by Anna Tambour
“Dear friends:”
He looked first to the startled Burhanettin, then to the astounded, blushing Faldarolo.
“Our journey has almost ended,” Ekmel said. “We part soon, most likely never to meet again.”
“What?” said Burhanettin. “You’re not going home with me?”
“There is nothing left for me.”
“Your honeys! Where will I get your honeys?”
Ekmel leaned back against the donkey’s side, but addressed Burhanettin: “Would you have waited faithfully for me to visit your town again?”
“Of course not. How could I?” said Burhanettin before he listened to himself, but he must have heard the echo. He frowned, and pulled irritably on the one horn left of his moustache.
“And you,” said Ekmel to Faldarolo.
“As She,” and Ekmel laid his hand on the donkey’s neck. “She forgave me. She and I forgive you. And we wish you to find the answers to the troubles in your soul.”
Faldarolo hung his head.
On the bladder, Nick broke into the closest thing he could, to tears. How he wished he could do something!
Creeping forward with a dreadful deliberation, she arches her neck over the worm, considering it with her beady eye. Then, as it begins to take refuge beneath the shingle — for worms seem to understand that toads are no friends to them — Martha pounces and grips it by the middle. Next comes a long strain, like that of a thrush dragging at a branding in the garden, and after the strain, the struggle.
Heavens! what a fight it is! Magnify the size of the combatants by five hundred, and no man would dare to stay to look at it. The worm writhes and rolls; Martha, seated on her bulging haunches, beats its extremities with her front paws — cramming, pushing, gulping, and lo! gradually the worm seems to shorten. Shorter it grows, and shorter yet. It is vanishing into Martha’s inside. And now nothing is left but a little pink tip projecting from the corner of her mouth, in appearance not unlike that of a lighted cigarette.
—H. Rider Haggard,
A Farmer’s Year
The white breast
INSTEAD OF GOING DIRECTLY TO 3c, the Muse went to the smoking section, attracted to the noise and discomfort.
At the window, in Carriage 2, Valentin was waiting. He’d almost used up his patience, but had distracted himself by estimating the haul, for he had the confidence of the optimist that she would return, and this time when she did . . . !
He’d calculated that, with a wad she flicked that much, he could live for the rest of his life in some seaside resort and have a different woman every night, and two on Tuesdays.
She stuck her hand in a pocket—a different pocket than before, but it made the same irresistible sound.
She was wearing a common white coat, the type worn by lab workers and shop assistants where they sell cabbages—but what did that matter? What this woman’s game was, he’d ceased to care. The only thing that mattered was that that incomparably sexy sound she made, flicking the wad, was soon going to be something he did for himself.
He opened the door casually, and the cold air tore open his jacket which had lost every one of its buttons in that skirmish with the tourists.
He ignored the cold and smiled, as the baring of his pure white chest was something that had always been another of his tricks.
The woman pretended to ignore him, and halfway turned to the door of Carriage 3.
“Not that way, my beauty!” growled Valentin, and he threw his arms around her.
She went completely still, the better for him to run his hands down her sides . . .
Just when he’d reached something, she clasped her hands to his, and clutched them to her.
“Ahh,” he grrred.
She whirled around and faced him, her nostrils dilated and her hair gone so big and sexy, he almost lost his sense of purpose, but “patience!” he cautioned himself, and smiled into her eyes.
She smiled into his eyes and shimmied back in little tiptoed steps of those incredible red boots.
“So it’s games we play, my cherry tart?” said he.
“If you say,” she giggled, raising one shoulder in the cutest little gesture.
Don’t play games! something in him said. Get it now! and kick her off the train.
She took a small step forward with her left foot, and swung her right with supernatural force, right at Valentin’s heart.
He flew off the train and into the air, passing over birds both singly and in flocks, overflying experimental institutes and towns that existed on no maps. He soared through cloud banks and beyond, up through the inner and outer atmospheres of Earth, where he grabbed at a glove reported lost by some astronaut whenever, and a biodegradable plastic bag, and a robot hand that twitched, and where he passed spiders trailing gossamer lines, and he was dropped down into shattered forts where he grabbed at cornerstones and those wooden posts that stick out of towers, and tore the skin off his hand as he was whisked away and along and through, and he counted the humps of camels in caravans and sneezed on particles of early gunfire and choked on the fumes of burning towns with mouldy straw roofs and lots of decaying bodies—and he sped through forests of bluebells, just high enough from them to almost pick one, when he was whisked back up to the vastness of noplace where he was just a spec in a zillion unidentifiable flying and floating objects as he travelled in an oblique orbit—hitting and breaking through space and time continuums till he didn’t know where he was at any time, nor when it was, but whenever it was and wherever, it didn’t matter because there was nothing he could do about it nor was there any way he could just die.
But, he hadn’t gone without a fight. When she kicked him, he grabbed at her hair, and it was one small comfort that he tore out a good handful. He dropped it of course, while his eyes were closed and he whizzed around screaming his guts out. But it was a small satisfaction.
Another small satisfaction was the bit of red on the tip of the Muse’s right boot, which is where Nick ended up after he pulled himself loose from Galina’s face.
