The tram travels along a city street, lined on either side with bright goldrush buildings that inexplicably lift Maryanne’s spirits. The goldrush that changed the city overnight is not so far removed in time from where she sits: not fresh, but not quite history. Not so distant that she can’t imagine swaggering miners, pockets bulging, standing on the footpaths and marvelling at the city that gold built – that they built. In gladness let us sing … The buildings, decorated with gargoyles, ancient flowers and old European gods, line the street with quiet satisfaction. They sparkle and she feels a sudden rush of ownership. We did that once. The loud, crass, swaggering best in ourselves somehow made beautiful things. The bombs of this never-ending war are too far away to bother these ornate and intricate facades. The war will come and the war will go, and when it’s gone these buildings, these monuments to a not-so-distant time, will still be lining the street, the quiet satisfaction that beams from them in the midday sun unruffled.
As Maryanne descends from the tram, she hears a howl and a cry coming from the front of the Town Hall. And she looks round to see a group of women sharing a newspaper. It is spread open and flattened against a wall, the women at the edges of the group pinning it there. Somebody is sobbing. A further howl rises from the group and people passing stare without stopping; a man, stepping up from an underground toilet and onto the footpath, pauses for a moment and moves on. How did this happen? A few years earlier, anybody – everybody – would have stopped. Now, nobody does. And it’s not that they don’t care. It’s just that there’s only so much care to go around.
Maryanne nears the group of women. She can now see in the newspaper what she knows to be column after column of names. Death fills the pages. A woman, fashionably dressed, possibly on her way to some fashionable club for lunch, collapses onto the footpath, howling one moment, sobbing the next. And all over the city, women like her – and fathers and mothers, and sisters, brothers, cousins, lovers and friends – are opening newspapers or staring at noticeboards on town halls and post-office walls in silent, breathless dread. Maryanne can almost hear the wings of dark Death beating in the air, then tapering into the sky, and knows they will descend again with the next day’s newspapers bringing the next day’s roll call of mortality.
She’s seen it all again and again. Everybody has. Every day a new howl joins the old howls on the great march to death. The fashionably dressed woman suddenly leaps to her feet, tears streaming down her face, and screams at a young man walking past, following him down towards the station, crying and screaming until she is dragged back by her friends. Just a group of women: going to lunch one minute, dressed for a day out, and all changed the next.
Maryanne can’t help wondering whether there is also some part of them, neither spoken of nor acknowledged, that longed for an end to all the waiting as much as they dreaded it. Longed for something … final. Like hearing the screeching brakes of a runaway tram and both dreading and longing for the crunch of a collision all in the one moment of horrible anticipation.
Surely some deep longing for it all has been conjured up by the magicians of darkness. Why else would a whole civilisation rush to the killing place? And so when the Wart speaks of death and blood and honour and sacrifice, are the hoarse cries that follow only cries of anguish, or are they also of some deep, unspeakable longing? Unspeakable pleasure. Everyone ecstatically mad. Is this not when the beast rears its head, roused by the magic words of ‘blood’, ‘death’, ‘duty’ and ‘sacrifice’? And so when the beast howls it sounds like a howl of pain, but is it not also the howl of some deep craving, some deep pleasure that cannot be expressed any other way? Maryanne asks herself this, wondering if she too has not gone mad even to be asking it. God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour. Death, oh glorious … if this is what it takes so that we shall never be the same again, then let death rain down.
Maryanne turns from the group of women. Are we all damned? And mad? For as deep as that woman’s sorrow is, the worship of death that put everyone on the great march to war is everywhere too. The dark conjurers who summon up the hell in all of us – the beast in all of us – have held sway. The beast demands death. The beast craves it. Not just pain, but the deep pleasure of unutterable sorrow, the rapture of unspeakable loss, of oblivion. And it will not be satisfied until the last drop of blood has drained into the mud of ancient battlefields and swamps and there is nothing left.
