by Sean Wallace
A shuffling sound, from behind – Acamapixtli drags himself out of the workshop on tottering legs, bleeding from a thousand cuts, staring at us as if we held the answers. “Nezahual . . .”
“He’s gone,” we say, and his bloodied hands clench. We wish for tears, for anger, for anything to alleviate the growing emptiness in our chests.
Acamapixtli smiles, bitterly. “All for nothing. I should have known. You can’t cheat the gods.”
We say nothing. We stand, unmoving, in the courtyard, watching the sunlight sparkle and dissolve in the water of the fountain until everything blurs out of focus.
This is what we see: a flock of copper birds speaking to the assembled crowd – of machines, of arched bridges and trains over steel tracks, of the dream that should have been Nezahual’s.
This is what we see: a city where buildings rise from the bloodless earth, high enough to pierce the heavens; a city where, once a year, a procession of grave people in cotton clothes walks through the marketplaces and the plazas of bronze. We see them make their slow way to the old war cemeteries and lay offerings of grass on the graves of long-dead warriors; we see an entire nation mourning its slaughtered children under the warm light of the silenced sun.
This is what we wished for.
The Return of Chérie
Nisi Shawl
Hissing gently as if to attract the sky’s attention, the Okondo turned in the evening air with lover-like deliberation. Lisette watched from the new warehouse’s loading dock as it left her. Up there the sun still shone, flashing brightly on the gondola’s rear window, gilding the balloon’s purple sides. A gigantic cacao pod, rubber-backed barkcloth molded over aluminium girders and rings: when last she lived in Everfair, way back in the nineteenth century, such an apparatus was no more than a dream. But now she had ridden one.
Away down the Ulindi River’s long, lush valley the dirigible floated, freshly loaded with tin and tea, cocoa and hemp, the region’s produce. Leopold’s guns posed it not the slightest danger; they were gone. The flight to the lowland ports would be as uneventful as her voyage here. This was 1914. The tyrant had been vanquished for almost ten years.
Lisette need have no concern. Yet she yearned after the departing dirigible till it became indistinguishable from the periwinkle dusk. Or did she yearn for another?
A cool wind fell upon her, descending out of the Mitumba Mountains. Someone wrapped a soft shawl over her shoulders. It was Fwendi – her brass hand glinted in the lantern light spilling from the warehouse door. With the faintest of ratcheting whirs, Fwendi’s hand released the woven cashmere to settle against Lisette’s still-smooth neck. “Merci, mon ami.”
“Pas du tout,” Fwendi replied. Though they’d traveled extensively – Europe, Middle Asia, and the US – French remained their shared tongue, serving as their secret language. As it had served with Daisy in Lisette’s vanished youth.
“You ought to come inside,” Fwendi scolded, continuing in French. “Come to the hotel.” Lisette wanted to rebel against this bullying nursemaidery, but in truth there was nothing left to see, the sky darkening so swiftly here, mere kilometers from the equator.
Nonetheless, she affected an injured air. “As you desire, Maman,” she replied – a jest, since she had fifteen years more than Fwendi, according to the best reckoning the refugee had been able to provide. She bowed her head and stalked inside.
Fwendi ignored Lisette’s play-acting with the practice of years. Unfussed, she contrived to be first to reach the lantern and remove it from the long chain dangling off the high rafter. Her own cloak she looped over one arm – the one of flesh.
Neither had ever before come to Kalima. Fwendi assumed the lead, taking them down the bluff and into town, past the homes of farmers and mechanics, by workshops that on the women’s way to the warehouse had been loud with the clang of hammers on hot metals or heavy with the reek of rubber, vertiginous with the incense of volatile chemicals. Now all these establishments sat silent, doors shut but windows open, airing out in preparation for the morning.
The “hotel” could be distinguished from Kalima’s other houses by its three storeys and its condescending facade, like that of an American plantation house. The Washingtons, Negro immigrants from the Carolinas, owned the place and occupied its ground floor. They rented rooms to such travelers as visited Kalima without alliances of kin or trade among the local Blacks.
Lisette had alliances in this neighborhood and had called on them. But not for shelter.
