Somewhere East of Life

by Brian W Aldiss

  Halting, he folded his arms and stood frowning.

  “You know how Kaginovich was born? From a dead mother. So the story goes.” Untrue, like so many good stories, but… “You don’t have to believe the textbooks slavishly to understand he would carry that loss within him to the grave.

  “No mother. Isn’t that supposed to be one of the worst disasters that can befall a child? No mother. There’s no guidance; you have to forge your own character, for better or worse, to become gentleman or Genghis Khan. It makes you internally into a sort of Frankenstein’s monster, an anomic personality, which Kaginovich certainly was.” He checked himself, then continued, “That ikon—that powerful depiction of mother love—threw him into a fit of jealous rage. All he’d lost, for all his conquests, suddenly it was out! He smashed the picture that reminded him of his unassuageable wound.”

  Blanche was listening with half-open mouth, frowning in concentration.

  “And you, Roy? Supposing all that was so?”

  “Cod psychology? It might be true, all the same. I spend my days trying to make sense of everything.”

  But she perceived that the remark hid something more he wished to say.

  “Did you also hate the picture? Your mother died when you were a boy, didn’t she?”

  He was shaking his head, looking up as if for succour at the branches over their head. The sun was hidden behind cloud.

  Asking her why they had joined WACH, he said it must be because what they sought to preserve had its taproots in the past, like a wisdom tooth in a jaw.

  “I loved the ikon as soon as I saw it. Not hate, like Kaginovich, but love. Longed to possess it.”

  The other thing she said had to be answered. He would hardly call himself a boy when his mother died. It was summer and he was away at school, scarcely realizing even that his mother’s illness was serious, although he knew she had been having treatment. He was fifteen and a half, and a fast bowler in the first eleven. His mother died of cancer a fortnight before the end of that term.

  By common consent, Burnell and Blanche sat down on a bench dedicated, a plaque informed them, to a dead doctor.

  What had really hurt was that Tarquin, his father—he was sure from the best of motives—did not tell him his mother was dead until the school broke up and he arrived home to find her gone. To his agonized cry, “Why didn’t you phone me?,” Tarquin had replied that he didn’t wish to upset his son’s cricket fixtures. Although he was aware that his father also grieved, from then onwards they had never again spoken to each other of Vanessa.

  Burnell gave no indication he noticed that tears fell from his eyes, dropping straight down like winter sleet. Blanche bravely held her ground and let him speak.

  But what had really hurt, he said, perhaps addressing no living listener, was that by the time Tarquin broke the news to him, his mother was already buried, the funeral was over, and he had never said his last farewells to her. That had really hurt. It still did. He had never said goodbye to her. That memory remained clear.

  She did no more than put an arm around him, saying nothing.

  “Oh, well,” he said, and, “Bugger. Emotion got the better of me! I suppose what I saw immediately in the Madonna of Futurity was myself in my mother’s arms, secure and content. The mother was her, looking into the future with a premonition of the illness that would take her away from me.

  “So, to see the ikon smashed, that beautiful image smashed…well… That’s why I went ape.”

  They sat and looked at each other, she from France, he from England, while German traffic roared behind distant trees.

  She said that she sometimes thought that most of the great hoard of the world’s evil, and particularly the violence of men, could be swept away in one generation, if only all today’s children could feel loved and secure; perhaps the secret of all virtue lay hidden in a tit, a parental lap. “Why do you wish to withhold all this from your psychoanalyst?”

  “Because,” he said. “Because I don’t know if it’s true. How is it that our most vital thoughts can be hidden from us?”

  She had shared the tears; now she shared his laughter. “You are the most maddeningly honest dishonest man I’ve ever met.”

  “Oh, what the hell! Blanche, I don’t know why I’m lingering in this madhouse. I’ll have to get back to work. Take another trip somewhere. Somewhere where the population aren’t all at each other’s throats.”

  “Fine. I’ve an even better idea. First of all, come back to Madrid with me. This very evening.”

  “Come and learn Spanish?”

