by Michel Faber
Most of this extra strength was not, in fact, caused by the routine selecting and pushing into jars of the gherkins, though this was the least unpleasant work. The task that had really made the difference was one that each of the women was given in turn, for limited periods only, because of its brutal physical demand. This task had the technical appellation ‘banging the jar’. About three-quarters of the way to the end of the line, the monotony of female bodies was broken by a different fixture: a squat wooden post, its top coated in thick grey rubber as if it had been dipped in a vat of the stuff. This post, with its shock-absorbing tip, was where each jar must be slammed down hard to ensure maximum settling of contents before the final few gherkins were added. Failure to do this resulted in underweight jars, which resulted in angry lectures from the factory foreman, which resulted in Nina ramming her right hand into her sodden apron pocket and ordering it to clench until the fingernails broke the skin of the palm. It was therefore very important to bang the jars hard enough.
Today, when Nina’s turn to bang the jar came, she nodded agreement but excused herself for just a minute and walked off. It was only in the toilet that Nina’s hand became aware Nina was feeling ill, as she kneeled on the floor in front of the vinegar-dewy bowl and retched. The fluctuations of digestion were a foreign country to Nina’s hand, but it understood that there were times when food, however solid and distinctively textured it might have been when going into the body, was changed somehow into a vile glutinous soup potent enough to halt all activity until it was ejected. Nina’s hand, fastidious when indulged but stoical in a crisis, rose to the deed Nina herself was hesitating to command: it entered the retching Ο of her mouth and slid two fingers into her dilated gullet. When the vomiting was finished, Nina washed her hand and face and went out to bang the jar.
For a while, the work was much as Nina’s hand had experienced it before. It grasped the jar, bashed its base on the rubber-tipped post, replaced it on the belt, and so on and on. Within minutes, though, an unfamiliar feeling began to make its way down to the hand, indicating that all was not as normal in Nina’s body. Microscopic insects seemed to be buzzing in the nerves, alarming at first, ultimately soothing, like a self-generated massage. The hand felt itself swelling, increasing in mass, the way it had felt when first released from under the crush of Nina’s thigh, but paradoxically it felt lighter too, as if the atmosphere of the factory had changed the laws of gravity and was inviting all things of great density to float up into the air. All the while, the banging of the jars went on, regular as a pulsebeat, forceful as falling cars in a wrecking yard. If anything, the rhythm was more powerful than before, settling into the groove of automatic command. Nina had become a machine whose actions her hand could no longer influence, but whose efficiency it need no longer oversee. Soon a state of strange equilibrium was reached, with Nina’s massive and languorous hand riding on the impact of the banging, accompanying the jars on and off the belt as they leapt up and down, rather than having to seize them. Eventually, the activity became a moving fixture, like the sea, and above it hovered the soul of the hand, watching.
Of course there were seconds going by, bright flashes of time, winking in rhythm with eternity, but they never amounted to minutes. Each was joined to the last and the next, or disappeared suddenly, according to its wish. Within these seconds, folded inside them like hors d’oeuvres, were sensations: the sensation of bouncing up and down through the balmy, vinegary air, the sensation of banging the jar, the sensation of losing hold of the reason for banging the jar, the sensation of losing hold of the jar itself, the sensation of the jar shattering, of the sharp glass intruding into the space that Nina’s hand had always shared with Nina alone.
Nina’s hand levitated into space, a leap subdivided radially over time, so that it had seemingly endless leisure to consider its position. It perceived that it was far from Nina’s centre of gravity, farther than it had ever been. Still languorous, it indulged a barely registered spasm of curiosity and opened itself to Nina’s wishes and commands, but found itself disconnected from them utterly.
In the vast frictionless sky of moments that Nina’s hand was suspended in, all the years of interdependence it had lived through with Nina glowed into perspective. The hand had never doubted it should exist only at Nina’s side, but it doubted now. The hand and the woman had held each other back, undeniably. They had been, perhaps, a mismatch.
