Days Like Today (23 page)

His first experience of women had also taken place in the quarry. He was interested in two girls at school and another who worked in a bakery. He used to have daydreams about going out with them and about how much they’d let him do. His two friends were similarly plagued by futile dreaming. They were still trading lies and secrets when an older girl asked him if he’d like to come out on a picnic. He’d almost said no, not understanding that she’d used a code phrase. She’d been nice and hadn’t laughed at him. ‘At night,’ she’d explained. ‘You know. In the quarry. Have a couple of beers and cook some sausages over a fire.’ Then she’d smiled, seeing that he’d understood. He’d said yes. And that was the beginning: going back to the place of terror to become an initiate, learning to feel at ease
and to belong to the crowd of people who went there.

It didn’t change the way he thought about the two other girls at school and the one at the bakery. But after a while it began to influence the way they thought about him. Only after he’d acquired the reputation of taking a girl to the quarry did he become someone to whom younger girls felt they could entrust themselves, while their parents were sure that they could not.

He was still in his teens when the quarry was declared out of bounds. First of all, several women were found murdered. Two were pregnant girls. Suspicion naturally fell on the man or men who might have fathered the unborn children. While investigations were still going on – and one man was already under arrest – more deaths occurred. The combination of methods used – strangling and knifing – suggested that more than one man was behind the crimes. The arrested suspect argued that despite his acquaintance with the dead girl he was supposed to have murdered, he hadn’t seen her in some time and wasn’t it likely that she’d been out at the quarry to meet another man who was the real father – or many men, who would pay cash for sexual intercourse, as a lot of people there did?

More bodies were discovered, including those of two young boys. The arrested man was released. No one ever found out who was responsible for any of the deaths.

After the killing of women and boys came the big fights between men. Family, religion, race and former nationality all helped to give the participants an incentive, as did the occasional winning or losing of some regional sports team
at an important competition. Or the cause might simply have been the need to get into a fight.

As soon as the first men were killed and others badly injured, the friends and families came out in force. More men died; some of the women formed a protest group and went out to try to stop the fighting. They were beaten up by both sides. Three of them were hauled off to the far end of the quarry and raped. After that, the police stepped in. They entered with guns against a mob that knew the lie of the land better than they did and, greatly outnumbering them, took their weapons and beat them to a pulp.

The next stage was closure. The army took charge. Soldiers went down into the quarry, scoured every corner of it for human remains, broke and blasted the steps, railings and footholds from the rock face and removed the ladders. They used so much dynamite that no entrances remained, only a sheer drop from every point. The bad feeling they left behind quickly transferred itself back to the original sources of conflict. People thought, and said, that – as far as they were concerned – enemies didn’t live in foreign countries: they lived right down the road and on the other side of town.

When the war began, there was plenty of hatred to call on. And once things were rolling, the few who had been neutral were sucked into the action. They became part of it. And then they hated, too.

*

They had three weeks of colds in the house. His theory was
that the aid workers had brought sickness when they’d come to take the orphans away. One night the children got into a fight about something. There was screaming, shouting and crying – a general outpouring of misery and complaint that overwhelmed them all, including him and his wife. Afterwards he was tired to death. He woke up in the middle of the night and got out of bed. His wife turned over, murmuring, ‘What’s wrong?’

He said, ‘I need some air.’ He moved to the window and pulled the cloth aside. A wild, ghostly pallor flooded down from a full moon high in the sky. His hook was on the sill, where he left it every night before going to bed. The light touched it, making it gleam. She hated the hook. It wasn’t that she was afraid of having him hurt her without meaning to if he rolled over in bed or flung out an arm in sleep. She just hated it anyway.

He felt his way downstairs and stepped out into the night. Everything was caught up in the moon’s estranging glamor. He walked into the old orchard and roamed through the twisted alleyways. Long ago there had been a stone fountain near the center of the place, at least he thought he remembered something of the kind from his childhood, when the trees had belonged to a neighboring farm.

