Mother’s Land * She knocked. She waited. For the way that she felt, she might just have passed an ancient and cynical cleaning lady in the vestibule below, or on the ascending stairway, sweeping, keeping an eye out for problematic strangers, dubious women, truant children. She was alone on the landing. She’d been alone as she climbed four floors, passing closed doors, the shrill, muffled heat of an argument, silence, silence, and the yip-yip-yap of an inconsequential dog. She knocked again, more firmly now. And waited… But now, there were footsteps on the other side of the dark, wooden door, and a muffled demand in the one voice that told her how things were likely to go today. She’d brought a book—an ancient, hard-back journal—with her, and she clutched it to her chest. It was a pitiful shield: fit—at best—for smashing a fly. It was a pitiful shield against the impatient voice that was not Cassándrö’s welcome and welcoming baritone. It was another masculine voice, heavy with brutal ennui lodged in its depths. “It’s Özminá,” she said, still hugging the tome to her chest. “I need Cassandrö; you too…if you can help.” It was hot. The air was immobile. And after the eternity of a heart-beat or two, she heard the click of a lock, another lock, and the metallic slide of a simple bolt. The door opened, just more than a crack, and Iizmáel stood there, wary; and—after whatever calculations ran through his mind—the door opened wider, squeaking on its hinges as Iizmáel stepped aside to let her in. She held her breath as she crossed the threshold. “I’m sorry,” she said. “If I’m disturbing you.” “It’s still early.” “I know. I’m sorry.” It was her one day off, and she couldn’t stay at home. Alone. “You haven’t slept. Have you?” He closed the door behind her. “No.” “You have a choice, then,” Iizmáel said. “Coffee. Maté. Or brandy.” She recognized his overture: the gesture of a truce, but she remained tense, clutching the book to her chest and taking shallow, careful breaths. She shrugged. “Whatever you’re having,” she said. “Maté,” he told her, nodding toward the sunlight wafting in from the open balcony doors. A breeze stirred the sheer, white curtains and the sword-shaped leaves of some balcony-dwelling plant she couldn’t name. Something poisonous, she thought, something at home in a jungle full of vipers, or at least a witch’s garden. “Sit,” Iizmáel said. “I’ll bring bread.” He shrugged. “I’ll warm some cheese.” It took some effort to step across gleaming, polished hardwood, and the expense of an antique rug, like wine, moss, and ivory for its rich pattern of colors; but she made steady steps to the moss-green sofa. She sat. A toy-mouse stared at her from between the cushions. Cassándrö had always been fond of cats, had always lived with at least two of them. He’s arranged himself with one! Özminá thought, as Iizmáel took barefoot steps into the kitchen. He was tall. Lean. He moved with the arrogance of a dancer and the grace of some wild predator. His hair, a black cascade, touched his naked shoulders. He wore nothing more than under-briefs, and his immodesty—Özminá thought—announced the limits of his gesture at a truce. There was movement, just beyond the periphery of her view. Voices. And after a moment, Cassándrö ambled into the parlor, a gray cat shadowing him and brushing itself against his ankles, tail raised. He smiled. He’d dressed, and Özminá saw an old, familiar modesty there. He wore a gentleman’s sarong and vest, both linen in the color of an egg-shell, and a sharp contrast to his skin, like mahogany. “You’re out early,” he said, settling on the sofa beside her. “I couldn’t sleep. “ “How are you taking it?” “I can convince myself that she’s still there, if only I listen. I spent the whole night listening and a dozen times or more, I could have sworn I heard her cough…Her room still smells like medicine. Her closet is empty.” “It takes time,” Cassándrö said, clasping her hand. “Give yourself the time you need. Get away from it for a while. Take a trip.” “Where?” A shrug. “Anywhere.” There was accidental irony in Cassándrö’s suggestion, but he couldn’t have known that, even as his eyes rested—after a moment—on the book she’d placed on the low, book-clogged table before the sofa. She needed to take a trip: into something written. “Yours?” he asked. “Hers,” Özminá said. “I need you to look at it. I need you to tell me if it says anything.” * They’d moved, after a while, into the kitchen. They drank astringent, steaming mate. “You can’t see this at all,” Cassándrö had said. “Can you?” “They’re not blank pages,” she’d said. “I know that much.” But it was Iizmáel who made the most sense of it, Iizmáel who read the blank pages: at first with idle