Secret Dreams (43 page)

“A
silence lay over the valley. The people of the wood lay quiet in their huts. The only sound a dog slavering over its knob of gristle.”

The last part of the story came out like splinters. “I took the stag's pelt back to the birthing cave for the Inescapable One. What a strange expression on the animal's face, as if still wondering, Who on earth gouged my eyes out? Moon Watcher put the stagskin over Mother of Stone's head, giving her a crown of antlers. I heard the Hag chanting:

“Who is she?

The One you know.

Who is she?

The One of Woe.

Who is she?

The One for Thee.”

The girl's voice came taut as glass. “Above the fire, the moon set in Mother of Stone's crown of horns. The moon passed down, but no daylight came. No sunrise … The black night grew full of stars, and the moon herself rose up again to cross the sky. I am in the forever night…. Suddenly I'm holding an antler spike of my own. Smoothed flat on one side, as if to be carved with marks. And as each white face sails overhead, I cut a scratch upon the antler with a chip of flint.

“The moon goes faster as it flies across the sky. A brief breath of darkness, then it kneels up again in the east. Waning from old and waxing full. Across the sky it swells and dies, shooting from horizon to horizon between gaps of black. And each time the moon flashes through the dark, I scratch a mark on the bone. Moons and months pass as I scratch and scratch. The moon leaps across the arch of heaven, a white band in the black sky. I've been scratching the bone for a hundred years, a thousand, ten thousand. Frantic to keep up. The flint cuts my hand. But it's no longer a little girl's hand. Aged. My hand as wrinkled as an old woman's claw. I
am
Moon Watcher. Me all along. Gone from little girl to Hag with no life in between. Old and about to die. I'm not ready! It's not fair! Not fair!”

In the Burghölzli garden the girl shrieked, “Not fair! Not fair!” The head gardener stared at her, wondering whether to call an orderly. But since Herr Doktor gave no signal, he turned his face to the earth and forgot her existence.

Fräulein had begun to twiddle furiously, but instead of sawing her own thigh, she reached over her lap and sawed Herr Doktors. Already the muscle beneath his trousers was getting sore.

“What does it mean?” she demanded. “Tell me. Tell!”

He shifted his leg a bit, moving the twiddle to a fresh spot.

“I don't know.”

She flew into a passion. “You don't know!” The hand began to saw its way into his flesh. He tried to shift again, but she followed the same spot on his thigh cunningly. “Why not? You're supposed to know! Supposed to!”

“No, Fräulein. Only you know what it means.”

She snatched her hand off him and sawed her own thigh in the V of her hips. “So why should I tell you anything? You're not my flatter, not my matter! You just used me to tell you stories. Snickering with the worker bees. Telling everyone what we did and then laughing behind my back!” He tried to deny it, vigorously shaking his head, but she wanted none of it. “Liar! You used me! You —”

She froze. As if some tight spring had snapped inside … For a moment he thought she'd been struck by a seizure. Her hand paused mid-twiddle in the crevice of her thighs. An odd expression on her face, a sort of wonderment, as if she'd just grasped a problem that had preyed on her mind for a long, long time.

“I've seen it before.”

“Seen what?” he whispered, afraid to jolt her.

“The deer in the firelight… the shoulder where they cut it. I've seen it before. A long time ago. In my parents' house. I — I remember now.”

“You saw an animal's leg in your parents' house?”

“No … not a deer's. By the light of the fire in the grate … My brother's.
My brother's kg.”

TRAUMA

For a moment she sat with her head bowed, going through it all again in her mind: the veil of fire, the red embers, the book-lined parlor of her parents' house. A vision that seemed to walk straight into her mind from the outside. The way the embers fell in the fireplace grate, glowing deep and remote in the polished brass face of the andiron shovel. The whole room reflected in the shovel's flat brass pan as it leaned into the metal arms of the stand. As a little girl she liked to stare into it, as in a looking glass, seeing the big green leather chair and the books standing in their shelves along the walls.

She thought she remembered the stag, sitting with its legs crossed, smoking a pipe — the deer's haunches filling the entire seat like a side of beef. And then she winced. No, not a stag, but her flatter sitting with his legs crossed, his black briar pipe in hand, staring moodily into the fire. But what happened next? He put down his pipe and uncrossed his legs. Then leaned over the chair to pick up a deer's hindquarter off the floor, laying it on his lap. It straddled his knees and he was slapping it savagely. Raising his hand and bringing it down, and the sound of his palm striking the moist flesh rang in her head.

