Laurie Sheck Read online

  Claire turns in her sleep. She’s dragging an anchor over the ice to the beach, thinking this will secure the ship when the ice breaks up in spring. Then she thinks: this won’t work, I have to think of something better, but keeps dragging it anyway.

  Fanny,

  I’ve read that were one magically able to move at unheard-of speed, it would be possible to travel to someone else’s future but not your own. You’re always in your own present. Even so, there’s something subtle and supple that moves through the nerves and makes them wonder. The mind’s a finer body. I want to believe this, though we live in perplexity ever. I feel so cold tonight, and Mary’s far away—so many planes of broken ice inside her. Shelley says she feels consoled but I don’t know. It’s late so I’ll stop, will write more later—

  How easy to lose track of this North when I picture her in her room somewhere in Italy, though I’ve never seen her face, don’t even know what part of Italy she’s in. Where is she? Florence? Pisa?

  {Allegra}

  but it is lost to me now

  that animation which is the child of Liberty

  the this makes deformity a monstrous deformity in me

  and am ashamed of the

  {monstrous} monstrous but {already}

  by my own blindness I have fallen

  drowning with the waves closing above our heads we are lost in the x

  X

  Mary,

  I’m not used to being apart from you. Weeks now, and I still unpack my boxes slowly. There’s been much rain. The banks of the Arno are like those of the Rhine, but of a much softer character. I’m learning German. I translate from Phaedrus, walk in the Boboli gardens with Louisa and Annina. Every now and then I don’t think of Allegra, so what does that make me? Then I remember the Hoppners complaining of her “perpetual coldness.” How she has grown so quiet. I dream of it often now: your face crusted with ice, my own also. Shelley walks with a warming fire in his hand. I hope the baby’s well. Someone said today the French are so polite they call a robber “an enthusiast of what does not belong to him.” So, we are all robbers—

  (Your) x

  Claire

  Her hand’s so often fevered now, or so it seems. (There’s almost nothing I can know for certain.) She’s in her room, but how can I know what to picture? Is there a window? A desk by the bed? What books is she reading? Once she wrote Calderon then crossed it out. Wrote Rousseau, crossed it out (I remember your room, though I want never to think of it). Her hand as if seared by a warning mark, and burning:

  I yearn to be made beautiful with one kind action

  but I gave her away I

  This deformity of mind this as if nature had set a warning mark upon me

  beware of still water the tranquil surface temptsXXX

  or is it that we are atoms XXXX reeling

  we are atoms in a dream and are made into voices

  creating and destroying, undisclosed

  Recipe for an Ague … from Dr. Warren

  I Oz. of the best red Bark.

  I Nutmeg grated.

  I Table spoonful of beaten blk. Pepper.

  I________of coarse sugar.

  To be mixed with Syrup of Poppies into an Electuary.

  A large Tea Spoonful to be taken immediately and then repeated every half

  hour

  That the whole quantity may be taken in 24 Hours—

  Half the quantity for a Child—

  Who would choose to come here?:

  “I brought with me Spurr’s Geology, also Anna Karenina. Unless a man has lived apart for a long time he doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he claims he wants to live solely with his own thoughts. I was grateful for any sound, even, for a while, the howling of wolves.”

  ∼ ∼ ∼

  “Maybe our worst piece of luck was the loss of our sewing kit. We couldn’t repair our clothing, though Broenlund fixed his boots with a nail. The rest of us descended the glacier in our stocking feet. Hagen died on November 15th.”

  ∼ ∼ ∼

  “In my little hut I gave names to the different utensils, and often found myself babbling to my teakettle and the pots and pans.”

  ∼ ∼ ∼

  “I’ll never forget my joy at the return of color.”

  Sometimes Claire’s hand disintegrates with an almost-gentle abandon before me. As if just to stay in one place is too much of a weight and she’s found a way to drift from her fever, break free. But mostly her hand stays trapped in solidity, leaving words like heavy weights on the page. She writes deformity four times in one day, writes monstrous four times the same day. (What would she think of me? I who am “monstrous,” “deformed,” though you meant to make me beautiful.) If I could read to her, soothe her with books, though how would I reach her, with what voice?:

  “Loveliest of what I leave behind is the sunlight, and loveliest after that the shining stars, and the moon’s face, but also cucumbers that are ripe, and pears, and apples.”

  Or:

  “I am a flood: across a plain,

  I am a wind: on a deep lake,

  I am a tear: the Sun lets fall,

  I am a hawk: above the cliff,”

  How much of what I’d read could truly comfort? “To speak is pain but silence too is pain.” How could she find comfort in that, unless there’s comfort in what’s true?

  I close my eyes, remember the northern explorers who gave names to their utensils, felt joy at the return of color. I wait for her to return.

