American Ghosts & Old World Wonders (13 page)

           
After her mother died and was buried, her father forgot the mother and forgot the child and married the woman who used to rake the ashes, and that was why the child lived in the unraked ashes, and there was nobody to brush her hair, so it stuck out like a mat, nor to wipe the dirt off her scabbed face, and she had no heart to do it for herself, but she raked the ashes and slept beside the little cat and got the burned bits from the bottom of the pot to eat, scraping them out, squatting on the floor, by herself in front of the fire, not as if she were human, because she was still mourning.

           
Her mother was dead and buried, but felt perfect exquisite pain of love when she looked up through the earth and saw the burned child covered in ashes.

           
"Milk the cow, burned child, and bring back all the milk," said the stepmother, who used to rake the ashes and milk the cow, once upon a time, but the burned child did all that, now.

           
The ghost of the mother went into the cow.

           
"Drink milk, grow fat," said the mother's ghost.

           
The burned child pulled on the udder and drank enough milk before she took the bucket back and nobody saw, and time passed, she drank milk every day, she grew fat, she grew breasts, she grew up.

           
There was a man the stepmother wanted and she asked him into the kitchen to get his dinner, but she made the burned child cook it, although the stepmother did all the cooking before. After the burned child cooked the dinner the stepmother sent her off to milk the cow.

           
"I want that man for myself," said the burned child to the cow.

           
The cow let down more milk, and more, and more, enough for the girl to have a drink and wash her face and wash her hands. When she washed her face, she washed the scabs off and now she was not burned at all, but the cow was empty.

           
"Give your own milk, next time," said the ghost of the mother inside the cow. "You've milked me dry."

           
The little cat came by. The ghost of the mother went into the cat.

           
"Your hair wants doing," said the cat. "Lie down."

           
The little cat unpicked her raggy lugs with its clever paws until the burned child's hair hung down nicely, but it had been so snagged and tangled that the cat's claws were all pulled out before it was finished.

           
"Comb your own hair, next time," said the cat. "You've maimed me."

           
The burned child was clean and combed, but stark naked.

           
There was a bird sitting in the apple tree. The ghost of the mother left the cat and went into the bird. The bird struck its own breast with its beak. Blood poured down on to the burned child under the tree. It ran over her shoulders and covered her front and covered her back. When the bird had no more blood, the burned child got a red silk dress.

           
"Make your own dress, next time," said the bird. "I"m through with that bloody business."

           
The burned child went into the kitchen to show herself to the man. She was not burned any more, but lovely. The man left off looking at the stepmother and looked at the girl.

           
"Come home with me and let your stepmother stay and rake the ashes," he said to her and off they went. He gave her a house and money. She did all right.

           
"Now I can go to sleep," said the ghost of the mother. "Now everything is all right."

           
The stepmother took the red-hot poker and burned the orphan's face with it because she had not raked the ashes. The girl went to her mother's grave. In the earth her mother said: "It must be raining. Or else it is snowing. Unless there is a heavy dew tonight."

           
"It isn't raining, it isn't snowing, it's too early for the dew. My tears are falling on your grave, mother."

           
The dead woman waited until night came. Then she climbed out and went to the house. The stepmother slept on a feather bed, but the burned child slept on the hearth among the ashes. When the dead woman kissed her, the scar vanished. The girl woke up. The dead woman gave her a red dress.

           
"I had it when I was your age."

           
The girl put the red dress on. The dead woman took worms from her eyesockets; they turned into jewels. The girl put on a diamond ring.

           
"I had it when I was your age."

           
They went together to the grave.

           
"Step into my coffin."

           
"No," said the girl. She shuddered.

           
"I stepped into
my
mother's coffin when I was your age."

           
The girl stepped into the coffin although she thought it would be the death of her. It turned into a coach and horses. The horses stamped, eager to be gone.

           
"Go and seek your fortune, darling."

This piece was written in praise of Jan Svankmayer,

the animator of Prague, and his film of
Alice

           
In the city of Prague, once, it was winter.

           
Outside the curious room, there is a sign on the door which says "Forbidden". Inside, inside, oh, come and see! The celebrated DR DEE.

           
The celebrated Dr Dee, looking for all the world like Santa Claus on account of his long, white beard and apple cheeks, is contemplating his crystal, the fearful sphere that contains everything that is, or was, or ever shall be.

