Palimpsest

I do not mind the hole. It is like a fontanel, where all the parts of my skull come together, and do not fit exactly, not exactly, but well enough. The Albumen drains into this place, and on the other side of the world, a single stone weeps white. The river is thick and the reeds are recalcitrant enough that it long ago became a great Delta, and in this Delta is a city, a small city, a hidden and secret place within the great and sprawling city which has had so many names.

My boys are so close to it now. The gates can smell them. I have let them cheat. I held back the shadows like curtains so that they could meet before they ought to have, before they met the girl with the riverbanks on her face. I was too eager, too eager to see them together, like characters in a play I could not wait for the fourth act. Will you forgive me? Even I require absolution, even I.

There is a little harbor here, places to tie boats. All creatures need boats who are not fish, and even I am not a fish. I watch them with a dozen eyes as they knot their little ship to the pier. I watch them climb onto the long grass of the Delta. You're here, my boys, it will be all right now, I promise. I will look after you. I always have, haven't I?

Ludovico helps Oleg up onto the strand, and there are men and women there watching them, with long, outlandish hair braided up and out like electrical wire, with smooth faces and clothes spangled in stars. They just watch, they do not move. There are houses clustered in patches like mushrooms, with round windows and broad lawns. There are strawberry gardens and cucumbers growing long and fat. It is a pleasant place. Starlight flickers over chimneys puffing sage-smoke. The Albumen crashes into the gaping hole in the center of the city a distance off, a waterfall like snow, and three little mills turn at its crest.

Oleg walks to the nearest man. He is short, mustached, his cheeks round and friendly, a pocketwatch chain dangling absent-mindedly from his pocket.

“Where is Lyudmila?”

The affable man's whiskers droop. “Now,” he says, “which would you prefer? I can pretend I haven't the foggiest, welcome you to Signe-de-Renvoi, plate you up a nice helping of beet-greens and pan-fried koi, and pour you wine that'll make you believe in God. We'll have a nice evening and you can be on your way, whatever way that is. Or I can tell you that she's just in that house there, and she's been crying for weeks over you, and you'll run off before I finish talking and there'll be no beets for anyone-”

But Oleg is already gone. The man chuckles behind him, and Ludovico tries to keep up, but Oleg does not want him there. She is his sister, and the door of the little house makes a satisfying sound as he slams it in Ludo's poor, baffled face.

Lyudmila is sitting in a large green chair, and indeed she is crying, and there is a kettle on in the rear room, and beet-greens sizzling in a pan with golden, buttery koi. She looks up at him with reddened eyes.

“Tell me why,” he says softly.

“Why what?” She sniffles, wiping her nose with her sleeve.

“Why they made you. Why you came to me.”

“What do you want, Oleg? You are so difficult! You are why we have to have this place, why we have fought to carve it out of a rushing river and three blades of grass. It is so exhausting to be always guessing. I ran away because you wanted something to chase. I did not come back because you knew you did not deserve it. I am only crying because I thought you would want it.” Abruptly, she smiles brilliantly abject joy spilling over her face. “I can be overjoyed to see you, too, or scorn you and make you grovel, I can whip you like a horse to do your penance. Just tell me, just tell me, please.”

“Mila, stop it!”

> “I came to you, Oleg, I came to you, a whole city in one body, because you were so alone, and you missed her so much. I wanted you to love me, me, the girl from Novgorod and the city, together, inseparable, the child of their mingling. I wanted you to be happy. I made shoulders and feet and breasts and hair out of the substance of you. I did my best.”

“Why me?”

Lyudmila cocks her head to one side, finchlike. “Who said it was just you? I am a Pecia. One manuscript in many pieces, many copies. I am Palimpsest, many pieces in one manuscript. I do it for everyone who weeps and longs and wants. I cannot turn my back on want. It calls me, as though I were a unicorn and it a virgin. It is the least I can do-it is so hard to get here, you know. I wanted you. You wanted your sister. It was easy for me.”

