by Anna Tambour
The King's Carver, Eric the Strong, was sent to volunteer, and has not returned.
The queen who watched him is now quite slender, though we have lost her present address, somewhere on the outskirts of this grown-great city, growing every greater under the King's reign.
But that was all in the summer in the city of Öm, where far from the moderating influence of a temperate sea, the summers are hot and flyfilled, and the winters are something else.
- 2 -
The winter in Öm is so cold that a thief could stab you with an icicle, and days later, should the King use investigators who investigated, they could find the thief's fingerprints on the icicle, still pointing towards the sky from your rock-hard breast. That is the story told by people who live here, to tell how cold it gets.5
It is now the middle of winter, and the Palace is unoccupied by the King. He is in a distant land where it is summer now—a summer of Raspberries Romanoff and tulips in windowboxes and champagne-scented horse races. He is spending this evening studying. He sits at a round table, and beside him sit jewelled ladies, scented of lily and tuberose, of civet cat and oleander and barbary lime and ambergris and kufu bark and fusque. On the floor is a red carpet, only slightly stained. Overhead, a span of chandeliers makes him feel at home. He is playing baccarat, or maybe it is twenty-one. We cannot tell the difference, so let us watch. He wins, yet again. A lot. He laughs, and expansively grabs a buttock in each hand. The ladies both laugh. He sweeps up his winnings, and invites the ladies to take their leave with him. They stroll out together under the stars, which they cannot see because the lights of the town, the lights of the boats shining upon the water, the lights of the casino, the lights of cars, and of bars, shine too brightly for those merely stars to shine against.
The King's bodyguards follow. Their cigarettes glow like the trail of a comet.
~
Back home in Öm, the winter was as the Little Emissary had been warned. Yet it was a shock how cold it really was. The running sewage congealed, and then froze solid and bumpy. The plastic bag walls of homes stiffened with rime, and then ice. People burned little fires out of what they could find to burn, and houses caught fire, houses of cardboard and beaten stuff and some mudlike brick, and those were the permanent homes that ringed the central town. Other people huddled together as shelter, and many froze hard in the unremitting cold. The pipes in her building burst, and it took weeks of her time, going from one office to another, to get someone to come to look at them. She had to get a water carrier and yet another servant. These servants were something that she didn't know what to think about. Was she helping their lives or oppressing them? She didn't know whether she should say please or thank you, explain something again and again, or hit them, the local custom.
A skeleton staff of Emissaries, leaving each morning from their homes of brick and concrete, went to their work, as the people of the markets and the streets went to theirs. Some distributed protein supplement biscuits, risking the wrath of the King. Some taught the benefits of Education. Some met with the King's Guard, to train them to better serve. Some surveyed the Water, some surveyed the Air, some surveyed the Numbers of Feathered Carnivores missing from the Central Market. Some surveyed the growth in the number of Surveyors in Öm. Some wrote surveys in their offices in the city, and some took notes to write more later, from other lands. Quite a few Emissaries wore one expression, did one job, and spoke one language during the day, and in the evening, quite another. Some of them worried about whether the King would know. Some of them worried about whether their land or the people who sent them, or their families so far away, would know about their life in this strange place.
Our Little Emissary of the weak-willed heart had sent her report to her people at home, and waited for further instructions—a new mission to carry out. In the meantime, she conducted her own studies. She walked the city and felt its soul. She talked to, or tried sign-language with people who had newly come to find its riches, and who slept wrapped in rags and the warmth of each other. She tried to speak to the human donkeys, but they were always in a great rush. She watched a man who beat out metal, making cooking pots that would have looked stunning holding flowers as a table centrepiece, but cost less than plastic buckets. She watched the people who gave to certain silent beggars. Many of the people who gave were thinner than the beggars.
The Little Emissary was overjoyed to see such generosity—the silent spirituality of Öm. She wished that she could take these people home with her to speak and teach—to wipe away the wanting and getting and wanting more of the land that she came from. If only she could make these people—the givers and the enlightened ones— Emissaries to her land. Öm is so much more, she wrote, than just starving people.
She found a young man of gentle voice and huge and melting eyes, and simply amazing hair, and they made each other warm, as he taught her.
~
Spring came. The winter smell of fires from all kinds of rubbish and the dry, clean smell of snow faded, to be replaced by the growing stench of melted excrements and garbage and mud and dirt.
The King was busy in Öm.
Close to the King's Palace, a rambling eyesore was eliminated.
In its place, a Casino was erected as if the King had given an order of "Off with their heads" if this fairy palace didn't rise at the speed of the sound of decree.
Three Banks sprang up in the city square. By summer, streetlights, electricity, cable connections for communications to foreign lands—real communications—sprouted all over New Öm, all around the Palace, in the centre of it all.
And in New Öm, hotels popped up like mushrooms after rain.
And toilets were installed, sometimes with plumbing.
And electricity was connected, sort of.
