Land Of The Headless (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  She laughed at this. With her laugh it was as if the whole world levered about into sunlight on the axis of her joy. Many things which had been impossible became possible. Is there a better definition of the miraculous?

  I led her back through the city and to our house, and it did not take much to convince the women in the top room to accept her, provided only I pay her rent until she found work of her own. Since she was hungry I took her to a certain café, a place that tolerated headless customers (although in a separate room from others) and bought her some supper. We talked.

  Simply talking to her opened up the universe of possibilities. I was continually refreshed by the lack of rancour in her voice; after everything that had happened to her, and her own blamelessness, and her terrible sufferings, after rape and false accusation and decapitation, she was still not moved to bitterness. On reflection, and as I know her now, this is not a surprise. This is consonant with her nature. She has a good soul. I recognised it from the first. It was why I had fallen in love with her. It was why my love was refreshed by meeting her again.

  I wanted to ask her about the walk to Cainon, about the assault, but I could not find the words in which to do this. In point of fact I wanted her to confirm that it had indeed been Mark Pol who assaulted her. I didn’t doubt that he was the culprit, but I wanted to hear her tell me so herself. For her doing this would add the victim’s justice to my vow for revenge. But you can understand: it is not an easy subject to introduce into conversation.

  She went back to the house shortly after that to sleep. I, on the other hand, hurried to my place of work. I was several hours late and was not surprised when the owner fired me there and then, neither allowing me back into his establishment, nor paying me the money he owed me for the half-month worked. But this did nothing to dampen my spirits. I had chanced upon the woman I loved. The All’God, or Fate, or Nature, or Providence - whatever the force, a force for good - was to permit me to make amends for what I had failed to do years before.

  I found another job within the week, working in a fat-rendering facility. This was day work, which suited me better, as it moved the routine of my day into synchrony with the routine of Siuzan’s day. She took unpaid work at a church, cleaning and sometimes even giving lectures there to pious headed on the experiences of the headless. The lack of money mattered little; I was happy to pay her rent and her pharmocopy bills, and she accepted my charity with an ingenuousness that only made me love her more. This mixture of child and adult is the most potent of mixes for the loving heart.

  We talked. We grew accustomed to one another. This, of course, is the point of the story I am telling you.

  Four

  Love, just as it involves the coming together of two individuals, also involves the combination of two emotions inside each of those individuals. People may mistake either of these two feelings for love, even though each may be severed from the other - and, indeed, previously in my life, I myself had made exactly this mistake. But when actual love comes to a person it grants a commanding perspective upon all former heart trills and self-illusions. You see the past infatuations as trivial things, howsoever absorbing they may have been at the time. You see the actual love as something new.

  Actual love came now, as I came to know Siuzan Delage a second time.

  This is the nature of the two components of love: one is the recognition of something better, higher, something purer, more, something to which the soul feels a tug upwards, more beautiful, more valuable, more talented or essential, and this is the severed half-element of love that I had mostly experienced before in my life. When I had looked on women before, I had gazed much as does the reptile in amongst the leaf-litter who turns his swivelling eye upon a butterfly. This had been my whole former life, I think; living as that cached-away reptile. But this ideal, alone, is not enough.

  The second element is the recognition of something accessible, something reachable and graspable in the other. Do not be shocked in what I say, for the sensual implications of my words, though vulgar, are a necessary part of my meaning. This second thing is something animal as well as spiritual. In saying this I do not mean that the love-object must embody base or lewd desires, and indeed those who know only this kind of love condemn themselves to a living banality corroded by the dull repetitions of hedonism. But in the connection that draws lovers together, in (for instance) the begetting of children, or the creation of that unique intimacy between two souls that is the emotion most like new life, this element has its essential part. To love only what one cannot possess; or to love only what one can possess because one can possess it - neither serves alone. Neither is love. It is only together that they can create true togetherness.

  It might be truer to say that I did not dare love Siuzan Delage when I first knew her, and this despite the fact that I dreamed of her, that I yearned for her. She was too greatly removed from me. But now that she had been reduced she was beneath the notice of all those virtuous headed men. Through no fault that was hers she had become one with me, with my kind. But since my kind were sinners, and since all men were sinners, all men were my kind.

  It enabled love. Habit, which determines most of life, is precisely the thing dissolved by love. I will explain what I mean by this: during those long months in the cell on Athena, in the company of my imprisoned comrades, with all the neck valves clicking and tocking in tumbling rhythms, habit was the way this sound ceased to exist for us after only a few hours. Long drawn-out months of this brittle percussion, the putting-together of intricate patterns of noise, sound-waves that registered on my aural prostheses, data that was transmitted and processed in my ordinator, somehow there in my mind, and yet wholly unnoticed. This stands, for me, as the type of all habit. What is so remarkable about living with that noise for nearly a year without noticing it is that there was nothing else in that cell to notice; no other distractions or occupations of the mind. But the mere habit of that stimulus deadened it nevertheless.

