I'm With the Bears (15 page)
Crack-bang!
A crater appears two meters from Bruno's head, the dirty-laundry sky fills with crows and croaks, the horses shy and the chickens go mental. Incrediblyâor notâBruno hasn't noticed his danger, and carries on fiddling with the window-catch, slack-jawed. I notice that I'm shrieking at a lanky militiaman whose crucifix swings loose: “He hasn't got a
weapon
he's
harmless
don't fire don't
fire
!”
The Crucifix guy looks around at the leader, Wyatt.
Wyatt's watching Bruno, along his handgun's line of fire.
“My husband has Alzheimer's,” I plead. “We don't keep guns.”
My heartbeat's throbbing so hard my chest cavity feels bruised.
After a sick moment the leader, Wyatt, nods: “Stand down.”
Now I snarl at the Crucifix gunman: “You almost
killed
him!”
“Fat chance.” The smallpox-scarred one sniggers. “Jeez'd miss a cow at ten paces.”
“T'was
forty
paces t'was! An'ya
know
t'was Oshi Whynot.”
Bruno, meanwhile, has wrestled open the window. “Paola! Where were you? Are these drop-outs from IT, here to fix the Internet?”
Feeling shame is stupid, and unfair on Bruno, yet I do.
“We are, Sir,” Wyatt calls up. “Won't take a jiffyâsome joker installed a Californian RBR sequencer, to cut corners. We only use Indian-mades: see you another five years, even on max-hot-tasking.”
Bruno nods once. “Ah. Good. Not before time.”
He shuts the window and retreats into the blank dark.
Feeling gratitude is stupid, too: especially as the siphoning tube goes limp. That's it. Our fuel's gone. What now? Back to firewood, peat: back to the Middle Ages, step by step.
I'm empty. “How do you people sleep at night?”
Wyatt approaches me. “Professor, I have a gift and some news.”
“Yeah? I'll take five hundred liters of paraffin, please.”
“First, the gift.” From a pocket he removes a tiny clear plastic box.
My fingers recognize the box first. “Two spearmint Tic-Tacs?”
“Mercy beans.” The soldier says it like it's nothing special.
“Take your âgift' back. I don't need suicide pills. We'veâ”
“Chuck them if you want, but you should hear the news.”
“We've survived this long: we'll surviveâ”
“The Cordon's shifting, Professor: eighty clicks south.”
His soft voice cushions the impact of the meaning: at first.
Something plastic falls at my feet: Wyatt stoops for the box.
“The District,” I'm saying, “won't abandon the Peninsula!”
Wyatt straightens up and sighs. “Some planner at JÄ«ndà n-TransUral in Petersburg or Beijing surveyed their six thousand acres on a sat-map; reckoned,
Well,
that's
not worth the ammo or the manpower
; and it's a done deal. Our Government gets told, not consulted about it.”
“So we're just being thrown to the wolves?”
“Yer'd stand more chance,” Jeez the Crucifix sniffs, “if
t'was
wolves an'not Jackdaws, Ol'lady.”
The steep heath, the sloughing sea, the horizon's a ghostly line.
“So . . . at our ages,” I'm saying, “my husband and I are refugees?”
Wyatt holds my eye. “The New Cordon will have an immigration bar.”
“This country has been our home for a quarter-century.”
“It's not to do with citizenship or ethnicity: it's your age.”
I unwrap this riddle and find something terrible. “No: no. They can't keep out the
elderly
?”
Wyatt looks away and looks back. Calvin used to do that, before breaking bad news. “Thirty-five years old for men, Professor, and thirty for women. They have shiny new Chinese chromo-testers at the checkpoints: one dab of saliva and they know your age to within seven days.”
“And . . . so . . . well . . . what are
we
supposed to do?”
Ever so gently, Wyatt puts the Tic-Tac box into my hand.
