A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel (7 page)

“Come in, come in,” he cried, beaming and standing up so swiftly he bumped the table, provoking a gentle clatter of glass. “I didn’t like to wake you, but I’m glad you’ve arrived at last. I don’t mind telling you that our conversation has been strained!”

With a wave of his hand he indicated his sole dinner companion: my steward, Sten. Colorless, doleful, looking shrunken beside the tall Bainishman, Sten sat before a plate heaped with an array of foreign delicacies, rose-colored claws and forbidding blobs of aspic.

“Sten,” I said, trying not to laugh.

“Ekawi,” he returned in a mournful tone. “The gentleman insisted I sit. I felt I could not refuse.”

“No, no, you did right. Listen, Sten, I need money, Olondrian money. Just give me half of what you’ve got in the purse.”

The Bainishman, still standing, resting both hands on the table, glanced from me to Sten and back again with a look of indulgent good humor, but when he saw Sten pull out the purse and count a number of bright triangular coins into my hand, his brows contracted in dismay.

“What! What’s this? What do you want with money? You don’t need money in my house,” he exclaimed, either forgetting that his house was a hotel, or overcome with native hospitality to the extent that he intended not to charge me for the meal.

“I’m sorry. I can’t stay.”

“But where are you going? I have
sefdalima,
real
sefdalima
from the country, either with or without anchovies! Come,
telmaro
, I beg you, you haven’t eaten!” And at last, in despair, as I opened a door: “Not that way! The other door, if you want the street. . . .”

“Thank you,” I called out over my shoulder, hurrying down the passage, my pockets jingling. I soon came out into the antechamber with the white roses. Then all I had to do was open the door, and there it was: sea air, long cypress shadows, the racket of carriage wheels, Bain.

I ran down the front steps of the hotel and into the light of the evening, dazed as a moth released from a dark bedroom. Strangers jostled me, merchants in short cloaks with well-fed, shaven cheeks, students in colorful jackets and the tasseled shirts of scribes. The glad spirit of the
kebma
hour was awakening under the trees: the cafés were crowded with diners laughing through clouds of cigar smoke, tearing the flat, oily loaves of
kebma
, rinsing their fingers in brass bowls, clapping their hands to call the waiters. I darted across the street, dancing to keep away from the carriages, and pressed my face to a window where books lay blanketed in dust. There they were, just as I had imagined, open, within easy reach. I pushed the door, setting off a soft bell, and entered the shop.

Then it was like those tales in which there are sudden transformations: “He found himself in a field, and felt that it was a very vast country.” It was like the story in which Efaldar awakes in the City of Zim: “There were walls of amethyst round him, and his couch was upon a dais.” In the shop there was a dim, ruddy light and little space to move, for the shelves rose everywhere, filled with books with their names written on the spines:
The Merchant of Veim. Lyrics Written While Traveling on the Canals. The Secrets of Mandrake Root and the Benefits Derived Therefrom.
I ran my fingers over the books, slid them from the shelves, opened them, turned the pages, breathing in line after line of mysterious words, steeped in voluptuous freedom like Isvalha among the nymphs of the well, a knot in my throat with the taste of unswallowed tears. There were so many books. There were more than my master had carried in his sea chest. The shop seemed impossible, otherworldly, a cave of wonders; yet it was not even a true bookshop like the ones I would discover later, lining both sides of the Street of Poplars. It was one of those little shops, tucked into various corners of Bain, which sell portraits of popular writers and tobacco as well as books, whose main profits come from the newspapers, whose volumes are poorly bound, and which always seem to be failing, yet are as perennial as the flowers. It is unlikely that anyone before or since has experienced, in that humble establishment, a storm of emotion as powerful as mine. I collected stack after stack of books, seizing, rejecting, replacing, giddy with that sweet exhalation: the breath of parchments.

