Shikasta (Canopus in Argos: Archives Series, Book 1)

Something like that, he said.

  Very well then. In Marrakesh George spent exactly half a term in Mahmoud Banaki’s class. When he came out he was fully versed in the History of the Religions of the Middle East, back to Adam at least if not further. Right?

  Right.

  But who told you to send George to that class at that time?

  Hasan.

  You mean he breezed in one afternoon and said Mr. Sherban! Mrs Sherban! I am Hasan and I am interested in George, a very promising lad you have got there, and I want you to see that etc. etc. And you said, But of course! And it was done.

  He was being definitely on the defensive but patient.

  You forget Rachel, that Hasan came along after quite a lot of people of that kind.

  Saying of that kind, in that way meant I had to accept those words and all the thoughts I had had on that subject.

  All right, I said.

  He was sitting there, rocking about on the back legs of his chair, looking at me. And I was looking at him.

  And then he said what I had all this time been waiting for him to say.

  You must see, Rachel, that being George’s parents meant we had to see things differently. Yes.

  We have been taught to see things differently. Do you see? Yes.

  At the beginning, when it started, often enough your mother and I thought we were mad. Or something like that. Yes.

  But we went along with it. We did go along with it. And it worked.

  Yes, I said.

  Then he said, Rachel, you must run along, I’ve got to finish this, I have to, do you want any help with your homework? If so, I can after supper.

  No, I said, I can manage.

  I have seen something. During the term when George was doing the History of the Religions of the Middle East at the Madrasa, he also took classes from a Christian and from a Jew. In other words, while he was learning the curriculum, he was simultaneously learning the partisan points of view that wouldn’t be in the curriculum. Not to mention God knows what from Hasan. That means he couldn’t take exams, because what he had learned would never be contained in the exam questions. Though of course he could narrow everything down, after all Benjamin and I have to do that all the time. But that isn’t the point. He is being educated for something different.

  By whom?

  What for?

  Meanwhile he is a star figure in the local youth movements. And it makes me sick. Benjamin says George needs to show off. Well, that is of course what I cannot help thinking. But in my experience what Benjamin thinks is nearly always wrong. It comes out of his being jealous. Like me. At least I know that I am jealous and Benjamin doesn’t seem to. Anyway I come more and more to the conclusion that what I think isn’t worth anything. I seem to myself more and more a sort of sack full of emotions. Swilling around. I am angry. I don’t know what about. I am so angry I could die. Sometimes I watch these emotions go surging past. Hi there anger! Hi there jealousy! Hi everyone! This is Rachel saying hello!

  I have to put down what I feel about Suzannah. I think Suzannah is awful. Mother is very patient when Suzannah comes, and Father is extremely humorous. She is a loud, vulgar, stupid, flashy girl. She is crazy about George. Well girls crazy about George are like the sands of the seashore. So why Suzannah?

  I asked Mother. (She is back from the epidemic. But she is leaving for the famine next week.) She said: George is seventeen and a half. She said that George was seventeen at least ten times in half a hour. That was about all she could say about it. Meanwhile I could see she was wishing I would stop yapping at her. Yap yap yap, like a little dog. I could see myself. I asked Father. He said, Suzannah is extremely physically attractive. I can’t bear this. Furthermore I don’t believe George sleeps with Suzannah. I said to Benjamin who was making a lot of coarse remarks, George certainly does not sleep with Suzannah. He said, Darling little sister, what do you think they do during these starlit nights? I said he was stupid and didn’t understand George.

  I said to George, Do you sleep with Suzannah, and he said Yes.

  When he said that what I felt was that he had hit me. So I cried a lot. If George could sleep with Suzannah, then nothing mattered. How can he? It is an insult. I mean, to girls who are serious. I just feel that everything is spoiled. And Benjamin is quite right I am afraid. He says George is a power-lover and he is. So that’s that.

