The Forgetting

by Sharon Cameron

  “You really are all right?” he asks. Eshan caught me leaving contraband in their garden once. Nothing they couldn’t have grown or been assigned, and just enough to make sure Hedda wasn’t feeling so desperate that she would take more than her meager share at the granary again. I wonder if Eshan ever told Imogene. We’ve never mentioned it. I give him a tiny nod, but he doesn’t leave. He says, “Can I come in?”

  And before I can look back to give him any sort of nonverbal response, I hear the door opening. I grab the tattered cloth, fling it over the purple plant before I turn around. My hands grip the table behind me, the whole bundle just hidden behind my back. Eshan shuts the front door and, being male, looks completely alien in my sitting room. He gets straight to the point.

  “Things can’t go on like they are. Already the fields aren’t quite big enough to feed us. Someday soon, we’ll have to go outside the walls. I know they say we don’t know what’s out there, that the walls must have been built for a reason, that we don’t know what we’ve forgotten. But if that’s so, then Janis and the Council should let some of us volunteer to go over and find out. Or, if they know a reason why we shouldn’t, say so.”

  I study the mat at my feet as if it’s the most fascinating thing the city has to offer, but I’m listening. And agreeing.

  “Janis has been a good leader, but she’s getting old. Already the Council is making decisions she would have never allowed … ”

  Like his mother’s flogging. I didn’t know a braided rope could cut.

  “… and you know that’s all Jonathan. If we’re not careful, we’re going to wake up after the Forgetting and discover that he’s the one in charge.” He pauses. “Did you hear Jonathan’s announcement today?”

  I shake my head.

  “They’re doing a count, of all of us, this sunsetting, to see exactly how many are in the city. They’re also going to start giving rewards. Turn in a rule-breaker, extra rations. Now how does that make sense when we’re not even sure if the grain will last through the dark days?”

  It doesn’t make sense at all.

  “And it’s stupid, don’t you think, to just sit around and see which half of us starves? Some of us are meeting today, tenth bell, on my garden roof, to talk about going over the wall. I thought you might be interested.”

  For the first time I lift my eyes. “Why do you think that?”

  Eshan starts at the unexpected sound of my voice. “I just … did,” he says. “I do.” I see now that he’s nervous. He’s playing with the tether of his book. “When we know how many of us there are, we’ll know just how bad the next harvest is going to be, and then it will be the time to approach the Council. I haven’t mentioned your name. I wouldn’t … I just mean to say, I appreciate what you’ve done.”

  Now he’s talking about the contraband in his garden. Surely Eshan and Imogene can’t know where those things really came from. Surely they think it came from our own stores? Yesterday I would have been certain; today, I can’t be certain about anything. The fraying edge of the cloth over the plant cutting brushes my fingers behind my back. I don’t like all this talk about rule-breaking and rewards.

  “You should come,” he says. “Think about it.”

  In what realm of reality Eshan the Inkmaker’s son thinks I will sit on his roof and talk injustice with our old schoolmates is beyond me. No matter how much I might agree with him. But I nod, and after a moment he nods, too, hesitates, then nods again and slips out the door.

  I watch him pass by the window, hands behind his head. Frustrated. I don’t blame him any more than his sister. But I wonder if what he said about the size of the fields is true, if the city really will be forced to move outside. We’ve always been taught to fear the unknown beyond the walls. But what if it wasn’t unknown? What if someone besides me could remember?

  I turn back to the table, take off the cloth. The smell wafts up, so clean it clears my head. Assuming Liliya is not poisoned by the resting I could quiz her, see if there are other memories lurking that I might share, but something tells me she’s not going to cooperate. Genivee has no memories before the Forgetting at all, and Mother … It would be hard to know what’s a true memory with her and what isn’t, no matter what I fed her. Not that I actually have anything to give them, of course. Thanks to Liliya’s greed or her lack of breakfast, I’m going to have to go back over the wall before I can do anything at all. And I cannot get caught this time. Not yet. And not now.

