The Leto Bundle

by Marina Warner

  Ella nodded. Phoebe said, for she often spoke now for her mother, ‘Mum knew that. That’s why we came to find you. Besides, you’re famous, so you stick out.’

  ‘Ah, ma petite,’ said Séverine Martin, touching Phoebe’s cheek. ‘It’s not common for me to become emotional, not at all. I’ve a crocodile hide – oh!’ she heard what she had said – ‘I’m sorry, I mean to do what I do you have to stop feeling things for this one, or that one. You cannot become attached. But this is something I’ve hoped for. For ten years I’ve thought so often of you and of that time. Ah, I’ve dreamed to see you two again.’

  Ella said, carefully, ‘So you remember? What you said then?’

  ‘How could I forget?’ The doctor paused. ‘I have the other piece, I’ve kept it in my case, with my instruments, all this time.’

  Phoebe said, ‘I didn’t remember what you looked like. I thought you were older.’ She smiled, and her small round face grew bright. ‘I’m well, I’m strong, but I . . .’

  ‘The pain still comes,’ said Ella, indicating her daughter’s arms, her back, her legs.

  The journalist could not contain his curiosity: two of the continent’s drifting horde of female beggars, mother and child in their headrags, with busted and grimy sneakers on their feet, with their dirty old bags of belongings, now greeted with rapture by a heroine of the war. ‘How do you guys know each other?’ he asked, with determined cheer.

  ‘Now you . . .’ Dr Martin hesitated.

  ‘Steve, Steve Catnach,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Yes, Steve. Steve, you are very lucky to be here to see this. It’s an extraordinary moment. This woman . . .’

  ‘Ella,’ said Ella.

  ‘Ella.’

  ‘And Phoebe,’ added Ella.

  ‘This Ella saved my life.’

  And so, over lunch at the local estaminet, the plan took shape. Steve Catnach would tell the story of the women’s vigil in the basement of the hospital, as he was told it (which was not the whole story, for both women tacitly agreed, without conferring, not to give the full details). He would find the photographer who had taken the picture of Phoebe after the bombing on the road that summer day more than a decade ago, he would track other witnesses of that notorious and tragic blunder, he would start a media campaign to bring the young girl to Enoch, where revolutionary skin regeneration techniques were developed far ahead of other countries’ medical expertise, and he would commit The Fanfare to organising an appeal and getting the necessary papers to admit Phoebe with her mother into the country.

  ‘It’ll give the paper a profile,’ he said. ‘Put some clear blue water between us and the competition, who can’t make up their minds about the refugee question – talking of quotas and pressure on schools and social services, danger to the democratic ecology, and all that – and then mouthing about human rights and our great history of tolerance and openness. We’ll show we’re the family paper that isn’t scared of coming off the fence. That we’re not the kind to pussyfoot about, we know what compassion means and instead of just blah-blah, we do something about it.’

  But it would take a little time. Meanwhile, Ella should hang on, managing the way she had done till now.

  Doctor Martin put in, ‘But you’ll advance her some money, no? So she can find somewhere to live, have a permanent address, for example? Then we shan’t lose her again?’

  Steve Catnach had no difficulty, of course, in finding the photographer who’d taken the picture, even though the massacre of Tirinčeva had sunk in public memory beneath the waves of other conflicts, other disasters, other images of children dying. But the picture was one of the ciphers of atrocity that set the standard for the later records: the picture agency had sent Phoebe’s phantom down the wires, beaming through the air her fragile flayed body, her mute howl. The photograph had gone quivering through airspace to be reassembled on the front page of newspapers here and there, and subsequently, everywhere, including annuals and encyclopaedias of the world’s best photographs, with increasingly apocalyptic titles.

  A veteran of many hotspots, the photographer told Steve Catnach: ‘I got there with the medics, just after it happened. I think you can feel the horror from my photograph, how hot the tarmac was and how raw her body was. I was proud to get that picture. It brought home so much of the true nature of war. It got to people. It changed things. It’s what a war photographer dreams of, that scale of opportunity.

