Last Stories and Other Stories

SOURCES AND NOTES

Since these stories are less ethnographically faithful than any of my Seven Dreams, I have not scrupled to operate an Anglo-Saxon charm in Bohemia, or even to alter magical names and terms to suit me. (May I be forgiven by all the demons and angels.) Notwithstanding, the basic laws of magic (sympathy, contagion, etcetera) strike me as psychologically true, so I have tried to respect them.

My Bohemia is an imagined construct. My Trieste and Veracruz both contain some deliberate anachronisms both architectural and otherwise. For instance, I wished to set “Two Kings in Ziñogava” sometime in the colonial period, when slavery was still common in Veracruz. But at this time San Juan de Ulúa was more of a fortress than a prison island. Tant pis.

EPIGRAPH

“It is the custom for the barber to shave the deceased…”— Pamphlet from the Despica Kuca, Muzej Sarajeva, collected in 2011.

TO THE READER

“Wherever there is a rose…”— Saadi [Sheikh Musli-Uddin Sa’di Shirazi], The Rose Garden (Gulistan), trans. Omar Ali-Shah (Reno, NV: Tractus, 1997; orig. Arabic [?] ed. ca. 1260), p. 186 (VII.19).

“There is no means through which those who have been born can escape dying…”— Paul Carus, comp. “from ancient records,” The Gospel of Buddha (London: Studio Editions/Senate, 1995; orig. pub. 1915), p. 211 (slightly “retranslated” by WTV).

ESCAPE

As many of my readers know, the events related in “Escape” derive from a real incident (19 May 1993), whose protagonists were named Bosko Brkic and Admira Ismic. As in “Escape,” he was Serb and she was Muslim. However, I have altered many other details. For instance, Bosko’s family had long since departed Sarajevo; the couple were living together unmarried. They decided to leave not for the reason I have given but because Bosko had been summoned to report to the police, who of course were incensed against Serbs. I decided to alter their identities and their situation in order to respect the privacy of their surviving relatives. The family members in my account are composites of Sarajevans whom I interviewed, was told about, etcetera. Their relation to Admira and Bosko is entirely imagined.

In this story and in “Listening to the Shells,” the various confused and contradictory later accounts by strangers of the couple and their deaths (including “No, no; he was the Muslim and she was the Serbkina,” and “Actually, that’s just an urban legend”) are all verbatim as I heard them in 2007 and 2011. In 2011 a young Sarajevan woman summed up “that story on Vrbanja Most” for me: “He was Orthodox and she was Muslim. Today they are as famous as Romeo and Juliet. Just among the older generation they are popular, not the kids.”

My one visit to Sarajevo during the siege (described in a chapter of my long essay Rising Up and Rising Down) took place in 1992, roughly half a year before the two young people were killed. Descriptions of the city in “Escape” and “Listening to the Shells” are based in part on my notes from that time and in part on my Sarajevo trip notes from 2007 and 2011.

Given names of characters in these three ex-Yugoslavian stories— People in this region would know which names are typically Serbian, Bosnian or Croatian. Some commonly occur in more than one group, such as Marija, which can be associated with both Serbian and Croatian women. I am informed (although I take it with a grain of salt) that a few names are still more specific; thus Indira might be a Bosnian girl from a mixed marriage or an atheist family.

Meaning of the name “Vrbanja Most”— My friend and translator Tatiana Jovanovic writes, first noting that there is no considerable amount of information on this edifice, since “it is not beautiful or historically interesting compared to some other bridges in Sarajevo”: “A name of the bridge ‘Vrbanja’ probably meant a willow grove… but some of researchers of the central medieval settlement (in Bosnia and Herzegovina) think that the name refers to [the] undiscovered key of ‘Vrhbosne’ (literally, the top of Bosnia). It was known also as ‘Ćirišinska cuprija’ or ‘Ćirišana’—i.e., ‘Chirishan Bridge’ [which] was a name of a small company that produced glue (“Ćiriša”… sounds [like] a Turkish word)… Probably, long time ago, in the ancient time, a wooden bridge was in this place, about which we can know because of discovery of some Roman bricks… in some fields in Kovacici, Velesici, etcetera. Bašeskija (an author, probably a historian) mentioned it [in] 1793 as a wooden bridge that was erected or renovated by a Jewish merchant. The previous one was destroyed by flood [in] 1791, and because it was needed to have a bridge in the same spot (especially for the Jewish people to go to their cemetery), the Jewish merchant paid for its renovation. It was restored again in [the] 19th c., but today, on the same spot, there is a new bridge made of reinforced concrete which was built after the Second World War.”

The Serbian officers with stockings over their faces on the Vrbanja Most (just before the beginning of the siege)— Mentioned in Kerim Lucarevic Doctor, The Battle for Sarajevo: Sentenced to Victory, trans. Saba Risaluddin and Hasan Roncevic (Sarajevo: TCU, 2000), p. 35.

LISTENING TO THE SHELLS

Occurrence in the Orthodox graveyard overlooking Bucá-Potok— Related in Lucarevic Doctor, pp. 29–31.

Comparison to my reporting from 1992 in Rising Up and Rising Down will show that my protagonist had it better than I did. Although my sojourn on the frontline was terrifyingly educational, if I had it all to do over again, perhaps I would rather spend my evenings at Vesna’s, flirting with her and meeting her friends. Too bad there were no such people.

THE LEADER

Epigraph: “There is no life on the earth without the dead in the earth.”— Branko Mikasinovich, Dragan Milivojevic and Vasa D. Mihailovich, Introduction to Yugoslav Literature: An Anthology of Fiction and Poetry (New York: Twayne, 1973), p. 176 (Veljko Petrovic, “The Earth,” n.d.).

THE TREASURE OF JOVO CIRTOVICH

Epigraph: “I could have been unvanquished…”— Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ivan Supicic, chief ed., Croatia in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (vol. 2 of Croatia and Europe) (London and Zagreb: Philip Wilson Publishers and Školska Knjiga, 2008), p. 122 (part of grave inscription).

Most descriptions of Trieste in this cluster of stories are based on visits in 1981, 2010 and 2012. Some descriptions of the old city are indebted to illustrations in Trieste Dall’Emporio al Futuro/vom Emporium in die Zukunft, Dalla Collezione di Stelio e Tity Davia alle foto del nuovo millenio per la rappresentazione della città in un viaggio ideale (Trieste: La Mongolfiera Libri, 2009).

Names of Serbian settlers in Trieste, events relating to the two Churches of San Spiridione, descriptions of those churches, the Triestine doings of Casanova (which actually occurred in 1772–74), the Triestine Serbs under the Napoleonic occupations, etcetera— After text and illustrations in Giorgio Milossevich, Trieste: The Church of/Die Kirche des San Spiridione (Trieste: Bruno Fachin Editore, 1999). I have altered history rather freely. The real Jovo Cirtovich (or Curtovich) did not arrive in Trieste in 1718 but was born then, in Trebinje, Herzegovina. He first visited Trieste in 1737. According to Milossevich, p. 34, he “was certainly not a refined person. He was a practical man aiming at essential things and full of new ideas and initiatives.” Apparently he began his career as a porter. This historical Curtovich would have lived in his warehouse (built in 1777), not on the hill. The Orthodox Church, or, more accurately, the first Church of San Spiridione, was built for both Greeks and Serbs in 1753 (thirty-five years after my Cirtovich’s arrival), visited by the Tsar in 1772, left in 1781, by the Greeks, who wished to worship in their own language, decked out with a pair of Muscovite bell towers in 1782, demolished in 1861 to forestall a potential cave-in, and rebuilt somewhat later in the form which I describe here. My invented Cirtovich married in 1754. Tanya, whom like all his children I have invented, would have been born in about 1764, so her father’s last voyage took place when she was fifteen. The names of Cirtovich’s brothers are all genuine. About his father’s death I know nothing. In 1806 Napoleon took ten rich traders hostage until Trieste paid him a vast tax; among them were the historical Jovo Cirtovich and Matteo Lazovich. Those two were incarcerated again in the third French occupation (1809). Cirtovich died that year, aged ninety-one, having outlived his children even though he had married three times. His brother Massimo closed down the family business in 1810.

