A Very Private Life

by Michael Frayn

  Noli stares at her blankly, the brown eyes blinking again, the soft pouches of dark skin around the eyes crinkling in puzzlement. For a moment Uncumber is infected by his failure to recognize her. Perhaps—perhaps it isn’t Noli? It looked like him for a moment, but surely Noli wouldn’t be so short, so old, so pouched about the eyes, so given to nervous blinking?

  “Uncumber!” he says in his funny Noli accent.

  Uncumber’s eyes brim over with grateful tears. Never in her life has anyone said anything so perfect and beautiful to her. She just sits on the bed, with a long graze across her forehead, and her ankle swollen up like a ball, and the bruises coming up on her thighs and arms (all these wounds sustained in the quest for him!), and the tears running out of her eyes, liquidly watching this man of all men, this king among kings, this hairy-chested animal, lost in pleasure at his baldness, his astonishment at seeing her, his shortness, the tufts of hair in his ears, the way he rubs his hand back and forth over his mouth as he looks first at her, then sideways to right and to left at his fellow kings, as they all shout at once, trying to tell him how they found her and brought her in.

  “Skava, ‘Holovis, holovis!’” they tell him. “Oc skava, ‘Noli, Noli!’”

  He in his turn begins to offer explanations to them, turning from side to side to face them, spreading his hands, pushing his head forwards, referring to the holovis and demonstrating the writing of something across his chest. Uncumber follows each gesture adoringly. All the kings in the room seem to be amused by Noli’s explanation. They laugh and slap him on the back.

  “Menec Noli!” they shout. “Menec timtim Noli!”

  And they wink at Uncumber. She smiles back at them; they are all transformed by their kinship with Noli.

  Only the queens seem unamused. They catch each other’s eyes and compress their lips. The children gaze up into the adults’ faces with open mouths, trying to follow the drama, half smiling when they look at the smiling kings, half frowning when they turn to the frowning queens.

  Noli, feeling Uncumber’s gaze upon him, spreads his hands and shrugs. Uncumber smiles trustingly back.

  Now several of the queens are shouting at Noli, pointing first at Uncumber and then upstairs. The kings humorously encourage him. Noli scratches his head, then leans first this way and then that, as if trying to lean out of something, while he puts his head on each side and talks very fast. But he is shouted down.

  Uncumber keeps her eyes on him. She is confident that as soon as he has explained everything to the other kings and queens he will take her in his arms and sweep her away to some room, or some other house, where they can be alone together.

  Eventually some sort of agreement is reached—though evidently not one which meets with Noli’s approval. Two powerfully built young kings lift her off the bed and force their way through the crowd with her. They take her out into the hall and up the staircase, with the whole crowd following hard upon their heels. She can hear Noli still arguing behind her as they go.

  “Druv ao tork holovis,” he says in injured tones. “Simni parakaminod, leptil muamuani i koro holovis. Ei! Ei! Ei!”

  Poor Noli! It sounds as though they won’t let him take her off on his own. They all want to look after her!

  Up the broad staircase they go, then up to yet another floor, and then up a third staircase, a wooden one this time, with steep steps, almost too narrow for Uncumber and her bearers. At the top of the stairs is a landing with a number of doors opening off it. Noli opens one of these doors, and they carry her into a room rather like the one downstairs, only smaller and lower and even more crammed with things. The two young kings set her down on one of the beds.

  The crowd is already swarming into the room. Noli and the two young kings struggle with it, forcing the bodies back, detaching hands from the doorposts. Uncumber feels half sickened, half excited, watching all this pressing of body upon body. The animal kingdom!

  When the door is finally shut and bolted, there remain in the room not only Noli and Uncumber but three queens, one king with a straggling black moustache, and five small princes and princesses of varying ages. To Uncumber’s surprise, Noli makes no attempt to expel any of these. His family! Of course! Uncumber’s heart sinks; the idea of Noli’s having a family had never occurred to her.

