by n a bourke

 

The voice of the past is always the voice of an oracle;
only if you are architects of the future and are familiar
with the present will you understand the oracular
voice of the past.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche ~

 

 

If I were human I would weep.

If I were a goddess, I would step over the railing and into the ocean. I would wade, hip-deep, through the water. Terrible and tall, my hair flaming behind me, my skirts awash with blood and churn. My eyes burning through the dark like the lamps of twin lighthouses. I would tether the ship to my shoulders with steel reins, and haul her into port. I would drag the ship onto the stony sand, beach her there and thunder up the cliffs to the city. I would stand at the gate and sing a note so true the great stones of the walls would shudder in their footings. The wood of the gates would split, their hinges would shatter in their locks. I would make the walls of Lisbon fall. I would walk through the ruined gates of the city and I would find her. I would lift her from a cradle of rubble, feel her arms slip around my neck, the bird-weight of her head resting on my chest.
If I were a goddess, I would step into the ruined city and gather her home.

Instead, I am standing at the prow as the ship sloops forward, splitting the waves in a gentle, too-slow quietude. I will her turbines to turn faster. I watch the captain in his lamplit cabin, sipping tea at the window. I want to murder his calm. My heart rams against my ribs, threatening to break through the fragile film of skin. Faster. Faster. I will the world to turn.I watch the ocean lull, the stars twinkling, the moon gawping. Somewhere in the distance they are moving away from us. Racing across the ocean, through the streets of the city, through the fields that surround it. Out and out to the furthest rim. They are carrying her into places a child should never see. Never know. They are holding her close, whispering terrible things into the pink shell of her ear. Somewhere, out there in the dark, they are making her turn away from us.

I can see the lights of the harbour. I am sure I can see them, in the thick fold of darkness between sky and sea. The wink of a candle in the harbourmaster's home. The flash of a torch on the docks. I can smell the cut tulips lined up on the docks in heavy buckets, their heads lolling against each other. I can hear the traders and the early risers bartering for the best, the darkest, the heaviest blooms. Tomorrow is the festival of light.  Every man, woman and child in the city will already have folded a tiny wax-paper tulip and set a luxe – a red or pink candle – inside it. At midnight they will converge on the shore and set their paper tulips adrift. The soft glow, the jostle of them on the waves, will make the harbour seem like an inverted sky strewn with stars, flickering and drowning.

We are pulling forward. I can see already the faint glow of the bonfire – Beatrice's fire – above the city. I can smell the houses with their wide, wooden shutters thrown open to greet the day: the redolence of cool sweat and bitter fruits, warm oils and dark timbers. The green of the tulips in their buckets and vases, and the soft, waxy heat of the candles. By morning we will pull into port, and our search will begin again. We will move through the streets like tourists, pretending leisure. We will buy tulips, take off our shoes and walk up the hill to crouch beside the softly-glowing bank of coals that is all that will remain of the bonfire. We will toss our heavy-headed blooms into the ash and turn away, scanning the faces of the crowd. Watching for a look, a nod, a gesture half-concealed. A flash of recognition, of hope. Something. Anything that will lead us to her.

It will be strange to walk through the city again, out into the fields that surround it; I am sure it is much changed since I last saw it. They say the Penitents have made terrible changes, that the people are afraid. They say the streets are vigilant. These things have become both commonplace and incomprehensible, I know, but still when we slip into port I want to believe I will see the old world. The world I once knew and loved so well. I want to believe this ship has sailed backwards through time as well as space, bringing us to the cities of memory, the cities of my dreams. The cities in which Perdita waits, her hands cupped around a perfectly-folded wax-paper tulip, its tips sharp and white, the light of the candle within it reflecting up onto her face.

Does it surprise you that I dream? That memories wash over me untrammelled when I turn away from life? Such a cacophony of regrets, of horrors that refuse to fade, and yet the past frightens me far less than the future. What if Perdita is truly gone, broken open, torn apart, passed into the suck and swell of time without us?

Margause is making her way towards me – she sways unsteadily, gripping the rails and hitching her skirts as the deck rolls beneath her feet. She makes quite a comic spectacle, not least because her face is tinged a peculiar shade of green beneath her fashionable new hat. Much as the sight of her fills me with nostalgia and tenderness, it is a tenderness filled largely with regret that she is not her mother's daughter – nor her grandmother's or great-grandmother's – in anything save name and a few quaint affectations of the flesh. Those times have passed. History has closed her doors upon us. We rarely talk, as she sits beside me in our cabin. The hours fill up with silence as she pores over my Manuals and Histories. What can she hope to find there that I could not tell her? This is not a time to look for answers in the past. The Penitents and their false Wynder have betrayed us; the future beckons with an ill-made hand.

