The Winged Histories (25 page)

Children run through the yards, chasing each other. Dogs are snapping at bones. And we sit here, immobilized by silence. The house is hushed and empty, it seems as if even the servants have gone away, taking with them all naturalness, light, and color. Life, real life, is banished to the golden, bread-smelling amadesh, where a little window is open to let out the heat, where the cook sits with her feet soaking in a basin and Nenya takes off her kerchief to let the servants’ children plait her hair. Life is in the morning room, peeping from under the bearskin rug. It is in the little parlor where, on the day before Tanbrivaud, Siski and Tav and their mother will hang up ribbons and evergreen branches, bursting with laughter, standing on the hard leather chairs. The children cover their mouths when they laugh, they hide behind the curtains. Their mother is purposeful, lively, like anyone’s mother. She scolds them, chases them with the branches. Then suddenly she raises her hand. “Shh
.
” On her cheek a pale mark like a star.

In the dining room, the stranger raises his glass. He stares before him at the candles. He is the author of this enervating silence. For them, for his family, silence and contempt. It is for others that he unpacks the jewels of his intellect and charm. She has seen him hold a room full of visitors spellbound with his talk, convulse the most sober listener with his wit. From the old conservatory where he spends his evenings alone or with the doctor, she has often heard his shouts of unnatural laughter. Yes, he laughs until he chokes, he cackles, he pounds on the table. But not here. Here he sets his glass down by his plate. He says something, she doesn’t know what, something that makes her mother tilt her head, a public smile crystallizing on her lips.

“Perhaps not necessary,” her mother murmurs.

He goes on talking, he is talking now about money, lamp oil, wood. “The earlier you rise, the more wood you consume. You sit in that parlor of yours, a huge room, and heat the whole place for seven hours.”

Her mother laughs, a little frown of pain denting her brow. “Oh, never seven hours. Never that long.”

Siski looks at the window but she can only see their reflections now, the night is too dark, the dining room too bright. She sees her mother’s image motion for Fodok, order more apples, the servants mustn’t hear them argue, it wouldn’
t do.

A familiar despair, as easily recognizable as home itself, comes in from the night and the desert, from all directions. Don’t say anything, don’t look. For evil is here, among the plates. Afterward everyone will rise, fleeing that high cold room. The children will go to the parlor, running, bumping into the walls, shoving each other, giggling, behaving as they think other children do. In the parlor Dasya will throw himself on the floor in front of the fire. “Alas my heart, I’ve eaten enough for fifty men.” Tav will string the little bow she carved that afternoon and pursue them until bedtime with her toy arrows. “Stop it!” Siski shrieks, flinging herself behind the couch. “I don’t want to play, I mean it, kad shedyamud.” But she does want to play. The restlessness, the need for movement and light, is terrible. She rolls on the skin rug, laughing, clutching her ribs.

Sing more, play more, make more noise. Father is in the conservatory cutting up cakes of bolma, he won’t hear. Subdued at last, exhausted, they go upstairs where they can hear their mother playing the limike in her dressing room.

Oh joyful the morning, the fairest is walking

on field and on hillside her blossoms to shed.

Every night the same tune, a very beautiful tune by Hailar the Blind, that master of rhythm, harmony, and mathematics. She plays it every night, again and again. Sometimes she sings. The children fall asleep to those complex and ordered tones. She is not talented; music is difficult for her, she makes mistakes, goes back to repeat the most intricate measures. She plays it quickly, as if she would feel how fast her fingers are able to move, and then slowly as if to drain each note of its essence. Sitting cross-legged on the low flat couch, not looking in the mirror. About her the light of the porcelain Nainish lamp. She plays. On the wall hangs a portrait of her father in an ebony frame, below it a painting of Faluidhen she made herself, long ago.

