by Paula Guran
I disposed of these on my way back to the flat. I took a long, circuitous route on the U, getting off at one stop then another, leaving a shoe in the trash bin here, a sock there, dropping the flannel shirt into the Spree from the bridge at Oberbaumbrucke. The pockets of the tweed jacket were empty. At the Alexanderplatz I walked up to the five or six punks who still sat by the empty fountain and held up the jacket.
“Anyone want this?” I asked in English.
They ignored me, all save one boy, older than the rest, with blue-white skin and a shy indigo gaze.
“Bitte.” He leaned down to pat his skinny mongrel, then reached for the jacket. I gave it to him and walked away. Halfway across the plaza I looked back. He was ripping the sleeves off; as I watched he walked over to a trash bin and tossed them inside, then pulled the sleeveless jacket over his T-shirt. I turned and hurried home, the chill wind blowing leaves like brown smoke into the sky.
For the first few months I read newspapers and checked online to see if there was any news of Philip’s disappearance. There were a few brief articles, but his line of work had its perils, and it was assumed these had contributed to his fate. His children were grown. His wife would survive. No one knew about me, of course.
I painted him all winter long. Ice formed and cracked across his body; there was a constellation of bubbles around his mouth and open eyes. People began to recognize me where I set up my easel and stool in the Grunewald, but, respectful of my concentration, few interrupted me. When people did look at my work, they saw only an abstract painting, shapes that could be construed as trees or building cranes, perhaps, etched against the sky; a small pool where the reflection of clouds or shadows bore a fleeting, eerie similarity to a skeletal figure, leaves trapped within its arched ribs.
But nearly always I was alone. I’d crack the ice that skimmed the pool, dip my watercolor cup into the frigid water, then retreat a few feet away to paint. Sometimes I would slide my hand beneath the surface to feel a soft mass like a decomposing melon, then let my fingers slip down to measure the almost imperceptible pulse of a heart, cold and slippery as a carp. Then I would return to work.
As the winter wore on, it grew too cold for me to work outdoors. There was little snow or rain, but it was bitterly cold. The pool froze solid. Ice formed where my watercolor brush touched the heavy paper, and the ink grew sluggish in my Rapidograph pen.
So I stayed at home in the studio, where the orbweavers again hung beside the windows, and used the watercolor studies to begin work on other, larger, paintings—oils on canvas, urban landscapes where a small, frozen woodland pool hinted that a green heart still beat within the city. These paintings were extremely good. I took some digital photos of them and sent them to Anna, along with the name of two galleries in Schöneberg and one in Kreuzberg. Then I went to visit Arethusa in Sicily.
I had planned on staying only a few weeks, but the Mediterranean warmth, the smell of olive groves and sight of flying fish skimming across the blue sea, seduced me. I stayed in Sicily until early spring and then returned briefly to Ogygia, my true island. I could not recall the last time I had visited—a steamship brought me, I do remember that, and the trip then took many hours.
Now it was much faster, and the island itself noisier, dirtier, more crowded. I found myself homesick—not for any island, but for the flat in Schöneberg and the quiet place in the Grunewald where Philip was. I had thought that the time in Sicily might give me other distractions; that I might find myself wanting to paint the sea, the bone white sand and stones of Ogygia.
Instead I found that my heart’s needle turned toward Philip. I breathed in the salt air above the cliffs, but it was him I smelled, his breath, the scent of evergreen boughs beside shallow water, the leaves in his hair. I returned to Berlin.
I’d deliberately left my laptop behind and asked Anna not to call while I was gone. Now I found a number of messages from her. Two of the galleries were very interested in my paintings. Could I put together a portfolio for a possible show the following autumn?
I arranged for my most recent canvases to be framed. The sleeping nudes I had done of him back in Maine had arrived some months earlier; I chose the best of these and had them mounted as well. All of this took some time to arrange, and so it was mid-April before I finally took my satchel and my easel and returned to the pool in the Grunewald to paint again.
It was a soft, warm morning, the day fragrant with young grass pushing its way through the soil. The flower vendors had baskets of free-sia and violets on the sidewalk. On the Landwehrcanal, gray cygnets struggled in the wake of the tourist boat as the adult swans darted after crusts of sandwiches tossed overboard. The captain of the boat waved to me from his cockpit. I waved back, then continued on to an S-Bahn station and the train that would bear me to the Grunewald.
