A Table of Green Fields (9 page)

—You will not age here, and when you go home your sheep will not have noticed you've been gone. I can splice time onto time, with a bolt or two of eternity.

—Shit!

—You need not even imagine that you are here, now. Because on Olympos there is neither here nor now. You are so many words written by a polished writer named Loukianos, of Samosata in Kommagene, who will live two millennia from now. Look you, here before the gate, these are friendly trees. The one will not grow without the other.

The curving street inside the gate (it opened of itself) was paved with stones laid down when Ilion was a forest. They walked along narrow paths among trees which the boy Ganymed could not name until they arrived at a building with cyclopean rock fitted together in irregular hexagons.

—It sure is foreign here, Mister.

—A sweet soul, Loukianos. There was a time when he was an Aethiopian named Aisopos, who understood the speech of animals.

—I can talk sheep.
Baa baa.

Later, when Zeus had shown Ganymed to some very strange people, a nice lady who only looked at him briefly from her loom, a fat lady who sniffed, a handsome gentleman writing 
music and couldn't be bothered to look, an amiable red-faced blacksmith who squeezed his arm, and lots of others. At a long family table with buzzing talk, Zeus lifted him onto his lap and said that after so exciting a day they were going to bed, together.

—Don't recommend it, said Ganymed. I sleep with Papa at home, and he says that I twist and turn all night, and talk in my sleep, and that my knees and elbows are as sharp as stakes. —I will not mind.

—Besides, I want to sleep with that fellow down there, name of Eros, your grandson. He's neat.

Whereupon the fat lady laughed so hard that she had to be helped from the table.

40

 

Sunlight through sheets. Twenty toes. The phone.

—Accept a call from the Fyn? Oh yes. Hello, hello! Yes, I'm probably awake. Nikolai's here in the bed with me. Well, he spent the night. Listen carefully. He's not Nikolai and never has been. He stood in for Nikolai, who was having some kind of torrid affair with a bint, while his adoring trusting parents thought he was being an Ariel for Denmark's most promising young sculptor. He's Mikkel, the friend Nikolai talked about so much, I mean of course the Mikkel Mikkel talked about so much. Don't scream into the phone: it bites my ear. No, I'm not drunk and I haven't lost my mind. You should see him. Mikkel, that is. We've only seen him charmingly nude. Now he's decidedly naked, and his hair looks like a cassowary. Oh yes, you know what boys are like. Disgraceful, yes, and frowned on by psychologists and the police, but lots of fun. The clergy are of two minds about it, I believe. Actually, he went to sleep while we were talking about how friendly it was sharing a bed. I'm putting him on the thread.

A good cough, first.

—'lo, Samantha. I'm not as awake as Gunnar. Congrats on 
being pregnant. Gunnar told me last night. You must show me how to change diapers and dust on baby powder. None of last night happened, you know? Yes, I'm Mikkel.

Listening, head cocked, tongue over lips.

—And I'll give you a big hug, too, when you get back. Tuesday? OK, here's Gunnar again.

By way of good manners, Mikkel rolled out of bed. Downstairs he started coffee and poured orange juice into burgundy glasses, for style. The studio seemed strange, and he looked at the rosy marble of the Ariel as if he'd never seen it before.

A papyrus fragment of a gospel written in the first century shows us Jesus on the bank of the Jordan with people around him. The fragment is torn and hard to read.

In the first line Jesus is talking but we cannot make out what he's saying: too many letters are missing from too many words to conjecture a restoration. It's as if we were too far back to hear well.

We catch some words. He is saying something about putting things in a dark and secret place. He says something about weighing things that are weightless.

The people who can hear him are puzzled and look to each other, some with apologetic smiles, for help in understanding.

Then Jesus, also smiling, steps to the very edge of the river, as if to show them something. He leans over the river, one arm reaching out. His cupped hand is full of seeds. They had not noticed a handful of seeds before.

He throws the seeds into the river.

Trees, first as sprouts, then as seedlings, then as trees fully grown, grew in the river as quickly as one heartbeat follows another. Arid as soon as they were there they began to move downstream with the current, and were suddenly hung with fruit, quinces, figs, apples, and pears.

