by Wren, M. K.
Human beings were social animals. They weren’t made to live in solitude so absolute, so hopeless. They weren’t made to live celibate, sterile lives, to die in a void.
“Rachel, if we could only go on farther, across the Columbia, maybe, or south into California . . .”
“Of course, we could go on, but we have to make up our minds whether we want to continue to be farmers, or to take another step backward and become nomads. You can’t have both, Mary. We’ve been away from Amarna over two weeks, and we’ve covered less than two hundred miles. And even then, we may go home to find some of our animals dead, or something worse might’ve happened. The point is, if we choose to go searching over long distances for survivors, we’ll have to forfeit Amarna, and I wonder how long we’d survive as nomads. Most of the land we’d be traveling through won’t be exactly hospitable.”
Is that all it comes to—survival?
And Mary knew the answer.
Without a whimper, the hope died and left within her an irrevocable silence.
She said, “It would’ve been easier—more merciful, anyway—if we hadn’t lived through the winter.”
The wind gusted colder in the wake of those words. At length, Rachel said, “Maybe. And maybe something will put us out of our misery eventually. Right now, I’d prefer to pursue other options.”
“Other options?” Mary stared at Rachel’s shadow shape. “What other options do we have?”
“Well, there’s the problem of finding other survivors. Our trouble is there are only two of us. That forces us to choose between being farmers or nomads. But maybe somewhere—it’ll have to be somewhere fairly near—others were luckier in terms of numbers, so some of them would be free to leave home to make the same kind of search we are now. They’d look for exactly what we’re looking for. Maybe they couldn’t actually see our fires, but they could see our smoke. There’s hardly a day when we don’t have a fire of some kind going. We can’t find them, but they can find us—by our smoke.”
The hope that had seemed dead stirred. “Yes, anyone following 101 is bound to see our smoke, and that’s the only way to travel along the coast.” Then the hope sighed into quiescence again. “So, all we can do is go home and wait and . . . survive.”
Rachel leaned forward, rested her elbows on her knees. “There’s something else we can do. We can prepare our legacy to the future.”
Mary laughed, heard the acid edge in it. What kind of legacy could they leave? And to whom? To what future?
Rachel said levelly, “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. There’s nothing we can do about the hellish mess humankind has made of this living world, and there’s nothing we can do about our lost civilization, except . . . Mary, when you try to define civilization, what you come up with has to include the factor of accumulation. The discoveries of each generation are its legacy to all those that follow.”
Unseen in some indefinable distance, an owl cried. Mary said, “But the chain is broken now.”
“Yes, but it’s been broken before.” Rachel’s voice was as soft and as poignant as the owl’s. “Not so totally. Usually it breaks in one culture, while it’s maintained in another. A great deal is always lost in those breaks. We don’t know how much was lost in the dark ages in Europe, but we know what was saved. Western civilization was built on it.”
“And was that a good thing?”
There was a hint of annoyance in Rachel’s reply, but it didn’t last. “It depends, I suppose, on how you define good. A lot of extraordinary things happened, or were invented, discovered, or created in the context of Western civilization that I’d call good. I know far more about the universe than Solomon in all his wisdom, not because I’m so much wiser, but because of the two and a half millennia of civilization that occurred since he died. Every painting I did was a child of that civilization. And shards of that civilization have survived.”
“What, Rachel? What could possibly have survived?”
“I don’t know what might have survived elsewhere. I only know what has survived in our possession. The books, Mary.”
Mary shuddered, folded her arms against her body, overtaken by a sensation of fear she could neither control nor understand.
Rachel meant the books at Amarna, her own and those she had scavenged the last two years. She had spent every hour she could purloin from their punishing schedule reading those books, sorting them by subject and author, separating out the duplicates. Mary had never taken part in that, had avoided looking at the books, much less reading them. She hadn’t even recognized her denial of them, nor let herself wonder why she denied the written word, which had once been her craft, her art, her life.
