Pilgrim (33 page)
No one understands. The only childhood I’ve ever truly known
—
or at least that I can identify, outside of my dreams
—
was gleaned by watching the childhood of others. Of Temple, Toby, Kate, Cassandra…Antigone…Astyanax…To say
I have been a long time aborning
is not to grasp the half of it. All these childhoods and not a single nursery of one’s own to remember.
I slept. I woke. And was found. Always found. A foundling. As Sybil found me. Lying beneath a tree. A chestnut? An oak? I don’t remember.
Eighteen. Eighteen years old. I was always
eighteen
at birth. Or so it seemed. Whatever had happened before then was just a dream.
Perhaps this was funny. Amusing. He smiled, but could not laugh out loud. Not quite.
It might have been interesting to
remember, absolutely,
being a child
—
not just to dream a childhood. To have held this book in my own small hand. To have pierced the meaning of the words with my own
child’s eyes.
To have placed my finger, thus and so, upon the phrases…
It was a blue jacket with brass buttons, quite new.
And:
Peter asked her the way to the gate…
And:
Mister McGregor hung up the little jacket and the shoes for a scarecrow to frighten the blackbirds.
And:
His mother put him to bed, and made some camomile tea; and she gave a dose of it to Peter!
“One table-spoonful to be taken at bed-time.”
Pilgrim smoothed the pages and closed the book.
Barnaby? Bobby? Barraclough?
If I had a cousin whose name began with B, what might I want it to be?
Benedict,
perhaps. Or
Benedick.
The traitor, Arnold
—
or Shakespeare’s wonder man of words, the jealous bachelor
—
like me. All this time
—
and married only as a woman.
But surely I would not want my cousin to be a traitor
—
just because his name begins with
B?
I’m not so sure. A traitor knows where he stands. The rest of us waffle and put on shows of patriotism. Better to settle once and for all on the other side of the fence. At least it means that a person has a choice
—
that his conscience is alive and that he’s capable of argument. Just to be born an American
—
an Englishman
—
a Greek
—
means nothing, until you make the
choice
to be so. Everyone should be given the opportunity of being born in opposition to one’s beliefs. Mere patriotism is bondage.
So much for Benedict Arnold.
So much for Benedict Bunny.
No. So much for rejecting
Benedict Bunny
out of hand.
And Cousin Benedick? I might opt for him, but for one flaw. He married.
Pilgrim set the book aside and sat on the bed.
Poor old Barraclough. At Omdurman.
Empire.
He glanced aside at the cover.
Blue coat. Brass buttons. Radishes. Robin. Handle of a spade. Slippered toes.
The robin singing. Peter ecstatic
—
nibbling. And string beans a-growing. And the earth turned over
—
hoed and healthy. Resplendent. And the robin, with one foot raised and Peter, with one foot crossed upon the other
—
the very image of song. The very image of contentment.
And each intruding in another’s empire: Mister McGregor’s garden.
Why did it all sound so familiar?
“Let me stake this land and set out my cabbages,” Pilgrim said to the Moon beyond the window. “These, my cabbages, are flags—my flags—and with these flags I claim this land. My land. And if you enter here, to trifle with my flags and my intentions—my wife will bake you in a pie…”
He smiled and closed his eyes.
Shut out the Moon
—
it has no flags, but one day it shall
—
and Barraclough will die up there, sure as fate. For the love of cabbages andlettuce.
Cousin Benedict, I salute you. I am on the other side of this argument already, having witnessed too many warlords claiming their gardens with a cannon.
What
—
oh, what, what,
what
was his name?
Benedict? Benedick? Abou Ben Adhem?
Pilgrim smiled.
Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini…?
Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord…
Peter Rabbit.
And now she is gone, who was my last finder
—
who came to me beneath a tree and said:
are you lost—and may I help you find your way?
And in her hand she carried a book
—
a childhood book like this
—the Brothers Grimm.
