Little, Big

by John Crowley

  In the Capital, the Emperor-President watched too, his eagle-browed but soft brown eyes dimmed. Never long; longing is fatal. A cloud of pity, of self-pity, rose in him, and took (as clouds can do) a form: the form of Ariel Hawksquill’s aloof, amused and unyielding face.

  Why me? he thought, raising his hands as though to exhibit shackles. What had he ever done that this awful bargain should have been struck with him? He had been earnest and hard-working, had written a few cutting letters to the Pope, had married his children well. Little else. Why not his grandson, Frederick II, now there was a leader; why not him? Had not the same story after all been told of him, that he was not dead but slept, and would awake to lead his people?

  But that was legend only. No, he was here, it was his to suffer this, insufferable though it seemed.

  A king in Fairyland: Arthur’s fate. Could it be true? A realm no larger than the ball of his thumb, his earthly kingdom nothing but wind, the wind of his passage from here to there, from sleep to sleep.

  No! He drew himself up. If there had been no war so far, or only a phony war, well, that time was over. He would fight; he would extract from them every jot of the promises so long ago made to him. For eight hundred years he had slept, doing battle with dreams, laying siege to dreams, conquering dream Holy Lands, wearing dream crowns. He had hungered eight hundred years for the real world, the world he could just sense but not see beyond all the dissolving kingdoms of dream. Hawksquill might be right, that they had never intended him to have it. She might (might well, oh yes, it was all coming quite, quite clear to him) have been in league with them from the beginning to deprive him of it. He almost laughed, a dreadful laugh, to think that there had been a time when he had trusted her, leaned on her even. No more. He would fight. He would get those cards from her by whatever means, yes, though she unleashed her terrible powers on him, he would. Alone, helpless it might be, he would fight, fight for his great, dark, snow-burdened new-found-land.

  “Only hope,” Mrs. MacReynolds said, dying; “only have patience.” The lone walker (refugee? salesman? police spy?) passed the last house on the outskirts, and stepped out along the empty highway. In the houses behind, one by one the bluish eyes of sets were closed; a news broadcast had begun, but there was no news any longer. They went to bed; the night was long; they dreamed of a life that wasn’t theirs, a life that could fill theirs, a family elsewhere and a house that could make the dark earth once again a world.

  It was still snowing in the Capital. The snow whitened the night, obscuring the far monuments that could be seen through the President’s mullioned windows, piling up at the feet of heroes, choking the entrances to underground garages. Somewhere a stuck car was crying rhythmically and helplessly to escape a drift.

  Barbarossa wept.

  Just About Over

  “What do you mean,” Smoky asked, “just about over?” “I mean I think it’s just about over,” Alice said. “Not over, not yet; but just about.”

  They had gone to bed early—they did that often nowadays, since their big bed with its high-piled quilts and comforters was the only place in the house they could be truly warm. Smoky wore a nightcap: draughts were draughts, and no one could see how foolish he looked. And they talked. A lot of old knots were untangled in those long nights: or at least shown to be for sure unentanglable, which Smoky supposed was more or less the same thing.

  “But how can you say that?” Smoky said, rolling over toward her, lifting as on a big wave the cats who sailed the foot of the bed.

  “Well, good heavens,” Alice said, “it’s been long enough, hasn’t it?”

  He looked at her, her pale face and nearly white hair just distinguishable in the dark against the white pillowcase. How did she always come up with these un-answers, these remarks struck off with such an air of logical consequence, that meant nothing, or as good as nothing? It never ceased to amaze him. “That’s not what I meant, exactly. I guess I meant how do you know it’s just about over? Whatever it is.”

  “I’m not sure,” she said, after a long pause. “Except that after all it’s happening to me, partly anyway; and I feel about over, some ways; and …”

  “Don’t say that,” he said. “Don’t even joke about it.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t mean dying. Is that what you thought I meant?”

  He had; he saw now that he didn’t understand at all, and rolled over again. “Well, hell,” he said. “It never really had anything to do with me anyway.”

