The Midnight Circus
Page 16
ROSENWASSER
SOLOMON
STEIN
It was an epic poem, those names, a ballad in alphabetics. Rachel could have recited them along with her mother, but her mouth never moved. It was an incantation. Hear, O Israel, Germany, America. The names had an awful power over her, and even in her dreams she could not speak them aloud. The stories of the camps, of the choosing of victims—left line to the ovens right to another day of deadening life—did not frighten her. She could move away from the group that listened to her mother’s tales. There was no magic in the words that told of mutilations, of children’s brains against the Nazi walls. She could choose to listen or not listen; such recitations did not paralyze her. But the names:
TANNENBAUM
TEITLEMAN
VANNENBERG
WASSERMAN
WECHTENSTEIN
ZEISS
Rachel knew that the names had been spoken at the moment of her birth: that her mother, legs spread, the waves of Rachel’s passage rolling down her stomach, had breathed the names between spasms long before Rachel’s own name had been pronounced. Rachel Rebecca Zuckerman. That final Zeiss had burst from her mother’s lips as Rachel had slipped out greasy with birth blood. Rachel knew she had heard the names in the womb. They had opened the uterine neck, they had lured her out and beached her as easily as a fish. How often had her mother commented that Rachel had never cried as a child. Not once. Not even at birth when the doctor had slapped her. She knew, even if her mother did not, that she had been silenced by the incantation, the Zeiss a stopper in her mouth.
When Rachel was a child, she had learned the names as another child would a nursery rhyme. The rhythm of the passing syllables was as water in her mouth, no more than nonsense words. But at five, beginning to understand the power of the names, she could say them no more. For the saying was not enough. It did not satisfy her mother’s needs. Rachel knew that there was something more she needed to do to make her mother smile.
At thirteen, on her birthday, she began menstruating, and her mother watched her get dressed. “So plump. So zaftik.” It was an observation, less personal than a weather report. But she knew it meant that her mother had finally seen her as more than an extension, more than a child still red and white from its passage into the light.
It seemed that, all at once, she knew what to do. Her mother’s duty had been the Word. Rachel’s was to be the Word Made Flesh.
She stopped eating.
The first month, fifteen pounds poured off her. Melted. Ran as easily as candle wax. She thought only of food. Bouillon. Lettuce. Carrots. Eggs. Her own private poem. What she missed most was chewing. In the camp they chewed on gristle and wood. It was one of her mother’s best tales.
The second month her cheekbones emerged, sharp reminders of the skull. She watched the mirror and prayed. Barukh arah adonai elohenu melekh ha-olam. She would not say the words for bread or wine. Too many calories. Too many pounds. She cut a star out of yellow poster board and held it to her breast. The face in the mirror smiled back. She rushed to the bathroom and vomited away another few pounds. When she flushed the toilet, the sound was a hiss, as if gas were escaping into the room. The third month she discovered laxatives, and the names on the containers became an addition to her litany: Metamucil, Agoral, Senokot. She could feel the chair impress itself on her bones. Bone on wood. If it hurt to sit, she would lie down.
She opened her eyes and saw the ceiling, spread above her like a sanitized sky. A voice pronounced her name. “Rachel, Rachel Zuckerman. Answer me.”
But no words came out. She raised her right hand, a signal; she was weaker than she thought. Her mother’s face, smiling, appeared. The room was full of cries. There was a chill in the air, damp, crowded. The smell of decay was sweet and beckoning. She closed her eyes and the familiar chant began, and Rachel added her voice to the rest. It grew stronger near the end:
ABRAHMS
BERLINER
BRODSKY
DANNENBERG
FISCHER
FRANK
GLASSHEIM
GOLDBLATT
HEGELMAN
ISAACS
KAPLAN
KOHN
LEVITZ
MAMOROWITZ
MORGENSTERN
NORENBERG
ORENSTEIN
REESE
ROSENBLUM
ROSENWASSER
SOLOMON
STEIN
TANNENBAUM
TEITLEMAN
VANNENBERG
WASSERMAN
WECHTENSTEIN
ZEISS
ZUCKERMAN
They said the final name together and then, with a little sputter, like a yahrzeit candle at the end, she went out.
Story Notes and Poems
The Weaver of Tomorrow
This story was published in my first book of original fairy tales, The Girl Who Cried Flowers, that launched my career and landed me with the title (from Newsweek Magazine) of “America’s Hans Christian Andersen.” Between Andersen and Oscar Wilde, I had discovered a longing to create new fairy tales. These are stories that walk like and talk like old tales but are brand new. In other words—not from the folk, but from a specific author. Though often these stories go back into the folk culture—“The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” are popular “folk tales,” but each one began as an original story by a specific author and from there moved out into the world, becoming “folk tales.”
