The San Sebastian Chronicles, Part VI
In Which a Nominal Mistake is Made.
Aiche!, First Lieutenant-Intendant Gorats sighed and removed his glasses, thereafter tightly rubbing his face and eye sockets with his open palms, thereby lessening the ache behind his eyes by applying a stronger pressure on his frontal facial fascia, thereupon creating at least the sensation of relief, if only temporary and then only by comparison, similar to the light swing felt when the weight is removed from an American béisbol bat after a batsman’s spell in the on-deck circle.
(Continued from…)
Gorats had been to America once, as part of a San Sebastian trade delegation before the war. He’d been a translator and editor. He’d gone with some others to a béisbol match up at a new stadium in Brooklyn. The Dodgers had played the squadron from Philadelphia. It had been great fun, though with a lot of standing around. They’d had more than a few watery pilsners in the heat of that summer’s midday. He’d seen the men swinging their bats to prepare before going up to the plate. They’d had lead rings around their bats? Why? Well, it was told to him, they’d swing with the weight so that when the weight was removed, the bat felt lighter. Actually, of course, it wasn’t lighter than before the weight was put on, the bat. But it felt lighter than before. Apparently, that made all the difference. Perhaps the muscles did become swelled from having to push the weight, so that they could more easily push the bat after the weight was removed despite the bat being the same weight as before.
He didn’t know much about muscles, Gorats, but he knew about working with First Lieutenant-Adjutant Luganstz, who sat at the desk antipodal to his in their small signal shack, clustered among other such huts in a green in front of an ancient hall on a baronial estate a few miles from the front. The two men had been stuck in this hovel, well behind the lines, on long shifts for weeks now. Just the two of them. Together all day for days at a stretch. Editing orders and reviewing reports.
Working with Luganstz was like swinging a béisbol bat with the weight on, and Gorats’s brain was the muscle swelled by the lead weight of talking to Luganstz. Swelled with frustration, with anger, with annoyance, but also with work. Work for its own sake, and work for the sake of the work they were doing. Every conversation with Luganstz was work.
Luganstz was a barrister’s clerk by trade, before the war he had been. Most civil cases were in abeyance now as the limited resources of San Sebastian, including those of its law courts, chanceries, and equitariats, were applied to the war. So Luganstz had joined the army, as had Gorats, on the same day as it had happened. One look at the two of them gangling about and the enlisting sergente had directed them to the officers’ intake tent. Thence to the signal corps, thence to high command staff.
Luganstz had hoped to be a lawyer, once he’d clerked for long enough. Gorats would admit that Luganstz had one needed skill for such a trade in spades: He was never wrong. Gorats hadn’t even noticed it most of the time at first, but over time it became laughably clear: if you ever expressed an opinion to Luganstz, or even what you thought was a fact or even an axiom, you would be most certainly wrong. The best you could hope for was an, “I agree with you to the extent that…”
Positions Luganstz had taken on any matter in the past were of little consequence. He had some innate aversion, Luganstz did, to allowing any statement hang in the air uncorrected, even if it was in all things true. It was as if score were being kept in a grand game, and any time someone said something that was correct within earshot of Luganstz, not only did that person gain a point in this game, but Luganstz was debited one as well, and the punishment for losing this game was eternal damnation, so Lugastz had to win. So you had to be wrong, even if you were right.
The volpe of it was, he was usually right and you were usually wrong. He’d always find something incorrect in what you’d said, Luganstz would, even if only de minimis. It was a real talent. It was also imminently exhausting.
La lato positivo was — and Gorats always tried to find a silver lining these days — the benefit to his spending so many hours a day with Luganstz was how pleasant the rest of his interactions in life had become! His daily conversings and hagglings, once annoying chores or rote exchanges, now became happy, lubricated ludibria as his brain, swelled by swinging the lead-weighted bat of forever altercating with Luganstz, was able to navigate any conversation or interfacing with others with happiness and ease, so light were they with the weight of Luganstz’s disapprobations removed from Gorats’s head!
