Palimpsest (24 page)

But there, in Benicia, November closed her hand over the black mark on the strange man’s huge bare calf. He thatched fingers through her hair, and his cries echoed in her house like a list of things a man can want:
god, god, god
.

Oblation and Legerdemain

T
ENEMENTS LINE THE
A
LBUMEN
R
IVER,
raised on stilts over the wash. It is difficult to say in this late age how they were built, for the stilts are little more than spider silk, and they waver in the wind. But the houses are borne up nonetheless, and it is rumored in the wealthier neighborhoods that the poor have discovered a tree—possibly some sort of pygmy birch—which longs to fly. Logically, then, the riverside slums are collectively referred to as the Aviary.

For obvious reasons, the manufacture of ladders is a highly prized skill in this part of Palimpsest. It is a holy profession, and each rung is possessed of spiritual significance. The first is the Rung of Honest Labor, and the last is the Rung of the Salt of Heaven. Between, each ladderer may stack his own path. If a rung should break, then bad luck infects the household, and at least one child must be adopted out to avert disaster. These are called Little Rungs, and tend to be swapped from house to house in a rough circle through the Aviary, as the quality of local laddery is never so great that they will not eventually return home.

When they are old enough, the young girls of the Aviary greet each morning on the banks of the Albumen. They braid their extraordinarily long hair together to make a great net, and hand in hand, float upon their backs on the gentle currents. Great golden koi live in the shallows of the river, and the poor beasts are ob sessed with the taste of curls. They become tangled in the net, and by noon the girls drag themselves back to shore and gut their catch with small bone knives strapped to their calves. The koi perish in a rapture of braids and young girls’ savage laughter. Their meat tastes of coconuts and birdfat, and the girls have the rest of the long day for their lessons.

Nhean lives in one of the floating houses, an aged man with a paunch and the head of a snarling, split-lipped tiger. He has a livid, purple scar where stripes meet skin. He makes a yellow goulash of the unfortunate koi, and in it is a sweetness coveted by all his neighbors. But he does not like to share, even though he would not have any koi at all if the girls did not make their rounds and share their catch with the elderly who cannot fish for themselves. He eats by himself every afternoon, tearing his meat with fangs savage and rotting.

He is mute, as all of his kind are.

Even the babies of the Aviary know that veterans usually end up here, in the river muck. Children learn better than to chatter at them. A woman with hyena’s feet in the third ward lets some of the fishing girls watch her while she cleans her cassia-wood shunt and peer with held breaths into the place where her larynx once was. Nhean would never allow this. His family has lived in Palimpsest for longer than trees have longed to fly, and he understands the necessity of certain dignities.

Though he has a kind of sign language of his own invention, the local children can only guess correctly the gestures for
mother,
southeast,
and
sleep.
They would have given up long before now if his goulash was not so wonderful, if it did not have green onions floating in it, and also flowing orange fishtails.

Nhean is also a ladderer, and the rungs between Honest Labor and the Salt of Heaven he names strange things: Phirun, Who Loved Betel Nuts; Sovann, Who Did Not Like His Wife but Never Let Her Know; Veasna, Who Was a Drunk and No Good to Anyone.

Samnang Who Loved Her; Vibol Who Loved Her; Munny Who Loved Her.

Chanthou Who Loved No One.

No one understands this nomenclature, and he does not have the voice explain it.
It must be the war
, they say.
Those must have
been the people in his battalion. In his squad. Maybe people he
killed.
They are wrong, but it is a reasonable story, and he lets it lie.

Nhean, for many years now, has made two of his rungs weak.

They will splinter, eventually, and sooner than the rest. That is how it should be, how it happened in a village long ago, in a green country whose name he cannot even remember anymore.

I remember it, of course. I could tell him. I don’t think it would comfort him. Shall we spoil his day completely? Lean in to his big, striped ear and tell him a single word, a word from another world, which will bring back all the terrible memories he ever wept to forget?

I cannot do it. He is so old. It doesn’t matter now.

_______

Secretly, Nhean keeps a hope in his heart, and at least that is still whole. He hopes that enough rungs break that someday a child will come ’round to him, and he can love it and teach it to make a yellow goulash, and sleep with his tail curled around it at night.