Some details of Serbian dress and Orthodox tradition are indebted to Prince Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich, with the collaboration of Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich (Eleanor Calhoun), The Servian People: Their Past Glory and Their Destiny, 2 vols., ill. (New York: Scribner’s, 1910). A few incidents of life (for nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Montenegrins) under the Turkish occupation (for instance, a man’s execution by flogging in the market square) are indebted to Milovan Djilas, Land Without Justice, anon. trans. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958).

Serbian attitudes toward the Ottomans, and toward the Battle of Kosovo— Here is a typical (pre-1991) assessment: “During the Turkish occupation, the Serbian Orthodox Church was the only force that kept alive the national spirit and the hope for a better future.”— Mikasinovich, Milivojevic and Mihailovich, p. 2. Djilas relates some horrible stories of opportunistic murders of their Muslim neighbors by Orthodox Montenegrins, while also relating a few Turkish atrocities. A dark view (and widely subscribed to nowadays) of Serbian historiography is summarized in Branimir Anzulovic, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

Several Serbo-Croatian (as the language was still called in 1980) folk proverbs are taken, more or less altered for style, from Vasko Popa, comp., The Golden Apple: A Round of Stories, Songs, Spells, Proverbs and Riddles, ed. and trans. Andrew Harvey and Anne Pennington (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2010 repr. of 1980 ed.; orig. Serbo-Croatian ed. 1966), pp. 26, 32, 33, 41, 48, 65, 93.

Various obscure Roman coins, cities and provinces (Cyrrhus, Panemuteichus, Bithynia)— Some of my information comes from A.H.M. Jones, Fellow of All Souls College, The Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1937).

“Take counsel in wine…”— Benjamin Franklin, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1987), p. 1187 (“Poor Richard’s Almanack,” 1733–58).

Captain Vasojevic— The proud clan of this name was famous for its raids against the Turks.

Decline of Ragusan trade in the early eighteenth century, together with its causes and effects— Information from Francis W. Carter, Dubrovnik (Ragusa): A Classic City-State (London and New York: Seminar, 1972), pp. 407–14.

Some descriptions of Dalmatian medieval religious art and architecture and of Glagolitic derive from illustrations and text in that previously cited volume by the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Other descriptions are based on my notes from visits to Dalmatia in 1980, 1992, 1994, 2011 and 2012.

Archimedes’s suppositions— Great Books of the Western World, Robert Maynard Hutchins, ed.-in-chief, vol. 11: Euclid, Archimedes, Appolonius of Perga, Nicomachus, var. trans. (University of Chicago, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1975, 20th pr. of 1952 ed.), p. 525 (Archimedes, “The Sand-Reckoner,” bef. 212 B.C.).

“The Sultan’s rivals dragged him down from the sky” in 1730. This ruler, Ahmad III, had regained Morea from Venice in 1718, the year that Cirtovich arrived in Trieste.

Grisogono’s Venetian circles for calculating the heights of tides— From 1528. Grisogono was born in Zadar.

Description of traditional Serbian marriage customs— Based on research and translation by Tatiana Jovanovic. The source was Emma Stevanovic, Faculty of Philosophy; Tatiana says “she was a student probably in a department of Ethnology.” Much to my disappointment, Tatiana “omitted the most melodramatic and patriotic parts.”

Descriptions of the squid-entity in the dark-glass, of cephalopods generally, and of nautiluses— After photographs, diagrams and textual information in: Richard Ellis, The Search for the Giant Squid (New York: Lyons Press, 1998); Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Philippe Diolé, Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence, trans. J. F. Bernard (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1973); and Peter Douglas Ward, In Search of Nautilus: Three Centuries of Scientific Adventures in the Deep Pacific to Capture a Prehistoric — Living — Fossil (New York: Simon and Schuster/A New York Academy of Sciences Book, 1988).

The fumigation of a coffin, and the rite with coins— Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich and Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich, vol. 1, p. 70.

Porphyry’s claim about Plotinus— Great Books of the Western World, Robert Maynard Hutchins, ed.-in-chief, vol. 17: Plotinus: The Six Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page (University of Chicago, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), p. vi (introduction).

Various (but not all) descriptions of Marija Cirtovich and her attributes (affinity for doves, different-sized eyes, etc.)— After illustrations of Mother of God icons in Alfredo Tradigo, Icons and Saints of the Eastern Orthodox Church, trans. Stephen Satarelli (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Publications, 2006; orig. Italian ed. 2004).

The papyrus from Heracleopolis, and other such (e.g., the wrapping of the crocodile mummy)— All these are, alas, invented, but some details relating to handwriting, sites of excavation and the like derive from information in E. G. Turner, Greek Papyri: An Introduction (London: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1968).

Description of the Sphere of Fixed Stars (“that great blue dome of ultramarine”)— Based on the ceiling dome of San Spirodione Taumaturgo in Trieste.

Description of “the gloomy latitudes”— After a visit to Patagonia in December 2011.

The magical procedures followed on the island— Abbreviated from Sayed Idries Shah, The Secret Lore of Magic: Books of the Sorcerers (New York: Citadel Press, 1958), pp. 25–27 (The Key of Solomon, Son of David).

“The Patriarchs”: “There is no resurrection without death.”— Actually, Patriarch Gavrilo (1881–1950), as quoted in Anzulovic, p. 14.

The silver likeness of Saint Blasius— Seen by WTV in Ragusa (Dubrovnik).

Description of Mrs. Cirtovich— After a bust by Ruggero Rova (Trieste 1877–1965), Il Sorriso, 1910.

The Serbian crosses of black tar— Montague Summers, The Vampire in Europe (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1968; orig. ed. 1929?), p. 159.

The lucky man who dies at Easter— Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich and Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich, vol. 1, p. 26.

“Society has no way out of disappointment…”— Djilas, p. 257.

THE MADONNA’S FOREHEAD

In some versions of the tale of why she bled, a frustrated player threw a boca ball at the Madonna’s forehead. In the others, someone threw a stone, not a brick. She was the Madonna delle Grazie, or “Dei Fiori”—by one account the property of the family Fiori, since she was found in the nineteenth century when someone was digging in the Fioris’ garden.

“we may conceive of the masochism merely as a painting…”— Wilhelm Stekel, M.D., Sadism and Masochism: The Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty, trans. Louise Brink, Ph.D., vol. 1 (New York: Liveright, 1953 repr. of 1929 ed.), p. 210.

Varying opinions regarding the Madonna’s forehead— In the end our disagreements solidified into two factions, which assembled themselves in the appropriate cafés. Speaking on behalf of the old men, I want to dig my finger’s crook into your collarbone so that you’ll believe me when I insist that life was much better when we possessed as many theories as Triestini, and discussion was as many-grooved as the costumes for “Aida”…—when we could mumble into our grappas about the Madonna, our mumblings even extending beyond the metaphysical to erotic considerations, so that the rancor with which we contested our interpretations of her spilled blood could, just like our city’s yellow, soapy-feeling old marble, dissolve decade by decade in the acidic air. Oh, but human nature’s not like that! At my stage of life, all I want is the lovely blue sky with grey cream in it; and however bad it was, the past stays safely past; that Trieste’s always misty blue and white like a faded travel poster. Until the Romans roofed this territory with their authority, it was contested among Illyrians, Istrians, Celts and others; and after the Romans, first Venice, then Austria and finally Italy got their hands on it. Napoleon was here in 1797, just for the day. But I didn’t live through most of that, so it’s pleasant to talk about; I never oppose local color; in fact, I’m proud of that blue-and-red fragment of the old Teatro Verdi. — Nowadays it’s less complicated. There are only two factions: the light and the darkness. Of course, I forget which is which.

