The Village on Horseback. Jesse Ball
same by her tapping as I did by my proving. Once, she turned to me, face filthy from contact with our matted floor, and said, “Of all the villages, ours is the most easily understood. Each successive village is less believable. Each is worse. Even so much as a thought arrived at bravely can mean your expulsion from one place, your inclusion in another.”
“But what,” I asked her, “did we think of, to bring us here?”
“Brother of mine, we looked in every cabinet and under every tree for the way back to an earlier village. But with each passage we fall faster.”
With that she removed her dress and began to rub herself against the curtain. Then I realized, the tapping was continuing, but she was not tapping. Looking up, first at this window, then at that, I saw that behind every pane of glass there was an uglier and more spiteful face, beneath which gripped and ungripped, tapped and tapped and tapped again, the many fingers of a great and angry crowd.
Mention
And to think, of all the great and wonderful things that could have happened . . . that your name should have been mentioned, and by whom and to whom! Now you are sorry for all the terrible things you did when the world seemed an unkind place. Now you recoil from your darker period, that time which preceded this glorious day. No more shall you sit alone in windswept cafes as rain broods over dim cities. No more shall you stand for hours outside your own terrible door, outside the doors of others. No, no . . . you have been mentioned, spoken well of before company, and it is plain to all—your life has acquired the glorious sheen of reputation before which all else must inevitably fall.
A Scene
Day draws to a close. One man passes another in the street, and as they pass, each looks the other in the face, as if to say, “You may indeed be the center of all this, but sir, it is just as likely I should be.” Nearby, a painfully soft little bird has alighted on a branch, watching the comings and goings with great interest. And you and I, we arrive later to that moment, and thus cannot be noticed, nor gainsaid, as we make our way along the thin streets of that decades-lost foundry town. Equally, we can be certain both men were quite wrong.
An Emerald
It came to be known that one of the miners in that filthy godforsaken camp had found an emerald as big as a man’s fist. The jealousy of the other miners. The pleasure of the miner’s wife. The worry of the miner himself over the possible theft of his newfound prize.
And how he woke the next day and the day after from dreams in which it had not been he who found the gem, but another. And how nothing could be done to comfort him but that the emerald should be brought out from its hiding place, and that he should be let to touch it and hold it and wake fully from his dream with all the glory of this true plane upon his dirty lap.
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