She is almost upon me. I must close soon enough. I see she has brought my wrap up onto the deck, although she undoubtedly aims to convince me to come in out of the weather. How she fusses over the stray grains of salt that worry their way beneath my surface! I am eroding, she claims, sanded down by the winds of the great Atlantic Ocean, and it is her burden to fight against this terrible erosion, just as the Oikos fight against the tide of my gifts: of knowledge, science, the transformation of bodies. Here, so far away from you, from home, their struggles and ours seem not so different, after all. We are all working towards a utopia we cannot truly imagine. We are all striving for immortality, for comfort and enduring love. Though they are right, also, to fear the future we may build.

'There you are,' Margause sighs, as she falls into a chair beside me. 'I've been looking everywhere for you. Why must you sit out here? The breeze is stiff enough to whip cream. I've brought your wrap and a hat, so the salt will not get into your skin.'

She presses the items into my lap, and I happily arrange the wrap around my shoulders, but this other thing – this hat as she calls it – seems more like an apiarist's defence, covered in a fine veil of dark cloth.
'It would save me hours of repairs and cleaning,' she says.

I take the hat and crush it in my lap, feeling the brittle straw snap between my fingers. We watch the sky and the ocean. There are few birds and even fewer clouds. Occasionally, the sound of a small child's laughter comes to me from the foredecks, its voice strewn on the air as if broken into pieces by the wind. Eventually, somebody brings tea and Margause sips at it disinterestedly, preferring to hold the warmed cup in her hands for comfort. The brisk air does her good, though she would loathe admit it. At least her colour seems a little restored by the time my chronometer chimes. 'It's time,' she says, and we both rise. I hold her arm to steady her as we make our way along the deck. She is light, though she leans heavily upon me.
I am glad it is not you, my love, who leans upon me as we make this journey. I do not know what I will find at its end, what lies and dissimulation. What horrors. Who knows what I may be forced to do, what I may find it necessary to become, in order to bring Perdita home. I steel myself against the ache your absence generates. This is no time for love or longing. Instead, I must become what I am: hollow, unrelenting, a machine. I must have the pitiless will of the huntress if I am to bring her home and place her, once again, in the circle of your arms.

I have known loss for centuries. I have borne the deaths of each of my companions, both dear and tolerated. I have lost families, loves, houses, villages. Whole cities, whole nations, have grown and decayed while I have persisted. I have seen rivers change their course, mountains beaten down into hills, oceans swell and subside, seeds grow into great trees only to fall and die and rot. And yet this loss – the loss of one child – this loss I cannot bear. Not again.

Margause lies sleeping on the narrow bed of our cabin, trying to recover from the sickness that overwhelms her body when we travel by ship. I often wonder what it would be like to feel ill, for the body to rebel so completely. In the Silent years, when I remained alone and damaged for so long, I was merely immobile and quiet. I did not quiver or despair. As the accoutrements of my civilised surface decayed or were carried off, the metallic hoops  and shelves beneath became a haven for small colonies of mice and insects. I had the odd sensation, while they fretted and died within me, of being almost alive.

I sit at the window, listening to Margause sleep, to the fragile murmur of men and women sleeping in the cabins beside and below us. They shift and turn and murmur, dreaming of the past, of their homes, of the future we have yet to meet. They turn to each other in the slim cots, even in sleep, offering their warmth to each other. At night, when you slept beside me, I would watch you shift and twitch, watch the soft pucker of your brow, the movements of your hands across the sheets, feel you curl around me and wonder if you knew, in your dream, who it was you held. I would lie facing you, watching your mouth move, watching your eyes shift beneath the lids to follow some unknowable fall of snow or leaf or hair. I was filled with a hollow ache, watching you walk in the city of your dreams, knowing I would never feel those streets beneath my feet, never know the beauty towards which you turned and smiled with such quietude, such love.

Outside there is only ocean as far as I can see, barely illuminated by a sprinkling of stars and a weak, thin moon. I unloop the chronometer from my waist and spread it out on the desk. The long chain, the heavy timepiece at its end, the orbs that mark out the centuries of my life. One for each miracle, each wittling at the truth.

History is a fickle mistress, Henri. She will not love you as you love her: she will not open her heart and pour forth her secrets, no matter how willingly you prostrate yourself at her feet. She is mute, and capricious. She turns and turns and turns again. You can never hold her, never truly see her face. Do you remember the old story of the boy at the well, who must rescue his love by holding her throughout the night, as her form shifted from one horror to another? By morning she was her true self, and he took her home. His persistence was rewarded, as yours will never be. History is like the dream of a stranger who wakes and tells you of oceans deeper than time, of creatures he cannot describe, of tastes and smells and textures he has never known in his waking life, of cities without streets, cities without walls. You can listen to the tale of what he saw, but you cannot walk through the streets of his dream or hold in your hand the blossom of a dying tree that smells like burnt cinnamon, like a sleeping child's breath, like the last light of a beautiful day. Words fail us all, in the end.

