The Paradise Ghetto

by Fergus O'Connell

  Julia and Suzanne are weeding once again, this time on a new patch of dug-over soil. As usual, they alternate between bending down and kneeling in the dirt. A hoe would make all the difference and even though all the hoes were handed out this morning, Julia suggests that maybe one has been finished with and handed back to Adolf. She says she’s going to go and see if she can get her hands on one.

  The door of the shed is swung back and held in place with a red brick. She finds Adolf inside, sitting at the small table he uses as a desk and smoking. The book where he records everything is open on the table in front of him. As she enters, he becomes busy, picking up a pencil and appearing to study the book attentively.

  It turns out there are no hoes available and Julia is about to return to work when Adolf says, ‘Would you like a cigarette?’ He reaches into a cardboard box, takes one out and hands it to her. Julia’s always been able to take or leave cigarettes – and she definitely doesn’t want to share one with Adolf.

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ she says.

  ‘You’re a very beautiful girl,’ says Adolf.

  ‘Thank you,’ Julia says as icily as possible. ‘I’d better get back to work.’

  ‘Don’t be in such a hurry.’

  He gets up and puts the cigarette down in an ashtray. He comes round the table.

  ‘Even if you don’t want to smoke, take a break. You won’t find too many bosses who say that, now will you?’

  Adolf stands a couple of steps away from her.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about you a lot, Julia,’ he says.

  Julia says nothing, wondering what the best thing to do is.

  ‘I’ve been wondering ... wondering if you’d be interested in becoming my girlfriend?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ says Julia.

  ‘There would be a lot of advantages. I could get you extra food. You’ve seen – I have cigarettes. Even if you don’t smoke you could trade them for something else.’

  The prospect is attractive but that’s about the only thing about the whole proposal that is. Julia dislikes Adolf and while this by itself wouldn’t necessarily be a problem – she’s fucked lots of people she didn’t like, both men and women – she has another reason. Julia has slowly been coming to the conclusion that she never wants to have sex with a man again. Actually, if she thinks about it and judging by what happened with Suzanne, it seems like she never wants to have sex with anybody ever again – man or woman. Since she’s been in the ghetto she hasn’t had her period. She wonders if all that part of her body has shut down.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to think about it?’ asks Adolf.

  ‘I’m sure,’ says Julia. ‘I’m very flattered but I think not.’

  ‘As you wish,’ says Adolf.

  ‘Will there be anything else?’ she asks.

  Adolf doesn’t say anything but he lunges towards her and grabs her, putting his arms around her. She resists, she struggles but he is very strong. He tries to kiss her, but she turns her head away. She feels one of his hands make its way crablike from her ass down the front of her thigh and then, hoisting up her skirt, he puts his hand in between her legs. She wriggles and tries to escape but her arms are pinioned by her side.

  ‘Just one kiss,’ says Adolf, as he tries to get his hand inside her underwear.

  ‘Let go of me, you fucker,’ says Julia.

  ‘Just one kiss,’ Adolf repeats.

  Julia tries to kick him in the balls but he holds her too tight and she can’t lift her leg to get any kind of momentum. She can feel his fingertips trying to probe inside her. He is still trying to kiss her but so far all he has managed to do is to wet her face with saliva.

  Julia suddenly relaxes and turns her lips to his.

  ‘That’s more like it,’ he says and goes to kiss her.

  He has eased his grip on her a bit. It is enough for her to raise her leg and stamp her heel down hard onto the top of his foot.

  He shouts in pain and breaks away.

  ‘Fucking bitch,’ he says.

  ‘Fuck you.’

  Julia pushes her skirt back down and walks out of the shed.

  This is going to be trouble.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  The Voyage (Suzanne)

  On the voyage Birkita learned a little more about the captain.

  Contrary to appearances he was less than ten summers older than her – she had thought he was at least double that. His wife had died in childbirth taking the child – a little girl – with her.

  ‘He left on a voyage with a beautiful wife and about to have a family,’ the first mate, who was also the steersman, explained to Birkita. ‘He came home to “dust”, is the word he uses – everything gone.’ After that he either sold or just walked away from his house – the first mate wasn’t sure which. Now he lived on the ship which was called Seva after his wife.

  If he had a name, Birkita never found out what it was and nobody on the crew seemed to know. He was simply ‘Captain’. Birkita came to learn that the crew adored him – would go anywhere with him, do anything for him, risk anything if he asked them to. Of course the crew were well rewarded for their trouble. ‘He shares the profits. There aren’t too many captains do that.’

  ‘Does he long for death?’ Birkita asked the first mate, wondering if this meant the captain was rash and took wild risks.

  ‘No. But he finds no pleasure in life.’

  It might have been a description of her.

  Birkita wondered if all of this explained why the captain seemed to have taken her under his wing. Was she the daughter he never had? When Birkita had first hailed him from the quayside, she had already decided that, in addition to paying him money, she would gladly have opened her legs for him. She was way past the point where that would have meant anything to her. But he had looked for nothing like that.

  She ate her meals with him and the first mate and she occasionally managed to make the captain laugh. He seemed to like that, though his laughter was as though it came from another time and not something he did any more.

