Palimpsest (14 page)

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 Casimira’s hand. He had a thick blue ribbon around his neck, like a girl’s 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 lion’s 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 monk’s 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 behind 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.”

Casimira’s 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.”

November’s 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 November’s 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.

Casimira’s 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. It’s time.”

She holds up a long blindfold, and November recoils from it, untrusting.

“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 Casimira’s 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 pilgrim’s 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 dullard’s 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 singer’s 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 generals 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.