Maryanne’s legs feel as though they are about to give way and fold beneath her. What a time, what a time to be bringing life into the world when all it craves is death. A spring breeze blows the dropped newspaper gently along the footpath and up the street. Maryanne wavers on the spot before boarding her connecting tram. I can’t do this … I can’t … I …
She gets out at the library and spends the next hour sitting in the blissful sanctuary of the domed reading room to which she comes most days, driven, often as not, by sheer restlessness, this need to be out, to walk through these days, through this valley of death that she can’t tear her eyes away from. She sits for an hour: the huge domed reading room her cathedral, and the wisdom this cathedral contains her scriptures. After her hour, and it has not escaped her notice that the hour she regularly spends in the reading room is equivalent to the hour she would once have spent at mass, she places her books on a trolley, a trolley that, in time, some quietly stooped custodian of the library will push from one letter of the alphabet to another, shelving the books, all in their place, as if the library in all its alphabetically arranged order were a model of how the world ought to be. Or could be. Was once, and will be again.
From the library she takes a short walk away from the city and pauses at a narrow sandstone facade, complete with gargoyles, glinting golden in the sun, and once again, uplifted, she feels that odd sense of possession. We did this once, in all our crass, swaggering finery. And she thinks ‘we’ because at that moment she possesses her city; it is hers as much as she is its – the best of it. And we will come through, she murmurs, staring down at her belly, we will come through somehow.
***
What Katherine might think, Maryanne can only imagine, for Maryanne is about to take the lift up to the offices of the city’s suffragettes. Although, they don’t go around calling themselves that. Not to her. Officially, they are the Women’s Political Association and Women’s Peace Army, which, when Maryanne first read about them, sounded very earnest and daunting. Not her sort of thing at all. But the more she heard about them, the more she wanted to know. She’s never been one to troop off in a gang, and she’s never belonged to any party or joined any movement, but she was curious. And curiosity won out. So she’s been here before, she knows the way up the five flights that lead to the offices, and the women who frequent them know her. This is also one of the few places in the city, along with the library’s reading room, where she feels at home – though it is perhaps not so much a cathedral as a wayside chapel for Maryanne and a soup kitchen, for they fed people here during the big strike. It is a place that is many things.
‘Back again,’ a young woman says, then disappears into a discussion. It’s always the same. Busy. Lots of talk. Somebody always running round with a sheet of paper in hand or carrying a stack of pamphlets. Maryanne rarely says much, and nobody minds: swollen belly, no wedding ring. Nobody cares.
‘Here, what do you think?’
The same young woman thrusts one of the pamphlets under Maryanne’s nose. The gesture is not only eager, but is posed, Maryanne suspects; something in the manner of saying: well, let’s see what the people think. Maryanne smiles, she is evidently one of the people. Or so the young woman imagines. One look at her and Maryanne knows she is from what the northern half of the city calls the ‘other side of the river’. Posh. Private school. Privileged. And there is presumption in the way she thrusts the pamphlet into Maryanne’s hands that annoys her. But, at the same time, this young woman is keen to know what she thinks, and Maryanne can’t help but be flattered. And also anxious. She
’s never been asked to give her opinion before. The question is also posed in the manner of a welcome: a way of saying that Maryanne, one of the people, is also one of them. And there is something reassuring in being welcomed into their company. Something that makes her feel less alone.
She gazes at the pamphlet, which announces a meeting to be held the next month. An important meeting. A meeting the times call out for. The words ‘peace’, ‘sisterhood’ and ‘new world’ rise to meet her in large letters, but she barely takes in the rest before the young woman speaks again.
‘Well?’
The young woman smiles, radiating, Maryanne can’t help but think, a fantastic innocence. It is evidently her work and she wants to know what Maryanne thinks. And straightaway Maryanne knows that it is the last thing she will tell her. Her impulse is to say that the world doesn’t want peace, only death – don’t you see it? It’s everywhere. Sweet glorious death and exquisite tears. That’s all the world wants. It wants to gorge on tragedy so that nothing will ever be the same again, then collapse into deep, pleasurable sleep. And let them, let them have it. I’m tired of them all. Let them have the death they crave, until the last of the craving is wrung out of them and they are exhausted by it and finally look forward to just living and we can start all over again with what’s left. Then, perhaps then, they will listen to your words. But not now. Throw your pamphlets to the wind and see where they land. She wants to say this and all the things that are bottled up in her, which have been brewing inside her all through the year, and which she’s never told anyone. All the strange visions that come to her, too strange to tell, constantly, haunting her: visions of hell and beasts and death. She’d like to say all of this, but this young woman radiates such fantastic innocence that she can’t. And so she finds herself looking up and saying, ‘They’re wonderful words. Really wonderful.’
