Tiger Work, page 9
‘I have a nasty cold.’
‘You need someone to look after you.’
‘And will you do that?’
‘Yes, with pleasure.’
‘Why?’
Knowing how touchy she was about love, I did not know what to say. She was watching me closely.
‘See, you have no reason. You’re just…’
‘Lonely?’
‘Yes, that’s it.’
‘I’m not lonely. I’ve got the birds and the trees.’
‘What is it then?’
‘Why are you hostile towards having anything to do with me?’
‘I’m not. It’s just that I don’t want history to repeat itself.’
‘What history?’
‘All of it.’ She paused. ‘We have to make a new history, or we’ll just start the same cycle of creation and destruction that brought us to this point.’
For the first time I heard what she was saying. She was right. It is as if the logic of being human is tilted in a certain direction, as if we can’t escape what we are. We are doomed to compete, to exploit, to conquer, to control, to make hierarchies, to make power structures out of differences, to make power structures out of everything.
‘But how are we going to be different from what we’ve been in the past,’ I asked, ‘when human nature seems so flawed?’
‘We have to have agreements. We have to reshape human nature,’ she said.
‘Can it be done?’
‘We weren’t always what we became. That happened over time.’
‘What’s the first thing you would propose?’
‘Equality,’ she said.
‘But how can you propose equality without the power to enforce it?’
‘Do I need power to enforce it?’
‘Not with me, but with others.’
‘Once power enters the picture, then we are lost,’ she said.
‘But power is always there.’
‘That’s why I want my domain and you can have yours.’
‘But you are sick now and need someone. Another time it could be me. We need one another. Do you want to be absolutely on your own?’
‘Might not be so bad.’ She paused. ‘No. I wouldn’t.’
‘What about if we banish power?’ I said, suddenly inspired.
‘How do we do that? The first oafish person from the tunnels to see the world all empty and fresh again will want to take it over and rule. Then we are going to need power to deal with him or her. So we will always need power to deal with the impulse of power when it arises.’
‘So what are we to do then?’
‘We will make new laws. The first new laws of the race to come after us.’
‘What will your first law be?’
‘Every person is an inviolate and unique being. No one’s humanity is to be diminished in any way.’
‘Is that a law or a saying?’
‘It’s the best I can do with this nasty cold I’ve got. Look, thank you for coming round. But can we do this another day?’
I had offered to look after her, but now I could tell she wanted me gone. Perhaps the fact that I had found her was enough for the moment. I left straightaway, and she did not look up as I was leaving.
8
I stayed away for a week, then I brought flowers, hoping that she was better. She didn’t answer the door. As I was leaving, I heard her call me from an upper room.
‘You didn’t have to kill a couple of flowers for me.’
‘I didn’t kill them,’ I said defensively. ‘I just cut them.’
She came down and sat on a sofa. She was looking better, with a bright scarf round her neck.
‘Imagine someone cutting your flower to give away as a gift.’
‘Their flowers will grow back; mine won’t. That’s the difference.’
‘That’s going to be one of my laws.’
‘What?’
‘There must be respect for all life.’
‘Can we respect plants and animals and eat them?’ I asked.
‘If you respect them, why eat them?’
‘Fair question, but plants have no emotions. They don’t feel pain.’
‘How do you know?’
‘They would cry out if they did.’
‘So crying is the only way of knowing whether a being feels pain? That is so human-centric. What if they felt and expressed pain another way? What if an alien species who expresses pain by turning green subjected us to various torments and we didn’t turn green? They would be justified in concluding that we felt no pain and forever afterwards could subject us to unmentionable tortures.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘We have to respect the rights of forests and trees and plants and flowers.’
‘Won’t nature be wild then, and unmanageable?’
‘As opposed to exploited and dead?’
‘Your world is becoming impossible,’ I said.
‘And the world as you see it is already extinct. Don’t you get it, those of us who have survived must take the human race in a new direction or we will make the same mistakes again.’
‘But can the human race be taken in a new direction?’
‘Right now, we are the human race. Can we go in a new direction?’
I stood thinking about it for a long time.
‘Will you have children?’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Why not?’
