Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (13 page)

One evening Tanya overheard Captain Vasojevic trying to console her father, who seemed worried or upset. He was saying: Even octopi can be tricked into grabbing hold of olive branches.— What her father said to that she could not hear.

Now the younger sisters, as was indeed their own desire, began in turn to be married off closer to home than the elder, their destinies as simplified as the concentric blue leaf-waves on their parents' plates. They wove their trousseau-clothes as industriously as a nest of elegant spiders. As each one was wed, she gently kissed her parents, brothers and sisters on the cheek.

As for Tanyotchka, by this time she had the peach-colored skin of a young woman, the creamy face of an Italian beauty. Of course she remained a Serbkina, the kind whose form is more powerful than tears.

If I may be more explicit, perhaps the reason that in later life her father did not entirely understand her was that while he kept his aspirations as uncorrupted as a soldier's well-oiled arquebus, she grew up, as I said, a Triestina, sweetened by her summers in the arbor of grapes and roses,
which, among other more secret things her family's high walls enclosed; and when she heard her father's booted footfalls on the stone walkway, although she invariably leapt up in joy and rushed into his arms, as soon as he had stroked her hair and given her two or three bristly kisses, he turned back to his business, with that sad and watchful expression freezing again on his face, and she, having established that by embracing him again she could delay the resumption of his cares but could never keep them away from him for more than another few instants, learned to let him go, turning away on her own account, in order to avoid the sight of his suffering—not that she even realized that she perceived it, quotidian as it was, and child as
she
was, inhaling life without distinguishing good from bad, which after all would have accomplished nothing anyhow; and likewise drinking in the cool, still, rose-scented afternoons as she sat in the pavilion sewing beside her mother. As crisp as the ivy-shadows on the awning, as sudden as the crow-caws were her experiences of her father, but just as one forgets shadow-patterns, however beautiful, so even now she still misplaced him in his absence, not that she thereby loved or needed him less. Her needle sometimes forgot to flash, hovering instead, like the black bumblebees considering which rose to investigate next; but this dreaminess, which her mother occasionally indulged and her father saw as something else, did not get her behindhand in her tasks. Where her thoughts glided at such times was as much a mystery to others as what might be in her father's neck-pouch, but for a fact the singing of the blackbirds helped her remember, as any true Serb should, the day at Kosovo Polje, Field of Blackbirds, when Prince Lazar got his doom.

The first time that her eldest two brothers, well outfitted with warm goatskin vests, went off to sea, Tanya wept, and her mother slapped her face to scare away the bad luck. The child bowed her head to indicate the submissive repentance she scarcely felt. Then her mother kissed the icon many times, praying for a safe voyage. Tanya willingly did the same. Her mother explained about the evil eye, Satan's watchful greed, the jealousy of men (from which Christ preserve us) and the snares of Death the Huntsman. The flower-engraved copper vessels were hissing on the great block of the stove, while Srdjana, who had pretended not to see anything,
knelt on the floor, and crammed in more wood. Veljko and Petar had ridden down to the ropemaker's to order rigging for Uncle Massimo. Tanya's father was already at the warehouse.

Perhaps her mother said something to him, because a day or two later he took the girl, decently veiled, alone with him to the empty church, whose lower ceiling-domes were elaborate Easter eggs with figures on them, while the upper ones made up a vault of blue being circumnavigated by marching figures; at the highest point of that inner sky stood Christ in a sun of crackling golden flowers; and in the quiet sizzling of the votive candles her father asked her to pray to our heavenly Prince Lazar, whose shoulders are higher than the deck-cannons of any Spanish galleon. This she did, while he crossed himself and murmured beside her; and when they came out, the Canal Grande was black with ships. Her father inquired whether she loved her brothers, and she said yes.— Don't worry, Tanyotchka. My luck will shelter them, even though they've gone with Uncle Stefano.— The girl kissed his hand. Petar drove them home, and there was her mother in the doorway, forming up a warp of fabric from her loom into the air and all the way across the courtyard to the stack of Roman gravestones which everybody now used for any and all purposes.

