The Broken House

by Tom La Farge

  “He looked that way at me once, Piptiyya! I took him out at night and taught him to see what’s really there, and then he saw me. One look sent me back.” A laugh. “Back to what I had been before the Company of Walls. It all came back to visit me! I … did a ceremony … Drytung can tell you. On the road I found a good place, I made smoke, I opened myself and looked into the gap. I don’t know where I got the courage, unless from terror itself. I found a way, and now I must keep on it. Everything I have I will use to climb so high that anyone may see me, but only as I wish to be seen. And then I’ll look at him—at Shandimus.”

  Silence grew, shadows stretched, ’Nna drank cooling tea. Then, voice refreshed, reached back to the golden bellies.

  “Your old story that you fell out of, Piptiyya, belongs to me now. It’s I must tell it to you, just as you allow me to look on while you mother my babies, here in the quiet garden I have given you. Will you miss your own garden? Will you miss your friends, will you regret the laying of a tablecloth with crystal and silver? I’ll tell it all to you.

  “And you, now, Piptiyya, this is the place for you to stay and mend and be happy as a lizard, with just lizard needs!” They turned to watch a lizard sunning on the wall, spiny and tan behind Drytung’s lavender. As Piptiyya watched the slow throb of its gullet she received ’Nna’s images, of a garden to tend, a life to mend, babies as hungry as breasts are full, quiet work among realities, dirt, the pantry, needs grown to the height of her competence—lizard needs.

  She and Drytung worked together well. Once she’d heard him put words to a tune she was playing, then, after sniffing, sing it over with every noun replaced by garlic. She’d laughed and said: “Their first word will be garlic!”

  Piptiyya sat up and reached for ’Nna in the shadows, found a bony shoulder. Then pulled her into light, a skinny, smiling brown girl. They looked at each other from out of their new stories; Piptiyya saw a promise, and the alliance was sealed. Then ’Nna laughed and pulled on her clothes in a swirl of saffron and poppy, cornflower trousers jumping up her legs, then a last ballooning from which her dark face pushed out to plant a kiss. “Umm’ and ’Nna!” she crowed, then brushed the sleeping babies with her fingers and gathered her herbs. “Here, put these in the soup!” she said, holding out leaves pulled from her bundle. “If you like the taste, you can take more from my garden.” Then was gone as if carried off by dragons.

  The twins woke ravenous. Piptiyya found herself wanting soup and carried the babies into the kitchen, wondering what would happen to Shandimus’ story after ’Nna had seen him.

  23.

  Galantine of Shadefish with Famine Chaud-froid

  Drytung was late to dinner at ’Nna’s. A dozen or so fashionables reposed at her table, and a rich light sprang back from jewels and decorations, bald crowns and bare arms. He slid onto his couch, murmuring excuses. His bike had absolutely given up the ghost—that brutal track. As Drytung was dickering with a bush mechanic in amusing vernacular, the soup came in. He unfolded his napkin. Only the finest damask for ’Nna these days. He tried to trace the light back to its source.

  Some came through the windows, filtered by leaves and red dust. It was very green out there, where were the other houses? Frogs and wood-doves boomed and gurgled.

  A ladle knocked his bowl, and his eye traveled up the figured golden handle to the girl’s hand. Real nails never grew that pearly. Had ’Nna hired actresses? He’d never seen anything so bright in a girl. Now she was serving his neighbor, Lady Vinesap, a literary lady, powder and violets lightly masking other, more human smells. The girl was better to look at.

  Down the table vessels glowed. The light came from them. Faces leaned rosy into the glow, bending, over steaming spoons.

  “How is the Artificial Ocean progressing?” asked a woman, as if soup led naturally to this topic. The Sacellary answered this Kyra Kalba, a wellknown actress. The Artificial Ocean was being dug. Slurp. Walls’ Excavations Bandum was busy about it. Every available steamshovel had been requisitioned. One could hardly hear oneself think at the University.

  “The new electric boats keep sinking, though,” the Sacellary admitted.

  “I hear they flip over backwards,” said a Corsator Miyano V’Hastray, (of Stables).

  “Yes, that is so. The motors turned out heavier than expected. The Despot was most chagrined.”

  “When they float, iftooby, we’ll race them to Rhem and lob bombs,” said Annag. Could she mean that?

