“Lose your train of thought there, podner?” Reef inquired after a while.
“I’m wondering what to tell Ratty’s people. They’re under such a deeply mistaken impression, aren’t they.”
“That’s if those motorcycle boys were givin us the ‘straight dope.’”
“They’re the guardians of the thing now. Of this whole sad, unreadable Balkan dog’s dinner, come to that. They don’t want the job, but they’ve got it. I don’t want to believe them, but I do.”
From then on, in moments when his time was less closely claimed, Cyprian would find himself waiting for a vast roar of light, toxic and pitiless, turning the sky blank of all detail, from which not even his dreams would be exempt.
WHEN THEY GOT MOVING AGAIN, Reef was delighted at how easily this baby took to being out on the road. Ljubica cried for the reasons any baby would, but no more, as if she knew her trooper’s destiny and saw no point in delaying her embrace of it. Any object she learned to hold, she would next start throwing around. Though Reef did and didn’t need it just then, she reminded him of his son Jesse back in Colorado.
“You’re acting like she’s your second chance,” Yashmeen said.
“Anythin wrong with that?”
“There is if you think you’re entitled to one.”
“Who says I ain’t?” he almost said, but thought better of it.
They were heading east toward the Black Sea, with some half-thought-out idea of setting up in Varna, resuming the old resort life, raising a few leva with some low-intensity gambling and so forth, baby to the contrary notwithstanding, whatever.
“Somebody said the King’s summer palace is there.”
“And . . .”
“It’s still summer, ain’t it? When the King’s in town, there’s suckers around, you never heard that? ancient proverb.”
The topic of the Interdikt had not arisen again. Ljubica’s birth had taken the question, for Yashmeen, to a far lower priority. That neither young man was bringing it up suggested to her that they might all somehow be of the same mind. Even an amateur neuropathist observing them at this time would have diagnosed a postpartum folie à trois. The rest of the world were heading for cover, the dreams of bourgeois and laborer alike were turned rattling with terrible shapes, all the prophesiers agreed there was heavy weather ahead—what were these people thinking? and with an infant to look after, too. Irresponsible if not outright hebephrenic, really.
There was a perfectly good road to the sea, but somehow they could not stay on it. They kept turning uphill, into the Balkan Range, even backtracking westward again, as if blindly obeying a compass fatally sensitive to anomaly.
At certain hours of midday, pine branches with dark streaks of shadow between reached trembling toward them like the arms of the numberless dead, not pleading so much as demanding, almost threatening. Birds here had not sung for generations, no one alive in fact could remember a time when they had sung, and these skies belonged now to raptors. The country was well prepared for what was soon to break over it.
Up above the red tile roofs of Sliven, having climbed through clouds of butterflies inquisitive as to Ljubica’s status, which she was doing her best to explain to them, they came upon a strange rock archway twenty or thirty feet high, and the minute she caught sight of it, Ljubica went a little crazy, waving arms and legs and commenting in her own language.
“Sure,” Reef said, “let’s go have a look.” He cradled her in one arm and together with Yashmeen they made their way over to the formation, Ljubica gazing up as they passed under it and out the other side. They returned to find Cyprian talking and smoking with a couple of boys who’d been lounging around. “That arch you just walked under? They call it the Halkata. The Ring.”
She thought she knew his voice by now. “Oh, another local curse. Just what we need.” But he was gazing at her, unwilling to speak, his eyes agleam. “Cyprian—”
“If you walk under it with someone, you will both—you will all, it seems— be in love forever. Perhaps it’s your idea of a curse. Not mine.”
“Then go ahead, it’s your turn.”
His smile just managed not to be wistful. “And anyone who passes through it alone, according to my informants here, turns into the opposite sex. I’m not sure where that would leave me, Yashmeen. Perhaps I don’t need the confusion. The last time I was out here,” he continued later that evening, down in Sliven, in a room they had taken for the night in an old house off Ulitsa Rakovsky, “I had to put my impulses away for the duration, Balkan gender expectations being a bit as you’d say emphatic. Details one had simply ignored at Cambridge or Vienna demanded the most urgent attention here, and I had to adapt quickly. Imagine my further surprise when I discovered that women, who appear to be without power, in reality run the show. What did that mean then, for one’s allegiance to both sexes at once?”
