Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  ‘“I don’t understand what that means,” Kay said after a pause. “Either you see or you don’t. You can’t see and not see at the same time, can you?”

  ‘“This particular picture means something, Katharine. Sometimes in order to see what really is, rather than what appears to be, it is necessary to look not with both eyes, but with one eye alone. Looking with two eyes may allow you to see depth and to obtain perspective on the world around you; but it also limits what you may see, precisely by making your view more precise. Sometimes, this picture suggests, you may see more by seeing less, and perhaps you may see in some profounder way by not seeing – in the normal sense – at all.”

  ‘“Why does the eye have hands?” Kay asked. “Does that mean something too?”

  ‘“Right. It is with our hands that we make things, so the hands of this eye work as a symbol for a kind of creativity. This kind of seeing, you might say, is generative, creative, making. And the eye has no lid, perhaps because such making-seeing requires focus and concentration – you can never blink.”

  ‘Kay studied the shape of the handed eye for a moment. “Are all the drawings like this one?” she asked. “Do they all mean something? Are they all about seeing?”

  ‘“They all mean something, yes, though some of them have meanings I don’t understand, or think I don’t understand. And no, not all of them are about seeing, though some are. This one –” he turned the page to reveal a drawing of the full moon hanging over a settling ocean – “also represents ways of looking. As the sea becomes still, the water provides a perfect reflection of the moon that illuminates it; the light of the moon is something that the sea beholds, something that the sea itself becomes, and also the very thing by which the two are joined – that is, the light. But it is only in stillness, in concentration, that this union of the watcher, the watched and the watching itself can all become one. And there are deeper meanings to this drawing, but I can only grope at them.”

  ‘“Deeper meanings?”

  ‘“I think so. The words at the foot of this drawing I do not understand. They mean something like ‘The eye and its double are one’. But there’s a pun – that is, the words can mean something else, too, which is more like ‘To accuse a friend is to forgive him’.”

  ‘The light outside the house was growing paler by the second, so much so that Kay could no longer see her own reflection in the once-black windowpanes before her. In the street a sudden whirring announced the morning’s milk delivery. The little truck came to its soft-jolt stop, and sat back on its brakes with a gentle clinking of bottles. Her father stood by the window, looking into the gem-blue of the east. “And the star will show in the morn,” he said under his breath. As if to himself.

  ‘“What?”

  ‘“Nothing.” He suddenly appeared to have noticed the boy shuffling crates of bottles in the street below. “Is that the time –?” Hurrying to the desk again, he seized the little book of emblems, along with a couple of others, and began to cram them into his ragged rucksack. He fumbled with the straps, tightening them, then turned to Kay and tousled her hair, stuck for a moment, it seemed, for something to say.

  ‘“You forgot your tea,” Kay said.

  ‘He smiled, but he didn’t have time for tea.

  ‘“Is your mum still angry?”

  ‘“I think she just wants you to stick around for breakfast like other normal dads.”

  ‘He was silent for a moment, looking at a book on the desk beside him. He tapped his finger on it, so gently that his finger didn’t make a sound. “Kay, listen,” he said. “I wish you didn’t always have to be caught in the middle.”

  ‘“I’m not.”

  ‘“I’m afraid this time you are.”

  ‘The two of them regarded one another for a few seconds. It seemed as long as anything a person might feel or know.

  ‘“Kay, remember what I’ve shown you here, all right? Remember it as well as you remember anything.” And then, as if he had reminded himself of a droll joke, he took up the mug carelessly and sloshed the tea down his throat. Kay almost laughed.

  ‘“I’ll see you later,” he said. “Love you.” He turned to go.

  ‘From the door he turned back. “If you need me, you’ll know where to find me. And tell your mother we’ll always have Paris. It’s a line from an old movie. One she likes.”

  ‘“She won’t like that,” said Kay.

  ‘“No,” he agreed. “But tell her anyway.”

  ‘And then he was gone. It was the twenty-fourth of December, and the first full day of the winter holiday.’

