Palimpsest

When November tries to remember this night a year from now, she will think the woman’s name was Xiaohui. She will be almost sure she can remember the ring of the name, falling into her ear like a little copper bell. She will remember that they shared dumplings, and that the woman was a Berkeley student, a historian who knew the names of every one of Mohammed’s grandchildren, and could recite the drifting census data of the ancient city of Karakorum, where the Khans raised tents of scarlet.

November had only her bees. They suddenly seemed paltry to her, poor and needy.

“Tell me about the cities of the bees,” Xiaohui said, her head cupped in one hand. “Tell me how big around the queen’s belly is. Tell me what their honey tastes like.”

November laughed, and the owner’s wife scowled over a tray of tomorrow’s cookies.

“I gave them orchids this year,” November said shyly, “orchids and bellado

Xiaohui arched her eyebrows, and November blushed. She reached into her purse, drew out a small jar with a lily stamped on the lid, and passed it over the plastic table like a spy relinquishing her secrets. The blue-eyed woman dipped her thumb into the murky honey and licked it quickly from her skin, closing her eyes, pressing her lips together, so as not to lose a drop. She took November’s hand in hers as she tasted, lacing their fingers.

The fortune cookies came, not wrapped in cellophane but fresh from the oven, sitting greasily on the check. They cracked into them, and Xiaohui nodded in the direction of the owner’s wife.

“My mother makes them every day,” she whispered. “She writes nonsense-fortunes, whatever she is thinking about when she’s baking: The fog is too thick today! Jiangxi Province had proper mist. I am allergic to milk,that sort of thing. People think she’s crazy, but they buy the cookies by the dozen.”

“What do you think?”

Xiaohui shrugged. “She’s my mother. Jiangxi Province didhave nicer weather.”

November glanced down at the scrap of white paper in her hand. It read:

Is not my daughter sweet?

But she was not, November found, when she kissed her outside the restaurant, under the washed-out constellations. She tasted like flour, flour and salt. Their breasts pressed tight together between two fog-dewed overcoats, the ache of it half-painful and half-pleasant. Xiaohui took her to a little apartment above a grocery store, and they fell together just inside the doorframe, awkwardly, like great beasts too eager for niceties. She bit November’s lower lip, and there was blood between them then.

“You need me,” said Xiaohui breathlessly, pulling November over her, sliding hands under her belt to claw and knead. “You need me.”

“Don’t you mean ‘I need you’?” whispered November in the girl’s ear.

“No,” she sighed, arching her back, tipping her chin up, making herself easy to kiss, easy to fall into, easy to devour. “You’ll see. You’ll see.”

_______

As Xiaohui drifted to sleep, one arm thrown over her now black and honest eyes, the other lying open and soft on her thin student’s sheets, November stared up into the dark, awake. This was not such a new thing in her ordered world—relationships required such vigilance, such attention. You had to hold them together by force of will, and other people took up so much space, demanded so much time. It was exhausting. This was better, the occasional excursion into Chinatown, into the city of St. Francis, who after all watched over wild and wayward animals. This was better, but she slept fitfully afterward.

November stroked the inside of Xiaohui’s thigh gently, a mark there, terribly stark, like a tattoo: a spidery network of blue-black lines, intersecting each other, intersecting her pores, turning at sharp angles, rounding out into clear and unbroken skin. It looked like her veins had darkened and hardened, organized themselves into something more than veins, determined to escape the borders of their mistress’s flesh. In her sleep, Xiaohui murmured against her lover’s neck, something about the grain yields of the farms in fourteenth-century Avignon.

“It looks like a streetmap,” November whispered, pressing her hand tenderly against it, so that Xiaohui’s pale skin seemed whole and unbroken.

THREE

THE DREAMLIFE OF LOCK AND KEY

There was nothing in Oleg’s apartment that was not locked away, safer than treasure, safer than a heart. Even the thin light from a tall and dusty lamp, tinged brown at the edges like an old apple, was bound and locked, a key turned, bolts slung firm. It could not leave this room, it would shine only here, for Oleg, and only for him.

Oleg was a locksmith. He had always thought the term overwrought, implying that he spent his days torturously pouring molten brass into molds banging out locks on some infernal anvil. It implied a burlier, more archaic man than he. Anyway, most of his public business was in keys, not locks. His private business was collection.

Keys did not really fascinate him, though he collected them as well, matching them carefully, not to the lock that was made for them, modern to modern, brass to brass, keycard to slot, as a common locksmith might, but to the ones he felt they yearned for, deep in their pressed metal hearts. He possessed a rusted iron key with an ornate lion’s grimace at its head, slung alongside a gleaming hotel’s card-slot lock, its red and green lights dead. He had laid an everyday steel housekey against the rarest of locks, real gold, with lilies raised up on its surface, a complex system of bolts and tumblers concealed within. Only Oleg had heard their cries for each other. Only Oleg knew their silent grief that they could not join.

He remembered Novgorod only vaguely, where he was born, where he had been a boy, briefly. It did not seem to Oleg that he could have been a boy long. Surely he would remember more of it, if it had been an important time. He had only images, as though he had once gone on vacation there—snapshots, postcards, souvenirs. He was born, properly, when they left, wafting like tea-steam through Vie

Yet Novgorod hung in his heart, an alien thing, hidden as a key. He could recall dimly the quicksilver bleed of the Volkhov River, pale cupolas under the snow like great garlic bulbs. But those churches were all nameless to him—he could not pluck the saints who owned them from his forgetful heart, and for this sin he did guilty penance among his locks. Everything was white and gray in that Novgorod-of-the-mind, even the violinists on Orlovskaya Street, men without blood, playing fiddles of ash. This white pendulum swung within him, even as he bent with his tools to locks more beautiful and complicated than memory.

He lived in New York, but the New York of Oleg Sadakov was not the New York of others, and he alone ministered this secret place, stamped onto the back of the city like a maker’s mark. He crept and crawled through it, listening, for Oleg could listen very well, better than rabbits or horses or safecrackers.