The Broken House

by Tom La Farge

  “I’m thinking that a taste leads a man to lay the world, something about it, on his tongue and to know it with the most embodied knowledge. From it at that same moment he receives an answer to his deepest question: an assurance of his integrity as a creature. But tastes grow from the world in the first place. We can’t want whatever we want. The world a man lives in informs his tastes as a gardener would, watering some, weeding out others. A creature in the full field cannot properly adjust to so much welter and surge. Desires shoot through too fast, too thick, a bundle of imperatives; a will. Then the best satisfaction is release. And because they don’t keep time, these desires clash ungovernably.

  “So any creature finds a corner of the field where the tastes that arise can be met without frustrating a competing appetite. A garden. Then tastes can be met in a rhythm that allows each to flower. The knowing how to govern, how to garden, is what makes the creature human.”

  He paused for an answer. Piptiyya knew what she thought of his garden-time. The words for saying it came as ready as any other disastrous reply she had ever made a man in whose power she lay. Her garden was an island in a world that hammered at it ceaselessly. Her garden was toil that would come to nothing. In the end the field would break in, dropping seed of wild and undistinguished growth into the ragged holes it tore open, then burn even that. The time her garden knew was suspended catastrophe. So now she was helping a man make a garden, feeding him while he wrote poems, letting him draw her nakedness, keeping his babies alive, keeping out of sight.

  Piptiyya held her tongue. She rose, smiled at Drytung and the moon behind his head, then went into her room to smear her soreness with a salve.

  21.

  The Summons

  When the moon had dwindled to a discolored round in an early sky, Drytung rose from his boulder and once more climbed the gully-stair, back to the house. Hadu was done, Hadu was printed and selling, and now he had The Answer to write; but he paused to inspect his plantings. It was not yet midsummer, yet along the gully walls many growths had spread from the ledge or cranny where he’d lodged them to mantle the rocks and fill in between them. Many were flowering. The gully garden had achieved quite a mature look, not overplanted, pleasingly unstudied, everything doing as well as if it had all just happened right.

  There was goldencrown, a swarm of shaggy little suns among ferny leaves. There was kidney vetch, stems silky-silver, petals rumpled rose. Woodruff skyblue, fragrant. Speedwell tall, blue-violet clusters with butterflies in loopy orbit. Scallop-leafed betony blared back at the sun through pink trumpets. White briony spread leaves like apologetic hands. There were purple catmint and hairy brome, plants of a tall and wispy habit. Below them, lime-stonecrop laced the rockface with streaks of white like mineral veins. Houseleek sprouted in green rosettes like miniature artichokes, and spike heath raised speartips of bunched pink bells, each, if you looked, dangling from the mass by a tender pink filament; and broom crept beneath, yellow pellets, leaves tiny but shapely. Cyclamen, pink against fat lustrous leaves, and cloveroot’s five petals like yellow propeller blades, five sagegreen knifeblade leaves stabbing symmetrically. Powderblue primroses near the head of the gully, and powderpink dragonhead, and the blue-green pinecone of spiderweb, all silvered with tracery of threads. Madwort, a tight little shrub balled up among the rocks like a rock itself. Last, skullcap’s blue-violet clutch of lips and fingers, a fist closed around mouths that would be talking.

  Coming up through the orchard, he saw someone in the rose parterre; a flash of bright silks. Drytung hurried.

  The woman, veiled and smelling of violets, bent over a tall saffron rose as Drytung ducked beneath the cypresses, but her head turned to him and then away. She straightened and flowed to the terrace where, settling, her silks gathered on the bench where he drank his wine in the evening.

  “Kyra,” he said as he came up to her, and he bowed. Then she revealed her face, and she was Lhool! Taking his fingers, kissing the tips; soft hands, hers, pearly nails; hair dressed in a chignon and lighter than he remembered; the blade of her tribeswoman’s nose soft with powder, the curve of her mouth refined by a delicate gloss of no striking hue. Lhool, sublimed! ’Nna can take her anywhere now, he thought, as he sat. Thus he looked at Lhool against the yews, with the new moon a cicatrice in the dry blue sky. Lhool smiled pleasantly, her eyes narrowing in the spread of tinted, scented skin till wrinkles forked; till that glass-green regard was nearly but not quite concealed.

  She saw him as a man. His sex (he crossed his legs) with its brutality of sudden need was the root-ball from which lanced the predictable lines of a character she knew less well yet well enough. She was familiar enough with the species, knowing its habit, to address him, turn aside his thorns, open his buds, take what she needed and leave what her nature fitted her to leave—fructification or blight.

  “I have come to do a little digging in my daughter’s plot,” she said, and even her voice had smoothed, her accent trained to manage correct speech with some energy of folk inflection. “I won’t disturb you? Everything has grown so fast this year! Your garden looks … splendid.” Lhool using splendid! She paused while he thanked her. “And I have been in to visit the babies. So calm, so well grown! I think Umm’ will wean them soon.” Now it was his turn to compliment her and her daughter on the nurse they had procured him, and he mentioned her assistance with the garden. “Ah yes, she knows how to make things flourish. She is … unusual. A rare find. And with two such gardeners, how could your beds be anything but blooming?” Her smile spread her mouth, her teeth were smaller and whiter than he remembered.

  Two could play this fencing game. He praised her metamorphosis into elegance; told her she looked dressed for a court reception more than for digging in the dirt. “Thank you, I have some old clothes in a bag. Umm’ has invited me into her room to change, by and by. So polite. They are more the sort of clothes I used to wear—you remember the old days.” What, six weeks ago? “My old clothes from the village. How they wear! We wove them to last a lifetime of work, back in the bled.” Ah, the dialect word for tribal homeland, the simple, wholesome place. “They suit me better, really, but my daughter insists on dressing me as if I were her doll.” And Lhool raised her arms and twisted in a playful, look-at-me-now way that tightened the silk across her bosom and gathered spirals around the firm column of her midriff. “She has the money, you see,” she added simply, dropped her arms and waited.

  What could he do but ask? It came out in a rush, floated on a mother’s pride: ’Nna was rising. ’Nna was nobody’s cook but her own, now, and gave such special, cozy little dinners to such a select company; Lhool mentioned names. The Sacellary had taken up ’Nna, well, he had always liked her sauces. So too had some ladies, kyrai of the Academy, nothing more respectable or accomplished, and some popes from both fashionable and popular parishes, orthodox and brilliant minds, at least one well-known preacher among them. A few sevastoi tired of complaining, some officers of Schools and of Stables. Annag, when home on leave, ate at ’Nna’s intimate table. The Megas Kyr was hoped for.

  ’Nna was working with Root but was not his mistress. Relations between them were limited to their collaboration in the theater. There were, Lhool intimated, other admirers, highly placed men; but ’Nna had no official lover. She was living in what Drytung knew as the Fondooq, though Lhool referred to it by its older, more respectable name, the Praetoriat.

  Drytung was surprised she hadn’t moved yet. He had lived in the Fondooq when he first came to the City. It was a warren, a ruin, a rambling, crumbling, endless old pile built as a fort, then domesticated as a bureaucratic palace, and then, when money was tight, sold off to an innkeeper, who had made it a caravanserai. He had turned the grand reception rooms into stabling and warehouses; mules and camels munched under tarnished chandeliers. As trade moved more and more to Walwira, the Fondooq became a sort of self-contained slum, a refuge for poor families, shabby bachelors, thieves, drunkards, harlots, pederasts, messiahs, des
erters, penniless scholars, unfrocked popes, displaced peasants, and literary men. In its most insalubrious regions it was a flophouse, a gin palace, a hospital for incurables run by superannuated whores.

  Just the sort of place that Root would like; Drytung was surprised that ’Nna, with all this money she had now, did not live somewhere nicer. Surely one of these friends must be good for a maisonette off one of the boulevards of the Pleasure Quarter? Something modern, pretty, with two back doors? Drytung did not voice these questions but must have twitched a nostril, for Lhool said with a smile,

  “You will see for yourself what plans she has when you come to visit her, Kyr Drytung.” And he was about to reply, running his hand back through his hair, that he did not come much to the City these days nor was planning any early visit but hoped that ’Nna would always feel the farm to be her home, when Lhool said, “You have not forgotten your promise.”

