Nothing Sacred Part 7

NEW JOB, DAY 12.

Everything is going almost too well. Tea solved my paper problem by providing me with my own notebook and pen for field notes yesterday. He did not ask that I return them at the end of the day. This morning he left me alone in the corridor outside the room of scarves and the library. Somewhere in the building voices are raised-Wu's, from the sound of it, and Tea's. His doesn't sound as if he's angry, just as if he's talking loud enough so she will hear him over the sound of her own voice. There's a third voice too, never raised high enough to come to me as more than a murmur. There. That one stopped.

Now I can hear only the throb of the generator, except that since my dreams began, it has never sounded like a simple soulless mechanical device. I cannot be aware of its throb without sensing the mutterings and deep groans of the chant beneath its beat. The three electric bulbs we've been allotted throw deep shadows into the corners, draping the doorways with black velvet, softening the destruction.

Here comes Tea, he's carrying something small and rectangular.

LATER.

No wonder Wu raised so much h.e.l.l! Tea brought a tiny computer, no bigger than the volume of Huck, with a monochrome screen but with graphics almost as sophisticated as the ones used with the GAG program.

"I am having a bad time convincing the commandant to let us use this," he said. "But you are needing to see what has happened here and what we are attempting to undo." He grinned. "The commandant is reprimanding me severely for being most unsecurity-conscious around such a desperado as yourself."

"I heard," I said.

So we sat together in the corridor, side by side on the ruins of a carved pillar, the urban anthropological equivalent of a tree stump in some sylvan glade, bending over the little screen and keyboard, our shadows blocking the bobbing light from the slightly swinging utility lamp overhead.

Tea tapped a series of keys. I paid careful attention, and also to his access code. He made no effort that I could see to hide it from me so it may be that his EARL GRAY opens only certain files to which I will need access. Still, it definitely bears remembering for future reference.

The screen cleared and the graphics lines began resolving themselves into a flash of blueprintlike diagrams flipping past like a more sophisticated version of the old children's books that, when riffled by a thumb, turned slightly varied drawings into moving pictures to demonstrate the elementary principles of animation and amuse the kiddies. Tea punched another b.u.t.ton and the frame froze, then began filling in lines and shadings until the screen held two white mountains against a gray sky punctuated by fluffy white clouds. The mountain in the background was the shape of an inverted ice cream cone. The mountain in the foreground held what appeared to be the black and white photographic image of a great city, filled with people. The slopes below the buildings terraced to a broad bright lake which seemed to gleam despite the lack of color.

I opened my mouth to say, "But that's the city in my dreams," and barely caught myself. Tea looked at me curiously. "Nothing," I said. "What is this? Plans for a ski resort when the war's over?"

He held up his hand, then lowered it dramatically, forefinger first, and punched another key. Thepicture changed to a broad corridor with carved beams and a procession of robed people filing past.

With a brief look between his knees to the pillar on which we sat, he gave a short grunt and pointed to a brocade-wrapped column on one side of the procession. Its top was embellished with the image of Ganesh, the G.o.d who was an elephant on top and a man on the bottom. "You see? Here we are sitting on this structure here?"

"You mean this is what's left of that corridor?"

"Yes."

He punched another key and we were back to the mountains and the city. With another punch, the image turned from a photograph into an old film and the motionless figures began walking, running, sweeping the front steps of buildings, holding merchandise aloft in the marketplace. Then, all at once, a point of light twinkled in one of the clouds, and although the flags continued to wave and the waters of the lake to lap on the sh.o.r.es, the people stopped in midframe, as if listening to some great voice. Then a tiny gray donkey in the marketplace pulled back on his reins and bolted through the streets, pulling strands of yarn from drying racks so that it fell onto his ears and tangled in his hooves, trampling fruits and vegetables on blankets on the curb, toppling towers of baskets and pots. The single donkey's movement was lost as yaks and horses, dogs and cats also began running. I was watching the animals and the people so closely that it was only when the people began first to point at the mountain, then to throw their arms up over their faces or to run, that I noticed what was happening to the taller mountain. I had seen enough avalanches on the trip here to know that that was what I was witnessing, but with the little plumes of snow rising from the summit and the sides of the great peak, it looked as if it was a smoking volcano, ready to blow its top.

