by Gene Wolfe
“Very well indeed,” I said. “Both the productions I have seen have been excellent.”
“But only for the past two seasons. When I joined the company it had nearly fallen apart. We revived it—Bobby and Paul and I. We could do it because we cared, and because we were able to find a few naturally talented people who can take direction. Bobby is the best of us—he can walk away with any part that calls for a touch of the sinister …”
She seemed to run out of breath. I said, “I don’t think there will be any trouble about getting him free.”
“Thank God. We’re getting the theater on its feet again now. We’re attracting new people, and we’ve built up a following—people who come to see every production. There’s even some money ahead at last. But Mary Rose is supposed to run another two weeks, and after that we’re doing Faust, with Bobby as Mephistopheles. We’ve simply no one who can take his place, no one who can come close to him.”
“I’m sure the police will release him if I ask them to.”
“They must. We have to have him tomorrow night. Bill—someone you don’t know—tried to go on for him in the third act tonight. It was just ghastly. In Iran you’re very polite; that’s what I’ve heard.”
“We enjoy thinking so.”
“We’re not. We never were; and as …”
Her voice trailed away, but a wave of one slender arm evoked everything—the cracked plaster walls became as air, and the decayed city, the ruined continent, entered the room with us. “I understand,” I said.
“They—we—were betrayed. In our souls we have never been sure by whom. When we feel cheated we are ready to kill; and maybe we feel cheated all the time.”
She slumped in her chair, and I realized, as I should have long before, how exhausted she was. She had given a performance that had ended in disaster, then had been forced to plead with the police for my name and address, and at last had come here from the station house, very probably on foot. I asked when I could obtain O’Keene’s release.
“We can go tomorrow morning, if you’ll do it.”
“You wish to come too?”
She nodded, smoothed her skirt, and stood. “I’ll have to know. I’ll come for you about nine, if that’s all right.”
“If you’ll wait outside for me to dress, I’ll take you home.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“It will only take a moment,” I said.
The blue eyes held something pleading again. “You’re going to come in with me—that’s what you’re thinking, I know. You have two beds here—bigger, cleaner beds than the one I have in my little apartment; if I were to ask you to push them together, would you still take me home afterward?”
It was as though I were dreaming indeed—a dream in which everything I wanted—the cosmos purified- delivered itself to me. I said, “You won’t have to leave at all—you can spend the night with me. Then we can breakfast together before we go to release your friend.”
She laughed again, lifting that exquisite head. “There are a hundred things at home I need. Do you think I’d have breakfast with you without my cosmetics, and in these dirty clothes?”
“Then I will take you home—yes, though you lived in Kazvin. Or on Mount Kaf.”
She smiled. “Get dressed, then. I’ll wait outside, and I’ll show you my apartment; perhaps you won’t want to come back here afterward.”
She went out, her wooden-soled American shoes clicking on the bare floor, and I threw on trousers, shirt, and jacket, and jammed my feet into my boots. When I opened the door, she was gone. I rushed to the barred window at the end of the corridor, and was in time to see her disappear down a side street. A last swirl of her skirt in a gust of night wind, and she had vanished into the velvet dark.
For a long time I stood there looking out over the ruinous buildings. I was not angry—I do not think I could be angry with her. I was, though here it is hard to tell the truth, in some way glad. Not because I feared the embrace of love—I have no doubt of my ability to suffice any woman who can be sated by man—but because an easy exchange of my cooperation for her person would have failed to satisfy my need for romance, for adventure of a certain type, in which danger and love are twined like coupling serpents. Ardis, my Ellen, will provide that, surely, as neither Yasmin nor the pitiful wanton who was her double could. I sense that the world is opening for me only now; that I am being born; that that corridor was the birth canal, and that Ardis in leaving me was drawing me out toward her.
When I returned to my own door, I noticed a bit of paper on the floor before it. I transcribe it exactly here, though I cannot transmit its scent of lilacs.
You are a most attractive man and I want very much to stretch the truth and tell you you can have me freely when Bobby is free but I won’t sell myself etc. Really I will sell myself for Bobby but I have other fish to fry tonight. I’ll see you in the morning and if you can get Bobby out or even try hard you’ll have (real) love from the vanishing
Mary Rose
Morning. Woke early and ate here at the hotel as usual, finishing about eight. Writing this journal will give me something to do while I wait for Ardis. Had an American breakfast today, the first time I have risked one. Flakes of pastry dough toasted crisp and drenched with cream, and with it strudel and the usual American coffee. Most natives have spiced pork in one form or another, which I cannot bring myself to try; but several of the people around me were having egg dishes and oven-warmed bread, which I will sample tomorrow.
I had a very unpleasant dream last night; I have been trying to put it out of my mind ever since I woke. It was dark, and I was under an open sky with Ardis, walking over ground much rougher than anything I saw in the park on the farther side of the channel. One of the hideous creatures I shot night before last was pursuing us—or rather, lurking about us, for it appeared first to the left of us, then to the right, silhouetted against the night sky. Each time we saw it, Ardis grasped my arm and urged me to shoot, but the little indicator light on my pistol was glowing red to show that there was not enough charge left for a shot. All very silly, of course, but I am going to buy a fresh powerpack as soon as I have the opportunity.
