9
Margot had given Harriet five city commandments.
Make sure you eat enough.
Avoid getting sick; let people with colds fend for themselves.
Turn in no more and no less than a proper day’s work.
Don’t like Clio more than you like me.
See some sights if humanly possible.
The fifth command proved the trickiest to implement. One afternoon Harriet went into Clio Kercheval’s office without knocking. Clio clicked her computer screensaver on in case Harriet came around the desk, and then she folded her hands together.
What can I do for you, er—Dottie.
Harriet shook her head.
Sorry, what can I do for you, Rosolio? Lyud . . . no? Camille? Child. What can I do for you, child?
Harriet petitioned Clio for a group trip to the city.
To the city? Clio patted her knee until Harriet inferred that she was supposed to come and sit on it. Harriet shook her head again. I’m fourteen, she said.
Well. What do you want to see in the city, fourteen-year-old?
Historical monuments? Or we could go to the zoo?
Listen, child—there’s no need for you to see the city. The city would corrupt you.
Harriet had another go. School, then. School would improve us.
School is a greater corrupter than any city. I’m really doing the best I can for you—in loco parentis, you know.
Oh, said Harriet. I think I’ll go home, then.
You want to go home? Clio was thunderstruck. The most recent opinion poll had returned the results that going home was the last thing the girls wanted. What was going on here? Was Margot Leveque’s kid negotiating? Clio may not have been able to remember the child’s name, but she was one of the more convincing Gingerbread Girls, and her absence would induce no small loss of revenue. Harriet opened the office door. Clio jumped up and closed it again.
Don’t be like that. I’ll order textbooks, she said. Books from Gretel’s curriculum. You can study from them, be your own teacher. And you can teach the others, if you’d like. You can all be home educated. What do you think? Is it a good compromise?
Harriet accepted. In the dormitory she gathered the girls around and told them she’d got Clio’s permission to turn the Buckingham tearoom into a classroom for a couple of hours before they were due to head to the factory. They could gather around the tabletop held up by nutcracker soldiers and follow the National Curriculum with seed-pearl crowns set upon their studious heads. Nothing is impossible for royalty. The plan was unanimously agreed upon, but rousing the Gingerbread Girls the morning after the textbooks arrived was a different story. Harriet got called names and was told she’d better watch her back . . . so she let the sleepers sleep and relied on textbooks to help her transport other textbooks. They made good doorstops. She put down her notepad last. At four in the morning in the Buckingham tearoom, Harriet put on the crown that hung off the back of her wooden throne, stuck her hand into the pocket of her dressing gown in search of a pen, and found thirty-two folded notes. All were variations on Go Harriet! Get that knowledge! and Sorry I’m so lazy ? ? ? and Please forget what we said this morning . . . when it comes to solid-gold boffins we have no one but you. Her friends knew themselves and had written these the night before.
The history textbooks were the ones Harriet had been most interested in, but the only ones available were all about the histories of other countries that had greater global relevance and the suspiciously bravura role Druhástrana had played in their fortunes. Humble Druhástrana, friend to all nations, forgotten by all in its own time of need (but when had that been?). All aggression against Druhástrana was unjust and ultimately unsuccessful; there beneath the national emblem (three black griffins with their backs turned atop a gray mountain) on the flag was the motto: Never wounded, never wrong. The referendum had been the only way to definitively withdraw from the so-called brotherhood of nations; let them see, yes, they’d all see how well they’d get on without all the contributions Druhástrana had made toward world peace . . . Harriet bent the textbook in half at the page she was reading and banged it against the tabletop, trying to shake some of the opinionation out of it. She was oppressed by this opinionation; each sentence threatened to turn her into a cynic by the time she reached the end of it. She turned to another textbook, on the history of England, and got on with that one a bit better, especially the bit of Druhástranian history the author had managed to slip in as an aside on referendums. The author asserted that the need for Druhástrana’s Great Referendum (the one that had divorced it from all formal international relations and most informal ones too) had been brought about by a general taking of umbrage against all the foreigners who kept coming in and trying to propagate distracting inequalities, stuff about physical appearance and who people should and should not fancy and places of prayer that were better than others, or notions that the best people don’t pray at all . . . Druhástranians didn’t need any of that. What Druhástranians wanted was to keep things simple and concentrate on upholding financial inequality. Even that inequality could have been ironed out if the populace really wanted it, but singularity, the possibility of singularity, was something that the voting majority found impossible to sacrifice. Ask any Druhástranian man or woman and he or she will admit this truth—(Harriet did not admit this truth, but then she was neither man nor woman; she’d have to ask Margot sometime)—the truth that he or she can find the strength to live out a lifetime under the most dire privations as long as there’s a chance, however irrational, that he or she could someday stumble upon some abundance that’s accompanied by the right to keep it all for himself. Or herself. Thus did Druhástrana turn away from the world, like those three black griffins we see on our flag, and if only we could see what lies before those griffins! What is it they’ve been watching over all these years? What could have kept them from turning to face us?
After this the textbook author returned to a discussion of the Magna Carta and stuck to that, so Harriet dropped history and turned to maths and science and a handful of languages, English foremost. Clio tested her, neglecting to mention that the test papers were past exam papers for each subject. The difficulty was meant to be demoralizing, but Margot Leveque’s kid got motivated by it instead. She stopped talking about going home and followed the applicable rules and guidelines with gusto. Harriet’s logic was malleable regarding anything that wasn’t a matter of the heart, and even when she was conscious of having been led into fallacy, it pleased her to reassemble her thoughts to order. It was the only way she could be sure they wouldn’t go to waste.
Two things happened—one pleasant and one unpleasant.