A Stranger in Olondria: A Novel Read online

  “Why not?”

  “It’s the Feast of Birds, telmaro. The streets will be full of nasty people, thieves! Your father always took my advice and stayed indoors on the Feast.”

  I needed no more encouragement. “Good-bye!” I laughed, flinging the door wide.

  The Feast of Birds is dedicated to Avalei, the Goddess of Love and Death, of whom my master had said: “Not all that is ancient is worthy of praise.” In my readings, Avalei’s shadow had passed most often at moments of crisis; I thought she must be like the vegetable gods of the islands, mute and beyond appeal. Yet her great feast day appeared to involve no sacrifice or grief. The cafés were crowded with groups of students pounding the tables and singing, and a boisterous crowd of country people possessed the Garden of Plums, dressed in shades of blue and smelling of charcoal fires.

  When the procession began, the musicians scrambled down from their makeshift stages and the crowd pressed eagerly toward the Grand Promenade, and I went with them, forcing myself among the straining spectators opposite the gray façade of the Autumn Palace. Drums boomed, deep and solemn. In the gardens of the palace, where in the last century a famous general had hanged himself for love, people climbed up the bars of the wrought-iron fence for a better view, waving banners above an aviary of tissue-paper macaws. “Can you see it?” someone shouted near me, almost into my ear. “No!” I replied. There was the dark march of the drums. Both sides of the street were thronged with people watching from under the trees, and stiff-legged soldiers patrolled the edges of the crowds.

  The procession came down the street, heralded by a trembling sigh, a sigh released all at once by the waiting crowd, and then by bursts of music which erupted along the street like waterspouts, and by loud cries and the waving of scarves. The women were waving their scarves in the air, slow flags of colored silk, waving them with their bare arms, even from the balconies, and singing strange, exhilarating songs that rose and throbbed in the heated air like melodies from the depths of the earth. The drums came into sight, huge, decorated with bells, made from the skins of sacred bulls raised in the temples, creatures fed on wheat and basil and turned to face the west before they were slaughtered, their massive horns preserved in bronze. The drummers wore masks of painted wood and nodded their heads as they struck. Behind them walked young eunuchs with silver censers, their mellow, eerie voices entwined in ethereal cadences, mingling with the dark fumes that billowed around them. . . . The air was filled, all at once, with a strong smell I could not place, an elemental odor like frankincense and charred bone, and under the influence of this scent, more powerful than that of the spice markets, I saw the priests strutting in their skin skirts. They were naked to the waist, and their chests were shaved and painted with ochre; they were crowned with the bronzed horns of the slaughtered bulls, and behind them came the priestesses in cloaks of lion skin, bearing lilies and decked with garlands of cornflowers.

  In the winter I go to the Land of the Dead,

  I belong to Telduri my brother;

  In the spring I belong to Tol,

  The God of Smoke and Madness;

  In summer only shall I be yours,

  O youth with the reddened cheeks,

  O player of flutes,

  O star who sleeps beneath a tree on the hill.

  So sang the priestesses, and with them the women among the crowd. And the goddess came into view, she or her image, hewn from a great stone and borne by twenty men on a litter, a vast figure spangled with old gilt.

  Where is the hunting knife

  with which I slew the milk-white deer?

  For I see it not: neither beside my arm, nor under it.

  This was the song of the priests, which the men around me sang with them, the notes lifting into an impassioned thunder, pleading and terrible and underscored by the bells and drums. The air was erased by the odor of incense and flowers. The goddess passed slowly, a thing of such unbearable weight, of such gravity, that I could scarcely look at her and could not read the expression in her face of indifferent stone. She was a moon: there was nothing animal about her. Her litter was heaped with lilies, jonquils, anemones, and narcissi amid flames which were barely discernable in the sunlight; they were the flames of scented candles, and there were urns about her, and carpets, and the men who bore her sweated a scarlet ooze through dyed faces. Behind her came another, smaller litter borne by hooded priests, in which, underneath seven layers of sumptuous brocades, the Book of Mysteries slept in its silver casket as if under the sea, in its dim and fragrant grotto studded with pearls.

