Eleven years later her daughter Maureen borrowed it. Repeatedly, the taxi driver’s wife asked for it back, and Maureen meant to give it back, but she always forgot. Until one day when she was going to her mother’s and the scarf came into her head, a vision inspired by a picture of the night sky in September in the Radio Times. Her flat was always untidy, a welter of clothes and magazines and tape cassettes and full ashtrays. But once she had started she really wanted to find the scarf. She looked everywhere. She grubbed about in cupboards and drawers, threw stuff on to the floor and fumbled through half-unpacked suitcases. The result was that she was very late getting to her mother’s. She had not found the astronomical scarf.
This was because it had been taken the previous week—“borrowed,” he too would have said—by a boyfriend who was in love with her but whose love was unrequited. Or not as fully requited as he would have wished. The scarf was not merely intended as a sentimental keepsake but to be taken to a clairvoyant in Shepherds Bush who had promised him dramatic results if she could only hold in her hands “something of the beloved’s.” In the event, the spell or charm failed to work, possibly because the scarf belonged not to Maureen but to her mother. Or did it? It would have been hard to say who its owner was by this time.
The clairvoyant meant to return the scarf to Maureen’s boyfriend at his next visit but that was not due for two weeks and in the meantime she wore it herself. She was only the second person into whose possession it had come to look on it with love and admiration. The lepidopterist had worn it because it was obviously of good quality and because it was there; Sadie Williamson had recognized it as expensive; Maureen had borrowed it because the night had turned cold. But only her mother and now the clairvoyant had truly appreciated it.
This woman’s real name was not known until after she was dead. She called herself Thalia Essene. The scarf delighted her not because of the quality of the silk, nor its handrolled hem, nor its color, but because of the constellations scattered across its midnight blue. Such a map was to her what a chart of the Atlantic Ocean might have been to some early navigator, essential, enrapturing, mysterious, indispensable, life-saving. Its stars were the encyclopedia of her trade, the impenetrable spaces between them the source of her predictions. She sat for many hours in meditative contemplation of the scarf, which she spread on her lap, stroking it gently and sometimes murmuring incantations. When she went out she wore it, along with her layers of trailing garments, black cloak, and pomander of asafetida grass.
Roderick Thomas had never been among her clients. He had just moved into one of the rooms below her flat in the Uxbridge Road. It was years since he had had any work and longer than that since anyone had shown the slightest interest in him, wished for his company, paid attention to what he said, let alone cared about him. Thalia Essene was one of the few people who actually spoke to him and all she generally said when she saw him was “Hi” or “Rain again.”
One day, though, she made the mistake as it turned out of saying a little more. The sun was shining out of a cloudless sky.
“The goddess loves us this morning.”
Roderick Thomas looked at her with his mouth open. “You what?”
“I said, the goddess loves us today. She is shedding her glorious sunshine on to the face of Earth.”
Thalia smiled at him and walked on. She was on her way to the shops in King Street. Roderick Thomas started shambling after her. For some years he had been on the lookout for the Antichrist, who he knew would come in female form. He followed Thalia into Marks and Spencer’s and the cassette shop where she was in the habit of buying music as background for her fortune-telling sessions. She was well aware of his presence and, growing increasingly angry, then nervous, went home in a taxi.
Next day he hammered on her door. She told him to go away.
“Say that about the sunshine again,” he said.
“It’s not sunny today.”
“You could pretend,” he said. “Say about the goddess.”
“You’re mad,” said Thalia.
A client who had been having his palm read overheard it all and gave Thalia a funny look. She told him his life line was the longest she had ever seen and he would probably make it to a hundred. When she went downstairs Roderick Thomas was waiting for her in the hall. He looked at the scarf.
“Clothed in the sun,” he said, “and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.”
Thalia said something so alien to her philosophy of life, so contrary to all her principles, that she could hardly believe she’d uttered it. “If you don’t leave me alone I’ll get the police.”
