BROWSE Columns
✕
The war dropped over the world like a thick fog, an old man’s heavy breath spreading from the heart of the Empire of the Double-Headed Eagle far away over its mysterious margins. It wasn’t over by Christmas, for all the rumours and bets throughout the Crown Lands, and beyond.
Shells. Splinters in the furrows. Dark seeds.
A hallucination from a pistol shot. Stirring confusion, exaltation, mistrust. A tiny bullet threatening to tear the Empire apart.
Yes, so the schoolmaster had predicted: it will crum-ble. He uttered his prophecy in the middle of the town hall square on the day of the summer solstice.
The summer of 1914.
"The world will sink into confusion,” Aurora heard him say as she approached the square, “then, it will be the end of this world, of us all!”
How could the world come to an end when her life was just beginning?
"What’s to come,” the schoolmaster carried on, shaking his felt hat in the direction of the crowd that had gathered around him, “shall alter the edges of the empire more drastically than its bleeding heart. Soon,” his hand arched in the air, his gaze sweeping across the blue-green hills, “soon, a grey mist shall fall and settle over our province before the heavy curtain of melancholy drops over the Crown Lands. Then, a huge iron gate shall rise from the mud. Kept shut by twelve iron latches. Behind it, a river of tears, long and wide as the Danube, and as turbid it can be in rough weather.”
Aurora followed the schoolmaster’s gaze. On a stretch of Saxon blue sky, clouds moved quickly past the main square, the Mount of Honey, westward towards Vienna, possibly. Another formation, ashen in colour, moved in the opposite direction. They crossed over the hills, like two knights on a battlefield. The whistle of the four o’clock train grew louder and louder, and before her puzzled thoughts could settle, the schoolmaster (freshly ironed shirt, Sunday jacket, well polished boots) placed his right hand on his heart, his fingers brushing the double-headed eagle badge on his lapel. He bowed, turned on his heels, and ran up the spiral staircase of the bell tower.
The town hall square filled with sound:
ONE — TWO — THREE — FOUR —
Silence.
A swish in the air.
Within seconds, the crowd had gathered around a shapeless pool of blood.
Unfastened from the lapel of the schoolmaster’s jacket, the badge revolved in the air, then zigzagged across the crowd. A boy made his way through the forest of legs and stopped it with the tip of his shoe. He picked up the badge and blew the dust off.
The dust rose, massed into a cloud.
In the afternoon sun, it looked like a giant soap bubble.
Aurora stepped out of the crowd, helped the boy pin the badge to his jacket and patted him on the shoulder. She could feel his bone through the fabric.
Another Christmas came and went, and it looked like the war was going to last a little longer than expected. By March, there were rumours that the fair, with its paraphernalia of magic and dust, might not return that summer.
The year was 1916, Aurora eighteen. War happened on the periphery of her life, for a while. Then, it began to eat into the lives of everyone.
In November, on the 21st, Emperor Franz Joseph died at Schloss Schönbrunn, in Vienna, eighty-six years after he had opened his eyes to the same green and blue space, the same gold and purple stage set of his old realm.
The war spread across the world, wiping out the impetus of the Blue Danube Waltz along the way. The Belle Époque perfume of grace and goodwill dissolved in the trenches. So did the longing for a language above all languages —— Esperanto, Ido, Volapük.
Daily reports, delivered by town or village criers to market squares packed with women and a few crippled or old men, kept track, as best they could, of the living, the dead, and — in between — the missing. Some were still expected to return from the front, others no longer, though at night, out of nowhere, more than one would feel the shadow of a son, a husband, a brother around them. Blurred pictures of who they’d once been, groping through the thin boundaries of darkness for a path to their town, their home. A crooked finger would tap on the wall, a rough hand slip on the door handle, a faint breath would leave flowers of mist on a windowpane.
Faint, rising, spreading across the threshold of life.
Day followed night. Sunshine, the spring torrents.
On one side, the rupture. Staying alive, on the other.
Behind the chaos, a lining of life subsisted. It provided for the war. The working hands of women, young and old, sent baskets of eggs, bread and potatoes to feed the front. At night they wove sheets to wrap the wounded.
The obstinate routines of keeping alive –– with the helping hand of chance.
Aurora, too, wove sheets to send out to hospitals, washed and boiled what remained of the old ones, added washing blue to restore their whiteness. Each day she welcomed as a gift, a small life, and she used her own gifts to sustain it. When her mother ran out of black fabric for the dresses she made for widows, mothers or sisters, Aurora dyed what was left. She had her own way of doing it, mixing the dyes she made from plants to create a warmer, more soothing black.
From the peeling paint of the telegraph office, the lonely Emperor’s paper eyes still watched over the town mostly deserted by men. But the cloak that made them part of one world had been torn. Burst at the seams was their vast motherland, the edges of the Empire brought down to mere scraps of lands and tongues.
