‘See?’ his wife said. ‘I told you.’ She signed the paper held out to her. As she handed it back, she asked, ‘What can you tell me about her?’
‘Nothing. She doesn’t move but she isn’t paralysed. She’s old. Maybe she’s sick, maybe not.’
‘Does she talk?’
‘She makes noises. That’s all.’
‘We should get extra rations for this. Somebody’s got to keep cleaning her up all the time.’
‘You get what’s written down there.’
‘Well, we’ll do our best, but just look at her. I mean, she isn’t going to last long, no matter what we do for her. It looks like she’s had a stroke, anyway. Did a doctor see her before you loaded her into that cattle truck?’
‘Doctor?’ both the aid workers repeated. They laughed. One of them said, ‘When was the last time you saw a doctor, Professor?’
The other one said, ‘I expect that would be Dr Houdini you’re referring to – we haven’t seen him around for quite a while.’
The first one said, ‘I guess he’s done a disappearing act.’
After the two of them had left the house, they could still be heard, faintly: laughing as they got back into their opensided van, banged the doors and started the engine.
That evening he helped to move the beds. They had to keep the old woman downstairs, where the smell immediately began to infiltrate everything around her. His wife said, ‘We’ll never be able to get rid of her.’
He answered in a low voice, ‘They’re sure to move her along soon. We aren’t qualified to deal with her.’
‘How qualified do you need to be to clean up piss and shit?’
‘In a real hospital they might be able to get her speech back.’
‘Oh my God, what for? Who’s got the time for that sentimental garbage? Look around you. It’s the children who need what this old biddy’s using up. She’s had her chance. And she had more than most – she must be a hundred if she’s a day. She’d better stop making that noise.’
‘She probably doesn’t know she’s doing it.’
‘It makes me feel like hitting her over the head.’
‘Don’t forget: we’re lucky to have a refugee with us.’
‘You don’t have to do the washing. Listen. There she goes again. Well, she can just lie in it. I’m not doing anything more till the kids are in bed.’
*
As he had feared, they went into a cold snap. It lasted nearly a week. All doors and windows had to be shut tight against the bitter daytime winds and the freezing nights. The old woman whined and groaned and the house reeked of her uncontrollable bodily emissions. Her mind might have been blocked by some unknown inner disaster, but the rest was without restraint. Whatever went in, came out. The stink reached every part of the house. After a while they began to taste it in the food they ate and even in the water they drank.
‘She’s as strong as a horse,’ his wife said. ‘She’ll last for ever.’
‘Hush,’ he whispered.
‘What for?’
He’d been told that people who were immobile and unable to talk – even people who were in a coma – could sometimes still hear. If the woman knew what they’d been saying from her arrival onward, she’d be in a state of anguish.
Outside the house the air was clear. He stayed away from home, going in to town or moving farther out into the country and working as long as he could, despite the cold.
*
Spring came at last, the real spring. Children who had hidden indoors for the past months came out to play. They formed gangs. Sometimes they took part in the ancient circle games and dances he’d grown up with. When he heard their voices from far away, he was reminded of his own childhood, his parents and the world that had been safe and happy before everything was smashed to pieces. But more often the games became like rehearsals for military activity. The gangs had leaders and bullies; the girls were excluded or beaten into submission. He could see the time coming when the older girls would be turned into whores until they became pregnant, after which their parents would throw them out of the house. And by that time the boys would have armed themselves with weapons to use against rival gangs; they’d already found tunes for the words they shouted as they strode back and forth, acting important. He didn’t like to see them marching: it made him think that everything was going to happen all over again. But, of course, it would.
He concentrated on the vegetable garden, using the children as guards. They understood that their presence next to the newly dug and planted rows was essential. They never left the house except in a group, knowing that if anything were found to be missing at home, he or his wife would punish them for it after their return.
Everyone stole. His main worry, especially during the night, was the food. No matter how they tried to disguise it, anyone could tell that they had plenty now: enough to eat and to save, as well as seeds, bulbs and roots in the ground. Three of their neighbors had similar gardens but you could never have too much and – as his wife pointed out – those were just the people who would be the first to try out a midnight raid on somebody else because they could always say that the stolen produce had come from their own place.
The trees came into bud. People forgot their desire to have just one object that wasn’t chipped, cracked, worn, torn, broken, mended or secondhand. They’d been given a fresh beginning and their world felt transformed.
The young ones longed for love and adventure while at the same time dealing in corruption and copying all the brutalities of their elders. They were busy trying things out. He took care to remain alert to what his own kids were getting up to, but it was impossible to keep all of them under control.
