I had the instant image of the hotel performing this very act. Clouds of dust and snow-spray rose into a black sky speckled with watching stars; bricks and pieces of iron bowled along the road.
And suddenly, as if she saw this image too, she gave some of her sharp little barks of laughter.
“Don’t think,” she said, “I’d be sorry. Not even if a ceiling dropped on my head. Oh, I hate it here,” she said. And as suddenly as the laughter, her eyes were luminous and nearly youthful with tears. I had the urge to take her wooden hand. I didn’t risk it. “I was young once,” she confided. “Do you believe me?”
I said, “We were all young once, Madame.”
“Pouf! You’re a baby still. Twenty-eight—what’s that? I was in my thirties, and still young. Oh yes. That was my time. Oh, the naughty things I did. He never knew, my son, and my husband was dead by then, thank God. Well, it wasn’t any of their business. I worked here for them both, their skivvy. But it had many benefits, that. I would get to meet all the guests, enter their rooms even, quite intimately. There was always some excuse. Yes, little one. You and I might have had some fun then.”
I looked at her narrowly. Now her eyes were sly.
I said, “I’m sure we’d have got on famously.”
“Famously! Oh you English. Yes, I can hear that you are, all right, even through your French which is so exactly fluent.”
Unwisely no doubt I assured her, “In fact, Madame, I’m a Jewess.”
“A Jewess. Well then. The Jews are not so popular now, are they.”
“If they ever were,” I said.
“An arrogant race,” she said. “And yes, you’re an arrogant little thing. Of course you’re a Jewess. But I had a lover once, a Jewess.”
There. It was out. She had consorted, not so much with a pariah ethnic race, but with her own, that of women.
Her tears, which had dematerialized, shone out in her eyes again, and I thought she would reminisce now over past love. But she said again, pathetically, stoically and hopelessly, “How I hate it here.” And she didn’t mean, I saw, only the hotel. It was the world she hated, and what she had become in it. Here meant also her flesh.
Just then a waiter, attended by his Chief, came to the table with a long dish of offal-stuffed sausages.
“No!” snapped Madame Cora. “Take it away. I will have fruit.”
“Madame—it’s winter. There are only the apple tarts and the pears in syrup.”
“Bring me the pears. They will be disgusting, but it’s all I can expect, now.”
The two waiters went away, bearing the sausages before them.
It wasn’t that she bored me. But the pressure of her sorrows (like water on the riven tap), was very great, even overwhelming. Any plan I’d had, gradually to lead her to the elusive subject of the woman I called Suzanne, had drained from me as she spoke of her life. What was this momentary spark to that bleak digression? And anyway, did I really care? “Suzanne” perhaps had only been another of my means to kill time at the hotel. In addition, I had begun to be alarmed someone might soon summon me again to Madame Ghoule, who would then demand, since I could afford to buy myself brandy, and had dined in the restaurant, that after all I pay over all my accrued money towards the repair of the water-damage. It seemed, did it not, so much more ruinous than I’d thought.
Because of all this, I was shifting mentally, thinking up a polite reason to leave Madame Cora, and so make my escape from the hotel. And in that way, I almost missed the next abrupt change in her eyes.
When I defined what was happening, I was caught a moment longer, staring. It was as if a sort of glittering shutter fell through her eyes, first opening them wide as windows, and then closing them fast behind itself, so only that steely, glittering façade was left behind.
She sat bolt upright, her chin on her hand, these metallic and non-human eyes fixed on something behind me.
I turned round.
And all across the dining area, I saw a slim woman dressed in elongated black that was not a uniform, a large black hat with a silvery feather in it perched on her dark hair. She was in the process of walking out of the room. And yet—I hadn’t seen her in the restaurant until that second. (Had she perhaps entered behind my back, while the old woman and I were talking?) Whatever else, I knew her at once. It was She from the corridor. Not Henriette de Vallier, but Black Eyed Susan.
