by Jesse Ball
She began to cry.
—I have tried so hard to remember my previous life. I have stared and stared into walls, carpets, clouds, desperately trying to conjure up anything, but it will not come. They took it all away.
He ran his hand up and down her back. It felt very good. Her hair was very soft and he was touching it. She was talking and talking and the skin of her face was soft and smooth. Her eyes were greedy and bright and full of need. She looked into his eyes as he thought no one ever had, and then first slowly and then desperately, they moved into each other, convulsing and shuddering in joy. She could hardly bear to stop talking long enough to kiss him, but then she did. It was almost too much to have her touch him, but as soon as she had, he could bear nothing else. It was the same with her. He could feel in her that it was the same with her, that they were mirroring each other, that their feelings were springing back and forth. And she kept saying, over and over—be true to me. Be true to me.
—
The claimant sat on the porch with the examiner. She was telling him about the weather and how the weather worked. He asked why the seasons could be the same for so long. He said it was contrary to what she had told him about seasons. She laughed and said, we have moved villages four times. How close together do you believe those villages to be? And she had explained that in the first village where they had been, it was winter.
—The villages are all over. Thus, we can go to whatever season we like, and live the same life.
She was talking now about the clouds, and naming all the kinds of clouds.
Meanwhile, he remembered what Hilda had said to him when she left:
—Meet me, not tomorrow night, nor the next night—but three nights from now. Come to my house, Martin will be away. He will be away. Tell no one!
THE NEXT DAY, it was all he could do to behave the same as before. He felt when he saw the examiner that she would see right through him, and so when he had left Hilda, he had immediately made a plan. This was the first real action of his new life. Making a plan: he hadn’t done such a thing before. What did it mean to be able to do such a thing?
When he had gotten home in the night, he brought with him some new plants that he had found on the road. He sat up late drawing them and tried harder than he ever had before, and he managed a good drawing—the first good drawing he had done.
In the morning he showed this drawing to her.
She will think I am happy because I have succeeded. She will attribute all my happiness to this.
AGAIN AND AGAIN, he found himself imagining Hilda. He pictured her lithe brown body with no clothing. He imagined her thinking of him, and he felt concern. Could it not be that she might discover that he was not worth knowing? Could she not feel she was better alone? He grew terrified. He was a failure. He had little to say—and had done nothing, knew nothing. The examiner was constantly pointing out his faults and his stupidity. And when the examiner praised him, it was only out of kindness. What was there about him that could equal up to Hilda?
He looked back on the supper at her house, and he thought of the way she had been looking at him. Again and again, he replayed in his mind the episode in the kitchen. He could see her standing askance before him. How he wanted to see her again!
The examiner had stopped speaking. She was sitting silently, looking over at him, and there was nothing in her eyes at all. She was just a husk, just patience itself. She would inhabit her body again when there was a reason to. In the meantime, she waited in some nearby place. That was almost how it was with her.
—EMMA, SAID THE CLAIMANT. I am ready to try again.
—Are you ready, she said.
—I am.
—To a meeting? To meet more people? You have been very quiet lately.
—I don’t think that I was very good, when we met that couple. Or when we saw them again. I need to try harder.
—It isn’t about trying, said the examiner. It is about being present. You are far inside yourself, and need to be at your edges, ready to spring.
—I will do it, he said. I will.
The examiner looked at the newspaper and saw that there was a meeting of a botanical society that very night.
—Who knew, she said. A botanical society.
—Oh, you must have known, said the claimant sharply.
The examiner raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.
THE BOTANICAL SOCIETY meeting was held in a building called the library. The claimant had not been to the library before, but he knew the word. It was a place for books to be kept, and indeed, when they arrived, it was quite full of books. This botanical society did not have very many plants or flowers. In fact, they were a sort of bibliographical botanical society, because mostly they talked about flowers and showed each other pictures of flowers in books. This is why the meeting was at the library; it was the place where the books were. Also, there were books that the members owned, and they brought these books with them when they came.
There were nineteen members of the botanical society. All of them were there. They were introduced to him one by one, all by name, and he shook hands with the men. With the women, he shook hands, but in a different way. He sort of held the ends of their fingers briefly. That was shaking hands with women. Then, they all sat down and began to talk. Someone had pots of coffee, and they drank from paper cups. The people of the botanical society were very concerned about him and Emma. Concerned, in that they felt he and Emma concerned them. That two botanists, or a botanist and an assistant, should be in the town was wonderful and quite reasonable. It was a fine town. Why shouldn’t it have a botanist? Indeed, it had a botanical society. There was an immediate motion for Emma to give a talk about botany, which Emma refused to do for the time being. My work disallows it, she said.
