The Traitor

by Michael Cisco

  Tzdze asked me about children, and I replied that I had a son. Before Tzdze asked me about my son she told me that she had no intention of marrying, that Xchte would be the one to marry, and that Xchte’s children would inherit the estate. After Tzdze said this she asked me about my son and I said only that I had always been against having children, because my wife’s health was fragile and because I felt neither of us could possibly justify the absurdity of a child. Unfortunately she became pregnant, despite our really frantic efforts to avoid it, and nearly died giving birth to our son. He exhausted us both with his demands and we aged horribly during his childhood. He took up with native children right away and spent most of his time with them and their relatives, and when he was old enough he told us that he despised us, that we were traitors, and he ran away. Despite my best efforts I was unable to locate him for a long time, I didn’t discover what had become of him until after my wife’s death, but if I had managed to find him, he would never have returned to us. I don’t know what I would have done had I traced him earlier. It was entirely for my wife’s benefit that I searched and searched for him; I thought he was either foolish or right in his own way, by turns, and never missed him that much. Apparently he had disowned us utterly and vanished among the other natives. He may even have joined the partisans, that would have been entirely consistent. Even as a very young boy he was always ill at ease with us; he never understood us. When my wife died we had both already forgotten each other. Tzdze listened to all this with a level expression, and played backgammon with me.

  Tzdze lived alone with her twin sister Xchte and her many servants with no need at all for anyone, although she certainly had the capacity for strong attachments to people. There was nothing for miles in the vicinity of the house. Servants would ride back and forth regularly for days at a time for supplies, and others would forage and hunt whatever they could in the forest. I have never eaten better food in my life. The food of Tzdze’s estate was unique. Although I was thinking of Wite with great pain all the time, I ate Tzdze’s food ravenously. I’ve always hated feeling filled up with food, but the food at Tzdze’s house never sat heavily on me in any quantity. I ate ravenously there not only because the food was excellent and prepared with great care, but because I felt the strong property of this unique food was something of Tzdze’s. From the first I belonged to Tzdze, and by eating as much as I did I felt I was becoming more properly hers. Tzdze invited me to take my meals with her. Wite never joined us, and evidently ate very little or not at all during this time, and we never discussed him. We said next to nothing to each other during meals, I know I didn’t because I’ve always been self-conscious about talking and eating. I feel disgusting enough as it is without the worrying logistics of eating food.

  We did most of our conversing as we played backgammon in the long second-floor gallery. Apart from the momentary glimpses of her that I caught during the day as I would wander through the house, I always saw Tzdze at a table. I would sit just to the left of the foot of the table as we ate, while she would sit at the head of the table. When we played backgammon we sat opposite each other in the center of the table, and I faced the windows. Tzdze appeared to live in total order. She made a habit of fighting herself at every turn, of (cruelly) correcting herself impersonally. Tzdze resembled Wite in this way—he had a blindness to everything that wasn’t directly in front of him that I admired. I have always been at risk of dissipation, siphoned off in every direction at the whim of this or that bit of trivia, while Wite had a wholly linear life, linear and inclined. He had no choices and no freedom, and there was never a question as to how he would end, there was nothing to choose, the only test he faced was a test of endurance, to carry on through to the end without stopping short. Tzdze’s life was even more compressed, into a single point, but an infinitely rich and eternal point. It was from out of this point that Tzdze played backgammon with me.

  Wite was always alone, I could never find him, I all but ceased to exist for him at that time I’m sure, and when I wasn’t playing backgammon with Tzdze I would spend my time idling, wandering at random through the house while my head would fill itself with worthless thoughts. Tzdze’s house was not as gigantic as it seemed, the rooms were never spacious, but they were in infinite supply. Tzdze’s house seemed to have sprouted out of the ground; its rooms were not laid out regularly; the plan (if any) seemed to favor unexpected openings, most of them small, affording unusual vantages onto other parts of the house, including parts that were almost inaccessible. This accounted for the frequency with which I saw Tzdze during the day, even though we never properly encountered each other except in the ways I have already mentioned, never casually or accidentally. I would see Tzdze through small windows set in the walls, often through the triangular trapdoor in the floor of the fourth-floor portrait gallery, or from one of the many indoor and outdoor balconies (most of which were small, like theater boxes), or from the many extremely high spiral staircases, or passing in one of the elevators. Tzdze’s house was in this way like a gigantic crystal chandelier, reflecting and multiplying her image. Tzdze was always talking with the servants, issuing new instructions, much of which, from what I could overhear, since the walls and floors were riddled with openings, concerned the preparation of meals, and she was accompanied by Xchte everywhere she went. I would usually come to rest in the fourth-floor portrait gallery. The most important paintings were kept in this gallery, the rest were scattered throughout the house. Most of the walls in Tzdze’s house were covered with heavy brass vines, but often a tapestry would be hung over the vines and then portraits would be hung over the tapestries. As a consequence Tzdze’s house was not only filled with Tzdze’s face and form but with all its antecedents. Tzdze’s ancestors’ pale faces and hands, and throats and breasts, threw off an extremely faint, chalky, ebbing light that misted the rooms like incense when there was no other light. I felt at home with them. There was no end to them. Any one of them could have stepped from his frame into the room behind my back, slipped out into the forest without being noticed by the servants, who were also everywhere and also resembled the portraits, although this was a resemblance of familiarity, I’m saying this resemblance was acquired through familiarity, and not inborn as was the case with Tzdze. Now that I say it, it is truer to say that the resemblance began with Tzdze, not with the portraits or the originals. The resemblance is only possible as a connection working backwards from Tzdze, even in the case of her younger sister. There, the resemblance was nevertheless only partial.

