The caryatids, p.33
The Caryatids, page 33
The death of his mother had been a particular tonic for George. Suddenly he was calling her “Mother.” There were handsome new gifts for Inke, and, when George was at home, he was markedly kind and attentive. Even the children noticed George’s improved behavior. The children had always adored George, especially when he was at his worst.
“You only have to bury a mother once,” George coaxed, “it’s not like I’m asking you to bury my damnable sisters.” This was a typical fib on his part because, in all truth, his mother and his sisters were cloned bananas from the same stem. Inke held her tongue about that, though. Everybody knew the truth, of course: the Mihajlovic brood were the worst-kept “secret” scandal in history. Everyone who loved them learned not to say anything in earshot.
Then George further announced that his mother’s burial was to be a traditional Catholic ceremony. Not the kind of ceremony George preferred: those newfangled Dispensational Catholic ceremonies, with ubiquitous computing inside the church. No: George was firmly resolved on proper committal rites, with a vigil, a Mass, and a wake. Conducted in Latin. The Latin was the final straw.
At this overwhelming gesture, Inke had to give in. Her surrender meant the tiresome chore of shopping for proper funeral clothes for herself, George, and the children. For George wanted no expense spared.
Inke soon found, from the unctuous behavior of the tailors, that this was no ordinary funeral. It was to be a famous funeral. A world-changing funeral, a glamorous climacteric. In particular, everyone asked if George’s children were going to meet “Little Mary Montalban.”
There seemed no use in Inke’s obscuring the fact that her children were the cousins of Little Mary Montalban. Lukas, Lena, and even baby Ivan would personally meet the simpering, capering Little Mary Montalban, the “girl with the world at her feet” …
Mljet proved a keen disappointment. The island looked so mystical and lovely from the deck of a ferry, yet the landscape was a fetid, reeking wilderness, swarming with insects even in November, a rank place like an overgrown parking lot, and with scarcely any civilized amenities.
Inke’s little German guidebook made a great deal of pious green fuss about the returning fish and the swarming bugs and the glorious birds of prey and so forth, but—just like the “Treasure Island” of her older son’s favorite book author, Robert Louis Stevenson—Mljet must have been an excellent place to be marooned and go totally mad.
Inke remarked on this to the older boy but, although Lukas was not yet eight, and huge-headed, with missing teeth and spindly schoolboy limbs, Lukas already had his father’s wild look in his eyes. “Marooned and going mad!” Lukas thought that was wonderful. He would maroon his little sister Lena and make her go mad, by stealing all her dolls and leaving her without any playmates.
Construction work was booming at the island’s new tourist port, which was named Palatium. Someone highly competent was sinking a great deal of investment money here. Given that George was so deeply involved in those logistics, this was a heartening sight to Inke. It almost made up for the fact that the sea trip had badly upset the baby.
Palatium’s newly consecrated Catholic church seemed to be the first building formally completed. It was certainly the first decent place of worship consecrated in Mljet since who knew when. The church had a proper crying room with a trained nursemaid in it, a quiet American girl. This girl was Dispensation—it was annoying how many of them dressed themselves to show their politics—but she loved babies.
Nerves jangled, Inke dipped at the holy water, led the older children up the aisle, genuflected, and slipped into a front pew. Peace at last. Peace, and safety. Thank God. Thank God for the mercies of God.
The coffin was candlelit with its feet toward the holy-of-holies. Inke and the children shared the shining new pew with an old man sitting alone. Some threadbare Balkan scholar, by the look of him.
The poor old man seemed genuinely shaken and grieved by the death of Yelisaveta Mihajlovic.
Inke could not believe that Yelisaveta Mihajlovic had been any kind of decent Catholic. If she had been, she would have trained her children in the catechism, instead of stuffing their cloned heads like cabbage rolls with insane notions about how computers were going to take over the world. Yelisaveta Mihajlovic was nobody’s saint, that was for certain. That dead creature in the elaborate casket there was the widow of a violent warlord, a Balkan Lady Macbeth.
