“But!” (Dr. Turbyfil quivered.) “What then comes to pass? An anthropologist goes into an Apotheke—a druck-store, yes?—In Peiping—oh, a beau-tiful city, I have been there, I love it with all my heart!—he goes into a native Chinese pharmacy, and there what is it that he finds? He finds—amongst the dried dragon bones, powdered bats, tigers’ gall, rhinoceros horn, and pickled serpents—two human-like gigantic molar teeths. And then, behold, for this is wonderful! The whole picture changes!”
Oh my, oh my! thought Dr. Turbyfil.
“Now Primal Man becomes huge, tremendous, like the Sons of Anak in the First Moses-Book. We must now posit for him ancestors like the great apes of your Edgar Burroughs-Rice. And how it is that we, his children, have shrunken! Pit-i-ful! Instead of the pigs becoming elephants, the elephants are becoming pigs!” Dr. Sanzmann clicked his tongue.
“But that is nothing! Nothing at all: Wherefore have I come to you now? To make known to you a something that is so much more startling. I must begin earlier than our own times. Charles the Fifth!”
Dr. Turbyfil quavered. “I beg your pardon?”
“Charles the Fifth of Hapsburg. In 1555 Charles the Emperor resigns, no, retires? Abdicates. His brother Ferdinand succeeds him as sovereign of the Hapsburg dominions, and Charles retreats himself to a monastery.
“‘With age, with cares, with maladies oppres’t,
“‘He seeks the refuge of monastic rest—’”
“Ahhh, Professor Sanzmann,” Dr. Turbyfil began, stopped, blinked.
“Yes—yes: I di-gress. Well. Charles and Ferdinand. A medallion is struck, Charles, one side—Ferdinand the other. And the date, 1555. Here is the medallion.” Dr. Sanzmann reached into an inner pocket and pulled out a flat little box, such as jewelers use. He opened it.
Inside lay a blackened disk about the size of a silver dollar, and a piece of paper with two rubbings—the profiles of two men, Latin mottoes, and the date: 1555. Completely at sea, and feeling more and more sorry for himself, Dr. Turbyfil looked at his rosy-faced and gray-haired caller; made a small, bewildered gesture.
“Soon, soon, you will understand everything. Nineteen thirty. My vacations—I am still in Chair-many—I spend at Maldenhausen, a little rural hamlet in a walley. Then things are quiet. Ah, these Chairman walleys! So green, remote, enchanting, full of mysteries! I drink beer and wine, I smoke my pipe, and go on long walks in the countryside. And—since I am a scholar, and ever the dog returns to his womit—I spend also some time in the willage archives… Many interesting things… A child named Simon.
“In 1555 a child named Simon is stolen by an ogre.”
Dr. Turbyfil pressed a fist to his forehead and moaned faintly. “Is—what?” he said, fretfully.
“Please. You see the hole in the medallion? The child Simon wore it about his neck on a thong. They were very reverend, these peasant people. An Imperial medallion, one wears it on one’s bosom. A photostatic copy of the testimony.” Professor Sanzmann opened the box, removed papers. Photostatic copies, indeed, were among them, but the language was a monkish Latin, and in Gothic lettering. Dr. Turbyfil felt his eyes begin to hurt him, closed them. Professor Sanzmann, dreadful man, spoke on. There were two witnesses, an old man of the name Sigismund, a boy called Lothar. It was winter. It was snow. The child Simon runs with his dog down the field. He shouts. He is afraid. Out of the snow behind him the ogre comes. He is just as they always knew ogres to be: huge, hairy, crooked, clad in skins, carrying a cudgel. Terrible.
“Lothar runs for help. The old man cannot run, so he stays. And prays. The ogre seizes up the child Simon and runs away with him, back into the fields, toward the hills, until the snow hides them.
“The people are aroused, they are fearful, but not surprised. This happens. There are wolves, there are bears, there are ogres. Such are the hazards of living on the remote farms.”
Dr. Turbyfil shivered. A chill crept into his flesh. He rubbed his fingers to warm them. “Folklore,” he croaked. “Old wives’ tales.”