That is all that's on the fragment.

We follow awhile in our imagination: the people running to keep up with the trees, as in a dream. Did the trees sink into the river? Did they flow out of sight, around a bend?

There is no such thing as time on a summer afternoon. The green and blue of the lavender fields, the tumbled clouds over the pine wood, the Roman bridge neither slide along the river of time nor feel its current pass through them.

—It's the drone of the bees, Julie said, stops time. And the fragrance of the lavender drenches it, and puts it to sleep.

They had built their boxcar beyond the lavender fields where the woods begin.

—Raise sweet children, bright children, Anne-Marie said in her grandmother's raspy voice, and what do they do? They build a boxcar.

—Well, Grandma, Bernard said with tenor innocence, it's to play in.

—It's not being able to keep an eye on us that bugs them.

Julie, Bernard, Anne-Marie, and Marc built their boxcar beyond the lavender fields where the woods begin. Five metres long, two wide, it sat knee-high above the pine-needle floor of the wood on corner posts braced with diagonal studs.

—A shoebox to the power of fifteen, Marc said, with doors in the middle. It has the feel of a real boxcar. The doors are sort of permanently open.

—Boxcar doors are sometimes open, Anne-Marie said, sometimes closed, even when the train's moving. We got the proportions right.

Knocking apart the packing crates salvaged from back of the factory had been as much fun as building the boxcar: floor, walls, top, pie-pan brake wheels, the ladder up.

The light in the boxcar was neither room light nor tent 
light. At the doors the light was that of the wood. The dark ends of the inside were brightened by small high windows.

—Ours, Julie said, patting her knees, all ours.

—Lavender fields out one door, the wood out the other, Marc said. It's a tree house that's a boxcar. Along the river, on the tracks, in all kinds of weather. Let's all hug.

—The Autumn Crocuses,
Julie announced.

Marc sighed, crossed his eyes, and twiddled his fingers.
—The meadow is splendid and lethal in autumn the cows grazing there are placidly poisoning themselves.

—Apollinaire.

—Anne-Marie's underpants are a meadow, Bernard said, what there is of them, cornflowers, buttercups, daisies.

—Crocuses the lilac of a black eye.

Bernard had entered the boxcar with high elbows and a bound. He lay on his side in the straw, hands under his cheek, eyes alert.

A bird whistled a trill, went silent, and began again with dotted notes and sharp rests, like a dripping faucet, before another trill.

There was a distant dry rasp of crickets.

He had known where Honduras was in class. And M. Brun had said that General de Gaulle had never talked over the telephone.

A sulphur butterfly flew at changing heights through the doors of the boxcar, from the lavender fields to the wood.

—Y
our eyes are like these flowers, violet and dark as autumn. They poison me as the crocuses poison the cows.

—Poor sick cows.

—M. Brun explained why the crocuses are like mothers who are daughters of their daughters and if Apollinaire had any more punctuation than Marc has hair in his britches you could follow him better.

—The crocus blooms before it has any leaves. There's an article on it in the
Encyclopedia
under
Sons before Fathers.

—School children come in a fracas elves in winter jackets with hoods playing harmonicas and pick crocuses mothers that are daughters of daughters and are the color of your eyelids. 
Anne-Marie began a dance to the poetry.

Bernard pretended to be asleep.

A Roman cart drawn by two white oxen crossed the stone bridge.

Marc was General de Gaulle refusing to talk over the telephone, batting at gnats.

—The children bob like flowers in a demented wind.

—The cowherd sings,
Anne-Marie joined in.

—And the cows,
they recited together,
abandon forever, mooing and shambling slow, this autumn meadow beautiful with deadly flowers.

Marc grunted.

Beyond a march of sunflowers, laundry on a line, fragrant with lavender, Marc recognized his summer shirts, socks, underpants, jeans. Sunflowers like Aztec kings in green mantles.

The abrupt bluff. The stone bridge, over which the Romans passed in carts laden with sacks of lavender.

