Falling Out of Time (7 page)

As she ambles, she throws these words into the air. I feel almost weak-kneed from the surprise. I look around to see if anyone has heard her, but fortunately it is only she and I on the street at this hour.

“Maybe
there
has been here all this time?” she continues, and the matter-of-fact cadence of her voice unsettles me even more: she might as well be conversing casually in our kitchen.

“And maybe we’ve been there, too, just a bit, since it happened to us?” She straightens up and a new momentum seems to drive her steps. “Maybe
there
has always been here, and we just didn’t know it?”

A cool breeze blows. She wraps a scarf around her neck, leaving her beautiful shoulders bare. She does that for me. Today is my birthday, Your Highness, and she knows how much I love her shoulders.

“And if that is the case”—she takes a deep breath—“then maybe, maybe
she
is here with us, every single moment?”

The powerful stab of the words makes us both stop.

“Just imagine,” she whispers.

We keep walking. She up front, I in the shadows of houses and through darkened yards, shaken.

TOWN CHRONICLER:
Now, from day to day, the wayfarer’s walk grows more vigorous. At times it seems, Your Highness, that a nameless power hovers over the town, envelops it, and—like a person sucking an egg through a hole in the shell—it draws these people and others toward it, from kitchens and squares and wharves and beds. (And—if there is truth to the shocking, dizzying rumors, Your Highness—even from palace rooms?)

The woman atop the belfry—once in a while I look up and see her there among the clouds, her silver hair unbraided, flying—she, too, must sometimes cling to the spire with both arms or else be swept up in the invisible storm. Now, for instance, her mouth is agape, and I do not know
whether she is shouting out in the silence or eagerly swallowing words as they float past.

TOWN CHRONICLER:
The next night, my wife and I take our daily walk again. Between the houses we catch an occasional glimpse of the small procession ambling over the hilltops on the horizon.

TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE:
In recent days I think I see, over their heads, in the air, some sort of reddish flicker, a chain of embers hovering above …

TOWN CHRONICLER:
As usual, she sets our pace. When she pauses, I stop, too. Sometimes, when she is lost in thought, I must enter a yard and huddle behind a fence, praying I won’t encounter a dog. At this moment she watches the strange embers at length, and I, as always, watch her. The faint moonlight falls on her face. She was so beautiful once. She is now, too.

When we finally arrive at her home, she opens the door. But tonight she lingers at the doorway, turns, and looks straight into the dark, as though guessing exactly where I am hiding. I feel the home current wafting toward me, warm and fragrant. She hugs her body and sighs softly. I may be wrong, but perhaps it is her way of telling me that she would like to fall upon me now, screaming, teeth bared, and beat me furiously with her fists, tear my skin off with her nails.

She slowly shuts the door. Retreats into her home. I look up to the hills.

ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:
 … Based on my observations, I believe, my boy, that only a certain type of person is likely to notice it—the
blaze
. That, between me and myself, is what I call those mysterious embers.

TOWN CHRONICLER:
I met him again by chance tonight, at three o’clock in the morning. This time he was not writing exercises on the wall. Tired, defeated almost, he sat down in the dark on the street bench where I was napping. After we shared a moment of embarrassment, and
after I reminded him that I had been his pupil in the first grade, and that it was in his class that I had met the woman who would eventually become my wife, we climbed up onto the bench together and stood there watching the phenomenon.

ELDERLY MATH TEACHER:
My heart tells me, my boy, that from the moment a person notices the blaze, he is destined to get up and go to it.

