Novelties Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction Read online

  I think there are two different kinds of memory, and only one kind gets worse as I get older: the kind where, by an effort of will, you can reconstruct your first car or your service serial number or the name and figure of your high school physics teacher—a Mr. Holm, in a gray suit, a bearded guy, skinny, about thirty. The other kind doesn’t worsen; if anything it grows more intense. The sleepwalking kind, the kind you stumble into as into rooms with secret doors and suddenly find yourself sitting not on your front porch but in a classroom, you can’t at first think where or when, and a bearded, smiling man is turning in his hand a glass paperweight, inside which a little cottage stands in a swirl of snow.

  There is no access to Georgie, except that now and then, unpredictably, when I’m sitting on the porch or pushing a grocery cart or standing at the sink, a memory of that kind will visit me, vivid and startling, like a hypnotist’s snap of fingers. Or like that funny experience you sometimes have, on the point of sleep, of hearing your name called softly and distinctly by someone who is not there.

  THE NIGHTINGALE SINGS AT NIGHT

  THE NIGHTINGALE IS CALLED a Nightingale because it sings at night.

  There are other birds who cry in the night: the whippoorwill complains and the owl hoots, the loon screams and the nightjar calls. But the Nightingale is the only one who sings: as beautifully as the lark sings in the morning and the thrush at evening, the Nightingale sings at night.

  But the Nightingale didn’t always sing at night.

  There was a time, long after the beginning of the world but still a very long time ago, when the Nightingale sang only in the day, and slept all night—like the blackbird and the wren and the lark.

  Each morning in those days, when night had fled away and the earth tilted its face again into the sun, the Nightingale awoke from sleep, along with the lark and the robin and the wren. He drew his beak out from the feathers of his shoulder, he fluffed out his brown plumage, and—as the long bars of morning sun found their way into the thicket where he liked to live—he sang.

  In those days every morning seemed to be the first morning that ever was; everything the Nightingale saw, the green leaves sparkling with dew, the multicolored morning sky, the mossy earth teeming with insects, the tall trees, the birds and beasts awakening, all seemed to have just been made that morning.

  That was because Time had not yet been invented. But it was about to be invented.

  On a certain morning very much like every other morning that had been, the Nightingale awoke and sang. As he sang, he saw someone coming through the glades of the forest where he lived. It was someone the Nightingale knew well, someone he loved, someone who caused him to sing even a longer and more beautiful song as she came closer.

  There was no one in the whole world at all like her, and yet she was just a little like everything there is.

  She had no name, in those days, this someone; for that matter, neither did anyone or anything else, because names hadn’t been invented yet. But long after this story, she would come to be called Dame Kind.

  The forest where she walked was all Dame Kind’s work. She had planted the trees and the flowers in all their variety and helped them to grow. She had watered them with the rain and had set the sun to shine on them. It was she who had thought of filling the trees with birds and the air with insects and the rivers and the seas with fish and the earth with animals.

  It was she who had thought of making the earth round, like a green and blue and white marble, and who set it turning in the sun, so that there would be day and night.

  In fact, there was nothing on earth or in the sky that Dame Kind had not thought of and set in place and made to go. Every small difference there is between one thing and another, Dame Kind had first thought of. It was all her work, and she went about in it endlessly, fixing and changing and pruning and thinking of new things all the time.

  It was no wonder that the Nightingale was glad to see her, and sang for her, because she had herself thought up the Nightingale, and thought up his song, too.

  “Good morning,” sang the Nightingale.

  “It’s a beautiful morning,” Dame Kind said, and it was. She smiled, and the beauty of the morning was her smile. “And I,” said Dame Kind, “have had a new idea.”

  “I bet it’s a good one,” said the Nightingale, who had never had an idea in all his life, good or bad.

  “I think it’s a good one,” said Dame Kind. She thought a moment. “I’m sure it’s a good one. Anyway, I’ve had it, and so there it is. Once you have an idea, there’s no going back.”

  “If you say so,” the Nightingale said cheerfully. “What is the new idea?”

  “Well,” Dame Kind said, “you can come see, if you like.”

  Together they went through the forest to the place where the new idea could be seen. In Dame Kind’s footsteps as she walked there sprang up two new kinds of turtle, the speckles on the eggs that plovers lay, and the world’s first June bug. The Nightingale didn’t marvel at these things, because such things always happened where Dame Kind walked in the world.

  At a certain place in the forest where the sun fell in patterns of light and dark on the flowers and the ferns, there sat a creature the Nightingale had never seen before.

  “Is it the new idea?” asked the Nightingale.

  “It is,” said Dame Kind.

  The creature had a round, flat face, and it stood on two legs, not four. Like some animals’ babies, it was all naked, except on the top of its head, where long fur grew thickly. The sheen of its skin was soft and fragile-looking. There was something in its child’s naked face, in its wondering eyes, that the Nightingale had never seen before in the faces of any of the thousands upon thousands of creatures that Dame Kind had thought of.

