by Brian Aldiss
'How can you laugh? He was so desperate to help his wife and family. He wanted fifty rupees. He would take the money back to his wife and then he would come with us to the Calcutta Hospital to have his heart cut out!'
Putting her hand politely to her mouth, Amma laughed again.
'Why is it funny?' Jane asked desperately. 'He meant what he said. Everything was so black for him that his life was worth only fifty rupees!'
'But his life is not worth so much, by far!' Amma said. 'He is just a village swindler. And the money would not cure the child, in any case. The type of smallpox going about here is generally fatal, isn't it, Pappa?'
Dr. Chandhari, who sat with a hand on his patient's forehead, said, 'This man's idea is of course not scientific. He is one of the scheduled classes - an Untouchable, as we used to say. He has never eaten very much all during his life and so he will have only a little weak heart. It would never be a good heart in your father's body, to circulate all his blood properly.' With a proud gesture, he thumped Robert Pentecouth's chest. 'This is the body of the well-nourished man. In Calcutta, we shall find him a proper big heart that will do the work effectively.'
They arrived at the railway station. The sun was above the horizon and climbing rapidly. Rays of gold poured through the branches of the trees by the station on to the faces of people arriving to watch the great event, the stopping of the great Madras-Calcutta express, and the loading aboard of a white man going for a heart-transplant.
Furtively, Jane looked about the crowd, searching to see if her man happened to be there. But, of course, he would be back in his village by now, with his wife and the children.
Intercepting the look, Amma said, 'Jane, you did not give that man baksheesh, did you?'
Jane dropped her gaze, not wishing to betray herself.
'He would have robbed you,' Amma insisted. 'His heart would be valueless. These people are never free from hookworms, you know - in the heart and the stomach. You should have bought the vase if you wanted a souvenir of Naipur Road -not a heart, for goodness sake!'
The train was coming. The crowd stirred. Jane took Amma's hand. 'Say no more. I will always have memories of Naipur Road.'
She busied herself about her father's stretcher as the great sleek train growled into the station.
Down the Up Escalation
Being alone in the house, not feeling too well, I kept the television burning for company. The volume was low. Three men mouthed almost soundlessly about the Chinese role in the Vietnam war. Getting my head down, I turned to my aunt Laura's manuscript.
She had a new hairstyle these days. She looked very good; she was seventy-three, my aunt, and you were not intended to take her for anything less; but you could mistake her for ageless. Now she had written her first book - 'a sort of autobiography', she told me when she handed the bundle over. Terrible apprehension gripped me. I had to rest my head in my hand. Another heart attack coming.
On the screen, figures scrambling over mountain. All unclear. Either my eyesight going or a captured Chinese newsreel. Strings of animals - you couldn't see what, film slightly overexposed. Could be reindeer crossing snow, donkeys crossing sand. I could hear them now, knocking, knocking, very cold.
A helicopter crashing towards the ground? Manuscript coming very close, my legs, my lips, the noise I was making.
There was a ship embedded in the ice. You'd hardly know there was a river. Snow had piled up over the piled-up ice. Surrounding land was flat. There was music, distorted stuff from a radio, accordions, and balalaikas. The music came from a wooden house. From its misty windows, they saw the ship, sunk in the rotted light. A thing moved along the road, clearing away the day's load of ice, ugly in form and movement. Four people sat in the room with the unpleasant music; two of them were girls in their late teens, flat faces with sharp eyes; they were studying at the university. Their parents ate a salad, two forks, one plate. Both man and woman had been imprisoned in a nearby concentration camp in Stalin's time. The camp had gone now. Built elsewhere, for other reasons.
The ship was free of ice, sailing along in a sea of mist. It was no longer a pleasure ship but a research ship. Men were singing. They sang that they sailed on a lake as big as Australia.
'They aren't men. They are horses!' My aunt.
'There are horses aboard.'
'I certainly don't see any men.'
'Funny-looking horses.'
'Did you see a wolf then?'
