All lice and nits left the body.
The red generative essence derived from the mother rose upward.
The white generative essence derived from the father fell downward.
A single drop of blood formed at the heart center.
The exhaled breath extended from the body by a cubit.
The exhaled breath extended from the body by an arrow length. The blood in the heart formed two drops.
It’s always darkest before the dawn is something our father used to say. He would say it at a time when it didn’t make sense and then, later, when it would have helped to hear a cheery word, when, being the nearer, the air of darkness had first entered and taken possession of our open eyes, when we’d lost even the cheeriest among us (by which most of us meant the Botanist though even the Cook would have been a welcome sight, toiling toward us up that wet, grassy hill with an armload of stolen provisions), our father was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t a surprise. It was the way it had been on Fairmount Avenue, one of us in tears after having fallen down the stairs, our knee bleeding and our heart broken, having been denied a piece of candy from the dish shaped like a shoe Nanny kept on her dresser beside the postcard of Niagara Falls, and the whole time we could hear our father whistling a tune from a popular show but we could never figure out what room he was in.
We could always tell where our mother was, even though she acted like she wanted to keep everything she did secret, whereas we could never tell where our father was, even though he acted like he didn’t care. Our mother wanted to be watched; it’s amazing how much of our time was spent watching her.
We were trained to be vigilant. The thing is, we were what we had become accustomed to watching, all of us, all those winters and summers of our lives together, every step we were taking and had taken before and would take again. But we were so busy being vigilant we failed to notice one another’s comings and goings, the modest lapses, the entrances, the exits.
The towns were empty for the most part. The little dog continued on with us, biting at our ankles as if in play though we knew he had to be hungry. He had saved someone’s life; it was hard now to remember the story but it had changed everything and so, despite the bites and the smell, we knew we owed him fealty. The Swede had either succumbed to the sickness or been eaten by the beast or joined the marketeers.
At last we found a roadside table with enough chairs for all of us to sit down around it. The sun had come out; a dark blue awning was spread above us, fluttering and waving and dyeing the seated assembly below with its color. A man emerged from behind a potted shrub, a white apron low on his hips. He ran his hand through his thinning hair. If he was there to take our order he gave no sign of it.
Two French doors led into the hostelry, painted dark green, one of them slightly ajar. We knew they were going to be there: this is where we had been headed from the first intake of breath and the first expulsion of breath, the table set as it had been from the start, the knives and forks and spoons. The napkins, folded in triangles. The white plates with a blue stripe around the rim. The table could have been set for a party, except then you’d have known who the guests were. A party often serves as a kind of explanation. It’s the least interesting part of a life, really. We already knew all we needed to know or thought we did.
This is no place for a baby, the man with the apron said. We could tell he was disapproving, scornful even, though of what, we were unsure. He had seen everything that had attained a human body come through here. Alas! The human body ages day by day! The relatives and friends surrounding us in this life are like a gathering of shoppers at a market. When the market closes, the shoppers disperse. Likewise this illusory aggregate of form.
One of us had failed to obstruct the womb entrance and thus was forced to suffer in a dog kennel or a pigsty or an anthill or a worm hill for the rest of this temporal existence. There was to be no way back.
One of us appeared filleted on a platter, drenched in lemon, a sprig of parsley in his mouth.
One of us lay like a fallen cairn at the top of a pass, severed of all flesh and bone.
One of us remained in the kitchen, seeing to the food.
On Fairmount Avenue we hadn’t had a cook. There were so many of us you’d think we would have, but our mother liked to say she did the cooking herself. She gave us jobs in the kitchen—chopping, stirring, pounding, beating, folding, washing, slicing—we never knew what we were involved in making and then, amazingly, there would be a dish to carry to the table, following the presentation of which our father would heap praise upon our mother and we would start to eat. The Cook wasn’t interested in cooking; back then he had a chemistry set. The Botanist used to sneak into the kitchen in the middle of the night and eat all the maraschino cherries out of the jar on the back of the refrigerator door, leaving our father with nothing but stems for his cocktails. The Topologist used to sneak into the kitchen, too; she was attracted to pots and pans and mixing bowls, anything that could be used to contain something else. The Iceman went for the freezer, the Archivist, the trash can. The Keeper, though—the Keeper liked to bake, but mostly because she liked to eat.
In through the French doors went the man with the apron. Out came the dough effigy made with seven kinds of grain. Out came the seed syllables of the four elements, as well as other pastel-colored delicacies. When the serving utensils made contact with one another they caused an unpleasant chiming sound.
The Astronomer sat with his baby on his lap. Already it was quite self-possessed, like its mother, who was nowhere to be seen. One of us slipped the baby some food; this was how Nanny had done it with us, to win us over. You think Nanny is so great, our mother used to say. You don’t know the half of it. There there, darling, we heard someone say—it sounded like Jee Moon but we couldn’t be sure, the voice pale green, folding in on itself like wings. Even as she spoke we were slipping away like shadows.
Don’t feed the dog from the table! the man with the apron commanded.
The year of feeding in the human realm had come to an end. When we ate, it seemed tasty. But did it taste so good now? Even the gods with their terrific stature couldn’t stop the effect of our actions, the greatest of which was our journey from one place to another, the smallest of which was the killing of fleas.
You think any of it belongs to you? the man with the apron said.
This is what we were asked, and, really, already we could see our eyes weren’t there, the way pieces of us were disappearing, hair, black eyebrows, a smile, a crown of gold.
Acknowledgments
Portions of this novel were originally published, in slightly different form, as “La Bête du Gévaudan,” in the Cincinnati Review, “The Botanist’s House,” in Conjunctions, “The Excursion,” in Fairy Tale Review, an untitled excerpt in Fence, “The January Tunnel,” in the Harvard Advocate, and an untitled excerpt in the Review of Contemporary Fiction.
I want to thank Louise Glück and Polly Young-Eisendrath, who together with Olaus Magnus, Lucretius, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead, are among the animating spirits of my book.
Kathryn Davis is the author of seven previous novels, the most recent of which is Duplex. She has received the Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman, both the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award and the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and lives in Vermont.
The text of The Silk Road is set in Adobe Garamond Pro. Book design by Rachel Holscher. Composition by Bookmobile Design and Digital Publisher Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Friesens on acid-free, 100 percent postconsumer wastepaper.
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The Silk Road Page 12
