Everything seemed important. Everything seemed as important as everything else. My hand couldn’t keep up with my mind. I jumped from one thing to the next, rarely finishing a sentence, never finishing a paragraph. I regained my fluency in Arellian to the point of dreaming in it more often than I dreamed in the other languages I knew. I woke in the middle of the night to find myself speaking it. Wade slept so soundly that he didn’t hear me, though I was always convinced that he had and checked to make sure that he really was asleep.
By day, especially when I was alone, Arellian crept into my mind more and more. It began to seem that it was not just my language but everyone else’s as well. In grocery stores, I saw it written on the labels of the items on the shelves and on the signs above each aisle, displacing English and Afrikaans. I was terrified that I would forget myself and speak it aloud in public, address perfect strangers in this language that they would take to be gibberish, proof that I had lost my mind. One afternoon, I held a can of tomato sauce in my hand and stared at it for minutes as the words on the label changed from English to Arellian, Arellian to English, back and forth until I was so dizzy that I nearly fainted. Only when I absolutely had to, when I was conversing with or listening to others, was I able to ward off what I feared would be a complete retreat into an imaginary world from which no doctor or medication could bring me back. Only in the evenings, in Wade’s company, the two of us having a drink in the kitchen after I had written in my diary and read Het Achterhuis for hours, was I able to relax for a while and put from my mind the language that I had invented, taught myself to speak and read and write when I was just a girl.
From The Arelliad
DEAR ALSO-ANNE (1985)
I read the Diary she kept
by day, by night while others slept,
when she was all she’d ever be,
a girl named Anne, like you and me,
a girl who grew up happily
until the world, struck by a curse,
turned good to bad and bad to worse.
How could a girl who braved the odds
go unacknowledged by the gods?
If gods there are, strange gods they be
who match a child with history
in history’s worst century.
If only I could pace myself, or read something other than her diary, or nothing. Write nothing. Sit back and rest until my pulse slows down enough for me to sleep. But I’m driven to keep up with something that forever pulls away from me. Some nights, fragmented sentences are all that I can manage, and even those disintegrate and I’m reduced to syllables that race like mice across the table. It can’t be done, it can’t be done, put down your pen, don’t start again. I’m not looking for pity from you, Anne. You must think that this is just what I deserve, or that it’s not nearly enough.
Arellia is treacherous. There are no maps. The signs are unreliable. It’s dark now, but there is light enough to see you watching me, the Shadow She, the small girl in the black peacoat, too thin a coat for such a night.
It seems the wind will never rest. This is not the kind of west wind to which English odes are written, but a wind as brutal and lethal as the barrel of a gun. The sun comes up; the wind dies down. The sky is clear; there are no sounds on days when girls like you are found.
I must avoid the yellow wood. If I go in, I won’t come out. Your fellow Anne is nowhere to be seen. You follow me, silently, stopping when I stop lest you get too close. You might be my reflection except for your eyes, which are nothing like mine, so green they don’t seem real. I’m not the age that I was then, but you’re the same, still seventeen, as old as you will ever be, as old as Margot Frank was when she and her sister died. It’s ten years since you and I first met here in Arellia. Ten years you’ve been pursuing me, accusing me with silence or with words.
I’ve had enough but can’t say so, for you are right: I know. You know.
Wade must be thinking that, if what Bethany has accused Dad of is true, there is much that I’ve been keeping from him, wondering how much of Rachel van Hout is real and how much is not, such as the things I say he makes me feel. If Bethany’s accusations are true, how much of me is false? He may no longer believe that, before him, there was no one else.
If I endured what Bethany says she did, how could I not be forever changed by it? Perhaps he thinks of Dad when he’s with me and thinks that I do too. How could I not have thoughts of Dad running through my mind when he and I are in bed, when I only seem to lose myself? I told Wade once that it felt “like God” when we made love. It did, but I doubt that he believes it now. He may think it was all an act, and that’s all it ever was.
My breakdowns and my illnesses, my mania, these diaries—he thinks it’s my dad who makes me scribble in my notepad right in front of him night after night. Dad is what that’s all about, me thinking I can rid myself of him if I get it all down on paper. Or else he thinks the diary is purposeless, a mounting obsession that will put an end to me.
I wonder if Wade used to think that it was him I was writing about. Does she ever think of me when she’s recording history? Or is it by Her that he believes I’m possessed, by Anne Frank, the dead diarist whose diary, he may think, I’m somehow trying to complete. Small wonder that she’s going mad, the ingenue of such a dad, the tutelage she must have had. He may think me Dad’s protegé in denial, but every time I see Dad smile it sickens me, as the sight of me may sicken Wade.
I’m putting thoughts into Wade’s head, words into his mouth that may be nothing like the truth. Perhaps he thinks of me even more tenderly than before, just as he would if some disease was slowly stealing me away but leaving him behind, untouched, more in love with me than ever, to ask why fate or God had let someone so young, who bore no blame for anything, suffer so unspeakably? His darling Rachel. The disproportionality, the pitiless disparity of it, a mere child pitted against a man like Him, a mismatch that Wade could not have conceived of until now.
