The Leto Bundle

by Marina Warner

  Kim still lived with his parents; he meant to move out, but housing closer in was expensive on his salary, and the area was much safer than the inner city for his computer equipment, which was his most valuable, indeed almost his only prized possession, HSWU’s matrix and engine.

  Araminta McQuy, born St Clair and brought up as a girl in one imperial possession after another (her father was a railway engineer), adopted Kim from Tirzah, at the height of the Tirzahner Orphan Rescue campaign. Minta and Gerald McQuy were in their late forties, aged parents by the standards of the Sixties. It was the local priest who’d put them on to the agency that organised his adoption, ‘through their hidden networks’, his mother had said. ‘They run escape corridors from places that go up in flames.’

  He’d heard the story many times since the year he celebrated his thirteenth birthday (in retrospect, he realised that he was probably older than that, maybe even three years older), when she first sat him down to answer his questions, her eyes unblinking to prevent tears spilling from them. She told him how, with his father, she had travelled to Tirzah immediately after the war came to an end, and waited and waited until he’d been found and brought to them.

  The whole idea began one summer afternoon, during the four-year-long siege of Tirzah, when Gerald McQuy was feeding the birds with the stale crusts Minta had cut off his breakfast toast. ‘Your father knows how important it is for birds to learn the whereabouts of their food source long before winter comes,’ Minta told Kim. ‘I was watching the six o’clock news, not paying much attention, though. Then it started showing pictures of the siege and of a column walking down the road. There were hundreds of refugees with handcarts and barrows and pushchairs and pathetic bundles of things. It was the first of the civil wars far away that we could see happening in front of our eyes inside our own houses. There’d been newsreels about Suez and Cyprus at the flicks on Saturday mornings, and the Troubles were beginning, but all those wars were too early for the telly. And at first news cameras didn’t seem to follow the army and the carnage, not in the same way as the Coronation. Then they started sending reporters to the fighting. I was on our government’s side. I really believed we had to do something – it was our duty to go in and try and stop the Tirzahners tearing themselves apart. White man’s burden and all that. I was brought up to believe in our responsibilities. So watching those people trudging out of the burning city, something happened to me. I felt this cold hand grip me and something happened in the pit of my stomach. It was as if I’d come down with one of those sudden fevers of my childhood, it was that strong. I called out to your father – he was still by the back door pottering about. I tried to say something sensible, but I couldn’t find the words, because I was trying not to start crying.

  ‘I was hoping that the war would all calm down, now that the city had been taken by our side, that there’d be no more bloodshed and everybody could start rebuilding their lives.

  ‘You see, we had a soft spot for that country, because we’d been on a very happy holiday by the seaside there – before the conflict. Or rather, before the bandits came down out of the mountains, where they’d been feuding for . . . centuries.’

  His mother’s voice had faded then, and Kim sitting up solemn and quiet, with his knees together, felt the tension of unspoken confessions, and didn’t want to know any more; he wanted to go to his room and paint the cyclopean orc and his vulture steed that he’d bought with his birthday money. His father was sitting beside Minta on the sofa, not in his usual armchair. It was clear they had decided to tell him something together, something he was afraid he wouldn’t want to know.

  She controlled herself, and went on, ‘When your father came in from the garden, I just said, “I so wish we could do something, be of some use. It does make one feel so utterly futile.” And you, you’, – she leant out and patted Gerald’s knee – ‘you understood.’

  ‘My dear,’ he said.

  ‘There was a man on the news saying that tyrants who launch wars always hark back to imaginary histories of wrong and injustice in order to justify their violence. But when it comes down to it, it’s not history, it’s men of violence, here, now, getting away with murder. Why should they get away with murder?, I wanted to shout. Then we saw photographs of all these children who’d lost their fathers, brothers – and their mothers. They were being rounded up in refugee camps – and I’d always wanted to have a . . .’

  Minta clutched Gerald’s hand and then put her arms around Kim; he burrowed deep into the blue lambswool of her cardigan for it felt as if a crevasse had gaped and dropped him out of the present time into another, where the ordinary laws were broken at random, and inconsistently. He was frightened, but also exhilarated: so much was explained by this faltering, stilted confession of his mother and father, so much he had intimated before but not understood.

