Ensemble
Page 25
in black inside, her ear to a device much like a radio headset, trying vainly to hear perhaps her darling Cici, or perhaps Christ himself, speaking in the reedy tones of an old-world hurdy-gurdy. Once Effie did go up the road to the mill during one of her trips into town for cleaning supplies, and she stood before the ominous castle-like edifice like a knight who has come to challenge an enemy of his kingdom. The gate was padlocked, and workers no longer came to increase the girth and length and breadth of the slumbering behemoth within, but in the tall factory windows she could distinguish glimmers of copper and steel, Hydra-headed clusters of thick electrical wire , and complexly interlocking gears like the innards of a titanic wristwatch. She had been forthright with Arthur early that morning, as he sipped a bit of weak Postum and tried to explain to her once more the conceit behind his machine. “Even Edison,” he told her, looking boyish in his nightshirt and freshly trimmed mustache, “devised his phonograph to record the voices of the dead. He believed that in the future we would merely set up a contraption in an empty room and living heirs would soon have instructions from their ancestors on tin cylinders. So I am not so absurd.” At such moments, when he explained things like this, she could almost see him in triplicate before her, like a trick photograph, with Thaddeus and George on either side, nodding their beards. She had married him because he was more definitive than they had been; whereas they were often tongue-tied or, conversely, over-verbose, he was the one among them who stubbornly tried to speak in a language those outside his secret society might yet understand. “Like your brothers before you,” she told him, taking the empty cup from where it precariously balanced on his knees, “you have lost touch with reality, and I blame your dark companion. Even if one were to make out words among the chords, as you say, who is to say they would be in English, and who is to say they would wish anything for us to join them? There’s something of the devil in your machinery, and I no more believe in the devil than I do in all the saints put together.”
He nodded toward where the wall-safe was, behind the lithograph of “The Dying Sioux,” but of course she knew nothing of the safe behind it, its combination, or the documents within. “In the future,” he said, “music will travel unseen through cables spanning the globe, and you will be able to turn a dial and call up your recently departed parents, who will sing you to sleep.” Already there was something otherworldly, distant and somnolent, in his voice, as he sank back deeper into his pillows and drew a quilt up to his chin. For a moment she wondered if she were hearing his voice, or that or Thaddeus, or George. She saw them sitting on either side of the bed, smoothing their brother’s hair, willing him to join him in that last room at the end of the hall, the one with no visible door and no key. “We have the wireless,” she told him, starting to tiptoe from the room, “and an organ that runs by electricity; I saw one in a theater in Chicago.” He might have been asleep by the time she closed the door.
It was later that afternoon that, having returned from the general store laden with boxes of goods that promised antiseptic cleanliness and miraculous polishes, she discovered the little round jars: four of them in all, with the customary pirate’s flags and made of the usual iodine-colored glass. There they were, secreted behind the pickled beets and canned tomatoes and pig’s feet in the cellar pantry, kept where it was perpetually cool and dry, waiting their turn to be consumed. One of the bottles was empty and another nearly so, just an inch of golden grains at the bottom.
“You have discovered my little beauty secret,” Mrs. Karinskaya said behind her; she had that way of entering silent as a cat and as dangerously, too, if you were the mouse. “And you also notice that we have no rats on this farm.”
Effie found her back up against the pantry shelves, a jar still guiltily in her white hands. “I hadn’t noticed,” she told the much taller woman who was blocking her exit, “but it’s beginning to make sense. Today, even though they don’t always fool me, I am going to fetch a general practitioner. I suggest you stay here to answer a few polite queries.”
Mrs. Karinsakaya roared with laughter that was deep and hearty and overwhelmingly masculine. “Did you know,” she told the other woman as she watched her replace the jar, then, thinking better of it, draw it out again, “that I am 126 years old? And yet I am not the oldest of the Skapetz. Do you not know who we are? Have you never heard of us—the Believers? Once the Tsar Peter the Third was one of us. Rasputin was fearful of our influence. We were the imperial court’s droshky drivers! We kept fine Orloff stallions! And we never hurt no one, but we were hounded into the Urals, into Armenia, forced to go live along the Dniester valley with the heathen Gypsies of greater Romany. People of peace, all of us, treated like swine by swineherds!”
