by Tom La Farge
Turning, Drytung expected to see a playing area appear in the chasm, but what leapt into visibility, one after another, were other rooms like this one. Like this they were ruins, caves, charmingly furnished and lit, married to the void.
Now ten more boxes came on below him, then ten more and ten more, ringing the hall right around, in all six levels of viewing rooms, each casting its particular glow out to fade into the cylinder of compacted darkness. Drytung craned and squinted. The lowest rank snapped on far down in the depth of a dreadful drop. He leaned back.
It felt like being inside a dovecote. Where was a stage? He could see nothing like what he remembered from the old gaslit theaters. Each of the rooms he could see was unique. From the next on his left dull red light pushed out and made a soft bar in the air. He couldn’t see much, but surely those were telescopic riflesights in that rack on the green wall? Above the prayerstool? Almost nothing was left of another room, just a jut of parquet with a brass bed at the tip of it, catching the first light of dawn. Elsewhere he saw a cerise dressing room all hung in mirrors; a gold and amber library with lamps shaded in lilac glass. Was that, over on his right, a tiled watercloset, with toilet and towelbar?
The rooms were lit like sets. Were they all stages, would Root’s drama occupy them all, would the action call for a bed, a toilet, a riflesight? “Vertical axis,” Root said quietly and as if in Drytung’s skull. Lamps came on up and down the middle of the well. They were fixed to a thin black column that rose the whole height of the theater, and they shone in all directions, cones of scintillant grey. Some did not more than raise an aura, but the stronger beams arrived at the rooms and changed the look of them. Drytung picked up DRYTUNGS BOOK.
“Prepare for the forgotten grave. Find your places.”
Forgotten grave? Not far below him, straight across the dark well of the theater, an attic bloomed in mixed light, its own flood of sunlight pouring through a riven roof, and the stark light of the central lamps. All the other rooms dimmed. Two women, two svelte bodies advanced into light, stood amid piles of stored possessions. Drytung wished for a lens. A riflesight would do, so he left his boudoir by the door painted with a hunter’s horn.
Then it was all couloirs and ramps, forks to guess at. Tinted light leaked out around the frames of doors. He did not at once find the riflesight room, but he entered each he came to, curious what it would show him. The Forgotten Grave, that was the name of Root’s play. He’d started it at the farm. “The Forgotten Grave,” seemed a bit overwrought. At length he found the room he was looking for and selected a powerful sight from the rack. By then the scene had changed.
In a room lit with coalfire glow and lined in animal pelts, a white-armed girl’s red hair spread, and Drytung was caught in the play of it. Twisting in agonized hands, it spread into fiery points and coiled around her arm. Animal rankness, at the same time a dream of lithe movement.
He carried the sight into a chamber of padded benches, candlelit air flavored with oils and powders. The scene moved into the room next door, and it was hands he noticed, all he could see was hands and recalled Lhiss’ touch, but again, elsewhere in his mind, he followed the growth of a sense of personality. What had that to do with hands?
From another room, barred with shafts of dusty light and echoing like a railroad station, he peered into the erotic lives of a man and a woman seated on that precariously perched brass bed and lit by candles. But also, again quite separately, he heard the words they spoke as music of language, words drawn out or bursting forth, variations of pitch, stress, and duration with no difference in voice. Old men could speak those lines and get that same dance of phrase.
All this Drytung wrote down in his book, almost against his will, irritated by these excitements, by the fine, bright, fanciful forms riding a black ocean that threatened to extinguish them. In one scene Drytung was startled to see, in the boudoir from which he had started, a man bending over a woman. She was lying on the chaise, and her dress was pulled down, exposing her breasts. They are absolute, he thought, as the man laid his mouth on the nipple of one, his palm on the nipple of the other. He raised his sight; the woman looked up: Annag. The man turned; the face in the crosshairs was his own, but much older. It is not true; it is a false vision, he thought, and wished that a rifle went with the sight.
