The Saskiad Read online

  BOOKS BY BRIAN HALL

  FICTION

  The Dreamers

  The Saskiad

  NONFICTION

  Stealing from a Deep Place: Travels in Southeastern Europe

  The Impossible Country: A Journey Through the Last Days of Yugoslavia

  Brian Hall

  The Saskiad

  Copyright © 1997 by Brian Hall

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from

  this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  For information about this and other Houghton Mifflin trade and reference

  books and multimedia products, visit The Bookstore at Houghton Mifflin

  on the World Wide Web at http://www.hmco.com/trade/.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hall, Brian, date.

  The Saskiad / Brian Hall.

  p. cm.

  ISBN O-395-82754-X

  I. Title. PS3558.A363S27 1997 813'.54 — dc20 96-25841 cip

  Book design and decorations by Anne Chalmers Type: Electra (Linotype-Hell), Lithos (Adobe)

  Printed in the United States of America

  QUM IO 987654321

  "Ithaca" in The Complete Poems of Cavafy, copyright © 1961 and

  renewed 1989 by Rae Dalven, reprinted by permission of

  Harcourt Brace & Company.

  FOR PAMELA

  PART 1

  JANE

  When you start on your journey to Ithaca,

  then pray that the road is long,

  full of adventure, full of knowledge.

  Do not fear the Lestrygonians

  and the Cyclopes and the angry Poseidon.

  You will never meet such as these on your path,

  if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine

  emotion touches your body and your spirit.

  You will never meet the Lestrygonians,

  the Cyclopes and the fierce Poseidon,

  if you do not carry them within your soul,

  if your soul does not raise them up before you.

  — Cavafy, "Ithaca"

  1

  This is where she is now: a Greek island, low and away, last of all on the water toward the dark. Ithaca lies between two ridges at the head of a long crooked bay. No automobiles desecrate the silent streets. The modern world has been rubbed out like a mistake. The great stone clock tower on the eastern slope chimes the hour, its triad of gongs shimmering in the gelatinous air.

  The sun is motionless, huge. How deliriously she can feel the heat on her arms! She peels off her clothes, and her skin is golden like the sun. Her arms and legs glide, buttery at the joints. She can feel quite distinctly the dirt under her bare feet. She glides between the clapboard houses with their wraparound porches, their nested gables and towers. Beautiful homes like carved chests containing fine things: all the people she does not know.

  But here is an incongruity amid classical Ithacan order and repose. Her own house: the swaybacked porch, the three floors of mismatched windows, the white paint so indecently peeled that only splotches remain like lichen on the rotting shingles. Rising from the shallow roof is a belvedere, a small room with windows all around. A Captain's room.

  There is nothing she wants so much as to get up into that room. She would be able to judge the weather up there. She would pace undisturbed, lost in thought, unaware how much her men admired and loved her.

  She bounds onto the porch and tries the door. Locked. She grips the knob and pulls, confident of the swelling strength in her hands. But the door holds firm, indifferent to it.

  2

  As always, she wakes early, thinking, thinking. The new girl will be in school today. She saw her sitting in the Vice Principal's office. The new girl!

  She listens. Quiet.

  The sky is empty of stars. She turns on the light by her bed. Blind blackness presses against her window. How frightening! But when she turns out the light, her faithful stars have come out to cheer her: Orion in the northwest, and directly overhead the Big Dipper, which travelers call the Wagon because it wheels, never stopping, never sinking into the wash of the ocean. A supernova blazes in late-setting Bootes, the Herdsman, who herded Odysseus home. And the Moon, her planet, is a wind-filled sail racing along the ecliptic, waxing, always waxing, toward some fullness, some completion she can hardly wait for, but cannot foresee.

  Could it have something to do with the new girl? She is so beau- tiful.

  The stars are fading. She is the only one to keep a safe eye on the cunning dark, to help bleed this blind black to gray. No one else thinks of these things. Perhaps the new girl will. The beautiful new girl.

  3

  When she catches the first glimmer of the lake, she slips quietly down and pulls on rubber boots in the back hall. Outside is the sodden snow of a Tylerian January.

