The saskiad, p.4
The Saskiad, page 4
Jane is not scornful. She actually seems to take Saskia's opinions seriously. "I know. But I'm hooked. I'm terrible!" At least she is not as hooked as Jo, for whom the butt is as permanent a part of her face as her mouth is. Saskia has imagined that if you slid the cigarette out from between Jo's lips, it would turn out to be a cotter pin and Jo's jaw would fall off. Jane has also smoked hemp, as she has casually mentioned a couple of times. Fortunately, none of that has materialized yet in Saskia's presence. Let's face it, hemp makes you kind of stupid. Lauren and Bluffaroo pass a joint around sometimes after dinner, and the next thing you know they're giggling because one of them knocked a glass over, hyuck hyuck.
But the first time Jane comes to White-on-the-Water is right after school, so Lauren is in her plant-master mode. Saskia is proud of her as she turns, tall, capable, from the stretch and bend of aphid spraying (naturally, something natural, a vegetable soap), to say hello. Bluffaroo and Jo are nowhere to be seen. "Both trailers are off limits," Saskia explains. "Major leprosy colonies." The soap dissolves the soft-bodied aphids, like sulfuric acid.
Saskia brings down Lauren's sewing basket, and out of it come bolts of brilliant damask, sumptuous brocade, cloth-of-gold. The bolts are laid out on the kitchen's scarred wooden table and arranged in a manner pleasing to the eye. The spice jars in the rack over the stove yield galingale, spikenard, cubeb. The clamor of the market — the sellers hawking wares, the caged chickens squawking, the wooden wheels rumbling over the stones — is nearly deafening. A score of languages are spoken within earshot, every color of skin can be seen. The Wanderer herself is a striking pale gold. She reads off the words chalked on the shoulders of the jugs beneath a table: "Date wine. Rice wine. Ai, and palm wine, too!" She rocks out the stained bung and breathes deeply of the heady fumes. "I haven't had so much as a horn of decent palm wine in months!"
It has been a long journey for the Wanderer, from Kubilai Khan's capital through jungles and deserts, from one wretched village to the next. But here at last is a fine town, bustling with sellers of rich goods in every street. The Wanderer lingers in the striped shade of this awning because the merchant is comely, with a lively eye. Judging from her duskiness, this town must be south of Cathay. Ai, but it is good to look upon such a maiden after so many months of sleeping under the stars, wrapped in one's cloak against the mountain frost!
"As-salaam aleikum," the maiden says, bowing her head gracefully.
The Saracen tongue? The maiden must be a worshiper of Mahomet. But not wearing the veil. A tart? Curiouser and curiouser. "Aleikum as-salaam," the Wanderer responds.
The merchant maiden continues in the trade language of the area. "I think you'll find these cloths to be of very high quality, sir." Where has this golden Wanderer come from, the dark maid must be wondering. What lonely roads has she walked and what evil things seen? The pain of the world is in her eyes. Alas, it is the lot of the Wanderer to leave a trail of broken hearts.
With a connoisseur's touch, she runs her fingers over the cloths. She slides the silk tinglingly along her arms. She rubs the coarse buckram against her cheeks. "Mmm. That's fine fustian." The ripple of twill, the ridge of wale, the tickling grassy yield of nap. Soon the merchant maid is picking up the bolts after the Wanderer and holding them to her own cheeks.
"And what might you be buying, good sir?" the maiden asks at length.
"Some of everything, perhaps." The Wanderer smiles charmingly. "Or nothing, perhaps. I might buy you out, or I might leave you with all your goods and not a bezant of mine." One must keep them guessing or they will steal you blind. Marco taught her that.
The maiden's eyes flash — a fiery one! — as she counters, slim dark arms on hips, "You'll find no better wares than these in all of Arianmariandishdashdale."
The Wanderer falters. Arian— ? She pushes away the thought that it is an improbable name. Southern India, perhaps. Some of the names there are absurdly long. But the people of India go naked, and this maiden, alas, is modestly attired. "I meant no offense." What are a few bezants compared with such beauty? "On my soul, I will buy it all!" If Marco were here he would be bouncing a palm off his forehead and bellowing, "Stop! Stop!" Marco is a trader first, a practical man, ever despairing of his impetuous disciple. "My name is Aiyaruk. What is yours, pray?" The dark maiden hesitates. "You do not trust me with it?"
