The Everlasting — Chapter 15

15

SEVERAL YEARS AFTER the war, during the mid-afternoon hour I generally put aside to fantasize about setting fire to my manuscript and disappearing into the countryside to raise goats, I received a book in the post.

I was aware, as I unwrapped it, that I ought to be filled with awe or terror, or at least the simple thrill of discovery. But all I felt was an odd ache in my chest, and a sudden, sharp pain in my left hand. I flexed it twice, but the ache remained.

I tucked the book under my arm and left my office immediately. I knocked hard into Harrison as I rounded the corner, not even pausing to apologize.

I was halfway home before it occurred to me that I might be suffering from another of my delusions. As a boy they’d been dismissed as flights of fancy—I would wake screaming that my feet had turned black or come home full of stories about a girl I met in the grove—but they worsened during the war. For the week after the battle at the dunes I’d refused to speak or swallow, to the bafflement of every field nurse and doctor. They’d had to tie socks over my hands so that I wouldn’t claw my own throat bloody, searching for a wound that wasn’t there.

In the end they’d decided I had suffered some mysterious head injury— I’d been found crouched over Colonel Drayton’s corpse—and sent me home with prescriptions that didn’t work and a medal I didn’t deserve.

There was a boy seated beside me on the train. He had very long, reddish lashes.

I found myself opening the book, asking in my smooth and edgeless voice, “Can you read this?”

He couldn’t, of course, but he liked your device on the front. He expounded on this subject for a while, and I listened with that strange panic rising in my throat. I felt wildly, inexplicably fond of him: I liked the high pitch of his voice, which he tried and failed to lower; I liked the stubby shape of his fingers; I liked his mismatched front teeth—one full-size, one still a baby tooth.

I forced myself to stand at my stop. The boy nodded at the book.

“What’s it called?”

I pictured him reading it one day. Pictured him enlisting, shipping out, fighting, killing, dying, another hero of Dominion.

Something swelled painfully in my chest—fury, I thought. I didn’t answer him, but fumbled for my wallet and shoved the entire thing into his small, scarred hands.

It took me three days to translate the first page.

I don’t know why. Perhaps I was ill—my head hurt badly whenever I read more than a few sentences, and I couldn’t keep warm, though the air in my flat was hot and sour as boiled milk. The pain in my left hand had settled into a dull ache between the bones of my middle and ring fingers, which persisted no matter how I wrapped or bound it. The bandaging provoked another one of my little delusions—I could feel the ghosts of other hands around mine, the rasp of calluses that didn’t exist—so I threw it away.

I was plagued, too, by a strange, listless futility. I would find myself crawling back into bed before the sun had set, or chain-smoking at my desk, watching the clock as if I were waiting for something.

On the sixth day I cabled Professor Sawbridge. She never wrote me back. I wish to God I’d wondered why, or made inquiries, or gone looking for her—but I didn’t.

On the seventh day I went out for cigarettes and milk. A man spat on my boots and I smashed the milk bottle across his face. It occurred to me, as I watched him sputter bloodily at my feet, that I was hugely, incandescently

angry, and had been since the moment I unwrapped the book, since before that, since always.

I returned to my flat at a near run. I burst back through the door, breath whistling in my chest, filled with a wild urge to rip the pages from the spine —but the book was gone.

In its place there was a crisp white card, bearing no name, but only an address.

I held the card and thought, grimly: Finally.

The streets surrounding the capitol were empty, oppressively quiet. The white marble steps were littered with odd trash: trampled pamphlets, snapped poster boards, a single shoe. Near the top there was a pool of something reddish and gelid, which I stepped carefully around. I thought, for no reason, of my father.

An unmemorable, polished sort of person was waiting for me at a side door. I followed them through a series of unmemorable, polished hallways, until we reached an office with four guards posted at the door.

The woman inside—handsome, ageless, with metal-yellow hair and very blue eyes—greeted me warmly. “Thank you for coming, Corporal Mallory.”

“Vivian?” I said, as if the Minister of War was the mother of an old school friend. Her smile didn’t waver, but she blinked once, and I went dizzy with shame. “That is, ma’am—Minister Rolfe—”

“Vivian is fine. Sit down.”

I sat.

“Our country,” she said, “is at a crossroads.” Then she talked for a while about the war and the nation and the glory that was within our grasp. I had the sense that it had once been a very good speech, but that it had been delivered too many times, and gone stale.

I found myself watching Vivian’s mouth. Every so often her lips would move in a way that allowed me to see her left canine, which was badly chipped, the tip jagged, the bone gone grayish and dead. I stared at it until my knuckles began to throb, fiercely.