Blow its top it did, but not with a great upward explosion. In silence, the top of the mountain poured down upon the city, seeming almost like a huge peaceful drift as it covered the buildings or knocked them down the terraced slopes into the lake. Of course, it would not have been silent. If the computer had sound, we would have heard the screams of the people, the groan the mountain gave as its top tore loose, the roar of the rus.h.i.+ng snow, the thunder of the boulders smas.h.i.+ng stone, timber and flesh, and the churning of the lake as its waters swallowed all of the avalanche and the city it could hold, before it filled to a dry hump, a foothill to a ravaged foothill of the familiar horned mountain that rose above me every day as I walked from one bunker to another.

"Then this was a lamasery?" I asked.

He grunted. "This is my home. A bomb dropping on the far border beyond the great peak is making the avalanche. Here is what we are doing to remedy this."

He showed me frame after frame of the manual clearing of the city site. The first two frames showed a handful of ragged survivors lifting rocks, clearing draped vaguely human forms, digging down with their hands to scoop out the tiny pool that was all that remained of the lake. A later frame, flas.h.i.+ng by, showed a pack train with a party of weary-looking people in tattered uniforms led by a tiny dark girl. I thought one of the uncovered heads was blond and would have looked more closely but Tea rapidly punched to the next frame. Successive pictures showed the clearing of the boulders and the melting and runoff of the snow, the digging of the bunkers, the erection of the camouflage canopy. It looked a bit like the movies Mom used to show from her working vacations on ecotreks during the reclaim-the-earth kick when she was a beginning travel writer.

When the frames flipped back to the original picture, and Tea turned off the computer and closed the screen back over the keyboard, he rose and turned away from me without looking at me, but I hadseen the ditch of moisture that tracked down the pits on his scarred cheek.

DANIELSON.

I resisted my first impulse, which was to tell my cellmates all about what I had seen on the screen immediately. I didn't feel like being rebuffed again or like listening to their cracks because my information had nothing in particular to do with escape. Now, if I could get another look at those blueprints, at a slower speed, I might have something to tell them they'd be interested in. Not that, lately, they have been uninterested in me at all, at least not as an object of compet.i.tion and strutting. It seems to me, as I begin to have a little broader experience of this camp, that there are many other cell arrangements which could have been used in regard to me, but that Wu chose this particular one because of the way it would upset the men.

Not that I try to upset them. Their weirdness really has nothing personal to do with me at all. After the first rush of feeling flattered by the unaccustomed gallantry, I began to see that the compet.i.tion for my attention wasn't so much romantic or even s.e.xual as the sort of sibling rivalry I'd seen between Mom, Grandma, Grandpa, and Great-uncle Medicine Wolf during the last few years when Mom was stuck in the cabin taking care of all the older ones. On my infrequent visits from school and the city, each of them tried upstaging tricks worthy of the hammiest actors, if not open rudeness, to get my attention away from the others.

Even Merridew's charismatic leaders.h.i.+p wore thin while he was under the influence of my novel charm. One evening, for instance, he suggested that Thibideaux, who had the best-looking rice bowl, ought to trade with me, since I needed to get my strength back after losing so much blood.

"For Chrissake, Colonel, you're not her f.u.c.king nursemaid," Danielson complained.

"Let's have none of that kind of language around here, soldier. There's a lady present."

I was beginning to feel like a piece of china in a bull shop. I tried to laugh it off, "That's right, Danielson, there's ladies present. What's your f.u.c.king problem anyway?" and firmly pushed away Thibideaux's proffered rice bowl.

Thibideaux shrugged and dug into his rice but Danielson, who is a literal kind of man, less humorous than your average antiaircraft gun, was nonplused. "s.h.i.+t, Viv, I didn't mean-I mean, h.e.l.l, I've got a wife and kids myself and I just..." He actually set his food aside to fumble in his pocket.

