Cherenkov turns again to gaze at the bow, and chuckles. ‘So that’s supposed to be more than a thousand years old?’ No one returns his grin. He frowns. ‘When can I leave? When can I return to… to my own world?’
Septima and her mother exchange glances. They gaze at him. There is a pleading in Septima’s eyes.
Her mother speaks. ‘Before you go we would ask of you a great boon.’
Cherenkov watches them.
‘Will you accompany my daughter on a voyage to see an old man?’
‘What old man?’
‘Custom forbids that any Eborean should go with her. If you will not go, she will have to brave the ocean alone.’
‘You do know that nothing of this makes any sense?’
Septima regards him with tearful eyes. ‘Please, Cherenkov.’
The Tribune says softly. ‘It will only take you twenty of your days, not more.’
‘Twenty days?’
Cherenkov’s jaw sets as he holds the Tribune’s flinty gaze. He offers Septima his hand, and she puts her’s in his. He looks her directly in the eyes. ‘Promise me that when we return you will let me go.’
She glances at her mother who says: ‘Once you return, sir, if you still wish to leave us, so be it…’
A wisp of expression flits across Septima’s face, one that Cherenkov cannot read. He bows his head. Her hand is small and warm in his. He raises his head. ‘I’ll go.’
Septima brightens with joy. The Tribune raises her hand and attendants come down either side of the table and clear away their cutlery and plates. Behind them come others with more platters. Upon one lies an enormous cooked fowl decked out in peacock feathers. Eyeing other strange dishes, Cherenkov asks: ‘When do we go?’
The Tribune puts a hand on his arm and smiles warmly. ‘After you have both slept well, my dear.’
Four
Cherenkov searches the quay for any other boat. ‘We’re expected to go to sea in that?’
‘My daughter is an accomplished sailor,’ says the Tribune.
‘All Eboreans are,’ says Septima.
‘But twenty days, in that? It doesn’t even have a cabin!’
‘We have stowed enough food and water under the foredeck for more than thirty days, and there are tarpaulins to keep off the weather.’
Cherenkov hears an edge to the Tribune’s voice that she backs up with a hardness in her eyes. ‘I told you I’d go, and I intend to keep my word.’
Septima smiles. In those loose baggy trousers that stop just below her knees, shirt, waistcoat, short coat and three-cornered hat – she looks like a pirate. He grins wryly; he is dressed just the same.
A bell somewhere above chimes the octal. He looks out through the harbour arch: if this is morning it is a rather dusky one; even the ocean is brighter than the sky.
Septima steps aboard. He passes her his freshly-laundered raincoat; safely rolled into it are his cigarettes and a few other things. Attendants steady the boat as he clambers in. He sits on a low bench and faces Septima. Her hand rests on the tiller. He helps push the boat away from the quay with an oar. Under her instruction, he helps her raise the sail. They drift out of the harbour, and Septima points their prow towards the open ocean. As the wind fills the belly of the sail, he is thrown towards her. He slides back onto his seat. The boat cuts the swell.
❖
Distantly behind them chimes the bell. Cherenkov, off-colour, turns from the ocean’s rise and fall to look at his wristwatch. He can’t believe they’ve been at sea for an hour and a half. He notes the time and, at the next peal, he sees that considerably less than an hour and a half have passed. As he comments on this to Septima, she points over his back. He turns. Flashing clouds and a raging, luminescing sea rush at them. The first storm wave punches the boat, and lifts them. They plunge down the other side and are lashed by seawater. He heaves his breakfast out over the glowing ocean.
❖
Sea light, sinuous in the water, betrays the violence of the ocean that erratically lights the clouds as if with diffuse searchlights. Waves thrash the boat as Septima struggles to hold their course into the squall. Cherenkov clings to the bows.
❖
He wakes and gazes up at featureless grey. The boat rocks him gently. He grasps the bow and sits up and winces; he reaches round to knead his back. He feels dizzy, and doubles over the side. Only mucus drips from his lips. He grips the side of the boat, and gazes sternward to where Septima is draped over the tiller asleep. He smiles.
