The saskiad, p.20
The Saskiad, page 20
Saskia shakes his huge paw. One of Bent's eyebrows is raised. "Daughter?" He looks from Thomas to Saskia. "You see the resemblance," Thomas says.
"As a matter of fact, I do. And ... Jane." He takes her hand, looking at Thomas again for guidance. "Daughter's friend?" "That's right."
"Pleased to meet you," Jane says.
"Bent," Thomas says briskly, getting down to business, "I want to talk to you about the plans for this action." "They're all set."
"I'm sure they are. But what about contingencies? Have you got a flexible thinker on the committee?" His voice is impatient in the face of Bent's brick-headed overconfidence in Plan A. "Thomas —" "Is McBride here?"
Bent sighs. The captain is back, and work will be harder. Brains will have to think again. "Yes."
"Let's go talk to him." Thomas turns the bigger man toward the other tents. To the girls he says, "Take a look around. I'll meet you here for dinner at eight."
The two men walk off together, Thomas urging on Bent, whose awkward rolling gait slows him down. Has he been wounded? A cannonball, an artificial leg? "Let's explore," Jane says.
They wander barefoot through the camp. People are eating now, sitting cross-legged with elbows high, spooning into eager mouths. A woman speaks in a strange tongue, showing her white-blond son wildflowers growing in a rash next to their tent. The boy's eyes fasten on the girls as they walk jauntily by, arm in arm. "Hello there," Jane says to him, and he quickly looks back at the flowers. They pass other boys, but none of them bray or throw spitballs. None of the girls or women have on face lard. Two girls glimpsed in their orange tent are surely not talking about what was on last night, but are debating, instead, the manifold problems of the world. Perhaps there is a bulletin board somewhere: "Anyone who wants to discuss saving the whales, meet me in tent #8." They scrutinize the banners. One is a rainbow with doves attendant. Another is vert, charged with dam, sable, encircled by gules, a baston sinister, gules. The biggest banner faces downriver, toward the construction site: "NO to the Langelva Dam!" "It's in English," Saskia says, disappointed.
"The international language," Jane shrugs. She wants to go see the construction site, but Saskia is not so sure.
"Maybe we're not supposed to go down there." "Come on, girl! What have we been hiking for a month for?" Jane gets her way, of course, and they head downriver. Saskia looks anxiously at the enclosures as they approach. Might an alarm go off? What if they are captured? Surely the protesters' position will be weakened if Jane and Saskia are taken as hostages. They will be known forever after as The Girls Who Ruined Everything.
But as they draw nearer to the site, it becomes obvious that there isn't anyone there. The chain-link fence is ten feet high and topped with barbed wire. Jane calls Saskia's attention to the way the fence goes a few yards into the river and is connected to the fence on the other side by close strands of barbed wire above and below the water. "That would be pretty nasty to get through," Jane says. She has done her share of foiling the best-laid fences.
The girls grip the cold steel wire. Saskia expected to see Cyclopean blocks of cement waiting to be rolled on logs into place, but most of the enclosure is empty. The grass has been churned under by deep-treaded tires and the ground everywhere is glutinous mud. Several trailers and port-a-johns squat in the filth. Big rolls of plastic hulk on wooden platforms. Blue tarps cover angular humps. Piles of long nubbly steel rods lie along the fence. "How do they make a dam out of this stuff?" Saskia wonders.
"Those are reinforcing rods. I'll bet I could —" Jane starts climbing the fence, hooking her long toes and fingers through the diamond holes.
"Maybe you shouldn't do that."
She has already reached the top and is studying the barbed wire. "I could probably get through this." "Please don't!"
Jane climbs good-naturedly down. The girls decide to wash their hair, and since they have to take their shirts off, they go a long way upriver. They heat the water on Thomas's stove and pour it over each other's head a few yards from the bank, as Thomas showed them, so that the soil will leach out the soap. Anyway, they use a special natural soap Thomas bought, which smells like a candle and is lousy for working up a lather, but he explained that was the whole point. They walk back feeling fresh and clean. Thomas is waiting for them at the tents. "What are you doing with my stove? I thought someone had stolen it."
"We went to wash our hair," Saskia says.
"You don't need the stove for that."
"But the water is cold."
"Welcome to nature. Give it to me, I need to start dinner."
