Laurie Sheck Read online

  So it’s the fragile that enables. The fragile that makes possible what’s seen.

  If you could have seen even a small part of me as fragile, would you have acted as you did? If you, like Montaigne, had mistrusted the surmises of your mind … And what happened to your eyes when mine first opened? Did they become a site of harm, a longing for snow blindness, a wound? Or were they suddenly weaponlike, or …

  I sense your breath, your hands moving over me again. I feel the soft bandages over my eyes. It’s worse than loneliness. Your touch the red grit of snow blindness. My eyes trapped in an inwardness I don’t want or understand.

  Mary,

  Why does fever bring such vivid dreams? I dreamt a child fell into a Well and that when I thought all hope was lost of getting him I turned around and you’d picked him out. Then Mrs. Williams, having said something imprudent against the Ministers, was tried for high treason, found guilty and beheaded. The little Boy Medwin died of a Worm Fever. Fanny stood a long time on a cliff, thinking. Clock bells kept tolling from a distant city.

  As if something is always lost inside the mind and in fever burns forward and is felt—

  I’m not used to being apart from you. I keep thinking of Allegra. That she’s cold. What am I that I read the Voyages and Adventures of Fernand Mendez Pinto when she’s cold?

  Count Boutourlin tells me many stories of Russia. How the night before the Emperor Paul was killed he signed a letter exiling eleven hundred to Siberia. His killers took care to leave no visible marks on the body so it would appear he died a natural death. For years he’d sent exiles, chained to each other two by two, in carriages to the north. Often one died but was kept bound to the other for the duration of the weeks-long journey.

  I think of the Emperor’s body. How the wounds weren’t visible. Sometimes I think of us like that, white and smooth as statues hiding a commotion of earth, tossed insides roughened, dark.

  I’ve heard, as you must have, that Patras has fallen into the hands of the Greeks with the slaughter of 10,000 Turks.

  And in Tripolizza they slaughtered 22,000.

  Each night before sleep I see Allegra’s face from the side. Then she turns to me and her eyes, though open, are blind—

  Sometimes this ice is a vast rib lifted from a vanished body. Or it’s the distance between one mind and another, one thought and another. The distance between memory and breath.

  Shen Kuo spent his life charting the minutest changes in degrees of distance. But how does one measure distance in the mind? I was sealed from you from the start, the chambers of my brain as far from you as any star.

  Today I found a canister with this list inside:

  Herewith the daily allowance per man for seventy-one days:

  10 ozs. biscuit

  9 ozs. pemmican

  1 oz. sweetened cocoa powder (being enough to make a pint)

  one gill of rum

  3 oz. of tobacco to be served out to each per week

  That’s all that’s left of them. Who were they? Did they die on their journey or reach home?

  Dear Fanny,

  I dreamed last night Moscow was filling with snow, and as it snowed great fires were spreading. But instead of tamping the flames the snow only fed them. You were there, and Mary, and myself. We were hot and cold all at once and none of us could speak. Bells from fallen towers dotted the streets like burial mounds or grand Egyptian heads. Count Boutourlin’s books were piled on a street-corner, the black print eaten by flames, crumbling back from sense and thought and law into some vast, unmeasurable whiteness. I wanted to say it was time to walk in the Boboli Gardens but my mouth was ice and anyhow I couldn’t see you or Mary anymore. I remembered those special chocolate biscuits we ate as children and decided I must go look for them—I wanted to give one to Allegra—then I woke.

  Now that I’ve seen more than her hand—the slope of her shoulder, her arm, the back of her head—it feels odder than ever when she doesn’t come. As if she’d been slowly drawing close (though I know this wasn’t so) only to pull suddenly away, vanished as the masked women in Florence at Carnival who wear black dominos and hoods. Or is she a dangerous secret I can’t know fallen far from where my mind can find her? Then—

  I am truly uneasy for it seems to me some time since I have heard any news of Allegra. I fear she is sick

  Her hand moves fast, then slows, more deliberate:

  I studied my German again today. Nothing can be stronger proof of the force of a language than when the same word can evoke so many linked yet varied meanings, as in Geist, pronounced Guyst. From this comes our Ghost. In German it means Soul, spirit, Essence, force, mind, intellect, divinity—

  The Germans say, “That man has no ghost in him.” They say of a poor wine, “This is an unghostly wine.” They say a person can be Rich in Ghostliness. That a person of wit possesses Ghost.

  (Each day I wait for her to come to me, to ghost me.)

  One often hears in speaking of a man, “Ach! Er ist ein geist!”—Oh, he’s a very Ghost!

  And there are other words:

  Zwei is two, & ein is one; therefore sich ensweien or sich uneinswerden have the same meaning; that is to “two oneself,” or to make oneself two; or to “un-one” oneself; that is, to be no longer of one and the same opinion as another; to quarrel.

