Secret Dreams (30 page)

To swear before Eternity: no feeling, no act, no success or failure — compared to that first time. To Swear, Before Eternity. A thing no mortal could
ever
know. Oh, happy fool.

Progress seemed everywhere. On a sudden impulse he decided to introduce her to the idea of a bath.

“Bath?”

“Laff,” she answered,

“Bath,” he repeated.

After a moment: “Baff.”

How simple if her private room had been built with a bath. Most of the fourth-floor patients were marched out weekly in a troop. First women, then men an hour later. Down to the shower room where all hell broke loose: soap flew and water splashed over the towels. Measly towels, barely wide enough to wipe a person dry. Afterward, damper versions of the fourth-floor patients were marched back to their rooms, in various states of dress and cleanliness. Just dumb luck none of them cracked their skulls.

As for the girl, the idea of her white, skin-and-bones body standing naked in the immensity of the shower room, with its twelve-foot ceilings and jets of water, screaming again, while a nurse and an orderly stood grimly by, making scrupulously sure they hosed every nook and cranny …

No, there had to be a more private, tender way.

Zeik solved the problem. One day he passed the sixth-floor laboratory, with its long black laminated tables, rows of gas jets and boiling beakers,- there he spied a coiled length of rubber tubing about ten yards long. The tubing gave birth to an idea. Down he went into the hospital's forgotten reaches, plunging deeper, scavenging in every corner until he found what he was looking for. In the slimy blackness of a storage bin dating back decades lay a fifty-year-old copper bathing tub, long abandoned, filled with oily rags, dead paint cans, and indescribable filth.

Zeik cleaned the worst of it, bringing the tub upstairs in a more presentable state for the kitchen staff to scrub and polish. After he checked it for leaks, they placed the copper sitz bath in a corner of the girl's cramped room. Rubber tubing ran from the hot-water spout of the sink. But the thing had no drain. Originally it must have been tipped over onto a stone floor, the water running out the gutters of a bathhouse. So he improvised, bringing along a two-kilo tomato can to scoop out the dirty water.

“Bath,” Herr Doktor said.

“Baff,” the girl repeated doubtfully. The presence of the big tub agitated her. She hid from it, twiddling furiously. But she didn't shriek,-and let it stay. Her first bathtimes were hesitant, touching the water with a trembling finger like a cat's paw, the other hand fluttering across her thigh. Eventually the girl came clean in stages,- soon dangling her hand in the copper tub, then swirling the warmth about and letting the bathwater run through her fingers. After a few days the wrist and forearm of one arm were clean to the elbow, a dark ring on the white skin like a ship's waterline.

And then later, all of herself. Getting into the hot water wearing the sad remnants of her chemise and bloomers, she stripped off her sodden rags and slid them into a heap in the corner. She dried herself on huge towels that Herr Doktor bought specially from a Turk-ish bath. A half dozen of them, kept freshly laundered and neatly stacked on her dresser. Herr Doktor took away her gray rags and left her a white hospital gown, which disappeared under her sheets and swathings. Following her bathtimes, he scooped out the dirty bathwater,- later Nurse Bosch or Zeik took care of the chore. As the weeks passed she soon took baths herself and drained the tub herself, but not without several episodes of flooding — generally in the middle of the night.

Their talking went on.

Not the normal “How are you? I am fine,” but a slow exchange of single words. Seemingly random. One word bringing on the next, their sounds a code. One day they had a “conversation.” She lay at his feet as he sat cross-legged in the chair. She tugged and fretted with his shoelaces, playing with the bow and the knot. A bright sky of mid-February burned into the room, the sun silvery and the tree branches rattling like a tangle of skeleton bones.

“Blue sky,” he said, as you would say, Nice day, isn't it?

She paused in twirling his laces. Then one single word:

“Lawning,” she said. He was stumped a second or two before he knew what she meant. Longing.

Blue sky.

Longing.

“Family,” he said, as in, You don't say?

“Hospital,” she replied at once.

“Blood,” he said right back.

