Читать книгу The Village on Horseback - Jesse Ball - Страница 35

THREE

Claus Valta

During the golden age of punishment, peasants often dreamed secretly of a brutal public death that might earn some measure of fame. The greatest of the executioners, Claus Arken Valta, was much in demand, and would tour the country with a coach and horses, sleeping each night in a golden pavilion. He wore a moustache, though it was not the style, and always bathed his hands in a bowl of milk that would be set beside his axe, or laid nearby the gibbet. He had a fine voice and could carry many a pleasant tune. Often he would sing as he went about hitching up horses for the drawing and quartering of a felon or wastrel. He took pity on everyone, and would cry if he saw a bird with a broken wing, or a three-legged dog stumbling through the crowd. At such times he was inconsolable, and would refuse to go on with the execution. Afterwards, always, he repented and would slaughter as many as nine or ten deserving souls in as many minutes. His penchant for public speaking was exceeded only by his memory for faces. “Why, haven’t I seen you before?” he would remark, as he tightened a noose around some unfortunate’s neck. Without waiting for an answer, he’d loose the trap and watch the bagheaded wretch drop to a wrenching death. He rarely let the dying have their last words before the crowd, instead gagging them, and inventing speeches which they might have said, the which he would recite to the crowd from memory. In this he was no different from other great men. What they imagine is always more palpable, more true, than anything we might wish or wish to say.

Of the Secret City

AND if on the banks of that river to which you once did go, there arose a fair city, of which you alone could know—how sad that this knowledge has eluded you, how sad that you have lived so long from home, spendthrift of your life until even this has abandoned you, even this hidden city, never seen, has faded out of possibility into such a realm as the one in which we now speak.

Parable of Life’s Wake

—A woman who has just smothered the man with whom she slept. The disarray of her clothing. Her steps, back and forth in that tiny room. Light is beginning by the window, intending to cross slowly as it always has done. If the woman were to scream, and someone, anyone, were to come to her assistance, how much could she hope for from such a person? Might they help her to hide her crime? Might they take advantage of her in this, her weakness? If she should sigh and toss her pretty head, and pass through the town in crinoline, gold glittering on her thumbs and ankles, why, who could tell her different? Who could say, “You may not do this that you have done.” For life is its own excuse, its wake the shed gray, the unbearable touch of the harshest wool.

Unnoticed Offenses

One man said: I refuse to be seen with such a person!

He spoke of you.

I wonder what you did, unknowingly, to make him hate you so. I wonder who else, unknowingly, you have made enemies of, on this and other days. And of them, who will wait in the wings of your moving theatre, trembling and grinning, anticipating a later scene or act?

To Knock at an Unknown Door

A wealthy man went walking one day, on the grounds of his great estate. He walked in familiar places, admiring first this view, then that. He ranged farther from the manse until, as the sky began to darken, he realized he was walking in a region of his lands where he had never been. Through a veil of trees, he saw a tiny cottage; in the window were lighted candles which seemed to welcome him.

Such a man, such an estate, such a cottage (near and yet impossibly removed from all else, come to only at dark and in confusion)—out of this what is possible? What is not?

The man approached the cottage and with the boldness of a landowner stamped his feet loudly upon the doorstep and knocked upon the door.

It was a moment before anything happened, but when things began, it seemed they happened all at once. The door flew open—behind it was a man, in face and manner identical to the landowner. With a sneer and a shout, he drove an iron poker straight through the wealthy man’s chest, and with a second roar withdrew it, stepping forward to catch the body as it fell. Discarding the poker, he pulled the body back into the house, drawing shut the door in one clean motion. Not even a cry had escaped the landowner’s mouth. Door shut, the cottage stood again in silence, its windows candlelit, the season pressing in on all sides. It is possible, the candles seemed to say, that a double may stay in hiding at your heel for decades, and that one day you may come upon him. A man may not resist his double.

Late in the evening, a landowner who had been out walking returned, and advanced up the tree-lined carriage drive before his elegant house. He paused repeatedly, as if to admire each thing, each object of his vision as though all were new to him. At the door he was greeted by a servant, who took his coat and led him to table, where his wife and children awaited him. Servants saw to his every need.

Mutterings

Do not come near when flood waters are rising. It was in foolishness that our hearts were overthrown, and it will be in haste that our lives end. A set of toys, laid out on some inarticulate floor, will be like causes in a causeless time. Ask why, as if in doubt. Doubt is a glorious luxury, and one upon which we base all our hopes. Upon a silver field, motley hunters have speared a boar. The composition shakes and trembles, as wind moves from object to comparison.

The Book

In the book she wrote down things that were surely true and things that were surely false. Nothing was subject to interpretation—this was the necessary wrong, with great freedom the result. She wrote, a man has hurriedly leapt from coveted position, and found surfeit of disaster, then stopped, looking out an open window to where two boys were piling rocks. Upon those of our own breath, we heap the hardest, heaviest stone. A knock came then, with a letter pushed beneath the door. She took it to the bed, and drawing her knees up to her chest, read the letter spread out before her on the bed.

