by Anna Tambour
The Omniscient had not chased anyone before but he was the Omniscient.
The Muse had been chased by many men, but never the Omniscient, so after circuiting London for a moment, she stopped. “What do you know about this?”
“It’s your crandolin. And who was he?”
The look on the Omniscient’s face was not what she was accustomed to. A sneer? And who was he—that guy whose black shoes, socks, black jeans and black limp t-shirt lay so insouciantly on the floor as if they didn’t miss the body that had just so recently given them a reason to exist?
The Muse and the Omniscient raced each other back to the scene. The Omniscient won. He had witnessed far too many faints and deaths to waste a glance at the librarian/writer crumpled beside the epicentre of Disturbance. He sped instead to the sprawl of raiments with no body in them. In he darted down the neck of the t-shirt, in the manner that an inspector would—if, he chuckled gleefully, an inspector could waft like me.
As he expected, the t-shirt was just as hollow as the socks, the legs of the jeans as hollow, too. But just as he ahhed upon entering the bulging lefthand front jeans pocket, the Muse barged in.
“Why are you so interested?” he demanded.
“Why shouldn’t I be?”
Why should you be, you fabricator? he thought, but was too polite to say.
“Who is he?” she said, thinking I’m not myself. Was it something I drank?
“Don’t crowd me so.” He inspected further.
That did it. She dropped the book on the table and shoved herself in beside the Omniscient in the wallet, where she met the credit cards of ‘Mr Nicholas Vin Kippax’. Anyone but him!
Panicking, she slipped out of wallet and pocket. The Omniscient followed her. They hovered over the table. She was so flustered, she looked uncertain—and rather touchingly old, like something in a roadside diner story—that cloud of cigarette smoke suspended over a plate of bacon and eggs.
She tried to think but couldn’t think of something nasty to say, something that might restore her dignity. I’ve never been observed. This is intolerable! She wanted to flee, but that would look, O! Where’s my goddessness?
“Why did you take that book?” The Omniscient sounded suspiciously solicitous.
I don’t know. She grabbed the book—only to fumble the snatch. The thing fell out of her hands and hit the floor with a sharp noise, and then a sussurance of heavily put-upon pages, not that she stooped to notice. I want to be alone, home with my face and shoes off. I want to cry like a woman and damn the world. Even escaping in wine prose had just lost its appeal. I’m so very tired.
“I was tired, too,” he said. “Until this extraordinarity.”
“How dare you to listen to my thoughts.”
“Young lady, at your decibels, I could hardly block my ears. I say again: Why did you take that book? And why did you put it back as if you hadn’t picked it up? You cannot change that fact. You know we are not to interfere.”
“Gorgonna! You critique me. Do you know how much work you’ve given me from your failures?”
They glared at each other. It was all he could do to glare in a dignified manner. She didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted by the ‘young lady’.
Two clouds approached and caught up to them. Hers was a hot sticky swirl of love and need and pleas from millions of Richard K. Stubbses—all variations on a theme of Come, I need you. I can’t live without you. The Omniscient’s cloud was a black whirlwind: I asked for the straight stuff. This is bullshit. and You bastard. You’ve left me hanging.
“Anything but that,” they both thought at the exact same time.
“This is indeed an extraordinarity,” he said, gathering up the book and laying it on a table. “We should secrete ourselves where we can unravel this mystery.”
Escape!
Maybe they both heard that, maybe not.
She caught herself in the act of reaching into her pocket.
“An extraordinarity,” she busily thought. Excellent description. A crandolin, Nick Kippax . . . Perhaps the Omniscient has a use. He’s dull as a rational explanation, though . . .
He smiled at her, all uncle-ish. She considered inviting him to her place. A crandolin, Nick Kippax . . . Escape . . . and she said what popped into her head:
“Do you like trains?”
