No two mornings are ever quite the same. Some are cold and dark and rainy, and some — a great many, in fact — are like the beginning of the world. First the idea of morning comes, and then, though it is still utterly dark and you can’t see your hand in front of your face, a rooster crows, and you’d swear it was a mistake, because it is another twenty minutes before the first light, when the rooster crows again and again, and soon after that the birds begin, praising the feathered god who made them. With their whole hearts, every single bird in creation. And then comes the grand climax. The sky turns red, and the great fiery ball comes up over the eastern horizon. After which there is a coda. The birds repeat their praise, one bird at a time, and the rooster gives one last, thoughtful crow, and the beginning of things comes to an end. While all this was happening, the villagers were fast asleep in their beds, but the lamplighter was hurrying along on his bicycle, and when he came to a lamp, he would reach up with his rod and put it out.
The lamplighter was not young, and he lived all alone, in a small cottage at the far end of the village, and cooked his own meals, and swept his own floor, and made his own bed, and had a little vegetable garden and a grape arbor but no dog or cat for company, and the rooster that wakened him every morning before daybreak belonged to somebody else. It was an orderly, regular life that varied only in that everything the lamplighter did he did a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later than the day before, depending on whether the sky was clear or cloudy, and whether the sun was approaching the summer or the winter solstice. And since at dusk he was in too great a hurry to stop and speak to anyone, and in the morning there was never anyone to speak to, he lived almost entirely inside his own mind. There, over and over again, he relived the happiness that would never come again, or corrected some mistake that made his face wince with shame as he reached up with his rod and snuffed out one more lamp. The dead came back to life, just so he could tell them what he had failed to tell them when they were alive. Sometimes he married, and the house at the edge of the village rang with the sound of children’s excited voices, and in the evening friends whose faces he could almost but not quite see came and sat with him under the grape arbor.
The comings and goings of his neighbors were never as real to him as his own thoughts, and so the first time he saw the woman in the long grey cloak walking along the path that went through the water meadows, at an hour when nobody was ever abroad, it was as if an idea had crossed his mind. She was a good distance away, walking with her back to him, and then the rising sun came between them and he couldn’t see her anymore, though he continued to peer over his shoulder in the direction in which he had last seen her.
He told himself that he needn’t expect to see her ever again, because he knew every woman in the village and they none of them wore a long grey cloak, so it must be a stranger who had happened to pass this way, very early one morning, on some errand. He looked for her, even so, and the next time he saw her it was from such a great distance that he was not even sure it was the same person, but the beating of his heart told him that it was the woman he had seen crossing the water meadow. After that, he continued to see her — not often, and never at regular intervals, but always at some moment when he was not reliving the happiness that would never come again, or undoing old mistakes, or placating the dead, or peopling his solitary life with phantoms. Only when he wasn’t thinking at all would he suddenly see her, and he realized that the distance between them was steadily diminishing. One morning he thought he saw her beckon to him, and he was so startled that he almost fell off his bicycle. He wanted to ride after her and overtake her, but something stopped him. What stopped him was the thought that he might have imagined it. While he was standing there debating what he ought to do and trying to decide whether she really had raised her arm and beckoned to him, suddenly she was no longer there. The early morning mists had hidden her. And in that moment his mind was made up.
Morning after morning, he peered into the distance and saw, through the mist, the familiar shape of a thatch-roofed cottage or a cow standing in a field, or a pollarded willow that had been there ever since he was a small boy. Or he saw a screen of poplars and the glint of water in the ditch that ran in a straight line through the meadows. But not what he was looking for. And as dusk came on and he got out his bicycle and his rod, there was a look of purpose on his face. If anybody had spoken to him as he rode past, stopping only when he came to a lamp that needed lighting, he would not have heard them.
And who said incontrovertibly that things are what they seem? That there is only this one life and no little door that you can step through into — into something altogether different.
One beautiful evening, when the warmth of the summer day lingered long past the going down of the sun, and the women stayed outside past their usual time, talking and not wanting to interrupt their conversation or the children’s games, and one kind of half-light succeeded another, and the men came home from the fields and sat down to a glass of cold beer, and the dogs frolicked together, and finally there wasn’t any more light in the sky, and in fact you could hardly see your hand in front of your face, suddenly a babble of voices arose all over the village, all saying the same thing: “Where is the lamplighter?”
People groped their way into their houses, muttering, “I don’t understand it. This sort of thing has never happened before,” and in one house after another a light came on, but the streets remained as dark as pitch. “If this happens again, we’ll have to get somebody else to light the lamps,” the village fathers said, standing about in groups, each with a lanthorn in his hand, and then, chattering indignantly among themselves, they set off in a body for the lamplighter’s cottage, intending to have it out with him. A lot of good it did them.
