Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  Balthazar misses New York.

  [ 7 ]

  There won’t be any vials then. Balthazar tells himself that it does not matter; that it is even better without, more honest. All the same he frets about the work. What if the scenes are too small, too intimate for the size of the stage? How to control the Smoke of so many people with no Shapers and a single Soother in Etta May?

  All week long, he runs around making arrangements. He needs to have stage props built and find a better rehearsal space; must train three helpers from scratch; requires two new actors, people who can step into emotion as though into a pair of shoes. Everywhere he goes with his requests there is the same mix of bemusement, interest, scepticism. The Miners like theatre; but the moment they hear the work is commissioned, they grow suspicious. They want entertainment, not education.

  Balthazar talks to factory workers, shopkeepers, washerwomen. He notices things: takes note of them, pencil ever at the ready. The factories are like fiefdoms, competing for output, for workers, for reputation; even for allotment produce grown in their yards. Some are men only; others employ both sexes, women in coveralls smelting iron ore. Downtown is where the black market has made its home, nestled up to the Council in more ways than one. Toptown children run in the streets unspeaking, conjoined by clouds of Smoke; mothers watch them, afraid that they will leave. For the hills, and the Angel of the North. Balthazar wants to stage him and wonders if he has wings.

  He notices something else. Wherever he goes he seems to come across young Miss Cooper. She is everywhere: at the brickwork’s kitchen, doling out cabbage soup; joking with the metal workers on their way to their shift; trading gossip with the milk woman at dawn. Time and again he sees her at the dovecot at the edge of town, laughing with the pigeon fanciers; sees her with her hands around a prize bird, making cooing noises to the animal, her full mouth screwed into a raspberry purse. And increasingly, too, he sees her with Meister Lukas, drawing him out of his melancholy, walking with him hand in hand, innocently that is, more like a girl than a woman, though sometimes her hand will brush his leg or, leaning over while they picnic sitting on a little wall, her breast will crush itself into his upper arm, just for a moment, while she reaches for the salt shaker on his side of the wall. Balthazar notes it, studies the pigeons.

  He wonders: are they flying north or south?

  [ 8 ]

  Balthazar talks to Meister Lukas. They have been working all morning on some details of the lighting arrangements, talking about sight lines, shadows, wattages, bulbs. Lukas is attentive if passive. He is wearing his work face, clear-eyed, not given to movement; asks precise questions in the lilting English that is his. Balthazar looks at him and realises how little he knows about his employee. Meister Lukas’s hometown in China became a German colony when he was still little more than a boy; he apprenticed himself to a Lutheran engineer, adopted a new name, and was taken to Germany. The Second Smoke will have found him there, in Dresden, where (he once told Balthazar) he was such a curiosity that children would follow him around in the streets. When Balthazar met him, he was in Hamburg, working for a shipyard. Meister Lukas came to a performance; stayed afterwards and started talking about how the ventilation fans were set at the wrong angles, and how the sound effects were poor. They have never talked politics, or family, or love. Now Meister Lukas wears the Mark of Thomas at his temple; blinks, fans out his fingers; sketches a calculation in the air.

  “I will need another helper,” he decides. “Maybe two.”

  “I will find someone.”

  “It’s in the budget?”

  “There is no budget.” After a pause: “We could ask Miss Cooper. She seems the helpful kind.”

  Meister Lukas blushes at that. No, it’s more than a blush. It’s irritation, his boss meddling in private affairs.

  “You like her,” Balthazar says, just to fill the silence. It seems to prolong it instead. “It’s none of my business.” Then: “Maybe she’s got a motive, you see. She might not be as innocent as all that.”

  Lukas’s face does not change but his nostrils bleed a tiny slug of Smoke. “Nonsense,” he says, certain and curt. “I have tasted her.”

  Balthazar snorts at that, makes to argue, stops himself. What he says instead is “What do you two talk about? You do talk, don’t you? Not just smooch.”

  It comes out lightly, playfully, and wins a little smile from Meister Lukas.

  “This and that. She is curious about China. And the Storm. And she loves the theatre.”

  He pauses and Balthazar waits him out, smiling, encouraging him, feeling false.

  “She has been asking me about the vials,” Meister Lukas admits at last in a tone overeager to allay suspicion. “She had already heard about them. Perhaps you mentioned something to her.”

  “What have you told her?”

  “Nothing.” A hesitation. “This and that.”

  “Everything then.”

  “What was there to tell? You never told us where you had them from. I just told her when we first used one. And how they worked in a performance. It’s hardly a secret.”

  Balthazar nods, acknowledging the point. “She has another man, you know. One of the pigeon fanciers. Big fella.”

  “So what? She told me herself. He’s only a friend.”

  “And you? I thought you were in love with Eleanor. Two days weeping on the ship! Whatever happened to that?”

  Lukas looks back at him coldly, the Mark on his temple making him look bolder somehow, more rakish.

  “Eleanor isn’t here.” And more quietly, a moment later: “Is it true that she survived?”

  “Ask Miss Cooper. She makes a point of being very well informed.”

  [ 9 ]

  Etta May comes to him within the hour, her hands planted on her fleshy hips, all in a lather to tell him off.

