Work Text:
(i.)
Ty jesteś rodem z piekła
A ja jestem rodem z nieba
Magdalena’s heart whirred once, twice, three times, and stopped.
She stumbles, the joints in her knees locking. A full five seconds after willing it to happen, her right arm rises to catch her fall.
Something is burning. Her creaky eyes swivel downwards; she pats awkwardly at the few flames that linger on the scorched remains of her dress. Her porcelain feet have cracked, and so have half the fingers on her right hand. Her left hand ends at the wrist – a sooty iron screw where the delicate china hand, with its carefully hidden joints and spider-silk tendons, ought to connect. She blinks ash out of her eyes; the carefully-stuck rows of eyelashes are coming undone in strips. Her breath is hot; there is soil, not shined bronze or fabric grass or cool unsalted water but dark grainy soil beneath her, working its way into her seams. She is losing the ability to think too, she supposes, because only one thought keeps running through her mind: Viltė. Viltė. Viltė. Viltė. Viltė. Viltė. Viltė. Viltė.
Hurt – Anger – Shock –
Can she really feel? She would have responded yesterday, an aloof, beautiful “Yes”, resplendent in her righteousness, and have closed her satin/skin eyelids for the night with a majestic serenity.
(Viltė, evidently, hadn’t thought so.)
What did I ever do to you? she thinks – slowly, a word at a time.
It’s not my fault fate tied us together. It’s not my fault I’m proud, or clever, or beautiful; or that I wished the advancement of my country. It’s not my fault I aimed to cheat at our little game. All things act according to their nature.
All – things – act – according – to – their – nature
“Oh, no, you don’t hate me,” she told Viltė in her beautiful soprano as the Lithuanian pressed the pistol’s barrel into the hollow between her breasts – Magdalena’s own revolver, trimmed in gold. (Her chest is hard and withered now, like clay baked in a kiln, and she is becoming porcelain pieces, and no longer a flesh and blood whole.) “You hate that you let it all happen.”
But she had cared in her own way, hadn’t she… Hadn’t she matched Viltė’s looks with her own, been charmed if only a little by the soft looks that sometimes passed between them, such a contrast to both’s hard exoskeletons of scars or artifice…
Her breathing is labored, now, and it would be one thing to die quietly, hearing your heart tick out the last beat in the comfort of your own bed or your own floor, having decided, this time, to let it slow until stopping rather than wind it up again, but no, she dies like this, in the woods, in the dirt, and no one will even find her parts for collecting. It was always bound to happen – cycles – and after all, everything functions until it doesn’t.
All –
things –
act –
according –
to –
their –
nature.
There’s a single downy feather in her chest where there once was a bird, and it swirls up and sparks against the glass walls beneath her collarbone each time she inhales.
Once upon a time, a lady came across a broken machine.
There’s a sudden moment after awakening – not from sleep, but rather – that is, if you’ll allow for a momentary tangent, something like this:
You have been in a dark tunnel, something like –
It’s evening in the city where you live, almost night; darkness is falling, but slow and grey, like a thin, shimmering scarf thrown down from the roof of the sky, and you are out walking, past the high, opaque buildings. You turn into an alleyway, and the shadows fall over you, purple and charcoal, the width of your two arms stretched out to either side of you. And when you reach the end of the alleyway, you turn left, because of course it turns left, and continue, and the buildings at your side seem to get higher and higher and night is falling over you, but you can’t see any stars in the darkening sky, and when the alleyway ends, you open a manhole cover and go down, slipping ever so easily into total darkness, and climb down and down and down for a year and a half. When you’ve reached the bottom, you start walking, but hardly in a straight line: you ramble and double back on yourself and don’t feel lost because you have nowhere to go. At intervals you might see light from a grating some leagues above you, and if you’re lucky it might even look like stars. But you keep walking for another month, and it feels like it’s sloping gently even if you can’t tell for sure, and you don’t see stars or gratings anymore, only the feel of the slick mud-on-stone beneath your feet. And seventeen months later, when Christmas and Easter and Michaelmas have all gone by aboveground, and Christmas again, you start to wonder if maybe you didn’t ever see the things you thought you saw before. Sleeping, you don’t see the kind of things humans see behind their eyelids – orangey purples browns magentas blue-I-glanced-at-the-sun-by-accident that lasts for an hour. Sleeping, you don’t see anything behind your eyelids at all. And then – then – someone turns on the lights.
