PART I
The important thing is to carry the sun with you, inside of you at every moment, against the darkness. For there will be a great and terrifying darkness.
from: The Maze in the Heart of the Castle
Maybe everyone lives with terror every minute of every day and buries it, never stopping long enough to look. Or maybe it's just me. I'm speaking here of your ordinary basic terrors, like the meaning of life or what if there's no meaning at all, or what if somebody pushes the red-alert button, or the economy collapses and we turn into ravaging beasts fighting over food, not to mention the noises in an old house when boards creak and things go bump in the night. Sometimes I think we're all tightrope walkers suspended on a wire two thousand feet in the air, and so long as we never look down we're okay, but some of us lose momentum and look down for a second and are never quite the same again: we know.
That's why, when I found the note hidden in the old hurdy-gurdy, I didn't take it as a joke. I could smell the terror in the words even before I'd finished reading the first sentence: They're going to kill me soon—in a few hours, I think—and somehow they'll arrange it so no one will ever guess I was murdered.
But perhaps I'd better explain about the hurdy-gurdy and why at my age, which is twenty-two, I am not out in the world setting it on fire, figuratively speaking, or graduating from Wellesley or Bryn Mawr, or doing any of those normal upper-middle-class things, but instead own and tend the Ebbtide Shop, Treasures & Junk, Amelia Jones, Prop., 688 Fleet Street (not your best section of town).
Actually it's because I'm so free, a word I use loosely and not without irony. Due to circumstances I won't go into at the moment I have been quite alone in the world since I was eighteen, and with a rather strange childhood under my belt as well. When I was seventeen my father packed me off to a psychiatrist named Dr. Merivale. I think my father knew he was going to die soon and one day he looked across the room and saw me, really saw me—perhaps for the first time—and he thought, "Good God!" So off I went to Dr. Merivale, who was supposed to inject confidence and character into me in prescribed doses, three times a week, at forty-five dollars an hour, and a few months after I'd begun seeing Dr. Merivale my father went to the hospital with his last heart attack and died. He left a rather surprising amount of money, to be doled out to me month by month until I was twenty-one by the First National Bank downtown. I think he hoped that Dr. Merivale would assume some kind of responsibility for me.
I continued visiting Dr. Merivale for two years, at first out of sheer inertia, having nothing else in my life, but gradually I began to grow interested in what he was trying to do. Actually it was like going to college, except that while other girls were studying Jung and Freud out of textbooks in class I was collecting dreams for Dr. Merivale, learning the difference between super-ego and id, discovering that I came from a trauma-ridden family and that I was terrified of life. I crammed just like a student, reading books on psychology all day and half the night.
It had an effect: one day I looked in a full-length mirror and realized why nobody had ever noticed me: I shouldn't have noticed me, either, in an over-sized gray sweater with stretched sleeves and a gray skirt with a crooked hem. I went out and bought a pair of bellbottom slacks, which were in style at that time, and a bright pink shirt, and a pair of sandals. The bellbottoms swished when I walked, and I liked that; the next week I bought a white sweater and then a blue one. One day I accused Dr. Merivale of being a stuffed shirt—heady stuff! He was really very pleased with me after he'd recovered from the initial shock. I can't say I blossomed physically: I was still thin and freckle-faced, with straight brown hair, but inside I was coming to life. I could almost forgive my mother for hanging herself when I was eleven.
After the big house on Walnut Street
was sold I moved into a boardinghouse—Dr. Merivale insisted I be among people—and fell into a very growth-oriented regime because I wanted to change as fast as possible. I set the alarm clock for eight, rose and did deep breathing exercises, then transcendental meditation for twenty minutes and after that half an hour of yoga followed by thirty minutes of Canadian Air Force calisthenics (aimed mostly, I have to confess, at increasing my bust measurement). Sometimes it was almost noon before I had breakfast. And three times a week I went to Dr. Merivale, and I hung mottoes all over the walls of my room like "I am the master of my destiny and the captain of my soul."