           
It is a round ball of solid glass and gives a deceptive impression of weightlessness, because you can see right through it and we falsely assume an equation between lightness and transparency, that what the light shines through cannot be there and so must weigh nothing. In fact, the Doctor's crystal ball is heavy enough to inflict a substantial injury and the Doctor's assistant, Ned Kelly, the Man in the Iron Mask, often weighs the ball in one hand or tosses it back and forth from one to the other hand as he ponders the fragility of the hollow bone, his master's skull, as it pores heedless over some tome.

           
Ned Kelly would blame the murder on the angels. He would say the angels came out of the sphere. Everybody knows the angels live there.

           
The crystal resembles: an aqueous humour, frozen:

                       
a glass eye, although without any iris or

                       
pupil -- just the sort of transparent eye, in

                       
fact, which the adept might construe as apt

                       
to see the invisible;

                       
a tear, round, as it forms within the eye, for

                       
a tear acquires its characteristic shape of a

                       
pear, what we think of as a "tear" shape, only

                       
in the act of falling;

                       
the shining drop that trembles, sometimes, on the

                       
tip of the Doctor's well-nigh senescent, tending

                       
towards the flaccid, yet nevertheless sustainable

                       
and discernible morning erection, and

                       
always reminds him of

                       
a drop of dew,

                       
a drop of dew endlessly, tremulously about to fall

                       
from the unfolded petals of a rose and, therefore,

                       
like the tear, retaining the perfection of its

                       
circumference only by refusing to sustain free fall,

                       
remaining what it is, because it refuses to become

                       
what it might be, the antithesis of metamorphosis;

                       
and yet, in old England, far away, the sign of the

                       
Do Drop Inn will always, that jovial pun, show an

                       
oblate spheroid, heavily tinselled, because the

                       
sign-painter, in order to demonstrate the idea of

                       
"drop", needs must represent the dew in the act of

                       
falling and therefore, for the purposes of this

                       
comparison,
not
resembling the numinous ball

                       
weighing down the angelic Doctor's outstretched

                       
palm.

           
For Dr Dee, the invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world.

           
The hinge of the sixteenth century, where it joins with the seventeenth century, is as creaky and judders open as reluctantly as the door in a haunted house. Through that door, in the distance, we may glimpse the distant light of the Age of Reason, but precious little of that is about to fall on Prague, the capital of paranoia, where the fortune-tellers live on Golden Alley in cottages so small, a good-sized doll would find itself cramped, and there is one certain house on Alchemist's Street that only becomes visible during a thick fog. (On sunny days, you see a stone.) But, even in the fog, only those born on the Sabbath can see the house anyway.

           
Like a lamp guttering out in a recently vacated room, the Renaissance flared, faded and extinguished itself. The world had suddenly revealed itself as bewilderingly infinite, but since the imagination remained, for after all it is only human, finite, our imaginations took some time to catch up. If Francis Bacon will die in 1626 a martyr to experimental science, having contracted a chill whilst stuffing a dead hen with snow on Highgate Hill to see if that would keep it fresh, in Prague, where Dr Faustus once lodged in Charles Square, Dr Dee, the English expatriate alchemist, awaits the manifestation of the angel in the Archduke Rudolph's curious room, and we are still fumbling our way towards the end of the previous century.

           
The Archduke Rudolph keeps his priceless collection of treasures in this curious room; he numbers the Doctor amongst these treasures and is therefore forced to number the Doctor's assistant, the unspeakable and iron-visaged Kelly, too.

           
The Archduke Rudolph has crazy eyes. These eyes are the mirrors of his soul.

           
It is very cold this afternoon, the kind of weather that makes a person piss. The moon is up already, a moon the colour of candlewax and, as the sky discolours when the night conies on, the moon grows more white, more cold, white as the source of all the cold in the world, until, when the winter moon reaches its chill meridian, everything will freeze -- not only the water in the jug and the ink in the well, but the blood in the vein, the aqueous humour.

           
Metamorphosis.

           
In their higgledy-piggledy disorder, the twigs on the bare trees outside the thick window resemble those random scratchings made by common use that you only see when you lift your wineglass up to the light. A hard frost has crisped the surface of the deep snow on the Archduke's tumbled roofs and turrets. In the snow, a raven: caw!

           
Dr Dee knows the language of birds and sometimes speaks it, but what the birds say is frequently banal; all the raven said, over and over, was: "Poor Tom's a-cold!"

