She was stunned; she could not believe it. Surely there would be at least another night—that was little enough to ask.
“Can’t you stay?” she said.
“You know I can’t.” His voice was rough and strained. “I go where they tell me, come when they say come.”
She tried to hold back the time, but it slipped away, ran through her fingers. The sky darkened slowly from cerulean to Prussian blue, the stars came out and the cool night wind stirred over the jetty.
Below her, in a cluster of lights, they were making the boat ready. Orchestrinos were playing up the hillside, and there was a little crowd of men and women gathering to say good-bye. There was laughter, joking, voices raised good-naturedly in the evening stillness.
Klef, pale in the lights, came up the stairs to where she stood; his head tilted as he came, his grave eyes holding hers.
“I’m not going to cry,” she said.
His hands took her arms, gripping her half in tenderness, half impatiently. “Mary, you know this is wrong. Get over it. Find yourself other men—be happy.”
“Yes, I’ll be happy,” she said.
He stared down at her in uncertainty, then bent his head and kissed her. She held herself passive in his arms, not responding or resisting. After a moment he let her go and stepped back. “Goodbye, Mary.”
“Good-bye, Klef.”
He turned, went quickly down the steps. The laughing voices surrounded him as he went toward the boat; after a moment she heard his voice too, lifted in cheerful farewells.
In the morning she awoke knowing that he was gone. A frightening knowledge of loss seized her, and she sat up with her heart leaping.
Down the high dormitory, smelling faintly of cinnamon oil and fresh linens, the sisters were beginning to rustle sleepily out of their cubicles, murmuring and yawning. The familiar hiss of the showers began at the far end of the room. The white-curtained windows were open, and from her bed Mary could see the cream and terra-cotta roofs spread out in a lazy descent. The air was cool and still and mysteriously pure: it was the best moment of the day.
She rose, washed herself and dressed mechanically. “What is it, dear?” asked Mia, bending toward her anxiously.
“Nothing. Klef is gone.”
“Well, there’ll be others.” Mia smiled and patted her hand, and went away. There was a closeness between them, they were almost of an age, and yet even Mia could not be comfortable long in Mary’s company.
Mary sat with the others at table, silent in the steaming fragrances of coffee and new bread, the waves of cheerful talk that flowed around her. Carrying her loom, she went down with the rest into the court and sat in her usual place. The work began. Time stretched away wearily into the, future. How many mornings in her life would she sit here, where she sat now, beginning to weave as she did now? How could she endure it? How had she ever endured it? She put her fingers on the controls of the loom, but the effort to move them appalled her. A tear dropped bright on the keyboard.
Mia leaned over toward her. “Is there anything the matter? Don’t you feel well?”
Her fists clenched uselessly. “I can’t—I can’t—” was all she could utter. Hot tears were running down her face; her jaw was shaking. She bowed her head over the loom.
Iliria was neither wearisomely flat, nor cone-shaped nor pyramidal in its construction, like some of the northern islands, but was charmingly hollowed, like a cradle. The old cobblestoned streets rose and fell; there were stairways, balconies, arcades; never a vista, always a new prospect. The buildings were pleasingly various, some domed and spired, others sprawling. Cream was the dominant color, with accents of cool light blue, yellow and rose. For more than three hundred years the island had been afloat, just as it now was: the same plazas with their fountains, the same shuttered windows, the same rooftops.
During the last century, some colonies had been creeping back onto the land as the contamination diminished; but every Ilirian knew that only island life was perfect. Above, the unchanging streets and buildings served each generation as the last; down below, the storage chambers, engine rooms, seines, preserving rooms, conveniently out of sight and hearing, went on functioning as they always had. Unsinkable, sheathed in ceramic above and below, the island would go on floating just as it now was, forever.
It was strange to Mary to see the familiar streets so empty. The morning light lay softly along the walls; in corners, blue shadow gathered. Behind every door and window there was a subdued hum of activity; the clans were at their work. All the way to the church circle, she passed no one but a Messenger and two Carters with their loads: all three looked at her curiously until she was out of sight.
