by Paul Park
“And did you have a lover there?” asked Marcelline.
“Yes,” said Charity. That day she was ironing the sheets, and she paused for a moment in her work and put the iron up into its stand.
“What was he like?”
Charity ran her glove back through her hair. “He was dark, like me,” she said. “He had a high, pale forehead and long hair,” she said. “He had a beard.”
“Was he handsome?”
“No.” She frowned. “I don’t think so. Or at least—to me he was. He had beautiful hands.”
Often Mr. Taprobane would come down into the laundry, too, to listen to these stories. After a period of sullenness he had become fond of Princess Charity, and often came to help her with her work. Sometimes he brought newspapers for Charity to read aloud: Professor Sabian’s Free Word, as well as broadsheets from the Rim. These were full of accusations, rumors of hoarding and profiteering, and every morning they would publish a list of the condemned. Marcelline would lie on the mattress underneath the stairs, dressed in her expensive underwear, while the little man would sit in an untidy heap, twisted around his knees. Fascinated, they would listen as Charity read out the obituaries of princes, soldiers, lawyers, priests. It was practice for her, to see if she could read the names without inflection. But sometimes a description would conjure up a face into her mind, a cousin or a family friend, and then her tongue would stumble. And once she stopped and put the paper down when, in a list of miscellaneous names, she came across this one: “Starbridge, T.”
“What’s the matter?” asked Marcelline. “Sweetheart, what is it?” and she got up and put her arms around her, and held Charity’s face against her breast.
“I don’t know,” whispered Charity. “I just wish I knew sometimes. I just wish I knew for sure.”
Then she looked down, because Mr. Taprobane had gotten up too. He was holding up a flask of whiskey with a solemn expression on his face.
Charity smiled and reached down for it, and that was a mistake. In a little while she felt better. In a little while she was sitting cross-legged, drinking whiskey on the bed with her arm around the cripple’s shoulder. And then she let herself be coaxed upstairs, for drinking made her easy to persuade. “No wonder you’re unhappy,” said Marcelline. “This room would get the best of anyone.”
The laundry had no windows, and it stank of bleach. “No wonder you’re depressed,” said Marcelline. “Look at you, why do you wear such clothes? You’re such a beauty; why do you hide it?”
Though it was dangerously near evening, Charity allowed herself to be coaxed upstairs, and soon she was sitting in Marcelline’s bathroom, while the younger woman cut her hair. “I hate to do it,” Marcelline confided. “It’s beautiful stuff, but not very stylish, unless you keep it clean. Real Starbridge black, we used to call it; not very popular nowadays.”
I deserve a bit of cosseting, thought Charity, and after her haircut she found herself taking a bath in Marcelline’s huge bathtub. Mr. Taprobane had gone back to work, but Charity had barely noticed his departure, her head was so full of liquor. The windows were clouded up with steam, and Charity lay back and let herself be stroked, and rubbed with perfumed oils.
Marcelline was a big girl with a fine, full figure. Her skin was flushed from her exertion, and in the damp air of the bathroom, her hair hung wet around her face. Her legs were naked, and Charity could see her skin through her wet camisole, her nipples and her hair. “The gentlemen would love you, that’s for sure,” she said as she scrubbed Charity’s arms. “I mean it. I don’t understand why—oh my God.”
The girl had scraped her thumbnail along Charity’s palm, and the greasepaint, weakened by the water and the soap, had given way. Charity opened her eyes and jerked herself upright, splashing water on the floor. She tried to pull her hand away, but the girl wouldn’t let go. She was stronger than Charity, and she held Charity’s fingers open while she studied the scrape in the greasepaint that her thumbnail had made. She was staring at the tattoo of the silver rose. Then she let go suddenly and sat back on her heels beside the bathtub, bowing her head and making the gestures of respect.