Dim gray walls relieved by clusters of roses. No one knows why she plays the same air every night, that song and no other. Perhaps, on the wave of music, she returns to the fresh, cold climate of the north, to the vast pink orchards, to the pines. Or perhaps the challenge of Hailar’s composition enables her to forget, for an hour, the relentlessness of her life. Or perhaps the music she loves so dearly compensates her for the hardships, the losses coming one after the other. The struggle to maintain the house, to keep from having to sell the carriage, give up the tutor for the children, cut down the woods. For the battle to keep dishonor at bay, the necessity to smile, to lie, every day. And for her husband, always for him. Yes, perhaps those liquid notes and the pleasure of creating them each night is a recompense for his disappearances to Tevlas, for the money he spends which he will never explain. For her suspicions, her secret tears, the sobs she smothers with her pillow. For the humiliation she suffers when one of the servants knocks at her door because the master is lying unconscious in a hallway, and she must give permission for him to be carried upstairs, undressed, rolled into bed, so that the children will not discover him in the morning. For the night she glanced from the window, having heard a noise below, and saw him urinating drunkenly in the garden. For his coldness, his rebuffs. The way he mocks her for praying, calls her a fool, sneers at all her interests and amusements. And the way that the children, as an extension of her, meet with the same repulsion and scorn. The way they shrink from him with their huge despairing eyes—her children who are so eager to please, so sensitive that the least unpleasant word brings out great bruises on their hearts. For the way that the house has become a place of sighs, a trackless wasteland in which happiness is kept hidden like a crime. On holidays the children cluster whispering in her dressing room, unwrapping their little presents with cold fingers.

And then there are the sudden changes, his violence, his caprices. The gifts that overwhelm with their strange brilliance. The Bainish gown he purchased for her, its skirt encrusted with Nissian rubies, or, for Siski, an astonishing, princely horse. And the outings, abruptly decided upon, the excursions to Solfian in an open wagon. The wind pulls furiously at the children’s flying hair. Seated on bales of straw, frightened, disheveled, they cling to one another, jolting over the roads in an ashen twilight. It takes too long to get to the wood; they are hungry, thirsty, desperate. Their father’s face grows harder as it becomes clear his plan has failed. By the time the little rush lights are lit, those lights which are meant to give them so much pleasure, Siski is weeping softly and Tav has fallen asleep.

Oh joyful the morning, the fairest is walking

on field and on hillside her blossoms to shed.

Siski looks at her father. She looks at him. She hears his voice. “I’m only trying to make a bit of conversation.” A flash of movement, the quiver of a whip. He has thrown his napkin down. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? Conversation over dinner.”

He reaches for a candle, and the light drawn close picks out the gray in his beard and illuminates his handsome, hawk-like, deep-lined face. A face that seems almost petrified, except for the roving and fiery eyes. He lights his cheroot, dripping wax on the tablecloth.

“Careful,” her mother says, very quickly, not thinking.

“What did you say to me?”

He stares.

Her mother’s eyes are downcast, her fingers fluttering. “It’s nothing, it’s only—the tablecloth, you’re dripping—”

“
And isn
’t this my own house? And can’t I spill whatever I like on the tablecloth?”

The same, every night, the same weariness and oppression. No one eats.

Siski looks at him, the world about her beginning to dissolve. No, it is not the same every night. Tonight it is not the same.

“It’s because Mother has to clean the linen,” she says.

Silence. He looks at her in stupefaction before the eyes with their discolored whites and scarlet veins begin to gather their fury. She hurries, afraid she won’t be able to finish.

“It’s because she has to clean the tablecloths, that’s why she doesn’t like them to get stained.”

Already her eyes are full of tears. He sits back in his chair, cold, sarcastic. “I suppose she doesn’t have servants to wash the tablecloths. Or perhaps she makes you wash them, is that it?”

She hears herself stammering. “She. She has to ask Nenya. It makes extra work, she doesn’t like it— ”

And with shame, rage, loathing, she feels herself beginning to sob, because it’s horrible, this existence, ignoble, demeaning. And because, by weeping, she has already lost.

“You dare to open your mouth. You killed that horse. You’ve cost me more money than your mother with her firewood.”

She cannot see him anymore; the table slips and blends with the wall, swirling about her, melting in the light. She imagines the others staring at her in horror, at this violent display, this scene. But she has gone too far to stop. “Mother gets up early in the morning to do the accounts,” she cries, weeping and shaking, her hands clenched on the table. “She needs the wood, she needs it. She always saves, she never wastes anything. Let her have the firewood from my bedroom, I don’t want it.”

“Siski,” her mother says.

“No,” her father interrupts, his smile malicious and triumphant. “She says she doesn’t want it. Very well, you won’t have a fire, but you won’t give the wood to your mother because it is not yours to give. It is mine.”