  “Aw,” she said, and moved closer to him, putting an arm around him. “Aw, Smoky, don’t be that way.” She placed her knees up behind his, so that they lay together like a double S.

  “What way.”

  She said nothing for a long time. Then: “It’s a Tale, is all,” she said; “and tales have beginnings and middles and ends. I don’t know when the beginning was, but I know the middle….”

  “What was the middle?”

  “You were in it! What was it? It was you!”

  He drew her familiar hand around him closer. “What about the end?” he said.

  “Well that’s what I mean,” she said. “The end.”

  Quick, before a looming something he saw darkly huge in her words could steal over him, he said, “No no no no. Things don’t have ends like that, Alice. Any more than they have beginnings. Things are all middles in life. Like Auberon’s show. Like history. One damn thing after another, that’s all.”

  “Tales have ends.”

  “Well, so you say, so you say, but …” “And the house,” she said. “What about the house?”

  “Couldn’t it have an end? It seems like it will, not long from now; if it did …”

  “No. It’ll just get older.” “Fall apart …”

  He thought of its cracked walls, its vacant rooms, the seep of water in its basements; its paintless clapboards growing warped, masonry rotting; termites. “Well, it’s not its fault,” he said.

  “No, sure.”

  “It’s supposed to have electricity. Lots of it. That’s how it was made. Pumps. Hot water in the pipes, hot water in the heaters. Lights. Ventilators. Things freeze and crack, because there’s no heat, because there’s no electricity.”

  “I know.”

  “But that’s not its fault. Not our fault either. Things have gotten so bad. Russell Eigenblick. How can you get things fixed when there’s a war on? His domestic policy. Crazy. And so things run out, and there’s no electricity, and so …”

  “And whose fault,” she said, “do you think Russell Eigenblick is?”

  For a moment, just for a moment, Smoky allowed himself to feel the Tale closing around him, and around all of them; around everything that was. “Oh, come on,” he said, a charm to banish the idea, but it persisted. A Tale: a monstrous joke was more like it: the Tyrant installed, after God knows how many years’ preparation, amid bloodshed and division and vast suffering, just so that one old house could be deprived of what it needed to live on, so that the end of some convoluted history, which coincided with the house’s end, could be brought about, or maybe only hastened; and he inheriting that house, maybe lured there in the first place by love only so that eventually he could inherit it, and inheriting it only so that (though he struggled against it, tools were never far from his hapless hands, all to no good) he could preside over—maybe even, through some clumsiness or inadequacy he could easily imagine himself capable of, insure—its dissolution; and that dissolution in turn bringing about … “Well, what then?” he asked. “If we couldn’t live here any more.”

  She didn’t answer, but her hand sought his and held it.

  Diaspora. He could read it in her hand’s touch.

  No! Maybe the rest of them could imagine such a thing (though how, when it had always been more their house than his?), maybe Alice could, or Sophie, or the girls; imagine some impossible imaginary destination, some place so far … But he could not. He remembered a cold night long ago, and a promise: the night they had first been in the
same bed, he and Alice, bedclothes drawn up, lying together like a double S, when he saw that in order to go where she would go, and not be left behind, he would have to find within himself a child’s will to believe that had never been much exercised in him and was even then long in disuse; and he found himself no more ready to follow now than he had ever been. “Would you leave?” he asked.

  “I think,” she said.

  “When.”

  “When I know where it is I’m supposed to go.” She drew even closer to him, as though in apology. “Whenever that is.” Silence. He felt her breath tickle his neck. “Not soon, maybe.” She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder. “And maybe not leave; I mean leave-leave; maybe not ever.”

