Michel Faber - The Book of Strange New Things

Towards the end of his weeping fit, he cried about the coin collection his father had given him. It was shop-bought but serious, a handsomely packaged starter set that included a French franc, an Italian lira, a 10-drachma bit, a German 50-pfennig with a woman planting a seedling on it, and other commonplace treasures which, to a clueless boy, seemed like relics from an ancient epoch, the prehistoric empire of numismatics. Ah, happy innocence… but not long afterwards a schoolfriend murmured in his ear, serpent-like, that this prissy little collection was not valuable at all , and persuaded him to swap the lot for a single coin that had been minted, he said, in 333 AD. It was misshapen and corroded but it had a helmeted warrior engraved on it and Peter fell under its spell. His father was furious, when he found out. He kept saying ‘ If genuine… ’, ‘ If genuine… ’ in a fastidiously dubious tone, and lecturing Peter about the extreme commonness of Constantine copper coins, and how damaged this one was, and how the whole damn business of collecting was infested with fakery. Peter kept protesting, hotly, ‘ You weren’t there!’, referring not just to the reign of Constantine but also to the moment when a small, impressionable boy was defeated by a bigger, cleverer one. For years, that poisonous repetition of ‘ If genuine… ’ festered in his mind, proof of everything that was creepy and cold about his father. By the time Peter was ready to understand that the quarrel was bluster and that his dad had simply been hurt, the old man was in his grave.

About all these things and more, Peter wept. Then he felt better, as if purged. His raw eyelids, which would have needed careful pampering if he’d been anywhere but here, were soothed by the oily moistness of the warm air. His head, which had started to pound towards the end of his crying jag, felt light and pleasantly anaesthetised.

‘A very long สีong,’ said Jesus Lover Five, sitting with her back against the lectern. He hadn’t noticed her arrive. This wasn’t the first time she’d come to the church to visit him, at an hour when most others of her kind were sleeping.

‘Why aren’t you in bed?’ he asked, heaving himself up on one elbow. He could barely see her; the entire church was lit with nothing more powerful than a couple of oil flames floating in ceramic soup-bowls: toy braziers.

‘Awake,’ she said, as if that explained everything. Perhaps it did.

He replayed her comment in his head. A very long song . Evidently, to her, his weeping sounded no different from singing. The distress in his voice was lost in translation; she heard only the horn-like music of whimpering, the rhythm of sobs. Maybe she would have liked to join in, but couldn’t make out any words.

‘I was remembering things from long ago,’ he explained.

‘Long ago,’ she echoed. Then: ‘Long ago, the Lord สีaid รี่o Iสีrael, I have loved you, my people.’

The quote from Jeremiah surprised him, not because she had managed to memorise it, but because it was from a more modern translation than the King James — the New Living, if he wasn’t mistaken. Did Kurtzberg pick and choose between different Bibles? In the King James, ‘long ago’ was ‘of old’, while the original Hebrew meant something more like ‘from afar’.

Long ago and far away… maybe they were the same thing after all. Rousing himself from his scholarly fog, he opened his mouth to ask Jesus Lover Five why she had quoted that bit of Scripture, what it meant to her.

But Lover Five’s head was slumped onto her chest. Whatever the reason for her insomnia at home in her own bed, she had found sleep here, with him.

It was during his second sojourn with the Oasans, also, that Peter experienced his first death. His first dead Oasan, that is.

He still had no clear idea of the size of the settlement’s population, but was inclined to think that it might be a few thousand, and that the Jesus Lovers represented only a tiny minority of the souls living in this great hive of dwellings. Birth and death must surely be going on as normal inside those amber walls, the same as in any other big town, but he had no access to it — until, one day, Jesus Lover One came and told him that his mother had died.

‘My mother,’ he announced. ‘Dead.’

‘Oh! I’m so sorry!’ said Peter, instinctively putting his arms around Lover One. He could tell at once that it was the wrong thing to do, like embracing a woman who absolutely doesn’t want to be touched by anyone other than her husband. Lover One’s shoulders cringed, his body stiffened, his arms trembled, his face turned away lest it brush against Peter’s chest. Peter released him and stepped back in embarrassment.

‘Your mother,’ he blurted. ‘What an awful loss.’

Lover One gave this notion some deliberation before responding.

‘Mother made me,’ he said at last. ‘If mother never be, I never be alสีo. Mother therefore very imporรี่anรี่ man.’

‘Woman.’

‘Woman, yeสี.’

A few more seconds passed. ‘When did she die?’ asked Peter.

Again there was a pause. Oasans had difficulty choosing the linguistic boxes into which they felt obliged, by others, to put their conceptions of time. ‘Before you came.’

‘Before I came to… Oasis?’

‘Before you came with Word-in-Hand.’

Last few days, then. Maybe even yesterday. ‘Is she… Has there been a funeral?’

‘Few…?’

‘Have you put her in the ground?’

‘สีoon,’ said Jesus Lover One, with a pacifying motion of the glove, as if giving his solemn promise that the procedure would be attended to as soon as it was feasible. ‘Afรี่er the harveสีรี่.’

‘After the…?’

Lover One searched his vocabulary for a pronounceable alternative. ‘The reaping.’

Peter nodded, although he didn’t really understand. He guessed that this reaping must be the harvest of one of the Oasans’ food crops, a job so time-sensitive and labour-intensive that the community simply couldn’t fit a funeral into their schedule. The old lady would have to wait. He imagined a wizened, slightly smaller version of Lover One nestled motionless in her bed, one of those cots that already so closely resembled a coffin. He imagined the fluffy wisps of bedding being wrapped around her like a cocoon, in preparation for her burial.

As it turned out, there was no need to guess or imagine. Lover One, speaking in the same tone he might have used to invite a guest to see a notable monument or tree (if this place had had such things as monuments and trees), invited him to come and see the body of his mother.

Peter tried and failed to think of a suitable reply. ‘Good idea’, ‘Thank you’, and ‘I’d like that’ all felt wrong somehow. Instead, in silence, he put on his yellow boots. It was a brilliant morning, and the shade inside his church ill-prepared him for the dazzling sunshine.

He accompanied Jesus Lover One across the scrubland to the compound, taking two steps for every three or four of the Oasan’s. He was learning many things on this visit, and how to amble was one of them. There was an art to walking slower than your instinct told you to, keeping pace with a much smaller person, yet not appearing exasperated or clumsy. The trick was to pretend you were wading through waist-deep water, watched by a judge who would award you points for poise.

Side by side, they reached Jesus Lover One’s house. It looked identical to all the others, and had not been adorned with any flags, accoutrements or painted messages proclaiming an inhabitant’s death. A few people were walking around nearby, no more than normal, and they were getting on with business as usual, as far as Peter could tell. Lover One led him around the back of the building, to the patch of ground where clothing was washed and hung, and where children often played with คฐฉ้ฐ, the Oasan equivalent of boules , soft dark balls made of compacted moss.