Like a quick little animal she burrows into her nets and is gone. According to the records in my possession she has not uttered a single word for upward of nine years.
And now, Your Highness, it is finally dawn.
DUKE:
Dawn!
From within the loathsome night,
from the theater
of its nightmares, I once again
extract and
collect myself piece
by piece, a monarch-mosaic:
here is my hand
outstretched for bread,
and its fresh smell
and warm body,
but first, first
my eye
goes to the window,
drawn to two birds in a puddle,
to a dawn rising
sanguine. Look,
my lord, you are blessed:
here on a platter
is a newborn day,
its teeth not yet emerged—
But for a week now, far away
on the hilltops, a man
like an open razor blade walks
and cuts, his head
in the sky.
WALKING MAN:
And yet
I shall move you,
my rootless child,
my cold,
fruitless child.
Every day it gets
harder, every day you grow
more hardened, more
and more taxing.
TOWN CHRONICLER: Every time the midwife leaves the room, the cobbler jumps up to the window. His eyes dart over the hills, his lips seem to chew up insults and curses. Hammer in hand.
He notices me in his yard now, behind an empty chicken coop. He does not come out or banish me; he doesn’t even threaten me with his hammer. I carefully show him my notebook and pen. I believe I see him nod.
MIDWIFE:
Opposite my bed
on the w-w-wall
is an ancient round
c-c-clock.
It is old and weak,
with hands s-s-stuck
on the same hour
and the same m-m-minute
for more than a y-y-year—
TOWN CHRONICLER: Her voice, soft and flat, comes from the next room. The cobbler moves away from the window. He walks backward. Backward? Strange: as if sleepwalking, he probes around until his back touches the wall. Both arms slowly rise on either side. His shaved red head slams against the wall to the beat of the words from the other room.
MIDWIFE:
And only
the thin s-s-second
hand keeps fluttering
p-p-pouncing all the time
all the time that’s
left, all the time
that was given,
p-p-pounces and lurches
back
unw-w-wavering,
storming
fighting
to pass
to cross
or just
t-t- to be,
to be one sheer full simple second no more no less
just that, God,
just be.
DUKE:
And here, in the palace,
in the private chamber,
a whistling kettle and steaming
coffee. I am serene and slow
and limp, undoubtedly:
an exemplary duke—
no.
No.
A man not-himself
has awoken from this night—
hah, the gravity
of tragedy. (You thought
you were safe, m’lord, you thought you were
immune. Your troops
cover the land, a thousand hussars
on a thousand horses, and you in
shattered shards.) But he rises,
he rises to his day,
silently puts on the slough
of his name, inwardly
fans the dim embers, does his best
to convince himself that he still remembers
what it was like to
just
be;
how to stare, for example,
how to stare? How
does a person just stare
innocently, how does he
for one instant forget
what is seared inside him
by affliction?
In short—
an impostor of sorts, a sham,
pretending to be an everyman
whose eye
is drawn to the open window, whose hand
reaches simply
for bread—
Amid all this, I suddenly
plummet,
plunge,
a mere
shadow
of he who walks there
alone, of he who,
with heavy steps,
chisels the verdict
on my land:
all that is,
all that is
(oh, my child,
my sweet, my lost one) —
all that is
will now
echo
what is not.
TOWN CHRONICLER: “It’s like a murmur,” the centaur explains when I pass by his window the next evening. “A murmur, or a sort of dry rustle inside your head, and it never stops.”
Not willingly, Your Highness, does he give his testimony. Only after I show him the royal edict with your seal and portrait does he realize that he has no choice but to collaborate.
CENTAUR: “Veritably”? You need to know what’s going on with me? You’re telling me the duke could give two shits about what is veritably buzzing around in my head? Okay, then, gird your gonads and do some chronicling. Write down that it’s, let’s say, like dry leaves. What are you ogling at like an idiot? Leaves! But dry ones, right? Crumbling. Dead. Did you get that? And someone keeps stepping on them, over and over again … So? Is that veritable enough for you? Will the duke be pleased? Will his face glisten with delight?
TOWN CHRONICLER: My own honor, my lord, is easily put aside. But I am absolutely unwilling to allow your representative to be humiliated this way, and so I immediately turn to leave—
CENTAUR: What’s that? Without a kiss? Get back here right now! I believe, pencil pusher, that your edict explicitly requests “all the information required for the authorities, without omitting a single detail”! True or false? Well then, open up your little notebook right this minute and start chronicling:
“Someone keeps treading on them, on the dry leaves”—write this!—“walking around and around in a circle, dragging his feet …” Now make a note of this: khrrrsss khrrrsss. Like that, yes, with three s’s at the end. I bet that little detail will clarify the situation for the duke veritably! That will get it up for him in no time! Are you getting the picture, lap-clerk? Has anyone ever told you your face looks like a waif’s?