  To catch a glimpse of her from behind, the converging lines of her back, in our house, as she stepped from the lowest cracked stair onto the hall floor was enough to balloon my heart with happiness.

  We spent almost every evening together, eating and talking.

  ‘I will confess something to you,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When first I met you, me newly beheaded and you still beautiful in face and form - when I first knew you, you were so far removed from me, so pure and fair, I almost hated myself.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense!’

  ‘Say, rather then, that it made me sink within myself in wretched comparison.’

  ‘Foolish!’ she laughed. ‘To cast your own psychological weakness out onto me! To make me a tool in your self-dislike! I didn’t feel that way about you when we first met.’

  ‘But all I’m saying is - that I loved you from the very first.’

  ‘You’re saying that your love demeaned you!’ She laughed again.

  ‘Not demeaned, exactly,’ I said. ‘But it certainly brought me a sharp awareness of my own unworth.’

  ‘Worth?’ she challenged. ‘And who is worthy, in the eyes of the All’God ? Love comes from Him, as rivers from their source, and so it thrives on the inequality between object and object, for without this gradient love can’t flow at all. I would go further. I might say,’ she went on, ‘that it is not possible for equals to love. There must be this disproportion to generate love. And, even more than this, the greatest love comes when both parties consider themselves far below the other, just as we are with the All’God.’

  It saddened me to hear her say this, because it was inconceivable to me that she could ever have considered herself far below me. But then I thought to myself that perhaps her shame and beheading had lowered herself in her own perceptions, and I derived some small comfort from this. Does that seem a shocking observation to you? Love can create that level of desperation in a man’s heart. But then she said:

  ‘When first I met you - you, old
er than I, a noted poet, a man enduring sufferings nobly. How could I not feel lower than you?’

  ‘Impossible!’

  ‘Impossible!’ she said, as if in agreement.

  Weeks came and went. The logic of my days was now shaped about the morning talk with Siuzan before I walked into the city to my work; and about our evening meals together. The rest of the day and all of the night were grey by comparison.

  ‘What is this charm you wear about your neck?’ she asked me one day.

  I held up the bit of blue plastic. ‘Do you not recognise it?’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘Is it some memento of your army days? You never talk about the army.’

  ‘The army?’ I was surprised. ‘Do you wish to hear of it?’

  ‘I don’t wish you to keep yourself hidden from me.’

  ‘But the army is hidden in plain view. You know what the army is. It is an organisation devoted to killing. Should I introduce such a subject into our conversation?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Maybe you’re right.’

  ‘I’m not the only one’, I said, ‘who holds back from talking about certain things. You do not talk—’ But she anticipated what I was going to say.

  ‘I know what it is to which you are referring. But I can’t talk about that. Can’t.’ She was silent for a moment, and I pondered how much pain and injustice was folded into the single syllable, that: all the walking from Doué to Cainon, the assault itself, the walking on through the desert afterwards in company with her attacker, unable even to speak aloud about what had happened. Of course I respected her desire to stay silent. Nevertheless, there was so much I wanted to know about that time. Had she stumbled on in a sort of shock, keeping company with her rapist because she could think of nothing better, until the chemist had examined her and handed her to the police? Or had she purposefully held her tongue, for fear that Mark Pol would attack her again? And what had it felt like, to be taken by the police and treated not as victim but as criminal? I wanted Siuzan to feel that she could tell me the whole of her story. But I was ready to wait. I understood, I told myself, why she could not yet talk about that.

  Siuzan finally found remunerative work in an ammonium facility, not far from my own workplace. We fell into a routine of meeting for breakfast in the pre-dawn every day, and then walking towards our work places together.

  Once, resting briefly during this morning journey, I remarked to Siuzan that she had changed since I had first met her. ‘How do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t mean change for the worse,’ I said.

  ‘A change in character?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She was silent for a moment. ‘A change,’ she asked, almost sadly, ‘in soul?’

  ‘Can one change but not the other?’

  ‘To go through an experience such as mine,’ she said. ‘To go through an experience like ours - how can it not change one’s soul? To lose a head! It marks you.’ After a moment she asked: ‘So, how am I different? I mean, how exactly?’

  ‘Oh, you are not fundamentally different,’ I said. ‘And so, therefore, perhaps it is true that the soul can’t be scratched or scuffed by the collisions of life, as you say. But when I first knew you, your faith was a—’ I paused, unsure of the word.