Climbing the Hill of Carpenters, she saw the gray dome of the church rising against the sky—a smooth, unrelieved ovoid, with a crescent of morning light upon it. Overhead, a flock of gulls hung in the air, wings spread, rising and dipping. They were gray against the light.
She paused on the porch step to look down. From this height she could see the quays and the breakwater, and the sun on the brightwork of the moored launches; and then the long rolling back of the sea, full of whitecaps in the freshening breeze; and beyond that, the dark smudge of the land, and the clutter of brown windowed stone that was Porto. She stood looking at it for a moment, dry-eyed, then went into the shadowed doorway.
Clabert the Priest rose up from his little desk and came toward her with ink-stained fingers, his skirt flapping around his ankles. “Good morning, cousin, have you a trouble?”
“I’m in love with a man who has gone away.”
He stared at her in perplexity for a moment, then darted down the corridor to the left. “This way, cousin.” She followed him past the great doors of the central harmonion. He opened a smaller door, curved like the end of an egg, and motioned her in.
She stepped inside; the room was gray, egg-shaped, and the light came uniformly from the smooth ceramic walls. “Twenty minutes,” said Clabert, and withdrew his head. The door shut, joining indistinguishably with the wall around it.
Mary found herself standing on the faintly sloping floor, with the smooth single curve of the wall surrounding her. After a moment she could no longer tell how far away the big end of the ovicle was; the room seemed first quite small, only a few yards from one end to the other; then it was gigantic, bigger than the sky. The floor shifted uncertainly under her feet, and after another moment she sat down on the cool hollow slope.
The silence grew and deepened. She had no feeling of confinement; the air was fresh and in constant slight movement. She felt faintly and agreeably dizzy, and put her arms behind her to steady herself. Her vision began to blur; the featureless gray curve gave her no focus for her eyes. Another moment passed, and she became aware that the muffled silence was really a continual slow hush of sound, coming from all points at once, like the distant murmuring of the sea. She held her breath to listen, and at once, like dozens of wings flicking away in turn, the sound stopped. Now, listening intently, she could hear a still fainter sound, a soft, rapid pattering that stopped and came again, stopped and came again . . . and listening, she realized that it was the multiple echo of her own heartbeat. She breathed again, and the slow hush flooded back.
The wall approached, receded . . . gradually it became neither close nor far away; it hung gigantically and mistily just out of reach. The movement of air imperceptibly slowed. Lying dazed and unthinking, she grew intensely aware of her own existence, the meaty solidness of her flesh, the incessant pumping of blood, the sigh of breath, the heaviness and pressure, the pleasant beading of perspiration on her skin. She was whole and complete, all the way from fingers to toes. She was uniquely herself; somehow she had forgotten how important that was. . . .
“Feeling better?” asked Clabert, as he helped her out of the chamber.
“Yes . . .” She was dazed and languid; walking was an extraordinary effort.
“Come back if you have these confusions again,” Clabert called after her,
standing in the porch doorway.
Without replying she went down the slope in the brilliant sunshine. Her head was light, her feet were amusingly slow to obey her. In a moment she was running to catch up with herself, down the steep cobbled street in a stumbling rush, with faces popping out of shutters behind her, and fetched up laughing and gasping with her arms around a light column at the bottom.
A stout Carter in blue was grinning at her out of his tanned face. “What’s the joke, woman?”
“Nothing,” she stammered. “I’ve just been to church. . . .”
“Ah!” he said, with a finger beside his nose, and went on.
She found herself taking the way downward to the quays. The sunlit streets were empty; no one was in the pools. She stripped and plunged in, gasping at the pleasure of the cool fresh water on her body. And even when two Baker boys, an older one and a younger, came by and leaned over the wall shouting, “Pretty! Pretty!” she felt no confusion, but smiled up at them and went on swimming.
