The Bastards' Paradise

by Kathe Koja

  Thus if he had had a moment’s dark urge to appropriate more than his own work, to fling various pages, say, from a casement window, that urge was easily vanquished by his better angels; and so down the stairs again, nervous and exhilarated, breathing like a cat, half a step from the hallway from which the maid’s giggle and coo had disappeared along with the maid, picture still in her hand, for You? from startled John Abram appearing in suspenders and soft house shoes, no thick-soled boots this time. The Jew!

  Like our Savior, sir, with a blow that surprised them both, an off-balance pistonlike punch to cleanly break John Abram’s nose, beginner’s luck and Fuck yourself standing, Frédéric had gasped, before colliding in the passageway with Samuel Ridley: the two rushing out into the snow, Frédéric shivering as much with a strange elation, a heady blend of anger and might, as from the sudden blast of the cold, as Samuel Ridley hurriedly kicked and flung sooty slush across their tracks, bounding off in a sideways gait As if it’s seven-leaguers they’re chasing! You do so too!

  But this dissemble proved unnecessary, as they made their way unpursued back to the avenue, down frozen streets past trash-bin fires and two hopeful whores in Widows’ weeds, Frédéric towing Samuel Ridley onto, then off, the ’bus and up the saintly steps of the Cathedral, to disappear into the massing crowd of fervent worshipers, sanctuary and blessed warmth and chanted prayers, the hymns he has so missed—though the quality has sadly suffered since his own days in the choir, the organist is more than halfway out of tune. And the choristers, the choristers are —

  “Herr St. Vitus?” and Frédéric jumps like a felon, Samuel Ridley jumps too though it is only the second curate, stopping pewside to ask after his health and prospects since “It’s been some time since I’ve seen you,” with a friendly hand on the young man’s shoulder, who indeed looks much the worse for wear. “Though your comrade was here, on your behalf—I don’t know his name, he’s a workman on the pageant? Kindly fellow, strong-looking young fellow with pale eyes—”

  —as Frédéric’s own eyes widen, one hand without volition finds his heart as “His name,” he says, “is Hadrian”—and oh, if only he had seen that daring entry and stairway climb, that victorious battle with John Abram! to prove once and for all that Frédéric belongs in this place as he belongs at Haden’s side, for what danger cannot be faced down if faced together? And now the battle is part of the story, a story to be shared as soon as he can safely reach home; and share there as well the script, to demonstrate his honor along with his love to its subject and hero—

  —Haden, who at that moment sits in earshot of a very different sort of choir, two red-nosed merchants strangling a patriotic hymn, at a three-legged table with Istvan beside, workman’s jacket shrugged over the showman’s shirt, pearl resumed and kohl wiped to a smear as “Salut, kit,” the serving man dealing down a half-bottle of Spanish port. “To blood and thunder. And our young actors, Pipper especially, Henry Irving himself would be green.”

  “And you were mossed. Can you say why, now?”

  “Faire de la mousse, why, not I. It’s you who ought stop fretting—better we were elsewhere just now, let the hounds chase themselves awhile, and Mick will keep good watch on the lads. The first rule of the general is to trust one’s lieutenant—”

  “We’re not in the fucking army,” as a vagrant image of the long-ago corporal marches past his mind’s eye, the fleeting safety, there is no safety, even the corporal did a better job of taking care—

  “—though he doesn’t trust me,” Istvan one-knee nudging the puppet case in which the jewels lie, the money from the Caesar’s money box, less than hoped for but still enough to count. “And yet all’s for him. ‘We are two,’” half in song, “Castor and Pollux, I’d share whatever immortality, I’d give him mine. We’d twinkle like the Gemini, up in the stars—”

  “What’s that tune?” inquires one of the red-nosed caterwaulers. “Or are you drunk?”

  “I mean to be,” past the port and this dive, then blunt brown rum in another dive and smaller, three tables, five chairs; then blackish brandy or what is sold as brandy in a smaller place still and even filthier, a saltbox room off the lowliest canals, a stoic tapster beneath candle sconces older than the deluge, a fat rat sitting boldly on an unmarked keg as “No more St.-Mary,” says Haden; they are both drunk, now, the peculiar steep drunkenness of sorrow, ostensibly playing cards, passing bent and folded paper back and forth across an ancient table. “I’ll be Mundy true, or whoever-soever, why not? Or let the road name me, since there’s no fucking use for me here—”

  “Don’t be a fool. Stay put.”

