Heroes and Villains (2 page)

Marianne lived in a white tower made of steel and concrete. She looked out of her window and, in autumn, she saw a blazing hill of corn and orchards where the trees creaked with crimson apples; in spring, the fields unfurled like various flags, first brown, then green. Beyond the farmland was nothing but marshes, an indifferent acreage of tumbled stone and some distant intimations of the surrounding forest which, in certain stormy lights of late August, seemed to encroach on and menace the community though, most of the time, the villagers conspired to ignore it.

Marianne’s tower stood among some other steel and concrete blocks that, surviving the blast, now functioned as barracks, museum and school, a number of wide streets of rectangular wooden houses and some stables and market gardens. The community grew corn, flax, vegetables and fruit. It tended cattle for meat and milk besides sheep
for wool and chickens for eggs. It was self-supporting at the simplest level and exported its agricultural surplus in return for drugs and other medical supplies, books, ammunition, spare parts for machinery, weapons and tools. The sounds of Marianne’s childhood were cries of animals and creaking of carts, crowing of cocks and the bugles of the Soldiers drilling in the barracks. In February and March, wailing gulls blew in from the sea across the freshly ploughed fields, but Marianne had never seen the sea.

She was not allowed to go outside the outer wire fence away from the community. Sheep sometimes wandered away, leaping briary hillocks above abandoned habitations, and sometimes a shepherd followed them, though he would go reluctantly and heavily armed. The Soldiers kept to the roads when they drove away lorries full of produce but, even so, the Barbarians occasionally hijacked the convoys and killed all the Soldiers.

‘If you’re not a good little girl, the Barbarians will eat you,’ said Marianne’s nurse, a Worker woman with six fingers on each hand, which puzzled Marianne for she herself had only five.

‘Why?’ asked Marianne.

‘Because that is the nature of the Barbarians,’ said her nurse. ‘They wrap little girls in clay just like they do with hedgehogs, wrap them in clay, bake them in the fire and gobble them up with salt. They relish tender little girls.’

‘Then I’d be too tough for them,’ said Marianne truculently. But she saw the woman honestly believed what she said and wondered vaguely if it were true. She thought that at least a visit from the Barbarians would make some kind of change. The children played Soldiers and Barbarians; they made guns with their fingers and shot one another dead but the Soldiers always won. That was the rule of the game.

‘The Soldiers are heroes but the Barbarians are villains,’ said the son of the Professor of Mathematics aggressively. ‘I’m a hero. I’ll shoot you.’

‘Oh, no, you won’t,’ said Marianne and grimaced frightfully. ‘I’m not playing.’

Her uncle was the Colonel. He had a harsh, loud voice and she disliked him. Her brother was a cadet. Her mother loved her brother best. Marianne tripped up the son of the Professor of Mathematics and
left him sprawling and yowling in the dust, which was not in the rules. The other children soon left her out of their games but she did not care. She was a skinny and angular child. She marked all her possessions with her name, even her toothbrush, and never lost anything.

Besides the wire netting around the boundaries of the cultivated land were the watch towers manned with machine guns stood on stilts at intervals; there was also a stout wall topped with barbed wire round the village itself. The only entry through this wall was a large wooden gate where the sentry post was. When the Barbarians attacked the community, it stood siege inside the village wall since, in order to enter the village, the Barbarians had to storm the gate. When Marianne was six years old, she saw the Barbarians for the first time.

It was the time of the May Day Festival. On May Day there was a picnic, there was music and the Soldiers performed an impressive march past and drill. Marianne’s father, a gentle man constitutionally sunk in melancholy, stayed in his study with his books, such was his privilege, but her mother, the other Professor women in the tower and the Workers were very busy. They cooked succulent food and pressed best clothes. Marianne ran around bothering and pestering everybody, stealing scraps of uncooked dough and curiously indulging her spitefulness in several ways until at last her nurse said grimly: ‘I’ll deal with her.’

