The Leto Bundle

by Marina Warner

  Then the explosion happened again, and again, and in the smoke and the flames she lost sight of her daughter and fell on to the hard, hot road.

  When she moved again, which seemed aeons later, in an underwater world where all was slowed and clogged, she found the little girl shivering, lying in the road naked, with her hands fluttering helplessly over her raw flesh. She wasn’t screaming any more, she wasn’t able to speak, and her eyes were rolled up in her head; nobody could hold her, touch her, cover her. Flying metal had pierced Phoebe’s flesh; her face, hands, legs, torso were spattered with welts; her back was flayed. She looked like a rabbit skinned by a hunter to spit on a fire.

  But in this butchered body, her eyes were moving, and so was her mouth: she was alive, her face said so. And so was Phoebus, clinging now in terror to his mother’s legs. They’d both been hit by the bursts of shrapnel, but their wounds were slight, by contrast to Phoebe’s. In the smoke and the dust, Leto began whirling, looking for help, looking for Teal. So many were spattered with the burning metal, stumbling, fallen, and so many were lying motionless, bleeding heaps on the road.

  Phoebe was gibbering, shaking as she lay on the road to a kind of hoo-hoo-hoo sound like a lost bird; there was no help to hand, not for a while, not until the paramedics appeared in a freshly marked Peace Front ambulance with the journalists behind them in a dented Mercedes. The team wrapped Phoebe in a shiny foil pupa and laid her on a stretcher in the shade.

  Many bodies sprawled around them. They looked like children playing ‘Ring-a-ring-o’-roses, we all fall down’, Leto thought, incongruously. Then Leto, as she hunted through the victims, came upon Teal’s whistle, which lay blackened and twisted in the ashes.

  Later, when she knew something more about the siege conditions and the attackers’ weapons, she learned that the victims lying around her on that bombed approach to Tirzah were spread with a fiery glue that had been packed in the casings. Phoebe’s skin was burned off her body as if by acid coating an etching plate, biting the print of its passage everywhere it met naked skin. Where this bubbling glue came into contact with clothes, they vaporised instantly, so that the metal scraps and slivers of the nerve agent’s shell could bury themselves deeper into the victim’s flesh.

  Leto clutched Phoebus tight; she did not wail, she needed to keep controlled and alert for Phoebe’s sake, and for his, too. But at that moment, she would have walked into the fire of her own accord in order to cease to be, in order for the abyss into which Teal had fallen to close over her head too.

  2

  In the Basement of the Hospital

  For more than two years before the time when she and the children first walked into the war, the ordinary processes of Tirzahner livelihood had been disrupted, and with the disruption had begun the urban migration: cowherds and milkmaids abandoned their pastures in the hills and descended into the town bringing with them terrified reports of rapine and pillage. The besiegers included young soldiers – seventeen, eighteen years old – who jeered at their captives, under encouragement from their leaders, as they stripped and raped their women in front of their eyes: this was men’s way of talking to one another, trading insults. The bodies of wives, daughters, sweethearts, mothers, served as communal notice boards: nail your message here, sign here, or if you can’t sign, make your mark! Then, during the five-year-long destruction of the city, the fugitives who had run to safety inside its walls assembled shanties in the shadow of new international department buildings and company headquarters from the crates and containers in which supplies were flown in to service the various denominational groups who were working in Tirzah alongside the clumsy, relentlessly churning turbine of the siege: peace-keepers, press corps, TV crews, medical observers, every kind of volunteer, aid workers, travel operators, and, naturally, the black marketeers with their drums of bitter coffee and wormwood dust for tea, and their medical supplies with the expiry dates obliterated, defaced and altered.

  The soldiers who were defending were encamped outside, in trenches and barricades of junk; but for the inhabitants, their attackers remained faceless, anonymous, an amorphous and ever-present menace that took the form of fire and flame and bursts of thunder: riders of the apocalypse, with hooves bagged in felt so that they were upon you before you knew it, the bomb working its way with its victims before the sound of its explosion shattered the corpses’ eardrums.

