◊
After green week ended, Magdalena washed the blankets that had covered her windows. She was hanging them to dry when the composer reached her house. While she fixed the blankets to her line with clothespins, the composer sat on a tree stump with his fiddle tucked underneath his arm. By now he had grown comfortable watching idly while she worked in the kitchen or the yard. He knew she would not want his help. He wasn’t made for that sort of work.
“You survived,” she said, and beckoned for him to follow her inside.
“Yes,” said the composer. He had been trained not to belittle the superstitions of the rustics. Their mouths and doors would shut as soon as he did. “I thought today we might work on some more transposition of the ballads.”
“No,” said Magdalena. “Today I will sing for you.”
The composer reached for his wire recorder, trying not to look as eager as he felt. He had seen how Sklep opened up when the threat of green week ended. Sellers called out to passersby without taking care to keep their voices low. Children went to and from school in noisy, gleeful throngs. Men walked tree-shaded roads without looking nervously above them. But Magdalena, the composer had feared, would stay closed.
The woman took a long sip of water and grunted to clear her throat. Her arms hung at her sides and her chin pointed to the ceiling. When she sang, she made no sound. The composer sat and listened, his wire recorder humming uselessly in his lap. Triglav would have photographed the woman’s open mouth, her squinted-shut eyes, her flared nostrils. Triglav was dead on the floor of the river. The composer remembered hearing the story of some German hack who wrote a piece made entirely of rests: four pages of silence.
Then, after a few minutes, sound began to come from the woman’s throat. She sang in an undertone as thin as eggshell. The pitch of her voice wavered like an instrument being tuned. The composer could not have imitated the sound on his fiddle or pipe or piano. He could not have described it with modern notation. He could only listen, holding the wire recorder to Magdalena’s open mouth and wondering if the device would even catch the sounds she made.
“Did you hear me this time?” she said, when she was finished.
“A little,” he said. “Are you trained to produce such sounds?”
“I am too tired for questions,” said the woman. “Please, go before the rain comes.”
The composer packed up his belongings. As he reached the door, the sky opened and rain poured down.
◊
After green week, Triglav returned. He came out of the river with a wife and a lush, dark beard on his face. When he shaved, his skin was smooth as a child’s underneath. He would say nothing of what happened on the floor of the river. He moved like a sleepwalker.
Ewers of water rested on every flat surface in the small house that Triglav shared with his new bride. The table, the bookcase, the stove top, the porch steps were all covered. Triglav’s wife did not offer the composer anything to drink when he came. The composer was accustomed by now to the inhospitality of the people of Sklep, and took the liberty of filling his canteen from one of the kitchen table pitchers. He found the contents murky and sour, as if taken from still water.
“It’s not to drink,” said the wife.
The composer sat down and waited for Triglav to come home. His assistant’s wife sat down across from him. Occasionally she dipped a dishrag in one of the pitchers and patted herself down with the swamp water, wetting her face and neck and hair. The composer lifted the camera from his lap and took photographs; the way the girl craned her neck, he could see that she wanted to be admired. After a while he asked if she liked to sing. She told him she’d always thought songs were better left to people who didn’t have any in them.
“Any songs?”
“Any blood,” she said.
Triglav came in the door humming. He asked the composer if they could go fishing soon. He said, “Alida tells me we won’t have rain tomorrow.”
From beneath the wet rag draped across her face, Alida said, “There will be no rain until the stranger house is empty.”
Triglav said, “Does she think she can do that? Put us men under siege that way?”
“She’s unmarried,” said Alida. “Of course she can.”
◊
At the side of the river, Triglav spoke in a low tone of what happened during green week. He said he remembered those days as a dream. He watched while his existence swam above him. He had no power to stop things from happening on the floor of the river.
The girls could breathe, could swim. The girls’ limbs got longer, their incisors jutted out from their mouths; when they kissed the boys who partnered them on the shore, it stung like salt rubbed in a wound.
He said the girls sang sometimes at night, the same ritual songs they’d sung at Cemuk.
“You can only hear those sorts of songs properly underwater,” Triglav said to the composer. “They make so little sound above the surface.”
The composer took out his notebook and made a note: damage to the inner ear necessary for ritual music to resonate as intended?
“I only wonder,” the composer said. “Why did you marry her?”
“What do you mean?”
“She almost killed you. She might still kill you.”
“Oh, that’s how things are in this town,” said Triglav. “Every woman sees her husband drowned before she marries him. All the girls are made like that. They have to be, or they couldn’t make the rain come.”
His assistant believed in the power of the ritual now; the composer made a note.
“This power she has over you, you don’t mind it?” he said.
“Of course,” said Triglav. “They have us underneath for one week, just one week, and then we have them for the rest of their lives.”
“Or they have you,” the composer said.
The air was hot, for the sixth month had come and the summer solstice was close, yet still Triglav shivered. He said, “You shouldn’t stay here any longer.”
“Why not?”
