The Tent Read online

  And there you have it, in one word, or possibly two: post-colonial.

  Heritage House

  The Heritage House is where we keep the Heritage. It wasn't built for that - it was once a place where people really lived - but the way things needed to be done in it was cumbersome, what with the water coming out of a well, and the light coming out of oil lamps and tallow candles, and the heat coming out of a stone fireplace, and then there were the chamber pots to be emptied and the tin bathtubs to be filled. Also it was so hard to keep the rooms clean. So people built newer houses, with plumbing and so forth, but the Heritage House was not torn down, and when we decided to have some Heritage we agreed that the Heritage House was a good place to store the stuff.

  We spruced it up, of course: fresh paint, brass polish, floor wax. Women were hired to show people around: they are adept at smiling and giving explanations, and nodding. Among us, it is thought that if men perform too many of these activities their faces will crack all over and peel off, and there will be nothing but gristle underneath.

  The people who visited the Heritage House were mostly women as well. They wanted the explanations that could be found there - why some chairs were higher than other chairs, in the days of Heritage, and who did the scrubbing of the tin bathtubs and the emptying of the chamber pots, and how the water used to make its way out of the well. They wanted to know how things got the way they are now, and they hoped that the explanations given by the smiling women in the Heritage House might help.

  Men didn't care so much about those subjects, and so they didn't go. Also they said that Heritage ought to mean things that have been inherited, passed down from father to son as it were, but since nobody did the so-called heritage things any more, or even thought about them except when they were in the Heritage House getting nodded and smiled at and bored to death with explanations, Heritage House was a misnomer in the first place and they didn't see why they should have to pay taxes to keep the joint going.

  Over time, the Heritage House filled up. It was such a convenient place to stash things you no longer had a use for but didn't want to throw out. More and more Heritage was crammed in. An annex was built, in the style of the original edifice, with a tea room in it where you could rest your feet and relax - Heritage could be exhausting - and more female guides were hired, and research was done on authentic costumes for them to wear. But then there was a change of government and funds were cut. Perhaps some of the Heritage should be disposed of, it was said. But by now there was so much Heritage jammed in there that just sorting it out would take much more money than anyone wanted to spend. So nothing was done.

  I went to the Heritage House myself, the other week. It was in disrepair. The windows were opaque with dust, the front steps were a disgrace: it was clear to see that nothing had been scrubbed off or fixed up in years. I rang the rusted bell for a long time before anyone answered it. Finally the door opened. I could see a long hallway, piled to the ceiling with boxes and crates. Each box was labelled: CORSETS. MIXMASTERS. THUMBSCREWS. CALCULATORS. LEATHER MASKS. CARPET SWEEPERS. CHASTITY BELTS. SHOE BRUSHES. MANACLES. ORANGE STICKS. MISCELLANEOUS.

  From behind the door an old woman appeared. She was wearing a chenille bathrobe. She let me in, pushing aside a stack of yellowing newspapers. The place stank of mouse droppings and mildew.

  She nodded at me, she smiled. She hadn't lost the knack. Then she launched into a stream of explanations; but the language she spoke was obsolete, and I couldn't make out a word.

  Bring Back Mom: An Invocation Bring back Mom,

  bread-baking Mom, in her crisp gingham apron just like the aprons we sewed for her in our Home Economics classes and gave to her for a surprise on Mother's Day -

  Mom, who didn't have a job

  because why would she need one, who made our school lunches -

  the tuna sandwich, the apple, the oatmeal cookies wrapped in wax paper -

  with the rubber band she'd saved in a jar; who was always home when we got there doing the ironing

  or something equally boring,

  who smiled the weak smile of a trapped drudge as we slid in past her,

  heading for the phone,

  filled with surliness and contempt and the resolve never to be like her.

  Bring back Mom.

  who wanted to be a concert pianist but never had the chance

  and made us take piano lessons, which we resented -

  Mom, whose aspic rings

  and Jello salads we ate with greed, though later derided -

  pot-roasting Mom, expert with onions though anxious in the face of garlic, who received a brand-new frying pan from us each Christmas -

  just what she wanted -

  Mom, her dark lipsticked mouth smiling in the black-and-white soap ads, the Aspirin ads, the toilet paper ads, Mom, with her secret life

  of headaches and stained washing and irritated membranes -

  Mom, who knew the dirt,

  and hid the dirt, and did the dirty work, and never saw herself

  or us as clean enough -

  and who believed

  that there was other dirt

  you shouldn't tell to children, and didn't tell it,

  which was dangerous only later.

