Hastily, Sladja pushes the pen into Judy’s hand and then reaches for the drawer. In an instant, seeing Sladja’s other hand fly to her pocket, Judy understands that she’s looking for a new sheet of paper, on which the words will be recopied, with the missing name restored. But before her other hand can discover the empty pocket, with just the slight pressure of her fingers closing on the knob, the unlocked drawer skids open, toppling to the ground and releasing a flock of fluttering sheets of paper.
Sladja stares at the drawer and then at the hand that found nothing in the pocket where the key should be. She takes in the room, the desk, the four dark walls, the coil of blankets where Judy sleeps, and the pages she left on the floor.
Very slowly Sladja bends and picks up the key from where Judy slipped it under the desk.
Only in that instant does Judy understand the magnitude of what she has done in Sladja’s eyes. She has peered into what Sladja sought her help in forever erasing. She has seen what was to be hidden—and even now doesn’t entirely understand what that is. A recalibration of a grand agenda…or maybe a deeply private shame. Shame of weakness, or of unwillingness to yield, or only of an error in her doctrine—for losing the man she loved or failing to protect the children in her care or for the dwindling end of the world fifty-seven men and women tried to build when they were young…Or was it something else altogether, something that has eluded Judy, an answer Sladja will never give to a question Judy will never be able to ask?
Without words, there is no way for Judy to defend what she has done.
So she only looks on as Sladja picks up the papers from the floor and reads the last page Judy read, the one written in the hand of the man who came with her into these hills and then left them alone.
When she has finished reading, Sladja drops the last pages of the first history on the desk. Judy stands, determined to face with strength whatever is coming. But Sladja steps past her, lowering herself onto the empty stool and using Judy’s pen to strike out page after page in the first history and then in the second. She makes no effort to hide her work, and Judy stands beside her, watching until it’s complete. The pen performs the work of an axe, cutting a man from where he stood, removing Ren from the only place where he remained.
She waits to see what will happen next, if the histories will be taken away from the black house, or if she will. When Sladja makes no move toward the key that still lies on the floor, Judy picks it up and offers it to her in her open palm. But Sladja shows no interest in the key or the woman who holds it.
Instead she crosses to the broken window and stands at it for a long time. From behind her, Judy sees what she sees—a white spray of stars over a black sky. But she cannot guess at what she feels.
After a time, Sladja turns away from the window. She doesn’t take the key or the old pages or the new. She doesn’t show her face to Judy, waiting anxious at the middle of the small, dark room. She leaves the house without a backward glance, leaving the lantern still burning and the pages spread over the table in careless disarray.
* * *
—
Judy waits all night and day, but no one comes to the black house. Enough water remains in the jug to mete out over a week if need be, and a day without food is nothing to someone who has lived so long in these hills.
At first she leaves the pages untouched, expecting Sladja to return for them. But when she doesn’t, Judy gathers and orders them, setting them at the centre of the table in a tidy pile. And then, when dark falls again and the lantern burns on, she pulls the stool to the table and reads the last pages of the history.
Fewer than a dozen of the original colony members now remained, and none of child-bearing age. After the leaving of the bereaved parents and of those demoralized by grief, which spread like a contagion through the camp, Sladja wrote her account with a tone of stoic disinterest. She recognized with a flick of her pencil, a sharp word or two, that nothing, after all, would be built to last in these hills. The people would die one by one, as Ren had written, and then the houses they had lived in would crumble. No new generation would lift up the burden of their imagined future.
And so instead, Sladja found a new purpose, amending her cause and that of the colony itself. She wrote of the need to keep safe those in her trust. The threats were manifold; she would have to prevent them from the folly of leaving camp, like those before them, to face incomprehensible dangers. And she would have to keep others from entering camp and imperilling this last place of refuge. But in enforcing these directives, she needed to also ensure they didn’t cripple the very faculty they had sought to protect. They would have to turn away all threats without becoming ruthless.
Without discussion, Sladja invented and imposed the rule of silence. She presented it to the camp with a prepared speech that she recounted in the history. “We came into these hills to hide from them. But even here we aren’t safe. They find us, or enter from within. They know the weapon that weakens us, makes us lay down our defences willingly before those we might have easily defeated. They make us hear and feel, and they steal our pity. And they do it with words.
“Lies,” she said, “are told by words. It is the only way lies travel. But truth speaks in our eyes and faces, where it can’t be silenced or forged.” She reminded them of the peddlers; no one knew if they were born mute or if their tongues were cut to ensure they wouldn’t report to the cities, but their silence preserved their own safety and that of the people who lived in the hills.
If, she wrote, after making this speech, I hadn’t listened to Josefine. Or even to (here, three letters are scratched out by a slash of ink, but Judy knows the name they spelled). If I had driven her out instead of letting her manipulate me with a sad story. I can’t let myself think of how it might be different now. They fool us that way, those other ones. Move us, as she moved me. Persuade us, as she persuaded all of us to let her stay. But they can’t read our faces or lie with theirs. Those like us can share what we feel and need without ever speaking again, and then we’ll have denied them their last tool to harm or deceive. We should have been so much more careful with our words.
