What Lot's Wife Saw

by Ioanna Bourazopoulou

  Phileas Book found it impossible to accept that in today’s modern democratic society people could be ruled by a blatantly despotic regime, flouting the international Bill of Rights. Township or business, the Seventy-Five were breaking the law.

  The man inhaled the minty aroma that curled out of the teapot.

  “Evidently, Mr Book, you’ve only a vague, even naïve, notion of what democracy is. I don’t really blame you because you’ve never had to solve political problems, nor had to govern heterogeneous masses who don’t know what they seek or how far they can reach. If you had, you would know that the first thing a democracy does when security is threatened is abolish personal rights and restrict freedom. And from where does the threat arise? From the local conditions, naturally. These conditions dictate the system of government, Mr Book, and they oblige the establishment to adopt certain policies; the reverse would be the imposition of arbitrary rule. We cannot ignore the geophysical realities of the Colony, the isolation renders it virtually uncontrollable. Our employees are like the sailors of a vessel that’s sailing mid-ocean with no communication system, completely isolated from shore. Now, in these conditions, the captain is God and there would be chaos if he weren’t.”

  Book settled back into the couch and remained silent with his cup in his hand. Perhaps if he didn’t speak the man would stop continuously correcting him. The man interpreted Book’s quiescence as surrender and cheerfully changed the subject.

  “Why do you use letters in your crosswords, Mr Book? Why not articles, essays or excerpts from literary works, for example?”

  Book felt his patience wearing thin. “Are you so interested in my work? Can you kindly explain to me why you’ve dragged me here?”

  Visibly annoyed, the man tapped his finger rhythmically on the armrest.

  “Mr Book, I ask the questions, and you answer them. Those are the rules. Tucked away in your wallet is a cheque whose value, if I’m not mistaken, considerably exceeds ten years’ wages from The Times. These wages, I’m told, will discontinue in the near future. I do wonder where a recently laid-off designer of Epistlewords would seek his next employment? Can he allow himself the luxury of raising objections to the terms I offer?” He drew out his next sip of tea to afford Book time to appreciate the predicament he faced and then favoured him with a hearty beam. “You are, most surely, free to return the cheque and leave if you don’t wish to cooperate with us. We always want people to cooperate of their own free will.”

  Book studied his shadow, which stayed absolutely immobile, taking its cue from his own inaction. Whenever the Consortium puts you under siege to get something it wants, all the alternative routes open to you are so illusory that if you choose one of them you could drown in your own saliva. He preferred to leave the demand for his surrender unanswered, adopting a stance an ostrich would be proud of, and managed to mutter hoarsely, “You haven’t told me your name or your title, sir. I don’t know how to properly address you.”

  The man laughed at this evasion.

  “Oh, please admit that my name is of total indifference to you, and as for my position within the company, it would take too many hours to explain. I’ll tell you, however, what you’d really like to know. Yes, Mr Book, I can confirm that you’re talking to the top, the top decision-making management.”

  Book looked warily around him, trying to find where the top management was hiding since he doubted whether the man would actually describe himself that way. He scrutinised the ceiling for hidden cameras and probed the arms of the couch for the microphones that transmit their conversation to those really in charge. The unremitting light in the lounge, apart from fatiguing his eyes, had nailed his shadow onto the deep pile of the carpet. Despite himself, he mentally measured it and felt a familiar shame that after so many years he remained a meagre one metre forty-eight.

  Paradoxically, from that abysmal night in Aunt Mildred’s lounge when the television had informed him that he’d just been severed from his past and that, half-formed, he’d been thrust into the limbo of the present, his body had obeyed and had stopped growing. His height had been frozen like a frame from a horror movie. In vain he had stood against the wall, drawing lines above his head and appealing to the mercy of Gustave’s measuring stick. One metre forty-eight. He’d never grow, time’s passage would envelop him without nurturing his exterior and would deliver him, a wrinkled teenager, into old age.

  During the gruelling months that followed the catastrophe, his only consolation had been that his seven most beloved people, the seven satellites of his bygone life to whom he owed his very existence and who encircled him in their orbits, defining him by their affection, had each managed to write him a letter. They’d all found time to disclose their feelings for him on paper, camouflaged behind innocent tales, teasing, jokes and childish illustrations, they’d all applied their saliva to seal the envelope which had been posted in time. He shuddered at the thought these letters could have been intercepted by the disaster since then he would have had nothing concrete of theirs to confirm that they’d actually existed and weren’t mere figments of his imagination. There would have been nothing to prove that he hadn’t suddenly appeared that gloomy afternoon like some fungus in Aunt Mildred’s lounge, but had real roots. There had been a time when there’d been solid land where maps now showed sea; a time when he’d had parents who considered him their child; when there’d been sisters called Françoise, Manon and Fabienne; when there’d been a blood brother called Gustave who’d known all his secrets; when there’d been an unrealised dream called Mélanie. In their midst had been Phileas Book, and since all these people had existed, it could only be that he existed as well.