'I mean, more like ponies. Shaggy. Small and shaggy. Is that gun loaded?'
'Naturally. They're forest ponies - I mean to say, not ponies but reindeer. "The curse of the devil", they call them.'
'It's the bloody rotten light! They do look like reindeer. But they must be men.'
'Ever looked one in the eye? They are the most frightening animals.'
My father was talking to me again, speaking over the phone. It had been so long. I had forgotten how I loved him, how I missed him. All I remembered was that I had gone with my two brothers to his funeral; but that must have been someone else's funeral, someone else's father. So many people, good people, were dying.
I poured my smiles down the telephone, heart full of delight, easy. He was embarking on one of his marvellous stories. I gulped down his sentences.
'That burial business was all a joke - a swindle. I collected two thousand pounds for that, you know, Bruce. No, I'm lying! Two and a half. It was chicken feed, of course, compared with some of the swindles I've been in. Did I ever tell you how Ginger Robbins and I got demobbed in Singapore at the end of the war, 1945? We bought a defunct trawler off a couple of Chinese business men - very nice old fatties called Pee - marvellous name! Ginger and I had both kept our uniforms, and we marched into a transit camp and got a detail of men organized -young rookies, all saluting us like mad - you'd have laughed! We got them to load a big LCT engine into a five-tonner, and we all drove out of camp without a question being asked, and -wham! - straight down to the docks and our old tub. It was boiling bloody hot, and you should have seen those squaddies sweat as they unloaded the engine and man-handled —'
'Shit, Dad, this is all very funny and all that,' I said, 'but I've got some work to do, you know. Don't think I'm not enjoying a great reminiscence, but I have to damned work, see?. Okay?'
I rang off.
I put my head between my hands and - no, I could not manage weeping. I just put my head between my hands and wondered why I did what I did. Subconscious working, of course. I tried to plan out a science fiction story about a race of men who had only subconsciouses. Their consciousnesses had been painlessly removed by surgery.
They moved faster without their burdening consciousnesses, wearing lunatic smiles or lunatic frowns. Directly after the operation, scars still moist, they had restarted World War II, some assuming the roles of Nazis or Japanese or Jugoslav partisans or British fighter pilots in kinky boots. Many even chose to be Italians, the role of Mussolini being so keenly desired that at one time there were a dozen Duces striding about, keeping company with the droves of Hitlers.
Some of diese Hitlers later volunteered to fly with the Kama-kazis.
Many women volunteered to be raped by the Wehrmacht and turned nasty when the requirements were filled. When a concentration camp was set up, it was rapidly filled; people have a talent for suffering. The history of the war was rewritten a bit. They had Passchendale and the Somme in; a certain President Johnson led the British forces.
The war petered out in a win for Germany. Few people were left alive. They voted themselves second-class citizens, mostly becoming Jewish Negroes or Vietnamese. There was birching between consenting adults. These good folk voted unanimously to have their subconsciousnesses removed, leaving only their ids.
I was on the floor. My study. The name of the vinolay was -it had a name, that rather odious pattern of little wooden chocks. I had it on the rip of my tongue. When I sat up, I realized how cold I was, cold and trembling, not working very well.
My body was rather destructive to society, as the Top Clergy would say. I had used it for all sorts of things; nobody knew where it had been. I had used it in an unjust war. Festival. It was called Festival. Terrible name, surely impeded sales.
I could not get up. I crawled across the floor towards the drink cupboard in the next room. Vision blurry. As I looked up, I saw my old aunt's manuscript on the table. One sheet had fluttered down on to the Festival. I crawled out into the dining-room, through the door, banging myself as I went. Neither mind nor body was the precision ballistic missile it once had been.
The bottle. I got it open before I saw it was Sweet Martini, and dropped it. It seeped into the carpet; no doubt that had a name too. Weary, I rested my head in the mess.
'If I die now, I shall never read Aunt Laura's life....'
Head on carpet, bottom in air, I reached and grasped the whisky bottle. Why did they make the stuff so hard to get at? Then I drank. It made me very ill indeed.