“M-m-m's gash,” Fräulein sputtered. She tied his shoelaces in a hopeless, unpickable knot. Her vulgar word snatched the breath from his throat. When he felt he could talk, he tried:

“Doktor Jung. That is, myself.” He switched legs, giving her the other shoelace to tie in knots.

“Nothing,” she said, pulling at the lace.

Nothing? It hurt that his name meant nothing. Ja, she could hate her mother all she wanted, but now he courted her good opinion. Surely he was more than just a nothing? What of his influence? His presence? His devotion?

“This chair,” he said, tapping it with a pencil.

“You,” she said immediately. “You.”

Ah … pleased for a brief moment. Then he resolved to say the one black word that always brought their conversation to an end. Just to show her he knew its power.

“Father.”

Not “your father.” Just the black word. Alone like a dark pebble on a white sandy beach. She'd stop playing with his laces. And start to twiddle, sawing her thigh. He hated saying the word, to halt their talking in the middle. The room went so quiet you could hear a person walking on the cold gravel path down below in the garden.

“Father,” he insisted.

This last time shook her loose. She convulsed on the floor and sprang to her knees. She ripped the notebook from his hand, flinging it away. Crouching before him like a rabid monkey, the tangled hair swept off her head. A wild vicious thing. Eyes glittering as though she might grab him, tear off a finger with her teeth.

“Queen of Sparta!” she snarled. The hatred surging out of her. Body rippling with the need to spring. “Queen of Sparta!”

Waiting her out, waiting until she finally ebbed with a sigh of contempt, Giving up on him and crawling back under the covers, The burnoose going over her head,

“Father,” he'd say, And she crouched as before, like a Sphinx on the bed. While he — entranced — sat frozen, her timid prey. His will crumbling. Weak all over. She wanted him thus. The chair slid away, and he knelt before her, cowed so that she might see. Humbled by her surging wrath. Rage at his not giving her what she wanted. Bow to me. Go low. And slowly she rose up before him like a tower of smoke, graceful and deadly. To stand above him like the beginning and end of the world … So began the first act in an elaborate play, an intricate fantasy, a ritual that they performed over and over. For the simplest beginning had been the hardest part to learn:

All Must Kneel Before The Queen.

They had to play out the Ritual several times for him to fully grasp all its parts. A long time it seemed: the winter days of February lingering before March. But since the parts never varied, when their meaning became clear the two of them acted out the Ritual quite deftly. She forced him to learn a number of facts in order to play out the fantasy, and if he failed to pick them up (say, acting the role of the old, decrepit King) she was quick to anger. She crouched on the bed, that furious look in her eyes, watching in pleasure as he squirmed in fear.

Fräulein called herself the Queen of Sparta. ‘And for the time being, Herr Doktor put off many of the obvious questions as to the meaning of her “Sparta” and her “Queen,” and how she hit upon the fantasy, with the knowledge it required of history and ancient peoples.

Could she have known the far older name, Arcadia? The backward mountains of the Péloponnèse: where slaying and sex and death had been acted out since men lifted their muddy eyes to the icy sky. Acted out long before the empires of the Mediterranean mother sea, long before they built Palace Mykonos on the high rocks. The ritual rose out of the dark time, when heroic Mycenae was but a dank stronghold, overlooking a rain-sodden crossroads, ‘Out of “a time when a handful of hungry brigands gazed down like vultures for easy plunder on the winter plain. Happy enough to steal an old goat or a new cloak — if either could be had without too much of a fight.

Strange ritual indeed. More than simply a fragment of her madness — for clearly the Ritual once existed. And he knew in a vague but powerful way that her play came out of the depths of time: a thousand years before Helen's betrayal of Menelaus, before warlike Agamemnon's sea raids off the coast of the Troad. So when the girl used the word Sparta, he took it as a signpost on a road, directing his gaze toward a small part of this immense world she wished him to see.

But for the time being, whether Fräulein invented the Ritual or had read about it somewhere made little difference to Herr Doktor. He sensed hidden meanings pulsing through, for the action felt dreadfully familiar. It stirred the marrow of his bones, rumors from dim ancient spans, the glimmer of another man sleeping within him all his life. Suddenly waking beside the charcoals of a campsite fire —- that oldest home of man —- and sensing all around a circle of cold faces gathered in the dark.

