Thin Places

by Kay Chronister

  ◊

  You may not remember: after two days, they caught you wandering naked in the forest, a rabbit’s hipbone stuck in your incisors. They carried you home, but already I was gone. I married my girl with the good head on her shoulders. I became a solicitor. We kept a cramped, pretentious apartment in the city where I hung an appropriate hat and a rainslicker on a rack by the door. Of course she had to get pregnant; before that, she was itchy and restless, pacing the insubstantial length of the place and asking how the fog felt on my shoulders, and if she could still get a job as a typist, why not, why not only a few days every week, only a few hours. Knocking over the bowl of white roses that she had set on the coffee table, spilling water on the carpet. I thought as we laid beside each other at night that I must dislike her because she was not you, and yet I think I could have hated her on her own merits.

  We never had Marseille, she and I. But we had children, three of them, and the bowl of roses was soon forgotten; she no longer asked about the feeling of fog on my shoulders. When you have children, you can’t think of much else. And all the while—listen now, let me see if you shift in your sleep, let me see if I am capable of hurting you—I was burning your letters. If my good-headed wife had seen them, I think she would have gone mad and abandoned me, stage heroine-like. I had something to lose besides myself. I tried to think only rarely of you standing half-veiled in the garden. I never let myself sit in silence. I had at least seven moments of epiphany where I understood, finally, how to rid myself of you. Then another of your letters would come and I would see that I had made no progress whatsoever. The fire could roar in the hearth a hundred years and I still wouldn’t succeed in burning away the feel of you.

  I will admit something to you now: I read them. All of them. Your one-sided passionate correspondence, your childish inarticulate wails. Isabella, you wrote me in my own voice; you signed your missives with my name, and addressed them to yourself. What is one to think? I convinced myself, somehow, that at long last you loved me, and all my fearlessness and all my climbing and all your invasions into the deepest reaches of me had been for something.

  ◊

  There is something I have neglected. I hold this part back, for I cannot face it with the direct sensible stare of a man facing his mirror or I will not see myself when I look into the square glass pane above the bathroom sink anymore. I shave my face; I shut my eyes.

  We were twelve years old. We stood across from one another on the patio with the afternoon sunlight coming in sharp fragments through the tree branches. “Hold out your hand,” you said, “close your eyes. Trust me.” The veins across your face throbbed eagerly. I obeyed, feeling you all over me. A second of anticipation, then a whisper-light brush of your fingers on my palm. I could feel the slide of your nails, the hard ridges of your knuckles, then something softer.

  “Open your eyes,” you said, and I did, and there was a spider sitting fatly in the middle of my palm. Shock stilled me and I could not drop the creature.

  When they wrapped my hand in the hospital, they said I might have died. They said you could surely not have known, a note of hope in their voices, anxiety underneath, looking at your aunt to see what she said. She could have said the word then, but you were what they call a skeleton in the family’s closet. Your mother before you and your daughter after. You said nothing for yourself, looking funereal in the corner. Days later, perhaps weeks, we knelt in the raspberry thicket, and you whispered, without any prompting, “I wanted to make you feel what I do when I look at a sugar dish or a blue sky or anything at all.”

  “Afraid?” I said.

  “No,” you said. “Not quite. Disgust and anger and sadness and hatred and like you are seeing yourself in a mirror that doesn’t work right.” You cried then, and it was the only time I ever saw you cry for real, the broad colorless glistening tears of a child, streaking across the veins on your cheeks, skirting the edges of your veil.

  ◊

  You possess me now more than ever you did before; I have you less. You ought to be diminished with your head nodding on that hospital pillow, your wrists manacled by those soft linen restraints. But you have what all women, I have been told, finally long for. A daughter is a death that reinvents you, hollowing out that space which was occupied with nothing and filling it with blood and filth and adoration, and I see now how she will do to you what already you have done to me. What your aunt could never bear to say to me before was that the truth of you was you were abject, a word I have said so many times now that it has become to me a two-syllable dance, a soft blunt whisper followed by a sharp jolt: you are cursed, your entire female line. The daughter kills the mother in childbirth and in so doing inflicts upon herself an infected wound that will spend the rest of her life slowly disfiguring her.

  In whispers, your aunt and I spoke of the infant as if she were an adventurer who would lug the sticker-encrusted suitcase of her childhood all over the world. She was to be sent overseas for an Oriental upbringing. To be handed off to some sufficiently remote French convent for a more traditional sort of cloistering. Or to be enclosed in the same cage that once held us, learning geometry in the spirals of cobwebs, sounding out words from your old conduct books. Your aunt would not say what we both already knew: she would go with me, and nowhere else. This child is you transmuted into something I can hold onto, she is the summer backwards, she is us standing underneath the boardwalk and hearing the many feet pass above and knowing that the sun will not set for a long time still.

  They will bury you, I am assured, beneath the cathedral outside Marseille. You can sing your longed-for vespers, you can wear your girlhood veil. You are not getting loose from me, you are only transforming; in the rooftop garden of a cramped city apartment, my daughter will skin her knee and hyacinths will bloom.

