The sky had clouded over and the rising wind was carrying a full blizzard with it. By the time Dik was dragged through the streets back to the barracks, the gale was bearing thick, suffocating snowflakes, settling in for a night-long storm, piling up new drifts against the walls and posts of the village.
Bruised and disconsolate, aching in head, stomach, groin, legs, chest, Dik lay locked inside his room for the remainder of the night and for all the following day. He was given water, but no food. The heating in his room was turned off, and when he tried to read one of the many books that littered his room the overhead light was abruptly turned off.
He had much on which to ponder and nearly all of it was concerned with Moylita and the possible fates that he imagined had befallen her. They were all awful, and he could barely countenance them. For the rest, he wondered again and again about the little story he had held, unread, for those few moments. All Moylita had told him was that it concerned a soldier who became a poet. From the burgher’s reaction after skimming through it Dik could easily imagine there was rather more to the story than that. There were those few sentences the burgher had read aloud: sense gases, distortion of perception, nothing that might be trusted. Later, the fragments of the shouted argument he had overhead through the closed window of the council chamber: the right to be told, the illegality of the gases, the madness.
Moylita had written the story exclusively for him. She had not discussed the background with him; she only mentioned the poet. This was for her the true statement of the story and so the same should be true for him.
He had not told her about his own literary aspirations, of the bundles of unpublished verse that lay neglected in the cupboard in his room at home, of the numerous incomplete drafts of stories. Had she somehow guessed about these?
She had interpreted the novel for him, perhaps divining correctly that he related his own life to it. Had she been intending him to do the same with the story?
Dik did not know. Whatever part of him had once been a poet had been beaten out of him by the military basic training: those long brutalizing weeks in the camp had had their effect and he could not easily forget the failure of the verse he had attempted when he arrived in the village. The studious, sensitive boy who had never made many friends was a long way behind him now, beyond the wall thrown up when he reluctantly volunteered.
His precious copy of The Affirmation was safe in his room. He had half-expected someone would take it away from him, but clearly none of his superiors was able to appreciate how important it was to him. When daylight came and he was sure no one was checking what he was doing, Dik squatted down on the floor, leaning his back against the door. He read a long section of it. He chose the passage he had always found the most intriguing: the last five chapters.
This was the part of the story where Orfé had finally escaped from the conspiratorial machinations of Emerden and the other minor characters and was free to go in search of Hilde. What followed was a journey not simply through the exotic landscape of the Dream Archipelago, but also a voyage of self-exploration. In a moving irony, the more Orfé understood himself and the events that had led up to his escape, the more remote from him Hilde herself became.
Reading the book for the first time since Moylita had talked about it, Dik was suddenly aware of the wall symbolism that ran throughout it, and he cursed his lack of percipience in not having seen it for himself. As Orfé sailed from one island to the next, following the obscure trail of clues left behind by the fleeing Hilde, he encountered a series of barriers. The images chosen by the author, the dialogue she wrote for Orfé, her actual choice of words, all reflected the fact that Hilde had retreated behind a wall of Orfé’s own making. Even Moylita Kaine’s locale for the end of the quest – the island of Prachous, which in Archipelagian patois meant ‘the fenced island’ – was appropriate to her theme.
The last irony, that the wall behind which Hilde retreated was the one he had earlier built to keep others away from her, now took on a resonance that made Dik silently shed a few tears. His younger self reached out from the past, briefly touched him, reminded him of his earlier sensibilities, his old ways of feeling and of being.
Behind him, in the bare corridor of the barracks beyond his locked door, booted feet constantly moved heavily to and fro.
The book left him with a sense of artistic satisfaction, but soon enough his thoughts returned to the lost short story. Moylita had been trying to tell him something with it. Did he know enough about it that he could try to imagine what that could be?
Affirmation/negation: opposites. A wall lay between them?
Orfé failed to climb his wall when he had the chance, and thereafter it was too late. In the story the soldier climbed a wall and became a poet. Orfé started the novel as a romantic idler, a dilettante and a sybarite, but because of his failures he became a haunted ascetic, obsessed with purpose and guided by moral principle. In the story, what?
Dik, still not fully understanding, but trying hard, began to sense what Moylita Kaine might have wanted of him.
On the mountain frontier, high on the ridges, there was no greater penalty for disciplinary offences than to be sent back on wall patrol. Dik was therefore not surprised when he was restored to normal duties. He never saw the ginger-haired caporal again, and nothing was said about the events of the past two days. By the middle of the afternoon of the following day he was pacing an allotted sector of the wall, high above the countryside he was supposedly protecting. It was bitterly cold: at intervals he had to remove his goggles. Narrowing his eyes against the glaring sun he chipped away the encrusting ice from the dark filtered lenses. It was also necessary to work the breech mechanism of his rifle to prevent it jamming.
While climbing up to the frontier in the morning, Dik had for a time been able to see the sawmill from the slopes above the village. There had been no lights on that he could see and the unbroken snowfield around it revealed that the warmway had not been switched on, or had possibly even been removed.
