The Doloriad: A Novel

Prolegomena to Future Agonies

When Dolores inclined her head to acknowledge the presence of her uncle the movement dragged her down toward the earth; her breasts dipped and swung in a low arc and the rest of her droopy, fat body scarcely managed to resist. The wheelbarrow in which the others had placed her wobbled dangerously until their uncle grasped its handles with his trembling hands and began to push Dolores away from the encampment and into the forest. The rest of the children watched them go with little feeling, deadened by light and heat. As she rolled down the slope that led to the green border of trees a great tremor went through her, but Dolores was not able to distinguish between fear and desire and so she made herself still again and awaited her destiny with the wooden resignation of a sinking merchant ship. Her affinity to the earth was so pronounced that she couldn’t wait to be in it, though she would never be able to articulate that in words, the trick of which eluded her, and so Dolores had faced up to the marriage and what the schoolmaster called the dribbling monotony that was promised to her just as stoically as she’d faced up to being born. She bounced along in her melancholy way, as patient as a stone, and Agathe watched her from the ridge above the path, having followed the two of them at a distance since their departure from the camp. She moved forward, still hidden by the dense net of leaves, and squinted down at the pair in the gully below her. Their uncle shuffled along with his unwieldy burden and the cracked lenses of his glasses repelled the sun; the light bounced away from him, splintering into new delusions, and those bright disks, fixed to the head and the long, dry stick of his body, gave him the appearance of a watchtower on the move. It was no surprise to Agathe that their mother had entrusted their uncle with the transporting of Dolores, the success of which was already a source of much speculation among her children, because his loyalty to the Matriarch was ancient and unquestionable; at all times he bowed to her stronger will. And then there was Dolores herself and whatever soul remained to her after nineteen years of stony submission, although Agathe couldn’t find it with her narrowed eyes. The sun slipped through the green canopy above them and moved over her sister’s white body. She was a blinding point, all the more blinding given her placement within the bright forest, sodden with light, and suddenly it was painful to look at her. But this was the last sight that Agathe would have of her sister before she was gone with no guarantee that she would ever come back, and so she blinked the tears from her eyes and committed the image to the vault of her memory, scrabbling in the earth with her dirty, restless fingers as if anchoring herself to the damp mulch of the forest floor. The creaking of the wheelbarrow—the whoosh of air as it moved from one side to another, tilting with the weight of her sister’s body—her uncle’s dry cough. Up on the ledge watching the pair through the screen of vegetation, Agathe felt as though she were really down there, next to her uncle and the wheezing sound he made as he pushed the wheelbarrow along the rough dirt path, and she could smell the sweat pooling in the deep folds beneath Dolores’s armpits without having to imagine it. But this sense of herself dispersing, of occupying multiple spaces at once, was something Agathe knew how to dismiss, and so she pushed herself back through the green forest and through the arrow loops of her own dark eyes all the way into her own dark head, and concentrated on the stupid smile she thought she saw on her sister’s lips. Even if she had had legs, Dolores wouldn’t have known how to use them to get away. There was a poison in her and the theft of her legs had not been enough for it: those melted stumps were simply the sign of that greater corrosion, much as the trappings of a church are only there to point to the presence of the god, and it was this hidden thing, not their uncle, that was leading her into the forest. It was the blunt promise of her anatomy: the slack mouth and the round pig eyes; the antiquated languor of her fat white hands—these small acquiescences all pointed to the answer of a question never asked: a great pale feminine yes. Agathe knew all this and knew not to feel sorry for her.

"In primo enim statu sic erat subjectum corpus animae ut nihil in corpore contingere posset quod contra bonum animae foret vel quantum ad esse vel quantum ad operationem, the first voice said, and the second voice translated: In the first age of mankind the body was subject to the soul and nothing could happen in the body that would be contrary to the good of the soul, neither in its being nor in its operations."

There is an ancient agreement between the glass and the light that allows one to pass through the body of the other without hesitation. Today she was the glass and the glass was in her; her head was a great flat plane and the sun slithered through her brain and received no alteration; she was an infinite disk and she could not see where she ended and the whiteness of the void began.

The second voice continued, reading from the page, Nor does it matter that even then there was a diverse dignity of souls according to the diversity of bodies… and the surface that was Agathe spasmed—something gave in, and she became aware of the world in stages. Before she knew it she was surrounded by the long, light bodies of her siblings and the walls of the sunny schoolroom. She straightened in her seat and looked at her brothers and sisters, who sat in rows with their faces angled toward the light as if they were waiting to receive orders. Propped up in his high chair, the schoolmaster was a black mass silhouetted against the window behind him, gutted of detail, and understood this angling as a mark of his significance, although he was not blind to the glare of absence in their faces. Agathe placed her chin on the hump of her folded wrists and tried to look at him too, but it was impossible to concentrate on anything in this room that had given in so stunningly to the slyness of the forest and the brightness of the sky, and she was not afraid of the schoolmaster and the dark arrow of his attention because it would be equally impossible for him to address any one of them by name, to single them out, and so the schoolmaster never tried, not wanting, perhaps, to shatter either the illusion of his importance or the pretense of the lesson.

