Palimpsest

Yes, she thinks, it is all right. I am here. I am here and it was worth the price. It was worth a stranger with red hair, worth a boy who loves his sister, and his sister, too. Worth all of them.

But the bees are impatient with her gladness. They pull her to a door so great she does not right away realize that it is attached to a single house. An enormous lion’s paw marks its center, and she puts her hand upon it, as if greeting tenderly the beast whose foot it must be. The bees scream, and the screams of bees are joy or rage; there is room in them for only two kinds of cries. The lavender-suited manikin circles her waist with its buzzing arms; the door opens with a grand sweep, as though it had practiced just such a sweep for a decade and more.

Framed by thick ferns and far too many umbrella-stands, a woman stands just inside in the hall. She wears a severe dress, just the sort of thing a governess might wear, green-black from throat to floor, clasped by an enormous copper wasp at her collarbone and a long, ornate belt, copper too, a shining chain of tiny boxes that circle her compressed waist and trail to the floor in line like a monk’s knotted rope. Her curly hair is piled high, an artful, decorous shade of green, deeper than emeralds or water, a sedate and proper color. It is the exact shade of her eyes. She holds a child by the hand, a boy with a blue ribbon around his neck, dressed like a little dauphin, and he hides behind the woman’s voluminous skirts, peeking out at the newcomer.

The bee-manikin strides jubliantly to the woman and tips her chin towards itself. She kisses the bee-crowded face warmly, tilting her head in the classical pose of the seduced woman. The manikin gestures emphatically toward November and promptly dissolves into a swarm which dissipates through the house, leaving Aloysius’s beautiful suit in a ripped, wrinkled pile on the immaculate floor.

“I like your dress,” the woman says coyly. The boy hides his face in her bustle.

“Aloysius made it,” November says, unable to think of anything better, more clever, more deserving of the woman before her. Her throat constricts.

“Oh, I know! I have several of his. There’s no mistaking his work, really.”

The two women are silent for a long while. A far-off clock whispers the hour.

“I also know,” the green-haired woman says finally, “because I bought it for you. It’s a present.” Her blush is so furious that November can feel the heat of it just inside the great door.

“What have I done to deserve such a present?”

“Well.” The woman looks determinedly at the floor. “My bees became very excited some time ago. They danced and sang a name, over and over, and I could not sleep for their chanting of it. The queen asked for an audience, and I let her sit upon my earlobe. She rubbed her legs together and said that they had fallen in love with an immigrant woman. They said she smelled like gorse and hibiscus pollen. They said she knew how to love them back, they were sure of it. And they were sure, as children are always sure, that their mother would also love the object of their apiary affection.”

“Are you their mother, then?”

“I am Casimira, and that is as good as saying: yes.”

“I am glad that I fought so hard against coming back to this place, Casimira, or I might not have found the girl with your house on her belly.”

Casimira’s eyes move appraisingly over November, who feels very much like a child in her lavish clothes.

“The dress will do, I think. Next time I will know better what suits you.”

“Do for what?”

“I am taking you to the opera. How else shall we get to know one another? That is why you needed a dress. I do not care much for fashion, but a dress is like a sail, it must be held before one, colossal and dazzling, if one is to get anywhere at all.”

November’s eyes blur with tears. My dress; my sail.

Casimira crosses the quartz-veined floor, takes November’s slender hands in hers, and leans forward to press cheeks, two absurd Victorian ladies, too proper for kisses. They stand thus for a long while, and only after that while whittles away does the boy timidly, carefully, place his small hand on November’s long blue skirt.

Casimira breaks the embrace and pulls up the length of her belt like a fishwife pulling in her line. She opens the third box from the bottom and withdraws a small ring with a delicate moldovite honeybee in its gem-cage. She slips it onto November’s chapped hand and, hesitantly, holding her breath with an excitement she ca

_______

Casimira allows her smallest fingers to graze November’s as their carriage clatters along the slick bronze tracks. There is no mount—heron-grooms and clip-tail leopards are for those too poor to afford the track tariffs, Casimira explains. But the reins extend stiffly from the jade-trimmed carriage nevertheless, a nod to tradition. The fiery streetlamps blur in November’s vision as they pass away from the great house, past Krasnozlataya Street entirely, avoiding the amber shadows that demarcate November’s allowable space in Palimpsest. They careen down to the bubbling mouth of a thick white river, and the ramshackle houses crowding the banks. The carriage stops at a tottering edifice. Eleven windows are broken; eleven windows are whole. There are no lights within.

Casimira’s gloves are the color of her hair—a size too small, so that her fingers cup delicately toward her palm. With her curled hands she guides November past the great splintered door, down a long hall lined with threadbare rugs, and into a tiny room, hardly big enough for both of them. They crouch together in the dark, knees touching, scalps against the ceiling. Casimira’s skin smells like the musk of a striped cat.

“I have brought you here specially,” she whispers. “This is Thulium House, the opera house, which you will not have heard of, I know. But it is the best thing I know.”

“How long have you lived here, that you know such places, that you have such a house as the one I saw, that you have a child?”

Casimira laughs, looks quizzically at her, and November has a curious moment of double vision, this quizzical woman and another, in a different dress spangled with silver stars, standing by a white river.

“I was born here,” she says. “I’m not at all like you. And he is not my child.”

“People are born here? How?” November asks, so new at this, the dullest child in class!

“In the usual way, I should imagine. Is there some exciting new method where you come from?”

“No . . . but if you’ve never been to my world, how did you know about the ring?”

“I listen. I have a billion ears, and they whisper to me of a trillion small things. They tell me all your little protocols—bees are particularly attracted to exotic systems of ma

“Casimira, what is this place? If your ears say so much, you must know.”

“I don’t understand the question, my dear. It is the world.”

“But it’s not. I go to sleep, I wake up here. I take nothing back with me. It may be real, for some values of real, but it is not the world. Ilive in the world. I know its shape and its smell.”

There is a small rapping at the door of their room, and Casimira shakes her head. “Later. It’s time.”

She holds up a long blindfold, and November recoils from it, untrusting.

“Nothing is going to hurt you, November. I promise. I will not allow it. I would never allow it.”

Unsure, her jaw tight and quivering, November accepts the fold. When the matriarch bends to her, she sees that the back of Casimira’s severe dress is entirely cut away, so that her smooth skin shows past her tailbone. Casimira tightens the ribbons at the back of November’s head, and guides the hands of her compatriot to return the favor. It is an oddly ritualistic thing. They breathe together, blinded.