‘For all the reasons I’ve been giving. If we can’t take ourselves in a new direction, then there’s no point in having kids.’
‘But we have to have kids or there will be nothing.’
‘Is that such a bad thing?’
‘What? I can’t believe you are saying that. Of course it’s a bad thing.’
‘Why?’
‘This is our planet. Humans should be here. It’s ours too.’
‘Is it? Is it really yours? How is it yours? All the other species were here long before you arrived on the scene. We are just latecomers who took over the party. We overextended our reach and made ourselves extinct. Here we are, living in the aftermath of humanity, and we’re still hankering for the things that brought about our demise. Are we not mad? This book I was reading made me think. Is humanity a preparatory species, doomed by its inherent limitations to be a forerunner to a wiser species that will transcend our fatal errors and make this earth the paradise it was always meant to be?’
‘You think we are just a bridge to something else, something higher?’
‘Yes. The more I think of our history, the more I conclude that we are just a rehearsal for the real act that will come after us. We were a warm-up show. We are flawed forerunners. Like the Atlanteans were before we came along.’
‘And where will they come from, the real act to which we are forerunners?’
‘I don’t know. They will come from elsewhere. Like us, they will have lost their planet, having taken all their blessings for granted. They will have been searching the galaxies for millennia, looking for a place of beauty that can sustain their life forms. Maybe it is they to whom the paradise of the earth is promised, because we have been disastrous caretakers of the miracle. I don’t know. It’s just a conjecture. Maybe even a fantasy.’
‘But what about us?’
‘Us?’
‘You and I?’
‘We can’t start a new earth.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t want to. I don’t think we deserve a second chance. I don’t trust the impulse of human history that is in me.’
‘But we’re different. If we work together, we can start an entirely new history.’
‘I don’t want to think about it. I want to sleep now.’
She shut her eyes. I left. A week later she came to see me. She found me in the garden. She had been watching me for a while before I noticed her. I had felt the critical weight of her eyes, but could not place it.
‘I’ve been watching you,’ she said. ‘You work as if you are expecting a mate.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why are you taking such trouble with your garden? You wouldn’t take such trouble if you were all alone in the world. There would be no point.’
I was silent. I realised that nothing I said would ever persuade her. I had come to accept that she wanted nothing to do with me. I represented for her everything that had gone before. She represented for me all that was to come. I kept silent and brought her drinks and avoided looking into her face.
‘I had a dream last night that you died and that I was all alone here,’ she said. ‘All the plants and trees and birds and sky started talking to me, and their speech was so big and strange that it frightened me, and I woke up with a jump. A world without you is worse than I imagined.’
I said nothing. I went back to work. I was clearing the leaves, smoothing the hedges, and generally keeping the garden clean and fine-looking. Why was I doing it? No one was going to see it. Least of all her. I had given up on her.
‘I think you’re right. We have to do something or one day one of us will be horribly alone in an empty world. Just makes me tremble to think of it.’
I began to water the lilies and begonias.
‘Are you giving me the silent treatment?’
‘You criticise the human past, and yet you behave selfishly and irrationally yourself,’ I said. ‘You want to do what suits you. Then you want to change your mind when it suits you too. It seems to me that we are ill-matched; I accept that we are doomed, and that’s fine with me. I’d rather live in peace and be lonely than be subjected to your endless games. If we are wiped out, then so be it. At least let me have some peace.’
She stared at me a long time. Then she vanished into the bushes and was gone. I could hear her footsteps far away. Two weeks passed and I didn’t see her. I thought it best to forget her. I worked my garden. Then I wrecked it. Then I started again. I had fits of weeping that lasted two days. I screamed into the trunk of lime trees. I found a gun in the house, along with bullets, and wanted to kill the wolves that marauded the woods near me. I starved myself for three days and was quite willing to let the world die with me. On the fourth day, as I lay on the kitchen floor, with everything becoming more blurred around me, I saw this angelic form hovering over me, and I passed out in its light. Then it was darkness.
