The Broken House

by Tom La Farge

  Annag ought to have been inconsolable, but she was not, not a bit. On the contrary. Drytung had never seen her so focused, so brisk, haggling every penny like a fishwife. The dealing turned one way, then another: towards cash, toward commodities, at last toward an exchange. There was another house, it came out, that Annag knew of, not far from the City, a mill beside a vigorous stream. Shandimus could order it sold to the V’Detsinoy. Then they would make a dam and generate some of this electricity; sell it to the towns round about. Shandimus thought it over, stroking his beard. Finally he smiled and agreed. Then Drytung had witnessed endless signatures, receiving the pen from Shandimus and passing it on to Annag, who smirked as she scrawled. yet still he wanted her. She had let him kiss her, as they returned to quarters and then batted him away with her sheaf of documents.

  He cut the motor, kicked down the stand, pulled the machine to rest; turned and stood in the farmyard looking toward the house. The world was still moving past him, his being still a trail stretched out from here to the Hook. Somewhere in that house there were children. Drytung shuddered. He had not fathomed ’Nna, though he had had her, he and Root both. He thought he could trust ’Nna not to bring him down, his career was moving at last, but now with babies (they might die) he couldn’t be sure. Root would do little enough, the responsibilities would fall on him, Drytung, and the disgrace. A proximus to marry a cunt! To raise dirty brats of another man’s begetting (it might be)! Drytung stared at the farmhouse’s open door. Well, he had been through it before, one way and another. He picked up his satchels and walked in.

  Blinded by the darkness, then dazzled by light pouring in from the garden through open door and windows, Drytung squinted and waited. But when he could verify his vision, what he saw, in the midst of the great kitchen, was a girl, naked to the waist, cross-legged on a bench with a dark baby at each breast. She was facing him, fair, and although her frame was slender, her breasts were full. His eye skipped the blackness of the babies but then returned to see them soften into golden brownness.

  He must not go on ogling this girl, though he supposed her a servant Root had hired, to whom he owed no special courtesy. He set his bags down and nodded; she nodded back easily, and as she did so, her breasts ceased to reflect his looking and joined smoothly to her uncramped shoulders, collarbone and throat, her balanced head, its fine hair and high forehead and calm grey eyes. A strange relief unlocked his own neck. He poured himself a glass of water from the jug and sat down in his old chair for a smoke and a think.

  Piptiyya held a warm bulge of baby-skull in either palm. The pace of their sucking slowed; she looked and saw their eyes begin to close and open. They always finished together. The officer had crossed his legs and was smoking a cigarette, looking around the kitchen.

  “What do they call you?” he asked.

  “Umm’.”

  “Umm’. Don’t you have a real name?”

  “Piptiyya,” she lied. “But Kyra ’Nna prefers Umm’.”

  “She hired you?” And after that he did not ask any more questions, about her past, where she came from, what had become of her own baby. He didn’t want to know, he was coming back to live here and, she reckoned, didn’t much want another human presence. He had stalked in like a cock through high grass, uncertain whether he will meet maggot or marten. He had stared at her breasts as men will, but then the look had shifted, eased. He sat his chair in a posture more elegant than comfortable, and the elegance was a bit studied. He was not of the Court or the Hook—lucky.

  “I’m Drytung,” he said, after expelling smoke through his nose. She ducked her head. The other writer. He hadn’t wanted to look at the babies either. They were asleep, their fingers lightly flexing in the same rhythm. She laid the boy carefully along her thighs, then lifted the sleeping girl into the cradle. The boy went down beside her. They’d wake together.

  He was watching. Now she could cover herself, but there was nothing to fear in his gaze, only anxiety. He looked to her, she saw.

  “I left before they were born,” he said, half-smiling, tight around the eyes, “to go into the field.” He paused, and then she understood. She studied him a moment, his presence, then turned to the cradle.

  “They are both yours,” she said.

  “Really? Are you sure? How d’you know?” He got up and came to lean over the cradle, the most fluid movement he’d made yet. She pointed to their mouths, their eyebrows. He looked and laughed. His own children, now that he saw them (she saw), didn’t look so black. He straightened then like a man beginning to see his way out of a false position. It was queer how easily she could read him. A bit of a snob. That silver cigarette case chased in a pattern of waves had come from a jeweler she knew. If he were to stay, it would be all right.