I became aware that she had stopped talking some time ago. I jerked my eyes back to hers and found her watching me with the tolerance of a teacher for a bright but wayward pupil. “Why don’t we cut right to it,” she said, gently, and drew a square wooden object from her desk. The book landed between us with a hollow wooden thock, and my pulse leapt urgently in my throat. Whatever I had been waiting for was very near now.

Vivian tapped the cover. “A discovery like this is too important to leave to the ivory tower types. Sir Una belongs to the people. To that end, we intend to commission a translation, to be published in the spring by Satford & Gills. We arranged for you to receive the book as a sort of audition,

which you passed.”

I blinked, stupidly.

“The Death of Una Everlasting,” she said, in a voice like a radio announcer, “translated by Owen Mallory, by order of the Chancellor of Dominion. How does that sound?”

It sounded like the sort of fevered daydream an undergraduate would invent to get himself through his exams, involving a level of wealth and prestige that simply did not exist for medieval historians. A small, slimy part of me went slack-jawed with ambition; the rest of me watched coldly, from a great height. “What an honor,” I said, because I was supposed to.

“And Chancellor Gladwell—”

“Was murdered by radicals twelve hours ago. You are speaking now with Chancellor Rolfe, but let’s not get bogged down in the details.”

I waited for shock to arrive; it never did. I said, faintly, “I see.”

The Chancellor of Dominion crossed her arms on the desk and leaned toward me. Her expression became almost comically severe, like the queen of hearts in a deck of cards. “You have served your country well, Owen Mallory.” Even her voice changed, the accent turning oddly archaic. “Are you the man who will save it?”

This was the moment, I thought, for a show of emotion. I made myself swallow, as if overcome. I nodded.

Vivian’s face relaxed again. There was something unsettling about the way her expressions shifted, a fractional delay. “Excellent! Let’s go ahead

then—no time like the present, is there?” She clapped her hands twice, very loudly. The door opened, and the unmemorable person said, “Chancellor?”

Vivian issued a series of instructions, but I barely heard them. I was reaching for the book, sliding it across the desktop. My left hand was hurting so badly now it was difficult to make my fingers close around the cover.

I opened the book. For the first time since it had arrived in the post—for perhaps the first time in my life—I experienced true surprise. “The pages,”

I said. “The pages are—” I swallowed, this time in genuine and wholly inexplicable distress. “Not blank.”

Vivian gave me a quizzical smile. “Well, I should certainly hope not!

Did you think I gave you a fake?”

I swayed a little. I could smell the clean, wild scent of frost, the green bite of pine.

Behind me, the door opened again, this time admitting a pair of men who both looked like they knew the difference between stocks and bonds.

“Ah, Mr. Satford, Mr. Gills. Make yourselves comfortable. This is Corporal Mallory, the young man we discussed.”

The men introduced themselves and expressed their extreme joy to be working with me on a project of such national import. They produced glossy leather folios and began to turn the pages, describing the terms of their offer in a language that seemed to bear very little resemblance to modern Mothertongue. What, I wondered, was an advance against royalties? My hand was screaming now, the pain traveling in hot waves from my wrist to my jaw.

Vivian cut in sometimes with questions and clarifications. The men nodded and made tiny amendments to their papers. I sat in dazed silence, thinking, over and over, for no logical reason: This isn’t how it goes.

But apparently it was. Someone handed me a pen. I signed my name twice and shook three hands. Mr. Satford assured me that a check would be delivered by special courier the following morning. Then everyone stood, so I stood, too.

I reached for the book, but Vivian pinned it to the desk with one finger.

“Property of the state, I’m afraid. We’ll get you an office here, and a couple

of assistants.”

I nodded because I didn’t know what else to do. Turning away from the book felt like missing a step on the stairs, a sick swoop.

Vivian gave me a bracing slap on the shoulder at the door. Her eyes flicked to my forehead, slicked with sweat, and she shook her head, fondly.

“Poor thing. You must be absolutely stifling in that coat. You’d think you were expecting snow.”

Everyone laughed, and so I laughed, too.

I finished the translation well before winter.

It wasn’t hard. The Chancellor gave me a very nice office in the capitol building, two security guards, and crisp, glossy photographs of each page of The Death of Una Everlasting. (The original text was packed carefully away; the college archivist would have approved.) I was also provided with a pair of painfully deferential graduate students who insisted on addressing me as Professor Mallory. When I corrected them —I was only a lecturer—they said, instantly and simultaneously, “Yes, Professor Mallory.”

One of them, an anxious young woman named something like Daphne or Shelly, scrambled to explain. “It’s just, that’s what the Chancellor called you. And Professor Sawbridge talked about you so much when we took her Material Cultures of Middle Dominion course. She said you were—”

“A feckless sycophant?”

“—worth ten of us.”

