Page 13 of Palimpsest


  “I watched you,” she said. “I've watched for ten days now, until evening, from that window just there. That's my office. I wanted to know how long you'd do it. I drank about a thousand cups of tea. I ran out of sugar. You just kept coming back and I just couldn't interrupt you, it was so beautiful, so awful. I saw your lips split open. I saw the sore on your temple grow.” She put her hand in his hair. “It was like watching someone be born. You were an angel, a real one, with a terrible name, like in the Bible. No feathers or light, just hardness and falling into the dark. My hands shook on my teacups for ten days. I didn't dare interrupt. But I decided I wanted you, after all. I wanted to stop it for you, to stop the wind and the snow and hold my arms over your head. So I'm here, I came. My name is Hester and I came for you.”

  Oleg clawed his way up her height as though she were a craggy hill and his kiss was like biting into her warmth. Under his teeth the blood of her lip welled up, a hot red thing between their mouths.

  “I'm here,” he choked, “take me, I'm willing to go. Any where. Away. Please.”

  And Hester took him like a beggar onto the train, which he would not remember, far to the north end of the island, and into an apartment he barely saw through the film of his cold and his grief and his need. He was so hungry for her he thought for a moment his body would simply leap out of itself and into her, a second body, compressed and crimson and screaming within the freezing shell of his elbows and knees. He kissed her neck where it was black as frostbite, bit it, shut his eyes against her and grabbed at her hips, just to pull her closer than anatomy allows, just to swallow her warmth, her sweet breath like milky tea.

  “Wait,” she gasped, her shirt already wrinkled up over her belly, her jeans unbuttoned. “It's been so long… just wait.” She put her palm against her cheek, her eyes wild, glistening. “It's been so long since I did this.”

  “What? I thought you'd be… I don't know. Old hat. A veteran.”

  “I didn't want it,” Hester snapped, slumping onto her threadbare brown couch. “I don't. I said no—remember that word? I turned away from it. All of it.” She pulled out a drawer on a small blue table; it was filled with dusky orange bottles the color of dead suns, bottles not unlike his own at home. “I have six prescriptions to make sure I sleep black and deep. Dreamless. Get it? I didn't want it. I didn't want to see that place, ever again. I grew my hair just long enough to cover the mark and I ate pills till the city went away. It's been years. I stopped. It is possible to stop. Until a ghastly, frozen angel comes walking down the street and you think: No more. He's not my responsibility. Someone else take this one, someone else come with a long coat and wrap him up, someone else kiss him until he's warm again! Why won't they come? Why won't they come? But they don't come. No one else is coming, and he's freezing and so beautiful you think the wind might take him just to ease its loneliness. And you're lonely, too. And you tell yourself he's worthy, if anyone ever was.”

  Hester was up on her knees on the couch cushions, bent over the torn arm of the sofa, her nails digging into the upholstery, staring at the floor, her voice thick and ragged. Oleg stroked her arm timidly, not knowing how to help her, until she grabbed his hand and dug her nails into it instead. She tilted her face to be kissed again, such a terribly deliberate act, slow and resigned, that he simply slumped into her, awkwardly, falling together in a heap onto the couch, their tongues hard and hostile. Her breasts were small and cold beneath her shirt; she did not stop him when he pushed her jeans down, or when he turned her around so that she held the edges of the unraveled upholstery to keep herself kneeling as he moved her knees apart and pushed into her, still frozen and shaking. It was not easy—she was dry and unyielding, her teeth clenched, her breath sucking thin and sharp at the air. That she did not stop him was all she seemed to be able to contribute, and the pills rattled in her drawer as he buried his face into her neck. His body leapt out of itself; she held his arm around her waist. “I don't want to go back,” she whispered helplessly.

  A GROVE OF BAMBOO SPRINGS up near the southern barrens of Palimpsest, just before the city slides away into desolate desert. It is very green and very tall, so tall that the fibrous crowns get lost in the deep blue clouds. Between the willow-bright trunks grow scarlet tulips, each as sedately filled with rainwater as a cup with tea at the finest of houses. The stalks stand like a portcullis against the desert, and no man may say where they end. Certainly not I. Certainly not you. But we may come here and look out on the waste, for it is a singular pleasure to be warm and safe while one watches horrors unfold, is it not?