“What have you been doing to my husband?” she asked, understanding the old woman to be quite insane but never having felt saner herself. “Why have you been doing this to him, when he gave you a last refuge and a sanctuary to pursue your studies?”
“Look at my face,” commanded Mrs. Karinskaya, “the skin of a woman in her prime, and yet—and yet—” She had suddenly fallen to her knees, her caftan-like skirts draped around her, as if she were begging Effie’s forgiveness, or perhaps her complicity. “I am a holy eunuch, as are all the true Skoptzi,” Mrs. Karinskaya said. “I underwent the rite soon after I married, and my wife followed me soon after. She had already given me a son.”
Effie was not too astonished to ask, “Wife?”
“Don’t look at me that way. I have not been a man for over one-hundred years; how then could I pretend to be one? Cici, Arthur’s mother, was my great-granddaughter; we escaped revolution and famine in Wallachia and found ourselves somehow in Estonia. I raised Cici as if she were my own daughter and I her mother. Why then should I want to harm her only living son?”
“I believe little of what you say. Arthur has told me what a swindler you were, how you cheated innocent widows and widowers.”
“Am I to be blamed for bringing a little comfort into lonely peoples’ lives? My remittance was small, compared to what I gave them. And I barely survived at times. I was lonely myself; I had lost my lovely Cici and then my three little orphans… Please don’t destroy my jars; such medicine is difficult to obtain these days, in such a small town, and I confess I am just a little bit its slave. It is after all what keeps me alive.” Mrs. Karinskaya had risen to her feet while Effie stepped around her through the doorway and up out of the cellar. “I want you to leave these premises, or I will have you arrested,” she said as she went. “Go ahead, take your jars, if you must. If you were trying to make Arthur as immortal as you claim to be, you must know that you were killing him in the process.”
Mrs. Karinskaya called after her: “Your sentimentality I owe to your sex. Christ himself was weakened by his own flesh; that is why he was condemned to earth for all time. Arthur was meant to be one of us, for we live as much in the world of spirits as this one—just look into his eyes! He doesn’t see you; he sees a phantom…” She was just babbling now, and Effie was already well out of earshot.
By the time the doctor left, in the middle of a horrific thunderstorm that evening, news had already come in from town of the fire: the mill was on fire once again. The fire department had already been diverted on a mission to save a burning barn, and by the time the volunteers had made it to the mill, the walls had fallen in, the new wooden framework within having collapsed, and the Omniphonium lay in the smoldering rubble, a gargantuan, twisted mass of metal; the fire had been so hot its steel innards had buckled and fused, and all the many rooms of dynamos and amplifying machinery had become an indistinguishable amalgamation of wires, cables, and gears. In the process of trying to save the mill, firefighters had demolished the gates and smashed in the immense front doors, only to find that it was too late to salvage even the ivory keyboards or the velvet-lined listening booths. Of course, all of Arthur’s notes and documents were lost, as was Mrs. Karinskaya’s library of arcana, her books and
charts and sacred bestiaries and gallimaufries of impossible secrets and sects, amphigories and horoscopic, hagiographic nonsense. Effie revealed nothing of this to Arthur at the present—he’d been heavily sedated by the doctor despite his protests, and it was a few days more before she dared to leave his bedside and visit the ruins. She had not seen Mrs. Karinskaya since their confrontation in the cellar, though she nearly screamed every time she saw a house-spider or heard caws from the cornfield. Her room was now empty, all the drawers in the chest yawning open and the wardrobe hangers and hooks scattered across the floor like domestic landmines. In righting the room, Effie found a letter on the floor under the bed, written in faded brown ink on very thin tissues of paper.
“Darling Grandmother,” it began in English, then abruptly changed into another language —though it was hard to tell, the writing was so spindly and faint. It was no language or even alphabet she recognized, and she had been a good student of languages as a girl. A little down the page there were other phrases in English and a spattering of French: