by Marvin Kaye
Justus drew himself up. He was almost the height of Vonderjan, but like a reed
beside him. All that room, and waiters on the stair besides, were listening. "I am
not—I have no— disease—"
Vonderjan shrugged. "That's your argument, I understand. You should leave it
off, perhaps, and seek medical advice, certainly before you consider again any
courtship. Not all women are as softhearted as my Anna."
"What—what?"
"Not plain enough? From what you showed her she knew you had it, and
refused you. Of course, you had another story."
As Vonderjan walked through the door, the two brother officers were, one
silent, and one bellowing. Vonderjan half turned, negligently. "If you don't think
so, examine his prick for yourselves."
Vonderjan did not tell Antoinelle any of this, but a week later, in the city, she
did read in a paper that Justus had mysteriously been disgraced, and had then fled
the town after a duel.
Perhaps she thought it curious.
But if so, only for a moment She had been absorbed almost entirely by the
stranger, her strong husband.
On the first night, still calling her Anna, up against a great velvet bed, he had
undone her clothes and next her body, taking her apart down to the clockwork of
her desires. Her cry of pain at his entry turned almost at once into a wavering
shriek of ecstasy. She was what he had wanted all along, and he what she had
needed. By morning the bed was stained with her virginal blood, and by the blood
from bites she had given him, not knowing she did so.
Even when, a few weeks after, Vonderjan's luck began to turn like a sail, he
bore her with him on his broad wings. He said nothing of his luck. He was too
occupied wringing from her again and again the music of her lusts, forcing her
arching body to contortions, paroxysms, screams, torturing her to willing death in
blind-red afternoons, in candlelit darkness, so that by daybreak she could scarcely
move, would lie there in a stupor in the bed, unable to rise, awaiting him like an
invalid or a corpse, and hungry always for more.
3
Lucius paddles his boat to the jetty, lets it idle there, looking up.
Another property of the flood vapour, the stars by night are vast, great liquid
splashes of silver, ormolu.
The light in Yse's loft bums contrastingly low.
That sweet smell he noticed yesterday still comes wafting down, like thin
veiling, on the breeze. Like night-blooming jasmine, perhaps a little sharper, almost
like oleanders.
She must have put in some plant. But up on her terrace, only the snake tree is
visible, hooping over into the water.
Lucius smokes half a roach slowly.
Far away the shoreline glimmers, where some of the stars have fallen off the
sky.
"What you doing, Yse, Yse-do-as-she-please?"
Once he'd thought he saw her moving, a moth shadow crossing through the
stunned light, but maybe she is asleep, or writing.
It would be simple enough to tie up and climb the short wet stair to the terrace,
to knock on her glass doors. (How are you, Yse? Are you fine?) He had done that
last night. The blinds were all down, the light low, as now. But through the side of
the transparent loft he had beheld the other shadow standing there on her floor.
The piano from the sea. No one answered.
That flower she's planted, it is sweet as candy. He'd never known her do a
thing like that. Her plants always died, killed, she said, by the electrical vibrations
of her psyche when she worked.
Somewhere out on the Sound a boat hoots mournfully.
Lucius unships his paddles, and wends his craft away along the alleys of water,
towards the cafes and the bigger lights.
Whenever she writes about Per Laszd, which, over twenty-seven years, she has
done a lot, the same feeling assails her: slight guilt. Only slight, of course, for he
will never know. He is a man who never reads anything that has nothing to do with
what he does. That was made clear in the beginning. She met him only twice, but
has seen him, quite often, then and since, in newspapers, in news footage, and on
network TV. She has been able therefore to watch him change, from an acidly,
really too-beautiful young man, through his thirties and forties (when some of the
silk of his beauty frayed, to reveal something leaner and more interesting, stronger
and more attractive), to a latening middle age, where he has gained weight, but lost
none of his masculine grace, nor his mane of hair which—only perhaps due to
artifice—has no grey in it.
She was in love with him, obviously, at the beginning. But it has changed, and
become something else. He was never interested in her, even when she was young,
slim, and appealing. She was not, she supposed, his "type."
In addition, she rather admired what he did, and how he did it, with an actor's
panache and tricks.
People who caught her fancy she had always tended to put into her work.
Inevitably Per Laszd was one of these. Sometimes he appeared as a remote figure,
on the edge of the action of other lives. Sometimes he took the centre of the stage,
acting out invented existences, with his perceived actor's skills.
She had, she found though, a tendency to punish him in these roles. He must
endure hardships and misfortunes, and often, in her work, he was dead by the
end, and rarely of old age.
