by Lee, Tanith
Even now I’ve grown old, I can’t bring myself to speak much of Vera’s own death, though it was peaceful. She was by then well over seventy, and I, at the time, an elderly woman in the prime of her sixties. Nor, as you see, do I speak much of our relationship. We were never especially faithful to each other. Which never mattered. Something stronger than sexuality stayed between us until the day she left me forever. Something, dare I say, even stronger than love.
Age
Fleurs en Hiver
Judas Garbah
We were dining together, Miche and I, in a small restaurant near the Moulin Rouge. There was nothing between us. Really neither of us had anyone else just then to have dinner with.
Outside the night was loud with car horns, voices and lights. The dark restaurant was russet from food and smoke. The candles burned in yellow clumps.
Across from us, a noisy blonde woman, overweight and thick with paint, was making a display of her meal. The waiters fluttered round her obsequiously, then went off and sniggered at her in corners. Over the back of her little chair, quaking at her weight, was carelessly draped her white fur wrap. “And those are diamonds in the fat bitch’s ears,” said Miche. “They should throw her out, the fat sow. My God, at her age, that rouge, those lashes – and the voice of a crow.”
Through the cover of the smoke I’d been watching her. I was ravished by her, frankly. She ordered this and that, was courteous, brisk, bubbling, appreciative, haughty. Then flirted with her lined, lead-heavy eyes, smiled her red lips over teeth too long and stained by forty-five years of good cigarettes.
“Judas, don’t look at her like a sheep. She knows what we are, don’t worry. You didn’t see her glare as we came in.” Of course, Miche sweeping by with his silks and youth, vaunting. And in her kingdom, only women ruled with men. We were dangerous trespassers.
I wanted to go up to her and lift her away from the sordid restaurant where she had sunk like a stone. Take her through the city, lighting her cigarettes for her, helping her fragility gallantly across the rainy roads. Tell her I admired her, buy her something dainty. But such an impulse was most unwise.
When we left near midnight, she was still electrically alone at her table, ordering champagne now, a nice one. Keeping up the evening’s life, not letting it go.
“Well, we got away before she stabbed you,” said Miche, looking up at the red moon. “What did you see in the cow?”
I didn’t bother to say. Flowers in their winter mode, soggy and half dead, their colors lost and petals falling, smelling no longer of anything we like. As we throw them on the bonfire we forget they had such charm. They burn and flash in the fire, gaudy, and brave, and that’s the end of them.
The Crow
Judas Garbah
“Why in God’s name did she call you that?”
“She hated me. I told you, she was always trying to lose me in the slums.”
“Judas,” said my companion, consideringly. His own name was Georges, a perfectly acceptable one. He could, if he wanted, link himself to whole calendars full of kings and saints. My name’s fame, of course, came from the Iscariot family, all those years ago in Palestine. “Did you never think of changing it?”
“My father did. Once he’d extricated me from my mother’s limp clutches.”
“Oh? So tell me, what name did he give you?”
“Something ordinary and nondescript, a drab, paltry little name no one would remark or remember. What else but Georges?”
My companion then called me quite another sort of name. But presently got up and came to kiss me. A reasonably amiable lover, Georges. At least to begin with.
Soon after this, our lunch was finished. Despite the heat we rose and walked away from the terrace of the white-painted house, along the track of burnt earth that led up above the village.
A few miles off by train lay another country, and a surreal town constructed of stone vegetables, something magicked out of legend. We hadn’t yet stirred ourselves to go there, too busy with ourselves and each other. But the village had begun to bore us. It was full, as all strange places are, of non-human aliens, acting out curious rituals and routines like automata. One is excluded, and anyway afraid to join in. One wishes one had gone there in disguise, able to speak in the proper local accent and dress and stink in the exact local way, so passing unobserved. But it’s too late by then. One has been seen, heard, sniffed, catalogued. But then too, after all, everywhere is another planet until one has learned to know it, following which you finally understand you are yourself the alien, the unreal thing. Not merely uninitiated, but a monster.
