People of the Book

by David Stacton

  “And are there ghosts?”

  “Why of course,” she told him, as though surprised. “It is a human building. But they can’t harm you unless you want them to. Hurry.”

  Above him he saw the glint of faded gilt on porcelain blue, a rayed nimbus, a crucifix. Below it she opened a door. A draft nearly blew the candle out. They were at the top of the building, but dusk had come suddenly. Ahead of them a long gallery, open to both the elements and the courtyard on the right side, led past interminably closed doors. There was nothing reassuring about this bank of doors, all shut. The Katzburg was full of them. Selina shielded her candle to keep the flame from being seen. As she did so, her fingers glowed at the edges translucent pink.

  At the end of the gallery was a hole in the yellowed masonry. Entering it, she took her hand away from the candle. They must now, to judge by the stonework, be in the original schloss so well defended by its outer screens of ostentation. Whoever had first built here, had not seemed to care that not only men, but also families, die. The schloss was as permanent as a pyramid. Below them the floor slanted down. Following it, they came to the wellhead of a spiral staircase, jointed like a backbone. It was dark down there. It was as hard to peer into as a spiral shell.

  Selina, with a glance over her shoulder, stepped down, her robe catching on the steps behind her, her candle held over her head so its flame sooted the stone stairs above her. She put her forefinger to her lips, for they had reached a narrow Maltese-shaped slit in the wall. Peering through as he passed, he saw they were above the Great Hall, with its twin staircases. There was an undulant swell of shadows. She disappeared around the turn. She had forgotten to shield her flame.

  *

  “So that’s where she’s hid,” said the Magician, from the lurks of the musicians’ gallery, and sat down mildly on the wreckage of a portative, in wonder.

  *

  Just as you began to feel diseased with the motion, the stair abruptly stopped. Selina blew out her candle and moved more certainly. They were in another corridor, depressed, low, stone-ribbed, and much too wide. She counted doors.

  “This wing is not used. It is safe here.” She opened a door, waited for him, and closed it after them. They were in a barren place without windows. She moved away. Another door opened and out of it came, in a moment, light. He followed.

  She was busy igniting wicks. She went from wax stick to wax stick, and they blossomed after her. Then, thinking better of it, she blew most of them out, and stooped to light a fire laid in the grate.

  So much darkness had left him with spots before his eyes. Slowly, like black sunflowers cast loose, they whirled into each other, merged, and the room became clear. It was a startling room. Two heavy marble Landsknechte held up the lintel of the chimneypiece. The flickering light made them seem to stir. Above them, an escutcheon rippled toward the ceiling. It was wind-worn and effaced. The fire caught, crackled, and sent out light, as from an oven door. On the far wall a field of jeweled flowers on yellowish white silk, embroidered with seed pearls and silver and gold thread, flashed with emerald, green glass, ruby, amethyst, and the blue of marshfire. Sprays and tendrils and leaves and vines swayed in and out of darkness, with a peristaltic undulation, among the martyrdoms.

  Selina giggled. “I found some old copes and cut them up. It covers the windows.”

  The other walls were hung with tattered millefiori tapestry, across which pale rose and leeched blue peasants snared rabbits and hunted cony. For furniture there was nothing but a vast bed, a chair, a table, an armoire, a chest. On the bed was a white coverlet with a scarlet Maltese cross. It must have been a battle flag filched from somewhere. The canopy was made of similar things. It was a room collected out of flotsam. The logs caught well. Selina blew the last candles out.

  “There is wine,” she said, nodding toward the table.

  Standing there, uneasy, outrageous, balanced on one hip, perhaps scared, he did not want wine.

  “Then sit on the bed and take your boots off,” said Christine Natt och Dag. It was the last voluntary appearance of that long-dead stranger, the last use she had for her.

  “Why?” But he sat on the bed.

  “Because I do not propose to do it for you,” said Christine, and vanished out of that body utterly. Selina paused by the fire and then moved around the room, carelessly, swiftly, in a way he had not seen before; she seemed to be becoming younger and younger. Going over to the cut-up copes, she ran her fingers across the prickly, sharp-edged flowers.