She scooped Marianne under one arm and took her to a high room nobody used. A window opened on to a little balcony of white-painted iron. She had a key to this room and she locked the door on Marianne, snapping through the keyhole: ‘There you’ll stay until I fetch you.’ Miraculously translated from the business of the kitchens, Marianne was quite deflated. She sat on the bare boards in the middle of the floor and looked about her. A creeper wound in through the open window like a snake; there were all kinds of snakes in the forest, several of them venomous, which was not so before. Marianne was not frightened to be left alone but she was very angry. She went out on to the balcony, which squeaked beneath her feet. She peered through the iron bars at the village. It appeared diminutive, from this height, and very tidy and brightly-coloured, like a place where everyone was happy. The orchards shivered with bloom. The fields were soft green but the brambles were still pierced here and there by a few spires of steel which arched to the
ground like decolourized rainbows, and leprous viaducts crested with purple loosestrife lurched towards the still uncovered core of calcined earth at the centre of the ruins. Around the edges of the horizon spread the unguessable forest.

Marianne found a piece of biscuit in her pocket and ate it. She wore a checked skirt and a brown sweater. She had long, blonde pigtails. She broke things to see what they were like inside. Her brother was sixteen, ten years older than she. Her nurse said: ‘You ought to love your brother’ and Marianne asked: ‘Why?’ Now she was left alone and forgotten, high in the tower on such a beautiful day. When she finished her biscuit, she was still hungry and gnawed the end of her plait for want of anything better.

She watched the detachment of Soldiers come out, preceded by a small military band which played a selection of marches. All wore uniforms of black leather and plastic helmets with glass visors. They had rifles slung over their backs. All the community had gathered to watch them; Marianne saw her mother and her nurse in the crowd and saw her brother among the Soldiers. Everyone was clean and proper, shirts and dresses white as paper, suits as black as ink. Marianne was bored. A bird came and perched on the balcony. It cocked its head and offered her a cynical regard. It was a seagull.

‘Hello, bird,’ she said. ‘Have you come a long way? Have you seen any Barbarians?’

She liked the wild, quatrosyllabic lilt of the word, ‘Barbarian’. Then, looking beyond the wooden fence, she saw a trace of movement in the fields beyond. It was not the wind among the young corn; or, if it was the wind among the young corn, it carried her the raucous whinny of a horse. It was too early for poppies but she saw a flare of scarlet. She ceased to watch the Soldiers; instead, she watched the movement flow to the fences and crash through them and across the tender wheat. Bursting from the undergrowth came horseman after horseman, filling the air with terrible screamings. They were dressed in furs and brilliant rags. A look-out in a watch tower had already been strangled to let them through and the men at the sentry post were playing cards so they did not see the visitors in time; two Soldiers, paying the price of lack of discipline, were shot. Then all was chaos.

The rabble came to ravage, steal, despoil, rape and, if necessary, to kill. Like hobgoblins of nightmare, their flesh was many colours and great manes of hair flew out behind them. They flashed with curious curved plates of metal dredged up from the ruins. Their horses were bizarrely caparisoned with rags, small knives, bells and chains dangling from manes and tails, and man and horse together, unholy centaurs crudely daubed with paint, looked twice as large as life. They fired long guns. Confronted with terrors of the night in the freshest hours of the morning, the gentle crowd scattered, wailing.

Marianne bemusedly saw a good deal of blood, as when animals were slaughtered, but when she raised her eyes from the battle-field of the village green, she noticed a second party of Barbarians (bristling with knives but far less gaudily painted) who jumped the wires without flamboyance and now, while the fighters were engaged, were calmly occupied in seizing sacks of flour, crocks of butter and bolts of cloth while nobody attempted to stop them. They went in and out of the houses, occasionally making threatening passes with their knives, and then she saw some Worker women seemed to be helping them. Marianne thought this was very interesting.

Soldiers and Barbarians fought hand to hand. Riderless horses seethed back and forth, screeching. Noises of gunfire and voices rose up to Marianne and she listened absorbedly. A Barbarian in a helmet of feathers decorated with the antlers of a stag appeared like a crazy sunrise on the flat roof of the museum; he held a knife between his teeth and was about to spring into the mêlée below when a bullet shattered his eyes. The knife fell from his lean lips. He inscribed a great arc on the morning as he dived forward to the ground, spouting his brains. He was the first man Marianne saw die; the second was her brother.

