Nowhere (18 page)

Of the governmental tenants, the Court was most quickly reached from the ground floor. The one-car elevator at the rear of the little lobby seemed indifferent to my button-pushing, and therefore I went beyond it to a staircase and descended to a dank basement corridor, which was dimly lighted by a naked bulb of small wattage that hung from the ceiling on a badly frayed wire. I groped my way along the hallway, trudging here and there through pools of standing water and more than once hearing scurryings that could have come only from rodents of a fairly substantial size.

I had begun to assume I was in the wrong cellar for the Court, or else the handwritten sign outside had been the work of a practical joker with unfathomable motives, and was about to turn back when a door opened in the crepuscularity just beyond me, and an ancient man, with a parchment skull around which were a few unruly wisps of white hair, shuffled forth. His judicial robes were tattered.

I was amazed that he could see me, given his rheumy eyes and the feeble available light. “
Now
you come,” he said peevishly. “Now, when I’ve got to go piss. Well, you’ll just have to wait while I go to the toilet, which means climbing the stairs, for the lift is once again out of order, and then at my age you have to stand there till the prostate gland decides what to do, holding that shriveled wick that’s no earthly good for any other function.”

“I was simply going to observe the court at work,” I said. “Please don’t feel any need to hurry on my account. I’ll just go in and sit down. Is anyone else there?”

“Certainly not,” said he. “We dispense swift justice here and don’t make people wait around.”

“Then I’ll come upstairs with you and look in on the other branches of government while you’re in the toilet.”

He made a gesture of indifference. Going up the stairs at his side required more patience than I had anticipated, so slow and tottering was his climb, but when I offered him a hand or arm, his rejection, with a horny elbow, smote my ribs that were still sore from the calipers of Olga’s steel thighs.

To make some use of this time I asked him about the court: was it civil or criminal?

He grunted disagreeably. “What a dumb question. Criminals have no place in a court! They are dealt with by the police.”

“But is it not possible that the police might sometime punish the wrong man?”

“It’s also possible that a person might be struck by lightning or have some other kind of ill fortune, contract a mortal illness, and so on, but that sort of thing is not an occasion for a resort to a court of justice.”

“Then what does your court deal with? Civil lawsuits?”

By now we had climbed perhaps four steps, each of which the old jurist gained in a most precarious way, teetering interminably on the metal binding at the edge of the tread and arresting a backwards fall with a desperate grasp of the rail, applied only at the last moment it could have been effective. After witnessing this procedure repeatedly I at last took my heart from my mouth: he was actually in no danger of falling.

“I don’t know what that term means,” said he. “What I adjudicate are private differences between individuals. For example, a man acquires a new possession, say a pocketknife, and proudly shows it to a friend. The friend disparages it, so the owner of the knife hauls him into court on a charge of envy. The defendant, on the other hand, tries to prove that his criticism of the knife had to do only with objective standards of quality: the workmanship is shoddy by comparison with other knives sold for the same amount of money.”

“Suppose you decided in favor of the plaintiff in this example?”

“If the decision went against the defendant, he would be obliged, for a certain length of time, to wear a placard on his back announcing to the world that he was an envious person.”

“The same kind of thing, then, that the person arrested for rudeness must undergo.”

“Not at all. Rudeness is a crime against the state,” said the old judge. “Envy is a personal matter. An envious man is not put into the pillory.”

I couldn’t see the distinction. Therefore I asked him another question. “Do you have insurance companies in Saint Sebastian?”

“No,” said he. “It is against the law to wager on someone else’s misfortune.”

“Then what happens to the man on whose sidewalk a pedestrian slips and breaks his collarbone and subsequently sues the property owner: a routine occurrence in the States—?” Something like that happened to a retired postman who lived next door to my uncle’s sister-in-law’s second cousin’s friend: the uninsured ex-mailman was the defendant; the victim claimed he had dislocated his spine; I never learned of the outcome.

“Yes,” said the old man, toiling up the third-to-last step to the ground floor. “The victim would surely be sued by the property owner.”

“Can I have heard you correctly? The
victim
would be sued? Wouldn’t he be doing the suing?”