  When Xchte was present, then more of Tzdze’s past, especially her family past, was present, at the margin. Xchte afforded a weak idea of Tzdze’s prior life and its source. Otherwise it was impossible not to think of Tzdze as an eternal and uncreated person; I’m exaggerating to avoid the greater error of understatement. I’m feeling stronger and stronger as I write, as my life passes more and more into the writing and out of my body. Soon it will all be worthless to everyone. These portraits have none of the vulgarity and hysteria of mirrors—I think I would be driven insane if I had to stay in a house filled with mirrors, perhaps with even one mirror. Over backgammon, I told Tzdze that I was first shown a mirror in the capital, shortly after I arrived. The reflection I saw made little impression on me, I knew the way I looked and was very satisfied to ignore the way I looked. I wore whatever came to hand and dressed haphazardly until my marriage, when my wife started picking out my clothes. I had never known what to wear or why I should bother thinking about clothes in the first place. Tzdze always dressed in similar clothes, almost always in white with pearls. I don’t think that Wite owned a change of clothes. I had always dressed like a down-at-heel clerk, although on the day I met Wite I was wearing my best suit. I had on my best suit only because it happened to come to hand as I got ready to join the Prince’s party, and for that matter it was my best suit only because I liked it best for some reason, there was nothing especially impressive about it. I’m still wearing it. I expect I’ll be buried in it.
I would never have expected it to last this long. I’ll never wear anything else, unless they put a shroud on me. I remember, after they brought me here, when they came to take me for my hearing. I had to stand between two men in a cavernous hall, waiting to be admitted into the judge’s chamber. There was a huge mirror on the wall opposite the chamber door, and as I was compelled next to sit on a bench along the wall, by the judge’s door, with my two guards on either side of me eating sandwiches, I saw myself there every time I looked up. I didn’t recognize myself. I looked nothing like the reflection I remembered in the first mirror I had seen in the capital. I had to wait a long time, and I would look down and try to keep my eyes fixed on the spot where the opposite wall met the floor, but every now and then my eyes would turn up to the mirror, and for a few minutes I would have trouble finding myself in it, I blended in perfectly with the furniture and the panelling. The guards were always clearly visible. Then when I did see myself, I would suddenly see myself, that is I would suddenly realize that what I was looking at was me, and I almost screamed. It was a relief to be brought before the judge and sentenced.

  I loved Tzdze’s patience as she played. Tzdze played more or less slowly but her concentration never drifted. Whenever she asked me about myself or my wife Tzdze seemed to be asking me to help her concentrate, and I’m going to be ruthless and tell you that I was glad to use my past shamelessly like that, to empty it out for Tzdze’s concentration. I looked forward to playing with her mostly for this, as a matter of fact. Tzdze asked me about my wife’s illnesses and I said that she usually got pains in her legs and shortness of breath, and prolonged dizzy spells. Sometimes her dizzy spells were so severe that she would cling to the edges of the bed and press her face hard into the pillows, and often she would be sobbing. I did everything she asked and I preferred it that way, although she suffered, and to this day I still think of her illnesses with great pain. At worst, she would lie in bed and fuss while I tried to work and look after her as well. My wife was impatient and sickness made her fussy, but I knew that she was still suffering, as she got better she wouldn’t know what to do with herself and this feeling in particular would bring her desperation to the surface, she really only knew how to be sick, or it might be better to say that, when she started to feel better, she would get frightened, she would begin to feel that something was expected of her again. These illnesses always interfered with her in a certain way, so that she couldn’t simply dispense with them the way other spirit-eaters do. She didn’t blank professionally. It occurs to me now I never saw her do it; I think it revolted her. And her illnesses would interfere, even when I tried to help her. When I offered to use my limited skill to help her, she would shrink from me in horror, as though I had offered to do something appalling. What she was expected to do I’m sure I don’t know, she certainly didn’t know and was frightened, and she would turn desperate. All the people who have ever been around me, except perhaps for my uncle Heckler and Tzdze, have been desperate. My desperation was already so chastened by then that it could only arise from outside, I was already completely skeptical of it and gave it nothing but practical reasons, and now it gets no reasons from me at all, I’ve left off with it.

