Please accept my assurances at all times that I remain, your obedient servant. Benjamin. I assume you do know Suzannah is in Camp 7, Andes, with Kassim and Leila?
GEORGE SHERBAN to SHARMA PATEL
Dearest Sharma,
First of all, Greetings! In any style you like. No, I am not laughing at you, I assure you. I am writing this in great haste late at night because I get the impression very strongly that you have a change of plan. Yes, I do remember how you laugh at me when I say such things. And I feel sorrowful because I have something of importance to say, but I feel you will not listen to me. But perhaps you will, perhaps you can, just this once, and so I am writing to say this to you: Please stick to your plan and please leave at the time you said you would. Please do not go down into Encampment 8. I beg of you. And if you are prepared, just this once, to trust me, to believe me, take as many of your staff with you as will go with you. Don’t stay where you are and don’t go down into Camp 8. How can I reach you? How can I persuade you? Do you have any idea what it feels to know someone as I know you, to hear you say I love you, and with such depth of feeling and such sincerity! – and yet know that I shall not be believed, no matter what I say. You will not do as I ask, I know that. And yet I must try.
Sharma, what can I do to make you listen to me? This once, believe me. If I said to you, leave your position at the head of your Army, leave your honours and your responsibilities, you would lecture me for my lack of understanding of your equality with me, my ignorance about women and their capacities, but you would suddenly, even surprising yourself, leave everything behind you, your powers, your position, as if you had been hypnotized, and you would come with me, like a sleepwalker, presenting yourself to me with a smile that said: Here I am. And from that moment you would never again agree with me in anything, or fall in with anything I wished, or trust me. Your life would be a demonstration of how badly I treated you. Do you know this, Sharma? Is that not a remarkable thing? Perhaps you do not agree that this is exactly what would happen. And no, I am not saying that I want you to do any of these things, no I do not. I am only begging you, begging you – listen to me, and don’t go down to Encampment 8. Sharma my love, will you listen to me, please listen to me …
(This letter was not sent.)
[See History of Shikasta, VOL. 3015, The Century of Destruction, Twentieth Century War: 3rd and Final Phase. SUMMARY CHAPTER.]
From SUZANNAH in CAMP 7, the ANDES, to GEORGE SHERBAN
My darling.
It is very cold tonight. It is not easy to get adjusted to this altitude. Kassim and Leila are all right, and that is the main thing. A lot of people are finding it hard. We have a lot of chest troubles. Our doctors are working all the time. Luckily we have plenty of medicines. But I wonder for how long. Sixty-three people came in. They got out from France. They say there is nothing much left of Europe. They are full of all kinds of stories but I said I didn’t want to hear. I don’t see the point. I think it is morbid. What is done is done. So I came to our hut and left them talking. It would be a good thing if you could get hold of warm clothes for all the children. We have nearly 1,200 children now. I did what you said and put Juanita in charge of the children and she has made her husband work with her. They are a good team. All the children like them. Today a party came in from North America. Ninety-four. They want to stay here but I said this camp is full. Well, it is. How are we going to feed everybody? That is what is on my mind. I said they could stay some days to rest and then they should go to Camp 4. It is only 200 miles. They can leave the weak ones and the children with us. They say North America is full of troubles but I said I didn’t want to listen any longer. I have my work cut out. Can you try and find some shoes for the children? I think it would be a good thing if some more camps got set up, if the refugees are going to come and come like this. I don’t see what can be possibly left up there. But I don’t want to think about it. Kassim says he wants to come and be with you. I said he is too young but he is fifteen. Leila wants to come too. I said definitely no. I said I would find out what you think about Kassim. And they would have to obey. That is a question.
When you think about winter coming up in the North, it is a good thing for the epidemics I suppose, but it is a bad thing for the people who are left. But I don’t want to think morbid thoughts.
Philip came in just now and says he saw you and you are working hard. He says you will be coming next week. When you come we should get married because I am pregnant. I am sure now. I wasn’t sure until today. It is all very well these young people saying things like that don’t matter in these times, but I think we should set an example.
I am two months and two days pregnant.
I hope it is a boy but with my luck I suppose it will be a girl. I don’t really mean that, only partly.
I have got Pedro to mend the roof of this hut. Pedro is very nice and I want to suggest we should adopt him when you come. What I mean is, we should tell him we regard him as our child. He is feeling insecure. I can always tell things like that. It is not good for an eight-year-old boy to have no parents and nothing at all. I think we should have some kind of ceremony. We can always think of something. By the time we have finished I expect we shall have a dozen or more, if this goes on! Many a true word is spoken in jest.
I won’t tell Pedro he can be our child until you have agreed.
They have built a big fire in the centre of the camp tonight and there is a big moon and it looks nice. They are telling stories about their escapes from the different places. What happens is, someone steps forward into the place just near where the fire is and then everyone is silent and then this person tells their tale. Then this person goes and sits down and another gets up. Or someone sings a song. Some of the songs are very sad. Some of them romantic. And then someone else steps forward and tells their tale of woe. There will be a lot of babies born soon. We shall have to feed them. The doctors are watching all the babies very carefully.