Instead he moved and looked another way, at a kitchen, empty but for several gleaming copper pots bubbling on a stove, giving off fragrant steam that bright gaslight sculptured in thoughts of divinities, a sense of racing acceleration.
He could not pull his gaze from these scenes, in each of which a vision of lived time was blossoming. They made him dizzy. They were like moments he’d gone through when, waiting to sleep, he had summoned a well-known picture before his mind’s eye. Striving to hold it steady, remember it fully, he had seen the image suddenly grow so detailed that he felt he could march into it, never escape. He passed from visualization, that assemblage of inexact images and impressions, to stark vision: this other scene surrounded him with such immediacy, that he never wanted to leave, to live with less. Yet in terror of losing himself forever in that seeing, he would sit up, stare at some object, rise and walk till the vision faded. This play was affecting him the same way.
This play was about war. Not the war, Shandimus’ Long Fall Back, not war-plotted-on-maps nor war-seen-from-a-balloon—not these but just the scenes soldiers never know they’re seeing, not while they’re still in them. They’re packed with too much, they pass by too quickly. Later the soldier goes inside them, is surrounded by them—not willingly. More happened than can be remembered, but it all can be felt. Drytung, feeling it now, was glad to have his book. Writing in it kept him from sinking too far into war, which Root had summoned with just a few bodies, most of them women’s, these wrecked gorgeous rooms, and the mixture of lights.
As he scribbled, Drytung wondered about the lights. Delights. The punning word came up from he did not know where, but he wrote it down and thought about it. Delights of marriage, a coupling of images from outside with others from within. He had never, in his Letters From the Field, tried to represent war as it is fought, but if he had, he’d have guessed, and made his choice of images accordingly, that war makes so fierce an attack that private fancy had nothing to do but try to withstand the shock and repel as many violent sensations as it could. Now, letting himself down into war-scenes as far as he dared along the cable of his writing, he saw that the soldier always meets the war. He must do so, or she must, or else be flattened.
Drytung wondered how many spectators in the Roohaneeya would be able to meet the force of Root’s attack. Perhaps, he realized in the act of writing down the thought, perhaps The Forgotten Grave will take a different face toward them, present them other sorts of scenes, enact a different assault. Could so many attacks be coordinated from a central headquarters? Or in this sort of theater was every spectator a composer and tactician, choosing ground from the geography offered, choosing troops from those under his or her command, taking away a different play?
Then war all the same, he scrawled and looked up at a sudden change of light. His box was bathed now in rich dimness, amber shadows gathering, and the gray beam from the central column added no brightness but made dimness more apparent. He put the riflesight down. ’Nna and Lhiss stood by him in the box; the play had come at last to him.
Turning her face away from him, ’Nna raised her arm and opened a hole in her side. It was a well, faceless, colorless, bottomless. To keep from falling in, he shifted his sight back to the other woman, whose eye, sealed empty, opened in his seeing. He fell.
That night, walking back alone, Drytung made no effort to remember but fell into sleep and then into bed in the little house ringing with the singing of frogs.
25.
Windows
For three years before joining the army, still a penniless underteacher, Drytung lived in the City. He lived the first year in the Fondooq, writing and tearing up what he’d writ
ten. At that time every sullen tone or look landed on a sore place, he was unhardened by his desire for his master’s wife. By night he would wander the streets, looking for lit windows. He had stolen into alleys, then into gardens, climbed ladders and balanced on rainbarrels. No one used blinds in that part of town.
He had wanted to see and had seen women undressed or undressing, standing bowlegged in a steaming tub, examining their bodies, tweezers in hand, or squatting over the pot, then twisting to look. It made no difference that naked bodies were so rarely what clothed ones led him to imagine: that breasts sink and spread, crotches bristle, buttocks bulge more square than round, more yellow than white, purple veins web pasty thighs, feet turned up expose cracked orange heels and twisted toes. He didn’t care. To feel nothing but by way of seeing; to remain at liberty while binding the spontaneity of others, this was to be master.