It is late afternoon—after six—but we have not had dinner yet. I am just out of the tub, and sit here naked, with today’s candy egg laid (pinker even than I) beside this book on my table. Ardis and I had a sorry, weary time of it, and I have come back here to make myself presentable. At seven we will meet for dinner; the curtain goes up at eight, so it can’t be a long one, but I am going backstage to watch the play from the wings, where I will be able to talk to her when she isn’t performing.
I just took a bite of the egg—no unusual taste, nothing but an unpleasant sweetness. The more I reflect on it, the more inclined I am to believe that the drug was in the first I ate. No doubt the monster I saw had been lurking in my brain since I read Mysteries, and the drug freed it. True, there were bloodstains on my clothes (the Peri’s asphodel!) but they could as easily have come from my cheek, which is still sore. I have had my experience, and all I have left is my candy. I am almost tempted to throw out the rest. Another bite.
Still twenty minutes before I must dress and go for Ardis—she showed me where she lives, only a few doors from the theater. To work then.
Ardis was a trifle late this morning, but came as she had promised. I asked where we were to go to free Kreton, and when she told me—a still-living building at the eastern end of the Silent City—I hired one of the rickety American caleches to drive us there. Like most of them, it was drawn by a starved horse; but we made good time.
The American police are organized on a peculiar system. The national secret police (officially, the Federated Enquiry Divisions) are in a tutorial position to all the others, having power to review their decisions, promote, demote, and discipline, and as the ultimate reward, enroll personnel from the other organizations. In addition they maintain a uniformed force of their own. Thus when an American has been arrested by uniforme
d police, his friends can seldom learn whether he has been taken by the local police, by the F.E.D. uniformed national force, or by members of the F.E.D. secret police posing as either of the foregoing.
Since I had known nothing of these distinctions previously, I had no way of guessing which of the three had O’Keene; but the local police to whom Ardis had spoken the night before had given her to understand that he had been taken by them. She explained all this to me as we rattled along, then added that we were now going to the F.E.D. Building to secure his release. I must have looked as confused as I felt at this, because she added, “Part of it is a station for the Washington Police Department—they rent the space from the F.E.D.”
My own impression (when we arrived) was that they did no such thing—that the entire apparatus was no more real than one of the scenes in Ardis’s theater, and that all the men and women to whom we spoke were in fact agents of the secret police, wielding ten times the authority they pretended to possess, and going through a solemn ritual of deception. As Ardis and I moved from office to office, explaining our simple errand, I came to think that she felt as I did, and that she had refrained from expressing these feelings to me in the cab not only because of the danger, the fear that I might betray her or the driver be a spy, but because she was ashamed of her nation, and eager to make it appear to me, a foreigner, that her government was less devious and meretricious than is actually the case.
If this is so—and in that windowless warren of stone I was certain it was—then the very explanation she proffered in the cab (which I have given in its proper place) differentiating clearly between local police, uniformed F.E.D. police, and secret police, was no more than a children’s fable, concealing an actuality less forthright and more convoluted.
Our questioners were courteous to me, much less so to Ardis, and (so it seemed to me) obsessed by the idea that something more lay behind the simple incident we described over and over again—so much so in fact that I came to believe it myself. I have neither time nor patience enough to describe all these interviews, but I will attempt to give a sample of one.
We went into a small, windowless office crowded between two others that appeared empty. A middle-aged American woman was seated behind a metal desk. She appeared normal and reasonably attractive until she spoke; then her scarred gums showed that she had once had two or three times the proper number of teeth—forty or fifty, I suppose, in each jaw—and that the dental surgeon who had extracted the supernumerary ones had not always, perhaps, selected those he suffered to remain as wisely as he might. She asked, “How is it outside? The weather? You see, I don’t know, sitting in here all day.”
Ardis said, “Very nice.”
“Do you like it, Hajji? Have you had a pleasant stay in our great country?”
“I don’t think it has rained since I’ve been here.”
She seemed to take the remark as a covert accusation. “You came too late for the rains, I’m afraid. This is a very fertile area, however. Some of our oldest coins show heads of wheat. Have you seen them?” She pushed a small copper coin across the desk, and I pretended to examine it. There are one or two like it in the bracelet I bought for Ardis, and which I still have not presented to her. “I must apologize on behalf of the District for what happened to you,” the woman continued. “We are making every effort to control crime. You have not been victimized before this?”
I shook my head, half suffocated in that airless office, and said I had not been.
“And now you are here.” She shuffled the papers she held, then pretended to read from one of them. “You are here to secure the release of the thief who assaulted you. A very commendable act of magnanimity. May I ask why you brought this young woman with you? She does not seem to be mentioned in any of these reports.”
I explained that Ardis was a coworker of O’Keene’s, and that she had interceded for him.
“Then it is you, Ms. Dahl, who are really interested in securing this prisoner’s release. Are you related to him?”
