Days Like Today

by Rachel Ingalls

  *

  After he’d seen death once, he began to expect it. It was all around, just waiting for its time. Even in years of peace, when it was usually hidden away, it was natural: a part of life. Other losses began to strike him as equally shocking but not natural: the loss of mental and spiritual power in everyone, including himself, and in the country at large – a draining away of honesty and fair dealing: an overall abandonment of principles, a general debasement.

  Few of the changes were immediate. There were stages and developments, as in the growth of plants or the progress of a disease. The moral decay he saw had been going on for years but because he had been part of it, he hadn’t been particularly aware of it. The fact that it dismayed him meant that apparently he still had some virtue left: just enough to cause him pain without doing good to anyone else.

  He remembered a time during his recuperation: they were all in a shelter, waiting for the bombardment. There were so many people that his main worry was of the air giving out, although as soon as he thought about that he began to sense the claustrophobia and impending panic in everyone around him. That reminded him that an outbreak of hysteria could be worse than mild suffocation. The hands and hair, the bodies and clothing of strangers were pressed tightly to him – sometimes even in his face. A child suddenly complained, ‘Something bit me,’ and a few people laughed, which broke the tension. But shortly after that a woman screamed, ‘My necklace – it’s gone!’ She started to call out, ‘Thief, thief,’ but a crowd of other voices told her to quit. Before the fighting, a lot of people would have murmured, ‘Poor woman.’ And even a year after it had begun, they would have thought: Stupid bitch, why didn’t she hide it better? Necklaces aren’t to wear, they’re to sell. But finally most of them, like him, envied the thief and asked themselves why they hadn’t been lucky enough to spot the necklace so that they could have stolen it themselves.

  His wife was good at sneaking away with things: food, clothing, small objects – anything that caught her eye. He never commented. He’d notice what she’d managed to steal, or get the kids to steal, and he’d be glad of his share.

  *

  Their neighbors were back; first one family, then two more, and at last all of them who were still alive or not caught between borders and behind lines. He and his wife lied about how long they’d been at home. They made it seem that they’d arrived a few hours ahead of the others, and had spent all their time cleaning and scrubbing and unbricking the well. ‘No fuel?’ they said; ‘no, we’re in the same state. We’re all in the same boat.’ ‘Yes,’ the children agreed, lying expertly. Telling lies was a peacetime skill as well as a wartime necessity.

  He had beds and mattresses. Other people were lucky if they owned one blanket to share among the whole family. Everything was obvious, of course. The neighbors knew. And he knew what they thought of him. But everyone realized that nobody else – and certainly none of them – would have acted differently. The laws of the lawless were in operation: First come, first served; finders keepers, losers weepers.

  After the neighbors came the refugees: twenty thousand of them in a procession that looked like a picture of the damned let out of Hell. This time the aid workers were at the head of the column instead of the tail end. They’d learned that if they didn’t introduce and explain the distribution system, householders would simply beat up any one who came to the door. As for a slowly moving line of unarmed people, most of them related to the enemy – that presented an opportunity for reprisal without injury. Even the smallest children turned up with sticks and stones.

  Two immense refugee groups were herded across their territory. After that, the numbers were fewer, although his wife said that the neighboring district had had fifty thousand marched through.

  When the count dropped, the so-called friendly refugees joined the human flood and the housing system began. In the first settlement they had eight orphaned children billeted on them. He’d managed to rebuild the big bed so that all the refugees could sleep in it, jammed up against each other like sardines in a can. His wife was allocated food rations for the orphans and – as long as her family was taking care of refugees – for herself and her husband and children, too. They were given bread. There was nothing else. For six weeks they had bread. And they were grateful.

  One late evening he headed for home with a pile of lumber on his back. The light down by the horizon was a strange, bruised purple. All he could hear was his breathing and his feet moving. As he thought about how his children were growing up in a world without school and books and religion, he heard the howling of a dog. He stopped, and heard it again. It had seemed immeasurably far away at first but while he was listening to the repetition, he placed it: the sound must be coming from the quarry, which meant that it had to be human.

  He told his wife about it and she said, ‘Forget you heard it. Don’t interfere. Nobody falls in by mistake nowadays.’

  *

  Since there was no longer any local or national economy as people had once known it, he set up a business of exchange and reciprocal favors, which he ran together with a man he happened on while out walking or, as he called it, foraging. He was always looking for anything that could be used in some way.

  The man was middle-aged and husky, yet despite his look of strength there was a sadness about him. He didn’t talk much. When he did, there was a melancholy in his voice, too. Before the war he’d been a cellist in a symphony orchestra, so he said. Below the knee his left leg ended in a wooden peg that he’d made himself while he was in the hospital, waiting to be released. He introduced himself as ‘Peg-leg’. He said that everybody was going to remember him by his disability in any case, so he might as well get used to it. And nothing was going to be the same again after all this mess, so it wasn’t such a bad idea to begin with a new name to go with the new life; otherwise it could break your heart to keep thinking about how things used to be. ‘Is there any work around here,’ he asked, ‘for an ex-soldier?’

