Granta 131

by Sigrid Rausing

  This is the best wood I have. I’ve put all the perfume I have on it, and I’ve shaved it into little slivers as best I could with these old fingers. Aren’t you enjoying it?

  You know, it occurred to me – I have to say this quietly, and I shouldn’t say it at all, which is why I have to whisper it into your metal ear – that maybe that soldier heard wrong. Maybe our city lost. Maybe your priests will come and kill the men downstairs and set you free and carry you back to your city on their shoulders in triumph.

  I don’t know if they’d consider me your enemy. Don’t worry. I’m not worried.

  But it doesn’t seem likely. My city’s armies are stronger, the gods are bigger and heavier and made of more gold.

  And even if that is what’s happened, that doesn’t cheer you, does it?

  God, why are you so sad? There was a little boy whose spirit ate the bones of his neighbours while he slept. Shall I tell you a story? Will you tell me stories? How do you rush across the valleys? When you fly, is it with the slow strokes of a heron? Do you scatter farms with blood? How do the hunters of your city honour you?

  Oh you must remember the Washing of the Mouth! When one minute this was wood and gold, and then it was you. Do you remember, these eyes for you to see with, these hands, this staff you carry? When the people made you?

  I’ll tell you a story then. This is a story I tell myself from time to time. A tiny city was overrun by soldiers who took its little god and a very young local man to look after it. The two of them were locked away together. The man was sad because he’d seen the soldiers kill his family with swords and now he was without them. The god was sad for godly reasons. Because he’d let his people down and now their crops would rot, and because he knew how they’d come for him and look at him when they got him back and no one had ever asked him to god them.

  The man cried and he was angry with the god. ‘My baby’s dead,’ the man said. ‘My wife is dead. What good are you? Set me free. You’re the only god of my city so you’re the god of everything. Harvests and war and childbirth and everything. And death. I’m too afraid,’ the man shouted. There were knives in the armoury but he wouldn’t pick them up. ‘So you do it for me. Don’t I worship you? Do it.’

  The god felt the man’s worship and, further away, the worship of his other people as they approached with ransom. It gave him no strength, it made him tired.

  The man and the god watched from the top window of the tower. ‘They’re coming,’ the man said, ‘and you’ll have to start doing your job again.’

  The man looked into the god’s silver eyes. The god looked into the man’s grey. The man jerked like a toy, grabbed his chest, gasped and wheezed and fell down.

  The priests and the soldiers of the victorious city came up the stairs, escorting the defeated holy men and women. They heard a great crash and a scream. They rushed into the top room.

  Strewn across the floor were the remains of the captive god. The man had smashed it against the walls. It was all in pieces. Its wood was in splinters. Its metal was twisted. Its gems – and there were never many – were scattered and broken. There in the middle of the rubbish stood the young prisoner. He was slapping the sides of his own body and his head, screaming and staring with wide eyes at his own hands.

  The high priest assured his defeated enemies that this hadn’t been his orders, that it was an insane action by this slave. Who was, he reminded them, one of their own countrymen. Nonetheless, the deicide brought a bit of shame to the priest. It had occurred under his city’s authority. Of course their city had to stay under his city’s control, but they could keep their ransom. And the slave, he told them, would be executed.

  But when they’d gone, he looked thoughtfully at the young man, who was still gripping his own flesh as if it bewildered him.

  ‘I’m going to have you whipped,’ he said. ‘But what happened? You hate gods now? All of them? Or just your own? For failing you?

  ‘If you ever do anything like that again without instruction,’ he said, ‘I’ll have you killed. But I need a slave who has a bit of scorn for gods. A bit of spite. Just enough not to be cowed by them.’

  He had the young man whipped, and then he had him bandaged, and then he told him what his duties would be. And the new slave said to him, ‘Not spite. Pity.’

  Don’t be afraid. Were you sleeping? I’m going to take my hand off your mouth now.

  Can you see the moon?

  Oh, thank you. You’re kind. You are a kind god. Let me kiss your cold face.

  Tonight I could hear the soldiers downstairs like snorting calves.

  I heard them eating and laughing, shuffling in their blankets, and I started to hear them more and more clearly. I heard, I heard the secrets that floors and walls tell in their creaks. When I got up I don’t remember, or how, perhaps I flew as if my feet had little wings, or as if my head was a cloud. But I was by the window and that moon talked back to me in its light.

  There are things about the ways bodies see. There are things to be said for how flesh eyes see night and fail to see it. But to look through shadows to where the mountains are like the teeth of fishes again! Everything’s silver like the metal that was upstairs on the floor a long time ago.

  The soldiers are moving early. Visitors are coming with tribute for you.

  Don’t be sad, god. What you’ve done – it’s such a thing. Follow my finger towards, yes, there, not a bat but a moth, and its heart rises in its little moth chest because it’s in love. Geese will wake and cry in the day soon, and the lava in the ground will answer them.

  I’ll put my arms around you. These are old man’s arms but let me carry you, my friend, let’s rise, like when you fly. Yes you’re heavy even though you’re not so very gold but I don’t care how heavy you are. I’m not as heavy as I was once either, or as strong, but I’ll carry you.

  Look. In the mountains are rock machines and rock ships with eyes, and we can see the edges in the seamless stone that separate those things from the rock that holds up the trees.

  Your worshippers are coming. I know. Come up with me to the top room.

  They’re coming to buy your freedom, you small heavy god. Your city’ll be a colony and your worshippers’ll take you back.

  Come in. That’s only wood on the floor. All the scraps of silver they took away, years ago, to make more of their own gods in the city. That wood I leave there for nostalgia. To push it into my fingers.

  You never heard my name and I never heard yours. It doesn’t matter at all. Listen to what that angry cloud is telling you, the mutter of all the animals on the crest of the hill.

