by Jane Yolen
“Try them,” the old woman said again, thrusting them at him. Her voice was compelling.
Boris took the left hand between his thumb and forefinger. The hand was as slippery as rubber, and wrinkled as a prune. He pulled it on his left hand, repelled at the feel. Slowly the hand molded itself to his, rearranging its skin over his bones. As Boris watched, the left hand took on the color of new cream, then quickly tanned to a fine, overall, healthy-looking beige. He flexed the fingers, and the left hand reached over and stroked his right. At the touch, he felt a stirring of desire that seemed to move sluggishly up his arm, across his shoulder, down his back, and grip his loins. Then the left hand reached over and picked up its mate. Without waiting for a signal from him, it lovingly pulled the right hand on, fitting each finger with infinite care.
As soon as both hands were the same tanned tone, the strong, tapered, polished nails with the quarter-moons winking up at him, Boris looked over at the witch.
He was surprised to see that she was no longer old but, in fact, only slightly mature, with fine bones under a translucent skin. Her blue eyes seemed to appraise him, then offer an invitation. She smiled, her mouth thinned down with desire. His hands preceded him to her side, and then she was in his arms. The hands stroked her wind-tossed hair.
“You have,” she breathed into his ear, “a lover’s hands.”
“Hands!” He suddenly remembered, and with his teeth ripped the right hand off. Underneath were his own remembered big knuckles. He flexed them experimentally. They were wonderfully slow in responding.
The old woman in his arms cackled and repeated, “A lover’s hands.”
His slow right hand fought with the left, but managed at last to scratch off the outer layer. His left hand felt raw, dry, but comfortingly familiar.
The old woman was still smiling an invitation. She had crooked teeth and large pores. There was a dark mustache on her upper lip.
Boris picked up the discarded hands by the tips of the fingers and held them up before the witch’s watery blue eyes. “Not these hands,” he said.
She was already reaching into the closet for another pair.
Boris pulled the hands on quickly, glancing only briefly at the label. SURGEON’S HANDS. They were supple-fingered and moved nervously in the air as if searching for something to do. Finally they hovered over Baba Yaga’s forehead. Boris felt as if he had eyes in his fingertips, and suddenly saw the old woman’s skin as a map stretched taut across a landscape of muscle and bone. He could sense the subtle traceries of veins and read the directions of the bloodlines. His right hand moved down the bridge of her nose, turned left at the cheek, and descended to her chin. The second finger tapped her wen, and he could hear the faint echo of his knock.
“I could remove that easily,” he found himself saying.
The witch pulled the surgeon’s hands from him herself. “Leave me my wen. Leave me my own face,” she said angrily. “It is the stage setting for my magic. Surgeon’s hands indeed.”
Remembering the clowns in their makeup, the wire-walkers in their sequined leotards, the ringmaster in his tie and tails—costumes that had not changed over the centuries of circus—Boris had to agree. He looked down again at his own hands. He moved the fingers. The right were still laggards. But for the first time he heard and saw how they moved. He dropped his hands to his sides and beat a tattoo on his outer thighs. Three against two went the rhythm, the left hitting the faster beat. He increased it to seven against five, and smiled. The right would always be slower, he knew that now.
“It’s not in the hands,” he said.
Baba Yaga looked at him quizzically. Running a hand through her bird’s-nest hair and fluffing up her eyebrows, she spoke. But it was Uncle Misha’s voice that emerged between her crooked teeth: “Hands are the daughters of the eye and ear.”
“How do you do that?” Boris asked.
“Magic,” she answered, smiling. She moved her fingers mysteriously, then turned and closed the cupboard doors.
Boris smiled at her back, and moved his own fingers in imitation. Then he went out the door of the house and fell down the steps.
“Maybe you’d like a new pair of feet,” the witch called after him. “I have Fred Astaire’s. I have John Travolta’s. I have Mohammed Ali’s.” She came out of the house, caught up with Boris, and pulled him to a standing position.
