Winter's Tale

by Mark Helprin

  Purely by chance, she headed south to the Village. The city was empty, its only activity the blinking on and off of neon signs, an occasional plume of steam that rose from the street, or a gull that gently crossed the gap between the canyons, gliding on air that was pink with dawn and equanimity. Everything seemed benevolent. But, still, she was apprehensive. Marcel had said that she would be devoured immediately by the hard city outside. “You’ve never lived alone,” he said. “It’s not easy. How will you find an apartment? Where? Do you know how difficult it is to obtain an apartment in New York? And a job: it might take months to get a job. Meanwhile, you’ll starve on the street.”

  Early in the morning, a real estate agent showed her a tiny chamber on Bank Street, which he called an apartment. The bathtub was in the kitchen, and she could touch all four walls of the “bedroom” from one spot, but it was clean and it was quiet, and it overlooked a garden. “You’ll have to share the balcony with the gentleman who lives in the adjoining residence. He works for The Sun, piloting their launch, so he’s always out when the weather’s good, and you’ll have the balcony to yourself.”

  “But it’s only a foot wide,” Christiana protested.

  “Two hundred dollars a month,” the real estate agent answered.

  She signed the lease, put down a security deposit and a month’s rent, and the real estate agent left. “Bang!” said Christiana. “Just like that, and I’ve got a place to live!” She opened a bank account, stocked the refrigerator, and furnished the place, all before noon. Since she needed only a small table, two chairs, a white sleeping mat, some blankets, a pillow, three lamps, an old prayer rug, and a minimum of kitchen equipment for her minimum of a kitchen, she was left with more than $2,000—and some pocket money with which she bought lunch, a Danish dictionary, several Danish novels and geography books, a notebook, and some pens. She was going to teach herself the language that she had first known and that still lay dormant within her needing only to be awakened. By three o’clock that afternoon, she had found a job.

  At the service entrance of a beautiful house in Chelsea, a most astonishing-looking ageless woman named Boonya took her inside and began to explain the duties of an occasional maid.

  “But I said full-time,” Christiana protested.

  “Mr. Penn pays you for full-time, dear,” said Boonya, who was as round as a medicine ball, “but you only work part-time. In the interbules, you’re supposed to go to liberries and concerps. If you go to college, he’ll pay your tutition. Me, I prefer to work around the house, to cook and do the washtub and stuff. But each is different. Bosca, the dark girl, who was here until she left, was studying in the theater. Do you see what I mean?”

  “Yes. Extraordinary.”

  “If that’s how you want to put it. All right, can you cook?”

  “I used to cook in my parents’ hotel.”

  “Good,” said Boonya, as she led Christiana to the kitchen. “But you may not be familiar with the foods that Harry Penn holds dear to his heart. He and his daughter have favorites, which I’ll teach you how to make.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, durbo cheese stuffed with trefoil, camminog, meat of the vibola, roast bandribrolog seeds, satcha oil hotcakes, young Dollit chicken in Sauce Donald, giant broom berries, crème de la berkish tollick, serbine of vellit, pickled teetingle, chocolate wall hermans, trail lemons, Rhinebeck hot pots with fresh armando, parrifoo of aminule, vanilla lens arrows, fertile beaties, archbestial bloodwurst, Turkish calendar cake, fried berlac chippings, cocktail of ballroom pig, vellum cream cake, undercurrents, crisp of tough boxer lamb, sugared action terries, merry rubint nuts, and rasta blood-chicken with Sauce Arnold.”

  For each of these products of Boonya’s crazed imagination, she had a recipe. Christiana looked on in wonder as Boonya pantomimed the preparation of fresh teetingle, or the proper way to cut vanilla lens arrows. “Always flour the marble before you put down an uncooked lens arrow. Sprinkle the vanilla. Cut it fast!” she screamed, her fat sausagelike arms flailing about the medicine ball. “Otherwise, it sticks. Sticky little bastards, lens arrows. Did your mother ever teach you how to properly bone a good serbine of vellit?”

  Boonya took her through the house, which was filled with books, paintings, and nautical relics, all of which required regular dusting. There was an illuminated painting of Harry Penn as a regimental commander in the Great War. “That was years ago,” Boonya explained, “ages and ages ago. He’s a young man there, but not now. Now he’s old. He spends a lot of time at The Sun, but when he’s here, he’s always reading. He says books stop time. I myself think he’s crazy. (I put a book right next to my alarm clock, and the clock kept on going.) Don’t tell anyone, but when he reads something that he likes he gets real happy, turns on the music, and dances by himself, or with a broom sometimes. Mum’s the word.”

  “I suppose it’s because his wife’s dead,” said Christiana, “that he dances with a broom.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Boonya. “He dances with a mop, too.”

  “Maybe he had a mistress.”