Being in the best of all positions when the Muse gave the putrid Valentin, who’d been such a pig to Galina, the old what for, it was good he had no gullet or he would have choked himself laughing.
Flush
THE OMNISCIENT slunk away. He had watched through the window of Carriage 3, so he saw Valentin wrap the Muse in his arms. He saw Valentin’s hands, saw the passion in the man’s eyes. He saw the Muse clutch Valentin’s hands close—and he wanted to do as he’d seen so often. Yes, he wanted to hoist Valentin on something tall—and watch him scream at first like a worm on a hook . . . and then watch him . . . die . . . whimpering.
But love made him clutch his passions and stand as still as a watcher through a pinprick in a paper screen, for: If She loves him, who am I to interfere?
Her creativity allows her to find value where I do not.
He was just turning to slink off to travel into some sort of oblivion if he could find a way, since I am cursed with useless immortality, when he saw the denouement.
She rejected him! Maybe she never loved him. Maybe he . . . that cad!
The Omniscient wanted to rush to her, but stopped himself just before this foolish act.
Yes, he slunk away. What do you have to offer? he asked himself.
Sentimentally, he walked back to 3C and climbed up to his bunk.
A moment later, she wandered in, her face tragic and brave and lined and, oh, so very beloved.
She didn’t look up to his bunk. Indeed, she acted as if his side of the room had never existed. Instead, she sat on her bottom bunk and reached in her pocket and took out that pack of cards she was always flicking, and laid one card on the table.
Without daring to breathe, he stretched forward, and saw: Death.
“Hah,” she said.
She flicked another card on top of that.
Two Fools.
“I could have guessed,” she shouted.
She tore the next card from the t
op of the pack, and threw it on top of the others.
A Spotted Youth.
Her forehead creased. Next she took a card from the middle of the pack. The Omniscient smiled at her cheating herself.
“An Unintended Consequence”, it said.
The Omniscient had never seen a tarot deck like this, so he was all afire to see the next card.
“An Apple”, it said, but it showed distinctly a medium, flushed and russeted (and the Omniscient was willing to bet: crisp, sweet and aromatic) Golden Harvey, otherwise known as Brandy Apple, first grown in England (Herts.) in the 1600s.
“Geeveston Fanny,” he said, and though she dropped her cards and they fell to the table and floor, neither the Muse nor the Omniscient noted them.
“That’s another nice apple,” he said.
“It’s a lovely name.”
“Frequin Rouge.”
“Go on.”
“Forfar Pippin, Striped Beefing, Brabant Bellefleur, Black Taunton, Brown Snout.”
“Don’t stop now!”
“Golden Reinette, Hyslop Crab, Hubbarston Nonsuch, Hollow Crown, How do I love thee.”
“Go on,” she said.
“The last isn’t an apple.”
She knelt on the floor and began to pick up cards, but before she had completed, he was beside her picking up the last of them, and now he gently but firmly took them from her and rearranged them pedantically with their strangely ugly backs facing upwards.
“This is the Upset Dragon,” he said, and at a wave of his left hand, his right held a stack of cards that arched its back like a dragon with indigestion.
“And this is the Somatic Stretch,” he said, and the arch fell and cascaded almost to the floor.
“And the Three Card Flippant,” he announced, “and the Antigravity Buckle,” his eyes not on the cards, but her . . .
“Of course,” he said as he dropped the pack lifelessly to the table before her, “they’re only tricks.”
“Of course,” she said.
“I’m shamelessly worthless,” he said, shaking his head and not bothering to hide any more, his infinite grief. He hated himself for showing it, as she might think he was begging, but he had to confess.
“I can never be worthy of your bravery,” he said. “Your sense of adventure. Don’t look at me like that. I’m low enough to have spied upon you! I know your creativity craves—”
“Creativity!” The Muse jumped up and threw the cards in the Omniscient’s face. “That’s my creativity!” And she burst into inexplicable tears.
“So you wind down with cards?” he said. “You’d need to with so many stories. Oh yes, I know you sneak out and work. I know you cannot stop the flow of stories coming from you any more than—”
“You lovable old fool!”
“Lovable?”
“Fool!” she said, and somehow she was in his arms and he was in hers.
The beginning of the book of making an old man into a young man . . . It is a million times efficient.
—unknown author (Pharaonic Egypt)
First impressions
AND SO THE TOWN WHERE MULLIANA LIVES comes closer with every step.
Faldarolo’s heart is in a turmoil, so he doesn’t notice that the crowd gets thicker as the town’s gates loom. There are many loud and coarse jests tossed which he ignores, but all of a sudden, in that coarseness gleams a needle of sound. He strains his ears to hear it, but it grows thicker and suddenly pierces through every word and guffah and gesture, till it shines above everything and the crowd pauses, and is silent.
“That is Mulliana,” mouths a mounted man on a horse beside Faldarolo, and Faldarolo whispers to Burhanettin. “You didn’t say anything about her voice.”
“What voice?” said Burhanettin.
Faldarolo raised his hands to the sky.
“That? What’s her voice matter? You can always get a musician if you like music.”