"I'm thinking. My name is Al-Embroidia Al-Fastansia Al-Maram-mjibwa!"
Well! Quite a name. Aiyaruk must admit it is impressive. But perhaps too impressive. Perhaps it is rather pretentious, non? The maiden rushes on, "And I am the daughter of the queen!"
"No you're not." There are no queens in the Khan's empire. Everyone knows that.
"I am too. You must obey me."
Things have taken a wholly improper turn. Aiyaruk draws herself to her full height: "I am a disciple of the far-famed Marco Polo. I obey no one but my master." The maiden also draws herself up, and Aiyaruk finds herself farther below than ever. Unfair to take advantage of Aiyaruk's size! Uncalled for! Aiyaruk's voice drips with sarcasm: "And anyway, what is the daughter of the queen doing selling wares in the streets of Arianmarianwhatever?"
"I'm standing in for my slave. He had to go to the bathroom." A brazen lie! And yet. . . there has been a slave underfoot for the last minute or so. Insolently fingering the bolts of cloth and asking impudent questions, he looks an unhealthy young dreg, besnotted and beslobbered. "This must be your slave," she exclaims, grabbing the boy roughly by the arm.
"Yes, that's him. Hand him over."
"The daughter of the queen, and all you can afford is this disgusting thing?" The slave is whining. Aiyaruk boxes his ears and he runs away wailing.
"That wasn't really my slave," the maiden says haughtily. "My slave is still in the bathroom."
Aiyaruk sniffs. "You're just embarrassed to admit it." "Why is Quinny so upset?"
Lauren is standing in the doorway, a hand cupping the head pressed gooily into her hip. Saskia and Jane trade a glance. They understand each other without a word or a wink. "I don't know," Saskia says, puzzled.
"I don't either," adds Jane. They shrug.
Lauren is exasperated. "I don't understand half the time what his problem is. I want you to include him in what you're doing, Saskia. You're good with him." "Sure." "You're a good girl."
Saskia winces. "As-salaam yoorwelkum."
"Hm?"
"Never mind."
"Well excuse me, Miss Temper."
Go stick your head in the compost heap. "Come here, Quinny." He transfers his clutch readily to her. He never blames anyone, he only wails for comfort and accepts it from any quarter. Saskia will be nice to him for a while.
"You girls will have to get this stuff off the table," Lauren says. "Dinner will be early. I'm working down at the cafe tonight."
"Yeah, yeah, OK."
Lauren heads out to the greenhouse. Jo calls this "mowing the grass for dinner," and breaks into her wheezing laugh. Jane offers a handful of cubebs to Quinny, assuring him they're sweet. He spits them out, coughing and sneezing. "As-salaam howdyoulikem?" Jane asks, and she and Saskia have a very nice laugh together.
4
Lauren works hard. Spring, summer, and fall she's at it all day in the field and greenhouse. In winter she still has the greenhouse, and her waiting job in Ithaca, and at the winter solstice there are the Scotch pines to cut and sell on top of everything else. "You get the whole summer off from school," she says to Saskia. "What about me?" Saskia hangs her head. "I need some time for myself."
That's only fair. After dinner she disappears up to her room to meditate, and after meditating she climbs into her brass bed — as high as a table, as wide as the barn door, as massive and firm as Earth herself—and reads, mostly books about meditation. "I am at the beginning of the greatest journey," she has said to Saskia. "I am only now learning what it is I truly want."
In the ample bosom of that brass bed she sleeps soundly. She never wakes when Mim has a nightmare or Quinny starts blubbering and has to be taken to the bathroom. The bed was the first piece of furniture Lauren and Thomas bought for the house, Lauren said. They found it at an estate sale for a dead giant, and it took six men to lift it into Betsy. They had to take out the door frame to get the bed into the bedroom. Then they didn't put pads underneath it, and over the years the feet dug deeply into the softwood planks.
Once every couple of months Lauren goes to a meditation retreat for three or four days and that is when Saskia really appreciates how hard she works the rest of the time, because Saskia is almost run off her feet following the farming instructions she leaves behind. The astrology group meetings aren't as bad, because they last only a day. The members get together on a farm on the next lake over, to cast horoscopes, or something like that, and talk about their swami, who died two years ago. This is not Truth, the Godhead guru, but someone later, named Baba Yogi. Lauren has his picture by her bed: he looks pretty gentle, actually kind of simple-minded, with milk-blue eyes and a triangle of white hair on his lower lip. Saskia never saw him in real life. She couldn't go to the astrology group because she had the crew to take care of. The group is now publishing eight volumes of aphorisms that the leader left behind, scribbled on little pieces of paper. Lauren says they are gentle and profound and above all playful, in a saintly, all-knowing, bodhisattva-ish way.