But I still had nightmares every night.
It was at the boardinghouse that I met Calley Monahan, who had freckles, too. What struck me first about him was his great calmness. He couldn't have been older than thirty, he had a red beard and red hair and every evening after dinner he would remain behind at the table and peel an apple, slowly and very intently. I knew nothing about him except his name and that he played the guitar; sometimes I would hear him practicing in his room, which was above mine: sweet lonely songs like "Red River Valley" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" After about three weeks we said hello when we met on the stairs—I was feeling quite daring by that time—and after a few more weeks I stopped going into a panic when he said "How are you?" and one evening after dinner we actually had a conversation. He wanted to know what I did in my room all day.
I rather incoherently stammered out an explanation—it didn't occur to me to dissemble—and he said, "So what does this doctor do for you?"
I said he was trying to free me.
"From what, and for what?" he asked pleasantly, looking up from his apple-peeling.
I turned scarlet, and then after a moment said defiantly, "Well, for one thing I've learned I have an IQ of 140 and that frees me from feeling stupid, which is the way I've felt all my life."
He looked at me for a long time, gravely, without amusement, which was merciful, and he seemed to be making up his mind about something. He said at last, quietly, "You'd better come and meet Amman Singh."
What's strange about this is that after he took me to meet Amman Singh that evening I never saw Calley Monahan again, which always reminds me of Jung's speculations about "meaningful coincidences" in our lives, because if it weren't for Calley Monahan I would never have met Amman Singh. I would probably have joined the typing class that Dr. Merivale kept urging on me, and I would certainly never have found the note in the hurdy-gurdy. Sometimes I ask myself, would anyone else have discovered it, and if they did would they have cared, or done anything about it and changed the lives of so many people?
It's things like this that comfort me when I feel frightened about life.
I was very nervous about going out for the evening with a young man, and quite unable to decide whether it was a date or not, so I compromised and wore the old gray sweater with the bellbottoms: half old life, half new. From somewhere Calley Monahan produced a motorcycle—I hadn't known he had that—and off we roared through the streets of the city with me hanging on for dear life. In spite of having lived all my life in Trafton I'd never visited Clancy Street
before, or even seen it. It was in the oldest section of town, a narrow street lined with decaying old houses, funny little shops and a few stalls set out on the sidewalks. We parked in front of a grimy wooden house with a lopsided front porch, climbed five flights of stairs to a grimy hall and walked into Amman Singh's room.
The room was dim and not very clean and he was
the oldest man I think I've ever seen, and yet. . . His
skin was the color of coffee and cream, with a network of fine lines crisscrossing it everywhere, not wrinkles so much as lines like filigree lace. He glanced at me just once as we came in, and I saw that his eyes were black, really black, like ink or a raven's wing or a black pearl, and so soft, so luminous they seemed to melt all over his face. When he looked a
t me I felt something inside of me melt, too. He sat cross-legged on the floor like a Buddha in pajamas; several people were crouched uncomfortably around him talking a language I couldn't understand.
We sat down and waited. Being here struck me as weird and a little scary and yet I felt a sense of peacefulness flowing over me. It seemed to come from Amman Singh: his voice, for one thing, so soft, almost whispering as he replied to the others, and then of course those luminous kind eyes.... I felt he wasn't trying to please anyone, or demand anything, he was simply there, and the others adjusted themselves to hear him. It was about ten minutes before he turned to Calley and said, "You have brought a friend."
"Yes."
His eyes rested lightly on me. "We have been speaking of violence."
"Oh," I said.
"The violence inside us all, the angers, the negative thoughts, the resentments, and greeds."
I nodded politely.
He said in his soft, whispery voice, his eyes kind, "When you entered this room I felt your violence."
Now if there is one thing I felt I was not at that time it was violent. I was soft, malleable, shy and timid, and having doggedly visited Dr. Merivale for two years I determined to assert myself. I said indignantly—after all who was this creepy old man who looked like a high lama in Lost Horizon—"But I don't have violence in me, my psychiatrist is trying to teach anger to me, he says I don't want enough for myself."