He couldn’t find the fountain, nor any trace of stone or pipeline. He stopped walking. It seemed to him that everything was gone. The wonderful light threw a momentary allure over the dreary muddle of ruined landscape and buildings. But there was nothing worth looking at in daylight. Beauty had gone from the world and from their lives.
The long delay of spring, the vanishing of the hope they had been given earlier in the year, made their poverty worse than before. What was left to offer a child like the one who had kissed his hand? When he thought of that sweet, inept gesture, he wanted to weep. But no tears came from him. That was gone, too.

If only they could get through the war – that was what he used to think: if only they could get through it, everything would be all right. But it was beginning to seem to him that nothing would ever be right again.

He kept going to work every morning, as usual. The days were empty, companionless.

Every crumb was counted as they waited for the next hand-out.

The aid workers didn’t come back for another two weeks. When they did, they brought bedding, socks, mittens and food. A soldier who was traveling with them handed over a secret package of coffee, which he and his wife saved as if it were the gold of the fairy tales. Genuine gold was worth hardly anything any more and money was just paper. But coffee could get you out of trouble or buy you a favor. Sometimes coffee could even buy medicine. Cigarettes were also valuable, but not nearly so precious. All the soldiers still had cigarettes and matches. Coffee – even dried out, even ancient – was exquisite luxury.

The next morning their refugee arrived – only one: an old woman whose name and age they were never told because no one knew anything about her. She was simply being pre
served as an example of the aid workers’ goodness and proof that they were acting according to humanitarian principles. They’d given her a number.

She was carried into the house and placed in the center of the only decent downstairs bed they still had.

‘Not there,’ his wife objected. ‘I know these old people. Their bladders work day and night. Put her over there. We’ll rearrange things as soon as we can.’

The woman was shifted to a corner of the room where three of the children had been hanging around, full of curiosity about the aid people. As the workers lowered their burden to the floor, a stream of urine gushed from her; a steamy, stale odor filled the room. The children became hysterical, holding their noses and making sounds that imitated farts. One of the men who had helped to carry her muttered, ‘Christ, not again.’

‘See?’ his wife said. ‘I told you.’ She signed the paper held out to her. As she handed it back, she asked, ‘What can you tell me about her?’

‘Nothing. She doesn’t move but she isn’t paralysed. She’s old. Maybe she’s sick, maybe not.’

‘Does she talk?’

‘She makes noises. That’s all.’

‘We should get extra rations for this. Somebody’s got to keep cleaning her up all the time.’

‘You get what’s written down there.’

‘Well, we’ll do our best, but just look at her. I mean, she isn’t going to last long, no matter what we do for her. It looks like she’s had a stroke, anyway. Did a doctor see her
before you loaded her into that cattle truck?’

‘Doctor?’ both the aid workers repeated. They laughed. One of them said, ‘When was the last time you saw a doctor, Professor?’

The other one said, ‘I expect that would be Dr Houdini you’re referring to – we haven’t seen him around for quite a while.’

The first one said, ‘I guess he’s done a disappearing act.’

After the two of them had left the house, they could still be heard, faintly: laughing as they got back into their opensided van, banged the doors and started the engine.

That evening he helped to move the beds. They had to keep the old woman downstairs, where the smell immediately began to infiltrate everything around her. His wife said, ‘We’ll never be able to get rid of her.’

He answered in a low voice, ‘They’re sure to move her along soon. We aren’t qualified to deal with her.’

‘How qualified do you need to be to clean up piss and shit?’

‘In a real hospital they might be able to get her speech back.’

‘Oh my God, what for? Who’s got the time for that sentimental garbage? Look around you. It’s the children who need what this old biddy’s using up. She’s had her chance. And she had more than most – she must be a hundred if she’s a day. She’d better stop making that noise.’

‘She probably doesn’t know she’s doing it.’