           
Above the Doctor's head, slung from the low-beamed ceiling, dangles a flying turtle, stuffed. In the dim room we can make out, amongst much else, the random juxtaposition of an umbrella, a sewing machine and a dissecting table; a raven and a writing desk; an aged mermaid, poor wizened creature, cramped in a foetal position in ajar, her ream of grey hair suspended adrift in the viscous liquid that preserves her, her features rendered greenish and somewhat distorted by the flaws in the glass.

           
Dr Dee would like, for a mate to this mermaid, to keep in a cage, if alive, or, if dead, in a stoppered bottle, an angel.

           
It was an age in love with wonders.

           
Dr Dee's assistant, Ned Kelly, the Man in the Iron Mask, is also looking for angels. He is gazing at the sheeny, reflective screen of his scrying disc which is made of polished coal. The angels visit him more frequently than they do the Doctor, but, for some reason, Dr Dee cannot see Kelly's guests, although they crowd the surface of the scrying disc, crying out in their high, piercing voices in the species of bird-creole with which they communicate. It is a great sadness to him.

           
Kelly, however, is phenomenally gifted in this direction and notes down on a pad the intonations of their speech which, though he doesn't understand it himself, the Doctor excitedly makes sense of.

           
But, today, no go.

           
Kelly yawns. He stretches. He feels the pressure of the weather on his bladder.

           
The privy at the top of the tower is a hole in the floor behind a cupboard door. It is situated above another privy, with another hole, above another privy, another hole, and so on, down seven further privies, seven more holes, until your excreta at last hurtles into the cesspit far below. The cold keeps the smell down, thank God.

           
Dr Dee, ever the seeker after knowledge, has calculated the velocity of a flying turd.

           
Although a man could hang himself in the privy with ease and comfort, securing the rope about the beam above and launching himself into the void to let gravity break his neck for him, Kelly, whether at stool or making water, never allows the privy to remind him of the "long drop" nor even, however briefly, admires his own instrument for fear the phrase "well-hung" recalls the noose which he narrowly escaped in his native England for fraud, once, in Lancaster; for forgery, once, in Rutlandshire; and for performing a confidence trick in Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

           
But his ears were cropped for him in the pillory at Walton-le-Dale, after he dug up a corpse from a churchyard for purposes of necromancy, or possibly of grave-robbing, and this is why, in order to conceal this amputation, he always wears the iron mask modelled after that which will be worn by a namesake three hundred years hence in a country that does not yet exist, an iron mask like an upturned bucket with a slit cut for his eyes.

           
Kelly, unbuttoning, wonders if his piss will freeze in the act of falling; if, today, it is cold enough in Prague to let him piss an arc of ice.

           
No.

           
He buttons up again.

           
Women loathe this privy. Happily, few venture here, into the magician's tower, where the Archduke Rudolph keeps his collection of wonders, his proto-museum, his "
Wunderkammer
", his
"cabinet de curiosites",
that
curious room
of which we speak.

           
There's a theory, one I find persuasive, that the quest for knowledge is, at bottom, the search for the answer to the question: "Where was I before I was born?"

           
In the beginning was. . . what?

           
Perhaps, in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.

           
Kelly once took the Archduke aside and offered him, at a price, a little piece of the beginning, a slice of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil itself, which Kelly claimed he had obtained from an Armenian, who had found it on Mount Ararat, growing in the shadows of the wreck of the Ark. The slice had dried out with time and looked very much like a dehydrated ear.

           
The Archduke soon decided it was a fake, that Kelly had been fooled. The Archduke is
not
gullible. Rather, he has a boundless desire to know
everything
and an exceptional generosity of belief. At night, he stands on top of the tower and watches the stars in the company of Tycho Brahe and Johann Kepler, yet by day, he makes no move nor judgement before he consults the astrologers in their zodiacal hats and yet, in those days, either an astrologer or an astronomer would be hard put to it to describe the difference between their disciplines.

           
He is not gullible. But he has his peculiarities.

           
The Archduke keeps a lion chained up in his bedroom as a species of watch-dog or, since the lion is a member of the
Felis
family and not a member of the
Cave canem
family, a giant guard-cat. For fear of the lion's yellow teeth, the Archduke had them pulled. Now that the poor beast cannot chew, he must subsist on slop. The lion lies with his head on his paws, dreaming. If you could open up his brain this moment, you would find nothing there but the image of a beefsteak.