Shikasta (47 page)

It goes without saying that as usual I felt
lacking,
and sat there
with all my emotions rioting around, of no use to anyone.

I couldn't speak, and then he said, It is not difficult to feel love for someone, in the sense that something is called out of you by possibilities. Potentialities.

Her qualities are not the ones you need? I asked. It sounded feebly sarcastic, but I hadn't meant this at all. So he didn't take it like that.

You surely must see, Rachel, that none of us is going to have the things we want. I know that. Very well, then.

You haven't mentioned Suzannah, I said. I didn't think it was Suzannah on your mind. I didn't say anything.

Then he said, Rachel, I want you to listen very carefully. But I do, always.

Good. Listen now. When I and Benjamin leave, I want you to stay here, in this flat, and look after Kassim and Leila. I don't want you to leave here. I want you to remember that I said this.

When I heard what he said, I was engulfed in a sickness. A blackness. It was horrible. I knew that what was happening was terrible. I wanted to grasp what was happening. I felt that I should be absorbing something and I warn't.

I was faint and not seeing well, but I heard him say Rachel, please remember, please.

When I had stopped being faint, he had gone out. He sent the children back in and I went on teaching them.

I have been waiting for George to talk some more with me alone, but while I often sit with him and his visitors, he doesn't talk with me alone.

We heard today that Simon died in the Sudan. Of one of the new viruses. George telephoned from the college on a special permission but Simon was already buried. George and Benjamin and I sat in the living room together, by ourselves. No visitors. It is very hot tonight. We were waiting for Olga, and she came in late, but she had been told already. Then the four of us sat. Olga
is
so worn out, I don't think she felt anything at all. I could see from her face that it was not that she couldn't take it in but that she had a long time ago. The four of us went on sitting there, quietly, until Olga said, It is going to be morning soon. She has gone to bed. George and Benjamin are still sitting in the living room.

George and Benjamin left today for Europe. With a contingent of twenty-four, all delegates from different parts of Africa. Olga and I are here, and the two children. Olga is almost invisible, she floats around. She does go to the hospital, but she comes in early at night and lies down. She has some life in her in the mornings, and she sits in the kitchen with Kassim and Leila and tells them stories about George as a child, and then as he grew up. When she forgets something she looks at me, and I fill in. I see she wants to be sure they know about George. I sit and listen to her, and what she says is quite different from what I remember. I mean, because she is so tired and
gone,
the things she says are halting and flavourless. I sometimes can't believe this is George she is talking about. Then I have to wonder if the things I wrote down about George are lifeless in the same way. Sometimes what she says sounds as if it comes out af a very old dusty book. She repeats anecdotes. She tells them things about George that she knew, and I didn't. She talks and talks and talks about George.

Leila and Kassim sit watching her. They are very attractive children. They are thin, from too little food, wiry, with alive brown faces, straight black hair, soft dark eyes. I contrast them with the children in the Camps and I feel they are precious. Of course that isn't fair to the children in the Camps. Every one of them needs someone to love them. Each one of them.

Suzannah comes in every evening just about supper time. She is very quiet and 
humble.
She is exactly like a dog that hopes it will not be sent away. Yet whenever she comes everyone is kind. Olga is particularly. She sits beside the children at the supper table. She is nice with them, simple and sensible. They like her. I look at her in her loud smart blouse and her commonplace face and her waved hair and I simply cannot believe it.

Olga woke me in the night and said I had to take her to hospital. I rang Suzannah who came with her army car. We took Olga to hospital, and I asked Suzannah to go back and be with the children. Olga was taken to a little room off one of her own wards. There were a lot of bright lights, and doctors and nurses. She said to the chief doctor, Please don't … meaning, don't give me drugs. He works under her usually. He took her hand and smiled and nodded, and nodded at the other doctors and nurses and they all went out and left me with Olga. She was very tired. Her face was grey. Her lips were white. She made a movement with her hand and I held it. She was looking at me from a very long way off. I could see that it was all she could do to breathe. She said, in a loud sudden voice, Rachel. I waited, and waited, and waited. The bright lights battering down. Then she smiled, a real smile, so I knew she was going to die at once, and she said, Well Rachel … in a friendly sort of way. Then she stopped breathing. I closed her eyes after a bit. Before that she had been looking at me. So it seemed. I stayed with her until she was cold. I did not feel any grief because it did not seem to be indicated. Anyway, I don't believe in death. And anyway, I wished I was with her. Then I called a nurse in, and said that if there were any documents to sign, I would have to, because now I was the only member of the family left here. They gave me a cup of coffee and brought me a form to sign. Then I walked home. It was light by then. Suzannah was asleep on the sofa in the living room. That made me like her, because there were six empty beds she could have put herself in. She did not fuss or say anything silly, but made me more coffee and then got the children up and gave them breakfast. We sat together in the kitchen, and I told them that Olga had died, and that I would look after them. And Suzannah too, they asked? And of course I said, Yes. It seemed completely the right thing to say.