TOWN CHRONICLER:
As he spoke, his large feet shuddered and shook the wooden bench. My own small feet were suddenly filled with motion. I talked to him silently. I said there was a time in the world when my daughter was not in it at all. She was not yet. Nor was there the happiness she brought me, nor all these torments. I wanted him to look at me with his lost, confused gaze in which everything was possible. I wanted him to call me to a house wall again and test me on addition-subtraction for all eternity. I thought: Perhaps he also longs to be an innocent young teacher again? Perhaps I could ask my wife here, and together we could build a little class that would suffer no sorrow? I had already begun to hum “two and two are four” when he suddenly leaped off the
bench—I was amazed to see how agile he still was—and stood looking at his twitching feet. Then he spread his hands before me in apology and turned to leave, mumbling to himself:

TOWN CHRONICLER:
And she walked! Walked away! Suddenly, out of the darkness, she appeared beside me on the street, then walked away without seeing me at all, moving behind the teacher as if sleepwalking. I quickly lay down on the bench and made myself as small as possible. I was very cold. I tried to fall asleep. I could not. I do not know what I shall do with myself today, and the sun has not even risen. The town is terrifyingly empty. I wander the streets. No one. I run to the wharf, dig through reeking piles of nets and dry seaweed—no one. Where will I go? There, on the hilltops, the small embers glow tonight as though each holds a beating heart. In a dark yard at the edge of the market stands an old gray donkey eating from a trough. I hold my face up to its mane and rub my nose in it. To my surprise, it is soft, softer even than the centaur’s hair. Perhaps things in the world have softened in my absence? The donkey stops chewing. He waits for me to talk. Of that thing that happened to her, to my daughter, I must never speak with any person—I explain to him—and if truth be told, I am forbidden even to mention her, although I don’t always stick to that, particularly since that man began circling the town. The donkey turns his head to me. His gaze is wise and skeptical. It’s
true, I whisper, I’m not allowed to remember her. Just imagine! He twitches his ears in surprise. It was the duke, I say as I throw my arms around his neck. It was he who commanded me, in a royal edict, to exile myself from my home, to walk the streets day and night recording the townspeople’s stories of their children. And it was he who forbade me—by explicit order!—to remember her, my one. Yes, immediately after it happened, he sentenced me, after she drowned, I mean the daughter, Hanna, after she drowned in a lake right before my eyes, and I couldn’t, listen, there were tall waves, huge, and I couldn’t … What could I …

You don’t believe me. You’re moving your ears dubiously, even crossing them as if to dismiss the possibility … I know exactly what you’re thinking:
The duke? Our kind and gentle duke? It cannot be!
Everyone in town thinks so, and honestly, sometimes I think so myself. Perhaps you’ve heard that we used to be good friends, the duke and I. Soul mates. Yes, after all, I was his jester for twenty years, until the disaster befell me. His beloved jester … And to think that he, of all people, decreed such a terrible decree … How did it even occur to him?

My lips suddenly quiver, and the donkey cocks
his head and studies them. I fear he might read in them words I would rather keep to myself, or those that I am forbidden by the edict to even utter, or remember, even the slightest hint or word or thought of the person she would be today, if she were. I may not imagine her at all, nor dream her image. Nor are longings, yearnings, and so forth permitted. Or sudden heart pangs, or churning contractions of the gut, nor any kind of crying, whether sobbing or the faintest sleepy whimper. A memory-amputee is what I am, donkey. Abstaining from my daughter. A prisoner in a tiny remote cell inside my spirit, until, as in the poem we once read together, the duke and I,
“My life (which liked the sun and the moon) resembles something that has not occurred.”

TOWN CHRONICLER:
They walk on the hills and I follow them, constantly darting between them and the town. They groan and trip and stand, hold on to each other, carry those who sleep, falling asleep themselves. Nights, days, over and over they circle the town, through rain and cold and burning sun. Who knows how long they will walk and what will happen when they are roused from their madness? The duke, for example—who would have believed it—walking shoulder to shoulder with the net-mender, her fluttering nets occasionally wrapping themselves around him. And the elderly teacher, with his thin halo of hair, walking swiftly, as he is wont, hopping from one foot to the other and reaching his head out to
either side with immense curiosity, even in sleep. And the cobbler and the midwife, hand in hand, eyes tightly closed, with stubborn resolve. And at the end of the small procession walks my wife, dragging her heavy feet, her breath labored, her head drooping on her chest, with no one to hold her hand.