Dik hid in his hostel room for the rest of the day, waiting for the inevitable summons to Clerk Tradayn’s office in the civic hall, but it seemed nothing in life was inevitable, for the summons never arrived. By nightfall, Dik was more in terror of the uncertainty than he would have been of punishment.
The story he had never read—his story—seemed, for reasons he did not fully understand, as potentially explosive as one of the enemy’s flatcake mines. Moylita had warned him herself, and the burgher’s reaction to it had confirmed it. She would be charged with spying and treason, and she would be imprisoned or exiled or shot.
The fact that the same might happen to him was of less importance.
The constant nagging fears and worries sent him into the streets of the village as soon as the evening meal was over. He had eaten virtually nothing, sitting in silence as the other lads shouted and laughed.
The night was clear, but a strong wind was up, lifting the powdery snow from the roofs and sills and sending it stingingly into his face. Dik walked the length of the main street, hoping for a sight of Moylita or some clue as to where she might be, but the street was empty and dark and the only lights showing came from windows high under the gables. He returned slowly, halting when he came to the civic hall. Here the tall windows showed light, gleaming in horizontal slits through the wooden shutters.
Hardly thinking what the consequences might be, Dik went to the main doors and walked inside. There was a narrow hallway, cold and brightly lit, and opposite him were two more doors, made of wood and heavy glass, ground-cut with ornate curlicues. A caporal was standing before them.
“What’s your business, Constable?”
“I’m looking for Moylita Kaine, sir,” Dik said, with simple truth.
“There’s no one here. Just the burghers.”
“Then I’ll see them, sir. Clerk Tradayn summoned me.”
“The burghers are in Council session. They summoned no one. What’s your name and number, Constable?”
Dik stared back silently, fearing the caporal’s authority but still compelled by his anxiety about Moylita, and he backed away. He returned to the street, closing his ears and mind to the caporal’s orders, shouted behind him. Dik expected to be followed, but once he had let the main doors swing closed behind him the shouts ceased. Dik ran away, sliding on the icy ground as he reached the corner of the building. He came into the tiny square which lay beyond. This was where the local farmers could petition the burghers during the daytime, and where, before the war, there had been weekly markets. The square was divided up into a number of pens where the tithe-livestock would be kept while the petitions were heard. Dik vaulted over two of these pens, then paused to listen. There was no sound of pursuit.
He looked up at the shuttered windows of the civic hall, behind which was the Council Chamber. Dik climbed on to one of the pens, and shuffled forward until his hands were resting on the cold brick of the building. He raised himself as high as he could go, and tried to peer through the shutters into the Chamber. The shutters behind the glass were louvred, and all he could see was the ceiling, richly ornamented in plaster mouldings, and delicate, pastel-coloured renderings of religious tableaux.
Dik could hear the indistinct sound of voices from within and after several unsuccessful attempts to see, he pressed his ear against the glass. At once, he heard the sound of Moylita’s voice, high-pitched and angry. A man said something Dik could not hear, then Moylita shouted: “You know the sense-gases are being used! Why won’t you admit it?” Several voices were raised against her, and she was shouting. A man said: “…we’ve found out who your friends are.” Then Dik heard Moylita shout: “…the men have a right to know!” And: “…drive them mad, it’s illegal!” The chamber was in uproar, and Dik heard a series of loud thuds and the sound of wood falling hollowly against wood. Moylita started to scream.
Then Dik was found by the caporal. He was dragged down from his precarious place by the window and fell kicking and struggling into the snow. The caporal cuffed him about the head until he stopped, then hauled him away. He was taken to a guardroom by the entrance to the civic hall, where he was given another beating and two platoon sergeants were summoned.
The sky had clouded over and the wind had risen, and by the time Dik had been dragged through the streets to the hostel, the gale was bearing thick, suffocating snowflakes, piling them up against the walls and posts.
* * *
Bruised and dispirited, Dik was locked in his room for the rest of the night, and for all the following day.
He had much on which to ponder, and nearly all of it was concerned with Moylita and the possible fates that he imagined could be delivered to her; they were all awful, and he could barely countenance them. For the rest, he wondered about the little story he had held, unread, for those few moments. All Moylita had told him was that it concerned a soldier who became a poet; from what happened when the burgher read it he imagined that its content was rather greater than that. The few short sentences the burgher had read aloud: sense-gases, distortion of perception. Later, what he had overheard from the Chamber: the right to be told, the illegality, the madness.
But Moylita had written it exclusively for him. She had not talked about the background, she told him only about the poet. This was the true statement of the story for her, and so it should be for him.
He had never told her of his own literary aspirations, of the bundles of unpublished verse that lay in a cupboard somewhere at home. Had she somehow guessed?
She had interpreted her novel for him, perhaps divining that he related his own life to it. Had she been intending him to do the same with the story?
Dik did not know. Whatever part of him had once been a poet had been beaten out of him by the military training; he could not forget the failure of the verse he had attempted when he arrived in the village. The studious boy who had never had many friends was a long way behind him now, beyond the wall of conscription.