THE CLAIMANT found that he was having difficulties again noticing when it was that someone was speaking to him. He found that he was having difficulty controlling his breathing, and he found that he was scowling or changing his expression when he didn’t mean to do so. All of these things had been problems in the past, but now they had suddenly become meaningful to him. He had to fix these things if he was to become better for Hilda—if he was to be a person that Hilda would want to see and know. If she learned of the way that he was, well, she knew already. But, if it was confirmed to her that this was all that he could be, then…it didn’t bear thinking about.
So, the claimant poured himself into his effort to be social, and he tried desperately to notice when he was spoken to, and to speak back regarding the subject. He asked questions when he didn’t understand things, and he smiled as much as he could.
When they walked home, they would go under a street lamp, and the examiner would say,
—How careful you were back there.
and they would go out into the darkness past the light, and she would say,
—and how reckless!
—How careful…
—and how reckless!
—How careful…
—and how reckless!
It was a bit of a joke with her, for she had told him that this was the way that good learning proceeds. One must be careful at all careful points, and reckless at all reckless points. Those who are careful always get nowhere. Those who are reckless plummet.
When they got to the porch, she turned to him.
—What do you think about lying?
—I don’t lie, he said. You know that.
—Aren’t we lying about being botanists? asked the examiner. Isn’t that a sort of lie?
—But, we spend all day drawing plants.
—Is there a time, she asked, when it is worthwhile for everyone—for you to lie, and then is it a bad lie? Or should all lies be found out, exposed, and the liars excoriated?
—Don’t answer, she said. Just think on it.
And then she smiled at him. It was a warm, gentle smile. Such a smile she had never given him in all the time he had known her. With the flush of his success at the botanical socie
ty, he was off balance, and this smile swept over him. He suddenly felt that he should tell the examiner everything, that he should explain how he had met Hilda, and how she was plotting something, he didn’t know what. He felt that he should lay the whole matter before her and do just what she said he should do.
After all, she had always done right by him. The things that Hilda had said about her examiners—that isn’t how it had been with him.
And while he was thinking all this, the examiner went up the stairs, and he neither followed her nor spoke.
HILDA!
He thought he had spoken, but he had not.
The door was open before him. He was standing in her doorway, 23 Juniper Lane. She stood in the hall, in work garments, gardening clothes, rubber boots, a filthy shirt rolled up to the elbows, short trousers, and a thick cloth belt.
—I was just working in the garden. You are an hour early!
She came into the doorway and took his hand, pulling him into the house.
—Inside! Inside, quick.
—I’m sorry, he said.
—Don’t be sorry, you fool. Close the door behind you.
She drew him up the stairs, past all the photographs and over the creaking boards.
—I LOVE YOU, he said.
—You fool, you fool, you fool, she whispered. Let us never talk of such things. If it is true that there is only for me in this horrible place one thing and that thing is you, and there is only for you in this horrible place one thing, and that thing is me, then we need not talk of love. Love is a comparison. I like him but I love another. We are at the bottom of a ditch and there is just a parcel of air to be found, a parcel and when it is done, we push at the space, and another little space of air presents itself. Who can talk of love? There is only air—or none, and if there is none then there is nothing at all.
She spoke like this, on and on, forever chiding him when he said this or that. I don’t know how long I have been in these places, really, she confided, it could have been forever. Have you known anyone else, in all this time, he asked her. I have only had the courage now, after all this time, to explain myself to someone. And why me. Because, she said, because—you were so dazed when I met you. You were still drifting inside. It was the first time I could tell for sure that someone was a living person, and not a shell like the rest of them.
—There are hundreds, maybe thousands of them, she said. Thousands of villages. There is a world beyond it, I am sure of that. But what the relationship is between the world and the villages, I can’t say. It seems that it could be that the world created the villages, that the government over all, the republic, made the Process of Villages in order to fix the people who were ill, who couldn’t bear the way the world was. It could also, however, be the case that the government merely found the villages, a separate society on its edge, and nurtured it. The distinction is that the villages might be a part of the republic, a subset of it—or they might be a separate thing, which are being used by the republic to heal itself. If the sick people are placed into the villages as part of an agreement between the villages and the republic, then they are merely servants of the republic. Then the examiners are bureaucrats of a kind, and the whole Process of Villages is a massive bureaucracy.
—But, if the Process of Villages is just a place that grew up in a sort of passive antagonism to the republic, then it could be that sick people are abandoned there by the republic, and that the examiners are just the kind people who receive them, who receive them and nurse them back to health.
—Even where that abandoning takes place—should it take place at all, is in dispute. It could be that the fogging is a thing, a kind thing done by the Process of Villages, a gentle response to the horrors of the republic. Or, it could be that the fogging is what the republic does when it washes its hands of someone, and that it is something the Process of Villages has learned to deal with—almost as though it were a peculiar malady in its own right.