  Wite had disappeared entirely, sighted in these days only occasionally, prowling around the foundations of the house, never at the stone outbuilding. Wite seemed to have lost all interest in the stone outbuilding. From what the servants said, Wite was spending most of his time indoors in unused parts of the house, and he seemed to be nearing complete collapse. Tzdze and I were spending more and more time playing backgammon, adding another hour every day until we spent nearly every waking moment playing backgammon, and our rate of play was forever accelerating, the pieces flew off the board under our hands and leapt back again every ten minutes, then every five, then every minute and soon faster still, our hands would weave between each other over the board like schooling fish, and I noticed that Tzdze’s hands moved in a regular criss-cross pattern as she played, and as I began to use the same gestures inverted to my side of the board I found I could play as fast as Tzdze did, making every move automatically without thinking, and that this mode of automatic play could completely satisfy the demands of the game while requiring no thought, and as we played under a hypnotic spell over which the hours slid by as only a purely external fact while within us time stood still, while our heads and bodies remained completely motionless and our hands streamed precisely between each other creating in each case a unique game, and during this time I never once looked up at Tzdze’s face nor saw any part of Tzdze but her hands flashing between mine over the pieces and the board, and I’m sure that, had I looked up I would have been completely banished from history by the unendurable look of Tzdze’s face entranced. Well let me exaggerate, it’s better than saying too little. The pieces flew off the board and clattered together on the table to either side in perfect piles. As we played we would sometimes lean forward and then I would feel the crown of her head only a few inches away from mine, and occasionally there would be a sparking across, and a circuit would come briefly into existence from our hands linked across the board by the pieces up our arms and then so on into our heads. We sat across from each other and played all day, faster and faster, and we didn’t look at each other even when we came into the room. And during this time Wite was seen only very rarely, in a serious state—this is what one of the servants called it—tenaciously haunting the abandoned parts of the house and its foundations.

  One night I woke up to find him sitting at the foot of my bed. His face was pale and blue. He shook. He waited while I dressed and then left the room. I followed him outside. We climbed the bluff behind the house. The slope was covered with tall grass. We reached the top together and Wite stopped in front of the stone outbuilding. The wind was blowing at a constant rate, causing the branches of the trees and the blades of grass to nod back and forth regularly. I could hear one cricket. Wite walked toward the stone outbuilding. I had not yet been up there to see it. It was a small stone pavilion with a round base flush with the ground, eight feet in diameter, ringed with a banister and four columns, and topped with a conical dome. There was a narrow gap in the banister on one side, wide enough to admit one person at a time. Wite stepped under the dome and stopped. He was sweating. Wite placed his hands on the banister, and he was shaking more—more urgently now. His eyes widened and watered.

  Wite was looking away from me, across the top of the bluff, into the trees. He had told me he intended to kill himself in there. The outbuilding was made all of gray stone, carved but not polished, deeply pitted and cracked with age, blasted by the weather. Wite stood in the stone outbuilding and shook, looking across the top of the bluff, with his hands trembling on the banister. He was crippled with fear. Wite took me across the bluff, away from the stone outbuilding and into the trees, to a place where there was a shallow depression in the ground behind a low hummock topped with enormous rustling pines. He had stood in the stone outbuilding and had stared in this direction, across the bluff, through the trees, toward the shallow depression and the low hummock. Wite showed me a cave, formed by an overhang of rock held together in the grip of the roots of the trees overhead, making a low arch. The cave floor was an inclined slab of rock that lined the bottom of the shallow depression and climbed up under the arch. The mouth of the cave was diamond-shaped, like an eye. Wite went inside. I couldn’t go in. He took my arm and pulled me in a few feet. The cave was not deep. Wite showed me a high shelf at the back of the cave. He pointed it out to me and made me understand that he wanted his body left on that shelf after he died. He was showing me where he wanted me to put his body. I felt I was smothering. He released me and I left the cave.

  We walked together to the bottom of the bluff. Wite told me that he was going to kill himself there soon, but that he did not have the strength. He said, “I’m not of one mind about it yet,” and saying this he looked exhausted. In fact, he looked so thoroughly drained I find it hard to describe. Wite told me th
at he would wear himself down into doing it, and then changed his mind and said that he was going to build himself up into doing it. Then Wite told me that he was glad to see me spending time with Tzdze, and that he hoped we were good friends. He told me that he hadn’t said anything to her about killing himself. At that time apparently she knew only that he was a fugitive—he said that he owed her a word of warning. It had never occurred to me before that Tzdze was placing herself at risk for harboring him, and that she accepted this risk, as I’m sure Tzdze would have accepted any consequence, without trying to profit, without calling any attention, and without thinking twice. What an idiot I was! This was entirely characteristic of her. Wite asked me if I had told Tzdze that he intended to kill himself there. I said no, and he seemed satisfied. With pain, he told me that Tzdze shouldn’t hear of it until he was sure he could do it. Then he added, with his face downcast and in a low voice, that he might need me to tell her.