Stars: The Anthology

by Janis Ian

  Camm. "The Holy Mother is an Aznir bitch," she said. She remembered. Camm had said that, once. He had been joking, mostly, but she had been horrified nonetheless. "And this was done according to Her will. She deserves no such reparations."

  Now Jirev nodded at Marnissey’s escort and they backed away from the cold-slab while Jirev covered up the body with its shroud. A charity-shroud. Camm had family on Sarvaw; would the body be sent home, would Camm’s family have to look at this?

  "I will be the judge of that, if you please," Jirev said. He was Aznir Dolgorukij, by his accent. "It is quite true that you are not under the criminal code to blame for this. Uncle Birsle will assess your penance for the error of an over-hasty promise. You will not be seeing Danitsch again, or several of your classmates either."

  She could not be a murderess just because she’d wanted her life back. She could not. It was too horrible; it was too insane. "What have I done?" Marnissey whispered, and looked to Jirev for an answer. The people who were with her helped her into a chair; Jirev squatted down to crouch on his heels in front of her, and look into her eyes with resigned sympathy.

  "You only wished somewhat too passionately to be rid of an association whose demands had overwhelmed you," Jirev said. Marnissey did not hear accusation in Jirev’s voice; she listened to him greedily. "Because of that the man is dead. He did not deserve to be killed, nor so cruelly. Nor do you deserve to be held to account for it, it was an error, but you know that you will be blamed for it. We must decide."

  It was too true. She could see her future, and there was nothing in it; she would be blamed—people would rather blame her, howsoever irrationally, than recognize the darkness in themselves that had made such a thing possible. She would be blamed. And she had not yet even won back her family. "What can I do?"