Her guilt, naturally, had something to do with this—was she truly punishing
him, not godlike, as with other characters, but from a petty personal annoyance
that he had never noticed her, let alone had sex with her, or a single real
conversation. (When she had met him, it had both times been in a crowd. He
spoke generally, politely including her, no more than that. She was aware he had
been arrogant enough, if he had wanted to, to have demandingly singled her out.)
But really she felt guilty at the liberties she took of necessity, with him, on
paper. How else could she write about him? It was absurd to do otherwise. But
describing his conjectured nakedness, both physical and intellectual, even spiritual
(even supposedly "in character"), her own temerity occasionally dismayed Yse.
How dare she? But then, how dare ever to write anything, even about a being
wholly invented.
A mental shrug. Alors… well, well. And yet…
Making him Gregers Vonderjan, she felt, was perhaps her worst infringement.
Now she depicted him (honestly) burly with weight and on-drawing age, although
always hastening to add the caveat of his handsomeness, his power. Per himself,
as she had seen, was capable of being majestic, yet also mercurial. She tried to be
fair, to be at her most fair, when examining him most microscopically, or when
condemning him to the worst fates. (But, now and then, did the pen slip?)
Had he ever sensed those several dreadful falls, those calumnies, those deaths!
Of course not. Well, well. There, there. And yet…
How wonderful that vine smells tonight, Yse thinks, sitting up in the lamp dusk.
Some neighbour must have planted it. What a penetrating scent, so clean and
fresh, yet sweet.
It was noticeable last night, too.
Yse wonders what the flowers are that let out
this aroma. And in the end, she stands up, leaving the pen to lie there, across
Vonderjan and Antoinelle.
Near her glass doors, Yse thinks the vine must be directly facing her, over the
narrow waterway under the terrace, for here its perfume is strongest.
But when she raises the blinds and opens the doors, the scent at once grows
less. Somehow it has collected instead in the room. She gazes out at the other
lofts, at a tower of shaped glass looking like ice in a tray. Are the hidden gardens
there?
The stars are impressive tonight. And she can see the hem of the star-spangled
upper city.
A faint sound comes.
Yse knows it's not outside, but in her loft, just like the scent.
She turns. Looks at the black piano.
Since yesterday (when it was brought in), she hasn't paid it that much attention.
(Has she?) She had initially stared at it, tried three or four times to raise its lids—
without success. She had thought of rubbing it down, once the litter -chips
absorbed the leaking water. But then she had not done this. Had not touched it
very much.
Coming to the doors, she has circled wide of the piano.
Did a note sound, just now, under the forward lid? How odd, the two forelegs
braced there, and the final leg at its end, more as if it balanced on a tail of some
sort.
Probably the keys and hammers and strings inside are settling after the wet, to
the warmth of her room.
She leaves one door open, which is not perhaps sensible. Rats have been
known to climb the stair and gaze in at her under the night blinds, with their calm,
clever eyes. Sometimes the criminal population of the island can be heard along
the waterways, or out on the Sound, shouts and smashing bottles, cans thrown at
brickwork or impervious, multiglazed windows.
But the night's still as the stars.
Yse goes by the piano, and through the perfume, and back to her desk, where
Per Laszd lies helplessly awaiting her on the page.
4. Bleumaneer
Jeanjacques came to the Island in the stormy season. He was a mix of black
and white, and found both peoples perplexing, as he found himself.
The slave trade was by then defused, as much, perhaps, as it would ever be.
He knew there were no slaves left on the Island; that is, only freed slaves
remained. (His black half lived with frenzied anger, as his white half clove to sloth.
Between the two halves, he was a split soul.)
There had been sparks on the rigging of the ship, and all night a velour sky
fraught with pink lightning. When they reached the bay next morning, it looked
nearly colourless, the sombre palms were nearly grey, and the sky cindery, and the
sea only transparent, the beaches white.
The haughty black master spoke in French.
"They call that place Blue View."
"Why's that?"
"Oh, it was for some vogue of wearing blue, before heads began to roll in
Paris."
Jeanjacques said, "What's he like?"
"Vonderjan? A falling man."
"How do you mean?"
"Have you seen a man fall? The instants before he hits the ground, before he's
hurt—the moment when he thinks he is still flying."
"He's lost his money, they were saying at Sugarbar."
"They say so."
"And his wife's a girl, almost a child."
"Two years he's been with her on his Island."
"What's she like?"
"White."
"What else?"
"To me, nothing. I can't tell them apart."
There had been a small port, but now little was there, except a rotted hulk,
some huts, and the ruins of a customs house, thatched with palm, in which birds
lived.
For a day he climbed with the escorting party up into the interior of the Island.
Inside the forest it was grey-green-black, and the trees gave off sweat, pearling the
banana leaves and plantains. Then they walked through the wild fields of cane, and
the coffee trees. Dark figures still worked there, tending the kayar. But they did
this for themselves. What had been owned had become the garden of those who
remained, to do with as they wanted.