And then my head ached. A harsh sunlight shone into the house, and it seemed as if I had missed a whole season. When I tried to move, I couldn’t. I could barely keep my eyes open. I became aware that someone had been feeding me. After what seemed like two days, I heard the song of the lark above the far roof. I heard something cracking in the earth. I found these ominous sounds oddly restful. A day later, emaciated, I sat up and looked around.
She was sitting across from me, watching me with intense eyes. When I moved, I could feel her move too, but subtly. I settled my eyes on her a long time and did not speak. I did not know what to say. She smiled.
‘Is there any way we can start again?’ she said.
‘From what?’
‘From where we went wrong. I went wrong. I was being an individualist. I was putting my concerns about power above everything else. Then I saw that if I am here in this world on my own, it becomes meaningless whether I have my own power or not. I don’t want to be queen of the world if it means being on my own in the world.’
‘Is that what you really want? To be queen of the world?’
‘Perhaps! Maybe underneath all my posturing that’s what I really want! Quite shocking, isn’t it?’ she said, pretending to look shocked.
‘Quite,’ I said, wearily. ‘But you are queen of the world.’
‘Because I am the only woman! Not very hard, is it?’ she laughed. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Surprised that I am still here.’
‘Please be here. It is truly frightening being here on my own. Last night a pack of wolves howled outside my window. I had the weird impression that they were camped there, waiting for me. I couldn’t sleep a wink. I heard sounds all over the house, and I was convinced they had got in and were coming to eat me alive. Do you think love originated in the primal loneliness of our ancestors?’
I grunted. Twice. She got the joke, and smiled.
‘It’s a long way from that loneliness to the wars and terminal egotism of our last civilisation. It seems our people lost their way a very, very long time ago.’
I said nothing. I was happy to hear her voice and her thoughts.
‘I never told you how I got here,’ she said. ‘And I will never tell anyone else. Our people lived in the far north of the tunnels. Been living there now for over half a century. I think at some point we began to go mad. There’s no other way to describe what happened. Every now and again someone would try to take over the group. There was nothing to take over, we were living in holes; yet someone would try and take over, and give orders, and take the women for themselves, and the rest of us would have to fight them. People got killed. It is as if people, in the extreme isolation in which we were living, suddenly became power crazy. It was as if power was the only thing that could console them after the destruction of the world, as if the misery of our lives could only be compensated for by power over others.
‘I swore then, when I was a child, that I would always be free, even if it killed me. It nearly killed me being unfree. One uncle seized the women and wanted them as his concubines. He claimed to be the strongest. Fights broke out and relations were killed by relations. People had power fights over everything: over the women, the food, prime sections of the tunnel, and, above all, the light.
‘We only had two hours of sunlight a day in the tunnels where we lived, and power determined who got to be in that sunlight. It poured in from a crack no larger than an egg, but that light became what most of us lived for. The most powerful had the first light. They stood under it and basked in it and washed their faces in the beam. Then it was their wives and children. And after them the next most powerful ones took in the light. Often, fatal combats broke out about who should stand in the light. Many of us went for months, even years, without ever standing in the light. All we could do was watch the beam from afar, watch it on the heads of those who were powerful enough to deprive us of it.
‘A time came when my father was unable to take it anymore. He could no longer bear living in the darkness of the tunnel, able to see the beam of light but never to taste it or feel it on his face. One morning he dared to go to the crack in the tunnel before anyone else and lift his face up to the first rays of light. The joy this gave him was extraordinary to behold. But his act so angered the powerful ones among us that they struck my father on the head with a jagged stone, and I saw the crown of blood on his head, which the beam of light illuminated. The blood ran down his face and collected in his eyes. The look on his face suggested that his martyrdom was worth feeling, after all those years in the dark, that heavenly light on his face. Even if it was just once. He died that night. Two days later, in a way that had become almost normal in the tunnels, my mother willed her own death.
‘After we buried her, many things happened too terrible to tell which woke in me the resolve to escape and face the certain death of the outside world rather than live another day an eternal prisoner of mindless power. It wasn’t a desire for light or for life that drove me out. It was the desire to be free, to never again be tyrannised, to never let anyone condemn me to darkness while they keep all the light.