It hasn’t happened yet.

The rungs which are weak are the rung of Chanthou Who Loved No One, and the rung of Mealea, Who Fell in the River.

_______

“Do you remember when mother let us eat caviar for the first time?” Lyudmila asks. “I remember how red the little eggs were, and how they burst on my tongue, and all that fishy golden oil ran down my throat. I loved it, there was so much salt in it, as though they were little sacs filled with salmon tears.”

Oleg frowns. “That was before I was born. I could not have been there, if you were there.”

“Oh,” she says, her fine forehead creasing in confusion. “Of course. I forget, sometimes.”

“I know.”

The river curdles by, and Oleg thinks he can see eyes open in the pale, dark, piscine eyes.

“I remember when you told me the story about the land of the dead,” he says, trying to cheer her up. “I told it to mother and she took my books away for a month. And I remember when I asked that girl, the Polish girl, to marry me. You whispered in my ear that she did not have a yellow rainslicker, and it would end badly.”

Lyudmila bobs her head. “Didn’t it?”

Snow still spatters her hair. He does not think it is meant to melt.

“Will we get there tonight?” he asks. “Where we’re going?”

“I think so. I hope you do not mind heights.” She is quiet for a long while, and Oleg strokes her knee gently, chastely. “It is a strange and pleasant thing to play the game of ‘Do You Remember?’” Mila sighs. “The only answer possible is
yes
. A
no
stops the game cold. Do you remember when I went away? From the Brooklyn girl, and also from you.”

“Yes, I’m sorry for that. I’ve said I’m sorry.”

“Didn’t you wonder where I went? Did you think perhaps there was a Prince of Cholera?”

“You didn’t die of cholera,” he points out.

“A Prince of Drowning, then. With a blue umbrella. Maybe he kissed me, and maybe his lips were cold.”

Oleg considers this. It had not occurred to him before, but he is not really upset by it. The dead keep their counsel, and he never expected to be told of his sister’s love affairs.

“Is that what happened?” he asks.

“No.” She shrugs.

“I miss you, Mila,” Oleg says, his throat thick. “Your strange little ways of saying things. I can’t see the world the right way up without you.”

Lyudmila shakes her head, as if to clear it, to make it empty of all that disturbs calm water. “This is … difficult for me,” she says.

“It is hardly easy for me! This is such a crazy place. It’s … pretty, but it’s not right in the head. But I had to come back! You’re here, and not at home anymore. It’s cold there, now, and I sleep on the floor. I can’t bear our bed. Hester—I guess you don’t know her, but she’s the one who didn’t want to come back, the one with short hair like a boy. She brings me orange juice and cold hamburgers, sometimes, when I don’t have the energy to go out, and that sounds bad, it sounds like things are bad, but I’m okay. I don’t mind. I don’t mind coming to you these days. It’s like I’m your ghost, now. I can be as faithful as you were. I can.”

“Yes, fidelity is important. I select for it.”

“What?”

“It’s so strange,” she murmurs, “that the village of the moon-drinkers was destroyed and yet these spindly little houses on their stalks survived. How can that be? The bombardments were astonishing, wasp-cannons firing fusillades like golden clouds, pale green rockets that sent burrowing weevils into the foundations of every house. I cried. I remember crying. But it was for fidelity, all of it. I understood that, even then. The whole war, just for that. And because of it I learned so many things.” Lyudmila turns her face up to him, her fine, high cheeks streaked in tears. “I believe that you are faithful. That is why I bring you to my boat and stay beside you, because the war said with bombs like beetles that faithfulness must be answered with faithfulness, and that is a harder lesson than it may sound.” Lyudmila cocks her head, as if seriously considering a snarled problem. Her tears stop very suddenly. “And so I am trying to decide,” she says dreamily, “how long I ought to let this go on. It is pleasant to be held by you, after all, and pleasant on a late winter evening to be called Mila, and pleasant to smile at you and receive your smile in return. I am enjoying it.”

“Mila, what are you talking about?”

“A little longer? Just a little? I think I would like to be your sister, for a little while more.” Oleg’s grip tightens on the edge of a broken, useless oar. “But I see I have handled it badly, because I have become bored with saying some things and not others, with wearing masks. I should not be blamed. It is my nature. And I must pay the price for that. I am not your sister, Olezhka. Perhaps it was wrong of me to dress myself so that you would think so, but I am not a very nice creature, not really.”

