“I couldn’t very well leave her behind! Uncle Al worries her. Besides, she might be useful.” She patted her mother’s shoulder. “Right, Mommy?”
Her mother gave a trembling smile.
“I can’t let you do this. Leave her with me. I’ll keep her.”
“No. She doesn’t like to be parted from me. She’ll shred your sheets, and you won’t like it. And besides, I want her. She’s trusty in a pinch.”
“There’s nothing I can say to make you change your mind?”
“Why would I come out at midnight in this contraption just to change my mind? No, I’m bent on going, so you might as well stop crying.”
“But you—and Mary—you’ll never—I’ll never see you again.”
“That’s for the Good Lord to decide.”
After a moment she said in a softer tone, “Come, now. Don’t take on. You have Sam Esh, for what he’s worth. Soon you’ll have a baby. Don’t begrudge me my poor old mother, or this bag of bones I call a dog. Or Mary. After all, she came to me.”
I wiped my eyes and looked at her.
“It was on the seventh round,” she said in the same low, thoughtful tone. “Do you ever think of that? I found her on the seventh round. When we were all looking for the ones we’d be with forever. I walked right into her.”
“We were supposed to see ghosts or photographs. Not something hard like that.”
“Well.” She smiled. “It’s just a fancy. Tell the girls I said goodbye.”
She gave Mary no instructions, and I couldn’t see that she touched her at all, but Mary started off, pulling the cart eastward.
(The next year, at Old Christmas, I stood at the window holding baby Jim and watched a group of girls go down the road. They crowded together, hurrying over the snow, their breath excited, white and quick. They meant to go around a barn. I thought I heard a burst of laughter floating on the air. Oh, sweet girls, I thought, what do you hope to find? Don’t you know that somebody always has to be sacrificed? Ask the animals—it’s all they talk about. Then, rocking the baby to calm myself, I thought of Mim. I thought of her breaking down the fence around the Profane Industries. I thought of her getting caught, and then I stopped. I didn’t want to think of that, and I still try not to think about it. I still see her, always, always. I make up stories for her in my head, when I’m doing the wash, when I’m scrubbing the porch with silver sand. I see her rescuing Jonathan from a dark hole underground. They have to jump across an invisible wire. They have to scale a wall. I see her traveling the country, her loins girded, her shoes on her feet, and her staff in her hand, eating her bread in haste. Jonathan rides in the cart with Mim’s mother and the dog. They come to the rivers, the floods, the brooks of honey and butter. And Mary, striding alongside Mim, is almost like her sister. She is like a portrait of Mim in metal. She looks the way she did the last time I saw her, in front of my own house in the moonlight: distant, almost as if she doesn’t know me at all. But she does know me. “Hi, Lyddie!” Some part of me remains inside her head, just as Hochmut, even now, would recognize my scent. I make stories for her, and I give her noble pursuits, because you wouldn’t—would you?—you wouldn’t create a character and make it a machine.)
Ada Hoffmann
VARIATIONS ON A THEME FROM TURANDOT
No one will sleep until the Princess learns the Stranger’s name.
Liù the slave girl, who has loved the Stranger since before his exile, when he was a Prince, when he smiled at her—Liù alone knows who he really is. So it is Liù who is dragged to the Princess’s garden by night, bound, ankles twisting as she stumbles through the peonies.
“You know what he will do to me if I do not win,” says the Princess, cold and resplendent, moonlight glinting like a star from her veils.
“He will be your husband,” says Liù. “He will love you. You will both be so happy. Please, Daughter of Heaven.”
The trouble is that the Stranger loves the Princess, and the Princess—heir to the throne of imperial China—despises love. On behalf of her ancestress Lo-u-Ling, she has sworn not to marry—until a man appears who can answer her riddles. Dozens have died trying. The Stranger, the man Liù loved and served her whole life, succeeded. If the Princess cannot learn his name by morning, he will marry her, whether she wills it or no. But princesses are not taught to lose gracefully.
“You know what I will do to you,” says the Princess, “if I do not win. I have seen you with him; I know that you know. Tell me his name. I will not ask politely again.”
The executioner at her side shifts his weight, a shadowy bulk, knives and pincers glinting.
For a moment, as Liù despairingly weighs her options, her view of the garden shifts. She is not really in China—not even in anything that resembles the real China. She is in an opera house in America. The garden with its pond and arching bridges is only a set. Yet Liù is Liù. The pain and terror are real. She has died protecting the Stranger’s secret, hundreds of times, and will die again each night, as a spellbound audience looks on.
Liù is a faithful slave, too good and too in love to complain. Her sacrifice will save the Stranger, which is all she has ever wanted. Yet just for a moment Liù thinks, There must be another way.
The moment fades. The executioner advances. With a beautiful, musical sigh, as she has done hundreds of times, Liù snatches the dagger out of his hands and stabs herself to death.
Over time Liù’s flashes of insight grow longer. She stops forgetting them at the end of the night. She grows balky, confused.
There must be another way.
She lies and says that the Stranger is nameless: he himself does not remember his past or his name. The Princess kills her, then half the city, in a rage.
She tries fleeing before the opera begins, leaving the Stranger to his fate. But she cannot stop being Liù. The Stranger is her whole life. Love and guilt, fear for his safety, draw her back.
She tries speaking, in various ways, to the Princess.
Most of these hurt more than they help. But by now Liù remembers clearly enough, from evening to evening, to keep track. In a few months she has learned to stretch her extra time to an hour, an hour and a half.
The Princess speaks to Liù in fascinated tones. “How can you love him, when he is a beast like any other man?”
“Not all men are beasts,” says Liù. The Princess beheads her.
“He is an angel, not a beast,” says Liù. “He is nothing like any other man.” The Princess has her hanged.
“I do not know, Daughter of Heaven,” says Liù. “I am helpless. I can say nothing of love, except that I feel it, and cannot feel otherwise.”
The Princess is stonily silent.
“My lord,” says Liù to the Stranger, “why? Why must you win this woman, when so many will die for it?”
It is the opera’s first act, a filthy thoroughfare outside the palace gates. The Stranger has seen the merest glimpse of the bloodthirsty Princess, and has fallen in love. He knows he must answer her riddles, no matter the risk; any man who tries and fails is executed.
Liù has begged him, in her first and most beautiful aria, to reconsider. The Stranger’s father has begged him to reconsider. The palace’s Lord Chancellor, majordomo, and head chef have sung a comical trio critiquing his plan. In the next act, the Emperor himself will beg him to reconsider. It never does any good.