(from: Chapter 5 - The Map of Metopolis Scaled 1:1; Chapter 4 - The Rail Car of the Millionaire, and from At the Armenian’s Tavern and Once Again at the Armenian’s Tavern - Chapters 3 and 6)

If you are far, far away from the city and take a completely different viewpoint, to look from beyond the big river, from the plain of Dicomesia - on a clear summer morning or evening, when through the iridescent sunbeams one could see even the souls of the dead, you can discern right over Metopolis, much more clearly than ever and better than anywhere else, that red dust which appears less easy to notice and less disquieting when you are close to the town. I come from Dicomesia and my childhood years were always charmed by that aura of imperial vapour which enveloped the peaks of Metopolis when seen from afar. Back to Metopolis then and established here at last, I drew up for myself, after full twenty years of inquiries, maps that would help me find out if the wretched town of Metopolis , with its houses spread on apparently sterile hills, could not possibly stretch in complete self-forgetfulness over an immense treasure-trove of red marble. A town that breathes its own everyday wretchedness while in fact it’s lying over an unknown treasure, and that, once it found out about this treasure, would hardly have time enough to unearth its riches and feed on them. Instead of flourishing, it would cave in house by house, family by family, street by street, man by man - and instead of a godly fate becoming manifest to it, there would have already appeared on the site of the submerged Metopolis a pit, a no man’s ravine. Hardly had the treasure been unearthed by the Metopolisians from under their own feet, than its pit would have straight away turned into their own irrevocable common-burial pit. This red marble, I’d suspected for over twenty years, was hiding massive under the town. I was expecting to find definite signs of its presence, or rather, I expected that they did not appear too soon, so that I’d not see the end as close as all that. Or, should they appear, I wanted to envisage and know them thoroughly enough to hide them away even better, for fear other eyes might clap on them, as I wanted to keep them as far as could be from these signs. That would be the Millionaire’s secret. And I was inclined to think more often than not this secret of mine just a Polichinelle’s secret.

            Now I was before that bone of the earth uncovered by the landslide of the loess layer. A bone I’d dreamed to see for a life time and about which I’d decided that, should it tell me anything about the existence of marble nearby, I’d keep my mouth shut and carry with me to the grave every bit of what I new. This was mere naiveté. It can be noticed even in full daylight that all the roads among the hills where they’d once looked for marble led to and meandered around the town, with no exception. All those societies that had gone out of their ways towards Metopolis - had they been looking, one wonders, for anything but what I’d been trying to find myself : The bone of the earth which alone could tell them where exactly lay the massive treasure everybody hoped to find. A bone fated to be just found, broken and destroyed so as to reveal the main trunk itself.

            Now a new society is coming in the guise of a firm with triple headquarters. But what if this one is coming to look for precisely the same thing ? Since it is a fact: coins, pottery, inscriptions - hardly any of these are left, they’ve been unearthed a long time ago, used up and traded away completely.

            I’ve cultivated the slope of the hill year in, year out, with the aim of weakening the grip of the earth through the roots of the strong plants, avid for humidity, but also counting on the likelihood of annual rains, no matter how sparse. Especially as the tillable part of the hill, oriented towards the North-East and in the way of the Big Gale, was rich in snow, from December until March and it had rich stores of humidity, dangerous for the stability of the layer of loess overhanging the slope, on top of the rocky hill’s backbone.

            When I noticed from my moving rail car that the earth had started to move down at the top of the hill and was sliding downwards hardly visible, with the sunflower rows still standing, I realized that the split of the layer of earth would eventually occur right under my eyes. I braked the rail car and had just time enough to take my pick-axe and spade, which I keep within reach under my tin armchair.

            I ran and stopped at the foot of the hill: the thick layer of loess was sliding past me with the large sun-flower heads left untouched, stems still standing.

            Then everything collapsed and became an ugly mess in a valley below.

            The bone of the hill remained naked, whole and shiny under the sun.

            Not a vein of red marble, from the peak to the foot of the hill.

            I started digging under the hill’s base. I hit my pick-axe in there until at last I came upon a wide spot of red marble that was disappearing underneath the rock, as it were, in the direction of the valleys that led to Metopolis. But what if the spot did not lead too much further, or in case it extended further, what if it went not towards Metopolis but to the right or the left of it? This only meant that the ultimate sign that I’d been hoping to find was not this one, everything was again delayed for me and who knows whether the spot in question did extend in yet another direction or not, and then the suspected hidden stocks of red marble might just not be anywhere else at all. There was nothing more I could see.

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I have never been weak enough to imagine that I might dominate Metopolis or even command its view entirely with my eyes. I have looked with fresh curiosity at it this time too, but with the restrained fear of being one day engulfed by that muddle of wretched houses and backroads. The ribbons of the narrow, scrambled streets wound behind the houses, as if painfully contorting their backs to reach out to some unknown celestial spiral, but they apparently wrung that way only to absurdly end up in the big river, and only to turn back again by other trajectories and go towards the barren peaks and valleys of the local hills. A fine, reddish dust floated over Metopolis. And had it not been for the walnuts and quinces spreading out the wide-leafed umbrellas of their rich, dense foliage over the roofs’ edges , the cobblestone of the roads and the uneven yards would have offered to the sky a desolating vista of dryness and barren lands. The giddy flashes of the town’s windows when hit by the dazzling sunlight shone forth suddenly as if sending some kind of vainly repeated alarm signals in the direction of the big river, so calm and in complete control of its own riverbed, and, beyond, towards the wide expanse of the rich field of Dicomesia, which I could see shamelessly bathing in ripe wheat sheaves and rolling over in the tall, dense, green clovers of the corn, as I was sitting in my armchair of the moving rail car. To make sure that it survived, Metopolis had lived long by “feeding on its hills” - as General Marosin once put it. The red marble and the best of stone had been extracted from practically everywhere they existed, the hills were pierced and crumbled all in turn, or there only remained deserted remains of them. The crumbling excavations were getting ever closer to the town, the less red marble and noble construction stone could be found by the prospectors on remoter hills. “One day we shall begin eating up the hills under our town. Should we eventually find underneath all the rich treasure of the red marble we are hoping to find, we shall be rich in exchange for the submersion of our town and of our houses” - General Marosin also said once, but then the risk of submersion had been a long way off as yet, for one could still find pure limestone at a great distance from the town and the surrounding walnut and quinces woods.

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            About the same time that Mavrocordat city received its name, Metopolis itself acquired its name of Metopolis , having been named before with a Turkish sort of name very hard to pronounce. An archaeologist had discovered in that region, under some hills, a number of metopes of sorts - some red marble slabs bearing Byzantine cameos on their surface. And then the neighbouring city was immediately called Metopolis, the town of the metopes, that is, and its inhabitants were not less ready to call themselves Metopolisians, getting it into their heads that they really were the direct followers of the Imperial Romans and Byzantines (for, you see, the Byzantines actually did extend their rule over these neighbourhoods - and this is the only historically ascertained fact).

            In those years, Reichenbach as well as many others were bent on giving the name Mavrocordat to the locality they inhabited; they even improvised a series of slightly imaginary data about a certain Sultana Mavrocordat, the niece of the Exaporitus himself, who reputedly ran and found shelter exactly in this vicinity, wishing to consume here her intense romance with a very brave, bold and vengeful negustorlaz - the chief merchant and master of almost the whole eastern part of the Dicomesian plain. Reichenbach had done everything in his power to secure this name for the town. And when at last the name Mavrocordat was endorsed by a royal gesture, Reichenbach lavishly spent even more money to erect on the bank of the big river an enormous statue in honour of the former ruler, Constantin Mavrocordat (who reigned six times in Wallachia and four times in Moldavia); the statue presented the venturesome Fanariotike seated in a high chair of state made of stone and holding in one hand the Constitution that he’d given to Wallachia, and in the other hand the Mercure de France magazine where his Constitution had been praised. It was again Reichenbach who obstinately insisted for an inscription to be placed on the statue’s pedestal, written in Latin, the language which Constantin Mavrocordat had so loved that it accompanied practically each of his portaits: CONSTANTINUS MAVROCORDATUS, UTRIUSQUE VALACHICAE ET MOLDAVIAE PRINCEPS - REGIFICOS FASTUS MUSARUM VINCIT AMORE.

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 God only knows why it’s been called so: The Armenian’s Tavern.

            They say an Armenian may have once lived in Metopolis, the owner of a ferry and two jetties at the turn of the big river, from where you can see quite clearly the ford beyond, used by the flocks of The Wool Citadel. The location on the Metopolisian bank of the big river which The Armenian had laid his hands on to build the two jetties had made him reign supreme on both river banks: nothing could be transported from one river-bank to the other without him reviewing everything with his own eyes and in his own customs houses. As could be expected, he soon took over the jetties of The Wool Citadel’s other bank, he wrote them in his name too - so no cloth or carpet manufacturer, no skins merchant, no peddlar, cattle, horse or buffalo raiser or drover, nor any retail or whole-sale thief could be perfectly sure of the run of the animal, wool, or meat business, unless they followed The Armenian’s directions. Even the strait in the big river’s waters between Metopolis and The Wool Citadel seems to have once been known as The Armenian’s Vice or The Armenian’s Pocket.

            But I’ve never heard of any Armenian holding a tavern in Metopolis, never; this would have been too much of a retail business that eats up masses of time and blocks a man up behind the counter, not leaving him any resources to circulate freely under the sun and to watch over the big river, over Metopolis, the entire Wool Citadel, the passages between the highway and the big river, the mountain and the field, over every move on The Horses’ Island or in the richest town of the Dicomesian realm, namely the city of Mavrocordat. What’s more, they say that The Armenian, even if he did own jetties on the banks abreast of Metopolis and The Wool Citadel, he never lived in any of these two localities, but in Mavrocordat city - a safer, busier harbour, which also commanded the view of that part beyond and on the big river which was under the imperial Turkish rule in that time immemorial. But it might just as well be that the older Armenian of Mavrocordat was someone completely different from the one in the history of Metopolis. This one from Mavrocordat city - where he allegedly traded goods off with Trapezunt and Anatolia, with Syria and the Egyptian Alexandria - is reputed to have lived and done his big business behind the screen of a little, harmless property, namely, he kept, they say, an insignificant printing press that used letters from a transitional Latin and Slavonic alphabet cast in wood fonts to print Gospels, Pentecost Prayer-Books, Consecration Texts and, as lay literature he printed The Colloquy of the Vegetables and Fruit plus a few stories from The Arabian Nights . As his little printing press depended on the benediction of the severe monasteries at Mount Athos - this Armenian, wishing to print the Arabian Nights, had expurgated from its tales all that was love and pleasure between man and woman. What’s more, just like in a monastery of Mount Athos, there existed no woman in the Armenian’s household, in his yard or his printing house. Even the domestic animals of his household were all male: a hound, a tom-cat, a cock, a he-turkey, a guinea cock and a mule. He had, right in the pavilion where he’d drink his coffee, coiling around a dried willow pole, a he-snake who died of old age, leaving no offspring behind, just like The Armenian himself.