Still, there had to be some redeeming qualities to any woman lying dead in church. After all was said and done, Yelisaveta Mihajlovic had created George. Inke knew well that George wasn’t quite human, but she considered that a distinct advantage in a husband.
Just look at that weepy old man over there; his blue-veined hands were clenched before his face, he was clearly Dispensation yet sincerely praying as a Catholic. Life wasn’t about being perfectly consistent, was it? Mankind were miserable sinners. If they didn’t know they were sinners before their whole Earth caught fire, they certainly ought to know that by now.
Inke rose from the pew to attend to the casket in the mellow candlelight. This was the most expensive, elaborate coffin Inke had ever seen. She’d thought at first that it was a properly open coffin, but no. The casket had a bubble top of thin, nonreflective glass. The dead woman’s coffin was hermetically sealed.
And that corpse inside her bubbled sphere of death … what brilliant undertaker had been set loose there? The more one stared at those gaunt, painted, cinematic features, the more she looked like some brilliant toy.
There was just enough graceless authenticity left to the corpse to convince the viewer that the undertaker’s art concealed an actual dead woman. Or a dead creature anyway, for the war-criminal fugitive had been living for years up in orbit, where human bone and muscle wasted away from the lack of gravity, where the air was canned and the skin never felt healthy sunlight … How many “days” had this waxwork creature seen, with her dead silent-actress eyes, those orbital sunrises, sunsets, as she bounded off the walls of her tin home like a fairy shrimp …
She didn’t even have legs!
A shroud covered her lower body. Thin, cream-colored, silky fabric. Enough to veil her abnormalities, but enough to show the ugly truth to those who—somehow—must have known what she was doing to herself, to her body and soul, way up there.
She was sickeningly strange. Yet at least she was truly dead.
A reflective shadow appeared on the glass bubble. It was one of the clones. The clone took a stance at the far side of the coffin. She stared into the bubble, fixated, gloating.
She was dressed in elaborate, lacy white, with a long stiff bodice but a plunging décolletage, like some bulging-eyed bride, drunk at a Catholic wedding and burningly eager to haul the groom to a hotel.
Inke had only met one of the cloned sisters: Sonja, the strongest one. She knew instantly that this one was Biserka. She knew that in her bones.
“I’m Erika Montalban,” Biserka told her.
Inke did not entirely trust her own English. “How nice. How do you do?”
“And you’re Inke, and those are your kids!”
Lukas and Lena were sitting placidly in their pew, heads together over a silent handheld game. Inke knew instantly that Biserka would cheerfully skin and eat her two children. She would gulp them down the way a cold adder would eat two mice.
“Where’s the baby?” Biserka demanded, scanning the church as if it sold babies on racks. “I love babies! I want to have lots of them.”
Inke touched her scarf. “You should wear something … on your head. We are in a church.”
“What, I have to wear a hood in here, like a Muslim girl or something?”
“No, like a Catholic.”
“Do I get to eat those little round bread things?”
“No, you’re not in a state of grace.”
“I put the holy water all over myself!”
“You’re not a Catholic.”
“It is always like that!” Biserka screeched, wringing her hands in anguish. “What is with you people? I did everything right, and you’re not having any of it? I’m going to find John. John is going to fix this, you wait and see!”
Biserka stormed out of the church.
“You told her the proper things,” said the old gentleman. He had stepped from his pew to the coffin, without Inke hearing his tread. He spoke English. “You were kind and polite to her.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“My name is Dr. Vladko Radic. You do not know me, Mrs. Zweig, but I know a little of you. I am a friend of Vera Mihajlovic.”
“I understand. How do you do?”
“I also knew Yelisaveta Mihajlovic. I knew her rather well. Yelisaveta was a great patriot. Of course she committed excesses. God will pardon her that. Those were very excessive times.” Radic was drunk. Drunk, and in church.
