The Silk Road

by Kathryn Davis

  Beyond the Dômerie there was nothing much to see aside from bare trees and underbrush, outcroppings of rock and flashes of river. The wish to fill the empty space between one place and the next was overwhelming. It was an impulse having less to do with wanting to see things, what was next, around the bend, than with trying to make time contiguous. The sun brightened, releasing mist from the road, smells of sweat and damp wool.

  The Keeper disliked walking but she loved to ride. She always had and, unlike the rest of us, she was good at it. Nanny always made sure there was an abundance of hot water waiting for her afterward, a cake of black soap from Spain, a pile of fresh towels. The Keeper would remove her boots, her velvet riding hat and dark green jacket, her matching jodhpurs. She would undress completely and step into the tub. She knew the Cook had made a peephole above the toothbrush holder but she didn’t care. She liked thinking of him watching her wet body.

  Past the fallen pillar where the accident happened, the ash tree, the stone mileage marker, the drinking trough, the sharp curve before the railroad underpass. The Keeper had been reading our mother’s fortune while the train was headed across the bridge. Make your mind as blank as possible when shuffling. Five of wands, strenuous competition. The greedy four of pentacles. The page of the same suit, reversed. Carelessness. Could any future be more boring?

  Everyone knew it was dangerous for a woman to travel alone. It was dangerous for men, too, and a traveling companion didn’t assure safety unless you were lucky enough to be traveling with an armed mercenary. The town appeared deserted but the Keeper knew it wasn’t; everyone was holed up indoors, peering out from between blinds or behind curtains. The houses were old and crammed together in a row the way the prisoners used to stand chained together on Fairmount Avenue, waiting to follow one another wherever the road took them, in this case into the river, which was beginning to freeze over. After it froze solid the washerwomen could no longer drive up and down it in their gaily painted barges to take in laundry, taking in laundry being another way of saying they were prepared to offer their services to lonely men along the route.

  One day a laundry basket appeared on the Keeper’s front stoop with a baby inside, wrapped in a pink blanket. At first, because of the blanket, she took the baby for a girl. He was a quiet child, so quiet the Keeper found it hard to remember he was in the house. Sometimes he cried—a soughing of wind in the trees, woodnotes in the gloaming. But she was used to being by herself and, unlike a real mother’s, her breasts had never had milk in them to let down and serve as a reminder.

  The Keeper approached the house cautiously; she wasn’t surprised to see that the horse had arrived before her, and that it was standing in the front yard, pawing at the frozen grass. Hello, the Keeper called past the open front door. Once inside she could hear the sound of keys tapping, paper rustling, a drawer being slammed shut. She fed the stove and put on the kettle. The baby had grown to be a skinny little thing, but whether he was sneaky or merely timid, she’d never been able to tell. Lately he spent most of his time in his room, and when he came out it seemed like she never actually saw him, just felt him wrapping himself around her legs the way a cat does. When he wasn’t in the house he played rough. He would come home with blood on his shirt. His clothes always needed fixing—that was something she could do for him.

  Of course we knew this about the Keeper—more than any of us, she was meant to be a mother. Given who our mother was, she was meant to be our mother, and on this account it was difficult for us not to resent the boy, especially when the Keeper asked us to help pay for the shoes he needed because of his clubfoot. It wasn’t a bad one. By the time he was half-grown you’d never know he’d had a problem. He was going to end up tall and attractive, we could see.

  The Keeper had everything a mother is supposed to have. She had a teakettle and a hearth. She had a stand mixer and a wide lap. She had a blurred soft side and a raptor-like watchful side. She had a sewing basket.

  Needles, she had needles.

  Inside the boy’s room it was dark; the sun stayed outside along with the horse and the river and the town, borne like a shield between two arms of water. The dog-headed beast was out there too; sometimes the boy thought he could see its face looking in his window. Its fur had a white tinge to it and it emitted a terrible odor. If only he could get the sequence right, the boy thought, tapping keys. The beast had torn out the throats of shepherdesses celebrated for their beauty; it had drained the blood from the bodies of little children. In his room the boy slid his finger across an image; there was something he was supposed to destroy, if he could get the sequence right. The devil had appeared close at hand; often it emerged as pokkes on the bodies of men and animals.

