Drinks Water dreamt with his eyes open as the men sat with him in a circle. Already he could hear the ringing of their axes in his ears. As they inhaled the sacred smoke he saw them building small, gray boxes, and beside those boxes he watched his people die.
The water rushes around the rocks in wild, violent circles. He looks at it with a scientific eye. Here chaos begins, he thinks to himself.
My mother cannot stop walking. She goes from one room of the big house to another, then outside, one state to the next, then across the ocean.
“A body breathes under the earth,” she moans. “Its lungs are filled up with dirt.”
My father talks under his breath. “This is the hardest part,” he says, and he is right — w hen she hears and sees what is not there.
It is not there, he is sure of it and tells her so.
“How can you be so sure, Michael?” she asks over and over, and he says it again with an authority he does not often call up.
“I am sure. Believe me.” And he holds her shoulders and looks into her eyes. This is the worst part, we children think, watching her from a far corner. I wonder to myself whether she w ill ever be well, and Hetcher somehow knows this and puts his hand on my shoulder and whispers, “It will be fine.” I want to know w here his faith comes from, his eves that shine confidence as she begs us to come to her, calling us out from the shadows.
“Mom,” he says, hugging her with the whole of his strength. He is so little still.
“Tell me the weather, Hetcher,” my mother says. But before he can tell her of the cold spell we are in, the temperatures below freezing each day, no sign of a break, she says, “I wish there were tulips here,” and brushes his head. She picks up the phone, books a flight to the Netherlands — then cancels it — books it again.
“Tulips,” she says again and again, “tulips,” until somehow she sees the heads of her children, our heads, blossom red and yellow, and she is satisfied.
“Oh, my!” she exclaims. “You two are so beautiful!” To see our heads blooming in brilliant color makes us dearer to her; she understands us better in that moment, loves us more. I w ill gladly make my head a petaled top for her, I think, my arms the green leaves of tulips, my body a stem she might pluck and hold close to her breast; something she needs, finally.
Sometimes I think I have heard the fluttering of wings. Sometimes I think I have seen something: a tip of a tail, a piece of beak, a leg, one thin leg of that incredible bird. Sometimes I see the bare branch of a tree swaying in slow motion in my sleep and I know what that means. I try to get myself past the tree to see what’s beyond it — the held that opens like a great hand, the w ide breath of sky. I search for a trace of the Topaz Bird. Only moments before it was perched on that bobbing branch. I am getting closer. I follow the horizon line of my dreams. I watch. My mother’s robe is shining and gold. I listen. Her voice is sweet and low. I close my eyes in the dark and ieel her warm breath. I try to picture that bird in my mind. But it’s so tiny, so hard to see.
“You must not be afraid,” she says in her lovely night voice. But still I must be. Still I can’t see it, not even now as I fall into this twenty-year-old sleep, this grown-up sleep.
“Mother,” I whisper, though she is far away now, “help me, please.”
I wait for the leap — the way to see past the tree to that place — her voice. I will wait forever, if I must, for that wonderful flapping, and me right there, on the wings of it.
“Gently,” her biography reads, “gently in recollection, Colette led her visitor to the bedroom she had known as a child; she showed him the cat-door, through which at dawn, the vagabond cat had ambled in and fallen on the bed, ‘cold, white and light as an armful of snow.’ Finally she led him into the garden.”
Her voice sails on the air, skimming it. “Quelle surprise, Sabine!” she says. She is delighted to hear from her friend who is so far away. It is a miracle, she thinks — and she says so — how one can sound so near, how one can be so far and so near at the same time.
My mother’s voice is a small boat being tossed on the waves. Giddy and light. It gets bigger and moves steadily through the water. “Absolument,” she says, “oh, absolument.”
She is so charming. “N’est-ce pas?” she laughs. “Evidemment. Oui, maintenant, je suis très heureuse — oui.” She is glowing. She laughs again. I close my eyes and pretend I am the woman on the other end of the phone. I concentrate on her voice. She is so delightful. “I would not hesitate to love her,” I sav to mvself. “I would not hesitate to love that voice.”
“They dined on mince,” she sang, “and slices ot quince—” Her eyes lit up. “Which they ate with a runcible spoon,” we said together. “And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, they danced by the light of the moon, the moon. They danced by the light of the moon.”
“The waves beside them danced, but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not be but gay,
In such a jocund company,
I gazed — and gazed — but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought.”
“The Daffodils!’” I yelled.
“By whom?” my mother asked, smiling.
“Wordsworth!” I screamed.
“For oft w hen on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon the inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”
“You must never forget,” she would whisper, leaning over me, after all the bedtime poems had been recited, all the bedtime songs had been sung, as she covered me with her night and shut out the light and kissed me on the forehead, “that the Topaz Bird means us no harm.”
“It’s even more beautiful than a swan,” I said, my head feathery with sleep.
“We are lucky to see it,” she said. “You must not be afraid.”
The women wake early. It’s misty; there’s a smell of dew, of damp mushrooms, of nuts — chestnuts. They lie in the wet herbs, say nothing, listen to the odd two-note whistle of a bird. It’s spring.
Slowly the garden awakes, the world awakes — le jardin, le monde. They look down the Rue de Beaujolais where the milkman comes in his cart. Christine frames him with a stone wall off in the distance, puts lilacs in the foreground, a border of lavender.
They drink café au lait from cracked pink cups and eat tiny blocks of chocolate. They pet the cats. They open Le Matin and Vogue. Sabine looks up.
“Grand-père laid slabs of wet chocolate out on the roof at night to dry,” she smiles, “and in the morning there would be the most wonderful flower-petal designs on them.” She giggles. “They were the paw prints of cats!”
In the distance they can see the sunlit slopes where the grapes that have been in Sabine’s family hundreds and hundreds of years grow. It’s fall now. All is burnt orange, and yellow, and scarlet. The earth smells so lovely — the smoke, the leaves. The silence is thrilling. They walk into the dark woods together, pretending it is a virgin forest that no one has ever dared walk in, though an hour before they watched the woodcutter disappear into that leafy darkness.
“I’m cold,” Christine says.