by Adam Roberts
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I have.’
‘What was he like?’ Pel asked. ‘I saw him speak once, addressing a whole crowd. I thought then he had real presence.’
For a moment I allowed myself to hope that Pel’s reminiscences would drown out my own need to retell the story. But she halted with a stutter on the last word that was almost a cough. ‘But how did you meet him? Why? Was it Treasury business?’
‘No. It was before I worked in the Treasury.’
‘She had private audiences with him,’ said Ruby.
‘Really?’
I paused, but then went through with it. ‘It was before the War,’ I said. ‘It was about liaising with the enemy. With Als, and the Leader asked me to represent my people as a diplomatic officer.’ There was a silence at this. I could see Pel putting two and two together.
‘That was you?’ she said, her eyes bulging with astonishment. ‘You were the person who went to Als? Well, I had no idea.’ I thought that was a stupid thing to say, since she had only met me for the first time a few minutes earlier. But I am too harsh. It was one of the things people say. I might almost have been able to let the whole story slide past, to turn it back to her with some question about her stole, if she hadn’t added, ‘But weren’t you captured? I heard you were tortured.’ The last word, tortured, came out in a half-stifled breathy tone, as if propriety had at last caught up with the speaker. There was a sudden chill in the room. I felt an appalling desire to outrage this woman, all these women. I wanted her complacent expression of vague pity transformed into bewilderment, as if I could, with a few words, take this stranger and dip her in the pool of pain so that she needn’t take it all so lightly. As if this is (I felt like saying) a matter for conversation with a near stranger! But there was a bar that came down internally, and all the blackness and decay, all the bulging evil of it, was blocked back. It had no name, it was only ‘it’.
After ‘it’ had happened, after I had come back from Als, I had been debriefed. Several military officers had promised me that I would undergo this process, as they brought me coffee. Their eyes were wide, their mouths a little open, at the torn shirt I was still huddling about my body; and at the bruises. They brought me coffee, and brought me an army-issue chemise that was too large and too scratchy for comfort, but I wore it anyway. And, of course, I knew what ‘debriefing’ was; I was not so clueless. But in my state, which was a strange one, rigid but liable to shatter, I could not hear the word right. I had been brought up to use the word briefs to refer to undergarments, the sort of word that paid a delicate homage to the fact that if such things had to be mentioned at all, it ought to happen and pass quickly. As I sat there, in a tiny military room, holding the huge mug of coffee with both my hands folded around it, my mind vividly pictured my being de-briefed, being violently undressed, and I began to shudder. Another part of my mind was trying to be stern, telling me don’t be ridiculous Rhoda, you are being ridiculous and saying these are your people, they will help you. But in all my time in that army installation, the three days before I was released to my home again in the city, I could only control the shuddering, and the urge to scream out, by actively freezing myself inside. I think, and I am not given to hyperbole, that at no other time in my life have I had to be so strong.
At the debriefing, when it happened, I was quizzed about this and that. Mostly they wanted to know about the capacity of the Alsists to make war (they called them, throughout, ‘the anarchists’; it was only later that the habit was formed of calling them ‘the enemy’). But there was an awkward five minutes when they asked me to go through the events of the drive south. They had brought in my old ripped shirt and laid it on the table in front of me, almost as if it were a witness against me, and I fixed my gaze upon it so that I wouldn’t have to look at the male faces. And I filled my ears with my internal voice; they are trying to help you, these are your people, and I tried to work through the story. The most important thing, I felt, was that I not cry. It seemed the most crucial thing in the world that I not cry. When I came to the crux of the matter, though, I faltered. The words would not come. One of the men there asked, in a voice hushed with what he presumably thought was respect, but which sounded in my ears too much like horror, ‘Were you . . . interfered with?’ That, then, became the expression that captured the event. And because it was so evasive a phrase, it somehow served its purpose. At all the other occasions afterwards when I was asked, I used it: I was interfered with. But that was a word, a polysyllabic bar in itself, that only blocked out the inner turmoil all the more completely. And behind the bar there was a sense of swelling, a growing.