  I wrote that last bit several weeks ago. It has been a very bad epoch in my life. Benjamin suddenly started being very nice to me and I and Benjamin went out a lot. Several times, quite by chance – though I know our parents don’t believe this, Benjamin and I were in cafés where George was with Suzannah. When George is with Suzannah, so it would seem, he is quite different from what he is at home with us. He is very funny. He laughs a lot. Not a care in the world. Showing off. I just wanted to be sick. But then Benjamin started to show off too, and more than once called across to George and Suzannah with all sorts of jokes. I wanted to die. So then I said I wouldn’t go out with Benjamin. I stayed at home. I did badly with my school work. And then Mother talked to me. She was disappointed in me. I know she and Father had talked. I’m not stupid. She came into my bedroom one night. I was crying. I said to her at once, All right, you and Father think I am jealous of George. She said to me, That’s not the point at all. I said to her, All right then, what? – for already I could see a new perspective. She said to me, George isn’t a saint, he isn’t some sort of paragon. But the point is, he is not yet eighteen years old. I said, I think it is all disgusting.

  She said, as humorous as you can get, Rachel, what is disgusting?

  I said, Olga, George is a person who sits in a room and thinks that if there are thirty people in it, then there are thirty intestines full of shit, thirty bladders full of pee, thirty noses full of snot, and three hundred pints of blood. So I suppose if he is in a café with Suzannah, with those fat boobs of hers hanging out, he is thinking, two intestines full of shit, two bladders full of pee, two noses of snot, two bodies full of sweat, and twenty pints of blood. Not to mention 700 million sperm and an egg. And an erection and a vagina.

  Olga sits down. She lights a cigarette. She leans back. She folds her arms. She sighs. She says, When did he say things like that? Getting at once to the point.

  He was … it was a long time ago.

  I daresay he might have added a dimension or two since then.

  Well, I can’t stand it, I said to her. I can’t stand life. That’s the truth of it.

  I had half a thought that she would put her arms around me and comfort me. But although that is what I was wanting before she came in, when she was actually there I would have been ashamed if she had.

  She said: You do not have any alternative, Rachel. Because you can either stand it, or commit suicide. Or live in such a way that it is as good as committing suicide. And there is evidence to suggest – here she was being humorous the way Father is, she has caught it off him – there is evidence to suggest that there is hell to pay. Literally. But in any case, we do not commit suicide. And the way she said this was different from anything I had ever heard from her, full of pride. Really grim. It was as if she had slapped me or flung me into freezing water. I suddenly saw her quite differently. I saw that she was a person. Not my mother. She had thought it all out. She had wanted to commit suicide. She would never commit suicide. On that night I grew up. Or so I would like to believe.

  I have been thinking about Olga’s life. I have been trying to put myself in her place, always in camps full of refugees, dying people, starving people, people dying of diseases, babies dying. When I was with her in the epidemic that time I saw her crying over a room full of dying babies. No one else was there. She was very tired, that was why she was crying. Ever since I can remember, my mother has been working with people dying in one way or another. She is always in places where it is truly hell. Always. And that is true for my father too. I see that I am extremely childish.

  What I am writing now happened three nights ago. I co
uld not write it down before, it was too difficult. Now I have thought about it. Very late I heard George come in. It was four in the morning. It was very hot. It was that time when night is still absolutely here but morning is here but you can’t see it only feel it. Outside in the streets it was silent in that particular way. I would know any city I have been in by the silence at four in the morning. George had come in. I could hear him in his room. I went to his door and knocked. He did not answer. I went in. He was just slipping down his trousers and I saw him. Our family has never made a thing about nakedness, but what I was thinking was, That has been inside that awful cow. He turned his back, so I saw his buttocks and his back and he put on his pyjamas. Then he got into bed and lay down with his arms behind his head. George is very beautiful. But if he were ugly it would be the same. He was very tired. He wished I wasn’t there. Exactly like my parents, affectionate and patient. He said to me, Rachel you aren’t being kind. I was expecting him to say, Fair. When we use words like Fair, Olga and Simon always laugh and say we haven’t stopped being British and childish. But he said Kind. So I said to him, I don’t care, George. I don’t understand. So he said, Well Rachel there isn’t anything at all I can do.

