The Atlas

by William T. Vollmann

  9 But it must be told that two women and five children were still alive . . .

  [The Hebrew text breaks off here.]

  * Some modem commentators have suggested that they specifically feared the intentions of Eleazar, who was known to have killed so many persons, Romans and Jews alike, including even Menachem ben Judah, the hero who'd slaughtered the Roman garrison at Masada seven years past, at the very beginning of the Rebellion. The tale goes that shortly before Jerusalem fell, Menachem ben Judah found Eleazar's father, Ananias the High Priest, in a state of terror at the impending Roman victory, for which he killed him—an act which Eleazar avenged.

  Limbo (1994)

  And all this I entombed in my heart, burying it deep in my heart's four chambers. And the chambers of my heart are called Courage, Fortitude, Righteousness and Sacrifice. But although I have applied my mind to have these things, although they are engraved in the doorways of my heart, I do not possess them. In defiance of God I seek most vainly to prolong my life. And when righteousness calls me to ascend the Serpentine Path, my fear whispers that I shall never come down living from the Hill of Gold. And when courage bids me rise up against tyrants, my fear speaks in a soft low voice, bidding me bow down to wickedness, that I might accept the bribe of my life. And when fortitude commands me to offer my throat to the blade of pain, my fear shows me the way of hiding, there in the manmade wells and bubbles in the rock of the tanner's shop. And when sacrifice summons me away from the sweetness of the light, then my fear pains me like the stinging salts of the Dead Sea.

  I am a woman with child, and I do not want to die.

  God listened, and said to her: Go, and eat the bread of your life, my sad young maid. Lift up your heart, and await the coming of the enemy. They will be easy with you, on account of the others who have died. They will weep tears of pity, and your slavery will be light.

  Capri, Campania, Italia (1993)

  And I myself, neither man nor woman, but only scribe long dead, my flesh long turned to crackly old leaves, imagine how if this woman could have chosen her own Hill of Gold there would have been no Eleazar whom she feared (although the Hebrew sources report that she was his kinswoman), no Serpentine Path, just an empty white walk studded with light, and trees at regular intervals, then a road roofed with branches, a giant palm, then lights set into the steep coast of night, the sound of a girl singing eerily to herself, silence, and then people calling far away, a barking dog, the smell of the cold sea. The girl sang again, two notes; perhaps she was only calling to the other woman, who it is written was old, or to one of the five children who hid and feared. Her echo rose into the black heavens.

  Let the Hill of Gold become some sunny rock of trees and white houses.