  Leto survived with the twins: part of the broken city’s jetsam, they worked to salvage anything that lay to hand and could be turned to use. The men who gave her work now and then would pick her out of the crowd that gathered at the back doors of businesses of one kind and another in the ruins – she offered herself for cleaning, principally. At the end of the day, when they’d assess the women’s work, they’d call her out, referring to her as ‘Ella’ – simply ‘her’ or ‘that woman’. She did not fight against this new name: ‘Leto’ was outlandish to the locals, and her life in Tirzah felt so cut off from the former sense she had of herself before, that she no longer owned the woman she had been.

  The burning had left Phoebe’s skin peculiar as developing paper. When she began to heal, her new, taut, pink sheath of a body took on an ethereal shine, so that she almost seemed transparent, like one of those marine organisms that float in the currents or like leucocytes in the bloodstream. Her flesh, uncovered, gave off an eerie luminosity, otherworldly in its lambency, but also morbid. The involutions of her innards and the light flutter of her heart and lungs shadowed this odd translucency, reminders of vitality, and with it, of incipient mortality; over them the twisting ropes of scars formed a raised lattice. The glue’s chill flames had dematerialised her, so that she seemed all made of the eerie twilight of the new moon, mottled and crisscrossed by the branches of battered, keloid tissue that caused her torment.

  What Phoebe needed as she began to grow, what her mother began to pilfer from the Hotel Metropole where she cleaned and from the clients she serviced there, were oils, foundation creams, unguents, soft lathering liquid soaps, anything that could ease Phoebe’s tight painful skin and make it supple over her developing bones.

  Every morning, her mother would empty the phial of creams she had squeezed out (it was very important that she took so little it could not be noticed) and massage Phoebe’s arms and throat and back; then, with the foundation cream, she’d smooth over the angriest part of the scars. In this way she tried to soothe the vitreous, stretched flesh that had become her tiny daughter’s burden. But there was a salve she knew she wanted; made of a rare spider’s web, it was reported to have legendary healing properties that made it change hands on the black market in medicines at the price of far more obvious treasures. The wives of the government leaders and the generals used it to rejuvenate their complexions; doctors rarely got their hands on it, even when they were dealing with the bombings’ worst casualties. Distributors were hoarding it, against even worse times; or so it was rumoured. The wonder of it flickered in the back of her memory, reminding her of a whispered promise she could now barely catch. The struggles of the present day were wiping Leto’s mind, moulding Ella to their necessities.

  The small family took lodgings in the shantytown huddled on the riverbank in Tirzah; and Ella first worked by day in the hospital as a cleaner, which she was lucky to get through one of the staff she’d met when Phoebe was a patient there. By night she did other things, in the rat runs between the shelters. Then she moved to the Metropole, where the clients offered richer pickings for her needs and the twins’. As Ella, one of the cleaning staff, she took the pair with her every morning, leaving them in the laundry store while she worked.

  Weeks went by in the broken city, the weeks turned to months and then into years; the remaining inhabitants of Tirzah could not rouse themselves from the torpor that war had inflicted on them, the brand that despair burns on the minds of its victims. But Ella conceived a raging will to pull her son out of this hellpit, he who had miraculously survived almost unscathed and now did not bear a trace of
that day on the road to Tirzah. She didn’t want him to suffer any longer the unrelenting neediness of their struggle to survive. Observing the foreign clientèle in the Metropole, with their ready money, their expensive toiletries, their books, their fine, warm clothes, she began to form a plan. She also witnessed a succession of worried couples from Enoch who lingered listlessly for weeks in the stricken hotel, then suddenly left, with a child in their arms, emitting a flurry of joyful cries, bundling themselves off behind enemy lines (spreading more cash around) to the occupied airport. Phoebus was the sunnier child, the most winning, irresistible, in fact; he wasn’t damaged like his sister; he would be accepted somewhere where he’d have a better future. There, he would thrive.

