by Mark Martin
A clattering pan on a stone floor tells me that Bruno is up. I bookmark my spot in our magnum opus, stow my precious reading glasses on the shelf, grab my stick and hobble down the hallway before he has the chance to hurt himself. By the exercise bicycle—used as a coat-stand for most of our marriage—Bruno’s trousers lay discarded. I smell, and then see, that he didn’t use the privy. Another chore for the morning ahead: at least he didn’t step in the mess like yesterday. In the kitchen Bruno is inspecting the fridge’s innards, as if it were not a dead cupboard for turnips donated by Finbar but that cabinet of refrigerated wonders we all used to take for granted. “I was searching everywhere for you, Paola.” He calls me Paola on good days: on less lucid ones, he just gazes through me.
It’s early, so I still have energy to say that I’m Avril, that Paola was his first wife, that Paola passed away many years ago.
“Why’s”—my half-naked husband blinks—“the Internet down?”
“We’ve had no Internet for eight years, Bruno.”
For whose sake, I wonder, do I try to tether him to reality?
“How can I do research without Internet access?”
“Put this on—” I take off my dressing gown “—it’s chilly.”
He allows me to feed his limp arms into the sleeves.
I remember dressing Calvin when he was little . . .
. . . a balloon of grief inflates in my throat, and hurts.
Poor, poor Avril . . . shall we have a little cry?
Bruno frowns. “I’m expecting an email from Fran Worcester!”
Here we go again, for—literally?—the thousandth time.
“She’s told the Vice-Chancellor to cut our funding, the witch!”
“Bruno, it’s 2033: Fran Worcester’s dead; the Vice-Chancellor’s dead; our Uni was burnt by Rapturists—” I draw breath and wonder, as ever, where to stop? Economics has eaten itself; dementia is eating you; climate change has crippled global agriculture; our government only has the means to hold the Cordon because Jīndàn-TransUral needs order on their farm.
Then I hear men outside, and horse’s hoofs.
Must be Finbar. I grab my sheepskin cardigan.
On the ruckled yard that was once a patio, I find a cart made out of an old boat and car wheels, two Shire horses eating from a nose-bag, and one-two-three-four-five-six-seven strangers—all male. Where to begin? Two intruders are siphoning the paraffin from our tank into large plastic tubs; one perches on the Mitsubishi—now a henhouse—writing something; another minds the horses; and the last three stand guard with guns cocked my way. Army hand-me-downs are in evidence, but the gang’s piercings and insouciance all say “Casual Militia.” It’s hard to guess ages in these feral times: the horse-minder might be as young as twelve or thirteen. They are unfazed by an elderly householder wielding a walking stick, and my sternest voice wavers, rather: “What’s going on here, exactly?”
“We ownin’ vis jooce Ol’lady,” states a jowly one in pungent dialect.
“You can bloody well unown it, and pour it back again!”
“Nohcandu Ol’lady. DisGov’s requissyin’ illegal stockpiles.”
“This ‘stockpile’ is our legal quota. Less than five hundred liters.”
“More’n elsewheres now’days ’tis.” This gunman is pocked with smallpox. “S’tember’s tanker’s a No-Show at Terminal. Norf o’Cordon, I seen folk get spiked for a ten-liter placky o’jooce.”
Spurt by spurt, my paraffin is vanishing: I resort to bluff. “Listen: Captain Oscar Boru of the District Government happens to be my son-in-law, and if you know what’s good for you . . .”
Their swapped smiles take the steam out of my sentence.
The one on the Mitsubishi speaks. “Mrs Bredon, am I right?”
I’m surprised by his cultured tone. “ ‘Professor’ Bredon.”
“Your neighbor,” he nods toward Finbar’s, “gave us your name. He reckoned the lads would be less trigger-jumpy once we knew you’re no threat.” He’s about thirty—the age Calvin would be—and his demeanor (and Chinese Burberry flak-jacket) mark him out as leader. “Regarding Oscar Boru, Professor: you must be the fiftieth nearest and dearest of the good captain we’ve spoken to this week. The joke is that Boru’s our main customer—even the DG platoons are zip out of fuel. Hinterland’s hogging every last drop.” He slaps the plastic tanks. “This’ll shore up law and order.”
“You’re gangsters,” I fix his eye, “without official sanction.”