In the office that day, I felt a demoniacal urge to scream at this woman, to use the words I had always been too inhibited to use (even here, in this document). But the urge passed. A part of me knew, you see, that the momentary release would have left a space into which a tempest of guilt and remorse would have swirled. And so I said nothing, only dropped my eyes a little.
Pel said, ‘How terrible!’ And then again, ‘How awful.’
Ruby scowled. I realised then that she felt cheated, as if the credit that would otherwise have reflected on her for having a friend and workmate who had actually met the Leader had been poisoned. It didn’t matter that it had been that Alsist man who had done the poisoning; it was somehow, in that context, my fault. I suppose, ideally, Ruby would have wanted a friend who had simply met the Leader, without any of the subsequent unsavoury stuff. But because of who I was, of what happened to me, Ruby was trapped in a circumstance where her spontaneous glowing of pride was always going to be polluted, and polluted by something that we, women together, could not even name.
To try and rescue something of Ruby’s credit, then (and certainly not because I felt like speaking further, for I would rather have said nothing) I tried to lift the mood. ‘I only met him twice,’ I said. ‘And once more when there were some other people present, but only twice for personal meetings. He was always extremely courteous.’
Of course, as I said the word, I realised how feeble it was. It was not that it did not describe the Leader, because that was exactly how he was: courteous, with all its connotations of external politeness and chivalry, and a deeper sense of distance, of a man who had no connection with women and was not interested in cultivating one. But the word was hopeless and inadequate to Ruby and Pel’s expectations of a description of the Leader. They wanted more.
‘So, what was he like?’ Pel urged.
I almost gave up, because I really didn’t have the energy to go on with it. But the consequences would have been more unpleasant, so I added, ‘He’s a great man. You can really feel it when you’re with him. You have an almost electric sense of a people’s destiny resting on him. But he has such vigour, it’s a wonder.’ Or I said something like this, which I have said any number of times at gatherings of women, or at parties or whatever.
And Pel breathed, her anxiety at my unmentionable suffering, anxiety that it might intrude its ugly self into the conversation, finally relieved. ‘I always said,’ she said. ‘I always said that he had a real presence.’
There have been several dreams about the drowned boy-man. In some of them it is I who do the drowning, stuffing a shirt into his mouth so that he chokes and gags. I wake up from these dreams feeling dreadful, sweating and asthmatic, gasping for breath myself. I go through a litany of panics in my head (has the window broken, am I choking on chlorine? Is the house burning?) before I am able to settle myself. But the dreams keep coming back. My only remedy, I think, is prayer. Maybe it is only inside a church that I can step away from the world of men, the world of war, and speak a bubble of peace that can wrap me around. It is a stifling thing, war: it is a society drowning.
But the irony, I suppose, is that even my religion has changed. The worship of everybody else seems disjointed and wrongheaded to me nowadays, and increasingly I go to the church at odd times in the day, slipping out of the office to avoid the crowds.
It would
be too vigorous a locution to say I had a realisation; but perhaps, in a more passive voice, I could say there has come a realisation; it has crept over me in the night. I used to think my vision of God was that of my people, my Leader. But the war has given me the occasion to revise this. I realise that for the enemy, God is nothing but a version of their own egos, a monstrous shadow of desire and appetite sitting on the throne. And of course, as against such blasphemy our cause is just. But the realisation has dawned on me, latterly, that God for the people of Senaar is something collective, like the will that glues together the action of thousands; like the patterns of light cast on a wall, or the scurrying of silver-skinned fish, in the sunlit waters, moving and turning as a single organism. Our Leader sees this pattern in himself, and God is our Leader in another place. God is that into which we all are absorbed. But the longer the war has gone on, the more that has happened to me, the less I think of God in these terms. The point of God, if I can say so without overreaching my phrase, is not to dissolve in Him. He is what keeps the others out, he is the membrane that defines me as myself and not as some helpless watery nothing. And the elaborate husbanding of the thing inside me, the constant vigilance, will find its point in God. The thing that it is an unending effort of will not to vomit out, the thing stuck inside me, is a great jewel, the bevelled edges painful, sometimes, against my soft internal organs. But a jewel of great price. I see myself clutching my Soul to myself, a case containing an unimaginable treasure, a thing that others would steal. And this guarding of the precious thing is the point: to be able to arrive, and to present the Father with this gift.