  She clapped her hands. “You do remember something! It’s in the blood. That was our joke—that you wouldn’t join me because you couldn’t speak Spanish.”

  “Lady, it was a fib. It’s beyond telling how much your visits have meant to me. I can see clearly why and how we were—may I say are?—lovers. But I can’t join you until I’ve got…”

  She finished the sentence for him: “…that bloody Steff out of your system.”

  14

  In the Korean Fast Foot

  The evening flight from FAM to Madrid’s Barajas Airport was going to be full, as usual. Blanche Bretesche sat in her club-class seat, which the airline liked to refer to as an “armchair,” sipping champagne and staring out of the cabin window. She worried about Burnell and about herself.

  She was well aware she might be mistaken by investing so much emotion in Burnell and could save herself hurt by making a break with him. “Beware of Pity,” she quoted to herself; yet pity was not her predominant feeling. Nor, even, was lust. She and he were compatible. Even his atheism—perhaps a more uncertain quality than he realized—held an appeal, although Blanche regarded herself as a Catholic. She tried to tot up the pros and cons of their relationship. This business about the death of his mother: Blanche thought she understood all the ramifications of that. He had faced up to the loss long ago; it surfaced only occasionally, like a wrecked vessel during phenomenally low tides.

  And yet… The thought occurred to her that Roy’s sorrow at having been unable to pay a formal adieu to his dead mother had left its scar across his character. It possibly accounted for Burnell’s reluctance to say a final farewell to Stephanie, although Stephanie seemed long ago to have said goodbye to him.

  But was that a valid insight? Or was it just a line of reasoning to which the generations since the turn of last century and the emergence of psychoanalysis had become indoctrinated? The Freudian Neural Highway. No one liked farewells.

  Blanche smiled to herself. He shared her mistrust of received opinions. That was another reason for loving him.

  But to look for reasons for love was a hopeless quest, au fond. Love still held its formidable attractions in an age in which a whole stewpot of beliefs simmered—rationality, romanticism, economic factors, faith, crass commercialism, asceticism, a thousand -isms. Love was unequivocally barmy. She liked that English word, barmy.

  Love was also a pain in the neck.

  How had it ever come about that humans loved? Wolves formed families; male and female wolves stayed monogamously together; they protected and reared their cubs. Blanche had a deep admiration for wolves, as for all wild things. She had never heard of anyone claiming that wolves loved. Wolves were the most clearsighted of animals. Love occluded human vision, was a kind of tipsiness. Humanity thirsted for love like vampires for blood. Love is blind drunk—not a way to go through life. Or even through European airspace. Leaving him meant leaving something of herself behind.

  A late-boarding passenger came and sat in the armchair next to Blanche. It was Doctor Maria-Luisa Cervera, helped into her seat by a steward. The learned doctor panted slightly before turning to survey her neighbor over her horn-rimmed spectacles. They recognized each other.

  Dr. Cervera, a well-known anthropologist, was in her eighty-first year, still indefatigably traveling. She was in charge of excavations at a recently-discovered site in the north of Spain.

  A stewardess came and p
oured both ladies champagne.

  “I’m pleased to see you, Blanche. It saves me approaching you formally. We hope World Cultural Heritage might support our dig at San Pineda in the Sierra de la Demanda.” She sipped her drink, coughed, apologized. “It’s very worthwhile. Culturally important.”

  The de la Demanda site was in the news. In a cave in the mountains, long covered by landslides, a grave had been found containing human-type remains. Dr. Cervera had been called in. Her team of archaeologists and anthropologists were slowly uncovering the first articulated skeleton of an eolithic woman ever found. The skeleton was dated as between 300,000 and 350,000 years old. It thus predated Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon, and what was self-inflatingly called homo sapiens sub-species. Excavation was proceeding with caution. Dr. Cervera was fighting to keep the entire operation in Spain, despite Japanese and German interests involved.

  Blanche was curious if nothing more. Though even by calling the San Pineda cave a prehistoric cathedral she doubted whether WACH would provide financial support. Prehistory lay outside WACH’s range. “Bodies aren’t in the charter.”