At last I found a leather-bound copy of the
Romance of the Valley
with which, once they had touched it, my hands refused to part. It was a “two-color copy”: the chapter titles were ornamented with elaborate flowers in blue and crimson ink. The cover was also embossed with a pattern of blooms; the paper, though not of the best quality, was of pressed cotton beautifully textured; and through the pages danced the mysterious tale, the enchanted hawks and the sorrowful maiden transformed into a little ewe-lamb. Clutching this prize I approached the bookseller’s desk, that hallowed region central to every bookshop, however lowly, in Olondria. This one, like many others, was piled with books and scattered papers, and behind it, in the glow of a lamp, sulked a young girl of great beauty. She had the amber skin of the Laths, the people of Olondria’s wine country, and masses of coarse brown hair that snaked among the towers of books. Her hands, grimy and capable with broken fingernails, wrapped up my purchase and clenched my fifteen
droi
with frank eagerness. I thanked her, but she did not look up. Instead she yanked a curl of hair impatiently from among her charm necklaces. I walked out into the last light of the evening. Bells tolled in the Temple of Kuidva, and over its dome the first stars were coming out.

If you love Bain as I have loved it, then you will know its spell, a heady mixture of arrogance and vitality, which has in it a great sigh, as of an ocean that has been crossed, the sigh of its terrible age from the depths of its stones. You will know the arcades underneath the Golden Wall where the old men sit, playing at
londo
and sipping their glasses of
teiva
, that colorless, purifying fig alcohol which has no scent, but whose aftertaste is “as chewed honeysuckle.” You will know the wood-sellers, the midnight trot of the horse of the nightsoil wagon. You will know also the great glow of the Royal Theater, huge as a castle and lit for its gala events like a temple on fire, with its wide tiered terraces going down to the canal. And you will know the white walls, the smell of sumac, the smell of dust, of coffee roasting, of eggplant fried in batter, the “unbearable quarters” where there is the feeling that someone has been interred, that people cannot live among such ancient towers. All of this I discovered in Fanlei, the “Month of Apples,” one of Olondria’s happiest and most careless months. There may still be a few in Bain who remember me as I was then: an aristocratic young foreigner in a gray silk suit.

My days began with a carriage ride through the humid morning streets to the great spice markets. Housed on the site of ancient horse and cattle auctions, the vast covered markets, with their arched leather roofs made to keep out the rain, form a jumbled labyrinth that stretches almost to the harbor. Here in the shadows the lavish, open sacks display their contents: the dark cumin redolent of mountains, the dried, crushed red pepper colored richly as iron ore, and turmeric, “the element of weddings.” One wanders among the cramped, odorous, warren-like enclosures, among elderly men and women, fresh from the country, who sip glasses of tea as they sit beside their wares, their hands smelling perpetually of cinnamon. There are younger merchants, too: slow-voiced men, gentlemen farmers, who dab at their eyes with muslin handkerchiefs; and in one corner a Kalak woman, one of Bain’s old fishing people, sells the wind out of a great brass bell. There are herbs, fresh and dried—mint, marjoram, and basil; there are dark cones and mud-like blocks of incense; there are odors in the air that seem to speak to one another, as though the market were filled with violent ghosts. Wandering vendors offer tea and odorless “water of life,” which revives those who succumb to the spice madness: for here there are treacherous substances, ingredients for love-philters, and spices used in war and assassination. I have seen them selling the powder called
saravai
, the “hundred fires,” with which prisoners are executed for treason; and there is also the nameless spice which, carried on the wind, infects one’s enemies with the falling sickness. There is crushed ostrich eggshell, the “beckoner of women.” It seems as if the odors cloud the air—as if, in the half light, the breath of spices rises up like smoke and wreathes the faces of the merchants.

Here I sat with Sten, bargaining, arguing, and laughing, pouring pepper into sacks for my customers, awaiting with growing impatience the hour of noon, the end of the market day, when I would walk out alone into the city. When that moment came, and my servants tied up the sacks and rolled down the door of the stall, I stood and brushed the pepper from my clothes, and with hardly a word I left them, walking out with the last of the Bainish citizens, mingling with them, no longer a foreign merchant.