Everything is being done the way you said.
I feel very lonely without you, I know you don’t like it when I say things like that.
I know it is no good my asking you if you feel lonely without me because I suppose you’ll just smile as usual.
Well my dear, I shall see you next week, please God.
Your Suzannah
From KASSIM SHERBAN
Dear Leila, and dear Suzannah. And hello! to Pedro and Philip and Anqui and Quitlan and Shoshona.
And a very big kiss for little Rachel which is of course the most important thing of all. Tell her that and say I have a beautiful yellow bird for her.
Hello, hello and hello. I know that you Suzannah are waiting for me to say something about George but I can’t, because guess what, when I caught up with him he was off North, and he said I was to manage by myself and gave me things to do and pushed me off. But he gave me your news Suzannah, and that’s wonderful, and this time it will be a boy, that’s what I think.
This is a completely new town. I got here last week. It is the strangest town. Of course it is all of wood and stones and lacquered paper, but the shapes are not what you’d expect, I haven’t figured it all out yet. I came walking down the hill into it, and it was like a dream. And what made it worse was that I was scared. After all I am young, not even my best efforts can disguise that, and I am still in the old Youth Army uniform, because I can’t find anything else, and after all they were running Youth Army people out of towns before the Third World War, and even killing them. The hunters hunted. Do you remember the song:
The hunters hunted,
The weapons turned –
When the hunters hunted,
The world burned …
That’s all I can remember of it. I don’t want to remember it I suppose. There seemed no place to hide when you heard that. How did we survive all that I wonder? – but I didn’t mean to start on all that again. I keep deciding never to think of any of it again but my mind goes back to it.
Anyway, I came down
into this town scared witless. I didn’t know what to expect. At the very least I thought I would have to persuade them I was harmless. But that didn’t happen. The town has a central square and a fountain. It is all done in stone. There were people standing about the square, and as I got into it, full of apprehension, it was the strangest thing, but I was accepted at once. No one expected me to be harmful. Can you imagine what that was like?
There is a guesthouse for travellers and for a week every traveller is given food, if not much, and then if there is work he can do he starts earning the food, and if not, he goes on somewhere else. I did not want to start work, because I was on a ‘fact-finding survey’ so George said. So he said, and if you have to get facts, then you have to ask questions. Where better than in the guesthouse, and then the café, and the store, and the square again. It had dawned on me by then that it was the people who I was to meet – that was the point of the exercise. The people in the square and everywhere else answered any questions I asked. Facts. There are fewer facts in the world now than there were before the smash-up. A woman from the North, an Argentinian, took me to her house and told me what was happening there, and how the War had affected that area, and she made me meet others. It began to dawn on me then … all the time I was being reminded of something, I didn’t know quite what, and I was lying awake every night trying to remember what it was, and even now I can’t say much about it, but it is like what the other Rachel, and Olga, and Simon, used to tell me of how the three were taught by people just coming past, and how they learned things without there being actual lessons and timetables most of the time. I keep meeting people, and all of them seem to know at once who I am and what to tell me or where to take me. That is very peculiar. Something peculiar is going on, but I don’t know what.
Take a simple thing like the shape of this town. There were no plans. No architect. Yet it grew up symmetrical and on the shape of a six-pointed star. I didn’t realize it was a star until I walked up out of the town very early one morning, and when I looked down, trying to see if I could notice anything different, I was able to see the star-shape. But no matter who I ask, no one seems able to say anything about plans or a master plan or anything like that. And there is another thing. When I walked down into this town, I was taking it absolutely for granted, but absolutely, that there were going to be different factions and the rulers and the armies and the police and I would have to watch my step and be careful what I said. Do you realize how we have all had to do that? Do you? Of course I don’t mean the little ones, not little Rachel, but even Philip or Pedro. All the time watching our step. It has been drilled into us. But after a couple of days I felt a great relaxation all over my body, like yawning and stretching, and then I suddenly understood I wasn’t afraid of doing the wrong thing and landing in prison or ending up as butchers’ meat. I simply couldn’t believe it. I can’t believe it even now. I haven’t seen anybody fight. I haven’t seen a riot or walls being smashed down or stones being thrown or people being dragged off screaming or anything like that at all. There is a very old Indian here, and when I was talking to him I said things like this I’ve written here, and he said, you are the child of great misfortune and now you must learn differently. Did you know that when the old explorers came here long ago there were Giants here? The old Indian told me that, he had learned it in what he called the White School – does that take you back? – but it was true, because his grandfather and his great-grandmother knew all about it. Well, I wouldn’t like to be asked what facts I have got from being here, but I am leaving tomorrow. I have been hoping that the people who were kind to me in this town would say: In the next town, look up so and so. But they haven’t. I am walking with four others. An old Israeli, he was a scientist in Tel Aviv, and a girl from the old United Arab Emirates, and an old woman from Norway – she got here somehow – and another woman with two children from the Urals. They wanted to stay here and find work but there isn’t any, but there is news that people are wanted thirty miles off in another new town.
