Days Like Today (20 page)

Since he was still recuperating, he put up with everything from her. He was so conscious of his own wound that it didn’t occur to him that she too might be suffering the effects of war.

The children were nervous of him. They behaved as if he were a stranger. At some moments they’d look fixedly at the place where his left hand ought to have been, at others they’d turn their heads quickly in order to escape being caught in the act of staring at a disability.

He gave them the creeps. The realization pained him as much as would the loss of their love. And perhaps it came to the same thing: they didn’t quite shrink away but when
ever he approached too near, he could feel their dread. He told his wife, whispering into her ear at night. She answered softly, ‘Give them time. They’ll get used to you eventually. You’re their father but they don’t know you yet. It’s all going to take time.’

It made him feel better to talk to her. What made her feel better was to make love, even so soon after the last birth. Once or twice he asked if she thought they really should: what if she got pregnant again?

She finally said to him, ‘I can’t do without it and if I don’t get it from you, I’ll get it any way I can.’

As soon as she was pregnant again, she calmed down and he understood: that unless she was carrying a child or nursing a newborn baby, she couldn’t feel that there was any point in going on. There had to be something in her life that hadn’t yet been ruined.

He also understood that she had allowed their daughter to die because the child was a girl, not a boy, and not the favorite daughter and because – if the aid workers had taken the child away in time to save its life – the family would have had to accept a cut in the bread rationing. His wife had made all those decisions while he was unaware of what she was doing.

When he saw the extent to which their lives had been determined and directed by her, he was amazed. The slight edge he felt of queasiness, even horror, actually increased her desirability. But he knew that with such a wife he couldn’t afford to lose his strength.

He did exercises to keep the muscles limber in his shoulder
and arm. He walked. Whenever he lifted a weight, he remembered to balance it and not to favor one side. He learned to use the left arm again. The doctors had promised him an array of implements that would fit onto a socket at the end of his healed stump: various builder’s tools, a plastic hand without moving parts and the traditional pirate’s hook. He hadn’t really believed in the hook, but just as he healed well enough to be ready for the ingenious tool kit with its many ultra-modern gadgets, he was offered an artificial hand and a hook. Nothing else, he was told, was available; the other choices had now been discontinued. He refused the hand. It was unshaped: no indication on it of joints or knuckles, and it had a dead color like a plastic toilet seat. He chose the hook, with all its historical connotations of violence and romance. And after more exercises, he found that it was useful.

During those initial days of homecoming, their scavenging wasn’t very organized. They wasted time by not conferring and by forgetting to take essential equipment with them. But as soon as they felt established, they began to fear the arrival of others. They’d have to hurry if they wanted to furnish the house, gather food and other supplies and remove from the neighborhood anything that could be used as building material.

The first things they took were beds and mattresses. After that, anything: in no particular order of importance. Most of the nearby houses were in the same condition as theirs but they did find a child’s wheelbarrow that had
been hidden, or possibly lost, under the foundations of a collapsed terrace by the old market gardens. Every single pane of glass had been shivered out of the greenhouses but there were still seeds, roots and bulbs.

They stripped enough wood from the walls and floors of neighboring houses to rebuild their own place and also to amass a good stock of firewood. Nothing would last through the winter, of course. To feel at all hopeful they needed the gas and electricity back, the running water, the telephones. But they had enough fuel to cook with.

They unbricked the well down behind the abandoned orchard and he volunteered to drink the first cupful. They had heard so many stories about booby traps and poisoned wells that he expected to die, but the water was still pure. Some of the old trees, gnarled and decrepit as they were, had been scarred and split, and some had been chopped down. The stumps were left but there was no sign of the wood. Others had just been hacked up – splintered and torn and probably shot at for target practice or for fun. But most of the trees had been left. A few bore small, bitter apples. One or two rows contained trees on which all the fruit, though minute, was edible and even sweet. To pick one of the tiny apples and hold it close to his face, breathing in the smell – and then to bite into the fruit and taste the sour sweetness – was a delight and, while it lasted, an astonishment.

Later in the next year, catching a whiff of fragrance blowing from the blossoming old trees, he’d think he was back in his boyhood again, loving and in love, with a soul unbroken: before he’d lost his hand, before he’d killed or
done the other things he’d done, or seen everything that he’d seen.

He tried not to remember the trees that used to stand directly behind the house; they had brought the loveliness of spring up to the windows and its honey breath into all the rooms. In the autumn they had supplied large, luscious fruit that could be stored through the winter or made into bottled preserves. They had had apples and plums. Those were the trees that the enemy troops had used for firewood, simply out of laziness, because they were the ones nearest to the back door.

They had flour, some dried meat, salt and three precious bags of potatoes. Before they set out on their first well-planned plundering expedition, he went to the place where he’d buried an ax before joining up. It was still there. That was a triumph: the moment when he felt that, no matter how bad things were, he’d come home.

His wife inspected all the gardens in the area. She came back carrying a sack full of roots and leaves. One of the children proudly steered the wheelbarrow at her side; it was heaped with dusty bulbs: that was what they’d be eating and they’d be very pleased with it. Anything that fell under their eyes was like a forest creature caught in the cross-sights. They were like wild animals themselves: always hungry, always looking at everything with greedy eyes; criminals and murderers, he thought. How could you teach your children anything when they’d been through this?

And what did he tell them, anyway?
Don’t get caught.
Don’t lose what you’re carrying. Don’t let them find the stuff on
you. If anybody stops you, fight like hell and if they try to tell their
side of the story, lie your head off.