Triglav wouldn’t say. “We ought to get away from the river,” he said. “A bachelor is worth the same as a grave here.”
“What’s that?” The composer had never heard the proverb before.
“Nothing,” Triglav said. “Nothing. That’s just what we said underneath the surface.”
◊
Magdalena was not inside her house when the composer next came to her door. Steam rose from the roof of her banya, so he determined that he would return in an hour; an hour passed and still she sat inside the bathhouse. Long into the night she remained. Every half hour, boys brought hot stones and fresh water to her banya door.
The composer did not question them, though he wanted to. No one in Sklep would speak to him since he listened to Magdalena sing. His music students stopped attending their lessons and his interview subjects made implausible excuses that the composer recognized for what they were: rejections, closed doors. At night he played Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude on the pianoforte. He remembered a story about how Chopin had written the piece after he saw a vision of himself drowned on the floor of a river, raindrops falling over him in a steady patter. The composer thought perhaps he could call the rain to Sklep if he played that prelude enough times. The sun could not shine while someone played Chopin well.
The villagers of Sklep were too reserved to openly blame him for their drought, but the magistrate did come once to the stranger house. The composer admitted him and then returned to the piano bench, continuing where he’d left off in the Raindrop Prelude. “You can leave this town,” the magistrate said, when the composer came to a rest, “whenever you want—perhaps you did not know?”
“Do you fear to be seen with me?” the composer said, dropping to the bottom of the piano as he came to the slow, solemn portion of the piece marked sotto voce. He could hear the rainfall especially well in this bit, the drops coming steadily down. “Will they cast you out too?”
“I fear starving more tha
n I fear the wrath of any woman. The only thing she can do is what she’s already doing: not singing.”
The composer stopped playing and made a note: music a mechanism of social control.
“You believe there will be no rain if the girls won’t sing?” he said, returning to the piano.
“The girls? No. They are—needed. For what they are. For the blood their children inherit. But for now, Magdalena is the only woman who makes the rain come.”
“And when she dies?”
“Another woman will sing for Sklep.”
The composer had reached the prelude’s closing motif, a bright tentative passage like the morning after a storm. He played the last chords. He held them down for longer than the score prescribed. Without turning his head, he said, “That might be for the best, don’t you think?”
◊
Magdalena was still inside her banya when the composer came to her house. Steam rose from the bathhouse in white shuddering waves, but still the air felt dry. For weeks there had been no rain. The composer knocked on the door twice, then waited. When she told him to come inside, he did.
Magdalena was wrapped in wet willow leaves, a rustling gray garment that covered her from chin to ankles. Her bare feet, pale and shriveled with water, sat propped on one of the wooden benches affixed to the walls. Her wet hair was bound with fern fronds and hung down her back in heavy bundles.
“I want you to bring the rain,” said the composer.
“No,” said Magdalena, and rose from the bench. The willow leaves crackled softly when she moved. Outside, the wind picked up.
“You won’t?”
“No,” she said. “Not while an outsider stays in the stranger house, banging on foreign instruments and writing songs that sound like bad copies of the ones we sing at Cemuk-time.”
“You refuse?”
“Leave Sklep.”
The composer understood. The crops were wilting in the fields. The river had gone down so far that the Sklep river-girls swimming along the floor were visible from the bank. The trees were as bare as they were in wintertime. Even bathhouse wood couldn’t retain its moisture. Even the wettest things had become perilously dry.
◊
Everyone knew who burnt down the banya with Magdalena inside. They also knew when the banya burnt, because the first rain in weeks fell in time to put out the last of the flames.
Sometime later, when he had left the stranger house and taken a wife of his own among the village people, the composer asked Triglav’s wife, the new rain-bringer, to sing for him. She did, in a cool, sonorous undertone that made each note sound like a secret dropping from her lips. The composer could hear her perfectly.
The Warriors, the Mothers, the Drowned
The coyote follows Ana and her baby from inside a shroud of dust, swallowing the distance between them down into his empty belly. Over her shoulder, she can see how his indolent lope matches the frantic, foam-lipped canter of her tired old mule stride-for-stride. He would catch them even if she didn’t draw back on the reins and tell the mule to slow his pace. That’s what she says to herself, trying to slow the thud of her heart in her throat. “This won’t be more than a moment, mi querida,” she tells little Sylvie, who is oblivious and half-asleep in a makeshift sling. “We’ll just see what he wants.”
Already she knows what he’s after; how could she not? But she wearies of pretending not to know, of his tracks in figure-eights all around their aluminum-roofed shack, of his shadow stretching out long on the sand, of his hot breath on the back of her thighs now as she dismounts to face him. Only an animal, she’s been saying to herself; she can’t yet force herself to call him by that other name. In all the stories her mother told, no scabbed, hideous creature stole the living into the land of the dead. The nagual were wise and noble and only came after the deceased were wind-whispers laid into graves.
“You should not be still running with the little girl,” says the coyote.
“Why do you chase after us?”
“She belongs in the land of the dead,” says the coyote.
