by Kim Edwards
They had come in the gold car and Muda followed them as it left, walking steadily after the glimmering gold as it receded on the horizon. Even after it was long out of sight, the dust it had stirred up settling on the fruit trees, he walked. Finally all trace of the car was gone, and he squatted down on the side of the road in the shade. He tried to tell himself it was the divine will, but all the holy verses, even the one on the kris, which he had known in his fingertips, had fled from his mind. He sat like that, quite silent, in a vast emptiness. Across from him the golden dome of the mosque glinted in the midday sun, brightly, like a jewel.
In the Garden
ANDREW BYAR BEGAN HIS EXPERIMENT IN THE GARDEN, GOING out in the dusky evenings after the help had dispersed for the day, after the cook had served the last meal and washed the china and departed to catch the final trolley, after the gardener had arranged the tools in a gleaming, orderly progression against the shed walls, had carried the remnants of the weeding to the mulch pile at the edge of the grounds, and had tended to the orchids hung like lanterns from the trellis—that was when Andrew Byar went outside, the house behind him lit like a great ship, his wife and grown sons moving through their evening rituals beyond the panes of glass.
It was June, the air fragrant with jasmine, honeysuckle, and mimosa. Catalpa blossoms burst like stars in the trees; their delicate custard scent infused the violent air. Andrew walked to the shed, stepping quickly, almost stealthily along the path, as if he were a thief and not the owner of these three verdant acres in the heart of Pittsburgh, high on a bluff overlooking the flatlands on the opposite shore of the Monongahela River. There his steel plants roared all day and night, bright as beating hearts, glinting in the distance like piles of burnished coins.
At the shed door he turned on the flashlight and stepped into darkness rich with the scent of raw wood and linseed oil and fresh, damp earth. He made his way to the workbench. Beneath it, shoved in a corner, was a wooden crate once used to ship fresh persimmons from the sea coasts of Japan, now buried under blankets. Dust billowed in Byar’s narrow beam of light, and the smells of mildew and oil flew up as he dragged the crate to the middle of the room. He slid the lid off and groped inside for the strongbox hidden beneath a pile of old magazines, limp and yellowed. The box, smooth steel, was wrapped carefully in layers of oily rags, which fell in a soft pile by the polished leather of his shoes. He opened the latch with a tiny, intricate key he took from the inner pocket of his coat.
A ten-ounce bottle, fashioned of brown glass, was cushioned in a cloud of cotton. Ubiquitous, it might have held iodine, or smelling salts. Andrew Byar balanced his flashlight on the bench. He took a test tube from his pocket and carefully poured a clear liquid from the bottle, filling the vial to a line marked near the top, then stoppering it with a cork. He put the brown glass bottle back into the box, nestled the box into the rags and beneath the wilting magazines, and slid the crate back to its position beneath the bench, the moldy blankets. Flashlight in one hand and the test tube in another, he went back outside, striding past the swimming pool and down the gravel path between the camellia bushes laden with rosy white flowers, until he came to the trellis where the orchids hung.
Here, he paused. From this clearing the house was visible only in pieces through the trees, magnificent elms and oaks and sycamores hundreds of years old, rare remnants of the virgin forests felled a century before to build the city. He stood watching for a moment, glimpsing the glassy light and shadowed brick amid the leaves, imagining his wife in her evening bath, plush towels on the floor of Italian marble and rose petals scattered on the water. Recently, her hair had begun to gray, and each week a stylist came to the house and left her gilded, as pale and ornately framed as a mirror. Still, in her expressions, her slowing movements, Andrew Byar faced his own age. His two sons were home from college for the summer, apprenticed to the steel factory, which he had built from nothing and through which he had made his fortune. They were indolent young men, handsome and spoiled, and he had no confidence in them. This summer they had brought friends, steady rivers of young men and women whose bright laughter flowed through the house, who studded the tennis courts with their flashing limbs and shouts, who draped themselves over benches, sofas, armchairs, who swam laps in the natural spring pool or splashed in the shallows or drank martinis at its edge. Andrew avoided them and slept poorly, waking from nightmares where his empire, built at such sacrifice and with such canny skill, constructed so painstakingly from the hours and sweat of his whole life, had been frittered into nothing as they played.