“Pardon me, Madame—” I stuttered, rising, throwing back my chair. Madame Cora’s face seemed to dress itself in a kind of leer. She found my urgency funny, of course. She knew precisely what I was at.
In the doorway I brushed hastily past Jean, who was coming in with a tray of drinks. He cursed me, but I scarcely noticed.
Black Eyed Susan—Suzanne des Yeux Noires—was crossing the lobby, going under the yellow electric lamp, exiting into the blowy crystal vistas of the night.
As I too dashed out on the pavement, I was glad the snow was long gone. For already she was far ahead of me, walking swiftly in her little high-heels, that gave at each step a flash of ankle in a clock-patterned stocking. The wind blew her hat-plume to a ripple like a sea-wave in storm.
I could smell the unborn spring, acid as new wine, tossed by the wind. I could smell a hint of musk and violet—as unlike the scent of Madame de Vallier, or the Patron’s hair oil, as any perfume could be that came from the same flower.
Now I was running. Dare I call out? What would I call? Suzanne! Suzanne! Wait just one instant—
But Cora had told me anyway, Suzanne wasn’t her name.
At the street’s corner, under a lamp, she turned, my quarry. She looked back at me, or I thought she did. All across the distance, in the web of light, her two space-black eyes, gleaming like frost on a steely surface. Then she was around the corner.
I ran to it, and reached it in seconds. But she had disappeared.
I patrolled up and down the street a while, looking in at doorways, up at windows, lighted or un, once into a lively café.
She must live, or visit, in this street. Perhaps I should knock on doors? I didn’t knock. I wandered only up and down, until a man came out of the café and offered me a drink, and I had to tell him I was waiting for my friend. “He hasn’t turned up, has he?” said the man, triumphant. “Why not give me a try?” But I told him I feared my friend was ill and I must go to him, and hurried away back to the hotel.
Even from outside I saw some fresh kind of uproar was going on, the lobby full of muddled figures and someone shouting for something, I couldn’t make out what.
I entered, and stood at the edge of the crowd, and Jean thrust out of it, pasty-faced, and slouched past me, though the street door and away up the street. Also I heard the telephone being used, clacking like a pair of knitting needles, and Madame Ghoule’s guttural, “No, he must come. At once, if you please. This is Madame Ghoule at La Reine. Please make haste.”
And then the entire unintelligibly chattery crowd was falling silent, and down the stairs, and into the crowd, parting it like the Red Sea, came the Patron, greasy grey, his spectacles in his hand, and looking ashamed, as if caught out in some particularly socially-unacceptable crime.
“Make way, it’s the Patron.” “Let him by, poor fellow.”
He went on into the restaurant. And the crowd stole after him, Madame Ghoule lunging among them, crying out now in a clarion tone, “The doctor’s on his way, but his car has broken down. He’ll have to walk.”
In the big room though, the crowd, composed only of a scurry of waiters, a selection of guests and customers from the bar, spread itself, and showed its essential thinness. A couple of people were still seated at their tables, they too looking more embarrassed and depressed than anything. Altogether it was a badly attended show, the audience not large enough, nor moved enough, to honor the tragedy.
Which tragedy then? Oh, that of Madame Cora, who, sitting at her table with her chin propped on her hard little hand, and her eyes wide open, had died in their midst without a sound.
>
No one had noticed, it seemed, until the Chief Waiter brought her the pears in syrup.
•
She must have finished that very moment I got up to run after the phantasmal Suzanne. What I’d seen occur in Cora’s eyes was then after all truly an opening, and a closing. But the almost sneering amusement on her face had only been death.
It seemed she hadn’t suffered. A massive apoplexy, the doctor assured everyone. Congratulating, very nearly, the indifferent Cora on such a textbook exodus. It would have been too quick for pain, he said. This I believed. Nor had she wanted to stay. If the ceiling had fallen on her, she said...Well. It had.
