The Night Language

by David Rocklin

  He couldn’t know how it would be when they saw the queen next. There probably would be many more people around her. Servants and dignitaries and pomp, and they would be who they were expected to be.

  The two of them, he thought. This is the first time they’ve seen each other. The first words to pass between them, and what they give to each other is their loss. Their mourning.

  The sight of Alamayou and the queen jarred something loose in him. The Feroze felt like a lifetime ago, the last night at the ship’s rail longer still, but Alamayou had been on deck, staring at the waves, and that feeling Philip had while watching him was the one he’d fleetingly felt at the cottage fire, and now it was here in the room with them. A strange feeling that if he’d left Alamayou alone, just a bit longer, something would have happened. He wouldn’t have left the fire, or the rail. He would have stayed.

  Jesus, Philip thought. Maybe he wanted to burn. Maybe he would have jumped.

  It was her presence that enabled Philip to put a name to the sensation he’d been carrying since Naismith’s account on their first day at Windsor. Watching Alamayou with the queen, Philip wondered if the queen carried it, too. The room of portraits might be where she went to commune with the dead. To touch the idea of ending.

  He knew it was true. That’s what Alamayou was doing. Turning the idea of killing himself over in his hands like the mechanical cat. Seeing how it might work.

  Why didn’t he?

  He sat back as the realization settled in. There would be questions, more and more of them as Alamayou learned to speak. But bloody Christ, the more he thought about it, the more he felt that he was right. They wanted Alamayou to learn English so he could present himself as a grateful foreigner. What they’d find, Philip feared, was just how alone he was, and how badly their invasion had broken him. Then what would they do with him? Not exactly the grateful prince come to embrace England’s cause, is he?

  It was all a jumble of chaos, blood, smoke, screams, silences, but as he thought harder, he couldn’t say that Alamayou’s hand was in that fire by force, or that his father had hold of him. Watching him by the glowing hearth with the queen, thinking of all the questions yet to come, it felt like Alamayou had been there at the fire, his hand beginning to shrivel and burn, by choice.

  The moment you give them words, he thought, they’re going to pull your insides out. I know what I’m talking about. May you be smart enough to stay silent.

  Only at night, Alamayou, can you let anyone see. And only to me. I’ll keep it all safe, I swear.

  He watched Alamayou with the queen, as if he belonged. With a word she could banish him anywhere in the world. She could send him back. And if he was alone, somewhere far away from anyone, he might find himself facing another fire. Another rail with no one there and no reason to remain. His hands outstretched, ready to embrace the fall.

  They remained in the portrait room together, deep into the night. As exhausted and worried as he was, Philip couldn’t close his eyes. He couldn’t miss so simple a thing as two people who’d lost, alone and silent, speaking a night language only they understood.

  Chapter Six

  22 December 1900

  The rabbi fell ill during the night.

  Stupid is what it was, he’d tried to tell the

  stubborn fool. An old man walking the heart of the city in search of dinner, conversation, and souvenirs, and expending far too much energy in the bargain. The body, like an old engine, needed time and tending to return to operation, and here Ariel was already exhausted from the Channel crossing.

  The rabbi lay quietly in the bed he’d purchased to make the flat more comfortable. A thin blanket covered him to his belly. He’d been working on a translation of the Talmud. His scrawlings littered the floor.

  Looking at the old man, Philip realized that he’d never seen the rabbi without his religious garb, his hat and his heavy black overcoat. Propped there against a stout pillow, the rabbi wore a nightshirt alone. He was smaller than he usually appeared, a striking thing. They’d known each other all these years, and the rabbi was smaller than he ever knew. From this day forward, he thought, I won’t think of him and see the same man.

  Shadows swelled on Frith. He took a chair to the window, where he sat and listened to the incantations of the street. Horses’ hooves on broken cobblestone, the bit-muffled protests of the laboring animals, the chimes of St. Paul and Dunston ringing together across the dark skies.