  Before crossing the Rubicon, it is best to remove one’s shoes. Mysendonck pushed off his boots with his toes. They lay on the floor, the abandoned chitinous yellow tubes of some long sea creature. He was dressed, as usual, like the Huntsman of Soest, in old and greasy soft buckskins. The warmth in the room brought up the smell of them.

  Reaching behind her, Selina let her hair down. It fell with a silken swoosh. With a slow smile, she unhooked her dress, and pushing it before her, let it fall and stepped out of it. It looked as limp as an abandoned body.

  Mysendonck watched. Selina was a lady. He did not know how to address her. With a lady one must wait to be asked. He clasped before him his orange fingers, the shape of young carrots.

  “Selina …”

  She whirled angrily. “I am not Selina.”

  It was true. He was frightened. “Where did she go?”

  The woman—she was not so much a woman as a slightly heavy, smoothly flowing girl—considered this and then laughed.

  “Back,” she said, stroking a finger across her lower lip. “I am Manglana.” She drew off her smallclothes and moved naked in the firelight, humming to herself. “Are you afraid of me?”

  It was the Magician’s voice, the Magician’s question, but from far away.

  “You look the way you looked on that stump,” she said. She was thinner than you would have guessed Selina to be, and quick in her movements. The firelight brought out the pink small buttocks, the small breasts also, of a girl, but with here and there the beginnings of the fatty tissue of maturity. She was chryselephantine. She came over and sat on his knees.

  “Manglana undresses you now,” she said impersonally. This voice was avid.

  It was not the custom of commoners ever to remove all their clothes, but Earl Haakon would. He became Earl Haakon, and began to fumble at the laces of his shirt.

  “You, too,” said Manglana, seeming to take this change of selves for granted. “But Manglana does that. Always.” And slowly, very slowly, she began to undress him. She did not touch him in any other way.

  “What is it?”

  She pouted. “What is what?”

  “What you are humming.”

  “Oh that,” she said. And in a hushed, lost voice, pulling down his trousers, she sang:

  “Fiddledee. Dee. Fiddledee. Dee.

  The flower has married the honey bee.

  The sun shines forth. The wind blows free.

  When this you see, remember me.”

  She pulled him down into a flickering, rumpled, bolstered white cave. “Remember me,” she said. “There is no me to remember.”

  Mysendonck entirely vanished into the clean white-skinned employments of Earl Haakon. One is legendary for two minutes. Then one sleeps. One is folded into the tomb. And then a hand emerges. It is unconsecrated ground. It has neither time nor dimension. One is jostled by ghosts.

  “I need the young,” said Manglana, if it was Manglana. “Always the young. I cannot live without the young. I get so weary. And the candles all burn down. I need to have them. I am alive. I cannot stay so otherwise. It is dark. It smells of earth. It is like white blood. I am not like her. By day I sleep in earth. Slowly, slowly it comes back. They are different worlds.”

  Manglana propped herself up on one elbow and watched that long continent called a man, which has ports and harbors and a mole on its left shoulder. By day we do not wish to know the name of this landfall. It is the coast seen through mist, when we have run out of sweet wate
r and have drifted until our swollen tongues hang out and the yellow sun stretches bulging from horizon to horizon.

  She could not yet call Selina back. She was insatiable until at last she lay back drifting in a boat that has lost its oars. Ahead of us is an island, bleak, ruinous, waiting, on which the cypress trees stand about like an ancient people. We must never land.

