by Michel Faber
She was storing up things all the time which would be more potent back home than they were here: objects, experiences, acquaintances. Things which were distasteful, inconvenient, even terrifying here would be the most precious cultural currency back in Seattle. Finding the bloated body of a dead baby at the aid truckstop, revolting though it had been at the time, was a recollection to strike awe into the hearts of her friends. Taking walks in 120-degree heat – ‘Oh yeah,’ she would say to incredulous friends, ‘I’d get bored otherwise.’
Lydia’s Walkman was a tape recorder, too, so she had the mourning songs of the Bharatani in the bag. She knew a couple of guys in Seattle who had a kind of a weird primitive industrial funk band going called Hybrid Spore, and these tapes she had of the Bharatani chanting were the sort of thing they would kill to sample. They might even let her join the band in order to get them – she could sing and play percussion, maybe even play one of those keyboards you just fed ROM cards into. Being a musician would certainly make a lot more sense than studying metallurgy and jewellery-making, the career her parents had most recently pinned her down to.
‘It would be fun,’ her mother encouraged her. ‘All those strange metal wristbands and amulets and belt-buckles you’re always looking for at the markets – you could make them yourself, and sell them to other people just like you.’
But if there was a way to sell Lydia on the idea of being self-supporting, this definitely wasn’t it: she did not want to be deprived of a reason to frequent the markets, she did not wish to make jewellery for anyone but herself to wear, and she did not like the suggestion that there was a class of people ‘just like’ herself.
‘Well, Mom,’ she sing-songed, ‘we’ll just see how things pan out.’
She had only been interested in metallurgy originally because of the alchemy angle; the books on witchcraft she was always reading had chapters on alchemists sometimes and they sounded cool.
‘Well you know, some of what I’m trying to do is a kind of alchemy,’ Ivan had said to her once.
‘Sure, Dad,’ she’d replied.
Security was tight in and around the Silbermachers’ house, because everything except the paraphernalia of Ivan’s research was of some value to the Bharatani, even the atmosphere, which was air-conditioned to transform the infernal heat into something as easy and pleasant to swallow as chilled water.
‘Lock up, always lock up,’ Ivan told Lydia every time the girl was leaving. ‘Who knows, they could take your Walkman.’
She would raise her eyes to her black, black fringe in despair at his pathetic attempt to make the danger real to her: why was he always so far off the mark! She never went anywhere without taking her Walkman with her.
Nothing ever went missing, anyway. Even Ivan had to admit that. The only items he seemed to be having to replace at an inordinate rate were ballpoint pens.
‘Is it you who’s taking them?’ he asked Lydia on her return from one of her walks. She shrugged as she tore off her sodden shawl, revealing a black-corseted cleavage glistening with perspiration.
‘I write to my friends in the States,’ she said, extending her lower lip imbecilically to blow upwards into her sweat-matted hair.
‘Well, you must have a lot of friends.’
‘Not many,’ she challenged him. ‘I write heaps.’
Actually, Lydia didn’t write at all, apart from the odd postcard. She hated writing, couldn’t see the point of it; in fact, she admired the Bharatani for doing without it for so many thousands of years. When she missed her friends, she called them on the phone.
‘I took, like, mountains of clothes, y’know,’ she confided into the mouthpiece, cradling it between her chin and collarbone as she punctured blisters on her feet. ‘Like I got stuff there’s nooo way I can wear here, y’know, like gloves and fur-lined boots and stuff. But y’know, you may as well use up your luggage allowance. I mean, the Walkman and the CDs were, like, cabin luggage, y’know, so what else was I gonna take?’
‘Well, it’s real difficult to be, like, true to myself here. I go out in my black dress – the one with the long raggedy skirts and the lace-up bodice, y’know, that’s real low-cut, and lace-up boots and my hair fluffed out like this, y’know, and then I gotta wrap a shawl around my chest, y’know, cuz of the religion here, and the weather is so hot, you wouldn’t believe. In five minutes, I’m, like, plastered with sweat, and my hair’s sticking to my face, y’know, and there’s, like, a little stream of sweat running down between my tits, y’know, and I’m worried my inner soles are gonna, like, dissolve.’
