Just when Judy is about to scream for Eban to help her, to protect her from this woman who seems bent on crushing their baby with her probing hands, Sladja suddenly breaks into a smile, the lines of her powder-white skin arching from her eyes to her jaw. She meets Judy’s eyes with such a nakedly pleased expression that all at once Judy feels sure her baby is safe. This woman won’t hurt her child. What’s more, she knows something about it, something Judy doesn’t know herself. Some good news of the child, hidden in the invisible interior of her body.
To her surprise, she smiles back at Sladja, nodding and closing her hand over the woman’s own and pressing it more firmly to her belly to show she understands. Yes. This baby lives.
The grin fades from Sladja’s face and she seems to search Judy’s eyes for something before dropping her hands and releasing her. Abruptly, she returns to the door and gathers the dishes she left there, depositing them at the desk. She doesn’t set them out for her, assembling the meal, as Oona does. Instead, she stares so intently at the tray that Judy’s gaze is drawn to it too. But it isn’t the food that has caught the woman’s attention.
If she had been closer, Judy would have snatched up the paper before Sladja could take it, but instead she only watches helplessly as the woman lifts it to her face, holding it inches from her eyes and squinting as though she struggles to read what Judy has written there. Silently, Judy admonishes herself. She should have returned it to the drawer with the other pages. She has grown careless.
After a few moments, the woman crumples the page into her fist and wrenches open the upper drawer. Pulling out the other pages, she holds each one up in turn, reading them as she did the first, so that the paper nearly grazes her face. When she’s finished, she gathers up the remaining papers from the drawer, even those Judy hasn’t so much as marked, and tucks them under her arm, pausing only then to look back at Judy.
In any other circumstance, Judy would expect that she was about to speak, to ask her something urgent. But instead, after a moment, the woman reaches into a pocket in her long skirts and produces a key. Glancing briefly at Judy, as though checking to see whether she understands and agrees about what will happen next, the woman then opens the locked lower drawer.
She withdraws the bound volume that Judy first read down in the hole she now stands over. A second volume is revealed beneath it, thinner than the first, and a stack of papers, and then Sladja shuts the drawer and locks it. Returning her attention to the first volume, Judy watches as the woman opens it over the desk, flipping to the page where Judy’s own writing appears. The woman slides a new pencil with a pointed tip between the leaves, marking the page where, Judy understands now, she is to write.
From across the table between them, the two women share a look of understanding. Yes, Judy thinks, as though the other can hear her. She’ll write it there. Her story. Of now, and everything that came before. Of her and Eban both. More than the bare, stunted lines they first left on the page. She’ll tell Sladja, write it all there on the page as though everything that’s happened to them is something she has carried and can now lay down.
Satisfied, Sladja backs away from the table, lifts the filled chamber pot from the floor and, bent over its weight, leaves the black house without looking at Judy again.
When she is gone, Judy takes up the pencil and writes until nothing is left between her blackened fingertips.
XII
This is what she writes:
We were three. I lived with my fathers in a house with glass windows and a yard of dust. The sky was grey nearly every day, and the air thick. But on the clearest days, fields of yellow would appear at the farthest point we could see, a yellow line tracing the sky. The end of what was ours.
Once my father Daniel walked with me as far as the gates of the resource allotment and we stood staring out over those fields. Here and there the soil was bald, and what grain grew looked sun-scorched and sickly, and I knew it was all the food there was. We kept our own garden, because Daniel knew how to make things grow—my other father often said he could have raised roses from a stone. When it was warm he would bow over the pots in our yard, spending hours prodding at the soil, divining, like the snake charmer in one of my other father’s books. The year we had two chickens, he would keep the shells of their eggs to rake into the dirt. Sometimes he would haul buckets of our filth into the yard and that, too, he would use. When the chickens died that summer for lack of water, he wouldn’t let me bury their poor bones, what was left after we had eaten what we could. Even their tiny bird skeletons went into the pots.
But there were seasons and years when his pots yielded nothing and we had to buy our food from the peddlers, same as anyone, and pay whatever unreasonable price they asked. Alphonse would always pay, because it made Daniel go too quiet, haggling with a stranger in the yard surrounded by his pots of desiccated seed, a garden aborted in the dirt.
So though he hated it, he knew and I did without him saying that without those yellow fields we would have starved. He warned me not to touch the gate, but he let me stand close enough that I could see how the machines that ran the irrigation system had gone red with rust and must have been made long ago.
“They won’t last forever,” he told me.
“They’ll make more,” I said, but he didn’t really hear.
* * *
—
They send Eban again that night. She feels there is a purpose in sending him, but can’t guess what it is.
Again he hesitates at the door and she does nothing to invite him inside, waiting instead until he makes up his mind.
He comes to the table where she is writing and when she doesn’t look up, he whispers, “I have your dinner.”
“Either they are listening to us or they aren’t,” she says, still without raising her head. “Whispering doesn’t help.”