Now, no longer hidebound by Nina’s fears and limitations, Nina’s hand glimpsed all the million uses it could have been put to by other people, in other times and places … Its nerves, still open to stimulus, received distant, second-hand instructions and experiences from the greater world of manipulations.
Insubstantially attached to a host of strangers’ bodies, it flexed hitherto unimagined muscles in exquisite ways, adding tiny diamonds to a heart-shaped cluster of jewels, carving tiny wooden figures for souvenirs of Switzerland, assembling a compass from glittering debris laid out on a velvet cloth. By contrast, skin prickling in the dry heat of Africa, it began to pluck an exotic orange zither, gathered courage and speed, and played it until the strings shimmered with perspiration. Elsewhere, elsewhen, it restored a vandalised Pietà, fitting fragments of marble scarcely bigger than crushed eggshell back into the curve of a wrist. Next, sheathed in pellucid gloves, it reconnected severed nerves with microscopic surgical thread. Then again, it wielded a slender paintbrush whose tip was as soft as the hair at the nape of the neck, slicked to a red point as if with a droplet of blood, descending towards an almost-finished masterpiece. Tiring, perhaps, of the impossibly meticulous, it pushed a detonator that changed the world’s topography in an instant, flicked a switch that restored power to a bombed Balkan village, waved a banner on a mountaintop. In the pursuit of more intimate textures, it planted a single yew tree in loamy earth, winkled a petrified sword from the bottom of a coral bay, stroked the snow-powdered mane of a husky.
These and innumerable other sensations, prowesses and dexterities passed fleetingly through the nerves of Nina’s hand, but there was no end to them, and yet there was an end to the hand’s capacity to receive. It had reached satiety at last, and so it abandoned, one by one, those of its vessels which were still permitting more to enter.
What it wished to experience most of all now was stillness, anaesthesia, darkness such as could be found under a pillow.
Thankfully, merely wishing for this darkness seemed to propel the hand towards it, as if volition was the means of flight in this universe of disembodied possibilities.
The air thinned, was less rich in sensation, and such sensations as passed through the hand now were soothingly familiar: the memory of breadcrumbs in the bed, the fine stubble on the jaw of a beautiful man in the morning, the brilliant floes of soapsuds in the bath, the discovery of damp viridescent moss in the world just outside the doorstep.
Finally, before Nina’s hand curled up to rest, it relived just one more experience: the moment when Nina, newly sighted as a days-old baby, discovered something floating in front of her face, a rosy, quinquefoliate flower that was somehow, magically, attached to her.
The Crust of Hell
AFTER FOUR HOURS and seventeen minutes there was a raindrop, and Ivan sprang to life.
There were other raindrops, of course (though not many), but this was the only one to fall in the neatly demarcated rectangle chosen for Ivan’s experiment, and he set to work with the equipment. He wanted to know exactly what happened to that raindrop after it hit the sandy soil: how long did it quiver there like a liquid pearl, how slowly did it sink in, how wide was the stain, how deep was the penetration?
With information like this, Ivan might just be the man to change the world.
The rain stopped after three minutes and fifty-two seconds, for good. Ivan did every test he could, then packed up. The temperature had dropped slightly, to 107 degrees Fahrenheit.
Back in the jeep, the guide was cleaning his teeth with that most prized of foreign tools, the sama
naf – Swiss army knife, in other words. Out here, all familiar language was swamped by harsh incomprehension and transformed beyond recognition, just as the arable land was swamped and transformed by salt and sand. Ivan squinted at the guide and realised only now that this was a different man from the one who’d accompanied him here yesterday.
‘Where’s Yaphet?’ he said, wondering if he’d get an answer in English.
‘Yaphet go with Yaphet family, go with Yaphet house.’
So: Yaphet had folded up his hut of sticks, packed it on the back of a camel, and moved on with his wife and children. Why these people did this, pulling up what little vegetation there was in order to erect temporary dwellings, when if they only stayed put and tilled life into the soil they could have a self-regenerating homeland, was a mystery to Ivan.
‘Will you be here tomorrow?’
The man shrugged, smiling broadly. His teeth were stained with lat leaf.