I have seen that of course George will marry Suzannah. How was it I didn't see that before? She is a member of the family already. She has been for a long time.

Now George and Benjamin have gone away and Mother and Father are dead, this flat is full of space. I have put Kassim in
George's room, and Leila in Benjamin's room. This is something very important for them. Before they have felt like refugees taken in. But now you can see they feel part of the family. I have given them jobs to do, like keeping the flat tidy, and shopping, and both Leila and Kassim can cook some things. I still haven't sent them to school. I don't know where or how. I have even thought of trying to find Hasan to ask him. Perhaps these children are important the way George was? For all I know Hasan is dead. Over and over again, you think of someone you haven't seen for a time, and then you hear: dead. George didn't leave instructions for the children except that I had to look after them. I cannot possibly teach them all they should know.

Last night Suzannah came for supper, in the way she does, her
eyes
saying she must be asked, but of course ready to leave in a moment if she isn't. As we were talking at supper, the subject of school came up. Suzannah is good at math, so she will give them lessons. Then she said she would take them sometimes with her to her job. She teaches physical culture and hygiene and diet and that sort of thing at one of the Youth Camps. I said No, I didn't want Leila and Kassim influenced by all that. I saw that both the children were looking amused in their polite way. Suzannah said, You must not overprotect these two. I always get furious, inwardly, when she says things. It is her manner. Everything she says has the same quality. Pushy. But it is a result of something I didn't understand, because of not liking her. It is strength that makes her insist on what she thinks. She insists and is too loud because of her experiences. The usual bad ones. She has had to fight for everything. And so she does fight. She was a refugee. She has never even known her real name. The Camp administrator called her Suzannah. She has not had any name but that. She was for six years in a girls' Camp. She taught herself all kinds of things in the Camp. She got the helpers who knew math and hygiene and diet etc. to teach her. She fought her way out.

Suzannah was going to her job as it happens this morning and it would have been sensible to ask her to stay the night. I didn't. I wanted to but I couldn't make myself. I felt taken over by her. So
she went home, leaving just in time for the curfew. I felt guilty. When I was helping the children to go to bed, Kassim said, Rachel, are you trying to protect me and Leila from things we have already experienced? I don't know very much about them. I don't ask them, because it must be painful, and if George did tell me I wasn't listening. Perhaps they want to talk about it and I don't let them. I will but give me time.

People are always coming here asking for George but not nearly so much. Like a stream's steady current suddenly reducing its flow. And that makes me wonder. For everything has always seemed so haphazard, the people coming, and how they came, it always being so difficult, but now he is not here, only a few come. I am being careful. Benjamin said I must be on the lookout for informers and spies. How do I know when a person is a spy? I have been left to manage much more than I can. I must be making bad mistakes I suppose.

Yesterday Raymond Watts came. Of course I am careful of him. But why is he still here? George was always telling people to go here and go there, but he didn't tell anyone to stay here. Late in the evening some boys from Holland came in. They got here in the usual crazy way, hit and miss. Suzannah was here. She made a sign at me and beckoned me outside. Of course they saw this. I suppose she imagined that they didn't. She ‘whispered' to me that I should be careful of them. They heard, because they left at once. I asked Suzannah how she knew. She said, When one has had certain experiences, one senses these things. So I asked her about Raymond Watts, and she said, Oh he is all right now.