  In the barn Marilyn lumbers, steaming, to her feet, the back up first on splayed legs, the udder swaying hugely. Saskia dumps a scoop of pellets in the trough and shovels muck into the bin, then squats to rub the furry udder, coaxing the coo into letting down. Marilyn never lies in her own muck. She is a good coo with a clean udder, a pleasure to rub. Saskia works white ointment into the rear teats, and the udder veins bulge, the teats swell. She fires into the bucket a long sequence of pump-action double-barreled blasting. She has the strongest hands of anyone in her grade. At the Ithacan Carnival last summer she pushed the dial on the grip machine up to "Bone-crusher." Afterward, Marilyn is rewarded with a pile of hay and a hug as wide as two arms can reach. Saskia delights in the hot bristle against her cheek. When Saskia was little, an earlier coo pushed her against the wall, making her cry. Thomas ran to rescue her, his brown robe flapping. He lifted her a mile high and kissed her.

  In the coop, the chickens mince around her feet like bathers crossing hot sand. She leaves three eggs on the sideboard in the kitchen and pours a saucer of milk for Gorgon, who sidles her fat black body up to the dish with a grunt-like purr. It is a Discipline to love Gorgon, who bites and claws, and squats furtively in corners to do her business along the baseboards. Saskia once wrote and illustrated a reader for the crew that started, "Fat cat, black cat! What cat? That cat!" Pirates threatened, but Gorgon eventually saved the day. A rather pathetic fallacy.

  Back upstairs, Saskia picks a skirt and shawl for school. No need for a shower. The caramel smell of Marilyn in her hair is better than any soap. There's a flush of aqua along the eastern ridge. Time to raise the crew. Barring a rescue by the new girl — swinging down on a rope with a Tarzan yell? — the best part of her day is over.

  4

  Across the hall, her boatswain is still asleep, damn her eyes! "Get up, you scoundrel! The wind freshening, and a falling glass — no telling what the day will bring!" A lazy dog, yes. But she's damn comely. A hoogily thing. "Come on, Mim, if s almost seven." Saskia rummages through the pile of stuffed animals.

  "I'm up!" Mim bubbles up, animals tumbling. "Where's horsey?"

  Saskia picks it off the floor. Good God, what the Admiralty sends her. On the lower deck she rouses the rest of the crew — Austin, Shannon, Quinny — to the usual accompaniment of grumbling. Poor devils, it must be hell to be pressed into this service. Weevily food, never enough sleep. And where does it end? Beheaded by a cannonball or sent shrieking under the surgeon's knife. "Don't blame me," she always tells them when they cry. "Blame Boney." They straggle off to the latrine. (Or is that the loo? Perhaps the ship has no such thing. Simply off the side? Not on this ship.) Quinny takes his sheet with him. "Your hygiene!" she bellows after them. "I'll be checking!"

  Tall, capable Lauren is in the kitchen brewing coffee which, l
ike the Captain, she thinks of as soon as her eyes open. She is monumental in her nightgown, her ton of hair unbound. Saskia reports to her back: "Quinny wet his bed again."

  Lauren's shoulders sigh. "You stripped it?"

  "He does it himself now."

  "Well at least he's doing something" She turns to face Saskia, her eyes still cushioned with sleep. "How old is he, anyway?"

  "Seven."

  "Ridiculous!" She bangs closed the freezer door on her fancy Ithacan coffee. "Get him to make the bed up himself, too. If he's going to do that like a baby —"

  "I'm working on that."

  "How did he get to be seven years old?"

  Saskia assumes that's a rhetorical question. "It's not a big deal."

  "Teach him to do the laundry. Then he can wet his bed all he wants."

  "It's no big deal" You really shouldn't bother Lauren before she has had her coffee.

  "Don't be a martyr, Saskia. Nobody likes a martyr." The coffee machine lets out a Bronx cheer. Lauren fills a mug. Hurry up and drink it, you crabby old thing! She sips, smacking at the heat. "If you want to be Quinny's servant, go right ahead. I'm getting dressed." As if getting dressed is the way not to be Quinny's servant. Lauren sips again and closes her eyes appreciatively. What is it about coffee? The Captain fights a battle in a gale off a lee shore and never changes expression. But give him a cup of the real thing after a month of burnt-bread swill at sea, and the sparkle in his eyes is a lovely sight.

