Crematorium for Phoenixes

by Nikola Yanchovichin

  The group stepped on broken tiles that creaked and crushed gravel with the caution of young children who are headed toward something that attracts them even though they are afraid.

  These tentacles stroked their costumes and tested their nerves. They hoped that whatever they found they could resist.

  Thus, step by step, they finally came to the moment that our history dictates the company reached the center of the underground puzzle—an oval room that unfolded to reveal an underground lake surrounded by spherical walls.

  It was hard to tell what caught the eye first.

  Perhaps it was the round columns that clung to the room’s ceiling, settled and elongated as the wind stops trees. They were strung like a band chains that crisscrossed in the center like the spokes of a wheel.

  There, chained to them, roared and sharply cried something that looked like a bull, although it was difficult to determine what exactly it was.

  The men stood motionless; they were people who had entered the swamp from which there is no escape, only death.

  “Everett, son, do not . . . !” shouted one voice.

  Another figure, small and squat, stood unremarkable in this background. It approached the creature that shook the chains and had stretched them to their limit.

  “Please, son, stop . . . Please . . .” the voice broke into sobs as the monster—a humanoid with an elongated neck like a horse or an ox, desperately tried to break free. It cried and howled.

  The men approached. The creature sensed their presence, roared even more, and sprayed foamy saliva and drops of sweat everywhere.

  “It’s not time for a meal . . . Not for that food. I said it . . .” cried the man, standing as a beacon to the surf and not responding to anything else.

  Tammuz waved to the group, and they loaded their guns with quiet clicks, pointed it at the figure that stood as ruthless as a graven image.

  The man turned around and look at them.

  “Who are you? How, how did you get here?” he said like a scientist who had been surprised in the middle of his obscene experiment.

  “We came to kill the monster,” Tammuz called over the creature that raged like a beast that had lost all of its reason.

  “To kill, to kill . . .” repeated the man and his gaze slid over the strange weapons, stopping as if he had remembered something. His eyes widened. “No, you promised me, you cannot do it, you had promised me . . .” he stammered like a little child.

  “What? I don’t know what you mean,” said Tammuz and engaged the rifle.

  “NOOOO!!!” the man shook wildly. The skirt of his garment, which had previously been indistinguishable, now showed; it was a shiny, matte-red ermine that girded his body. “Please don’t, you had promised me, you had promised me . . .” his voice was again that of a child.

  “Promised? We haven’t promised anything,” said Tammuz, but he lowered his gun, apparently intrigued.

  “This is a game, right? Another trial? For you life is just one card from greasy dough that has been thrown away.”

  “Listen . . . .”

  “No, you had better listen to me. I am tired, you know. I’m sick from all of you but mostly by myself. I was an ordinary shepherd until you told me that my name was Minos, and then in the mountain of Dicta, I dictated the laws that raised me like a king on this island.” The man’s voice trembled. He kept swallowing and swallowing his pain. “You promised me and gave me much more with your chariots, so we built cities in the wilderness, created ships that reached and put under obedience overseas lands that we hadn’t even know existed. From the children of the wild who didn’t even have their own language, you made us into who we are, and when my son Everett got sick, I thought that you would help . . .” the legendary Minos, ruler of the grand Mediterranean, choked on his tears.

  “You made a promise that you would help—that you would wave and everything would be fine. But that didn’t happen every time. And here’s your result,” he said and pointed at the Minotaur who was breathing, snorting steam and saliva as an ox. Lying on the ground, tears crawled like raindrops that had fallen over the old man’s cheeks, which reminded one of dough. “You abandoned and left us in hell, alone with our pain.”

  Sharukin bowed his head, as if the accuser had finished his speech. The bars were closed, leaving only a sobering silence between the four horizons of the world—the cell where you only have moments of reflection.

  “You are right. Sometimes the biggest penalty of the divine are not his words, but his silence,” he said, sliding his gaze across the bas-reliefs on the columns, which were issued as gargoyles waiting for carrion and flexing their claws. “But these were not gods, Minos, they were just human beings.”

  “Men, huh?” muttered the old man. “So for those people, the world is just a table, leaned over to create new horrors.”

  “Yes.”

  “And all their and our work is the history on this island. It will be distorted and half-remembered and will be transmitted to those who will come.”

  Tammuz could only shake his head. He sighed and stared at the mosaic floor upon which kerosene stains looked like Rorschach images as Minos continued, “That is just part of a story, lad. That’s the ability of God, to look through our mortal eyes in every part of the centuries. Do you understand? And the only thing that He is looking at now is that!” the old man said, pointing like a ghost at something right by the snorting monster.

  Tammuz and his band, who had approached him, stared at the grooves on the floor that were folded like shells of piled junk.

  They all blinked several times. Their eyes were narrowed when the old man pulled out a torch, and the monster roared at the smoky fire. He shook his chains and his shade, as if still growing, was cast upon the piles and piles of scattered, gnawed bones and skulls that grinned speechlessly at this farce.

  “Lord, what is this?” asked the men.