Raymond Watts came again. I have seen that he is in love with me. Well, if he wants to waste his time. He was talking about things, and I heard he was a schoolteacher in England. I asked him how long he would be here, and he said, Six months, unless fate was kind, meaning me I suppose, and so I asked him to give Leila and Kassim lessons.

Last night Suzannah was here because she had taken the children to her Camp with her, and made them help her with her
work, and then she taught them math, and then she had supper. Then I made myself ask her to stay the night. I put her in Father's and Mother's room. She was nearly collapsing with emotion. Well, so was I. She has a little box of a room on the edge of the town where the sand is in drifts right up to the door and mangy dogs roam about. The room is too hot for her to be in at all in the afternoons. It is quite like the little mud room I loved so much, but the house doesn't have a court with a pool, and she doesn't have a roof to sleep out on. This morning I said to her it would be sensible if she moved in here. I didn't do it nicely, I am afraid, but I did it, so I suppose that is something. I know she is going to start throwing her weight around, but she won't even see anything wrong in it, and there is nothing I can do, and I know it isn't important.

When I put Kassim in George's room, I told him I would clear out the cupboards for him and today I did. I brought George's things into my room. He never has had much in the way of clothes, so what there was left here went in with mine. Of course I could not help crying. I miss him so much I ache all day and all night. I miss Benjamin too, strange as it might seem. I don't miss Olga and Simon much. That is because they had gone so far away before they died. What I do miss is what I can remember of them when I was little. But that is stupid. And when I think of how tired they were, that makes me want to cry. But they wouldn't value that. Well, I don't value it either. I have given up worrying about me being childish. I have put George's papers in cartons. I found letters in his papers, I don't know if I should have read them or not, but I did. One was from his great love in India. All I can say is, she doesn't understand much about George. Also a letter from George to her, which he didn't send. She hasn't read it, but I have. So it seems to me, judging by
results,
that this letter was more for me than for her. I take it for granted that I am being dishonest.

Letter from
SHARMA PATEL 
to
george sherban

Dear Comrade,

I only heard last night that the bearer is going your way, so this last letter (I have been writing to you every spare minute I get, which isn't saying much!), it has to be short, this letter.

When are you coming? You promised. Luis says you are to come on another all-round trip, India just one of your ports of call. I am waiting 
–
you know how impatiently.

But I have something concrete to put forward. At the next Pan-Europe Conference of the Youth Armies, it is on the cards India will be elected into Convenor's position. This is what everyone is expecting. That will make your Sharma boss of Europe for that year. (Of course I am only joking, as you know!) But I am looking forward to it, apart from the travelling to each of the countries. I talked to Luis about my idea. I asked him to think it over carefully. I told him that
if you were prepared to put yourself forward for it,
you would very likely represent North Africa. Are you prepared to put yourself forward? You didn't seem wholehearted when we discussed this. You are wrong! It isn't correct to vacillate and hang back when you know you are right for a position! Selfish ambition is one thing. I am not advocating that. I don't think even my worst enemies could accuse me of that. But it is not modesty to refuse to undertake responsibilities you are right for! And you are the right man for the job. And you deserve it. Your style of work and your achievements are well known. And there is your Indian background, which is not unknown! I hear on all sides how highly you are thought of. So, I hope that I will hear from you that you have put yourself forward for the path that now lies open to you. Which brings me to my plan. What I asked Luis was this. It would be a step forward on the right path to link Europe and Africa. At the present these links are intermittent and tenuous. We should correct this. I propose that you, as representative of North Africa (you
will,
you
must
agree!), should be elected with me Joint Heads of the Armies for the year. And of course this year might very well become two or even more, it tends to happen! I can see your dear smile! I can hear you pointing out that this plan of mine depends on three unknowns. But I have a hunch. I have a feel for how things are likely to work out. I have been right often enough, admit it! So I am working this end for
the success of this plan. We can travel together through Europe and North Africa. I don't have to say what that would mean to me. And to you, I know. Our lives together, our love, will fuse into the great upward march of mankind, which is led by the uncorrupted youth of the world.

Oh I can't wait to see you again! But I have been so busy, all day and half the night as usual, I haven't had time to be sad. I know this is what you would want to hear from me when we meet.