  We miss you, Mom,

  though you were reviled to great profit in magazines and books

  for ruining your children

  - that would be us -

  by not loving them enough,

  by loving them too much,

  by wanting too much love from them, by some failure of love -

  (Mom, whose husband left her for his secretary and paid alimony, Mom, who drank in solitude

  in the afternoons, watching TV, who dyed her hair an implausible shade of red, who flirted

  with her friends' husbands at parties, trying with all her might

  not to sink below the line

  between chin up and despair -

  and who was carted away

  and locked up, because one day she began screaming and wouldn't stop, and did something very bad

  with the kitchen scissors -

  But that wasn't you, not you, not the Mom we had in mind, it was the nutty lady down the street -

  it was just some lady

  who became a casualty

  of unseen accidents,

  and then a lurid story . . . )

  Come back, come back, oh Mom, from craziness or death

  or our own damaged memory -

  appear as you were:

  Queen of the waffle iron,

  generous dispenser of toothpaste, sorceress of Mercurochrome, player of games of smoky bridge at which you won second-prize dishtowels, brooder over the darning egg that hatched nothing but socks, boiler of horrible porridge -

  climb back onto the cake-mix package, look brisk and competent, the way you used to -

  If only we could call you -

  Here Mom, Here Mom -

  and you would come clip-clopping on your daytime Cuban heels, smelling of sink and lilac, (your bum encased in the foundation garment you'd peel off at night

  with a sigh like a marsh exhaling), saying, What is it now,

  and we could catch you

  in a net, and cage you

  in your bungalow, where you belong, and make you stay -

  Then everything would be all right the way it was when we could play till after dark on spring evenings, then sleep without fear

  because you threw yourself in front of the fear and stopped it with your body -

  And there you'll be, in your cotton housecoat, holding a wooden peg

  between your teeth, as the washing flaps on the clothesline you once briefly considered hanging yourself with -

  but forget that! There you'll be, singing a song of your own youth as though no time has passed, and we can be careless again, and embarrassed by you,

  and ignore you as we used to,

  and the holes in the world will be mended.

  Horatio'
s Version

  Absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story . . .

  These were Hamlet's last words to me. Well, almost the last. I didn't know at the time that this wasn't a request but a command - in effect, a clever and twisted curse. I would be doomed to stay alive until I did tell the story. Which is why you are reading my own words, in this very newspaper, today.

  Yes, this is Horatio speaking: friend, confidant, ear-for-loan, eternal bystander at the festivities and debacles of the great and bloodthirsty. I have to say that I did my best as second banana during the Elsinore affair. I listened to Hamlet's outpourings, which at times bordered on lunacy; I sympathized; I offered what I hoped was sage advice. And then I got stuck with cleaning up the not inconsiderable mess.

  Or not so much cleaning it up: wrapping it up. I was supposed to set down the events truthfully, as they had occurred, though showing Hamlet in a more or less favourable light, the light that shines on every protagonist. I hoped to wring some poetry out of these events, darkish poetry it would have to be. Perhaps I could add some philosophical musings about the human condition. I also hoped to come up with a plausible resolution to the story.

  But what was the story? It was a tale of revenge, that much was clear. A wrong had been done, or it appeared to have been done. Hamlet said, as I recall, "O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right," or something like that. But through morose dithering combined with sudden rash actions, he ended up killing quite a few more people than ought to have been killed, even according to the rather loose guidelines of honour as then constituted.

  This often happens, as I've observed during the course of my now entirely too-long life. The Hatfields and the McCoys go at it, turn and turn about, until no one's left standing. Countries are similar. "Two wrongs don't make a right," I have often said while standing deliberately in the line of fire during these small, medium, and large payback events, but few have ever listened to me. An eye for an eye is their idea. A head for a head, a bomb for a bomb, a city for a city. Human beings - I've observed - are hot-wired for scorekeeping, and since they like to win, they're always going one better than the other fellow.

  Excuse me. Not one better. One more.

  I started out well enough at the outset. I found a fresh piece of parchment, I ground some ink. Once upon a time there was a well-meaning but knotted-up prince called Hamlet, I wrote. But that didn't sound quite right. Then I thought I might do it as a sort of play. Elsinore. A Platform before the Castle, I wrote. Then I dried up.

  Trouble is, I started thinking about the story behind the story, which was not that Claudius had murdered Hamlet the Elder, but that Hamlet the Elder had murdered another king called Fortinbras. Well, not murdered exactly: slain in single combat, thus getting hold of a wad of Fortinbras territory. But the upshot of all of Hamlet Junior's machinations was that he himself ended up dead and Fortinbras the Second got hold of everything - not only his father's lost lands, but all of Hamlet's lands as well.

  So if it was a revenge story it was a strange revenge. The only person to benefit from it was someone who hadn't been directly involved. That often happens too, I've noticed. Maybe instead of being a revenger's tragedy the Hamlet saga was a story about subconscious guilt - Hamlet realizes the Hamlet family has done dirt to the Fortinbras clan, and obliterates his own kinfolk and scuppers his inheritance in a spectacular act of self-sabotage.

  While I was chewing on my quill, dozens of years went by. Then some jumped-up English playwright chose to dramatize this whole fracas. I was annoyed - he hadn't even been alive at the time, and he put in a bunch of stuff he couldn't possibly have known anything about. If he'd come to me I might have set him straight; but he didn't, and he published first. He filched my material and appropriated my voice and exploited a human tragedy that was really none of his business.