The test tube in his hand had warmed until it seemed to give off its own heat. Andrew held it up, trying to discern if a faint glow came from within, or if this was merely a trick of the scarce evening light. The single brown bottle hidden in his shed had cost more than his pool, more even than the private train carriage fitted out with velvet and gold in which he traveled to New York City once a month. Yet if this liquid was, as he believed, an elixir of life, then no expense was too much, no cost beyond consideration, even if it cost him the earth.
He took the cork from the test tube. Slowly, carefully, drop by drop, he poured the liquid evenly into the soil around the orchid.
He stood still before the trellis then, until the darkness was complete, until the crickets and frogs filled his head with a frenzied singing that seemed near madness. Then he slipped the empty tube into his pocket and went home.
In this way his evenings passed for one month, then another. By day he was, as usual, consumed by business. He drew up contracts in his office or strode along the catwalks over the burning furnaces, while below men worked, shadows shoveling and hefting and shaping long bars of steel. The heat from the red-hot metal pleased him, as did the intricate dance between machinery and men, and he looked forward, too, to the end of every week when the accountant brought the production figures to his office high above the plant, sliding them across the mahogany desk in a black leather folder edged with gold leaf. Andrew Byar, born poor in Scotland, was a self-made man, and proud of it. He believed in the power of his own personal will, and he believed in science. Pittsburgh in the 1920s was a pulsing city, powered by great machines and fabulous inventions, and if soot sometimes fell from the air like dark snow, if the rivers grew choked and black, then Andrew Byar believed that science would find solutions. Already electricity had displaced the dangerous hiss of gas, the awkward churning of steam; in decades to come the city would gleam, a bright metropolis, sunlight scattering and refracting from the mirrored surfaces of a million well-oiled moving parts.
All made, of course, from steel.
Byar had profited from his keen understanding of new technologies, as well as from his instincts for risk and innovation. He trusted people less completely, knowing as he did about human frailty and failure—how many men had died in his plant through a single careless action, after all? How many times had a widow appeared in his office, begging for money to feed her fatherless children? He gave it, always, taking care to explain each time how the accident might have been avoided. Thus wise in matters of human failure and culpability, he had given his gardener a camera, with instructions to photograph the orchid in the garden every morning at precisely eight o’clock. Memory, with its unexpected currents, its tendency to favor hope over facts, was not something he would trust. Each day the gardener came into his study and put a manila envelope on his desk, and each day Andrew Byar dated this envelope and filed it in the oak drawer of his desk without opening it up.
At the end of the second month, when his family was in Europe, he locked the door to his study and took the sixty-one sealed envelopes from the drawer. Clear morning light poured through the windows, which ran floor to ceiling along the wall behind him. He hung the photos one by one, in chronological order, against the opposite wall, securing each to the plaster with a bit of tape. By the time he reached the last, his hands were trembling. Still, he was methodical, careful, precise. Not until the final photo was hung did he step bac
k to survey the whole.
What he saw astounded him. He had begun with an orchid whose flowers were sparse, a plant well past its prime. Yet, nourished by this experimental liquid, the plant had flourished so profusely that change was clearly visible from one photo to another. After only a single week the orchid had burst its pot; twice more in these two months it had done the same, and now it was as large as a bush. Blooms cascaded from stems grown so long that they draped themselves over one another, trailed against the ground. He went immediately to the garden, where the orchid hung from the center of the trellis, its blossoms living jewels. He touched their waxy white petals, their deep purple hearts, with awe. What had been ordinary had become something from another world, a place more fertile and profuse, a place of unending plenty.