18. The kingdom where straightforward, logical thinking was admired over every other kind
IN a kingdom somewhere between China and the Caucasus, it became so much the fashion to admire straightforward, logical thinking over every other kind that the inhabitants would not tolerate any angle except a right angle or any line that was not the shortest distance between two points. All the pleasant meandering roads were straightened, which meant that a great many comfortable old houses had to be demolished and people were often obliged to drive miles out of their way to get to their destination. Fruit trees were pruned so that their branches went straight out or up, and stopped bearing fruit. Babies were made to walk at nine months — with braces, if necessary. Elderly persons could not be bent with age. All anybody has to do is look around to see that Nature is partial to curves and irregularities, but it was considered vulgar to look anywhere but straight ahead. The laws of the land reflected the universal prejudice. An accused person was quickly found to be innocent or guilty, and if there were any extenuating circumstances, the judge did not want to hear about them.
In the fiftieth year of his reign the old king, who was much loved, met with an accident. Looking straight ahead instead of where he was putting his feet, he walked into a charcoal burner’s pit and broke his neck. The new king was every bit as inflexible as his father, and after he ascended the throne things should have gone exactly as before, only they never do. The king had only one child. The Princess Horizon was as beautiful as the first hour of a summer day, and the common people believed that fairies had attended her christening. Her manner with the greatest lord of the land and with the poorest peasant was the same — graceful, simple, and direct. She was intelligent but not too intelligent, proud but not haughty, and skillful at terminating conversations. She was everything a princess should be. But she was also something a princess should not be. Or to put it differently, there was a flaw in her character, though it would not have been considered a flaw in yours or mine. Because of the royal blood in her veins, it wasn’t suitable for her to be alone, from the moment she woke, in a room full of expectant courtiers, until it was time for her to close her eyes to all the flattery around her and go to sleep. But when the Princess’s ladies-in-waiting
had finished grouping themselves about her chair and were ready to take up their embroidery, they would discover that the chair was empty. How she had managed to elude them they could not imagine and the chair did not say. Or they would precede her, in the order of their rank, down some long, mirrored gallery, only to find when they reached the end of it that there was no one behind them. When she should have been opening a charity bazaar she was exercising her pony; someone else had to judge the footraces and award the blue ribbon for the largest vegetable and the smallest stitches. When she should have been laying a cornerstone she was climbing some remote tower of the palace, hoping to find an old woman with a spindle. When she should have been sitting in the royal box at the opera, showing off the crown jewels and encouraging the arts, she was in some empty maid’s room reading a book. And when the royal family appeared on a balcony reserved for historical occasions and bowed graciously to the cheering multitudes, the Princess Horizon was conspicuously absent. All this was duly reported in the sealed letters the foreign ambassadors sent home to their respective monarchs, and it no doubt explains why there were no offers for her hand in marriage, though she was beautiful and accomplished and everything a Princess should be.
One summer afternoon, the ladies-in-waiting, having searched everywhere for her, departed in a string of carriages, and shortly after the Princess let herself out by a side door and hurried off to the English garden. She was in a doleful mood, and felt like reciting poetry. Everywhere else in the world at the time, English gardens were by careful cultivation made to look wild, romantic, and uncultivated. This English garden was laid out according to the cardinal points of the compass. Even so, it was more informal than the French and Italian gardens, which were like nothing so much as a lesson in plane geometry. Addressing the empty afternoon, the Princess began:
The wind blows out; the bubble dies;
The spring entombed in autumn dies;
The dew dries up; the star is shot;
The flight is past; and man —
At that moment she observed something so strange she thought she must be dreaming. A small white rosebush named after the Queen of Denmark was out of line with all the other small white rosebushes.
The Princess spent the rest of the afternoon searching carefully through garden after garden. A viburnum was also not quite where it should be. The same thing was true of a white lilac in the Grand Parterre, and a lemon tree in the big round wooden tub in the Carrefour de la Reine. So many deviations could hardly be put down to accident; one of the gardeners was deliberately creating disorder. It was her duty to report this to her father, who would straightway have the gardener, and perhaps all the other gardeners, beheaded. But he would also have the white rosebush and the virburnum and the lilac and the lemon tree moved back to where they belonged, and this she was not sure she wanted to have happen. It stands to reason, the Princess said to herself, that the guilty person must work after dark, for to spread disorder through the palace gardens in broad daylight would be far too dangerous.
That night, instead of dancing all the figures of a cotillion, she sent her partner for an ice and slipped unnoticed through one of the ballroom windows. There was a full moon. The gardens were entrancing, and at this hour not open to the public. Walking through a topiary arch, the Princess came upon a gardener’s boy in the very act of transplanting a snowball bush. Instead of calling out for the palace guards, she stood measuring with her eyes exactly how much this particular snowball bush in its new position was out of line with the other snowball bushes.
