Heroes and Villains (3 page)

She grew less spiteful but now showed unusual lines in her face as if she would not be easily satisfied. Her father said there were no such things as ghosts so she would go off by herself into the swamp, although
her nurse forbade her. Marianne was very wiry and agile. She picked her way where the sheep went, trying to imagine numbers of men, women and children, but she never fell over or hurt herself. She learned to beware of the ugly plants covered with razor-sharp thorns that grew everywhere and never even to touch the sticky, green and purple berries swarming with iridescent flies which these plants produced in autumn, for the noxious sap burned the fingers. She knew how brambles sometimes masked the mouths of bottomless vents in the ground, the original purpose of which baffled her. She found out that if she ignored the obese and hugely fanged rats who nested in the choked sewers and sometimes came out to play, they would ignore her.

Shells of houses now formed a dangerous network of caves, all so overgrown it seemed nothing could ever have lived there and she never found anyone, though sometimes she would find the picked remains of bones of animals and human excrement, indicating that the ghosts in the ruins ate and defecated and therefore were unlikely to be ghosts at all, or ghosts only in the sense that they had forfeited their social personalities, like those mendicants of the swamp who sometimes came begging at the gates of the village, men and women running with sores, filth and rags scarcely covering their deformities. Sometimes the Soldiers threw bread to them and sometimes frightened them away by firing bullets over their shapeless heads but they were never let in.

‘They are the outcasts of the outcasts,’ said her father. When she was twelve, he told her:

‘Before the war, there were places called Universities where men did nothing but read books and conduct experiments. These men had certain privileges, though mostly unstated ones: but all the same, some Professors were allowed in the deep shelters with their families, during the war, and they proved to be the only ones left who could resurrect the gone world in a gentler shape, and try to keep destruction outside, this time.’

He had read more books than any other Professor in the community. He reconstructed the past; that was his profession. His lashless eyes were bleared with shortness of sight; soon he would go blind and then have nothing but the things he could touch such as his little clock. Marianne would have to read his books aloud to him. Rousseau, for
example. He was writing a book on the archaeology of social theory but maybe nobody in the community would want to read it, except Marianne, and she might not understand it. Theirs was primarily a community of farmers with the intellectual luxury of a few Professors who corresponded by the trading convoys with others of their kind in other places. And the Soldiers were there to protect them all.

‘There were no wild beasts in the woods, before the war. And scarcely any woods, to speak of. And everyone alive was interlinked, though some more loosely meshed into the pattern than others. Now it has all separated out; there are genuses of men, not simply
Homo faber
any more. Now there is
Homo faber
, to which genus we belong ourselves; but also
Homo praedatrix
,
Homo silvestris
and various others. In those days, Marianne, people kept wild beasts such as lions and tigers in cages and looked at them for information. Who would have thought they would take to our climate so kindly, when the fire came and let them out?’

He was fond of posing questions of this type, as were all the Professors; but especially her father. Sometimes she thought he was not talking to her at all but to himself or to a congregation of scholars who only existed in his mind. Nevertheless, she listened to every word he said.

Now and then the community broke from its trance. A Worker went mad one midnight and fired the house where his wife and three children slept. They choked and smothered. He ran through the streets laughing and weeping, entered the Professor’s tower and flung himself from the balcony. Suicide was not uncommon among Workers and Professors when they reached a certain age and felt the approach of senility and loss of wits, though it was unknown among the Soldiers, who learned discipline. But homicide was very rare and usually happened shortly before a Barbarian raid.

Another time, an old man broke into the museum and began systematically to wreck the glass cases and the treasures beneath them. He found a tin of red paint and wrote on the wall of the museum:
I AM AN OLD MAN AND I WANT THE DAY OF JUDGEMENT NOW
. He reached the stores of petrol with a candle in his fist but a warning bell rang and the Soldiers shot him before he could do more harm. The Soldiers also dealt inscrutably with the deformed.

Her father said: ‘The Soldiers are delegated to police us and protect us but they are developing an autonomous power of their own.’