His glare suggested such annoyance that I was concerned lest he become distracted and lose his tenuous grasp of the railing and plunge backwards down the stairs. “Are you trying to bait me?”

“Forgive me, sir. I’m honestly trying to understand the workings of your law, so different from ours. In America, and I think many other places, the injured party is the plaintiff.”

“And so with us,” the old man told me, his anger subsiding, or rather turning into what would seem contempt. “In the episode you have projected, the property owner would have been humiliated by someone’s having been injured on his sidewalk. It would only be right that he sued the fellow who was responsible,
viz.,
he whose back was injured.”

“But what of the victim? First he hurt his spine and is perhaps permanently disabled, and then he is sued. Is that justice?”

The judge’s brow descended. “Yes,” said he. “The person you speak of sounds as if he might definitely be the kind of unfortunate whose specialty is making the people around him totally miserable. One more such outrage might well prove him to be the kind of troublemaker we would want to eliminate from our society.”

I repeated, “Eliminate?” The problem with ingenious systems of justice is that they inevitably have their ugly aspect.

“It’s often the only answer,” said he. We had at last reached the lobby, where he stood sourly contemplating the door of the out-of-service elevator. “And Gezieferland, believe it or not, dotes on such people: they’re always after us to send them more losers. Sometimes they even threaten to go to war. The idea there is that we’d beat them savagely and thus their entire population would again suffer the kind of loss they live for.”

As I remembered from Olga’s remarks, Gezieferland was another little country, north of Saint Sebastian. “Are you saying that you exile these so-called losers to your northern neighbor?”

He nodded, and proceeded to refer to the southern neighbor mentioned by Olga. “Swatina takes off our hands anyone who makes a public menace of himself: say, walks along the street speaking violently to an invisible companion or exposes a part of himself that might disgust others, such as a back covered with pimples or an enormous belly. There are scoundrels, male and female, who will commit this crime at the beach and play portable phonographs and eat gluttonously while dripping with sweat. Lying to the south of us, Swatina has a warmer climate than we and consequently a longer beach season. Indeed, the visitor to that wretched country sees nothing but striped umbrellas and hideous naked bodies.”

My physical impatience was making me uncomfortable. I could not endure creeping up two more floors in his company. Therefore, with thanks to him for helping me to a new understanding of Saint Sebastian, I hastened to a narrow flight of upward-leading stairs and climbed to what Americans would have called the second floor, but which, in the European style, was the first: of this I was reminded by the painted
1
on the wall of the landing. This meant that the old judge would have an even longer climb to the toilet than I had first supposed.

It seemed nonsensical that the governmental agencies would be put on the upper floors when a costume business, a school of ventriloquism, and the novelties of Mellenkamp occupied the more accessible offices. I thought that on the route upstairs I might just stop off at one or more of these establishments and talk with the people who worked there, but on each landing there was a locked door between the stairway and the business floor, as well as a sign forbidding entry and warning the would-be trespasser that attack dogs patrolled the premises at all hours.

At the third (actually the fourth) floor, the door to the landing stood open. To shut it would have been preposterous: it consisted of an empty frame from which the panels had been removed. I went along the corridor, passing the toilets (which had no doors whatever and therefore no designation as to the sex of their users). I arrived at a door marked
CHAMBER OF LEGISLATORS
. I opened it and stepped inside.

What I saw was a largish room filled with canvas cots of the folding, Army type, each of which contained the recumbent form of a markedly shabby man. The odor of the place was very unpleasant. As I stood there, surveying the place, I felt a hand plucking at my trousers in the area of the knee. It was the man on the nearest bunk.

“Hey, buddy,” said he, continuing to yank at me, “gimme some dope.” He seemed not much older than I, but he was in miserable physical condition, and he obviously had not washed his face in time out of mind: the dirt was ingrained.

“I don’t have any,” I said, and pulled away from his grasp.

“How about a drink?” When I shook my head, he asked, “Then have you got a cigarette at least?”

“Sorry, I don’t smoke.”

“Then what
have
you got for your legislator?” he asked. “It better be good, if you want me to scratch
your
back.”

“I’m a visitor, a foreigner. Are you really a legislator?”

