Stagman walked into the courtyard. He looked at Valentin and said, “The Ambiguous Threshold.”
“My turn,” said Valentin. “The one of the vowels has already gone.”
“Good luck,” said Berkowitz.
“Mon ami,” said Valentin, “I suspect luck has nothing to do with it.”
When Valentin had gone, Berkowitz walked around the garden, looking at the Outer Islands. Rocks, no different than the ones in the central cluster. Rocks scattered across a carpet of moss.
He looked down at his pajamas. They were badly wrinkled, and one sleeve was spotted with soup. Didn’t that prove this was a dream? Showing up for an exam in pajamas. One of the classic scenarios. Lucky he wasn’t naked. He wondered if Marie de la Roche had been.
“The Ambiguous Threshold.” Stagman was waiting for him. Berkowitz felt a sudden impulse to shake him by the shoulders and beg him to say something, anything, else—to get one real answer in this place. His stomach gave a queasy rumble. They could at least have fed him breakfast.
Instead, he followed Stagman into the garden. They passed between rosebushes that seemed to whisper as he walked by. Berkowitz looked closely and realized, with distaste, that the petals on the roses were pink tongues. They passed a fountain, in which waterlilies croaked like frogs. In alcoves on either side of the path, ornamental cherries were weeping on the heads of stone nymphs that were evidently turning into foxes, owls, rabbits—or all of them at once. He brushed against a poppy, which fluttered sepals that looked like lashes.
Beyond the fountain was a hedge of Featherbushes, with an opening cut into it, like an arch. Berkowitz followed Stagman through the archway.
The hedge grew in a circle, its only opening the one they had passed through. Grass grew over the ground, so soft under his slippers that Berkowitz wanted to take them off and walk barefoot. He had often gone barefoot as a child, but he could not remember what it felt like, walking on grass. The grass was spotted with daisies that were, for once, actually daisies.
At the center of the circle was a stone arch, shaped like the arch in the hedge, but built of the same blocks as the harbor and the castle. Its top and sides were irregular, and broken blocks lay scattered on the grass beside it, as though it were the final remnant of some monumental architecture. Sitting on one of those blocks was the Questioner.
“Good morning, Professor,” she said. Today she was wearing a blue dress decorated with bits of glass. Her hair hung in two braids tied with blue ribbons.
“Good morning,” said Berkowitz, trying to put as much irony into his voice as he could with a felted tongue. The silence in the circle made him uncomfortable. Even the sound of the fountain was muted.
The Questioner rose and asked, “Are you ready for the Question?”
“I guess,” he said. He looked at Stagman, waiting with his hands folded together, like the Dalai Lama. This had to be a dream.
“Would you like to step through the Threshold?”
“What,” said Berkowitz, “you mean now?”
“That is the Question, Professor. The only Question there is. Would you like to step through the Threshold?”
Berkowitz stared at her, and then at the arch. “You mean that thing?” Through it he could see the hedge, and grass spotted with daisies.
The Questioner sighed. “That thing is the Threshold. Everything you see around you, including myself, is what you might call an emanation of it. If you step through it, you will proceed to the Outer Islands.”
“So that’s the whole test?”
“There is no test,” said the Questioner. “There is only the Question. Would you like to step through the Threshold?”
“What if I don’t?” asked Berkowitz.
“You will, of course, return to the Inner Islands.”
“You mean I’ll be back at the university?”
“Yes,” said the Questioner. “You will return to your life, as though you had never left it. You will forget that you once stood on the Threshold, or you will think of it as a dream whose details you can never quite remember.”
“And if I do?”
The Questioner tugged at one of her braids. For the first time, she looked like an impatient child. “You will, of course, proceed to the Outer Islands.” She added, slowly and with emphasis, “As I have previously explained.”
“What about the university?”
“You will appear to have died. Probably of a heart attack. Your diet, Professor, is particularly conducive.” She gave him a lopsided smile, which looked almost sympathetic. “Unless you would prefer suicide?”