Now, as she thought about the books, she found herself suddenly and silently weeping, and the ravening agony of grief doubled her over.
Now she understood.
It was fear of this knife-edged pain that had blinded her to what was so obvious to Rachel. For Mary, handling and reading those books was tantamount to touching and talking to the corpses of loved ones. They were reminders of what was lost. It was that loss she had wanted to deny as she wanted to deny the darkness before her now.
Yet now the grief, inch by inch, second by second, surrendered. She felt herself trembling, and it wasn’t because of revived pain or even the cold wind. It was a manifestation of hope.
Our legacy to the future.
The future. That was where hope lived.
Rachel said, “We have over six thousand books at Amarna now. Of course, it’s a pitiful fraction of human knowledge. But it’s all we have. I don’t believe they’re the only books left in the world, just as I don’t believe we’re the only survivors, but I keep thinking maybe we have the only existing copies of some books. They must be preserved if it’s remotely possible. Mary, what else can I do for humankind? You’re young and still capable of bearing children—if other survivors do find us—but I’m past that. And maybe those books will make more difference in the long run.”
Mary felt an encompassing calm, and she tried to remember when she had felt anything like it, when fear and doubt hadn’t been foremost in her mind. Before the End, certainly. Yes, she could remember one moment in her life when she felt a similar calm: the night she finished the last page of the last revision of October Flowers. The calm arose from her realization that she had accomplished something worthwhile, and she had done it well.
She thought about that book, thought about her book being read in an unforeseeable future, and the idea was profoundly satisfying. She thought of the legions of writers—all dead now, probably, if they weren’t before the End—who had written with the conviction that their words would be read by future generations they couldn’t imagine.
She thought about the books at Amarna, the books she had denied for two years. She didn’t know what Rachel had picked up in her scavenging, but she knew what had been there Before. The encyclopedias. At least, they offered summaries of knowledge. Books on science, especially earth sciences. On human history. On art. Yes, the children of the future would have some idea of what the Parthenon looked like, or the stricken gray figures of Kollwitz, the woodcuts of Hiroshige, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the seething sunflowers of Van Gogh, the columns of Karnak. For a moment the grief revived. Was that all the children of the future would know of those astounding creations? A few pictures in a few books?
But they would know something of them. They would know what was possible for the human mind.
Fiction. There wasn’t much fiction at Amarna. At least, there was a complete Shakespeare. And a volume of Sophocles’ plays. Dickens, Kafka, Melville, Tolstoy, Cervantes, Austen, Conrad, Steinbeck . . .
Yes, and poetry. Dickinson, Eliot, Yeats, Dante, Wordsworth, Sappho, Auden, Whitman . . .
So little, such a minute fraction, but Rachel was right. It was all they had.
Mary said on a lon
g exhalation of breath, “Yes. Oh, Rachel, yes.”
Rachel laughed. “Yes, we should do it?”
“Yes, we must do it.” Then she hesitated. “But how? This climate is so damned hard on books.”
“There’s also the problem of acidification. Not many of our books are printed on paper that won’t acidify. There are ways to stop it, but they’re too technical for us. I think all we can do is seal the books as nearly airtight as possible, then hope that someday, someone will learn how to make paper and ink—or even a crude printing press—so they can copy the books before they disintegrate.”
That seemed a remote possibility, and Mary was again aware of the chill in the wind, the acrid smell of the smoke from their signal fire.
Rachel seemed to sense her doubt. “Mary, we can’t predict the future, and I know it’s unreasonable to ask more of life than life, but I do, just as human beings always have. This is my more. Maybe nothing will come of it but a pile of rotten paper. But I have to try.”
Mary pulled in a deep breath, felt it astringent in her throat. “No, Rachel. We have to try.”
Two years ago, in the frigid shadow of the winter, they had made a choice to survive. Now they were making another choice in a silent, lightless wilderness.
A choice to live, not just survive; to live as human beings.
For as there are misanthropists, or haters of men, there are also misologists, or haters of ideas, and both spring from the same cause, which is ignorance of the world.
