Palimpsest Read online

  The woman looked like she must have come from the North Pole: frizzy pale red hair blossoming around broad red cheeks whipped flush by the cold, a great long scarf trailing behind her. She wasn't pretty, but she wasn't plain. She didn't say anything, but her face was so bright and hopeful, so welcoming that November's ribs ached. The woman ran to her and stopped up short, her breath fogging in the evening air, the cutting blue breezes that belong to the Bay at dusk. She unbuttoned her peacoat with shivering gloveless fingers and pulled up her sweater like a child. It was on her belly, just under her left breast, like a patient spider crouching on her skin. The girl glanced at November's rings and grasped her face in delicate fingers, kissing her with the ferocity of a newborn bear suckling at its mother.

  A HOUSE SITS SQUARELY ON THE CORNER of Krasnozlataya and Corundum Streets. Over the years it has grown to encompass nearly the whole of both boulevards, up to 19th Street and down to 6th. Through the spaces where its cornerstones do not mark the earth, the gardens of this house spill out onto the street in long emerald swathes. Beggars sleep beneath the pomegranate trees, and the carriage tracks swerve gracefully to avoid the intruding verdancy.

  The house itself was planted as a sapling, its roots bound up in muslin and soaked in rose water. Three women brought it in a pine bucket, stroking its bark to keep it calm. They buried it in secret, hidden by a complicit moon, in the soft earth that was then Krasnozlataya Street, before the underground trains and the elevated tracks, before the great spires, before water-spouting, mice-headed gargoyles bred on that broad road with such zeal. The women wore gray veils and crowns of steel gears. They knew how to conduct rites properly-how to dress, how to stand. They came each night thereafter to feed it and whisper to it, they came silently and with sweet things in their pockets: sugar and apples and Spanish tiles and slivers of False Crosses, braids from their own head, ivory buttons, golden sewing needles and the heels of a thousand Sunday roasts, cherries with pits of hard molasses, faucet heads in the shape of men's mouths, frankincense and myrrh, lye and whiskey, long black pokers and swaddling clothes, handbags and haircombs, Christmas cakes, hemlock, lemon tea and glass goblets, a slaughtered blue sheep, and, lastly but most important, the sad gray form of one of their sons, who had strangled in his umbilical cord.

  Whose child it was none of us may tell.

  All of the women were named Casimira. They did not find it confusing.

  The house, well-fed beyond all dreams of cornice and window hinge, began to grow so quickly and with such vigor that the houses on either side of it were forced to pick up their prodigious suitcases and, with much pointed sniffing, homestead elsewhere. The house threw up radiant cedar walls and windows of smoky glass. Bronze roof tiles clattered out from the chimneys like dominoes falling. Palisades and sweeping stairs twisted up from the earth, and long hallways stretched their arms for children to hide in. It opened room after room like blossoms, each furnished in a single color, for it was an orderly house and liked things just so. It sent up eight floors to begin with, and more sprouted with the harvest each year. It peaked and gabled its tiled roof, and threw towers into the air. At night passersby heard the house singing little nonsense songs to itself as it dressed up, a girl waiting with breathless hope for a festival to begin.

  Finally the house opened a room in its topmost tower, the largest of all the rooms it had ever grown before, and this room it colored in every shade of scarlet so that to stand within it was to stand within a beating, bleeding heart. This done, the house locked itself and waited, growing only as a tree will grow, one ring for each year.

  It became the habit of the Casimiras in subsequent years to bring each heiress to the door of the wonderful house and press her little hand against the knocker, a lovely thing in the shape of a lion s paw. For many years, the house remained quiet and inert, no matter the charms of the young visitors. When the current Casimira turned eight years old, she was brought to the house. Her mother took her steady hand in hers and lay it against the door.

  Perhaps you have already guessed it, for you are no doubt very clever. I certainly knew it must happen this way, but then, anticipation is one of my great hobbies.

  The lion-knocker sounded clear and long, and the door opened without the smallest creak. It closed sharply behind the child, however, and kept her parents in the snow.

