Neveryona (21 page)

By contrast, the market economy is a constant subject of conversation. It fills page after page in urban archives, private archives of merchant families, judicial and administrative archives, debates of chambers of commerce, and notarial records. So, how can one avoid noticing it? It is continually on stage.

F
ERNAND
B
RAUDEL
Afterthoughts on
Material Civilization and Capitalism

‘Well, just look around you! You say you’ve seen the Old Market. This one is going to be six
times
the size of that spread of junk and garbage over in the Spur!’ Madame Keyne’s voice was triumphant. ‘Here there will be air, light, room for commercial growth, the encouragement of true diversity among products, marketing methods, competition and profits!’

‘But
you’re
laying the whole thing out!’ Pryn exclaimed. ‘Does that mean the whole New Market will belong to you?’

‘Nonsense! I’m merely financing its construction. You can see, we had to pull down practically a whole neighborhood. It wasn’t easy. The demolition has only been completed for a week or so – ‘

‘But
you’re
going to lease space in your New Market.’ Pryn insisted, ‘so that you’ll get something from everyone who uses it … ?’

‘Only the
smallest
rent!’ Madame Keyne leaned her head confidentially. ‘I am an ambitious woman. But I am neither stupid nor selfish. That lack is one of the traits
that distinguishes me and my class from the aristocrats, who have laid so much misery on this nation – the Child Empress (whose reign is politic and permissive) excepted. No, I intend to take only enough to compensate me for my troubles in the building. I think of this market as a gift to the great city of Kolhari, a gesture that will make us worthy of world regard. That is the spirit in which the project was proposed to the Empress’s ministers. That is the spirit in which we are carrying it out. Now – if you want to see what
is
mine here, you must come this way.’ Madame Keyne started along beside the fence.

Having momentarily slowed to watch the activities about her, Pryn hurried to catch up.

Coming by them now was a thick-set man. His red scarf was partly braided in with his hair – much of it gone from his freckled scalp. Behind him were three older boys and a girl. As they walked, the red-scarfed man instructed, ‘… and, of course, lateness will not be tolerated. You men are here to work, and we will get a day’s work from you. This woman, or one like her, will be by with a bucket for you to drink from every hour; as well, a woman will be by with a bucket, also every hour, into which anyone who has to may relieve himself. Once you are at your work, there should be no need to leave till we say so. Our first crew of barbarian loafers did more sipping and pissing and splashing of water over their heads than they did digging –
and
expected to get paid for it! But we’ve finally managed to locate a better breed for our wants here …’

As they passed, the girl looked at Pryn. I wonder, Pryn thought, if she thinks
I
shall be carrying a water pail or slop bucket?

Something brushed the front of Pryn’s dress and struck Madame Keyne, a step ahead, full on the thigh. Madame Keyne raised her arm and looked down where the clot of mud – or worse – pulled from her skirt to fall to the dust.
Madame Keyne looked off at the fence, beyond which barbarians massed. Someone pulled from the fence to hurry away in the closing crowd. Some of those around where he’d been were laughing.

Madame Keyne made a face, shook her skirt, and started walking again. ‘I’m afraid that’s one of the inevitable unpleasantnesses of life outside my garden. It’s also why I harbor my dislike of the Liberator.’

‘Was that one of the Liberator’s men … ?’

‘I doubt it,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘Much more likely it was some disgruntled creature with a mother to support, three sisters he has not yet married off, a wife, and uncountable children – a man whom we just failed to hire or, indeed, just fired for his laxness. Or it could be some mischievous youth, a cousin to our own Wild Ini, who has seen such a man as I described throw his clod (though he understands the reasons no more than a pampered aristocrat’s brat), who merely finds such violations amusing. Unfortunately, though, a growing number of those men over there, including some of the clod throwers, think the Liberator is here for them.’

‘But I thought – ‘ for all this seemed as confusing to Pryn as what had been going on within Madame Keyne’s own walls – ‘the Liberator had come to free slaves.’

