Beautiful Blue World (13 page)

I LIKE BLUE.

I like blue.

I like blue.

I carried the sentence with me through the rest of the day and the evening, turned it in my head as I lay in bed that night.

It was still there in the morning, when I woke to pull back my black curtains and saw that the sky was mostly gray, but there was a thin blueness to it anyway, that kind that comes with a chilly morning.

I like blue.

After breakfast, I let myself into Rainer's room and sat down.

I watched him sitting.

We didn't acknowledge each other.

I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them.

After a few minutes, I said, “My father…”

I paused, to see if he was listening.

I figured that he was.

“Father works at the post office. He has a beard that's starting to turn gray, and eyes the blue of the sky when the blue is thin, like just after the sun comes up on a cold morning. He calls me Big, because I am the oldest. I used to help him at work in the afternoons. I could sort the letters or go on deliveries with him. But they made new rules about post office security because of the…” I looked at him. We both knew. “Because of the war.”

I told him about Mother.

And Kammi and Tye.

I did not say
But I'm worried you have killed them.

I told him about school.

And Megs.

I did not say
It's your fault I do not go to school anymore. It's your fault I'm not with my family and Megs.

I did not say I had folded them all up like tiny pieces of paper and stowed them in a little box, deep inside me, so I didn't have to think of them and hurt.

I kept all the angry thoughts stuck in my chest, even though they stewed all the while.

Even though they were also true.

I told him about the woods that I loved.

The summer.

The raspberry-glazed buns.

I fell silent. Silent like snow falling: gentle, but building.

Would he answer eventually, like with the colors?

He wiggled his toes—he had no shoes on, just socks, though his laceless boots lay in the corner, but he wasn't going anywhere anyway—and watched his feet.

He looked angry.

As if listening to me had hurt somehow.

But it shouldn't have.

I'd held back all the things I thought would hurt.

I hadn't said anything mean.

Maybe he'd answer me later.

Like with the colors.

I let go of my knees, getting up to leave.

“Those are all things that you have stolen from Tyssia.”

His words fell through my mind slowly, like stones plopping into a stream: I heard them one at a time.

“What?”

“All those things—the raspberries, the woods, the stream, the mushrooms—those belong to Tyssians.”

A hot pit grew in my stomach.

What should I say?

It was my job to talk to him. And he was finally ready. I couldn't leave now.

Remain calm. See what he needs to say.

See what I could learn.

I took a deep breath and spoke slowly.

“My home is in Sofarende. All those things are within Sofarende. Why would you say they belong to you?”

“You took them from us.”

He was crazy.

“Of course we didn't.”

“You did. Where you live is the ancestral home of Tyssians.”

“But we've been here for hundreds of years.”

“But half of your land was home to Tyssians. You have not been Sofarende for hundreds of years. Less than one hundred years. On stolen land.”

Each province had voted to become one country called Sofarende. The Sofarers, Tyssians, Eileans, and Nor'landers…everyone had blended together to be modern Sofarenders.

We hadn't kept track of who was who.

We hadn't seen a reason to.

We had been proud to be mixed.

I
could
have been part Tyssian by blood; I lived in southern Sofarende, where it was more likely. And I looked like Rainer.

It had never mattered before. Never even entered a discussion.

My skin crawled.

“They voted,” I said. “The Tyssians in those areas wanted to become part of Sofarende.”

“There must have been someone threatening them to do so.”

“I don't remember learning about any threats.”

“You wouldn't. Why would they have taught you that at school? If you've even been to school. You seem to just sit around all day.”

“For someone who hasn't wanted to talk for days, you sure have a lot to say.” I glared at him.

“For someone who tried to get me to talk for days, you should be glad I am telling you what I know.”

“The only things stolen are the things you've taken from us since this war began—including the lives of the innocent people you've bombed in their sleep.”

“
I
didn't bomb anyone.”

“And what about the Skaven lands? They don't have Tyssian ancestors. How did you justify taking them?”

Rainer's eyes went glazed and empty. He turned away.

No amount of questioning was going to get anything else out of him today.

Not that it mattered.

He was a liar.

“YES, WE'D HEARD FROM
people on the ground that they'd been saying that.” The Examiner folded her hands in front of her on her desk.

“You have—people—on the ground? You mean, inside Tyssia?”

“Of course we do.”

“Then what do you need me for?”

“You are angry?”

“No, I just—I just—I don't understand.”

“We have lots of people who work for us, who help us. What else did he have to say?”

“That we threatened the Tyssians who voted to be part of Sofarende a hundred years ago. That's not—that's not true, is it?”