He pulled out a wallet devoid of anything except a picture of a woman and two toddlers. "That's them-Sherry and the twins." The color in the photo was faded and the woman's light limp hair and eyes were drained of color, but I could tell she would be pretty, even without surgery. Her smile was strained and I thought she was holding the two chunky curly-headed blond kids still from sheer force of will.

"They're gorgeous," I said, lying only a little.

He licked a pinch of rice from his fingers and gestured to his wife's picture with a little finger to which a grain of rice clung. "Sherry has that same trick you do of turning your head at a certain angle when she's trying to read," he said as if it were especially clever of us to do so.

"I guess I'll have to sue her," I said, trying to kid him into a little less intense a tone. The moony comparison with his wife irritated me when it seemed pretty clear to me that all we had in common wasbeing female.

"What?" he asked, pulling himself back from his family to answer my silly remark. The picture was plasticized, but the plastic was yellow and cracked and had gray ground into the edges of the cracks from so much handling. Danielson's eyes were clear and pale around the pupils, so widely dilated to take best advantage of the b.u.t.ter-lamp light.

"Just a joke," I said quickly, reminding myself that it's a form of cruelty to inflict comedy on the humorless. "Tell me more about your wife."

He seemed at a loss for a moment and then said as if it was beside the point, "Oh, Sherry's great. A really good mother for the twins and when I was home, she always tried to make things nice for me-made nice meals and kept the kids quiet." That faint praise seemed to exhaust him, though he continued to stare at the picture, making me wonder what it was that made him long to hear from Sherry anyway, since she sounded very dull to me.

But I did want to know my cellmates as individuals and felt that it was vital to my sanity that I do so.

So, although I was sure Danielson would have been more comfortable talking about his last body count than trying to articulate his feelings about his family, I asked, "How about the kids?"

"The boys-oh, they want to be just like me when they grow up." I thought, What-a prisoner? But this time I was smart enough not to say so.

Instead I asked their ages, which turned out to be another trap, which I realized with another quite physical pang as a pained look crossed Danielson's rugged mug.

"I- It's been a long time. I haven't even heard from Sherry since I've been here, and it's funny but I just realized, they could be grown already for all I know," he said. Then added bleakly, "Like the Colonel said, n.o.body knows how long we've been here."

We'd been over all that already and my head was beginning to throb again. Maybe I'm allergic to b.u.t.ter-lamp fumes. If so, it's unfortunate but I'll have to live with it.

Danielson swung down off his bunk to squat next to me, his back against the cell wall, his knees spread, rear resting on his heels, elbows resting on his knees. His skin was covered with a chalky smear from the day's labors and a scallop of mud gleamed moistly on the sides of his sandals. Still, he was pleasantly warm and didn't smell any worse than the rest of us and the room, which was at its most fragrant since we empty the bucket when the guards bring dinner.

Danielson kept his voice pitched low, as if he didn't want the others to hear, and I realized I'd been doing the same thing, though the conversation was not especially intimate.

Returning the photo to his wallet and that to his pocket he said, very earnestly, "I sure wish you could meet Sherry. She's my baby, all right. At least, I hope she still is. I keep saying I haven't heard from her but I bet she writes every day. G.o.d, I wish they'd just let us have our mail. They just do it to cut us off from our own kind." This speech should have been touching but there was a woodenness to it that didn't ring quite true, as if he was telling me what he thought I expected to hear-his feelings about his family, which seemed more a matter of concern to him than to any of the others, surely went deep and yet the trite stock phrases he used to speak of them were delivered in a colorless and mechanical way, albeit with a certain wistfulness. Has it been so long since he's seen them that their memory has grown too remote for real emotion? I suppose it's possible."Surely we wouldn't be kept in the same cell if they really wanted to isolate us," I said.

"Oh, well, that's so we won't mingle with the others. They've got other prisoners here too-most of 'em gooks and wogs, a few Russkies. Traitors probably-maybe defectors. We all haul rocks together but the guards are always watching to prevent fraternizing. Guess they're afraid we'll rally the others with our good old American know-how and gang up on them. There aren't that many guards, you know."

"Have you tried to escape before?" I asked.