“She is not dead yet.” Ana can hardly even speak that word, dead.
“But here is the river,” says the coyote.
And there is the river. Ana has lived all twenty-one years of her life in half-starved flatland and never seen such lush endlessness, ink-colored and wreathed in spiny grasses. She might think it beautiful if she did not know: across the river there is no return.
She should dig her heels into the poor tired mule and kill herself outrunning death, but instead she says, “Take us to the other side.”
The coyote cocks his head. “You will be in the land of the dead. Do you realize that?”
“All right. So we will cross the land of the dead. And we will come out the other side. If we can do that, you have to let her live.”
The coyote smiles open-mouthed. Here is a game he knows how to win. He trots ahead, dragging a tail of thorn and goldenrod, then waits at the riverside for them to climb astride his back. He is a towering creature—his head comes to her chest—but somehow they both mount comfortably, Ana and her baby, swinging bare legs over his hoary sides. When he swims across the river and Ana is submerged, she feels coldness but not wet. After months in the desert, shivering is unfamiliar and magnificent.
◊
Sylvie’s sickness was only a cough at first, a small scuttling sound that whistled when she slept at night. From the dust, said one of the other women at the labor camp. There was too much dust. So Ana fashioned a little mask from twine and cloth to protect her baby’s lungs.
While summer wore on and Ana got sunburnt and hollow-eyed and strong, Sylvie got weak. Her breathing grew shallow and red tendrils of snot cobwebbed in her throat. When she cried, Ana couldn’t always make her stop. For hours she would pace the dirt floor with her face buried in Sylvie’s curls, promising someone—was it Sylvie? Maybe it was herself—“We will not always live here, mi querida. One day we will go north. We will be safe and happy, and the grass will sparkle green.”
And all through those long ember-colored nights, the creature skulked past their shack on tawny, bone-thin legs. How did she never guess what he wanted?
◊
Ana thought the land of the dead would be empty, but it is full to bursting. With gods’ turquoise bones, with small grimacing golems fashioned from maize, with temples so black and shimmering that she can’t quite make herself look at them. The coyote plods along ceaselessly, nose to the ground and tail flung high. Up through the ash-colored landscape they go, snaking around heaps of coal and green-eyed idols. At last they reach a hilltop. The coyote lets them off his back and they look out, standing side-by-side on the precipice.
“First there are mountains,” says the coyote.
◊
The mountains are towers of red stone, close to one another as twins in a womb. They shudder and palpitate, and beneath her feet Ana can feel their joined heartbeat. Kissing the crown of Sylvie’s head, she sets out down the narrow canyon path which divides the peaks. The coyote trots at her side, silent save for the soft scrape of his tail on the sand.
“They are not only mountains,” says the coyote.
She bristles at the leer in his words. “What are they, then?”
“They are the remains of some ancient storm that sent boulders hurtling down over the gods, and beneath the land of the dead their roots still wrap around the wrists of gladiators.”
He says those words like they are memorized; probably he has said them before, to someone else, perhaps someone whose baby also coughed and convulsed for three long summer months. To Ana they sound suspiciously like poetry, and she will not heed them. She climbs over the outcropping of rock, steadying herself with one hand and cupping Sylvie’s scrawny tailbone with the other. Closer now, she sees how the mountains bow toward each other in slight, almost imperceptible flinches of movement. Where she steps might not be where her foot lands.
“I can’t cross this,” she tells t
he coyote.
“Then you will live here, among the ashes and the golems. No further than most of the dead have ever gotten,” says the coyote.
“But I am not dying.”
“Then your living spirit will be meat for something ravenous,” says the coyote.
She wishes he would say what he means: he is hungry, and intent on devouring her. He has been licking his chops outside their shack for months, and Ana wonders now if it was not only Sylvie that he was after. Eyeing the mountains distrustfully, she crouches down low and shelters Sylvie’s head in the crook of her arm. Slowly, she crawls forward. When the rocks shift once more, her hand is crushed between two boulders. Ana fears a lash of pain, but she only feels the solid weight of stone all around her. Prying her hand out of the crevice, she finds her fingers crumpled and covered in blood. Still she feels no pain. She can be hurt and unhurt here, torn and yet still standing like a barren stalk of corn after the harvest.
She stiffens. Says, “It doesn’t hurt a bit.”
The coyote looks on disapprovingly as she wades deeper into the mountains. He seems displeased that she has not conceded defeat, but she can tell already that he is patient. Earlier, he said that he has a thorn in his paw but cannot pry it out, for his teeth are made of briars and he lodges a new complaint in his foot whenever he tries to remove the old one. That is to say, he told her slyly, he is well-practiced in shoving the same boulders up the same old hill. Ana doesn’t guess he’ll congratulate her when she reaches the other side of the mountains. He doesn’t. He lowers himself down to a crouch and they mount again, Ana wrapping bruise-mottled arms around Sylvie, tangling her fingers in the coyote’s wild thatch of fur.
Thin Places Page 3
