The Gradual (2 page)

Music was music to me, whatever it was called. But I loved my parents, and was not a natural rebel.

One warm day in summer, early on, when I was about seven years old, I made a simple discovery that indirectly initiated the events that eventually were to change my life.

Because of the confining circumstances of wartime, and because I was still a small child, I had almost no curiosity about the outside world. I was in the house for most of the time. When I went outside it was usually in bad weather – cold, murky, clouded, windy. It was the same all over Glaund, except in the mountains, where it was worse. The roads were often flooded with deep puddles because of damaged drains, or they were made dangerous by the uncleared heaps of rubble. Several times when I was a boy I grazed my knees or shins on pieces of metal or broken masonry jutting out from the ground. People in Errest walked with their heads down, watching where they put their feet, incurious about the world around them.

I was no different. I hurried to and from school, I usually walked after dark to the club where I played. I neither knew nor cared much about what was outside my immediate environment.

On the day in question I was wandering around the top floor of our house when I noticed that the ladder leading to the roof loft had been left down. The loft was often used by my parents, so the existence of the ladder was not a surprise, but they normally slid it up and out of sight. My parents were not around and my brother was downstairs somewhere. I climbed slowly.

It was not forbidden territory – advised-against would be more accurate because my parents rarely forbade anything. They always persuaded Jacj and myself, explained things to us. That was their way. I knew that the roof area was a risky place to be because some of the incoming shells were designed to explode in the air. Many houses had been destroyed from the top down and past damage to our house had been caused by air bursts. But on that day there had been no siren and in fact we were going through one of those periods when there was a lull.

I knew my father kept several boxes of sheet music in the loft and I was curious to find out what was there. The loft space was unlit, but a large window set into one of the sloping roofs let in sunlight. The air under the roof was warm, smelling musty and dry. Dust lay on sheafs of manuscript paper, some of which had written notes, but most of which did not. Old instrument cases and a wooden music stand were leaning in a corner.

I found the printed sheet music in a large box but as soon as I started looking I realized it was not going to be the sort of music I liked. There were vocalists, trumpeters, guitarists, male voice choirs, female crooners – I had been hoping to find something I could learn and play, but none of this appealed to me. I was just a small child. I did not know anything. Thinking back, I can’t help wondering what was really there in that box – perhaps some of it might be valuable now. Well, I lost interest and moved away.

I went to the window and because there was an old chest beneath it I was able to clamber up to look at what was outside.

For the first time in my life I had a clear and almost panoramic view of the sea. Not just the grey beaches a short distance from our house, where pallid waves broke listlessly on the polluted shingle. Those I saw every week. That sea had never interested me. It had an oily quality, a sense of tired menace, a worn-out and unwanted threat, like a deep puddle where broken pieces of machinery might lurk dangerously beneath the surface. I was used to its desultory noise, its acidic smell, its old poisoned state. I saw the movement of the tides, and occasionally the sea’s different moods when the wind was high, but it was a familiar feature of my everyday life and it had never engaged me. I could rarely see much of it because the air was so dirty.

From the loft window all was different. The air must have been unusually clean that day, with the wind blowing from the south. It did that sometimes, bringing rain or snow in the cold months when it encountered our chill atmosphere, but what I saw that day was a still, shining surface, bright golden where the sun burnished it, mostly blue or grey elsewhere. It dazzled me. I had not realized it was there, that it was like that.

Nor had I known before this moment that there were islands out there. I could see three of them, high irregular shapes made to seem dark because of the surrounding brightness. Fascinated by the sight of them, and completely forgetting why I had climbed up to the loft in the first place, I stared across at those islands. It was impossible to make out details on them because of the distance, but I was certain there would be people living there. Houses and towns must be there but because of the cleanliness of the sea around them their houses and towns would not be like mine, could not be.

I leaned against the grimy glass, gazing and wondering, trying to imagine what it would be like to live in a small place, one surrounded by the sea, one without bomb damage, a steelworks and a mess of factories. I had only the vaguest idea what island life might be like. I had never before thought islands might be real, might be out there, in the sea and visible from the house I lived in.

My father, coming up the stairs from lower in the house, reached the top landing and noticed that the loft ladder was still down. He climbed up to find me.

‘If a drone came over you might be hurt,’ he said gently, as he stood beside me at the window. ‘You have seen how much the roofs are damaged, even if the explosion is not on top of us. We have to survive, all of us. You have to survive the war, Sandro.’

The loft would always be a vulnerable place. Lower down in the house the walls were reinforced as best they could be, the windows sealed with anti-blast laminate. Nothing could protect a house against a direct hit, but these were a precaution against a shell falling a street or two away.

‘I was looking at those islands,’ I said. ‘Can we go across and visit them?’

‘Not at present, not while the war goes on.’

‘Do people live over there?’ I said, pointing with my hand. My father said nothing. ‘Who are they? Do they have music too?

‘Come on down, Sandro.’

That was the end of the adventure, such as it was. I had glimpsed a distant view I had not known before: a shining sea, the bulking of unnamed islands and the possibilities they enigmatically suggested. I knew nothing of them, but the sight of them was alone enough to charge my imagination. The sounds of waves broke around me, wild ocean winds blustered, tall trees bent on shorelines and high mountains, and there were foreign voices in the towns.

I felt within me unexplained images of beaches, reefs, harbours, lagoons, ships’ sirens, violent gales, the cries of seabirds, the suck of a tide moving back over shingle.

I wrote a little piece for the piano, trying to transcribe to real music the delicate and confusing sounds inside my mind. It did not work out as well as I wanted it to, but to this day I think of it as my first full composition. I have not played it for many years.