Dr. Sanzmann waved his hands, then placed them on the photostats. “This is not the Brothers Grimm,” he said. “These are contemporary accounts with eyewitnesses. I continue. The people go out in the storm, with dogs and pikes and even a few matchlocks; and since they huddle fearingly together and the snow has hid all footmarks, it is not a surprise that they do not find the child or the ogre’s spoor. The dog, yes—but he is quite dead. Crushed. One tremendous blow. The next day they search, and then the next, and then no more. Perhaps in the spring they will find some bones for Christian burial …
“The child had been warned that if he went too far from home he would be stolen by an ogre. He did go too far from home, and he was stolen by an ogre. So. Fifteen sixty.”
Dr. Turbyfil ventured a small smile. “The child has been dead for five years.” He felt better now that he knew what was in the carton. He visualized the card which would never, certainly never, be typed! “Bones of child devoured by ogre in 1555. Gift of Prof. Ludwig Sanzmann, Dr. Phil.”
The Goethe scholar swept on. “In 1560 the child Simon,” he said, “is discovered trying to pilfer fowls from a farmyard in the nexten walley. He is naked, filthy, long-haired, lousy. He growls and cannot speak coherent speech. He fights. It is very sad.”
The museum director agreed that it was very sad. (Then what was in the carton?)
“Child Simon is tied, he is delivered up to his parents, who must lock him in a room to keep him from escaping. Gradually he learns to speak again. And then comes to see him the Burgomeister, and the notary, and the priest, and the Baron, and I should imagine half the people of the district, and they ask him to tell his story, speaking ever the truth.
“The ogre (he says) carried him away very distantly and high up, to his cave, and there in his cave is his wife the ogress, and a small ogre, who is their child. At first Simon fears they will consume him, but no. He is brought to be a companion to the ogre child, who is ill. And children are adaptive, very adaptive. Simon plays with the ogre child, and the ogre brings back sheep and wenison and other foods. At first it is hard for Simon to eat the raw meat, so the ogress chews it soft for him—”
“Please!” Dr. Turbyfil held up a protesting hand, but Professor Sanzmann neither saw nor heard him. With gleaming eyes gazing into the distance he went on.
“It comes the spring. The ogre family sports in the forest, and Simon with him. Then comes again the autumn and winter and at last the ogre child dies. It is sad. The parents cannot believe it. They moan to him. They rock him in their arms. No use. They bury him finally beneath the cave floor. Now you will ask,” he informed the glassy-eyed Turbyfil, “do they smear the body with red ocher as a symbol of life, of blood and flesh, as our scientists say? No. And why not? Because he is already smeared. All of them. All the time. They like it so. It is not early religion, it is early cosmetic, only.”
He sighed. Dr. Turbyfil echoed it.
“And so, swiftly pass the years,” Professor Sanzmann patted his hand on the empty air to indicate the passing years. “The old ogre is killed by a shebear and then the ogress will not eat. She whimpers and clasps Simon to her, and presently she grows cold and is dead. He is alone. The rest we know. Simon grows up, marries, has children, dies. But there are no more ogres.
“Not ever.
“Naturally, I am fascinated. I ask the peasants, where is there a cave called the Cave of the Ogres? They look at me with slanting glances, but will not answer. I am patient. I come back each summer. Nineteen thirty-one. Nineteen thirty-two. Nineteen thirty-three. Everyone knows me. I give small presents to the children. By myself I wander in the hills and search for caves. Nineteen thirty-four. There is a cow-tending child in the high pastures. We are friends. I speak of a cave near there. This, I say, is called Cave of the Ogres. The child laughs. No, no, he says, for that is another cave: it is located thus and so.
“And I find it where he says. But I am circumspect. I wait another year. Then I come and I make my p
rivate excavations. And—I—find—this.”
He threw open the carton and unwrapped from many layers of cotton wool something brown and bony, and he set it in front of Dr. Turbyfil.
“There was a fairly complete skeleton, but I took just the skull and jawbone. You recognize it at once, of course. And with it I found, as I expected, the medallion of Charles and Ferdinand. Simon had allowed them to bury it with the ogre child because he had been fond of it. It is all written in the photostatic paper copies… In 1936 the Nazis—”
Dr. Turbyfil stared at the skull. “No, no, no, no,” he whispered. It was not a very large skull. “No, no, no,” he whispered, staring at the receding forehead and massive chinless jaw, the bulging eye ridges.
