Tamaruq

by E. J. Swift

  Their eyes meet.

  ‘So you can speak,’ says Dien.

  She doesn’t see the blow coming. One moment she’s staring up at Dien, the next she’s on the floor, her jaw a fierce star of pain, blood welling in her mouth. Dien stands over her, clenching and unclenching her knuckles.

  Adelaide puts a hand to her throat. She can feel the words, trapped deep down inside her throat. Slowly, haltingly, she calls them up. Blood dribbles from her lips.

  ‘I w— I won’t go b-back there. I won’t – t-talk to them. I won’t have anything – to do – with them.’

  Dien gazes at her for a long time, and now her eyes are hard.

  ‘Well,’ she says. ‘We’ll see about that.’

  Dien goes away. Dien returns. She begins a tactical campaign. She starts by speaking softly, sitting on the table with her legs hanging loose and casual in their warmers, speaking about Vikram. With every repetition of his name, Adelaide feels the whirlpool widening. He was important to the west, says Dien. He had ambitions. He started something, something even Eirik was unable to start. He got under the City’s skin, that’s the truth of it. He was getting people on side, even Citizens. And she knows Adelaide helped with that, even if it was for the wrong reasons, she helped. She knows Adelaide cared about Vikram. She knows they were fucking. After all, everyone saw the newsreel. Maybe Adelaide even thought she was in love. It has a certain romance, doesn’t it, the Architect’s granddaughter and the poor revolutionary. But now he’s gone, and the last things that were said about him made him out to be some kind of criminal mastermind, and worse. Devious, they said. Conniving, treacherous. An eel in the water. Dien lifts her gaze sadly. What kind of legacy does Vikram have now, she asks? Was his death for nothing? Surely Adelaide does not want him to have died for nothing?

  Another cup of coral tea. Other people – Dien’s people – escort her to the bathroom. They bring her back. They sit her in the chair. Feed her, force her to swallow when she tries to refuse. We don’t want you passing out on us, now. She wants to scream.

  Dien’s efforts become more overtly hostile. Adelaide owes Vikram, she says. She owes the west. If not for everything her family have done, and Dien could offer a pretty comprehensive list, Adelaide only has to ask, then how about for the man she betrayed. Make this right, she says. Help us. Help your dead westie boyfriend.

  Dien talks on. The mobility of her face becomes intensely familiar: the stretch of her lips, thickly coated in that cheap cherry lipstick, the way her jaw sets at a slight disjuncture when she clenches her teeth. There’s a small mole at the edge of her eyebrow, a larger one at her temple. Every action she makes is decisive and set, she moves as if there were no other possibilities of movement; Dien has conquered all of them. She circles the room. She comes closer, pausing at Adelaide’s back, leaning in, the smell of her last meal ripe between them as her words drift into Adelaide’s ear. Constructed. Persuasive.

  Hours pass. The light in the room changes. Dien talks. Adelaide sleeps, or thinks she does. She feels numb with exhaustion. She wakes to find Dien sitting, surveying her, not a trace of weariness in the other woman’s face. Dien’s eyes shining in the dark. She has no idea how long she has been there. They begin again. Dien talking. Adelaide silent. A dead man and a whirlpool between them.

  Daylight. A man enters the apartment with a case. He sets down the case and opens it and from an array of metal tools he selects a scalpel and a tin of salt. The westerners rope Adelaide to the chair and remove her boots and socks and someone takes hold of her ankles, their thumbs digging in, pulling back her toes and presenting the soles of her feet to the man. She clamps her teeth, a fresh flood of pain welling in her bruised jaw. The man takes up his scalpel. His thumb runs over the soft skin in the arch of her foot, his grip tightening when she flinches.

  Adelaide looks at Dien. Dien looks at her. She doesn’t want to show fear but all of her limbs are shaking uncontrollably at the thought of what is to follow.

  ‘No,’ says Dien. ‘This won’t work. Let’s try something else.’

  The next time she wakes the room is empty and the door is open. She looks about her, blinking, confused. Is she really awake? She becomes aware of a hot, itching sensation in her groin and realizes to her humiliation she’s wet herself. Through the door she sees two figures. A man and a woman, his hand on her elbow in an intimate, supportive gesture. Familiar. So familiar.