He couldn’t even hold them down when they were at home. He used to step into the house to hear whispers and smothered, explosive giggles coming from the direction of the old woman’s bed. She’d be whimpering and moaning as usual. And he’d find them pushing things into her mouth, pinching her, driving pins into her arms, pretending to stab her in the eyes with a stick. ‘What are you doing?’ he’d roar at them, and they’d scatter. But they were always drawn back. In their minds she wasn’t human or even animal; she was an object – an object of amusement. Their favorite trick was to make her mew and cry in patterns, as if she were singing a song.
He’d tried to explain things to them until he realized the true horror: they understood perfectly well that the old woman could still feel pain and that their actions were hurting and frightening her. That was what they liked. That was the essence of the enjoyment.
If they behaved that way when they were young, what was their generation going to be like later? How would they treat ailing parents and grandparents or – when they had them – their own children? They had no respect for the weak and helpless: the old, the newly born, the sick, injured, crazed or blind. They accepted no responsibility for any of that. The young had been shown that even the strongest could die. They could see no point in prolonging the lives of the second-rate.
*
The spring was as lovely as in any year of peace. On some days it seemed like a season from an ancient age when all the world was beautiful, peopled by gods and goddesses.
They thought for a while that things might be getting better. It was even possible, they imagined, that the fighting might come to a stop.
They carried the old woman outdoors so that she could enjoy the fresh air. But her piteous whines and fearful gasps, her grunts and sighs, ruined the fine weather for them, just as when they were indoors she made the house unbearable. Feeble and miserable as she was, she seemed indomitable, whereas they were being worn down.
‘She’ll live for ever,’ his wife said. ‘She’ll probably outlive us.’
One day he returned to the house for a bag of nails and a couple of hinges that were stored in the shed. On his way past the front door, he heard the old woman moaning. He stepped inside, where he found the children persecuting her again. He chased them out of the house and then went
to the back, to collect what he’d come for. He crashed around in the cramped space, so angry for a moment that he had to stop and cover his eyes with his hands, thinking: Be careful. This is how people have accidents. Calm down.
They were just young, he told himself; they would learn. They’d change, like everything else. As soon as there was a genuine political settlement, the economy would stabilize and there would be enough for everyone. There would be celebrations, feasts, the ritual marking of days and years. Children would enjoy being innocent again and cruelty would recede from their minds. That was his hope, although he now saw little evidence for continuing to believe it,
In the distance he heard three of his children singing the alphabet song:
The Queen of Dalmatia, whose name was Aspatia, arrived in a grand coach and four. She had footmen and flunkies and uniformed monkeys and pink pearls right down to the floor.
They all sat down early and ate until late: pomegranates, pickles and pears; pasta, pies, parsnips and plump purple plums; peaches, pineapples and peas. Peacocks and partridges, pancakes and plaice; peppers and pretzels and palm trees. Prime poached, puce piglets and purest champagne that poured from the bottles like rain.
The Prince of Pomander ate a live salamander. He grimaced and gargled and gagged. He’d done it by accident but it set a court precedent much admired in Shiraz and Baghdad.
Oh, what delectable dishes they ate, from the lowliest up to the mighty and great. What speeches rang out through the old dining hall, what flirting and drinking and laughter went on. Oh, what a fine time they had, eating and talking and dancing away. All through the evening and into the dawn, everyone happy and glad. And the party went on the next day.
The sound of their voices drew away his fury. But he thought that it wouldn’t be long now before they changed the nonsense rhymes to jingles that came close to the original obscenities of the old army version.
*
A military workforce came through with builders and engineers, leaving a restricted and unreliable telephone system and a low-level electricity supply that cut out just when you didn’t expect it to. They were becoming a part of the modern world again. They had bottled gas, kerosene and intermittent running water that wasn’t always safe to drink. They could get eggs, but not chickens, except on the black market. You could get anything there, so people said.
Occasionally you could catch sight of the big dealers going by, usually in the evening. There were always two cars: the bodyguards up in the front of the first one, with the boss in the back seat, sometimes accompanied by a henchman, and – in the second car – the women, in fur coats and diamonds and face paint you could see from a distance. They and their friends continued to do business without bothering most people; their fights were all with others of their own kind. Among the ordinary populace the general feeling was that they were providing a service no government was yet able to offer. Of course it was also true that if you went against them, they shot you; but everyone knew that. They were predictable and therefore less of a threat than, say, a roving band of deserters – that was the sort of thing that made everyone nervous, even the crooks.
By the time the leaves were out on the trees, his wife was saying that she’d rather live in a work camp than keep the old woman with them.
‘What are we going to do without the extra rations?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. And I don’t care. If you want her here, you can take care of her.’
‘I’m working already.’
‘Who isn’t?’
‘I don’t understand why she doesn’t die. She’s in such a bad state.’
‘She’s alive because she’s being treated like royalty in this house.’
‘I guess if she died, we’d be issued with another refugee. One that would be easier to look after.’