  “And do what? Play keep-home with that blue-eyed tartar, and watch the fucking roof hatch for a sign?”

  “Your heart’s your home,” tapping the card just turned, the deuce of hearts. “See, there’s your sign…. He is my home,” very softly. “He’s my stage. Do you know,” another card turned, a sloe-eyed queen, a tale that even Rupert has never heard, “once at a ball, some high-hat affair in Brussels, some beribboned bitch put her eye on him, handsome as he was, as he is—she made for him to dance, or chat, but for her he’d do neither. So,” leaning closer, his hand on Haden’s with more than a drunk’s insistence, as if he must tell this story, in this room empty now but for them and the questing rat, “then she said to me, for she saw me watching, ‘What a waste, isn’t it! He’s a nancy, you know, an awful nancy.’ And I,” leaning even closer, cheek to cheek as if a great secret is being passed, “I kissed her, that bitch, like this,” his teeth sudden to Haden’s ear, not a bite but very nearly, “and ‘So am I,’ I told her. ‘And he’s mine.’”

  And as Istvan draws back, triumphant, smiling, Haden sees the pain in his eyes, glazed and diamond-bright and “A toast to nancies,” their hands still linked, Istvan raising with the other the filmy beaker, to swallow then share with Haden, who swallows, too, his own pain, swift to recognize this other’s depth, unsure of its cause but the cause is the same and “He’s your man,” Haden murmurs. “Anyone who looks at him can see.”

  “And a toast to performance! Love is a performance, it lasts forever, and then you part…. A moment,” levering himself up from the table, “a piss,” lurching half out the door for that moment, then another, then Haden up as well to peer past the jamb—“Did you fall in the canal?”—to see instead Istvan hunched hands to face, pressed into the damp stones of the wall, so “Inside,” Haden says with great rough kindness. “Come inside, uncle,” to sit at the table again, to finish the hand of cards, finish the fluid in the beaker, and doze together, a pair of knaves, two foxes in a makeshift den—and if, in his sleep, Istvan weeps, a lost boy crying in the darkness, only Haden ever knows it, head to that shoulder and its scars unseen, old red ropes faded pinkish by time, a thousand thousand’s heartbeats just a blink to the blank immortal glimmer of the stars.

  The snow has stopped; the moon is on her way at last, a stalwart matron, waning into the dawn past the droop of the purple drapes. On the desk is the copybook, Rupert’s copybook, and the teakwood box of letters, its contents sorted into another sort of tale; so many letters, all to say the same thing. In wrapped scarf and shirtsleeves, Rupert sits on the rosewood bed, eyes closed between sleep and waking; he has drunk a deal of wine atop the whiskey, drunk the last of the little Queen’s bottle; his chest aches greatly; he is waiting.

  Some hours ago there was a hubbub in the street, constables and commotion, a woman shrieking out like a crying bird. Then came beating on the door below, the locked and bolted theatre door: what had the gentry fellow called it, trompe l’oeil, fool-the-eye, yes. He had opened this door, had stood listening at the head of the stairs, but Mick and the others seemed to have managed whatever furor there was, for at last the pounding stopped, and the street grew still again, filling only with snow. It was Mick, with Tilde, who climbed at last to knock and knock and knock until he must open, not fully, the door kept ajar as Your trunk came, said Mick, looking once to him then pointedly away, Tild
e beside with some unheard explanation—They were looting, Anders said, remember Anders? Looting that lordship’s room, since he is chopped—You need food, Sir! Please, let me bring you some food! But he had closed the door then, gently, inexorable as the snow still falling; he knew she had seen the blood on his shirt, Mick had seen it, too.