Some dusty stunted olive trees cranked up the track beside us. Beyond lay emptied fields, brown vineyards already stripped of any harvest.
In a derelict poplar a cluster of black rags perched, and let out a raucous yell.
“Bloody crow,” said Georges. He crouched quickly to the path, picked a shard and hurled it treeward. It seemed Georges was sullen now, not wanting this walk, but unable to decide on anything more inviting. The vegetable town, and I, the two previous attractions, must have dimmed together.
Up in the tree the crow, missed by the stone, hopped and throatily swore back at him.
Georges bent for another missile.
“Let it alone,” I said, less from kindness than irritation. “It hasn’t hurt you.”
“I hate them, crows. They’re bad luck.” Off whirled the second stone. This one also missed. The crow however, lurched from the branches and flapped untidily off across the fields. It was old, or so it looked, its feathers dull and somehow misplaced, its chiding voice like a rusty rivet. “Go on, you devil! Get back to hell!” bellowed Georges, prancing about. He had gone mad, evidently. The red-black wine at lunch, the pale yellow spirit, the roast meat of a fresh-killed boar eaten last night, the leaky creaking house, myself, all these had driven him from his wits. My name, even, even that. How probable. Here he was, having fucked the betrayer of Christ. My God, he was doomed now all right.
At the top of the track about an hour later, we paused to regard the distant mountains, where Cathars had been hunted and tortured and burned in previous centuries. Their crime: the belief that the devil ruled the world, while God was a benign and powerless being, capable only of promising something nice after death.
Going on, appropriately perhaps, next minute a sort of wood evolved and closed in on us.
The trees were crookedly black and skeletal, strung with a bunting of dark desiccated leaves. Through their gaps the distance and its images appeared and retreated, like mosaics of vision in the henbane eater’s temporary – or conclusive – blindness.
“What a spot,” said Georges. “Like a witch-wood.”
It was. Yet too it was the sort of terrain more normally found in northern Frankish literature. Here, it seemed a mistake. And besides, what was the type of wheedling witch who might emerge from it, to kidnap we two innocent children?
After a few more minutes of plodding on, Georges kicking at any plants on the woodland floor, the ‘witch’ appeared.
George let out a loud silly laugh. At this, the ‘witch’ turned all his power of attention on us. He was an old man. How old, I’m no longer certain. To me then he looked about a hundred. Very likely he was in his sixties. But in that climate, and in those days, both sexes were inclined to dry up and to desiccate, just like the distasteful leaves on the trees of the wood.
He was stooped over, very thin, all in faded black. Like the trees there, too. His hair was longish and grey. His eyes a filmy black. His nose seemed either hooked or oddly pointed. He glared at Georges, who backed away and turned to me in visible terror.
I said, in a poor facsimile of the local tongue and dialect, “Good day, señor.”
At which the old bugger straightened himself, and drew from the corded belt at his waist a knife, sharp as a broken piece of glass.
Not very long ago, I was sitting on a bus in London. I do that now. Taxies are luxuries. It’s Anna, sometimes E
sther, who have money. Poor impoverished Judas gets by as he must, poor old dear.
But to get to the point. I found myself sitting behind another old man (I was the first) and in fact he was undoubtedly younger now than I am, in his early fifties, I’d think, maybe less.
The strangest thing instantly occurred to me. The back of his neck, the shape of his hair upon his head, his flat, well-made ears – these reminded me irresistibly of someone from my past, that is, my far-off past. A man too that I had never known well, yet somehow recalled in the most intense and – I supposed – accurate detail. For a brief while I wasn’t sure whom he could be. But then gradually I remembered the witch-wood. Of course, it was none other than the ‘witch’ himself. Had I recorded him then, so intimately, from behind – this smooth strong neck, without what my sister Anna has sometimes referred to as the ‘Westerner’s Crank.’ That is a neck with a dent along the back of it, which describes the passage of the spine into the skull. Among male Jews, according to Anna, this indentation is always absent. I must say I’ve seldom ever seen it, save in adolescent boys, and certainly the man on the bus did not have this crank. His neck was firm and rounded as a column, crisscrossed only two or three times by a few neat horizontal creases of gathering age.
