Secret Dreams (42 page)

Fräulein searched for some clue to explain this strange carved head fitted in the wall. Far away at the bottom of the page she spied the letters of a caption. She walked the length of the page to read it.
Talisman of a Gorgon in a village wall
was the disappointing answer.

Gorgon? What was a Gorgon?

Beneath her feet the stone head moved its lips.

The Grim One …

Fräulein looked doubtfully at the picture. Had it really spoken? Her head bumped against the mud-brick wall. She touched the dry stone carving. Quite dead. But the stone spoke words…. So dreams could have their own dreams.

She beheld a silver ribbon that wound down from the hills, watering a shallow plain. Terraced fields. Clustered trees in orchards. Beyond the fields the land rose sharply: grazing pastures of high grass, green spears waving in the wind. A dark forest cloaked the knees of the hills. Inviting woods, calling her to sit under their cool boughs, to ponder the stillness and the way of their dappled leaves. The Gorgon's Wood? The Queen's? But the leaves only danced upon the wind in answer.

Higher up, pine trees stalked the naked slopes of stone. And higher still, the bare flanks of the mountain, home of rock and sky. The glint of ice burned in the shadows of the mountain's crags. Empty but for the lonely cold and the tang of spring that spiked the air.

Abruptly Fräulein stood in the midst of a village. A mere few cottages of mud brick, bleached white from endless seasons. Some faded rags hung limply from a line strung between two huts. “Is anyone here?” she called. But only silence came. A village dog trotted past, sniffing at every empty door.

She dipped her hands into the cool depths of a wooden trough. A mud-brick kiln sat near the wall of the potter's cottage, a kiln built in the shape of a beehive. And here again, on the oven door, she saw the Gorgon's terror face scratched in the clay.

Within the hut an old man of skin and bone lay on a mess of straw. His eyes bright and sharp, but his thin mouth drawn. Above his head a tattered robe hung on a peg. It might have been purple once but now was as faded as the man. He raised a tremulous arm, his bony fingers pointing silently across the room.

In a dingy corner squatted a small figure, a naked girl of eight or nine, hands and feet bound with cords. On her face a mask of clay with the same face as the kiln's, as the stone in the wall, but painted. Black-rimmed eyes, red open lips — as if the mask itself had been feeding on an open wound. The girl wriggled and whimpered in her bonds. The old man took a skin from the wall and poured a draft of dark-red wine into a small stone cup. Red drops ran out the crack in the cup's rim, dripping on his hands. He went to the child, tipped her chin, and poured the wine down the mask's open mouth. The girl choked and sputtered, streams of wine running down her chest.

Once more Fräulein stood upon the picture book. How could she tell Herr Doktor any of this? Whatever she said sounded so stupid. Oh yes, Herr Doktor, last night I had the strangest dream, …

So instead she told him:

“Last night I went to the place where the Queen came from. To the cave where the world was born,”

They sat in the Burghölzli garden, under the hundred window-eyes of the hospital. It was the first of April. Herr Doktor had been careful to wipe down the stone seat by the garden wall, for it had rained the night before, and he'd placed his topcoat under them so they might sit. A ground mist lay in the hollows of the garden, raindrops clung to the naked thorns on the vine.

The gardeners had begun their season's work despite chances of a sudden frost. Herr Doktor and the girl watched silently as the head gardener inspected a flower bed near the glass-enclosed dayroom. The headman rubbed the dirt in his palms and muttered to himself, while his young helper, a cheerful lad (rumored to have a police record), leaned on his spade and stared pensively into a sad gray sky that threatened snow. All about them the buds and shoots on the trees were swollen and ready, needing only the sun and moon of summer to set them free.

“In my dream I'm sitting in a room,” Fräulein told Herr Doktor. “In a green leather chair. Then I go to another place. It's the same time of the year as now. But far away. And very old.”

“Sparta?” he asked.

“No!” she snarled. “Didn't you hear me? I said
old
. Before they called it that. A village. And a Lady of the Wood. Lady of the water we drank and the mountain stone. Lady of the earth and sky. I was her daughter of the night…”

Before she had only sputtered in fits and starts, spitting out phrases with intricate meanings. But now she said things. Who cared if he didn't understand it all. They were finally talking — where he might say things too and she might listen. A great passion bloomed in him. For he had led her from the solitary room into the waiting trees of springtime. Him alone.

