Tales and Imaginings (5 page)

I grabbed the card back; the blotchy bulbous creature didn’t look at all like Nit. I tore it into little bits and flung them into the gutter. After a moment of paralysis Midgley dived to collect them. As I strode off into the crowd I heard him wailing after me, ‘How many pieces were there?’

A number of twisted alleys threw Midgley’s intrusive images off the track, but as soon as I rejoined the crowds lining the procession route I saw Persimmon looking down at me from one of the
hundreds
of windows in an immense office-block. There was someone at every window; why had my eye immediately met his? He
beckoned
, apparently offering me a share in his vantage-point, but I
pretended
not to see him and turned back into the quiet parts of the city emptied by the pull of the festival. Soon I found a small
shapeless
open space at the juncture of several narrow streets; in its
centre
a tree had transformed itself into a little forest by dropping dozens of minor trunks from its branches to the ground. The earth
was trodden hard into warm brown paths winding among the
pillars
of the tree; some fat grey monkeys slept fitfully in the branches. I leaned against the central trunk, where it was cool and shady. In the high wall opposite me was a gate; its delicate lattice of wood was broken in places. On either side of the worn step in front of it slept a small plump crocodile, blindfolded with moss. Above the wall I could see among foliage three people in bright yellow robes, climbing ladders to gather fruit; I could just hear their murmured talk. Further back in the little courtyard a gilded dragon marked the corner of a temple roof. A gong sounded, once, very deep and
mellow
. The priests came down from the trees with their baskets, and were hidden from me by the wall. The gong stroke came again, and then there was silence.

I could hear flies buzzing. I stepped round the big tree-trunk and met a dreadful stench. A pig’s face, stripped from the bone and flattened out like a mask, was fixed to the tree-trunk by four nails; blood had collected and dried in the hollow of a stone below it. I jumped into the sunshine and hurried through the deserted streets to join the crowd.

It sounded as if the procession was coming at last. People were pushing and jumping to see, and the crowns of the palmtrees lining the ceremonial way were full of children. A boy squeezed through the crowd and stood before me; a dozen big lizards of pleated paper hung around his neck, and two more ran along behind him on strings. By twitching the strings he made the lizards dart at my ankles. One of them ran up the others back as if in copulation, and the boy looked up at me with a doubtful grin. Immediately a man pushed him aside, handed me a peacock feather, and dragged the boy away. The crowd swirled around me. Someone snatched the feather out of my hand. Nit appeared at my side; she put her hands in front of her face, the palms towards me, and said, ‘You come to house, see from window.’

I struggled after her slim figure, which slipped easily through the crevices
in the swaying mass of people. She stopped in front of a row of pedlars hung about with trays of fruit, and bought from each one. We went down a side-street, and then along an alley between rows of small wooden houses that leaned together. She climbed the steps of the last of these, pushing aside the cane mat that hung in place of a door. ‘Surely the procession doesn’t come down here?’

‘Very important street‚’ she said. ‘Everybody come down here.’

The little house swayed slightly as I stepped into it. The ground floor was hardly more than a wide verandah over the edge of a small canal; I could see water glinting through gaps in the floor and between the bamboo hangings that formed the opposite side of the room. A little boat lay propped on its side in the middle of the floor; someone had broken off in the middle of repainting an eye on its prow, leaving a paintbrush resting in a saucer of red lacquer. There was little else in the room, just a mat in one corner, a few things that might have been bird-cages or fish-traps, and an old gramophone.

Nit had climbed a ladder into the room above. I lingered a moment, peering out at the motionless water. A row of small boats was moored against the factory wall that formed the opposite bank. Each boat had a roof supported on four poles and made of
overlapping
leaves like tiles. I could see the boatmen drowsing in the shade, while their womenfolk cooked fish over bowls of glowing charcoal.

When I climbed the ladder I found that Nit too was blowing smouldering charcoal into a flame. This upper room had no
windows
, but the wall on the canal side was a screen of fretted wood; drops of sunlight lay in spirals on the floor. I took off my shirt and felt the coolness of the room on my body.

Nit had bought two of each kind of fruit, and we knelt on the
floor, the basket between us, to eat them. She peeled off the
curious
geometrical husks one by one and showed me each fragile
liquid
shape in the palm of her hand: two suns, two stars, two crescent moons. She knelt symmetrically, and when she passed me a little cup of tea with her left hand, her right hand moved slowly in the air as if to preserve this symmetry. Then she put both hands on her knees, palms up, and smiled at me.