“Official,” he tilts his head left and right, “unofficial: come on.”
“Thieves and thugs,” I grip my stick, “plain and simple.”
“Fink we’re fugs?” The jowly lieutenant’s smile is what Bruno used to call “Post-Dental Age.” “Juss ya wait fo’va Jackdaws.”
He’s trying to scare me. We live south of the Cordon.
The trees clack and grunt. A horse urinates.
“This fuel’s ours,” states the leader. “Go back indoors.”
“Would you take orders from trespassing bandits?”
“Look,” he says, “nobody wants to hurt you, but our job—”
“You look, Che Guevara: winter’s round the corner; my husband and I are in our sixties and we need that fuel; so if you think of yourself as a human being, listen to your conscience and put it back.”
“Y’oughta gra’itood,” says a siphoner, “w’aint takin’ y’eats.”
“Sixty years’ a crack o’whip,” says another. “I’ll dead by sixty, I’ll.”
Their lack of compassion is stony and without cracks.
I address the leader. “You’re committing an immoral act.”
“Here’s morality: oil’s at three thousand dollars a barrel, in those dwindling zones where prices still mean anything. And we’ve got dependents, too. Our children will be manning the Cordon, ten years from now. This fuel improves our chances of having a future, of sorts.”
“That’s just—” what’s the right word? “—sophistry.” Oh, what’s the use? It’s over their heads. “You won’t get off the Peninsula. We look after our own out here.”
“Oha fink we will get off okay.” Jowls cocks his semi-auto.
“Whassa Sophie’s Tree, Wyatt?” asks the boy with the horses.
“ ‘Sophistry’,” says the platoon leader. “Waster lingo. It means ‘slick bullshit.’ Greek etymology, right, Professor?’ He mocks my condescension. “My mum was a—” he opens sarcastic quote marks “—a ‘lexicographer’.”
Sycamore leaves scurry around our ankles, rat-like.
“So you have a mother, too?” I change tack. “Tell me, if—”
There’s a panicky yell of “Va top winder! Sniper!”
Swing and a swivel and a blur and weapons clicking—
I turn around: Bruno is struggling to open the back window.
“Don’t shoot!” I’m an old woman shouting in an awful dream where air is noise and my voice is feeble. “We don’t have any—”
Crack-bang! A crater appears two meters from Bruno’s head, the dirty-laundry sky fills with crows and croaks, the horses shy and the chickens go mental. Incredibly—or not—Bruno hasn’t noticed his danger, and carries on fiddling with the window-catch, slack-jawed. I notice that I’m shrieking at a lanky militiaman whose crucifix swings loose: “He hasn’t got a weapon he’s harmless don’t fire don’t fire!”
The Crucifix guy looks around at the leader, Wyatt.
Wyatt’s watching Bruno, along his handgun’s line of fire.
“My husband has Alzheimer’s,” I plead. “We don’t keep guns.”
My heartbeat’s throbbing so hard my chest cavity feels bruised.
After a sick moment the leader, Wyatt, nods: “Stand down.”
Now I snarl at the Crucifix gunman: “You almost killed him!”
“Fat chance.” The smallpox-scarred one sniggers. “Jeez’d miss a cow at ten paces.”
“T’was forty paces t’was! An’ya know t’was Oshi Whynot.”
>
Bruno, meanwhile, has wrestled open the window. “Paola! Where were you? Are these drop-outs from IT, here to fix the Internet?”
Feeling shame is stupid, and unfair on Bruno, yet I do.
“We are, Sir,” Wyatt calls up. “Won’t take a jiffy—some joker installed a Californian RBR sequencer, to cut corners. We only use Indian-mades: see you another five years, even on max-hot-tasking.”
Bruno nods once. “Ah. Good. Not before time.”
He shuts the window and retreats into the blank dark.
Feeling gratitude is stupid, too: especially as the siphoning tube goes limp. That’s it. Our fuel’s gone. What now? Back to firewood, peat: back to the Middle Ages, step by step.
I’m empty. “How do you people sleep at night?”
Wyatt approaches me. “Professor, I have a gift and some news.”
“Yeah? I’ll take five hundred liters of paraffin, please.”
“First, the gift.” From a pocket he removes a tiny clear plastic box.
My fingers recognize the box first. “Two spearmint Tic-Tacs?”
