Jitterbug Perfume (22 page)

To witness Kudra then, giggling and barefoot among the poppies, it would have been hard for anyone to picture her on her knees in a Constantinople pantry, weeping and wailing, shaking like the shuttle in an overachiever's loom, begging Shakti, Shiva, Kali, and Krishna to forgive her for rebelling against divine authority. (And it is divine authority, is it not, that insists that we must die? That grants us consciousness for a few decades, then, no matter how gloriously we have used it, snatches it away? Surely, the human race committed some heinous atavistic crime for the gods to inflict it with mortality, as they have; and isn't it a worsening of our crime, a compounding of our guilt, to try to escape our just punishment?) Even after absorbing the Bandaloop legacy (or part of it, at least), Kudra could never quite overcome the feeling that, in defying death, she was doing something wrong and would be made to pay for it in some prolonged and unspeakably excruciating way. When in Alobar's company, when meditating or bathing, she could exult in a body that remained firm and juicy while thousands about her withered away, but alone in the frottage of twilight, awaiting Alobar's return from the spice docks, fear would ooze out of the brown pit of her chin dimple, and, whimpering, she would turn from one deity to another, even bizarre Ganesh, with his elephant head, pleading for mercy for not having submitted to a widow's death in the rope yard.

Now Alobar had grown up in a more intimate relationship with his gods. His snored in magic tree trunks and twinkled in the constellations, frequently emerging, mossy-haired or moon-burned, to fraternize with humanity, sharing human foibles and appetites. As a king in the forests of what would one day be called Bohemia, Alobar, himself, had been deemed half divine. Still, he, too, felt odd and uncomfortable at times, felt a gulf widening between himself and his fellows who went uncomplaining to the grave. "Am I clinging to my individual being only to have it grow inhuman and strange?" he would agonize. "Am I inviting a revenge worse than simple annihilation?"

On a day such as that one, however, a day popping its seams with sunshine, lust, and adventure, it was difficult for him—or Kudra—to conceive of anything worse than annihilation. So, they advanced in the lavender mountain haze like chatty autograph-seekers closing in on a celebrity's hideaway, but in their secret hearts they wanted something other than your scrawl, Mr. Shaggy; they wanted you to reach into their secret hearts and remove the hard, knobby doggy bone of doubt that their apparent victory over time had buried there.

"We have been living in Constantinople among the Christians," explained Alobar.

"The Christians doth be everywhere," said Pan.

"Not in my homeland," said Kudra.

"They will be," said Pan. A wave of faintness and nausea broke over him. He ignored it to concentrate on Kudra s mounds.

"Prior to that," said Alobar, "we lived in a cave far away in the East. Have you ever heard of the Bandaloop doctors?"

"No," said Pan. "Don't be stupid."

Alobar reddened. "You've been around a while. I thought someone might have mentioned Bandaloop to you."

"I am Pan," said Pan. "People do not
mention
things to me."

"Your point is well taken," said Kudra. Pan grinned at her lasciviously. Alobar glowered.

"I will play for thee," said Pan, producing his reeds.

"We wished to talk to you about immortality," protested Alobar.

"Thou art too late," said-Pan. He blew a few weak notes on his pipes.

"Too late for talk or too late for immortality?" asked Kudra.

Pan's instrument made a sound, high and thin.

'Too late for us or too late for you?" asked Alobar. He had noted the god's physical decline.

"Thou art interested in the immortal,
this
be immortal," said Pan, and he commenced to pipe in earnest.

"But—" objected Alobar.

"Your point is well taken," said Kudra.

Alobar glowered.

Before she met him, before they flushed him from his thickets, Kudra had imagined Pan to be a giant, a winged monster with fire-blackened hooves and more arms than necessary for the discharge of polite duties; imagined him smoldering, hissing, uprooting trees and spitting hailstones, instructing humanity in a thunderous tone. She was frankly disappointed when he proved to be slighter in stature than her Alobar, and she could barely keep from sniggering at his -foul tangles of wool and his silly tail. Even his stench failed to measure up to Alobar's description of it, striking her as more locally naughty than universally nasty. It wasn't until he began to pipe that Kudra got some sense of Who (or What) He Really Was.

