Interfictions 2

by Delia Sherman

  My father concluded his speech with a short bow and wiped his brow on his sleeve, panting softly. He retrieved the glass from under his chair and tipped the last drop of vodka into his parched throat.

  Poniatowski smiled and nodded. He was a good listener, but, of course, most of what my father said to him made no sense at all. Except for one thing. “I accepted the throne of Poland only because I thought that Catherine would marry me if I, too, were a monarch. All of Europe thought the same."

  "You were her puppet!” My father could not control himself any longer. “All of Europe knew that. But everything changed after your speech. That was the moment you showed your true self, your brilliance, Your Majesty. You could have done great things for your country had you simply done as I have just described."

  "Kings are the slaves of history,” Poniatowski murmured sadly and reached up to stroke his chicken. She dipped her white plumed head under his caresses and shook out her tail. A single milk-white feather flew up, caught a draft, and landed on my father's knee. He picked it up and tucked it into the breast pocket of his sport coat.

  Poniatowski wiped a tear that had escaped from his rheumy old man's eyes and rearranged the folds of his velvet robe. “You are wrong about me. I never had power other than the power Catherine gave me. I was not born to do great things. An excellent education enabled me to conceal my mental and physical defects. I have sufficient wit to take part in any conversation but not enough to converse long and in detail on any subject. I have a natural penchant for the arts. My indolence, however, prevents me from going as far as I should like to go, either in the arts or in the sciences. I work overmuch, or not at all. I can see the faults of any plan but am very much in need of good counsel in order to carry out any plans of my own. In short, I would have made Catherine a good husband. Why do you think she stopped loving me?"

  The vodka buzz had worn off, and suddenly my father felt sober, cold, and tired. Though not an intuitive person, he now saw Poniatowski more clearly and realized that there had been a flaw in his approach. The former king of Poland was ruled not by his mind, but by his broken heart.

  "I understand,” my father said evenly, as if trying to calm a child who has broken a favorite toy. “I, too, was once married to a Russian woman. Though she wasn't a tsarina, she carried herself as one. I remember the day I came home from work to find the apartment completely empty. She had taken everything—my furniture, my daughter, even the cooking pots."

  My father looked up to find Poniatowski nodding sympathetically. “Catherine also took our daughter away from me. A child for a throne. I never saw her again.” A second tear slid down Poniatowski's withered cheek. “She did not live past her second birthday. Is your daughter alive?"

  "She's alive, thank God,” my father put his hands together and glanced heavenward. “I should have gone after them, but something stopped me. I should have at least tried to take my daughter, but times were different then. Divorce courts almost always granted custody to the mother. I also believe that the child, especially a daughter, should stay with the mother, but I still regret not doing more. It wasn't until she became an adult that my daughter and I renewed our relationship. In short, I understand how difficult Russian women can be."

  "But Catherine was German,” Poniatowski protested.

  "Only until she came to Russia, and then she was more Russian than the Russians,” said my father.

  "What does that mean?” Poniatowksi leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, finally interested in what my father was saying.

  "Nobody knows. The Russians can't even decide what it means to be Russian. In any case, I'm sure Catherine loved you. Women only torture the men they love."

  Poniatowski clapped his hands. “Bravo!” The beautiful chicken flapped her wings and settled back down on his shoulder. “You understand everything. I promise to read your proposal, but not until tomorrow morning, after we've both had a good night's sleep. In the meantime, you shall have supper with me."

  Not having any relatives in eighteenth century St. Petersburg to stay with, my father gladly accepted the count's hospitality. For dinner they would have a simple omelet. Poniatowski told my father how he had learned to cook in Paris, during his first trip abroad. Now that he was older and had a sensitive stomach, it gave him great pleasure to eat at home rather than in one of those expensive St. Petersburg restaurants, which he could no longer afford anyway. My father, who hated to waste money, was glad that he and Poniatowski were able to agree on something besides the curious nature of Russian women.

