Work of His Mind
Genna loves trains. While she plastered her face to the dirty glass of the window, Johannnes snuggled up against me and drew in his sketchbook. I leaned over to see it, but he hid it with his hand and said, "Not until I'm done."
Every bit of livestock, every creek, every farmhouse was worthy of exclamation from the little chestnut miss. She counted cows until she lost track at over twenty. Then, as she fidgeted, I gave her a few bits of barley-sugar stowed away just for that occasion. Finally Johannes was done. "Here it is, Grandmama," and he pushed the book over to me.
He'd drawn Lilli – not the most accurate representation, for his lines still scrawled and his figures still had the childish distortions of size and proportion. But it was she, without doubt. He'd caught her mannerism of resting her chin pensively on her hand, staring out into the mist, and how the blonde tendrils kept escaping her tightly-bound braids. There was the slight curve of her cheek with just a touch of shading to round it out.
"Look," I said to Genna, "it's a perfect likeness of your cousin."
Johannes beamed. "I'm going to marry her someday," he announced.
"That's horrid," Genna said. "She's a girl!"
I laughed in spite of myself. "You have a long time before you think of marrying," I remarked.
"It doesn't matter," he stubbornly replied. "I am going to. I asked her this week."
"And what did she say?"
"She said of course, you silly, whom else would I marry?"
Deeply I sighed. Johannes's face grew longer and more mournful by the month, his eyes deeper-set and more incisive. "It's a beautiful drawing," I said. "Shall we send it to her by post, or leave it in your sketchbook for her to see when you go to the seashore?"
"In my sketchbook," he answered, and rested his head on my arm, eyes closed. Everything with him was touch, the feel of a pencil or eraser in his hand, the warmth of a hug. As childish as his illustrations still were, they had the suggestion of almost tactile living things. As Erik lived through his eyes and ears and voice, Johannes lived through his fingers long and strong for his age, through his skin. He fumbled at games and sports, but could take a watch apart and put it back together without a flaw. Adults and girls loved him, while other boys ignored him at best, and at worst called him a mollycoddle or teacher's pet. Philippe wasn't concerned. When he gets some muscle on those long arms and legs, he remarked, then he'll thrash them.
I stroked Johannes's thin black hair soft as silk, and looked out the window. Genna had exhausted herself hopping up and down to see outwards, and now rested her head on my lap.
We passed through fertile fields wide and heavy with golden grain. The thickly-packed heads almost made the stalks bend over, but they were not yet ripe. From my own childhood an old anxiety learned early in life clutched at me. This was the most vulnerable time, when the harvest was not quite ready for the reapers. Thunderstorms, hail, a sudden frost could ruin all. My mother and father would hold each other and pray for another few weeks of good weather, so that the ripening could finish.
A single storm could cut a field down in its prime. A cerebral storm, is what the doctors had called it when they brought Raoul home unconscious from his office at the Bourse. One said apoplexy, another said an aneurysm. All I knew was that the heavens opened a cloudburst of blood inside my husband's fair head, the head that still bore substantial gold within the grey.
Both of my husbands died in the same age of their life, in their early fifties, both fields of wheat mowed down before fully ripe. I hugged Genna and Johannes a little tighter.
We got off the train at the Grobbendonk station, the children clutching their little bags and I my carpetbag. The sun slanted down just enough to propel that golden afternoon into rosy twilight. There was Philippe, tall and slouching by the trap, whose heavy black horse jingled the reins. The children ran to him and he wrapped them in those long strong arms. After he had deposited them in the back seat, he kissed my cheeks and helped me up into the front. We rode in silence for a time, as the children chattered to him about their train ride, about Peter and Wendy, about how Johannes always wanted the nursery window open. Philippe did not believe that children should sit always silent around adults, and for that I was grateful.
We pulled into a narrow lane sheltering under alder and ash. I said to Philippe, "I'm going to Perros-Guirec in September."
"Why would you want to go then?" he asked, genuinely surprised. "I knew you didn't want to come and stay with Anki here, but you didn't have to run away to Perros to make your point. It will be grey and cool, and no one will be there."
"That's the appeal. And it's not that I don't want to help you. We're almost at the house, Philippe, so I won't waste time. I don't think you should leave your family."
"Then tell Anki. She's the one who's so adamant about staying in Belgium."
This was a new wrinkle, and almost bursting with anxiety I finally managed to talk to Anki in the kitchen. Her cook was off for a half-holiday, and so I snapped beans from the garden, long green ones with fat waxy seeds, and she rolled out dumplings. Flour covered her plump forearms, and her black curls kept escaping her red paisley kerchief. Something savory with onions simmered in a large black kettle on the stove, and in the warmth and cheer of the big kitchen, some of my sadness from the train ride slipped away.
"What are you going to cook those dumplings in?" I said in Flemish.
"Pork meatballs with onion broth. They've just started boiling." Then she looked at me sideways with a complicit look. "Mother has already written me."
"She didn't waste any time."
"She never does. If there's a leaf on the front steps, she'll sweep it off. The moment the bread dough rises, she's there to punch it down. She doesn't miss a step."
I waited, unsure. "It's not something a mother really wants to bring up, especially when her daughter is mistress in her own household."
She hung the thick dumplings on a rack to dry out a bit, and took the beans from me to put on to boil. "My life is here," she said. "What about my garden? We dig potatoes out until December. I might as well let the apples rot on the ground, as there will be no one to eat them this winter. Mother knew my thoughts, though. She said in her letter, 'Your home is with your husband.' But London, I don't know, Mother de Chagny. We'd have to live in an apartment."
"You grew up in a flat, over the glass shop."
"I know, and that's why I prefer living someplace like this."
"What does Philippe say?"
"He wants me to be happy. He doesn't want to insist."
I took a risk. "Anki, I never figured you and Philippe to have a cold marriage."
Her face was ruddy from sun and exertion, so it didn't change color, but the tender flesh around her collarbones did. "He's a lusty man," she said softly, "and he awakened it in me."
"As it should be. It's not shameful, Anki. It's one of the greatest joys given us in this life. Which is why you both would suffer for not sharing the quilt all winter."
"It's not just shame. But it's not fitting to say more."
"Then, there's Johannes."
