Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  ‘It wasn’t long ago, but you would have been absolutely right. Razzio still loathes Phantastes, that’s for sure –’ Phantastes turned pointedly towards the dark window beside him, and Will rolled his eyes with affectionate theatricality – ‘but the partnership with Ghast hasn’t quite turned out to be what Razzio expected. For one thing, he thought the festivals were going to continue, only he thought he –’

  ‘He thought he was going to be First Wraith,’ snarled Phantastes, turning back suddenly towards them. His hand on the edge of the seat was white with tension. ‘Can you imagine? That pompous right-angled miscreant!’

  He snorted as he turned back to the window, making a show of peering out into the dark. Will watched him looking through the window at the bare fields and rocky mounds and cliffs that, grey and blue in the near pitch of the night, passed in a nauseating weave. ‘But that wasn’t it,’ he said softly so that only Kay could hear him. ‘Razzio would have broken with Ghast anyway. He never intended otherwise.’

  Just give me back my sister. That’s the only place I want to go. Kay dug the nails of her right hand into the back of her left. Five nights.

  The journey went on and on; for eight or nine hours Kay alternately clutched her stomach and braced her aching back as they swerved and sped up the coast road towards Patras. She dozed, and when she woke she looked groggily out of her window for the white road signs looming out of the darkness, then vanishing behind them: FILIATRA, PYRGOS, AMALIADA. Every time they turned or came idling to a crossroads, the sedan rattled so violently that Kay’s stomach quivered with the motion, and she thought that they might see dawn from a hard shoulder, facing westwards to the sea with a cold wind at their backs. But then the driver would clap his flat palm down on the dash and bark a few stern words, and as if in response the engine would trim up and surge a little, and off they would lurch again, leaving their stomachs several metres behind them.

  Somehow – after hours of swerving and speeding, rattling and at times riding on little more than the wind at their backs – as the long grey light before dawn rose, they pulled up at the pier in Patras. Cold air rushed all over Kay’s skin as she climbed out of the car. Will said he would go to look for tickets, but Kay couldn’t follow; with the nausea still clutching at her stomach, she forced herself to walk to the edge of the pier, away from the waiting cars and buses, and stared at the dark water where it lapped against the cement. Phantastes had followed her, and now stood quietly beside her as she let the rhythm of the sea’s ripples strike out a music without meaning.

  ‘Kay,’ he said. ‘This may not be the right time, but there is something I want to ask you before we get to Rome, and to Razzio.’

  She stared at the water. She had no appetite for sitting down or focusing her eyes. Phantastes seemed to want her to do both. Beyond the ferry, beyond the breakwater, lay mountains; she couldn’t see them, but she knew they were there. The thought of them, of their height and their massy weight on the unseen horizon, gave her a sense of firmness. Her stomach turned, and began to settle.

  She sat down on the bench Phantastes had offered her. Behind them lay the soft glow and hum of the small city, but before them a whole scape of darkness, furzed by a little mist off the water, lay thick but scattering, like the cloak a magician might wave over a trick, just before revealing its marvel.

  ‘Look at that,’ said Phantastes. ‘Have you ever seen anything more beautiful?’

  A few lights winked in the darkness beyond the breakwater – how far beyond, it was impossible to tell. At first Kay’s eye was drawn to them, puzzling at the flatness of a view that, like a screen, jumbled all its treasures on a single plane. But when she let her gaze drift, she noticed the gathering contours – just suggestions for now, slight intimations of depth and colour – which would, she knew, in time throw forth mountains, oceans, skies, all composed of the widest sailing reaches. It was like seeing the oak in an acorn, or the sky in a drop of water hanging from a leaf.

  ‘No,’ Kay whispered in reply. ‘It really is wonderful.’

  ‘Sometimes the most compelling images are not the colourful images of great depth and full of matter, but the ones that conceal them. Look at this canvas of black – black-black, blue-black, green-black, star-black, sea-black, cloud-black, tree-black, mountain-black. We know these things are there, that they will shortly awaken, but for now they linger in different qualities of darkness, intense and potent. Before us, all you can see is the effacement of what should be – what will be, as the morning wears on – a gut-clutchingly awesome survey of mountains, forests, precipices, valleys, waves, tides and sky. What you see beyond the harbour now is a much more powerful thing. I look out on this water and see expectation, promise, as great a significance as I have witnessed. My looking, here, is a longing.’

  ‘So the reality isn’t as beautiful, then?’ For no reason she could name, Kay felt almost annoyed by the way Phantastes was speaking.

  ‘It is – but its beauty is of midday, and it is a beauty that cloys and stales because it is open. The beauty of night never fades because it is a beauty that has not yet shone, a beauty of hope, of expectation, of desire. Your first view of a midday beauty is always in this sense your last: it becomes familiar, commonplace, indifferent, and thus in time neither beautiful nor really a view at all.’

  ‘But then a beautiful thing … must always be something you cannot have.’ I want to have it. Give me the day. Give me the day at home.