The black master had elaborated, telling Jeanjacques how Vonderjan had at
first sent for niceties for his house, for china and Venetian glass, cases of books
and wine. Even a piano had been ordered for his child-wife, although this, it
seemed, had never arrived.
The Island was large and overgrown, but there was nothing, they said, very
dangerous on it.
Bleumaneer, Blue View, the house for which the Island had come to be called,
appeared on the next morning, down a dusty track hedged by rhododendrons of
prehistoric girth.
It was white-walled, with several open courts, balconies. Orange trees grew
along a columned gallery, and there was a Spanish fountain (dry) on the paved
space before the steps. But it was a medley of all kinds of style.
"Make an itinerary and let me see it. We'll talk it over, what can be sold."
Jeanjacques thought that Vonderjan reminded him most of a lion, but a lion
crossed with a golden bull. Then again, there was a wolflike element, cunning and
lithe, which slipped through the grasslands of their talk.
Vonderjan did not treat Jeanjacques as what he was, a valuer's clerk. Nor was
there any resentment or chagrin. Vonderjan seemed indifferent to the fix he was in.
Did he even care that such and such would be sorted out and taken from him—
that glowing canvas in the salon, for example, or the rose-mahogany cabinets, and
all for a third of their value, or less, paid in banknotes that probably would not last
out another year. Here was a man, surely, playing at life, at living. Convinced of it
and of his fate, certainly, but only as the actor is, within his part.
Jeanjacques drank cloudy orjat, tasting its bitter orange-flowers. Vonderjan
drank nothing, was sufficient, even in this, to himself.
"Well. What do you think?"
"I'll work on, and work tonight, present you with a summary in the morning."
"Why waste the night?" said Vonderjan.
"I must be ready to leave in another week, sir, when the ship returns."
"Another few months," said Vonderjan consideringly, "and maybe no ship will
come here. Suppose you missed your boat?"
He seemed to be watching Jeanjacques through a telescope, closely, yet far, far
away. He might have been drunk, but there was no smell of alcohol to him. Some
drug of the Island, perhaps?
Jeanjacques said, "I'd have to swim for it."
A man came up from the yard below. He was a white servant, shabby but
respectable. He spoke to Vonderjan in some European gabble.
"My horse is sick," said Vonderjan to Jeanjacques. "I think I shall have to
shoot it. I've lost most of them here. Some insect, which bites."
"I'm sorry."
"Yes." Then, lightheartedly, "But none of us escape, do we?"
Later, in the slow heat of the afternoon, Jeanjacques heard the shot crack out,
and shuddered. It was more than the plight of the unfortunate horse. Something
seemed to have hunted Vonderjan to his Island and now picked off from him all
the scal
es of his world, his money, his horses, his possessions.
The clerk worked at his tally until the sun began to wester about four in the
evening. Then he went up to wash and dress, because Vonderjan had said he
should dine in the salon with his family. Jeanjacques had no idea what he would
find. He was curious, a little, about the young wife —she must by now be
seventeen or eighteen. Had there been any children? It was always likely, but then
again, likely, too, they had not survived.
At five, the sky was like brass, the palms that lined the edges of all vistas like
blackened brass columns, bent out of shape, with brazen leaves that rattled against
each other when any breath blew up from the bay. From the roof of the house it
was possible also to make out a cove, and the sea. But it looked much more than
a day's journey off. Unless you jumped and the wind blew you.
Another storm mumbled over the Island as Jeanjacques entered the salon. The
long windows stood wide, and the dying light flickered fitfully like the disturbed
candles.
No one took much notice of the clerk, and Vonderjan behaved as if
Jeanjacques had been there a year, some acquaintance with no particular purpose
in the house, neither welcome nor un.
The "family," Jeanjacques saw, consisted of Vonderjan, his wife, a
housekeeper, and a young black woman, apparently Vrouw Vonderjan's
companion.
She was slender and fine, the black woman, and sat there as if a slave trade had
never existed, either to crucify or enrage her. Her dress was of excellent muslin,
ladyishly low cut for the evening, and she had ruby eardrops. (She spoke at least
three languages that Jeanjacques heard, including the patois of the Island, or
house, which she exchanged now and then with the old housekeeper.)
But Vonderjan's wife was another matter altogether.
The moment he looked at her, Jeanjacque's blood seemed to shift slightly, all
along his bones. And at the base of his skull, where his hair was neatly tied back
by a ribbon, the roots stretched themselves, prickling.
She was not at all pretty, but violently beautiful, in a way far too large for the
long room, or for any room, whether spacious or enormous. So pale she was, she
made her black attendant seem like a shadow cast by a flame. Satiny coils and