Джоанн Гринберг - I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

“But you made costly mistakes, didn’t you?” Furii asked gently. “You identified the wrong girl at the camp.”

“I was wrong a hundred times. But as long as I was ugly and ruined and beyond hope, and of a substance that was poisoned and poisoning, I could still appear to be right. If I was wrong—even a little—then what was left?”

She saw the weak and wound-licking ghost of old vanity in what she was saying and laughed. “Even in Pernai—nothing—I had to have a little something.”

“And so do we all,” Furii said. “Are you ashamed of it? To me it is one sign that you are a member of Earth at least as much as of Yr. Do you believe that your substance, as you call it, is really poisonous?”

Deborah began to tell her about the Yri laws governing the ultimate substance of each person. People were differentiated by this substance, which was called nganon. Nganon was a concentrate which was defined in each person by nurture and circumstance. She believed that she and a certain few others were not of the same nganon as the rest of Earth’s people. At first Deborah had thought that it was only she who was set apart from humankind, but others of the undead on D ward seemed to be tainted as she was. All of her life, herself and all her possessions had been imbued with her essence, the poisonous nganon. She had never lent her clothes or books or pencils, or let anyone touch any of her things, and she had often borrowed or stolen from other children at school or camp, delighting, until their stolen nganon wore off them, in the health and purity and grace of the possessions.

“But you told me that you used to bribe the children at camp with the candy that your mother sent you,” Furii said.

“Well, yes. The candy was in a box, all cellophaned and impersonal. Being unopened it had no essence, and it takes about a day or so before the Deborah-rot sets in. I gave it right away almost as soon as I got it.”

“And so you bought a little popularity for a few hours.”

“I knew I was a liar and a coward. But by that time the Collect had begun to come stronger and stronger, and …liar and coward’ were standard comments.”

“And this feeling was threaded through with the precocity that you had to maintain, and with your grandfather’s saying always how special you were.”

Deborah had pulled away her mind and the doctor looked up with a kind of sharpness in her eyes, catching Deborah at the edge of something.

“Anterrabae …” Deborah called in Yr.

“Where are you now?” Dr. Fried interjected.

“Anterrabae!” Deborah said aloud and in Yri. “Can she bear the great weight?”

“What is it now, Deborah?” the doctor asked.

She moaned to the god, then turned to the mortal in desperation. “Anterrabae knows what I saw—what I have to speak of…. If only I had not seen it; if it had been hidden, that special thing … that thing.”

When she began to shiver with the cold of an ancient parting, Furii gave her a blanket, and she lay on the couch rolled up in it and shaking.

“During the war …” she said, “I was a Japanese.”

“An actual Japanese?”

“I was disguised as an American, but I was really not an American.”

“Why?”

“Because I was the Enemy.”

It seemed to Deborah an ultimate secret, and Dr. Fried was forced to ask her to speak louder time and time again. She began to explain that because she could go into Yr or rise out of its incredible distances without visibly changing, Yr had given her, as a gift for her ninth birthday, the power to transmute herself in form. For a year or so she had been a wild horse or a great bronze-feathered bird. She quoted to Dr. Fried the Yri incantation which had once freed the bird-self from the illusion of the ugly and hated girl:

“e, quio quio quaru ar Yr aedat

temoluqu’ braown elepr’ kyryr …”

(Brushwinged, I soar above the canyons

of your sleep singing …)

When she was this great soaring creature it seemed as if it was the Earth ones who were damned and wrong, not she, who was so complete in beauty and anger. It seemed to her that they slept and were blind.

When the Second World War had come, making of the names of Pacific Islands another language of hell and magic to Americans, the Collect had said to her, “They hate these Japanese as they have always hated you,” and Anterrabae, in the urbane falling-smile, Bird-one, you are not of them.

She had remembered hearing the fragment of some speech on the radio. “Those who aren’t with us are against us!” And the Collect had cried out, Then you must be this enemy they fight!

On a certain night before falling asleep, Deborah had been reborn as a captured Japanese soldier. From behind the mask of an American-Jewish girl with a past of an American suburb and city, the elliptical eyes of the Enemy looked for the day of his unmasking. The tumor’s impossible, insistent anguish was his war wound, and his mind, versed in a strange language, rang with dreams of escape. He did not hate his captors—he never wished that they would lose the war, but the world now offered meaning to the irreconcilable oppositions in Deborah, the ruination of her secret and female parts, the bitter secrecy of her wound, and the hidden language. Captivity and secrecy and the glory and misery of Yr’s declaration You are not of them were somehow justified.

On the day that the war in the Pacific was over, Anterrabae caused Deborah to break a glass and step on the pieces with her bare foot. There was no pain, and the doctor, wincing himself as he picked the slivers out, was awed and a little puzzled at her “soldierly” stoicism.

At last I am brave enough for the damn doctors! Deborah said in Yri to Lactamaeon.

You are captive and victim, Lactamaeon said. We did not want you to escape.

“You hid this presence from everyone around you,” Furii said. “Did you hide it also from Yr?”

“It had no place in Yr; it was part of the Earth dimension.”

“And so the Censor had the care of keeping it secret. Is that not so? I have trouble to understand the place of this Censor in your kingdom.”

“The Censor is supposed to protect me. In the beginning he was put at the Midworld barrier to keep Yri secrets from coming out in Earth’s conversations. He censored all my acts to keep Yr’s voices and rites from reaching the Earth’s people. Somehow he became a tyrant. He began to order everything I did or said, even when I was not in Yr.”

“But this Censor, and Yr itself, was still only an attempt to understand and explain reality, to build a sort of truth where you could live. Well,” the doctor concluded, “I am sure there is much to see here and to study. You are not a victim now; you are a fighter with me, for the cause of your good, strong life.”

When her patient left, Dr. Fried looked at her desk clock. It had been a long, exhausting session, though the clock showed the time had been no longer than usual. The intensity of her listening, of her sharing, had been so great that she wondered if she could face an afternoon of the cries and agonies of the other patients and the studies and bitter questions of the psychiatric students. What was it today, again? She looked in the appointment book on her desk. Oh, yes, the seminar. But there was, miraculously, an hour before she had to leave. For three weeks her Schumann records had lain on the record cabinet unopened. Beethoven was calling from her memory. Why was there always so little time? She stretched and walked into the living room, teasing herself by humming little bits. Schumann or Beethoven? How does the doctor feel today?