She hung the last of the dumplings on their wooden rack, and seated herself across from me, the rickety wooden chair creaking a little under her soft weight. "They can dry a few minutes longer. It makes them fluffy. It was Johannes that made Philippe wonder if we shouldn't stay here. Boys don't like him. Philippe wrote to inquire about the schools in England, and they sound like they're all games and competition and bullying."
"Some would think that toughens a boy up. But you two don't seem to."
"Philippe thinks he will toughen on his own as he grows. He's just not sure if transplanting him is a good idea."
"If you're worried about a school, you can engage tutors."
She laughed. "That costs dearly."
"Not so much as you'd think. Besides, Anki, Raoul's estate was substantial, and Philippe will come into his share. I still have to go to Paris to get everything settled with the lawyers, and those are just the French holdings. No, don't look like that. It's not charity. It's your husband's patrimony. It's for Johannes, if you need it."
"Philippe said there was a neighborhood where we could live, a few tram stops from the medical college, directly next to a large park. Hyde Park, I think he called it."
"You see? He does want you with him, if he's already looking for flats."
"Everyone will have to learn English, I suppose."
"The children will learn it quickly. I knew only a little book French when I moved to Paris, and I was almost thirteen, far older than your children. Even so, I soon chattered in it, even if I never sounded like a Parisienne. Nor did I know any Flemish when I came to Brussels."
"Your Flemish is good," she remarked.
"One thing I can do is memorize. I wouldn't have survived as an opera singer otherwise. Even when I didn't know entirely what I was singing half the time, the sounds just came out."
"Well, they say children absorb them quickly when they're younger. I won't know what they're saying. Philippe, now Philippe is masterful at languages. Besides, Johannes will miss Lilli," she said, laying the dumplings on top of the boiling liquid in the kettle.
"Yes, he will. You saw the drawing he made on the train."
"It's a deep love he has, Mother de Chagny. Don't just say he's a boy, and he'll change."
"You'll not hear that from me. Children can have a deep love for one another," I said, thinking far back. "Monsieur De Chagny and I met when I was a bit older than Lilli and Johannes, about thirteen, and he just a year older. I think children grow up faster now, for we were both as innocent as children of eight or nine. We played together all summer on the Brittany seacoast, with its caves and ancient lighthouses and standing stones, what they call the menhir. The fishermen told us they were left by the fairy people. The Christians came, the fishermen said, and made the fairy people angry, so they set out in boats for hidden islands off the coast of England, where the priests couldn't find them. They left their stones behind as a warning not to follow them. Was it true? I don't know, but we loved to think it was.
"Anki, before we go in. It's not about the garden, or languages, or living in a flat. There's something else, isn't there? You said it wasn't shame, but something else, something unfitting."
She looked away, and set the heavy tureen down on the wood-planked sideboard. "You know my births went easy, until Roland. After he came, I don't know what it was, it was as if the life had gone right out of me. I was in bed for two months, and nothing really felt right until six or seven afterwards. You can't know how Philippe and I suffered. He for me, and me for him, seeing him worry for my health, then fighting desire, trying to damp it down."
"But Roland's over two, and there hasn't been another one since."
"At what a cost you don't know. We wait as long as we can, and he comes to me, desperate. I open to him because I don't want him to take a mistress, but there's no joy in it for me, as I lie there and worry. Then no baby comes of it, and it tears me apart, all that fear, all that avoidance for no reason. At least if he left, I could put off having another baby a little longer, and with less on my conscience."
"Oh, Anki," I sighed. "Philippe is a doctor. Surely he knows," and I struggled to find the Flemish, "ways to ... ways to not have a baby. Other than having him move to London for a year."
Tears stood in her eyes. "The dinner's getting cold," she sniffed.
"It will wait," I said, and I put my arms around her soft sloping shoulders.
"I go to Mass every Sunday with my parents," she said, muffled against my shoulder. "They'll see me not take Holy Communion, and they'll ask."
I stroked her hair. "Not if you're in London they won't."
"You say this so easily. Had this happened to you?"
"Anki, after I had Louvel, I was very ill with fever, and had deep pains all through my chest, my belly. They thought they would lose me, but I hung on. I guess I'm hard to kill. Anyway, I slowly got better over the months, and at first, like you, feared another child. But none came. I don't know why."
"Were you glad?"
"At first I thought it was sinful, to be happy about something like that. Then I didn't worry about it anymore. I didn't try to be cured, so maybe that says something."
"I want more children, but not right away, and especially not in a strange land."
"Is it really just the faith, Anki? France is a country full of Catholics with small families. Everyone knows what is going on. It's not as if you want to spend your time going to parties and the theater every night, where children would just get in the way. You're devoted to your children. You just need a rest, to build up your blood. How can that be wrong?"
A dark shadow swept past the kitchen door, Philippe looking in. "The children are calling for supper," he commented. Then he saw Anki's wet face, and he came in, all tender concern. I let her go and she buried herself in his long arms, face against his chest.
"I'll see that the children are washed up," I said as I slipped out of the room.
Last night, as I prepared to climb into the old four-poster covered with one of Mme. Gyselink's velvet crazy quilts, Anki came in to sit for a few moments on the edge of the bed. She and the children were going with Philippe to England.
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
When I woke up after our carriage ride, I knew at once that it was mid-morning. That short trip under the stars had brought me back to the world of time and seasons and clocks. I stood before him obstinately and insisted that he set my watch. He laughed a little, then adjusted it for me from a large and ornate pocket-watch hidden in his vest. He had me sing a few scales, then pronounced my voice unharmed by the cold air of the night before.
His ring still burned like an ember deep within the closed oven door of my evening bag. The smell of warm cinnamon bread and coffee told me that he'd already been out that morning. After finishing some toast, I sat down in his wingback chair and made another demand. "I want my sewing. My hands are idle, and that bores me."
He flew to my side. "Never," he said rapidly. "Never will I let you be bored. What kind of sewing do you want? Embroidery? Cross-stitch? Crewel-work?"
I shifted restlessly, not really wanting to sew, but instead wanting to test him. Something had changed, but I couldn't tell what it was, and this was a way to see. "I don't know," I said, determined to take the capriciousness of woman to the full extent. "Sing something for me. Something not of the opera."
Retreating, he sat down at the piano, then squirmed around in that restless way he had, when he didn't know what to do next. He played a few plangent chords, then began to keen and wail some Arabic-sounding melody, and I forgot my restlessness to lean forward, entranced. After a few moments I found the pattern, some odd scale that never quite resolved, and attempted to chime in with a countermelody. We went on like that for some time, two birds soaring and intersecting, but never meeting. Off he went into another melody harder to follow, so that my voice weakened, then drifted out altogether as he sailed off behind a horizon that I could not see.