  “You big bully!” she opens, Virginia cadences, slowed down for emphasis. “Why be so hard on the boy?”

  “Meister Lukas? He’s what—twenty-two, twenty-three? Hardly a boy.” He flashes her his best-pruned scowl. “You think the ‘Meister’ is an actual title or just an affectation? I suppose there must be a piece of paper: with gold trim and a big German seal. Though he does seem a little young for a ‘Meister.’ ”

  But Etta May will not be sidetracked.

  “Why interrogate him like that? Like he’s done something wrong. So he found himself some consolation, after the horror of the Storm. It’s perfectly normal. And why not Miss Cooper? She’s pretty. She has…attributes.”

  “You have attributes,” he answers crudely, cupping his own chest.

  “So I do! And who is to say I have not found myself a sweetheart too?”

  Balthazar laughs, then realises Etta May is not entirely joking. He chews on the notion, dissects it. What he finds underneath is this:

  “You like them, these people.”

  It comes out more incredulous than he means it.

  “They have my sympathies. It’s difficult, starting history from zero; wiping out a thousand years of prejudice. So, of course, they messed it up. But the heart’s in the right place. And they know how to laugh, down from their livers and Smoke.” She pauses, looks him over. “I thought you of all people would appreciate that.”

  “If they wanted to restart history, they would have done better to move. Get away from this mire; start out somewhere fresh.”

  “What, in the New World? You like it better there, eh? Home of the free and all. Oh, you’re right, we got the better end of the deal. Secondhand Second Smoke: a torch rather than the whole bloody bonfire. Just enough revolution to set the country free from its stuffiness, without tearing it all down. And you like New York. The capital of Capital; where money is more important than Smoke.” She snorts, real anger on her breath. “I am not sure it suits you, old woman; nor the colour
of your skin. Money or no money, you go down south where I’m from, you’ll still be the nigger director who has to leave the room while your plays are being staged. We don’t mix our Smoke with just any old coon.”

  “I didn’t know you were a wit, Etta May. And political.”

  “What a contrary old sourpuss you are, Balthazar Black! It might do you good to put skirts on, once in a while. It unclenches you, honey: feeling the wind between your legs.”

  And she storms off, hiking up her own skirt to well above the knee, as though there were a puddle to negotiate, ankle-deep and clogged with mud.

  [ 10 ]

  And so Balthazar finds himself shunned. Not that he is banned from his own rehearsals, or that the actors won’t talk to him. But word has spread that he is “in a mood.” Where he was his players’ companion before, he is now their employer, no longer included in their jokes and banter, their repartee of Smoke. Even the cat has abandoned him and taken up with the milkman who lives across the street.

  Balthazar does not mind, of course. He’s got work to do and is glad not to be distracted; was never truly one of them. Only sometimes does he get lonely; sits sulking in his room, rewriting scenes or composing bitter little sonnets about the futility of change. The writing is poor, the consolation slight. Balthazar is bored. And so he starts watching young Miss Cooper.

  As hobbies go, it is more riveting than some.

  For Miss Cooper makes an interesting study. For instance, there is the simple fact that she has no work yet seems flush in tokens, enough so to be liberal with gifts. Then, too, her movements follow no known schedule, with only a handful of fixed points to her day: Meister Lukas (though his star is already waning), the dovecot, a tailor’s shop, a warehouse, Downtown. Ideologically, Miss Cooper is a strong advocate of Smoke, but it is rare to see her smoke herself. She smiles instead, touches people, above all men; touches them as though by accident or from spontaneous bursts of affection. When she does answer someone’s banter with her Smoke, it is light, tinged with flirtation and caprice. There is an air of the ingenue around Miss Cooper; of simplicity and sex. Even those people who dislike her—older women, mostly, matrons with sons to protect—think her a ninny gifted with charm and a fabulous arse.

  Balthazar does not make the same mistake.

  All the same, he is surprised to find she has noticed his watching, and—having noticed it—come to conclusions of her own.

  [ 11 ]

  She comes to him late one night while he is sitting over his notes. He thought the house door locked but there she is, already standing in his room, unannounced and spreading scent.

  “Here you are!” she greets him warmly. “Lukas told me you had shut yourself in. He said you are sulking. And will you look at all these notes!”

  Lukas. No “Meister” to her. Balthazar turns over his notebook and papers, watches her step to the window and close it. Something about her attire is different. The coat is heavier than seems necessary for the relative warmth of the evening; the riding boots too formal for a stroll. She looks as though she is getting ready to travel. But what sort of person travels at night?

  “You are a spy, Miss Cooper, aren’t you?”

  “Teddy, please.” She hops up to sit on the desk in front of him, dislodging notes; touches his forearm in her winning way. “You know yourself that spying is impossible. We live in the Smoke here and the Smoke does not lie. Everybody knows that much.”

  She smiles, aware of the absurdity of telling a theatre man that all Smoke is true. All it takes is a moment’s conviction; spotting the emotion within oneself, in a gesture or smile, then dredging it up from the deep. It is a lying to oneself. Some people have a talent for it.