“So, tell me now, sir museum director: Is this not a find more remarkable than big teeths in a Peiping herb shop?” His eyes seemed very young, and very bright.
Dr. Turbyfil thought rapidly. It needed just something like this to set the Sunday supplements and Mr. Godbody ablaze and ruin forever both his reputation and that of the Holden Museum. Years and years of work—the seventeen chapters on the Mousterian Era alone in Man Before the Dawn—the bequest from old Mr. Godbody—
Then the thought sprang fully-formed in his mind: Where there had been one skeleton, there must be others, unspoiled by absurd sixteenth-century paraphernalia—which had no business being there, anyway. He arose, placed a hand on Professor Sanzmann’s shoulder.
“My friend,” he said, in warm, golden, dulcet tones. “My friend, it will take some time before the Sanzmann Expedition of the Holden Museum will be ready to start. While you make the necessary personal preparations to lead us to the site of your truly astounding discovery, please oblige me by saying nothing about this to our—alas—unscholarly and often sensational press. Eh?”
Dr. Sanzmann’s rosy face broke into a thousand wrinkles and tears of joy and gratitude rolled down his cheeks. Dr. Turbyfil generously pretended not to see.
“Imagine what a revolution this will produce,” he said, as if he were thinking aloud. “Instead of being tidily extinct for fifty thousand years, our poor cousins survived into modern times. Fantastic! Our whole timetable will have to be rewritten …” His voice died away. His eyes focused on Professor Sanzmann, nodding his head, sniffling happily, as he tied up his package.
“Incidentally, my dear Professor,” he said: “before you leave I must show you some interesting potsherds that were dug up not a mile from here. You will be fascinated. Aztec influences! This way…mind the stairs. I am afraid our cellar is not very well arranged at present; we have been recataloguing…this fascinating collection formerly belonged to a pioneer figure, the late Mr. Tatum Tompkins.”
Behind a small mountain of packing cases, Dr. Turbyfil dealt Professor Sanzmann a swift blow on the temple with one of Uncle Tatum’s tomahawks. The sinister Continental scholar fell without a sound, his rosy lips opened upon an unuttered aspirate. Dr. Turbyfil made shift to bury him in the farthest corner of the cellar, and to pile upon his grave such a pyramid of uncatalogued horrors as need not, God and Godbody willing, be disturbed for several centuries.
Dusting his hands, and whistling—a trifle off-key—the hymn called “Bringing in the Sheaves,” Dr. Turbyfil returned to the office above stairs. There he opened an atlas, looking at large-scale maps of Germany. A village named Maldenhausen, in a valley…(Where there had been one skeleton, there must be others, unspoiled by absurd sixteenth-century paraphernalia—which had no business being there.) His fingers skipped joyfully along the map, and in his mind’s eye he saw himself already in those valleys, with their lovely names: Friedenthal, Johannesthal, Hochsthal, Neanderthal, Waldenthal…beautiful valleys! Green, remote, enchanting…full of mysteries.
The Woman Who Thought She Could Read
INTRODUCTION BY MARTHA SOUKUP
I happened on short science fiction and fantasy during heady times, the 1970s. Many of the great anthology series were publishing then: Orbit, Universe, New Dimensions, Dangerous Visions: exciting books filled with stories by strong new voices. A walk to the library after school would reap an armful of stories by Lafferty, Delany, Wolfe, Wilhelm, Bishop, Piserchia, Effinger, Silverberg, Dozois, Russ, so many, too many to keep in your head. Fine voices, quirky, intelligent, and fresh: half of what I learned about science fiction and fantasy I learned from stories like theirs.
But the hottest new voices couldn’t top what Avram Davidson had done in a collection of short stories, written as much as two decades before they came along. Pocket Books issued a paperback edition of his 1962 collection Or All the Seas with Oysters in 1976. The copy I bought then sits on the arm of my chair now. The story ending the book, in the place of honor, is “The Woman Who Thought She Could Read.”