Since my office is in the Whitefield area (eastern suburbs) in Bangalore, I planned to board from Krishnarajapuram, known locally as KRPuram (close to railfan Karthik’s home). One of my office friends dropped me at the station at 1610 hours. The approach to the platform is pretty bad. Lucky if you don’t sprain your ankle! 4 platforms in all, 8004 was to come in at Pf 2. As I made my way there, a 10-coach passenger came in hauled by a WDM2 at Pf3. No boards, but, likely to be Madras-SBC Pass. On Pf 2, there was an outdated board (no mention of AC), fortunately in English, mentioning the coach sequence of the Expresses stopping there. Very few respectable trains do.
—Arnab Acharya,
from Indian Railways Fan Club Trip Report 8003 Trip No. 2
Look a mirror in the face
NICK KIPPAX, such as he was also, stared at himself in the mirror. Galina applied a thin paste she’d made of cold potato water and smooshed rye, clouding his view. It looked like she’d applied a paste of exactly that, if you knew your ingredients, and if you didn’t, it could make you want to cross yourself.
For the Adwentoursomme.
“Some adventure.”
Nick howled his bloody head off, threw pans across Galina’s galley, slashed the seats with knives, all after he’d choked the life out of that jerk, Valentin, and threw up at the sight of the pignosed Savva—all figuratively speaking.
Galina felt none of his angst. He was a disgusting, disfiguring rash on her otherwise blemishless, cherries-and-cream face. Nothing personal, but Galina hated that rash with all her passionate heart.
Nick didn’t take it personally. He did, however, feel her heart beat. He felt her moods. He felt the soul of Galina, her hopes, her fears. Her vagina, from inside.
“So much for ancient virgin blood.”
Two steps back
A GUST OF FOUL WIND hit Nick Kippax, or more properly speaking, another part of what Nick Kippax had become. Then an evil spray made him try to shrink into himself—impossible, stuck as he was in a matrix of honey. Nick had never been so close to a mouthful of rotten teeth. He cursed his state. What good is seeing and smelling if I can’t strike him dead with a wish?
Ekmel the honey merchant slurped back a gobbet of drool. The night before had been that kind he most wanted to remember. His head felt like a pressed radish. And his storeroom!
“How could I leave it like this?” He knew, though the details were as water poured upon sand:
Last night, at the height of mundane happiness (always the madness smote him at those heady heights) he pulled his robes back on and ran free of the importune of soft arms, singing companions. He ran to his storeroom where alone in the dead of night, he opened all his jars and boxes—to coo to them, to appreciate them with the pure emotion of a true connoisseur in private communion with his loves. They drove him crazy—he never knew what for, but he always fainted at one point in the rapture of stocktaking. Joy and Worry, two beasts hobbled together for eternity, by Desire. He always remembered that much. He’d opened his eyes to see the ceiling of his storeroom, and daylight gazing back at him with the coldness of his wife.
But this morning, rat droppings bold as his wife’s demands sat where a honeycomb had stood. In a wide-mouthed crock filled with amaranth honey from Çis, a mouse hung upside down, its fur encrusted with golden bubbles. Sample jars gaped everywhere. Strawtips poked from one, a glob of cobwebs clogged another. Easily sieved, both.
The third sample jar, however (isn’t it always the third?) . . . “Hoo,” he coughed. He peered closer yet. That remarkable colour that was not like honey, but was like . . . a chill ran up his spine.
“Like a disease.” Yes, he talked
to himself. So? A wise man is quiet in public and talks to himself alone.
“Or (he shuddered) the hue of a young woman’s cheeks at a certain time.” Disease and women are best kept away from home.
“Fool!” When he was sober and unhung-over, Ekmel scorned superstition. He ladled a pitcher of water, drank half, removed his cap and poured the rest of the frigid water over his close-cropped scalp.
Yesterday he’d filled that sample jar with the cheapest, ordinariest, most insipidly colourless clover honey. He dried his head on a towel and stuck his face (revoltingly) close to the jar again. (Some nostrils are not made to be looked into.)
The honey shimmered redly. Defiantly?
“Unsievable.”
The jar was worthless, the honey contaminated beyond redemption. Any other merchant would have tossed the jar into the street to be picked up by an urchin. Not Ekmel. Waste not, people said, a lesson stinking of misers and paupers.