  Fanny,

  Whose laws am I obeying, whose habits of syntax, custom, thought, even as I write to you here, now, alone in this room in what I would like to think of as the privacy of my mind—What swervings and interruptions go uncaptured, what breakings, stutterings of thought? What does syntax cover over? This grammar I’ve drilled and drilled into myself, isn’t it also a stifling, a blindfold, an Emperor, a platoon? Doesn’t it partly build a closed world? How much do I keep even from myself within this orderly progression we’ve been taught to think of as thought? But thought’s an odder creature, Fanny—wounded, struggling, raw

  blooms of the Boboli gardens Allegra’s hair

  no & no & no

  the small gold watch on your wrist when they found you

  your silk handkerchief clasped leather purse those narrow paths and affect nothing being bound

  So what is Liberty? My hands so often as if bound. These hands that have minds of their own, thinking that they touch Allegra’s hair then startle back to this wooden desk, this pen. There’s liberty and the appearance of liberty, so Locke said.

  Civilization gradually increases and we call this liberty. But it’s not. We’re given license but it can never be a substitute for liberty.

  I feel how language stiffens, tied by polite agreement, laws. So our words have all the gloss and finery which license can give, and are as far from the free, natural movements of liberty as East is removed from West, though both are visited by the Sun—

  … real liberty never (will) can exist but with simplicity …

  If I could touch its frightful preciseness— If I could come near—

  that rough and generous discordance I think of the softness of your

  dress even as your body stiffened your smooth most secret hands

  Today I see her hand as usual, then her whole arm, her shoulder white in her white nightdress, a glimpse of her neck, the dark back of her head. I never thought I’d see this much of her. It’s as if as she grows more alone something in her becomes more visible, though I’d have thought the opposite would happen.

  Mary I’m still not used to being apart from you. I don’t know how I’ll … and Dr. Bojti and his family are perfectly nice, I walk with them and read and continue learning my German but something in me isn’t well and I think I can be a governess someday go far away but everything’s far away since Allegra, I’m a coward and worse. Misgivings aren’t reason. I don’t know what’s “reasonable.” I feel my actions as monsters. Mysel
f a fiend inseparable from myself. My mind dark—as when black vapors hover over the parent marsh. In his first Canto Tasso wrote, “My heart has been made wise through love, and sadness suffering has made a path to Wisdom.” But I don’t think this is so. If Allegra suffers what will it give her? Doesn’t suffering take away, deform? It’s not so bad for us, we’re older Sometimes it seems all the world rises up against the world—

  a ruined temple with one remaining pillar

  and (natural because)and Nature without restraint

  because real Liberty will never exist without simplicity

  Disturbers of the State and of the established order

  Still unused to seeing this much of her, I watch her shoulder, the back of her head. She’s a volcano wrapped in a cloud, a hand of flame struggling in white ice—

  If Parry comes back from the Northwest Passage I wonder what words will mean to him, if speaking will even make sense anymore, or will he carry a silence like drift-ice, or a silence, even, like Fanny’s

  Then she’s writing backward. I wonder why she does this, and why now:

  Thursday Nov. 16th. A Rettel morf (A) Yellehs—Od emos Namreg Sesicrexe. Osla (a Elbaf) Selbaf morf Surdeahp.

  Friday Nov 17th. Od emos Namreg Sesicrexe. Osla Selbaf morf Surdeahp. Ni eth (gnineve) Gnineve Li Rongis Inailiug semoc.

  Saturday Nov 18th. A Rettel morf Yellehs—Klaw tuo htiw Aniloap. Krow lla yad.

  It’s such a strange language, suddenly, when backwards. Each letter wrenched from its quiet hour. As if she’s reached another shore, something rising nameless and unclothed inside her. Then she raises her hand, closes her journal, thinks (I imagine this, but what right do I have to imagine what she thinks?):

  it’s time to sleep. What would it mean to be free? I’m atoms in a dream yet I love as if shackled. I need to find some way to get her back. Captain Hely writes of being “monster-ized” but who isn’t “monster-ized.” Shame. Emahs. Am. There’s no steadiness of mind. It’s late, must try to sleep

  When Albanov was rescued after months of struggling on the ice (a small ship, the Saint Folka, picked him up), did words still make sense to him, could they capture at all what he’d seen? He wrote an account of his journey, published three years later as an appendix to a small hydrographic journal.

  He suffered from “a disorder of the nerves.” Spent time in a military hospital in Petrograd. An acquaintance found him a job in a mapmaker’s office. Years later his employer remembered, “He was clad in a shabby coat, his face thin and nervous. He was mostly good-natured and obliging, but had a strikingly unstable temper. A word or glance could throw him into sudden desperation.”

  Five and a half years after his return, Albanov was still trying to raise funds to go north in search of the Saint Anna.