  The Larssons.

  Shame envelops her, that she should appear to them in this state. She tries to stand but she is still bound to the chair.

  The Larssons see her.

  ‘Ata!’

  Their faces change. They look confused. What is she doing here? Then other figures come into view. Dien. The man carrying the case. The case. Dien is holding something. She uncurls her hand, letting Adelaide see. A salt box.

  Adelaide starts to scream.

  ‘No! Dien, no!’

  She can hear Mikaela pleading.

  ‘What are you doing to her? Please, let us see her!’

  Dien does not reply. She is staring meditatively at Ole and Mikaela.

  ‘Leave them alone!’ Adelaide screams. Ole tries to enter the room, to reach her, but the man with the case bars the way.

  ‘Please—’

  Mikaela’s face, fraught with distress.

  ‘Ole, Mikaela, get away from them! Get away!’

  ‘Ata!’

  ‘Mikaela!’

  ‘Ata!’

  Dien passes the salt box to the man with the case, then enters the apartment and closes the door, blocking Adelaide’s view of the Larssons. Panic floods her. She looks frantically to Dien.

  ‘You wouldn’t—’

  ‘I would.’

  ‘But their son, that boy – he’s one of yours – you can’t do this!’

  Dien shakes her head regretfully. ‘I know.’

  ‘No.’ She is shaking. ‘No, I don’t believe you.’

  When Dien speaks her voice is soft, almost caressing.

  ‘Don’t underestimate me, Adelaide Rechnov. And let’s be clear – I want you to be clear. We’re talking about me hurting these people. Your rescuers. Ole and Mikaela, that’s their names, right? Which I will do. Do I want to hurt them? No. I don’t, of course I don’t. I don’t enjoy torture. But will I, in order to make you do what we need? Yes. I will. Unequivocally. Because we’re at war here, and in war, people make sacrifices.’

  Her gaze locks with Adelaide’s.

  ‘Don’t make these people be one of them. They helped you, I hear. You might say they’re the reason you’re alive. I’ll leave you to think on it.’

  She rises. Walks towards the door.

  ‘Wait!’

  Dien pauses. As she turns Adelaide sees the glint of triumph in her eyes, and she understands that this is the end result of a calculation Dien made a long time ago, one whose outcome she has been riding out ever since.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever you want. Just please, don’t hurt them.’

  Dien’s crew can’t work out how to act around her. They are more uncertain of themselves than Adelaide, who has been treated worse than this, and now that the terms have been made clear she at least knows where she stands. The arrangement is essentially house arrest: they keep her locked in Dien’s apartment, but she is free to move around it, as long as someone is there, to make sure she doesn’t take a knife from the drawer. Try to stab one of them – or herself.

  She doesn’t recognize the towers across the waterway. She can usually orientate herself by the graffiti. This must be one of those parts of town where they kick out the homeless and the people have regular work and an assumed air of gentility, where aspirations of crossing the border are not uncommon.

  Different people come and go from the apartment. There are only two rooms, the living and sleeping area, and a small bathroom where the taps work if the water meter has been paid. When the westerners mention their plans it is always in hushed voices. After a fe
w episodes like this Adelaide starts to laugh.

  ‘Something amuse you, Rechnov?’ asks Dien.

  ‘No, nothing.’

  But she can’t suppress a smile, and Dien is watching.

  ‘Only, if I’m going to be your figurehead, don’t you think it would be useful to know what you’re trying to do?’

  ‘I don’t think we’re at quite that level of trust yet, Rechnov. Shut up or we’ll lock you in the bathroom.’

  Despite everything Dien has done, she has to admit to moments of liking for the other woman. One of the others glances in Adelaide’s direction and mutters, ‘The water.’

  ‘You don’t think I’m serious, do you? Stars above. Anyway, she isn’t going to kill herself. Are you, Rechnov?’

  ‘I’m weighing up my options,’ says Adelaide.