Nevertheless, in the dark of the cabin, with the sea curling and shushing beneath me and the stars burning silently above, I have a little time to spare and I have promised you this much. I will try, Henri, to parcel up the past and make a gift of it for you. The only gift that is truly mine to give. I will tell you my story.
But where does the past begin, and how am I to make sense of so much time, so much life rising up and falling away? So much awful, urgent life rotting in the earth at our feet. Each truth I tell conceals another thousand left unspoken, unremembered. If I leave out the weather, the light, that is one thing - the Obanites rarely record the harvests and storms of the past - but in order to make sense of history I must select names, faces, incidents, plucking them from the whirl like a child scooping tadpoles from a river. So many slip through my fingers. Who can say which omissions are cruel and which are necessary.

You must remember, Henri – try to hold it always between yourself and this tale, like a glass through which you read each word – that for every moment I remember, there may be another that has been cut away, or blown clear. Another that Eloise or Montane or even Margause have wiped from me, either intentionally or accidentally. Once my hair was a sheath of silk, once my throat was a sheer brass column, my eyes green as leaves. Once my belled skirts concealed  the series of wheels, the cogs, upon which I turned. Once my hands were like mittens, unfingered. Once, I had a belly etched with stars, but now it is smooth and unmarked. The sky was erased and I have been remade. Again and again. I am far from whole, far from constant. My body has a history as shifting as your own. So, too, the clockwork chambers of my interior. How can I know what I have forgotten? How can I know what wheel of history has rusted away or was simply lost, one night, as we crossed an open field? What memories were spooled in springs that have long since rusted away?

I am not a woman, or a tale or a tree, although I am not so complete or actual as some suppose. Once I thought of myself as being like an antique cabinet, full of drawers both hidden and apparent. A riddle of interiors. Eloise – one of those long-dead Eloise's I have loved – once attempted a catalogue of my interior: a kind of map. It grew and grew as she pursued it, spilling out over her desk. The map became like a city laid out in white squares, within which I was folded. Here, she said, is the avenue of your contentment. Here the rue de pommes. Here is the flood, the the drift, the dream. Here, she would say, beneath the heart, here are the ruins of the city you once were. Here are the arrowheads of an old battle, the bones of dead birds. A ruined chapel, an empty clock.

The map grew larger, more complex. It had no centre, no edge. Eloise pinned these great sheets to the walls of her home and worked up on them as she stood, as though they were a mural. She folded others into thick accordions and piled them up beneath her bed or stacked them on the table. She worked on them so often they began to fall apart along the folds. She forgot which piece joined to each other. It became a kind of puzzle: a rebus none of us could read.

As a child her daughter built tents from the great sheets, folding them up into cones, or draping them over chairs so she and her dolls could sit within them. As she grew older, and the map spread out, growing ever larger and more mysterious, the daughter came to see the whole enterprise as a kind of madness. When the mapmaker died it took ten days to parcel up the work she had done: she was buried within its folds. Her daughter retained a single folio of this once-great translation of my makings and hung it on the wall of her room, beside the window. Neither of us knew what aspect this extracted relic represented: a roughened edge of thick paper, convergence of blue and green lines – rivers, roads, perhaps the roots of a field of grass – converge in the lower-left of the sheet, near a tiny, dark circle and a cross, or perhaps it is a blade.
This much I have to tell: the ruin of a map. The rest is lost, or meaningless as clouds.

You cannot trust this tale, though I am the only one left to tell it. You cannot and should not trust me, Henri, we both know that. I am an inexpert carpenter whose timbers are warped, whose hands are rough with age, whose tools are blunt and imprecise, though I will make the tale as true as I can.

I unclip my chronometer from about my waist and spool it on the table. Laid out like this, with the chain of orbs spiralling around the timepiece, it looks like an antique map of heaven: seven planets circling a clockwork sun, each equal in weight and girth, each etched with the symbol of a miracle. The timepiece at its end has an overlapping set of four silver moons that fold over the face. Unfolded they form a cradle of horned petals around its edge. It is engraved on the back with dragonflies and apple-blossoms, though the pattern is now worn smooth with age. The seven stones anchored evenly along the chain are milky jade, each carved with the symbol of a miracle: an open eye, a teardrop, a tulip, a quill. The third stone, which marks the Miracle of Silence, is smooth and blank-faced.

Each morning, in the Haven of your home town, the Penitents take turns to chant the hours, measuring out the cycle of the year, the turn of centuries. It begins at midnight, in the centre of the hall, as it does in every Haven. A single Penitent unhooks a chronometer from around her waist and stops time. Her fingers slide along the chain to the first orb, with its etching of an open eye that looks like a half-furled leaf. She holds it in the closed fist of her left hand, closes her eyes, feels the weights within the stone shift. Soon darknight - the suspended breath of time between time - will end, and she will open her eyes.

That is when I will begin, too, with the first orb: with the opening of an eye.

 

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Perilous Adventures in Olvar Wood. Queensland, Australia