He had, of course, searched for other books by the same author but had found nothing. He instinctively assumed the author dead – because of the common misconception that most books found in second-hand shops were by dead authors – and because two of the preliminary pages of his copy had been torn out he hadn’t been able to find the publication date. A letter to the publisher had eventually elicited the deeply gratifying information that not only was Moylita Kaine still alive, but that she (for no good reason, Dik had until then tended to assume that the author was male) was presently working on her second novel.
All this had been happening at the forefront of his life as the political dispute with neighbouring countries developed into hostilities, but before the actual fighting along one of the common frontiers broke out. As a growing boy, bookish and isolated, instinctively peace-loving, physically clumsy, unaggressive to a fault, Dik had been painfully aware of the encroaching war, terrified of what it might mean for him, and alarmed by the changes it had already brought to everyday life. As he absorbed himself in Moylita Kaine’s enthralling novel he tried to wish the war away, to retreat into the satisfying and complex imaginary world she had created.
Many changes had taken place while he lost himself in this intriguing inner world, not only in the society around him but also in his own circumstances. Three years had slipped by, and now he was in one of the bleakest and potentially most dangerous theatres of the war. So far, the actual fighting had been confined to a large area of the coastal plain in the south, and the mountain sector had maintained grey alert status ever since his arrival. Nonetheless he was in the front line. All his private hopes and plans had to be suspended until the war ended, but he took his much read copy of The Affirmation with him wherever he went. It was, like the unseen nightly arrival of the train from Jethra, a tenuous link with his old life and his past, and in another sense a hoped-for link with his future.
A day or two after the night of the burghers, a printed sign appeared on the noticeboard in the main hall of the barracks. It said that a government-funded war writer was on duty in the village, and available for consultation.
Dik applied at once for a pass to consult the writer. Rather to his surprise, the pass was issued almost without hesitation.
‘What do you want to see the writer for?’ his platoon lieutenant said.
‘To improve my mind, sir.’
‘You get no relief from duties.’
‘It’s in my own time, sir.’
That night, Dik slipped the pass between the pages of the novel, choosing as its place the passage describing the momentous first meeting between Orfé and Hilde, the captivating wife of Orfé’s rival, Coschtie. It was one of his favourite scenes in the long book, rich with ambiguity, intellectual challenge and a throbbing undercurrent of sexuality.
Before he could make use of the pass Dik returned to duty. The next day he was sent up the mountain and began a three-week tour of patrol missions along the walled border. His squad arrived as a series of nuisance raids were taking place, and mortars and grenades were being exchanged across the wall. On part of the wall on the other side of the same mountain six constables from another platoon were killed and several more were injured. While reinforcements were being brought up from the village the weather closed in and all military action temporarily ceased. Dik was sent back to the village.
The blizzard continued for another two days, blocking the streets with immense drifts. Dik was confined to barracks with the others, boredly watching the grey-black sky and the driven snow. He had grown used to the weather in the mountains and no longer saw it as an expression of his own moods. Dark days did not dispirit him, clear days did not cheer him, as they frequently had while he was still at school. It was rather to the contrary, in fact, because he had been out on enough patrols to know that enemy attacks were fewer when the sky was heavy with snow, that a day that began bright with winter sunshine often finished bright with spilled blood. It was curiously exciting to know that Moylita Kaine was somewhere in the village but also depressing that he still could not use his pass to visit her.
The blizzard ceased on the third day and Dik was detailed to a snow squad, working alongside the tractors to clear the streets once more. Digging with the others, his arms and back straining with the heavy work, Dik spent most of the long hours obsessively wondering why the burghers had not laid electric warmways through the village as they had done along the approaches to the frontier, and on the banquettes behind the parapet of the wall itself. But beneath the snow and ice were the ancient cobbles of the village streets, grating against the metal edge of the spade as Dik laboured at the task.
Repetitive work induced repetitive thoughts, but it relieved him of some of his bottled-up resentment against the burghers. He knew little of what life must have been like in the village before the frontier was closed, although some of the lads who came from the region talked knowingly about gun-runners, drug dealers and shady businessmen buying up many of the local businesses, moving into the outlying farmhouses and taking over the burgher responsibilities, while the local folk who remained worked in the timber industry or as subsistence farmers. Now the village’s importance was its strategic position beneath the wall along the mountainous frontier.
Dik slept deeply that night but in the morning, as he huddled in the back of the lurching truck while it followed the steep warmway up towards the frontier, his over-used muscles were in agony. The pack on his back, his rifle and grenade-thrower, his steel helmet, and his snow boots and ropes, felt as if they carried the same dead weight as all the snow he had shifted.
The chance to see Moylita Kaine had come and gone and his hopes for a meeting would have to be put on hold until the next spell of stand-down. Dik was resigned to it with the weary stoicism of the part of him that had become a foot soldier. He accepted that if he survived the next tour of operations, or wasn’t injured or captured, she might well have completed her work in the village by the time he came back from the wall.
