Close to the gates a spacious garden lies,

From storms defended and inclement skies.

Four acres was the allotted space of ground,

Fenced with a green enclosure all around.

Tall thriving trees confess’d the fruitful mold:

The reddening apple ripens here to gold.

Here the blue fig with luscious juice o’erflows,

With deeper red the full pomegranate glows;

The branch here bends beneath the weighty pear,

And verdant olives flourish round the year,

The balmy spirit of the western gale

Eternal breathes on fruits, unthought to fail:

Each dropping pear a following pear supplies,

On apples apples, figs on figs arise…

What palace is this, where the doors gleam with gold and the pillars are silver and the trees never stop fruiting? As though hypnotized, she advances to the rooming house wall and scales the gate and peers through the shutter. Inside, four boys in doublets sit around an old man with a goiter ballooning from his throat. The boys repeat the verses in a bloodless monotone, and the man manipulates what looks like leaves of parchment in his lap, and Anna leans as close as she dares.

She has seen books only twice before: a leather-bound Bible, winking with gems, conducted up the central aisle by elders at Saint Theophano; and a medical catalogue in the market that the herb seller snapped shut when Anna tried to peer inside. This one looks older and grimier: letters are packed onto its parchment like the tracks of a hundred shorebirds.

The tutor resumes the verse, in which a goddess disguises the traveler in mist so that he can sneak inside the shining palace, and Anna bumps the shutter, and the boys look up. In a heartbeat a wide-shouldered housekeeper is waving Anna back through the gate as though chasing a bird off fruit.

She retreats to her handcart and pushes it against the wall, but wagons rumble past and raindrops begin to strike the rooftops, and she can no longer hear. Who is Ulysses and who is the goddess who cloaks him in magical mist? Is the kingdom of brave Alcinous the same one that’s painted inside the archer’s turret? The gate opens and the boys hurry past, scowling at her as they skirt puddles. Not long after, the old teacher comes out leaning on a stick and she blocks his path.

“Your song. Was it inside those pages?”

The tutor can hardly turn his head; it is as though a gourd has been implanted beneath his chin.

“Will you teach me? I know some signs already; I know the one that’s like two pillars with a rod between, and the one that’s like a gallows, and the one that’s like an ox head upside down.”

With an index finger in the mud at his feet she draws an A. The man raises his gaze to the rain. Where his eyeballs should be white, they are yellow.