  ‘That depends. What can you do?’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘You can work with me,’ he suggested. ‘I’m a carpenter: beds, tables, chairs, doors, window frames. Even roofing.’

  ‘I could learn all that.’

  ‘Where are you living?’

  ‘I’m not anywhere,’ Peg-leg told him. ‘I was passing through, but now I’ll find someplace. I can stay and work with you till spring. Then I’ll move on.’

  They’d meet in the morning and start off to town together to look for jobs to do. There was plenty of work for carpenters. He liked Peg-leg because he was serious, a good worker and, like himself, injured. In the hospital, and whenever he’d met people around that time, he couldn’t understand the tactlessness that made them all say the same thing: Lucky it wasn’t the right hand. But now he knew that that was the truth. Without his right hand, everything would have been difficult, every movement unnatural and perhaps never possible to relearn.

  At home his wife struggled with the children and with the orphans, whom she resented. He was glad to get out of the house every morning, even in the worst weather. And when it was a fine day, his spirits would rise as he breathed the clear air and looked at the trees and, off in the distance, saw Peg-leg waiting at the gate where they met. One day he felt that he’d woken from darkness into light; he was well again. He might be missing one hand, but he was alive and healthy and still young and still a man who could find work and feed his family. And he was out of the fighting. And he had a friend.

  *

  They got through the worst of the winter and his mind was filled with the thought of a new pair of boots. His wife dreamt of the moment when life would become so normal that a dentist would move to a nearby town and she’d be able to find the time and the money to make an appointment.

  There wasn’t a day when somebody in the house didn’t have a bad cold. Sometimes they were all down with colds and fevers, except his wife: she couldn’t afford to be sick, she said.

  The
birds started to come back and there was a hint of spring in the softer winds: it wasn’t quite there but it was anticipated. He began to notice – in the mud and melting snow – the tracks and droppings of small animals. One day after a long thaw he saw two cats and a dog. He warned everyone in the family: a tame animal, reverting to the wild, could be as dangerous as any genuinely wild creature never on friendly terms with man. Occasionally it could be worse, because it would be fearful and full of mistrust. It could attack, unprovoked. It would almost certainly carry diseases; a bite or scratch might be fatal. It wouldn’t be a bad idea, he said, to carry a stick.

  Just as what was left of the flower bed began to produce green shoots under the retreating snows, the orphan children were moved on. He saw them waiting outside the front door for the truck that would take them away. They were skinny and hollow-eyed, their clothing in tatters. His own children were beginning to look well tended and fatter in comparison. And, following the example of their elders, they had been using every opportunity to persecute their weaker companions. He’d never said anything, because the house – together with the food and the children – was his wife’s business. But now he was touched by pity at their malnourished, hopeless look. He went to where she hid the food. The child on guard asked, ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘You shut up,’ he answered. He took the refugee children a few scraps – enough so that they’d have something to get them through a long journey. They ate the food straight away. ‘I hope they find you some place better than this,’ he told them.

  There was no better place. The whole country was exactly like his own neighborhood except that in the cities it was easier for your neighbors to steal from you and there was a greater danger of sudden bombardment and siege.

  ‘I’m sorry we didn’t have more to give you,’ he added. The children listened with a dead look on their faces. You did have more, they were thinking, and you gave it to your own children.

  When the aid workers arrived, one of the orphans – an undersized little boy, who had been in the habit of following him around – ran back, snatched up his right hand and pressed his face to it.

  He felt the small hands and a warm wetness, as if the child had licked his knuckles. Then the boy turned and ran off.

  His wife was standing in the doorway, holding the baby, who was screaming. ‘Did he bite you?’ she asked.

  He’d have felt better if he’d been bitten. The gesture had probably been meant as a kiss.

  ‘I thought the little bastard was going to bite you,’ she said. ‘That’s all we need. Make sure he didn’t break the skin.’

  He didn’t bother to look. Who could afford medicine? And black-market medicine was likely to be adulterated with so many substances that it could kill you all on its own.

  ‘Imagine if they were ours,’ he said.

  Their children would be all right. They were adept at every dirty trick of the petty criminal. If they had to, they’d kill and eat any family chosen to take them in.

  She looked at him in a way that told him his weakness was disgusting. ‘We’ve lost the bread ration too,’ she said.

  ‘There’ll be more.’

  ‘No. They’re moving all the kids out.’

  ‘They’ll bring us some others.’

  ‘How do you know? Maybe they will, maybe not. You don’t know. I’ve seen people starve to death. Nobody starves in the army. You only find out about that when you’re captured.’