I am twelve, she said. And really too old to be reading fairy tales. But it was on the shelf and I couldn’t sleep and so…Do you know the story of Hansel and Gretel?
And I said:
No. My name is Pilgrim.
And she was
Sybil—
whose daughter Temple, twenty-five years later, presented me with
The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
Temple Pryde
, he read again.
Her book, with love from Mommy, Christmas, 1905.
Barraclough. Cabbages. Empire. Death
.
If only I could remember…
He turned out the light and lay down, drawing the covers up to his chin.
I will lie here and the name will come to me.
Brahms. Beethoven. Bach. Boccherini. Bellerophon. Baal. Beëlzebub. Bacon. Bleat. Brontosaurus. Barrie. Barnum. Belloc. Blake. Borgia. Bulwer-Lytton. Benjamin…
Benjamin. Ah, yes. My cousin
Benjamin.
I bid you welcome.
In his mind’s eye, Temple stood as she had that afternoon at the train station—black-bowed Alice beside her—and her brothers and sisters towering over her. Her mother, Sybil, had died—been killed. Was gone. Truly gone—into the woods with Hansel and Gretel, where he and Sybil had met all those years ago—and who was to know if he would ever be allowed to follow?
The Moon was full that night and Tatiana Blavinskeya could not sleep. She was dressed as she might have been when preparing to go on stage as Queen of the Wilis in the second act of
Giselle
. Her rounded arms were bare, except that streamers of pale chiffon were loosely stretched from shoulder to wrist. Beneath her calf-length skirts she wore her best white stockings and her waist was tightly bound with a pale green taffeta sash whose bow ends looked like wings. Her hair was plaited and wound from ear to ear across the back of her head. She had tied green ribbons to her wrists and she held a pair of pointe shoes in her lap.
She was seated by her window, staring up at the Moon—which had risen over the heights behind the Clinic and was now shining down so brightly that every new leaf on every tree could be counted.
Sister Dora sat on the bed, afraid to leave her patient alone in such a wistful mood. All evening long, the Countess had been playing with her costumes—dragging them one by one from the armoire and the steamer trunk in the corner, holding each one up for inspection in the mirror and laying them aside on the bed, the backs of chairs and even on the floor.
Princess Florine’s feathered bodice for the Bluebird pas de deux from
Sleeping Beauty
. The scarlet, high-waisted tutu—
and the fan!
—for the
Don Quixote
variations. The butterfly wings from
Papillons.
The Sugar Plum Fairy’s violet and purple costume from
The Nutcracker
,
with its faux-amethyst coronet and wand. Three swans—two white, one black—and the Princess Aurora herself: “Imperial Russia in all its glory! Regard the beading here and here and here! And this! My favourite, favourite, favourite! Set in Moonlight—danced by the light of the Moon—Myrthe, Queen of the Wilis! Oh—if we could only find an audience—an orchestra—a corps—I would dance till dawn!”
Blavinskeya regarded herself in the full-length mirror. “You may not understand,” she said, “how I had to beg for the role of Myrthe. I have not the body for it, you see. And yet it was my greatest triumph. By tradition, she is tall—and I am not. By tradition, she is slim as a fall of water, which I am not…” She smiled. “By tradition, she is cold—which I was not. But, oh, I wanted…I wanted…I
had
to dance her. And I begged them to give her to me—and I danced her for them and they relented. They had to!” She laughed. “I was magnificent!” She subsided. “Magnificent.” She whispered, “because I, too, had died a virgin…”
Sister Dora always kept a sedative standing by—a vial of ether, another of laudanum. But she was reluctant to apply them except in the gravest emergencies. Tonight, however, she had already sat with the Countess for three hours into the dark and now it was two o’clock and there was no sign of abatement. The Countess was already breathless—in spite of being seated. It was as if she had just returned from a performance.
“We dance as the dead,” Blavinskeya said in her
Russian-accented German. “And all by Moonlight. All by the light of the Moon. We are the dead young virgins who have perished before their marriage vows. And yet…it is the living who watch us. The living who watch.”
