Rupetta, p.14
Rupetta, page 14
I nodded, thinking of the records I had seen: the simple words that marked so many cruelties, so many deaths. ‘I thought that might have been what happened at first, but the Penitents kept meticulous records. What the prisoners ate, where they were housed, what they did each hour. The women’s menstrual cycles. The words—the names—they cried out in their sleep. At the time, before all the records were released, it would have been possible to believe Mathilde had died and it had been covered up. But I’ve been through the records. I’ve spent months in those stacks reading the names of the dead and her name isn’t there. She survived, and was released. There’s a record of her release interview, of what she wore, what she carried with her when she went. They weighed her and shaved her head, took an imprint of her teeth and her fingerprints. She had lost three teeth while she’d been locked up. They were given to her, along with a paper bag with her hair in it and the shoes she had been brought in with. Gardening boots, still crusted with dirt. Two guards walked her out of the compound to the gate. One of them gave her some money. They locked the gates behind her. She just stood there, on the street outside the gate. For several hours she sat on the bench across the road. Prisoners often did. As if they no longer knew how to be in the world, where to go. When the visitors started to arrive, forming a queue that wound along beneath the shadow of the brick wall, she walked away. After that, there’s nothing; she simply disappeared.’
‘And you want to find her.’
‘She’s dead by now, of course, but yes. I want to know what happened to her.’
‘What if you can’t?’
‘I’ll find something. There’s so much material in the archive that suggests . . . something. I don’t know what. Something more than seems apparent. And so little has been written about them. As Jenon would say, history is not the discovery of truth, but the making of it. I’d like to find a truth that makes sense of Emmeline’s life, as well as Mathilde’s. They lost so much; they deserve to have their story told.’
***
When I was a child I made paper trains. I folded them out of anything I could find: my homework drafting sheets, the stacked pile of re-usable paper on my father’s desk, pages torn out of my maths workbook. I had memorised the train timetable, and knew how long it took to ride from our home to the station. Late at night, I would lie awake listening for them, hearing them come snuffling up the pass. The 9:53, I would announce to the darkness: Express to North Cove, then all stations. Passengers for Whitestone Shute should travel in the front car—the front car only—due to the short platform at the station. I would push my paper trains across the desk in my room, veering around the pencil jar in a wide scoop, and sleep with them flattened beneath my pillow. I dreamed of departure with no sense of what my destination might be.
Once, when I was very small, my father took me to the city and we spent a morning at the harbour, watching the dirigibles shift like party balloons above the bay. I watched the people drifting in and out of the departure lounges and sat contentedly for at least an hour watching the luggage carousels. Best of all were the suitcases covered in stickers. I recited the names of the places they had been—Beirut, London, Cairo, Singapore, Tokyo—and watched with wonder as their owners collected them, believing I could see the dust of distant continents in their hair, the shimmer of golden distance on their skin. I pretended to be travelling, too, waiting for my luggage with studied impatience. Occasionally, I checked my chronometer, or shook my head and grimaced at my fellow travellers. I wore my coat buttoned up to my chin, hoping to look world-weary, hoping to seem nonchalant. When my father came to collect me I saw only how ordinary he was, how homely and content. His broad hands and old boots with the scuffed toes. His good hat held gently in his hand.
I blushed and stood quietly, trying to pretend that he was my driver, come to collect me and take me to my glamorous city hotel. That my baggage had gone on ahead. That we were headed anywhere but home.
I have still made it only as far as the Bay, and those few childhood trips to Oikos Island.
On Saturday, I took Miri down to the docks and we sat in a coffee shop at the end of the pier watching the ships come in and I told her about my visit there as a child and she joined my game. We pretended to be characters from a novel—just in from the Antarctic—our bones still thawing. We huddled over our warm cups and smiled secretively at each other. The waiter brought us a menu and we studied it as though it was written in a foreign language, finally ordering a piece of orange cake, which came on a plate with the insignia of a dirigible on its rim. We ate the cake and Miri wiped the plate clean with her serviette and then slipped it into her bag.