All day he was in a state of euphoric agitation, distracted in his morning meetings, pacing the factory grounds and glancing at his watch, willing the slow hours to pass. At last, evening began to gather, and he went home. He dismissed all the help and sent his car for Beatrice. Wear white, he instructed in a note, folding the dense paper once, imagining her at her dressing table, the dark words discarded amid her bottles of perfume. She would be late, he knew. Spirited and capricious, she would take her time; perhaps she would not come at all. He had seen her first one morning at dawn, an errant, early rising guest floating like a petal on the invisible and mysterious currents of the pool, her pale skin almost iridescent.
Dusk was softening the edges of the world. Impatient, unused to idleness, he arranged the setting carefully to pass the time, carrying a white wrought-iron table and chairs to the expanse of soft lawn. It was a night garden, bordered by low clouds of white alyssum. Moonflowers opened as Andrew worked, releasing their faint scents of lemon into the darkness. He hung the spectacular orchid from a low branch of a sycamore tree, each blossom like a candle in a chandelier. In a crystal bowl filled with water he placed white lilacs and camellia blossoms, so that the table seemed a part of the garden and yet appeared to float above it, too, to be suspended, hovering as bright and fleeting as a wish.
At last he heard her footsteps, rustling the gravel. And then he glimpsed her on the path, as pale and slender as the stem of a plant. Her white dress had a diaphanous layer, making her both vibrant and undefined, amorphous. She wore a fitted hat, close as a caress against her skull.
“What is it?” she asked, laughing, her lips cool against his own. “I can’t wait to know. What is your surprise?”
They sat at the table. Andrew Byar pulled an unlabeled bottle from the canvas bag on the grass, the old glass smooth and undulant in his hands.
“This wine,” he said, “is two centuries years old. A case of it was discovered on the bottom of the sea, part of a shipwreck off the coast of France in 1718. For all those decades it lay beneath the waters, and when they brought it up it was still intact. Think of it, Beatrice—the grapes that made this wine grew in the world when the garden where we sit was nothing but wilderness.”
Beatrice smiled, intrigued, he could tell, and curious. It was the same look she had given him when she climbed out of the pool at sunrise, her skin so pale against her lavender suit, water streaming from her limbs, and found him standing there, watching her and waiting.
The cork crumbled; he poured the wine and raised his glass to hers.
“To the lost past,” he toasted. “And to our future.”
The rare vintage tasted darkly of burnt oak; it was dry, not bitter, with a trace of cherry. Marvelous, Beatrice murmured. When their glasses were empty, Andrew reached into the canvas bag and pulled out another bottle, which he put on the table beside the first.
“This one has a label,” Beatrice observed.
Andrew smiled. The night air was as warm as breath. “Yes,” he said. “It’s the most recent vintage from the same vineyard in France where the first wine was made.” He turned the modern bottle, keeping his eyes on her face. “Of course, in another two hundred years, when this bottle is opened, almost everything that is living now will be dead.”
“You puzzle me,” she said, and looked away, and he remembered that despite her youth she was sensitive to death; she had lost her only brother to influenza.
“Yes,” he said, “it is most depressing, I agree. But Beatrice, what if you could live to drink this wine?” He put the bottle down and took her hands. “What if, in two hundred years, we could sit in this garden again, just as we are now, and open this bottle together?”
She laughed, and her laughter struck his silence like waves and fell away.
“I don’t understand you,” she said.
He stood then, and pulled her up. He showed her the orchid that had been so withered, now profuse with life. The year was 1922, and the Curies had transformed plain earth into something rare and unimagined. A secret of the universe had been revealed, and a restless world dreamed of transformation. In drugstores everywhere were special toothpastes, hand creams, bath salts, liniments, chocolates, all laced with radium, promising miracles. In factories across the country, women painted luminous faces onto clocks, licking the tips of their brushes to keep a fine point, tasting a bitter metal from the heart of the dark universe. The era was affluent, and most people could afford to have a little radium, but only a man as rich as Andrew Byar could have all he wanted. Radi Os. He whispered the name of his elixir, running his fingertips over the vial in his pocket. When he told Beatrice what the bottle had cost, she gasped. And when he poured the drops into her second glass of wine and his, this wine from grapes vanished for two hundred summers, she drank.