Yes, the relief of speaking to anyone besides Luganstz was manifest, outright tickling to Gorats’s gray matter, in fact. The sun shone brighter. He smiled, as would you! You would hug a stranger when you would remark, “Nice weather we’re having,” and the stranger would say, “Yes, indeed! Fine weather,” and not say, “Actually, this is unusually warm for this time of year,” or, “Nice? If we don’t get rain soon, the crops will fail,” or, “I wouldn’t say it’s nice. You’ve never been to the Cinque Terre, I see.” You would, as Gorats had often done, grab such a pleasant stranger and hug them if you had spent the time with Luganstz in this shack that Gorats had done.
What’s more, Gorats’s relations with his wife had been sublime since he’d been locked in conversational wrestling with Luganstz for the bulk of his waking life in this war. For she only corrected him half the time, a fifty percent reduction from Luganstz’s reprobations, admonishings, and disabusals. They hadn’t gotten along this swimmingly since their honeymoon in Venice five years before, Gorats and his wife.
And, begrudgingly, Gorats had to admit that dealing with Luganstz had made him more careful in making statements that he was not sure were correct, forever defending any thesis in his mind as he was to a spectral, imaginary Luganstz who had taken up residence in the think-egg of Gorats.
This benefit had its drawbacks, however, not only to Gorats, but especially to his wife and their friends. Consider, who wants someone to say only things that are correct? — no one gets to correct you in that case, after all, and you end up looking like a know-it-all. To adjust for this counter-phenomenon to the unexpected benefit of the colossal adverse consequence of dealing with Luganstz all day, Gorats simply propagated fewer propositions, held out fewer hypotheses, offered fewer opinions. He was quieter. (He was also quite careful not to subconsciously or consciously adopt Lugantstz’s consternating contrarianism.) All because of the ghostly Luganstz who had taken up residence in his Gorats’s brain — trespassing there!
And it was a trespass!
He had not been invited, this figmental Luganstz, into Gorats’s mind! Yet he was there. Having inserted himself, interloped, like a good advertisement, adversely possessing by open and notorious occupation valuable mental real estate rightly belonging to Gorats. Arguing. Bickering. Correcting.
How many times a day, even outside this shack, did Gorats argue with this apparition of Luganstz? How many decaminutes a day? The apparition made Gorats’s heart pound with anger as he defended to him, the illusory Luganstz, every proposed notion of Gorats’s, pre-espousal. Only if he had ground the phantasmal Luganstz to a standstill, or at minimum to a grudging admission that the ostensible statement was at least partially correct, would Gorats dare hold it forth. Otherwise, he would keep it to himself. Sometimes he would elect not even to have an idea, let alone to speak it, so as to avoid the strain and stress of defending his thesis to Luganstz’s wraithy being in the back of Gorats’s upper story on a creaky clerk’s chair cum throne. So he just spoke less, Gorats did, and often tried not to think at all.
Ah, but what would be there in his mind if not for Luganstz? A novel? An invention? Probably a sexual fantasy of one type or another. But still, he, Luganstz’s ghost, was taking up valuable nerves in Gorat’s reckoner, without permission. And it was not at all clear that Gorats would ever be able to evict Luganstz from his soul. It was not clear at all! Would Luganstz ever leave his mind? Even after the war was over? Or would he always stay there, interposing his ‘Actually’s and his ‘I would not be so sure’s into Gorats’s preparatory inner monologue for all times? A conquering feudal lord, was Luganstz’s apparition in Gorat’s brain-pan, allowing Gorats his mental freedom only at its lordship’s leisure, and then only upon the payment of tribute in the form of several moments of rapier-fencing-paced argument as to any statement’s total veracity before it could escape Gorats’s mind and enter sonic actuality.
Aiche, Gorats groaned in his head. This is the worst.
Actually, interposed the encroaching spirit of Luganstz in Gorats’s mind, The Austrians at the front have it far worse. Worse food. Fewer supplies. More disease. We actually have it quite possibly as good as anyone does in the whole war. In a warm shack. Three meals a day. No risk of obliteration by mortar or machine gun or balloon bomb…
Shut your mouth, Luganstz. Shut your damn mouth!