  It was nearly six in the morning, and the procession at Windsor was still a good while away. Even at the early hour, London lived. The sun was still missing from Little Britain, but soon the fortunetellers on Howsten would emerge to promise husbands for the wayward girls. Men with powder keg cameras would manipulate the smoke to fool the gullible into seeing their own souls on glass. Boys with pranks to play would break into the oldest houses, where they’d light candles and start rumors of hauntings that would cross the still waters of Bull and Mouth.

  It reminded him of his arrondissement in the Marais. There above Ha Kehilot, he spent so much time caring for the elderly, ill Jews sent to him by the rabbi. He helped with births, and later with the common bouts of childhood. He practiced the medicine of life. No one among their odd little community in the Marais had many choices. All they had was each other. They closed their circle tight.

  I’ll miss that most of all, he thought. Belonging somewhere. I feel as I did the day I saw the queen at Villefranche, near the sea. As if everything is falling away from me. It falls and I’m falling with it.

  He left to change his clothes, returning to the front room in a good suit and a face shaved clean. The letter he always kept close was tucked safely in his breast pocket, next to the carte de visite.

  He thought he would simply leave them by the sleeping rabbi’s side, but upon entering the room he discovered the rabbi awake and dressing.

  “So,” the rabbi asked as the first morning light blossomed across the flat’s walls, “what will you do with yourself after I’m dead?”

  “Dear God, don’t be so morbid.”

  “Morbid is to admire death. I’m enjoying myself in life far too much for that. But I must know what you’ll do. That’s why I came, if you’ll recall. To exercise my considerable power to secure your future.”

  “Well, this much I can see. You’re better and you won’t listen to me.”

  “I heard you. The body fights what it doesn’t understand. Did I get that right?”

  “You did, to my great surprise.”

  “That must be why you’re always fighting me.”

  “In a few days, you’ll be back to dining with widows and shopping for all the trinkets you can carry back to Paris.”

  “Return to Paris with me, then. You can convert. Become a black Jew.”

  “Anything but that.”

  The rabbi labored to put on his heavy black coat.

  “Rebbe, I don’t want you there with me.”

  “What harm could a sick old rebbe cause you?”

  “It’s not a joke. I’m not asking your permission. I’m going alone.”

  “Did you take notice of all my work?” He gestured to the papers covering much of the room’s flat surfaces. “It’s the Talmud. Holy writings. I’m translating them to French and English. You may not realize it, but to some, I’m something of a noteworthy man. Eisenmenger translated the Talmud to German, and Chiarin—an Italian no less!—translated it to French but that was a blasphemy, intended to turn the Jews away from its influence. Horrible. A colleague, Rebbe Pinner, and I are taking on the task and we’ll see it through properly. I’m telling you this because last night I came across something you might be interested in. It seems that the Talmud has a word for confession of a crime. It means ‘silence,’ Philip.”

  “I know I’ve told you so little about myself, it’s a wonder you’ve put up with me all these years. There’s a r
eason for it. There always has been. I don’t want to lose you. You’re the only friend I have in the world.”

  Bells. Church towers across the city proclaimed the commencement of the procession at Windsor. Among them there would be the gentle bells of a small, forgotten chapel, so modest that it could be taken for a potter’s shed. No one visited its untended cemetery as he recalled. A few headstones scattered across a tiny enclosure of overgrown grass. No one of importance lay beneath its soil.

  He wanted to be at Windsor, now. He wanted to walk its halls, find the stone steps that led up to the top of the Round Tower, go to one of its parapets and see everything from up there. The chapel, the villages nestled against the far rolling hills, the paths winding away from the castle to other towns, other lives.

  He’d have just enough time if he left immediately.

  “Listen to me, rebbe. Something is going to happen today if I’m able to do what I came here for. I need to see her. The queen. But it’s more than that. You’ll learn of it sooner or later, but I don’t want you there. I don’t want to see you when you hate me.”

