The Grandmothers (19 page)

I walked through the trees and down the hill into the thinly scattered lights of the city which stopped on the edge of the dark of the ocean. I went past the pool, which was still full of youngsters. All around it flared the torches which we, The Twelve, had ordered to be kept always burning. We had imagined, when the infants and the little children and the women who attended to them had gone off to bed, how the flames from the torches would move and shine on the water that was never still, or would sometimes drip fire on a windy night, so that it would be hard to tell if the little waves on the pool were fire or water. Now it was a noisy drunken scene, and it was easy to walk past in the half dark, unnoticed. The girl who had asked about my garment was lying half in, half out of the water, one of a group who it seemed were all copulating together like a tangle of snakes in spring.

A youth on the other side of the pool was trying to grab a girl: she was very young, not more than a child. He was shouting at her, half-singing it, ‘New girl in the pool, fears the push and fears the shove, Come to me, I’ll give you love; …’ I was able to recognise this as a debased version of

New lamb on the hill fears the snow and fears the storm, Put it down and keep it warm, Mend the cracks in barn and shed, The lamb will pine without the ewe The ewe without its lamb pine too, keep them warm and keep them fed …

These days when the wind blows cold across our lulls no one brings the lambs and ewes down for safety, and the white patches that are dead lambs look like the last shreds of snow on the grass, or like white flowers spattered everywhere.

I came into my house in the dark and sat in the dark, alone. My house? It is a long time since I could think of this spreading house as mine. In the middle of my life, half a century - almost - ago, my sou Bora came to me and said that he had a wife and three children and needed more space than he had, in a smallish house in one of the cities from the old time, which meant, in a rough area. There was much more to this than simple practicality. I would not say we were estranged, but for a long time we had not had much to say to each other. My house - poor Shusha had died - is in the part of The Cities where the elite live. I put it like that, simply, without evasions or the usual justifications, because, well, I am too old for all that. I, The Twelve, were a governing elite, but for a long time we have not been. People like my son went in for a lot of vilification and even when The Cities were doing very well indeed. ‘The powerful oligarchy which rules us, ‘That kind of thing. But young people vociferous in this way usually end up standing where the vilified elders stood. For him to move up here, to this house, was a statement to all concerned and we both knew it. A wing of four rooms was built on, and here I moved, the house servants easily accommodating themselves to balancing my meagre wants with the family’s. Our relations were cordial enough. We didn’t see each other sometimes for weeks. And then in his turn my son Bora found he was being faced with - in his case - a daughter-in-law; saying, You don’t need all that room. And he built a wing on the other Side of the house, to let my grandson and his wife and children move in. They were prominent in DeRod’s circles and I would have liked to joke with someone about this new elite - but these days I have no one to enjoy jokes with.

And now i must record the worst thing that happened to us, the most unexpected, and still the most puzzling. A message came from DeRod that he was abolishing The College of Storytellers and The College of Songmakers. It was not possible to console ourselves by saying it must be a mistake. DeRod’s agents had requisitioned the two buildings. This was not long before Shusha died and my son moved in. Shusha was beside herself. She was responsible for the education of the young and the two colleges were what she relied on. For a while we sat together, doing what so often resulted from an order from DeRod: we were trying to understand how he was thinking, why he did what he did.

For a good while after Destra’s death and DeRod’s accession The Cities were at a height of brilliance. A golden age. Our festivals of storytelling, our song festivals, our entertainments, followed each other through that cycle of the sun from a grand climax on the day when it is coldest, but we know it will get wanner, until the generous blaze of the day when we know that from now it will get colder, and that was the other big festival. Mid-Light. People were coming from faraway cities all over the peninsula. People still do come, but they are different people and bring with them strife and disturbance, and their enjoyment is expressed m a raw jeering laughter that was never heard in our time.

