The Ice Age

by Margaret Drabble

  The ambassador puffed meditatively at his American cigarette. He returned to the subject of ill treatment. Anthony explained that he had been obliged to undergo certain rather uncomfortable forms of medical treatment that he was sure would be considered archaic in the West, except perhaps in some very run-down mental hospitals, but that he had survived them without lasting ill effects. The other unpleasant aspect had been the behavior of certain of his fellow prisoners, who had taken against him on account of his nationality; other inmates, however, had defended him, and now he found he rubbed along quite easily. There were two other fellows who spoke English, of a sort, some who spoke German, and Anthony himself was learning Wallacian. He found he had more time for study, now: he was so exhausted, in the first months, that he’d been unable to concentrate in the evenings, but now he’d adapted, and they’d put him on lighter duties since the ambassador had written about his bad heart. For which he was grateful to the ambassador.

  “Is there anything I can get you?” asked the ambassador. “I could try to get books sent through. Or writing paper.”

  Anthony hesitated, then laughed. “There are some books in the camp,” he said. “There are even some English books. There’s a detective story by John Dickson Carr, which I’ve read fourteen times. I know the plot rather well by now. And there’s a copy of the Pickwick Papers, which is rather more satisfying. And an annotated Boethius. I don’t know what to ask you for, really, there are so many things I’d like. I wouldn’t mind a book on Eastern European birds. There must be one, surely? We see quite a lot of birds. Passing through.” He paused, embarrassed. “But what I’d really like,” he said, “would be a Wallacian tampura. It’s a sort of guitar, you know? Do you think they’d let me have one? One of the other chaps has got one, he’s been teaching me to play. We sing, in the evenings.”

  “I’ll try,” said the ambassador. “I’d forgotten you were something of a musician.”

  They were both silent. The time was up. The guards rose to their feet. The ambassador reached out, shook Anthony’s hand as warmly as he could.

  “Tell them not to worry about me,” said Anthony. “As you can see, I’m all right. In fact,” said Anthony, “you could say that I’m making good use of my time. We should all be obliged to spend a few years of enforced contemplation. There’s something rather consoling about the lack of options. Freedom is a mixed blessing, don’t you sometimes think?”

  The ambassador smiled wanly. “I’ll send you the bird book,” he said. “And a guitar, if I can get hold of one. And I’ll try to visit again. I suppose it’s possible that they might let Mrs. Murray visit you, in the autumn. I’ll try to fix it.”

  “I wouldn’t bother Mrs. Murray, if I were you,” said Anthony. “I shouldn’t think she wants to visit Wallacia again.”

  And they shook hands again, and parted.

  The ambassador, driving back in the diplomatic car, down the winding road to the flat alluvial plains of the East, reflected that Keating had not asked him a single question about the outside world, about English politics, about world affairs, even about Wallacian affairs. He was not much surprised. Prisoners, like longterm hospital patients, lose interest in everything beyond the confines of their own institution. Keating’s state of mind seemed good, all things considered. He had been the victim of the most appalling bad luck, but he seemed to be taking it well. Not bearing grudges. What he would be like in two or three years’ time, who could say?

  The ambassador did not feel too worried about Anthony Keating. He had himself spent the last two years of the war in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, without a copy of the Pickwick Papers for company.

  Anthony Keating is writing a book, while he is in prison. He is not the first prisoner to spend his time in this way, and will not be the last. His book is about the nature of God and the possibility of religious faith, and he suspects that if he lives to finish it, and if ever he returns to England, and that if he is allowed to take it with him, nobody will want to publish it. He realizes that his memoirs of prison life would be of more general interest, but thinks it would be unwise to write them while still captive on Wallacian territory, and anyway, he is more interested himself in the problem of God. He is not too perturbed by lack of reference books: Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy has influenced him more than it should have done, perhaps, or would have done in other circumstances, but he cannot help that. He admires Boethius. He too was a prisoner, and Anthony is interested in the fact that he found consolation more in philosophy than in faith, in those last terrible years. Anthony’s book is not very well written because he is not a very good writer. But he writes for himself. He has lost interest in any market.

