Cat Country (30 page)

My captive quickly seemed to have forgotten everything and went blank. And then after a long while, he seemed to have thought of something. ‘It’s all his fault!’ He pointed at Young Scorpion and the latter smiled.

‘Speak!’ I ordered the prisoner.

‘It’s all his fault!’ The soldier repeated. I knew how verbose and roundabout Cat People can be, so I waited patiently until he’d worked off some of his anger.

‘None of us wanted to go to war, but
he
tricked us into going to fight. The enemy was even prepared to give us National Souls, but he wouldn’t let us take them! The only thing he was good for was controlling us and keeping us from what we wanted to do. The Red Cord Corps and a number of other units all took the foreigners’ National Souls and retreated in perfect safety. We were the only ones left for the enemy to give a good beating to, and believe me they did! We are his father’s personal troops, but rather than looking after our welfare, Young Scorpion there led us straight to the execution ground. It seemed that as long as there was one of us left alive, he’d still want that lone individual to die like a well-behaved little soldier! His father was already planning to pull us out. But this one! He wouldn’t go along with it. The other troops retreated in perfect safety; they weren’t wounded and would be in good shape for looting when they got back to the rear. But
us
! We don’t even have a single club left. How are we to go on living?’ He seemed caught up in his own eloquence, and neither Young Scorpion nor myself said anything. We just listened. At least I listened, for Young Scorpion was perhaps so caught up in his own grief that he wasn’t paying attention. I, on the other hand, was definitely fascinated by everything the soldier had to say. I just hoped he would go on and on, the more the better.

‘Our land, homes and families,’ he continued, ‘have all been taken away by you. Old Scorpion does
this
to us today and you do
that
to us tomorrow. The number of officials increases every day and the poverty of the people increases apace. You thieve and cheat us until there’s nothing left for us but to join the army. And then once you have us in the army, you force us to help you thieve from others just like ourselves. And the ruling class always takes the lion’s share of the loot. You let us have a tiny bit of it only for fear that we won’t go on helping you if you don’t. We can’t work, for you make soldiers of our parents so that we have to grow up in the army, knowing nothing but soldiering. If we didn’t become soldiers, we wouldn’t be able to make a living in any other line!’ He stopped to catch his breath and I took advantage of the opportunity to ask him a question.

‘Since you know that they’re no good, why don’t you simply kill them and take over everything yourselves?’

The soldier rolled his eyes away. At first I thought that it was because he didn’t understand my words, but then I realised that he was thinking. After a while, he asked, ‘You mean we ought to revolt?’

I nodded my head. I hadn’t thought that a simple soldier would be familiar with the term ‘revolution’. I’d momentarily forgotten about the great number of revolutions the Cat People had already gone through.

‘There’s no point in talking about that. We don’t believe in it any more. There’d be some pleasure in killing them for revenge, but revolution’s a waste of time. Every time there’s a revolution, we common folk just lose something else. The revolutionaries are all bad. Take that time when they were going to split up all the land and property, for instance. Everyone thought it was a great idea. But in the end each man only got a tiny bit of land, not even enough to plant a dozen reverie trees. We went hungry whether we worked the land or not.

‘The ruling group couldn’t come up with any way of solving our economic problems, especially the younger ones – all they were good for was coming up with plans, but they never paid any attention to whether our stomachs were empty or not. Any plan that isn’t directed at filling the bellies of the common people is a joke. We don’t believe anything they say any more. But since we don’t have any way out ourselves, we simply serve as soldiers to anyone who gives us reverie leaves. And now they won’t even let us be soldiers any more! There’s no point in revolting, but killing them would be sweet. We’ll kill every last one of them! In having us go to war against the foreigners,
they
tried to kill us. But if we were all dead, who would there be to eat their reverie leaves and serve them as soldiers? They collect reverie leaves by the pile and wives by the dozen, but they won’t even give us a scrap of their leaves. Instead, they send us out to make war against the foreigners and kill or be killed!’

