Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  Soon only Balthazar, Timmy, and Etta May remain.

  [ 3 ]

  “More letters! Courtesy of the Minetowns International Postal Service. International, ha! And will you look at the stamp they have dreamt up? A spade and a hammer crossed on a purple field. If they crawl any farther up their own arses, they will commission a new national anthem, ‘In Praise of Toil.’ ”

  “Is it from Livia?”

  “Who else? I am surprised she writes to me, not to you.”

  “You are easier to write to, Balthazar. She and I stood too close, back on the pier. We held hands and communed with a rock. I doubt we will find need to speak ever again…So, what does she say?”

  “Wait, let me finish it first. God, what a scrawl she has—very aristocratic. And the way she puts things. Clearly but without much poetry. It makes me think of her mother.”

  “Well?”

  “Beetles! Beetles everywhere. They are still swarming, up in the hills. There must be millions of them now. Feeding on every patch of dark Soot they can find. Cleaning up town. Now, she writes, you can see what was Soot and what is just muck. And everyone has stopped smoking. It’s put paid to Downtown—there’s no point to it anymore—and has killed off half of Minetowns’ jokes. If they stop farting, too, the other half will go.”

  “It’s not funny, Balthazar. A lot of people will be desperately confused. And I worry for those children who were born in the Smoke. They must feel utterly lost without it.”

  “You just wait until they meet the next generation! I wonder how many of them will be born without any Smoke organs. Our tales of Smoke will be fairy tales to them. Until they go somewhere without beetles and get themselves infected.”

  “Will there be a place without beetles, Balthazar? Somebody has already put some on a ship and brought them to Boston. At least there is a rumour to that effect.”

  Eleanor pauses, studying the old playwright across from her. They are sitting in her uncle’s cell. She has made some half-hearted effort to go through Renfrew’s papers but has given up. The business of government is too complex for her, and in any case, she has no right to it. Parliament remains dissolved. It is late summer and Britain is entirely without governmental structure. Anarchy! On a day like today, hot and clear, the word sounds light and liberating. It is unclear, however, for how long it can sweeten the watery porridge they’ve been eating. It’s all they have left.

  “You should be on tour,” she resumes the conversation. “While you still can, I mean. While there still is Smoke to shape.”

  “And nurse a dying art?” He prunes his face. “I suppose it’s that or go back to writing plays about people who stab each other onstage—like they used to, before the Smoke. Fake blood and onion tears. And long bloody speeches, explaining to the audience what it is the actor feels.” He pauses and grows grave, leans forward in his chair. “The truth is, Eleanor, I am ready to go. It’s Etta May—she isn’t ready. She shot Livingstone and now she thinks she is a danger to the public. A murderer! Timmy’s the only one who can make her laugh.”

  Eleanor looks at him quietly. “If you love someone, Balthazar, you better tell them.”

  “Hear, hear! You know she almost drowned me, right? And anyway, I have not gotten to the juiciest bit of the letter yet. Livia writes that she and Thomas have ‘partaken in the outdated bourgeois ritual of marriage.’ They got hitched. The whole of Minetowns will be appalled!”

  Balthazar pauses to return Eleanor’s smile. Then his smile turns evil, and shrewd.

  “You know they have a piece of rock there, don’t you? Down in one of the mineshafts. At least that’s what Miss Cooper hinted to me. Think about it: a little splinter of God. Unless the beetles got to it already. But if they didn’t…Perhaps they’ll spend their honeymoon there, our newlyweds. It’s in Thomas, after all. She writes that he’s ‘quite changed.’ And that he ‘looked lovely in his dinner jacket.’ ” Balthazar grimaces at that, as though the phrase itself were painful. “Do you know what a romance is, Eleanor? A romance is a kind of play where you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

  [ 4 ]

  Another month passes. A letter from Mowgli arrives, soon followed by another. Eleanor tells Balthazar all that they contain, though she refrains from reading them to him. This is less because of the professions of tenderness they include (though they do and they are intimate) and more because she does not want the playwright to comment on the poverty of Mowgli’s composition (let alone that of his spelling). He and Smith landed in Bombay and had a hard time convincing the native city council that now holds power there not to sink them in the harbour. Nor were the rebels immediately convinced that the beetles were anything more than another tool of colonial rule. The movement was split in any case: along lines of religion, of cast and caste, of money and region. Mowgli cut the Gordian knot by releasing some of the beetles that made up their cargo. With such misery in the city—producing a great density of Soot, some of it very black—the beetles soon found sustenance. Within a week some of them had spread to the poppy fields and were eating those. It was unclear whether they continued to breed. Miss Cooper, meanwhile, seemed to be active in the very south, where the Company retained some measure of authority. She was selling the inoculant whilst also paying a team of scientists to analyse and attempt to synthetize it.

