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

The works included in this volume were written between 2003 and 2008. During that time I lived (in 2003–2004) in a series of Manhattan and Brooklyn apartments, (in 2004–2006) in various parts of France, (in 2006–2007) in Iceland, and lastly, (in 2007–2008) in Chicago. Matching the places up to the works is most likely a ridiculous proposition, but I encourage those who choose to do it.

It has always been my ambition to produce an omnibus, a small, tidy book of depths that would fit in a pocket, yet occupy a traveler for several train rides. When I saw that these various books of mine could come together into such an omnibus, I was delighted, and went forward with the idea immediately. What you have before you is the result of that thought.

Jesse Ball, 6 April 2011

They were given the choice of becoming kings or kings’ messengers. As is the way with children, they all wanted to be messengers. That is why there are only messengers, racing through the world and, since there are no kings, calling out to each other the messages that have now become meaningless.

F. Kafka

2 Dec. 1917

If you were to go walking on a certain day, intent on winning the heart of a certain girl, you might invite her to walk with you along the river road. She might consent, and climbing out her tiny window, she would leap down into your arms, and together you would go. But never would you imagine that there by the river, a cast of actors is awaiting the rise of an enormous curtain which no one can see, and that they are waiting for none other than the two last actors, who straggle, many hours away, along some country road. By chance, they resemble you and your love exactly. By chance, you arrive just as the curtain rises.

A palace so large that the kingdom itself is but a small part of it. Servants sent to some far corridor are given burials, for we know well that they will not return. Communication is a matter of whispers, which travel like cursed fact. And our hearts are maintained through windows, where courtesans’ soft skin and long lashes are arguments that uphold this life. Everyone has their orders, which must be carried out. These are kept in tiny cylinders hung like pendants from our servile necks. Since we cannot read, we must ask others to read these instructions for us. And often these interpretations change. All in all it is a good way to be, or so I have heard, as beyond the walls of this enthronement there are great doubts like standing trees, and each outlives a man, and each is named for some task we will never be allowed.

You have been betrayed. Yes, it’s true. It’s early September in the city where you live and someone has spoken to the authorities. Even now, the chief of police is sitting behind an enormous mahogany desk in the vast ministry, waiting for you to be brought in. All across the city, squads of officers are preparing themselves. Likenesses of your face are being handed out.

It’s true you meant no harm. Also true: there’s no way anyone could know. And yet the real truth remains: someone has given you up. Soon there will be boot-steps on the stairs, a loud knocking at the door. Soon you will be spoken to repeatedly in a loud voice, tied and carried under a policeman’s arm like a parcel to a waiting car.

If only you could make it into the next apartment and beg your life of the widow who lives there, she would hide you, and then how happily and well you would live. But even to stir from your chair is impossible. For the book of your acquaintance has closed on this hundred-hundredth day, and limp clouds are straggling like children across the windowpane. There is no hope. You have been betrayed and the wild exodus of fate from the fated is never-begun and alwaysfinished. The sounds from the street are maddeningly normal. Also, it’s hotter than you like, and you are wearing far too many clothes. As if a bird told a bird a bird’s judgment, the day itself has announced its coming in yellow colors and vague shapes just beyond the edge of sight.

A green sea, huge and fugitive, sits at anchor beneath the roof of your small home. Word of this is general in the village, and neighbors pass by again and again hoping for a glimpse. But your bemusement is like a wellworn knife and you caress it slowly, back turned, as a tiny smile plays against the broom closet, pretending it is a broom, though in truth you know, it is no such weighty thing.

In among the foregone on the narrow road that circles and recircles the city of your tongue, the highwayman has gone walking with his next victim. He is handsome and dashing; she is young and petulant. They stop beneath a tree and her long hair falls to the ground. She says, “I am in love with a man, but I fear he is a bandit.” To this the man says nothing, but stands, quietly stroking her hair. A cold breeze rises and he holds her close. Soon in the distance he will see evening riding and know that it is time.

By the harbor, a great work has begun. We of this town already think of ourselves differently. Travelers have started to arrive. They say they left their homeland years ago at the news, and have been on the roads for generations. When it is finished this statue will be a portrait-signature upon an uncertain earth, a letter we few shall leave for the crowded centuries that wait inside the hills. And to think, I know the headman, who used to be the town’s mason. I spoke to him, saw him pass in the street just days ago. He was head-to-toe in flat working gray, and could be missed but for the fiendish cast of his eyes. And who but a mad man could make such a statue? A statue of the town in which we live, exact and equal to an inch, yet formed from the hardest stone and rising up out of the water. Already it looms above the town on great marble stilts. I saw myself walking there, or standing as it were, as I once walked, beside a pond with lilies. He saw me, he must have seen me walking there, where I often walked, by that pond where my daughter was drowned. And yes, in the waters of the marble pond, I see he has etched some impression of a face looking up from the depths. He has peopled the houses with scenes from our lives. He has stretched the avenues, and laid them with old parades and angry, roused evenings. In the center square, on which work has just begun, a man is being lynched. But best of all, at the harbor mouth of the statue town, which will come last, he tells me will be built a marble sea in which we all shall be buried, one by one, as years and hours take our hands.

It is rumored to exist in every city, in every human settlement. One has heard, or one knows of someone who has heard, in the crowded street, in the drawingrooms of wealth, in the merchants’ salons and the workmen’s meeting houses, the timbre of an agent of the Bank, facilitating advance, supplying the necessary collateral, acceding to wishes, and accounting, irrefutably, for all the gaps in our human exchanges. Where do such agents come from? How may they be known? They seem never to be seen, but would be recognized at once. Often they can be made out, barely, across a room, in closeted discussion with some luminary. One presses closer, and the bank agent is gone. Furthermore, no one saw him go.