Faldarolo and Ekmel exchanged glances, but did not speak. Indeed, they were both too overcome with emotion, but it must be said that Ekmel, who had never been overly affected by music, had become very soft in the heart.
First impressions count. Faldarolo had never heard any instrument as heavenly as Mulliana’s voice. He had always considered himself a musician above mere musicians—that music- making for him wasn’t a trade, a set of skills such as any apprentice could learn, given enough time and diligence. No. From the time when his lips were too small to properly kiss the bladder-pipe, he was attracted, a love that had matured when he met the bladder-pipe that changed his life. Faldarolo became a musician as he was destined to, but he thought of his living as letting others listen in to him make love.
Now, the sound of Mulliana’s voice—rising, falling, insinuating . . . That voice fell upon him, entered into him, and his insides stirred in ways that made him laugh bitterly at his previous transports of love.
Faldarolo walked (actually, he was jostled this way and that) through the town gates a changed man, a man who knew that he was only a bladder-pipe blower with a bladder-pipe that needed fixing.
“Bletted medlars,” cried an old woman, plucking at his sleeve. In her basket was a pile of brown fruits with skins as wrinkled and brown as she. He bought three, as he could hardly move, and the man ahead of him, Burhanettin, had stopped altogether.
“Old women’s hair!” shouted Burhanettin at a little boy. “I should tan your skin for calling it Palace helva.”
“Kind sir,” said the boy, “I only tell what the sweet maker tells me to.”
“I’m sure he does,” said Ekmel, looking kindly at the boy but not having a single coin to spend to help him.
“That,” said Burhanettin, pointing at what the boy was holding—five wooden skewers stuck into a base of what looked like wads of white hair—
“That abomination—get it out of my sight and smell, boy— that is tepme helva. Backfire helva. Old women’s hair!”
He glared around him, and well he could, for there had grown a crowd that had given him the space he needed, so wild had grown his gestures—and he still had the greatest physique of anyone in almost any town. He was, however, as funny, if his hands were not touching you, as an angry bull, and some sniggers broke out of the crowd.
“You like that!” he shouted at them, pointing, for the boy was too frightened to move, so Ekmel had reached out for him and was holding him out of harm’s way, but the offending sweets were still in sight, as big as a bouquet.
“That . . . ” sputtered Burhanettin. “That . . . ”
He was so angry he didn’t know how to put it, so put it in the crudest terms he could, lifting his upper lip so that those who hadn’t noticed, pointed to his hilarious half-moustache. “That sugar candy! If you like that, your town deserves to rot in hell.”
Faldarolo sidled around till he reached Ekmel, and he gave Ekmel a handful of coins, and Ekmel gave them to the boy and pushed him off with soothing words, and then Ekmel walked up to Burhanettin and had some quiet words with him, which seemed to work, for Burhanettin stopped glowering, though his shoulder- muscles rippled unpredictably.
And the little group proceeded onwards, molested not, till they reached the crowd amassed under the famous tower.
At this point, Faldarolo should have bid the others goodbye and wended his way to the musicians’ quarter even though, with her heavenly voice floating over the rooftops, mere musicians such as he would have been a crude joke here.
But as Burhanettin had pointed out, there is no accounting for taste, so Faldarolo was confident that there would be a musicians’ quarter in this town—and furthermore, he just knew that there would be an instrument maker who could fix the bladder-pipe.
Still, he tarried with the crowd below the tower.
Burhanettin also tarried, though his soul was curdling worse than a helva that is stirred one way and then another. “Backfire helva,” he muttered, wanting to kick himself. No matter that this Mulliana had no choice living in this town or being loc
ked in that tower. This town that’s spread her fame for beauty and worth calls Old Women’s Hair, Palace Helva.
He sighed mightily, but he did not leave. Having come this far, he had a certain amount of curiosity. The cord that he’d used to hang those two jars around his neck, chafed.
“Her father died yesterday, so it’s only a matter of who steals into her chamber first,” said a man beside Faldarolo. He was dressed in gold brocade and sat on a restive dark horse. The horseman beside him, dressed louder than a peacock, pulled on the reins of his snorting white. “You want to wager who holds whose horse tonight, and then we can be off?”
“A coin for a rose,” said the first. “I hear there’s a sweet thing in . . . ”
Burhanettin didn’t hear them, so moiled were his thoughts.
Beside him, Ekmel didn’t rightly know where to go or what to do, but he didn’t want to spend life aimlessly, so this is where he decided to take his leave. He was just reaching out to touch Burhanettin’s shoulder in farewell, when—
“HARK!” boomed a voice, out over all the crowd assembled below the tower. The voice was so loud, and of such authority, that a flock of birds overhead paused in flight.
Hark
“CLOSER,” said the crandolin.
Mulliana lifted the crandolin higher towards the slit in the wall, but the crandolin huffed, dissatisfied.
“This won’t do,” said the crandolin. “Put me down.”
So Mulliana put the crandolin on the floor.
“Now wrap your hand in that rug there,” said the crandolin.
Mulliana did as she was told.
“Now punch a hole through the wall.”
“But I can’t do that!”
“Delicate maiden, are you?” chuckled the crandolin.