Some years ago, but she could remember the day with clarity because it was the one and only time that he had ever shared his real life with her, he had come down with a tube, like a section of bamboo in his hand and he had said, “Look through that, Senya, and tell me what you see. No, put it to one eye and close the other, now what do you see?” It had been summer-time and the door in the base of the tower had been open and he had handed her the thing with its end pointing outwards. So she had obediently closed one eye and applied the other to the end of the tube and seen nothing, a blue, and she’d been confused, torn between her wish to please him, since the toy was evidently of importance to him, and her inability to guess even what it was that she was expected to see. And then, suddenly, she had seen. A tethered goat, eating grass. She’d said, “I can see a goat.”
And that had been exactly the answer he wanted. He said: “Now, take the glass away and look in the same direction, Senya. Can you now see the goat?” She could not.
“Try the glass again.”
She did so, and there was the goat, so close that she felt that by reaching out her hand she could have touched it.
“I see it now,” she said.
Then he’d snatched the thing from her and said, “It brings distant things close, doesn’t it? It will be of inestimable value to me in my work.”
After that she had felt less happy about her own work, fearing that even when she was far away in the valley he might turn the glass in that direction and see her as plainly as she had seen the goat and the grass. But in time she had realised that he only turned the glass upon the stars or the moon, and the fear had left her. This morning however, because she was about to do something that outraged her own standards, her fear of being observed sprang up again, lively enough to make her turn and look before rounding the corner of the wall and making, in a furtive way, for the entrance to the kitchen courtyard.
Although she had never yet been back; to what in her mind she always called the house, she knew who lived there. A big fat man who had made a fortune from running houses of prostitution in Pyangyong. A very disreputable way of making money, as the man had realised. So, with one child born and another about to be, he had sold his houses, moved into the country and bought Melchior’s family house and several little farms. He was said to be an oppressive, unmerciful landlord. It was also said that his temper had been embittered by the fact that people
inother big houses would not befriend him, called him Bawd-master and did not seek to ally their families to his by marriage. All this Senya had heard from the tongues of gossips. She had heard it said, also, that her master was at fault for so demeaning himself as to sell the house of his fathers to such a man.
And now, after all these years, she was about to demean her master even further, and demean herself too, by begging at the kitchen door.
It was terrible, and she knew it; and it was all her master’s fault; he’d wasted his substance, just as he was at this very moment wasting the pig which, killed a week ago, would have provided several succulent joints, and killed tomorrow would .hardly have enough fat in it for basting.
The kitchen door was firmly closed against the cold; but even her buzz-ridden old ears could hear the sound of voices, of laughter. When she knocked there was a momentary silence, then a voice said, “See who that is.”
Another voice said, “Ordering me about! Go yourself, lazybones.”
The first voice said, “Lazybones, am I?” And there was the sound of a scuffle and more, louder, laughter.
Senya knew, intuitively that there was no master, no mistress, within this house. She remembered hearing somewhere that the Bawd-master, old now and his bones creaking, often took himself and his family south to winter in a less rigorous climate.
Slaves left in charge, she thought, growing arrogant and fat in idleness, the worst possible people to beg from. This opinion-based on experience—was confirmed when the door was opened by a young woman who said, after one glance:
“Whatever you’re selling, we don’t want any.”
With the suddenness of a lightning flash from a summer sky, the idea came to Senya. She said in a wheedling, cajoling voice, not her own:
“You’ll want what I have to sell, dearie. So will those within. I can read fortunes. True ones. By the lines in your palm, or by the tea-leaves in a bowl, I can tell what Fate has in store for you.”
And wasn’t it marvelous! She could have said, I’m starving, my belly is empty, my legs shake and my head spins from hunger, and they’d have turned her away. A few words of rubbish and there was the girl at the door all attention, and a voice from within saying, “A fortuneteller, is it?” And in less than a minute she was inside the warm, the food-scented, the oh-so-familiar kitchen.
Melchior climbed the stairs and reached the one at the top, much wider than the rest, with, straight ahead of it a solid door, and to the right an aperture with a slatted shutter. This he opened and hauled up the basket, which, as was his custom, he had packed himself. For some reason quite outside his comprehension old Senya appeared to resent this sensible labour-saving device; she had offered to toil up the stairs with whatever was needed, and when he had pointed out to her that they were both now too old for such needless exertions, she’d turned sulky. Whenever she packed the basket something went wrong with the contraption because she seemed unable to understand the necessity for packing the basket in a balanced way. So now he did it himself. He knew—or thought he knew—exactly what was in the basket today. At the bottom a few handfuls of charcoal for his brazier; the last of the supply; a full jar of water, and as a counter-balance on the other side a larger wine-jar containing a very small amount of rice wine, also the last of the supply. Between the two his half of the bread and cheese. Ample for all his needs for the next twenty-four hours. He carried the basket into the glass-roofed, Circular room and set it on the floor. Then he looked about him with that sense of satisfaction, of home-coming, which the room never failed to evoke.
All around the room, broken only by the entrance door and another leading to a little side chamber, ran a wide flat bench, set at just the right height for a man standing or sitting on a high stool to work at. On this bench, this morning, several charts, drawn on paper or parchment, and smaller pages covered with closely written figures or words, lay exposed. Others, neatly rolled, lay on shelves beneath the
bench. In thecentre of an empty space stood a box without a lid; in it lay his tools, his astrolabe, his compasses, his lodestone, and the glass which Senya remembered. There were pens, too, and sticks of coloured chalk, ground to a fine point; there was a knife and an ink-jar.
The centre of the room was clear except for the three-legged brazier and a tall ladder with a stout strut at the back of it and at its Tip a platform upon which a man could sit or lie. The whole place was noticeably neat, even clean. Dust was never allowed to gather upon the oldest, the least used chart or map.
It was noticeably cold, too, perched on the hill-top, and above bench level all of glass: he looked wistfully at the brazier, already laid with a few dry twigs and lumps of charcoal. But he must not be extravagant. Soon, when the sun reached its midday height, the tower would become warm; then when it went down and night fell it would be colder than it was now; he must reserve his fire for the night. So he tucked his hands into his sleeves and went and stood by one of the charts, studying it.
He wondered if there were, somewhere in the wide, outer world, anyone who, looking at this chart, would understand it. There were astronomers in Pyangyong—it was there that he had gained a rudimentary knowledge of the subject, but, and this thought roused no pride in him, they were not of his calibre. How could they be? He had given his whole life to the study; they were men of divided interests; they gave lectures, reared families, took regular meals and spent a great deal of time in useless talk.