The Forgetting

by Sharon Cameron

  “Would you like me to bring you a jug of cool?” the woman asks.

  I shake my head. Two or three degrees from scalding is exactly how I like it.

  A quick smile creases her face. “I don’t know why I asked. You never do.”

  I look up, surprised. It’s funny that she remembers this about me, when every female in Canaan must come in and out of these bathing rooms. I watch her bend to pick up my drying cloth in the fog, but what I see is the glassblower’s son materializing out of Jin’s dark corner. How often are we all being observed without knowing it? So many times the Lost are dismissed, ignored, and women gossip in these baths. They gossip a lot. All at once I’m willing to bet this little Lost woman knows everything about us.

  I lean over, swirl the water with a hand, and for the second time in one day I start a conversation. “Could I … ” I try again. “Do you have a name?”

  The woman’s forehead wrinkles more at my question, but she only places the folded cloth neatly on the bench, careful not to touch my pack, and says, “My name is Rose, Nadia the Dyer’s daughter.”

  So she knows me. As suspected. I say quietly, “Do you happen to know the glassblower’s son?” I begin to undo my braids, as if my question is casual, and she steps over to touch the running water, as if its temperature might have changed.

  “The glassblower’s son?” she repeats, voice soft beneath the water splash. “I thought you might have asked your sister about that.”

  “My sister? Which one?”

  “Liliya.”

  I frown. Why would I ask Liliya about Gray? I never voluntarily ask Liliya about anything.

  Rose says, “They have an understanding, or are approaching one. That is what the potter’s wife says. She lives across the street from the glassblower.”

  I huddle in the water, stunned by this news. I have no trouble believing that Liliya would be interested in Gray. He probably has some sort of line queuing. But I just can’t picture him choosing my sister. Then again, he is a zopa. I say, “But why start an understanding this close to the Forgetting?” The whole thing will be over in seventy days. Unless they choose each other again.

  Rose watches me closely. “Maybe it’s only a dalliance.”

  Now I’m shocked. Would Liliya really allow that? It would be easy for her to have an understanding with Gray. Just go to the Council and show that they’ve both written it in their books. And if they don’t choose each other again after the Forgetting, then take themselves back to the Council and cross it out. That’s what everyone does, unless they decide to stay for any children. Or take the coward’s way out, like my father. But a dalliance, a relationship of convenience, unwritten, that is shameful. And stupid. Two or three months after a Forgetting a girl could find a child in her belly and have no idea how it got there. And since that child’s name will not be written in the books of two parents, that child will be taken, and that child will be Lost. I jerk loose another braid. Liliya, I have decided, is also a zopa.

  “Or it may only be a rumor,” the wrinkled woman says in her quiet voice. “It’s best not to trust everything that is heard in the—”

  A blast of cool air disturbs my steam. My head jerks up, the Lost woman turns, and there, standing in the doorway, is Liliya, wrapped in a drying cloth. I stare at her, torn between irritation and fear of what she might have overheard. Liliya puts two dark eyes on the Lost woman.

  “You can go.”

  The old woman shuffles out without a backward glance. Liliya closes the door behind her and it’s just the two of us and the sound of water splashing. I sink back into the basin. If Liliya is seeking me out, that can’t be good. She sits daintily on the bench, adjusting the drying cloth as she crosses her legs, a key dangling from a string around her neck. I examine her anew from beneath half-lidded eyes. My sister is pretty, in a curly-headed, big-eyed, curvy sort of way. Very curvy sort of way. Everything about me is tall and straight. We look like two different species. Maybe we are.

  “Mother was upset this morning,” she says sweetly.

  I spread my arms along the rim of the basin, careful to show that her presence doesn’t affect me. The water is up to my knees now. “She knows I left early for the baths.”

  Liliya snorts. “Genivee is such a little liar.”

  I narrow my eyes. I will not stand for her insulting Genivee.

  “I was concerned when I saw you come in,” Liliya says. “Running about during the resting, going who knows where, with who knows who. I was so worried, I dropped off Mother and came here instead. I couldn’t even go to the granary today.”