There was no one in the forest when I arrived. High above me the sky stretched, the pale blue-green of a frog’s belly. Waxwings gave their low whistling cries and fluttered in the upper branches of the beeches, where tiny new leaves were just starting to unfurl. I stopped hurrying, the sun’s warmth tugging at my skin, the sunlight saying slow, slow. A winter storm had brought down one of the larches near the pool; I had to push my way through a scrim of fallen branches, yellow hawthorn shoots already covering the larch’s trunk. I could smell the sweet green scent of new growth; and then I saw it.
The pool was gone: there had been no snow to replenish it. Instead, a cloud of blossoms moved above the earth, gold and azure, crimson and magenta and shining coral. Anenomes, adonis, hyacinth, clematis: all the windflowers of my girlhood turned their yellow eyes toward me. I fell to my knees and buried my face in them so that they stained my cheeks with pollen, their narrow petals crushed beneath my fingertips.
I cried as though my heart would break as the wind stirred the blossoms and a few early greenflies crawled along their stems. I could see Philip there beneath them. His hair had grown, twining with the white roots of the anemones and pale beetle grubs. Beneath rose-veined lids his eyes twitched, and I could see each iris contract then swell like a seed. He was dreaming. He was beautiful.
I wiped my eyes. I picked up my satchel, careful not to step on the flowers, and got out my easel and brushes. I began to paint.
Anemones, adonis, hyacinth, clematis. I painted flowers, and a man sleeping, and the black scaffolding of a city rising from the ruins. I painted in white heat, day after day after day, then took the watercolors home and transferred what I had seen to canvases that took up an entire wall of my flat. I worked at home, through the spring and into the first weeks of summer, and now the early fall, thinking how any day I will have to return to the pool in the Grunewald, harvest what remains of the windflowers, and set him free.
But not yet.
Last week my show opened at the gallery in Akazienstrasse. Anna, as always, did her job in stellar fashion. The opening was well-attended by the press and wealthy buyers. The dark winterscapes were hung in the main room, along with the nudes I had painted for those seven years. I had thought the nudes would get more attention than they did—not that anyone would have recognized Philip. When I look at those drawings and paintings now, I see a naked man, and that’s what everyone else sees as well. Nothing is concealed, and these days there is nothing new in that.
But the other ones, the windflower paintings, the ones where only I know he is there—those are the paintings that people crowd around. I’m still not certain how I feel about exposing them to the world. I still feel a bit unsure of myself—the shift in subject matter, what feels to me like a tenuous, unsteady grasp of a medium that I will need to work much harder at if I’m to be as good as I want to be. I’m not certain if I know yet how good these paintings really are, and maybe I never will be sure. But the critics—the critics say they are revelatory.
“SEEDS”
LISA L. HANNETT AND ANGELA SLATTER
It passed with mortals none the wiser.
The daylight hours darkened and there were
storms; many silver-shod hooves were heard ringing against the vault of the sky. Thunder and lightning ruled, for a time, and humans lifted nervous eyes to the unseasonal display, clouds colored gold one moment, red and blue the next. They watched as balls of fire fell and burst before they hit the ground.
Above the earth, Bifrost was sundered. Óðinn lay dead and Fenrir raged in the halls, devouring godly corpses and shitting them out only to begin the process anew the following day. Hel wandered, wondering what she might do next, then began to forget who she was. Frost giants, released from hatred and need, melted away. Fire giants burnt low and collapsed into stone embers. Cowards fled. The great serpent relaxed its coils and simply went back to sleep.
Miðgarðr remained otherwise untouched. Ragnarok was an apocalypse for the gods alone.
Gudrun Ælfwinsdóttir, Fragment from The Forgotten Sagas
Little man,” sneers Bjarni Herjólfsson as the passenger emerges from the ship’s hold. “Little man, what is under that cover?”
