by Gemma Files
“No offence, Miss, but you never struck me like a small-town gal.”
“You either.”
“Well, should be fun. Who knows, I might be the least white person they’ve ever seen. Like, not on TV.”
“I’m not sure I’d go into the situation thinking that.”
“You might if you were me, but don’t worry. I’ll be good.”
A couple of minutes elapsed, the ground spinning by beneath us like the fields outside, the sun already halfway up the sky—it’d be noon soon, it occurred to me. Lady Midday’s time. But the steely grey October overcast seemed worlds away from the burning white air of the clips, and the radio had switched to the twenty-first-century electronica of Daft Punk. Last night felt like it’d happened to somebody else.
(The Mommy should listen.)
“I wonder if any of the original notebooks are up there,” said Safie. “The ones the book’s afterword talked about. Be interesting to see if she drew on any other stuff, besides the Wendish material.”
“Like what?”
“Well, maybe this is just me connecting everything back to my pet obsessions—” She gave me a wry eyebrow lift; I snorted, nodded a silent touché. “—but Lady Midday and some of the things in the other tales, they reminded me a lot of figures that pop up in Yezidi myths as well; it would just be neat if maybe there was actually a direct connection, somehow. I talked about some of this in Seven Angels, I don’t know if you remember. . . .”
I shook my head. “You might have to recap. It’s images, names, and characters that stick for me; backstory detail tends to kind of slide.”
“Okay. Well . . . you remember the part where my Dédé says how in Yezidi thought, God basically entrusted the management of the world to this heptad of Holy Beings, who’re sometimes called angels, sometimes heft sirr—the Seven Mysteries?”
“Given that part’s in the title, yeah.”
“Mmm. So they’re supposed to be God’s emanations, these angels, and God delegates most earthly action to them—sort of like how the mediaeval Cathars and other Gnostic-influenced sects claimed the Devil was ‘king of this world,’ with God’s complicity. It’s a system that leaves room for a whole lot of animistic deities, spirits of place or concept—the kind you get in ancient Greek, Roman, Aryan-Indian, and Slavic beliefs, or even Chinese Shenism and Japanese Shinto. And these things could be good, could be bad, could be beneficial or malign, but since they all had God behind them, you couldn’t really get rid of ’em, not completely. The best you could do is, um . . . stop paying attention. Ignore them, walk away. Don’t ever give them what they want.”
“Which is?”
“Attention, I guess. Worship.” She paused for a moment. “Which means there’s a whole lot more than seven angels, when it comes down to it—and maybe more things like devils than my Dédé wanted to admit.”
I frowned. “What’s that mean, ‘God’s complicity?’ Like, what . . . God lets these things exist?”
“More than that. It’s like He wants them to.”
“For what possible point?”
She shrugged. “Do I look like God to you? All I know is that when I went looking for source Yezidic texts in the U of T rare-books libraries, I ran across an idea that’s making more and more sense to me these days, which is that there is a connection between the Lucifer myth and Malak Tâwus, the Peacock Angel—but it was the Yezidi angel that came first, not the other way around. It turns up in all Big Three monotheisms, it’s got offshoots in half a dozen versions of Gnosticism, the core cosmology looks like a key inspiration for Persian Zoroastrianism, and you can find echoes in a bunch of pagan mystery cults too.”
“So the Peacock Angel is the Devil?” I had forgotten my nausea, forgotten my shoulder, and turned to face Safie as directly as I could; I had no idea how much of this might prove useful, but I’d never been able to resist a new myth, creation or otherwise.
Safie tilted one hand back and forth, making a sort-of-but-not-really grimace. “Well, the ‘origin story’ for Malak Tâwus is almost exactly the same as the Muslim myth about Iblis, the djinn they later call Shaytan—but Yezidi revere Malak Tâwus for refusing to submit to Adam, while Muslims believe that Iblis’s refusal to submit was what made him fall out of grace with Allah. From our point of view, God praised Malak Tâwus for refusing to serve something made out of dust, because he was made from God’s own light; instead of punishing him, God made the Peacock Angel His own representative on earth, telling him to dole out responsibilities, blessings, and bad luck as he saw fit. And we can’t question him, because he’s beyond good and evil—good and evil are human qualities.
