The Vintners Luck

by Elizabeth Knox

  On the other business – I have written to my bailiff to tell him that you may by all means occupy the old soldiers’ gallery over the coach-house. I think you will want to seal off those big doors at its end – through which armour was winched for storage. There is a pit of sand beneath the doors where Paul played as a child and in which, in past centuries, chain mail was cleaned, or so I believe. Still, despite the sand and soft landings I don’t like to imagine you or any of your guests in peril of falling. The roof will need tiles replaced, but the beams and flooring are of oak, and sound. You’ll have a great gallery to pace in, room for all your books. You need never spend another night at Clos Jodeau. I always thought the room above the cuverie too low for my vintner, but I suppose it suited his humility.

  Aurora de Valday, Baroness Lettelier

  Damascus

  15th November 1834

  My name is Apharah Al-Khirnig. I think you know who I am. For when stars glitter, and the eyes of men are closed, you are my brother.

  The hand that makes its straight marks on this paper belongs to an old Russian fellmonger, a soldier too (he reminds me) and, like you, a veteran of Borodino. Isaac Kumiliev fell ill while in this city on business. Lacking money he was abandoned by his servants. I found him in a Christian hospice, a vile place with only one dry nun to every twenty suppurating inmates. I have tended Kumiliev for half a year, and in that time we have both come to understand that his illness is such that it will keep him here. And, during that period, he has taught me a little Russian and a very little French – but not enough to make me independent of his scholarship and able to write to you myself. Kumiliev has met our mutual friend – so you mustn’t imagine this letter proceeding with arguments and accusations of madness.

  The angel Xas has been a frequent visitor for fifty years. He came to me in my first tranquil year of widowhood. I did not enjoy the wedded state, but was, fortunately, married to an inattentive and ailing man – his eighth bride – widowed shortly thereafter and returned to my father’s house to care for him in his final illness. (Writing this I realise I have spent not one half-hour of my life in the company of a young man.) As an only child, my father’s death left me in possession of the portion of his fortune not tied up in trade – this house, an orchard of almond trees, and a small vine-yard.

  The angel enjoyed my roof gardens and told me of his own garden, not troubling himself to dissemble as to its whereabouts. When, after some ten pleasant meetings, I remarked that he seemed to be a very polite and personable demon he explained to me what he was, indeed. He told me that demons were the native peoples of Hell, that fallen angels had colonised the demons and that the demons worked for fallen angels, cultivating sinners on vast plantations of suffering. He spoke as though to mend my childish error, not with shame, or coyness, or airs of self-excuse.

  Such was our talk.

  I found Xas enchanting from the moment I saw him – and was delighted to discover the scope of his reading and retention of learning. Though there were times when my faith wrapped me round with its terrors and I feared for my already lazy, vacillating soul, my heart at every meeting would say to me, quietly: This angel is a pure spirit.

  Over many years I have revised that thought. Our friend has, rather than is, a pure spirit. I learned that he understood me, knew I would not preach, or even repeat, any of what he told me, because I didn’t care to lose my safe place in the world. Xas understood that I was a coward of complacency, who delighted in what she knew and others did not (especially my pious cousins, from whom, when I pass them in the outer corridor of the mosque, I am obliged to turn my face). Xas beguiled me with his lovely firm face and his strange truths and I sought neither to influence him, nor the world by reporting his talk.

  For many years I reserved my judgement on the verity of the matters about which he spoke. The more silent I was, silent and unaltered in my peaceful gardens, the more composed, impartial and consistent his telling became. And the less I credited his words. He was, to my mind, too calm to be honest. At some time during these years he spoke to me of the young Frenchman he had met, how he thought he might go back to see whether ‘the boy had got himself married’. I told him he should cultivate more friends, and suggested he promise to visit you each year. It seemed to me you could be his first friend who was fully in the world, a family man, a man who liked commerce.

  Then Xas changed. He became troubled and uncertain, puzzled and tender. He began to talk about you – brought reports of your words and actions for my wise interpretation. And I saw that his trouble was one and continuous with his former composure and I understood with a terror like (Isaac tells me he must write grace, that grace is what I mean. And I put up my hands, as one does to acknowledge marvellous calamities or fate, and say, ‘God is great’). With a terror like grace I realised that I was in some ways responsible for the life of this unformed immortal.

