I was living in Cali, Colombia; my first novel was still no more than a collection of voices; my movements were hampered by the violence surrounding the city and the epidemic of kidnapping-for-ransom that made travel a high-anxiety affair. I suppose all sorts of things were high-anxiety then: my career, my marriage, my day-to-day life in that beautiful, mad boomtown.
Then one night I dreamed “Nocturne,” or at least its climax: a shockingly detailed and specific dream that left me astonished and afraid. For the next month my life grew simpler. I had to tell this story. It would not relax its jaws until I did so.
I wrote obsessively, and revised with patience, and then (alas) slipped “Nocturne” into a box. I never sought to publish the story. What was I waiting for? Perhaps a signal as clear and certain as the original impulse to write the tale? If so, that’s what Shawn has provided, and for this I’m very grateful.
— Robert V.S. Redick
NOCTURNE
Robert V.S. Redick
There are windows we struggle not to look through, scattered among all the houses of our lives. Here is one: a boy slick with chilly sweat, skeleton-thin, tube-trussed, mouth opening and closing like a fish on a pier. His eyes, somewhere unfathomable; his room filling with flowers.
Perhaps he sees the great aunt at his bedside, frail and silent, fighting to keep the blanket about his chin. Perhaps he stares into delirium, into the dream from which he cannot wake: a fat man has hooked him through the gills, and laughing cheerful murder, reels in his prize. The man’s face changes minute by minute; his laugh and his absolute power do not.
You are forgiven if you doubt the next hypothesis; the author himself has been drawn to it as reluctantly as the boy to that unattractive brute. Perhaps minds cleansed of the film of rationality do sometimes sharpen. Perhaps that’s all it takes.
Consider a window in a deep stone wall. Gaping, glassless, big shutters banging in a storm. Lean inside. A cavernous room, rows of steeple-backed chairs, moonlight on a lustrous floor. Moist tongue of wind uncoiling room to room, odor of bloodwood and marsh myrtle, blackness, a threshing of waves. And kneeling before a lifeless hearth, a young man, shivering: Anton Cuza, alone in Tchavodari Palace.
He is in command of the situation: for indeed, despite the squalor of the moment, he also commands the palace. A very mixed blessing, he thinks. Christ, but my hand is cold!
The hand, his left, fishes for wood chips in an iron urn. The urn is slippery with kerosene, painfully cold. His mind swims with the vapors, until a sharp pain shocks him awake. The fuel has touched a scratch on his wrist. He spits and curses, but in fact he is almost grateful for the pain, its clarity and warmth.
He thinks: I must get warm like that, now, all over. Oh damn this wood! For the logs are green, and shrug off flame with sharp cat hisses. Anton is slight, shallow-chested, and mortally afraid of the Spanish influenza, its death march through the Romanian lowlands.
The Great War is over; much of Europe is electrified. Women in Bucharest cook on iron coils that blaze red at the twist of a dial; even the Turk dangles a bulb from his ceiling. But no cables have yet braved the Danube marshes, and the truck that brings gas and food to the palace has gone south with the Magar and his army, prowling the Bulgarian frontier.
“That damn fool Ionel!” their commander bellows at each return, failing to find his palace bathed in a twentieth-century glow. “Does he want the Second Division maintained like a levy of serfs forever?” These are theatrical rages, destined to be gossiped up and down the coast, reminding everyone that the Magar may speak with contempt, if he pleases, of the Unifier of Greater Romania. Some say he and Bratianu are friends; others that they are bitter rivals, that the Magar could take Bucharest if he chose. Whatever the truth, last year his tantrums won him a telegraph wire, threaded apologetically over the swamps from some distant terminal in the Carpathian ice. No one but Anton ever uses it. Forever left behind (consumptives are easy prey for Bulgarians), he taps a midday report to the capital, boils wheat grist with ham, paces to keep warm.
The logs wheeze, exude a yellowish steam. He wrings his hand at them; drops of kerosene cry pff!—accomplishing nothing. Disgusted, he pulls together the last wood chips and stuffs them into the iron cradle of his torch. With his clean right hand he strikes a match. The torch bursts to life, a gag bouquet from a magician’s sleeve.
“Hooray!”
Anton does not mind shouting, even at foolishness. He is at home.
Somewhere above, wind scours the chimney. Moonlit ash rises like some otherworld snow; his torch trembles. Anton cradles it to his chest.
“A storm tonight. Just our luck.” He presses the torch into a wall mount. “Not to worry. We’ll fix things, won’t we?”