TOWN CHRONICLER: While I pretend to be writing down this foolish drivel, I periodically stand on my tiptoes to steal a glance at the heaps crammed into his room. I make a quick list: wooden cradle, pram, tiny bed, lots of deflated soccer balls, colorful little chairs, rocking horse, toy boat, rusty cars from an electric train, cowboy hat, Indian feather chain, endless pages of drawings and doodles … Incidentally, this whole assemblage is covered with fly droppings and cobwebs. It all seems withered and brittle, and every object looks as though it might crumble at the slightest touch, if not a mere look. The creature in the window keeps on prattling, cursing, and slandering. I persist. Gym shoes, skates and sandals, books, books everywhere, a small school desk, pencil cases, a green chamber pot, a little bicycle with training wheels … He can blather on all he wants with his filthy curses. I nod at him once in a while. Even twenty notebooks would not suffice. This place contains an entire museum of childhood—or perhaps the museum of one child. Rubber fins and swim goggles, wool teddy bears, furry lions and tigers—
He’s stopped talking. He
peers over his glasses at me. He might suspect something. A little accordion, backpack, tin soldiers, paintbrushes, not good, I am disquieted, those bloodshot eyes. I’ll stop soon. Hey, board games! Beloved Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders, decks of cards, props for the budding magician, Boy Scout uniform, goody bags from birthday parties, bow and arrow—how can you even breathe in this room?
CENTAUR: You can’t. And now, if you value your life, hireling, get lost and don’t come back. Off you go! Pronto!
TOWN CHRONICLER: Picture albums, masks, toy gun, pacifiers, whistles, flashlight—
CENTAUR: Scram, you leech! Otherwise I’ll come out to you—
WOMAN WHO STAYED AT HOME:
Five years after my son
died, his father went out
to meet him.
I did not go with him.
I did not go. I did not go so much
that I foundered. I sat
cross-legged, displaced. I listened
to a voice that reached me
from afar: he
walks, he walks. I did
not go.
I did not.
Not
there.
My heart beat:
he walks. My blood
pounded: he walks.
Spoons and forks clattered, mirrors
glittered, signaled: see
him, see him, day and night, he
walks. I would go with him
to the end
of the world. Not there,
not
there.
DUKE:
… he might be an insurgent; I am
uncertain. My scouts say
he poses a danger:
the coolness of the unruly, of a
stubborn, wayward man.
But his eyes—they report—
shine with the pale blue light
of a child’s gaze.
MIDWIFE:
You will n-n-never know,
my d-d-daughter, that every man
is an island,
that you c-c-cannot know another
from within. A son’s own
mother cannot
be him, even for an instant,
cannot sustain
him, self-sustain herself
in him—
TOWN CHRONICLER: The town streets are thick with fog. The midwife is at her window, her eyes on the hills, her lips almost kissing the pane as she whispers feverishly. Fragmented vapors appear on the glass like hieroglyphics and quickly vanish, sometimes before I can write them down. From my post—this time behind the crumbling well in the yard—I notice her husband sitting on his stool, watching her longingly, hammer in hand.
MIDWIFE:
Nor will m-m-my self adhere
to your self any longer,
nor will my self
to myself adhere. It has all come apart. They say
there are things in the world. They say things
are c-c-connected. I look in the f-f-faces
of those who say, and see
holes
and crumbs,
specks
of limbs.
CENTAUR: He keeps stepping on the leaves in my mind, trampling them, day and night, always the same rhythm, never changing, fifteen years it’s been, since then, even when I sleep, when I shit, yes, write that down, it should be written somewhere, and there are whispers, too, all the time, like this: Hmmm … hmmm … And then he lunges like a swarm of wasps, buzzzzzzzz, drilling through my brain: it happened, it happened, it happened to him, it’s forever, it’s forever, and he won’t, he’ll never—
Ummm, look, lackey, this is just inside me, right? You can’t hear it, can you?
TOWN CHRONICLER: After I left him this evening, I turned around for another glance or two. His large, pale face in the window grew gloomier as I walked away. His long eyelashes moved with incredible slowness. A slim band of light suddenly glowed from the lakeside and quivered over the dark sky. I ran to see—
WOMAN IN NET:
Two human specks,
a mother and her child,
we glided through the world
for six whole years,
which were unto me
but a few days,
and we were
a nursery rhyme,
threaded with tales
and miracles—
Until ever so lightly,
a breeze
a breath
a flutter
a zephyr
rustled
the leaves—
And sealed our fates:
you here,
he there,
over and done with,
shattered
to pieces.
TOWN CHRONICLER: Now she notices me and falls silent. The entire pier lies between us, but she reaches out as though I were standing right beside her.
WOMAN IN NET:
I was cut
with scissors
from the picture,
solitary ice
of absence
came to singe
my limbs.
