by Tanith Lee
Somehow, he had survived death. Or had he? This seemed the most tenuous and precarious of survivals. Limbo was the notion that came to mind. If he still possessed a mind.
He found that he looked ceaselessly in all directions, but all directions were the same. He was searching for a method of escape, or a mode of return. His life was precious to him. He longed for it. He wanted to go back! There must be some way… And when this passionate yearning grew very strong, out of his confusion the desert seemed to fill with crowds and colour and noise. He was in a procession on horseback, or else watching one from the roadside. He heard the cannon booming over Paris or the day the Bastille fell; he heard – but these were only waking dreams. With an effort, each time he shook them off. The door to release was not to be found in this way.
It seemed then he rummaged about in the emptiness, or maybe hurried over it, or dug through it, all to no avail. And then, when he stopped, his thoughts grew very still and began gently to flow out from him. He was afraid to lose them, and himself. This fear was more dreadful than any of the others, more dreadful even than the fear of death had been.
There was anger too. None of this was what Lucien had believed would greet the ‘immortal’ soul. It was demonstrably useless to call on God. (He had done so.) Either God did not exist, or did not attend. There were also curious moments when it seemed to him that he, not God, had the key to all of this. But how could that be so?
Perched there in the depths of the waste, he huddled memories about him, warming himself at the recollections of beautiful Lucette, and crying over his child, or thinking that he cried. But the loneliness pressed down on him like an inexorable coffin-lid. Though he supposed he could people the colourless greyness, which was not even grey, with the figures of wife and friends, or with anything, he knew such toys were false, and useless.
Was everything he now experienced a punishment? Not the ridiculous Catholic Hell, but some more deadly state, where he must wander for ever, weighted by depression, alone, until his own self was worn away as time washes smooth a stone? Lucette – Lucette…
Lucette, desiring her freedom so much, was already partly out of her body as the blade fell. She heard, and felt the stroke, but from some way off. Then the multitude, the blood-soaked guillotine, all Paris, the very world, dashed away beneath her. She rose into a sky almost cloudless and utterly blue. Whole and laughing and lovely, she entered Heaven with the lightest step, in her white dress, her hair already long again.
It was all so beautiful. It was as she had dreamed of it when a child. Balanced on their clouds of cirrus, the streets of gold, the pearly dazzling palaces, the handsome people smiling and brave, the little animals that made free of every step and cornice, the birds and the kind angels that flew overhead, about the level of the fourth-floor windows... She ran along, crying with pleasure, at every crossroads expecting to meet Lucien – probably sitting writing something, and so engrossed, he had momentarily forgotten the time of her arrival. But she did not find him. And at last, there in the golden sunlight of endless day, Lucette paused.
A stately woman in white robes came down the boulevard, and Lucette approached her. “Madame, excuse me, but I should like to ask your advice.”
The woman looked at her, gently smiling.
“I’m searching for my husband. He died some days ago, and I expected he would be here before me…”
The woman went on smiling.
“Madame – I can’t find him.”
“Then perhaps he is not here.”
“There is nowhere else he could be,” said Lucette firmly.
“Ah, my dear, there are numerous other places. He could be in any one of them.”
Lucette frowned and her fine eyes flashed. Was this woman daring to suggest…? “Where?” said Lucette. It was a challenge. One did not live next to a fighter such as Lucien without some of the trademarks rubbing off.
But enigmatically, the woman only said, “Seek and ye shall find.” And so passed on down the street.
Lucette sat under a portico to pet a pair of white rabbits. She told them about Lucien, and once about the child they had had to leave behind them, and then she wept. The rabbits were patient and dried her tears on their fur.
