by John Gardner
Vlemk the box-painter opened his eyes a little, raised his eyebrows, and looked at his friends. He looked at the Queen, as if to ask what had happened, then down at his lap. He lifted the sack and began to put the boxes in, one by one. She watched them being taken from her with the anguish of a child losing its treasures. Each horror he moved to the sack was like flesh torn from her, but she kept herself from speaking. When he’d put them all inside and had pulled the purse-string that closed the neck, he pushed back his chair and stood up, nodding to her and gesturing. She too pushed back her chair—breathing shallowly, her legs slightly shaking—and stood up. The poet protested. The man who had the axe raised his head as if in distress, looking at her throat. She tried to look away from him but found herself helpless until the box-painter came around the table and offered her his arm. She seized it and clung tightly. Though she looked back, trailing him to the door, still clinging, no one asked for money. She tried to think about it, but her mind was still full of the image of the axe.
Soon they were on the street, where her driver was waiting, the black-and-gold carriage gleaming weirdly in the light of the lamps and the distant moon. The driver held the door of the carriage for her, melting into darkness in the way her father had always liked, and Vlemk the box-painter squeezed her arm, more powerfully than he knew—she would have bruises in the morning—then released her and began to back away. Before she knew she would do it, she reached out, sudden as a snake striking, and seized the bag of boxes. He did not seem surprised but only looked at her, expressionless, as if thinking of another way of painting her.
“Let me take it,” she said. She could not look at him. “Sell them to me!”
He said nothing, showed nothing, but after a long moment shook his head sadly, a little sternly, and opened his thick, strong fingers so that the bag was hers.
She stepped into the carriage, the door closed behind her, and almost at once she heard the tocking of the horses’ hooves and felt the swaying of the carriage.
10
It was the beginning of a terrible period for the Queen. Whatever the truth might be, it seemed to her unquestionable that she had glimpsed a world more important than her own, gloomy and malevolent but intrepidly alive. In her sleep she would dream of the dark, smoky tavern and see again the tip of the axe peeking out from the skirt of the silent man’s coat. Putting on a necklace or walking in a field, she would suddenly find herself not looking at the emeralds or watching the airy pirouette of starlings but gazing, mystified and perhaps a little frightened, at the calm, sleeping face of Vlemk the box-painter, the sum of the earth all around him—the poet who could not write, the violinist who could not play, the grim man who carried an axe and stared at throats.
Strange to say, the boxes, when she laid them out one after another on her table, had no great interest for her now. She looked at them, studied them, but the magic had evaporated. They were pictures, simply—not even very good ones, she occasionally suspected—and though she knew, intellectually, that they were the story of her life or image of her character, she found that something had gone wrong with her; she had no feeling for them. She looked at them each time with renewed disappointment. They might as well have been sick cartoons. They were not just that, she knew, and she struggled to feel their significance. Sometimes, indeed, she could feel a frail echo of the original thrill of alarm—sense herself decaying, know the horror of death. But when she thought, she knew that the feeling did not come from the pictures, it came from the tavern, the silent man’s axe. The pictures were boring. It was because of that, because she had lost all feeling, that sometimes she sat with the terrible pictures spread out before her and silently wept.
“Are you all right?” the picture that could talk would say.
She would sniff, jerk back her head, and nod.
“You certainly are becoming a bore,” the picture that could talk would say. “What ever happened to your fury?”
“ ‘Fury,’ ” the Queen would mock, sniffing. There it usually ended. But one night when unaccountably the air smelled of winter, the picture felt cross enough to press the matter. “That’s what I mean,” the picture said. “Why are you so quick to pounce on things?”
“The quilt,” said the Queen coolly, rising from her bed. “Why? That’s no fair!” cried the picture. “What did I say?” But the Queen had no mercy and put the quilt over the picture’s face.
It was not quite sufficient; she could hear the picture wailing, like the hum of a mosquito; but she ignored it.
