All the Days and Nights (59 page)

“
Zenadoura macroura carolinensis
, the mourning dove,” the printer whispered, quoting from the great unabridged dictionary that it was his life’s dream to set up in type and print. His ink-stained, highly skilled, nervous hand sought and found his wife’s soft hand. The typesetter crossed himself.
The doves, aware of their presence but not frightened by it, moved among the boughs, seeking out the breadcrumbs, and with a slight movement of their feathered throats making sounds softer than snow, making signs and symbols of sounds, softer and more caressing than lǔv and dǔv, kinder than good, deeper than pē.

J
UST
before dark, when it was already dark inside the cottages and barns and outbuildings, the lamplighter came riding up one street and down the next, on his bicycle, with his igniting rod. He did not answer when people called a greeting to him, and so, long ago, they had stopped doing this — not, however, out of any feeling of unfriendliness. “There goes the lamplighter,” they said, in exactly the same tone of voice that they said, “Why, there’s the moon.” Through the dusk he went, leaving a trail of lighted lamps behind him. And as if he had given them the idea, one by one the houses began to show a light in the kitchen, or the parlor, or upstairs in some low-ceilinged bedroom. Men coming home from the fields with their team and their dog, children coming home from their play, were so used to the sight of the lamplighter’s bicycle spinning off into the dusk that it never occurred to them to wonder how the lamps he was now lighting got put out.

No two mornings are ever quite the same. Some are cold and dark and rainy, and some — a great many, in fact — are like the beginning of the world. First the idea of morning comes, and then, though it is still utterly dark and you can’t see your hand in front of your face, a rooster crows, and you’d swear it was a mistake, because it is another twenty minutes before the first light, when the rooster crows again and again, and soon after that the birds begin, praising the feathered god who made them. With their whole hearts, every single bird in creation. And then comes the grand climax. The sky turns red, and the great fiery ball comes up over the eastern horizon. After which there is a coda. The birds repeat their praise, one bird at a time, and the rooster gives one last, thoughtful crow, and the beginning of things comes to an end. While all this was happening, the villagers were fast asleep in their beds, but the lamplighter
was hurrying along on his bicycle, and when he came to a lamp, he would reach up with his rod and put it out.

The lamplighter was not young, and he lived all alone, in a small cottage at the far end of the village, and cooked his own meals, and swept his own floor, and made his own bed, and had a little vegetable garden and a grape arbor but no dog or cat for company, and the rooster that wakened him every morning before daybreak belonged to somebody else. It was an orderly, regular life that varied only in that everything the lamplighter did he did a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later than the day before, depending on whether the sky was clear or cloudy, and whether the sun was approaching the summer or the winter solstice. And since at dusk he was in too great a hurry to stop and speak to anyone, and in the morning there was never anyone to speak to, he lived almost entirely inside his own mind. There, over and over again, he relived the happiness that would never come again, or corrected some mistake that made his face wince with shame as he reached up with his rod and snuffed out one more lamp. The dead came back to life, just so he could tell them what he had failed to tell them when they were alive. Sometimes he married, and the house at the edge of the village rang with the sound of children’s excited voices, and in the evening friends whose faces he could almost but not quite see came and sat with him under the grape arbor.

The comings and goings of his neighbors were never as real to him as his own thoughts, and so the first time he saw the woman in the long grey cloak walking along the path that went through the water meadows, at an hour when nobody was ever abroad, it was as if an idea had crossed his mind. She was a good distance away, walking with her back to him, and then the rising sun came between them and he couldn’t see her anymore, though he continued to peer over his shoulder in the direction in which he had last seen her.

He told himself that he needn’t expect to see her ever again, because he knew every woman in the village and they none of them wore a long grey cloak, so it must be a stranger who had happened to pass this way, very early one morning, on some errand. He looked for her, even so, and the next time he saw her it was from such a great distance that he was not even sure it was the same person, but the beating of his heart told him that it was the woman he had seen crossing the water meadow. After that, he continued to see her — not often, and never at regular intervals, but always at some moment when he was not reliving the happiness that would never come again, or undoing old mistakes, or placating the dead,
or peopling his solitary life with phantoms. Only when he wasn’t thinking at all would he suddenly see her, and he realized that the distance between them was steadily diminishing. One morning he thought he saw her beckon to him, and he was so startled that he almost fell off his bicycle. He wanted to ride after her and overtake her, but something stopped him. What stopped him was the thought that he might have imagined it. While he was standing there debating what he ought to do and trying to decide whether she really had raised her arm and beckoned to him, suddenly she was no longer there. The early morning mists had hidden her. And in that moment his mind was made up.

Morning after morning, he peered into the distance and saw, through the mist, the familiar shape of a thatch-roofed cottage or a cow standing in a field, or a pollarded willow that had been there ever since he was a small boy. Or he saw a screen of poplars and the glint of water in the ditch that ran in a straight line through the meadows. But not what he was looking for. And as dusk came on and he got out his bicycle and his rod, there was a look of purpose on his face. If anybody had spoken to him as he rode past, stopping only when he came to a lamp that needed lighting, he would not have heard them.

And who said incontrovertibly that things are what they seem? That there is only this one life and no little door that you can step through into — into something altogether different.

One beautiful evening, when the warmth of the summer day lingered long past the going down of the sun, and the women stayed outside past their usual time, talking and not wanting to interrupt their conversation or the children’s games, and one kind of half-light succeeded another, and the men came home from the fields and sat down to a glass of cold beer, and the dogs frolicked together, and finally there wasn’t any more light in the sky, and in fact you could hardly see your hand in front of your face, suddenly a babble of voices arose all over the village, all saying the same thing: “Where is the lamplighter?”

