Lilies
by
Iain Rowan
Copyright © 2011 Iain Rowan
It was autumn, and the city was at war. As the pavements turned slick with wet, yellow leaves, the hills to the north talked to each other in low rumbling voices. Soldiers clattered into the city in trains, spent their money in a whirl of drink and women, and left for the hills. Fewer returned. Those that did, drank more quietly, eyes on the floor, worn coats patched up against the spiteful wind. The leaves fell, the war carried on, and every day the night stole in a few minutes earlier. It was autumn, and the city was at war, and Alex was afraid.
He was one of the lucky ones. He had spent fourteen days on the front, cowering in holes in the ground while the earth erupted around him and men that he had spoken to just hours before lost arms, legs, lives. His entire world had been mud. He had lived in mud, tasted mud, pressed himself into the mud as if it could shelter him from the world being ripped apart around him. Then his sergeant had crawled up to him one morning, spat in his face, and told him that his daddy must have lined somebody’s pocket: he was to report to the back lines for transport to the city, and when—not if, when—he returned to the front the sergeant would make it his personal mission to ensure that Alex was first in the firing line.
Back in the city he was assigned duties couriering messages back and forth, from civil servant to general, to minister, to anonymous civilian. It was tiring, it was tedious, and it was safe, but Alex was still afraid and often when he ate all he could taste was mud. He spent hours shivering outside closed doors, shuffling his feet in the rotting autumn slush. He hurried from one side of the city to the other, two stops on the train, six stops on the rattling tram, hours of getting lost in strange streets, and everywhere, the dead.
Alex tried not to look at them, conscious of the impulse to stare, embarrassed by it. He had seen the occasional dead person back in the village, as had every child. He’d even slept under the same roof as one, when his grandfather came back. None of this prepared him for the city. In the village, custom was that families kept their dead to themselves, that the week was a time for private moments, not public display. In the city, Alex thought at times that the dead outnumbered the living. If the war went on much longer, maybe they would.
As he searched an elegant row of tall houses for the address on the letter in his hand, he passed one of the dead. The man stood on the pavement, looking at the houses, slowly moving his head from side to side in an unconscious mockery of Alex’s own search. It struck Alex that the reason there were so many dead in the city was that they could not find their families. They were cut off by the dislocation of wartime, everything in motion. Perhaps the man standing in the street, vacantly considering doorways, belonged to a family who had all died together, and now for a week they wandered the streets with the same cold stare, looking for one another, never finding each other, always lost.
Alex was only nine the day that his grandfather came back. The old man had been ill for weeks, sweating and wheezing in his bed. Alex had spent dutiful hours by his bedside, alternating between fear and boredom. It had seemed that his grandfather was over the worst and would live to sit glowering by the fireside another year, but then he sat up in bed, said something about last year’s apples, and died. He was buried the next day. Alex stood uncertain in the soft rain while his mother cried and the village priest stumbled through his words. Then the mourners walked away, Alex’s uncle putting a hand on his shoulder to guide him. Halfway across the graveyard he looked back.
The graveyard workers stood around the shallow mound while the black-coated priest knelt in front of it. His coat tails flapped around him, and for a moment Alex thought that he was not a man at all, just a swirl of crows, come to reclaim their graveyard from the intruders. Then the priest thrust his hands into the soil and pulled, and Alex saw the thin white legs of his grandfather appear, heard the priest muttering the blessings.
"This isn't for you," his uncle said softly, and the pressure of his hand kept Alex walking. He still looked back though, and he saw his grandfather's rebirth from the ground, the soil falling from him like black snow. When the priest had brought the body back into the world again, he nodded his head and the graveyard workers draped a shroud over it, and carried it slowly into the place of rest. "Now we wait, son," Alex's uncle said. "Now we wait for the miracle."
Three days later, as Alex steered his dinner from one side of his plate to the other, there was a heavy knock at the door. Alex’s mother gasped and closed her eyes. His father stood up and said, “Well. Well.” Alex took the opportunity to drop several vegetables under his chair.
“You go to your room now, Alex,” his mother said.
He looked up cringing, thinking that she’d caught him, but saw that her eyes were still shut.
“No,” his father said as he walked to the door. “No, the boy should stay. He’s old enough.” Standing outside in the rain was one of the workers from the graveyard, and just behind him stood Alex’s grandfather, looking confused, as if there were something very important that he should remember that he could not. Alex’s father handed over the customary couple of coins and the worker nodded and then walked away.
“Come in, father.”
The old man shuffled into the house and stood in the middle of the kitchen as if he were unsure what to do. Alex stared at him, fascinated. He was the same grandfather to look at as always, but his skin was pale and his eyes were clouded, the way fields were by the early morning mist. Alex’s father ushered the old man to his usual seat by the fire, his mother cried, and the boy hung back by the door, wondering, uncertain.
#
Alex climbed worn stone steps and knocked on a dark green door. An elderly man in an ornate servant’s uniform cracked the door open and raised a trembling eyebrow.
“Message for the colonel.”