Magdalena’s eyes were burning. The white glow of the blue sky blinded her, and for a moment, she merely blinked and tried to shut or squint her scorched eyes.
When the light began to fade, it coalesced into the form of a woman’s white face and gold-brown curls. Her round arms were cradling Magdalena’s shoulders. There were pearly tears in her sky-blue eyes. She shone, her whole body, and the wisps that had freed themselves from her chignon made a white-gold halo around her oval face. She was an angel; in that moment, Magdalena knew nothing else – not the manner of her death nor the manner of her resurrection, and far less other, more important things.
“You’re so ugly,” the angel said.
Mlle. Marianne Bonnefois is an emotional creature. A romantic creature. A woman of passion.
When she saw the remains crumpled a little ways from the roadside, her heart nigh broke.
Carefully, very carefully, she fell to her knees at the side of the corpse, and carefully, very carefully, she sliced down the center of the corpse’s chest with the silver penknife she always keeps in her reticule, the one engraved with the Bonnefois family motto:
Ne vile velis.
Wish nothing base.
And the little wind-up key on the corpse’s tin heart was so easy to turn back a year, and another year, and another, until Mlle. had given the machine another infinity of life, and the little chick’s feather with the sparks at the edges that, rising, burned away into ash and, falling, grew back with the regularity of breathing, had long since escaped towards the heavens, caught on a stray breath of wind.
When the searing in her ruined eyes fades enough that she can focus, she cries.
The angel strokes her burnt scalp and stares deeply into her bottle-green irises.
“Come home with me,” the angel says, in an alto so rich and sweet Magdalena could drown in it. “I can fix you.”
Magdalena means to say “Yes – yes! Sì! Of course, kochanie, and afterwards, you can come home with me, at least for a little while. (A flustered pause.) If I’d be so bold as to presume to bring an angel to earth, which after all, is something a little like falling, ‘a caelo usque ad centrum’.”
But when she opens her mouth, no words fall out, and since this sometimes happens in any case, and maybe, for some reason, she’s nervous about doing anything with a woman again, which, nervous – as if! – she strains her breath and tries to force the words, and it feels like choking. (She keeps trying, though; she tries and tries until black spots rot her vision and the darkness swallows her again.)
(She wakes a few dozen times before her voice returns. The angel’s “home” is all white light and little rainbows, on the floor and on Magdalena’s coverlets, and the walls are some sort of glass, because she can see beyond them into an anteroom, and past that a courtyard with an aging fountain and some roses in the distance before yet more glass on the other side. (It’s different; you’d expect the glass to provide spaciousness, but all it does is make you feel enclosed.) Each time she awakens, there’s something new for her – new feet, new hands, new skin stretched over her burns, new soft lips. And finally, she can speak again, and however many weeks it’s been are meaningless.)
“Water,” she whispers, feeling the old thrumming of the vocal chords in her throat – not the old thrumming in her chest as she spoke or sang. She grips the angel’s wrist as she turns to leave. “Wait. I… my name is Magdalena, Magdalena Łukasiewiczówna,” and she stares into her eyes because she knows that this is something important. “I’m from Warszawa. I –”
“Shh,” the angel says, and runs a hand through her straight new hair, untangled. “Don’t tire yourself.
What’s the hurry to go back to a place like Warszawa? You’re not better yet
I can still make you better. Wouldn’t you like that?
(and in moments of emotion)
We don’t need anything but each other
you & I, we’re more than the world
there’s nothing else we need but each other. Who cares about Warszawa?
A tragedy; that’s what this is, one for the Opéra
…your passion and patriotism have always been something I loved
about you, you know that
(they’ve known each other for a month)
ma chérie, I won’t let you go anywhere; you’re not well
And leave me? Ah, all my love, all my tears, are wasted – a girl who esteems one city higher than me, me who gave her hair and eyes and hands and feet, welded the bronze bones in her leg back together, who gave her skin to cover her soft thighs and a voice to speak with
– then perish, poor Marianne, and leave her first.”