And tales were told, enticing many comers.
Money came for a holiday in exotic Öm.
New traders came, with silk, and gold, scented this and that, and watches and fountain pens and duty-free.
And all the King's land heard of this wonder.
The Little Emissary wandered around in this strange New City part, feeling out of place and poorly dressed, and angry at herself, and wishing that she could afford ... and then she hurried away to the market where she and her young man shopped.
There, protein supplement biscuits were sold, and bags of rice marked gift of, and bags of corn— that corn, also gift of.6
Women sat behind piles of beans, a mound of twenty potatoes, a feather-duster-full (and still fluffing) of sparrows, their feet tied together.
An old man sold fly swatters made of wire that he twisted as he sat, or he repaired yours while you stood.
Clothing of all the lands of the Emissaries hung, in its washed-out slogans and pilled polyester, in Fashion and Business and Sportswear and Casual.
A dusty man at the end of a chain was the centre of a laughing crowd, as he jerked his end of the chain, the other end of which jerked his bear's nose.
A man sat at a treadle sewing machine, making shirts to order. His small collection hung behind him, all one style, the only style he'd sewn for forty years.
The Little Emissary bought from him, one for her and one for her melting-eyed enlightener.
One day, she saw from a billboard that the King had met her Queen. They were hugely pictured smiling together, each facing forward, both sitting in carved chairs. The King towered over the Queen, and looked magnificent.
The Little Emissary was hopeful and very proud. She was only a little disappointed to learn of this meeting this way.
~
She lived these days, on protein biscuits and bottled water. She had a window garden in the little flat given to her as an Emissary along with a small living stipend. The window garden hadn't been successful yet, so she ate these biscuits so that she didn't take the meagre vegetables sold at the market from the mouths of those she'd come to help. The lack of vegetables in her diet did not cause her hardship, as she had always despised them, but s
he did miss breakfasts of a cup of cocoa and a soft white roll with butter.
He was helping her to understand. He gives me, she wrote in her journal, a sense of be.7
At night, one place that many Emissaries gathered was a little hole of a restaurant in the old part of the central town. The woman who ran it wore the wastefully voluminous costume that many women here still wore. She was known for her pizza and lemon meringue pie, and she kept a dog that growled at beggars at the door. And the place had cold beer.
Our Little Emissary scorned that place, just the thought of it.
The people at her home office had still not communicated a mission for her, nor ordered her home. Her parents sent her many worried letters, some of which arrived, and a box of chocolate sprinkles, which arrived to her surprise.
She smiled at the memory of its melted messiness, but her Teacher with the Melting Eyes had eaten it without complaint.
Without direction from abroad, she directed herself, as she felt this land seep into her.
She painted a poster and stuck it up on the outside wall of the building that housed her office. She didn't know how to read the writing here, so painted a tottery man waving a bottle, all dressed in rags. Below the man, she painted another bottle, then an equals sign, and then a chicken on a plate. She was no artist, but thought it all quite recognisable. The poster, however, had taken her two days, and she had no knowledge of how many people that it taught.
She thought of the dogs that howled at night, but there were too many dogs and the protein biscuits were even expensive for her. Food here is overpriced, she noted for the record.
She took pictures for the record. She walked and wrote. She spent much time in her flat, with her Teacher.
She visited New Om again, just to look.
This time she didn't have time to feel shabby and to wish she could afford some duty-free.
There it was— it was so obvious that she was ashamed at herself for not thinking of it sooner—her Project.
~
That night she walked to the Grand Hotel, next to the Casino, and waited by the entrance. She didn't have long to wait. It took about five minutes before she saw her first person whom she knew to be in danger. She rushed to the rescue.
"Don't!" she cried, as she put her hand upon the arm of a young fresh local girl, a beautiful girl with melting eyes and a body partly clothed in a skin-tight microscopic dress. "They will use you," the Little Emissary said as she pulled the girl away.
The melting-eyed girl reached down to take hold of the Emissary's shoulder. And with her other hand, she swung. The beautiful girl was mortified as the blood from the woman's nose spattered her dress because then she needed to run home to wash away the blood and dry it before running back. The night would be lost.
The Little Emissary wandered drunkenly out to the dark streets, walking till she was thoroughly lost. Eventually, after much confusion of directions, she was led by a talkative but incomprehensible old woman, to the hospital. But the hospital was closed, so she waited with many others outside in the dirt, all night, and when it opened the next day and doctors finally came, and she finally saw one, he said there was nothing he could do to fix her nose, and she thought about it, and thought that at home, her doctors would say the same. So she begged for some ice, and he eventually found some, and she walked home with the ice against her face, held over her nose in a plastic bag smelling of unidentifiable flesh.
From her nose, she suffered much pain, but much of the weight of her Ömward provisions were pills.
She eventually healed—to a wry-looking face.
~
And Öm grew ever greater.
And more brick houses were built, and more Emissaries came.
