Days Like Today (24 page)

The spring was as lovely as in any year of peace. On some days it seemed like a season from an ancient age when all the world was beautiful, peopled by gods and goddesses.

They thought for a while that things might be getting better. It was even possible, they imagined, that the fighting might come to a stop.

They carried the old woman outdoors so that she could enjoy the fresh air. But her piteous whines and fearful gasps, her grunts and sighs, ruined the fine weather for them, just as when they were indoors she made the house unbearable. Feeble and miserable as she was, she seemed indomitable, whereas they were being worn down.

‘She’ll live for ever,’ his wife said. ‘She’ll probably outlive us.’

One day he returned to the house for a bag of nails and a couple of hinges that were stored in the shed. On his way past the front door, he heard the old woman moaning. He stepped inside, where he found the children persecuting her again. He chased them out of the house and then went
to the back, to collect what he’d come for. He crashed around in the cramped space, so angry for a moment that he had to stop and cover his eyes with his hands, thinking:
Be careful
.
This is how people have accidents. Calm down.

They were just young, he told himself; they would learn. They’d change, like everything else. As soon as there was a genuine political settlement, the economy would stabilize and there would be enough for everyone. There would be celebrations, feasts, the ritual marking of days and years. Children would enjoy being innocent again and cruelty would recede from their minds. That was his hope, although he now saw little evidence for continuing to believe it,

In the distance he heard three of his children singing the alphabet song:

The Queen of Dalmatia, whose name was Aspatia, arrived in a
grand coach and four. She had footmen and flunkies and uniformed
monkeys and pink pearls right down to the floor.

They all sat down early and ate until late: pomegranates, pick
les and pears; pasta, pies, parsnips and plump purple plums;
peaches, pineapples and peas. Peacocks and partridges, pancakes
and plaice; peppers and pretzels and palm trees. Prime poached,
puce piglets and purest champagne that poured from the bottles
like rain.

The Prince of Pomander ate a live salamander. He grimaced
and gargled and gagged. He’d done it by accident but it set a court
precedent much admired in Shiraz and Baghdad.

Oh, what delectable dishes they ate, from the lowliest up to the
mighty and great. What speeches rang out through the old dining
hall, what flirting and drinking and laughter went on. Oh, what
a fine time they had, eating and talking and dancing away. All
through the evening and into the dawn, everyone happy and glad.
And the party went on the next day.

The sound of their voices drew away his fury. But he thought that it wouldn’t be long now before they changed the nonsense rhymes to jingles that came close to the original obscenities of the old army version.

A military workforce came through with builders and engineers, leaving a restricted and unreliable telephone system and a low-level electricity supply that cut out just when you didn’t expect it to. They were becoming a part of the modern world again. They had bottled gas, kerosene and intermittent running water that wasn’t always safe to drink. They could get eggs, but not chickens, except on the black market. You could get anything there, so people said.

Occasionally you could catch sight of the big dealers going by, usually in the evening. There were always two cars: the bodyguards up in the front of the first one, with the boss in the back seat, sometimes accompanied by a henchman, and – in the second car – the women, in fur coats and diamonds and face paint you could see from a distance. They and their friends continued to do business without bothering most people; their fights were all with others of their own kind. Among the ordinary populace the general feeling was that they were providing a service no government was yet able to offer. Of course it was also true that if you went against them, they shot you; but everyone knew that. They were predictable and therefore
less of a threat than, say, a roving band of deserters – that was the sort of thing that made everyone nervous, even the crooks.

By the time the leaves were out on the trees, his wife was saying that she’d rather live in a work camp than keep the old woman with them.

‘What are we going to do without the extra rations?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. And I don’t care. If you want her here, you can take care of her.’

‘I’m working already.’

‘Who isn’t?’

‘I don’t understand why she doesn’t die. She’s in such a bad state.’

‘She’s alive because she’s being treated like royalty in this house.’

‘I guess if she died, we’d be issued with another refugee. One that would be easier to look after.’

‘Don’t you believe it. People like us have taken over the work of the hospitals. But this is beyond anything. If I ever set eyes on another one like this, I’ll just let her lie there. We don’t even have hygienic surroundings. They couldn’t have expected her to last more than a couple of days. She should have died a long time ago.’

They stopped talking and stared at the woman, who no longer had even the look of someone who should be pitied. She was repulsive. She was the only one in the house who had a bed to herself although, God knew, nobody would want to use it after her. When she finally died, they’d have
to burn it. Except that they wouldn’t. They’d put the next refugee into it.

‘You do it,’ his wife said. ‘It’s your job.’

Over the next few days he found himself thinking at odd moments that it would benefit everyone, including the old woman, if he got rid of her; such a killing would be what was called ‘humane’, ‘an act of compassion’, or ‘putting her out of her misery’.

It was even possible that the blubbering, whining noises she made were an attempt to ask someone to dispatch her rather than let her continue in bondage to her irreparably damaged body.

And maybe not. Perhaps she was just saying:
Feed me,
love me, pity me, make me well again: help me
. But he’d seen plenty of hospitals where there were patients who just kept repeating, ‘Oh God, let me die.’ And they’d meant it. Lots of people felt like that. He could imagine feeling that way himself.

He didn’t want to hurt her. That wouldn’t be right. None of their troubles, including her own condition, could be considered her fault and certainly not the war, nor the system of refugee housing.

He didn’t want to get caught, either. How could he dispose of her safely and painlessly? He thought about that during the next week and over the following months as the summer came and then reached its height and even with all the boards taken off the windows and the doors standing open, the oily tang of urine and the fulsome, barnyard stench of excrement reached every corner and expanded,
ballooned, pulsated in the air. You could choke on it from the next room.