At first, his playing, too, seemed slight; it was so simple, careless, and primitive that one had to sympathize with Timolus, who, judging the music contest between Pan and Apollo, had unhesitatingly awarded the prize to the Apollonian lyre, thereby establishing the tradition that critics must laud polish and restraint, attack what is quirky and disobedient, a tradition that endures to this day. Had Timolus not hooked Pan off the stage so quickly, had he possessed the—the what? the honesty? the humility? (Timolus, after all, couldn't play shit) the nerve? to actually listen to Pan, to respond with something more genuine than his preconceptions, he might have been affected, as Kudra began to be affected, once she stopped smirking at his obvious lack of formal training and quit comparing him unfavorably with the flutist, Lord Krishna. Pan's song, because it served no purpose, because, indeed, it transcended the human yoke of purposes, was, above all, liberating. It was music beyond the control of the player's will or the listener's will; the will, in fact, dissolved in it (which may explain why it was politically necessary for Apollo, with the compliance of Timolus, to drown it out). To Kudra it was the aural equivalent of the rope trick: a giddy ascent up a shaky coil, to arrive in a place of mystery, where the sense of all-encompassing oneness with the natural world and the sense of the absolute aloneness of the individual coexist and commingle. There was a sort of hippity-hoppity bunny rabbit quality to Pan's erratic melody, but also a roaming goatish quality, stubborn, rough, and lean. If at one instance it sounded tender and idyllic, at another, threatening and brutal, perhaps that was because Pan's song was the inner animal's songs, all of them, summed into one seemingly random epiphany. Kudra felt that at Pan's concert she was on less than solid ground, yet, as unsteady as that ground might be, she was driven to dance upon it. (Maybe there is no proper way to react to the inner animal's tunes but dance to them.)

Kudra found herself swaying rhythmically and wiggling her grass-stained toes. She turned to Alobar to find him executing a little shuffle, snapping the fingers of his left hand while with the right he defined a tempo by shaking the charred remains of her half-smoked shoe. Kudra was amused by Alobar's tentative polka until her eyes fell upon the tumescent protrusion dancing with him. Disgusting, she thought. An
erection is just inappropriate.
Then she realized with a shock that she was so wet that children could have sailed toy boats in her underpants.

The next thing she knew, she and Alobar were dancing up the hillside, following the Charmer's pipes, through thistle bushes and over jagged rocks; and while panic fear erupted with a roar from her deepest places and while she overheard Alobar plaintively asking, "Doesn't it matter to you that she is my wife?" she was incapable of turning back.

The refined erotic engineering taught by the
Kama Sutra
had not prepared Kudra for that night of priapism, but the following morning, after she had sponged her chafed parts in the grotto pool and smeared them repeatedly with the aromatics that she lugged about in the teapot (even so, the goat smell was to cling to her for weeks), she found that she and Alobar could face one another without shame, and she nodded in total agreement when Alobar ventured, "I feel somehow that his lechery was secondary, although to what I cannot say."

For breakfast, Pan served them olives, tomatoes, and cheese, which they ate in the nude without a trace of self-consciousness. Throughout the meal, the sleepy-eyed god kept testing the air, more like a hare than a goat, until at last Alobar inquired what he might be sniffing.

"Flowers, methinks, but unlike any flowers that bloom in these parts. Most strange. Dost thou smell them, too?"

"You are smelling my perfumes," said Kudra, and when Pan looked puzzled, she thrust her shoulder under his nose. His bewilderment increased. "Thou didst not smell like that last night," he said.

Alobar made a move to produce the perfume jars, but Kudra caught his wrist and bade him wait. "We puny homers, as you call us, have some magic of our own," she said. "Tell me, do you find the aroma unpleasant?"

