Mirror

by Amita Basu

Table of Contents, parts: 1, 2,

part 1

A breeze ripples the mirror-clear fountain in Uncle’s garden. When the water stills, I see an eagle flit across it. The sky, in the water, looks darker than it is, pregnant with possibility. So it’s at the water I keep staring, waiting for the eagle’s return.

The breeze audits Uncle’s garden and returns to me its fragrant report. Frangipani constitutes the hard-muscled, limelight-hogging body of this fragrance; water-lily, its camera-shy underclothes; rose, high in the nostrils, its mirror-preening watered-silk dress. Frangipani is Uncle’s favourite flower. Annoyed to be tucked out of sight in the greenhouse, it inundates the mansion.

‘Holloa, Katharyn!’ Our last guests call to me as they emerge from beyond the yews onto the red-brick path between the manicured lawns. ‘You won’t forget Saturday?’

Leaning out of the first-floor ballroom, I wave back, grinning ear-to-ear. My laughter ripples like the fountain water: gently. I gasp for breath and laugh again, louder. ‘I shan’t forget! Thank you for coming!’

Tonight’s guests were all my art-school mates. It was Uncle who offered me this party; I leaped at it. This last couple, now trotting away, study in a building across campus. Next week they have exams. We may not meet, so they’re reminding me now about Saturday. They’ve fortified themselves with this party; they’ll reward themselves with the next.

Arm-in-arm trots this last couple, their chatter rustling like happy leaves. The sky arches vast yellow and violet; it’s been a summer of parties and parades; we stand on the threshold of war, but we’ll win the war; we’re the chosen. Why shouldn’t they be happy?

What if I told you about the love triangle I’m trapped in? What would you think of me then?

Leaning out too far, I watch them turn out our garden gate and disappear beyond the high stone walls. Play-barks draw my attention back home.

On the lawn gambol Chintzy’s spaniel pups. Graceless on squat legs; swollen-tummied from bolting down her dinner, which Fritz the gardener set down three minutes ago. They’re whining because their overstuffed tummies hurt. Now from the milk bowl, emptied and capsized, one pup stumbles towards the fountain.

Galzy. Big and healthy, black-furred like her siblings, only her eyes are different: blazing blue. But Galzy doesn’t like the others; Galzy’s always straying.

Galzy waddles drunkenly towards the fountain. Canova’s Eros and Psyche, redone for Uncle in snow-white Thassos marble. The lip of the fountain’s base protrudes, like lotus petals, creating underneath a cool damp basement where the pups have been napping these summer afternoons. Galzy’s going to stretch her swollen-sore tummy against the under-fountain’s coolness.

Galzy I watch; Galzy I learn to see.

Galzy sees nothing; she learns nothing. Thrice a day, she bolts down her food then waddles over to soothe her sore stomach.

Another flicker in the fountain. The eagle is back.

The eagle awes me. The puppy touches me. Between my awe and my sympathy, the trance I’ve sustained these six months falls for one moment from my eyes.

Or, perhaps, they’ve already killed me. Perhaps this is the long moment after death: when the spirits looks down on the body, poised.

Perhaps not. Either way: I must speak. What should I do? Where does my duty lie? Hush, Katharyn! Shut your eyes again. La-la-la. March-march-march.

I lean out of the ballroom window, doubled over, elbows on the low windowsill. From the gramophone behind me, Strauss wafts past me out into the balmy June air. The gramophone stands on the grand piano, our top piano maker’s top model. A cohort of our top pianists gifted it to Uncle. The recording is from our capital’s orchestra: from one of a series of grand free public concerts of National music that Uncle has commissioned every summer, all summer, five years running.

‘National’ music! All the best European music is our music.

We’ve hosted twenty couples tonight; not one of us could competently play a waltz. I’m training as a vocalist; I’m dabbling at piano and violin; I’m half-decent at both. Two of our guests are my Vocals classmates, equally instrumentally indifferent. The others aren’t studying music; they have an excuse.

A generation ago, there would have been no excuse. Everyone from our class, girls especially, would have played waltzes blindfolded, and grappled respectably with Chopin’s most formidable études. We’d have been accomplished. But modern machines obsolesced accomplishments; modern ladies and gentlemen, working outdoors like the commoners, can’t accommodate accomplishments. All this happened before the Guidance.

Now, we’re all accomplished again, in the old new ways. The men stalwart and firm-footed; we women desirable and motherly. Everyone briskly good-tempered. We still can’t play a waltz.

To the old accomplishments we no longer aspire, but to the old pastimes we cling. For now.

