Voices in Time

by Hugh Maclennan

  Wellfleet had drilled himself to accept almost everything after his own world had vanished, but he had been isolated too long to know what had been happening in the last two decades. Vaguely he was aware that a new generation was coming alive again, but he had never met any members of it. Years ago the Third Bureaucracy had relegated him to this compound where he was allowed a small room and enough food and clothing to keep him alive.

  The rest of his day passed in a slow tension and in the early twilight he went to bed hearing the birds singing until the last oboe-throb of an oriole ceased and it was dark.

  Lying in the dark he sank slowly down into the sea of his own past. So long ago the morning of his life; so long ago even his middle years when the marvellous, tragic structure they had called civilization had shattered itself.

  Inevitably, after a pause, a raw new bureaucracy had emerged out of the wreckage and this was the one that had ordered the past to be ciphered out as though it had never been. But how could this André Gervais have discovered his mother’s name? It unnerved him to know that he had. Then he remembered something he had not taken in when Gervais had been talking to him. The young man’s voice had been kind.

  As drowsiness seeped through him there welled up the images of some girls and women he had known, and he had known many. A few of them were the only treasures he had left, apart from his books. Now it was Joanne. He dozed, came awake a short time later, saw light from a risen moon washing the spines of his books, then faded off into the depths of sleep. How long he slept he did not know but it must have been several hours, for when he woke the moonlight was gone and the room was dark.

  Once more he was a man in his prime, for in a long dream Joanne had returned to him in the full reality of her living flesh and spirit. Small, so near-sighted she was almost blind without her glasses, surely she had been as valiant as anyone he had ever known. She had been absolutely honest. With herself first of all, for her essence had always been private. Only those who had been truly loved by her had discovered how rarely beautiful she was, for only they had seen the wonder of her love-smile. He lay still. She had returned to him with uncanny accuracy – her eyes when she loved, her lips when she loved, the body of a profound human being as supple as the muscles of sea tides when all of her moved and rippled in a whiteness of love – where was she now? What was she now? Her body had been dust for years but she had never been more real than she had been a few minutes ago.

  His eyes closed and after a while he slept dreamless until the morning.

  TWO

  A ground mist veiling the trees, the sun seeping through it, the feeling of a hot day coming, a true summer day after the long cold in this cold land. He had eaten a light breakfast when the instrument stabbed the silence and he went to it as fast as his stiff knee could move. It was André Gervais again.

  “How kind of you to call me! I never thought you would. I’m so ashamed about yesterday. I don’t think there’s anything serious the matter with my brain but it was so sudden. Your mentioning my mother’s name, I mean. She vanished so long ago. I’m forgetful, I suppose, but I think it’s because I’ve been alone so long. I see it in the others here where I live. We try to like each other, but we don’t really find each other interesting. My best friend is a chipmunk. I save crumbs from my meals and when I go outside he comes to me and eats off the palm of my hand.”

  Gervais spoke quietly, carefully. “I’m the one who should apologize, Mr. Wellfleet. I was far too eager. Now I’d like to explain why I called you. When I called I was only taking a chance on your name. I mean, I was astonished to find you were real. But when you told me that this lady – this lady Stephanie Wellfleet – that she was your mother, it was such marvellous luck I could hardly believe it and I suppose I became excited. You see, this proved that what I had found was genuine, and if it’s genuine it’s absolutely priceless.”

  The old man was as bewildered as ever. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, so perhaps you could explain.”

  Gervais, still speaking quietly, told him that he was a young man, twenty-five years old, and that he was calling from the ruins of the old Metro where he worked. A few years ago a group of men had formed a small company to commence the building of a new city on a section of the ruins because, so said Gervais, they had been told by several travellers that this was one of the great natural sites in the world. From some old books they had learned that in the far distant past many famous cities had been destroyed and new ones built on top of their ruins. In the central part of the wrecked Metro they had found a wall standing and had blown it down to level the place. While the debris was being cleared away, Gervais himself had found two large castiron boxes, each one weighing about twelve kilograms without the contents. On each box was engraved the name “James Wellfleet” and the number 1872.

  Wellfleet listened in a daze. Then he sat down.

  “Give me time to think,” he said. “It was so long ago. James Wellfleet was my great-great-grandfather and he died long before I was born. I suppose 1872 was a date under the old system.” A memory blazed up in his mind. “This is incredible. Yes, suddenly I remember. It was after my stepfather’s death. His name was Dr. Dehmel. He was a German.”

  “A man called Dehmel has left a lot of records in these boxes, but I can’t understand much of anything I found in them. Do you know about the boxes themselves?”

  Wellfleet began to tremble and his voice was unsteady. “Yes, I do remember.”

  “You saw those boxes?”

  “No. No, I never saw them, but I knew they had been lost. It was the only time I heard my mother cry. She’d had a hard life and she had terrific control. All our lives were in those boxes, I remember her saying. All our lives. I was only a boy and I thought she meant money.”