  “But first the nautomachy, iftooby!” Corsator Miyano reminded her. “Has a date been set, Kyr Sacellary?”

  But Lady Fayte asked, “Where’s the army got to?”

  Miyano named a town fifteen minutes by motorbike from the Cut. It was the last possible defensive position before the Cut itself. Everyone understood. Dishes came and went; talk wrapped the war in information. Three foreign powers, industrial republics that had sprouted in abandoned corners of the Empire, were arming and financing the enemy force. No one thought now the Rhemots were capable of such a campaign. They and the Old Believers were just a screen to hide an invasion. Troops had landed on the northwest coast near Gnaupoor and established a beachhead.

  Everyone had heard of skirmishes on the northern steppe. “Our troops are being corralled by barbed-wire fences strung between blockhouses.” “Hardly good form.” Latterly, an armor-plated train, boxcars abristle with cranes and guns, had come chuffing down the old main line to disgorge a horde of workers. “They’re mending the track! And laying a road alongside it!” “Ah, then they’re coming after our dam.”

  Meanwhile the Company of Schools kept to its barracks and did nothing; no more did Mules. The Megas Kyr was fighting his divorce through the courts; was disinheriting his son. The Despot was playing with toy boats!

  Only Shandimus was fighting a war. With one voice, finishing one another’s sentences, the diners narrated his brilliant, heart-breaking, cold-blooded withdrawal from the Hook, using what troops and weapons he could put his hand on; losing, always losing; but losing slowly, killing twice, three times as many as he lost; making the enemy look like fools.

  “He kept a column of their shock troops driving in circles for five hours,” said a young kyra.

  “Oh yes,” said her husband, the balding Kyr V’Wassy-Puqua, “a motorized column, it’s quite a story. They were hurrying to take M’semt. He misled the column onto the road that circles Lake Taggourn. Well, he kept them driving around those eight miles by putting out a new road sign each time the column drove past; you know, ‘M’semt 40 miles,’ ‘M’semt 32 miles,’ ‘M’semt 24 miles’….” They all laughed heartily. “The lead driver simply could not believe how bad the road becomes as you approach M’semt!”

  Meanwhile the roasts went out and the salads came in. Buttery lettuces, peppery cresses, mushrooms like sublimated humus; rocket met suddenly like a spear of animal terror.

  “They’ll find a surprise when they cross the Cut!” No iftooby. ’Nna was by the windows, smiling. “The Domestic Shandimus will arrange a treat for them!” Faces cleared at the thought.

  “And if he hasn’t thought it up yet,” added Miyano, “we’ll send him the latest Hadu!” Everyone laughed and clapped, and now they got up to walk and smoke on the terrace, as ’Nna’s girls cleared. One had only one arm; Drytung looked closer and recognized Jbeeba in a low cut gown. He turned to ’Nna. How blank she was, swathed in nubbly white. Her voice was bright, though, as she called him to the window.

  “Your quarters,” she said, nodding into the night. Out in the green darkness a light showed a corner of porch, a column twined by creepers. “Two rooms, very plain, far from people and near to frogs—I know your tastes!” she laughed. He thanked her. “Whenever you come. You know you must come often! Umm’ and the babies will visit too.” Drytung nodded.

  “Ah!” in a public voice she then declared, “the galantine!” And everyone turned back to the table.

  The glowing vessels made a ring on the new
cloth, a sheet of rust silk whose wandering streaks suggested dune-ridges in a red desert. Some lights had been turned up, others dimmed; some were steady, others pulsed. Their lights married as they spread, and goblets, bowls, cruets, mills, and cellars cast shadows, tinted and wavering.

  Four girls brought in a platter bright with copper scallopings and scrollings. On it Drytung saw scarlet fish-scales, but it was no simple fish. From a central fishhead gaping and staring up to heaven, ridges of fishback swam out to all four cardinal points, as if four large fish shared the one head, then bent in a pinwheel, swimming in a sauce of dun chaud-froid, ribbed as if by wind and studded with sprigs dispersed like shrubs on an arid plain.

  As he returned to his couch, he looked between two fish-ridges and saw the Glen of V’Goun. Shandimus had fought a battle there. Drytung had been in it; it was the matter of his third Letter from the Field, “Flowing Uphill.” He had hurried to get it out before coming to the City, and here was its very terrain modeled in a paste of toasted flour, clarified butter, veal stock, and tomato, a mother sauce slowly reduced to a battlefield.