  I split the end of the cutting, get it in a water jar, and, as soon as I’m sure no one is lurking outside, run up the stairs to the roof and nestle it among the dying breadfruits. Then I’m back inside, dropping the bar across our door, down the silent hall, and into the resting room I share with Genivee. Light beams from one high window, open now for the cross-breeze from the door, leaving a bright warm patch on the pale green matting. I go to my knees, shove aside my mattress and blankets, and, using a broken metal hinge confiscated for the purpose, pry up a floor stone. Beneath the stone is a hole.

  It took me weeks to dig out the hole. Sneaking jars of soil up to the garden every day, digging only when I had the house to myself, and without leaving the smallest speck of dirt for the all-too-observant Genivee. I reach in and carefully move aside extra ink, a pen, and a wad of thick sacking that holds a book. A true book, for all four of us, sewn page by stolen page. A book that, when finished, will contain everything that’s happened to our family since the last Forgetting. Everything except Anson the Planter. I think that memory could only hurt them now.

  I also have a jar of stain in the hole, waterproof, made from oil and the shells of the blacknut trees in the lower-quadrant grove. I’ve been testing it on my own knees, which, now that I think of it, has probably been a bit of a bathhouse riddle for poor Rose. But when the Forgetting comes, my mother and sisters will be marked with this, all of us locked in this room together, with our books. And if something happens to one of our books, if there’s any question about the truth, I’ll show them the alternate one, hidden in the same room, under a floor stone marked with the symbol that is stained on their skin. No one will be able to separate our family again.

  I slide my pack off my back. All this is written in my book, too, in detail. I can’t count on not forgetting myself, just because I didn’t the first time. Though part of me hopes that I will. Then I sit back on my heels, one hand still propping up the stone lid of my hiding hole. Liliya is not going to cooperate with this plan, I realize. Not anymore. She’ll fight to get rid of me. The sister that isn’t. The thought makes me feel sore, bruised inside.

  Into the hole goes everything that came with me over the wall. Soil samples, pressed leaves, the apples I’ll have to retrieve again soon, to get them dried and into our storeroom. And I drop in the rocks I’ve collected on the mountainside as well, my one and only attempt at decoration, a row of deep, sparkling blue crystals lined up on a single shelf. I replace the floor stone, my mattress and blankets, leaving my side of the room plain and impersonal. Genivee’s is an explosion.

  I half braid my hair, swinging it to the side to avoid my pack, lost in thought as I go back to the sitting room. Genivee, being Genivee, has left flour, oil, spoon, bowl, and an apron sitting on the table for me. I measure, pour, and stir, but I’m not thinking about bread at all. I’m thinking about sickness.

  I’ve never been sick, and I’ve never met anyone who’s been sick, at least not in their body. But we talked about it in the learning room once, when one of the doctors came as part of our apprentice exploration. The ways people die, she had explained, are from age, accidents, childbirth, or poison, but sometimes there can be an internal malfunction. Nothing to be done about that, though there are certain chemicals from leaves or fruits that can relieve pain or, rarely, correct the malfunction and make the person well again. My spoon slows.

  What if the Forgetting is not something inescapable, like Jin’s age, but more like a malfunction? A sickness? And if so, did Liliya, while being a zopa, ea
t something that would correct it? If our memories aren’t gone, but still inside our heads, could we get them back out? What if I didn’t have to convince Liliya that I belong in our family? What if she, or Mother, could remember one glimpse of my face from before? What if none of us ever forgot in the first place?

  I stir with a vengeance, arms aching. I have to know if it could be true. I have to go up the mountain, get more of that plant, and give it to Liliya. See if any more memories come, to compare them with my own. There’s nothing else to do. And then my stirring slows, and it hits me. There is someone else I could give that plant to. Someone I share a memory with from before. Someone who already knows I’ve been going over the wall.

  I jerk off the apron, leave the dough in the bowl, and hurry out the door, careful not to run, so as not to alarm Hedda. I cut between houses, past the Learning Center, where the children are chanting: “If a book is lost, then so are they Lost. I am made of my memories … ” Then across Newton Street, then Sagan, darting into the alley beside the potter’s workshop, directly across the street from the glassblower’s. And there I pause.

