The Caryatids (43 page)

"My husband admires you very much," she told him, "and he would like to trust you, but really, John . . . Biserka. Why Biserka?"

"Yes," he said wistfully, "I know. 'Biserka.' "

"Why?"

Montalban looked at the gathered children—they were plunging through the crowd, bobbing like corks.

"My little daughter Mary . . . she lacks for playmates. Mary doesn't have much of a peer group. Why don't you and the kids come and visit us this Christmas? We'll all go to Lily-Pad. Up in orbit. It's very quiet up there. It's private. We'll have a good long chat about certain matters. You and I, especially. We'll iron some things out."

"Why do you want to fly into outer space? That is dangerous."

"The Earth is dangerous. And the sun is also disquieting. If the sun grows seriously turbulent—then Mars wouldn't be far enough away for us. I commissioned some speculations on that topic. We've made some interesting findings. Should the Earth's sun become unstable, it turns out that, with the Earth's present level of industrial capacity, we could escape to the Oort Cloud with a biosphere ark of maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty people. Carrying our ubiquitous support machines, of course." Montalban seemed to expect an answer to this extraordinary declara-tion. "Of course," Inke told him.

"The Earth would become a cinder. Mars would be irradiated. Hot gas would be blasting off the surfaces of Jupiter and Saturn. The only spark of living vitality left in the solar system would be a shiny bubble containing us. Us, a whole lot of our maintenance machinery, and mostly, microbes."

"'Us' John."

"Yes, I mean
us,
Inke." He waved his hand at the funereal crowd.

"You, me, the kids. People. There wouldn't be much of us left, but we would be what there was."

"You really think that way."

"Yes, I have to think that way. It's necessary."

"You're not a conservative businessman, Mr. Montalban."

"No, I'm what people call a 'Synchronic realist.' We choose to look directly at the stark facts of science and history." Montalban sighed. "Of course, whenever one does that in an honest spirit, everything becomes visionary, abnormal, and extreme."

There was a bustle at the graveside. Somehow, amazingly, George had assembled his sisters into a public group.

Since they violently loathed one another, Vera, Sonja, Radmila, and Biserka had all been determined to stand out during the funeral. Rather than wear proper dark mourning clothes—as everyone else was doing—they had each, independently, decided to mark themselves out as free spirits by dressing entirely in white. So the sisters were all in white, iden-tical, grim and chilly and marbled, pale as statues. Making the most of this misstep, George had hastily borrowed a white jacket from an Acquis cadre. He'd ripped off the jacket's political tags, pips, and braiding. So George was also in white. Gathered there at the monster's graveside, two by two with George standing at their head, the women were intensely romantic and pretty. Five siblings holding up the autumn sky.

"This is George's finest hour!" said Montalban, his dark eyes wide. "Look what he's achieved! I could
never
do that! Never! He's got them publicly holding hands! Like when they were kids!" Inke knew fear. "This is not going to work."

"Of course it will work! He's finally got them burying their primal trauma here! Even though they're a broken set, they're violently off-kilter . . . they're letting go of their past! Everybody's watching! The whole world adores them."

Inke knew that the women could not bear up. Flawed from birth, scorched by murder, their hearts were broken: they had failed compre-hensively. They were strong and resolute and intelligent women, but they could not possibly support the roles that fate had forced upon them. They were broken statues for a broken world.

"They cannot bear it," she told him.

"Well, I'm not claiming that this is a perfect solution for them-—peace never lasts forever in the Balkans—but come on, Inke, they're not
stupid!
Look, he's giving them the ceremonial shovels!" It was a local tradition to distribute short-handled shovels at a grave-side, for the convenience of mourners casting dirt.

George was the first to pitch in with his fancy shovel—without another word or gesture, he began heaving damp clods straight into the open grave. He looked thrilled, overjoyed. George meant to finally conceal a lifelong embarrassment. He might have filled that grave all by himself. George was so gleeful and eager about his work that the women, as if helpless, fell into line. Soon they were all throwing dirt into the Earth, earnestly, tirelessly. When each saw that the others were sparing no effort, they really set to. Their arms and legs in ominous unison, the clones labored like iden-tical machines.