  Mowgli had planned on a speedy return to Britain. Then he heard a story, repeated to him by more than one source, of a northern river pouring black hate into the land—a river that had its source in the mountains of Nepal. So he—Smith and Grendel still in tow—had decided to head north with their remaining cargo of beetles, looking for the parts of the rock still buried in glacial ice. Most of the train lines had been blown up by terrorist activities, so they were travelling with horses and carts. A local maharaja, who up until recently had been one of the Company’s many puppet rulers but had now emerged as a leader within the national uprising, lent them an armed escort of fifty men. Given the date of the letter, they may have arrived at their destination by now, though it was unclear whether they would actually be able to cross the Nepalese border.

  Balthazar listens to all this without any show of emotion. It is only when Eleanor finishes that he purses his black lips.

  “He’s quite convinced then, your lover boy. He’ll liberate this world! What did he call it? The ‘Age of Reason.’ Rationality is a bug! I always had my suspicions!” He flares his nostrils, as at a bad smell. “If the beetles find another rock, they will swarm again. Imagine the numbers! It’ll be the end of Smoke.”

  “And the rock, too, will die.” Eleanor shudders, the memory of rage running through her, and of the rock’s distress, at not being understood. “Perhaps it’s for the best. We were not meant to live side by side.”

  “ ‘Meant’—no. But then what are we really meant for, other than to make more of us?” Balthazar makes a crude gesture. “It’s strange. I was terrified of the rock. Still am. But to erase it like this—like it’s never been here…”

  “Erase? Not quite, Balthazar. Have you seen the colour the sea takes on some mornings? ‘Tar Seas,’ that’s what the fishermen have started calling it. They come on it in little patches. But they are spreading. Not just here but up north and in the Channel, perhaps farther away than that. Some part of the rock is in there. It—”

  Eleanor makes to say more, then falls silent, distracted, and cups one hand over her abdomen. Balthazar waits until the inward look on her face has cleared.

  “Tar Seas, eh? How poetic! And you? Have you decided on a name yet?”

  “Names,” she says. “At least I think so.”

  And then she adds giddily, a girl of eighteen sharing a secret, “Come, Balthazar, put your ear here. Perhaps you can hear.”

  [ 5 ]

  What’s this? Pregnant? Twins! And when did this happen? In the handful of days afte
r the events on the pier? En route, travelling down from the Lakes, on a woolly blanket rolled out in a private hollow on some hill? Or back in the Keep, on one of those narrow pallets that pass as beds there, fighting for space, half falling off at every rearrangement of their limbs? Was it the day after she shed her harness? Or was she wearing it still and he had to cut her out of it with scissors? Did she smoke and seethe with anger when his body proved unable to respond? Or was it smokeless on both sides, their passion hidden, vouchsafed only by their kisses and their bodies’ heat? Or did it happen before—in that first Storm, say, out to sea, when it was he who was bound and she drank off his rage like so much spirit, then jumped him drunk on her own lust? Was it ugly then, or beautiful; did it leave a bitter taste?

  I know what you are thinking. We should have been told.

  [ 6 ]

  And another half year passes filled with letters, conversations, quiet yearning. Renfrew dies and is buried in a simple grave marked only by a wooden cross. Lady Naylor departs for Paris, to see it “cleaned and crawling with black bugs.” She leaves Eleanor a purse of money and the keys to two of her estates. Balthazar and Etta May decide to return to North America, taking along Timmy, who has started to talk and now won’t shut up, as though words were Smoke and an inner Gale were still blowing inside him, forcing them out in great, unmodulated bursts. Eleanor moves to a nearby village and finds she is not entirely forgotten: a fisherman’s family takes her in and dotes on her (their son followed her north, and brought back stories). When her time comes, husband and wife fetch the village midwife and sit downstairs, holding hands like they did when they were courting, listening to Eleanor’s cries of pain.

  “It will be over soon. A young girl. It goes easy when you are young.”

  “Shut your mouth,” says the wife. “What do you know about childbirth? ‘Easy,’ he says, like he’s an expert in it!”

  They sit and listen to her, drinking endless mugs of piping-hot water, wishing it were tea.

  [ 7 ]

  And a story makes the rounds, of a black whale breaching from out of this tar sea, rising to the very root of its tail and standing in the noonday sun like a fist raised in salute—and of its eye, tiny and alive, staring down with cold indifference at the fishermen who saw it—before dropping back beneath the black shroud of the ocean, mourned by a hundred black-and-yellow birds whose cry pierced the air long after it was gone.

