This Water

by Beverley Farmer

  If she can know him only on the surface, over and over on the surface, she is happy for this to be the case, he pleases her so as he is. Like her, he is pale and smooth all over, they are both of a crystalline pallor, except that only he is pricked with a sprinkle of fine silvery down over his cheeks and chin and upper lip, that she loves the feel of against her bare skin. His fell of pale hair, faintly golden, hangs down his back like hers. Her nipples have breasts under them, soft and loose, where his lie flat. Otherwise the contours of his face and body are a close match for hers under the white tunic; even their shadows are the same shape and the same blue of snow shadows where they fall. His eyes shine like lantern-lit water, changing as they do with the changing light; the only part of him that does change, she thinks, but no, there is one other. Their lips meet, shut, then open, and their speechless tongues. His hands stroke her and her hands follow the same path over and around him, until he is holding her close, closer, and in between the lips she has between her legs, somehow entering in, moving in and out all the while, and she moving too, long and long, and knowing no more all the while than if she were fast asleep. It fascinates her, later, how different he is between the legs. He holds her face to face, and the rest is out of sight. But she has seen him down there, and felt him with her hands as well, and he has no other lips, though what he has there instead is as full and smooth as her lips. Then they have no need of speech, their bodies do all the speaking, and the listening, and then they are stilled, transfixed. This is how he loves her best, how he wants her.

  And yet the point of fusion is when he is at his most remote, impervious to her, shaken to the core as he is, and as she is, weak, lost in mutual adoration, or so it seems to her, opening her eyes to his closed eyes and his abandon in her arms. So they lie clasped, interpenetrated and remote, until she finds him gone from the trance and away. She awakes alone to find no sense remaining of his face or body or any feel of him. Every time is the first time, every sleep a more intimate solitude.

  You go away and I am lost without you, she says one day. I have thought of that.

  And he comes back with yet another treasure, a ball of gold thread for her to unwind as she goes about the labyrinth and wind back up to where she was before.

  Fasten it to a lantern stem first, he says, showing her how to knot it, and let it roll out behind you. To find your way back, pull it in gently and roll it up. Take care not to lose it, he says, as if it might run away and hide.

  Their silken robes have a suppleness and sheen, and a translucency that catches at the edge of the light as they move, so that at times their limbs show darkly through it or the folds and contours of the bodies inside leave shadows at the surface. Brocaded or as sleek as water, they are always white but for the tinge of blue or yellow that the light leaves in the folds and in this they are like the surrounding snow. Sometimes she is so distracted with the flow and shine, the pools and grooves and fringes of shadow that stain her clothes and his, that she loses the thread of what he is telling her. If he catches her attention straying he pulls her up firmly. She can never make him see what has drawn her eyes away and how helpless she is to resist; but, warned by the faint pleats of impatience between his eyebrows, she soon learns to look steadily at him or down at her hands at such times, only not away, and to pay attention.

  The underworld of the dome is all transparency and reflection, variations on white, on clear, endlessly repeating itself in columns, passages, walls and shelves, in coil on coil of staircases, whiteness and deep transparency through and through. All this he holds in his head and soon so shall she, his perfect bride.

  Once at her footfall he turns and puts into her hands a sparkling ball he has been holding. She makes a nest of her hands, balancing the weight of it.

  What is this?

  Can you see inside?

  All she can see is the crinkled surface of her palms. Look deeper, against the light, he says, and holding it high she finds hairlines of fracture inside, mists and opacities, blades which flash in colour where the light goes in. He holds out his hand for it and sets it in a crystal bowl on the shelf. Then he pours water gently in until the ball is half-mirrored and enlarged. It swells up to the waterline, tips and rolls in the light and finds at last a glittering balance.

  How it has grown! she says. Look how big it is!

  As do we, my love, in the bath, he says. But how does it grow?

  As do we, my love, in the bath, she replies. Is it playing with us?

  Indeed. It is a matter of appearances.

  Once in the bath their limbs expand, threaded all over in a net of light, as weightless as the water in the clarity of the bath. Lovemaking is all smoothness there and soft motion and afterwards they lie down weighted like stone together, like the crystal ball, fractured and alight, pierced, closed, grown solid, at one.

  Sometimes when she awakes he is already away in the outside world, and she feels his absence, taking in the loss of him with her whole being. Now she will be some time alone in the grip of the gold ring but at least with the freedom of the ball of gold thread. She knows without knowing how she knows, or how she feels, what some time is, here where nothing changes. But she finds herself drifting more and more often into climbing the crystal stairs into the great dome, until she is sleeping up there, in the constant starlight, alone, under the moon that has its comings and goings, much as he does; though the starlight is not entirely constant, there are flashes, falls, shifts and disparitions; and the moon’s course, though easy to follow in a clear sky, is as wayward as his, in his absences as well in the labyrinth, as if even the moon is playing a marry dance. But there is a pattern the moon weaves over the stars, a repeating and developing pattern, that makes it more like the golden timepiece. Is there one moon or many? Is it silver, or ice and snow like this world and the stars? From time to time she sees patches on it where the black sky shows through, always the same patches, its constant face; is that a sign that it is always this same moon? Sometimes it has a tinge of gold on its face, coming up and going down behind the rim of snowy hills – always at a different point of the rim, up and down, baffling her with its waywardness. In all this it is like the dome. Except that sometimes no moon will be there at all, so that only the stars move, almost always as one, turning and turning; except for the loose ones that wander or fall and fizzle out, and the one bright star in the middle that never moves, the still point of the sky, as the dome is in her own flat world.

  Sometimes, tracing a moon’s path through the stars, she sees herself as if turning at the same slow pace, alone and alight in the night sky. And once in a while she sees a black form like a self crossing over the moon with its arms out wide. Beside and behind it are other such selves crossing the moon’s face as if they were one form, as if joined, and yet free, and her heart soars in their wake. She raises her arms wide. What are they? Oh to be one with them, up there on the moon! But they are self-sufficient, crossing the universe together, needing no other, and she has her solitude.

  Suddenly out of nowhere here is her Lord back again and coming to take her hand, the hand that wears the ring – like a fragment of the timepiece, she sees, before the thought sinks back, if a fragment were to break away – and then to lead her up the winding stair to bed, by which time the free selves afloat overhead are out of sight and out of mind.

  At times while he is away great snowstorms close off the sky, so that the hills are enveloped, and the valley and the walls and at last the great dome, and she is swathed in opacity. Inside nothing changes, she is frozen in time, or is it time itself that is frozen? She endures, on and on, like the timepiece, like the water that comes and goes inside the great globe of the dome.

  She waits, swaddled now in silk, now water, silken of skin as she is and barely conscious of a distinction, silk, water, skin, it is all one. And again he is away and never comes and she is growing aware of how long it is now, aware that there was once a time when she was alone and unaware; and a time when he came and she was al
one no longer; and now in his absence she is alone again and has a sense of lost time that is growing in her, through no will of her own, or fault, and is of his making. His absence weighs like his ring, an ever-presence. Her duties she had no need to learn. What were the three last bonds he had said when they met that she would also come to know? Silence. Solitude. Absence. Meaning, of course, his absence.

  There comes an awakening when the skin of the dome has a glimmer over it, and slowly over time a pulse with light, a long dark, a short light, but the light is longer each time and the snow slipping. Soon she can see out, into a light brighter than that of the fullest moon, and slightly gilded, like the wine. Thrilled all through at the spectacle, she never tires of looking at the behaviour of the light on the snowy surfaces outside the panes and on the farthest hills. And then an orb appears in a dip of the skyline of the ring of hills, and she sees at last what is the cause of all this, a round red-gold apparition, a second moon, spilling colours over the whiteness, turning the darkness blue, washing away the stars, until she is filled with awe, with rapture. Shadows, she sees, take their colour not from what casts them but from the surface in the snow or on the floor as they fall, only the colour deepens, as if the surface were under spilt water, or the shadow itself were water. Shadows are blue and shift slightly, changing shape as they brush the surface, and sometimes a tiny shadow passes through or comes to rest, shrunken, with its arms spread out, and fades away. Shadows of selves, out in the frozen world? She wonders if he knows about them, and where he is now and why. She loves the changes and hopes for more. She speculates that there might be a way of keeping track of time by shadows.

  And then he is back and for a time in the world of there being nothing but you and me as one whole being, one self.

  She asks about the black selves she has seen on the moon and he says they are beings with wings for arms who fly between the worlds. And they are not all black, some are white, it is the moon behind them that makes them all seem so. And the moon itself is a world.

  Is it! And it plays with our eyes? And the stars are – ?

  All worlds of their own.

  And as white as we are in our world.

  He folds his arms, having seen where this is heading.

  And we, she goes on, are white like them and yet only they can go from one white world to another in the dark of the sky?

  Speak for yourself.

  And we only have this one world?

  You want more? We only have arms, he says, not wings to fly on.

  How do wings fly?

  These beings lie head down on the wind, he says, and beat their wings so, and he spreads his arms out and waves them. And their legs they stretch out behind them.

  I see! And they never come down?

  Not here.

  On other worlds? She tries it herself, on tiptoe, her arms wide. Like this? What are they like, wings?

  Theirs are like arms in full sleeves of feathers.

  Her eyes have clouded with bewilderment. His smile has faded. He says to wait, and comes back with a grey stone. Holding her forefinger, he traces a shape that reveals itself, embedded there, the spine, the arms that are wings, the legs. How strange, such a free body caught in a stone! But all she can think of now is flight and other selves and worlds. As if possessed, from then on she looks out for their wings against the moon, longing for them.

  She asks if he has other such stones, and he reveals a multitude.

