Winter of artifice; three novelettes (15 page)

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his hand on it. Life, colors, music, women—all were hung around this dead leg, like votive offerings. There had never been any Mischa, Mischa was in that leg, imprisoned, bound in it. The pain of lameness, of knowing, even as a child, that one carries a fragment of death in one. To live with a dead fragment of oneself. The fierce graspingness of death already setting in. To be crippled, humiliated, left out of games, not to be able to ride horseback. The lameness concealed at concerts, but not before women. The wounded look in the fixed gaze of the mother when she watched him walk. Her love for him was not joyous, but heavy with compassion. When she kissed others she radiated an animal pride, her nostrils quivered. When she kissed Mischa it was as if part of her died at the very touch of him, in answer to the part in him that was dead. Mischa trembled when he had to walk across a room. He hated women because of his lameness, because they too closed a fierce part of themselves when they approached him, made themselves more tender, more attenuated, and looked at him as his mother had looked at him. He was ashamed. So terribly ashamed. The Voice said very gently: "You preferred to offer your hurt hand to people's eyes. You offered the whole world your hurt hand. You talked about your hand. You showed your hand so no one would notice the lameness. The hand did not shame you. The hand that struck your father seemed to you rightfully, humanly punished by immobility."

Mischa was weeping, his face turned to the wall. Now that he looked at the lameness, the leg seemed to become less dead, less separate from him. The leg was not so heavy, not so gruesome, as the secret of the pain he had enclosed in it, his fear and pain before the leg. Every nerve and cell in him tense with the fear of discovery, tense with rigid pre-133

tending, dissolved in new tears before the fact which appeared smaller, less dark, less oppressive. The crime and the secret did not seem so great as when he had watched over its tomb. The pain was not so much like a monster now, but a simple, human sorrow. With the tears the great tension all through the body softened. He was a cripple. But he had committed no crime. He had struck his father, but his father had laughed at the scene, and his mother too. They had hurt him more than he had hurt them. The tears were like a river carrying away the tension. The walls he had erected, the nightmares he had buried in his being, the tightness of fear, the knots in his nerves, all dissolving. Everything was washed away. And the big knot in his hand, that was loosening too. It was the same knot. The muted hand that could no longer draw his mother's voice out of the cello. The static hand that could no longer strike. The crippled hand for the world to see, while the real shamed Mischa walked surreptitiously before them hoping to conceal his dead leg from the world.

Exaltation lifted him from the couch, out of the room. He was running out of this room filled with knowing eyes, through the softly carpeted hall, passing all the rooms filled with revelations, to the red lights that bore him down to the street.

In the street he did not feel the sea of ice and snow. The warmth was in him like a fire that would never go out. He

was singing.

* • * *

In the underground drugstore, Djuna sat eating at the counter. The young man was mixing his sallies with the drinks: "Are you a show girl too?" he asked her. The sea elephant, owner of the place, swam heavily towards her with a box: "I kept this box for you; I thought you would 134

like ir. It smells good." The sea elephant sank behind the counter, behind waves of perfume bottles, talcum powder, candy packages, cigar boxes. She was left with the sandalwood box in her arms.

She carried it through the lobby. The lobby was full of waiting people lumped there, waiting without impatience, reading, mumbling, meditating, sleeping.

Every time she passed through the lobby her throat tightened. Behind every chair, every palm tree, every sofa, every face half-seen in the dim light of the lobby, she feared to recognize someone she knew. So7)ieone out of the past. She could repeat to herself as she passed that they were all lost, that in the enormous city they had lost her tracks. She had crossed the ocean, destroyed their addresses. Stretches of long years and of sea lay between that first half of her life and this. The city had swallowed them. Yet each time she crossed the lobby she felt the same apprehension. She feared the return of the past. They sat in the lobby waiting, waiting for a crevice, a passageway back into her life. Waiting to introduce themselves again. They had left their names at the desk. So many of them.

They were waiting to be admitted. They wanted to come upstairs and enter her present life. Djuna herself did not understand why this should be such an intolerable idea. Perhaps not so much their coming back, if they came for a visit and sat in a chair and talked. But they might act like a sea rushing forward and sweeping her back again into the undertows of early darkness. Surely she had thrown them out with the broken toys, but they sat there, threatening to sweep her back. Stuffed, with glass eyes, from a slower world, they look at her on this other level of swifter rhythms, and they reach with dead arms around her. She wanted to 135

escape them in elevators which flew up and down hke great, swift birds of variety and change. Moving among many rooms, many people, among great secrets and feverish happenings. Their tentacles like the tentacles of the earth waiting for the return to where she came from. Could all escape be an illusion? That was her fear, seeing duplicates of the people who had filled her early world.

She would go and have her hair washed, which was as good as weeping. The water runs softly through the roots of the being, like warm rain, and washes away everything. One falls into rhythm again. She would have her hair washed and feel this simple flow of life through the hair. She passed into the hair-washer's cubicle, out of the lobby of the waiting past.

Djuna was soon poised again on the threshold, faced with the same fear of traversing the lobby. There was a moment of extraordinary silence in the enormous hotel: she could not tell if it was in her. A moment of extraordinary slowness of motion. Then came a dull, powerful sound outside. A heavy sound but dull, without echo. Djuna felt the shock in her body. The shock traversed the entire hotel, the silence and the panic were communicated, transmitted with miraculous speed. All at once, it seemed, without words, everyone knew what had happened. A woman had thrown herself from a window and fallen on the garage roof. Thrown herself from the twenty-fifth floor. She was dead, of course, dead, and with a five-month child inside her. She had taken a room in the hotel in the morning, given a false name. Had stayed five hours without moving from the room. And then thrown herself out with the child in her. The sound, the dead heavy body sound, resonant still in the structure of the hotel, in the bodies of the people communicating this image one to

another. Djuna could see her bleeding and open. The impact. Fallen, fallen so quickly back to the bottom. Birds fell this way when they died in the air. Had she died in the air? When had she died? Ascension high, to fall from greater heights and be sure of death. Lonehness, for five hours in a room with this child who could not answer her if she questioned, if she doubted, if she feared....