            It’s very hard to find the connection between such a man and the tavern of Metopolis or, for that matter, any tavern meant for the accomodation and frolicking of all worldly vanities.

            And then, as is known, in times closer to our own day, the tavern was set up as the property of a woman, sometime during the reign of Charles I Hohenzollern who’d been the first to introduce in the United Romanian Principalities become a kingdom The Monopoly of Alcoholic Drinks and Tobacco. This lady-owner, having appeared in Metopolis at the time of the first Hohenzollern, was given the nickname Hohenza and she lived to see the advent to the throne of Charles II, namely at the time of the regency held by the patriarch Miron Cristea who endorsed every act in the name of the little prince Michael, then only 5 years of age. And when the game of football appeared, with its rules that were known even by the youngest child, Hohenza was called by a shorter name: Henza, for it was on the deserted grounds behind the tavern, in her property, that the first ball-games for grown-up men were held.

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            One could say that I am the owner of a rail car and a narrow railway approximately 6 kilometres long, which connects the crumbling hill with the deserted stone quarry on it (which was abandoned by the Royal Society for Civil Engineering under State Supervision) to the pilot-station for pealing off willow-wood, at the German’s Leg, abreast of The Armenian’s Tavern. My house is situated on the table-land over the three hills that dominate The Metopolisian Valley, namely, The Warm Hill of the stone quarry, The Windy Hill and The Sparrows Hill. I erected my house on the spot where there used to be the barracks of the special drilling group of The Royal Society. I have only retained from the barracks the roof, made of the best brand of tin sheet. After The Royal Society retired and quit the stone quarry, and the railway too, I gradually erected beside the wooden walls of the house some new ones, made of pieces of broken red marble which I transported with the rail car from another quarry, deserted by a different society, The Society for Stone Heaters and Indoor Decorations, Sumbassaku and Sons, which had prospected at the Buffalo’s Hill, very long time before The Royal Society had tried its luck at The Warm Hill. After these two societies there followed others, with an almost identical fate.      No end of societies and abandonments.

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I ride in my rail car on the narow railway, become mine too, any time the weather does not permit me to cover the uneven, shorter distance between the table-land and The Armenian’s Tavern which I generally cross on foot when the weather is fine. And I also travel in the rail car when I have to do my shopping at The Tavern or in Metopolis, or when I need to transport down from my domicile, very rarely, loads greater than I could carry in hand.

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When I sit in the armchair of my rail car that glides in slow descent on the rails from my table-land down the muddled valleys that open onto the amphitheatre of Metopolis, I acquire a special knack for general ideas. And holding in my view, as if from the vantage point of a mobile sky, the minutest moves that take place in the yards and backroads of the locality, I could increase the daily, fugitive drawing caught by my sight to fit the past-present-future dimensions, tying, that is, and condensing the stupid and momentary millimetric scraps into the map of the Metopolisians’ destinies scaled 1:1. They have always entangled their yarns and will keep doing so, down there in their amphitheatre consisting of sterile hills, screened by the crowns of the walnuts and quinces. Now, for example, as I am driving my rail car down to meet The Topometrist and the broker of the Inter-Balcanic Archaeological Society. I just stop looking in the direction of the shed next to the parish-clergyman’s household where Glad and The-Red-Mare managed to make from a crooked wheel a manufacture for tallow candles. I know too well what happened there and maybe I can guess what is going to happen from now on. Let me look rather towards the isthmus of boats stationed in the harbour of Metopolis, where nothing happens, apparently. Stretched on the bottom of the boats, indiscernible from outside, the boatmen sleep and none of them dreams of the few wretched dimes they’ll be getting for tips when the night closes in from the numbskulls taking pleasure trips to The Wool Citadel and back. I could number there among the boatmen some criminals and at least a few score of hardened thieves. But who would care to think of such old jades, who have hardly made any mark in all their lives, and haven’t even got the mark of a hero’s scar on their skin? The boats they sleep in dazed by the heat are not theirs. Some belong with The Armenian Tavern, others are part of the old, constantly repainted fleet of the Turk Aziz the Christian Convert. The boat trips are paid for by the clients not to the boatmen but either at The Armenian’s Tavern or at the berth occupied by Aziz-the Christian-Convert on board the Hagia Sofia ship. Every night, after the pleasure-trips are over, the jaded boatmen are chased away from the boats to resume their weekly wandering. This would be the world that lives on the scant tips dropped behind on the afternoon outings at Metopolis. Sometimes, you may find straying and lost among the boatmen in addition to toothless thieves chance young, honest people, still trusting in their stars. (Thus was it with The-Red-Mare who fell in with the boatmen when she was about 16, before she betook herself to Marmatia, so that she became the first boat-girl, who, although she wore a knifeblade tied to her belt, was forced to sleep with almost all the boatmen and had no choice. During the week, this beggarly mob, knifeblades hidden in their rags, spread towards The Horses’ Island in search of an easier living among the wild animals and the swarms of mosquitoes and blue-tail flies. Or towards The Wool Citadel, awaiting the passage of the sheep flocks over the fords, or of the cloth, meat and skin merchants. Or to Mavrocordat city, where a porter’s job paid by the hour for the ferry-loads of grain, vegetables and cheeses requires muscles and a beast’s hardened front to obtain a one or two days job.

            But such things happened a century or so ago, here or anywhere else, too.

            The Book of the Millionaire has very little space for whatever has happened once or several times before . 

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7. THE-RED-MARE AND THE FIRST SNOW

THE CROSSING OF THE FROZEN BIG RIVER WITH MARRIAGE BOOTS

Before she fell into the hands of the boatmen and before she ran to Marmatia where she was to met the woodcutter, marry him then begin her love with Glad, The-Red-Mare had known her first man beyond the big river, at the wild horses’ racing in Dicomesia. The young Dicomesian boys vie with each other racing in the sight of the girls, on the empty waterside covered with snow which stretches between the Wool Citadel and the acacia woods at Glava and Apud Glava.

            The-Red-Mare was then fifteen or sixteen and she lived in Metopolis. Fibula and Guldena had taken her in their care from The-Big-Kiva, the buffalo cattle drover, and they’d given her a bed in a corner of the gold smithy. Until the age of 15, The-Red-Mare hadn’t known snow, because she’d had no boots and hadn’t used to go out in winter time. Girls didn’t receive boots until they reached the age when they could chase men. This was also meant to keep them from starting their loves too early, and in the belief that a girl was not worth spending very much money on, too. Let whoever has seen on the right or the left of the big river a girl running barefoot in the thick of winter, going out of a yard and entering another, or, again, barefoot, feeding grain to the geese or hurrying with a forkfull of straw for the horses inside the shed, let him or her know, therefore, that the girl was unmarriageable as yet, and she’d not really come to know snow apart from those few steps she took in a matter of seconds. A girl’s body with the breast still not grown and unable to fend for herself yet would go about barefoot in the spring, the summer and until the late autumn, and from December until about March she would keep almost always indoors. And should any one of the girls start her love or sex life earlier than her shoes’ age, she started loving barefoot and more often than not that would be how she’d continue and end up her love life. This manner of punishing the girls until their marriage lots were finally cast has to do with an old Dicomesian custom that was finally extended to both river banks. Even in Metopolis that claims to be some sort of a town, this custom was unanimously received as good and wise. The-Big-Kiva whose loving had been conducted only barefoot her whole life, from the first men she’d met who had, however, their own women and homes, had done her best to guard The-Red-Mare from the lust of the male flies, for as long as the girl had walked barefoot. She intended to buy boots for the girl the first summer when she should show any signs of maturing hips and breasts, to push her away over the frozen big river until she reached the Dicomesian horse racing waterside in order to join the row of girls shod and dressed in warm clothes who stared in terrified expectation at the Dicomesian young men whipping their wild horses, with hoar frost in their manes, on their bridles and beards, while galloping through the rising sheets of snow. The heathen racing of the future Dicomesian bridegrooms ended with broken bones and skulls more often than not, but it was always crowned with abducting virgin girls. A girl who was abducted at the horseracing on the waterside could be sure to become a wife and then make a home and family of her own. Which is capital for a woman’s destiny.

            But The-Big-Kiva had died in the middle of life drowned in a thawing flood, on the big river that had overflown, breaking the banks and wiping out entire villages from the face of the earth at the same time when many of the black buffaloes that the woman drove had perished under the waters. The-Big-Kiva never owned a home. As long as the girl had been very young she’d carried her on her back, in a sack. In the summer, Kiva would make an arbour with reeds or rushes for herself and the girl, while in the autumn and winter she’d find shelter in the hull of a deserted ship that she’d partitioned into several rooms, lining them inside with animal skins. Kiva would make combs for herself out of buffaloes’ horns, whoever has seen or known her remembers her as a big woman, almost gigantic, that made the earth tremble under her walking feet, but was always neatly combed, with her hair gathered in plaits high on the top of her head. She dressed her hair so because it was on the crown of her head that she’d carry the heavy water crock, the bundle with foods and all her housework gear when she wandered away from the big river through pastures, for weeks on end, for months even, to graze her buffaloes. When Kiva died nobody found anything more than she’d been known to possess in her home set among the ship’s planks.

