At the beginning, her mother didn’t believe in the war at all. Or she wasn’t afraid of it. She deliberately made provocative statements about not being afraid. She said war was good because it always created new forms of art. She thought it was particularly good for theatre. There was nothing like seeing a play right after a war.
But then the Enemy had entered the country easily and now occupied the beautiful Capital. It had upended all their lives. And in fact, all the theatres and newspapers and concert halls had been closed, as Elysian art was now illegal. Sofia’s mother was at the very centre of the art world. It could be claimed that Clara Bottom was the Simone de Beauvoir of Elysia. She was the first to write in their language what it is to be a woman. That one is not born but becomes a woman, more or less. And thus, she was on the Enemy’s most wanted list.
The Enemy had come to reclaim the land they had lost in a treaty after the Great War. The Capital had been spared the mass destruction the rest of the country had seen. Of course, the Capital was considered sacrosanct by both sides. Now the citizens of the Capital existed in an uneasy lull in the violence, waiting to see what would happen next, while slowly building an underground resistance. Clara Bottom inserted herself right into the heart of it.
Whose idea was it that all the children should flee the Capital? From the very beginning of the Occupation, parents had asked that their children be allowed to leave to stay with relatives in the countryside. To spare them from what, exactly? the Enemy asked. But they were too afraid to answer. And then the Enemy announced that children could leave the Capital on a special train the following weekend. Sofia’s mother immediately began preparations for Sofia to be on that train.
“I am not a child anymore,” Sofia protested. “I don’t want to be sent away with the children.”
“Don’t be a fool, Sofia. This is an opportunity to escape. The Enemy is letting children leave.”
“You aren’t leaving. I am going to stay here with you. I want to be a war hero too.”
“A war hero! There are no heroes in this war.”
“I am staying for the Uprising.”
“Oh, you are stubborn and ridiculous, Sofia!”
“You want me to leave. You’ve never liked being a mother. You never wanted me to be born.”
Sofia’s mother was being bossy about what Sofia put in her suitcase. Sofia did not think this was fair. She never liked when her mother told her what to wear or how to act. But now she would be where her mother couldn’t even see her. So why should Sofia care? She was going to stay with some third cousins who lived in a small village. She could not even tell you whether it was a cousin of her mother’s or her father’s.
She asked about her new cousins.
“You’ll be very good for them,” her mother said. “Make sure the children pick up your accent and not the other way around. And read every night. You have to learn to have a rich vocabulary when you are young. Otherwise, it will never seem natural when you use large words later on in life. I know it’s heavy, but I’ve put a large book in your suitcase.”
“Oh, this is awful!” cried Sofia. “I am not a child. You cannot send me away with all the babies. I am needed in the Capital, just as you are!”
“This is your way out, darling. Just be a child for the duration of the train ride.”
Sofia picked up her suitcase. It was heavier than she thought. She opened it again. She saw her large folklore book, Tales from the Forests of Elysia, inside it. She was pleased. “My book!” Sofia announced.
“Look, darling, this is the most important thing I will ever tell you.” She took out the book and opened it. Sofia noticed at once that the book was different. The pages had been taken out and replaced by her mother’s latest manuscript. “You are to deliver this book to the people who are meeting you at the train station. You know how valuable this is. It is my life. It is our lives. I have to get it out of the country.”
“No! You’ve ruined my favourite book.”
“Why must you be so obtuse, child? The fate of the bloody country is on your shoulders, and you’re worried about a handful of fables. You say you want to be a resistance fighter. You have to get this book to people who will get it out of the country. You’re the only one who can do it, Sofia. We have to get the word out to Europe. They have to know that we are like them. They can’t let a civilized society filled with thinkers and artists be razed to the ground. They think we are still backwards and barbaric. They don’t understand that we are nothing like the Enemy. We are like them.”
“You don’t love me. You love your writing first.”
“Of course the book is more important than you. It’s my memoir, yes. But it’s more important than me. It’s the celebration of an Elysian life. What are any of us except expendable during a war? It’s the idea of freedom that has to be saved. It’s a culture that we created. If we can keep that alive, we are all saved. Our individual fates don’t matter. Don’t you think about yourself. Think about the book. It has to make it out of the country.”
“I can’t travel with children. What if the girls from my class are there? No, I cannot get on the same train as them.”
The train station was filled with mothers. Sofia believed that when a train pulled out of the station, all the mothers felt a burden lift from their shoulders. In Sofia’s mind, wartime was the most wonderful time for married women in the city. They all went back to behaving like young girls. Women never actually liked being mothers; they only liked the idea of motherhood beforehand.