CAT GODDESS

The bright yet pastel-like oil paintings of Leonor Fini celebrate femininity, androgyny, narcissism, surrealism and decadence. Often her women are Klimt-like in their pallid elongations. Aside from her cats, she loved nothing better than a good quarrel; best of all was when she orchestrated a falling-out between two of her friends. In 2009 I visited a postmortem retrospective of this great artist’s work at the Museo Revoltella — the perfect venue, I decided, admiring some more Tominzes in gilded oval frames: near-naked young women fiddling with themselves. In the dead Baron’s library, the backs of the chairs were carved with twin caryatid-like females who played quite busily with their own breasts. The red velvet cushions reminded me of Leonor Fini’s lips. Mostly, of course, I studied Leonor’s paintings. Entranced, I expressed my appreciation to the coat check girl. She smiled and said: Can you catch me? — Before I realized who she was, a strangely pallid corseted woman in a lace-sleeved red tunic was running through Trieste, daring me to kiss her. Lace around her throat, lace between her legs; oh, my! Finally she permitted me to grasp her from behind while she leaned against an antique column. As it happened, in those days I was still as handsome as Napoleon used to be back in 1805, so when I asked for a kiss, I hoped for assent, but she said: I’ll only make love if you act like a woman. — When I finally agreed, that wary-eyed tease, as magnificently black-clad (in gloves, dress, the whole works) and as regally bored as the Duchess of Aosta, refused to take anything off. Maliciously giggling, she next proposed that I act like a cat. But I did not wish to. Fortunately for my aspirations, the previous night I had caught a ghost-fish, which I was wearing around my neck (for creatures of that sort never stink), so I held it out into the air behind Leonor’s ankles, and then, just as I had hoped, three of her ghost-cats crept out of nowhere to bat that spirit-meat between them and finally share a few nibbles. This sight softened my friend, so she led me into an irregularly edged apartment tower whose windows, each of a different shape, were shuttered by concretions of unpainted planks; and in one room we lay down together to fill each other with Trieste, where the afternoon sky is bluer and the trembling bedroom curtains so much whiter that they might as well be silver and gold.

Several descriptions of Leonor Fini’s paintings and of photographs of her derive from illustrations in: Museo Revoltella Trieste, Leonor Fini: L’Italienne de Paris [exhibition catalogue] (Trieste: 2009), and Peter Webb, Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini (New York: Vendome Press, n.d.).

A few descriptions of elegant Triestinas are based on photographs in Elvio Guagnini and Italo Zannier, eds., La Trieste dei Wulz: Volti di una Storia: Fotographie 1860–1980 (Trieste: Alinari, 1989).

The shy little marble girl— Sculpted by Donato Barcaglia, 1871. Now in the Museo Revoltella in Trieste.

The story (which Leonor especially loved) of Maximilian and “La Paloma”— From Webb, p. 10.

The “slim, lovely young wasp-waisted beauty in a black jacket-skirt and black tights who held a whip and sometimes permitted him to feed tidbits to her pet bulldog”— Based on a painting by Giuseppe de Nittis, 1878, La Signora del Cane (Ritorno dalle Corse), which I saw at the Museo Revoltella.

Description of Rijeka— After a visit there in 2009.

The pale man in the photographer’s doorway in Prague— After a photograph in Pavel Scheufler, Fotografiké Album Čech 1839–1914 (Prague?: Odeon, 1989).

Leonor’s inability to face the death of her own cats— Webb, p. 207.

Leonor’s interest first in cadavers, then in mummies and skeletons— Somewhat after a direct quotation in Webb, p. 11.

“I dislike the deference with which your Rossetti’s been treated.”— Ibid., p. 71, somewhat altered.

The perfumed cat excrement at Leonor’s— After Webb, p. 46, who implies that the story may be apocryphal.

The pale women wading naked in dark water— After Museo Revoltella Trieste, pp. 160–61 (La Bagnanti, 1959).

“The men around me are dead…”— Altered from Webb, p. 143.

“I prefer cats…”— Altered from Webb, p. 25.

“femininity triumphing over a city”— Webb, p. 11 (Leonor is describing her relief of Amazons trampling men).

The “woman not unlike Giovanna, but with still longer, richer hair”— After Museo Revoltella Trieste, p. 125 (Streghe Amauri, 1947).

Descriptions of mummies, Sekhmet, Hathor, etcetera— Based on visits to the Museo Egizio di Torino in 2009 and 2012.

THE TRENCH GHOST

Description of the trenches at Redipuglia— After a visit there in May 2012.

“I am not this.”— This simple yet profound point is indebted to I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, trans. from the Marathi taperecordings [sic] by Maurice Frydman, rev. & ed. Sudhakar S. Dikshit (Durham, NC: Acorn Press, 1973), p. 59: “To know what you are you must first investigate and know what you are not.”

Description of the pillboxes at Tungesnes (on the coast west of Stavanger)— After a visit there in September 2011.

“Find what is it that never sleeps and never wakes, and whose pale reflection is our sense of ‘I.’”— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, p. 12.

“the pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless.”— Ralph D. Sawyer, with Mei-Chün Sawyer, comp. and trans., The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China (San Francisco: Westview, 1993), p. 335 (“Questions and Replies between T’ang T’ai-tsung and Li Wei-king” [written in Tang or Sung period], quoting Sun-tzu).

“It is the body that is in danger, not you.”— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, p. 412.

THE FAITHFUL WIFE

A few details of daily life in preindustrial Bohemia are indebted to information in Sylvia Welner and Kevin Welner, eds., Small Doses of Arsenic: A Bohemian Woman’s Story of Survival (New York: Hamilton Books / The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2005), pp. 4–23, 33–35. [The letter-writer’s surname is not given; she is simply introduced as Tonca, writing to her son Jaroslav. Her childhood recollections take place in the early twentieth century; I have assumed that the early-nineteenth-century existence of Michael and Milena’s family was no richer than hers.]

Return of female Romanian vampires; tale of Alexander of Pyrgos— Summers, The Vampire in Europe, pp. 310, 232.

The Bohemian custom of masking oneself on the way home from a funeral— Ibid., p. 287.

The seventh Mansion of the Moon, called Alarzach— Francis Barrett, A Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer: A Complete System of Occult Philosophy (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1975 pbk. repr. of 1975 ed.; orig. pub. 1801), Book I, p. 154.

The tale of Merit— Her grave-goods and her husband’s are on display (“the tomb of Kha”) at the Museo Egizio di Torino.

“I have found a woman more bitter than death…”— Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, The Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Rev. Montague R. Summers (New York: Dover, 1971 repr. of 1948 rev. ed; orig. Latin ed. ca. 1484), p. 47. (Sentence originally began with “And I have found…”).

The vampire who first chuckles, then whinnies like a horse— Pëtr Bogatyrëv, Vampires in the Carpathians: Magical Acts, Rites, and Beliefs in Subcarpathian Rus’, trans. Stephen Reynolds and Patricia A. Krafcik, w/ bio. intro. by Svetlana P. Sorokina (New York: East European Monographs, dist. Columbia University Press, 1998; orig. French ed. 1929), p. 132.

The Dark Man by the water (“he torments people when he finds them by the waterside”)— Ibid., p. 133.