            The young girl who was later to become The-Red-Mare had grown into a quite big lass those last years of Kiva’s life, she’d got used to remaining alone at home among the animal skins on the ship, had become able to find food on her own, some said she could even catch the fish with her muzzle under the water as otters do. But it seems that The-Big-Kiva, whether or not aware that her end was nearing, was not at all uncautious in respect to her daughter (they say she was not her daughter really, she’d just found her abandoned somewhere, but these are things very hard to ascertain). A few years before disappearing, The-Big-Kiva had taken over to Fibula and Guldena’s house a trunk furnished with all her precious belongings: a box or two filled with things that nobody but she and the two goldsmiths knew of. It can’t have been a treasure. And even had it been one, The-Big-Kiva wouldn’t have known its worth too well. Her trunks may well have held no more than bronze coins and all kinds of old, rusty metal trinkets anyone could find in the masses on the roads and the deserted places she’d usually tread on her ways from the big river, to Metopolis and The Sea. At any rate, had her trunks held any more valuable stuff, say, coins even more precious and stones inscribed with words in unknown languages, the only ones to know how to reckon their value thoroughly were precisely Fibula and Guldena. Or rather, Fibula, since Guldena, apart from the flames of the forges in the gold smithy and the moulds for the casting of jewelry, had barely any clear notion of anything.

            Fibula and Guldena took the innocent lass to their place and promised her in their turn a pair of boots, when they received her in a corner of the gold smithy and gave her a bed. The girl had to work for the boots by rubbing with ash and sand until her head split with pain and her eyes burned the old coins made of iron, copper, bronze, silver, even gold sometimes, pierced all over with time as they were; or she had to rub metal stumps covered with verdigris and coming in the oddest forms before they were thrown into the forges: ancient fighting helmets, swords, belts, hairpins (fibulae), pendants etc. etc.; then again, after casting the melted metal with stone spoons into the moulds, she’d have to take each of the new-born jewels in turn, the rings, bracelets, ear-rings, hairpins, to clean them and polish them, or to place others back into the baths, for nickelling, chroming, silvering or gilding them each as its lots would have it. Sometimes, she’d use the old coins minted with gods’ and emperors’ faces to fashion them directly into belts, necklaces or crowns for brides, under the guidance of Guldena herself, after she’d previously rubbed them until she got them to shine brightly.

            It was at the gold smithy that The-Red-Mare had learned since very very young to care for women’s ornaments. When Fibula and Guldena couldn’t see her and weren’t spying on her from behind their little windows with silver grating and bronze clamps at the side of the gold smithy, she would clasp earrings that were still warm in her ears or she’d put hot rings on her fingers, or crowns made of imperial coins and meant for brides’ heads on her own head. At first, what she’d loved most was to pass through the flames the helmets and swords, the old coins spilled by the bucket by Fibula and Guldena in the little foundries ; she’d look with the joy of a wild animal in her eyes at the resulting hot liquid which she mockingly called, with the grudging imagination of a hungry child, iron honey, copper honey, silver honey, gold honey, according to the metal of the old trinkets; from it, the two women with their faces completely detached and alienated from everything they’d do, cast in forms made of hardened sand framed in steel boxes hairpins and all sorts of expensive trifles for young women. “In this wretched little world of today, it’s only young women who are still worthy of the brilliance and riches of the emperors” - Fibula would say. If it’s true she liked the fire into which the old metal coins and objects were thrown, she felt wonder and dread at the sight of those new things emerging cold from the moulds, but still retaining somehow the glow of the fire. She craved for them, but was sufficiently frightened to hardly ever touch them; cold though they were now, she believed that one day, a hidden flame of theirs would burst forth in search of water, to suck the hair, finger, arm, temples, hips or waist of whichever woman was wearing the ornament. This belief may have been inspired in her by The-Big-Kiva who’d protected her from metal and from any woman’s metal ornament made from stuff inside the “earth’s bowels”, telling her that there was nothing more beautiful than a thing made of the buffalo’s horn, of animal skins, the sheep’s wool or the birds’ down. These come from over the earth’s surface and from the sun. Whatever comes from underground is not the man’s own, and even less the woman’s, who’s been blamed enough as it is, to walk with downcast eyes and whose lot is the longer she lives, the more to look upwards at the sun. This is about all she’d learned from Kiva, apart from the washing of her face and of her body in the big river, and apart from the skill to hide every time she saw or heard somebody unknown approaching the ship.

            Once, when Kiva was away, grazing her buffaloes, the girl found in a hidden casket of the ship’s keel a little yellow bell she liked to play with, as it had a sound like a tiny, plaintive yelp. Back to the ship, Kiva snatched it from the girl’s hands, dug the ground at the foot of a hill with a spade and buried it there: “The bell barked, it didn’t toll. It was the dog of the earth and its place is at the bottom of the earth”. In its stead, Kiva gave the girl a red wool tassel which became a favourite toy she never parted with.

             When she got to be in Fibula and Guldena’s care, the young girl grew tall and slender, she had long, straight bones, she’d go about almost naked and barefoot in the immense space of the gold smithy filled with the forges’ heat, because she’d grown out of the dress she’d had ever since she came from The-Big-Kiva; that dress had worn out to tatters, “it had downright melted”, as she liked to put it, what with her moving ceaselessly about the gold smithy . Her frail body had become ruddy under the effect of the flames which ate up the helmets, swords and old coins with gods’, kings’ and emperors’ heads, and her hair was growing ever redder, from flaxen-coloured as it had been in her first infancy. Fibula had regarded her while moving long, slender and naked among the piles of fire-bound coins and she’d observed her red hair covering the shoulders and the whole back more efficiently than her rag-dress. “The tart - had the goldsmith thought to herself then - by the time her boobs are grown, she’ll be all golden.”

Fibula was herself tall and thin, and liked to say about a woman who was not tall that she must come from the duckling’s race and shall never have anything to serve her in measuring up to man or knocking him down. Looking at the girl’s locks of red hair on the long back and at the ruddy body with its sprightly, easy moves, Fibula had renewed her pledge, sort of spitefully, while the fat Guldena was not around, in the gold smithy: “You shall receive the boots for your approaching snow. But you need red boots, you. They’re not to be had in Metopolis or The Wool Citadel or anywhere else near here. When you receive them and when you feel them on your feet you’ll think they’ve come from nowhere and have grown from your mare’s bones, since you’ve got the red head, body and legs of a slim mare.” Her nickname was getting under way. And it was the first time that, when the young girl, who’d been left all alone after Fibula’s departure from the gold smithy, thought about this nickname while laughing and shaking her mane, throwing herself on her back upon the bed, lifting the long, straight legs towards the ceiling, beating with them the hot air of the gold smithy and rubbing the skin of her ankles to check if she might not possibly feel on the bone the incipient growth of her red boots. At the ankle joint, she fancied some kind of pain; she’d feel the sore spot only to realize that the pain went much higher up, contaminating the whole leg bone with its grip, then reached under the sole where a hidden smoothness was throbbing, which she knew absolutely nothing of; she’d clasp the soles in her palms to see if the points of the shoes were not actually sprouting there. But she’d be suddenly seized with fear. What if a duck’s web should start growing to grip her toes for good? She’d jump on her soles fast, there, on the sand of the gold smithy and she’d raise now the length of one leg, now the other, in the direction of the dazzling forge flames, moving her toes all the time for fear they might get stuck together, or if they had already begun to, to burn in the fire all trace of a duckling’s webs.

            For years on end now she’d kept moving her toes to keep them awake, and she’d never stopped moving them, not even when she’d started walking on shod feet, not in sleep either, when you could get more easily enveloped in the mist of unknown happenings that could be traced back to the duck’s gait of those who lived and slept before yourself.

THE DICOMESIANS. HOW TO MAKE YOUR WAY IN THEIR MIDST SO AS TO LEAVE OPEN YOUR WAY OUT

The-Red-Mare came into her full nickname when she received her boots and crossed to the other side of the big river, walking on the ice up to the beginning of the lands of Dicomesia, where the Dicomesian masters of the plain attract with their wheat, horses and pristine customs young women and people who wish to get rich. The Horses’ Island - stretching in the middle of the big river roughly from the area of the Wool Island and Metopolis as far as the waters around the Mavrocordat town - belongs to the Dicomesians; there do they raise and leave their horses to stop caring for them but also to let them grow wild and have them always swift and with the devil in them. In Dicomesia it is not only the families who own horses but even children, they choose while very young a horse or a foal each, as soon as they are able to swim everyone on his own to the island where they learn how to ride and fight with those of the same age. When they approach the marriage age they clap eyes as early as the autumn on what seems to them the most untamed horses, for the races of the Epiphany. The barbarous horse races in the snow, on the plain stretching from the Wool Citadel to the acacias at Glava are almost exclusively run by the young Dicomesians as it’s been a very rare thing to see a foreigner from the lands of Dkcomesia appear at the races and dare the local youths in the gallop of the scouring horses. At the races they abduct girls, who have come to watch them from almost every settlement lying to the left or the right of the big river. The abducted foreign girls become Dicomesians and in this way the Dicomesian stock increases, is kindled afresh and renewed with each young generation and gets reborn from the love that begins every year in the snow.

            That in Dicomesia there are more boys born and that the Dicomesians, therefore, need girls coming from other places might be just a delusion to the eye. When their children are born, the Dicomesians take the greatest care of the boys. Infant mortality decimates infants of the female sex mainly. If we were to unravel them, the thoughts of a Dicomesian might run something like: A woman is golden, not to raise her from a child, but when you take her already grown, that is, when she’s good as a servant and to be loved. No wonder then that you’ll come across more daughters-in-law than daughters in the Dicomesians’ houses.

            When a mare bears to them a filly rather than a foal, the Dicomesians are happy: they can count on further breeding.

            If they have a baby-girl rather than a baby-boy born in their homes, they take it as an ill omen, of loss in the field, death among the horses, slaying among their buffaloes and sheep, in short - the breaking of their property - for a girl requires a dowry to be married, and before marrying her out, instead of seeing to your own business, you have to guard her bottom with a club for fear that some rascal might come and bite it. (I’ve used the Dicomesians’ manner of speaking). When you have your own daughter you’ve got to keep on giving her stuff over and over again from your pocket and table, even when she’s settled down in her own home. But when you’ve taken an already grown girl from foreigners, you’ve made her your daughter-in-law and married your son to her, you can always expect to get and get more stuff, not to mention that you’ve acquired in your home and yard an extra-servant for free.