Charity jumped to her feet. Terrified, she ran into Marcelline’s bedroom, covering her nakedness with a bathrobe of red silk. Then she hurried out into the hall and down the staircase, not thinking and not listening. Otherwise, she would have heard the stamp of heavy boots coming towards her up the stairs. But as it was, she ran down the steps until it was too late, and she saw on the landing below her the figure of a man.
In the middle of the stair she tried to stop herself, clutching at the banister, slipping down onto the steps. Panicked, she turned her head away, not bearing to look as the boots stamped towards her and then stopped. She closed her eyes and did not open them again until she felt a man’s fingers on her chin, gentle and strong, pulling her face around. Then she opened her eyes and found herself staring into the face of a young soldier standing on the step below.
He was dressed in the uniform of the Desecration League, and his fingers were dyed red. The throat of his tunic was closed by a pin in the shape of a child’s hand. He was a handsome man, with a hard, clean-shaven face, and he was smiling. “What have we here?” he asked.
Charity’s forehead was still hot, and her hair and skin were still dripping wet. She had tensed every muscle of her body; one hand held her robe closed, and the other was locked into a tight fist. This was the palm where Marcelline had scratched away the paint, and in her mind Charity uttered a prayer she did not think she knew, when the soldier reached down for her hand and started to caress her fingers, as if to loosen them.
“Please, sir,” she said. “Please, sir, may I go?”
The soldier smiled at her a moment, and then he bowed and stepped aside.
* * *
A week after this incident on the stairs, Mrs. Soapwood called Charity to her bedroom. By that time she was so pregnant that it was hard for her to move; her arms and legs were bloated, her skin shiny and green. Charity had heard rumors that she could no longer stomach solid food. Charity had heard that she had sent Mr. Taprobane out all over the city, searching for olive oil and mince pie, but then had vomited them up onto her bed.
Charity found these stories easy to believe. Already past the time of any natural confinement, Mrs. Soapwood lay gasping on the bed. The room stank of disinfectant and perfume, but there was another smell underneath those, the smell of something poisonous and sick.
Yet Mrs. Soapwood’s mind seemed clear enough. “A gentleman has come to see me about you,” she said. “He’s been here twice.”
Charity looked around the room. New municipal regulations had forbidden the private practice of religion, yet even so there was a shrine next to the bed. The icons had been removed, but the candles were still burning, and there was a brass bowl full of water, surrounded by framed photographs.
The blinds were drawn, and it was dark. Mrs. Soapwood lay on her side, breathing heavily, while the rain rattled on the windows. “You’re a pretty girl,” she said. “What do you think?”
“I’d rather not.”
“Very well. But think about it. There are worse than he. And it would be easier than the work you’re doing now.”
“I’ve thought about it.”
“Very well. But remember, it wouldn’t have to be what you have seen. I was thinking of something . . . elegant. Expensive, like a palace. You know the Starbridge language. I’d have them treat you like a princess.”
“No,” said Charity.
“You could wear a veil. You could make the illusion as perfect as you want. Only you would have to use the Starbridge language. That’s why they would come.”
For a moment Charity was afraid that Marcelline had betrayed her. Then she remembered how she had cursed at Mr. Taprobane and pushed him down into the mud. “I don’t know much,” she said. “Mostly abuse. Words I picked up from my mistress.”
“But that’s all you would need. Mostly abuse. That’s why t
hey would come.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” said Charity. “I’d rather not.”
Mrs. Soapwood turned over onto her back. “Very well,” she said. “Just think about it. I make no demands. Only I would like you to wear some better clothes. Dress as if you worked here. There—I have put some clothes out by the closet. Some of mine. Alter them to fit yourself. I can’t wear them anymore.”
The sheets where she had lain were rumpled and wet. They were thick and made of silk, but they had ridden up along one side to expose an old and rotten mattress stuffed with straw. Mrs. Soapwood groaned and shook her head. “I am very sick,” she said.
Charity came to her and sat down. “It will be over soon.”
“Yes. For better or worse. God help me, I am so afraid. Touch me. Put your hand on me.”