“My Dédé Aslan used to say that if God commands anything to happen then it just happens, automatically—bibe, dibe. So God could have made Malak Tâwus bow down to Adam, but He chose not to, and that was the right choice: human beings are flawed because we were made flawed, intentionally; we need to be guided by sublime beings, which is the Peacock Angel’s job. It was a test for Malak Tâwus and he passed, qualifying himself to act as God’s stand-in, so God doesn’t ever have to worry about humanity again.”
“Wow.” I sat back in my seat. “What’s this all got to do with Lady Midday?”
“Well, what Lady Midday reminds me of is, basically, one of those old other angels, or spirits, or gods—the figures from the cult offshoots, the beings one step down from the Seven. Things that sometimes got prayed to, sometimes just placated; things that were local to one place or time and got left behind when people died out, or moved on, or converted to something else. If you think about it, isn’t that how Midday and some of the other figures in the stories come off? It’s like they’re desperate for attention, but they don’t know how to do anything except repeat their old patterns, so they wind up harming the very people whose attention they’re trying to get in order to . . . I don’t know, keep going. Stay alive. Intact.”
“Can tah in can tak?” I suggested then explained, off her baffled stare: “Desperation, Stephen King—he calls it the Language of the Unformed. It means ‘small gods out of a greater god.’”
“That’s . . . almost exactly what I’m talking about, yeah. Weird.”
I shrugged. “Tropes are tropes. They resonate. Which is why, awesome as all of that sounds, I don’t know if we’re going to be able to get much mileage out of it—for this project, anyway. I’d be really surprised if Mrs. Whitcomb had even heard of the Yezidi.”
“Maybe. But how much do we really know about Mrs. Whitcomb’s background, anyway? We know her maiden name, Iris Dunlopp, and . . . what else?”
“Not much,” I acknowledged. “She was adopted—her ‘mom,’ Miss Dunlopp, was the woman who ran the orphanage she grew up in, and Mr. Whitcomb was a big contributor. That’s how they met. Iris taught the younger children basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, plus gave art classes for local kids and tutored adults, that sort of thing.”
“So, dead parents. Any information as to how, or who they were?”
“Not that I’ve uncovered. Balcarras might know.” I thought a minute. “Actually, Jan Mattheuis said the Quarry Argent Folklore Museum had all Mr. Whitcomb’s old papers, as well as Mrs. Whitcomb’s paintings. He must’ve donated them at the same time.”
“Good thing we’re going there then.”
“Yup.”
I’m still not entirely sure what prompted me to ask the next question. It’s always struck me as something too personal to ask someone who hasn’t already brought up the topic, and most people who do so tend to make the answer pretty obvious. But—
“Safie,” I began, carefully, “how much of this stuff do you believe? I don’t mean just know about, or use to build films around, but that it’s objectively true—is that what you think?”
Safie opened her mouth then closed it. “I . . . don’t know,” she finally replied. “All of this is more like history than re
ligion, really. It’s what makes my family what it is, which makes me what I am; it’s always going to be there inside me, this sort of core I rotate around—the source of everything.” I nodded. “It’s why I ended up going to the Fac in the first place, you know? I wanted to extend what I’d already been doing into a longer-form narrative, to package it in a way people from outside my family could swallow; show them all the stuff I’d grown up with as just part of my day-to-day. And that’s probably why I’m here, too.” She glanced briefly at me, our eyes meeting. “Because if that’s what Mrs. Whitcomb wanted, I kind of feel like I owe it to her to finish her work.”
It struck me then, like a slap—how weird it was I’d never asked myself these sorts of questions. What was it she’d been doing it for, exactly, in the first place? What drove her to constantly return to these stories, re-interpret them over and over, especially “Lady Midday,” yet still end up so unhappy with the result she literally tried to bury it? For all my feverish research thus far, I’d never once thought of her as a person, with goals or desires of her own that might yet be accomplished even now, through us. Someone to whom something might be owed.