❖
He angles his wrist and peers at his watch. Five twenty-three. He gazes out over the mounding ocean. Clouds range above them like the spokes of some vast wheel. An infinite sky spans a horizonless ocean. He looks all the way round: no edge gives scale to, or any understanding of, where they are. The ocean sheds some of its paler pulsating blue up into the clouds.
He slips back into the cradle of the boat and gazes unfocused at the sky. ‘Five twenty-three.’ He shakes his head. He screws his eyes and bares his teeth.
❖
The boat glides across the glowing ocean and leaves a glittering wake like the tail of a comet. Septima trusts the tiller to a loop of rope. She encourages Cherenkov to sip a little water often, and is kind and polite, but her gaze is turned inward. He watches expressions pass across her face, and hears her mumbling. He cannot bear to watch her for long. Behind her looms the depthless immensity of the sky that has become a terror to him: a blank world where he and she are the merest fading strokes. When he closes his eyes the oblivion he seeks is constantly scratched by light.
❖
They do not speak as their bodies ram together; they look away from each other’s frantic eyes.
Sated, they gaze up into the null sky, but inky memory seeps back in.
❖
They couple again and again until their bodies are bruised and raw. It is not love, nor even desire.
❖
‘It snowed the day before,’ he says. ‘The sun made everything so clear. It hadn’t looked unusual – just a sort of factory pumping smoke out of its chimneys. Before we reached the gate we came across a railroad siding with several box cars on it.’ He glances at her. ‘There is a stench. It has been building,’ his nostrils distend, ‘for a while now. I struggle not to turn tail and run. The door on one of the box cars is open; inside, bodies are piled four or five high. Skeletons, really.’ He wrings his hands. ‘Flaps of leathery skin. Grins glitter with frost. Just inside the gate a wire pen and kennels packed with Alsatians; throats slashed, heads crushed, like…’ He mimes holding something, and violently pounds. ‘Some barracks with the lightning insignia of the SS. The smell burns my nostrils.’ He draws his shoulders up to his ears, and winces. ‘I can feel it coat my skin.’
Septima tries to move away from him, but he grips her and stares into her eyes.
‘Ahead is a ditch, a German facedown in it. On the other side a wire fence; electrified. Prisoners behind it look at me. I can’t speak: they won’t speak.’ His fingers dig into her arms. He flicks his chin up. ‘What can you say in the heart of Hell? Eh?’
Septima shouts in his face: ‘You lie!’
He peers at her. ‘I see that you need to believe that.’ He nods, his eyes wide. He looks away, and squints.
‘On our side of the fence, to the left of the dogs, the shower blocks: vast filthy grey spaces, shower-heads in a parade-ground grid. Coal-fired ovens, heaps of corpses. Mounds of ash studded with bones and teeth. I blessed the cold for it kept their rot just on this side of endurable.’
He gazes at her, and his mouth sags open, his eyes see something; slightly he shakes his head. ‘I watched the inmates beat and club German soldiers to death. And I laughed.’
‘When I got away I stripped off my uniform and burned it. I scrubbed my skin and shaved my head, but couldn’t rid myself of the smell.’ He releases her, and gazes at his hands, and he wrinkles his nose. ‘I can still smell it.’
He stares at her, and blinks away tears. ‘What if it
never ever goes away?’
She stares back at him, and kneads her arms where he has left marks on the skin.
‘The only thing I kept,’ he reaches for his rolled up raincoat, rummages in it, ‘was this.’
He shows Septima his painted doll. He smiles and tears run down his face. ‘Granny gave me this to keep me safe. She said it had kept her safe all the way across the ocean.’ He pulls the doll in half and inside is another; he pulls that in half and inside is another. Shelling each one reveals a smaller one inside.
Luminous waves sigh and slap along the hull.
Staring at the line of halved, diminishing dolls, Septima shakes her head, and tears spill from her eyes. Her hands slide down her body. She jerks when they reach her naked thighs and belly. She looks down, eyes widening.