  Phantastes reached out in the dark and placed his open palm against the night before him, as if it were a windowpane. ‘Too dear for our possessing. Yes, perhaps. But, Kay, do you also understand a different kind of beauty? Maybe I have been too hasty. The beauty of the familiar, of the known; the beauty of home and the fullness of light: these are the beauties of knowledge, and although they frighten me like a rock tomb closing in and cutting off my air, even I can see their power. These are the engines that drive plotting and all narrative – always cycling through the ungraspable present towards a possessable then, a time in the past or in the future that can be fixed and held, even owned. The left-wraiths, the plotters – there is a place for these beauties, and they hold them dear. But for me – the image, cloudily wrapped in all its potential meaning, the exalted mist of the present –’

  He broke off. The water slapped gently against the pier a few feet below them.

  ‘I am saying too much,’ said Phantastes. ‘I only mean that I was too hasty. Even imagining has its flaws.’

  The grey woollen light had shifted while they spoke. It seemed to clear in patches, drawing away like separate veils, first from this swell on the water, then from that ridge of a distant mountain, first dimming that star, then illuminating that cloud. Kay let the illusions and misapprehensions tease her vision as she watched, imagining a grey form to be the near, hulking prow of a ship, only to be shown moments later that it was the far ridge of a hill. The still scene danced with revelations.

  ‘What flaws?’ she asked.

  ‘An image cannot be both known and understood, both seen and grasped,’ said Phantastes. He spoke slowly, as if carving his thoughts from a block of wood. Kay tried to listen on the edge of his knife. ‘In the act of imagination we perceive, and perhaps admire; but to interpret, we must also destroy the image. This process happens in time, and partakes of narrative. And so you may say that the image is vital, that the image is immediate, that the image is present. But you must also say that the image is fleeting, insubstantial, unknown. The image is like the now. When is the present moment? Can you ever say, It is now? And yet we know that it is here, and that it means something real to talk about the present. So it is with the image: the moment you begin to be aware of the image, or of the perception, the imagination, it ceases to be that and becomes the interpretation of itself. So the image, along with the faculty of image-making – the imagination – suffers its own flaws.’

  Phantastes was quiet for a moment or two, as if he were the surface of a water, and swells
were passing through him.

  ‘Child, take this and keep it with you.’

  Kay put out her hand and took a little book. The moment it touched her hand, with a shock like electricity recognition seemed to rush along her arm, and in the dim light of the harbour it seemed that she saw and smelled the bright-hued leather, heard the rustling of the ancient pages.

  ‘I know this book,’ she said. The words shot out of her like a reflex. The volume Phantastes had handed her was small; almost small enough to fit comfortably into the palm of one hand. Its supple covers were stained a uniform deep red, and within, she knew, the once-white pages had yellowed. She held it in her hand, remembering, and allowed the obscure shadow of the harbour to conjure her memory of that morning the week before. The memory seemed to arise in the book, which was its source and its anchor, to transit through her, and then to issue from her, back into the book. She sat, darkly stunned, both seated on the bench beside Phantastes and not on it – suspended somewhere over that dark water.

  ‘I was reading from it on our journey here, while you slept,’ said Phantastes. He reached into one of the pockets of his robe and drew out a small torch. He handed it to her. ‘Open it at the page I marked. I think it might interest you.’

  Setting down the light for a moment, Kay opened the book carefully, with two hands, stretching with the even pressure of her fingers against the tight binding and the stiff, warped block of paper within. Although she thought she knew what to expect, she was surprised to find that, at the point near the back to which Phantastes’ bookmark had directed her, the page – and several pages after it – were thickly covered in her father’s cramped, heavily inked hand.

  ‘Why don’t you read it aloud, child?’ said the wraith.

  Kay took up the light and switched it on. Almost at once, as she began to read, she found she did not need it.

  ‘When Kay reached the top of the stairs and stepped across the threshold of the tiny room that perched above the front of the house, her father would be bent over his notebook, writing. The little desk, too cramped for his long, angular legs, might have bucked like a startled dog had he ever turned to welcome her, and upset the morning tea she set carefully by his elbow, just far enough away to be sure that no stray splash would blot his work. It wasn’t that he was mean or impolite, she thought as she now climbed the stairs; he was just incurably busy, forever absorbed in one thing or another, and recently so much so that he had stopped eating with the rest of the family. Instead he took cold plates of food (when Kay remembered to bring them to him) alone in this makeshift study. Kay knocked gently on the door with her free hand, steadying the mug in her right as she drew slowly to a moment’s halt. She pushed the door open.

  ‘The hunched back within the tattered wool of its grey jumper was a greeting she knew well, and one she resented less than her mother did – most of all because she could plainly see, as almost anyone might, just how tense a greeting it was. She put her hand gently on the weary mass of muscle that was her father’s right shoulder, and set the steaming tea under the desk lamp, the light of which – against the cold black panes of the window beyond – seemed to drink up its vapour. He said nothing, but then his pen was moving furiously across a line, and without doubt he was in the middle of a thought. For a moment she paused, all her weight poised on her forward knee, and tried to read the titles on the spines of the books piled since the previous night haphazardly across the cluttered workspace. A few of them were in scripts she couldn’t recognize, much less read, and a number of others appeared to be the musty old volumes of Transactions of the Royal Archaeological Society that her father often collected from the University Library on his way home for the weekend. But there was one book, sitting at her father’s elbow, that she had never seen before. It was of a brushed and faded rose colour, not especially thick, and obviously very old. No writing at all appeared on the cover. Though it was a tiny book, it seemed nonetheless somehow broad and flat, but between two of the five raised bands that sectioned its spine, in gold capital letters appeared the simple title, Imagining.