He lays the dishes down one by one and then says, in a slightly louder voice, “You’re angry. You’re angry with me.”
She knows it’s true but doesn’t understand why, so she only shrugs. At first she was unable to tell, but now, each hour, it becomes more clear—her hatred of this place, it creeps in over the windowsills, smuggles through the keyhole in the floor. She is furious to be caught like an insect in this house. She is furious to be learning nothing more of anything…of an existence beyond this one, or the lives of people below these hills. She feels farther from it all than she has ever been before, drawn instead into another mystery altogether, one that is no use to her.
And still there is nothing in any of this that she can blame him for. But for her, they would have grown old in their hide, bent and white-haired, his voice the only voice she heard, his face the only face she saw. She would have blamed him for stealing her chance to know who she’d have been without him. She would have hated him as a way to hating herself.
It has now been years since she felt what she had taken for love become a kind of gravity, a force she couldn’t resist or remove. Eyes closed, she could recognize every part of him with her hands. He pressed into the space that should have been hers alone. He occupied her. And if it began in love, now it feels like something much bigger and darker and less. It feels like a robbery.
They argued for a year before she said she would leave without him. It took that long. And then she had to keep repeating it to believe it herself. She’d never been without him or her fathers. It is true, what she now whispers to her daughter. As alone as she felt, she’d never truly been alone.
And so they left that place. She took him from it. She brought him here. And now she despises every stone of the house that contains her, and the ghosts of whoever they used to be, those people who built this place, and the ghost of him, disappearing before her, in this room, wanting to be like them, to die among these empty houses, to sleep beneath their floors, mouthing their silences.
“Tell me why you like it here,” she says. “Tell me what
it is. What it is that…”
“That…?”
That lets you live among these tongueless people and see no horror here. “That changed your mind. That makes you trust them.”
“I don’t think they mean to hurt us.”
“But you are whispering.”
She takes satisfaction in his frown, in the long pause before he attempts a reply. When he finally opens his mouth, she interrupts him.
“How many of them are there?”
“The others? You know. Only them. The ones we met here.”
“Only those five? Are you sure?”
He shrugs. “I haven’t seen anyone else.”
“But there are almost a dozen houses…I counted them…”
“You know from the book. There were more. But not anymore. Maybe not for years.”
“Why?”
“There could be any reason. I see these people every day. They live like a family. Each with a house of their own, except for the two brothers who share their house together.”
“The girl. The girl they locked beneath the floor. Is she family too?”
“They all sleep under the floor.”
“All bolted from above?”
He lifts his hands and drops them. “You always thought I was too careful. Now you tell me not to trust them? These people we’ve hunted for, walked miles to find?”
“Why do they keep me here, when you’re allowed to live among them?”
He looks troubled now. “That I don’t understand.”
“You trust them that much? You leave the mother of your child under their key?”
He winces slightly at the mention of her child, as he always does, and eyes her belly as if that’s what he doesn’t trust. “I wonder if it’s because of your…pregnancy. It seems to matter. It seems to be important to them. They believe you’ll bear a child.”
She understands his meaning. They believe and he does not. She means to let him feel the keenness of her anger, its sharp edge. But her voice when she speaks is pleading. “She still lives, Eban. I still feel her. Alive in me.”
He nods and averts his eyes. “I thought…when they first came in here and she—Sladja—examined you. I thought I could see what she did. The shape of you seemed different. Like the baby might…it might still…”
She is flooded with a sudden impulse to put her arms around him, but when she stands he steps backward, and she sees that he fears her. As softly as she can, she says, “Goodnight, Eban.”
He seems sad as he turns to leave. At the door, he tells her, “They make me useful. Sladja comes to me and makes me show her what to do with herbs to heal burns, and had me sew three stitches into Golda’s leg when she fell on the rocks gathering water. I have value here. That’s why. That’s why I feel safe.”
She sinks onto the stool again and smiles briefly and almost tenderly, hands already restless, reaching for the pencil, while he shuts the door.
I was fourteen years old the day we saw the deer.
It was Daniel who spotted it first, and who noticed that it limped.
“There,” he said, when he had called Alphonse and me out to stare across the dust to the shape scuttling past the gate to the allotment. “And look how it favours its right hoof.”
“A deer?” Alphonse said in disbelief. “Out here?”
“Out here and not for long.” Daniel set down his field glasses then to look with his naked eyes at the dark shape. “The cameras will pick that up.”
“Will they kill it?” I asked.
“If they do, it won’t be to eat. Maybe to study it. Or they might shoot before they have the chance to do even that—I don’t know if there are people behind the guns they train on anybody fiddling with the gate there.”
And then it was Alphonse who set out down the road carrying a lidded bowl of vegetables retrieved from the cellar. Daniel and I passed the field glasses back and forth, and saw the animal’s reluctance, the nervous way it sprang away from him, but not fast or far enough.
“Sick maybe, as well as injured,” Daniel said. “Or starved.”
The deer never came close enough to the yard for me to see it well. It followed the trail of shrivelled carrot that Alphonse laid down for it, but only at a distance.
