Read The Best of Electric Velocipede Online
Authors: John Klima
The Best of Electric Velocipede (34 page)
“Well, in most cases, it would simply have been a routine punishment for being much too familiar with the herbs of the hedgerows . . . For causing the winter wheat to freeze in the ground, and enchanting the children, and curdling the milk . . . For stealing the blood and vitality out of the young men’s veins and the fertility from the old men’s loins . . . Though in more acute cases they may have been trying to protect their lands against the depredations of a more dangerous kind of revenant. You know how it goes . . .”
I didn’t, but I let it pass.
“Deflowering virgins before burial, disabling harlots . . . Anything to prevent that unbounded female energy from coming back to haunt them. Vampires, werewolves, she-devils, lamias, liliths, succubae . . . Ever since the fall of the matriarchy, all our societies have always lived in a constant state of siege, and our own supposedly modern era is no better in this, than the most impoverished peat-bog monarchy. Even if you have a whole catalogue of books on the shelves of the British Museum, or a prestigious new chair of nuclear physics at the Sorbonne, you are still, in the final analysis, part of that monstrous regiment, which has always disturbed the minds of right-thinking men since the start of history—a conspirator against Crown and Christendom. Even if you have money and status, they will always do their best to exorcise you at the first sign you might be a living female . . .”
She was talking about herself again, I realized. What had she had to go through to make her so defensive?
“But the picture . . .” I changed the subject. “Could a simple suspicion of sex and witchcraft have been enough to explain the extreme viciousness of the attack?” Of course, thinking about the inward-looking atmosphere of all the small towns I had ever visited, I realized at once that it could. But still, I pressed on: “Could it not have been some greater transgression? Polluting a more serious harvest? Stealing the seed of the lord of the manor?”
Frida laughed, her face filling with light again.
“Oh, I suspect that the lord’s seed was volatile enough. Who ever heard of an aristocracy that didn’t put itself about a bit? It was almost a point of honor back then: sowing your oats in the servants’ halls, and casting your tares on the stony ground . . . It was like a test of your virility, of your fitness to rule. No, it was the lord’s love that was sacrosanct, the pledge of his hand in marriage and the rights to his feoff . . .”
“So you’re saying that my twin here might have been too well liked—too well loved—by the lord of the manor, and that got her called vampire, because she sucked the life-blood from his germ-line’s dreams of inheritance?”
“Maybe.” She shrugged. And then she hesitated, as if on the brink of a momentous decision. “Or maybe . . . Maybe . . .” She stammered. “Maybe because she was too well liked—too well loved—by the master’s daughter.”
She blushed.
So that was it
. I felt my heart skip a beat. It couldn’t have been easy for her in a small town like this, becoming slowly aware, as she grew older, that her innermost nature was going to put her so far beyond any possibility of complete social acceptance. That, like her vampires and her rusalkas, she would be forever damned. And strangely, despite my better judgement, I found myself responding to her emotional nakedness, for why was she telling me this, if not because she was now struggling with something like the emotional state of her hypothetical maid of the manor? I felt flustered—excited and confused, and not a little flattered at this sense of being the object of her attentions—in a way I had not since my first, clumsy teenage romance, oh, many years ago.
“Daughters have always loved each other,” I replied inanely, playing for time, because for all my worldly veneer, her revelation had shaken me.
It was then that I saw the beginnings of disappointment cross her face, as if she was starting to brace herself for yet another in a long line of rejections. She bore it bravely, of course, with a fortitude born of cruel experience—and what had she had to go through, to acquire that deep a capacity for resignation at so young an age?—but her eyes—her beautiful, sea-green, Vorticist eyes—looked so hurt she might have been dying. It nearly broke my heart.
So I stepped forward and kissed her.
Her lips were soft, not quite as warm as I expected, and her face—her strikingly angular, deliquescent face—was suddenly, shockingly flushed with tears. It was almost too much, the way I could taste her salt on the scarlet blush of her cheek bones, as if she were some kind of glistening, piratical sea creature, cast up on the strand of a muddy Bohemian fishpond.
I don’t know which of us was the more nervous. But I felt better having touched her. Maybe if I let my hands do my talking, they could fill in the gaps in my language, for at that moment, I could not have found the words to describe what I was doing, let alone the rush of all the different things I felt. It had been a very long time since I had last been reduced to a condition of wordlessness, and to my surprise, I found it extraordinarily refreshing. And the pulse of her body, as she made my own body dance on the close-cropped turf of her riverbank, was as intoxicating as any absinthe, as narcotic as any vision. As much the culmination of an improbable dream as any figure of Central European folklore.