“I don’t like to be indebted,” Magdalena says honestly, learning to be guarded – and she remembers this about herself, that she’d rather be magnanimous and nudge others into her debt than ever let it be the other way around.
Mlle. waves a hand. “Please! You’re not.”
and sometimes you’ll chirp away like a bird
and I’ll put you in a cage so you can’t fly away
There is a mirror in Mlle.’s glass house, oval-shaped, long enough to enclose Magdalena from top to toe, and she gazes at her reflection in the metal as she sings.
She tries to remember faces: the picture of her own face, putting on makeup in the dressing room. The passion of the characters she consented to play: tears, frowns, confident impassivity, broken shock. Dashing, impossible love, the type that doesn’t exist anywhere offstage; heroic stares a thousand yards in the distance.
The faces are no problem. She even musters some feeling.
- longing: I don’t belong here, I belong in Warszawa, no matter what condition it’s in;
- gratitude: Mlle. Marianne Bonnefois cradling her head in her soft/smooth arms;
- surprise: Viltė moving hastily away the first time she leaned up to kiss her chapped lips; white light, blinding her charred eyes;
- the particular jolt when you’re walking confident down a set of stairs and you place your foot where the next stair is supposed to be but it’s a step too low or too high: the sabre scar over her left cheek, dissolved into nothingness, perfect creamy skin where she thinks was its place. (you used to tell stories about that sabre scar.)
- humor: I was dead and now I’m not! I was in Warszawa and now I’m not! Viltė shot me and now I’m whole! I pretended to be a hero, and then I lived it, and now I’m pretending again!
The faces are no problem. But her voice – is.
“A voice to speak with,” Mlle. had said. “Skin to cover her soft thighs and a voice to speak with.”
(A voice to speak with, yes
…but it’s not her voice.)
Tears never do anything to help. They only smear your makeup.
It’s a strange thought to occur to her. She isn’t even wearing makeup. (Or at least she thinks she isn’t, who fucking knows what Marianne’s done to her body without her knowing –)
Her knuckles are bloody. She stares at the shards of the mirror that still cling to the wall through hot, angry tears and tries not to collapse to the ground.
(There’s nothing broken in Mlle.’s house.)
She can feel the jagged pieces of glass through the satin soles of her slippers.
Magdalena blinks despite herself, twice in quick succession, and the tears spill onto her cheeks, and she wants to break something else. She wants to break the whole goddamn house. She wants to give herself back that fucking sabre scar.
Mlle.’s white hands close gently over her fists.
“Whatever happened? Let’s get you cleaned up.”
“I can’t sing” is not something she is going to say.
She sits at the vanity in Marianne’s room and lets Mlle. dab her fingers with a handkerchief. Mute.
I can’t sing.
“Look at the porcelain, you’ve come near shattering it,” Mlle. fusses, bending and unbending the joints in her knuckles.
“I used to be like you,” Mlle. says, and lifts Magdalena’s right hand. “China. Pewter. Thread. Plaster and stuffing and grout.” She smiles beatifically. “But my heart started to beat, like humans’ did. My skin became soft and porous and muscle began to thread through my hollow arms, until I could barely feel the wires, and then they disappeared altogether.” She lays Magda’s hand back down. “I am more than the sum of my parts.”
You don’t need to worry, Marianne Bonnefois thinks, and gently sweeps her flesh-and-blood fingers through the girl’s flat hair. I’ll remake you.
Magdalena sits on the brocaded-cushioned vanity stool, silent, for half an hour. She is thinking about “the sum of my parts”. She is thinking about the gilded, whole quality of the past.
There’s a piano in Mlle.’s room.
She took lessons for the harpsichord as a child – or did she? Did she just play with the baby grand in the orchestra pit, pick out the melody line and snicker at her friends’ laughter when she inevitably messed up? The Roman girls laughed, too, when she called it fortepian –
After half an hour, her voice whirs, “You have a piano?”
