Because death is eternal, people suppose that it must partake of the infinite, in which case we could hope to enter ever wider if darker voids. In fact, each threshold is meaner than the last.
Throughout my life, but especially toward the end, when my heartbeats grew as slow as the drumbeats which announce a shrine dance, what I liked best of all was to sit behind the crowd of spectators, with my back against a tree as I inhaled the shade. If you have ever drunk in the humid sunshine of Kamakura in early spring, which is flavored, as is a fresh bun by its raisins, by pigtailed girls in white blouses and vermilion kimonos, you will understand me when I say that moments and instants can remain as distinct as the studs on a verdigrised bronze bell even in that languid ocean haze, when life and death resemble the square white sleeves of two shrine dancers slowly intersecting. Soon they would summon me to the dance, striking the gong which is shaped like a crocodile’s mouth. Then, perhaps, I might no longer be able to enjoy the flutter of a young woman’s eyelids, but I deluded myself that what I lost in colors and forms would be recompensed me in spacious ease, as if I would find myself lolling atop Kamakura’s famous cliffs, which are grown with ferns and bamboo. Once upon a time before I died I sat beside a woman I loved, on a shady cliff-ledge marked with many stupas, gazing into the lapis lazuli fog of the sea. She took my hand, and we gazed down upon the waving tops of bamboo, which were russet green, and beyond them our vision flew over the steep low house-tops somewhere between pastel and metallic in their various shades, then lost itself in the pale bay. We slept in the darkness of her hair, and woke among Kamakura’s blue hydrangeas, drinking up that summer, each humid green cliff-hill of which was so thick with growth as to resemble a single tree. Sometimes when she rolled her sticky body off of mine in order to drink green tea or make water, I even opened my eyes, faithfully hoping that somewhere within death I might pass into that blue-ceilinged room where seaside Kamakura pants with so many sharp green tongues. I have always wondered whether trees are speaking to me; and whenever they shaded me from the humid heat of Kamakura, nodding over me and glistening in ever so many coruscating greens like the foam from fresh-made powdered tea, I wished to thank them. Well, they shade me now. The huge-toed nakai trees bore into my bones. Whether she still lives I cannot say. Wherever she is, we cannot comfort each other.
I progress but slowly in learning how to be breathless underground, my mouth choked with earth, worms and rain-seepage passing through me, my rotting coffin collapsing on me, breaking my ribcage, showering me with earth.
It might be better could I forget our days in Kamakura, which were almost poisonously somnolent. After drinking in her love, each morning I was as a gasping, wilting leaf; a bamboo sapling exhausted by its own weight. Kites called above the treetops. Stroking my face, she wept for pleasure, and when I looked into her soul then I saw the yellow-green veins in a glossy blue-green leaf whose pigment is speckling off, leaving the yellow behind. Whether or not she loved me, she certainly lived me, and I her, I who can live no more. With her I anticipated life and death in Kamakura, both of them in the style of a japonica’s roots tied down with moss so sweetly. We roamed the jungled cliffs whose names we did not learn. We lay kissing and gasping in the wet sunlight, hopeful of the time when the sea should darken and the breeze should dance in the cool evening waves.
I look back (or up); I imagine; I change flesh with the living, who through the law of compensation immediately find themselves in my shoes — which, to be sure, are of the finest patent leather, for it is the custom for the barber to shave the deceased, to powder him, whiten his face and rouge his cheeks and lips, and dress him in a frock coat with patent leather shoes and black trousers, as if going to a ball, may God forbid — this shall not happen to Makso. My shoes have swelled with moisture. They bulge with dirt and bone. Meanwhile I gallop around in clothes as yet unkissed by worms. Even when alive I showed little talent for living; now I show less, and when people see me they scream.
If only I could persuade the barber to rouge my cheeks! Then I might feel more handsome down here. I want to go to the ball; I’m ready to dance my rotten heart out. There’s supposed to be a theater deeper down.
I’m trying to like it here. I know that I’m obliged to. Sometimes the vermin tunnelling through me give me pleasure of a sort, but it would be better if I could give up thinking. I can’t breathe; therefore, I won’t; I’m going to the ball; goodbye.
AND A POSTSCRIPT
There is a wall of ill, whose gate opens unto an archway formed of giant spiders squatting silently in a long row; and at this passage’s far end there is a courtyard in whose center stands a woman barefoot, with dark red lips, who holds a bunch of flowers in her upraised hand. Tongues of white and yellow lace fall like fingers or pagoda-gables down to her ankles. Because she is alive, and I still have life in me, I pray to kiss the mud between her toes.
SOURCES AND NOTES
Since these stories are less ethnographically faithful than any of my Seven Dreams, I have not scrupled to operate an Anglo-Saxon charm in Bohemia, or even to alter magical names and terms to suit me. (May I be forgiven by all the demons and angels.) Notwithstanding, the basic laws of magic (sympathy, contagion, etcetera) strike me as psychologically true, so I have tried to respect them.
My Bohemia is an imagined construct. My Trieste and Veracruz both contain some deliberate anachronisms both architectural and otherwise. For instance, I wished to set “Two Kings in Ziñogava” sometime in the colonial period, when slavery was still common in Veracruz. But at this time San Juan de Ulúa was more of a fortress than a prison island. Tant pis.
EPIGRAPH
“It is the custom for the barber to shave the deceased…”— Pamphlet from the Despica Kuca, Muzej Sarajeva, collected in 2011.
TO THE READER
“Wherever there is a rose…”— Saadi [Sheikh Musli-Uddin Sa’di Shirazi], The Rose Garden (Gulistan), trans. Omar Ali-Shah (Reno, NV: Tractus, 1997; orig. Arabic [?] ed. ca. 1260), p. 186 (VII.19).
“There is no means through which those who have been born can escape dying…”— Paul Carus, comp. “from ancient records,” The Gospel of Buddha (London: Studio Editions/Senate, 1995; orig. pub. 1915), p. 211 (slightly “retranslated” by WTV).
ESCAPE
As many of my readers know, the events related in “Escape” derive from a real incident (19 May 1993), whose protagonists were named Bosko Brkic and Admira Ismic. As in “Escape,” he was Serb and she was Muslim. However, I have altered many other details. For instance, Bosko’s family had long since departed Sarajevo; the couple were living together unmarried. They decided to leave not for the reason I have given but because Bosko had been summoned to report to the police, who of course were incensed against Serbs. I decided to alter their identities and their situation in order to respect the privacy of their surviving relatives. The family members in my account are composites of Sarajevans whom I interviewed, was told about, etcetera. Their relation to Admira and Bosko is entirely imagined.