  Now, difficult Frenchman, you hope I will tell you what our friend had to say about you. Yet it seems more pressing to me that I, who was raised in the Moslem faith, could find myself in a Catholic purgatory – in the company of other hapless heretics all complaining in the thousand tongues of humankind. I’m an old woman now. Unlike you – a man of middle years who mourns his former glory because he feels it was unused – I am truly unused, intact, an untasted fruit withered around its seed. I must somehow settle my debt to the world, which I have loved, disregarding what I have learned of its Master’s fastidious wastefulness.

  I hope our friend has shared these thoughts with you. If so, then I offer again what we both have heard. But if, as I suspect, your talk has been loud with love and injury, and crowded with the inconsequential beauties of daily lives you felt you both must share, then attend to these scraps of testimony.

  Xas is afraid of your fear. But to me he speaks about God in every shade of feeling from adoration to loathing.

  Angels have cold hearts, Xas says (his head resting in my lap), and thick skulls. Hosanna is about the whole of their repertoire. That’s the best God could do. He means to do better. Perhaps he means to make a world. Perhaps that is what Heaven is for; God is collecting the makings of a world. God catches and preserves what we call souls, Xas says. God has his engine of extraction. He has already built a kingdom out of our expectations of happiness, built Heaven from our hopes of Heaven.

  I know I have brought much of this troublesome knowledge on myself. For instance, thinking myself very clever I asked him why he has a navel – not having had an umbilicus, a womb in which he grew, a female parent, a bloody birth and squalling infancy. Xas replied by way of a question: ‘Why do men have nipples when they will never suckle a child?’ Then I asked, in all mischief, whether men were made in the image of women. To which he said that all warm-blooded creatures are female first, but that this is not a heresy. Then followed with his heresy: All angels were made in the image of men.

  Has he said any of these things to you? These heresies that had him follow his friend (as he calls Satan) into exile from Paradise. Am I to be forbidden Paradise for having heard these things? (And I am sure Xas’s truths – as I believe they are – have not made me love God less. Indeed, I take great personal interest in God, and love him for my friend as I love King Mutamid for the poetry he composed.)

  What are we to teach our friend, Frenchman? I believe we must teach him how to return to Paradise.

  He says that, at a great height, on a clear day, but not in these latitudes, the air below him is like a convex lens, thick and heavy, and presses him so that it seems easier to ascend than fall. With his wings a little open he simply lies on the air, he says, till the sun goes and his breath makes ice form on his body. I believe we must teach our friend how to return to Heaven. I don’t believe Xas fell – but flew downwards as a pelican pierces the water looking for fish. I believe he belongs in Heaven where he is – God tells me in my heart’s voice – missed and welcome.

  But, Frenchman, how can he fly to Heaven when your friendship exerts such
gravity? Don’t keep him any longer. He has already been detained four thousand years by having confounded God’s secrecy with Satan’s honesty. Please assert your influence. Drive him off. Let him go.

  1835 Floraison (the flowering of the vine)

  It was a hot night and their couch was far from the low fire, which Sobran had lit for illumination, along with the candles at the door to the staircase. That door was closed and barred. At the other end of the long gabled gallery the double doors were open on a twenty-foot drop, treetops and night sky. The room smelled of the beeswax with which its floor had been polished, the polish crusted in ancient scars made by spurs, boot nails, armour.

  Sobran had just remembered Apharah’s letter. It came back to him (as something to hide) after a long, fabulous convulsion of self-forgetting that had left him dry, abrased and as cleansed as old chain mail rinsed in sand. First he noticed the night, moonlight on the wands of the cherry by the open doors. Then he remembered to taste Xas’s gift – Cavalierii, a sparkling wine made from white berries by the méthode champenoise. From Finland. It was like a liqueur, powerful and aromatic. It flowered in his head and he remembered the letter. Then, without thinking, he mentioned it.

  ‘Can I read it?’ Xas asked.

  ‘No. It’s between me and Apharah.’

  ‘I’m between you and her.’