"Yeah, I tried it once," he said grimly. "Thibideaux did too- tried to sneak out with a pack train, get back to our lines, send help for us. But they caught him before he'd been gone a day. Didn't even take him seriously enough to punish him, just laughed at him and put him back to work on the rock pile.

Marsh would have tried at the same time, but he got frostbitten bad getting here and he can't take the cold out beyond the pa.s.s worth a d.a.m.n. The Colonel has been trying to get together a plan to get all of us out but they've always guarded us way too close for anything that big. And now there's you. Even if the four of us could make it, we couldn't just go off and leave you with the slants, now could we?" He sat in angry silence for a while. "b.a.s.t.a.r.ds." He squeezed the bridge of his nose between a thick thumb and forefinger and for a moment his breathing was measured and heavy, the weeping equivalent of dry heaves. His evident despair did nothing to cheer me, and I didn't feel that his confidences had brought us any closer to understanding each other either. Instead, it made me wonder if he was more of a dolt than I had taken him for originally or if I was missing something in what he said.

So I patted him on the shoulder and said awkwardly that I supposed I had better turn in.

He took the comradely pat for what he wished it to be and abruptly exited the lonely-family-man mode and lurched into a pa.s.s which consisted of grabbing my hand and asking if I wanted him to tuck me in. I managed to refrain from jerking away and also from saying, "What? Here? You've got to be kidding?" and simply shook my head and crawled onto my bunk as the Colonel called to him to join a game they played with stones and wood splinters.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL BLACK LUNG.

What a bore! As if being a POW wasn't bad enough, I seem to be sick all the time and unlike most of the camps I've read about in my history books, this one seems to have an uncommonly healthy inmate population and I have to be the puny exception.

It's the air, of course, and all the dust and dirt. As we dig through more and more of the rubble, we find more rooms intact, but Wu's wish is that we bypa.s.s the available rooms to sh.o.r.e up the hallway and clear the rubble to extend the pa.s.sages to the lower reaches. We can, she says, study the contents of the rooms later. It's frustrating, but when I find something in a rubble pile and slip it into my pocket to examine later, Tea makes no objection, and sometimes I see him doing the same thing. Now and then he borrows the computer again to show me where we're heading, but I prefer the reality of the library to all of the computer's simulated secrets.

Every day we pa.s.s the door, leaving all of those mutilated books still crumpled on the floor, and we dive deeper into the maze of rooms and cells no bigger than the one I occupied in solitary. "Deeper" is a good term, for each tunnel-like pa.s.sage leads farther downhill, and many small flights of stone steps must be excavated before we can continue to each new level, and that's what's done me in.

In the lower pa.s.sages the dust and stink is even worse than it is above, since there aren't as manyholes in the ceilings to admit air. We've swept and hauled dust and debris to the surface as if we were miners, and though it still isn't nearly the hard work hauling rocks on the surface is, my civilized respiratory system, accustomed in my youth to the healthful effects of being around trees and later benefiting from the cleanliness of the reoxygenated air prevalent on the NAC since the Reclamation, rebelled.

I coughed and sneezed until my head ached and my throat hurt, to the detriment of not only my health but my present a.s.signment.

"Here, Viveka, what are you thinking of this?" Tea asked me one day, unrolling a delicate sc.r.a.p of watercolor he had pulled from beneath a stone. I bent forward, to let the beam from the work light fall on it without my shadow obscuring it. The tight feeling in my throat, the itch in my nose and ears, erupted into a sneeze spraying spittle over the pastel pigments, making the black ink run like a movie star's mascara. Another sneeze blew a fragile silk prayer flag to dust, while yet another caused a landslide within the pile caused by a collapsed ceiling and trapped us in a narrow pa.s.sage until we dug our way out.

Wu chose that moment to make her inspection. She addressed Tea in Tibetan-I understood a few phrases by now- and he replied, gesturing to me.

"If she is not satisfactory, we can put her to work hauling rock with the others," Wu threatened in English, shrugging.

The doctor sauntered up then, just as I began another coughing spell and the three of them burst into a rapid conversation in Chinese or Tibetan, I couldn't really tell, the upshot being that despite what I gathered was Tea's protest, my cough and I were relegated to the chain gang.

