Palimpsest (17 page)

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 Gabriel’s 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 Lyudmila’s 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 each 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

P
EREGRINATIONS

N
erezza 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.”

“I don’t understand.” Ludo opened his eyes to a room flooded with sunlight, all the brighter for her sparse belongings. The sunlight seemed to be unsure of what to do in the absence of a couch to fade or curtains to shine through, and so had gone helplessly nova in the center of Nerezza’s living room. He groaned again, his head throbbing like a struck bell.

“Don’t you? I know it’s hard to keep in your head, a hard wrestle, like Jacob and that angel. But she’s there, you must see that. You saw her. She’s there and safe and you don’t have to worry about her anymore.”

“Where the fuck is
there
?” Ludo did not often swear, but he felt he had placed the word perfectly, squarely.

Nerezza looked at her shoes. She was dressed already, in cream and camel, impeccable, and Ludo thought she probably didn’t know how to be anything less than that.

“Palimpsest,” she whispered. “Don’t make me … I don’t like saying it. Here. I don’t like saying it here.”

Ludovico extricated himself clumsily from her and stalked into the small kitchen, buttering bread and slicing cheese for himself without speaking to her. He could feel her watching him fumble with her knives, knew his cheeks blazed with little points of blush that could not quite spread.

Nerezza folded and unfolded her hands. “I know—”

“I am not discussing this,” he snapped.

“You were there, Ludo! You saw the horses. You ate a snail with a silver shell. You saw her, you saw Paola—that’s her lover’s name, Paola. Did you know her?” Nerezza hurried on. “You sat next to me and I tasted your tears.”

“I had a bad fucking dream.” He felt satisfied having used that word again, as though it were a badge he could wear and polish.

“Dreams don’t work like that. Two people don’t dream identical dreams.”

“I am not discussing it.”

Nerezza shrugged. “It’s not that I feel responsible for you. I feel …” She stared at the precise moons of her cuticles. Strands of dark hair had begun to work loose from the meticulously messy knot at the nape of her neck. “I feel that Lucia left her life untidy, and as her friend it is my duty to order it. If not for her, I would never have seen the things I’ve seen. It is the least I can do to …” She looked sidelong at him through her lashes. Ludo could not tell whether she meant the expression to look kittenish or morbid. “Feed her animals while she’s gone.”

Ludo gripped the edges of the cream-colored countertop. He shut his eyes; the sunlight turned his eyelids to a ruby smear. Had she been here? Had she eaten this brown bread with crystals of coppery sugar in the crust? Had she let a cigarette sigh into ash on that light-scoured terrace? He tasted the snail still on his lips; there were such screams in his ears, ringing, ringing! But it was a mad thing, an impossible thing. Leave it to Lucia to find a madness so big she could vanish into it and drag him with her, far behind, weeping for her, like a penitent on a chain, stumbling behind the priest’s cart.

“If you want to see her again,” Nerezza said quietly, “you have to accept this. It’s fairly simple, in the end.”

“If she wanted to leave me, there might have been a divorce. I’ve always liked legal documents. They feel so real. That would have been easier. Quicker. More final.”

“This is very final. Or will be, when she’s finished.”

“You don’t know her. You don’t know us. She will find a way back to me, if the world is as you say and all this is real.”

Nerezza laughed, a bark, a snap of an eel’s electric tail. “She’s
gone
, Ludo. And if she’s lucky, she’ll soon be in Palimpsest forever, and you’ll only see her if you fuck the right shopgirl.”

“But she’s not there yet? Not completely? She’s somewhere here, too, in Italy, in Europe? America?”

Nerezza threw up her hands in disgust. “Oh, for Christ’s sake.
No one
has gotten there yet, completely, permanently. But yes. I drove her to the airport. So that she could try. I helped her get a passport. You have no idea what she and I have been through together—I was
there
, I watched her go, toward Paola and Palimpsest and all of it. I helped her. She would have bled through her eyes for it. So would I. God,” she raised her eyes to the impassive ceiling, “if only the toll were as cheaply paid as that. If only I could bleed and that would be enough.”

Helpless in the face of his idiocy, she lifted her slim shoulders and let them fall. He tired her, he could see it. An animal who made a mess all over her house. His tears and his semen on her sheets, the endless laundry of him, the endless water he required and gave back uglier, saltier, than he had received it.