“All right,” he said finally. “I give up. Why don’t you try to guess my name?”
But then he glanced up at the sky and slapped his head. “Ah, I forgot what I came for. Rosamund, my sweet girl, where are you?”
As he said this, he was already running away like the wind. And so I had no choice but to cup my hands around my mouth and shout at his back, “Do you know Rosamund?”
“No.” He was already some distance away. “I have to find her first. And then I’ll know her.”
“Why are you looking for Rosamund?”
He was almost at the horizon. “Because she’s my guest.”
I sighed. He was already invisible. “I am Rosamund.”
A whirlwind swept from the horizon. The young man was standing in front of me again. He combed his hair with his hands, smoothed out the wrinkles on his shirt, and then bowed toward me very chivalrously. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, my… guest.”
“But who are you?”
“Neither of us could guess the other’s name. If you’re truly Rosamund, then permit me to present you with my true name: the Magician of Weightless City.”
February 25: The Knight of the Rose
Six years after meeting me, the Magician of Weightless City no longer looked so young. His castle was the secret to his eternal youth.
But I still enjoyed running barefoot on the wild heath. To see me, he often had to leave his castle. And in this way we grew up together.
Now that I was eighteen, he was like a knight, with a steel will and iron-hard shoulders. But when I was twelve, I had entered his castle for the first time.
The castle was the silent robot sitting on the ground. Since the robot had no need of a bladder, that was the location of the castle gate. After we entered, the Magician (still boyish back then) held my hand with his right hand, and, with a puff, a torch appeared in his left hand. The interior of the castle was completely dark.
We passed by many murals, set foot on countless carpets, and after the seventh turn in the staircase, we knocked over three silver bottles and a crystal ball. The Magician’s eyes and hair glinted brightly in the light from the torch. Both of us talked only of the journey we had taken and what we had encountered along the way, as though we hadn’t been paying attention to each other at all.
Finally I saw my mother, sitting on a chair covered by a tiger skin. She looked serene; her face hadn’t changed at all from how I remembered her.
“Let me take a look at you, young lady,” she said. Then she recognized me with a start. “What in the world happened to you?”
The Magician clapped his hands, and the torch disappeared from his left hand. Innumerable points of light suddenly appeared in the dark ceiling of the great hall, like stars, like fireflies.
The man who brought forth light said to my mother, “Your Majesty, while you have only been here a little while, she has been living outside on her own for six years.”
“What kind of witchcraft is this?!” My mother hugged me and then pushed me back, holding on to my arms tightly so she could examine me in detail. I was too embarrassed to look back at her.
The Magician said, “A thousand years ago, one of my ancestors came through the Door Into Summer. Using magic and witchcraft, he built this castle of eternal youth. Whether something is living or dead, as soon as it comes inside, it ceases to be eroded by the river of time. The short periods that I have lived outside the castle caused me to grow into this boyish form you see.”
My mother spoke in the darkness. The starry light that bathed her forehead could not illuminate her eyes. The Queen confirmed the claim of this fugitive’s descendant to his domain and made him Weightless City’s first knight.
The answer to this grant of peerless honor came six years later. My knight found the dust-covered silver armor in the depths of the castle, put it on, and bowed slightly to the Queen on her tiger-skin throne. “Please allow me to be Rosamund’s knight. She’s come of age and is ready to have a knight of her own.”
I hid in a dark corner, watching him with my wide-open eyes like a fawn.
“Why?” my mother asked.
“Because she needs a knight. Not just any knight, but me. And I need to become the knight for a pure lady. Not just any lady, but her.”
“Then,” my mother said, “what can a knight do for a princess? Perhaps he doesn’t even know what she truly needs, and neither does she.”
The Magician of Weightless City, once a proud youth, and now a knight standing tall, full of courage, trembled as he heard this. His cold, rigid shadow stretched long and narrow, and as he trembled, it seemed about to take off from the ground.
Finally the corners of his mouth lifted, and he answered the woman sitting high on her throne. “The loneliness in her heart is as dark as her eyes. But I will give her eternal light.”
And with that, my knight departed his gloomy castle without looking back.
Behind him, the Queen, driven mad by the terror of eternity, screamed, “The stars are going out! You cannot bring back lasting light!”
The stars are going out. You cannot bring back lasting light. But the barefoot princess remained hidden in the darkness, expectant.
February 28: A Skeleton or Two
I was sick.
I’d lost count of the passing years. Six years? Sixty? Or even six hundred? February twenty-eighth was the last day of that suspended period, the end coming like a cliff cleaving space into two halves.
The Queen of mankind had gone mad in the castle. She could not tolerate the erosion of the river of time, and could tolerate even less the passing days that now skipped over her like migrating birds over a forgotten tree. And so she constantly paced the halls of the castle, too frightened to abandon this heaven of eternal life, and yet unable to derive joy from the absolute stillness.
In her face, I could no longer detect the bloom of that secret flower. The permanent starry night of the great hall’s ceiling cast two gloomy shadows under her eyes against her pale mask of a face. My mother’s once-luminous black eyes had, after many, many, many years of unchanging life, finally dimmed and merged into the darkness.
I thought of the man who had once built this castle, that great priest with only half a head. Where had he gone?
When the world outside was drenched in heavy rain, I made torches out of bundles of straw and played hide-and-go-seek in the castle. I passed through room after room full of dust, perusing books whose pages shattered at my touch—perhaps time had touched them now and then, after all? Among them was a diary kept by another princess who had lived here long ago. She had poured out her heart through her quill.
Sometimes I carried an oil lamp, and as its shifting light cast shadows on the walls, they coalesced into unfamiliar faces; sometimes I lit a candle inside a rose-colored paper lantern, and the light flickered, almost going out.
I walked through the Cimmerian castle, got lost, searched, and occasionally, at the end of a long hallway, I’d see a figure, hear a low murmur, and then everything would once again disappear into darkness and silence—it was my mother, walking, losing her way, seeking, like me.
Finally our paths brought each of us to the same room, a room I had never been in before. Everything inside seemed as new as the long-ago day when the castle had been first erected. I found my mother sitting on the bed, inside the calla lily–colored netting, sobbing like a ghost. That luxurious room had floor-length curtains, bright red, fresh, as though drops of blood were about to ooze out.