I was touched,
I was blighted
by the frost
of randomness.
TOWN CHRONICLER: She forcibly shuts her mouth with both hands. Her great black eyes fill with terror. If you ask me, Your Highness, the poor woman has not the slightest comprehension of the words that leave her lips! Incidentally, I think she truly believes that if I only came and touched her, this false spell would be lifted. But it has been almost thirteen years since I touched another person. Now I must hurry, Your Honor: it is almost midnight, and I cannot be late for my wife.
TOWN CHRONICLER’S WIFE:
A clear corpuscle
glowed inside me, a golden
granule gleamed. I knew that
it was me, my soul,
my core, it was the purpose
of my being. Born
with me, I thought, and so
would die with me—
I did not know that I might live
long after it, that I would be
diaspora,
deciduous.
A liar, too—
the kind who easily,
no eyelid batted,
dared to speak of:
me.
WOMAN WHO STAYED AT HOME:
I sank my teeth
into my flesh. I did not
go. I dwindled
like a candle.
Only he still lay
awake in me: now seeing,
now remembering, now crossing
through a hell. Now quiet
with his son. Or
laughing. Tasting
crumbs of happiness
with him—
Do not breathe,
or think
of what he sees, what he recalls,
what ails
his heart—wounded inside him.
Inside me
an extinguished eye lit up,
the eye of a half-devoured beast
in its predator’s mouth.
What does he see
there, I asked, I screamed, I slammed
my head against the wall, and how
swept up, how peeled away, and how
far has he gone
toward the darkness?
WALKING MAN:
I seem to understand
only things
inside time. People,
for example, or thoughts, or sorrow,
joy, horses, dogs,
words, love. Things that grow
old, that renew,
that change. The way I miss you
is trapped in time as well. Grief
ages with the years, and there are days
when it is new, fresh.
So, too, the fury at all that was robbed
from you. But you are
no longer.
You are outside
of time.
How
can I explain
to you, for even the reason is
captured in time. A man from far away
once told me that in his language
they say of one who dies in war,
he “fell.”
And that is you: fallen
out of time,
while the time
in which I abide
passes you by:
a figure
on a pier,
alone,
on a night
whose blackness
has seeped wholly out.
I see you
but I do not touch.
I do not feel you
with my probes of time.
CENTAUR: Take you, for example, Town Chronicler, or whatever it is you call yourself. You’re a real sight for sore eyes, you are. Get a load of that bowler hat, boss! And the tie, and the satchel, and the pencil mustache—mwah! It’s just a shame you look so bedraggled and filthy, like some kind of tramp. And also—I’m sorry—but you reek like a fresh pile of droppings. Other than that, though—
All right, all right, no need to get in a huff! What are you talking about? Insulting a civil servant? Hah! Lighten up, pencil pusher, I’m just joking around. Besides, you should know that it’s all from jealousy. Yes, write that down in the biggest letters you can make: The centaur is jealous of the clerk!
No, you tell me: Isn’t it incredibly fortunate that you, as part of your job, and undoubtedly in return for a handsome salary, can spend as much time as you want peering into other people’s hells, without dipping so much as your pale little pinkie inside them? Think about it! What could be more titillating than someone else’s hell? And besides, I’m sure you’ll agree that secondhand pain is far better than firsthand. Healthier for the user and also more “artistic” in the sublime—I mean, the castrated—sense of the word. Take you, for example: it’s been at least a week now since you’ve been coming here, just by chance, walking past my window three or four times a day—yesterday it was five, but who’s counting—hurrying about your business, lost in thought, when suddenly: Bam! A screeching halt! A surprised blink! What do we have here? Why, it’s a centaur! And a bereaved one, at that! Two for the price of one! I’d better quickly put on an expression of tender sorrow and commiseration, and in a flash I’ll dip my silver-plated quill in its black ink, and one-two-three, I’ll ask about the son, ask about the son, ask about the son! And if the subject’s answers are not satisfactory, I won’t give up, no, I won’t give up, I’ll come back in an hour or two, and tomorrow morning again, and I’ll ask about the son again, and I won’t relent even if the subject grits his teeth and bites his tongue until it hurts, and please tell me what he was like as a baby, what he liked to eat, what he built with Legos, which lullabies you sang to him … Well, listen up, you black-inked tick: even the inquisition’s tax assessors didn’t torture people like this! And then all of a sudden, psshh! The town clock strikes, ding-dong, see you later, thank you very much, it’s been a pleasure, the quill goes back in its case, the notebook in its folder, and the pencil pusher is on his way home, open parenthesis, what does he care that I’m sitting here bleeding, ripped apart, slaughtered to pieces, close parenthesis, clerko hums a happy tune and ponders the leg of lamb waiting for him in the oven, and probably the legs of some lady or other … What? Hey? Did I grab you by the what’s-it or didn’t I?