While he had been down in the village certain changes had been made to the physical defences along the wall. New floodlights had been installed close to many of the guard posts, and enormous drums of electric cable had been dumped on the slopes immediately below the wall. In addition, several immense and bulbous metal shapes had appeared, half buried in the snow beside the warmway. Complicated arrangements of pipes and nozzles led from these across the warmway and up to the parapet of the wall. Although there were many warning signs, and strict enjoiners that only trained technicians were to approach, Dik had tripped over the bulky pipes several times until he learned to watch out for them.
He was allowed a short break at dusk, when he sipped a hot and spicy soup in one of the guard posts, but after the early nightfall he was back in his sector, pacing to and fro in numb misery, trying to count the minutes that remained until the end of his watch.
Night patrols were especially nerve-racking, because for most of the time he and the other constables were effectively alone against the hostile alliance of dark and cold and unexplained noises. Reinforcements waited in the forward quarters a short distance below the wall, but if an attack came it was the patrols who had to bear the brunt of it for the first minutes. On this night the Federation side had not turned on their floodlights, so Dik could hardly see even the bulk of the wall looming beside him. All that was distinguishable was the dark strip of the warmway against the white snow, and the sinister, half-buried cisterns.
Whenever he passed the guard post he checked the current state of alert. He was reassured to be told each time that little enemy activity had been detected.
He wondered, as he had often wondered, where the enemy were and what they were doing or planning on the other side. Was there someone like himself, a few feet away on the other side of the parapet, stamping to and fro, thinking only about how long it would be until the end of the watch?
Here, at the place where the two countries met, where two political and econom
ic ideologies clashed, he was physically closer to the enemy than almost anyone else. If there was a sudden invasion across the wall, or even a skirmish, he would be the first to have to fight or die. And yet the frontier united him with the enemy: the men on the other side obeyed the same sort of orders, suffered the same fears, endured the same physical hardships, and they, presumably, defended their country to support a system that was as remote from them as the burghers and their tithes were remote from himself.
Dik again worked the breech mechanism to free it. There was a pause in the whining of the wind and in the brief lull Dik heard, from the other side of the wall, someone there working a breech mechanism. It was something the patrols often heard when they were on the wall: it was at once alarming and perversely comforting.
Dik could feel the weight of Moylita Kaine’s novel in his pocket. He had brought it with him, in defiance of standing orders. He knew that his return to patrols did not of itself prove he was in the clear. He knew or suspected that his kit would be searched, and the thought of losing the precious copy was too awful to bear. Anyway, he felt after the events of the last two days that the act of carrying it was the least he could do for her. He had no idea what had happened to her, although it was almost certainly unpleasant. Carrying her book was the only way he knew of enacting her ideas. She talked to him in symbols, and in return Dik was prepared to enact symbols.
He could not act in reality, because he had realized at last what she had been urging him to do.
He glanced up the immense bulk of the wall beside him. It looked bleak and unsymbolic, and almost certainly unclimbable. It was booby-trapped: certainly on this side, and almost certainly on the other. Flatcake mines had been laid by both sides. The tripwires and scramble fence were touch-triggered and electrified. A man had only to show his hand above the top of the wall and a fusillade of radar-directed shots would come from automatic trap-rifles set by the other side. In the period of less than two years that the war had been in progress there were already scores of stories about grenade duels brought on by little more than the sudden sound of sliding snow.
Dik walked on, remembering the momentary resentment he had felt about the way Moylita had interpreted her novel for him. This was the same. It was all very well to create symbols in the pages of fiction. It was an entirely different matter to be out here, exposed on the wall, in the grip of a winter gale, coping with the grim reality of war. In Moylita’s negation of ideals, a man could climb a wall and find his destiny as poet. Dik’s own sense of destiny was well formed, but it didn’t include making a suicidal leap into the unknown. He too could make his own negation.
Then he remembered the sound of her voice coming from within the council chamber. She had taken a risk in writing the story and she had apparently paid a price for it. Conscience and a sense of moral responsibility returned, and Dik thought again about climbing the wall.
It was high along here, but there were firing steps further along. Sometimes they were used.
He became aware that somewhere around him was a hissing noise and he halted at once. He crouched down, holding his rifle ready, looking about him in the gloom. Then, from a long way away, from the depths of the valley, a shrill thin sound reached him, distorted by a combination of the wind, the distance and the snow-covered walls of the mountains: the train was in the depot, letting its whistle be heard.
Dik stood up again, relieved by the familiarity of the sound. He walked on, rattling the bolt of his rifle. On the other side of
the wall, someone else did the same.
The hissing continued.
Another hour passed and the end of his watch had almost arrived, when he saw the figure of one of the constables walking along the warmway towards him. Dik was frozen through, so he stood and waited gratefully for the other to reach him. But as the figure came nearer Dik saw that he was raising his arms and holding his rifle above his head.
He halted a short distance from Dik and shouted in a foreign accent, ‘Please, not shoot! I give up, wish surrender!’
It was a young man of about his own age, the sleeves and legs of his protective clothing ripped and shredded by the razor wire. Dik stared at him in silent astonishment.
They were near one of the cisterns, and the hissing of gas was loud above the wind.
