It is a long drive — beautiful. Now and then she puts the flat of her palm on her stomach, she thought there was already a faint swell of the curve there; but really is amused at herself, all the prime meat they eat has made her less gaunt anyway. Whoever is in there — boy, girl — hasn’t grown enough yet to make the presence evident. She is very well, no morning sickness his aunt had warned her of; a healthy Russian woman become an Italian wife. She feels a sudden — yes, happiness, it must be? At thirty, a new sense of life. As he drives, she looks from the landscape to this man dutifully received so weighty on top of her every night, with a recognition that he, too, must need this sense.
The old farmhouse shows its transformation to be his, as his gifts of fine clothes and jewellery transform her. When she uses the bathroom, it is all mirrors and flowered tiles. The new relatives embrace her, there is coffee and wine and cakes. Again the picture book and photographs go round; she summons her breathlessly hesitant words of their language to tell them the names of squares and churches, palaces. These glories that have survived are once more his wife’s distinctions — she, his acquisition. He is gratified by the enthusiasm for Russia’s old glory of these relatives who depend on him for their living — You must go there one day. — In America it is said that people are booking trips to the moon …
Then it was time for the uncle and cousin to take her, led by her husband who owns it all, round the cattle-breeding installation. To her, cows graze in fields in summer, they are part of the green peace of a landscape as clouds are of a sky. There are brilliant fields stretching way behind the house. But no cows. There are sheds huge as aircraft hangars, and a great machine beside a solid wall of crushed maize that smells like beer.
Five hundred beasts. The owner knows his possessions exactly. In the hangars are five hundred beasts. The party is walked along the cement passage between each row, where the heavy heads face their exact counterparts on the opposite row. In front of each bowed head is a trough filled with the stuff that smells like beer. The huge eyes are convex blacked-out mirrors, expressing no life within. The broad, wet, black soft noses breathe softly upon the food. Some are eating; those that are not are in the same head-bowed position. They are chained by the leg. The bulk of each animal is contained — just — by the iron bars of a heavy stall; it cannot turn round. It can only eat, at this end of its body. Eat, eat. The butcher owner tells her: at six months, ready for slaughter. Prime.
Then she is led down the backs of the rows. Vast rumps, backsides touch the iron bars, hide streaked and plastered with the dung that falls into a trough like the one for food. The legs are stumps that function to hold up bulk.
She spoke only once — no need, the butcher owner keeps a running commentary of admiration of his beasts’ condition, market prices. She puts together in English, out of the muddle of languages that inhibit her tongue — When they go out in the fields?—
Never. They spend the six months in the installation. That is the way meat production is done today. They are gelded — know what that is — he demonstrates. That’s why they grow so fast and well!
She puts out a hand to touch the head above the shining eye-globes and the creature tries to draw away in fear but cannot move more than a few centimetres to either side, or front and back of the iron bars.
She turned from the men, absorbed in their talk and gestures, and walked out of the hangar looking only at the concrete under her feet. If the eyes followed her as she passed, she could do nothing for them. Nothing.
She stands outside, the sweetish beer smell from the wall of crushed maize in her nostrils as in theirs. She is swollen with such horror, her body feels the iron bars enclosing her, the bars are before her eyes, she cannot turn about, escape to the house. She does not know where it comes from, this knowledge — happening to her — of how it is for them, beasts born dumb as a human being can be made dumbly unable to free itself. It is as if that brief moment of awareness — happiness — had opened her to something in her she didn’t, shouldn’t know, a real memory she couldn’t have had. There are many bad things endured in her abandoned, escaped life back — home — where the basilica from past centuries was world-renowned and her grandmother begged in the famous streets, her pension unpaid for years. But there is nothing, in her own record her life keeps, like this. And there is now, here, a child inside her seeded by the owner of these beasts in iron bars.
When the men come out, he takes her arm. — Tired? — And to the other men, in their language — She’s expecting, you know. — The news is repeated, over grappa, at the house. This aunt embraces her. There is a toast to the new addition soon to be welcomed in the family. A child with an inheritance — going to be born lucky.
She collected her picture book and photographs. At that moment she decided she would go there — home.
Back.
But to what?
Instead she found someone who, with the exchange of her few words, money, agreed to give her an abortion. And she told the butcher she had miscarried.
‘The individual’s choice of a future earthly body is limited, however … ’
No. Whoever the interpreter was who wrote that was in ignorance. Choice? That’s a temporal concept. There’s no choice because choice implies a fixed personality to make it. I am an old being Returned in the being of a child; I find I’m back as a man, or Returned again to continue his experience in another time, place, as a woman. The gender is only one of the forms of Return. But if there can be any remnant of what I once really was—‘really’: how meaninglessly relative that is in so many, many Returns — it is the sense that I’m somehow more fully inhabited, as a male, than when the Return is female. And to carry over being from the earthly death of a young male to a woman, with the vestiges of what he endured inevitably continued somewhere in her — I inhabit her, I am her — that something in me of course becomes part of her, her personality her character as a being, although she doesn’t know the reason.
And within her, a maleness I harbour resents this being—hers—as the victim she is in this phase of possible existences.
The first fish propelling itself by its fins over the slime to sand. That’s when it all started.
They tell so.
And death: that’s the end. Dead. They think I’m gone, but it’s a process, lingering, between this past and that, lived. Can’t call it memory? Something not even collective memory, because nobody comes back from the dead do they, to tell? I’m only some kind of answer — invented, dreamed into being? — to their awful fear of death everyone has from the beginning of earthly consciousness.
They think I’m disappearing, but always they’re disappearing from me. Left behind. For this time.
I don’t know in which Return I first heard about it. Read about it, it seems. I wish I never had. I believe if you don’t know of some possibility, you’ll never have to live it. Outside your orbit. Absurd, really, because I then must already have been a Return, the only sure, actual beginning is the fish — and even it had had a form of being in another element.
It must have been one of the Returns in which I had become middle-aged, even old — certainly adult, with a developed intellectual curiosity. Most times I was young, or a child. Short-lived: at once available again. Must have been when I was a being dissatisfied with the explanations of human life on offer: given in churches, synagogues and mosques; or simply had the kind of restless mind that seeks out explanations in etymology and philosophical tracts and treatises. ‘Karma. The sum and consequences of a person’s actions during the successive phases of his existence, regarded as determining his destiny. Fate, destiny. Sanskrit karman (nominative karma), act, deed, work, from karoti, he makes, he does.’ The garble of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. And there are other interpreters. ‘The doctrine of karma or transmigration … is intimately associated with the philosophy of the Upanishads.’ I don’t believe I ever read the Upanishads. Then there’s: ‘Officials, too, are subject to the laws of karma — that sooner or later every action brings its retribution, in this existence or in one to come.’ And another: ‘ … karma can be seen as the law of “eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth” … but such an interpretation is not only a simplification, but also a severe limitation. ’