Jitterbug Perfume (30 page)

After a dozen containers had been filled, they hiked into the high hills, where smoke would not be noticed, and, while Pan lay on the humus, noodling his pipes (Alobar had fetched them in his sack, and they put the local fauna into a tizzy), Alobar constructed a crude laboratory. He boiled down the beet pollen into an extract, gray, gooey, and possessed of a
basso profondo
that could have brought the rafters down in the grand opera of" smell.

When all the extract had been made, Alobar shook the wood lice out of his britches, washed his face in a creek, and set out for a large town on the Russian border, where he knew a vodka master to reside. Pan was left behind to guard their equipment. Without the feeble god to slow him, Alobar reached the town in a week. There, he approached the vodka maker, who, in return for the last of Alobar's French gold pieces, agreed to distill the beet pollen extract, an operation that, to Alobar's displeasure, consumed the better part of a month.

The job at last complete, Alobar tied a gallon jug of distil late to each end of a stout pole, rested the pole across both shoulders, and left the town at a trot. Were it not for the preciousness and weight of his cargo, he might have left at a gallop. He was anxious about Kudra, who could have returned in his absence, anxious about Pan, who could have strayed. In as much as his health would permit, Pan had cooperated in the venture to disguise his malodor and transport him to the New World, but he hardly could be rated enthusiastic. He was, in fact, so nonverbal, so distant, distracted, solitary, and, even in his invisibility, especially in his invisibility, charged with psychic shock, that nothing he might have done would really have surprised Alobar, who had little choice but to withhold trust. Stopping neither to eat nor sleep, his brain hot with imagined disasters, the man who once was a king in this land flapped through the countryside in his filthy rags, his boots (ailing away from his feet, his latest beard flying in the wind like a nauseated Chinaman losing his bird's nest soup.

Their camp proved blessedly intact, Pan present and accounted for, molesting a confused doe that he had attracted by his piping. As the poor deer sprang into the bushes, Alobar lifted the pole from his raw shoulders. "Tis done," he said, and lay down in the lean-to, falling immediately into a wife-infested slumber.

Twelve hours later, he awoke and set at "once to mixing the beet pollen distillate with jasmine oil and citron essence, in varying proportions. After five days of experimenting, he hit upon what seemed the ideal mixture: one part beet to twenty parts jasmine to two parts citron, a ratio that inspired him to name the scent K23. The K was for Kudra.

Lake a lobster with a pearl in its claw, the beet held the jasmine firmly without crushing or obscuring it. Beet lifted jasmine, the way a bullnecked partner lifts a ballerina, and the pair came on stage on citron's fluty cue. As if jasmine were a collection of beautiful paintings, beet hung it in the galleries of the nose, insured it against fire or theft, threw a party to celebrate it. Citron mailed the invitations.

If Alobar could trust his nose,
K23
stopped Pan in his tracks. It seemed to throw a mantle—gossamer in places, heavily embroidered in others—over his funk, and however long and hard the goat musk might squirm beneath that cloak, it could not wriggle free. "I wonder if I am only imagining that it is so effective?" worried Alobar. "Perhaps it is wishful smelling." There was nothing to do but submit it to objective testing.

Into a sack, Alobar packed a gallon jug of K23, what remained of the beet pollen distillate (the jasmine and citron were used up), the empty bottle that Kudra had designed, some roasted beets to munch on on the road, and his companion's innocent-looking reeds. Then, at Pan's pace—out there in the back country the peasants still secretly honored him, a fact that put a tad of pep in his step—they set off in the direction of France. In every village through which they passed, Pan—freshly sprinkled with K23—walked ahead, Alobar following at a distance of nine or ten yards. Directed by Alobar, Pan endeavored to brush as closely as possible to people in the street. From Bohemia to Paris, the results were invariably the same.