  “Philip, are you going to hurt someone?”

  “She’s dying. What more can I do to hurt her? I’m hoping to take her pain away.”

  “At some cost to you.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “There’s the man I know,” Rabbi Ariel said. He put on his broad brim hat. “Come. Let’s get one of those English hansoms. I’m in the mood for royalty.”

  “In that case, there’s somewhere I need to go to first.”

  §

  Upon sizing them up, the chapel’s caretaker assumed they were vagabonds looking for somewhere to get away from the insistent winter.

  “I’ll not let you in,” she said. She was short but barreled about her waist and hips. She carried a spade and wore the dirt of the churchyard like a badge of honor.

  “I’ve nowhere to go to say my prayers,” he told her. “Isn’t it obvious that’s the case? Look at me, for God’s sake.”

  “Ignore my friend,” the rabbi said. “Synagogues have much to learn from churches in terms of sublime beauty. If we could just go inside for a moment, just to see it, I know we’d find it inspiring. And I’d like to offer a prayer for Her Majesty’s sake. It would be a mitzvah. A kindness.”

  She relented when he smiled. Opening the chapel door, she stood aside for them. “Rest assured I’ll be right here,” she told them.

  It’s changed, he thought as they wandered inside the chapel’s tight space. The chancel was where it had once been, in the eastern corner where the altar stood, but it had been raised a few steps and a worn-looking sanctuary built around it. The stained glass looked foggy and untouched by a duster. He wondered what it was the caretaker actually did.

  He could feel the gruff woman’s eyes on him, so he bowed his head and muttered to himself. The rabbi did the same, though his were real words of prayer.

  “Who rests here?” Rabbi Ariel whispered.

  He got up to show the rabbi the brick wall where a brass tablet was affixed. The rabbi followed him.

  Approaching it, he traced the inscription for the first time while Rabbi Ariel watched him, his body bending ever so slightly forward and back. “Davening,” the rabbi had called it. Submitting oneself to God’s power.

  He’d only ever seen a blurred photograph in the Journal, long ago. But this:

  Born 23 April 1854. Left us 9 January 1869.

  He was a stranger no more.

  “I’m so sorry, Philip. I’m understanding more each day. I never wanted to ask you what happened to him since you told me you knew these people. But I suspected. He was your friend, I see that in you.”

  “Rebbe, you don’t know what you see.”

  “Let me say a prayer for him, and for you.”

  The colored glass above them was growing lighter. The bells across London swelled and twinned. It was getting late and he wanted to leave. He needed to do what he’d come to do.

  “No more prayers,” he said.

  §

  He stood with the rabbi outside the castle gates, next to the bars, and watched the goings-on as the crowd around and behind them swelled in size. Windsor was draped in somber bunting. An air of contemplative quiet settled over the grounds, the arrivals, and those members of the court visible in the castle doorways. Many in the crowd wept.

  Signs of the queen’s imminent death were everywhere.

  He shifted restlessly, waiting for the right moment. His stomach lurched and fear dewed his forehead, making him feel sickeningly dizzy. It was worse than being at sea.

  Carriages pulled up to Windsor’s gates before a throng at St. George’s Chapel for the Garter Service. A chamber quartet played a lilting, melancholy piece from Handel as the carriages came to gentle stops under the porte cochere. Coachmen stepped down to hand out the elite of London: Honorable Members, dukes, earls, lords, esteemed patrons of the arts and the artists themselves. They wandered onto the drive to await instruction on where and how to walk and how to bow properly. In due time they’d walk the path to the chapel. If there were to be initiates this day, the inductees would don the velvet and ultramarine mantle, the heraldic shield of St. George’s Cross encircled by the Garter, the surcoat and Tudor bonnet, and the collar—some thirty troy ounces of gold.

  The onlookers would rain good wishes on the newly chivalrous member. Honi soit qui mal y pense. Evil to him who thinks evil.

  But not today, he thought.