curiosity, and then—after a while—with something adoring and reverential, something spooky in the way in which it resembled worship. It was Iizmáel, who by the indifferent demands of Cassándrö’s schedule, became Özminá’s guide into the depths of the book. “You’ll be here when I get back?” Cassándrö asked. “I don’t know,” Özminá said, certain only of the fact that she didn’t want to be alone with Iizmáel. “Come to the lab if you need to; I’ll be there until one bell past vespers.” He left after the common rituals he shared with Iizmáel, and Özminá didn’t watch as Iizmáel rose from the table and disappeared with Cassándrö into another room—the bedroom, she guessed, seeing it all in her mind’s eye: seeing the way they talked, oh-so-casually and with harrowing intimacy; and she saw how they touched each other, for a while, how Iizmáel helped Cassándrö dress; she saw how they kissed, and how they walked to the door, maybe pausing to stroke one or another of the fat, gray cats. She saw it clearly, not looking, and when she heard the front door closing, she tried not to see Iizmáel stepping back into the kitchen, caramel-skin faintly blushed, and his obsidian hair pulled back into a ponytail, now. She tried not to see him smile—oh, so faintly!—as he settled back into place at the table. There was a long moment of silence. He touched the book—now closed—with the crest of one finger, and after a while longer, he skewered Özminá with an inquisitive, carnivorous gaze. “Your mother,” he said. “Was a durwan.” It might have been a question; it might have been a statement of fact. An assertion as bland as the announcement that there might be silverfish in the cellar. “I don’t know,” Özminá said. “She never said.” “The war,” Iizmáel said. “My father always mentions it, but only in the way that he never talks about it. It’s hard, I guess…for them.” “Hard for him,” Özminá snapped. “My mother is dead.” “Before the war, we spoke four languages.” “I know.” “Nowadays, we’re lucky if we remember two of them. But they’re our languages…all four of them. Most durwans come from the south, where they speak an archaic form of Sfumato. Your mother was from the south.” A shrug. “I never heard her speak it.” “Never?” “It was too much like the war, I suppose.” “You never learned it?” “Who speaks it here?” “I do. Other’s too…not like before…not like—” he paused, waved the thought away, and took a sip of cooling maté. There was politics in the murky depths of that language, in the archaic form of it. “And what would we say in Sfumato? Would we sit, brazenly, in cafes, deciding which theaters to bomb?” The bile in her voice echoed what she knew, and what she knew drew a line of goose-bumps down her spine; Iizmáel had touched something. Not with those long, caramel fingers; no…he’d touched with something else. He touched that thing at home on theblank pages of an uncomfortable heirloom. Though he sat across the table from her, with that journal, and the ruins of breakfast between them, he was too close. Too close. As he’d always been. Always right there, looming, and with Cassándrö on the other side of him. Too far away. And always, Cassándrö stood too far out of reach.: where Iizmáel could touch him, but where she could not. A cryptic smile tugged at the corners of his mouth; there was something vaguely, disturbingly equine in the set of his features, the cast of his muscles. He was lean. Tall. There was something angelic and predatory in the cast of his features. Now, he was simply too close and smiling in a way that Özminá couldn’t understand. “We’d say a lot to each other…maybe we’d say the things we need to say, things you can’t say in any of the other languages. “Chiaroscuro is easy, but Unione is better if we’re fighting. Cangiante is good for scaring old, local ladies on the tram, if we want to remind them of the color of our skin…your skin, especially…and Cassándrö’s. For me, but differently, because I’m pale with straight hair; it’s still there, though, that fear, but not as intensely; still, they’ll always worry if I had a knife, they’d think of me driving a lorry and raiding dumpsters and trash-heaps for dead clocks, mattress-springs, anything shiny and worth a scrap-salvage fee. We’re from a motherland that defies everything they know, and our skin and our languages are the most potent markers of that.” Özminá closed her eyes and sat back, pressing her spine against the chair. “You’d spend all of the time, speaking Sfumato to me, but saying nothing more than how much you hate it here.” Her words left the dry taste of aspirin in her mouth. “I don’t hate it here. If we were back home…I might never have met Cassándrö.” “If we were back home,” she said. “I might never have