  Gray and his father—I think his name is Nash—are working together on a large cylinder of glowing orange glass on the end of a blowing tube. His father takes the tube from his mouth, still spinning it, then quickly rolls it back and forth across a sheet of metal. Gray hits the tube, the glass breaks off, and then he cuts it fast with scissors. Bright sparks fly, and, like a piece of cloth, the molten glass falls and lays flat on the sheet. Now it’s a long, thin pane, clearing as it cools, nearly ready for a window.

  His father lifts the metal sheet and slides it back into another furnace. Gray wipes his forehead with the back of his arm, almost exactly like I did with the bread. Only he is smiling, from amusement, pleasure, happiness, I don’t know. I’m unfamiliar. It strikes me as beautiful, unexpected, and I’ve never wanted to approach a place less in my life. I have no business here, or nothing I can admit to. Then Gray turns his head and sees me standing across the street.

  He wipes his face again and says something to his father. The glassblower shoves him once, playfully I think, and steps through a door into their house. Gray looks at me again and waits. I force my steps, pulse racing as hard as when he caught me at the wall. I wonder what the potter’s wife will have to say about this in the baths.

  The heat from the firing furnace is a barrier to be breached. I push through, Gray wiping down tools as I inch into his workspace. He’s much larger than his father, a black apron tied over a shirt of light blue that is stained with sweat, smudges of soot and stubble on his jaw. He grins just a little.

  “The dyer’s daughter seeks me out. We make—”

  “It has to be today,” I say.

  “Why?”

  I don’t answer this. He puts what looks like a very thick spoon into a bucket of water, and I’m surprised to hear the water hiss. He looks at me sidelong. “Anything to do with why you came racing through here earlier like your hair was on fire?”

  I shake my head, a dismissal more than a denial. He’s thoughtful, a tiny line between his brows. Again I notice the dark smear that is his eyelashes. Oh, I can see why Liliya is interested. But why does Gray want to go over the wall? Or does he?

  “Whatever is going on with my sister is none of my business,” I say in a rush. “And what I do is none of hers. Swear to me you’re not trying to help her get me caught.”

  The frown deepens. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Gray go so long without a smirk. “I … ”

  “Never mind,” I say quickly. I can’t believe I asked. Anyone who would dally or otherwise with Liliya is probably not trustworthy in any case. “First bell of the resting, be on Jin’s roof.”

  “Okay. But—”

  “Fine,” I say, cutting off whatever he was going to add. The whole plan is stupid, and I don’t like to be stupid. First, assume Gray is somehow not trying to get me flogged or earn extra rations or my sister’s admiration by getting me caught. Second, get him over the wall without being seen, traipse about the mountainside, trick him into eating an unfamiliar berry and telling me things he probably doesn’t remember, and third, get us both back over the wall and home without anyone the wiser. The thought of just how much could go wrong makes me long for the bed I will again not sleep in. The thought of what we could gain if Gray does remember makes me determined to do it, stupid or not. The thought of nothing going wrong, of being over the wall, alone with the glassblower’s son, makes me turn to go.

  “Nadia,” he says.

  I look back. The smirk has returned, so I glare at him.

  “You have flour on your nose.”

  I do go then, and as soon as I’m out of sight I use the end of my tunic to scrub my face.

  I drop into my place at the long table to eat with my mother and my sisters, feeling every second of the last resting I missed. Mother is small, slender, with the coloring of the rest of the family, only her dark hair is threaded with gray. She runs her hand back and forth along her book, still upset by the empty bed at waking. Liliya looks the most like her, Genivee a close second, the two of them almost identical in their curly-headed prettiness, even if what’s inside their heads is so completely different. I am like the pale bruise on the rich brown of a honeyfruit.

  “Did you hear about the counting today?” Liliya asks. She’s slicing up the bread I baked, serving everyone but me. She doesn’t seem poisoned. “Council members will be coming to every house in our quadrant, tomorrow after the leaving bell.”

  I lean over to take the knife, to cut my own slice. The blade has the entwining letters “NWSE” stamped into its blade, like most of the metal tools in the city, another of Canaan’s little mysteries. Mother shakes her head and pushes my hand away. “It’s Liliya’s turn to cut.”