Bruno's snoring, snottily. He's catching a cold. I file his toenails, discolored like rhino horn, and the daylight dies. I usually go to sleep with the sunâonce the solar-lamp dies, there's no spareâbut tonight I take it to my study. The Siphoners left a grim prognosis after they'd vanished down the track. Finbar and Annâin their late fifties, also unwanted by the New Cordonâdropped by afterwards. We hatched plots to keep our spirits up. Finbar has one final tranche of fuel for his boat, stored in an old copper mine-shaft: but get real, where would we go? Drift up to the Faroes, like a Rapturist in his faux-medieval coracle, trusting in the breath of Providence? What about Bruno? What would
I
be if I just abandoned him? Wyatt was right: the one place the Jackdaws won't find us, and that's inside a mercy bean. What will I do? Sip nettle tea, retrieve my reading glasses and retreat into volume three of Avril Bredon's and Bruno Thoms' best-known contribution to the now-extinct discipline of anthropology.
Where was I?
Well, summer passed, and autumn rusted the valleys. Raids by bandits over the mountain border had ruined the harvest in that region, so the Emperor decided that before winter closed the passes, he would raise a mounted army to root out this scourge. Every village in the Country of Youth was to send ten men, and now that Haji's household consisted of one, he was the first to be chosen. When Haji's grandmother, safe and warm in her distant cabin, learnt the news, she told Haji this: “The Emperor's a fool. Those mountains could swallow up twenty armies, and when the snows come, it's worse. Here's how you survive. Ride the dun mare to war, but take her colt along, too. At the river on the border, kill the colt. Do this, and with God's grace you'll come home alive.”
A horseman in the Emperor's army, Haji heeded his grandmother's advice. At the border crossing, he slit the colt's throat, ignoring the mare's grief and his fellow-soldiers' bafflement. The army rode into the hostile mountains, but the bandits melted away. After three days' riding, the Emperor's forces were ambushed in a tangled valley. Many of Haji's companions were slain in the storm of crossbolts, but the survivors fought back with discipline, cunning and ferocity, and the Emperor's men finally won that bloodiest of days. That night, however, winter pounced: a screaming blizzard confined the army to their tents and makeshift shelters for a week. The wounded perished, an unlucky few were driven mad, the weaker horses froze to death, and food ran out. On the seventh day the skies cleared, but that unmapped world was smothered in snow. Wolves, crows and probably new groups of bandits were gathering, and nobody knew the road home. Haji now remembered his grandmother's advice and begged the Emperor's aide-decamp to try an idea. Untethering his mare, Haji whipped her hindquarters with an elm switch and shouted, “Away!” The mare trotted off, leading Haji and the aide-de-camp's scout unerringly back to the place she had last seen her colt, at the border of the Country of Youth.
Safe, rested and warm in his palace, the Emperor summoned Haji to his gem-encrusted throne-room. The ruler asked his young subject how he had known the trick with the mare and the slaughtered colt. Haji looked the Emperor in the eye and said, “My grandmother told me, Your Majesty.” The Emperor wanted to meet this wise woman. Haji replied, “That's a little difficult, Your Majesty. When she reached her sixtieth birthday, I persuaded her to go into hiding in the forest.” Uproar broke out and Haji found a knife at his throat. The scandalized Emperor asked if Haji were not afraid for his life, following his confession. “I
am
afraid, Your Majesty,” replied Haji, “but fear or no fear, how could I alter one word? Unless we respect our old people and listen to their wisdom, we damage ourselves and our future more than ten thousand bandits ever could.” The Emperor was silent for a long time. His courtiers awaited his judgment. Haji, calmly, awaited his fate.
“What were the Emperor's words?” teased my old, wrinkled aunt, as she worked her loom,
click-clacketty, click-clacketty, click-clacketty
. “Work it out yourself, you young sappy idiot. I'm still here, with a few winters in me yet, aren't I? Look about you: hasn't the Country of Youth become the Country of All Ages?”
by Wu Ming 1
I. The road from Parasacco to Medelana, November 16
A persistent dream. I haven't finished my thesis, but continue to collect personal reminiscences from ancient parish priests and
basapilét
, bigoted old peasant women dressed in black. With my tape recorder as my constant companion, minor roads take me up to little gravel paths and from there onto muddy little tracks that lead from one cottage to another. I return to Ferrara with a rucksack full of unconnected stories, of a time when the missal was still in Latin, the priest stood with his back to you, and the chalice of wine was offered up
pro vobis et pro multis effendetur
, for the remission of sins (yours and those of others).
