The Wilful Eye, Page 4

  I claw the crown from my head and fling it away from me. I unfasten the great gold-encrusted king-cape and push it off; it suffocated me, crushed me. My girl watches, shocked, as I tear off the sash and brooches and the foolish shirt – truly tear some of it, for the shirt-fastenings are so ancient and odd, it cannot be removed undamaged without a servant’s help.

  Down to only the trousers, I’m a more honest man; I can see, I can be, my true self better. I take off the fine buckled shoes and throw them hard at the valuable vases across the sitting-room. The vases tip and burst apart against each other, and the pieces scatter themselves in the dogs’ fur as they lie there intertwined, grinning and goggling, taking up half the room.

  The princess – the queen – is half-crouched, caught mid-laugh, mid-cringe, clutching the ruffles about her knees and looking up at me. ‘You are different,’ she says, her child-face insulting, accusing, above the cream-lit cleft between her breasts. ‘You were gentle and kind before,’ she whispers. ‘What has happened? What has changed?’

  I kick aside the king-clothes. ‘Now you,’ I say, and I reach for the crown on her head.

  My mother stirs the pot as if nothing exists but this food, none of us children tumbling on the floor fighting, none of the men talking and taking their tea around the table. The food smells good, bread baking, meat stewing with onions.

  It is a tiny world. The men talk of the larger, outer one, but they know nothing. They know goats, and mountains, but there is so much more that they can’t imagine, that they will never see.

  I shower. I wash off the blood and the scents of the princess, the bottled one and the others, more natural, of her fear above and of her flower below that I plucked – that I tore, more truthfully, from its roots. I gulp down shower-water, lather my hair enormously, soap up and scrub hard the rest of me. Can I ever be properly clean again? And once I am, what then? There seems to be nothing else to do, once you’re king, once you’ve treated your queen so. I could kill her, could I not? I could be king alone, without her eyes on me always, fearful and accusing. I could do that; I’ve got the dogs. I could do anything. (I lather my sore man-parts – they feel defiled, though she was my wife and untouched by any other man – or so she claimed, in her terror.)

  I rinse and rinse, and turn off the hissing water, dry myself and step out into the bedroom. There I dress in clean clothes, several layers, Gore-Tex the outermost. I stuff my ski-cap and gloves in my jacket pockets, my pistol to show my father that my tale is true. I go into my office, never used, and take from the filing drawers my identifications, my discharge papers – all I have left of my life before this, all I have left of myself.

  Out on the blood-smeared couch, my wife-girl lies unconscious or asleep, indecent in the last position I forced on her. She’s not frightened anymore, at least, not for the moment. I throw the ruined ruffled thing, the wedding-dress, to one side, and spread a blanket over her, covering all but her face. I didn’t have to do any of what I did. I might have treated her gently; I might have made a proper marriage with her; we might have been king and queen together, dignified and kind to each other, ruling our peoples together, the three giant dogs at our backs. We could have stopped the war; we could have sorted out this country; we could have done anything. Remember her fragrance, when it was just that light bottle-perfume? Remember her face, unmarked and laughing, just an hour or so ago as she married you?

  I stand up, away from what I did to her. The fur-slump in the corner rises and becomes the starving grey, the white bull-baiter, the dragon-dog with its flame-coat flickering around it, its eyes fireworking out of its golden mask face.

  ‘I want you to do one last thing for me.’ I pull on my ski-cap. The dogs whirl their eyes and spill their odours on me.

  I bend and put the pink Bic in the princess’s hand. Her whole body gives a start, making me jump, but she doesn’t wake up.

  I pull on my gloves, heart thumping. ‘Send me to my family’s country,’ I say to the dogs. ‘I don’t care which one of you.’

  Whichever dog does it, it’s extremely strong, but it uses none of that strength to hurt me.

  The whole country’s below me, the war there, the mountains there, the city flying away back there. I see for an instant how the dogs travel so fast: the instants themselves adjust around them, make way for them, squashing down, stretching out, whichever way is needed for the shape and mission of the dog.