  He should change his shirt, before Istvan comes; where is Istvan? How many years has he spent so, waiting, patiently impatient, for that light step on the stairs? And always to be worth the wait…. What heaven can heaven offer, that can ever better that sound? The monks had had their own ideas of paradise: those soldier-saints, the untouched Virgin on a cloud with her Son beside, somehow infant in her arms and scarred hero, too; is it blasphemous to own that in his mind the same is true of Istvan? The boy in the viaduct, his pennies and his smile, Jesu that smile! and the fierce and wily actor, oh, there never was a man could play like him. Scarred too, yes, the guilt for that wounding has lessened but never left—yet the wounds made Istvan only the more beautiful, and even more to be prized for the near-losing, on that terrible night so long ago, just a moment past…. When will he come?

  He must have slept, then, head back against the pillows, woken by the rumble of the cough, the God damned cough, that adversary he cannot hope to best. One hand gropes for the bunched and sticky handkerchief, somehow his spectacles are gone—as a cleaner handkerchief is put into his hand, its odor of brandy, Istvan to offer it: the hand with the warrior’s ring, je reste avec vous—

  —while Rupert blinks and half turns, as if somehow he might hide, but Istvan turns him back, so simply and with such simple pain that Rupert’s arms open, half-apology, half-command, to clasp then lock around him, they sit so on the bloodied bed until “I’d not meant you to know,” Rupert’s murmur, but “However think I didn’t?” with a kiss, the flavor of copper, blood on Istvan’s lips. They sit again until Istvan shivers—he wears no coat, where is his coat?—so Rupert wraps him in the old satin coverlet; it seems they might sleep, until “It’s not the going,” a murmur, a sorrow deeper than any tears, “it’s the leaving. Who’ll care for you, messire?” but “Hola, Mouse,” past what could be heartbreak, but a heart so strong cannot break, only suffer and suffer and smile; that smile. “It’s nothing we can’t play through.”

  One sleeps, then, as the other watches; then both sleep, dreamlessly, spooned tight together on the cot. When they stir, past dawn, Istvan is first to rise, to share the last sips from his flask, to nod without surprise at the piled letters from the box—“Quite the cache, yeah? Here’s another,” opening the puppet case to show the white-powdered stones like the ghost of treasure, stickpins, brooches, a tiara, a cameo of some unremembered king and “That’s your play,” Rupert’s frown, “with that narrow little toff? He’s dead now, did you know that?”

  “No. Dead how?”

  “Ask Tilde,” staring at the jewels, the bound roll of bills, then with bleak and sudden passion “Why do you seek them, messire? Why did you ever! I took care for us, always, best as I could—”

  “Why did you care, ever, if I had them or had not? Christ, Mouse! Whatever could be more urgent than you to me?”

  Silence then, each man his own, until finally “Cur fox…. You might have fucking told me. Since Paris?”

  “Since Paris, yes. There was a young lady in it, too,” bending to take the goods from the case, rolling all into a raveled linen scarf, the scarf into a poke sack thrust underneath the cot. “And I might have fucking told you—though there was no fucking involved, believe it—but my thought was you’d think to stop me. Or strike me—”

  “I have thought to stop you. And strike you. Often.”

  “—even though it’s over, now, hail and fucking farewell; those letters, too. And all of it meant only for—”

  “This,” Rupert reaching for the copybook, “this is for you,” putting it into his hands, sealing that lifetime’s gift with a kiss as Istvan sits again, to turn the pages, the plays, the stories, the chain of memories burnished anew, turning up at last a smile of such sweet glee—“Why, you’ve made an epic of us!”—that Rupert’s eyes shine like a boy’s, the blind and the seeing, though “It took a deal of effort,” with a proud little shrug. “Since before Paris—and you never knew I was about it, did you? Never caught me writing a word.”

  “No. Never…. It’s all of us, isn’t it. All the way back to Marco, to when we were lads.”

  “All I can recall, every step of the way. I meant it to surprise you—” but then the cough returns to shake him, Istvan’s gaze unwavering, until “No surprise in this, is there?” Rupert hoarse and shrugging; he wipes his lips. “Even a lad knows he has to die. What I never guessed is that I’d have you. And this way,” reaching to press Istvan’s hand atop the copybook, “you’ll not forget our plays.”

  “Forget?” says Mr. Castor from the opened case. Istvan closes the book with the ceremony proper to treasure, sets it to the desk, tugs open the drapes and “We,” with a half smile, determined as a knife to wood, “are not done playing. Keep your inkwell filled, yeah?”