  There I was standing at the door, and he was in bed and his eyes kept closing.

  He said, Rachel, what is it you want?

  At this I was slapped in the face again. Because of course I wanted him to say I hate Suzannah, she is a clumsy vulgar idiot. But he wouldn’t in a hundred years.

  Sit down, he said.

  I sat on the bottom of the bed.

  I was expecting some illuminating remarks, I see that now, but of course his eyes kept closing.

  He did look so handsome. But he was so tired. And I started to think about his life. He never has slept more than three or four hours a night.

  I thought he was asleep. So I began to talk. I was talking to George. I said, It is absolutely intolerable, all of it, it is awful, it is ugly, it is disgusting, and life is absolutely unbearable.

  His chest rose and fell, rose and fell. I wanted to put my head down on it and go to sleep.

  He suddenly said, with his eyes closed, Well Rachel … I am listening. And he was asleep again. Absolutely gone. I stayed there a little, thinking he might wake up. But the light came in at the window. There were the dusty palm trees along the streets. The smell of dust. Hot. George slept and slept. I felt ashamed and angry and I went to bed.

  I have been thinking about Suzannah. Suzannah has been in George’s life for nearly a year. That is a long time. I look back over a year and it seems forever. And I have grown up so much in that time. Suzannah comes to supper here a lot. She is very eager to please. She never takes her eyes off George, I am sorry for her. I did not realize that I am, until now. It is because she knows quite well she is not good enough for George. She wants to marry him. I once would have thought she was insane. But if George can sleep with Suzannah then he can marry her. I said to George, Are you going to marry Suzannah? He said to me, My dear little sister! I hate that, it is what Benjamin calls me, and anyway, I am over sixteen now. But what about Suzannah, I said. She is twenty-three years old, he said. I was shocked to the spine when he said that. In the first place because she is so much older. And then because he thought it could make any difference to her. He said, She knows very well that marriage is not on my agenda. At this, I was shocked again. I can’t remember George ever being stupid before. I said to him, George, Suzannah wants to marry you. She thinks of nothing else, day and night. He said to me, my little sister, you were born to be my tormentor, my hair shirt. At which he picked me up and whirled me around the room.

  This was in the living room. Benjamin came in at this point. He wanted to be part of it. The moment he came in, things were different, I mean, George whirling me about became a different sort of act, hostile and against me, and not friendly. Which it had been. I could feel George slowing down because he knew this too. Benjamin tried to join in the whirling about, as if I were a prize to be grabbed away. George set me down against the wall and stood in front of me. Benjamin kept dodging about in front of George because he wanted to throw me up and down and whirl me about. By then I was crying with rage. At the same time I was grateful to George.

  After a minute, Benjamin felt ridiculous and he went to sit down. Then George sat down.

  Rachel believes that I ought not to be sleeping with Suzannah, said George to Benjamin. I may say that this was quite serious. He had taken me seriously.

  Of course you should sleep with her. Fuck them all, I say, said Benjamin. The minute he had said it, we could both see he was sorry. He looked embarrassed.

  There sat Benjamin in one chair. Large, hairy, brown. Like a peasant. And George, thin and lithe and elegant. Both embarrassed. I stayed where I was, because I was afraid Benjamin would come after me.

  Well, little sister, said Benjamin, so you think George wouldn’t be sleeping with Suzannah? But why not?

  I said, Oh sleep with anyone, who cares, I don’t care, I used to think it matters, but I can see that it doesn’t matter at all.

  I was crying so that tears were literally splashing on to the floor.

  George was looking at me. He kept looking at me. He was obviously unhappy. I was full of triumph because he was.

  George said, Well little sister, tell me, who should I sleep with?