People groped their way into their houses, muttering, “I don’t understand it. This sort of thing has never happened before,” and in one house after another a light came on, but the streets remained as dark as pitch. “If this happens again, we’ll have to get somebody else to light the lamps,” the village fathers said, standing about in groups, each with a lanthorn in his hand, and then, chattering indignantly among themselves, they set off in a body for the lamplighter’s cottage, intending to have it out with him. A lot of good it did them.

I
N
a kingdom somewhere between China and the Caucasus, it became so much the fashion to admire straightforward, logical thinking over every other kind that the inhabitants would not tolerate any angle except a right angle or any line that was not the shortest distance between two points. All the pleasant meandering roads were straightened, which meant that a great many comfortable old houses had to be demolished and people were often obliged to drive miles out of their way to get to their destination. Fruit trees were pruned so that their branches went straight out or up, and stopped bearing fruit. Babies were made to walk at nine months — with braces, if necessary. Elderly persons could not be bent with age. All anybody has to do is look around to see that Nature is partial to curves and irregularities, but it was considered vulgar to look anywhere but straight ahead. The laws of the land reflected the universal prejudice. An accused person was quickly found to be innocent or guilty, and if there were any extenuating circumstances, the judge did not want to hear about them.

In the fiftieth year of his reign the old king, who was much loved, met with an accident. Looking straight ahead instead of where he was putting his feet, he walked into a charcoal burner’s pit and broke his neck. The new king was every bit as inflexible as his father, and after he ascended the throne things should have gone exactly as before, only they never do. The king had only one child. The Princess Horizon was as beautiful as the first hour of a summer day, and the common people believed that fairies had attended her christening. Her manner with the greatest lord of the land and with the poorest peasant was the same — graceful, simple, and direct. She was intelligent but not too intelligent, proud but not haughty, and skillful at terminating conversations. She was everything a princess should be. But she was also something a princess should not be.
Or to put it differently, there was a flaw in her character, though it would not have been considered a flaw in yours or mine. Because of the royal blood in her veins, it wasn’t suitable for her to be alone, from the moment she woke, in a room full of expectant courtiers, until it was time for her to close her eyes to all the flattery around her and go to sleep. But when the Princess’s ladies-in-waiting had finished grouping themselves about her chair and were ready to take up their embroidery, they would discover that the chair was empty. How she had managed to elude them they could not imagine and the chair did not say. Or they would precede her, in the order of their rank, down some long, mirrored gallery, only to find when they reached the end of it that there was no one behind them. When she should have been opening a charity bazaar she was exercising her pony; someone else had to judge the footraces and award the blue ribbon for the largest vegetable and the smallest stitches. When she should have been laying a cornerstone she was climbing some remote tower of the palace, hoping to find an old woman with a spindle. When she should have been sitting in the royal box at the opera, showing off the crown jewels and encouraging the arts, she was in some empty maid’s room reading a book. And when the royal family appeared on a balcony reserved for historical occasions and bowed graciously to the cheering multitudes, the Princess Horizon was conspicuously absent. All this was duly reported in the sealed letters the foreign ambassadors sent home to their respective monarchs, and it no doubt explains why there were no offers for her hand in marriage, though she was beautiful and accomplished and everything a Princess should be.

One summer afternoon, the ladies-in-waiting, having searched everywhere for her, departed in a string of carriages, and shortly after the Princess let herself out by a side door and hurried off to the English garden. She was in a doleful mood, and felt like reciting poetry. Everywhere else in the world at the time, English gardens were by careful cultivation made to look wild, romantic, and uncultivated. This English garden was laid out according to the cardinal points of the compass. Even so, it was more informal than the French and Italian gardens, which were like nothing so much as a lesson in plane geometry. Addressing the empty afternoon, the Princess began:

At that moment she observed something so strange she thought she must be dreaming. A small white rosebush named after the Queen of Denmark was out of line with all the other small white rosebushes.

The Princess spent the rest of the afternoon searching carefully through garden after garden. A viburnum was also not quite where it should be. The same thing was true of a white lilac in the Grand Parterre, and a lemon tree in the big round wooden tub in the Carrefour de la Reine. So many deviations could hardly be put down to accident; one of the gardeners was deliberately creating disorder. It was her duty to report this to her father, who would straightway have the gardener, and perhaps all the other gardeners, beheaded. But he would also have the white rosebush and the virburnum and the lilac and the lemon tree moved back to where they belonged, and this she was not sure she wanted to have happen. It stands to reason, the Princess said to herself, that the guilty person must work after dark, for to spread disorder through the palace gardens in broad daylight would be far too dangerous.

That night, instead of dancing all the figures of a cotillion, she sent her partner for an ice and slipped unnoticed through one of the ballroom windows. There was a full moon. The gardens were entrancing, and at this hour not open to the public. Walking through a topiary arch, the Princess came upon a gardener’s boy in the very act of transplanting a snowball bush. Instead of calling out for the palace guards, she stood measuring with her eyes exactly how much this particular snowball bush in its new position was out of line with the other snowball bushes.

The gardener’s boy got up from his knees and knocked the dirt off his spade. “The deviation is no more than exists between the North Pole and the North Magnetic Pole,” he said, “but it serves to restore the balance of Nature.” And then softly, so softly that she barely heard him, “I did not know there was anyone like you.”

“Didn’t you?” the Princess said, and turned to look at him. After a moment she turned away. For once she found it not easy to be gracious, simple, and direct. She said — not rudely, but as she would have to a friend if she had had one — “I have the greatest difficulty in managing to be alone for five minutes.”