In the Country of Last Things (13 page)

“I was hoping you could give me something more definite about William,” I said. “One way or the other.”

Sam shook his head. “Nothing is definite in this place. Considering the possibilities, you should be glad of that.”

“I’m not going to give up hope. Not until I know for sure.”

“That’s your privilege. But I don’t think it would be wise to expect anything but the worst.”

“That’s what the Rabbi told me.”

“That’s what any sensible person would tell you.”

Sam spoke in a jittery, self-mocking voice, skipping from one subject to another in ways that were difficult for me to follow. I had the sense of a man on the verge of collapse—of someone who had pushed himself too hard and could barely stand up anymore. He had accumulated over three thousand pages of notes, he said. If he kept working at his present pace, he felt he could finish the preliminary work on the book in another five or six months. The problem was that his money was running low, and the odds seemed to have turned against him. He couldn’t afford to do the interviews anymore, and with his funds at such a dangerous
ebb, he was now eating only every other day. That made things even worse, of course. The strength was being sapped out of him, and there were times when he became so dizzy that he no longer saw the words he was writing. Sometimes, he said, he would fall asleep at his desk without even knowing it.

“You’ll kill yourself before you finish,” I said. “And what’s the point of that? You should stop writing the book and take care of yourself.”

“I can’t stop. The book is the only thing that keeps me going. It prevents me from thinking about myself and getting sucked up into my own life. If I ever stopped working on it, I’d be lost. I don’t think I’d make it through another day.”

“There’s no one to read your bloody book,” I said angrily. “Don’t you see that? It doesn’t matter how many pages you write. No one will ever see what you’ve done.”

“You’re wrong. I’m going to take the manuscript back home with me. The book will be published, and everyone will find out what’s happening here.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Haven’t you heard of the Sea Wall Project? It’s impossible to get out of here anymore.”

“I know about the Sea Wall. But that’s only one place. There are others, believe me. Up along the coast to the north. Out west through the abandoned territories. When the time comes, I’ll be ready.”

“You won’t last that long. By the time winter is over, you won’t be ready for anything.”

“Something will turn up. If not, well, then it won’t matter to me anyway.”

“How much money do you have left?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere between thirty and thirty-five glots, I think.”

I was flabbergasted to hear how little it was. Even if you took every possible precaution, spending only when absolutely necessary, thirty glots would not last more than three or four weeks. I suddenly understood the danger of Sam’s position. He was walking straight toward his own death, and he was not even aware of it.

At that point, words started coming out of my mouth. I had no idea what they meant until I heard them myself, but by then it was too late. “I have some money,” I said. “It’s not so much, but it’s a lot more than you have.”

“Bully for you,” Sam said.

“You don’t understand,” I said. “When I say I have money, I mean that I’d be willing to share it with you.”

“Share it? What on earth for?”

“To keep us alive,” I said. “I need a place to live, and you need money. If we pooled our resources, we might have a chance of making it through the winter. If not, we’re both going to die. I don’t think there’s any question about it. We’re going to die, and it’s stupid to die when you don’t have to.”

The bluntness of my words shocked us both, and for several moments neither one of us said anything. It was all so stark, so preposterous, but somehow or other I had managed to speak the truth. My first impulse was to apologize, but as the words continued to sit in the air between us, they went on making sense, and I found myself reluctant to take them back. I believe we both understood what was happening, but that did not make it any easier to speak the next word. In similar situations, people in this city have been known to kill each other. It is almost nothing to murder
someone for a room, for a pocketful of change. Perhaps what prevented us from harming each other was the simple fact that we did not belong here. We were not people of this city. We had grown up in another place, and perhaps that was enough to make us feel that we already knew something about each other. I can’t say for sure. Chance had flung us together in an almost impersonal way, and that seemed to give the encounter a logic of its own, a force that did not depend on either one of us. I had made an outlandish suggestion, a wild leap into intimacy, and Sam had not said a word. The mere fact of that silence was extraordinary, I felt, and the longer it went on, the more it seemed to validate the things I had said. By the time it was over, there was nothing left to discuss.

“It’s awfully cramped in here,” Sam said, looking around the tiny room. “Where do you propose to sleep?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “We’ll work something out.”

“William used to talk about you sometimes,” he said, showing the faintest sign of a smile at the corners of his mouth. “He even warned me about you. ‘Watch out for my kid sister,’ he would say. ‘She’s a spitfire.’ Is that what you are, Anna Blume, a spitfire?”

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said, “but you don’t have to worry. I won’t get in the way. I’m not stupid, after all. I know how to read and write. I know how to think. The book will get done much faster with me around.”

“I’m not worried, Anna Blume. You walk in here out of the cold, plunk yourself down on my bed, and offer to make me a rich man—and you expect me to be worried?”

“You shouldn’t exaggerate. It comes to less than three hundred glots. Not even two seventy-five.”

“That’s what I said—a rich man.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so. And I also say this: it’s a goddamned lucky thing for both of us the gun wasn’t loaded.”

That was how I survived the Terrible Winter. I lived in the library with Sam, and for the next six months that small room was the center of my world. I don’t suppose it will shock you to hear that we wound up sleeping in the same bed. One would have to be made of stone to resist such a thing, and when it finally happened on the third or fourth night, we both felt foolish for having waited for so long. It was all bodies at first, a mad crush and tangle of limbs, a splurge of pent-up lust. The sense of release was enormous, and for the next few days we went at each other to the point of exhaustion. Then the pace died down, as in fact it had to, and then, little by little, over the weeks that followed, we actually fell in love. I am not just talking about tenderness or the comforts of a shared life. We fell deeply and irrevocably in love, and in the end it was as though we were married, as though we would never leave each other again.

