by Adam Roberts
But the thought of that somehow brought me a certain calm. I was able to discipline myself. When Ander returned two days later, he was even more nervous than before. We went into the garden again, as he hummed and coughed his way towards the question. And as I sat there I was struck by something about him. He was, as Zed would hootingly have pointed out, quite ugly; and even his ugliness was without distinction, for there were any number of men out in the city whose faces and figures were equally squat and coarse. But, for all this, he was a man, and a person. I stared at his eyes (it made him nervous, I recall), and I thought to myself, perhaps he was handsome once. He was forty-four when he asked me to marry him, but I thought of him at seventeen, or eighteen. And his eyes were a glowing blue colour. Indeed the flurry of his complexion, that redness, only served to make the blue eyes stand out all the more powerfully. I thought of him young, slim (maybe), with a full head of hair, and then I thought of those same eyes beaming out of his face. Why do eyes age not at all? Why can’t human beings be made out of eye-stuff, so that we might maintain our glow into old age? I thought to myself that Ander’s features connoted not ‘handsomeness’ but ‘man-ness’, and that as such they were perfectly fine.
After the wedding, we went away for a honeymoon cruise, on a thirty-metre yacht that another friend of my father’s loaned us. It was Ander and myself, with two crewmen and a chef. But, as we sailed round and about, through Hercules’ Pillars and down the coast of Africa, I got to see another side of my new husband. Where before he had always been stumbling shy, physically awkward and stiff around me, or else tripping over garden weeds, or dropping cutlery from the dinner table, in the bright yellow honeymoon sunshine he clambered about the yacht like a monkey. He stripped to the waist, revealing the same patchy, swirly hair on his body as head, and sprinted up and down the rigging. I was quietly upset by this, for reasons I wasn’t entirely able to articulate to myself. It was, somehow, unseemly; as if my husband had revealed himself a fraud, as if his gaucherie had been nothing but an act and now he was taunting me with his true agility. Perhaps I was angry because a part of me had hoped I had been marrying a man who would always be less than me, and this display jarred with that expectation. Certainly I was rather angry, and the anger came out in high-pitched shouts of concern up the rigging. ‘Be careful, dear! You’d better come down now.’ Or, ‘Don’t, don’t, you’ll fall in. There are sharks in these waters, you know.’
After the honeymoon I did indeed get a house of my own, two hundred metres down the avenue from Father’s town house. And with nothing to do, and the housework attended to by servants, I spent much time strolling up the way and simply being in my old and more familiar place. Father would sometimes come across me, and joke that I had run away from home. That was a fantasy that sometimes occurred to me, in fact. Not that my husband was a bad husband. He was not. I think he was a fine husband. But there was a certain awkwardness that never wilted between us, a certain kind of wrapping that he was never able quite to pull off me.
Part of it was ill-timing, of course. The first three years of our marriage coincided with the coming to fruition of the plans for the Voyage, the voyage here, to Salt. Ander’s own anxieties about going, about liquidating enough capital to see us clear on the new world, about arranging all his affairs on Earth, all that was rather overshadowed for me by the ructions in the family that was no longer, strictly or completely, mine. Zed refused to go to the new world, absolutely refused. Father absolutely insisted that he would, that we all would. There were horrible arguments, in which Father shouted about how the army had taught Zed no discipline, and in which Zed howled, positively howled, a series of incoherences. And these were only the fights that I witnessed; there must have been many more, when I was down the road in my own home. Through all of them the one strand that kept us as a family together was that Zed never once contemplated actually leaving Father’s house and making a life for himself. Father seemed so absolutely a fact of nature with us that we could no more conceive of an alternative to his will than we could an alternative to our hearts’ beating.