I was shocked to feel a sudden surge of affection; I hadn’t felt much of anything since I walked out of Vivian’s office. “Oh.”

The other one, a rowing-clubbish boy named Georgie or Frankie, said, glumly, “And twenty of me.”

I sent Professor Sawbridge another telegram that evening but received no reply. The term had started the previous week, but her office on campus remained locked, and her usual courses had been assigned to harassed- looking junior faculty.

I made an effort to be nicer to the graduate students after that. Partly because anyone who had survived Material Cultures of Middle Dominion deserved reparations, and partly because I needed them rather badly. Their Middle Mothertongue was quite poor—why did everyone struggle so much with strong and weak noun classes—but I kept forgetting to eat or drink, and my hand often hurt too badly to type.

I would translate aloud, instead, while they took turns transcribing. Once I caught Georgie (Frankie?) staring glazedly at me rather than typing.

“What?” I asked him.

“Sorry, Professor! It’s just”—some revelatory throat-clearing and blushing here—“you have a lovely voice.”

I did. I always had. There was no reason it should startle me so. “Thank you, Frankie. Did you put that second comma in the last sentence?” He nodded, still blushing. “Well, strike it out. Whoever wrote this had a very loose grasp of punctuation.”

The day we finished the first draft, the Chancellor herself arrived with a bottle of expensive-looking brandy, the color of which reminded me of someone’s eyes, though I couldn’t recall whose. We raised our glasses to Dominion, and to the First Queen, and to you. My voice caught and snapped on your name, like a loose thread around a nail.

Before she left, Vivian took me aside. “Well done, Owen. You’ve done everything I asked, beautifully. You’ve kept the faith. It hasn’t been easy, I know, but”—here she actually winked—“God rewards the faithful.”

I tried to believe her. But when I thought of God, all that came to mind was a wide smile with a chipped, graying tooth.

The first edition of my translation was published in a matter of months, with a level of fanfare even I found vaguely disquieting. Surely it wasn’t usual for every academic review and newspaper column to adopt the same awed, idolatrous tone; surely someone had doubts about the provenance of the original book or the quality of the translation. But if anyone asked questions, they asked them quietly, from the corners of their mouths.

Chancellor Rolfe had, after all, declared the book a national treasure.

She read long passages aloud on the radio, drawing lessons and parallels from them as priests did from scripture. She had cheap pocket editions printed for the troops, and there were rumors that she slept with the original text on her bedside table.

Satford & Gills shipped me off on an extensive lecture tour following the publication. This, I thought, they would soon regret; I had a fine, strong speaking voice, but I was uneasy on the stage, inclined to fidget and stutter.

I doubted whether anyone would come.

But they did. At first in the twenties, then the hundreds, packing every hall and forum. Each event might have been plucked from my most ambitious, unlikely fantasies: shaking hands with leading scholars and critics, fielding invitations to clubs and societies I’d never even known existed, standing behind tall oaken lecterns, looking down upon a sea of eager pink faces.

I supposed in my fantasies Professor Sawbridge might have been among the crowd, or even my father. But Sawbridge was still busy with her tomb, apparently, and my father must have still been angry with me. Admittedly, I’d called him a liar and a traitor when last we spoke, and expressed the hope that he would never again darken my doorstep, but it struck me as rather shabby of him to respect my wishes after thirty years of ignoring them.

But what did I care? I had the adulation of thousands, now. I was a respected scholar, a war hero—a knight of the nation, even. The Chancellor had taken my oath in a somewhat hurried ceremony just before the first edition went to print; Satford & Gills had been very eager to put Sir on the cover.

The people of Dominion—who had laughed and spat at me, who had scorned and doubted and reviled me—now loved me as one of their own. I had been born outside of Dominion, which I imagined as a grand house with shuttered windows and locked doors. The Death of Una Everlasting, it appeared, was the key.

But then a woman had lingered after one of my lectures to pat my hand and tell me she only wished the rest of “my type” would devote themselves

to their new country. Later, a photographer had asked if I would be willing to pose in my “native costume.” Then I’d overheard a pair of scholars who’d invited me to join their society: Oh, come now, one of them said, laughing, you’re always saying we need a mascot.

And I understood finally that a nation is a house with no windows or doors at all. That no matter what I did—no matter how much blood I spilled in its defense or ink I spent in its praise—it would never, ever be my home.

But if Dominion was not my home, where was it? Not the fetid flat above the butcher shop. Not my father’s narrow gray row house in Queenswald, and surely not my mother’s country, which I had known only as an infant and, later, as an invader. I would only be a different kind of stranger there, anyway: Instead of being surprised when I spoke their language, people would be surprised when I didn’t.

No. The word home evoked only the sweet green smell of the woods, long gone, and sometimes another word: Yew, I thought, or perhaps you.

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