They made a strange pair, shuffling from exhibit to exhibit in the grey light. When he had shown her all his pieces of bone, his hair dolls, and blunt iron sickles twined with ribbon like convolvulus, he explained the meaning of each object and also where he had got it. This he had won at cards; that he had dug up in a desert; no value could be put on that one. He spoke coaxingly. “You can have any of these things. They are all very lucky.” But she was nervous and looked away. The Grand Cairo would not be downcast. He winked at Ashlyme with the vulgar gallantry of the secret policeman, as if to say, “I’m not finished by a long way yet!”
On a table he had a machine in a box. When he did something to it with his hands it produced a thin complaining music like the sound of a clarinet in the distance on a windy night, to which he tapped his feet and nodded his big head energetically, while he grinned round the room. But this only further confused the fortune-teller, and as soon as he saw that she would not dance, he shrugged and made haste to silence it. “We had a lot of those in the North,” he said.
“Look at this,” he invited her. “You can have this.” He stuck out his hand and made her look at the ring he had on it. “Inside here,” he boasted, “I carry the most deadly poison there is, made from the excrement of cats. I always wear this ring, even while I am asleep. And if it ever happened that I found myself in a position intolerable to my pride…”
He unscrewed the bezel of the ring. The fortune-teller stared expressionlessly down at the dull powder it contained.
“You can have that,” he said, snapping it shut.
She shook her head slowly in her bovine way. He smiled and looked directly into her eyes.
“Tell me my future, then,” he ordered.
The night was coming on. Fat Mam Etteilla sat resting her bosoms comfortably on the edge of the little green baize table, two dark patches of sweat spreading slowly under the arms of her dress. She shuffled the cards, spread them, and stared at them in surprise. The dwarf, looking over her shoulder, laughed loudly. He lit a lamp and sat down opposite her. “That’s something, eh?” he said. “What do you think of that?” Dull gold light flared off the grubby, colourful slips of pasteboard. He tilted his head to one side and considered them intently.
“Again!” he ordered. The fat woman went on staring at him. “Again!”
Ashlyme sat forgotten in a corner of the room. He had asked if he might go home, but the dwarf would not let him. “I might want you to take a message for me,” he said carelessly. The hot food cooled; the sheep’s head gazed into the gathering gloom with its bulging eyes; downstairs the dwarf’s police came and went, came and went, with their urgent reports from the Artists’ Quarter, their rumours from Cheminor, and their suspects from the Pont de Nile. None of this was interesting to the fortune-teller and her client. Only their two heads were visible, leaning avidly over the cards in the gold wash of light. Sometimes they set up a dull murmur: “Two rivers-a message!” “Avoid a meeting!” The room grew chilly. Ashlyme wrapped himself in his cloak and slept uncomfortably.
Later there was a quarrel; or perhaps he dreamed it. Someone knocked the table over in the dark. A stool scraped on the floor. A bottle fell and broke. Ashlyme heard the Fat Mam breathing heavily through her mouth, then the words,
“I am committed in the Rue Serpolet! What you ask is not yet possible!”
He had a confused impression of the cards spilling through the cold air the way a conjuror spills them from hand to hand, each small crude picture bright and cruel and alive and very far away.
When he next woke it was early dawn. If the table had been knocked over, they had righted it again and now sat with their elbows on it, looking first at the cards and then into one another’s eyes. The dwarf had disarranged his hair; it stood up in spikes, and beneath it his face was eroded and unhealthy. A half-eaten meal and a jug of “housemaid’s coffee” stood at the Fat Mam’s elbow, and there was dried milk in the hairs on her upper lip.
They seemed to be talking a language Ashlyme didn’t understand. He shook his head, cleared his throat, hoping they would notice him and become less remote. Fat Mam Etteilla gazed at him blankly for a second, an expression of greed fading from her features. The Grand Cairo got up and stretched. He walked over and pulled one of the oranges out of the sheep’s head, then went into the other room, peeling it. Ashlyme heard a muffled oulouloulou through the wall. A moment later the cats began to come in from Montrouge. They surrounded the card table, rubbing their heads against the fortune-teller’s ankles, more and more of them until the room was full of their drugged purr.
“None of these cats is mine,” the dwarf told her proudly, finishing his orange. “They come to me from all over the city because I speak their language. What do you think of that?”
She smoothed her hair complacently.
“Very nice,” she said.
Ashlyme left them and walked stiffly out into the city, where the thin milky light of dawn was falling across the earthworks and onto the faces of the dwarf’s raw new buildings. When he looked back the tower was dark but for a single yellow window, against which he could make out two silhouetted figures. He rubbed his eyes.
THE FOURTH CARD
Chaos and uncertainty follow this card. A journey or undertaking of which the outcome cannot be guessed. According to another reading, vacillation.
“I have heard the cafe philosophers say, ‘The world is so old that the substance of reality no longer knows what it ought to be.’ ”
If you stood at the window in the studio at Mynned and looked out towards the Low City, you felt that Time was dammed up and spreading out quietly all around you like a stagnant pond. The sky was the colour of zinc.
Ashlyme pursued his life dully, unsure what he might have begun by bringing the dwarf and the fortune-teller together. One night he dreamed he was standing in a gallery which overlooked the ground floor of a large building. The whole of this floor, he recorded, was given over to piles of secondhandclothes, among which wandered hundreds of elderly women with powdered cheeks and wet angry eyes. They turned the clothes over busily: they looked like beetles in their black coats. Then the Barley brothers had come in, accompanied by the Grand Cairo, who immediately began giving away coloured balloons. There weren’t enough to go round. The women fought over them in the aisles, running over one another furiously, red in the face. I woke up sweating: it was just like being in Hell.
The popularity of his portraits persisted, but he found his clients distracted and hard to pose. For the moment, he wrote, they are a little subdued. It will pass. They find themselves chafed by their isolation. They say it is like living on an island, and I suppose they are right.
Something new, in the shape of Paulinus Rack and his difficulties, soon came to take their mind off their predicament. I have heard, Ashlyme noted, not without satisfaction, that he has made unwise property investmentsin the Low City. If Die Traumunden Knaben is not a success, he will crash, and his patrons will disown him. Yet they constantly interfere with the production, demanding that it be made “more acceptable.” They must have sets designed by Audsley King, but they do not want the ones that have already been submitted. These are, it appears, “too gloomy”; they are “drab”; they are at one and the same time “too suggestive” and “too blatant.” Rack is driven to dining alone at the Charcuterie Vivien (where he does not speak to me). Meanwhile, somebody has suggested we have a play about the Barley brothers.