Eventually Zed agreed, gave way before Father’s will. The yelling he had done, the shouting down of so inviolable an icon as Father, seemed to leave him listless and drained. And so we were all prepared. It was Father’s great project, the culmination of his connections with the high-powered military people. And for a while after Father’s death, Zed became tearfully obsessed with going to the new planet. He was going, he said, so that he could devote his life to building a new world, a monument to Father’s memory. ‘He showed us the way,’ I remember him saying. ‘Father showed us the Promised Land, but he was a Moses and God has taken him from us.’ My own sort of grieving was so different from Zed’s that all this display merely bounced off me. After two weeks of melodrama, bluster and weeping, Zed cooled, calmed, even seemed to stiffen a little. He was not going, he said. He could not go. Why should he throw away a perfectly good life on this distant alien world? Why should he subject himself to the frontier hardships of some unformed wilderness? He never suggested I not go, of course, because he knew my husband was going, and clearly I would do what my husband did.
And, recently, I have begun to wonder if I did the right thing in coming to Salt. Putting the question like that seems to invite a negative answer, but I really mean the question open-endedly. When I think of Zed, still alive (I suppose) on Earth now, as we speak, I can grow homesick. Zed is the closest thing left in the universe to Father. But then I think of that old world and I can only envision it in terms of its closure.
Ander died in the hibernation tank. I wept more publicly for him than I had done for Father, but again that was partly because many people died in hibernation and there was a public mood of tears. The infectious quality of social grief, like laughter. And, hand on heart, the truth was I wasn’t exactly crying for him. I was crying for Father, for the strength that he breathed and moved, the strength that defined him. And for a heart that couldn’t flex, and so burst, in a catastrophic attack that knocked him clear out of his chair and into the bookshelf and left him lying on the floor of his study with hardbacks littered on top of him.
I have only slowly emerged, then, from the grieving for my father, although that grieving has been a hidden thing. One of the ways it came out was in my establishing the Women’s League of Senaar, which kept my hands free from the Devil’s mischief on the voyage out. It pleased out Leader to regard me as something of a spokes-woman for the female opinion, as if such a thing could be easily condensed. And I worked hard at the League, keeping locked deep away in my breast the fact that I didn’t really like women, and that I certainly did not respect them. Looking back on it (and the League was more or less wound up when we finally established Senaar on Salt), I think of it as an elaborate device for placing me in the company of men, of winning approval from men in power. The day I met the Leader for the first time was one of the proudest of my life. But if that was all the Women’s League of Senaar was, then I was in some sense lying to everybody. I prayed about this, and asked guidance from God. Perhaps God was taking the issue out of my hands by the turn of events. Because, once the war began, there really was no further need for a League of Women. It is rather paradoxical, in fact. Nowadays, it is possible to walk down Barlei Parade and get the impression that Senaar is nothing but women. Even the few men who loiter around the city have a feminine air to them. Old and bent with the vanity of old men, all expensive fabrics and overstated neckties rather than the plain blue of the uniform of the young men. Or a few sick men, wounded or lame, and they too tend to preen like women; forever stopping to examine their reflection in a shop window, to see whether their empty sleeve is tucked neatly enough into their jacket pocket. Oh, I shouldn’t have such thoughts about heroes of Senaar, men who have given up parts of their body, but increasingly the urge comes upon me. Women are wounded too, but because the wounds are not so blatantly displayed they go unremarked, ignored.
Last week Ruby came into the o
ffice full of joy. ‘It’s all over the street Visuals,’ she said. ‘The war is over!’
It almost came out of me, like an ill-controlled belch, to sneer at this and say, ‘What, again?’ But if I had been sarcastic, Ruby would either have misunderstood, thinking me sincere, or – if she had actually caught the sense behind my words – would have been deeply hurt. And because she believes in the Leader, it was no contradiction to her that the war could be announced as over, as won, and yet still carry on being prosecuted. Each victory announcement filled her with a real joy.
Actually, I see I am painting Ruby as a sort of fool, an idiot, and she is not. I suppose she is able to swallow the official line on the war with so much ease because most of her thoughts are away from official things. Perhaps most people are this way. She thinks of the day’s work, of what to cook for her husband when she goes home, of what Visuals to watch over the weekend. She is most comfortable with gossip about people (women, inevitably, because there are only women around) which has nothing to do with the official life of Senaar. And perhaps this provides her with comfort, with a shield against the brutalities of the larger picture.