  ‘The wire service photograph is in black and white so it doesn’t show her flesh like prime cut. I had two cameras, one with colour, but for commercial reasons in those days we always shot in black and white too. But I do remember the moment in bright Technicolor; she was haloed in a blaze and the sky was so blue, too, beyond the smoke. You could reproduce the pic in colour – it never has appeared because after the other one became so famous, the colour looks sort of false. And maybe strikes a wrong note of horror flick grue – maybe papers aren’t good at visual irony.

  ‘She wasn’t alone. I framed her to look like that, because it made a more striking picture, but there were others, too, children, old women, some younger ones. Her mother. No men. When I reached the spot, several victims were lying on the road, incinerated like logs in a grate in the early morning, still holding their shape, but disintegrating at the slightest poke into white, papery ash. I made several pictures of the whole massacre, but picture editors the world over went for her. Because she was a little girl. You could say she was lucky.

  ‘I hesitated about taking the photographs at all, it seemed – it was early days in my career – indecent in the presence of the dead. But I always think of Lee Miller, who didn’t flinch when she saw horror but made its picture for others to know its face too. All this has become banal, now, and getting photographs has been degraded by some of our colleagues to a slut’s trade, but I still think it needs courage to look at the heaped dead at Dachau and take a light reading, and I wanted to have the same kind of steel, and the same kind of panache as Lee, who went into the wreckage with the army after the defeat and took off her cleated boots and had her first hot bath for days in Hider’s bathroom, Prinzgentenplatz 17, Munich; she’s looking up with a question mark in the corner of her top lip. Do you know the photograph?’

  From then on, The Fanfare’s campaign rolled, and in the autumn of that year Ella and Phoebe flew in an aeroplane for the first time, carrying documents identifying them and granting them entry; they were accompanied by press. They landed at the airport north of Enoch, where they were met by more journalists, and were driven to an undisclosed address in a small new town nearby. The photographer was commissioned to make a portrait of Phoebe now, and was flown to Albion and sent to meet her again at the country hotel where The Fanfare had billeted her. He took a simple, straight image, in which her small, oval, defiant face was blurred, almost as if seen through tears. He also photographed her back, to show the sore map of her skinned flesh.

  Steve Catnach’s paper continued to hide them from all rivals until the time came for Phoebe to be admitted to the Royal Bethlehem Hospital for Children, in the heart of old Enoch, where Dr Martin’s private representations and the public’s clamour had won Phoebe the attentions of the most skilled skin-grafting surgeons in the world. But meanwhile, waiting for the bed to become free and the team of doctors to be assembled, Ella and Phoebe learned to go to the pub round the corner from their neat little brand new red-tiled house in Market Cluer, and sit in the back in the children’s room with the telly, where a fire burned whatever the weather, and a collection of darning mushrooms and pincushions decorated the cabinets. Phoebe relished the Special Kids’ menu: Basket of Nuggets and Chips, with ketchup and a Coke, followed by two scoops of strawberry swirl ice cream; she would flourish a chip, dripping with gore, while she made remarks to the screen and the company. Steve Catnach began to address all his instructions to her, not to her mother, whom he felt he knew as little about now as he had when he first came across her in the office of FemMédecs du Monde. The interpre
ter he’d employed found Ella’s speech tricky – she had an odd, unplaceable accent, he said, as if she didn’t really come from Tirzah. This was not something Steve Catnach needed to explore, not when he was running a front-page campaign against the systematic extermination of the Tirzahner locals by the invaders.

  Ella had no papers for herself or for her daughter, besides the ones The Fanfare had arranged, so he hadn’t been able to ascertain her age or Phoebe’s. Phoebe must have reached her early teens at the very least, he calculated, if you counted off the years of their struggle westwards. She still looked like a child, thin and fragile-boned, with that eerie jellyfish transparency of flesh. However, in the settled atmosphere of Market Cluer, she was beginning to grow, doing well at the local school and overcoming her handicaps, the teachers reported to The Fanfare, with courage and flair. Ella, by contrast, fretted; the enforced inactivity of life in the ribbon development that linked the old market town with the countryside’s agritourism, boating and fruit farms, made her desperate.

