The ritual foods were shared. The maror, bitter herbs, represented the bitterness of slavery, Becca said. The haroset, a paste of chopped apple and walnuts, symbolized the mortar used by the Hebrews to assemble bricks into walls for their masters. The paste was sweet, Becca said, because of the sweetness of slavery.
Sweetness of slavery? Isabel frowned at the plate of haroset. Whatever could be sweet about slavery? To be polite, she let herself taste the tiniest bit of haroset on her plate.
After the seder meal was done and they were clearing the plates away, Isabel did ask, “What was the point of calling slavery sweet?”
Becca turned on her, her face in critical lines, just like the old days in the basement schoolroom. “Why did you not ask before? What is the purpose of the entire ritual, if not to teach the young about freedom?”
“I know well enough what freedom is. That’s why I don’t understand why you call slavery sweet?”
“What do you know about freedom?” demanded Becca. “You were born a slave—both of you.” Daniel nodded in agreement.
That was true, Isabel realized. She and Daniel were the first to be born and survive within the Wall. She grew uncomfortable, wondering what kind of argument she had got herself into. “But we have our history. We know what freedom was, and we know we want it back.”
“Nonsense,” said Becca. “You owe your very existence to the intervention of our masters. Your entire life consists of haroset.” Becca turned and took a broom of tied twigs to sweep the floor.
“The Hebrews understood freedom little better,” said Daniel, coming to Isabel’s defense.
“Of course,” said Becca. “The Hebrews came to Egypt in the first place and put themselves under Pharaoh, because they were starving; because life in Egypt was sweet. Once they became slaves, what did they do about it? Even Moses was useless, at first; he killed an Egyptian, then had to flee. It took a woman to teach Moses freedom,” she added, waving a finger at Daniel. “That was his wife, Zipporah, who bore him a child and renewed the covenant. That had to happen, before Moses could become God’s instrument to free his people.” She set the broom aside. “Maybe when your own child comes, then you’ll learn how to be free.”
Isabel reddened at this remark. Just the opposite, she thought: How could she ever fight the keepers with a baby on her hands?
Daniel said, “Freedom has to be reborn in each generation. We do have our history to remind us.”
“Yes,” said Becca. “That’s why Liza put those pictures up on the wall, for those of you who need to see.”
“Pictures?” said Isabel. “You mean John Dickinson and Helen Keller?” She had never thought of them as heroes of freedom, but of peace and handicap.
“John Dickinson was a patriot,” Daniel said. “He authored the declaration of the Stamp Act Congress and led the boycott of British tea.”
“And then refused to vote for independence,” added Isabel.
“Independence,” repeated Becca. “Does freedom mean independence? What did American independence mean before Doomsday, when my watch came from Hong Kong, my blouse from Malaysia, and my heating oil from the Persian Gulf? Independence,” she muttered. “Interdependence. The Earth is round…as far as you walk, you come back to where you started…”
Becca began to sway on her feet, and Daniel helped her sit down. It had been a long day for her, and Isabel recalled with pain how ill she was. “You need your sleep, Teacher Becca.”
The two of them left Becca to sleep. They walked arm in arm outside, Daniel carrying a candle lit from the fire. Isabel looked up into the starless “sky,” and thought how Harriet “Moses” Tubman had escaped to Canada with only the North Star as her guide. As they reached the window of their cell, Isabel’s steps slowed and her heart beat faster. She released Daniel’s arm and took the eyespot scale from her pocket.
“I’m going,” said Isabel. “Back to the pylon. This time, I will escape.”
“Escape where?” Daniel asked. “To another hypersphere?”
“I’ll find other folks, somewhere, and we’ll join forces to fight our way out.”
Daniel held the candle up to her, and the shadows wove a jagged pattern across his eyes. “What does thee mean, Isabel?”
“I mean that with enough of us together, we might overpower the goatsnakes and capture their energy cylinders. We could use the cylinders to defend ourselves while we find the way out of the Hive.”
“Isabel, thee doesn’t know what thee is saying. That is precisely the kind of thinking that left us humans in Gwynwood, surrounded by skeletons. There are different kinds of freedom; remember Helen Keller? What did freedom mean to her?”
Helen Keller, as a Special Child blind and deaf, had had to be trained like a wild animal before her teacher had taught her to speak through the touch of fingers. Isabel frowned. “That’s not our problem. What does freedom mean to us?”
“Freedom means obedience to God,” said Daniel quietly. “No more, and no less. God set the Hebrews free only after they were kept from worshiping Him.”
“Harriet Tubman prayed to God without ceasing. In the end, she took up a rifle for the Union.”
“A brave woman. And yet, in a sense the Civil War postponed true emancipation a hundred years. The Quaker abolitionists knew better.”
“How could they know? Those Quakers were never slaves. They were all white, like you.”
Daniel’s face darkened, and for a moment he could not speak. “Thee is wrong, Isabel. I was born a slave, as surely as thee. And when I hear God’s word, I promise thee, I will go.”
XXXV
OVER THE NEXT few days, Isabel tried to make her way into the Hive through the other-dimensional gate of the pylon, but each time the keeper overcame her with sleep and the goatsnakes carried her out again. After several attempts, the sleep-fog began pouring out of the airwall even as she came near.
There had to be some way to evade the keeper. A torch would scare off its angelbees, but it would scare off her own angelbees as well, leaving her without assistance to penetrate the airwall. For the moment, she was at a loss.
As April passed, Isabel’s morning sickness lessened and her waist thickened appreciably. Daniel let out the seams of her overalls so she could still ease them on. She began to feel overly warm all the time, as if spring were turning into summer, but Daniel and Becca felt no change. The little inside-out planet enclosed a drop of eternal springtime. The garden was always full, for as one patch of corn died off another patch ripened.
Isabel chafed at the ease of it, how they took for granted their sustenance from their masters. “It’s haroset,” she said: “How are we to demand freedom, while we enjoy the fruits of slavery?”
She started to clear some plots of her own and planted seeds of zucchinis and sunflowers and tomatoes. Unfortunately the birds and rabbits attacked her plots with enthusiasm, though they stayed away from what the keepers had sown. Daniel joined her, plowing and sowing, and rising before dawn to scare off the robins. It was a small start, but it gave them something to do and at least a taste of independence. Through Isabel’s mind flashed the recollection of Grace Feltman, driving home alone in the horse cart. Even poor Grace needed to feel independent about something.
Becca watched with admiration, but she did not join their efforts. “You may be right but—somehow—I have my doubts. The gardeners know perfectly well that we can provide for ourselves, on Earth. These are not the gifts we must refuse. We have yet to meet the snake with the apple.”
“On the contrary,” Isabel exclaimed, “we’ve got too many snakes with too many apples.”
“Perhaps.” The scales twinkled on the lids of Becca’s eyes, which were dark and sunken underneath, for her pain robbed her of sleep. “At any rate, something has happened to our pylon. It won’t ‘talk’ as it used to.”
“Not at all?”
Becca hesitated, “Go and see for yourself.”
Isabel had not been to the pylon since the night she real
ized she was pregnant. So after dinner she put the scale on her eye, gave it a couple hours to adjust, then set out down the glowing path through the forest.
The pylon was not completely dark. It showed a single vision, over and over, the same one it had shown last: the nuclear mushroom cloud, erupting and boiling up into the stratosphere. Sometimes it was a groundburst, at other times an airborne fireball that reached to touch the ground, or occasionally a burst from underwater, spreading its fingers of lethal foam across the sea. But nothing else would appear within the six-sided pyramid, no matter what shapes of softened wax Isabel raised before it.
