Judy is as astonished as if the woman had peeled away a limb.
With an expression of intense concentration, Sladja opens her jacket to reveal two objects slipped inside a deep pocket, laying them on the table before Judy, side by side. One is a sheaf of empty pages, and the other is a wooden box. Opening the box, after Sladja’s nod of encouragement, Judy finds a steel-nibbed pen and a pot of deep blue ink.
Then Sladja sweeps up the pen, the ink and the history, turns her back and settles onto the floor, bent over the torn page so that Judy can’t see what she is doing with it. Judy hides her frustration by flipping through the stack of pages Sladja has given her. The paper is thinner and smoother than any she’s seen before, and she wishes she could ask how it was made.
After some time, Sladja pulls herself from the floor, her age making the simple act of standing a feat of strength and will, and Judy has to resist the urge to help her to her feet.
The page Sladja lays before her now has been altered and amended in the wild and wavering blue hand Judy recognizes from the history. Whole sentences have been struck out with a single jagged line, and new words scrawled above. She stares from the page to Sladja’s hands, which shake even clutched in fists as they are now. She understands that there is something wrong with those hands, and maybe with Sladja herself. And then she understands everything.
I’m to write it, she thinks. Sladja can no longer do it herself. She wants the history written again, and I’m to write it.
Judy looks into the older woman’s eyes. As if Judy has spoken aloud and as if she has heard, Sladja nods.
Then she lays the page on the table, smoothing it with both hands like something cherished, and locks the volume from which it was torn inside the drawer.
When she is gone, Judy doesn’t hesitate. She opens up the ink and begins the work of copying both old and altered words onto the clean and empty page.
* * *
—
The last words Judy writes of her own are these:
Alphonse loved to tell me stories of the baby I once was. He was more sentimental than Daniel and would have to wipe his eyes as he spoke of just how small I had been, of a foot that fit perfectly in his hand, of a season of nights spent at watch over my cradle, which he’d sawn apart a chair to build.
“You were a being of time,” he said once, eyes closed and the tip of his nose a little reddened as he recalled my smallness, when I had been unable to move or eat but for the loving care of my fathers. “You would pin us to a single moment, as we waited and watched you breathe or sleep or drink. The long hours of the night would pass in slow seconds as we looked at your tiny face and thought that we would be content to watch it for the rest of our lives, to do only that, only look down over this small being and forever know, Just now she is safe. Time had become something else altogether, something remote and measureless, a kind of grace.
“But then, all at once, over a single night sometimes, we would see how time had travelled through the room while we weren’t looking. Your face would be bigger, your body longer than the day before. A gown no longer fit. A hand could clasp what yesterday it couldn’t. And we understood that time had never altered or shown any compassion for us. You grew and grew and grew, and would not have stopped even if we’d wished it.”
“Did you wish it?” I asked him.
“No and yes and no. You taught us how long hours are, and days, and how quickly they pass. That’s what babies do. They are an education in time. Its constant alterations their perpetual becoming.”
“Would you have wished me not to become—to stop?”
“But for the fact that I know what stopping is. A single certainty, instead of all that possibility. You can’t want that, and it’s the only other choice.”
But Alphonse stopped. We came into the hills together and Eban found us on the ninth night we slept in our tattered tent, frozen and grieving and afraid. Eban was carrying a rifle when I caught him watching us. He turned and it was I who was caught, in his pale eyes that were kinder than any I’d seen before, and he glowered for a moment, as he does when he’s unsure, but I knew from his eyes not to fear him. I still can see him as he was, standing there in the near dark, a figure of mercy with a weapon in his hands.
And it wasn’t long after that that a girl so wild she scarcely knew a word to speak brought some sickness to us, and Alphonse became a single certainty, in a pile of dingy bedding, in the middle of the wood I understood I’d never leave. And the girl stopped, and Eban’s mother stopped, and after that, he and I continued, moved high up into the hills with all our possibility, which somehow felt like only one. And the babies we made together grew and ceased, unborn, becoming other certainties.
I would have liked to love Eban. This is the cold, unthinkable thought that I have now. I read it on the page and am not certain I believe it. But I find I don’t have the imagination or the memory to convey me across the great distance between this time and one when I was sure of him and believed we’d find happiness together in the hills.
And what belongs to us now, which he mistakes for love, is something so much less it makes me want to flee these hills or let you leave me locked in this room forever. Because I knew what love was. I lived in its house.
And what I saw in my fathers’ faces, heard in their voices, felt part of just for standing near them, is not here or anywhere nearby.
XIII
The young Sladja, who put her pen to the first page of this book when it was new, wrote in a hand that bears roughly the same resemblance to the newly scrawled addenda that a young, straight back might bear to an old and crooked one. The earlier writing is confident, each letter shaped with care, the passages long and breathless. The corrections she made moments ago, bent over the page on the floor, are scarcely legible, the wildness of the shivering blue lines contradicted by the words themselves, which are stilted and overwrought.