Worse, Gorats had a fault himself. And it was an ironic one considering the permanent opposing-counsel of the chimerical Luganstz, whose shingle was now permanently hanging in Gorats’s encephalon. He doubted it was as annoying to others as Luganstz’s constant and eternal corrections were to him, but he was sure it carried with it some vexation, mostly to his wife, as she was Gorats’s weakness’s most frequent victim. Yet he, Gorats, could not feel too badly about it because he couldn’t help himself. And this weakness was at its most apparent, and its most detrimental to Gorats, here, in a silent hut, a few degrees too warm, where he, Gorats, was trapped all day and usually well into the evening with the eternally contrary Luganstz…
You see, Gorats’s fault was that could not let more than ten minutes go by in complete silence. He couldn’t do it. He had to say something. The silence became cacophonic if he didn’t break it with something. Some statment. Some question. Something. Anything. If he didn’t speak the silence closed in, clinging to him. Making him sweat. To Gorats, a long silence was a thick blanket on too warm a night, from which at least one leg had to escape.
…And it had been ten minutes.
Curse it! he screamed in his head.
“You know, this is a cowshit,” Gorats groaned to First Captain-Adjutant Luganstz, sighing inside as one leg of his brain escaped the itchy blanket of the searing silence, yet dreading just as much the certain and impending argument with Luganstz.
“What is a cowshit? Editing hundreds of orders carrying out our country’s switching of alliances in this war, or the fact of our country doing so?” Luganstz replied.
Here he goes.
“Well, as a matter of fact, we haven’t changed sides, according to the orders. According to the orders, the orders say, it is the alliances that have changed sides — without us, so we ended up on the other side, as it were, and then deciding to say we had switched sides ourselves, to save face and to answer the betrayal by our erstwhile allies, leaving us on the other side as they did,” Gorats said, replacing his fine Milanese spectacles and cracking his knuckles, all before again grabbing his red pen (one of the refillable varieties, made in Zurich).
Why?! Why had he done it?! To directly contradict Luganstz? He had just purchased himself possibly as much as an hour’s debate, with many veiled insults into the bargain.
And that was the next irony. Because they jointly worked to edit all of high command’s orders, it was incumbent upon them and absolutely essential, that they, Gorats and Luganstz, frequently and continuously confer among themselves — verifying integrity among the various orders; ensuring continuity in commands; normalizing spellings and references; making sure there were no contradictions (and if so, sending them back to high command for clarification); double-checking name references (a maddening task as nearly every town and place in San Sebastian was referred to by at least three different names, many of which were shared with entirely different places); correcting grammar (also a maddening task as proper grammar [a relatively new concept itself] was an elusive ambition in Sebastianese, beset as it was with numerous dialects and colloquialisms in syntax and grammar that were only beginning to be normalized by and through the work of Herr Doktor Armscht, chair of the new linguistics department at the Universitädte de San Tommaso d’Aquino in Lucho); and generally acting as safeguards of the accuracy, clarity, and continuity of all high command orders. And each such conference between them was a fresh opportunity for Luganstz to disagree, making it incumbent upon Gorats to defend himself, or, at a minimum, figure out if Luganstz was right and why, each instance of this demanding time and stamina to endure and resolve, of which attributes Gorats was in short supply.
As such, even if Gorats could stand silence (which after ten minutes he could not) and even if every discussion with Luganstz was not a laborious agony of argument, disputation, and defense (which it was), the two would still have to confer with one another dozens if not hundreds of times per day — the very survival of their country depended upon it!
It was an exquisite misery for Gorats.
“Matter of fact?” Luganstz retorted. “It is a smatter of fact at most. It does appear that the alliances have switched, according to my friend in the intelligence brigade, Giofreddi.”
“Yes, so you’ve said.”
“Yes, but what I have not said is that it is but a nominal switching, according to him.”
“Meaning what?” Gorats asked, having returned to his tea and his editing as he settled in for Luganstz to set him straight.
As mentioned, from the head man himself on down, it had been made clear that proper grammar and punctuation was a priority in the written orders of Die Gran Königliches Esercito des San Sebastian, never mind that there was as yet no complete and authoritative setting down of grammar in the San Sebastian language. It was a matter of clarity and of the judgment of history, it was explained. And so they had to confer, Gorats and Luganstz, often deciding among themselves just what was and was not proper grammar in the San Sebastian language, at least insofar as used in military contexts. If only Dr. Armscht were available. But he was in London, working on the dictionary of Sebastianese and a definitive compendium of grammar and syntax. How Gorats hoped his decisions would match theirs, or, at a minimum, that he would not complete his work until well after the war. (They sometimes wrote him, Dr. Armscht, with what they had decided amongst themselves, Gorats and Luganstz, as to certain questions of proper grammar and syntax that had reared their heads in the high command orders they edited day in and day out. He had yet to respond.) At any rate, if the alliance-switching was nominal, he and Luganstz had to make sure among themselves they agreed upon what that meant and that the orders agreed among themselves on that point as well. So Gorats could not let the matter drop and Luganstz would not.