  Meanwhile the Keeper was looking through her kitchen cabinets to see if she had the ingredients to make a One-Two-Three-Four Cake, so named because it was made with one cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour, four eggs. A cake made this way is slightly dull and not a little heavy but otherwise foolproof, unless one of the eggs is rotten or someone, somewhere slams a door.

  Whether we liked this kind of cake or not, it was what we got for our birthdays, a yellow cake with white buttercream frosting and pink or blue candles, depending. Today might as well have been the boy’s birthday, the Keeper thought. She didn’t have any sugar but the market hadn’t closed yet.

  In his dark room the boy continued tapping on his keys. Tap tap tap. Tea was steeping in the Keeper’s yellow pot. The boy was tapping on his keys, moving the dog-headed beast from place to place. He slid his finger across an image: a tree, a house like a drawing of a house, a door in the middle with a window on either side of it and three above.

  Tap tap tap. A horse. It happened in an instant, the moment the Keeper stepped outside. In the channel branch at the eastern gate of her heart, an expanse of light, the sage of the anguished spirits. Compare the black and white pebbles of past actions. If you are to be reborn as an animal, you will see rocky caverns, empty hollows, and straw sheds shrouded by mist.

  What were we supposed to do? Time was, as they say, slipping through our fingers—how long would it take before others of our number disappeared forever, leaving the rest of us weeping into our hands? The hike from the hospital was arduous; the footpath rock-strewn and flooded, descending steadily and steeply, like walking down a stream.

  Like walking in a dream, someone said, merrily merrily merrily. Maybe there was a rainbow, a shrub with livid purple fruit. Whatever you do, don’t eat it, said the Botanist. But the Geographer and the Topologist were too distraught to pay attention, the Geographer because she couldn’t stop worrying about the Keeper, the Topologist because she had seen the Swede’s rosary lying on the path. She pocketed it, we saw her do this; then she kept playing with it in her pocket, continuing to do so as we passed under an electric pylon and entered a small, walled lane.

  Watch out for live wires, said the Astronomer, but the line was dead.

  The day had dawned clear and bright, the sky rising above us, deep blue and streaming with clouds, like the garment of a deity.

  Eventually the lane brought us to a large tall house with a steep slate roof. We could see a face looking down at us from a third-floor window—a small, wan face that seemed familiar, the face of someone we once knew well, maybe even loved.

  Hello! the Botanist called up to it, but whoever it was in the window continued to look down, making no response.

  We could tell the Botanist wanted us to help her remember who the person was, but as far as we were concerned, she was on her own. None of us had the least interest in digging up the past except insofar as we played a starring role in it.

  Greedily held in the chains of Venus, said the Iceman. In her sea-colored dress and her beautiful Sicyonian shoes. The Botanist’s tale was a love story. How could it be otherwise, given who she was?

  Though it wasn’t the Botanist’s lover up there; her lover, as we seemed to remember, had died in her arms. He hadn’t been sickly like
the person looking down at us, either, but he had been dead and this person was alive. Nor did the person up there actually seem to be looking down at us but at the deep gorge into which we were about to descend, the Allier so far away it might have been a single strand of hair, shining and silver, lost and fallen from one of our heads.

  The face in the window was such a small face to strike fear in our hearts. But this was the way it always happened, the wedge driving us asunder so slender as to be practically invisible.