  “He did, but she had short hairs. I also got short-haired mops. They’re for precision cleaning, like those small wheels they got in racing cars. In them European formula P’s, the wheel’s the size of a silver dollar. That’s why they have midget racers, who can grab it in their tiny hands.” She looked around in conspiratorial fashion and beckoned Christiana toward her. Whispering softly, she said, “Their little bodies fit between the struts. My cousin Louis tried to be one. He’s small enough, Lord knows. But Louis always pretends to be a shadow turkey, so they threw him out.”

  “What’s a shadow turkey?”

  “That’s one of those things that boomatooqs use to wash windows with, but they’re illegal in New York and New Jersey, so Connecticut boomatooqs have to smuggle them through to get to Pennsylvania. Get my drift? Louis wasn’t all there. One day, the Lord was cracking nuts, and Louis was taking a nap in the nut pile. Get it?”

  Christiana smiled, but, when Boonya looked away for an instant, duplicitously rolled her eyes.

  “Shh!” hissed Boonya, holding her finger up in the air. “Do you hear castanets?”

  “No,” Christiana answered.

  “I think I hear them passing on a funeral wagon. Maybe the Spanish ambassador kicked the bucket.” And then, with drops of sweat dripping from the unified eyebrow that marched across her forehead like a centipede, Boonya gradually stoked the fire of her madness until she intoned like a druid, singing to Christiana what she said were her ten favorite Egyptian Christmas carols, delivering a long and intense dissertation on Eskimo sexual utensils, and talking about the coconut, which she maintained was exclusively the symbol of military preparedness. She would stop to quiz Christiana.

  “What’s the symbol of military preparedness?”

  “The coconut.”

  “Exclusively?”

  “So it is said.”

  But all in all, Boonya was a good maid and (in her work, at least) as stable as the Rock of Gibraltar. And she looked like it too, or, rather, like a sphere with three melons on it—two enormous breasts that swayed with gravity, and a head upon which were coils of thin blond hair wound in basket-weave. She was Norwegian, and thought she was superior to the slim and beautiful Christiana, who was Danish, because Norway was above Denmark.

  They got along in a fashion. Going to work became for Christiana an extraordinary entertainment, for Boonya’s declarations and pronouncements were never-ending, she could clean like a demon, she sang songs in languages that no one knew, and she had recipes for a thousand foods that did not exist.

  NOT UNTIL winter, when during a prolonged blizzard The Sun’s launch was idle, did Christiana discover the inhabitant of the apartment on the other side of the wall. A steady northwest wind drove the snow in hypnotic trajectories as the blizzard rushed through the garden, turning it into an alpine cirque. Asbury and Christiana sat facing one another for hours, though between them were tw
o fires and several thicknesses of brick.

  She was deep in Thorgard’s Winter Seas, speeding along at two pages an hour in the original Danish. Asbury was at a little table before the fire, struggling with Dutton’s Problems in Advanced Navigation, over which he soon had to triumph if he were to continue his progress toward a master’s certificate. For six months, they had lived in adjoining rooms, and been completely unaware of one another’s presence, though they slept literally less than a foot apart.

  Were the forces of nature less concerned with the mounting of stupendous blizzards and the greening of mountain ranges than with maneuvering together a good man and a good woman, the bricks that separated them would have crumbled long before. But the forces of nature did not seem to care, and it was not until Asbury got up to get his fire going that he and his neighbor were finally enabled to meet. He rocked the logs with a poker, watching the red coals chip off into devil’s candy. When he was satisfied with the activity he had promoted in the crucible before him, he banged the poker against the back wall of the fireplace three times, to rid it of a few glowing embers that had lodged in its hook.

  Christiana put down her book and stared at the inner wall of the fireplace. Then she got up, seized a poker, and knocked back three times. It was answered. Soon the telegraphy moved from the firewall to the wall above the mantel, and then to the wall between their beds. There, discovering that voices could carry through, they introduced themselves, but then cut off their conversation quite rapidly thereafter, out of embarrassment. “What place is this in your apartment?” she had asked.

  “My bed,” he had answered. “What about you?”

  “The same,” she had said, realizing that they slept only inches apart.

  “Are you going to move it now?” Asbury asked.

  “No.”

  Sometimes they spent hours lying next to the wall, saying anything that came to mind, telling their histories, what they had thought, and what they had dreamed. In this way, they became so intimate that it was as if they were having a blistering love affair without anything like a wall between them. In the summer, he told her, they could travel by their narrow balconies to a valley between the peaks of the roof. “From there you can see the river,” he told her.

  She said that she would like to go there. But was it dangerous to climb up? “No,” he answered. They would meet during the summer. But not until then.

  “What do you look like?” Asbury asked one night, months later, because he knew that, since it was already the beginning of May, he would soon see her.

  “I’m not pretty. I’m not pretty at all,” she said.

  “I think you’re beautiful,” he shot back through the wall.

  “No,” Christiana insisted. “It’s not true. You’ll see.”

  “I don’t care,” he answered. “I love you.”