  Her levity seems to surprise, but not displease, Dien, who every now and then will give her a curious, straight-on look, as though Adelaide is a previously undiscovered species whose behaviour must be constantly monitored and re-evaluated, and Dien is not fazed by this process being transparent. It reminds Adelaide of the way her twin Axel used to examine things, back in the days when Axel’s speech was almost entirely composed of questions, tumbling over one another in his eagerness to ask all that he wanted to know.

  Something has shifted in her memories of him. The poison has drained away; it is easier, now, to remember Axel at his best, and not in the absent, befuddled state which defined the last years of his life. Axel, she suspects, would have appreciated the ludicrousness of her current situation, and he would not have hesitated to have pointed it out to her captors. But Axel didn’t always use his head, either.

  She remembers Mikaela’s face. She can’t trust Dien.

  ‘This is the speech.’

  Dien pushes a piece of paper under Adelaide’s nose. This is the latest iteration of their plan, the plan Adelaide is not to know, but can guess at.

  Adelaide puts a finger on the paper and slides it back across the table. Dien looks at it for a moment, expressionless, then stands, picks up the paper, walks around the table and puts it in front of Adelaide.

  ‘This is the speech,’ she says again.

  ‘There is no point in me doing this. Nothing I can say—’

  ‘I’d slam your stupid head into the table,’ says Dien, ‘but there’s no point in beating you up. It won’t have any impact if you look like the victim here. But if you don’t help us, so help me I will damage your precious friends. That is a promise.’

  Mikaela’s screams. Ole’s frightened, bewildered expression. Her gaze drops to the paper in front of her and against her volition, she begins to scan through the text. After a few lines she frowns and picks up the paper.

  ‘Who wrote this?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter who wrote it, you’re going to read it, and you’re going to read it like you fucking believe it.’

  ‘It matters because it’s shit. No one says things like this.’

  Dien places both hands on the table, her head thrust forwards, the muscles in her neck taut with tension. Under her headscarf Adelaide can see strands of dark brown hair. She has never seen Dien’s hair before. Her own is starting to grow out, but they won’t allow her to dye it again.

  A vein pulses in Dien’s forehead as she clenches her jaw.

  ‘Then write a better one, Rechnov,’ she says at last.

  She places a blank sheet of paper and a pencil in front of Adelaide, and leaves the apartment. Adelaide hears the key turn in the lock behind her.

  Sounds of habitation from the adjacent apartments blur and fade away as she stares at the blank page. The room is still.

  Once again she reads through the speech that Dien has provided. She doesn’t know if it was Dien who wrote it, but it is bad. Incoherent and inconsistent. Adelaide has food in her stomach and the taste of coral tea in her mouth, and it’s good coral tea. For the first time in days her head is clear; she should be able to write what they want in her sleep.

  What do they want?

  And who is they? Who is she meant to be speaking for?

  She had thought she understood the west. Its character is imprinted on her mind in a series of inexorable impressions: her journey to the unremembered quarters, bound and blindfolded in the well of a boat, crossing from tower to tower on a fraying rope metres above sea level, a skad beating the face of a westerner into pulp, a girl who showed her kindness falling to her death from a collapsing bridge.

  But even these few weeks since have revealed to her a more complex, segmented society than she, and maybe even Vikram, would have liked to acknowledge. What can she possibly say that will convince a crowd of westerners?

  After an hour, Dien returns. She looks at the blank paper. At Adelaide.

  ‘Time’s ticking,’ she says. Her mouth curls in a grimace that might be a twisted smile, Adelaide isn’t sure. She looks at Dien, thinking how the old Adelaide would have judged this woman. The slight irregularity of her features. The cheap cosmetics. She would never have seen what lies beneath that exterior, the courage or the cruelty; it would have been beneath her to offer Dien a second glance.

  She picks up the pen, and writes a line.

  ‘That’s right,’ says Dien.

  The door slams again.

  Adelaide stares at the words on the page.

  I used to live over there.

  I used to live over there, with those people.

  There was a man I knew, a westerner. His name was Vikram.

  Dien reads through the speech in silence. When she comes to the end she sits back in her chair and folds her arms, eyes narrowed in the familiar, shrewd expression. Assessing. Reassessing.

  ‘It almost reads like you mean it.’

  Adelaide says nothing.