  Now the antique razor is freshly stropped, and a basin of hot water carried up by anxious Tilde—

  “I can help. Is Sir—”

  “Be easy, milady. We need sprucing, is all.”

  —while Istvan slips off Rupert’s wrinkled, bloodied shirt to note, kiss, and bathe the bruising his own sad blow has left behind, then plants himself in the hard dazzle of the windows’ sun to scrape away first his stubble, and then the pointed goatee. Rupert, carefully puffing at a Raven, offers his own throat—“Me next”—but “I think we’ll keep that beard awhile. Gravitas becomes you, recall? —No,” toweling the last of the soap from his chin, “you needn’t dress just yet,” careless to leave the drapes undrawn as he takes Rupert by the hand, draws him back into the bed: let any watch who might, and see, then, what love looks like, waning only to wax anew as tender and invincible, broken and unquenchable, mouth and hands and a pillow for a prop, the little cigarette crushed out —

  —as the sun glares on the crusted snow and the rooftops’ grey sward of ice, the pigeons and black sparrows skimming through its light, and below on the bricks one determined beggar is rewarded for his rooting in the alley’s detritus by a silk handkerchief only somewhat filthy, RMS the monogram bordered in black Greek keys. In the square, the newspaper shouters bawl out confident as actors—“Murder, cold-blooded murder! The Vigilist knows!”—for nothing sells papers like tragedy, especially tragedy on one’s very corner, involving a foreigner lord.

  Inside, sleepless Haden and his lads make sure of every lock on every door and window, leaving only the roof hatch unnailed, before sharing out the shares from the evening’s performance, Pipper by unanimous vote to receive a doubled portion—“Even Alek an’t do it better,” Haden’s accolade as Pipper beams—while Mick and Lucy investigate the hostage trunk, Alban Cockrill beside and agog with Aladdin’s delight as this device and that trinket are brought forth for examination, it is like having a peep straight into the master’s mind! Tilde pours boiled goat’s milk into a bowl for Ru, keeping back with a wooden spoon the scummy skin, keeping back the black bubble of fear, the cards consulted lying still where they were left, their midnight spread on the lip of the stage: the flat sweep of the Shadow attended only by Justice and the knaves, death and loss and change without chance of resistance —

  —as across town on Crossways Street, the frightened landlord peering from above, Samuel Ridley expostulates stridently, helplessly with a pair of constables, who add Frédéric—just emerged into the street, having for caution’s sake spent the night at the studio—to their midmorning’s tally of park dodgers and a Libby too soused to stand, all of them on the rolls but caught out without their pins. Frédéric shows his papers, Frédéric tries to dissemble—“The clasp broke? Not again!”— Frédéric thinks for a wild moment to flee, could he dart back inside the building, clamber away somehow from its roof? but instead, white-faced, stuffs swiftl
y into Samuel Ridley’s hands not the gypsy satchel but the script inside: “Here, sir. Take these valuables to St.-Mary’s—”

  “Valuables?” one constable’s interest roused then doused by the curled and blotted pages, would even the church want such trash? as “Come on then,” the other irritable to harry Frédéric into a smelly black-doored van where one man lies moaning and shoeless, the others silent with cold, and all, to the constable’s way of thinking, better sent to the cannon than left clogging the streets like the rubbish they are. By the time the van arrives at the Protectorate lock-up, the moaner has joined the majority, that heavenly choir that sings just beyond hearing’s reach in a place, like the stage, where faith creates the vision of the blessed, and the God or gods as audience decide with their attention what tales are worth the making, which shall fade in the telling and which shall continue to be told: for myth is mutable until it is not, and not every striver makes his way into the stars. In myth, Pollux battles the demons with the help of Mercury; Orpheus wins back his love only to lose again; and the puppet—for neither hell nor death applies to puppets—opens its eyes upon the workaday world and, much like God, makes from what is, what is not: takes time from a clock, letters from a box, and worshipers from a church, shares hair ribbons and conspiracies from one constructed lady to another; and from the mating of the void and Mr. Loup creates a puppet’s puppet, small and humorous and terrible, Mr. Jinks whose performance history will be memorable if brief, and whose peculiar visage will command pages in a history yet unwritten, but already well-begun.

  From the introduction to The Strings of Memory