Loving One turned away. She tugged her father’s hand for a swing up the hill. He laughed, and made her fly up from the ground. She squealed, tickled both by joy and fear, and was lowered down to her feet. She walked on, up the wooded hill, through patches of shade and sun.
But not lost, not lost in the middle of her life, thought Milena. This is at the beginning, when the wood is full of light, and the way is straight.
The child turned and looked back at her. And the face showed that the child understood more than she could put into words.
Ghost, the face said, go home. Ghost, you are nothing to do with me, now. Ghost do you think that just because you are at the end, that you mean more than I do?
At the still hub of the turning world, Milena saw all of her past. She remembered the Child Garden on the day she met Rose Ella. She remembered the flowers that poured out of her on the day she stood in Thrawn’s room and reformed light. She saw the Earth below through the windows of the Bulge; she saw Archbishop’s Park; she saw the reeds and slow waters of the Slump. She remembered the fire as it danced up Thrawn McCartney’s arm. Did any of it really weigh more than this, here, the child walking between her father and mother, up a hill, through a wood in another land?
And Milena awoke again on the soft, warm floor of the Reading Room.
‘Not again,’ said Root. ‘I told you! I said don’t fight.’
‘Always fighting,’ murmured Milena.
‘They don’t have what they want.’
They want Rolfa.
‘The pattern isn’t complete!’
Mike Stone came crawling. ‘It’s got to stop now, anyway,’ he said. ‘My wife is ill.’
We get old and lose our selves, thought Milena. Why did I bring the cancer back? So that people would get old? She thought of Hortensia whose calcium-leached bones kept breaking. She thought of the child running through the garden of the great house and of the faces of her childhood friends. They would be her age by now, in their early twenties, in Czechoslovakia. But they would not be dying.
Why did I do it at all?
Root strode quickly to Mike Stone. ‘Mike, love, let me explain,’ she said and helped him back into his chair. Milena heard some of what she said. Something about medicine helping. Something about it all being over in an instant.
The Doctor came. The Doctor was in Whites and carried an applicator. Milena thought of the round, fat, flushed face of the child she had once been before the virus touched her. She thought of the feeling lips of the horse in the garden and the fun of cutting chives.
Milena understood why she had brought the cancer back.
‘People are going to get old now aren’t they?’ Milena asked him. ‘They’re going to live a long time because of the cancer?’
‘Yes indeed,’ said the Doctor. There was a hiss from the applicator. Another cure to make her ill.
‘So if people can get old again, will you let them stay children?’
Milena Shibush had brought back cancer so that children might be left alone a little while longer to play in the garden, amid the trees, with the light. Who would have thought that Milena Shibush would the out of love for children?
‘Oh,’ said the Doctor, his smile still professional and distracted. ‘We’ve cured people of childhood. Children knew nothing: they needed to be taken care of; they were naturally cruel. Childhood was a disease.’ He stood up, looking pleased, and shook his head. ‘We’re not going to bring childhood back.’
I’ve lost, thought Milena. She had not even known there had been a battle. Her life had been spent trying to bring back what she had known in childhood.
Milena had thought her life had begun with Rolfa. She thought that she had bloomed when she found Rolfa, and that her life had gone on blossoming even after Rolfa had left. Instead, her life had been finished, in the sense of being accomplished. Its end had been achieved. In Rolfa, with Rolfa, she had found love. And love was the image of everything that had been lost: her home country, her home tongue, the landscape of childhood, her way of seeing it, her father, her mother, her name, the place where she would have been happy. She had lost her self.
And Rolfa, even she was lost. Rolfa, they even have you. They have your voice, they have your mind, they can make you speak when they want you to. I gave you to them. So why am I holding back my memories of you? Let them have those.
I am going to have to find another way to fight.
Milena relinquished her claim. She remembered Rolfa for the Consensus.
Milena remembered being lost in the dark in the Graveyard. Loose threads of old dead costumes strayed across her face and blistered sequins were rough under her fingers.
There was music playing, insanely loud. The music was Das Lied von der Erde. The words told a kind of ghost story.
Milena was sucking her finger, sick at heart with fear, fear of being ill again, of losing more of herself. She was lost in the dark, more frightened than she need be, because it reminded her of all the other ways in which she was lost. It reminded her that no one would notice she was gone. And the voice, high and sweet and sad, was a woman’s voice, reminding her that she needed love.
So the dark around her was haunted. Don’t be silly, she told herself, what do you think it is, an orchestra of ghosts? She scraped her head on brick, looked through an arch and saw a light on the wall. She saw there was no room for an orchestra. It was obvious what was playing; if she could have thought clearly she would have known that it was a recording. But she was too frightened of life and of herself to think clearly. Milena remembering felt pity for Milena the actress. The actress knelt and pulled back a curtain of old clothes.
Trouble, thought Milena the actress. Trouble, thought the Milena who remembered. Trouble, seeing the mound of papers, the mess, the shrieking music, and the slumped, dazed brute of a Polar Bear. There was disorder there.
In the music, someone who might already be dead was departing with regret and sadness. The dead are more afraid than the living, and in some ways they are more alive.
The GE stirred herself with a kind of convulsion as if she had almost settled into death herself, following the music there. She knocked over paper and plastic cases, as if she were blind. Sadness hung from her face like lead weights, pulling down the flesh under her eyes and around her jaws. The music had been calling for someone. The paper slid away to reveal a box, a small, crude soundbox, made of metal as thin as paper. No wonder the music had hurt when the volume was full up.
To the poor starveling of the Consensus the soundbox was a wonder, and it drew her out of her hiding, out of her fear, as did the soul-sadness on the GE’s face.
‘Where did you get that?’ Milena the actress asked in wonder, though she could hear music any time she liked. Her viruses would sing it for her, out of memory. It was the metal that drew her, the cost of the thing. It was private metal, something owned and therefore more precious, if only to someone else.
‘China, I believe,’ said Rolfa, and Milena could hear the youth in her voice. Youth was plump and fruity, not yet worn by doubt. It still had hope. ‘You wouldn’t happen to have any alcoholic beverages about your person, would you?’