‘Too much lat,’ said Ivan, grinning in return.
The guide shrugged again, making a weary hand gesture that denoted sexual erection. He meant by this that the stimulant was the only thing that made it possible for him to work, to drive around the desert with foreigners, to fight members of other tribes, to fuck his wife – to do anything other than surrender to the heat and the aridity, curl up on the sand, lose the last of his water content and be baked, like clay.
‘OΚ, let’s go,’ said Ivan.
He was the boss. Consultant to governments and multinational corporations, modest-selling author of Applied Agrodynamics of Meteorohgy, he might as well have been an army general with a hundred deaths under his belt: he was white, he had money, plentiful food, a vehicle, a house with water in it. He was the ‘OΚ, let’s go’ man.
It was exactly two months now since the Silbermacher family had been waved through the Ethiopian border on their way to Bharatan, this aggressively arid territory four hundred feet below sea level and half-way between what could be called Africa and what could be called the Arab States.
One of the first things the Silbermachers had learned when they got there was that a map, unless you already know exactly where you are, is nothing but a pretty picture. If you have been in the habit of picturing yourself somewhere in particular on a round and colourful globe, your sense of where you are on the planet is probably dependent on how much you understand of what’s being said behind your back and what lies north, south, east and west of you. You know you are in Hungary because people are speaking Hungarian and that way is Austria and that way is Romania. You know you are in Seattle because people are speaking American and that way is Canada and that way is Oregon. In Bharatan, the Silbermachers understood nothing and nobody: so, they were nowhere.
Africans kept metamorphosing into Arabs, as far as Ivan’s family could see. An apparently African man would disappear into the army barracks dressed in a goat-herder’s loincloth and shawl; he would emerge in military khaki, looking suddenly like a member of the PLO. Understanding the language would have helped, of course, but unlike the previous rash of visitors to Bharatan, the Silbermachers were not linguists: to them, when the Bharatani spoke, it sounded like African-chief talk from old Tarzan movies, or sometimes it evoked memories of CNN footage from the Arab Gulf war of 1991.
Then again, all a Bharatani had to do to confuse the Silbermachers even more was get hold of a torn and faded Jim Beam T-shirt from the army rubbish dump, and suddenly he was in their eyes a black American, sauntering around in search of buildings to spray graffiti on.
The Silbermachers had no religion themselves and were ideologically opposed to tampering with the religion of native peoples, but as a result they hadn’t the foggiest notion of what the Bharatani believed in, so this too remained a mystery. Ivan’s teenage daughter discovered that the Bharatani considered the display of female hair, breasts and thighs wicked: that was about it.
‘They’re real, like, inhibited, y’know’ was her assessment. ‘Like those holy rollers down south.’
By ‘down south’ she meant somewhere in southern USA like Texas, of course, not somewhere in southern Africa like Malawi, though the slur would have been equally true of either place.
Not that the Silbermachers had that much to do with the common Bharatani, since most of those lived in the desert beyond the army enclosures. Clusters of huts housed the men, women and children who were no use to the foreigners, and in these portable shelters like birds’ nests fallen from the sky, the Bharatani lived briefly and died. A narrow stream of water trickled through the settlement, polluted by sand, salt, shit and the occasional child’s corpse. To drive through the settlement was a deeply affecting experience for the Silbermachers, though precisely what part of them it was affecting was hard to say. Everywhere dark-skinned, emaciated people were praying, jabbering to their God to deliver them – Allah, Jehovah, Set, Haile Selassie, who could tell?
The Silbermachers lived in a house in the military sector, because for all their liberal guilt they could not live in a bird’s nest fallen from the sky.
They came from Seattle, from the US of A, by invitation, because a few years ago the Bharatani had evolved to the point where they at last developed a script for their spoken language, and some foreign linguists had eagerly received it for study, and the Bharatani’s mass starvation had come to the notice of the Western world. The local government’s brief was to cure the Bharatani of nomadism and get them to settle down and plant food, so that the shifting soil would settle down too, binding together to support life. Ivan Silbermacher’s brief was to find out if there was anything that could be done about the soil’s relationship with the weather.
