by Michel Faber
Ivan never dreamed of doing anything like that to his daughter, but she didn’t consider herself lucky because of this or anything else. He had very little to offer her, and all her attempts to bridge the gap were failures. She had played him ‘Harvester of Virgins’ by Dead Souls through her CD Walkman, inserting the earpieces into his ears herself, and he had taken them out again after two minutes, pronouncing the music too monotonous. Monotonous?!? What a joke! When new acquaintances asked her what her dad did for a living, she relished replying, ‘Oh, he watches clouds move, waits for snow to melt, stuff like that.’ It was a delicious answer to be able to give, both because it was a swipe at her father’s own tolerance for monotony, and because she could nevertheless impress her friends with the unusualness of his job.
This unusual job had brought the family to the edge of a desert whose name one army linguist had translated for them as ‘the crust of Hell’. Ivan, Ivanka, and Lydia: that was the family. The other two children were dead, one in utero and the other in the men’s room of a nightclub, his body’s water supply poisoned by too much of the wrong chemical.
Lydia missed her kid brother Mike terribly, and hardly ever did drugs because of him.
Of course, she’d tried lat leaf within days of arriving in Bharatan – it would have been too great a shame to return to the US without knowing what it was like, even though she was disgusted by the mess it left on the teeth. Her verdict on it was damning: these people had to make do with shitty, primitive, underpowered versions of everything – food, water, clothing, equipment, housing, entertainment – and their drugs were no exception. Piss-weak! The real tragedy of the Bharatani’s starvation Lydia saw as a direct result of several rectifiable mistakes: lack of education about contraception, lack of smart lawyer politicians who could demand the best at the bargaining table, and lack of information about the rest of the world, that is, TV.
Ivanka had a different view of the Bharatani’s plight: their essential curse, she felt, was that they had no hope of leaving Bharatan, except as plumes of funeral flame. If only there were somewhere for them to escape to … But the whole continent was teeming with refugees already, all of them destitute, unskilled and feeble. The Somali fled into Ethiopia, and the Ethiopians fled into Somalia, but though there might be places where a refugee would not be beaten with axles left over from abandoned Communist agricultural machinery or forced to pound her own baby to death in a maize mortar, there was no oasis which offered freedom from despondency, diarrhoea, and death. The Bharatani were so far away from any city they could reach on foot (the scarce camels were for status, not for riding on) that their nomadism was confined to the same few hundred miles of desert, which they shifted across as mindlessly as the wind-driven sand dunes reclaiming their little plots of agriculture.
Ivanka hoped her husband could do something about this, but she had her doubts. But then, she had worse doubts about her own instincts to help, which were more along the lines of adopting Bharatani orphans.
She had raised this possibility with Ivan and Lydia only a few days after the family’s arrival, and their response had been unenthusiastic.
‘I know you’re still very upset about that baby you lost,’ said Ivan, ‘but if you’re dead set on adoption, why not adopt an abandoned American kid when we get back to the States? A life is a life, and a white kid would have more chance of being accepted and happy in an American environment than a transplanted Bharatani. There’s not even any guarantee that our climate and bacteriological spectrum wouldn’t kill one of these kids as surely as starvation and malaria.’
Lydia’s response, though different, was the same.
‘Look, Mom, I know you still miss Mike a real lot, and so do I, but adopting some, like, diseased black baby is not gonna bring him back, y’know? I mean, Jesus Mom, we’ve got our own problems.’
Ivanka wondered which problems Lydia had in mind, but she had a suspicion they were probably things like boy trouble and grief over short legs, so she didn’t press the point. The last thing she needed was to lose her temper and yell another lecture about living in terror of an oppressive political regime, which meant nothing to Lydia anyway. So, she nurtured her secret empathy with the Bharatani and carried on cooking in her air-conditioned house, breathing deeply.
Apart from helping with the unloading and distributing of food from the aid trucks every morning, Ivanka didn’t go out of doors all that often; the challenge of accompanying her husband on to the crust of Hell to look at sand all day was beyond the scope of her wifely devotion. Back in Seattle she was wont to give generously to hopeless and unselfish causes, but she had too much gypsy in her to die for such a cause herself. Nor was she so bored with her own company that sheer stimulus deprivation drove her out of the house, like Lydia, who loitered around the camps of Bharatan in her Goth gear almost every day. What must these destitute desert-dwellers think, seeing this mousse-haired, punk-blackened vampirella doing the rounds? Ivanka couldn’t help smiling at her own responsibility for bringing such an outrageous incongruity into the world.
