Cyclops (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Read Online Free PDF

which seemed to offend the man:
    “What do you say to that? Hardly a traffic accident, eh?” he was saying with a bitter smile, proud at being able to comprehend the extent of the horror in the headlines.
    “What can I say? You could have read the same thing yesterday and the day before …”
    “Yesterday and the day before … If it was there yesterday and the day before, does that make today less appalling?” the man asked sternly. “You don’t have to be a doctor to see that. But of course, doctors see only what it’s like to be ill when they get sick themselves. Now, what about when those people over there”—he gestured vaguely with his head—“read about us in the papers one day? When a California doctor starts muttering that the headlines are boring, always the same as yesterday, and the day before? Just because you and yours were spared yesterday and the day before, does that mean you’ll be saying today and tomorrow that everything’s the same?”
    Melkior was finding the conversation strange. … And why the devil had this man picked on no one but him?
    “Yes, well, people are funny that way,” he said, merely to end the unexpected encounter.
    “What way?”
    “Well … if one of us were to be run over by a tram they would be more upset about it than about those thousands killed in the ruins in London. Not because they like us more—simply because they don’t want to expend their imagination on things like that.”
    The man didn’t understand what Melkior was on about, and the word
imagination
struck him as downright offensive.
    “Imagination?” he asked sternly. He knitted his eyebrows and looked Melkior in the eye with unconcealed disapproval. “Conscience, not imagination! What’s there to imagine? Shall I pretend I’m not afraid of war? No, not for myself! Nor for the wife! I told them this morning at the Mobilization Office … They gave me papers for Apatin … I said, I’m not talking about my wife … If there’s got to be a war, I said, you won’t be canceling it for my wife’s sake. Right? But how can I look my fourteen-year-old boy in the eye and pretend to be as full of cheer as if I were going bowling when the child reads the papers and knows that the Jerries broke through the Maginot Line and took France in a month? Children are no longer babes these days. The boy knows where I’m going and he never says a word … And I hear the little ones talk: Daddy’s going to drive a tank, they say. That’s what things have come to!” and the man spread his arms, showed that they were holding nothing, empty helpless arms.
    “So you’ve been …” but the man didn’t let him finish.
    “Called up!” he cried sharply as if cursing God. “There, see for yourself: youngsters strutting about free as birds, picking up girls, while they go calling us up, the class of nineteen hundred! They told me—because I’m a driver with Impex—they told me I’d been reclassified as a tank driver. But I’ve only seen tanks in the cinema! How on earth am I going to drive one? And Russian—because they say the Russians are going to give us the tanks—Russian tanks are not designed for our kind of terrain, no sir, not by a long shot! That’s something for those bigwigs up in Belgrade to sort out, not for a simple driver like myself, right?”
    Melkior had been looking in all directions in search of Dom Kuzma and scarcely listened to the argument about the tanks. He asked the man offhandedly, only to be polite:
    “Not for our kind of terrain, you say?”
    “By no means! Those are steel fortresses, weighing upwards of ninety tons, what use can they be up our hills? This is a mountainous country.”
    “How strange …” said Melkior quite absentmindedly. He was overcome by an odd kind of queasiness at the word
mobilization.
“Mobilizing, aren’t they?”
    “You bet they are! My best friend’s been in since last Tuesday. Class of nineteen hundred, same as me. He’s all right, he’s