Leading you astray . . . She hadn’t, she didn’t. If anything, it was the other way round; because it was always me who loved more, who wanted more, and Skizi who went along with it, because she might as well . . .
And I’d loved her so much that I’d – when I thought it was Ana Himyana who’d told the guards – I’d –
I put my hands over my eyes, pressing until my head started to ache. I didn’t want to think about what I’d done. Ana Himyana is an Anarchist.
And Miren . . . I wanted to be angry with her. But I wasn’t. She was only protecting herself, and I understood that. Or maybe I was just too tired; maybe I’d used up all the anger I had, and now there was nothing left, like a container with only dry dust in the corners.
Somewhere behind me, Mama and Papa both raised their voices at the same time, and there was a thud and a crash, like something smashing against a wall. I’d never heard my parents argue before; it seemed a good time for them to start. I thought I heard Martin’s bedroom door opening upstairs, and the creak of his feet crossing to look down over the banister. He called down to me, but I didn’t look up.
I’d killed Ana Himyana, as surely as if I’d borrowed a rifle from one of the guards and shot her myself. And I’d known it, when I wrote that letter. I’d known exactly what I was doing.
Ana Himyana is an –
Ana Himyana –
I clenched my jaw, pressing my back teeth together. I couldn’t move. If I stayed still, I wouldn’t exist.
‘Est!’ Martin hissed down from above me. ‘Est? What’s going on?’
I stood up. Everything felt a long way away. I took a few steps forward, opened the front door, went into the street, shut the door behind me and walked down the narrow strip of sunlight between the houses. It was chilly, and I felt the skin on my neck prickle. I thought I heard Martin call my name again, but I might have imagined it.
I walked up past the church – it was empty, the windows smashed, the doors wrenched off their hinges, the pews taken away for firewood – and through the network of alleys that led to the edge of town. They were full of rubbish, scraps of fabric and dirt I didn’t want to look at. Everything was quiet.
And I went to the only place I could think of.
Fourteen
No one had been in the hut for months; at least that was my first impression, when I pushed my way in. The door was stuck, entangled in weeds, and most of the roof had come down and was on the floor, in great grass-covered mounds. You wouldn’t have known where Skizi’s bed had been. The scrawls on the plaster were still visible, and I took a careful breath, somehow expecting to smell faeces and ash, as if it was only yesterday that Skizi had been taken away; but the air was clear and didn’t smell of anything.
But I hadn’t been the last person in the hut. I saw – feeling nothing – that the guards, or partisans, Anarchists or Socialists, had left three rifles stacked in the corner, and there was a dog-eared pile of leaflets on the shelf, which had slid down the wall and was at an odd, lopsided angle. I picked up the top page: A Letter to the People . . . They were home-printed, hardly legible, and the grammar was all wrong. I looked round, imagining candlelit meetings, arguments, and then . . . They’d left their rifles here, and there were cobwebs strung across them like ribbons. They must have been arrested.
I picked up one of the rifles. The stock was cool and clammy, and it was heavier than I remembered. But it was the same model that the guard had taught me to load, and to fire. I leant it against the wall and walked back to the door, wiping my hands on my trousers, and stood looking out. The breeze ruffled my hair.
Once, a long time ago, Teddy had told us about his friend in the trenches in the Great War, who’d put a rifle barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his toe. It wasn’t cowardice, Teddy had said, it was just fatigue. He was too tired to go on living.
I sat down in the doorway, not caring about the damp chill that soaked into my trousers. I put my head against the door frame. One evening last summer – more than a year ago – Skizi and I had sat side by side squashed into this doorway, passing a cigarette back and forth, savouring it as if it was a fine cigar. She’d got bottle of cheap vodka from somewhere – we’d drunk it earlier that afternoon – and the world was soft-edged, not quite real. I could still taste the thin, fierce alcohol, the tobacco smoke and warm evening air, and see the stars coming out slowly in the sky. The memory sat in my stomach like a live coal.