It's not as bad as it sounds, however. The fresh air has helped my cough, and the cool breeze made short work of my feverishness, though initially I was dizzy when I bent to pick up the stones. As the day wore on, instead of getting much tireder I began to feel better, coughed less, and my chest and throat relaxed. n.o.body made me pick up boulders, but I stacked medium-sized rocks on the wall all day and while my respiratory system felt better, every muscle in my body stiffened to immobility the moment I shuffled into the cell behind the men and stretched out on my cot.

That night, Merridew cut the courtly c.r.a.p and pulled rank on me. "You know, Viv, my daddy and my grandaddy were career men like me. Back when Grandaddy served, they were only just letting women into the service. People had doubts about it then, and even though my daddy's second-in-command on the last manned s.p.a.ce flight to Ura.n.u.s was a woman, I confess I got my doubts about it still. And you're an excellent case in point. You were an out-of-shape mess when you rolled through that door and more than likely would have died of shock if we hadn't been around to help you and would have died from the trip if the old woman hadn't put that spell on you. And you were pregnant, which a male trooper wouldn't be, and then you lost a baby, which a male trooper wouldn't have done, and you got sick in a way that's impossible for a man. You're still peakedy and now you're sick again so you lost a strategic job that you might have been up to physically and are out there with us, where you can't pull your own weight. Not that anybody holds that against you, necessarily, but what if we do get this escape organized? You couldn't keep up, could you?"

"No," I said flatly. "But maybe you're overlooking other contributions I could make. I can speak a little of their language. I can find out their plans and where supplies are kept and-"

"You might have. If you'd kept that inside job. But even so, in return for that kind of help, do youexpect one of us to carry you piggyback across the mountains?"

"Of course not."

"Well, then, lady. You wanted to be a soldier. Don't you think you'd better start acting like one and shape up?"

"This wasn't my idea," I whined, managing to produce another miserable cough.

"You volunteered, didn't you?" he demanded.

"I hardly think it's fair to call it that when all the other choices are made unavailable, or you're not qualified for them, and pretty soon you find you've been herded toward the only one they ever intended to let you take all along," I sniffed, feeling sorrier for myself than at any time since my capture. "Where the h.e.l.l have you been, Merridew?"

"Here, mostly," he said, fixing me with a gimlet eye. "And so will you be the rest of your life unless you quit blaming people who are in no position to give a d.a.m.n about what you think are injustices perpetrated on you and stir your b.u.t.t to do something about helping yourself. I don't really give much of a s.h.i.+t how you got into this situation, Ms. Vanachek, I'm just telling you you'd better get yourself in good enough shape so you can leave with the rest of us if we make an escape."

"I'm in plenty good enough shape to die of exposure and frostbite right now," I informed him in a withering tone that was somewhat spoiled by having to wipe my nose on the sleeve of my uniform.

"Well, and if anybody'd get it, it would be you," he said with a disgusted sigh. "I'm telling you this for your own good, Warrant Officer. Now I want you on a routine of calisthenics every evening before you dig into your rice."

"With all due respect, sir, f.u.c.k off," I said. "I am a prisoner of war. As far as I'm concerned that means I'm out of this war, and also as far as I'm concerned that's the best thing that's happened to me since I got into this war."

"Warrant Officer, it is the duty of every captured NACAF serviceman and -woman to attempt to escape. Now, in my judgment you are incapable of meeting the physical challenge this would pose. For the good of your fellow prisoners as well as for yourself, I think you'd better reconsider."

His voice was calm enough but his face was turning red. "Okay," I snapped, turning my back on him and coughing as pitifully as possible into my fist. "As soon as I can breathe."

NEW JOURNAL, DAY 30.