“Were they jugglers?” asked Boris.
“No,” Baba Yaga said, shaking her head. “No. But they had soul.”
Boris didn’t answer. Instead he climbed into the mug and gazed fondly at his hands as the mug took off and headed toward the horizon and home.
In the Hall of Grief
I was thirteen summers, the last turning of childhood, when Great-grandmother became ill. She was exiled upstairs, to the windowless room under the thatch, to practice lying in darkness. So it is with the very old, whose lives are spent in dusk just as newborns must learn to live in the dawn.
It was not Great-grandmother’s illness that made me eligible to enter the Hall of Grief, but my own signs of adulthood: the small breasts just beginning to bud, the fine curlings of hair in the cave places of my body, the rush of fresh blood from the untested nest of my womb.
I was ready. Had I not spent many childhood hours playing at the Hall game? Alone or with my brothers I had built my own Halls of willow branch and alder snappings. We had decked the tables, made signs, drawn pictures. Always, always my table was best, though I was the youngest of us all. It had more than just an innocent beauty, decked in ribbons and bordered by wildflowers: red trillium for life, blue-black elderberry for death, and the twinings of green boughs for the passage between. No, my tables had a character that was both mine and the grieven one’s. It had substance and imagination and daring, even from the time I was quite young. Everyone remarked on it. The other children sensed it. But the elders who came and watched us at our play—they knew for sure. I heard one say (overheard, really), “She has a gift for grief, that one. Mark her well.”
But even before that, I had known. As a child I had started crafting my own grief poems. The first aped the dirges and threnodies I had been taught, but always with a little twist of my own. One in particular I remember, for my parents shared it with the elders as a sign of my gift. It began:
I sail out on my dark ship
Toward the unmarked shore
With only the grievings
Of my family to guide me.
The ship breasts the waves …
The dark ship, the unmarked shore, they were but copies of the unusual metaphors of grief. But the wording of the fifth line, the penta—which foreshadowed the central image, that of a carved figurehead of a nude woman, something of which I should have had no knowledge, for we were a people of the Middle Lands—convinced them all. I was a prodigy. I basked in their praises for weeks and tried hard to repeat my success. But that time I could not. It was years before I realized that, truly, I grieved best when trying for no effect at all, though the critics and the public did not always know the difference. But the craftswoman knows.
And then the day came when I was old enough to enter the Hall of Grief. I rose early and spent many minutes in front of the glass, the only one in the house not covered with the gray mourning cloth. I drew dark circles under my eyes and deep shades on my lids. Of course I overdid it. What new griever does not? I had yet to learn that true grief makes its own hollows in the face, a better sculptor of the body’s contours than all our pencils and paints. Artifice should only heighten. But I was young, as I have said. And even Great-grandmother in her dusky room was not enough to teach me then.
That first day I tried something daring. Even that first day my gift for invention showed. I painted my nails the color of my eyelids and I took a penknife and scraped the paint on the thumbnail of my left hand into a cross, to signify the bisecting of life and death. Yes, I see you understand. It was the beginning of the carvings I would later do on all my nails, the carvings that w
ould become such a passion among young grievers and given my name. I never do it myself anymore. It seemed such a little thing then: some extra paint, an extra dab of darkness onto light. An instinctual gesture that others took—mistook—for genius. That is, after all, what genius is: a label for instinct.
I plaited my long dark hair with trillium and elderberry, too. And that was much less successful. As I recall, the trillium died before the morning was over, and the berries left my braids sticky with juice. But at the moment of leave-taking, when I went upstairs to give Great-grandmother the respect I owed her, I felt the proper griever. And she turned in her bed, the one with the carvings of wreaths on the posters, the one in which all the women of our house have died. Then she looked at me with her luminous, half-dead eyes.
“You will make them remember me?” she asked.
“Great-grandmother, I will,” I replied.