Paradise lost, he thought leaning back in his chair. Pale flowers opened in the darkness, amid the rising sounds of insects, and the wine warmed his throat, hers.
Paradise lost, now found.
ANDREW HAD CALLED THE CAR, it was waiting when Beatrice finally left the house, sitting quietly as a shadow by the gate. She walked, listening to the night sounds of crickets and wind in the leaves and the harsh crunch of the stones beneath her pale satin shoes. Her eyes would not stay down, she looked up into the night sky with its endless wheeling, scattering stars. Her father had a telescope and had tried to teach her the constellations, taking her to the roof of their own great house and pointing out, with infinite patience, the belts and flames and streaming hair, the cups of stars brimming over with night-darkened sky. She had studied it to please him, but she could never see what he was so intent on showing her. Celestial navigation, he explained, a science of the air: whole fleets had traveled with only these stars for guides. Beatrice stared until her eyes ached and stars burned phosphorescent against her closed lids, but even then the patterns eluded her. Often, just as she felt on the verge of seeing the stars coalesce into a shape, they seemed to swell, spilling over into rivers, shattering like a handful of rice strewn across blacktop. Her father sighed and put the telescope away. He could not imagine that his only living child would not share his love and aptitude for science.
The driver had the window rolled down. His cigarette ember made a bright arc as he reached to start the engine. Beatrice paused to tell him she would walk—the night air was so lovely—then passed through the gate into the street. Her footsteps were solid and lonely on the city sidewalks. The vast grounds of the estate rose wild and tangled beside her; a soft breeze stirred the diaphanous wrap she wore across her shoulders. The night was so dark that the random stars seemed nearly within her reach. Beatrice flung her head back to gaze at them, joy cascading through her flesh. She felt like a star herself, pale and radiant, as if every one of her cells were burning bright, as if she gave off her own particular light into the universe.
This feeling was something new: perhaps, though not certainly, it was the consequence of Andrew’s elixir. When he put the drops into her wine, she had stopped laughing out of respect, though privately she had remained amused. She had drunk out of curiosity and politeness, repeating the formal, nearly silent exchanges that held their passion like a vessel, but also being true to a vow she
had made to herself. For Beatrice was involved in an experiment of her own, one that had only tangentially to do with Andrew Byar. The wine had tasted old, of worn oak with a trace of mold. She let it linger on her tongue, imagining those vanished grapes, but she had tasted nothing out of the ordinary, not even the tinge of salt from all those decades beneath the sea.
It was not until later, after they had finished the wine and were walking along the rock path through the white garden, that it began. Moths, luna and sphinx, skimmed through the shadows and lit on the moonflowers, lifting their slow wings. Near the house, a bed of white nasturtiums seemed to flicker and spark. Beatrice slipped off her shoes and waded into the pool, a natural spring shaped by stones. You look like a water lily, Andrew said, and she glanced down at her dress, its hem soaked now and darkening. She smiled and pressed her palm to his cheek. He caught her hand and kissed it, his lips against the shallow concave below her fingers, his breath in the palm of her hand. She felt it then for the first time, how her flesh, where it had been touched by his, seemed to pulse with light, transformed, but she blamed this sensation on the wine, the starry light, the strangeness of the moonstruck garden. They walked across the grass. She stumbled, and he caught her arm, and she felt it again: the splay of his fingers like rays of sun on her skin. Inside the house, it was so different. Light trailed from his fingertips and marked her flesh, light soared through her like a comet in his bed.
Now she turned onto the avenue of stately homes, the white wrap slipping from her shoulders, her hair falling loose down her back. It was an extraordinary night, the air soft and warm, a caress. She heard the car following her in the near distance, and as she passed through the familiar gates of her father’s estate, less grand than Byar’s but magnificent all the same, she turned and waved to the driver, who looked straight ahead at the empty road and pretended not to see her. Then, still smiling, she followed the tree-lined path to the back garden, where she sat on a bench by the pond. On the rooftop her father’s telescopes stood in a line, and beyond them, the stars.