  Two girls (let them both be that; nobody likes to be old), one in a sweater, one in a jacket, arms linked at the elbow, promenaded back and forth along the terraced way until a school of other shouting girls swept them up. They all ran down to the sea, where the cacti had legs like crossbreeds of spiders and artichokes. There was a shimmering wall of pines between cliff-stairs and the sea. They had never seen death and wanted to go dancing. That night their lovers would come on the ferry. They'd go with them hand in hand between tree-swellings and turquoise water and white cliffs to the tree-haired Arco Naturel, which has several shining sea-holes where some of them would make love; others would descend as far as the Grotta Matrimonia, that gigantic hollow in the earth like a drained boil; and as the boys they'd chosen gripped their breasts, they'd lie looking upward at the chalky ceiling studded with pale stones like jewels of baseness; perhaps for a moment they'd feel uneasy, almost remembering the cisterns of Masada where they'd hid while above them the ones they loved died praying and bleeding; they'd gasp in the boys' arms, then afterwards grow shy and run ahead up the trail into a steep thicket from which the narrow white crags burst up. All the girls met here every morning to dream of boys together amidst the leafy reaches of golden buds and lilies. The boys came running after them, pounding up the old Roman road. A gull rose and fell in the shade of the steep bay. The boys were searching, but they couldn't find them; the girls knew this secret place so well. They watched the boys coming from far down the treepacked cliff where grottos spat out ocean from their crusted lips; and they giggled. It was almost dawn. They almost didn't want the boys to find them. It was their last night together. Tomorrow morning they would leave this thicket of rosemary, emerging from their wall of white boulders bulging with cacti in whose crotches were birds' nests and balls of pine needles; and they would go down to the sea to get married. After that they would never meet again. Some would go with their husbands to live in Rome. Others would set up house in Napoli or Firenze or even far Catania. They'd never again gaze together at those rocks like icebergs in the dark sea, those ocean-stones whirl-kissed by eddies and fan-shaped waves. That is why, succumbing to the promptings of history, I now introduce to these pages the apostate Josephus Flavius, who was not a Zealot, and held out in a cave with many other men when the Romans came. The Jews in that cave had proposed to stab themselves, but Josephus convinced them it would be less of a sin if they killed each other. Better yet, he contrived to be at the end of the line. Ah, Josephus, how I love you, for you loved life! You were good to yourself; you despised that monstrosity called High Principle. When all but he and one other man were dead, he persuaded his companion to surrender at his side. What happened to Josephus's friend I don't know, but Josephus (who wrote our best extant account of the Jewish War, always glorifying himself and the Romans) was dragged before Vespasian in heavy chains. Because he prophesied with a sycophant's urgency that Vespasian would soon be Emperor, he kept his life and in due time even became rich and free. His first two wives had abandoned him. He married a nice girl in Rome and later left her for a Cretan belle ... So I wonder: Would the two young women who hid from their fate have played the same game that Josephus did (excluding from their hearts, of course, his own reptilian selfishness)? I can almost hear them laughingly urging their sisters down the hill, gently coaxing and swaying them ahead, until they were the only two left; and then they slipped away to be virgins together forever. — No, I don't think so. — Now the heads of the boys rose above the heads of pine trees, gazing down from the crags. From the shade of a white crag, boys came running, bearing their sweethearts a glorious hellfire of blue flowers. They pulled their true loves away from the other girls, took them swimming in green water with reddish stones underneath, white gulls overhead like whitecaps. The girls whispered: I love you so . . . — Why did they weep when they said it? Did they truly long to flee the empty sea-horizon, running back up the tree-frizzed slopes their bare feet knew so well, meeting other girls above the white cliffs? Now it was dawn, the low white wall of windows and arches at the water's edge cliffs not white yet, but purplish-gray, the other ferries white, whitest of all the hydrofoil's wake. The boys took them by the hand. The girls kissed their mothers and fathers goodbye forever. Their husbands had already bought them ferry tickets. And the island quickly became a lump of rocky cloud in the sky, stretching its coast off long and low until it fell off the edge of the world.

  A LETTER FROM TOKYO

  California and Japan (1993)

  * * *

  California and Japan (1993)

  The first time he read the Japanese girl's letter his heart rushed because he was sure that she was saying she was his. He had written to her passionately. She'd replied: If you have a little enough time, please stop by Tokyo to visit me. You probably are not interested in Tokyo, but maybe in seeing me. To him this phrasing seemed so delicate and perfect a statement of acceptance that he kissed her letter for joy. Then at the end she said: Please come back alive from Burma. Because I love you, too.

  Night after night he stayed up rereading this and imagining holding her in his arms. He felt that he was approaching her ever more closely. Soon he'd be kissing the moist lips of her desire. But he wasn't there yet; although he knew what she'd written by heart, he
had not penetrated every veil of her meaning. Her penciled marks were as cold and smoky as the Japanese Sea; it was only latterly that his urgency had begun to sense the low brain-colored island of Japan coming closer, to see the khaki squares as of a woven mat, interspersed with the dull leaden glitter of cities: You probably are not interested in Tokyo, but maybe in seeing me. Now he was close enough to glimpse Japan's dragonclaws and rivers, and the water like silvery fog (but maybe in seeing me), those dark green curds called trees. In seeing me. Because I love you, too. But then one night the letter was used up. Instead of tacit it seemed lukewarm. He tumbled into despondent confusion.