It was the season of sudden rains. The wild summer storms came out of the west, pouring on the slate roofs and the white wind towers, swaying and bowing down the poplar trees in the Street of Booksellers and rolling in sheets from the awnings of the cafés. These were the rains that drove people close to the walls, under the balconies, or sent them dashing madly through the squares, and drenched the fluttering ribbons and bright trappings of the horses so that their flanks were streaked with delicate watercolors. The storms washed the streets so that little streams of brown water went roaring along the gutters toward the sea, and thundered on the roofs of the cafés where people were crowded together laughing in the steam and half darkness. I loved those rains; they were of the sort that is welcomed by everyone, preceded by hot, oppressive hours of stillness; they came the way storms come in the islands but did not last as long, and often the sun came out when they had passed. I was happy whenever the rain caught me walking about in the streets, for then I would rush into the nearest café, along with all the others who were escaping from the weather, all of us crushing laughing through the doors. The rain allowed me to go anywhere, to form quick, casual friendships, forced to share one of the overcrowded tables, among the beaming waiters who pushed good-naturedly through the throngs carrying cups of steaming apple cider. In this way I was thrown together with students or dockworkers or tradesmen, or the
huvyalhi
, the peasants in their old robes, with their belts of rope and tin earrings and tough shoes caked with dung, and the pipes they smoked carefully in their cracked misshapen hands. As the rain poured down outside, we leaned together over our drinks, and there was always the weather to talk about for a beginning, and everyone was glad for the sudden excuse to have a drink and for the wild release from the stillness of the air. The cafés smelled of cider, wet clothes, steaming hair, and tobacco. The lamps burned valiantly in the storm’s darkness; often there was someone playing the northern violin, which is held upright between naked feet and moans like the wind in the towers.

After the rains the city was tranquil and glittering, freshly washed, the high roofs shining, the trees iridescent with moisture, and all seemed calm and quiet because of the passing of the storm. The clear air sparkled with the cold light of diamonds. The winds coming off the sea were cool, and there was no dust in the city; it had all been washed away with the heat and discomfort, and the sky had been washed as well and rose in pale, diaphanous layers of ether, streaked with gauzy clouds in blue and gold. Slowly the cafés emptied and the waiters sat down to play
londo
. Children came out to race painted boats in the gutters; they laughed and shouted down the wet streets in the opalescent air, while above them white-shawled grandmothers dragged chairs out onto the balconies. In these transparent hours I would set off again on my walk, down the Street of Booksellers or toward the intricate trees of the Garden of Plums, often with a girl on my arm, perhaps a student drawn to my strangeness or one of the city’s cheerful lovers for hire.

There was never an end to Bain. I never felt as though I had touched it, though I loved the book markets under the swinging trees, the vast array of books on tables, in boxes, stacked on the ground, and the grand old villas converted into bookshops. I loved the Old City also, which is called the “Quarter of Sighs,” with its barred windows and brooding fortified towers, and I loved to watch the canal winding below the streets and bridges and the stealthy boats among the shadows of trees. Laughing, replete, I raised a glass of
teiva
in a café, surrounded by a bold crowd of temporary companions, a girl at my side, some Ailith or Kerlith whose name I no longer recall, for she was erased like the others by the one who followed.

“Perhaps I’ll stay,” I shouted over the singing from the next table. “Perhaps I won’t go home. I’d like to know every corner of Bain.”

The girl beside me giggled and tossed her hair, her earrings jangling. “Bain!” she said. “You won’t know Bain until you’ve been to the Feast of Birds.”

C
hapter Six

The Feast of Birds

I think I still do not know Bain. The Feast of Birds taught me of no city on earth, but of another, deeper territory.