It was Siberia again, the dread reindeer sailing eternally their ships across the foggy ice lakes. They were munching things, fur and wood and bone, the saliva freezing into icicles as it ran from their jaws. Terrible noise, like the knocking of my heart.
I was laughing. Whoever died dreaming of reindeer - who but Lapps? Digging my fingers into the nameless carpet, I tried to sit up. It proved easier to open my eyes.
In the shady room, a woman was sitting. She had turned from the window to look at me. Gentle and reassuring lines and planes composed her face. It took a while to see it as a face; even as an arrangement against a window, I greatly liked it.
The woman came over to look closely at me. I realized I was in bed before I realized it was my wife. She touched my brow, making my nervous system set to work on discovering whether the signal was a pain or pleasure impulse, so that things in there were too busy for me to hear what she was saying. The sight of her speaking was pleasurable; it moved me to think that I should answer her.
'How's Aunt Laura?'
The messages were coming through, old old learning sorting out speech, hearing, vision, tactile sensations, and shunting them through the appropriate organs. The doctor had been; it had only been a slight one, but this time I really would have to rest up and take all the pills and do nothing foolish; she had already phoned the office and they were very understanding. One of my brothers was coming round, but she was not at all sure whether he should be allowed to see me. I felt entirely as she did about that.
'I've forgotten what it was called.'
'Your brother Bob?'
My speech was a little indistinct. I had a creepy feeling about whether I could move the limbs I knew were bundled with me in the bed. We'd tackle that challenge as and when necessary.
'Not Bob. Not Bob. The ... the....'
'Just lie there quietly, darling. Don't try to talk.'
'The ... carpet-- '
She went on talking. The hand on the forehead was a good idea. Irritably, I wondered why she didn't do it to me when I was well and better able to appreciate it. What the hell was it called? Roundabout?
'Roundabout....'
'Yes, darling. You've been here for several hours, you know. You aren't quite awake yet, are you?'
'Shampoo....'
'Later, perhaps. Lie back now and have another Little doze.'
'Variety_ '
'Try and have another little doze.'
One of the difficulties of being a publisher is that one has to fend off so many manuscripts submitted by friends of friends. Friends alway have friends with obsessions about writing. Life would be simple - it was the secret of a happy life, not to have friends of friends. Supposing you were cast away on a desert island disc, Mr. Hartwell, what eight friends of friends would you take with you, provided you had an inexhaustible supply of manuscripts?
I leaned across the desk and said, 'But this is worse than ever. You aren't even a friend of a friend of a friend, auntie.'
'And what am I if I'm not a friend of a friend?'
'Well, you're an aunt of a nephew, you see, and after all, as an old-established firm, we have to adhere to certain rules of -etiquette, shall we call it, by which —'
It was difficult to see how offended she,was. The pile of manuscript hid most of her face from view. I could not remove it, partly because there was a certain awareness that this was really the sheets. Finally I got them open. -
'It's your life, Bruce. I've written your life. It could be a bestseller.'
'Variety.... No, Show Business....'
'I thought of calling it "By Any Other Name" '
'We have to adhere to certain rules '
It was better when I woke again. I had the name I had been searching for: Festival. Now I could not remember what it was the name of.
The bedroom had changed. There were flowers about. The portable TV set stood on the dressing-table. The curtains were drawn back and I could see into the garden. My wife was still there, coming over, smiling. Several times she walked across to me, smiling. The light came and went, the flowers changed position, colour, the doctor got in her way. Finally she reached me.
'You've made it! You're marvellous!'
'You've made it! You're marvellous!'
No more trouble after that. We had the TV on and watched the war escalate in Vietnam and Cambodia.
Returning health made me philosophical. 'That's what made me ill. Nothing I did ... under-exercise, over-eating ... too much booze ... too many fags ... just the refugees.'
'I'll turn it off if it upsets you.'