‘As you can see, my history has not predisposed me to accommodate others. But I see now that drawing extreme conclusions from my experiences, no matter how bitter and terrible, is not much better than depriving others of light. We can learn the wrong lessons from what happened to us. I did, and I’m sorry. You are not a tunnel tyrant. At least I hope not. Please let’s start again.’
‘How?’
‘Tell me how you came to be here.’
I told her the little I could in the manner that my poor strength allowed, in a low voice, with no inflection. She listened to me with vacant eyes, more silent than she had ever been.
‘So the people from your tunnel are still there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you tempted to go and tell them that there is still a world out here?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Same reason as you. They will revert back to what they were before. Within fifty years they will replicate the same conditions that brought us here. I fear them more than the bubonic plague I read about. Leave them in their ignorance.’
‘That’s what I think. I also think that we must look after one another. After all, we are all we’ve got.’
‘Is that a new principle of yours?’
‘I have many new principles.’
9
When I got better and could walk and take in the sun, I found that I did not recognise her anymore. She seemed an entirely different person. She was always smiling. She no longer spent all her time in her house. She seemed not so keen to be alone anymore.
Together we rebuilt my garden, which had become a little ruined while I was ill. Foxes and other wild creatures had torn their way through it. There was something odd about the way the garden was shredded. We started having big fires in the nights to keep wild animals away. We found wood everywhere. The houses, though crumbling, had stores of all manner of things that had survived whatever had befallen the world while we were in the tunnels. We found supplies of candles. We found an old electric generator. It took us a week to drag it back to the house, and a month to get it to work. We found guns and bullets. In a run-down museum we found a cannon and an old machine gun. We found cellars full of wine from many centuries ago. Some of the bottles of wine had preserved so wonderfully that when we uncorked them, their fragrance filled the living room and their fruity taste, redolent of long tranquil summers, lingered on the palate and in the mind for days. Some bottles held only ancient wine-dust.
The cellars of the city yielded tools, boots, a fruit-pressing machine, computers, cords, weighing machines, records, clothes, parts of cars – in short, all the equipment that was used to sustain a household. Every day we brought back something new.
‘You need someone to look after you.’
‘And will you do that?’
‘Yes, with pleasure.’
‘Why?’
Knowing how touchy she was about love, I did not know what to say. She was watching me closely.
‘See, you have no reason. You’re just…’
‘Lonely?’
‘Yes, that’s it.’
‘I’m not lonely. I’ve got the birds and the trees.’
‘What is it then?’
‘Why are you hostile towards having anything to do with me?’
‘I’m not. It’s just that I don’t want history to repeat itself.’
‘What history?’
‘All of it.’ She paused. ‘We have to make a new history, or we’ll just start the same cycle of creation and destruction that brought us to this point.’
For the first time I heard what she was saying. She was right. It is as if the logic of being human is tilted in a certain direction, as if we can’t escape what we are. We are doomed to compete, to exploit, to conquer, to control, to make hierarchies, to make power structures out of differences, to make power structures out of everything.
‘But how are we going to be different from what we’ve been in the past,’ I asked, ‘when human nature seems so flawed?’
‘We have to have agreements. We have to reshape human nature,’ she said.
‘Can it be done?’
‘We weren’t always what we became. That happened over time.’
‘What’s the first thing you would propose?’
‘Equality,’ she said.
‘But how can you propose equality without the power to enforce it?’
‘Do I need power to enforce it?’
‘Not with me, but with others.’
‘Once power enters the picture, then we are lost,’ she said.
‘But power is always there.’
‘That’s why I want my domain and you can have yours.’
‘But you are sick now and need someone. Another time it could be me. We need one another. Do you want to be absolutely on your own?’
‘Might not be so bad.’ She paused. ‘No. I wouldn’t.’
‘What about if we banish power?’ I said, suddenly inspired.
‘How do we do that? The first oafish person from the tunnels to see the world all empty and fresh again will want to take it over and rule. Then we are going to need power to deal with him or her. So we will always need power to deal with the impulse of power when it arises.’
‘So what are we to do then?’
‘We will make new laws. The first new laws of the race to come after us.’
‘What will your first law be?’