But for herself, she preferred to stay inside, listening to the short-wave radio, keeping the house neat, and reading books in case the telephone rang. In choosing to avoid the desert atmosphere she was also trying to prevent her chronic conjunctivitis getting worse, or even contracting the eye herpes which was epidemic here. The Bharatani all had bloodshot eyes, pus-yellow eyes, cataract-milky eyes, so Ivanka didn’t feel as maladapted as she might have. She used to joke with Ivan that the only conditions under which her eyes could be white and healthy were in the heart of the Pest sector of Buda-Pest, with just the right chemical mixture of fresh Eastern European air, Trabant exhaust and alcohol. Away from Hungary she was never without her eye drops, and would come to a standstill in the oddest and most inconvenient places to administer them. In the exit lane of a supermarket car-park in LA once she had relived the fear of militia harassment during her last weeks in Hungary: the LA police sprang out of nowhere with guns cocked and yelled at her to lie down on the ground. It transpired they had mistaken her eyedrop ritual for some sort of drug abuse. Another time, during a job interview, she had abruptly thrown her head back, her mouth falling open with the pull of gravity, and squeezed the little droplets of medicated tears on to her eyeballs. ‘Eshcuse me,’ she had mumbled through her extended throat. But she’d got the job anyway, and not just because her extended throat was beautiful. She could get away with virtually any behaviour, because of her winning manner, her understanding of people, and her accent, which would always identify her as a foreigner deserving benefit of the doubt. At least in America. Here in Bharatan she was m’geni to the Africans, infidel to the Arabs; she was a guinea pig among warthogs.
She missed her girlfriends back in Seattle. Sometimes when Ivan was talking to some bureaucrat about the genetic make-up of cactuses or casuarina trees, she wished she were in a coffee-house with Winnie and Fran, hearing them talk about art or Welfare.
‘It makes so much more sense to import something like ocotillo, which doesn’t look that pretty but can survive drought, than to have millions of poppies blooming the day after a rainfall,’ argued Ivan. ‘The poppies look great in the National Geographic photos, but they don’t fix the soil, mammals can’t eat ‘em and they’re gone without a trace a week later.’
Yes, that’s all very well, Ivanka thought, but how does the ocotillo feel about being transplanted?
Ivan didn’t seem to mind where he was, even if it was nowhere, as long as he was permitted to use and improve his skills in his chosen area. That was one of the good things about him, Ivanka had found. Though he was highly ambitious, he wasn’t fixated on the sort of success that requires a particular kind of house, make of car, brand of champagne, street of address. His ambitions were over a much farther horizon, their realisation barely glimpsed; while striving for them, he was quite content to make do and have fun.
At least, that was the way it had been back home in the States. Out here in Bharatan,
Ivan seemed more obsessed with his research, less mindful of the other things in life, that is, less available for sex. With every week that went by, Ivan was more and more likely to spend all day and half the night out in the desert with his calculators and equipment, while she read books by bedlight. The arrival of crated consignments of new equipment from Japan (equipment for what, for God’s sake?) she soon learned to equate with Ivan being AWOL for up to three days at a time.
‘How about watering this little cactus tree once in a while?’ she would tease him, and he would respond gladly, but only, of course, if he was there to respond.
As for Lydia, she didn’t seem to mind the isolation and the lack of attention from her father. For the last two or three years at least she had demonstrated a preference for relationships that could be conducted by phone or shouted over the noise of a nightclub PA system. Her way of judging whether she could be comfortable socially with another human being was by deciding whether or not she could, on a given occasion, get away with wearing her Scraping Foetus off the Wheel T-shirt, which depicted a crucified Christ and the slogan ‘If you’re gonna get down, get down and pray!’ Not many people passed this litmus test.
Ivanka, in trying to work out who and what was truly important to her deeply subcultured daughter, recalled that Lydia had left behind some sort of boyfriend called Stevo.
‘Are you missing Stevo?’ she therefore asked one morning when Lydia was moping at the breakfast table, fiddling with a letter from him.
‘I guess,’ she said.
‘Were you really close?’
‘Oh yeah, sure,’ said Lydia. ‘We were a steady thing. We’d even listen to the same Walkman, like, one earphone in my ear and the other earphone in his. That kinda thing makes you, like, one person.’
‘What was the best thing about him?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I guess’ – she smiled mischievously – ‘he didn’t ask too many dumb questions.’
One thing that was similar about Lydia and the Bharatani was that you could never tell if you had embarrassed them or caught them out in any way. The Bharatani were black, and couldn’t blush as far as Ivanka could tell. Lydia used thick make-up to achieve her Gothic pallor, and blushes couldn’t penetrate. A long walk outside in the blistering sun could do it, washing her pale topsoil away in a deluge of sweat, but then she would return with a flush that lasted until she disappeared for the evening into her bedroom.
Nobody in Bharatan took much interest in the Silbermachers except for Lieutenant Ralph Kravitz, an army interpreter who seemed to have been Heaven-sent to provide them with home-style social intercourse. Amazingly, he had also done a couple of years of a biology degree, so he had the ammunition to argue with Ivan: he relished the role of devil’s advocate over the usefulness of Ivan’s work, and Ivanka enjoyed nothing more than listening to the two of them argue because it reminded her, as her husband spoke more and more passionately, of why she still loved him. Visits from Kravitz always ended in particularly good sex when he was gone, and Ivanka had the added pleasure of dressing attractively to see if Ralph might, in another world and time, have been the one to take her to bed.