Blavinskeya leaned down and pulled her pointe shoes onto her feet—one and then the other, rising to adjust their “comfort.” “Comfort is never the right word for pointe shoes,” she explained. “They are agony personified. Invented in hell—by a man, of course. Nonetheless, over time your feet adapt to them. Each moulds the other—the foot the shoe, the shoe the foot—and a certain ease can be achieved. But never comfort.”
She adjusted the ribbons, wrapping them more tightly around her ankles, tying them neatly and giving each a pat of satisfaction with her chubby hand.
“
Bon! Je suis prête.
Let us go—and I will dance in the Moonlight.”
Blavinskeya started past Sister Dora, snatching up a cashmere shawl as she went, and made for the door.
“But, madame!”
“No time for
buts
, Schwester dear. We are for the gardens. Follow me.”
Saying this, Blavinskeya was already out in the corridor and marching towards the stairs.
Sister Dora, struggling to disentangle herself from a white swan, a black swan and a scarlet tutu, discovered to her dismay as she rose to her feet that her left leg had fallen asleep.
“Damn! Damnation!”
She fell to her knees and scrambled up again, following as best she could Myrthe, Queen of the Wilis, limping along the corridor and down the stairs, across the entrance hall and past the dozing concierge into the foyer and beyond the foyer, through the doors and into the night.
At Küsnacht, the moonlight filtered through the curtains, falling across the foot of the bed where Jung lay awake with Emma.
His hand was on her belly, having already felt one kick, to which he had replied by tapping out a message in Morse code with his fingers:
hello in there! Hello!
“The kicking only started just today,” Emma told him. “I love to think of her shouting:
I need more room! I need more room!”
“She?” Jung said. “With a kick like that, it has to be a boy. Our second son.”
“It’s a girl. We’ve spoken—and I know it.”
“Spoken? Please be serious.”
“Believe me or not, Carl Gustav, a mother and her child converse. Not always in words, but in many other ways as well. I send down thoughts and I know she receives them. She sends back waves as answers—even as questions—and the waves flood all the way through me. It is true. It is true. Believe it. She is my little fish, and I am her ocean. She is my swimmer—I am her sea. You must remember what it feels like,
floating in the sea, my darling. At Capri, how we floated hand in hand…don’t you remember? How we drifted out so far they had to come and fetch us back with a rowboat.”
“We could have drowned.”
“Nonsense. Not together. We had each other—hand in hand and it was all so warm and peaceful—blue and bright and safe. It seems to me that swimming in the sea is just like my little fish in here…whatever it is they call the waters of the womb—I always forget it…what?”
“Amniotic fluid,” Jung muttered through his moustache, bending down to kiss Emma’s belly. Then he laid his hand out flat against her skin and made the shape of the child inside.
“You ever hear the phrase
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny?
” he said.
“I’m sure I’d remember if I had,” Emma laughed. “I couldn’t begin to tell you what it means.”
“Man called
Haeckel
. Ernst Haeckel. Biologist. German. Long dead—but controversial in his time. We had to study him at university. He had a lot of theories, some of them useful—some of them not. In some ways, you might say he was a pupil—not a pupil, a disciple—of Darwin’s. Disciple and extrapolator. Went a few steps beyond the master, so to speak. Such as:
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny
.”
“Heavens—what huge words!”
“
Ontogeny
—
the origin and development of the individual
.” Jung pronounced the words as a teacher might to a classroom—tapping them out on Emma’s stomach,
the way he might have tapped them out on a desk. “Like your little fish in here,” he added. “Then:
phylogeny
,” he pronounced, “
the evolutionary development of groups of organisms
. You understand? And it was Haeckel’s notion—Haeckel’s
theory
that your little fish in there is passing through some of the same stages of development that, collectively, we all passed through in the evolution of the human race. From
protozoa
to
Homo sapiens.
Do you see?”
