The fur of the rug so deep. “Are they still harvesting?” she asks. And receives that gift, her mother’s half-laughing, half-despairing gesture, the optimism that never seems to desert her, that gives even her most dreadful and disappointing stories a piquant flavor.
“My dear, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you.” She goes on talking in her easy, simple, inimitable way, telling of stolen oxen, storm-damaged trees, a fence that can’t be mended until she finds money to buy posts. As she speaks her hand hovers over the notebook in which she keeps the accounts. It is covered in baize and held together with string. She is not good at sums and always works them out two or three times on the backs of old menus before she enters them in the book.
“Sometimes I’m afraid to open it,” she confesses, laughing and wiping her eyes. Tears shed between amusement and grief. Her delicate skin, scrubbed by the air of the desert, shines beneath the dark wing of her hair where a few pale threads are sparkling. And Siski knows by her resolute smile that despite the catalogue of disasters there will be gifts and a ball again this year on the Feast of Lamps. This is not one of those moments of crisis, occurring two or three times a year, when her mother paces the rug, muttering and counting on her fingers.
During those times the house grows dark; they are ordered to save the oil. Nenya goes about with a fierce stiff face, carries trays to the morning room and makes certain grim allusions which the children are too frightened to examine. At night there are strange bumps and scrapings: their mother, in her dressing gown, is emptying cupboards, looking for things to sell. Worst of all are the Tolie mornings in the huntsmen’s room when she explains to the servants that she can give them only half their wages. The rough hands, clad in gloves if it is winter, close about the coins, and the herdboys shuffle silently toward the door. Afterward her mother returns to the morning room. Her uncombed hair is fastened with pins, her arms hang by her sides. The children crouch at the edge of the door she has forgotten to close and watch her gesturing, animated by desperation. She insists that their tutor go over her sums. “We must think of something!” she cries. “You will surely see something I have missed.”
She makes him sit in the chair and kneels beside him. And the tutor snatches off his skullcap and throws it on the floor, a habit which is comical in the schoolroom but not here, not here. “I am not a steward!” he cries. “You ought to have a steward.”
He fumes, kicks at his fallen cap, sometimes even weeps. Their mother rises at last and goes to the window. A strange half-smile on her lips, she rests her forehead against the glass and gazes out at the desolate countryside.
But today, no, today there is no despair, only the usual struggles, and fires burn in the library and the little family parlor. Siski goes into this parlor, where skins cushion the floor and a pair of Savrahili sabers hangs on the wall. There are no flowers now, and the parlor looks plain, even austere, but it is still one of her favorite rooms. Only, in the air, she can detect the chill that follows wherever her father, that stranger, that interloper, has passed.
All morning he sleeps. Siski and Tav and their cousin wander through the south wing of the house, they look at the books in the library in silence. They are examining pieces of armor in their dead grandmother’s audience hall when a shield slides off the table and falls with a clang.
They look up, frozen in the light from the window. Slowly the clamor dies away and they hear the beating of three hearts. But there is no other sound until noon, when a creak on the stairs admonishes them to seek the amadesh, the orchard, the hills. Usually they go riding at this hour, but Siski will not ride without Tuik, and the others walk with her under the apricot trees. Dragging branches through the fallen leaves. The house stands over them, aloof, pierced with windows like broken mirrors. The house in which he walks, drinks his coffee, sits in the library alone. They stay away, running wild in the orchard and on the farm, eating raush from their pockets and drinking milk behind sheds where goats are being slaughtered. They run filthy, half-frozen, harassed by dogs.
Dasya looks up at the purple sky. “It’s kebma time,” he says.
Slowly they return to the darkened house. Certain formalities are preserved. They bathe, they dress for kebma. Siski wears a pair of agate pins in her hair. In the drawing room she stands near the fire, holding her plate, chewing. She does not know or think about what she eats. And all of them stand like that, just eating, silent, unless her mother clears her throat and begins a tentative conversation.