No! No! No! Not a haunch of meat in his lap. But her brother!

“My twin brother!” she wailed at Herr Doktor. “Right in his lap, with his pants down around his ankles. My fa-fa-fa … my fa-fa-flatter spanking him on his white backside, making it redder and redder. While I just stood there watching. And it was my fault,” she sobbed, “all my fault….”

Herr Doktor rose from the damp stone seat.

“Come,” he said at last. “Let us go in.”

But she remained with her head bowed. He did something he had never done before. Gently touching Fräulein by the elbow. She started violently and for a long minute they stared at each other. Finally he turned away and went slowly under the frowning walls of the Burghölzli. She let him go a few paces and hesitantly followed. Shuffling after him, she caught up, and they walked abreast for several paces. She reached for his hand, holding him by the fingers but not letting him take hers. Something about her taking his hand touched him deeply, making him want to protect her forever. Take her into his very home and have Emma help too. Surely if Emma could see the girl this way she would understand and want to help. Perhaps there was some way to explain, make Emma understand.

His musings came to a sudden halt. They had been stopped short on the narrow garden path. The gardeners' fully laden wheelbarrow blocked the single way leading to the stairway door. The only other entrance led through the dayroom. He wondered if they might go around the huge barrow and over the flower beds, but in a strange twist of fate, the head gardener had roped off the soft, tilled earth with pickets and twine. If they trod there, they would certainly ruin the rows of new green shoots. Herr Doktor looked for the gardeners to move the wheelbarrow, but the men were nowhere in sight.

With a growing sense of dread, he retraced their steps as she clung to his fingers. In a dozen paces they had neared the glass solarium, Fräulein tugged at his fingers for him to stop.

“I don't want to come this way,” she said with a note of panic.

“But this is the way in,” Herr Doktor explained. Orderly Bolzen, on guard in the dayroom, gazed at them through the glass. Not doing anything, mind you, simply staring at them in a detached way, as if at bugs in a killing jar. He” felt slightly ridiculous in front of the orderly. One of the pinheads grinned at them for no reason.

“No, we can't go this way,” Fräulein implored.

“But everyone comes this way when the other way is blocked.” He was pushing her. He did not want Bolzen or Nekken or anyone to see them backing off, afraid…. Herr Tom Thumb had come to the dayroom glass and looked at them with tender sympathy, as if he read the girl's mind. The dwarf had his thing out his fly and flicked it at them.

“Everyone comes this way,” Herr Doktor insisted. They had already dallied too long.

“I won't!” Her voice rose to shrillness. “Not this way!” The Bricklayer pressed his bare bottom to a glass pane. À lively crowd of Incurables had gathered by the windows. Some were openly laughing,

“Everyone does,” he repeated inanely, then touched her elbow, wanting her to trust him. She shook his hand off, glaring. “Yes! Everyone! Everyone!” She bolted back the way she had come, trampling the flower beds and tripping over the twine. She stumbled through the side door and up the stairs, shouting:

“But not me! Not me!”

Herr Doktor let her go. He wanted to follow her, he could probably catch her on the stairs if he tried. But instead he squared his shoulders and marched into the dayroom, nodding. “Good day, Bolzen.” And then passed through the confusion toward the haven of the inner doors.

Nurse Bosch had just started to change the girl's chamber pot in room 401 when Fräulein flung open the door. The chamber pot clanged to the floor, a stream of liquid sluicing under the bed. The girl edged back along the wall like a trapped cat, inching her way toward the bed. À fierce light burned in her eyes.

“You're laughing at me,” she snarled.

“No, really I'm not, dear.”

“You are. You
all
are. “Fräulein stood on the bed and struggled with her clothes, tearing at them. Nurse Bosch tried to lend a hand. “Can I help you, dear? Would you like a nice bath?”

Fräulein had wound her tartan skirt about her waist. “Don't touch me, pig! No flatter! No matter! No Doktor! No bath! Get out!”

As the nurse left the room, the girl was spinning herself into a cocoon of bedclothes. Mumbling, “I'm not a glass-house thing. Not a sick bee. Not an
egg
anymore. I'm the Queen. The Queen …”

Herr Doktor had to sit quietly and think. Ach! Trying to parade the girl in front of everyone like a prize cow — trying to make her go through the dayroom and come out the other end … Appalling!