  The three queens go silently to a table in the corner of the room, where cooking-pots and earthenware vessels are stacked. Sighing heavily, the eldest of the three produces a spray of blue flames from a metal stand and lifts a blackened pot onto them. The children all sit along the edge of a bed and stare silently at Uncumber. The king with the straggling black moustache gazes gloomily at the floor, picking his teeth with his nail. Noli raises his eyebrows, sucks in breath through his teeth, and scratches the back of his head.

  “Ei! Ei! Ei!” he says. “Chen divas khodkhod. Chen divas khodkhod!”

  A colossal double explosion fills the room, like the one which caught Uncumber off balance in the garden. She jumps painfully and puts her hands over her ears, expecting the room to burst apart in a shower of dust and smoke, as buildings do sometimes on the holovision. A dribble of white powder does come down from one corner of the ceiling, and the plates jump on the shelves.

  But nothing else happens. And no one else in the room moves a muscle.

  Her first night with him

  Uncumber falls asleep while the others are eating. They put a plate of stuff from the cooking-pot in front of her—a nightmare mess of solid brown greasy lumps and green vegetable matter, like some piece of paranoiac imagery off one of the violence channels, which she cannot even bring herself to look at. The others bend over their plates, hack at the loathsomeness with handfuls of tools, and pack it into their mouths until they can scarcely speak. The scrape of eating-tool on plate, the slop-slop-slop of lips, the uneven sound of incomprehensible, half-articulated conversation have a hypnotic effect on Uncumber in her deep exhaustion. The noises become intimate but remote; the room slips and crumples before her closing eyes.

  When she wakes it is dark, and the room is full of noise of a different sort. S-n-o-o-o-o-r-e … Snort! Grunt! Nkgh! Kh-n-n-n-n-n-n …! For several panic-stricken moments she cannot think what it is, or where she can possibly be. Slowly she works it out: it is the noise of ten people sleeping, and she is in a bed. A very narrow bed; she can’t move. Something warm and solid is pressed against her, all the way down her right side. Cautiously she feels it. Another human being! Of course! Noli! With a shock of pleasure she runs her hand over the cloth covering his broad, powerful back … his shoulders … the back of his neck (smoother, touchingly smoother, than she’d have supposed!) … and up into his hair (more luxuriant, voluptuously more luxuriant at the back than you’d think from his baldness!). She catches her breath in her growing excitement. He stirs and groans. She feels an irresistible impulse to run her hand through the fuzzy hair on his chest…. But there isn’t any hair! It’s smooth—and it bulges and folds…. Suddenly it jerks away from her hand, struggles to sit up, turns on the light … is not Noli at all, but the thinnest and dourest of the queens!

  Everyone wakes up. The children cry. The thin queen points at Uncumber and accuses her of—well, Uncumber can imagine what. Everyone shouts and waves his arms. Uncumber fails to explain even in her own language, and at last the light is turned out again.

  After that Uncumber lies awake for hours, scarcely daring to breathe, for fear of touching the thin queen again. Her swollen ankle and her bruises have started to throb, the room is unbearably stuffy, and the noise and smell of all this sleeping humanity becomes overpowering. Sometimes she falls into a sort of delirium of overtiredness, in which she keeps moving from one weird room filled with bare-eyed people into the next, driven by the feeling that there is some correct arrangement of people and rooms and that if only she can find it everything will come out all right. At other times she surfaces and worries about Noli. Her heart aches for him, trapped in this crowded room, surrounded by these surly queens and screami
ng children. How like him to share his life with all these burdensome people! To make himself responsible for all this human freight! Grunt! S-n-o-o-o-o-r-e! Khnuh! A-a-a-a-a-a-h! The whole room is heaving with life! She quite understands that he cannot really express what he feels for her in these circumstances. But they will go away. She will take him away.

  The cook-queen is presumably his wife; she saw when the light was on that they are sharing a bed. How like Noli to get himself caught by a woman like that! Probably when she was younger she looked plaintive and vulnerable and he felt sorry for her. Then the large surprised queen would be her sister—no, his sister, she looks too sympathetic to be related to her—and the thin queen would be perhaps the wife of the moustached king, who is sleeping on the floor, or perhaps another sister, or sister-in-law….