And so on.
At the conclusion of each interview we were told either that the matter was completely out of the hands of the person to whom we had just spent half an hour or an hour talking, that it was necessary to obtain a clearance from someone else, or that an additional deposition had to be made. About two o’clock we were sent to the other side of the river—into what my guidebooks insist is an entirely different jurisdiction—to visit a penal facility. There we were forced to look for Kreton among five hundred or so miserable prisoners, all of whom stank and had lice. Not finding him, we returned to the F.E.D. Building past the half-overturned and yet still brooding figure called the Seated Man, and the ruins and beggars of the Silent City, for another round of interrogations. By five, when we were told to leave, we were both exhausted, though Ardis seemed surprisingly hopeful. When I left her at the door of her building a few minutes ago, I asked her what they would do tonight without Kreton.
“Without Harry, you mean.” She smiled. “The best we can, I suppose, if we must. At least Paul will have someone ready to stand in for him tonight.”
We shall see how well it goes.
I have picked up this pen and replaced it on the table ten times at least. It seems very likely that I should destroy this journal instead of continuing with it, were I wise; but I have discovered a hiding place for it which I think will be secure.
When I came back from Ardis’s apartment tonight there were only two candy eggs remaining. I am certain—absolutely certain—that three were left when I went to meet Ardis. I am almost equally sure that after I had finished making the entry in this book, I put it, as I always do, at the left side of the drawer. It was on the right side.
It is possible that all this is merely the doing of the maid who cleans the room. She might easily have supposed that a single candy egg would not be missed, and have shifted this book while cleaning the drawer, or peeped inside out of curiosity.
I will assume the worst, however. An agent sent to investigate my room might be equipped to photograph these pages—but he might not, and it is not likely that he himself would have a reading knowledge of Farsi. Now I have gone through the book and eliminated all the passages relating to my reason for visiting this leprous country. Before I leave this room tomorrow I will arrange indicators—hairs and other objects whose positions I shall carefully record—that will tell me if the room has been searched again.
Now I may as well set down the events of the evening, which were truly extraordinary enough.
I met Ardis as we had planned, and she directed me to a small restaurant not far from her apartment. We had no sooner seated ourselves than two heavy-looking men entered. At no time could I see plainly the face of either, but it appeared to me that one was the American I had met aboard the Princess Fatimah and that the other was the grain dealer I had so assiduously avoided there, Golam Gassem. It is impossible, I think, for my divine Ardis ever to look less than beautiful; but she came as near to it then as the laws of nature permit—the blood drained from her face, her mouth opened slightly, and for a moment she appeared to be a lovely corpse. I began to ask what the trouble was, but before I could utter a word she touched my lips to silence me, and then, having somewhat regained her composure, said, “They have not seen us. I am leaving now. Follow me as though we were finished eating.” She stood, feigned to pat her lips with a napkin (so that the lower half of her face was hidden) and walked out into the street.
I followed her, and found her laughing not three doors away from the entrance to the restaurant. The change in her could not have been more startling if she had been released from an enchantment. “It is so funny,” she said. “Though it wasn’t then. Come on, we’d better go; you can feed me after the show.”
I asked her what those men were to her.
“Friends,” she said, still laughing.
“If they are friends, why were you so anxious that they not see you? Were you afraid they would make us late?” I knew that such a
trivial explanation could not be true, but I wanted to leave her a means of evading the question if she did not want to confide in me.
She shook her head. “No, no. I didn’t want either to think I did not trust him. I’ll tell you more later, if you want to involve yourself in our little charade.”
“With all my heart.”
She smiled at that—that sun-drenched smile for which I would gladly have entered a lion pit. In a few more steps we were at the rear entrance to the theater, and there was no time to say more. She opened the door, and I heard Kreton arguing with a woman I later learned was the wardrobe mistress. “You are free,” I said, and he turned to look at me.
“Yes. Thanks to you, I think. And I do thank you.”
Ardis gazed on him as though he were a child saved from drowning. “Poor Bobby. Was it very bad?”
“It was frightening, that’s all. I was afraid I’d never get out. Do you know Terry is gone?”
She shook her head, and said, “What do you mean?” but I was certain—and here I am not exaggerating or coloring the facts, though I confess I have occasionally done so elsewhere in this chronicle—that she had known it before he spoke.
“He simply isn’t here. Paul is running around like a lunatic. I hear you missed me last night.”
“God, yes,” Ardis said, and darted off too swiftly for me to follow.
Kreton took my arm. I expected him to apologize for having tried to rob me, but he said, “You’ve met her, I see.”
“She persuaded me to drop the charges against you.”
“Whatever it was you offered me—twenty rials? I’m morally entitled to it, but I won’t claim it. Come and see me when you’re ready for something more wholesome—and meanwhile, how do you like her?”
“That is something for me to tell her,” I said, “not you.”
Ardis returned as I spoke, bringing with her a balding black man with a mustache. “Paul, this is Nadan. His English is very good—not so British as most of them. He’ll do, don’t you think?”