As if she’d only just noticed.
“Yes!” Mlle. says. “One of the girls left it.”
Magdalena spends the rest of the day at the piano, and stays through the night, until trills and chords explode in front of her new eyes like color. She knows it doesn’t sound good, but she can’t find it in herself to care; she’ll stay there until it does sound good.
She starts out with Carmen. “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle”. The little singular notes she manages to find with hard porcelain fingertips (knuckles bandaged) don’t feel triumphant or confident or alluring. They feel like the scratching of her new voice.
L'oiseau que tu croyais surprendre
Battit de l'aile et s'envola.
L'amour est loin, tu peux l'attendre;
Tu ne l'attends plus, il est là.
Tout autour de toi, vite, vite,
Il vient, s'en va, puis il revient.
Tu crois le tenir, il t'évite,
Tu crois l'éviter, il te tient!
By the next day, she’s abandoned the snippets of songs she remembers. She’s playing herself.
Sometimes she feels Mlle.’s gaze on her back, or hears her footsteps up and down the stairs. Finally, she settles seated on her bed. Magdalena can hear her sipping at a glass – wine, no doubt, that or champagne – the rustling of soft, thin nightclothes around her.
At dawn, Magdalena pauses, fingertips lifting. Her wrists ache – her back, forearms, eyes. She swallows the knot in her useless throat.
Mlle.’s delicate hands are on her shoulders, and then her lips are pressing into Magdalena’s own, and something is caught in Magdalena’s chest like a held breath and she stays in place and doesn’t move away. She doesn’t move away when one narrow strap of Mlle.’s silk nightgown slides off the shoulder, and she doesn’t move away when Mlle.’s left breast brushes the top of her brocaded bodice.
Marianne breaks the kiss and retreats to her bed. She smiles gently at the wide-eyed girl. It’s clear she needs some time to get used to the idea. (Her own eyes close soft and sweet when she kisses.)
Marianne already has a name picked out.
‘Some time’ passes.
(ii.)
Południca
Lady Midday
Before the treaty, before the ceasefire, and before the war, there existed a country called Poland – and other countries, like the Hetmanate and the Grand Duchy and the USSR, and something vaguely located called ‘Ruthenia’. And before this country and all its neighbors existed – but after the forests had begun to clear: because people cleared forests even then – when a grand portion of the land was field and soil, there existed a woman. Sometimes an old woman, sometimes a young. She made flowers grow in the rye to steal children away, and struck people down where they stood with illness, and delighted in puzzles and words. She cut off workers’ heads with nothing but a pair of long silver scissors if they answered a question wrong (though it’s unknown if she sewed on different heads afterwards.) She drove people mad. Looking at her form, shimmering like oil on water, was like having a flashlight shone into your eyes. A very bad woman!
A cloud of dust carried her wherever she went, at noon when it was hottest and brightest. Perhaps she was the dust cloud herself. But when she rested on the ground, it was in woman’s form, and barefoot.
She dressed in white.
(iii.)
Zmienię ci obudowę
I włożę części nowe
“My name is Magdalena Łukasiewiczówna,” the girl whispers. “I was born in Warszawa. I killed Colonel Viltė Laurinaitytė and then she killed me. My name isn’t Felicyta.”
“My sweet,” Marianne says. “So brave, so beautiful. Felicyta suits you better.”
Fortune, that’s what brought you to me, and fortune and good luck that you lived.
Oh, there’s nothing else in the world we need.
“You must agree with me,” she murmurs, and winds a strand of the girl’s golden hair around her forefinger. Felicyta has learned to kiss with eyes closed.
“I’ll think about it…”
“What’s there to think about?” Marianne stretches out. “What’s left for you?” She blinks heavy-lidded eyes and fixes her gaze on Felicyta’s lovely emeralds, suddenly serious. “They hurt you, back there. They killed you.”
The girl’s whole body shudders.