  Then I am stumbling in the snow, staggering alongside a wall of snowy rocks. Above me, against the snow-blown sky, the faint lines of Flatnose Peak on the south side, and Great Rain on the north, curve down to meet and become the pass through to my home.

  The magic goes out of things with a snap like a passing bullet’s. No giant dog warms or scents the air. No brilliant eye lights up the mountainside. My spine and gut are empty of the thrill of power, of danger. I’m here where I used to imagine myself when we were under fire with everything burning and bleeding around me, everyone dying. Snow blows like knife-slashes across my face; the rocky path veers off into the blizzard ahead; the wind is tricky and bent on upending me, tumbling me down the slope. It’s dangerous, but not the wild, will-of-God kind of dangerous that war is; all I have to do to survive here is give my whole mind and body to the walking. I remember this walking; I embrace it. The war, the city, the princess, all the technology and money I had, the people I knew – these all become things I once dreamed, as I fight my frozen way up the rocks, and through the weather.

  ‘I should like to meet them,’ she says to me in the dream, in my dream of last night when she loved me. She sits hugging her knees, unsmiling, perhaps too tired to be playful or pretend anything.

  ‘I have talked too much of myself, ’ I apologise.

  ‘It’s natural,’ she says steadily to me, ‘to miss your homeland.’

  I edge around the last narrow section of the path. There are the goats, penned into their cave; they jostle and cry out at the sight of a person, at the smells of the outside world on me, of soap and new clothing.

  In the wall next to the pen, the window-shutter slides aside from a face, from a shout. The door smacks open and my mother runs out, ahead of my stumbling father; my brothers and sisters overtake them. My grandfather comes to the doorway; the littler sisters catch me around the waist and my parents throw themselves on me, weeping, laughing. We all stagger and fall. The soft snow catches us. The goats bray and thrash in their pen with the excitement.

  ‘You should have sent word!’ my mother shouts over all the questions, holding me tight by the cheeks. ‘I would have prepared such a feast!’

  ‘I didn’t know I was coming,’ I shout back. ‘Until the very last moment. There wasn’t time to let you know.’

  ‘Come! Come inside, for tea and bread at least!’

  Laughing, they haul me up. ‘How you’ve all grown!’ I punch my littlest brother on the arm. He returns the punch to my thigh and I pretend to stagger. ‘I think you broke the bone!’ And they laugh as if I’m the funniest man in the world.

  We tumble into the house. ‘Wait,’ I say to Grandfather, as he goes to close the door.

  I look out into the storm, to the south and west. Which dog will the princess send? The grey one, I think; I hope she doesn’t waste the gold on tearing me limb from limb. And when will he come? How long do I have? She might lie hours yet insensible.

  ‘Shut that door! Let’s warm the place up again!’ Every sound behind me is new again, but reminds me of the thousand times I’ve heard it before: the dragging of the bench to the table, the soft rattle of boiling water into a tea-bowl, the chatter of children.

  ‘You will have seen some things, my son,’ says my father too heartily – he’s in awe of me, coming from the world as I do. He doesn’t know me anymore. ‘Sit down and tell us them.’

  ‘Not all, though, not all.’ My mother puts her hands over the ears of the nearest sister, who shakes her off annoyed. ‘Only what is suitable for women and girl-folk.’

  So
I sit, and sip the tea and soak the bread of home, and begin my story.

  In Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Tinderbox’, a humble soldier – and not a particularly intelligent or virtuous one – comes into possession of a magic tinderbox which, once he realises its powers, allows him endless wealth, romance and, finally, to become king. The tinderbox is the key to controlling three monstrous dogs, with eyes as big as saucers, millwheels and the Round Tower at Copen- hagen, and these are probably the creatures that drove me to choose this tale. When I was small I wasn’t a fan of dogs of any kind, and the huge dogs, and with ever-huger eyes, were the stuff of nightmare. I think I found them so distracting that for me there wasn’t anything else much in this story. Reading it as an adult, I see that there’s a class war going on, in which the lower classes, in this case, triumph over the upper ones. I have no memory of this whatever.

