Celebrant

  The attendance of deKlend is requested civilly at the Belvedere on the evening of the thirteenth of this month for symposium. Refreshments will be served. No RSVP necessary.

  Sincerely, Mnemosems

  Mnemosems! The card is freehand; the handwriting is extremely elegant. Mnemosems?

  He picks up the telephone.

  Which month is this?

  I mean what day?

  No not the day of the week the day of the month, the month of _________________________!

  The twelfth?! (he says in surprise) The twelfth was the day before yesterday. Aren’t you mistaken?

  No/click.

  deKlend hangs up and takes hold of his mouth and the front of his chin with his left hand. He opens the door to the hall. No newspaper. The place is mobbed by sturdy construction workers, many of whom turn to glance at him as he opens his door. The drumming of hammers and wheezing of hand saws fills the building.

  How did I manage to sleep with all that? (he wonders)

  There’s a fragrance in the hall air. A little is wafted after him into the room, and he remarks it is more like a woman’s perfume than a—

  Downstairs the newspapers confirm the day is the twelfth; he knows this without going downstairs to check them. Turning a corner into a narrow lane a flier is thrust into his hand by someone he doesn’t see, but whose noisy sniff rasps behind him once as he presses on his way. There are documents to deliver as always. The sniff echoes, repeats. It’s the same sound, falling downhill. A great deal of all this terrain deKlend can ignore. Later on, he finds the flier again, stuffed into one of his shawls.

  The attendance of deKlend is requested at the Belvedere on the evening of the thirteenth of this month for symposium. Refreshments will be served. No RSVP necessary.

  Sincerely, Mnemosems

  Folding it distractedly his attention is arrested by another note neatly written on the back of this battered sheet of paper. A familiar perfume rises from the letters. A note to him, maybe from her.

  Is it you? (he marvels) Have you finally decided to summon me?

  I don’t remember you, but I remember how you would appear like her soul in a woman I love, all of them. You were the one thing in common I loved in them all, in cooperation with all the unique things I loved in each, and you was the only word I could attach to you. As if I loved you, the word you, but said in a soul that only certain women’s personalities had power to summon. Therefore it must be one soul (he thinks) that conjures both the woman and myself in one you, I to utter it and her to elicit it. Have you learned to write me letters now?

  At the appointed time, deKlend follows the fragrant directions.

  The girl who seats him is peculiarly drab for the place, with a flat figure, a sort of cheesecloth dress that hangs on her like a tarp over a mail box. She sniffs once, explosively, with a sharp rasp in one nostril, as she turns to palm him to his chair.

  The table is small and sits alone at one point on the circumference of a sunken, tiled circle, screened from the rest of the club by a sort of tent, pink and yellow curtains. A fantastically complicated carpet is spread on the floor, all dark and somber reds and browns but laced through with a moonlight vine.

  A moment later, the dancer appears, stepping from a shadow he only then realized had been there.

  She’s older than he expected. Waiting for the music to begin, up on her bare toes, though not quite en pointe, with her smooth, heavy arms up around her head and her eyes demurely lowered, she wears a simple dress that flares around her hips and hangs in an upside-down petunia to her knees. There is a thin petticoat or something inside, no stockings. The top is a halter augmented with a few scarves, and she wears heavy bangles on her wrists and ankles. Orange blossom.

  With sporadic knocks and bangs the music begins, centered around a regular, quizzical note on a wood block and a low tam-tam, and then a baritone flute. Her opulent figure begins to sway and then she lowers her arms, so that their shadows no longer criss-cross her face. Her eyesockets are filled in with kohl, scarlet lead on her lips, her almost colorless yellow hair is braided in tight plaits around stiff lengths of lead wire so they stand up vibrating from her scalp in serpents shaped like parentheses, tipped with minute pink bows. Her lips part over perfectly black teeth.