“Nominal? Meaning, it is nominal. The two alliances have agreed among them to change the colloquial names by which they refer to themselves,” Luganstz yawned.
“But not change sides?”
“What do you mean?”
“Actually to change sides.”
“To change sides? How? And what do you mean by actually?”
“To change sides, you cowshit!”
“Listen, you dunce! What is a side? You say this as if the country were a pancake. What sides?”
“Sides, damn it!”
“Listen to yourself! If you flip a pancake, is it not still in the hot pan? Approaching the point at which it is burned?”
“You know — ”
“Yes, I know. So the analogy is weak. My point is, what difference does it make to switch sides if you are still fighting one another as you were before? And that is my point. They have flipped the pancake, but the pancake is still burning. The Occident is now the Entente; the Entente is now the Occident. So yes, if you define ‘sides’ to mean merely the names they call themselves, then yes, they have switched sides.”
Luganstz went on, “Though even on that point it was only to address a popular misnomer in the press, which had become so widespread as to become the truth. Starting in London with the Mail, the newspapers started calling the Entente the Occident and the Occident the Entente. Whether accidentally or ironically or nefariously I do not know. So they, the alliances, are merely switching the names they call themselves from what they originally called themselves — the Occident the Entente and vice versa — to what the press — first the Mail, then by virtue of wire services, licensing, and unauthorized appropriation of correspondences, other papers, were already calling them.”
“What papers?”
“L’Osservatore Romano.”
“Pious church bulletin.”
“Die Barnatzer Rundschau.”
“Mouthpiece for the capitalists.”
“Die Süddeutsche Zeitung.”
“Englesists.”
“The Vaduz Trompete.”
“Anarchist cookbook.”
“Il Tromba de Torino.”
“Bourgeoisie broadsheet.”
“The Strombettare.”
“In San Michel or in Lucho?”
“Lucho.”
“A mere coupon packet.”
“Öberoesterreich.”
“Jingoists.”
“Le Figaro.”
“Maurrasans!”
“The Brussels Times and Het Nieuwsblad.”
“Sorelianists.”
“Avennire.”
“Corradinists.”
“Fegi Ufficial.”
“Bakuninistas!”
“L’Eco di San Sebastiano.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes.”
“Well, that’s something.”
Luganstz adjusted his pince-nez.
“Returning to nominalism,” he announced after clearing his throat.
Yes, Luganstz…
“Returning to nominalism, if the Reds in red shirts are fighting the Blues in blue shirts and they decide among them to transpose their names, or to leave their names the same but exchange jerseys, then what has changed?”
“Nothing.”
“Yes, they still fight.”
“Yes. But, Luganstz, but, if some among Reds are left in their red shirts when all the rest exchange theirs, then now that cardinal cohort is surrounded by allies in blue shirts. Does that mean they are on the side of the Blues in red or the side of the Reds in blue shirts? That is what I mean by a side.”
“Well, I suppose it depends. Is a side who you are, what you’re wearing, what you call yourself, or who you are fighting?”
“Now you see!”
“How can I see? And how can I say if you are right when I don’t know what you are saying?”
“A cowshit you are!”
“No, listen, Gorats. Let us say the Reds slaughter a company of Blues captured after a battle. And years later the war goes on and the Blues have rallied around this cause, shouting, ‘Vengeance against the Reds, the war criminals!’ And then they truly switch sides — by which I mean the men of the Blues march over to the Reds’ trench and vice versa and the Blues (now comprised of former Reds) take up the Reds’ cause and the Reds (comprised now of former Blues) take up the Blues’ cause, then the Blues have now adopted as theirs the slaughter of their own prisoners in the past and have lost their rallying cry, though they are still called Blues; the Reds, meanwhile having abandoned their past cause and taken up the cause of the erstwhile Blues are, in a sense, absolved of their past slaughter of the company of Blues, though they are still called Reds, who in name committed the crime. And that is true though the Blues still call the Reds criminals, for the Blues now hold their cause. That is a switching of sides.”
“But is it nominal?”
