The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six Read online

  As she got up, she smiled back at him. He clapped. She curtsied, and, gathering a couple of Teyvel’s swords, began to juggle them. They got ahead of her. She shuffled forward to catch up. They got more out of hand. Her shuffle burst into a march. Then, in an exaggerated military step—a circular advance for an army of one—she double-timed. Faster and faster, she chased her own behind. All the swords got away. She gasped and covered her head as the sharp blades stabbed into hard dirt. Rather than curtsy when the man laughed, she gave a salute.

  On horseback and tightrope, she recalled more that she’d seen of the war. She mimicked it, inexplicable to her, until the man watching her was wallowing in mirth.

  She climbed onto the trapeze, high above. Seating herself on the beam, she dropped into a slouch. She covered her ears, shut her eyes, and set her face in a pout. The laughter ceased. She raised her head, and lost her balance. She fell off.

  And into the man’s arms. He knelt, setting her on her feet. His first words were, Will you marry me?

  Heyh had never been asked a question like that. In fact, she’d never been asked anything, except as the rhetorical punch line to a round of abuse, so she didn’t know what to respond. She tried the only reply that came into her head: Yes.

  The man kissed her. All at once, she knew that she’d given the right answer, the only possible one, as fixed in eternity as the stars in the sky. She grabbed his sleek hair, to kiss him again.

  He brought her outside, holding her large hand inside his own. He brought her to the middle of the festivities, and, standing on a barrel of ale, announced their betrothal. Bewildering as it was for his advisers to hear His Majesty speak after nearly three years, they were even more flabbergasted by what he was telling them.

  — You can’t marry her. She’s a . . .

  Heyh spoke with confidence, facing the crowd.

  — I am a clown.

  — A clown can’t marry a . . .

  Heyh turned to her betrothed.

  — Sir, who are you?

  — I am the king.

  — And you want to marry me anyway?

  — If you’ll marry a buffoon.

  The king ordered his subjects to stop fighting. He spoke clearly, enunciating every word, but in the din of war, he wasn’t heard. He raised his voice. He spoke from the balcony of his palace in the east, and his castle in the west: The war is absurd, he said.

  Nobody laughed. If folks got the joke, they didn’t show it.

  The king had notices posted in every town, revoking all military commissions and forbidding soldiers from obeying generals’ orders. The threat of peace intensified fighting. The leaders of each army made their troops believe that His Majesty was ridiculing their hard-fought suffering. The king’s advisers fled the country—afraid to be associated with a man who seemingly had betrayed everybody—smuggled out by the circus in jester outfits: Shimmel and company had endured enough violence already.

  The monarch was left alone with his betrothed. They’d nobody to marry them, so they simply behaved as if the deed were done. Hidden in barns and shacks, they made a palace of their embrace. They healed each other. They healed together.

  But this was not a time to live happily ever after. A farmer heard their lovemaking and turned in the king to the local militia for—had he fallen so low?—half a sack of potatoes. Heyh escaped only because nobody believed she could be queen. Folks sneered, and left her behind.

  She went looking for him. She stumbled through the night, nearsighted, directionless. She walked into the dawn. The sun swelled over the earth’s cusp. Then she realized where she was: What she’d mistaken for the end of the world was the rift between east and west.

  Heyh was no longer lost. She saw what had to be done. The king would die unless his land was healed. She scampered past the front line, where folks were just waking up. While the sentries tried to figure out what side she was on in her motley uniform, she reached the fault line, and fell inside.

  Standing up, she found that the rift was just about as deep as she was tall. Not as bad as she’d thought. With her large hands, she dug in, and started pulling at the land.

  For several minutes, the soldiers on both sides watched her, holding fire as she tried to work the land loose, and draw it close. The soldiers watched and watched until one of them, a sixty-year-old infantryman, started to snicker.

  — What’s so funny?

  — She thinks she can fix the country by might.

  — Ridiculous.

  — And here we are, working three years to break it by force.

  — So you’re laughing at her?

