Palimpsest (33 page)

“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?”

Nerezza will not look at him. She keeps her gaze on the shark-headed woman, and when she mumbles, the rain tramples her words—but Ludo can see her lips move:
You don’t deserve it
.

The two men wade in and drag the boat to the lockhouse, where they lash it to the little dock and haul Ludo and Oleg out. The shark-headed woman is silent, but glances up at the door frame, beaten sea-wood, and seems to judge it fair.

“How can you do this, Nerezza? Are you going to watch them bleed us out? Are you content to make me into Radoslav?”

A fist cracks across Ludo’s jaw. “Don’t talk to her!” one of the men growls. Ludo’s eyes roll—when they focus again he sees a huge face purpled in rage, with a line of freckles across the nose. The other one is missing an ear. “If you have to talk,” Freckles growls, “you talk to Ululiro, and show some fucking respect.”

“What’s happening?” says Oleg, shaking, uncomprehending, looking from Nerezza to Ululiro to Ludo. “What are they doing?”

“They’re Dvorniki.” Ludo snarls. “Street-cleaners. They are going to cut our throats on the door jamb because we’re immigrants.”

Oleg opens his mouth and closes it. “Nice word for a mob,” he mumbles.

Ludo grunts agreement. “They think it’s magic. That it’ll keep us all out. Or maybe they don’t. Maybe they just think it’s fun.”

No-Ear doesn’t see a difference. He wrestles Oleg to the floor, bashing his head against the door frame and jamming his chin upward, exposing his throat. Freckles pulls out a long, curved knife. He looks to Ululiro for confirmation. But Ululiro is watching Ludovico, and she does not move. She does not speak.
She is like
the people in the church
, Ludo realizes.
A veteran. She was in the
war. On the losing side, from the looks of it. Oh—
oh.
There is no
was.
She is in the war. This is the war.

“Your uniform,” Ludovico says gently, knowing his life hangs between them like a thin curtain. “Were you a soldier?”

Ululiro nods.

“Not just a soldier. A general. Even …
the
general.
Generalissima.
”

Ululiro nods.

“You have to know this won’t matter. Not really. If it’s not us, it’ll be someone else. We’re coming. Someday, the roads will be full of us, and you’ll have to watch us fall to our knees in rapture, in relief, you’ll have to watch us grow old and bear children and hang hams in store windows, set our watches by our wives’ hearts, drink coffee on sunny afternoons.”

“General, let me cut that one’s throat first, so he shuts his filthy mouth,” Freckles barks.

Ululiro does not move. Ludovico does not stop.

“We’re coming. The world is changing. And even if every door frame in Palimpsest runs red, someone will find a way.” Ludo chuckles. “Do you know what a palimpsest is, Ululiro? It’s vellum, parchment that has been written upon and then scraped clean, so that someone else can write on it. Can’t you hear us? The sound of us scraping?”

“Ludo … ” Oleg moans, his neck beading scarlet under the taut knife.

But Ludovico ignores him. He thinks of November’s broken hand, her fingers. What she gave up for safe passage. “But, General. If it has to be anyone, why not me? Why not us? Why not someone who is willing to become like you, who is willing to lose a thing he treasures for the sake of this city, for the sake of his friends?”

Ludo slowly extends his tongue. Rain spatters it; he lets it run.

“Take it,” he says. “Take my voice as the toll of this lock. Take my tongue, and I will be silent, like you, like all of them. I will be a monument—better than all the rest because I will bear witness to your suffering. Folk will look at me, setting my watch, drinking my coffee, and they will say:
Ululiro snatched victory from her enemies
after all. She got to choose. She chose the first one, and
marked him as her own
. Everyone will know that you had a battle left in you, and bought one last joy in the name of the silent.” Ludo was so close to Ululiro he could smell her fishy, acrid breath, seething between sharp, yellowed teeth. “Mark the frame with my blood, General. I will be silent forever in your name. An immigrant. A veteran. And it will be over.”

Ululiro’s throat worked beneath a ghastly scar that marked the join of her shark skin with her human body. She burned to speak and could not. Nerezza reached for her elbow, but the general slapped her away, seizing Ludovico’s arm and stalking to the door frame, tossing her head from side to side as though swimming through deep ocean. Freckles and No-Ear backed away from her, pulling Oleg with them, spines suddenly straight with fear and love.

Ululiro snatched Freckles’s knife and caught Ludo by the throat. She raised the blade, and with a soundless howl slashed through his tongue.

FOUR

T
HE
K
INGDOM OF
H
EAVEN

N
erezza sat between November and Ludovico. Her face was a mess of flushed skin and tears. Ludovico shook to see her so, and looked to November to steady himself.

“I don’t want to,” Nerezza hissed in fluid, cultured English.

“You don’t have to,” November said softly. “But I am asking you.”

“Why should this be easy for you? Why? It is not easy for me,” she spat at Ludovico in Italian.

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:

T
HE
G
REEN
W
IND

In Transit, Westbound: 11:09

T
HERE 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 loss, 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.