by David Treuer
~ The Translation of Dr Apelles ~
Other Books by David Treuer
Rez Life
Native American Fiction: A User's Manual
The Hiawatha
Little
The Translation of Dr Apelles
A Love Story
DAVID TREUER
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2006 by David Treuer
Publication of this volume is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota; and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art. Significant support has also been provided by the Bush Foundation; Target; the McKnight Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
The author gratefully acknowledges the Bush Foundation Artist Fellows Program.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
Print ISBN: 978-1-55597-451-0
eBook ISBN: 978-1-55597-079-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2006924339
Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter
Cover art: © Blue Lantern Studio/CORBIS
Paper valentine image: istockphoto.com
~ for gretchen ~
There is only one event in life which really astonishes a man and startles him out of his prepared opinions. Everything else befalls him very much as he expected.
— Robert Louis Stevenson, “On Falling in Love”
“Read it aloud, your grace,” said Sancho. “I really like things that have to do with love.”
— Cervantes, Don Quixote
Apelles' Song
CUPID and my Campaspe played
At cards for kisses,—Cupid paid;
He stakes his quiver, bow and arrows,
His mother's doves, and team of sparrows:
Loses them too; then down he throws
The coral of his lip, the rose
Growing on's cheek (but none knows how);
With these the crystal of his brow,
And then the dimple of his chin:
All these did my Campaspe win.
At last he set her both his eyes;
She won, and Cupid blind did rise.
O Love, has she done this to thee?
What shall, alas! become of me?
— John Lyly,
Alexander and Campaspe, 1584
Translator’s Introduction
I was looking for a book.
A very particular book in a vast and wonderful library. I found what I was looking for. It hadn’t been opened for quite a long time judging by the dust that coated the upper edge and by the way the paper had yellowed on all the sides creeping toward the gutter. When I opened it, some loose pages different from those of the book fell onto the floor. I picked them up and noticed that they were covered with text in a language I did not understand.
After much searching I found someone who could make sense of those words for me. I listened as he spoke the story out loud. What I heard was the most amazing tale I’ve ever heard—full of Indians beautiful to look at and also Indians who were treacherous, full also of hunting episodes, of capture and recapture. The tale was about foundlings (who are only called that because once they were lost) and about animals, too, and kidnappers and prostitutes. In this story there is war and reconciliation, a marriage, and the death of a boy. Ultimately, what I heard was a story about the quest for beauty. It is sometimes surprising where you find it.
I was moved. What I heard was profound. And I decided to try and render that story into English and into a language, an idiom that, God willing, can be translated into other languages as easily as we shed one set of clothes only to don another. I have also tried to paint a portrait of the body underneath those clothes that is beautiful even in its smallest part and that will be beautiful no matter what language it wears. Because, above all, I have written this down as an offering, as an offering to the world, an offering of beauty and of _____. But I cannot write that because that word has lost its meaning. So. An offering of beauty because beauty endures no matter what and no one is immune to it, no one has escaped from it, and no one ever will so long as there are eyes to see, ears to hear, and ink with which we can preserve it forever.
I hope you accept this offering, this book, this gift of beauty, and that you read it to the end. And then, turn back here and read it again.
In the meantime, the task is before me. I only hope that I can hear what few have heard, see what few have seen, and emerge full, whole, healed, on the other side. I hope I can relate the lives and feelings of others, the beauty of it all, without losing my mind. But as with many beautiful things, this story was born out of conflict. They were difficult times. It was a time of
~ Prologue ~
war.
1. Not between the people and their enemies across the river, or those farther up near its source—they were enemies still. All were hungry for the rice beds and trapping grounds, and for the protection of the village with its store of guns, axes, traps, skinning knives, and sacks of flour and oats stacked high in the storeroom. But the village (known as Agencytown because the Agency along with a church and a lumbermill was located there) with all its riches, with all its advantages, was more of an illusion than a real prize. The white people might be able to grant favors—trade, protection, and loans. But neither the rich nor the poor, the powerful or the weak, Indian or white, could grant mercy. And this was what the people of the small band camped near the source of the river needed most. Mercy to spare them from the winter.
First it snowed. It snowed without stop. The ground was covered, hollows in the land were drifted over. Low bushes, ground hemlock, and juniper wore a heavy coat of snow. The lace of rabbit snares disappeared overnight. It kept snowing all the next day and through the following night. Fox snares set out on game trails and the box traps for lynx and bobcat were nowhere to be found—they, too, disappeared underneath the snow. It continued to snow and with it came a great wind. It blew over the gullies and sloughs. The pits at the portages filled with squash, corn, and rice were lost. The blowing snow leveled off the creek beds, covered the beaver houses and the moving water at beaver dams and springs.