“Oh dear.” And Ljubica was laughing too. Reef was off in some local krâchma. Yashmeen and Cyprian watched one another with some of the old—already, “old”—speculative trembling.
UP IN THE BALKAN RANGE one day for the first time, defying the predators above, they heard birdsong, some kind of Bulgarian thrush, singing in modal scales, attentive to pitch, often for minutes at a time. Ljubica listened intently, as if hearing a message. All at once she leaned out of the crocheted shawl Cyprian was carrying her in and stared up past them. They followed her gaze to where an old structure of some kind, destroyed and rebuilt more than once over the centuries, hung above a deep canyon, seemingly impossible to get to past the rapids in the river and the steep walls of bare rock. At first they weren’t even sure what it was they were seeing, because of shifting curtains of mist thrown upward by the roaring collision of water and rock.
“We need to go back,” it seemed to Reef, “climb up top, try to get to it by coming downhill.”
“I think I see a way,” said Cyprian. He led them up into a skein of goat paths. Here and there steps had been cut into the rock. Soon, audible above the boiling uproar below them, came choral voices, and they had reached a path, kept clear of brush and fallen rock debris, ascending in the long departure of light to a dark mossed arch above them, underneath which stood a figure in a monk’s robe, with its hands held out, palms upward, as if presenting an invisible offering.
Reef had pulled out a pack of Byal Sredets and offered them to the monk, who held up a finger and then, inquiring with his eyebrows, another, and took two cigarettes, beaming.
“Zdrave,” Cyprian greeted him, “kakvo ima?”
He got a long stare of appraisal. At length the man spoke, in University-accented English. “Welcome home.”
THE CONVENT BELONGED to a sect descended from ancient Bogomils who did not embrace the Roman Church in 1650 with most of the other Pavlikeni but chose instead to go underground. To their particular faith, over the centuries, had become attached older, more nocturnal elements, going back, it was claimed, to the Thracian demigod Orpheus, and his dismemberment not far from here, on the banks of the Hebrus River, nowadays known as the Maritza. The Manichæan aspect had grown ever stronger—the obligation of those who took refuge here to be haunted by the unyielding doubleness of everything. Part of the discipline for a postulant was to remain acutely conscious, at every moment of the day, of the nearly unbearable conditions of cosmic struggle between darkness and light proceeding, inescapably, behind the presented world.
Yashmeen at dinner that evening, with a discreet scream of recognition, took note of the convent’s prohibition against beans, a Pythagorean dietary rule she remembered being also observed by the T.W.I.T. Before long she was able to discover more of the Pythagorean akousmata—arguing strongly, she felt, for a common origin. She could also not help noticing that the hegumen, Father Ponko, had the Tetractys tattooed on his head.
He was more than willing to talk about the Order. “At some point Orpheus, never comfortable in any kind of history that could not be sung, changed identities, or slowly blended with another demigod,
Zalmoxis, who some in Thrace believed was the only true God. According to Herodotus, who heard it from Greeks living around the Black Sea, Zalmoxis had once been a slave of Pythagoras himself, who upon receiving his freedom went on to pile up a good-size fortune, returned here to Thrace, and became a great teacher of Pythagorean doctrine.”
There was an icon of Zalmoxis in the church, where Yashmeen and Reef found Cyprian after the evening service kneeling on the stone floor, before the carved iconostasis, gazing into it as if into a cinema screen where pictures moved and stories unfolded which he must attend to. Shadowless faces of Zalmoxis and the saints. And depending on a kind of second sight, a knowledge beyond light of what lay within the wood itself, of what it was one’s duty to set free. . . .
Yashmeen knelt beside him. Reef stood close by, holding and slowly rocking Ljubica. After a bit Cyprian seemed to return to ordinary candlelight.