I stood up. The sun was going down. I was shivering, but I didn’t feel cold. I watched my hands shaking and they didn’t seem to belong to me.
I went into the hut. I picked up the rifle again. It was loaded.
I wondered what Ana Himyana would tell me to do.
I slept there that night. It was freezing, but the cold didn’t seem to touch me, not really. I was hungry too, but I didn’t mind. I wanted to stay still, frozen and curled into myself like someone that hadn’t been born yet.
I dreamt of Skizi. At least, I think it was a dream; but I was so cold that I was in a kind of lucid place between being asleep and awake. It was very quiet and simple, more like a memory. She was standing in front of me, still wet from the bath I’d given her, with her hair dropping tiny gems of water on her shoulders.
‘I survive,’ she said. She’d said the words to me before, but now her voice was different – soft, clear, as if it was something she wanted me to understand. ‘That’s all I want. Nothing else matters, as long as I survive . . . If I need to run, I run. If I need to steal, I steal. Whatever I have to do . . . I don’t care what I do, as long as I can walk out the other side. All right?’
I was too cold to move, or breathe. I wanted her to stay where she was, even if she was only a memory.
But she didn’t. It was too much to hope for; after all, she was dead, wasn’t she? She gave me a long look – and for that strange, suspended moment, I was afraid and full of a kind of joy – and then she was gone.
I closed my eyes again, and I was back in the dark. But now the cold had started to reach me, and I felt real again. It wasn’t a good feeling, but it was better than being far away, watching myself through a film of shame. And after a while, I slept.
When it got light, I unfolded myself painfully and got up. I was hungry. At home there would be hot water and ersatz coffee, coarse bread and lard, maybe a little scraping of jam.
As I walked past the rifles, I paused; but it was too cold to stand there for very long, and in the end I went out, leaving them where they were.
The sun was coming up. All the shadows were thin and long, and the light was silvery. I went down the hill, my hands in my pockets, not hurrying, my head empty and clear and cold, like the sky.
The streets were still deserted. I walked back the way I’d come, past the church. The pello wall in the square was covered with peeling posters, men with their fists in the air, women laughing with their hair blowing over their faces. I stood there for a moment, thinking about the morning I’d come back from Skizi’s hut that first time.
Suddenly, irresistibly, I wanted to tell someone about it. I imagined putting it into words – leaning forward, searching for the right way to say I loved her, I loved her, I loved –
When I got home, I could tell Martin. If I was brave enough; and I felt brave.
I could even tell him about Ana Himyana.
I turned the corner and walked down our street, blinking in the sudden darkness between the houses. Blue and purple spots danced in front of my eyes.
There was a pello ball in the gutter in front of me. I went to kick it out of the way, but something seemed to stop my foot, and I paused, looking down. There were shards of glass around it, glinting and catching the light, like jewels. And the ball was . . . familiar. I bent down and picked it up.
The pello ball that had killed the Bull . . . Angel Corazon’s ball, Skizi’s ball. My ball . . .
There was a peculiar, shivery feeling on the back of my neck, as if a cloud had gone over the sun; but I was
in the shade.
I looked up at my window. There was sunlight catching the top corner of it, in a jagged, toothy edge. The glass was broken, as if someone had thrown the ball out while the window was still closed.
I felt my throat tighten. The glass crunched under my feet as I took a step forward.
Our front door was open. Just a little way open.
I found myself looking back over my shoulder, as if there was someone there who could help. But there was no one, just the quiet street. It looked flat and shadowy, like a stage set after the lights had gone out.
I took a deep breath, trying to make it last as long as possible. I wanted to stay here, in the moment before I went through that open door and saw what had happened. I squeezed the ball in both my hands, pressing the seam into my palms until I knew it had left a pressure mark on the skin.
Then, when my lungs were empty again, I put the ball into my pocket, and went into our house.
There wasn’t much out of place. There was only the silence, and perhaps I was imagining that. It felt as if I was the only person in the world.
There was nothing missing. Nothing had been taken away; only the hall table was at an angle, and a bit of the plaster had been knocked off the wall behind it. Someone had struggled; or just been clumsy . . .
