Disturbed by Her Song Read online

  Disturbed by Her Song

  Tanith Lee

  writing as and with

  Esther Garber

  &

  Judas Garbah

  Published by Lethe Press at Smashwords

  Copyright © 2010 Tanith Lee.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in 2010 by Lethe Press

  118 Heritage Avenue • Maple Shade, NJ 08052-3018

  www.lethepressbooks.com • [email protected]

  ISBN: 1-59021-311-4

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59021-311-7

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover art: David Gilmore.

  Cover design: Thomas Drymon, drymondesign.

  Library of Congress

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lee, Tanith.

  Disturbed by her song / Tanith Lee, writing as and with Esther Garber & Judas Garbah.

  p. cm.

  A collection of dark and fantastical stories.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59021-311-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 1-59021-311-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  I. Title.

  PR6062.E4163D57 2010

  823’.914--dc22

  2010025907

  Meeting The Garbers

  I first met the Garbers in the 1990s; that is, I met Esther, and her brother, Judas. Anna didn’t turn up, though she subsequently sent me a polite and kindly note. In fact I’ve never met Anna, not yet, despite being given access to certain portions of her own work, and recently one of Judas’s stories which, it seems, she assembled from Judean fragments.

  Esther’s first communication with me involved the viewing of a headstone.

  This was an arresting event. She refers to it in her novel, 34, but allowed me to see the stone first. Just as the novel describes it, it was carved, and of very new-looking marble, set above a neatly finished grave. It bore only the number that became the book’s title.

  The complete novel was given to me shortly after. And not a great time after that, the first collection – Fatal Women – followed. Some separate stories by Judas arrived a few years after Fatal, and were not included in the initial Esther collection. (Judas doesn’t seem to care about this. He always refers to himself as ‘a Writer’ – but does he mean by trade – or inclination? Has he been published elsewhere? I sense some subterranean work, via a small press of long ago, in French, or even an Arabic language.)

  Back in the ’90s, the Garbers were rather striking. (They still are, I would say.) Judas especially was, and remains, a very handsome man, naturally slim and quite tall, by now, I would guess, in his sixties, as I am. But time frames with – definitely Esther – are hard to fix. Her (and Anna’s) childhoods at least appear to have taken place in Egypt in the 1920s-1930s; but then Esther also proposes a young womanhood in England and France, between the two World Wars. By the mid-90s she should therefore (yes?) have been approaching or inhabiting, at least, her seventieth year – or her hundredth! But she looked to me then of a youthful appearance – approximately fifty. She still, I have to remark, does. A smart and well-dressed woman, neither old-fashioned nor let-me-be-of-the-Now, she shows her ethnicity – presumably mostly Jewish; this less in her (excellent) pale complexion, grey eyes and lush, wavy dark brown hair (not a hint of grey in that) than in a sort of antique-coin type arrangement of her profile. Semitic she is. Judas, too, of course. He is besides a seemingly wonderful equality of half Jew and half Arab, with the definite resultant beauty. His hair is mostly still black, his eyes, if anything, blacker than before.

  Neither of these people is especially warm and forthcoming however. They are cool, if sometimes observant and witty companions. Both are quite guarded also. Curious, it always seems to me, when their writing is so determinedly open and frank.

  They have, they did from the inception, make very clear the different spelling of their surname. Esther, of course, is Garber, which is recognizably European Jewish. Judas meanwhile spells his version Garbah. I haven’t been able to learn if this is based on some variant, presumably adopted by his butterfly mother, or an invention of his own.

  I firmly believe that both of them are not merely compulsively truthful, in the way less of the Confessional than of certain writers/story-tellers, but conversely strategic liars. I’m well aware too that neither of them will object to my saying this. (Would I dare say it otherwise?) Lying also has its part in an authorial work-kit.

  They do, perhaps inevitably, fascinate me. And whatever they care to reveal, demonstrate, tell me, I find enormously interesting.

  There is Esther’s London (UK) flat, for instance. (It has a brief manifestation in an earlier story not appearing in these volumes.) A weird apartment in its way, with a huge main room divided by a single step into an upper and lower ‘terrace,’ and with much smaller rooms – kitchen, bathroom, workroom, bedroom – leading off a gallery above. It has long windows and green curtains, and a view outside of tall, summer-rich trees and grayish stone, one of those inner London streets you suddenly find around Harley Street, the British Museum, or otherwhere. Between the apartment door and the outer front door to the flat, is a ‘storage’ area (what exactly is stored there?) that also has a small guest bedroom with bed and en-suite lavatory and shower. Esther parks her brother out there on his very occasional visits. She has said he has repeatedly requested she acquire a cat, so that he can admire and stroke it, when in residence. But she hasn’t done so, and Judas denies all this. There is always a little scratchiness from both of them, when referring to the other. Or to Anna, actually. It can be seen anyway quite plainly in the text.