Shortly after the incident in the museum, there was another visit from the Barbarians. The raid was an expected surprise; six years was a long time to pass without one but the time-scale of the community stretched out years for ever and also somehow cancelled them out, so an event could as well have taken place yesterday or ten years before. These Barbarians were not the tribe who killed Marianne’s brother; these came by foot at night, secretly and perfidiously, poisoning cattle they did not steal, sliding past the Soldiers’ look-out on their bellies and strangling those on guard. Four Worker women vanished.

‘They slit the bellies of the women after they’ve raped them and sew up cats inside,’ said the nurse, now a very old woman growing strange in her ways.

‘I think that’s most unlikely,’ said Marianne. ‘In the first place, I don’t think they have cats. We have cats to keep the mice from the corn and to use up our spare affection. They don’t grow corn and they don’t look to me as if they’re very affectionate, either.’

‘You young ones think you know everything about everything whereas, in fact, you know nothing about anything,’ said the old woman. ‘One day the Barbarians will get you and sew a cat up inside you and then you’ll know, all right.’

Though Marianne did not believe her, she felt a certain quiver in her belly as though a cat, a black one like the one her nurse owned, prowled around down there. She recalled with visionary clarity the face of the murdering boy with his necklaces, rings and knife, although the memory of her brother’s face was totally blurred. Sometimes she dreamed of his death; one day, waking from this dream, she realized the two faces had super-imposed themselves entirely on each other and all she saw was the boy killing himself or his double. This recurring dream disturbed her and she awoke sweating, though not precisely with fear.

‘Rousseau spoke of a noble savage but this is a time of ignoble savages. Think of the savage who murdered your brother,’ her father said.

‘I do,’ she confessed. ‘Quite often.’

He wound his fingers together and looked at her with a kind of fear. He had colourless eyes, like rainwater. His voice was thin and cool and
his skin had a certain transparency; he wore a good, dark suit, as all Professors did. Marianne loved him so much she only wished she could be more sure he was really there.

‘Is there a young man in the community you would like to marry?’ he asked her when she was sixteen.

She considered the cadets one by one. Every Professor’s eldest son became a cadet among the Soldiers, that was the tradition. Then she considered the Professors’ younger sons, nascent Professors themselves since it was a hereditary caste. They were all hereditary castes. She even ran her mind’s eye over the Workers. After all this consideration, Marianne acknowledged it was impossible for her to consider marriage with any of the young men in the community.

‘I don’t want to marry,’ she said. ‘I don’t see the point. I could maybe marry a stranger, someone from outside, but nobody here. Everybody here is so terribly boring, Father.’

‘Your mother was a remarkable woman,’ he said, from the depths of some sudden preoccupation of his own. ‘She married me in spite of my deformity. I was a lucky man.’

‘I think she was the lucky one,’ said Marianne.

‘We are all arbitrary children of calamity,’ he said in his academic voice. ‘We have to take the leavings.’

‘I don’t see why!’ she exclaimed.

‘You will,’ he said. She thought of her nurse saying: ‘You know nothing about anything,’ and she thought: ‘He’s old.’ She looked at him with immense tenderness, as if he were sick of an incurable disease.

‘You never made friends with the other children,’ he said. ‘I know you’d rather not live here but there is nowhere else to go and chaos is the opposite pole of boredom, Marianne.’

They had long ago stopped using the dining-room and he moved the clock into his study. It made a small, private ticking as he talked, as if the time it told was a secret between the three of them.

‘If the Barbarians inherit the earth, they will finally destroy it, they won’t know what to do with it. Their grandfathers survived outside the shelters, somehow; they survived at first by accident and continue to survive only by tenacity. They hunt, maraud and prey on us for the things they need and can’t make themselves and never realize we are
necessary to them. When they finally destroy us, if they finally destroy us, they’ll destroy their own means of living so I do not think they will destroy us. I think an equilibrium will be maintained. But the Soldiers would like to destroy them, for Soldiers need to be victorious, and if the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?’

Marianne loved him so she tactfully hid her yawn behind her hand. She loved him but he bored her.