‘You remember Nit all yesterday?’

‘I thought of you very often.’

‘You come to dance again?’

‘I have to go home tomorrow, I’m afraid.’

She looked at me in silence for a few moments, and then jumped up and ran to empty the husks out of the basket onto the embers of her little fire; immediately an invisible forest sprang up in the room.

There was a blanket spread out on the floor in one corner. I lay down among the trembling stops and commas of light, and watched her as she darted to hide our two small cups behind a screen. As she wriggled out of her dress I closed my eyes and lay very still. A few moments later I felt the electricity of her hair touch my cheek, and then the light kiss of her breasts against my body. I put my arms round her as she lay against me, and I held my breath. At first her touch lay across a knife-edge between pain and delight; I felt the tendrils of her nerves and mine twisting together, and suddenly all my blood turned into pure amazement. She opened, I entered; at the same time I could hear children splashing in the canal and a dog howling in the factory opposite; then we were shaken one against the other, and my body breathed out years into hers.

As we began to fall into our separate worlds again a quiet
conversation
started downstairs; I hadn’t heard anyone come into the house. Nit lay under me with her eyes closed. The warm muddy breath of the canal came and wrapped us together; I kissed her
eyelids
and touched her lashes with my tongue. She put up her hand to my face without opening her eyes, and then the weight of her sudden sleep pulled me down to lie and watch a knot of sunlight glow in the filaments of her hair, an inch from my eye.

Great waves shifting slowly on the horizon became small as they approached the shore, and dwindled to rods of glass on the sand. The ripples retreated and swelled, and rolled away to become mountains. The girl in my arms came out of the sea, serious,
smiling
; she walked towards me with a gift in her hand, a photograph which I was to see. Behind her the waves were beating at the rim of the sky.

Slow gongs were pulsing, some streets away. Transparent fingers of sunlight reached across us into the shadows of the room. Nit had turned away from me and was curled up in her sleep; I moulded myself to the curve of her back, with my face in the warm darkness of her hair, and took her two small breasts in my hand. Her voice came sleepily: ‘Were you a virgin, before?’

After a while I answered, ‘Was I? I’m afraid I don’t remember. Go back to sleep again.’

The streets were being hosed down; burnt stalks of fireworks were swept into the gutters by bright arcs of water that hissed and
twisted among the feet of the crowd hurrying to work. Persimmon was at the airline office even before I was. Through the glass door I saw him, sipping a small black coffee and instructing a naked child in double-entry bookkeeping. He looked up, closed a great ledger and came out to help me watch my suitcase being flung onto the roof of the coach.

Inside the coach a heap of torn banners, crushed paper lanterns and trodden masks was stirred by the awakening of two late-sleepers, who began to bundle these relics of the festival together and
burrow
among them for their own clothes. Persimmon’s gaze lent the spectacle a certain weight. The pile of rubbish fumbled its way
processionally
along the coach and became jammed in the narrow exit. Under the shouts and kicks of its guardians or tormentors it quaked and was convulsed, and spewed itself out in a multicoloured flood of mismatched feet, clocks, stars, grinning pigs and
somersaulting
fish.

‘Tawdry evidences!’ said Persimmon. ‘Let this be what you carry away of yesterday’s high solemnities; something not achieving the dignity of a memory, perhaps, and yet as near to a memory as
anyone
deserves who was not actually present. I must say there is something elusive about you that makes me wonder if I should have squandered all this effort shaping your experiences.’ He gave me a reproving look, and when the two celebrants of the mystery,
dancing
with laughter, fell out of the coach onto the heap and began to stamp it into the mud, he moved to interpose his thickness between me and the equivocal sight.

‘Well, your great-aunt’s little hoard is dispersed into the general flux, and you return to your textbooks. My further existence I
commit
to your memory, with some misgivings. Midgley, if you forget him entirely, will not be missed. Dark, as you probably realize
,
was merely my own more relaxed, weekending, self.’

‘I realize no such thing‚’ I began, but Persimmon raised a heavy
finger to indicate a tiny figure appearing at the end of the street: ‘Here comes the measurer of all things! Midgley is
the only man I know who consciously obeys the laws of perspective. When your coach leaves, remember to look back; his ‘dwindling with distance’ is unforgettable. What a strange lot we are! What odd names we have! You will have to write about us. Failures of characterization you can disguise as shallowness of character, confused intentions as the intention to confuse; as your co-author I may say such things. The unpublished novella is the most forgiving of art-forms.’