The frontier had fallen quiet again and a few days later Dik returned unharmed to the village. He had two days of stand-down to look forward to and the time which normally was spent uselessly hanging around the barracks suddenly had a meaning and purpose.
The pass the lieutenant had given him allowed him unsupervised access, during daylight hours, to the disused sawmill on the edge of the village. Dik knew the sawmill as a landmark but had never been close to it. During the long hours of the patrol he had rehearsed the walk to it in his mind a score of times. This aside, he did not know what to expect, either of himself or of Moylita Kaine. The prospect of meeting the writer was such an immense, unimaginable one, that he had not thought through beyond the first moments. He had nothing that he had prepared to say to her. It would be sufficient simply to see her, or with luck shake hands with her.
However, as he left the barracks Dik slipped his copy of The Affirmation inside the front of his greatcoat. He most definitely did want her autograph.
At the edge of the village, where the street narrowed to a path, Dik was surprised to discover that a warmway had been laid on the ground, cutting a black swathe through the snow. White vapour rose from it in the frosty air. He stepped on to it, his feet slipping slightly as the crusted snow and ice he had picked up on his boots melted beneath him.
The old mill soon came into sight. As Dik climbed up the slope towards it he saw someone standing by a window high up in the front wall. It was a woman. When she saw him climbing the warmway she opened the window and leaned out. She was wearing a large fur hat with flaps that fell untied over her ears.
‘What do you want?’ she called, looking down at him.
‘I’ve come to see Moylita Kaine. Is she here?’
‘What do you want her for?’
‘I’ve got a pass,’ he said.
‘There’s a door – round there.’ The woman withdrew her head and firmly closed the window.
Dik walked obediently towards the corner she had ind
icated, leaving the warmway and stepping along a narrow strip where the snow had been trodden down into a hard and uneven path. It was only as he rounded the corner and saw a door set into the side of the building that he realized he must have spoken to Miss Kaine herself.
While he had not built up a mental picture of the author, and had imagined her neither young nor old, he realized that he had not expected her to look quite the way she did. The glimpse he had been afforded of her had been of a woman in her early middle age, plump and fierce-looking, totally unwriterlike.
The author of The Affirmation had been, in Dik’s indefinite imaginings, more ethereal, more a romantic notion than an actual person.
He opened the door and walked into the sawmill. The old building was unlit and freezing cold but he could see the angular shapes of the benches and saws, the immense storage racks and conveyor belts. A huge engine, dark and covered in rust, squatted in a corner beneath an arrangement of overhead wheels, belt drives and shafts. Daylight glinted through dozens of cracks in the thin planks of the walls. The smell of wood and sawdust was in the air: dry and distant, sweet and stale.
He heard the sound of feet moving above and the woman appeared at the top of a flight of wooden steps built against the wall.
‘Are you Miss Kaine?’ Dik said, still hardly believing that it could be her.
‘I left a message at the Civic Hall,’ she said, coming down towards him. ‘I don’t want to be disturbed today.’
‘Message … ? I’m sorry. I can come again another time.’
Dik backed away, groping behind him for the door handle.
‘And tell Clerk Tradayn I’m engaged tonight as well.’
She was almost at the bottom of the steps and waiting as Dik fumbled with the handle. It seemed to have jammed, so he took his other hand from his pocket to get a better grip. As he did so, his copy of The Affirmation slipped down inside his greatcoat and fell to the ground. The pass, until then still wedged between Orfé and Hilde, slipped from the pages and fluttered away. Dik stooped to pick them up.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, flustered by the closeness of her, her immense height, her brusque manner. ‘I didn’t know …’
Moylita Kaine came quickly to his side, and took the book from his hand.
‘You’ve got a copy of my novel,’ she said. ‘Why?’
‘I was hoping … I might talk to you about it.’
Holding the book, looking at him thoughtfully, she said, ‘Have you read this?’
‘Of course I have. It’s—’
’But the burghers’ office sent you?’
‘No … I came because, well, I thought anyone could visit you.’
‘So they told me,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you come upstairs for a while? It’s warmer.’
‘But you aren’t to be disturbed.’
‘I thought you were from the burghers. Come up to where I’m working. I’ll sign your copy for you.’
She turned and went up the stairs. After a moment, gazing disbelievingly at the backs of her trousered legs, Dik followed.
The room had once been the sawmill’s office. The window looked down the hill towards the village, and across to the distant mountains beyond. The room was bare and grubby, furnished with a desk and a chair and a tiny one-bar electric radiant heater. It was not appreciably warmer here than it had been downstairs and Dik understood why Miss Kaine wore her furs as she worked.
She went to the desk, moved some papers aside and found a black fountain pen. As she opened his book Dik saw that her hands were clad in gloves, with the ends of the woollen fingers cut away.
‘Would you like me to dedicate it?’
‘Yes, please,’ Dik said. ‘Whatever you think is best.’
In spite of the moment, Dik’s attention was not on the signing of his book because as she started taking the cap off her pen he had noticed that in the centre of the desk was a large pad of lined paper, with handwritten words covering about a quarter of the page he could see. He had found her actually in the process of writing something!