  As for Anna – as I say, I’ve never glimpsed her. She seems a well-organized, clever, possibly erudite woman, any hang-ups, (as evinced through Esther’s 34, etc) either well under control or – maybe – non-existent. She respects her sister’s and her half-brother’s (Judas is only related to these women through their father) literary work, but has her own agenda. She is far more successfully secretive than either of them. And too Esther’s implication (in her novel) that Anna is – how shall I say? – less than she seems – may be indicative. I wonder if I ever will be allowed, or even able, to meet her? I’m unsure, if given the chance, whether I’ll be eager – or dismayed.

  Having said which, obviously, I have never met any of these three in the flesh. In the flesh, so far as I can tell, they do not exist. At least not in any form or body I have ever physically encountered.

  Nevertheless, to state they are simply three more of the thousands of characters I myself have written about, or through whose minds I have been made privy to their lives, seems not to express any sort of truth at all. Though I would proclaim this in reference to any character of whom I’ve written – they are all real to me, more real, far more real than so-called Reality – yet with the Garbers some other categorization must be found. I haven’t yet found one. And for this reason, their narratives, which I undeniably write (long-hand, as ever), then type, are styled – for the sake of veracity, never obscuration or gimmick: Tanith Lee writing as Esther Garber/Judas Garbah.

  That they are both gay is decidedly not the reason. I have written about Lesbian and male homosexual aspiration, love, lust and longing in several other places. Just as I’ve written about and as, ‘straight’ women and men, gifted sorcerers, murderers, gods, demons and saints – and anything else I felt, at the time, given to encompass.

  Nor do I think I do write about
E and J because they and I share Jewish blood. (I’m a mix – half Russian Jew, a quarter English – with a tiny dash of French – a quarter County Clare Irish, and with a feasible whisker of Russian, and a drop of Black blood – unluckily the last two are probably untraceable.) But Esther and Judas, (and I assume Anna) are far more proper exponents of the Semitic races than I am. E and J at least have the correct looks – as I said before, that glamour you can still see on ancient coins. And they are far more seasoned, steeped in other countries and customs, for example, those of France, Spain and Egypt.

  They are not me. They – are themselves.

  Evidently, in this perceivably split-personality tract, I am both distancing myself and irrevocably attaching myself to the Garbers. But then, as with most of my characters, and in this instance far more than with any other, they too have attached themselves to me. When they are there (often they are absent), they are clearly delineated presences, just outside the mindscape. And unlike the others, too, they remain largely clandestine.

  How much more work they will give me I have no idea. I’ve never sensed a forthcoming library, not even a full shelf. I know there should be one more Esther novel. I even know the title: Cleopatra at the Blue Hotel. This promises to reveal how Esther and Judas first met, as adults, by the Nile. While a second collection of Esther stories and novellas, which includes some pieces by Judas, plus the odd half-glimpse of Anna, already exists. Two of these tales, incidentally, Esther and I wrote together. Lee is truly bats, one might say. Or not. It seemed to me those particular tales have a combined perspective. Certain things I could essay through Esther that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred to me, and (maybe?) vice versa.

  To go back to the first introduction and meeting: despite not taking place corporeally, it did begin through a viewing of that pure white headstone. I dreamed of it, in the 1990s, complete with its number: 34. In many Dream Books, a clean, well-kept grave can be interpreted as a brand new start. I took it as such. And about three weeks after began to write the novel with that name. I had the first sentence, and I had the sense of Esther Garber. Nothing more was needed.

  More even than with all the differing kinds of fiction I write, the Garbers have given me a significantly unlike territory. In this world, and out of it, anachronistic (deliberately), time-twisting, utterly self-indulgent – why not? Why write in chains? – and experimental. Varnished truth and gloves-off lies: the exquisite question that never has an answer; the answer that is the question.

  Thank you, Madame et Monsieur.

  —Tanith Lee, 2009

  Contents

  YOUTH AND AGE

  Black Eyed Susan - Esther Garber

  The Kiss - Esther Garber

  YOUTH

  Ne Que V’on Desir - Judas Garbah

  The X’s Are Not Kisses - Tanith Lee & Esther Garber

  Alexandrians - Judas Garbah

  Death and the Maiden - Esther Garber

  AGE

  Fleurs en Hiver - Judas Garbah

  The Crow Judas - Garbah

  Disturbed by Her Song - Esther Garber & Tanith Lee

  Once upon a time there was a princess, outside whose high bedroom window a nightingale sang every night from a pomegranate tree.

  While the nightingale sang, the princess slept deeply and well, dreaming of wondrous and beautiful things. However there came a night when the nightingale, for reasons of her own, did not sing but flew far away.

  In the morning the princess summoned a gardener and told him to cut down the pomegranate tree. The man protested; the tree was a fine one, young, healthy and fruitful. But the princess would not relent. For as she said, all that one previous night a nightingale had perched in the branches, and the princess’s sleep had been very much disturbed by her song.