A typical night would find the three of them (Lydia preferred Nine Inch Nails remixes to Ralph) discussing the relative ascendancy of Death and Life. How Eastern European all this is!, Ivanka would think as she sipped her icy alcohol, and the men would go right on fighting.
‘Life actually wants to take care of other life,’ insisted Ivan. ‘A fruit will struggle against all odds to be useful. Think about that! It could much more easily just grow up with no use to anything but itself: some thorny creeper with a texture like barbed wire and a taste like ash – just any old Life for Life’s sake. But no: it goes through a million complicated biological changes just so it can be a fruit – juicy, delicious, beautiful, edible.’
‘Usefulness is subjective,’ objected Kravitz. ‘You only think a fruit is so wonderful because we’ve taught ourselves to eat it. The fruit doesn’t give a damn. Besides, it’s only a temporary aberration – something that happens in the fly-speck millennia between lava flows. The Earth didn’t support life to begin with and it’s not interested in supporting it now. Have you noticed the increase in volcanic activity? Lava is the perfect life extinguisher. Have you ever been there when the sand dunes are on the move? They actually make a noise: they boom as they go, it’s frightening as all hell. And you know what that sand wants to do? It just wants to roll all over the lakes, the roads, the human settlements, the eight per cent of the land that’s arable – those sand dunes are just thousands of acres of Death on the move.’
‘You’re wrong, Ralph, you’re wrong. Life wins out against all odds. The whole purpose of every organism is to survive and reproduce and prosper—’
‘Yeah, so sand reproduces and prospers.’
‘Life, Ralph, Life! If there’s just the tiniest chance for something to grow, it will. Lichen will grow on the wreck of a car. Moss will grow on a lump of shit.’
‘Maybe. But you can’t feed a million starving people on moss and lichen. Especially if they have to scrape it off car wrecks and lumps of shit.’
Whether the tens of thousands of Bharatani in the refugee camps around the crust of Hell were really starving was a matter of debate. The international aid organisations claimed they were, and sent pamphlets all over the world imploring people like Ivanka Silbermacher to help, which she generously had, even before there was any hint that her husband’s work would take her here. Other observers were more cynical, however. Lydia was of the opinion that the Bharatani males had a pretty easy life, lying around the camps chatting to each other, chewing lat leaf, drinking alcohol brewed in buckets from grain rations, and creating more little Bharatani.
‘If they got off their ass and grew some food or, like, helped the women with the chores, the cooking, the gathering and stuff, there’d be more to go round,’ she pointed out. ‘I mean, they’re not too weak to fuck, right?’
‘Don’t use that word,’ sighed Ivanka. ‘You know we don’t like that word.’
‘Jeesus, Mom, I’m being serious!’
‘Well, you don’t have to use that word to show you’re being serious.’
But that was the word Fergie ‘Fez’ Shipley used in discussing the Bharatani problem with Lydia when they had their confabs behind the army barracks. The observation about the Bharatani men not being too weak to fuck was a direct quote from him.
‘Those aid organisations, when they say there’s a hundred thousand gonna starve, what’s that mean? It means lots of people are real hungry, right, the way lotsa people in this part of the world’ve always been. And outta those people who are hungry, some are maybe gonna get weak and sick. And outta those, some are gonna get so weak and sick that the food they get ain’t gonna do ’em any good. Those ones are gonna die, sure. But is that real starvation? I mean, like, is that people shrivellin’ up and dyin’ because they got no food to eat? I tell ya, there’s more to it. I mean, there’s pills these people should be gettin’ that the pharmaceutical companies are makin’ sure they don’t get. There’s an anti-malaria pill, there’s pills to stop the runs. I mean, shit, these poor bastards don’t see meat from one month to the next, and they don’t even get a fuckin’ iron pill!’
Shipley, for all that he impressed Lydia with his political analysis, did not impress her as a man. Her rendezvous with this chinless, bug-eyed, fez-toting army corporal were strictly business: he could get things she needed from across the border. The army’s supply lines were like an impossibly long river snaking from Bharatan right to all those cool faraway places where drugs were made.
Shipley, for his part, knew better than to lay a hand on anything of hers besides her money.
‘That’s some allowance you get,’ he whistled once.
‘Hey,’ she objected with a shrug, ‘I’m wasting my life out here, just like you. You’re getting paid for it, why shouldn’t I? I could be in Seattle right now, seeing Godflesh.’
One thing was a big relief for Lydia about this time on the crust of Hell: no boyfriends. She had no need or desire for a relationship at this time in her life, but back home there was no getting away from it because teenage culture was powered by sex. She’d been worried about her nipples: were they too far towards the sides of her breasts, were the areolas too dark, would a guy even want to touch them? – even though she didn’t want a guy to touch them, no guy she knew, anyway. She read about fellatio in glossy women’s magazines, mouthing the instructions as she read, even though the thought of having some guy’s hose down her throat made her sick. She worried about the way her naked abdomen wrinkled up when she sat and bent over – did that mean she could never sit on top during sex?
Even girl-to-girl friendships were difficult if there were no guy problems to talk about, and to go to a concert alone was more hassle than it was worth, both during and (especially) afterwards.