‘…’
‘Yeah, well, I could do what Mom and Dad do, and wear light-coloured clothes. Cuz, like, black absorbs the heat a real lot. I mean, believe me, you don’t see anybody wearing black out here. But I mean, that only makes it more important to stand up for what you believe in, doesn’t it?’
‘…’
‘Donna? Yeah, I’ve got her crucifix.’
‘…’
‘No, she didn’t give it to me. She, like, sold it to me.’
‘…’
‘Well, not exactly. She came up to me in a club one night and started, like, insulting me? She was saying, like, I’d been hanging out with this guy Keith she was steady with, and like how she didn’t want him anyway, cuz he was a real asshole, and I’m saying, like, “Hey listen, Donna, I don’t even know this guy,” but she’s, like, “Sure, sure,” and being, like, real unpleasant, y’know? So she reminds me about the crucifix and I say, “Yeah well, I don’t have it with me, y’know, I mean, it’s nice, y’know, but I don’t, like, carry it wherever I go just in case I run into you.” So I remind her about the ten bucks she owes me, and she says, “What ten bucks?” and all this kinda stuff, and then something about how this guy Keith’s loaded, and I’m, like, thinking, “Well babe, looks like you just sold me your crucifix for ten bucks.’”
‘…’
‘Oh yeah, it’s real neat. It’s big – big as a pizza sub, y’know. It’s got, like, jewels all along it, that are supposed to be, like, rosary beads, and it’s, like, so good to hold, y’know, its texture and everything, and it’s always warm, y’know, cuz it’s right there on my breast, y’know, real close to my heart. It’s my most coolest possession. It’s wicked.’
Lydia’s crucifix had got her in trouble only once so far in Bharatan. A wrinkled old man in a loincloth and a threadbare flannelette shirt came up to her and smiled. He looked as if he had just about reached the maximum life expectancy of forty, and might fall dead at her feet any minute. ‘You Christian,’ he rasped, pointing at her bejewelled treasure. ‘Me Christian. We pray.’ And he went down on his knees, signalling her to do the same, which she did.
‘O God Jesus,’ the old man said, clasping his skeletal hands. ‘We pray. Fadder witch art. Will be done. Earth same as Heaven. Give us day bread. Differ us from enemies. Fine is the kingdom. Amen.’
He looked to Lydia in case she had anything to add.
‘Hey listen, Heavenly Father,’ she said. ‘Make it rain, will ya?’
The weeks of the Silbermachers’ sojourn in Bharatan accumulated day by scorching day into months. There was no doubt that Ivan was working hard, but the original estimate of six to eight weeks was what Ivanka had planned for when she’d been packing, and now everything was running out. Not the basics, of course, like bread and ketchup and tinned fish and Pepsi, which were supplied by the army, but the little luxuries that make life in a harshly foreign place endurable.
‘Where’s the chocolate frogs, Mom?’
‘We’re all out of chocolate frogs, honey.’
‘Chocolate cookies?’
‘Out also.’
The army being a male institution, sanitary pads were not one of the basics they supplied, so when these ran out Ivanka and Lydia had no choice but to be philosophical.
‘We’ll have to wear strips of rag, like the Bharatani women,’ sighed Ivanka.
‘Cool,’ said Lydia, for this too would be valuable cul
tural currency back home.
‘Unless you want to try tampons.’
‘No way! Toxic shock!’
‘That was only one brand, I think, a long time ago. Anyway, I’m sure they researched it and it’s fixed now.’
‘They’re not as bio-degradable.’
And so Ivanka and Lydia started cutting some of the extra bed-linen into strips.
Later when Kravitz got to hear about it he was pretty exasperated. ‘You’re crazy,’ he said. ‘What are you going to do when you’re back in the States and it’s freezing?’
‘I guess we’ll just have to buy more linen.’
‘What a waste of resources!’ Kravitz shook his head. ‘You should have told me. The army’s got hundreds of fleecy cotton blankets stockpiled up in the storerooms, that nobody’s going to use and that we sure as hell aren’t going to ship back where they came from.’