  She would abandon him. Then, later, she and Phoebe would rejoin him, she told herself. Her determination had brought them this far already; she was determined this wouldn’t be a final parting.

  So Phoebe was told her brother was leaving, for a while, to be safe somewhere else. For his part, he looked at his mother pensively; but did not cling. She felt they had an understanding: this remedy was a temporary measure.

  ‘You won’t be caught up in the fighting when – if – it breaks out again,’ she whispered into his warm head, stroking the soft skin of his left ear where the fold still gave him an impish look. ‘You’ll have a better chance, there.’ She wasn’t abandoning him to strangers; she was lending him to . . . stewards, guardians, people who would teach him, feed him, raise him better than she could. All over the world parents sent their children away to be educated; it was the custom of the wealthier classes, in fact. Nor would the separation from her Phoebus last for ever.

  When the time came and Phoebus left, she told herself over and over again that she had done well, for his sake, and for his sister’s.

  Another year went by after that day and the siege dragged on. Ella herself could find no way to leave; being outsiders already, her kind couldn’t count on the generosity of the plundered and scorched countryside, not when scarcity stripped men and women to the teeth, to the bone. She would have liked to find a far, far away place to hide, to bury Phoebe from men’s eyes, but who would take an odd, mutilated girl with them on this exodus? Nobody could be trusted, even in better times.

  Phoebe would not be parted from her mother, anyway: ‘I can do things with you,’ she pleaded. It was true; she liked being the only one to command her attention; it consoled her for the physical absence of her brother. She would help tidy away the linen by climbing up on the shelves, and sort the laundry and start soaking it in the basins – they had to save water – when Ella left her there to perform her unnamed, extra duties in the hotel.

  There were some men who liked – well – Ella wasn’t going to put it into words. ‘It can’t come to that,’ thought Ella. But it might. The little girl was growing up.

  Another year passed, their third in Tirzah: Phoebe was nearly six.

  ‘Come here,’ she pulled her daughter to her, roughly. ‘Let me tell you something. First of all you don’t look anything like your age, and that’s a protection you need, in this kind of city. Hold on to it as long as you can. It’s the only advantage of . . . the damage that’s been done to you. I do this job because there isn’t any other way. Your brother’s safe, far away. We’re going to find a way to make you safe, too. We’ll follow him, we’ll find him. Everything will be better.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Phoebe. ‘I’d like that.’ She paused, then asked, ‘Will he be with Teal?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  When the end came, just before the sixth winter of the siege, a winter that would have finished off the remaining survivors, foreign helicopters flew in over the last blazing barrage from the guns in the encircling hills, over the line of tanks trundling down the main road from the north towards the charred and splintered city, and landed on the roofs of the large nations’ embassies; they lifted out a few favoured, counted-on, wealthy locals, all of their own nationals among the personnel, and some members of the foreign press. Cars loaded with the possessions of the besieged started to head for the nearest border, but many ground to a standstill well short of it, as the petrol ran out even for the rich who’d made a killing during the long siege from drugs and medicine and brothels and other necessities, while several other vehicles hit the snub noses of the many mines, spread-eagling their passengers and their treasures on the cratered tarmac. Children, whose eyes were quicker at detecting the weapons’ shallow mounds, were sent in by the attacking army to glean the remains.

