A STORM STRANDS ME in the old northern capital. For days and nights on end the snow flies thick and fast, and the wind howls, swirling the big flakes in dancing, blinding veils, piling up monumental drifts. Only the cries of a few indomitable sleigh men rise from the narrow tormented streets to the window of my chamber. The wind makes tatters of their foolhardy curses, the cracks of their whips, the complaints of their struggling ponies.
Then the weather clears, and the old capital is left clogged and muffled with white. Snow drapes the gilded onion domes and tiled spires like a form of ponderous arctic moss. The local populace comes out, laboring through the drifts between the slovenly wooden houses and the grand stone buildings. These splendid edifices boast imported fancies of ornamentation, of sun-drenched pastel plasterwork magnificent with scrolls and other such prodigies of adornment. Everywhere is fur-- voluminous fur hats, thick fur coats and collars, fur boots. The sleighs rock and bump through the scene, rudely making way. The sleigh men lay about defiantly with their whips and oaths. A stunning cold settles in. The smoke from chimneys piles up solid and immobile in the frozen air.
My hosts are minor nobility. Their great house is drafty, dating from the capital's earliest age of prosperity. But it's comfortable for all that, richly hung with carpets and tapestries, and the ware on its dining tables shows off much precious metal. My hosts are generous to a traveller, but they suffer the ills of their class, marooned off here in a snowy far corner of the world. They're smug and provincial, preoccupied with their own importance and politics. They scorn, but are eager for the latest of foreign fashions (only the latest!)-- which they assiduously imitate while they turn up their noses and sniff, and make superior faces. I pay off my keep in traveller's currency. That is, I divert my particular table in the dining hall with accounts of my days at the other side of the world, in the warmth of the tropics. The northern wind moans in the big tiled hearth chimney, and between the rows of raised goblets I talk of trade breezes, and palm trees, and the sweet milk of the hairy coconut... of seas blue and warm as the midsummer sky, of brown-skinned tribes who idle away their days dressed for Eden, in flowers and scraps of leaves.
Later, in the smoky common room, after a few hands of badly played cards, I hide a yawn and make sure to compliment my host on the singing of his two unmarried nieces. The pair of them beam and pant, all hefty pink cheeks and ornate braids beside the spinet of their music instructor. I even find a moment or two for my brand of commerce, involving some articles of dubious exotic provenance carried with me discreetly in my luggage.
It's all quite tedious and familiar, this traveller's sojourn, apart from the vast snows, and the imperious cold, and the peculiar, gleaming antiquity of the onion domes. But it happens I'm grateful for the storm and its delays. It brings me a romantic dalliance, which I pursue at first with amusement; and then, to my traveller's surprise, with genuine agitated passion.
On the first night of snow, I hurry along an outer gallery, on the way back to my room. It's a not-much-travelled course, a route I've never used before, but I'm concerned about the bodings of the weather, and want to gauge them firsthand. I see ahead a young woman under one of the massive ancient stone arches. Clad in silvery fur she is laughing at the swirling snowflakes, her hands out to catch them, her face thrust up. I approach slowly and look on, amused. I tremble under my several traveller's shawls from the cold. Suddenly this wintry bacchante spins around. She regards me, startled. I smile at her. All at once she laughs again, and spins back about, and resumes her enjoyments.
"So you like the snow," I declare, grinning, and quite charmed by the glimpse of her I've just had. She only laughs. I don't remember seeing her before, and the nature of her cone-topped hat, and the old-style shaggy verve of her coat, are ambiguous as to her status. She could be a friend of the household. She could still be one of the staff. I demand her name, but she won't respond. I watch the flakes whirling down around her. She collects a gloveful and merrily licks it. I laugh myself, shaking my head. "You strange northern folk!" I tease. This remark makes her merrier. Abruptly she turns, and thrusts the catch of snow toward me for a taste. I take the traveller's liberty and seize her wrist playfully, and tug to press in for a kiss. She pushes me off. "Now now--" she rebukes. She laughs in high spirits and pirouettes slowly away, face and hands up to the nonstop snow.
"I must go in," I announce, beguiled and a little perplexed. "Or I'll catch my death out here! But I can tell I won't be travelling in this weather," I go on. "Where and when can I see you again? In more comfortable surroundings," I add.
I pass the night on my heaped pillows, under the blankets and rugs, my dreams spiced by a curious girl in a conical hat ringed with fur-- a pale girl with lovely grey eyes, slanted in the northern manner and slightly weak, and a small laughing mouth, and round white pretty cheeks.
She meets me every violent night of the epic storm, but always in that outer gallery. The stealthy comforts of my room, or the secluded warmth of a back hallway I've employed a couple of times for amorous matters, she refuses. I learn to dress in proper furry fashion for our snowy assignations. No one ever surprises us as we loiter there conversing under a gutting taper, or wander up and down as the wind flails and lashes, while she recites to me stories of the old capital and its winters. She sings me songs that have been written through the years in their honor. Then she laughs, and she springs away and I watch her salute the turbulent flurries with joyous arms. When she turns to me, gleeful and spattered with flakes, I sweep her up in my bulky arms, and she lets me briefly taste her lips, lips so cold and tantalizing. But never anything more--this curious, bewitching acolyte of the north.