Watching Thomas cook, Saskia decides he is angry about something. Perhaps his subordinates at the council meeting were being brick-headed. She goes off to sit with Jane by the river. The white-blond boy is there, filling a pot. "He's real cute," Jane says, bouncing her heels. The boy runs away with the pot, sloshing water.
"You embarrassed him."
"I don't think he understands English." Jane stretches luxuriously and drops her arm over Saskia's shoulder. Saskia holds on to her fingers. "You know, we haven't seen boys in ages." "Who cares?"
Jane shrugs. "They're not completely useless." The girls laugh, Saskia blushing. She uses them according to her pleasure. Thomas is calling them to dinner.
While they eat he gets into a better mood and starts to talk again. He tells them about all the havoc the dam will wreak, how much of the valley will drown, what valuable things will be lost forever. "There is a marsh two miles upriver which is important to migrating birds. It will be under a hundred and fifty feet of water. The reindeer come through this valley in large numbers every spring because it's the only easy passage to the lower country for miles." The girls eat their rice, trying to look glum, or maybe outraged. But since they are going to save the river, Saskia wonders aloud, why get depressed? "Because it's not at all certain we are going to save the river. Not if the cowards on the protest committee get their way." He is cleaning up now, scrubbing the cups furiously with dirt, not elaborating.
"So what's their way?" Jane asks at last.
Thomas flings the rinse water down at his feet. "Sitting in front of bulldozers and chanting doggerel. Polishing their passive resistance like a trophy for the mantelpiece. Their way has a hell of a lot more to do with feeling good about themselves than getting anything done. I know this kind of people. They've never been here before, they don't know anything about this valley. They come like kids to Camp Protest, they sit in the road holding hands until the police come and carry them to the van, and they sing songs while the van drives them to jail, where they refuse to pay a fine so they spend one night in jail singing more songs and holding hands, and then they go home feeling like saints. And when the dam is built right on schedule they don't notice, because they're somewhere else, sitting in the road and singing songs."
"What are you going to do?"
"Right now, I haven't a clue." He shakes his head, in disbelief that he hasn't a clue. "I know one of the organizers here, a man named McBride who used to have the stomach for some direct action. But I couldn't talk any sense into him." He presses his lips together and pulls at his beard, actually ripping out a few hairs. "To think we came all the way up here to find this bunch of idiots running the show . . ."
The committee! Of course! Not Thomas's subordinates, but something like the Admiralty: a bunch of stupid old men from noble families, inbred, blundering around the oceans losing ships and men, not listening to the infinitely smarter Captain, whom they look down on as a man of low birth. The Captain eventually gets around them, but he must do so resourcefully, speaking honeyed words, full of blandishments. And here the girls have been, stupidly disturbing Thomas, adding to his tension rather than helping to relieve it. "Should we leave you alone?" Saskia asks. "We could go take a walk." Thomas's eyebrows arch. "Have I been bad company?" "I just thought maybe you needed time to think —" He waves her words away. "No —" He delves into his pack. "In fact, I have a surprise." He removes something wrapped in paper and hands it to the girls. "To celebrate our arrival." A bottle of champagne.
"This is great!" Jane says, cradling it in her lap. "When did you get it?" Saskia asks.
"Before you flew in." He takes the bottle down to the river to nestle it between submerged rocks. He looks up at the sky, which has clouded over during the last hour. "This should be a happy night. Party in my tent in one hour. Formal attire."
Good thing the girls washed their hair! In their tent, they agonize over what to wear. "I can't look good in any of this!" Jane wails. "How about your jeans?"
"They're dirty!" She pulls on her khaki pants, which perhaps are marginally cleaner than her jeans. "I'll bet he's got something spotless in that pack somewhere. Like a tuxedo."
"Can you believe he carried that bottle all the way and never told us?"
Jane is slipping on her coral earrings. "Girl, at this point I'd believe anything."
He doesn't have on a tuxedo, but his wool shirt and cotton pants are somehow clean, and his tent is festively festooned with red tape, which he commandeered, he explains, from surveyor's stakes he uprooted along the dam road. The champagne sits in the cooking pot, packed in snow.
Jane beams. "This is so . . . !" She can't think of a word romantic enough for it.