‘Don’t you believe it. People like us have taken over the work of the hospitals. But this is beyond anything. If I ever set eyes on another one like this, I’ll just let her lie there. We don’t even have hygienic surroundings. They couldn’t have expected her to last more than a couple of days. She should have died a long time ago.’
They stopped talking and stared at the woman, who no longer had even the look of someone who should be pitied. She was repulsive. She was the only one in the house who had a bed to herself although, God knew, nobody would want to use it after her. When she finally died, they’d have to burn it. Except that they wouldn’t. They’d put the next refugee into it.
‘You do it,’ his wife said. ‘It’s your job.’
Over the next few days he found himself thinking at odd moments that it would benefit everyone, including the old woman, if he got rid of her; such a killing would be what was called ‘humane’, ‘an act of compassion’, or ‘putting her out of her misery’.
It was even possible that the blubbering, whining noises she made were an attempt to ask someone to dispatch her rather than let her continue in bondage to her irreparably damaged body.
And maybe not. Perhaps she was just saying: Feed me, love me, pity me, make me well again: help me. But he’d seen plenty of hospitals where there were patients who just kept repeating, ‘Oh God, let me die.’ And they’d meant it. Lots of people felt like that. He could imagine feeling that way himself.
He didn’t want to hurt her. That wouldn’t be right. None of their troubles, including her own condition, could be considered her fault and certainly not the war, nor the system of refugee housing.
He didn’t want to get caught, either. How could he dispose of her safely and painlessly? He thought about that during the next week and over the following months as the summer came and then reached its height and even with all the boards taken off the windows and the doors standing open, the oily tang of urine and the fulsome, barnyard stench of excrement reached every corner and expanded, ballooned, pulsated in the air. You could choke on it from the next room.
One day he realized that all day long he’d been thinking: I hope I don’t die like that. Pretending to himself that his feelings were nobler than they were, he asked himself how she could want to go on living. It would be doing her a kindness to put an end to her.
He remembered his friends, so young and full of exuberance, who were now dead while a rotting piece of senility like this lived on. The mere fact of it enraged him. And the next moment, it filled him with sorrow. This thing had had a mother once. Once upon a time, a young woman had cradled a baby in her arms and looked lovingly down into its face; and it was to become this pitiable wreck.
Somebody should just hit her on the head with a shovel. He didn’t want to do it himself. But if his wife did it, he’d accept it.
His wife wouldn’t do it. She’d told him straight to his face that it was his responsibility. It was something he was just going to have to carry out without thinking: like breaking the neck of an injured animal.
*
The summer went by and the warm days of September. The crops were better than they had hoped for. They were able to save up towards the coming months. They were eating well for the first time that year; but their good fortune was spoiled by the old woman’s presence.
It was bad enough in the warm weather when they could open the windows. What was it going to be like if she had to spend a whole winter with them?
Of course someone in her condition couldn’t last much longer. He didn’t think so, anyway. But his wife said, ‘That old bag is just the kind who’ll go on for another ten years, sucking it in at one end and pumping it out at the other.’ He didn’t like to hear her talk like that but he knew that her derision was a sign that she was looking for a fight. It was better to let her talk and not to make any comment.
‘We’ve got to get rid of her,’ she told him. ‘We could get her out of the house and keep on drawing the rations.’
‘Suppose they want to see her?’
‘We could produce somebody. I heard of a case where five families lived off one old crone like this. They just moved her from house to hou
se when the aid workers came around. It would be even easier here. You just give one of the officials a percentage.’
‘And wind up in jail.’
‘Not if you know the right ones. I could fix it. Just get her out of here.’
The rains began, followed by the first frost and then, near the end of October, a week of mild weather that was springlike, almost summery. And suddenly, with the warmth, there was an outbreak of killing. As usual, there were some strangled girls, either pregnant or raped, but a lot more of the victims were children. He and his wife reminded the kids to be wary of strangers and over-friendly people. From the snake-eyed silence with which the advice was received, he began to suspect that many of the perpetrators were also children. That was certainly possible: war had awakened in the general population a readiness to kill. In any place where troops had gone through, there were always more corpses than seemed normal. Wherever there might have been hand-to-hand combat you could get away with it. People settled their quarrels as soon as they saw the first uniform go by.
His wife would do it if she had to. Even if she didn’t have to. If she thought she could escape detection, she’d do it for a cup of sugar. It meant nothing to her.
How much did he mean to her himself? She still needed him, but he was damaged. As soon as other, able-bodied and younger men arrived back – on leave after a temporary cease-fire or with the occupying and peacekeeping forces or, should it ever be possible, at the end of the fighting – she might start looking around for something better. He had no idea now what she was like except that he feared she might be turning into someone who was stronger than he was and who eventually wouldn’t have any use for him.
‘I’m not going through a winter with that lump of disease in the house,’ she told him.
‘She isn’t sick. She’s old.’
‘She’s sick. I don’t want the children to catch it.’
Days Like Today Page 20