‘Every person is an inviolate and unique being. No one’s humanity is to be diminished in any way.’
‘Is that a law or a saying?’
‘It’s the best I can do with this nasty cold I’ve got. Look, thank you for coming round. But can we do this another day?’
I had offered to look after her, but now I could tell she wanted me gone. Perhaps the fact that I had found her was enough for the moment. I left straightaway, and she did not look up as I was leaving.
8
I stayed away for a week, then I brought flowers, hoping that she was better. She didn’t answer the door. As I was leaving, I heard her call me from an upper room.
‘You didn’t have to kill a couple of flowers for me.’
‘I didn’t kill them,’ I said defensively. ‘I just cut them.’
She came down and sat on a sofa. She was looking better, with a bright scarf round her neck.
‘Imagine someone cutting your flower to give away as a gift.’
‘Their flowers will grow back; mine won’t. That’s the difference.’
‘That’s going to be one of my laws.’
‘What?’
‘There must be respect for all life.’
‘Can we respect plants and animals and eat them?’ I asked.
‘If you respect them, why eat them?’
‘Fair question, but plants have no emotions. They don’t feel pain.’
‘How do you know?’
‘They would cry out if they did.’
‘So crying is the only way of knowing whether a being feels pain? That is so human-centric. What if they felt and expressed pain another way? What if an alien species who expresses pain by turning green subjected us to various torments and we didn’t turn green? They would be justified in concluding that we felt no pain and forever afterwards could subject us to unmentionable tortures.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘We have to respect the rights of forests and trees and plants and flowers.’
‘Won’t nature be wild then, and unmanageable?’
‘As opposed to exploited and dead?’
‘Your world is becoming impossible,’ I said.
‘And the world as you see it is already extinct. Don’t you get it, those of us who have survived must take the human race in a new direction or we will make the same mistakes again.’
‘But can the human race be taken in a new direction?’
‘Right now, we are the human race. Can we go in a new direction?’
I stood thinking about it for a long time.
‘Will you have children?’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Why not?’
‘For all the reasons I’ve been giving. If we can’t take ourselves in a new direction, then there’s no point in having kids.’
‘But we have to have kids or there will be nothing.’
‘Is that such a bad thing?’
‘What? I can’t believe you are saying that. Of course it’s a bad thing.’
‘Why?’
‘This is our planet. Humans should be here. It’s ours too.’
‘Is it? Is it really yours? How is it yours? All the other species were here long before you arrived on the scene. We are just latecomers who took over the party. We overextended our reach and made ourselves extinct. Here we are, living in the aftermath of humanity, and we’re still hankering for the things that brought about our demise. Are we not mad? This book I was reading made me think. Is humanity a preparatory species, doomed by its inherent limitations to be a forerunner to a wiser species that will transcend our fatal errors and make this earth the paradise it was always meant to be?’
‘You think we are just a bridge to something else, something higher?’
‘Yes. The more I think of our history, the more I conclude that we are just a rehearsal for the real act that will come after us. We were a warm-up show. We are flawed forerunners. Like the Atlanteans were before we came along.’
‘And where will they come from, the real act to which we are forerunners?’
‘I don’t know. They will come from elsewhere. Like us, they will have lost their planet, having taken all their blessings for granted. They will have been searching the galaxies for millennia, looking for a place of beauty that can sustain their life forms. Maybe it is they to whom the paradise of the earth is promised, because we have been disastrous caretakers of the miracle. I don’t know. It’s just a conjecture. Maybe even a fantasy.’
‘But what about us?’
‘Us?’
‘You and I?’
‘We can’t start a new earth.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t want to. I don’t think we deserve a second chance. I don’t trust the impulse of human history that is in me.’
‘But we’re different. If we work together, we can start an entirely new history.’
‘I don’t want to think about it. I want to sleep now.’
She shut her eyes. I left. A week later she came to see me. She found me in the garden. She had been watching me for a while before I noticed her. I had felt the critical weight of her eyes, but could not place it.
‘I’ve been watching you,’ she said. ‘You work as if you are expecting a mate.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why are you taking such trouble with your garden? You wouldn’t take such trouble if you were all alone in the world. There would be no point.’