  “When I was a young man,” said the Magician, taking up his position in the middle of this lost consciousness, with a sad, helpful nod, “I visited Venice, and Zara, and a curious town named Ragusa, in which the citizens walked up and down on paved streets, endorsed cargo, insured futures, and dared not go into the hills beyond their walls. It is a maritime republic. Off the jetty of Ragusa, an hour’s row, lies a small island called Lokrum. It is where the dead live. At one end of it is a monastery. Below the monastery is a circular pool in the cliffs, which connects with the sea. I shall not tell you what lives in that pool. But the other end of the island slowly rises. Not even the monks ever go there. Shrubs and cypress trees are set out in long sloping avenues which lead nowhere. At night—they would not dare to stay otherwise—the monks release dogs. These rush through the pine trees, the cypress trees, on nights of storm, baying. From the topmost pinnacle of this island, you can glimpse the bastions of Ragusa, small, distinct, strong, and waves breaking in its harbor. It is in the hands of the Turk now. But not even the Turk stays on Lokrum overnight. At dusk you can see people lined up on the stone jetty. The waves chop. The people are desperate to jump into the last boat. If they have missed it, they swim after it. I am one of those lost in night. Selina, live by day. Have nothing to do with the Isle of Dogs.”

  She looked at this young continent she was too old to visit any more, except for water. We cannot live without water. O Jungling. Jüngst im Traume sah ich auf den Fluten einem Nachen ohne Ruder ziehn. We are ourselves water.

  The Magician had this attribute: though he no longer spoke completely any one language at any one time, he could put places, scenes, emotions, people, in your head. He himself had no identity. They moved, talked, and shimmered. For a moment, when this young man with a hundred bodies slid smoothly into her, he vanished. But also, as they lay sleeping with a glister of sweat on their upper lips, and snoring, she saw him in an hundred coves along their flesh, quietly warning her away from harbor. “Selina, avoid the Isle of Dogs, if you can.”

  “But why,” she had said once. “Tell me why. If you could tell me why, yes, I would be Selina.”

  “Child, there is no why. There is only what we are.”

  For a moment she saw that gray face, indulgent, gentle, withdrawn. So she woke Mysendonck up. She was no longer what she saw in him.

  “You must go,” she said, and clogged with sleep, pulled the sheets around her, and peered spinsterishly about the room, and heard with weariness that intolerable authority seeping back again. The tide was on the turn.

  He did not want to, but he got dressed and stumbled out of there. She turned on her stomach and bit the pillow. She knew what would happen next. He would send her dreams. But though she fought it, she could not escape, she fell asleep, a rotted mixture of contempt and gratitude.

  *

  Mysendonck came out at the top of the double stairs. Deliberately he made a clatter (he was a child, a dangerous, well-meaning child). He had made his little noise in the world, and now it was over. Puzzled that the echo did not continue, he glanced up.

  There was a tall shimmer on the opposite stairway, and the Magician stepped out into a last dying patch of light. He said nothing. He watched.

  Of course a great leader of men, like Mysendonck, a sexual athlete besides, the substance utterly drained out of him, never scuttles. But sometimes he hurries.

  *

  In the room, the Magician said to himself, “Poor child, poor child,” and stoked the fire. Then, lighting one candle of a candelabrum on the table, he settled himself with his book. From time to time he glanced toward the bed.

  Selina was having her nightmares. She thrashed and turned over. Getting up, he pulled the coverlet around her shoulders. “I am a star wandering about with you, and flaring up from the depths,” he mumbled over her. It was an ancient hymn, from the world’s noon. There might be difficulties. He hoped not. He had had to wave his wand once or twice, and he hated to do that. But there are some things we cannot give up, even if to keep them be to our disadvantage.

  It was a long wait. Gray light began to find its way into the room. Selina sat up in bed, hugged the comforter to her breasts, and opened her eyes.

  “I hate it, I hate it,” she said. “Why did you teach me things?”

  The Magician took from his sleeve a pewter traveling watch, prised it open like an oyster, and set it ticking on the table. It ticked and ticked.

  “Selina,” he said. He might have been moving over her chest in search of diagnostic noises.

  “I am Manglana.”

  “No. It is daylight. I have been sitting here all night.” The Magician rose and approached the bed, half merciful assassin, half maestro medico, in a long beaked cap, out of Byzantium.

  “Manglana, Manglana, Manglana,” chanted Manglana, and began to beat the sheets with the palms of her hands.

  Bending over, the Magician put his long fine hands around her throat, increasing the pressure. Unless they have some disease you know not of, this is not dangerous. It brings them release. It is as impersonal as one’s own dying.

