The Silk Road

by Kathryn Davis

  The Cook awoke from his nap with a start. Don’t forget the wine, he said. The wine there is the best in the world.

  So you walked, said the Archivist. There were cows. There were walls. No one’s interested in a travelogue.

  It was obvious he was still angry about the noose. In any case, we knew where the story was headed. According to the lore of the trail, a day or so out of Le Puy a person was going to appear and advise the Topologist to ignore the red and white blazes in favor of a shortcut they would describe in detail. The consequences of taking this advice were various. She might end up back where she started. She might find herself spending a lonely night in a dark wood. She might never be seen again.

  The dark wood, of course. The dark wood was the clue.

  Jee Moon was looking off into space in that way of hers, narrowing her eyes.

  Midway on our life’s journey, the Iceman said.

  It was a large person, the Topologist said. There were so many wayside crosses it was confusing. She glanced around the room and we all became self-conscious about our size.

  Was it a man or a woman? The Geographer was taking out her tablet.

  I don’t know, the Topologist replied.

  You don’t know? the Keeper said, laughing. You scholars! It’s a miracle you ever reproduce.

  The person was back lit, the Topologist explained. Whoever they were, they stepped out from behind a cross. They had on a bandana, pirate style. It must have been late in the day because the sun was shining in the Topologist’s eyes as it made its way to the horizon. Soon night would fall and the section of trail between where she stood and the next village was steep and rocky. The trail here was treacherous under the best of conditions but now that a light rain had started falling, the moss-covered rocks were going to be slippery.

  It was on the third day. Aside from the Swede, the Topologist had encountered very few fellow pilgrims, the fast pilgrims who strode past her as if late for important appointments, the tired pilgrims propped against the trunks of trees. She was lonely, a condition she failed to recognize. Back home she spent a lot of time alone and so she thought she never got lonely; she forgot that someone was usually there even if she couldn’t see them, in the department kitchen making coffee, at the copy machine, or mailing a package. Sometimes her office mate was sitting right beside her in the same room and still she couldn’t see him. That would be when she was busy traversing the infinity of points that were going to end up describing a perfect model of the unsolvable continuum hypothesis.

  There turned out to be a shortcut skirting the Lake of the Egg. The Topologist liked the sound of that. She could bypass the steep section and get to Monistrol in time for dinner. If she decided to avoid the hostel, Monistrol boasted a three-star hotel. All she needed to do was ignore the blazes and follow a series of cairns marked with the letter M.

  “For Monistrol,” the Topologist guessed.

  “If you like,” the figure in the bandana said. It had a deep voice, but then so did some women.

  The rain was coming down harder now. The first cairn was just visible off to the left in a thicket of yellow broom.

  One foot in front of the other. This is how a person walks. We all knew this fact perfectly well. Voluntary action arises from within, from the unpredictable movement of a single atom. A trail was unfolding just ahead of each footstep, and then, faintly visible through the rain and gathering dark, another cairn. How is it possible for the solid objects around us to melt away into the past, and for a new order of objects to emerge mysteriously from the future? As promised, the trail didn’t descend sharply, nor was it rock-strewn. If anything, it was resilient underfoot, a moist web of vegetation, pale green and translucent like a luna moth’s wings. While she walked, the Topologist felt herself becoming aroused. It was as if whatever lay beneath her had its attention fixed amorously on the cleft between her legs. She felt like she was naked from the waist down, hungrily observed and getting wet, her breath coming faster and faster.

  Walking can do that, said the Keeper. It’s perfectly normal. She was trying to be reassuring, like a mother.

  Sphagnum subnitens, said the Iceman. Glittering sphagnum. All it thinks about is sex.