  “This is the only food that my son Everett can take, levied as a tax from all over the Asia Minor coast and Peloponnese–—human flesh,” Minos spoke. He hauled his cloak about him, shivering like an old man in a winter storm. “Yeah . . .” he finished, seeing the realization of the truth on the faces of the group. “Sometimes the tragedy does not need many words. Reality itself usually works.”

  The men were rubbing the tops of indecision while staring at their own reflection in the gutter spray; Tammuz turned his head up and said, “Then I’ll end this.”

  “Okay,” Minos said, and he took a few steps forward until he embraced the Minotaur, which allow him to do so. “Do it.”

  “But why?” interrupted Sharukin, who until now had been a silent witness to what was happening.

  “Because he is my son, boy,” said the old man, stroking the monster that mooed endearingly, squinting with pleasure in his animal eyes. And this is one of those things that even in a weak story has some sense.

  Tammuz pulled out the knobs of his rifle, holding it like a scepter that blesses or curses. It snapped like a rattlesnake warning. He lifted it to his shoulder and rested his cheek on the butt, shrinking his eye toward the long barrel.

  “Wait, you will kill him?” called Sharukin.

  “I have to,” said Tammuz.

  “But why?”

  “Life is often a box with a pop-up toy that is not always popping out good things. And the true monsters in this story are those who kill them,” said Tammuz. He wiped a few tears that would pipetted loosely down, dissolving into his slimy suit.

  Then he tried to aim, but his hands dropped, trembling with weakness.

  “You have it right, boy. Life has pretty moments in which a person is required to live more or die. Fate is sometimes a cage in which we stand too long chained,” said Minos. “You do not have to do it. It should have been done a long time ago. Because ultimately, death is a maze in which there is no way out. Give me your weapon,” he finished, as if again dictating divine words that were spoken passionately in the red clouds.

  Tammuz listened to
him.

  Minos took the gun. It looked strange and was an unknown object to him, like the scepter that the time travelers had given him to rule over the Aegean. He lifted it and took a bead on the Minotaur.

  His eyes filled with tears that were accumulating one after another. Seemingly identical, they contained thousands of shades of sorrow, all rolled up insanely as rain and tapping on the window of a diseased one.

  “Goodbye, Everett,” he said.

  There was a shot that echoed like muffled thunder in summertime corridors.

  The monster was dead.

  Merging again with the mined darkness, Minos disappeared.

  There was the clatter of footsteps, perhaps even a muffled shot, and then all was quiet, as if a curtain had been lowered.

  Chapter Twelve

  The boat was elongated and had a tapered waterline imitating wood. Its fiberglass seemed to glide over the waves like a swan.

  Several men were scrambling and rigging things as agile as monkeys, walking up and down the ropes, stretching the winches and pulleys. They shouted to each other in the morning twilight.

  At the end rudder at the bottom part of the quarter deck, with his hands leaning on it and dressed in a gray winding robe, stood Takeshi. From time to time, he adjusted the course.

  A hundred feet in front of him, on the keel, which was cutting through the foamy water, leaned Akuma. He had braced himself on the railing.

  Thus, in the Western Pacific, in the stream of the warm Kuroshio Current, in the Sea of Japan, as a precious metal melted among others, these men had started a curious journey that had something to tell.

  How could it be any other way?

  If God is a puzzle that leaves bits of itself on every piece of land and people on the globe, He had put the most into the Pacific and had left in its heritage His eyes.

  From north to south this ocean drags its waters, colored as fermented beer in rotten yellow, while the smoky hues of God’s pupils spread across the canvas like a blue carpet that has no memory, only infinite love.

  And between it, arranged in irregular cilia, rose and pushed the imagination the islands that were frozen as a flock of whales splashing the water with their bodies and tails.

  Before them was not only the bracelet land of Japan, the backbone of Hokkaido to Okinawa, but also the entire Pacific, which contained a dozen other lands and pieces of paradise.

  It is therefore incomprehensible how in these lands that stretch to the astronomical dimensions in reality, or even in dreams, we can have something that is evil.

  But, unfortunately, dear reader, we both know that among the furlongs of gaps, often separated by doors, pain is hiding. So it would be a lie in this unskilled history to say that in these dimensions evil didn’t exist.

  Because it does.

  Often, life’s narrative grinds a barrier over dreams. Evil is for that.

  But behind the disappointment that upon a few white sheets can be read, “I am terribly sorry,” there is none.

  And after you leave that behind, you will gradually get to what matters.

  Because each story is a ticket through which we can sneak away from the problems. And no matter whether it will be told in the red slums of Cairo by a half-blind beggar or in a stained glass room in the fog of Copenhagen by a poor shoemaker’s boy, this is the only patented dream machine. Everything good in this world operates only with a pure heart.

  And while listening to such stories beating in the thick darkness, we are still pacing.

  Therefore, allow me like a fixative solution to be applied on photographic plates to before our eyes again pop up the view of a ship in full sail in the cigarette-gray water that hides a coin sliced from heaven with His eternal splendor.

  The company piloted the vessel beside the stretching mountain ranges of Japan that curved like knocking mill wheels and fused with their mirror images in the water along with that speed only a sailor could understand.