And they are. She believes they are. Just too wonderful for the times. The young woman, no fool, eyes her suspiciously.
‘We’ll know just how wonderful if people come.’
‘I hope they do. I really hope so.’
It is just as the conversation seems finished and the young woman is turning away that Maryanne sees a small pile of leaflets demanding ‘Justice for Milhaus’. She picks one up and reads it, and the young woman turns back towards her.
‘You know the case?’
Maryanne speaks without looking up. ‘How could I not?’
‘And what do you know?’
‘Only what I read in the papers.’
Here the young woman raises her eyebrows and rolls her eyes. She and Maryanne nod in silent agreement, as if to say, ah, the papers!
‘I can’t read them any more,’ the young woman says.
‘I find I can’t but read them. It’s like lifting a rock and seeing what’s under it. You can’t take your eyes off them. At least, I can’t. They show us who we are now. What we are. As though we looked deep inside ourselves, and this is what we found. People are …’ Maryanne shakes her head.
She doesn’t say that she’s developed this odd connection with Milhaus, the feeling that they are both on the outside looking in on a city gone mad; the feeling that whatever happens to him happens to her. The way we sometimes make these connections: if the sick dog lives, so will I; if Milhaus comes through these times, so will I.
‘… people are being led,’ the young woman says, finishing Maryanne’s sentence for her.
Maryanne’s eyes are alight. ‘You think so? You really think so?’
‘Yes—’
Maryanne is becoming bolder with every moment and doesn’t let the young woman finish. But it’s not rude, and the young woman doesn’t take it that way. Maryanne’s finally got a chance to say what she thinks, and she’s going to say it. And the young woman, far from put out, is looking at her with a touch of admiration, perhaps amused admiration, as though just discovering that this middle-aged woman, swollen belly, but ordinary-looking really, albeit with striking eyes that are now lit up, is a bit of a surprise package. And Maryanne is looking back, gauging the amused respect in the young woman’s look, while also gauging that, smart as she is – and oh, she’s sharp all right – she needs a little lesson in life as well. From one of the people.
‘They didn’t need to be led. Don’t you see? They were just waiting for it. Ready.’ She closes her eyes, the memory of the mother and her children just a few hours earlier suddenly vivid again. Give that to your fancy man … Hun’s whore …
‘Perhaps. All the same, people need someone to blame. To hate.’ The young woman pauses. ‘And Milhaus was born to fall and be hated. The perfect scapegoat. This whole scandal was concocted to make you vote yes. Not you,’ she adds, pointing at Maryanne, ‘but people. Enough people voting yes will give the prime minister what he wants. A spy, one of our own, among us only helps. Make people scared enough and they’ll do whatever you want. The papers, the prime minister—’
‘The Wart.’
‘The what?’
‘I call him the Wart. Can’t you see it? I can. This large wart on thin, spindly legs.’
The young woman looks at Maryanne with questioning eyes, then laughs. Soon they are both laughing and the women behind them, deeply engaged in discussion, turn round, a puzzled look in their eyes, as if to say, what is that sound?
The young woman is laughing because she can see it. Of course, a wart. Like those cartoons of politicians and kings: bullfrogs in suits, walruses wearing spectacles – a wart on legs. She nods at Maryanne, a nod that says: yes, I can see it. A wart. And he will always be a wart now. Their laughter subsides. The young woman turns serious again.
‘Imagine how alone he feels.’
‘Milhaus?’