“If I may ask you a favor,” slurred Dr. Radic, “if an old man may ask you one small favor … the dead have to bury the dead, but my dearest domorodac, my dearest Mljecanka, Vera Mihajlovic … A very beautiful, very sincere, very lovable girl … for all the infernal machines that cover this island, it has never been the same without her!”
Radic began sobbing, in an unfeigned, gentlemanly fashion, wiping at his rheumy eyes. “I sit here praying for Vera … praying that she will come here to see this unfortunate woman, and that Vera can return to this place, and that life here can be made right again! Have you seen Vera?”
“No sir, I have not seen her.”
“Please tell Vera that all is forgiven if she will come back to the island! Please tell her that … yes, life will be different, life must be different now, but Dr. Radic has not forgotten her, and she has many friends here and she will always have friends.”
The poor old man’s distress was so deep and immediate and pitiful and contagious that Inke burst into tears. “I know that Vera is here. She must be here.”
“She is a very noble, good person.”
Overwhelmed, Inke fled to the pew to rejoin her children. Lukas glanced up. “Is that our grandmother dead in that bubble?”
“No.”
“Okay!” They returned to their game.
Worshippers were quietly filtering into the church. The liturgy began. It was a small church but an impressive, full-scale performance, which might have suited Zagreb or even Rome. Lectors, musicians, altar boys—the ceremonial staff almost outnumbered the attendees.
Then there were cameras. Not the small cameras everyone carried nowadays. Large, ostentatious, ceremonial cameras with sacred logos.
There was no sign of George at the funeral service, which was entirely typical of him. Yet the young priest—handsome, bearded, deftly in command of the proceedings—was an inspiration.
It seemed impossible that anyone could properly bury a creature like Yelisaveta Mihajlovic: yet she had to be buried somehow, all things had to pass, and this priest was just the man to do it. Each soothing element of the ritual was another wrapping round the creature’s airtight coffin: the Introductory Rite, the Liturgy of the Word, the Intercessory Prayer, the Office of the Dead from the Liturgy of the Hours …
This priest was nobody’s fool about the goings-on here either, for he chose to speak from Wisdom, Chapter Four:
“But the numerous progeny of the wicked shall be of no avail; their spurious offshoots shall not strike deep root nor take firm hold.
“For even though their branches flourish for a time, they are unsteady and shall be rocked by the wind and, by the violence of the winds, uprooted;
“Their twigs shall be broken off untimely, and their fruit be useless, unripe for eating, and fit for nothing.”
Those who lacked a firm grounding in Scripture could not follow the priest’s allusions, but those who grasped his meaning, grasped it well. Inke took satisfaction in that. She was suddenly glad she had come to the funeral. She always had a terror of preparing for a funeral, but as a funeral itself went on, there was always something right and good about it. When a funeral was over she felt profoundly glad to be alive.
Six pallbearers solemnly carried the creature’s glassy casket to a hillside above the reviving city of Palatium. There was a neat hole in the soil there, chopped there as if by lasers. They conveyed the capsule into the Earth.
There was an impressive crowd at the graveside, much larger than the gathering inside the church. George had finally made it his business to appear. He looked solid and dignified.
The glamorous mourners at graveside were not seeking any consolation in the rituals of faith—on the contrary, it was entirely clear to Inke that they were there on business. They were all stakeholders in this process, somehow. They were cunning people. They all had good reasons to be here. They were burying the past so as to get a firm foothold on some ladder into tomorrow.
She was surrounded by handsome, self-assured, polished, gorgeous foreigners.
By the sound of their American English, Inke realized that these people had to be the Montgomery-Montalban clan. This was the famous Family-Firm, with its blood relations, its staffers, servants, investors, and trustees. How strange to think that Europe was so full of conscientious social justice, while America had its ruthless aristocracy.
