The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,39

She herself was too large to climb into the chimney after him. She seems to have run for help, but the little children and the mistress and I were out picking blackberries in the valley, and blind and wounded as she was, she didn’t find us in time.”

“When the doctor told us Jasper was dead”—the magistrate’s wife, Minnebie, whirls her face from the window; her voice is queer and unexpected—“I went to the upstairs lavatory to cry, at the top of the house, and there I found the eyes of Lonie were still in the washbasin—”

The magistrate thinks he will be sick. “Where are the babies? Where are my little ones?” he asks, with a terrible fear in his voice.

“Can you imagine my disgust?” his wife goes on. “I learned at that moment: we are an unlucky people. I do not wish to give my children to this defeated land, nor to this defeated house. I shall save my gifts for the victorious kingdom of heaven.”

“Don’t get abstract on me now. Where are the little ones?”

“Smallpox.”

“What?”

“All three boys, one by one; after Jasper died. Within a week of one another.”

The magistrate draws a long breath. He pulls the covers up further under his chin. His face glows like a moon rising from a green ocean.

There is a long silence in the room. In the performance for the whale ducks, the entire theater sits in silence for fourteen minutes. Then the music begins to rise, and the magistrate throws off the bedclothes.

“My wife,” says the magistrate slowly. “Minnebie. Do you know? There is a way. We will bring back the children.”

Minnebie looks at him in hatred.

The magistrate begins his beautiful aria.

“We will journey far away from here to the valley of oblivion,” he sings. “Forget the defeat and all the lost children. We will forget and start again from the beginning. Do you know how much like a dream all this misfortune seems to me now? Imagine how much more like a dream it will be when the trees have lost their leaves and regained them. How much more like a dream when the earth has passed into shadow again and again and the stars have grown colder and colder! When the birds have laid eggs until, with the generations taken together, they have laid more eggs than would cover the ocean floor?”

(At this, the whale ducks exchanged meaningful glances, touched to the quick—“It’s our time, he’s speaking of the time of the whale ducks!”)

The magistrate pauses. Minnebie says nothing, and a great silence again envelopes the stage. The magistrate seems to go just a little red in his white face, but only ever so slightly, so that, looking at him, it isn’t clear whether it is blood rising with shame into the net of capillaries over his facial muscles or whether it is because he has raised his head from the pillow and taken a bit more of the rays from the vanishing sun. (The whale ducks insist on only the best lighting for a production of Naragir.)

“How much more like a dream will it be then!” he shouts into the darkness. “I’ll tell you how much more! Much more like a dream. Dreams are lovely things. I am an old man, but still, even in what’s left of my life, I have time. There is always time. And listen, my darling—we will be blessed with new money, made through new industriousness, and God will bless us with new children, different children will be born to us. And although you’d never believe it, having forgotten the ones that came before, the new ones will be better than what we’ve lost. The songs the first ones used to sing won’t be sung, but other children can sing other songs, and the richness of their lives … will outdo any richness—” and the magistrate begins to cry.

Meanwhile, Minnebie’s fury is gradually reaching the breaking point. “I have no children in me,” she screams, “not now, nor ever again. The children I had are the children of the country that was shattered and I shall never forget—I shall never forget the shattering. Would you have me go on? Would you have me walk away from death as if it were less than life?” Minnebie says, and with that, in the way the story would have continued if the opera had not been interrupted on the night of Botuun’s skeleton’s debut, Minnebie kills herself; she uses the magistrate’s own revolver from the commode next