OVERTURE TO BLINDNESS [THE EXECUTIONER.]

A PANTOMIME

with male bodyparts, marble & morphia

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

The GOVERNOR……………….. Alexander SABUROV

The CLOCKMAKER……………….. Victor KAIN

The EXECUTIONER……………….. A vial of MORPHINE

An unseen bird chirps nearby.

THE GOVERNOR. — Present tense will not do. My wife is dead.

An unseen bird chirped nearby.

*

Silence fell back on the graveyard after the last shovelful.

Fellow townspeople scattered like leaves after a seemly five minutes or so, and then after ten there was no one but the governor himself and the discreet shadow of the clockmaker. The butcher Olgimsky had muttered condolences and been quick to depart, but Victor Kain remained, straight, still, statuesque near in his mourning blacks. No colour about him but the green of his eyes, affixed somewhere above the wretched geometry of that patch of overturned land where Katerina Saburova now laid. He’d not said a word to the bereaved. Only shared a glance. That is enough, Alexander decided, for he understands, and I understand. We are the same.

Something about the clockmaker’s side profile triggered an old memory, though he failed to grasp it. The governor looked down. There was a speck of soil on Victor’s black polished shoe. Alexander’s eye couldn’t tear itself off it— so this is what she has become, my wife, my love, the Earth. The love of his life a bit of dirt on another man’s shoe. Mistress Morphine would be proud. Mistress Morphine would holler in her veins, and she’d listen close, and he’d cry in stunned silence. He hadn’t cried at her deathbedside. Cruel sort of regret to wave white handkerchief-like in front of her tombstone.

How ugly his blue eyes looked, rimmed with red.

How ugly her half-hearted grave, cruelly nestled between her two rivals’ mausoleums. It had taken long to dig. He’d watched the gravedigger’s ropey arms (clench-unclench like a camera shutter). He’d watched the give of the earth, the bite of the shovel. Bits of soil stuck under the man’s fingernails. His own clean if bitten to the quick, bitter, uneven, jagged unfinished crescents. He’d watched the coffin go down with his stomach. Muttered something (he did not remember).

Victor Kain’s hand claimed his shoulder, then. Alexander looked a long time at the veins threading the back of it, blue-on-pale, veins that would extend and crawl up his forearm, play at ropes keeping him together. This hand on his shoulder, it grew him something like heartburn. Fast pointy sort of nausea. A bird called up in a tree, to no response. It reminded him of a knife to the gut although he’d never been a fighting man. You’re a glorified clerk, Olgimsky the meatmonger had said, once, his fleshy hand, the sickly golden ring on his finger, pointed at him. He had replied, so I am, he had waved him off. Olgimsky came to the funeral, Olgimsky left without a hand on his shoulder. Victor, though, Victor—

Victor was older than him, and gentler. Victor had buried a wife like him. The butcher too, but then again he had not loved her as Victor had loved mighty Nina whose name made the trees shudder. As Alexander had loved Katerina. They were lucky men, Victor and himself. He’d been lucky even when Katerina started to drown in the arms of her executioner. Victor did not say

“I am sorry”

because it would have carved a gash deep down his shoulder, whereupon the man’s hand lay. Victor’s mouth caught on the edge of his breath. He had thin lips, made for severity. All the same his face was gentle.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

Alexander’s red-blue eyes took their time meeting the clockmaker’s. A touch of nascent tears stuck to the cornea, much like dew on a leaf (how would it slip along Victor Kain’s thumb). Alexander said,

“I would have a word with the executioner.”

The executioner was very small. The executioner was cousin twice-removed to the plague, only more dishonest. The executioner promised pain-relief wrapped in an ampoule.

“A pity that she is dead also.”

The executioner, Mistress Morphine / the lover, Mrs. Saburova / same now,

Katerina, Katya, Katyusha down the drain.

*

The GOVERNOR paced the bedroom. Broad daylight, curtains closed. Only a sliver of timid sun through the gap.

The GOVERNOR. — Where might you be, death-sower, where do you hide? You’ve killed her.

Through his grief he could scarcely see. Besides the EXECUTIONER was very small, and didn’t have much light to catch in this self-inflicted darkness. She simmered patiently within the glass of her vial. Waiting for the needle that would not come. The GOVERNOR sat at the edge of the bed, on the side undisturbed by the shape of her sleep. Wild hands running through his hair.

The GOVERNOR. (trembling) — You’ve killed her.

*

They sat at a dinner table too long for two. It sliced the room in half.