  Which means she knows she could get away with not going today. The granary is a perfect apprenticeship for Liliya, learning to decide how much everyone in Canaan can or can’t have to eat. She’ll be one who retains her work skills after the Forgetting, I think. Telling other people how to live must have become second nature by now. She’s still smiling.

  “So where have you been, Nadia?”

  I don’t move, but I can feel my body tensing in the heat. Only now am I connecting the Lost woman’s words about my sister and the glassblower’s son and his sudden appearance in Jin’s roof garden. Liliya dislikes me; I’ve always known that. But the idea that she might actually hate me enough to find out what I’m up to, to get me caught, that thought has never occurred. I look at her smug face through the steam.

  “Nothing to say?” she asks.

  Would it give Liliya some sort of twisted satisfaction to see me flogged? Any guilt she might feel would be gone in seventy days.

  “You’re so quiet, Nadia.” She eyes my pack, snatches it, and sets it in her lap.

  “Liliya,” I say.

  She twists the clasp and opens the flap. I know she can see my book now, and I feel much more exposed by that than my naked body in the bath.

  “Stop, Liliya. Now.” If she touches my book, I will scream the bathhouse down.

  “Apples!” She nearly squeals. “Not many of these left in the city now, are there? But what’s this?” She pulls a small bundle from my pack, folds back the cloth to show a purple branch studded with pale, round fruits. Like the dark day moons. “Are they silvercurrants?” she asks. And before she’s even finished speaking she has two of them popped into her mouth.

  I watch her swallow, paralyzed. Those aren’t silvercurrants. I actually have no idea what they are. I brought that plant from over the wall. I’d intended to show it to Mother, see if she’d seen anything like it in the dye house. She’s actually very knowledgeable about plants, some of it retained from my father, probably. But even my half-insane mother wouldn’t put something in her mouth when she didn’t know for sure what it was. Liliya is such a zopa. She makes a face.

  “Needs sugar sap.” She sighs. “You know there’s something wrong, don’t you, Nadia?”

  There are a lot of things wrong. I’m waiting for Liliya to convulse, or at least froth at the mouth. She talks on.

  “You know you only apprenticed at the dye house to be with Mother. But that hasn’t worked out for you, has it? Why do you think that is?”

  This is pulling at a still-fresh wound, as my sister is aware. I did apprentice at the dye house for a time, to be with Mother, and no, it didn’t make a difference. But Mother had loved me once. I remember it.

  Liliya leans forward, squishing my pack against her ample chest.

  “You weren’t with Mother and me when we woke up from the Forgetting. You probably think I was too confused, but I remember when the door opened and the sky was sparkling. Genivee was in her cradle seat, all the little seedlings in the window, and you—you picked up your book from the table, and you know what you said next, don’t you? You said the book wasn’t yours.”

  I’d also said her name was Lisbeth, because it was, before Father wrote her a new book. But she doesn’t remember that. The water gurgles and rises, my body half ivory, half sunrise pink. I think I’m getting too hot this time.

  “You know it’s not you she cares about
seeing in that bed. It could be anyone. And you don’t look like us,” Liliya says. “You don’t act like us.”

  I’m the only one who favors our father. Finally I whisper, “My name is written in Mother’s book.”

  Liliya leans back against the wall, arms comfortably around my pack. “Oh, we had a Nadia, I think, before Father died. But I think we lost her and got you instead. We all know it’s true, and it’s time we admitted it.”

  So this is what Liliya thinks. Really thinks. While I’ve been risking my back to make sure the Forgetting never separates our family again. My head feels like the swirling currents. She balances my battered pack on her lap, plays with the soft twine of the tether.

  “I could toss your book in right now, you know. Ruin it. And you wouldn’t say anything if I did, would you? Because if you did, I might tell about all your running around during the restings.”

  I watch her hands.

  “But I won’t do that. Because I think it’s better if you do. And that’s why I’ve come to say that I want you to apprentice at the Archives. Think about it. You would have access to all your old books there. You would have the chance to fix them.”