lost him.” “You didn’t lose him, Özminá. He loves you.” Her cheeks heated. “He sleeps with you.” “He loves you, Özminá. There’s more than one kind of love; all you have to do is accept it on its own terms.” “I’m sorry,” she said, toying at a bread-crust in the saucer in front of her. “I didn’t come here to be a venomous bitch at your kitchen table. I’m sorry.” Cassándrö shrugged. “It’s okay.” “Is it?” “I want it to be.” “Why…? I mean that honestly…why?.” “Because…” he glanced at book…the expensive and old journal. “Because, maybe one day, you’ll learn Sfumato, and we can talk to each other in a different way than this.” Özminá closed her eyes and pressed her hands—flat—to the table-top. “What did my mother write?” she asked. “What’s on those blank pages?” * “Will you walk with me?” Iizmáel asked, after translating six pages of dense Sfumato text; it was written, he said, in a difficult, eccentric hand; there were ideograms in the text: durwan symbols. Her journals, he said, were a map of some kind. Özminá nodded, and agreed to walk with him. They’d left the apartment, quietly, and with some distance between them. The first hints of sunset drew themselves through the western sky in deepening shades of amber and peach; there were clouds in the distance: another city, Özminá thought. “Have you ever been there?” “There…?” Though she was aware of Iizmáel beside her, she couldn’t glance at him. Not yet. She was afraid of what she might have seen. She was afraid of who might really have been there: as handsome as a horse with the eyes of something cunning and voracious. “To Sýlöníkíá.” “No.” A pause. She drew a deep breath. “Have you?” —And kept her gaze steadfastly ahead. “It takes a durwan to get you there; at least in the traditional way. Doesn’t it?” “Yes,” he said. “I know a few.” “You said that my mother was one.” “She never told you?” “No, and I never guessed. She was a journalist, and mámí. That was all.” “I’m sorry.” “Why?” she asked. “Did she write anything…in Sfumato, at least, as to why she didn’t tell me she was a durwan?” “She left Sýlöníkíá,” Iizmáel said. “When she was very young. During the first pogroms: when the White Hats were a problem. At least that’s what I think, from what I’ve been able to read. Other parts of her journal are in Chiaroscuro…and in Unione…she wrote poems in Cangiante I didn’t read those. You didn’t ask me to.” He spoke softly, and Özminá recognized another truce. He seemed—she thought—shaken; he seemed—she thought—provoked to brooding contemplation by something. They walked for a while, in silence. Özminá tried to imagine what it was like: to know the archaic form of a common language. She tried to imagine her mother—a durwan?—leaving home as a child and living as a refugee. Here. And what—she thought— would Mother think of Iizmáel? She’d liked Cassándrö well enough: a good lad she’d called him, though she’d said little else. Had she seen something in him? If she had really been a durwan…a woman of the threshold, could she have seen Iizmáel or someone, when all Özminá could see was herself? Kissing Cassándrö. Marrying him. Walking beside him, in her tasteful sari, as she walked beside Iizmáel now? He was elegant in his pleated, linen kilt, and his vest with his left wrist adorned in a braided copper bracelet: announcement of his marriage to Cassándrö. Did she see her daughter being a fool and loving a stone? And that was exactly what Mother called arrangements as one-sided as a woman’s love—a girl’s love—for a man destined for other men. And now, she walked the length of Cordwainer Street, past the post office, cafes, and an expensive, exclusive absinth bar with green awnings and a riot of geraniums growing in enormous, clay pots. They passed bookstores, a butcher shop (soup entrails were cheap today), a bakery, and a bank. After a long, wordless while, they passed row-houses behind wrought-iron fences, as they neared the edge of the city…as they neared the bay: crescent-shaped, and with harbors over there to the north, and a vast expanse of public space given over to restaurants, cafes, and a place to rent boats for short jaunts to the islands. They walked along the lip of the harbor, and Iizmáel found a place to stop; he spent a moment removing his sandals, and in a way that was endearing and childish, he walked through undulant sheets of water, thrown onto the concrete by the motion of small, energetic waves. There were benches in the distance. A dirigible buzzed overhead. “Would you like to sit?” he asked. “Sure,” she said. And thought of the tableau: a young man and a young woman, sitting together, with silence in between them: a man and a woman, sitting together, beneath the buzz of a dirigible, and with