“Please, Mila, don’t talk about this. I can’t bear it.”

“But it is cruel to let you think she is here! I did not realize you would not know the difference. It’s not a very good game if you don’t know we’re playing. It was cruel to let Hester see the hands of the dead with no one to dry her tears. I learned my lesson; I won’t do that again. I am capable of learning.”

“I don’t want to hear this. I’ve only just gotten here. Let me lay my head on your lap again. Tell me stories about the municipal parks of the dead.”

“I am worried about you, Olezhka. I do not think you are very well at all, and I love you. I want you to be well.”

“No,” he moans. She grips her parasol tightly. Her snowy hair hangs all around her.

“Look at me, Olezhka! Listen to me. I am … something else. The thing I am is called a Pecia. I am … like a machine. You would think of me like a machine. I am made of snow, and of silver, and of the bones of river fish. I am covered in the patina of cupolas. Made out of all the things you remember about your childhood, out of Novgorod and the Volkhov, out of a little girl in a red dress, out of wintertime.
I was made for you;
there is a place where people like me are made. Inside me are not bones as you would think of them, nor blood, yet the things inside me are also red, and also white, as you know bones and blood to be.”

“This is insane. You’re real, I can feel you.”

“Yes, I am real. And I am alive, and warm, and therefore I cannot be Lyudmila. But,” and Mila leans her parasol against the rail, the foxes snoring lightly. She crawls to him along the floor of the boat, her long hair dragging below her. “But I remember Lyudmila. I remember what you remember of her. I know the story of the Princess of Cholera, and I can tell it to you, as many times as you want. I remember the girl in Brooklyn who you wanted to be your wife, and I remember her orange blossoms, how sickening their perfume was in our house. I was built to remember. I was built out of remembering.”

“Who built you?” Oleg is numb, his hand trailing in the pale river, his throat tight as a fist. She smiles and wraps her arms around his knees.

“Palimpsest. Olezhka, did you think it did not love you and pity you? Do you think I did not? For I am as much this place as I am Lyudmila. I remember when you were fourteen, how bitterly you wept in my arms when that little brown-haired girl mocked you. I remember carriages on my skin and a war in my belly. But for all that I can smile at you with Mila’s lips and tell you Mila’s stories and even smell like Mila, all for your sake, to answer the terrible things you cry out for during the night.”

Oleg’s palms sweat. He does not want to know the answer.
Do
not ask
, he thinks, and tries to clench his throat around it. But the question is a lock and it seeks the key of her and he cannot stop himself, even though the taste of it is like the Volkhov, muddy and reedy and cold, and he doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to know, doesn’t want to think or be, just bury himself, in her, in what looks enough like her to pass, in what is good enough. But it flops out of him anyway, and he stares at it, how ugly and pathetic, how himself, how shameful.

“Why,” he whispers, “if you, here, in Palimpsest, are not my Mila, if you are a robot or whatever you say you are, why has she stopped coming to me in the real world?”

Lyudmila looks up at him, and her face is so like his: elongated, made more graceful by high cheeks and fuller lips, by long hair and a finer jaw than his own. But it is his face, his mother’s face, a thing shared privately, jealously, among family. And it is so full of pity and sorrow, love and helplessness, and such
disdain
. He wants to claw at it with his nails until this well-dressed, lying thing dies and his own Mila is left, until she comes back, his girl, his, and she will remember everything, and apologize for leaving him like a poor dog, and they will be happy, and this will all end.

He grabs her face, his own face, and tilts it to him, pushing his nails into her cheek. Drops of blood show, real and red, red as dreams, and she does not seem very much at all like a machine. He doesn’t want her to speak. He doesn’t want her to say what she knows. But she is close and she does smell like Mila, like dead, wet Mila tangled up in his bedsheets. He kisses her; her mouth opens underneath his, pliable and cool. Oleg does not want to admit that he has wanted this. He claws deeper, and she does not cry out. She tastes like new paint and he wants to vomit, to die on the river rather than face this thing which looks so much like his sister. He shoves her away.