  ‘We must go to Enoch,’ she kept telling Catnach. ‘I want to work, I want Phoebe to learn – more than . . .’ she waved her hand at the window and the village, and sighed. Here, the girl hung around the bus shelter outside the pub with the local youngsters who’d nothing to do but smoke and dream of dealers coming their way, until Ella appeared to drag her away to bed. But when one of Phoebe’s new friends commented, the following night, ‘Yer mum’s really weird’, Phoebe jumped on her, and then, when the girl pushed her off, she fell down on to the road, on her back. She didn’t scream, but got up slowly and turned on her heels and left them, walking as ordinarily as she could while the pain blazed down her spine: they knew not to come at her again, but hung half-menacing, half-ashamed, in the chequered lozenge of light shone on to the road by the bus shelter.

  ‘Looks like a rat when it’s born,’ she heard one of her friends say. ‘I’ve seen it.’

  ‘Newborn rat.’

  ‘Back of arms and legs like slime – I saw her at break. She oozes.’

  ‘Yuck,’ said another. ‘Brain-damaged.’

  Ella argued with Catnach that they’d thrive in the capital, that they were used to cities, to noise, to activity, that Phoebe needed to be mixed with people more like her. ‘Here we look different – in Enoch, we would disappear. Nobody’d notice us.’

  ‘That’s just it – we can’t have you disappearing.’

  On Phoebe’s first visit to the hospital, Steve explained to her, she wouldn’t be staying more than a night.

  ‘The doctors have told me they’re just going to take a sample of skin from you, so that they can make you a new one. They’ll just put your legs to sleep, and it’ll be over.’

  Catnach was able to write fervently about the girl’s courage. ‘The surgeon lifted a small section of skin, about the size of an old penny, or, a silver milk bottle top, or, for those who don’t remember such things, a slice through a hard-boiled egg,’ he wrote. ‘At one point during the operation, Phoebe opened her eyes and began watching. She never flinched. The ordeals she has lived through during her short life have given her amazing courage to face suffering, to accept the reality of the body.’

  Having taken this piece of healthy skin from a part of her upper thighs at the front, where she had not been burned, the medical team cultured it in a Petri dish. From this portion of unimpaired, healthy, whole tissue, a scraping that looked more like the dry wing of a dead insect, the doctors began weaving a new raiment of flesh for Phoebe, a new epidermis and endodermis, as if that scrap were rather the vital cocoon of a giant silkworm whose fibres they could wind out hour after hour until they could cool and salve her rawness in its flossy filaments.

  The operation took six hours, and six surgeons, working with needles and thread; they stitched the lustrous, pliant envelope of new tissue to Phoebe’s body as she lay face down, making neat knots at intervals. Afterwards, Phoebe lay, swaddled, in bed, first in the hospital, then back at Market Cluer. It would take fifteen weeks of painkillers and rest and visits from the district nurse for the graft to heal; the bandages were to be changed weekly: The Fanfare sent a car to take Ella and Phoebe to the hospital, and Steve phoned them, and sometimes visited, to write up the girl’s progress.

  ‘Phoebe is beginning to grow into a normal healthy teenager,’ he reported. ‘Her mother tells me she has appetites and moods, and a streak of rebellion, but isn’t that just like every other girl of her age in the world?’

  She is beginning to grow, Ella nodded to herself. It’s true. It isn’t just that she’s putting on weight that could be the effect of enforced immobility and the food but I can tell it’s not only that she has had her first period it frightened us at first when we saw blood on the sheets in the morning and I looked at the bandages thinking I’d find a terrible patch with blood seeping through where the skin had torn or become infected with the pills they give her against the pain she wouldn’t feel anything if something went wrong but then I realised what it was and I was glad I kissed her and she let me kiss her with a kind of softness she hasn’t shown before because she was glad too though it means we have to guard now against other dangers not yet not yet

  It seemed we had got stuck in a moment of time that would hold us for ever that we would never be able to pull ourselves free of its hold as if it was one of these photographs they take stopping time Phoebe is a like a monument to them but to me she should be living, changing, growing from day to day. Like an ordinary girl, the journalist is right she is catching up now to the time that she lost her new skin is bringing her forward matching her body to her mind setting her free

  When the last bandages came off, the doctors were interviewed; they beamed at their success. ‘It was one of the most ambitious operations of its kind ever undertaken,’ Catnach reported. ‘“It has been successful beyond our highest expectations,” the hospital spokesman declared.’