  She does a dance of small and more subtle gestures requiring the close attention of the watcher, meant to be seen up close—eyes rolling—skin is pale as paper and opaque. She has an air of tragedy about her that deKlend finds impossible to resist. A drop of clear water trickling from the livid scalp honeycombed in braids now trembles from one earlobe a moment, but she is not perspiring. The toes of her left foot trace the patterns in the carpet, the moonlight vine, although she is not looking down. She lifts her right leg and points her right foot at him, holding it there, rising and falling before him, like a cobra’s head, or like a reverse cobra, brandishing its hindquarters at him, or a rattlesnake, because the baubles around her ankles are bells, and she shakes them at him. She never sets that foot down, keeping it raised, while her left undulates along the carpet’s lines like a snail. She holds her lips out in a fragile cone, concentration in her lips not in her eyes, which are boring into him—she holds her skirt closed between the backs of her wrists under her lifted leg; now her fingers twist invisible harp strings in the air. She rotates in complete circles using only the strength in her left foot, keeping the other one raised. Then she dials the air with that jingling right foot, immediately before his face. The muscles in those legs stand out distinctly. The whole of her guitar-shaped body has the same supple density and weightiness.

  By the end of the dance, as she is retreating toward the spot where she first appeared, he is eagerly waiting for the moment when she will drop the commanding, lofty demeanor she wears now and will give him a more natural, approachable look, but she vanishes without a trace as the music ends like a broken fantasy.

  deKlend makes his way backstage and she is there, behind the first door he tries.

  “Did you like my dance?” she asks. She holds her head tilted forward and her lips shape the lustrous blackness inside. Her words are adorned with coquettish quotation marks, the fluttering eyelashes of flirtatious words.

  He is looking at her with much the same expression. Very much, (he says, after a moment)

  Neither of them move. They’re like two puppets hanging from pegs. Only ceremonial conversation, remember my ban! With the contrast in her face and her fixed, burning gaze, Phryne looks like a silent film image. The tragic air that clings to her grows stronger every moment. She was infinitely sensitive, infinitely wronged.

  I would like to see you dance again (deKlend says)

  “Would you?”

  He nods.

  Yes. Will you dance again tonight?

  She shakes her head once, and her braids wiggle. “The stage is closed now.” She tilts her head momentarily as she speaks and her tongue flickers out from between her teeth.

  Will you dance for me then?

  “Just for you?”

  Yes.

  An agreeable tremor seems to shake her, her eyes light up briefly she smiles and says “Tomorrow! I will.”

  Bright gleams of pleasure shoot through the pearly sadness of her face. The effect strikes him as almost too beautiful to be true.

  Not tonight?

  “No. Tomorrow.” She’s giving him a melting look that’s almost fond.

  What are you doing now?

  She laughs gaily and gestures him out of the room, coming toward him. He leaves, with a little smile, his first, and for a moment, as she is closing the door between them, their warmth blends there at the threshold, he can smell her powder, the linen of her dress, and she can smell the wool in his jacket and his own very faint and nameless scent.

  When the door is shut, she rushes to the full-length mirror on the wardrobe to study her own exulting expression. She flits her hands all over herself to quiet her body and tell it to be patient. Through the ensuing day the pilgri
mage to Votu and this woman vie in his mind and he can’t banish from his inner vision the image of her as she stood just before she began her dance, when she wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were downcast and she looked as though she were sleeping. You stir me, drawing my heart up out of the quicksand, brushing the crumbs of excrement off of it, but these are all illusions, I’ve been alone too long and now as before I won’t be able to keep from getting smashed by my heart’s ogre. Knowing I am overdoing it is the same as not knowing, because a spigot siphons down out of it and drains the heated wine like a hot brand in heart of hot wine that salts the heart’s leaves of gold brawn at the thought of you, of you... the thinking of the thinking of my covetous reverence for your... your gold... She’s forgotten you (he tells himself)

  Phryne

  The bare name printed there on the screen. No matter what else comes up, that name lives there, always in view. He sees it without hearing it, because he doesn’t know how to pronounce it. Instead, the arabesque combination of undulating letters dances her dance in place. How can it be starting so early? At that moment she is sleeping. deKlend feels fear of understanding too well, and having nothing else to do or think—as if I had arrived at anything! Her nudity breathes through the bedclothes, though her arms below the elbow and her legs below the knees are wrapped in incest gauzes.