She felt her stomach turn over and her hair stand on end. Something had to be wrong, but what? Were they still upset with her for shaping the “keeper” and crumbling it in her hand? Had her gardening attempts displeased them? Or was there something else afoot, something she could not know about, outside the hypersphere?
She set her jaw hard. “If you’re trying to scare us, it won’t work,” she said aloud. But the sound of her voice rang flat and empty in the unearthly darkness.
Since the pylon would not answer, Isabel took to following the keeper-gardener at night on its rounds through the zigzag rows of squash and corn. But neither the polyhedral body, nor its floating angelbees, would take notice of her. Isabel had failed so far to figure out the six-dotted code of the angelbees. She trained herself to wear two scales at once, one on each eye, as Becca did; it took a while to sort out the images from each. She discovered then that when one angelbee turned to face another, the play of dots winking around the eyespot intensified, only to disappear when the angelbees were alone. So it seemed that the floating eyeballs could talk to each other. A sign of some autonomy, perhaps?
The goatsnakes, by contrast, appeared fully subservient to their keeper, feeding it regurgitated vegetable matter at the “mouth” on the keeper’s underside, and performing various gardening tasks, pruning the foliage and sprinkling seed for new vegetables. She envied them their powerful tools, those cylinders with the bladeless saws that the goatsnakes wielded entwined in their coils. She watched closely, in case they might drop one and leave it behind. Perhaps she might use it to take the keeper hostage and force her way out of the hypersphere.
As the fetus grew, Isabel found herself needing extra hours of sleep, and the pace of her jogging slowed. Still she kept it up, ten laps a day round the hypersphere, the sweat rolling down her forehead until it stung her eyes. She had to give up some of her extra gardening, but she continued to milk the sheep, gather nuts, and keep the fire going.
One night in June, as Isabel was trying to get to sleep, she felt something move inside her belly. She turned restlessly to the other side, but it moved again.
She tapped Daniel’s shoulder. “It moved, Daniel.”
“What’s that?”
“The baby. It moved.”
“Is that good?”
“Of course, silly. It means it’s growing on schedule. Here, feel it.” She placed his hand over the spot where it had moved, but just then the buried creature chose to be still.
The fetus grew rapidly, and by the end of the month scarcely an hour passed without the sensation of its head or its foot pushing outward. As Isabel jogged, the little one, too, seemed to be jogging inside; sometimes, when one leg pushed too far out to the side, she had to push it back in. All night she could feel it stretching and tumbling within the waters of its own inside-out planet.
Now that the baby’s presence was so palpable, Isabel almost felt as if it had been born already. She decided to assume it was a girl and think of it as “she” from then on. Since “she” would need clothes and diapers, it was time to get things in order. Daniel cut up the snowsuits into diapers, and Isabel sheared enough fleece from Hannaleh and the other tame ewe to line a sleeping place.
Becca offered to help, but her condition had taken a turn for the worse. She was losing weight, and she spent most of her time lying inside her cell. At night she could be heard moaning quietly. Isabel ransacked her medicine collection one last time, but all the painkillers and sedatives were gone.
Daniel said, “I will read to her at night, until she falls asleep.” He took up the Bible, one of the two books they had brought.
Isabel turned on him suddenly. “What about yourself? How’s your anemia medicine holding up?”
“I’ve got another two weeks’ worth.”
“Then you’ll have to conserve your strength, too. I’ll do the reading.”
“But thee needs sleep, for the baby to grow.”
“You’re the one who will have to deliver it.”
He turned white, then sat very still, until the color returned to his cheeks. He swallowed once, then nodded. “I know. I just try not to think about it.”
They hugged each other hard. “Let me try to escape again,” Isabel whispered fiercely. “There’s got to be a way back. I’ll explore that corridor again—”
“No. It’s not safe,” Daniel warned. “If they put thee out again with that sleep-gas, it might harm the baby.”
“Then you have to go.”
For the first time, Daniel seriously considered this. “I still believe we are here for a purpose,” he said. “We must find out what that is.”