It began as all holidays begin, though stamped with the special gaiety of Olondria: the city prepared for the celebration for two days. Revelers spilled from the overcrowded cafés and thronged the streets; when the outdoor tables were filled they sat on the curbs, uncorking bottles of
teiva
. From the balcony of my hotel room I looked down on garden parties, women in brilliant clothing laying tables among the oleanders, stout grandfathers bellowing for more wine, and children everywhere shrieking, trampling the marigolds, chasing one another. All the children held flexible wooden wands with tissue-paper birds attached to the ends, their gauzy feathers strengthened with copper wire; when the children played, these magical creatures trembled as if about to take flight for the trees, and at night they lay discarded on the lamplit grass. Many houses, I noticed, were dark, without a sign of joy; I once saw a child who was watching the streets pulled in from a balcony and scolded. But the streets were alive, flamboyant, crowded with vendors, vintners, and flower girls who had burst all at once from the markets to conquer the world.

On the day of the procession I put on a clean shirt with a pearl button at the throat and went downstairs, curious to observe the famous holiday. Yedov was in the antechamber, peering out a window, and he turned toward me with a grave look as I entered.

“Where are you going,
telmaro
?”

“Out to see the procession,” I answered cheerfully.

He frowned. I observed that he was not dressed to go out himself: he wore a plain white morning coat, a modest jasper in one ear, and what we in Tyom would have called a ten-o’-clock face.

“Oh, you don’t want to go out today,” he said.

“Why not?”

“It’s the Feast of Birds,
telmaro
. The streets will be full of nasty people, thieves! Your father always took my advice and stayed indoors on the Feast.”

I needed no more encouragement. “Good-bye!” I laughed, flinging the door wide.

The Feast of Birds is dedicated to Avalei, the Goddess of Love and Death, of whom my master had said: “Not all that is ancient is worthy of praise.” In my readings, Avalei’s shadow had passed most often at moments of crisis; I thought she must be like the vegetable gods of the islands, mute and beyond appeal. Yet her great feast day appeared to involve no sacrifice or grief. The cafés were crowded with groups of students pounding the tables and singing, and a boisterous crowd of country people possessed the Garden of Plums, dressed in shades of blue and smelling of charcoal fires.

When the procession began, the musicians scrambled down from their makeshift stages and the crowd pressed eagerly toward the Grand Promenade, and I went with them, forcing myself among the straining spectators opposite the gray façade of the Autumn Palace. Drums boomed, deep and solemn. In the gardens of the palace, where in the last century a famous general had hanged himself for love, people climbed up the bars of the wrought-iron fence for a better view, waving banners above an aviary of tissue-paper macaws. “Can you see it?” someone shouted near me, almost into my ear. “No!” I replied. There was the dark march of the drums. Both sides of the street were thronged with people watching from under the trees, and stiff-legged soldiers patrolled the edges of the crowds.

The procession came down the street, heralded by a trembling sigh, a sigh released all at once by the waiting crowd, and then by bursts of music which erupted along the street like waterspouts, and by loud cries and the waving of scarves. The women were waving their scarves in the air, slow flags of colored silk, waving them with their bare arms, even from the balconies, and singing strange, exhilarating songs that rose and throbbed in the heated air like melodies from the depths of the earth. The drums came into sight, huge, decorated with bells, made from the skins of sacred bulls raised in the temples, creatures fed on wheat and basil and turned to face the west before they were slaughtered, their massive horns preserved in bronze. The drummers wore masks of painted wood and nodded their heads as they struck. Behind them walked young eunuchs with silver censers, their mellow, eerie voices entwined in ethereal cadences, mingling with the dark fumes that billowed around them. . . . The air was filled, all at once, with a strong smell I could not place, an elemental odor like frankincense and charred bone, and under the influence of this scent, more powerful than that of the spice markets, I saw the priests strutting in their skin skirts. They were naked to the waist, and their chests were shaved and painted with ochre; they were crowned with the bronzed horns of the slaughtered bulls, and behind them came the priestesses in cloaks of lion skin, bearing lilies and decked with garlands of cornflowers.

In the winter I go to the Land of the Dead,

I belong to Telduri my brother;

In the spring I belong to Tol,

The God of Smoke and Madness;

In summer only shall I be yours,

O youth with the reddened cheeks,

O player of flutes,

O star who sleeps beneath a tree on the hill.