As the invisible Pan walked by, people's eyebrows would raise, their noses would tilt, and they would begin to turn toward the source of the scent, looks of expectation or ill-concealed delight forming on their faces. Halfway into the turn, however, that expression would be abruptly dislodged by a twitch of embarrassment, and, reddening slightly, the person would turn away, as if to look directly at the origin of such a fragrance might violate an intimacy sacred even to an unrefined yokel. Bemused smiles involuntarily parting their lips, they would continue on their way for a few yards, when, at a safe distance and no longer able to resist, they would stop and slowly look back, smiling all the while, only to find that the emanator of the aroma had—so they believed—turned a corner or disappeared through a doorway. Off they would go then, not really disappointed, some fantasy or other obviously drawing a grass blade lightly along the genitals of their minds.

Now Alobar was hardly expert, but he realized that he had concocted a unique and genuinely amazing perfume, a fragrance whose possibilities extended far beyond its worth— praise the morning star for that worth!—as a cover-up for the Horned One's fetid ooze.. Kudra had predicted it, had she not? She had said, at least, that she wished the perfume for Alobar and her as much as for Pan.

On the outskirts of Paris, where they rested beneath a stone bridge, waiting for darkness before daring to enter the city, Alobar filled the bluish bottle to the brim with
K23.
He put its stopper in. He pressed it to his tear-wet cheeks.

It was late September, there were tambourines of frost in the air. Alobar and Pan crossed the great city, their breath always one step ahead of them. Man's breath and god's breath looked identical, congealed in the urban night. Their footsteps, on the other hand, were distinctly different—the bum flap of Alobar's boots, the blacksmith chisel of Pan's hooves— but they led to the same destination over the rigid effervescence of cobblestones.

The incense shop was just as they had left it, boarded up and blocked by a crude wooden cross. Apparently the monks were giving it a wide berth. Had Alobar stopped off at the neighboring brewery/perfumery, he would have caught the abbot discussing the sale of the business to an enterprising fragrance broker named Guy LeFever. At that very moment, LeFever was inquiring about the possibility of locating the owner of the incense shop and purchasing it as well, for he had heard that its inventory was quite valuable and in disuse, but the abbot, who was sleeping better those nights and taking no chances, wrung his lily hands and cried, "No, no, do not pursue it."

As deftly as possible, Alobar pried open a rear window. He and Pan crawled in. Alobar's heart was beating more loudly than Pan's hoofbeats as they climbed the stairs. The door to the sitting room was opened with a creak. Alobar did not recall that it had ever creaked before.

It seems there should have been a harvest moon that night, but not a cuff link of moonlight was in evidence. Perhaps the moon was spending the evening at Versailles. In any case, Alobar didn't really require a moon to see that nothing in the room had changed. The pale reach of a streetlamp was sufficient to illuminate the sad tableau: his note, the single shoe, the balls of dust.

He avoided going inside, but, rather, leaned across the threshold just far enough to set down the bottle of
K23,
having first removed its stopper. He shut the door briskly, as if the breeze from the door might speed a waft of perfume toward the Other Side.

Upon the bed where he, a latecomer to kissing, had kissed so much of her, he lay the night, weeping, dozing, waking to weep once more. Throughout the morning he lay there, a pillow, which he imagined to bear some scent of her ebony hair, pasted to his face. It was past noon when he finally released himself from the twist of marriage-stained sheets. Lint in his beard, burrs of salt in the corners of his eyes, he padded barefoot to the sitting room to fetch the bottle. Pan was up and would be needing a fix.

As bait,
K23
had failed—for the time being, at any rate. Alobar had heard no sound from the sitting room during the night, and now, creaking open the door, he saw that his note still lay there, beneath the forlorn shoe. But wait! Hadn't he tucked the note
inside
the shoe?! And hadn't the shoe been placed in the very center of the carpet, whereas it now lay somewhat off to the right, closer to the fireplace!?!

Shaking like a wedding announcement in a misogamist's fist, Alobar examined the shoe, unfolded and reread the note. He turned them over and over. He even sniffed them. There were no marks, no odors, nothing unusual in any way. Yet they had been moved, he was positive of that! The question was, had they been moved during the night—in which case, the perfume was a lure, after all—or sometime during the preceding five months? The light had been so dim, his emotions so swollen on the previous evening that he easily could have overlooked such a slight, though significant, displacement.

