Byzantium Read online

  BYZANTIUM

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  BYZANTIUM

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  Stories

  BEN STROUD

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2013 by Ben Stroud

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  Print ISBN 978-1-55597-646-0

  EBook ISBN 978-1-55597-074-1

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2013

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013931485

  Cover design: Alvaro Villanueva

  Cover art: US Geological Survey Map

  For Marissa

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Randall Kenan

  Byzantium

  East Texas Lumber

  The Don’s Cinnamon

  Borden’s Meat Biscuit

  The Traitor of Zion

  Eraser

  At Boquillas

  Tayopa

  Amy

  The Moor

  INTRODUCTION

  RUMOR HAS IT THAT SHORT STORY WRITERS, nowadays, are meant to lack ambition. That short stories are best when about wee tiny things. That brief fiction should be about precious moments, only, and not about the great and grand events. That the short story’s province is one of glowing epiphanies and small changes at the last minute. Short stories should not aspire to gulp down the steaming bouillabaisse of the big world; short stories should remain happy with nibbling at cute cucumber sandwiches. Who honestly believes these hollow prejudices, I do not know.

  Clearly, Ben Stroud did not get this misleading e-mail, and I am so very grateful for that oversight, and I do believe the world of prose fiction is all the richer for it.

  Rather than spend time trying to diagnose how the world’s vision of the short story became so anemic, let us instead praise the full-blooded sweep and majesty of Stroud’s imagination. Let us celebrate a writer of great bravery and artistry and deep feeling. To be sure he takes us far and wide—from Bismarck’s Prussia to the conquistadors’ New Spain to the Bosporus’s still-Constantinople. Ben Stroud has wanderlust; this collection, Byzantium, is our ticket to ride.

  The earliest known record we have of the black detective Jackson Hieronymus Burke—the Moor—is an advertisement he ran in several Berlin newspapers in 1873, promising discretion and modest fees. (“The Moor”)

  For some odd reason the concept of historical fiction has been greatly maligned among certain learned folk. To them the very phrase conjures up the lurid covers of bodice rippers set on antebellum plantations, or yet another mediocre novel about Gettysburg or the sack of Rome, or a poorly imagined biography of Caravaggio doctored up to look like fiction. It is convenient for them to forget that War and Peace is a historical novel, or to make bizarre rationalizations about the astonishing recent work of Hilary Mantel.

  Herein rests Stroud’s great courage. A story about a black sleuth in mid-nineteenth-century Berlin, “The Moor,” could have been a recipe for disaster, but thanks to Stroud’s Calvino-like deconstruction of narrative, a literary whirligig about mystery—masterfully done—turns the unlikely ingredients into a marvel of storytelling, unafraid of exposition, of history, of being out of fashion. It is a story that reads as if it could have been written way back then and in another language, and yet it resonates so very slyly with Obama-era preoccupations about race and origins and government and terrorism and how we try to make sense of our world.

  Stroud is preternaturally wise about what it might be like to be a European man loose in the curious colonial, slave-fueled, mosquito-ridden Caribbean and the invention of a “cooling safe.” The voice in “Borden’s Meat Biscuit” is not show-off or drenched in dutifully researched facts, but remains convincing, a successful act of linguistic legerdemain:

  Here we paused as several negroes dressed in finery paraded before us, their masters goading them, showing them off to the city’s wealthy gathered on the courthouse lawn. Timson leaned closer and whispered. “I have been in contact with agents of President Pierce. They have given me assurances.”

  The sentences, so often deceptively simple, tell so much with an admirable economy. Most often these stories begin in medias res. There is an implicit trust in the reader’s intelligence, which makes the reading of these stories all the more engaging: it is not as much a matter of figuring things out as it is an interiority—you are experiencing this world from the inside out. Stroud respects us, expects us to be as involved, curious, and transported to these worlds as he is. We are to be flies on the wall with him.

  The stories that take place in our current time have a similar fascination with travel, the wide world, the history of cities, personal histories, the mystery of history, and the history of mystery. “Amy,” a story about an American in Europe and his unfaithful heart, moves us because our young man is trying to figure out his own treachery, and failing. (“I am blameless. I said: I owe no one. I said: Surely something better has been promised me.”) Sad, self-deluded fellow. Just as in the story “Eraser,” the protagonist grapples not just with the people around, but with what Faulkner once called “the human heart in conflict with itself.”

  Of course that understanding is the price of the ticket, the thing that makes Ben Stroud’s stories a cut above. So we sail with him to Byzantium, to the distant shores of newly discovered countries; we witness warriors and slaves and soldiers and ship captains, but we are always reminded, taken back to the wonderful, maddening mysteries inside us all.

  Yes, Ben Stroud is brave, Ben Stroud is smart, Ben Stroud is funny, Ben Stroud is a magician, Ben Stroud teaches us what it is like—past and present—to be human.

  I dote on these stories, and hope you will enjoy them as much as I do.

  —Randall Kenan

  BYZANTIUM

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  BYZANTIUM

  I WAS BORN a disappointment.