The poem below was one I wrote in answer to my friend/co-author David L. Harrison, who had written a poem about a wheel and posted it on his blog in 2020.
The Wheel Spins
I am the spinner
of the yarns
that keep you warm
each night.
I am the weaver
of the dreams,
that help your heart
take flight.
Hand off the wheel,
I slow the tale
the strand that pulled
you in.
I draw the pattern,
for the day
and then begin
to spin.
I knit your bones,
I fill the hole,
I start the stitch
that sews your soul.
The White Seal Maid
“The White Seal Maid,” one of the many selchie stories and poems I have written over the years, was first published in my own fairy tale collection called The Hundredth Dove and Other Stories, 1977. Selchies are folk tale creatures from Scotland and the Scandinavian countries. They are seal folk, but when they come ashore, they shed their sea skins and dance upon the sand. Though they dance joyously, at those moments they are incredibly in peril from humans who fall in love with them, steal their shed skins, and force them into marriages of a sort. I guess I am as obsessed by selchie stories as the humans who supposedly steal their skins.
The poem that follows has been turned into a gorgeous song by Lui Collins. We have since written many songs together. Here is a link to Lui singing it: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=KbfhOJyL8Is. We ended up in a band together: Three Ravens. My grandson said to his father, “Nana’s in a band? What does she play?” And my son Adam, a musician himself, never missing a beat, answered, “The audience.” The poem was first published in my collection Neptune Rising in 1982.
Ballad of the White Seal Maid
The fisherman sits alone on the land,
his hands are his craft, his boat in his art,
The fisherman sits alone on the land,
a rock, a rock in his heart.
The selchie maid swims alone in the bay,
her eyes are the seal’s, her heart is the sea,
The selchie maid swims alone through the bay,
a white seal maid is she.
She comes to the shore and sheds her seal skin,
she dances on the sand and under the moon,
/> her hair falls in waves all down her white skin,
only the seals hear the tune.
The fisherman stands and takes up her skin,
staking his claim to a wife from the sea,
he raises his hand and holds up the skin,
Saying: “Now you must come home with me.”
Weeping she goes and weeping she stays,
her hands are her craft, her babes are her art,
a year and a year and a year more she stays,
a rock, a rock in her heart.
But what is this hid in the fisherman’s bag?
it smells of the ocean, it feels like the sea,
a bony-white seal skin closed up in the bag,
and never a tear more sheds she.
“Good-bye to the house and good-bye to the shore,
Good-bye to the babes that I never could claim.
But never a thought to the man left on shore,
For selchie’s my nature and name.”
She puts on the skin and dives back in the sea,
The fisherman’s cry falls on water-deaf ears.
She swims in her seal skin far out to the sea.
The fisherman drowns in his tears.
The Snatchers
I was reading some Jewish history as I worked on a book about my father’s family, especially his oldest brother, who had been sent to a Russian military academy because he had been such a scoundrel as a teen. And what I found out was that Jews were rarely sent to such places, which fed directly into the Russian army, because of three factors: The food would not be kosher. They would have to march and do maneuvers on the Sabbath. They would probably never get to return home. Ever. But the army never conscripted an only boy child, leaving a family without a son. Nor did they take anyone who was in some way maimed, incapable of holding and shooting a rifle, or with foot or leg problems that would preclude walking many miles a day.
The Jewish answer to this was twofold. First they adopted out all but one of their sons to son-less members of their community. And if there weren’t enough son-less members, they would cut off the boy’s finger, or toe, effectively maiming him enough so as not to be army material. The army’s response to that were the Snatchers, bounty hunters (sometimes Jewish themselves) who snatched up the boys before either of these things could occur.
I was so surprised by this information, I knew I had to write the story. It was published by F&SF Magazine in 1993, and later was reprinted in the anthology Masterpieces of Horror.
The poem comes from a book of poems I wrote about my father’s family in the Ukraine and their immigration to America, a memoir in verse called Ekaterinoslav, published in 2012. Lou was the bad boy sent to the military academy, and in the end sent across to America to anchor the family that would come a few years later, in two waves. My father, the second youngest, came in the last wave.
Lou Leaving Home
We do not know how easily he leaves,
escaping his father’s wrath,
his mother’s tears,
his sisters’ casual relief,
the younger children’s disbelief.
Does he turn and smile? Blow kisses?
Does he use the front of his hand, the back,
as if leaving takes no courage at all?
Or is he already far-seeing,
like a sailor well used to travel,
eyes squinting into the sun;
imagining the road to the big ship,
plotting the route across the waves,
dreaming of America’s streets
shining in the sun like gold.
