The Traitor

by Michael Cisco

  I told the lieutenant and he immediately sent word to the adjutant. A number of men were sent off with me to find the other ringleader, with the understanding that another group of armed men dispatched by the adjutant himself would join us on the way. Now I was mustering forces, I was the one setting large operations in motion, of all people! Of all people, now I’m in charge of bringing in a criminal, with dozens of men at my disposal! I pointed them to the partisans and now I was leading them to fetch out the one remaining man, and, when I did, I would be recognized as the sole author of this triumph. My impulse then was to lead them around in circles, then abandon the search. I had been away when all of this started, and now I reappear and fix everything, restore order—even now I can’t get over it, imagine me “restoring order!” I was glad to do it, too, I wanted to do it. My hatred for them overcame my hatred for the Alak representatives who used me. Now I understand how these abominable cities keep going, how they can get even someone like me into the act, when they offer the victim his chance to be a torturer himself. I led armed men to the top of the street, where the adjutant’s group met us, and there was a minister with them, who so to speak took over from me. When I saw the minister I knew that the adjutant planned to “make an example” of the second of the ringleaders and I felt both satisfied and terribly distressed. The soldiers surrounded the house and knocked on the door—I instantly “knew” it was empty, except for him, and the minister knew it too. The minister simply plunged its two front paws through the door and seized both sides of the jamb, tearing them out and much of the wall as well. The opening it had made was still too small, and it seized one of the posts that supported the house’s frame and wrenched it out of place, breaking it in two. The soldiers fell back and the upper eaves of the house collapsed inward, dropping several heavy timbers across the minister’s back. I heard a cry almost in the same moment and saw a figure in the alley beside the house—he had just leapt out a window. The minister lunged forward and seized him, then bounded out into the street again. It brought the second ringleader out of the alley, holding him unharmed and wailing in one of its middle hands. It held him up, so that the mob that had gathered could see him. I watched its blank, inhuman face, with lidless protruding eyes that saw in all directions, and this terrified me and attracted me in exactly the same way that Wite terrifies and attracts me. It dropped the second ringleader into the street and tore him to bits in an instant, without spilling a drop of blood, for it all drained out across its skin and boiled immediately away into an invisible cloud of red steam. In the blink of an eye there was nothing left of the second ringleader but a pile of fragments, as clean and dry as scraps of cloth or dead leaves.

  I told Wite this story, but he seemed already far beyond paying me any attention. Will you believe me when I tell you that it was only then that I first realized he was a murderer? He had killed at least a dozen people. He had killed Prince Eskellde in front of me. He had murdered someone right in front of me but it was only now that I thought of him, speculatively, as a murderer. He had never seemed like a murderer to me before, and the people he killed seemed to have been killed by a natural disaster. I had thought of him as a force of nature, and now I was his accomplice. None of this had occurred to me until I had told him this story—during our flight together I never thought about it. I knew the Alaks, I had participated in their investigations and worked with their magistrates. I knew it was genuinely impossible that they would fail to find Wite. They would set their sights, with clear and unclouded eyes, on his trail, and would follow him until they brought him back. They certainly couldn’t permit the man who murdered Prince Eskellde to go free, but, even if Wite had killed only people of no particular importance, the Alaks would never tolerate him, would spare no difficulty in finding him, would harry him all his life. The Alaks established order. From the ancient days of their first kingdoms they reached out with the intention of embracing everyone they met as an Alak; they could not imagine a human being who was not an Alak—Wite, to them, was either an Alak in need of correction, or something not human. Regardless of what he was to them, and I want to stress that he could never be an object of their hatred, for they hated nobody, they would not rest until he was accounted for somehow. They wanted less to punish him than to account for him. It was a miracle they had not already found us. The longer we remained at Tzdze’s, and we were not going anywhere, the more likely it was that they would find us. Inevitably, they would find us. I had no idea what to expect when they arrived, and I vaguely wondered what they would make of me as Wite’s accomplice. I assumed they thought I was dead. I had taken responsibility for Wite from the first, and I felt even more strongly my responsibility to him then. His knees buckled under him and he fell down on the grass, coughing or retching, and I immediately knelt beside him and took his shoulders in my hands. He was trembling uncontrollably. He seemed completely powerless, mortally sick. I felt responsible for him. I still wanted to help him, but was I going to help him kill himself? He was thoroughly poisoned with spite, and how could I help someone like that? But I never doubted that I would stay with him to the last, and that I would suffer when it was over, and that until then he would suffer much worse and that I would have to give him what meagre help I could. If they came and shot at him, I thought then that I would selflessly shield him with my body, step forward completely without fear and without offering harm to anyone, just to prevent a bullet from reaching him and thus give him another moment of life to draw breath in. I was full of silly ideas, I hardly knew who it was I walked next to! If he decided to end his own life, that would be an enigma to me. All this dawned on me as I knelt down beside him and held his shoulders.

