Song of Slaves in the Desert - Alan Cheuse [115]
Anything to distract me from my worrisome woes!
“A Descent into the Maelstrom.”
This story took me quite rapidly along with it, as I began to read, the story within the story, that is. “We had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag. For some minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak…”
The characters in the story within the story climb the mountain called Helseggen, and I climb with them, even as the narrator reaches the vertiginous moment when he looks down from the heights at the sea.
“I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian geographer’s account of the Mare Tenebrarum. A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive…”
I no sooner looked upon the sea with this agitated narrator within the story when I heard the knocking at my door.
Still in a stupor, in a reading dream, I lowered my feet to the floor and stood up.
The knocking, tapping, sounded again.
“Yes?”
With chilled blood in my veins I half-imagined to find a giant raven standing there.
I went to the door and opened it.
“Massa,” Liza said.
“No, no, no, no,” I said, suffering a jump in my blood into my throat and down along both upper limbs, and then down further. “I would prefer that you do not call me that,” I said. I was agitated from reading the story, I told myself.
Liza looked furtively behind her.
“May I come in, massa?”
I nodded, and she stepped inside, trailing an invisible cloud of scent. Earth after rain, wood-smoke, wood-flower—her perfumes charmed me with their natural airs.
“It is late, Liza,” I said. “Is there trouble?”
She shook her head.
“They have all gone to bed. I’ve been walking up and down the hall, trying to…to make the courage to knock on your door.”
At which point she burst into tears.
“Oh, massa!”
“Please?” I said.
She shook from her misery, and wailed on.
“Tell me,” I said, “what is the difficulty? You act as though you’re being pursued.”
“I am,” she said, and threw herself down upon the bed, which she herself had prepared for me so many nights since my arrival.
“Please tell me,” I said, still keeping my distance and trying to pretend that we were together in a well-lighted downstairs room with many people passing in and out instead of alone together in the dark in my room and on my bed.
“Water, please,” she said.
Immediately, I poured her a cup of water from the pitcher near my bedside, a pitcher that she herself had fetched and often refilled.
She sat up and sipped from my cup.
“Thank you, massa,” she said.
“Nate,” I said. “Call me Nate.”
“Nate,” she said. “Thank you, Nate.”
Still quite in possession of my own mind, I noted the effect the saying of my name on her lips produced in me.
“So now, Liza,” I said, “will you please explain to me what circumstances have brought you here to me at this hour of the night?”
For a small part of a second, she laughed, or I thought she laughed, but then it turned out to be the awkward intake of breath and noise that began another round of tears.
Which she suddenly cut short, jerking herself erect and pushing her head back against the headboard.
“He is after me,” she said in a deep and hurried whisper.
“Who is after you?”
I leaned closer, and found myself, with legs already weak, naturally giving in to gravity, sitting lightly near the foot of the bed, and allowing my eyes to focus on her face. Even in the dark her eyes showed a ferocity and a fear at the same time that I could not fully comprehend. And her hands meanwhile she clasped together, almost as if in prayer, and kneaded them nervously on her breast.
“I cannot go into it, it is too distressing,” she said.
“But you must tell me,” I said. “Obviously you came here to ask for help and I can’t help you unless you tell me the truth of the situation.”
“It is too awful to tell,” she said, making liquid sounds with her lips, as she if were still drinking from the cup.
“Take a moment,” I said. “Compose yourself.”
I took a moment myself, also, getting up from the bed and going