  Aunt Mildred died instantly in the lounge, as if her soul had been waiting to be liberated by this calamity. Book passed his sixteenth birthday as a guest of Dublin’s Social Services Shelter, with one ear glued, in agony, to the radio. Rescuers searched the flooded waters back and forth, fishing in hope, but reeling in ninety-nine deaths for every life. One felt that the mud would swallow the whole continent. The stench of mould and the rancid smell of decomposition reached as far as Ireland, while each week that passed diminished the chances of his ever finding one of his own. The radio incessantly announced lists of recovered bodies deposited by the tsunami in the most unlikely corners of the planet, and he kept thanking his lucky stars that his loved ones hadn’t been among them. He gritted his teeth, willing the passage of each second to slow so that time would stretch and afford those swept to sea a better chance. He listened to reports about those recovered, half-dead, injured, babbling insanely or dumb through amnesia, but with a life spark that still glowed. Alive, at least! His only hope was that he’d find them, nurse them back to health, remind them of their names and identities, and provide them with parts of his own body to replace what was missing in theirs. He would lie down beside them as they regained their strength and then, he was sure, his shadow would grow.

  At night he’d pull the covers over his head to shut out his present reality – the communal baths, the dreary rooms, the uprooted youths lying on the beds next to his, biting their lips in an effort to stifle their cries – and he’d try to return to his previous life. He ran his fingers over the seven letters and felt the sensations of kisses on his cheek, of hands ruffling his hair and of shy glances of budding love, all of which held the gloom of the oppressive nights at bay. He’d read these letters ten times a day and had learnt them by heart, but each time he re-read them he’d discover some new detail that had escaped his notice before. A misplaced comma that inexplicably split a sentence (Manon had been absent-minded), an accent disassociated from the letter it belonged to (the table had moved; Fabienne’s bicycle must have nudged it), the vague smear in the margin (they’d been peeling figs that Madame Thomas had brought round, so it must’ve been a Saturday), the faint fingerprint (Papa must have been pruning the rosebush). Momentary alterations in the handwriting (the door must have opened and caused a draught), poor choice of adjectives (t
he television must have been blaring), mechanical repetitions (food was nearly ready). He could see the afternoon sun passing through the large embroidery of the kitchen curtains casting a pattern on the letter because the words were written in lines of progressive slant as the shadow marched across the paper. He realised that Françoise’s schoolbag had been heavy enough to numb her fingers and prevent them from holding the pen properly. He could feel the morning breeze deliciously raise the hairs on their arms, he could see the sun’s rays refract in the glass mirror, he could hear the dripping tap in the kitchen.

  The letters, unbeknownst to their authors, had absorbed their entire surroundings, down to the last detail. These little memory time-vaults would serve to treat the seven amnesiacs when he finally found them but could find no recognition in their vacant eyes. He’d give them their own letters to read and that would release their imprisoned consciousness, their eyes would focus, their disabilities would heal and they would cry, “Phileas, where have you been all this time? We never doubted for an instant that you’d save us. Hey, is that enormous shadow yours?”

  Months passed and Phileas Book clung trembling to the radio, listening to the latest harvest of corpses, of cripples and of the insane. The names of Adam and Geneviève Book, Françoise, Manon and Fabienne Book, Gustave Coty and Mélanie Bouatier were not to be found amongst the survivors or the deceased. They remained listed as “Missing”. He could feel time maliciously slipping away from him, leaving him paralysed, inactive and useless at Europe’s edge. He had to think of some solution, some way to become active instead of passive, but where should he search? Since they hadn’t yet shown up it could only mean that they were hospitalised amnesiacs, probably in some refugee camp, and that they weren’t able to remember their own names. He ruled out any possibility of one of them having passed away since he’d have felt it immediately – he couldn’t have remained alive had they not survived.

  By spring his anxiety had reached such a pitch that he was having trouble breathing. Six months without any news. All the uprooted youths who shared his ward had been blessed by some word from a loved one, but not he. At dinner he’d stare blankly and try to conjure a glimpse of hope from the void, trying to tease the perfect vacuum to offer up a tangible idea of action. Suddenly, out of the blue, the idea of The Times took root in his mind. He’d heard that the paper would be distributed, free of charge, to the refugee camps, in the spirit of aid that many of the companies of the North had initiated for the victims. He thought that if the paper printed the seven letters, they might act as elixirs and awaken the seven amnesiacs who might read them in the camps and then try to contact him. So for weeks he carefully hoarded the meagre allowance provided by the Social Services and stashed it patiently in a sock until he reckoned he’d enough to escape from Ireland. He took a bus, then a ship and finally a train that delivered him to The Times headquarters in London with the seven letters carefully wrapped in cellophane.