—PLATO (428–348 B.C.), PHAEDO
The last lesson today was on geography. The globe on its wrought-iron stand is still by the table where the children were gathered around it a short while ago, naming continents and oceans. When we came to the end of our allotted time, and the other children made their hurried exits, Stephen stayed, studying the globe. “Mary, it looks like if you could cut out Africa and South America, they’d fit together.”
It was a startling observation for a thirteen-year-old whose education, despite my best efforts, is so limited. Now I sit in my usual chair at the head of the table, and he stands beside me, tense with concentration, his eyes fixed on the book open on the table. He’s looking at a map of the megacontinent of Pangaea, a map of our world as it was 250 million years ago. For the last fifteen minutes, with the help of this historical geology text, I’ve been introducing him to plate tectonics.
He asks, “Is the land still moving, Mary?”
“Yes. That is, the continents are riding on top of the plates, and they’re still moving. But very slowly. At best, a few inches a year.”
He smiles, the fire of wonder in his eyes. But I see it quenched at the same moment I hear a sound behind me. Someone has come out of the kitchen.
I choose not to show that I’m aware of her. “Stephen, you can take this book and look through it. If there’s anything you don’t understand, I’ll help you with it.”
But he shakes his head, looking past me. “I’ve got to help Jonathan split wood.”
I don’t try to stop him. I watch him as he hurries out the back door. Then I say, “Hello, Miriam.”
I hear a quick intake of breath. Witch, she is no doubt thinking. How did I know it was she standing behind me? She walks past me to the long side of the table, puts down a bowl and a basket of pea pods. I close the book, but only after she has given it an oblique scrutiny, and I see something in her eyes that surprises me.
Fear.
I’ve never seen Miriam afraid, not even for a fleeting moment as now. It is as unnerving as the opening of a door where I didn’t know one existed. You can’t hate someone who is capable of fear.
And do I hate her? I hadn’t thought my feelings were so extreme. And they aren’t. Not for Miriam. I don’t hate her. I hate what she represents to me: the perpetuation and potential triumph of unreason. I hate her lack of fear, and above all, her lack of doubt.
Miriam has never in her life said, “I don’t know.”
Her hands move quickly about the task of emptying the pods; the peas rattle and ricochet against the glazed sides of the bowl. But she pauses, tosses her bright hair back from her shoulders.
“Why are you staring at me?”
I am for a moment embarrassed. “I didn’t mean to stare, Miriam. I was only thinking . . . how much you remind me of Luke.”
She resumes her work, facile hands moving ceaselessly. “I look more like my mother than Luke.”
There’s a cast of antagonism in that, and I don’t know if it’s for me or Luke. “Well, you’re certainly prettier than he was,” I reply lightly.
Her cheeks redden as she slits open a pod with her thumbnail and strips out the peas. “Beauty is only in the soul.”
“No doubt. But it’s your hair that reminds me so much of Luke.”
Slit, strip, peas tumbling into the bowl. “Luke was only my physical father. My uncle, Brother Jonas, was my true father.”
I hear the antagonism again, and I’m sure now it’s for Luke. I wait to see if she’ll say more, and finally she does.
“Some said my uncle was a hard man.”
I respond cautiously, “Did they?”
“Well, maybe he was in some ways. Not like Luke. But Brother Jonas was a good man. He was a man of faith, and he loved God and always kept His Commandments. Always!”
And, of course, the children in that good man’s household had no choice but to love Jonas’s god and keep those patriarchal canons. For a while the only sounds are the cracks and rattles of her work. I remain silent, and finally Miriam stops, looks at me, then down at the book.
“What were you showing Stephen in that book?”
“I was telling him about plate tectonics.”
When I don’t elaborate, she looks at the cover of the book, takes some time to read its title, which is also its subject. I see again, only because I’m looking for it, that hint of fear in her eyes, but it is immediately masked by righteous contempt.
She says, “That’s one of those books that goes against the Bible.”