When Lauren is reading in bed instead of meditating it's all right to come in and say good night. Saskia loves the way she looks at these moments, so hoogily in a cone of lamplight, her ton of hair unbound, her pillows piled around her. She has a wide face with almond eyes and cheeks so well defined they look glued on. It's not a mobile face. In fact it's rather mask-like, which is why you have to be so careful with her. Whether that mask is inborn or learned Saskia doesn't know, she has no other relatives to compare it with. Lauren never talks about her family. It's as though she never had one, as though she sprang out of someone's head fully formed.
Her reading glasses are as big and round as two full Moons, and the eyes behind each seem as calm as the Sea of Tranquillity. The book she is holding might be Being Peace or Be Here Now. Saskia will linger at the door, and Lauren will look up and slowly, deliberately close the book on a finger and lower it to her lap. In the evening after meditating or for days after a retreat Lauren does everything this way, one thing at a time, with a concentration so steady and slow it seems to ooze from her like molasses to coat the object of her attention.
It often seems that Lauren's present is not instantaneous but infinite, leaving no room for past or future. Years ago there was a pendulum wall clock in the kitchen with an uneven tick that sounded like a peg-legged captain limping. When Lauren first looked at it each morning, she would reach up and move the minute hand backward or forward five, ten minutes. That was Lauren's power, young Saskia imagined: the very fabric of time slid tinglingly past faster or slower as Lauren oozed faster or slower along the infinite line of her present. The clock had to be adjusted to fit the day Lauren was making.
Sometimes after Lauren lowers her book and gazes at Saskia, instead of saying good night she will ask if Saskia wants to brush her hair. Mim's hair is thick, burnt umber, pert, hey-you-guys hair. Jane's hair is elegant, gleaming, ruler-straight, obsidian. But Lauren's hair, one must concede, sweeps all before it. As long as Jane's, as bushy as Mim's, and of a color indescribable even for Saskia, who knows all the color words. It might crudely be called auburn, but it has claims on copper and bronze and a faintly pink rust, and it hints in some lights at things more exotic, like cinnabar and peach. When you sink your hand into it you imagine you will draw it back out swirled in hues like an Easter egg.
Lauren puts down her book, rises regally from her brass bed to put on an Indian robe and settle into a chair. She gathers the mass like a pile of autumn leaves and deposits it in back, where it hangs almost to the floor. A tapestry of hair, before which you ought to bow down and worship. The first touch! It feels like wool, like a light electric current. Saskia pats it down and it bounces back, she clumps it in her hands, she fluffs it, she runs her hands through it, her fingers parted like fork tines. She reaches in deeper, finds her way elbow-deep to
Lauren's large head and massages her scalp and temples. Lauren sighs. "Why don't we do this every night?" Wlhy don't they? Only Lauren can answer that.
Lauren's hairbrush fits coolly into Saskia's hand. She brushes back from Lauren's forehead. Lauren says, "Harder." As Saskia brushes farther back she steps away from the chair and lifts the hair so that it becomes a costly fabric on a loom that Saskia must stretch herself across. Fine silver threads are woven into it. Lauren wants Saskia to pull them out. The hair grows silkier in her hands, a deep shine developing. "You're strong," Lauren says. Saskia proudly brushes harder.
When Lauren climbs back into bed, Saskia would like nothing better than to climb in with her. Not to be with Lauren — that would be babyish — but to swaddle herself in that buffed, miraculous hair, wind herself in it like a caterpillar in its cocoon. She might wake up a butterfly. They say good night. Lauren turns out her light and falls into the dreamless sleep of the well-brushed.
How painful to compare Saskia's hair! Its color is also indescribable. It was once your garden-variety blond, nothing to write home about, but respectable. Then, around the time the mushy pink blobs came, it began to darken, the way cheap varnish darkens and clouds. Saskia ruefully calls it "blondish."
"Reminiscent of blond," Jane says kindly. "An allusion to blond," Saskia says. "Blondesque," Jane says, inspired.