“Where were the people? No one in the village. All gone into the hills to watch the sky and count the days. Only Grandmother Gray Face knew the time to come down, to dig the Green Man from his grave and plant him in the fields. We had other names for Gray Face. The Hag. And Moon Watcher.

‘And the Lady of the Wood had many names. Î saw her face staring from the village wall. From the potters kiln. On every painted mask … Queen of the Mountain. And we loved them both together. Hag and Lady both. Though one was old as a grasshopper. And the other made of stone.”

She called her tale a dream, but it seemed far too detailed for that. And as she spoke Herr Doktor realized the Queen of Sparta ritual they played was but one of its acts. Clearly hers was not the Sparta of the Heroic Age, of Troy and Mykonos, but far earlier. Fräulein seemed to be describing what sounded like the long-forgotten rites of season and fertility. The moment of magic, of ceremony and passage, where the extended family of rugged hill tribes gathered for the spring sowing of the land. And as she told him her dream, he ceased to notice the chill garden, even the hard stone seat on which he sat. She spoke and he listened, as when they first played the Queen. And as before, there came the insistent prodding of invisible hands, the whispered urgings of hushed voices —– unintelligible, yet dreadfully familiar. The muffled sounds of people gathering in the dark. Waiting for some signal to begin. “I go to the Gathering,” Fräulein whispered. “I see it in my lap, in the book. And I go there. In the dusk the people of the wood went with the old man and the girl. Gathering together under the oaks …”

A sliver of moon rose above the trees, shedding a faint light on the rushing stream that wound down from the hills.

Fräulein stood on a path strewn with crackling leaves. The smell of sap issued out of a thousand trunks and boughs. She heard the sounds of bells shaken, and a lone voice singing words she did not understand. She felt the press of bodies all around. And the steady stamp of feet marching higher along the wooded path. While down below, the village lay dark, all the hearth fires cold.

They went to a clearing cut in the knees of the mountain: a low cave like a toothless mouth opened on the face of the slope. Before the cave the Last Fire burned. Now the people of the wood came to seize these last red coals, to bring the village hearths to life. While she whom they called the Gray Face poked at the dying embers, sending sparks into the starry night.

“I saw another person by the rushing water. Not a person. A rock. Sloping head. No eyes. A crack for a mouth. A figure partly carved and partly left alone. When the rain fell on her, we said she was crying. Urania. Queen of the Mountain. Mother of Stone. And Hers was the birthing cave where the world was born. Where the women groped out blindly in the dark for the old Hags hands. And when the pain came, praying with their birth beads clutched to dry, cracked lips … Then rubbing them against their foreheads as they soaked the floor with their sacwater and their blood, even as they chewed their birth cords free. For it was
Her
name they gasped in the moaning cave. Panting: Mother, help me. Mother, please!”

Herr Doktor gripped the edge of the stone seat. Birth beads! Now where in hell … Ja! In a grimy glass case in the British Museum: little bits of carved antler, or stone or coal — most no larger than a knucklebone. A faded caption card inside the display read:

Deer Beads

Aurignac Caves

Uncovered 1887

&

By some oversight the discovers' names had been overlooked by the museum's curators. But they called them deer beads because of their shape. Always carved in the shape of a pregnant doe's body, with the back-jointed hind leg of a running animal. Never any head or hoof, and the ripe pregnant belly looked almost human. Half human female, half female animal … Hundreds had been found across Europe, buried in the floors of caves with the chewed bits of umbilical cords — shreds of Motherflesh as gifts to the Goddess? They found one bead from Peterfels, Germany, still freshly carved, as though never handled, showing none of the incessant rubbing that all the others evidenced.

Had women giving birth rubbed them smooth as the pangs came on and the hours wore away … ? Were they magic charms, lucky pieces passed on — from mother to daughter, sister to sister
—
in hope and prayer for a healthy birth? And if stillborn babies came, or the mother died, were the unlucky pieces cast aside and never touched again? Were Catholic rosary beads and Arab worry beads distant relations, faded reflections of a long-abandoned practice? For a fleeting moment he saw the countless birth caves of Stone Age man. In Germany, in France, everywhere, a thousand tribes, a thousand worm-crawls, a thousand women's cries of Mother, help me, Mother, please, for a thousand years, ten thousand, more! Cries that rose and fell while the cave's stone walls slowly darkened over time. And when in the course of civilization the mute holes ceased to hear womankind's cries, laden with the death-life struggle of human birth, had man as well? Who really knew … ? Herr Doktor had given up and turned away from the dusty glass case.