I packed my bags that night, unmolested, and left. I was only astounded to meet Jasmine the chambermaid in a corridor, who said to me fiercely, “Fancy going with a slut like that Sylvie. I’d have liked to be your friend. And I can keep my trap shut about things.”
Surprises everywhere.
I took the train to the city, and found a room. As I was always doing. At least in this lodging I was allowed to make a fire, and the landlady offered hot coffee and bread in the mornings.
Of course, I had completely given up my search for, my pursuit of, Black Eyed Susan.
Perhaps I should invent an epilogue, in which I disclose that, before leaving the hotel, I’d found an old photograph of Madame Cora, and seen at once, with a shock so terrific I staggered, that she was the exact double of my “Suzanne.”
And demonstrably therefore had been “Suzanne” in her youth. Hadn’t she said, Madame Cora, that she longed for her youth, and her female lovers? Hadn’t she said that “Suzanne” was never known by that name?
Maybe it was her ghost I saw, that is, the premonition of the ghost of Cora’s past, or even her spatial spirit, finally eluding the hotel and the world and the old wizened body, clad in what Cora thought her own perfect form and age, about thirty, dark and sensuous, carnal in her black of mourning for a husband, in that expedient, safely deceased; ready for more adventures in some other place.
Or maybe the woman I saw, for see her—scented her—I definitely did, if only twice, was another secret mistress of the unusual Patron. Or even some figment of my own winter madness, which Cora recognized as such, knowing that any woman like Esther must be strange in other ways.
I think of her sometimes—of them both. Black Eyed Susan, vanishing into thin air at two turning points, a corridor, a street corner. Madame Cora vanishing also into thin air, leaving only her husk behind her leering in victory at her last laugh.
•
Thimbleriggery and Fledglings
Steve Berman
The Sorcerer
Bernhard von Rothbart scratched at a sore on his chin with a snow-white feather, then hurled it as a dart at the chart hanging above the bookshelves. The quill’s sharp end stabbed through the buried feet of the dunghill cock, Gallus gallus faecis, drawn with a scarab clutched in its beak.
“A noble bird,” von Rothbart muttered as he bit clean his fingernails, “begins base and eats noble things.”
He expected his daughter to look up from a book and answer “Yes, Papa,” but there was only silence. Above him, in the massive wrought-iron cage, the wappentier shifted its dark wings. One beak yawned while the other preened. A musky odor drifted down.
Why wasn’t Odile studying the remarkable lineage of doves?
Von Rothbart climbed down the stairs. Peered into room after room of the tower. A sullen chanticleer pecked near the coat rack. Von Rothbart paused a moment to recall whether the red-combed bird had been the gardener who had abandoned his sprouts or the glazier who’d installed murky glass.
He hoped to find her in the kitchen and guilty of only brushing crumbs from the pages of his priceless books. But he saw only the new cook, who shied away. Von Rothbart reached above a simmering cauldron to run his fingers along the hot stones until they came back charred black.
Out the main doors, the sorcerer looked out at the wide and tranquil moat encircling his home, and at the swans drifting over its surface. He knew them to be the most indolent birds. So much so they barely left the water.
He brushed his fingers together. Ash fell to the earth and the feathers of one gliding swan turned soot-dark and its beak shone like blood.
“Odile,” he called. “Come here!”
The black swan swam to shore and slowly waddled over to stand before von Rothbart. Her neck, as sinuous as any serpent’s, bent low until she touched her head to his boots.
•
The Black Swan
Odile felt more defeated than annoyed at being discovered. Despite the principle that, while also a swan, she should be able to tell one of the bevy from the other, Odile had been floating much of the afternoon without finding Elster. Or, if she had, the maiden—Odile refused to think of them as pens, despite Papa insisting that was the proper terminology—had remained mute.
“What toad would want this swan’s flesh?” her papa muttered. “I want to look upon the face of my daughter.”