“May your lines of grieving be long,” she said.
“May your time of dying be short,” I answered. And the ritual was complete. I left, for I was far more interested in the Hall of Grief and my part in it than her actual moment of death, when the breath leaps from the mouth in a great upward sigh. That is a private moment, after all, though grieving is all done in public. Still, I know now that all our mourning, all our grieving, all the outward signs of our rituals are nothing compared to that one quick moment of release. Do I startle you with my heresy? It is an old woman’s right.
I did not look back, but ran down the stairs and into the light. My mother and her mother walked with me to the Hall of Grief. And though we marched to the slow metronome of the funerary drums, my heart skipped before.
The Hall was even larger inside than I had dreamed. Great massive pillars with fluted columns and carved capitals held up the roof. I had seen the building from afar—for who had not?—but had never been close enough to distinguish the carvings. They were appropriate to the Hall, weeping women with their long hair caught up in fanciful waterfalls. You laugh. Only in the countryside could such banal motifs still be seen. It was a very minor Hall, to be sure. But to my eyes then it was magnificent, each marble weeper a monument to grief. I drank it all in, eager to be a part.
Inside the clans had already set up their tables, and Mother and Grandmother threaded their way through the chaos to our usual stand with an ease born of long experience. Under the banner proclaiming our colors—we had always been the Queen’s own, even in our little backwater—was a kidney-shaped table. It was littered with the memoria of our dying ones. We had three that year, a small number, counting Great-grandmother in our attic. I can still recite the birth lines of the other two: Cassania, of Cassapina, of Cassuella, of Cassamerra was the one. Peripia, of Perrifona, of Persivalia, of Perdonia was the other. And of course, in my own direct line, I can still go back the twenty-one requisite names. We have no gap in the line, of which I am still—though it sometimes makes me laugh at myself—inordinately proud. I am the last, as you know. No one grieves for me, no sister of the family, no blood griever, and sometimes it still bothers me that this is so, my own sisters having gone before when I was too young to grieve for them.
The daughters of Cassania and Peripia were already there, having no attic grieven of their own and no new grievers to prepare for their first Hall. They had borne only boys. And my own sisters had gone in one of the winter sicknesses, leaving me the only hope of our clan. Our table was piled high with pictographs, for this was before we had learned to capture life impressions with the photobox of the strangers. Changes come too quickly now that even boys are taught to grieve.
Since Cassania’s daughters were known for their fine hand, there were many ornately lettered lamentation plaques on the table. But the table, for all its wealth of memoria, was disordered, and that disturbed me greatly.
I spoke in an undertone to my mother. “May I be allowed to arrange Great-grandmother’s part?”
She did not understand my distress at the disorder, taking my request as a display of eagerness. But I was still too young to do more than look. I had yet to apprentice to a griever, to one of my older aunts. I had only a meager background, the pretendings of a child among children, and brothers at that.
So I was sent away while the older women worked, sent off to look at the other tables in the Hall, to discover for myself the many stages and presentations of Grief.
The other tables were as disordered as our own for, as I have said, we were only a minor Hall, and the grievers there unsophisticated in their arrangements. One or two had a rough feeling that I have since tried to replicate in my own work. Touching that old country grief has, I think, often given me my greatest successes.
To think of it, walking in a Hall before the days of the strangers for the first time. The sound of the mourners lining up in the galleries, waiting for the doors to open. Some of them actually wailed their distress, though in the major Halls that rarely happens anymore. Except on great occasions of state: an exiled priestess, the assassination of a princess, a fallen queen.
Inside the Hall, the grievers moved silently, setting up their tables and stalls. I remember one old woman lovingly polishing a spear, the symbol of the warrior her dying great-uncle had been. And another placing a harp with a broken string beneath the lamentation: One last song, one final touch. I have always liked the simplicity of that line, though the broken string was a bit overdone.