"What was that?" I asked presently. "It was like a scale, but not quite."
"They never told you about modes in that vaunted Conservatory, that jewel in the vast belly-hole of the new Republic?"
"I remember something about them, not much."
"You weren't a very good student, were you?"
"No," I agreed, "I wasn't."
"It's an Arabic mode. You take the second and the sixth of a major scale and flatten them," and he illustrated on the piano. He leaned his head back and wailed that peculiar ululation again, and this time shivers went up my back. What sounded like warm feathers rising on an updraft now became some fiery spirit shrieking in on bat's wings.
"You have a dance in Don Juan Triumphant that uses it," I observed. "It's all rhythm and movement, it carries one away. But no one will go home whistling it."
He snorted impatiently. "Have you given any thought to what I proposed last night?"
"No," I lied.
Quickly rising, he said, "That's understandable. You need to know everything about your husband, don't you? Next thing, you'll be asking for a pre-nuptial agreement, so as not to get cheated out of any property, eh? I'm even willing to take as a dowry your beautiful voice."
"Spare me the sarcasm, Erik."
"It is most amazing, you've been with me for two weeks now, and unlike Lady Bluebeard, you haven't found my nest of wives all hung in a row in the closet. But I have something else to show you, something better than errant wives hanging on hooks. Today I will show you the work of my mind."
He pushed aside a tapestry, a cheap machine-knotted scene of bucolic shepherds groping gaping shepherdesses, the kind displayed in piles in the department stores. Behind it was a door mounted seamlessly into the wall. As if at his command it swung open, revealing a space dark and ominous. The shadow swallowed him, and then a soft glow silhouetted his tall form.
"I shut off the gas in here while you were my guest. When I start working in here, time vanishes entirely. You would have thought you were walled up after all," and his tone hinted at mockery.
He beckoned, and I entered hesitantly. That first lampglow was met by others, until the room slowly came into focus. I gasped, and he laughed appreciatively.
The room appeared to be full of people, or some kind of waxworks. Then I gave a little scream, for what looked to be a body lay opened up on a slab of a table, tubes and wires protruding from its yawning, cavernous torso. That gutted cadaver had no head, but an entirely natural arm lying to one side, medium-sized and of indistinguishable sex. I lifted its hand and dropped it at once, so limp and cold. Like a corpse, but rubbery.
Behind me came the sound of a great clock being wound, and then a shuffling noise. Motion swept past the corner of my eye, and then I screamed in earnest, a loud sharp shriek, for out of the gloom a large waddling figure ambled towards me. It rolled back and forth, and most horrible, it was the perfect likeness of the old manager, Monsieur Poligny. Frozen with fear, I stood in its path and only moved aside just as its round, protruding stomach was about to touch me. It shuffled along slowly, with a faint humming sound, and when it bumped a table it made a sharp left turn and ambled off again until it hit the wall, only to turn left once again.
I heard Erik laugh, which made me shake with anger as well as fear. I turned towards him enraged. His low, nasty chuckle broke off only when the Poligny figure trapped itself in a corner behind another table, and circled ever leftward in mindless repetition. Tears ran down my cheeks as I watched him manipulate the figure's back, and the automatic man stopped stock-still as a statute.
"What in God's name was that?" I finally asked, wiping my eyes.
"It's an accurate representation of the former captain of our happy little ship of fools in the National Opera, is it not? Come over here and see. It's turned off, and anyway, it won't bite you, although it might have knocked you down had you stood there like a cow in the middle of the road."
Hesitantly I approached the short fat figure dressed in evening clothes. Its grizzled wiry hair felt real, as did the side whiskers and bushy moustache. I pinched and then slapped its fat cheeks, rubbery and resilient. Wire spectacles sat on the edge of its potato-shaped nose, and little red veins had been expertly painted around its tip.
"A remarkable work of art," I said, still shaking a little.
Erik beamed. He had entirely forgotten my tears. "Do you like it?" he said, leaning over me intently.
"It's terrifying. Up close I can tell it's fake, but if I'd met it in the gloom of the cellars, I would have thought it was him, no question."
Rubbing his hands together, he cackled with laughter like a great mischievous boy. Around the workroom lay various parts of bodies, gears, long coils of wire, springs laid out in baskets. Curious, I went back over to the figure laid out on the table and peered at the complicated arrangement of tubes and wires inside. He followed me over, looking over my shoulder.
"Look," he said. "See how the wires go through the limbs like nerves inside a body," and indeed, a thin net of silver traces branched out from the central core down to the limbs. "Springs attach to the wires and pull the arms and legs, so that my automata have movement. They're not just waxworks, for as you can see, I've taught them to walk. Nor is walking simple. It takes hundreds of coordinated movements to keep a body upright, to keep the legs synchronized and the rest of the frame balanced."
"Erik, these are remarkable," and once again he smiled, pleased. Never had I seen his face break into such brightness. I could almost look directly at him. Some of his frightful ugliness came from his mournful expression, but in this playroom of the mind his gloom lifted. He made me angry for frightening me, and angrier when he laughed at my fright, but his face was light as a boy's and my hurt feelings ebbed. "Whatever gave you the idea to make them, and what are they for?"
He motioned for me to sit on a high stool, and pulled another one close to me, his knees almost touching mine. "I lived in Persia for some years, working for the Pivot of the Universe," and he spat these words out sarcastically, "Nasir-al-din, the Shah of all Shahs. Yes, he really called himself that, and several other titles as garish and pompous. He lived in a great palace called the Golestan, with fountains, and an entire labyrinth of rooms, as well as the walled-off wing of the andarun reserved for his wives and concubines. Nasir thought everyone was trying to kill him, and at one point or another someone always was, so he hired me to keep him safe from his enemies, and a good many of his friends as well. I learned to control doors and vents and windows with wires thin as these. Notice, Christine, these aren't really wires at all, but extremely thin coiled springs almost fine as thread.
