What Lot's Wife Saw

by Ioanna Bourazopoulou

  I wrapped up the service as quickly as I could. The earthworms beside me, having removed their helmets in respect for my own exposed head rather than in deference to the deceased, shared my dread of drops from the ceiling that could sear into our scalps at any given moment. So don’t imagine anything fancy, just a couple of hurried lines since the galleries are guarded and we might be discovered. The assembled miners crossed themselves, murmured bon voyage to their liberated mate, and donned their helmets once more. Then they deployed in the reverse of the relay chain that had brought me here and thus delivered me back to the statue.

  The last link in the chain asked me slyly if I’d like to be delivered to the cyclist’s quarter as I could take advantage of the veil of fog that would hide me from Hesperides’ prying eyes. I assented. Rumours abound that I often visit the cyclist’s quarter, but I don’t care. As I deserve this Colony, so this Colony deserves me as High Priest.

  The miner led me to the edge of the neighbouring quarter and when I made out the glimmering of the cyclist’s small fires, my heart lifted. My escort disappeared into the gloom without either thanking me for the ceremony or for accepting the danger I was exposed to each time I conducted the service, but his gesture to bring me this far was a form of gratitude. The salt miners are a feral bunch. Their silences are full of poison, fury smolders in their eyes, but they feel the fear and that is why Captain Drake is confident when he goes armed amongst them.

  Cyclists, on the other hand, are a different kettle of fish. The glow of their fires drew me like a magnet. The cyclists never gather in their homes or meet in bars or cafés. They squat on the ground in groups of six, around their fish-oil fires, drinking tepid beer and dipping slices of cornbread in deep pots full of cheese melting in the fire. They rub their aching calves and occasionally they sigh or quietly laugh. They make room for me to join them but then I am ignored. It’s a pity that they don’t attend any services, I would dearly like to include them among my flock.

  These people do everything in formations of six, starting with the powering of the berlingas, the wicker carriages that are the only method of transportation in the Colony. The six cyclists of each berlinga are bound together for life: the same pedal stroke, the same pumping of thighs and the same breath. Even when they are off duty they hang about in that same group. If something happened to break them up they’d become incapacitated, crippled.

  They always keep their wide-brimmed hats shoved hard against the bridge of their nose. You can’t see eyes, just trim and taut bellies rising and falling with each breath, in perfect synchronisation, and muscular legs, calves of solid steel from pedalling. I’m sure they could crush stones in the bend of their knees.

  I sat at the edge of the fire. Someone placed a half-full glass of tepid beer in my hand. I wrapped myself tighter in Ali’s cape and gratefully sipped the spent foam. Isolated, but feeling far more at home than anywhere else, I struggled to follow the conversation, to which I never contribute. They were discussing the regulations which cover traffic on the streets of the Colony for both passenger and cargo carriages. The cargo berlingas are like covered wagons and they transport the sacks of salt from the works to the port, whereas the passenger ones are open twenty-seaters to carry the colonists. The regulations would have it that cargo berlingas always have priority, even empty ones – salt being more precious than humans. Now, full passenger berlingas are very heavy so tremendous pressure against the pedals is needed to stop them and a prodigious effort is expended to accelerate again. An illogical regulation, concluded the cyclists, who only distinguish between loads of salt and loads of humans by which weighs their berlingas down more. Then they fell silent since they could communicate superbly in silence, as they share the same thoughts.

  Sitting next to them, I feel closer to God than I do when conducting services in the Hesperides Metropolis, a parody of a solemn service at the best of times, scribbled notes, surreptitious glances and whispers. I swear that if instead of the psalms I served up La Traviata, no one would notice. In the peaceful and comradely silence of the cyclists, I can hear angels. They’ve managed to become interconnected, to achieve charitable detachment and not to rise to provocation. This is why they drive Captain Drake crazy and he fears them more than he does the Mamelukes, although you’ll never catch a cyclist hurting a fly.

