When the Enemy took over the Capital, a quiet nervousness descended upon the streets. The orders they began to receive were very clear, and everyone tried to follow them to a T. But it was not long after people in the Capital had registered their identities and occupations at the new courthouse that the arrests began. They had all expected the wealthy to be arrested. Soldiers went through their houses seizing goods that they would use for their war effort. It was harder for the citizens to have empathy for the extremely wealthy.
But then cultural figures began to be arrested too.
An eighty-six-year-old actor was arrested on charges of pedophilia and corruption of minors. His extended family, filled with young children, followed him out onto the street.
Perhaps if there had been only a handful of arrests of cultural figures under absurd trumped-up charges, the citizens might have been able to turn a blind eye to them. But they became more and more frequent. And it became clear that people were being arrested only because they were cultural figures.
There was a professor of literature who in twenty years had not paid attention to a single event that occurred after 1876. He was particularly dumbfounded by the accusations. When he was accused of espionage, it was said by some that it was the first time he had properly understood the country was at war.
There was a popular cabaret singer who couldn’t carry a tune but would belt out songs at the top of her lungs and with an infectious confidence. She was beloved, and everyone thought her voice was charming and endearing because she couldn’t sing well. And it made them listen more carefully to the words she was singing.
She hadn’t a violent bone in her bouncy, overweight body. So it was remarkable that she was arrested and disappeared on the charge of acts of terrorism. She had apparently served a tray of poisoned pastries to a group of senior citizens. This was hard to believe, as all those close to her swore she would never bring harm to a cupcake.
Then it was announced that all the universities would be closed. “The entire faculty of Freedom University has disappeared,” Clara yelled in the kitchen.
“I thought you said that university was second-rate,” Sofia said, biting into a piece of toast.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Sofia. Those are thoughts a person has during peacetime. It is a luxury to be able to tear apart your friends and colleagues. Now we are all united against the Enemy.”
Then high schools and grammar schools were closed too. Sofia knew this was a shocking injustice. But she was happy she no longer had to go to school. She had created an idea and impression of herself at school that was almost certain never to change. She would be regarded as awkward and shy and unlikeable for years. Once your classmates considered you a loser, it was almost impossible for you to rectify this notion.
She believed she could become a different kind of girl now. She felt she had been given a blank slate. She would reinvent herself. She had this secret image inside her head of the girl she wanted to be.
“My books are being burned in the square tonight,” her mother announced one day. “Anyone who has a copy of one of my books faces a fine and possibly imprisonment. They are mad. They can’t erase me.”
The list of banned books had grown to cover not only her own titles but almost the entirety of Clara’s library. Many residents of the Capital elected to dispose of their collections all at once. Sofia would stroke her folktale book when she was out of her mother’s sight. The Enemy seemed unconcerned with children’s books.
“I think people, women especially, will never burn my books,” Clara said. “They’ll hide them in their walls. Women are very good at hiding things. They are always trying to hide that they are aging. Why do I bother risking my life writing these books if people are not going to do me the courtesy of risking their lives to own them? Why should I assume all the risk?”
“They have already read them so many times that the words are in their heads,” Celeste suggested.
Her mother was delighted by this answer. She put her index finger out and waved it at the maid. Sofia wished she had come up with this answer herself.
“Of course I only want to write more now. I have been slowly working on my memoir. There was never any urgency before. But I will finish it now. It was always going to be my most popular work. It would have been a national bestseller in our country. It will only be available to read in other languages. Some of the intricacies will be lost, of course. But the ideas will come through. They will see we were enlightened people.”
Clara began pacing excitedly around the living room as she spoke. A lock of dark hair escaped her kerchief and fell on her forehead like a question mark.
“This is what the West is like. They believe in Great Men. That is how they remember history. There was no French Revolution without Robespierre. The men of their age embody their country. Without a great orator, a people will not have a voice.”
Sofia watched as her mother began rearranging her desk and papers, as though she intended to start writing immediately.
“Then I will get it out of the country. This manuscript in itself will have a great story. It will have been written under the Occupation. More than anything, the West adores a writer who was murdered. They will weep over every page, regretting they never knew of our existence. They cannot let our culture be erased like this. It will be way too hard on their conscience. They think we are ignorant and there is no reason to come rescue us now. If my books had a wider readership outside the borders, our allies would already be here. Through my fascinating and outrageous life, they will see in me all the qualities and aspirations of the country.”
Finally, Clara sat down at her desk, and she held her pen up like a sword. “This will be a life, an Elysian life, from birth to death!”
“How can you describe your own birth?” Sofia asked. “Even if you can describe your own birth, how do you go about describing your own death?”
“Poetry, Sofia! Poetry!”
Sofia had no idea why her mother wasn’t more terrified. If they were killing writers, it stood to reason that her mother should crawl underneath the bed and hide there for the duration of the war. But instead of making her numb and slow, the way it might a beautiful animal, terror made her spring into action. Before, she would take one or even two naps a day, and fully wake up only at night, when everyone else was asleep. But now she was awake all day. She was restless and alert. She would leave the house in a hurry.