  Little Casimira stood in the great hallway at the foot of a staircase like a tier on the wedding cake of a giant. After a long while, she fell asleep on a plush lavender chair for lack of anything better to do.

  When night came spooling blackly through the tall windows, a little boy came tiptoeing down the stairs and held Casimiras hand. He had a thick blue ribbon around his neck, like a girls necklace, but wider, and it was very tight, but the boy was lovely all the same, with a high flush on his pale cheeks and extremely proper slippers on his small feet. He shook her awake, but very gently, with solicitude.

  “Wake up, Casimira,” the boy said. “Wake up.” The boy smiled at her very perfectly, an expression of pristine technical accuracy, as though he had practiced the smile in a round mirror for eight years. “I do not have a name,” the boy demurred, “so I cannot introduce myself to you, but I would have been your grandfather, if I had not been so clumsy and tripped over my mother when I meant to come into the world.”

  Casimira did not answer.

  “I have kept a room for you,” the house said, and blushed perhaps more deeply than it is correct for boys to blush.

  The sky is needled with stars, and November breathes in the green cardamom and laurel of the Palimpsest winds. She wears the violently blue dress of Aloysius, and her belly prickles in the breeze. Peacock feathers graze her shoulder. The buildings of Krasnozlataya Street spindle tall and thin around her, so tall that long scarves of clouds obscure their peaks, and she wants to shiver, but she cannot manage it. From every terrace and corner grin gargoyles through which old rainwater spurts in sprays and splashes, only to be caught in long pools at the base of each tower. The little faces are mice and hedgehogs and opossums, foxes and rats and blind, nosing moles. Their faces contort as all gargoyles do, peering from within curling stone leaves, licking sharp teeth, but their faces seem so sweet and dear to her, she laughs in the middle of the street, and they grin wider on their heights.

  Yes, she thinks, it is all right. I am here. I am here and it was worth the price. It was worth a stranger with red hair, worth a boy who loves his sister, and his sister, too. Worth all of them.

  But the bees are impatient with her gladness. They pull her to a door so great she does not right away realize that it is attached to a single house. An enormous lions paw marks its center, and she puts her hand upon it, as if greeting tenderly the beast whose foot it must be. The bees scream, and the screams of bees are joy or rage; there is room in them for only two kinds of cries. The lavender-suited manikin circles her waist with its buzzing arms; the door opens with a grand sweep, as though it had practiced just such a sweep for a decade and more.

  Framed by thick ferns and far too many umbrella-stands, a woman stands just inside in the hall. She wears a severe dress, just the sort of thing a governess might wear, green-black from throat to floor, clasped by an enormous copper wasp at her collarbone and a long, ornate belt, copper too, a shining chain of tiny boxes that circle her compressed waist and trail to the floor in line like a monks knotted rope. Her curly hair is piled high, an artful, decorous shade of green, deeper than emeralds or water, a sedate and proper color It is the exact shade of her eyes. She holds a child by the hand, a boy with a blue ribbon around his neck, dressed like a little dauphin, and he hides be-hind the woman's voluminous skirts, peeking out at the newcomer.

  The bee-manikin strides jubliantly to the woman and tips her chin towards itself. She kisses the bee-crowded face warmly, tilting her head in the classical pose of the seduced woman. The manikin gestures emphatically toward November and promptly dissolves into a swarm which dissipates through the house, leaving Aloysius's
beautiful suit in a ripped, wrinkled pile on the immaculate floor

  “I like your dress,” the woman says coyly The boy hides his face in her bustle.

  “Aloysius made it,” November says, unable to think of anything better, more clever, more deserving of the woman before her. Her throat constricts.

  “Oh, I know! I have several of his. There's no mistaking his work, really.”

  The two women are silent for a long while. A far-off clock whispers the hour.

  “I also know,” the green-haired woman says finally, “because I bought it for you. It's a present.” Her blush is so furious that November can feel the heat of it just inside the great door.