            If a new-born filly is a godsend as compared to the birth of a baby-girl, this is also due to the Dicomesians’ mad infatuation with horses. And it is not from any gratuitous taste for pithy sayings that the Dicomesians say the following:

            Don’t beat your horse, before beating your children and wife.

            Rather than have your horse dying, let your shed burn up.

            But,

            The horse with no shed, like the man with no teeth.

            Where there’s no horse, alas for the road.

            You can trade off a friend for an enemy,

but do not give away your horse unless God takes it from you

and even then you shan’t do so unless he gives you a better one in exchange for it.

            You can tell the archdeacon by his kamelavkion, and the horse by his racing.

            Get yourself a horse first and only afterwards a wife.

            The wife may leave you in the lurch, the horse will carry you farther.

            But.

            With a worthy horse you can tame a bad wife.

            With a good wife you won’t fix a broken horse.

            Whoever has both a good horse and a good wife has not lived in vain.

            If on top of it your wife bears sons to you, you can be sure your horse shan’t be

  left in want of grain or mares.

And so on and so forth.

            It becomes self-evident, then, why the island of the big river that washes Dicomesia has been presented by the Dicomesians to the horses.       

            But the Dicomesians have left too much of the horses’ fate in the hands of the island.

            And when things began to take a bad turn, rather than acknowledge their share of guilt, they laid the whole blame upon the island.

            They’ll curse the island if their horses lose in vigour and their seed is damaged. But little do they stop to think that they’ve underfed their horses, while saying to themselves: “They’re provided well enough as it is, there, on the island. ” Things have been pushed too far, as it so happened that one day the horses on the island joined their forces with Lost Constantine the First, when the latter was very young, to attack the Dicomesians. But until the time for this story, here’s a little more about the particular ways of the Dicomesian horses.

            They’re not tall in the least, but rather shortish and stout. Full of hair and with a long beard, that’s what they look like from the autumn until they’ve seen the winter through. Should they appear in the window frame in winter, you’d say they looked like some devils on four legs, wearing horse-head masks. They’re swift and vicious and once they genuinely take to their master, they’ll help him out of the lurch or poverty with their teeth. Although short, they draw the plough like buffaloes and run harnessed to the cart or saddled as fast as rabbits do. They swim like fish, some of the horses can cross the river swift as arrows if they are followed. They prefer the wilderness on the island to grazing tethered in a rich hay- or shamrock field. They are in no way nice when it comes to their fodder, but if you abuse their confidence too long with corn cobs or straw, hiding the oats and lucerne away from them, they’ll attack the barns overnight and break them with their hoofs. Just like Dicomesians, they can barely put up with women. Whether or not they get offended when a woman touches the reins nobody can tell for sure - as it’s hard to tell what there is in a horse’s mind, after all - but they will always overturn the cart, should a woman dare pull their reins to get the cart moving; they’re completely fearless and take absolutely no pity on her. This may be the reason why a woman who has been widowed will start by selling the cart and horses. For those who know little about The Horses’ Island this might seem an unearthly thing. Turned wild, the horses with long beards and manes hanging down to their knees run in groups of twenty or thirty headed by a leader: some old jade skilled in everything. You wonder at the vigorous horses who can well run for a whole day without breaking their milt down ready now to be led practically anywhere by such a lame, gaunt, mangy jade. When their leader dies, they guard him almost without eating, until a stench from the fallen jade drives them away. As long as he lives, a horse leader takes them all around the island, to graze in the best grass, to drink water from the big river, to the handiest fords where they can cool down a little bit their hoofs and bellies, then into the shade of the willows with fewer mosquitoes and gadflies when the sun is scorching, or behind the acacia curtains in the storms or rising sands. There’s hidden enmity between the leaders, also coming - who can tell? - from more ancient motives. One herd of horses can hardly bear another and it may happen for two horses who are pulling the same plow or cart in Dicomesia, led by the same master, to opt, on The Horses’ Island, one for a leader, the other, for one who may be a complete enemy of the first. Back to Dicomesia, the two horses separated on the Island into two different herds make it up and start with difficulty a shared life and work.

            If a foreigner comes to The Island and wants to steal a horse or simply mount on his back to cross its land which is full of marshes and brambles, he had better continue his journey on his own. The moment the foreigner appears on the island, the herds though separated from each other by big distances, raise their heads and stay like this, staring at him, waiting for him to pass or to get him to understand that he’d better pass on. If the foreigner approaches, the horses remain stuck still, with their heads raised and staring at him. This is precisely the sign for the unwanted traveller that he’s got nothing good to expect. But he will come even closer. How strange, the traveller thinks to himself, the herds on the sides start running, only this herd I’m heading for won’t move and keeps staring at me, beating their tails all about to chase away the flies. And really, the horses with beards and manes reaching down to their knees keep waving their heads and tales placidly and fanning away the flies with gusto, all the time the traveller’s approaching. He should have realized that the danger was now impending. But he advances, now he’s abreast of the horses and sticks his hand into the hairy mane of the horse that he considers the nearest and mildest, he throws his weight on its back, congratulating himself for being such a skilled connoisseur of the equine lot. The other horses break into a gallop, while the one he’s just mounted on still does not budge and won’t lift its hoofs from the ground; the traveller hits his heels against the horse’s belly and his fist into its mane; the horse keeps fanning the flies away from his head and rear, as if it had nobody on its back. Cursing, the traveller wants to get off and give it up, but now the Dicomesian horse does do justice to itself and dashes into a gallop, this time relishing to carry the man on its back, then stops short and starts again in swift zigzags between the willows and aspens, making the rider hide his head all the way under the low tree branches to avoid hitting his legs against the old rough trunks pierced with hollows. Neither does the horse let off on his victim before it takes him straight to the herd which it belongs to. Here, the herd moves aside , parting into two and leaving a wide space in the middle, where the horse begins a demented game as if in a kind of special paddock for pure mockery, it rears on its hind legs, it kneels, it throws back its hoofs, neighs, then opens its two sphincters to relieve nature, while the foreign rider is dumbfounded; on the sides, the whole herd is engaged in pranking almost similar to the actions of the horse in question, until this horse breaks into an insane gallop once again, drawing after it not only the matrix-herd but the others also, shaking the island in a mad stampede. Eventually, the foreign rider is thrown off the back of the horse somewhere. Then all the herds resume their places and graze on imperturbably or fan away the gadflies as before.

            This is something that may happen to a foreign traveller any time in a year, from spring until late autumn. For the island teems with horses all year. A Dicomesian does not have only one pair of horses, but several, and he uses them to till the land in turns, or uses just some of them. The young horses or the too young colts are allowed to become thoroughly wild, the nerve they acquire out there is never lost on them, as in the Dicomesians’ opinion a free horse is not a lazy horse, but becomes swift, wise, it gets used to hardships, it learns from the old horses how to find in a wide, unknown expanse of land the best grass or how to be content with a less good grass when almost all the surrouding grass is really bad (there are years when this may well happen). The Dicomesians let their horses untethered and their children go free on the island to get them used to living under the blue sky over their heads, by the blue sky understanding precisely that part of the world where they are going to lead almost all their lives. A horse or a boy who does not see the island often are a sick horse or a sick boy whose lives, if spared by God , are spared because neither the master nor the father know how precisely to go about getting rid of them.

WINTER, THE PLEASURE-GIVING SEASON FOR BOTH PEOPLE AND HORSES. THE HYMN OF JOY AND THE CHURCH ON WHEELS.

Winter is the pleasure-giving season for both the Dicomesian young and the horses. Oat overflows from the bags and fills the mangers. Streets teem with riotous youths getting ready for the great Dicomesian celebrations of the Epiphany horse racing. Trial races are run uninterruptedly on the commons, in the field, at the waterside, all along the big river and under its high banks. Nothing but strong gales can gather the horses in around the mangers, in the sheds and the youths at their meals with the parents.

            How or when it came about that the barbarian celebration of the horses’ racing in the snow was put down to the Christian feast of the Epiphany and was paired to the custom of throwing the holy cross down among the ice fields through a breach in the water made somewhere in the middle of the big river - this much remains hard to know.

            But what is known is that the naked people who dive among the ice floes to catch the cross thrown into the big river by the priest are not Dicomesians but either thieves returning to be pardoned on account of the hard winter, or else some other kind of foreign people coming in search of bread, who do not belong to Dicomesia but are informed as to the boon of the Dicomesians who will give out stuff with two hands at the Epiphany (since this is the celebration for their marriageable sons). The cross-catchers who swam among the ice floes to grab the rood from the hallowed water of the big river by hitting each other in the stomach with their heads and scuffling like madmen under the floating ice might well amass on those occasions whole cart-fulls of flour and beans, tallow-strips and chunks of larder, or dried apples, by calling in from one house to another, down the streets of the Dicomesian townships. All of those who dive after the cross are entitled to this alms, not just the man who has caught it in the scuffle of the big river waters. And he who got hold of the cross is the one to divide the charity goods received among the thieves, retaining the best share and, moreover, he can stay behind and live with the Dicomesians through the winter without having anyone remind him that he used to be a thief or that he is a stranger. Afterwards, should he keep seeing to other business throughout the year following the Epiphany than the kind of fishy business which had once damaged his name and nickname (the nickname mainly, since it is just through the nickname that both the honest folk and the thieves live and are known in Dicomesia), then he can drive the horses drawing the Dicomesians’ Church on Wheels. Every winter the Dicomesians descend behind a kind of Church on Wheels drawn by six horses to the big river waterside where the horse racing of the marriageable youths take place, and where the lasses wearing marriage boots come to watch, to be watched and then abducted. Dicomesians have regular churches as well, but the olden Church on Wheels, which they have drawn along every year to the waterside, used to be employed only to honour that particular winter-day of the young riders and the shod lasses. I say used to be, as the Church on Wheels can be seen no longer: it’s long been hidden by the Dicomesians, and in its stead, at the Epiphany they use a sledge big as a hayloft, also drawn by six horses.

