“I expect we’d manage somehow. There are things you don’t know,” she says.
There’s a way Nan has of shaking her head when she has well and truly had enough of my questions so that the skin wobbles around her neck. This is the headshake she’s given me now but I can’t stop myself from going on and on.
“But how? What other provisions? Not fish, nor flesh, nothing that has lived and nothing that has died, nor any other thing but what they give us, isn’t that right?”
“Look to your studies, Caroline—”
“Caro,” I remind her.
“Shush now, granddaughter, I don’t like that other name! It isn’t a good thing, whatever you might think, and I shan’t call you by it. You’re far too loose with your words. A thing is what it is. You can’t change it just by asking and you are Caroline Eve Arkwright. Now enough of all this fretting, I’ll go to the village tomorrow and be straight with them.”
“But you can’t, Nan!”
Now I’m thinking of her shuffling walk. I’m thinking of the sound her chest makes when she breathes in and out heavily.
“I’m not so far gone as you would have me, not yet. There’s still some good I can do. It’s like when they put their thumb on the scale, they know it doesn’t break with the bargain. We’re allowed the onions and they must give them over.”
“But the potatoes?”
“He hasn’t poisoned the potatoes, Caroline! Now hurry along and fetch your books. We’ll try the passive periphrastic today. Your mother made such a fuss over that in her day, but we’ll see if you can’t master it quicker than she did!”
It has been three days since Nan went to the village.
For three days I’ve eaten little flour pancakes. To start with they were as big as my fist, but now they’re no bigger than a mussel shell. I tried to make the coffee just as Nan does, but my hands were shaking so badly that I spilled the grounds. I’ve tried to collect them, but I can see plainly that it isn’t only coffee I’ve got but salt too.
And I haven’t dared to touch the potatoes, whatever Nan said!
Nan came to visit me this morning. I’d been so anxious I could hardly look at my books! But then I heard the winch turning and turning and I knew it was her coming back to me at last!
The villagers wrapped her in a beautiful, winding sheet of red silk. I’ve only seen that color once before. Nan told me that it was called carmine and that it can only be made with the shells of certain insects. It’s very expensive.
The word carmine is very like the word carmen, carminis which is charm, prayer, or oracle.
Her body was very light, so light I thought, for a moment, that perhaps there was nothing wrapped in the silk at all — but when I moved her, the silk fell away and I saw her hand. The nails were a colorless yellow and the veins were a colorless blue and I’ve no other words for what I saw except that I knew the hand could belong to no other.
It was a kindness they did her, wrapping her up in red silk.
I took her in my arms very gently and still she was so light.
I unhooked that platform just as she used to do but Nan was so much better at it than I am! It’s very hard when you’re all by yourself. The hook was difficult to manage and the fourth wheel was broken off completely. But they wrapped her in red silk and that was kind, I think, for they mightn’t’ve done that.
They might’ve taken her away and never sent her back to me at all.
Still I can’t come to the thought properly.
Moriturus est.
She has died.
The platform moves very slowly.
It isn’t balanced very well but I don’t know how to make it better. I don’t want to touch Nan. I can’t bear the thought that she’s underneath the red silk. It’s as if she were sleeping and not actually dead. It’s as if she could wake at any moment. But when I touched her she didn’t wake up, when I shook her she was so still! Her skin was very cold and it made me think about what she said last time, about how it’s very cold where we must go and I take a blanket for myself and the blanket is pale green with golden flowers and it’s one of my favorites but then I think I don’t want to take my favorite blanket because then I’ll always be thinking on the red silk when I wear it, so instead I settle for my second favorite blanket which is old and gray.
But then the blanket is bulky and it’s difficult to move in. It keeps getting trapped under the wheels of the platform. At last I let it lie beside the rail. I shall return for it eventually. I must come this way again.
But am I being foolish?
“Will I be warm enough, do you think?” And then: “I’m frightened of the way. Please. Please wake up. I don’t want to go by myself.”
Her silence is terrible.
I decide not to leave the blanket after all. Instead I wrap it around myself the way I’ve seen the Romans in the pictures do it so that it falls like a heavy dress around me. If I had string I would cinch it around my waist but I don’t have any string.
I pass the pantry and the sitting room. The blanket catches again and I must adjust it. I pass the bedrooms. The sunlight is still very bright here. It echoes the way that sound echoes and sometimes the colors it makes upon the walls are beautiful. There are all sorts of colors but none is the same color of red as the winding sheet of silk.
And then we are moving into darkness — past the eleventh chamber where I faltered, past the twelfth chamber and the thirteenth chamber. I never asked Nan how far the way was. I never asked Nan what must come next. I don’t think I’m brave enough for this but I must be brave enough because there is no one else to do this for her, no one but Caro, Caro passing into car . . .
From the darkness comes a new kind of light as if the walls themselves have begun to shine very softly. They are all studded with silvery white blooms that remind me very much of the flowers I’ve seen in the village in springtime, all clustered together in little beds. Or perhaps these things look like teeth. Or snow. There are long shining spindles that hang suspended and I must be careful when I step underneath them. Some have broken away. Their edges look very sharp. When I look at them I can see myself carrying Nan reflected a thousand times, perhaps ten thousand times, but each image I see isn’t me exactly.
I touch my eyes. They begin to water and burn dreadfully. My hands are almost white, the silk sheet is almost white.
This is what death looks like, I think, and it is a very frightening thought: but I’ve never seen anything as white as this!
Around and around, through chamber after chamber, the walls shrink around me until I feel as if I could reach out on either side and touch them. At the same time they begin to feel larger and larger as if there were some method by which I can detect the dimensions of the room which relies upon neither my eyes nor my fingers. It is strange to think I’m perhaps not so very far from my own bedroom. I’m within the place I’ve always lived. It shouldn’t be frightening for all around me are the places I’ve walked all my life. But they aren’t this place, are they? This place stands in the center of all that. The air stings my eyes, it tastes like the ocean air but much sharper.
Now there is shadow, and with it, the sense of something deliberately obscured.