  Now that I’ve read it properly (and pretty much got over my fear of dogs), ‘The Tinderbox’ interests me for two other reasons: the poor princess is not much more than a trophy for the unnamed soldier – I know, that’s not very new, but I always notice; and the moral of the story is almost nonexistent. This is just a revenge tale for the habitually downtrodden; its point is not to paint certain behaviour as good or bad. The soldier behaves pretty much as he pleases, killing and manipulating people with no hesitation. At the end everyone sits at the wedding feast, the populace in terror of their new king, the symbols of his power, the three dogs, staring at everyone ‘with their great round eyes’ – and it’s presumed you’ll sympathise with him rather than, ooh, say, the orphaned princess or his defenceless subjects. It’s not a nice story. It’s not about a pleasant person. Probably my main purpose in rewriting it the way I did was to wag my finger severely at this dimwit, insensitive soldier.

  So I gave him a conscience. It’s only just germinating; we see the first stirrings of instincts telling this young man that perhaps popping off your pistol is not the best way to solve every problem you encounter. He can’t really cope with that thought, and when I add fellow feeling to the mix right at the end, he becomes aware of the awfulness of his deeds. The only thing he can think to do is run away from what he’s done, and return home, searching, I suppose, for the world he can never recapture. He expects that the dogs (now in the princess’s power) will soon follow, and tear him apart much the way he tore apart her family and her own innocence, so he commits a kind of suicide.

  My story is also a revenge story, against perpetrators of thoughtless, greed-motivated violence – particularly towards princesses! The only person left standing at the end, in my version of the story, is the princess – goodness knows if she’s in a fit state to rule, but she’s certainly equipped to get her own back on the young man who betrayed her. Whether she does so – and, if she does, whether she exacts her revenge in the way he expects – are matters for another story.

  I drew my view of the war in this story from two articles. One is by Ben Anderson in the London Review of Books in January 2008, about the war in Afghanistan.[1] My soldier is in a similar position to a member of the Afghan National Army being trained by the British; everything they stand for is foreign to him, and he’s only in the war to pursue his own advantage. Read the Ben Anderson article and you’ll find fragments of my Tinderbox Soldier scattered throughout.

  The other article is an interview with Arkady Babchenko, a veteran of the Chechen war, about his published account of that war, One Soldier’s War (Portobello Books, London, 2007). Babchenko says such things as:

  There’s nothing like the density of life in wartime. In an hour you go through so many events, so many life-important events. There’s only life or death. Survival – that’s the only thing in front of you. Nothing else has any meaning . . . life loses its flavour, it becomes boring. And you somehow need to drag yourself back up again. Many people drink, take drugs . . . people can only live on the brink.

  Also:

  Only my body had come back from the first war. My mind stayed there. My body walked around and looked at this world without understanding it.[2]

  I tried to capture something of these mental states within my Tinderbox Soldier. Hans Christian Andersen seems to have made his hero a soldier quite lightly, and purely to enable him to dispatch the old woman at the start, and later the royal family and courtiers, with unthinking ease, the moment they cross him. I wanted both to capture and to undo that thoughtlessness, that complete selfishness. I wanted to prod apart one aspect of that plain tale, and to assert that things were not so simple or so right. Even in class wars, the classes are made up of individuals, and some of these are damaged, fumbling, mistaken individuals, who harm other people in their turn.

  I think this is territory that fairytales traditionally don’t explore; they’re generally straight-talking, almost all plot and very light on characterisation and reflection. The best of them, however, provide in their powerful simplicity many opportunities for a reader’s, a listener’s or a writer’s imagination to pause and to muse, and then to take flight. In my novel, Tender Morsels, in this retelling of ‘The Tinderbox’ and in several other retellings, I’ve found that the basic structure of a fairytale has provided an ideal trellis for growing a story. While I reconstruct the trellis, my own preoccupations sprout and grow and entangle themselves with that frame, and at the end I have something that I’ve taken so far from the original that it is really mine, but which is still held together, even if almost invisibly, by the things in the original which have made it endure down the years.