Charity slid her hands underneath the bedclothes. “Touch me!” cried Mrs. Soapwood. “Do you feel anything alive? Do you feel anything struggling? God help me, I have carried life before, and it was not like this.”
Every spring in Charn, with the coming of the rain, there was a plague of monstrous births. According to religious doctrine, this was a natural event. The twenty-seventh bishop had raised six women into sainthood for bearing children to the rain. But in recent generations even the priests had had their doubts. Chrism Demiurge himself had once expressed his skepticism. “I cannot believe that this rain is the literal semen of Beloved Angkhdt,” he had once remarked. His words had provoked riots in the slums.
Nevertheless, there had been no other theory. Books about the sugar children had been violently suppressed. Professor Sabian had spent four months in prison, and on a public scaffold in Durbar Square the priests had made him eat the pamphlet he had written on the subject, page by page. But now all that was different since the change of government. Mrs. Soapwood had a copy of the pamphlet by her bed, annotated and reprinted in an edition of ten thousand. “Sabian,” she said. “Promise me you’ll get me Sabian, when my time comes.”
* * *
During the first months of the new government, the National Assembly of Charn met in a converted bathhouse behind Wanhope Prison. The building had been abandoned since the end of winter, when it had been one of nine similar facilities. In winter, poor people would come from all over the city to stand naked in the enormous steam rooms, separated by concrete barriers according to their castes. The bishop’s secretary had been afraid that they might freeze to death in their unheated homes.
In warmer weather these bathhouses had been abandoned, and some had already been torn down. The one behind Wanhope Prison had been the largest of the nine, a single great amphitheater of stone, windowless, but domed with milky glass. In it, in November of the eighth phase of spring, the National Assembly had gathered to draft a new constitution. On November 12th, old style, a resolution came before the Board of Public Health, and the four members of the board had put the matter to the full assembly so that they could hear the debate before they voted.
The issue had originally been under the jurisdiction of Professor Sabian, for he was the board member for food and medical distribution. He had hoped to dispose of it quietly, to present the Board of Health with an accomplished fact, but members of the assembly who were hostile to his interests had caught news of it.
That month the assembly was bitterly divided. On the lowest levels of the amphitheater, in a circle around the dais, sat Professor Sabian and his moderates, sober men in dark clothes. Most had been professional men under the old Starbridge regime, clerks and small officials. In the amphitheater they formed a central fortress of middle-class solidity. But they were beleaguered in those days, surrounded by circles of extremists. That month especially, it seemed that every day in the debates, men would leave the lower seats and walk up through the upper benches, to where the followers of Raksha Starbridge sat along the highest edge.
In November the extremists formed the largest single group. They called themselves the Rim. Orange was their color; the delegates wore orange armbands, though many were distinguished better by their loud, strident voices and their drunkenness. Many were from the lowest classes, unused to any power but bitterness, full of a new importance that was breaking them apart.
Among them sat Raksha Starbridge, now called January First. He was slouching in his chair. By his side stood another prominent member of the Rim, a man named Valium Samosir. Still young, he had gained influence in the assembly by the beauty of his voice and his ability to transform the harsh and bitter hatreds of his party into polished words. Outside the assembly, too, he had become famous for his personal beauty. The common people had nicknamed him the Bishop of the Revolution. His austere, noble features were on posters all over the city.
He was just finishing his speech. “Gentlemen,” he said. “Far be it from me to impugn the honesty of any member of this council. Who can forget the first glorious days of our rebellion, when men like Martin Sabian stood alone against the forces of oppression? Who then could have doubted his patriotism, when he first raised the standard of revolt in Durbar Post Office? What man among us does not love him—let him dare to raise his hand. Who does not love him for his kindness, his compassion, his steadfast courage in the people’s fight? No one has loved him more than I. Even now I find it hard to raise my voice against him.