‘And now you’ve come back especially to kill him?’ I pointed at Young Scorpion.

‘That’s exactly the reason! He orders us out to die at the front and won’t even allow us to accept the foreigners’ National Souls!’

‘What are you going to do after you’ve killed him?’ I asked.

He was silent.

Young Scorpion was the first clear-headed person I’d met during my Martian experience and yet this soldier and his comrades hated him to the very marrow of his bones. Of course, it wasn’t my place to, nor did I have the time to, explain to this soldier that Young Scorpion was not the man he should hate. He had mistakenly taken Young Scorpion as representative of the official class, and since he couldn’t put his hands on the whole of officialdom, he had decided to take his revenge on Young Scorpion. This revealed to me one of the real reasons for the debilitation of Cat Country: those with a little intelligence were forever leading their compatriots to revolt before they had secured a firm knowledge of the real workings and power structures of their own society. Then, while seeking to solve the political and economic problems of Cat Country, these well-intentioned and self-appointed leaders would themselves be swept up in the whirlwind of the very problems they had set out to solve.

The common people, having gone through a series of revolutions, had, to be sure, cultivated a class consciousness. But they were still in such a state of abysmal ignorance that their class consciousness was limited to realising they were being swindled as a group, but not being able to do anything about it. The upper classes were confused; and the common people were confused. Above and below, they were equally confused! This was the fatal weakness in the body politic of the Cat People! Suffering from such weakness, even though they were shocked by the prospect of the imminent extinction of their whole race, even
that
kind of shock still wasn’t enough to make them grit their teeth, stand up and fight back.

What was I to do with this soldier? That was a problem. If I let him go, he might well run off to get help and then come back to finish off Young Scorpion. And if we kept him with us, he certainly wouldn’t be the most congenial of companions. Besides, where would we go?

It was already late in the day and we’d have to make up our minds what we were going to do. Young Scorpion’s expression indicated that he was only hoping for a quick death. Where were we to go? Going back east to Cat City would be dangerous. And the west? That would be to jump into the maw of death, for it was quite likely that the enemy was advancing in our direction at this very moment. After long deliberation, it seemed to me that seeking refuge in the foreign enclave was the only course of action open to us.

Young Scorpion shook his head at the suggestion. I should have known. He would rather die than lose face by seeking refuge with the foreigners. He told me to release the soldier. ‘Let him go wherever he wants to!’ I had to admit that was the only thing we could really do with the soldier, so I released him.

The sky gradually darkened. It grew unusually and fearfully dark. And all was silent. There was no one in the immediate vicinity. And yet we knew that in the distance, there were defeated troops behind us, and enemy soldiers before us. It was a silence like that on a desert island just before the sudden fury of a storm. And the quieter that it got the more nervous we became.

Of course, if Cat Country were wiped out, I could always go somewhere else. But I was heartbroken with thoughts of my friend, Young Scorpion. To spend the eve of the extinction of a whole nation in a small lonely room – what a melancholy prospect! By now I had grown to like Revery to the point that I couldn’t bring myself to leave her either.

Only when a state is on the verge of extinction does one comprehend what a weighty relationship exists between an individual and his nationality. Of course, this had nothing to do with me personally, but I had to consider things from Scorpion and Revery’s point of view so that I might be able to enter into their hearts and shoulder part of the load of their grief. There was nothing that I could say by way of comfort, for the destruction of the country was due to the stupidity of an entire people. What was the point in trying to comfort one or two individuals? The death of a state is not the catharsis of a tragedy, nor is it a poet’s metaphor for righteousness. It is a cold and ugly fact; it is the steel logic of history. How can one explain away a fact, no matter how many emotional phrases one uses? I was actually listening to the last gasp of a dying state. My two friends, of course, heard it even more clearly than I did. In their hearts they were no doubt cursing the bitter times and reminiscing over the sweet. Now reliving the past was all they had, for there was no future, and their present had nothing to offer except the gradual fulfilment of the greatest disgrace to which creatures can be subjected: annihilation.