DeRod did not take part in these festivities, or not much. Always affable and obliging, he might appear at a festival, but it was as if what was after all the pulse and beat of our communal life did not touch him, had nothing to do with him. He preferred his armies. He had even made up a song for them, catchy, full of a patriotic fervour we had not associated with The Cities until then. It was popular, and sung not only by the soldiers. Just how far this army song was in spirit from our music was shown when it was sung by a young aspirant at a song competition. The audience laughed at it - at the song, not the singer; in those days to mock a performer would have been thought unkind.

The festivals were held not in one place, but in several, in public places everywhere: we were still trying to make sure ancient rivalries were not being fostered. For several days, at these times, you could not walk down a street or enter a garden without finding yourself part of singing, dancing, or some enactment, which might be the joining of the old towns at the time of the birth of The Cities, or perhaps the short reign of The Cruel Whip, But we discouraged the kind of music he introduced, the violence and the crudity of it, though we could not deny it attracted crowds. From small seeds big trees may grow. As we often say but perhaps we do not

think often enough about the meaning. The Cruel Whips effusions and effluences, discouraged by Destra and then by us, have grown into a nasty poisonous flood.

The message from DeRod, ending our prosperity - though at the time we had no idea how thoroughly and soon the end would come - arrived at the height of our happy festival culture.

Shusha said she would go and see him, and went off then and there. After all, her brother, whom she had scarcely seen for years, lived a short walk away. She returned looking as if someone had hit her. Shusha was always a sensitive soul, too much so, for her own good, as she knew; and as I often warned her. And the story, when at last she was able to tell it, did not seem at once to justify such pain. DeRod at first did not recognise her, and then apologised by saying it was a long time since she had visited. She had to swallow indignation: she had once made every kind of attempt to see him. But he did not seem to see that she was angry. It was a family occasion, the room full of people. His children were like my son, with families of their own. Shusha was only just able to put names to the men and women who must be DeRod’s progeny, and there were a lot of children. A long table was loaded with food. Plentiful, reported Shusha, but not very elegant. And this was the note or tone of what she saw: she was puzzled by it and surprised. She said they were a crude and ordinary lot, and you’d never think they were anything more than a gathering of the kind of people you might find in a low-class eating house or inn. ‘I kept thinking, This is Destra’s son, he was brought up by Destra,’ she said, sorrowful, and with that unfailing note of bewilderment that had to accompany our discussions of DeRod. She was introduced as an aunt, to some, who said it was nice to meet her and as a great-aunt to others, They offered her food but she said to DeRod that she wanted to talk to him, even for a minute. ‘Well, talk away,’ he said, as if it did not occur to him that she might have a special reason for needing to talk. ‘It’s about the festivals’ she said. ‘Why are you abolishing them?’ She said she felt like some idiot, the way they all looked at her. “What makes you think I am abolishing anything?’ DeRod enquired, impatient with her. ‘You’ve just taken over the colleges, you’ve taken our buildings.’ ‘Oh, have we?’ said he, not impudently, but as if hearing the news for the first time. ‘Well, never mind, I’m sure you can fix up your festivals.’

Soon she excused herself and came home, weeping.

The Twelve sent him messages of all kinds, and visited him in delegations of twos and threes at his house. He greeted us with his usual affability, making it clear by his manner that we were an irrelevance; he might offer us a cup of wine, but the most we could get out of him was, ‘I’m working on something, I’m sure you’ll like it.’

On my visit to him, with Eleven and Nine, I said to him, ‘You are destroying the very essence of what we are, the soul of The Cities. We are admired for it by everyone. Why are you doing this?’ I remember his look - I’m not likely to forget it] How often I have recalled that look, to see if there was something there I had missed. His look at me, at us, was not angry. Not discommoded. It showed nothing of the discomfort of one who feels inferior. There was a little embarrassment, not on his own account, but on ours. ‘I didn’t say I am doing away with music,’ he repeated. ‘There are plenty of different kinds of songs and music’

‘And the tales? Our story? The history of The Cities?’

Did he shrug? Well, as good as.