“Mercy beans.” The soldier says it like it’s nothing special.
“Take your ‘gift’ back. I don’t need suicide pills. We’ve—”
“Chuck them if you want, but you should hear the news.”
“We’ve survived this long: we’ll survive—”
“The Cordon’s shifting, Professor: eighty clicks south.”
His soft voice cushions the impact of the meaning: at first.
Something plastic falls at my feet: Wyatt stoops for the box.
“The District,” I’m saying, “won’t abandon the Peninsula!”
Wyatt straightens up and sighs. “Some planner at Jīndàn-TransUral in Petersburg or Beijing surveyed their six thousand acres on a sat-map; reckoned, Well, that’s not worth the ammo or the manpower; and it’s a done deal. Our Government gets told, not consulted about it.”
“So we’re just being thrown to the wolves?”
“Yer’d stand more chance,” Jeez the Crucifix sniffs, “if t’was wolves an’not Jackdaws, Ol’lady.”
The steep heath, the sloughing sea, the horizon’s a ghostly line.
“So . . . at our ages,” I’m saying, “my husband and I are refugees?”
Wyatt holds my eye. “The New Cordon will have an immigration bar.”
“This country has been our home for a quarter-century.”
“It’s not to do with citizenship or ethnicity: it’s your age.”
I unwrap this riddle and find something terrible. “No: no. They can’t keep out the elderly?”
Wyatt looks away and looks back. Calvin used to do that, before breaking bad news. “Thirty-five years old for men, Professor, and thirty for women. They have shiny new Chinese chromo-testers at the checkpoints: one dab of saliva and they know your age to within seven days.”
“And . . . so . . . well . . . what are we supposed to do?”
Ever so gently, Wyatt puts the Tic-Tac box into my hand.
Bruno’s snoring, snottily. He’s catching a cold. I file his toenails, discolored like rhino horn, and the daylight dies. I usually go to sleep with the sun—once the solar-lamp dies, there’s no spare—but tonight I take it to my study. The Siphoners left a grim prognosis after they’d vanished down the track. Finbar and Ann—in their late fifties, also unwanted by the New Cordon—dropped by afterwards. We hatched plots to keep our spirits up. Finbar has one final tranche of fuel for his boat, stored in an old copper mine-shaft: but get real, where would we go? Drift up to the Faroes, like a Rapturist in his faux-medieval coracle, trusting in the breath of Providence? What about Bruno? What would I be if I just abandoned him? Wyatt was right: the one place the Jackdaws won’t find us, and that’s inside a mercy bean. What will I do? Sip nettle tea, retrieve my reading glasses and retreat into volume three of Avril Bredon’s and Bruno Thoms’ best-known contribution to the now-extinct discipline of anthropology.
Where was I?
Well, summer passed, and autumn rusted the valleys. Raids by bandits over the mountain border had ruined the harvest in that region, so the Emperor decided that before winter closed the passes, he would raise a mounted army to root out this scourge. Every village in the Country of Youth was to send ten men, and now that Haji’s household consisted of one, he was the first to be chosen. When Haji’s grandmother, safe and warm in her distant cabin, learnt the news, she told Haji this: “The Emperor’s a fool. Those mountains could swallow up twenty armies, and when the snows come, it’s worse. Here’s how you survive. Ride the dun mare to war, but take her colt along, too. At the river on the border, kill the colt. Do this, and with God’s grace you’ll come home alive.”
A horseman in the Emperor’s army, Haji heeded his grandmother’s advice. At the border crossing, he slit the colt’s throat, ignoring the mare’s grief and his fellow-soldiers’ bafflement. The army rode into the hostile mountains, but the bandits melted away. After three days’ riding, the Emperor’s forces were ambushed in a tangled valley. Many of Haji’s companions were slain in the storm of crossbolts, but the survivors fought back with discipline, cunning and ferocity, and the Emperor’s men finally won that bloodiest of days. That night, however, winter pounced: a screaming blizzard confined the army to their tents and makeshift shelters for a week. The wounded perished, an unlucky few were driven mad, the weaker horses froze to death, and food ran out. On the seventh day the skies cleared, but that unmapped world was smothered in snow. Wolves, crows and probably new groups of bandits were gathering, and nobody knew the road home. Haji now remembered his grandmother’s advice and begged the Emperor’s aide-decamp to try an idea. Untethering his mare, Haji whipped her hindquarters with an elm switch and shouted, “Away!” The mare trotted off, leading Haji and the aide-de-camp’s scout unerringly back to the place she had last seen her colt, at the border of the Country of Youth.