He rumbled again, "Diversa fuisset dignitas animarum, cum oporteat animae ad corpus proportionem esse, ut formae ad materiam, et motoris ad motum, and Marta translated laughingly, A diverse dignity of souls. It is necessary for the soul to be proportioned to the body. As form to matter, as mover to moved… but all Agathe heard was a diverse dignity of souls. She let her eyes slip out of focus and the line of children in front of her melted into a column, a smooth marble whole. Next she placed her head in her hands and imagined her way into the dead city, gliding through the thinning trees toward the crumbling apartment block where the schoolmaster lived in what used to be known as Vinohrady. It was from this lonely building, half swallowed by the green undergrowth, that the legless old schoolmaster was carried to the school every morning, wrapped up in his habitual cloud of resentment and despair and full of curses and mumbled threats. After wrenching the schoolmaster from his sheets and placing him in the metal wheelbarrow, her brothers would push their portly trophy along corridors where the early-morning light tumbled through defeated ceilings and dark green moss made secret insinuations across the ancient wallpaper, and then down the gentle incline that led from the schoolmaster’s apartment to the encampment some three miles distant, Jakub at the handles and Adam guiding the front wheel, while Marek would run ahead and tell the others that they should assemble in what the schoolmaster liked to describe as that run-down hellhole of a building" because no matter how parodic they believed the process or however meaningless the schoolmaster’s lessons, they were preferable, after all, to the other options. Agathe had never seen the city with her eyes, but Jakub had told her about it, and now she followed the thread of his images and saw the weeds pooling in the gaps between the broken tiles, the windows with their shattered panes of glass, and the rotting wooden doors of the apartment blocks, listening all the while to the whispering of the abandoned buildings, which was sometimes mutinous and at other times a lament, and the quiet desolation that shoved and jostled around the bright halo of her brother’s hair. When they reached the rotting room where they had their lessons, the schoolmaster droned on about things nobody cared about for as long as he could bear it, and then his pouchy eyes began to droop, fat mouth slackening, and he’d snore and snore until the boys took him home and this was the end of words—there was only the creaking of the wheelbarrow, the rustling of the leaves, and the quiet drip of the dying light through the canopy above them, a great mottling; and so the journey back to the schoolmaster’s lair had the cadence of an older dream, a slow, incomprehensible merging. Soon night hailed down upon the old city. The schoolmaster emitted his high snore and fifty feet above him a flock of roosting birds drowsed in the wet wooden rafters of the apartment block, their white droppings mingling with the trickling water from yesterday’s rains to form a pale liquid that dripped through the ruined floors and landed on his swaddled form, speckling the blankets and sieving through the wiry mass of his beard …

Thunder cracked from somewhere to the north of the encampment and Agathe was dragged back to the schoolroom. She looked around but it was as if none of the others had heard it: the schoolmaster continued to read from the book in front of him, Marta translated, and the children dreamed, staring at the bright window with its sweep of yellow light. The sun slugged through the dirty glass and what emerged on the other side was altered and impure, nothing like the effortless exchange that had earlier absorbed Agathe’s full attention, and for a moment this saddened her, bound up as she was in the dribbling time of the room and the encampment beyond it. Outside it began to rain: somewhere near the heart of the forest slow, stupid Dolores would be getting soaked as she waited for the Matriarch’s others to come, though none of her siblings were sure that they would. Agathe kicked her legs beneath the desk and leaned down to observe the relative perfection of her own limbs. The hatred she felt for Dolores was thick, indivisible; an indistinct welt of what used to be identifiable moments. She picked away at it anyway, trying to draw out individual images. Dolores sunning her whale-like body in the grass while the chickens scrabbled in the earth around her, the squirming ribbons they dug up premonitioning her own damp fate. The schoolmaster with his round, beady eyes craning over the high edge of the schoolroom window in order to spy her through the tangle of undergrowth, which arranged tantalizing flickers of her legless allure. The boys laughing at her as their uncle wheeled her through the camp, her mouth eternally at crotch level. Agathe dreamed. Not of her own marriage but of Dolores’s. She was Dolores as she wobbled her way through the forest, unaware of being watched, the wheelbarrow tilting flirtatiously. Or was it that she was Dolores further back in time? Dolores in the grass with her T-shirt off, the fat brown hillocks of her nipples sticking up in the air. These obscenely resolving themselves into something hard and translucent—the glass; the wet smell of the forest; the drone of the schoolmaster’s voice; a diverse dignity of souls.

