The Peasants

The peasants drank.

The peasants drank and talked. They pantomimed. Mostly, they pantomimed the war which had consumed them. The war had been over for years. The small tavern of shadows where they congregated, a collective shambles, was like the intermediate stomach of a ruminant where things that should not have been consumed are somehow digested.

They drank beer. They drank mostly in the evening in their village which had been destroyed by the war. They drank the alcohol made from plums. They drank alcohol made from the beautiful rye grass. They drank herbed alcohol made from the fermented juice of fruits with the bodily forms of young girls and women. They drank mead. They drank to the cemetery. They drank to the brave. They drank to the worms. They drank to the fire and the fire’s children.

They got insanely drunk and talked about the village war dead. Someone would talk about A. An old man would get drunk and would act out A.’s death for the rest of the bar. A. had not answered a certain officer of the occupying army correctly. He had stood before an officer of the army which had owned their village for the duration of the war and answered incorrectly. He had answered as if it was a performance. He figured the officer was giving a performance in that funny costume of his. A. had wanted to perform too. He had been very young, the village comedian. He had all the playfulness and natural comic instincts of a puppy. He had been promptly taken to a nearby barn and shot. The entire village had watched.

A’s pantomimer would tell the story of A. over and over, night after night, year after year. Was the story a joke? It was told in the tone one tells a joke, with broad smiles all around. The smiles of the drunks remembered the fate of A. and his comical words spoken into the face of the officer. Certainly, the shooting of A. was told as a sort of punchline. The voice telling the story got louder during this part and then everyone guffawed. “Shot dead in that barn.” “What was he, seventeen? Eighteen?” “Sixteen, I think,” an old woman chimes in. Laughter follows.

But what sort of laughter is it? Could it be compared to the laughter of schoolchildren on the playground? Or is it a rarer sort of laughter? The story would not change. Only the storyteller would change, his face becoming wizened like a dried apple, his teeth less, his teeth uglier each year. And the faces of those who listened to this story would deteriorate along with the storyteller’s face, as if in a secret sympathy.

So the bar collected drunks that would pantomime the various war dead of the village. Each dead person had a stand-in. The stories of very young children who had been murdered by the war were not told. Their stories must have gone somewhere else to be told, somewhere even darker.

The old lush who told B.’s story down the years droned on and on. She would sit in a dark corner of the bar where she could see everyone. She knew who everyone was, what everyone was. People no longer talked about who had been good in the war, who had been bad. It was the stories that needed to be pantomimed, not morality. People are story magnets. And drunks are the most magnetic old story collectors. When you’re drunk, you need a rope. And stories are like ropes you can pull yourself along. Any old story with a barb in it will do for thinking, will do the thinking for an old drunk.

The old lush would tell how B., a simple mender of shoes, had made bombs. He was attempting heroism. But he blew himself up before he had a chance to place those bombs under the occupiers’ vehicles. He blew himself up in his own barn. He blew himself up, but also a pregnant horse. That was the sockdologer for B.’s story. The drunks had even named a cocktail after B. It was called “The Pregnant Horse.”

It was drunk on the darkest nights, on the heels of the tragedies with the most teeth. Maybe it was an amulet. The younger citizens who frequented the bar, who were born after the war, had no idea what the nightmarish denizens were talking about when they toasted each other with the memory of this horse exploded in time immemorial.

And so on and so on. C.’s pantomimer recalled that young woman who had slept with the enemy for favors and was later found hanging from a large branch over the river with an ill-gotten couture bag around her neck.

D.’s story was that of an old woman who had been forced to kneel on her family’s soil with a pistol pressed to her head. She had been given the choice to spare her beloved pig or herself. She had chosen to save the pig, so the trigger was pulled. The pig was shot immediately afterwards, of course.

E. had been an educated man, the villager with the most books, who had tried to lecture the occupiers in front of his fellow villagers. He had been tied to a chair in his study and burned with his books. The drunk assigned to tell E.’s story would make the flames with his hands and his arms. He would become the flames as he laughed uproariously, a strange glitter in his eyes. The alcohol would feed the story, down at the roots, would feed all the stories.

The young people were trying to reclaim the tavern for their generation. It became easier with the years, as the bodies of those who remembered the war, its pantomimers, drifted off to the village cemetery. The stories went quiet, the stories went dark. Rain and snow fell on the cemetery. The names on the tombstones became fainter.

These young ones, who were interested in making love and making money, had no interest in these old stories. They would be polite. But they could not laugh at these stories. They would stare stony-eyed at the punchlines. You had to have been there to get it. They understood that these wizened creatures had become these stories and that this tavern was their home. They mostly tolerated them.

On the rare occasion that one of the younger drunks would go after one of the older drunks, the older drunks would form a posse and grab bottles. The young man would usually back down once he saw all the missing teeth of his adversaries and how even the old women were ready to draw blood.

The one all the old-timers wondered about was M. He had lived just outside the village. Nobody knew what happened to him or how he had behaved during the war. He just disappeared. His little house was still there but empty after the war. Nobody had even thought to check on him. Was he young? Some said yes, some no. Was he old? Some said yes, some no. Was he crazy? A monk? Did he have a family? Certainly, he did not or they would have been remembered. He must have been solitary.

But what was he? The only people who might have known were dead. If anyone had ever known. The best people could do was a story of a story of a story about M. that was usually soon discounted as hearsay.

M.’s story was the one story that changed constantly. All the other stories remained the same. M. was a community project, the one story in which the storytellers (and they all took turns telling M.’s story) could use their imaginations. They could embroider, they could reinvent. Some nights everyone was sure M. was a villain. He must have been in the enemy pay, in the enemy headquarters, “giving them information on all of us.”

Other times, he was off doing something heroic to save the village. Certainly he existed. He wasn’t fictional. Though he existed now as a series of permutating fictions. He had been real.

You could still see his house at the edge of the village, decaying. Its little roof had turned to moss long ago and had begun to cave in. All of the furniture had been taken by scavengers. Birds liked this little house now. It had become a bird hostel, a come-and-go-as-you-please aviary. The drunks were mystified. The tongues returned and returned to the missing story the way a tongue returns and returns to a missing tooth.

Maybe M. had been a saint and preached to the birds like Asisi. Maybe the birds were the souls of the dead villagers and M. had left this rainy house to them, that they might perch in its windows and watch the wild grasses and wildflowers of the summer fields nod in the wind outside their beloved village.

So the old-timers prattled on, such nonsense that rankled the ears of the young lovers and businessmen sharing the tavern with them. So long after the war, everyone still had magical hopes. And magical hopes are only chatter, the young men and women thought.

When the last old drunk found himself the only person in the bar who remembered the war, to whom could he tell his story?

He was like the last exemplar of a lumbering species now going extinct, trapped in a zoo. The others were outside his cage, looking in. Look at those strange eyes in the creature‘’s head.’“Do you think it guesses it’s the very last one?” a young woman would whisper to a young man. “And the smell!” a student would intone, elbowing his buddy and shaking his head.
In the corner, the old man faced outwards, drinking himself deeper and deeper into the only story left to him, since he could no longer speak, the conundrum that burned inside him almost as ardently as youth itself: “But what really happened to M.?”