Victor’s house was cold, as if the aptly named Crucible had been left to rot by its resident alchemist. Of the man of magical science there was little tonight, but the gleam in his twyrine-green eyes when he took a sip. Jaundiced lamplight was unkind to the starch of his collar, even more so his skin. Alexander noticed. Then tried not to. Something in the air was ripe with ill-advised wanting. Victor had shaved hastily, there was a shallow cut on his cheek (a half-hearted grave). A fit of childish nerves saw the governor play with his food, driving back and forth the rake of his fork across a splatter of greens (undercooked), past the dry ridge of some cutlet (overcooked). Fibers nesting between his teeth. He’d not been hungry since the funeral.

The space between his ribs was wide; he tried to fill it with words, although Victor hadn’t questioned his presence, his sudden need for company—

“We’ve both of us been subjected to the joys and sorrows of marital law— I suppose I have been looking for some manner of kinship in sentiment. It was either your table or Olgimsky’s, and, well. I am sure you will not begrudge me my choice.”

“Hardly.”

The green-eyed dreamer’s knife slashed at a piece of meat. Alexander admired the twist of his thin, pale wrist peeking, just so, out the cuff of his shirtsleeve, all protruding bone and a scatter of fine dark hairs, and the twitch of a muscle as it moved. If it turned, then, there would be the exposed, off-white underside of it and its blue vein, and what might it taste like? (the river Gorkhon)

“Marital does sound so much like martial.” A smile on Victor’s lips, thin as an emperor’s. “Forgive me. I know Katerina and yourself have been running a tight ship as of late, even before the outbreak. If anything, I commend your belief in a form of order we Kains are often keen to lose sight of.”

“Order”, repeated the magistrate with a pensive tilt of his head. “Yes. In truth, it was for me a sort of comfort. Even as it slipped through my fingers, I thought, I must hold on to it. This is what a ruler does, yes? Your family notwithstanding. A ruler puts things in their place. A ruler has little room to dream.”

Victor smiled again. That absinthe-green sadness bloomed in his eyes, and at the corner of his mouth where skin looked grey, sallow. It faltered, lasting not a second. Alexander found sadness a becoming expression on his severe face, and hoped to see it bloom some more.

“I wish we could be of the same mind, sometimes”, said the dreamer.

“As do I.”

“Still I am glad to see you here and not over at Olgimsky’s. Isn’t it odd, when you think of it— that our wives have been buried, and that we fickle men are left behind in such a constant state of mourning— I for one am often troubled by the idea, though it’s been some years since Nina’s passing. But, ah! I am being maudlin. It is September and the Town is greedy, and so She feeds on what is most precious. Such is the order of things.”

Yes. That it was. She fed as do wounded animals each year and She gave in return.

And still the magistrate did not want to accept the Town’s autumnal hunger as inevitable. He cast a red-rimmed blue eye into his glass of twyrine. Some said the herbs within talked to them when they’d had a glass too many. It made him think of his wife, his wife swimming in seas of cold morphine. He had joined her once only in her bliss (isn’t it the husband’s prerogative to make his wife happy?) and it had taken him as a sickness; her as a mistress, lowercase. Morphine, morphine, how typical of a goddess to eat at another’s throat, at another’s marrow. Katerina had loved her so.

(Katerina had loved him so.)

He did not touch his drink. His fork played at surgery with the remains of a dry cut of meat. What was it the steppe doctors said about Lines in the body— did dead animals, too, have Lines all over under— but Victor’s marble-cut mouth moved and he heard nothing—

(He blinked, once.)

They slipped out and into the parlour for smokes. Alexander did not touch the offered cigarette, black and gold-filtered. Victor’s teeth caught nicely on his. The green of his eyes took on that twyrine hue, now half-asleep, hazy. Hamstrung at the receiving end of this green, the governor squared his shoulders, straightened, made himself military man, like his redcoat blockade of a namesake. It did little to ease the lump in his throat; the loathsome, equal bother further down, the cruelty of wanting after death. Victor breathed out his smoke, and said:

“I’m sorry to say the novelty of your grief is not likely to wear off, if you love your wife as much as I love mine.”

“I do”, Alexander said.

And it was true. Victor loved the great Nina whose name still blew across Town like a hurricane years thereafter. Victor spoke of her in present tense and every mirror in the house listened. And thus Alexander loved the great-also Katerina whose dark eyes, opium-liquefied, had until the end loved him back. Alexander would like to encase her in the museal beauty of the present verb too, if he could— if time and its inevitable erosion would let him, be it at the cost of those last scraps of youth, to that last roundness of cheek the plague and its martial law had finally stripped from him.

