7.
My great-grandfather purchased our family farm in North Dakota. He rode there from Pennsylvania on his bicycle. Like Isak Dinesen, he strove and struggled and loved the land. Like her, he dispossessed a darker people.
8.
The same can be said of Dorothy’s Uncle Henry and Auntie Em. Reconsider the meaning of ennui. Reconsider Dorothy’s longing for many colors, her final acceptance of dusty Kansas. Reconsider the role of flight.
9.
You would not describe a body in flight as “lifeless matter.” You might, however, describe it as an animal. This does not make much difference to me. After all, L. Frank Baum asks, “Why should not the animals have their Fairies, as well as mortals?”
10.
Last night I dreamt I was stretched on a desert of snow. I grasped the tops of the clothes-pegs, dragging myself painfully toward the glow on the horizon. The city, the city. As I squirmed forward I left my coat and even my skin behind, with a sob of grief and also a great sense of physical well-being. I would describe my relationship to land as one of distance. I would describe it as truncated. I would describe it as numb. I would describe it as essentially a relationship of mourning, not for lost land but for the capacity to believe.
11.
Primary disadvantage of flight: exposure. A black silhouette on the open sky is so easy to shoot down.
12.
Primary advantage of flight: rejection of the land, which makes it possible to reject the category “landless.”
13.
Sometimes after a dust storm fine gold sand covers my floor. One of my friends habitually rolls in this dust, in order, she says, to feel “grounded.” The city, she claims, is an artificial construction, a kind of no-place. I am interested in how a no-place can be home.
14.
Oh, flight! Oh, flight!
15.
In my city, I sip green tea. I avoid vacant lots, which are full of the angels of God. When the wind blows, a subtle excitement tugs my heart, as if clouds are forming somewhere over this rainbow nation. Is it a storm? Not yet; but the wind is strong enough to lift me from the roof. Screeching with joy I tumble into the sparkling air, where thousands like me already cavort, rising and falling on stunted wings, like miniature cyclones among the grinning towers.
An Account of the Land of Witches
1. An Account of the Land of Witches
I arrived in the Land of Witches at the end of the season of furs. The sun shone, banks of chilly foam lay piled up in the streets, and the river emitted groans day and night as the ice broke into pieces, setting free the witches’ colorful winged boats. My master took a room in the Lean Hotel. This building consists of a single spire that twists up into the greenish, iridescent sky. Ascending to our room presented no difficulties, however, for the steps were endowed with a charm that eroded time.
This shaping of time is one of the marvels of the Land of Witches. I have never seen a people so rested and happy; for them, time runs opposite to the way it runs for us: onerous tasks pass swiftly, while a pleasure may last for weeks or, indeed, forever. I have seen Ygasit, the proprietress of our hotel, wash every dish in the place in the time it takes her to bend her full cheek slightly toward one shoulder, while Verken, the musician who became my particular friend, told me she once played a single note for a year without tiring of its beauty. The smallest child can roll time into a ball and chase it down the stairs or fashion it into elaborate paper chains. In the pastry shops, they drizzle time over the cakes. This molding of time, like all their miracles, is achieved through the Dream Science.
Once I had begun to practice the Dream Science myself, I was able to reduce my time beneath my master to almost nothing. No sooner had he climbed onto me than he would roll off again. Outside the window, the stars would shrink and vanish like ice.
In the Land of Witches, everything tends skyward. Their beautiful boats, adorned with batlike wings, are as happy among the clouds as on the water; the first time the shadow of one of these gliding marvels passed over me, I shivered, for I thought it must be some giant bird of prey. Wonder overwhelmed me when I looked up to see little witch-children peering curiously at me through the boat’s glass floor. The vessel must have come recently from the river, for it sprinkled the air with droplets. One struck my cheek like a freezing tear.
Their houses resemble plants: many sprout rooms like parsley flowers, which sway on their long stalks when the wind blows. Others, like the Lean Hotel, strain toward the clouds. The witches wear tall headdresses, three to four feet high and bedecked with veils. I thought the adornment cumbrous until I realized that these veils, which float on the air like spidersilk beaded with dew, are in fact a means of catching the wind, the secret behind the witches’ extraordinarily light and buoyant footsteps. Their conveyances are many and varied: when not traveling by boat, or the headdresses that, in a strong breeze, can lift them from the ground, the witches skim over the snow on gold discs, propel themselves through the streets with a sort of javelin, or trot about balanced on huge hoops.
The streets of their city resemble a perpetual carnival. There is always a sound of bells.
They play on great flutes made of whalebone and harps as round as shields.
In the shadow of the mountains, there is a park called the Place of Mourning where, Verken told me, one such as I would spend months, perhaps years, if I were a witch.
The Place of Mourning lies, I have said, in the shadow of the mountains, but this is only one of its locations. Like the entire Land of Witches, this hushed and tenebrous park is porous, its borders fluid, and its atmosphere transportable. I was hanging my master’s smallclothes out to dry behind the hotel when Verken approached me, dancing on top of her traveling hoop, her circular harp clasped firmly under one arm, and called down to me that I should spend a season in the Place of Mourning. When I ignored her, she alighted gracefully, her earrings clashing. Her hoop fell sideways so that it leaned against the wall of the hotel. “You are injured,” she said. I told her that she was mistaken. She reached out and took my wrist, her eyes abrim with compassion and light.