  — I’m laughing at us.

  His comrades got it, then. They chuckled along with him. Soon it was the whole battalion, enough so that Heyh could hear them. She hesitated. She listened, for she’d developed a good ear, and heard that it wasn’t a jeer. The sound was warmer, not hitting her, but embracing her like the king, her lover. She recalled what she’d done for him the day they met. She exaggerated her efforts, amplified her expressions. If she couldn’t move the land, at least she could move its inhabitants.

  Laughter spread over the battlefield, ripples cresting into waves. Soldiers dropped their weapons, and generals their ambitions, joining their voices in the mass hysteria, carrying it clear across the countryside. They made such a ruckus that the ground began to rumble. The whole land shook. The earth quaked. And the rift closed.

  Folks on both sides surged forward. They crossed the fault line. They’d scarcely have noticed it, so embattled was the surrounding terrain, were they not looking, and asking one another: What happened to the clown?

  Heyh was gone. Pulled from the wreckage of his dungeon, the king was brought to where people remembered seeing her before the ground closed. There was a clown here, they said. She was lost when the land came together.

  At first they thought he was laughing. Then they saw the tears, and knew that she’d been something to him, maybe everything, and their wonderment opened into mourning.

  The kingdom turned to tears that evening, on every laughing face. The earth was bathed in their salt water, and healed together as the flooding dried.

  VOV THE WHORE

  There once was a region where folks cultivated secrets like turnips. The land was so poor that to grow anything at all took generations of expertise about seasons and seeds. In good years, people had food to share, a harvest feast that lasted a week, culminating in a garland of weddings. But in drought, farmers kept to their own soil, raising crops using routines and rituals guarded more jealously than wife and family.

  The rain hadn’t come in ages when Vov’s mother married her to Ezra the widower. The girl was sixteen. The last harvest had been when she was twelve, and five suitors had proposed to her. Her father, however, had decreed that she wasn’t ready for matrimony, especially to the one she loved.

  — How would you know, Vov?

  — Ben brings me daffodils.

  — And I bring food to the table. Shouldn’t I have your affections?

  Her father had then taken what was meant for a husband, and Ben had married Vov’s cousin. That winter, the clouds had gone dry, Vov’s father had died, and the girl had lost her mind.

  At least that’s what folks said, seeing her wander through the woods, murmuring harvest songs to herself, searching for daffodils. She missed meals, and declined to bathe or wear clothes. Neglect accentuated her beauty, sculpting her small body, stripping it down like a river eroding stone. Every day, men gazed at young Vov passing in the distance, a short stretch of white flesh in an ankle-length wrap of black hair, and comforted themselves that their wives, though homelier, had more sense than she.

  Ezra, however, had last been widowed before Vov was born. He was a big man emptied by age, who’d lost not one but three wives, young women wed and gone without bringing him a child in compensation. Someone who buries spouses so regularly may get pity, but he isn’t likely to be offered folks’ daughters too frequently. So old Ezra had mar
ried Vov as eagerly as her mother had dispensed with her. He’d accepted a dozen eggs as dowry, yet her real value to him, since he’d sent his mule to slaughter, was to pull his plow—a labor to which he accustomed her in lieu of a honeymoon.

  There were many secrets to this practice. In the first place, Ezra plowed only at night, to free the sunlight from his soil. Furthermore, rather than driving straight lines, he made his furrows labyrinthine, so intricate that not a drop of water could escape his acre plot. And then, since he lacked sufficient excrement, he fertilized the ground by uttering dirty words wherever he went.

  Vov had learned these words from her father in a different context, of which she was reminded when Ezra said them, and, though they clogged her bowels with dread, they also left an expectant tingling, like a supper bell chiming, in the cleft between her legs. Her husband’s cussing, however, never led there; the closest he came to touching her was with a whip over the shoulders.