  I can’t remember: did a young man destroy his miserable god, or did a god free its worshipper and take his blood and his bones?

  Well.

  Let me put you here to talk to the sun, which is coming soon, to talk to it with your motionless golden mouth and the scatter of its heat on you. Let me put you down – these arms are shaking! – not in the alcove by the junk of an older god’s body, but right here, out on the ledge as far as I can, so the wind worships you. That worship doesn’t hurt? No. That you can bear a minute.

  They’ll call me mad again. Here come your worshipping people, and that’s another thing: don’t worry, you’re ready, and no one will do anything for you or to you, you do it all, you’re a god, you move in your ways. I’ll put you one tiny bit closer to the air so the birds are ready for you.

  And don’t think me rude as I leave a little grease kiss on the back of your head and turn my back. This is your communion. I’m going to jump and dance – these old legs! The floor’s vibrating, more and more now as here come the soldiers and your worshippers. Don’t be sad, you needn’t see: you are facing the other way.

  My dance makes the tower shake. You quiver on your threshold.

  They call out to you! How sad they are to see you move!

  And you aren’t sad any more. Thank you, you kind god.

  So. Feathers like mountains, or knives, unfolded gold?
Rush.

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  SANDRA SIMONDS

  Model Reconstruction of Ancient Rome

  In the lower right is the Pantheon. We use a program called

  MODFLOW to model groundwater and pull down

  of the aquifer. There isn’t going

  to be much more water. The sun moves across the oculus

  as children dig holes in the garden.

  Here I am. My name is Sadie. I am a ‘mom’

  living in the 21st century. Mostly, I am not a poet

  but today I have stolen a few hours from work.

  The structure of the whole

  is a symbol of the world.

  Arches spring up. Do you want to go to Sephora

  and get some fake eyelashes?

  Here I am. Sephora, symbol of stolen work.

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  CONTRIBUTORS

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  John Ashbery is the author of more than twenty volumes of poetry. His new collection, Breezeway, is published this spring. A two-volume set of his collected translations from the French (poetry and prose) was published in 2014.

  Jesse Ball’s work includes the novels Silence Once Begun and The Curfew. ‘The Gentlest Village’ is an extract from A Cure for Suicide, forthcoming from Pantheon Books in July 2015.

  Nick Caistor has translated more than forty books from the Portuguese and Spanish from authors such as José Saramago, Roberto Arlt, Andrés Neuman, Juan Marsé and César Aira. He is the editor and translator of The Faber Book of Contemporary Latin American Short Stories.

  Kevin Canty is the author of three story collections and four novels, including Winslow in Love and Everything. His short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Tin House and elsewhere.

  Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of classics.

  Jon Fosse is an internationally renowned Norwegian writer and playwright. In 2007, he was made a Knight in France’s National Order of Merit.

  Janine di Giovanni is the Middle East editor of Newsweek. A war and conflict reporter for twenty-five years, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was recently made an Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University for her work on trauma victims. She also advises the United Nations Refugee Agency and the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.

  Peter Gizzi’s most recent books include In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems 1987–2011 and Threshold Songs. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

  Charles Glass was ABC News’s chief Middle East correspondent from 1983 to 1993 and is the author of four books on the region, including the forthcoming Syria Burning.

  Noémie Goudal’s solo show, The Geometrical Determination of the Sunrise, will be presented at the New Art Gallery Walsall and at Foam Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam.

  Sebastià Jovani is a novelist, essayist and poet whose most recent book is the novel Transnistria. ‘The Archive’ was first published in Spanish in the latest issue of Granta en español, Rebaño + 1 (Herd + 1).

  Kathryn Maris’s most recent poetry collection, God Loves You, was published in 2013.

  China Miéville is the author of The City & The City, Embassytown and London’s Overthrow, among many other works of fiction and non-fiction. His forthcoming collection is Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories, published in 2015.

  Ottessa Moshfegh is the author of McGlue, a novella. Her first novel, Eileen, will be published in the US this year and in the UK in 2016.

  Tracy O’Neill is the author of The Hopeful, published in June 2015. Her work has appeared in Grantland, Rolling Stone, the Atlantic and Bookforum. In 2012, she was awarded the NYC Emerging Writers Fellowship by the Center for Fiction.

  Damion Searls translates from the Norwegian, Dutch, German and French. His translations of Jon Fosse include Melancholy (with Grethe Kvernes), Aliss at the Fire and Morning and Evening, as well as the libretto for an opera of Morning and Evening, premiering at the Royal Opera House in 2015.

  Raja Shehadeh is a lawyer and writer. His books include Strangers in the House, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape and, most recently, Language of War, Language of Peace: Palestine, Israel and the Search for Justice. He lives in Ramallah.

  Sandra Simonds is the author of four collections of poetry: Ventura Highway in the Sunshine, The Sonnets, Mother Was a Tragic Girl and Warsaw Bikini. She is a professor of English and humanities at Thomas University in Georgia.

  Arch Tait was awarded the PEN Literature in Translation Prize in 2010 for his translation of Anna Politkovskaya’s Putin’s Russia. To date he has translated twenty-seven books from the Russian, most recently the memoirs of Akhmed Zakayev.

  Ian Teh has published three monographs: Undercurrents, Traces and Confluence. His work is part of the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Hood Museum of Art. Traces II was supported by the 2011 Magnum Emergency Fund and the 2014 Abigail Cohen Fellowship in Documentary Photography.

  Ludmila Ulitskaya studied biology at Moscow University and worked at the Institute of Genetics until she was fired for dissident activities. She later became a scriptwriter and repertory director of the Hebrew Theatre of Moscow. She is the author of thirteen works of fiction, three tales for children and six plays. In 2001 she won the Russian Booker Prize.

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