  We had all been lying on our backs. It was like Savasana only there were roses in the wallpaper. There were mouths. Those of us who couldn’t sleep heard everyone else breathe the deep breaths of sleeping people. Those of us who slept, slept lightly, always on the verge of being awakened by those of us who couldn’t. The light fixture looked like a dog face. The light fixture looked like a breast. The Geographer walked in her sleep; we called her Miss Bit on account of her strong white teeth, the scalloped mark they left in more than one forearm. Had anyone shared a bed with her? Maybe we had separate bedrooms. Truly, bedtime had been a time of terror for all of us and our mother’s kisses didn’t help. If you tried to read under the covers with a flashlight Nanny would swoop down on you. Tomorrow is another day, she always said, to which someone would reply, Duh, and someone else would say, Maybe not. The Archivist talked in his sleep. In his sleep he was genial, conversational. How many of them were there? we heard him say, and then he started to laugh. The Keeper tossed and turned and threw off her blankets. Sleeping with her was like sleeping with a horse. Run slowly, slowly, horses of the night. According to Nanny, if you had a bad dream it was a good idea to examine it in the light of day, letting the sun lap into its corners and reveal the terror for what it was, something as ordinary as a pearl button or a glass of milk.

  But the terror was real. It was a by-product of having been born.

  In every nightmare there was a place you were not supposed to enter. No matter how hard you tried to stop yourself, it was where you ended up. It was the end of you, and if you tried to scream, something that started out endearing like a puppy turned to wind, a howling wind, the tongue in your mouth thick and blue at the root as you swallowed yourself up.

  For whatever reason, we didn’t want to linger on the lane in front of the large tall house. The sun was behind it, casting its shadow over us. We could see where the trail bent sharply to the left, becoming once again a narrow footpath before continuing its descent into the gorge.

  Come on, the Cook said to the Botanist. Being a cook, he usually had better luck with her than the rest of us. He said that once we got to the river there would be food, good food. We could smell it cooking all the way up here, he said, but when he took the Botanist’s hand, teasingly, and tried to pull her toward the footpath, she pulled in the opposite direction. She looked the way she always had, her feet planted firmly and her eyes honey-gold and gleaming, yet it was as if she’d gone back to being the person she’d been in the hospital, hovering above the ground, only a fraction of an inch this time, a distance too insignificant to be visible and yet unsettling. At last she started waving her arms around like someone who has walked into a cloud of midges, and we took it as dismissal.

  The hillside was so steep that to begin walking down it felt like stepping off a cliff. Luckily the footpath had been designed with switchbacks; it was also quite narrow, forcing us to walk single file. Because of this quite a lot of time elapsed before we realized the Botanist wasn’t with us, maybe not even until we got to the river. There was a sizeable crowd gathered on the riverbank, some people bundled up against the weather, some stripped naked to swim. To everyone’s amazement the Archivist materialized among the swimmers, his small wet head appearing and disappearing within the wings and limbs of the current, winsomely, like the head of the Keeper’s pet river otter that lived for a while in the cellar washbasin. What had the Archivist done with his clothing, his spectacles? Our mother warned us about swimming with other people. Until we were told otherwise, it was better to stay out of the water.

  As the Cook had promised, the concession stand was open. A sweet child of indeterminate sex, clad in a faded green pinafore and bog shoes, sold wine to those of us who would drink it. Meanwhile, a short distance away, a man who seemed much too old to be the child’s father roasted a medium-sized animal over a fire, turning the spit, then dozing off, then starting awake and turning the spit once more.

  He should have been basting the animal, we knew that much, even without being instructed by the Cook. The Archivist should have been mindful of the force of the current, we knew that much as well.

  We were growing careless. If we didn’t watch what we were doing there would be no one left. Inside each of us there were red and white drops, in each heart a drop the size of a pea with a white top and a red bottom. It was called the indestructible drop; our life-bearing wind dwelt inside it.