‘We teach our children,’ I said. ‘It is how they learn their skills. They learn from them an enquiring habit of mind, how to think, how to make comparisons. How are our children going to be taught?’

How well I remember his long preoccupied stare, at this. He frowned, he fidgeted, his eyes wandered and then returned, he leaned forward to stare at my face, into our faces, and then sat back. He sighed. He must know what he was destroying: he must. And yet he did not seem to.

The festivals were cancelled, and The Cities began to fall into disorder. There was a sullen, angry mood, and that was when began the outbreaks of public violence. As for us, The Twelve, we were as if he had hit us in the heart region: the way fighters do, to disable an opponent. Some of us became ill. Quite soon Shusha died. I knew it was because of shock, of grief.

Then the new thing began. A Festival was announced, and it would be organised by the armies. When it took place, people who were used to the old ways were uncomfortable. It was all military, to do with army exercises, marching, army life, and even fighting, though that was a rather abstract affair, more like games, and it would be hard to associate blood and death with them. Hard to imagine the ceremonies of our festivals, which insisted on the deep seriousness of our lives, our responsibilities for each other and for The Cities. The choirs of DeRod s armies sang wonderfully: after all, many had been trained at our schools. But what were they singing! You could imagine that not very clever children had written these songs, children who had no idea that anything better was possible. They were pompous, or bombastic; they were silly and jokey - the kind of jokes small children like. The audience showed their disappointment. This did not last. A new generation arrives quickly on any scene, and soon the children were youngsters who became adults, and when they said Festivals they meant DeRod s and ours were not much more than a memory insisted on by their parents.

The nastiness of The Cruel Whip came back. Some of the new songs I could hardly bear to listen to, they were so vulgar, so crude, so full of incipient violence.

We, The Twelve, were not surprised that DeRod was threatening the nearest city to ours, over the mountains, with invasion. The strength and reputation of The Cities saved us: the endangered city succumbed at once to DeRod and sent a tribute of slaves.

So, with the next city he decided to master. Soon half the peninsula owed tribute to us, and not a real battle had been fought.

That was the picture not long after Shusha’s death, at about the time of my son’s coming to live in my house. He was employed by the armies as an administrator, and while of course he had been brought up by myself and by Shusha in the old days, it was as if all that had slipped away from him, gone. I used to marvel that a young man who had had such an upbringing could now see nothing of value in it. His look at me when I tried to remind him that there had been better times was like DeRod’s: it was I, it was we, who were out of place, out of step. And so it was with all the children of The Twelve. The new spirit in The Cities had wiped their memories clean.

When that rich feast of tales and music had so suddenly been silenced, all kinds of superstitions sprang up, and new gods flourished. Our tales and songs had not celebrated Deity, not more than the basic truth of our interconnectedness, under the Sun, our Creator. Now there was a moon cult, and with that ceremonies of a bloody kind which even now I don’t know much about. My son Bora doesn’t either, but my grandson is an initiate. Bora told me, ‘He’s into some weird stuff, I can tell you. Better not be out at night with that lot around or you’ll find yourself with your throat cut and stretched out on a stone to please the moon.’ He laughed. You could think he admired that sort of thing. It was the violence he admired. That he does admire.

At the inns and drinking houses the songs were like wails or bawlings or battle cries, and where the gentle tones, the subtleties, of our songs had been, was now, louder than anything, a loud drumming, like the heartbeat of a criminal. When I walk past such a place I hurry, because I can feel my whole self being aroused to

anger, threat, even murder. And yet our people can now spend all evening in such places, with that loud thumping in their ears, drinking, sometimes dancing. It is hard to believe that some of them must remember a different, gentler time.

I missed and miss more and more, the sounds of the games and songs that once you could hear everywhere, as you went about.

There was a skipping song that went like this:

Make a hole As deep will go The long wing feather Of an old black crow. Water and grain Go in together. Cover it well. Watch the weather.

Noil’ make new holes,