A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel Page 7
I summoned my courage and nodded. “Of course! I shall see to our rooms.” Sten looked relieved and hurried back into the wagon, but I saw him kiss the tips of his slender fingers as he went, and his lips moved rapidly as if in prayer.
The reins struck the backs of the horses. I turned to the Bainishman beside me, squared my shoulders, and said: “Good afternoon.”
His gold eyes widened. “Good afternoon! What!” He reached out his hand, smiling, and enveloped mine inside it. “Good afternoon to you, telmaro!” He leaned in closer, searching my face for any sign of comprehension. “Do you speak Olondrian? Are you the apkanat?”
I laughed and answered him clumsily enough, but with delight: “I am a merchant from the Tea Islands. My father—he used—he was coming—”
“Yes, yes!” said the gentleman. “But come in out of the sun.” He ushered me toward the hotel along a pathway of pink slate. “So you are the son of the bald gentleman! Yes, I expect him every year! I hope no misfortune . . .” He trailed off as we went up the stairs to the porch.
“He is dead,” I said.
“Ah!” The gentleman’s brow was creased with such a look of pain that I was sorry I had not spoken with more delicacy. “That is dreadful, dreadful! And he no older than myself! But forgive me—I am called Yedov of Bain.” He put his hand on his heart and bowed, showing me the round patch of pink skin at the top of his skull; when he had risen I bowed also, saying: “Jevick of Tyom.” At this he gave a rich, merry laugh. “Marvelous! Such an education! Ah, but your father was shrewd! Come, step inside.”
He clasped the brass ring on the door and pushed it open, leading me into a vast, cool room, empty but for a vase of white roses on a table. His leather slippers smacked on the tiles, and the tails of his light-green morning coat fluttered as he passed through this hall and into the gloomy corridor beyond. The entire hotel possessed, like its owner, an odor of cedar, old carpets, and heliotrope. Somnolent parlors yawned on either side of the passage, each with a high, marmoreal fireplace gleaming in the shadows and shapeless pieces of furniture pushed against the walls. At length we came through a set of peaked double doors onto a veranda flooded with sun, and I stood blinking in the robust sea light of Bain. “I’m here,” I murmured in the tongue of the north, gripping the ornate curves of the balustrade. The iron was cold on my palms, unyielding, foreign, delightful.
My host offered me a chair—a long, low object covered with a green silk shawl—and hurried off to fetch me “a drop of the country.” I reclined on the chair, breathing in the scent of the garden, the perfume of exhausted pansies mingled with the odors of dust and ancient plaster. The sky was deep blue, the balconies like necklaces. I lowered my gaze: the arm of my chair with its cover of pear-green cloth seemed to pulse in the tireless light. There was my hand, narrow, dark, languid. In Olondria. When my host returned with the wine, I had drifted into a blissful sleep.
I awoke rumpled and sweaty and sat up, evening light on my face, thinking of books. It was the kebma hour, named for the bread that is eaten at dusk: across the garden I could see lights in the windows, and in one overgrown yard a woman’s voice called insistently: “Valeth, come in.” I started up, turned, and went into the hotel, knocking against furniture in the gloom until a light in the corridor led me to my host. He sat at a table laden with food, his face and oiled hair shining in the rays of a splendid table lamp in a netting of pink crystal.
“Come in, come in,” he cried, beaming and standing up so swiftly he bumped the table, provoking a gentle clatter of glass. “I didn’t like to wake you, but I’m glad you’ve arrived at last. I don’t mind telling you that our conversation has been strained!”
With a wave of his hand he indicated his sole dinner companion: my steward, Sten. Colorless, doleful, looking shrunken beside the tall Bainishman, Sten sat before a plate heaped with an array of foreign delicacies, rose-colored claws and forbidding blobs of aspic.
“Sten,” I said, trying not to laugh.
“Ekawi,” he returned in a mournful tone. “The gentleman insisted I sit. I felt I could not refuse.”
“No, no, you did right. Listen, Sten, I need money, Olondrian money. Just give me half of what you’ve got in the purse.”