  Two cairns, three cairns, four cairns. By now the rain was coming down so hard the Topologist could barely see a thing. Eventually she lost count, her mind’s aching avenues of thought set loose through every part of her. There was a sound emerging from the back of her throat and her eyes had stopped seeing anything except in her mind’s eye those moist green funicles, glittering—yes! that’s what they were doing!—glittering and teasing. Touch me, she thought, please, oh please, the slightest touch …

  She came violently, lying on her back at the threshold of a low stone building that appeared to be a shrine to Saint Roch. A small brown dog, some kind of hound with long ears and pleading eyes, sat off to one side of the building, violently trying to scratch itself in a place it couldn’t reach. “Here boy,” the Topologist said, putting out her hand, but of course she was forgetting. The dog spoke French.

  Saint Roch, said the Archivist. That one’s mine, too.

  You can’t own a saint, said the Keeper. A saint’s day can be yours, but that’s it.

  I’m not trying to take anything away from you, said the Topologist. I’m just saying where I was. I thought that’s what we were supposed to be doing. To figure out what happened to one of us back there in the labyrinth.

  She looked at Jee Moon, who was looking at the Archivist with a severe expression on her face.

  Stop it, Jee Moon said to him, and everyone drew a breath, momentarily shocked.

  Where was I? the Topologist asked. I certainly wasn’t anywhere near the Lake of the Egg, if there even is such a place.

  Blazing a trail through pathless tracts, said the Iceman.

  There was a plastic bag caught in the underbrush. A scrap of something held trembling there. Am I the only one who remembers? said the Botanist.

  It happened that the Topologist was on the threshold of a very old shrine to the saint known in France as Saint Roch, in Germany as Rochus, Rocco in Italy, Rock in England. The trail guide listed many shrines to Saint Roch but this wasn’t one of them. Like the other shrines it was Romanesque in style, the windows mere slits in the walls, the ceiling low, the only light coming from a handful of votive candles of varying length, burning in two small racks near the altar. Who had lit them? the Topologist wondered—it seemed like she had ventured a great distance from the trail, though the presence of the dog suggested she might not be as far from human habitation as she thought.

  The saint was in the shrine. He was a good-looking young man clad in a brown tunic printed with gold fleurs-de-lys, the hem of which he was in the process of lifting flirtatiously above his left knee.

  Flirtatious! said the Archivist. You’ve got to be kidding. The saint isn’t flirting! The saint is lifting his hem to show the plague sores on his thigh. The Archivist had learned this from the sisters at Saint Roch parochial school. The saint was born to rich parents who died when he was twenty years old, at which point he gave away his worldly possessions and set out on a pilgrimage. Somewhere in Italy he encountered an epidemic of the plague and for a while he tended the sick, effecting many miraculous cures by the power of prayer and the touch of his hand. Eventually, though, he contracted the disease and was expelled from town by the very people he’d been helping. He went into the forest where he lived in a hut made of tree limbs and leaves; he would have died if it weren’t for the little dog that brought him bread and licked his wounds to heal them.

  You mean an icon, right? The Botanist had come to sit beside the Topologist; she was sitting very close, closer than the Topologist liked. It wasn’t the saint himself in the shrine with you, the Botanist said. She didn’t mean this as a question.

  But that was such a long time ago! The Topologist could feel the Botanist scrutinizing her for a sign of whatever it was that had turned her from a stern-faced girl with
dark brows and thin brown hair and a long upper lip, a string bean of a girl wearing pale blue cat’s-eye glasses, into what she was now, a tube of skin that could be stretched into a torus to contain an entire universe. Soon there would be nothing left, the walls of the tube getting thinner and thinner, the skin powdering off, powdering, powdering, like the snow that wouldn’t stop falling, the uncountable realm of stars.

  I don’t know, the Topologist said. Maybe it was just an icon.

  But if so, why was he warm to the touch? And what about the little dog?

  The Botanist was petting the Topologist’s forearm, a gesture we remembered from our school days, sitting in assembly singing songs about the seasons, about the bluebirds gaily singing, the autumn leaves falling, the ash grove how peaceful, the sleigh on the roof. A light stroke from the crook of the elbow to the wrist—the girl who invented it called it tickling and she was especially good at it. She was a poet but our mother called her P, for Pest. P for Perfect. P for Poisonous. Everyone wanted to sit next to her.