            Fibula, who, in her early youth had crossed the river wearing marriage boots herself - this was a long, long time ago - had seen the Church on Wheels. (Anyone boasting to have seen it can’t be otherwise than old). Fibula was old when she started saying that she’d seen The Church on Wheels, and it had walls made of long, rough planks, high wheels with solid hubs and two shafts, one at the narthex the other at the altar side. The horses could be harnessed to either shaft, recalling, as it seems, the beginnings of historical time, when the Dicomesians of the plain would be overtaken by the overflowing hordes of the Turks, the Tartars or by any other invasions coming from practically everywhere and when they would hasten to attach the draught beast to whichever shaft came handiest, only to dash for the mountains, galloping on the backs of their small, hairy horses with beards and manes reaching down to the knees, and when they’d place at the head of their sweeping convoy The Church on Wheels, where they’d previously lift up and hide their virgin young girls and chests filled with wheat seeds. But Fibula had learned the history of the two shafts from the only man capable to interpret it for her thoroughly, namely from Philip Lascareanu the Theologian, called The Humbled One, long before departed abroad where he became a scholar, a learned Byzantinologist; he’d been the sole man to realize that The Church on Wheels was a treasure: “a greater treasure - he’d say - than a hoard gathered by ten million people over one thousand and fifty years, but which the Dicomesians have always been completely unaware of and ‘ve gone on using as if it were a festival cart”. And it is even said there’d been some Greeks who’d once come to buy it - “with lumps of gold”, as a local legend would have it, which cannot be trusted any more than legends can be trusted in general ; but one thing is sure: that year, at the Epiphany, when the Greek merchants came to buy stuff from them, it was the first time that the Dicomesians - adviced by the Humbled One who’d returned among them for a short trip - kept The Church on Wheels well hidden, and the races were run at the waterside, in front of a sledge on runners made of entire trees felled down, in which sledge there sat thoroughly wrapped up in dressed sheepskins the priest and the thief entitled to drive the horses.

            Fibula had returned to Metopolis nevertheless, after she’d crossed over the frozen big river to Dicomesia when young, wearing marriage boots and after she’d lost her virginity. Talking of the Dicomesian man who’d abducted her, she’d later say “he was a boor with his yard alive with horses and bitches”. But Fibula had called herself Dicomesian since, all her life. Then she set up a gold smithy and became a dealer in women’s jewelry - but not before travelling to Rome and Paris first (though her mother hadn’t been rich, still she owned two saws for cutting marble and a workshop for finishing stone slabs, which belongings she bequeathed to Fibula; but the man to fondle Fibula ever since her earliest youth, by giving her not only love, but also riches has been and remains so even now, when Fibula’s grown almost old, Philip the Humbled One; but leave these until the time is ripe). The gold smithy from Metopolis was made by Fibula with Guldena who is not a native of this region, she comes from the town of Mavrocordat, she’s a fattish woman with a round, pink face constantly sweating, which makes her cheeks, chin, forehead, eye-lids and ears glisten always. Fancy the masses of old coins Fibula has handled all her life, among them not a few really precious ones, and quite a lot of them she’s thrown into the fire. Riches such as these may have attracted her, still she never seriously considered them important when she had them, so they haven’t made much of a difference in her life. But Fibula had never forgotten The Church on Wheels which she’d seen with her own eyes, whose value greater than the worth of any riches she was well aware of, as she’d always kept her eyes open for it, to learn its hiding places, that became more and more secret and were shifted ever more often by the Dicomesians. Fibula knew from The Humbled One and she’d never forgotten that none of the riches which she might amass could possibly outweigh in price the dirty planks, the rough hubs and the two shafts of The Church on Wheels. That is why, even when she’d grown old, when Metopolis had begun to get wiped out from the face of the earth and become submerged, under the blows dealt to it from above the soil by the merchants who’d buy the heirless old women of no little fortune, paying for their care during the last years of their lives only to inherit them subsequently, also being mined all this while underneath the hills with dynamite placed by the greedy red marble searchers, or when, in turn, The Armenian’s Tavern, The German’s Leg, General Marosin and General Glad, then The-Red-Mare, Bazacopol, Emil Havaet, the over-frail Topometrist included - when all of them had disappeared for good, when no marble hill had remained standing under the soil of Metopolis, or beyond Metopolis for that matter - Fibula hadn’t forgotten The Church on Wheels. She’d always kept her eyes open for it, even when the earth was caving in under her slippers made of purple with golden tips. She knew its hiding places, ever more secret and shifted ever more often: thus it was that in her last years of life, now left with just a few teeth in her mouth, Fibula, who knew the last shelter where the Church on Wheels had been hidden and locked in, let herself in one night into the storehall where the movable temple stood bolted and padlocked, harnessed herself together with Guldena to the shafts on the narthex side and tried to drag it as far as the line of the quince-trees, to the hatter’s house.

            But things such as these are still very far on in the story. Let The-Red-Mare cross the big river first, wearing marriage boots, and some more other things pass.

THE DRESSING UP OF THE RED MARE IN PURPLE ATTIRE WITH A BELT AND NECKLACE MADE OF IMPERIAL COINS

To have a girl set out in the gale, early in the morning, over the frozen big river and cross into Dicomesia is not an unusual thing for the Metopolisians. Especially when the girl puts on boots for the first time and goes away to try her luck among the Dicomesians and to be abducted. But the Metopolisians did not see that morning the young girl who left Fibula and Guldena’s gold smithy for good. In winter, Metopolisians get up late, especially on feast days.

            On the eve of the Epiphany, one night beforehand, Fibula, assisted by Guldena presented to the girl a pair of red boots. On seeing them the girl had been puzzled, since she still lived in the hope that she would have the red boots sprouting from her bones. Nevertheless, she received them laughing as spare boots. She’d been so confident about the others, the boots to grow from her soles and her ankles, that, often, she’d clasped her feet in her palms, swearing to herself that she already had them, could feel them, and nobody should know her secret. Receiving others from Fibula eventually, she thought to herself: “I’m going to wear these red boots from the goldsmith first, until they’re torn. Then only shall I put on and use mine which are more beautiful and which I must take care of heart and soul.”

            Fibula dressed her in a long dress the colour of royal purple, with high white lace around the neck, she tied a belt around her waist made of old Greek, Roman and Byzantine coins. These were bronze coins minted hundreds of years before in the town of Histria, situated not too far away from the site of today’s Metopolis. The coins had on the obverse the head of the goddess Hera, or the overturned faces of Castor and Pollux; or the head of the strong Herakles, who could kill serpents from his cradle, by throttling them with his bare palms; on the reverse they had a vulture holding a dolphin or some wheat sheaves in its claws. Fibula gave her a necklace, as well , made of coins, too, including some mediaeval Venetian and Genevese pieces which at the lower side of the necklace, nobody knows why, were next to a Roman sesterce bearing the effigy of the mad emperor Nero. The necklace was clasped at the back with a kind of flap made of another two coins, namely two Roman aces, less precious as the metal goes, but extremely valuable through their old age.

            When she received the necklace, the girl remembered that she’d cried a few months back when rubbing with ash and sand precisely these coins that Fibula gave to her as a present now, combined into a belt and a necklace. Fibula had slapped her then for the first time, because the girl had thrown the coins, saying that she could not rub them with ash and sand any further than she’d already tried to. So she’d resumed her rubbing until she made them shiny. She now got them as a present and didn’t know what to think. Had they been prepared for her by Fibula from the very beginning? Was Fibula offering them to her so that she might not forget the past shame? Could it be that the goldsmith was trying to teach her a lifelong lesson? The girl knew nothing of pedagogy, and Fibula was not in favour of such disciplines that she saw fit only for weaklings and applied to them by the equally weak men. So there was no connecting the past slapping with the presents that the girl received now, on the eve of her departure over the frozen big river, with the boots on. One could rather give credit to Guldena’s words, uttered much later on: The belt and necklace coins were from the trunk once brought to the gold smithy by The-Big Kiva. Might they be the present made by the buffalo-drover, the girl’s mother, for the time when her girl became ready to marry? But here there is a misunderstanding. The-Big-Kiva dreaded metals and any thing at all connected to the “bowels of the earth”, which could only bring misfortune. She couldn’t wish to do harm to her own daughter, could she? But Kiva knew the world, nevertheless, and she was aware that nobody can become an insider unless one adopts its customs… This may have been a compromise of Kiva’s which she’d never make for her own benefit, but which she allowed for the sake of her beloved girl. At any rate, The-Big-Kiva hadn’t forgotten to put in the trunk for her daughter the most precious talisman: the red wool tassel.

            Fibula did not omit, the evening before the Epiphany, to attach to the ornamentation of the dress the red wool tassel: she fastened it on the high collar of white lace, so that it gave to the heavy fabric of the purple dress a smooth, warm detail. The girl was happy to receive the dress and felt elated by the red wool tassel she’d played with as a child. Once the girl was dressed up, she’d nevertheless retained her own beauty. The gaudy clothing and the Fibulaean ornaments had not estranged her from herself; the clear, oblong oval of the face, with the black eyes and the slightly aquiline nose, the tall, slender stature, the ruddy hands and legs with straight, long bones could not be mutilated, whether by a royal dress, or by a sackcloth; the red hair fell abundant and rebel with its flame-like strands over that impossible harness of the ornaments, over the royal purple dress with its blooming white lace collar and the red wool tassel, over the coin necklace from which Nerone’s head had been suspended, as well as over the belt that strung the Greek drachmae and asars - all showing the face of Hercules in several copies- combined with the imperial Roman and Byzantine coins. Fibula said to the girl: “You’re dressed like an empress, with ornaments from all the ages of the world. If you are able, scatter these imperial things as soon as you can and live your love with whoever you wish and fancy.” Fibula spoke like this. Although she didn’t care a fig for pedagogy, the numerous schools she’d been through, and the rich, distinguished people she’d consorted with had spoiled her manner of speaking which she’d strew with teachings fit to be spread and cracked at parties on pleasure-giving nights.

            This concluded the girl’s dressing up on the eve of the Epiphany.

            The girl took off her clothes and stared at the things she’d received long and vacantly.

            That night she slept naked in the gold smithy with the red wool tassel under her pillow. She dreamt that someone had stolen her real red boots off her feet and now she was only left for as long as she lived with the spare boots she’d received from Fibula and Guldena. When she woke up, she eyed her toes worriedly: but there was no trace as yet of the duckling’s web. For all the ugliness of the dream, she could still say to herself that she hadn’t lived to see the worst as yet.