Unable to learn anything from the slipper or paper, he scrutinized the room itself, patrolling the carpet, inch by dusty inch. Nothing. The walls, too, were a tabula rasa. When his gaze settled on the fireplace, however, his spine was straightened by a fulminous jolt. On the mantelpiece, next to Kudra's beloved silver teapot, a word had been written in the dust!

Yes, someone, using a fingertip as implement, had plowed a grafitto on the surface of the marble, where the dust lay thick as fur. The script, while instantly familiar, was not Kudra's style, however, nor was the word in her single written language. When Kudra had finally become literate, it was French that she learned to read and write. The word on the mantelpiece was from the Slavo-Nordic tongue that his clan had used to speak of battles, bear hunts, beet harvests, and broken mirrors, and the handwriting was that of the only woman in his kingdom with the ability to write that language: Wren.

For a long time, Alobar just stood there, grasping the mantel ledge for support. So shocked was he by the implications of language and penmanship that he didn't even consider content. When at last he turned his attention to it, his bafflement only increased. The word was a transitive verb, an exclamation, a command, of which an exact English translation is impossible. The closest equivalent probably would be the phrase:

Lighten up!

Lighten up, indeed. Against his better judgment and to Pan's chagrin, Alobar remained in the flat for a week, subsisting oh crusts of stale bread and flakes of moldy cheese. Each night he placed the open bottle of
K23
in the sitting room, each morning he rushed in and searched for messages in the dust. There were none. That is, there was but one, the one and only:
Erleichda.
"Lighten up!"

Alobar watched the last grain of green cheese work its way down Pan's invisible gullet while some morbid hymn about the gore of Christ drifted over from across the street. He chewed a mouthful of dried blossoms from the shop's supply. They tasted like Grendel's underpants. He spat them out, wiped his beard with his sleeve, and asked, "What shall we cook for dinner? The drapes?" Had Guy LeFever, who was next door closing his deal with the abbot, overheard him, the businessman might have snapped, "Not drapes, you idiot, draperies. Drape is a verb." LeFever did
not
overhear him, but Alobar knew that it was merely a matter of time before one of the monks did hear him, or spot him through a window (the upper ones were not boarded), a prospect that caused his empty stomach to rattle its chains.

He was sitting there in the universal slouch of hopelessness, the old droop of despair, when he felt the pressure of Pan's hand on his arm. The god had never touched him before, and Alobar had to confess that his first reaction was that he must defend himself against intended buggery. Pan simply squeezed him, however, and remarked, "Death hath more than one way to defeat a man, it seems. Death bests thee even while thou liveth." Then he walked away, his hooves beating a slow rat-a-tat on the floorboards, pausing to call over his presumed shoulder, "Puny homer."

That must have done it. Alobar slumped there for another quarter-hour, then rose, bathed, shaved off his tear-encrusted beard, donned his finest clothes, polished his spare boots, pulled on and powdered the frazzled wig that Pan had dragged home from Descartes's funeral, and beckoning to the god, who may or may not have been smiling, slipped recklessly out of the shop while the sun's seal was still affixed to the scroll of the horizon.

Packing the perfume, beet distillate, and little else, the pair made its way to Marseilles, where the last ship of the season was preparing .to sail for New France.

For more than a decade, the French had dominated the Great Lakes region of what would eventually be called North America, but unlike the English and Spanish, the French tended to view the New World in terms of its spoils—furs, fish, Christian converts, and a possible westward route to the Indies—rather than as a place to build homes, towns, and a new life. Disease, attacks from hostile Iroquois, and a major earthquake in Quebec in 1663 had brought its fur-trading company to the brink of ruin and set weary settlers to crying "Back to France!" before Louis XIV stopped waltzing long enough to rectify matters. Rumors of a mighty and mysterious river flowing southward from the Great Lakes, perhaps as far as the Pacific, had reached King Louis, and, murmuring "Mississippi, Mississippi", into his scented hankie, he raised New France to the status of a royal province, secured it with a regiment of highly trained soldiers, and appointed a capable executive to oversee its internal affairs. Henceforth, Louis decreed, qualified settlers (those with skills) would take precedence over missionaries and trappers on the ships to Montreal.