"Later, when my work in Persia was complete, I moved on to the Sultan's court in Constantinople. He gave me a workshop full of the best watchmakers, skilled craftsmen expert at working silver, and it was there that I first integrated the controls I had mastered in Persia into automata that bore the human form. For really, when you look at it, the complicated series of movements and sequence of operations needed to control a set of sliding doors is based on the same principle as the movements of a limb. Look, there is a little mechanism here. When I wind the automaton up, this tiny device starts to spin. Then, if the body moves too far to the left or right, this gyroscope touches one or more of these wires. The wires pull the limbs back into the right line of motion, the contact of the spinner here ceases, and the figure once again is oriented properly. You see, several of these wires have to compensate and provide forces going in the opposing directions ..."
On he went, speaking more energetically, poking with his long fingers here and there inside the gaping dummy, not paying the slightest attention that the more his terminology became obscure, the more I yawned. His attention was instead more focused on the thousands of tiny calculations needed to determine exactly how hard or softly the little wires should pull. When he paused for a breath, I interrupted, "So what did you do with these things in Turkey, then?"
He looked over at me, as if surprised to see that I was still there. "We built several automata made in the form of the Sultan, and would position them in visible places along the ramparts of his palaces. When the British sent warships into the Bosporus, they reported seeing him or his generals everywhere, sometimes in more than one place at the same time. It confused them to no end."
"It would have been easier to just dress men up like him."
"How would we have tested them, otherwise? Anyway, the Sultan was greatly interested in the automata, not so much for confounding the enemy, but more to see if they could be taught simple tasks, and if they could be made simply and cheaply. What he thought of using them for, you see, was as soldiers, made in factories the way the French and British made carriages or guns or steam engines. The Ottoman sultan envisioned mass-produced soldiers that could have their weapons embedded in their bodies, soldiers requiring neither food nor shelter nor sleep."
"That's monstrous. And you were going to help him do this?"
He looked blankly at me. "Monstrous? More so than making a gun or boots? Is the denim factory reprehensible because it makes uniforms? Or somehow are the uniforms acceptable because they go on a man, a man that will be blown to bits by a shell or have his leg cut off when the bullet wound shatters the bone?"
"They're like chessmen," I whispered. "It makes war a game of chess, with toys."
"They are not toys," he snapped. "Anyway, they could do other things." His irritated sideways look told me I had deprived him of the pleasure he initially got when I marveled over his works. "As I said, if you were listening earlier, it is not necessary for such a control system to be packaged in human form. Simpler systems can put the heads on matches, or screw the bolts into a wooden frame, in other words, do the drudgery men and even little children do every day. Let me explain it more simply, to you as a farm girl. Why plow with an ox that you have to feed hay, or stable over the winter, when you could plow with a mechanical one? It would not even have to look like an ox; it might look quite different. It's not the form that determines the functionality of the automaton."
I wandered from my hard, uncomfortable stool, shaking my head at Erik's insane notions. Typewriters, motor cars, cables that carried telegraph messages across the Atlantic, farm machines that Louvel writes of in America that make the McCormick reapers look primitive – we knew nothing of those then. My parents had done the work of farm animals and their only reward was an early death on one hand and a beggar's life on the other, so in my simplicity Erik's words sounded like nonsense.
Over in the corner I noticed a figure I had missed. It was human sized and shaped, but covered with a sheet eerily shroud-like. "What's this?" I said, and pulled on it.
"Leave that be," he called out, rushing over to my side, but too late, for the sheet pulled away to reveal a woman dressed in a simple blue dress that fell to her knees, with a pair of loose trousers beneath. Her long unbound hair fell over her shoulders like crows' wings.
"Who is she?" I asked, but he said nothing, just shifted his weight nervously back and forth, rubbing his hands together. "I know," I said playfully, "was she one of your mistresses? Or perhaps one of Bluebeard's wives?" Then at once I was sorry, for he stuffed one of his long hands into his mouth, biting on it, and turned away.
I touched her cheek. She was rubber-cold like the fragmented body on the table, but it seemed wrong to touch her, almost too intimate. Her lips were full and her nose long. Over her intent, dark eyes many tiny hairs had been impressed into the mask of her face, so that thick black brows met over her nose. I did not find her face beautiful; it was too heavy and serious, but all the same she looked alert and intelligent. Her full bosom swelled out the front of her dress as much as her hips did the sides, and I wondered how realistically drawn she was under those silk blue draperies.
An irrational, childlike urge seized me to lift her dress and look. Did Erik mould her breasts out of foam and gutta-percha, testing the weight and feel of each to get them exactly right? I suddenly felt dizzy, almost sick, and before I could against my better judgment touch one of those breasts, just to satisfy my curiosity, I picked up the sheet instead. Gently I laid it over the silent woman's cold figure, not beautiful, but imposing.
Erik faced the wall silently, shoulders shaking, but with anger or grief I could not tell. "I'm sorry," I said softly. "She was real, wasn't she? She meant something to you." I shamelessly thought, but did not add, who would love him, looking as he does?
He looked wildly around the room as if seeing it for the first time. "I had almost forgotten that was there," he said. "Never mind, it's nothing, she's nothing, in any event, she's dead. She died a long time ago."
"In Turkey?" I asked, suffused with pity, embarrassed now that I had thought that there were no other loves before me.
"In Persia. Don't ask me how she died."
Something in his tone chilled me, and suddenly the room seemed filled with silent, inanimate witnesses that could at any moment move behind my back, or out of the corner of my eye, raising their hand in mocking accusation. I shivered at the thought of these blind, unthinking forms moving through the dimly-lit corridors and caverns beneath the Opera.
"Erik, I want to go into the drawing room. Please, can we leave?"
He opened the door for me, blew out the lamps, and shut the white stone door on that black pit of memory. Then he sank down into a chair and sat silently for a long time, unmoving, staring at the fire that never stopped. I went into my room and unbraided my hair to brush it out, a little annoyed that he had never yielded to my request for a proper vanity mirror. But I had learned to dress my hair simply, without eyes or another pair of hands, and so I let it fall out all loose, brushing away. It gave me something to occupy myself, something to distract me from Erik's terrible silent brooding.
It hadn't occurred to me to close my bedroom door. A small sound startled me, and there he stood in my doorway, staring at my hair with a fierce, desperate hunger. He had put on his false nose and greasepaint. Hastily I wrapped it into a loose mound on top of my head, attached with a few pins. Tendrils fell on all sides of my face, and I pushed them away in irritation at having been caught so unguarded, almost as if undressed.
"I thought your hair was curly," he said accusingly as I plaited it in a thick braid and wrapped it around the top of my head.