  The Women Who Sing For Sklep

  The composer stopped when he came to the hillside overlooking the village of Sklep. He asked his assistant to photograph the squat little houses of wattle-and-daub, sipped from his canteen, and looked upon the landscape with approval.

  He rode into the village posting to his horse’s trot, stiff in the saddle after many hours of riding. His assistant was fortunate; his assistant got to walk. His assistant’s name was Triglav, after the old Slavic god, which the composer appreciated.

  Sklep had no Sunday market, so the main road into town was empty, besides a woman who sold goat’s milk in glass bottles on one side of the road. The composer did not ask her where to find the town magistrate. He already knew. The house at the end of the road was taller and narrower than any of its neighbors. Already he had seen a dozen villages arranged just the same way.

  In front of the tall, narrow house, the composer dismounted, put his horse’s reins in Triglav’s hands, then walked to the door and knocked. The horse nibbled hopefully at the dust in front of the house. Triglav arranged and rearranged their luggage. The composer waited, his arms crossed like two intersecting bars in front of his ribcage.

  Inside the tall and narrow house, the town magistrate served coffee from an Arabic carafe. The composer’s eyebrows lifted at this display of worldliness. They were on the Hungarian plain. Last year the composer had lived with a tribe of people who spoke their own language and played instruments made from freshly sanded pine.

  “I want to study the music of your people,” the composer said to the magistrate. “I want to live beside you and understand what inspires you.”

  The magistrate did not say why, not aloud, but his brow furrowed deeply.

  “Go see Magdalena,” he said.

  “Magdalena,” repeated the composer.

  “Come to the Cemuk festival tomorrow. I will introduce you.” The magistrate was still frowning. “What is that thing?”

  He was gesturing to the camera, a cloth-covered lump in Triglav’s lap. The composer nodded to Triglav, who obediently removed the cover and peered down the telescopic lens at the squat, wind-whipped man sitting across from him.

  “Please,
not me,” said the magistrate, and rose to his feet. “I don’t have any.”

  The composer was an expert in his field, so he could not ask for clarification.

  ◊

  The composer and his assistant showed up to the festival before anyone else did. They spent two hours photographing and recording and transcribing the gathering of wood by the young men of Sklep, who timidly darted back and forth from a thicket of birches to the field where they laid their kindling. At dusk, the boys lit a cluster of bonfires.

  As the sky darkened, the people began to emerge from their houses. The girls wore white robes and had fern fronds braided into their hair; the children were barefoot. Everyone was shivering.

  The composer made a note of the festival’s taxonomy: Christian alteration of a pagan summer fertility ritual. He stood at the front of the crowd, beside a birch tree covered in ribbons and beads, and watched the girls shuffle into formation. In a few minutes they would sing, opening the sky, and rain would come to the village of Sklep. The other tribe he had lived with had told the composer about this miracle so many times that he believed their stories must have some basis in truth.

  No one asked the composer who he was or why he had come. No one spoke. After a while the composer saw the girls open their mouths in unison like they were singing, but no sound came out. He shut off his wire recorder. He watched their lips form words he couldn’t recognize, their throats rippling with effort, their chests rising and falling.

  Meanwhile Triglav winked into the camera and shot photo after photo. Triglav must either be hearing sound or had expected not to hear sound. No one acted surprised by the silence. The composer felt deeply and profoundly uncomfortable.

  The girls shut their mouths in unison. The one on the end exhaled heavily as though all of the not-singing had tired her. Without speaking, they formed a line and walked into the birches. The young men followed at a respectful distance, heads lowered. A boy of eleven or twelve tried to go with them, but his father restrained him. The boy made a little choking sound of frustration. When he saw the look on his father’s face, he fell silent.

  As the last of the boys disappeared into the trees, the composer tucked his trousers into his socks and set out after them. The procession had split the woods like a part, pressing down the undergrowth. The path left behind was easy to follow, and no one stopped the composer or his assistant from following. Beside the composer, Triglav shouldered the camera and photographed the backs of the girls’ heads and the boys’ shoulders from between the birches.

  They walked for close to an hour. A few of the boys played scuffed brass instruments. Chromatic scales in irregular minor keys. Melancholy, dirge-like music. The music had no discernible tempo, but the boys all walked as stiff and regular as soldiers. The composer made a note to ask whether they practiced the ritual beforehand.

  The boys glanced nervously into the trees sometimes; the girls too, though with less fear on their faces. Things with rope-like arms and legs shifted in the branches but never came down. Slick sounds came from the canopy. Presently the procession came to the side of a thin black river. The boys put their instruments down, and the girls laid candle-topped wreaths of pine and yew branches on the surface of the water.

  The composer put his notes away and watched the wreaths drift downstream. He could feel that something was going to happen. Beside him, Triglav made a small shuddering sound and laid the camera into the composer’s arms. The composer was surprised, but shifted to shoulder the burden. He watched his assistant join the village youth. For reasons that he would not be able to remember later, he did not call Triglav back to him.

  The girls and boys paired off, Triglav beside a girl with a narrow, pointed face that reminded the composer of a fox. The composer watched as they opened their mouths in another soundless song. Triglav sang too.