Amman Singh listened with his head cocked like a bird and then he said in his soft, singsong voice, "Always .., how blind we are to ourselves...."
"How?" I gasped.
His eyes met mine and held them. "A tree may be bent by harsh winds," he said softly, "but it is no less beautiful than the tree that grows in a sheltered nook, and often it bears the richer fruit. In your desperate longing to be like others, to be like everyone else, you seek to destroy what may be a song one day."
I sat, astonished. Of course I understood him at once. What he said was true, of course it was true: I wanted above all else to be—well, normal, homogenized, pretty, popular, not lonely. I had accepted my longing as logical and sane, it was what Dr. Merivale wanted for me and it was what I wanted for myself. Now, suddenly, all my exercises and calisthenics and galvanizing mottoes looked like little straitjackets I'd cut out and made for myself. I couldn't decide whether this funny little man was hypnotizing me or waking me up from a long sleep, and it was terribly important to know: I sat staring at him, and then I stood up and walked out. I left without a word to either Calley or to Amman Singh, and I walked alone back to the boardinghouse, went into my room, closed the door and stayed there for two days. On the evening of the second day I suddenly burst out laughing.
The next morning I telephoned Dr. Merivale and told him that I wouldn't be coming in to see him for a while, and then I tore down all the mottoes from my wall and packed away all but a few of my books. I began to walk around town just looking at people and flowers and things. Sometimes I would stop in to see Amman Singh and he would make herb tea and we would sit very quietly and drink it. Once in a while, but rarely, he would tell me a story, but not often, because there didn't seem any need for words between us. When he asked me what I was doing I said I was waiting, and he nodded.
And then one day, two blocks from Amman Singh's room, on the street that bisected it, I saw this merry-go-round horse in the window of a shop and I stopped, transfixed. I stared at its lines, at the rakish tilt of its bridled head, and a deep sense of pleasure lifted my heart and made it light and full of music. It was the first time in my life I'd felt an emotion that was all mine, and the first time I'd admired something not influenced or colored by someone else's words and tastes and thoughts.
I went into the shop, which was called the Ebbtide Shop, and I bought the merry-go-round horse from the gnarled little man inside. It was delivered to my room and I spent the loveliest week of my life regilding and painting the horse which I named—of course—Pegasus.
And incredibly, for that entire week I slept without a nightmare.
Unfortunately the next week there was a second merry-go-round horse in the window of the Ebbtide Shop—coal black this time, with a scarlet saddle—and since my room measured only 15 by 15 it was obvious that I couldn't buy this one, too. I went inside to admire it, though, and to explain to Mr. Georgerakis why I'd have to pass this one up. He said it didn't matter to him because his business was for sale, and a merry-go-round horse in the window was a good advertisement, and four in the basement was even better.
For the first time I became aware that I had turned twenty-one and had money. I asked him how much he was asking for his shop. He said he had a long-term lease on the building, which was high and narrow, with a two-room apartment upstairs, and in the basement a storeroom and delivery platform. For the business itself he was asking twelve thousand dollars.
I bought the shop that same day: bought it lock, stock and barrel and without haggling. Its more valuable stock consisted of five merry-go-round horses, two player pianos, three antique dolls, a jukebox, piles of old clothes, and a hurdy-gurdy. I scrubbed and swept and painted, had a new sign made for outside, and hung blue-and-white-striped curtains on gold rings at the back of the window. What I could not do was discipline the overwhelming amount of junk that Mr. Georgerakis had bought in cases and cartons, and by the dozen; if I threw it out there'd be almost nothing left in the shop and so I cut prices and hoped it would move slowly and steadily out of the door in the hands of customers.
