Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

It wasn’t to be tender then, I saw. He chose that moment to sit up and made to kiss me. I pushed him back down and held his arms in place until we were done. The kissing I could not bear.

The kissing would be worse than the ice.

Afterward, when he was done, he threw back his blankets and swore. Eh. I’ve ruined you, have I? he said, for there was blood on him and on me. He went to his basin and washed himself before telling me to do the same.

Men always said it that way— I’ve ruined you. I couldn’t explain, but, no, I did not feel ruined. I wasn’t sure what I felt at first, besides being shocked by the blood — I felt like I’d slain something else, though the blood was mine.

He let me stay the night in his bed, which was warmer than the room off the kitchen. It was a strange vigil, for he snored so loudly I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I felt my body warm.

I could feel how easy it would be to stay, and it was almost tempting, for being easy. I, with only ash for my trousseau, the new girl for the widower. I think he felt this also. But that was not what I wanted. It wasn’t why I’d come all this way.

What I felt, by morning, was how it was as if I were someone new. Or, perhaps, more: There was someone I had become, and she had made this decision by way of introduction.

You should leave, this new girl I was said to me. Before he wakes.

I slunk from the bed and stood again in the cold. As I dressed myself in that dim kitchen light, I felt the opposite of ruined. I felt strong again, ready to try to cross the ocean again.

I was sore, that was all. And so this felt like a triumph over death, as if I had been dealt a murderous blow and lived.

§

There was still one member of my family left to bury.

I paused on the hill above his farm, having found graves much like the ones my mother and I had made, though these were made with stones well carved.

He was like me, then, also the last of his family left among the living.

The name I took was from a smaller stone, farther back, older. She had died three years before these new ones, at the age of three. Her last name was different from the rest. She could have been a sister’s child. I said it aloud in the air, a whisper.

Lilliet Berne.

I suppose I knew even then what Verdi later told me about the great tragedies, those great families who’d caught the attention of the gods for their hubris and were struck down, known to us now as the subjects of operas. My family was not, to my knowledge, a great family, but they were dearly good — any greatness they had was in their goodness. But I sensed even then, before I knew the word, the hubris was mine. And the gods did not kill for hubris — for hubris, they let you live long enough to learn.

It is only to be for a little while , I told myself, for however long it would take me to get to my aunt. I would go back to my old name then. This one would keep me safe as I traveled. In its disguise, I could hide all my sins, like this one.

Instead, it would be this name I would return to, the name I chose that day, this name that would stay with me when almost nothing else had.

My hubris was hidden from me, as it always is, until it is too late, and it began with this stolen name. I believed I could hide from my Maker and start again. My hubris, then, something I’ve not yet been punished for, the real punishment still ahead of me.

§

There is a novel all French schoolchildren are made to read in the new Republic of France, written to outline the nation’s history. I would read it to teach myself both the language and country while at the Conservatoire in Paris. Le Tour de la France par Deux Enfants is the story of two orphaned brothers who travel the entire country in search of their uncle, helped at each turn by the good people of France. When the brothers leave home there is a description of the sky. Pas une étoile au ciel. In my clumsy translations I mistook étoile for toil, star for work. By a work of the sky, I thought it meant. By a work of the sky, the orphans left. Not a star in the sky, as the orphans left, was what the phrase meant in that sentence. But still I thought, This I understand. Orphans made for stories.

If I was making for you a book for children, the page opposite this one would be an engraving of the girl as she stands on a street in New York, with a girl’s map of the world, in which she imagines she can go back the distance her mother traveled from Lucerne in Switzerland to Minnesota and find her kin there. A dotted line would connect the two places, drawn by the author. For the final X, the cemetery near the farm in Brooklyn, where she takes the name of a girl, Lilliet Berne, 1860–1863, dead at age three, which she gives the next time anyone asks it of her.

With a dead girl’s name, Death would go looking somewhere else, I was sure. No funeral, no prayers said for her, no stone to mark her rest except this name, the heaviness of it on my tongue each time I say the name all these years, until now, when it has nearly worn away.

Her book closes there and this other one opens. In the first picture, she is standing on the back of a horse, waving to a crowd.

I will try and name, by the end of this, the country this tells the story of.

I WENT BACK TO the river and wandered the shipyards.

I had the memory of a story from my father of stowaways, people who managed to hide on a boat and cross the sea, but I couldn’t figure out how one went about it. The boats all seemed forbidding, silent, impermeable, and the looks the men gave me warned me to stay back. These men were not the kind I’d known before. The way they looked at me, like I was a lamb. I would soon know how lucky I’d been with my widower.

I found a tent pitched near the water, and it glowed and shook with the noise of singing and horses, gunfire and laughter. As I approached, a flap opened, and a dejected-looking woman stumped out.

It was the strangest thing I’d found, perhaps, in all of my short life, this noisy tent near the water, and I waited to see how I could go in. I walked closer. It did not seem open to the public — there was no audience.

The day grew dark. I watched as more and more women left. I knew I would have to leave soon, to work, and yet I waited.

I noticed a man paying attention to me. He came and stood right in front of me finally, tried to press a piece of paper into my hand, saying something to me and gesturing at the tent door, but he hadn’t tried to introduce himself so I ignored him. And after my episode with the farmer, I feared strange men but also myself, a little.

Fine, he said finally, exasperated. Be that way if you must. If we can’t get Muhammad to the mountain, we will bring the mountain to Muhammad.

I remembered my mother would say this when I was stubborn. I looked down at the paper, where it lay on the ground, and read it dully.

Female Equestrienne Rider Needed — Audition Today!

Skill with Firearms and Singing Important! Get Ready to See Paris!

He went into the tent, to my surprise.

The flap flew open again, and this time standing there was a small group looking at me.

A light glowed high above the others, separated from them, and moved steadily toward me. As I watched, it twinkled, broke into limbs of a kind, so that it seemed for a brief moment a dancing figure of fire, something small and capable of lighting, say, a cigar. It danced, moving as if it could beckon me somewhere. Then I saw it was coming for me.

It was a tiny oil lamp, set high up into the curly wig of a strange, enormous, and terrifyingly beautiful woman. A few more lamps lit the back of her head, so that she was curtained in light. Thick red curls rose for several feet above her face. She was accompanied by a giant looking at me over the top of her hair, his face shadowed by the light and by what I first thought was another man, but was instead a woman dressed in pants walking with a soldier’s powerful stride. I looked away, thinking they’d be on their way, but then looked back when from behind them suddenly appeared the man who’d tried to force the paper into my hand. This one! he said. See? Am I right?