  I want to end this chapter neatly for you, but I’ve run out of things to say. These “chapters” are nonsense, they tidy up messy things, but it’s important that the story be clear, and I promise I’m telling everything honestly.

  Chapter Five

  After I brought Wite back inside I was called to meet Tzdze. I can’t move any faster than this and I can’t skip anything, and I have no choice. I would have to write everything out in this way no matter what, no matter whether I wanted to or not, this is a testament, I must write it this way. I do not have the audacity to try to claim this is all voluntary and a gesture of my own freedom, or an act of my will at all, properly understood. My arms rise from my sides and I sit up, and my hands pull me across the room to the table, and I begin to write, still sleeping, still delirious, almost not here at all, exhausted, completely worn out. I act mechanically, powerlessly, without will, but not in apathy, burned up as I am, failing as I am, there is no apathy. Back then I had no intention, no thought, of writing about any of this, the idea would have offended me then. I’m offending as I write this, but I have been granted immunity, I offend on someone else’s behalf, and I am condemned and outside punishment already.

  I was summoned to Tzdze’s sitting room, which was long and had many windows low to the floor. The ceiling was also low, but not so low as to make it necessary for me to bow my head, although I did bow my head as I entered. There was a large table in the middle of the room, set lengthwise in the center, and Tzdze was sitting on the other side, facing me, in the middle of the table. Her hands were on her chair’s arms. There was another chair on my side of the table, opposite her, and there was a backgammon set lying open on the table in front of her. Tzdze sternly asked me if I would play backgammon with her, and I think I said “all right.” I remember how weak my voice was in her presence, and that the room was silent. We started playing. Tzdze was dressed in white. I wonder how I’ll do, describing Tzdze? Tzdze was dressed in white, and her arms moved mechanically across the board, beating me. Presently, I remember, her sister came in and sat down behind her in a beautifully embroidered armchair, and began doing needlepoint. I could hear her breath in her nostrils, I can hear it right now. Tzdze won and asked me to play again, and we started playing backgammon again. She played expertly. I was distracted at first but I bega
n playing more seriously as the second game started. I had played backgammon with my wife and with some of the apostates who would come to visit, sometimes every day. We would all sit together without saying anything to each other, anything but bare and plain things, and we would eat peanuts soaked in coffee and drink black tea. We would be drenched in sweat, drinking glass after glass of tea, brewing more, drinking more, until we were steaming ourselves, and our play would get correspondingly faster. My wife and I never drank tea as compulsively when we would play in the evening. My wife liked to drink red wine afterward, to help her sleep. She would usually throw her hands up and forfeit the game to me, and silently clear away the tea things and the board. Then she would bring in a glass of wine and drink it by the window while I would lock up the house. What have I been saying? Tzdze’s sister left the room and came back, came and went like a pendulum. I would see her face out of the corner of my eye, swinging back into the room. Tzdze beat me again and immediately set the board up again, without asking me if I wanted to play again, and we began to play again. She was looking sternly at the board and her lips were compressed. I thought she was disgusted at having beaten me so easily. Her sister left the room. By now I was able to concentrate. Tzdze was losing. Her arms swung back and forth over the board as she moved her pieces, gracefully, efficiently, precisely. I saw the expression on her face grow more relaxed while becoming more concentrated. In the next room her sister began playing something quietly on a piano. I didn’t recognize the piece. I know nothing about music and never learned to play or sing, unlike most apostates. My wife played guitar beautifully, and she also sang well, well enough for plain music. She would play for me on nights when we didn’t feel like backgammon, and sometimes she would sing, and when she got tired I would read to her. I always enjoyed listening to her. I felt closest to her when she would play and sing. Now Tzdze’s sister was playing very quietly in the next room. Tzdze took no notice and continued playing. I beat Tzdze. She seemed satisfied and excused herself. I remained sitting at the table until her sister finished her piece and the music subsided.