  The days passed – an endless procession of blue skies and knife-sharp shards of sun on water. Occasionally they saw the sails of other ships but mostly they were alone upon the sea.

  Birkita’s skin started to brown under the sun – she had been so pale, had spent so much time indoors. Her body healed. In the lupanar she had felt as though she was little more than a vessel into which men pumped their poison. She had been beaten, bruised, bitten, punched and slapped. At times it had felt as though her insides were being destroyed. Here, on the ocean, with the warm breeze on her skin, the sun on her back, clean air in her nostrils, she felt her strength returning, her body becoming whole again.

  She asked the captain about how they knew where they were and how they didn’t get lost. He explained about navigating with the sun by day and the stars by night. He seemed to get great pleasure from showing these things to her. It was as though he had always intended to do them with his own daughter.

  She asked if she could help and she was given menial chores to do – preparing vegetables, cleaning. She cooked a meal and the result was so successful that she was made the cook. Several of the crew looked at her in that way that she knew so well but under the captain’s protection, there was never a problem. It was as though she was the captain’s daughter with all the respect that that implied.

  Being out there on the vast ocean, Birkita wondered if the gods really cared about her or anybody. She thought of the people who had come before her – not just the people that the bull Roman had killed but all of her ancestors way back to the first people. Why had they come into the world? What had their suffering been for? Did the gods really watch everything that went on? Did they care? Were there any gods? And if there were, what had she and her family and her village and her whole people done to deserve the punishment that had been visited on them? Soon she would die and it would be like she had never existed. There was nobody alive now who would even remember her. />
  But strangely enough, in this there was a certain comfort. She found she was able to stop thinking about the past – at least for long periods of time. And the future? That too she could forget about – at least for now. She found herself wishing that the voyage would never end. As she lay in bed, rocked by the gentle motion of the sea, she thought about asking the captain if she could join the crew but she laughed at the thought. It was a ridiculous idea. Anyway – there was something she had to do. Until that was done, there could be nothing else.

  She had been surprised at how little the death of Cassius had satisfied her and as for Flavia, she still felt the guilt of that. They had been so close, so intimate. What would happen to Flavia now? If she was lucky, she would end her days in the lupanar.

  And if she wasn’t?

  Birkita preferred not to think about that.

  31

  Next morning it looks as though Adolf has started to get his own back on Julia. Rather than letting her and Suzanne work together he sends them off in two different gangs. It is like this for the next few days. Julia consoles herself with the fact that once all this beautification of the ghetto is finished, she’ll hopefully get moved into some other type of work and away from Adolf. Or the war might end. In the meantime, there is the book.

  Though they didn’t intend it this way – they hadn’t really thought about it all – the book seems to be about to divide naturally into two parts. Part One is Birkita’s outward journey from Britannia, Part Two is going to be her return and her search for revenge on the bull Roman.

  Looking at them now, Julia thinks that there has been an inevitability to all of the chapters in Part One. Each one has flowed pretty inescapably from the one that came before it. Right now, Part Two is a blank canvas. Other than the business of Birkita getting her revenge, they have little else. It would have been nice to have been working side by side with Suzanne so that they could have started to talk about all of this but Adolf has put paid to that.

  Birkita is going to land in Baeterrae which, as Suzanne has explained, is on the south coast of France – Gaul. Birkita then has to make her way to Britannia. Julia thinks there is no point in covering any of that in the story. The reader wants to know about Birkita’s revenge. A journey through all of France, whatever adventures might occur along the way, is just going to bore people. They need to get Birkita to Britannia as quickly as possible. Of course, that’s the great thing about writing a novel. They can get her there in just one line: ‘As soon as the ship tied up in Londinium, Birkita walked down the gangplank and set off on the road that led north-east.’

  So Julia starts to ponder what might happen next? What form will Birkita’s revenge take? Will she really crucify the bull Roman or will it be something else? Does the bull Roman have a family? Children? That’s another thing that Julia loves about writing – the possibilities.

  That evening when they have handed in their tools and are heading wearily back to their barracks, Julia notices there is something different about Suzanne. Her usual dreaminess seems to have been replaced by something else. Is she smiling more than usual? She’s always very optimistic and positive but there’s something more this time. There is a sense about her of a secret she will never tell.

  Before she has gone to sleep, Julia has worked out what it is. Suzanne has fallen in love.

  Julia’s theory is confirmed almost immediately. Suzanne is suddenly less interested in the book. When Julia starts to ask her about Birkita’s revenge, Suzanne says she’ll have to think about it, adding that it’s good that Birkita is on the ship – while she is making the sea voyage, Suzanne and Julia can take their time thinking about what is to come next.

  This is completely out of character for Suzanne. Up until now, it is she who has spoken of the urgency to get the book written – how the war won’t end until it’s done. And of course, there has always been – unspoken but constantly in the back of their minds – the worry that they might be separated or deported from the ghetto. After all, there was a deportation of nearly a thousand people as recently as February.

  When Julia realises that this is indeed what has happened, the shock is really more than she can bear. And the Pandora’s box that this has opened begins not with Suzanne but with Julia herself.