I stared out the windshield, struck silent. Thankfully, Safie didn’t seem to notice. “I wish I could talk to my Dédé,” was all she said, wistfully. We were on some rural route now, one of only a few cars moving; Lake of the North district isn’t one of the big cottage country destinations, and we were well in advance of whatever they considered rush hour. She added, after a moment, “God, I miss him.”
I nodded, and just for a blink, my mind returned to Simon and Clark. Much to my surprise, given how little time had elapsed since we’d left, I found myself in complete sympathy.
As it turns out, we were both wrong about at least one thing regarding Mrs. Whitcomb—she had met at least one Yezidi while she was still alive, though she might well not have known it at the time: doomed Gustave Knauff, whose surviving family still traces the origin of their fortune back to the Crusades, when a certain Swiss knight brought home a beautiful woman of Middle Eastern origin and married her, claiming her parents—conveniently dead—were converts to Christianity, their documentation lost in transit from Acre. There’s a tiny yet passionate sub-genre of art history devoted to tracing Yezidi themes in Knauff’s paintings, especially the famous Black Annunciation and his subsequent Hymnes de Paon triptych. Not that this has much to do with anything, I suppose, within immediate context.
But maybe it does, and maybe I’m just fooling myself, because I’m afraid to do anything else. Maybe everything’s linked, like atoms; all the component parts of some unknown universe, laid parallel beside our own. Maybe it was fate, always: inexplicable, inescapable.
Be nice if it was, I suppose, on one level, because then there would never have been anything I could’ve done—or not done—to make what happened . . . happen. Then it would’ve been out of my hands from the very beginning. From long before.
And none of it would be my fault.
That conversation with Safie is actually the last thing I remember clearly from our entire trip. It’s after this point that things begin to skew, smearing together, a tangle of moments I still find difficult to set in linear order—I know certain events happened, but not when or how, let alone why. Luckily, I have Safie’s footage to refer to, with its built-in time-stamp and freeze-frameable visuals, as well as her physical notes, scrawled but scrupulous, in a series of sixty-sheet Staples mini-notebooks she bought in bulk; she’d used them to track continuity on editing jobs, mostly, developing a quite amazing eye for detail. And all of that becomes even more important now, when I no longer have Safie herself to consult with.
But that’s for later, right? A place for everything, with everything in its place.
Safie’s notes say we reached Quarry Argent around 4:30 P.M., by which time I was pale and slightly faint from vertigo, but I refused to stop long enough to recuperate—just chugged some water, donned a pair of wrap-around sunglasses I’d bought at Shopper’s Drug Mart, and set off for the museum. The person who answered the door was Bob Tierney, interim director, standing in that weekend for actual director Sylvia Jericote, who goes up to Gravenhurst every October to spend time with her family.
Tierney hadn’t been there during Jan Mattheius’s sojourn in Quarry Argent, but he knew the basic details, and when we showed him the clips from Untitled 13, he perked up considerably. The footage shows him as a square-set guy with hyperthyroid eyes and an unfortunate neckbeard, gesticulating excitedly as he tells us: “Wow, that looks so much like her paintings! It’s uncanny, huh? Isn’t it just. You know, we have the largest collection of Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb in Canada, not that she was ever so well-recognized, you understand, outside of Ontario.”
“We’d heard that, yeah,” I can hear myself say, from slightly outside the frame. “Love to film those, if the museum’s okay with it. And Mr. Whitcomb’s private papers, you have those too?”
“Right, right; we’ve a whole three file boxes on Mr. Whitcomb at least, down in the basement. Though two of them are mainly about the mine, and I guess you probably don’t want to see those.”
“Not as such, no.”
