Child Garden (68 page)

Her mother lifts Milena up onto a seat. Milena can feel how small and light she is, as if she can flick herself up into the air like a playing card. It is a talent to be so light, so quick, so much like a fire. Time seems so slow and smooth, like honey. Milena's legs swing high off the floor. Her mother pulls her back into the seat and her legs have to stick straight out in front of her. Nothing is made for children.

There is a screeching and a sudden lurch forward. Slowly, as if weary or reluctant, the train begins to pull away.

'Zamavej no rozloucenou, Milena.''

'Wave goodbye, Milena. Wave goodbye.'

Her mother is weeping very silently. Milena the child is perplexed. She had been told they were going away, but she did not believe it. Go away where? What other place to live is there? To Prague? That would be lovely, but wasn't Prague dangerous? Hadn't they left Prague to hide?

The drab little station is hauled away. It is not possible to see the village. There are trees, and the old river, and the cows, dim in the mist, and a steeple with a rounded dome. Gradually, it is all swallowed up in darkness.

Home, wept the Milena who was remembering. That's my home. Milena the child is not weeping. For her it is just a passing landscape. That is the country I have never seen again, thought the one who remembered. That is the place I carry around in my head, unformed, part of me, but not remembered. Until now.

Milena's mother holds up Milena's hand in a tiny mitten and waves the hand for her, makes it wave goodbye to no one.

Not mittens, but
palcaky.

The clothes the people on the train wear, the way their hair is cut and combed, the stockings over trouser cuffs to keep out the cold, the smell of the trains. Mint tea and little sugared cakes in boxes to eat on the way, and that particular resin panelling, and the sound of the train, its low throaty growl, as if it had a beard and sang songs in a wild, strained voice or smoked cigars. As if, like her father, the train talked about freedom until it died.

Not freedom, not freedom, but
svoboda.

Those aren't houses, they're
domy..

Those aren't fields, they're
pole.

Those aren't blackbirds, they're
kosi.

And I am not Milena Shibush. I never became Milena Shibush. She is elsewhere, in the land that might have been.

Oh Tato, oh Mami, does it stretch that far away? Does life pull us apart so much, that we stop being real? All of that then was real? How did it fade? And how is it here again?

Milena remembered childhood.

She remembered skinning almonds in someone else's house. Loving One, Loving One, they kept calling her. The almonds came out of a red clay bowl of boiled water and they were hot. Milena kept pushing with both thumbs, and then magically, mysteriously, the almond would slide out of its brown skin.

It was Easter. She and the other children ran through a huge garden, giggling, in sunlight, to cut chives with scissors. A shaggy horse with feeling lips kissed the chives out of their open hands and Milena gasped in wonder. They found ladybirds and tried to keep them in a bowl full of grass, and in the front room of the great old house, which was a warehouse, the girls built a secret room out of boxes. They had a toy piano. They fought to keep the boys out of their secret room, and as they fought secret music tinkled. Milena remembered pushing a boy over. Milena fought and won, squealing with excitement.

Milena remembered the faces of the friends she had forgotten. There was a little girl who had almond eyes, beautiful black hair in a ribbon and a pink dress. There was Sophia with blue eyes and brown hair, and a wan little boy, weaker than the girls but who refused to cry and kept bravely coming back to storm the redoubt. Milena's hand was slammed in a door and she wept and wailed, and then, as soon as the pain subsided, she ran off, laughing again, to be with the others in the garden, hunting chocolates under the leaves.

I was happy.

And I have never been at home in England. I have never felt English, I have never felt in the way they do. I know their words but I do not really feel them. I do not really cry in English, or laugh in English, or make love in English. I find the people dull or cruel, bland or pretentious, rude or prim but I never quite get their measure. And I never quite do the right thing or say the right thing, because underneath my grammar is not only bad. My grammar is Czech.

And Milena remembered later on that same Easter Day, the child beginning the long climb home. There had been an Easter pageant in the domed church, and the child wore white robes now, and wings covered in crinkled resin that caught the light. She was climbing the hill that led up from the village back to the hot limestone house. The path sloped up through a dark wood. The child was holding her father's hand, and her mother's hand, and she was dressed as an Angel. Her plump face, flushed purple, looked up.

The child looked up at Milena.

She can see me, thought the Milena who was remembering. I can see her.

Her father tried to pull her higher up but the child resisted. She stared glumly right at Milena, at her adult self.

I remember this! thought the adult.

And Milena remembered looking at an old woman whose skin seemed to have gone yellow wherever the bones pressed against it as if the bones would break out. The woman was bald, except for a few wisps of hair. The child saw her and felt dread. It was unaccountable dread, as if she knew this wasted spectre was her future.

And time stood still. The moving hub of the world turned around a point that was still and Milena stood in it, Milena at the beginning and Milena at the end.

The adult knelt underneath the branches of the trees that had paused for breath, in the sunlight that was not moving, in one instant that was fully apprehended.

'Do you have time?' the adult asked the child. She wanted to talk to the child, to warn her.

The child did not understand English. That's right, of course! thought the adult, and put a hand to her face. She tried to remember the words in Czech. She wanted to warn her, protect her. Warn her against what? Life? Death? Leaving home? The child scowled, perplexed.

'Be happy,' croaked the adult, whose world it no longer was. She reached for a foreign language and came up with the wrong one.
'Soyez content.'

The child tugged at her father's hand and time began again.

Stay here! thought Milena the adult. Don't hurry to be away. Your father will the, your mother will the, you will lose this whole world! You will lose your self!

Milena remembered seeing an old, desperate, sad face yearning to deliver a message that perhaps no child should understand.