  She has come to hate men. She has seen what they have done to the world. They are all about anger and aggression and violence. Even their bodies show it – the erect penis like a sword, wanting to hurt, to damage, to penetrate, to pierce. How different from the self-contained beauty of the female form. So Julia had come to the conclusion that she wants nothing further to do with men. If there is to be anyone in her life in the future, it will be a woman.

  And she had thought that that woman would be Suzanne. Despite what happened the night of the betrayal (as Julia thinks of it), she had still hoped that she and Suzanne could build a future together; that after the war was over they would stay together. It is this prospect, as much as the book that has kept Julia going. Indeed, if it had been somebody other than Suzanne who had proposed the book, Julia sees now that she is not sure if she would have had much interest in it.

  A future without Suzanne is the bleakest future Julia can imagine. In fact, it is not a future at all; not a future she would want.

  Suzanne seems oblivious to all this and Julia is too distraught to speak to her about it.

  Julia is even more distraught when she finds out that the man Suzanne has fallen for – for it is a man – is Adolf.

  32

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Suzanne says angrily.

  It’s at this point Julia knows she should have stuck to her earlier instinct and not spoken about this to Suzanne. It’s too late now, of course.

  ‘Why would I lie? What reason would I have?’ Julia asks.

  ‘What reason? You’re jealous. That’s what reason. You wanted me and when I offered myself to you, you rejected me. And now you don’t want anyone else to have me. Or maybe now you know what you’ve lost and you want it back. Well, it’s too late, Julia. You had your chance.’

  ‘Look, please – I’m telling you the truth. I know what happened between us can’t be undone but not Adolf. Anyone but him.’

  ‘He’s a good man, Julia – and he can get extra food. I don’t know about you but I can’t take much more of this. We’re dying on our feet. This can save us. And don’t worry, I’ll share the food with you, if that’s what you’re wondering about.’

  ‘That’s not fair, Suzanne. You know it’s not the food.’

  ‘He’s a good man, Julia.’

  ‘He’s not a good man.’

  ‘Oh, and you’d know, would you?’

  ‘Yes, I would know.’

  ‘Really. And how is that?’

  Julia and Suzanne have been sitting against a wall out in the courtyard. It is April and the heat of the day hasn’t quite evaporated yet. Now Suzanne gets up and stands opposite Julia, hands on her hips.

  Julia had never intended that it would come to this – but now it seems like there’s no going back. It is her last card.

  ‘Sit down,’ she says quietly.

  ‘I’d prefer to stand,’ says Suzanne, though her voice becomes a bit calmer.

  ‘Remember I told you I was an actress,’ Julia begins.

  Suzanne nods.

  ‘And you asked if you’d ever seen any of the films I was in.’ Julia laughs a brittle laugh.

  ‘I very much doubt if you would have. You see, they were ... well, adult films.’

  ‘Adult films?’ asks Suzanne, uncomprehending.

  She really is so innocent in so many ways.

  ‘Dirty films! Sex films. I would have sex with men in them.’

  The light has come on.

  ‘And women,’ Julia adds.

  ‘What’s that got to do with any of this?’ asks Suzanne.

  She tries to continue her angry tone but she is clearly taken aback.

  ‘Because I’ve a lot more experience of men than you have.
I’ve met his type a thousand times before. He’s bad news. He’ll break your heart ... Or worse.’

  ‘Well, it’s my heart,’ says Suzanne, and with that she storms off.

  Suzanne doesn’t come back that night. Julia assumes she is with Adolf. In the morning at the hut, waiting for their work assignments, Suzanne looks radiant despite her bony face, big eyes and shrunken frame. They stand at opposite ends of the semicircle of people and Suzanne looks defiantly at Julia. Mercifully, they are put in separate gangs and don’t see each other for the rest of the day. Nor does Suzanne come back for food or bed that night.

  Julia thinks she now knows what Birkita must feel like having lost everything. She finds herself thinking more and more about the girl on the ship in their story. Julia wonders if Birkita could have been an ancestor of hers, many, many generations back. She finds herself spending long hours thinking about this as she works silently, oblivious to her workmates around her. Could it have happened that an ancestor of hers had a life that mirrored Julia’s?

  And as Julia becomes more and more the girl on the ship, the girl who has suffered so much, Julia finds herself asking what Birkita would have done? What would she have done if she were here now instead of Julia?

  The answer comes to her easily.

  Birkita would have carried on.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Britannia (Julia)

  As soon as the ship tied up in Londinium, Birkita walked down the gangplank and set off on the road that led north-east. It had been early spring when she had left Pompeii. It was the beginning of summer now.

  The captain of the Seva had brought her to Baeterrae just as he had promised. She had been cheerless when the voyage ended. She would have happily stayed on the ocean for months – indeed for the rest of her life.

  The captain embraced her before she left, holding her and whispering in her ear that she should be careful. He gave her food and some money – quite a lot of money – essentially what she had paid him in the first place. She had the feeling that there were lots of other things he wanted to say. She sensed that, had she asked him to let her become part of the crew, he would have agreed. Indeed, she felt that if she had asked him to adopt her, he would have said yes to that too.