Eventually Lucette rose and went on alone, determined to search every street and park, every room and cupboard of Heaven. She did so. Up stairs she hurried, over bridges, under which ran the sapphire streams of Paradise, scattered with flowers and ducks. Into high bell-towers she went, and from the tallest roofs of all she gazed into rosy distances, between the flight paths of the angels. She did not grow tired. There could be no tiredness. But she grew unsure, she grew uneasy. Now and then she asked someone. Once, she even asked an angel, who stood calmly on a pillar some feet over her head. But no one could aid her. Lucien? Who was Lucien? She was accustomed, was Lucette, to being married to a famous man. It added to her sense of outrage and sadness that they did not know him.
Though there was no time, yet her search of Heaven took a lot of it. In the end, it seemed to her she had visited every inch. Finally, she sought a gate, and walked out of it into the clouds. She turned her back on Bliss. It was not bliss, if her love was not to be there with her.
An infinity of sky stretched away and away. Lucette moved across it, still searching, and the glow of the ethereal city faded behind her. Like an... illusion.
On the astral plain, though illusions may be frequent, one does not sleep, let alone turn in one’s sleep; neither does one do so in annihilation. Nevertheless, in a manner of speaking, D’Antoine did ‘turn’ in his ‘sleep’.
It was as if, determined to wake up at a particular hour, he now partly surfaced from deep slumber to ask himself, drowsily, unwillingly, “Is it time, yet?” But apparently it was not yet time. With a – metaphorical – grunt, the Lion, who no longer remembered he had been the Lion, sank down once more into the cosy arms of oblivion, burrowed, nestled, and was gone again.
The demon whose turn it was on the spit with Héros stared at him quizzically.
“Don’t you find all this,” said the demon, “a bit samey?”
“Being tortured, do you mean? I suppose, as torturer, you might find it so. We can swap places if you like.”
“You miss the point,” said the demon.
Héros eyed the demon’s pitchfork. “Not always.”
As it had turned out, the lascivious fiery swing was not the only appliance to which Héros had been subjected. He had suffered many more stringent punishments. Although strangely enough, only when he himself began to consider the lack of them. But doubtless that was merely the prescience of guilt. Strangely too, more strangely in fact, even the worst of the tortures seemed rather hollow. This one, for example, of being slowly roasted alive, stabbed the while at suitable junctures by the pitchfork – somehow it was difficult to retain the sense of agony. One’s mind unaccountably wandered. One had to remember to writhe. It was not that it did not hurt. It hurt abominably. And yet…
“I apologise,” said Héros, “if I don’t seem properly attentive. No fault of yours, I assure you.”
“Perhaps,” said the demon, “yours?”
“Oh, undoubtedly mine.”
“Perhaps,” said the demon, “you shouldn’t be here.”
The spit had stopped revolving. The roasting flames grew pale.
“I can’t think where else.”
“Try,” said the demon.
Héros frowned. Now one thought of it, this was the first occasion one of the minions of Hell had held a conversation with one. Since his bonds had disappeared, Héros sat up and looked about him. Hell seemed oddly inactive, and dull, as if it were cooling down, a truly appalling idea. Weary spirals of old smoke, as if from something as mundane as burnt pastry, crawled upwards from the cold grey obsidian rocks. Nothing else moved. When Héros turned to the communicative demon, it too was gone.
The fires of Hell went out, and Héros sat alone there. No friend, no enemy, for whom to exhibit courag
e, no audience for whom to shine.
After a long time, a feeling of discomfort, spiritual malaise, drove him to his feet. He walked along the shelving greynesses, searching for something, unable to realise what. And as he did so he ceased to walk, began simply to progress.
Calm arrived suddenly. It was like letting drop a ton weight you had been holding onto for years; it was wonderful. And almost immediately on the lightening and the calm began a quickening of interest, a dramatic, pervasive excitement…
Lucien started up – and in that instant was aware he was no longer Lucien, was no longer even he – and that it did not matter. That it was actually a great relief.