Her mother felt alive with the possibility of danger.
Her mother began working furiously on her new book. She wrote through the day and night. Her mother sometimes got sick writing. She wrote for three days. And then wept in bed with a migraine, vomiting violently on the floor.
She muttered in the darkness. She begged for someone to help her. She was covered in sweat. She demanded a cold rag for her forehead. The sight of a glass of water made her weep. Perhaps because she wanted it so badly but couldn’t drink it. She lay on the tiles of the bathroom floor so she would be cold.
Sofia ran as quickly as she could to the pharmacist, whose shop windows had been cracked and were now held together with brown tape. He opened a cabinet behind the cash register with a miniature key and took out a small blue jar of pills. He would never give her mother more than four pills. He said they were addictive. And no one would forgive him for turning the country’s greatest writer into a drug addict. When she was recovering and the pills made her stoned, she was very content. She became very baby-like.
This time, the doctor gave Sofia an entire jar. He held her hand. “Tell your mother she is very brave.”
Sofia was irritated by her mother’s memoir. Because her mother, when she was exhausted from writing, would put her feet up and recount some of the events she had transcribed in the book. Her mother had a look of bliss on her face as she narrated, through the rose-coloured lens of nostalgia, her favourite life adventures.
She spoke about everything, from when she had the top marks on her college exit exams, to a time she climbed on the roof of her dorm to save a cat, to awards she had won and men who had fallen head over heels in love with her.
Sofia didn’t want to interrupt her mother’s respite from the war outside the door of their apartment. A war that, in all likelihood, would erase every trace that Clara Bottom had been on this earth. Perhaps she considered herself close to death. And her life was passing in front of her eyes. And she was writing it down. But what got under Sofia’s skin was that there seemed to be no anecdotes about her. Which led her to wonder whether she was in her mother’s memoir at all.
Sofia felt she could tell when her mother was writing about a college tryst. Sofia was observing her one night and she stopped writing to put on a record and danced to it with her eyes closed. She knew her mother had travelled in her head to a time before Sofia was born. And was at a dance hall with young men admiring her.
Sofia was angry at her mother for slipping away from her. While she was there in the room, dancing with men other than her father. It was as though one of them might whisk her away, to have another, more suitable child.
It made snarky comments leap out of her mouth. There was nothing she could do to stop herself from saying them. They were already out of her mouth. She was like cupid, firing arrows at her mother’s heart. But none seemed to quite hit the mark.
“You look as though you are drunk,” Sofia said. “You look seasick.”
Clara, seeming not to have registered her daughter’s comment, continued swaying around the living room.
“I would be embarrassed about writing about past lovers if I were you.”
“And why is that, Sofia?” Clara answered with her eyes still closed.
“Because they were such ridiculous men. They were bad dancers. And told stupid jokes. And puked on their shoes. They thought they were so intelligent, but they only repeated things they read in books.”
Clara stopped dancing and looked steadfastly at her daughter. “How did you know?” And then her face broke into a smile and she started to laugh.
“Well, then, why do you seem so happy writing about them?”
“Oh, it’s not the men. It’s the writing itself that pleases me. There is no language as beautiful as Elysian. It is poetic by nature. It is an incantatory language. It is like a magic spell. Sometimes I feel the temperature around me change while I am writing.”
“Perhaps we are a race of fairies, making crazy poems in a language only the trees understand,” Sofia said, sighing.
“Oh, what a beautiful way of putting it, Sofia.” And to her delight, her mother added, “I shall put that in the book.” She turned back to her desk and proceeded to scribble down what Sofia had said.
Sofia was pleased. She was somewhere in the memoir. Hidden somewhere in its pages, wound up in her mother’s words, like a climbing rose.
And then, making Sofia feel even more involved in the memoir, Clara handed her a pile of notebooks one afternoon, saying, “Let’s type some of this out.”
The notebooks were wonderful. Look what she had been entrusted with. The pages crinkled when she turned them. It was as though her mother’s words had set them on fire. Her cursive spread across the page like vines that were out of control. When Sofia typed, she was alarmed by the sound of machine-gun fire that emanated from the words.
Clara stopped and peered over Sofia’s shoulder. She felt her mother’s hair settling on her shoulder. She smelled her skin, which was a mixture of cold air and tobacco and a hint of a rose perfume she would wear sometimes before the war. But now that seemed to emanate from her naturally.
Sofia did wonder whether it was strange to be in love with your mother. She felt towards her mother the way you would feel towards someone who was unobtainable. Someone who had always held something back. Someone who would never commit.
It was said that mothers loved their children more than children loved their mothers. But Sofia loved her mother monstrously, ferociously. Sofia was madly in love with her mother. And like any obsessive lover, she wanted to take her mother’s freedom away. She wanted her mother to be beholden to her.
She had always held back on allowing herself to be in love with her mother. Because she thought it would only lead to further rejection. Because she did not want to love someone who didn’t love her back. She wouldn’t even admit that to herself. But now, she had let her guard down and was basking in her mother’s new attention. How could she resist?