  “Please to take your couches,” spoke the girl who had served him soup. Flesh like marzipan; her chestnut hair fell across one eye. She rang a silver bell and smiled, standing behind a lectern. A reading lamp shone down upon a book, which now she held up: “Flowing Uphill”! It was out already! Drytung ducked his head to polite applause.

  She read with a clarity of inflection that brought each succeeding phrase into the light. In her cadence Hadu now walked across a barren moor, climbing the glen between two upland spurs. Where he passed windtwisted pines below the crest, Drytung saw a splay of rosemary. Saw Hadu pause to study the glen below, a stony watercourse with just a bright thread spilling down it (silver glacé).

  Meanwhile girls reached in with slicers. They carved at the galantine and then served everyone a section of fish-massif but left the Glen of V’Goun intact. As fingers raised morsels to lips, the reader’s clear voice rode a ground of appreciative murmurs. “What fish is this?” Cubes of sweet flesh with a saffron fringe, lodged in a forcemeat compounded of more fish, bread, cream, nutmeg, and pepper; pistachio shards and pimento shreds folded into that. “Shadefish from the Mother!” announced Lady Vinesap. “Eat into the heart,” said the girl.

  Drytung wondered if the words were his, encountered just then by chance in the reading. Truly, he thought, water eats into the earth’s heart, following necessary paths. As the girl read on, Hadu traversed the slope on tracks that sheep and goats had worn, labyrinth of fixed appetites. And in that way, with that necessity, the enemy force must pour itself down like herds or rain, to overwhelm the weak check Hadu’s men could put upon them. Unless, against all inclination, he made them run uphill.

  On the crest of a ridge stood a fort, squat and ochre, massively gated.

  “I know that house,” said Lady Fayte and swallowed. “That’s the V’Goun stronghold, from when they were bandits.”

  “Weren’t we all,” said V’Wassy-Puqua.

  The reading girl offered them Hadu lighting lamps in the fort behind illfitting shutters, till it seemed as if there must be many men inside. Dryung got a frisson from hearing the girl read his description of engines gunning in the courtyard. For, first, he savored the motor-mimetic rolling of r’s and gagging of rgh’s in the verse. Second, he had been in the cab of one of Shandimus’ last two working trucks, one hand on the starter and the other on the choke, his boot on the throttle, doing what he could to suggest a constant coming and going of motors.

  So lured, the enemy vanguard wheeled and probed up the slope, squad by squad, securing every new advance, rolling light field-pieces forward, lugging up machineguns, their tripods and belts, digging in by cautious spadefuls, lifting out the stones by hand and setting them on foxhole parapets. At dawn they would begin their bombardment.

  But at midnight Hadu gave the word. The truck sounded a long aa’oogahah on its klaxon, and before the echoes died, the charges blew, and the whole façade of the fort toppled forward, fell on the besiegers. Charging downhill in panic, they alarmed their own sentries, who opened fire. In the confusion Hadu withdrew to his next position; and the girl fell silent, while another touched the fort on the fishback ridge. It fell apart in an explosion of orange sauce, and the largest part of it was placed on Drytung’s plate, to general applause.

  Then a pause. They all went back to poking in the chaud-froid and ruminating on the results. As Drytung probed, singular tastes exercised his palate and raised moods in his mouth. Eating so, one became what one was: a marriage of hungers. And surely it was famine-food they were eating! Seeds. Roots. Bulbs. A twig. A nut, a strip of bark, a tiny egg bursting raw between the teeth.

  “Why, this is clay!”

  “Clay! Give us a taste. Mmm, it’s quite good.”

  “Where’s it from?”

  “Annag, my dear,” said the Sacellary, “taste it; I’m quite sure it’s V’Detsiny clay.”

  Tears ran down Annag’s red face as she chewed.

  “Best clay in the world,” V’Wassy-Puqua consoled her.

  “I wonder how ’Nna came by it,” said Lady Fayte.

  “I don’t know!” wailed Annag. “It belongs to Shandimus!”

  Finishing his last nut, Drytung heard grunts, peeps, rustlings from the darkness. The room lit itself and no more. That girl, the reading one, was leaning forward between Miyano and Annag, laying a platter of cheeses, her own skin whey-pale and finely pocked like cheese. She caught his eye. She did more: she brushed back her hair and winked.