  Her legs kicked. Her face grew purple. Identity disappeared. She began to gag. If you press the main artery to the brain, the effect is the same, but it is not always easy to find this. The Magician shaped her into identity, as he would have shaped clay, with his hands. It has no features but the features we give it. And yet it is clay.

  She heaved convulsively. She could no longer see. She passed over in a great rush, like waters through a collapsing tunnel.

  Tick, tick, went the watch.

  “Two minutes,” said the Magician, and, compassionate, relaxed his grip. He was not so fond of staring into the charnel house as you might think. And yet he had no other contact with the living.

  This empty thing lying there opened its eyes.

  “Selina,” he evoked.

  “Yes.”

  “It is all right now.” He watched her closely.

  “Yes,” she said wistfully. “You are very good to me.”

  “I need you.”

  “Give me your hand.”

  As he sat on the bed, she looked into the eyes of the last male cousin-german of Christine Natt och Dag, and did not mind any more. After all, he had saved her.

  “My dear Selina,” he said, running a calloused hand across her cheek. “My dear Selina.”

  “You are bad, I think,” Selina told him. “But you are very kind. I will get up now.”

  *

  The Magician strode out onto the parterre in front of the Katzburg. It was ten in the morning. And yes, there was Mysendonck, with his absurd horse and his equally absurd ruffians.

  “We need firewood,” he said. “Either you cut it yourself, or you get someone else to cut it for you. That is your first lesson in authority.”

  In the woods that afternoon the axes rang against the bleeding wood until sunset.

  33

  The Magician, a lonely man, had known Selina now for six years. Effortlessly they had moved back and forth across Central Europe. He was a person known by reputation, not by name, in no way mysterious and yet full of darkness, eagerly awaited and yet feared. He had been seen in the camps for so long as there had been a war. She was a common prostitute, a camp follower. She moved in a blue wagon in the baggage of the Imperial side. There were thousands and thousands of women like that. But something about her had caught his eye.

  And so, he supposed, had she been caught, by him.

  She was not then known as Selina. She lived under some other nom de lit. It was a name he had given her out of the past of his own family. He had no illusions about her: she w
as a peasant. But like most aristocrats of the autocratic type, he trusted peasants more than he did most people, and they him. If one knows what the animal is, one can depend upon it. A peasant will slit your throat or follow you for life. One’s own people are not so reliable. If the peasant turns out not to be reliable, that proves nothing about the peasant; it merely means your own ignorance of animal behavior has once more tripped you up.

  In this sense, all men are peasants.

  At the time, he had been traveling as an astrologer. It was a convenient disguise. He was then in his second sixties, still quite young, still trapped in the awful longevity of the Natt och Dags and their descendants. The name is extinct; the blood is not. This war was early on then, but there are always satellite wars; he had been striding through the Apocalypse for years; a slight skill at the placement of stars, and of how to calculate men, had given him his laisser-passer. With the general staff, he presented himself as a humbug, and they believed it real. With the general run of humanity, he presented himself as real, and they pronounced it humbug. But all men were afraid, took his charts, and gave him money. Tell them they would die in August, and like enough they would. They haven’t much spine, after all. They are a superstitious lot. It was not magic; it was a knowledge of who was sick and who was well. He could tell at a glance. Had he come to them as a doctor, they would have rejected his advice. Assured they suffered not from fever but from Fate, they paid him well.

  He had no medical training, except for wounds, but he was the fourteenth of his family to rule that little place in which he had grown up. The Sodermanns always died in their fifties. If the Børdes survived their sixties, they lasted beyond eighty. The Swensen boy had hanged himself at eighteen. It was none of it surprising. You had only to look at three or four generations of them to see why. Each man’s life span, barring accidents, few of which are, is decided before he is born. It is a matter of descent. If he develops early, he will die soon. If he develops late, he will live on. Those capable of directing their lives live longer than those who are not. Some have luck. Some will have none. These things can be read off at a glance. There is some connection between the great perambulations of space and the toddle we take. It is something we do not know yet. One does not have to know everything, to know all.