The Magic (October 1961–October 1967). Roger Zelazny

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СКАЧАТЬ in India had been Dionysiac compared to this.

      “What is that tube of fire?”

      “A cigarette. Want one?”

      “Yes, please.”

      She sat beside me, and I lighted it for her.

      “It irritates the nose.”

      “Yes. Draw some into your lungs, hold it there, and exhale.”

      A moment passed.

      “Ooh,” she said.

      A pause, then, “Is it sacred?”

      “No, it’s nicotine,” I answered, “a very ersatz form of divinity.”

      Another pause.

      “Please don’t ask me to translate ‘ersatz.’”

      “I won’t. I get this feeling sometimes when I dance.”

      “It will pass in a moment.”

      “Tell me your poem now.”

      An idea hit me.

      “Wait a minute,” I said. “I may have something better.”

      I got up and rummaged through my notebooks, then I returned and sat beside her.

      “These are the first three chapters of the Book of Ecclesiastes,” I explained. “It is very similar to your own sacred books.”

      I started reading.

      I got through eleven verses before she cried out, “Please don’t read that! Tell me one of yours!”

      I stopped and tossed the notebook onto a nearby table. She was shaking, not as she had quivered that day she danced as the wind, but with the jitter of unshed tears. She held her cigarette awkwardly, like a pencil. Clumsily, I put my arm about her shoulders.

      “He is so sad,” she said, “like all the others.”

      So I twisted my mind like a bright ribbon, folded it, and tied the crazy Christmas knots I love so well. From German to Martian, with love, I did an impromptu paraphrasal of a poem about a Spanish dancer. I thought it would please her. I was right.

      “Ooh,” she said again. “Did you write that?”

      “No, it’s by a better man than I.”

      “I don’t believe it. You wrote it yourself.”

      “No, a man named Rilke did.”

      “But you brought it across to my language. Light another match, so I can see how she danced.”

      I did.

      “The fires of forever,” she mused, “and she stamped them out, ‘with small, firm feet.’ I wish I could dance like that.”

      “You’re better than any Gypsy,” I laughed, blowing it out.

      “No, I’m not. I couldn’t do that.”

      “Do you want me to dance for you?”

      Her cigarette was burning down, so I removed it from her fingers and put it out, along with my own.

      “No,” I said. “Go to bed.”

      She smiled, and before I realized it, had unclasped the fold of red at her shoulder.

      And everything fell away.

      And I swallowed, with some difficulty.

      “All right,” she said.

      So I kissed her, as the breath of fallen cloth extinguished the lamp.

      III

      The days were like Shelley’s leaves: yellow, red, brown, whipped in bright gusts by the west wind. They swirled past me with the rattle of microfilm. Almost all of the books were recorded now. It would take scholars years to get through them, to properly assess their value. Mars was locked in my desk.

      Ecclesiastes, abandoned and returned to a dozen times, was almost ready to speak in the High Tongue.

      I whistled when I wasn’t in the Temple. I wrote reams of poetry I would have been ashamed of before. Evenings I would walk with Braxa, across the dunes or up into the mountains. Sometimes she would dance for me; and I would read something long, and in dactylic hexameter. She still thought I was Rilke, and I almost kidded myself into believing it. Here I was, staying at the Caste Duino, writing his Elegies.

       . . . It is strange to inhabit the Earth no more,

       to use no longer customs scarce acquired,

       nor interpret roses . . .

      No! Never interpret roses! Don’t. Smell them (sniff, Kane!), pick them, enjoy them. Live in the moment. Hold to it tightly. But charge not the gods to explain. So fast the leaves go by, are blown . . .

      And no one ever noticed us. Or cared.

      Laura. Laura and Braxa. They rhyme, you know, with a bit of clash. Tall, cool, and blonde was she (I hate blondes!), and Daddy had turned me inside out, like a pocket, and I thought she could fill me again. But the big, beat work-slinger, with Judas-beard and dog-trust in his eyes, oh, he had been a fine decoration at her parties. And that was all.

      How the machine cursed me in the Temple! It blasphemed Malann and Gallinger. And the wild west wind went by and something was not far behind.

      The last days were upon us.

      *

      A day went by and I did not see Braxa, and a night.

      And a second. And a third.

      I was half-mad. I hadn’t realized how close we had become, how important she had been. With the dumb assurance of presence, I had fought against questioning the roses.

      I had to ask. I didn’t want to, but I had no choice.

      “Where is she, M’Cwyie? Where is Braxa?”

      “She is gone,” she said.

      “Where?”

      “I do not know.”

      I looked at those devil-bird eyes. Anathema maranatha rose to my lips.

      “I must know.”

      She looked through me.

      “She has left us. She is gone. Up into the hills, СКАЧАТЬ