  When he heard her crying, he thought that perhaps he had gotten himself in deeper than he should have. But he did love her, and he didn’t care if, as she steadily maintained, she was homely. This he made clear to her on a number of occasions during the late spring. Finally, he asked her to marry him.

  Everyone, including Hardesty, thought that Asbury had made a terrible mistake. “I understand,” Hardesty said, “how people, especially lonely people, might fall in love through a wall. But if she is, as she claims, physically repulsive, you’ll need that wall between you for the rest of your lives.”

  “I know,” Asbury said. “If she’s really hideous, you might be right. But she says that she’s just overly plain, whatever that means. I still can’t see how she could fail to appear to me to be the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  Hardesty offered to go look, and received a resounding lecture on trust, after which Asbury affirmed that he was going to take the risk. Her voice was beautiful, and he knew that he loved her—that was enough.

  She agreed to marry him, and they decided to meet in the roof valley on the first fine day. Naturally, it rained throughout most of the spring.

  But one day early in June, in the morning, before the sun was too hot, Asbury went out on the roof. At first he climbed to the peak of his own side and stayed there, looking at the river, trying not to tremble too much, because it was the perfectly blue day for which he had been waiting. Hell, he thought, let’s just do it. He went into the valley and up again, and spoke through a chimney.

  “Christiana,” he shouted. “Are you up? I hope I have the right chimney.”

  “I’m up,” she yelled into her fireplace, her heart racing.

  “Come to the roof. It’s time we met.” He tried not to be nervous. “After we get over the shock of this, one way or another, we can go sailing. Maybe all the way to Amagansett.”

  “Coming,” she said, in motion, in a voice that had reverted to nearly pure Scandinavian, though the word was hardly audible as she sprang away from the hearth.

  Asbury went down to where the two roofs met, and stood with a foot on each one, facing the direction from which she would appear.

  First, her hand came over the edge while she climbed up on the balcony rail. Then she rose in one quick movement, and stood before the lover that she had never seen. She was more than pleased. And he was stunned.

  “I knew it,” he said, in triumph, struggling to take her in all at once. “I knew that you would be the most beautiful woman in the world. And goddammit,” he said, stepping back a pace so as not to be overwhelmed, “you are.”

  III

  THE SUN . . . AND THE GHOST

  Nothing Is Random

  NOTHING IS random, nor will anything ever be, whether a long string of perfectly blue days that begin and end in golden dimness, the most seemingly chaotic political acts, the rise of a great city, the crystalline structure of a gem that has never seen the light, the distributions of fortune, what time the milkman gets up, the position of the electron, or the occurrence of one astonishingly frigid winter after another. Even electrons, supposedly the paragons of unpredictability, are tame and obsequious little creatures that rush around at the speed of light, going precisely where they are supposed to go. They make faint whistling sounds that when apprehended in varying combinations are as pleasant as the wind flying through a forest, and they do exactly as they are told. Of this, one can be certain.

  And yet there is a wonderful anarchy, in that the milkman chooses when to arise, the rat picks the tunnel into which he will dive when the subway comes rushing down the track from Borough Hall, and the snowflake will fall as it will. How can this be? If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined; it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined. No matter, it all happened at once, in less than an instant, and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given—so we track it, in linear fashion, piece by piece. Time, however, can be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once. The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was, is; everything that ever will be, is—and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we imagine that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful. In the end, or, rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but as something that is.

  Peter Lake Returns

  FOR SEVERAL years or more, the run of severe winters had been broken by a series of sunny counterfeits that were called winter only by Hawaiians. The worker-devils who tore up the streets in mid-Manhattan as traffic swirled about them like floodwaters around a caisson, did so in the mi
ddle of January with their shirts off. At Christmastime, women were seen on high terraces, sunning themselves. There was no snow; the garment industry was convulsed; the news weeklies had a series of identical covers about the weather. (Newsweek—“No more winters?”; Time—“Where are the snows of yesteryear?”; The Ghost News Magazine—“It’s Hot.”) Then, just at the peak of complacency, when it was assumed that the climate of the world had changed forever, when the conductor of the philharmonic played Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and left out an entire movement, and when to children of a young age stories of winter were told as if they were fairy tales, New York was hit by a cataclysmic freeze, and, once again, people huddled together to talk fearfully of the millennium.

  Snow filled the parks in volumes that would have impressed the inhabitants of the Coheeries, overwhelming half the trees and hills. It soon became the custom to ski from place to place, passing silently over dead and buried cars. The air was so clear that people said, “Shake it and it will shatter,” and day after day, week after week, month after month, a dense freezing wind descended from the north, pushing snow and ice before it like a calving glacier. Winter abounded and exploded. Always the season of testing and extremes, it made some people euphoric and others suicidal; it split granite boulders, tree trunks, and marriages; it tripled the rate of winter romances; brought back sleds and skis, and chapbooks about Christmas in New England; and it froze the Hudson into a solid highway. It even froze half the harbor.