  The young man’s voice became eager again: “Something far more valuable than money was in them. They had heavy padlocks and they were so corroded I had to burn them off. When I opened the lid I found hundreds of papers and photographs and rolls called tapes, whatever that means. The boxes had been perfectly airtight and the contents were as fresh as yesterday.”

  The old man was silent, trying to remember. Yes, those boxes must have been stored in the basement of the house where she and Uncle Conrad had lived. A year after her husband’s death she had gone to England to spend half a year with a sister who lived there. While she was away a developer had bought the property, smashed the houses down, and dug a hole thirty meters deep and a block long. His mother’s furniture had been taken out and put into storage but there was no sign of the boxes.

  He told Gervais this and added, “All this happened on top of what had happened to her before.” His breathing became asthmatic again. “This is unbelievable. Did I hear you say that some of that building was still standing?”

  “Only a wall and a half. It was an empty shell.”

  “It was one of those crate-shaped buildings we had everywhere. It was forty floors high.”

  He sat in a daze, motionless, lost in a confusion of memories. Then he heard Gervais speaking.

  “We want to know where the truth is. We’ve heard all sorts of stories about the past, but how true were they? In school they gave us the Diagram, but you were a teacher once and you know what that was worth.”

  “So you’ve checked out my record since you last called me? Well, why not? What was the Diagram worth? It was their chief instrument in obliterating the Past. It was supposed to be history, but it omitted nearly all the history of the human race before the Third Bureaucracy. Do you know what the word ‘history’ means?”

  “I know what it means, but I don’t know what it was. We’ve found many books, but very little from the time when you were young. Everyone knows the Destructions happened, but we weren’t told why. Do you know why?”

  “Oh, Mr. Gervais, how can I answer a question like that? What happened – yes, I know that. What happened was that hundreds of millions of human beings and animals were obliterated within
a few hours and the metros turned into graveyards. For years we’d known there was a chance of this happening, but we never believed it would. Afterwards the Bureaucracy – I’ve already called it the Third Bureaucracy – the people in it now were babies when the Destructions came. Their parents had survived because they didn’t live in the metros. They were on farms and in small towns and pockets outside the action.” He paused. “I wonder if I can possibly make you understand. The metros had become the central nervous system of the entire world. Communications – and they were marvellous – the bureaucrats, the organizers, the planners, the headquarters of everything – they were all in the metros. Nobody could be independent of them. When they were destroyed, the whole system ceased to exist. Those who were on the outside were in horror, just as I was myself. The first few years were so terrible that I can’t bring myself to remember them. There was no control at all. It was every man for himself. It was as though the whole world had been thrown back six or seven hundred years without having the organizations those ancient people had.” He paused, breathing heavily. “Of course, there were many survivors who understood small skills. Some of them could repair small engines, but they couldn’t manufacture them. They couldn’t refine fuels. Fortunately a good many doctors who had practised in small towns and in the country survived. They had their medical books, but they could no longer get the drugs they needed. Anyway, medicine survived after a fashion. Then gradually little patterns of order began to appear and another Bureaucracy came into being.

  “This Bureaucracy couldn’t have been anything else but bad. One of their leaders was a maniac who went around preaching ‘They brought the wrath of God upon themselves and upon us all. So let their names and deeds be obliterated forevermore.’ That’s why they concocted the Diagram, and for a while anyone who tried to tell young people about the past was in danger of his life.”

  Again he stopped, waiting for Gervais to speak, but Gervais said nothing.

  “This part of the world,” he went on, “was probably luckier than most others because one of the hydro dams survived. Well, of course you know all about that. At least we had electricity and there were men who understood how to use it.”

  “Quite a few factories have been built lately,” Gervais said quietly. “We’re learning. We know how to manufacture wires and repair turbines. We’re learning very quickly.”

  “Of course, I always knew there were survivors who had enough skills to restore a little of what was lost, but there was no will for it. The Bureaucracy was hopelessly ignorant. They couldn’t endure their memories or face their future. They also had power, and were crafty enough to know that if the intelligent survivors became organized, they would lose that power.”

  Wellfleet’s breathing had become congested and he felt weakness coming over him. It was the old trouble. He had been sitting with his head down and his neck bent forward and the calcium deposits along the back of his neck had been restricting the flow of blood to his brain. He lifted his head and breathed rhythmically and heard Gervais speaking again. Gervais was saying that he wanted to turn the papers over to the old man. He was saying he longed to meet him and talk with him. Wellfleet shook his head.

  “If these papers are personal, I can’t understand who would care about them today. If my mother is in them they must be at least fifty years old.”

  “I’m not sure, but I think some are much older than that.”

  What was the use? Wellfleet was thinking. How could anyone explain to a man of Gervais’s age, brought up on the Diagram, what the world had been like before the Destructions came? He said it aloud.

  “I think I might understand if I had a chance,” Gervais said.

  “It would be too dangerous even to try.”

  Gervais was surprised. He felt pity, even sorrow, for this old man he had never seen or heard of until yesterday. Where had they been keeping him?