I was silent. I realised that nothing I said would ever persuade her. I had come to accept that she wanted nothing to do with me. I represented for her everything that had gone before. She represented for me all that was to come. I kept silent and brought her drinks and avoided looking into her face.
‘I had a dream last night that you died and that I was all alone here,’ she said. ‘All the plants and trees and birds and sky started talking to me, and their speech was so big and strange that it frightened me, and I woke up with a jump. A world without you is worse than I imagined.’
I said nothing. I went back to work. I was clearing the leaves, smoothing the hedges, and generally keeping the garden clean and fine-looking. Why was I doing it? No one was going to see it. Least of all her. I had given up on her.
‘I think you’re right. We have to do something or one day one of us will be horribly alone in an empty world. Just makes me tremble to think of it.’
I began to water the lilies and begonias.
‘Are you giving me the silent treatment?’
‘You criticise the human past, and yet you behave selfishly and irrationally yourself,’ I said. ‘You want to do what suits you. Then you want to change your mind when it suits you too. It seems to me that we are ill-matched; I accept that we are doomed, and that’s fine with me. I’d rather live in peace and be lonely than be subjected to your endless games. If we are wiped out, then so be it. At least let me have some peace.’
She stared at me a long time. Then she vanished into the bushes and was gone. I could hear her footsteps far away. Two weeks passed and I didn’t see her. I thought it best to forget her. I worked my garden. Then I wrecked it. Then I started again. I had fits of weeping that lasted two days. I screamed into the trunk of lime trees. I found a gun in the house, along with bullets, and wanted to kill the wolves that marauded the woods near me. I starved myself for three days and was quite willing to let the world die with me. On the fourth day, as I lay on the kitchen floor, with everything becoming more blurred around me, I saw this angelic form hovering over me, and I passed out in its light. Then it was darkness.
And then my head ached. A harsh sunlight shone into the house, and it seemed as if I had missed a whole season. When I tried to move, I couldn’t. I could barely keep my eyes open. I became aware that someone had been feeding me. After what seemed like two days, I heard the song of the lark above the far roof. I heard something cracking in the earth. I found these ominous sounds oddly restful. A day later, emaciated, I sat up and looked around.
She was sitting across from me, watching me with intense eyes. When I moved, I could feel her move too, but subtly. I settled my eyes on her a long time and did not speak. I did not know what to say. She smiled.
‘Is there any way we can start again?’ she said.
‘From what?’
‘From where we went wrong. I went wrong. I was being an individualist. I was putting my concerns about power above everything else. Then I saw that if I am here in this world on my own, it becomes meaningless whether I have my own power or not. I don’t want to be queen of the world if it means being on my own in the world.’
‘Is that what you really want? To be queen of the world?’
‘Perhaps! Maybe underneath all my posturing that’s what I really want! Quite shocking, isn’t it?’ she said, pretending to look shocked.
‘Quite,’ I said, wearily. ‘But you are queen of the world.’
‘Because I am the only woman! Not very hard, is it?’ she laughed. ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Surprised that I am still here.’
‘Please be here. It is truly frightening being here on my own. Last night a pack of wolves howled outside my window. I had the weird impression that they were camped there, waiting for me. I couldn’t sleep a wink. I heard sounds all over the house, and I was convinced they had got in and were coming to eat me alive. Do you think love originated in the primal loneliness of our ancestors?’
I grunted. Twice. She got the joke, and smiled.
‘It’s a long way from that loneliness to the wars and terminal egotism of our last civilisation. It seems our people lost their way a very, very long time ago.’
I said nothing. I was happy to hear her voice and her thoughts.
‘I never told you how I got here,’ she said. ‘And I will never tell anyone else. Our people lived in the far north of the tunnels. Been living there now for over half a century. I think at some point we began to go mad. There’s no other way to describe what happened. Every now and again someone would try to take over the group. There was nothing to take over, we were living in holes; yet someone would try and take over, and give orders, and take the women for themselves, and the rest of us would have to fight them. People got killed. It is as if people, in the extreme isolation in which we were living, suddenly became power crazy. It was as if power was the only thing that could console them after the destruction of the world, as if the misery of our lives could only be compensated for by power over others.