But I do allow myself one little indulgence … I remember … do
you
remember? – that jewel of a night after the Conference at Simla … one day nights like that will be the heritage of all mankind, and so I don't feel selfish when I think of this jewel of a night. Oh George,
when
will I see you again? The bearer will be returning here before going on to Peking and will bring me your letter. Which will agree, I hope and trust, to my proposals.

Your Sharma

GEORGE SHERBAN
to
SHARMA PATEL

I have read your letter very carefully. I will see you during my visit to India and I will tell you then why I will not allow myself to be put forward, as you suggest. But Sharma, I
did
tell you, I explained everything to you.

I have been dreaming. Would you like to hear my dream?

There was a civilisation once
–  
where? 
–  
it doesn't matter. The Middle East perhaps, China, India … It lasted a long time. Thousands of years. We can't think like that now: continuity, cultures not changing very much, generation after generation. It was a civilization where there were rich and poor, but not great extremes. It was well balanced, too, trade and agriculture, and the use of minerals, all in harmony with each other. People lived a long time, perhaps a thousand years. Perhaps five hundred. But it doesn't matter, a long time. Of course now we despise the past and think that children were mostly born to die because of ignorance. But these people were not ignorant. They knew how not to have too many children and to live at peace with their land, and their neighbours.

Imagine what a marriage might have been then, Sharma.
Nothing frantic and desperate, no fear of death as we all have it, making us rush to mate and marry and the having and holding because we know that everything may so suddenly be taken away.

And lifetimes stretching in front of you … a young man may have parents two hundred years old, think of that Sharma, how sensible and experienced they must be … he sees this marriage, and its strength and it sense, and he knows he wants the same. And there is a girl like him. They may have known each other all their lives. Or have heard of each other, for there is plenty of time to hear of this one and that one
–
to listen to someone growing up nearby, and to wonder, would we be right with each other? But there is no hurry, no rush, no desperation. Behind them stretches their civilisation, and the wise men and the historians and the storytellers tell them of it, and in front of them stretches their world, and will go on and on …

But marriages are made young, of course, for that is the time for marriage. The families make slow and thoughtful approaches to each other. What they are thinking of is how they can carry the best they know into the future of the race, their culture. They see themselves, feel themselves, as the bearers of culture. Yes, they discuss family characteristics
  – t
his is a good family, the mother is good and balanced and beautiful enough, and the father is also these things, and his line too. When these young people know these things are being discussed, it is not with a sense of personal affront, which is how we would, now, in these days, experience a discussion about
–
not our wonderful and precious selves
–
but our importance as representatives. When they meet, it is without panic and grasping. They talk and they visit and they wait and they get to know each other's families, and all this may take a long time, years even, for there is no hurry. And they know that if they decide not to marry, then in any case they will be friends for so long they cannot see the end of it. Meanwhile they love, of course, and choose how they may live, in this place or that, he will work at this or that, and she too, and all the time their children are implicit in what they say and think and do, for the knowledge of how to keep a strong, continuous healthy civilisation is the deepest thing in them.

Can we even begin to imagine, in our feverishness, our
consumption of possibilities, the slow, full texture of their days, their years?

They marry, when the time has come for it. What is he? A merchant perhaps and she will travel with him and work with him, or a farmer? A maker of artefacts, these two, tiles, household vessels, everything satisfying and good in their hands, and to look at. Or they will choose to live in a house near their bakery, or is it a leather goods shop, or is he a carpenter, or does he work with metals. What they do with their hands brings them satisfaction, pleasure, every gesture they make must have use, and necessity. There is no hurry. No fear. Of course people die, but after long lives. Of course there are accidents and even, sometimes wars, but these are skirmishes along the edges of their civilization, bordering another just as fine and old as their own. There is respect between these two cultures, and often marriage and much trading.

This couple have their children and educate them and they are absorbed into the stream of inheritance which carries them like a river. I can see these two young things
–
like us, Sharma
–
in love, and loving, but not in the service of some ‘cause,' and not grabbing love as a shield against horrors.
Which is what we are doing, Sharma.
They are kind, and playful … I can see them doing simple pleasant things like walking along a riverbank, and swimming naked in fresh good water with their friends. And visiting each other's houses, visiting friends. Can you imagine what friendship must have been like in those days? Now our friends are usually in another continent, or are going to move away next week. I like to think of what friendship must have been then.