Loving One turned away. She tugged her father's hand for a swing up the hill. He laughed, and made her fly up from the ground. She squealed, tickled both by joy and fear, and was lowered down to her feet. She walked on, up the wooded hill, through patches of shade and sun.

But not lost, not lost in the middle of her life, thought Milena. This is at the beginning, when the wood is full of light, and the way is straight.

The child turned and looked back at her. And the face showed that the child understood more than she could put into words.

Ghost, the face said, go home. Ghost, you are nothing to do with me, now. Ghost do you think that just because you are at the end, that you mean more than I do?

At the still hub of the turning world, Milena saw all of her past. She remembered the Child Garden on the day she met Rose Ella. She remembered the flowers that poured out of her on the day she stood in Thrawn's room and reformed light. She saw the Earth below through the windows of the Bulge; she saw Archbishop's Park; she saw the reeds and slow waters of the Slump. She remembered the fire as it danced up Thrawn McCartney's arm. Did any of it really weigh more than this, here, the child walking between her father and mother, up a hill, through a wood in another land?

And Milena awoke again on the soft, warm floor of the Reading Room.

'Not again,' said Root. 'I told you! I said don't fight.'

'Always fighting,' murmured Milena.

'They don't have what they want.'

They want Rolfa.

'The pattern isn't complete!'

Mike Stone came crawling. 'It's got to stop now, anyway,' he said. 'My wife is ill.'

We get old and lose our selves, thought Milena. Why did I bring the cancer back? So that people would get old? She thought of Hortensia whose calcium-leached bones kept breaking. She thought of the child running through the garden of the great house and of the faces of her childhood friends. They would be her age by now, in their early twenties, in Czechoslovakia. But they would not be dying.

Why did I do it at all?

Root strode quickly to Mike Stone. 'Mike, love, let me explain,' she said and helped him back into his chair. Milena heard some of what she said. Something about medicine helping. Something about it all being over in an instant.

The Doctor came. The Doctor was in Whites and carried an applicator. Milena thought of the round, fat, flushed face of the child she had once been before the virus touched her. She thought of the feeling lips of the horse in the garden and the fun of cutting chives.

Milena understood why she had brought the cancer back.

'People are going to get old now aren't they?' Milena asked him. 'They're going to live a long time because of the cancer?'

'Yes indeed,' said the Doctor. There was a hiss from the applicator. Another cure to make her ill.

'So if people can get old again, will you let them stay children?'

Milena Shibush had brought back cancer so that children might be left alone a little while longer to play in the garden, amid the trees, with the light. Who would have thought that Milena Shibush would the out of love for children?

'Oh,' said the Doctor, his smile still professional and distracted. 'We've cured people of childhood. Children knew nothing: they needed to be taken care of; they were naturally cruel. Childhood was a disease.' He stood up, looking pleased, and shook his head. 'We're not going to bring childhood back.'

I've lost, thought Milena. She had not even known there had been a battle. Her life had been spent trying to bring back what she had known in childhood.

Milena had thought her life had begun with Rolfa. She thought that she had bloomed when she found Rolfa, and that her life had gone on blossoming even after Rolfa had left. Instead, her life had been finished, in the sense of being accomplished. Its end had been achieved. In Rolfa, with Rolfa, she had found love. And love was the image of everything that had been lost: her home country, her home tongue, the landscape of childhood, her way of seeing it, her father, her mother, her name, the place where she would have been happy. She had lost her self.

And Rolfa, even she was lost. Rolfa, they even have you. They have your voice, they have your mind, they can make you speak when they want you to. I gave you to them. So why am I holding back my memories of you? Let them have those.

I am going to have to find another way to fight.

Milena relinquished her claim. She remembered Rolfa for the Consensus.

Milena remembered being lost in the dark in the Graveyard. Loose threads of old dead costumes strayed across her face and blistered sequins were rough under her fingers.

There was music playing, insanely loud. The music was
Das Lied von der Erde.
The words told a kind of ghost story.

Milena was sucking her finger, sick at heart with fear, fear of being ill again, of losing more of herself. She was lost in the dark, more frightened than she need be, because it reminded her of all the other ways in which she was lost. It reminded her that no one would notice she was gone. And the voice, high and sweet and sad, was a woman's voice, reminding her that she needed love.

So the dark around her was haunted. Don't be silly, she told herself, what do you think it is, an orchestra of ghosts? She scraped her head on brick, looked through an arch and saw a light on the wall. She saw there was no room for an orchestra. It was obvious what was playing; if she could have thought clearly she would have known that it was a recording. But she was too frightened of life and of herself to think clearly. Milena remembering felt pity for Milena the actress. The actress knelt and pulled back a curtain of old clothes.

Trouble, thought Milena the actress. Trouble, thought the Milena who remembered. Trouble, seeing the mound of papers, the mess, the shrieking music, and the slumped, dazed brute of a Polar Bear. There was disorder there.

Ewig blauen licht die Fernen

Everywhere and eternally, the distance shines bright and blue.

In the music, someone who might already be dead was departing with regret and sadness. The dead are more afraid than the living, and in some ways they are more alive.

Ewig
...
ewig...

Ever...  Ever...

The GE stirred herself with a kind of convulsion as if she had almost settled into death herself, following the music there. She knocked over paper and plastic cases, as if she were blind. Sadness hung from her face like lead weights, pulling down the flesh under her eyes and around her jaws. The music had been calling for someone. The paper slid away to reveal a box, a small, crude soundbox, made of metal as thin as paper. No wonder the music had hurt when the volume was full up.