The eleventh Mansion of the Moon, called Azobra— Barrett, p. 155.

“Some say that vampires have two hearts.”— Information from Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, The Complete Dracula: Two Books in One! Combining “Dracula, a Biography of Vlad the Impaler,” and the bestseller “In Search of Dracula” (Acton, MA: Copley, 1985), p. 95.

Some of the later descriptions of Milena floating in her bath are inspired by Bonnard paintings.

DOROTEJA

What is done with cristallium etcetera— Dr. G. Storms, Anglo-Saxon Magic (The Hague: Martinius Nijhoff, Centrale Drukkerij N.V., Nijimegen, 1948), p. 235 (The Holy Drink against elf-tricks). Since I have moved this spell to Bohemia, I changed elves to goblins.

“This is my help against the evil late birth…”— Ibid., pp. 196, 199 (Against Miscarriage; original reads “this as my help…”).

Rite of washing in silver-water on New Year’s Day— Bogatyrëv, p. 42.

Churchgoing of dead souls on Holy Saturday— Ibid., p. 68.

The dead woman who returned to bite her husband’s finger— Ibid., p. 120.

THE JUDGE’S PROMISE

Epigraph: “And finally let the Judge come in…”— The Malleus Maleficarum, p. 231.

The incident in Neinstade (which supposedly took place in 1603)— Elaborated after Summers, The Vampire in Europe, p. 201.

“the ill-fated Bohemian rectangle”— Phrase quoted in Joseph Wechsberg, Prague, the Mystical City (New York: Macmillan, 1971), p. 1.

Police work of Frederick the Great and the Police President of Berlin (both actually in the early nineteenth century)— Clive Emsley, Policing and Its Context 1750–1870 (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), pp. 99–100.

Location of the Golem’s corpse and Dr. Faustus’s residence— Wechsberg, pp. 5, 38.

Travails of Bohemian linen-weavers— Jaroslav Pánek, Oldrich Tuma et al., A History of the Czech Lands (Charles University in Prague: Karolinum Press, 2009), p. 292.

Description of the second medallion of the sun— Information from Shah, pp. 46–47.

“And though it was sore grief to us to hear such things of you, inspector…”— Tweaked a trifle from The Malleus Maleficarum, pp. 255–56 (formula uttered to a penitent relapsed heretic).

Characteristics of various demons— Shah, pp. 86–88.

Definition of Abnahaya— Barrett, p. 156.

The witch’s purpose in digging up a dead man’s head— Ibid., p. 108.

“The Romanians say that a vampire can go up into the sky…”— Information from Summers, The Vampire in Europe, p. 306.

The myth of a secret tunnel from Prague’s Jewish Ghetto to Jerusalem— Wechsberg, p. 29.

The witch-events of Saint John’s Day— Bogatyrëv, p. 76.

“this sort of creature does not give anything for nothing.”— Shah, p. 80 (Grimorium Verum, oldest known version 1517).

JUNE EIGHTEENTH

Epigraph: “So long as there is an Emperor…”— Joan Haslip, The Crown of Mexico: Maximilian and His Empress Carlota (New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1972 repr. of 1971 English ed.), p. 367.

Various information on Maximilian’s life and career was obtained from Haslip, and Jasper Ridley, Maximilian and Juárez (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992).

Maximilian’s aspirations: a castle and garden by the sea— Haslip, p. 113. Some of my descriptions of Miramar are a trifle anachronistic, since the place was merely a “bungalow” when he and Charlotte lived there (Ridley, p. 185).

“Owing to some radical defect in the Mexican character…”— R. Lockwood Tower, ed., A Carolinian Goes to War: The Civil War Narrative of Arthur Middleton Manigault (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992 pbk. repr. of 1983 ed.; orig. ms. prob. bef. 1868), p. 322 (Appendix II: The Mexican War Service of Arthur Middleton Manigault).

Maximilian’s china blue eyes and beautiful teeth— Information from J. J. Kendall, Late Captain H.M. 44th and 6th Regiments, and subsequently in the Service of His late Majesty, the Emperor of Mexico, Mexico Under Maximilian (London: T. Cautley Newby, 1871), p. 157. According to a German observer, however, the Emperor’s “chief defect is his ugly teeth, which he shows too much as he speaks” (Haslip, p. 235).

“Matters ran on pretty well for the first two years…”— Kendall, p. 185.

“No Mexican has such warm feelings for his country and its progress as I.”— Charles Allen Smart, Viva Juárez: A Biography (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1963), p. 357 (said in 1865).

Ten-year serfdom for negroes— Ridley calls this “particularly ironic” (p. 216) since Maximilian had just abolished peonage. The new decree was for the convenience of ex-Confederate colonists.

“We see nothing to respect in this country…”— Haslip, p. 268.

“If necessary, I can lead an army…”— Ibid., p. 302.

Details of Maximilian’s last days and execution— Ridley, pp. 262–77, Haslip, pp. 484–98.

“I am here because I would not listen to this woman’s advice” and Maximilian’s reply— Slightly reworded from Haslip, p. 494.

Curtopassi scissoring away his signature— Thus Haslip. According to Ridley (p. 265), it was Lago.

Descriptions of retablos— After text and illustrations in Elizabeth Netto Calil Zarur and Charles Muir Lovell, eds., Art and Faith in Mexico: The Nineteenth-Century Retablo Tradition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001). The votive caption in my text is invented.

Description of the Holy Child of Atocha— After two illustrations in Zarur and Lovell, pp. 108–9.

“in France it was no longer permissible to be mistaken.”— Haslip, p. 196.

The reality of Princess Salm-Salm’s seduction attempt, which is reported in several biographies of the Emperor, does not convince Ridley, who asserts (pp. 266–67) that it “sounds like the gossip of an officers’ mess.”

The various discontents of Charlotte— Haslip proposes (p. 127) that “Maximilian, who was neither very virile nor highly sexed and who was only attracted by the novel and exotic, found that with Charlotte he could no longer function as a man.”

“You must stay here for the night…”— Haslip, p. 487.

The gardener’s daughter in Cuernevaca— Ridley, p. 171. According to Haslip, she was the gardener’s wife. Concepción Sedano is said to have given birth to Maximilian’s son in August 1866 and died “of grief” the following year. The son might have been a man who was shot as a spy in France during World War I.

The slave-girls of Smyrna— Ridley, p. 50.

Reading material of Miramón and Maximilian— Ridley, pp. 270–71.

First dream: Description of Maximilian’s embalmed corpse— After an illustration in Gilbert M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson, eds., The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 268 (letter from Empress Carlota to Empress Eugénie, 1867).

Details of Maximilian’s postmortem journey: The Novara, the hearse in Trieste; the marble tomb in Vienna— Gene Smith, Maximilian and Carlota: A Tale of Romance and Tragedy (New York: William Morrow, 1973), pp. 284–85.

“Anything is better than to sit contemplating the sea at Miramar…”— Haslip, p. 361.

“Just as when upon first penetrating the Brazilian jungle he nearly shouted for joy…”— This sentence is grounded in the following haunting words of Maximilian’s, which do indeed refer to the Brazilian jungle (1860): “It was the moment when all we have read in books becomes imbued with life, when the rare insects and butterflies contained in our limited and laboriously formed collections suddenly take wing, when the pygmy growth of our confined glasshouses expand into giant plants and forests…. the moment in which the book gains life — the dream reality” (quoted in Haslip, p. 130).

Maximilian’s order for two thousand nightingales— Haslip, p. 361.