  With the victory of the enemy, and the consequent promised pacification of the country, those who had been trapped in Tirzah for three long years now tried to thread their way back to their villages again; there were some old men in this shuffling column, some boy children under six, but for the most part women made up the ragged numbers, women with infants and toddlers in their arms, on their backs, sometimes wheeling their own broken, frail mothers in pushchairs before them where they clutched bursting bags of their remaining possessions on their laps. When an old woman collapsed on the march, they tried to tie her corpse to their meagre heap of belongings, and another one took her place in the last of the wheeled vehicles, be it a child’s pram or a shopping cart. But miles into the hills, with everything burning and smoking around and not a scrap to eat or a well that wasn’t choked with putrefying carcasses or poisoned by explosives, these feather-light bodies were left on the side of the road with a quick, frightened prayer. The weeping was dry-eyed; a kind of howl that started in the pit of the stomach and rose to the head and hardly needed the throat; a possession by sorrow; loss made palpable, a chemical miasma seeping through the gut, the brain, the eyes. No one wept the way women weep in ordinary times; they had too little water for splashy, rheumy tears.

  When the victorious soldiers reached the hub of the city, the Square of the Swallows, where an obelisk of Egyptian rose granite stood, imported from an historic victory of Tirzah’s conquerors a long time ago, and more recently inscribed with a patriotic salvo written by the national romantic encomiast on a brass plaque on its pedestal, they swarmed off their daubed, webbed brown tanks like woodlice freed from under a rock, aimless and panicky, their officers kicking over the stone to set them loose and standing back as they rushed in fours, in threes, in pairs, shouting, embracing, bayoneting this obstacle and clubbing that, kicking and cuffing, to force the event to feel like a triumph to them, to make their mark, to tell on history and sever the old times from the new ones. They were the liberators from oppression, the bringers of light and plenty; they were the coming men. They stamped through the municipal palaces, wrecked the headquarters of this and that organ of state, where the cabinets voided their contents on to grey carpets like the young infantrymen who vomited after combat and performing the rape and mayhem that pleased their officers. They slewed the books in the national library this way and that, grinding the swollen and stuck together pages into the glittering needles of the glass dome that had received a direct hit early on from the big guns that ringed Tirzah. What the snowmelt of last winter, the rains and the mud had begun to destroy, was finally shredded by the cullet fallen from every shattered window. The victors did not loot the books, but swept on, down the main street to the smart hotels (including the Metropole), where they stove in the doors of bedrooms and ransacked the bars, though the cupboards were bare and had been for a while (a handful of intrepid black marketeers were well concealed, waiting to choose their moment). The soldiers made their billets in abandoned dwellings or, if they unearthed some lingering occupants, too ill to flee, they threw them out, and still shouting and kicking, triumphantly took possession of their home. They smashed it if it was humble; they seized it if it was comfortable. The housing in the centre of the city was splintered and blackened and squalid and cramped by comparison to the residential suburbs, but the water had been cut off by the shelling many months before and the long low houses with shaded gardens that had once been luxuriously furnished had been plundered for
firewood to keep the besieged alive during the winters.

  The batteries on the hills stopped firing, and it felt, in the unaccustomed silence in the city, as if Tirzah were now truly isolated, that there existed nothing beyond its borders except shadows, the flimsy, drained shadows of a past that was being blotted out by the huge, hulking, enfleshed figure of the present time, who had arrived in his cleated boots with a clatter and a loud cheer to block out any lingering memories and thoughts. The artillery ringing the city had guaranteed, it turned out, that the stalker from history’s long nightmare remained on the other side of no-man’s land; now, after more than five years’ fighting, he had come to his new home. When the column of the fugitives passed out of sight, it seemed they had all fallen over the edge of the world into a bog of primal slime, which swallowed them up.

  Here and there the conqueror was greeted with a sweaty, ingratiating invitation to a cellar, where something was hoarded, or to a table where some pepper sausage and hard dry bread was laid out like the petrified food of the dead in an old tomb. Some of the troops struck poses for one another, brandishing their guns at the foot of the obelisk in the Square of the Swallows, as if they were taking a memorial photograph. But as the only film in the country had long belonged exclusively to the press corps, who grimly guarded it, it, too, had become a rare and expensive treasure – and now the press corps were all gone, the last one dangling from the helicopter’s rope like a circus performer as it scissored straight up into the streaked sky.