‘Then what should I say?’ Moylita Kaine said.
‘Just sign it, please.’
‘You wanted me to dedicate it. What’s your name?’
‘Oh … Dik.’
‘With a C?’
‘No, the other way.’
She wrote quickly, then passed the book back to him. The ink was still wet. Her handwriting was loose and wild and it looked as if she had written, To Duk … will evey beet wisl, Moylilo Kine. He stared at it in joyous incomprehension.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I mean … er, thank you.’
‘I would have signed the title page, but you seem to have torn it out.’
‘That wasn’t me,’ Dik said, anxious to correct a wrong impression. ‘It was like that when I found it.’
‘Maybe whoever had it before didn’t like the book.’
‘Oh no! That couldn’t be true.’
‘Don’t you bet on it. You didn’t see the reviews.’ She went behind the desk and sat down, stretching out her hands towards the fire. Dik glanced at the pages in front of her.
‘Is that your new novel?’
‘A novel? I should think not. Not at the moment.’
‘But your publishers said you were writing one.’
‘My publishers told you that? What—?’
‘I wrote to them,’ Dik said. ‘I thought The Affirmation was the best novel I had ever read and I wanted to find out what else you had written.’
She was peering at him closely, and Dik felt himself beginning to redden. ‘You really have read it, haven’t you?’
‘Yes, I told you.’
‘Did you read it all the way through?’
‘I’ve read it several times. It’s the most important book in the world.’
Smiling, but not patronizingly, she said, ‘How old are you, Dik?’
‘Eighteen.’
‘And how old were you when you read the book?’
‘The first time? Fifteen, I think.’
‘Did you find some of it rather, well, bizarre?’
‘The love scenes?’ Dik said. ‘I found them exciting.’
‘I didn’t mean those especially, but … good. Some of the reviewers—’
’I looked up the reviews. They were stupid.’
‘So you did see them.’
‘Yes.’
‘I wish there were more readers like you.’
‘I wish there were more books like yours!’ Dik said, then instantly regretted it. He had vowed to himself that he would be dignified and polite. Miss Kaine was smiling at him again and this time Dik felt his enthusiasm had made him deserve it.
‘If that isn’t your next novel,’ he said, pointing at the pages on her desk, ‘do you mind telling me what it is?’
‘Nothing much. It’s what I’m being paid to write while I’m here. It’s a play about the village. But I thought everyone knew what I was doing here.’
‘Yes,’ Dik said, trying not to reveal his disappointment. He had seen the leaflet setting out the war writer scheme and knew that sponsored writers were commissioned to produce drama about the communities they visited. He had clung, though, to an irrational hope that Moylita Kaine would somehow be able to rise above that sort of thing. A play about the village lacked some of the appeal of another novel like The Affirmation. ‘Are you writing a novel, though?’
‘I did start one but I’ve shelved it for the moment. It wouldn’t be published … not until the war is over. There’s no paper for books at present. A lot of sawmills have closed.’
He knew he was staring at her, unable to look away. It was difficult to believe that she was truly Moylita Kaine, someone who had been in his thoughts for three years. Of course she did not look like Moylita Kaine, but she didn’t even talk like her either. He remembered the long philosophical dialogues in the novel, the subtleties of debate and persuasion, the wit and the compassion, the sheer storytelling verve. Was it the same person? r />
His first impression of her appearance had been hasty. It was her bulky winter clothes that had made her seem plump, because her hands and face were slender and delicate. He found guessing her age to be impossible: she was obviously several years older than he was, but that was all he could be sure of. He wished she would take off her fur cap so he could see her face properly. A wisp of dark brown hair fell across her forehead.
‘Is the play what you want to write?’ he said, still staring fixedly at her.
‘No, but I have to make a living.’
‘I hope you’re paid well!’ Again, he flinched inside at his own forthrightness.
‘Not as well as your burghers are being paid for having me here. But because of the war – well, I didn’t want to give up writing altogether.’ She had turned away from him, pretending to hold her hands closer to the fire. ‘Many writers are in the same position. You do what you can. Provided the war doesn’t go on too long, maybe a fallow period will be good for us all.’
‘Do you think the war will be over soon?’
‘Both sides are at a stalemate, so it could go on for ever. What’s that uniform you’re wearing? You’re in the army, aren’t you?’
‘The Border Police. Same thing, I suppose.’
‘Why don’t you come and stand over here? You’ll be warmer.’
‘I think I should be going back. You said you were busy.’
‘No, I want to talk to you.’
She turned the electric fire, indicating that he should go nearer, so he went to her side of the desk and leaned awkwardly on the corner, letting the heat play on his legs. From his position he could read some of the words she had been writing on her pad of paper.
As soon as she saw him looking, Moylita Kaine turned the top page and laid it face down on the others.
Taking it as a rebuke, Dik said, ‘I didn’t mean to pry.’
‘It isn’t finished yet.’