"It be quite pleasing—from a blossom. A woman shouldst smell as thou didst last night."

"Bah! You Western males are all alike, whether you call yourselves gods or men. You've had your noses in too many battles and too many hunts. Alobar used to hate perfumes, but when he came home from the warehouse every evening accidentally smelling of nutmeg and cinnamon and tumeric, he grew accustomed to the idea that flesh is more appealing when not left to marinate in its own rank juices. Here. Close your eyes for a minute. Just for a minute. Go ahead. Trust me."

Reluctantly, Pan lowered his. big monkey lids, whereupon Kudra doused him with enough patchouli to stampede a herd of elephants. His eyes flew open like the hatch covers on an exploding ship, and he commenced to sniff at his extremities, as if he were wildly in love with himself. A kind of disorienta-tion seemed to seize him, causing him to walk in circles, repeatedly crossing his own path. The nymphs, who had entertained Alobar during the night while Kudra was being entertained by Pan, laughed nervously from their mossy lounge across the pool. One of the nymphs sidled up to the god and pulled his tail with a petal-picking gesture, only to be flung violently to the ground. At last, Pan sat down between Kudra and Alobar, still inhaling drafts of himself with expressions of disbelief, and began to speak in the most subdued tones Alobar had yet heard him employ.

" Tis true, thou homers
do
have magic of thine own, the gods have always known that, known it even better than thee. We gods know how to use our powers, but most men and women do not know how, that be the difference between us and thee. Sniff sniff."

"Forgive me," said Alobar, "but the important difference between men and gods is that gods are immortal and men are not. Is this a result of we men not knowing how to correctly use our powers?"

Pan ran his rather squashed nose along his patchouli-contaminated arm. "Once, a long time ago, when the earth had a flat dark face and a belly of fire, back before the hills had grown so tall that they pushed the moon away, mankind was given a choice between life and death and through trickery or misinformation or something else, made the wrong choice. That is all there is to it."

"But what if," asked Kudra, shooting Alobar a meaningful glance, "but what if we decided now to choose life?"

"Then choose it," said Pan.

Again, Kudra and Alobar exchanged glances. "But would not that anger the gods?" Kudra asked.

"Ha ha ha!" The laughter burst out of Pan like the barking of some obscene dog. "Anger the gods? The gods, those that art still around, wouldst congratulate thee for finally catching on."

"You mean . . . ?"

"I mean that the gods do not limit men. Men limit men."

"We are," asked Kudra, "as deserving of immortality as the gods?"

"Thou hast not deserved immortality because thou hast been too puny in thy mind and heart and soul. Sniff."

"But we can change that?" Kudra's voice was hopeful. "We can expand our minds, and enlarge our souls, and choose life over death?"

"Sniff sniff. Thou hast that potential."

Alobar was nodding his head excitedly, and Kudra wore a smile that you could mail a letter in. An eleventh-century letter, written on parchment, rolled into a cylinder and tied with thongs. The Charmer was still cruising the patchouli patches.

"Great Pan," said Alobar, with a degree of reverence, "I used to be king over a state, but now I am king over myself."

"Dearest Pan," said Kudra, with more than a degree of intimacy (in the preceding night, after all, she and the god had left no sexual stone unturned), "I used to weave rope, but now 1 weave my world."

"Methinks thou doth speak from freedom not from vanity," said Pan, "and I lift my wineskin to thee, for thou art rare among humans. Sniff." He squirted a stream of wine into his ugly, yet sensual, mouth. Red rivulets ran into his beard to disappear there, sopped up, perhaps, by whorls of thirsty wool. "Ah, but Alobar, doth thou not recall my telling thee that gods art immortal for only so long as the world believes in them? Thou hast only to look at me to see how a god dwindles when belief in him dwindles. Immortality has its conditions. Immortality has its limits. And immortality has its dangers. Whatever thou hast learned about death from thy wise men in the East, thou wouldst do well to remember ..."