  To “un-one” oneself… strange word. Though Claire says it means “to disagree, to quarrel,” in my mind I assign a different meaning—what I’ve wanted to say for so long though I’ve had no word to say it: if I could have “un-oned” myself, become no longer solitary, apart; if you hadn’t fled from me, or even if you had, if I could have spoken to another, learned to live beside another …

  She folds the paper, returns it to the drawer. Her hand closes the window, pulls shut the white curtain, is gone.

  Often as I walk over the ice, watch Claire, or read, or eat my supper, wash my face, I can’t imagine who I’d be without this loneliness. If I could “un-one” myself, and yet.

  When John Ross was rescued after two years alone on the ice, the kindness burned him. He’d become used to being given up for dead, putting on his hard wet socks, being hungry, talking only to himself. Does the familiar become a kind of comfort, and what once was comfort almost seem a form of violence?

  Afterwards he wrote: “I’d been brought back to life and civilization from the borders of a distant grave. Long accustomed to a cold bed on hard snow or a bare rock, I could no longer sleep amid such comfort. Each night I’d leave the bed that was so kindly assigned to me and seek out the hardest chair I could find. I don’t yet know if time can reconcile me to this sudden and violent change …”

  Fanny,

  I’m so used to you not speaking. As if in silence you can stay near me without being hurt by whatever it is the world wounds with—misunderstandings, calamities, language’s prolific and intricate betrayals. Your mouth a firm shutness. Your hands folded, still.

  and I am truly uneasy I have not seen her for over two years and fear she is sick

  She’s opened her journal—scrawls swift cross-outs, ink blots, x’s, the word destroy, like so many storm-tossed ships:

  I have not XXXXX XXXXXXX

  Dear Mary Dear Dear F

  Fanny I I fear she is painful and unprotected that he threatens to put her in a convent that you threaten to put her in a convent that you XXX

  I beg you do not and I could never see her would destroy forever

  would destroy & to banish her forever from her native (land by making her unworthy)

  you (have it in your power to) may destroy me have destroyed (my own feelings)

  but (you cannot) your power cannot destroy

  the feelings of nature

  resolve to be destroyed in

  But(I) as I will will not be destroyed Allegra whom I nursed day and night that first year

  There is no person on earth who will give me notice of her well-being she is delicate and cant tolerate

  the cold can’t tolera
te XXXX

  Such beautiful creatures almost never and has grown quiet and serious as if old

  I cant but were I to stay silent the promise violated

  I don’t know how to address you in terms fit to awaken

  cannot now think what to sign myself cannot sign

  In eighteenth-century China, Yuan Mei wrote of the “impenetrable north” as a bastion of ice between the known world and another. If you go far enough, the sky’s “the color of tortoiseshell,” clouds spew black hail. “Nowhere in that region are there any bushes or trees, nor is there any coal or charcoal.” Nameless monsters rise from black ice. If you hold a torch to your clothes “the most delicate fur of your sleeves won’t get singed.”

  Is this how the sky seems to her now, brown and shut as tortoiseshell, all Earth a frozen place where she no longer can even sign her name?

  After the ship Advance had been ice-bound for three years, the captain and a few remaining men set out on two small boats and sledges to find land. Traveling for months they saw no one. Then one day they came upon a man seeking eider. One of the men called out to him, “Don’t you know me? I’m Carl Petersen.” But the man seeking eider called back, “No. You can’t be. His wife says he’s dead.”

  Claire doesn’t sign her name, and Carl Petersen, who spoke his name into the air after so many years locked in ice, didn’t hear it back. The man wouldn’t say it. Just “he” and “his.” “His wife says he’s dead.”

  (And I who have no name. And you who didn’t name me.)

  Yuan Mei saw the ice as a place of annihilation and namelessness, a way “too terrible to traverse.” Though he said there was a cave if only you could find it, and on the other side two statues thirty feet high—one a man riding a great tortoise, the other taming a serpent with his hand.

