Both were in good spirits, their mood currently rising after a few days of that episodic and paralyzing depression they had long ago learned to recognize, a depression that physicians over the years had blamed upon the weather, the work, or perhaps on Nela’s ovaries or whatever they were attempting to be cyclical. Nela herself called the episodes NMS, or nonmenstrual syndrome, and both she and Bertran had learned to suffer through them stoically (eschewing any thoughts of suicide until later) in anticipation of the euphoria that very frequently ensued. Bertran was reading a note that had been passed to Nela during the performance, and his current upswing kept him cheerful about it, though he didn’t find the contents honestly amusing.
“This man wants to marry you,” he said with a wry grin.
“I know. That’s my fifteenth proposal, Berty. I’ve kept count.”
“They never want to marry me.” He pulled a long face. “Here I am. Always a bridesmaid….”
“Well, they want to do what they do want to do, with you.”
It was true that Bertran had been propositioned from time to time. “Only because you’d be there,” he said. “Your inescapable presence makes the prospect excitingly wicked.” Bertran contorted his mouth as though to spit. He claimed not to be intrigued by those who propositioned him, though he sometimes found Nela’s suitors truly amusing.
She shook her head, pouting. “I think the ones who want to marry me want it for the same reason. Let’s tell this one yes and see what happens. What’s his name? Ladislav Something?”
“Poor fish. When you tell him I’m coming along on the honeymoon, he’ll gasp and his little gills will quiver. He probably thinks we’re a fake.”
She nodded in agreement as they swerved to the right, into the stables, where they moved between two lines of glossy horses, all munching, stamping, looking up with glowing dark eyes to greet whoever was coming through. The twins enjoyed this short detour after every show, and they paused to stroke sleek flanks and soft muzzles, receiving whickers and nuzzles in return.
“Why do these crazies want to marry me, Berty?”
“Because you’re exotic,” he said. “Beautiful, but very, very strange. It’s the same thing we’ve talked about before. Some people hunger for the strange because they have not found answers in their ordinary lives. They want to be different.”
“None of them would trade places with us. We’re different.”
He thought about it. “Well, perhaps they desire singularity more than difference. They feel their humanity is not all, not everything, not enough. They feel strangeness immanent inside them, and they want to understand it as singularity without displaying it as oddity. They want to be pointed out for their distinction, not because they’re weird.” He looked down at her. “Or, perhaps, they lust after variety, diversity, newness. Who knows?”
Bertran’s gaiety flattened somewhat as he considered the matter. From time to time, unpredictably, he quivered with indefinable longings and nostalgic melancholy quite distinct from the depressive episodes, times during which he thought he must be yearning for some place he had forgotten or had not yet seen. He called these moods ubalgia, where-pain, but only privately, to himself, never speaking of them, not even to this, his probably dearest and certainly nearest kin. From time to time he dreamed, dark reflections of dreams he had had in childhood, now more erotic and more perilous. He tried not to dwell on these, either, realizing without asking that he was probably not alone.
During one late, restless night fairly recently, in fact, Nela had spoken into the empty darkness, almost a whisper, as though to herself.
“I want to sleep. Except I dream about Turtledove, at least he starts out as Turtledove, but then he turns into the heavy little turtle who spied on the birds. ‘Gray thorn and gray leaf and gray wind rising.’” Her voice had seemed to inhabit the darkness like a lost spirit. “And then suddenly he has feathers, and he is Turtledove, really, with wings and he’s reaching for me, calling me, Mommy, Mommy, and I’m trying to find him….”
Her words summoned a picture of a moon peering through mist while voices from childhood called in the dark, “Berty! Where are you, Berty?” Fog and autumn smoke, and a nostalgia bittersweet. Where had it been? Who had been calling him? Not Mother. She had called “Nai-lah … Ber-tee,” both names, always. Who was it who had called him alone, just him, as though he could answer as the turtle had answered, alone, “Here I am!” That’s what the little turtle had cried when he heard his friends calling, his plodding, heavy little friends, searching for their longlost comrade, high on the windy mountain.
Caught in his where-pain, Bertran hadn’t responded to Nela’s whisper in the shared dark. Instead, he had lain quiet, pretending he hadn’t heard, and after a time he had fallen asleep. The memory hadn’t left him, though, and it was of that calling voice he was thinking as they emerged from the stables with the last of the sunset in their eyes, a rose-violet glow, bright enough that the figure stepping from behind the nearest wagon was silhouetted against the light and showed, for that moment only, as a stalky and featureless blackness.
“Please do not be alarmed,” it said. “I am not from your world. May I have a moment of your time?”
The accent was patrician, if anything, delivered in a mellow though slightly raspy baritone. It was Alistair Cooke’s voice. Bertran immediately guessed it was intended to be reassuring, since anyone with senses would know