  “Who should go to such lengths just to have white hair?” Rabbi Ariel asked as he watched the coachmen. He stroked his beard.

  “Solicitors, for one.”

  “How do they get their wigs to look like that?”

  He told the rabbi of a day he’d spent in the warm kitchen of the castle. While cooks prepared the luncheon, Charles, the castle coachman, got ready for his formal duties that evening: the driving of distinguished guests from a celebration on Temple Street to a grand Windsor dinner. He dressed in his livery, a white shirt as hard and unyielding as the planks of a barn, and stockings of equally intense white beneath silver buckled pumps and knee breeches of a dark, lush blue. A swallow-tailed coat the color of blood topped it all off.

  For his duties, Charles had to wear a wig. He’d watched the coachman wet it with water and rub a mild soap into it, after which he used a fanned puff to apply generous dollops of powder. By the time he’d finished, Charles looked as if he’d stepped out of a painting in the halls of Parliament into a world he no longer belonged to.

  “Better they should pretend to have young men’s hair,” the rabbi said.

  “They’re wearing the colors of mourning.”

  “I know, Philip.”

  The rabbi was trying to cheer him up. It had been that way all morning. Mild jokes, terrible puns, casual observations of others, and questions about trivia. All for nothing.

  “Philip—”

  “Wait. It’s starting.”

  Sextons held open the Chapel doors for Princess Louise, who emerged alone. She remained the most beautiful of the queen’s daughters, all the more so for her isolation. It wasn’t mourning as with her mother, her lost brother Leopold, or the lovelessness of her marriage. She’d chosen the roads she walked that took her so far away from duty and country.

  He admired that about her. Once he’d faced the moment when it was clear, he had no choice but to leave everything behind. All that he’d left, he stared at now.

  Reaching into his pocket, he took out the yellowed letter and pressed it into Rabbi Ariel’s hands. “Rebbe, I want you to take this.”

  He caught a glimpse of the Blue Room window, and he knew the queen was in there. When the glass was open to allow even a sliver of chill winter wind inside, the curtains swayed inward, shaping themselves in twists of dark fabric before the air paused and the curtains fell. It re
minded him of the simple beauty of watching a loved one breathe.

  It is perfectly her, he thought. She’s here and not here.

  He moved closer to the stone pillar of the gate.

  Rabbi Ariel stared at the letter. “What are you doing?”

  Beyond the bars, children played atop the mound. They chased each other in a game of needle’s eye gone to anarchy. Their two lines were ragged, their teams fluid. Three of them collided and they tumbled to the soft ground, laughing as they sang a childish rhyme in exuberant, breathless tones.

  The needle’s eye that doth supply

  The thread that runs so true

  I stump my toe and down I go

  All for want of you

  They didn’t fear the world, he thought. The world awaits them. Money and station would accomplish a lot for them, and yet they’d still learn that some things burned themselves onto the skin, so they’re never lost. They’d learn that there were so many kinds of memories. The things they’d remember until life pulled them somewhere else, no matter how many promises they would make, that they’d always recall the moment.

  We should try harder than we do to hold on to such things, he thought at the gate, but matters come over the course of the years to push them away.

  Then there are the other memories, which never leave us even when we beg them to. They lie with us every night. I suppose those children will eventually collect some of those, too. If they’re lucky enough to have and lose something so rare.

  “You’re my dearest friend,” he told Rabbi Ariel above the growing din of the crowd.

  The rabbi put a hand on his arm. “I’m not letting you go.”

  The crowd erupted in cheers as others emerged behind Princess Louise. There were officers of some military branches. The insignias of the Irregular Horse, the Dragoons, the long-ago Abyssinian Second.

  They marched in unison past the waiting dignitaries to the Middle Ward and the long shadow of the Round Tower. Seeing them, the boys and girls fled to the motte. Up its chalk hide they went to the keep. There they held out their arms and pretended to be dirigible pilots, cloud-hopping falcons, pirates sailing the high seas.