  “I dream the wind tears the ice I’m lying on from shore and carries me out to sea where no one can find me.”

  “I can feel no sorrow for Shpakovsky.”

  “Shpakovsky, Lunayev and Nilsen are ill. I put them in the sledge, but then I see their heads are horses’ skulls, so why am I trying? When I wake I don’t know where I am.”

  “I repeat the word sledge until it means nothing.”

  “I find the words we, us, together, want, painful and very confusing.”

  Fanny,

  Who would have thought there would be so many Russians in Florence? Often I spend my evenings at Casa Boutourlin, house of Dmitri Petrovich Boutourlin. He likes to speak to me of Moscow—of the Great Fire of 1812 in which his entire library was destroyed. That library had been among the most famous, the most vast, in Russia. Now all that’s left of it is a catalogue with green marbled boards and a gilt spine, published in Paris in 1805.

  His poor health has brought him here. Sometimes he walks me through his new library—shelves of thousands upon thousands of books he’s collecting (there are now almost 7,000) but he says it’s like walking through a blizzard—he can’t see them, not because of his eyes, but because of what he lost in Moscow. He can’t make his sight focus on the letters on the spines. Everything goes white, unfocused. As if he has a kind of snow blindness, a pain in the eyes that makes them sting in a whiteout of cold fire. When he walks into the parlor he can see again. He can see clearly in the gardens, the streets, the sitting rooms, the halls, anywhere but there.

  I’m learning many things. The fire swept through the city leaving almost nothing.

  As you left almost nothing. The cold white of you, the fire.

  So, Fanny, today I visited him again, Count Boutourlin, and he talked more about the Moscow fire. As if he could see it right before his eyes as we sat and drank our tea. Or, no, not right before him, but as if it was locked partly away as in a vault (if fire could be locked away) and he could look at it without being burned (yet sometimes he seems to almost burn, and he has this problem with his eyes).

  He told me that on the day Napoleons army entered the city, most of the Muscovites had already fled. Most taking nothing. The sick and the ill left behind. One soldier said of that day, “We heard only our own footsteps. It was that quiet. The absolute stillness frightened me much more than gunfire. For a time we tried to reassure ourselves that the citizens were in their houses secretly watching.”

  Why is there comfort in being watched, Fanny, even if in secret? And there IS often comfort in it. As I imagine myself watching you, and imagine, too, that sometimes you watch me, even from your ever-absence. If I could watch Allegra … but sometimes my eyes are like Count Boutourlin’s, I cant hold her face in my mind … cant watch over her even in my mind.

  He went on to say the fires started on September 14th, but were small and scarce. Then on the 16th a hurricane blew in, spreading strong winds across the city. Soon the stores in Red Square were on fire. Imagine. The Kremlin was burning. Burning logs rolled through the streets, embers whirled, cascaded. Bell towers burned, their bells breaking loose and clanking through gutters. All the old beautiful buildings destroyed. Carved faces falling onto ruined columns. Dmitri’s library gone. Paintings gone. Churches, diaries, domes, hospitals, gone. 25,000 wounded Russian soldiers in the hospitals died.

  The Count read to me these words from Philippe-Paul de Segur, Napoleons aide–de-camp: “Everyone was silent. We accused ourselves. We could not look at each other. We were an army of criminals who had destroyed a beautiful city. Then we learned it was the Russians themselves who had set the fires.”

  Napoleon said, “To annoy me they burn their own history, the works of centuries!”

  Who burned the city, Fanny? Maybe it was both the Russians and the French … the hand of desperation, the echoes from all those vacant rooms.

  Then Dmitri wanted to walk through his new library. I held his arm as his sight grew dim, as if he were walking through a fiery white wind that pressed against his cheek then spread to his whole face, pressing even harder on his eyes—until it made of his features a white cast to be left among his books and shelving, a hard white shadow of who he’d been—

  I close my eyes and remember Claire’s account of Dmitri Boutourlin’s eyes, how they don’t work right in his library, and it pains him to see. Everything gone white, occluded. How it’s his mind that causes this, not his eyes. Then I imagine myself snow-blinded like Albanov. For three days and nights he stayed inside his tent, wore bandages over both eyes. Any light, even a sliver, was too much. His snow blindness stained the world red, not white as I’d have thought. As if snow and ice had caught fire and that fire lived inside his eyes. Now when I think of Claire I see her hands tinged red, her nightdress and writing desk, red.

  I’ve read the cornea has no blood vessels of its own; nourishment and protection must come from tears and liquids in the chamber behind it. I wonder if you knew this when you made me—that two such vulnerable, transparent lenses have to carry us into all color and form, as if they weren’t fragile … as if… The more I think of it the stranger it becomes, that such fragility secures us to the world.