Oh I can’t wait to see you again! But I have been so busy, all day and half the night as usual, I haven’t had time to be sad. I know this is what you would want to hear from me when we meet.
But I do allow myself one little indulgence … I remember … do you remember? – that jewel of a night after the Conference at Simla … one day nights like that will be the heritage of all mankind, and so I don’t feel selfish when I think of this jewel of a night. Oh George, when will I see you again? The bearer will be returning here before going on to Peking and will bring me your letter. Which will agree, I hope and trust, to my proposals.
Your Sharma
GEORGE SHERBAN to SHARMA PATEL
I have read your letter very carefully. I will see you during my visit to India and I will tell you then why I will not allow myself to be put forward, as you suggest. But Sharma, I did tell you, I explained everything to you.
I have been dreaming. Would you like to hear my dream?
There was a civilisation once – where? – it doesn’t matter. The Middle East perhaps, China, India … It lasted a long time. Thousands of years. We can’t think like that now: continuity, cultures not changing very much, generation after generation. It was a civilization where there were rich and poor, but not great extremes. It was well balanced, too, trade and agriculture, and the use of minerals, all in harmony with each other. People lived a long time, perhaps a thousand years. Perhaps five hundred. But it doesn’t matter, a long time. Of course now we despise the past and think that children were mostly born to die because of ignorance. But these people were not ignorant. They knew how not to have too many children and to live at peace with their land, and their neighbours.
Imagine what a marriage might have been then, Sharma. Nothing frantic and desperate, no fear of death as we all have it, making us rush to mate and marry and the having and holding because we know that everything may so suddenly be taken away.
And lifetimes stretching in front of you … a young man may have parents two hundred years old, think of that Sharma, how sensible and experienced they must be … he sees this marriage, and its strength and it sense, and he knows he wants the same. And there is a girl like him. They may have known each other all their lives. Or have heard of each other, for there is plenty of time to hear of this one and that one – to listen to someone growing up nearby, and to wonder, would we be right with each other? But there is no hurry, no rush, no desperation. Behind them stretches their civilisation, and the wise men and the historians and the storytellers tell them of it, and in front of them stretches their world, and will go on and on …
But marriages are made young, of course, for that is the time for marriage. The families make slow and thoughtful approaches to each other. What they are thinking of is how they can carry the best they know into the future of the race, their culture. They see themselves, feel themselves, as the bearers of culture. Yes, they discuss family characteristics – this is a good family, the mother is good and balanced and beautiful enough, and the father is also these things, and his line too. When these young people know these things are being discussed, it is not with a sense of personal affront, which is how we would, now, in these days, experience a discussion about – not our wonderful and precious selves – but our importance as representatives. When they meet, it is without panic and grasping. They talk and they visit and they wait and they get to know each other’s families, and all this may take a long time, years even, for there is no hurry. And they know that if they decide not to marry, then in any case they will be friends for so long they cannot see the end of it. Meanwhile they love, of course, and choose how they may live, in this place or that, he will work at this or that, and she too, and all the time their children are implicit in what they say and think and do, for the knowledge of how to keep a strong, continuous healthy civilisation is the deepest thing in them.
Can we even begin to imagine, in our feverishness, our consumption of possibilities, the slow, full texture of their days, their years?
They marry, when the time has come for it. What is he? A merchant perhaps and she will travel with him and work with him, or a farmer? A maker of artefacts, these two, tiles, household vessels, everything satisfying and good in their hands, and to look at. Or they will choose to live in a house near their bakery, or is it a leather goods shop, or is he a carpenter, or does he work with metals. What they do with their hands brings them satisfaction, pleasure, every gesture they make must have use, and necessity. There is no hurry. No fear. Of course people die, but after long lives. Of course there are accidents and even, sometimes wars, but these are skirmishes along the edges of their civilization, bordering another just as fine and old as their own. There is respect between these two cultures, and often marriage and much trading.
This couple have their children and educate them and they are absorbed into the stream of inheritance which carries them like a river. I can see these two young things – like us, Sharma – in love, and loving, but not in the service of some ‘cause,’ and not grabbing love as a shield against horrors. Which is what we are doing, Sharma. They are kind, and playful … I can see them doing simple pleasant things like walking along a riverbank, and swimming naked in fresh good water with their friends. And visiting each other’s houses, visiting friends. Can you imagine what friendship must have been like in those days? Now our friends are usually in another continent, or are going to move away next week. I like to think of what friendship must have been then.
And I can see these two with their young children, enjoying them, enjoying every minute, because there is not the sort of pressure we know. And watching how they grow and show this trait or that, show the past which they are carrying into the future.
And I can see them, still young people, very young, a hundred, two hundred years old, vigorous and lively, and their family is grown and self-supporting but not flown as we take for granted must happen. Imagine the relations between children and parents who may know each other for hundreds of years? I wonder what kind of bond that might be. Imagine, it might take three hundred years or more for a person to reach maturity. You can think about it, and think about it all and not really grasp it, it is too hard for us. The high marriage. A real marriage. It happened once, I am sure of that.