  My father was John Lekapenos, one of the emperor Maurice’s favorite generals. He had risen through the ranks from a hovel in Thessaly and had plans to establish himself—through me—among the great families. In the years he awaited my arrival, he elaborated my future career: the army, an illustrious marriage, a governorship or high ministerial position. But when I was brought to him, still smeared with my mother’s blood, the first thing he saw curling toward him out of the blankets that swaddled me was the chewed red crook of my withered hand.

  He must have thought it a talisman of his reverse. Not long after my birth, Maurice was overthrown and my father discharged from the army by the usurper, Phocas. He was forced to leave the camps for good, and, bloated and disheveled, he spent his days sitting in the kitchen with a pot of wine, haranguing the servants about long-ago campaigns against the Avars and the Bulgars. He talked of armies massed in the cold along the Danube, of the legion’s priest bringing forth the icon of the Holy Mother, and how he would know, if the sun glinted just right against her eyes, that it would be
a good day for fighting. The servants ignored him, but I always listened, snug in my hiding spot behind the oil vat, my legs folded against my chest. He loathed the sight of me, would cuff me whenever I came into his presence, but I liked to be near him, and longed to prove myself worthy of his love.

  I never had the chance. He died when I was eight. He was in his bedchamber, putting on his old uniform. The Persians had been swallowing provinces whole, Phocas had in turn been deposed, and my father hoped the new emperor, Heraclius, would give him a legion. They had campaigned together years before, and he’d talked of nothing else for weeks, brightening when at last he heard the drums of Heraclius’s soldiers as they entered the city. As soon as Heraclius was established in the palace and Phocas’s ashes were tossed in the sea, my father prepared for court. He was to go that morning and was cleaning his sword—this he always insisted on doing himself—when he put his hand over his arm. Then he collapsed. I had hidden myself in a corner behind a chair, and when he fell I stayed there watching for nearly an hour. Eventually I crept away and left him for the servants to find.

  That was the end of any hope for us. My mother kept me shut in the city house, where she looked after our dwindling fortune. I spent my days reading or hiding in the garden, listening to the servants’ gossip. At my mother’s insistence I always wore a specially fitted glove over my hand. I got older, grew restless. When I reached my majority a procuress was consulted and a woman brought to my chamber, and soon after that I began to sleep all day so I could prowl at night. At dusk I would escape through the back entrance to wander the dark streets, going as far as the Hippodrome. There I would watch others taking their pleasure—keeping to the shadows, my hand hidden as I studied a chariot racer leaning into a prostitute, her leg wrapped round his torso, or libertines goading a gilded crocodile in the bear pit, their bodies slurred by powders from the east. When the Persians came and encamped across the Bosporus, laying siege to the city, I went up to the roof every night to watch their attacks and then their slow retreat. When a traitor’s body was dragged through the streets, I joined the mob, unnoticed, and kicked at the corpse and cursed it as the chariot pulled it toward the harbor. I had no vocation. I had no life or standing beyond our house’s walls. So I lived until my twenty-eighth year, a rattling ghost in the great hive of the city.

  I SAY UNTIL MY TWENTY-EIGHTH YEAR because it was in that year—the first of that brief, confident era following Heraclius’s crushing victories against the Persians in the east—that an imperial courier burst into the garden where I was sitting with my mother, drinking tea, and handed me a summons. It came from the Keeper of the Seals, and when my mother saw the purple ink she began to fret. She declared I was to be given some high rank and fussed over my appearance, then decided I was to be executed and began to cry, then reversed herself a dozen times more. I didn’t know what to think. The summons itself offered no hints: it only gave directions for when and how I should come to the palace. I was surprised that anyone, much less the Keeper of the Seals, would wish to seek me out. I brushed my mother away and went up to my chamber to spend the rest of the day alone.

  When morning came I hired a litter to take me to the Chalke Gate, as instructed. There I showed my summons to the guards, and they admitted me to a courtyard where a large ivy grew. I knew, from one of my father’s stories, what I was seeing. The ivy was nurtured from a clipping taken from the old palace at Rome, and the fountain in the courtyard’s middle, surmounted by a bronze Romulus and Remus, ran with waters brought from all the empire’s corners: the Tiber, the Danube, a spring in Syria, the upper reaches of the Nile. Just beyond the fountain, three men were contesting with an elephant, a spoil from the wars. A crowd of servants and soldiers had gathered to watch them fit gold covers onto his tusks. Some had their arms to their noses in imitation of the elephant’s trunk, and were whistling, trying to get him to trumpet.

  Stacks of crates filled the other side of the courtyard, and it was from behind one of these that a eunuch, spare and with a shaved head, emerged. Squeezing out of his hiding place, he dusted himself off and came up to me and demanded the summons. After he read it he gave me an oddly close look. Then he ordered me out of the litter and took me past the elephant and through a guarded archway. We walked a few steps down a grand corridor of white marble before he stopped and pulled back a tapestry. Behind it, a narrow passageway snaked off into darkness. He went in ahead of me, guiding me by the sleeve, running his other hand along the brick and repeating something to himself. When we came to a tiny iron door he stopped and faced me.