  She sinks back into the waking dream about the rooms and is violently roused from it by another of the terrible double explosions, which makes her spring up in bed, clutching at her heart and tangling blindly with the thin queen’s limbs. This wakes the thin queen in her turn and gives her the idea that Uncumber is assaulting her again. She fends her off and shouts. Once more the light is turned on; once more everyone looks accusingly at Uncumber.

  “I’m sorry,” she says miserably. “I couldn’t help it. It was that terrible bang—the bang.”

  “O,” mutters the moustached king. “Papoom.”

  “O, papoom,” mutters everyone else without interest, settling down again and turning out the light.

  Uncumber spends the rest of the night rigid with apprehension; and indeed, some minutes or hours later there is another similar explosion. Then at last the strange grey light of outside day creeps into the room around the shabby curtains and illuminates the tangle of humped bodies, limbs, and open mouths. Grotesque, she thinks and, still thinking it over and over again, falls at last into a heavy sleep.

  Papoom! When she wakes again it is with another of the appalling explosions bursting in her head. But now the room is full of light, and the beds are empty. She sits up and drags on her dark glasses.

  “Noli!” she cries stupidly. “Where’s Noli?”

  The only two people in the room are the cook-queen and the surprised queen. They turn round at her cry and stare at her.

  “Nek taomoro Noli,” says the cook-queen.

  Papoom

  The surprised queen brings Uncumber a large, sawn-off fragment of some whitish substance riddled with little air-pockets and surrounded with a hard brown skin, and, when Uncumber looks puzzled, gestures to her to eat it. She breaks off a small piece and nibbles it cautiously. It’s all right—more or less tasteless, in fact. She chews up several mouthfuls. It wouldn’t normally occur to her to eat something that looks suspiciously like expanded polystyrene, but she finished the last of her food pills the day before, and her stomach is crying out for nourishment. The surprised queen brings her a bowl of hot brown liquid, on the top of which tiny cream-coloured specks and opalescent discs of grease are floating. She closes her eyes and sips it. It tastes remarkably like what comes out of the coffee tap.

  So Noli’s nek taomoro. That’s what they said about him before, of course. She thought then it might mean he was dead. But he survived nek-taomoro-ing before, so perhaps he will again.

  She is fascinated by the idea of the window. All she can see through it from her bed is a square of milky yellow sky. She jumps out of bed to go and take a closer look—and collapses, gasping with pain, on the floor, clutching her swollen ankle. It really won’t bear any weight at all.

  So she has to hop. But the view is worth it. The same red disc that she remembers from her childhood excursion into the outside world hangs in the same yellowy sky. The window overlooks a kind of yard surrounded by outhouses. Beyond them she can just catch a glimpse of the complex, evilly intertwined trees in the overgrown garden. They look even more alarming by day. A shock of horror goes through her to think of herself making her way among them the previous night.

  But it’s the yard which interests her most; there are so many things in it that she’s never seen before. A number of birds are walking about, with dirty white feathers and yellow legs, pecking at the ground. A four-legged animal covered in black fur, with a tail sticking out at the back, yawns and scratches itself with one of its feet. It looks rather like a toy dog Uncumber had as a child, so perhaps a dog is what it is.

  And there is a lot of machinery in the yard—rusting, broken machinery. A king appears, opens the shattered door to one of the outhouses, and drives out a travelling machine balanced on four wheels. It’s all like some historical drama! Yet somehow it looks entirely natural, as if the world has always been like this.

  On one side of the yard is a huge pile of what can only be rubbish—old packaging, broken chairs, rags, rotting vegetable matter. Uncumber is astonished at this. Why don’t they just put it in the tube, like everyone else, and dispose of it? Presumably the tube is out of order, the way tubes get. Then why have they never bothered to have it repaired? Can’t kings and queens get outsiders to come and do their jobs for them?