The radios were turned on again. People moved fast again, normally. The silence had been in everyone, for one second. Then everyone had closed his eyes and moved faster, up and down. One must get dizzy. One must move. Move.

Djuna sat in the room of the Voice. The little man no one ever saw, he was standing by the window.

"Look," he said, "they are skating in the Park. It is Sunday. The band is playing. I could be walking in the snow with the band playing. That is happiness. When I had happiness I did not recognize it, or feel it. It was too simple. I did not know I had it. I only know it now when I am sitting here confined to this armchair and listening to confessions. My body is cramped. I want to do the things they do. At most I am allowed to watch. I am condemned to see through a perpetual keyhole every intimate scene of their life. But I am left out. Sometimes I want to be taken in. I want to be desired, possessed, tortured too."

Djuna said: "You can't stop confessing them, you can't stop. A woman killed herself, right there, under your window; that noise you heard was the fall of her body. She was pregnant. And she was alone. That is why she killed herself."

"I listen to them all. They keep coming and coming. I

thought at first that only a few of them were sick. I did not

know that they were all sick and bursting with secrets. I did

not know there was no end to their coming. Did you ever

walk through the lobby? I have a feeling that down there they are all waiting to be confessed. They all have more to say than I have time to hear. I could sit here until I die and even then there will be women throwing themselves out of the window on the same floor on which I live." * * * •

Lilith was waiting for the steamer bringing her brother from India. She watched the people stepping off the gangplank. She feared she would not recognize him. When he had left he was a boy. A boy in a plaster cast of hardness, of dissimulation. Intent on defending himself against all invasion by others, against feeling, against softness, against himself. A boy swinging between violent, brutal acts, and fits of weeping like a woman. Would she recognize the compressed mouth, the ice-blue eyes, the pose of nonchalance, the briefness of speech, the tension and the sudden breaks in the tension? A boy in a plaster cast of hardness. Untouchable. At times she suspected that he had refused to recognize her presence in him. Perhaps it was he walking there, so rigid in his clothes. No. So many people, so many valises, trunks, confusions, greetings. And then suddenly there was no one else passing down the gangplank.

Lihth stopped one of the stewards: "Do you know Eric Pellan? Can you tell me if he's sick? I can't find him."

The steward promised to go and see. Lilith imagined Eric lying in his bunk, sick. She waited, already suffering, as she suffered when he was small and in trouble. The steward returned: "I have found him," he said. "He's not sick, but his papers are not quite in order, so he can't step off the boat until tomorrow morning. He wants you to come on board."

The eyes watching behind eyeglasses. They faced each other without words. There was a break in their pause as 13S

if the bodies would break at the shock of their meeting. Then he smiled brusquely, and the talk broke through the barrier of fifteen years.

"You look swell," he said. "Are you as bossy as you were? Remember how you wanted to do the fighting for me? You wouldn't let me fight m\- own battles with the boys. You came with an umbrella and beat them. They laughed at me for having a sister fighting for me. I had to go far away to get away from you. You look swell! Who do you fight for now? W'hn do you help cross the street? Who do you stop the traffic for now, with insults at the drivers? You look swell, much sweller, much sweller than before. But you can't boss me now."

All the passengers had left the boat but a few of the crew and the purser who was adding numbers and listin

of silverware chiming in the dining rooms. Repose of furniture, windows, lights. A funereal watch of covered chairs. A dead backstage. No vestige of the people who passed. Clean.

Brother and sister stranded. Not allowed to land, they walked on a frontier not marked on the marine or earthly-charts. Frontiers of memory. The anchor dug deep into the sandy marshes of memory. Here in the skeleton of the marine monster, with its empty windows unblinking, its empty decks, empty salons, deserted by the musicians and sailors, beyond the earth and beyond the sea, they sit before a banquet of memories. The ship was the world of their childhood filled with indestructible games. He had carried his childhood to India, he had dyed it in foreign colors, he had bathed it in exotic music, burned it in unnameable fevers, choked it with strange incenses, strangled it in new loves, lost it in opium deliriums, buried it in Mahometan cemeteries. It had turned to ivory, to a mineral in his breast. The more they pressed down on it, the stronger the compression, the more it had gained in rarity, in fixity. A diamond lodged in the breast.

Brother and sister walking through the skeleton of the monstrous ship which had taken him away and brought him back with the same diamond lodged in the breast. Bathing in the acid of the past, they bared the bones unbleached and this diamond.

Their first imaginary voyage with chairs, tables, rags, was the most prolonged in all their existence. The ship they had boarded together at birth had never moved; they were locked in it forever, without passengers and without landing permits. All the other cabins empty, and they forever cursed to sail inside the static sea of their fantasies. Riveted to the shore of the past, forbidden to land, with the anchor set deep in rust.

Another day in the confessional. LiHth lying down and talking. Lilith watching the Voice with something like hostility, expecting him to say .something dogmatic, some banality, some unsubtle generality. She wanted him to say it, because if he did he would be another man she could not lean on, and she would have to go on conquering herself and her own life alone. She was proud of her independence. She was waiting for the Voice to say something unsubtle that she could laugh at.