  In the basement kitchen of the Marble Palace, my father sat on a high wooden stool and watched Poniatowski cook. The beautiful chicken walked around the rough wooden table pecking at breadcrumbs.

  "Why do you examine each egg over a candle flame before breaking it?” My father was hoping that the question about the eggs would lead to an explanation about the chicken. In lieu of an explanation, my father got a story.

  "I used to sneak into the aviary of the Summer Garden in the morning. It was Catherine's favorite place to have her intimate dinner parties,” Poniatowski began. “I spent many a pleasant evening there in my youth, back when I used to be invited to her parties. The aviary has fallen into disrepair since Paul became tsar. Now I visit the place for an hour or two each day, to keep the birds company. I pick up an egg every now and then, not wanting them to go to waste."

  What harm was there in stealing eggs from a dead lover, especially when one is poor and hungry, my father wanted to ask. But he kept silent.

  "The Summer Garden reminds me of when Catherine was young and I was the love she had not found in her marriage,” Poniatowski continued. “She was beautiful back then, and absolutely fearless. She would sneak into my rooms dressed as a cadet, in breeches and boots with shiny silver spurs, wrapped in a fur-lined cloak. In her later years, she grew fat and pitifully prone to flattery. Her last lover before she died was an insipid boy of twenty-six. Can you imagine? I was once such a boy."

  My father nodded. He, too, had once been such a boy.

  "I still laugh when I recall the antics—I never really liked sex. Did you know that she was my first lover? I found it degrading the way she used to ride me around the bed like a pony, though I will never forget the feeling of her powerful, slender thighs clenched around my back. I tried to talk to Catherine about my love for her, that it was so pure as to be almost platonic, but she just laughed in my face. She liked to sing during our lovemaking, compose little operettas, dress me up like a doll. All idiocy. I can just imagine what it would have been like for her last Favorite, what the New One thought when a graying mountain of a woman climbed on top and grasped him with her old-womanish hams ... but that's all in the past now."

  My father, who hated to interrupt someone in the middle of a story even more than he hated to listen to people talk about intimate matter), cleared his throat and said, “You were going to tell me about the eggs."

  "I understand,” Poniatowski smiled. “You want to know about my chicken."

  My father began to protest, because he felt it was important to continue in the charade that the chicken simply wasn't there, or that it wasn't odd to meet a former monarch living with a pet chicken, but the count waved him off with another laugh.

  "One morning I returned from the Imperial Aviary with a pocket full of fresh eggs. When I tried to crack the first one, it cheeped back at me! It was fertile, and, moreover, the chick inside had been just minutes from hatching when I so rudely invaded its shell. So I took the egg, which was largely intact, though cracked, and placed it inside a fur-lined glove. Eventually, pieces of the shell flew out of the glove, and I was able to sustain the newborn chick on mashed flies and droppers full of water. One day a perfect little yellow chick emerged, and now look at her,” Poniatowski grabbed the chicken and kissed her fine feathered neck. “Isn't she beautiful? She's a gift, after all my suffering."

  Let me repeat: my father is a scientist. He deals with the physical world
, governed by the predictable laws of cause and effect. He has no mental construct for the metaphorical (or metaphysical) significance of a chicken born from a lover's garden. Or so I thought. Nevertheless, he made no comment about the chicken-and-egg story, simply agreeing with his host that she was indeed a handsome bird.

  Poniatowksi and my father finished their meal in companionable silence and wished each other pleasant dreams ("Spokojny sen"). It really was an unusually warm night in February. There should have been piles of snow along the embankment, but the sleepless citizens of St. Petersburg were strolling about amid daffodils tricked into premature bloom.

  Later that night, there was a terrible storm, one of the hundreds of storms that regularly flooded the city until Brezhnev dammed the Neva River in the 1970s. Sometime after midnight the air changed from a caress to a claw. The waiting winter cold rolled in, making the Neva thrash in her canals like a sick man upon a pillow. The howling wind and rain and wicked waves stalked thief-like through the empty streets, creeping under doors and through partially opened windows, breaking up the bridges and sweeping out the foundations like coffins from sodden graveyards.

