Gilda Trillim

by Steven L. Peck

  It was a scary place. Behind the shelves could be descried cavernous earthy hollows that the dangling lamp could not penetrate. Anything could hide in these invaginations and, I was certain, did. I imagined dark things that could be felt, not seen—pale beasts, sensuously grotesque who stared from their secluded dens, hidden but present, disclosed but masked in invisibility. These were not monsters conjured from my brother’s pulp magazines in which teeth and claw were the tools of destruction. The sharp protective accouterments his comics offered up, fashioned from some sort of atom and electron-laden thing, were weapons of physical matter that, in turn, might be fended off with other arms made of the same, like sword or spear, or be blown to bits by a bit of cold-steel southern Idaho weaponry.

  The monsters of these holes were different. These malignant spirits were penetrative miscreations that did not devour flesh but menaced souls from the margins of reality. Such things could as easily follow you into a dream as into another room. I knew if I was quiet and reverential they would just watch—for now. Yet they were to be respected and avoided. One did not peer too closely behind the peaches or try to reach beyond the back row of green beans cavalierly. Caution was the order of the day. Even so they were manageable. By keeping your eyes away from the dark places behind the furnishings you could avoid contact and thus confrontation. Care was needed, but not so much that the whole place needed to be scrupulously avoided. You did what needed to be done, but did not linger or stay to play. While dark and dangerous, they just wanted to be left alone to mull over their world of gloom. These, however, were not the only beings present in that small grotto. There were many whose personality could be discovered.

  When you entered the place from the rough-hewn wooden steps, you encountered a low-watt light bulb hung in the center of the ceiling by a long thin cord. Because you had to pull a beaded chain to turn it on, the bulb was left swinging, making the shadows dance with a steady cadence, as if a hypnotist had set the entire room into a rhythmic, purposeful swaying. As the period of motion decreased, the metrical incandescent pendulum slowed and the rocking shadows steadied and, in the dim yellow light, sturdy shelves were revealed.

  The ancient wooden planks held an array of lost and lonely cans, along with forlorn and forgotten bottles and jars. Their disposition seemed to awake slowly, as if, unused to the light, they were trying to moor their emerging consciousness to something surer than the troubled sleep that the cellar imposed. They seemed to be blinking and rubbing their eyes, trying to grasp a world they did not understand and mostly feared. Of the myriad of bottled things, most longed to be opened. To be the one chosen, the one who would be carried out of the dank pantry and bathed in kitchen light. But others, those with faded labels, or rusted lids, dreaded your touch and withdrew to dark corners. Still, as with all things, I knew at that time every item of home production manifested a self, a personhood as present as anything that lived under the stars.

  I found a small half-pint jar of what looked like syrupy blueberry jam. Feeling as dark as a witch, I declared by fiat that it was blueberry cordial-wine and drank it up. That amount of sugar filled me with such otherworldly power and energy that I knew I was as drunk as a homeless sot staggering through the streets of Boise. I wheeled about the house (such a fine acting job of inebriation I portrayed that I convinced even myself that it was no pretense), shouting words that my mother and father, had they heard me, would have washed my mouth out with their profanity neutralizing concoction of mayonnaise combined with Worcester and Tabasco sauce. Finally, I turned to the holy of holies in our small frame house—my parents’ bedroom. A sacred place that we were forbidden to transgress.

  As I entered still reeling from my sugar tear, I felt a secret presence—brooding and dangerous that watched over my parents’ concerns. It sobered me. I approached the chest of drawers, its top arrayed with doilies, bric-a-brac, and small bowls holding coins and odd assortments of jewelry, cufflinks, buttons, and tie clips. I opened the drawers like a thief. The contents were disappointing, mostly loaded with clothes I had seen a hundred times on the lines in the backyard. My parents’ underwear, Mormon sacred garments, held no interest to me and disgusted me in ways that their socks did not. That drawer was closed quickly. In another, I found piles of letters bound with twine tied in lovely bows. They were addressed from my father at an APO address and posted to my mother. I feared to pull the bow loose lest I not be able to configure it back to the way I found it, so I left them promising that I would one day read them. I fully expected to find the pageantry of their love story fully revealed on the pages of that correspondence. I also knew it would be as rich and magical as any found in a fairy tale.

  I listened very carefully for the sound of their return, but hearing nothing I turned my attention to a small thin bookcase. It was of dark, almost black wood that gave the impression of solidity and seriousness. This I knew was my mother’s. I could sense by the way it had been dusted and the way the books had been arranged with care, that this piece of furniture was attended, suggesting to my mind a sense of holiness and danger—an altar to a god that I thought might be watching with hand raised ready to strike if I offended the sacredness of the space.