"Sorry to disappoint you. You've never heard of a curling iron? You heat it on the stove, and then use it to make locks."
"Another artifice of woman," he sniffed.
"But you enjoyed the effect," I said as I put in the final pin. "Rags work the same way. I used to tie my hair up in them sometimes."
"Rags at one end, rags at the other," in sing-song he went, and I stared at him, shocked, but he stood rocking gently in the doorway, lost in his own world. Then, returning, he focused his deep black eyes on me, and his face was ugly with anguish. "I will fetch your coat, and we will go out for some air." He still shook with emotion.
"Fine," I answered. "Is my dress suitable?"
"For a carriage ride, most acceptable."
He made no move from the door, so I said firmly, "I have to wash up. Please wait for me in the drawing room." Then he left, eyes full of doglike devoted love that didn't irritate me this time. That strange apparition in the hidden room haunted me. I could not stop wondering how she met her death.
I emptied my beaded evening bag's contents into my larger leather purse. There at the bottom was the velvet box with his ring. At first I thought to put it in the back of the bottom writing desk drawer, where I had stuffed my suicide notes, but decided that it might enrage Erik if he knew I left it behind, so in it went into the bag. The soft purse of light blue leather had been one of his gifts. It must have been a kind of traveling bag, for when it came from the grand magasin it already contained an ivory comb and a small matching pocket mirror, which I kept concealed from Erik. To my delight I also found a little stationery kit with gold pencil, some thick gold-bordered paper, and five small envelopes, all very neat and compact within a gold leather case.
When we stood once again on that algal lake shore, he said, "Show me how to get to the Rue Scribe exit," and so I retraced our steps from the night before, hesitant in a few spots, but finally coming to the heavy iron gate. It was open, and Erik cried out in suppressed fury. "I told you this door was strange and capricious," he snapped.
"Perhaps yours is not the only key," I commented.
He growled inarticulately, then pulled the gate shut and locked it, handing the heavy carved key to me. "Open it. Show me that you can."
I struggled and once almost dropped the key onto the muddy path, but after a few tries I heard the huge lock scrape open. Straining, I pulled the iron gate just wide enough so that one at a time we could squeeze through. He stood impatiently, tapping his foot, and so I pulled it shut behind me, and it locked more easily than it had opened. Fascinated, I looked at the little wicked face twined with vines as he held his hand out for it.
"It's not yet yours," he said as he snatched it from my grasp.
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
We emerged into light purple twilight and a cold delicate rain. I sheltered under the wide stone archway and he went out to hail a cab, but it took a long time as the Rue Scribe was mostly deserted of vehicles. Finally a worn old berlin stopped, its springs sagging and squealing. Erik negotiated for a long time with the cabman, and it occurred to me, I could run away. He's not watching, it's a long way to the street, and anyway, there are other men walking about under their black umbrellas.
He beckoned impatiently to me, but I shook my head, I wasn't going out in that rain. The cabman was smiling, so Erik must have offered him a good amount of fare to take us wherever we were going. The big bearish man laughed, and handed Erik his own black, battered umbrella. "Don't blame her, mate," I heard the cabman say in his basso profundo rumble. "Looks like you'd best go fetch her," and so he did, conveying me across what felt like a wide wet sea of sidewalk.
The driver smiled and tipped his hat at me as I entered the cab. He's not Erik's lackey, I thought. Erik trusted me to stand under the archway on the Rue Scribe. Just one word from me, and this cabman will have a crowd around us and Erik in the hands of the police. I shook my head and Erik looked at me curiously.
"Nothing," I said.
The berlin was large inside, made for four. I sat on one side, and Erik on the other. He looked mournful, so I patted the seat next to me, but he shook his head, no. He didn't seem angry, just abstracted and quiet. We clopped on until we came to the vast ruins of the Tuileries Palace, rubbled and silent, broken teeth in a battered and bruised mouth. The charred remains of trees and the crossbeams of roofs lay in the blackened shadows of cracked stone walls.
"I like to come here," Erik said after awhile. "I have my own coffin, but that provides a rather limited point of focus. This is Paris's coffin."
Three weeks ago, I said to myself, I would have had no idea what someone was talking about, had they said that to me. "I know," I answered. "It's a reminder, this someday will happen to you."
"They want to demolish it. Rather, I think they should let it stand forever. If they remember why it burned, perhaps the rest of this city, perhaps France itself can avoid its fate."
"I didn't think you cared about any particular country, especially France. I thought you had no country."
"Perhaps, just perhaps, I have discovered that there are other things to contemplate besides one's own grave, and that life might hold one little ray of brightness it did not, until recently."
A little shudder went through me. I remembered his eyes going over my hair. The driver slowly went around the grounds of the huge ruin as night fell over what remained of the glory of empires past. Unlike the Bois de Boulonge, there were no women hiding in corners this evening, probably because of the rain, and no other carriages in sight.
He looked lost and forlorn on his side of the berlin, a tall boy made to sit on the stool all by himself. Once again I patted the side of my bench, and this time he slid over, positioning himself as far from me as possible on the cracked leather seat. He looked down at his highly polished shoes, his trouser legs immaculately pressed with their sharp crease, and swayed a little back and forth, another nervous tic of his. Downcast, he asked, "Have you thought more of what I offered you last night?"
In that evening I thought I had lost all fear of him, but the question that hung on my tongue struggled to get out, anyway. "I have to ask you some things, first."
"Then you agree to accept me?"
"I don't know, Erik. Perhaps it depends on your answer."
"What else is there to negotiate, Christine? I've already told you that everything material I have is yours, and that I want no dowry but your voice."
"It's not that. It's your ... your clockwork men."
"My automata," he corrected.
"Yes, the automata. Who is the girl? And how did she die?"
He jumped, startled, and at first I thought he was going to bolt from the carriage. Then he pulled his arms around his chest, not crossing them, for they were so long that they almost went around his body entirely, as he hugged himself, to keep himself together.
"So you want to know how she died," he said flatly.
"Who she was, and how she died. To be precise."
"Very well, Mademoiselle Curious, who someday will meet her death due to her chronic condition. You want to know. I strangled her. She died at my hands."
I gave a sharp gasp, and thought of fleeing the carriage myself. The cabman will help me, I thought. But not here, as it's too dark and deserted. I couldn't help but look at Erik's long gloved hands, black and gripping the jacket of his wool frock coat so tightly the knuckles stood out through the thin leather.