So sang the priestesses, and with them the women among the crowd. And the goddess came into view, she or her image, hewn from a great stone and borne by twenty men on a litter, a vast figure spangled with old gilt.

Where is the hunting knife

with which I slew the milk-white deer?

For I see it not: neither beside my arm, nor under it.

This was the song of the priests, which the men around me sang with them, the notes lifting into an impassioned thunder, pleading and terrible and underscored by the bells and drums. The air was erased by the odor of incense and flowers. The goddess passed slowly, a thing of such unbearable weight, of such gravity, that I could scarcely look at her and could not read the expression in her face of indifferent stone. She was a moon: there was nothing animal about her. Her litter was heaped with lilies, jonquils, anemones, and narcissi amid flames which were barely discernable in the sunlight; they were the flames of scented candles, and there were urns about her, and carpets, and the men who bore her sweated a scarlet ooze through dyed faces. Behind her came another, smaller litter borne by hooded priests, in which, underneath seven layers of sumptuous brocades, the
Book of Mysteries
slept in its silver casket as if under the sea, in its dim and fragrant grotto studded with pearls.

All at once the women sang: “
The hunting knife is within my heart, the hunting knife is the ornament of my heart
.” And the music swelled, the voices of men and women together now, the men asking
Where is the hunting knife
, and the women answering them in ardent notes like shot arrows:
The hunting knife is the ornament of my heart
. Faces twisted with ecstasy. A woman near me looked toward the trees, arching her back, her bright face wet with tears; and other women opened their mouths and flung hard, trilling melodies at the procession, songs that jarred with the sacred music. Elsewhere there were cries, sobs, the chattering shrieks of someone who was speaking in a language without words; and as the goddess passed away, a great convulsion of weeping wracked the crowd, pierced with inarticulate cries.

My own cheeks were wet. I was still gazing at the disappearing goddess, Avalei of the Ripened Grain, when a second tremor went through the crowd—not as profound as the first, but signifying some change, some new excitement. “The Wings!” someone cried. At once the shout was taken up; people were running, but not closer to the procession. They were running back into the square, into the garden, into the alleys, pressed together and laughing, glancing behind them. Children were snatched up quickly and borne away, women picked up their skirts, and a few men climbed the trees of the Promenade, while the balconies above the street grew crowded with curious figures looking eagerly downward, half laughing and half afraid.

“The Wings!”

I stood looking at the street. My face was strangely warm, as if I had drunk a pitcher of new wine. The crowd had grown thin; there were only a few of us who watched, transfixed as if by the track of an errant comet. And we saw them come: young men, running, roaring, linked together, their arms interlocked so that they moved like a wave, like a thick tumultuous flood or else like a dragon, some single beast of a hundred parts, deranged, obliterating the pavements. They moved as if they were running downhill at the mercy of gravity, as if they could crash through forests, armies, stone, and as they came they shouted and some were singing and others wore grimaces of pain, or else of an alien ecstasy. The street performers began to scatter belatedly toward the alleys, but the youths came into their midst with the force of a deluge, and those whom they could touch they seized and drowned in their living river, compelling them to run or be crushed underfoot. I watched them, shivering, feeling something like terror, or perhaps longing, seeing their sweat-dampened hair as they came closer, and seeing also that some of them had blood smeared on their foreheads and others were soaked as if they had come through a sheet of rain. Near me a man, his face radiant with tears, released a fearsome cry and plunged like a diver into the moving mass. I saw myself for a moment, a small figure under the trees; and then they cracked over me, and I was with them.