  The old stories that survive the centuries all have good bones; even the damaged ones where the logic of the plot has been half worn away by time and retelling will retain some elements – an ungrateful dwarf, or a prince bespelled into bear form – that I find irresistible. Fairytales express our longstanding and sometimes unspeakable urges, fears and hopes. They’ll live for as long as we do, loved by some, dismissed by others, and approached with caution by those they discomfit, who feel the power beneath the plain surface.

  [1] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n01/ben-anderson/diary

  [2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/nov/21/biography

  Moth’s father was a foolish, impulsive, prideful man. One day he decided to go before the king with some other men, to propose a festival. He was a miller and the other men were variously a grain farmer, a cow herder, a baker and an orchardist and each of them called himself the master of his trade. Their idea was a festival that would involve an orgy of breadmaking and cake-devouring from which they would reap the profits. The king would have a goodly cut for his coffers. The trouble was that none of the masters had given much thought to what the festival should celebrate. Their sole desire was that as much bread and cake and butter and jam and cream be consumed as humanly possible.

  When Moth heard them plotting in the parlour, she begged her mother to intervene. ‘They cannot go and dither before the king,’ she said urgently. ‘He will not stand for it.’

  ‘You know your father, Moth,’ her mother said, making a coy moue at herself in the looking glass in her bedchamber as she tried on a new hair ornament which her husband had bought her from a traveller.

  She meant he would not listen to her, Moth supposed. It was true that her father listened to no one unless their opinion agreed with his own and then he thought them marvellously clever, though less so if it was a woman, for women were not of much account in the Middle Kingdom. Her father was not a cruel or hard man and it might have been different if her mother had spoken with gravity from time to time, but she did not trouble herself thinking much at all, claiming it produced wrinkles and constipation. Certainly Moth’s father had not wed her for her wit, but for her beauty, which was admittedly considerable. Her figure was the sort men desired, being softly full at the hip and bosom with a dainty waist between. Her skin was rosy pink and white as a naked breast, giving her a soft, exposed look, and her limpid eyes were as blue and guileless as a summer sky. Her crowning beauty was her hair: it hung to t
he floor in a warm, rich, honey-gold fall, which her husband described as the lovely colour of wealth. That the weight of it gave Moth’s mother endless headaches and neck aches did not trouble him, nor that when she walked, it literally swept up dust and twigs and even the odd spider. Not that she had to wash or brush it, of course. She had a servant for that, though as a girl Moth had liked to brush it herself.

  Now she had the uncontrollable urge to shake her mother, for truly she was like a big, soft, stupid doll.

  ‘Moth, do not frown in that ferocious way or you will give yourself lines,’ her mother said, catching the grimace in the looking glass. But even before she got to the end of the sentence she was distracted by a freckle at the corner of her eye, asking Moth if she would call it a beauty spot or a freckle. Moth had no idea what to say. As far as she could see, such a mark was a beauty spot if it was on the face or form of a beauty and a mere freckle if the wearer was plain.

  ‘If my father gets his head chopped off you will be sorry,’ she muttered under her breath, and went out to try to waylay him, for while he could not be told a thing, he could be influenced if a matter were handled carefully. Sometimes Moth thought she had become clever to compensate for the foolishness of her parents.

  ‘My pretty thing,’ said her father, rising from the table and looking at her with a faint dissatisfaction. Her cleverness troubled him and he was always afraid she might produce some gnomic utterance that would humiliate him, not that she had spoken so since she was very small. Yet he loved her, too, with a baffled helpless love that did not know what to do with itself. The other men had risen, smiling, but with less judgement in their looks since she was not their daughter.

  ‘I heard you talking about a festival,’ Moth said. ‘What will it celebrate?’

  The men looked at one another in consternation and Moth crossed to the window, pretending not to notice as they drew into a little clot by the fire to talk in soft urgent voices.