  All at once the women sang: “The hunting knife is within my heart, the hunting knife is the ornament of my heart.” And the music swelled, the voices of men and women together now, the men asking Where is the hunting knife, and the women answering them in ardent notes like shot arrows: The hunting knife is the ornament of my heart. Faces twisted with ecstasy. A woman near me looked toward the trees, arching her back, her bright face wet with tears; and other women opened their mouths and flung hard, trilling melodies at the procession, songs that jarred with the sacred music. Elsewhere there were cries, sobs, the chattering shrieks of someone who was speaking in a language without words; and as the goddess passed away, a great convulsion of weeping wracked the crowd, pierced with inarticulate cries.

  My own cheeks were wet. I was still gazing at the disappearing goddess, Avalei of the Ripened Grain, when a second tremor went through the crowd—not as profound as the first, but signifying some change, some new excitement. “The Wings!” someone cried. At once the shout was taken up; people were running, but not closer to the procession. They were running back into the square, into the garden, into the alleys, pressed together and laughing, glancing behind them. Children were snatched up quickly and borne away, women picked up their skirts, and a few men climbed the trees of the Promenade, while the balconies above the street grew crowded with curious figures looking eagerly downward, half laughing and half afraid.

  “The Wings!”

  I stood looking at the street. My face was strangely warm, as if I had drunk a pitcher of new wine. The crowd had grown thin; there were only a few of us who watched, transfixed as if by the track of an errant comet. And we saw them come: young men, running, roaring, linked together, their arms interlocked so that they moved like a wave, like a thick tumultuous flood or else like a dragon, some single beast of a hundred parts, deranged, obliterating the pavements. They moved as if they were running downhill at the mercy of gravity, as if they could crash through forests, armies, stone, and as they came they shouted and some were singing and others wore grimaces of pain, or else of an alien ecstasy. The street performers began to scatter belatedly toward the alleys, but the youths came into their midst with the force of a deluge, and those whom they could touch they seized and drowned in their living river, compelling them to run or be crushed underfoot. I watched them, shivering, feeling something like terror, or perhaps longing, seeing their sweat-dampened hair as they came closer, and seeing also that some of them had blood smeared on their foreheads and others were soaked as if they had come through a sheet of rain. Near me a man, his face radiant with tears, released a fearsome cry and plunged like a diver into the moving mass. I saw myself for a moment, a small figure under the trees; and then they cracked over me, and I was with them.

  They were students, poets, and lovers of the goddess Avalei, and they were mad with the love that drove them through the streets. Love made them bound up and down among the walls in a rhythmic dance, clinging to one another, chanting hoarsely: “Riches and glory I do not desire, nor do I wish to be king; I ask nothing more than to be your lover and slave, to remain with you; only stay with me in the hills and you shall fulfill all my desire. . . .” Their dance was like those which are danced on the eve of battle. They tore through the streets with the savagery of an inferno until their passion exhausted itself like a sheaf of lightning among the alleys, and they stumbled, still clutching one another’s arms like frightened children, in
to the shelter of an ill-lighted café. Then I saw for the first time the faces of those who had been my companions in terror, and they were thin and drawn, their expressions stunned, and their bodies wore the shabby clothes of those who drink under the bridges, and their gestures were vague, and they held one another’s hands. They were true devotees of the goddess and had spent the day in the temple drinking heady liquors made from fermented flowers, and some of them had made love to the temple harlots behind the screens and wore the lost and shimmering look of new-slain warriors. The café where we found ourselves, fatigued and sore, our lungs aching, was a great stone room with a domed and blackened ceiling, with smoky lamps along the walls which made me realize that the sun had set and only the blue dusk came through the doorway. Evidently the “Wings” were known there, for a fire was quickly kindled and sleepy girls materialized from the darkness, one with a large pewter basin from which she splashed the face of a boy who had fainted. We looked at each other in the firelight.