‘And if I publish?’

‘I fear no one will recognize us. Not even you.’

Persimmon turned away abruptly, and greeted Midgley with: ‘I’ve given him my parting gift, so what about yours?’ Midgley began to slap at his numerous pockets as if hoping some suitable small parcel might materialize. Then his face cleared; he produced a bulging pocketbook. ‘There’s something here you might care to remember me by; it’s a definition of the word “sky”.’

I read, neatly penned on a small card:

‘Thank you, Midgley; that’s really very nice. And it makes me feel I should apologize for tearing up that photograph. In fact I wish I had it now.’

‘Don’t worry!’ Persimmon interrupted. ‘He has plenty more photos like that; don’t you, Midgely?’

Midgely turned an anguished, beseeching face towards him.

‘Of that girl?’ I asked.

‘Of that girl.’

I looked at Midgely’s moist eye and burning brow, and said, ‘Don’t tell me any more.’

‘No, you know just enough‚’ agreed Persimmon.

Midgley shifted from foot to foot, and changed the subject: ‘And which way do you go from here?’

Persimmon answered for me, with a voluminous gesture: ‘He expands in all directions, leaving us, it appears, to drown in our own watch-springs. In terms chosen from your well-furnished store, this Time and Space will become a street-corner on an Electron in an Atom of his most inward Nucleus. Come! Those two drunkard magicians have finally settled for the workaday masks of busdriver and conductor; you are about to leave. No need to remind you never to come back; the past is the most unrevisitable of cities. Bow for me before the tomb of your great-aunt! Wave, Midgley, wave!’

The coach roared and shuddered. Persimmon and Midgley were sucked from me into the vortex. The city folded its petals and sank like a stone.

Late in one of the thousand autumns of the Autumn Empire, the family So, lacking in both wealth and learning, entrusted what they had of either to the youngest son and sent him off to find the world and bring it home. How huge that world was, they didn’t know. Between the City of the Emperors and the provincial capital, the highway touched the sky three times and wintered in a desert; to the provincial capital from the little town So had heard named but had never visited was half the length of a river; the way from So’s village to that town which even an Emperor might forget, was choked with many years of leaves. And yet such a distance was a mere step in thought to the grown child with hopeful eyes who was scattering those leaves in his eager striding. Among the leaves, deeply nested, lay a skull. It didn’t sleep; it ached with emptiness where memories used to be. ‘Who was I?’ it wailed, as it did whenever anyone passed by, but its dried-up voice was lost in the rustling leaves. Then So’s foot jolted it from its resting-place. ‘Don’t follow me!’ cried So, seeing it roll and bounce after his heels; but the bubble of bone jumped on a thin wind to his shoulder, and gripped his ear in its teeth. ‘Who was I?’ it hissed. ‘Who am I? If I had my memories I could lull myself to sleep. You must swear to help me, or I shall never let go.’

‘I know nothing; how can I help you?’ wept So.

‘Swear!’

So faced each of the corners of the Empire in turn. To each
corner
he said, ‘May I die upon this spot if
I fail to answer this skull’s questions.’ The skull then loosed its hold on his ear and fell back among the leaves.

‘There are a few withered scraps of learning still remaining inside me‚’ it said. ‘Take them, study them – they may be of use to you – find out where I could have gathered such unheard-of stuff, come back and tell me what you discover.’

So bent down, crooked his finger into an eyesocket, and pulled out a muddle of spiderweb. He squeezed it into a pellet before the wind could tear at it, and stuck it into the middle of his topknot. Then he kicked a few leaves to cover the skull, and marched on.

He marched, with a stride he felt already becoming legendary, through a land in which legends lay as thick as autumn leaves, until a long time later he came to the Imperial City, or at least to the Examination Halls which ring it about and hide its splendid
mysteries
from those who have not yet shown themselves worthy. After a hungry night in the forest fringe he presented himself, one of a vast number, before a door which was flung open at sunrise to admit all comers to the day’s examination. After being stripped, searched, and scrubbed, So, like the others, was led to his cell and locked in. There awaited him a bowl of drinking-water, an
oil-lamp
, the writing implements, and the Question, sealed in a hollow bamboo rod. Without pausing even to pray, he pulled the wisp of silk from the rod, and read on it the words, ‘What day of the week is
it in your dreams?’