“Died?” said Berkowitz. “No one said anything about dying. If I go back to the Inner Islands, whatever they are, will I ever come here again?”
“No one gets more than one chance to stand on the Threshold.”
“Why?” asked Berkowitz. “Look, here are the things I want to know. What exactly are the Outer Islands? What will I be if I go there? Will I be me or something else, like a chicken man with daisies growing out of my head?”
“Enough,” said the Questioner. She was no longer smiling. “I am a questioner, not an answerer. When Marie de la Roche stepped through the Threshold, she said,
la foi, une mouette suspendue
au milieu de l’air
Professor Berkowitz, will you step through the Threshold?”
Berkowitz looked at her, standing beside the archway. He looked at the arch itself, and through it at the hedge. A breeze ruffled the feathers on the bushes.
He thought of returning to the house they had rented, without Helen. Without the smell of her vegetarian lasagna, without her voice, which would suddenly, even while reading the newspaper, begin reciting “Jabberwocky.” To his bookshelves, now relatively bare. He thought of gray rocks scattered across a moss courtyard. Of the collected works of Keats, a woman with a flamingo on her head, roses whispering as he walked by. Of the university, and his students with their ringing cell phones. Perhaps Helen would call. He did not think so.
Then he looked at Stagman, who was rubbing the side of one furred cheek. This was a dream, and next week was his tenure evaluation.
“No,” he said. The Questioner nodded with finality. He looked at her for an excruciating moment, then put his hands over his eyes. He waited to wake up.
THE RAPID ADVANCE OF SORROW
I sit in one of the cafés in Szent Endre, writing this letter to you, István, not knowing if I will be alive tomorrow, not knowing if this café will be here, with its circular green chairs and cups of espresso. By the Danube, children are playing, their knees bare below school uniforms. Widows are knitting shapeless sweaters. A cat sleeps beside a geranium in the café window.
If you see her, will you tell me? I still remember how she appeared at the University, just off the train from Debrecen, a country girl with badly-cut hair and clothes sewn by her mother. That year, I was smoking French cigarettes and reading forbidden literature. “Have you read D. H. Lawrence?” I asked her. “He is the only modern writer who convincingly expresses the desires of the human body.” She blushed and turned away. She probably still had her Young Pioneers badge, hidden among her underwear.
“Ilona is a beautiful name,” I said. “It is the most beautiful name in our language.” I saw her smile, although she was trying to avoid me. Her face was plump from country sausage and egg bread, and dimples formed at the corners of her mouth, two on each side.
She had dimples on her buttocks, as I found out later. I remember them, like craters on two moons, above the tops of her stockings.
Sorrow: A feeling of grief or melancholy. A mythical city generally located in northern Siberia, said to have been visited by Marco Polo. From Sorrow, he took back to Italy the secret of making ice.
That autumn, intellectual apathy was in fashion. I berated her for reading her textbooks, preparing for her examinations. “Don’t you know the grades are predetermined?” I said. “The peasants receive ones, the bourgeoisie receive twos, the aristocrats, if they have be
en admitted under a special dispensation, always receive threes.”
She persisted, telling me that she had discovered art, that she wanted to become cultured.
“You are a peasant,” I said, slapping her rump. She looked at me with tears in her eyes.
The principal export of Sorrow is the fur of the arctic fox, which is manufactured into cloaks, hats, the cuffs on gloves and boots. These foxes, which live on the tundra in family groups, are hunted with falcons. The falcons of Sorrow, relatives of the kestrel, are trained to obey a series of commands blown on whistles carved of human bone.
She began going to museums. She spent hours at the Vár-muzeum, in the galleries of art. Afterward, she would go to cafés, drink espressos, smoke cigarettes. Her weight dropped, and she became as lean as a wolfhound. She developed a look of perpetual hunger.
When winter came and ice floated on the Danube, I started to worry. Snow had been falling for days, and Budapest was trapped in a white silence. The air was cleaner than it had been for months, because the Trabants could not make it through the snow. It was very cold.
