‘I heard the boy say that Koberman lived even after all those things were taken out of him. Kept on living. God.’
‘Did the boy say that?’
‘He did.’
‘Then, what killed Koberman?’
The coroner drew a few strands of sewing thread from their bedding. ‘This — ‘ he said.
Sunlight blinked coldly off a half-revealed treasure trove; six dollars and seventy cents’ worth of silver dimes inside Mr. Koberman’s chest.
‘I think Douglas made a wise investment,’ said the coroner, sewing the flesh back up over the ‘dressing’ quickly.
Cistern
IT was an afternoon of rain, and lamps lighted against the grey. For a long while the two sisters had been in the dining-room. One of them, Juliet, embroidered tablecloths; the youngest, Anna, sat quietly on the window-seat, staring out at the dark street and the dark sky, her brow against the pane.
Anna did not move her head, but her lips moved and after thinking a long moment, she said, ‘I never thought of that before.’
‘Of what?’ asked Juliet.
‘It just came to me. There’s actually a city under a city. A dead city, right here, right under our feet.’
Juliet poked her needle in and out the white cloth. ‘Come away from the window. That rain’s done something to you.’
‘No, really. Didn’t you ever think of the cisterns before? They’re all through the town, there’s one for every street and you can walk in them without bumping your head and they go everywhere and finally go down to the sea,’ said Anna, fascinated with the rain on the asphalt pavement out there and the rain falling from the sky and vanishing into sewer mouths at each corner of the distant cross-section. ‘Wouldn’t you like to live in a cistern?’
‘I would not!’
‘But wouldn’t it be fun; I mean, very secret, to live in the cistern and peek up at people through the slots and see them and them not see you? It’s a nice goose-pimply, rainy-day feeling like when you were a child and played hide-and-seek and nobody found you and there you were in their midst all the time, all sheltered and hidden and warm and excited. I’d like that. I like to fool people. That’s what it must be like to live in the cistern.’
Juliet looked slowly up from her work. ‘You are my sister, aren’t you, Anna? You were born, weren’t you? Sometimes, the way you talk, I think mother found you under a tree one day and brought you home and planted you in a pot and grew you to this size and there you are, and you’ll never change.’
Anna didn’t reply, so Juliet went back to her needle. There was no colour in the room; neither of the two sisters added any colour to it. Anna held her head to the window for five minutes. Then she looked like she had made a decision, she looked way off into the distance and said, ‘I guess you’d call it a dream. While I’ve been here, the last hour, I mean. Thinking. Yes, it was a dream.’
Now it was Juliet’s turn not to answer.
Anna whispered. ‘All this water put me to sleep awhile, I guess, and then I began to think about the rain and where it came from and where it went and how it went down those little slots in the curb, and then I thought about deep under and suddenly there they were. A man, and a — woman. Down in that cistern, under the road.’
‘What would they be doing there?’ asked Juliet.
Anna said, ‘Must they have a reason?’ ‘No, not if they’re insane, no,’ said Juliet, ‘in that case no reasons are necessary, there they are in their cistern and let them stay.’ ‘But they weren’t just in the cistern,’ said Anna, knowingly, her head to one side, her eyes moving under the half-down lids. ‘No, they were in love, these two.’ ‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Juliet, ‘did they crawl down there to make love?’ ‘No, they’ve been there for years and years,’ said Anna. ‘You can’t tell me they’ve been in that cistern for years, living together,’ protested Juliet. ‘Did I say they were alive?’ asked Anna, surprised. ‘Oh, but no. They’re dead.’
The rain scrambled in wild pushing pellets down the window. Drops came and joined with others and made streaks.
‘Oh,’ said Juliet.
‘Yes,’ said Anna, pleasantly. ‘Dead. He’s dead and she’s dead.’ This seemed to satisfy her, it was a nice discovery and she was proud of it. ‘He looks like a very lonely man who never travelled in all his life.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He looks like the kind of man who never travelled, but wanted to. You know by his eyes. Travelling eyes in a sick body.’