The Bainishman, still standing, resting both hands on the table, glanced from me to Sten and back again with a look of indulgent good humor, but when he saw Sten pull out the purse and count a number of bright triangular coins into my hand, his brows contracted in dismay.
“What! What’s this? What do you want with money? You don’t need money in my house,” he exclaimed, either forgetting that his house was a hotel, or overcome with native hospitality to the extent that he intended not to charge me for the meal.
“I’m sorry. I can’t stay.”
“But where are you going? I have sefdalima, real sefdalima from the country, either with or without anchovies! Come, telmaro, I beg you, you haven’t eaten!” And at last, in despair, as I opened a door: “Not that way! The other door, if you want the street. . . .”
“Thank you,” I called out over my shoulder, hurrying down the passage, my pockets jingling. I soon came out into the antechamber with the white roses. Then all I had to do was open the door, and there it was: sea air, long cypress shadows, the racket of carriage wheels, Bain.
I ran down the front steps of the hotel and into the light of the evening, dazed as a moth released from a dark bedroom. Strangers jostled me, merchants in short cloaks with well-fed, shaven cheeks, students in colorful jackets and the tasseled shirts of scribes. The glad spirit of the kebma hour was awakening under the trees: the cafés were crowded with diners laughing through clouds of cigar smoke, tearing the flat, oily loaves of kebma, rinsing their fingers in brass bowls, clapping their hands to call the waiters. I darted across the street, dancing to keep away from the carriages, and pressed my face to a window where books lay blanketed in dust. There they were, just as I had imagined, open, within easy reach. I pushed the door, setting off a soft bell, and entered the shop.
Then it was like those tales in which there are sudden transformations: “He found himself in a field, and felt that it was a very vast country.” It was like the story in which Efaldar awakes in the City of Zim: “There were walls of amethyst round him, and his couch was upon a dais.” In the shop there was a dim, ruddy light and little space to move, for the shelves rose everywhere, filled with books with their names written on the spines: The Merchant of Veim. Lyrics Written While Traveling on the Canals. The Secrets of Mandrake Root and the Benefits Derived Therefrom. I ran my fingers over the books, slid them from the shelves, opened them, turned the pages, breathing in line after line of mysterious words, steeped in voluptuous freedom like Isvalha among the nymphs of the well, a knot in my throat with the taste of unswallowed tears. There were so many books. There were more than my master had carried in his sea chest. The shop seemed impossible, otherworldly, a cave of wonders; yet it was not even a true bookshop like the ones I would discover later, lining both sides of the Street of Poplars. It was one of those little shops, tucked into various corners of Bain, which sell portraits of popular writers and tobacco as well as books, whose main profits come from the newspapers, whose volumes are poorly bound, and which always seem to be failing, yet are as perennial as the flowers. It is unlikely that anyone before or since has experienced, in that humble establishment, a storm of emotion as powerful as mine. I collected stack after stack of books, seizing, rejecting, replacing, giddy with that sweet exhalation: the breath of parchments.
At last I found a leather-bound copy of the Romance of the Valley with which, once they had touched it, my hands refused to part. It was a “two-color copy”: the chapter titles were ornamented with elaborate flowers in blue and crimson ink. The cover was also embossed with a pattern of blooms; the paper, though not of the best quality, was of pressed cotton beautifully textured; and through the pages danced the mysterious tale, the enchanted hawks and the sorrowful maiden transformed into a little ewe-la
mb. Clutching this prize I approached the bookseller’s desk, that hallowed region central to every bookshop, however lowly, in Olondria. This one, like many others, was piled with books and scattered papers, and behind it, in the glow of a lamp, sulked a young girl of great beauty. She had the amber skin of the Laths, the people of Olondria’s wine country, and masses of coarse brown hair that snaked among the towers of books. Her hands, grimy and capable with broken fingernails, wrapped up my purchase and clenched my fifteen droi with frank eagerness. I thanked her, but she did not look up. Instead she yanked a curl of hair impatiently from among her charm necklaces. I walked out into the last light of the evening. Bells tolled in the Temple of Kuidva, and over its dome the first stars were coming out.