Riding our bikes home along the river we laughed at nothing. At the buildings and lanes, at the window displays and the parking meters, at the footpaths and the sounds of strangers speaking to each other. The light fell down through the trees as though they were cathedrals, hushed and illuminated, and the water rippled against the rockwalls like a wet body. We waved to the people on the ferry, travelling home, and whirred through the park. There I was, in a foreign country after all. Smeared with happiness like a child who has filled her arms with kittens, who rolls down a hill and spins and spins until she is dizzy and tangled and skinless and bright. We lay on the grass and put our heads together and our hands up in the air and watched our fingers writhe together. Fingertip to fingertip, pressing and releasing, turning and turning. I wanted to eat her. Wanted to shell her like a pea. Find her fresh green centre. My whole body was turned inside out. I was a spilled sack of stars. I had no right to be so happy. To walk so completely out of myself and into her.
***
My father’s letters had become insistent, and strange. I wrote to him that I was busy, that my research was out of control, that I had no time. He wrote back, in his calm and patient way, telling me to bring the work with me. Perhaps he could help. At the very least I could work undisturbed at home, in my old room. When the mid-semester break came, I tore myself away from Elm and took the train home.
He was waiting for me, at the station, with my old bicycle propped against his hip. Without it, I would barely have recognised him. He looked small, and huddled. His hands, when he held them out to me, when he clasped mine in them and kissed my forehead, were liver-spotted and paper-thin.
He insisted I ride home, while he walked beside me. His own cycle, he said, was broken.
At home, he bustled in the kitchen making tea, slicing cake, insisting that I shower and change my clothes before meeting him in the lounge to catch up.
‘I should tell you about your mother,’ he said, abruptly, as soon as he’d poured the tea.
I sat on the rug beside him, poked at the fire and watched the sparks flicker on the brickwork. ‘It’s so long ago, Dad, we don’t have to talk about that now.’ I remembered being carried down the stairs by him after her death. In my dream my clothes are wet, soaked through and dripping onto the stairs. I am cold all over, except where my cheek is pressed against the crackling woodsmoke-smell of his jumper. That one small spot feels alive and dry and warm. The rest is hollowness. A cold, perpetual winter ache.
‘We do,’ he said. ‘Before I die, before I forget it all, I have to tell you the truth.’
‘You don’t need to,’ I lied.
He shook his head, leaning forward in his chair to watch the fire and feel its warmth. I could smell the old wool of his jumper, the familiar comfort of its thickness and warmth. ‘She was already dying when she came home from Oban. She wouldn’t speak to me, would barely eat. Every glass in the house was smashed. She was so angry. You were small, you needed her, but she couldn’t hold you. She could drink, though,’ he laughed, drily. ‘Love was a disease in her. When we were kids, she once kept the dead body of an old dog in her bedroom. She took it out and wept over it every night. She screamed when it was taken away, and her mother held her back while her father carried it out of the house on a sheet of stiff board. It looked almost alive: the maggots squirming under its skin made it look as though it was breathing. She had tried to get the Penitents to give it a Rupettan heart, but they refused, and she was furious with them, with everyone and everything, for not being perfect.’
She had been a passionate woman; I had known that my whole life. Knew it in my bones as well as in my heart, for her passion had taken root in me. Fed me and clothed me, nourished me in a way my father’s quiet soul could never understand. If she had become a drunk, and I had forgotten it, in the way of children who do not know what it means to be flayed open by the world, whose capacity for forgiveness is not ruined by life yet, I was not surprised. If my father had chosen not to tell me she had been a drunk, to preserve her memory as sober and loving, I guess I could understand that, too. I had been a child, just five years old when she died: slowly, but with a great noise, like a storm that rages and leaves the forest broken in its wake. Afterwards, there were just the two of us, and he had cared for me with steady, quiet patience. I knew this all already, I told him, and stood to quiet him. It was cold and late and I had work to do.