  A week went by in which he didn't read it, and then one hot afternoon he took it from the envelope and traveled down its lines. This time it was not lukewarm but sisterly, loving, enthusiastic, not at all erotic. There was some other matter in the letter—chatty, newsy stuff—which in previous nights had appeared to him only as the lingerie which translucened the more exciting words, but now he comprehended that it was in fact the real stuff, that love was no more than fondness and the invitation merely kind and polite. He'd only thought otherwise because the letter he'd sent her first had been so desperately tender. What if she'd never even received that letter? After all, there was no reference to it. Ah, the perils of context! So he flew away from Japan, leaving her lights and blackness for more blackness.

  He said to himself: How can the meaning of these words squirm and wriggle so much on my mind's hook?

  But then he thought: After all, I never knew what anything else meant, so why should I know what this means? It's written that there's no such thing as truth . . .

  He sent her a love-charged reply and waited. Six months later he heard from her in a Christmas card that she was about to marry someone else.

  DISAPPOINTED BY THE WIND

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada (1993)

  * * *

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada (1993)

  West of the place where Niagara's turquoise marbles itself with foam and changes to cobalt, there are other blue veins in my atlas which idle between Lakes Erie and Ontario; north of them the eye is caught by Lake Ontario's burrowing nose which one's gaze traces from Burlington to Bronte, Oakville to Clarkson, Port Credit to Mississauga, and so up to the city of Toronto. In the autumn this way of going allows one to make the acquaintance of wide blonde and redhaired trees. There are coppery-leafed forests along the riverbanks, and lanes of leaves the milky green of English apples. Closer to Toronto they have all turned the hue of golden deliciouses or Mclntoshes; and in Toronto itself they have mainly left the trees. Looking once more at my atlas I discover the whole weight of northern Canada bearing down on Toronto. From James Bay roots of frosty rivers grow south, reaching.

  In October, when I was visiting, a chilly wind blew always from the lake, piling up fog that was beige with whitish highlights like a field of October corn. I felt alone. On the subway people wore woolly jackets over their sweaters, sitting bowed against the dismalness of the growing cold. By January they would be long used to it, but that was because by then the summer would be dead and in a frozen grave, permitting the mourning to take place with detachment, irony, and eventually even joy as the extremists joined the strong fierce red-cheeked battalions of winter, gloating in fresh stinging winds; but at the moment summer was newly deceased, still paling and cooling and clotting on a bed of crunchy leaves. So each subway passenger was alone like some Arctic traveller who, homesick while the wind groaned, stretched a hand out of the sleeping bag and ate dry cereal, pushing the cold back a few steps. I knew a little about what cold was. Toronto was not cold yet. On the borders of Canada lay snowdrifts as pure and rich as cream. In summer the mud had been wet between them. It was just above freezing—much colder with the wind chill. Beside the Arctic Ocean was a ridge of pumice-like rock, and then a long low snow-ridge, flat on top like a barn roof, that was almost the same color as the sky. When I tried to read or write there my fingers quickly became numb. The wind grew more forceful; the tent-fly was caked with ice, and my wet boots froze. That was not cold yet; that was still summer. But now the sea had begun to freeze, and down in Toronto we knew that even without knowing it. On the subway we felt cold. Each passenger hunched with his hands in his pockets or deep inside his sleeves, longing to retract arms and legs within his heartwarmed torso to resist the cold, as a sphere of glowing blood. The men glared or sadly gazed; the women wrinkled themselves into frumpishness or followed the flashing stations with clear and angry eyes.

  At night it was so much colder still that loneliness overcame lethargic sadness. That was why at night the girls in their thick coats seemed to offer promises of warm cuddlings. It was like Walter Benjamin in Moscow in 1926, pursuing Asja Lacis and scribbling: Moscow as it appears at the present reveals a full range of possibilities in schematic form: above all, the possibility that the Revolution might fail or succeed.

