As for Tanyotchka, by this time she had the peach-colored skin of a young woman, the creamy face of an Italian beauty. Of course she remained a Serbkina, the kind whose form is more powerful than tears.
If I may be more explicit, perhaps the reason that in later life her father did not entirely understand her was that while he kept his aspirations as uncorrupted as a soldier’s well-oiled arquebus, she grew up, as I said, a Triestina, sweetened by her summers in the arbor of grapes and roses, which, among other more secret things her family’s high walls enclosed; and when she heard her father’s booted footfalls on the stone walkway, although she invariably leapt up in joy and rushed into his arms, as soon as he had stroked her hair and given her two or three bristly kisses, he turned back to his business, with that sad and watchful expression freezing again on his face, and she, having established that by embracing him again she could delay the resumption of his cares but could never keep them away from him for more than another few instants, learned to let him go, turning away on her own account, in order to avoid the sight of his suffering — not that she even realized that she perceived it, quotidian as it was, and child as she was, inhaling life without distinguishing good from bad, which after all would have accomplished nothing anyhow; and likewise drinking in the cool, still, rose-scented afternoons as she sat in the pavilion sewing beside her mother. As crisp as the ivy-shadows on the awning, as sudden as the crow-caws were her experiences of her father, but just as one forgets shadow-patterns, however beautiful, so even now she still misplaced him in his absence, not that she thereby loved or needed him less. Her needle sometimes forgot to flash, hovering instead, like the black bumblebees considering which rose to investigate next; but this dreaminess, which her mother occasionally indulged and her father saw as something else, did not get her behindhand in her tasks. Where her thoughts glided at such times was as much a mystery to others as what might be in her father’s neck-pouch, but for a fact the singing of the blackbirds helped her remember, as any true Serb should, the day at Kosovo Polje, Field of Blackbirds, when Prince Lazar got his doom.
The first time that her eldest two brothers, well outfitted with warm goatskin vests, went off to sea, Tanya wept, and her mother slapped her face to scare away the bad luck. The child bowed her head to indicate the submissive repentance she scarcely felt. Then her mother kissed the icon many times, praying for a safe voyage. Tanya willingly did the same. Her mother explained about the evil eye, Satan’s watchful greed, the jealousy of men (from which Christ preserve us) and the snares of Death the Huntsman. The flower-engraved copper vessels were hissing on the great block of the stove, while Srdjana, who had pretended not to see anything, knelt on the floor, and crammed in more wood. Veljko and Petar had ridden down to the ropemaker’s to order rigging for Uncle Massimo. Tanya’s father was already at the warehouse.
Perhaps her mother said something to him, because a day or two later he took the girl, decently veiled, alone with him to the empty church, whose lower ceiling-domes were elaborate Easter eggs with figures on them, while the upper ones made up a vault of blue being circumnavigated by marching figures; at the highest point of that inner sky stood Christ in a sun of crackling golden flowers; and in the quiet sizzling of the votive candles her father asked her to pray to our heavenly Prince Lazar, whose shoulders are higher than the deck-cannons of any Spanish galleon. This she did, while he crossed himself and murmured beside her; and when they came out, the Canal Grande was black with ships. Her father inquired whether she loved her brothers, and she said yes. — Don’t worry, Tanyotchka. My luck will shelter them, even though they’ve gone with Uncle Stefano. — The girl kissed his hand. Petar drove them home, and there was her mother in the doorway, forming up a warp of fabric from her loom into the air and all the way across the courtyard to the stack of Roman gravestones which everybody now used for any and all purposes.
In those days she often liked to scare herself by making shadows on the wall with her gabled lantern; sometimes a twisted bit of driftwood that one of her brothers brought her would produce some fine weird shape. Whenever her mother caught her, the girl got extra work to do. But when her father noticed, he insisted that she not be punished merely for dreaming. Already she knew that there was something which she would be expected to do one day, something secret and good, which indeed she would come to demand of herself once its meaning announced itself from darkness.
By then she was braiding ropes for her father whenever he allowed her, first the trecia simplice, then the wide mesh of the plagietto con fragio. She loved more than anything to please him.
He inquired what she desired of him, and she said: To learn as much as you. — Smiling, he rose and went away. No one had ever said that to him before; nor had he asked the question of anyone, even her eldest brother. As she watched him go, she saw that obscene secret care, whatever it was, swoop back down onto his shoulders. A few days later she cried out in joy when he brought her a brass microscope.
Unlocking his Organum Mathematicum (a fine one made in Würzburg in 1668), he opened to her all the slanted shelves with their many-colored tabs of knowledge.
Here in one pocket were depictions of all seven planets, which truly did, in spite of what her mother and the priest insisted, revolve around the sun, elliptically. She pulled out a card depicting the moon’s hideous face, and this in one stroke destroyed her pleasure in lunar nights. Once a lady had come in to pray at church; from a distance she was radiant; then she drew near the altar, and the mother dug her fingernails into Tanyotchka’s wrist in disgust, for here was a syphilitic prostitute, whose leprous face was pitted with stinking sores. Her kindly father being absent, the men rushed to turn her out, thrusting at her with sticks until she ran away. Then her mother made all the children wash their faces and hands in rosewater. The lunar disk expressed this diseased character. But her father informed her that what appeared to be imperfections were nothing more or less than mountains and seas, irregular like our own. The girl wished to know whether there were people on the moon. Before he could answer, her mother laughed at her. — Father says that knowledge will save us! explained Tanya; her mother slapped her mouth.
And in another pocket were ships in profile passing a two-dimensional undulating Turkish coast of domes, minarets and clusters of rectangular edifices. She knew all too well that her father had been thereabouts. She raised the magnifying loupe, and with a thrill of horror discovered a Turkish woman in a green overmantle and a long white dress with red flowers. She asked whether all Turks were evil, as Uncle Massimo said. Stroking her hair for an instant, her father departed. She heard the carriage bearing him away; he was gone near about two months, and no news came. That night her mother prayed to Saint Thomas, who guards the rain-clouds.
She learned to operate the two disk-tiers of her father’s solar clock, to name each monster and animal painted on his celestial globe. She could already slide the bronze knob of the dromoscope as accurately as Nicola and Vuk; she was better at it than Veljko. Smiling, her father softly clapped his hands to watch her. Of course he’d never take her to sea.
Veljko had been jealous about the Organum Mathematicum, but their father brought the proper gift for him: a crocodile mummy from Umm-el-Baragât, which when Petar carried it from the warehouse was still wrapped in papyrus: crumbly, dingy stuff, inexplicably valued by their father, who removed it with extreme care and took it off to his study. The crocodile stank, but Veljko loved it. Tanya helped him improve its eyes with vermilion beads. Unfortunately, he carried it out into the garden one day, in hopes of scaring Srdjana, and before she could oblige him the watchdogs had devoured it.