  Unfortunately, neither his impassioned arguments nor the copious tears that rolled down his cheeks sufficed to convince the genial employees. They ruffled his hair and explained that it’d be impossible for the paper to allocate the space in its pages to accommodate his dream. They received thousands of heart-rending appeals to locate missing persons, and the paper dedicated enough space as it was to print the lists of names, but it’d be inconceivable and unfair to others to print the letters themselves. They promised to include the seven names in the next edition in the Missing Person’s Column. Book knew that this was futile, it had produced no response to date, it wasn’t the solution. On the other hand, his heart had leapt when he’d heard that masses of letters arrived daily with relevant appeals. Perhaps one of these contained his mother’s panic, his father’s anxiety or the wail of little Fabienne pleading for him to find her. The employees didn’t know what to do with him, but when they saw that he was penniless, they took pity and proposed that he could distribute the post to the various desks for a small wage. He was given the right to open the letters before distribution on the condition that no harm would come to them. His eyes had lit up and, armed with the letter opener that they’d issued him with, he’d sped off to the mail office.

  He spent his days and nights next to the mailbags, which came in lorry-loads and were dumped in the basement. He read through all the letters because the amnesiacs might have enlisted the help of someone else to compose the letter, or some writer might’ve mentioned by chance that convalescing in the bed next to theirs was a youth with hair like seaweed, a slight stammer, and blind as a bat without his glasses, and Book would’ve immediately identified Gustave.

  He soon realised that the process was too time-consuming because the piles in the basement were replenished faster than he could read them. He would lie, exhausted, among the bags at night, thinking that he wasn’t going about it in the right way. He had to focus on the seven and not to waste time reading all of Europe’s mail. But every time he opened a letter he couldn’t resist the temptation to read it, even if it was obvious from the postmark, name, language or handwriting that it couldn’t have come from those he sought. There was always a nagging thought that the shock might have radically altered their personalities so that the letters they produced would be practically unrecognisable, even differing in handwriting, language or signature. They might’ve ended up in the depths of half-submerged Asia or Africa, or in faraway Japan, Easter Island or Alaska. The only way that he could discern the soft giggle of Fabienne between the lines written by some unknown ten-year-old girl was to sniff out that particular aroma of his sister which set her apart from all other girls her age. There’s always something that’s never lost, no matter how drastically they’d changed, or how much they’d forgotten, or had made a huge conscious effort to forget or even been forced to forget, and this something he had to discover if he was to have any hope of success.

  He would then switch on his torch and pore over the seven dog-eared letters once more in order to catch the underlying distinctive rhythm, the soundhues – that elusive combination of sounds and colours which, like hidden Moorish treasure, would be so firmly buried away in the personalities of the castaways that no shock and no amnesia could reach and change it. As he analysed these signals that escaped from the writing, he realised that the seven letters were somehow connected in a mysterious way, as if each one was complementary to the others. He had the impression that he was listening to seven instruments playing different chords but which all together produced a harmonious musical result. Deep down they’d been playing the same melody even though their solos were oddly dissimilar, and that underlying, connective melody was of their love for him – or perhaps his love for them?

  He became furious that he hadn’t thought of this synaesthetic approach earlier and had wasted his time reading through all the letters as single entities, unconnected one to another. He realised that his castaways could only be revealed to him through this rich synthesis. No matter in which corner of the globe they’d found themselves, no matter what name, language or handwriting they employed, no matter how misleading the subject of the letter might be, they would reveal themselves as soon as he could correlate one letter with the corresponding six others.

  He devised the musical model in his mind and drew it on a piece of paper – it looked like a meandros, the ancient Greek key pattern, which incidentally bore a remarkable resemblance to the enormous, helical wave that’d swept over the South of France. He assigned a proper place for each of the worn letters within the meandros, judging them by their respective underlying melodies, and the pattern became an instruction sheet on how to combine the melodies to produce the harmonious symphony. He plunged back into his search with renewed hope.

  By the end of the very first day, he’d discovered seven letters that fitted perfectly into a meandros. Although they’d originated in different countries and their subject matter and styles were wholly unalike, their underlying, nearly inaudible music clearly indicated their hidden connection.

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bsp; He ran as fast as his legs could carry him to the Correspondence Department Manager and asked him to check his amazing discovery. He laughed out loud, adding that the meandros reminded him of Sally’s backside and called some desk chiefs to see the drawing, hoping that Sally, who was busy working on an article in the next office, couldn’t hear. Sally, however, had not only heard but had left her office to join all the others from their floor. Two hours later, many of the staff from other floors had gathered around the meandros and were following with interest Book’s excited babbling. He was explaining how the complementary soundhues, the rhythmic refrain of the orchestra, the seven chords which weaved melodiously through the spirals of the meandros to join in a crescendo at the end, produced only one cry: “We’re coming for you!” That cry stood out as a diagonal of the meandros while the three horizontal letters created the tempo and the three vertical ones added the variations. The six horizontal and vertical letters gave the impression that they served to forge the diagonal, seventh epistle, which, in turn, was silent without them. Sally smacked her palm on the table and proclaimed, “This meandros has a future.” She collected the sheet with the drawing on it and barged into the Chief Editor’s office. “Bob, are you in the mood to listen to a fresh idea for a Sunday Times article?”