  But that was just to placate him, he knew. He had after all never been more than a minor character in that destiny, he had always expected to be left in some sense behind: but that fate had been for so long in abeyance, causing him no grief, that (without ever quite forgetting it) he had chosen to ignore it; had even sometimes allowed himself to believe that he had made it, by his goodness and acquiescence and fidelity, go away. But he had not. Here it was: and, as gently as she could consonant with there being no mistake about it, Alice was telling him so.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “Okay.” That was a code-word between them, meaning I don’t understand but I have come to the limit of my strength to try to understand, and I trust you to this point anyway, and let’s talk of something else. But—

  “Okay,” he said again, and this time meant a different thing by it: because he saw just then that there was one way, an impossible unfollowable way but the only way there was, for him to fight this—yes! Fight!—and that Somehow he would have to find it.

  It was his damn house now, damn it, and he would have to keep it alive, that’s all. For if it lived, if it could, then the Tale couldn’t end, could it? No one would have to leave, maybe no one could leave (what did he know about it?) if the house held together, if there was some way to halt its decline, or reverse it. So he would have to do that. Strength alone wouldn’t be enough, not anyway his strength; cunning would be needed. Some huge thought would have to be thought (did he feel it, down deep, trying to be born, or was that just blind hope?) and nerve would be necessary, and application, and tenacity like grim death’s. But it was the way; the only way.

  Access of energy and resolve spun him in the bed, the tassel of his nightcap flying. “Okay, Alice, okay,” he said again. He kissed her fiercely—his too!—and then again firmly; and she laughed, embracing him, not knowing (he thought) that he had just resolved to spend his substance subverting her; and she kissed him back.

  How could it be, Daily Alice wondered as they kissed, that to say such things as she had said to the husband she loved, on this darkest night of the year, made her not sad but glad, filled in fact with happy expectation? The end: to have the Tale end meant to her to have it all forever, no part left out, complete and seamless at last—certainly Smoky couldn’t be left out, not as deeply woven into its stuff as he had become. It would be good, so good to have it all at last, start to finish, like some long, long piece of work that has been executed in dribs and dabs, in the hope and faith that the last nail, the last stitch, the last tug at the strings, will make it all suddenly make sense: what a relief! It didn’t, quite, not yet; but now in this winter Alice could at last believe, with no reservations, that it would: they were that close. “Or maybe,” she said to Smoky, who paused in his attentions to her, “maybe just beginning.” Smoky groaned, shaking his head, and she laughed and clasped him to her.

  When there was no more talk from the bed, the girl who had for some time been watching the bedclothes heave and listening to their words turned to go. She had come in through the door (left open for the cats to go in and out) silently, on bare feet, and then stood in the shadows watching and listening, a small smile on her lips. Because a mountain-range of quilts and coverlets rose between their heads and the room, Smoky and Alice hadn’t seen her there, and the incurious cats, who had opened big eyes when she had entered, had returned to fitful sleep, only now and then regarding her through narrowed lids. She paused a moment now at the door, for the bed had begun to make noises again, but she couldn’t make anything of these, mere low sounds, not words, and she slipped through the door and into the hall.

  There was no light there but a faint snowlight coming in through the casement at the hall’s end, and slowly, like someone blind, she went with small silent steps, arms extended, past closed doors. She considered each dark blank door as she passed it, but shook her blond head at each in turn, thinking; until, rounding a corner, she came to an arched one, and smiled, and with her small hand turned its glass knob and pushed it open.

  CHAPTER TWO

  To remark the folly of the fiction,

  the absurdity of the conduct, the

  confusion of the names and manners of

  different times, and the impossibility

  of the events in any system of life,

  were to waste criticism upon unresisting

  imbecility, upon faults too evident for

  detection, and too gross for aggravation.

  —Johnson on Cymbeline

  Sophie too had gone to bed early and not to sleep. In her old figured bed-jacket, and a cardigan over that, she lay huddled close to the candle which stood on the bedside table, two of her fingers only allowed out from the bedclothes to hold open the pages of the second volume of an ancient three-volume novel. When the candle began to gutter, she reached into the table’s drawer, took out another, lit it from the first, pressed it down into the candlestick, sighed, and turned the page. She was far, far from the final weddings; only now had the will been secreted in the old cabinet; the bishop’s daughter thought of the ball. The door of Sophie’s room opened, and a child came in.