  Sobran dissembled, said he didn’t have the letter any more. He was destroyed, felt thinner by inches, had but one defensive reflex left to him: outright lying.

  ‘Did you burn it?’

  Sobran opened his eyes. There was something odd in Xas’s tone – as though burning a letter came close to placing it in his hands.

  ‘And if I did she and I alone would know what it said. And her Russian scribe, I suppose, the invalid Kumiliev.’ It pleased Sobran to prove he’d had a letter, and insights into Apharah’s household.

  ‘If you destroyed it, it would go to Heaven.’

  ‘So is Heaven full of laundry lists and lewd books? The sorts of things people burn.’

  ‘Destroyed originals go to Heaven. You can find a copy of anything copied in Hell. Heaven is full of the membranes of lost manuscripts. They are like the skin a snake casts when it grows, transparent, in the shape of a snake and printed with airy scales. But these are indestructible, and lovely, like a gold leaf. There are laundry lists, yes, and love notes, totes, tavern bills, burnt verses –’ and Xas quoted:

  My tongue is a stone and one with my mouth

  Reputations, policies, statues, promises

  All prove with time

  My tongue is a stone and one with my mouth

  My lids never wet my eyes.

  ‘Sappho – one of her verses lost in the fire that destroyed the library at Alexandria. I’m translating.’

  ‘From this I deduce that you’ve been to Heaven more than once since the days of Pompey. I don’t imagine you stopped to read when you went to see Nicolette.’

  ‘Quick, aren’t you.’

  ‘Do you often go to Heaven? Perhaps to chase up lost correspondence?’

  ‘I’ve been four times since I fell. Once to read what burned. Lucifer sent me – he thought it suited Our Father to burn the library at Alexandria. We didn’t want any ideas lost to us. Human ideas. You are doing our thinking for us. I went again to ask God a question – He didn’t answer me. And I went to look for a human friend – I can’t say that I found him. I went for you, to see Nicolette. Don’t ever ask me what question I asked my Father, Sobran, or what happened to my friend.’

  ‘Not one of your “saints”, I gather, just a “solitary” – in purgatory now, perhaps.’

  Xas shook his head.

  Sobran examined him, relieved to be able to disengage that much. ‘So when you burnt Léon’s letter you sent it to Heaven?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sobran laughed. Apparently he couldn’t rid himself of memories or evidence. ‘Would you bother to look for Apharah’s letter in Heaven? Are you that curious?’

  ‘No. I’d ask her what she wrote. Or I’d make you tell me.’

  ‘Please,’ Sobran said, on a quick breath out as he was wrapped in two wings, the radiant heat of the angel’s body over him now, like sunlight, but in one place a burning glass, turned to concentrate. ‘You think because you can make me stiff again I’ll tell you what she wrote? What a child you are.’

  Xas sighed and let him go. He dropped down as heavily as he was able, in a poor approximation of a sulk. He said, ‘It had occurred to me to go to Heaven to seek the other page of Léon’s letter.’

  ‘There was no other page.’ Sobran went cold; he felt his cock cool and loll against his leg.

  ‘I think there was.’

  ‘No. He heard me come up the stairs, he –’

  ‘Why didn’t you call for help and cut him down?’

  ‘I don’t know. He was still. He was dead.’

  ‘Where was the letter?’

  ‘On the bureau.’

  ‘Where was it written?’

  ‘He was writing at his desk.’

  ‘Was there sand on the desk? Did he have time, hearing you coming up the stairs, to blot the page, and take it to the bureau? How many drawers has that article of furniture?’

  ‘It’s tall, with a mirror at head height.’

  ‘So, Léon didn’t write his letter at the bureau. Must I be exhaustive? He hanged himself before you came up the stairs. Why did you go upstairs?’

  ‘To fetch Léon for lunch.’ Sobran was abruptly covered in gooseflesh which caused Xas to sigh, somewhere between pity and delight. ‘No, I heard something,’ Sobran said. ‘Or rather I knew to listen because the house itself seemed to be listening, hard. I said something to Baptiste, then went upstairs. I looked in on Céleste, who was bathing. My first thought was that something was amiss with her. Then I went to Léon’s door.’

  ‘Céleste has the other page.’