"Mesdames," Thomas says gallantly, handing out the camping cups. "Voulez-vous de champagne?"
The cork pops under his hand. "Music to my ears," Jane sighs.
Thomas pours a round. "We have to make a toast," Saskia says.
"To a month of good company," Thomas says.
"Hear, hear!" the girls say, and the three cups clack. Saskia sits in the triangle, one knee touching Jane, the other touching Thomas, and wonders if she has ever in her whole life been happier. They could not have known it at the time, of course, but on the night Jane and Saskia ran in the woods, the reason they couldn't bring their feelings to completion was that Thomas was not there. Now he has come like a key into a lock and opened them all to a happiness they never could have imagined. Everything has been leading up to this night of bliss in the hyggelig tent by the river of ichor at the navel of the world. Knee to knee to knee they sit, laughing over the adventures they have had: the Round Tower, the ferries, the fog, the flies. The champagne bristles against her tongue, and Thomas pours again.
Saskia sips and talks and laughs and radiates love like a dwarf star, and after a while the bottle is empty and she is light-headed, the perfect amount. Jane is so beautiful with that extra sparkle in her eyes, Saskia wants so much to . . . Jane unfolds her long legs and excuses herself. She zips open the flap and crawls out. Saskia notices it's getting dark. Jane climbed the fence in her bare feet and touched the barbed wire. How bold she is! Where is she going to do her business? Is she there by now? Maybe she is undoing her pants. "Jane is hot to trot," Saskia says. Thomas smiles. Night is back, and the stars are back, and her Moon is sailing again along the ecliptic, waxing, always waxing. The fawn will remember it is a fawn and run away. "Jane really wants to . . . you know."
"No, I don't know."
"She wants to —" Saskia can't say it. "With you. In the worst way, she says. Her exact words."
He laughs, a pained abrupt sound, as he did when carrying them across the other river. "Tell me, what do you and Jane do in that tent?"
"Us? Nothing."
"How old did you say Jane was?" "Almost fourteen."
He laughs again. "Practically an old maid." They have uttered these words before. They are in the web of the done, speaking what is right and proper. "She's done it before." The angel dreg in the leaves, holding his thing, laughing about it so boldly. "She's done it lots of times." The same bed every night? she said. How boring! I think of it all the time, she said.
Thomas is smiling. "So what you're saying is, why be a martyr?" Brown eye to blue eye, he and Saskia drink each other in. "Nobody likes a martyr," Saskia points out.
Jane comes back. Saskia says she also needs to go do business. Which is true. She crawls out and walks away from the camp. While she squats behind a boulder she feels a drop of rain. So nature will help. She walks back to the other tent. The girls' packs are lying on the grass. She quietly loads them into the tent and crawls in after. She opens her pack and rearranges it, putting the tarp at the bottom. There is just enough room for one sleeping bag between the packs. She crawls into the bag. It is fairly dark now.
Murmur of talk in the other tent. Saskia is a Moon maid, dedicated to Wisdom. Her body is no longer hers to give. Like Tycho, she must forgo the pleasures of this world to contemplate the eternal verities of the starry realm. Their voices are hushed. Then comes silence. A kiss? Jane's voice: "What happened to Saskia?"
Thomas murmurs. Silence again.
Jane giggles. "Maybe I should go."
Saskia hears silly slow Jane coming out of the tent. "What are you doing in there?" Jane asks at the flap.
Saskia pulls herself out of a deep sleep. "Hunh?"
"It's raining out here." Jane unzips the netting. "Why are the packs in the tent?"
"Couldn't find the tarp," Saskia mutters. She turns in the bag, sinking into sleep again.
"But we have to get the packs out. I'm getting wet."
Saskia is breathing regularly, sound asleep.
"Saskia!"
Saskia is so deeply asleep she doesn't hear.
"Saskia, wake up!"
Saskia is roused, annoyed this time. "Let me sleep!"
Caught between Thomas and Saskia, Jane hesitates at the flap. "Saskia" means "Scylla" and Thomas is her twin. We'll get you, my pretty, heh heh!
Jane is gone. Saskia hears the zip of the flap of the other tent.
Murmuring.
Silence.
Rustle.