He followed her just the same. She walked up to Shepherd’s Bush Green. Her threats gave her a dark aura and he saw the stars encircling her. She fascinated him, though he was beginning to see her as a source of danger. In Newcastle, where he had been living up until two years before, he had killed a woman he had mistakenly thought was the Antichrist because she told him to go to hell when he spoke to her. For a long time he expected to be sent to hell, even after the woman was dead, and although the fear had somewhat abated, it came back when he was confronted by beautiful evil women.
A man was standing on one of the benches on the green, preaching to the multitude. Well, to four or five people. Roderick Thomas had followed Thalia to the tube station but there had to abandon his pursuit for lack of money to buy a ticket. He wandered on to the green and the man on the bench stared straight at him and said,
“Thou shalt have no other gods but me!”
Roderick took that for a sign, you’d have to be daft not to get the message, but he asked his question just the same.
“What about the goddess?”
“For Solomon went after Ashtoreth,” said the man on the bench, “and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites. Wherefore the Lord said unto Solomon, I will surely rend the kingdom from thee, and will give it to thy servant.”
That was fair enough. Roderick went home and bided his time, listening to the voice of the preacher which had taken over from the usual voice he heard during his waking hours. It told him of a woman in purple sitting on a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. He watched from his window until he saw Thalia Essene come in, carrying a large recycled paper bag of a dull purple with CELESTIAL SECONDS printed on its side.
Thalia was feeling happy because she hadn’t seen Roderick for several hours and believed she had shaken him off. She was going out that evening to see a play at the Lyric, Hammersmith, in the company of her friend who was a famous water diviner. To this end she had bought herself a new dress, or rather, a “nearly new” dress, purple Indian cotton, with mirror work and black embroidery. The blue starry scarf, which she had taken to calling the astrological scarf, went well with it. She draped it round her neck, lamenting the coldness of the night. All this would have to be covered by her old black coat, as a shawl would be inadequate.
A quick glance at her engagement book showed her that Maureen’s boyfriend was due for a consultation next morning. The scarf must be returned to him. She would wear it for just one last time. As it happened, Thalia was wearing all these clothes for the last time, doing everything she did for the last time, but clairvoyant though she was, of her imminent fate she had no prevision.
She walked along, looking for a taxi. None came. Thalia had plenty of time and decided to walk. Roderick Thomas was behind her but she had forgotten about him and she didn’t look round. She was thinking about the water diviner, whom she hadn’t seen for eighteen months but who was reputed to have split up from his girlfriend.
Roderick Thomas caught up with her in one of the darker spots of Hammersmith Grove. It was not dark to him but illuminated by the seven times seventy stars on the clothing of her neck and the sea of glass like unto crystal on the hem of her garment. He said not a word but took the two ends of the starry cloth in his hands and strangled her.
After they had found her body, her killer was not hard to f
ind. There was little point in charging Roderick Thomas with anything or bringing him up in court, but they did. The astronomical scarf was Exhibit A at the trial. Roderick Thomas was found guilty of the murder of Noreen Blake—for such was Thalia Essene’s real name—guilty but insane and committed to a suitable institution “during the Queen’s pleasure.”
The exhibits would normally have ended up in the Black Museum, but a young police officer called Karen Duncan, whose job it was to collect together such memorabilia, thought it all so sad and distasteful, that poor devil who never should have been allowed out into the community in the first place, that she put Thalia’s carrier bag and theater ticket in the shredder and took the scarf home with her. Although it had once been dry-cleaned, the scarf had never been washed. Karen washed it in cold water gel for delicates and ironed it with a cool iron. Nobody would have guessed it had been used for such a macabre purpose, there wasn’t a mark on it.
However, an unforeseen problem arose. Karen couldn’t bring herself to wear it. It wasn’t the scarf’s history that stopped her so much as her fear other people might recognize it. There had been some publicity for the Crown Court proceedings and much had been made of a midnight-blue scarf patterned with stars. Cressida Chilton had read about it and wondered why the description of it reminded her of James Mullen’s second wife, the one before the one before his present one. She didn’t think she could face a fourth divorce and a fifth marriage, she’d have to change her job. Sadie Williamson read about the scarf and for some reason there came into her head a picture of butterflies and a dark house in Bloomsbury.