He rolled in the dust with a shaggy Barbarian boy armed with a knife. They threshed and wrestled, ends of fur blurring their faces, and the knife kept flashing in the sun. They were some way from the general fighting as if they had arrived beneath her viewing platform on purpose to demonstrate violence to her. The Barbarian boy’s mound of black plaits and ringlets covered and uncovered them but she saw them staring at one another, both oddly startled, as if this was the last thing they expected to happen, this embrace to the kill.

Their mother had returned to the tower. Perhaps she saw them and perhaps she called out and perhaps her brother heard her voice or some distracting noise for he glanced away from his adversary, who immediately took advantage of this lost guard to stick a knife into the other’s throat. Blood bubbled. The Barbarian boy dropped the knife and clasped his victim in his arms, holding him with a strange, terrible tenderness until he was still and dead. Marianne waited for somebody to shoot the Barbarian boy but nobody with a gun was available. The boy pushed the newly-made corpse against the wall and sat back on his haunches, pushing the hair out of his face. She saw he had several loops of beads around his neck and his hands were covered with rings. Since Marianne looked down at him from so high up, he appeared foreshortened and she only noticed his rings because they caught the light. The sound of the fighting was terrible music. The boy looked up and saw the severe child who watched him.

An expression of blind terror crossed his face, which was painted in stripes of black, red and white. He made some vague, terrified gestures with his hands; when she was much older and thought about him, which she came to do obsessively, she guessed these were gestures with which he hoped to ward off the evil eye. She chewed her pigtail. He scrambled upright. Many bullets now rattled into the wall behind him; a bullet struck the corpse so it shuddered with the imitation of life but a riderless horse galloped through the gunfire and the boy was all at once up and gone. The horsemen were all gone; the raid was all over.

There was now a deep silence broken only by the lowing of frightened cattle and the screams of a few dying horses and some dying men. Five Soldiers died, in all. A couple of Barbarians were left behind, too badly wounded to escape; the Soldiers briskly shot them, dug a pit and buried them. A woman had gone away with the Barbarians, as sometimes happened. Food, cloth and also some calves and chickens had been taken, enough to recompense the raiders for their losses. It was typical of any of their visits.

Her father found Marianne when it was dark. She was asleep in the farthest corner of the room from the balcony. She was sucking her thumb. She dreamed of dark, painted faces and woke in tears. Her father kissed her.

‘It is all over and you must go to bed.’

She was hungry and remembered she had seen unusual amounts of food prepared that morning; she did not know these had become the funeral baked meats.

‘I want cakes and stuff,’ she said.

‘You mustn’t ask your mother for cake, now,’ he said and brought her milk and slices of bread and butter in her own room. Although she did not know why, she cried herself to sleep; her father held her hand for a while. He had no hair on his head nor any eyelashes, either.

‘Your brother’s gone to the ruins, where the dead people go,’ said Marianne’s nurse. ‘It’s well known the ruins are full of ghosts.’

Wherever he went, their mother shortly followed him. Her son’s death broke her heart; she lingered on for two more years but when she ate some poison fruit she took sick almost gladly and made no resistance to death. After that, Marianne and her father lived alone together with the old nurse, who was now too old to live anywhere else. They got on very well. He taught his daughter reading, writing and history. She read his library of old books; in the white tower, in his study, she looked out of the window across the fields to the swamps and brambles and tried to imagine a forest of men.

‘Can you visualize the number “one million”, Marianne?’ said her father. Marianne tried to envisage all the people in the village and then that again and then that again and that again, again and again, until they were infinite, there was no counting them, and she shook her head.

‘Say goodbye to the concept of plurality, in that case,’ he said. ‘It used to be very important. And what does the word “city” mean?’

She thought for a while.

‘Ruins?’ she hazarded.

So he directed her back to his books, Mumford etc., and to the dictionaries; but the dictionaries contained innumerable incomprehensible words she could only define through their use in his other books, for these words had ceased to describe facts and now stood only for ideas or memories.