Pressing. Pressing.
“Pressing and pressing,” she sobs. “Pressing on everything all the time.” She kneels at the edge of the sunken garden, her face on the low stone wall that is dusted with snow. She turns her head, rubbing her cheeks and forehead on the rugged stone. Her hand tight over her heart where she feels it pressing. Why is it? Why? Why all the time? Stars burst and glitter behind her eyes, the steadying pain of her forehead stung by snow. Still it keeps pressing and it is possible to die here in the dark, deserted garden.

To die of it. To die. She shivers, snow is on her neck, her knees are wet, her feet numb in the embroidered slippers. She turns her head again. Snow on her eyelids. Someone comes and stands beside her and she feels that it is Dasya.

He does not speak. She raises her head. Lights in the house behind him and she knows that he can see her upturned face. She cannot speak of it, she would rather die. “
Tuik is dead,
” she chokes. “I killed him. And you’re not happy here anymore.”

He crouches beside her, jacketless in the cold. “I am happy.”

She shakes her head. “You’re not.”

She wonders if Aunt Mardith took him aside at Faluidhen. If he, too, is under the fog of shame. Is that why he is so strange with her, so distant?

“Siski,” he says. “Look, stand up. You can’t stay there.”

He pulls her up. Suddenly she feels quiet, remote. As if all the world has fallen away from them. He holds her hand as they walk to the end of the garden and stand looking out at the snow-dark night. Two figures in a shapeless landscape.

All winter her room remains cold. She tells herself she’ll grow used to it. Nenya brings her heated bricks in secret. “Here, sudaidi.” Her guilty face, the bricks wrapped in a sheet, her glance down the corridor as she thrusts the bundle into Siski’s arms. And before there is time to thank her she has hurried off toward the stairs, her kerchief shining in the dark and then winking out. Silence. The lamp on the desk seems smaller, pale. And Siski understands that it was really the glow of the fire that lit the room in the past.

It takes a long time for the bricks to heat the bed. Her book shakes in her hands. She tells herself that everything is the same, just the same. But she cannot read the beloved words. The forget-me-nots in the margins quiver and turn to clouds in the dazzle of her tears. She wipes her eyes on her wrist and tries again. The green green wood. She bites her lip. At last she lays down the book and sobs in her crossed arms. But in the morning she is pale, defiant. No one must speak of it. She snaps when her mother tries to comfort her.

And very soon no one speaks of it, as if nothing ever happened. In that cheerless chamber she goes to bed each night. Here she retires to be alone, to weep, to nurse her flayed heart when she learns that Uncle Fenya has bought all but a tiny strip of the farm. Lying under the blankets in the dark. Once, in the little parlor, her father himself attempts to speak to her. “How was your night?” he asks gruffly. “Fine,” she says, and leaves the room. That night his hard eyes flash as he mocks her across the table.

But still there are the conventional gestures, the meals, the celebrations, at the end of the year the colored lights in the avla. She stands at the window, behind her the scraping of the Tevlasi orchestra,
the stamping of spurred and booted feet. Someone takes her arm and she turns, the lamplight in her eyes. Mun Vidara wears black and has black eyebrows. Her face is tense and eager and her creaking dress smells sharply of ammonia, dried sweat, and eau de cologne. She drags a young man forward by the elbow. “It’
s our Tadi!
” she shrieks, beaming with her long dun-colored teeth. “You’d never have known him, would you?”

Siski smiles and shakes her head, regarding the tall soft-bodied youth with the curling hair. Behind him a blur of dancers, colored skirts unfurling in light. She hears her father’s wheezing, delighted laugh, his special laugh for responding to flattery, and sees him leaning heavily on Em Makov’s shoulder. “That’s it!” he shouts. “Exactly what he said. And I said to him, we’ll have another bottle, these ladies are still thirsty!” Evergreen boughs hang limply on the walls. It is the Feast of Lamps, the annual holiday ball at Ashenlo.

Tadi does not dance badly. He talks of Eilam, the shops, the carriages, “
Vai,
it makes our Tevlas look like a ’Rouni farm.” She answers vaguely, looking over his shoulder. She sees her mother beside the table of drinks, discussing something with Nenya. Nenya wears a small crown of satin flowers for the occasion and an apron embroidered with heraldic greyhounds. Her mother wears the same gown she wore last year, a crimson silk refurbished with black lace borders at neck and hem.