  *

  The plain-looking woman is just as she had been, though her dress is blue now.

  Is Frrrn dancing tonight (he asks irrelevantly)?

  With a superior expression, Froo-neh, she corrects his pronunciation.

  The music is the same, but the dance is different. She is exactly the same, but now she wears a dress of sheer white silk with a billowing, sail-like skirt. The carpet is different, black and white with vividly colored accents. Phryne dances on one leg as before, skating and soaring with the same meticulously controlled and steady movements.

  If he turns out to be an ass (she thinks), let him see what he will miss.

  The final moments of this long dance she swims through the air, rolling her whole body above the ground without one uneven movement. As before, he is the only one present. Her heart is pounding when she leaves the floor—puzzling over his rapt face that twinkled there in the murk like a pale island far from shore.

  deKlend is the first man she’s ever danced for in her own likeness. He has no idea what is at stake for her, nor can he.

  She said to herself, no disguise when I dance for him—no disguise. He has to want me.

  Makeup doesn’t count!

  He raps at the door of her dressing room, but no one answers. He looks around the place fruitlessly and leaves, dejected; until he sights her standing in a doorway across the street, half veiled in shadow. Crossing over to her he wonders if she isn’t an optical illusion.

  She steps down to him smiling. There’s a sable hat, like a fluffy black wreath, on her head, and a coat with a fur collar. They walk together. Her bottom is large, and her dress so snug around her waist, so that she might almost be her own figurehead.

  Their booth is in the darkest corner. She seats herself in the very heart of the shadow and remains perfectly still, watching him. To deKlend, Phryne’s clear, acid, silent film face is like a cold projection unwavering in space.

  Though she does not budge, she seems beside herself with excitement. Her gaze seems to gather it up and throw it in coils about his shoulders.

  How long has it been since I last sat with a man without being in disguise (she thinks)? It is bizarre.

  She feels completely exposed, and also her own face becoming a disguise.

  Her red mouth makes (to him) fascinating quick shapes, writhing over black pearls. From time to time a flickering pink tongue parts them.

  She leans forward, and the beam of light that lights her spills over her collarbone’s wings and down onto her (to him) impossibly white bosom. Desire sinks into him like dread.

  There is conversing going on around them in an exchange of voices, now scooping his up and setting it down again, now picking hers up.

  No, they aren’t speaking. Phryne’s face, alone in the dark like the flame from a lamp, recedes from him. It lifts, a little unsteadily, then continues to recede, dwindling before him. An air of tragedy sings all around his ears.

  He leans forward, resting his weight on his hands, which sink into the vinyl cushions. She climbed in reverse over the back of the seat. Her face seems to bore a tunnel into the blackness and he climbs in after her, over the seat and into the corner, into the tunnel. He has to crawl. The floor is curved and segmented, the air and stone are warm with a fragrant draft that slithers over him, her face drawing nearer again.

  Phryne is just up ahead, crouched facing in his direction, with her gloved hands spreading their fingers on the stone. His face draws near to hers. As it does, hers begins to recede again. His chin passes over her bare toes which brush his cheeks. He follows her face up her body to the top and she draws his weight down onto her. Glancing a moment around he sees a wan light far away.

  I recognize this place (he thinks) Corridors of the sky.

  He kisses her face—

  Not my mouth! (she says)

  Her mouth is irresistibly beautiful. He kisses very near it, and around her face.

  Not my lips!

  He presses his lips to hers and she returns his kiss rapturously.

  No more! (she says with a hoarse laugh) No more!

  She claps her hands to either side of his head firmly and directs it down.

  Kiss me here!

  Phryne holds his head to her throat. Now she is driving it down into her bosom. She seems to want to crush herself against his face, especially his eyes. She is slipping and sliding in his arms, not evasively, but making adjustments, and he can sense she is shedding her garments. His hands discover more and more of her flesh, so firm it’s nearly stiff and he realizes her whole body is taught as a bowstring strung on her skeleton. But she’s not frightened—she’s embracing him. Her legs embrace him. Her breath embraces him, milky and so sweet it almost tangs.