In the Land of Witches there is, every year, a Festival of the Dreaming, during which all the witches dream the same dream together. The dream may be very simple. Last year they dreamt they were taking a pumpkin cake out of the oven. Everyone awoke in tears.
The Dream Science obliterates distance as well as time.
“Let me help you,” Verken said.
At that I snatched my wrist out of her grasp. She was a witch, a musician, and a free woman, and I was not; but there were some things that I knew better than she. On the subject of offers of help, I was something of an expert. In my home city, my mother’s cousin had offered to help her in her poverty by taking her youngest girl child off her hands. He sold me to my first mistress, whose son, a university student, helped me by teaching me my letters. It would increase my value, he said, beyond my current use, which was to provide him with pleasure and sleep at his mother’s feet. When my lady died, her son sold me to a merchant, profiting greatly, as he had predicted, from my ability to read and write. This merchant—my current master—had two kind daughters who, when we were at home, treated me generously to cracked jewelry and cast-off gowns. I preferred to be on the road: to be shivering, here, in the cold sunlight, hanging clothes. “I don’t need help,” I said to Verken.
“Then let me give you a word,” said the witch.
The word she gave me was pomegranate. It was not only a word; it was a dream. In the Land of Witches, words open doors in the dreamscape. In the dream-language, said Verken, pomegranate means dusk and the rattling of dry leaves.
It also means winter. It means black bile and a cloister. It means a tooth.
“Dream of pomegranates,” Verken said, “and you’ll find yourself in the Place of Mourning.”
In the Land of Witches, each word is translatable into a dream. This is the foundation of the Dream Science.
Once I
understood what Verken had given me, I began to make notes toward a Dreamer’s Lexicon. Each day, when my master retired for his midday rest, I sat with the musician in the little grape arbor behind the Lean Hotel. I was quite warm now, for I made sure to dream of rabbits. Borrowed sun streaked the wall and made the grapes sparkle like earrings of green glass. Verken admonished me that to describe the sun as “borrowed” was a mistake. This was our sun, she said: the sun of the Land of Witches.
My hands trembled as I took notes, not with fatigue but with excitement. I could roll up my trousers, now that it was so warm; Verken admired my heavy ankle bracelets, and I gave her one, which she fixed to her headdress as an ornament. The next day she informed me that she had been to a marvelous place. What was my elation, and what my terror, when she described to me the massive walls of my own city, the triangular gardens, and the boughs of the sacred trees.
“Impossible,” I gasped.
“Not at all,” she replied, smiling. “It is only necessary to board a boat at the Quay of the Blackened Cod, and travel some few miles south, to where the orange groves begin. And, of course, one must have the proper dream . . .”
In the Land of Witches, life is not cut out of whole cloth, but resembles a series of pockets.
It is not true that there is no suffering there. Indeed, if there were no grief, there would be no need for a Place of Mourning. The witches know disappointment, and sadness, and sickness, and death. Nor are they immune to the cruelties of ordinary human beings. Verken, who traveled much in her search for new musical forms to enrich her repertoire, had once been captured by a strange people who, by flashing lights into her eyes and startling her with loud noises, prevented her from sleeping for five days. Unable to dream or to answer the questions posed to her in an unknown tongue, she sobbed hopelessly in a puddle of her own urine. By the sixth day she was exhausted enough to dream with her eyes open. In an instant she found herself in the Place of Mourning.
“There is enough cruelty in the world,” she told me softly, “to justify all the music ever made.”
I met her eyes. We had never spoken of my master before, but I knew that we were speaking of him now.
In the Land of Witches, one is always touching many lands at once. To raise a cup in a dream is to tumble down a hill.
“I have hurt you,” Verken said, on that grape-green afternoon when she described to me the streets of my own city.
“No,” I answered, weeping. “But my country is so far. It’s so far away. And now you say, in a few miles . . .”
“With the right dream,” she whispered, “you may get there in a few steps.”
She covered my hand with hers. It was warm as a rabbit’s pelt.
2. A Refutation of the Account of Witches
I, Taharqo of Qorm, jewel merchant, devotee of the Horned God of Mount Napata, member of council in the world’s most illustrious city, father of two daughters and now (for the gods are generous) a son, do submit to the public this refutation of the lies of my escaped slave, Arta.
I purchased this Arta for no small sum in the country of the blacks. She was literate, and possessed a great facility for learning languages, which made her remarkably valuable to me on my travels—though, no doubt, her talents also aided her in her escape. Arta was well-treated under my protection, even affectionately so, amply fed (she had, like all her people, a predilection for sweets), clothed and petted by my own daughters, honored by me with several rich gifts (including a nose-ring of speckled jade), and beaten no more than was lawful. In short, she was a full member of my household. We called her Tan-Tan. In her loss, the kindness of my family has been scorned, the feelings of my daughters wounded, the burdens of my lady wife compounded, my business dealings hampered, my purse outraged, and my pride trampled underfoot.