Papa’s study door was open. I looked through the doorway without going in. The medicine cabinet was empty. There was a smashed bottle on the floor and a heavy, volatile smell.
I went up the stairs. I ought to have been hurrying, but my body wouldn’t move fast enough. It was as if the space around me was thick, like molten glass. I couldn’t breathe properly. The doors on the landing were open too. Mama and Papa’s bed was rumpled, and the wardrobe door was swinging. Maybe the guards had let them get dressed, before they took them. There was a pale, lost-looking boy looking back at me from the mirror, his ragged hair sticking to his temples.
I felt as if I was stuck to the floor. I had to make an effort to turn on my heel and leave the room.
I went up the last staircase. Martin’s room. It always looked as if it had been ransacked; there was nothing different now. Only –
My heartbeat hiccupped.
The wall.
There were new names.
I picked my way across the things on the floor – books, leaflets, a dirty shirt – to the wall, the way I’d done hundreds of times before. Something crunched under my foot, and when I lifted my shoe there was the broken barrel of Martin’s fountain pen, and a mess of dark purplish ink. I noticed with a kind of distant interest that there were crumbs of plaster on the nib. I looked at the new writing. The letters were rough and difficult to read; they’d been half written, half scratched on to the wall. I thought it must have been awkward to hold the fountain pen at the right angle; it was stupid of Martin not to use a pencil instead, like he had for the other names. In spite of myself, I saw him stumbling over to the desk, rummaging desperately for something to write with, and scribbling the names on the wall with whatever came to hand, not caring if it spoilt the nib of his pen . . .
I didn’t move my eyes, but suddenly the letters came together, and I was reading the words, without wanting to.
Anton Bidart. Veronika Bidart. Martin Bi
He hadn’t had time to finish writing his own name.
I went into my room. The sheets had been dragged off the bed. They’d looked for me then. There was a cold breeze from the window. Someone had cut themselves on the jagged edge of glass; there was a sprinkle of red on the windowsill. I hoped it was one of the guards, and not Martin, but there was no way of knowing.
I sat down on the bed. I didn’t mean to exactly, but everything swayed and flickered darkly, and when it cleared I was sitting down.
I stayed where I was, frozen. I didn’t feel anything. It was like that moment when you find the right wavelength on a radio. On either side of me there was the hiss and scream of noise; but where I was, exactly in the middle, there was nothing. As long as I didn’t move, I’d stay in that narrow band of clarity, safe.
I’d been here before; this time it wasn’t real, it couldn’t be real. For my whole family to be gone, like a magic trick . . . This time there was no scrawled graffiti, or ashes or smeared excrement; just the absences, just their names on Martin’s wall, as if he’d known I’d come back and look . . . The guards were practised by now – bored, even – and they’d done their job efficiently, without malice. Even if it was Martin who had left his blood on the window, it was probably an accident, like the dent in the plaster downstairs . . .
Nothing moved, nothing changed. The breeze from the window touched my forehead, my eyelashes, my lips. If I moved I’d feel it, so I kept still.
I stayed where I was for a long time, staring at the wall until the sun shone on it directly, so bright my head started to ache. Then, slowly, I realised that I couldn’t stay where I was. I didn’t know whether the guards came back to check for the people they’d missed. I couldn’t believe that I was that important – but then, hadn’t Papa said the same yesterday? The memory made me shake uncontrollably, and I had to close my eyes and hug my knees before I could go on thinking. I remembered that someone – one of the old police chiefs – had been released, a few weeks ago, but it had been a mistake, a clerical error at the prison, and the next day the guards had turned up at his house to arrest him again. Maybe they would come for me now . . .
But if Mama and Papa and Martin and Skizi were all gone . . . where was I supposed to go?
I had to take a deep breath, because of the panic that rose up inside me and threatened to engulf me. This couldn’t be happening, it couldn’t have happened.
It was like looking at a wall, a wall so wide and high that I couldn’t take it in properly. There was no way past it, or over it, or around it. It was just there, unnegotiable, merciless. My life was on the other side of it.