  Jirev nodded. "It is not fair, nor is it just," he warned her. "Mourn him, Marnissey, as though you were true lovers, and your attempts to make a distance had been attempts to shelter him from his enemies. You shall have support and protection from the Order of the Malcontent, but you must do your part. Birsle will explain. Now you may go, but I will send the doctor to attend you."

  ~~~~~

  "So we’ve come to ask your blessing," Nebrunne finished, folding her hands in her lap and lowering her eyes to the carpeted floor in front of her feet, very aware of Cilance’s tense figure on the old-fashioned two-sitter beside her. "We intend to be married. There’s a clinic in Fibranje with a vacancy for his specialty and mine, so we can be together."

  Great-Aunt Marnissey was thin with age, but her slim figure almost resonated still with the fearless will and determination that had defined her life since the day her lover had been murdered. Tirelessly she had worked for the cause of integration; tirelessly she’d struggled to build lines of communication within the schools, to teach that the Holy Mother never asked one of her children to strike another for the crime of being a different sort of Dolgorukij. Never.

  And every day without exception she had gone down the hill into the city, to where the old university grounds used to be, and spent her morning hour of prayer in the chapel that had once been attached to the school. She took a mover, now; at more than eighty-seven years old Standard she could no longer walk so far quickly or well. But she had never failed to speak every day in the morning to the Holy Mother and the man she was to have married, never once in more than sixty years.

  Now she sighed, and the weariness of the sound made Nebrunne raise her eyes and blink at her great-aunt in moderate surprise. Aunt Marnissey looked pained, in some sense, and Nebrunne had thought her news would be more welcome than it seemed. Unfolding her hands Aunt Marnissey set them to the arms of her straight-backed chair.

  "You met in the hospital, you say." She was speaking to Cilance; Nebrunne nudged him nervously with her elbow, to make sure he knew that he was to answer. Cilance cleared his throat.

  "Yes, ma’am. I’m in anesthesiology, so Nebrunne and I work together on emergency most shifts."

  Aunt Marnissey frowned, to Nebrunne’s confusion. "How do your co-workers feel about your plans, niece? Do they know that you and this young man intend to have a family?"

  What could Aunt Marnissey be expecting, after her life spent in public education efforts? "Some of our friends know, Aunt Marnissey. And some of them suspect. We haven’t made any formal announcements. We want to make sure nobody’s surprised when we do."

  "Have there been any incidents? What about your mother, does she know?"

  This was more serious an examination than Nebrunne had expected. She began to worry; but why would Aunt Marnissey deny her blessing? "Well, there’s been teasing, Aunt, because my uniform isn’t always perfect." And people affecting to check in linen stores to find her when Cilance was on shift, and making remarks about weddings and gestation periods.

  It was only the way they teased all courting couples. "And I’ve told Mam about Cilance, that I want to bring him home. I wanted to talk to you first of all. Please. Let us know that we can have your blessing, to be married."

  She sounded a bit more desperate than she liked, but it was because she didn’t understand. "And your people," Aunt Marnissey said, turning again to Cilance. "Have you spoken to your family? What do they say?"

  Cilance was bearing up under inquisition with grace and tact and forbearance, and if Nebrunne hadn’t loved him when they’d gotten here she would have loved him now for how gently he handled her great-aunt. Cilance nodded, as though considering her question.

  "My mother already knows Nebbie, ma’am, she’s in administration at the hospital. I haven’t really talked to my father or my brother and sisters, not yet. Nebbie wanted to speak to you first." A person’s family knew when something was up, that went without saying. Nebrunne had actually almost-met one of Cilance’s sisters before she’d met Cilance; they’d gone to the same intermediate-school, as it turned out, but they’d been three years apart.

  Aunt Marnissey sighed. "The world has changed," she said. "I only wonder if it’s changed enough. The Holy Mother knows it’s difficult enough just to be married without any additional complications, but they tell me that Fibranje is a nice station, a developing world."

  One outside the Combine, more to the point, where the impact of octaves of prejudice would be diminished by distance and dilution in the company of a majority of souls who weren’t any kind of Dolgorukij. Cilance’s family had been happy and prosperous in Orachin, but they both knew that there were better places to found a mixed marriage than Orachin: and Fibranje was likely to be one of them.

  "Difficult to be married," Cilance agreed, surprising Nebrunne. "Impossible to imagine life without Nebbie in it, ma’am. We mean to make a go of it."

  Nebrunne could hear the weight of the long nights of discussion in his voice, hours spent with their heads together arguing the yes against the no of it to see if they were equal to the challenge. What was more to the point it seemed that Aunt Marnissey could hear it too, because she pushed herself up out of her chair to stand and beckon them both to her.

  "Good answer," she said. "You give me hope for the future. Come here, children." Gathering both Nebrunne and Cilance to her as they knelt she kissed their foreheads, each in turn. "May the Holy Mother bless this match toward the working of Her will, and send you long life, health, and happiness, and children in due season."

  She sat back down. "Now go and speak to your families. Both of you. And I hope to not hear any of that disgusting Metoshan so-called music, at your wedding. Good-greeting, children, go away."

  Cilance helped her to her feet. Nebrunne leaned over her aunt and kissed her cheek with heart-felt gratitude; and then they fled the house together, with the house-keeper on her heels to see them out. It was a beautiful evening. She was too happy to want to talk, but Cilance had something on his mind, she could tell.

  Once they had walked a suitable distance away from the house she poked him in the side to get him to talk. Cilance looked side-wise at her and shrugged. "What d
o people have against Metoshan music, anyway? It’s a very cheerful idiom. What’s the problem?"

  It was a familiar complaint, requiring no answer. Nebrunne smiled happily at him, her heart full of love. "All right, Ipoxlotl music, then," she promised, and went arm-in-arm with Cilance down the street to catch the public-mover, and go home.

  End Note:

  My sister said she’d listened to Janis Ian perform "Society’s Child" with my mother, one time. Mom said that the point-of-view character had made the correct choice; my sister was quite naturally provoked with her about that.

  I’m pretty sure that my mom wasn’t making a racist value judgment so much as a strictly mom-based "I’d want my children to be happy, and it’s easier to be happy when you’re not struggling for acceptance at every turn" one. I wanted to do something with this song that might communicate the "you’re both right" reaction I had, listening to my sister tell the story.

  When I first re-visited the lyrics I meant to present Marnissey very coldly as a woman who’d made a self-aware choice to have an inconvenient lover beaten, and who would be punished for arranging the murderous assault for the rest of her life.

  Listening again to Janis perform this song, however, reminded me powerfully of the difference between the lyrics as text and the more complete story communicated by the words and the way the singer sings them. It became a gentler story—still ugly, but I hope more charitable.

  (Back to TOC)

  Murdering Stravinsky

  or

  Two Sit-Downs In Paris

  Barry N. Malzberg

  We’re bringing down the Beatles

  Dylan and his pals

  We’re working very hard

  to be the avante-garde

  Murdering Stravinsky

  ~ from Murdering Stravinsky by Janis Ian and Philip Clark

  Their brutal faces, clamorous voices, all one voice. In the theater and then out of it. Me, Igor Stravinsky, the force that through the green fuse drove the flower of the century.

  Murdered? Impossible? Believe none of it!

  Murdered!