If you love Bain as I have loved it, then you will know its spell, a heady mixture of arrogance and vitality, which has in it a great sigh, as of an ocean that has been crossed, the sigh of its terrible age from the depths of its stones. You will know the arcades underneath the Golden Wall where the old men sit, playing at londo and sipping their glasses of teiva, that colorless, purifying fig alcohol which has no scent, but whose aftertaste is “as chewed honeysuckle.” You will know the wood-sellers, the midnight trot of the horse of the nightsoil wagon. You will know also the great glow of the Royal Theater, huge as a castle and lit for its gala events like a temple on fire, with its wide tiered terraces going down to the canal. And you will know the white walls, the smell of sumac, the smell of dust, of coffee roasting, of eggplant fried in batter, the “unbearable quarters” where there is the feeling that someone has been interred, that people cannot live among such ancient towers. All of this I discovered in Fanlei, the “Month of Apples,” one of Olondria’s happiest and most careless months. There may still be a few in Bain who remember me as I was then: an aristocratic young foreigner in a gray silk suit.
My days began with a carriage ride through the humid morning streets to the great spice markets. Housed on the site of ancient horse and cattle auctions, the vast covered markets, with their arched leather roofs made to keep out the rain, form a jumbled labyrinth that stretches almost to the harbor. Here in the shadows the lavish, open sacks display their contents: the dark cumin redolent of mountains, the dried, crushed red pepper colored richly as iron ore, and turmeric, “the element of weddings.” One wanders among the cramped, odorous, warren-like enclosures, among elderly men and women, fresh from the country, who sip glasses of tea as they sit beside their wares, their hands smelling perpetually of cinnamon. There are younger merchants, too: slow-voiced men, gentlemen farmers, who dab at their eyes with muslin handkerchiefs; and in one corner a Kalak woman, one of Bain’s old fishing people, sells the wind out of a great brass bell. There are herbs, fresh and dried—mint, marjoram, and basil; there are dark cones and mud-like blocks of incense; there are odors in the air that seem to speak to one another, as though the market were filled with violent ghosts. Wandering vendors offer tea and odorless “water of life,” which revives those who succumb to the spice madness: for here there are treacherous substances, ingredients for love-philters, and spices used in war and assassination. I have seen them selling the powder called saravai, the “hundred fires,” with which prisoners are executed for treason; and there is also the nameless spice which, carried on the wind, infects one’s enemies with the falling sickness. There is crushed ostrich eggshell, the “beckoner of women.” It seems as if the odors cloud the air—as if, in the half light, the breath of spices rises up like smoke and wreathes the faces of the merchants.
Here I sat with Sten, bargaining, arguing, and laughing, pouring pepper into sacks for my customers, awaiting with growing impatience the hour of noon, the end of the market day, when I would walk out alone into the city. When that moment came, and my servants tied up the sacks and rolled down the door of the stall, I stood and brushed the pepper from my clothes, and with hardly a word I left them, walking out with the last of the Bainish citizens, mingling with them, no longer a foreign merchant.
It was the season of sudden rains. The wild summer storms came out of the west, pouring on the slate roofs and the white wind towers, swaying and bowing down the poplar trees in the Street of Booksellers and rolling in sheets from the awnings of the cafés. These were the rains that drove people close to the walls, under the balconies, or sent them dashing madly through the squares, and drenched the fluttering ribbons and bright trappings of the horses so that their flanks were streaked with delicate watercolors. The storms washed the streets so that little streams of brown water went roaring along the gutters toward the sea, and thundered on the roofs of the cafés where people were crowded together laughing in the steam and half darkness. I loved those rains; they were of the sort that is welcomed by everyone, preceded by hot, oppressive hours of stillness; they came the way storms come in the islands but did not last as long, and often the sun came out when they had passed. I was happy whenever the rain caught me walking about in the streets, for then I would rush into the nearest café, along with all the others who were escaping from the weather, all of us crushing laughing through the doors. The rain allowed me to go anywhere, to form quick, casual friendships, forced to share one of the overcrowded tables, among the beaming waiters who pushed good-naturedly through the throngs carrying cups of steaming apple cider. In this way I was thrown together with students or dockworkers or tradesmen, or the huvyalhi, the peasants in their old robes, with their belts of rope and tin earrings and tough shoes caked with dung, and the pipes they smoked carefully in their cracked misshapen hands. As the rain poured down outside, we leaned together over our drinks, and there was always the weather to talk about for a beginning, and everyone was glad for the sudden excuse to have a drink and for the wild release from the stillness of the air. The cafés smelled of cider, wet clothes, steaming hair, and tobacco. The lamps burned valiantly in the storm’s darkness; often there was someone playing the northern violin, which is held upright between naked feet and moans like the wind in the towers.