I opened my eyes again, staring at the real wall, where the leaflets were peeling away from the plaster and the laughing peasant women had faded to the colour of old teeth. I’d left the bedroom door open, and it swayed a little in the draught from the window. The chill prickled on my skin.
I heard Skizi’s voice in my head, soft and unexpected. I survive. And suddenly I thought I knew what she was trying to tell me. She wasn’t going to let me give up.
Leon. I still had Leon.
I stood up, stuffed a few things into a bag and left the house. And I made my way to the train station, keeping to the back streets, out of sight.
I bought a ticket with my cap low over my face, frowning and hunching my shoulders so that I looked like a boy. I waited behind a low wall, until the Irunja train had drawn up at the platform; then I ran for it. At the first stop – Zuberi – I got out of the train, walked to the ticket office and then turned on my heel, ran back and swung myself up into a different carriage just as the train started to move off. No one who’d got off the train changed their mind when they saw me; one woman gave me a strange look, but that wasn’t surprising really. I dropped into my seat in the new carriage sweating and out of breath, but almost sure that no one was following me. I didn’t know if I was relieved or disappointed.
There were guards at Irunja station, checking papers, but they were giving everything a lazy, cursory glance that made me suspect that they didn’t even bother to read the names. They let me through without a problem, although I heard them whistle and laugh amongst themselves after I’d gone past. I felt the air rush into my lungs with relief, but I made myself keep walking, in case they were watching.
The streets were quiet, and everyone I saw was walking quickly, head bent, as if they were on an urgent errand and couldn’t stop to talk. It felt like a foreign country. I kept seeing abandoned motor cars, some burnt to blackened shells, some only vandalised, their windscreens smashed. I wished I’d thought to look in Papa’s study for a map of the city; but now all I could do was keep walking, trying to remember where we’d gone, the Sunday of the King’s Cup more than a year
ago. From the station I thought it was left along Museum Street, towards the student quarter, but I wasn’t certain. If only Martin was here . . .
For a moment the ground sucked and heaved under my feet, and I stumbled. If Martin was here . . . I would have given anything, anything at all, for him to be here with me – or instead of me. I couldn’t bear it. I stopped where I was, in the middle of the pavement. I couldn’t go on.
But after a while I discovered I could go on. So I wiped my face on my shirtsleeve, and went on.
The street names had changed. I couldn’t remember what they’d been before, but they’d been whitewashed and painted over: Revolution Street, Marx Street, Liberty Avenue. Someone bourgeois had painted in an apostrophe after the s in Workers Road. I walked past a little mews called Magnificent Uprising Avenue, and couldn’t stop myself giggling. I felt drunk with adrenalin and exhaustion and misery.
After a while the revolutionary fervour seemed to die out, and the streets had no names at all. But I thought perhaps I recognised the houses I was passing; and if I was right, Leon’s old rooms were over to my right, not too far away. There were posters of Our Glorious Leader everywhere I looked. I turned a corner into a wide, sunlit street. I stood swaying slightly, feeling nauseous, wanting more than anything to sit down on the pavement and fall asleep. The building opposite was draped in red banners and more Our Glorious Leaders, but it seemed familiar all the same. After a few moments I realised it was the Royal Museum – although it wasn’t royal any more, of course, and everything that made it a museum had been smashed long ago.
I turned slowly on my heel and scanned the buildings on this side of the street. Leon’s rooms had been in one of those . . . I didn’t think I knew which one, but my feet walked me to a door and I thought I recognised it. It was open, and I caught a glimpse of broken tiles on the floor, peeling paint, and posters that were sagging off the walls. It was where Leon’s rooms were – or had been . . . Now it had an indefinably official air, and there was a guard lounging just inside the door, clicking and clicking at a battered cigarette lighter. I stopped dead, started to turn away, then faltered and turned back. It was stupid to come all this way and not even ask for Leon . . . and they’d know where he was, wouldn’t they? He was famous.
Love in Revolution Page 18