Instead:
Waste nothing on the ordinary man.
There is no such thing as spoiled.
And Quiet.
Those three keys, a client list, a collection of unpaid creditors and a donkey were all the wealth he’d inherited. His father, a great carouser, had said:
“With these keys, if you have watched me, you will grow richer than if I left you a house of gold.”
It is bad luck to curse your father, and anyway who was Ekmel to disagree? He worked too hard to think in those early years, but he constantly used the keys. Indeed, he grew richer (and rounder) than his father. His father the unfaithful, contrasted mightily with the son, who never cheated on what he called his two loving wives, “Honey” and “Intelligence”.
“What happened to you?” he said to the honey in the jar. “I’m sure it’s nothing serious.” Not sure at all. Use the keys.
The honey glowed. So does fish on a hot day. So do rubies.
“Who did this to you?” Ekmel asked, thinking at first, that the answer needed a great detective, or a wizard who could spy on time.
At first Ekmel wasted time thinking of who he knew who could solve the puzzle, till he, in thinking of the smartest person he could think of, solved his own puzzle, for the smartest person also had the motivation, the sneak.
“Burhanettin!”
He had to have done this, but what did he have to gain by turning what was honey in this little pot, into something else? Ekmel didn’t know, but he knew that only that helvassia-i-dukka Burhanettin knew honey as well as a bee. Only Burhanettin would know that Ekmel’s heart would spasm at this lurid glow, and that Ekmel would not be able to sleep till he knew how to deal with it. Only Burhanettin belittled Ekmel’s integrity at their every meeting. Had Burhanettin, the celebrated confectioner, been so turned by his perverted pleasures that he craved new heights, planting this evil shock to further plague the poor unsuspecting honey merchant?
Ekmel couldn’t fathom, but the insults Burhanettin had always tossed to him made his ears burn now. This has gone too far. To come into my own storeroom, my sanctum. Why, I’ll have to get into his workroom and dye his nougat blue . . . Better yet, I’ll drizzle it with mustard oil!
Nick heard all this, and like Eve to the snake, the pussycat to the owl, Nick understood Ekmel’s every spoken word, whatever his language, whatever the place; whatever the hell, the century.
Nick breathed a mental sigh as Ekmel removed his face from the jar’s proximity. Then Ekmel rammed a stopper in the jar’s mouth.
Three steps forward, to the master of the lips of love
FROM THE GLASS, Nick Kippax watched Burhanettin beat, stir, chop, pour, measure, pour, boil, slice into patterns and roll into shapes as varied as snowflakes. Gild, silver, box, pile into breast-shapes and pyramids. Nick could smell and see, and he could imagine the taste and texture of each sweet that Burhanettin created. He didn’t know anything about the helvassian-i-dukkan, specialists in honey- based confections, but he always reckoned he’d know a true master chef if ever he met one.
Nick was more than awed. The man he watched was a moustachioed, mighty-muscled genius who bore conditions so primitive they made Kippax feel smaller than ever about his own renowned skills.
Too soon Burhanettin cleaned up, scrubbing his sticky pots till they shone. He wrapped one large load of nougat and dropped it into a sack. Nick tried to imagine the addicts who depended on Burhanettin—how many this production would satisfy for how long. He was moved when Burhanettin decanted every drop of what Burhanettin called Kirand-luhun from the little glass to a small and sturdy glazed jar like Ekmel’s.
Then Burhanettin stoppered the jar, dammit.
Nick heard a thud—that sack being slung over a shoulder?
Then he felt himself picked up and dropped a short distance, and joggled. Warmth. A sack hanging from his waist, against his underclothes. He’s on the move.
The heavy kitchen door creaked opened, latched shut.
“Uncle,” Burhanettin said. “Take these keys.”
Nick heard the sound of a crotchety old man unwrapping himself from a rough blanket, the slip of a reed mat.
“Impossible! What is this?” A voice that had lost a few chords. He’d be good with a cane across a boy’s back. “The helvas!”
“In the cabinet,” Burhanettin assured, “just as you left them.”