  His treasure is displayed on shelves of crystal along the crystalline walls of room after room, not walled away like the timepiece, and yet he has hardly shown her any of it. The items are grouped together by kind. There is crystal of every shape and thickness and no colour, and then, in the next room, of every radiant colour at once, with the light casting up images of each brilliant object; plates of silver and gold line the shelves of one room, and white dishes another, and cups like thin silk, or ice, in which the fingers holding them show up like shadows. There is room after room of stones large and small, in the light of lanterns angled so as to penetrate some way into those stones that have a translucence or a light-catching texture. Thus they cast their shadows and a mesh of superimposed reflections, an effect not dependent on snowlight or moonlight, not subject at all to chance and change. Every stone is beautiful – her eyes tell her so – but those that let in the light are the ones she likes best. He has been quick to put a name to each of them, and she is as quick to learn these names that have no meaning, only a sound: emerald, jet and bloodstone, granite, limestone, basalt, greenstone, agate and quartz, jade, flint and marble and sandstone, diamond and sapphire, ruby and garnet, amber and opal. The stones are of all colours and have streaks and stripes or crystal formations in their depths, speckles and flares. And now that she knows the stones by heart, he has taught her the names of the colours, red, orange, yellow, green and blue. There are more colours than names, and only the opals have them all. She has seen something like them before, in faint fleeting bands of light out over the snow, so frail that they vanished before her eyes. But in opal they flare up, fiercely bright, changing in the hand that turns it under the lantern.

  If he himself has no urge to fondle his stones, he is pleased that she can hardly pass them by without reaching out a hand. She holds them up to the light and strokes their skins, rough or smooth, while he looks on smiling. She is holding a diamond above her arm one day in fascination when he asks if she likes diamonds best of all.

  They are like the stars, she says, and yet like drops of water they hold all the colours inside them. And she weaves the diamond and its faint band of colours in the air over herself.

  But then, she likes the look of her fingers under the diamond as much, or more, her silky fingers that swell and are carved with creases and whorls she would never have known were there. And then there is opal – its light so intense that it fills the eye and leaves, once put down, another, opposite self, lingering in the dark of her dazzled eye. Opal is the most thrilling and it has the same colours in it as a diamond, some only visible, more or less, depending on the angle she holds it at.

  But no, best of all is amber. There is a room of drops and beads of amber lighter than stone or crystal but as various, flecked, streaky, clear or pale as snow in the sun. And amber is the colour of the moons when they hang low to the sky.

  While he is back she asks if he will let her look into his eyes and he patiently sits still while she peers into one then the other.

  What do you see? he says, his breath fluttering on her face.

  Woven threads, and shadows, and a dark hole in the middle.

  A dark hole, he says, that can take in a world.

  Do mine have one as well?

  Why not? Brows raised, he looks at them one by one, leaning in. Yes, they do, he says gravely, and a world inside each one.

  Do they! She has seen nothing in his but her own round face.

  And the world I see inside them is myself, he smiles, and she, who can never take her eyes off him when he is in this teasing mood, lifts her face for his kiss.

  Your eyes are like water, she says later, and no stone is half as beautiful.

  How so, like water?

  She leans in close to check, and there she is herself in his eye. He kisses her.

  Well, are they?

  I am sure they are. Are mine the same?

  What do you think?

  I think so, she says.

  So they are, then.

  Are they? And that pleases you? She leans gratefully into him.

  Everything pleases me, that is the purpose of it. As a matter of fact, he says, in a grating voice she has never heard him use before, there is no flaw in anything here whether shaped by hand or by no other power than sun, wind and water.

  She stands mute, stunned at the rebuff, and recovers herself. Water I know, she says, but her brow has a line traced, which he strokes smooth with a finger. But what is sun?

  The amber eye of the sky.

  That pleases her. And
wind?

  Wind is like its breath, he says, and blows lightly on her cheek.

  Is like it – but is not it?

  Wind is the breath that drives the clouds and the snow. The breath of the outside world.

  Have I seen wind? Or breath?

  He holds a crystal up to his eye and she recoils, gasping at the swollen image afloat in it.

  Wind, breath, is only ever seen at its work, he says. Wind is invisible. He takes her by the hand then, but not, as she half-hopes for one wild leap of thought, to lead her out into the breath of the outside world, but upstairs to bed.

  Water you know, he says one day, and stone, but do you know what they do together? He leads her by the arm to a crystal bowl of veined and speckled stones.

  Dry stones, he says.

  She reaches for one but he stays her hand.

  Wait, he says, and pours water from a jug into the bowl. Wet stones, he says, and his face is alight like the stones in a kind of rapture.

  It is as he says, the stones are transformed, larger, of course, as she knew they would be, but even their colours have deepened.

  They have grown, as do we in the bath, she says aloud, and the colours too. Is it the water’s doing?

  Take one out, he says, and she watches her fingers expand to grasp a green-specked pebble. But her fingers shrink once out of the water, and so does the pebble.

  It still has its deep colours, she says.

  Only while it is wet.

  And when it is dry?

  It goes back to how it was.

  So it is the water’s doing!

  It is both, the union of the two.

  How is it a union? If one only lies in the other for a time and then it slips away, she says, and lets the other go dry?

  His stare has grown hard as a stone. There is no convincing you, I see, he says, and no pleasing you either.

  On the contrary, she says, all manner of things pleases me.

  He lingers, although he has turned to go.

  As long as I have nothing to do with it?

  More than anything, you please me.