  He thought she was winking, but then he saw: she had lost that eye! She had only one! That one was amber-irised, liquid, prominent, mantled in languorous lid with a sweep of soft lashes; on the other side of her nose, taut skin stretched from brow to cheekbone, with sealed reddened lids slanting.

  Later, not sober, Drytung walked out and wondered how he was going to find the little house through ’Nna’s jungle-garden. But the one-eyed girl came up behind him with a lamp and took his arm. Once inside, she put the lamp down, turned back the sheets. As he went to her, there came to mind the unwritable history of their walk there: rustle of nesting fowl, a push through brush of some hoofed creature, a white fish rising with open mouth beneath an oblivious frog. He had felt an apricot squash under his shoe and smelt its perfume, which returned now as he raised a finger to touch the raw, lashless rim.

  24.

  Well and Stair

  Drytung awoke to curtains being drawn and reached to pull up a sheet, but it had been kicked off during the night.

  “No one can see you,” said the girl. He did not care to be visible, all the same. Reaching off the bed for the sheet, he saw a steaming pot and a cup on the table. “Drink your coffee and wash up. We must be at the Roohaneeya by eleven.”

  The Roohaneeya is Root’s theater, Drytung thought, but I don’t know her name. So, in a strangled voice between two sips, he asked her. Lhiss. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, taking her time with her shirt.

  “Lhiss,” she repeated later, on the porch. “When you want me, put a light in this window.” She slipped a key into his hand. By day the unsettling garden was nearly as solid a mass as by night, the path bordered with shells of devoured molluscs. Smells overcharged the air, something was grunting. Drytung shuddered and thought of his own garden, and his Answer. He had written a canto; Umm’ was at his table now, up in the granary, copying it out in her fine cursive. Now he must put that work aside to fulfill his promise. An ars for the drama—“what theater is.” He had ideas but wanted to see what there was to see in Root’s new playhouse.

  They were not to leave the Fondooq, it transpired. Lhiss led him down corridors or one long hall that at a certain moment lost its ceiling and became a lane. In that strait passage burdened donkeys and busy people pushed both ways, while old women stood blocking the flow, their hands pressed into the small of their backs, loudly gossiping. He waited to debouch into the
boulevards of the Pleasure Quarter, but they never did. The lane turned crowded alley where shops displayed heaps of unsold goods and glum men sat behind level scales. In a street of tailors all the work was mending, turning, patching. Times are bad, he thought. Scarce food, no jobs, the war is tightening round us. The electrification was finished, no more work on that. Now boys and girls were mobbing him, whining for money with their heads to one side, repeating the same pathetic phrases. But Lhiss said something in dialect, and they ran off, singing a very vulgar song.

  Lhiss opened a door between two stalls. This could not be the entrance to a theater! Two feet away a bearded tinker with no legs rocked in his bowl, tapping at a kettle, not a tooth to his grin.

  Inside, a ramp led down to blindness. Drytung must let himself be taken by the hand. His eye could make no sense of the way they followed, there was going up, there was going down, there was turning corners and walking through wide-echoing spaces or tight ones, but there was no light. Once he saw an orange bulb dim at the bottom of a nightmare stair he was thankful not to be climbing down. At last after a steep climb they came to a halt in the darkness with still deeper darkness just beyond. His hand was let go, and he clutched a velvet rail.

  “Light the sky in F,” Root’s voice said from everywhere, and stormclouds roiled not far overhead. Staring at them could not resolve the doubt as to whether they roiled in truth: were all Root’s plays performed under open skies, or was that “F”?

  He looked down. It was like standing at the lip of a well. He must be in some sort of box? Rather high up?

  A chair pressed the tops of his calves.

  “Light 63!” Root’s voice ordered. “Take a seat, Drytung, I need my girls. Welcome to the Roohaneeya.” Drytung sank onto the velvet of a fine fauteuil with quilted armrests, bisque in color. A pearly shimmer spread just where he was, but beyond the rail all was void. Drytung looked about him and was alone. He was in a sort of a shattered cabinet whose design and decor raised thoughts of whispers and fondling. Its floor stepped up to the back wall, and two other fauteuils and a chaise-longue stood facing different ways. Not like any theater box he’d ever occupied. The apple-green boiserie of the rear wall showed six doors outlined in twists of gilt. “Make yourself comfy,” Root’s universal voice invited him. “Light the other sixties now!”