Later, in the hospital—recuperating—I scrolled past Safie’s beautifully centred shots of Mrs. Whitcomb’s art, arranged earliest to latest, and was frankly amazed by their complete lack of familiarity. Oh, they all shared a certain visual kinship, obviously; all fell inside a particular spectrum of artistic influence, displaying Impressionist or even Fauvist leanings and an Orientalist design sense, much like Mary Cassatt’s domestic portraits or Odilon Redon’s famous “chimères.” The colours she used were pale and slightly off, even in the studies she’d done as a teenager, as though she routinely diluted everything in her paint box with white lead or Chinese yellow. Her favourite subject matter seemed to be country landscapes that, on closer examination, proved to have figures lurking suggestively in almost every part of them—white-draped, long-limbed, oddly contorted, their faces hidden by hands, hair, the folds of their flowing robes.
One of the most evocative, done when she was only thirteen, was of a cornfield that could have literally formed the backdrop for Untitled 13. Indeed, when I examined them more closely and cross-referenced them with Mrs. Whitcomb’s films, almost all of the paintings soon began to look like location scouting stills done in oil: the swamp from The Old Man With a Frog’s Mouth, the dock on the Lake of the North itself from In Spring We Drown the Winter, the quarry where The Pots With Candles In Them are dug up. I remember staring at that one for at least a minute, the shot in which the chief excavator lifts a random pot lid free replaying in my memory: inside, a quarter-face with a single eye, blinking, bloodless. And the carefully lettered title insert card immediately afterwards—Those Old Heretics Have Been At It Again, Mocking God’s Will With Their Evil Ways And Feeding Their Elders To The Earth—could that have been Mrs. Whitcomb’s own handwriting, that slightly spiky copperplate?
The story that movie was based on, from The Snake-Queen’s Daughter, ran a page long at most: For it is told how near Riga, before Christ took hold, those old heretics used to sacrifice their old and young alike at harvest’s end, to seed the fields and bring on next year’s crop. How they cut them into pieces then put those pieces into pots with candles in them, each signifying the soul cast away to be eaten by She Who Gives All, who walks behind every row. And when they were taken up by godly men and asked to defend their actions, they said only: “But what better gift to give my true Mother, the Mother of everything, than that of she who bore me or he who bred me? To fold them deep in the soil’s open mouth and let dirt fall down upon them like a blanket, softly extinguishing them, returning them to seeds in the darkness . . . unless it be my own child, of course, my best-loved, my favourite. . . .”
(And that dreadful sin was practised as well, here and there, in different places. But the priests put an end to it, as is only proper, with fire, sword,
and salt, and nothing ever grew again on the spot where these terrible criminals were finally done away with.)
“What can you tell me about Mrs. Whitcomb?” I can be heard asking Tierney as Safie tracks past the quarry painting to frame a miniature of a flower garden in full bloom, so small yet vivid it almost seems like a tiny window opened from one season onto another. “Does anybody know where she came from? Or why she was committed to Miss Dunlopp’s in the first place?”
“Well, it’s all pretty vague if you’re just looking at the official documents—she doesn’t have a birth certificate, for example, so she had to visit Europe under her husband’s passport on their honeymoon—but we were eventually able to find a copy of Miss Dunlopp’s register. The year that Mrs. Whitcomb was admitted, there were only three other orphans who stayed at the Home, and two were boys who got fostered out quick, apprenticed to local farmers; the third was a girl who never shows up again. It’s like she just vanishes, but if she’d died Miss Dunlopp would’ve recorded it, because that tended to happen a lot—there was a definite protocol in place for dealing with it. So what we think is this girl might’ve been Mrs. Whitcomb, except Miss Dunlopp changed her first name to Iris and gave her her own last name, never making a clear connection between the two.”
“Why do you think she would’ve done it that way?”
“Oh, that’s because the other girl was kind of famous around here. There was a scandal associated with her—nothing she did, more something got done to her—so Miss Dunlopp probably wanted all that forgotten, to give Mrs. Whitcomb a fresh start.”
“What was this other girl’s name?”
“Giscelia Wròbl. She came from up around God’s Lips, or maybe Your Ear; was a lot of farmland in between, with quite the little community of Wendish Anabaptist immigrants—her father, Handrij Wròbl, defected from one of their sects after his wife Liska died in childbirth. But the other Wends mainly moved away after it happened.”