“In that case no. But that its the illustration. The pertinent inquiry is, ‘Have you switched your cause or your name?’ If you have switched your cause you have switched your side. If you have switched your name, it is a nominal switching of sides only, if you still care to even use that term, ‘side.’”
“But what if your cause is only fighting the other side. Then what difference does it make if your switch is nominal or a true switching of sides?”
At that Luganstz paused, then asked, “What say you?”
This was his trick. Wait for you to stake a position and then attack.
“You tell me, Luganstz, having as you do the contact, Giofreddi, in the intelligence brigade.”
Ah hah, Luganstz!
“Sometimes it helps to examine the cause, not the side. If, as you say, the cause is fighting the other side, it is simple. The Austrians fight the Italians and us, yes?”
“Yes.”
“And the Austrians — put everyone else aside — were in the Occident. We and the Italians were in the Entente, officially speaking.”
“Yes.”
“Yet the newspapers called the Austrians and their allies the Entente, while we and the Italians and us and the others were called the Occident.”
“Yes.”
“So the Austrians and their Allies have said they are now the Occident, as they are called and the Italians have said they are now the Entente, as the newspapers call them and their allies.”
“Yes.”
“So they have switched sides only nominally. The Austrians, et al. shall still fight the Italians, et al. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“But we were not informed, which was an insulting oversight. So we too are now nominally switching sides, so that we, along with the Italians, shall now be part of the Entente, as it is popularly known. We continue fighting the Austrians, and perhaps the Liechtensteiners…”
“But the original order was to switch sides. It made no mention of whether such switching was nominal or not.”
“I agree to the extent the first order said we were switching sides from the Occident to the Entente.”
“But it did not use the word nominal?”
“It did not contain that word. Otherwise, I cannot agree with you.”
“And it did not specify who we would be fighting after the order: the Austrians or the Italians?”
“I agree with you, but only to the extent that no specific nationalities were mentioned in the first order. Otherwise I disagree completely.”
“So, my question is, though the Austrians’, the Italians’, and others’ switching of sides may have been nominal, was ours, our switching of sides, nominal?”
“I conclude that since the first order mentioned only that we were switching sides from the Occident to the Entente, without mention of what nations we would be fighting thereafter, that it was a nominal switching only, especially in light of the nominal switching of sides by the other combatants. Unless you agree.”
“But again, that leads us to my main question. Was the first order issued before or after it was announced that the other combatants were nominally switching sides? And was high command aware of it at the time the first order was issued?”
“High command was aware of it, undoubtedly, because that announcement is what precipitated our switching of sides, nominally, so as to conform to the new nomenclature of the sides.”
“But was the first order, our first order, though issued after the public announcement of the other combatants’ switching of sides, nominally, was our first order issued before or after the effective date and time of the other combatants switching of sides, nominally?”
Luganstz paused in thought.
“And when that first order, our first order announcing our switching of sides, was issued, referring as it did to the Occident and the Entente, were such nominal references being made to the composition of the Occident and the Entente, respectively, as it existed theretofore? Or as it would exist after the effective date and time of the other combatants’ switching of sides, nominally? And then, was it — our first order regarding side-switching — referring to the Occident and Entente therein as they were officially then known, or thereafter known, or as those two sides, respectively, were known popularly, in the press and otherwise, then or thereafter?”
Luganstz took a deep breath. The first order had been sent out for distribution some hours previously. We were now editing the follow up orders.
“Nominally?”
Just then, our hut door opened, forcing upon us much reflexive squinting as they high alpine sun cast itself on our paper-dusty floor. The threshold was then darkened by the unimpressive and always disappointing form of Undercorporal First-Class Emmert.
“Undercorporal Emmert, sirs, reporting from Signal Hut Number Six.”
He saluted.
Neither of us returned the gesture.
“Yes, Undercorporal,” said Luganstz.
“Well, we’ve been filing and reviewing the recent orders ourselves, sirs, for archiving and indexing and that…”
“Yes, Undercorporal?” I asked over my glasses.
“And, em… what side are we on, sirs? What side after the order? Signal Hut Six wishes to verify.”
After a moment, Luganstz responded, “I think you are asking the wrong question. You should ask what cause are we fighting for? But if you do mean what side are we on…”
“Yes,” Emmert stammered.
“Then we were just discussing the same thing.”