After the incident with the drowned boy, for instance, we were back in the office, all three of us talking about it. ‘It is such a tragic event,’ Clare was saying. ‘He would have been fitted with a sinus-filter after his fifteenth birthday, wouldn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ said Ruby. ‘That might have saved him.’
‘Fourteen,’ said Clare. ‘Such a tragic age at which to die. So much ahead of him.’
I felt like saying: the army ahead of him, and his body stuck like a porcupine by the enemy until he bled his life onto the salt. But of course, I said no such thing. And, anyway, this was not the line Ruby and Clare’s thoughts were following.
‘There are so few eligible young men,’ said Ruby.
‘And now one less.’
‘The young men in their uniforms . . .’ said Ruby, her voice wandering a bit. It was not a sentence, just a random piece of speaking, but it communicated enough to Clare, who nodded and said, ‘Hmm.’ Then they both looked at me.
I am sure they find me odd. They are unsettled by the way I sometimes seem dissociated from life in Senaar, from the war. I might sound snide in what I say about Ruby, but if I were ever to challenge her banality she would flush with controlled rage, and tell me (as she has done several times in a more indirect way) that I was not in the city on that terrible night when the enemy first bombed Senaar. That I did not experience the horror of it, and that therefore I have no grounds to speak. Perhaps she is right. Certainly there have been other bombings, one of which broke all the windows in our office, and threw us to the ground with our hands over our mouths. But I still feel the war is something that happened whilst I have been away.
After Ander died, I found I had plenty of money to live a comfortable life. And for a while, this was what I did. Most of my time was connected with the church; at first, actually helping finance and build a church, with a big end window quintiglazed and overlooking the Galilee. And then there were many duties associated with the church. I spent a lot of time praying. But after I came back from my ill-fated diplomatic expedition to the enemy, I did nothing at all. I sat in my house, and literally stared at the wall. Or I waited outside, heedless of the radiation danger, and watched people hurry by. Money can buy that level of depression as well as that level of indolence.
But, as the war heated up, my money became diminished. There were three devaluations of money savings in as many weeks, and then a devaluation of vote savings (where a deal of my fortune was tied up). At the same time, food began to go up in price to an astonishing degree. Prices would increase between morning and evening, so that people took to eating breakfast as the main meal of the day to save a little money. Standing in the street opened up a new display, of thin and ragged people, particularly Eleupolisian wastrels, workmen and women whose fixed wages after tax meant they could no longer afford to buy food. A few of these tried begging, but that was an expulsion offence. Most they just hung about outside, as if daring the sun to give them cancer and so end their misery.
It was not that I was rendered exactly destitute by the devaluations or the price increases, although things certainly became tight. But it seemed a hint from Fate, from the Divine, and I took it as such. I found work in the office of the Vote Treasury: not one of those brokerage houses, where all is spent haggling and shouting with people on the phone. That was too disruptive for me. No, I work in the Official Vote Treasury. The work is light enough, and I was high-profile enough to be a plausible applicant for the post as Chief Secretary. But there is actually little to do, apart from occasional meetings of the Senate or Parliament where Official votes are required in a hurry. And the pay is small: Ruby and Clare have husbands who provide most of the money for their lives; and I have my savings. My inheritance. I certainly couldn’t exist on a basic official salary.