Those were the best days for me. Not just here, you understand, but anywhere—the best days of my life. It’s odd that I could have been so happy during that awful time, but living with Sam made all the difference. Outwardly, things did not change much. The same struggles still existed, the same problems still had to be confronted every day, but now I had been given the possibility of hope, and I began to believe that sooner or later our troubles were going to end. Sam knew more about the city than anyone I had ever met. He could recite the list of all the
governments of the past ten years; he could give the names of governors, mayors, and countless sub-officials; he could tell the history of the Tollists, describe how the power plants were built, give detailed accounts of even the smallest sects. That he knew so much and could still feel confident about our chances of getting out—that was the thing that convinced me. Sam was not one to distort the facts. He was a journalist, after all, and he had trained himself to look skeptically at the world. No wishful thinking, no vague suppositions. If he said it was possible for us to get back home, that meant he knew it could be done.

In general, Sam was hardly optimistic, hardly what you would call an easy-going person. There was a kind of fury surging up in him all the time, and even when he slept he seemed tormented, thrashing around under the covers as though battling someone in his dreams. He was in bad shape when I moved in, malnourished, coughing constantly, and it took more than a month before he was restored to a semblance of decent health. Until then, I did nearly all the work. I went out shopping for food, I took care of emptying the slops, I cooked our meals and kept the room clean. Later on, when Sam was strong enough to brave the cold again, he began slipping out in the mornings to do the chores himself, insisting that I stay in bed to catch up on my sleep. He had a great talent for kindness, Sam did—and he loved me well, much better than I had ever expected to be loved by anyone. If his bouts of anguish sometimes cut him off from me, they were nevertheless an internal affair. The book remained his obsession, and he had a tendency to push himself too hard with it, to work beyond his threshold of tolerance. Faced with the pressure of organizing all the disparate material he had collected
into something coherent, he would suddenly begin to lose faith in the project. He would call it worthless, a futile heap of papers trying to say things that could not be said, and then spin off into a depression that lasted anywhere from one to three days. These black moods were invariably followed by periods of extreme tenderness. He would buy small presents for me then—an apple, for example, or a ribbon for my hair, or a piece of chocolate. It was probably wrong of him to spend the extra money, but I found it difficult not to be moved by these gestures. I was always the practical one, the no-nonsense housewife who scrimped and fretted, but when Sam came in with some extravagance like that, I would feel overwhelmed, absolutely flooded with joy. I couldn’t help it. I needed to know that he loved me, and if it meant that our money would run out a little sooner, I was willing to pay that price.

We both developed a passion for cigarettes. Tobacco is difficult to find here, and terribly expensive when you do, but Sam had made a number of black market connections while compiling the research for his book, and he was often able to find packs of twenty for as low as one or one-and-a-half glots. I am talking about real, old-fashioned cigarettes, the kind that are produced in factories and come in colorful paper wrappers with cellophane on the outside. The ones Sam bought had been stolen from the various foreign charity ships that had docked here in the past, and the brand names were usually printed in languages we could not even read. We would smoke them after it got dark, lying in bed and looking out through the big, fan-shaped window, watching the sky and its agitations, the clouds drifting across the moon, the tiny stars, the blizzards that came pouring down from above. We would blow
the smoke out of our mouths and watch it float across the room, casting shadows on the far wall that dispersed the moment they formed. There was a beautiful transience in all this, a sense of fate dragging us along with it into unknown corners of oblivion. We often talked about home then, summoning up as many memories as we could, bringing back the smallest, most specific images in a kind of languorous incantation—the maple trees along Miro Avenue in October, the Roman numeral clocks in the public school classrooms, the green dragon light fixture in the Chinese restaurant across from the university. We were able to share the flavor of these things, to relive the myriad incidentals of a world we had both known since childhood, and it helped to keep our spirits up, I think, helped to make us believe that some day we would be able to return to all that.

I don’t know how many people were living in the library at that time, but well over a hundred I should think, perhaps even more. The residents were all scholars and writers, remnants of the Purification Movement that had taken place during the tumult of the previous decade. According to Sam, the succeeding government had instituted a policy of tolerance, housing scholars in a number of public buildings around the city—the university gymnasium, an abandoned hospital, the National Library. These housing arrangements were fully subsidized (which explained the presence of the cast-iron stove in Sam’s room and the miraculously functioning sinks and toilets on the sixth floor), and eventually the program was extended to include a number of religious groups and foreign journalists. When the next government came into power two years later, however, the policy was discontinued. Scholars were not evicted
from their dwellings, but neither were they given any government support. The attrition rate was understandably high, as many scholars were forced by circumstances to go out and find other kinds of work. Those who remained had been pretty much left to their own devices, ignored by the various governments that had come in and out of power. A certain wary camaraderie had developed among the different factions in the library, at least to the extent that many of them were willing to talk to each other and exchange ideas. That explained the groups of people I had seen in the lobby on the first day. Public colloquies were held every morning for two hours—the so-called Peripatetic Hours—and everyone who lived in the library was invited to attend. Sam had met Isaac at one of these sessions, but he generally stayed away from them, finding the scholars to be without much interest except as a phenomenon in themselves—one more aspect of life in the city. Most of them were engaged in rather esoteric pursuits: hunting for parallels between current events and events in classical literature, statistical analyses of population trends, the compiling of a new dictionary, and so on. Sam had no use for these kinds of things, but he tried to stay on good terms with everyone, knowing that scholars can turn vicious when they think they are being made fun of. I got to know many of them in a casual sort of way—standing in line with my bucket at the sixth floor sink, exchanging food tips with the women, listening to the gossip—but I followed Sam’s advice and did not become involved with any of them, keeping a friendly but reserved distance.