  “What does it mean?” asks the fisherman’s wife, who has come to look to Eleanor for answer to all manner of things as though their ages were inverted.

  “It means the world is changing yet again.”

  She smiles as she says it, for in the air, over one of the cribs if not the other, hangs the faintest plume of Smoke, calling to her with its need.

  A blank stage, its only props a single, rectangular table, positioned in such a manner that its long side is parallel with the stalls. The table is split into two halves by a line of chalk. Mowgli and Eleanor sit at the short ends, Mowgli on the right, Eleanor on the left. Mowgli’s side of the table is cluttered with decorative knick-knacks, all of them broadly “oriental”: a carved elephant statue, representations of a few Hindoo gods, a copper carafe, leather drink coasters, etc. Eleanor’s half is entirely empty apart from a sheaf of writing papers and a small photo of Renfrew, positioned at an angle so that the audience can see it.

  Both Eleanor and Mowgli are writing letters. Their movements are precisely synchronised. Now they both write, bent forward. Then they stop, lost for words; look up (not seeing the other but all the same gazing into each other’s eyes), then hastily scribble two or three lines; stop again, prop their heads dreamily onto a palm (the right for her, the left for him); write another line, read it to themselves, their lips moving, then quickly cross it out—all at precisely the same time, their faces mirror images, one pale, one brown.

  Now they dig in their respective desk drawers and each retrieve a carefully folded letter; open it; and smile as they read it. They look around themselves, making sure they are not observed, then bring the letters up to their noses and smell them, the way lovers do, for some hint of the writer’s scent. Mowgli cries then, a single tear (give the actor an onion to squeeze if he needs it). Eleanor smokes. The fans turn on, carrying her Smoke into the audience, a taste of love: young, lusty, greedy, nervous love.

  The taste of regret in it is only very light.

  BLACK OUT. CURTAIN.

  LIGHTS.

  The End

   ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “Human beings fear nothing so much as being touched by something unknown.”

  So writes Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power, a book that apprehends the solitary individualism of modern life and opposes it to the intoxicating and dangerous loss of self that takes place when we accept an indiscriminate “touching” and surrender ourselves to the crowd.

  When I set out to write Soot, I knew I wanted to write a book about what it means to be touched—about its beauty and its potential for violence; about the long reach that our lives have into those of others, often halfway across the world (a reach facilitated by words and emotions but also by money); about the rootedness offered by community and the oppressions and confinements so often imposed by it; about the crushing loneliness and liberating anonymity of the atomised individuality that characterises so much of twentieth- and twenty-first-century life; and about our continued fear of touching those who come from beyond our borders of understanding.

  It should not have surprised me, perhaps, that even as I was engaged in the seemingly so solitary act of writing a novel, I too opened myself up to being touched: by ideas, naturally, but above all by people; by their generosity and enthusiasm, their intelligence and insight. While the touches that are the subject matter of the novel—the multihued tendrils of Smoke that communicate and betray, ensnare and connect—are bittersweet in their implications, those that have reached me in my writer’s garret were an unalloyed blessing. They changed me as well as changing the book, and for this I am deeply grateful.

  I would like to thank Boyd White, for his sustained engagement with and shrewd insights into the book—I could not have done it without you, my friend. I would also like to thank Dakota White, who I can honestly say was the best possible reader I could have found for a late draft of the book and whose enthusiasm for the adventures of Eleanor, Mowgli, and the dastardly Smith did much to sustain my own faith in them. Thanks also go to the editorial teams at Doubleday, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and HarperCollins Canada: They provided the tap on the wrist here—and the boot up the backside there—that kept me on course; and to Simon Lipskar at WritersHouse, for being there on my writer’s journey and helping me see clearly. Sheeraz Gulsher marshalled the linguistic resources of friends and family to translate a number of sentences into some of the (many) languages of India and Pakistan; I hope my version of the Colonial novel complete with ancient curses and dangerous terrorists (Rider Haggard, eat your heart out!) will give him some pleasure. I also want to thank the many people I spoke to during my travels in India and Nepal, who bore with my many questions and spoke and laughed with me until I no longer felt a stranger. Above all, I wish to thank Chantal, my wonderful wife, for her intelligence and honesty in editorial matters as much as for her patience (the latter was more sorely tried). I would be lost without you, my love.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dan Vyleta is the son of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany. Having lived in Germany, Canada, the United States, Turkey, Austria, and the United Kingdom, he has aspirations to be Bohemian in more ways than one. He is the author of Pavel & I; The Quiet Twin, which was short-listed for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; The Crooked Maid, short-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and winner of the J. I. Segal award; and Smoke, a Canadian bestseller translated into ten languages. He currently teaches literature and writing at the University of Birmingham in England.

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