  He had forgotten it. He had been prompt to forget it as soon as made.

  “You will come to see my daughter act in Kyr Root’s theater, and then you will write about their work. You have said so, Kyr Drytung; you must do it. They are rehearsing now. Root’s new play will open before the end of the summer. Yes, the season begins early this year. You see, no one has left town, on account of the al aq tree fee kay shoon,” she charmingly carefully pronounced in her countrywoman’s trill, “and of course the war.” As if without war and electrification she and ’Nna would have been down the Hook at their “place.” “Everyone is reading your new Hadu,” she added. “No one speaks of the war without reciting from it, Kyr Drytung.” He knew it had had to be reprinted several times in ever larger press runs. The accounts he’d been receiving from his banker had made him think of buying the freehold to the farm, if the Company would sell. Perhaps the Sacellary could help.

  “My daughter no longer has to bring your name up. Now everyone speaks of you without prompting. She is still your greatest champion, Kyr Drytung, she speaks to the Sacellary of your public service, she says you deserve a title. You must come and write a poem that will make everyone see her as delightfully as now they see the Domestic Shandimus.

  “You have heard he is falling back faster? They say now he will be driven off the Hook by winter. That he will fall back on the City.” Lhool turned away and looked about her, gazing at all he had planted. She reached a hand to brush a corkscrew tendril of the vine now halfway up the arbor’s column. “My daughter read me aloud your new Hadu,” she said, simple unlettered mother, her knowing fingers gentle on a plant. “So beautiful and sad. A battle fought in a garden! Surely there is nothing more trad-jic,” she said and looked him in the eye. “You are a master. You must come to my daughter soon, come to write my ’Nna.

  “Now I will go kiss my grandchildren and change my clothes.” Smiling she pointed to the door behind her, as if she were inviting him, if not to watch, at least to have the image of her warm nakedness in his thoughts as he went up to write his poem; to balance, maybe, the less consoling image of Shandimus surveying his garden as a possible battlefield. “Then I will dig, and then I will leave. I will say good-bye now.” She bent to him and kissed his fingertips again, her lips lingering warm on the places where he held his pen. Then she was gone from the terrace, a lithe figure vivid as a poppy slipping inside the faded blue door.

  PART FOUR

  A SEASON OF DINNERS

  22.

  Blackening

  On a day, a sunny day, ’Nna twitched her donkey’s head through the postern gate to trot up the track that crossed the spur. The sun heated her under her robe. She lived too much indoors, and City houses grow cold at night, when she often paced, sleepless, holding her arms, navigating dim, chill rooms between wellings of heat from braziers, light from lamps, her mother on her mind, her babies on her mind, Shandimus’ words, and Root’s demands. She must steer cunningly and stay warm.

  So, climbing through a meadow, ’Nna undid her robe and let it fall, pulled off her shirt. From a flacon she poured oil into her palm and rubbed circles on her chest, belly, shoulders, neck and throat, then reached around behind till her fingers found each other in a loose clasp between shoulderblades. Her pelvis carried her, rooted on the blanket, her spine answering the donkey’s spine as it swayed. Then she dropped her arms and let the sun toast her, while the donkey’s head bobbed, ears flicking, steeply up between stones and scrubby growths.

  And she could grow as black as she liked; or as men liked. True, she had seen it. The more her eyes stood out in her face, the more men’s gaze shifted to her skin. Root had wished her to lighten! He had told her to mix a blanching ointment, “you’ll know how—or your witch mother will. You’ll have to show your body onstage, in some of these roles,” he’d admonished her. “You can’t go on as a dark little shadow, my love. Bring yourself up to where your mother is. Tawny’s quite good enough, try for tawny, will you.”