“But there are crimes of silence, as well as speech. That is what he stands accused of, and I too would be guilty if I were to remain silent. Even now he has not lied, gentlemen. Don’t think that. He has not spoken one word of falsehood in this chamber. But there are many kinds of lies—gentlemen, every day we have heard him speak. Every day we have sat mesmerized and listened in respectful silence while he outlined the minute details of public policy. Yet in this matter, which affects us all, he has said nothing. We have honored him with the most important post in our new government—minister of distribution. Yet now we learn that he, of all people, has conspired to release half a million criminals onto our streets. He is minister of distribution, let him tell us now what plans he has made to feed and clothe this multitude. What plans has he made to find them shelter, in a city where the recent fires have left one hundred thousand homeless, where most of the sixth ward is still under water? Gentlemen—I have seen them sleeping every night under the Embankment—these people are subsisting on five grams of artificial rice a day!”
Throughout the speech of Valium Samosir, the noise in the assembly had been building, until finally it blocked out his words. Delegates from the outer circles of the amphitheater stood on their chairs to hurl abuse down on the moderates, while the president of the assembly rang his bell. One drunken member, wearing an orange headband, beat the back of the chair in front of him with a wooden club. Raksha Starbridge said nothing, only slunk down deeper into his seat and made a cage out of his trembling fingers. Then suddenly, a smile passed over his lips; he turned towards Valium Samosir and winked.
The young man still had not finished. “Mr. President!” he cried, raising his hand. “Mr. President!” But it was no use. So in a little while he gave up, and crossed his arms over his chest, and stood scowling contemptuously out over the pandemonium that he had made.
He was a fastidious young man, well washed, his white shirt beautifully laundered. He was over six feet tall, but fine-boned, with high cheekbones and pale lips. So that when Professor Sabian stood up, even his supporters saw the contrast, the beautiful young man and the tiny old professor. Emaciated and intensely frail, Sabian stood leaning on his desk, supporting his weight on his knuckles. He seemed very tired, his neck bent, his head bowed low, as if overburdened by the weight of his features—his big eyes, his enormous nose and ears.
“Gentlemen,” he said, and the sound of his high voice succeeded where the bell of the president had failed, for all around him the assembly settled down to listen. “Gentlemen,” he said. “I sense an accusation in what my . . . honored colleague says, and yet I don’t understand it. What he says is true: I have given orders for the release of all the
political prisoners of the former government, a number which my sources put at not above three hundred thousand. And it is true: I did not think it necessary to advise this assembly of my decision. That is not a mark of my contempt for this assembly, as the honorable gentleman has implied, but of my trust: I still cannot believe that any citizen of this city could find it in his heart to disagree with my decision. But it seems I was mistaken.”
Professor Sabian raised his head for a moment to peer around the room, and then he looked back down at the notes upon his desk. “I was mistaken,” he said quietly. “Now we have heard this morning from the honorable gentleman, introducing Motion Number Four-four-one-c and d before the Board of Public Health. Several gentlemen have spoken up in favor of this bill, and still I don’t believe it. That any delegate of this assembly should seriously introduce a motion proposing that the gateways of the Mountain of Redemption be walled up and that three hundred thousand men and women there be left to starve, whose only crime was that they were enemies of our great enemy—brothers and sisters, these prisoners are the first heroes of our revolution. Many are in urgent need of medical attention.”
He paused for a moment, then went on. “Now I know. No one understands, as I do, the burden this will place on our resources. But in all conscience, we have no other choice. And there is a way—for the past week I have been working on the preliminary arrangements. They are practically complete. And I believe that with courage and confidence, and with God’s help . . . ,” but after that he could go no further. The assembly, which had been listening in silence, suddenly broke out into an uproar of shouting and abuse. It was a serious political mistake, to bring the name of God into that debate, for it touched everything that Sabian had said with the stigma of reaction. It was a slip of the tongue, and political observers later claimed it never would have happened if Professor Sabian had not been so tired, so broken down with working. He was not a religious man, not in the old sense.