They climbed the stairs to the top storey. Lisette occupied her own room; Fwendi followed her in and used the lantern to light the small stoneware lamp beside her bed. A pleasant warmth lingered from the day. Lisette’s trunk brooded in one corner, upright, like a wardrobe. A valise, open on a wicker chair, offered gloves, scarves, handkerchiefs, and stockings to wear on the morrow, when she would have to decide . . . what she would not now think of. Lisette removed her hat and suspended it from a peg beside a looking glass. A blue-glazed water pitcher stood on a washstand near one white-curtained window. Shades of barkcloth curled behind the curtains, ready to unroll. Altogether, it was as comfortable a home as she had occupied in years.
“’Soir,” she said carelessly as Fwendi retired to her own room, which she shared with Rima. Those two did not harmonize. In moments, as Lisette had expected, she heard a sharp rapping on her door.
“Enter,” she said. Not in French. This newest member of her makeshift, itinerant household spoke only English.
Rima – Serenissima Bailey – blew through the opening door like a storm. Her namesake, the heroine of Green Mansions, had been described as fragile, small, demure, but that was not this tall nineteen-year-old, strong and swift as a cyclone. Rima’s long brown shins thrust impatiently free of her dress’s slit panels. Her half-bare arms reached for Lisette, crossed behind her back and pulled her close to murmur mock-angry reproaches for her late return to the hotel: had she planned to stay out all the night?
Lisette sighed and avoided the offered kiss. “No. But—”
“But you wasn’t meanin’ to spend time with me, was you? Naw, I thought not.” Rima dropped to sit on the bed in an attitude that ought to have been graceless: face jammed in cupped hands, elbows dug into her knees, feet planted wide.
“Of course I was. But not in my room. Not alone.” Not in Everfair, with its memories. Its possibilities.
A shy smile played over Rima’s berry-dark lips. “It was good, though, wasn’t it? What we done?” Her enchantingly slanted eyes peeked upwards. “Don’t make neither one of us no bull dagger.” The last in a worried tone – the girl still feared social consequences due to their encounters; these would have been harsh, indeed, in the coastal Florida village where Lisette first found her. Even in cosmopolitan New York, where Lisette had introduced her protégée to the emerging literary crowd, the code was strict. One had to be careful . . .
“You’d best go to your room.”
“Yes’m.” Rima rose to leave and turned her back, posture suddenly elegant as a hussar’s. Perversely, Lisette wished her to stay. In that instant Rima whirled around and crossed the room in two strides, bending to embrace her. “Promise! Promise!” she demanded, pressing her brow against Lisette’s as if seeking to force her way into her mind.
What should I promise? Lisette wondered, but she knew what was needed: a vow of love. A vow she could not bring herself to make.
Morning. Breakfast was included in her arrangement with the Washingtons, but they provided it between the uncivilized hours of five and nine. Lisette girded herself for the day alone: she had dismissed Rima well before midnight.
Matty awaited her on the net-veiled verandah, pouring chocolate into a large, ugly cup. The smell of it had lured her to this table spread with a clean enough cloth and set with fresh bread, jam, curls of butter in ice, and a revolting pyramid of small, dead fish.
In blessed silence, Matty filled her cup, too, and pulled forward a chair for her. As Lisette sipped and
composed herself she noted that he placed three of the fish on his plate before assuming his own seat. Well, he was a Scotsman.
“’Jour.”
“The Capitol Mote is next Market Day, and you’ll be there in plenty of time,” he told her needlessly. He must mean to soothe her. “Relax and enjoy your holiday.”
Matty’s hatred of Leopold was legendary. Someday soon the King would die – perhaps when the Germans and Allies laid waste to Belgium on their way to invading France. What would Matty do once his old enemy was no more?
She should tell him her official reason for stopping here – which was almost the real one. Matty, too, belonged to the Fabian Society and had Everfair’s interests at heart. He would comprehend.
Instead, she asked whether he thought her understudy capable of performing Lisette’s part. In many ways Rima was ideal. Her darker complexion needed little or no make-up compared to the cosmetics with which Lisette disguised the European portion of her heritage.