His precious copy of The Affirmation was safe in his room, and in the late afternoon he had worked out enough of the resentments and angers to feel calm, and he lay on his bed and read a part of it. He selected the passage he always found the most intriguing: the last five chapters. This was the part of the story where Orfé had escaped from the conspiratorial machinations of Emerden and the other minor characters, and was free to go in search of Hilde. Orfé’s quest through the exotic landscape of the Dream Archipelago became a journey of self-exploration, and Hilde became ever more remote.
Reading the book for the first time since Moylita had talked about it, Dik was suddenly aware of the wall-symbolism, and he cursed his lack of percipience in not seeing it for himself. As Orfé sailed from one island to the next he encountered a multitude of barriers; the author’s images, her dialogues, her choice of words, all reflected the fact that Hilde had retreated behind the wall of Orfé’s own making. Even Moylita Kaine’s choice of locale for the end of the quest—the island of Prachous, which in Archipelagan patois meant “the fenced island”—was appropriate.
He finished the book with a sense of satisfaction, but his thoughts returned at once to the short story. Moylita had been trying to tell him something with it; did he know enough about it to try to imagine what that could be?
Affirmation/negation: opposites.
Orfé failed to climb his wall when he had had the chance, and thereafter it was too late; in the story, the soldier climbed a wall and became a poet. Orfé started the novel as a romantic idler, a dilettante and a sybarite, but because of his failures he became a haunted ascetic, obsessed with purpose and guided by moral principle; in the story…what?
Dik, still not fully understanding, but trying hard, began to sense what Moylita Kaine wanted of him.
* * *
On the mountain frontier there was no greater punishment than wall-patrol, and so Dik was not surprised when he was restored to normal duties. By mid-afternoon of the next day he was pacing an allotted sector of the wall, high and remote and lost in
cloud. It was bitterly cold: every few minutes he had to chip away the encrusting ice from his goggles, and work the breech-mechanism of his rifle to prevent it jamming.
While climbing up to the frontier in the morning, Dik had been able to see the saw-mill from the slopes above the village. There had been no lights on that he could see, and the unbroken snowfield around it showed that the warmway had been taken up.
During his leave certain changes had been made to the defences along the wall. The beginnings of a new floodlight system were evident near some of the guardposts, and immense drums of electric cable had been dumped on the slopes. In addition, several bulbous metal shapes had appeared, half-buried in the snow beside the warmway. Complicated arrangements of pipes and nozzles led from these across the warmway and up to the parapet of the wall; Dik tripped over the pipes several times in the murky light, until he learnt to watch out for them.
He was allowed a short break at dusk, when he drank a ferociously hot soup in one of the guardposts, but after nightfall he was back in his sector, pacing to and fro in numb misery, trying to count the minutes that remained until relief.
Night patrols were especially nerve-racking, for he was alone in the hostile alliance of dark and cold and unexplained noises. On this night the enemy had not turned on their floodlights, so he could hardly even see the bulk of the wall looming beside him. All that was clear was the dark strip of the warmway against the white snow, and the sinister, half-buried cisterns.
He wondered, as he always wondered, where the enemy were and what they were doing or planning on the other side. Was there someone like himself, a few feet away on the other side, stamping to and fro, hoping only for the end of the patrol?
Here, at the place where two countries met, where two political ideologies clashed, he was physically closer to the enemy than anyone else. And yet the frontier united him with the enemy; the men on the other side obeyed the same sort of orders, suffered the same fears, endured the same hardships, and they, presumably, defended their country to support a system that was as remote from them as the burghers were remote from himself.
Dik worked the breech-mechanism to free it. There was a pause in the whining of the wind, and in the brief silence Dik heard, from the other side of the wall, someone working a breech-mechanism. It was something often heard at the wall: at once alarming and comforting.
Dik could feel the weight of Moylita Kaine’s novel in his pocket. He had brought it with him, in defiance of standing orders. After the events of the last two days he felt that carrying it was the least he owed her. He had no idea of what had happened to her. Carrying her book was the only way he knew of enacting her ideas. She talked in symbols, and Dik was prepared to act in symbols.
He could not act in reality, because he had realized at last what she had been telling him.
Climb the wall, Dik.
He glanced up at the bleak, unsymbolic wall beside him. It was known to be booby-trapped. Flatcake mines had been laid by both sides. The trip-wires and scramble-fence were touch-triggered and electrified. A man had only to show his hand above the top of the wall and a fusillade of shots would come from the other side. In the short time the war had been in progress, there were already scores of stories about grenade attacks brought on by nothing more than the sound of sliding snow.
He walked on, remembering the momentary resentment he had felt about the way Moylita had interpreted her novel for him. This was the same. In her negation of ideals, a man could climb a wall and write verse afterwards; Dik was making his own negation.
Then he remembered the sound of her voice coming from the Council Chamber. She had taken a risk in writing the story, and she had paid for it. Conscience and the sense of responsibility returned, and Dik thought again about climbing the wall.
He glanced up at the dark bulk beside him. It was high here, but there were firing-steps further along, where one could climb if necessary.