Her mother had taken her to the train station to see her off. She was wearing her most fashionable dress. Her mother was usually lazy when it came to anything involving paperwork, so Sofia was surprised she had managed to sign her up for this transport. It was the only time her mother had been efficient about anything. Of course! Her mother wanted to get rid of her so she could have lovers. This wasn’t about any manuscript, it was about being free of her. With her father safely in America on business, having left the country before the Occupation, her mother wanted to be a single woman. And although Sofia missed her father occasionally, her mother never seemed to. Free of a husband, she had now traded her daughter for currency on the dating market.
Sofia was surprised by the number of children on the train platform.
As the mothers began to recede, she saw she was in an enormous crowd of children. It seemed possible that at least half of them would get lost. It was hard to keep your wits about you. The children had their stops written on tags around their necks. If they were to miss their stop, they would be lost forever.
There was no one to take their hands. So they found themselves deliberately touching others so they would not feel alone. They stepped carefully on the heels of the children in front of them as they boarded; they held on to another child’s scarf. You wanted to hang on to somebody.
Sofia did not like having the burden of carrying the book with her mother’s manuscript in her suitcase. It meant she had to worry about the book on top of herself. She felt all the other children had been told to look out, above all things, for themselves. But she knew she was supposed to prioritize the book. She couldn’t think properly. It was as though the book inside the suitcase were speaking loudly over all her thoughts. In prioritizing the book, her mother was prioritizing herself over Sofia. Sofia had a sudden urge to open the window of the train and shove the suitcase out. And be free of it.
Oh, she had had it with this war! The Enemy’s persecution of artists was only giving them a ridiculous pompous view of themselves. And they had rendered going to the store a perilous adventure. How she longed for the simplicity of her former boring life in the Capital. How she wished she could be at home, drinking coffee and listening to a radio play. She would even bear school at this point. But instead, the Enemy had decided they needed their land back. They could have just asked, Sofia thought, with frustrated tears in her eyes. She straightened her shoulders. I am fourteen! she reminded herself. She was too old to weep at being separated from her mother.
When they were an hour out of the Capital, the train came to a halt. It was surrounded by trucks and soldiers. Several of the soldiers had bullhorns and told the children in their own language that they were all to debark from the train.
When they heard the bullhorns, the children had crowded up against the windows to see what was happening. But they had no impulse to get off the train. They had been told by their parents to stay on the train no matter what. They weren’t supposed to get off until they had met up with loved ones.
The soldiers again instructed them all to leave the train. There were trucks that were going to take them back to the Capital to their mothers. They would be reunited with their parents. They would have delicious soup. And possibly pie. Their parents had decided they could not live without them after all. The children reacted to this with great enthusiasm.
The majority of the children came running out to the soldiers. They all pushed their way through the train doors as though they were bursting out, some falling down the steps, others happily jumping right over them. Then they lined up, pushing each other and yelling all the while, to get on the trucks. They allowed themselves to be lifted up under the armpits. They were so sure of the power of their own cuteness. They batted their eyelashes and smiled at the soldiers. They were the last of the stupid children in the country. Was being trusting a sign of stupidity?
Sofia did not line up. She stood away from the trucks and edged quietly into the forest. There was a small group of other suspicious children who took refuge there. They stood behind the trees, watching. She saw the trucks pulling away with the children crammed inside them. The oddest thing was the sound of laughter that followed behind the trucks. Like a string of tin cans attached to the bumper of a car. The children were enjoying being on the back of a truck. It was as though they were on a class field trip to an apple orchard.
She heard the voices of children in the last truck join together in song. They were singing a lullaby. They sang about a pretty girl who drowned herself after being rejected. It was a song every child in the country knew. It was a song they had learned when they were too little to properly consider its meaning. And when they grew older, they were too familiar with the words to make any sense of what they were actually singing. The words were simply the words of the song. And they made them feel young and protected and happy.
Marianna was too in love, too in love, too in love. She fell for a man who damned her to be too in love, too in love, too in love.
Sofia had never thought hard about it before. But now the absurdity of the song struck her. Everything would seem absurd from here on in, she suspected. There was no such thing as normal. Suddenly a soldier caught sight of Sofia and the group of children and called something out while pointing. The children turned and ran into the woods in different directions.
Sofia stopped to catch her breath in a small clearing in the woods. Her suitcase was still in her hand as though she were going on a holiday and not running for her life.
She sensed danger acutely. She sensed it the way an animal did. Every way she turned, the danger was standing directly behind her. She had an impulse to run, but since she didn’t know which direction to go, she felt frozen on the spot. Since she had stood in the clearing for several minutes without anything happening, perhaps it made sense not to move a muscle. Maybe if she stood in place for a whole day and night, the soldiers would be far enough away from her that she could safely sneak out of the woods.