  ‘ “Katharine –” ’

  I can’t keep reading this. I can’t stop reading this. Dad.

  ‘Kay started as her father looked up from his writing and raised his eyebrows at her. Quizzical, but not unkind. She realized that she was still leaning, now rather heavily, on his shoulder, and pivoted back against the nook created by a battered old filing cabinet that stood hunched against the desk. “Dad, is that a library book – the red one?”

  ‘Without a glance or a pause her father answered, “Library book – oh. Of a sort. No. I’m borrowing it from an old friend.” He stared at her for a few moments from a metre away, apparently watching something that was going on at the back of her head. The way he appeared to look through her made her want to squirm.’

  Dad.

  ‘“It’s very beautiful,” Kay said, awkwardly stealing a glance back at the book and hoping that she wouldn’t have to meet her father’s eyes again.

  ‘“Have you looked inside it, Katharine?” he said. His voice was even, and still very soft.

  ‘“No, of course not.”

  ‘“Would you like to?”

  ‘The immediacy of his offer almost took Kay’s breath away. It was unusual enough for her to get any kind of reaction from her father, above all this early in the morning – so preoccupied, so immersed had he lately become in his study. Any kind of a conversation was extraordinary. But this staring, this genuine interest – she splayed the flats of her fingers uncomfortably against her hips while her father cleared a rough space before him on the desk. Then, with much more care, straightening up in his chair as if to stand, he carefully retrieved the rose-coloured volume. Using both hands, he squared it neatly before him, brushing his long middle fingers along its edges, almost with a flourish or a caress, as he laid it out. Now that the book was closer, Kay could appreciate how deep and rich the brushed red of its cover really was: it had a gathered intensity that made her think of the vital insides of things, and of vulnerability.

  ‘“It’s kermes,” said her father. He spelled the word for her. “The red colour comes from a dye called kermes, made from the bodies of insects gathered from oak trees. Only the females are red, and only when they are pregnant. They look like tiny berries. Someone would have crushed the dried bodies into a powder, then boiled it in water to produce a dye, then steeped the leather in it. Once it was widely used, not only for binding books but for all kinds of dyeing and pigments. But today it is hardly known.”

  ‘Kay leaned over for a closer look, and ran her own finger across the surface of the book’s cover, which she found to be much smoother than she had thought, and cool. “It really is beautiful,” she said again. “What is the book about?”

  ‘Kay’s father leaned back in his creaking chair, took off his glasses and rubbed the back of his knuckles painfully across his wrinkled brow. In the indirect, raking light of the desk lamp the ridges on his face stood out in high relief, like one of the carved, square-set stone faces she sometimes glimpsed on the covers of his books. Replacing his glasses, he sighed and rested the fingertips of both hands upon the edge of the desk before him. He turned his head, looking her full in the face for a second time. His red and haggard eyes glistened even in the low light, and Kay thought suddenly that perhaps he had been sitting at the desk all night.

  ‘“I think I had better show you,” he said simply.

  ‘As he prised the book open at its very centre, Kay was immediately surprised to discover that, though it was a delicate and exactly made little volume, bound with stiff leather boards, it was not a book but a manuscript, all written by hand. To the left, the yellow-worn paper was blank except for the faint image of ink bleeding through from the other side; but to the right, nearly the entire page was taken up with an ink drawing. A single unlidded eye stared out at her, drawn freely in heavy black pen, but somehow also with exacting detail. From its sides two brawny, gathering arms extended
, each of which concluded in a muscular, outsized hand, the palm spread open. It was framed in a large square, within the enclosed border of which ran a linear pattern of entangled leaves. At the right foot of the page several words were written in the same ink, cursively, and in characters Kay was not certain she recognized.

  ‘“Is this some sort of illustration?” she asked. “But what kind of story would have this in it?”

  ‘“No, it’s not a book of stories, Katharine,” answered her father. He took up the earlier pages in his left hand and flicked slowly through a sheaf of them, allowing her to see that not just this but every page was covered with similar drawings. “It’s a book of emblems – pictures. Each picture is something like a story, except instead of things happening one by one, in a picture like this everything happens at once. In order to understand it, you need to tell its story yourself.”

  ‘Kay liked stories, and the weird picture of the staring eye captivated her. “And those words at the bottom of the page – are those the titles of the pictures?” she asked, nearly putting her finger on the writing on the first of the pages, at the centre of the book, beneath the leaf-bordered frame.

  ‘“Of a sort, yes. You won’t be able to make out the words because they are in an old form of writing, and anyway not in English. But if I were to translate this one for you, I would say something like ‘Seeing without seeing’.”