She turns away from him, crouches, brings her thighs together and pulls on underwear. She is careful not to look him in the eye. He licks the tears from his upper lip, puts on his raincoat, and shuffles to the other side of the boat. Back at the tiller she gazes fixedly past the prow.
❖
Each tries to find something outside the boat to look at, but the boat is their only reality. The sky, as blank as a dead face, fills the mirror of the ocean.
❖
Something slides beneath the water and sheds radiance in its arrowing flight.
Cherenkov clamps his hands to the sides of his head. ‘A dinosaur!’
‘Colubrosa.’
The fleshy submarine slips under them; its head darts upon a massive swan neck. With a thrust of its four paddles it glides away. Its iridescent wake unravels in the ocean.
His arms drop to his sides. ‘I thought them whales,’ he says in English.
‘What?’
‘In the dockland, I thought them whales.’
She nods. ‘Without them we Eboreans couldn’t survive: they give us meat, building bone, tooth ivory, leather, rope and string and the oil that lights our lamps.’
❖
The boat carries them into ever more luminous regions. Cherenkov watches tendrils of radiance weave in the swell until his head aches. The light that suffuses the world has crept inside his eyes: everywhere he looks, sparks scratch his vision. The pattern is not the same in every instance: when he looks in their direction of movement, it rushes like snow towards the windshield of a speeding car. Views to either side and back reinforce this impression.
He buries his face in his arms, and pants. ‘I can’t bear it!’
‘Bear what?’
When he explains, she says: ‘Pull your tricorn down.’
He pulls on his three-cornered hat, but only manages to jam it tighter on his head. She brushes his hands away and unbuttons each of its three side flaps. The brim released, she folds it down over his ears and the nape of his neck; as she does so the flashing in his eyes flutters and snuffs out.
He sags against the bow and groans. ‘How?’
‘The opals.’
He sits up. A glimmering band runs around the brim of Septima’s hat; a band that had been hidden within the brim when it was buttoned up. Light writhes over the band. He peers close: it is made of pebbles in which blue radiance glows and sparks.
❖
The waves ahead have a knobbly surface. Bands in the water snake past.
‘Seaweed!’
‘Sargassum,’ she says.
Ribbons the colours of copper and brass float in loosely-woven mats. Flotation sacs pebble the bands like octopus suckers. The mats thicken to rafts, then islands: sargassos, she calls them.
Soon, as far as the eye can see, the humps of these sargassos rise above the waves, and give an even vaster scale to the ocean. By contrast, the tiny world of their boat contracts.
❖
He opens his eyes and sits up. ‘Who is this Old Man?’
She shakes her head. ‘No one really knows; only that he has been here always,’ she indicates a floating island, ‘living upon one of those.’
Cherenkov frowns. ‘How will we find him?’
She shrugs. ‘All I was told was to head always lightwards.’
❖
It takes a lot of staring and arguing before they accept that it is real; Septima steers them towards a helix of rising smoke.
❖
The sargassos hunch so high that Cherenkov and Septima can no longer see over them. The boat runs along a low rolling coastline. The root of the rising smoke comes into sight: another sargasso.
Septima runs the boat aground on its shore. Casting glances inland towards the smoke, Cherenkov helps her brail their sail. They slip over the bow and drag the boat up out of the water.
The sargassum mat feels slick under their feet; tough and yielding like calloused skin. The ocean swell moves beneath it, but more languorously than they have grown accustomed to on the boat. It is hard to stay upright.
Septima clambers back aboard and returns with a sack that she passes down to him. It is heavy and lumpy. When she jumps down, Cherenkov sets off, but she catches his arm. ‘Hold on.’ She crouches, slips her hand into a pocket and draws out a soft leather pouch from which she slides a gold object onto her palm, and flips it open.
She glances up at him. ‘A marine chronometer.’
It is an exquisitely fashioned pocket watch, its white face inscribed with octals and other markings. It has several hands. She snaps it closed and returns it to its pouch and puts this back into her pocket.
‘We must leave in three days.’