  ~~~~~

  "You understand that decisions must be made," Diaghilev said to me in Paris, discussing our various career choices. Petrouchka a success, Firebird a success, Pulcinella so-so. Then came the War. This discussion in Paris was many years after the premiere when the memory of the riots was no longer so painful. The world had found much larger concerns, much bigger riots, since the Romanovs were so inconveniently upended. ("Come, Alexandra, there seems to be a little bit of an uprising. I am sure there is nothing worth our concern, but we should be cautious.")

  "This is a risky circumstance, everything has changed since the War. People have become more serious, more fearful, less interested in sensation. We artists who flourished through sensation, we must learn to moderate our work, to respect form. The winds of history blow against us now."

  So there we sat, the ballet master and myself, the soon-to-be-recognized-as-immortal Stravinsky and his attendant and one time professional colleague, what is known in Hollywood as the sidekick, Serge. Stravinsky still deep at that time into his irreligious period, I am ashamed to admit. Here poised our young, still-defiant codger, sitting calmly if somewhat nervously at that outlandish café in Paris, masks leering from the walls. Scuffling and incautious boulevardiers topped tables in their haste to lay passionate hands on one another, whether from desire or fury. We felt ourselves to be inconspicuous. A pair of fortunate refugees from the Revolution, fled from the steppes to take their ease in this decadent, shimmering Paris. Scandalous! But there we were twinned in exile, and all the better for it.

  This was the Twenties. What a lavishly misspent time! What foolishness! You could get away with almost everything in Paris: Hemingway and the other louts making plans for bullfights and whores in Spain, Joyce tippling his way through Ulysses and making a little time with Sylvia Beach whenever he could get away from Nora. Diaghilev was still obsessed by pirouettes and fouees and the attitudes of the altar boys at the barre. The War had changed everything, but he refused to notice. It was an offstage thumping struggle; the stink of cannon smoke affecting the dancers’ respiration, that was all. "The sounds you make, the shapes and colors I have created are unbearable to them. They may tolerate us for a little while, but soon that will come to an end. The Czar upon his throne thought that he was safe too; now consider his condition. And those Bolsheviks—"

  "Must we hear again about the Bolsheviks?" I said. "Haven’t they done enough in Russia? Here at least we can sit in the sun and look at the women." Lechery, I am ashamed to admit, in those decades before at last I returned to the faith, was so much a part of Stravinsky in those difficult, changing years. I lived too much for the poetry of the Earth. Expatriation is a problematic business anyway, unleashes the soul in unpleasant and damaging ways. Still, lechery always feels good at the time, which is one of its great lures.

  "No," Serge said, "We cannot hide. We can try our old tricks, old burglaries. Ah, lies and the curse of enchantment! They do not want the truth." He motioned in the general direction of Moscow, several thousand miles to the East but close as always, of course, to our hearts. "The Czar in his box did not want the truth either, but he learned

  after a while and tragically to respect it. The people here, however, they are trivial. They respect nothing."