  “Where are we?” I asked the slight, grimy youth who was holding my hand.

  He shrugged. “Somewhere in the Quarter.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No,” he said, looking at me as if I had asked an odd question, though there was blood mixed with the dirt on his brow and hair. We sat at a table with some of the others on wooden chairs strengthened with twine, and the girls, moving as silently as witches, brought us wine and teiva and held out their hands which we pressed with coins, and then melted away, yawning, into the gloom. “I need a drink,” said the boy who sat opposite me in a trembling voice. Tears welled up in his eyes, though he was smiling. . . . The others patted his back, and one of them said, “Yes, by the gods, I’ve a dragon’s thirst!” and there was a light pattering of laughter. Outside, in the streets, beat the music of fifes and drums, the continuing festival, which we had stepped out of, if only for a moment; and I found myself wishing fervently, with desperation and sadness, that these strange youths would let me remain among them.

  We were young and had been through a fire, and so we were shy.We did not exchange names, but after a time we began to behave like young men, and our talk grew louder in that dim room where pork and rabbits crackled above the hearth and the drowsy girls went dragging their feet. Our eyes shone; a boy took a violin from against the wall, removed his boots, and began to play, cradling the instrument; when the meat was done we ate it ravenously, grease on our lips, and the strength it gave us was potent like that of the wine. I found myself in an earnest conversation with two of the youths, explaining things to them I had not known myself, connections between the poets I had never seen before, a clear architecture rising out of excitement and teiva. The youths who listened were students at the School of Philosophy, and they argued eagerly, with fiery humor. They rolled cigarettes for me and we bent close together, smoking, their eyes alive and sparkling in the dimness. I had answers to all of their contradictions; they looked at me admiringly, they laughed, they began to call me the Foreign Professor. And I felt myself at the height of human bliss as I protested, “No, not foreign. I’ve been raised on the northern poets. . . .”

  The night brought music. A band from the festival invaded the café, armed with raucous pipes, guitars, and swollen drums, filling the room with a reek of sweat, demanding money and wine, releasing a deafening, jaunty cacophony of sound. The whole room glittered with girls, perhaps the same ones who had served us earlier, but now they wore long earrings and shrieked with laughter, and the young men caught them and whirled them about the floor in popular dances, their shadows huge in the redness of the firelight. The music called in a troupe of Kestenyi dancers from the street, who were greeted with ragged cheers from the drunken students—they were lithe young men with rouged cheeks and hats that were round at the brim and square on top, made of the piebald skins of goats. They wore long purple tunics that reached to their boot-tops and were slit at the sides to show their voluminous embroidered trousers, and they skipped wildly on their heels and toes, their bodies motionless from the waist up, their faces fixed in sublime hauteur. I watched everything through the deep, resplendent mists that surrounded me, watched the rise of an arm, the toss of a head, watched even the shoulder of the girl who had come to sit on my lap through a starry haze—it was cool to the touch, as if made of enamel. She turned her head to look at me. I was happy and exhausted, feeling as I had felt on the open sea: as if the world had drowned and something new had taken its place, a ringing brilliance, fathomless and transparent.

  The cool girl moved her lips, saying something I could not hear. I told her that no, she was not heavy at all. My desire for her had no beginning; I felt it had always been there, blind and torrential like my desire for the city. She took my arm and led me into the rooms, the elusive corridors, the hanging stairs, the ineluctable darkness, into a room with walls as thin as if they were made of cardboard, where a single candle winked crazily in the gloom. There was music from downstairs. I believe the girl was talking to me, but I could not understand anything she said, not until she drew close to me and I heard her voice distinctly as she whispered: “Cousin, this is what the gods eat.”