‘Slaves are men and women who labor for no pay. Over there are men who do no labor for no pay. The similarity is enough so that they might make the mistake themselves. If the Liberator makes the same mistake, I may well have reason to pay out a full twelve and six to the next fanatic who asks.’ Madame Keyne sighed, her thoughts drifting somewhere else. Suddenly she announced, ‘The thing Jade does not realize – ‘ startling Pryn – ‘and that her position as my secretary, or perhaps my own love for her itself may prevent her from realizing, so that it is the one thing in our relationship for which I
feel guilty, is that as one grows older, one lives more and more off the little signs of whatever community one moves through day to day and less and less off the gifts that fall out of individual relationships. If one does not prepare for this change in youth, then age becomes a bitter time. This is not to disparage the beauty of one’s relationships with lover or friend. It is only to acknowledge what, for so many in the city, is a sad truth. Community can, however awkwardly, replace individual relationships. But individual relationships only grow poisonous and resentful if there is no community to support them. But we are
not
going to discuss this any more, my girl. Still – ‘ Madame Keyne looked at Pryn without any smile at all – ‘I must tell you, if there was any motivation other than idle curiosity behind the disreputable act you caught me indulging with that clever, disreputable man on Black Avenue – and you are old enough, girl, to know no curiosity is really idle – it is only to protect my sense of that community, which includes, for me, equally the man who flung his clod, you, all those who wear my red scarf, Ini, and Jade, and, yes, the whole of this city … the nation to whom I make my gift, here, as well as those neighbors of mine in Sallese whom I would not dream of inviting to a small, private supper with any of the ones of you I have mentioned, for fear the resultant hostilities and intolerances would render the whole notion of community ludicrous, if not barbaric.’

Another clod landed a few feet before them.

Behind the fence was some kind of scuffle. The men ahead of them noticed; one, a great strapping fellow, turned back toward Madame Keyne.

‘But what about
his
sense of community,’ Pryn asked. ‘I mean the Liberator’s – ‘

‘The Liberator, ‘ey, Madame Keyne?’ The big man who stepped up had the same green eyes, Pryn realized,
as Gorgik. For a moment, Pryn wondered if, under the scarf about his neck, was the Liberator’s collar.

Pryn blinked.

The face was unscarred.

And his forty-five or fifty years sat among the muscles, calluses, and the general heft of his body more easily than they had rested on iron-collared Gorgik’s. ‘Are those dogs acting up again?’ He bawled over the fence: ‘Have you no respect for a woman of Madame Keyne’s standing in this city?’ Shaking his head, he looked back. ‘You may be sure nobody wants any “Liberator” on
this
side, Madame.’

‘Hello, Ergi,’ Madame Keyne said. ‘I’m glad to see my best foreman is on the job.’ She turned again to Pryn. ‘The men who work over here find the idea of the Liberator mildly uncomfortable – no doubt because they make the same mistake as the men outside.’‘These fellows here don’t want to lose their jobs to the men out there,’ declared Ergi. ‘If this Liberator is for the unemployed, then he can’t very well be for the employed, too. Hey, you!’ Ergi bawled again, waving his fist. ‘Over there – over
there
with that scaffolding! Not there!’ He shook his head. ‘There’s muscle a-plenty around here, Madame Keyne. But I don’t think a man in the place can think two thoughts that follow one from the other. Is this your new secretary?’

Startled, Pryn looked up to see Madame Keyne at least looked surprised.

‘Possibly,’ Madame Keyne replied. ‘And possibly not. I haven’t decided whether I need one. This young woman reads and writes – ‘

‘More than I can do!’ Ergi laughed.

‘ – and she listens. As for what she thinks about what she hears – ‘ Madame Keyne’s dark, dry face took on its
amused and curious smile – ‘that we have yet to determine.’

‘Well, you don’t have to worry about what anyone thinks of the Liberator on
this
site, Madame Keyne! That’s for certain – Hey, there!
Hey!
I said put it – !’

‘Yes,’ Madame Keyne went on. ‘But there are other confusions to be made, just as simple and just as interesting. For example – ‘

‘Excuse me, Madame.’ Ergi hurried off to right some confusion ahead, shouting, waving.

‘Just as a man who has no work and gets no money for it may think himself a slave, so a man who has work and gets only very little money for it may think himself the same. And that – I have no illusions about it, girl – is very much the workers, men and women, on
this
side of the fence.’

They had almost crossed the dust and gravel, which Pryn had finally been able to reread as a thriving market. What they approached now, however, baffled her.