Long after noon So was still pacing his cell wondering why in all his many remembered dreams he had never looked at a calendar; he cursed himself for neglecting such a simple preparation for the days of greatness that had dawned in so many of those dreams. He beat his forehead against the wall in despair; a little object fell at his
feet. The skull’s wisdom! He blew upon the close knot, and under his breath it unfolded into leaves and scarves and wings as delicate as the smell of dew, covering every surface in the cell with a
clinging
web of words. ‘… No silk supports the ink of the dream, no stone bears its chisel-marks, nor can one cast bronze from its mould; unlike life, and even unlike memory, the dream is nothing but what is attended to, for it is the creation of that attention. Even a painting of a dream cannot dream of a dream, as a simple
question
and its answer show: does one dream in colours? Only if one dreams of colours. In the contrary case the question does not arise. Similarly the dream day is not necessarily one in a sequence of days; only by dreaming of hope or memory can one be sure that that day is not alone in all the endless darkness of time. But here again either alternative can only be awakened by a question, and if the dream does not ask, the alternatives sleep together in peace

So transcribed as fast as he could. The footsteps of the guard who would collect the answers could be heard in the distance; the trumpets of sunset sounded from the highest towers. He flung down his pen and lit a taper at the oil-lamp to seal his answer into the bamboo tube. In his haste – the cell door was being unlocked – he splashed a drop of molten wax onto the network of script lapped about him, which disappeared in a flick of flame as the door swung open.

Pillowed upon his unease at having destroyed his clue to the history of the restless bone, So lay peering at the stars from under a broad leaf in the thicket that had been his bedroom the night before. At midnight his eyes still showed, anxious as candleflames among the restless branches; then the bells of a procession were heard, torches could be seen flaring in the arched corridors of the forest, a wide
path was being beaten across the bushes, a handsome litter arrived and its aged occupant was handed to the carpet hastily flung to receive his feet. It was the venerable Examiner, come to find So according to the directions the youth had penned where an address was to be written on his bamboo cylinder. ‘My son‚’ he began,
signalling
a servant to pour out soup for the round-eyed starveling summoned from the bushes, ‘by chance yours was the first paper to be read. Your mode of enquiry strays from the prescribed ways of our ancient culture, but it must be conceded that, just as a wind fresh from the hills finds shortcuts about the city we old
inhabitants
never happened upon, so your outlandish speculations bring to a close an era of thought. The other answers have been burned unopened, and the appointment is
yours. It is
one for which your alien learning well equips you, as will be explained to you by the Governor of a certain town on the furthest frontier of the Empire. That town is now your home. The journey takes a year; you start immediately.’

Leaving his troubled conscience lying in the impression of his body on the fallen leaves, So ran towards the star pointed out to him by the Examiners servants; before the flares and clamour of the retreating procession had faded from the woods his run had been choked to a walk by the brambles; at daybreak he read the scroll of directions he had been given and turned towards the distant
snowpeaks
; through every stage of tears and aches and cold and scratches he held towards his prize, and in another spring found himself
tumbling
down a mountain brook into a valley which hung above the endless grey plains of the Barbarians. Not far below him was the
little
frontier-town, a swallow’s nest in a crook of the great wall that circumscribed the Empire. Where the stream paused and rounded itself into a slowly turning pool, So rested, watching the water’s anxious memories of snow yield to the sunlight and the silence. He slept; he stripped off his weariness and threw it away. And then he
jumped up to see his future home. He soon found he was being warmed by the admiration in the eyes of a young girl half hidden among the trees; these eyes told him he was newly strengthened and brown from the mountains, and that the sun was curling in his young beard. Then the eyes vanished, and although So ran forward quickly he found nothing but shadows.

The forest through which So now had to descend was strangely transected here and there by curving rides that tapered away to nothing or swelled into clearings of geometrical shapes he could not name. He became bewildered, and had to ask his way of gangs of workmen burning out thickets and uprooting trees in the
perfecting
of some great design; they scarcely understood his dialect, nor he theirs, but they pointed him on to where, finally, a wide
hook-shaped
clearance brought him down to the forest’s abrupt edge and a road through fields to the town and the Governor’s house.

When So had presented himself to the Governor, and even before he had been instructed in his duties, his questions were of the bright-eyed shadow he had seen in the ornamental forests above the town. The Governor smiled understandingly; his
understanding
, So immediately knew, like his serene mellowed white-bearded dignity, was that of the Empire itself, upon the unswerving prow of which he was here the figurehead, clear-eyed over the unruffled seas of Time.

