Gubik was allegedly the illegitimate issue of a deaf and dumb Astingi maiden and a long gone soldier billeted in Silbürsmerze, incurring both the enmity of her tribe as well as the indifference of the local population. Mother had taken her in, given her rooms over the stable, an easy regimen in the house, and had even acted as her midwife — all the more remarkable since Gubik came into the world only a month after myself.
He was good with animals, all animals, and took to his role as a kind of elevated swineherd, carrying a crook sharpened at the edges like a scythe, diffidently picking up the prized long-haired Mongolian pigs from each village house at dawn, and escorting them to engorge themselves on the fallen fruits and nuts of the forest, supplemented with a mash of beetroot, bird’s eggs, and trout. At dusk they would return in single military file, until each belled pig had turned in at its own gate. For pocket money he would join the gruff and dirty choruses of those who dragged boats upstream, though he did not take well to authority and had a highly developed sense of injustice. Mother once said that he would “not be happy until every king was strangled in the lap of every disembowled priest, every dwarf stretched out, and every beggar enriched.” When he returned downriver, he would go to the empty church to practice on the echo organ, playing with his rope-burned hands behind his back his own renditions of “The Flight of the Bumblebee” or “Ah! Perfido” holding double-thirds or even full octaves in both hands. Opening the full Rückpositiv and Brustwerk pipes, he drew uncomfortable tremolos from a duplex of the vox angelica and vox humana.
We played hide-and-seek in the papyrus thickets of the marshes, shouting to each other, “A whistle or cry, or let the game die. Waterman, Wodje Mze, arise!” I crawled like a weasel through the reeds, and when I could smell him behind me, as strong as twice-fortified wine, I turned and threw a handful of mud into his face. But he was too quick for me. Blinded by his vertigo of elbows and knees, he tumbled me into the stumps and swamp water, pushing my head into the muck. It was all I could do to keep my nose above water, and behind me I could feel Charon’s throbbing phallus. I screamed a mortal scream, managed to free an arm, reached up and tore out a gout of hair, and then, encrusted with the tomb-leaves of semen, ran back to the house.
Certainly, I found this irritating and rather beside the point, but the same scenario would be repeated many times. It was neither erotic nor innocent. It meant nothing in itself, but it presaged much. Though I saw him infrequently, he was always there — I remembered him three times a day, and still do.
One day Mother took me aside upon my flustered return. “I see you have been experimenting,” she said cheerfully but with melancholy eyes. “Just remember that the wastebin is where experiments should end up, not à la page.” And only our lack of ready cash prevented my seriously deranged playmate from being sent away to school. “One day,” Father said with a shrug, “you will just have to collect yourself, take a step back, and knock him down.”
I came into the world to replace a dead child, a true sister, pretty, petite, flirtatious, and extremely well-behaved, who lived only a single hour. I do not know if she had a given name. The lintel door of the chapel in which she was buried is inscribed only, “Waterlily of the Mze.” I had strict orders never to play near it — its doors were always locked — so I was inevitably drawn to it like a magnet, and regularly stole away to gaze through the chapel keyhole. Inside, impressive stained-glass windows rose to a cupola hooding a small bell which was never rung. A wine-red banner hung across the sanctuary, on the steps of which was a cushion nestling a broken saber. Once I gained entry through a broken floorboard. In the altar, behind a spring-loaded door, I found a chalice, upon it engraved “The Cup of Sorrow.” Inside the chalice, wrapped in a silk handkerchief, were two perfectly cut stones, one red, one blue. I felt a great solidarity with this vanished playmate, and I knew no one would ever build such a monument to me.
Her chapel (the last gothic church in the West) had been constructed from the ruins of a watchtower upon a promontory, its bowsprit terrace providing perfect views up and down the Mze. Owls nested in the gables by day and eagles by night, a silent changing of the guard accompanied only by Waterlily’s incessant singing; like me, she sang well before she could speak, throughout the night. She had our mother’s voice; her forzas were like a car hitting a wall, and eventually she mastered even the most difficult Astingi song-cycles, which, tighter than a sestina, go on in the same excruciating fashion — absence, devastation, return, retribution, wedding, absence, et alia, alia, among them Rage Over a Lost Penny; I Am Not Scheherazade; If I Lay Down for You, It Is God’s Wish; It Doesn’t Become You When You Speak; He Who Doesn’t Kiss Her Deserves to Have His Tongue Torn Out; or that showstopper, the eighteenth-century magisterial masterpiece, The New God:
On a pilgrimage I heard
the good tidings from a
conversation between a dog and a cock
That the Almighty Father was dead
as well as his Good Lady, his son,
and the fearsome ghost
Put in his place is an elderly
Uncle with red whiskers who
has only been in jail once
He understands not a word of
Hebrew, Latin, or Greek and
only a smattering of English
He wears an old black silk top hat
and a red knitted waistcoat and
knows all there is about turnips and buttermilk
He has a rusty old gun but
no license, and a bad-tempered
sheepdog whom the angels call “Testy”
They say he will make a very good God,
And a much better one for our people
A great pity they had to endure the other for so long.
When I returned to her, on Easter or other holidays when the family was otherwise preoccupied, I would open the altarpiece and, taking the stones from the chalice, shake them in my hand like dice — and when I was feeling most like the last son of an inglorious age, she would sing sweetly in the chapel, “So what are you alive for?”
In those stolen moments in the chapel of my dead sister, it occurred to me what my problem was. I had an âme féminine, a feminine soul. My thick heroic blood had somehow become feminine, upper class, and barbaric, negating modern culture, which makes the feminine masculine, democratic, and artificial. Civilization clung to me like rags. So while playing the man, I have always felt like a princess, a dead princess about to awake and make mincemeat of certain people, and as such I have incurred the fear and hatred of men, particularly if they were important personages.