  “And who do you think I am spying for, Balthazar?”

  “I don’t know. Renfrew? Your brother? Your pigeons fly south. Does the Miner who collects the notes know who they are from? No, I imagine he doesn’t. He’s just happy you pat his cheeks.”

  She raises an eyebrow at that, mimes slapping her own rump, more cheeky than saucy, the hand fine-boned, white, and small. Balthazar is dried up and old. Even so he feels her charm.

  “So what are you up to, Miss Cooper? You’ve been interrogating Meister Lukas about the vials—you must have realised you’d get nothing out of me. What do you want with them?”

  She shrugs, picks through his notes, with the insolence of a little girl winding up her favourite uncle.

  “I found your supplier, Balthazar. Out in the hills with his goats. He’s lonely. Missing his wife.” She scoots off the table, leans her hip against his chair. “Let’s trade answers. What I want to know is do you really have no vials left?”

  “I don’t.”

  “And do you know how it was done? The bottling I mean. You can’t just stand in a Gale with an empty jar.”

  “I don’t know.”

  She accepts this without showing any disappointment. “Your turn then.”

  “Where do the pigeons carry their messages?”

  “South.”

  “To Renfrew?”

  “To a Mr. Livingstone, mostly. But yes, some I suppose end up with Dr. Renfrew. But look at you frown!”

  “So you’re a liar. A traitor. You live with these people and don’t believe a thing.”

  “Believe?” She brightens at the word; wanders over to his bedside and starts picking through his things.

  “Have you read Pascal, Balthazar?” she asks, becomes distracted, mouthing a line from a scene he has worked on and discarded: For in thy Smoke I find myself lost, he can read it off her lips.

  “Pascal? You mean his wager? Yes, I have, as a matter of fact. It’s better to gamble on God’s existence than not to; if you have faith and are wrong, nothing much happens; but if you don’t and God turns out to exist, you’ve pissed away paradise. I always thought it a rather silly argument; something that might appeal to a banker. Or a fraud.”

  “That’s because you haven’t read to the end! His point is merely that it would be reasonable to believe. Pascal understands perfectly well that in itself this does not change anything. To actually start believing you have to act. Pray, attend service, hang the cross on your wall. You have to write faith into the practice of your life; and do so even though you don’t actually believe, at least not yet. Do this for a year, or three, or ten. ‘Custom, without violence, without argument, will make you believe. It is custom that makes men Christians; custom that makes them Turks.’ I am paraphrasing it rather badly. Pascal’s French is very nice.”

  “What is your point, Teddy?”

  “My point, Balthazar, is that you asked me what I believe, which is a very Minetowns sort of question, for above all it’s important to believe very passionately here, more passionately than the next man. And yet I am telling you, nobody here believes, or if so it’s only from habit. It’s all a big lie; make-belief. And your beloved Livia is the biggest liar of all.” She stands up from the bed, saunters closer, playful and girlish, trading secrets. “I hear she told you about the third ship. The one they believe started the Storm.”

  Balthazar bristles. “How can you possibly know what she told me?”

  Miss Cooper smiles, leans close, whispers in his ear. “Did she also tell you they found something on that ship? They salvaged it and brought it back and hid it down the mine, without telling the Council. And just today I heard another story: that she goes to look at it. A black piece of rock. She talks to it, like they are sweethearts. They say it reminds her of Thomas.”

  She studies him, sees that all this is news for him, and, pleased by his ignorance, shrugs and turns away.

  “The stories people will make up to pass the time! What about you then, Mister-Mistress Black? What is your story? Where did you read Pascal, and learn to write like that? And when did you put on breeches? Oh, come now, tell me, whyever no
t?”

  Balthazar hesitates. A part of him wants to shake his fist at her, or call her names. But he does not want her to leave. God help him, but he likes pretty Miss Cooper. Worse yet: he wants to be liked by her.

  “I worked in the kitchens of an Oxford college,” he says at last. “When I was a young thing, young and handsome. A don there took an interest.”

  Miss Cooper laughs: warmly, even now that she is mocking him. “Don’t tell me. He read to you in bed!”

  “He had an extensive library. Including a secret shelf of illegal books. Theatre plays, Dekker, Marlowe, Shakespeare. It’s surprising in how many plays a woman puts on trousers, and is remade.”

  “So you stored up that lesson, for later when you were old and pruned.”

  He shakes his head, annoyed by her at last, at her presumption that she can guess his life even before it’s been told. All at once her charm has worn thin.

  “Your kind will never understand what the Second Smoke meant for the likes of me. Or for these Miners.”

  She smiles at his reprimand, though he can see she is stung.

  “I don’t know, Balthazar. Half of the Miners seem about ready to return to the tried and true. People like structure. And food. And the old custom runs deep. As for me, do you know what I miss, Balthazar? A really good bath. With a maid topping it up every quarter hour. And a white fluffy towel that’s soft and new and radiantly clean.”

  It strikes him now that she has washed. There is no Soot on her at all.

  “Your brother must hate you, Miss Cooper.”

  “My brother ran away from here two years ago. You know why nobody here talks about him? They are afraid he got fed up with it all and headed home to our family pile.”