  “What have I done to deserve such a present?”

  “Well.” The woman looks determinedly at the floor “My bees became very excited some time ago. They danced and sang a name, over and over, and I could not sleep for their chanting of it. The queen asked for an audience, and I let her sit upon my earlobe. She rubbed her legs together and said that they had fallen in love with an immigrant woman. They said she smelled like gorse and hibiscus pollen. They said she knew how to love them back, they were sure of it. And they were sure, as children are always sure, that their mother would also love the object of their apiary affection.”

  “Are you their mother, then?”

  “I am Casimira, and that is as good as saying: yes.”

  “I am glad that I fought so hard against coming back to this place, Casimira, or I might not have found the girl with your house on her belly.”

  Casimiras eyes move appraisingly over November, who feels very much like a child in her lavish clothes.

  “The dress will do, I think. Next time I will know better what suits you.”

  “Do for what?”

  “I am taking you to the opera. How else shall we get to know one another? That is why you needed a dress. I do not care much for fashion, but a dress is like a sail, it must be held before one, colossal and dazzling, if one is to get anywhere at all.”

  Novembers eyes blur with tears. My dress; my sail.

  Casimira crosses the quartz-veined floor, takes November s slender hands in hers, and leans forward to press cheeks, two absurd Victorian ladies, too proper for kisses. They stand thus for a long while, and only after that while whittles away does the boy timidly, carefully place his small hand on November s long blue skirt.

  Casimira breaks the embrace and pulls up the length of her belt like a fishwife pulling in her line. She opens the third box from the bottom and withdraws a small ring with a delicate moldovite honeybee in its gem-cage. She slips it onto November s chapped hand and, hesitantly, holding her breath with an excitement she cannot even begin to contain, turns the stone inward. Casimira blushes again with a heat like a broken furnace.

  Casimira allows her smallest fingers to graze Novembers as their carriage clatters along the slick bronze tracks. There is no mount-heron-grooms and clip-tail leopards are for those too poor to afford the track tariffs, Casimira explains. But the reins extend stiffly from the jade-trimmed carriage nevertheless, a nod to tradition. The fiery streetlamps blur in November s vision as they pass away from the great house, past Krasnozlataya Street entirely, avoiding the amber shadows that demarcate November s allowable space in Palimpsest. They careen down to the bubbling mouth of a thick white river, and the ramshackle houses crowding the banks. The carriage stops at a tottering edifice. Eleven windows are broken; eleven windows are whole. There are no lights within.

  Casimiras gloves are the color of her hair-a size too small, so that her fingers cup delicately toward her palm. With her curled hands she guides November past the great splintered door, down a long hall lined with threadbare rugs, and into a tiny room, hardly big enough for both of them. They crouch together in the dark, knees touching, scalps against the ceiling. Casimira's skin smells like the musk of a striped cat.

  “I have brought you here specially,” she whispers. “This is Thulium House, the opera house, which you will not have heard of, I know. But it is the best thing I know.”

  “How long have you lived here, that you know such places, that you have such a house as the one I saw, that you have a child?”

  Casimira laughs, looks quizzically at her, and November has a curious moment of double vision, this quizzical woman and another, in a different dress spangled with silver stars, standing by a white river.

  “I was born here,” she says. “I'm not at all like you. And he is not my child.”

  “People are born here? How?” November asks, so new at this, the dullest child in class!

  “In the usual way, I should imagine. Is there some exciting new method where you come from?”

  “No… but if you've never been to my world, how did you know about the ring?”

  “I listen. I have a billion ears, and they whisper to me of a trillion small things. They tell me all your little protocols-bees are particularly attracted to exotic systems of manners. They are my children-it would be more accurate to say I am the daughter of that boy holding on to my skirts! Perhaps if you are patient, I will show you the factory where my ears are made.”

  “Casimira, what is this place? If your ears say so much, you must know.”

  “I don't understand the question, my dear. It is the world.”