That passage of his life had come to an end when his master’s wife died, and Drytung at once forgot her. He had left the Fondooq and found two small rooms between an alley and a walled yard. The only window, in the back room where he worked, would have looked out on the yard if he had not had to keep it shuttered and barred. But if there was no school and the day was fine, he would undo the bolts, swing back the bars, open the casements and the garden door. He began to plant a garden. He threw out litter and rubble, brought in dirt, seeds, seedlings, slates for paving. His garden got plenty of sun and flourished. Writing, he would relax his gaze till it rested on a spray of leaves outside, a blossom, or a slug on the wall.
After the first rehearsal at the Roohaneeya, he had hurried to the farm and filled pages of DRYTUNGS BOOK with notes. For never before had he enjoyed both delectations at once: that of looking out at a scene unmarked by anything but sunlight, and that of looking in at bodies and then through and beyond them. It had never occurred to him that both could happen and he still be Drytung, but so it had been. He had stood at both ends of a look.
Now, three weeks later, Drytung again took his place at ’Nna’s table, near open windows through which wafted a smell of smoke; a light touch of toasted paper. There had been, he gathered, shelling near the port. What he was smelling was smoldering books, but it was the university library that had been hit. Not Mole Place! That was a relief, for his new Letter from the Field, the fourth, had just come out.
It was a literary supper he was sitting down to, nearly at midnight after an evening at the play. They had all been to see the Bros. Crow’s new heroic drama, Dysgenis, at the Old Variety on Convent Court, down in the old slave market. Kalba, who was in the play, was at the table; so were Lady Vinesap and Lady Fayte, and Korto the epigrammatist; Miyano, of course, and the Sacellary; Thorn, who wrote characters, Esterday, who had thoughts and got them published, and a libertine pope called Previus. Root was there too.
Since it was late, the dishes came all at once, spread out across the cloth by Lhiss and another girl, the redhaired actress. When he had put a candle in the window the night before, it had been she and not Lhiss who came. Now she and Lhiss unloaded trays, and everyone but Root, was reaching to prong some morsel off a distant platter. So did Drytung. This fourth Hadu had completely sold out. There wasn’t a copy to be had, and the printers were at work on a second, much larger run. Drytung, slurping down oysters, thought he might soon be able to meet the price that the Realty Bandum had set on the freehold of the farm. He was doing well, his children were growing and happy, Umm’ Piptiyya seemed content. Only the war was going badly. The library burnt! He extended his long upper lip over a brimming half-shell.
“The Brothers gave us a good evening, I thought,” said Miyano, stirring up trouble; everyone knew of their vicious attacks on Root. “Not too long, not too loud, not too hard; everything in its place, no surprises but plenty of spectacle.”
Root did not respond. “And Padli filled his role with great energy,” the Sacellary added. Kalba smiled. Padli, a new face in the theater, was her lover, now that the Megas Kyr had let her go. He had played the heroic part, that of the Emperor Dysgenis. “I thought he was at the top of his form. Quite up to playing opposite a major interpreter of women’s roles.”
Thorn put in, “The Brothers have been reading. What a grasp of history they have!”
“The matter was memory,” snapped Korto. Everyone looked, but he said no more.
“Tauber says,” said Kalba after a pause, “that a playwright’s true matter is his audience’s attention. He gives shape to that. The play is just his mold.”
“Some plays are mouldier than others,” said Korto. “But my attention is no jelly.” Then returned to eating. It was how he spoke.
“Attention,” said Lady Fayte, “is an opening through which art and the soul … well, what is it they do?”
“Wink at each other through the glass?” said Miyano, winking.
“Sniff each other underneath the tail,” suggested Thorn.
“Look one another in the face,” declared Lady Vinesap.
“Thank you, dear,” Lady Fayte replied. “But does the soul have a face?”
