As soon as I was old enough to read by myself I stopped having my mother read to me at night, because I always disagreed with my sister as to what should be read to us that evening; and it was so much better for me to read what I wished while Julie sat on my mother’s lap and listened to her reading from Just So Stories or a poem from A Child’s Garden of Verses (both of which I now found childish) in her slow, soft voice; and when I was sick my mother would simply buy me a book, such as Captains Courageous, which I was too proud to ask her to read to me. But when I did still like having my mother read everything to me, and I was absorbed by poems like the one about the fight between the gingham dog and the calico cat, or the one that described a voyage to Africa, in which the traveler sees the knotty crocodile of the Nile (but I used to think that it was the NAUGHTY CROCODILE that had eaten people up and so must be spanked), and he finds the toys of the old Egyptian boys and all the other things which rhyme — there was still one poem which I dreaded. It was called “The Land of Counterpane,” and it recounted the fantasy of a child who is sick and abed with his toy soldiers. This “Land of Counterpane” is simply the topography of the wrinkled and up-thrust blankets; and the child marches his soldiers up and down the quilt-patterned hills, skirmishes them on whatever rare plains there may be, and sets up ambushes and rescues at the mouths of little vales formed by pinching the sheets into contours of sufficient exactitude. My mother could never understand why it was that I so disliked this poem,* but, accepting my detestation as she would have accepted one of my father’s pronouncements on some mechanical matter, she did not read the poem to me, and I felt grateful, dreading the sight of the very poem that preceded it as my mother slowly turned the pages, which were as colorful as butterflies’ wings; and feeling the smug contentment of one who has arrived alive, most bones intact, after a session or two on the rack, when we were safely a couple of poems beyond. The truth of the matter, which I was always ashamed to explain, was that the image of the wrinkles terrified me, I having just become aware of the correlation between the wrinkles on the faces of my grandparents and the fact that they were going to die within the next several decades; and once I had been prevailed upon to accept the fact of my own death, I started feeling my face every day for wrinkles, knowing that one day they would come; and I watched my parents closely, noticing with horror the ever-lessening resemblance between my mother and her bridal picture in the family album, and the fact that my father’s hair was slowly graying; and when I lay in bed all day, the eerie luminescence of my sickness in me and all about me, my inability to recall my healthy state in any real sense made the wrinkles of my own “Land of Counterpane” seem a menacing memento mori.
But I wanted to go to Antarctica. In New England there was the snow and the woods, but it was gloomy among the trees and when I went sledding with Julie we would always crash into old stone walls. Antarctica sounded much better; my father told me that hardly anyone lived there. I imagined a sunny space of snow, a smoothness of ice that sparkled blue and green. There were penguins, of course. Icebergs moved through the ocean like ships, and far away could be seen jumping porpoises, and I could build snow castles and have my own ice-cream mine. One needed a parka to live there, but it was not too cold, especially when the sun was out in the afternoons and the ice was like a mirror. I would come out of school sometimes in February or March, almost understanding fractions. Those were warm days for winter; the snow was a little sticky, and it packed perfectly. They were building tall snow sculptures on the green. On my way home I walked past fields with the grass coming up golden through the snow, and that was territory belonging to Antarctica.
When I looked out the window of our new house the yard was just like a photograph. The trees and shrubs were various shades of green against the yellow-brown lawn (which I had just mowed). The sky was cloudless, naturally. Other houses in the neighborhood maintained the still solidarity of the nouveaux riches. I had a plenitude of time, and time being, like all things which have been thought on and settled, value-free, I could, I suppose, have made those free afternoons and evenings into delightful baskings in supra-conscious temporality as well as I did make them into hours of boredom and horror.
After some discussion, my friend and I agreed to put two hours’ worth of coins in the parking meter. It was a hot day, and neither of us thought that we would want to stay any longer than that.
“Should I lock my door?” I said.
“Yes, please,” my friend said.
We walked over to the ornamental fountain where the demonstration was scheduled to begin, and children came up to give us pamphlets. The man with the bullhorn said that if we were united we would never be defeated. The shouting procession began. Nobody saw us. Sweat was in our eyes. My friend and I walked listlessly. We were both feeling very tired. After two blocks we went back to the car.
It is part of the fragmentation of life that after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan I wanted to go there. It sounded like a treasure-trove of nightmares. Allow me to quote briefly from the Encyclopædia Britannica to set my expectations’ scene:
A kingdom in … For information about border disputes … great central range of mountains … a series of deep ravines and broken ridges … more than 115°F in the summer, while in the highlands of Kabul … to -15°F in February … the influence of the southwest monsoon hardly extends beyond Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan … a dry, invigorating atmosphere … periodic blizzards … large forest trees … The lowest terminal ridges, especially toward the west, are naked in aspect … Wild animals include the wolf, fox, hyena, wild dog, wildcat, common leopard, mongoose, wild sheep, mole, shrew, hedgehog, bat, several species of jumping mouse, jerboa and pika hare. Bears are found in the forests and the Mongolian tiger is said to inhabit the thick reed country of the Amudarya … The Pathans, i.e., the Afghans proper … dark hair and … The Tajiks … The Hazaras, also, are part of the far-flung Mongolian race. They are glabrous, short-haired … Different forms of the vendetta exist … the protagonist hops on one leg … involves the attempt to retrieve a decapitated calf’s body from a ditch, on horseback, and carry it to the goal, hundreds of riders participating in the contest … singing in a chorus accompanied by native instruments … an Iron Age settlement at Balkh with plain buffware … few remains of the early Muslim invaders … the Hephthalite domination … when already Arab armies … descended upon the city … Mongol hordes … no living thing was to be spared. The beautiful city of Balkh was utterly … The horrors of the Mongol invasion were then repeated, though on a lesser scale … peace and prosperity … was parceled between the Mughals of India and … were slaughtered … The Russians … Internal strife … Meanwhile … blinded and imprisoned … indolent ruler … Napoleon … but instead the Sikh ruler robbed him of the famous Koh-i-Nor diamond … the unfortunate minister to be cut to pieces … holy war in 1836 … A British army … honorably treated … who killed him with his own hands … a speedy but peaceful settlement of the Afghan question … annihilated … evacuated … machinery and other modern appliances … assassinated … the national awakening … independence … a group of reactionaries who … a reign of terror … Unfortunately, this steady progress was interrupted by … Internal peace was maintained, and steady progress … neutrality … friction between Afghanistan and Pakistan … agreements with certain foreign governments … a motorway and … the new constitution … rioting by students … the assembly … social welfare centers … a military academy at Kabul … facilities for jet bombers.