  He recognizes that his interest in God may be due solely to his peculiar situation, and the number of times he has escaped death, unusual for a Briton in the nineteen seventies. He cannot evade the idea that God has given him the chance to work out the first causes and the last causes, and that he must not reject it. Those long winter days alone at High Rook House were a warning and a preparation. He should have concentrated harder then, but was too distracted by the memories of the living, by the immediate future, by Alison, Jane, Molly, Tim, Len Wincobank, Maureen, Babs, Giles Peters. Also, he was not then sufficiently uncomfortable. Now he is often bitterly cold, usually hungry, and frequently afraid. Unpleasant things happen to his fellow inmates from time to time: they fall ill, disappear without warning, one or two try to escape into the inhospitable surrounding wastes, and are shot. The absence of drink, sex, warmth, and human affection has concentrated his mind wonderfully. If God did not appoint this trial for me, then how could it be that I should be asked to endure it, he asks. He cannot bring himself to believe in the random malice of the fates, those three gray sisters. He is determined, alone, to justify the ways of God to man.

  Religion was illegal in Wallacia, until the Tetov regime was overthrown, although now some forms of it are tolerated. Some sects are still proscribed. Several of his fellow prisoners are prisoners of conscience, clinging pertinaciously to obscure beliefs. There are two Latter Day Bogomils, one Jehovah’s Witness. Anthony does not get on with them at all well. He thinks they are crazy. He cannot see how anyone can voluntarily endure years in Plevesti camp for principles so unlikely. They worry him, however. For maybe he is equally mad. But he feels that if God exists, he would not care either way in what way men confessed him, what strange rites they undertook for him. The question is: is he there, or is he not? And when will he greet Anthony Keating?

  He takes time off, of course, for other matters. He has learned to play his guitar quite well, has learned some fine Balkan ballads, and is in demand for evening musical entertainments. He has made some friends, of sorts, and learned much of the sufferings of others, and of their courage. This is natural, in a prison. He thinks more of them now than he thinks of the shadows from the past. He has ceased to dwell on the empty private dream that he and Alison once shared, of peace and love.

  This book too, like Anthony’s, could have been about life in that camp. But one cannot enter the camp, with Anthony Keating. It is not for us, it is not, anyway, now, yet, for us. But we must acknowledge, we must pay our respects, within our limitations. Into some of Anthony’s experience, we can enter.

  We can appreciate, for instance, his interest in birds. The ambassador, true to his promise, sent him not only the guitar, but also a well-illustrated bird book. Anthony takes pleasure in observing, identifying. They are free, they fly in and out freely, unalarmed by the sight of human imprisonment. He resents them less than those in Scratby resented the soaring jets of the RAF. The birds are innocent slight spirits.

  Toward the end of his second year, as Anthony is sitting in a half hour’s break from sawing wood, he sees a rare bird, a wonder, a bird that, as he knows from his book, rarely visits below the snow line, rarely visits the haunts of men, a secret beauty. It is a tree creeper. It perches, for a while, as Anthony watches, on the barbed wire of the high fence. It sits
, and waits, then off it flies, its rounded little wings a brilliant red, beautiful, rare, dipping and leaping up, fluttering like a butterfly, for him alone. Off it will go, back to its rocky crevasses, up, high up in the mountains. But it has visited him. And it is alive. His heart rises. Perhaps it will come again. It is, he thinks, a messenger from God, an angel, a promise. I think these things because I am high on suffering, he tells himself, but nevertheless his heart rises, he experiences hope. He experiences joy. The bird will fly off, fluttering away its tiny life. There, we leave Anthony.

  Alison there is no leaving. Alison can neither live nor die. Alison has Molly. Her life is beyond imagining. It will not be imagined. Britain will recover, but not Alison Murray.

  About the Author

  MARGARET DRABBLE is the author of The Sea Lady, The Seven Sisters, The Peppered Moth, and The Needle’s Eye, among other novels. For her contributions to contemporary English literature, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008.