Surely, he’d already counted
the cards to be played,
having learned in his old school,
to gamble the Russian way:
no mercy given, none received.
Wilding
I wrote this story for an anthology, Starfarer’s Dozen, 1995, and it is driven by three things. The first is New York City and the apartment house I grew up in on 97th and Central Park West. Not only did I play in Central Park with friends, take my younger brother Steve for walks and games in the park, but I was transfixed by the large building next door, “The First Church of Christ, Scientist,” though I never went in.
Second, I am fascinated by tales of creatures/humans who can shift shapes, be they vampires, werewolves, superheroes, or in this case those kids who go out “wilding.”
Third, I am a huge fan of Maurice Sendak’s picture book Where the Wild Things Are, which had a lot of influence on this short story. The picture book begins with a boy—Max—who goes wilding in his wolf suit with actual Wild Things before sailing home to his supper, which is still hot.
However the actual term “wilding” had hit the news around the time I was working on the story (in the 1980s). It was used to label teens in gangs who ran through Central Park, beating up runners and raping young women. A group of young black teens were charged with savagely beating and raping one female runner so viciously she could not recall what had happened to her. Someone else eventually confessed to the deed, his confession was corroborated, and the boys were set free.
The poem below was written back in 2012, but this is its first publication.
Deer, Dances
The day, the night I was a deer,
little leaves and shoots tempted me,
acorns in their hard jackets,
and the wild white clover.
River became my only drink,
running over twenty-one stones.
I did not mind getting wet.
Doe my woman, sang to me,
and the little spotted fawn, my family,
cheered as I danced by,
the white flag of my tail
semaphoring my joy at speaking,
at dancing with my little brothers.
All the while, my hooves
struck turquoise from the rock,
leaving a jeweled trail.
You watched me run until the dawn,
sweat glistening on my hide,
the moon resting in my antlers.
I shall return to you soon,
but not so soon I have left
the flint of my soul behind.
Requiem Antarctica (with Robert J. Harris)
I had an idea. My novels usually start with an idea, my short stories with a first line. The idea for this story was simple but fascinating—that polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott, bitten by a vampire when still in England, and finding himself now one of that horrid crew, takes on the task of leading a crew of explorers to the Pole in the hopes to cool his hot vampiric blood. When crewman Oates, upon whom he had been feeding after his own blood supplies and assorted birds and other creatures ran out, said, “I am just going outside and may be some time” (this is a true part of Scott’s well-documented adventure), Scott knew his own time was up and he hoped no one would ever find his own body, a double sacrifice.
Okay—I had the idea, but that was all except for several bad tries at a beginning and no real plot to speak of. I was in Scotland having dinner with my friends Debby and Bob Harris, and spilled the vampiric beans. (We three are all published writers and dinner conversations often are about things we are writing.) Bob—with whom I’d written several published short stories and eight published novels—said in his almost unparsable Dundonian accent that he was a huge Falcon Scott fanatic and had many rare books about the man. Bob is also a plot genius. “Let’s write it together,” I said. We did, and sold it very quickly to Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 2000. Frankly, I always thought it should be longer—novella length. But we never got around to writing that.
The poem first came out in the anthology The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women in 2001, edited by the indefatigable anthologist Stephen Jones, and then as lyrics for a song by the group Folk Underground.
Vampyr
We stalk the dark,
Live in the flood.
We take the madness
In the blood
.
A moment’s prick,
A minute’s pain
And then we live
To love again.
Drink the night.
Rue the day.
We hear the beat
Beneath the breast.
We sip the wine
That fills the chest.
A moment’s prick,
A minute’s pain,
Our living is not
Just in vein.
Drink the night,
Rue the day.
We do not shrink
From blood’s dark feast.
We take the man,
We leave the beast.
A moment’s prick,
A minute’s pain,
We live to love
To live again.
Drink the night,
Rue the day.
Night Wolves
Yes, I was one of those kids—who hear and see and smell things at night. Had nightmares. And middle child, son Adam, took after me. As an adult, he solved it by becoming super-dark in his own writing. Fighting fire with fire. In my adulthood, I stopped worrying about bears and wolves and started worrying about burglars and jewel thieves. (I don’t have those kinds of jewels!) And then I got an alarm system. As I live in a small town, the police are very quick to get to me, as the station is only half a block away from my house. I found out how fast they responded when I pushed a button on a necklace I found in my bedside table. I hadn’t remembered it was an alarm, the kind for old ladies who may fall in the middle of the night. Before I could figure out how to shut it off, there was a policeman at my door! Nightwolves was first published in an anthology called The Haunted House in 1995.