“How devoted you look,” he smiled.
“Oh, you are ragging me.”
He shrugged. “Only surprised.”
“To find me in a sacred place. Trivial, housewifely me. Have you forgotten the church up on Krâstova Gora, where I first learned not only that my baby would be a girl but exactly what her face would look like? I knelt and received that, Cyprian, and I pray you may arrive at a moment of knowledge remotely like it.”
They rose, and walked out of the narthex, the three of them and Ljubica, out into the scent of myrtle in the deepening dusk. “When you leave here,” Cyprian said quietly, “I shan’t be coming with you.”
At first she didn’t hear the quietness of it, and thought he was angry, and was about to ask what she’d done, when he added, “I must stay here, you see.”
Though she could not trust herself then to speak, Yashmeen already knew. She had begun to feel him leaving as long ago as their tour of the French casinos, as if he had discovered a way back, not a reversion to any known type, more a reoccupying of a life he might have forgotten or never noticed there all the time waiting, and she had come slowly to understand she could not go with him wherever he was bound, watching helplessly as each day the distance opened a bit more. Despite their bravest hopes. If he had been desperately ill, she would at least have recognized and carried out her duty to him, but that slow departure, as if into the marshes of Time, miasmata rising, reeking, odors that went directly to the most ancient part of the brain, summoning memories older than her present incarnation, had begun, even long before Ljubica, to overwhelm her.
“It may be,” Cyprian said as gently as he thought he had to, “that God doesn’t always require us to wander about. It may be that sometimes there is a— would you say a ‘convergence’ to a kind of stillness, not merely in space but in Time as well?”
Gentle or not, Yashmeen took it personally anyway. The extent of her statelessness had unfolded for her like the progress of a sky from dawn into its shadowless day, a wandering in which she would count as home only the web of sympathetic spirits who had dug spaces beneath their own precarious dwellings to harbor her for a night or two at a time. Who might not always be there when she needed them to be.
Reef on the other hand thought Cyprian had only come up with some new way to be difficult, and would soon be on to something else. “So you’re fixin to be a nun. And . . . they ain’t supposed to chop nothin off, nothin like ‘at. . . .”
“They are taking me in as exactly the person I am,” Cyprian said. “No more of these tiresome gender questions.”
“You’re free,” Yashmeen speculated.
Cyprian was apologetic. “I know you were counting on me. Even if it was only for body mass, another tree in the windbreak. I feel that I just fell over and left you all exposed. . . .”
“You know, you’re so damn clever all the time,” Reef said, “it’s hard to trust anything you say.”
“Another British vice. I’m sorry for that, too.”
“Well, you can’t stay here. Hell, be Bernadette o’ Lourdes if you want, just not out here. I know it’s your particular patch and all, but Pete’s sake, take a look around. One thing I’m never wrong about is knowin when there’s a fight on the way. Nothin telepathic, just professional. Too damn many Mannlichers all over the place.”
“Oh, there won’t be any war.”
How could either of them say, “But you see how impossible it would be to defend this place, no clear lines of retreat, no escape.” Cyprian must have known by now what happened to convents in wartime. Especially out here, where it’d been nothing but massacre and reprisal for centuries. But that was Balkan politics. In here other matters were more important.
“They have adapted the σχημα,” Cyprian explained, “the Orthodox initiation rite, to their own much older beliefs. In the Orphic story of the world’s beginning, Night preceded the creation of the Universe, she was the daughter of Chaos, the Greeks called her Nvξ, and the old Thracians worshipped her as a deity. For a postulant in this order, Night is one’s betrothed, one’s beloved, one seeks to become not a bride at all really, but a kind of sacrifice, an offering, to Night.”
“And shall we”—Yashmeen pausing as if to allow the term “ex-beloved” to occur in silence—“be allowed there? At your ceremony?”
“It could be months, even years away. In the Eastern rite, they cut off the novice’s hair, which she must then weave into a kind of girdle, and wear it under her habit, round her waist, forever. Which means that before they’ll even consider me as a candidate, I must first grow my hair long enough—and given my current waist measurement, that could be quite some time.”