  I know I’m getting too hot. There’s a blurriness at the edge of my vision.

  “Change your books. Let Nadia be lost in the Forgetting. Like she was last time. Find your real family, or something close, and stop making Mother miserable. We’ll all forget soon and then everything will be like it should. Unless you’re still there when we wake up.”

  My sister tosses my pack to the floor and stands, adjusting her cloth. “How can you take the heat in here?” she asks. I watch her walk to the door, every step sure, confident that something necessary has now been done. She looks back at me.

  “Do it, Nadia, or I’ll make it happen myself. You know I will. Just let me know when you’ve taken care of things. No reason to talk about it again.” Liliya waits to see if I’ll respond. When I don’t, she says, “You know you’re miserable, too.” Then the door shuts and I am alone.

  I need to get out of the basin. My knees are on the ledge beneath the water, elbows on the rim, then my hand covers my mouth and I am racked with one silent sob. I wouldn’t have thought Liliya could slice my insides to ribbons, but she has done it, ruthless and precise, like a harvester with a scythe. I’m dizzy, heart throbbing in my chest, and the little breath I can find feels more like water than air.

  The shock of cold water on my back jolts my eyes into opening. The sluice gate has been shut, and Rose sets down the water jug.

  “Sit on the edge, then,” she says. “Head down.”

  I do as she says, and feel the wind of a swaying fern frond in Rose’s hand. The moving air has an instant cooling effect, though my chest still heaves. When some of the dizziness has passed, Rose deftly unbraids the rest of my hair and pours soap on my head. I can’t believe I let her. I don’t let anyone deliberately touch me except Genivee. But I close my eyes and allow Rose to work the soap through, keeping them closed when she pours more cool water to rinse. I feel the nudge of the drying cloth next to me and wrap myself in it.

  “Come to the bench,” Rose says. I walk on unsteady legs to sit on the cooler stone. I’m not crying anymore. I never cry. Except for today. Today is the exception to everything.

  “Better?” Rose asks from beside me.

  I nod my head, but I can’t look up at her wrinkled face. “Do you ever wish you could remember?” I ask. “Because I don’t want to remember.”

  The steamy air moves. I think she nods. “I’ve wanted to remember before. But not now.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Lost girls need me. They don’t have anyone else.”

  I close my eyes. I am a lost girl, I think. Without being Lost. Liliya’s words seep back through my mind, leaving a dark, slimy trail behind them. You weren’t with Mother and me when we woke up from the Forgetting. You probably think I was too confused, but I remember when the door opened and the sky was sparkling. Genivee was in her cradle seat, all the little seedlings in the window, and you—you picked up your book from the table, and you know what you said next, don’t you? You said the book wasn’t—

  My eyes fly open. What did Liliya mean, seedlings in the window? There were no seedlings in the window after the Forgetting because our father took them with him. I know he did. And I have never seen another plant inside our house again. “Put it on the roof,” Mother says every time, as if she unconsciously avoids it. I suck in a breath, and then another.

  “Are you well?” Rose asks.

  I look wildly for my pack, relieved to see that Rose has set it back on the bench, out of the splashed water on the floor. My cleaned clothes are beside it, still a little damp. I jump up and jerk the tunic over my head, pulling the leggings onto my skin with difficulty before sliding into my sandals. The pack goes to my back, tether tied to my belt, but not before I stuff the bundle with the bare purple shoot that I brought from over the wall inside it. I rush for the door, then dash straight back, swing my pack onto the bench, and dig inside. I place one yellow apple in Rose’s startled hands.

  “Thank you,” I whisper.

  I run out of the bathing room and past the pools, damp hair flying, the slap of my sandals loud in the echoing space, through the changing room and into the low, hot sunshine and overcrowded streets.

  Little seedlings in the window. That’s what she said.

  Liliya has had a memory.