  “I must talk to ’Nna,” he said.

  “Yes, she’s here today.”

  “Today?”

  “Kyra ’Nna,” she explained, “lives in the Fondooq … with Kyr Root.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “They work together.”

  “What, in the theater? Is she acting in his plays?”

  “Yes. But she comes here to work in her garden, and to see the children.”

  “Is she in her garden now?”

  “Yes. With her mother. Kyra Lhool.”

  That name threw Drytung around a new corner. Lhool! Was there truly such a woman, ’Nna’s real mother, and they together? Which had overmastered which? What was he to say to them, what demands would they make, would they take up his time, for he must write! There was the second Letter From the Field, he must not be long in bringing out that, now that the first had gone over so well, and then there was his great poem on gardens pressing on him, as fragrances pressed in from outside where he had planted.

  This girl, Umm’ Piptiyya, was looking at him. His face must be showing too much, he didn’t care. Her grey eyes, unreadable and steady, gazed like something in the garden that he didn’t mind, quite liked. He calmed down. Their habits, he sensed, would not jar.

  “Well,” he breathed, “I’d better go speak to ’Nna and see what she’s come about.”

  18.

  The Answer

  He walked out, wholesomeness solid behind him. The garden now must answer to a demand with wildness at the heart of it. Still his own heart rose as he went to meet it.

  He stood on the slates he’d laid around a little pool. Set in the house wall, a demon’s-mask fountain dropped a tuneful thread of water. Sky, stone, water, fragrance, the fall of the land: these had been Drytung’s materials. This southeast-facing terrace would be shaded when the grapevines covered the arbor; planted at the corners, they were well on their way up the cedar posts, the lower grapeleaves as broad as his hand.

  From the pool, a sheet like a lucent flagstone, water spilled into a second pool, long, sparkling axis of the rose parterre. Still raw, only a little way into its second season. ’Nna had kept it up, he saw no weeds, no debris, nothing left brown and trailing. The myrtles that framed it were starting to grow together. Boxwood borders, square and round, and in the center of each a rose sprang from the dirt, leaves glossy, red buds coming, one or two would blow before long.

  He walked down onto the gravel beside the long pool, turning to study the creeping fig he was training to climb the farmhouse wall. Wondering if he might not better espalier a couple of trees on either side the terrace, to make a bolder, more defined shape alongside the (future) shagginess of the arbor. He had in mind a kind of dogwood that would take, he thought, early flowering in golden yellow; or blue juniper could be dramatic, though perhaps somber? He turned and walked on, pinching off brittle sprays. The myrtles, when they grew, would shelter the roses from wind that dried them out.

  Midway in the myrtle hedge, along the right-hand side, he had planted four cypresses that would in time grow together in a mass, and he’d carve out a domed room pleasant to dine in. Steps led up behind them into his kitchen garden, herbs lay beyond that, beyond t
hat again ’Nna’s plot. She’d be there now. She’d have heard his bike. But Drytung did not turn aside but walked on to the foot of the rose parterre, where another cypress formation stood in training to be a gate. Outside the walk became a path and veered left, downhill through an orchard of lemons and oranges just coming deliciously into flower. The pool’s overflow became a stream that the path followed between outcroppings of stone and native shrubs. Drytung had begun the work of taming these wild growths, moving them and shaping them to round them out. He wanted a spread like a massing of vegetable boulders, russet, ochre, sage-green, pine-green, growing among the volcanic stones, which the wind carved into black hammerheaded oblongs and soft cubes.

  Brook and path dropped into a gully and became a stair down to the lip of the cliff. He had laid black volcanic spars for risers. Bright mosses overspread the steps, and a wealth of fissures and ledges in the wall on either side suggested plantings whose components changed every time he walked down here. The gully looked east, so shade-loving plants could look north, the sun-drinkers south. He’d started saxifrage. “Saxifrage.”

