SKILA, AVERKIE

(17th and early 18th century)--Of Coptic descent, a fencing instructor, one of the most renowned saber experts in Constantinople at the end of the 17th century. Skila was hired as a servant by the Constantinople diplomat Avram Brankovich. He practiced his saber skills with his master in total darkness, tied to his opponent by a long leather belt. He knew how to heal wounds and always carried with him a collection of Chinese silver needles and a mirror on which red dots outlined the contours of his head and green dots the spreading lines on his face. When wounded or in pain, Skila would stand before the mirror and pierce his own face with the Chinese needles wherever the green dots appeared. His pains would disappear and his wounds would heal, leaving only the odd Chinese letter on his skin. This mirror could heal no-one but himself. He always liked to have amusing people around him, and wherever he smoked and drank he paid them well to make him laugh. But he determined the price of every joke differently. Laughter--he believed--can be ordinary when a man laughs at only one thing. That is the cheapest kind. More costly is what makes a man laugh at two or three things at once. But that kind of laughter is rare, like everything else that is precious.

Averkie Skila spent decades painstakingly collecting the best saber strokes from the battlefields and outposts of Asia Minor; he studied them, tested them on living flesh, and finally described them in a text filled with diagrams and sketches showing the various strokes of this ancient art. He could kill a fish in the water with his saber, or at night hang a lantern on a sword impaled in the ground and then, when his enemy was facing the light, attack him from the darkness with a knife. He marked each of these movements with a different sign of the zodiac, and each star of these constellations represented a single death. It is known that by 1689, Skila had already mastered Aquarius, Sagittarius, and Taurus and was in the constellation of Aries. All he needed was practical confirmation of the final saber stroke and this constellation would too be his. The stroke was a snake-like incision that left behind a terrible, sinuous, gaping slash; like a mouth it released voices from the wound sounding like the cry of liberated blood. Somewhere on the Austro-Turkish battlefield in Walachia in 1689, Skila, as he himself notes, tested this, his final stroke, and subsequently retired to Venice, where the experiences of this swordsman and saber master were published in 1702 in a book entitled The Finest Signatures of the Saber. Included in the book were folios with diagrams of fencing strokes, portraying Averkie Skila as standing amid the stars or, more precisely, in a cage or net formed by his saber moves. To the uninitiated he seemed to be enclosed in a beautiful, transparent pavilion that he had drawn and constructed in the air around him with a whistle of the saber and a cut of the blade. But this cage was made of such sumptuous shapes and was so light and airy, so full of sweeping turns, floating domes, bridges, arches, and slender towers at each corner, that Averkie Skila looked as though he were enclosed in the flight of a bumblebee whose endless signature in the air had suddenly become legible. Averkie Skila's face was serene behind those complicated moves of prison bars, but it had double lips and always looked as though someone else inside him wanted to speak in his stead. He maintained that every wound was a new heart that beat independently; with his saber he made the sign of the cross over these wounds. He has a hairy nose, by which people recognized him and avoided him.

An interesting note was left by the musician and dream reader Yusuf Masudi. He and Averkie Skila worked as servants for the said diplomat to the Sublime Porte in Constantinople, and he hunted for the specters that travel through people's dreams. He noted that, in cases when two people dream each other and the one's dream builds the other's reality, a small part of the dream is always left over. These are "the children of the dream". A dream, of course, is shorter than the reality of the one being dreamed, but the dream is always incomparably deeper than any reality, so there is always some dross left over, a "surplus of material" that cannot completely fit into the reality of the person being dreamed, but rather, spills into and attaches onto the reality of a third person, who consequently experiences considerable difficulties and changes. As a rule, this third individual is in a more complicated situation than the first two; his fee will is twice as restricted by the unconscious that of the other two, because the surplus of energy and material that passes from one dream to the other alternately flows into the spiritual life of the third person, who thereby becomes a sort of hermaphrodite and leans toward one dreamer one moment and the other dreamer the next.

It was Masudi's conviction that Averkie Skila suffered from this type of inhibition of will and was in a dead heat with these two dreamers, whose names Masudi also mentioned. They were Averkie's lord and master, Avram Brankovich, and a man named Cohen, whom Averkie Skila did not even know. In any case, though Skila was like an instrument with the deepest voice and thickest strings, he could only form the skeleton of the melody, the rudimentary, crude sound of his own life. All the rest evaded him and was tailored by others and for others. His loudest cries and greatest achievements took him no further that the level at which others exist painlessly and perform within the mean of their own possibilities.

According to Masudi's version of events, Averkie Skila did not start his collection of saber strokes for reasons of professional or military nature, to advance the learning of the art, but, rather, as a part of his desperate search for the one stroke that would rescue him from the vicious circle within which he moved, waiting for his tormentors to come within reach of his saber. In his final years, he placed great and unreasonable hope in solving his predicament with the aid of a single saber stroke, which, he claimed, was under the sign of Aries. At times he would awaken, his eyes filled with the dried-up tears of sleep; but when he rubbed them, the tears would break and crumble under his fingers like pieces of shattered glass or grains of sand, and from these fragments the Copt was able to tell that these were somebody else's tears, not his.

Be that as it may, the final diagram in the Venetian edition of Averkie's book, The Finest Signatures of the Saber, showed Averkie Skila in his cage of broken-line strokes; but the zigzag saber stroke under the sign of Aries was depicted in this sketch as a passage permitting an exit from the cage or net. In the final diagram of his book, Averkie Skila is pictured exiting from the cage of his combat skills through an opening made by this unusual sinuous stroke, and walking, as if through a gate, to freedom. He cam out through the slit as through a wound, being born from his astral prison into the world and a new life. And inside his mute outer lips the other, inner lips laughed joyously.