But that is exactly what I am talking about: the attitude of my last sentence. I work at the heart of one of the crucial institutions of our democracy, the very process by which the ballot operates. But do I feel engaged in the political world? No. I feel I sit in an office all day with Ruby and Clare and listen to them gossip. I feel I bite down comments that would be inappropriate, and that would only cause them pain. I feel I go home at night to an empty flat, unless it is a church service evening. Some days I come in especially early, because I have nothing to do at home. On these occasions, I find myself talking to the cleaning-man, a polite young Eleupolisian who speaks the common tongue only poorly. He comes in before dawn, and scrubs and rinses the entire office with cleaning equipment he had to buy himself. But whenever he sees me he drops his eyes, fearful that I might have him deported. I can’t believe he earns enough to afford even the most meagre meal, and yet I suppose it is better for him in Senaar than in the chaos of Eleupolis. He is in his mid-twenties, I suppose: a thin, bearded young fellow. Yet I think of him as a boy, even though he is a man. It does matter to me, this awkward mental shuffling of definitions, boy, man, man-boy, boy-man. Sometimes, talking to this young boy, whose name I do not even know, I will watch him slowly emerge from his shell, his smile spreading to reveal his teeth, as his shattered language pieces together some or other comical observation. But then I will hear the door open downstairs, and Ruby’s voice cooing hello up the stairwell, and I will frown and wave the boy away with my hand. It would not do to be caught talking with an Eleupolisian. Ruby would be shocked. And, just before he turns to carry his bucket away, down the stairs, into his cupboard, I see his face fall back into its usual miserable lines. When I write about it now, I find a certain watery sense of sadness coming into me. But at the time, if I am honest, underlying it all is a sort of smouldering glee that I can raise him up only to crush him again.
The other day, the wife of a senior officer called by the Treasury. She had some spurious reason for calling, I suppose; preparing the ground for some official military requisition of votes. But in fact she came to display herself before the three of us. She knew Ruby from an Officers’ Wives club, and she had been in the area (she said) buying a new stole.
Her name was Pel. She was a bulky woman, with a creaky skeleton that groaned under the weight of her flesh as she moved. Her skin had a strange woody look to it, not grained exactly but with a salmon-coloured mottling that might have been her make-up. She was dressed in a bulging dark brown dress-suit that rustled like dead leaves when she gestured with her arms, or when she crossed her legs after sitting down. The stole was very fine: a carefully manufactured ersatz mink. ‘Go on,’ she urged, breathily. ‘Feel the hairs.’
We all of us felt the hairs.
She stood before us, and stretched out both arms like a crucifix, with the stole draped from left hand to right hand and round the back of her neck. ‘Isn’t it magnificent?’ she said. We all made the noises of agreement.
Then she sat down. Before the war, we might have offered her tea, but there
had been no tea for over a year.
‘It’s a beauty, a beauty,’ said Ruby. ‘But why have you bought it, Pel dear? Is it for some function, or simply to impress your lovely husband?’
‘Well,’ said Pel, confidential. ‘It’s not confirmed yet, but my husband tells me that there may well be a special little gathering next week. That the two of us may be in the same room as – whisper it to no one – the Leader!’ She sat back, with a ‘what-do-you-think-of-that’ expression on her face.
I watched Ruby. I could see her beaming, whilst beneath her face her muscles worked. To be at a social gathering with the Leader was an impressive prize within the economy of gossip. Ruby was searching for some way to upstage it, or at least to take some of the glory from her visit.
In fact, it was Clare who spoke. ‘Oh, I’m so jealous!’ she said, ingenuously. ‘I would love to meet our Leader.’
‘Rhoda has met our Leader,’ Ruby said, a little too quickly. ‘Haven’t you, dear? Met him more than once.’
Pel paused just long enough before turning to me. ‘Have you?’ she breathed. ‘Have you really?’
I almost sighed, but managed to hold it back. Sighed, because every time I had told this story to a group of women the narrative inevitably led from the glory of talking with the Leader to the dust and ashes of the subsequent events. Indeed, so obvious was the trajectory that my few friends at church took care not to bring it up in public. But Ruby’s way was narrow-sighted. At the moment, all she could see was the opportunity for impressing this fine-dressed woman. Later, as the conversation wound its way to the inevitable painfulness, she would gulp and blush and feel stupid. But it was the nature of her short-sightedness that she never learnt circumspection from it.