Birchwood

by John Banville

‘Listen, my dear Malvolio, be reasonable-’

  ‘O that'll be all right now,’ said the server, with an assumed calmness, lifting a hand to straighten his hat. ‘That'll be all right.’ He stuffed the writ into his pocket, put a finger to the side of his swollen nose and deposited at Silas's feet a gout of blood and snot. ‘Now!’ he said, and left.

  He was as good as his word, for within the hour Rainbird, who had been sent to scout, came back pedalling furiously with the news that the troops were on their way. We hauled down the tent, hitched up the horses, fled. Angel's stew was overturned and lost in the confusion. The army, at a distance, saw us go, lost interest in us and turned back to the town. Out on the roads the air was vile with a smell of rot, and in the ruined fields people stood motionless in groups, baffled and silent. The potato crop had failed.

  30

  I WAS NOW midway upon my journey, stumbling in darkness, and the day came when I could no longer ignore the fact that the darkness was of my own making. Accordingly, I began to consider seriously my past and my future. It was the present I should have thought about, but the present is unthinkable. It did colour my thoughts, however, with of all things a certain insouciance. The imminence of disaster brings not piety and a concern for last things, it brings frivolity and laughter. I think that we shall all be drunk and gay, dancing a jig in the nude, when the apocalypse arrives to annihilate us at last. Famine hung above us like black smoke, and under that black cloud I wondered, with incredible levity, if it might not be better for me to cast aside the notion of a quest.

  The story of my sister, the stolen child, had been laughed at. That laughter woke me from a dream. No, not a dream precisely, but a waking, necessary fantasy. Necessary, yes. If I had not a solid reason to be here, travelling the roads with this preposterous band, then my world threatened to collapse, for I still believed then that life was at least reasonable. The future must have a locus! If not, what was the point? It was a cold bleak sea in which to be adrift. Still, for all the dangers it entailed, I admitted at last that the search for this doubtful sister could no longer sustain me. Well then, if she did not exist-and I could not admit that much- how explain the hints and discrepancies in my past, the tiny corners of enormous secrets revealed, and that one bold forthright message delivered to me the night before I left? I went over these fragments again and agaiq, and always there was distilled out of all my considerations one thrilling and inexplicable name- Prospero. Only the name emerged, no reasons, explanations, revelations, except for a barely substantial sense of a connection somewhere between a red-haired boy and a story told of the shadowy master of revels himself. I wearied my brain with wondering and then stumbled in a kind of trance to see Rainbird, but when I saw him I had nothing to say, for it was not Rainbird himself I had sought but something for which he was a paltry symbol. I turned away, angry and frustrated, and the dwarf smirked and said,

  ‘Find her yet?’

  If she did exist, this sister whom I called Rose, I did not know why, what chance had I of finding her? The world is full of people, and how many of them know from where they come? A crack opens, a creature falls in, the crack closes. We were half a day's journey out of the town when Mario beside me suddenly cried,

  ‘Sophie! Where is she? You seen her, eh?’

  I had not seen her. He leaped down and ran ahead to the forward caravans. Soon he returned, pale and frantic.

  ‘She'sa gone! My baba! We lost her.’

  There was a touch of astonishment mixed with his grief. He trotted beside me for a while, wringing his hands and muttering, then he fell behind and stopped and looked helplessly this way and that, turned and sped off down the road we had travelled. We halted and called after him, but he would not hear. He did not return that night. The choice was clear before us, we must either return and face the soldiers or move on and leave him and the baby to their fate. Silas paced up and down in the black caravan after supper while the rest of us sat in silence watclung him. He avoided our eyes for as long as he could and at last turned to us and threw out his arms.

  ‘What can we do?’ he wailed. ‘We can't go back!’ He lumbered to his knees before Ada and took her hands in his. ‘What shall we do, my dear? It's your child, you…’ He searched desperately for a description of Mario. ‘Your friend,’ he said faintly.

  Ada shrugged.

  ‘We can't go back.’ She glanced at the rest of us. ‘Can we?’

  No, there was no going back. We used the soldiers as a name for our fear, but it was the murrain stalking our heels that drove us on. We travelled high into the mountains, thinking surely, up there, away from the towns, there would be no shortage of food. We were wrong. At first the full significance of the potato failure did not strike us. There would be a famine, that much we knew, and a few people might starve, but not us. The spud had never been our staple diet, and was there not a spectrum of other vegetables, of meat and bread, of milk, eggs? There was not, after a little while. As news of the blight spread, only marginally swifter than the blight itself, the fields were stripped, and what was left, the great meadows of corn, the cattle, these were reserved for export to another land, and trade would not be disrupted or even interrupted because of a mere famine. The first deaths were reported as the grainships sailed.

  Up in the mountains we did not starve, but hunger was a constant baleful companion, as yet only a vague gnawing in the pits of our stomachs, but what horrors it promised! O I do not say that we were desperate up there. Like the rest of the country, things would have to get much worse before we would admit our plight. There was still the occasional rabbit, a loaf of bread. We developed a taste for nettle soup. It was summer, after all, glorious weather. Angel made sloe wine, and one night we got wildly drunk, every one, even the children, but in the morning with the hangovers the lethargy came back, that strange abiding paralysis which had attacked the spirit of the circus. In every village where we stopped Silas looked at the tumbledown hovels, the shuttered pubs, the drawn grey faces and remote eyes staring blankly, and shook his head, saying no, this was no place for our talents. At last we even stopped travelling. There seemed no point to it anymore. The summer sunshine took on a muddy cast, became somehow dimmed, as though our eyes were filled with water.

  But what a spot it was where we chose to stop, a little green cleft between two hills with a stream and an oak tree and a view down a long verdant valley where the shadows of clouds swam down the mountain slopes all day, and larks at noon set the sky quivering with their music. It was here, one morning in July, that Mario caught up with us. I watched him make his way across the valley, plodding slowly along on a stick with his head bent. He lopked like an old man. His clothes were in tatters. The soldiers had beaten him. His eyes were strange. He sat wrapped in silence among us for a long time and then stirred and sighed.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Gone.’

  One of his hands lay before him on the table like a dead white animal.

  31

  MY WANING FAITH in the existence of my sister was revived briefly and unexpectedly by Sybil. Now for Sybil there were only two kinds of people, those who came under Silas's sphere of influence, and those other altogether splendid creatures who came under hers. I do not know on what evidence she decided who was whose, but in her eyes the distinction was very clear, and those who could not be considered by any stretch of the imagination to belong to either camp she ignored so totally that they might have been transparent. Angel, being neutral, she would not see, but toward Mario, one of Silas's men, she bore an enmity so unrelenting, even after the loss of his daughter had broken him, that one was forced to admire it. Of course, when I say Silas's influence I mean that he was merely a handy yardstick by which she measured the depraved and raucous, vulgar side of life, that life lived in the nasty world of the people which horrified her so, and which, she firmly believed, touched at no point her private planet of rose petals. She saw herself as a delicate bloom struggling for survival on a dung heap, and the shrewishness, the fou
l temper, the coldness, these she regarded as but the traits of an aristocratic nature. Such was Sybil. Well well, blind pride is no crime, whatever they may say, and I think I must have loved her a little in my odd way if this feeling now, in deceptive September, can be trusted. She looked on me as Silas's pet prodigy and treated me accordingly, which is why I was surprised and frightened when she showed me what for her can only be called tenderness.

  It rained all that day, drops like fat pearls fell out of a bright sky and turned our spot into a spongy green quagmire. Birds sat in silence despondently in the bushes shaking the wet out of their plumage, and the rocks dripped and streamed. It was one of those days when time seems to have paused out of a lack of interest. I was passing by Silas's caravan when I heard my name called softly through the open doorway. Inside, when I could see through the gloom, I found Sybil alone on a bench under the little window sitting with her legs crossed, one foot idly swinging, the fingers of her right hand resting against her cheek. She wore a long black skirt, a white blouse and narrow patent leather boots. I realised anew what an exquisite creature she was, with that vivid red hair, the sculptured face, pale slender hands, but now I saw also how much she had changed in the last weeks. Something had happened to her face, a minute but devastating change. Her left eye seemed to droop a fraction lower than the right, and this imbalance gave to what had been her cool measured gaze a querulous, faintly crazed cast. Her cheeks too had sunk, and their former bloom had now become a silvery sheen. Her fits of fury were more frequent, less comprehensible. She lacerated Silas for no reason that could be discerned other than his existence. Her rages fell asunder in the middle, the words dried up and she was left trembling, leaning out to one side, hiccupping speechlessly, her hands clenched and a red stain spreading slowly across her forehead. Then she would stumble away with her head bent, hands over her face, and, after an awkward silence, someone, usually Magnus, would rise and follow her with heavy tread while the rest of us sat and waited with bated breath for the first long piercing wail. Now she lifted her face to the pearly light in the window and gazed out across the valley.

  ‘Is it true you're searching for your sister? They say you are. That's very…romantic’

  She spoke quietly and gravely. I could think of nothing to say, and I suppose, being young, I squirmed, pursed my lips, sighed. She looked at me with her crooked icy blue eyes.

  ‘What is her name?’

  ‘Rose. I-I think.’

  ‘Rose. Ah. And you know what she looks like? You have a picture?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She smiled. I would have preferred her cold stare. Her foot swung faster. She twined a lock of hair around her fingers.

  ‘I might be able to help you,’ she said. ‘Would you like me to help you, Gabriel? There are a lot of things here that you don't know about. Silas tells me things. He has a plan, you know. Soon, soon we'll be leaving here, and then I could help you, if you…’ She paused and frowned, as though searching for something that I might have to offer. ‘If you were to become my… friend. That's all I have ever asked of anyone, that they be friends with me. They say I'm a bitch, O yes they do, Gabriel, they say that, but it's not true, not true at all. I am only…unhappy.’

  The voice caressed me, it was almost a physical sensation, the warm words touching my eyelids, my hot cheeks. If I gave her any answer it must have been a tiny whine. She offered me her hand but I would not take it.

  ‘Gabriel? Don't you like me either?’ Her eyes narrowed, and although she did not seem to move her lips I could see now the glint of her sharp white teeth. The hand she offered began to tremble, and the fingers danced like pale snakes. ‘Why don't you like me. Gabriel!’ She stood up, and a handkerchief fell from her sleeve and fluttered to the floor. ‘Little beast,’ she snarled. ‘You're like the rest, you hate me. Well we'll see, my man, we'll see who needs who, yes, yes. I could save you but I won't, not after this. I'll laugh, yes I'll laugh, when they string you up and gut you. Now get out!

  I turned to go, relieved and terrified all at once, but before I could take a step she swept past me through the door and plunged down the steps into the rain. I picked up her handkerchief, gingerly, gingerly, and put it on the bench. There was a flurry behind me and she was back again, staring at me wildly. Her hair was laced with shining raindrops. She fell to her knees and threw her arms around my hips, and with her head against my stomach she wept, such bitter tears, such black sorrow.

  ‘I'm so unhappy,’ she sobbed, ‘so unhappy!’

  I wanted to laugh, although there was nothing funny, nothing at all, and now I am surprised to find that I still want to laugh, thinking of that scene, and still I can see nothing in it that merits laughter. Strange. What brought forth that grief? I hesitate, I am unwilling, I hardly dare to voice the notion which, if it did not come to me then comes to me now, the insane notion that perhaps it was on her, on Sybil, our bright bitch, that the sorrow of the country, of those baffled people in the rotting fields, of the stricken eyes staring out of hovels, was visited against her will and even without her knowledge so that tears might be shed, and the inexpressible expressed. Does that seem a ridiculous suggestion? But I do not suggest, I only wonder.

  32

  THAT SUMMER ENDED. We were relieved, I think. September suited better our sombre mood. Every autumn seems like the last. Not that the weather turned. The sun still shone, mocking us with its gaiety, and the little stream still chattered, but on the hills the trees were dusted with copper, autumn gold was in the air, and a smell of smoke at evening. But all that time, gone! Our lethargy frightened us. There were other, worse things. Terrible rumours were brought back from the lowland with each week's dwindling stock of provisions. The people had no food down there, they were eating grass, the bark of trees, dried leaves. Children were seen gobbling fistfuls of clay. Bands of savage-fanged hermaphrodites stalked the countryside at night killing and looting. Some said they ate their victims. These preposterous stories made us laugh yet filled us with a quiet terror which we could not admit to ourselves or to each other. The admission would have made it worse, and so we played with exaggeration as a means of keeping reality at bay. It did not work. Reality was hunger, and there was no gainsaying that.

  We did find a way to neutralise the truth if not quite banish it, and that was by inventing taller stories than the tallest the lowland could produce. One day, however, the trick backfired in our faces when Silas told us of the ingenious and economical method which he swore they used to bury their dead down there. So many were dying, all of them penniless, that a full-scale funeral with all the trimmings was impossible for each of them, until someone invented the false coffin. This was a splendid affair, craftsman-built from the best wood, with brass handles and gleaming bolts, paid for out of a general fund.

  ‘Expensive, that's true,’ said Silas, ‘but here's the beauty of it, listen. A large town would need no more than two of them, say three at the most. Why? Well, the stiff is popped in, see, bolted down, out to the graveyard, hold the contraption over the hole, the druid says the prayers, then someone presses a switch and plop! down goes your man, fill up the grave, shut the trapdoor and you're ready for the next cadaver! How about that now for a notion?’

  We laughed into our fists and stamped our feet, held our sides, the story was so droll, so ludicrous. An hour later Mario and Magnus returned from a vain search for food down below, and when they told us of a funeral they had witnessed, Silas's story was no longer fantasy, although the coffin they had seen had been no splendid casket but a plain wood box with an ill-fitting panel underneath which was wrenched out to release the body. Magnus remembered the dull thump inside the grave.

  Now we ate only what the countryside could give us, wild berries, crab apples stewed, an occasional rabbit or a hare, some roots even. Once we ate a fox which Magnus had inadvertently trapped. Such a beautiful creature, we wept as we ate, for the fox and for ourselves, but beauty had no place in that world, the times were such that there w
as nothing to do with beauty but destroy it. Ah Ida, my gentle Ida. I went with her one afternoon to gather blackberries. It was a perfect autumn day, full of light and woody smells, glittering and crisp. We wandered far away from the camp, across the hill and down into another valley where the bushes were heavy with fruit. Ida sang as we picked. We ate our fill of the tender berries. They tasted of summer and sunshine. Disaster waits for moments like this, biding its time.

  ‘Gabriel,’ she said, ‘have you really got a sister?’

  ‘Yes I have. Of course I have.’

  She watched me with that odd awed gaze of hers, dropping her pickings absentmindedly into the grass beside the can.

  ‘But how will you find her?’ she cried very softly, and leaned toward me, full of concern. I shrugged, and looked away across the mountains with a frown. When I turned to her again there were tears in her eyes.

  ‘Poor Mario,’ she said.

  She wandered away then across the meadow, and I lay down in the warm grass behind the bushes. I was half asleep when I heard them, and scrambled to my knees and peered out over the briars. On the far side of the valley three Soldiers were making their way laboriously down the hillside. Great hulking fellows they were, drunk I think, staggering and stumbling on the stony ground, clutching at each other, their rifles joggling on their backs. Once down in the valley they halted suddenly and stood with their heads lifted, listening. On a breeze there came to me faintly the sound, which they had heard, of Ida's piping song. They crept into the bushes and soon the singing stopped and there was a scream, a scream such as I have never heard again, and I have heard many, expressing as it did so little fear, but a terrible depth of desolation and woe. I raced across the valley, into the bushes, heedless of the thorns tearing my legs, but I could not find them, and there were no more cries to guide me.