  I am Nadia the Planter’s daughter. I am writing in a book that says Dyer’s daughter because Father went away and Mother says that’s who I am. She does not remember before. Nobody remembers before. I remember. Now I am going to write all of what our teacher taught us to say.

  At the first sunrising of the twelfth year, they will forget. They will lose their memories, and without their memories, they are lost. Their books will be their memories, their written past selves. They will write in their books. They will keep their books. They will write the truth, and the books will tell them who they have been. If a book is lost, then so are they Lost. I am made of my memories. Without memories, they are nothing.

  Books will be written in every day. In our books we are to write the truth.

  Truth is not good, and truth is not bad. When we write truth, we write who we are.

  Books will be tied at all times to the body. When we keep our books, we remember who we are.

  Books that are full will be taken to the Archive. When we register our books, we learn our truth.

  When we forget, we are to read our books. When we read our books, we remember our truth.

  When a book is changed, the truth is changed. When a book is destroyed, then we are destroyed.

  I got a good grade for writing that and spelling all the words. Now I’ll think about how many of these words aren’t true.

  NADIA THE DYER’S DAUGHTER

  BOOK 1, PAGE 65, 2 SEASONS AFTER THE FORGETTING

  I keep running, up Meridian, around the edge of the gathering in the amphitheater. Janis is talking, voice amplified by the bowl she stands in, Jonathan behind her, flanked by Reese and Li. I skirt the high ground, and when I look to the side I see her eyes fix on me, tracking my progress around the rim. I dodge behind a group of bodies, escaping her gaze and a few curious expressions, leap over some flower pots, then across Second Bridge to duck right down Hubble Street. I pass the potter’s and the glassblower’s. Gray is in the open-air part of the workshop, where I found him just before the last Forgetting, hair wet and curling, shirt dark with sweat from the furnace where his book nearly burned. He glances up, straightening as I run past, but I don’t have time to think about him now. I have to get home.

  Two streets to Hawking, then I turn the corner into the little alley between our house and the neighbors’ and burst through my front door. The sitting room smells of hot wind, baking, and dry herbs. I run through it and stick my head into the storeroom. The wrapped loaves of dark days bread are stacked above rows and rows of sealed jars,
the harvest of this sunlight’s garden, dried apple and pepper braids hanging from the ceiling. No one is there, or in the resting rooms, so out the door again, up the outside stairs, two at a time, to a roof garden almost identical to Jin’s, only ours is well-tended and one story up instead of two. Genivee has moved the bread oven into the sun for me, I see, to heat while I was at the baths. But I’m alone on the rooftop.

  I make my way back down to the sitting room, slam the door, set my pack on the shining metal top of our long table. The window stands open to the breeze, the constant footsteps and clanging and calling of the city barely muted. I take out the cloth bundle with the shoot now bare of its fruit and touch the smooth skin of the leaves. Liliya ate this, I think, and Liliya had a memory. Of seedlings on our windowsill. Such a small, insignificant detail, a thought easily discarded, but its existence rocks the stone beneath my feet. I lift the cutting to my nose. A fresh smell, sharp, almost with a tingle. What if the Forgetting doesn’t drain our memories away forever, like Rose pulling the plug in the basin, but only locks them up, like a book in a bathhouse cupboard? Could we unlock what’s inside our heads? I jump at the sound of a voice.

  “My mother said I had to come and check on you.”

  It’s Imogene the Inkmaker’s daughter, standing in our alley, her wispy brown head stuck inside my open window. Her twin, Eshan, is a little behind her, his arms crossed. I turn my back to them quick, blocking their view of the plant cutting with my body.

  “She said you came running down the street like you were crazy.”

  I don’t know what to say to that. I probably was. I probably am.

  I hear Imogene sigh when I don’t answer. “I’ll just tell her you’re fine, shall I?”

  I’ve known Imogene and Eshan all my life. Their mother is Hedda, and the whole family is blue-eyed, brown-haired, and perfectly nice. It’s the nice ones who can hurt you the most. When I peek over my shoulder Imogene is gone from the window and Eshan has taken her place.