I hope he prays that I don’t bear those scars, not just for his sake but for mine. Surely he does. But if he suspects that these things, or worse, are true, I hope he believes that I am still and always will be me, my body just as beautiful, my soul inviolable, as sweet as when we met—that nothing can change that.
But then there is the Shadow She, who roamed the yellow wood before Wade met me. I was already lost in Arellia to expiate another crime of little Rachel Lee. Wade would not be so sure of me if he knew why the Shadow She keeps coming back. Arellia and Claws von Snout, the girl who wears the black peacoat, the things I think and dream about. Do I want my diary as much or more than I want Wade? I don’t know where such thoughts come from. I left him but went back to him. He took me back; I took him here. He looks at me resentfully sometimes, as if I am greedily using up all the words allotted to us by the gods, taking his share as well as mine, hoarding them in my notebooks.
Wade wants to know what makes me write. He wants to catch what I’ve got, hopes that he’ll come down with it, the van Hout family disease. It doesn’t occur to him that he might be my Muse, because he’s always thought I would be his. I don’t need his inspiration, but it’s starting to seem that, without mine, he’ll never write a single word. The irony will drive him mad—I’ll write and write, and all he’ll ever do is read, the novelist he thought he’d be stifled by a wife who, if she had her way, would never write again. I never show a word to him, or anyone.
Two books elude him, day and night:
the one I will not let him read,
the one I will not let him write.
He looks at me resentfully,
as if he could, if not for me,
write something good, or even great—
write anything instead of wait
for inspiration from above
to free him from the one he loves.
He sits for hours in that room and tries to write, or thinks of trying, anyway. As he sits and stares at his typewriter, it’s hard to say if anything about his homeland goes through his mind, so preoccupied is he with my strange family, the strangest one of whom is me. He thought he had to get away to see things in perspective. I wonder if, someday, he’ll think he should have got away from me. I hate to hear him sigh in there, the silence of his typewriter—I know he’s come to doubt that he can write.
“All those hundreds, hundreds of books I read—better to have written one. I’d take one line for every night I spent reading Shakespeare. Perhaps it’s time that I owned up to being whatever in God’s name it is that I’m supposed to be.”
I chose him, not his vocation, but don’t dare tell him that in case he thinks I am agreeing with his self-assessment.
It’s been five months since I re-chose him, and I’m writing in Arellian more often than not. If I’m the impediment I suspect I am, what if, one of these days or nights, Wade puts me aside and that book of his comes pouring out at last?
I hope I never see Wade in Arellia, staring at me accusingly, alone among the yellow leaves. I might end up writing of no one but him while burning candles in my room. For me, he puts aside his dream. He follows me, he lives for me and, in the end, he dies for me, the mad autobiographer who writes the books he planned to write while he watches over her, his blood drained of its ambition. I become his one vocation. To be my minder becomes the main work of his life. The book I take such pains to hide I leave to him when my mind and body fail, but he isn’t able to decode one word of The Arelliad.
They’re drawn to me, the mad, the dead, but Wade is not yet one of them—
But now I sink deeper into the page and see that Wade is in here with me. I’ve invited him in to show him where I live—Arellia, the yellow leaves forever falling from the trees. I take his hand and lead him about. “See that one in the peacoat, the one in black, the Shadow She—she always stares like that. And look, the Frank sisters are over there, Anne and Margot…”
The very worst has come to pass—Wade is now among the lost. He leaves me and he goes to them, the Frank sisters, who take him by the hands.
His eyes tell me and them that he’s never known unbearable, abiding pain. He’ll speak of me when I can’t hear, tell them about the things I did to lure him in.
The blue sweater I gave him should have been a goodbye kiss. My reappearance at his door was a sad mistake. How could unlucky Wade say no? Arellia—he mustn’t stay. I have to make him leave or find a path to lead him out before von Snout appears.
How strange it is to see him here among the girls who died when they were young. How tall he is compared to them. Their loyal minder he might be, their guide through Time, through History, a man, at last, among three girls, the only one left in this world.
Now comes the quickening of time that happens when I start to rhyme, the vertigo…the wind picks up in one great gust, a churning vortex from the west in which the beast conceals himself, the Monster known as Claws von Snout.
They scream and strike out through the trees, the Frank sisters, the Shadow She. I try to grab Wade’s hand, but he runs away from them and me. I can’t keep up, I never could—I lose him in the yellow wood. I hear him shout, “Where have you gone? Why did you leave? Remember what the sirens said? The sun will rise; they’ll find me dead.”
I hurry into the woods. There’s no sign of Wade, no sign of the Frank sisters or the green-eyed Anne.
Arellia, before the dawn. The smell of Snout is in the air. He’s still out there, waiting for me and the others. The darkest hour of the night—no light but for the eyes of Snout, two coals of red that flit about like fireflies between the trees. He’s blustered in like this before. He’s unsure of me, though he’s been tracking my decline, waiting for the perfect moment. If I weaken further, he’ll strike. He growls as if to say, “Not yet. Ten years without a taste of you, so what’s another day or two? It won’t be long; I’ll come for you. I’ll come for you another night.”
He’ll slink off before the sun comes up, smouldering in spite as he retraces his advance.
Head bowed, he’ll keep a cold eye out for witnesses of his defeat.