“She brings to the stage a certain—” Matty hesitated diplomatically “—a definite verve.”
Lisette glanced up suspiciously from a critical examination of her cuticles. “I have been coaching her voice.”
“No, she’ll be fine – brilliant, quite . . . quite active; I’ve watched—”
Ah! It was Lisette’s self-regard he was wary of damaging. She relaxed. “Fwendi is pleased also.”
At this, Matty blushed. Fwendi was twenty-six, and he was all of fifty-four. One year younger than Daisy.
Dirigibles could fly by night, given a sufficiently bright moon. They traveled sometimes as many as 120 kilometers in an hour. If Daisy had received Lisette’s message immediately upon the Okondo mooring in Kisangani, she could well have boarded the vessel for its return trip. Allowing four hours to unload, Lisette had calculated the airship’s arrival here to be at ten this morning. Then she had laughed at these calculations, so obviously her own desires disguising themselves as reliable estimates.
With Fwendi at her side and Rima trailing sulkily behind them, Lisette proceeded back through Kalima to the warehouse, considering how unlikely it was for Daisy even to have been awake at such an hour – 2 a.m., assuredly, by the time the dirigible tied up to the Kisangani tower.
It was 10.45 a.m. In daylight the town’s streets were filled with people. A cluster of toddlers stared straightforwardly at Fwendi’s hand – such prostheses were uncommon now the atrocities necessitating them had ceased. The attention in no way discomfited Fwendi: she obliged her impromptu audience with a little show, rolling her sleeve high and spinning her hand like a weathercock at the end of her beautiful, glittering arm. This latest model included flint and steel: she struck sparks with thumb and ring finger, and one chubby boy tried to imitate her, squealing with frustration.
A shadow passed. Lisette looked up: the Okondo! Her heart sped, and she slipped eagerly through the ring of children. Some seconds later, her entourage was back beside her. The dust their boots kicked up hurried before them, whipped by a little wind. Worried, Lisette scanned the clouds, the mountainsides, but saw no sign of turbulence in the sky’s upper reaches.
Ten wooden stairs, then a gravel track, then a few more stairs, but these mere indentations in the bluff’s earth buttressed with sections chopped from some poor tree’s trunk. She fell behind Fwendi – age had its advantages, but physical alacrity was not one of them. On the flat area above, she regained her lead. Rima continued to trail them both.
Again the glad shade. Dark against the dazzling sky, the dirigible hovered, now merely seven meters above her head, lassoed to the mooring post.
Freight comprised the line’s primary business; it wasn’t equipped for passengers. She recalled the process by which she had disembarked yesterday. Perhaps she shouldn’t watch Daisy subjected to such indignities? A makeshift sling had lowered Lisette to the ground, or fairly close – only a bit over a meter she’d had to jump as the sling swayed and shifted with the balloon’s small but constant movements.
Too late, though. A black square opened in the gondola’s tight-woven bottom. Leaf-wrapped bundles cascaded out, followed by crew swarming down ropes and leaping to stack them neatly at the dock’s far end, nearest the warehouse. They were all clad in colorless loose shirts and wide trousers, shod in sandals. It took Lisette more time than she would have expected to recognize that one of them was Daisy.
But at fifty-five years, what was the dear woman thinking? On her feet without recollection of rising, Lisette ran over the stones of the loading dock to her, to the one she had no right to ask anything of, who had joined her here anyhow at the first invitation – the first direct communication between them in over a decade.
Daisy had seen her, of course. She said something unintelligible to her companions and approached Lisette with the free-limbed gait of an adolescent boy. Her hair, still dark, had been cut shockingly short and restrained at her neck with a ribbon the greenish-blue of a redwing’s eggs; a matching length circled her throat. Only faint lines creased her well-tanned brow and bracketed her thin, smiling mouth. That was all Lisette had time to note before being crushed in an embrace so tight it threatened suffocation.
Released quickly, she would have staggered, but Daisy kept a hand on one shoulder, kneading it with a kitten’s loving fierceness.
Lisette blinked and saw that tears filled Daisy’s eyes also. “You came,” she pronounced, rather stupidly.