The flakes were too small, too icy and fine to catch on the branches, and so they sifted through and continued down. It was a terrible dry, white blanket that was pulled over the land. Those at trapping camps struggled back to the village, but after they returned, no one could break out. The snow was too dry to support snowshoes.
The people cowered in their lodges and rolled together in their furs and the few trade blankets they possessed. The snow stopped after four days, but the damage had been done. They were trapped. It grew colder. Those who stirred outside and tried to break trails to fetch wood and water or to access the caches of meat built on platforms were burned by the cold. Their lips were seared, their noses and ears singed. And though they walked out of their lodges to lift the siege of winter, they crawled back spitting blood into their blankets.
Soon there was no food, water, or wood in camp. The lodges were cold. Body warmth was the only relief, but not for long; it was stolen first from the strong, and then from whoever was careless or compassionate enough to give it, and always the wind and cold took their shar
e. One by one the people died. And with them died history, knowledge, memory, experience, and desire. They died quietly. It was a bloodless massacre.
The children died first and with them gone, what is the use of tears? Why else wail and cry and scream and beat at the snow if not for them? And so the people passed silently, and not even into memory (which is a form of life after all) because there was no one left to remember them. They all died, save one, who was too young to remember anything.
In one lodge there had been one who still lived: a boy who had just seen his fourth birthday. His three brothers and two sisters were dead. The boy’s mother had made sure he would live. The father, struggling away through the snow in search of food, had left them. He had not come back
On the seventh day of the siege all the children were still alive. They were arranged around the ashy firepit, each in a blanket with a hot rock held to their stomachs to keep them warm. The boy was awake—and he was too young to be afraid of death. He watched his mother. She had got up out of her blankets and looked at her children one by one. The youngest boy was still of nursing age, the next was a toddler, the twin girls were two, the next boy just over three, and he was the oldest. His mother had been pregnant every year since he had been born. When she watched her children she saw the very contours of her life.
He saw that she had been looking at him for some time but in a way she never had before: not as a whole, but piece by piece—first at his legs, hidden under his blanket, then, after a time, at his torso, then at his arms, his hands, and lastly, his face. She smiled. And, across the sleeping bodies of her five other children she said calmly, as though mentally dressing him in fine clothes, You, my son, will live. You alone. He fell asleep.
When he awoke the next day the toddler boy was dead. He lay outside the lodge wrapped in a fawnskin, and the boy’s mother handed him his dead brother’s woven rabbitskin blanket that she had resewn into trousers. Put these on, she said. He said nothing and did as he was told. On the next day the twin girls, just two years old, lay beside his brother outside the lodge, resting now, in a bed of snow, wrapped in flour sacking. The air in the lodge was cold—crystals coated the elm-bark roof. Put this on, his mother said, holding up his sisters’ rabbit blanket, transformed overnight into a long tunic. His mother took what toys and objects they had—a small bow, a doll, the infant’s cradleboard—and with a precious match, turned them into a small fire. Warm yourself, she said. On the third day his brother, just a year younger than he, was dead and slept in the snow alongside the other three, and his blanket—which he no longer needed—was no longer a blanket. His mother handed him a pair of rabbit-fur gloves and a hat. Put these on so you will live, she said. He said nothing and did as he was told.
The next day was a long one—he did not even so much as look outside. He did not want to see his sisters and his brothers sleeping in their cold beds. Four sleeping outside, and three not sleeping inside—him, his mother, and the infant, who, ignoring the rules of silence, began to cry. He cried for food, for warmth, and perhaps, with the knowledge of what was to happen next. His mother did not nurse him. He continued to cry—sometimes loudly and at other times in an insistent whine that filled the lodge. The boy had nothing to do and nowhere to go, and so he had to listen all day and into the cold, cold night, to his brother’s cry, his desperate clamor for mother’s milk. Sometime during the night the crying stopped. The boy heard his mother move quietly about the lodge and then, with his eyes shut and his body buried in all the remaining blankets, he felt a slap of cold air against his body as his mother opened the flap to put the baby to bed next to his brothers and sisters.
It was still night, all was quiet. The village dogs had been eaten before, and so there was no one left to comment on the misery of the people. Usually the dogs, the ones without language, cry for the people, and such an arrangement brings comfort. But the dogs were gone, and more terrible than their absence, was what the boy heard—the very close, small sound of his mother’s grief.
When the morning was light, he opened his eyes, afraid of what would greet him. He saw his mother sitting with her back to the firepit, a halo of light from the smokehole over her head. He crawled to her and she opened her arms, and he did not know what to expect to find there. But he had nothing to fear. When he reached her lap, she lifted her shirt and exposed her breasts and guided his head where it was needed and nursed him. She stroked his hair as he nursed and called him by his name. And as he continued to nurse she called him, repeatedly, and in the order of their birth, the names of his martyred brothers and sisters. And so, just as he had taken their clothes and their furs and their food, he took their names as well.