"With your bare hands?" I gulped out.
He laughed, cold and chilling. "Not entertaining enough for those whose death it was her role to amuse. No, I used an instrument silent and swift, which you must pray that you never see, although were I to use it on your pretty white neck you would not see it at all, as it would come at you swift as desert wind, and so devastatingly thorough that you would have no memory at all of how you died."
"This was in Persia."
"Oh, she was a criminal, a vile enemy of the Arsehole Around Whom the Universe Rotates, the Shah himself, and worthy only of a death at the hands of an infidel like myself."
"Erik, don't make me pry it out of you. What happened?"
His eyes full of accusation, he said, "Don't blame me for this story, as you in your insatiate nosiness wanted to know." Then his voice took on a sing-song, faraway cast. "When I was brought to the Shah's palace to build, I noticed thick wooden screens in many of the large public rooms. Even the legislative chamber itself had one, intricately carved into odd geometric shapes, or even with leaves and vines, for the Persians lacked the strict prohibition against representing things of nature and the human form held dear by some of their fellow Mahometans. The court's chief portraitist even wanted to paint me, imagine that, but I quickly disabused him of that notion. However, I digress.
"These screens had holes so tiny the light could barely seep through. Behind them I could see shadowy forms, thickly muffled. From the giggles and murmurings I grew to learn that these were the women of the palace, free to come and go behind the screen, to listen and watch as best they could. It turned out that my first assignment was to construct a series of mirrors and listening tubes, so that the sights of the public areas of the room, the areas not sealed off from view, could be seen by the women themselves as they sat concealed. Likewise, the Shah wished for them to be able to hear all that went on, even speech in far corners of the room that normally inaudible."
"That's odd," I remarked. "I thought the women of the East lounged around all day and took baths, or listened to mandolins."
"The sensual fantasies of the Salon painters," he snorted. "When I came to the Shah's court, he was a young man, proud and wounded from his defeats to the British at Herat. If he was angry and bitter, his mother the Khanum was even worse. Surely you remember Abraham and Sarah entertaining the angel in the desert, and when the angel told Abraham his ancient wife would conceive, Sarah was listening behind a curtain and laughed out loud? Thousands of years later, whether Mesopotamia or the Qajar dynasty, it had not changed. The women still listened, and the Shah and his generals, his counselors, his advisors in turn listened to the women. My job was to make them able to listen, and to see better, without being seen themselves.
"But they're kept confined," I objected. "How could they help? What did they know?"
"A remarkable amount," he said sternly. "Do not underestimate them. When I worked in the legislative halls, in the court chambers, in the salon rooms where diplomatic parties were held, the women would crowd behind the screen and chatter to me in French, very good French too, far better than what you hear in the gutters and alleyways of Paris, even. I had not perfected my nose, I had not even known then such a thing was possible, and so I wore a silk mask. They teased me about it, saying that I was neither man nor woman nor eunuch, for if I were a man or eunuch I would bare my face, and if I were a woman like them I would be on their side. Many a time was I tempted to press my face up against that curtain of wood or marble, and show them that which they mocked, but I had been warned never to try to look through it upon pain of a severe flogging.
"Then the women's space was cleared by the eunuchs, and I would go in and set up the system of mirrors and sound reflectors I'd designed, simple curved surfaces like mirrors, but with no silver on them. A series of them, and I could make sound bounce through a vast room like a ball tossed between children playing in the park. As I worked, I saw further screens in the walls, layers within layers of secrecy, and although I could not see the women I could smell their heavy rosy perfume, and I knew that they watched me.
"It was then I met the man who would become my closest friend, and then turn against Erik, but that was many years in the future. He was a young aristocrat, about my age, almost as tall as I and bright-eyed, clear-skinned, with a beautiful curved smile. Because he was the cousin of the Shah's favorite wife, he had been given a highly prestigious position, a kind of detective of security, to root out spies and potential assassins within the vast network of the Shah's wives' and concubines' relatives. For these cousins and uncles and brothers, as well as their wives and children, all came to visit their sisters or cousins in the women of the andarun, as in their apartments the women could receive them without the veil. This melange came and went all day and into the night, and my Persian friend was given a staff to help him. He sent for me to discuss how we could further monitor the women's relatives who came to visit.
"My friend had a half-sister, the youngest daughter of his father's fourth wife, for whom Nasir Shah had developed a momentary passion. Because he also loved his favorite wife so dearly, and because he had promised to ask her for her opinion about any further wives he would take, under her direction he made the girl his concubine, but gave her one of the better apartments, one that would have been more suited for a wife. She came to live in the Golestan Palace, and my friend visited her frequently and told me of her tears, her sadness, her homesickness for her seaside village. He was too prudent to say so directly, but she especially despised the Shah's mother, who needled her ceaselessly about failing to conceive any children by the Shah.
"We worked together, my Persian secret policeman and I, in the great hall where the Shah appeared daily to dispense justice, and I noticed one woman whose bright peacock-colored wrappings could be seen through the screen.
" 'It's her,' my friend said one day, gesturing in her direction.
" 'She can hear you,' I remarked, as we mounted a speaking tube behind a piece of molding. 'You're speaking right at the focal point.'
"He shut up, but from that day on, she appeared behind the screen in whatever room we worked in, always distinguishable by the bright full veil of peacock blue, trimmed with a hand's-span width of gold embroidery. I did not dare speak to her, and tried to pretend she wasn't there as best I could.
"One day a tall black eunuch whom I did not know approached me. It was she who summoned me, and trembling I accepted, telling him pointedly to have her not offer me anything to eat or drink. He laughed slyly and I despaired, because the eunuchs hated me. When I was led to her apartment, a table was spread out with tea, the sticky rose-flavored candy the women loved, little cakes. Inwardly I despaired, because to refuse food or drink among the people of the East is a deadly insult. I already knew what power the women of the court had, and hated her, or the eunuch who put me in that predicament.
"She came in, muffled and closed off from my view, covered entirely, even her eyes were concealed by a fine mesh that hung over her veil. We both looked at the table spread out before us, I in my silk mask, she swaddled as tightly as a mummy, and we both laughed. Under the eunuch's bored, suspicious gaze we chatted lightly in French, and she showed herself to be as brainless as a Parisian schoolgirl, but that made no difference. I was charmed, entirely." Then he looked at me with profound sadness and heavily sighed.