  Stephanie, his best friend at school when he was seven, who showed him French knitting at break and did cat’s cradles with him in the corner of the playground, said that his mother looked old and yellow and they didn’t sort of match whereas she and her mum did; they were peas in a pod, especially when she was allowed to use her lipstick and eye shadow. But he countered with a confidence for her ears only: his parents really weren’t his parents. Secretly, he knew he was a deposed prince of a distant, sunbaked country very far away, but he’d been robbed of his gold and elephant tusk throne and he was now wandering in disguise – though his subjects still recognised him with covert signs in the street when he passed. He’d return in triumph one day. He’d be recognised. He’d be known.

  Stephanie liked this story; she lay down on a school bench and closed her eyes tight and whispered the words, ‘elephant tusk throne’, slowly again and again, and then asked Kim to describe his lost kingdom to her. Animals kept coming into the picture, from various alphabet books he’d been given, though he wasn’t sure that the creatures in his mind’s eye belonged to the historical past where he’d once lived. ‘I want to go there, I want to go there,’ cried Stephanie, squeezing her eyes tight shut, like Kim, so that they could watch the colours change in bands and stars in front of their lids.

  Minta used to take him to lessons to prepare for his first Communion, but his father never went with them to Mass. She told him, as one of the fragments of information that she relinquished, ‘We promised to bring you up in the faith because otherwise they wouldn’t have found you for us – it was a bit underhand of us, I suppose, as we didn’t really believe, either of us. But there you are, now, and I couldn’t imagine what my life would mean without you.’

  ‘You must believe, you must,’ cried Kim as a child, ‘Otherwise you’ll go to hell for ever.’

  Minta McQuy laughed. ‘I don’t think so, pet. If God exists and he’s a god of love – which is what they say – he wouldn’t let the devil build a terrible place like hell in the first place.’ Then she went quiet and took him in her arms and stroked his hair, ‘You see, it would give the devil too much power, when he has already so much to do here and is so busy and so successful at what he does here.’

  In dribs and drabs, they told him what they knew. It wasn’t much; in those days, adopted children weren’t encouraged in their attachments to their birth mother. Minta wept when she tried to tell Kim what his mother must have gone through, how she would only have given him up because it was the only way he could have survived. So when Kim read the story of Ishmael at his catechism class, he recognised his alter ego. The nun showed him a picture and in the mock-tearful, hushed tones she used to express her wonder at God’s ways, she described how, when Ishmael lay dying, dying in a wilderness where there was no water or food, his mother set him down and turned away and sat herself down a little way off, so that she should be spared the sight of his death. But God took pity on them and an angel came down in a golden glory, with a red drape casually tossed over his smooth and shining body, treading through the air as if solid steps were carved in it, and touched his mother on the shoulder and pointed – west. We
st.

  He too had come west, from Tirzah.

  There, said the angel, gesturing towards the setting sun, there there will be food and water, and a place to lay their heads, and shelter, and friendship. ‘And family,’ said Minta.

  Kim grew up ‘well-rounded’, his school reports said; he had never been trouble, almost to Minta’s regret, for she attributed his teenage containment to damage he had suffered before they adopted him, experiences that lay beyond her reach, beyond his conscious memory. The doctor to whom they’d taken him on their return assessed undernourishment since birth; it had stunted his growth, he said, and slowed his mental development. Otherwise, there was nothing wrong, just his time had been moving more slowly than other children’s. ‘Think of him as a preemie,’ said the doctor, ‘Their chances of survival are improving year by year – we really can look forward to an absolute fall in the rate of infant mortality – but it’s still tricky. They need more attention, and they do grow at a somewhat different pace.’