A week later, the rule came into enforcement, and by then, all but six members of the camp had left in protest. Only Sladja, Oona, the twins and one senescent couple remained.
In her speech, Sladja had also announced that all newcomers to Haven would be subjected to the same tests they had faced in their youth, before coming into the hills. She cleared out Josefine’s house while Oona and the couple dug a pit beneath its foundation, like those they had dug beneath their own houses, where they themselves would now sleep, in hopes that those who found Haven would think it long abandoned.
It took eleven days to build and contain the fires that burned the surrounding circle of forest, so they could more easily spot and track approaching strangers. Those strangers would be brought to Josefine’s house and cast into the pit until they could be tested. There is no indication in the record of what would happen to those who failed the test.
The entries become terse and infrequent. A dozen years tumble past in a couple of pages. Sladja’s handwriting is increasingly difficult to read. In passing, she complains of a tremor in her hands. What a joke, she wrote. The same palsy that wrested away the mind and body of my mother now doubles back for me. All the way up here it came, slunk into these hills to find me. Not even that have I escaped. A great, devouring joke. And there is no one to laugh.
The summer after the couple died, five days apart, Sladja recounted a conversation with a man she had first mistaken for a peddler.
I found his footprints in the ground of the burned wood. I could make no sense of them at first, till I tracked him to his tent. I saw then that he used a pair of purpose-made canes to walk, to minimize the weight borne by his arthritic knees. Strange to see a runner, which is what he claimed to be when I woke him, walk with a limp. In the tent beside him was a young girl, whose ag
e I couldn’t guess. She was wild-eyed and silent.
The pages that follow make clear that runners were not, as Judy first thought, agents of the resistance like the riders who had collected Daniel’s work. The man was one of a company of people who travelled through the hills and other, farther places, charged with finding those who had escaped the cities and their records. She reads how runners like the man, whose name was Lincoln, were given photographs of the missing, and sent to search out where they hid. Some were rumoured to do their work for the other ones, and were feared. But Oona had hired Lincoln long ago to find her sister and her child. The sister, whom he had located at last in the outland, had been ill and had not survived the journey to Haven. But the child, Golda, knew her aunt on sight from Oona’s resemblance to her own mother, and Sladja wrote that the two held each other as though they would never let go.
Lincoln wasn’t well, and Sladja allowed him to stay in the camp for three days, watching him closely. He slept in Josefine’s house, but not in the pit beneath the floor. He agreed readily to the rule, and didn’t say a word again. By the third day, his colour and cough had improved and Sladja visited him with a rolled sheet of paper in her hands. On the page, she had written out the terms of an arrangement. If Lincoln gave up his work as a runner, and agreed to make camp in the burned wood and keep watch over its surroundings, she would offer him whatever fuel and food he needed to keep himself.
Sladja wrote that Lincoln had considered the matter for several hours after she left him, but he was old and tired of limping the forest paths, and when she visited him again, he had signed his name beneath her own.
There was, it seems, little to report in the months and years that followed Golda’s arrival at Haven colony. They were now so few that they found it easy to provide for their needs, stockpiling surpluses of furs, grain and cured meat to trade, and they wanted for nothing in the way of food or basic supplies. But as Golda grew older, a discontent took hold in her, and she was often overtaken by sour, restless moods, abandoning whatever task she was assigned to wander without purpose in the wood. Her aunt worried for her, and Sladja worried too.
Golda’s ventures away from the camp became longer and more frequent, taking her farther each time, until one night she couldn’t be found. Bobby-Rae located her four days later, halfway to the foothills, cold, starved and defiant. She fought him all the way back. After that, Sladja assigned one of them to monitor her every day, sticking close by her side to ensure she didn’t escape, but three more times she managed to elude them. After her third escape, she was gone for nearly a month, and of that time, Sladja wrote nothing at all in the history. But when she returned, Sladja took up her pen again.
* * *
—
26 days she was away from us. 26 days she walked in these woods, wearing the clothes she slept in on her last night with us. Without proper boots or coat, without weapon of any kind, she walked and walked. I don’t know where she went. And I don’t know what she found there. Oona asks. I can’t stop her from asking. I must punish her for that and I can’t. She asks but Golda cannot answer. She has shown us what they did to her. When we washed the dirt from her—dirt everywhere, in places that shouldn’t ever have been touched—and removed the rags of her clothes, she turned her head toward her aunt and opened her mouth and we saw that they had taken her tongue.
It wasn’t enough to keep watch. It wasn’t enough for Oona to sleep with her in her house. Now we’ll lock the door at night and open it for her at dawn, so she can’t go away from us again. But I still see in her eyes that senseless, desperate desire to leave. I wish I could take it out the way they took her tongue. I swear I’d take her eyes themselves if it would do it.
And again and again, in the dim late hours, this thought returns to me: We will be the ones to leave. We’ll leave all three of them. When Oona and I are gone, they’ll have only each other, and houses and gardens that would take a dozen to maintain, and these words.
I’ve made so many mistakes. I want to lift them out of these pages now. If it were possible I would scrub them from our history like a stain, till all that remained was who we were when we came here, and what we meant to do.
