by Michel Faber
The kitchen was a Baroque wonderland of polished wood and brass; dozens of weirdly-shaped implements and utensils hung in neat rows on the walls. Few of them were ever used. All the Fahrenheits’ food came from a freezer the size of a Volkswagen, and Una boiled or baked it either in the grey pot with the cracked wooden handle or the singed pink ceramic oven dish, according to what it was. She was a pathologically forgetful cook and any meal not prepared by the children was likely to be a challenging affair, though occasionally she did get into moods when she would create elaborate pastries or even soups.
‘You need vitamins, minerals, and all those mysterious little trace elements,’ she would enthuse, serving each of her children some extraordinary treat on the special plates with the silver rims.’You can’t live on rubbish all the time, you know.’
The twins’ bedroom was painted mauve, as a bisexual compromise between pink and blue. Very little of the walls showed through, though, because of the density of prints and bookcases and shelves piled thick with knick-knacks. All these things had belonged to Una when she was a child; she had insisted on taking them with her to the island for her own personal, sentimental reasons, long before she had conceived of Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain. Over time, more and more of it was passed down to the children. Her eyes would mist over, and she would rush to fetch something from a locked cabinet or even a suitcase.
‘Here, I want you to have this,’ she would say, brandishing some ancient ornament or faun-coloured book. ‘If you promise to take care of it.’
From careful study of these things – the little wooden horses with real manes and tails, the crystal baubles with cherubs inside, the music boxes that played Alpine melodies, the stuffed mouse with the Tyroler hat, green velvet jacket and lederhosen – Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain pieced together an impression of who on earth their mother might be.
Conversation was considerably harder to come by. Una addressed perhaps a hundred sentences a year to her children, or even less if repetitions weren’t counted.
In view of this scarcity, the twins were compiling a ‘Book of Knowledge’, in which they faithfully recorded all the things their mother said to them. Not the half-hearted scoldings or the offhand domestic instructions, but anything more pregnant. The book – a hundred or so blank pages bound in stiff, intricately patterned covers – was a sacred object and mistakes were not allowed. Every word, every letter proposed for inclusion in it was discussed by the twins beforehand, practised on scrap paper, then inscribed onto the creamy white pages with great care. Appropriately enough, the first thing written into the book was what their mother had told them about the book itself when she’d presented it to them.
‘This book was once a tree.’
It was an intriguing thought. The Fahrenheits’ house was infested with paper – hardbound texts, maps, German romances, very old newspapers, glossy magazines flown in from Canada, plus of course Boris and Una’s own mountains of notes and journals. All these, if mother was to be believed, had once been trees. The notion was doubly potent because the children had never seen a tree, except in books.
Their own attempt to grow such a miraculous thing for themselves, by pulping a book into paste and burying it in a compost of excrement and yeast, had not been successful.
Disappointed, they’d worked up the courage to knock at their mother’s study, to ask her the exact recipe for trees.
‘Not now, darlings,’ she warned them, leaning further into the pearly light of her desk lamp.
One day, Boris and Una Fahrenheit returned from yet another visit to the Guhiynui, landing their grimy blue-and-silver helicopter just outside the house as usual. They disembarked, one from each side of the cabin, stooping under the whirling blades. Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain watched them from the dining room window, through the trickling shimmer of condensation. Four cuckoo clocks, in various rooms of the house, started cooing simultaneously. In the snows outside, a chaos of huskies swirled around the grown-ups, barking and snuffling.
It was obvious, even before Boris and Una reached the front door, that they were in an unusually subdued mood. They were neither arguing like bitter enemies nor (as was equally common) discussing their findings like affectionate colleagues on the brink of a breakthrough. Instead, Una walked into the house silent and pale, pausing only to let her coat fall to the floor before disappearing into the bedroom.
Boris, a few steps behind, followed her to the bedroom door, then thought better of it. He left the house again, and busied himself putting the helicopter away. Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain watched him through the glass, wiping the condensation away with their pyjama’d elbows, pwoot woot woot.
Eventually their father was ready to give them an explanation.
‘Your mother has eaten something that disagreed with her,’ he said.’Don’t be surprised if this ends badly.’
This was the sum of his thoughts on the matter, but it was enough to galvanise the twins into action.
For the next three days, Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain put aside all childish things in order to nurse their mother in her bed. Holding back offers of nurture only during those arbitrary hours of ‘night’ when their parents were actually sleeping together, they devoted every remaining minute to a routine of snacks, cold compresses, warm towels, fizzy pills and hot water bottles.
‘Oh, you are such little darlings,’ Una beamed at them, her face glowing like a gas flame. ‘My own mother couldn’t have nursed me better than you two are doing.’
Pride in this distinction didn’t blind the twins to the fearsome obstinacy of their mother’s illness. As the days passed, they grew stoical in their acceptance of the prophesied ‘bad end’, which in their minds was their mother having to be transported hundreds of miles to the nearest hospital.
Instead, she died.
Bringing the breakfast as usual, the twins found their father loitering outside her bedroom, fully dressed.