“Naturally.” Daisy attempted to give Lisette a look of severe reproach down her long nose, which served merely to lower the spillways of her lashes. Then both wept openly a short while, laughing as well.
They wiped their cheeks. Lisette made the introductions and they walked to the hotel. Rima displayed an awful, forced cheerfulness, pacing backwards along the uneven roads, chatting amiably with her rival. Who seemed as youthful as ever she had been. Her work on the dirigible aided her, she claimed, in her writing.
Rima answered Daisy’s questions about the Continent when Lisette couldn’t bring herself to speak. This occurred frequently.
Fwendi had a parasol, which she clamped in her brass hand and held to shade herself and Lisette. By the time they reached the hotel the sun was noon-high and broilingly hot, even so near the mountains. Rima’s determined gaiety had mercifully subsided and the party mounted the steps in silence. In the dim entryway, the eldest Washington girl offered them luncheon, then, when that was turned down, iced tea, which they gratefully accepted.
Once more to the verandah. Lisette was tempted to stretch out upon the wood and raffia divan, but knew better. The straight-backed chairs kept her head up, her chin becomingly high. Matty had intercepted the tray and bore it out to them. The drink’s chill revived her somewhat. Ice also had been unknown formerly in Everfair.
“Ah, Fwendi, I need your opinion of a change in the script I’m contemplating making.” Pathetic, the lengths to which the man went. Really, despite his help with the Germans in Cairo, there was no need for him to have come on this trip at all, but Lisette could not grudge him whatever comfort he found in the girl’s company.
“Yes? A change in the play? You’d like to read a passage to me, perhaps?” Fwendi rose from her seat on the divan. “In your room?”
Matty followed her within as if mesmerized.
Rima remained. “Well. I imagine y’all have plenty things you wanna talk about.” But she made no move to depart. Uneasiness thrummed in the silence like a hidden insect.
From above came an interruption to the awkwardness: Fwendi’s voice. “Rima! Rima, come up here – to our room – please?” With apologies for giving them what they wanted, the actress at last left Daisy and Lisette alone with one another.
Perhaps . . . perhaps only a couple of meters separated them now. Jackie had died last August, in Ireland. Did Daisy still mourn him?
Of course she did. But how deeply? For how long?
“I was told you’ve been entrusted with—”
Lisette shook her head, a warning that they
could too easily be overheard, and crooked her finger. Daisy comprehended. She closed her mouth and crossed the verandah’s wide planks to Lisette’s side.
“Make-believe you love me.” Muffled laughter in Lisette’s hair. “What is the joke in that?” she asked, pretending offended dignity.
“Oh, chérie—”
Lisette found herself on her feet, drawn up into Daisy’s arms. Balancing on her tiptoes, she put her lips to one ear. “Now we whisper.” She shut her eyes.
“Yes. Chérie—”
Lisette wanted only to listen – to the fast beat of Daisy’s heart, to her soft, rough breathing – but she must speak, and quickly. “Others may intrude at any moment.” Their hosts. Or Rima, who’d left them so reluctantly. “I have received secret offers for the Mote from both Allies and Entente. Let us pledge an assignation to discuss them in detail.”
“Yes.” The poet bent over Lisette’s other ear. “Where can we meet? Chérie – how soon?”
Cool and blue, the night fell swiftly. A smudge of a moon hung low over the Ulindi. Lisette set the lamp carefully atop her trunk and turned it low.
Europeans told their secrets inside locked rooms. Lisette had learned other ways, here and in her journeying. She saw their merits: if one had a clear view of the surroundings and an evident absence of spies, it would seem one might say anything.
But the lips could be read. Unsure from whom they hid – a matter of concern mainly to the Entente and Allies – Lisette was content to meet Daisy inside, in her own quarters, privately. As of old. As she had often dreamt of doing again.
A steady, even knock on her door. “Enter,” she called.
Daisy had changed out of her work costume into a slightly more conventional garment: a gown like a loose duster, which covered her knees but ended well above her ankles. Which were still sturdy but neat.
The room’s one chair was empty. Daisy took it, and Lisette sat on her bed. The windows were opened, but their shades were down, their curtains closed.