  There was no more melted cheese in our pot. Someone, somehow, came from the neighbouring fire to fill ours up again, which must have drained all of theirs. That fire was manned by a cargo berlinga team and they wished to convey to our passenger team, even at a cost to their own aching calves, that they agreed that the regulation was ridiculous. I heard angels again.

  Then they began singing under their breaths. They sing as they pedal, quickly, in rounds, with syncopated intakes of breath and protracted murmurings at the end of each refrain. The smoke of the fire melded with the tendrils of fog and the figures beside me seemed reminiscent of the weathered images of saints portrayed in Byzantine icons. Their tender song reached out and softened my heart, it transported me to a place where pain is more tolerable, life less futile and God less deaf.

  For a moment I believed I was dreaming as I discerned an extraneous figure in the circle around the fire. A youth was sitting amongst the cyclists dressed strangely, in a red shirt and with a gold earring dangling from one ear. His long hair descended in rivulets around his amber face, forming tight curls which were dripping as if he had just come from the sea. His eyes were riveted on the fire, eyes black as coal, like two underground tunnels leading to the centre of the earth. As I gazed upon him, I was strangely gripped by an ache deep in my chest and a sigh escaped my lips. He invoked times gone by and seas that allowed you to sink, that accepted you, not like our sea that rejects you, as if it is spitting you out. I wanted to ask him how he had found himself amongst us, which of my dreams had incubated him, but I found myself incapable of moving, my lips wouldn’t obey me, as if the cyclist’s rhythmic singing had hypnotised me. I struggled to keep my eyes open but I must have surrendered to sleep’s cocooning power.

  I felt someone shaking me; my eyelids fluttered open and I made out the face of Ali, my servant. The hour had advanced, the fires had been extinguished, the atmosphere had cleared and dawn was breaking. I was all alone, lying in the street, covered in salt residues from the wind in the night.

  Ali had found me like the bloodhound he is. Ali never fails to find me no matter how profoundly I lose myself – he smells me out. He had had this uncanny ability to follow my trail from the time before the Overflow, from a previous life, when we were looking for skeletons in the jungle. Since coming to the Colony, I’d never before felt the memory of the jungle become so vivid. I believe it was the influence of the youth with the earring, how else could I explain it? He had awoken in me sensations that had been numbed to near extinction but I now smelled damp leaves and fertile soil, I heard a hornet’s loud buzz and the chattering of monkeys. I returned to lands forgotten as I felt and saw things that didn’t exist.

  When Ali leant his ageless dark face over mine, I imagined that he would say, “I didn’t allow the diggers to touch the bones, White Man. I guarded them with my life all night and I’m off to sleep now.” But instead he called me “Father” and told me that Bianca Bateau, Lady Regina’s chambermaid, had come to the villa looking for me. The Lady requested that I go immediately to the Palace for a very urgent matter. I wrapped myself in the cape and took Ali’s hand and allowed him to lead me to Hesperides. I trusted him to guide me through the dangerous quarters just as I had trusted him when he was guiding me through the dense jungle and the crocodile-infested rivers.

  With the first light of day, I was joined by Fear and Shame, my devoted masters who condescend to withdraw only when I lose myself in the fires of the cyclists, but they never forget me. They awaited me at the borders between the cyclists’ quarter and the dockers’ and, well fed though they were, immediately spread their jaws wide and bit me in the heart. I squeezed Ali’s hand and dr
ew some meagre comfort from it.

  The dockers’ quarter was large and disorderly and split into subsections. The longshoremen, the tow-boatmen, the sanitation workers and so on; each had their tight-knit section, all at odds with one another. The dockers are fun loving, sentimental, they drink to excess, they’re liars and they wear their integrity on their sleeves. They’re unique among colonists in their readiness to resign as soon as they’ve saved up enough credits to return to civilisation. Theirs is the only quarter whose population is constantly renewed. For the rest of us, especially us old hands, there’s no return, our homelands have vanished and we cannot abide the new geography, Europe without a South, Africa without a North, Asia without a West. It’s here that we’ll be buried, if we are not buried already; it’s here that we’ll waste away, as if we were not already insignificant; it’s here that we’ll cease breathing, if what we do can still be called breathing.