Do you like this dream, Sharma? I wonder …
Or, if you don’t, how about this … we are back in time, back, back … people are physically very different from these I have just written about, and of course different from us, with our diseases and our degenerating organs and our pitiful little lives.
That was a time when this earth had close links with the stars and their forces … does this annoy you, Sharma? You probably think it not useful. You are a very practical girl, and I admire you for it. Any situation offered to you – in no time you have grasped it, summed it up, seen how it may develop into the future. It is a capacity rooted in the deepest part of your nature – you value the capacity but not what it is rooted in! There isn’t anything I value in you I could tell you about, and you would be pleased! Do you know that? Isn’t that amazing? You think I value what you value in yourself – your cleverness, your ability to manage situations, your brilliant sensible speeches, the way you are so concise and quick in committees. Even your humanity … Do you know, you would be angry, if I told you what I love to see in you … it is a marvellous grasping of the actual, a sense, a gift, an instinct. I watch you pick up a bowl of rice and your hands have in them a language of understanding. You put up your hand to adjust your sari. I could watch that gesture forever. It has such certainty in it, such knowledge. One of the children come running, and it is not what you say, but how you touch and hold. It is a miracle, this thing in you. I can never have enough of it, I watch you, how you put your feet on the earth, so absolutely right, every step, and the movement of your head as you turn it to listen. I tell you, Sharma, there is something there that I – I simply give up! I salute it, and that’s all.
In those days of this othe
r older dream of mine, there were few people on the earth. These people who did live here knew what their lives were for. Because we don’t, we have no idea at all. They existed to keep life flowing into this planet. It was they who regulated the cosmic forces, powers, currents, so many, and so different, and all with their patterns and flows and rhythms. The lives of these people were regulated, every minute, by their knowledge. But this did not mean a clockwork regularity, which is how we have to think and feel, but a moving with, and through, these always changing flows of the currents.
When a man and a woman married, it was not ‘to have children’ or ‘to make a family’, not necessarily, though of course children had to be born and when they were, it was exact and chosen. No, these two would be chosen, or choose each other, for they were born with the knowledge of how to do this – because they were complementary, and this was judged always by how they stood in relations to stars, planets, the dance of the heavens, the forces of the earth, the moon, our sun. It was not even that they chose each other, rather that they were chosen by what they were, where they were. When they ‘married’ – and we cannot even begin to guess how that seemed to them – their being together was a sacrament, in the sense that everything contributed to the harmony. And when they mated, this was a sacrament, in the true and real sense, used consciously and exactly to adjust, fuel, add to, lessen, powers and currents. And what they ate was the same. And what they wore. There could not be disharmony, because they were harmony. Everything, their thoughts and movements … they were suspended, on this earth and heaven, and through them flowed the lives of stars, and through them flowed the substance of the earth to the stars …
That was how marriage was then, Sharma. I can see your face as you read this.
I must end now. My personal life has been sad recently. My father and mother died. They were wonderful people. There are family problems.
I will see you soon.
RACHEL SHERBAN’S JOURNAL
A lot of refugees have arrived from the new war, and we have had twenty of them in this flat. Fitting in somehow. Now they have gone on to a camp. Survivors. Surviving. I can’t understand why they try so hard. Each one, a story of amazing escapes.
A million people died last week. Why then should it matter if Rachel Sherban stays alive? That is my question. I don’t know who to ask it of. There must be a reply to it. If George was here, what he did would be the answer. He is always at it, rescuing people. One way or another. Mind you, I wonder if some of the people he rescues would be pleased if they knew they have genetic value. Genetically useful, said George once when I asked about someone.
A million people. I try to take it in. The people that were milling around in this flat are alive. But the unlucky ones are dead. Why one alive and one dead? It makes no sense to me at all. Out in the streets at night, all the rioting and shooting and then someone dead on the pavement. It might just as well be me. I went out last night. Curfew or no curfew, I walked about the city. All night. Soldiers. Trucks. Shooting. I did not even cover my face. No one saw me. I walked back into this flat this morning quite alive thank you. Well, answer that, whoever you are. Suzannah was out of her mind. Do you want to kill yourself, she shrieks.
I have seen something. I wonder how it was I didn’t before. Who is it needs this killing, this agony, this suffering, the death, death, death, death. The blood and the blood. The reek of blood going up from this planet must be in somebody’s nostrils. Somebody needs it. Something. There isn’t anything that doesn’t have a function. What happens always fits in with everything. What happens is needed by something. It happens because it is drawn out of a situation by need. There isn’t anything that happens that is extraneous. There is somebody or something that needs this savagery and the blood.
The Devil, I expect.
I feel as if I have suddenly found a key in my hand. I read that the cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.
I feel very odd. As if I am not here at all. Don’t exist. A wind is blowing through me. I can feel it, blowing through my cracks and crannies. I am always cold.
I walk about this flat and I keep feeling myself float off into unreality. That is a word. I look at that word and it isn’t anything. Once again there isn’t a word for it. Yesterday I felt so gone, that I looked back into my room to see if I could see me sitting at the window. Because I couldn’t feel myself where I stood at the door.