Then all the children help her. “Oh, did you know?” “I think.” “I saw him too.” Her father stands by the window with crossed arms. His smile is taut, derisive, false. “Is that what you think?” he says. The silence closes. No one looks at him. They eat.
Evenings of candlelight and dread, without innocence, without pleasure. Her high lace collar scratches the back of her neck. In the dining room the candles stand on the table in pallid rows while on the walls the portraits kindle their abstract smiles. Her father eats doggedly, attacking his meat. He mutters: “The meat is tough.”
“I’m sorry,” her mother says softly. “It was roasting all afternoon.”
“That’s why it’s tough, you let them overcook it.”
He beckons and Fodok steps from the shadows with a bottle of dark wine. The liquid curls in the glass with a tinny music. Outside moonlight covers the fields, roads, and canals with a mantle of chalk. Hired men and girls are going home along the roads, singing, stepping vigorously in their rawhide boots. A few herds of cattle and sheep are on the roads as well, being driven home in the dark. The herdboys sing their peculiar oh-ee, oh-ee notes. Light shines from a kitchen with a waxed floor. At the Three Falcons, Durs is easing out corks with his heavy tufted hands. Men sit everywhere, on the steps, at the table under the fig tree, reaching for bottles, coughing, pulling off their gloves. Young Osenor, who plays music in exchange for drinks, sits in his special chair and plucks the diali. With a comb in her hair.
Children run through the yards, chasing each other. Dogs are snapping at bones. And we sit here, immobilized by silence. The house is hushed and empty, it seems as if even the servants have gone away, taking with them all naturalness, light, and color. Life, real life, is banished to the golden, bread-smelling amadesh, where a little window is open to let out the heat, where the cook sits with her feet soaking in a basin and Nenya takes off her kerchief to let the servants’ children plait her hair. Life is in the morning room, peeping from under the bearskin rug. It is in the little parlor where, on the day before Tanbrivaud, Siski and Tav and their mother will hang up ribbons and evergreen branches, bursting with laughter, standing on the hard leather chairs. The children cover their mouths when they laugh, they hide behind the curtains. Their mother is purposeful, lively, like anyone’s mother. She scolds them, chases them with the branches. Then suddenly she raises her hand. “Shh.” On her cheek a pale mark like a star.
In the dining room, the stranger raises his glass. He stares before him at the candles. He is the author of this enervating silence. For them, for his family, silence and contempt. It is for others that he unpacks the jewels of his intellect and charm. She has seen him hold a room full of visitors spellbound with his talk, convulse the most sober listener with his wit. From the old conservatory where he spends his evenings alone or with the doctor, she has often heard his shouts of unnatural laughter. Yes, he laughs until he chokes, he cackles, he pounds on the table. But not here. Here he sets his glass down by his plate. He says something, she doesn’t know what, something that makes her mother tilt her head, a public smile crystallizing on her lips.
“Perhaps not necessary,” her mother murmurs.
He goes on talking, he is talking now about money, lamp oil, wood. “The earlier you rise, the more wood you consume. You sit in that parlor of yours, a huge room, and heat the whole place for seven hours.”
Her mother laughs, a
little frown of pain denting her brow. “Oh, never seven hours. Never that long.”
Siski looks at the window but she can only see their reflections now, the night is too dark, the dining room too bright. She sees her mother’s image motion for Fodok, order more apples, the servants mustn’t hear them argue, it wouldn’t do.
A familiar despair, as easily recognizable as home itself, comes in from the night and the desert, from all directions. Don’t say anything, don’t look. For evil is here, among the plates. Afterward everyone will rise, fleeing that high cold room. The children will go to the parlor, running, bumping into the walls, shoving each other, giggling, behaving as they think other children do. In the parlor Dasya will throw himself on the floor in front of the fire. “Alas my heart, I’ve eaten enough for fifty men.” Tav will string the little bow she carved that afternoon and pursue them until bedtime with her toy arrows. “Stop it!” Siski shrieks, flinging herself behind the couch. “I don’t want to play, I mean it, kad shedyamud.” But she does want to play. The restlessness, the need for movement and light, is terrible. She rolls on the skin rug, laughing, clutching her ribs.
