Palimpsest (3 page)

“What do you think?”

Xiaohui shrugged. “She’s my mother. Jiangxi Province
did
have nicer weather.”

November glanced down at the scrap of white paper in her hand. It read:

Is not my daughter sweet?

But she was not, November found, when she kissed her outside the restaurant, under the washed-out constellations. She tasted like flour, flour and salt. Their breasts pressed tight together between two fog-dewed overcoats, the ache of it half-painful and half-pleasant. Xiaohui took her to a little apartment above a grocery store, and they fell together just inside the doorframe, awkwardly, like great beasts too eager for niceties. She bit November’s lower lip, and there was blood between them then.

“You need me,” said Xiaohui breathlessly, pulling November over her, sliding hands under her belt to claw and knead. “You need me.”

“Don’t you mean ‘I need you’?” whispered November in the girl’s ear.

“No,” she sighed, arching her back, tipping her chin up, making herself easy to kiss, easy to fall into, easy to devour. “You’ll see. You’ll see.”

_______

As Xiaohui drifted to sleep, one arm thrown over her now black and honest eyes, the other lying open and soft on her thin student’s sheets, November stared up into the dark, awake. This was not such a new thing in her ordered world—relationships required such vigilance, such attention. You had to hold them together by force of will, and other people took up so much space, demanded so much time. It was exhausting. This was better, the occasional excursion into Chinatown, into the city of St. Francis, who after all watched over wild and wayward animals. This was better, but she slept fitfully afterward.

November stroked the inside of Xiaohui’s thigh gently, a mark there, terribly stark, like a tattoo: a spidery network of blue-black lines, intersecting each other, intersecting her pores, turning at sharp angles, rounding out into clear and unbroken skin. It looked like her veins had darkened and hardened, organized themselves into something more than veins, determined to escape the borders of their mistress’s flesh. In her sleep, Xiaohui murmured against her lover’s neck, something about the grain yields of the farms in fourteenth-century Avignon.

“It looks like a streetmap,” November whispered, pressing her hand tenderly against it, so that Xiaohui’s pale skin seemed whole and unbroken.

THREE

T
HE
D
REAMLIFE OF
L
OCK AND
K
EY

T
here was nothing in Oleg’s apartment that was not locked away, safer than treasure, safer than a heart. Even the thin light from a tall and dusty lamp, tinged brown at the edges like an old apple, was bound and locked, a key turned, bolts slung firm. It could not leave this room, it would shine only here, for Oleg, and only for him.

Oleg was a locksmith. He had always thought the term overwrought, implying that he spent his days torturously pouring molten brass into molds banging out locks on some infernal anvil. It implied a burlier, more archaic man than he. Anyway, most of his public business was in keys, not locks. His private business was collection.

Keys did not really fascinate him, though he collected them as well, matching them carefully, not to the lock that was made for them, modern to modern, brass to brass, keycard to slot, as a common locksmith might, but to the ones he felt they yearned for, deep in their pressed metal hearts. He possessed a rusted iron key with an ornate lion’s grimace at its head, slung alongside a gleaming hotel’s card-slot lock, its red and green lights dead. He had laid an everyday steel housekey against the rarest of locks, real gold, with lilies raised up on its surface, a complex system of bolts and tumblers concealed within. Only Oleg had heard their cries for each other. Only Oleg knew their silent grief that they could not join.

He remembered Novgorod only vaguely, where he was born, where he had been a boy, briefly. It did not seem to Oleg that he could have been a boy long. Surely he would remember more of it, if it had been an important time. He had only images, as though he had once gone on vacation there—snapshots, postcards, souvenirs. He was born, properly, when they left, wafting like tea-steam through Vienna, Naples, and into New York. They had gone silently from those places, trying hard not to disturb the air. In his memory he searched for a single word his mother might have said to him on the trains and ships between the two mismatched slabs of his life. He could only summon her cold white hands and the aquamarine that hung from her neck on a golden chain, clear and hard, swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the train. Snapshots. Souvenirs.