‘You know what he looks like, then?’
‘Yes. Very ill and very handsome. You know how it is with a man made handsome by illness? Illness brings out the bones in the face.’
‘And he’s dead?’ asked the older sister.
‘For five years.’ Anna talked slowly, with her eyelids rising and lowering in gentle pulsations, as if she were about to tell a long story and knew it and wanted to work into it slowly, and then faster and then faster, until the very momentum of the story would carry her on, with her eyes wide and her lips parted. But now it was slowly, with only a slight fever to the telling. ‘Five years ago this man was walking along a street and he knew he’d been walking the same street on many nights and he’d go on walking them, so he came to a manhole cover, one of those big iron waffles in the centre of the street, and he heard the river rushing under his feet, under the metal cover, rushing towards the sea, towards other places and things.’ She put out her right hand. ‘And he bent slowly and lifted up the cistern lid and looked down at the rushing foam and the water, and he thought of someone he wanted to love and couldn’t, and then he swung himself down in on the iron rungs and walked down them until he was all gone save his hand drawing the lid shut after him and the rain hit on the lid for all the rest of the night. . .’
‘And what about her?’ asked Juliet, busy. ‘When’d she die?’
‘I’m not sure. She’s new. She’s just dead, now. But she is dead. Beautifully, beautifully dead.’ She admitted the image she had in her mind. ‘It takes death to make a woman really beautiful, and it takes death by drowning to make her most beautiful of all. Then all the stiffness is taken out of her and her hair hangs upon the water like a drift of smoke. And her arms and legs and her fingers move in the water with such slow purposelessness and she’s very water-elegant and water-graceful. There’s not a clumsy move in her as she hangs in the water.
She turns every once in a while to read passing newspapers with unseeing eyes.’ Anna nodded her head, amusedly. ‘All the schools and etiquettes and teachings in the world can’t make a woman move with this dreamy ease, supple and ripply, and fine.’ She tried to show how fine, how ripply, how graceful, with her broad, coarse hand, but it was more a jerking than a lazy gesture. She put her hand down and did not try to show how again for another full five minutes.
‘He’s been waiting for her, for five years. But she didn’t know where he was, until now. So there they are, and will be, from now on! In the wet season they’ll live. But, in the dry seasons, that’s sometimes months, they’ll have long rest-periods, they’ll lie in little hidden niches, under the drains, like those Japanese water flowers, all dry and compact and old and quiet.’
Juliet got up and turned on yet another little lamp in the corner of the dining-room. ‘I wish you wouldn’t talk about it.’
Anna laughed. ‘But let me tell you about how it starts, how they come to life, when the rainy season comes. I’ve got it all worked.’ She bent forward, held on to her knees, intensely interested, staring at the street and the rain and the cistern mouths.
‘There they are, down under, dry and quiet, and up above the sky gets electrical and powdery and the clouds look dark and soon the rain comes down!’ She threw back her dull, grey-brown hair with one hand. ‘At first all the upper world is pellets. Street cars run by all pimply. Then there’s lightning and the thunder and the dry season is over, and the little pellets run along the gutters and get big and fall into the drains. They take gum-wrappers and cigarettes and theatre tickets with them, and bus-transfers!’
‘Come away from that window, now.’
Anna made a square with her hands and imagined things. ‘I know just what it’s like under the pavement, in the big square cistern. It’s huge. It’s all empty from the weeks with nothing but sunshine. It’s empty and it echoes if you talk. The only sound you can hear standing down there is an auto passing above. Far up above.
The whole cistern is like a dry hollow camelbone in a desert, waiting. I bet the whole floor of the canal is pasted and mashed flat with old circus banners and newspapers about 1936 and 1940 and the war and the movie star who died.’
She lifted her hand, pointing, as if she herself were down in