He wished he could have taken notes as she hurried on, but he would have made her repeat things like Moon Watcher and Green Man and Mother of Stone. So he let her gallop forward, blurting out the rest, losing details in confusion and finally coherence:

“But our night of the Gathering was not for the birth of one child only. No. Tonight we gathered for the birth of us all. Moon Watcher kept count of the days. Knowing when to plow and when to sow. The huntsmen trapped a stag for the blooding. For the Inescapable One. Dragging it to Mother of Stone still alive.

‘“Now bring him to me,' Moon Watcher cried. ‘Bring him low!' And they laid the beast against the standing rock. The circle of faces wore clay masks with open, howling mouths, tangled vines and leaves in their hair. Wood people … The old man strode out of the circle, dragging the little girl by a rope at the neck. She stumbled to the feet of Mother of Stone. Her clay mask fell away. And I saw my face,
my
face on the little girl's head.

‘The old man thrust me close to the stag's wide brown eye. ‘Wish it were me, don't you? Stick me with the knife and see the blood run out. Next year, you think! Next year you'll bring me low before the stone!' Now Moon Watcher hobbled from the fire, holding the cracked stone cup for all to see. From her bony chest hung withered paps. ‘My cup is dry. No son have I. But for the Green One who lies in the orchard down below.' Then, raising her arms, she cried,

“‘Let the Blooding begin!'

“The huntsmen pinned the beast at every point. No, not huntsmen … but women. Smeared with dirt. Leaves in their hair and saplings tied to their arms. Things of water, wood, and field. Hunthers. One of them cut a flap from the stags shoulder. Its eyes bulged, liquid centers ready to burst. She pressed her thumb into the vein to make it swell. Then sliced it with a flint. À fine spray sprinkled our faces. Welling into the warm flap. The stag screamed a long, thin scream as its life seeped out…. We dipped the rock cup into the beast's neck. Passed around the cup and drank. The stag's face streamed with tears of wetness. Or was it me?

“It is done,' the old man said.

“‘Done,' Moon Watcher echoed sadly Then, pointing into the dark valley, ‘Go down and find the Green Man in the earth. My only son. Find his growing head.'“

Fräuleins voice was harsh from so much talk, and her limbs loose like a marionette's, as if the hands that held her strings were all worn out. “The Hunt-hers tied off the stag's vein and repinned the flap of skin to sew him up alive. They carried the stag on a long pole down to the valley. When we reached the orchard, the old man forced my face to the ground.

“‘Now dig.'

“I clawed at the roots of an apple tree with a stick, then with my bare hands. The old man yanked the rope around my neck. ‘Faster!' The pile of dirt grew at my feet. My gritty fingers struck a body in the ground. About my size …

“‘We buried him dead,' the old man sang. Is he alive?' I showed the limp thing around the circle. Not human and not dead either. A bundle of old stalks woven in the shape of a little man. Husks for hands, knotted grass for knees and elbows. Dressed in a bit of sacking. A hooded face. Inside, a handful of barley seed, now sprouting green hairy bristles beneath a shadowed cowl. Buried dead in winter. Now alive.

“The Hunt-hers snatched the Green Man and spread him across the apple tree. Pegging off hands and feet. While the people pranced around the trunk, crying, ‘Alive! Alive!' They hit the Green Man with switches. They struck his vitals. Taking him apart stalk by stalk and reed by reed as they leaped around the tree. Beating him to frayed shreds that floated in the darkness till not even shreds were left.”

“Suddenly the dogs bayed madly. The Hunt-hers had unslung the stag. It bounded away through the orchard, wobbling as it crashed over the black fields. I saw a dog clamped onto its hind leg. The whole gang of us howled and went after it in a pack. The Hunt-hers caught the beast by the running stream. They swarmed over it with flints, skinning it alive. We tore the stag to pieces, gobbling handfuls of its guts as it shrieked helplessly. Bones and entrails lay strewn over the ground. Food for foxes and kites. When the thing was finally limp and dead, the mob broke up and wandered off, straggling into the night…. In the morning there would be nothing left. Only a dark stain on the ground, soon to be overgrown by riverbank reeds.