She heard the sound of footsteps breaking sticks in half. As though someone were so frustrated with their homework, they were breaking their pencil in two, again and again. Before she knew it, she was not alone in the clearing. There was a boy a few years younger standing with her. He stopped running and stared at her, panting for breath. He seemed to think he had found a safe spot since there was another child in it. His whole body relaxed. He looked at Sofia and smiled.
And there was the sound of a bullet and a terrible sinking thud. There was a black hole in the boy’s forehead. He continued to stare at Sofia for a moment, as though he were wondering if they could still be friends, despite his being dead. Then his body slumped to the ground.
When his body hit the ground, she felt as though there had been an earthquake.
You had no idea how easy it was to extinguish a life until you saw it.
There was nothing anyone could do to revive that boy. There was no science or philosophy on earth that could bring him back to life. He was lying on the forest floor. While his family members back in the Capital were hoping he was safe, telling themselves he was safe.
Sofia ran. She did not believe that at this moment, her mother was worrying about whether she was safe. She was certain, instead, that her mother was worrying about the safety of her manuscript. She decided she would save herself. Maybe if she had believed her mother was worried about her, she would have stood there, like a lost child, waiting to be shot in the head too. Instead she ran away from the world of adults.
She was certain there were animals running right beside her, moving away from the danger. They weren’t animals per se but were more like shadows of animals. She didn’t exactly see them, but she sensed their presence and saw their black forms out of the corner of her eye. She didn’t have time to turn and look at exactly what they were.
She wasn’t afraid of any animals other than humans at that point. If she had seen a bear standing there, she felt she would have flung herself into its arms.
Then she was out of the woods. She was standing at another train track. She looked down at her school shoes, which were covered in mud. The soles of her feet were so painful from running, they were burning, as though she were standing on a frying pan over flames. She had to endure the pain.
There was something odd about the clouds. They seemed lower than they had been before. She felt dizzy with a new realization. She suddenly felt the opposite of weight at the end of her hand. There was a lightness at the end of her reach. And that lightness made it feel as though she might float up into the clouds like a balloon whose string had been let loose. She was horrified by what she had misplaced.
In the flurry of chaos, she had become separated from her suitcase. So many of the children had become separated from their personal belongings. They were allowed to return home, and no one would care about lost items, as long as the children were safe.
She didn’t have the suitcase with her. The suitcase her mother had put her manuscript in. The manuscript Sofia was supposed to guard with her life. She knew she had no right to be running for safety without it. She had put her own life above her mother’s manuscript.
She could never go back to the city. She would never be able to face her mother again. The only excuse she could possibly have for giving up the manuscript was that there was a bullet in her head. She hated her mother for a moment, for making her feel this way, for putting her in this position. For making her feel the manuscript was more valuable than her.
It wasn’t as though she had any option to go back to the city. The army was moving towards the Capital to destroy everything. She knew probably more than any person in the Capital that death was coming. And it was going to be brutal and savage in a way they could not imagine. Because you could not conceive of such brutality until you had witnessed it yourself.
Sofia followed the tracks. She was so nervous. It was strange to be lost. She didn’t think she had ever been lost in her whole life. She knew the city streets so well, it was impossible to get disoriented there. There were also maps on the corners of each block. They were behind glass on the walls outside subway stations. You could always stop and look and see exactly where you were. How she wished she could come across one of those maps now and stand on tippy-toes to look at it.
She turned around quickly because she felt as though she was being followed. The trees stiffened in place, like a child playing a game of freeze tag. The trees would start moving again as soon as Sofia turned her back. The sound of the stones underneath her shoes started getting louder and louder. Her footfalls sounded like a train leaving the station.
There was whispering in the air. It was like bits of conversation had been ripped from the mouths of the children from the train, like pages from a book, and like a page, the bits had been blown by the wind for several miles until they reached Sofia’s ears. Perhaps there was a child who was a ventriloquist who was throwing their voice a hundred miles.
The children were whispering. They seemed to be mocking her. What could they be talking about? They were making fun of her because they were dead and she was alive. They didn’t have to worry about being cold or hungry. The Enemy meant nothing to them now.
Sofia couldn’t stand the idea of dying. She didn’t know whether that made her a coward. But she felt that she hadn’t spent enough time on earth. She hadn’t had any time to properly develop a personality. She wanted, at some point, to know what it felt like to be herself.
The wind was being awful and harassing her. It kept sticking its hands in her pockets. She didn’t know what it wanted. Did it want money? She never had any money in her pockets. She was a child. She had forgotten how it was always colder as soon as you left the city. She was not ready for the chill.
