Palimpsest

Agostino had taken Anoud to his house while the three of them talked—he had at first been delighted with November, and they had played the visitor's game of half-signed, half-remembered phrase-book slivers of the other's language. But Ludo had found himself suddenly jealous, and he did not know who he envied more. None of them were playful and dear with him. When Nerezza had finally returned home, however, and seen the shape of things, she had crumpled to the ground as though the steel strings which had held her all this time were slashed through and dashed against her walls.

“Get her out,” Nerezza had begged, over and over. “Get her out. If we cannot have our Radya, he cannot have her. He can't.”

November had gone to her and taken her in her arms. Ludo could see she was hardly more used to this than Nerezza herself, but she held Nerezza's dark head under her chin and rocked her, and sang softly to her, and Nerezza bore it. She bore it and did not protest, but her jaw clenched, she ground her teeth, nonetheless. They spoke to each other in English, and he did not understand them. But he had asked his eel-girl to translate, and the tears had come again.

Nerezza looked at the newcomer with black and glittering eyes. In the bald apartment light, November was even less impressive-looking than she had been at the baths, her scars deep, her mutilated hand undisguisable. And the mark on her face—what she must have borne, unable to hide herself as they could! She was a ruin of a woman, and as thus he found her calming, like the white-stoned forum.

Slowly, Nerezza began to nod, and he suspected it was because to look at November was to know it had not been easy for her, not in the smallest part, and Nerezza saw her own grief writ in blood and ink and scar tissue on the American woman's body. He saw November take a deep breath, and her hands trembled. Whatever she was saying was intricate, painful for her, and she was afraid of it. He longed to reach out and touch her face—would she, lithe ibex, leap from him to land on her horns and bounce up, bounding off into meadows he could not touch? Nerezza turned to him, not meeting his gaze.

“This is what she says, Ludo. If you can make sense of it, good luck to you. ‘These are the folk who may pass into the kingdom of heaven: the grief-stricken, lovers, scholars of a certain obsessive disposition. Brute beasts. Women who have become as men and men who have become as women. Writers of books with long titles. Only those knights who have failed to touch the Grail. Industrious women. You, and I, and a boy named Oleg, and a girl with blue hair.’”

Nerezza was crying again. She turned to November, speaking rapidly, angrily, and all Ludovico could understand was the name Radoslav, repeated and repeated, desperately added to the list. But Ludo hardly heard Nerezza. He stared at November, her wet and hopeful eyes. She thought he would not understand. That he would think her words irrelevant. But he did know, he understood, for he had loved St. Isidore all his life, an encyclopaedist, a man whose intellect was confined in long, precise, radiant columns of text, illuminated lists which placed together circumscribed the world.

Nerezza looked back and forth between them, helpless and livid.

“Another one is coming,” she hissed in Italian. “I heard her talking on the telephone. I hate you both, and I curse you, as well as I am able to curse anything. You blithely stumble into this, and in a few weeks you've done what I can never, never do. Do you understand? Radoslav is dead. None of us can ever go. Not ever. And it took us years to find each other. It took everything from us. Husbands, wives, jobs, children. You're like a rich man's son, who has earned nothing in his life and is given everything. I let you live in my house and you cover it with your shit. I hate you. I hate you.” Her voice was even and furious, it did not hitch or break, and he could see the sparks of her eel-flesh grimly blue at her ears.

“Nerezza,” November said, “Nerezza. Nerezza.”

November kissed her reddened forehead. “I'm sorry,” she whispered, over and over. “I'm sorry.” And she kissed her mouth, her jaw, her ear, her neck, trying to kiss everything hard of her away, and if he had not felt the bees in her, if he had not heard them sing, he would not have understood how November, broken and battered as she was, could have the courage to comfort the wildness, the bestial scream of Nerezza.

But Nerezza would not let herself be kissed. She was stiff and cold, her body held tight and inviolable. She clamped her eyes onto Ludo, full of bile and bitter loathing.