Nick heard a slap of feet, the creak of glass sliding in wood.
Perhaps the old man was counting.
“And in my room,” said Burhanettin. “Enough to fill you with joy.”
“And you?”
“I’ll be back when I return.”
“Hmph. May your—”
“Yes yes,” cutting short a quarter-hearted blessing. “And you.”
Nick heard the door to the shop open and Burhanettin call back, “Don’t just guard them, Uncle. If someone pays you, let them escape.”
No love match
NICK KIPPAX, SUCH AS HE ALSO WAS, felt as irritated as the bladder- pipe. Of all places to be stuck.
She’s bad news, mate, Nick told Faldarolo. What do you see in her? Not that Nick really expected the man to be able to explain such execrable taste, even if he were sensitive enough to know that Nick was anything other than just a pain in the bladder-pipe.
A syrupy story
THE WOMAN IN RED caught the train with one hand and swung on, her long hair snapping. The cuddly man in the gorgeous paisley waistcoat was next. Only a passing lark saw them board but the facts that the train had not slowed and that Pshov station was the closest (and it, two hours away) were of no interest to the bird any more than the speed of the sun. Instead, the lark did notice that the female toted a case covered in spiderwebs; the male, a yellow portmanteau. Neither case leaked seeds or worms, so the lark flew onwards.
“Luxurious accommodation,” said the Omniscient.
From their bunk/seats (across from each other at the window table in the first compartment that the Muse had opened the door to—“3C”—a 4-bunker with no other occupants, that the Muse and omniscient somehow filled within moments, as any mortal would), the Muse and the Omniscient watched the snow-clad land flow by—fast as a river of milk so vast the opposite bank lies in another horizon.
“Have you ever travelled by train?” she said.
“The Americas were once excellent for copy,” he answered wistfully. He ran a thumb over the pattern ingrained in the red leatherette seat cover. “I’ve been on this train before,” I think.
“In what form?”
The Omniscient didn’t say, and the Muse didn’t press the matter.
Every so often, a village would float by. Fanciful carvings, brightly painted romantic fripperies—swirls and hearts and animals and flowers, poked out from snow-capped cottages made with logs. In their seas of snow they looked half sunk, and they listed drunkenly. Their front doors were half the height of a man and the windows looked only half as big as they should be, scrunched but twinkling as a fat woman’s eyes.
The cottages’ cheerful
, sagging shapes reminded the Omniscient of a story . . . One snowy noon, a cart filled with sweet-boxes was boarded by three men. They slew the driver and tossed him into a drift. A short time later, the snowfall turned into a blizzard. At first the men argued, but soon enough crawled under the cart together, agreeing to sleep there for the night. But before night fell, the wind died, and one of the men crawled out. Making many exaggeratedly quiet movements that proved he was up to no good, he unharnessed the horse. The Omniscient watched, wondering what would happen next when suddenly the two other thieves jumped on the stealthy one’s back, and the horse neighed, and with the ease and speed of a fish leaping through waves, the horse raced away, its bells jangling, through fields too treacherous and deep with snow, for men. By the time the Omniscient directed his attention back to the thieves and cart, they were nowhere to be seen, their footsteps disappearing within metres, but soggy sweet-boxes were strewn all over the snow.
He remembered the boxes specifically because they trailed ribbons and bled red and green on the snow. They made him hungry for Roman ices, so he had dictated, “like Roman ices” and the author took that down, only to delete it the next morning, muttering, “Where’d I get this crap from?”
Like syrups on snow the Omniscient had said at another time. Was that kept?
He tried to recall the last time he’d been here, if he’d been, but instead, the song of the train’s wheels made him need to do something, before their lullaby put him to sleep.
Shivering whispers
SAVYA WAS SO HAPPY that if Galina had asked him to turn up his nose at vodka, he would have forsworn that balm for her. Blissfully, she was ignorant of her newly-acquired power.
“All my beauty ruined,” she sobbed into his hollow chest.
The railway carriage rocked and clucked in its motherly way as the train raced ever forward over vastness lit only by the train’s eyes and stars shining on snow.