  At which Benjamin said, Obviously, Rachel.

  Then nothing happened for a few moments. George looked shocked and amused. Both. Benjamin was ashamed again.

  It was one of those times that I recognize more and more: you can see alternative scenes parallel to what is really happening. Because of Benjamin, what he was, I could see very clearly that I could fling myself across the room, and try to scratch his eyes out. Then George would get up, pick me up off Benjamin, and sit me down.

  That was Benjamin’s scene. What he imposed.

  But George being there prevented this happening.

  Because George was there and looking as he did, I walked out and away from the wall and sat down by myself.

  This is a serious conversation, said George to Benjamin, and Benjamin shut up.

  So who should I sleep with? he asked me. I am a normal male. I shall not be marrying for five years.

  At this, both Benjamin and I were stopped in a different way. There was a long silence.

  I really want to know, said George. There are brothels by the hundred in this and any city. And of course there is chastity. There are a lot of girls who want to sleep with me. Suzannah is one.

  All this seemed to be so off the point, I could hardly believe it.

  And when you are finished with her? I said. What will she do when you marry?

  Good God, said Benjamin, listen to that! – He was acting the part of resigned astonishment. The eternal feminine – the absolute absoluteness, the ultimate ultimatum.

  Well go on little sister, said George, I want to know.

  She loves you, I said.

  She loves you, said Benjamin to George, as before.

  Yes she does, I said. It’s funny you can’t see it. Why can’t you? Why are you like this? Why are you suddenly stupid? You are the most important thing that ever will happen to her.

  Well that’s true enough, said Benjamin. False modesty will get you nowhere.

  For George was in fact looking quizzical.

  I said, You can marry fifty other women and she can marry some fat stupid speech-making politician, and she can be a big lady and make speeches and run around in a uniform, and you will still be the most important thing that ever happened or ever could happen.

  George was extremely embarrassed. He was red. I have never seen that before, with George. Benjamin for once was looking quite sensible, even grown up. Benjamin said to George, She’s right. George said, Well, so what am I supposed to do? Benjamin said, very dramatic, Trapped!

  I have been thinking.

  What I have concluded is this. You don’t understand something until you
see the results.

  What made me think about this is the Conference of Youth. When he said he was going I was sick. Later I heard he was the delegate for some Muslims, some Jews and some Christians. Well, there isn’t anybody else who could do this. I don’t know how he does. And he could have represented socialist groups and marxists and business groups. They asked him,

  I couldn’t go to the Conference. I wasn’t asked. How could I be when I never go near youth groups?

  Benjamin went. First he said he wouldn’t go if it killed him, but he went, of course.

  I heard everything that happened. From Benjamin. But after he had finished I thought out what had happened from my own point of view.

  Benjamin says that George was ever such a success and the belle of the ball, and hinted that George spent the night with some woman. Suzannah wasn’t there. I could ask him and he would tell me but I won’t, never again.

  But since he came back, there have been messages all day, from everywhere. I am not going to list the countries because I can see there won’t be an end to them. Because George went to that Conference in that way he can travel to anywhere now and be welcome. And various people have turned up at this flat and talked about George and what he said at the Conference. He was talking, they say. They mention particularly about his talking. And Benjamin said he ‘spouted’ all night. If he spouted, then how could he have been with some woman? I said this to Benjamin and he said he never suggested George had done anything but talk.

  They keep turning up here, white, black, brown, pink, and green, day and night, day in and day out, and it is perfectly clear that they want to hear George talk. I have seen something. George talks as Hasan talks. George has caught it from Hasan. That is what I have seen. And I sit and listen and so does anyone else who is around. So do Olga and Simon. And so does Benjamin. He doesn’t say a word. He can jeer as much as he likes afterwards, and sometimes he has no idea at all about what is going on but he listens like the rest of us. So as usual I have to say this: my feelings are one thing. But what I am thinking is quite another. As for what I understand when George is talking, then … but obviously there is no point in saying anything about that.