The hurdy-gurdy I didn't find until later, after I'd moved in upstairs, because it was covered with burlap and stood in a dark corner of the shop. It was a beautiful hurdy-gurdy, in mint condition for its age. It stood on a sturdy maple stick, and the strap for carrying it was only a little frayed. The box itself was glorious: a faded Chinese red with gold edging, and in the center was this bright, rather corny painting of towering blue alps, a river gorge and a cream-colored sky. Very Rousseau. When I turned the crank there was a creak, and then a twang, and the instrument actually began to play "Tales from the Vienna Woods." After that came a second tune: a faded slip of paper glued to the side told me that it was Sonata No. 1 from Vivaldi's "II Pastor Fido," and this was followed by the "Blue Danube Waltz." I knew I couldn't part with this; I carried it upstairs to the apartment and began playing it evenings when I wasn't teaching myself how to play the banjo, or doing accounts.
One evening about three weeks later the hurdy-gurdy crank got stuck and refused to budge, silencing the "Blue Danube Waltz" on its second note. I found a screwdriver and pried open the back panel, which fitted loosely anyway, and that's when I discovered that a folded slip of paper had slowly worked its way down toward the working mechanism. It was this that had brought it to a halt. I carefully lifted out the wad of paper with a pair of eyebrow tweezers and tried the crank again. It moved smoothly, and the "Blue Danube Waltz" resumed playing at once. I screwed the panel back into place and only then noticed the slip of paper I'd tossed on the floor. I picked it up, smoothed it out to see what it might be, and met with a terror far worse than my own.
I read: They're going to kill me soon—in a few hours I think—and somehow they'll arrange it so no one will ever guess I was murdered. Why did I sign that paper last night? I was so hungry and tired but this morning I knew I should never have signed it. Whatever it was it was my death warrant.
But to die so strangely, a prisoner in my own house! WHY HASN'T SOMEONE COME? What have these two clever faceless ones told Nora, or even Robin, to explain my silence? Never mind, what has to be faced now is Death. Perhaps I could hide these words somewhere in a different place in the hope that one day someone will find them—that would make Death less lonely. And so—should anyone ever find this—my name is Hannah. ...
The last letter collapsed under my eyes, the h ending in a long shaken stroke that dropped several inches below the line, as if the pen had slipped, as if a voice had been heard, or a step approaching.... I pictured this unknown Han
nah trembling—as I was trembling now—folding up this paper, holding it a moment, wide-eyed as she looked around a room for a hiding-place, and then the quick move to the hurdy-gurdy with its loose back panel, and the slipping of it through the crack.
What kind of person would own a hurdy-gurdy? The paper on which the words were written was faded but it was the kind of cheap yellow paper you can buy in any stationery store, a ream of it for two or three dollars, called "seconds." Cheap yellow fades fast, so that didn't mean a great deal. The handwriting looked sensible, and it was certainly legible, even if the words ran together a little toward the end. There was that paragraph, too; I didn't think I would have bothered with a paragraph if I knew I was going to be murdered any minute. The handwriting was a little small but not cramped. What kind of person was this? I wanted to know. My wanting was so strong it astonished me.
Sometimes when I'm in a certain mood I've looked at life from a great distance, like peering at it through the small end of a pair of binoculars, and I wonder about it. The whole business seems very strange to me, just one shot at threescore years and ten, and for what? I mean, there has to be a reason for being here; even no reason is a reason. One of Amman Singh's stories is that we're on this planet because there are gods and demons in the universe who are numb to feeling, and so they send us here to watch our antics and feel violence through us, vicariously, because it's violence that feeds them and keeps them alive. And the only way to escape being "eaten," as he calls it, is to study violent emotions, detach oneself from them, and so cheat the gods and demons. Well, why not? People do seem to make such a botch of living: killing and squabbling and rejecting and hating, as if life's some kind of toy to play with or destroy. Somehow we all end up victims, and the horror of it is that we're victims of each other.
And now I was meeting another victim.
What kind of paper had they wanted her to sign?
She couldn't still be alive. The hurdy-gurdy had been mine for several weeks and before that it had belonged to Mr. Georgerakis.
The Tightrope Walker Page 1