  There on the shelf I saw it. I can only describe it as a book that was calling to me, shouting for me to pick it up. It was as if this were a book I knew well, an old friend unrecognized until this moment, which demanded that I run to her and embrace her. The book was of polished brown leather and gold-gilded ends and on the cover was embossed a single word, Proust. I opened it carefully. I could tell the book had been opened many times as none of the gilded pages were still stuck together and separated as easily as a well-shuffled deck of cards. I thumbed through it eagerly. This jumped out like a surprised jackrabbit in the back pasture, (and I can even now find it easily in my own copy of the book):

  I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.1

  I don’t know why, but this staggered me as much as the blueberry jam. I knew it was true. The world was alive with ghosts. In every object spirits lived, present in everything from objects as tangible as a stuffed teddy bear, or as airy as the number three—all had their viewpoint, their way, and their awareness. I knew this. The longer I stared at something, the more I knew its spirit.

  Over the course of many years, I have returned to that passage again and again. For what was so true and present to me then has now utterly departed from me. The world has relinquished all animation. Things seem to be only things. And I wonder again and again what I’ve lost, for it seems to me that much has been lost. Where once everything could be counted on to feel something toward me, now I feel alone in a world of careless articles. The ghosts of my youth have all departed from me.

  I think it was in the University that the roots of my animated world were wrenched from their rich, imaginative soil. And not just to the cold non-living objects of the world, but even life itself. As if it turned every singing bird or bouncing dog into just so many machines that tick tock to the beat of their own internal motions, movements established long ago when the universe came to be.

  Yet I keep coming back again to this passage from Proust and these lines I found in the book you gifted to me at Christmas last year:

  In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.
/>   We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.2

  And I am left wanting to shout at my professors, and to the empty self-thing that I have become, and who now seems so blind compared to that little girl who heard the silent voice of a book shout to her and who felt the weight of a shadow’s dark watchfulness: What died in the wolf’s eyes? What did Leopold watch leave that poor beast’s being? And can we bring it back?

  I am yours,

  Gilda

  Vignette 4: Some Documents Compiled from Writings about Her Stay in a Soviet Orthodox Convent. Events Circa 1961

  A largely unknown piece of Gilda Trillim’s life was uncovered due to some remarkable detective work by Peking University scholar Tang Whelan. He has been relentless in pursuing information on the ‘lost year’ as it is known in Trillim studies. The story of his discovery is worth a book or even a novel in and of itself as his research has taken him from rural Idaho to the heart of Central Russia.

  Apparently, at the end of the badminton season in 1960 Gilda pulled a hamstring tendon during her final match against veteran player Sydney Fields. Most researchers believe that she fell into an episode of depression and returned to Idaho to work through her injury and its effect on her psyche. There were no known letters or even journal entries from this period. It appeared that she had cut herself off from all public appearances and made no contact with her friends. Interviews with her siblings seemed to confirm this retreat back to her parents’ home, and her sister even suggested that she had a memory of Gilda returning home for a spell after her injury. Even so, the evidence was skimpy. And there were unsubstantiated rumors from various quarters that this was not true, however.

  Due to the dogged determination of Dr. Tang, however, we now have the rich and incredible account (almost unbelievable, frankly) of the ‘lost-year.’ A book in Chinese was published this year on that missing time, but it is currently not available in English, although such an edition is planned for 2022.

  Near the headwaters of the Lena River in Russia (near Lake Baikal) is the Convent St. Margarita of the Blessed Trees, an Orthodox Convent. It was a short-lived experiment in the marriage of faith to education, art, and science. Because of its remoteness and inaccessibility, and the willingness of nearby local leaders to allow its existence (with some evidence of bribery), it escaped the worst of the Stalinist religious persecution. The convent turned out to be a hidden patch of light in a dark era. How Gilda came to this place in the heart of the USSR is unknown, but it is here she spent a year coming to know an apple seed. Yes, you read that right. An apple seed.

  Dr. Tang says that there is a great hall in the convent that contains literally scores of Trillim’s chiaroscuro oil paintings of a lone apple seed, brown on orange, lit by a single candle. These were painted over the course of her year-long stay there. If this was not enough of a find, the convent archives yielded a daily journal that Gilda kept during her stay. While much of it describes largely mundane accounts of her quotidian activities—things like minor battles with the Abbess, or complaints about the unrelenting diet of bread, fish, and weak beet or turnip soup—there are profound thoughts on the relationship of observers to objects—like apple seeds.

  As Dr. Tang documents, a few of her entries almost border on madness:

  I sit down after my 45th painting and sigh and cry and then sigh again. I am no closer to understanding this seed than when I started. It sits there on the orange cloth, baiting me, calling me, daring me to find it out, to discover its way of being, to capture what it is under that brittle brown shell. I’ve painted it again and again, turned it nearly every angle, captured subtle nuances of its given aspect. I have been presented and handed all sides of this simple object, and yet nothing of what it is enters me. I’ve painted it in morning sun and gloaming cloud, in two seasons, and in afternoon and evening. I’ve placed the candle at numerous angles. I seem not to have come to know it at all. I thought by looking at it, its nature would slowly reveal itself. Give me what was hidden. I don’t mean ‘know’ its soft inner fruit. Obviously, I could crush it, and smear its greenish pulp over a glass and peer at it until blurry-eyed, but isn’t that just another angle? Wouldn’t that mess just be painting 46 through, say, 67? Would I be any closer to getting to it than I am now?