‘It makes me feel like hitting her over the head.’

‘Don’t forget: we’re lucky to have a refugee with us.’

‘You don’t have to do the washing. Listen. There she goes again. Well, she can just lie in it. I’m not doing anything more till the kids are in bed.’

As he had feared, they went into a cold snap. It lasted nearly a week. All doors and windows had to be shut tight against the bitter daytime winds and the freezing nights. The old woman whined and groaned and the house reeked of her uncontrollable bodily emissions. Her mind might have been blocked by some unknown inner disaster, but the rest was without restraint. Whatever went in, came out. The stink reached every part of the house. After a while they began to taste it in the food they ate and even in the water they drank.

‘She’s as strong as a horse,’ his wife said. ‘She’ll last for ever.’

‘Hush,’ he whispered.

‘What for?’

He’d been told that people who were immobile and unable to talk – even people who were in a coma – could sometimes still hear. If the woman knew what they’d been saying from her arrival onward, she’d be in a state of anguish.

Outside the house the air was clear. He stayed away from home, going in to town or moving farther out into the country and working as long as he could, despite the cold.

Spring came at last, the real spring. Children who had hidden indoors for the past months came out to play. They
formed gangs. Sometimes they took part in the ancient circle games and dances he’d grown up with. When he heard their voices from far away, he was reminded of his own childhood, his parents and the world that had been safe and happy before everything was smashed to pieces. But more often the games became like rehearsals for military activity. The gangs had leaders and bullies; the girls were excluded or beaten into submission. He could see the time coming when the older girls would be turned into whores until they became pregnant, after which their parents would throw them out of the house. And by that time the boys would have armed themselves with weapons to use against rival gangs; they’d already found tunes for the words they shouted as they strode back and forth, acting important. He didn’t like to see them marching: it made him think that everything was going to happen all over again. But, of course, it would.

He concentrated on the vegetable garden, using the children as guards. They understood that their presence next to the newly dug and planted rows was essential. They never left the house except in a group, knowing that if anything were found to be missing at home, he or his wife would punish them for it after their return.

Everyone stole. His main worry, especially during the night, was the food. No matter how they tried to disguise it, anyone could tell that they had plenty now: enough to eat and to save, as well as seeds, bulbs and roots in the ground. Three of their neighbors had similar gardens but you could never have too much and – as his wife pointed out – those
were just the people who would be the first to try out a midnight raid on somebody else because they could always say that the stolen produce had come from their own place.

The trees came into bud. People forgot their desire to have just one object that wasn’t chipped, cracked, worn, torn, broken, mended or secondhand. They’d been given a fresh beginning and their world felt transformed.

The young ones longed for love and adventure while at the same time dealing in corruption and copying all the brutalities of their elders. They were busy trying things out. He took care to remain alert to what his own kids were getting up to, but it was impossible to keep all of them under control.

He couldn’t even hold them down when they were at home. He used to step into the house to hear whispers and smothered, explosive giggles coming from the direction of the old woman’s bed. She’d be whimpering and moaning as usual. And he’d find them pushing things into her mouth, pinching her, driving pins into her arms, pretending to stab her in the eyes with a stick. ‘What are you doing?’ he’d roar at them, and they’d scatter. But they were always drawn back. In their minds she wasn’t human or even animal; she was an object – an object of amusement. Their favorite trick was to make her mew and cry in patterns, as if she were singing a song.

He’d tried to explain things to them until he realized the true horror: they understood perfectly well that the old woman could still feel pain and that their actions were hurting and frightening her. That was what they liked. That was the essence of the enjoyment.

If they behaved that way when they were young, what was their generation going to be like later? How would they treat ailing parents and grandparents or – when they had them – their own children? They had no respect for the weak and helpless: the old, the newly born, the sick, injured, crazed or blind. They accepted no responsibility for any of that. The young had been shown that even the strongest could die. They could see no point in prolonging the lives of the second-rate.