GENERAL MAROSIN DID NOT APPEAR IN THE MARRIAGEABLE GIRL’S DREAM BUT HE COULD HAVE DONE SO

            Fibula and Guldena’s gold smithy lay beside the big river. But on leaving it the morning of the Epiphany, the girl did not head for the ice on the big river to cross over to Dicomesia, but rather she went first in the direction of General Marosin’s farm. Then the general was not old as he is now.

            It was too early, no Metopolisian had shown up in the streets when the girl had gone out of the front door, Fibula and Guldena were asleep when she left the gold smithy for good, only Guldena had awoken for a few seconds to put the crowbar on the front door from the inside. She’d made this wish for the girl: “may you fare well wherever you take or leave your bones”. Guldena imitated Fibula’s wickedness, but couldn’t see that Fibula’s wickedness was used wittily, so she imitated the mistress , yes, but only in the ring of her words to which she added just thistles she’d gathered from everywhere.

            Why the girl fancied to go first in the direction of the general’s farm, she could not say exactly herself. Maybe she considered him a friend and, leaving Metopolis, she wanted at least to see the walls of his farm again, though she’d not really seen them before, but she imagined more or less where they would be and they could be climbed over should any great trouble make her ask this friend’s help. Often, when the girl was in the gold smithy, she thought and dreamt that in case of misfortune she had only the general to run to. And in her mind she reckoned how she might steal into the General’s Pavilion when some misfortune chased her away and made her move away on untrod paths. The girl that reached the marriageable age was still an innocent lass who bore to General Marosin a kind of filial love. Let’s call it so, although it’s not proper, the girl having always been raised with no father; she did not even know exactly what this word meant, but thought, when she heard it, that dad meant some kind of foreshortened form of a word which she did not know, just as you use Bill instead of William, Dan instead of Daniel or Ted instead of Theodore. Not to mention that the general couldn’t be considered an old man who had such a big daughter. The marriageable girl, had she had a father, her father should have been almost old. Marosin was a colonel when he was under 30, and he’d become a general at 46. He was no more than 47 when the girl had seen him enter the gold smithy for the first time and he looked much younger than Fibula who was no older than 40 or so. Now to be of this age, not yet 50 and, what’s more, a general, makes you seem, in the eyes of a pubescent girl, rather handsome, like a bridegroom coming to get his bride a little late perhaps, but coming, nonetheless. It was this confused bridal feeling that the girl had had, rather, when she saw the general. But Marosin would never consider her more than an innocent lass, he tried to keep within the limits of this position, that of a man too old for such a tender creature. Either because he’d seen the young red-haired girl and he’d liked her or because he had ties with Fibula that the girl ignored, General Marosin would come to the gold smithy very often. But the strange thing was that he’d sometimes come when he knew that Vibula was not at home. Might General Marosin have had anything to discuss with Guldena? But the General would almost never address Guldena, if he saw her, he only asked her where Fibula was. It once happened that neither Fibula nor Guldena were in their respective rooms behind the silver grating and the bronze clamps when the general entered through the door one day. Only the red-haired girl sat in front of the forges in her completely tattered dress received from The-Big-Kiva. On such days when Fibula and Guldena were at home and the general came, they would send the girl to an adjoining room where there was a workshop with some grinding machines, “Guldena’s workshop”. But now the general had found her alone in front of the forges, with her ruddy arms and legs bared to the heat and glow of the fire. The girl did not know what shame was. She knew that she was tall, had red hair, and unless she took good care, she’d have a duckling’s web growing in between her toes, but she had no familiarity with abstractions such as: shame, indiscretion, affection, vulgarity, elevation. Most people don’t know if she’s really born from The-Big-Kiva. She does not know this either. About children she fancies, just as she did about herself, that they appear from time to time in the waters of the big river and in the grass, here and there, being then fetched by foreign women, taught to wash their faces and beware of yellow bells and of the unknown men who approach the houses on the ships to ask no end of silly questions.

            When she heard the general knocking at the door of the gold smithy and when she saw him enter, she rejoiced as she did every time a beaver put its paws on the side of the ship or a handsome horse came to drink water near where she was swimming.

            The general put his hand out to her. As a child-girl, she’d always imagined when she saw people putting out their hands that they were in pain, they had a finger or the whole palm perhaps aching. When you don’t greet but just laugh joyfully the moment a stranger approaches, this means nothing hurts. She even said to the general: “Does your hand hurt again?” “It does, badly” - the general answered, merely pretending, and let her study his hand. Then the girl observed his epaulettes and tresses more attentively. The epaulettes resembled a lot some moulds of Fibula and Guldena’s stacks, which moulds were used for casting the various ornaments. The tresses resembled some wide, beautiful hairpins. “I’m playing with them” - she’d said touching the tresses on one shoulder. The general took off his coat and gave it to her, laying it on her knees to cover her better. She stopped looking at the epaulettes when she had the whole coat in her hands and started passing her palms over the fine fabric, over the shiny lining, she stuck her arms in the sleeves to feel better what was in there. A foreign pungent smell came into her nostrils from the coat. She liked that smell and buried her nose in the general’s tunic. Then she got up, took from a vessel in front of the forges a handful of coins, Greek drachmae and sesterts, talents and bessants and started ranging them carefully on the coat’s epaulettes. Then, as the general had sat down cross-legged on the sand, not far away from where she was sitting, she took more handfuls of coins and sprinkled them over the general’s shirt, hair, shoes. The general started laughing and spread full-length on the sand. Then she grasped a whole vessel full of old coins, overturned it and buried him in no end of coins of all colours and sizes, bearing all sorts of faces and signs on them. The general, as he was stretched on the sand and covered in old coins, lifted his arms and brought her to his chest, put his mouth close to hers and pressed her lips. The girl did not understand anything, she said: “You’ve hit me by mistake.” Since then the general had not come to the gold smithy any longer. “What’s wrong with your mouth?” Fibula had asked the girl that same day. “The general hit me by mistake.” Fibula had already gathered from the girl’s innocence that nothing much had happened between her and the general. “Were the general only a lieutenant as I knew him when I was young, your mouth would look very different and you would not tell all that happened” - Fibula said to the girl. And Guldena laughed an ugly, gargling laugh, her face sweating more than usually.

*

            It had started snowing, then the blizzard raged in thick rising sheets, when the girl went to see for the last time the walls of the general. When she got to the farm, the blizzard had grown stronger and had clogged the air, it was hard to see even a few steps ahead, as the day had got so dim because of the gusts of snowy wind, that she first hit the wall before seeing it. “I must hurry or else I can’t return to cross the big river on the ice.”

            Still she remained near the wall for a while. She didn’t know where the entrance gates were.

            It was no use climbing over the wall. Not because her clothes prevented her in any way, although she was wearing over her dress a heavy buffalo-skin coat lined on the margins with beaver-skin, a beaver-skin collar and cuffs. Weren’t it snowing and weren’t there such a strong blizzard, with the gale coming in long gusts, she would take off her coat, throwing it over the wall, then she’d jump after it herself. It wouldn’t be much of a thing to her. Beyond the wall was a tree whose thick, bending branches reached over to the street level. She’d only have to grasp one of the branches and let herself in over the wall. In the flight of her body she would have enough time to chose the place where she would fall, to recover her coat and direct herself then towards the General’s Pavilion that could not be too far away; she’d once gathered that the Pavilion’s beautifully finished chimneys made of brick could be seen from the street when the air was clear. But the blizzard was raging now and she could not see two paces ahead; the chimneys were not visible, and not even the branches of the tree standing so close to the wall could be discerned. The morning resembled a whitened night and she could not know for sure where she herself was, let alone where to climb over the wall if she cared to. She might lose the coat, were she to throw it over the wall. And she did not want this to happen. Of the coat she knew that it was made of the buffalo skins left to Fibula by The-Big-Kiva, just as she’d left with Fibula the beaver skins. And she also knew that they were the only buffalo skins that Kiva had been keener on than on any living animals, for they were of a reddish-brown colour like the colour of waters in the dead of the night after they retained the sun deep within. Of the entire buffalo herd she had in her care, Kiva only had three or four heads that were her own property. These, of a rare breed, reddish, not black, had made Kiva fear that they might get lost, all of them being bulls; once they’d even disappeared for a time , stolen or gone astray, but on that occasion she was lucky enough for they returned to the herd. Kiva let them live for another few years so as to get offspring from them, then she slew them one by one with her own hand. Once the buffaloes were slain, the skins did not lose their beautiful colour, a cawer from The Wool Citadel having seen to it that they retained it, and Kiva then lay them in the trunk alongside the coins, the red wool tassel, the skins and old stones sent to Fibula. A hulky man in a long, heavy sheepskin overcoat appeared near the wall, approached the girl and asked her yelling through the storm, so as to make himself heard: “Who are you looking for?” “General Marosin”. “Who are you?” “It’s me, from the gold smithy” -the girl answered, not knowing any longer what she should do in front of the colossus who’d become indiscernible in the dense storm, moving his aggressive shadow to and fro. “Ah, it’s you, mistress Fibula - came the voice of the colossus and the shadow got again enveloped and submerged in the blizzard - the General left in his sledge over The Big River yesterday.” The girl did not ask where and was not given time to say that she was not Fibula, but the girl from the gold-smithy. Still, the colossus kept yelling though unasked through the storm and snow: “Where the General has gone to nobody knows, mistress Fibula. Maybe he left for Dicomesia. Maybe for Mavrocordat. Maybe for The Wool Citadel. Maybe he’s gone wolf hunting with The Millionaire. He’s a General and shan’t inform anyone where he leaves or when he returns.”

            Then, the colossus suddenly backed up into the blizzard, spinning on his heels, took only a few steps back and not even his shadow that had been visible until that moment could be seen; instead of the shadow, which had disappeared, a savage whirlwind revolved, hit the wall, got smashed and scattered again, gathered itself together anew and dashed towards the wall, but there the whirlwind was engulfed by another greater whirlwind that abducted it, then the two of them burst up together, roaring louder than the voice of the dissipated colossus.

            The girl remained in the street a while longer, without moving, not knowing what to do. She heard from the side where the colossus had disappeared another voice, a shrill woman’s voice shouting: “Who was it, who were you talking to?” “Who should it be but Fibula, that tart. She looks for the general not only at night to creep between his sheets. She looks for him in the early morning, scratching his wall with his nails. She won’t have her fill of the stallion’s show, ever .”