Inke stared at the uncanny spectacle. Every spectator was silent and astonished. Vera was the best at the labor. As an engineer, Vera understood dirt and digging. Vera had a pinched, virginal quality—Vera was a fanatic, the kind of woman who had never understood what it meant to be a woman. Vera was efficient and entirely humorless, a robot.

Radmila made it all look so effortless. She handled her shovel like a stage prop. Radmila was the world's most elegant grave digger. It was as if every woman in the world should aspire to spend her evenings filling graves.

Sonja had filled many graves already. Sonja was the one who best un-derstood what she was doing. It was a moral burden to see Sonja at her deadly work. It made one sweat.

"Biserka isn't doing much," Inke said.

"We call her 'Erika' now," said Montalban. "She broke her ribs. She's still in a lot of pain."

"Your Biserka is up to no good. Biserka has never been any good. She would never hold up her own part of anything."

"I like to think of my Erika as a troubled girl from a severely disad-vantaged background," said Montalban. "But, what the heck, yeah, of course you're right, Inke: Biserka is evil."

"Why
her,
John? The other one is the mother of your child."

"Well, I love them all so very dearly, but . . . they're so fierce and ded-icated and selfless and good!

They frankly tire me! Biserka considers her-self a cauldron of criminal genius, but since she's so completely self-absorbed, and so devoid of any interest and empathy for others-—motivated entirely by her resentment and always on the make—well, Bis-erka's certainly the easiest to manage. There's something abject about Biserka. I don't have to negotiate that relationship all the time. Biserka is the one that I fully understand. And she needs me the most. Left alone in a room, Biserka would sting herself to death like a scorpion. She will always need her rescuer. She'll always need a white knight to save her, she'll always be in trouble, and she will always depend on me. That's why I love her the best."

"To love an evil woman means that
you
are evil."

Montalban shrugged. "I like to think of myself as a deeply fallible man who is healthily in touch with his dark side."

Biserka cast a shovelful of dirt over Radmila's beautiful shoes. Rad-mila resolutely ignored her.

"Hey, I think I'm getting a blister!" Biserka whined, straightening and sucking at her fingers. "Why don't we stop all this hard work and let the servants do it?"

"Get out of the way," said Vera.

Biserka stabbed her shovel into a loose mound of dirt and departed the grave in a huff.

"You shouldn't have said that to her," said George mildly:

"Oh, so
she
has a hard life?" snarled Vera. "I've been digging up this island for ten years! Do you smell that fresh air from the hills? I
built
that fresh air."

"You thought
that
was work?" Sonja demanded, incredulous. "Your ten-year vacation on a tropical island? I fought and I suffered! The air was black! The air killed people!" Radmila was silky. "I hope you don't expect us to praise you for worm-ing your way into the bowels of a totalitarian regime."

"Listen to
you,"
shouted Vera. "You're famous and rich! Even your
daughter
is famous and rich."

"Vera, is it my fault that you missed out on life by dressing up like a skeleton?"

"At least I'm not like
her,"
shouted Vera, "a soldier's whore who lifts her skirt for any man with a gun!" Sonja scowled. "Like a
Hollywood actress
is the pillar of chastity? I don't think our dirty skirts are any of your dirty business, Vera."

"They're going to kill each other now," Inke told Montalban. "Those spades can be turned into weapons."

"Any technology is a weapon. Go and stop them now, Inke."

"What, me? I'm a nobody."

"That's what I treasure about you. You're a normal human being, and you've even got normal kids. Go and stop them, Inke. You must. We've got only a few seconds left. Go intervene, make them more normal. Hurry."

"You do it."

"I can't. Don't argue with me. Do it, go." Montalban squeezed her shoulder, gave her a little push. Inke somehow tottered into the midst of the sisterhood. They'd stopped heaving dirt into the grave and were hefting their shovels to bat-ter and slash.

Everyone in the crowd was silently watching the tableau. Even George was staring at her intervention. Yet George seemed unsurprised to see her jumping into the quarrel. He was even daring to hope for the best.

AFTERWORD

THE CARYATIDS: AN INTERVIEW WITH

. . .