  All I know is, we are very lucky to be here, the Botanist said. We should count our lucky stars.

  That’s right, said Jee Moon. You should.

  We should count carefully, said the Topologist. It’s easy to make a mistake.

  Lucky stars! The Astronomer was laughing.

  I don’t see what’s so funny, said the Botanist.

  But everyone knew the Botanist didn’t have a sense of humor.

  The settlement was here before we arrived. Though it appeared uninhabited there was a sense in the place of a room you’ve walked into that’s been recently vacated, that feeling of a stir in the air we associated with entering what we used to call the Morning Room, due to the fact that the sun streamed through its tall front windows every morning and then went away before noon, leaving the room dark and cold and more empty than before, Father’s paper still unfolding itself on the piecrust table, the stems of his reading glasses folding themselves back in place, the leather wings of the daemon that had only recently left the room spreading for flight.

  There had been no trail guide any of us could remember. The Geographer had been mapping the retreating hem of the glacier, the Astronomer the wandering stars of Boötes. At some point the Topologist remembered having owned a guidebook but she thought she left it on a café table somewhere in the Aubrac. She’d been preoccupied, having just noticed the nice-looking blond man across the road, pausing to upturn a pebble from his hiking shoe.

  The Swede! said the Botanist. He was waiting for you—don’t tell me it wasn’t the Swede!

  The Archivist expelled a breath. Love and marriage, he said. Is that all you girls think about?

  When pressed to give an explanation for how he got here all he could remember was an overwhelming need to keep a long-standing appointment.

  Like in a dream, said the Cook. The train is leaving the station. There’s so much steam you can’t see a thing. And where is your bag? And where is your sweetheart?

  With a trail guide you have the illusion of control, the Geographer conceded. The way you do with a map. The sense of space as a controlled substance is overpowering, except you don’t know where it’s going to take you.

  You don’t! agreed the Keeper. One minute you’re hallucinating, the next minute here you are. She tossed her head and a shudder ran through her magnificent burnished flesh.

  When you arrive at the edge of the world you stop remembering things like how you got there. Your attention keeps pouring over the edge, out and away from the footprints left behind you in the snow, unable to focus on anything except the cove of sparkling light there at the foot of the escarpment. It was either a real pool full of something like water—we were in agreement on that if nothing else—or just a gathering of attention, all of it in one place, as solid and bright-surfaced as a jewel but otherwise beside the point.

  Meanwhile the sky had lifted so far above us that we could hardly see it. It was white the way everything in the place was white, only strangely contained as if soffitted, as if in lifting itself it had become part of an immense architectural plan, the ceiling of a house that had been there from the beginning. I am so small, each of us thought, stirring the air while we walked along in a way we experienced as a need to speak, something inside ourselves opening. That’s when Nanny would appear from out of nowhere, a pile of fresh, warm towels in her arms. Bath time proceeded according to age, youngest to oldest. There would be some tears and then, in the little yard behind the scullery, a shared cigarette or two.

  The land the settlement was built on belonged to our ancestor who had been a famous explorer. It was a wild, tilting tract high above the sea, at its foot the cove where the floatplane landed. His journals were kept behind locked doors in the glass-fronted bookcase in the library, along with family treasures like the big egg with maroon spots and the meteorite. From the distaff side, our mother told us. All of it. You won’t find a single explorer on your father’s side. They’re meek as lambs, the lot of them.

  Of course to say that the land belonged to our ancestor is a falsehood. He never paid for it and even if he’d wanted to, the original inhabitants of the place didn’t consider it their property. The money we came from was old money, our ancestors having hauled it with them first across land and then across sea, planting it where they landed, cultivating whatever grew there until its taproot was too deep to disturb. Human beings have always moved from place to place, whether by design or due to the unforeseen, droughts and wars, pestilence and persecution, the Silk Road they traveled on a conduit not merely for precious commodities, for spices and jewels, mirrors and honey, but for everything strange or unknown, a variety of alien gods and ideas, an unbounded universe with nothing outside it, the dung-covered eggs of the silkworm. This was our birthright, this easy assurance that whatever we wanted was ours, both to have and to bestow. We knew nothing about privation and adventure, as Jee Moon liked to remind us. It was common knowledge Nanny had spoiled us rotten.