She hated the May Day Festival. She took some food and escaped very early in the morning. She went farther into the ruins than she had ever been before. She found a passage that must once have been a wide road where she could walk with perfect ease. She penetrated to the fossilized heart of the city, a wholly mineralized terrain where nothing existed but chunks of blackish, rusty stone. Here even the briars refused to grow and pools of water from the encroaching swampland contained nothing but viscid darkness. All was silence; the rabbits did not burrow here nor the birds nest. She found a bundle of rags with putrified flesh inside and looked no further but hurried on until the swamp and brush began and the ruins merged almost imperceptibly with a shrubland of bushes and small trees, still pocked here and there with overgrown buildings. Then she entered the forest.

The trees surrounded her with vertical perspectives which obscured the flow of the hills. Here were wolves, bears, lions, phantoms and beggars but she saw nothing though she walked as softly as she could. It was long past midday and the sunlight fell in slanting rays on the trunks of the trees. She startled an antlered stag, who swished away through the undergrowth before she had a chance to see him properly; she remembered the antlers on the head of the Barbarian who fell from the museum roof and recollected that particular May Day was ten years before, exactly. Blossom covered the hawthorn bushes, the wilderness bloomed. Moon-daisies, buttercups and all manner of wild flowers hid in the foaming grass. She saw a variegated snake twined round the bough of a tree but it did not harm her, did not even stick its forked tongue out at her. Bird song and the wind in the leaves seemed not to diminish but to intensify the silence; she could hear her own blood moving through her body.

She thought she was alone until she came upon a man in a robe of black fur and many necklaces. She stepped back quickly into the bushes before he saw her. He was crouching on the ground grubbing up plants with a small spade and putting them in a basket. He was a huge man, well over six feet tall, with black hair frizzed out in a cloud down to his shoulders and a scanty, double-pointed beard dyed scarlet on one side and purple on the other. As he worked, he muttered to himself. A donkey was tethered to a tree nearby and, also tethered to a tree, was a child.

The child had a collar round his neck fastened to a chain. He was naked but for a very ragged pair of trousers. He was eating something and slobbering. He was twelve or thirteen. He was covered with a snaky, interlaced pattern of tattooing all over his chest, arms and face. Suddenly this child began to cry out and thresh around, foaming at the mouth. The man dropped his spade, went to the child and kicked him many times. The child shrieked and subsided to a babbling murmur, rubbing his ribs where the man had kicked. The man returned to his gardening without more ado, referring from time to time to a book with coloured illustrations which lay on the ground beside him. Marianne was surprised to see the book for she had been told the Barbarians were quite illiterate. The red marks of the blows glowed against the greenish pallor of the child’s flesh. Marianne slipped away noiselessly. She had thought herself entirely private and was a little unnerved to unexpectedly encounter a man with a book.

She soon found herself on a road. She broke through a brake of hawthorn and tumbled down a bank on to a wide, firm, green highway – green since overgrown with grass and weeds but, still, a road. She clambered back into the hedgerow and concealed herself, for she heard the sounds of horses’ hooves. She was not frightened at all, only curious; the nomads rounded a curve in the road and, from her hidey hole, she watched them pass.

They had rough, unpainted carts piled with cooking gear, blankets, skins of animals, weapons and other domestic equipment she could not identify. A few children, some of the crippled and some of the old rode on the carts but most of the women walked beside them, even those swollen with pregnancy. Many of the women were pregnant. They guided the horses or drove a few skinny cattle before them. There
were many horses and ponies, far more horses than cattle or goats.

The women wore trousers or long cumbersome skirts made out of stolen blankets, or stolen cloth, or leather, or fur. They had blouses, some beautifully embroidered, and rough, sleeveless jackets usually of either fur or leather; some wore Soldiers’ jackets though the black leather had been transformed by the application of beads, braiding and feathers. They were all decorated with astonishing, tawdry jewellery, some of it plainly salvaged from the ruins and of great age, some weirdly fashioned from animal bones and baked clay. Their hair was wound with ribbons and feathers; their faces were painted a little round the eyes or else tattooed with serpentine lines like those on the child in the wood. Most were barefoot, though some wore stolen boots or sandals made of straw.