  At length we found a place to sit in the shade of a large beech tree. The little brown dog lay curled up fast asleep in the hollow between two roots. Was it possible the Swede was still alive and close at hand? The Topologist went off to see if she could find him while the rest of us stayed put. The theriac was having its effect, leaving us sluggish and irritable and without ambition. The Geographer’s stomach swelled, the Iceman bled from his mucous membrane. You were supposed to relax the bones of your ear; you were supposed to let your nostrils flare. At some point we saw the Astronomer wade into the water with a fishing pole and cast a line into a deep hole near the bank. He was fishing for grayling; people around here called it the shadow of the river. If he managed to catch any fish it would be advisable for us to eat them. What we needed to do now was to fortify our systems with elements native to the region, whereas theriac was a foreign substance that had made its way to us from town to town along the Silk Road. It was compounded of sweet liqueur and opium and the flesh of vipers. After taking theriac you got the feeling of a lump in the throat that could not be swallowed. Your stools passed with difficulty. The theriac might possess properties capable of prolonging life. On the other hand, it might be making things worse.

  We sat on the grass drinking wine and eating roast meat. If the Keeper were with us, she would be laying out her cards. Even though we pretended to be above such things, we counted on her to tell us who we were, what crowned or crossed us, what the future had in store. In the same way we had come to count on the Botanist’s sweetness, her idle flirtations, her complete lack of a sense of humor.

  The day had been windy. It seemed like it was windy all the time those days, and the wind didn’t seem to originate in one of the cardinal directions nor did it seem to emerge from all of them at once but instead to be a function of the air itself, something akin to the restlessness in our bodies that made us keep moving, as if all a person had to do to escape the sickness was to outrun it.

  The mysterious horseman moves slowly, according to the thirteenth card in the Greater Arcana. Of course the Keeper wasn’t there to say it, but we could hear her saying it clearly just the same, just as we could see the card, a handsome skeleton astride a snow-white horse.

  Death is nothing, the Iceman said, since the nature of the mind has proved to be mortal. When the body dies the soul does too. To link a mortal thing with an everlasting one and suppose they have something in common, weathering the same furious storms, is folly.

  At death, all the winds undergo dissolution and get channeled into the heart. Our limbs become smaller, our sight darkens, inside us there is the appearance of smoke, of fireflies, of a butter lamp going out.

  The moment she could no longer see us the Botanist opened the door to the tall house with the steep roof and went in. Mostly, she needed to put it all behind her, and by “all” she meant all of us, as well as the events of her life, what people call memories. Right away it was as if she had never been inside a house before; even the noise the door made closing behind her seemed not to have been made by wood sliding against wood with an accompanying burst of
air, but instead signaled the presence nearby of something previously unknown or imagined, something large and shifting around in a space too small for it, breathing heavily through the mouth.

  Little bug, little scrub, little bead, little need. The Botanist knew she was being summoned. She was floating again, that much was for sure.

  Up a long staircase and onto a landing. The windows were shut tight yet if she looked back she could see smoke seeping from the crevices, as well as from hundreds of small objects on shelves along the walls, unrecognizable, glinting as if in the light of a fire but there was no fire, no stove, no candle, no light at all. Meanwhile the smell of smoke occurred to her like the image of a small girl in a smocked dress playing jacks, not a memory but an idea. It was exactly the way it happened when she was working: there would be the smell of hyacinth and there would be an old lady reaching for something just out of reach. There would be the taste of a cranberry bean and there would be a young man sharpening a pencil. You couldn’t interrupt these operations of reaching, of sharpening—they were each, in their own way, eternal.

  The thing is, we couldn’t save one another. The Botanist was in danger but there was nothing we could do. Ditto the Archivist, borne on the increasingly powerful current, headed for the rapids where the Rock That Cries had ended many a life. We hadn’t heard about this yet but we were going to. There was nothing we could do. Once you were in the Savage Domain there was no escaping the dog-headed beast. Meanwhile we sat on our cloaks under the capacious beech tree, eating meat and drinking wine and planning what to do next, as if the operation we were involved in, however it might be described—déjeuner sur l’herbe, maybe, or fiddling while Rome burns—were not, likewise, eternal. As if we could have any say about the outcome. As if we couldn’t see the little brown dog curled on the grass at our feet.