  Judging by the dimensions, the Consortium was miserly when building houses in these quarters. Two-storey homes with wooden floorboards, the upper floor assigned to the higher grades and the ground floor for the rest. The endless arguments of the dockers over the allocation of the floors reach Hesperides. A worker with wild eyes chose that particular moment to come out of the ground-floor entrance, carrying a bucketful of his morning’s defecation, which he flicked squarely onto the first-floor balcony. His upstairs counterpart swore at him, brandishing clenched fists, and aimed a gob of spit in his direction. I was the unlucky recipient of sprays of the excreta of both parties but that contaminated me less than their futile hatred.

  Cyclists shun such discrimination, they tear down the offending floor and join the two apartments. This isn’t allowed by the regulations since all buildings belong to the Consortium – even the air that we breathe belongs to them – but who can impose law and order on the cyclists? Captain Drake showers them with fines, he tosses about reprimands and threats but they fall on deaf ears. They pay their fines obediently, but you still can’t find a single floorboard in place. Oh, I do love the cyclists.

  By the time I’d reached the Palace, dawn had well and truly broken. I surrendered Ali’s cape and climbed the marble steps of the entranceway. My legs trembled as the strange emotions of the previous night still disturbed me. The memories still affected my body. I stepped as though probing each feature of a jungle path with trepidation in case it harboured a snake. My calf was gripped by the re-enactment of the pain of that old snakebite. I realised that I wasn’t at all well. I could feel my robe cling to me, restricting my movement. My ears registered the sharpening of the claws of carnivores, the beating of bat’s wings and the lament of elephants. I’m not sure how I managed to reach the top floor of the Palace, perhaps it was my jungle instinct which drove me to climb as high as possible so as to spot any dangers approaching.

  Lady Regina was waiting for me, visibly upset, with her hair uncombed. “It’s all over, Monty. I’ve had it, it’s back to the dogs for me.” I had no idea what she was talking about. “Don’t let them send me back, Monty. I’ll die, I tell you. I’ll die right there on the wharf. I’ll strangle myself with the ship’s chains. I am not going back alive, you have to help me.”

  That was exactly how the hyena’s eye shone in the jungle when focusing on a new-found carcass, and so I could plainly see what had escaped me before, that Lady Regina had the eyes of a hyena. She led me to the Governor’s bedroom, but not before she had whispered cryptically in my ear, “If I go down, all five of you go down with me, just so you know!”

  Governor Bera was lying on the bed, immobile. He was wearing his ceremonial uniform and had his arms crossed on his chest with his fingertips touching his shoulders. I was taken aback, both by his attire and by his posture. It was as if someone had arranged him for display. I asked Regina, but she swore she hadn’t touched him.

  I leant over his face. He seemed serene and the sides of his mouth had been warped into a smile. It flashed through my mind that that was exactly how a sabre-toothed tiger would have smiled three million years ago.

  5

  Letter of Nicodeme Le Rhône

  (page 1)

  Colonist’s File No.: 00452150

  Place of Birth: Marseilles, France

  Position: Private Secretary to the Governor

  Administrative Level: A1

  Adopted Name: Charles Siccouane

  Dead Sea, Friday, 4th September

  Your Excellencies the Seventy-Five,

  I humbly express my respects and hope that my letter will shed light on the dark and unexplained events which have occurred over these last fifteen days in the Colony and have led me to doubt even the existence of God. Due to the Colony’s geophysical peculiarities, this letter will reach you after a few weeks, but I hope that your representatives get here sooner to investigate the matter and deliver us from our torment.