“If you’re not one of my constituents, go fuck yourself,” said he, letting his head fall back on the unspeakably filthy pillow.

As it happened I was not offended, but I
was
curious. “You have no interest in maintaining friendly relations with other countries?”

He replied without bothering to raise his head. “I might or might not have, according to my needs at the moment, but being nice to you would have nothing to do with the matter in any event.”

“You mean because I come from a country that has a long record of rewarding those who insult it?”

“I don’t know or care which country you belong to,” said the recumbent legislator. “I’m speaking universally. And that has exhausted me.” He closed his eyes and almost immediately began to snore, denying me the opportunity to ask him a final question.

Therefore I put it to the man in the next bunk, a person quite as filthy as the first and as disagreeable, who sneered at me and said, “Keep going. I heard what you said to Filtschmidt.”

“I merely wanted to ask why you have no fear of being arrested for rudeness.”

“Because we’re legislators, you cretin. Why should we create a law to which we ourselves are subject?”

By now these people had succeeded in irking me. “According to my information,” I said with a sneer of my own, “you have no power whatever.”

He covered his eyes and wept, the tears running abundantly from beneath his hands to drip on the dirty, caseless pillow, as if he were squeezing water from a concealed sponge. When at last he spoke, he did so through sobs.

“I have never been addressed so cruelly.” He wept some more. “Oh, how could you?”

I had enough. “Stop that sniveling, you ninny. You reserve the right to be nasty to others, but you can’t take your own medicine.”

“But that’s the only way of doing it!” he howled. “You’re punishing me for being human, and it isn’t fair!”

“If you were brighter,” said I, “you would understand that my punishing you is only human, as well, and it’s really not fair of you to call me unfair.” At least he stopped crying. Now he simply looked baffled. I decided that further traffic with the legislators would not be fruitful, and I left the smelly dormitory, found the stairway again, and climbed until I reached the attic. Judging from the many steps I encountered, the attic was three or four stories above the legislators’ chamber, but I found no indication en route that I was passing other floors and saw no means of access to them if indeed they were in place.

At the top of the stairway was a door of which the top panel was frosted glass. Scotch-taped to my side was a typewritten notice, which read:

BEYOND THIS DOOR ARE THE ROYAL MINISTRIES. ALL PERSONS ARE
HEREBY WARNED THAT ANY VISITOR MAY BE ASSAULTED AT ANY TIME AT THE WHIM OF THE MINISTERS, WHO ARE NOTHING IF NOT
WILLFUL.

This news was not reassuring, but I had expended too much energy to turn back now. I opened the door and walked down a brightly lighted corridor of which the walls were painted a cheery apple-green. The hallway was carpeted in a slightly darker version of the same color. These premises were the most attractive I had yet found in the building, and but for the sign outside I would have assumed I had succeeded in penetrating not a governmental office but rather one of the business floors I had elsewhere been denied admittance to.

The first door on my right, made of solid wood and painted in a jolly French blue, was labeled:
MINISTRY OF IRONY
. I decided to go along the hall to its termination and see what the other ministries were called, before choosing which to enter first. The next, on the left, with a door of bright orange, was the Ministry of Disaffection. Then came, on the right, the Ministry of Clams. On the left again, the Ministry of Allergies. The doors to the foregoing were painted, respectively, blue-green and brick red. Finally, at the end of the hall, neither right nor left, but facing the visitor, was a zebra-striped black-and-white door labeled:
MINISTRY OF HOAXES
.

I confess I could not resist applying first at the last-named. I was rewarded by the sight of a very comely redhaired young woman, who sat at a receptionist’s desk in an anteroom furnished with deep chairs and an outsized sofa. These pieces were upholstered in salt-’n’-pepper nubby tweeds. Here and there on the walls were hung
trompe-l’oeil
still lifes which at any distance at all you could have sworn were real: the dead pheasant, next to the game bag and fowling piece, seemed really to be decaying. “How do you do,” I said to the receptionist. “I’m a visitor to your country. I wonder whether you’d be willing to tell me something about this ministry? Am I correct in assuming that its work is rather like that of what in America we call the police bunco squad? Do you deal with the kind of misrepresentation by which honest citizens are bilked?”