Palimpsest

“Get her out,” Nerezza had begged, over and over. “Get her out. If we ca

November had gone to her and taken her in her arms. Ludo could see she was hardly more used to this than Nerezza herself, but she held Nerezza’s dark head under her chin and rocked her, and sang softly to her, and Nerezza bore it. She bore it and did not protest, but her jaw clenched, she ground her teeth, nonetheless. They spoke to each other in English, and he did not understand them. But he had asked his eel-girl to translate, and the tears had come again.

Nerezza looked at the newcomer with black and glittering eyes. In the bald apartment light, November was even less impressive-looking than she had been at the baths, her scars deep, her mutilated hand undisguisable. And the mark on her face—what she must have borne, unable to hide herself as they could! She was a ruin of a woman, and as thus he found her calming, like the white-stoned forum.

Slowly, Nerezza began to nod, and he suspected it was because to look at November was to know it had not been easy for her, not in the smallest part, and Nerezza saw her own grief writ in blood and ink and scar tissue on the American woman’s body. He saw November take a deep breath, and her hands trembled. Whatever she was saying was intricate, painful for her, and she was afraid of it. He longed to reach out and touch her face—would she, lithe ibex, leap from him to land on her horns and bounce up, bounding off into meadows he could not touch? Nerezza turned to him, not meeting his gaze.

“This is what she says, Ludo. If you can make sense of it, good luck to you. ‘These are the folk who may pass into the kingdom of heaven: the grief-stricken, lovers, scholars of a certain obsessive disposition. Brute beasts. Women who have become as men and men who have become as women. Writers of books with long titles. Only those knights who have failed to touch the Grail. Industrious women. You, and I, and a boy named Oleg, and a girl with blue hair.’”

Nerezza was crying again. She turned to November, speaking rapidly, angrily, and all Ludovico could understand was the name Radoslav, repeated and repeated, desperately added to the list. But Ludo hardly heard Nerezza. He stared at November, her wet and hopeful eyes. She thought he would not understand. That he would think her words irrelevant. But he did know, he understood, for he had loved St. Isidore all his life, an encyclopaedist, a man whose intellect was confined in long, precise, radiant columns of text, illuminated lists which placed together circumscribed the world.

Nerezza looked back and forth between them, helpless and livid.

“Another one is coming,” she hissed in Italian. “I heard her talking on the telephone. I hate you both, and I curse you, as well as I am able to curse anything. You blithely stumble into this, and in a few weeks you’ve done what I can never, never do. Do you understand? Radoslav is dead. None of us can ever go. Not ever. And it took us yearsto find each other. It took everything from us. Husbands, wives, jobs, children. You’re like a rich man’s son, who has earned nothing in his life and is given everything. I let you live in my house and you cover it with your shit. I hate you. I hate you.” Her voice was even and furious, it did not hitch or break, and he could see the sparks of her eel-flesh grimly blue at her ears.

“Nerezza,” November said, “Nerezza. Nerezza.”

November kissed her reddened forehead. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, over and over. “I’m sorry.” And she kissed her mouth, her jaw, her ear, her neck, trying to kiss everything hard of her away, and if he had not felt the bees in her, if he had not heard them sing, he would not have understood how November, broken and battered as she was, could have the courage to comfort the wildness, the bestial scream of Nerezza.

But Nerezza would not let herself be kissed. She was stiff and cold, her body held tight and inviolable. She clamped her eyes onto Ludo, full of bile and bitter loathing.

Then Nerezza’s eyes shone, and suddenly she smiled. She put her arms around November, never taking her gaze from Ludo, and let herself warm, alight, feign ardor. Ludo shuddered. What had she hatched in that lightless heart?

Nerezza clung to November as the bee-stung woman pushed the top of her own green dress down to her waist and held her breasts out like St. Agatha, an offering. November opened her eyes and caught his gaze over Nerezza’s shuddering body. Ludo could not tell if the shuddering was false or true. She was whispering in Italian, too ashamed to be understood, and Ludo knew the beekeeper could not hear it, and vowed to explain it to her, when he saw her on the other side of night.

“Am I, November?” Nerezza was saying. “Am I among the folk who are permitted to enter the kingdom of heaven? Tell me. Tell me.”

_______

He left them then. He did not want to watch. He did not want to see.

But he knew November now, he knew her, and she was his Isidore, his Isidora, and he would tell her everything, everything he knew, everything engraved in his marrow, when all this was done and they could speak, and drink together wine like blood, through the starry night and into day.

PART V:

THE GREEN WIND

In Transit, Westbound: 11:09

THERE IS A PLACEon the far western edge of Palimpsest where the tracks have fallen into disrepair. It is wild and su

The trains did not discover the breach in the tracks for some time. They were distracted, the season was not right for westbound travel, the Missal Line had gone into heat early for three years ru

There is concern, in the highest echelons of sport commuters, that a train might one day become bold enough to jump the tracks at Oathusk and escape Palimpsest altogether, into the wilds beyond and the mountains, through the wide farms and pastureland, and from thence who knows? Yet still others deride this idea as the worst sort of fancy: the trains are happy, they are loved, they are well-fed and well-mated. In the midst of debate, the tracks go unrepaired. The wheat bends the wind at Oathusk, and the stars watch the raspberries grow long.

_______

The next carriage is empty. It is a long, vast stretch of new tatami mats, redolent and bright green, their ribbons black and gold. Sei ca