  Were they trivial? If so, what was wrong with that? What terrors from frivolity after the horrors of great seriousness and international debate? This old, this exhausted world had staggered from the abyss of a terrible war, a generation laid to waste and etc., what was wrong with triviality, with burgundy at a café in midday? This was not a question worth arguing with Serge, however. Nothing would change him. There had been plenty of trouble in Moscow once we realized that the second Revolution was not going to be at all like the First. Everyone but the Romanovs came to see that quickly.

  What had Anastasia, the last daughter of the Romanovs, been thinking in the basement of the Palace? Was she making any plans at all or simply praying? Did she think that rescue was coming? Did she think that the Bolsheviks were unarmed peasants who in the presence of the Czar would bow and retreat? Who can judge the thoughts of a little girl so long ago? Yet somehow this is of crucial importance; if I could deduce Anastasia’s state of mind I might somehow have comprehended my own.

  Serge had said: stay, stay, your time is coming. We should not go anywhere. This is only a temporary situation. He, no scholar of historical trends, liked his caviar and routine and the thunder of bells in the Square. He thought that it would go on that way. "Do not anger royalty. The pleasures of royalty are our only way toward salvation." He was wrong then as thirty years later he would have been wrong about the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  "Nonsense," he said at the worst of it. "This will come to nothing. This rabble will never win." At that moment Anastasia was hiding in the basement, the last of the survivors. The castle shook. She knew that soon they would find her. They would come into the basement, lay enormous hands upon her, spirit her away. Like the rowdies at The Rite of Spring they had no respect for the abominable truth of desire, even for the hopeless damaged fabric of a little girl lost in the entrails of the Palace.

  ~~~~~

  Fifty years later, after all of the changes, after the unpleasant business which was the Soviet system itself had broken free and poured into the West, I felt once again that I was done for. I knew that it was only a matter of time before they came for me as well. They had even done away with those young British hoodlums, the Insects I used to call them. Sam Goldwyn would have appreciated that, and the replacement of the Insects was no great loss. No loss to music, to humanity, to anything with ears. Good riddance, in fact.

  But the business with Britten had been a scandal. They shot him—as they had shot Magritte and with a fine sense of justice—in his hat while he was conducting an Altenburg. Britten had been knighted, he composed a ballet for the Coronation, was a courtie
r to Elizabeth, the Queen’s composer…but unlike the Insects, he could tell a hawk from a handsaw and he had managed to escape.

  Britten must have been thinking: the world will see yet another Peter Grimes before I kick the bucket. I have written the War Requiem and in so doing have beaten them. He must have been dismayed when they shot him. How could they do this? He had been knighted. Britten must have also thought that he was exempt from all historical judgment.

  Rumors persist that he fled successfully to a remote village in Poland whose name cannot be translated. Pushgorny? Pvgorny? If so, it is there that he sits beside the equally traumatized and furious Peter Pears, sulking at the blasted landscape, the unhappy peasants, the rumble of distant gunfire. A long way from the Four Sea Interludes for the Queen’s Musician. A goodly distance from Altenburg, yes? Of course Britten’s gifts were always overrated, a feeble and pretentious composer whose work in no way approached the heights of my own distinguished canon. Britten did to English composition what that charlatan Schoenberg had done to the diatonic scale. (It is merciful that Schoenberg has been dead seventeen years now. What they would have done to him is too fierce to contemplate. His small pension from the university and unhealthy arrogance would have ill-prepared him for this cataclysm.)

  And old Pablo. They got Pablo all right. They caught him in bed with Francoise and made short work of the old lecher. When they buried him, his own brush slashed the sky, the bloody cubist sky and his sketches, those wild and improbable explosions of his need spinning maniacally before the world’s gaped spaces… A tornado of fingers and shattered horses and then, after he was planted, the silence, rain on the grave, Francoise weeping, unholy water drowning the past. Another charlatan, old Pablo, but lovable in his folly and as a lecher myself, I could appreciate his predilection. Of course the panels from Diaghilev had been snatched from his paintings. Any fool could see this. Cubism and the twisted limbs of sacrifice merged.