—But what is fogging?
—It is an injection. I figured out how to unlock the examiner’s desk two houses ago, and I read the text they keep. The injection changes you, sends you deeper into yourself, in order that you can learn to protect yourself from life’s difficulties. It does other things, too. It ruins your memory, and you lose most things you knew. That’s why they have to teach you everything all over again.
—So, said the claimant. I was injected with something. That’s what they did. They told me I was very sick, and that…
—You were very sick, and that you almost died. That you were on the edge of death, and you were rescued, and that now you are recuperating, yes, that is what they say. It is in the book, written down for them to say it. All the questions you will ask are there, and all the answers they will give. But, what we do not know, she said, is whether the book is true. It is possible that the book is a conditional lie. It could be all the truth that enables the examiners to do their job, with all the space around filled in with lies. In fact, it is quite likely that it is that. A thinking person could conclude nothing else.
The claimant felt that he was voyaging through a place of trees. The trees were rushing by, running like dancers in a long line. They danced around him, rushing and running and leaping. Their leaves fell across his face and their limbs tore at his clothing. He felt that he was falling and that the race of the trees kept him afoot. Each time he nearly fell, he was buffeted up and all the while, a great wind swirled in the distance. He wasn’t going anywhere—he could not go anywhere—it was impossible, wherever one went, one would be rushed off one’s feet, and held afloat in a mireless confusion.
As this feeling rose in him, she noticed that his face was changing, and she slowed her speech.
—Darling, she said, darling. It is all right. It is all right. We will find some way forward. I know we will.
—But what, he said, what could such a thing be? It is all hopeless.
And as he said it, he felt that it was true.
But then Hilda took him and kissed him and held him to her, and it was the strangest thing: he was sure suddenly that it was not the bedroom of Hilda’s house that he was in, but that he was in another bedroom, in a house just like it, but one that he had never been in. And in Hilda’s place, he saw another young woman, a person he had never seen in his life, but for whom he felt great respect, in whom he had great comfort, but who could it have been, who? and he was pulling her to him, and sobbing, and he felt her body all against his. His hands were in her hair, her soft yellow hair, and he grew calm, everywhere, calm. And then he was back again, back again in the house with Hilda. She was pulling away and standing.
—COME AND SEE, Hilda was saying.
They went into the study and stood by the desk.
—The lock is just there, she said. It can be picked, and all the answers are inside. I only managed to find the book and read some of it. Then I was moved and I got a new examiner. Martin is much more watchful. He speaks like an idiot, but it is all an act. He is a monster. I am afraid of him. Not that he would hurt me, but that he knows everything that I know, and more.
—Hilda, what is your real name?
—In the last place, where I failed, it was Kat. In the town before that, it was Morna. I don’t even care about names anymore. If you could tell me my original name, it would be, it would be…
—What?
—It would be dirt, that’s all. Just dirt. Not even worth putting in one’s mouth.
IT WAS SEVERAL DAYS before he met her again. This time it was in the wood beyond the lake, just at dawn, as if they each had gone out for a walk and happened upon one another. That would be all right, they thought. Even if someone saw, such a thing would be all right.
They sat in the wood, by a stream. There was a stand of birch trees. He leaned against one and they spoke about this and that.
Suddenly, to Hilda and Martin, it felt very good to talk about nothing at all. They sat and made completely banal statements about the morning and the day an
d each other’s clothing (which was practically the same), and they were very happy.
This went on until Hilda began to sob uncontrollably.
Martin tried to console her. When she finally spoke, she said,
—I need for us to have a plan. Otherwise, I am afraid—I am afraid we will just go on like this, living here. I am afraid nothing will change.
—But, what is there to do?
—I think we can leave, said Hilda. I think that it is possible to leave. It’s true that people come. People who were not here before come here now. Even if for us it isn’t entirely clear—I believe that I was in several villages before this, but it might not be true. I might always have been here: despite that, it appears true that others who were not here are suddenly here one day. If that’s so, they come from somewhere, and we can go there, to the place where they came from, and to places beyond that. I’m sure of it.
Martin nodded.
She began to touch his hair and face, and he sat quietly in these attentions for some time.
—I have a present for you, she said.
She handed him several sheets of paper. They had been torn out of a book.
—Read them later. Goodbye for now.
The claimant sat in the wood and looked at the pages. They were, they must be—from the examiner’s book. There in neat lines of type he found a description of the gentlest village as though it did not yet exist. He found a description of the role of examiner and rules for how an examiner ought to be. He was partway through such an explanation when he reached the end of the torn-out section.