My father put his hand on my arm and pushed me back into my chair. ‘There’s more, Henri,’ he said. ‘Sit.’
He turned his hands over before the fire, studying the arthritically-curved fingers. ‘She had wanted it so much: to be a Penitent, an Obanite. She worked hard, and passed the exams. Not just passed them: did well, caught the attention of the Dean and was offered the Transformation months before any of the others. She came home so happy, when she found out. Laughing. In love again, with the world, with you, with me. And then she went back, and had the surgery, and . . . ’ he looked up at me, shifted in his chair. ‘I know you thought . . . I know you believed, all these years, that she had an affair, and that somehow that destroyed her career, but it wasn’t that. She had the surgery, but her body rejected the Penitent heart. She was there, in the Haven wards near Oban College, for months. I travelled down every week to visit her, while you stayed here with Old Paul. They tried everything they could, but her body just wouldn’t have it. In the end, when they knew there was nothing they could do, they sent her home to die. It made her angry that they hadn’t been able to tell the Transformation wouldn’t take, that they hadn’t been able to make it work. But angrier still that she couldn’t make her body accept it with her own bloody willpower. In the end she believed that she was, despite everything, despite herself, inherently heretical. She said her body had betrayed her; as bodies will. And that I should make sure you didn’t make the same mistakes she had.’
My father closed his eyes, pressed his fingertips to his forehead. He looked ashen and ashamed and I loved him terribly, and hated him, too.
‘You can stop now,’ I said, feeling the fury lash in my throat.
‘She wanted so much to be a Penitent, like your grandmother and your great-grandmother. And your ridiculous Aunt Grace. You’re like her in that. You have her ambition; her sense of duty to the Bellmer tradition, and her sense of entitlement, too. She thought it would be easy, and most of it was. She was bright and the work—the study, the research—all that came easily.’
My father looked at me. His grey eyes were steady. ‘We should have told you the truth, but she refused to let the truth weaken you. She said it would frighten you; that you might come to think that there was something to be afraid of, that you might turn away from the family tradition, might turn your back on the Obanites, and she wouldn’t have that. Not at any cost.’
‘Why didn’t it work?’
‘It just didn’t take. Surely you’ve heard stories, at the college? People who don’t survive the operation, or develop . . . complications? Sometimes, the body rebels against the change.’ My father looked around the room, at the hearth, at the warm bricks. He shook his head again, turning his hands over and over in front of the flames. ‘Do you understand what I’m telling you?’ he said, and I heard the shadow in his voice, heard what it had cost him to tell me his old secret, and loved him and hated him in equal measure. For telling me. For having not told me long ago. For having loved me so quietly. For having loved me at all.
I nodded and poked at the fire. I understood enough, I thought. The rest could wait.
I wanted to put my hands over my father’s mouth. Cut out his stupid tongue. Stop his eyes from watching me. I went out into the garden and lay down on the grass beside my mother’s grave, listening to her heart tick, dreaming of her body—mossy-toothed, rotten and skinless—folded around it.
That night he slept in his chair, unable to manage the stairs up to his room. In the morning, I left early, came back to Elm.
After that, going home was hard. I wrote polite letters, said nothing about what he had told me. He hinted, sometimes, asked me how I was coping, whether I had thought more about our ‘little conversation’. I wrote about my work, about my plans for next year. I had deadlines to meet. There was no time to go home and hear more. No time to let the story of my mother’s death sink its teeth into my dreams.
She had gone home in disgrace, that much had been true. And the photograph of her, in the white dress on the lawn of the Haven, that was true, too, in its way. As true as photographs ever are. Her pale face. The shadow of the Transformed heart beneath her pale shirt. I had thought it was a tattoo; I had known, even then, about the graduate students and their mock hearts. My mother had described them to me in great detail, and later my father had shown me the silver, etched piece my mother had bought as soon as she was accepted into the College.