“The face it has is the face it turns,” said Esterday. “And I agree with Korto: this play of the Brothers asks the soul to meet it with the face of wistful memory. Yet whose memory goes back so far? Forgetful cracks are ever widening, and what grows there is our wish.” Korto grunted.
“And if wish is the face that soul turns towards art…?” Once again Lady Fayte would not finish her sentence.
“Then art becomes the mirror to the wish,” said Root, “not another face at all.”
The Sacellary said: “I haven’t seen such an artful use of dry-ice vapor in years. Goddesses projected onto steam!”
Drytung had been more impressed by the lighting. The whole set had been painted in light. Rich colors washed the walls and made a moor, a water-filled grotto, a throneroom or bedroom at the twist of a dial. Focused lamps brought the personages forward and modeled their gestures. The least narrowing of a lid or twitch of a lip, even far upstage, could be plainly read. Voices and faces seemed launched from there along invisible tracks to where he had sat. The others sat nearby in the Sacellary’s box, but what they saw and heard he’d never know. Yet the dramatic picture composed itself so readily that there weren’t many ways to read it..
’Nna had seemed to enjoy this story of Dysgenis, like her of mixed breed; unless Drytung was making that up. Mother a Scion of the Line raised in exile. Father a barbarian shaman. From birth Dysgenis found himself in a false position, yet by wit and will he freed himself from shame and put himself right. The crises he faced were such as anyone must rise to meet. Drytung himself left the Old Variety with spirits raised. Of course that might have been the effect of the very encouraging conversation he’d had with his bookseller; and yet he could not help thinking that, really, there’s a place for this sort of theater alongside the undoubtedly more serious yet far more taxing visions of the Roohaneeya. Especially in time of war.
Miyano said, “I liked the scene when Princess Ahhurra tries to seduce Dysgenis.” Kalba had played Ahhurra, the exotic pagan, and had bared her breasts which, neither large nor very white, had been so lit as to seem hills of snow. “Anyone can feel the force of will needed to decline such an invitation.”
“But you are describing Dysgenis’ predicament,” said Thorn, “not his character.”
“Surely we are who we are in a situation?”
“There’s a difference between a situation and what you’ve described,” said Root. “You said it yourself: anyone at all can stare at Kalba’s tits—pardon me, my dear—all frosted like pastry and set out in the shop window, anyone at all can read the shape of that moment, it goes in only one direction. So with the rest of the play. It’s not that the Brothers are clumsy in building their plays. On the contrary. Lines laid down as clear as on a map. Couldn’t get lost if you wanted to. What, a boy born into shame becomes the ruler of the civilized world? Absolute fear gives way to absolute wish. A clear view of a str
aight path that leads from being stuck in the wrong to being completely, powerfully free in the right. Anyone can pedal himself down that road and leave the theater whistling.”
“Then what’s a situation?”
But Root made no answer to that.
“Does Tauber, perhaps, offer these ‘situations’?”
“Tauber offers characters,” answered Thorn. “Characters have no freedom.”
“No, they’re their own constraint,” Root agreed. “The more Tauber knows about human imperatives — and no one but you, Thorn, knows as much about that — the darker his plays get. No, Tauber gives us the conflicts of characters hopelessly fixed by all he knows about them. In the end they’re automata, fantastically complicated and interesting automata.”
“No one has touched my omelette!” said ’Nna. “I think you need to be revived with some wine!”
They drank eagerly, knowing the wine would be better than any they could get. The omelette too was sublime, flavored with a rich fish sauce and shallots and chives cooked in butter. They could not remember when they’d last eaten eggs so fresh. For the war had grown, and everyone felt a blockage of life, except here, at ’Nna’s table. They spoke of the library fire. Esterday reported that it had more than half burned before the Fire Bandum of Walls hauled up their museumpieces of firefighting gear. Many books had been consumed, but, oddly, only those published in the last century or so. The older manuscripts and incunabules, dating from the Misprision, those had survived.