Agathe slid down from her desk and began to crawl away on all fours. The schoolmaster turned the page and cleared his throat but nobody looked at him. Instead the few children who were still awake watched Agathe as she made for the door. Now the light was dimmer; the clouds blocked out the sun. They had hurried over from the mountains beyond the city and now they hung above the encampment and formed a proximate sky of their own, softer, more forgiving. The afternoon’s radiance was quashed. Agathe thought about their mother, and her brain contracted as she tried to come up with an appropriate lie or an excuse for intimacy. Around her the air was heavy with ozone, and the warm rain stirred the earth to thick mud. Jan scurried across the square that lay between the schoolroom and their mother’s apartment block, heading for the building on the other side of the encampment that he shared with their older sisters, and she knew that if he saw her hanging around he would put her to work. As she watched him approach, Agathe considered escaping into the empty canteen, or giving up the encampment for the forest, where it would be cool and silent, but she wanted to be near their mother, and so she darted away from the covered entrance of the schoolroom and crawled along the edge of the stone dormitory that bordered the square’s lowest side. Jan’s eyes were stuck ahead of him and he didn’t see her. He rounded the side of the schoolroom and disappeared from sight, and Agathe began to inch in the direction of their mother’s quarters. Glowering at them from the top of the sloping square, the apartment block was the tallest building in the encampment, and although the Matriarch never used the upper levels, it was easy enough for Agathe to imagine her spying on them from that commanding height, noting down every one of their errors in a large dusty ledger so that she would never lose sight of who could be trusted and who could not. And this was not so far from the truth, she reminded herself as she scrambled across the muddy square, because her whole life long their mother had had a passion for keeping records, and at night the children would hear her tapping away on the faded keys of her old plastic computer and know that she was thinking of them, though never in the way that they wanted. Agathe clambered up the stone steps at the base of the building and hurried along the short tumbledown corridor that led to their mother’s office. The door was open and she stuck her head inside. The Matriarch sat with her arms folded on the wooden desk and her gaze was fixed on the encampment, which she watched through the dirty glass of the window in front of her. She was surrounded by a pool of light that came from a single desk lamp, while her electric wheelchair crouched in the dark corner farthest away from Agathe. As always, their mother’s eyes were hidden by her black wraparound sunglasses and a pale pink quilted shawl covered her broad shoulders. The Matriarch gave no sign that she had seen her daughter approach or heard her footsteps on the peeling linoleum of the corridor outside, and so Agathe studied her face, which was strong and determined and nothing like her own. In the square outside, everything was water, liquid, slipping, blending, but here she was caught in the net of her mother, in the long, narrow jaw with the crooked nose pointing off to one side like a rudder and the thin gray hair spreading out over her iron shoulders in ever-thinner tendrils.

The way it rained in this part of the country was something unique, thought the Matriarch, who was old enough to remember other places and other rains, these memories seeping through the cracked surface of the present, the bright, enameled fiction of the camp, no matter how hard she tried to push them down. As she stared out across the square, the sky pressed in and the world welled up. A flood of tepid water submerged the earth, a little at first, but the rain, like the light, would get stronger. The flood was holy, the Matriarch decided. She closed her eyes and saw a slow sheet of mud and debris roll away from the enclosure of the camp, flowing down the slope and along the former road in the direction of places whose names were sputtering candles in her wet, dripping mind, hissing with ž’s, š ’s, and ř ’s that she’d been only too glad to forget, and one day the rain would wash them away entirely, the sounds of the dead city and her memories of them, and then the Matriarch would finally be free of it—the past and its language. She sat in her office and the past sloshed around her head, and outside it rained with a fury that belonged to an era remembered only through the hints of the city and the stony belligerence of the abandoned buildings. The Matriarch was coy about this time. She didn’t like to think about a time that wasn’t bound by her rules, the rituals invented for her family, the order that was uniquely hers. She kept her knowledge close to her chest, and their uncle could be trusted not to speak of the time that had preceded their time when the city was full of other people and automobiles of many colors streamed down highways that seemed inexorable as fate. The Matriarch had been born in another time altogether, when the world had been made up of clear lines and definite spaces, and this gave her an advantage over them because as a rule her children were weak, shapeless, and overwhelmed by the enormous lethargy that hung above the empty city and the surrounding forest; if it wasn’t for the efforts of the older siblings, Jan and his sisters, the whole lazy lot would perish. The Matriarch had a sense of direction, energy. It had seemed impossible to continue and yet here they were, the Matriarch and her family, and life went on. If she had her way it would never stop. If she had her way it would get bigger and bigger. But the children belonged to this world, not her—You can tell it from looking at them, their uncle had rasped, sitting in his chair in the dying light, when she’d brought him another one, and there were always more of them, another white baby nestling up against her like a blind, squirming maggot; and who would have ever thought that it would be her to be the one to keep them all alive? The Matriarch opened her eyes and peered through the broken plastic blinds at the muddy disorder of the encampment. The flood was dangerous, she concluded. Although it promised to sweep away the past and its degradations, it, too, belonged to the new world and was part of its leveling, an incessant, deadly mingling. And because the world around them was empty, save for the eyes of the few animals left that watched them from the forest and waited for their end to come too, the flood could only be intended for the Matriarch and her children. The rain hurtled down. She looked up at the sky