Tiresome as the paintings on the boxes were, or deeply depressing, not for what they showed but for the proof they gave her that she was only half alive, a miserable creature displacing air in the world for no good reason—the thought of the tavern filled her with something like the same alarm she had felt when she first stepped through the door. Perhaps that was the answer, it struck her all at once. Immediately she thought of the man with the axe and felt a tingle of fear. Suppose he should indeed kill her! In her mind’s eye she saw it vividly, the sudden moving shadow where she had thought there was only a doorway, his rush toward her, coattails flying, the axe uplifted, the man running just a little sideways, coming without a sound. The vision was so clear that it made her cry out, sudden tears filling her eyes. She clenched her fists, then clutched her head, trying to think clearly. Was that perhaps the curse that had fallen on her—a fear of life because she too much feared death? Surely that was wrong! Surely there was nothing in the world that she feared, pain, sickness, madness … Abruptly, reaching her decision almost without knowing it, she rose and snatched up her cloak, crossed to her door, thinking of calling for her carriage driver, then paused, lips pursed, and, deciding on another course, threw her cloak across a chair. She quietly opened the door, stepped through, and just as quietly closed it; she looked to left and right, then hurried to the chamber of her maid. When she opened the door without knocking, letting light rush in, the maid sat bolt upright in bed and gave a peeping cry.
“It’s all right!” said the Queen. The maid’s eyes widened again, and her small gray mouth fell open.
“I need to borrow some clothes,” said the Queen. And so that night the Queen walked down into the city, alone and in disguise.
Not even the stupidest of the regulars were fooled, but they pretended to be. The Queen stood stiff and erect at the elbow of the ex-violinist. “Do you mind if I sit down?” she asked.
The ex-violinist looked at his friends in befuddlement, then back at the Queen, then severely nodded, reaching out with a jerk of his arm for the chair, to pull it back for her.
It was the strangest, most joyful and terrifying night of her life—as much of it as she could remember. It seemed to her that all she had suspected was true: her ordered life was madness, only this wild, unbridled acceptance of whatever the universe might throw, in its glorious indifference, was true and right. Somehow in her innocent dreams of debauchery she had imagined that she would sing like a gypsy and dance, throw her fists like a man, indulge in unspeakable language. That, when she thought of it now, made her toss back her head and shake uncontrollably with laughter. No no, it was nothing like that for the Queen. It was something far more wonderful and vile. It was the smell of the armpits of the ex-violinist as he closed her in his arms, almost falling from his chair beside hers in the tavern, raging against music. It was the coldness of the flesh of the sleeping poet when she kissed him on the cheek—she would have sworn he was dead—and the heat in the fingers of the axe-murderer as he slowly lowered his hand onto hers, pinning it to the coarse tavern table, his eyes staring through her.
“Very well,” she thought, sometime long after midnight—full of cunning, her eyelids so heavy she had to peek out through the slits, “very well, very well …” She strained futilely to remember what she’d meant to say. The three men’s eyes were all glazed and still, like the eyes of dead animals she’d seen beside the road. “Very well,” she said again, with conviction, and raised one finger to s
hake it at the axe-murderer. She made her face bold and dissolute. “I suppose you’re aware that my father died?” The murderer looked at her as before. Yes, she thought, yes! and felt a thrill of aliveness. What was it to artists—a life, a death? She smiled and jerked herself left to look around at the room, pawing abstractedly for her glass and straining hard to clear the blur. Smoke, darkness, people, a tall figure, blurred at the edges, standing by the door. She smiled, head lowered, and swung her face back toward the axe-murderer. “Well” she said, her voice gone deep. “I imagine you wonder why I’m here!” She laughed, hearing the girlishness, the sweetness. “Ha ha! Ha ha!” She steadied herself, focusing on the murderer’s face, and it occurred to her that it was time to speak truthfully. She took a drink from her glass, not looking down from his eyes. “I suppose you’re aware that my father died?” she said. “Well!” she said, coming to her senses—she was making a scene; it was absurd. “Very well!” she said, and smiled. The murderer was leaning down, doing something with the axe, under the table. The tall man at the door came toward them and slowly walked past, his arms folded over his chest. He was a policeman. When he was gone, the murderer wiped his forehead. The policeman sat down in the corner of the room. He got out his pipe and stoked it. After a moment, pursing her lips, the Queen said, “I suppose we all die, don’t we.” She found she was crying.