  “But it s not. I go to sleep, I wake up here. I take nothing back with me. It may be real, for some values of real, but it is not the world. I live in the world. I know its shape and its smell.”

  There is a small rapping at the door of their room, and Casimira shakes her head. “Later. Its time.”

  She holds up a long blindfold, and November recoils from it, un-trusting.

  “Nothing is going to hurt you, November. I promise. I will not allow it. I would never allow it.”

  Unsure, her jaw tight and quivering, November accepts the fold. When the matriarch bends to her, she sees that the back of Casimiras severe dress is entirely cut away, so that her smooth skin shows past her tailbone. Casimira tightens the ribbons at the back of November's head, and guides the hands of her compatriot to return the favor. It is an oddly ritualistic thing. They breathe together, blinded.

  “I have listened to so many of you move through the city,” Casimira says mildly “The beetles know you, and also the ants. You crush them beneath your feet because you are ignorant. I feel their infinitesimal deaths in my smallest finger. I have seen so many proceed as you proceed now, your silly pilgrims progress through a place which is my home, which is no more strange to me than milk at breakfast. You are all so confused, so young. I feel as though I have heard your dullards questions so often my stomach is sick of them, though no one has ever gotten close enough to me to ask lip to ear, as you do. They ask it of the heavens, and the dark, and icons, and the stars, and beggars, and the moon. The spiders hear it all and laugh at them. It is unutterably boring, the multitudes in progression from innocence to inkling to knowledge to the inevitable apotheosis of desperation. It is wearisome in the extreme; it never varies. No one ever succeeds, they either give up or abandon themselves to nihilism or kill themselves. No one ever solves the equation, no one can ever steal more than a few scattered nights in Palimpsest. You are all so alike you might as well be family.”

  A hushing, sliding sound interrupts politely and a draft tells November that one of their walls had been drawn up like a curtain. The skin on her cheek pricks up in gooseflesh. Her pulse throbs.

  The voice begins quietly, a low, cheerless note held terribly long. A tremor passes through her-she can feel the singers breath on her neck, the electric brush of lips at her ear. And the song goes on, the ballad, the aria, so close she knows each motion of the invisible mouth. A woman sings of a child with the head of a frog who fought in the war, who in the center of the battlefield sang dirges to all she killed with her small pistols. The child loved a boy with wolf's hands, and to her song he always came, faithful, to dwell in the peculiar grace of those who have just escaped a great, black thing. But the general
s heard her song, too, and came with their tall surgeons to cut out the child's larynx, so that she could no longer give away their position to the enemy. She stood in the center of the battlefield and sang until she cried and her face was red with the effort of it, but she was silent, and without her song the boy with wolf's hands was lost, caught searching for her behind the lines, and gleefully executed by the frog-girl's fellow soldiers.

  The song is complex and awful and so beautiful November's stomach twists in fear that it might end. But end it will and end it does, and the singer's tears have fallen into her ear. She puts up her hand in the dark, and it falls upon a wet face, as near to her as kissing, and then it is gone. The unseen soprano retreats; the wall slides back. Casimira takes her blindfold away; November takes hers.

  “She will go to the next room, now, and the next, and the next,” Casimira sighs. “The opera is an austere and intimate thing, it cannot bear very much light. She will sing in a hundred ears before the night is done. She will sing of the war, and the miserable remnants of it, and of love in the days when Hieratica Street was an inferno.” Casimira puts her small hand on November s sternum. “This is the world,” she says sternly, “just the world,” she says, her eyes half-glowing in the shadows. “Terrible things happen here, to children, to the grown. We have a history the same as you do. When you are in your own home and ask where you have found yourself, what do you answer? You say to yourself: I am home, in such and such city, in such and such province, in a country, in the world. You are in Palimpsest. It is just a city. I am not a magical thing. I am not a beast or a sylph. I just live; we all just live. We eat and starve, we hoard and we fling open our stores. We fall from grace, we lose faith.” Casimira circles Novembers waist with her gloved arms. “We become obsessed over things against good advice.”