  He developed early, it seemed. A duvet of dark hair appeared on his upper lip and cheeks when he was twelve; others put it down to his general complexion, but Minta knew it meant he was catching up with his age, that, physically, he wasn’t any longer retarded by his infancy. Nor was he mentally: he was a diligent schoolboy, with sudden erratic bursts of indignation – the first signs of his later activity in student protests. But she often wished he’d have fun like other women’s sons, that she and Gerald would return to find traces of a clandestine party, or even a girl whispering in Kim’s room. She would even have welcomed a window flung open to get rid of the smell, as other parents lamented, noisily. But Gerald couldn’t see there was any problem in having a son who, unlike so many of their friends’ and neighbours’, hadn’t dropped out, didn’t play loud music, hadn’t pierced his person in any place, and did not take drugs.

  When his parents told him about his origins, that afternoon of his thirteenth year, it still fitted with the earlier dream he’d entertained of his secret, faraway kingdom. But the story also became real for him because it took place in a country nearby on the map, during a war that had frightened everyone in Albion on account of its savagery and its death toll, so near to home.

  When Minta and Gerald McQuy flew into Tirzah, they put up at the single newly functioning hotel on the burned out main street; they had the name of a nun in a team of Catholic relief workers and had brought with them £500 in small notes. This cache contravened all the currency restrictions imposed by the government of the day so they stowed it as deeply as they could, in two money belts which they kept on in bed. The sum also represented a large tranche of their combined savings, from Gerald’s job as a middle-ranking civil servant (he was employed in the planning department of Lanthorn borough council where he struggled against the new broom approach to urban renewal), and Minta’s wages as a part-time clerk in Outpatients at the pioneering local health centre that Gerald’s department had supervised, and for which it had been commended.

  The Hotel Metropole in Tirzah was connected to the water supply for a few hours daily, and intermittently to the smashed electrical grid. Its former elegance still glimmered through the wreckage: the sweep of the double staircase up to the mezzanine bar opposite the entrance was no longer reflected in floor-to-ceiling speckled mirrors, of course, and the potted palms that had lent the foyer the air of a turn of the century spa had been charred in the bombing, their porcelain jardinières cracked. But the general ambience breathed elegance, and the reception desk, holed here and there, remained a magnificent slab of rose marble studded with pearly fossils, while, upstairs (and with the lift out of service, this was indeed up the stairs) the bedrooms and bathrooms still spread out their ample proportions with the restrained swagger of pre-war luxury. Since the insurgency had abated and international agencies had brokered a relief programme, the glass had been replaced in the windows, and such furniture as could be salvaged rearranged. Temporary emergency measures brought food to the city in astronaut packages, including sachets of ice-cream powder.

  There were insects everywhere. ‘For they shall inherit the earth,’ muttered Gerald, moodily swatting at the flies in a dirty sunbeam. At home, he always removed spiders to the garden by trapping them in a glass and then slipping a piece of card under the rim. Here, there were spiders in every corner, under every protrusion, busily spinning, their old webs torn by the weight of the prey they’d already ensnared and cocooned and laid up for the winter.

  ‘They know how to provide for the duration,’ said Minta. ‘Their larders are stuffed!’

  They arrived in the hotel, and waited for news. The process was very tortuous, since it was not yet clear if the government allowed foreign adoptions; they took place, but nobody knew – or would divulge – the process by which the petitioning parents were screened, the orphan picked out, the documents produced. Capriciously, suddenly, a child would appear in the arms of Sister Thomas, the nun in charge of the charity’s programme, and the family would whisk her away to the airport, before somebody might decide differently and revoke the move.

  Sister Thomas, bright-eyed, plump and masterful, cheerily ordered them to pray and be patient. She would contact them as soon as there was something to report.

  The days dragged by. Gerald went sightseeing, but Minta had no appetite for adventure. He came back and reported: on the black market in fuel, foodstuffs and books, on the continued felling of every bush and tree in the old, once shaded avenues and gardens of the city, on the ingenuity of the local mechanics, tinkering with torn metal to patch broken vehicles and get burned kitchens in working order again, on a service of thanksgiving he wandered into, where everyone was weeping for the dead. He did not tell her that, as a foreigner with clear means, he was continually accosted, beseechingly, by well-spoken women with modest manners.

