The Twilight of the Bums (8 page)

Between them the bums can speak and/or understand Turkish, French, Erse, Japanese, Latin, American, Javanese, German, British, Italian, Hebrew, Dutch, Spanish, Yiddish, and even Ladino, that lovely little language which the Sephardim invented after they were kicked out of Spain a few times ago. But none of these have worked. The bums are lost in a big city, and no one has any idea what they are trying to say, it's a bad dream.

They make a hand gesture which they believe is the international sign for being lost, for distress, but from every person in this city to whom they perform this gesture all they get in return is the bite of the thumb, a gesture they do not understand a fig.

It is not understand a fig.

What is then, Schmartie?

It is give a fig.

What does it mean?

Dunno.

The old bums are lost, they are lost and tired. They are lost and tired and hungry. They are lost and hungry and thirsty and tired.

Fooled you, didn't I?

What?

Fooled you, didn't I? You already said that.

You expected a certain order based on expectation in the last run of sentences, didn't you?

I am tired and thirsty.

We're lost.

The bums sit on a bench. What a lovely city, a small city somewhere, it looks like the western Argentine. What a lovely city, a small city somewhere in the Argentine, or in the Crimea, or in the Persian Alps. But still, provincial beauty notwithstanding, they cannot make themselves understood. And every time they try, the folk bite their thumbs.

The smaller of the two bums takes off his coat, turns it inside out and puts it on again. Looks ridiculous, all the bits of stuffing and loose thread and stitching are exposed. You do likewise, he says to the fat bum. Turn your coat inside out.

But it is embarrassing, and very uncomfortable.

Do it anyway, my mama told me a story once about a lost kid who did this.

So, what happened to him?

I don't know, she died before she could finish the story.

That fast?

It was a long story.

Oh, well then. Fat Bum turns his coat inside out while Small Bum steps behind the bench to reverse his trousers.

There they sit then, dear Reader, the inside-out gang, our two lost bums, two turncoats on a bench somewhere on earth. What do you suppose happens next? Or do you suppose the bums are already saved? It is up to you to finish the tale.

The bums are, we have been informed, on their farewell tour of selected cities of the European continent. They have said goodbye to Prague and so long to Vienna. In Madrid, they uttered the same sad farewell they uttered the last time they were banished. Today we find them in Berlin of all places. In, of all places, the Botanical Gardens.

In the Gardens, the old men have come upon a presentation of pansies, a special display of pansies, thousands of tiny faces, living souls of the dead, their colors intense under indirect artificial light, a violent intensity in the blossoms and in the air itself, as if ghost petals extended limitlessly, superblack extension of the fragile velvety petals, the whole vibrating under a huge hand-painted sign in old High Gothic script:

Then something happens. Something that we can only approximate, that we can only suggest. It happens like this.

One of the bums suddenly turns to the other, and asks if he remembers a visit they made to a botanical garden in another city, years and years ago.

The other bum replies that he does remember that visit. In fact, he remembers clearly that it was a display of Easter lilies that attracted their attention then, huge white trumpets, and a smell, almost sickening …

The first bum closes his eyes and asks the other bum to lead him through the field of
stiefmütterchen
, the delicate glowing banks of
step-mothers
, as they are known to us English speaking folks.

The blind man puts out his hand, the other knowing to guide it toward a blossom. The blind man feels the blossom, the tender stalk, the fragile hardy insistence of the plant.

Close your eyes too, and feel, he says to his friend. But already his friend is groping with the palm of his hand into a cool bed of peat moss.

My mother had no place for bedding plants in the little courtyard in front of our house, says the blind man, but I'll bet she imagined flowers like these … strange they are called step-mothers.

Why, wonders the other man, equally absorbed, do I think we had a blind gardener?

Everything died with her when she was … all her beds of flowers, her forsythia, her roses, her tulips, her iris, her gladioli …

Then the first blind man says, remember, we were in Kyoto, trying to find this place we had heard of where you could get a good whole body massage, a delicious massage, better than a fuck, we were in Kyoto, we were the occupying forces, you know, and we were stumbling about the place looking for this special massage parlor, when we entered a part of the city, a restricted zone, a zone of blind folk, all wearing white cotton kimonos, a zone of survivors who had been blinded by the radiation blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a zone of blind people stumbling along trying to make their way through the narrow streets of their ghetto. So many sightless folk in those flowing white cotton kimonos …

Why am I telling you this? We didn't want a massage anymore. We went back to the base.

Yes, I remember. And soon after that you lost your mother, says the other bum.

Thus relocated in such a steep absence, the old men open their eyes, and for an instant the light and the bright colors of the pansies make their eyes water, and now they are ready to bid farewell to another city they will probably never see again.

So the boys are now in Krakow trying desperately to find the reclusive poetess Wislawa Szymborska to ring her up and announce to her that two of her greatest fans have shuffled all the way from Bumsville, as it were, and wish to chat with her, to take her to lunch and a ride on the ferry (if there is one in Krakow).

The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations
, is the bums' favorite line, a line we find them chanting aloud over and over again at the Café Milo_z Szcze_liwa while eating boiled potatoes and drinking vodka, and where the other patrons look at them as their own future, as what they will become when they too are rich American fuddy-duds, as their beloved homeland becomes yet another anonymous market economy.