Afterward, she dressed and strolled, wet as she was, along the seawall promenade. Giddily she began to sing as she walked, “Open your arms to me, sweetheart, for when the sun shines it’s pleasant to be in love. . . .” The orchestrinos had been playing that, that night when—
She felt suddenly ill, and stopped with her hand at her forehead.
What was wrong with her? Her mind seemed to topple, shake itself from one pattern into another. She swung her head up, looking with sharp anxiety for the brown tangle of buildings on the mainland.
At first it was not there, and then she saw it, tiny, almost lost on the horizon. The island was drifting, moving away, leaving the mainland behind.
She sat down abruptly; her legs lost their strength. She put her face in her arms and wept: “Klef! Oh, Klef!”
This love that had come to her was not the easy, pleasant thing the orchestrinos sang of; it was a kind of madness. She accepted that, and knew herself to be mad, yet could not change. Waking and sleeping, she could think only of Klef.
Her grief had exhausted itself; her eyes were dry. She could see herself now as the others saw her—as something strange, unpleasant, ill-fitting. What right had she to spoil their pleasure?
She could go back to church, and spend another dazed time in the ovicle. “If you have these confusions again,” the Priest had said. She could go every morning, if need be, and again every afternoon. She had seen one who needed to do as much, silly Marget Tailor who always nodded and smiled, drooling a little, no matter what was said to her, and who seemed to have a blankness behind the glow of happiness in her eyes. That was years ago; she remembered the sisters always complained of the wet spots Marget left on her work. Something must have happened to her; others cut and stitched for the Weavers now.
Or she could hug her pain to herself, scourge them with it, make them do something. . . . She had a vision of herself running barefoot and ragged through the streets, with people in their doorways shouting, “Crazy Mary! Crazy Mary!” If she made them notice her, made them bring Klef back . . .
She stopped eating except when the other sisters urged her, and grew thinner day by day. Her cheeks and eyes were hollow. All day she sat in the courtyard, not weaving, until at length the other women’s voices grew melancholy and seldom. The weaving suffered; there was no joy in the clan house. Many times Vivana and the others reasoned with her, but she could only give the same answers over again, and at last she stopped replying at all.
“But what do you want?” the women asked her, with a note of exasperation in their voices.
What did she want? She wanted Klef to be beside her every night when she went to sleep, and when she wakened in the morning. She wanted his arms about her, his flesh joined to hers, his voice murmuring in her ear. Other men? It was not the same thing. But they could not understand.
“But why do you want me to make myself pretty?” Mary asked with dull curiosity.
Mia bent over her with a tube of cosmetic, touching the pale lips with crimson. “Never mind, something nice. Here, let me smooth your eyebrows. Tut, how thin you’ve got! Never mind, you’ll look very well. Put on your fresh robe, there’s a dear.”
“I don’t know what difference it makes.” But Mary stood up wearily, took off her dress, stood thin and pale in the light. She put the new robe over her head, shrugged her arms into it.
“Is that all right?” she asked.
“Dear Mary,” said Mia, with tears of sympathy in her eyes. “Sweet, no, let me smooth your hair. Stand straighter, can’t you, how will any man—“
“Man?” said Mary. A little color came and went in her cheeks. “Klef?”
“No, dear. Forget Klef, will you?” Mia’s voice turned sharp with exasperation.
“Oh,” Mary turned her head away.
“Can’t you think of anything else? Do try, dear, just try.” “All right.”
“Now come along, they’re waiting for us.”
Mary stood up submissively and followed her sister out of the dormitory.
In bright sunlight the women stood talking quietly and worriedly around the bower. With them was a husky Chemist with golden brows and hair; his pink face was good-natured and peaceful. He pinched the nearest sister’s buttock, whispered something in her ear; she slapped his hand irritably.
“Quick, here they come,” said one suddenly. “Go in now, Gunner.”
With an obedient grimace, the blond man ducked his head and disappeared into the bower. In a moment Mia and Mary came into view, the thin girl hanging back when she saw the crowd, and the bower.
“What is it?” she complained. “I don’t want—Mia, let me go.