  But, of course, these people are the outsiders! They are the animals of the world. Down in the yard—the lower animals, with feathers or four legs. Up here—the higher animals, with cloth wrapped round them, and the use of fire. This is what she always wanted to know—how the outside classes live, what the world is like outside the holovision circuits. And this is it. She gazes about her with benevolence. These are the real people, undistorted by holovision! This is the real world! She turns and smiles at the two queens in the room, trying to convey the intensity of her admiration for them and for what they represent. The surprised queen smiles a small surprised smile back.

  Papoom! Once more Uncumber jumps and trembles with shocked reaction. But she knows now what the papooms are; the whole story has come back to her. They are the noise of the ancient rockets, like the one she arrived on, passing overhead on their way in and out of the rocketport at 515–214. Once upon a time there were real kings and queens in this palace. Then the papooms came and pauperized everything in their path. Out moved the kings and queens, to take refuge in the secret burrows of the developing inside world, leaving their palaces behind as slums to house the outsiders, who have to scavenge for their homes.

  But Uncumber has a romantic feeling that Noli really is a king: a king who refused to abandon his palace and who proudly, sadly, hopelessly stood his ground while the barbarians swirled in around him.

  A serious talk

  Uncumber lies by the window all day, playing with the children when they come in, and doing her best to eat the food that the queens bring her. It becomes swelteringly close in the room as the day wears on. In a way she enjoys the discomfort. She recalls learning that the outside temperature varies from one part of the world to another—and here she is, making practical experience of the information!

  When, towards evening, Noli comes in, she feels she knows so much more about his environment as a result of everything she has seen and thought during the day that he himself seems more familiar than ever. Every line of his face is as deeply ingrained in her memory as if she had known him from childhood. His hands are stained black and green, and there are more stains on his boots. A sharp organic smell lingers about him, which she savours with pleasure.

  She smiles at him, of course, and he nods and smiles at her—in a rather constrained way, as she expects, since he cannot risk revealing his real feelings in front of his wife. He pulls off his shirt and washes under the single cold-water tap in the corner. Uncumber watches every movement he makes. He sluices handfuls of water round the back of his red neck and up over his red pate, snorts water down his nose in an irresistibly manlike way. Then he scrubs himself dry with a little worn towel, opening his eyes very wide, as if to exercise them after their immersion, his rising eyebrows pushing little red waves up his forehead to the edge of the shiny roof on top.

  Meanwhile the cook-queen talks at him over her shoulder—long, rasping, impa
tient sentences, to which he replies with half-audible, indifferent monosyllables. Evidently exasperated, she turns and lectures him direct, pointing at Uncumber with the knife she is holding, and wagging it up and down to emphasize her points. Clearly she wants him to do something about Uncumber. He exercises his eyebrows, saying nothing. Then he puts on a clean shirt and combs the fringe of hair round the back of his head. “Ticini!” he says sharply to the cook-queen, and she stops her complaints at once. Then, still combing, he comes and sits down on the edge of the bed opposite Uncumber.

  He smiles and points at her ankle. She moves her head from side to side, with a wry look. He nods and continues to comb his hair. Then he holds up his hand and raises it sharply into the air, blowing between his teeth as he does so. She watches the gesture intently, but when he puts his head on one side and raises his eyebrows she has no idea what response he wants from her. He repeats the demonstration; she shakes her head, baffled. Noli looks round at the other people in the room, rubbing his chin at the difficulty of it all. They all of them—queens, children, the king with the straggling moustache—start raising their hands on end and shooting them up into the air with little hissing blasts of air between their teeth. She looks, mystified, from one to another. Noli points at her and goes through the performance once again. Oh, they want her to do it! She smiles and nods, eager to please. She raises her hand on end, shoots it into the air, and blows through her teeth. Everyone nods and smiles. They all shoot their hands into the air together. They all blow through their teeth. Uncumber is delighted to have mastered this little social usage.

  But somehow they seem dissatisfied. They consult together, looking at her. Noli tries repeating the gesture, but this time, instead of blowing through his teeth, he says, “Papoom!”

  At last she sees what the’re driving at: it’s a rocket going up! “Papoom!” she agrees, smiling. “Papoom!” agrees everyone, smiling too.