  Don’t look down! (she whispers) Look at my face!

  Her dreamy, imploring, demanding face.

  Squeezing together in a bundle deKlend’s desire for her becomes a panic, like tingling smoke filling his lungs so that his breath comes in hitches.

  He kisses her mouth hungrily.

  Don’t! (she murmurs)

  Don’t kiss!

  She returns his kisses with a kind of despair, enjoying each more.

  Don’t ki-iss... –iiss... –iisss... –i-iss...

  Shivers grab her and make the bells on her ankles jingle on high. When he bats her fur hat off and pulls her head back by the braids she sings out in delight.

  He follows her closely, almost crowding her. She stops in the spacious foyer of the rooming house and divests herself of hat and coat, and he does the same with his blankets, hanging them on pegs. She is still wearing her silk dress.

  When she lowers her arms from the pegs, she remains where she is, again without moving, and looking at him.

  He is tilted up to her, as if the floor sloped.

  She brushes his cheek with the back of her right hand.

  I after all can’t know anything (he thinks)

  Now she rests her hands on his shoulders, turning her head slightly. For the first time he notices the fetching (to him) crease there where her jaw folds into her neck.

  I am going to roll out the pale dough of her (he thinks)

  Her perfume grows stronger and keeps changing; she is singing to him from some remote spot, far from here. Repeating her name more correctly each time as he siphons each of her flat braids through his teeth, undoing them. Each one buzzing like an antenna. The magnetism of their two bodies lifts. She invites him to go wading, opening a spacious landscape. Her arousal at being rubbed sending her into a tonic and deKlend vigorously kneads her body in his hands. A soft, alert steamroller of sleep, paddling the air, rolling her shoulders, because it’s ti
me to go, to wade.

  They’re making love. Strike up the orchestra. They are masters. This is it. This is all.

  In Votu:

  A handsome young man, a brunette, in a white shirt and vest, suspenders, trousers and boots. He has a dhole with him, a sizeable one, sporting a red bandana covered in white markings around its burly neck.

  He holds out a hand gathered together, fingers down, and jingles coins in it, smiling at Gina. Gina swings her head from side to side no. The man goes on jingling. Suddenly the dhole takes one jump forward and barks with a sound like gunshots at close quarters and Gina is so surprised she freezes long enough for the man to traverse the distance with incredible speed and seize her up under one arm like an umbrella.

  Pigeon girl shouts from a roof and the shout begins to travel, an alarm rising from one rooftop to another. They know the little signs that distinguish whrounims from people.

  The whrounim is already through a gate and outside the city, Gina crushed under that arm.

  A whrounim streaking across the green, carrying Gina with it. A figure in pursuit, hair like a windswept torch.

  She is too far away to hear them. Behind her, some of the girls are calling and watching, others run back inside the city walls for help, crying that a pilgrim has abducted a little girl.

  The whrounim is a handsome man; Gina it carries against its body in the crook of its right arm.

  The whrounim glances back at Burn and seems to float away on an elastic landscape. Burn speeds up, bringing her knees nearly to her chest and the gap between them contracts, Gina’s frightened face, jostled cries. Burn pours it on and springs forward with her baton upraised in both hands brings it down as the whrounim turns, its legs dancing but the baton nevertheless clouts him along the side of his neck and right shoulder—watching from afar pigeon girls see the two of them disappear in a spiral of dust. They’re just in among a jumble of boulders sparsely fringed by trees.

  Gina slips out of her wrapper and wriggles naked in between the rocks. The whrounim scrabbles after her and Burn, who had landed and been precipitated forward for many long paces turns and comes at it again with her baton, striking it with the end in the back of its knee. The whrounim’s knee buckles and straightens and it turns to confront Burn throwing out its hand in a slap she barely evades. He slaps and flings blows at her and she can only just stay away.