Ivanka Silbermacher’s brief was to maintain her relationship with Ivan. She was his wife of twenty-three years, an attractive and resilient woman who could generate a certain amount of energy in 120-degree heat, despite having been born in a cold country. Her skin was dark tan against the white blouses and skirts she always wore: she joked that she looked more like a gypsy than ever. She could make delicious refrigerated casseroles that didn’t taste as if their ingredients had come from cans. She could charm obstructive bureaucrats. She could stare down hostile Bharatani. She was a wonderful lover.
The most obvious thing Ivan and Ivanka had in common was their given names, but these were near-identical by coincidence only. Ivan was fourth-generation American Jew, with Ukrainian forebears in some distant past that meant less to him than (say) the fact that Kellogg’s Frosties were less sweet now than in the pre-healthconscious days of his childhood. Ivanka was Hungarian, and hadn’t come to the US until 1968. At twenty, alone in a strange country and speaking almost no English, she found the odd coincidence that her next-door neighbour’s name was the masculine equivalent of her own just about as complex a talking-point as she could manage with one of the natives.
‘Ivan – Ivanka – it’s the same!’ she had smiled, relieved to be able to get through a sentence without committing some fundamental error.
Ivan had been interested, sincerely interested, in Hungary’s political situation, and that had made her feel warmly towards him, because all the other men she’d met so far only wanted to talk about TV, food, the weather and sex. The irony was, of course, that she hadn’t the vocabulary to talk about Hungary’s politics with Ivan, however much his interest in it made her displaced little body come alive for him, and instead she mouthed broken clichés about TV, food, the weather and, later, sex. She’d tried to say what it was like for a young woman in Eastern Europe, how different it was from America. Lacking words like ‘conscientious’, ‘politically aware’, ‘genderisation’, and ‘dialectics’, she had to make do with crude equivalents, and somehow her assertion that ‘Here in America a woman can be not so free’ ended up with her letting him take her to bed.
But he had been all right. By the time she had learned the language well enough to be able to judge whether he was really on her wavelength, he was so used to her that he seemed to be the sort of man she would have chosen anyw
ay, even at the outset.
But then, it was hard to tell. If your man has already learned where on your butt to put his middle finger, how to disown patriarchy by handing over the newspaper, and what brand of shampoo your wiry black hair requires, you can’t really size him up the way you would if he was new. And then of course, she loved him too. Loved him enough to want to kill him when he had an affair, four years after they were married: she’d thrown his clothes, meteorology textbooks, shoes et cetera through a closed window on to the street four storeys below, then slapped his face so that his glasses flew off, then punched him several times on the nose. Bleeding profusely, he had apologised to her energetically on the bedroom floor, and they had conceived the first of their three children.
That child, Lydia, was with them now, here in Bharatan. She was eighteen years old, and of course had no memory of her conception. The thought of her parents making love was like imagining Ron and Nancy Reagan engaging in soix¬ ante-neuf. Lydia was the only sexually potent one in her family, as far as she was concerned. Her own body was white and smooth, with jet-black hair, of which she liked her eyebrows and pubes best. Her legs weren’t long enough, though: a genetic legacy from a short mother.
Cultural dissemination being what it is, an extraordinary variety of foreign spores had landed and failed to take root in Bharatan at one time or another. Ivan was not the first meteorologist to visit, nor Ivanka the first Hungarian woman. But Lydia was the first Gothic-style punk. Not one Bharatani, ever, had seen anything like this pale American girl dressed all in black, with black lips, black nails and a wayward nest of black hair.
‘Lydia’ wasn’t her given name, which was Vanushka, another little joke between her parents, for old times’ sake. Although ‘Vanushka’ was plenty exotic enough to satisfy the teenager’s passion for individuality, it was still not her own choice, so she chose ‘Lydia’ instead. It reminded her of one of her role models with the same name, an avant-garde performance artist and musician who wore black leather and wailed poetry about killing domestic pets and being fucked in the ass by her daddy.