  ‘More intensely experienced?’ she suggested.

  ‘A more enthusiastic faith, perhaps. I cannot speak as to the intensity of it - for you, I mean.’

  ‘My faith is unshaken,’ she said shortly. ‘It is not my sufferings that have altered my faith.’

  ‘But something has altered it?’

  ‘You,’ she said simply.

  She stood up and walked away from me. It was very early in the morning. We had been sitting on the lip of one of the city’s fountains, a shin-high oval wall enclosing a marble structure like a marble stove from which a fine stream of water flew up and misted down. The pallid light of the pre-dawn was in the sky and upon the city but, as yet, inert, the potential of day rather than day itself. The water spouting in a cloud from the heart of the fountain, which sparkled and shuffled rainbows in its mist in the daytime sunlight, was as opaque as milk. The air was cool but contained within itself the promise of the day’s heat yet to come.

  I did not follow her when she walked away. I did not wish to possess her, or control her actions. I loved her enough to allow her to roam and stride. Of course, I watched as she walked in a wide arc fully about the fountain. And eventually she came back and sat down beside me. What she spoke next had the flavour of a speech she had prepared, and practised as she walked about the fountain, but it had the qualities of truth and directness for all that.

  ‘A thing I had not anticipated about love,’ she said, ‘is that without daring it cannot come at all. I think this is why I am interested in your time as a soldier, although you don’t like to talk about it, I know - but a soldier makes daring his job! His career! And I would love to learn that skill. You see, before I met you I believed that all my love should be reserved for the All’God. It seemed so tiny a gift for Him, after the giant gifts he had given me: life, light, the prospect of heaven. I resolved that I must put all my effort into loving the All’God. Surely it was a trivial devotion to pour only some of my cup of water back into the ocean! A spoonful seemed so inadequate when measured against the entirety of the sea, and so the whole cup must be emptied, and shaken to unloose the last droplets.’ She stopped for a while, and then went on: ‘Of course the cupful is, in a way, just as inadequate a gesture as the spoonful, when measured against an ocean which is - to speak simply, and literally - infinite. But it was the most I could do. I felt I should do the most I could.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  ‘And this is what has changed,’ she said. ‘I am not putting it very well. I knew that I could only offer a very little, a cupful, or even a spoonful. But I have come to see that when we are talking of the infinite, as we are when we talk of love, a little is enough. Or to put it another way, when we are talking of the infinite a little is everything. For the All’God, I believe now, the little is more than the lot.’

  She stopped at this point and angled her torso away, so that I thought she had confused herself and I said jauntily, ‘You speak like a mystic!’

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Falling in love with you has needed daring on my part, and now that I have taken that risk I understand love better. There are truths that can only be known by bravery. This, I think, is the change in me you recognise. Loving the All’God is an experience of . . .’ And here, for the first time, she faltered, searching for the correct word. I waited patiently.

  ‘An experience,’ she said, finally, ‘of homecoming.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I knew exactly what she meant.

  A bird, perhaps a thrush, alighted on the stone lip of the fountain several yards along. Its wings rattled like brittle silk and then folded so quickly away it looked like a conjurer’s trick. The bird dipped forward and drank from the water, and rocked back on its pink legs. Its plumage was dark brown and freckled with yellow. It watched us out of the side of its tiny lightbulb-shaped head. Then it bounced up with a whipcracking flutter and flew away into the air. The state of my mind, then, in that place, was as if there was some brief communion between myself and the bird. The whole of the bright sky was my home. I felt that the flow and chatter of the fountain was the pulse of my own blood.

  ‘To understand faith as more than simply ritual and practice is to experience this profound recognition,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s to feel the - return. But to love somebody else . . . that is to leave home. And that requires a specific courage that loving the All’God does not. For how can you leave somewhere to find the All’God when He is everywhere? My love for you is a - different thing. It does not diminish my faith. It throws it into a more pronounced and more beautiful relief. And I suppose that is why the All’God has made things the way He has. To create beings who can love objects other than Hi
mself does not dilute, but rather intensifies, our love for Him. This is what I mean by the little being more than the lot.’

  We sat for a while. I listened to the sounds of the city beginning to wake: the traffic increasing; the café owners about the square opening shutters and rolling out awnings, putting out tables and chairs. ‘All the things I have suffered,’ I said, ‘all my experiences, all the trials - I don’t renounce a single one of them. They have all worked together to make me what I am now. And to bring me to this place, here, with you. Perhaps that was the purpose of those things all along.’

  We were still alone, although soon enough people would come walking past the fountain; but whilst we were still alone, and despite the fact that we were in a public space, I embraced Siuzan as we sat together. Then we made our way onward to our respective places of work.