“I wanted my real sister, in the real world, as she has always been, in her red dress and her wet hair.”

Lyudmila stands and crosses to him. She takes her face in his hands and her eyes are so big, so gentle and sorry, and she kisses him like a sweetheart, like a good woman courting a lost soul. “Oleg,” she whispers, “my poor boy. My poor, poor child. There is no Lyudmila in that world. There has never been. Little Mila died before you were born and she never left the cities of the dead. She works in a hat shop there and has a little cat. You take pills to keep your hallucination away, and they do not always work, so she appears to come and go. You, in that place called New York, have seen and heard many things that are not there, and that is what they call madness.”

Oleg shudders and sobs without sound or tears against her, and she smells so much like his Mila, of wet reeds and high clouds, and he did not want to hear this, he did not want to hear it on the boat and he does not want to hear it now. He buries his face in her breast, seeking her comfort, blindly knowing it to be true, unable to turn his heart to look it in the eye.

“We come here, Oleg. The Pecia, when we are not wanted anymore. We plant strawberries and raise goats. We make holiday cakes and marry and have our dances known to no other. We are Pecia; together we are one long book of marvelous things. But I want to be Lyudmila. We all want to be what we were made to be. It is in our nature to want such things. We are set in motion, we cannot be stopped, and we want to fulfill our part. To love the crying, wretched folk who stumble into us, into this city, into the body of Palimpsest which is also streets and avenues and cliffs and a river and a very deep hole. You tell the city so many things, secret things, like lovers curled up in its arms, in my arms. How can I give in return less than my own secret, best things?”

“I am sorry I hurt you.”

“You did not hurt me, Oleg. Unless you want to have hurt me. At your word bruises will bloom on my belly and blood will trickle from my cheeks. Or I will kiss you and tell you stories about the Prince of Drowning, who is a dashing fellow with blue boots, and we will eat fish together and plant rhubarb under the moon.”

Oleg kisses her sternum, her neck, her cheek, her eyelids. He wants to choose something brighter, shinier. Something doctors would approve of, would judge “progress.” But she is so close, and she smells like a river, and he is not a doctor. “Be her. Be my Mila. Forget, forget that you were ever a Pecia, forget everything in you that is Palimpsest and be my sister, be from Novgorod, be a dead girl who loves me. And let me forget, too. When I see you again, let me forget that I knew you were a false Mila. Let me forget that you told me she was never real. Let me believe forever that you are my own girl, who never left me. Let me forget it all. There can be no love between strangers. Be Lyudmila.”

The Pecia closes her eyes and tears tremble in her lashes. She smiles and the room quavers from the sadness of it. Oleg kisses her mouth and she returns it, hungrily, as hungrily as the dead ever are for warmth and blood and living, breathing lovers. She clutches the small of his back to her and pulls him onto the great green chair, where he can taste, on her tongue, the Volkhov, flowing muddy and sweet and deep between them.

THREE

A HOUSE OF NO WORDS

Oleg spent half a day helping November decide whether or not a suitcase was strictly necessary. They decided to err on the side of caution, and packed each of them a change of clothes and toothbrushes. She was not what he thought she would be, the thing so full of golden electricity that he could feel in Palimpsest just beyond the borders of himself. She was a ruin to look at, and he supposed he was too. They had all paid so much to cross the river before them. Two coins for each of them, perhaps so that the other one, the Japanese girl they did not yet know, could cross freely, painlessly, and the ferryman never catch her eye.

Ludo had given Oleg a small key, a present—it unlocked nothing, but was beautiful, small and exquisite, silver and old. He wore it around his neck now, and felt in small part that it was meant to fit within him, to slip between his bones somehow and force him open.

He had not seen Lyudmila in Italy. It is so much water for her to cross, he thought. She must have been frightened. It was easier to think of her keeping house in the New York apartment than to consider for even a moment what the woman who was and was not Lyudmila had said to him. Only a little while longer, he thought, and it will not be important.