In the dream, I am twenty-five years old and I have to get a move on, stop “waffling.” The deadline is just round the corner and my supervisor is getting impatient.
âWill you just make your mind up what it is you want to do! You've interviewed a hundred people, you must have some idea by now what to write about. You've read Portelli's book, you've read the one by Bermani
and
Montaldi's. What are your thoughts on memory as a source for history? Have you drafted an outline? Have you drawn all the appropriate comparisons?
A recurring dream. Each time I find myself at the bottom of a valley shrouded in mist, as intrepid as the first historian on Earthââshe who tells the mother of all storiesââand I discover that some other character has passed through before me, the interviewee is exhausted, she has talked for hours and can't take any more.
ââYou could've come to some agreement,
ragazòla
, if you'd both come at the same time I could've said all this stuff just the once . . . I talked about when I went to St. Peter's, about the pope who came to Consandolo . . .
Adès a son stufa, a voi andar a lèt
. I'm fed up now and just wanna go to bed.
Come to some agreement! It sounds easy, but I don't know who this creature who precedes me is. I only discover (I later discover) who it is in another dream but the dreams themselves are separate, watertight episodes. What I learn in one dream doesn't flow into the next.
But then, dreams are not the real world. No pope has ever been to Consandolo.
I have to rediscover, every single time, that the Writer always precedes me.
I wake up with a start, in the freezing cold. The word that pops into my head is in dialect:
Ingrottita
.
Ingrottita
?
Ingrottirsi,
in the infinitive form. This verb doesn't exist in Italian.
Ingrutìras
, meaning: your body stiffening up in the freezing cold, as you lie curled up in your sleeping bag.
It's like a tiny explosion, a word reaching me from my childhood, seeping into my head. The language of my mother reaching out to me.
Here I am again,
sui mont ad Parasac
, on the mountains at Parasacco.
The mountains at Parasacco don't really exist. There's no high ground at Parasacco. No high ground anywhere nearby. Even before the Crisis the lowlands of the Po Basin were very low-lying indeed, a bowl of fog in a gray landscape. The “mountains” of Parasacco are two little bumps, mounds covered in weeds, in what was once a private courtyard. The expression is just an old witticism, a cliché from before the Crisis.
ââWhere did you go on holiday? asks one chap.
ââ
Sui mont ad Parasac
! replies the other, by which he means nowhere.
Peasant sarcasm.
Parasacco was a village of few houses, on a bend in the road that wound its way through clumps of trees to the south of Via Rossonia, just before the turning to Medelana. Via Rossonia went all the way to the Abbazia di Pomposa. Travelers on foot, however, would walk down to the
comune
of Ostellato, admiring on the way the bleak landscape with its network of access paths across the marshlands.
Medelana, already a ghost hamlet at the end of the last century, was now little more than a fleck of gray-green spittle on the horizon. When I was a young girl,
andar a Madlana
ââto go to Medelanaââmeant going to watch porno films. There was a cinema in Medelana that my schoolmates used to go to even when they were under age. Sad little group pilgrimages. Still images projected onto a sheet, one after the other in sequence to create the illusion of movement: cock in, cock out, cock in, cock out, a little squirt and then it started all over again. Then the cinema closed down. Every now and then they reopened it for a bingo night, though less and less frequently, and in the end it was shut down completely.
Not far away was the defunct factory that used to produce the moulds for decoysââfor hunting. Plastic ducks. The main wall collapsed, the rain ruined the large containers and the web-footed imitations escapedââso, plastic ducks on the San Nicolò canal, ducks on the branch of the Po at Volano. In my day, this part of the river was not as high or as wide. After the Crisis it rose by at least a yard and became wider. Now it really is a major river.
There it goes, the invincible armada of ducks on its way to the sea. Who knows where the ones that don't get stuck in the reed beds will end up? Maybe, a hundred years from now, they'll reach the
Grande Macchia
, the Big Dump, a vortex of rubbish that floats around in the Pacific and sooner or later picks up every bit of plastic that ends up in the water. I picture the
Macchia
in the sun: a calm, aromatic expanse. Sun-kissed. Photodegrading.
Ducks, here I come. My eagerness to be on the move is growing,
com al canarìn d'Alvo
ââlike Alvo's canary.