They were students, poets, and lovers of the goddess Avalei, and they were mad with the love that drove them through the streets. Love made them bound up and down among the walls in a rhythmic dance, clinging to one another, chanting hoarsely: “Riches and glory I do not desire, nor do I wish to be king; I ask nothing more than to be your lover and slave, to remain with you; only stay with me in the hills and you shall fulfill all my desire. . . .” Their dance was like those which are danced on the eve of battle. They tore through the streets with the savagery of an inferno until their passion exhausted itself like a sheaf of lightning among the alleys, and they stumbled, still clutching one another’s arms like frightened children, into the shelter of an ill-lighted café. Then I saw for the first time the faces of those who had been my companions in terror, and they were thin and drawn, their expressions stunned, and their bodies wore the shabby clothes of those who drink under the bridges, and their gestures were vague, and they held one another’s hands. They were true devotees of the goddess and had spent the day in the temple drinking heady liquors made from fermented flowers, and some of them had made love to the temple harlots behind the screens and wore the lost and shimmering look of new-slain warriors. The café where we found ourselves, fatigued and sore, our lungs aching, was a great stone room with a domed and blackened ceiling, with smoky lamps along the walls which made me realize that the sun had set and only the blue dusk came through the doorway. Evidently the “Wings” were known there, for a fire was quickly kindled and sleepy girls materialized from the darkness, one with a large pewter basin from which she splashed the face of a boy who had fainted. We looked at each other in the firelight.

“Where are we?” I asked the slight, grimy youth who was holding my hand.

He shrugged. “Somewhere in the Quarter.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No,” he said, looking at me as if I had asked an odd question, though there was blood mixed with the dirt on his brow and hair. We sat at a table with some of the others on wooden chairs strengthened with twine, and the girls, moving as silently as witches, brought us wine and
teiva
and held out their hands which we pressed with coins, and then melted away, yawning, into the gloom. “I need a drink,” said the boy who sat opposite me in a trembling voice. Tears welled up in his eyes, though he was smiling. . . . The others patted his back, and one of them said, “Yes, by the gods, I’ve a dragon’s thirst!” and there was a light pattering of laughter. Outside, in the streets, beat the music of fifes and drums, the continuing festival, which we had stepped out of, if only for a moment; and I found myself wishing fervently, with desperation and sadness, that these strange youths would let me remain among them.

We were young and had been through a fire, and so we were shy.We did not exchange names, but after a time we began to behave like young men, and our talk grew louder in that dim room where pork and rabbits crackled above the hearth and the drowsy girls went dragging their feet. Our eyes shone; a boy took a violin from against the wall, removed his boots, and began to play, cradling the instrument; when the meat was done we ate it ravenously, grease on our lips, and the strength it gave us was potent like that of the wine. I found myself in an earnest conversation with two of the youths, explaining things to them I had not known myself, connections between the poets I had never seen before, a clear architecture rising out of excitement and
teiva
. The youths who listened were students at the School of Philosophy, and they argued eagerly, with fiery humor. They rolled cigarettes for me and we bent close together, smoking, their eyes alive and sparkling in the dimness. I had answers to all of their contradictions; they looked at me admiringly, they laughed, they began to call me the Foreign Professor. And I felt myself at the height of human bliss as I protested, “No, not foreign. I’ve been raised on the northern poets. . . .”

The night brought music. A band from the festival invaded the café, armed with raucous pipes, guitars, and swollen drums, filling the room with a reek of sweat, demanding money and wine, releasing a deafening, jaunty cacophony of sound. The whole room glittered with girls, perhaps the same ones who had served us earlier, but now they wore long earrings and shrieked with laughter, and the young men caught them and whirled them about the floor in popular dances, their shadows huge in the redness of the firelight. The music called in a troupe of Kestenyi dancers from the street, who were greeted with ragged cheers from the drunken students—they were lithe young men with rouged cheeks and hats that were round at the brim and square on top, made of the piebald skins of goats. They wore long purple tunics that reached to their boot-tops and were slit at the sides to show their voluminous embroidered trousers, and they skipped wildly on their heels and toes, their bodies motionless from the waist up, their faces fixed in sublime hauteur. I watched everything through the deep, resplendent mists that surrounded me, watched the rise of an arm, the toss of a head, watched even the shoulder of the girl who had come to sit on my lap through a starry haze—it was cool to the touch, as if made of enamel. She turned her head to look at me. I was happy and exhausted, feeling as I had felt on the open sea: as if the world had drowned and something new had taken its place, a ringing brilliance, fathomless and transparent.