THE-RED-MARE IN HER MARRIAGE BOOTS FINDS THE DICOMESIAN WATERSIDE DESERTED AND WITH NO KIDNAPPING RIDERS

The girl crossed the big river on the ice. The gale and the blizzard may have deviated her steps and delayed her, but she did at last arrive at the horseraces’ waterside. There, in Dicomesia, the weather had calmed down. Big, dark clouds could be seen moving sluggishly across the shy. But the waterside was completely deserted. She waited but nobody came up. No traces of hoofs or sledge runners could be seen on the waterside, the storm-driven snow had covered everything here as well. She realised that it must be much later than noontime. She’d missed the moment of the horseracing and abductions. This meant her fate as a marriageable girl was postponed for another year. She crossed the waterside through the willows and aspens up to the big river and back to the high slope where the acacia woods of Glava and Apud Glava began, in the hope that there might appear some more horse riders or at least one.

            In the ice of the big river she saw a big hole with ice-sloes broken by the axes. Maybe the ice hole where the priest had thrown the cross and where the thieves jumped in to catch it, swam and fought with each other blindly in the water, each hoping to come across the rood first.

            She could no longer return to the gold smithy in Metopolis.

            She went towards the acacia woods again to climb the slope leading to the Dicomesian settlements. She didn’t know what to do and where to go. But one thing was sure: she was bound to go towards some home or another.

            Up on the hilltop there appeared a sledge. And the sledge started descending to the waterside. Happy, the girl ran to meet it, unclasping the white shawl from her head and beating the frosty air with it.

            The man in the sledge stood up, hit his red horses savagely with the whip and called something out, gliding down even faster through the sprays of snow in the direction of the girl with the shawl in her hand.

            General Marosin jumped from the sledge, dressed in a long heavy coat made of yellow fox furs. He took her in his arms, the white shawl dragging behind in the snow. “I have ready for you in the sledge another heavy coat made of otter furs”, said the General, lifting her high to him and hit her on the mouth again with his own mouth, as he’d done in the gold smithy once before, but this time he hit her hard, very hard.

            He took her in the sledge down a long road on the river bank .

            They arrived at the town of Mavrocordat and spent one night in an empty house with thick, smooth carpets on the floor, woven with a pattern of blue peacocks and lions white and lanky-haired as goats. With high heaters that had towers at the top and entwined stone columns on the sides, and down, among the columns, with transparent doors showing big logs consumed by fire.

            She can’t recall too clearly or know precisely why the General took her there. It was rather Fibula’s words uttered in the gold smithy on the day when she’d asked her what was wrong with her swollen lips that clarified something of what had happened to her in the house of Mavrocordat. The General behaved like a lieutenant in that house. But the girl does not remember at all precisely what happened in the rooms with blue peacocks, with cushions and smooth beds - or, just that the General seemed angry and in a big hurry, clasped her in his arms furiously and with a changed expression on his face. She also remembered he’d knocked her down and in the end he’d told her mirthfully: “My Red-Mare, my Red-Mare. Don’t cry, you’ll get over it soon.” And he petted her cheek, thinking she was crying. But she was not crying. She was looking in wonder at the bruises she had on her hands and legs. Still wondering, she even got hold of her toes to see if the duckling webs had not already started to grow. For something must have happened to her and she did not know very well what. She did not understand a thing, then or anytime afterwards.

            The next day in the morning, when the General was fast asleep, a tall woman dressed in a buffalo-skin coat lined on the margins with beaver skins, and wearing underneath a dress the colour of royal purple trimmed with a high, white-lace collar, with a belt and a necklace made of imperial coins, went out of the house in a hurry, but so fast that her long red hair was swinging and flying behind her in long streaks, although there was no wind, and it was snowing quietly, with big snowflakes.

            This woman was The-Red-Mare. Her nickname had been sealed for good.

            The General did not find her again. He searched for her all through the town of Mavrocordat. He even got others to look for her. But all was in vain. At last, the general left his sledge and horses in someone else’s care at an inn, and returned by another path to Metopolis. And after he arrived there, he left on a trip unknown to other people and stayed away from the town for almost a year.

            When you run for your life you don’t head for either the open field or the people’s settlements. You head for the big river. It is safer than everything else. That’s what Dicomesians do. That’s what The-Red-Mare did, too, when she disappeared from the house in Mavrocordat.

            Now, having found the big river again, she went down the bank, took off her buffalo-skin coat, folded it, placed it to one side and started running in her royal purple dress and in her red boots among the ice floes and slid on the ice. She was laughing and sliding on the ice.

            For years on end, she had looked through the window of the gold smithy, watching the girls and boys sliding on the ice. She’d never had a chance to slide, too. She hadn’t had boots. And when she crossed the frozen big river for the first time, when she left Metopolis, she had other things on her mind.

            Now she was all by herself on the entire big river, the town of Mavrocordat could be seen in the distance, far beyond the bank, it was snowing calmly, she ran with trotting feet, then let herself slide forth on the soles of the red boots.

            She took off her belt and necklace made of imperial coins and threw them bankwise. They were in her way.

            She slid and she slid on the ice for a long time, until she got cold. The snow had made her dress wet, her red hair let off steam, so did her royal purple dress, her arms, and the lacework around her neck.

            Then she saw the red wool tassel she had from The-Big-Kiva was missing from her neck.

            She didn’t know that this tassel had fallen a night before on the carpet with blue peacocks in the house of Mavrocordat. And not knowing this, she now looked for it through the ice floes, until her soles grew stiff in the red boots, and the wet dress shoulders had crusts of ice on them. She cried for the first time in her life, with deep sobs, but couldn’t find the red wool tassel anywhere.

            Standing on the bank, Aram Telguran was looking at her from the door of his coffee shop. High up on the bank there was a lonely coffeehouse which The-Red-Mare had not seen when she was on the run. The windows of the coffeehouse opened on to the big river, and in the window-panes you could discern cages with numberless yellow canaries. The coffeehouse stood on the bank lonely and isolated, in a remote corner of the drowsy harbour completely covered with snow and it could barely be noticed from the town of Mavrocordat; the smoke came coiling out of its chimneys, smelling bitter-sweet, of coffee and of tea. Dusky-Aram was looking at The-Red-Mare from his vantage point on the bank, he kept crossing himself and watching her slide on the ice over and over, he kept raising to the sky his short, fleshy arms showing from his closely-curled, dark astrakhan coat that covered his stout body:

             “Oh my God, what empress is this coming on the ice before the coffeehouse of wretched Aram Telguran, who’s never ever seen such a tall, sprightly empress before, in all his Armenian’s life dating back to the times before Christ and the reign of Wise Seleucos I. The steam of her doe’s nostrils turns into snow all around, just like ermines who are born from the still warm winter breath of the Armenian lakes Van and Sevan. I bow to you, purple empress, come towards me or let me descend where you are, to feel myself ascend by abasing myself and ascending again together with you; may I just reach the tips of your sun boots to kiss them ever so humble, as I kiss the dust that I’ve trodden since the day of my birth.”

            Aram had a plaintive ring in his voice, like a priest who has forgotten his religion and has lost his church. He was crossing himself and praying on the riverbank, so big and stout, crumbling his cap in the grip of his hands, wringing his fists against the closely-curled lapels of the astrakhan overcoat.

            The-Red-Mare gathered her belt and necklace from where she’d thrown them away, put on her buffalo-skin coat and started climbing the high bank towards the Armenian.

            She no longer feared anyone. Aram was ugly, ill-favoured even, but she was not afraid of his face as dark as coal, of his crooked nose and big, bulging eyes like two onions, of his muzzle and lips like a hare’s, of his bulky stomach overhanging his thighs, or of his greyish, almost white hair that shone like a swarm of serpents coiling over his forehead, and at the end of his black, bushy eyebrows.

            Aram Telguran kept lamenting on the bank, crumbling and biting his cap as if ready to eat it: “Dear God, what an empress this is now getting towards me!” - his tears ran down his cheeks because of the biting frost that made the branches of the willows under the banks give a dry, cracking sound. With the cold and the frost, both Aram’s eyes and his nose, too filled with running water. He kept wiping his face with his sleeve and his cap and was laughing with joy at the sight of The-Red-Mare, but did not leave off lamenting:

            “My empress, were the Armenians still in possession of the kingdom of Urutru on the bank of the lake Van, I would give it to you more than whole, as it’s never been, ever. A chip from Noah’s own Ark would I give you, and I’d take you among the sweet vine-stalks of the Ararat valley to catch for you there a youngling of the dove-kind, from the stock of the dove who brought forth in her beak the green olive-branch when the Biblical Flood waters deigned to withdraw from the face of the earth”.

            They entered the coffeehouse.

            Aram Telguran asked her, slapping and hitting his palms over his forehead in supplication:

            “What would the empress of purple like to have from the wretched Armenian Telguran? Raisins from Malta there are none, it’s winter now , sailors come no longer up the big river of Mavrocordat. White rose petals in heavy candied syrup, to carve them out with a silver stiletto one by one, as hard as stone but clear as the spring water? Or a coffee kissed by the black sun of Africa, or brewed tea-leaves grown and rolled among the silks of China? A coffee would caress hot and gentle the cold, holy lips of my empress who’s been crying…”

            “How about drinking a coffee? The Red-Mare thought to herself. She’d once had some at the gold smithy but didn’t like it. “Should I try it once more?” She asked Telguran to bring her a coffee: “I’ve got no money to pay you for the coffee, but I’ll wash your cups and glasses a whole day.”

            Aram opened his bulging eyes even wider. He was feeling humiliated at the woman’s words and resumed his lamentation with renewed fervour: “Why are you mocking at me, oh, my empress, for in all history, ever since the Median, Sassanide or Mamaluke invasions of my Armenian country, in time immemorial, nobody has brought such shame upon my defeated people, scattered through all the face of the earth. Oh my, when you could actually buy with just that golden minted face of the mad emperor Nero lying asleep on your royal purple breast full of coins, when you could buy with it only, my whole coffeehouse, foundation and all, taking my coffeehouse in the palms of your hands, if you pleased, to dash it into the big river and smite against the ice all my coffee cups, and wretched cheap glasses, and to let just my canaries escape and return to the thick of my undercoat for heat and to sing right abreast of my heart.”