In those days she often liked to scare herself by making shadows on the wall with her gabled lantern; sometimes a twisted bit of driftwood that one of her brothers brought her would produce some fine weird shape. Whenever her mother caught her, the girl got extra work to do. But when her father noticed, he insisted that she not be punished merely for dreaming. Already she knew that there was something which she would be expected to do one day, something secret and good, which indeed she would come to demand of herself once its meaning announced itself from darkness.

By then she was braiding ropes for her father whenever he allowed her, first the
trecia simplice,
then the wide mesh of the
plagietto con fragio.
She loved more than anything to please him.

He inquired what she desired of him, and she said: To learn as much as you.— Smiling, he rose and went away. No one had ever said that to him before; nor had he asked the question of anyone, even her eldest brother. As she watched him go, she saw that obscene secret care, whatever it
was, swoop back down onto his shoulders. A few days later she cried out in joy when he brought her a brass microscope.

Unlocking his Organum Mathematicum (a fine one made in Würzburg in 1668), he opened to her all the slanted shelves with their many-colored tabs of knowledge.

Here in one pocket were depictions of all seven planets, which truly did, in spite of what her mother and the priest insisted, revolve around the sun, elliptically. She pulled out a card depicting the moon's hideous face, and this in one stroke destroyed her pleasure in lunar nights. Once a lady had come in to pray at church; from a distance she was radiant; then she drew near the altar, and the mother dug her fingernails into Tanyotchka's wrist in disgust, for here was a syphilitic prostitute, whose leprous face was pitted with stinking sores. Her kindly father being absent, the men rushed to turn her out, thrusting at her with sticks until she ran away. Then her mother made all the children wash their faces and hands in rosewater. The lunar disk expressed this diseased character. But her father informed her that what appeared to be imperfections were nothing more or less than mountains and seas, irregular like our own. The girl wished to know whether there were people on the moon. Before he could answer, her mother laughed at her.— Father says that knowledge will save us! explained Tanya; her mother slapped her mouth.

And in another pocket were ships in profile passing a two-dimensional undulating Turkish coast of domes, minarets and clusters of rectangular edifices. She knew all too well that her father had been thereabouts. She raised the magnifying loupe, and with a thrill of horror discovered a Turkish woman in a green overmantle and a long white dress with red flowers. She asked whether all Turks were evil, as Uncle Massimo said. Stroking her hair for an instant, her father departed. She heard the carriage bearing him away; he was gone near about two months, and no news came. That night her mother prayed to Saint Thomas, who guards the rain-clouds.

She learned to operate the two disk-tiers of her father's solar clock, to name each monster and animal painted on his celestial globe. She could already slide the bronze knob of the dromoscope as accurately as Nicola and Vuk; she was better at it than Veljko. Smiling, her father softly clapped his hands to watch her. Of course he'd never take her to sea.

Veljko had been jealous about the Organum Mathematicum, but their father brought the proper gift for him: a crocodile mummy from Umm-el-Baragât, which when Petar carried it from the warehouse was still wrapped in papyrus: crumbly, dingy stuff, inexplicably valued by their father, who removed it with extreme care and took it off to his study. The crocodile stank, but Veljko loved it. Tanya helped him improve its eyes with vermilion beads. Unfortunately, he carried it out into the garden one day, in hopes of scaring Srdjana, and before she could oblige him the watchdogs had devoured it.

As for Vuk and Nicola, the only presents their father now gave them were coins of various realms, all fungible; that satisfied them best.

Years after he was gone, Tanya wondered whether he had wished to tell her more about his youth in Serbia. Why she knew so little was mysterious in and of itself. Uncle Stefano's daughters, for instance, loved to prattle about their high stone house, as if they could remember it. Uncle Alessandro first made friends with her brothers by telling over the Turks he had killed; of the three boys, Nicola especially adored him, and rushed to mend ropes for him or even tar the deck, if only he could be near him. Jovo Cirtovich was, perhaps, shy. On rare occasions Tanya overheard him relating to her proud and breathless brothers some family tale of raid or ambush, in which he never signified.— Remember well, he'd say. There were Cirtovices at Kosovo.— To the daughters he declined to mention such things, and so she did not inquire, a respectfully meant omission which in old age she regretted. Once for no reason he described that same stone house, which had smelled of sausages, tobacco and ancient wheat, and Tanya, a little afraid of being unseemly, inquired about her grandmother.— Much like your mother, he replied. She cared for all of us, without many words.— And Grandfather? Uncle Florio says he died a hero.— Marking the ledger with his forefinger, he looked up to say: He was a great man, praise be to God. Now, Tanyotchka, have you found the mistake in Uncle Massimo's invoice?