After the rains the city was tranquil and glittering, freshly washed, the high roofs shining, the trees iridescent with moisture, and all seemed calm and quiet because of the passing of the storm. The clear air sparkled with the cold light of diamonds. The winds coming off the sea were cool, and there was no dust in the city; it had all been washed away with the heat and discomfort, and the sky had been washed as well and rose in pale, diaphanous layers of ether, streaked with gauzy clouds in blue and gold. Slowly the cafés emptied and the waiters sat down to play londo. Children came out to race painted boats in the gutters; they laughed and shouted down the wet streets in the opalescent air, while above them white-shawled grandmothers dragged chairs out onto the balconies. In these transparent hours I would set off again on my walk, down the Street of Booksellers or toward the intricate trees of the Garden of Plums, often with a girl on my arm, perhaps a student drawn to my strangeness or one of the city’s cheerful lovers for hire.
There was never an end to Bain. I never felt as though I had touched it, though I loved the book markets under the swinging trees, the vast array of books on tables, in boxes, stacked on the ground, and the grand old villas converted into bookshops. I loved the Old City also, which is called the “Quarter of Sighs,” with its barred windows and brooding fortified towers, and I loved to watch the canal winding below the streets and bridges and the stealthy boats among the shadows of trees. Laughing, replete, I raised a glass of teiva in a café, surrounded by a bold crowd of temporary companions, a girl at my side, some Ailith or Kerlith whose name I no longer recall, for she was erased like the others by the one who followed.
“Perhaps I’ll stay,” I shouted over the singing from the next table. “Perhaps I won’t go home. I’d like to know every corner of Bain.”
The girl beside me giggled and tossed her hair, her earrings jangling. “Bain!” she said. “You won’t know Bain until you’ve been to the Feast of Birds.”
Chapter Six
The Feast of Birds
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sp; I think I still do not know Bain. The Feast of Birds taught me of no city on earth, but of another, deeper territory.
It began as all holidays begin, though stamped with the special gaiety of Olondria: the city prepared for the celebration for two days. Revelers spilled from the overcrowded cafés and thronged the streets; when the outdoor tables were filled they sat on the curbs, uncorking bottles of teiva. From the balcony of my hotel room I looked down on garden parties, women in brilliant clothing laying tables among the oleanders, stout grandfathers bellowing for more wine, and children everywhere shrieking, trampling the marigolds, chasing one another. All the children held flexible wooden wands with tissue-paper birds attached to the ends, their gauzy feathers strengthened with copper wire; when the children played, these magical creatures trembled as if about to take flight for the trees, and at night they lay discarded on the lamplit grass. Many houses, I noticed, were dark, without a sign of joy; I once saw a child who was watching the streets pulled in from a balcony and scolded. But the streets were alive, flamboyant, crowded with vendors, vintners, and flower girls who had burst all at once from the markets to conquer the world.
On the day of the procession I put on a clean shirt with a pearl button at the throat and went downstairs, curious to observe the famous holiday. Yedov was in the antechamber, peering out a window, and he turned toward me with a grave look as I entered.
“Where are you going, telmaro?”
“Out to see the procession,” I answered cheerfully.
He frowned. I observed that he was not dressed to go out himself: he wore a plain white morning coat, a modest jasper in one ear, and what we in Tyom would have called a ten-o’-clock face.
“Oh, you don’t want to go out today,” he said.