‘Really?’ said Ivanka. ‘That’s terrible! Why don’t you just give them to the Bharatani? They’re desperate.’
‘For blankets on the crust of Hell?’
‘It gets very cold at nights.’
‘OK, I know, but there’s still a problem. There’s only a few hundred blankets and thousands of Bharatani. Who would decide who gets and who doesn’t get? It wouldn’t be like the food relief, which is divided equally.’
‘It doesn’t sound like an impossible problem to me. It sounds like the sort of thing that could be solved with a bit of common sense and a bit of sensitivity.’
‘Common sense and sensitivity? From the army? Get real, Ivanka, and just tell me how many blankets you want.’
Three more weeks, and Ivanka began to realise that she couldn’t stand to live here on the crust of Hell much longer. She really was beginning to feel like that poor transplanted ocotillo, except that she wasn’t anywhere near as compatible with the environment as that … not frail exactly, but so unsuited: a winter flower pushed into sun-baked, salty soil in the hope that against all odds it would root.
The fetish for the exotic and the alien which had made her so enthusiastic about all things African and Middle Eastern when she’d been in America had been completely neutralised as if by chemical reaction: now she hankered after all things familiar. To open the last tin of cocktail frankfurters, a food she hadn’t even liked in the past, provoked a mournful sense of loss. Her favourite bottle of mascara, left out accidentally in the sun, was baked so that the brush was fused with the contents. All her books had been read and reread, and there was nothing in the army library except short novels about men called Hank or Max or Ted who didn’t mind getting the odd spatter of brains on their flak-jackets. Perhaps worst of all, the fleecy cotton blankets were almost used up, and ever since the night Ralph had made a clumsy pass at her, she didn’t want to ask him for anymore. She missed Ivan horribly; he was almost never in the house.
‘I really am in Hell,’ she said to herself, and to her mother too, in a letter. Complaining did her no good, though, because Ivanka’s mother, a devout old crock living in a small Hungarian town, simply scolded her about using the word ‘Hell’ impiously. In a once-familiar language that Ivanka now found alarmingly difficult to read (was it her mother’s handwriting deteriorating with age, or was it her own mind getting poisoned by an overdose of foreignness?) the airmail pages of reply went on to remind her that this ‘mission’ in this ‘primitive place’ was a Heaven-sent opportunity to ‘sow the Word of God’ where it was most needed. Ivanka sighed and folded the letter up, utterly disheartened by the uselessness to her now of the mother who had once borne and nursed her. ‘Sow the Word of God’? She no longer even had the energy to make a casserole, quite apart from the fact that all the possible ingredients were just about used up. She couldn’t work magic.
She couldn’t even feel sorry for the Bharatani anymore. The truck driver who worked for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees had a word for it: compassion fatigue. ‘You’ve got compassion fatigue,’ he said, as she helped him unload the food rations. Next day, she decided to stop going to the truckstop; she’d have to be crazy to go out in 120-degree dusty heat, with her eyes already sore from crying and infection, and a pounding headache.
‘We have to talk,’ Ivanka told Ivan at last, one night after he returned at 3 a.m. from a long spell under the vast cloudless sky, and tried to sneak past her on his way to the study.
‘I’m very close to a breakthrough in my research,’ he pleaded mildly, his hands fidgeting up and down a sheaf of papers he was holding close to his chest.
‘That’s what I want to talk about,’ she said. ‘I can’t understand what good anybody could possibly believe you’re doing here.’
He laughed nervously, postponing anger.
‘There’s no need to insult me, just because …’ He trailed off, suspecting he was about to make a mistake. While he believed very strongly that Ivanka resented his work because she was missing him sexually, he knew her too well to say so, and not just because he feared her exploding into a tantrum of aggrieved humiliation. He feared just as much that he might have misjudged her, as he had misjudged her often in the past, and that to his own shame he would discover she was thinking far more analytically than he; in short, that she would prove herself dead right and him dead wrong.