  Anyway his play was too long.

  My own writer's block got worse than ever. Hamlet's well-known procrastination had rubbed off on me. I began asking difficult questions. Why me? Why should I have to write Hamlet's story? Why not my own? But there's nothing much to mine, really. Come to think of it, is there anything much to Hamlet's? By this time we were well into the seventeenth century, and Oliver Cromwell had gone on the rampage, and Charles the First had had his head cut off, and thousands of soldiers and civilians had died cruel and ghastly deaths, with their intestines wound out of their bodies and their heads stuck up on stakes. I'd seen a lot of that up close, so a few slashed and drowned and poisoned bodies littering the Danish court were no longer very horrifying to me by comparison.

  Somehow I no longer wanted to tell Hamlet's story. I wanted to tell something a little more - what's the term? Human, inhuman? Something bigger. But statistics pall after a time. We're not programmed to register more than a hundred corpses. In heaps they simply become a landscape feature.

  So I went back to the stories of individuals. I've covered the ground, I can tell you. The French Revolution, the Terror, the slave trade, the Spanish wars, Australia, Cuba, North America, Africa, Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, the Middle East, Cambodia - you name it, I was there. Sometimes I was a peddler of supplies, sometimes a dispatch runner, sometimes a neutral observer, sometimes a provider of aid; more recently I've been working for the newspapers. I've talked to famine victims, war orphans, survivors of massacres and rapes, perpetrators of them - all sorts of people, with clean hands and dirty.

  You've heard of injustice collecting? That's what I've become - an injustice collector. It's like a tax collector, only there's nothing to be done with the injustices once you've collected them except to pass them on, as best you can; though there's always the possibility that merely telling such stories will make people angry and thus give rise to other injustices. Still, after four centuries, I think I'm prepared to speak. To tell how things are, now, on this earth. Finally, I'm ready to begin.

  So shall you hear of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts; of accidental judgments, casual slaughters; of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause; and, in the upshot, purposes mistook, fall'n on the inventors' heads.

  All this can I truly deliver.

  King Log in Exile

  After he had been deposed by the frogs, King Log lay disconsolately among the ferns and dead leaves a short distance from the pond. He'd had only enough energy to roll that far: he'd been King of the Pond for so long that he was heavily waterlogged. In the distance he could hear the jubilant croaking and the joyful trilling that signalled the coronation of his celebrated replacement, the experienced and efficient King Stork; and then - it seemed but a mini-second later - the shrieks of terror and the splashes of panic as King Stork set about spearing and gobbling up his new subjects.

  King Log - ex-King Log - sighed. It was a squelchy sigh, the sigh of a damp hunk of wood that has been stepped on. What had he done wrong? Nothing. He himself had not murdered his citizens, as the Stork King was now doing. It was true he had done nothing right, either. He had done - in a word - nothing.

  But surely his had been a benevolent inertia. As he'd drifted here and there, borne by the sluggish currents of the pond, tadpoles had sheltered beneath him and nibbled the algae that grew on him, and adult frogs had sunbathed on his back. Why then had he been so ignominiously dumped? In a coup d'etat orchestrated by foreign powers, it went without saying; though certain factions among the frogs - stirred up by outside agitators - had been denouncing him for some time. They'd said a strong leader was needed. Well, now they had one.

  There'd been that minor trade deal, of course. He'd signed it under duress, though nobody'd held a gun to his head, or what passed for his head. And hadn't it benefited the pond? There had been a sharp upturn in exports, the chief commodity being frogs' legs. But he himself had never been directly involved. He'd just been a facilitator. He'd tucked his cut of the profits away in a Swiss bank account, just in case.

  Now the frogs were blaming him for the depredations of the Stork King. If
King Log had been a better king himself, they were yelling - if he hadn't let the rot set in - none of this would have happened.

  He knew he couldn't stay in the vicinity of the pond much longer. He must not give in to anomie. Already there were puffballs growing out of him, and under his bark the grubs were at work. He trundled away through the woods, the cries of amphibian anguish receding behind him. Served them right, he thought, sadly and a little bitterly.

  King Log has retired to a villa in the Alps, where he is at present sprouting a fine crop of shitake mushrooms and working on his memoirs, one word at a time. Logs write slowly, and log kings more slowly than most. He has engaged a meditation guru who encourages him to visualize himself as a large pencil, but he can only get as far as the eraser.

  He misses the old days. He misses the lapping of the water in the breeze, the rustling of the bulrushes. He misses the choruses of praise sung to him by the frogs in the pink light of evening. Nobody sings to him now.

  Meanwhile the Stork King has eaten all the frogs and sold the tadpoles into sexual slavery. Now he is draining the pond. Soon it will be turned into desirable residential estates.

  Faster

  Walking was not fast enough, so we ran. Running was not fast enough, so we galloped. Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed. Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled merrily along on long metal tracks. Long metal tracks were not fast enough, so we drove. Driving was not fast enough, so we flew.

  Flying isn't fast enough, not fast enough for us. We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down.