His hair was dark, but greying. His ears, I decided, were very couth, not small but neatly aligned. Nor had the lobes elongated much.
From behind, he was curiously attractive, and he had besides an appealing odor of cleanness and health, only accentuated by some powdery hint of his age. Partly I wanted to bend forward and inhale him, the nape of his neck, his greying hair. I was – to be frank – for a second aroused, in the most absurd and romantic way.
And so I recalled the one he reminded me of.
In that second too, like an omen, the bastard turned and looked out of the bus window. Not a bad face, but not the face I had unconsciously primed myself to expect. He wasn’t after all the ‘witch’ from the wood all those years before, and just above the Spanish border.
Georges screamed.
The knife in the old man’s hand glittered perilously, a nasty slender penis of steel.
He stooped, and began to dig out, from under one of the trees, a clump of stiff spikes, each hosting a single indigo berry-like flower. These were, I thought, the flower known locally as blue grape, though I might well have mistranslated the name.
Georges tugged on my arm. “We must run away—”
“Rubbish. He isn’t interested in us.”
“He’s mad – a madman.”
The old man straightened up, at least as much as his bowed posture allowed. He shot us a glance from the drained ink of his eyes.
His free hand, which was brown and bony as a bunch of twigs, made a gesture to us. Surprisingly it was not obscene. He had beckoned. We were to follow him, somewhere. Yet his invitation seemed to give him no pleasure. He turned his back then, and stamped away among the trees.
I had spent so much of my life following unsuitable people about, often unavoidably, I immediately went after him.
Georges rambled to the rear, remonstrating, until I told him to be quiet. I thought he would leave me, believed he had, realized he had not, and partially forgot him. Our personal idyll certainly seemed to be reaching its end. Until quite mature, I tended always to expect advances – many excitable and usually unwanted – and in the same proportion, inevitable rejections. Anna used to say my own envisaging caused them to happen. Now I expect nothing very much, and seldom does anything come.
The sunlight burned holes through the trees, which were drawing together. Then a burnt sienna shadow, hot as a cauldron, filled the woody tunnel. Down which the old man quickly limped, illogically pursued by me (and Georges).
At the tunnel’s end, a stark hillside opened out into a hole of air. Below, the wild land rolled off towards the mountains. On the brink, like something washed up by a wave, stood an old-fashioned house of some size and dilapidation. Before it was a yard, with chickens picking about, or squawking and flapping up on the broken wall. A line of red jars stood there, and fallen all around were bits of tiles from the roof. The old man, not once looking back, crossed the yard, cursing the chickens in thickly ornamental vernacular. He thrust at a wooden door, already ajar, and lurched on into the silent cavern of this palatial hovel.
“Don’t,” said Georges, running to catch me. “Don’t be stupid, Judas.”
I shook him off, navigated the chickens, and also walked straight into the house.
It was instantly underwater cool. So many of those places are like this inside their cave walls of stone. The space was wide, the floor also laid with tiles, also broken. A stair curved out of it, leading to the upper story. But a deeper shadow was in charge there, and the sickly honeyish smell of warmed rot drifted down.
Georges had now entered too, and fidgeted behind me.
“Those jars left outside are full of piss,” he informed me.
“It’s probably stale wine,” I said. “Unless he’s a tanner.”
“Oh don’t be such a fool, Judas. Let’s get out.”
The old man in black had disappeared, and there was a choice as to where he might have gone. Undoubtedly not up the stair so fast. But three closed doors marked the stained, veined empty walls, and a single archway, that gave on a steeply angled passage. Some sense of light was there.
A svelte lizard ran over the tiles on little clicking feet.