11
For Vlemk the box-painter, it was not easy to believe his eyes when he found her the next morning, gray as a ghost, one shoe missing, her body in the gutter surrounded by old papers, oyster shells, and frost like bits of glass and white hair. He knew from the instant he first saw her exactly what had happened and all that was wrong with her, for strange to say, she looked, right down to the last detail, like a certain one of the cruel, bitter pictures he’d made of her. He gawked, his knees bent, his arms reaching out; then, clamping down his hat with one hand, ran around her, absurdly looked down for a relatively clean place to plant his knees, shook himself in anger at such foolishness, then dropped down to listen—almost dizzy with dread—for her heartbeat. Was it possible that she’d frozen to death? He heard her heart at once, sound as any drum, and joyfully patted her on the cheek, weeping with relief, then rubbed his hands. “Yes, yes,” he exclaimed inside his mind, looking up and down the street, “be quick about it!” Tears ran down his cheeks, cold as ice in the wind. He planted his knees more firmly and thought about where to put his hands to pick her up.
It was only when he was halfway up the hill on his way to the palace, huffing and blowing, the Queen a deadweight in his arms, that the box-painter’s joy at finding her still alive gave way to worry. What was to become of her? He’d told himself at first that it was grief at the death of her father that had brought on this fling of self-destruction; for indeed, the whole kingdom had reeled and staggered at the death of the old man. But now Vlemk was beginning to remember certain things that disturbed him. He remembered how, when he’d ridden in the carriage with her, her gloved hand, laid on his, had trembled. It had filled him with alarm which he’d have given more thought to, had he not been, at the time, too drunk to think of anything but himself. He remembered, and saw again now, looking down at her—her head falling limply, slightly turned to one side as he carried her in his arms—how hollow her cheeks had looked of late, and how under her eyes she had dark circles. He thought of the glint he had seen repeatedly in her eyes when she was angry, a glint that seemed a little like madness. “Bless me,” he said in his mind, and his distress became greater than before. “How beautiful she is!” he thought, and did not notice the strangeness of it, for what he was noticing was quite the opposite, that she had changed for the worse.
Vlemk’s arms and legs were trembling and aching—“None of us are as young as we used to be,” he thought—and he saw that he must rest before finishing the trek up the hill. Now that the sun was out, the day had become quite warm. A maple tree stood beside the road just ahead of him, and he decided to push that far and set down his burden for a little underneath it in the shade. Shortly before he reached the tree, red-gold and glorious, he saw to his surprise that there was a monk sitting under it. He felt a touch of dismay, for he had hoped he could get her to the palace without anyone’s seeing her; but his weariness was not to be denied. If he carried her much farther he would fall; it was no time for niceties. He entered the sparse shade of the maple with the Queen, bowing politely to the monk as he came in, and lowered her to the grass and fallen leaves on the tree’s far side, where the monk might not notice who she was. Vlemk dusted a few bits of dirt from her forehead, straightened her arms and legs—as if arranging her for her funeral, he thought woefully, for in fact she looked astonishingly like the cruel painting he called “The Princess Almost Dead of Despair.” Then, wiping away all trace of his tears, Vlemk went around to the side of the tree where the monk was, to keep him occupied.
The monk was an old man as bony and wasted as a person who’s lived for years on just air and tea. He sat with the skirts of his cassock hiked up to let the breeze in at his legs—it was a day for picking persimmons or going for one last cool swim in some farmer’s pond—and he had his hood thrown back, revealing his large ears and head, as hairless as a darning egg. A stalk of timothy hung down limply from the brown stumps that more or less served him as teeth, and inside his collar, to cut down the scratching, he had burdock leaves.
“Ah! The box-painter!” said the monk, looking up at Vlemk. Vlemk studied him more closely. “We met one dark night in a graveyard where I make my home, insofar as I have one,” the monk explained.