  Please forgive me for being so forward as to address myself directly to Your Excellencies, when I know that you only communicate directly with the Governor, and certainly not with someone of my grade, but the unprecedented circumstances indicated that this was the only option. If this folder reaches its destination and, by that, I mean that the captain of your ship hands it over to you as we requested of him, you will find within it one key and six letters inclusive of this one. The authors of the other letters are: Lady Regina Bera, Judge Bernard Bateau, Priest Montague Montenegro, Captain of the Guards Andrew Drake and the Doctor Niccolo Fabrizio, all high-ranking executives of the Colony and trusted aides of the Governor.

  The aforementioned have gathered tonight in the Governor’s Palace and have agreed to record everything that has happened in the Colony from the 20th of August up to the present. We thought it best to write these reports in separate rooms so that we shall each be alone and undisturbed. This method was preferred to composing a common document to be signed by all, because there are delicate issues and some of us need to include matters protected by professional privilege.

  Thus, I cannot know what the others have included in their letters or in what order you’ll read them. In addition, I am not in a position to know how the others will choose to present the facts and I admit that I have grave reservations about the objectivity and honesty of most of them. The fact is, all six of us are responsible, equally to blame but equally innocent and equally terrified.

  On Thursday, 20th of August, the date of arrival of the Correspondence Ship, Judge Bateau and I, who are charged with the responsibility of delivering the Green Box and signing the certificate of authenticity, were obliged to be in the port from eight o’clock in the evening. The regulations covering the transportation and authentication are complex and exacting. In all the years that I have served as private secretary to the Governor, we have never once deviated from procedure, no error or omission was ever noted and the safety and integrity of the Box and its contents were never in doubt.

  Since early afternoon, an east wind was blowing that Thursday. The wind tower’s bells had alerted us that the fumes would be blowing in from the saltworks. I rushed out of the house as soon as I heard them, fearing that a thickening fog might prevent me from reaching the port on time. I took my position on the quay at seven-twenty, having been pursued by the fog that had nearly covered the houses. At eight the curfew for the cyclists had taken effect and by eight-thirty it extended to pedestrians as well.

  Judge Bateau appeared at a quarter to nine, having found his way by following the phosphorescent line etched into the pavement, connecting the Palace to the port. It’d been designed for the safe transportation of the Green Box on foggy nights. He’d been in a foul mood since, like a common labourer, he’d been forced to abandon his tavern to lug the Governor’s Box around, as if the Seventy-Five couldn’t have devised a more respectable method of communication with Bera than exchanging secret letters like lovers. When he’s drunk, Bateau forgets that such talk is punishable by dismissal and banishment from the Colony.

  “In the age of electronic technology we carry
boxes of wretched paper! Think about it, Siccouane, apply your rodent’s brain to the facts and add a dash of deviousness. You will conclude that the Seventy-Five purposely keep the Colony mired in antiquity: no electricity, no telephones, no decent fuel, because how else could they have imposed such an autocratic form of administration, such an exorbitant price for the salt and all the petty charades we have to perform! This air is pure poison. Twenty years I’ve been here and never have I had the pleasure of a single flower in my garden, or cat on my armchair, or bird on my windowsill or even a spider on my wall. Nothing survives. When the fog finally lifts it will reveal our corpses.”

  I had to be continuously on my guard since Bateau is wily and tries to induce you into reactionary conversations so that you commit yourself and then you’re his for the taking, signed, sealed and delivered. Anyway, the salt isn’t a mortal danger to humans because a particular component of the violet salt is compatible with our DNA. This is why, in the civilised world, it’s called “human salt” which, as Montenegro has confided to me, is totally appropriate because the rim and maw of the crater take the lives of miners.

  I’d drawn away from the intoxicated Bateau and had told him to stop plaguing me with his nonsense. If he had any questions about the effects of the fumes, then he should consult the relevant pamphlets that Dr Fabrizio handed out at the Infirmary.