“You have more trouble brewing now, you say, Roldi, than many monkeys might cause. . . . ?” It seemed the right moment to broach the cask.
It was.
“Yes .... damn it. ...” The prince sat up, set down his glass, and shook his head. “If ’tisn’t settled, there’ll be no buckwheat. If there’s no buckwheat, then they’ll start eating the wheat and the potatoes. If they eat the wheat and the potatoes, then they’ll not be having enough to make vodka. And if they’ll not be having enough to make vodka, they’ll have to be buying vodka. —And the Vloxi, may the Almighty God of Heaven and Earth defend us from evil, when the Vloxi start buying vodka ”
Eszterhazy had made only the first, faintest of beginning at an understanding. It would not do to push, it never did do to push. Anywhere. So he said one sole word. “Lurley?”
“So they say—” His friend pushed his hands through his hair, sighed. “So they say. ...”
After a moment. "And you say. . . ?”
_ The prince shrugged. “Perhaps it’s not a lurley. Perhaps it’s— perhaps she is ... an undine. . .”
Candles weeping golden-brown tears. Guest saying nothing. Waiting, waiting. Sipping the rich red wine. Thinking of old thoughts. Of old beliefs . . . could one indeed call them ‘old’ when they were so evidently still being believed? After a long, long wait, and a long, long sigh, Prince Rol- drando said, “Maybe she is an undine. Maybe one that old Theo made. Let go loose, out of anger, you know, with our gaffer. And so, maybe . . . maybe she’s been waiting . . . waiting . . . ever since
Sweet scent of beeswax, mingled with sweet scent of wild apples.
What century were they living in now, here, on the wild border inarches of the VIox, where the Avars and the Goths alike had left their bones to moulder and their spear-heads to rust and their ghosts, their still-vexed and angry ghosts, to wander, muttering and unshriven. . . . ?
“Because, you see, Engli, the old story of old King Baldwin’s bride? You know what the common-folk say about old King Baldwin’s bride?” Eszterhazy was lairly sure the story had not been originally told about old King Baldwin, but it was of the same blood; he summed the long and uncanny story up in a few words: Mow the noble lord had wedded a beautiful and a strange woman, bow her only condition was that she must never be seen to bathe. Mow for some several years the marriage had been happy enough, until ....one ill-fated
day ....the husband coming borne unexpectedly (ah, those eternal stories of husbands and their lalally-unexpected returns!), and bearing sounds of song and of the splashing of water, had dared to break his own word . . . had espied his wife in her bath ... espied, over the side of the tub, her glistening, glittering mermaids’s tail
Yes. . . . Yes. . . . Such is the common story. But it’s not the true story, you see. We know it. We of the family. She wasn’t a mere mermaid, you see. She was an undine. He spied her, she sprang out, and into the moat, and thence to the open flood. But they often used to be hearing her, wailing for her children. Es. An undine. She wedded him—for what? Gold? Hadn’t she, hadn’t they all of them gold enough, and silver and jewels as well, there at the bottom, where the rich ships sank? Ah, no, you know, what it is that undines want: a soul, a soul, is what undines want! She wedded him to gain a soul by reason of the Christian wedding, you know that, for the undine has no soul to start with. . . .
“And so maybe this is what she’s come for. Come back for. Is waiting for ” The prince’s voice droned on in the growing darkness, the last lights of the sunken day sinking into the horizon behind it, the candles sinking wetly into their sockets.
Eszterhazy felt his head snap up. Therefore, it must have dropped upon his bosom. A day’s travel by train and by coach. The full belly, stuffed with roast boar. The monotone narration. Narration stopped. Had Roldi noticed this breach of manners? What was the last thing he’d said? Ah. . . .
“Waiting for her soul, eh?” the guest said.
“No. No.” The host nodded emphatically. “Not her soul. She hasn’t got a soul. Don’t you see.
“She’s waiting for a soul, all right. But it’s my soul she. is waiting for….!”
Ephraim the trader was clad in velveteens, worn, clean velveteens. Tied at the knee in clumps of cords. His cross-gaiters. In Bella, such costume had not been seen off-stage in half-a-century. Here it was a suit of working- clothes. And the man and his trade was as archaic, in terms of imperial commerce, as his costume. But he was a man for all of that, and a civil man, too. It did not occur to him, as it often seemed to occur to others in this country scene—and in others, for that matter—-that the stranger from the big city was asking him about his own affairs for an ill purpose certain to involve the country fellow’s loss—or, what was just as bad: the stranger’s gain!
“Weel, sir [the traider said], I have four sisters. And tis our custom to dower them, not with much money, for our trade here doesn’t bring in much money, we don’t hunger or go in rags, but we don’t find ourselves with much in the way of cash. My old Dad, he give the girls furniture and featherbedding and of course they already has their own linens in their chests. And my old dad, he gives the bridegroom a gold watch and a chain, as is the custom with us. Well sir, as I say, I ve got four sisters, long may they live, and after the third, Estella was her name, After she was wedded off, twas like the house had suffered a fire. Oh, how she wept, ‘Father, Father, don’t forget me!’—and afterwards my old dad he says, in his wry way, ‘Forget her, how can I forger her, she’s tooken the last stick of furniture and the last feathertick off the pads!’ And yet there was the fourth sister, Mar- rianna, well, she gets betrothed, and there was a problem, how our old dad he did weep. ‘A shame to my name,’ he sayd. ‘I’ve got not a groushek nor a bedstool to dower her with, not to mention the gold watch and chain for the bridegroom,’—had I mentioned the gold watch and chain for the bridegroom, Sir?”
Eszterhazy listened patiently. A prosecutor or an examining magistrate might—at least in fiction— allow himself the luxury of asking crisp, incisive questions: short: to the point. But an enquirer such as himself, a stranger, among a strange-enough people, and involved in as strange a matter as this one—the best thing by far was simply to start with a general subject and then to listen. And listen and listen.
And listen. . .
“Well, Sir, we are not like how we hear the children in the cities are, we respect our old elders, our gaffers, as we say, and it pains us to see them weep. So I says, ‘Dad, never fear, I’ll help thee.’ And I gets in the wagon and off I goes, not half-knowing as to where, to tell the truth; and then it bethinks me. ‘No one has been down along the little river of late years, so off with thee, Em- phraim, and see what God may send thee.’ And among other things He sends me, Sir, is a whacking great pile of mussel shell, and so that’s the story, Sir.”
Someone, somehow, must have brought word to old Hakim the River Tartar, that a Highborn Guest was coming, for not only was rude hospitality already prepared on the table—a much scratched old pewter plate piled with nuts and mulberries, a jug of inilk, a pile of flatbread on a clean cloth—but the old man had put on his embroidered caftan: for usually the River Tartars, those lew who remained—usually they wore the cast-downs of the local Rag Market. The River Tartars had forgotten most of their own tongue without ever having gathered much mastery of the common speech. The old man muttered a long greeting which had once, perhaps, been current in the Courts of Karakorum. Then he pulled a boy from behind him, and shoved the lad forward. There was no robe for the lad, perhaps had been none such for a century. But the boy’s rags were at any rate clean.