But the color is the least of her problems. It has of course not escaped Saskia's notice in her wide reading that heroines — that is, genuinely intelligent, valiant, resourceful ones like Joan of Arc, not repulsive, sickly sweet, goody two-shoes ones like Little Dorrit — are few and far between. And among the few that exist, one trait is constant. They might be tall or short, beautiful or plain, but they always have thick hair. Thick hair is the mark of character, of spunk. It is the enhancement of beauty, or the solid compensation for plainness. What can it mean when you are both plain and thin-haired? Will you never be the heroine of your own story?
Lauren has two friends. One of them heads another ex-commune, with a water hole everyone goes swimming in during the summer. The other is a dancer and teaches at an alternative school in sunny Ithaca. All three of them are tall and beautiful. They form an equilateral triangle: perfect, no weak spots. All three have abundant hair, the ticket into the club. Lauren braids her hair into a rope that would dock an ocean liner, and the three of them stride out, laughing, for an evening on the town. Men drool after them slavishly. Goddesses, with goddesses' rights, they use men according to their pleasure. "Chew'em up," Saskia says. "And spit'em out!" Jane crows.
Saskia locks herself in the bathroom and drapes a towel over her wispy blondesque head. Studying herself in the mirror, saying, "Oh yes blah blah blah," she practices ducking her forehead to make the ends of the towel slip forward over her shoulders, then flipping the two ends back with a nonchalant motion of her hands. It feels so good she could cry.
5
Thus am I half Phaiakian and half Novamundian: a daughter of both worlds, belonging in neither. The ways of the Novamundians seem dull and crude to me and yet I would not be at home in Phaiakia, either, because I do not speak Phaiakian. Thomas spoke Phaiakian to me when I was young, and I knew it and spoke to him in it, but I remember it no longer. I remember only that the words were gentle and soft and of a rare beauty.
Liquid sounds that floated in the middle of the mouth, not deigning to touch brute teeth, tongue, or lips. There were words that dissolved in the air like mist, words that gurgled like water going down a drain. The sentences tipped back and forth like wavelets, rocking you to sleep. A sea language.
Phaiakian has somehow faded away from Saskia, leaving behind an outline of a memory of a feeling about them, a hollow glow indicating something that she once held and carelessly lost. She once read a fantasy book in which there was talk of an Old Speech, a magical language that had been forgotten for eons by the race of men. In this Old Speech, all things had been called by their True Names, and if one knew the True Name of a thing, then one knew the thing itself, one knew its nature. Bits of the Old Speech were remembered by certain wizards, wise and good men. Saskia hopes someday to find the Master who will not teach her so much as remind her of what she once has known, who will lead her back to her true lost self.
Whenever the Saskiad is sung by the bard in the feasting halls, it is interrupted at this point by the listeners, who demand to know: How did Thomas the Phaiakian meet Lauren the Novamundian?
Therefore will I explain: When Lauren was just entering folk-senhood, she came as a disciple to Huge Red, the famed citadel of higher learning that looks down from its promontory onto sunny Ithaca. She sat at the feet of the Masters and learned many things: she read the Great Books and learned the esoteric Greek System. She was quick, a delight to her Masters, and was soon to be awarded the cap and the Latin scroll that signifies an Adept.
Baccalaurei in Artibus. Ars Magisterium. Words of grandeur and power. But thanks to Tyler Junior, Saskia has only a smattering of Latin. The languages taught at Junior are Spanish (Ms. Birnbaum) and French (Mr. Hooper). In other words, none of the important languages, like Latin, Greek, Phaiakian, Mongol, Turkish, or Persian. Saskia was going to take Spanish, since the Captain is fluent in it (he was a Spanish prisoner of war for two years), but at the time when she had to make the final decision he happened to be a fugitive in Boney's France — a wonderful adventure in which he was hidden in a Loire chateau by a French nobleman with a tres belle daughter-in-law, who of course fell in love with him, as any woman must. And so the Captain was learning French, and it seemed appropriate that his Lieutenant would learn it with him. Unfortunately, the Captain became fluent within thirty pages, leaving his Lieutenant behind, and the tres belle daughter-in-law, in the person of Mim, seemed to know no French at all. But it was too late: Saskia was stuck reading crushingly boring schoolbook stuff about a couple of drips named Didier and Marie. Monsieur Oopair is a rabbity man with red-rimmed pop eyes and halitosis who picks the remains of his breakfast out of his beard, examining each particle and then eating it. Degoutant!