  Kay closed the kermes book and set it on her lap, letting her hands spring away from it a little, as if it were something dangerous or precious. She sat very still and stared at the richly red brushed cover; at the way in which, despite its plainness, it seemed to create rich fields of intensity and depth, regions of hue that gathered and disappeared as quickly.

  ‘Did my father give this book to you?’

  ‘No, he borrowed it from me on the understanding that he would take care of it. It is one of my oldest paper books, and has not felt the touch of a pen in over five hundred years.’

  ‘But he wrote this in it – I mean, this is his handwriting.’

  ‘Yes, I recognized it, too.’

  Out in the harbour one of the blinking lights turned out to have been a little boat all along. It didn’t seem to be moving.

  ‘This is what happened the morning he left – I mean, the morning he was taken. The morning Ghast took him. It was the last time we saw him at home.’ Kay didn’t dare to touch the book again. It was all so strange. ‘Exactly what happened. It was only last week,’ she added.

  Phantastes answered instantly, but as if from a distance. ‘I thought so. And I wondered then how it was that he could have composed such a history in these words, in this book. For Will recovered it for me from your father’s study in your house not five hours later, and gave it to me in Alexandria.’

  Kay didn’t dare breathe but said instead simply, ‘I don’t know.’ Suddenly she felt very tired again, as if her consciousness were a wave that had run high and splashing over a beach, but then receded into the sea as fast.

  ‘A mystery, then,’ Phantastes said. ‘But I imagine you will have many powerful mysteries in your life; and so I think you should keep the book. It may be that this story will prove an emblem in its way, and grow to be a great imagining.’

  ‘All right, you lot,’ said Will with vigour behind them. ‘I’ve got the tickets. Let’s go.’ Coming round the front of the bench, he brandished the ferry tickets in the air and smiled – but it was obvious that the smile was an effort, and his eyes seemed to be looking for something, or someone, not there.

  Flip.

  Will caught sight of the kermes book lying in Kay’s lap. For a moment a knot seemed to pull tight across his face; and then he was off again, striding through the rising light, back towards the line of cars and buses that had begun to shift forward on to the gangway.

  Kay looked at Phantastes.

  ‘To accuse a friend is to forgive him,’ said the old wraith. He didn’t look convinced.

  Kay shoved the book in her pocket, jumped to her feet and ran after Will.

  Will barely spoke the whole journey, neither on the ferry nor, after they docked in Brindisi, when the car ran throttling off the gangway on to the endlessly straight Roman roads slicing across the heel of Italy. Again, Kay mingled dozing with watching the low, stubbled, finished fields, punctuated by the occasional austere majesty of a great pine or the low, leaf-bare olive and walnut groves. And again, as the early afternoon sun began to plummet westwards, she picked out the road signs and, in the failing light, the high towers and battlements of the ancient cities they passed: Taranto, Potenza, Salerno, Caserta. With a bleak attentiveness Will occasionally offered Kay dried fruit and cheese, sips from the large water flask, and something that tasted like very dark, unsweetened chocolate. Phantastes ignored them both, grim and s
quarely set – probably exhausted, Kay thought, and apprehensive about their destination. At the first signs for ROMA he bristled, and by the time the car was fully engulfed in the lights and activity of the city he was practically panting. He spoke to the driver in rapid, curt bursts, and after some frustrated exclamations and startling near-misses the car pulled through two massive stone pillars, down a wooded lane and, finally, across a wide expanse of perfect grass. The city had quite suddenly melted away, and the car pulled up in front of a massive, stately building all faced in white stone.

  ‘Kay,’ said Phantastes. A few minutes had passed, and they were standing on gravel beside an elegant stone staircase that led up to the building’s grand entrance. The car had pulled away, crunching then clattering into the chilly evening. Phantastes stood under an orange lantern that lit the creases of his aged face with a rough, unforgiving rake. ‘I want to show you something.’ He dropped to a squat, holding out his hand. It, too, was etched with deep, crevassing lines; and the further it opened, the more distinct those lines became. The fluid movement of skin and muscle was mesmerizing. ‘An open hand can be trusted. Don’t forget that,’ he said, gripping Kay’s shoulder hard and meeting her gaze. ‘Don’t forget that in there.’