After some inner argument, reassurance countered by denial and self-rebuke, Karen Duncan took the scarf round to the charity shop where they let her exchange it for a black velvet hat. Three weeks later it was bought by a woman who didn’t recognize it, though the man who ran the charity shop did and had been in a dilemma about it ever since Karen brought it in. Its new owner wore it for a couple of years. At the end of that time she got married to an astronomer. The scarf shocked and enraged him and he explained to her what an inaccurate representation of the heavens it was, how it was quite impossible for these constellations to be adjacent to each other or even visible at the same time, and if he didn’t forbid her to wear it that was because he wasn’t that kind of man.
The astronomer’s wife gave it to the woman who did the cleaning three times a week. This woman never wore the scarf, she didn’t like scarves, could never keep them on, but it wouldn’t have occurred to her just the same to say no to something that was offered her. When she died, three years later, her daughter came upon it among her effects.
The daughter was a silversmith and member of a celebrated craft society. One of her fellow members made quilts and was always on the lookout for likely fabrics to use in patchwork. The quiltmaker, Fenella Carbury, needed samples of blue, cream, and ivory silks for a quilt which had been commissioned by a millionaire businessman, well known for his patronage of arts and crafts and for his charitable donations. No charity was involved here, for Fenella worked hard and for long hours and the quilt would be worth every penny of the two thousand pounds she would be asking for it.
For the second time in its life the scarf was washed. The silk was as good as new, its dark blue unfaded, its stars as bright as they had been twenty years before. From it Fenella was able to cut forty hexagons which, interspersed with forty ivory damask diamond shapes from someone’s wedding dress and forty sky-blue silk diamond shapes from a fabric shop off-cut, formed the central motif of the quilt. When it was finished it was large enough to cover a king-size bed.
James Mullen allowed it to hang on exhibition in Chelsea in the Chenil Gallery for precisely two weeks. Then he collected it and gave it to his new bride for a wedding present along with a diamond bracelet, a cottage in Derbyshire, and a Queen Anne four-poster to put the quilt on.
Cressida Chilton had waited for him through four marriages and twenty-one years. Men, as Oscar Wilde said, marry because they are tired. Men, as Cressida Chilton said, always marry their secretaries in the end. It’s dogged as does it and she had been dogged, she had persevered, and she had her reward.
Before getting into bed on her wedding night, she contemplated the two thousand pound quilt and said to James that it was the loveliest thing she’d ever seen.
“The middle bit reminds me of when you first came to work for me,” said James. “I should have had the sense to marry you then. I can’t think why it reminds me, can you?”
Cressida smiled. “I suppose I had stars in my eyes.”
IRINA MURAVYOVA was born in Moscow in 1952. She was raised by her grandmother, to whom most of her writing is dedicated. She came to Boston in 1985, where she held a variety of positions teaching and translating, and also made a documentary film. She has spent three years in the Department of Slavic Languages at Brown University. Now she is Editor in Chief of a weekly published newspaper, The Boston Time.
On the Edge
Irina Muravyova
Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz
Originally published as “Na Kraiu,” in Grani, no. 167 (1993): 12–23.
I t was a green, gushing, gritty world. Dirty, dark-faced people walked down its dusty roads. They stopped at a clump of large trees, built fires, and cooked supper. In the morning, their ragtag, colorfully dressed women hustled to the bazaars, badgered passersby, holding out their nut-brown palms.