The stories in that reprint taught me as much about what short stories could do as any book I’d read. I wondered then and wonder still: Why write a novel when you can make a few thousand words like “The Woman Who Thought She Could Read” this rich?
Davidson gives his characters voices as distinctive as his own. Their voices reveal things about them they don’t know about themselves, from the narrator recollecting his boyhood. It seems there are more characters than there are, because Davidson creates in this story a warm, but unsentimental, sense of a community; and from the community a sense of a whole America of several generations ago, living and breathing and laughing and worrying, loving, screaming. The curious boy recalled by his adult self; the cheerful immigrant midwife and bean-reader Mrs. Grummick; friends and neighbors painted, sometimes, in strokes just a sentence or three long. He even tosses in vivid characters long dead before his story opens. It deepens the sense of ongoing community. Folks. You recognize them when he shows them to you.
So why write a whole novel? (Well, there are other reasons.) Other writers can say this much about a time and a place: the way that time and place create the people in them, the way those people (eccentrically, clumsily, caringly) create that time and place. Two nights ago I went to a Chekhov play; Chekhov could.
It is always worth remarking when a writer has done this. It is doubly worth remarking when he has done it with economy and grace.
Here is a story where Avram Davidson has, and has. Remark it.
THE WOMAN WHO THOUGHT SHE COULD READ
ABOUT A HUNDRED YEARS ago a man named Vanderhorn built the little house. He built it one and a half stories high, with attached and detached sheds snuggling around it as usual; and he covered it with clapboards cut at his own mill—he had a small sawmill down at the creek, Mr. Vanderhorn did. After that he lived in the little house with his daughter and her husband (being a widower man) and one day he died there. So the daughter and son-in-law, a Mr. Hooten or Wooten or whatever it was, they came into his money which he made out of musket stocks for the Civil War, and they built a big new house next to the old one, only further back from the street. This Mr. Wooten or Hooten or something like that, he didn’t have any sons, either; and his son-in-law turned the sawmill into a buggy factory. Well, you know what happened to that business! Finally, a man named Carmichael, who made milk wagons and baggage carts and piewagons, he bought the whole Vanderhorn estate. He fixed up the big house and put in apartments, and finally he sold it to my father and went out of business. Moved away somewhere.
I was just a little boy when we moved in. My sister was a lot older. The old Vanderhorn house wasn’t part of the property any more. A lady named Mrs. Grummick was living there and Mr. Carmichael had sold her all the property the width of her house from the street on back to the next lot which faced the street behind ours. I heard my father say it was one of the narrowest lots in the city, and it was separated from ours by a picket fence. In the front of the old house was an old weeping willow tree and a big lilac bush like a small tree. In back were a truck garden and a few flowerbeds. Mrs. Grummick’s house was so near to our property that I could look right into her window, and one day I did, and she was sorting beans.
Mrs. Grummi
ck looked out and smiled at me. She had one of those broad faces with high cheekbones, and when she smiled her little bright black eyes almost disappeared.
“Liddle boy, hello!” she said. I said Hello and went right on staring, and she went right on sorting her beans. On her head was a kerchief (you have to remember that this was before they became fashionable) and there was a tiny gold earring in each plump earlobe. The beans were in two crocks on the table and in a pile in front of her. She was moving them around and sorting them into little groups. There were more crocks on the shelves, and glass jars, and bundles of herbs and strings of onions and peppers and bunches of garlic all hanging around the room. I looked through the room and out the window facing the street and there was a sign in front of the little house, hanging on a sort of one-armed gallows. Anastasia Grummick, Midwife, it said.
“What’s a midwife?” I asked her.
“Me,” she said. And she went on pushing the beans around, lining them up in rows, taking some from one place and putting them in another.
“Have you got any children, Mrs. Grimmick?”
“One. I god one boy. Big boy.” She laughed.
“Where is he?”
“I think he come home today. I know he come home today.” Her head bobbed.
“How do you know?”
“I know because I know. He come home and I make a bean soup for him. You want go errand for me?”
“All right.” She stood up and pulled a little change purse out of her apron pocket, and counted out some money and handed it to me out of the window.
The Avram Davidson Treasury Page 18