Second dream (based on the sacrificial incarnation of Tezatlipoca, whose name is also transliterated Teczatlipoca)— J. Eric Thompson, in charge of Central and South American Archaeology, Field Museum, Chicago, Mexico Before Cortez: An Account of the Daily Life, Religion, and Ritual of the Aztecs and Kindred Peoples (New York: Scribner’s, 1937), pp. 205–210. The victim was chosen from a pool of idle young men who were kept on reserve for the purpose. His enjoyments lasted for a year; he was not unlike one of our American range cattle, who wander freely under the sky, grazing and copulating until they pay our price (which at least spares them old age). Tezatlipoca’s four wives were Flower Goddess, Maize Goddess, Water [Goddess?] and Salt Goddess. On p. 212 the author remarks: “This ceremony signified that those who had had riches and pleasures during their life would in the end come to poverty and pain.”

Description of the quetzal-feather headdress— After an illustration in Brian M. Fagan, Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade: The Americas Before Columbus (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p. 12.

“amidst cool night winds”— One meaning of “Tezatlipoca” was “night wind.” Another was “youth.” He was “associated with human rulership,” all three of these details according to Joseph and Henderson, pp. 75–76 (Inga Clendinnen, “The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society”).

The obsidian mirror— This was another reified meaning of the name Tezatlipoca, who represented war, darkness and masculinity. The surrogate’s death facilitated the potency of other men. Zarur and Lovell, p. 104.

Description of the sacrificial stone basin— After an illustration in Fagan, p. 21.

“Never complain, for it is a sign of weakness.”— Ridley, p. 48 (one of Maximilian’s twenty-seven principles).

“God bless the Emperor!”— Haslip, p. 498.

Carlota: “One sees red…”— Smith, p. 291. [Ellipsis in original between “gay.” and “The frontier.”]

The incarnation of Teteoinan— Details from Thompson, p. 186.

The incarnation of Ilamatecuhtli— Ibid., p. 191.

“Well, you have your butterflies… the age of seventy.”— Altered and expanded from Haslip, p. 160.

THE CEMETERY OF THE WORLD

Epigraph: “Woe is me, Llorona!…”— Margit Frenk et al., comp. & ed., El Colegio de México, Cancionero Folklórico de México, tomo 2: Coplas del Amor Desdichado y Otras Coplas de Amor, p. 122 (3646, “La Llorona,” trans. by WTV).

The two possible origins of the plague— I have invented both of these. However, my description of the old volumes in the Archives of the Ayumiento de Veracruz (from which, thanks to translations by Teresa McFarland, I did garner a few rhetorical flourishes, together with the fact of the conversion of the municipal slaughterhouse into a barracks in 1648) is based on examination of them in January 2011, and in particular on the following: (1) Año 1608–1699, caja 01, vol. 1. (2) Caja 3, año de 1804; libro n 98 tomo 5. [As you can see, the cataloguing is inconsistent.]

Founding of Villarica, and the date of its removal to Veracruz; situation of the garrison, and a couple of other such details— Two Hearts, One Soul: The Correspondence of the Condesa de Galve, 1688–96, ed. & trans. Meredith D. Dodge and Rick Hendricks (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), p. 159n. In this place we are told that “lack of city walls made the [new] settlement vulnerable to strong north winds,” but in Veracruz I was informed that the city was “the cemetery of the world” for at least two centuries in part because of the fetor within its walls, so for this story I chose to follow local knowledge, or legend, and mention walls. Veracruz may or may not have been erected directly over an Indian town. A conquistador who was there locates it “a mile and a half from this fortress-like place called Quiahuitzlan” (Bernal Díaz [del Castillo], The Conquest of New Spain, trans. J. M. Cohen [New York: Penguin, 1963], p. 114).

Visual reckoning method when entering Veracruz Harbor— “In the old days navigators got into Vera Cruz by the picturesque means of steering so that the tower of the Church of San Francisco covered the tower of the cathedral… How the vast, shining wealth of Mexico poured into Europe through this port… [!]”— Edith O’Shaughnessy [Mrs. Nelson O’Shaughnessy], Diplomatic Days (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1917), p. 12.

The Marqueses del Valle were Cortés’s descendants, and for some years they ran the port of Veracruz.

Miscellaneous descriptions of Cempoala, the Casa de Cortés and Veracruz generally, including of the “haunted” houses (which were in fact pointed out to me as such)— From notes taken during that same visit in 2011.

The life and goddess-avatars of Malinche— Information from Anna Lanyon, Malinche’s Conquest (Crows Nest, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1999).

Doña Marina’s statement that “she would rather serve her husband and Cortés than anything else in the world”— Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico 1517–1521, ed. Genaro García, trans. A. P. Maudslay (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1956), p. 68. This is another translation of the Díaz text cited earlier.

Legends about La Llorona and other ghosts in Veracruz— From stories told to me by taxi drivers, etcetera, in 2011. Here is a fine one: A driver said that once he was driving to Cardel in his taxi and he saw a woman in a white dress standing at the edge of the road. She waved him down and asked him to give her a ride, all the while keeping her face hidden from him. La Llorona was frequently spoken of in these parts. She was said to wear a long white dress. She had long black hair down to her ankles and a horrible horse’s head. So the driver drove past the strange woman, who was likewise dressed in white, then made a U-turn in hopes of seeing her from the front. At once she disappeared. — “What would she do if you’d said: Oh, you’re so beautiful! and kissed her face?”— “The man would die at once,” he said, bored. “Did you ever see the ghost of Malinche or Cortés?”— “Not around here.”— “What about the old gods?”— “Not in this zone. But up at Cempoala, if you go into the ruins, there’s a big circle of stones, and if you stand at the middle of the circle and stare into the sun, the sun god’s energy will pour into you and cure all your problems.”

The castle— I asked a man about ghosts, and he said: “Oh, yes, La Llorona can be heard in the castle. At three or four in the morning, you can see swings moving in this playground, if no one is there. You can feel them coming out to follow you. There are other presences in other buildings, but the castle is the worst.”

Description of La Llorona after Ricardo feeds her the jade bead— After an illustration in Rubén Morante López, A Guided Tour: Xalapa Museum of Anthropology, trans. Irene Marquina (Xalapa: Gobierno del Estado de Veracuz de Ignacio de la Llave y Universidad Veracruzana, 2004), p. 147.

The golden parting gifts from La Llorona— Based on real Aztec goldwork on display in the Baluarte. Ordinarily they would have been melted down by the Spaniards, but the galleon sank. An octopus fisherman found them in a wreck, and went to jail for not disclosing them.

TWO KINGS IN ZIÑOGAVA

Epigraph: “But what does the social order do…?”— Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragosa, trans. Ian Maclean (New York: Penguin Classics, 1996 repr. of 1995 ed.; orig. French ms. ca. 1812), p. 517.

Common Spanish reference (ca. 1625) to an elegant, white-dressed black woman as a mosca en leche, a “fly in milk”— Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 19.

A few details of religious coercion and sacramental fees are taken (perhaps not entirely accurately, since Veracruz is not in the valley of Mexico) from Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico 1519–1810 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964). Some descriptions of masters’ and mistresses’ cruelty to slaves are derived from period woodcuts reproduced in Benjamin Nuñez, with the assistance of the African Bibliographic Center, Dictionary of Afro-Latin American Civilization (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980).

Description of the aventurine cask— From information in the Condesa de Galve, p. 143. Aventurine was a kind of glass containing scintillating particles.

Description and history of San Juan de Ulúa— After a visit there in 2011, and information from Teresa del Rosario Ceballos y Lizama, Una visita al pasado de San Juan de Ulúa [contains abbreviated English trans.] (Veracruz?: self-published? 2010). For the legends of Chucho el Roto and the Mulata de Córdoba, see p. 69. In English the island’s name is often spelled “Ulloa.”

“Mestiza, goddess of the orient…”— Frenk, p. 376 (5182, estrofa suelta, trans. by Teresa McFarland and WTV).