  “Mr. Wellfleet,” he said quietly, “believe me, there’s no danger any more. The Bureaucracy has changed. There’s a new mentality. It’s the books we’ve been finding. Some with pictures of cities long before Metro. They’re very beautiful. Those metros – we’ve collected many photographs of them and they all look the same. I can’t understand why people wanted to live in places like that.”

  Wellfleet gave a sad laugh. “Most of them didn’t have a choice. I’m sorry, Mr, Gervais, it’s not your fault. I understand that. But what you don’t know must be just about everything there ever was. Let me ask you a simple question. Do you know how many people are in the world now?”

  “We’re trying to find out. Would you know?”

  “How could I possibly know? I’d guess the population might be what it was three or four hundred years ago, but it’s only a guess, and a wild one. When I was your age there were hundreds of millions more people than there are now. None of my friends survived. Lately the faces of a few of them have been coming to me like photographs printed one on top of the other. Some of them were beautiful. Some were gentle and some were even happy. It was nothing in their characters that killed them. It just happened. So perhaps this damned Bureaucracy is right after all. Maybe it’s just as well that you should be prevented from knowing what was lost. Your parents would understand what I’m trying to say.”

  There was another silence, then Gervais said, “I love my parents, but they refuse to say anything about what it was like when they were young.”

  “I can believe it.”

  Again buried emotions surged up and the old man was unable to speak. The young man told him he had made a list of names connected with the papers and he began to read them off a paper he had before him – Stephanie Wellfleet, Dr. Conrad Dehmel, many more whose names John Wellfleet had never heard. Finally Gervais asked him if he had been named after his grandfather, John Wellfleet, and was he old enough to remember him?

  When he heard this, the old man went out of control. It was too much and it was coming at him too fast. For years that had become a long blur of empty time he had tried to lock away the meaning of everything he had been, known, and valued. For the next few minutes young Gervais wondered if Wellfleet had gone out of his mind, for he was sobbing and crying.

  “You don’t know! You can’t know! Nobody ever will know for ever and ever. They obliterated their lives and then they obliterated their names. Every remaining record they found they deliberately destroyed. It wasn’t like that ever before. My grandfather knew the names of his family going back for more than two hundred years into the Old Country and now he might never have been. People like him and my mother and Valerie and Joanne and everyone I knew and loved – even famous men we all knew – where are they? Only in my memory and sometimes I’m not even sure they’re there. My memory is a blur.”

  The young man felt fear. He listened to Wellfleet’s breathing grow steady and a moment later he heard his voice come out strong and firm.

  “Mr. Gervais, it so happens that I never knew the name of my real father. My mother, I think, was the purest soul I ever knew in my life. When I was sixteen, she told me that my actual father was a distinguished Englishman who hadn’t informed her that he was married to somebody else until she discovered she was pregnant. Previously she had believed she was engaged to him.”

  Gervais said nothing.

  “But when I was a child,” the old man went on, “this did not matter because of Grandfather. His own children were grown up and married and his wife – my grandmother – she had died a few years before. That’s what Mother told me. Mother used to keep his house and look after him and he was the kindest man you could imagine. He’d lost his money in business. There were some very smart business operators around then, but at least he wasn’t classified inoperative as the Bureaucracy classified me. Nobody was then. Grandfather loved all young and growing things. You’d never believe this, but in those days in the pre-Metro city there were wild animals on the mountain. You should have seen the squirrels. Somebody called it the City of Squirrels. And the wildflowers! There were
all kinds of them on the mountain and Mother and Grandfather knew the names of them all. Just think of that. They knew the names of the flowers.”

  He stopped abruptly and with an effort he quieted his breathing again.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Gervais, I talked too much and couldn’t stop. Talking to somebody real is like eating after you’ve been nearly starved to death.”

  After a short silence, Gervais said, “Of course, we’ve all heard stories. And the Diagram. Was there any truth in it?”

  “Oh, that! Yes, I suppose there was some. If you want to make a good lie stick, you’ve got to put at least a little truth into it.”

  “Then let me ask you another question. Was it when you were a child that the old System began to fall apart?”

  “I’ve often thought you could make a case for that idea. But let me tell you, there was a long, long trail a-winding before the final Destructions came. Am I confusing you? Of course I am.”

  “There’s another name here – Timothy Wellfleet. Do you think he’s alive still?”

  The old man passed a long-fingered hand over a long, narrow forehead.

  “For God’s sake, what next? Timothy, did you say? He was an older cousin of mine but I never met him. When I was a schoolboy he was famous for a while. He was a star on what we called the networks. I won’t waste your time trying to explain it, but it was a picture system we called television. It went everywhere. He was what we called a star for a short time and then he disappeared. I never knew what happened to him. I can’t believe he’s alive. If he is, he’s in his nineties. I know Mother knew him well. She was his first cousin and a good many years older. I have a vague idea that for a short while she helped bring him up. Otherwise I never thought he had anything to do with any of us.”