Palimpsest

The red leaves were encased in ice and silver on the day the treaty was signed, on this very spot, where you stand. It is nowhere in particular. It is nowhere special. There is no commemorative sculpture; there is no marker with helpful information to guide the sightseer. The river pounds the cliffs below the streetside, and there is a quiet bakery where a widow named Klavdia weeps into her dough and produces delicate, frosted cakes of tears and holly-berries. She still makes the winter cider, and her tankards are plain.

Casimira wore mourning red that day, and her face was streaked with tears no one could have expected as she signed the broadsheet. Her ships in the harbor below flew red sails and red flags. General Ululiro, her mottled blue sharks head glaring pitilessly unbeaten, at Casimiras bent green scalp, stood for the army, signed for the parliamentary forces.

She was so young, obscenely young, she could not be more than twenty. And yet, she had broken Ululiros spear, the war was done, her single, unassailable desire triu

mphant.

Do not be cold to her, Ululiro, daughter of a noble lamplighter, who danced at the gaslit balls of her youth with such frenzy! The simple truth is, Casimira wanted it more than you despised it, and I am a wanton thing—I answer the want which is keenest.

The frozen leaves fell one by one onto the dais, shattering silently as they alighted. There was no brass band, and no one spoke. Most present were beyond the capability.

In the treaty were provisions for the hundred thousand veterans left maimed and irrevocably mute throughout the city. As is the way of things, their sacred places and comforts have dwindled to a lonely strip of shoreline and a polite nod whenever they are passed in the street. In the meticulous paragraphs are also concessions as to an area of quarantine, and this is that place, this wooden disc, raised slightly above the street, where once the queen of insects and a shark stood side by side and watched the leaves fall.

Though most would prefer not to discuss it, this is where immigrants, permanent residents, once entered the city. When they come again, if they come again, who knows where they may arrive? But long ago they woke here, raw and naked and bleeding, for the ways here were hard, and they exacted their costs with regret and determination.

Klavdia has cakes for them, if they should come again. She fought for their sake, at the loss of an eye and a leg at the knee. Her other leg is a knotted, muscled bear-foot, covered by a time-softened apron. Each morning she sets out cakes and pies to cool on her sill, seeping with red juice. She watches the dais. She is quiet and cradled in her faith that nothing is ever in vain. Casimira told her they would come again.

Ludovico steers their boat through the evening. It is bright and cool, the rain passed, the stars like white and open mouths in the sky. He looks to the young man still hunched over by the bench, watching the milky current bubble by. He wants to say to him: My wife's name is Lucia, and she is here too, and not a copy, she herself. She does not want me. But I cannot stop running after her, as though I am a rabbit and cannot slow down or my little heart will burst. I understand this thing you do. And there is a woman sleeping on Nerezza's hard couch who will understand it too, even if you cannot say a word to her. She is like an ibex, who is clever and wily and strong on the thinnest and highest of peaks. Their fur is like the moon, but if you startle one, they leap with abandon to the earth, where they land gracefully upon their horns, safe and whole, and look never upon you again.

But no, Ludo corrects himself. She is like a human woman. She is like an anchoress chained to herself. And when I looked on her, despite every bruise, I could not remember the name of my wife.

But he finds he cannot say these things, he does not know how to say them to a young stranger in such pain his face is a weal, any more than he knew how to tell November that she was like an ibex or an anchoress. So he says nothing, steering south, and it is not difficult. Every hour on the hour, he kneels by Oleg and whispers in his ear:

“50 Via Manin Daniele.”

Oleg has begun to nod when he speaks, and Ludovico takes this as a victory. They pass below high bluffs, and he does not begin to guess what has occurred there, upon this harbor or those cliffs. It is pleasant, bucolic to him.

But you and I know, and we may appreciate, as the two men glide by, what has transpired to allow their passage.

Lock 19, where the Albumen dips downstream, following a course toward the center of the city, is normally staffed by a bored old mariner, picking his teeth with baleen and writing secret shanties about the beauty of land, the tilling of soil, the baking of bread. A small office houses the more-or-less interchangeable lockmaster-they all keep a potted basil plant, for the scent, and a white cat, for the company. It may well be the same plant and the same cat, from lockmaster to lockmaster No one can be certain. The lock console gleams-polished, upstanding cherry wood and brass. But today there is no old mariner with a cheerful beard chewing basil leaves. Today there a woman with the head of a shark is waiting, and with her the sort of nameless, faceless men who mean to do nameless, faceless things for the sake of their mistress. Behind them a woman with hair like eelskin is staring at her shoes-she has done what she feels is right, and we ought not to blame her.

Ludo pulls a heavy red rope to alert the lockmaster; a long horn sounds low and deep, vibrating in his teeth. Oleg peers over the edge of the boat through heavy rain as the cream of the Albumen drains from the lock, and their little boat descends, slowly towards the lockhouse.

“Thank you,” Oleg says. The rain seems to have wakened him, made him sharper, cleaner. “She's not your sister, I know you don't have to do this.” He looks down at his hands. “She's not my sister, either. I know that. Really… I know that. But a copy is better than a world that doesn't contain her.”

“You may not think so, but I do know what you mean, brother.” Ludo smiles wanly; rain drips from the pleasure boat's awning, from his hair, from his glasses.

“Will it really work? If I come to Rome?”

“I think so.”

Oleg frowns, staring at the lowering waterline. “And if one person says no, if one person thinks that this place is anything but paradise on a silver platter, no one gets to go. That's it, isn't it? If one person takes pills every night to keep themselves from dreaming, three people lose their tickets. Lose everything they want.”

“Please don't say no, Oleg.”

“Can you imagine what it would do to a person, to know that they were standing between three people and that marrow-deep, desperate need?” Oleg covers his mouth, shakes his head, but Ludo cannot share his private revelation, cannot know who he means.

A second horn sounds, and the great, scored walls of the lock rise above them, marble and quartz, old as amber. They drift toward the lockhouse, and there is a moment, just a moment, when Ludovico thinks he sees a shadow behind the boisterous green of a potted basil plant, the shadow of a flat, dark head, tossing back and forth behind the window. But it is nothing-of course it is nothing. No harm can come to him here.

The bow of their boat explodes in a shower of splinters.

Ludo and Oleg reel-the blast shattered the glass window of the lockhouse, and in the rain they can see the shark-headed woman and her servants, her gray-slick skin dull and peeling, her teeth yellow with age and neglect, her pupilless eyes exhausted, wild. Her clothes are brown and ragged, a general s uniform long since gone to moths. She points a ridiculous, old-fashioned blunderbuss at them, a shiny thing with a flared bell. One of the muscled young men at her side reloads it for her.

Behind the shark-headed woman stands Nerezza.

Ludo gapes. He cannot understand what is happening.

“Why? Nerezza, what are you doing?”