Georges now shrieked. He wasn’t afraid of lizards.
I turned round, and saw a short round woman, covered up in the familiar drained black. She must have come in from outside as we had, and seemed furious rather than startled by our presence. At noisy Georges in particular she cast a baleful look, and spat directly on the floor, presumably either to ill wish him, or to render him invisible. As neither spell seemed to take, she briskly clumped across to one of the three doors, went through and slammed it.
Georges wailed as I progressed into the angled passage. Its crooked arm led out into another high-walled area, this roofless and lit by the open sky. It was a courtyard, once carefully planted, now becoming ruinous. Small stretched dead trees and roping brown vines webbed the walls, in some of them little mummified fruits, unrecognizable and black. A dry fountain had a noseless cherub pouring nothing from a shell. The floor was beaten earth, sun baked, and scattered by what looked like the torn-off wings of insects scorched in fire. He, the old man, sat on a stone bench against the wall. He too looked scorched, if not quite mummified.
He glanced at me again.
“Inglés,” he said.
I smiled. “No.”
His eyes, tarnished mirrors. “Judio,” he accurately decided.
I added, “Mitad árabe.”
He showed his tarnished teeth, a grin, or a primeval signal of rage, and lowered his gaze to the fistful of blue grape he was busy thrusting into soil.
The sun was slanting over. A ray struck suddenly down on the court, hitting the edge of the dead fountain. A strange noise sounded. I stared transfixed.
Very slowly, the wrecked cherub was splitting into two. As the two halves (perhaps like me, one half Jew, one half Arab) folded back, a peculiar black creature slid out. It most resembled a salamander, a tiny dragon from some bestiary. Huge barbs or spines ran along the ridge of its back. A pair of stiff black wings stiffly rose up, the hinged jaw undid and out came a violent hissing that made me jump. It wasn’t I’d thought the thing was alive, I knew it must only be some mechanism, but the noise was vicious and I had no idea what to anticipate from it next. It showed me. Out of the clockwork jaws rushed a glittering stream of dirty fluid that splashed about the basin and over on to the earth below. The emission ceased. The mouth clapped shut with a clank.
The old man was laughing, presumably at me. I took no notice and went to inspect the salamander, now it was still. It seemed made of black iron. Had the sun shaft activated it? Maybe. Or else some trigger under the bench where the old man might tap it with his foot.
/> Behind me, back in the house, I could hear a murmur of voices. One seemed to belong to Georges, who had not come with me into the court.
“He is in no true danger from Marija,” said the old man, in the local polyglot. I had begun to detect the more strident tones of a woman. Marija, then. She was welcome to Georges.
The old man had potted up the blue grape, and now, alarmingly, he came across the court towards me. He walked like a crab, arrogantly limping almost sideways. His face was made of brown pleatings. He leant past me and rapped the dragon on its snout. At which it raised itself all the way up on to its hind limbs, like a dog begging. It had eyes of mica that flashed. “Made of me. I am,” the old man said to me, with a terrible, implacable pride, “Cuerca. Patxi Cuerca. Come, I will show you, in my room.”
In the house, Georges was hysterically protesting in French, “Non, non, madame—”
But had he been in the court with us probably he would have clung to me, trying to anchor me to the spot, and save me from who knew what worse-than-death fate the old man was plotting.
Unimpeded, I accompanied Patxi Cuerca. And what sort of name was that, if I had even understood him? Cuerca – didn’t that mean crow? Or no, perhaps not. Yet he was like a crow, like the eldritch crow in the tree the two stones missed.
The Room led directly off the court. Through the round-topped door we entered a windowless blank, where something seemed lurking in a smell of spice and mould. He struck a match and lit a lantern which hung just inside. I had not even seen it. Then, he shut us in.
A child somewhere – where? who? – had told me about the chamber in the rock where the robbers hid their treasure and Ali Baba found it. The child had not been Anna, though she was quite capable of that. But my sisters and I had never met when we were children.