‘I swore then, when I was a child, that I would always be free, even if it killed me. It nearly killed me being unfree. One uncle seized the women and wanted them as his concubines. He claimed to be the strongest. Fights broke out and relations were killed by relations. People had power fights over everything: over the women, the food, prime sections of the tunnel, and, above all, the light.
‘We only had two hours of sunlight a day in the tunnels where we lived, and power determined who got to be in that sunlight. It poured in from a crack no larger than an egg, but that light became what most of us lived for. The most powerful had the first light. They stood under it and basked in it and washed their faces in the beam. Then it was their wives and children. And after them the next most powerful ones took in the light. Often, fatal combats broke out about who should stand in the light. Many of us went for months, even years, without ever standing in the light. All we could do was watch the beam from afar, watch it on the heads of those who were powerful enough to deprive us of it.
‘A time came when my father was unable to take it anymore. He could no longer bear living in the darkness of the tunnel, able to see the beam of light but never to taste it or feel it on his face. One morning he dared to go to the crack in the tunnel before anyone else and lift his face up to the first rays of light. The joy this gave him was extraordinary to behold. But his act so angered the powerful ones among us that they struck my father on the head with a jagged stone, and I saw the crown of blood on his head, which the beam of light illuminated. The blood ran down his face and collected in his eyes. The look on his face suggested that his martyrdom was worth feeling, after all those years in the dark, that heavenly light on his face. Even if it was just once. He died that night. Two days later, in a way that had become almost normal in the tunnels, my mother willed her own death.
‘After we buried her, many things happened too terrible to tell which woke in me the resolve to escape and face the certain death of the outside world rather than live another day an eternal prisoner of mindless power. It wasn’t a desire for light or for life that drove me out. It was the desire to be free, to never again be tyrannised, to never let anyone condemn me to darkness while they keep all the light.
‘As you can see, my history has not predisposed me to accommodate others. But I see now that drawing extreme conclusions from my experiences, no matter how bitter and terrible, is not much better than depriving others of light. We can learn the wrong lessons from what happened to us. I did, and I’m sorry. You are not a tunnel tyrant. At least I hope not. Please let’s start again.’
‘How?’
‘Tell me how you came to be here.’
I told her the little I could in the manner that my poor strength allowed, in a low voice, with no inflection. She listened to me with vacant eyes, more silent than she had ever been.
‘So the people from your tunnel are still there?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Are you tempted to go and tell them that there is still a world out here?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Same reason as you. They will revert back to what they were before. Within fifty years they will replicate the same conditions that brought us here. I fear them more than the bubonic plague I read about. Leave them in their ignorance.’
‘That’s what I think. I also think that we must look after one another. After all, we are all we’ve got.’
‘Is that a new principle of yours?’
‘I have many new principles.’
9
When I got better and could walk and take in the sun, I found that I did not recognise her anymore. She seemed an entirely different person. She was always smiling. She no longer spent all her time in her house. She seemed not so keen to be alone anymore.
Together we rebuilt my garden, which had become a little ruined while I was ill. Foxes and other wild creatures had torn their way through it. There was something odd about the way the garden was shredded. We started having big fires in the nights to keep wild animals away. We found wood everywhere. The houses, though crumbling, had stores of all manner of things that had survived whatever had befallen the world while we were in the tunnels. We found supplies of candles. We found an old electric generator. It took us a week to drag it back to the house, and a month to get it to work. We found guns and bullets. In a run-down museum we found a cannon and an old machine gun. We found cellars full of wine from many centuries ago. Some of the bottles of wine had preserved so wonderfully that when we uncorked them, their fragrance filled the living room and their fruity taste, redolent of long tranquil summers, lingered on the palate and in the mind for days. Some bottles held only ancient wine-dust.
The cellars of the city yielded tools, boots, a fruit-pressing machine, computers, cords, weighing machines, records, clothes, parts of cars – in short, all the equipment that was used to sustain a household. Every day we brought back something new.