“What’s left, ma chérie?” Marianne says gently. “Not your family, not your house, barely your city if half of what I hear in the Post is true. (So sad.) Not your voice…”
Felicyta’s eyes flash at hers and then soften, liquefy. She looks down at the sheets, perfect eyelashes sweeping down. Her quiet dilemma and flawless, pained, features make her look like she’s in a movie. Marianne silently congratulates herself: every day now is a day behind the white projector screen of an old cinema, and the wind-up mechanism in her hero’s heart, twisted back all those years, has turned into film reel.
“You have me,” Marianne says. She reaches out to intertwine their hands. “You’ll always have me.”
When Felicyta plays, she is focused, and lost. Her eyes are unfocused, sometimes even closed. Her fingers move quickly across the keys or press deliberate into chords, sometimes jarring, sometimes beautiful.
Marianne sometimes advises/wishes she’d be a little more polished. Yet there’s something like tragedy in the girl’s furrowed brow, bitten-through lip, mechanical fingers. She pours everything into it, everything she feels, longing, love, irony; pensiveness, a wonderful Romantic grief. Sometimes she freezes and skips a few notes, hits a sharp she didn’t meant to, or plays the low E that’s out of tune, and it feels a little like the jolt you get when you’re climbing a flight of stairs and the next step is suddenly just a little too high or too low from where you expected it to be.
She loves to hear her play. Carmen, was it? That first night. Not a song for piano.
Si tu ne m'aimes pas, je t'aime;
Si je t'aime, prends garde à toi!
They start to leave the glass house at brief intervals. Marianne goes shopping and takes Felicyta with her on her arm: buys her chocolates and dresses and jewelry. One afternoon two weeks later, they go out for tea.
They play chess, once, in the glass parlor. Marianne sets up the pieces; she plays white.
Felicyta looks at the board, and then at her; a moment of incongruous, desperate pride flashes in her jewel-like eyes. (Marianne wishes she could preserve it in formaldehyde.)
The emotion is gone the instant her hands touch the pawn she opens with. She stares at the checkered board and at Marianne’s white queen with all the intensity of a corpse.
She loses. Of course she loses.
And you’ll be just as good as new
You’ll be able to be used again
One night, even –
“Magdalena Łukasiewiczówna?” The man rushes forward – a young man in a turquoise waistcoat, with glossy auburn hair and jewels hanging at his ears. “You used to sing at the Opéra, songs in Roman,” he fumbles at his gloves to take one off and shake her hand. (Vargas remembers her occasional performances well – shining and glamorous in vermilion taffetta, Roman undeniably, beautifully perfect when singing (her slightly-thin soprano swelling to carry the words), but speech with a hint of accent: something Eastern; a dark-haired woman rushing her away from her fleetingly shy after-performance autographs to kiss.) “I’m a big fan.”
Felicyta stares. Five heartbeats later, she responds.
“Thank you,” she smiles. “I don’t do that anymore.”
She’s playing again, one night two months later, beneath a warm summer evening. Something simple, soft and sad; Marianne is almost certain that the few mistakes she makes are simply to better convey the stumbling, honest tone.
For some reason, her fingers fumbling at a note, landing in the wrong chord, are suddenly infuriating.
All the effort I put into you and you’re still not perfect?
Marianne sharply – lightly – brushes the back of her hand across Felicyta’s knuckles, and the girl creaks to a halt, stopping frozen where she is.
Her hands beneath Marianne’s are satin and porcelain, worn through in places to show silver metal at the joints, and this is maybe the worst, that after all that work, all that feeling, Felicyta is less human instead of more.
“Don’t mess up,” Marianne says, and, tapping Felicyta’s left shoulder twice with a nail, moves to the next room.
Felicyta’s pupils are fixed on the wall opposite. The waltz she had been playing resumes briefly and trails off. She starts something simpler. She picks out the opening lines of the vocal part in Polovtsian Dances – the meter ruined by her caution; no notes are wrong.
Улетай на крыльях ветра
Ты в край родной, родная песня наша…
Finally, she collapses into scales for the rest of the day. Scales and arpeggios.
She is losing the ability to think too, she – supposes –
Mlle. Marianne Bonnefois sits up in bed four months after that and wonders what drew her to the girl in the first place.