  And the island of Hokkaido, with its touch of northern chill, came into sight. It materialized like an angel with open wings, revealing the charm of the southern waters leading to Okinawa.

  This space has been crossed by generations of traders, fishermen, and pirates, but it will sadly only be briefly sketched, as sometimes happens on a trip in the kaleidoscope of an unprecedented land.

  Because the course still pointed south, it strained while lined with felt and decorated with garlands of salt. The ropes vibrated from the air currents; they were stretched like the bones around which petrels circled and lifted their melodious song. The birds accompanied this journey through this piece of the southern seas.

  Every moment the water waves were being colored differently from the spectrum of light, creating a uniqueness that fate has combined only in water or in a loved one.

  There was nothing to disturb this tranquility, which preserved the original slack that created the world.

  And you must forgive us, reader, because sometimes there are no great songs. There are just simple melodies sung from a pure heart.

  It is because of these songs that what we love is laying in the elms and emerald-green fields cut into the land’s gates. Or perhaps it is being held ajar as noses in chalk-white deserts that carry the haze of the sun. It may even be found in the outlines and bristling pines of the mountain slopes.

  But this is not always true, as you know.

  Sometimes the pain we bear, hanging in our souls, becomes too severe. It chases us with the words, “You have nothing in this world except me.”

  Then all hell falls upon us. The dream castles of sand are crushed by the heavy boot of reality.

  Then the densely written pages become wrinkled, a crossed inability of sheets so that only dreams are slammed from them.

  But at this point in our history, tribulations are far ahead, covered by the miles, away from the horizon, emerging as the oil-blue stripes around a ship.

  So as twisted fingers pass from one sea to another, the sleeves and sleeveless water shall be imposed on each other so that one as a blessed individual could travel to the end of time and after a few days of the journey being shortened by copyrighted storytellers, the ship approached the island of Okinawa, which was rising on the water, smeared from adhered mud and emerald salt spray.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The underwater vessel surfaced like a drowned man, weightless and submerged in the misty light that penetrated the waters.

  The ice drifted while the snow precipitated its pieces, tearing them open like crystals of wispy bubbles.

  Somebody opened the valves and strong air hissed in morning freshness as the caterpillar train almost reached the end of its trip.

  After a while, a few chilly people shivered. The Leviathan’s engine started working with the sound of a fast moving trolley that was splashing away from the ghost-white water in a narrow strip. It shone like the trail of a comet.

  Iceland seemed again to plunge into the misty landscape, scratching its limbs without giving up easily. It was dragged like an animal into the den of a predator.

  During this time, Victor Drake, Amos Oz, and the others emerged from several compartments reinforced by ladders in the furnace room. They had started the auxiliary machines with fatigue, like hunched over and limp servants in a dazzling chrome laboratory.

  They were silent, each busy with his routine and thinking through in his own way what happened thousands of leagues under the sea.

  But as such things are examined, sometimes an everyday person sees only emptiness and futility. But the worst part is when he starts feeling those things when looking at himself. Then he understands that in the face of evil and sorrow he has lost a part of himself, a piece that will never be found.

  This is exactly the way the men were feeling while looking at the surfaces of stainless steel that reflected their inflated or oblong forms into soiled, frayed, denim structures.

  They were straining in their minds and looking for the blind, forgotten memories, the moments
of happiness. Instead, in their heads only the scenes of harsh naval discipline popped up along with the image of comrades lying on the seabed of the Berber Coast. They had other companions all the way in the islands of the Caribbean, who had been decimated by disease. It comes as no surprise then that the feasts in the evening that they had earned by hard labor were busted.

  In their consciousness floated the insoluble matter of eternal mystery that is slugged between a Sphinx’s paws while waiting for an answer to the question: “Why?”

  They were working, manipulating the machines up and down through the hatch and seeking decisions, but they found only silence.

  The Leviathan floated along, breaking the iron-gray, jagged waves that churned from the moving molecules of water just to fall into them again like a boat in a picture by Hokusai.

  They stabbed the northern storm and were tossed by its physical strength. The vessel navigated in the Atlantic, embraced the titanium whose name it carried ashore on four continents.

  Among this breath of water-cooled air from the atoms, connected to the universe itself by the horizon, it was quite possible to imagine that the inhabits would be gigantic squids howling like a dragon or a basilisk raised over tens of meters above sea level—very cold snow monsters that dragged the helpless into the abyss of their mansions.

  That chilled wildness intensified the pain and tossed a heavy hand as pushy as a drunk intruder.

  There was no one to extract them out of these waters. They were met only with the inconvenient, the pressure of pushed piano keys played in the deep extraction of loud sounds that resembled whale songs.

  Thus, the distributed locations each emitted a different water acoustics, and the men drove the boat while trailing a torn iceberg adrift over the North Atlantic.

  In their minds, like sprayed and sparkled crepes that embroidered the consciousness, waterfalls formed one single question: “Why?”

  Despite the events that had happened deep in the city, they had rehashed it over and over again. Still, no one had found a solution that revealed itself in a spinneret of letters to display a brilliant insight before them.