As if this loss were not enough (and I intend to discover how it was done, if I have to hold the proprietress of the Lean Hotel over her own stove!), I have had to endure, for several weeks now, the interrogations of friends and even strangers who know that I have lately returned from the Land of Witches. For my eldest daughter (a charming girl, guilty of no more than the natural thoughtlessness of her sex), in going through my belongings after my return, discovered the infamous Account of the Land of Witches among my papers and made several bound copies of it for her friends. When asked why she had done so, she stared at me dumbfounded. “Why, Father,” she said, “it is a diverting story; how could it be wrong?” On the Plains of Khod, where my honored father spent his adolescence, there is a saying that any girl can match wits with an ostrich.
The results of my daughter’s indiscretion are well known; the Account of the Land of Witches has been copied all over Qorm; it is available for purchase at every bookseller’s, despite my efforts to buy up the copies, or argue to the merchants the falseness of the document. The nature of the so-called “Dream Science” is debated in cafés, and I have heard some philosophy students have taken to sleeping all day. I have therefore decided to ride before the storm, as the saying goes, and release my own, true document to the public.
Know then that the Land of Witches is a meager, muddy little country, cold as a spider’s affections and dull as paste. The “river” of which my slave writes is an icy sludge, the Lean Hotel more of a stick than a spire, and the streets of the city narrow and stinking. There are no flying boats—if there were, the inhabitants would all fly away at once and settle in some more comfortable location. The wind comes over the water like a spear. I never heard bells; perhaps they were drowned out by the yapping of the dogs.
The natives of the Land of Witches are uniformly stupid and their language as nonsensical as the yammering of goats. Not even Ygasit, the greasy, gap-toothed proprietress of the hotel, can speak more than ten words in any civilized tongue. I depended on my slave Arta to conduct any business at all, for, with her gift for mimicry, she was soon chattering enthusiastically with the witches—who, I was disappointed to learn, believe that ornaments can only be given away, and not bought, making them utterly worthless as customers.
“But where do you get the jewels to give your friends?” I asked Ygasit through my slave. The witch laughed, her eyes twinkling through the gloom (for we stood in her kitchen, the fog of her noxious cooking as thick as soup), and answered that she received them from other friends.
“But where are they made?” I demanded.
Arta repeated my question, and, when Ygasit had finished spitting out words as barbed and slimy as fishbones, informed me that the witch—who, mind you, was clad in a grimy apron, and reeked of onions—considered my question indelicate.
“No one asks where they come from,” Arta said. “They are considered tokens of love, and no one asks where love comes from, or where it goes.”
She kept her eyes trained on my beard, as usual. She never met my eyes. I thought her expression respectful then; now, I remember it as sly.
The prodigious idiocy of the witches, who wear jewels but will not buy them, might have left me entirely bankrupt, save that I happened to have picked up some perfumed soaps in the south, and these the witches liked and purchased gladly. I therefore determined to stay until I had sold all of my small stock, in order that the trip should not be wasted. Each day I walked through the dirty, freezing streets to the little market where the witches do a great deal more talking than buying. How well I remember the snaggle-toothed children watching me from a balcony, their eyes gleaming like those of starving beasts. My slave told the truth about the witches’ headgear: both sexes wear towers of knotted cloth on their heads and sway through the streets like giraffes.
In short, a more miserable and useless country can hardly be imagined. This alone should be enough to disprove the existence of any “Dream Science.” If it were possible to travel by means of dreaming, believe me, no one in the Land of Witches would get out of bed.
If you are still determined, reader, to take seriously the scribblings of a duplicitous, scheming, lawless runaway slave, then at least consid
er the contradictions of her narrative! How could she be warm, and the rest of the city freezing? Why, upon our arrival, did we experience the city as freezing, when someone was surely dreaming that it was warm? How, precisely, does one travel by dream? Why does Verken claim to have dreamt first and traveled afterward, in one case, and in another to have traveled the instant she dreamed? How could a child cut time into paper chains? And how can the Land of Witches be everywhere at once—as one must assume my slave to be claiming, since her Place of Mourning shifts its borders? It is all the most tiresome nonsense! A shifting border is no border at all.
Here is the truth: my slave Arta, a most valuable piece of property, has been stolen by a witch called Verken, who probably planned to steal her from the moment we arrived and took to loitering about the hotel for no other purpose. This Verken is a tall, loose-limbed woman with a headdress of dirty red-and-orange cloth, who pretends to be a musician. This she certainly is not; for the sounds she drew from her barbaric harp, as she lounged barefoot in the arbor, resembled nothing so much as the farts of a gazelle. Ygasit, I am convinced, was an accessory to the crime, for, when questioned, she would only frown and repeat “No good, no good,” pressing my shoulder with a thick finger to confirm that she meant I, and not the thieving Verken, was in the wrong. I departed the Land of Witches in a cold fury; but I intend to return in a hot one. I am even now assembling a company of fighting men. I will go back to the Land of Witches, and if I cannot retrieve my property, I will at least make sure that no one dares call Taharqo of Qorm a fool.
Tender : Stories Page 15