  Kay stood with Will at the foot of the steps as Phantastes rang the bell. She looked at the house. The stairs and door were at the centre of a long range of windows across two storeys. She counted twenty-five on one side. Grand, palatial sashes, they all stood dark; their wooden trim, once painted, now cracked and peeled. In places the white stone of the facade had crumbled, and the more intently she peered through the thickening darkness, the more she picked out other occasional flaws: rough boards covering a dormer window in the attic, a gutter cracked and hanging from the eaves, a gap in the black iron railing that ran between the gravel court and the building. Around and above the door where Phantastes stood – growing impatient – an elegant covered porch was supported by dilapidated pillars, bounded by a black wrought-iron railing that ran on either side down the stairs, as much rust as metal. The steps themselves sagged with wear, and here and there weeds had pushed through cracks, though they seemed otherwise intact. After a night and a day of petrol fumes, lurching, swelling seas and nausea, the falling-down edifice looked just about the way Kay felt. On the verge of hopeless. She looked at the steps, and thought she might well find it impossible to climb them.

  A short, bald, paunchy man in a black waistcoat and crumpled tie opened one side of the black, two-leaved door and wedged himself into the crack. He spoke to Phantastes in a soft Italian that barely carried on the mild air. Even from behind, the old wraith looked grim and set: the lines carved into the skin at the back of his neck seemed to underscore his determination to see this visit as a spiritual trial. Although his hands hung limply at his sides, his shoulders were square and rigid, and his eyes, Kay thought, would be piercing. The other man, by contrast, looked calm and unflappable, languid as if on the verge of sleep, as slow to rouse as the oil that seemed to suffuse his olive complexion, and entirely unconcerned by the sharp interjections fired at him by Phantastes. After one such caustic sally Phantastes simply stared at him; and the fat-cheeked, self-satisfied man – unmoved – refused to answer. He looked up without concern full into Phantastes’ angry face, and Kay noticed with some admiration that he didn’t blink once. Ten or fifteen seconds passed, after which, like a coil released, Phantastes simultaneously flung up his arm and threw himself at the door, battering it open just enough to sweep into the house behind the waistcoat – the waistcoat who didn’t look behind him as the old wraith passed by, but rolled his eyes theatrically.

  ‘Che brutto,’ he announced, and frowned. Then, putting his hands together before him and inclining his head slightly as if about to pray, he turned to Will and Kay as they reached the top of the stairs, and said, smiling, ‘Guglielmo, benvenuto.’ With a flourish he bowed, turned on his heel and strode back into the house, leaving the door, with its flaking paint, standing wide before them.

  Dusk was gathering fast in the gravel court that lay before the house, and beneath evergreen trees to one side, pools of darkness among the boughs seemed to ripple outwards. But Kay would have taken any of those trees over the impenetrable gloom that waited beyond the threshold of the house before them. She stood stock-still.

  ‘Kay,’ said Will. His voice was soft. ‘That book –’

  ‘– is mine,’ she said.

  ‘It’s strange,’ Will offered.

  Kay slipped her hand instinctively into her pocket, where the book lay wedged close to her thigh. She thought of her father’s wisdom tooth, so many days before, and felt her own teeth set against her friend.

  ‘Look after it,’ Will said. ‘That’s all.’ He gave Kay a wink and a twitch of his ears, picked up his sack and skipped lightly over the heavy sill of the doorway, the cares of the last few days lifted by this return, as Kay thought, to a treasured home. She watched him disappear into the dark hallway, and willed herself to pick up her feet and skip as he had done, to take on this new place, this new chance with hope and – what was that word Phantastes had used? Resilient.

  Maybe this is his home, but it’s not mine. Kay looked at the scratches on the backs of her hands. She had made them herself, all through the long night. Each line on her skin was a path to somewhere.

  And then she saw that she had made two fists. An open hand can be trusted. She crossed the threshold and shut the tall, heavy door quietly behind her.

