Here, he finds two women kneeling over boxes. The boxes are small and shallow: the size of writing-table trays or vanity cases. Their lids have been removed, and the women are peering inside to watch moths laying eggs. The moths are females of the phylum Arthropoda: Bombyx mori. They have creamy white, scale-covered wings, the upper two of which are threaded with brownish patterns. Their bodies are hairy. They crawl slowly and groggily around each box’s paper-lined floor, stopping intermittently to let more tiny black baubles fall from their genital region. From their rudimentary mouthparts they dribble a gummy substance, which they smear onto the paper with their legs: as the eggs fall they stick to this, dotting the white with black. Scattered and sparse at first, the dots grow into small constellations, then whole galaxies made up of thousands of black stars. When these dark clusters have become so thick that they threaten to eclipse the space between them, the women pick the moths up one by one and, pinching their wings between their thumb and middle finger, deposit them inside another open box to continue their laying there. As the intermittent flow and drop of eggs from each individual moth dries up, the moth is picked up for a final time and cast onto the floor to die while a new moth is introduced into the box to begin laying in her place.
Serge was loud and panting when he cleared the threshold but, after adjusting both his pace and breathing to the room’s quiet, steady rhythm, is now standing still behind the kneeling women, watching them. Their faces, turned away from him and propped up on their forearms, are held just above the boxes, which makes the skirted waists that they present his way ride up into the air. The skirts’ fabric folds and pleats around their thighs but smoothly hugs their bottoms’ curves. Serge focuses on these, shifting his gaze from one woman’s haunches to the other’s. After a while he turns around and watches a third kneeling woman, bent over like the others but occupied instead with placing hatched larvae on a mat. This woman is facing him. Her arms are spread, her shoulders pulled back as she manoeuvres the slug-like creatures into place. She lays them out in rows, her hand returning to each row to neaten it the way a baker’s hand returns to rows of unbaked pastries on a tray. Each time she does this the top of her blouse falls half an inch or so, giving Serge a glimpse of breast. The larvae stir and wriggle slightly, their greyish-brown flesh soft and wrinkled, like the trunks of miniature elephants.
He’s come here looking for his mother, carrying a message from his father: something about costumes for the chorus, for the Cronos, children, Saturn, Saturday. It can wait, though. Two more women step into the Hatching Room with baskets slung across their backs. When they set these on the floor the woman kneeling by the mat pulls from them handfuls of mulberry leaves which she starts tearing up and scattering onto the larvae. The silkworms recoil and contract as the leaves hit them, then expand again, their oral cavities opening as they close in on the leaf-shards. The woman covers the mat in a gauze sheet, then turns to a second mat across which larger larvae have been spread and scatters torn-up leaves over these too. The women who have just walked in pick up empty baskets from beside the two mats and walk back towards the Mulberry Orchard, weaving around Serge on their way out.
A kind of clicking sound pervades the air: a fidgety, unsatisfying, low-level chafe. It doesn’t seem to be the laying moths who are making it: it’s coming from the far side of the room, from a large pit. Serge walks over to this, kneels beside it and sees something he’s not paid much attention to on previous visits to this room. Walled in by wooden planks, scores of white moths are coupling. Some are crawling around, their antennae twitching as they seek out partners; some are bumping blindly into one another, wrestling a little before moving on; but most are slotted into other moths. The males crouch over the females, thorax stacked above thorax, wings resting over wings. Once joined, they frot around, vibrating, as though trying to unhook themselves again, or to travel somewhere in this new formation. Serge reaches in and prods a couple with his finger; the stack of legs and wings topples onto its side and separates, leaving each half to stagger around in circles before beginning the slow process of reassembly. Once they’ve managed this, Serge scoops them up into his palm and, raising his hand into the air, says:
“You can do it, Orville and Wilbur!”
He jerks his palm upwards, propelling them towards the ceiling, but they arc leadenly, fall straight down to the floor and separate again. He picks the male, or perhaps female, moth up and, pinching its thorax in the fingers of one hand, plucks first one and then the other of its wings off. He sets the denuded torso back inside the pit to stagger around as it did before while he holds the wings up for inspection. Their markings, seen from close up, look like anaemic reproductions of the ones on the mulberry leaves. Thin, brown skeins run in lines through softer white tissue-straight, parallel lines all leading to a jagged, perpendicular main skein like spokes joining a central axis, breaking the creamy white into compartments. The pattern reminds Serge of the stained-glass windows of St. Alfege’s in Lydium-only these windows are without colour, void of scenes or characters: a set of empty, white, elongated boxes. He holds one right up to his eye, a moth-wing monocle: the Hatching Room, its wooden beams and kneeling women all sink behind gauze. They look like a daguerreotype, pale and sepiad. Serge, seven and splenetic, thinks: this is how this scene would look in years from now, if someone were to see it printed onto photographic paper-anaemic, faded, halfway dead.
ii
A ghost’s heading towards him, looming white and large behind the veil. The ghost lacks decorum: far from being awash with ghoulish dread, its face wears an expression of bemused derision.
“You look stupid,” Sophie tells him.
Serge drops the wing and tells her:
“So do you.”
He’s got a point: she’s all togged up in long white silks. The strips hang awkwardly about her almost-adolescent body, pinned around her shoulders and ungathered at the waist.
“It’s not finished yet,” she says. “It’s got to have stars spilling from it. You’ll look worse. Papa says you have to hold a scythe. Where’s Mama?”
“Through here somewhere.” Serge jerks his head in the direction of the Hatching Room’s inner door. Sophie picks up her trailing hem and steps through it; he follows. They cross a small courtyard and enter the Rearing House. Trellises rise from floor to ceiling: bamboo frames that cut the room up into grids which, half-filled by cocoons, veil this room like the wing-prism veiled the other. Some of the cocoons are thick, barely translucent; others are fine and transparent: through their incomplete white carapaces Serge can see worms moving their heads in slow figures of eight inside, the repetitive movement pulsing through the thin shells like dark heartbeats. They pass through to the Reeling Yard, in which a woman tends a pot from which wispy smoke is rising.
“Master Serge, Miss Sophie.”
“Where’s our mama?” Sophie asks.
The woman prods at the cocoons that bob in the pot’s boiling water, dunking and turning them as though she were cooking gnocchi. “With a buyer,” she says. She bends down towards a bowl of cooler water and picks at a pre-cooked cocoon with a needle, pulling its loosened filament out and attaching it to the reeling wheel. The cocoon spins in the water as she turns the wheel, unravelling completely until only the withered black body of the chrysalis inside is left, to float on the surface for a few seconds before sinking to the bottom of the bowl.
“Maureen’s baby,” Sophie mumbles to Serge.
“What?” the woman asks.
“You have to kill them or they rip the thread when they come out.”