He became aware that somewhere around him was a hissing noise, and he halted at once. He crouched down, holding his rifle ready, looking about in the gloom. Then, from a long way away, from the depths of the valley, a shrill, thin sound reached him, distorted by the wind and the distance: the train was in the depot, letting its whistle be heard. Dik stood up again, relieved by the familiarity of the sound.
He walked on, rattling the bolt of his rifle. On the other side of the wall, someone else did the same.
And the hissing continued.
Another hour passed, and the time for the relief-sentry to come had almost arrived, when he saw the figure of one of the constables walking along the warmway towards him. Dik was frozen through, and he stood and waited gratefully for the other to reach him. But as the figure came nearer, Dik saw that he was raising his arms and holding his rifle above his head.
He halted a short distance from Dik, and said, in a foreign accent: “Please not shoot. I wish surrender.”
It was a young man of about his own age, the sleeves and legs of his protective clothing ripped and tom by the barbed wire. Dik stared at him in astonishment.
They were near one of the cisterns, and the hissing of gas was loud above the wind.
Dik himself could feel the bite of the freezing wind through the gashes in his jacket and trousers, and as a floodlight switched on he saw a smear of blood below his knee. He looked at the young soldier standing amazed before him, and said again, much louder: “Please don’t shoot. I’m surrendering.”
They were near one of the cisterns, and the hissing of gas was loud above the wind.
The enemy soldier said: “Here…my gun.”
Dik said: “Take my rifle.”
As Dik passed him his, the young man handed his own over, and raised his arms again.
“Cold,” said the enemy soldier. His goggles had iced over, and Dik could not see his face. “That way,” said Dik pointing towards the distant guardpost, and waving the muzzle of the captured rifle. “This way,” said the young soldier, pointing to the guardpost.
They walked on slowly in the wind and snow, Dik staring at the back of his enemy’s caped head in admiration and envy.
The Watched
I
Sometimes Jenessa was slow to leave in the mornings, reluctant to return to the frustrations of her job, and when she lingered in his house on these occasions Yvann Ordier had difficulty in concealing his impatience. This morning was one such, and he lurked outside the door of the shower-cubicle while she bathed, fingering the smooth leather case of his binoculars.
Ordier was alert to Jenessa’s every movement, each variation in sound giving him as clear a picture as there would be if the door were wide open and the plastic curtain held back: the spattering of droplets against the curtain as she raised an arm, the lowering in pitch of the hissing water as she bent to wash a leg, the fat drops plopping soapily on the tiled floor as she stood erect to shampoo her hair. He could visualize her glistening body in every detail, and thinking of their love-making during the night he felt a renewed lust for her.
He knew he was standing too obviously by the door, too transparently waiting for her, so he put down the binoculars-case and went into the kitchen and heated some coffee. He waited until it had percolated, then left it on the hot plate. Jenessa had still not finished her shower; Ordier paused by the door of the cubicle and knew by the sound of the water that she was rinsing her hair. He could imagine her with her face uptilted towards the spray, her long dark hair plastered flatly back above her ears. She often stood like this for several minutes, letting the water run into her open mouth before dribbling away, coursing down her body; twin streams of droplets would fall from her nipples, a tiny rivulet would snake through her pubic hair, a thin film would gloss her buttocks and thighs.
Again tom between desire and impatience, Ordier went to his bureau, unlocked it, and took out his scintilla detector.
He checked the batteries first; they were sound, but he knew they would have to be replaced soon. He made frequent use of the detector b
ecause he had discovered by chance a few weeks before that his house had become infested with several of the microscopic scintillas, and since then he had been searching for them every day.
There was a signal the instant he turned on the detector, and he walked through the house listening for subtle changes in the pitch and volume of the electronic howl. He traced the scintilla to the bedroom, and, by switching in the directional circuit and holding the instrument close to the floor, he found it a few moments later. It was in the carpet, near where Jenessa’s clothes were folded over a chair.
Ordier parted the tufts of the carpet, and picked up the scintilla with a pair of tweezers. He took it through into his study. This was the third he had discovered this week, and although there was every chance it had been brought into the house on someone’s shoes, it was nevertheless unsettling to find one. He put it on a slide, then peered at it through his microscope. There was no serial number.
Jenessa had left the shower, and was standing by the door of the study.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Another scintilla,” Ordier said. “In the bedroom.”
“You’re always finding them. I thought they were supposed to be undetectable.”
“I’ve got a gadget that locates them.”
“You never told me.”
Ordier straightened, and turned to face her. She was naked, with a turban of golden towelling around her hair.
“I’ve made some coffee,” he said. “Let’s have it on the patio.”
Jenessa walked away, her legs and back still moist from the shower. Ordier watched her, thinking of another girl, the Qataari girl in the valley, and wishing that his response to Jenessa could be less complicated. In the last few weeks she had become at once more immediate and more distant, because she aroused in him desires that could not be fulfilled by the Qataari girl.
He turned back to the microscope and pulled the slide gently away. He tipped the scintilla into a quiet-case—a soundproof, lightproof box where twenty or more of the tiny lenses were already kept—then went to the kitchen. He collected the percolator and cups, and went outside to the heat and the rasping of cicadas.
An Infinite Summer Page 13