“You will learn”, the clockmaker said, “that strange geography of loss-and-want.”

He smoked so that the gold filter of his cigarette nestled between his lips, like a gilded invitation to a secret. The governor’s head spun on, what does it taste like (the river, the river). His wedding ring, too, shimmered; he saw behind his eyelids a vial of morphine, his wife’s stained lips rouge with guilt— Victor’s wife’s lips, Victor’s lips— then again that revolting urge, that damp longing at the tip of his tongue, what to do with it?

The cigarette crashed headfirst down the ashtray.

(You take it upstairs.)

*

The GOVERNOR. — You’ve killed her.

The EXECUTIONER said nothing. She seemed to smile between his thumb and forefinger as glass caught the light. He wanted nothing but to smash her frail vessel under his heel. Outside the wind picked up speed, rattled him to the marrow.

The GOVERNOR. (looking out the window) — She used to like the sound of it. When we first married, she used to— she was not scared of the Mistresses, then.

The EXECUTIONER. (wistful) — Oh she was not scared of anything.

The GOVERNOR. — No.

She had an odd voice, the EXECUTIONER. Not really there but a little metallic as if talking from the other end of a pipe. A children’s telephone. The GOVERNOR had no children.

The EXECUTIONER. — Remember what her wrist smelled like.

The GOVERNOR. — Yes. (he shot his enemy an angry look) No. Stop talking.

The EXECUTIONER. — You do the talking. I am not really there.

Soon there would be rain. It would be like the kingdom of his boyhood thirty years ago. He would run off and cry on her gravestone with the sky. He caught himself in the mirror. A white ghost in purple dressing gown, a few moles down his chest. He caught himself staring at the mirror-hand which held the EXECUTIONER.

The GOVERNOR. — Right, then. Away with you.

Soon there would be rain.

The GOVERNOR flushed the EXECUTIONER down the drain.

*

Men’s bodyparts are a nervous sort of thing.

It hadn’t occurred to the governor before. His own body he took for granted— other men’s bodies he took not at all into consideration, only the certainty of clothing and what it might say of whoever wore it. The silent bob of Victor’s throat struck him first after he’d abandoned his jacket, his waistcoat and tie, after he’d loosened one or two buttons of his shirt. That pale marble throat statuesque in nature, almost, almost white as Katerina’s own, but masculine, unsettling. Alexander could not bear to look. With some sort of two-sided relief he accepted the kiss offered, not without thinking (I should not).

Victor proved nearly timid. His mouth had the worn-out taste of cigarette smoke; his mouth like a cave beckoned him and he answered. His pulse was halfway down his body, creeping fast towards shame yet to come. He wished he’d smoked, too. The clockmaker was nice, the clockmaker was most of all a gentleman.

“Please”, Victor said, “do make yourself comfortable.”

He took his shirt off. The light played parlour tricks with his bones. He had fine bones all over, not only his face— something mathematical and pure about the sketch of his ribs under pale white skin marbled with spiderveins. Something Alexander liked, and wished to like some more. Beautiful was not a word for men, but then he’d never seen Victor Kain’s bare body, and so could not have known. He was not an imposing man, no, rather mind-over-matter, thin muscles on a leash, a bit of a foxhound about him; if only hunting dogs took well to marble. It was in a way like staring in a mirror. The governor himself, for all his speeches droning on about order and strength, was little more than a hollowed out paper-pusher, a son of bureaucracy, whose body even before the plague hadn’t been a military man’s. Still it was lean, and very pale, littered with moles. Not at all bad to look at if one had an eye for this sort of thing.

(Katerina had said once, you ought to eat more, as the meat sagged from her bones; in her lovely Mistress Morphine’s arms.)

(Katerina says once—)

“I’m very sorry about the chill”, Victor said as Alexander considered the darkmouth of the fireplace.

“Not at all.” He took off his jacket, then, felt suddenly underdressed. He’d not donned a waistcoat, nothing but his best shirt and ubiquitous scarf. Braces did their best to keep his trousers up. He’d lost weight, despite her admonishments. “In truth I feel rather feverish.”

At that the other man’s eyebrow shot up, not quite in warning nor alarm but something skirting the line between.

“Nothing to worry about”, he added.

