Jesse Ball: The Village on Horseback: Prose and Verse, 2003-2008

He took my statuette. I saw him. He led himself a pretty path right up the middle of the street, and stopping at my door, he knocked. Seeing no one was home (for I was hiding beneath my bed), he entered and passed through all the various rooms, coming finally into my own, where upon a small night table the statuette was placed. Oh statuette of a tearful god! How long I had kept you close beside me while I slept. But he put you under his coat, with one quick movement of a slimfingered hand, and off he went.

I thought for a moment, as he stood above me, of coming out from beneath the bed and making my presence known. But it seemed the wrong thing to do. Questions would be raised. What, for instance, was I doing beneath my bed on that miserable and immemorial day?

Inside the hospital there were several villages. I lived in the first, in a small cottage with my sister. We were not allowed to go to the other villages, nor were they allowed to come to us. But news was always circulating regarding the escape of a villager from one place or another.

How long had we lived in the village? This was a question I posed constantly to my sister. We would sit, glazed eyes mimicking glazed eyes, and mouth answers which we dared not speak. When we had first arrived, my sister insisted on saying we had lived there always. Now that we had lived there always, she insisted on saying that we had just arrived. Her skinny arms hung off the sides of her stiff wooden chair, which she kept trying to rock as if it was a rocker. The artist who had drawn her face must have watered down his ink fearing he would run out, for her features were indistinct — almost absent. She would only wear the one color, a pale yellow, and she thought herself a great beauty, though she had never told anyone this. She was always tempting me, slipping into my bed halfway through the night, or groveling at my feet.

The rest of the villagers hated us. They felt we were newcomers and should be hurt at every opportunity. But we had been there longer than anyone, and refused to allow their tawdry claims. After I put a fellow through a plate-glass window, they left me alone. But my sister was too delicate. I’d find her, huddled somewhere, bruised and crying, her yellow clothes torn. Once, I saw her running naked along the riverbank, chased by four old women. Together we drowned them, and used their clothing for scarecrows in our yard.

Always of an evening, my sister would be tapping at the glass with her fingertips, as I sat composing elaborate logical proofs that might one day prove there were no other villages but ours. I suppose she meant the same by her tapping as I did by my proving. Once, she turned to me, face filthy from contact with our matted floor, and said, “Of all the villages, ours is the most easily understood. Each successive village is less believable. Each is worse. Even so much as a thought arrived at bravely can mean your expulsion from one place, your inclusion in another.”

“But what,” I asked her, “did we think of, to bring us here?”

“Brother of mine, we looked in every cabinet and under every tree for the way back to an earlier village. But with each passage we fall faster.”

With that she removed her dress and began to rub herself against the curtain. Then I realized, the tapping was continuing, but she was not tapping. Looking up, first at this window, then at that, I saw that behind every pane of glass there was an uglier and more spiteful face, beneath which gripped and ungripped, tapped and tapped and tapped again, the many fingers of a great and angry crowd.

And to think, of all the great and wonderful things that could have happened. . that your name should have been mentioned, and by whom and to whom! Now you are sorry for all the terrible things you did when the world seemed an unkind place. Now you recoil from your darker period, that time which preceded this glorious day. No more shall you sit alone in windswept cafes as rain broods over dim cities. No more shall you stand for hours outside your own terrible door, outside the doors of others. No, no. . you have been mentioned, spoken well of before company, and it is plain to all — your life has acquired the glorious sheen of reputation before which all else must inevitably fall.

Day draws to a close. One man passes another in the street, and as they pass, each looks the other in the face, as if to say, “You may indeed be the center of all this, but sir, it is just as likely I should be.” Nearby, a painfully soft little bird has alighted on a branch, watching the comings and goings with great interest. And you and I, we arrive later to that moment, and thus cannot be noticed, nor gainsaid, as we make our way along the thin streets of that decades-lost foundry town. Equally, we can be certain both men were quite wrong.

It came to be known that one of the miners in that filthy godforsaken camp had found an emerald as big as a man’s fist. The jealousy of the other miners. The pleasure of the miner’s wife. The worry of the miner himself over the possible theft of his newfound prize.

And how he woke the next day and the day after from dreams in which it had not been he who found the gem, but another. And how nothing could be done to comfort him but that the emerald should be brought out from its hiding place, and that he should be let to touch it and hold it and wake fully from his dream with all the glory of this true plane upon his dirty lap.

During the golden age of punishment, peasants often dreamed secretly of a brutal public death that might earn some measure of fame. The greatest of the executioners, Claus Arken Valta, was much in demand, and would tour the country with a coach and horses, sleeping each night in a golden pavilion. He wore a moustache, though it was not the style, and always bathed his hands in a bowl of milk that would be set beside his axe, or laid nearby the gibbet. He had a fine voice and could carry many a pleasant tune. Often he would sing as he went about hitching up horses for the drawing and quartering of a felon or wastrel. He took pity on everyone, and would cry if he saw a bird with a broken wing, or a three-legged dog stumbling through the crowd. At such times he was inconsolable, and would refuse to go on with the execution. Afterwards, always, he repented and would slaughter as many as nine or ten deserving souls in as many minutes. His penchant for public speaking was exceeded only by his memory for faces. “Why, haven’t I seen you before?” he would remark, as he tightened a noose around some unfortunate’s neck. Without waiting for an answer, he’d loose the trap and watch the bagheaded wretch drop to a wrenching death. He rarely let the dying have their last words before the crowd, instead gagging them, and inventing speeches which they might have said, the which he would recite to the crowd from memory. In this he was no different from other great men. What they imagine is always more palpable, more true, than anything we might wish or wish to say.

AND if on the banks of that river to which you once did go, there arose a fair city, of which you alone could know — how sad that this knowledge has eluded you, how sad that you have lived so long from home, spendthrift of your life until even this has abandoned you, even this hidden city, never seen, has faded out of possibility into such a realm as the one in which we now speak.