Shikasta (25 page)

I found Ranee with a group she had saved from the whirlpools not far from the frontier. I asked if I might travel with her, so that I could make contact as I had to, and she agreed. So I went with her. Her charges were as stunned, as lost to their selves, as poor Ben and Rilla. But they did seem slowly to improve, while Ranee talked to them in a low steady compelling voice, as a mother talks a child up out of a nightmare, soothing and explaining.

INDIVIDUAL EIGHT

Her type and situation were endemic on Shikasta, repeating themselves over and over again, and this had been so ever since inequalities of position, and expectation, first appeared. Because females were at risk, needing help during the time their offspring were small (I repeat obvious facts, since basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked), because of this dependency of women, they have at all times found themselves in positions where they had no alternative but to become a servant.

A noble word. A noble condition.

In Shikasta a race dominant in one epoch may be subservient in the next. A race or people in a condition of slavery in one time or place may within a few decades become masters of others. The roles of the females have adjusted accordingly, and whenever a people, a country, a race, is
down
, then its females, doubly burdened, will be used as servants in the homes of the dominating ones.

Such a female, often to the detriment of her own children, whom she may even have to abandon, may be the prop, the stay, the support, the nourishment of an entire family, and perhaps for all of her life. For her
working
life, for such a servant may be turned out in old age without any more than what she came with. Yet she may have been the bond that held the family together.

An unregarded if not despised person, someone at least considered inferior, and thought of not so much as an individual as a role – a
servant:
but this female in fact being the centre of a family, its point of balance – it is a situation that has been recreated over and over again, in every time, every culture, every place …

The example of it that was my concern occurred in an island at the extreme west of the Northwest fringes. It had been, for centuries, a poor place, much exploited by other countries.

A family priding itself on its ‘blood', but without much money, employed a poor girl from the village. Because of economic conditions, marriage was never easy on the island, but the reason this girl did not marry, never even considered it, was that she was emotionally absorbed into the needs of this family by the time she was fifteen. She cleaned the house – a large one – did the cooking, and looked after the children as they were born. She worked as hard as any slave ever did, and accepted low wages, because she knew the family was not rich, and because she had never been taught to expect much – and because she loved them. She would spend a month's wages on a toy for a child or a dress for a loved little girl.

Several times mother and father quarrelled, and separated: then she looked after the children, held things together until the parents were united again.

The children, five of them, grew up while she grew old. They left home and the island for other countries. The two now old parents were in a large house, increasingly rickety, alone with nothing in common but memories of having had a family. They decided to emigrate. One evening they told their servant, who had been working for them for fifty years, that her services were no longer needed.

They took off, leaving her to clean and lock up the house, which was to be sold, and walk back to the village where she now had no tie but a widowed sister, who grumblingly offered her a home. The servant had nothing at all, only her clothes, and these were mostly cast-offs given her by the family.

It took months for her to understand what had happened to her. She had never seen herself as exploited, as badly treated. She had loved the family, collectively and as individuals, and their lives had been her life. They had not loved her, but she believed they had ‘in their way'. She had often thought them careless, thoughtless: but they had charmed her, delighted her! A kiss from one of the little girls, a smile from ‘the lady' and ‘I don't know what we would do without you!' – this had seemed enough.

She was numbed, low in spirits, and subject to crying fits ‘for no blessed reason I can see'.

The sister gossiped indignantly about the treatment of her sister. A young woman in the village who had aspirations to journalism wrote up the story, and it appeared in a local newspaper, and was later reprinted in a big newspaper on the neighbouring island.

The servant was brought even lower by these events. She dreaded that the family might think her ungrateful.

She received a reproachful letter from the parents, now on an island where it was sunny, and where because of economic conditions, servants were plentiful. Her distress became known in the village. The same young woman who had
written the article, and who saw a possibility that her promising career might be halted, discussed the matter with a lawyer. The sister, hearing of this, went to her own lawyer: the island was famed for its litigiousness, like all areas that have been kept poor and exploited by others.

The servant found herself being snarled and growled and wrangled over, while she remained passive, not knowing what had happened or how.

She wrote an incoherent letter to her former employers, full of phrases like ‘I didn't know anything about it!' They did it without telling me.'

Now they took advice from a lawyer. This ought to have been Taufiq, for, properly handled, the case would have exposed a good many areas of exploitation. He would have pointed out, for instance, that this situation, the woman working for any number of years in the most intimate service of a family, only to be dismissed with as little consideration as would be given to an animal, and less, in some cases, was at that time prevalent – and he would have been able to cite a dozen countries, bringing witnesses of several races and cultures.

A case did take place, but it was of the kind that onlookers find distasteful, embarrassing, a conflict of self-interest and dishonesties, with no real focus or point to it.

My responsibility did not go further than the servant herself: an old friend, though of course she did not know it, and two of the sisters, who were remorseful over what had happened. They had never thought of the old servant, except in sentimental terms, since they had left home, but the newspaper article and emotionally self-pitying letters from their parents made them think again. Both were open to better influences, which I supplied, and arranged their future accordingly.

As for the servant, her distress was acute. She felt in the wrong, and wronged. Her life with her sister was doing neither of them any good; she soon died.

I put her in the care of Ranee, in Zone Six, for she was already game for re-entry into Shikasta for ‘another try'.

While engaged in these tasks, I was more and more concerned with the problems of reporting adequately: having so recently been tutor to individuals who had volunteered for service on Shikasta during its last and terrible phase, I was able to contrast their expectations and imaginings of Shikasta with the reality.
Facts
are easily written down: atmospheres and the emanations of certain mental sets are not. I knew that my notes and reports were being read by minds very far indeed from the Shikastan situations. I therefore devised certain additional material, to supplement my reports.