Apta Julia in Provincia Gallia.

And in the river, once, in the time of the painters of Lascaux, seals. Back when trees walked, owls spoke oracles, and the moon gave signs.

—Wolves, Marc said, at the dark of the moon.

—We could make a film here, Anne-Marie said. A shoebox on a tripod, with round candy boxes for the Michel Mouse ears on top. Lights, and the little board with a hinged stick that snaps at Lights! Camera! Action!

—Better than reciting poetry, that's for sure.

—A film about Russians on the way to Siberia. Overheard saying that Stalin's feet stink.

—The tundra, gray and brown. A hundred kilometres and nothing but the flat tundra.

—With warps and waves in it. A long shot with our train as 
small as a string sliding along.

—Or we could bring in the cow, dogs, and cats, and be Noah's ark.

—Jews on the way to Drancy. We could escape. Pig-eyed Nazis shooting at us.

—Time to kiss, Julie said.

Bernard began searching in his pockets.

—Licorice, he said. They're the best. Besides, Julie likes 'em too. —Better than yesterday's lime.

—I think I'll climb the pine tree, Marc said. All the way to the top today. Off your shoes, Anne-Marie, and come up after me, bet you won't.

—Bet I will.

Bernard pinched a licorice pastille from its box with a shepherd and shepherdess pictured on it in eighteenth-century rustic finery, with laundered sheep watching in innocent wonderment as the seated shepherdess accepts a pastille from the standing shepherd. Bernard nevertheless put the pastille in his own mouth. Other times, other manners.

Marc, shinnying up the pine barefoot, said over his shoulder to Anne-Marie, hair flopping across his eyes, this is the first good hold. It's easy. Then, watch me, you go around to the other side, holding on good. The next best hold is right there, see? I'll wait until you're on the limb I've just left, so we'll be together all the way up.

Anne-Marie, untying her shoes and watching Julie and Bernard begin their long kiss, passing the pastille back and forth in their mouths, monkeyed up the limb Marc had climbed beyond.

—Don't look down, Marc said. You'll get swimmy-headed.

Julie and Bernard, hugging, sank to their knees in a slow topple sideways.

—They're going to kiss lying down. We're going to kiss when we get down, huh?

—It gets easier as you come up. The limbs are closer. I can see the barn and the horses.

—I can see your underpants real good.

—Don't go to any limb I haven't been on. If it holds me, it'll hold you. What does kissing get us?

—They're playing footsie. I can only see their sneakers from here.

—Why did Julie recite that poem by Apollinaire? Guillaume. He was in Grandpa's war, with the Boches, the tanks, and the trenches. Wore a big bandage on his head.

—We had to learn it for Ma'mselle Trudeau. He had a girlfriend named Annie, who moved to Texas and became a Mennonite. 

—What's that?

—Some species of the
culte baptiste.
We could gross out Julie and Bernard by throwing our clothes down from the top of the tree.

—Crazy. Would they notice?

—In time. They can't kiss forever.

—I can see the top of the bluff. Old Barzac and his donkey are on the ridge road, loading up with firewood. Higher, and you can see the shine on the river bend, like silver.

—I think I'm ruining my knees.

—Keep your legs stiff. Don't try to climb with 'em. Climb with hands and feet, like me. Watch.

—Our tarpaper roof on the boxcar is practically covered with pine-needles, like the thatched houses up north.

—There's a squirrel watching us, over in the next tree. We had to learn a poem by Jules Supervielle, about a math class, with a triangle and circle on the blackboard, and how an angle looked like a wolf's mouth. We're better than halfway up. When do we start being Tarzan and Jane?

—We've done that Supervielle too. He's from Uruguay. I like his poem about the creation of the world. God has the mountains moving around, which he decides won't do, and makes them stand still. Marc, are you feeling this tree sway, or am I getting dizzy?

—It's swaying a little. The branches up here are stronger. They're newer.

—The lavender's lovely from this height. Hallo, you've got a seat across two limbs.

—See how I've got my ankles locked around each other? I'm offing my
maillot
here. I'll have to throw it wide, or it'll catch    j