Auguries (a fragment)
And when she came out of the bus finally, looking up, the western sky seemed suddenly like a great red desert, dunes tapering off into a kind of moss of clouds, which floated on a dim but intense blue. She was unsure what made the color so intense when it was already dulled by the approaching night, but could only explain to herself that it was like the piercing of eyes, the grey-blue of a valleyed iris spread out flat across the whole dome of heaven. On earth, meanwhile, she could see no further than the end of the street, and she got to the house in four minutes.
She opened the front door with the key she had borrowed a few days before, but not having announced she would come by, she also rang the doorbell as she entered, and called out: âPapa?â Although the light in the sitting room was on, there was no response, and nobody in it; so her father must be out. She quickly packed up the things she needed from the guestroom and then went to get a drink of water from the kitchenette, closing a drawer and a cupboard that had been left open as the glass was filling up.
If he notices, heâll know someoneâs been here. Even more unsettling if heâs not sure. She decided to leave a note, and looked up a phrase that she knew he would have memorized, and which he might plausibly believe was in her vocabulary too, despite the abortion of her attempt at learning Arabic. â!Ù ŰłŰ§ŰĄ ۧÙŰźÙ۱â, she lettered clearly, set the piece of paper on the coffee table, and then hurried back outside so she wouldnât spoil the note. She was also going to have to take the longer way around to the station to avoid being seen if he came back from the shop then. But the train wasnât coming till quarter to anyway, so that wouldnât be any trouble.
In the minutes she had been inside, the desert had trickled away below the horizon, or at least below the backdrop of shadowed houses, leaving only some faint striations behind. The eye color too had drained out of the sky, but the mental image of it was stuck in her mind. She remembered the party a few weeks agoâa few months, actuallyâwhen someone asked her what her own eye color was. She had no idea, and they couldnât tell in the colored lighting there, so she had to take out her passport to check. She checked it again now, and yes, she had recalled that correctly, even if she didnât know what her own face looked like in the mirror:
Augenfarbe/Colour of eyes/Couleur des yeux
BLAUGRAU
Blue-grey, she had told them, was termed ÎłÎ»Î±Ï ÎșÏÏ in ancient Greek, that was âglaucousâ in English, and the goddess Athena was called ÎłÎ»Î±Ï ÎșῶÏÎčÏ, because she was figured with bluish grey eyes. Typical of her that she would know this, while a glaring fact about her own body escaped her. But was she so bad for that? A decade before, when she had told her ex about Aratusâ beautiful description of the constellations, they had said: âI donât understand how you can read that without actually looking at the stars.â Something to that effect. Now, why did that still rankle?
She had since lent that old copy of Aratus to an astronomy student, a friend of a friend of a friend who was out of her life now. And who had spoiled that evening too, now that she thought about it. No matter. She had given the book away without expecting it back. Still, she would have liked to know what the astronomer made of it. She had only read him the opening, the hymn to Zeus, after they had talked a little about Sufism. Perhaps many more conversations could have followed about his religion and hers. Perhaps not.
On the train, she thought again of Athena with her glaucous eyes, of heaven as a blue-grey eyeâit occurred to her that Athena herself was Kore, the goddess whose name means âgirlâ and âpupil of the eyeâ. Well, it didnât cohere into anything really, but it was a pleasing coincidence nevertheless. She put it into her note-taking app, maybe to work into a poem.
The fall of night had come by the time she had gotten to the village, and looking down from the station into the valley, she saw nothing but black thesterness spattered with dots of light, like fireflies or stars, or the campfires of the Achaeans before Troy. How different from the night in the city, which was only a kind of softer day, and perhaps more comforting than the day. She looked up again to see if the sight was mirrored in heaven, but there werenât many stars visible, only a moon shining through milk glass clouds. Domina luna, iovis filia. At the bottom of the valley, she came across another simile for the village lights, the red grave candles that were staring out from the unlit cemetery. But that was too morbid, and the colors didnât match anyway. So she didnât dwell on the ghosts but joined the living up the hill, who were waiting for her.
¶
The following day, her mother referred incidentally to the striking red of the dusk the night before, and when she herself mentioned it to her sister-in-law later, she remembered it too. Although it had called forth a chain of private associations, it had essentially been a shared experience, which pleased her. âIf it were not so, how could Ennius have said, with the assent of all, âLook at that, burning on high, which all call upon as Jupiterâ?â If the others did not name it Jupiter or call upon it, that seemed immaterial; they all still looked at it. And she would keep observance.
In the evening, âââ
Left unfinished in 2024. I made a few notes on how to continue, but these are too incomplete for me to make sense of now.