  “One cannot over-estimate the importance of this discovery. And the rest of the cave has yet to be investigated. We hope for other revelations.”

  “I could probably lay on a WACH observer. Might come myself.”

  The two women fell into deep conversation as the airbus took off. It was hoped that further excavation might even reveal other skeletons. The findings would transform understanding of human evolution. The San Pineda woman had probably possessed a brain of l,400cc, quite comparable in size to a modern human’s brain. Artifacts and plants found beside her suggested religious rites.

  “So the likelihood is that religion preceded humanity,” the old lady said. “But we can hardly expect that La Pineda was a Catholic.” Her smiles did little more than rearrange a few wrinkles about her mouth; her eyes remained disinterested.

  “From the photographs, I saw your ancient lady is bent double. Is that due to disease? Not natural posture?”

  “La Pineda would have walked upright when young. We’ll know better when we can get her out from the cave, but preliminary evidence indicates osteo-arthritis, and osteo-phytosis, such as you find among Neanderthals, in the lumbar regions. You’ve seen the Untouchable sweeping women in India, who spend most of their lives bent double at their trade? Or their fate, one might say. That may—just may—have been La Pineda’s fate. We all get stuck in life attitudes, you know.” She muttered irritably to herself, putting a hand up to her temple as if to confirm a headache. Blanche did not like to speak. She could not help recalling how, as a child, she had believed that the old were another species. Dr. Cervera said, almost in an undertone, “In the world of prehistory, old age was practically unknown. It’s a modern innovation.”

  Blanche deflected her attention from the notion that everyone became stuck in their life attitudes; it made her uncomfortable.

  “I’ve often wondered how largely illness acts as agent provocateur for religious faith. It is the incapacitated, isn’t it, who turn first to God? Just as it’s the sick who preserve the renown of Lourdes.”

  The old lady punctuated one of her long silences with a sip from her glass. “The sick. The incapacitated. The threatened. The aged. What a sacrilegious thought you have there, my dear. Religious people—I’m not one of them—would surely claim that God was an invention of the healthy, rather than the sick. It was the Son, down here on Earth, who got himself involved with the sick… ‘Take up thy bed and walk…,’ His father was busy healthily inventing galaxies.”

  Another silence, then a postscript, delivered mischievously. “Whether it was Jehovah who interested himself in our pre-Neanderthals, the Gospels do not relate.”

  Blanche chuckled. “So would you suppose that the Pineda People, if we can use that expression, were surprisingly advanced?”

  Dr. Cervera gave one of her cold old mysterious smiles. “Do you regard us as surprisingly advanced?”

  “Well, we’re flying at nine and a half thousand meters, and here comes the champagne again.” They laughed together.

  Blanche said, “I suppose that if the Pineda People—you don’t jump down my throat when I use that expression—had religions, worshipped gods or goddesses, they also loved each other as we do?”

  Since she received no immediate reply, since Dr. Cervera seemed intent on watching the bubbles dance as her champagne glass filled, she had time to reflect that her question was preposterous. It was easy to sound absurd when addressing such a learned elderly woman; she found elderly people in general difficult to converse with.

  She decided to obliterate her rather embarrassing question about love—Roy, you wretch, make up your complex little mind, will you?—with another question the old girl might find more palatable.

  “Do you think the human race will evolve out of some of its ancient inheritances?—Which could become recognized as fully as outmoded as granny’s old tableclothes tucked away in the family chest? Would it make for a more reasonable, more peaceable, society, if eventually we all grew out of such emotional quicksands as religion and…well, passionate love?”

  That was no better a question. Even while Blanche was posing it, she recalled that this illustrious dame had enjoyed a scandalous youth. Once on a time, her name had been linked with a Spanish film director, Luis Buñuel. She had then, by all accounts, been a turbulent lover. But that was in another century; besides, the wencher was dead.