And I can see these two with their young children, enjoying them, enjoying every minute, because there is not the sort of pressure we know. And watching how they grow and show this trait or that, show the past which they are carrying into the future.

And I can see them, still young people, very young, a hundred, two hundred years old, vigorous and lively, and their family is grown and self-supporting but not flown as we take for granted must happen. Imagine the relations between children and parents
who may know each other for hundreds of years? I wonder what kind of bond that might be. Imagine, it might take three hundred years or more for a person to reach maturity. You can think about it, and think about it all and not really grasp it, it is too hard for us. The high marriage. A real marriage. It happened once, I am sure of that.

Do you like this dream, Sharma? I wonder …

Or, if you don't, how about this … we are back in time, back, back … people are physically very different from these I have just written about, and of course different from us, with our diseases and our degenerating organs and our pitiful little lives.

That was a time when this earth had close links with the stars and their forces … does this annoy you, Sharma? You probably think it
not useful.
You are a very practical girl, and I admire you for it. Any situation offered to you – in no time you have grasped it, summed it up, seen how it may develop into the future. It is a capacity rooted in the deepest part of your nature – you value the capacity but not what it is rooted in! There isn't anything I value in you I could tell you about, and you would be pleased! Do you know that? Isn't that amazing? You think I value what you value in yourself
–
your cleverness, your ability to manage situations, your brilliant sensible speeches, the way you are so concise and quick in committees. Even your humanity … Do you know, you would be angry, if I told you what I love to see in you … it is a marvellous grasping of the
actual,
a sense, a gift, an instinct. I watch you pick up a bowl of rice and your hands have in them a language of understanding. You put up your hand to adjust your sari. I could watch that gesture forever. It has such certainty in it, such knowledge. One of the children come running, and it is not what you say, but how you touch and hold. It is a miracle, this thing in you. I can never have enough of it, I watch you, how you put your feet on the earth, so absolutely right, every step, and the movement of your head as you turn it to listen. I tell you, Sharma, there is something there that I – I simply give up! I salute it, and that's all.

In those days of this other older dream of mine, there were few people on the earth. These people who did live here knew what their lives were for. Because we don't, we have no idea at all.
They existed to keep life flowing into this planet. It was they who regulated the cosmic forces, powers, currents, so many, and so different, and all with their patterns and flows and rhythms. The lives of these people were regulated, every minute, by their knowledge. But this did not mean a clockwork regularity, which is how we have to think and feel, but a moving with, and through, these always changing flows of the currents.

When a man and a woman married, it was not ‘to have children' or ‘to make a family', not necessarily, though of course children had to be born and when they were, it was exact and chosen. No, these two would be chosen, or choose each other, for they were born with the knowledge of
how
to do this – because they were complementary, and this was judged always by how they stood in relations to stars, planets, the dance of the heavens, the forces of the earth, the moon, our sun. It was not even that they chose each other, rather that they were chosen by what they were, where they were. When they ‘married' – and we cannot even begin to guess how that seemed to them – their being together was a sacrament, in the sense that everything contributed to the harmony. And when they mated, this was a sacrament, in the true and real sense, used consciously and exactly to adjust, fuel, add to, lessen, powers and currents. And what they ate was the same. And what they wore. There could not be disharmony, because they
were
harmony. Everything, their thoughts and movements … they were suspended, on this earth and heaven, and through them flowed the lives of stars, and through them flowed the substance of the earth to the stars …

That was how marriage was then, Sharma. I can see your face as you read this.

I must end now. My personal life has been sad recently. My father and mother died. They were wonderful people. There are family problems.

I will see you soon.

RACHEL SHERBAN'S JOURNAL

A lot of refugees have arrived from the new war, and we have
had twenty of them in this flat. Fitting in somehow. Now they have gone on to a camp. Survivors. Surviving. I can't understand why they try so hard. Each one, a story of amazing escapes.

A million people died last week. Why then should it matter if Rachel Sherban stays alive? That is my question. I don't know who to ask it of. There must be a reply to it. If George was here, what he
did
would be the answer. He is always at it, rescuing people. One way or another. Mind you, I wonder if some of the people he rescues would be pleased if they knew they have genetic value. Genetically useful, said George once when I asked about someone.