  “Say nothing,” he said. “Stand and wait.” Then, twisting and pulling a ring in the door, he opened it and told me to step through.

  I had to stoop to clear the topstone, and by the time I stood on the other side, the door had shut behind me. Turning back, I could barely make it out, its lines fitting smoothly into the wall. But as I looked around me I soon forgot the door. The room glittered with gold. A stream ran through its middle, bounded by golden shrubs hung with carnelian fruits and silver briars hooked with thorns. High green trees of mosaic climbed the walls to the ceiling, where light fell from shafts and a sun glided on a circuit. In the center of the ceiling’s vault, God stared down, His hair flowing, His eyes gleaming in angry judgment. I knew where I was. I had always thought the Chamber of the Golden Meadow a legend, like the chamber that contained a living map of the sea. I looked again at the silver briars. I had heard it said that some of the thorns were poisoned; only the emperor knew which ones. He would meet his spies and servants here and take them for a stroll alongside the briars. If he grew displeased, he would give his interlocutor a nudge, and the unfortunate’s soul would be parted from his body by morning.

  The stream trickled, the sun clicked on its track, and I waited, even more uncertain of what was to come.

  A half hour passed, then another. Finally, a door on the far side of the room opened. It wasn’t the Keeper of the Seals who stepped through but Heraclius himself. The door closed behind him and he took a few steps toward me, then stopped. He was dressed in a simple tunic and a studded leather belt. His beard, grayed by his campaigns, hung below his chest. I stood still as stone—to suddenly be alone with the emperor, the man on whom all the eyes of the known world were fixed!—before it dawned on me that I was to go to him. I did so, bowing two or three times (in my nervousness I forgot the specific demands of protocol), and once I came near he put his hand on my shoulder and looked me over with his fading blue eyes.

  “You are Eusebios Lekapenos, John Lekapenos’s son?”

  “I am,” I answered, keeping my head bowed.

  “Show me your hand.”

  He did not specify, but it was not difficult to guess which he meant. I brought my withered hand forward, slipped off the glove, and let him see. He glanced at the bent knobs that were my fingers, the wrinkled crook that was my wrist, then motioned for me to put the glove back on. Once I’d done this, he took me by the arm and led me toward the stream.

  “I knew your father,” he said. “We campaigned together. It was a shame that—” He broke off, then nodded at me. After a moment’s silence, he started again, using a tone that, coupled with the unsubtle shift in subject, told me he was getting down to business. With a shiver I realized he was guiding me along the silver briars. “I recall hearing a story that when you were a child you visited several holy men, each of whom promised to heal your hand for you.”

  The story was true. Two years after my father died, my mother conceived the notion that a holy man could heal my hand, and she broke our isolation to take me through the streets to find one. In those days, as now, holy men flocked to the capital. They set themselves up in the houses of the rich, where they dressed in rags, refused baths, and spat out the delicate morsels offered them at dinner while shouting about fleshpots and the temptations of Babylon. Others, claiming to shun the world, lived in caves or on mountaintops a day’s walk from the city, where they received
crowds. And yet others set themselves on pillars in the streets and in the fora, shaking their beards at the people below and warning of coming cataclysms. The first holy man she took me to, chubby and with matted hair, grabbed my hand, put it to his mouth, and licked it. The second made me wait in his cave for two hours while he received other pilgrims, then told me that my hand was twisted because the devil had taken hold of it and that I must repent of my sins. The third spat at me from his pillar, claiming that would be enough, and the fourth told me to fast for six days and then return, by which time, forgetting me, he had left the city. Only with the fifth did I rebel. He had set himself up in one of the grandest houses on the Golden Horn, and promised to heal my hand if I would show my faith in his works by plunging it into a pot of boiling water. I had been given hope, I had believed in them, and when the healings failed I had blamed myself. But as I trembled beneath this holy man’s half-blind stare, his toothless scowl, I understood: he was a charlatan. They were all charlatans. I kicked the pot over, scalding the holy man’s legs, and ran out. The story passed through the city for a week—this I heard from the servants—before dying out. It was painful to recall, and I wondered why the emperor was interested.

  “I visited five,” I said.

  “And they could do nothing for you,” he said, “except mock your misfortune.”

  I didn’t know what answer to give, so I remained silent. We reached the end of the stream.

  “Have you heard the stories about the monk Theodosios?”

  I nodded. Everyone had.

  “Let me tell you another,” the emperor said as we crossed a footbridge and started walking up the other side. “The emperor Maurice had a son named Theodosios. He was slaughtered by Phocas alongside his father, but because his head was not sent back to the city, some claim he escaped and fled to the Persians for safety.” The emperor paused for a moment. He glanced up at the ceiling, to the eyes of God. Then he continued. “That story belongs to the past, and yet only a week ago one of my spies brought me a troubling report. In both Aleppo and Antioch he heard a rumor that Maurice’s Theodosios and this monk are the same, and that this monk has a claim to the throne as the rightful heir.”