“Listen to yourself,” said Reef.
“Yes Cyprian, how vain, really, you’re supposed to be renouncing all that.”
He grabbed two handfuls of the roll of fat in question and regarded them doubtfully. “Father Ponko admits that the hair-length rule is nothing to do with consecration, really—it’s to give us time to think about the step we plan to take, as it’s not for everyone.”
“Having your hair cut off is nothing,” the hegumen announced one day to the assembled postulants, “compared to the Vow of Silence. Talking, for women, is a form of breathing. To renounce it is the greatest sacrifice a woman can make. Soon you will enter a country none of you have known and few can imagine—the realm of silence. Before crossing that fateful frontier, each of you is to be allowed one question, one only. Think closely, my children, and do not waste this opportunity.”
When it was Cyprian’s turn, he knelt and whispered, “What is it that is born of light?”
Father Ponko was watching him with a look of unaccustomed sorrow, as if there were an answer he must on no account give, lest it call down the fulfillment of some awful prophecy. “In the fourteenth century,” he said carefully, “our great enemies were the Hesychasts, contemplatives who might as well have been Japanese Buddhists—they sat in their cells literally gazing at their navels, waiting to be enfolded in a glorious light they believed was the same light Peter, James, and John had witnessed at the Transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor. Perhaps they asked themselves forms of your question as well, as a sort of koan. What is it that was born of that light? Oddly, if one reads the Gospel accounts, the emphasis in all three is not on an excess of light but a deficiency—the Transfiguration occurred at best under a peculiar sort of half-light. ‘There came a cloud and overshadowed them,’ as Luke puts it. Those omphalopsychoi may have seen a holy light, but its link with the Transfiguration is doubtful.
“Now I must ask you in turn—when something is born of light, what does that light enable us to see?”
It turned out, as Yashmeen was quick to grasp, that Father Ponko was approaching the Transfiguration story from the direction of the Old Testament. He seemed under no illusions about her religiosity but was always willing to chat with the unbelieving. “You are familiar with the idea of the Shekhinah—That which dwells?”
Yashmeen nodded, her years with the T.W.I.T having provided her a broad though shallow footing in British Kabbalism. “
It is the feminine aspect of God.” Eyes brightening, she told him of the transcendent status enjoyed at Chunxton Crescent by card number II in the Major Arcana of the Tarot, known as The High Priestess, and of the Mayfair debutantes who showed up there on Saturday nights in veils and peculiar headgear and with very little idea of what any of it might mean—“Some thought it had to do with the Suffragette movement, and they spoke vaguely of ‘empowerment’ . . . some, men chiefly, were in it for the erotic implications of a Judaeo-Christian goddess, and expected orgies, flogging, shiny black accoutrements and so forth, so naturally for them the whole point got lost in a masturbational sort of haze.”
“Always that risk,” agreed Father Ponko. “When God hides his face, it is paraphrased as ‘taking away’ his Shekhinah. Because it is she who reflects his light, Moon to his Sun. Nobody can withstand pure light, let alone see it. Without her to reflect, God is invisible. She is absolutely of the essence if he is to be at all operative in the world.”
From the chapel came voices singing what the hegumen had identified as a canone of Cosmas of Jerusalem, dating from the eighth century. Yashmeen stood very still in the courtyard, as if waiting for some vertigo to pass, despite having already understood that vertigo was somehow designed into the place, a condition of residence. She recognized here what the T.W.I.T. had always pretended to be but was never more than a frail theatrical sketch of. “Talk about reflection,” she found herself muttering.
The present tense seemed less accessible to her each day, as postulants circled Cyprian, and he was carried farther from her, as by a wave passing through some invisible, imponderable medium. . . . And Ljubica, who gazed at the daily life of the convent as if she knew exactly what was going on, who uncounted times had fallen asleep with her small fist around one of Cyprian’s fingers, now must seek other ways to return accurately to what she remembered of the realms of the not-yet-created.
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