  The House of the Two Modes

  Kay stood in an ample lobby. Below her feet, stone mosaics in relentlessly geometrical patterns marched, turned and swirled through a muted riot of colour and shape. The walls rose steeply about her, high into a gloom above, from which descended a huge crystal chandelier – unlit and dusty, like the brittle body of a dead spider still dangling from the far corner of a ceiling. The walls Kay at first took to be blank expanses of smooth cream stone, but as her eyes adjusted to the interior light she saw that they, too, threw out texture and shape; etched arcs and circles, eddies and spirals that reminded her of the way Will’s hands worked on the board, or in the air, whenever he was plotting.

  Will and Phantastes had long since disappeared somewhere into the building beyond her – through one of three doors that led from the room, one in the centre of each of the walls that divided her from the inside of the house. She had stopped in the silent darkness, unsure of which door to take; and in that moment of catching her breath, catching at her own steps, in that moment Kay caught herself, and began to notice the loud and tumbling beauty that seemed to plot the space around her. The patterns on the floor and walls moved with such energy that at first she felt her own voice rising up in her throat, as if they called for an answer or would spur her into song. But then she felt something else instead as she noticed how the flow of movement, as it worked along the edges of the floor, of the walls, of the room, into the corners, held to its line, graced and flirted with the edge but never crossed it. All at once, like a sigh heaving over and coming to its long rest in her thought, Kay’s stomach settled and she subsided into calm.

  Maybe Will is right. Maybe this is a kind of home.

  Kay turned to the right and approached the door. From the room behind it, through the cracks that ran around the frame, light was pushing its slender fingers into the lobby. She put her hand to the round brass knob. It turned easily. She pushed.

  What lay behind the door immediately surprised her with its size and brilliance. Its scope. Like a grand salon from a fairy tale, it glittered with a luminosity that moments before she could not have imagined; from the high ceiling hung lamps of every kind, from simple round and visored bulbs, to shaded and cupboarded lanterns, to the grandest glass and iron chandeliers, every one shouldering its neighbour, each throwing out its shard or pool or shaft of brilliance, up and down, and all the lights rebounding and shooting around the walls, which were lined on three sides with what seemed like a hundred grand and gaudily grotesqu
ed mirrors. Kay’s eyes raced with the light, scattering and glancing from surface to surface, and it was several seconds before she realized that she still had the brass doorknob in her hand, that she was still standing in the entrance. She closed the door behind her, let her feet shuffle back up to it, and leaned against its solid reassurance while she tried to take in what lay before her.

  Apart from the mirrors, and the great glass windows that dominated the right-hand wall, the room was nearly empty. An elaborate purple sofa, long and plush, stood in its centre, facing her, and beneath it lay a huge, vibrantly scarlet Persian rug. Elsewhere the floors were wooden. So were the two ornate, gleaming cupboards facing one another from opposite walls at the far end. Nothing moved but the light, and Kay suddenly realized that, for all the warm yellow glow bounding and rebounding in her eyes, the air was extraordinarily cold. Her arms crossed, rubbing her shoulders, she set off straight through the space towards a door in the far wall, and slipped through it.

  The next room was much the same in shape: along the right wall a tier of stately windows towered aloft to the ceiling, where a cornice and cast friezes ran in white plaster against the corners; at the distant end of the room another matching door faced her, and in between, in all the inward vastness, there was very little. But this room was only dimly and intermittently lit, by a wood fire that roared in a huge grate to her left, and – beside it – by a tall, elegant standing lamp with three delicate shades shrouding three glowing bulbs. Beside the lamp stood a winged armchair, and to its left a low table, on which there lay a book. Along the walls there were three other tables, none of them very elaborate though all of marble; on one lay another book, on the second stood an earthen pitcher, and on the third was a woven basket full of ripe apples. Kay crossed the twenty paces to the apples, took one and held it up to her nose. It smelled distantly sweet. She bit into it, and found the flesh sharp, crisp and soaking with juice. While she chewed, she pictured this room from the outside of the house, counting down the windows, scaling it against the exterior.