truly capable: “When I was but a boy, I witnessed the most revolting scene of a surly beggar-man forcibly drowned in a vat of rank milk, curds big as horse scrota, by leading members of the chamber of commerce—”
“That is a story I rather would not hear.”
“You’ve heard it before?!” The man was thunderstruck!
“I would rather get back to the cow—”
“Ha ha, but madame, if I may say, without guiding your ladyship on an undignified anatomical tour of the baser creatures, a cow, by definition, lacks scrota utterly.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“Madame—I assure you—”
“May we return to the point, I beg you?”
“Frau Diva,” he began darkly, “shall I regale you with a tale of woe in which, as a brainless adolescent, goaded on by wayward friends, I sought to determine, once and for all, by crawling beneath a shamelessly flatulent heifer in the dead of night, the exact specification of its reproductive organs? Or,” he added, a mite sarcastically, “have you heard that one too?”
“We were referring to the purity of milk, as a means of comparison, but if the subject of milk carries with it too many foul memories of animals’ genitalia for you, we might just as easily employ another.”
“Milk! Pure! By God, that’s wrong—brazenly wrong, and dumb!” he cried, suddenly remembering.
She eyed him with faltering patience. “How so?”
“Oh!” He thought. “Well—if it comes to that, I’m not sure.”
She nodded, expecting as much. But she was mistaken; he went on:
“Do you mean, with respect to the cow?”
“I don’t know—you babbled something earlier about milk’s impurity in relation to the cow, but that’s not really what I came to speak to you about.”
“Well, I suppose I meant. . .” Here he came up dry.
“The reason I came,” she began.
“Wait, wait, let me think! Let me think!” He racked his brain, fingernails piercing his scalp. Gilda watched thin trickles of blood run down his forehead.
“It’s not important,” she said. “Please stop that, you’re—”
“Wait, damn you, please! I’ve got it! I’ve almost got it!”
“Take your hands off your head, my good man! You’re bleeding!”
“What?!” He pulled his hands away, and stared at the blood which coated them. He then looked to her with a gape of betrayal. “What have you done to me?!”
“I haven’t done anything, you silly man. You’ve done it yourself.” Sighing, she looked around the tidy room for a napkin, found one (subtly scented with sperm), sat him down in a chair and pressed the cloth tenderly to the top of his head.
“Ouch! That hurts!” he complained.
“Just sit still and stop acting like a baby.”
“Yes miss. . .”
She dipped the napkin in a glass of water and pressed it through his hair. He tried his best, but, despite his manful efforts at self-control, tears began dribbling from his eyes.
“Water,” he chuckled, and pointed to his cheeks. “It must’ve dripped down from the napkin—don’t you think?”
“Hush.”
He felt humiliated. “. . .I remembered what I was going to say,” he whimpered.
“What about?”
“The cow.”
“All right.”
“Would you—would you like me to tell you?”
“If you like.”
“Cows probably don’t like milk.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Pardon?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Um. . .They probably don’t like being, ah, manhandled—so to speak. At least—if it’s by someone they don’t truly love.”
“Cows aren’t people, you know.”
“‘Cowhandled’?”
“I mean—”
“‘Cowhoofled’?”
“I mean, we shouldn’t impute human emotions to animals.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because—God gifted us special attributes He denied the lower creatures.”
“Oh.”
“Mm-hm.”
“By ‘us’, do you mean—humans?”
“That’s right. For example, boy animals don’t indulge in erotic pleasures with other boy animals.”
“They don’t?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, no, not exactly. But if they did, then they would go to Hell.”
“Do animals go to Hell?”
“Well, no. I mean, that is, I can’t be sure.”
“So if you’re naughty, and your dog’s naughty, you could stay friends for all time amidst the flames and torture?” Here he looked, with something akin to joy, at Sam, who slept on a frilly pillow pilfered from the bedroom of his erstwhile mistress, dreaming of defecating.
“That’s not what I meant. Perhaps they have their own Hell. Perhaps God has created a special, smaller Hell for sodomitic creatures.”
