Folio One, Page Eight (magra mos kot)
Of course, I mentioned the insanity for your benefit. Writing so hurriedly—the boat leaves in only eight and a half hours—I cannot begin to impress upon you the particulars of my mental state. We have so much history to get through, and so little—perhaps just enough—time. The form of the work still eludes me. So many ideas rush through my head. Should I tell you about this moment, or should I communicate that desire? Should I cobble my life together to form a story with exposition, climax, and denouement?
As I write, the critic in me wants to edit things. It pauses to say, “Nishet does not know the significance of this.” New topics flutter in one ear and out the other. Perhaps I was wrong in beginning two weeks from my death——but regardless, the matter is done, and I cannot rectify it until you send me more paper. The neighbor's gampka ate most of my last ream.
A dour-faced palace secretary informed me that I indeed owned both the Wishing Tree carving and the Balru, along with the bone xylophone. Several other items—those that my mother had kept outside of her office—had been appropriated in a traveling museum exhibit and would not be available to me until 1920. I gave her financial information and orders to send everything she could to the family house in Kobsarka. I now had lh. 800,000 worth in goods—enough to keep me comfortable for two lifetimes. The xylophone was worth more than both art pieces combined. Once the rights to the museum pieces reverted to me, I would have another lh. 1,000,000 of priceless collectibles from the Makara Period: illuminated manuscripts, religious statuettes, and all of the poet Katasu's personal papers.
(For comparison, as inflation has weakened the buying power of the lehi considerably these last two decades, one lehi could buy a decent cup of nonu from a medium-priced restaurant. Half a lehi (five miheli) was the price of flower petal tea at the Kobsarka Café, and caffeine-infused koquia, nmkra, or quidasra from overseas cost two lehi per cup.)
Despite my family's affluence, I had never had an inhertance to call my own before. (I suppose everything else my mother passed to me through her Exception Will counts, but I was too short to fit into most of her dresses.) Everything the band made went to publicity, instruments, shows, and our employees' saleries—in short, we used most of the money to keep a competitive edge. The family-given allowance of lh. 75 per month barely paid for my personal expenses, and while I know that's triple the amount non-affluent families would give an illegitimate daughter, my aunt always caught me when I tried to be frugal.
If you had seen me walking alone through the corridors, trying to retrace the route the nuamë nuaf iča and I had taken, my brain reeling from what the secretary and I had discussed, you'd have thought me blind.
The sky outside was perfectly blue, and the light made my eyes tear. The man waiting for a floating garden beside me smelled like urine. He probably saw the nuamë nuaf iča and wet himself, I thought. I laughed and covered my face with the gyena scarf.
“Your communication band,” he said.
I touched my right wrist and pulled up the holographic screen. Abàkeyyi waved at me and made kissing noises. “Hey kòa,” she said. “We're all at the amphitheater waiting for you. Just thought you should know.”
“I'm only a few blocks away. Did the equipment arrive safely?”
“Your ksibja is in pieces.” She rolled her eyes. “Honestly!”
“Shit, Abàkeyyi, don't joke about that. Did Kadzì get the metrical changes to 'Touch Me'? I want to do it in 4/4 instead of 4/8. I feel like it should be played differently. Memorial, you know.” The platform eased up beside the roof. I stepped on board. “Are you still alternating on the masum drums with her? Did you get the blocking down?”
She moved her screen to get Kadzì on screen. Kadzì blew me a kiss and pulled the gyena up over her head, something the maidens from her region of the canyons do on the video phone no matter how intimately they know someone. I believe it began as a protest against government eavesdropping back when my mother was still living. “I think I have something, but we'll need to run through it backstage.”
“And the masum drums?”
“We'll switch positions a bit during the second blackout. That'll give us ample time to move about during the thirty-second a cappella vocals.” She reached offscreen for a glass of water. “I'm not happy with where my backup microphone ended up.”
Abàkeyyi moved the screen back. “Satisfied?”
“Yeah,” I said. “One more thing—I'm having something rushed to the back door. Have Litasau clear it.”
“What is it?”
“A sixteenth-century xylophone.”
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