  It is silent. I’ve put it under a drinking glass and pressed my ear against its base for hours, not to hear the noise it makes—it makes none—but to sense its silence. To learn of the noises it does not make and in that quiet revelation find the seed as it is.

  It haunts my dreams. It appears as mother, father, sister, lover. It comes to me as useless background and empty quest. And when I awake, I turn it ever so slightly and paint it once again. Come to me! Come to me sweet masked apple seed. Let me know one thing in this universe well enough to call it captured. Dear, dear apple seed, let me enter you. I welcome you! Enter me!

  I have not bathed in days. If Babs saw me now, she would think me mad. Perhaps I am.

  The Abbess kept a record too, which Dr. Tang has translated from the original Russian. He tells me that it documents how as Trillim continues this obsessive painting, some of the sisters seem to think that she is attaining a kind of holiness. A consecrated aspect begins to be ascribed to Gilda and a few of the sisters start to order and arrange her paintings in the great hall according to similarity of the perspective from which the seed is viewed. Candles are placed around this odd gallery, giving the great hall an aura of sacracy. The Abbess notes that the Prioress is uncertain this is proper, but goes along with it in silence. Hand painted icons of a woman resembling Gilda begin to appear and the Abbess thinks things have gone too far but does nothing to stop the apparent theosis of Gilda and her work with the apple seed.

  One bitter winter night Gilda writes of a growing despair. It has been cold and gray for days and the light that seeps into the room where she paints seems constant and unchanging from dawn till dusk and her paintings have been identical for four days in a row. It seems to broker a stupefying sameness she cannot dispel. There is a pause in her work for about a week in which she also does not write. When finally the clouds break there seems to be a shift in her perspective.

  My study of the seed has not failed. I just came from its cell, a cozy alcove situated about chest high outside my room that the sisters have given it—as if it were a new acolyte. Two of the sisters maintain a vigil there now and light candles throughout the night in the niche wherein it lies. When I carry it from that hollow to the chamber where I paint, they follow it, with lowly spoken prayers and chants. What happened I am not sure. My Russian is too poor to get them to explain in such a way that I can fathom the concepts. It has become a relic of sorts. I don’t understand, but I do understand. Now when I look at the seed it calls to me. It is entering me in new ways that are hard to describe. The seed is slipping from the boundaries of otherness and even though I can see it no better than when I first began painting, now after 97 paintings I am slipping into it and it into me. The seed’s being is becoming mine and when at night I am lying under the furs and wool blankets that ward off the Russian winter, I can enter into the seed. Not its inner seedy marrow nor inside the seed as a physical location, as if I were inside the biological substance that centers the hard brown shell, but inside the seed as seed. Inside the seed as if I were the seed. Inside the inside of the seed. It is hard to explain. I am becoming enseeded. I suspect it is becoming enhumaned. No one will understand this because words are failing me. But …

  It is at this point we begin to see the emergence of Trillim as confident novelist. She stops painting, yet she begins to assemble long l
ists of relationships to the seed. These lists are extensive. I’ll just give you one for they tend toward the monotonous. She seems to be trying to enumerate every possible thing that might be interacting with the seed. The objects she lists are not just things but relationships.

  List #31

  {candlelight, the upward motion of air in candle flame, Sis. Aleve’s movement, Sis. Aleve’s breath, air from the east window, the clacking of trees tossing in the wind, air from the high window on the north wall, the vibrations of a spider web as the spider moves delicately across the strands, the sound of the bells, {the presence of (gravitational pull of?): oak chair, icon of St. Peter, Icon of Christ child, Icon of Mary mother of Jesus, candle, iron candle holder, icon of Christ, floor stones, tapestry of boar, tapestry of peasants working fields, every stone of the convent, other sisters moving to and fro, the trees of the forest, the mass of water moving through the Lena}, the smell of the bread baking, the spider’s breath through tiny spiracles, the aroma of the soup cooking, the stirring of the soup sending spirals of steam into the air diffusing spreading moisture throughout the castle, the temperature of the air, the stones, the whisper of the wind as it blows upon the abbey, the cloth upon which it sits, the light from the sun scattered by clouds entering from windows bouncing off of walls, stones, floor, ceiling, the call of the crows that nest outside the east window, the hush of snow falling on the high window of the north wall, the beating of my heart and of all the sisters’, the whisper of prayers in the night}

  These lists go on for hundreds of pages. It appears they were constructed over the period of about a week. The journal falls silent for almost a month (or a moon?) and no one knows what happens but when it opens, it opens with this.