Sofia finally came to a station. There were crowds of country people standing at the platform being watched by soldiers. They were arguing because they wanted to take the train somewhere. But the train was late. They were waving tickets in the air.
She felt embarrassed. She was too embarrassed to tell the people she was being pursued by soldiers. They would think it was her own fault. They would look her up and down and wonder what it was about her that had caused the soldiers to dislike her so.
She saw a truck park near the station. Two older farmers stepped out of it and began to load the back with crates of cabbage that were waiting for them. They did not seem to be especially concerned by the proximity of soldiers. They were farmers. They assumed they were necessary and would be the last to be shot. The word was out that the soldiers were murdering the elite and the overeducated bourgeoisie, which probably made them think, on some level, that the Enemy had a point.
Why had her mother dressed her as though she needed to impress people at a dinner party?
There was a girl her size in an oversized, threadbare black coat and with a kerchief on her head. Sofia wore a red tam and a new coat that had been tailored in the city. She asked the girl if she wanted to trade. The girl looked surprised and was very happy with the trade. Sofia handed the girl her beret, although on cold days she would come to regret this choice. She wrapped the kerchief around her head and pulled the girl’s coat around her body.
“Can you tell me where we are?” Sofia asked the girl.
“We aren’t anywhere. We are just in the country.”
“Which is the way to Oloman?”
“I wouldn’t go that way if I were you.”
The two of them stared at each other. Then the girl pointed in a direction with her finger. They turned and walked away from each other. Each girl certain the other’s identity was safer than her own.
Sofia knew to be quiet; already, talking to the girl had been a risk. She knew if she opened her mouth, they would know that she was posh. Her mother had a funny way of speaking. All the girls who went to a certain elite women’s college picked it up when they were there. It was an accent that gave a deliberate sneer to all their words. Sofia had heard that accent since she was a very little baby. Despite having scores of nannies who spoke in a less obviously posh accent, she had picked up that of her mother.
One of her teachers had once told her that it didn’t matter whether she was intelligent or not. What mattered was that she sounded intelligent. By the time Sofia realized it was an insult, it was too late for her to say anything.
She noticed more people coming towards the station. Everybody seemed to have brought an object with them. There was a woman holding a red tea kettle covered in poppies. She had forgotten that about poor people. They were always attached to worthless objects. Whereas a rich person wouldn’t even attempt to equate themselves with a priceless object.
She looked around for something she could hold in her arms. Something she could cling to as though her family’s entire legacy depended on it. She was meant to hold on to her mother’s suitcase with her manuscript in it.
At that moment, a white goose waddled by, craning its neck around as though it had lost track of its gaggle. Sofia leaned over and picked up the large white bird. To her surprise, it did not struggle to free itself but relaxed in her arms.
She was astonished she was not frightened of it. If she were in her apartment in the Capital and a goose walked in, everyone in the house would have run around screaming and doing everything possible to kick it out. And she would have joined them. But the minute she held the goose in her arms, she felt immeasurably calmer.
Now she was ready to pass herself off as a member of the people. They would take pity on her because she was a poor child. She went up to the farmers and asked quietly whether she could climb onto their truck and have a ride as far as Oloman. One man shrugged and hoisted both the girl and the goose onto the back of the truck.
Sofia watched as the truck pulled away from the train station and the crowds of people receded. There were people walking on the road, carrying luggage, and they moved aside for the truck, parting like water. She saw the small buildings and houses begin to fade from the side of the road, until there were no more people, or any evidence of people. And the wind grew wilder and lonelier around her.
The truck began to drive down a road that led through the forest. The forest was filled with elf trees. They grew in the country. They strangled any other trees that tried to grow there. Their branches grew outwards as much as upwards. Their branches swirled and curled. Their branches wrapped around each other as though they were in love. As though they insisted on being united. The Elysian people did not use the expression “There are no two snowflakes alike.” Instead they said, “There are no two trees alike.”
The tree was on the currency. On every coin was a tree whose branches reached out to the round periphery. It was rather pretty.
Sofia had not been around trees in the same way in the city. There was the occasional tree in the middle of the sidewalk. But it knew very little about anything. It was silent. It was covered in animals. There seemed to be too many birds and squirrels inside it. The trees in the park were different too. They had been planted and raised. They had had their needs catered to. They had been protected from the elements when they were little. They were timid and vain and could be knocked right out of the ground in a storm. Sometimes they had hearts and initials carved into them. Which was painful when it happened, but in later years, people would run their fingertips along the initials, and that would give the trees a strange feeling. It made them feel as though they were owned.
Here the trees were wild and alive. On the back of the truck, Sofia rode under their arched branches as bits of sunlight that made it through the foliage danced around her like gold coins, and she moved, hopefully, away from the danger.