  What a Surprise

  She wore only a blue dress, without sleeves or a belt. She came a step through the door, her hand still on its knob, smiling the smile of a child who has a terrific secret, a secret which she’s not sure will amuse or annoy the grown-up she stands before; and for a time she only stood in the doorway, glowing faintly in the candlelight, her chin lowered and her eyes raised to Sophie turned to stone on the bed.

  Then she said: “Hello, Sophie.”

  She looked just as Sophie had imagined she would, at the age she would have been when Sophie had been unable to imagine her further. The candle-flame shivered in the draft from the open door, which cast strange shadows over the child, and Sophie grew for a moment as afraid and struck with strangeness as she had ever in her life been, but this was no ghost. Sophie could tell that by the way the child, having come in, turned to push the heavy door closed behind her. No ghost would have done that.

  She came slowly toward the bed, hands clasped behind her, with her secret in her smile. She said to Sophie: “Can you guess my name?”

  That she spoke was for some reason harder for Sophie to take in than that she stood there, and Sophie for the first time knew what it was not to believe her ears: they told her that the child had spoken, but Sophie didn’t believe it, and couldn’t imagine answering. It would have been like speaking to some part of herself, some part that had suddenly and inexplicably become detached from her and then turned to face her, and question her.

  The child laughed a small laugh; she was enjoying this. “You don’t,” she said. “Do you want me to give you a hint?”

  A hint! Not a ghost, and not a dream, for Sophie was awake; not her daughter, certainly, for her daughter had been taken from her over twenty-five years ago, and this was a child: yet for sure Sophie knew her name. She had raised her hands to her face, and between them now she said or whispered: “Lilac.”

  Lilac looked a little disappointed. “Yes,” she said. “How did you know?”

  Sophie laughed, or sobbed, or both at once. “Lilac,” she said.

  Lilac laughed, and made to climb up on the bed with her mother, and Sophie perforce had to help her up:
she took Lilac’s arm, wondering, afraid that perhaps she would herself feel her own touch, and if she did, then—then what? But Lilac was flesh, cool flesh, it was a child’s wrist her fingers circled; she drew up Lilac’s real solid weight with her strength, and Lilac’s knee pressed the bed and made it jounce, and every sense Sophie had was certain now that Lilac was here before her.

  “Well,” Lilac said, brushing the golden hair from before her eyes with a quick gesture. “Aren’t you surprised?” She watched Sophie’s stricken face. “Don’t you say hello or kiss me or anything?”

  “Lilac,” Sophie only said again; for there had been for many, many years one thought forbidden to Sophie, one unimaginable scene, this one, and she was unrehearsed; the moment and the child were just as she would have imagined them to be if she had allowed herself to imagine them at all, but she had not, and now she was unready and undone.

  “You say,” Lilac said, indicating Sophie—it hadn’t been easy memorizing all this, and it should come out right—”you say, ‘Hello, Lilac, what a surprise,’ because you haven’t seen me since I was a baby; and then I say, ‘I came a long way, to tell you this and this,’ and you listen, but first before that part you say how much you missed me since I was stolen, and we hug.” She flung open her arms, her face pretending to radiant, poignant joy to cue Sophie; and there was nothing then for Sophie to do but to open her arms too, no matter how slowly and tentatively (not fearful now but only deeply shy before the impossibility of it) and take Lilac in them.

  “You say, ‘What a surprise,’ “ Lilac reminded her, whispering close to her ear.

  Lilac’s odor was of snow and self and earth. “What a surprise,” Sophie began to say, but couldn’t finish it, because tears of grief and wonderment flew up her throat behind the words, bringing with them all that Sophie had been denied and had denied herself all these years. She wept, and Lilac, surprised herself now, thought to draw away, but Sophie held her; and so Lilac patted her back gently to comfort her.