  So Drytung sank into his garden and his poem. He called it The Answer. Words, trained, yet wild within their constraints, answer to realities and bring them into view as stonecrop models the stone; such was his conceit. Drytung danced down his stair. The gully walls grew steeper and ended, the stream fell into the Nahloon, the crevice plunging in an apron of wet scree. But the path cut left to a ledge that Drytung had designs on for a viewing terrace. Already a length of pipe with two elbows, hidden under rubble, carried water from the stream to a deep scoop in the rock. He’d started iris around the pool’s edge, a lotus in its middle. They looked to be taking.

  A twisting juniper spread to shade the bench where now he sat and looked as much down as out. It was a ballooner’s vista. Half a landscape painting composed of volumes with shadows, but half a map, webwork of tracks and lanes. A green motley of fields and gardens stitched with hedge-borders clad the Nahloon valley, rising till orange and olive groves took over and climbed farther before giving way, over on the northern slope, to a fringe of cedars. To his left, terraces of vines stepped up the volcano. To the right the world spread down to the Mother of Gardens (his own stream adding its wholesome tot to her vast draught) looping through emerald rhombs of bottomland. Beyond, bluffs stood up, faced in sandstone burning in the afternoon light.

  A little frog was sitting by the pool. Moist mossy brown, vivid green about the cheeks and behind the what-d’ye-call-ems—“eye housings”? It sat, nothing moving but its throat, its “gullet,” the golden, no, the “gold-flecked” eyes half-closed. Or “goldfoil,” or could one just say “foil,” since everyone knew the color of frog’s eyes. But did they. But some poet, was it Jumpky? had already used “goldfoil.” This frog’s calm regard took in many things, a poet struggling with words among them. But then, without his seeing it move, it faced the other way. It sat, toes splayed, long brown toes, muted jaguar-spotting on the thighs, calves folded under, and the digits of its feet reached out beyond the knees. Its sitting, “alert,” “erect,” suggested a jump to come, a “trajectory,” like an arrow preparing to be, what, “loosed.” Drytung put words to the frog, discarded them, found new ones, tried them. It was there, patient.

  He must go talk to ’Nna. He rose, it jumped, he started up the stair. The walls of the gully framed a milky sky. The garden looked hopeful, he could plan its succeeding stages, and they led him to his poem, the poem to his garden. ’Nna was no enemy of gardens or of poems; then why did he dread their meeting? He was, he was not, ashamed of their relations -- was he? An army whore, he’d shared her with another man! And had been satisfied to have ’Nna and now was happy to keep her away. To look down as well as across, was this to be his characteristic angle of vision, he who wished for words to answer stones and frogs? He could love. He did love. But to figure in a love story does one of two things to a man, he reflected, climbing uneven stairs. One may become a laughable puppet, he’d done that. Or else the story opens to darkness and chaos, fire and ruin.

  ’Nna was in his garden. He had brought her here, dark and hot. He found her in the field, exposed, disrupted, wild as they come, yet heading farther into wildness. He had tried to teach her what he knew, had shown her how to cultivate what formerly she’d had to scavenge wild in woods and fields. He’d schooled her in transplanting, spacing, selecting soil (they’d dug up donkeyloads of dirt from every spot within a full day’s walking) and treating it with compost, leafmold, bark, ashes, dung. He had taught her what to plant in sun and what in shade; what could live alongside what without being blighted or strangled. She’d made a black garden of poisons! Drytung knew it was nothing of the sort, but the insects her plantings drew! She’d set up a hive; the honey burned like pepper, stung like nettles, so dark in the spoon it was nearly black.

  Hot and dark: he’d used ’Nna too, he saw, approaching the cypress gate, as a way to relive (not relieve) his terror. After a long morning of lonely writing, after the labor of fitting together language-tesserae, he went to her for the hot exciting thing that he dreaded. “Annihilation,” no, too theatrical. “Loss.” Yes, that perhaps. He’d loved her since the broken house, where everything was smashed. There, at the zero point, she had appeared, loveable, hurt. At the farmhouse, when they coupled, there it was again, the field of loss. He got it back, planted it, it guaranteed everything. The approach to it, to ’Nna, excited him so much he often could not contain himself. His sex waggled, bobbed, spat, his seed flew everywhere but the ground where he’d meant to place it. No “possession,” no “conquest.” Then ’Nna became a sweet brown girl, tied a cloth around her head, and went with him into the garden. But once, it seemed, he had planted his seed; and now he was going toward her, and Lhool was there too.