Then Nerezza's eyes shone, and suddenly she smiled. She put her arms around November, never taking her gaze from Ludo, and let herself warm, alight, feign ardor. Ludo shuddered. What had she hatched in that lightless heart?

Nerezza clung to November as the bee-stung woman pushed the top of her own green dress down to her waist and held her breasts out like St. Agatha, an offering. November opened her eyes and caught his gaze over Nerezza's shuddering body. Ludo could not tell if the shuddering was false or true. She was whispering in Italian, too ashamed to be understood, and Ludo knew the beekeeper could not hear it, and vowed to explain it to her, when he saw her on the other side of night.

“Am I, November?” Nerezza was saying. “Am I among the folk who are permitted to enter the kingdom of heaven? Tell me. Tell me.”

He left them then. He did not want to watch. He did not want to see.

But he knew November now, he knew her, and she was his Isidore, his Isidora, and he would tell her everything, everything he knew, everything engraved in his marrow, when all this was done and they could speak, and drink together wine like blood, through the starry night and into day.

PART V:

THE GREEN WIND

THERE IS A PLACE on the far western edge of Palimpsest where the tracks have fallen into disrepair. It is wild and sunny, furry with green wheat and snarling raspberry vines. An olive tree, some speculate, rooted out the rails, while others are certain that the nearby sheep are the culprits, that they gnawed at the tracks until they broke, and surely their owner ought to be held responsible for damages. No one has volunteered to take up the wig and adjudicate the issue, and so lonely moth-bothered Oathusk Station has slid slowly and genteelly into disuse. It was not often frequented even in the first heady days of the transit system, and so few consider it a great los

s, save, perhaps, for enthusiasts of the particular pastoral style of architecture employed in the station house, whose rosebud windows were once a mild source of pride.

The trains did not discover the breach in the tracks for some time. They were distracted, the season was not right for westbound travel, the Missal Line had gone into heat early for three years run-ning-the life of a train is ever tossed by strange and chthonic tides. But as of late some few of them have begun to nose around Oathusk, sniffing the wind for news of the rosebud windows, of the black-faced sheep, of stationmasters gone to seed and drink. A train or two came quite close to the break, but reared in alarum and proceeded east into the comforting arms of the city once more.

There is concern, in the highest echelons of sport commuters, that a train might one day become bold enough to jump the tracks at Oathusk and escape Palimpsest altogether, into the wilds beyond and the mountains, through the wide farms and pastureland, and from thence who knows? Yet still others deride this idea as the worst sort of fancy: the trains are happy, they are loved, they are well-fed and well-mated. In the midst of debate, the tracks go unrepaired. The wheat bends the wind at Oathusk, and the stars watch the raspberries grow long.

The next carriage is empty. It is a long, vast stretch of new tatami mats, redolent and bright green, their ribbons black and gold. Sei cannot begin to count them. There is a slender station map like an ukiyo-e painting on one wall, and the room shakes like a carriage, but there are no benches, no rails. It is a place she knows and does not wish to.

“No,” she groans. “I don't want to be here.”

“But it is your home,” the Third Rail says. Plenitude scratches at her neck encouragingly.

“I don't like it, I don't want it. I told you. I want to go to the next car. The rabbit said there were horses.”

The Third Rail shakes her long head. She strides to the center of the room and Sei knows what will happen but she cannot bear it, she cannot bear this. “Why?” she yells at the Third Rail's back. “What purpose could this possibly serve?”

The Third Rail turns and seats herself in the great room, letting her unlined kimono pool out around her and smoothing her long hair into two flat planks. She reaches into her robes and withdraws an enormous book-it is swollen and waterlogged, and reedy bits of kelp and grass peek out from its pages like ribbonmarks. She opens it on her lap; lake-water splashes out. The Rail beckons Sei with sweetness, as if she is luring a cat from under the bed.

“No,” Sei moans, but she is going to her, could never have done less than go to her.