“Miriam, it has nothing to do with the Bible.”
“Nor God!”
“No. It’s not a philosophical treatise. You’re welcome to read it before you condemn it.” And I wince at my own words. That didn’t need to be said. I know she won’t read it. She can’t read it. Her reading skills are minimal, and her voluminous quotes from the Bible at morning services come primarily from memory.
Her back is straight as steel. “I don’t need to read it to know it’s evil. It teaches our children to deny God!”
“No, Miriam, it does not.” Then before my temper gets out of control I add, “God moves in mysterious ways, and no mere human can know all those ways nor claim to understand the dimensions of God.”
“But God spoke to the prophets, and through them to me. I know God’s Word and His Truth.”
I don’t rise to the bait, and after a moment she adds: “My children will learn to listen to God, and I don’t want them taught evil.”
I don’t rise to that bait, either. All at once I’m weary of this, and I know it’s a mistake to argue with her. It only feeds her conviction. And her willingness to argue with me feeds my anxiety. That willingness is due in part to the fact that we’re alone, but it also suggests a burgeoning confidence in her. I hear a rush of rain on the roof. Just a squall; the light has gone gray.
“Miriam, I don’t want to be your enemy. We can’t let ourselves be enemies, not when our little community is so vulnerable to schism.”
For a long time she studies me as if I am something inanimate, or rather a phenomenon to be cautiously observed. And I look back at her, seeing her in the same way: a phenomenon like the smoldering embers in a lightning-struck tree that are the seeds of a conflagration.
Finally she shakes her head, smiles faintly.
“No, Mary, you aren’t my enemy. You are the Lord’s enemy.”
I take a deep breath, let it out slowly.
Gird up your loins, old woman.
Yet what of that fleeting fear I read in her eyes when she looked at this book? Why would she feel anything but contempt for a book that describes the evolution of this planet as it occurred—not as it was written by the authors of the Pentateuch in an era when the world was still thought to be flat? Was she afraid of the truth in this book? Rather, the reality?
It finally comes home to me that Miriam fears this book as a body of arcane knowledge, magical knowledge: black magic. Here at Amarna, I am the possessor and fountainhead of that knowledge. A witch. And in the words of her god, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
In the same book of the Bible, her god prescribes ceremonies for animal sacrifices, decrees laws dealing with slavery, and advocates revenge in kind as a means of redressing wrongs.
I’ve been through all this before in another time, another generation. Generation unto generation . . .
The backdoor opens, and Esther, Grace, and Enid come in, wet and laughing with exhilaration from the rain. But Esther stops when she sees Miriam and me. “I’m sorry. Are we interrupting something?”
Miriam takes a pod out of the basket, slits it open. “No, Esther. I’m just getting these peas ready for midday meal.”
Grace sits down by Miriam. “Here—I’ll help you. Oh, the rain just came in buckets, so we had to leave the garden work for now.”
I rise, take the book to the shelves on the south wall, then go into the living room to look out at the rain. There are streaks of blue sky in the west, but above Amarna clouds hang like shadows. I hear the children come in the backdoor, then Jeremiah, all creating a congenial cacophony. This small, fearfully isolated community is still united.
The squall drifts on within half an hour, and indoor work is put aside for outdoor. At this time of year the garden comes first. And the garden begins in the greenhouse.
I’ve always thought the greenhouse was one of the most agreeable rooms in the house. I suppose it’s not precisely a room, although it’s surrounded on three sides by the house, and I can never think of it as outside. The angled glass panels of the roof let me look up into the sky, but they stop the rain. The west wall is nearly all glass, even its door, and I can see the ocean, but I can’t feel the sea wind. I walk on stone, but it must be swept with a broom like any inside floor. But half of this floor is earth, and that puts me outside again. So do the plants that grow in that earth: tomatoes, leaf lettuce, poppies, spinach, and, to distract whitefly from the others, nasturtiums. And for pleasure, sapphire blue lobelia.