“How did you feel, when you heard that?”

I clenched my jaw; that was probably answer enough. “Is it true?”

“No, it's not true. Sometimes it doesn't matter how long you've been somewhere. Before that, always, the land belonged to someone else. Or was shared by someone else. That's true almost everywhere.”

“So Tyssia's
not
right.”

“They're right that there was a history of Tyssian people living here. But they weren't threatened into voting a certain way. We have a long tradition of open and fair democracy; we're known for it. He's been presented with a version of history his government chooses for him, to convince him that there's a reason to fight us. Really, we think they want our sea access and to pose a bigger threat to Eilean's empire.”

“So they don't have a claim to this land?”

“A lot of peoples could put historical claim on this land. On any land. It just depends on how far back you want to go.”

I nodded.

She leaned forward. “His belief that he is right—that is one thing he brought from home.”

The next day, I went up to Rainer's cell with my arms full. I passed the items carefully through the bars. While our fingers wouldn't touch, I was able to get things through far enough for him to reach them and draw them over to his side.

First, a scroll of paper. He unfurled it, turned it over; both sides were blank. He looked back toward me.

I held up three paintbrushes.

He nodded.

I reached through with the brushes, and then tried to hand him the small tubes of paint, but they weren't long enough to get through the gaps, so I ended up tossing them so they landed on his side, and he reached through to retrieve them.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I can't easily get you the rest of the things.”

“It is okay,” he said. “I will use my dishes.”

He got his empty breakfast plate, squeezed out and mixed the colors. Set to work.

I knelt by the fence, watching.

Brown with jagged streaks of red and black. And an orange glow.

Like the nights of bombing.

It wasn't fond memories of home that he'd decided to paint.

Rainer filled the paper quickly.

Then he rested on his heels, looking at it.

“I'll be right back,” I said.

I ran to the art room and grabbed sheets and sheets of paper. Arriving back in his room moments later, I scrolled them up as I had the first one and passed them to him.

He nodded, and painted and painted. The images and colors took shape a little more—I could make out a sort of wheeled warcraft, the khaki-beige outfits of his comrades, faces black with mud but with eyes stark white—swishes of orange added into the red showed fire—white and black together showed smoke—black naked trees, stems of what would have once been thriving with life, burnt and ruined.

Paper after paper lined the floor.

Then he suddenly stopped painting.

My heart was pounding.

His brow and upper lip dripped with sweat; his breath came in uneven gasps, as if he had been running through those fields and their smoke just now, finding no refreshing leaves to cool him, only the machines of war.

He looked at me for just a second, as if I passed into his thoughts only momentarily, then back at the pages. He made a roar from deep in his throat and picked up one of them, about to twist his hands in opposite directions.

“Wait!”

I threw myself against the fence, my fingers gripping the wire hexagons.

“Don't. Don't ruin them.”

“They are garbage. It's all garbage. Everything is garbage.”

“I—I want them. I'll take them out of here, but, please, just let them dry.”

“You are my captor. You made me do this. You are in charge. If you say so, I will not destroy them, but I won't look at them anymore.”

He dropped the painting, went to the wall farthest from me, and stood with his head against it.

“I am
not
your captor.”

“You keep me here. You have keys. You could let me go.”

“I have keys only for this side. I didn't lock you up.”

“But you think I deserve to be locked up.”

“I've seen the houses of people I know bombed to bits. It looks like what you've painted. And you did that to us.”

“Not
me.
My country. And only to reclaim what was ours.”

“It wasn't
yours.
You're only believing what you've been told.”

“Maybe you're only believing what you've been told!” He turned around. “You're just a stupid little girl anyway. You have space and food that belongs to Tyssians, that we need!”

“You're the ones who've cut off
our
food.”

I sat down with my back to the fence. The hexagons pressed into me; under my thin sweater and my blouse, they made their imprints, which would stay on my skin for far too long.

I turned to find him sitting with his back against his fence, as I had been, the same hexagons pressing into his back through the big red X on his clothes.

“Were you really hungry, before?” I asked.

He didn't answer.

“You made my family afraid for our house and for our lives. You made my parents send me away. I don't even know if they or my sisters are still alive. I may never see them again. You understand?”

He nodded.

Maybe he would never see his own family again. And maybe he had thought that he should go in order for them to have enough to eat.

No!

I pushed those thoughts away.

“We—me and my family—did nothing to deserve that, no matter what someone told you about the past.”

He nodded again.

I knelt on my side of the fence, my head level with his.

We each believed it was the other's fault we were in this room.