  ‘Good. This is what we need. The meet’s tomorrow evening. It’ll be busy. You’d better practise.’

  ‘I want to see Mikaela and Ole.’

  ‘The meet,’ says Dien. ‘And then we’ll see.’

  She is clearly restless, but Adelaide senses her mood is closer to anticipation than irritation. She takes her chance.

  ‘What did you do, before you did this?’

  ‘And what do you call this?’

  ‘Revolution.’ Adelaide looks at her. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Good a word as any, I suppose.’

  ‘So, before the revolution, what did you do?’ Seeing the refusal in Dien’s face, she adds, ‘I’m just curious.’

  Dien takes her time answering, evidently considering the wisdom of engaging in more intimate conversation with a Rechnov, even one undisputedly under her control.

  ‘I was a nurse. Still am, when they’re desperate.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Does that surprise you? Course it does. I threatened to torture your friends. That’s not the actions of a nurse, you might think. But I’ll tell you something, Rechnov. Nursing teaches you a lot. Like suffering, it teaches you about that. It teaches you about pain, and the thresholds of pain, and when to alleviate it, and when to apply it, and how people behave when they feel it. When you’re a nurse you treat whoever comes your way and you don’t question what they did to get themselves in that state and whether they deserve to live or die. You just… plug the holes.’

  For a moment Adelaide sees, very vividly, a shard of glass stuck in a man’s stomach.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ll have been to the western hospital,’ says Dien. ‘It’s not a pleasant place, that’s for sure. It’s not a fair place, either. And you might be the most hard-arsed soul in the world, but until you’ve held a woman’s head with half her face shredded while she drowns in her own blood screaming for her mother and the ghosts, you haven’t seen shit.’

  ‘Was that what persuaded you? To join the resistance?’

  ‘A lot of things persuaded me,’ says Dien evenly.

  ‘Do you hate me, Dien?’

  Dien looks to the window-wall, distracted by a passing gull. The bird beats its way upwa
rds, lofting out of view, leaving behind the grey assault of the city. ‘I haven’t made up my mind.’

  From the moment the speech is agreed, the apartment is abuzz with adrenaline as Dien’s crew prepare for the meet. Adelaide, always at the edge of someone’s eye, now feels almost invisible as they bustle about, tense and distracted. Adelaide herself presents a fresh problem to be solved: Dien is concerned that someone might stab her on the spot.

  ‘Before she has a chance to open her bloody mouth.’

  ‘Is that likely?’ Adelaide asks. She tries for a joking tone but no one will meet her eye. Dien takes her aside.

  ‘People are angry,’ she says roughly. ‘They want to be persuaded. We’ve had western fighters before but they’re all dead, every one of them is dead. We need someone who is immune to the system, and you, Rechnov – you have immunity.’

  When the evening finally arrives it feels no more real or unreal than any of the strange events that have preceded it. They drive to the place in Dien’s boat. She listens to the voice of the sea, trying to make out a message in its whisperings, wondering if fate has an eye to her today. The meet is in a drinking house. Before they go in, Dien tells her that this was where Vikram and his friends Nils and Drake used to meet. Adelaide has no way of knowing whether it is true, or another piece of emotional ammunition to make her perform, but when they go inside she sees their photographs on the wall, pinned up with others, a collage of faces, southerners and Boreal, young and old. Among them is a man whose face is familiar from the newsfeeds, a man she watched drown: Eirik 9968. Beneath the collage is a tin of salt, the metal scratched and tarnished. Dien and the others go to the wall and perform the salt ritual, and Adelaide does the same, the grains falling somewhere behind her, over her shoulder – she can’t hear them land above the general rowdiness of the place.

  It is a shock to see Vikram’s face. In the photograph he looks quietly confident, in a way she struggles to remember now but knows must have been true. The image must have been taken during his time in the City.

  The place has a raw, unfinished quality with the upturned kegs and crates set out as seats, the naked bulbs swinging overhead. There are a lot of people here. Dien’s people are standing very close to her, all of them carrying concealed knives or handguns, and Dien’s flippant remarks about someone stabbing her take on an uncomfortable layer of truth and she realizes she is deeply, fiercely scared in a way she hasn’t felt for weeks.