By the time I was fourteen all my plans of becoming a professional musician had to be put aside. The war continued with no apparent conclusion in sight. Militarily it had become a stalemate. An arranged cease-fire brought an end to the bombing of towns, but our lives were still disrupted. The cease-fire was only temporary at first, but it was better than nothing and as the months went by it did seem to hold. Temporariness turned slowly into a feeling of permanence. The political and economic disputes remained – we heard about border infringements, mineral rights disputes, arguments about access to water sources, there was an apparently intractable row about reparations, and of course beneath it all was a clash of political ideology.

The main consequence was that a treaty was drawn up, but not a treaty for peace. The war itself, the actual fighting, was to be continued abroad. The great frozen continent at the southern pole of the world, which was called Sudmaieure, was uninhabited, deemed to be valueless terrain and was appropriated as a pitch for a standing war. Young people were drafted into the military in increasing numbers, shipped south, and made to stand on the pitch and fight for their masters.

No one therefore made the mistake of thinking that because our homes were no longer under attack the war had ended and we were at peace. Everyone realized that it would take years, perhaps decades, to return to that. However, the fabric of civilian lives might at least now be repaired. So many cities had been damaged, houses lost, factories and infrastructure destroyed – rebuilding work began. Ordinary people tried to resume their former lives.

The letter Jacj dreaded most arrived one day. The recruiting of young men and women had redoubled. He threw the letter on our breakfast table for us to read. He was given a date by which he must report for a medical examination. Assuming his health was acceptable he would be drafted immediately. He would be sent south to fight for the honour of our country, and had been pre-selected for something called the 289th Battalion, an active service unit.

Jacj and I often played duets together. Sometimes I accompanied him on the piano, but most often we simply stood side by side with our violins, quietly playing. One day, when we had finished, Jacj said, ‘Sandro, we need to talk.’

He led me to his bedroom, which was on the top storey of the house, and closed the door securely behind us. His pet cat, Djahann, a forest cat, mostly white and long-haired, was asleep on his bed. He sat beside her, pressed his hand lightly on her neck then teased her gently under the chin as she raised her head, large green eyes blinking.

‘I’ve got to join up,’ he said. ‘There’s no way out of it.’

‘When will it be?’

‘Next week.’

‘So soon?’

‘You saw the letter that came,’ he said. ‘That was the third one. I hid the others as soon as they arrived. I destroyed them.’

He told me then some of what he had been doing to try to avoid the draft. The anti-war group he belonged to had various strategies for avoidance, or at best for delay. The group mostly consisted of teenagers like himself, all dreading the call-up. He had tried all their ideas: begging for medical notes, claiming educational commitments, obtaining a letter from his tutor. The response from the army authorities had been implacable. Jacj said that going into hiding was the most desperate method, tried by many young conscripts he knew.

‘All were discovered,’ he said. ‘These people know where to look. It’s useless trying to escape them.’

‘But Dad said—’

‘I know. But in the end I realized that trying to hide only made things worse. It’s the coward’s way.’

I knew my father had arranged for a close friend from his days at university to take Jacj in. He and his wife had a farm in a remote village high in the Glaundian mountains – Dad said the escouades, the recruit squads sent out by the military authorities to find draft dodgers, were rarely seen in the mountains. Jacj would be safe there.

‘It’s not being a coward to oppose war,’ I said.

‘Then how long would I hide from the escouades? A few days? A few months? The rest of my life on a farm in the mountains?’

He said that he had made a decision. He believed that under international law the war was illegal – it was cruel, it had killed many thousands of innocent civilians, it had no social worth, it had no moral justification. Hostilities would have to be brought to an end soon, and in the meantime he would yield to the draft. There was little any young recruit could do alone, but at the least he would learn the system from the inside, gain and collect evidence, and one day after he returned to civilian life, and had completed his law studies, he would be able to act.

We were two boys: I was fourteen, Jacj barely eighteen. The draft was more than just a vague threat to me: I knew that in four more years my turn would come. To me, Jacj’s plan seemed, for a short time at least, to be brave and workable.

Jacj lifted Djahann from the bed, her legs drooping. She was still half asleep. He let her spread out on his lap, purring. He stroked her back, played with her paws, tickling the pads behind her claws in a way she loved.

‘She’s my priority, Sandro,’ he said. ‘Will you look after Djahann for me, until I’m back?’

We both fell silent, staring at the cat. She rolled on her back, raising her paws towards him.

A week later I walked down to the centre of Errest with Jacj, where he was to report to the recruitment building. Our parents, tearful but supportive, stayed at home. Following instructions, Jacj carried no luggage, but he was allowed one luxury. The letter had suggested a book, a photograph, a diary. Jacj had decided to take his violin, and it was strapped across his back.

We came to a line of white plastic tape, forming a barrier in front of the building. Here we said goodbye: too young to show the emotion we felt, too old not to feel it. We mocked a couple of brotherly punches, then he turned away and headed for the building. Halfway across the concourse a uniformed soldier directed him instead towards a grey-painted bus that was parked to one side. It had windows, but they were silvered against the chance of people being able to see inside. I waited for a while, watching other young recruits shepherded on to the same vehicle, but I was finding the scene depressing. I headed for home.

A few minutes later the bus was driven along the street past me. It left behind a cloud of oily black smoke.

A few days later my parents received an official letter from the Staff Strategy Office in Glaund City – this was known to everyone as the headquarters of the military junta. The letter was signed by Jacj himself, as if he had written it, but the countersignatures of two junta officers revealed the true source of the letter. The letter confirmed that his battalion was being sent to join a large operational division. Because of the conditions of war he would be unable to contact us until he returned to this country.

At the end of the letter there was an extract from something called an Article of War, which imposed secrecy and confidentiality on all the next of kin of serving troops, but it added that his family would be notified immediately the 289th Battalion was released from active duty.