There was a sudden jostling as a whole shoving crowd of Acquis cadres plowed through the crowd. These Acquis were unruly and ill rehearsed, for they had invited themselves to the proceedings. They had some right to investigate the proceedings, it seemed. Unwelcome yet inevitable, the Acquis were here like the police at a mafia wedding.
George was talking rapidly to one of the Acquis spies; for some reason, George was abandoning the decent suit she’d bought him and borrowing the man’s white jacket.
There was another trampling surge past the grave—how had the crowd grown so large and unruly, so suddenly? A host of bodyguards and paparazzi.
Little Mary Montalban had appeared upon the scene.
The child actress, whose skyrocketing fame had the world in such a tizzy—she seemed just another child to Inke, rather neatly and soberly dressed in gorgeous mourning clothes. The child walked serenely through the crowd, breaking a wake through them, as if she parted adult crowds every day.
The little girl drew nearer.
Suddenly, she turned her face up to Inke. The girl’s beauty was astounding. It burned and dazzled, like being hit in the face with a searchlight.
The child recited two lines, loudly, in a well-rehearsed German. “How do you do, Tante Inke? I’m so glad to see you here with us.”
Inke found herself bending to kiss the child’s delicate cheek. It was an irrevocable act, something like swearing allegiance.
Her children were thunderstruck to meet their famous cousin. It was as if someone had given them a toy angel.
Inke realized that the male stranger at her side was John Montgomery Montalban. She had met him once. John Montalban looked older now. And shorter, too—somehow, world-famous people were always much shorter in real life.
“George has asked me to say a few words after the interment,” Montalban said. “My little Synchronist eulogy … I hope you won’t mind that, Inke.”
It was as if he were pouring warm oil over her head.
“Are you nervous?” she asked him, the first remark that fluttered onto her tongue.
“Yes, I’m worried,” Montalban lied briskly, “I always hate these formal presentations … Inke, you married George. So you’re our expert on the subject at hand here. What on Earth can I properly say about Yelisaveta? At the end of the day, it seems that I knew Yelisaveta best. Yet she was—of course—a monster. What can I say about her that isn’t completely shocking to propriety? The world is listening.”
Inke considered the world—the poor, imperiled world. “Did the old woman ever tell you that she would come back to the world, down from orbit?”
“She did. Sometimes. She was stringing us on, from her lack of anything else to do with herself. It was like a long hostage negotiation. Please give me some good advice here, Inke, help me out. Tell me what I should say about this situation. The world needs closure on the issue. She was our relative, you know.”
Why was he talking to her in this confiding way? In the past, he’d always talked to her with the hearty exaggeration of an English lordship treating one of the little people as his equal.
“I think,” she said haltingly, “I think Yelisaveta was just … a dark story made by her own dark times.”
“That makes some sense.”
“She tried to build something and it broke into pieces. The pieces could not hold. So she lied, cheated, and killed for nothing … but the truth is … she believed in every last horrible thing that she did. She fully believed in all of it. She was sincere, that was her secret. It was all her sacrifice and her grand passion.”
Montalban was truly interested. “That is fabulous. How well put! And George is one of the remaining pieces, too! Yet George is the piece that is least like the rest of the broken pieces. He’s not much like them, they really hate him for that … Why is that, can you tell me that?”
“George is a man. Men take longer to mature.”
“I see. That may indeed be the case … in which case, may I tell you something important now about your George? George has always led a dodgy, improvised life … between the Dispensation and our good friends the Acquis … he was cutting corners, making connections … After this funeral George will have a changed life. Because those two great parties are finding a bipartisan consensus. We have found the powers necessary to defeat the climate crisis … And in doing that, we have let so many genies out of bottles that our Earth is becoming unimaginable. Do you see what I mean here? Instead of being horribly unthinkable, the Earth is becoming radically unimaginable.”
Montalban was so solemn and passionate in this assessment that all Inke could do was blink.
“Inke, I aspire to see a normal world. A normalized world. I have never yet lived in any normal world, but I hope to see one built and standing up, before I die.”