Judy reads both sides of the page four times before she lifts the pen from the table. The first passage has been considerably expanded, extra words crowding even the title, and she can’t guess the significance of the changes.
The Second History of Haven Colony
Like in heart and like in mind, we choose this life. Those named here joined together in this choice, freely made, guided by our shared conscience, hidden from a world that has fallen under shadow. Drained of the human graces, it belongs to others now. Where we hear, they are deaf. Where we see truly, they are blind. Where we are plied by mercy, they are iron.
These free people came into the hills on April 11th, 2062, and in this waste made a place of refuge for all under our care. We number fifty-three, named in these pages. We have chosen to live under the rule of silence. By its enforcement, we protect our own from those who would turn our hearts against us, pervert our pity and bend us to their will. The rule is binding for all who freely choose to live among us or who enter into our watch.
To those who wonder of these two worlds, the one fled and the other built by careful hands, with these words we tell you who we were.
* * *
—
Judy notices that from the list below of fifty-seven names, four have been removed. She wonders why.
The last passage, entered in blue beneath the pencilled names, is marred by so many excisions and additions that it is hardly readable. Sladja’s changes fill the margins and seep past the page edge, continuing on the other side.
Nearly a year we prepared. We might have prepared for a decade and not been ready. But the travel took only three days, even with heavy loads of food and seed and each of us carrying our own belongings, stripped to fewer possessions than we’d ever imagined possible. “Leave it all,” Ren had commanded on the night of our last assembly, meeting the eyes of each of our number, honourable and proud, worthy of the faith they have awarded him. “All but what will enable your survival.” He paused and studied us, as tho
ugh he guessed where weakness might exist, a reluctance to renounce the lives that now belonged to that before, an extinct time and place. “Our survival,” he said.
And so we left the village and left the world that was. We climbed into the hills, bent under our packs, and fast learned what had been forgotten and what should have been. The houses were ready and sufficient to our needs. For the year of readying, twenty men and women in our number had camped in the hills for months at a time, cutting wood, hauling stone, digging, sawing, nailing, and preparing this new place. The last place, for us, the last people.
* * *
—
Judy slides her finger down the list of names, but sees no Ren among them. At the edge of one of the blots of ink that have expunged four names from the list, she thinks she glimpses the contours of an R, but isn’t sure.
Alive in a way she hasn’t felt since she was bottled up in this black house, she fills the pen with ink and begins the work of copying the history. She writes until it is dark and the words impossible to read.
* * *
—
Sladja arrives at the end of the next day, when long beams of blushing sunlight are retreating across the floor, slipping out the broken window. She takes the new page and the old from Judy and reads, signalling neither approval nor disappointment. Then she tucks both pages in her jacket pocket and tears out two more. This time she sits down on the stool, which Judy yields, and makes her changes on the desk while Judy stands aside, trying not to watch.
From that day on, Sladja appears every evening to accept Judy’s work and mark new pages for her. Sometimes she brings a candle and stays on into the night, turning over so many pages that it takes Judy most of the day to copy them.
After that first night, Sladja leaves the job of bringing Judy’s meals to Romeo-or-Bobby-Rae, who sometimes lingers so long that she feels sure he is near to addressing her, but he only raises his eyes to her at the door before he closes it. Eban does not come again.
* * *
—
And as the weeks pass, Judy learns the story of the people who first came into the hills, and what drove them there.
The first dozen pages of Sladja’s account follow the process of the colony settling into their new lives in the wilderness. In great detail, she explains the back-breaking labour of hand-ploughing and planting the four-acre garden, the endless problems with the solar-powered pump that was to irrigate the orchard, and the disappointing yields of their first efforts at hunting, and foraging. An entire passage describes an outbreak of trichinellosis after a bear was felled in a rain of lead by a panicked novice hunter and the elaborate sequence of baths in brine and smoke failed to kill the parasite.
The account is at first instructive and objective, a report on lessons learned or brought from the other civilization. But as the colony adjusts to the new conditions of their existence, they grow bored, and conflicts begin to emerge. At one meeting, a couple with two young children speak of leaving the hills. Then, three pages are blotted out and there is no more mention of the family.
Ren figures frequently and importantly in the account, resisting the erasure Sladja seems to have attempted when she struck his name from the register, as Judy is now convinced she did. In each appearance he is portrayed with such respect—his proud little speeches recounted in full, his features described more completely than those of any other—that she guesses he was a leader of sorts to the colony.
None of our number has taken to the forage with such success as Ren, who returns from the forest with his sack filled of amaranth, chicory root or fireweed, and knows always with certainty which roots and leaves are safe to eat and which must be left untouched. Even in this drought, he has found beds of mushroom nestled deep in the cleft of a tree or huddled in its shade. “All that we need can be provided to us in these wilds,” he answers modestly when we wonder at his knowledge. “We must learn to know the trees we live among, which we can and cannot trust, as we once knew our neighbours and whether they should be avoided or sought.”