  Asja would not give herself to him anymore. Her hair was as weightless as milkweed down. But one evening they pushed their coats off the bed and he lay down with her on top of him. They started kissing. He put his hands inside her warm sweater.

  As I rode the subway on those foggy Toronto nights, I looked at the women and felt that I could have gone home with them to be warm, but I never asked any of them, and when I reached my stop I went out without looking back.

  This happened night after night. Night after night I derived pleasure from sitting across from the women of Toronto, imagining holding them in my arms in their dark warm bedrooms. Night after night I passed through the turnstile and ascended to Yonge Street, where the clammy wind tried to steal my hat. Then late one evening I came out into the silver, frosty air, and the wind was ready for me. It snatched my hat and whirled it over the roofs of buildings. It tweaked my nose and earlobes with burning mischievous fingers. It caught me up and lifted me above the lake. I saw my hat far ahead of me, a black star whirling higher to cap one of the delicious white stars of winter. Because I had fallen in love with the wind, I was permitted to become the white star, and my black cap sailed lovingly down onto my head. I was in the bedroom of the wind. The wind wanted to play with me, love me and eat me. I married the wind, and rode the wind all night.

  In the morning I woke up naked on an island of dark wet gar-tersnakes and birches whose leaves were speckled and orange. The wind came to kiss me, and sent an orange rain upon the sand. When I stopped blinking, the trees were bare and the snakes had slipped underground.

  I was not cold. My body was as red as a brick. It glowed and tingled and pricked. I found a thicket of Indian pipe in the sand and picked them, made black-jointed flutes with which to serenade the wind, and the wind, still loving me, raised the lake about me, sloshed cold violet-green water about me in glee until it burned pleasantly on the rims of my ears.

  Then the wind got tired of me. I don't know why. I had striven to be entertaining and different at all times. My own joy had certainly not diminished. But it didn't matter. This was divorce. My clothes fell down upon me with a thump, and in the dead calm I began to shiver.

  I crossed the lake in an old canoe and reached town just as the wind began again. Soccer players in blue jerseys were running amidst the leaves. A woman clutched the strap of her handbag, her face down in the wind. I wanted to ask her to marry me, but I was too cold. I found a street of brick houses and big dogs, where pillared porches and porticoes were overhung by pale orange leaves. Their tall narrow windows were as dull as the sky, reflecting the clouds that skidded before the wind.

  I met a redhead in a long velvet jacket. She was holding her little boy's hand as they strode though fallen leaves.

  I've been disappointed by the wind, too, she said.

  At first I thought she was talking to me. But then I understood that she was only trying to smooth the sadness of her son whom the wind refused to take away.

  The boy saw me. — Look, look! he cried to his mother. — His ears are red and happy. That means he's the wind's friend.
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  I smiled, said nothing, and walked away. Truly it was an ear-aching wind.

  On the subway the grinning laborers in their pea-jackets, the bald owlish businessmen in wool coats, the ladies in furs all hunched against the cold. Only one person, a fanatical prophetess who wore sackcloth, was kin to me. But she would not see me or the wind; I left her alone.

  Coming up the windy tunnel to Yonge Street, I found the boy, happily escaped, and running towards me amidst leaves and prayers blowing in circles. Men ran with their heads down, holding the brims of their caps. The boy begged me to bring him back over the feathery water of the windy lake to that khaki and ocher island of dying-leaved trees which lay so low in the lake that only windstruck people could find it. When I asked him how he knew about it, he said that his mother had told him. Then I knew that I had misconstrued my misconstruction, that she had been talking to me. I refused him, led him back through rolled-up leaves like trilobites on the sidewalks, and by subway we returned to the apple-colored maple leaves which curled on the trees of his neighborhood, swarming and wriggling down over the house pillars where girls in thick Indian sweaters and beaver ear-muffs ran shivering. The lady in the long velvet jacket was waiting for us. As she leaned forward to kiss me, the warm sighing breezes of her mouth reached my heart, and I melted into a puddle of water.