  My father, exhausted from his journey through the centuries, slept through it all, until the wraith like figure of Count Poniatowski in a nightshirt bent over his bed and inadvertently dripped candle wax on his forehead. “You must help me!” He cried. “It was so warm, I left the window open, and now she is gone. I've searched the entire house. She is out there in this storm. Please help me."

  Outside, the wind tore at their hair and clothing. Frigid water gushed out of the canals and numbed their feet. People driven from their ground-floor beds ran through the streets, scrambling over each other to get to higher ground. But Poniatowski did not seem to feel the sting of the sleet on his face. His eyes were fixed on a single spot on the embankment, where a beautiful willow swayed in the midst of a broken pile of pleasure boats. There, perched on a bobbing limb, was a luminous white speck, a ghostly flutter of wing. And then a wave came down upon the tree, and the speck was gone.

  "Catherine!” Poniatowski wrenched himself from my father's grip and ran for the tree. My father ran after him, clutching at the hem of his cloak.

  In the morning the world had turned to glass. Crystallized leaves fell from the trees onto the newly frozen ground with the plinking sound of a celestial harpsichord. Bodies trapped under the ice and snow would remain there until spring, immobilized like pike in a frozen pond. Survivors of the night stayed indoors with the curtains drawn.

  Poniatowski lay inside his Marble Palace like a corpse in a mausoleum. My father had carried him home during the night. He and the nameless, wordless nurse had put the count back into his bed. Having weathered several winters in wartime Poland, my father knew that you could survive this kind of cold only if you kept your head. He broke up the Karelian birch armchairs for firewood and gathered together the count's fur-lined cloaks—the red one, the black one, and the silver one with the chinchilla lining—wrapped himself and the nurse and the count, spooning together to conserve body heat. Toward dawn of the following day, death came softly on kitten paws and left behind an elegant corpse.

  The weather had grown mild once again. My father handed the cloaks to the nurse and bid her good-bye with a short bow. In no time at all he was back in my spare bedroom. When he came down to breakfast the day after he arrived, he looked a little more like his old self. Six months later, he asked me to help him with his memoirs.

  * * * *

  It was nine o'clock on a perfect July evening of our last session in the Catskills, and the sun was just beginning to set behind Slide Mountain. Dragonflies were dancing the mazurka with a flock of swallows as my father and I sipped vodka-spiked lemonade, gently rocking in our aluminum lawn chairs. We hadn't eaten since lunch, and I was starving, but there was still one question I wanted to ask. The fading light obscured my father's features, so now seemed like a good time.

  "Why didn't you go back?"

  My father put his drink down under his chair and shifted in his seat to stretch his bad leg.

  "You could have gone back,” I continued, “to an earlier time, when Poniatowski was a bit more lucid. Before he found his chicken, for instance. Maybe he would have listened to you then."

  "Well, it's obvious, isn't it?” said my father.

  I shrugged. Nothing in this story was obvious.

  "Cause and effect,” my father continued. “What have I always taught you? Follow the sequence of events to their logical conclusion."

  I shrugged again, not sure if he could see the gesture now that it was full dark.

  "If there was no war, the part of Poland in which I was born would not have become a Russian satellite state. I would not have gone to university in Russia, would not have met your crazy mother, and you would not have been born."

  "Oh,” I said, though this is what I had expected my father to say, exactly what a man of science would say in lieu of an apology. It was enough for me. To forestall the sentimental tears that threatened to mess up our beautiful moment, I tried to grasp the concept of my nonbeing. What I imagined was a vast marble room without furniture, weak northern light, a chill in the air.

  My father pulled something out of the pocket of his short-sleeved shirt. It was a feather, extremely white in the dark, moonless night. He leaned forward and handed it to me. “You are my beautiful chicken,” he said, “a gift after all my suffering."