I in my turn offer up the lures of the tropics, but I have to say she seems indifferent about them, to my slightly offended amusement. "My rabbit," I call her, for her pretty plumpness in her silvery fur. "My snow rabbit," because of the rare whiteness of her cheeks. Sometimes she looks so pale I tease her that I fear how long she is for this world. I confess this with a mock catch in my voice, and a sigh, which provokes her laugh. But my mockery has a tender edge to it. I bring her rum, bottled in the Indies, to build up her color; but she dislikes the taste. I make a present of the dried husk of an orange, plucked oceans away in the equator's heat. I scratch my name across this dusky reliquary globe, with a pang at the gesture's evocations. She sniffs it for a moment. The one gift she takes to heart is a sprig of coral, wrenched from a South Seas floor, which resembles, she decides, a fossil of sprouted ice. I scheme up presents to sway a girl in love with the snows of winter, while my lusters as a guest grow dulled, my charts and calibrations sit neglected.
Then the tumultuous skies exhaust themselves. The old capital lies transfixed in its drifts. That night, when she appears, my friend seems strangely agitated, distracted. I've ceased to press her on where she comes from, how she manages to make her way here every time through such a turbulent universe. She`s not herself now. She barely acknowledges the new gift I uncover in my hand, as she stands staring out at the icy, hushed darkness. She ends our rendezvous early-- abruptly. All at once I turn into the truest of lovers: I fear the worst. My heart won't let me sleep, there in the piled disorder of my bed.
The next night, for the first time, she's late. When she appears she ignores my protests. She seems more agitated than before, shockingly pale in her silvery furs. Her eyes glitter. "Would you like to come with me tonight?" she exclaims suddenly, gripping my hand. My heart leaps. "Oh my dearest love--" I tell her wildly. I kiss her but then she pushes me away. "We should hurry," she insists.
We pass undetected out into the street. The snow no longer drains the heavens, but the wind has revived. It beleaguers the old city, it swirls blinding eddies in the air. "Shall I hail a sleigh?" I ask, descrying a few late ones still out prowling for revellers. "No, no, it's not far," she says hurriedly. She leads me plodding off, my hand in her grip. We bend low as the wind rakes over us. We turn laboriously from the main thoroughfare, and then down along a suddenly mean lesser route, with decrepit wooden hovels and then open wastes. I exclaim in protest, and after the snow grows deeper and the night blacker, I exclaim again. The wind hurls the snow in stinging billows. I begin to shiver and sweat in my coat. "Where are we?" I not so much ask as demand. We've halted. She releases my hand from her grasp. "We're here," she replies.
I peer about in confusion. I blink at her under the icy brim of my hat. "Here?" I repeat stupidly, seeing no grand buildings, no little houses, only wastes of snow, tormented by the wind. "My darling," she proclaims. I stare at her in horror... at the unearthly pallor of her plump flesh. She throws off her cone-shaped hat, exposing the turbulence of her hair. "My darling!" she cries, as her coat falls away. Bare arms reach toward me, to catch me to her. I gasp, and stagger back, transfixed as if in a terrifying dream. "Now I understand," I stammer, hearing my words twisted and shorn by the wind. "You're not a live thing-- you're a ghost! You are, aren't you--" I exclaim, shuddering in powerless horror. She advances on me, laughing in intimate glittery lasciviousness. Slowly I stagger back from her, spellbound as I slowly sink down into the numbing embrace of the snow drifts. I feel her hands reaching under my coat... her stooping mouth closing on mine. I taste the ice of her lips.
It's the curses of a sleigh driver that save me. A sleigh driver who's lost his way, and disrupts the very wind and cold with his fury. I struggle, and heave the ghost away from me, a white figure subsiding back clawing into the tormented whiteness. I flounder off toward the shouts and whipcracks, screaming for my life.
My hosts tend me solicitously. Nobly even. They move me to a more lavish bedroom, and call in their personal physician, aided by the two unmarried nieces, to supervise my recuperation. This consists chiefly in keeping me warm, if not hot; of surrounding me in a furry cocoon and lacing my medicinal broth with my own rum. The hospitable solicitude touches me deeply, as does the discretion in not inquiring how I came to be in such a place, in such a state, in the middle of such a night. It crosses my mind that as natives of the old city and its winters, my hosts might in fact possess some wisdom about a jaded traveller's unexpected gullibilities. Especially those of the heart....
When I take my leave, I present them all with some of the rarer souvenirs and relics from my tropical cache. The best of course I still keep with me, packed away religiously in my luggage, with me in fact right under the furs and shawls and carpets of my sleigh. I wave a gloved farewell. The unmarried nieces weep, the foul-tongued driver brandishes his great whip to get us off. And I depart the old Northern capital, skimming over its imperious snows past the onion domes and the tiled spires, the oddly pastel splendors, and then turning, to set my course for the truer embraces of the south.
from Haunted Traveller: An Imaginary Memoir (Arcade Publ. 1999)
Photos by BY
