I tell him my real name, and feel that therefore I am known. I act like a dunce. I should know better. I make of him an idol, a cardboard cutout.
He on the other hand talks little: no more hedging or jokes. He barely asks questions. He seems indifferent to most of what I have to say, alive only to the possibilities of my body, though he watches me while I’m speaking. He watches my face.
Impossible to think that anyone for whom I feel such gratitude could betray me.
Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.
Today there are different flowers, drier, more defined, the flowers of high summer: daisies, black-eyed Susans, starting us on the long downward slope to fall. I see them in the gardens, as I walk with Ofglen, to and fro. I hardly listen to her, I no longer credit her. The things she whispers seem to me unreal. What use are they, for me, now?
You could go into his room at night, she says. Look through his desk. There must be papers, notations.
The door is locked, I murmur.
We could get you a key, she says. Don’t you want to know who he is, what he does?
But the Commander is no longer of immediate interest to me. I have to make an effort to keep my indifference towards him from showing.
Keep on doing everything exactly the way you were before, Nick says. Don’t change anything. Otherwise they’ll know. He kisses me, watching me all the time. Promise? Don’t slip up.
I put his hand on my belly. It’s happened, I say. I feel it has. A couple of weeks and I’ll be certain.
This I know is wishful thinking.
He’ll love you to death, he says. So will she.
But it’s yours, I say. It will be yours, really. I want it to be.
We don’t pursue this, however.
I can’t, I say to Ofglen. I’m too afraid. Anyway I’d be no good at that, I’d get caught.
I scarcely take the trouble to sound regretful, so lazy have I become.
We could get you out, she says. We can get people out if we really have to, if they’re in danger. Immediate danger.
The fact is that I no longer want to leave, escape, cross the border to freedom. I want to be here, with Nick, where I can get at him.
Telling this, I’m ashamed of myself. But there’s more to it than that. Even now, I can recognize this admission as a kind of boasting. There’s pride in it, because it demonstrates how extreme and therefore justified it was, for me. How well worth it. It’s like stories of illness and near-death, from which you have recovered; like stories of war. They demonstrate seriousness.
Such seriousness, about a man, then, had not seemed possible to me before.
Some days I was more rational. I did not put it, to myself, in terms of love. I said, I have made a life for myself, here, of a sort. That must have been what the settlers’ wives thought, and women who survived wars, if they still had a man. Humanity is so adaptable, my mother would say. Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.
It won’t be long now, says Cora, doling out my monthly stack of sanitary napkins. Not long now, smiling at me shyly but also knowingly. Does she know? Do she and Rita know what I’m up to, creeping down their stairs at night? Do I give myself away, daydreaming, smiling at nothing, touching my face lightly when I think they aren’t watching?
Ofglen is giving up on me. She whispers less, talks more about the weather. I do not feel regret about this. I feel relief.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The bell is tolling; we can hear it from a long way off. It’s morning, and today we’ve had no breakfast. When we reach the main gate we file through it, two by two. There’s a heavy contingent of guards, special-detail Angels, with riot gear – the helmets with the bulging dark plexiglass visors that make them look like beetles, the long clubs, the gas-canister guns – in cordon around the outside of the Wall. That’s in case of hysteria. The hooks on the Wall are empty.
This is a district Salvaging, for women only. Salvagings are always segregated. It was announced yesterday. They tell you only the day before. It’s not enough time, to get used to it.
To the tolling of the bell we walk along the paths once used by students, past buildings that were once lecture halls and dormitories. It’s very strange to be in here again. From the outside you can’t tell that anything’s changed, except that the blinds on most of the windows are drawn down. These buildings belong to the Eyes now.
We file onto the wide lawn in front of what used to be the library. The white steps going up are still the same, the main entrance is unaltered. There’s a wooden stage erected on the lawn, something like the one they used every spring, for Commencement, in the time before. I think of hats, pastel hats worn by some of the mothers, and of the black gowns the students would put on, and the red ones. But this stage is not the same after all, because of the three wooden posts that stand on it, with the loops of rope.