Franciscan desire to create a Kingdom of the Gospels in Mexico— Alicia Hernández Chávez, Mexico: A Brief History, trans. Andy Klatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006; orig. Spanish-lang. ed. 2000), p. 38.

“Stretch out your arms, negrita…”— Invented by WTV.

Benito Juárez: “I know that the rich and the powerful…”— Smart, p. 355 (said in 1865).

The Blue Range in Moquí Province (believed in from end of seventeenth century until the nineteenth)— Luis Weckmann, of the Mexican Academy of History, The Medieval Heritage of Mexico, trans. Frances M. López-Morillas (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), p. 39.

The Amazon of Ziñogava; characteristics of Amazons; claim of the Tarascans— Ibid., pp. 51, 49.

The skeleton hand— A not entirely uncommon Gothic element. For instance, I once read an English tale about a woman who was murdered by a rejected suitor on her wedding night. No one could prove anything against the man; the body had disappeared, and so had he. Her skeleton was found years later; her sister asked that the hand be cut off, in case it could bring about justice. One day the murderer came into the bar where it was displayed (yes, in a velvet-lined glass box, although in this version the velvet was black, not red, which I thought better for a Mexican setting), stared at it in horror, approached the glass box, touched it, and blood appeared on his fingers.

The crocodile “bullfights” of Dorantes de Carranza (ca. 1593)— Weckmann, p. 122.

“Much do I care for my María…”— Frenk, p. 121 (3636, “¡Ay! qué diantre de María,” trans. by WTV).

The head’s magic power— This may not touch your belief, but in 2011 I saw for myself how some pyramidal little tugboat could pull a long, many-smokestacked Rickmers freighter right past San Juan de Ulúa and out of Veracruz Harbor without seeming effort.

First arrival of Cortés at San Juan de Ulúa— Bernal Díaz, The Conquest of New Spain, p. 69. On the next page this conquistador describes the future site of Veracruz as “no level land, nothing but sand-dunes.”

Colors and significances of ancient Mexica directions— Zarur and Lovell, pp. 98–99.

“they are dead; they will not live…”— Isaiah 26:14.

Description of the Queen with “her eyes squinted shut like a corpse’s”— After an illustration in López, p. 153. “The closed eyes and the open mouth of this female figure indicate that she is dead.”

The two fountains of Huasteca and the magic mountain with the petrifying river— Weckmann, pp. 40, 39.

The shrub called hueloxóchitl—Lieut. R.W.H. Hardy, R.N., Travels in the Interior of Mexico, in 1825, 1826, 1827, and 1828 (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1829), p. 533. I have Mexicanized the orthography of Hardy’s huelosóchil.

“engordar el cochino”— Christoph Rosenmüller, Patrons, Partisans and Palace Intrigues: The Court Society of Colonial Mexico, 1702–1710 (Calgary, Alberta: University of Calgary Press, 2008), p. 45. This may be an anachronism, since the phrase was current in 1710, but then again perhaps it was in use a half-century earlier; therefore, dear reader, please let me off the hook.

Punishment of concubinage— Weckmann, p. 455.

“Sad is my heart, negrita…”— Frenk et al, p. 5 (2773a, “El Siquisirí,” trans. by Teresa McFarland and WTV).

Former name for San Juan de Ulúa: Chalchiuhcuecan— Francisco López de Gómara, Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary, trans. and ed. Lesley Byrd Simpson from 1552 ed. (Berkeley: University of California, 1964), p. 54.

THE WHITE-ARMED LADY

Epigraph: “For the white-armed lady…”— Snorri Sturluson [attributed; but the true compiler’s identity is uncertain], The Poetic Edda, trans. Lee M. Hollander, 2nd. ed., rev. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962; orig. texts 9th–14th cent.), p. 161 (stanza 7; slightly “retranslated” by WTV).

WHERE YOUR TREASURE IS

Kvitsøy is an island about twenty kilometers northwest of Stavanger.

“Better is the end of a thing than its beginning.”— Ecclesiastes 7:8.

“To what shall I compare the kingdom of God?…”— Luke 13:20–21.

The flower called guldå— Galeopsis speciosa Leppeblomstfam.

“I never knew you…”—Matthew 7:23

A valurt-flower — Symphytum officinale Rubladfam.

Rogaland is the district containing Stavanger.

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures…”— Matthew 6:19, 21.

“Somehow Astrid helped her make up the money — in secret of course.”— The following verse might apply to Astrid’s pre- and postmortem doings: “But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”— Matthew 6:3–4.

Bishop Eriksøn— Jørgen Eriksøn, the Bishop of Stavanger in 1571–1604, proved that the Lutherans were as firm against witchcraft as the Catholics. In 1584 Stavanger was the proud originator of the witchcraft law whose provisions eventually put to death about three hundred people in Norway, and we can give the Bishop some of the credit. The victims got hanged, burned or decapitated. In a portrait, the Bishop’s immense red moustache bends down over his mouth like the eaves of an old turf house, and his dark little eyes are sad and watchful in his pink moon-face.

“Blessed are those who are persecuted” and “blessed are the meek”— Matthew 5:10, 5:5.

THE MEMORY STONE

Epigraph: “Most people say that the bride was rather gloomy…”—Diana Whaley, ed., Sagas of Warrior-Poets (New York: Penguin Books, p. 136, “The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue,” trans. Katrina Atwood). In the epigraph I have emended “Serpent-tongue” to “Serpent-Tongue.”

The rock with the footprints and ship-carvings actually does lie in the center of Stavanger, and anyone who wishes can stand on it.

The description of the landscape near Valhalla is derived from notes I took around Lillehammer in 2006. I am especially grateful to John Erik Riley for a beautiful driving trip toward Jötunheim.

THE NARROW PASSAGE

Epigraph: “… if foul witch dwell…”— Hollander, p. 239 (stanza 28; slightly “retranslated” by WTV).

As mentioned in the source-notes to “Where Your Treasure Is,” Rogaland is the district containing Stavanger.

According to this city’s Sjøfartsmuseum, Stavanger was one of the main embarkation ports for American-bound emigrants from 1825 to 1870. And here my celestial captain requires me to insert an endorsement for Den Norske Amerikalinje, eneste norske passagerlinje til New-York. This ship made seven hundred and seventy transoceanic voyages, the last one being in 1963.

The discussion of emigration in my story (including the tale of the Amelia) relies considerably on information in Egil Harald Grude’s pamphlet From Vågen to America: The Migrant Exodus 1825–1930, trans. Susan Tyrrel (Stavanger: Dept. Maritime Museum in cooperation with Stavanger Vesta Insurance Co., printed by Rostrup Grafiske A.S., September 1986). According to Eli N. Aga and Hans Eyvind Næss, From Runes to Rigs: Cultural History Treasures of the Stavanger Region, trans. Rolf E. Gooderham (Stavanger?: Kulturkonsult, 2001), the herring arrived suddenly in 1808 (p. 88); then (p. 94) “the influx of herring became more and more unreliable after 1850, and the fishery came to an end in the 1870s.”

Some of my descriptions of Stavanger and the herring factories at this period are derived from illustrations (and, occasionally, text) in Susan Tyrell, Once Upon a Town (Stavanger: Dreyer Bok, 1979), pp. 26, 32–37, 75. Nowadays Stavanger is blessed with night-water twitching with reflected window-lights, and rain clouds hang nearly blue over the great oil ships, whose bridges glow more brightly than anything, while faraway ivory-yellow windows call across the black water.

Saint Mary’s and Haakon’s church— These are at Asvaldsnes (a visit for which I thank Mr. Eirik Bø), and here I first heard of that Doomsday legend.