MARY MONTALBAN
:
So, yes, clearly, the funeral was a great cathartic moment. My grandmother died twenty-six years ago. The death of that oldest clone freed the Caryatids to take on different lives. ENTERTAINMENT INSIDER
:
We do know a lot about the Caryatids, but we rarely hear much about your aunt Inke.

MM
:
Well, no, of course not. Inke's family, but she's not in the Family-Firm. EI
:
So: What on Earth did Inke do for them?

MM:Inke did something they could never do for themselves. Those of us who know them and love them best—we all know that they're not in-dividuals. The Caryatids are a matched set—a broken, damaged set. Inke knew that, she sensed it. So—there at the funeral, in public—Inke convinced them that they should exchange their burdens. They could choose to abandon their own roles, and play the roles of the others in-stead.

EI:Because Radmila was heartbroken. Sonja was defeated. Vera was hiding in some forest . . . MM:Yes, they were miserable, but since they weren't quite human, they did have other options. If they could see beyond despair, they could hold up
one another's
burdens instead of breaking under their own.

EI:Cooperating. Like caryatids changing positions as they hold up some building. "Caryatids" being female sculptures that support build-ings on their heads. From ancient Greek architecture. MM:I can see you've been studying.

EI:
Caryatids,
that's not exactly a common title for an artwork. MM:Iknow—but it all goes back to the ancient Greeks, doesn't it? The Greeks were the first to write

"history."

EI:Ancient history seems to mean a great deal to your Family-Firm.

MM:It means. everything. It
is
everything . . . Those ancient Greeks, they would never give women a vote, but piling a building on a woman's head, that was classical behavior for them. EI:So the Caryatids collapsed, and yet, after that . . .

MM:They were all such capable, energetic, serious-minded women. Doing their impossible jobs in unbearable circumstances. Once they changed positions, they revived.

EI:As long as each clone was doing the impossible job that
someone else
should be doing, they each felt like they were on holiday.

MM:Well, of course that is part of their mythos: that elegant, neat solu-tion. They rotated their roles, smooth and easy, without ever missing a beat. But that was a neat solution for us, not for them. We who loved them—the various communities who took them in—in many ways, we made them behave in that way. We forced the issue. We all felt much happier when a new Caryatid arrived to save us from the ugly wreck of the old one. People insisted that they could do the impossible. Because we needed the impossible done. Obviously, it was impossible for them to switch roles without our collusion, but we gave them that because we benefited by it. It was our happy ending, not theirs. EI:Critics say that Sonja was much better at playing Mila Montalban than the actual Mila Montalban. MM:That's a cheap shot at a fine actress, but . . . Well, Mila had no trouble running an Adriatic island resort. Vera blossomed inside a Chi-nese high-tech research camp. The Chinese much preferred her to Sonja. Sometime later Radmila went to China, while Sonja went to the island . . . Once in rotation, they didn't simply bear their burdens in suf-fering, they were able to thrive.

EI:It seems so simple that they could trade existences and end happily.MM: Oh no, no—believe me, nothing
ended.
And
happiness?
It's sheer arrogance for any outsider, any normal person to think that we could solve their problems . . . Nobody ever imposes a solution on those women. It's all I can do just to describe them.

EI:As the scriptwriter, you mean.

MM:Well, as a contemporary media creative, I always wanted to do a classic biopic about my mothers. I mean, to make a cinematic artwork with a linear narrative. A story line with no loose ends, where the plot makes sense. I enjoy that impossible creative challenge. It's impossible because only history can do that for us. Sometimes it takes twenty-five years, even two hundred years to crush real life into a narrative compact enough to understand.

EI:They say that to end with a funeral is the classic sign of a tragedy. Your latest project,
The
Caryatids,
concludes with a funeral.

MM:Well, that's a mother-daughter issue . . . Look, can I be frank here? That narrative is supposedly about my mothers, but as a pop-entertainment product,
The Caryatids
is the ultimate Mary Montalban star vehicle. It's not about them: it's all me. Obviously it's me. I pro-duced it, I directed it, I wrote the script, and I play all of them. I play every major part: I play Radmila, Vera, Sonja, the bit villain part of Bis-erka, I even play the dead grandmother in the glass coffin.