Shikasta (48 page)

A million people. I try to take it in. The people that were milling around in this flat are
alive.
But the unlucky ones are
dead. Why
one alive and one dead? It makes no sense to me at all. Out in the streets at night, all the rioting and shooting and then someone dead on the pavement. It might just as well be me. I went out last night. Curfew or no curfew, I walked about the city. All night. Soldiers. Trucks. Shooting. I did not even cover my face. No one saw me. I walked back into this flat this morning quite alive thank you.
Well, answer that, whoever you are.
Suzannah was out of her mind. Do you want to kill yourself, she shrieks.

I have seen something. I wonder how it was I didn't before. Who is it needs this killing, this agony, this suffering, the death, death, death, death. The blood and the blood. The reek of blood going up from this planet must be in somebody's nostrils. Somebody needs it. Something. There isn't anything that doesn't have a
function.
What happens always fits in with everything. What happens is
needed
by something. It happens because it is drawn out of a situation by need. There isn't anything that happens that is extraneous. There is somebody or something that needs this savagery and the blood.

The Devil, I expect.

I feel as if I have suddenly found a key in my hand. I read that the cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.

I feel very odd. As if I am not here at all. Don't exist. A wind is blowing through me. I can feel it, blowing through my cracks and crannies. I am always cold.

I walk about this flat and I keep feeling myself float off into
unreality.
That is a word. I look at that word and it isn't anything. Once again there isn't a word for it. Yesterday I felt so gone, that I looked back into my room to see if I could see me sitting at the window. Because I couldn't feel myself where I stood at the door.

When this place was full of the refugees it was all right because I spent every minute getting things for them and doing things. But even then I felt very light. Porous.

Suzannah is worried. She keeps exclaiming and looking at me.

Suzannah is so strong. When I sit near her I can feel heat beating out of her. No, not heat, strength. I feel actually burnt by it. It envelops me. But when I go and sit near her on purpose to feel this, because I think it may warm me, then it is as if I was being crushed, or fanned away like dead grass. She put her arms around me last night and hugged me. She rocked me. This was exactly the way a mother cat gives a kitten that has got cold or upset about something a really rough licking, so hard the kitten can only stand up or even gets knocked over. It is to make the blood flow. To shock the kitten into its senses. Those words, into its senses, are exact. Alive. They tingle. I can feel them. As I write this some words are alive and I can feel them pulse, but others are quite dead. Like Reality. Suzannah held me roughly and shook me, from the same instinct as a mother cat's.

But I was just nothing. A little bit of stick or cold shadow inside those great arms of hers.

I did put my head on her shoulder. Partly because it would please her. I even went to sleep. I am not here at all.

The night before last I woke up and saw Olga sitting on my bed. She was smiling. At once I could see it wasn't Olga, it was the moonlight, and the curtains moving. But what I felt for that second I thought it was Olga, was a sweetness and a longing. That made me afraid, because I never felt anything like that for Olga when she was alive.

I feel as if something very strong is putting at me, a sort of
sucking and dragging, and I want to let go into it. There is a strong sweetness somewhere close to me, tugging at me.

Susannah follows me around and looks at me. She loves me. Because I am George's sister.

I look at her, so strong. And so ugly. She was washing her hair. I thought, she is going to shape it into those awful ridges and curls again, making herself so thick and ugly. When her hair was wet I went to her, and took the comb and parted her hair and made it straight and flat. She knew what I was doing. She had a little smile. Patient. She is so
nice,
Susannah. I looked at her when I was finished, and there was a plain middle-aged woman. More like a servant. She knew what I was seeing. She had tears in her eyes. She was thinking. Rachel is beautiful. Suzannah does not envy me. She is not jealous or malicious or nasty in her feelings, like me.

I gave her back the comb, and she turned to the mirror and carefully did her hair as usual, fluffing it out and crimping it. Then the kohl and the lipstick. So she was back to normal. She did not look at me when she had finished. She had a stubborn air. Holding on to what she has. We had supper, Suzannah and me and the children. I was looking at her and wondering where she gets her strength. I put my hand into hers and she rubbed it and rubbed it. She knew why I had wanted her to fold my hand inside hers. She knows this kind of thing. She says to me, Poor little one, poor Rachel.

I really don't know what I can do, or say. I don't think I exist at all. There is a transparency around me, like a film I can't brush aside. A sort of faint rainbow.

Raymond Watts was here and said that someone had just arrived from over there and had information for me. This person had hoped to find George here. But that is strange in itself. Why should he. I told Raymond to bring this ‘someone' here.

I have to go, must leave at once. The ‘someone' said he ‘had access to' information that George was going to be killed by the Overlords. He didn't know George had already left here. He is part of the Administration. That means the Youth people
wouldn't trust him. Raymond Watts trusts him because he said he had ‘gone bad' from the Administration's view. I have to tell George. Warn him. He might not know.

Suzannah has been at me all night. I said she would take me over and she has. How is it possible? A year ago Olga and Simon were alive and were my parents, and George was here and Benjamin, and now I am here in this flat alone with Suzannah and two children I hadn't seen this time last year and they are my family.

What right has Suzannah to say what I should do. I could not stop myself loathing her, sitting there, leaning forward, all earnest eyes and great boobs, telling me, Do this, do that. She says I have to stay here.

This is your home, Rachel, this is where you belong. And of course you must be with Kassim and Leila, they need you. Over and over again.

Why do they need me? They need her! Why should the world need Rachel Sherban if it has Suzannah!

Of course she would be only too delighted to be left here in this flat in complete charge and
owning
the children. She is
here.
She is in my parents' room. She is positioned just right for George when he gets back. If he gets back.

I don't mean the things about Suzannah I wrote there.