There came the evening when, called urgently to save the church from fire, her father rode there with Petar and all her brothers and uncles, and Tanya found the key left in the lock of his ebony coffer. That time she was a good girl. A week after that, her father was at the warehouse, her mother in the garden caring for the lilies, her most prized flowers; her
sisters were weaving and spinning for their dowry chests. Tanya had finished verifying the consignment sheets of a cargo of olive oil. One barrel was unaccounted for. Nicola rushed in, peeped into the looking-glass as earnestly as the helmsman watches the dog vane, then departed, very worked up, yet somehow pleased with himself. Where was Petar? The girl put her ear to the stable door and heard his snoring. Yes, she was safe, and would now accomplish her object. Opening the chest, she saw a hoard of secret books. They were all about death. Her Uncle Florio had once sworn to her that every Turk is as a werewolf who devours children's flesh—and here was a tract which taught how any man could become just such a monster, by going to a certain island and lifting a certain white stone. What had her father to do with that? Terrified, the girl reclosed the lid and locked it, saying nothing to anyone. The next time they ate together, she watched her father's teeth. Half reassured, she rendered herself wholly so by promising herself that those books were not what she had believed. She was learning how to keep secrets.

Just for her he once brought a wooden chest all the way from Egypt; within stood tiny blue mummiform servants with their arms folded across their breasts and their kohled eyes staring ahead. She used to march them all around. He said that they must have belonged to some Pharaoh's sister-wife, who had been entombed with them so that they could do her work for her in the afterlife. Even a queen, so it seemed, was not exempt from agricultural labor.

Well, father, since we have taken away her slaves, will she have to work now?

He laughed and chucked her under the chin. Just then he was unriddling the mystery of the three triangles contained in the Pentangle of Solomon, and her still innocent as he supposed (for he never learned about the episode of the ebony coffer); to him it seemed that this first knowledge she was gathering must merely be as sweetly ancient to her as ears of wheat engraved on a buried Roman pillar; she was not yet armed with the Sword of the Word; the Divine Purpose had not murmured in her ear; but soon, perhaps even this winter, when the ships were in, he would show her the
Cabbalistic Secrets of the Master Aptolcater.

Father, where is Captain Vasojevic?

Him? Oh, I've sent him back to Egypt.

(The task, he did not tell his daughter, was to expose from beneath the sands of Egypt a certain pyramid whose vertex touched the center of the earth, and copy whatever writing might be engraved therein.)

On another day she asked why Prince Lazar had fallen, and her father, rising, with tears in his eyes, explained that Christ had offered two choices: victory at Kosovo, and then eternal insignificance, or the tragic glory of a defeat which his descendants would unceasingly mourn and seek to avenge.

Trusting her above all others in the household, even his dear wife Marija, he ordered whichever books she wished, even when her mother thought them unsuitable, and while her younger brothers were telling off Dalmatia's coastal islands to their father's strictest sea-pilots (for mistakes they now got beaten—she never did), she began to study the ancient Greeks, because next spring he hoped for her help in collating seven fragmentary parchments concerning astral navigation. She chose certain dramas as her primers; he sent away to Rome, paying gold ducats.— He said to her: I've prayed to Saint Sava that you'll find something I've overlooked.— At this the girl felt proud, guilty and uncertain.— He used to sit by the hour at his high easel-desk, calculating wages and profits, while she rested with her legs in his lap, reading Euripides. Not until she had children of her own did she realize how much trouble he must have put himself to, conveying the ledgers back and forth in order to be home with her longer. When she got to “Alcestis,” that play about the selfish man who falls out with his old father for declining to die for him, then finally persuades his wearily, tolerantly loving wife, Tanyotchka forgot to reach out and gently stroke her father's wrist; and he, coming up out of absorption in his ledgers, presently noticed the lack, and saw her lovely face illuminated with tears. Saying nothing, he continued his sums, waiting for her to speak. He had almost come to the time when he must be off to his ships when she said: Now I understand.