  "You're a good girl, Saskia," Lauren says, seeming to reconsider.

  "Woof!" she says testily.

  Lauren shrugs. "All right, you're not a good girl." She goes up to dress.

  Saskia scrambles eggs for the crew and sets out Marilyn's milk along with tots of fresh-squeezed rum. Shannon and Austin are sent back to wash their hands. Austin bops Quinny and Quinny blubbers. In the Judgment Book, Austin has eight demerits, Mim three, Shannon two, and Quinny twenty-six. When you reach ten demerits you clean out the latrines or swab the deck, or when it's hot you fan Saskia and Marco with wicker platters and feed them peeled grapes. But Quinny is under a different system. Discipline, in Quinny's case, has proven counterproductive, no matter what Lauren says.

  Saskia fills lunch boxes, checks book bags and clothing, tucks a wad of tissue paper in Quinny's back pocket. She wipes his slobbery chin. Lauren reappears in her greenhouse clothes to dispense regal kisses.

  The bus jolts down the last treacherous slope and nearly takes out the fence by Lauren's field as the driver, a real toby, backs and fills in the turnaround.

  "Morning, Chief." (His daily witticism is to call her Chief.)

  "Morning, Toby."

  They rattle through the bedraggled Tylerian landscape under dirt-soup skies, picking up dregs and pigs. Saskia sits in the front to keep a safe eye on the Toby, and Quinny huddles next to her for protection. Austin and Shannon sit in the back and holler for the short cut, an especially mogully "seasonal" road — basically a streambed — the Toby will take now and then when he fancies himself a nice guy. The back of the bus whips on that road, sending barns flying. Mim always sits over the rear wheel casing. The seat is saved for her, because everybody likes her and not even the dregs hide it. Two pigs who get on near town sit with her, and they are as quiet and good and neat as she is, although not so furry. The three of them hold their books on their laps and gaze at each other with long-lashed eyes. Saskia wonders what they talk about. When they laugh, they sound like forest mammals, laughing knowingly about mammally things.

  The oldest barns get off at the high school. Tyler Junior is next. "You can't come with me, Quinny." He may start blubbering. "I'll be on the bus this afternoon."

  "Have a nice day, Chief!"

  Her last seconds of freedom are the time it takes her to walk up the concrete path, through the fortified quadruple doors, each with its one baleful eye of netted glass, into the tiled gloom, the bang of lockers, the shouting and pushing and sneering and blubbering. Count off! Baa-aa-aa!

  5

  The new girl s name is Jane Sing. Ms. Plebetsky calls it out in English and directs the class to welcome her.

  Sing! The new girl nods, acknowledging the praise. She is tall and slender, with skin as brown as Saskia's brown eyes and yards of black hair as straight and glossy as an ironed horse's tail. She turns back toward the Plebe, so that her face is away from Saskia, the hair a satin veil between them. Can Saskia make her pull the veil aside? She bores with her eyes into the back of the new girl's head. Calling Jane Sing. The hum of her heart, the glowing ring of a glass as she rubs her finger on the rim. Sinnnggg . . . Sinnnggg . . . Turn Sing. Turn Jane Sing.

  Jane Sing turns. Her eyes run quickly over the faces, glittering as they search for Saskia, and when they find her they pause, they light like blackbirds on their rightful perch, home.

  In gym her locker is far away among the afterthoughts, beyond the next grade's Y's and Z's. Hurriedly putting on her uniform, Saskia tries to see Jane Sing through the crush of pigs, but by the time she pushes down to the end, Jane is already dressed, her hair pulled behind her in a ponytail, showing her chocolate wafer ears, which Saskia stares at. Jane looks up. Saskia panics and hurries past.

  Her arms and legs glow in the bright gym lights. Her round brown knees are a blur between the shorts and the socks, she handles the ball well. She runs at Saskia bouncing the ball, Saskia watches her beautiful legs, her willowy arms feinting right and left, she watches her flit past and jump for a basket.

  "Sheez louise, Saskia! What are you doing? Quit daydreaming!"

  Back in the locker room Saskia pretends to read notices on the bulletin board while Jane undresses a few feet away. Walking to the shower in her underclothes, Jane passes Saskia with another sidelong glance, as if to say, "When will you have the courage? Only ask me."