Hjelmeland and Suldal are two contiguous districts to the northeast of Stavanger, which, as I have said, lies in Rogaland. Hjelmeland is closer.

Reverend Johansen’s Bible passage: “Carry me, O LORD…”— Of course this is not a Bible passage at all, but a stanza from the Eddic poem “Skírnismál,” which I have clothed in a pseudo-Christian disguise. The original reads: “Thy steed then lend me to lift me o’er weird / ring of flickering flame, / the sword also that swings itself, / if wise he who wields it” (Hollander, p. 67).

Description of the “petroglyphs of long ships”— After a photograph in Frá haug ok heithni: Tidsskrift for Rogalands Arkeologiske Forening (Stavanger), nr. 1, 2007, p. 17.

“For the gate is narrow…”— Matthew 7:14.

“Glasir stands gold-leaved before Sigtyr’s halls.”— Snorri Sturluson, Edda, trans. Anthony Faulkes (London: J. M. Dent & Sons / Everyman, 1992 repr. of 1987 ed.), p. 96 (my “retranslation” of a line quoted in isolation from Skaldskaparmal). The title may be unclear, so let me note that this book is not in the Elder or Poetic Edda, which I cite as “Hollander,” but the Younger or Prose Edda, written ca. 1220–30. “Sygtyr” is one of Odin’s many names.

The maneuvers of King Rörek— Olaf Sagas, pp. 196–97.

“If you, Kristina, and you, Øistein, do not yet hate each other…”—Cf. Luke 14:26.

Description of the pond behind the Domkirke— Frá haug ok heithni, nr. 1, 2004, p. 7 (Bodil Wolf Johnsen, Byparken — En Historisk Oversikt, landscape painting from 1852).

THE QUEEN’S GRAVE

Epigraph: “But how is that future diminished…”— Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. E. B. Pusey, D.D. (London: Dent/Everyman’s Library, 1962; orig. Latin text bef. 430 A.D.), p. 274.

Description of the queen’s grave and its environs— After a visit in 2011 (thanks to the lovely Marit Egaas) to Hå Old Rectory, Nærbo, a seaside cemetery of sixty-odd Bronze Age mounds; and to Tinghaud and Krosshaug (near Klepp) where there is in fact an ancient queen’s grave.

The first Hnoss, Swegde, postmortem taxes to Frey, etcetera— Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, Part Two: Sagas of the Norse Kings, trans. Samuel Laing, rev. Peter Foote, M.A. (New York: Dutton: Everyman’s Library, 1961 rev. of 1844 trans.; orig. text 1220–1235), pp. 7–17. My Queen Hnoss is invented, as is her husband, King Yngvar, not to mention the Jötunsbok (I do wish that Frost Giants could write).

Einar Audunsson— My invention.

THE GHOST OF RAINY MOUNTAIN

Rainy Mountain is an invented place, but some of the landscape is indebted to the shrine of Nikko.

THE CAMERA GHOST

The watcher on the side— For readers who might not be familiar with Japanese Noh plays, the “watcher on the side,” the waki, is the one to whom the story (usually one of suffering as a result of an undying attachment) is narrated. Several other Noh references appear in “The Camera Ghost.” These would require much explication here, none of which is needed (I hope) to parse the story. A résumé of Noh characters and situations may be found in my book Kissing the Mask.

My camera’s eye— It was certainly strict in its fashion, neither blinking away an annoying telephone wire nor softening anything sad with a tactful tear. But because it was so uncompromising, it taught me how to see more carefully, so that unwanted telephone wires became fewer over the years.

“Was he two or were we one?”— These lines and the scene within the camera were partly inspired by watching the great Noh actor Mr. Umewaka Roruko in the backstage “mirror room” and interviewing him about his sensations. See my Kissing the Mask. It has been said that while preparing for a performance the Noh actor gazes into the mirror at his masked self, until he and the masked other come together. Still more haunting to me, the actor compels himself to see the stage as mirror and himself as reflected image. See Kunio Komparu, The Noh Theater: Principles and Perspectives, trans. Jane Corddry [text] and Stephen Comee [plays] (New York: Weatherhill/Tankosha, 1983 rev. expanded ed. of orig. 1980 Japanese text), pp. 7–8.

“Down this road we go, we go; / delusion’s road…”— Meant to sound like a Noh chorus, but all my mumbo-jumbo.

“and new pictures bloom up for the plucking, / so that I can never rest, never rest.”— This reflects the obsessive attachment of a ghost in a Noh play (or, for that matter, an Eastern European vampire who can’t help but count grains of rice until sunrise overtakes him). But in Noh the ghost would be so utterly tortured by his misery that he would be grateful to get freed by a priest and go into oblivion, whereas the protagonist of this story is proud to soldier on.

“In every grain of silver is a place of practice…”— These two lines allude to a much longer stanza of the Nara-era “Buddha Kingdom of the Flower Garland”: “In every speck of dust the Buddha establishes a place of practice, / Where he enlightens every being and displays spiritual wonders. /… while coursing through a past of a hundred thousand eons…”— William Theodore de Bary, Donald Keene, George Tanabe and Paul Varley, comps., Sources of Japanese Tradition, vol. 1: From Earliest Times to 1600 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001; orig. comp. 1950s), p. 110.

The beauty of the old waitress— The lens is fortuitously cracked through which poets see verses about the muted rusty beauties of decrepitude.

THE CHERRY TREE GHOST

Epigraph: “If cherry blossoms were never in this world…”— Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson, trans. and eds., From the Country of Eight Islands: An Anthology of Japanese Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 108 (tanka from “On Nunobiki Waterfall,” “retranslated” by WTV).

“because the girl paid threefold reverence to the Three Buddhist Treasures…”— Information from de Bary, p. 193 (Annen [841–889 A.D.], “Maxims for the Young”).

Sunshine at midnight, etcetera— These three tropes are allusions to Noh theater. One of Noh’s two thirteenth-century creators, Zeami Motokiyo, says in reference to the highest level of beauty: “In Silla at the dead of night, the sun shines brightly.” See On the Art of No Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami, trans. J. Thomas Rimer and Yamazaki Masakzu (Princeton:, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 372–76 (“The Nine Stages of the No in Order”). See also my book Kissing the Mask.

“She carries her ageing beautifully.”— Komparu remarks (p. 15) that other kinds of rojaku, or “quiet beauty” in a Noh performance, “can never approach the profundity nor the burden of aging borne by every beautiful woman and the dread of the ugliness that must come with the passing of the years.” The great poetess Ono no Komachi, the heroine of several Noh plays (see Kissing the Mask) had the misfortune to utterly outlive her physical loveliness. Komparu interprets the old woman-ghost’s attachment to her youthful beauty as an agony akin to the flames of hell.

“Kinuta” is a Noh play about the ghost of a wife who died of grief when her husband stayed away from home, preferring a younger woman. See Kissing the Mask.

“Even the dream-road is now erased.”— Much “retranslated” from Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997 pbk. repr. of 1961 ed.), p. 309 (Ariie, “Snow at the Village of Fushimi”).

Keisei’s warnings— De Bary et al., pp. 404–5 (excerpts from A Companion in Solitude, written 1222).

“Mr. Kanze in a carplike costume”— The description here and immediately following is based on notes I took during a Takigi Noh (outdoor torchlit Noh) performance by the late Mr. Kanze Hideo in 2005.

The Heian convention of pairing blue paper with a willow twig— Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan (New York: Kodansha International, 1994 exp. repr. of 1964 ed.), p. 188.

Teika’s tanka about crossing a gorge— A translation appears in Brower and Miner, p. 308.

“Better never to awake from this night of dreams.”— My retranslation of Saigyo, in Brower and Miner, p. 308.