Scarlet — brick — burnt red was the Empire’s bleeding torso —
A tale of extinct fairies.
***
***
One morning, Aurora sat on the porch of her new home in a small American town. She kept twisting an oak leaf between thumb and forefinger. It was emerald green, no bigger than a child’s palm.
How does the child, fearfully observant, connect what it has absorbed staring in silence, listening to the darkness?
What shall she make of that leaf?
A forest!
Her Enchanted Forest would be a map of her vanished homeland. It wasn’t any easier to draw than a forest, and even less easy to weave together each of its territories, its peoples and languages.
But from where she stood now, Aurora could see the Empire up close as neither she nor anyone else had ever seen it before — in one piece, as it had never been — though, up to a point in time, its looseness may have been its strength.
She had gathered plants, dyed cotton and all sorts of fibres. Then Aurora set about playing on her loom as if it were a giant violin with gut strings.
Within weeks, hills rolled down in dense layers of green, the woven surface organic, the way one colour related to another endlessly variable: green looked ochre, puffy or metallic, grey turned violet here, blue there, cyan farther on, now thick, now fluid. Still farther, a cluster of trees, their crowns and flanks rimmed with golden thread, no less lasting than spider silk. Closer, a stream of primary blue rose and slowly turned into a pale black simplified to crystalline green.
Had you brushed the surface of the tapestry with the flank of your palm, you could all but hear the long blue river gurgle, bump into a rock, flow; you came close to the birds’ song, to the aroma of resin and dry leaves.
Aurora’s concern had been how to make knots significant, as she saw them on maps of the Empire’s network of roads, rivers and mountain paths. The web of knots on the back of her tapestry added depth and movement to it, turning memory into a manageable surface.
Then, something else emerged in her mind, like an island in a mass of clouds. That single leaf had opened up space — it grew larger and larger, blurred, boundless. Yet when she looked into details, the image dissolved. It dissolved, but didn’t vanish, and slowly made its way into something: a colossal empire of wonder. At its centre, a giant dwarf sat on a giant mushroom and played the tune of childhood magic.
His cheeks puffed out like two balloons, the dwarf accompanied his song with a whistle and waved his kazoo like a conductor’s wand. The young lady he was singing to bobbed her head to the rhythm of the melody, her skirt swaying, the shaft of her parasol umbrella swinging over her shoulder, stirring up a swarm of butterflies around and over flowers and mushroom domes. Its tail wagging like a fan, the dog at the dwarf’s feet bobbed its head up and down, and couldn't be happier.
It is summer on a yellowing kitchen hanging Mother made for Aurora’s new home, this story stitched together point by point until they all formed a figure here, another there, a joyful song between them.
Summer within the contours of blue and gold: cheerful, colourful. Aurora unrolled her tapestry down the steps of the porch and onto the lawn, the wind breathing life into it.
There was something she had to do to keep it breathing.
***
Reshaping her woven map took Aurora longer than making it.
How to open up her tapestry without unthreading the whole?
The solution came slowly.
Subtraction instead of addition.
Partly woven, partly unwoven canvas.
One works the surface, light does the rest.
Aurora grew up with trimmed household linen: an idiom of daily care in the alphabet of survival.
You draw out a few threads from the edges, then stitch crisscross threads into the gaps to hold the piece together, make it lighter yet strong enough to withstand washing and drying under sun or frost, and give some character to the humblest piece of cloth.
She takes off her spectacles, runs a soft cloth over them, as if to wipe away a speck of dust in her mind. She picks up the scissors. Puts them down. There is something she knows now and sees how to go about it: what she needs to make her tapestry flow, breathe, stay open —
Aurora kneels over her woven map. Right palm wide open, thumb placed at the top of the piece, middle finger outstretched, she estimates the distance between the points where she has to pull out three threads. At the third span she stops, holds the edge of the tapestry in her lap, undoes a knot hidden in the weft and sets about her new work.
Holding one end with her left hand, with the right she picks the spot where she loosened the first knot. And so, one by one, Aurora pulls out three threads of the tapestry, then three more at equal intervals, and three more, until nine open stripes alternate with the woven lines, light flowing into the pattern.
Gaps you can see through — father.
Shape-shifting clouds on stripes of Saxon blue sky.
All that had been disjoint, irresolute, nebulous came together in this open map.
Anca Cristofovici's work — in English, and French — includes fiction, essays, and poetry translations. Her novel, STELA, was published by Ninebark Press (UT, 2015) https://ancacristofovici.blogspot.com/ . The author of two books of nonfiction and editor of a third, Cristofovici has also contributed to international art projects. She has received grants from the British Academy, the Rockefeller and Terra Foundations, and has been invited to read work at venues in the US and Europe. For several years, she was a Professor of American Literature and Arts at the University of Caen. She lives in Paris and now devotes her time to writing, art projects and long walks in Jardin des Plantes.