  The dead come here; the dead sleep fitful and dreaming.

  If only there were a funeral tonight, then we might see such things-but there! Is that not a fine baroness shrouded in stoat fur, her fingers and toes ringed with tourmaline, tied to her golden stake and hoisted up by her weeping catamites? Is her spider-waist bound up in daisies? It is! Surely, you can see it, just there!

  They will dig her grave screaming, her boys. Straight down into the earth, a pit of black and dust, in such an abandonment of grief that one or two may eat dirt until he follows her into the bathhouses of the dead. They will sink her down, standing tall and proud as she always did, as they remember her, calling for a tureen of rosemary broth and a favored one to ply his tongue beneath her gracefully uplifted gown. They will tilt her head toward the crescent moon, and as they shovel in the seedful earth around her, they will shriek, oh how they will shriek, until the owls shrink from them and hide their heads. It is possible that they will spill their seed after her in shuddering, lurching convulsions of anguish. And they will set her bamboo pole in place, small amid the great giants, and all her jewels will feed its roots.

  The dead of Palimpsest are thin and tall. The process will not begin until the bamboo grave-marker reaches past the cloudline, when the vapors of the stars seep down through the impossibly long green whistle-stalk. Only then will the scalps of the deceased break the soil like babies crowning. Without noise, without opening putrescent eyes, the dead will stretch toward the scent of the stars, mute, atavistic, slow as mushrooms. Their limbs will elongate, their softened skulls compress, their hips fold in like suitcases closing, and slowly as they stretch, they will grow long and lean as their stalk of bamboo. In a thousand years the peaks of their heads may peek out of the leafy terminal end of the trees, and they may breathe the exhalations of the stars.

  So they say, and so I hope.

  There are some who believe that the stellar winds will blow through the ears of the dead and carry their souls back down to the city on a palanquin of light.

  Leonide tends the grounds here. He has a great belly and used to joke to children that he ate the moon when there was nothing left in his cupboard. He has an enormous manicured mustache and thick hair he keeps in a bun like an old woman. His legs are those of a shaggy zebra, and he keeps them covered in stained rags and shoes made painstakingly to appear as though he still had human feet. He spades the bamboo beds and, in the honored manner of grave-keepers, long ago learned to converse with the dead. It is a happy tradition, requiring no long rituals of indoctrination or apprenticeship; the dead teach their own and in their own time.

  The house of Leonide is also thin and tall. It is made of marble. He was thinking of another place when he built it, a frightening, fairy-tale world his grandmother told him about, where they bury the dead lying down, and erect marble angels over them to watch and make sure they do not reach up toward the vaporous stars. The angels are diligent there. Thus the house reaches high, but not so very far up along the length of the bamboo is stark and white, and there is an angel crouching at the door, half hidden by ferns and bougainvillea, to watch over Leonide as he comes and goes. This angel is also diligent.

  Once in a very long while, during the autumn when no one can bear to die and miss the fiery trees or the coming of hoarfrost to Palimpsest, he feels himself grow forlorn and longs for conversation among the chestnut smoke and apple-heavy wind. Men are like tha
t. It cannot be helped. On these occasions Leonide removes a pocketknife from his prodigious trousers and cuts into the side of a stalk of bamboo. He is very careful. He cuts only a small piece, a rectangle, a fortune-teller s card, and removes it like a plaque from a high wall.

  Within, a gray hand moves slightly sluggishly Leonide takes it in his. He holds it gently, strokes the old knuckles.

  The hand squeezes back, softly, hardly a motion at all. Only a grave-keeper of the highest order would feel it, but Leonide is of such an order and such a rank, and he kisses its fingernails.

  Oleg places his hand upon the cool skin of a bamboo stalk. His fingers still throb, and he can feel cold, hard skin on his, though nothing touches him, and taste a red tea on his lips. He crawls with the sensation of it, with the other senses he carries with him like satchels. But they are less now, they fade. All things do, he thinks.