  So, dutiful, ’Nna had set about it. She’d planted a corner of her plot with caustic thistly plants that bloomed in violent reds and purples. ’Nna had applied white slime to an inconspicuous spot, a rib her arm covered, and it had burned for hours. Later her skin cracked open. Even now she could see, lifting her arm, the patch of dry skin, colorless as a scar and rough to the touch. Root had scowled but then had taken her by the shoulders and turned her till light fell on her. “Well then, we’ll do what we can with this electricity,” he’d growled. “You’re not as splotchy as you used to be. Been eating better, I expect. You’ll do as you are, only keep your skin oiled.” His look as he studied her blackness had been repeated since, by other men.

  She would work naked today, with just a cloth to keep her parts from burning. Drytung was in the City, she wouldn’t see him; and Umm’ Piptiyya rarely came near ’Nna’s plot. The donkey climbed the spur, the sky grew larger and whiter. Let it take her mother’s sickly whiteness but bake her black! As she came to the stony ridge-cap, and the Nahloon spread out lush, the Mother glinting in the distance, ’Nna stretched till every rib stood out, spread her face and arms to the sun and her legs out stiff till she balanced on her pubis; and then slid down, tethered the donkey to the figtree and opened the thorny gate.

  Later, sweating, she went to drink from the tap Drytung had put in his herb garden. Squatting, she sprinkled the herbs she’d culled and dashed water on her face. As she wiped hair back, she felt eyes on her. A blue shape was moving below. ’Nna rose, waved, called till “Umm’! Umm’ Piptiyya!” rang from the walls.

  They met in that quiet, warm spot. Piptiyya looked into ’Nna’s eyes before bowing to kiss her fingers, and ’Nna laughed and kissed the other’s cheeks, then pushed her off to fetch the babies, “Go!,” while she rested in shade. It was pleasant, she reflected, to make another woman a little fearful of the trouble she might cause; pleasant to have Piptiyya defer to her as to a lady, when Piptiyya was that and she herself was none! But ’Nna had done her a favor, setting her up here in private with two babies to feed for the one she had lost; with a garden, too, and a well-behaved man who was leaving her alone for now. Two sensitive people coming back from dark journeys.

  Sitting cross-legged in the shade, watching the sun raise russet, sage, bluestone glows in the braided herbs, ’Nna took the babies in her lap and let them play with her hair, while Piptiyya went for a tray-table and a teapot. ’Nna set them on their feet, where they stood wobbly, clutching her hands, and then sat, twisted, crawled at speed to where Piptiyya knelt with her sickle by a bed of mint. When they opened their mouths for the leaf laid on their tongues, ’Nna laughed. Then Piptiyya spread a carpet in the shade and put them on their backs; and as they seemed disposed to roll and set off on their travels, and Piptiyya was busy stuffing mint in the pot and going for the kettle, ’Nna pulled the rug till their lower bodies were in sunlight; then she began to rub their bellies. Piptiyya came back, and ’Nna heard water pouring and knew the other was watching her reach, from the shade into which she blended, a dark arm into light; watching dark fingers str
oke the golden bellies, first one and then the other, probe their navels, sometimes gently trace their small sexes before returning to the bellies and the folded flesh of their dark little buttons. The babies squirmed and fell asleep.

  “Your family has offered a reward,” ’Nna said and turned. Indeed Piptiyya’s grey eyes were on her. “Your sister Annag has been asking questions everywhere. She has tracked down some of the people from the estate, ones who got out. She knows most of your story but not the last chapter. All the V’Detsinoy are hunting for you. What will they do if they find you?” Piptiyya turned to pour. “Will they commit you to a nunnery?”

  Piptiyya held her out a glass. “Yes, that will be it.”

  “Because you are dishonored?”

  “Yes. There are abbeys,” she went on, “far from the City.” And she smiled. She knew that ’Nna wouldn’t betray her. They drank tea. ’Nna’s hand moved in the light between two shades, stroking the sleeping babies’ navels as she spoke.

  “It can all go so quickly. I saw fine houses down there on the Hook, when I was serving the Domestic. Villas. I never saw anything so comfortable, all clustered in the lanes. I’d stand in my stirrups to look over hedges into people’s gardens. I loved those round windows up in the orange roofs, like sleepy eyes opening under the tiles. Now Shandimus has fallen back among them, and I can see him look to choose which house to smash, which hedge to torch, to blind the enemy with smoke and block their advance with a wall of fire.