And then the doors were flung open, and the mourners came in. In the first crush, I lost sight of our own table, and was flung up against the wall. But soon the crowds sorted themselves, and I could see how the lines made a kind of pattern. There were long lines by the tables that gave away garlands and crying towels, though the longest by far was in front of the harper’s stall, where a live singer recalled in song all that had been great in the harper’s life.
I learned two things that day, before ever apprenticing: that to please the crowd and draw a line is easy, but to keep the lines coming back again and again and again is not. Once the garlands were gone and the towels all given away, once the singer stopped for a draught of wine, the line of mourners broke apart and formed again somewhere else. And none of the mourners remembered the grieven one’s name for longer than that day, though some remembered the names of the grievers. There is no immortality in that.
By noon I had toured the entire Hall, carrying with me a wilted garland and three towels embroidered with names of grieven ones whose deeds I no longer recalled. And I came back again to the place where I had begun, the stall of my own clan, piled high with memoria.
“Let me take a turn while you eat. It will be a slow time, now, while the funeral meats are set out,” I told my aunts and my mother, my grandmother having gone home to get her mother’s last meal. And because they thought I could do no harm then, the left me by myself at the table.
I busied myself at once, rearranging the overwrought items in a new way so that the whole picture was one of restraint. And then I sat down and composed a threnody, the first of the ones in my so-called “Gray Wanderer” period because for the first time the figure of the cloaked soul-traveler appeared. I wrote quickly, much faster than I was to work in later years, the words tumbling over themselves. I have always had a facility which, at times, betrays me.
You know the poem, of course: The lines of her worn and gray cloak …, which scholars insist refer to the lines of mourning. I did not mean that, just that the cloak fell from her shoulders in comfortable, familiar folds. But never mind. The scholars seem to know more about such things than we grievers do. You smile. You have heard me say all this before. Do I, in my age, repeat myself endlessly? Well, what else is there to do, lying in darkness, but retrace the steps of light? Here I throw no shadows. But once my shadow—the shadow of the Gray Wanderer—covered the entire land.
I had just finished the writing of the threnody and was tracing out the words onto a tablet, and it was slow going. I had not the grace of my aunts’ hands, and each letter was painstakingly drawn. You have such
grace, and that is one of the reasons why I kept you past your training. No, do not blush, child, you know it is true. Do not confuse humility with self-denial. You have an old hand grafted onto a young arm. Not for you the easy, strangers’ ways, the machines that multiply machine-drawn letters. Hold to it. Pass it on.
Yes, I drew the words slowly, and my hand faltered on a phrase. Oh, the phrase was fine, but the lettering was traitor to its truth. I was casting around for a scraper when I realized that someone was standing over me. I looked up. It was a youth just past that blush of boyhood, when the skin still has a lambent glow yet is covered with soft down that has not yet coarsened into beard.
“I would have liked them,” he said, nodding at the memoria to my great-grandmother and great-great-aunts.
It is the ritual opening, of course, the mildest approach to an unknown grieven one. But somehow I sensed it was sincerely meant, and though I answered with the words that have been spoken already a million million times by grievers, he knew my own sincerity in them.
“They would have grown by your friendship.”
I scraped the linen free of the ink and finished the threnody while he watched. Then I pulled it free of its stretcher. The linen curled up at the edges just a bit, which was what I had hoped. It meant that a reader had to flatten it by hand and that way actually participate in the reading.
He took the time to read it, not once but several times. And then he read it aloud. His voice had already changed, and it was low and musical. He was in training for Queen’s Consort, you see. And in his mouth the words took on an even more palpable sense of grief. A singer can make a song, you know.
Soon we were surrounded by the other table-watchers. He knew how to project his voice, and they had caught phrases that had beckoned them, drawn them in.
And that was how my mother and my great-aunts found us when they returned, with a long line of mourners standing by the table and all the other stalls empty, even of the watchers. The mourners were saying with him, as he repeated the threnody yet one more time, the chorus which is now so famous: