Soldiers of Paradise

by Paul Park

  “He sang a song to us,” said the man. “I saw a picture in the air. A ring of mountains, and women riding in the tall grass. It was a lie.”

  After that, Thanakar was reluctant to make him understand, to rob him of a delusion that was keeping him alive.

  The other convalescent was the white-eyed antinomial, who had sung his memories of his childhood above Rangriver to Thanakar and Abu in the warehouse by the river. Though his wounds were superficial, he had been in danger of dying of morbid melancholia like the rest, until the doctor found a remedy. Thanakar had carried in his baggage, as a token of the hopelessness of love, the bracelet he had gotten on the Mountain of Redemption, the payment for a night’s work there. The antinomial woman with the yellow hair had taken it from her wrist to give to him. It fitted neatly just above his elbow; unlike most officers, he never wore jewelry, but he had kept it as a souvenir. One day, changing the bandages on the dying man’s chest, all the coincidences of the story came back to him, and the next time he made his rounds, Thanakar brought the bracelet and gave it to him with his pills. The man rubbed his thumb along the carved silver, the pattern of animals devouring one another. Thanakar waited for some sign of recollection in his white eyes, some softening of his cruel face, but there was nothing. In the morning when he came again, the man had thrown the bracelet into a corner of the tent and was nearer death than ever. Once the bracelet had meant something to him. Not anymore. Time had closed its fist.

  The man lay back, his eyes pulsing and expanding, and drifting in and out of focus. Discouraged, Thanakar bent over him and touched his hair, but the man was too weak even to turn away. “Remember,” began Thanakar. “Remember . . . ,” but he wasn’t sure the man could hear. And as he faltered for a way of telling him his own story, the man’s mouth opened and he began to sing, a song as insubstantial as a ghost, the antinomial’s last song of himself, which comes with death. Thanakar bent low to listen, and as he did so, he thought he heard some last hostility creep into the tone, until the man closed his eyes and the melody ran pure again.

  Thanakar waited for the part he knew would come, the sweet, despairing leitmotif of love, a dozen notes, and when he heard them, he memorized them. He waited, and when the song was interrupted by some last coughing grunts, he took it up himself, note by careful note. Memorized symbols in an unknown language, and doubtless his pronunciation was poor, because he had to repeat it twice before the antinomial opened his eyes and looked at him with an expression so miserable and sad, it made him stumble into silence. But for this moment, Thanakar had retrieved the silver bracelet from the floor, and he pushed it into the man’s palm, lying open on the coverlet. His fingers curled around its rim. For several long minutes, his face held a look as if he were making a decision, and when he had made it, his mouth contorted in a snarl of anger. He had been bitten and betrayed. His eyes filled up with water, and Thanakar slunk away. But as early as the next evening, the patient was taking solid food.

  * * *

  These two antinomials kept company, not speaking, but playing music to each other. They kept apart from the others, out of a kind of delicacy, Thanakar fancied. He put them in a tent next to his own because he liked to hear them play late at night, an assortment of instruments at first, but after a while they had rejected all but two, a glass flute and a wooden one. When the doctor lay unsleeping on his cot, his mind racing through images of failed surgery, or of Charity or Abu Starbridge, or of Micum Starbridge repeating some simple action over and over, then it soothed him to hear those soft dissonances come seeping through the canvas walls, the glass flute and the wooden one, the music as evocative as speech. They played music all the time.

  But after talking to Aspe, Thanakar took a horse and went, left his hospital and rode up out of the valley back towards Charn, through lines of soggy tents. The images of Charity Starbridge had speeded up into a kind of frenzy. But once that night as he dismounted on the muddy track to stand in a shelter of a wall out of the rain, to rest his leg and watch the city burning like a candle far away over the hills, he heard the splash of horses’ feet. The two antinomials sat majestic on their horses in the rain, looking down at him. They didn’t speak; neither did he, and after a little while he climbed into his saddle again. They followed him all the way, riding slightly behind.

  At dawn they came up to the city’s gates. Thanakar had feared he might be expected. But all was pandemonium, a cursing stream of men with burdens, men on bicycles, women pushing handcarts. There was no guard. People stood in the road with no place to go, the mud up to their knees, their households on their backs.

  Inside the city it was worse, the streets clogged with people shouting and struggling in the rain. The fire wouldn’t spread this way for months, for here the wood was too wet to burn. Yet everywhere banks and businesses and schools were closed, the buildings empty and the streets full, the shrines jampacked with cursing worshipers. Thanakar and the antinomials abandoned their horses and continued on foot. They walked on for hours until, where two streets ran together and the houses fell away on either side, they could see the first tiers of the Mountain of Redemption rising to the sky, circles of stone battlements bulging through the mist. Thanakar felt a hand on his wrist.

  “That’s where she is,” said the antinomial.

  “Yes,” answered Thanakar.

  “Where?”

  “It’s called the Tower of Silence. There’s a section for heretics. You can’t see it from here.”

  “Can you take me?” asked the antinomial.

  “No.”

  The man squinted, and his grip tightened on the doctor’s arm.

  “I can’t do it,” said Thanakar. “I’ve got my own things to do.”

  The man gave him a long hungry look through slitted eyes. And then suddenly, as momentary sunlight tore through a rag of cloud above them, his expression cleared. He smiled up at the sky. Then, reaching out his immense hand, he put two fingers underneath Thanakar’s chin, and forced his chin up in a playful gesture of encouragement, and slapped him playfully across the cheek, knocking him off balance. Then he was gone without a word, slogging up the street, his coat pulled up around his face. But at the fork, where the road led straight up to the mountain’s base, he leaped forward and started to run, singing like a boy.

  That was the last time Thanakar saw him. The time would come when a man could travel all through the northern provinces and all through the slums of Charn without seeing a single antinomial. They were a transient people, and soon they were all gone. Foreseeing it, standing in the mud, Thanakar chose that moment for his own. In later times, when men would ask him what the antinomials were like, he would remember not the violence, not the savagery, not the smell of roasting meat, but that moment: a man running away up to a turning in the road, running joyfully to his own death, chasing, without thinking, something that could never be.

  The other stayed behind. He stood next to Thanakar, wiping his shaved forehead with his scarf. They were close to the Starbridge palaces. The streets were almost empty. A motorcar sped past, spewing them with mud.

  * * *

  Thanakar went home. But first, slinking through the corridors and up the marble stairs, his pale companion following, he stopped at the commissar’s apartments. The door swung open onto empty rooms. The church had already repossessed the furniture. In the hallway a man was busy repainting; he was an idiot. When he made the gestures of respect, he kept his paintbrush in his hand, so that when he was finished his nose and hair were daubed with green.

  The room smelled of antiseptic and incense. In Prince Abu’s bedroom, a printed notice was pasted to one wall. It said an epidemic of immorality had broken out here, and it had already killed two people—God have mercy. The document was an official one, and pinned to the bottom corner was a snapshot of an official execution. Someone had jiggled the camera, and the faces were impossible to make out.

  He walked down to his own apartment. He expected to find soldiers, but the hall was emp
ty. His housekeeper met him at the threshold—“Oh, sir,” she stammered. “Thank heaven you’ve come back. Your mother, sir. Your mother’s woke up. She killed a man.” Thanakar took off his coat and hung it up. Then he went past her through the library towards his parents’ bedroom, leaving her gaping up into the antinomial’s white face. “Oh, sir,” continued Mrs. Cassimer. “You can’t go in there. She’s dangerous. She’s killed a man. Who’s this you brought home, sir?”

  The antinomial unwrapped his cloak and stood dripping in his hospital clothes. Solemnly he took out his sunglasses and put them on. From his sleeve he took out his glass flute, and he examined it carefully in the light, while Mrs. Cassimer gasped and wheezed. She made the sign of the unclean, ducking her head into her armpits. “Angkhdt preserve us,” she whispered.

  Hesitating at the bedroom door, Thanakar smiled. “You can put him in the room next to mine,” he said. “Are there clean sheets?” The door was locked, with the key in it. He unlocked it and pushed it open.

  Inside, the room was wrecked. Books and pieces of furniture lay at random, and the windows were all broken. His mother sat naked on the bed next to his sleeping father, her arms around her knees, her hair loose around her shoulders, and when she raised her head to look at Thanakar, he saw her eyes had changed color from the hard black of the Starbridges to a molten red, and as he watched, they changed again, a slow reel of unnatural shades fading into one another: pink, white, yellow orange, red, pink. It was the only movement in her face.

  “Oh, sir, be careful,” remonstrated Mrs. Cassimer, peeking round the doorjamb. “She’s not safe. She killed a man.”

  “Who?”

  “Only a sweeper. On Tuesday—he discovered her. We had a terrible time to get her off of him. Mr. Gramercy, she bit his hand.”

  “Mother?” he called out into the room. The woman on the bed stared at him, her eyes a swirl of color.

  “She hasn’t touched my father,” he remarked. The prince’s long figure lay unmolested, still shrouded by her side.

  “No, sir.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “On Tuesday, sir. Eight days ago. In the morning.”

  “Did you send for the police?”

  “No, sir. It was only a sweeper. Oh, sir, it was those experiments of yours, I’m sure of it. Leave the dead alone, that’s what I say. I knew it was a terrible mistake.”

  “You should have said something.”

  “Oh, sir.”

  “I came back for other reasons. Have the police been here, or any soldiers looking for me?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Any parsons?”

  “No . . .”

  “What does she eat?”

  “Oh, sir, how can you be so calm? Your own mother, back from the dead.” The housekeeper was close to tears.

  “I’m thinking. She seems calm enough.” He took a step into the room.

  “Please don’t go any closer, sir. She’s not to be trusted, back from the dead like that. She’s lost her mind, and it’s a small wonder. Such a good mistress, too.”

  He took another step into the room. The princess opened her mouth, and he seemed to feel her cold breath from ten feet away, like a draught from an open doorway. “Son,” she said in a cold whisper, her voice cold as death. “I’m hungry, Thanakar.”

  “Beloved God,” sobbed Mrs. Cassimer. “Look at her eyes.”

  “Son,” the princess said again. “Tell the old fool to go away. Tell her to bring food for me. Tell her to bring tumbril pie and sandwiches. Tell her to bring fishes cooked in wine. I want them.”

  The doctor turned to Mrs. Cassimer. “Did you hear? Eight days—almost a week. She must be starving.”

  “Oh, sir. Fishes, she says.”

  “I have brought a guest here,” continued Thanakar. “Perhaps he and the princess have tastes in common. It sounds like it. As for me, can you make me a fruit salad? I was up all night.”

  “Beloved Angkhdt. Fishes, she wants.”

  “Please, Mrs. Cassimer.”

  “But sir, she killed a man.”

  “Yes,” whispered the princess. “What’s done is done.” She turned her eyes to the housekeeper, and the woman fled.

  “Well, Mother,” said the doctor, coming forward into the room. “You’ve made rather a mess.” He walked towards her, kicking through books and broken vases.

  “Yes,” breathed the princess. “Not too close, my son. That’s close enough.” He stopped uncertainly, and she continued. “Why, you’re a man now, Thanakar. Are you married?”

  “No.”

  “No. No need. Does your leg give you much trouble?”

  “Not much.”

  “No.” She looked almost young. Her hair was glossy and her face unlined, but her dead white pallor and her changing eyes made her a creature out of nightmares and sick dreams, trapped between worlds. She looked around the room. “How long?” she asked. “What is the date?”

  “October 46th, in the eighth phase of spring. It’s raining.”

  “So. More than fifty months, then. More than five thousand days. Are you religious, Thanakar?”

  “No.”

  “Good boy. They stole my life from me. I want it back. I want it.” Her eyes caught her reflection in the shards of a broken mirror on the wall; she turned away with an expression of disgust. “Not like this. Why did you wake me? It was the heroin solution. I could feel it pulling me upward as soon as you had shot it in, but I took such a long time to reach the surface, I was down so far. Look—your father looks as young as when I married him.”

  The doctor picked up a chair from off its side. “Tell me,” he said.

  His mother turned, and he watched her eyes fade from pink to white. “No,” she whispered. “Not now. A world of dreams, my son. Not now. I’m thirsty now. Bring me pear whiskey in a crystal glass. Bring me clusters of white grapes. I want them.”

  Thanakar rubbed his nose. A sound came from somewhere else in the apartment. The antinomial blew into his flute to clear it, and then started to play a small tune. The princess heard it. She tilted her head curiously, and Thanakar watched a stain of yellow spread and darken in her eyes. “What is that?” she asked.

  * * *

  He went to find Jenny Pentecost, but she was gone. The house was burned—charred timber, nothing. The police at the local station were obsequious and useless, because the mud and the ashes where the house had been still stank with perfume, and a blackened post was daubed with a cross and circle in red paint. “I’m sorry, sir,” said the policeman, picking at a pimple underneath his lip. “I wouldn’t have touched them, knowing your lordship to be interested, and a friend of the poor commissar’s too. We knew they were runaways, a girl marked like that. But who isn’t, nowadays? The whole district is clearing out. Evil times, sir, evil times. But look here.” He pointed out the red mark on the post, though no one could have missed it or failed to understand it. “See that? Not our jurisdiction. That’s the purge. Smell that? Now, no offense, sir, but we’ve heard some rumors about you too. I’d be careful, sir.”

  The clouds looked bruised and swollen over a light rain. In the street, mud reached over the ankles. It was quiet here, the fire far away, the streets deserted. Thanakar sat down on a projecting beam while the policeman walked around. Near his hand, a bird huddled disconsolately among some bricks, ruffling its green feathers.

  When the man had gone, Thanakar asked among the neighbors. They told him nothing, in many cringing and resentful ways. They were interested in money. They hated him. One old woman with blue teeth said, “No good ever came from your kind. Not for poor folk. Nothing but trouble . . . sir,” and she cocked her head in the direction of the burned house.

  But he found a little girl who told him. She was dressed in yellow rags. Sitting beside him on her porch, kicking her feet, wiping her nose along her arm, she told him how she had crept out that night to watch the house burn down, and how she saw the officers of the purge, in black boots and black unifor
ms, standing silhouetted by the flames, their horses stamping and tossing their heads. The roof had given way in an avalanche of sparks, and one of the horses had kicked back on its hind legs and pulled its bridle free. Standing on the ground, its rider had raised his whip and cursed.

  “But the family?” interrupted Thanakar gently. It was starting to get dark. On the horizon, the sun had dropped below the clouds, and it glinted on the brass roofs of the pagodas and, just visible atop its pillar, the statue of Mara Starbridge wrestling the hierophant. Some women picked miserably through the mud, down towards one of the shrines at the bottom of the street, tolling hand bells.

  The little girl swung and kicked her legs. Seriously, without a trace of fear, she told how she had seen a man and a woman handcuffed, gagged, led away. “Ama came to find me,” she said. “She told me to get back inside. But I saw them through the window.”

  “There was a little girl about your age. A little younger.”

  She wiped her nose along her arm. “I know. Jenny Pentecost. The freak. I called her that because she had a mark right here.” The girl gestured towards her cheek. “A devil mark. Ama says she should have painted her face.”

  “Did you see her?”

  “No. Ama says it isn’t right. She says it brings ’spicions down on everyone. She never went to prayer school. She never went outside.”

  “You didn’t see her—that night?”

  “No. I just told you.”

  His leg hurt. He turned his face into the sun, where it showed in a cleft between two hills. It would have been restful, he thought, to live in an antinomial country, where the laws of cause and effect had been repealed, where actions had no consequences. Here, he felt chained to many deaths—Charity Starbridge, the Pentecosts. Without his attention to distinguish them, they would have escaped notice. He thought: there is a disease in my hands which pollutes everything I touch.