Palimpsest

“Do you remember, Ludovico, the first night? Do you remember the house with the frog-woman in it?”

He did not want to admit to this. It was like admitting to syringes in the refrigerator or being unable to read. He did not like to be pried open at the hinges and stared into, murmured about in disapproving tones. Why couldn’t Lucia just stay with him, in their little home, with their books and their roasted chickens? Why must this horrid scene now play out?

“Yes,” he said gruffly, biting the word in two.

“Her name is Orlande,” said Agostino. His words echoed loudly, too loud in this place.

“Do you remember that you were not alone?” asked Anoud sweetly, looking tenderly at Nerezza, and a flood of jealousy released bile into Ludo’s heart.

“You must think very hard, Ludo,” said Nerezza. “You must try to remember. There were others, with you. Then, and now. When you sat in the stands with me, you felt them, you felt someone else eating when you had no plate before you. Someone else kissing when you were not.”

He struggled—it is never easy to remember a dream. A fleeting vision of long, blue hair swept through him, and he shuddered with it. St. Isidore, you never imagined this thing,Ludo implored silently. In what column would you have placed it?

“There were three of them,” Ludo said slowly, and he felt the weight of that memory lift from him. “One had blue hair. She was very young. Another, I think, another had a bee sting on her face. And there was a man with keys hanging from his belt.”

“Yes,” breathed Nerezza. “Anoud and Agostino, you understand, were there when I sat in Orlande’s shop, when I put my feet into the ink.”

“Only two?”

Nerezza pressed her lips together until they went white, and her companions would not look at him. They seemed to sag into each other, their breath stolen.

“About three years ago,” Nerezza said, “our friend Radoslav was killed. He was the other one, in Orlande’s shop with us. It’s . . . so hard to stay careful there. It is easy to become involved in unsavory things, and easier still to find oneself without shelter in dark alleys. There are people in Palimpsest—they call themselves Dvorniki . . . it means ‘street-cleaners.’ They’re veterans, you remember? Like I showed you, at the races. Their leader, or priestess, or whatever, has a shark’s head. They hold sabbats in doorways, any doorway, but they have a great, huge one built in the basement of the big train station . . . you haven’t been there yet, though. Anyway, it’s just an empty, carved doorframe, all black. No door, no hinge. And they . . . well, it’s wonderful there, in Palimpsest, but sometimes it’s not very nice.”

Anoud took up when Nerezza’s voice faltered—Ludo did not even know such a thing could happen! “Radoslav cheated a Dvornik at Valorous,”she continued. “That’s a game, with little copper stars you move around a board covered in white silk. He couldn’t have known the man was political. Radya was just . . . like that. Reckless. They came for him while he was drinking licorice wine in a hotel—the most civilized thing you can imagine, and the Dvorniki just grabbed him, with crab claws and donkey jaws. . . . They dragged him to the train station, to that big black doorframe, and they cut his throat on the lintel, praying that no immigrants should ever find their way to Palimpsest, that his blood would seal all the ways and roads.”

“It’s so stupid.” Agostino sighed. “Brutal, idiotic, Neolithic rituals, and they don’t work anyway. If they worked there would never have been a war.”

Ludo shook his head. “I’m sorry he died, but—”

“You don’t understand,” Nerezza snapped, her eel-tail back, her blue sparks crackling. “We wrote letters to him. We talked on the phone, for hours and hours. We had found him working in a provincial post office in Isaszey, in Hungary, of all absurd places. We had pla

Again, Nerezza lifted her shoulders—not a shrug, but her only gesture of helplessness, of submission to the constellations and the turning of invisible clocks. The grief on their faces was so naked that Ludo turned away from it with the same propriety he would have shown to a girl caught undressing.

“But didn’t he just wake up? I mean, if it happened there, shouldn’t he be all right here? Isn’t that how it works?”

Anoud began to cry softly, little wrinkled noises he could hardly hear. Agostino caressed her face with two curled fingers. Nerezza stared stonily at him and shook her head.

“Do you remember how often Lucia traveled out of Italy before she disappeared?” Nerezza continued, abandoning his question. She did not weep, even a little.

No, of course he didn’t remember. Lucia left; she came home. He did not try to track her, what would be the use, with that great tail, that determined erasure? Where had she gotten the money for such things? Impossible that this could have occurred while he looked the other way, that Lucia could have been so consumed by something not him. He wanted Nerezza to stop talking, to just shut upand leave him alone.

“She was looking for her . . . Quarto. That’s what it’s called. What immigrantscall it.”

Anoud laughed through her tears, a squeaky, mouselike sound. “That’s us,” she said. “Immigrants. Saying these words is always so hard! They sound so ridiculous in the daylight, with coffee in the pot and cats crying to be let in. They sound poor and small. But we did know her, Ludovico. We all did. There are not so many of us that we do not find ways to know each other. She was looking for them, and she found two of them. Their names are Alastair and Paola. We never met them. Paola was Canadian; that’s so far away.”

“But Hal,” Agostino cut in, his gangly arms still draped around both women, “Hal lives in—” Nerezza shushed him, and he hurried on without naming a city. Ludo wanted to throttle him. “Well, he wasn’t so far. They met just a little while ago. They found each other, like we did. And they went to find the others together. We think . . . we think that’s how it’s done. How you get to Palimpsest permanently. How you . . . emigrate. We think you have to find your Quarto here, in this world.”

Ludo felt his blood beat against his face. The great unsaid thing floated heavy and choleric in the room. “Am I correct,” he said, “in assuming that there is no one in this room who has not slept with my wife?”

He had been prepared for silence and took it for his answer. Ludo was, he knew, deep in the book of beasts, crushed between their many pages, growling all around. Anoud slid out of the grasp of her lovers’ hands and alighted by him. She had a pinched nose, small eyes—an ungenerous face, he thought. A mouse, certainly, if ever a woman had been a mouse. Hay-child, impossible generation, and such plagues. He was distracted by her hands, so slender he could not imagine there was flesh between skin and bone, and on her smallest finger was a carnelian ring, a smear of red on gold, the tiniest of stones.

Ludo had bought it in Ostia that long-ago summer, the summer of the yellow dress, when he and Lucia sought out that wonderful pecan-red shade on everything: rings, couches. When they bought wildly things to build a house around them, certain that nothing they laid their hands on would ever need altering, replacing.

Ludovico reached for Anoud’s hand and she gave it warmly, stroking his cheek with the other, a kind attention, as if soothing a child whose knee has been ski