My dear, my darling,

I have been told by those who now

manage my affairs, that I may never

see you again. would that it were not

so, and yet it seems maybe that we

may each accomplish what we need to

best in the other’s absence.

I remain, yours,

X

She rocked back and forth with drawn features, and sobbed once. Yet soon she was again at the window, where she wrote: Those men who are false to those they love have a hell set aside solely for their kind. In it, they must stab themselves for a glimpse of beauty, at which they expire and wake, left only to stab themselves again. With a smile, she closed the book and locked it in her desk. Then she ran nimbly to the door and down the stairs, throwing a light shawl about her slender shoulders, for the wind then came often and without warning from the north.

A Fortune

Once, a man went to a fortune-teller to have his fortune told. He went through his city to the district where such business is conducted. He crossed a small courtyard, and was admitted to her private chamber. She said, “You will die in the spring of the year, and crying of gulls will muffle voices that may come through the wall from another room.” The man was undone.

He begged of her to tell him what year it would be, yet she refused. Finally, he asked, “Is fortune-telling true? Have you told me the truth? Or do lies make your fortune?” To this she replied, “It is not not-true.

And when I lie, it is because a fortune is too grim to be told, and then it itself bears the burden of the lie.”

Thus, in the spring of each year, the man laid out his best clothing, and went about as though bereaved, and each summer, he sang and spent great sums of money, as if to do so was nothing and of no consequence.

A Man Whose

sleight of hand was so fast that even the flourished points of his tricks could not be seen. He would pull coins from behind people’s ears, but the audience would see neither the hand as it hid the coin, nor the hand as it took the coin away. His art was too great. The best of his tricks, to circle the globe in less than a second, impressed no one, as he, for reasons of his own, would always end up precisely where he had been standing before. “He’s a fraud!” they chanted. And they were right, in a way. Someone else would have had to come along and teach the audience to see, before they could ever appreciate this dancing of a human hand upon a second hand.

A Gift

A heavy wooden staff is presented as a gift. In 7 of 9 possible worlds, it is a stern staff, some length of thickly carved wood, a strength to the traveler. In the 8th world, separate, it acts and speaks upon its own, casting a moving shadow, bending its long neck beneath a canopy of leaves. We may not name it there, for there it names itself. And in the 9th, that farthest of far places?

Questions of the 9th remain unanswered, for statement there is nothing but swiftness of motion.

The Carriage Driver

In the midst of a terrible storm, a carriage comes thundering down a narrow drive, and pulls up at the entrance to a large mansion. The carriage doors are thrown open and a man with a haughty, powerful bearing exits the carriage and goes to the house. Hours pass. The storm is a brutal call from an angry host, and the tree line flails upon the near hills; the mud churns, pounded by the water’s ceaseless assault. Still the carriage driver waits, trembling. He wants to rub the horses with a soft blanket, but he cannot, for the mud about their hooves is too deep now for him to stand in. In fact, the carriage has now sunk so that only half of its wheels rise out of the mud. The horses are curiously dead, slumped in their harness, unmoving. Soon the mud will cover them. Then and only then will he knock upon the house’s great door. He will not speak when the door is answered, but will simply point, dumbfounded, at the carriage as it sinks from sight.

Three Visitors

It happened that a man returned from his day’s labor to find three young women living in his house. The first was black-haired, the second yellow-haired, and the hair of the third was scarlet. They gave him different reasons for their arrival. The first said they had been drowned in a lake by their father, who could not bear their taking lovers, and this is where they had emerged.

The second said they were tinkers, and had come to fix his pots. The third said they were commissioned by a lord to find the only honest man in Christendom. The beauty of but one of these girls would have lit the rooms of his house as by some small descended sun. The presence of three was uncanny and hardly to be borne. “I think you have come to take a husband,” said the man. And the girls laughed, and it was true that one would remain. But which? Each day, the three would tell stories, and he would guess at who was lying. And always he would catch the black-haired girl, while the others could deceive him. For her lies were grand, implausible affairs, and a signal delight. The girls slept in his bed, all three, while he laid out a mat on the kitchen floor, and wrapped himself in a single woolen blanket. Each night he would hear their murmuring, as they composed the next day’s lies. Finally, he took to writing these lies down in a leather book. For one year they stayed, and when they left all three left together, in the night. And when he looked at the book he had kept, he saw that he had only ever written down the tales the black-haired girl had told. He saw also, that he had been wrong, and that some tales he had thought false, now seemed true. A book, he thought to himself, a book of lies and truths. All equally redeeming, all damning, all brought upon us by these ghosts, our selves, and where we walk, where we have walked, where we will walk yet, guided by a chorus whose nature must always be hidden.