"It's all right," I said. "Go on."
"She liked slight of hand, and so I pretended to bend a spoon, made a few marbles appear and disappear. I leaned over to withdraw one from her sleeve, but the eunuch stood up and slid out his enormous curved sword and waved it in between us, signalling that we were to stay a table's length apart.
"I was entranced. The next day I did not see her, and a week later my friend informed me that she was gone from the Golestan, and I implored my friend, where? He told me only that the Khanum had arranged for her to be married to one of her nephews, and as he told me this his lip curled in disgust. The man in question was dissipated, one who thought of nothing but excess and cared neither whether it was man or woman, child or beast. Further, he had caught some filthy disease, and the best French doctors in Tehran could not mitigate it.
" 'Worst,' my Persian friend said, 'my father condones it. The Shah has promised him ten Arabian horses and a chance to race them next year. It's not that the Shah needs his permission, but he likes to keep on everyone's good side.'
"Every day, every night, I bitterly thought about escape, of finding her, of taking her with me back to France. I had been to some of the Shah's other palaces of pleasure on various construction projects, and knew that he had five times as many scattered across the country. She could be in any of those, or already in her new husband's house.
"Some corrupt eunuchs came to me in the night and offered me jewels in exchange for making a series of trap doors and passageways through the basement rooms, to connect the andarun to the outside. That way the ladies could go to the basement and meet lovers smuggled in from the outside, at high profit for the eunuchs. My anger overcame my fear at being caught in this double-dealing, and I agreed. Through their ringleader I discovered that she whom I sought would be briefly in the Golestan the next day, to meet with the Khanum about the upcoming marriage. I was to go to a little-used penthouse garden directly underneath the east tower, and wait there. It was neglected and dusty, and no one liked it because at midday the hot sun beat on it and baked it to clay. Even the fountain had been turned off long ago.
"At high noon I stood in the sharp white sun, thinking that if Nasir caught me, it would mean my death, and perhaps the death of my friend as well. I had seen men in the courtyard after Nasir's men had gotten through torturing them, and they looked far worse than myself, tongues and ears ripped off, eyes put out ... Oh, Christine, you are white. I told you stories of Persia were not for you."
"No," I said. "I want to hear it, till its conclusion."
"The sun bleached everything. It was midsummer, and everyone in the Golestan was asleep, it seemed, everyone but myself. I despaired of seeing her, and thought myself the victim of some trick or bribery. The garden was inset into the side of the building and was enclosed on three sides by the walls of the east tower itself, and on the second story was a porch railing, but not like we see, for this railing went from floor to ceiling. Like everything else in that garden it was broken and neglected, with the slatted wooden rails broken in spots, some large enough that a man could fit through.
"A movement on that upper level caught my eye, and my breath stopped in my chest. There, moving along the walkway, she was. I stood transfixed. She moved over to one of the holes in the railing, looking down at me with her veiled face. Then she called down, 'A trade, Maker of Trap Doors. A sight of my face for yours.'
"Tears stood in my eyes. I was young, and frightened, and she stood so still, like one of the great statues of ruined Persepolis. She took my silence to mean, go first, and so she did, unwrapping her head covering, and then the gauze that covered her face, letting the wide strips fall at her feet.
"She was not beautiful, not to my eyes, but rather an ordinary Persian girl of about sixteen, with fattish cheeks and the thick dark hair they prize so thoroughly. She stood there for a long moment with her dark hair long about her shoulders and entirely unmoving, for there was no wind to stir it. Then, when I made no move, said no word, she wrapped her face up again and slipped slowly away into the shadows cut black and sharp into the wall by the knife of the noonday sun.
"Frozen despite the midday heat, I returned to my rooms, brushing off everyone who tried to speak to me as I blindly made my way through the twisted corridors and vast halls of the Golestan palace. My Persian friend tapped on my door several times, but I lay on my cot and did not answer him, nor did I answer my foremen when they came after me. Finally one of the Khanum's eunuch's came, and I knew with sinking, despairing heart that someone had seen, and that I would be lucky to escape with a whole skin. I could try to throw myself on the mercy of the French embassy, but generally if one had broken one of the local laws, it was fruitless.
"A summons from the Khanum could not be ignored. I bathed, dressed, and greeted the small, round figure entirely covered in hijab, so that only her piercing, deep black eyes could be seen. She bade me sit, offered me juice in which a few rose petals floated, and again fear gripped me as I refused, as gracefully as possible. She waved her large hand, more like a paw than a woman's, thick with rings, as if to say, never mind. Then, in a move which horrified me more than anything, she told the eunuch to leave, and without a word, he did. I was alone with the mother of the Shah of Persia.
"We sat facing each other for long moments, without speaking. She lit her hookah and began to pull the sweet, hashish-scented tobacco into her lungs. Then she laughed, a hoarse laugh from down in a throat that sounded sore. 'So, Frenchman,' she said, 'You have this irrepressible curiosity to see women's faces. I will show you one, and you will not forget it.' She then unpinned the long and voluminous wrap which swathed her head, and sat there staring at me, blinking her slightly protruding eyes set in a fat moon face. It was an ordinary Persian woman's face, of late middle-age, with the typical dark moustache and eyebrows that they refuse to pluck or bleach. Then I was convinced that I was about to die, for one cry from her and the eunuchs would cut me to ribbons with their swords. 'Have you satisfied your curiosity?' she said in well-accented French.
" 'Yes,' I answered, and then, because the fear of death was on me and I saw no escape, I remarked, 'Shall I reciprocate the favor?'
" 'It's not necessary,' she said. 'My son has told me all I need to know.' Then she scrunched her eyes into piggish black slits. 'You are useful to him, Frenchman, and that's why I don't have you killed right where you sit. But you have a decision, some priorities to set in order. You are not the only one with secrets here, and not the only one whose secrets ultimately come before me. That little stunt on the rooftop will cost me dearly. My nephew doesn't want her anymore, says she's defiled herself. With what he's stuck his member into, I can't quite believe that, but that's his problem. But when you make things my problem, Frenchman,' and she did not speak, but rather spat the word out, 'then I have to take action.'
" 'Give her to me,' I breathed out. 'If he won't have her, give her to me.'