He fell asleep, full for the first time in days. He woke to nurse the other breast and slept again. This continued throughout the day and into the next. Each time he woke she was ready to give him more milk, though each time she grew weaker, and there was less and less milk to give. It was as though he were pulling the single thread of her life out of her body through her nipples. The next morning he woke out of habit. In the past, morning had meant getting kindling for the fire, hitting his moccasins against the rocks that surrounded the firepit to soften them; it meant waking his siblings. It had meant checking his snares and fetching water, hearing his father leave to go hunting. It had meant walking to the meat cache to chop off scallops of icy flesh to boil into soup, and hearing his mother sing as she roused her family to life. Now “morning” meant only that the sun had risen on a cold world in which, other than the motion of the planets, his body was the only thing that moved.
He peered around the lodge, and when he did not see his mother, he did not need to look outside to know that she was dead and that she had joined his brothers and sisters for one last sleep. He stayed where he was for two more days. He heard no voices, no dogs, no sounds of activity; he smelled no wood smoke, or roasting meat. He lived in a world that had stilled itself. He lay clothed in his suit of rabbit fur and under the other skins left by his family, buried and left to wait for warmer temperatures like a seed thrown into the brush. He did not melt snow for water, he had no method to do so. He did not eat snow either because he knew that to do so would invite the cold to enter his body through the door of his mouth and that he would end up as cold and as dead as the rest of his family.
After two days of this he was faint. The food on which he had lived—his mother’s milk—was gone. The memory of her savage sacrifice, the only thing that kept him alive, had thinned into the thinnest of broths. It alone had sustained him. The weather had broken. It was clear, the snow had stopped. But the cold was vicious.
And then he heard something like a footfall. The sound was loud in his ears—amplified by the silence and by the bark covering of the lodge as though the walls were a membrane that transmitted the smallest sound. Whoever it was walked heavily toward the lodge. Slowly. Stopping every now and then. Soon the noise came from immediately outside the doorflap and changed—along with footsteps came the sound of scraping. The snow was being removed from the edge of the doorflap. He waited for the flap to be raised, for light to flood the interior, for the warm hands of his savior, whoever he might be, to pluck him out. But no one tried to open the flap. The boy tried to call out, but his throat was too dry.
Afraid the people he imagined searching the snow might leave, the boy sat up. He was dizzy and almost fell back down, but he crawled on his hands and knees from under the pile of furs and blankets toward the door. He reached the skin but he could not lift it. He tried to stand but could not. The bottom edge of the doorflap had been iced fast to the lodge poles and to the ground. He was too weak to break the grip the winter-maker had laid on his lodge. He curled up on the ground and kicked at the bottom of the doorflap with what energy he had. At least the one outside might hear him. Little by little the bottom began to move. Snow sifted in. He kicked and pushed some more and soon more snow slid in along the bottom.
In desperation he
knelt in front of the doorflap and pulled and tugged and succeeded in opening a space big enough to crawl through, though the door was banked with snow on the other side. He pulled on his moccasins, his rabbitskin gloves, and rabbitskin hat, and looked around the lodge to see if there was anything else he could use. There was nothing, only his father’s pipebag. He felt through the skin and the pipebowl was still there. The stem had been used for firewood. He tucked the bag inside his pants and, drawing breath as though diving underwater, he pushed under the flap with his hands, and with his eyes squeezed shut, he wriggled his small body headfirst into the snow and began to worm his way out.
It was cold. His face was scraped and bruised and shaved by the snow. It clung to his lips and his purled lashes and was shoved up his nose. As much as he pushed against the snow it pushed back into his clothing—in his moccasins, under his shirt, down his back, inside his gloves. He wriggled and squirmed and when the edge of the lodge was even with his thighs he brought up first one leg then the other and pushed against the frame until his whole body was through. He had used all his energy, but he knew if he could not sit up no one would see him and he would surely die, not more than arm’s reach from the bodies of his family. He tucked his knees and hands under his body and pushed up until he knelt like a dog and thrust up his neck and then his head broke the surface of the snow. He gasped and tried to open his eyes. He shut them tight again—the sun was too bright. It had been eight long days since he had seen the sun. He flipped over on his back and shook off his gloves and wiped at his eyes, trying to clear away the crust of snow and ice from his face.
He heard no voices, no shouts of surprise, no murmurs of those witness to the spectacle of his birth from the snow. He wondered, helpless, blind, if he was surrounded by a silent enemy, warriors from across the river laughing at him. He vowed he would kill them if he could.