He still knew how to handle the kids but sometimes he didn’t understand them. You couldn’t teach them not to touch each other, not to touch themselves, not to touch insects or animals if they could find any in the destroyed landscape. They chased whatever hopped or crawled. They wanted to eat everything growing and anything they could pick up off the floor. You couldn’t even prevent them, after all that had happened, from doing things that were dangerous: trying to grab a pan of scalding water off the edge of a table, swallowing a bottle of something without thinking that it might be harmful. You had to keep an eye on them all the time. That was bad enough. The children who were in real trouble were the ones who stopped whining. They’d sit in a corner all day, silent. They wouldn’t eat. They’d say, ‘I feel sick,’ and not long after that they’d come down with the same infection everyone else had, but they’d be the ones to die.

One day he put down the load he was carrying, and straightened up to rest for a moment. He listened. The silence was enormous: a gigantic emptiness. You could have heard a cough or a hammer blow for miles. There couldn’t have been a bird left alive in the country. And the pets they’d had: cats, dogs – where were they? Somebody had pushed them into a cooking pot and made gloves out of the skins, undoubtedly. Vermin, on the other hand, were plentiful, both big and small.

After years of living with shelling so unremitting that he had come to believe his full hearing would never return, his
ears now strained for sound. He loved the slight pattering of leaves moving in a breeze. And he missed the song of all the many different kinds of birds he remembered. Now that the troops were gone, the birds would come back; but until they did, their absence remained another sign in the landscape of recent and comprehensive disaster.

The silence at night was entire, completing the darkness.

As they were settling back in, others were being moved and uprooted again. Some had official approval to go back to what had once been home, where – like him – they’d find the house gutted, the furniture gone, the inner walls defaced and in places knocked down or with holes punched through them. But they’d be lucky.

In many areas families found their houses occupied by people who would wave a set of papers at them, saying that they’d been granted the property by a provisional committee for something-or-other.

In their own district, enemy occupation was recent; the civilians had been moved out in a hurry to the nearest safe place, which meant that nobody else had been allocated their land. Not all the houses were left, of course. A number of families returned to an empty space; they were taken to the center of town and put up in deserted shops, old warehouses, churches and any other large construction that still had a roof.

The government officials in charge of housing installed families and went away, taking their papers with them and saying that food and clothing would follow. But what was
on paper had ceased to mean much. Most people made themselves as comfortable as they could: begging for what they could get and taking more when your back was turned.

For weeks he was the only man in the area over twelve and under sixty-eight. When the others arrived they were on stretchers or on crutches.

Soon the time might come when the most nearly able-bodied men would band together to form a guard or sentry unit for protecting the weaker households from theft and damage. But at the moment nobody could be spared. Just as there was no extra food, there was no free time.

The quiet held – the limitless, eerie silence after years of fighting and months of being walled up under bombardment. It was as still as the moment after snow stops falling.

You could imagine that the world had gone backward a few centuries to a time when everything depended on harvests and you walked to the next village to buy and sell on market days.

They weren’t really in a village, just out in the country on the outskirts of a small town. The town had been hit by air power, but not badly, since there had never been much there. A few kilometers away a larger town had had the paper mill and the gasworks bombed, neither of which had been of military importance, although from the air they might have seemed good targets. The troops who had been dropped there had stayed for a few days and moved on.

Everyone was afraid of the armies coming back, even of their own soldiers returning. Now that he was a civilian, he
had thoughts and feelings like the people he’d once held in contempt. When he remembered some of the things he’d done, he didn’t mind. Everybody else had done the same: just as bad and – most of them – worse. None of that was important. It was important to be alive. And to stay alive. He’d been doubly and especially fortunate: to be alive and to be out of the whole dirty business; because, as far as any of them knew, there was still fighting going on in other parts of what had once been their country The official reports didn’t say it was fighting. They called it negotiating.

About a month after other people started to reclaim houses in the nearby town, an old woman stopped him at the end of the lane and asked if she could have some apples from the orchard. He said, ‘You’ll have to ask my wife about that.’

‘Your wife is a hard woman.’

‘My wife is a fair woman. That’s why we’re still alive. Her first duty is to her own family.’

‘What can I do?’ the woman complained. ‘We’re starving.’

‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ he told her. ‘I’ve done my stint for other people and I’ve learned that as soon as they’ve got what they want, they forget what you gave up to help them. You’re the same. You want something and you don’t mind where you get it from. Look around you. Where am I going to find a single thing extra? And if I do find it, it’s going to be for us. We’re all in trouble. And we’ve been in trouble for a long time.’

She stood there, too dejected to speak. What he said was true and she still didn’t have anywhere else to go. He wasn’t sure that she was even from around there. He didn’t
recognize her, which didn’t mean much: hardship could obliterate faces and personalities. His arm shot out, pointing to the distance. He said, ‘You can take some apples from the far end of the orchard, but make it fast and don’t do it again. And next time, ask somebody else.’ He turned his back. He heard her running away to fill her shawl and her skirt. She hadn’t thanked him: she’d asked God to reward him.

God was asked to do so many things, especially at times when He didn’t seem to be there. One of the Army’s men of God used to say to them, ‘Now, boys, just because our Lord is on vacation at the moment, that doesn’t mean that He’s forgotten about us.’ He’d been a well-meaning man. They’d all thought he was a fool. He’d continued to pray over one dying soldier until the man began to scream, ‘Oh shut up, just shut up and let me die in peace.’ And when he’d tried to skip to the end, to get the important words said at least, the man’s brother had stood up and belted him.

After he’d seen death once, he began to expect it. It was all around, just waiting for its time. Even in years of peace, when it was usually hidden away, it was natural: a part of life. Other losses began to strike him as equally shocking but not natural: the loss of mental and spiritual power in everyone, including himself, and in the country at large – a draining away of honesty and fair dealing: an overall abandonment of principles, a general debasement.