  Wite spent days either in his room or in the stone outbuilding; if he wasn’t to be found in his room, he would be in the outbuilding, which was most often the case. Generally I did not visit his room, nor could I imagine him inhabiting it. Wite was not to be given a room. But from the start the stone outbuilding was his, as if he’d brought it with him. During this time his health declined, and the few times I saw him I was shocked at how deathly ill he looked. I never recognized Wite when I saw him. As I think about it now I’m certain Wite was spending his nights up in the stone outbuilding and that it was ruining his health, which was already bad. He avoided me completely. Tzdze may have seen him during this time, but he had nothing to do with me and said little to me, and Tzdze almost never spoke to me about him. Tzdze and I now played backgammon together every night after dinner, with little conversation. The one occasion she did mention Wite, she was speaking with her sister, whose name was Xchte, and I remember she said Wite looked hounded. Apart from remarking to Xchte that Wite looked hounded Tzdze never said anything about him during these games, and Tzdze never said anything about him to me directly during these games. When we spoke at all, apart from the essentials which were reduced by Tzdze’s mere presence to the bare minimum, it was usually about me. When I talked about myself in response to Tzdze’s questions, I could hear the words hit the air woodenly, and I knew that Tzdze questioned me about myself because to hear me speak about myself is to hear only a modulation of the quiet of empty rooms and everyday things. Later on I realized that she heard every word I said and every thing I said, but at the time I thought that Tzdze bade me speak to be her music box, for the plain and unengaging way I talked.

  Tzdze asked me about my wife. I told her that our marriage had been arranged by the other apostates in the capital. We met each other a number of times by only apparent coincidence. Neither of us was aware at the time that these coincidences were arranged by the apostates. This was usual, I told Tzdze. At the time I had just recovered from a long illness that had confined me to bed for weeks, only to discover that there was no work for me. I killed time by going into the country, came back depressed and nearly dying of boredom, and found there was still no work. During my illness my days had become completely formless, and afterward the lack of work left me with no external order, and I was unable to bring myself under discipline again. During that period I lost every day, and I was dying of boredom. She, my future wife, appeared again and again and eventually we noticed each other and very soon she was indispensable to me. She was almost immediately indispensable to me. We were mutually indispensable in almost no time, we went everywhere together and worked precisely together. Tzdze went on asking me about my wife. I only said that, shortly after my wife and I met, suddenly I was working every waking moment for weeks without respite, and that she was essential to me during this time. I told Tzdze that I would have been worked to death if my wife hadn’t immediately seen where she was needed and moved to help. I would most likely have died from all that work, and most likely I would have died willingly, I would have worked myself to death knowing full well right from the start, if she hadn’t been there to help me. With her help I neither died nor wanted to die. She visited me every day and looked after the things I had no time to do but which were essential if I were simply to go on living. Eventually she decided we should get married, so that she could be there all the time, and that was how we came to get married. Tzdze asked about the wedding. I said that we had had neither the time nor the money for a wedding, and I of course had no relatives to invite—although I’ve always been horrified at the thought of a traditional wedding full of useless relatives who want to get their fingers in, meddle and intrude in the most appallingly shameless way. I’ve always been disgusted by weddings, they bring out absolutely the worst in everybody. Two people get married and suddenly it’s everybody’s business, when that should be the last thing it is, and everyone within a dozen miles comes barging in with their tongues hanging out and their eyes bulging out of their sockets—these being the same people who made life impossible in the first place, who did everything in their power to drive us apart and destroy whatever enervated feelings we had left, who nearly killed us both by their constant interference and complete disrespect for us, who now want us to congratulate them and admit them even further into our lives when they’re trespassing unforgivably as it is. My wife had a few relations and friends and insisted on some small reception for them, but we were married with as little ceremony and as hastily and awkwardly as possible. When I imagine us getting married, even now, I start laughing and I can’t stop. I laughed even then, and I laughed as I told Tzdze about it, and even she laughed. Tzdze laughed right along with me. My wife and I were married in a ridiculous, half-destroyed ceremony in the presence of strangers, and then we held the reception. While my wife had insisted on the reception, it was thrown for us by a friend of hers. I sat and made the best of it, and while my wife enjoyed her friends’ company, she was already ailing from the first of many chronic illnesses. After a couple of hours she began to tire rapidly and then one day she lost consciousness. I heard the clatter of her fall in the next room. She recovered after a few days of rest, but not before I caught whatever it was she had, and ended up sick in bed myself. Neither of us was ever in entirely good health and we were constantly making each other sick. We never quarrelled, although we separated once, but we were forever making each other sick.