  For just a moment, watching the new creature, the Nightingale knew that the world was turning beneath him, turning and turning and never quite coming back to the same place.

  “What is it?” the Nightingale whispered.

  “It’s a Girl,” Dame Kind answered. “And here is a Boy to go with her.”

  Another creature came from the woods. The two seemed very much alike, though there were differences. The Boy had caught a crimson salamander, and he brought it to show the Girl.

  The Nightingale didn’t understand. “Boy? Girl?”

  “Those are their names,” said Dame Kind.

  “Names?”

  “They thought them up themselves,” Dame Kind said proudly. “With a little help from me.”

  The Nightingale marveled now. Never in all the forest had he ever heard of a creature that thought things up. He himself had never thought up anything. “How does it happen that they thought up names?” he asked.

  “Well,” Dame Kind said, going into the forest glade where the Boy and the Girl sat together, “that’s the new idea.”

  From a distance—he didn’t yet like to get too close to the new idea—the Nightingale watched the Boy and the Girl playing with the salamander the Boy had caught. What clever hands they had! Gently and quickly their flexible long fingers turned this way and that, picking up the salamander and putting it down, prodding it, caging it and releasing it. The Girl freed it at last, and then, as though her hands could not be at rest, she picked up something else—a flower, by the stem, between thumb and finger.

  When they saw Dame Kind, the two new creatures ran to her, smiling and bringing her the flowers they had gathered. She sat with them, and they climbed into her lap, and she hugged them to her bosom, and they laughed and talked with her about all the things they had seen in the world since they had come to be.

  “Look!” said the Girl, pointing up to the sky, from which a flood of hot golden light fell, warming her face.

  “Yes,” Dame Kind said. “It’s lovely and warm.”

  “We call it the Sun,” the Boy said.

  “That’s a good name,” said Dame Kind fondly.

  The Nightingale watched them for a time, and then, still marveling, he flew off to at
tend to the business of his life: to eat bugs and berries, to sing in the sun, and to raise his young.

  “Well,” he said to himself, “it certainly is a wonderful new idea.

  “I’m sure I never would have thought of it.”

  Dame Kind walked in the forest with the Boy and the Girl, holding a hand of each, and telling them about the world that she had made.

  She told them what things were good to eat and what were not, and the difference seemed very clear to the Boy and the Girl, as though they had always known it.

  She told them of some things they should take care about. She said they shouldn’t kick open hornets’ nests, or jump off high places, or get in fights with large fierce animals.

  The children laughed, because they knew all these things very well, from the very first moment they came to be.

  At evening they came to the edges of the forest, to an open place where the darkening sky was broad and high and deep and far away, and trimmed with colored cloud.

  “What’s beyond there?” asked the Boy, pointing far off.

  “More of the world,” said Dame Kind.

  “As nice as this?” asked the Girl.

  “Much the same,” said Dame Kind.

  “What are those lights?” asked the Boy, pointing up.

  “They are far, far away,” Dame Kind said. “So far that no amount of traveling could bring you much closer to them. They are huger than you can imagine, and there are more of them than you will ever know. They stitch the sky together, and without them nothing would be at all.”

  “I’ll call them Stars,” said the Boy.

  “Oh,” said the Girl, looking to the east. “Oh, look, what’s that?”

  Over the far purple hills there had arisen a sliver of golden light. As the Boy and the Girl watched, it grew larger, lifting itself slowly above the earth.

  “Oh, how beautiful,” said the Girl. “What is it?”

  The golden light grew round as it rose. It pulled itself free of the purple hills and rolled into the sky. It was huge, and bright, and looked down on the Boy and the Girl with a wise expression on its round, fat face.

  “It comes and goes,” said Dame Kind. “It’s lovely to look at, but not as important as it thinks. It steals its light from the Sun, when the Sun’s back is turned.”

  “I’ll call it the Moon,” said the Girl.

  “I wonder,” said Dame Kind, “why you think everything in the world should have a name.”

  Dame Kind had made the Moon, of course, just as she had made everything the Boy and the Girl saw and named.

  But she couldn’t remember just then why she had made it.

  I must have had a reason, she thought, looking up into the big fat face that looked down. The smile on the face of the Moon seemed to say: I know the reason.

  Dame Kind felt troubled. She took the Boy’s hand and the Girl’s hand and led them back into the forest. “Dear children,” she said. “You are my wonderful new idea, and I love you very much.

  “I’ve shown you everything in my world that can give you joy and pleasure, and I’ve explained about some of the inconveniences there are, and how to avoid them.

  “I’ve made you as well as I could to fit into this world I have made, and I will always think about your happiness, just as I do about the happiness of every other creature that is.

  “Now I want to tell you something.

  “For your own happiness, don’t talk too much with…” She gestured over her shoulder with her thumb.

  “The Moon,” said the Girl.

  “The Moon,” said the Boy.

  “The Moon,” said Dame Kind. “I think it’s not to be trusted. I forget just now why I think so, but I do. It comes and goes, and steals its light from the Sun, and it’s not to be trusted.

  “Will you do that?”