  Again the younger woman was challenged by one of those chill smiles. In the tallowy and wrinkled face were eyes as searching as needles. “At my advanced age,” Dr. Cervera said, “I have outgrown both religion and love. Whether that’s better, who can say? But you do, in a sense, miss what you once enjoyed…”

  Karl Leberecht was Burnell’s other visitor. He entered the great gray institution punctually every day at three o’clock, never staying long.

  The institution was its usual self, as dignified as it could be, and perhaps not less hospitable than is the general nature of such places. Its grounds and pleasant flower beds still proclaimed summer, and one of its sparrows still bothered Burnell, up in his room, next to the muttering Finn.

  Burnell entertained his friend in one of the downstairs visitors’ rooms where he had received Blanche. Leberecht was an altogether more serious kind of visitor, who liked to discuss artistic matters.

  He also informed Burnell that the loss of ten years of academic learning was in general regarded as an impediment to advancement.

  Burnell said that, being without ambition, he could live without advancement. All he wanted was to be on the road again. Although his Georgian commission had not been too successful, the civil war had made the whole operation difficult; at least he had located a valuable ikon regarded as lost. That ikon was now being expertly restored in Munich.

  That, his superior agreed, was certainly something. But, he asked, looking with some compassion into Burnell’s face, could he say he was really feeling his old self?

  “Yes,” said Burnell.

  “No,” said Burnell, when Leberecht visited him on the following day. “I lied to you yesterday. The truth is—I tell you this as a friend—I don’t feel like myself. I keep thinking…” He paused before being able to come out with it. “…I keep thinking I’m something lying in a hospital bed in a coma. No, worse than that—Karl, I keep thinking I’m just the interior monologue of someone lying in bed in a coma. What do you make of that?”

  Leberecht said he would look into it. He became very serious. On the following day he was back at the institution, still serious, but relieved. As they sipped the institution’s Bolivian coffee, he asked Burnell if he recalled the name of Peter Remenyi. Burnell certainly did; the name had come up on the electronic diary in his Soss City apartment.

  “He was a good friend of yours, Roy. He was also a Hungarian champion ski-jumper. You took vacations with Remenyi.”

  “Don’t remember.”

  “The
n you don’t remember being in a car crash with him. You escaped unhurt. Remenyi, who was driving, suffered a brain injury. He’s in a coma in a Budapest hospital. Prognostications are not hopeful.”

  Burnell’s immediate impulse was to say he would fly to Budapest. That was not advisable, Leberecht told him; it would be a wasted journey. Remenyi responded to no external stimuli, and was thought to be slowly deteriorating. In short, a PVS case.

  After much thought, they decided there had been a psychic linkage between the two damaged brains, Burnell’s and Remenyi’s. Burnell was relieved to know what had been worrying him.

  “You must tell all this to your psychoanalyst,” Leberecht urged.

  “God, no, Karl, I want to get out of here. Send me somewhere easier than Ghvtismshobeli. I’ll be fine.”

  Leberecht relented.

  “We’ve got just the place.”

  The air was full of traffic. A few days after Blanche Bretesche flew westward from Frankfurt, Roy Burnell was flying eastward. WACH booked him on flights which took him first to Istanbul and then, with a change of plane, almost due east along the Black Sea coast. While Burnell snoozed, he was transported across the polluted wastes of the Caspian Sea, toward the uneasy nations which had only a generation earlier emerged from Soviet domination, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. From Istanbul onward, Burnell was seated among hadjis, and no more alcohol was served.

  They landed in the capital of Turkmenistan after dark. Burnell took a taxi to his hotel, where the bar was closed and a deal of unfavorable yawning went on at the reception desk.

  There were in Central Asia numerous venerable structures to be entered into the files of WACH and, if possible, preserved for future generations. The cities of Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara were covered. To Burnell had fallen Ashkhabad, capital of Turkmenistan. Following Burnell’s recommendations, a team of photographers would arrive to ensure that pictorial images of favored buildings and art works remained in the world’s memory banks even when the originals fell victim to time and turbulence. The process was analogous to the way in which the larger carnivores, now extinct, existed only on film or in gene banks.