  He looks between the trunks of this great forest; half-formed mist noses at the leaves. It is perhaps inevitable that he notices, as a locksmith must notice, the small rectangles carved into the sides of the great trees. They are so very like doors, you see. And if he finds the little doors, then he must find the long fingers, the pinched hips with sprays of birthmarks, the kneecaps like burls. And he must understand it, he must, for the dead have taught their own, in their own time, and Oleg Sadakov knows their vernacular, their diphthongs and phonemes.

  “Oh,” he says. “Oh. You were here. You came here, and you saw inside the bamboo. Poor Hester-that s why you didn't want to come back.”

  “I remember her,” comes a voice by his ear, a voice familiar and low, like hushed singing. “She screamed and screamed. And I had such things planned for her sake.”

  Oleg turns, and she is there, she is there, beyond hope, she stands in her star-spangled dress, its blue train wet and sopping. Snow threads her hair. She holds a parasol that shades her sweetly, though when he looks closely at it he sees that three white foxes are sleeping on its surface, so pure and pale they seem no different from the diffident silk beneath their paws. Her face is whole and stern, Lyudmila's face, her lips rosy and full, not burst and drowned, her eyes gently gray, her skin flushed and alive. She is warm and real and young.

  Oleg feels he ought to genuflect before her as he did before the woman in the freezing streets of his waking life. But he cannot; his legs will not show her weakness.

  “Where have you been?” he cries instead, and shakes her by the shoulders. The foxes stir and yawn, their pink tongues unrolling. “Why did you leave me?”

  Lyudmila looks puzzled, her fine eyebrows knitting, and she puts her cold hand to his face. “I've been just here. I was waiting. You took so long. I was beginning to despair.”

  “Well, it's hard, Mila! It's not exactly like hopping a train uptown. I never had to go to such lengths to see you before.”

  Lyudmila purses her lips. She looks so very like their mother in that moment, her elfin face drawn in concern.

  “Sometimes I worry about you, Olezhka. Really I do.”

  Oleg puts his arms around her, as needy as a young bear snuffling for friendly paws in the wintry dark. She allows herself to be held, even lifted slightly off her feet; she pets his head tenderly. Her weight is real and solid in his grasp-she is so alive, and her skin beneath his palms is hot.

  “I missed you, Mila. I missed you so.”

  “You were not relieved to have an apartment to yourself? To let your tea go cold if you pleased, to kiss pretty things on your couch without dark eyes burning behind the curtains?”

  “No.” Oleg shakes his head fiercely. “No, never.”

  “Well.” Lyudmila disentangles herself, smoothing her skirt with a blue-gloved hand. “Well, then. That's settled.” She catches his wrist suddenly, sharply, her even nails cutting into him, her grip bony and rigid. “Don't make me wait again,” she hisses, and looses him as suddenly, as sharply.

  She leads him away through the forest, and he can hear, as if from far away, winds whistling through the stalks: it is almost a song they make together, but it cannot hold, and falls into scattering storm-whirls before the first verse is done.

  There is a small boat tied with a length of leather to a tarnished silver pier. It is not Gabriels gondola, but it sweeps in slender fashion from end to end in same general manner, and there are garlands on it, of seaweed and of marigolds. Lyudmila holds out her hand, intending in some genteel forgotten way to communicate that he ought to help her aboard, and Oleg hurries to her.

  The river is milky and thick as before, the cream in it a long golden ribbon. Lyudmila sits primly at the head of their craft and it drifts tranquilly downstream. She neither steers nor rows, but they keep their course. She gives him a smile like a present wrapped in red.

  “I will take you anywhere you wish to go,” she says brightly.

  Oleg touches her foot with his foot. Her color is high in the honey-sweet wind, he has never seen her like this. She is beautiful, he realizes, she grew up to be beautiful.

