Parsifal’s crest: three white anchors on a field of green samite.
Samite: A heavy silk fabric, often interwoven with gold or silver, worn in the Middle Ages.
Middle English samit, from Old French, from Medieval Latin examitum, from Medieval Greek hexamiton, from Greek, neuter of hexamitos, of six threads: hexa-, hexa- + mitos, warp thread. That’s what the American Heritage Dictionary has to say.
“And whose heritage would that be, anyway?” Joe wanted to know.
V
in the winter in the forest, Parsifal would wake with a thin layer of ice on his eyelids, so that before he could open them he would have to tap each one lightly with the forefinger of his right hand to shatter the frozen film. Thinking about it now, the tap and then the release that followed was like nothing he has felt since — a way to start each day that resembled walking out of a prison into the world. At least, that is how it felt to him, after he had left the forest and finished his high school education but before he had met his first librarian, walking out of prison, a free man, albeit with several strings attached, one of them being court-mandated visits to a therapist.
“Regressive,” Joe would have said.
The Motel de la Forêt was a low building with six units and no swimming pool. In front of each unit, though difficult to make out in the dark, was a small, smudged barbecue grill. Off to one side there was a large tent, the purpose of which was a mystery. In front of the motel’s office, Parsifal wiped his feet on a mat made of bottle caps and pushed the bell. It was late; he hoped someone would answer and not be frightened by his arriving in the middle of the night. The sign by the road had read “VACANCY.”
Finally a light went on and the door opened — cautiously, Parsifal thought — onto an office area of knotty pine, cuckoo clocks, and a counter on which rested three statues of squirrels made from acorns glued together. In front of one of them was a small sign that read “For Sale,” though no price was given.
The woman who stood before him wore a heavy red robe with gold threads running through it, backless slippers, and a sort of turban, the kind some women don after washing their hair. In a way, she resembled the woman at the florist shop, and also the woman at the map store, in her calm demeanor and the fact that she wore glasses, but in most other ways she did not.
“I’m looking for a room,” Parsifal said. “It’s just for one night. I hadn’t planned to have to stay in a motel, actually, but I’m afraid I got here later than I’d expected.”
“That will be thirty bucks,” the woman told him.
When Parsifal had trouble falling asleep, he thought about the trees in the forest, large and small, smooth barked and rough, how all of them were there waiting in the dark — upright, parallel, and patient. They were confident that the sun would be out the next day, those trees were. The night will pass, the trees seemed to say. All we have to do is to wait.
Fragments, true enough.
The trees were fragments, too.
His room at the Motel de la Forêt continued the same knotty-pine motif as the motel’s office. There was a fake Indian bedspread, a fake pine dresser, and a fake Indian rug on the floor. They were miles from Indians, as far as Parsifal knew, but possibly the owner of the motel, or the decorator, was unaware of that fact. More authentically, there was the head of a deer on the wall, but it was turned slightly so its aggrieved eyes watched him as he sat on the bed. A framed photograph, evidently taken some time ago, judging by the clothes of the people in it, hung on the wall facing the foot of the bed. It showed a man, a woman, and a child. Evidently it had been snowing, and the three were gathered before an open hole no more than eighteen inches from side to side. There were three sets of footprints leading up to it, but how the hole had come to be there was a mystery. Was it a grave for a beloved pet, or was that hole one of the first — perhaps the very first — salvo in the sky’s attack on the earth that has continued to this day?
The backs of the three were toward the camera, and there was little else to see except that the child held in his right hand some small object, possibly a toy, or a book, or, for that matter, it could even be a cup.
“What have you done?” the deer’s head on the wall seemed to be saying.
The logo of the Pelikan pen is of a mother pelican feeding her young, but that bird circling overhead was certainly no pelican.
In the middle of the night Parsifal was awakened from a dreamless sleep by a knocking on the door of his room.
“Just a minute,” he called out, and as quickly as he could he found his pants, shoes, shirt, and socks to put them on, but by the time he opened the door, no one was there at all.
“Hello,” he called out into the night.
His voice echoed in the trees and no one answered.
The sound of a person shouting into a grave.
The deer. Silence.
One other pen-filling system is the sleeve, or vacuum filler, which is a variation of the eyedropper in which the ink is sucked up a hollow tube like a straw. Capillary fillers and various sorts of button fillers are really just variants of the rubber ink sac.
While in the forest, Parsifal and Pearl mostly lived on things like mushrooms, pine nuts, certain ferns, and — the occasional animal part aside — especially on the dried beans Conrad brought with him on his visits. On the nights Conrad visited, Parsifal was first alerted to his father’s presence by a chorus of snapping twigs and muttered curses, until finally he would see his father’s middle-sized frame carrying a fifty-pound sack of beans (or sometimes brown rice or millet), along with all the various other things he had put into cloth bags and attached to his belt, staggering through the trees toward their house.
The only time Parsifal slept with a woman who was not a librarian he found himself missing their ways: the methodical unbuttoning of their clothing, how they took care to fold each piece after they removed it and placed it carefully on a nearby shelf or chair where they could find it again quickly, their patience as they waited for him to finish whatever he was doing before they asked a question or delivered a piece of helpful information, and the way they never, ever seemed surprised by his appearance. In contrast, the non-librarian threw her clothing everywhere and was full of opinions, which she was only too happy to share. She told him he looked “interesting.”
“Sand,” he had answered Joe’s question.
The continental breakfast buffet at the Motel de la Forêt was served outdoors in the extralarge tent he had seen the night before. For Parsifal, eating in public had never been an enjoyable experience. Being so exposed immediately upon waking seemed cruel indeed, but in this case, his fellow breakfasters were hardly offensive. They consisted of an old Danish-speaking couple, a family of four (a mother, father, and a set of overweight twins), plus a blind person whose guide dog, a yellow Lab, looked reproachfully at the rest of the breakfasters, as it if were their fault his master could not see.