  Then one day the plow’s blade broke. In a good year, that would have been easy to repair: Ben had a farm down the road, and in his barn he kept a grindstone. Ever since the rain had gone, though, Ezra and Ben had scarcely spoken, lest either inadvertently let the other in on a secret, and lose his singular strategic edge on fate. Ezra worried that even asking to borrow the grindstone would betray some life-and-death information, that his phrasing might convey the rhythm of his crop rotation, or that his choice of words, by painstaking recombination, might reveal to Ben some sacred truth about his farm unknown even to him. Obviously, he couldn’t take that sort of risk. He could not personally make his request. So he sent his wife, whose empty-headed simplicity perfectly suited her to the task.

  Vov had not spoken to Ben since her father had disengaged them four years before. In that time, he’d grown. He had the full black beard worn by all men in the region, shoulders the envy of oxen, and hands as broad as shovels, which he set on his hips as he saw Vov pulling a cart across the meadow.

  — This is no place to look for daffodils, little girl.

  — I don’t need flowers anymore. I have a husband.

  — And why has the old widower sent you here? What does Ezra want?

  — He wants to borrow your grindstone.

  — Why should I lend it? Did he send you to bait me? You may still be pretty, but everyone knows you lost your mind after you turned me down. Ezra wants to use my grindstone, does he? Little fool, come with me.

  He led Vov to a windowless shed, barred the door behind her. His grip firmed on her shoulders. He spun her around, ripping away her dress, and thrust her back onto a damp slab.

  — When you were twelve, you left me half-cocked in a field. This time, you aren’t leaving so easily. And you’d best not tell, little wench. You know how to keep a secret?

  Vov tried to speak. He shoved a fist into her mouth and, a moment later, another into her cleft. Except the second fist wasn’t one because he still had a hand on her neck, and then she felt a jabbing between her legs like the battering with which her father had often met her in darkness, only much, much stronger. Ben cussed and spat. He knocked her over. Her head smacked rock. Her mind went blank.

  Vov awoke alone. Her body was spread on the ground, bisected by a blade of light shining through the open door of Ben’s shed. She saw that her sex was violet like a bruise, and found that her head, crusted with blood, had hit Ben’s grindstone.

  Standing pained her, yet not in the vague way that she hurt from Ezra’s incessant whipping. There was a sharpness to her condition, a quickening in her thinking, a welling of awareness that had eluded her ever since her father had broken into her and forced her mind to hide. She took a breath. Cloistering Ben’s secret between her legs, she pulled on her dress, loaded her cart with the grindstone, and hauled the rock home.

  After a day of honing, Ezra ran out of oil. He ordered his wife to barter some for him. He brought her a jar of pickled tomatoes from the cellar, and sent her several miles to see Meir the lender.

  Vov hadn’t eaten tomatoes in ages—she wasn’t sure how long, since nobody had taught her to count—but she guessed it had been at least as many years as there were fruits in the jar. She sat down at the roadside and ate one. Some birds landed at her feet, ravens who mistook her, by the black of her hair, for a relative. They pecked at the seeds that spilled between her toes. She shared. They feasted. When the jar was empty, she sang them a harvest song. They alighted, all calling her name.

  Hearing the squalling above, taking it for a swelling storm, Meir gathered his amply larded gut and plodded outside on gout-bloated feet. He raised a cascade of chins to the sky, squinting into the sun as the last ravens scattered. He looked out onto his fields. He leered as Vov strolled toward his house.

  She nodded at the lender. She said that her husband had sent her to fetch some whetstone oil. He stopped staring. His face creased into a frown.

  — Ezra knows that I don’t work on credit when there’s a drought. What will he trade for it?

  — He was going to barter some pickled tomatoes.

  — Give them to me. We’ll see if they’re tasty.

  — They’re very tasty. I ate them already.

  — You’re as dotty as folks say. If you took them for yourself, little pretty, then what do you have for me?

  — Something more to your taste, maybe?

  — And what’s that?

  — It’s a secret.

  To show the lender what she meant, she lifted her dress.