He squints and leans over the hatch. In the darkness below, four thin blond men, all armed, huddle amid bales of homespun fabric, barrels of honey and bundled furs. Heavy air reeking of musk and damp wool issues from the hold, thick enough to choke. The pale swordsmen show no signs of discomfort. Expressionless, they surround a dome-shaped object, perhaps two feet in height and a foot in circumference. A cloth of oiled hide, its hem embroidered with silver thread in a pattern of vines twined around runes, is tucked tightly about the thing. The quartet sit facing outward, sharp ivory blades unsheathed across their folded knees. Poised and alert. Ready—but for what? Bjarni has no idea. The merchant is no slaver; he is not accustomed to ferrying live cargo, nor the odd ways of men stowed too long below decks.
The strangers have not shifted in days. At first, they would surface to relieve themselves over the strakes, or to stare up at the sky as though divining secret, cumulus messages. But after the sun rose thrice on their journey, as the ragged coastline diminished at their backs, the men were scarcely seen. When one did appear, the beardless foreigner, Snorri, left his post at the top of the stairs and took his place. The rest of the time, the runt trudged up and down the narrow steps, bringing food, hot drinks. Fussing as if they might be children liable to catch a chill. Though short, as he wended around cargo and men, he was forced to stoop to avoid crowning himself on the hold’s low ceiling.
It is Snorri who speaks when required, who had negotiated their fare and the conditions of their passage, who’d paid the three marks of silver Bjarni demanded. Snorri who’d hefted the group’s packs onto the ship. Snorri who whispered as the hours of watching turned to days, forever chanting under his breath.
And it is Snorri who now faces Bjarni with a fierce kind of courage, the courage of a small man protecting a large secret.
“Answer!” Bjarni’s voice rattles from deep in his chest. “So sly and sharp-witted. What mischief have you hidden in my ship’s belly?”
Snorri stares at the captain, lips pursed. “Growl all you like, Bear. When I hired you, it was on the condition that no questions be asked. I’ll thank you to stick to the terms of our agreement.”
Bjarni laughs as Snorri turns and scurries back down to his charges, but he feels a chill when four blond heads simultaneously turn his way, their blue eyes flashing silver. A warning, he thinks, cursing himself for accepting the commission. It isn’t greed that has guided the group’s coins into Bjarni’s purse. He’s worked hard for the silver that funds his expeditions, and will travel far to get it. Constantinople, Rus, Frisia, Iona—his keel has tasted the salt of many seas, and his fair dealings have earned him the respect of kings.
No, it isn’t greed that drives him westward, but lengthening nights and the cloak of frost settling firm on the shoulders of day. Winter drains even the frugal man’s storehouse; soon the seas will be too rough for trade. One last trip to Northumbrian shores, he’s calculated, and his household will eat well until summer. Bjarni casts an eye to his sailors, their broad backs and strong arms more fit for mowing hay than fussing with rigging. He shakes his head, lifts his gaze skyward. Tries to ignore the two empty benches where Guthrum and Sihtric should be.
There had been a squall like no other not long after they left harbour. Fair winds had turned foul, and the sea boiled as if Niflheimr was bubbling up from the underworld. At midday the sky had been black, and some of the men swore they saw women in the clouds, armed and helmed, riding horses with flaming eyes and smoking nostrils. Bjarni himself had seen no such thing, but he wasn’t a believer and that often made him blind to what others took for granted.
When the waters had finally subsided, his two sister-sons were missing, washed overboard by the temper of the waves. This storm was not natural, the survivors whispered; Njorðr, their friend these many years, had turned his back on seafarers. Something, they’d said, had angered their god. Eyeing the hatch, many thought or someone.
Seven nights, no more, sly Snorri had promised, as he paid Bjarni three times what anyone else would have. Transport to the ship’s furthest port and a place to stow their goods undisturbed. The conditions were simple, and easily kept. Stigandi’s sail was robust, her rudder true: the knörr was in her element in a stiff breeze and had once made the journey in five turns of the moon. But her captain had not counted on the men’s curiosity, nor on the strange events that had plagued them since their departure. Last night, two more of his crew disappeared. And on this, their sixth morning at sea with at least four yet to go, the ship is becalmed. It bobs aimlessly while a carpenter scrambles to repair the mast, snapped under the force of northerly winds. The gale had ambushed them at dawn, dying down almost as quick as it had roared to life.