‘She’s dead,’ he said, then smiled a ghastly smile as if trying to reassure them that he would not let a thing like this cast a shadow over their welfare.
‘But we have her breakfast,’ said Tainto’lilith.
‘It’s all right, you weren’t to know,’ said Boris.
Seeing that the twins were not taking his word for it, he stepped aside to let them into the bedroom where, at some uncertain time during the night, his wife had finally left him. The event seemed to have rendered him oddly lenient, almost tender.
Tainto’lilith put down the tray of tea and oatmeal just outside the door, and followed her brother in. Una Fahrenheit was lying horizontal in the bed, sheets pulled up to her chin. Her flesh was the colour of peeled apple. Her mouth hung slackly open, her eyes were only half shut. There was nothing happening inside her skull; it was deserted.
Boris stood in the doorway, arms loosely folded, waiting for Una’s children to confirm the correctness of his judgement.
Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain dawdled around the bed, sobbing and snivelling softly. Then, briefly, they wailed. In time, they stopped moving and made a little space for themselves on the edge of the mattress next to their mother’s body. They sat there, shoulder to shoulder, breathing in turns. Outside the bedroom, the tongues of dogs slurped at oatmeal and cold tea.
‘What happens to her now?’ Marko’cain asked the shadowy figure in the doorway.
‘Burial,’ said their father.’Or cremation.’
‘Oh,’ said Marko’cain. He was thinking angels might still come down from the snowy sky and scoop his mother’s body up to Heaven. Hidden somewhere far beyond the featureless gloom of the Polar atmosphere, there might be an exotic paradise of teak and lace, laid out ready for Una Fahrenheit. Perhaps only the reinforced concrete of the ceiling was keeping the angels from getting in.
‘I’ll leave the final decision to you,’ said Boris, with a heavy sigh.’Don’t think too long about it, though.’
Left alone with their thoughts, Tainto’lilith and Marko’cain wept a
little longer, then began to plan for the future.
They were angry, of course, that the opportunity of saving their mother had not been offered them. Had they seriously imagined she might die, they would certainly have done something to stop it. The universe was not above agreeing to bargains of various kinds, providing enough advance warning was given.
But she was dead now, and that was that.
‘We are orphans now, like in the storybook of Little Helmut and Marlene, suggested Tainto’lilith.
‘Well … not really,’ frowned Marko’cain. ‘We have a father.’
‘For how much longer?’
‘He looks quite well.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘You think he will leave us now that mother is gone?’ ‘It’s possible,’ said Tainto’lilith.
‘Ours is the only house on the island,’ objected Marko’cain.
‘He may go and live with the Guhiynui. He knows them a lot better than us, and some of them are bound to be women.’
Marko’cain considered this for a minute, then said, ‘We are talking about the wrong things.’ Behind them on the bed, the body of their mother was waiting.
‘True,’ said Tainto’lilith.
The important question was, what ritual would be the right one for their mother — not simply in the matter of removing her body, but also in commemorating all she had been in spirit. She was, after all, no mere piece of refuse to be disposed of.
‘We buried Snuffel,’ recalled Marko’cain. Snuffel was the children’s pet name for Schnauffel, one of the huskies who had died a couple of years before. They had buried him near the generator, in the lush soft earth surrounding the hot water pipes. An elaborate ceremony had accompanied the burial, involving recitations, toys and raw meat.
‘Snuffel was a dog,’ said Tainto’lilith.’Our mother isn’t a dog.’
‘I’m not saying we should do it exactly the same. But we could bury her along with her favourite things.’
‘She would hate to have her things buried. Whenever she gave us something, she was always upset if we got it dirty.’
‘But won’t she be in a box?’
‘I don’t know. Father didn’t say anything about a box. And you remember when we asked about making the fox cage, he said he had no wood to waste on such foolishness.’
Marko’cain sat slumped in thought. Outside the door, the dogs’ tongues stopped lapping and their soft clicking footfalls faded away. These things and more were made audible by the silence of their mother on the bed behind them.
‘I think,’ said Marko’cain at last, ‘Mother should be buried in very deep snow. Then, if after a time we decide we have done the wrong thing, we can fetch her out and she will still be good.’
For some reason this made Tainto’lilith cry again. Her brother put his arm around her convulsing shoulders. The bed shook gently, its three burdens bobbing up and down.
‘She wouldn’t like to be buried in snow,’ sobbed Tainto’lilith.
Marko’cain bit his lower lip and frowned.
‘Dead people don’t feel anything, do they?’
‘Don’t they?’
‘It’s in the Book of Knowledge, I’m sure.’
They went and fetched the Book of Knowledge, and found the relevant page. Sure enough, there it was: Dead people don’t feel anything.
The physical act of fetching the Book of Knowledge, quite apart from what was in it, helped the twins feel a little better somehow. It got them out of their mother’s bedroom for a minute, allowing their accumulated grief to escape like harmful fumes into the hallway. When they returned, the bedroom seemed airier and more benign. Una Fahrenheit was lying exactly where they had left her, unchanged to the smallest wisp of hair and glint of tooth. So clear was it from this that her spirit had departed, that the children lost much of their terror of the body she’d left behind. It was a husk, no longer truly their mother — more like their mother’s most treasured possession, which had been given to them as a parting gift.
All they had to do was decide how best to pass that gift on to the universe. There was, after all, a possibility that their mother was taking a lot more interest in her children now that she was dead and her splendid body was in their care. Always so well-preserved in life, she might be watching them anxiously from somewhere up above, to make sure she wasn’t mistreated or neglected in death.
‘I still don’t like to think of her frozen,’ said Tainto’lilith, ‘even if she can’t feel it. She is our mother, not a piece of lamb in the freezer.’
Marko’cain nodded, accepting this, but then an instant later he frowned, stung in the forehead by a new idea.
‘Perhaps we should eat her,’ he said.
‘Oh! What a horrible bad thought!’ cried his sister.
‘Yes, so there must be power in it,’ he reasoned.
Tainto’lilith bit her lower lip, thinking. All ideas must be considered carefully. The universe knew what was best for everyone, even if the way to its heart might sometimes be hard to understand.
Gamely, she tried to imagine the universe smiling down on such a hideous ritual, tried to imagine being brave enough to sacrifice her own feelings to it. Certainly there was a potent appeal in the idea of making their mother disappear inside them, rather than abandoning her body to parasites or the elements.
‘She is too big,’ said Tainto’lilith at last.’If I could eat her like an apple – or half an apple – I would do it.’
‘We could eat a little of her for the rest of our lives,’ suggested her brother.’Eat nothing else, ever. That would a very strong thing to say to the universe.’
‘This is silly talk,’ sighed Tainto’lilith. ‘I am feeling sick. Think of the hair.’
‘We could do something else with the hair.’ ‘This is silly talk.’ ‘Yes, you are right.’
Crestfallen, they sat on the edge of the bed, the Book of Knowledge lying closed on the floor at their feet.
‘Well … what is left?’ said Tainto’lilith after a while.
‘The best thing,’ said Marko’cain.
‘What do you mean?’ said Tainto’lilith.
‘All that we have thought of so far is no good,’ said Marko ‘cain.’So, the best thing is still left.’
That was cheering. They pondered with renewed vigour.
‘Father seemed most in favour of cremation,’ remarked Marko’cain.’That is, burning her.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It was the way he spoke the word.’
‘He said he would let us decide, though.’
‘But not to take too long.’
‘What time is it?’
‘I don’t know. The cuckoos will tell us soon.’
‘I don’t like the thought of burning mother,’ fretted Tainto’lilith.’It is worse than eating her. It’s like starting to cook her and then forgetting, and coming back to find her all black and ruined.’
‘The Guhiynui burn their dead people, I’m sure I heard father say.’
‘Every tribe has its own rituals,’Tainto’lilith said, struggling with hand gestures to make him understand.’The universe knows we are not Guhiynui. The universe isn’t stupid. We have to do something that is right for the tribe that we are.’
‘You think we are a tribe?’
‘Of course we are a tribe.’
‘Just the two of us?’
‘There are more of our kind where our mother and father came from. That’s our tribe.’
‘Father says they are all imbeciles and back-stabbers there. And mother said once that they let the streets get dirty, and another time that the trains are always late and full of rude people who will not stand up for a lady.’
‘Still they are our tribe.’
Marko’cain had become agitated, picking at little scabs on his knuckles and shuffling his feet.
‘I can’t remember why we are talking about these things,’ he said despondently.
‘Neither can I,’ admitted Tai
nto’lilith.
‘If only mother could tell us what she wants done.’
‘Perhaps she will send us a sign.’
‘Perhaps father will come back soon, and tell us we’ve run out of time.’
As if to confirm this, several cuckoo clocks went off at once, filling the house with the sound of mechanical bird-song.
After much discussion, the twins finally worked up the courage to tell their father they wanted to take their mother away with them into the wilderness. Once they were far enough out there, they would wait for a signal from the universe as to the best thing to do with the body.
Surprisingly, Boris Fahrenheit agreed.
‘You are little primitives, aren’t you?’ he commented, with new respect. ‘I had thought of commissioning some sort of Christian minister to fly out here and do the job, but I’m sure you would do better. You are blood, after all.’
Uncharacteristically, he began running about like a maniac, gathering together the necessaries for their journey.
‘With the extra weight, the dogs will be slower, and will get hungry and thirsty sooner: you must allow for that,’ he cautioned, filling a large canister with boiling water.
‘You must take a hamper of food for yourselves,’ he went on. ‘And food for the dogs. And fuel for a fire, if … if you need to make a fire. And I will fetch the compass for you. That is essential.’
Within half an hour he had organised them, hamper and all, and escorted them out of the house. In all those thirty minutes, from the moment the twins had announced their intention right up to the moment they stepped onto the snows, he scarcely stopped talking, reminding them of all the things they must do to keep safe. It was a totally unprecedented and, in the circumstances, bizarrely maternal display of fuss. Had there not been an important mission to accomplish, the twins might have considered inaugurating a whole new Book of Knowledge, merely to contain all the advice and instruction their father was shovelling onto them now.