  Meir was expert at judging meat on the hoof. He tweaked her breast, slapped her ass. He grunted and then, turning her around, knelt her over his doorstep. He opened his britches, grasped her shoulders, and shoved his girth against her rear. Once, twice, three times, his waves of fat washed over her back, and then she felt a slight tickle at her crotch, a trickle of warmth.

  He released her. She turned over to request the oil once more. He nodded. A deal is a deal, he grumbled, bringing her a small canister, even with a whore.

  On her way home, Vov began to ponder. She thought in terms that would never have occurred to her the previous day, let alone in years before. If Ben’s battering had made Vov perceive her body again, negotiation with Meir proved that it wasn’t all of her. A whore’s possession, her flesh, could be bartered. Perhaps she could even use it for her own pleasure? To test this idea, she detoured off the road and knocked at handsome Chaim’s door.

  Like every man, Chaim had watched Vov over the years—he was another of those who’d proposed when she was twelve—and he marveled at how the seasons since then hadn’t changed her: While his wife, Esther, was also sixteen, beneath the warp of age and stretch of children, he could barely see the pretty girl he’d once married. Yet on Vov, dumb to time, the years had no traction. Seasons took their measure only in the spectacular span of her hair.

  — It’s grown so long.

  — Do you like it, Chaim?

  — What are you implying?

  In an instant, she’d untied it. It cascaded over her shoulders. She invited Chaim under.

  He was twice her height. He lifted her until their mouths met, and, as he let her down, held on to her dress. She smiled. Grasping his neck, she straddled his hips and fed him her breasts.

  Chaim didn’t need to tell her that what happened next was a secret, but he said so anyway.

  — Esther wouldn’t understand.

  — You mean you don’t have secrets with her?

  — She’s my wife. Most of our secrets are together.

  — She’s lucky. Would you like to share another?

  That night, Vov tried to share a secret with her husband. In the dark, she went naked to his bed. Slipping in, she sought his mouth with her lips, and slid a hand up his crotch. Nothing stirred. She wondered if he’d expired, but could hear him still wheezing. For a while she listened. Only in her sleep could she hear that he was weeping.

  In the morning, he was rougher with her than he’d ever been before. He strapped her in the plow and hurled verbal f
ilth at her. She smiled expectantly. He tore her dress from her shoulders. She shrieked delightedly. He grabbed a whip. She raised her rump to take his secret. She shut her eyes.

  And felt nothing.

  She looked between her knees. Saw Ezra convulsing at her feet. Was he in ecstasy without her? Vov waited until he’d stopped shuddering. She slipped out of the yoke. His body was slack.

  So he was dead like her father. Vov knew that cadavers were put underground because it was dark there, a perpetual midnight, which naturally made eternal sleep easier for the deceased. She grabbed her husband’s feet. She dragged him through the dirt. She put him in the cellar, under a shelf of preserved fruit.

  After that, she was more free. She visited several farms each day. The men grew accustomed to seeing her, keeping their secrets with her, renewed on hayloft or under dormer. If she was hungry, she made them ply her with dainties from their cellars, for which she’d negotiate, on most favorable terms, when they were least able to resist her. If she was horny, she made them fold and bend her according to her pleasure, driving them past exhaustion with allusions to more virile partners. She did not try to hide the blemishes left by others, the gradual ravaging of her body now that time had grasp of her—now that she was alive—and if men asked about old Ezra, whether he was blind to her secret affairs, she’d say that nothing roused him anymore.

  Vov the whore had more lovers each week. Gluttonously, she accumulated more secrets. But gradually she suspected that, while the secrets were new, they weren’t especially different: She began to sense that truly everyone had the same secret, only a unique way of expressing it. For all their posturing, folks had nothing to hide.

  Certainly she couldn’t disguise that she was pregnant. As her womb swelled, lovers grew wary, and refused to touch Vov, each one sure that it was his infidelity bloating her belly. Yet if men were anxious to avoid guilt by association, wives were possessed by a different inclination: The women had already reckoned that Vov had lured their husbands into adultery, and eagerly awaited a child as evidence with which to drive the harlot clear out of the country.