Simultaneously all the greyness went away. The desert went. Instead... Here one is presented with the problem of describing a rainbow to those blind from birth, when one is, additionally, oneself as blind. But there is that marvellous beast again, the analogy. Analogously, then. The small bit of psychic fibre, which had been, a few seconds or years ago, the young man Lucien, passionate revolutionary, first-class writer, fairly consistent hysteric, and post-guillotinee, was all at once catapulted out of its self-constructed prison of terrors and miseries, into a garden of sun and flowers and birdsong. No, not Heaven. But so glorious the garden was, and limitless, it would have put Heaven to shame. And over there were mountains to be climbed, and over there seas to be swum, and up there, a library of wisdom with wide-open doors. And most charming of all, drifting here and there in earnest discussion with each other, or merely quietly reposing together, or quite alone yet still together – others, who were family and friends, thousands of them, the closest and the best; old rivals to be tussled with, familiar loves to be embraced. And imbuing it all a spirit of gladsome and determined, ferocious curiosity. Of course, it was not like this. Not at all. Yet, it was. Suffice it to say that the soul, which had last been Lucien, dashed into it with the psychic equivalent to a howl of joy, and was welcomed. And here is one more analogy. Imagine you were rendered voluntarily amnesiac, (absurd, but imagine it), and came to believe you were a small wooden post located in a cellar. And as the time went by, you saw the advantages of being a small wooden post, began, adaptable creature that you were, to like it, and so to dislike the idea of being anything else. And then the cellar door opened. And then the amnesia lifted.
Somewhere on the edges of the analogous garden, the soul that had been Lucien met the soul that had been peerless, assured Héros, entering in a bemused, nervous sort of way. And the two souls greeted each other, and reassured each other that everything was all right, before dashing off to discover all the things they were now so eager to find out about.
While somewhere close by, close as the bark to the inside of a tree, yet totally distanced, D’Antoine ‘turned’ again in his ‘sleep’, muttered something, metaphorically, and nodded off into oblivion once more.
That oblivion of his was turning out rather easy. Had she known, Lucette might have envied it. But as it was, her own sleepless journey reminded her of the tasks of Psyche in the Greek myth, a story Lucien had once told her, at the Luxembourg Gardens, and which had retained for her ever after the shattering poignancy of that time. In this way, it sometimes seemed a malign fate, even a malign goddess, hindered her.
Sometimes, the perimeter of her vision conveyed the image of a flock of fierce golden sheep with terrible teeth, or else she seemed to be kneeling, sorting grains on the ground. Eventually, she toiled with a pitcher up a steep, featureless hill. The sky was misty now, no longer blue but a colourless almost-grey. She too had entered the region of limbo, though she did not know it. She did know she must fill the pitcher at the black stream of Lethe, which brought forgetfulness, which, in effect, took all awareness of self away. Only by filling the pitcher, fulfilling the task, could she ever hope to find Lucien.
Unlike the myth, there was no opposition at the stream. As she bent towards the water, Lucette saw her reflection, just as she had seen it, living, in so many mirrors, even in a mirror that had also, once, reflected the face of Marie Antoinette. And in that moment, Lucette felt a pang of compassion for all lovely young discarded bodies, the white skin, the sunlit hair – for they were of no more use, nor hers to her, and now she understood as much.
Next time, she thought. But, next time, what? Then, letting fall the pitcher, and letting it vanish, too, she lifted a handful of the black water of forgetfulness, and with a last wistful thought of love, she drank it.
The incorporeal state did not seem quite right to the one who had been Lucette. She – it – was young, yet old enough that intimations reached through of one day when incorporeality would seem pleasant and informative, and another day, centuries in the future, when incorporeality would be yearned for. Meanwhile, these conditions were imperfect, yet they were not, after all, alien. Then, the young soul advanced or circled or perhaps did not move at all, and in doing so found the soul which had been Lucien.
Though neither was as they had been, no longer Lucien, no longer Lucette, no longer male or female, even so, the aura of love and kindness they had shared still bonded them, attracted them both to the other’s vicinity. But there were many such bonds now open to each of them. They came together now, and would come together often, and touch in the way souls do touch, which is naturally the rainbow and the blind again. But since there was no loneliness and no rejection and no anguish where now they were, they did not need to cling together, a single unit of two, against a hostile environment. For this environment was benign, and it and they were one.