When this place was full of the refugees it was all right because I spent every minute getting things for them and doing things. But even then I felt very light. Porous.
Suzannah is worried. She keeps exclaiming and looking at me.
Suzannah is so strong. When I sit near her I can feel heat beating out of her. No, not heat, strength. I feel actually burnt by it. It envelops me. But when I go and sit near her on purpose to feel this, because I think it may warm me, then it is as if I was being crushed, or fanned away like dead grass. She put her arms around me last night and hugged me. She rocked me. This was exactly the way a mother cat gives a kitten that has got cold or upset about something a really rough licking, so hard the kitten can only stand up or even gets knocked over. It is to make the blood flow. To shock the kitten into its senses. Those words, into its senses, are exact. Alive. They tingle. I can feel them. As I write this some words are alive and I can feel them pulse, but others are quite dead. Like Reality. Suzannah held me roughly and shook me, from the same instinct as a mother cat’s.
But I was just nothing. A little bit of stick or cold shadow inside those great arms of hers.
I did put my head on her shoulder. Partly because it would please her. I even went to sleep. I am not here at all.
The night before last I woke up and saw Olga sitting on my bed. She was smiling. At once I could see it wasn’t Olga, it was the moonlight, and the curtains moving. But what I felt for that second I thought it was Olga, was a sweetness and a longing. That made me afraid, because I never felt anything like that for Olga when she was alive.
I feel as if something very strong is putting at me, a sort of sucking and dragging, and I want to let go into it. There is a strong sweetness somewhere close to me, tugging at me.
Susannah follows me around and looks at me. She loves me. Because I am George’s sister.
I look at her, so strong. And so ugly. She was washing her hair. I thought, she is going to shape it into those awful ridges and curls again, making herself so thick and ugly. When her hair was wet I went to her, and took the comb and parted her hair and made it straight and flat. She knew what I was doing. She had a little smile. Patient. She is so nice, Susannah. I looked at her when I was finished, and there was a plain middle-aged woman. More like a servant. She knew what I was seeing. She had tears in her eyes. She was thinking. Rachel is beautiful. Suzannah does not envy me. She is not jealous or malicious or nasty in her feelings, like me.
I gave her back the comb, and she turned to the mirror and carefully did her hair as usual, fluffing it out and crimping it. Then the kohl and the lipstick. So she was back to normal. She did not look at me when she had finished. She had a stubborn air. Holding on to what she has. We had supper, Suzannah and me and the children. I was looking at her and wondering where she gets her strength. I put my hand into hers and she rubbed it and rubbed it. She knew why I had wanted her to fold my hand inside hers. She knows this kind of thing. She says to me, Poor little one, poor Rachel.
I really don’t know what I can do, or say. I don’t think I exist at all. There is a transparency around me, like a film I can’t brush aside. A sort of faint rainbow.
Raymond Watts was here and said that someone had just arrived from over there and had information for me. This person had hoped to find George here. But that is strange in itself. Why should he. I told Raymond to bring this ‘someone’ here.
I have to go, must leave at once. The ‘someone’ said he ‘had access to’ information that George was going to be killed by the Over
lords. He didn’t know George had already left here. He is part of the Administration. That means the Youth people wouldn’t trust him. Raymond Watts trusts him because he said he had ‘gone bad’ from the Administration’s view. I have to tell George. Warn him. He might not know.
Suzannah has been at me all night. I said she would take me over and she has. How is it possible? A year ago Olga and Simon were alive and were my parents, and George was here and Benjamin, and now I am here in this flat alone with Suzannah and two children I hadn’t seen this time last year and they are my family.
What right has Suzannah to say what I should do. I could not stop myself loathing her, sitting there, leaning forward, all earnest eyes and great boobs, telling me, Do this, do that. She says I have to stay here.
This is your home, Rachel, this is where you belong. And of course you must be with Kassim and Leila, they need you. Over and over again.
Why do they need me? They need her! Why should the world need Rachel Sherban if it has Suzannah!
Of course she would be only too delighted to be left here in this flat in complete charge and owning the children. She is here. She is in my parents’ room. She is positioned just right for George when he gets back. If he gets back.
I don’t mean the things about Suzannah I wrote there.
She says and says and says that George doesn’t want me to rush off after him. How does she know? Yes of course George did say I should stay here, but did he know then that this man was going to turn up? I have to go quickly, I know how I can do it, I have been thinking how. Suzannah said, You can’t go Rachel, if for no other reason than ‘I am such a princess’ and ‘they’ – meaning the Youth Army people – wouldn’t like my attitudes. ‘Surely you can see that Rachel,’ she said. Not bitchy at all, oh no, it is what she thinks, so she says it.
When I said that I was going, Suzannah said, Then at least let me tell someone who I know can help you. Meaning, with the transport and disguise. That ‘at least’ made me furious. It is funny, how Suzannah makes me furious. Rubs me up the wrong way. That is one of the phrases that are alive. Every word right. I said, I would meet anyone and do anything, all I wanted was to get across to Europe at once and tell George. I will not let them kill him.