“With fire?”
“I suppose.”
“And no treats.”
“What’s that?”
“If it’s Hell, there won’t be treats for the animals to enjoy. You know, milk for cats and bones for dogs, and all that.”
“I suppose not.”
“At least, not very many.”
“No.”
“At any rate, fewer than usual.”
She dabbed at him in silence for a bit, until he asked:
“What does Animal Heaven look like?”
“I really wouldn’t know.”
“Have you ever been there?”
“Of course not.”
“Would you like to visit, someday?”
“What a lot of silly questions you ask!”
“I was just wondering.”
More silence, until he broke it with:
“Don’t bulls ever make love?”
“Really!” She stepped away from him, and dangled the scarlet napkin before his eyes. “Do you see what happens when you act without thinking?”
“But I’m no actor.”
“You know perfectly well what I meant.”
He nodded, to pretend that he did.
She pulled over a stool and sat down across from him. “Now, to say what I’ve come to talk to you about.”
“Can one take a taxi from Human Hell to Animal Hell, then back again?”
“Stop interrupting.” Her unnaturally large frame, which had so entranced the late Inspector Pluck, and threatened to vaginally, or perhaps anally, inhale the stool, disgusted him in its suffocatingly overpowering womanliness. “What I want to ask you, is: Don’t you fear punishment in the next world?”
“Who?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“That’s right.”
“Ah. . .punishment for what?”
“For your sins.”
“But I haven’t got any sins.”
“Of course you have. We all have.”
“We have?”
“Of course.”
“Even you?”
“Of course.”
“What are they?”
“They’re none of your concern, is what they are.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t worry about mine. Just concentrate on yours.”
“On my what? Are we speaking about genitalia again?”
“On your sins, my good man!”
“But I’m clearly not a good man, if what you’re saying is true!”
“Oh, don’t try to misunderstand me!”
“I’d rather talk about your sins.”
“I’ve no doubt that you would, but that’s not why I’m here.”
“Why are you here?”
“To save you.”
“To save me?”
“From yourself.”
“I promise I won’t tear open my head again.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Are you certain?”
“As certain as the word of God.”
“Which word is that?”
“‘Hell’.”
“‘Hell’?”
“You’re going to go to Hell.”
“Where?”
“Hell.”
“Animal Hell or Human Hell?”
“I’m not so sure.”
“When?”
“When you die.”
“When will that be?”
“How should I know?”
“How should you know where I’ll go when I die, then?”
“Ugh!”
“Pardon?”
“It has been revealed to us.”
“What has?”
“The truth of eternal punishment and salvation.”
“It has?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In Holy Writ, and in personal revelation.”
“Personal what?”
“Revelation.”
“Oh.”
“But there’s still time.”
“Time for what? More homosexual relations?”
“No! Time to save yourself!”
“From whom?”
“From yourself!”
“What?”
Exasperated, she plunged her face into her palms.
“Be careful you don’t scratch yourself!” he warned her. “I should know.”
Infuriated by her burden—the ability granted to her to see so plainly what others squinted at, if at all, in queasy befuddlement—she began to weep. Bartoff, moved, began to (unintentionally roughly) stroke her hair.
“It’s all right,” he murmured. “You just have to accept that I can see things plainly that you squint at, if at all, in queasy befuddlement.”
She looked up, struck by the conjunction of her own thoughts with those of Bartoff and their narrator. “What do you mean by that?”
“Why, exactly what I said! I can see things, that have been made for me to see, which you, for whom they have not, cannot.”
“What sort of things? Do you refer to visions? Ethical shapes reifying in the air?”
“Not exactly. Only the love I feel for my lover. Of course you can’t see it. It hasn’t been granted to you. And of course you can’t understand it. It’s writ in a language you were never taught to read. But it’s real, nonetheless. And—you’ll just have to take my word for it—after all these years in my life which I’ve wasted, for others, for nothing—this is my only salvation.”