“No, dear, come along, it’s for the best, you’ll see,” said the other girl soothingly. “Do give me a hand here, one of you, won’t you?”
The two women urged the girl toward the bower. Her face was pale and frightened. “But what do you want me to—You said Klef wasn’t—Were you only teasing me? Is Klef . . . ?”
The women gave each other looks of despair. “Go in, dear, and see, why don’t you?”
A wild expression came into Mary’s eyes. She hesitated, then stepped nearer the bower; the two women let her go. “Klef?” she called plaintively. There was no answer.
“Go in, dear.”
She looked at them appealingly, then stooped and put her head in. The women held their breaths. They heard her gasp, then saw her backing out again.
“Crabs and mullets!” swore Vivana. “Get her in, you fools!”
The girl was crying out, weakly and helplessly, as four women swarmed around her, pushed her into the bower. One of them lingered, peered in.
“Has he got her?”
“Yes, now he’s got her.” Stifled mewing sounds were coming from the bower. “Hang onto her, you fool!”
“She bit!” came Gunner’s indignant voice. Then silence.
“Sst, leave them alone,” whispered Vivana. The woman at the bower entrance turned, tiptoed away. Together the women withdrew a few yards, found themselves seats on the old steps under the portico, and sat down comfortably close to one another.
There was a scream.
The women leaped up, startled and white. Not one of them could remember hearing such a sound before.
Gunner’s hoarse voice bawled something, then there was a stir. Mary appeared in the entrance to the bower. Her skirt was ripped, and she was clutching it to her lap with one hand. Her eyes were filmed, pink-rimmed. “Oh!” she said, moving past them blindly.
“Mary—” said one, reaching out a hand.
“Oh!” she said hopelessly, and moved on, clutching her garment to her body.
“What’s the matter?” they asked each other. “What did Gunner do?”
“I did what I was supposed to,” said Gunner, sulkily appearing. There was a red bruise on his cheek. “Gut me and clean me if I ever do it with that one again, though.”
“You fool, you must have been too rough. Go after her, someone.”
&n
bsp; “Well, then serve her yourself the next time, if you know so, much.” Prodding his cheek gently with a finger, the Chemist went away.
Up the slope, an orchestrino began playing. “If you would not be cruel, torment me no more. Do not deny me ever; let it be now or never. Give me your love, then, as you promised me before....”
“Shut that thing off!” cried Vivana angrily.
Her ageship, Laura-one, the eldest Weaver, was pacing up and down the seawall promenade, knotting her fingers together in silent agitation. Once she paused to look over the parapet; below her the wall dropped sheer to blue water. She glanced over at the blur of Porto, half concealed in the morning haze, and at the stark hills above with their green fur of returning vegetation. Her eyes were still keen; halfway across the distance, she could make out a tiny dark dot, moving toward the island.
Footsteps sounded in the street below; in a moment Vivana appeared, holding Mary by the arm. The younger woman’s eyes were downcast; the older looked worried and anxious.
“Here she is, your ageship,” said Vivana. “They found her at the little jetty, throwing bottles into the sea.”
“Again?” asked the old woman. “What was in the bottles?”
“Here’s one of them,” said Vivana, handing over a crumpled paper.
“‘Tell Klef the Fisher of the town of Porto that Mary Weaver still loves him,’” the old woman read. She folded the paper slowly and put it into her pocket. “Always the same,” she said. “Mary, my child, don’t you know that these bottles never can reach your Klef?”
The young woman did not raise her head or speak.
“And twice this month the Fishers have had to catch you and bring you back when you stole a launch,” the old woman continued. “Child, don’t you see that this must end?”
Mary did not answer.
“And these things that you weave, when you weave at all,” said Laura-one, taking a wadded length of cloth from her apron pocket. She spread it taut and held it to the light. In the pattern, visible only when the light fell glancingly upon it, was woven the figure of a seated woman with a child in her arms. Around them were birds with spread wings among the intertwined stems of flowers.
A Day in the Life Page 8