The thought of illness now terrified him. The thought of baring his chest, his throat, to another man also terrified him, but less so. His fingers strung up with nerves picked the knot of his scarf. Marked a pause at his collar, whereupon Victor’s greenlit eyes traced the cut of his jaw. Behind him there was that window, overlooking the garden. Still shut but not curtained. Alexander could decipher the intricate shape of a naked tree, thinking, why not, stripping further to partake too in this nakedness. I’m very sorry about the chill, Victor said earlier. He felt it now. It hugged the marrow of his bones.

He was terrified, and no doubt looked the part, for Victor seized his hand; ran a calloused clockmaker’s thumb up and down the ridge of his knuckles. Only Alexander’s eyes glued to his mouth, his thin lips, barely parted around a warm breath— 

“If you would rather leave— I would not keep you.”

But no, it came out wrong. Alexander said,

“Please—”

Victor sat at the edge of his bed, a little shy and half-dressed. Alexander did not meet his eyes.

He tried, wished to say, keep your shoes on. Unlikely hoping for that bit of earth, that sample of Katerina’s bed of loam, to sit on polished leather still. This would be like letting her see, and therefore not entirely dishonest. She’d cheated on him in the arms of morphia and he’d said nothing, had had no wish for punishment; only for her to recall herself and her love for him, never mind the infertile abyss of her belly. She would not chastise him for lying with another man, not now (he was not quite sure). A bit of Victor’s warmth had touched him at dinner. Love affairs have begun over less. He slipped a hand in a trouser pocket, angling for nonchalance, failing, if only to bait a smile.

“Keep your shoes on”, he said.

and not a speck of dirt on polished black.

*

An unseen bird chirped nearby. The CLOCKMAKER’s jaw made its nest into the GOVERNOR’s neck. He mouthed something there.

The GOVERNOR. — I can’t hear you.

The CLOCKMAKER. (shifting) — I said: past tense does not suit you.

The GOVERNOR. — Does it anyone? My life is behind me, and I only believe in linear time.

The CLOCKMAKER. — Well, I do not.

Silence. The GOVERNOR’s acute awareness of his nudity disturbed him. Whose body was this, chemically altered by the colours of a bite? The CLOCKMAKER’s hand was upon his chest. He laid his own over it.

The GOVERNOR. — I’m rather afraid of future tense, now. Of present, too.

The GOVERNOR nodded to their hands interlaced.

The CLOCKMAKER. — Never mind that. It can be past already if you want. (smiling brought out the absinthe in his eyes) But do try your hand at it. Something inconsequential. (he waved at the window with a few fingers and a cigarette) Listen to that bird outside.

The GOVERNOR. (flushing, a little) — Well, alright. How is this?

An unseen bird chirps nearby.

*

There are few things a man can earn that equal the knowledge of another man’s body.

Alexander’s shirt hangs open over the pale white of his chest, splattered with the cruel, curious bloodred bloom left behind by another man’s mouth (teeth and tongue; flavourful clove cigarettes on his skin). It hurts the way spice does when it tastes right. In his mouth the memory of bitten down skin, in his mouth the memory of (but those are not things one admits to). Beyond the windowpane there’s nothing now but naked night. A month ago the room would have bathed in the polyhedron’s glow; they’d have seen each other without need of a lamp; climbed over each other and not wanted for a map. Nothing, now. At last the dark takes itself back.

And Victor, sprawled there half-dressed in his once martial-marital bed, with a black cigarette hanging from his lips; Victor whose hands (whose mouth and more besides) have been upon him, have coaxed from him things he’s only ever given his wife and the sacrality of their bedchamber vows. He sits up, reaching out for a dressing gown, loose and well-worn and at home over the foxhound physicality of him. He smiles. Smoke pours out the corner of his lips.

“It’s not so bad, is it.”

The governor’s nails find the meat of his palm still damp. His heart grows wide as the muzzle of a shotgun.

“I suppose not. No.”

The cigarette crushed, again, then the patient approach— the rustle of a dressing gown in the dim bedroom light. It’s odd this companionship, but then it feels good and their wives don’t mind. Victor’s blunt fingernails dig into his back and so Alexander receives it, half-moon pleasure, half-moon sweat. His head lolls on the clockmaker’s shoulder, the silken certainty of it, and his blue eyes open, like a ripe fruit. That overflowing scent of present tense loosens his limbs. He falls further into the other man’s arms, thinking,

this is a stranger’s body—

this is a dead woman’s body—

this is my body, too.