  Or sent back, wounded. ‘We’ll see,’ he said.

  The refugee children were counted and loaded into the trucks and then counted again. One of the aid workers said that the orphans’ place would soon be taken by others – in fact, someone should call about the transaction in the afternoon. His wife looked up at that. ‘How many?’ she asked. ‘No idea,’ the man answered, in the way many people with a little power had acquired over the past years: you could tell from the tone of voice how good it made them feel to be able to give you – truthfully or untruthfully – information you didn’t want or no information at all when you really had to know.

  As soon as the trucks were out of sight, one of the children mentioned food: could they have something to eat? As a present, like the orphans.

  It wasn’t exactly tattling, so he couldn’t feel angry. He told them again that the orphans didn’t have anything. Another one of the children piped up, ‘Those aid people have to give them so much food every day, or else they’re arrested for keeping the money.’

  ‘But they may have a long trip before they get to where they’re going. I told you.’

  ‘You gave them our food?’ his wife screamed. She came at him from the doorway and hit him across the face. The blow made a loud noise. His cheek, ear and eye burned with the impact. She called him a stupid son of a bitch. Ordinarily he would have let things go until she calmed down, especially in front of the kids and while she was holding the baby against her hip, but this time he knew that it was important for him to keep his authority. When she came at him again for a second try, he punched her in the breast and then slapped her hard on the side of the face. She landed several feet away, gasping and on her knees, with the baby setting up a piercing cry. The children crouched against the wall.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he told them. ‘Your mother needs some time to rest. Let’s go for a walk.’ He held out his good hand. ‘Come on,’ he coaxed. For a terrible moment he was afraid that they might run away. But the smallest girl finally moved towards him in short, tottering steps, holding out her arms for him to lift her up. And after her, the others followed.

  He led them out of the house, and began to tell them a story as they walked. Their need for stories was almost as great as their hunger for food. They were always begging to be told a story, usually one that they’d already heard.

  He knew that he had won. When they returned to the house, his wife would regret what she’d done; she’d think that she had deserved to be punished. And he’d appear to be apologetic too, although he’d taken care not to strike her too hard. If he hadn’t been injured, he’d be able to handle her with a softer touch: he didn’t like hurting her. But if she was going to hit him in front of his own kids, she’d better be prepared to be laid out flat. He was the man of the house, after all. The children had to respect him. If he’d still had both hands, he’d have slung her over his back, carried her to the old millpond and dumped her in from the wooden bridge – that was what they’d done centuries ago to the witches and the gossips and the whores.

  The children began to ask questions about the story he was telling. He answered and went on. He threw in a few extra jokes. They all began to enjoy the walk, the fresh air, and being together. He turned the story into the nonsense tale he and his army friends used to recite when they’d been drinking: about the poor boy and the contest to win the hand of the princess and give her the kiss of true love.

  The version he used for them was always heavily censored. Some sections were his own invention. For instance, as he told it, the boy started to have good luck when he paid attention at school and his studious efforts brought results at the end of a year – a year and a day: the teachers at the school awarded him one of the entrance tickets to the palace dinner. Many tickets had been distributed throughout the length and breadth of the land but they weren’t given to just anybody, because you had to earn prizes and treasures in this life. If you didn’t earn them, you didn’t deserve them.

  He could have chosen other stories but since this was the one all the children liked best, he knew he could slip in some moralizing and get away with it. He was surprised to find that many of his interpolations, and even the offshoots into the sententious, produced requests for more, just as if they’d been part of the original fabric.

  The food list was especially good; the main portion represented the combined efforts of his combat unit over a period of years. But the best sections had been made up one winter’s night by a friend of his to whom rhyme came easily – a lighthearted young man who’
d been blown to pieces in the same explosion that had taken away his own left hand.

  The children would listen, entranced, sometimes joining in. And then they’d insist on having everything repeated. One of the best-loved sections described the clothes everyone at the palace wore to the ball before the kissing contest began. They loved the clothes and the food, the names of the characters, the music of the words, the fact that it was all unreal and sounded silly and that there was also a beautiful princess in the story. And, of course, that the hero won and everything ended happily.

  Only the children who were seriously ill failed to respond to the poor boy and the princess.

  In the army the favored verses were the ones that dealt with the ‘kissing’, which involved the princess trying out all the men, and vice versa, until the hero – the poor boy – won.

  ‘For true love is sweetest,’ he told his children, ‘and true love is best, and whoever finds true love is happy and blest.’

  When they returned from their walk, his wife was standing in the doorway, breathing out a narrow cloud like a banner. The air was cold enough to see your breath, but he’d smelled the nicotine from a distance. He stopped in front of her and held out his hand. From behind her back she produced the cigarette. He took a drag and handed it to her again. He half-closed his eyes as he exhaled. That was when it was best: on the way out, where you could look at it in the air, while you were still tasting it.