In this story, you see, the lovers do not join for ever to violin accompaniment on a cloud of mortal love. The lovers are no longer mortal, and there are no violins, no clouds. It is difficult not to experience annoyance or mournfulness, or even fear, that individual liaisons do not need to persist, in frantic intensity, there where the love is all-pervasive, calm and unconditional. We must try not to lament or to be irritated by them. Only note how happy they are, even if ‘happy’ is an analogous word.
While, somewhere close as a hand to a glove, D’Antoine ‘turns’ over and finally wakes, and is no longer D’Antoine. The lengthy sleep of nothingness has acted like a sponge, and wiped away physical identity. Though the emerging soul remembers it, of course, as all of them remember who they have been, plan who they will be, (no unfinished business is ever left unfinished; there will be other work, other loves, other springs), it is now a garment held in the hands, not the substance of the self. The true self is quite free. It leaps forward into liberty with an analogous roar of delight and resolution.
The resonance of such roars is a commonplace of the astral. Just as the sound of tears, the cry of pain, and the falling crash of the guillotine are a commonplace, here.
After the Guillotine
Chosen by Mavis Haut
And Kari Sperring
Tanith Lee has been much admired for the beauty and originality of her prose, her psychological and emotional acuity, her humour and much besides. Perhaps less visited, is the less visible arena of Lee’s responses to abstract ideas. Lee’s cornucopia is huge and I have so many favourite stories, I have selected one which examines her ability to understand material in a subjective form.
Lee’s imagination is never kept at arm’s length. She absorbs outer events as if she had experienced them for herself subjectively. Her characters, times, places, each with its own quirks, odours and echoes, can seem to have emerged from actual encounters. Even the smallest scraps aren’t wasted. She plunges in, enveloping herself in them, apparently transforming what she observes into her own, lived experiences, and seeming to close the gap between subject and object. This intuitive approach must exist to some degree in all acts of reading and writing, but Lee practices it with sometimes startling proximity. She has a sort of double vision, both subjective and objective. She is never judgemental in her search to take in the experiences of the other vicariously and her reinventions all primarily respect the subjective experiences of other beings. She is only borrowing them – or
possibly they invade her. She has described herself as the bus, not the driver.
This story (like the novel, The Gods are Thirsty, and, more obliquely, the novella Madame Two Swords) relates to the French Revolution. All of them focus on the lives and deaths of a small group of revolutionaries, each crucial in the early shaping of the revolution, but all destined for the guillotine.
Lee crosses the boundary between life and death with seamless lightness. We meet the four men on their way to the scaffold, follow them through their executions and on into their afterlives. Their experiences of life after death depend entirely on each one’s expectations. The results vary greatly as Lee moves through death’s different landscapes as if in a series of elaborate dance steps. She steps easily into her own writerly shoes with lines such as, “But there is that marvellous beast again, the analogy.” “Allusions both historical and classical were nicely observed.” The wife of one takes on Psyche’s labours to reach reunion with her beloved husband. Another dismisses the “ridiculous Catholic Hell”, while in the sleep of death the sceptic half-awakes “With a – metaphorical – grunt”, then “burrowed, nestled and was gone again.”
The entire story can be read as an extended excursion into the uses of metaphor. Lee studies the process of transformation through metaphor with microscopic care. She openly displays how metaphor can transform abstract ideas into narrative, and then confronts death, identity, epistemology, faith and – perhaps her own favourite subject – the nature of true love. Lee, the writer, remarks on true love’s ineffability, but she never seeks to tell it. Nor does she ever abandon the delicate subjectivities of other first persons to the naked cold of objective vision.
– Mavis Haut
Mavi Haut was one of Tanith Lee’s dearest friends.