So out comes Uncle’s grammy. As we patter across his parquet floor in crisp tweed and billowing muslin, Uncle stands beaming.

By the gramophone stands a crystal bowl of mangosteen and persimmon from Uncle’s greenhouse. He funds the greenhouse himself, with his royalties; he places it at the service of all his comrades, keeping this luxury socialist. He can’t do without it; sweet things are his one weakness. We’ve been having ants; I ought to put away the uneaten fruit. But if I leave this window, this evening ends. I’m not ready.

My left hip pivots, and my right foot taps to the music. On the building’s façade, my fingers play along. Uncle doesn’t dance, but Uncle favours Strauss.

My feelings to Strauss have completed one revolution. At ten, I disliked Strauss: it’s music to sedate cradled infants, to pacify merry-go-rounding toddlers. Music devoid of depth; a surface upping-and-downing. Give me, I declared as a teenager, Brahms any day: a wistful, beautiful colonoscopy of the soul.

At thirteen, barraged by Strauss for twelve months from loudspeakers at every street corner, I was primed; at that year’s annual grand rally, when I yielded at last to the Guidance, I yielded to Strauss, too. Now, at twenty, after seventy-two more months of barrage-by-Strauss, I loathe Strauss. A steady mechanical liveliness conjured out of no reality, seeing no reality. Music endlessly homogenizing. How can Uncle stand it? I must beg him.

Don’t do anything. Play along. Dance along. Shut your eyes. All this will pass.

My ears loathe the music. My feet dance along to it. I, too, am riven. Riven, I manage to go on.

A flicker on the mirror water. A flicker across my upper field of vision. The eagle is still here; now he’s circling. Now I look up to watch him in the sky. I survey what I can see of the street beyond our garden walls: not much. Has another rabbit escaped the pet shop, to crop our lawn? Or are there rats scurrying along the gutter?

Wings rushing at my face, rushing away again carrying my breath away, the eagle swoops on the fountain. I recover my breath. I shout. Galzy, a yard from the fountain, flattens herself, then scrambles to her feet and dashes under the fountain’s base. The eagle lands, misses and rises. Galzy screams. She’s invisible now, except for her scrambling white paw tips; but her screams would compel the dead.

The eagle regains height and glides in narrowing circles, again centring on the fountain. Galzy’s screams fragment my sanity.

Fritz crosses the red-brick path. Why is he walking lopsided? He halts under an elm, screened from me. I peer. Just as he’s taking aim, rifle raised to shoulder, I shout, ‘No!’

Fritz fires. Fritz misses. The eagle flies away, unhurt. Fritz mutters a curse, then steps out onto the lawn. ‘He was after your pups, miss,’ he explains.

‘I saw,’ I call down. ‘But that’s what eagles do. Spaniels are a dime-a-dozen, Fritz. Wild eagles, you mustn’t shoot them. Take the pups inside for the night.’

Fritz reaches under the fountain and retrieves Galzy, still screaming. I hear myself laugh. Fritz glances up, interrogatorily.

It’s my turn to explain. ‘She’s not hurt. She’s just a crybaby!’ Again I laugh. Loud and merry I’ve become these six months.

‘But,’ Fritz suggests, ‘she wouldn’t cry so if I’d shot that eagle.’

‘And then?’ Burrowing in Fritz’s arms, Galzy’s yelping subsides into a whimper; in the still evening air Fritz and I, thirty feet apart, now speak in normal voices. ‘Maybe she does want the eagle dead, all the eagles dead. A puppy, scared and angry, screams. Does she compel you to kill all the eagles?’

‘I’ll sleep on that one.’ Fritz nods good evening, and ushers the puppies into his lodge.

I watch Fritz walk away. How simple it must be in Fritz’s mind. Six months ago I, too, would’ve let a puppy’s screams override my sense of right and wrong or, better yet, rewrite it.

All along, my right foot has been dancing to Strauss on the grammy. Now my foot stops, and I don’t know why. Then a chill creeps up my spine, and I still don’t know why.

Galzy I watch. Galzy I see.

Me, thank God, nobody watches. Him, thank God, nobody sees.

‘Katharyn.’

Still half-out of the window, I freeze. If I jumped from here, I’d only sprain an ankle.

I straighten. Right of the window, oddly placed, is a pierglass. In it I see him standing. Thirty feet behind me, in the centre of the ballroom, on the glistening marble floor. Moored. His face turned away, his eyes cast down. This Stranger who lives in Uncle’s house.

He’s quick. He was on the lawn five minutes ago. What should I do?

‘Well?’ says the Stranger, staring at the floor a foot to my left.