Vlemk nodded and smiled, remembering now, though only dimly. He also remembered that when he’d last seen the monk the curse of the picture had not yet been put on him. By gestures and winces, he revealed his new condition.
The monk smiled and nodded, utterly unperturbed. “That’s the world, my friend,” he said. “Sin”—he looked up into the tree as if the notion pleased him—“sin is all around us. The whole of creation is one vast sin.” He smiled.
Vlemk scowled to show that he was not in agreement, or that at any rate he did not consider his curse to be a punishment for his sins but, on the contrary, a stroke of blind chance.
“Matter itself is sin,” said the monk. “This is a hard lesson, my child.” He reached toward Vlemk to pat his foot with one skeletal hand. Not instinctively, but to show how he felt, Vlemk drew his foot back. The monk closed his eyes and smiled as benignly as before. “I know, I know. You don’t believe me. No one does. Nevertheless it’s the case, I believe. I’m an old, old man, as you can see by these teeth—close to the grave, beyond all desire to make up stories. I can give you my assurance as a Christian ascetic, I was never so happy in all my days as I’ve been since the night I accepted the proposition that all matter, all earthly physicality, is filth and corruption.”
Vlemk sighed irritably, reached down for a stick on the grass beside him, and considered whether he was strong enough to continue on his way up to the palace. His legs were still weak, the strength in his fingers so diminished that he could barely break the stick with two hands. “Very well, I’ll sit here a moment longer,” he thought. Much as he disliked the monk’s opinions, Vlemk joked to himself a little bitterly, the monk did no more harm in the world than, say, an axe-murderer, and Vlemk had tolerated that, though perhaps not with pleasure.
“Ah yes, ah yes,” the monk said, nodding. “I understand the pull! That lovely lady there—” He gestured toward the Queen lying still as a corpse on the far side of the tree. Carefully, or so it seemed to Vlemk, the monk avoided looking at her. “Physicality has its beauties, but they’re devil-lures and delusions. Take my word for it. Everything passes. That’s the one great truth, this side of heaven.” He glanced at Vlemk, oddly shy. “Symbols, that’s their value,” he said. “Signs of what might be. This timothy stalk”—he pointed at the stalk he chewed on even as he lectured—“all the juice has been gone out of it for months now. That’s why I chew on it.”
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As he spoke, a bee, for some reason not flying but buzzing in the grass, struggling along through it, found purchase on his ankle and, still buzzing, beating its small wings with the fury of a damned soul in fire, climbed up on top of his foot and settled, gradually calming itself, between the monk’s first and second toes. Vlemk leaned forward slowly, not to alarm the bee, and pointed, imagining that the monk had not noticed it was there.
“Let him rest,” said the monk. “He has his troubles too.” He shook his head sadly. “A tiny soul trapped in the horror of materiality—sick unto death, it may well be; certainly it will be, sooner or later. For him, all the pain in the world is right there in that small body.” He pointed at the bee.
“You’re not afraid he’ll sting you?” asked Vlemk with gestures.
Ever so slightly, the monk shrugged. “Let him sting me. Not that he will, I think. But suppose he does? Who am I to complain? Up there where we can’t see them, blinded by daylight”—he pointed up into the tree, or through it—“stars are exploding. Have you ever seen an elephant die?” He rolled his eyes up, then closed them, shaking his head.
Rested, the bee began beating its wings again, and apparently whatever had been wrong before was no longer wrong, for it lifted from its place between the monk’s two toes, flying backward, then forward, or so it seemed to Vlemk, and zoomed toward the trunk of the tree. It moved on past the trunk in the direction of the Queen, and suddenly Vlemk’s heart floundered. It flew straight to the Queen’s lower lip and settled there. Vlemk was up at once, leaping like a flea, and dropped down on his knees beside the Queen and flailed his right hand above her face to drive the bee off. Horrified, too shocked to flail his hand again, he saw the bee lower its stinger into the pink of her lip—slowly, deliberately, it seemed to Vlemk—then fly away. The Queen’s eyes popped open and she gave a little cry. She raised her hand to her mouth.