Of course, if I had been a boy, I would never have been allowed to spend the night in her chamber, but as it was, nobody thought twice to disturb us. No matter how loudly our cornstalks waved . . . No matter how distinctly the plish and splatter of our millwheels floated out over the silent rooftops . . . We were only girls.
And she, my Rusalka.
Baudelaire, as so often, has a phrase for it.
What do I care if you are wise?
—he says in one his poems.
Be beautiful! Be sad!
And even today, with the Europe we once knew torn to tatters, and the lights of our old free-wheeling, arty crowd buried under a ton of blackout, there is something about his words that strikes me as essentially true. For if I had placed my bets on wisdom that day, I would never have got to know her. I would never have learned to love and long for the translucently angular planes of her face, and the uneven, coral-pink moons of her breasts—the sibylline bedding planes of her torso, and the honeycomb depths of her savante visionary’s womb . . . And my life would have been all the poorer.
For even after all these years, she is beautiful still, in her androgynous, transformative, Toyenish sort of way. Only her sadness has gone. Which is strange, given that she has been forced to abandon her home and her family—her life’s work and her memories, her career, even her mother-tongue—for a rootless and far from luxurious exile. But I suppose we all have to learn to adapt to our circumstances.
We did try New York for a while, but the magic I had known there at the start of the ’30s had gone. So we came back to England, and now we support the war effort by writing pamphlets for the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, and growing vegetables, and I spend my nights operating searchlight batteries with seven other women from a soggy little dug-out on the edge of the Fens.
It only goes to show where being an avant-garde artist can get you.
Love and loss and enchantment.
Exile and redemption.
I wouldn’t change it for anything, in testament of which I here sign my name:
Zora Dienstbier, author, sometime muse, photographer’s model, wife
Castle Mansions, Maiden Harborough
October 1941
∞
°
Darin Bradley
Artaud Wells, executor
Estate no. 0102-0125,
de Blainville
Lot appraisal 3821-06 (affidavit 3821-b)
[SIGNATORY WAIVED]
A
rtaud:
Attached, please find our bibliographer’s analysis for de Blainville Lot 3821-06. Dr. Paulin Gáribe’s chemical analysis appears in appendix ii, Dr. Anna Singlest’s commentary in appendix iii, and Dr. Anima Nandwani’s in appendix v. The accompanying affidavits will appear under separate cover (excepting 3821-b, reproduced here as appendix vi), each from the analysts’ respective laboratories and universities. We now record these in triplicate, so sign all three of each and return a copy to us. At the direction of one of our new insurance providers, we’ve included notarized memoranda in duplicate following the appendices: the documents stipulate that we request (and you agree) to provide a copy of each of the analysts’ affidavits for the de Blainville heirs. The other copies are for your records.
Our bibliographer assures us he will return the lot by this weekend. Let the matter of his scanning and uploading the documents be done between us. Following last week’s deposition, both your lawyers and ours signed off on the agreement (cf. “Fair Use,” appendix vii: Millennial Philology Subscription and accredited partners). It is for posterity and research that our agent made his copy—even if, I grant, he should have first acquired leave. As he told us, he did it without thinking—a scholar’s reflex, perhaps. Let me encourage you to acquire a transcript of the deposition, which includes the record of the bibliographer’s testimony, for it is both disturbing and brilliant. He felt (and still does) as if the documents scanned and uploaded themselves—as if, through his analytic processes, their perpetuation occurred as a foregone matter of course.
I think he may simply have acted on his bookish instincts without thinking. Regardless, the lot is undamaged, and we regret the inconvenience to the de Blainville heirs.
All best.
—Robert
Encl.: bibliographic analysis, Lot 3821
index of title-page facsimile images
Gáribe: chemical analysis
Singlest: socio-historical analysis
Facsimile manifest, Abergavenny House, 1666
Nandwani: site-specific socio-historical analysis
Electronic-facsimile subscription royalty agreement
Facsimile, affidavit 3821-b
Appendix i
Bibliographic Analysis: lot 3821
Estate no. 0102-0125,
de Blainville
[SIGNATORY, Aubrick & Wain, Inc.]
Disclosure of Electronic Publication:
An Anonymous Salvage
(and accompanying analysis)
For Use by Subscription: Millennial Philology Subscription (and accredited partners)
Per my agreement with Aubrick & Wain, Inc., and the de Blainville Estate, I, the attending bibliographer (lot 3821), have made a full facsimile reproduction of
An Anonymous Salvage
and my accompanying analysis. This digital document will be accessible only by subscription (cf. agreement regarding the de Blainville estate’s due-royalties) as approved by Mr. Artaud Wells (appendix vi).