It was Ran with her nets, the youngest ones murmur. Weeds dripped from her bloated arms as she rose from the deeps, whirling her knotted webs overhead. Spinning them like horseshoes at Stigandi’s post, intent on drowning us all.
Bjarni paces between the benches, silencing the men’s gossip with his presence. Quiet but not chastened, they sit rigid with halberds kept close, iron swords lodged in the planks at their feet. “Swing your hammers, not your jaws,” he barks, even as his palm warms the hilt of his dagger. “The sooner our lady’s mended, the sooner we’ll be away.”
Even with all hands contributing, it is late afternoon by the time the mast is erected, the stays, spreaders and fittings reattached. A square shadow stretches across the deck as ropes squeal through pulleys, hoisting the cloth once more.
“We’re in your debt,” Bjarni says, clapping Erlend the carpenter’s back. Once the sail is aloft, the captain takes charge of the rudder himself. He works the broad oar, maneuvering the vessel so as to face the setting sun. But no matter how he steers, the ship’s bow points not at the orange horizon, but at a world turned to ash.
“Steady on, lads,” he says, voice thin. Timbers creak and ripples lap against the hull, the sounds muffled. “Keep your heads. We’ve seen fog far worse than this.”
Above them hollow rumbles roll, reverberate, setting iron amulets around the men’s necks thrumming. Steel blades clank their thirst for blood. The thick mist swirls, condenses. Great chunks of sky splash into the ocean, darken, grow fins. Twice the length of a warrior, the creatures surface and dive. Whales, Bjarni thinks, and in the same instant sees faces, scales, rotting clothes. Teeth like white knives. Taloned fingers that grapple at clinker boards. Not whales.
The beasts circle the boat sleekly, hypnotically. The rhythm of their swimming draws the ship off course—Bjarni fights hard with the rudder, for naught. Damp air is expelled from blowholes, from gaping mouths, and pulls the sailors’ attention down to the water. Away from the sky thickening. Thunderheads amassing, dispersing.
Exploding in a hail of black feathers.
Bjarni is deafened by the sound of beating wings.
He cannot hear the men’s swords singing as they are drawn from scabbards. Nor the slice of cold metal through flesh, the thunk of bodies being struck dow
n. Nor beaks clashing against helms or puncturing windburnt skin. Nor hoarse shouts as wriggling figures haul themselves from the water onto Stigandi’s deck, adding grey slime to planks already treacherous with gore. Nor howls as sharp teeth sink into ankles, calves, thighs. The pounding of sailors against a hatch locked tight, Snorri and his charges safe and secure below. Bjarni’s eyes register the scene unfolding before him. His hands, welded to the tiller, ache for the leather hilt of his blade. His feet seek purchase as the ship lists under the weight of battle. But in his ears, there is a grey whirring. The fluttering of hundreds, thousands, of birds.
A tornado of magpies, grackles and crows spins around the bondsmen. A spear tears through the whirlwind, disperses its ranks—which reassemble, numbers undiminished, almost before the shaft leaves the thrower’s grip. As they spiral, so too does the fog. Or perhaps it’s the ship that turns, swiftly, violently, and the world remains still around it. The vessel shudders, groans, the mast threatening to undo Erlend’s hard work. Bjarni feels dizzy, and is soon heaving the contents of his stomach as he hasn’t since he was a boy. Stars come out and tell him he’s in the wrong place. Constellations he does not recognize guide him to realms unknown. A moment later it is day, the atmosphere tinted pink—another minute and the sun sizzles, extinguished beneath the waves. Still the men fight with edges too quickly dulled. Still the sea monsters feast on the fallen, and those about to fall. Still the flock flaps and eddies.
In the vortex overhead, the only point of calm in this unnatural storm, swoops a sleek black raven. The hardened sea captain stands, dumbstruck, as the beast descends. Now as large as a bull; now the size of a dreki, the span of its wings rivalling a dragonship’s twenty-five oars. Round as Bjarni’s wife, heavy with child, the dreadful bird darts between his smaller brethren, red eyes fixed on the ship’s latticed hatch.