  According to our ancestor’s journal, he fell in love with the place at first sight, having traversed the interior plateau in a canoe with his new bride. After weeks navigating rapids in a seething cloud of bugs, the occult emptiness of the scene before him was like hearing from someone he thought had died. He rested his paddle athwart his knees. He shivered, sharply aware of his carnal self, the sea extending everywhere he looked as darkly bright as outer space.

  Back then there was nothing to interpose between the young couple and eternity. There was no greenhouse, no kennel, no labyrinth, and whatever grew was stunted in the way of Arctic vegetation, whole trees no bigger than a person’s little finger. They erected their tent on the site of what would eventually become the Great Hall, and because they were tenting on bare rock in a high wind they had to weight the pegs with deadmen. It was a boundless night, the compass needle quivering, unable to fix on a single point. At some moment near dawn a child was conceived. Our mother told us the rest was history, her intention, as usual, misleading.

  By the time we got here the settlement was firmly established, with the Great Hall at its center and the labyrinth beneath it, though none of this was apparent from the beach. The first snow had fallen, leaving the face of the bedrock shining through like a postulant’s from behind a veil. The black flies and mosquitoes were long gone and the sea was so clear you could see all the way to the gas fields on the bottom.

  I need to take a sounding, said the Geographer. Could you give me room? She removed from her pack a thing that looked like an icicle and held it out in front of her, heading down the beach to where the Iceman sat eating a sandwich with his back leaned up against a large cairn. The cairn stood alone, suggesting it might not be a trail marker but a monument of some kind, possibly a cenotaph or an actual gravestone with a dead person lying beneath it. No matter what it was, we were cheered to discover it, its presence suggesting that we had actually arrived somewhere.

  Do you think you should be doing that? asked the Archivist, and t
he Iceman laughed, snapping the top off a bottle of beer.

  Relax, he said, holding out his sandwich. Have a bite.

  The Keeper hugged herself, pulling her hands up into her sleeves. You’re right, she said to the Archivist. We don’t want to be disrespectful. She glanced back over her shoulder at the rim of the escarpment where the white sky was being overrun by thick, churning clouds.

  The sense of being watched was overpowering: we were all aware of it, even if we pretended not to be. Such regard created an illusion of intimacy between us, a sense that whatever was watching could feel each breath as it took visible shape in the air, could register each passing thought each time we moved our eyes, as well as the moistness of our eyes, the dryness of our chapped lips.

  Like that depressing magazine in the pediatrician’s office. This is a watchbird watching a person doing something they shouldn’t be doing. This is a watchbird watching you.

  An immense angle of sunlight had erected itself where we stood on the beach, illuminating us and the pile of stones around which we were gathered. Someone had been fastidious when assembling these stones, limiting their selection to beach cobble, quartzite, and chert. There was no way of knowing how long ago this had happened.

  The things that got left behind were left here because no one was in any condition to take them away, or because the people who left them wanted to make sure they’d return. Whalers left behind baleen carvings and floor tiles, fishermen left behind fish skeletons and little leeks called hives. The Moravian missionaries thought they were never going to leave; thousands of years before them the first mammal hunters, appeasing a different god, left behind the body of a young girl, wrapped in bark and painted with red ocher.

  The Place of the Watchbird, the Geographer wrote in her tablet, naming it, and the icicle meter began clicking like a cat when it sees a mouse.

  It had been the same for all of us: we left in a hurry, without the proper maps. We forgot things, a purse, a ticket, a kiss goodbye. The water faucet wasn’t shut off all the way and the lights were still on, or at least they were when we turned the key in the lock. What was the use of locking up? There was no way to keep the water from escaping once it filled every room, to keep it from rising to the ceiling where it would short the lights. Not to mention the bodies of the fleas, borne on the flood, gleaming like jet beadwork. Did fleas even know how to swim?