The sky was as black as usual, and the stars were as bright as ever. The environment was peaceful, and yet on this eve of the demise of an entire nation, one simply couldn’t close one’s eyes. I knew that they were awake, and they knew that I wasn’t sleeping either. Yet none of us said anything. Our tongues seemed to be tied by the cords of doom. From this time on, neither people nor country would be permitted to speak again. The culture of another country had become dumb. Her last dream had been a song of freedom that had come too late. Now she would never wake again. Her soul could only go to hell, for her record in life was nothing but a dark and dirty spot on the pages of history.

FAREWELL TO MARS

I
T MUST
have been about dawn when I finally dozed off. I was awoken by two loud reports. The bodies of my friends were lying in pools of blood not two feet from me. My revolver lay next to Young Scorpion.

It would be impossible to describe what I felt at the time. My mind was a total blank and I was only conscious of a generalised pain. I felt the unflinching stare of my lively friends’ eyes fixed upon me. Lively? For a moment my brain was unable to make the transition and I couldn’t imagine two such lively friends as actually being dead. They both seemed to be staring at me, but there was no expression in their eyes.

They seemed to have grasped hold of some enigmatic and secret affirmation that they challenged me to guess. I stared at them until my eyes began to ache; their deathly gaze was still fixed upon me. It was as though they had given me a very difficult riddle to solve, but my mind was a total blank. Standing before them and unable to think of any way of bringing them back from the dead, I was painfully aware of the fragility and helplessness of life. I shed not a single tear. Except for the fact that I was standing and they were lying on the floor, we were equally wooden.

Without thinking, I knelt down and felt them; they were still warm. Everything was the same, except the lack of a friendly response. All that was left of them now was that tiny fraction of their lives that still survived in my memory, the rest had died with them. Death is perhaps not without its tranquil beauty.

Revery was the more pitiable of the two. Beautiful girls were not meant to live in dying states. I felt that my heart would shatter. The sisters, wives and mothers of a people have to pay for a society’s sins as well as anyone else. If I were God, I’d surely regret having made women for such a spineless people. Knowing Young Scorpion made me pity Revery all the more. It schemed that while there may have been a logic behind Young Scorpion’s death, Revery at least should have been spared. But perhaps it was idle to argue the rights and wrongs of dying with one’s country. Like it or not, an individual’s nation and people control one’s very existence, and when the nation or people perish, so does the individual. Besides, when that dreadful day arrives, who could be so wooden and soulless as not to want to perish with his state or people?

I began loving Young Scorpion and Revery all the more for having consciously chosen to accompany Cat Country to oblivion. I longed to call them back to life just long enough to tell them that they at least were pure, and that their souls were still their own. I longed to wake them and take them back to Earth with me so they might enjoy all those pleasures that life ought to hold. Fantasy is useless, but my only other alternative was grief. Yet no matter what direction my fantasy took, Revery and Scorpion remained woodenly stretched out on the floor, seeming to have already forgotten that I had once been their good friend. Now they would never be able to appreciate the intensity of pain that their fates had occasioned in my heart. It was as though life and death were separated from each other by a long series of skies piled one on top of the other. On one side, everything was life; on the other, death. And the two sides seemed separated by an infinite unknown. To me, Scorpion and Reverie now stood in the same relationship as flowers or birds. Although I might be able to explain to the world something of what it felt like to be a flower or a bird, still I would never be able to make one of them speak for itself. The silence of death is as absolute a fact as the inarticulateness of flowers. I didn’t know what to do. My friends had already made their final decision, but I was unable to decide any more, for I no longer felt that life had any meaning.

I sat woodenly watching over them until the sun was up. I could see their forms more and more clearly, but was less and less clear as to what I should do next. The light struck Revery’s face. She was still as beautiful and lovable as ever, but as silent and immobile as a piece of stone. Young Scorpion’s head was nested in the corner of the wall, and his face still gave one the impression of boredom, as though even death had not cured him of his pessimism. There were absolutely no signs of fear on Revery’s face.