Dik himself could feel the bite of the freezing wind through the gashes in his tunic and trousers and as a floodlight switched on high above the wall he saw a huge stain of blood below his knee. He looked at the young soldier standing amazed before him, and said again, much louder this time, ‘Please don’t shoot. I’m surrendering.’
They were near one of the cisterns and the hissing of gas was loud above the wind.
The enemy soldier said, ‘Here … my rifle.’
Dik said, ‘Take my rifle.’
As Dik passed him his, the young man handed over his own and raised his arms again.
‘Cold,’ the enemy soldier said. His goggles had iced over, and even in the brilliant wash of the floodlight Dik could not see his face. ‘That way,’ said Dik, pointing towards the distant guard post, and waving the muzzle of the captured rifle. ‘This way,’ said the young soldier, pointing to the guard post.
They walked on slowly in the wind and snow, Dik staring at the back of his enemy’s caped head in admiration and envy.
Whores
•
At last I was granted the leave for which I had been waiting since the beginning of the year. I left the war behind me and travelled to a seaport on the temperate northern coast of the continent. Fifty days’ sick leave lay ahead. My trouser pocket was heavy on my buttock with the wad of high-denomination back-pay notes. It should have been a time for convalescence after the long and agonizing spell of treatment in the military hospital, but even after so many weeks I had still been discharged too early and my mind continued to be affected by the enemy’s synaesthetic gases. My perception was profoundly disturbed.
As the train clattered through the devastated terrain of the bleak, unnamed southern continent, I seemed to taste the music of pain, feel the gay dancing colours of sound. Amid these preoccupations I knew only that I craved to be among the islands.
As I waited in the port for the ferry across to Luice, the closest island in the Dream Archipelago, I tried to understand and rationalize my delusions in the way the medical staff had trained me.
The brick-built terraced houses, which between perceptual lapses I knew were antique and beautiful, and which I saw glowed with the mellow pale brown of the local sandstone, became in my delusions synaesthetic monstrosities. They gave off a cynical laughter that tormented my thinking, they somehow emitted a deep throbbing sound that shook my chest cavity and weakened my knees, and their well-built walls were so cold to the touch that they chilled my heart like a shaft of tempered steel. The fishing boats in the harbour were less unpleasant to perceive: they were a gentle humming sound, barely audible. The army hostel, where I stayed overnight, was a warren of associative flavours and smells. The corridors tasted to me of coal dust, the walls were papered with hyacinth, the bedclothes enfolded me like a rancid mouth.
I slept poorly, waking many times from vivid, lucid dreams. One in particular had become a familiar nightmarish companion. I had experienced it every night since leaving the front line: I dreamt I was still with my unit in the trenches, advancing through the minefields, setting up a monitoring complex of some kind, a fantastically detailed and demanding technical task, then immediately dismantling it and retreating, again somehow finding a safe way through the mines, then returning to the same place, reconstructing the electronic equipment, dismantling it, repeatedly, endlessly.
In the morning my synaesthesia had receded once more, a sign I took to be encouraging. My periods of remission were becoming longer and closer together. During my last week in the military hospital I had suffered only one minor attack. For this reason they said they had cured me, which made the new outbreak doubly alarming. I wanted to be completely free of
the effects, but no one knew if that would be possible. Thousands of other men were similarly afflicted.
I left the hostel and walked down to the harbour, soon finding the quay where the Luice ferry berthed. There was more than an hour and a half to wait, so I strolled pleasurably through the narrow streets around the harbour, noting that the town must be a major centre for the importation of war matériel. No one seemed to be concerned about who I was, and security was lax. I walked into one warehouse where I saw several stacks of crates containing hallucinogenic grenades and neural dissociation gases.
The day was hot and sultry, a tantalizing foretaste of the tropical climate of the islands I was about to surrender myself to. Everyone around me said the weather was unseasonal, that an unexpected area of high pressure had settled inland, pulling down the soft warm airs from the tropical sea to the north. The townspeople were obviously relishing the novelty: windows and doors were wide open, and the harbourside cafés had placed tables and chairs outside for their customers and were enjoying a healthy trade.
I stood with a large crowd on the quay, waiting to board the ferry. It was an old, diesel-stinking boat, apparently top heavy, riding high in the water. As I stepped across to the deck I experienced a wholly normal kind of synaesthetic response: the smell of the hot oil, salt-stiff ropes and sun-dried deck planking summoned a strong and nostalgic memory of a childhood voyage along the coast of my own country. The experience of being gassed by the enemy had taught me how to recognize the response from my sensations and within moments I was able to recall in great detail my thoughts, actions, hopes and intentions of that time, so long ago.
There was a delay and an argument when I came to pay for my ticket. The army money was acceptable but the banknotes were too high in value. Smaller tender had to be found for change, and the disgruntled ferryman made me wait for it. By the time I was free to explore the ancient boat it had long since embarked, and we were a great distance out to sea. The coast of the wartorn continent I had left was a black, undulating outline across the southern horizon. Sea-birds wheeled in our wake. The decks throbbed with the vibration from the engine. Ahead were the islands.
The Dream Archipelago Page 5