  “If you say so,” said the Girl.

  “If you say so,” said the Boy, and yawned a huge yawn.

  “Good,” said Dame Kind. “You are wonderful children, and I’m sure you’ll be happy. We won’t mention it again.

  “Now I’ll leave you, because I have a thousand thousand other things to see to. But I’ll always be near, and I’ll always have you in my thoughts.

  “No matter what.”

  Dame Kind kissed them both, and then she went away, to pour rain, to plant seeds, to turn the world in its socket. She had some new ideas for beetles; as anybody who has ever looked closely at the world knows, Dame Kind is very fond of beetles.

  The Boy and the Girl lay down to sleep on the soft blooming moss of the forest floor. There was nothing to trouble them, and nothing to alarm them. When they slept, they had no dreams, because dreams had not been invented yet.

  Before she slept, the Girl looked up once at the Moon.

  It had grown smaller as it went higher in the sky, and it had lost its golden color; its stolen light was white and cold. The light crept through the branches of the trees and stole over the flowers and the ferns, making them all black and silver. It was beautiful and strange, and the face of the Moon looked down into the Girl’s face and smiled a far-off smile, as though it knew something about the Girl that the Girl herself did not know.

  The Girl turned away then, and put her arm around the Boy, and closed her eyes and slept.

  The days came and went, each one so much like the last that it was hard to tell whether it was the same day happening over and over again, or new days coming to replace old ones.

  The Boy and the Girl ate when they were hungry and drank when they were thirsty; when they were sleepy, they slept.

  With their quick feet and clever fingers they explored the world Dame Kind had made, giving a name to everything that seemed to have something different about it.

  One leaf of a tree seemed to be pretty much the same as every other leaf, so they didn’t give a separate name to each leaf; they called them all Leaves.

  There was not much difference between a bat and a bird, but there was a difference; so they called one a Bat and the other a Bird.

  The difference between Day and Night was the biggest difference they knew. In the day the Sun shone and there was light; then they went exploring, and gave names to things, and ate and drank. In the night there was no Sun, and they lay on the mossy floor of the forest and put their arms around one another and slept.

  And while they slept, the Moon came and went, rolling over the dark-blue sky and looking down on them.

  There was a night when, very close to where the Boy and the Girl lay asleep, an owl hooted, and the Girl awoke.

  She looked around her in the sparkling dimness. The fireflies had put out their lights. But there was a faint silvery light on the leaves and flowers.

  She looked overhead.

  Through the branches of the trees, on the deep-blue surface of the night sky, surrounded by the far-off stars, the Moon looked down on her.

  But it was not the same Moon.

  The Moon she had once seen was a round, fat face, with a smile that puffed out its cheeks, and heavy-lidded eyes half closed.

  This Moon was a thin crescent of light, with a shape like a fingernail paring; it had a thin, thin face that looked away, and a small pursed mouth, and a cold, cold eye that glanced sidewise at the Girl.

  “Are you the Moon?” she asked.

  “I am,” said the Moon, “I am.”

  “What became of the other Moon?” asked the Girl.

  “What other Moon is that?” the Moon asked back. Its voice was as cold and far-off as its light, but the Girl could hear it clearly.

  “You aren’t the same,” said the Girl.

  “Is that so?” said the Moon. “Well, there it is.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, well,” the Moon said, and looked away. “That’s my secret.”

  “Did you change?” asked the Girl.

  “That would be telling,” said the Moon.

  The Girl lay watching the Moon a long time, trying to think of a question she could ask that would
make the Moon tell what it knew. It bothered her that the Moon had a secret she could not guess.

  “There must be more than one Moon,” she said. “That’s all.”

  The Moon said: “Is that what you think?”

  “It must be,” said the Girl.

  “Hm,” said the Moon, and smiled a secret smile. It had rolled on by now, rolling toward the west; and without saying another word, it rolled behind the trees where the Girl could see it no more.

  In the morning she told the Boy: “We have to give the Moon a different name.”

  “Why?” asked the Boy.

  “Because it’s different now,” the Girl said. “I saw it last night. Once it was fat and round. Now it’s thin and sharp, and looks away. That’s a difference. And different things should have different names.”

  The Boy couldn’t think of an answer to this. He didn’t like the Moon, and didn’t like to think about it. “Maybe it wasn’t the Moon at all,” he said.

  “It was,” the Girl said. “I asked.”

  The Boy said: “We weren’t supposed to talk to the Moon! Don’t you remember?”

  “We weren’t supposed to talk to the Moon too much,” the Girl said. “I didn’t talk too much.”

  The Boy turned away. He had a feeling within him that he had never felt before in all the time he had been in the world. He didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t know why he felt it. “The Moon is the Moon,” he said. “It doesn’t change, and it has only one name. Two names would just be confusing. And we’re not supposed to talk with it.”

  He sat without turning around until the Girl said: “I won’t talk with it again.”

  And so she didn’t. But she thought about it.

  It’s a strange thing about names: when you know the name of something, you can think about it even when the thing itself isn’t there before your face.