The old man held out his hand, and Alex gave him the letter. Noise came from the end of the street, a brief scuffle, the sound of running feet, but no voices. Both Alex and the servant turned to look into the gathering darkness, but a voice bellowed from inside the house and distracted them.
“Who’s that? Who is it there, eh?”
“A messenger, Colonel,” the old man said. “Message for you. I have it here, I will bring it up.”
They both looked out at the street again, but whatever the noise was, it had stopped.
“A courier, eh.” The colonel had come down the stairs, and stood in the hallway red-faced, breath wheezing, looking at Alex. “Know what the message is about, son?”
“No—no, it’s sealed sir, I wouldn’t read it—"
“Don’t have to read it, son. Know what it’s about. Know what they’re all about, every damn one of them. They're about how little by little we are trying our hardest to lose this damn war. Don’t look so shocked lad, you think that’s treasonous talk, you should hear what the generals say. A drink for the cold, eh.”
The servant creaked off towards a side-table in the hall.
“No, my orders—" Alex said.
“Bugger your orders. Who gave you your orders?”
“My sergeant.”
“Bugger your sergeant. I’m a colonel, still counts for something. A drink for the cold.” The servant had returned with two shot glasses. The colonel handed one to Alex.
“You been there, have you son? At the front?”
“Yes,” Alex said.
“Thought so. See it in your eyes. Changes a man. Those who go there, they're not the same as those who come back.” He raised his glass in a toast. “To the end of the war.”
“End of the war.” The raw spirit burnt Alex’s throat and made his eyes water. He bit down on his tongue, desperate not to cough. The servant took the glass back, and Alex began to retre
at down the steps.
“Yes, the end of the war,” the colonel was staring out into the dusk, one hand tugging at his beard, seeing a landscape that wasn’t the city. “Don’t go back there, lad.”
Alex saluted and hurried away down the street. Just before he reached the main road, he saw a dark huddle on the pavement. It was the body of the dead man. Alex looked around, wandering what to do, who to contact. The man had obviously been searching for his family or old friends, and had not found them. Now his week had passed, and he was gone for ever. Given a chance for those last goodbyes, and it was wasted. Sad. Alex bent down over the body, and then he saw the white petals of the lily that had been placed on the man’s stomach.
The fire of the alcohol in his stomach turned to a sour swell of fear. He looked up and down the street, saw no-one, and hurried away towards the main road, towards the light. Alex knew what the lily meant: it meant that this was none of his business, and that he should leave now, before those responsible saw him there, considered him a witness to their crime. It had never happened in his village, but he had heard the stories, knew what the lily, flower of mourning, meant. It meant political support for the enemy over the hills, it was a mark of rebellion against everything—the government, custom and tradition, all the old ways. Those who left the lilies were subversives who put into practice the ways of the enemy. They committed the strangest of murders. They killed the already dead.
#
The night after his grandfather came back, Alex’s father took the boy for a walk in the long field. They said nothing until they reached the river. The night was cold and clear, and Alex stood and looked at the stars which gleamed hard in the sky, pins pushed through black velvet. He could hear his father breathing hard beside him.
“You know that he’s not back for ever,” he said at last. “You remember what I told you.”
“One week,” Alex said.
“Right, lad. One week.”
“That’s not a very long time, father.”
“Not long enough son, not long enough.” A silence stretched out between them, and they thought words that were snatched away by the dark water of the river, carried off before they could say them. At last his father sighed, and spoke. “But one week is what God has given us, and we must be thankful for that, a chance to say our goodbyes, fix your grandfather in our minds. It’s our way, and we must be thankful and respect it. It’s one of the things that sets us apart from the godless filth on the other side of the mountains.”
“I thought the dead came back everywhere?”
“They do son, they do.”
“So why don’t they—"
“They stop them.”
“How?”
He stared out into the darkness, shuffled his feet. “There are ways, son. There are ways.” Alex knew from his tone of voice that he should drop the subject.
“And after a week, will Granda go away again?”
“That he will, to the day, to the same hour he rose again.”
“And where will he go then?”
His father turned and walked away across the field, back towards the house, one hand up at his face. Halfway across, he stopped and waited for Alex to catch up. He put a hand around his son’s shoulders, and they walked back to the house together. A week later he was in his room, lost worlds away in a book, when his mother cried out. Alex never saw his grandfather again.
#
Days passed, the last few leaves fell from the trees, and the lonely routine of Alex’s work took him back into its arms and made everything outside it seem unreal. He lived in a city of shadows that seemed to only exist street by street. The graceful terraces that lined the street he was on were all that there was, and beyond them there was nothing. From the window of a tram halted at a stop he saw a dark haired woman waiting to cross the road. The simple beauty of her face was the only thing in that whole time that felt real to him. Then the tram juddered back into motion and she was gone. One night he dreamt of her, pale skin framed by falls of black hair, and even in the dream she had more substance than anything else he saw when awake. The war went on in the hills, the guns still rumbled, and everywhere Alex went he saw the distracted stares of the dead, as they stumbled lost along misty streets.
The sky was bruising with evening when he returned to the office from his last assignment. There was no-one else there but the sergeant, who sat next to the stove smoking one of his stinking cigarettes.