  One evening, as Minta was lying on the bed thinking she now understood what it might be like to be in prison, there was a knock on the door. She opened it, to a hotel maid. She began to say, carefully and slowly, that there was no need to tidy up or turn down the bed, and that she wasn’t going to go out. But the woman stepped in and took a photograph from the pocket of her apron.

  There was a paper with it.

  It said, in English, in carefully composed capitals:

  ‘I AM LITTLE BOY HELTHY STRONG PLEESE FIND FOR ME RICH FAMILY FOR FUTURE’

  Minta looked at the paper between her fingers and held on to it tightly as if it might disappear. Then she looked at the photograph – a black and white passport photo booth snapshot, torn so that only the hands of the person holding up the child to the camera were showing. The child was a blur, but maybe it was her sight that was failing from the pressure building up inside her skull.

  She stepped backwards into her hotel room. The woman followed her, or perhaps the woman’s closeness made her take the step back in the first place.

  ‘Yours?’ she asked, pointing to the hands in the photo.

  The woman shook her head, and patted Minta’s arm. Her hand was hard and dry. ‘You like? You want?’ she said.

  Minta cried out, ‘How?’

  The woman reached for Minta’s wrist and Minta flinched, thinking she was going to take the photograph from her, but no, she turned over Minta’s hand to look at her watch and she tapped the dial at the bottom to indicate six o’clock. Then she looked round the hotel room until she found what she was looking for: Minta’s handbag. She pointed to it, and said,

  ‘Dollar?’

  Minta hung her head and tried to shake it, but couldn’t make the gesture for fear that the paper and the photo in her hand would now evaporate. ‘Sterling.’ The maid did not seem to reject this and Minta, never imagining she could speak so plainly, asked her, quietly, ‘How much?’

  Then, very still, she studied the photograph. The child in the image wasn’t looking at the camera, but at something happening over the viewer’s shoulder, something that was creasing his round eyes into a small frown of attention. The m
outh was full, relaxed, but not smiling: this wasn’t a baby, as she had dreamed of, not a tiny infant who would arrive, unmarked by experiences she could never know. Her heart shrank: this was a child, not a babe-in-arms, and he was sitting up to face the camera. Then the blood swelled again, rushing to her temples and making her giddy: he could be hers. The boy’s head was slightly on one side, bright and alert as a wren, thought Minta, finally trustful enough to hop out of the bushes on to one of their feeders.

  The woman took back the message and the picture, replaced them in the pocket of her apron.

  ‘Three hundred fifty pound,’ she said, slowly. ‘Give me three hundred and fifty pound. When I come back with boy, here.’

  Later, as Kim grew up and his face changed, Minta could never remember what he had looked like when he was small, except for this characteristic bright crispness of movement, the readiness of his response as he put his head back or sideways to listen. But she always remembered the rush of hope she felt when she first pored over the photograph in the palm of her hand: the mystery of the small, blurred, round face that she’d been promised would return, enfleshed, to be a child of her very own.

  She sat on in the hotel room alone, waiting for six o’clock.

  Gerald came back. At first he shouted at her about street riffraff and medical guarantees and under-the-counter transactions and official paperwork.

  But when there was a knock at the door and the woman stood there with the child holding her hand, Gerald didn’t bluster any more. Minta fell back, with Gerald beside her, as if an apparition had materialised before their eyes and streams of celestial light were flowing down around it, while the woman laid the child on the bed, unwrapped him and showed him to them, whole and hale as he was, smooth and glossy as a horse chestnut newly slipped from its firm casing. Minta dared not look too closely; so near to the fulfilment of her deepest hope, she could not face finding some obstacle, some fatal impairment that would snatch the treasure from her grasp. Besides, she felt at that moment so emboldened by love that she would have taken a child who was blind, deaf and dumb. They both knew that some of the orphans were marked by their mothers so that they would be able to recognise them again, if they were ever reunited: a nick to an earlobe, a small tattoo on the shoulder. But this child was smooth and radiant, so this mother wasn’t the sort who’d inflict a hurt on one of her children, even in desperate straits. Minta felt a flow of love towards her. She would continue the work his first mother had begun, with all her heart.