(It was always bound to happen – cycles – and after all, everything functions until it doesn’t.)
Perhaps it was the allure of a nameless entity.
Rather, the burns on her face and shoulders. The quiet barely-there swipe of Marianne’s penknife; ne vile velis. The desperate way she looked at Marianne when she awakened, as if she could see nothing else, as if she would never see anything else.
(She doesn’t see anything else, now. She doesn’t see anything.)
No, surely it was the look in her eyes – be they rusted or bright arsenic green: her pride, her despair, her surrenders, her last stands. The way she pronounced “Warszawa.”
All these things are gone now. The beautiful girl in her bed is empty; she has nothing left to offer.
Mlle.’s hand is on her arm. She knows the feel of those soft fingers, those curved and painted nails; she’d know them anywhere; they’re all she knows.
They are walking down the stairs of the glass house, the first set, near the east wing. Neither of them misses a step. She has the odd sense that the silence is somehow uncomfortable, but it’s not her place to change it.
She isn’t Magdalena, and she isn’t Felicyta, she’s “the girl”, she’s nothing. She tells herself she’s Felicyta since that’s what Mlle. wants but it – doesn’t –
– always – work. God she thinks she might be breaking. Not again – she can’t go through that again, not again, no, please –
Mlle. turns to her. “Chérie, there’s nothing to be worried about.”
Felicyta smiles a perfect semicircle of teeth and nods.
They’ve reached ground level: beneath the glass floor of the kitchen is nothing but stone and dirt.
Mlle. leads her by the elbow into the next room over, and the next room, and the next. She unlocks a white door. The hinges swing open without a sound.
The small room is not glass. It’s very dark.
Mlle. smiles up at her, a comforting little smile, as she bends down and crouches over the floor. She ducks her gold-brown head bashfully as her hands move along the edges.
It’s a trapdoor.
“Go on,” she says.
Magdalena doesn’t move, frozen and breathless like she is when kissed. Felicyta’s feet start moving immediately.
It’s dark there. Their roofs are glass – Mlle.’s roof is glass – and her curtains are gauzy. There’s never complete darkness, not even at midnight, not even at two in the morning when it’s settled like a thick woolen blanket over the whole landscape. There’s never complete darkness and she doesn’t know what’s down there and she thinks she might hear people, a myriad of high, reedy voices that whirr and can’t sing –
“Go on,” the angel says. “I’ll come back for you in a minute. There’s just something I need you to do.” Her pale face is strained at the edges, but her eyes are pleading. She doesn’t want Marianne’s eyes to look like that. “For me.”
“Oh, certainly, for you, kochanie,” Magdalena twitters. “And afterwards you can come home with me, at least for a little while.”
“I’ll think about it…” whispers already-Felicyta.
Marianne is shining, beautiful. She could swear she casts light on the edges of the small, dark room. It’s not worth – it can’t be worth – giving up, right?
There’s nothing else for you – Mlle.’s sweet voice, rich alto, repeating again and again, ‘variations on a common theme’ –
– There’s nothing else.
“I will,” she says. “If you’ll come back?”
“Of course I’ll come back,” Marianne murmurs.
Her kiss goodbye is stunning, passionate. It cracks the bones of Felicyta and sucks out the marrow.
(And when the alleyway ends, you open a manhole cover and go down, slipping ever so easily into total darkness, and climb down and down and down for a year and a half. When you’ve reached the bottom, you start walking, but hardly in a straight line: you ramble and double back on yourself and don’t feel lost because you have nowhere to go. At intervals you might see light from a grating some leagues above you, and if you’re lucky it might even look like stars. But you keep walking for another month, and it feels like it’s sloping gently even if you can’t tell for sure, and you don’t see stars or gratings anymore, only the feel of the slick mud-on-stone beneath your feet. And seventeen months later, when Christmas and Easter and Michaelmas have all gone by aboveground, and Christmas again, you start to wonder if maybe you didn’t ever see the things you thought you saw before…)
It’s dark. She can’t hear anything now except the slowing, relentless tick-tick-tick of her heart.
‘Another infinity of life.’
For a brief sixty-one seconds, she’s alone.