Saskia pulls her T-shirt up over her head. Long hair catching in the collar. Toss. White patches with a pretty scalloped pattern along the edge. And look: not mushy pink blobs, no, chocolate kisses, the first swelling. Curve of the grain in the wood. Turning her on the warm slab. Off with her soiled pants! Semper ubi sub ubi. Sed non semper! Ahh. At your knees, O Queen. A man could lose his mind. Turning her. Rubbing in leg-long grunting his elixir of henbane and mandrake root putting her in a trance of earthly delights and broomstick rides to midnight sabbaths among the black trees. Golden hair on the backs of strong hands turning her. Deep in her bag her eyes are closed, she is naked, she is not alone but flank to flank to flank with them, mid-Deed, so hyggelig. Rain applauds on the fly.
22
Every day, people disembark from the coastal steamer at the Laistry-gonian landing eight miles away and are brought up along the dam road in vans commandeered by the committee. The camp expands to the foot of Thomas's mound, so that his tent is like the castle above the huddled medieval town. A committee member appears on a centrally located stepladder and makes announcements with a lieu-tenantine megaphone about food, availability of emergency funds, the first aid tent, classes in nonviolent resistance, lost and found, quiet hours at night, activities for the children. A plea is made about private business and a crew of hardy souls forms to clean certain areas. On the fourth day, two port-a-johns are unloaded from a van, which, Thomas points out, use toxic chemicals. All people have to do is hike far enough away from the camp and the river, he says. Some of these people look like they need the exercise, anyway.
While the camp is growing, hoisting new banners, planting new pikes, the fenced enclosure downriver remains ominously silent and empty except for a police car that goes on watch duty by the gate. The two Laistrygones in it do nothing but talk and smoke cigarettes until Saskia tires of looking at them through Thomas's binoculars. On the fifth day the committee announces that the dam builders have craftily postponed the arrival of the heavy equipment in the hope that the protesters will drift away. A collection goes around to supplement the emergency fund. Far from people leaving, more straggle in each day from the steamer or the bus, or on foot out of the hills. The camp population rises to 327, according to the board posted by the committee stepladder.
On "the morning after," as they say, Jane was quiet, but that was no doubt because she was tired, heh heh. They had an early breakfast so that Thomas could return to the committee first thing, to try to talk sense into McBride. After he left, the girls wandered around the camp, but didn't hold hands or talk about anything important. Jane took a nap in the afternoon while Saskia hiked up the river to the marsh and watched some birds poke around in the reeds. She wondered if some of them were geese, migrating south again now that Midsummer's Day was over. There were a few tweeps, and one loud wong-king.
Jane looked great at dinner. She wore her coral earrings again and sat close to Thomas, as naturally as you please. Afterward the girls went to hear folksongs at a place up the slope where you could see north to the ocean, and since it was a clear evening they saw the sun touch the water and roll along it, gingerly lowering itself in, leaving a haze of rose. Saskia couldn't figure out how Jane knew so many of the songs. When they came down there wasn't any question where Jane would go. Saskia lay awake for a long time in her own tent, not feeling like reading or writing in her journal, unable to sleep. Eventually she wrote some haiku, but none of them were any good.
After the sixth day Thomas stops trying to talk sense into the committee. "If no one else here is interested in doing anything effective, what am I fighting for? I should relax, have a ball at Camp Langelva." They all go looking for cloudberries. Later, Thomas cooks an elaborate lunch. Dessert is a cloudberry torte, and Jane and Saskia try to figure out how he possibly could have made it. He said he should relax, but, lunch over, he is having some trouble. Idiots are closing in on him. He frowns, surveys the crowd of tents below his mound, pulls at his beard. Saskia heads down to the river to fill the canteen, and by the time she returns they are in the tent. She stands around for a while, counting her blessings. Then she takes a long walk.
More days go by. The committee announces that the dam builders have postponed again. Now tent dwellers do start to drift away, leaving grassy patches in the camp. Someone on the stepladder pleads for patience and resolve. Thomas talks about the short attention span of sitters and chanters. "They have homes and jobs to go back to. They're too plugged in. They're part of the problem." The crucial element, he points out, is media coverage. "Television crews don't film protesters sitting on their butts." The man on the stepladder says that delay costs money, and the equipment will come soon. Thomas says something about getting attention, provoking an overre-action. He shakes his head, flinging off cobwebs. He takes Jane into his tent.