One day he realized that all day long he’d been thinking:
I hope I don’t die like that
. Pretending to himself that his feelings were nobler than they were, he asked himself how she could want to go on living. It would be doing her a kindness to put an end to her.

He remembered his friends, so young and full of exuberance, who were now dead while a rotting piece of senility like this lived on. The mere fact of it enraged him. And the next moment, it filled him with sorrow. This thing had had a mother once. Once upon a time, a young woman had cradled a baby in her arms and looked lovingly down into its face; and it was to become this pitiable wreck.

Somebody should just hit her on the head with a shovel. He didn’t want to do it himself. But if his wife did it, he’d accept it.

His wife wouldn’t do it. She’d told him straight to his face that it was his responsibility. It was something he was just going to have to carry out without thinking: like breaking the neck of an injured animal.

The summer went by and the warm days of September. The crops were better than they had hoped for. They were able to save up towards the coming months. They were eating well for the first time that year; but their good fortune was spoiled by the old woman’s presence.

It was bad enough in the warm weather when they could open the windows. What was it going to be like if
she had to spend a whole winter with them?

Of course someone in her condition couldn’t last much longer. He didn’t think so, anyway. But his wife said, ‘That old bag is just the kind who’ll go on for another ten years, sucking it in at one end and pumping it out at the other.’ He didn’t like to hear her talk like that but he knew that her derision was a sign that she was looking for a fight. It was better to let her talk and not to make any comment.

‘We’ve got to get rid of her,’ she told him. ‘We could get her out of the house and keep on drawing the rations.’

‘Suppose they want to see her?’

‘We could produce somebody. I heard of a case where five families lived off one old crone like this. They just moved her from house to house when the aid workers came around. It would be even easier here. You just give one of the officials a percentage.’

‘And wind up in jail.’

‘Not if you know the right ones. I could fix it. Just get her out of here.’

The rains began, followed by the first frost and then, near the end of October, a week of mild weather that was springlike, almost summery. And suddenly, with the warmth, there was an outbreak of killing. As usual, there were some strangled girls, either pregnant or raped, but a lot more of the victims were children. He and his wife reminded the kids to be wary of strangers and over-friendly people. From the snake-eyed silence with which the advice was received, he began to suspect that many of the perpetrators were also children. That was certainly possible: war had awakened in the general
population a readiness to kill. In any place where troops had gone through, there were always more corpses than seemed normal. Wherever there might have been hand-to-hand combat you could get away with it. People settled their quarrels as soon as they saw the first uniform go by.

His wife would do it if she had to. Even if she didn’t have to. If she thought she could escape detection, she’d do it for a cup of sugar. It meant nothing to her.

How much did he mean to her himself? She still needed him, but he was damaged. As soon as other, able-bodied and younger men arrived back – on leave after a temporary cease-fire or with the occupying and peacekeeping forces or, should it ever be possible, at the end of the fighting – she might start looking around for something better. He had no idea now what she was like except that he feared she might be turning into someone who was stronger than he was and who eventually wouldn’t have any use for him.

‘I’m not going through a winter with that lump of disease in the house,’ she told him.

‘She isn’t sick. She’s old.’

‘She’s sick. I don’t want the children to catch it.’

It was the children who brought everything in: colds, influenza, fevers, lice, bugs, fleas, skin diseases.

‘We’ve got to get rid of her.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I agree. But we can’t make it look like an accident if she can’t move, can we? And if it doesn’t look natural, they’ll get us for it.’

‘She just has to stop breathing, that’s all.’

‘It’ll show.’

‘Then it’s got to be the quarry.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘That’s what everybody else has been doing. Not just our neighborhood. Everyone in the district.’

‘Oh? Where did you hear that?’

‘I keep my ears open.’

So do I,
he thought. He still hadn’t heard anything definite about the quarry other than the occasional hushed joke. And he’d assumed that the black-market traders would have been using it for payoffs and assignations if there had been any way to get in and out. There were rumors, but all of them seemed to refer to what had gone on before the fighting.

‘They’ve been taking their refugees to the quarry, throwing them in and saying that they ran away. Nobody can get out down there. It’s sealed.’

‘And if somebody finds them? If the aid workers get to know about it?’

‘Listen. This is the way it works: you take your refugees out there and throw them in. If you hit them on the head first, they don’t last long and they can’t tell anybody their names. You go back home and say they moved off, looking for more food or trying to trace their cousins, or something like that. Then you get new ones. All the aid agencies have is their names – they don’t have time to make a record of anything else. Nobody official is going to remember what any of them look like. We aren’t supposed to have them more than a couple of months, anyway.’

‘But we aren’t supposed to kill them.’

‘You don’t have to kill anybody. Once they’re in the quarry, the rest of the bunch in there take care of things. They’d probably eat anybody healthy who just fell in. That’s what I think happened to that missing boy – I think some of his friends pushed him in for fun and the quarry people ate him.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Well, there isn’t any food down there.’

‘But they aren’t animals.’

‘They’re starving, injured and sick. They see a nice, clean, well-fed young child alone and unprotected among hundreds of them – are you serious? They’d roast him on a spit.’

‘Hundreds?’

‘That’s what I hear. Well, to start out with. Dozens, maybe. The rest will be corpses now. And bones. So. You get her out there and I tell everybody: her health improved so much that she just walked out on us.’

‘The kids would be spilling the beans to everybody and his grandmother. They’d think it was funny.’

‘I’ll handle the kids,’ she said. ‘That’s my department.’

He set off to walk to the quarry. He hadn’t been there since before the war, when he’d lived in his parents’ house on the other side of town. From his own place it wasn’t far. It wouldn’t take long.