            Aram brought the coffee. The-Red-Mare drank it, then made her way through some velvet curtains, “the glasses and the cups should be here”. They were clean, but she washed them all anew, from all the racks: glasses, coffee-cups, mugs, trays and copper coffeepots, teapots coming in all colours, made of iron or porcelain, tea-spoons, sugar-bowls, saucers for the fruits in soft, clear heavy syrups or murky, candied ones.

            “Alas, that I should have you mocking at me even while you’re verily hallowing my coffeehouse and my cups with your touch!” - went Aram’s plaintive words to her, as plaintive as words could be in his always lamenting voice. He was holding his head in his hands and the serpents of his white hair swung to and fro.

            The-Red-Mare would have liked to ask Aram Telguran why his hair was white, being youngish rather than uglified by old age. She was not aware that hair could grow white with the laments of the soul, or the plaintive longing for pleasures too remote to be reached or under the effect of day-dreaming and pointless contemplation. She did address a question to him, though, about something quite different: “Why is your name Aram Telguran?” - and the query meant more, much more, than simply asking the reason for his hair’s whiteness. The Armenian understood that the girl was asking him a capital question and so he began as follows:

            “My name’s Aram, as it comes from one beginning of the end itself. I am from Japheth’s own kin. Hence from the Japhethian nation, as Gregory of Nareg puts it. Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham and Japheth. And it was said unto Noah: ‘Come into the ark, thou, and all thy house, for I will destroy from off the face of the earth all the people that I have made, bringing a flood of waters to bear upon the earth for forty days and forty nights; but thee have I seen righteous and I will establish with you my covenant to let you live and multiply upon the earth”. Noah came into the ark, he and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, and of every living thing of all flesh took he to him by sevens, the male and his female. Noah was six hundred years, two months, seven and twenty days old when all the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and all the windows of heaven were opened and there was so much water that all the high mountains that were under the whole heaven were covered. After the earth was destroyed and the waters were abated from off the earth, all Noah’s kin bred abundantly in the earth and multiplied. I am of Japheth’s kindred. Among the sons that Japheth bred were Gomer, Madai, Javan, Tubal and Tiras. Gomer bred Askhenaz, Riphath and Togarmah. Javan bred Elishah, Tarshish, Kittim and Dodanim. Of all these sons of Japheth numerous peoples were formed, that settled in various countries, each according to their tongue, their kin and nation. Oh, my empress, if one name out of these has sounded to you Armenian, may you know then that I, Aram Telguran, come from that very same son’s kin. (The-Red-Mare did not know that Aram was uttering words taken straight from the Bible, putting in just a few connecting words from himself; she’d never opened a Bible in her life, so she listened to him further, in wonder). I am Aram, I come from the Japhethan nation and if I am a wanderer, just as my forerunners were, this has befallen to me as to them earlier on not because of some weakness in the body and the soul, but because of pride, not having consented to be enslaved together with my land enslaved by the Sassanides, the Medians and others for whose names the Bible has not had enough leaves to make note of even, for the Bible shuts precisely where the world and the people must begin again and again, all over. My name is Aram. And I am from Japheth’s kindred. Not from Ham’s kindred, though, for Ham saw Noah’s nakedness on purpose and was cursed he and all his kin to be servants for ever, and to look inquiringly into the recesses of the earth and the people’s hidden selves. I have not asked you, my empress, where you come from, or where you are going, why you’re wearing a royal purple dress and an imperial coins necklace, why you’ve been crying and sliding on the ice. I’m not asking these questions for I’m not of the kindred of Ham who inquires into people’s souls. I come from Japheth’s kin who, when he saw Noah naked, turned his back and advanced towards his naked father with his back forwards, to throw onto his naked body a garment and cover his nakedness. My name’s Aram. And I started to be called Telguran also, when my people began to grow handsome and it had turned Armenian already, when it learned how to sing with the word. That is, when the dark began to be split and lit up by the voices of the bardic poets. Three great poets cleared the Armenian air and mind: They were called Frik, Erzinga and Telguran. The rhythm of Telguran’s verse has the fertile heat of the summer and the dreamy embrace of the gales on the lakes of Van, Sevan and Rezaye, where ermines live with their white, clear skins so sleek that they mirror the peaks fifteen-thousand-feet-high of Mount Ararat. This is why I am called Aram Telguran, and the coffeehouse - I opened it in the town of Mavrocordat , after all the waves of the Medians, Sassanides, Mamalukes coming from the beginning of time onwards threw me here, on the banks of the big river, not having the least notion as to how many of my forerunners have had the same fate as mine. But I haven’t known, and I haven’t dreamt either that you’d come on the ice, oh, purple empress of mine…”

            The-Red-Mare listened to him, she laughed and said to him: “I don’t understand a whit of your words. But your name is beautiful.”

            With Aram Telguran, the-Red-Mare knew love thoroughly. The Armenian, put both in love as in all else things from the Bible. He had the belief that if some major things in life are written in a great book or other, it’s no use naming or babbling them out in your own ignorant words. This is why in his loving he uttered things drawn from the Bible, too. He knelt at the girl’s feet and brought forth laments from The Canticle, without inventing too much, simply adding details to make things fit and sound more homely:

            “How beautiful you are, my bride, my sister, your hair is like a flock of goats that have descended from mount Gilead. Your teeth like a flock of newly shorn white sheep which have come out from their washing. Like a thread of scarlet your lips are, like the slice of pomegranate under thy semidiaphanous veil, your cheeks. Your neck, the tower of David. Your two breasts, like two fawns. My hill of myrrh and my mountain of frankincense, until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to thy feet. How beautiful you are, my empress, and there is no blemish in you. Come into my arms from the top of Amana and the summit of Senir, from the lions’ dens, from the mountains of the leopards. My sister, my bride, thou hast ravished my heart. I take all from you, you givest me almost nothing, you,alike to a perpetual virgin, you - locked magic garden, covered well, sealed spring that you are.”

            Aram Telguran never asked The-Red-Mare as long as she stayed with him who she was or from whence she was coming. He did not betray his confession as to not being of Ham’s accursed kin. Whenever she’d tried to tell him some of her incidents, he’d stopped her: “No, my empress, your lips shall by no means open to whisper of what others have compelled you to be through. Hush, my royal purple miracle. Why should you impart to me what is not yours? What is not yours and was not meant as yours is always a sad story. O, my empress, each of us bears locked in one’s breast a kind of Aram Telguran chased away and a wanderer, with a sad story that has to be kept sealed, to prevent it from bleeding again. Not to mention that all possible great misfortunes have been confessed in their entirety in the Bible and that will just do”. (The-Red-Mare happened to find out from the Armenian that the lodgings in Mavrocordat where Marosin had taken her for a night were not the general’s, but Fibula’s. There would these two meet and had seen a lot of each other too when they were young, and head over heel in love. Many years later, The-Red-Mare would find out from somewhere else even more - but this happened after Fibula became poor, was ruined and started to grow old out-and-out - namely, that the house became the general’s, just as it occurred with the gold smithy which became the general’s own property, as Fibula and Guldena, who’d now turned old and powerless, moved out to the hatter’s house that lay beyond The Line of the Quince-Trees).

            In Aram Telguran’s coffeehouse, The-Red-Mare learned to spell and to reckon. She was so quick to do so, that Telguran would cross himself, but he kept crossing himself very often anyway. In her turn, The-Red-Mare told him that she felt computations must be done continuously, not only when one lost or won things. And Aram Telguran rejoined: “My empress, you have the tough, raw mind of Moses the Stammerer, but also the sharp mind, sharp many-times over, of Solomon, the son of David. You have come to me to advise me as gods will that I should place the laws of nature above what one learns in the temples. Long life rests with your right hand, whilst in your left hand you hold riches and glory, you, the noble, beloved woman. From your mouth issues justice - the old law and the new compassion you bear on the tip of your tongue.”

            When she left from Aram Telguran’s place, The-Red-Mare spelled, read and reckoned like a learned man. As for the Bible, she had it almost in full from him. He’d speak from the Bible both when moving among the cups and glasses and when he closed or opened the door.

            In a year’s time, with the coming of summer, The-Red-Mare went away as naturally as she’d come one year before, sometime in winter. She climbed to the harbour of the town Mavrocordat and on board of the Hagia Sophia that belonged to the Turk Aziz the Christian Convert and sailed back all the way to Metopolis. Aram Telguran was crying in her wake:

            “Why are you leaving, my royal-purple empress? Nobody shall make me happy again. The flood waters shall rain over me and my house again, and even if the field and the hills dry up again after the waters’ withdrawal, my vineyards shall not bear fruit again, ever, the dove shall not bring in its beak the green olive branch any more. The Medes, Sassanides and all the Mamalukes shall rise again to attack me and this time they’re sure to bury me alive for good, because I’ve been left alone and deprived of my empress, after having been deprived too of Van, Sevan ad Urutru in times out of record”.

            Back in Metopolis, The-Red-Mare fell into the hands of the boatmen, started wearing a knife, then ran towards Marmatia for about eight uninterrupted years and sent hardly any signs behind her.

Translated by Ioana Zirra

His best-known books are The Winter of Men (1965), Songs of the Plains (1968, poetry), Provincial Letters(1976), and the widely acclaimed Book of the Millionaire (1965-1976-1977). An authoritarian, wise nonconformist, perhaps a turn-of-the century dandy, the local Millionaire who likes to spell his own name and the almost mythical names of the characters only sometimes with italics - the whimsically aristocratic narrator who speaks from the perspective of the future of wisdom, from beyond the lesser, perhaps happier time of the story itself, is writing a fabulous chronicle in the manner of the magic realism of Márquez - the charm of this chronicle which the “Millionaire’s” ingenious story-telling transforms into a palimpsest, too, being its “Fanariotiké” Romanian Orientalism with its treasure of recognizable commonplaces. The pristine and the authentic, the little legend and the wider tradition are mingled in this careful record of the fabulous geography of the imaginary region to be narratively unearthed starting from Metopolis, a kind of dream-like, nostalgic Wallachian metropolis of the mind, of the latest Byzantine empire, too, a “metropolis” without “r”, slanting to one side as a half-visionary half-forgotten “bateau ivre” in its emphatic italicized font. (At one point in the story, we will be also announced that it has become submerged, like a kind of solid earth Atlantis, being “undermined” by the people’s greed and cunning).