someone’s life are true. Once it happens, they say, that person becomes your responsibility, and whether you like it or not, the two of you belong to each other forever.
It took us nearly three hours to get back to her house. Under normal circumstances, it would have taken only half that long, but Isabel moved so slowly, walked with such faltering steps, that the sun was already going down by the time we got there. She had no umbilical cord with her (she had lost it a few days earlier, she said), and every once in a while the cart would slip out of her hands and go bounding down the street. At one point someone nearly snatched it away from her. After that, I decided to keep one hand on her cart and one hand on my own, and thatslowed down our progress even more. We traveled along the edges of the sixth census zone, veering away from the clusters of toll mounds on Memory Avenue, and then shuffled through the Office Sector on Pyramid Road where the police now have their barracks. In her rambling, disconnected way, Isabel told me quite a bit about her life. Her husband had once been a commercial sign painter, she said, but with so many businesses closing up or unable to meet costs, Ferdinand had been out of work for several years. For a while he drank too much—stealing money from Isabel’s purse at night to support his sprees, or else hanging around the distillery in the fourth census zone, cadging glots from the workers by dancing for them and telling funny stories—until one day a group of men beat him up and he never went out again. Now he refused to budge, sitting in their small apartment day after day, rarely saying anything and taking no interest in their survival. Practical matters he left to Isabel, since he no longer considered such details worthy of his attention. The only thing he cared about now was his hobby: making miniature ships and putting them into bottles.
“They’re so beautiful,” Isabel said, “you almost want to forgive him for the way he is. Such beautiful little ships, so perfect and small. They make you want to shrink yourself down to the size of a pin, and then climb aboard and sail away…
“Ferdinand is an artist,” she went on, “and even in the old days he was moody, an unpredictable sort of man. Up one minute, down the next, always something to set him off in one direction or the other. But you should have seen the signs he painted! Everyone wanted to use Ferdinand, and he did work for all kinds of shops. Drug stores, groceries,tobacconists, jewelers, taverns, book stores, everything. He had his own work place then, right in the warehouse district downtown, a lovely little spot. But all that’s gone now: the saws, the paintbrushes, the buckets of color, the smells of sawdust and varnish. It all got swept away during the second purge of the eighth census zone, and that was the end of it.”
Half of what Isabel said I didn’t understand. But by reading between the lines and trying to fill in the gaps myself, I gathered that she had had three or four children, all of whom were either dead or had run away from home. After Ferdinand lost his business, Isabel had become a scavenger. You would expect a woman of her age to have signed up as a garbage collector, but strangely enough she chose object hunting. It struck me as the worst possible choice. She wasn’t fast, she wasn’t clever, and she had no stamina. Yes, she said, she knew all that, but she had made up for her deficiencies with certain other qualities—a curious knack of knowing where to go, an instinct for sniffing out things in neglected places, an inner magnet that somehow seemed to draw her to the right spot. She couldn’t explain it herself, but the fact was that she had made some startling finds: a whole bag of lace underwear that she and Ferdinand had been able to live off of for almost a month, a perfectly intact saxophone, a sealed carton of brand-new leather belts (straight from the factory it seemed, although the
It took us nearly three hours to get back to her house. Under normal circumstances, it would have taken only half that long, but Isabel moved so slowly, walked with such faltering steps, that the sun was already going down by the time we got there. She had no umbilical cord with her (she had lost it a few days earlier, she said), and every once in a while the cart would slip out of her hands and go bounding down the street. At one point someone nearly snatched it away from her. After that, I decided to keep one hand on her cart and one hand on my own, and thatslowed down our progress even more. We traveled along the edges of the sixth census zone, veering away from the clusters of toll mounds on Memory Avenue, and then shuffled through the Office Sector on Pyramid Road where the police now have their barracks. In her rambling, disconnected way, Isabel told me quite a bit about her life. Her husband had once been a commercial sign painter, she said, but with so many businesses closing up or unable to meet costs, Ferdinand had been out of work for several years. For a while he drank too much—stealing money from Isabel’s purse at night to support his sprees, or else hanging around the distillery in the fourth census zone, cadging glots from the workers by dancing for them and telling funny stories—until one day a group of men beat him up and he never went out again. Now he refused to budge, sitting in their small apartment day after day, rarely saying anything and taking no interest in their survival. Practical matters he left to Isabel, since he no longer considered such details worthy of his attention. The only thing he cared about now was his hobby: making miniature ships and putting them into bottles.
“They’re so beautiful,” Isabel said, “you almost want to forgive him for the way he is. Such beautiful little ships, so perfect and small. They make you want to shrink yourself down to the size of a pin, and then climb aboard and sail away…
“Ferdinand is an artist,” she went on, “and even in the old days he was moody, an unpredictable sort of man. Up one minute, down the next, always something to set him off in one direction or the other. But you should have seen the signs he painted! Everyone wanted to use Ferdinand, and he did work for all kinds of shops. Drug stores, groceries,tobacconists, jewelers, taverns, book stores, everything. He had his own work place then, right in the warehouse district downtown, a lovely little spot. But all that’s gone now: the saws, the paintbrushes, the buckets of color, the smells of sawdust and varnish. It all got swept away during the second purge of the eighth census zone, and that was the end of it.”
Half of what Isabel said I didn’t understand. But by reading between the lines and trying to fill in the gaps myself, I gathered that she had had three or four children, all of whom were either dead or had run away from home. After Ferdinand lost his business, Isabel had become a scavenger. You would expect a woman of her age to have signed up as a garbage collector, but strangely enough she chose object hunting. It struck me as the worst possible choice. She wasn’t fast, she wasn’t clever, and she had no stamina. Yes, she said, she knew all that, but she had made up for her deficiencies with certain other qualities—a curious knack of knowing where to go, an instinct for sniffing out things in neglected places, an inner magnet that somehow seemed to draw her to the right spot. She couldn’t explain it herself, but the fact was that she had made some startling finds: a whole bag of lace underwear that she and Ferdinand had been able to live off of for almost a month, a perfectly intact saxophone, a sealed carton of brand-new leather belts (straight from the factory it seemed, although the
Similar Books