The gardener’s boy got up from his knees and knocked the dirt off his spade. “The deviation is no more than exists between the North Pole and the North Magnetic Pole,” he said, “but it serves to restore the balance of Nature.” And then softly, so softly that she barely heard him, “I did not know there was anyone like you.”
“Didn’t you?” the Princess said, and turned to look at him. After a moment she turned away. For once she found it not easy to be gracious, simple, and direct. She said — not rudely, but as she would have to a friend if she had had one — “I have the greatest difficulty in managing to be alone for five minutes.”
“I don’t wonder,” he said. Their eyes met, full of inquiry. “When I look at you, I feel like sighing,” he said. “My mouth is dry and there is a strange weakness in my legs. I don’t ever remember feeling like this before.”
“I know that when Papa and Mama and Aunt Royal and the others come out on the balcony and bow to the cheering multitudes, I ought to be there with them, and that I embarrass Papa by my absence, but I do not feel that appearing in public from time to time is enough. There are other things that a ruling family could do. For example, one could learn to play some musical instrument — the cello, or the contrabassoon. Or get to know every single person in the kingdom, and if they are in trouble help them.”
“Your every move and gesture is sudden and free, like the orioles,” the gardener’s boy said.
“Also, I am very tired of wearing the same emeralds to the same operas year after year,” the Princess said. “Isn’t it nice about the birds. One says ‘as the crow flies,’ meaning in a straight line, but when you stand and watch them, it turns out that they often fly in big circles.”
“If I had known I would find you here,” the gardener’s boy said, “I would have come straight here in the first place.”
“Or they fly every which way,” the Princess said. “And nothing can be done about it.”
“I cannot tell you,” the gardener’s boy said, “how I regret the year I spent wandering through China, and the six months I spent in the Caucasus, and those two years in Persia, and that four months and seventeen days in Baluchistan.”
By this time they were sitting on an antique marble bench some distance away. They could hear the music of violins, and the slightest stirring of the air brought with it the perfume of white lilacs.
“What made you take up gardening?” the Princess asked. “One can see at a glance that you are of royal blood. Was it to get away from people?”
“No, it was not that, really. At my father’s court it is impossible to get away from people. There is no court calendar and no time of the day or night that anybody is supposed to be anywhere in particular, and so they are everywhere. I long ago gave up trying to get away from them.”
“How sad!”
“Until I set off on my travels, I didn’t know the meaning of solitude. In my country it is the fashion to admire any form of deviation. The streets of the capital start out impressively in one direction and then suddenly swerve off in quite another, or come to an end when you least expect it. To go straight from one engagement to another is considered impolite. It is also not possible. In school, children aren’t taught how to add and subtract, but, instead, the basic principles of numerology. As you can imagine, the fiscal arrangements are extraordinary. People do not attempt to balance their checkbooks, and neither does the bank. No tree or bush is ever pruned, and the public gardens are a jungle where it is out of the question for a human being to walk, though I believe wild animals like it. About a decade ago, the musicians decided that the interval between, say, C and C sharp didn’t always have to be a half tone — that sometimes it could be a whole tone and sometimes a whole octave. So there is no longer any music, though there are many interesting experiments with sound. The police do not bother men who like to dress up in women’s clothing and vice versa, and the birth rate is declining. In a country where no thought is ever carried to its logical conclusion and everybody maunders, my father is noted for the discursiveness of his public statements. Even in private he cannot make a simple remark. It always turns out to be a remark within a remark that has already interrupted an observation that was itself of a parenthetical nature. As it happens, I am a throwback to a previous generation and a thorn in the flesh of everybody.”
“How nice that there is someone you take after,” the Princess murmured. “I am said to resemble no one.”
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bsp; “As a baby I cried when I was hungry,” the Prince said, caught up in the pleasure of talking about himself, “and sucked my thumb in preference to a jeweled pacifier. Applying myself to my studies, I got through my schooling in one-third the time it took my carefully selected classmates to finish their education, and this did not make me popular on the playing field. Also I was neat in my appearance, and naturally quick, and taciturn — and this was felt as being in some oblique way directed against my father. From his reading of history he decided that the only way to make a troublesome crown prince happy was to abdicate in his favor, and he actually started to do this. But the offer was set in a larger framework of noble thoughts and fatherly admonitions, some of which did perhaps have an indirect bearing on the situation, if one could only have sorted them out from the rest, which had no bearing whatever and took him farther and farther afield, so that he lost sight of his original intention, and when we all sat down to dinner the crown was still on his head … I have never talked to anyone the way I am talking to you now. Are you cold sitting here in the moonlight? You look like a marble statue, but I don’t want you to become chilled.”
She was not cold, but she got up and walked because he suggested it.
“Two days later,” he continued, “I saddled my favorite Arabian horse and rode off alone to see the world. When I first came here, walking in a straight line through streets that were at right angles to each other, I felt I had found a second home. After a few weeks, as I got to know the country better —”
All the Days and Nights Page 46