‘She is a member of my household,’ he said, ‘and it would be entirely natural for you to fall in love with her, and she with you. No doubt it is already done. She is a delightful child, and the match may well be suitable as we know nothing of her parentage. You are interested in such details? It seems, then, that she and her brother, as very young children, were cast out of the Empire and carried by a servant into exile among the herdsmen of the plains. The brother, mentally enfeebled by what passes for schooling in those regions, was beguiled by dreams of return into stealing a horse one night
and attempting the journey. Doubtless he perished; certainly he was never heard of again. The retainer betrayed his trust by dying in some nameless little battle out there, and the girl, still hardly more than a baby, came into the hands of tribesmen bringing tribute to our gate here. If any indication of her birth was sent with her, it never reached us. The curious child plays all day in the spacious woods where you saw her; a few trinkets that came with her she has buried somewhere up there. I have not had the heart to tell her how soon these forests are to be burned down.’

‘Why must that be?’ asked So.

‘It is part of a vast ceremony to be enacted here; you have been sent to assist in its direction. Come to the window and look at the mountainside above us; observe the disposition of the rides and clearings. At the accession of every Emperor a wooded
mountainside
, such as this, is designated, a tall slope looking out over the plains of the barbarian horsemen. The forests are prepared, shaped by felling and planting into the form of the ideograph of the Emperor. Then they are burned. Thus once in the lifetime of each Emperor his symbol is imprinted in flame on the clouds, his
banner
is unfurled across the depths of the shapeless lands beyond the wall that defines his Empire, the remotest shepherd is attained by the brand of our fixed purposes on the flowing skies. And they bring their tribute, in such amounts that the wall has to be levelled across the width of the valley’s mouth to receive it.’

‘And what do we give in return?’ asked simple So. The
Governor
worked with his magnificent eyebrows to comprehend the question. Then he spoke.

‘The life of these nomads is
a flux and reflux over featureless plains, journeys from nowhere to nowhere; their only scholarship is in such insubstantialities as the endless streaming of clouds over their days and the endless cloudy dreams of their nights. But under their intoxication with the formless lies fear, a loneliness which
mounts through the years. Then our firm hand reaches out to them across the unwalled labyrinths of the grasslands; we do not forget them, they cannot wander out of our boundless thought of them; once in a generation, the Empire opens an eye. And a mouth. And their gratitude flows in like a tide.’

The Governor brought his gaze back from the horizon and
concentrated
it on So. ‘Your part in all this will be to superintend the removal of the wall, to prepare the storehouses, and finally to oversee the arrival of the treasures. You are not the man I would have chosen for the post; your dialect is largely unintelligible, your knowledge of the Empire seems to be limited to an acquaintance with a few hundred ditches; but it appears you excelled in an
examination
designed to discover the candidate uniquely suited to
dealing
with these meaningless folk. Indeed if you had not some natural imperviousness to reality you would never have survived your
journey
here. I bow before the wisdom of the authorities, and the hedgerow freshness of your eyes. Be my seconder, be my son, in this great matter which will crown my career and exhaust my failing powers; your reward will be my pale flower of the level lands – do you see her coming down the forest track? – this shred of a dream blown in from the unknowable. The Emperor and his Court are on their way here to inspect the tribute, and will arrive in six
months’ time. You may then petition for a dowry, a matter in which I
cannot
help you.’

During the following days, as So, a newborn horseman,
galloped
again and again the length of the wall that swung like a bird across the valley, he often saw the girl – Springrice was her name – watching him from a distance. Was it merely curiosity that
struggled
with her reluctance to leave the still, enchanted forests of childhood? So terrified himself with his swooping passages before her; the wall melted under the hands of ragged hordes tormented by his hoof-beats. The Governor nodded his approval each sunset.
At the end of the fifth day he met So with these words: ‘My son, your reward is closer at hand than I foresaw. I have just received word that the Court is making quicker progress than was expected and the Emperor will be here in two months’ time. I have given order for the forests to be fired tonight. The removal of the wall will be completed before the tribesmen reach us, thanks to the energy of the authorities in brandishing such a comet’s tail as
yourself
over the backs of our workers. Look up at the mountainside – there go the scribes who will write our name on the clouds!’

Stars were moving up the slopes of dusk above them; already the first torchbearers were spreading out along the fringes of the forest. Springrice came running to meet them with alarm in her eyes, and led the Governor aside. So pretended not to watch. She seemed to be pleading with the Governor, who brushed her aside with a pat on the head and strode off to order affairs in the town. Without hesitation the girl turned to So; it was the first time they had
spoken
together.