PAPER GHOSTS

Epigraph: “It seemed that the faded vermilion of the shrine…”——[The courtier Yukinaga?], The Tale of the Heike (Heike Monogatari), trans. Hiroshi Kitagawa and Bruce T. Tsuchida, 2 vols. (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1975; orig. Japanese text ca. 1330), vol. 2, p. 467.

“Your prayers will no longer be accepted.”— Ibid., vol. 2, p. 427. The Heike had committed sacrilege. Therefore, although they “prayed to the gods of the mountain for sympathy,” “their prayers were no longer accepted.”

“It is really impossible to compare my heart to anything.”— Abbreviated from Ono no Komachi: Poems, Stories, No Plays, trans. Roy E. Teele, Nicholas J. Teele, H. Rebecca Teele (New York: Garland, 1993), p. 48 (Komachi Soshi). Original reads: “It is really impossible to compare the way my heart is to anything.”

“Wait awhile; wait awhile.”— In the Noh play “Shunkan,” two of the three Genji exiles are finally pardoned by the Heike, and only Shunkan is left alone on their island of exile. The two who are returning to the capital call back across the widening stretch of water, “Wait awhile, wait awhile,” but no one ever comes for him, excepting only a loyal retainer who can do nothing but watch him die.

Compositional note: The girl in the red kimono might or might not have been a cherry tree; another ghost promised me that she was, but how could I know? Just as a Japanese ghost is said to be legless, with outstretched drooping hands, so it is with any cherry tree; but I can’t swear that all cherry trees are ghosts. Trying to describe her and failing, I wadded up sheets of paper in crumpled balls and threw them down; they turned into swarms of flowers.

WIDOW’S WEEDS

My description of fox spirits, and especially of killing them through unrelenting sexual intercourse, is partially based on Pu Songling, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, trans. and ed. John Minford (New York: Penguin Books, 2006; orig. tales written bef. 1715, with later glosses by other commentators), p. 161 (“Fox Control”). As for me, I am a virgin.

THE BANQUET OF DEATH

Epigraph— Valentinus: “You must share death amongst you…”— Jacques Lacarriere, The Gnostics, trans. Nina Rootes (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989; orig. French ed. 1973), p. 68. Valentinus (or Valentinos) preached and possibly wrote his treatise(s) in Rome around 135 A.D.

The time of the living midnight; fixing one’s meditations on the Dark Door; the contemplation of delusion— The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, trans. and explained by Richard Wilhelm, with commentary by C. G. Jung; trans. into English by Cary F. Baines (New York: Causeway Books, 1975; orig. ed. 1931), pp. 66–67.

The Dead Book of the Dead— A logical inversion of the following lines in the Valentinian “Gospel of Truth”: “In their heart, the living book of the living was manifest,” which was “in that incomprehensible part” of God. The book’s taker must “be slain.” Jesus “took that book, since he knew that his death meant life for the many.”— Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer, eds., The Gnostic Bible (Boston: Shambhala, 2003), p. 244.

“Search while thou wilt…”— Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall, Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff, eds. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2012), p. 18 (“Religio Medici” [1642]).

“Even when I eat their hearts I’ve stopped believing in sweetness.”— “The father,” who is “Jesus of the utmost sweetness,” “opens his bosom, and his bosom is the holy spirit.”— Ibid., p. 247.

DEFIANCE

Epigraph: “People also tried to defend themselves with hands and feet…”— Quoted in Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, p. 126.

WHEN WE WERE SEVENTEEN

Epigraph — Barrett, Book I, p. 67.

An opening more in the style of present times might be: “Less than a mile within the posted limits of our city, at the intersection where Mr. Murmuracki’s establishment used to be (he laid out three of my neighbors), a left turn will get you to a tract of undeveloped land in the heart of the floodplain. Last year a real estate developer made us a plausible offer for fifty-seven acres of it. I was the member of the city council who required more information, because it didn’t seem right to build houses predestined to go underwater. Setting aside the so-called ‘human cost,’ there remained the more straightforward calculation of how much the city might someday disburse for disaster relief. Just before our recess ended, Councilwoman Largo, whose husband happens to be the developer in question, took me outside to explain how much this deal would mean to her family, not to mention all those sweet young first-time homeowners who certainly deserved to enter the market, and their presence would in turn stimulate the convenience store franchises and probably another gas station, so I wavered; that woman knows how to smile! If she only smoked, I would have lit her cigarette. Then the city manager explained that the event I worried over was called a ‘fifty-year flood,’ meaning that it could hardly occur during our term of office. For proof he had a thick loose leaf binder, produced by McNeary Associates, the same firm who designed our new airport; I’m sure you’ve heard that the south terminal took the second-place award in Transit Whiz Magazine. Moreover, the city manager said, if any such situation presented itself, utterly unforeseeably, the federal government would assume the necessary obligations. Besides, we were insured. I told him that I worried about the people who were going to live in those houses, to which he said I had a good heart. As is his practice when administering any bitter pill, he harped on the budget shortfall of the last four years, a topic which bores me, because this is America, where we are supposed to overcome our problems. He reminded me that half the cities in the state were borrowing money from their own pension funds in order to pay out current expenses. I thought: For this I could be reading the newspaper. He nearly treated me as if I were stupid. If we turned up our noses at the taxes and fees offered by Sunny Estates, he continued, another police officer would get discharged from the narcotics unit come the first of January; furthermore, we could hardly prevent Ted Largo from building somewhere else on the floodplain, in which case those homeowners would be no safer while the tax revenues would accrue to Orangevale or Taft. I requested his opinion of Ted Largo, and, sliding his arm around my shoulder, he remarked: Well, he sure does have a charming wife. — I asked where we stood in our negotiations on the sports arena, and he informed me (privileged information) that the backers had threatened once more to walk out, because Taft offered superior terms. Worse yet, the new prison might be relocated to Akin County. When I heard that, I decided that we needed Sunny Estates. Two days later, Councilwoman Largo treated me to dinner at the Rusty Galleon. Three martinis later, she was up for anything, so we drove out to see the place in my car. It was a swamp, all right. We both agreed that living here would not be convenient for much of anything but visiting the cemetery. But as for visiting, well, that night we found it quite convenient.”

“With growing sorrow and fear, the poor man painfully saw…”— The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse, trans. Jack Zipes (New York: Bantam Books, 1995; orig. German version of “Iris” pub. 1918).

The girl who thought she lived on the moon— C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, rev. ed. (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1965; orig. German ed. ca. 1962), pp. 128–30.

The moon as “last receiver”— Barrett, p. 153.

Saxon practice: coin in a corpse’s mouth— Summers, p. 203 (actually, the only claim is that the coin kept the corpse from gnawing “further”).

GOODBYE

Epigraph: “With a heart full of hope…”— The Watchtower: Announcing Jehovah’s Kingdom, October 1, 2012, p. 11 (“The Power of God’s Word on a Hindu Family,” as told by Nalini Govindsamy).

“Every man passes through a critical age…”— Stekel, p. 353.

What I liked best in life— I like to look back in time, especially when I dream. Sometimes men to whom I was never close become dream-comrades simply because we knew each other when we were young. In my dreams we fly in a helicopter over a collage of landscapes all significant to me, and they share my delight in them. One is a desert river which none of us but I ever saw. All the same, they cry out in joy. We land at our old school, at whose post offices the mailboxes still bear our names among the others. And for all of us, many letters lie waiting new and unopened, with beautifully unfamiliar stamps on them — letters from the dead. — If I could ever revisit this past, I am sure it would seem to me as faded as the dusty, sticky sea in an old diorama in the Naval Museum in Veracruz. To each of us, the gazes of the others would surely appear as sad, dark and shining as that of the semi-obscure hero General Ignacio Morelos Zaragoza.