Often as we eat, we whisper among ourselves that we might have starved waiting for our scorched gardens to grow, but for the fruits of his daily trips into the forest. The hunters bring back kills only intermittently, and whether fewer animals yet live in this forest than we supposed or their skills are less than they claimed is anyone’s guess. In the world before this one, Ren ate no meat and disdained even the cow’s milk and hen’s eggs that could then be bought at any store. But he understands that in this new world, even principle must sometimes yield, and he surrenders it as easily as he surrendered the possessions that were no longer fitted to the lives we lead here. Yet to eat of the hunters’ kills gives him little pleasure, and he swallows only what meat is needed to survive.
* * *
—
As she reads further, the grandiloquent prose becomes faintly less stiff, and Sladja’s neutral pronouns falter, her I springing up among the endless, affectless we. And in this change, Judy notices a sort of alliance between her and Ren. Many pages later, she comes across a passage that seems to indicate they were something even more than that to each other.
On our ninetieth night in these hills, we were brought from our bed by a knocking at the door, and when Ren opened it he saw Gretchen, who kept watch that night. In hushed and hurried words, she told us—
* * *
—
With a sharp intake of breath, Judy rereads the passage. Our bed. She reads on.
In hushed and hurried words, she told us that a man and a woman had come out of the forest, awaking several houses with their flashlights and loud voices. She said that their English was poor and she could scarcely understand them. They were looking, she said, for a place they called Heaven.
“Heaven?” I repeated.
“I think it’s a misreading of the sign,” Gretchen answered. “I think they mean Haven.”
When we first came to this place, Ren asked an eleven-year-old boy to post the name of Haven colony at the path, honouring the future we had founded by choosing the youngest among us for the job. But the boy’s parents hadn’t disclosed that he had never gone to school, and the sign he produced read HAEVEN. The error troubled Ren. “We will need to be careful with words,” he had said during our final climb into the hills. “We are shaping a paradigm for future generations with our lives. Every choice we make, every gesture, every detail is a symbol. And so everything we do must be deliberate and precise.” But he had hesitated to remove or replace the sign, wishing to spare the boy’s feelings.
“We’ll take the sign down,” I said.
Gretchen shook her head. “No need. It blew down in the winds last week. These people didn’t stumble upon us. They already knew we were here. They came looking for us.”
We had long expected and planned for this development. The last people, we are also the first, pioneers in these hills, and we knew that in the months and years to come, many more would flee as we had fled. And by accident or intent, they would find their way to us.
“And when they do, will we turn them away?” Ren asked when we had first spoken of it. “Will we deny them what was hard-earned, because they lacked our foresight or our courage?”
I knew for him the answer was clear, as all truths were to him. And yet a shadow dwelt in my heart.
* * *
—
Sladja didn’t explain the shadow or its meaning…was it the same shadow alluded to on the first page, or some other, private worry? But as if it had poisoned the events that followed, the next many pages recounted only unhappiness. The couple adjusted poorly to the conditions at the camp, and proved to be of little use to anyone. The man, Alexander, was bad-tempered and stole fruit from the orchard. Sladja found him creeping through the colony after dark for no apparent reason. And his wife, Josefine, seemed untroubled by his behaviour and uninterested in the routine of the
colony and its inhabitants…only Ren seemed to hold her attention.
And I ask him what is meant by the long hours Josefine keeps at his side, and he tells me only that she is frightened and has endured more than we did, having lingered longer in the troubles of the old life.
“What fears does she have?” I asked him. “What troubles has she endured?” For she shows no weakness that my eye can perceive and seems to lack the gentleness of character that might allow her to suffer.
“When we earn her trust, she will tell us,” he promises me. But if she tells anything, it’s to him alone. She is as close-lipped as her husband among all others. She follows Ren to meals, darns his clothes, and spends her only hours apart from him gathering herbs in the wood that she boils and claims will ease his asthma. But his fits of wheezing have only grown more frequent in the months that he has been without the medication he once took (though he doesn’t know I hear him when he wakes at night, gasping, and leaves our bed for the outdoors, thinking he keeps his secret). And twice I have had to drive her from our own house.
He asks for my forbearance. He asks that I await her trust. But has she proven worthy of ours?
* * *
—
Sladja’s apparent jealousy balloons over the succeeding pages, as seemingly meaningless incidents between Ren and the woman, or conversations between Sladja and Ren, are recounted with forensic detail. But then abruptly, the couple disappears from the account, eclipsed by an incipient crisis, as the drought that took hold weeks after the colony arrived shows no sign of abating, and the rainless crops fail one by one, costing them not only the intended food supply for a year but also the source of future seed. When eight months later the well runs dry, fourteen men and women decamp for the foothills, and in passing, Sladja notes Alexander among them. She doesn’t mention what became of Josefine.
The Second History Page 20