Safe, rested and warm in his palace, the Emperor summoned Haji to his gem-encrusted throne-room. The ruler asked his young subject how he had known the trick with the mare and the slaughtered colt. Haji looked the Emperor in the eye and said, “My grandmother told me, Your Majesty.” The Emperor wanted to meet this wise woman. Haji replied, “That’s a little difficult, Your Majesty. When she reached her sixtieth birthday, I persuaded her to go into hiding in the forest.” Uproar broke out and Haji found a knife at his throat. The scandalized Emperor asked if Haji were not afraid for his life, following his confession. “I am afraid, Your Majesty,” replied Haji, “but fear or no fear, how could I alter one word? Unless we respect our old people and listen to their wisdom, we damage ourselves and our future more than ten thousand bandits ever could.” The Emperor was silent for a long time. His courtiers awaited his judgment. Haji, calmly, awaited his fate.
“What were the Emperor’s words?” teased my old, wrinkled aunt, as she worked her loom, click-clacketty, click-clacketty, click-clacketty. “Work it out yourself, you young sappy idiot. I’m still here, with a few winters in me yet, aren’t I? Look about you: hasn’t the Country of Youth become the Country of All Ages?”
ARZÈSTULA
by Wu Ming 1
I. The road from Parasacco to Medelana, November 16
A persistent dream. I haven’t finished my thesis, but continue to collect personal reminiscences from ancient parish priests and basapilét, bigoted old peasant women dressed in black. With my tape recorder as my constant companion, minor roads take me up to little gravel paths and from there onto muddy little tracks that lead from one cottage to another. I return to Ferrara with a rucksack full of unconnected stories, of a time when the missal was still in Latin, the priest stood with his back to you, and the chalice of wine was offered up pro vobis et pro multis effendetur, for the remission of sins (yours and those of others).
In the dream, I am twenty-five years old and I have to get a move on, stop “waffling.” The deadline is just round the corner and my supervisor is getting impatient.
—Will y
ou just make your mind up what it is you want to do! You’ve interviewed a hundred people, you must have some idea by now what to write about. You’ve read Portelli’s book, you’ve read the one by Bermani and Montaldi’s. What are your thoughts on memory as a source for history? Have you drafted an outline? Have you drawn all the appropriate comparisons?
A recurring dream. Each time I find myself at the bottom of a valley shrouded in mist, as intrepid as the first historian on Earth––she who tells the mother of all stories––and I discover that some other character has passed through before me, the interviewee is exhausted, she has talked for hours and can’t take any more.
––You could’ve come to some agreement, ragazòla, if you’d both come at the same time I could’ve said all this stuff just the once . . . I talked about when I went to St. Peter’s, about the pope who came to Consandolo . . . Adès a son stufa, a voi andar a lèt. I’m fed up now and just wanna go to bed.
Come to some agreement! It sounds easy, but I don’t know who this creature who precedes me is. I only discover (I later discover) who it is in another dream but the dreams themselves are separate, watertight episodes. What I learn in one dream doesn’t flow into the next.
But then, dreams are not the real world. No pope has ever been to Consandolo.
I have to rediscover, every single time, that the Writer always precedes me.
I wake up with a start, in the freezing cold. The word that pops into my head is in dialect: Ingrottita.
Ingrottita? Ingrottirsi, in the infinitive form. This verb doesn’t exist in Italian. Ingrutìras, meaning: your body stiffening up in the freezing cold, as you lie curled up in your sleeping bag.
It’s like a tiny explosion, a word reaching me from my childhood, seeping into my head. The language of my mother reaching out to me.
Here I am again, sui mont ad Parasac, on the mountains at Parasacco.
The mountains at Parasacco don’t really exist. There’s no high ground at Parasacco. No high ground anywhere nearby. Even before the Crisis the lowlands of the Po Basin were very low-lying indeed, a bowl of fog in a gray landscape. The “mountains” of Parasacco are two little bumps, mounds covered in weeds, in what was once a private courtyard. The expression is just an old witticism, a cliché from before the Crisis.