And so the Ritual was played — a familiar dance, knowing in his heart the next turn of it as they went along. The circle of faces drew close enough to see, streaked with dirt, twigs and leaves woven in their hair: a tribe surrounding him as he stood by that first fire. Tongues of flame, sparks, and smoke curled into the night. While the clan of faces chanted slowly, “You — you! … You — you!” pausing long heartbeats between each murmurous blow and the next. “You — you! … You — you!”

“Queen,” she snarled. The Ritual had begun.

He knelt on the floor before her, head bowed to the ground like a Moslem, not daring to look up. She stood above, remote and terrible, a queen blessing him with her mere presence — at once his mistress and owner of his soul. Moments passed … during which his knees began to ache and a numbness crawled down his shins. A change came over him,- the cramps grew, withering his flesh. No longer young and supple, his skin shrunk and wrinkled. Old age descend-ing on him like a cloak of troubles.

“Up,” she commanded. “To your knees.”

At last she allowed him to rise. His back straightened stiffly. His hands trembled at his sides,- his forehead numb from where he rested it on the floor. And he beheld her. Immovable and stony, not deigning to drop her eyes or lower herself to look upon him.

“The wreath,” she said. “Wear the wreath.”

Her hands moved, twining in and out. She wove an invisible wreath of leaves and green twigs into a curved braid. He smelled the fresh tang of the woven wreath and the clear sap at its broken ends. The plant scent mocked him, he shrank from it, touching his crown in loathing as she placed it on his brow. From out of the darkness he thought he heard the bark of a dog. A wind from the night licked his neck, and all the hairs rose like marching ants along his spine.

He always tried to remember the hospital room, with the life of the building buzzing around them like a great beehive. Every so often he glanced out the window at the cold, bright winter sky, to reassure himself that, ja, this was Switzerland and the clever, smart city of Zurich — but it seemed to him he looked through faded glass, a smoky daguerreotype sucked of all its color. The real vision came up the marrow of his bones: nighttime on a craggy hill, the circle of dirty faces, the young woman beckoning him to rise with taunting eyes.

‘The wine.” She meant for him to drink. They brought a stone cup, leaking bloody drops. Palsied hands took it, spilling down his front, great red drops splattering his throat as he tried to drink, choking on it. Laughter cackled from the ring.

She took the cup from his hands, swilling the rest in a long, even swallow, carelessly dropping the cup to the ground. He wavered like a frail reed. The chant spiteful and slow: “You — you! … You — you!”

Inside the hospital room she had begun to dance around Herr Doktor. A coy, graceful dance, unchanged from its first step, a dance of wooing and courtship, of families and friends. Peasant people danced it in country villages from Aries to Odessa. An old dance, the same in Crete as in Albania, the same everywhere, anywhere people sat and drank, sat and laughed and drank some more.

The girl stepped slowly round him in a tight circle, first in one direction, then the other. A teasing one-step — pressing her fists in at the hips, bringing out the curve of her waist. She dipped once and took a step.

Then stopped.

Dipped again and took a step.

Then stopped.

Now, again, the slow dip-and-step, leaving the old man by the fire, weaving her way toward the ring of faces standing in the dark … At the circle's edge she paused. The faces parted, and a stranger passed through their midst.

She knelt before him, offering the cracked stone cup with outstretched hands, as if the cup were his alone. He took it and looked about the circle, daring anyone to say different. The cup vanished into the shadow of his face, a trickle of wine running down his throat like sweat.

The old man's heart pounded in his ears: they let the stranger take his cup. His wine to a stranger's lips. How dare he touch the old King's cup!

The old man knew its every crack and curve. The father-son cup, made from the rock of the Moon Spring, where the crag water plunged into the thighs of the valley. A fist of stone broken from the rushing waterfall. Carved in the Before Time by the Forgotten Ones who spoke no words. But who, then as now, bowed to Her. The Silver White Face, whose body they saw in the snowy peaks, shining brightly on a moonlit night.