  Liliya looks amused before she turns back to Mother. “Do you understand that means we have to stay home in the morning, Mother?”

  “We’re not going to the dye house?” Mother pushes the food on her plate back and forth with a spoon.

  “Only for a little while, until the Council comes,” says Genivee. “I’m staying home, too. Then, when the Council says it’s time to go, we can all go. Nothing to worry about.”

  I stir the mix of greens on my breadless plate. “I think we should force some of our seeds from the garden,” I say abruptly. “We could have seedlings by sunrising, and get our harvest sooner that way. We might even get two.”

  There’s a shocked little silence at our table. That was quite a speech from me. It’s just that kind of day. I look down at my plate, but at an angle that gives me an easy view of my sisters and mother across the table.

  “We could put them in pots,” I say slowly, “and put the seedlings in the window.”

  Genivee shoots me a questioning glance, while Mother just looks unhappy, like I knew she would. But it’s Liliya’s expression that interests me. A slight frown, a passing confusion quickly dismissed.

  “I don’t like plants in the house,” Mother says. She runs a hand absentmindedly over the book around her neck. “It’s so untidy.”

  Mother used to tease our father about all the different plants he brought in during the dark days. The house had been full of them.

  Genivee says, “You should ask Liliya where she’s going before resting, Mother. I heard she was sitting with a boy.”

  “Genivee!” Liliya protests, but this is just the sort of thing Liliya and my mother love. It wakes Mother from her stupor. I thank Genivee with my eyes and prick up my ears for Liliya’s answer.

  “Is he handsome?” Mother asks, as if the Forgetting isn’t almost here.

  “I heard that he is,” Genivee answers, giggling. “Liliya says he’ll be the head of his trade one day.”

  Well, that’s not hard, I think. There’s only his own father to pass up for the job. I reach for my water cup. Actually, just by the way, Liliya, as soon as you’re done sitting with your boy, I’m taking him over the wall with me. And not to p
ry or anything, but you’re an idiot if you’re not making him write this down.

  Liliya pretends to be embarrassed. “You shouldn’t talk like that, Genivee.” Which means she wants her to.

  “That’s good,” my mother says dreamily. “It’s good for children to have a father, if they can. Never forget that you had a father once, girls.”

  But she doesn’t look at me when she says it.

  Genivee watches me during the writing time, her book in her lap. Kenny the beetle, a gift from over the wall, now living out his days in a jar beside Genivee’s mattress, sits like a bright yellow, multilegged apple, eating leftover greens on the palm of her hand. Genivee is watching me because I’m not writing, and also because I’m not getting ready to sleep. I’m braiding my hair down tight, retying the tether of my book, waiting for Mother to come see two full beds. Genivee says, “She’s jealous, you know. Liliya, I mean.”

  I drop my tether, startled into speech. “Why?”

  “Because she’s pretty and you’re not.”

  “That makes zero sense, Genivee.” I go back to tying.

  “See, that’s what I mean. She’s pretty, but you make people stare when you walk down the street.”

  They look at me because I’m an oddity of nature. Or crazy.

  “You’re exactly what she wants to be, and you don’t try, and you don’t even notice, and that’s really annoying, Nadia.”

  I have to smile at Genivee. She can be very perceptive, but I think she might be unaware of our oldest sister’s plan to get rid of me.

  “You should ask her about her boy. It will make her feel better since you don’t have one.”

  Something tells me this would also be an unpleasant conversation.

  Genivee lets Kenny crawl up her arm, and asks, “Why do you have to go over the wall?”

  I go still. Yes, Genivee is perceptive. Very perceptive. I don’t know exactly how she knows I’ve been going over the wall, but she does. I’m starting to wonder if everybody does. Answers flit through my brain, but I can’t think of a single one fit for my sister. Before, I’d wanted to understand where we came from, to know if there could be others out there, people like me, who never forgot. But today is different. Maybe today I can find a way to stop the Forgetting altogether. “Why do you think I do it, Genivee?”