I study him in the mirror. Rigid he stands, like a man holding himself erect with the last of his strength. For a moment, I picture a man hanged, swaying in the gallows, his body held rigid by an inhuman willpower.

‘Yes,’ I reply, facing in the mirror the crown of his head, ‘my dinner is settling. It’s time.’

I turn from the mirror, cross the ballroom, take the Stranger by the hand, and lead him away through Uncle’s Mansion.

What would Uncle say, if he knew about the Stranger in his house?

* * *

Uncle entered politics nineteen years ago. The Nation was in chaos.

We’d just lost the war. We hadn’t started the war, but we were the strongest nation on our side. So, all through the war, it was us the enemies blamed. They dropped leaflets over their citizens back home, and over ours here, citizens manning arms factories and grain fields. The leaflets were red and black, and they were crowded with caricatures. Of us. Ramming our heads pointy-helmeted into city walls. Dynamiting marble temples. Carrying screaming children into our mouths red-dripping and black-gaping.

Our citizens laughed at these leaflets. At first. A barrage of any kind eventually muffles laughter. Our supply lines dried up. Our soldiers mutinied.

It wasn’t on the field we lost. It wasn’t honourably the enemies won.

Afterwards, the enemies blamed us still. They pointed out to us the millions dead on both sides as you point out to a dog the poop it’s left on your carpet. They shamed us out of ever wanting war again. They crippled us, so that any war we waged would be one puppy screaming up at a skyful of eagles. They ground, with their heels, into the mud, our nation’s pride. They reduced our storied army to a litter of puppies. The puppies’ teeth — delicate, needle-sharp — they broke with deft hammerstrokes.

They made us pay for the war. They snatched away our most productive lands. Lands with coal mines, iron mines and steel factories. The lands that would’ve allowed us to repay the debt they imposed on us, they took from us.

Our only crime was to lose the war. For this crime, they branded our Nation a mad dog.

They forced our King to abdicate. They suddenly thrust democracy upon us.

In the first five years of democracy, we had fifteen elections and twelve governments. In the first fifteen years of democracy, gangs of Left and Right fought each other under our balconies with fists and sticks.

The debts the enemies imposed were hard enough to pay. Then the world economy stumbled into a mud swamp. Other nations pulled each other out; we were ground further into the mud. Our money became kindling paper; half our men lost their jobs. We defaulted on our debts. The enemies marched into our Nation and seized more of our lands.

We tottered to our feet only to collapse again. We dragged ourselves on through the mud, half-grateful that nobody was watching. From sixty million suffering souls the righteous, vengeful world had snatched away its eyes.

Uncle had fought in the trenches all through; he’d been wounded and decorated; he’d been blinded by mustard gas, but only temporarily. When Uncle heard our King had surrendered, he was bewildered. Had five years of Uncle’s life — had the sacrifice of two million of his compatriots — meant nothing?

Uncle suffered after the war. Our army, shrunk by Victors’ Diktat, dismissed millions of veterans unequipped for peacetime. Uncle, sporting on his one seedy winter coat his medals of honour, was assaulted by ruffians who blamed our soldiers for our Nation’s sufferings.

Uncle entered politics as junior member of a tiny party. In a basement torpid with beer fumes and cigar smoke, Uncle stood up to speak of his nation’s sufferings.

Uncle pointed at the enemies. We who had survived had become engrossed in the banalities of surviving. Uncle reminded us how unjust the enemies had been and were still being: how unprecedented was their punishment, calculated to starve us into oblivion. When we lay starved on all sides: then, perhaps, they’d look back at us, and see, and Tsk.

Uncle pointed at those within our Nation who had undermined our war effort. Such enemies within, he argued, there must’ve been: else how could our storied army have lost this war? The enemies without had bought up the enemies within: to leach our self-conviction, to rot our willpower, to sabotage our war engine.

Uncle pointed, unwavering, up and ahead. Uncle promised: We would rise. We would fight our way back into the Circle of Nations. We would do more.

Uncle opened his arms to embrace us. Uncle exhorted us: Nation, Awaken.

I say ‘us.’ But, back then, it was tiny audiences that Uncle addressed. Few heard him. Fewer listened. Legions of new political parties were battling for our attention: with words exhorting a half-dozen half-asleep barflies; with pamphlets that enterprising vagabonds collected off the cracked cobblestones for kindling; and with street fights that succeeded in getting a dozen parties, far-right and far-left, into the big centrist newspapers.

Most people Uncle couldn’t yet reach. Of those that he did, many didn’t understand him; they laughed at him. Others understood; quietly they bided their time.

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Copyright © 2023 by Amita Basu

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