ILLUSTRATIONS: The Shikastan Situation
[On his return from Shikasta, Johor offered the records some sketches and notes made in excess of his mandate. He believed that, as is recorded above, students of this unfortunate planet would find it helpful to have illustrations of the extremes of conduct produced by such a low concentration of SOWF. Emissary Johor tended almost to apologize for these sketches, which he admitted he had written, sometimes, for his own use, to clarify his mind, as well as to assist others. For our part, we have to point out – and we do this with Emissary Johor's full permission – that Johor had been within the Shikastan influences for some time when these sketches were made, and these are influences which conduce to emotionalism.
Archivists
.]

In the extreme western island of the Northwest fringes (mentioned already in the case of Individual Eight), which, as has been said, suffered every kind of conquest, settlement, and invasion, and this over many centuries and by so many different peoples, a period of poverty intensified to starvation devastated the economy, forced millions into emigration, and intensified deprivation of every sort. A certain youth found himself without work or resources. Except for one. He had been bred in a slum, but grandparents still on the land had kept milk and potatoes supplied to the family, and he had
grown tall, broad, and strong. And stupid. He did not have the wits to emigrate and make a new life for himself. Because of his physique he was recruited into the army of the latest conquerors of the island, given a showy uniform, regular meals, and the prospects of travel. This army, like all those of the Northwest fringes, was much stratified and officered by the class-proud and arrogant, and he was at the bottom of it, with no hope of ever being treated any better than the ruling caste's domestic animals. For twenty years he was sent from one area of Shikasta to another, all parts of a (very short-lived) empire which was soon to crumble but was then at its zenith. The function of this victim was to police a multitude of victims. From the extreme east of the central landmass to the north of Southern Continent I, the poor wretch was set to lord it over peoples belonging to civilizations and cultures older, more complex, more tolerant, and usually more humane, than his own. He was permanently half-drunk: he had drunk too much from childhood, to forget the brutalities of his existence. He had a reddened, usually perspiring face, and a wooden look that expressed his determination never to think for himself: vestigial attempts in this direction had been at once punished, all his life. Sometimes an officer would write to his family on his dictation, and these letters would always include the words: ‘Here you have only to stick your foot out and the blacks clean your boots for you.'

In every country he found himself – and he never knew more about them than their names before he got there – he took every occasion to seat himself in a chair in a public place, with first one boot thrust out, then another, a fatuous, proud, and condescending smile on his face, while some man made shadowy by poverty crouched before him, cleaning his black boots.

He would swagger around the policed areas of cities with a comrade, two gigantic men sometimes almost twice the size of the local people, in scarlet uniforms, braid and medals everywhere, and in one country after another this red face and fatuous smile, the shouted orders and abuse, the contempt and dislike written on the face of the barbarian, became a
symbol of everything that was brutal, ignorant, tyrannical. To them he symbolized empire. And when the empire crumbled, partly because of the extreme dislike the conquered felt for their conquerors, this red-faced ox would remain an image in millions of minds – to be recalled with hatred, and with fear.

As for him, the climates of these territories where he had eaten and drunk too much for twenty years finally gave him a stroke when he was still in his middle years. He was sent home to an island where the poverty was worse than when he had left, and which was simmering with revolt and civil war. He decided to settle in the land of his own land's conquerors, and worked as a porter in a meat market. He married a countrywoman, who had been a children's nurse – eighteen hours a day, six and a half days a week, for her food, and a roof and a pittance. She had never had any prospect of escape but marriage and she was relieved to marry this strong soldier who stood nearly two feet taller than she, swaggering in scarlet, and soon to be pensioned off.

This tiny pension was to her security, a haven; and in fact it did ward off the extremes of poverty, which were exacerbated by his drinking.

There were four children alive from seven born.

The wife and the children would sit in their wretched rooms in the evenings, waiting for him to crash and stumble up the stairs, hoping for the best that could happen, which was that this man would not shout and rage and threaten to hit them, and then weep and sit sobbing himself into a maudlin sleep; but would be in a good mood, and would sit at the head of the table, master of his household, great legs stretched out, his swollen and scarlet face complacent as he told them: ‘In them countries I had only to stretch out my foot and those blacks came fighting to clean my boots.' And, ‘We ‘ad only to show our faces and them black buggers ran for it.'

He died in a paupers' hospital. He sat propped on pillows, his medals pinned to his pyjamas, his great face bursting with apoplexy, his little blue eyes popping from folds of red flesh,
and his last words were: ‘We ‘ad only to show our faces and them black beggars ran for their lives.'

ILLUSTRATIONS: The Shikasta Situation

This particular incident took place in the southern part of Southern Continent I, but it was repeated in a thousand ways during the time the Northwest fringes used an advanced technology to conquer other parts of Shikasta so as to rob them of materials, labour, land. This particular geographical area was well favoured, being high, well watered and wooded, with a healthy dry climate. The soil was fertile. It supported a wide variety of animals. And it was lightly populated by a tribe with a particularly agreeable nature, being peace-loving, good-humoured, laughter-loving, natural storytellers, and skilled in the crafts. All the inhabitants of Southern Continent I were embedded in music: singing, dancing, the making and the use of innumerable musical instruments were the ground of their natures. They lived in balance with their surroundings, taking no more than they were able to put back. Their ‘religion' was an expression of this oneness with the land they lived in, medicine was an extension and an expression of their religion, and their wise men and women knew how to cure the sicknesses of the mind. This admirable state of affairs had not been long-lived: all Southern Continent I had been raided for slaves over centuries by other peoples, but the traffic had recently been stopped, and there had been a period without invaders from outside, or wars among themselves.