12

Jute sat impassively, staring but not seeing, thinking about all the messages she had received in her life, and not being able to remember any of them. She felt, suddenly, sitting there, as if she had been, all her days, missing out on secret and valuable things. Her mother had died when she was a little girl and all her life she had grown with two warring convictions in her mind, the finality of death, and the impermanence of death. Which is to say that she believed that when someone dies nothing of them remains, they went to nowhere land, they vanished completely, devoured or erased by the gods of the vacuum. Not even memory keeps them alive, because, eventually, memory too dies. On the other hand she was convinced that the dead are still here, somewhere, in spirit. She dreamed often about her mother, and in these dreams her mother told her useful things, prepared her for events to come. And Jute knew for certain that her mother whispered messages to her all through the years, warning her here, guiding her there. These were not loud voices that would cause alarm, but faint wind-whispers, things heard and not heard, heard almost through the agency of her own private thoughts, so that it was almost impossible to distinguish between her own thoughts and the whispers.

And so Jute saw the world dually. She never admitted to the latter view, the wind-whispers. As a faithful company woman she never for a moment slackened on the dour materialism expected of her. In all conversations to do with higher phenomena she affected complete scepticism, even scorn for all those who suggested that there might be more to life than met the eye. She loudly affected to prefer what could be seen and demonstrated, ‘real life’ as she put it, to any fancy notions of beings, life beyond death, intangibles, the miraculous, invisibles. And so she too lived a role. And the role overwhelmed her reality. She went days and weeks without the whispers of her mother – the most awful days of her life. And the anguish of it made her more miserable than anything the world did to her. And she had to think her way back to her true secret beliefs, to open herself privately to what she knew in the core of her being, before she could begin to dream of her mother again, and of her childhood, when she had been so happy, as if she had lived in an enchanted garden. To dream and wander about with those feathery whispers, those friendly words and that breezy laughter filling her with reassurance and a cheerfulness which she concealed beneath a grim and dour exterior.

But now, sitting alone, her mind empty, she tried to summon her mother. Ever since she first heard about the journey she had stopped seeing her mother, stopped hearing her, and dreaming about her. Jute was in the middle of her own wasteland. There was no love in her life. She was in a desert without an oasis. For two months now her spirit had been barren. She had lived so much in scepticism, had affected so much disdain for the notion of Arcadia on which they were now embarked, had suppressed her openness, had professed too much her dislike of airy-fairy notions, that she had drifted, without knowing when, into a dark and complex place, a tangled place. Her sleep had never been so troubled. Monsters and men with knives, whispering murder and abduction, appeared to her more frequently. Since she received the message in Husk’s flat, her life had been in a turmoil that she dared not admit to anybody. There was a mighty revolt in the palaces within her. There was insurrection in the land. Her sleep had gone to pieces; and the only voices she heard were harsh ones, and her only dreams took the shapes of the idealisation of the message, took nasty forms, and plagued her. Malasso became a constant visitor in her nightmares. He seemed everywhere, the incarnation of an evil she couldn’t deny was also part of her. How often did she see herself being murdered, raped, pursued, hounded, tied up, brutalised, mocked, laughed at, and isolated in her dreams? How often had she waited, lingering, for the sea-breeze voice of her mother? Jute sat now and stared. Nothing was coming through to her. She saw nothing, distorted everything, and was alone in her darkness, suspicious and disintegrating, and too proud to admit it.