Sing more, play more, make more noise. Father is in the conservatory cutting up cakes of bolma, he won’t hear. Subdued at last, exhausted, they go upstairs where they can hear their mother playing the limike in her dressing room.
Oh joyful the morning, the fairest is walking
on field and on hillside her blossoms to shed.
Every night the same tune, a very beautiful tune by Hailar the Blind, that master of rhythm, harmony, and mathematics. She plays it every night, again and again. Sometimes she sings. The children fall asleep to those complex and ordered tones. She is not talented; music is difficult for her, she makes mistakes, goes back to repeat the most intricate measures. She plays it quickly, as if she would feel how fast her fingers are able to move, and then slowly as if to drain each note of its essence. Sitting cross-legged on the low flat couch, not looking in the mirror. About her the light of the porcelain Nainish lamp. She plays. On the wall hangs a portrait of her father in an ebony frame, below it a painting of Faluidhen she made herself, long ago.
Dim gray walls relieved by clusters of roses. No one knows why she plays the same air every night, that song and no other. Perhaps, on the wave of music, she returns to the fresh, cold climate of the north, to the vast pink orchards, to the pines. Or perhaps the challenge of Hailar’s composition enables her to forget, for an hour, the relentlessness of her life. Or perhaps the music she loves so dearly compensates her for the hardships, the losses coming one after the other. The struggle to maintain the house, to keep from having to sell the carriage, give up the tutor for the children, cut down the woods. For the battle to keep dishonor at bay, the necessity to smile, to lie, every day. And for her husband, always for him. Yes, perhaps those liquid notes and the pleasure of creating them each night is a recompense for his disappearances to Tevlas, for the money he spends which he will never explain. For her suspicions, her secret tears, the sobs she smothers with her pillow. For the humiliation she suffers when one of the servants knocks at her door because the master is lying unconscious in a hallway, and she must give permission for him to be carried upstairs, undressed, rolled into bed, so that the children will not discover him in the morning. For the night she glanced from the window, having heard a noise below, and saw him urinating drunkenly in the garden. For his coldness, his rebuffs. The way he mocks her for praying, calls her a fool, sneers at all her interests and amusements. And the way that the children, as an extension of her, meet with the same repulsion and scorn. The way they shrink from him with their huge despairing eyes—her children who are so eager to please, so sensitive that the least unpleasant word brings out great bruises on their hearts. For the way that the house has become a place of sighs, a trackless wasteland in which happiness is kept hidden like a crime. On holidays the children cluster whispering in her dressing room, unwrapping their little presents with cold fingers.
And then there are the sudden changes, his violence, his caprices. The gifts that overwhelm with their strange brilliance. The Bainish gown he purchased for her, its skirt encrusted with Nissian rubies, or, for Siski, an astonishing, princely horse. And the outings, abruptly decided upon, the excursions to Solfian in an open wagon. The wind pulls furiously at the children’s flying hair. Seated on bales of straw, frightened, disheveled, they cling to one another, jolting over the roads in an ashen twilight. It takes too long to get to the wood; they are hungry, thirsty, desperate. Their father’s face grows harder as it becomes clear his plan has failed. By the time the little rush lights are lit, those lights which are meant to give them so much pleasure, Siski is weeping softly and Tav has fallen asleep.
Oh joyful the morning, the fairest is walking
on field and on hillside her blossoms to shed.
Siski looks at her father. She looks at him. She hears his voice. “I’m only trying to make a bit of conversation.” A flash of movement, the quiver of a whip. He has thrown his napkin down. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Conversation over dinner.”
He reaches for a candle, and the light drawn close picks out the gray in his beard and illuminates his handsome, hawk-like, deep-lined face. A face that seems almost petrified, except for the roving and fiery eyes. He lights his cheroot, dripping wax on the tablecloth.