'No. I'm adapting. They won't get me again. It's the misery the TV sets beam out from Vietnam all over the world. That's what gives people heart attacks. Look at lung-cancer - think how it has been on the increase since the war started out there. They aren't real illnesses in the old sense, they're sort of prodromic illness, forecasting some bigger sickness to come. The whole world's going to escalate into a Vietnam.'
She jumped up, alarmed. 'I'll switch it off!'
'The war?'
'The set.'
The screen went blank. I could still see them. Thin women in those dark blue overalls, all their possessions slung from a frail bamboo over a frail shoulder. Father had died about the time the French were slung out. We were all bastards. Perhaps every time one of us died, one of the thin women lived. I began to dream up a new religion.
They had the angels dressed in UN uniform. They no longer looked like angels, not because of the uniform but because they were all disguised as a western diplomat - nobody in particular, but jocular, uneasy, stolid, with stoney eyes that twinkled.
My angel came in hotfoot and said, 'Can you get a few friends of friends together? The refugees are waiting on the beach.'
There were four of us in the hospital beds. We scrambled up immediately, dragging bandages and sputum cups and bed pans. The guy next to me came trailing a plasma bottle. We climbed into the helicopter.
We prayed en route. 'Bet the Chinese and Russian volunteers don't pray on the trip.' I insinuated to the angel.
'The Chinese and Russians don't volunteer.'
'So you make a silly insinuation, you get a silly innuendo,' the plasma man said.
God's hand powered the chopper. Faster than engines but maybe less reliable. We landed on the beach beside a foaming river. Heat pouring down and up the sideways. The refugees were forlorn and dirty. A small boy stood hatless with a babe hatless on his back. Both ageless, eyes like reindeer's, dark, moist, cursed.
'I'll die for those two,' I said, pointing.
'One for one. Which one do you choose?'
'Hell, come on now, angel, isn't my soul as good as any two god-damned Viet kid souls?'
'No discounts here, bud. Yours is shop-soiled, anyway.'
'Okay, the bigger kid.'
He was whisked instantly into the helicopter. I saw his dirty and forlorn face at the window. The baby sprawled screaming on the sand. It was naked, scabs on both knees. It yelled in slow motio
n, piddling, trying to burrow into the sand. I reached slowly out to it, but the exchange had been made, the angel turned the napalm on to me. As I fell, the baby went black in my shadow.
'Let me switch the fire down, if you're too hot, darling.' 88
'Yuh. And a drink....'
She helped me struggle into a sitting position, put her arm round my shoulders. Glass to lips, teeth, cool water in throat.
'Go, I love you, Ellen, thank God you're not....'
'What? Another nightmare?'
'Not Vietnamese....'
It was better then, and she sat and talked about what had been going on, who had called, my brother, my secretary, the Roaches ... 'the Roaches have called' ... 'any Earwigs'? ... the neighbours, the doctor. Then we were quiet a while.
'I'm better now, much better. The older generation's safe from all this, honey. They were born as civilians. We weren't. Get me auntie's manuscript, will you?'
'You're not starting work this week.'
'It won't hurt me. She'll be writing about her past, before the war and all that. The past's safe. It'll do me good. The prose style doesn't matter.'
I settled back as she left the room. Flowers stood before the TV, making it like a little shrine.
That Uncomfortable Pause Between Life and Art...
I'd visited the exhibition of paintings by William Holman Hunt at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Afterwards, I went to the cafeteria, sitting and drinking orangeade after orangeade. A woman of about fifty sat down opposite me, we exchanged a word about the beautiful summer weather, and she embarked immediately upon the story of her life, which had been full of trouble and three husbands; not to mention a spaniel that got run over on the Kingston Bypass.
In Hunt's work, we are meant to think of the surface of the canvas as non-existent - a conspiracy that no longer exists between modern painters and their audience. Each frame admits one to a little floodlit stage. Inside lies a diorama in bright colour. In a picture like The Apple Harvest, you look at the apples, rosily hanging between the girl's basket and the sack, and peer closer for the threads that keep them suspended so miraculously in mid-air. With Hunt, you never see the threads.