  Fanny,

  While walking with Count Boutourlin in his library earlier today, I began to fear his blindness is contagious, that over time it will afflict me too. I know this is ridiculous, but as we walked and I read the spines of his books out loud as he increasingly likes me to do, my eyes began to blur, a white film spreading over them soft as the “a” in your name. If I told Mary she would say this is just another “wild project in the Clairmont style”—that I’m running away with things, making trouble. And yet, I could feel a coldness coming into me, its white namelessness spreading. Or I was a mountain of ice—or was it salt?—but a mountain that could see, and a chisel was chipping away at me until the air whitened and thickened with all those particles set loose from what I was. I had no choice but to look through them—everything filmy, unclear. If Allegra’s put in a convent it will be almost impossible to get her out. My claim is bare and obvious, yet amounts to almost nothing. There’s a woman I met here who’s six feet tall and is reputed to have disguised herself as a man so she could study medicine at Jena. But we’re not like her, Fanny. Or—am I?—or could I be? Sometimes I wake with your name on my lips and I want to say, Fanny, no, you need a stronger name, not those soft sounds that you have now—that fragile “f” like a feather, that gentle “a”—but something more fortress-like, more hard. Allegra’s delicate; I would take her to the Baths of Lucca. That day when she was christened Clara Allegra at St.-Giles-in-the-Fields, I heard my name go into her, mysterious and sharp. Mary’s Clara was christened that day also. The knife of my name going into them. The air cut by that sound. Yet that “C” in Clara, when recited as part of the alphabet, sounds not like a cut at all, but indistinguishable from “see.” As I see her now before me though I haven’t set eyes on her in years. As I see you. Still, so much ice and salt fills the air, its whiteness spreading—The loss of you. The cold fact of where she is.

  Blake saw the North as “Obscure, shadowy, void, solitary.”

  To Olaus Magnus it was a region of “demons, unspeakable derision, diverse shapes under the Seven Stars.”

  In the Chinese Mountain-Sea Classic it is a land of “deformed ghosts … over sixty days’ travel from the kingdom of Kiao-ma.” The few people who live there dress in dirty deerskin, eat from earthenware dishes, have mouths on the tops of their heads.

  To the Anglo-Saxons it was a place of “souls with bound hands.”

  Fanny,

  The towns called Bagnacavallo. That’s where the Convent is. Just north of Ravenna. A small place of towers and old walls surrounded by fields of tangled vines. But what does it matter if I picture it or not? The winters there are bitterly cold. My mind’s wonderings mean nothing, my picturing changes nothing. In the now-irrelevant and alien territory of my mind I see walls she looks out on each day. The wall surrounding the courtyard is 30 feet high.

  Locke again and Locke

  allows not the

  and keeps us so much in the dark

  (she’s only just turned 4, the convent demands double fees as she’s several years younger than the youngest others)

  and allows not allows not

  and

  lost and unknown when clothed in words—

  For the first time I see her sleeping, her arms wrapped around her head, the long sleeves of her nightdress white against white sheets. Are the convent walls building behind her closed eyes, and Allegra behind them? Walls thirty feet high, then higher, walls of white stone. Wherever she looks there’s a labyrinth of walls, their quiet like this ice.

  Fanny, I cant see her face anymore. As if this earth and its human processes have fallen from me, or rather I from them. Or I’m a stone disintegrating on the ground while the wall I wasn’t needed for grows stronger, more imposing—

  When the ships Erebus and Terror failed to return after six years away, a newspaper noted the “strange and unspeakable solitudes of the lost…” “We are bound to warn our readers that it is scarcely possible that provisions sufficient for three years can by any economy have been spread over five.” Yet it was awful to think of crewmen and ships “so utterly annihilated that no trace can be discovered at all.” Rescue teams searching for years found nothing—no glove, no log, no piece of hull, no tin of food, no bedding.

  (I can’t see her anymore, can’t…)

  Only once, a small copper cylinder which might have been used as a marker was sighted on some waves.

  Fanny,

  It’s spring in Bagnacavallo. But in my mind I see snow falling onto fires as in Count Boutourlin’s accounts of Moscow. I see walls of ice and ice that drifts and splinters. I see a face that’s not a face, features unreadable as fire.

  When the Goddess of Consolation came to Boethius alone in his prison cell she spoke of the tiller and rudder by which our world stays fixed and secured. She stood so close he could describe the woven cloth of her robe, “perfectly finished of the most microscopic threads and of a cunning manufacture.” I can hardly imagine. But he saw it so clearly he could discern the Greek letter pi woven into the hem, and at the top of the gown a theta, with a ladder-like structure leading from one letter to the other. But the robe was torn, Fanny, “The hands of certain violent men had ripped this same robe and had carried off such scraps as each one could.”

  Even so, her right hand still held her books, and her left her scepter. And the ladder was still there to be discerned.

  All day I think of Boethius locked in his cell, finding on the robes of the Goddess of Consolation a way to climb, rung by rung, from one letter to another, one feeling to another.

  She came to him gently: “Do you know me? Why don’t you say something?” Then gathering the cloth of her robe, she lifted it softly to his face and began to dry his eyes.

  “Your eyes are clouded with the cataracts of the human world.”

  “I nursed you, did you think I’d abandon you?”

  “Why are you crying? Why do your cheeks run with tears?”

  Then: “You have ceased to know who you are. This is your sickness. You have wandered away on your own. Your lamentations glow white-hot. Though you prefer to think of yourself as driven out, it is you who have done the driving—for such power over you could
never have been granted to anyone else. If I am to heal you I must find you in the dwelling place of your mind.”

  With this she fell silent.