She had died, not of a broken heart, not out of the humiliation of being sent home to Whitestone Shute, not out of love and weakness, but because of the Transformation. Something had gone wrong; her heart had failed. They had tried to fix it, but the problem was not in the mechanism, or in her body, exactly, but in the nexus between the two. Her old heart was torn clear—burned in the incinerator with all of the other discarded hearts—and her body had rejected anything else.
The Miracle of Harmony
Rûs: 1852
The fourth orb of the chronometer is etched with a series of notes, swirling around its centre in a wave of spidery annotations. If you hold a glass to the orb you can read the notes: the first eight bars of Perihan’s Aria, rendered in minute detail. This is the song Anise composed and sang for the first time in the dead of winter, 1852, and which you have heard sung—though never quite so well as it was sung that night—at Midwinter during the Festival of Harmony.
After months of preparation, we arrived at the court of the Empress Kassia. Montane, Anise, and I. We came in by the back entrance: the entrance reserved for actors and servants, and were ushered through thin, dark hallways to our rooms, which were small and dark, but clean enough. Montane took the first room, Anise and I the smaller one beside it. Our room had a window that looked out onto a muddied square. The walls of the palace rose up around it—four windowed walls, several storeys high. In the courtyard below the washerwomen sat and gossiped as they worked, pegging clean linen, already half-frozen into stiff sheets, to the lines that criss-crossed the yard. Our window would not open; its timbers were warped and swollen into place. We could see the courtyard; glimpse the women and the walls that faced us, only by peering through the gaps. Montane came in and inspected the room, checking that the sheets were clean, the fire lit. She brought a platter of food and water that she had gone down to the kitchen to collect, and warned us that the talk among the kitchen maids was thick with expectation. She rattled off the names of men and women we had never met—people who would assemble in the court tonight to see us throw our fate at the Empress’s feet—there was only one name we knew other than the Empress—that of Jacqueline. Montane pinched Anise’s cheeks, studied her face as though she might see, there, our future. Sing well, she said. We have staked everything on this.
When her mother left us, Anise stretched a line across the room. She removed our twin gowns from their trunk and hung them over the string to air, plucking at the skirts as she did so. We had gambled everything on this one night. Had sold everything we owned to purchase what we needed: gowns, a carriage, horses, shoes. Our entrance to the court, Montane insisted, must be seamless, inevitable. We must appear to belong amid the silks and perfumes, amid the knives and horses, as though we were born to them. And so, she had sold everything we could, including my mute sister, whose new owner —a young collector by the name of Hofrath Bereis—also owned a duck that digested food, and a younger mannequin—a girl—who had once played the flute. He took her to his grand home and encased her there, in an old garden-house, in a purpose-built glass cabinet. Once a year, on the anniversary of his birth, he had all his purchases—his follies—removed from their cases and set out in the garden. Hundreds of guests were invited to view his collection. Some were stolen, some broken during the sprawling, drunken parties he held. As he grew older his great fortune dwindled. It was said that he loved fast women, and slow horses. His numerous collections fell into disrepair, or were sold off to repay his mounting debts. At his death, his collections were put up for sale; the paintings did not garner much interest as they were all eaten to pieces by moths. But there was some excitement over his collection of mechanical toys. In the auction catalogue detailing his estate, however, there is no mention of Alazaïs, though the Vaucanson automatons, and the by-then-featherless duck, were listed.
I did not know, then, that all this would come to pass. I had no notion of how curious Alazaïs’s path through history would be. That night in the palace, as I contemplated my sister’s fate, amid the musty reek of mouse droppings and old mattresses, the gowns were an extraordinary folly: our entire fortune stitched up in japanned brocade and layers of gauzy silk. Next she pulled out the little packet of papers her mother had bargained so hard for. The papers were fine—almost finer than the silk of our gowns. As we breathed upon them they fluttered. She set me to work.
