“I find it hard to believe they’re going to exterminate us. You’re talking about genocide.”
“Have you forgotten Hiroshima? Nagasaki? And why did we sanction the extermination of hundreds of thousands of people in Japan? To prevent loss of life. To save ourselves. So don’t underestimate what fear can do to the human mind.” He stopped and looked down at the pile of crockery, lying forgotten at his feet. A dinner plate shook in his hand as he picked it up, and he steadied it as he resumed polishing. “Are you one of those people, Marlene, who believes in the power of positive thinking? My wife used to say that if she visualized a parking space, she would always find one.” He placed the plate into the wheelbarrow with an under-the-breath “there.” “But she didn’t always get what she wanted.” Wife in the past tense, fussing over her china. So this is what happens when death cuts you adrift from your family, when there is no weight of responsibility to anchor you down. You just float until you’re lost. After my parents had died, when I found myself alone, I hooked on to Julian; for better or for worse, he was ballast. And then the family came and there was something to work for, and I stayed on course. They set my course. If nothing else—if Julian resolutely failed to ever support me in even the smallest way—at least he gave me the solidity of supporting him. Now, watching the hermit adrift among his dead wife’s belongings, haunted by past horrors, I thanked Julian for the first time.
“I never really understood positive thinking,” I said. “We’d all just be fabulously wealthy and thin. I guess I believe in luck.”
“And are you a lucky person?”
“I’ve survived this far. As have you.”
“More luck than judgment, if I may say so. On both our parts.” He bustled off into the shed, and whatever he said next was obliterated by tap water pounding into the sink. I stepped onto the porch. He was drying his hands on a tea towel, rubbing it over each fingernail as if polishing them.
“Thank you for the food parcel.”
“Oh, yes, yes. Welcome. The Aga up at the house runs on oil, most convenient in the circumstances. I wanted some rations for my long march. Dead bodies in the kitchen, unfortunately, but that’s a necessary evil. Excuse me.” He blustered past and added an old-fashioned leather suitcase to the wheelbarrow. Then he went back inside and set about putting on his socks and boots.
“You baked the bread in a kitchen with corpses in it?” I said.
“It’s a big kitchen.”
“But the virus—”
“Doesn’t seem to have killed me yet. So I rather think the bodies are little more than an inconvenience. Needs must.”
Inconvenience. The thought of eating those buns—the kids eating those buns—filled my stomach with a buzz of disgust. And yet we were still here. Maybe it was time for needs must?
“So is that the ‘news’ you mentioned in the letter—this chatter?”
“There wasn’t a lot of detail. And some of the messages went too fast to decipher.”
“Decipher?”
“Some of it’s in Morse code. I learned Morse as a boy, of course, but I’m woefully rusty, only got the gist. And many of the shortwave channels are foreign—Radio Moscow and the like. Do you speak Russian?”
“No.”
“No. Shame, that. They’re coming through strong. Can’t understand a damn thing. Apart from ‘Angliyskiy.’ Seems to be every other word.” He prattled on about the vagaries of foreign broadcasts, but I had a hard time concentrating; his voice sunk away, and only the odd phrase surfaced into my consciousness. “Quarantine.” “Atrocities.” But inside my body, a giddy sparkle spread from my extremities to the core. Only once it reached and gripped my heart did I realize that it was euphoria. People living, people talking. Politics and religion. All the usual shameful human behavior. But life, nonetheless: not this paltry survival, but actual living. Terrorism, murder, state-sponsored inhumanity, I’d take it all, so long as I didn’t have to watch my children suffer one more day in this bloody awful Eden. Something like the relief of aircraft wheels squealing onto tarmac—only magnified beyond tolerance—sent a punch of adrenaline through me. So what if we are under quarantine? If they won’t come to us, we can go to them. Joni can go home. Billy can forget. All of us can heal.
“So what exactly are they saying?” I needed him to get to the point.
“Picked up some Arabic, Chinese. Scandinavians broadcasting in English, but keeps getting interference. The raving Christians would be quite amusing if they weren’t such”—he ground his fist against his ear in a toddler-like movement—“dreadful, dreadful people. But shortwave is not your simple car radio, you can’t—”
“The signal’s better at dawn and dusk. Okay, then I’m going to pack up the camp, and I’ll come back later,” I said, and in reaction to his undisguised surprise at my old-school knowledge, I added, “I grew up with shortwave. Expat kid. You said you caught the gist of the Morse code messages? Any clues to where exactly we should go? There must be someone offering help. For the kids at least.”
“‘Quarantine’—they repeat that word a lot—‘quarantine.’ And don’t go south.”
Don’t go south. So much for a gentle new life on the Mediterranean.
“And the rest is much as I told you before,” he said. “The scale of it has taken them by surprise. They’ve come down hard on the Continent—whole villages sequestered, refugees in isolation camps, some say mass exterminations.” He stopped, and the horrific images seemed to wraith around the clearing for a few seconds before evaporating.
“Whatever happened to ‘women and children first’?” I said.
“That seems to have been replaced with ‘each man for himself.’”
“So where are you going?” I asked.
“I’m going to hide in a cave, and when I come out the land will be cleansed. And then I can return to this corner I call home. The humble Mr. Mole after his adventures on the river.”
He turned and surveyed his domain. Whatever he saw added up to more than the sum of scrawny trees, three stone steps, and a shed. It was time to go and get packed up, but I lingered, sure there were more answers if I could only find the right question.
“What is this place?” I asked.
He smiled. For the first time, I saw his neat teeth, oddly childlike in his elderly face. “These are my ancestral lands.” He waved his arm in a wide circle and turned back to the wheelbarrow, picking up the handles. “The Lonely Steps are all that’s left of the ornamental gardens. In medieval times, the hall was over there. The woodland fought back, but nature can’t obliterate the family tree, eh?” He looked pleased with himself, despite the tears in his eyes. “Of course, my ancestors managed to lose the lot.”
“Every tree has a few bad apples.”