It is a week later. When I came down the hill into this town I was looking to see if it has a shape, you bet, and it has. It is beautiful, a circle, but with scalloped edges. The wavy edges are gardens. It is made like the last one I wrote about. It has the same paved centre, a circle, and a very beautiful fountain, with a basin, round, in a local stone, a yellowish rose colour. The basin is shallow, a couple of inches, and the water trickles into it in patterns, and there are patterns in the stone shining up from under the water, and there are the same patterns in the roofing of the houses and the floor tiles and everywhere. It is the most beautiful place I can remember. Again, no one knows anything about plans or architects, it just grew up, or so it would seem. Again I am in the guesthouse. We are all still together, but the woman with the children has got work in the fields and also in the laboratory, and the scientist has, too. As for the others, no luck so far.
Again people talk to me and tell me things. I just move from one to another. I know all about this area and this town and who is in it and what they do and what they have done before the War and what they think. I have the most peculiar thoughts. They are the most extraordinary and outrageous thoughts, but I am having them and so I propose to stand by them. Tomorrow I am moving on with the Arab girl and the old woman from Norway. They haven’t got work. Also a new travelling companion, a jaguar who walked into the guesthouse last night and lay down and was still with us in the morning. We thought he was tame but no one knows him. We gave him some maize porridge and some sour milk, and we expected him to turn up his nose but he didn’t. Apart from the jaguar there is little Rachel’s yellow bird, not a real one, it is made of dried grasses, and a very fine mongrel dog who has taken a fancy to me and he and the jaguar gallop along on all sides of us when we walk abroad.
A week later.
This time the town which we came up the hill to is octagonal, but we didn’t work that out until we were well inside it. It is composed of six linked hexagons. The hexagons are gardens. The lattice is buildings. Again these buildings are strange considering what we are all used to, of bricks and adobe and dried grass screens and lacquered paper. Everything is very light and airy. The central place is a star, and it has a fountain, making patterns of stone and water that echo each other. There are patterns on the walls and floors – different ones from the patterns in the last town. The old Norwegian woman got work in the kitchen of the guesthouse. The girl from the United Arab Emirates is with a man she met at the fountain. That leaves me and the jaguar and the dog. I have spoken with a lot of people in this town. Now I am going to have to say it. Regardless. This is what I have been thinking about all the way along these roads. We used to believe George was so special, well I am not saying he isn’t. Not that I thought all that much about it then. I just went along with everything. But there are a lot like George. Did you realize that, you there, Suzannah and everyone? These people I keep meeting in the towns and the ones that are on the roads and walk with us a little way and then go off into the pampas or the forests again, as if they had expected to meet us and had something to say, well, these people are George-people. They are the same. I know this is impossible, but it is the conclusion I have come to. There are more and more George-people all the time.
It is the same in this town as everywhere else. Now I am getting used to walking into a town with my stomach muscles relaxed and not in a twist and not on my toes all the time in case something comes out at me from some corner, and not having to look out for the local Camps, and not feeling scared to death if I see a group of young people, the way we all were. Yes of course I wasn’t exactly old myself. Do you suppose that living in a town has been like this in the past? I mean, people relaxed and easy and things happening the right way without laws and rules and orders and armies? And prisons, prisons, prisons. Do you think that is possible? Well, it is an outrageous thought, but suppose it is true?
It is four months later. I have been to four more towns, all new ones, a triangle, a
square, another circle, a hexagon. Do you know something? People are leaving the old towns when they can and making new towns in new places, in this new way. Doesn’t that make you think different thoughts? The people talk about the old towns and cities as if they are hell. If they are like what our cities used to be then they are hell.
I have had quite a few different travelling companions and heard all kinds of stories. From all parts of the world. Suzannah I think you are right when you don’t want to hear talk of the events in Europe, etc. I didn’t think you were right and in fact I despised you. I am telling you this Suzannah because you are so kind and you won’t mind. I have noticed something. As I go along these roads I am sometimes alone with my faithful jaguar and dog but sometimes with others, and when talk starts about the awfulness, then it is as if people are not hearing. Not that they are not listening. Not hearing. They look vaguely at you. Blank. Do you know what I think. They can’t believe it. Well sometimes I look back and it is such a little time, and I can’t believe it. I think that dreadfulness happens somewhere else. I don’t know how to say that. I mean, when awful things happen, even to the extent we have all just seen, then our minds don’t take them in. Not really. There is a gap between people saying hello, have a glass of water, and then bombs falling or laser beams scorching the world to cinders. That is why no one seemed able to prevent the dreadfulness. They couldn’t take it in.