❖
Slipping and sliding, stumbling, they make their way across the island. As they come within sight of a crude hut, Septima slumps to her knees. Cherenkov swings the sack to the ground and steadies himself on her shoulder. The smoke rises from near the hut; a figure squats beside a fire.
‘Courage,’ she says.
He helps her up, shoulders the sack and they set off.
Just as Cherenkov becomes aware of a second smaller figure beside the first, he senses an increased awkwardness in Septima’s gait; she stares at this smaller figure, a boy, with an expression Cherenkov can’t read.
Five
Cherenkov stares at the giant hunched over the fire. The boy rises, and looks past them. He doesn’t even come up to the giant’s shoulder.
‘A caveman?’ Cherenkov says, under his breath to Septima.
‘A Neanderthal, I think.’
She can’t take her eyes off the boy; he is about twelve, tanned and naked. His tousled mop of dark blond hair is matted with brine. His eyes are the blue of a summer sky. Cherenkov is nagged by a feeling that he knows him.
‘Have you come to fetch me home?’ asks the boy.
‘Yes indeed,’ says Septima, and makes a face at Cherenkov and shrugs.
Wary of the Neanderthal, Cherenkov reaches out to touch the boy’s hand: ‘I’m Cherenkov.’
The boy takes Cherenkov’s hand in both of his, and frowns. ‘Your name, your speech…’ He grins. ‘Your hand. You’re not Eborean!’
‘No,’ says Cherenkov, ‘I’m American.’
The boy nods and smiles. ‘I’m Octavio.’
‘Who is this with you, Octavio?’ says Septima.
The boy beams. ‘I don’t know his name, but he’s nice. He taught me to fish and how to walk on the island.’
To prove it, the boy ambles off across the heaving ground, and returns, his gait smooth and regular.
❖
The Neanderthal is as naked as Octavio; his brown skin appears to be marbled with dirt, but on closer inspection this turns out to be a second skin of tattoos.
Septima takes the sack from Cherenkov, unties it and reaches inside. She brings out two oranges and offers them to the Neanderthal. ‘I’ve brought you gifts, Old Man.’
The Neanderthal snuffles at the oranges. His face is huge, with an unnaturally wide nose and a mouth that is wider still. His swarthy skin is leathery and has a reddish hue. A hoary beard, roughly-trimmed around the mouth, reveals a surprisingly delicate chin. Hair runs up his jawli
ne, past small ears, to flare into a grey mane that still has some copper strands. Deep creases pull his cheeks down past his mouth; more form a deep ridge where his nose sinks under the bony shelf of his brow that conceals his eyes in shadow.
He extends a shovel of a hand, fumbles for the oranges, and brings them to his nose. He grunts, and his wide mouth widens further. He accepts more gifts from Septima: more oranges, some pears, a bundle of asparagus, leeks, a string of onions, radishes; even cherries.
Cherenkov frowns as each item is handed over; he gazes back the way they have come.
Septima addresses the Neanderthal: ‘Will you share your food with us?’
The Neanderthal rumbles something.
Octavio grins. ‘We’ll share our food.’
‘You understood what he said?’
The boy shrugs. ‘Not the words, but he always shares.’
Septima sits by the fire, tugs at Cherenkov’s waistcoat, and he sinks down beside her. He angles his head so that the opal band of his hat shields his eyes from the flashes. The embers under the fish are twists of seaweed aglow on a bony grate. More dried seaweed is piled up nearby.
The Neanderthal leans forward, and his nostrils distend; he reaches out with his thick fingers and plucks up a fish, flakes off pieces and hands them out.
Cherenkov juggles the juicy charred flesh around his mouth so as not to burn his tongue, and notices that the Neanderthal’s head does not follow his hands as he reaches for another fish. He leans forward: the Neanderthal’s eye sockets are empty.
❖
Stomachs full, they lie back.
‘I’ve something I can contribute!’ says Cherenkov.
He draws his packet of cigarettes from a pocket in his waistcoat and offers it to Septima. She twitches a smile, takes one, and lights it in the fire. She draws on it, and closes her eyes as she exhales.
Cherenkov offers one to the Neanderthal.
Matryoshka Page 3