It grows harder and harder to steady this pen. This diary will end when my hand finally fails. And if I go the way of my mother, it won’t be long after that till I struggle to eat, to walk. Hardest for her was the loss of speech—she would look at me with the words teeming behind her eyes, coarse sounds dropping from her stumbling tongue, her wet empty mouth. Those unsaid words blotted up her life, choked the air from her lungs. I thought it was horrible, to be unable to leave your own head, to be bottled up there. To break the joint of speech that connects one person to another. But now I will not even know the day when it breaks in me.
I’m going to stitch this diary into our log. If I could I’d write it all again. I’d speak for all of us, not just my feeble story. I’d hide what no one needs to know—my failings, Ren’s weakness, and what we lost up in these hills. We tried to be new and better people. And if it was stupid to think we could remake the world, or just save what was left of it, even just a handful of people—even just the ones we loved—then we should be forgiven for failing. If I wrote our story again, I would write it so that whoever read it might forgive us.
And I would choose better words. Strong, solemn words. When we first began to talk of going away into the wild, Ren told me that words would matter. He said we should choose each one with caution, speaking and writing with the enduring grammar of laws or scripture. “Or poetry,” he said. “So that our words become something more, something that will last. An edifice. A bond.”
I see now that I chose all the wrong words.
* * *
—
Judy is already angry by the time she reaches the last page, two years but only a few paragraphs later. The words are written in a wilder, more disordered hand than the quaking one of the preceding entries. The twists and knots of letters seem a kind of defiance, unyielding against the force that would dismantle them.
It has been two years since any stranger entered the burned wood or knocked upon our doors. I began to think the hills all emptied out, as our camp was. But today Lincoln came with news for us. He sketched a man and woman for me, wandering in the wood. He wrote only a few words—he went to school only a short time, and can spell little more than his name—but he made me understand. The man is one of his. Someone hunted for. He was paid for the man by someone in the cities, and would claim a good fee if he returned him there. But I emptied out every fur in our keep, half a winter of meat. And I gave him to understand that there would be more if he let this man and woman come to us and showed me where they camped. Together, we will take from them everything they carry, leaving only enough to ensure they survive the trip to us, and that when they arrive they will be in need. Because the woman, he showed me, will have a child.
And so, beyond all hope or possibility, comes a survivor.
And maybe, with that child, the world will begin again.
* * *
—
When Romeo appears, Judy has just dropped the history to the table and turned her back. Anger crowds out the questions—Who is it that wanted Eban found? And why?—as she understands at last that she walked into her trap like a fish diving into a net. That it was Sladja who robbed them and let them enter this place starved and weak and that she will never let them leave. She is thinking of toppling the lantern with a swipe of her hand, feeding the history to the last burning drops of oil. And then, staring out the broken window into the black trees, limned in moonlight, she sees his face appear out of the darkness before her.
She gasps and steps back, but he beckons her to the window again and reaches both hands through, pushing their contents into her own hands. She unwraps a scrap of linen and finds a hard, small loaf of bread and a handful of crushed red berries bleeding through the soiled cloth. His hands sl
ide to circle her wrists and she fears what he wants from her. The ground outside is lower than the floor she stands on, so he reaches slightly up to her, supplicant, his face shadowy, the moon describing his silhouette in white.
He’s young, she thinks. A boy, really. She thinks of the fatherless babies she read of, the motherless boys in the woods. An older man would have brought her water.
But she is grateful enough to put aside her anger for a time, and let him see her eat the berries with desperate appetite, sucking the juice from the cloth.
His hands have dropped now to the windowsill, but seem to linger there, waiting for something from her. She sets the bread aside, wrapped in the cloth, for later, and stares at him, uncertain. His eyes flick to her waist, and then all at once his hands are on her, and she is about to strike him, shove him as hard as she can to the ground, when she realizes what he wants.
His hands stretched over his head, through the window, hold the roundness of her belly between them. She resents the sudden, unasked-for intimacy, but she’s moved by his face and the gentleness of his touch. He rests his cheek on the sill, seeming not to notice the jagged edge of the broken pane. She hesitates and then decides to allow what is happening to happen a little longer, and she moves toward him. His face inches from her belly, he hums just loudly enough that she can hear, a sweet and dim refrain, a baby song.
The door opens as she stands at the window, her belly in a strange man’s hands.
Sladja, holding a small vessel of water but no food or pot, stops at the sight of Judy, her gaze dropping at once to the hands at her belly, which Judy impulsively seizes in her own. But Romeo, who seems to see in Judy’s face what has happened, steps back from the window and becomes a dark figure among the trees, lingering, listening there.
A hot, bright star of anger flares within Judy, and she seizes the history as Sladja waits, seeming to thin and dwindle in the corner of the room. Briefly, Judy thinks that the pages are lighter than she would have guessed, and then she heaves them at the woman in the corner, the fragile binding cracking to release a flapping, fluttering swarm of paper. Sladja drops the jar of water as she grabs at the pages and it shatters on the floor.
The Second History Page 24