“Please,” I begged, but Daniel shook his head.
“If we spook it, it may bolt for the allotment, the only place with shade for miles, and it will mean the end of it. I know you want to see it, but you might do it harm with your good intentions.”
“Young, isn’t it,” said Alphonse when he returned.
Daniel agreed. “Maybe a yearling.”
Alphonse stared at the animal, which stood at the end of the carrot trail, head and ears upright and high, watching us in wonderment. “Did you have any idea there were still deer in the world?”
Daniel made an expression of ambivalence. “I wouldn’t dare try to guess what is or isn’t out there.”
The silence then seemed anxious to me, but I couldn’t tell why. And then Daniel said, “No.”
“Stupid of us, though. We’d eat without a worry till spring.”
“No,” Daniel said, just as gently.
“No,” Alphonse agreed. “Not even if we starve.”
“No way of knowing what’s out there, but like all of us, that’s one half of the future. Only half a chance there’ll be another, and who knows how many such half-chances live out there in those hills yet. It would be a crime to rob the wilderness of one with so few left.”
Alphonse was quiet for several minutes. “I didn’t even think of that,” he said at last.
“What do you mean?”
“I just thought even now we aren’t desperate enough to kill something so lovely.”
Daniel looked away from the deer for the first time, his expression disapproving as he regarded Alphonse. “You really think it deserves to live more than the other creatures we’ve eaten? More than the hundred specimens pinned or bottled on my shelves upstairs?”
Alphonse shrugged and said a special law ruled over the beautiful. Particularly beautiful living things.
Daniel smiled briefly and noted that they would outlaw him for thinking that way in the cities.
“Fairness occupies their thoughts more than mine. I always favoured mercy over justice.”
The deer had eaten the last of the carrots and given up searching for more. We held our breath for one long moment as it looked back in the direction from which it had come, and then all at once it bolted, its lame leg no longer seeming to hinder it, heading, as best we could guess or hope, towards the hills.
“Well, your way isn’t merciful to those insects up there,” Daniel said.
“No. No, it’s not.”
The three of us watched the deer until it vanished from sight somewhere in the distance. Then we went inside and ate a supper of turnip stew.
* * *
—
For several nights in a row, she dreams of tiny beings of all kinds—human, animal, insect, once even a slender sapling on a steep, bald hill. There is no connection between the dreams except the vulnerability of these creatures. A newborn mouse, pink and blind, trapped in a jar. An ant attempting to carry a load much too big, which it drops and picks back up, again and again. It’s when she dreams of the human infant, lying on its side with its back to her, succumbed and motionless, that she understands these are all dreams of her baby.
Eban once told her that fetal cells can migrate from an unborn child into its mother’s brain, annexing her anatomy to serve its needs. She thinks maybe this baby is shaping her for mercy, creating in her a dangerous tenderness, which she will host like it is a parasite when the baby arrives. The parasite will ensure that to deny the baby will be an act of unbearable self-harm. If need be, Judy will starve to feed her child, and not because of duty or even compa
ssion. Because when the baby is unfed, they will hunger together.
She has never seen a baby. The youngest person she has ever known is the girl whose name was Elinor, who came to their first hide in the hills, whose illness infected Eban’s mother and her father and killed them both. Daniel had a photograph of himself and his sister as children in a garden in white clothes, and she used to stare at it, as a girl, and attempt to understand how her father had once been this smiling, neckless boy with fat hands and perfect teeth.
In books she has found pictures of them, babies as angels and as fairies, babies in the arms of their mothers, babies stolen or sobbing or watchful. She knows that they aren’t just tinier people but differently put-together ones, with wider eyes and larger heads, round bellies and short, thick limbs. She knows they are born preposterously weak, more helpless than new-hatched birds. But there are so many things she doesn’t know. How quickly do they grow? How long do they need to be spoon-fed and carried? When and how do they learn to speak?
When the other babies went, their passage made sense to her in a way she could never have explained to Eban. The inexplicable exits belonged to the mysteriousness of babies—these creatures that were incontestably human but clearly also something else. Something other and more. They grew in darkness. And died there. And whatever they were, invisibly, or could have been and weren’t, is their secret, which they keep.
Daniel was a collector, but he didn’t call it collecting. He called it keeping things. It was his work, but only coincidentally. You could tell that he would do it anyway, no matter what. He had jars filled with rock and sediment, samples of bark, shelved in lines across the wall over his desk. He kept insects pinned to paper after he’d finished examining them. Alphonse called it macabre and once threw out a box filled with their desiccated remains, thinking Daniel wouldn’t notice, but he was furious and didn’t speak to Alphonse for three days. At breakfast on the third day, I chided him, and said he shouldn’t disturb Daniel’s work, which I believed to be very important. (I was so proud when the riders would come to collect his papers.) But Alphonse said the work was done, and that wasn’t the reason Daniel was angry. “He misses them,” he said.
The Second History Page 18