With this analysis, I release my appraisal to Aubrick & Wain, Inc.; a copy exists in undisclosed safety-deposit (per appraisal agreement 3821-06, affidavit 3821-b), should a problem arise. All correspondence regarding the appraisal should be routed through Aubrick & Wain, Inc., or its approved agents.
It is my hope that by publishing lot 3821 in this manner, I have aided its perpetuation in a manner that will facilitate new methods by which this fey document can continue its fey business. Let the analyses of those scholars who follow my interest in lot 3821 be, themselves, the first of these new methods.
Collation Formula
:
[paper:] various 2
o
, 4
o
, 8
o
, 16
o
: π
2
, A-C
8
, D
8
(-D
7
),
x
A
8
[E],
x
A
13
[F],
x
A
4
[G], π
2
[$
1
signed] 59 leaves, unnumbered [pp. 1-118] 190 mm X 140 mm; 20-23 lines; various type, handscript; body & face, various
Title Page
: π
2
a
Crown, 2
o
: π
2
, chain 23-25 mm.; [paper:] large post; [watermark:] horn HRB
HIGHGATE RAG & BONE |
An Anonymous Salvage
| Willord B. Delby, printer & binder | Pennwick Bindry, Pennwick Ln. 1783
[type:] body 86; face 84 X 3: 5
Binding
:
Red calfskin over pasteboards, untooled; 193 mm X 143 mm X 10 mm.; no title; grain relief, .75 mm
Bibliographer’s Notes
:
The first two leaves of Lot 3821,
An Anonymous Salvage
, (identical in composition and measure to the book’s final two) are of a kind with the endpapers, each watermarked with large post’s characteristic horn watermark—in turn imposed with HRB for the Highgate Rag & Bone. Dr. Paulin Gáribe concludes in his chemical analysis that “the endpapers, as well as the first and last two leaves in the book, are made from fibers of varying ages, some as many as two hundred years apart. A great many of the fibers in the paper exhibit signs of having previously carried inks, dyes, or other resins” (cf. appendix ii, introduction). This analysis strengthens the seemingly foregone conclusion that the various documents collated into the book were recovered from a rag-and-bone shop, where, most likely, they would have been rendered unto new paper—as was the case with the documents and fabrics that were recycled into the endpapers. However, Anna Singlest, in her socio-historical analysis (appendix iii), finds no record of there ever having existed either a “Highgate Rag & Bone” or a “Pennwick Bindry.” For that matter, she can find no record of a Pennwick Lane, either. I see nothing untoward in her findings, as any number of people may have called any number of businesses (and the streets upon which they were located) by any number of different names during the period of the book’s collation.
Essentially, Lot 3821 is a collation of documents that perpetuate their own textual (and physical) survival. It is, of course, indeterminable whether the documents were recovered from the shelves of Highgate Rag & Bone by the shop’s owner or by some rag-picking client with a keen eye for bibliographic rarity. While, Dr. Singlest tells us, it would not have been unheard of for such rare and mysterious documents to have found their way into such a shop, it still would have been “highly unlikely,” as the eighteenth-century fascination with “curiosities” would have, most likely, recovered these materials from various auctions and sales of estate before they ever reached a rag-and-bone. Certainly one or two may have slipped past
curiosity
’s vigilant gaze, but for four to do so, each espousing similarly strange meta-textuality, seems to me a coincidence of the most improbable order. It is more likely that some other as-yet-undetermined agency facilitated the discovery of these documents as a group in what would have been the categorical madness and document-crowding of a rag-and-bone shop’s shelves.
My bibliographic analysis of the individual documents collated in Lot 3821,
An Anonymous Salvage
, follows below—the collator’s titles are separated from their documents’ analyses in each case by a single, broken rule, excepting the dual pamphlets of “The Humours,” which I present together.