“Careful,” her mother says, very quickly, not thinking.
“What did you say to me?”
He stares.
Her mother’s eyes are downcast, her fingers fluttering. “It’s nothing, it’s only—the tablecloth, you’re dripping—”
“And isn’t this my own house? And can’t I spill whatever I like on the tablecloth?”
The same, every night, the same weariness and oppression. No one eats.
Siski looks at him, the world about her beginning to dissolve. No, it is not the same every night. Tonight it is not the same.
“It’s because Mother has to clean the linen,” she says.
Silence. He looks at her in stupefaction before the eyes with their discolored whites and scarlet veins begin to gather their fury. She hurries, afraid she won’t be able to finish.
“It’s because she has to clean the tablecloths, that’s why she doesn’t like them to get stained.”
Already her eyes are full of tears. He sits back in his chair, cold, sarcastic. “I suppose she doesn’t have servants to wash the tablecloths. Or perhaps she makes you wash them, is that it?”
She hears herself stammering. “She. She has to ask Nenya. It makes extra work, she doesn’t like it— ”
And with shame, rage, loathing, she feels herself beginning to sob, because it’s horrible, this existence, ignoble, demeaning. And because, by weeping, she has already lost.
“You dare to open your mouth. You killed that horse. You’ve cost me more money than your mother with her firewood.”
She cannot see him anymore; the table slips and blends with the wall, swirling about her, melting in the light. She imagines the others staring at her in horror, at this violent display, this scene. But she has gone too far to stop. “Mother gets up early in the morning to do the accounts,” she cries, weeping and shaking, her hands clenched on the table. “She needs the wood, she needs it. She always saves, she never wastes anything. Let her have the firewood from my bedroom, I don’t want it.”
“Siski,” her mother says.
“No,” her father interrupts, his smile malicious and triumphant. “She says she doesn’t want it. Very well, you won’t have a fire, but you won’t give the wood to your mother because it is not yours to give. It is mine.”
Pressing. Pressing. “Pressing and pressing,” she sobs. “Pressing on everything all the time.” She kneels at the edge of the sunken garden, her face on the low stone wall that is dusted with snow. She turns her head, rubbing her che
eks and forehead on the rugged stone. Her hand tight over her heart where she feels it pressing. Why is it? Why? Why all the time? Stars burst and glitter behind her eyes, the steadying pain of her forehead stung by snow. Still it keeps pressing and it is possible to die here in the dark, deserted garden.
To die of it. To die. She shivers, snow is on her neck, her knees are wet, her feet numb in the embroidered slippers. She turns her head again. Snow on her eyelids. Someone comes and stands beside her and she feels that it is Dasya.
He does not speak. She raises her head. Lights in the house behind him and she knows that he can see her upturned face. She cannot speak of it, she would rather die. “Tuik is dead,” she chokes. “I killed him. And you’re not happy here anymore.”
He crouches beside her, jacketless in the cold. “I am happy.”
She shakes her head. “You’re not.”
She wonders if Aunt Mardith took him aside at Faluidhen. If he, too, is under the fog of shame. Is that why he is so strange with her, so distant?
“Siski,” he says. “Look, stand up. You can’t stay there.”
He pulls her up. Suddenly she feels quiet, remote. As if all the world has fallen away from them. He holds her hand as they walk to the end of the garden and stand looking out at the snow-dark night. Two figures in a shapeless landscape.
All winter her room remains cold. She tells herself she’ll grow used to it. Nenya brings her heated bricks in secret. “Here, sudaidi.” Her guilty face, the bricks wrapped in a sheet, her glance down the corridor as she thrusts the bundle into Siski’s arms. And before there is time to thank her she has hurried off toward the stairs, her kerchief shining in the dark and then winking out. Silence. The lamp on the desk seems smaller, pale. And Siski understands that it was really the glow of the fire that lit the room in the past.
The Winged Histories Page 27