Yet Novgorod hung in his heart, an alien thing, hidden as a key. He could recall dimly the quicksilver bleed of the Volkhov River, pale cupolas under the snow like great garlic bulbs. But those churches were all nameless to him—he could not pluck the saints who owned them from his forgetful heart, and for this sin he did guilty penance among his locks. Everything was white and gray in that Novgorod-of-the-mind, even the violinists on Orlovskaya Street, men without blood, playing fiddles of ash. This white pendulum swung within him, even as he bent with his tools to locks more beautiful and complicated than memory.

He lived in New York, but the New York of Oleg Sadakov was not the New York of others, and he alone ministered this secret place, stamped onto the back of the city like a maker’s mark. He crept and crawled through it, listening, for Oleg could listen very well, better than rabbits or horses or safecrackers.

The trouble was, New York was famous. Oleg had even seen it in Novgorod—a city so often photographed, filmed, recorded that there was truly no one who did not know its name, its outline, the shape of its body. So many books had been written about it, so many people had loved it and lived in it until their clothes smelled of its musk, so many had eaten its food and drunk its water and extolled its virtues like a gospel of the new world, that it had, with infinitesimal slowness, ceased to be, melted into vapor and dust. What rose now on the island of Manhattan was no more than the silver-white echo of all those millions of words expended on its vanity, the afterimage of all those endless photographs and movies which broadcast it to anyone who might live ignorant of its majesty. A monster, a fairy-tale mirror, glittering but false, a doppelgänger, a golem with
New York City
engraved roughly on its forehead.

No one had noticed.

Oleg retreated from the broad limbs of this new metropolitan giant and saw only the locks. He let people into places both secret and obvious, places they owned and places where they trespassed, into lovers’ hallways and grocers’ shops, into hotel rooms and abandoned buildings. Oleg did not care. He only wanted to touch the locks and find the keys for whom they wept. He saw nothing but the infinite city of locks, turning and winding through and around and behind the monochrome behemoth, and when the hours were very late, he often felt as though he could look through one lock and see all the others lined up behind it, opening up into forever, into a hundred thousand houses, into the Hudson, into the Atlantic. He could almost see the whitecaps breaking.

_______

Oleg had only once confessed to another soul that he knew the secret of what had happened to New York. He felt foolish about it later, but he could not help it—her name was Lyudmila. It was not his fault that that simple thing instilled so much trust in him, so much instinctive, automatic familiarity. Lyudmila had locked herself out of her tall, narrow house, where her cats mewled in panicked sopranos from within.

“That was my sister’s name,” he said softly as he put his eye to the lock in her brownstone, his lashes falling just inside the old metal.

The woman spoke to him hopefully in Russian. This occasionally happened, and he dreaded it. He could speak no more than a few words now, those snow-slushed consonants and swallowed vowels having receded into the same icy mist as Novgorod. He stopped her, blushed, admitted his forgetfulness. She only smiled, her hands white and cold, her blond hair swept heavily to one side of her face, spilling over the collar of her blue coat.

“It’s all right,” she said. “Remembering is very hard work. Not everyone is built for it. I asked if your sister lives in the city?”

Oleg shook his head, opening his tool casket. “She drowned, in the Volkhov, before I was born. She was wearing a red dress and black stockings—it was a cold day. My mother was pregnant with me, she closed her eyes for only a minute, to rest, and she always said she heard the splash in her bones before she heard it in her ears.”

“I’m sorry,” said Lyudmila, pulling up her collar as if to stave off icy waters a continent and a half away.

“These things happen,” he sighed, and the lock released its grip on the house with a loud click. Oleg felt as if his heart echoed with that click, unbuckled with it, bled out over the threshold of the door. His forehead was warm, his chest ached. It was only his third lock of the day, his service hardly even begun. He looked up at Lyudmila, the Lyudmila who was not his sister, who wore a topaz ring and had terribly long eyelashes.

“Invite me in, Mila,” he said, the boldness of the lock in him.

She looked alarmed for a moment but nodded slowly and ushered him into her small kitchen. As though it was his own house (and truthfully, as he had done in many houses that were not his before he had discovered a virtuous use for his passion), Oleg spread butter and salmon roe onto thick bread, sliced salted fish, filled two glasses with cold wine. Lyudmila let him, reclining placidly on her chair. She opened her mouth to speak several times, but instead simply watched him move, watched his hands on the bread, the fish.

