Geoff Ryman - Child Garden

It was the betrayal that made the infant howl and wail.

To the Milena who remembered, each shift of memory made the world tamer and more secure. It became more adult, less like leaves scattered in layers, and more like butterflies pinned in rows under glass. With each shift, the adult felt more at home, could find her bearings with more ease. Emotions came with names, already controlled and bearable. Milena the infant now knew words. But these were words that she had learned for herself. The words belonged to her.

The room around now came in only one focused shape, four walls. The wooden table, the wood-burning stove, the rickety chairs, the bean bags on the floor, the string of garlic, were all as the adult remembered them. They showed only one side of themselves at a time. Outside the windows, there was blazing daylight. Milena could now hear the ticking of the clock in all its soulless regularity. Tick-tock time.

’Milena,’ said her mother, quietly. ‘ Your father wants to talk to you.’

Tatinka, her mother called him. The words unleashed a sense of loss. Milena, the adult felt an undertow tug of strangeness, of loss. The adult had lost a language.

Milena felt another chasm open up under her. Time had hauled her away from her mother and her mother tongue. She felt the vertigo.

The infant was looking at her mother’s face. There was something very grave and serious in the world. It made her mother quiet and noble, and Milena’s heart swelled with love. Her mother was young and beautiful, and now noble as well. Her mother took her hand, and led her out of her old world, into another one, through the door to her parents’ room. Her parents’ room was where Milena went at night, when darkness frightened her. This room was darkened now. Milena felt panic.

’Is it night? she asked. The infant lived in a world where day could become night without warning.

’No, Milena. Its just the shutters. The shutters have been closed.

The room smelled acid like sour lemons. Milena the infant knew that smell. It rose off your body, from the tangle, when the world went sick.

The walls were brown, the sheets were brown, everything was jumbled, and dirtier than it should be. Her father was brown and jumbled, crucified on a bed. His black hair pasted slick and flat over his forehead. Now that Milena was older, people only had one face at a time. Words, even Czechoslovakian words, gave things only one face. This face had black stubble and dark flesh around the eyes.

Milena’s mother nudged her toward the bed. She stood next to him, at face-level, and a hot, damp arm was drawn around her. He was burning. Milena knew then that he had the illness. He had the burning and the shaking. He looked at her with eyes that were different, a stranger’s eyes. Milena went wary. They could take your father and give him someone else’s eyes.

‘Svoboda,’ he croaked.

Like Ne, the word meant freedom. But it was a Czech word, and not the same as English freedom, and never could be. Svoboda was something natural like apples, like the earth. Like paradise, the way to it was barred.

You can fight it, Tato. You think at it, and it changes. You can do that can’t you Tato? Milena wanted to explain, but couldn’t. Then she thought he would know that already. She had already been taught that adults always knew more than she did. Tato took Milena’s hand in his own. Milena could smell the hand. He spoke in rough and alien voice.

‘Be good, Milena.’

Adults were always telling her to be good. It was not possible to know what good was. It always seemed to change. Milena knew she could not promise to be good; she wasn’t sure what good was. She didn’t want to lie, but she knew she could not say no. So Milena nodded yes. She knew it was a lie, so didn’t say the words. She wanted to be good, but if he had to ask, did that mean she really wasn’t good? What should she do to be good? No one ever seemed to be able to explain it fully. The word good seemed to spread out, diffuse, as part of the brown walls.

‘Milena, answer your father.’

They were going to make her say yes. Yes was the word of acquiescence. It was the word of powerlessness.

Milena murmured, yes. Her mother made her say it again, louder. Her mother’s hand was on her shoulder, pushing her closer to her father, who was sick and who smelled. They both wanted something from her, and she could not think what it could be, however much she wanted to give it. She wanted to give it as long as she was not pushed.

The future, thought the one who was remembering, they want some promise of the future.

‘Kiss your father,’ her mother told her.

He smelled and was wet, and already he was not her father.

‘Milena, don’t be naughty. Your father wants to kiss you.’

There was something awful in her mother’s voice. It was not her mother’s voice. Her mother could become someone different too. Milena felt the hand on her shoulder like a claw. She was afraid. Any moment she would weep from fear, and that would be bad. She leaned forward, sticking out her lips to give her father a quick nip on the cheek. But his arm pulled, and her mother’s hand pushed, and his hot, wet sticky face seemed to swallow hers, and he smelled of beds and illness, and his wet lips were on hers, coating them with moisture.

Milena hated it. She stepped back, shaking inside. She wanted above all else to wipe her face, her lips, her forehead stained with someone else’s sweat. Above all else, she wanted to escape the transforming sickness. They let her go, and she ran out into the daylight, from the darkness, out into the garden, into the air.

Milena remembered standing until her legs ached, outside a church. She was wearing new white clothes, that her mother had made from sheets. The church was white, small and squat with thick walls and a dome on a spire. There were old lead plates on the roof, and Milena looked at them, sensing how warm they would be in the sun. She loved the dull burnish on them. The lead plates were made of metal and Milena had not seen many things made of metal.

Milena had asked her mother what the lead plates were and had been shushed into silence. Milena’s mother did not like it when Milena asked questions when other people were around.

Milena was beginning to discover that she was stupid. Other children, she was beginning to discover, had heads that were crowded full of answers. When Milena asked questions, her mother looked miserable, and her jaw thrust itself forward in something like anger. Already, when Milena wanted to get back at her mother, she would ask a question. Her mother, she knew, put things in her food, that made ill, to stop her asking questions.

Her mother stood next to her now, towering in black. She shook Milena’s hand to draw her attention back to the funeral proceedings, back to the hole in the ground, and the box that had been lowered into it, and the man in black who was speaking.

The proceedings were endless and had no point. They confused elaboration with importance. There were birds in the air, cawing in a spiral, swept round and around in circles. What kept them together? Were there wires that strung them together, that kept them up? Why could birds fly and not people?

The birds were important, the light on the roof was important. The fierce, black concentration of the adults on the dead box and the dead hole exhausted importance. By the time the adults were finished, the hole and the box would have no meaning. Milena knew the dead box and the black hole were her father. She knew he was gone. She was sorry. She had said she was sorry once, and meant it. There was no need to go on saying it. Sunlight fell like rain. The rain-light did not grieve. Neither did Milena. That was what adults found terrible.