  Saskia wraps a towel tightly over her underwear. Her skin is not dark or beautiful. Yellowish, it looks terrible when sweaty, pale and buttery, like something grown in the cellar. Jane's bra and undies hang over a hook outside a stall. They are edged with a pretty scalloped pattern. The bra is a yoke of patches. Of course willows don't have breasts. Saskia can imagine Jane's torso in the shower, the lines of it as straight and pure as her limbs. In her own stall, she bares herself and immediately covers herself again with steam clouds. When Saskia is bare, she is really bare. After two years of mooniness she still has practically no body hair. Even on the triangle there's only a few scraggly hairs like a revolting bunch of insect antennas. The hair on her head is cobwebby. With their inimitable charm, dregs run up and blow on it, as though she were a dandelion gone to seed. Mim is furry and mammally. Jane Sing is a gazelle. Lauren has silky hair all down her floor-length legs. But there is something reptilian about Saskia, something lizardy. Hairless skin, watchful eyes that don't blink.

  And she has breasts. No willow, but a stumpy lumpy apple tree. "Cross-your-heart bra!" the dregs yell. "Over the shoulder boulder holder!" Saskia has read books in which heroines long for breasts, in which they bare their fronts to the moonlight to make them grow. But that cannot be right. No real person would be happy to see the first mushy stirrings of the pink blobs, the swelling in the flesh around them like some dreadful allergic reaction. And yet here they come. Udders! Soon they will be swaying hugely and getting in the way. And there is nothing you can do about it, not a thing.

  6

  Ms. Rosenblatt spells it on the board, and there is an h hanging on the end: Singh. But you still pronounce it Sing. The h is hanging breathless, Saskia thinks. That's a pun. In her notebook she writes, "Saskia Sing."

  "Jane's family comes originally from India," Ms. Rosenblatt is saying with a phony wide-eyed expression. "That's a very long way away!"

  Jane Sing keeps her eyes straight ahead. Saskia would be embarrassed, too. The Blatt always talks as if this were the first grade: "Ooh, a vewwy wong way away!" She hovers next to the world map with her pool cue. "Does anyone know where India is?"

  "Beautiful place, In
dia," Marco grunts.

  "So you've said."

  "They're all idolaters. They worship cows." He snorts.

  "I worship cows, too."

  "No you don't." He gives her a noogie. "You milk cows, Aiyaruk. That's not the same." How nice it is to have friends who know everything about you from the first moment! There are no disappointments, no embarrassing discoveries.

  "No one has a guess?" The Blatt is wilting. Saskia raises her hand. "Yes, Saskia?"

  "India is that thing hanging down below Cathay."

  "Cathay?"

  "China, stupido," Marco whispers.

  "China. It's that thing hanging below, there." Like an udder with only one teat. Perhaps that's why they worship cows.

  "Yes, very good, Saskia."

  "Yes, very good, Saskia,'" simpers Marco. "The old cow doesn't even know what Cathay is."

  "Are all the women in India as beautiful as Jane?"

  "All the maidens are. Their flesh is hard. For a penny, they'll allow a man to pinch them as hard as he can. But there is nothing to pinch."

  "I guess not." If anyone pinched Saskia, they would get something, all right.

  "They all go around naked. Because it's amazingly hot."

  "And they're hard and brown?"

  "Like mahogany. Even their breasts."

  "Jane doesn't have those."

  "She will."

  Not swaying hugely, but as much a part of the clean lines as the curve of the hips, the curve of the grain in the wood. "It sounds beautiful, that way."

  "Oh it is, my lass." Marco gazes at Jane for a long moment. "A man could lose his mind altogether over a maiden like that."

  Marco is kind of a sex fiend.

  But here comes the Blatt, down the row with handouts. "We have to hurry through this unit if we're going to get to Rome by March," she says querulously. The handout is a list of dates and headings. Heroic age . . . Periclean Athens . . . greatest artistic flowering . . . cradle of Western civilization, blah blah. Only the Blatt could make Greek history dull. Saskia writes in her notebook: "Rome by March! We March on Rome! Beware the Ides of March!" She wishes she had a lean and hungry look. That is partly what makes Jane so beautiful: a lurking hunger. For what? For a friend, of course.