And more houses of fantastic construction were built.
And the King built another Palace.
But the Casino didn't thrive for very long.
The Casino didn't pay out as well as it should have.
And the drinks cost more than they should have.
And the poker machines were out of order.
And there were not enough places to shop.
And there was nothing to do.
And there was no beach, and no swimming pool with crystal-clear water.
And the Ski Resort within sight of the city, which had been planned because there were no trees left, and which would have had a perfect downhill run, never got built because the money that was granted for it, disappeared.
~
Surrounding the New City:
The streets still stunk, because they were still dirt.
The garbage was sorted, mostly recycled, but never as such, picked up.
The hotels needed to have electricity for most of the day, but they didn't.
They needed to have toilets that flushed, but the flush didn't flush far enough away.
And most of the city still had no flushes away at all.
And more sewage ran amuck.
And even where the taps were gold, the running water wriggled.
(And then there were those riots, though only very short ones.)
Besides, the heat was too hot and the cold too frigid, and the air conditioners weak, and the heaters none too heating, and the electricity still didn't work enough to make them useful, anyway. And the springtime stench was unbelievable.
And another year passed.
~
The Banks look well.
The King's priority is now "communications".
The Emissaries who gain permission to help, help communications.
The King is now tiring of his 107th queen.
The War that the King's Carver volunteered for, ended. But the King is ruminating on another one.
Of the King's Carver, Eric the Strong, nothing has been heard.
As to the redheaded Emissary of the Questionable Corn, he flew from Öm immediately after his embarrassing. However, all was not lost, as the experience sparked a spiritual awakening, and less than a year later, he returned to Öm . Now he wakens others as he tramps the city and hands out pamphlets and speaks and sings.
The multitudes in the city have grown, and with their growth have come bars on the windows, cries in the dark. Old men still sit in the dust and gamble with stones, with nothing to gamble away, but young men do not join them. These bars and cries and young men wanting a more exciting life are not however, anything remarkable for a city with growing pains. Compared to many of the world's great metropolises, Öm is remarkably well-ordered.
The presses still print in that Palace basement, and now they print two kinds of money. The people of his land use the gloriously coloured Krömer. Of that, he is very generous, printing very very much. The people who come to his land use another kind, the Convertible, and it is not as pretty. Of that more seldom-printed wealth, the King makes only a little.
The people who come to his land to see his dirt and slime, come often, and the King likes jesting with them.
The King's current culinary enthusiasm is farci—stuffing to us. Everything is stuffed. Suckling pig, wild boar, doves, camel humps. His current passion is how many can be stuffed into how many before the general effect is lost. The King still mulls. Tonight he is drinking glög.
The used queens now prosper, some of them, around the Grand Hotel.
The Little Emissary with the broken nose has left, her Teacher having disappeared.
~
The Little Emissary, home now, thinks of the land where she had lived and left a part of herself, she always says. She thinks of the great and growing city that she roamed, of the People she loved, of the markets where the goodness that was given, sold.
She wonders if she should have brought the young man with the melting eyes and amazing hair home with her, or whether he would have been corrupted.
Now she is warm when she wants and cool when she wants, and breakfasts on cocoa and white rolls and butter. She dreams of Öm, but feels at home in her city of people who know what to laugh at and when to cry; of
diesel and petrol fumes and sewers that run silent and deep; of toilets that flush away; of rats that keep to themselves so that you don't see them during the day, and never with its coat off, lying on its back on a cloth on the ground, with its mouth wide open and yellow teeth bared, as a family roast.
~
Her sleep is crowded with dreams of Öm. She thinks more people should walk the streets of Öm, as she had. She wonders what her people would think, what offerings they would consider appropriate for that great and growing place, that dirty and poor and fantastical land, where just the cost of one traditional outfit must be worth a year's food, and as for those amazingly elaborate necklaces! They were expensive, even for her!
She thinks of her Queen, and wonders what that meeting was like, the one with the King. And what had the Queen thought of the King, though her Queen is only of the Good Queen type, the type that must hate raspberries, always smiles, and comments on the weather. The Little Emissary doesn't quite know how to arrange her own conclusions, and she can't help thinking that if she knew what the Queen thought, really ...
But whether the Queen would know any better what to think than she or all of the many Emissaries who flock to Öm, and live there, this ex-Emissary can only guess.
Besides, she has never met her Queen. The Little Emissary has only met one queen, and it was during that last winter. And maybe she hadn't been a queen at all.8
~
Footnotes
1. Much of this account occurred before the King became the President, but as that makes little difference, we shall refer to him throughout as the King.
2. These statements of "... starving" and "... help" were broached in such a roundabout way in the specialized language of emissaries, possibly developed in order not to imply or insult, that we have condensed their expressed observation to seven plain words, so as not to exhaust the paper supply.
3. We are no dog experts, but something with sharp teeth and bug-eyes scrabbled at the end of a chain.