‘Look, we’re both tired,’ he sighed, relieved to have so easily come up with a conversational emollient to neutralise what he’d begun. It worked, too – or perhaps Ivanka wasn’t in the mood for a fight.
‘The way I see it,’ she said, ‘even an idiot – well, any Western idiot – can see what’s needed out here. The Bharatani need to stay on the land and make it good for things to grow, yes? Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, who knows: you aren’t the one supposed to persuade them either way, are you? And the weather, well, fact is, it doesn’t rain enough, yes? You’ve done lots of tests, you’ve been very busy. I’m sure if there’s anything the Bharatani need to know about what happens and doesn’t happen when rain falls on their soil, you must have found it out for them by now. But what they really need is for more rain to fall, yes? The UN must know this, and the Bharatani sure must know this, and yethere you are after three months, still working day and night, and someone is paying for it all.’
‘So?’ One little ‘So’ wouldn’t delay his capture very long, of course, but he tried it anyway, like a mouse uttering a peeplet as the mousetrap flips its trigger.
‘So who’s paying, and why?’
Ivan sank into an armchair, laying his papers down beside him. ‘There’s something I haven’t told you,’ he said.
‘I’m listening,’ she said.
‘My work here isn’t funded by the UN, beyond a few thousand dollars for military liaison. And it isn’t funded at all by the Bharatani.’
‘Yes,’ she said, folding her slender arms dangerously under her breasts.
‘It’s funded by Fujumara-Agcor.’
‘Yes,’ she said, gently squeezing her biceps through the cotton of her blouse.
‘They’re a new conglomerate, the end result of a few mergers. They specialise in pharmaceuticals and fertilisers. They believe my work could be of use to them in the future.’
‘What about now?’
‘They’re satisfied.’
‘I’m sure they are,’ retorted Ivanka. ‘Because they’re not paying anymore.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They’ve stopped the funds. You’re on your own now.’
‘H … how did you know that?’ He was grateful he was sitting down already, for he felt suddenly faint, dehydrated.
Ivanka spoke quietly, rocking on the balls of her feet. ‘It’s … a woman thing,’ she said, the Americanism sounding odd in her still-heavy Hungarian accent. ‘Women are born to receive certain phone calls. Something inside of us attracts them. A woman will always receive the call from her husband’s mistress that says, “Is that you Ivan darling, when can I see you?” A woman will always receive the call from a strange Japanese man that says, “Pl
ease tell your husband he’s gone overtime, overbudget, whatever, and without results we can’t send anymore machinery, chemicals, or money.”’
Ivan gaped at her, aghast.
‘Why didn’t you tell me? An important call like that!’
‘Oooh … I guess I must be the secretive type.’ Her lips were pouting, swelling with anger. Her hands gripped her biceps. He could tell she was only a few seconds away from eruption.
‘Well … uh … the same guy sent me a letter, anyway, telling me the bad news,’ Ivan conceded, as if to retract his accusation.
‘I know,’ Ivanka said, tapping her fingernails on her folded arms. ‘That was weeks ago. We’re still here. Who’s paying?’
‘Well … I am, Ivanka,’ he said, swallowing hard. ‘That is, we are. I sold the house.’
‘This house?’
‘Our house in Seattle.’
‘You what?’
‘I’m very close to a breakthrough, Ivanka. When it comes, Fujumara-Agcor will pay me enough for a dozen houses. We can live anywhere we like, and leave whenever we like. Just think of that, Ivanka: summer in Budapest, winter in—’
She held up her hand to silence him.
‘So what’s the breakthrough you’re waiting for?’ she whispered.
Ivan drew himself up to his full height; permitted himself, almost shyly, to reveal his pride.
‘I believe,’ he said, ‘I know how to make it rain.’
A terrible flush of red came up from the open neck of Ivanka’s blouse, overtook her neck and face, and she erupted.
At the crack of dawn, Ivan was at the machinery, squinting through a viewfinder at the clouds. He didn’t need to squint very hard: one eye was already swelling shut with bruising. He’d tried to put a Band-Aid on his lip, but it wouldn’t stay on. He hadn’t even got laid this time.