She was sixteen the first time she went to jail. She wasn’t any worse at stealing than the others, but she was unlucky for some strange reason. People said she had the evil eye and could sense misfortune. There was that crumbly, blue-eyed, fragrant-lipped woman who laughed with those gold crowns in her mouth and held out her plump hand: “Tell me my fortune, sweetie!” She knew instantly … What? Well, that the woman only had an hour left. That blue-eyed laughing woman with the fragrant lips and gold crowns only had one hour left. She could see it all: the embankment, the body thrown onto it from the hurtling train, the blue-eyed, dead-eyed thrown-back head with the half-open lips.… She did not tell her that. She wove the kind of tale the woman was expecting—about love and a journey, about the king of wands in the house of government who was tired of waiting, but by morning the whole district knew that a woman of about forty-five had been thrown from the evening commuter train at full speed—Alferova, Nadezhda Vasilievna Alferova, mother of two, unwed.…
Her first sentence was short. Just three years. She never went back to the Gypsy camp. She lived in Arkhangelsk and took a job every once in a while. She was married twice, though not officially. She didn’t steal very often, only when she liked something a lot and didn’t have any money. She had a special weakness for furs—coats and hats. More than anything else in the world she loved romance novels and movies from India, which she watched over and over again until she cried. She herself sang and danced and played the guitar. Her name was Liubov Rakhmetova.
“… and also, dear Liuba, I want to tell you that you are the most beautiful woman destiny ever brought my way. If you and I’d met in a town like Simferopol or Yalta, instead of here, I’d have shut my eyes, given up everything, and followed you like a dog. My little black-eyed seagull. Liubochka! See, sometimes I think about you and me stuck in this shitty little hole where we don’t even know what else might happen to us. What a rotten deal! We can’t go for a walk. We can’t enjoy each other. We can’t even look at each other like we should.… But write me, Liubov, I’m waiting impatiently for your reply.… Your Vasily.”
The letter was written in pencil on the yellowed, smoke-impregnated liner of a tobacco pack.
“Vasya, none of it’s my fault. My mother and father abandoned me, and evil people forced me to steal and wrecked my whole life. See, people say I’m a Gypsy, but who knows? They took me into the Gypsy camp right off the street where I was standing, completely abandoned and unwanted.… Just because I have black hair. Well, Vasya, Gypsies aren’t the only ones with black hair. But I like you a
lot. You might say I fell in love with you because I could really see what a good man you are and because you have a face they could put in the movies, a very beautiful movie. I’m sending you a present. Smoke it in good health and don’t forget me. Your loving Liubov Rakhmetova.”
Combing her shaggy gray head, the old woman with the brown bumps on her fingers told her:
“You’re a fool, Liuba. A fool as sure as I’m looking! Living in the same cell with you is pure punishment! You toss and turn, you moan, you grate your teeth! And now you’ve up and fallen in love! What’s that brain of yours for anyway?”
Turning her back to the gray, shaggy old woman with the brown bumps on her fingers, Liuba chuckled sadly, and her black eyes shone, greedy and underslept.
“… but I beg you, Liuba. Don’t try to find out what I’m in for because I’m not getting out” (from Vasily Lebedev’s letter).
“Dear Vasya! I give you my word I won’t keep any secrets from you, so I don’t really understand why you’re keeping a secret in your heart from me, as if I were a stranger. If you’re telling me the truth, that you love me, then why should we hide anything from each other? What kind of crime could you have committed that you can’t even talk about it? After all, I’d forgive you for anything in the world anyway” (from Liubov Rakhmetova’s letter).
The old woman with the bumps on her fingers, the old witch with the wrinkled eyelids, was seeping into her soul through the sour, moist cough that was tearing up her throat:
“He’s not going to tell you that as long as he lives. Ha! You listen to me. I wish you well, you little scamp! I know I shouldn’t trust your breed, but still … I like you, lady, and I pity you.… People are talking. Very, very soon, they’re saying, your Vasya … He did his wife in, or that’s the way it looks.… Except it was really ghastly. Pretty unusual. Hey, what’re you going all white for? That’s not going to make it any easier. In our life, a man’s worse than a noose. It all comes down to the same fancy. I’ll never believe in this love of yours as long as I live. There’s no such thing! You’re lying to yourselves, fools!”
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