So… I’m working on this novel and am taken back to the Reagan years in the US (though I didn’t even live in the US) and realize so much of what is happening now in the US (where I do live now) began then, with a policy of picking on or picking off smaller governments. Or hand-picking foreign governments. Now in the US we are experiencing this happening to us, with foreign interference in our elections, and how people like Vida continue to resist… And so her story, our story, continues…
It is worse in her dreams. Arthur is shot, bullets through his chest cavity opening him up to daylight, like the paintings she’s seen of St. Stephan, her black man’s head hanging toward the white martyr’s, talking like his body is glass.
– I have broken through the second ground. I have climbed the second level. See, the ground lies in splinters.
– My body is all eyes. Look at it! I look in all directions.
So his name now circulates. So he is listed on the enemies’ list. Vida straightens her legs and starts into town, sees a feint sliver of moon still visible ahead. It looks like a hammock. She walks down the street toward the center of town, the buildings and walls, stone on stone and brick on brick so nearly as they have always stood, except there is some smoke. She does smell smoke. Smoke fills her nostrils that flare. The spring rain should have quelled any fires by now.
She looks down the street, and her breath catches in her throat. There is nothing there, a hollow in the row of buildings and what is left of the police station is smouldering. The wing that contained the prisoners’ cells is burnt down to rubble. She closes her eyes against the fear of having lost Arthur for sure. It is a blind fear that passes with sight as she opens her eyes and her mind slowly clears.
Almost certainly it was the street kids who set this fire. The invading army had advanced with guns, not torches. But some town kids in their uninterrupted tradition of half-hearted lawlessness had that energy released by the invasion, and they might have set the place ablaze. But they also would have let Arthur free if he was being held in there. They would have boasted, and then Vida would have heard all about it, either from Arthur himself on the lam or from Claudia. Claudia would have known and would have reached her if Arthur had either died or been set free in a fire like this.
So now where to look? Where is one to look for a body on this body of land. It is like looking for a needle in a haystack, or like the scriptures says, easier to get a camel through the eye of a needle, or a needle shot through the heel of the revolution and draining its blood.
Vida’s face is wet again, but it is no use her wiping it with her sleeve. It is raining again now so hard she can no longer see the ship in the harbor through the rain. Still at this hour there is no one around to ask about the fire, and she thinks now perhaps Mrs. Williams was right all along. Don’t mess with the General, the older woman had counseled. He might know how Vida distinguished herself. He might know all about her, and there she is jogging his memory with her questions about Arthur. Talk to someone lower down, or just talk to yourself, Vida, and stop this looking. Stay home, Mrs. Williams had exhorted her. Stay here with me and the children, at least for now. At least ‘til you have to go away.
Vida puts up her umbrella and looks back over to where the police station is still smoking, wondering how with all the rain the fires can still burn. Where is the white room that she dreams? Vida wonders. A puddle is forming around her feet on the poured concrete, and she calculates: if Arthur wasn’t in the police station then they most likely took him up the hill to the prison. She has no way to get up there now except by walking, at least until the buses start running again. Claudia’s car is out of fuel, and fuel is being rationed. Cars are being searched and, in any case, if Arthur is up there at the prison then there is nothing she can do. There is the other possibility, that Arthur is dead. If Arthur is dead she still wants the body. That is the point now, the body and what she must do.
Thought stops. She’s here in town, the sun coming up, breaking through the rain clouds, and she is here, having come this far to get Art, and what did she think? Her body fills up with rage slowly, and the truth nearly knocks her over. Did she actually think he would be there at the station and that they would release him to her? No, she didn’t ever think that. What she wanted was to put this rage back on the man. She knew she wouldn’t, that she couldn’t get that far but she had wanted to bang on the bars of Art’s grey cell. She had pictured him in a cage, not a vast white room like in the courthouse, but there in a little cell of the local police station where she could let out her disappointment that was killing her, starting with a fury. Four days now. Everything that they had made is ruined and there are still two babies, a cretin sister, and an old woman. And now what the hell is she, Vida, supposed to do? Go back to his mom’s house? This is the fourth day.
She covers her face against the wave of regrets welling up, and now she doesn’t want to go find him. Instead she wants to go back to her own home, to take hold of her kids and wash their hair and plait Mary’s, tight and shining, then wash the house and wait, wait on the night as if she was younger with courage and bad manners, manners suitable to a woman who does what she wants. And then when it gets dark and if the music were to start at the bar down the road she would put on her earrings and slip on her black high-heels like a pair she’s never owned and a black polished cotton dress that swishes around her knees – shh shh – like a mother but she is not that mother because she is still so young. She would cross the dance floor with any man who has the time. Arthur hasn’t had the time for years. Vida’s lungs fill up with this rage, and she can’t decide what she’s going to do. A drop of rainwater drips off the branch she has passed, and she stops, wipes the water off her cheek with the back of her hand that makes her catch her breath, it looks so like her hand when she was a child, no paint on her nails now trimmed short, and this ring she wears looks nothing like a wedding ring. Could be a little girl’s ring. How would they know Art had a claim on her so that she, in turn, can claim him, claim his body. She can start again, might have to start again.
Slowly she moves, slowly as if dizzy, but after the first few steps she exhales and all the rage seems to blow out of her lungs. She looks actually deflated, smaller, older. Her forehead furrows and deep creases stretch from beneath her flared nostrils to the corners of her mouth, and she starts again. Her spine carries her away, the line of bones reaching up to her thin neck and extending down through the narrow of her back. The sensation of love and defeat are almost the same now for her. Vida and those she loves, the heroes in the revolution, the known and unknown, all the stories that are told and that which is not disclosed, Vida only wants to have the body, to get Arthur back, to repeat what cannot be repeated, to do the same again and again, no regrets, to invent and to repeat the invention. Vida mutters, mutters under her breath although there is no one to hear her and no one whom she could prevent, by muttering, from hearing her – I will go home and look after my babies. Mary with her arm stretched over James in his sleep, Vida remembers. She shakes her head, turns around. She turns her back on the burnt-out police station, turns away from the prison on the hill that stares down on the road she is going to travel. She begins winding her way back to Mrs. Williams’s house. Her shoulders bend forward as she starts back down the hill, back toward Mrs. Williams’s house.