the city behind them, alive with its own mundane noises. The bay—ahead—slapped against the rocky, concrete-edged shore: the sound of water—Mother always said—laughing at itself. “Do you know why we came here?” Iizmáel asked, after a while. “You’re trying to be nice?” Iizmáel smiled. He laughed, for the first time, today. “That too. But there’s another reason.” The day’s last sparrows chirped in some rearward distance. Traffic noise growled to itself, and Özminá gaze snagged on a pattern of mud-colored grime defining the contours of Iizmáel’s left sole. She could see the way his weight rested when he walked, the way his weight shifted. There was elegance in the way that he walked, and from the grime of his barefoot amble along the lip of the bay, she saw the manner in which he spread his toes and clenched them at the start, and at the end of each step taken: his toes, she thought, were as elegant and as sensitive as a blind man’s fingers: reading. He walked like one of his cats, like the little gray companion she’d seen, rubbing himself against Cassándrö’s legs, and Cassándrö walked the same way. There was that between them. “Look,” Iizmáel said, pointing out, over the bay and into a far, far distance. There was a haze near the horizon, a linear band of cloud vapor, dark…like a storm. Approaching as quietly and as inexorably as a storm. “The darwans are making arrangements; like your mother must have done a few times. My father is old. Too old to ask a darwan for what he really wants. He’ll die here, but one day—maybe with Cassándrö—I’ll go to a darwan and show her my papers. I’ll pay her.” The approaching storm, Özminá realized, was not a cloud-born disturbance. The cloud, just clearing the edge of the horizon, was not a cloud at all. “I’ve only ever seen Sýlöníkíá from a distance,” Özminá said. “Or from the bottom.” “Have you ever thought of going there?” “No.” She inhaled, and a lump nested in her throat, a sudden bolus made of air. “Maybe,” she said, a blush heating the flanks of her neck and riding along the curve of her cheeks. “Maybe,” she said again, hearing her mother’s voice woven through one of her rare, spoken nostalgias. “She had friends there…four boys she spoke about, often enough. She left. As far as she knew, they didn’t. She never said that she wanted to go back, but she wondered about them…at times. She has other journals that she’s left behind. She wrote about them, in Chiaroscuro. They’re old men now, if they’re alive. If they’re alive, they might not remember her. Maybe I’ll go there…one day. But most-likely not. I’d be afraid to meet one of them…one of those boys, and he’d remind me—” She stopped. Right there, and the lump in her throat grew. “Do you want to learn archaic Sfumato?” “Do you want to teach me?” “Yes.” “Why?” “Because we both love Cassándrö, and I’ve promised that I would never hurt him in any way. If we were enemies, that would injure him and I can’t live with that. There are ways that I could wound him, by accident, by stupidity, but being your enemy is something I can avoid.” He paused, placed both feet flat to the ground, and stabbed Özminá with a pleading, searching gaze, as black as obsidian and as hot as coals in a hearth. He was tense, but the only sign of it was the way he curled his toes under, now, as if making fists with his feet. “I know how you feel about me; I can see it. Like I did this morning, and I don’t want you to feel that way. I know that you’re in love, in some way with Cassándrö, and I don’t want to be in the way of that. So maybe, if you want…I can teach you the language. It’ll be something we can share, and maybe…I don’t know”—he shrugged, and raked outstretched fingers through the shoulder-brushing cascade of his crow-black hair—“maybe we can learn a new way to be. With Cassándrö, and with each other.” He smiled, then, but there was sadness in the expression, even with the fire in his gaze. “I’d like that,” he said. “I’d like that, a lot.” She closed her eyes and felt herself nod. “So would I,” she said. And for a long, long time after that, they sat together—sometimes touching hands and sometimes not—watching the strangest of the world’s countries—the country where Mother was born: the country she fled, when it wandered on another course—drifting toward them. There were people there, living their lives in four native languages. Sýlöníkíá. The Motherland. Mother’s land. —the end— **As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting. There will be more to this tale, it's rather difficult to not visit this universe again, as 4 of the languages spoken in a very strange country there are 4 methods of Renaissance painting in this world. I can't possibly leave that idea alone.