They ate without conversation, and Lyudmila seemed to burn in the middle of the pale blue room like a little sun. She finally removed her coat after they had eaten, and Oleg saw a thing like a spider on her neck, black and blazing, a mark sending up tendrils along her jaw, which her long hair had hidden, brachiating lines like streets and alleys, so vivid and dark they seemed to pulse with her heartbeat.

“It’s a birthmark, or something like that.” She laughed shortly. “Or would be, if I had been born last year.”

“I don’t mind it,” he said softly.

“I’ve never been to Novgorod. I was born in Odessa. It is so warm there, so warm and the buildings are so white. When I remember it, I only remember the whiteness. And the seabirds. I am cold here all the time. Sometimes I wake up and I think I can still smell the Black Sea. How lucky you are, that you remember so little.”

Oleg moved his hand over hers—it must have been the turn of the lock, how easily it had come open in his hands, how flushed he had been with success, with its little sigh of relief that only he could hear. Only that could explain how he could dredge up courage to touch her like that, so soon, without permission. His blood beat too high, too fast. He was a shy man, he spoke little, after his mother’s habit. But he heard the key in her, weeping old, rusty tears.

“It’s usually harder than this,” she said quietly, looking down at their joined hands.

“What is?”

Lyudmila shut her eyes and her mouth together, pressing lids and lips tightly, as though to keep her whole self inside.

“To touch a person … to sleep with a person … is to become a pioneer,” she whispered then, “a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them. I have been so many times to countries like that. I have learned how to make coffee in all their ways, how to share food, how to comfort, how to dance in the native ways. It is harder, usually, to find a person who wants to walk the streets of me, to taste the teas of my country, to … immigrate, you could say. Especially … well.” She gestured at her painted throat.

Oleg touched her neck, the black lines there, hot and moving slightly with her pulse.

“I think I would like your country,” he said shyly. He said nothing of his own, too full of the dead and the locked.

He took her into his arms, holding her golden head to his chest—how cold she was! Her skin was frost-dry, and he thought he could hear seabirds inside her, flapping at the freezing joints of her shoulders.

Lyudmila, who was not his sister, lay her arms around Oleg’s neck like a child. He could not bear to breathe, but he kissed her blighted jaw.

“I’m married,” she said simply, casually, an announcement of no more importance than her address or height. She did not move from him.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said huskily, his voice sliding from him like the skin peeled from a black fruit. He took a long breath and whispered into her hair, “This is not a real place. Didn’t you know? Didn’t you guess? Everyone looked at it and looked at it, never blinking, working so hard at remembering, taking pictures and writing novels, and never stopping, even for a moment, and when you look at a thing like that, you kill it, like the ant and the magnifying glass. There is no Manhattan left. We float in the black, and see the Empire State Building where there is nothing but void. What does it matter what we do in a place like that? Who we marry? If we lie?”

Lyudmila kissed him then, and in her mouth was the void, and in his throat was the void, and in the dark of dead Manhattan he lifted her up against the pantry door, and the jars of jam rattled within, raspberry against currant against plum.

_______

When he returned home, his own lock relieved and welcoming, his sister was sitting in the kitchen with her hands clasped in her lap, staring at him with great dark eyes. He tried not to look at her.

“I missed you, Olezhka,” said the dead mouth of the other Lyudmila, her red dress far too small now, the weeds of the Volkhov still throttling her neck.

FOUR

T
HE
B
OOKBINDER’S
W
IFE

T
he pads of Ludovico’s fingers were scored with paper cuts like lines of longitude and latitude. They had long since gone the murky gold color of expensive glue, the kind one can be absolutely certain has its source in rendered beast—perhaps, if one is fortunate and paid a great deal of money, one as interesting as a camel or lynx. Ludo used those murky, malevolent glues almost to exclusion—he was interested in them, in tools, in origins. He liked to think that he bound his books with the sinew of a Chinese tiger. He liked to think that while he slept, the endless spines stretched and growled, licking the typesetting with wide, rough tongues.