  ‘No,’ Sobran said. He began to move to rid himself of pinpricks of terror, like biting flies in a patch of shade. But Xas held him and began to kiss him as if he enjoyed the taste of terror, and Sobran felt, for the first time, that his was not a legitimate appetite. Then he was in the big surf of pleasure, blind to everything but what was immediately before him, the congestion of this angel’s deft, expressive mouth, the flushed, racked body he could not believe was his to touch.

  Later Sobran gave Xas Apharah’s letter. Gave it saying that she was entitled to her opinion. Xas read it, frowning.

  And, while Xas read, Sobran fell asleep. When the pressure in his bladder woke him he staggered up to stand in the double doorway and piss, then stood a minute longer and, as he breathed in the summer dawn, he realised the room was empty behind him. Silent, the coals furred with ash, the angel gone.

  At dusk, the day the grapes were trod at Vully, Sobran came back to the soldiers’ gallery only to change his clothes – to return to the revellers, his sons and younger daughters, the château’s people, the food, music, and dancing, the limbs streaked with fresh grape juice.

  Sobran walked into the dim room already tugging his shirt off over his head. He was blind when he stepped into the ice-water. His feet were bare, newly washed at the pump below of grape-pulp and skins. His foot was cool, but the water cold and full of mushy ice.

  Sobran freed his head and looked down at a thick bolt of water, silky on the waxed floor. Then he raised his eyes to Xas, armoured in ice from head to foot, hair like a frozen waterfall. The angel lay on his back, breathing strangely. His right hand was pressed to his side, below his left arm, where the signatures were, the arm clamped over that hand, and seams between each separate limb sealed with ice.

  Sobran went to him and asked, ‘What is it?’ He pulled at the arm and hand. He was looking into Xas’s face as he said this – saw himself recognised, saw a glimmer, relief. It was too like battlefield deaths he’d seen, and as Sobran pulled the arm and hand out of the embedded ice, blood came, black first like oil, then vivid red, in a room bright with
light reflected from the green treetops at the double doors. Sobran saw it all in colour, colour that came with the blood.

  Sobran tried to stem the bleeding, put his hand to the wound, and found how deep it was, the skin torn, twined signatures gone, and a hole, as though the angel had been gored by a bull. Blood poured between Sobran’s fingers. The man got up, slipped and stumbled his way to the bed, pulled off a sheet, and brought it back to the angel. He began to bind the angel’s chest. He raised Xas, and the angel’s wings flexed once as his body, in one final convulsive act of consciousness, tried to escape. One wing knocked over a lamp, which broke, and spread oil with the blood and thawed ice.

  Sobran picked Xas up, and put him on the bed. Blood formed beads on the wings, like water on a swan’s back. Sobran pressed his hands against the wound and looked into Xas’s face, saw something drain away behind the angel’s eyes. Dark blue. Sobran had forgotten that colour, forgotten it existed. Then the eyes closed, the face composed, and the struggle for breath stopped.

  Sobran moved his hand from the blood-soaked sheet. The room was very quiet. Sobran wondered what he was doing. He looked away from the angel to the treetops, sparkling, a crowd milling at the door to a room where a disaster has occurred. In a silence almost serene Sobran smelled sulphur-scented ice-water, and the blood, overpowering, not a shambles but a scent of drift and deeper drift of fresh snow. There was a moment of clean nothingness, when even time seemed gone from the room. Then Sobran stooped, wound his slick hands into the tacky ropes of Xas’s bloodied hair. He raised the angel’s face to his and gazed – then lay down with the angel to warm him, already in a stupor of sorrow, his lips resting lightly against the angel’s own.

  He sent Baptiste away from his door in the dark of night. Lied in his driest voice about having a guest, heard the shock in Baptiste’s hesitation, but didn’t care.

  The following day Sobran peeled off the bloody sheet and stripped the bed beneath Xas so that the angel lay on a bare mattress smeared with dried blood, his wing tips thick with it, but unsullied at their great high joints. Sobran used the bedding to wipe up the water, gelatinous gore and lamp oil. He stuffed the bedding into the fireplace and set it alight. It smouldered, then burned, smoking thickly.