*
Life
Collation
:
pot, vellum 8
o
: A-C
8
, D
8
(-D
7
)
[$
1
signed] 30 leaves, unnumbered [pp. 1-60]
190 mm X 140 mm (B
1
a
); 20 lines; A-C
8
, D
1
a
-D
6
b
: French Bastardia; body 122; face 120 X 3: 5
Title Page
: A
1
a
Le Livre de les personnes malades |
rappelez-vous à vos voisins
| MDLXIV | [image: “Doktor Schnabel von Rom” (“Doctor Beak from Rome”) engraving, Rome 1656, 125 mm X 100 mm (cf. facsimile i)] | Life
[last line handwritten: commensurate with type]
(Facsimile i, “Doktor Schnabel von Rom”)
Bibliographer’s Notes
:
This first section of the collection, titled Le Livre de les personnes malades:
rappelez-vous vos voisins
(The Book of the sick people:
remember to your neighbors
), by its printer (and “Life” by the overall collection’s later collator), dates from 1564 CE, as evidenced by the Roman numerals on its title page. It is comprised of four octavo gatherings, the last of which is missing its final two leaves, and the title page is printed in unremarkable French Bastardia. The gatherings appear to have been signed by the collator who titled them “Life,” the signatures appearing uniformly on the recto of the first leaf of each gathering. Curiously, however, the vellum has been trimmed to the dimensions of early seventeenth-century pot paper. In my opinion, the work had not one editor but several, each of which added some different innovation as the catalogue came to his concern. The vellum itself is poorly made and heavily wormed. I cite here a portion of Dr. Gáribe’s chemical analysis (cf. appendix ii, report 1
A
):
[T]he calfskin appears to have been inadequately limed prior to being stretched, facilitating, it would seem, varying microbial infestations. Furthermore, the worming patterns in the pages are consistent with those attributed to the common book louse (
Trogium pulsatorium
), suggesting that the colonies provided the proper environments for mold and other decayed matter upon which the book louse feeds. As there is no significant water damage to the vellum, I cannot conclude any other source for these organic anomalies.
The inadequate liming, Dr. Gáribe unofficially posits in his cover letter, may have been a result of shortages of calcium oxide during the period, as most of mainland Europe (as well as the British Isles) had depleted its supplies treating the corpses of the victims of the various plague epidemics from the previous two centuries with quicklime in mass graves. It is impossible to determine precisely what sort of organisms could have survived in the poorly limed vellum, even if only for short periods. The book louse is, however, a better candidate than most.
It appears as if these gatherings are only the first four (excluding the missing final leaves from the fourth gathering) of a larger, no longer extant, number. A
1
b
-B
3
b
record, in two columns per page, French, Dutch, and Italian names, each apparently signed by its owner—or, perhaps, someone surviving the name-holder. B
4
a
-D
3
b
record not names but personal marks. It is impossible, of course, to determine if these signatories were merely mimicking what they already saw in the book when it came to them or if more literate community members decoded the pattern for them.
I join Dr. Gáribe in unofficially theorizing that if book lice survived and reproduced within the vellum itself, and if they carried the
Yersinia pestis
enterobacteria, the circulation of the book as a list of plague sufferers to be remembered would almost certainly itself have been a communicator of the bubonic plague, of which history records a general European resurgence in the early 1560s. In this sense, the documents would have kept themselves
alive
by spreading the plague that provided their meaning. Under these fantastic circumstances, the book louse, the
Yersinia pestis
, and the text all shared a common interest in perpetuation—even in the face of the best efforts to the contrary by the people actually facilitating their survival.
*
The Humours
Collation
:
pot 8
o
:
x
A
8
[$
1
signed,
x
A signed as E by collator] 8 leaves, unnumbered [pp. 1-16] 190 mm X 140 mm (
x
A
2
a
); 23 lines;
x
A
8
: English Cursiva; body 82; face 80 X 2: 3
[paper:]
x
A: chain 24-6 mm.; pot; pot MC
Title Page
:
x
A
1
a
A Difcoverie of Curios Humour
| AN ALKEMICAL PAMPHLET | in Phlegmatic Ink | [rule 97 mm] | Printed by | The Metallers Companie, George Taylo, William Kenwick. 1627 | for the Worfhipful Companie of Stationers | The Humours | Phlegm
[last two lines handwritten: commensurate with non-italic type]
Bibliographer’s Notes:
This second segment of the collection, titled “The Humours: Phlegm” by the collator, fits its printing characteristics better than “Life.” The leaves in this gathering were printed from a sheet of pot paper (a French rarity, at the time, in early seventeenth-century England) bearing a dexter-facing pot watermark. The “MC” on the mark is, assumedly, an imposition the printers commissioned for their sheets. The paper itself has suffered some degree of decomposition, as evidenced by the sharp .25 mm relief of its chain lines. Unlike the vellum in “Life,” however, the leaves in “Phlegm” have not been artificially trimmed to mimic the conventions of another medium—they
are
the other medium of “Life”.