  Phoebe’s new skin gleamed with the high-gloss, new-minted look of a sweet chestnut prised from its snug white casing. Her afflicted translucency now opaque, densely textured as a precious hardwood, supple with a healthy water-repellent sheen on it like teak that will turn a deck from a puddle into a watertight drum or lignum vitae that will permit clockwork to function even when saltwater is gnawing at its innards, the young girl appeared to glow. She was still chary of revealing herself, and preferred long skirts that wrapped her legs and T-shirts that dangled down over her hands. But she could not extinguish altogether her new-made radiance. Journalists, coming to interview her, talked about her dazzling personality; instinctively, they pulled out their dark glasses as they fiddled with the buttons on their recording equipment.

  ‘What now?’ Catnach asked at the morning meeting.

  ‘What’s the progress on their documents?’ asked the deputy editor.

  ‘Slow, very slow.’

  ‘Do you think they’ve a chance of remaining? Is that what they want?’

  ‘It’s tricky. I’d say that in cases like these, the barometer’s falling. Public opinion, if it thinks for a moment longer than that first rush of pity, on the whole wants people to “go back where they come from”, repaired, restored – and grateful.’

  ‘Tirzah’s being reconstructed. As we speak, millions of dollars of humanitarian aid are being poured into its regeneration,’ the home affairs editor reminded the group, unnecessarily. ‘There’s no reason they shouldn’t return, find their old home again, settle back. Surely that’s preferable to struggling to make a new life here?’

  ‘She wants to move to Enoch and she’s very insistent that Phoebe be educated here.’

  ‘Turning into a Tory mum, is she? Demanding access to the “Right Schools”?’

  Catnach ignored this, and the fashion editor broke the awkward pause: ‘Let me make a suggestion. How about I do a style job on Phoebe for a spread about the image options of young girls like her? Could be fun – the whole caboodle, Sloane to dinge, with lots of cheap high street labels and make-up and stuff ever
yone can buy.’

  ‘What’s dinge?’ asked the property pages.

  ‘Where’ve you been? Haven’t you noticed who’s buying up the posh houses these days? Snaggle-toothed rock stars who look like they’ve just crawled out of a sewer.’

  Steve said, ‘Please not dinge. Might look like “Before” in a “Before and After” story. After all, they might as well have crawled out of a sewer.’

  ‘All right, we’ll go a bit more upmarket – chunky ethnic jewellery and Japanese prêt-à-porter.’

  6

  Hortense to Kim; Kim to Hortense, again and again

  Subject: Skipwith 673

  Date: Mon, 29 June 199– 11:37:49 +0100

  From: Hortense Fernly

  To: kim.mcquy

  Kim, I was out of town when you called, I wasn’t ‘hiding from you’ as you claimed to my colleague in Archives. You must calm down and not get so over-wrought about this and indeed everything else. My job is to present the National Museum’s classical antiquities to the public (to whom they belong): you are a member of that public. I am merely doing my job. I don’t share your views about history. I’m a historian, and a pretty down to earth person and I believe that things happened and we can find out what they were and how they came about. However, because Education & Outreach are now priorities I have to make history matter now, so you – your way of thinking – has some relevance to me, even though it flies in the face of objective use of evidence. You and people like you understand what in the past is prologue and we at the Museum have a public responsibility to keep in touch with these issues. This sounds preachy – and defensive – which annoys me, but I don’t know how to put it any other way.

  You’ll also be delighted to hear, I trust, that we have received lottery funds for a full new exhibit; and that the director is 100 per cent behind a complete refurbishment. No more hole in the corner displays.