  Eastern Tales

  translated by Anna Garber

  Youth and Age

  Black Eyed Susan

  Esther Garber

  Black Eyed Susan first passed me in the corridor, just after the old woman had pushed me into it. Black Eyed Susan’s eyes were black as ink from outer space, and she stared a moment, coldly with them, at me. But the old woman was still there, poking the twigs of her fingers into my side.

  “What? What is it?” I mumbled to her. I had become confused, but already Black Eyed Susan had turned the corridor corner and was lost to view.

  “In there,” rasped the old woman.

  “Where? Why?”

  “There, there.”

  Across the corridor was a door, one of many. “There?”

  Like a mouse all in black, though not a black like Black Eyed Susan’s, the old woman continued to push me forward as if I were on wheels, towards the door.

  It was marked Private.

  “But—” I said.

  Sharply, leaning past me, she rapped on the door with her horn-rimmed knuckles. For a mouse, the old woman was quite large, but for a woman quite small, shriveled down nearly to a husk, but a hard one.

  From within the room a male voice said, “Enter. If you must.”

  The old woman turned the handle of the door, thrust me through, and slammed it at my back.

  A big, warm room, fire in its grate, armchairs strewn about. Behind a polished desk piled with ledgers and papers, a man of average age and some indications of wealth, eyed me over his spectacles.

  “Who are you?” he inquired, without interest.

  “My name is Esther Garber.”

  “And?”

  “I’ve come to work at the hotel.”

  “And so?”

  “Monsieur, I was pushed into this room by an old woman.”

  “Ah!” A bark of laughter burst, beneath his narrow mustache. “Granny at her old tricks.”

  “Oh, was it your grandmother then, Monsieur?”

  He drew himself up, removed his glasses, and scanned me intently. “I am the Patron. This hotel is mine. Normally you’d have no dealings with me. All that is seen to by Madame Ghoule, whom, I assume, you have already met when hired. However, the old lady you refer to, Madame Cora, will tend to drag to my notice any new girl on the staff I might, she supposes, fancy.”

  My face became blank. I met his eyes with all the hauteur of Black Eyed Susan’s. Knowing, nevertheless, that if he must have me, then he must, since it was generally the safest way. Besides. I needed the job here, lowly as it was. My money had run out; and beyond the clean windows of the Patron’s boudoir, light snow was already falling on the little French town.

  He said, smiling with disdain, “Well, what do you think?”

  “I’m surprised,” I said, manifesting I hoped a halfway ordinary feminine reaction.

  “Don’t be,” said the Patron. “My grandmother is mad, of course. Anyway, you’re not my type—” what he actually said was, not my bite of biscuit.

  I should now be modestly insulted, perhaps. I lowered my gaze, and thought of ink-black eyes, floating there between me and the patterned carpet.

  He said. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Esther.”

  “And your duties here?”

  “Bar work, and some kitchen work, so I was told.”

  “And why then are you up here at the top of my hotel – aside, of course, from Madame Cora, who will have waylaid you somewhere between here and the ground floor?”

  “I’m to sleep at the hotel, so Madame Ghoule informed me.”

  “Of course. Very well then. I wish you a pleasant stay,” incongruously he added.

  So I was dismissed, opened the door and came out, looking uneasily about for mad Madame Cora. But there was now no sign of her, no sign of anyone.

  The entire hotel, which called itself The Queen, had a forlorn winter appearance, and few guests. Madame Ghoule, for it had been she who interviewed me, was a formidable barrel of a woman. The interview had consisted of her terse remarks on my proposed duties, and the evidence that I looked too skinny to be able to do any of it; was I therefore strong enough? I lied that I was, which she at once a
ccepted. “You will keep no tips for yourself for the first fortnight, that is our policy here. I hope that is understood.” I said it was. “After that you will receive your portion of tips from the communal dish.” I knew, having done such work previously, the ‘portion’ would amount to only slightly more than the initial fortnight’s nil.

  Walking back along the corridor, I found myself, instead of taking the back stair downwards to my allotted room, turning the corner. But Black Eyed Susan had vanished entirely. She might be in any of the rooms, or none. I knocked quietly on each closed door I now passed. But stopped this after one was suddenly flung open, and an irate man in shirtsleeves cried, “Have you brought my beer? Where is my beer?” I apologized, and told him it would shortly arrive. “I have been waiting here half my life,” he ranted, “for one tankard of bloody beer!”

  Below, on the third floor, when I reached it, I located my room. The bed had been made up – then unmade and left open – and the sheets seemed to have been slept in only that morning. Some longish, dark brown hairs lay on the pillow, and bending over it, I inhaled a faint musk of violets.

  Hadn’t just such a scent wafted by me in the wake of Black Eyed Susan?

  I thought, with abrupt alarmed excitement, that maybe she and I were to share this room. The bed was easily wide enough. But there were no personal items put about (aside from the dark hairs). It was an awful room, in fact. Bare floorboards, on which somebody had thrown a single rough shabby towel to act as a rug, an overhead electric light without a shade. The windows had tawdry curtains, and outside the town was settling grimly into the icing of the snow.