‘Yes. Hero one minute, villain the next. The enemy. A Hun.’ She pauses, lifting one of the leaflets. ‘The world loves you one day and turns on you the next. How alone. How strange.’
‘Indeed.’
‘He has no family. No wife, no children. No mother, it seems. At least, no one’s ever seen her. No father. No brothers or sisters. No one. Nobody visits. Or wants to.’
‘Nobody?’
The young woman looks at her quizzically. Surprised. ‘You didn’t know?’
‘I didn’t.’ Maryanne turns worried eyes to her. ‘Nobody visits at all?’
‘No.’
‘How awful.’
‘If only someone would. Just so he knows, he’s not alone.’ It’s offered as a sort of wish, but to whom or what, the young woman doesn’t seem to know. Her voice is vague, as if she’s thinking aloud. Maryanne nods slowly. The young woman continues. ‘The Germans have a word for people like him. Wunderkind. Wonder child.’ She laughs. ‘The Germans always have a word. What a language!’ And here she looks directly at Maryanne as she speaks. ‘Das Leben gehört den Lebenden an, und wer lebt, muss auf Wechsel gefasst sein …’
The effect is immediate. She is, at once, back in that drab little back room listening to Viktor speak, transported by the sound of the words and the sound of this young woman’s voice. And it is like hearing an old fairytale, or the words of some ancient magic spell, a spell that Maryanne instantly falls under. And it is not just Maryanne, for this young woman is transformed by the words she speaks, possessed by them, almost speaking from another time. It is thrilling, and it’s not just the sound of the words themselves: it is hearing the language of the enemy again, such a beautiful language and such beautiful sounds, spoken aloud in a public place. And it is not just Maryanne who is enthralled, for the women behind them have stopped talking and are listening in wonder at the sheer strangeness, the foreignness, of these sounds.
There is a long silence, the young woman seemingly oblivious of the effect she has had on them. And, as if having fallen under her own spell, she seems to be slowly returning to the here and now, a sleepwalker waking and becoming aware of everyone around her again. And, smiling at Maryanne, she slowly repeats herself, ‘Das Leben gehört den Lebenden an …’ then trails off into dre
amy silence.
And without thinking it or willing it, immersed in that same dreamy silence, Maryanne murmurs, ‘Schöne.’
The young woman looks at Maryanne anew. ‘You speak German?’
‘No,’ says Maryanne.
The young woman’s look is an inquiring one that seems to say, that may be the case, but you know at least this much. And how did you come by such knowledge? And it is then that she shifts her gaze from Maryanne’s eyes to her belly and, with a faint raising of her brows, answers her own question. And it is then that she repeats the word the Germans have for those like Milhaus: slowly, lingering on all three syllables. ‘Wun-der-kind.’
Maryanne, unable to speak for a moment, asks herself if she’s read the comment correctly, then gathers herself. ‘And the wonder child had to fall?’
The young woman, snapping out of her dreamy state, back to whatever it was they were talking of – Milhaus, of course; yes, Milhaus – nods before answering. ‘Perhaps.’
Maryanne nods back, convinced that some odd sort of bond now exists between them. At least, more than it did before. Enough to prompt her to ask, ‘What is your name?’
‘I’m Vera,’ the young woman replies. ‘And you?’
‘Maryanne.’
They smile, reach out their hands, and shake.
‘Cheerio, Maryanne,’ Vera says. ‘Must go.’
And with that, Vera finally turns back to the group of women behind them, who are once again deep in discussion about the planned meeting. ‘Peace’, ‘sisterhood’, a ‘new world’. Fine words, Maryanne notes. Even wonderful. But she’s still dwelling on the effect of hearing the wondrously strange language of the enemy spoken in a public place and can’t concentrate on the women’s conversation.
She glances down distractedly at the leaflet on the table in front of her: ‘Justice for Milhaus’. Nobody. No mother, no father. Why didn’t she know? She didn’t know, she concludes, because the newspapers didn’t tell her or anybody else, in case Milhaus became human and people started to feel sympathy for him. For that would never do. She picks up the leaflet and puts it in her bag.
Year of the Beast Page 8