  “Take me to a place where you and I may lie on a long bed with our knees tucked together. Take me to a place where I can make smoky tea that you will love to drink, where lemons grow and also where plovers sing at dusk. Take me to a place with a little mirror where I can shave, and a basin full of water where you can wash your hair. I could be happy in a place like that, I think. I could watch you sleep there. I could boil eggs for us, and bake bread for you.”

  “You want so little.”

  “Not so little.”

  They pass an hour in silence. The parasol-foxes chew at fleas and snap at passing mayflies, the jeweled bodies crunching between their vulpine teeth. Palimpsest yawns enormous on one side of the river, towers and leviathan flying buttresses ablaze with hanging lanterns, falcons screeching down the long canyons between them. On the other side, small towns stretch lazily along the greening mud, the clotted river thickening in the shallows, the polished logs of underwater nets floating sleepily on the yellowish currents.

  “Look to the banks, Olezhka,” Lyudmila says finally “And the moon falling there, on the spires and houses.” The knotted white buildings sleeping on the right-hand bank are warped like gnarled bones, many of them half-crushed, their dust feeding the river. There is a cathedral of a sort, and on its roof a lonely monk blows a long black trumpet. The moonlight is brighter than day there, and only there. The river remains in shadow. Men and women crawl out of the ruined houses and hold great glass jam jars above their heads, their long hair spilling back to the earth. The moonlight pours into the jars; the women screw on brass lids with muscled arms, piling their shelves with them, jar upon jar.

  “There was a war once,” Mila murmurs. “It began here. In this very spot. It was not a very long time ago.”

  “How can there be war in this place?”

  Lyudmila shrugs, her eyes downcast. “War likes best those towns that have grass growing on their roofs and apples on their trees, and especially those with industrious women who have lovers with strong brown backs. This was a town like that on the shores of the Albumen River, whose yolk was once rich and young. Before Casimira and her chariots, before the fires, before the moths with their awful wings and poisons. The cider was so fierce here it would take you off your feet in a swallow.”

  “Who is Casimira? What happened? How did it end?”

  But Lyudmilas face is shadowed, as if she grapples with some private grief he cannot touch. Instead, like a good brother and a dear one, he lays his head in her lap and wraps his arms around her knees. The boat wavers, but rights itself and passes the mournful town in utter silence. The last jar is screwed tight, and the moon goes out. It is very dark on the river now, and the stars shiver. Lyudmila smoothes his hair absently.

  “In the land of the dead,” she says finally her voice clear and cold across the water, “a boy who died of a fever wished to make his fortune in the munitions factories of that unfortunate land. And so he went to the districts of those who had died in battle, and begged from e
ach of them the bullets that had pierced them, which they each carried in their tin lunchboxes. There was one girl only who would not give over her bullet-”

  “Lyudmila,” Oleg interrupts softly, “why don't you drip water from your mouth when you speak anymore?”

  She is quiet; her hand freezes on his temple.

  “Do not ask me that, Olezhka. Let it be just a little while longer.”

  “All right, Mila.”

  Clouds sweep over the stars, and there is no light left on the long, white river.

  FOUR

  PEREGRINATIONS

  Nerezza cradled Ludovico's head in her arms. She did it awkwardly, not being by nature a nurturing dove of any breed, unused to ailing men in her bed, in her kitchen, in need of her coffee grinder's shrill whirring and her boiling water, in need of her. But she tried, gamely, as another woman might try to swallow fiery spices out of politeness.

  “Ludo, drink. You have to.”

  He turned his head from her, for a moment thinking he might throw up.

  “Lucia,” he groaned.

  Nerezza rolled her eyes. “Yes, Lucia. I know. It doesn't mean you don't need to drink when I tell you to.”

  Ludo drank. It was bitter and thick and duskily sweet. Lucia had often ordered him about—he required it, flourished under it, as he could never remember that eating remained vital even when a book was overdue and so beautiful it cracked his sternum with the force of it. She had had to curl his fingers around a spoon once, when a new American translation of the Bucolics was on the press and unconscionably late. Ludo had not tasted the carroty soup or the bread, but she had tasted for both of them.

  “If you cry in my house,” Nerezza said, “I shall call security.”