In an area at least as large as the market proper, there were many more workers than there were roaming the square. Clearly this was where Ergi’s foremanship centered. Pryn glimpsed him off amidst the excavations, hurrying some naked men from one pit to another. Though some scaffolding had indeed been set up, most of the workers (and only the foremen, Pryn saw now, wore Madame Keyne’s scarves) were digging out large, rectangular holes that left two- and three-meter walls of dirt between. ‘What will they be building here?’ Pryn asked, as they started to walk along one.

‘Here will be the warehouses, and administration offices, and archives, and market workers’ barracks, and vendors’ storage spaces, and … well, all the buildings needed to house the functions that must accrue to any sizable market area.
These
are the buildings which will be mine! Mine to rent, to allot, to administer! Oh, believe
me, though I disparage it, I’ve examined the Old Market as carefully as anyone in Kolhari. And I’ve learned precisely what keeps it so small. I am prepared to see that the New Market is successful, that it grows, and that I profit both by that success and growth.’

The image of the market as a map of the nation returned to Pryn, to be shattered a moment later by her sudden apprehension of this neighborhood of storage spaces and warehouses beside the market as a map of the market to come. And though none of it had yet been filled in, nevetheless it would control the very shape and pace, the movement and organization of that market as surely as Madame Keyne controlled the comings and goings of her red-scarfed employees.

As they made their way over the site, one or another worker looked up, to recognize Madame Keyne. The woman seemed to know most of them by name. ‘Morning, Terkin,’ she called as one man paused to grin up. She turned to another. ‘You swing your shovel that hard, Orget, and you’ll wear it out!’ which made Orget, already working furiously, laugh and redouble his effort.

Pryn looked down into the excavation on their left.

A young woman climbed, step at a time, up the wide ladder. By rope handles, one in each fist, she held a ceramic bucket, filled with urine and darkened with feces. She gained the wall and put the buckets carefully on the uneven dirt.

Urine spilled on the sloping clay.

With similar buckets of clear water, around which bobbed half a dozen cups, hooked over the rim by their handles, another woman stepped between Pryn and Madame Keyne to halt by the ladder top, waiting for the other to move off so she might climb down.

‘Over there – ‘ Madame Keyne pointed between the scaffolds and the workers rolling their carts of dirt along
the ridges – ‘is the sea … though one can hardly see the waterfront for all the confusion between us and it. Nevertheless, imports from the east and south will have easy access to my warehouses, and thus will have easy access to the entire web of commerce centering here.’

Pryn looked down into the excavation on their right.

Dark-haired, dark-skinned, arched backs running with water like the falls in Madame Keyne’s garden, most of the laborers had abandoned all clothes, though two or three still wore a loincloth, a leg band, or a leather bracelet.

‘Morning, Silon – and that must be your young barbarian friend Namyuk, who you said you’d bring us today. Work hard as your friend Silon, Namyuk, and you’ll do well by us!’ Madame Keyne stooped to take the wet, callused hand of a sweating man who ran up to tell her some story about his daughter, a lame ox, and a grain jar, to which Madame Keyne nodded and nodded with concern. As she stood, some joke came from the other side of the excavation – a very old joke, too, because Pryn had heard it even in Ellamon. But Madame Keyne tossed a jibe over her shoulder that made the diggers rest their shovels and the water-carrier lower her buckets. All howled – till a foreman, passing on the far wall, shouted them back to work.

Several times since their early garden encounter, Pryn had told herself she had no complete picture of this woman. Hour by hour that ‘non-picture’ had suffered its changes. But, whoever she is, Pryn thought, here seems her home – no matter how much she enjoys her flowers. She might even swing a pick – or carry a bucket – for Madame Keyne had just stopped a slops carrier who’d been walking before them with a limp; she searched through the folds of her skirt, found her purse, and tucked a small coin into the shift, which was turned down and bunched at the dry-haired woman’s waist. Then she called
the foreman over. ‘Take Malika here back to the water cask and put her on the filling detail – where she won’t have to walk on that foot so much.’ As Madame Keyne watched the older water-carrier and the younger foreman walk – and limp – off, Pryn thought: She really seems
more
comfortable here.