  I awoke to glare and silence. And then, beyond the silence, sound—the sounds from the street which I realized had awakened me, sounds of talk and footsteps, a burst of laughter, the whine of a door, the scrape of a wooden table across the pavement. My mouth was dry, but I felt no pain until I tried to move, and then I began to ache in every limb, the agony concentrated in my skull, which throbbed rhythmically as if in time to the ringing of my ears. With the pain came the realization that I was in a strange room, and that the silence of the room was the first thing I had heard, a blankness that made me uneasy because it was not like other silences: it was the dead sound of abandonment and squalor. I opened my eyes. I lay on a narrow pallet that smelled of ammonia and mice, wearing only my shirt, on a floor of wooden slats that had long ago been green, in a very small room dazzlingly lit by the sun. There was no sign of the girl, and no sign that the room belonged to anyone. I sat up, groping weakly for the trousers lying over my feet. I saw my boots against the wall, but my waistcoat had disappeared, and I soon realized that my purse was gone as well. The single pearl button that had once closed the throat of my shirt had been removed, plucked away with a surgeon’s skill.

  Trembling, my body clammy with a poisonous film of sweat, I opened the door and limped into the hall, a twilit region down which there echoed a shriek of coarse laughter. A door opened to my right, and a girl stumbled out. She slipped and fell, naked but for a green shawl clutched about her, turning her back to the wall, screaming with laughter, facing the open door at which she yelled: “Don’t you do it!”—and a pair of slippers was flung at her from inside. I stood, swaying, sick with rage, wondering if it was she, and about to demand the return of my belongings, when she looked up at me and shouted in a flatly insulting tone: “Vai! If it’s not the camel of Emun Deis.” Her own witticism sent her into transports of braying laughter. I turned away, walking unsteadily down the hall, refusing to believe that this could be my companion of the previous night, and lacking the strength for a fight.

  As I turned a corner I nearly walked into one of the Kestenyi dancers, who stood urinating calmly against the wall. He wore the long split skirt but was missing the trousers underneath, and the front of his skirt was looped up over his arm. He was very tall, and he turned to stare at me with his hot black eyes, a stare of vivid and terrible attentiveness which made me stop short, looking back at him, my heart racing. He looked like one whose thoughts are not those of others. There was something in his eyes, a look both vacant and profound, which made me certain he was no mere lunatic; his gaze of inspired singleness of purpose, combined with his handsome, bestial face, gave him a look of precise evil. I opened my mouth but could not find anything to say to his stare. At last he shook himself and released his skirt, which swirled below his knees, a voluptuous and dusky purple, and turned away, swaggering down the hall.
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  “Horrible!” I whispered, unable to help myself. I was now shivering violently with fever, and the ringing in my ears had grown into a persistent whine. I moved on down the empty passage. This hall seemed narrower, more constricted than the others, and it was quiet, as though at the center of the building. I was shaken by my encounter with the dancer and glanced back often, making sure that I was not being followed. Soon you will be outside, I told myself, but I did not believe it, no longer believed anything that I told myself, no longer believed that there had been sunlight, festivals, screens of poplars beside a canal. The air was dancing before my eyes. A stairway opened in front of me, and I shuffled down, trying to cling to the wall, which was smooth and cold and offered me no support; and at last, overcome by exhaustion, I sank to my knees and leaned back against the stairs, my mind reeling in the stillness.

  And then, suddenly, she was there. She did not appear, as a person would, but at once the world became aware of her presence. With a violence, a blinding rupture, she was there at the foot of the stairs, and the air opened, trembling, to receive her. The city wept. I cried out from the intense pain in my head, throwing up my arms to protect my face. . . . But she was there, I could still see her, just as she had been on the ship, with her childlike shape, her long red hair, and her face, unclear in the brilliance. The air shuddered, flashing with the strain of having to hold her, humming like sheets of steel, like sheets of lightning. There was the chaos in the hall of a disturbed geography, of a world constrained to rearrange itself.

  She raised her small hand. There was the shock of opening vistas, of landscapes over which I hurtled, helpless; and she said, in a voice as intimate as if she were pressing her fingers on my brain: “Rise! Rise, Jevick of Tyom!”