  When they finished singing, Triglav waded waist-deep into the river with the other boys. Ripples formed circles around them. They shivered with the cold. The composer wondered what he would name the concerto he wrote in honor of this ritual. He knew the villagers would drown the little decorated birch tree at the end of the festival. He wondered if they would drown anything else.

  Snake-like things came from the middle of the river, the same wet spitting predators that had been in the trees. Legs twined around necks, obscuring faces. The composer already knew his assistant was gone before Triglav sank into the water.

  ◊

  The woman Magdalena was old and built like a boulder. She crossed herself when the composer came to the door, saying, “You can never be too careful during green week.”

  In her little cottage, she served the composer a fist-sized hunk of black bread with soft curdish cheese. While he ate, she covered the windows and locked the doors. Twice she said a charm. He didn’t know the words but he felt their rhythm and knew they were holy.

  When he finished eating, the composer took out a leather-bound notebook and a pencil. He had not asked Magdalena if she would share the village music with him; he had not yet spoken to her. He thought something wordless must have passed between them. Already she had made overtures to protect him from whatever spirits the rustics believed in. He was comforted, a little flattered. He was hoping he would not end up like Triglav, dead on the floor of the river.

  “Do your people use modern notation?” he said first.

  She blinked at him.

  “The treble and bass clefs?”

  “No,” she said. “We don’t learn our music, not the music you mean.”

  “And which music is that?” He made a note: ritual music distinguished from other genres. Possible religious component to this.

  “The music that killed your friend.”

  “The music made no sounds. I thought it must be some kind of pageant, or spell, not—not music. And it was vocals only, no instrumentation. Is there a reason for that?”

  “You couldn’t hear it?” She looked suspicious.

  “No,” the composer said. “Should I have been able to hear it?”

  “Hmmm,” said Magdalena.

  “Do you make music like that?”

  “I can,” she said. “But I don’t think I shall.”

  “I’ll pay,” the composer said. For months his artistic failures had been haunting him; he had drifted in a sort of waking nightmare between concert halls and conservatories. He had been longing to make music as the rustics did in his homeland. Now he was wandering the earth like Cain, a mark of wonder on his forehead, trying to find what secrets were contained within the little villages long forgotten by the Poles and the Russians whose operettas were so popular. Civilization had no beauty any longer, he had told someone in a Viennese coffeehouse. He wanted to compose the wilderness.

  Magdalena blinked sleepily. “But we are, as you say, soundless.”

  “How can I train myself to hear you?”

  “You cannot. Outsiders cannot.”

  “And if I am not an outsider?”

  The woman laughed from deep inside her throat. She took the notebook from the composer’s hands and laid it on the floor. The wire recorder, she regarded with suspicion but allowed to stay. “You do not want to become one of us.”

  “Why not?”

  She licked her dry lips. Her eyes kept darting from his face to the covered windows. Shadows were playing on the blankets she had used as makeshift curtains. “When you hear the music, you will not be able to live anywhere else. You will have to stay here.”

  The last tribe he had lived with used to say the same things when they taught him how to play their fiddles and pipes. The composer admired how romantic the people of the plains were. He took up his notebook and made a note: music of central ritualistic and cultural significance.

  “While you live among us,” said the old woman, “always remember to listen for rain.”

  The composer said he would. Satisfied with his first day of work, he returned to the stranger house in the middle of Sklep. The snake-like things moved in the tre
es above his head but he did not hear them, or pretended he didn’t. That night, he composed a mazurka on his fiddle. He lay in his bed with the burlap-scented pillow and listened for rain.

  The bodies on the floor of the river shifted, and rain fell.

  ◊

  The villagers of Sklep rarely left their homes. Even the food-sellers were reluctant to set up shop. While they sold goose eggs and rye flour to the composer, their eyes roved the landscape nervously. Green week, he kept hearing. It was green week so everyone was afraid.

  They were not an expressive people. They did not mourn the boys and girls whom they had lost in the ritual. The composer made a note: ritualistic sacrifices occur with regularity? No one spoke of the lost youth, or of the snake-like arms that had reached for them. Magdalena would not acknowledge that anything had been lost, when the composer asked her.

  “They will come home. They have to sow their oats,” she said.

  The composer sent for a pianoforte. He taught modern notation and scales to anyone who would listen. He composed nocturnes and sketches on his fiddle. He filled numerous notebooks with his observations on the popular music of Sklep, which was mostly ballads full of cruel women and their hapless lovers. Only boys sang the songs. The girls never sang. They sat knitting with their long white fingers. Their feet drummed rhythms on the floor. The composer sat with them and felt impotent.

  Many nights the people retreated to the banyas, little wood bathhouses where strangers were not welcome. Boys hauled piles of hot stones from the hearth to the banya door, where their mothers and sisters stood waiting in goatskin robes. At last, the doors shut and flumes of steam rose from the banya roofs. The composer played lonely chromatic melodies on his fiddle and caught rain in a barrel. Twenty-two inches fell in the first week alone.