  He lingered in his herb garden, listening and breathing in sane fragrances that calmed him for the encounter. They were women, after all. They had no motive towards him of revenge. He had never shown ’Nna anything but kindness, nor received anything different from her; and she was, when you came down to it (how long it took him to come down to it!) the mother of his children. Piptiyya was their nurse, just the correction wanted, though he didn’t know why ’Nna should be corrected. The thought of Piptiyya eased him into a sort of presence, here in his favorite room of the garden.

  The herb garden was walled chest high in stone blocks roughly squared. He had planted it for fragrance, yet it had a design, simple braids and knots of muted colors (but the chives along the walls burst at the tips in balls of luminous purple). He thought of this room as a carpet with a second carpet of perfumes floating above it, stretched and changing with wind and season; but at any time of year there was a fine air to breathe there. He hoped Piptiyya would like it too, want to be there working with him.

  When he entered ’Nna’s plot, he saw no one till two women straightened behind a tall tangle, waved, beckoned, shrilly greeted him with laughter and demands. He went to answer them. ’Nna laughed her old laugh and kissed him twice on either cheek, teased him about his uniform, some dirt where he’d been sitting, rolled her shoulders drolly as she laughed. The other woman watched with eyes as light as glass. He could not read much there, except that he himself was an easy riddle. ’Nna presented her mother, Lhool, and the woman, to kiss the tips of his fingers, dropped the loose end of a scarf that she’d thrown across her mouth. Whatever crone’s sunken-cheeked, wrinkle-lipped grin he’d been expecting fled into morbid fancy when he saw, in rich light, ’Nna’s own lips plump, bowed in a contented smile. Nothing he might do would surprise Lhool, and she had the move to answer any of his, they stood on the very same ground. But smile and ease spoke alliance.

  Drytung and ’Nna went to sit in the shade of the figtree by the upper gate, at the garden’s highest corner, while Lhool bent again to work around the roots of plants. As ’Nna spoke, he looked at her, listened to her words, admired how well she spoke. He had taught her that. Then he became a
ware that the story she was telling was his own.

  She began by erasing herself from it.

  “You won’t see me often,” she said smiling, eyes wistful. “I must be in the City. I’ll have Lhool with me, so I leave the little ones with you, and Umm’. She will do better with them than I could. She has a terrible story.” Drytung, waiting to hear his own, did not want to hear Umm’’s terrible story, so she went on. “It will be peaceful here for both of you—a refuge,” and Drytung saw it so. “You will make your garden, and she will be your helper. You have seen how well the garden looks? Umm’ did that. I told her nothing, she knew what to do.” Now he did see it. “And you must write, Drytung!”

  Then she told the story of his fame. ’Nna played a part: it had been she, Drytung learned, who organized the placing of his pamphlet into every influential pair of hands in the City. She’d stolen the guestlist of the curopalates Sevene! (For whom, he now learned, she’d been cooking.) Annag had been her messenger, distributing copies out of a sidecar! Now his name, that barely had been spoken before, was pronounced by the most exalted lips!

  “You must write another Hadu, Drytung. And you must write your garden-poem and put in Umm’, a garden needs a woman. And something else, something for me.” He raised his eyebrows, but her voice ran smoothly on. “I’m going to be an actor, Drytung. Root wants me in his plays. I will have to learn what theater is; you must help me. You will write what theater is, and how an actor learns, and how a playwright makes a play. When you come to the City, you will visit Root’s theater, you will study us—me!” she laughed, spreading her arms in a stage gesture.

  Yes. He could easily see all that. An Art of Poetry, truly it was needed, nothing of the kind since the early Empire. And he was the man to write it. And dramatic poesy, yes, that should be the heart of it, poetry brought to life in a body, hot and dark. ’Nna still murmuring, Drytung saw how well his projects would complement each other. First, The Answer, as much about writing as gardening, about the poetic address to living things and their composition in a meaningful design. Then the Art of Poetry: about forms, gestures, words selected and launched at the auditor’s heart. And another Hadu: the cunning of the artist up against it. Three projects at once, good heavens.