She entered the apartment carrying her textbooks. She was wearing a hat of white fur that I had never seen before. She threw it on the sofa.
“Communism is irrelevant,” she said, lighting a cigarette.
“Where have you been?” I asked. “I made a paprikás. I stood in line for two hours to buy the chicken.”
“There is to be a new manifesto.” Ash dropped on the carpet. “It will not resemble the old manifesto. We are no longer interested in political and economic movements. All movements from now on will be purely aesthetic. Our actions will be beautiful and irrelevant.”
“The paprikás has congealed,” I said.
She looked at me for the first time since she had entered the apartment and shrugged. “You are not a poet.”
The poetry of Sorrow may confuse anyone not accustomed to its intricacies. In Sorrow, poems are constructed on the principle of the maze. Once the reader enters the poem, he must find his way out by observing a series of clues. Readers failing to solve a poem have been known to go mad. Those who can appreciate its beauties say that the poetry of Sorrow is impersonal and ecstatic, and that it invariably speaks of death.
She began bringing home white flowers: crocuses, hyacinths, narcissi. I did not know where she found them, in the city, in winter. I eventually realized they were the emblems of her organization, worn at what passed for rallies, silent meetings where communication occurred with the touch of a hand, a glance from the corner of an eye. Such meetings took place in secret all over the city. Students would sit in the pews of the Mátyás Church, saying nothing, planning insurrection.
At this time we no longer made love. Her skin had grown cold, and when I touched it for too long, my fingers began to ache.
We seldom spoke. Her language had become impossibly complex, referential. I could no longer understand her subtle intricacies.
She painted the word entropy on the wall of the apartment. The wall was white, the paint was white. I saw it only because soot had stained the wall to a dull gray, against which the word appeared like a ghost.
One morning I saw that her hair on the pillow had turned white. I called her name, desperate with panic. She looked at me and I saw that her eyes were the color of milk, like the eyes of the blind.
It is insufficient to point out that the inhabitants of Sorrow are pale. Their skin has a particular translucence, like a layer of nacre. Their nails and hair are iridescent, as though unable to capture and hold light. Their eyes are, at best, disconcerting. Travelers who have stared at them too long have reported hallucinations, like mountaineers who have stared at fields of ice.
I expected tanks. Tanks are required for all sensible invasions. But spring came, and the insurrection did nothing discernible.
Then flowers appeared in the public gardens: crocuses, hyacinths, narcissi, all white. The black branches of the trees began to sprout leaves of a delicate pallor. White pigeons strutted in the public squares, and soon they outnumbered the ordinary gray ones. Shops began to close: first the stores selling Russian electronics, then clothing stores with sweaters from Bulgaria, then pharmacies. Only stores selling food remained open, although the potatoes looked waxen and the pork acquired a peculiar transparency.
I had stopped going to classes. It was depressing, watching a classroom full of students, with their white hair and milky eyes, saying nothing. Many professors joined the insurrection, and they would stand at the front of the lecture hall, the word entropy written on the board behind them, communicating in silent gestures.
She rarely came to the apartment, but once she brought me poppy seed strudel in a paper bag. She said, “Péter, you should eat.” She rested her fingertips on the back of my hand. They were like ice. “You have not joined us,” she said. “Those who have not joined us will be eliminated.”
I caught her by the wrist. “Why?” I asked.
She said, “Beauty demands symmetry, uniformity.”
My fingers began to ache with cold. I released her wrist. I could see her veins flowing through them, like strands of aquamarine.
Sorrow is ruled by the absolute will of its Empress, who is chosen for her position at the age of three and reigns until the age of thirteen. The Empress is chosen by the Brotherhood of the Cowl, a quasi-religious sect whose members hide their faces under hoods of white wool to maintain their anonymity. By tradition, the Empress never speaks in public. She delivers her commands in private audiences with the Brotherhood. The consistency of these commands, from one Empress to another, has been taken to prove the sanctity of the Imperial line. After their reigns, all Empresses retire to the Abbey of St. Alba, where they live in seclusion for the remainder of their lives, studying astronomy, mathematics, and the seven-stringed zither. During the history of Sorrow, remarkable observations, theorems, and musical arrangements have emerged from this Abbey.