“No more today. You’re done.”
Alex sat on a stool, warmed his hands, rested his aching legs. “I’ll get away in a minute. Think I’ll just sleep the whole night through.”
The sergeant twisted the stub of his cigarette out on the dark iron of the stove. “I’d get out if I were you. Get out, get drunk, spend your wages on some whore.”
“Don’t have that much to spend, not if I’m going to eat the rest of the week.”
“Don’t worry about the rest of the week, son, live for today. I been talking to an old mate of mine, works as a valet to one of the generals. Rumour is, any day now they’re going to pass this work on to some civil servants." He spat, and it sizzled on the hot coals. "So that's you poor bastards back to the front. Count yourself lucky, you’ve had it good here, thanks to whoever pulled the strings for you—no bastard trying to kill you apart from the tram drivers, private room, not in some flea-ridden barracks. You’ve escaped the front this long, must have known you’d end up back there one day, fit young lad like you. They’re running out of fit young lads. They’d send me, if I had two legs. Get out, son. Live life, while you have one.”
Alex walked back to his small room. He thought about the mud and the terror and the choir of the dying who lay sobbing in no man’s land, he thought about the sergeant’s missing leg, he thought about the dead. He considered desertion for a while, melting away into the city, but he knew that he would be caught. And if he was caught, he would be taken to the moor to the west of the city, shot by a bored soldier no older than himself, and thrown in a pit of lime. No resurrection, no chance for his parents to say their sad goodbyes. He had hardly lived life, how could he accept that it could soon be over? He sat on his hard bed for a while, head in his hands, grieving for his future. Then he left, not bothering to lock the door.
#
All the light had seeped out of the sky, and the night was still and cold. It felt as if the whole world was waiting, holding its breath, because something important was about to happen. Thin fingers of fog wavered up from the motionless dark water of the canals. Alex walked towards the heart of the city. He didn’t know where he was going, but the sergeant’s suggestions held little attraction for him. What was the point of getting drunk in an anonymous bar, sliding slowly down a rough wooden counter as the night went on? What was the point in spending the night with a woman who found only his money attractive? Alex had never been with a woman, his head was full of the things he had read in books and poems, stories about passion and love set in worlds that seemed so much more real than that of the cold streets, the quiet small rooms with a bed and a chair and the stink of other men's despair.
As Alex reached a square near the centre of the city, the streets became busier. Soldiers on leave, the prostitutes and petty thugs who preyed upon them, officers of the general staff in their never-seen-blood finery, the ordinary men and women of the city, trying to lead a normal life amidst the chaos, putting on a pretence of peacetime in a city at war. Alex felt a stranger to them, a stranger to them all. There was so much that he wanted to do in life, so many places he wanted to visit, so many things he wanted to feel, and because a man he had never met would soon sign a piece of paper without a thought, he would never get the chance. A tram sparked through the square, metal grinding on metal. As it passed him, it slowed, and Alex jumped on to the footplate at the back, not knowing where it was going, not caring.
He bought a ticket to the last stop on the line, and settled back on the hard seat, content to let the sway and rattle take him to t
he place that he always went to while travelling, a place that was neither where he had come from nor where he was going. The tram jolted its way out from the centre of the city, heading for the suburbs. People got on, people got off, Alex paid them no attention. They stopped at a railway station, and all of the passengers left the tram apart from Alex and a short man who flapped and rustled at his newspaper. After a few moments the tram jerked and moved a few feet, and then stopped again. The back door of the tram opened and closed and Alex felt a gust of cold night air on the back of his neck. A dark-haired woman brushed past him, and the tram started moving again. As she passed, Alex smelt her scent. He could not identify it, but it made him think of falling leaves and the embers of bonfires and all the autumnal thoughts of things that he had meant to do and never done, things he meant to say but had left unsaid.
She sat a few seats in front of him on the other side of the tram. It was the woman he had seen a few days earlier. Even though he had only seen her for a few seconds, her face had stayed in his mind like a picture in a locket. She was more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen, even though if looked at part by part her features were no more than conventionally attractive. She had a fragile quality, translucent, like delicate china lit from within. The woman turned her head slightly to look out of the window, and the collar of her coat fell away to reveal her neck, slightly arched, a perfect curve. Alex felt a regret that made his fears seem an irrelevance. What happened tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that, was immaterial. What mattered now, more than anything ever would matter, was that he had seen beauty, and in another stop or two the woman would get off the tram and walk into the darkness. By luck he might survive the war, live his life, meet a thousand other people, and then die an old man knowing that he had lost something in his youth which he had never been able to find again.
She looked back in Alex’s direction, and he dropped his gaze. After a while, he looked up again. She was watching him, and he wanted to turn away again in embarrassment but for a few seconds he could not do so. Then he looked out of the window beside him, his mouth dry, his hands clenched. The shadows of the city flickered past. He could see her reflection in his window. She was still watching him. He found the courage to look at her again, but as he did, she looked away. Alex thought that she in turn was now watching his reflection, that they both looked not at each other, but at an image of the other.