" 'Never,' she said. 'I have discipline to maintain here. If every woman in the andarun who doesn't like the match I've made for her thought she could get out of it by exposing herself to any passing infidel, how could I run this herd of cats my son calls his harem?' So how do you say it? I will lay some cards out before you. You can pack your miserable belongings and get out of my son's court, and our country tonight. Go to the embassy and cry about your mistreatment, I don't care. They won't help you, because even their ambassadors aren't that stupid, to meddle with one of the women of the Ummah. They reserve their attention for the brothels full of Christians and Parsees.'
" 'I'm not going to have you castrated, although it would be doing you a favor. Then you could run in and out of the andarun as often as you liked. The women would like that, I suppose, as they've taken a fancy to you, which I can't understand, seeing as what a miserable specimen you are. Once healed, if you practiced a little frottage on a few of the women here and there, well, I'm tolerant as long as it doesn't interfere with my son's prerogatives. But clipping you would most likely kill you, as scrawny and bloodless as you look, and that would indeed call down the wrath of your diplomats on our heads. So there's one other thing you can do for me, Frenchman, to keep yourself in my good graces and thus in my son's. The little bitch is going to be put to death, as is both my son's right, and her father's. I've decided you will have the honor of carrying it out.' "
He sat back in the carriage then, catching his breath, and his normally pale face was paper-white, the rings under his eyes black as smeared mascara. He put his hand into his mouth again and looked out the window, and a great flood of pity filled me with sympathy and horror. "I think I know where this is going," I said softly.
Ignoring me, he shuddered and went on. "I wanted to stay in Persia. My friend had just told me of a new state building for which I was to receive the sole contract, a new set of courts mounted above a vast warren of prison cells, to house the ever-increasing ranks of the religious and political rebels within the Shah's empire. My Persian friend was to be installed as the chief security officer there, and he and I were to work together, designing the rooms for interrogations, for hearings, for investigations. It was the largest and most extensive project I had been offered so far. Ambition consumed me."
"So you agreed."
"So I agreed. The next Friday was set for the time of the execution. The large public courtyard outside the Golestan was set aside for punishments and executions. After the hands and feet had been carried away in baskets, sand thrown over the blood and the crippled dragged away, too stunned and dazed even to scream any longer, they brought her out. They had given me an ax for beheading her, but I threw it to the ground. Inside my coat sleeve I had a long loop of catgut, a garotte which I had learned to use in Russia, from one of the Indian showmen. I wanted her to die quickly and painlessly, not hacked or mutilated.
"A great crowd of men filled the courtyard, cheering me on, hissing and spitting at her. A few rocks flew until the guards screamed and waved their swords threateningly at the crowd. One stone hit me on the forehead and the wet blood soaked my mask and ran down to my chin. She stood still as a statue, quiet as a dead woman, for she was already dead, even though she still breathed and was warm. They unbound her hair and left her only in a short shift which provided no modesty. I took off my long coat and went to put it over her, even though the guards threatened and cursed me in Farsi. I spat a few curses back at them and then looked at her for a long time. The crowd began to scream, and I glanced up to the nearest tower, where behind a railing a long line of women watched, waiting to see her blood stain the sand.
"She showed no fear. 'I'm sorry,' I kept saying, 'I'm sorry,' but she looked at me calmly and said, 'You don't have to do this.'
" 'They will kill me,' I said.
" 'Then they kill you. At least you will not go to your Isa and his pure mother Maryam with blood on your hands.'
" 'I don't believe in Isa or Maryam,' I said. 'Those are children's tales.'
" 'Then pray for Allah's mercy on your soul.'
" 'Get on with it,' men in the crowd screamed. 'Bend her over first,' others howled. 'A slut like her won't mind.'
" 'I'll make this quick,' I told her. 'You won't feel much.'
"She looked away, tears standing in her eyes. I put my hands around her neck, felt the carotid arteries pulse on either side of her neck, and pressed them until her eyes rolled up in her head, then closed. Propping her up with my knee and one hand, I slipped the garotte around her neck with the other, pulling it tight and true, and it was over in a few moments. She slumped to the ground and some of the men cheered, while others complained that it was quiet, they'd missed it all, and there was no blood. I let her lie where she fell in the steaming sand and walked away.
"The next morning I met my Persian friend after his prayers, and after my morning coffee. We immediately sat down to work on the prison complex as if nothing at all had happened."
The rain had stopped but clouds entirely covered the moon, so the inside of the old carriage was dark, and the wet air made a little fog inside, from the warmth of our bodies. The ruined hulk of the whole Second Empire framed his sad head. He shook silently in his corner of the seat, and although his face was turned away from me, I knew he was crying. It tore through me, lashing me with pity. He is so alone, I thought. I knew him, I knew that he would recover his composure and make some sarcastic remark, ask me if I was satisfied, now that I knew, something about the "insatiable curiosity of women." Then I realized that he had answered me; he had told me who she was, why she died, and how, and now it was up to me to make my answer in return.
He is so ugly, I thought. I can't even touch him. How can I do this? I reached into my purse and stroked the velvet on the box like fur. People can learn to love. I don't love him, but maybe I can learn. Maybe something will happen, a miracle. Maybe I don't have enough faith.
Thoughts and fancies raced through my mind. I'm all he has. Besides, he's old, perhaps he won't want me to do those things, anyway. If he wanted them that much, he would have demanded them already. Perhaps he just wants my companionship, someone to listen to him. How does he bear all these sorrows he must carry, of which he never speaks and probably never will?
I coughed a little, and he turned his silvery tear-tracked face to me. Without speaking, praying that the sliver of ice in my heart would melt, I opened the dark velvet box and slipped the heavy gold band around my finger. Its weight pressed on me and I sagged a little, as the ox staggers under the weight of the yoke on its shoulders.
He stared at me in astonishment. "Do you want to look at this carcass any longer?" he asked, almost stammering over his words.
I shook my head.
"You liked the Bois. Would you like to go back there?"
"I would." I kept thinking, he's going to kiss me now, what will I do then? However, he made no move towards me. After giving instructions to the driver, he drummed his heels light and fast against the bottom of the berlin's seat, and this time I didn't rebuke him. Captured by his gaze, vibrating with his staccato rhythm, I fidgeted and soon tapped my own foot to that compulsive beat. Now that he had me, it seemed, he had no idea what to do next, or what to say. Slowly we crept along the tree-lined boulevard, and the ring burned on my finger like ice.
(to be continued...)