Her dream story floated through his head like dandelion fluff. Hunting bands of women. A cave where the world was born. Sucking the life from the veins of a bound animal. Flaying the figure of a hooded man tied to a tree. Marking the cycles of the moon on the flattened side of a bone. The People of the Wood did she call them?

Visions from her past? His past?
The
past?

More like a door leading down a dark tunnel of years, where you saw things that really were once upon a time. Not in the age of Menelaus, whose name meant “Might of the People.” No … these were the echoes of a far older time, with far older names: like that of the fair maid Helen, the Bright One. Of the Great Goddess, of her Mysteries and the Moon. In rocky Arcadia among the tribes called Pelasgoi. The Ancients, the Seafarers — though how long ago they came across the wine-faced sea, no one knew….

He glanced along the bookshelves in his office, searching for some clues among the silent tomes. He read a brief encyclopedia entry on Arcadia. It called the people “pastoral” — as if all they did was collect butterflies, count their goats, and chase young maidens. He found a slim volume by an explorer back from Africa: the fellow claimed he saw a bull sacrificed by the Masai warrior tribe. The hunters opened the beast's throat while it was still alive and drank from it. Emma's odd collection of that French priests drawings of the cave art in Les Eyzies … wisps of ghostly men in a hunting party, a bear bleeding torrents from the mouth, a score of spear wounds along his flank. Like children's drawings, really. Elusive and yet pointed.

The Ancient Ones had lived in the hills, just as Fräulein had said. A handful of sacred tribes hidden in mountain valleys. Tribes that met and married, loved and died — who called for blood sacrifices to the powers of earth and sky. And in times of feud, disease, or drought, lonely men fought duels on the mountainside in the stony night. And as the tides of men ebbed, invaders came up the valleys, marrying into the sacred tribes. Then more invaders, who pushed the Ancient Ones even deeper into the hills. Last of all the traveling chroniclers arrived, to search out the sacred ones and listen to their tales. But the customs of the mountain people were strange to all the latecomers. Arcadia had become a dark, backward place. The final refuge of savages clinging to their Stone Age ways.

By the time of Homer, the Ancients were being reviled in tales of family murder, incest, and cannibalism…. How long, Herr Doktor wondered, did it take the old stories to change, as the beliefs of one people were grafted onto the beliefs of another? How long for the reasons of ritual to be forgotten and die? Why women worshiped bees and cows? Why men worshiped stags and goats? Why men wove leaves in their hair, and why women chased them through the woods? Herr Doktor tried to remember who said that bit — which chronicler? His eye fell on a row of books his father had given him in his early student days: translations of the Orphic
Fragments
, Hesiod's
Works and Days
, a dusty Pausanias, and an even dustier Apollodoras. He couldn't remember.

Chroniclers, hah! A troop of old voyeurs traipsing around the rocky fist of the Péloponnèse, staggering from one drunken festival to the next and worshiping whatever god was being honored, whoever he or she happened to be. On the seashore, a dolphin cult. In the mountains, a stag cult. In the woods, a boar cult. If they reveled on a mountain above a fertile plain near the seashore: presto! a feast of the Barley-Dolphin-Stag cult. Bulls, sheep, goats, or bees—-just so everyone got drunk a dozen times a year and groped in the bush with anyone's woman but his own.

The chroniclers called them promiscuous practices. Nights when the fishwives, huntwives, and herdwives all went mad, chasing their men through the brambles, along a sandy beach, or in the new-plowed fields. And then grappling in the lustful dark, until the gray dawn saw them stumbling home with red eyes, dry-mouthed and shaky — still wondering who it was they'd clutched that night.

But customs changed as the revels were taken over by city-states and turned into civic mysteries. And later purified entirely, until sober temples of chaste youths and vestal virgins remained. While only those few tribes left in the mountains ran amok. Saturnalia. Walpurgisnacht. Carnaval. Easter. All the holy days stretched back to the wild revels in the dark: the coupling in the sea waves, the rutting in the hayfields. Herr Doktor seemed to recall reading a version of Aphrodite's ways and deeds where the love goddess went from man to man and god to god, sleeping with them all and then going down to the sea — emerging clean and fresh, with her virginity renewed!