In her head, she spoke a phrase of rara lingua that shed the albumen granting her form. The transformation left her weak and famished; while she had seen her papa as a pother owl devour a hare in one swallow, Odile as a swan could not stomach moat grass and cloying water roots. No longer the tips of great wings, her fingers dug at the moss between flagstones.
“There’s my plain girl.” Smiling, he gently lifted her by the arms. “So plain, so sweet.” He stroked her cheek with a thumb.
She could hear the love in his voice, but his familiar cooing over her rough-as-vinegar face and gangly limbs still hurt. A tear escaped along the edge of her nose.
“Why you persist in playing amongst the bevy….” He stroked her cheek with a thumb. “Come inside.” He guided her towards the door. “There won’t only be lessons today. I’ll bring a Vorspiel of songbirds to the window to make you smile.”
Odile nodded and walked with him back into the tower. But she would rather Papa teach her more of rara lingua. Ever since her sixteenth birthday, he had grown reluctant to share invocations. At first, Odile thought she had done something wrong and was being punished, but she now she suspected that Papa felt magic, like color, belonged to males. The books he let her read dealt with nesting rather than sorcery.
From his stories, Odile knew he had been only a few years older when he left his village, adopted a more impressive name, and traveled the world. He had stepped where the ancient augers had read entrails. He had spoken with a cartouche of ibises along the Nile and fended off the copper claws of the gagana on a lost island in the Caspian Sea.
But he never would reveal the true mark of a great sorcerer: how he captured the wappantier. His secrets both annoyed Odile and made her proud.
•
The Wappentier
As the sole- surviving offspring of the fabled ziz of the Hebrews, the wappentier is the rarest of raptors. Having never known another of its ilk, the wappentier cannot speak out of loneliness and rarely preens its dark feathers. Some say the beast’s wings can stretch from one horizon to the other, but then it could not find room in the sky to fly. Instead, this lusus naturae perches atop desolate crags and ruins.
The Rashi claimed that the wappentier possesses the attributes of both the male and female. It has the desire to nest and yet the urge to kill. As soon as gore is taken to its gullet, the wappentier lays an egg that will never hatch. Instead, these rudiments are prized by theurgists for their arcane properties. Once cracked, the egg, its gilded shell inscribed with the Tetragrammaton, reveals not a yolk but a quintessence of mutable form, reflected in the disparate nature of the beast. A man may change his physique. A woman may change her fate. But buried, the eggs become foul and blackened like abandoned iron.
•
This Swan May
When Elster was nine, her grandmother brought her to the fairgrounds. The little girl clutched a ten-pfenning tight in her palm. A gift from her papa, a sour-smelling man who brewed gose beer all day long.
“To buy candy. Or a flower,” said her grandmother.
The mayhem called to Elster, who tugged at her grandmother’s grip wanting to fly free. She broke loose and ran into the midst of the first crowd she came upon. Pushing her way to the center, she found there a gaunt man dressed in shades of red. He moved tarnished thimbles about a table covered in a faded swatch of silk.
The man’s hands, with thick yellowed warts at every bend and crease, moved with a nimble grace. He lifted up one thimble to reveal a florin. A flip and a swirl and the thimble at his right offered a corroded haller. The coins were presented long enough to draw sighs and gasps from the crowd before disappearing under tin shells.
“I can taste that ten-bit you’re palming,” said the gaunt man. Thick lips hid his teeth. How Elster heard him over the shouts of the crowd—“Die linke Hand”—she could not guess. “Wager for a new life? Iron to gold?” His right hand tipped over a thimble to show a shining mark, bit of minted sunlight stamped with a young woman’s face. Little Elster stood on her toes, nearly tipping over the table, to see the coin’s features. Not her mother or her grandmother. Not anyone she knew yet. But the coin itself was the most beautiful of sights; the gold glittered and promised her anything. Everything. Her mouth watered and she wanted the odd man in red’s coin so badly that spittle leaked past her lips.
Heiresses of Russ 2011 Page 9