  I ran the feather across my cheek and smiled in the dark. Time heals all wounds.

  * * * *

  Dinosaur Eggs

  I am grateful to the editors for giving me “interstitial fiction” to use in response to the question, “What sort of writing do you do?” Now I'm compelled to offer up another term in exchange: “concretion."

  According to Wikipedia, a concretion is what you get when mineral cement fills the porosity (the spaces between grains) in a mass of sedimentary rock. This mineral cement is younger and denser than the rock in which it forms. When the sedimentary rock erodes, the concretion, usually spherical or ovoid ("time is a sphere without exits"), pops out of its mold. Although “concretion” comes from the Latin word “con,” together, and “cresco,” to grow, the more common name for these geological objects is “dinosaur eggs."

  What does this have to do with writing interstitial fiction? I believe that interstitial fiction is created in exactly the same way as concretions: mineral cement (narrative) fills the porosity (imagination) in a mass of sedimentary rock (dreams, family history, objects and people you covet, allergies) to create an ovoid object (the story) that pops out once the sedimentary matrix erodes.

  So here is how the concretion entitled “Count Poniatowski and the Beautiful Chicken” was formed: a pastel portrait of a white Polish Frizzle chicken purchased at a garden shop; the Tim Hawkinson ?berorgan exhibit at the Getty Center, which I went to see with my husband (finally, a soul mate); the fifth-grade science fair; the humiliation of being disqualified for passing off my father's windmill as my own; Count Stanislaw Poniatowski, whom I encountered in a dishy biography of Catherine the Great (research for my novel-in-progress). What he wrote about himself touched me: “An excellent education enabled me to conceal my mental and physical defects.” I hear you, buddy. All the rest—my father, the Catskills, time travel—is mineral cement.

  Elizabeth Ziemska

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Black Dog: A Biography

  Peter M. Ball

  The first time the Black Dog showed up, I was five. We were living in Miriwinni, and it lurked behind the low, chain link fence that marked out our backyard, hunkered down in the long grass filling the space between the fence line and the train tracks. Noone else could see it, not even my parents. It was good at hiding when other people looked.

  I don't remember much about our house back then. My parents were teachers, so we moved a lot. I was five, and that means I'm working with hazy images here: I remember the house was on stilts, thick hard
wood pylons that would keep the snakes out and keep us dry if the river flooded. I remember off-white weatherboards and a corrugated iron roof. We lived across the road from an endless expanse of north Queensland cane fields. They burned blood red and spat ash into the air during the harvest months. The town was just a school, a pub, and a corner store that sold fizzy drinks and cordial. Maybe a couple of dozen people lived around the train station, the rest spread out in the houses that nestled in the heart of the cane fields. My friends were mostly farm kids, seen only on weekends.

  Miriwinni was the kind of place where adults were filled with conventional worries: a bad harvest, the bills coming due, snake bites while cutting the cane, a cyclone sweeping in over the coast. No one worried about the Black Dog except me. At first my parents would check the long grass when I spoke of him, just to make sure nothing was hiding there, but it didn't take long for their concern to falter. I was a child prone to imaginary friends and childish fictions. There was no reason to believe my stories. “It doesn't exist,” they told each other. “He'll grow out of it."

  * * * *

  One day, when my mother was taking me seriously, she convinced me that I should be making friends with the Black Dog. I was six, and I was terrified, and I refused to play outside. “It's time to conquer your fear,” she said, handing me a fistful of sausages. They were slimy to hold, the meat squelching through my fingers. My mother held my other hand and dragged me down the back stairs. “Give them to the dog,” she said. “Just throw it over the fence and let it know you want to be friends."

  The Black Dog didn't want to be friends. It was already sniffing out my scent as I trundled down the back steps. I saw the wolfish head rise out of the grass, fixing me with its crimson gaze.