“What purpose? Look what’s happening to Becca; what’s the purpose in that? Even the keepers must see, now, how ill she is. How could they be so cruel as to keep her here?”
He thought this over for some minutes. From outside, a barn owl called twice. “All right, I’ll try. After Becca’s asleep.” He climbed out the window with his Bible to read to her. As he went, Isabel thought again of Aaron Weiss in his last days in the hospital the year before. Now, how long did his sister have left?
XXXVI
DANIEL TRIED, BUT he had no more success than Isabel at evading the keeper at the pylon. In the meantime, as the nights passed, Becca seemed to enjoy Daniel’s reading, and she passed more easily into sleep. When Isabel’s turn came, she offered Harriet Tubman instead of the Bible, and Becca assented without comment. She read from the beginning, of Tubman’s girlhood on the plantation, how she grew up in a slave cabin and was sent out to a mistress who whipped her nearly to death for leaving dust on the furniture.
Becca shook her head. “It’s always hard to believe how foolish people can be.”
Isabel looked up thoughtfully. “That is true. That is why I always had trouble with the Bible. Even the prophets sometimes acted so foolish.”
Becca lay still except for her face, flushed with fever, her cheeks sunken and her skin withering as if she had aged another ten years. Her emaciation made the swelling of her tumor more pronounced, like a grotesque mockery of Isabel’s pregnancy, though Isabel felt ashamed to see it that way.
“What else is the Bible for,” Becca said, “if not foolish people? If people were wise, they’d have no need of the Bible.”
“But in the Bible, even God looks foolish. Why would He tell Abraham to kill his own child?”
“That’s a hard one, isn’t it. Men have always been ready to devour their own offspring, like Chronos. All the Abrahams, sending their sons off to all the wars, all in the name of one God or another.”
The bitterness in her teacher’s voice stunned Isabel, and she wished she had held her tongue. Then to her amazement, a tear seeped out beneath Becca’s eyelids and rolled down her cheek.
“And yet,” Becca added more slowly, “there must be some truth in Abraham. We must value God’s law above all, even the security of our children. Had our mothers and fathers obeyed the ten commandments, instead of making missiles for ‘defense’ of their children, perhaps we wouldn’t be here today.”
She stopped to swallow, and Isabel lifted a cup of water to her lips. “The truth is,” Becca went on, “we never learn. After Doomsday, all the parents of Gwynwood made a pact to spare their children the details of the Death Year. Life was hard enough, they said, in the early years, so why add this extra burden? We even left out of the seder t
he reading from Night, about Elie Wiesel’s first night in camp, lest the children ask questions about that other ‘first night.’” She added, as if to herself, “Perhaps we were not so far wrong. Even Wiesel kept silence, first, for many years. Children need time to grow, to learn joy. But you are grown, now, you and Daniel, and the others; you, the firstborn within the Wall.” Becca raised her right hand, slowly, as if it took all her strength. “When you return, you remind them. You tell them, the time has come for things to be told and known.”
“Yes, Becca.” Isabel’s voice was hoarse, barely recognizable as her own. Beneath her fingers the pages of her book were damp and tearstained.
Daniel tried several times to break out of the hypersphere, but got no farther than Isabel had done. In the meantime, as Becca worsened, she seemed to lose touch with the outer world, failing to respond when Isabel or Daniel spoke. Her head twisted from side to side, and she moaned in pain, continually, day and night. The two of them nursed her in turn, trying to keep her comfortable and clean.
“Isabel,” Daniel said one night at dinner, “thee has not been eating very much.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“But the baby needs food.”
“I know.” She recalled from the charts that she ought to be eating twice what she used to. She felt ashamed to suggest that they move their dining place away from the honeycomb of cells, where Becca’s cries could not be heard.
“Thee is overtired,” Daniel said. “Thee needs to keep up thy strength. I will nurse Becca alone from now on.”
The Wall Around Eden Page 23