No tanks came, but one day, when the sun shone with a vague luminescence through the clouds that perpetually covered the city, the Empress of Sorrow rode along Váci Street on a white elephant. She was surrounded by courtiers, some in cloaks of white fox, some in jesters’ uniforms sewn from white patches, some, principally unmarried women, in transparent gauze through which one could see their hairless flesh. The eyes of the elephant were outlined with henna, its feet were stained with henna. In its trunk it carried a silver bell, whose ringing was the only sound as the procession made its way to the Danube and across Erzsébet Bridge.
Crowds of people had come to greet the Empress: students waving white crocuses and hyacinths and narcissi, mothers holding the hands of children who failed to clap when the elephant strode by, nuns in ashen gray. Cowled figures moved among the crowd. I watched one standing ahead of me and recognized the set of her shoulders, narrower than they had been, still slightly crooked.
I sidled up to her and whispered, “Ilona.”
She turned. The cowl was drawn down and I could not see her face, but her mouth was visible, too thin now for dimples.
“Péter,” she said, in a voice like snow falling. “We have done what is necessary.”
She touched my cheek with her fingers. A shudder went through me, as though I had been touched by something electric.
Travellers have attempted to characterize the city of Sorrow. Some have said it is a place of confusion, with impossible pinnacles rising to stars that cannot be seen from any observatory. Some have called it a place of beauty, where the winds, playing through the high buildings, produce a celestial music. Some have called it a place of death, and have said that the city, examined from above, exhibits the contours of a skull.
Some have said that the city of Sorrow does not exist. Some have insisted that it exists everywhere: that we are perpetually surrounded by its streets, which are covered by a thin layer of ice; by its gardens, in which albino peacocks wander; by its inhabitants, who pass us without attention or interest.
I believe neither
of these theories. I believe that Sorrow is an insurrection waged by a small cabal, with its signs and secrets; that it is run on purely aesthetic principles; that its goal is entropy, a perpetual stillness of the soul. But I could be mistaken. My conclusions could be tainted by the confusion that spreads with the rapid advance of Sorrow.
So I have left Budapest, carrying only the mark of three fingertips on my left cheek. I sit here every morning, in a café in Szent Endre, not knowing how long I have to live, not knowing how long I can remain here, on a circular green chair drinking espresso.
Soon, the knees of the children will become as smooth and fragile as glass. The widows’ knitting needles will click like bone, and geranium leaves will fall beside the blanched cat. The coffee will fade to the color of milk. I do not know what will happen to the chair. I do not know if I will be eliminated, or given another chance to join the faction of silence. But I am sending you this letter, István, so you can remember me when the snows come.
LILY, WITH CLOUDS
Eleanor Tolliver’s heels clicked on the sidewalk—click click, click click, like a cantering horse, if a horse could canter in size 7 ½ shoes. It was odd, this lopsided step, in a woman whose lavender suit had been bought last week at Lord & Taylor. Really, she admitted to herself as she clicked down Elm Street, she should not have bought the narrows. The left shoe, in particular, pressed against her corn and produced the cantering gait we have noticed. And this was fitting because Eleanor, in spite of her lavender suit and matching handbag, looked like nothing so much as a horse.
The Eliots had always been horsy. The men had ridden hard, shot straight, and drunk whiskey. Their women had ruled the social world of Ashton, North Carolina. Any of them could show you the foundations of a house destroyed in what they still privately referred to as The War. If you looked carefully, you could see the stump of a column among the lilac bushes. When a daughter of the house, in the irresponsible twenties, had run off with a black chauffeur, her name in the family Bible had been scratched over with ink. The Eliots were rich and respectable. On Sundays, they took up the first two pews of the Methodist church.
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