I saved the cupboard until the third day. I looked carefully over the door first, inside and out, then the walls with their brass hooks – how could they have overlooked the hooks? Why didn’t they remove them? Too close to the floor? But still, a stocking, that’s all you’d need. And the rod with the plastic hangers, my dresses hanging on them, the red woollen cape for cold weather, the shawl. I knelt to examine the floor, and there it was, in tiny writing, quite fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or maybe just a fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
I didn’t know what it meant, or even what language it was in. I thought it might be Latin, but I didn’t know any Latin. Still, it was a message, and it was in writing, forbidden by that very fact, and it hadn’t yet been discovered. Except by me, for whom it was intended. It was intended for whoever came next.
It pleases me to ponder this message. It pleases me to think I’m communing with her, this unknown woman. For she is unknown; or if known, she has never been mentioned to me. It pleases me to know that her taboo message made it through, to at least one other person, washed itself up on the wall of my cupboard, was opened and read by me. Sometimes I repeat the words to myself. They give me a small joy. When I imagine the woman who wrote them, I think of her as about my age, maybe a little younger. I turn her into Moira, Moira as she was when she was in college, in the room next to mine: quirky, jaunty, athletic, with a bicycle once, and a knapsack for hiking. Freckles, I think; irreverent, resourceful.
I wonder who she was or is, and what’s become of her.
I tried that out on Rita, the day I found the message.
Who was the woman who stayed in that room? I said. Before me? If I’d asked it differently, if I’d said, Was there a woman who stayed in that room before me? I might not have got anywhere.
Which one? she said; she sounded grudging, suspicious, but then, she almost always sounds like that when she speaks to me.
So there have been more than one. Some haven’t stayed their full term of posting, their full two years. Some have been sent away, for one reason or another. Or maybe not sent; gone?
The lively one. I was guessing. The one with freckles.
You knew her? Rita asked, more suspicious than ever.
I knew her before, I lied. I heard she was here.
Rita accepted this. She knows there must be a grapevine, an underground of sorts.
She didn’t work out, she said.
In what way? I asked, trying to sound as neutral as possible.
But Rita clamped her lips together. I am like a child here, there are some things I must not be told. What you don’t know won’t hurt you, was all she would say.
CHAPTER TEN
Sometimes I sing to myself, in my head; something lugubrious, mournful, presbyterian:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
Could save a wretch like me,
Who once was lost, but now am found,
Was bound, but now am free.
I don’t know if the words are right. I can’t remember. Such songs are not sung any more in public, especially the ones that use words like free. They are considered too dangerous. They belong to outlawed sects.
I feel so lonely, baby,
I feel so lonely, baby,
I feel so lonely I could die.
This too is outlawed. I know it from an old cassette tape, of my mother’s; she had a scratchy and untrustworthy machine, too, that could still play such things. She used to put the tape on when her friends came over and they’d had a few drinks.
I don’t sing like this often. It makes my throat hurt.
There isn’t much music in this house, except what we hear on the TV. Sometimes Rita will hum, while kneading or peeling; a wordless humming, tuneless, unfathomable. And sometimes from the front sitting room there will be the thin sound of Serena’s voice, from a disc made long ago and played now with the volume low, so she won’t be caught listening as she sits there knitting, remembering her own former and now amputated glory: Hallelujah.
It’s warm for this time of year. Houses like this heat up in the sun, there’s not enough insulation. Around me the air is stagnant, despite the little current, the breath coming in past the curtains. I’d like to be able to open the window as wide as it could go. Soon we’ll be allowed to change into the summer dresses.
The summer dresses are unpacked and hanging in the closet, two of them, pure cotton, which is better than synthetics like the cheaper ones, though even so, when it’s muggy, in July and August, you sweat inside them. No worry about sunburn though, said Aunt Lydia. The spectacles women used to make of themselves. Oiling themselves like roast meat on a spit, and bare backs and shoulders, on the street, in public, and legs, not even stockings on them, no wonder those things used to happen. Things, the word she used when whatever it stood for was too distasteful or filthy or horrible to pass her lips. A successful life for her was one that avoided things, excluded things. Such things do not happen to nice women. And not good for the complexion, not at all, wrinkle you up like a dried apple. But we weren’t supposed to care about our complexions any more, she’d forgotten that.