She says and says and says that George doesn't want me to rush off after him. How does she know? Yes of course George did say I should stay here, but did he know then that this man was going to turn up? I have to go quickly, I know how I can do it, I have been thinking how. Suzannah said, You can't go Rachel, if for no other reason than ‘I am such a princess' and ‘they' 
–
meaning the Youth Army people – wouldn't like my attitudes. ‘Surely you can see that Rachel,' she said. Not bitchy at all, oh no, it is what she thinks, so she says it.

When I said that I was going, Suzannah said, Then at least let me tell someone who I know can help you. Meaning, with the transport and disguise. That ‘at least' made me furious. It is funny, how Suzannah makes me furious.
Rubs me up the wrong way.
That is one of the phrases that are
alive.
Every word
right. I said, I would meet anyone and do anything, all I wanted was to get across to Europe at once and tell George. I will not let them kill him.

I shall disguise myself to look like him. We are very alike, everyone says so. And they will kill me instead of him. It is easy. All these thousands of different uniforms and ways of dressing make it easy.

I am ready to leave. Suzannah follows me around saying, Don't go, Rachel, don't go. She is in tears half the time. She keeps saying, You are mistaken Rachel. She says my name in that heavy earnest way. The Jewish Ra-chel. I like my name like that. I have always been pleased when people said Ra-chel. But when she says it, it is as if she was taking me over. Through my name. I am thinking all the time, suppose George did know they were going to try and kill him and that ‘someone' would come here and I would want to rush off and warn him. He knows all sorts of things before they happen. But suppose he didn't? This is the most important point. Sometimes I think one way, then another. I cry all the time, though I try not to. Suzannah cries. She wrings her hands. I did not know wringing one's hands was something actually done. But she does. She would! Everything in her is very
pure.
She accuses me, Ra-chel, you are wrong, you are very wrong! – her eyes flash, they brim with tears.
Accusation.
How can you Ra-chel! It is wrong, oh I would not have believed it of you!
Reproach.
She makes some ridiculous mistake, perhaps in cooking, wasting some little thing. Oh, how could I do a thing like that, oh how could I!
Remorse,
her eyes widen and stare as if at an avenging accuser, her hair actually stands on end.

And so now we are two women, weeping and wringing our hands. I watch us doing it.

Here we are, in this flat, the two of us with two children, a family, and she leans all over me and makes me cups of soup and gives me her rations, and says, You must eat, Ra-chel, you must sleep, Ra-chel. She has altered all the furniture in Mother's and Father's room. There is no reason why she shouldn't. I've watched her stand in the door smiling in at the room, as if she had been given something wrapped in pretty paper and she doesn't
want to unwrap it for fear of spoiling the paper.

When I saw this I kissed her. I loved her for it. I wished I could give her everything wrapped in pretty paper to make up for the awful things that have happened to her, and that she came through. I can't imagine anything that could defeat Suzannah. If they put her down in a desert with Kassim and Leila, all by herself, a thousand miles from anywhere, she would say, Now Kassim, now Leila, this is what we must do, listen carefully. We must be sensible and …

I am leaving tomorrow.

COMRADE CHEN LIU,
to
PEKING: 
re the
GEORGE SHERBAN
situation

Attempts to dispose of this dangerous man have failed. What went wrong is not clear. A woman impersonating him, who we later discovered was his sister, appeared in various places, but not where he was scheduled to be: he has never made any attempt to disguise his movements. This woman was wearing the uniform of Section 3, North African Youth Movements, while leaving Tunis and arriving in Spain – aided by the Youth networks, and getting lifts with various types of military vehicle. In the south of France she changed to clothes commonly worn by the said George Sherban, and succeeded in passing for him, but only for a few days. Appearing in towns and encampments where he was not expected, and behaving in a bizarre manner, ‘he' was reported to have suffered a mental breakdown. Meanwhile the real George Sherban was in Brussels. This period of less than a week sufficed to start rumours that this ‘holy man' – as in some quarters he is taken to be – has the capacity to be in two places at once. The rumours spread widely and the real George Sherban was reportedly embarrassed. At any rate, in Amsterdam he addressed a meeting of hysterics, denying he had any such capacity, but such was the fervour of the crowd, he had to make a getaway. He went to Stockholm where he disappeared from our agents' view for some days. In the meantime, while our agents were still taking Rachel Sherban for him, she was involved in two serious accidents outside
Paris, but escaped from both with minor injuries. We tend to believe that he was attempting to reach her, or to send messengers of some kind to her. But she was arrested by the Paris People's Police on our instructions, and before she could be questioned, killed herself.

These theatrical events are not all that obscure this situation. For instance, we expected George Sherban to seek election as representative for all North Africa, and we are informed that he would certainly have succeeded. But he did not, and made no attempt to do so. He is travelling through the Youth networks representing an assortment of miscellaneous organizations, some with status, some without influence to the point of being ridiculous. I can only believe that his ambitions are pitched much higher. I can make no guess at what this man is aiming for. This is by no means the first opportunity for fulfilling
apparent
ambitions that he has despised. There have been others that were his for the picking and he ignored them.

Looking for factors that distinguish his career as representative of so many various and different Youth organizations, our agents can offer only a few consistent facts. One is that wherever he has been a handful of individuals abandon the positions they hold and make their way to other destinations. We can find no common denominator in these individuals, who are of every race and nation, and of both sexes. Nor in the places they go to. Or in the places they come from. Or in the work they do when they arrive. They may stay in the Youth networks or may not. Their work may be visibly responsible and respect-inspiring, or without civic value.

Taking these factors into account, I suggest that George Sherban be left alive for the time being, until we ascertain what it is he is aiming for.