I coughed myself to sleep that night and had a reprise of the dream I'd had in solitary, but this time I wasn't a little girl and it wasn't n.a.z.is: I knew I was Danielson, although I didn't look like him because I weighed about ninety pounds and was losing my hair. My rear was sore from continually being wet from dysentery and my stomach ached all the time as I trudged wearily from one end of a long kennel-like run to another, hauling rocks. I was building a castle, as in fairy tales, and I could just see the end of the long curly golden braid the princess had. I looked up and she waved. She was wearing a leotard and looked like my old buddy Sam and was telling me the health benefits of rock climbing. I wanted to answer back but my mouth was full of sores, and I knew these were from the disgusting stuff I'd been eating.I was thoroughly ashamed of myself when I woke the next morning, to find an almost empty slop bucket, a healthy breakfast momo, and a trek out into a mountain meadow to do moderate exercise all day long in suns.h.i.+ne and fresh air, presided over by gorgeous scenery and guards who were at least reasonable enough to allow you to stop to relieve yourself when necessary or get a drink of water from a kid whose job was to carry a pail and a cup around all day.

I did not so much as whimper, however much my body creaked and groaned, when we began the exercise program this evening, though I didn't enjoy it any more than I ever have and the cramped s.p.a.ce made it possible for only two people at a time to do anything which involved moving more than two inches in any direction. Still, I remain alive, mostly because despite Merridew's pitiless bullying I did only what I could bear.

The men were very funny, however, and apparently saw this new program of Merridew's as an opportunity to show the little lady how it's done. They stunk up the place royally working up a thoroughly goaty sweat while chinning themselves on an outcropping in the wall and doing sit-ups on their bunks and moaning that boy, were they out of shape, why while they were in basic they could do twenty times as many as this. There was much earnest lamenting about the lack of sufficient room for side-straddle hops, something I am very grateful for, since my frontal tendency to floppiness makes me most reluctant to indulge in side-straddle hops in mixed company.

After b.u.mping his head on the ceiling while too vigorously sitting up, Marsh declared that yoga would be a much better way to build strength, lung capacity, and properly condition one's muscles and tendons for the hard heavy work of the day.

That appealed to me much more than side-straddle hops. My grandmother could stand on her head until the day before she died and as a youngster I had been able to pretty well keep up with her regimen.

Of course, as a youngster I could also run for miles, climb trees, and turn cartwheels. But yoga could effectively be done to the same slow and sluggish rhythm to which my blood seemed to circulate these days and didn't require all that bouncing. So I chimed in, "After all, Asians have been doing it for centuries and they lift enormously heavy bundles with nothing but a tup line across the forehead and run for miles with heavy loads and probably have less s.p.a.ce than this to practice in."

"Sounds too much like 'If you can't beat 'em join 'em ' to me," Danielson growled, but then Thibideaux reminded him of the cla.s.sic martial arts movies they discovered they both used to watch as boys with lots of b.l.o.o.d.y ways of dismembering people with your bare hands and Danielson seemed considerably cheered.

Later, I asked Thibideaux where he had found such antiques as martial arts movies (of which Granddad and Great-uncle Medicine Bear had been so fond in their declining years, watching them on an ancient TVCR which they continually tinkered into operation with the same devotion young boys of affluent families devote to personal transport systems and young boys of less affluent families devote to rocket launchers and personal weapons) and he said, oh, you know, and looked at me as if I was crazy.

NEW JOURNAL, DAY 32-Work Detail.

The Colonel could have made a fortune as a civilian exercise coach, judging from the way I feel.

After only a couple of days, I can not only breathe but I'm actually enjoying the chain gang.

Partially, of course, it's the fresh air, brisk as whiskey and elusive as an easy dollar. Partially it's looking up from rocks now and then to see that great ruined mountain with its arms spread high above, asif blessing us for cleaning up the mess it made. For the first hour or so it's certainly the suns.h.i.+ne, which has been in plentiful supply and in which I revel until I become so hot and sticky with my efforts that I loathe it and long for a straw hat and sunscreen. And it's not all monotonous hauling of bits of shattered boulders. Perhaps that had been the case, but work parties have dug down now to a level where the ruins of the buildings Tea showed me are beginning to surface, so the debris I'm handling up here is almost as interesting as that on the lower levels. I particularly like the smooth, carved mani stones-there must have been millions of them here once, engraved with prayers and piled into walls. I've found probably two hundred already and it gives me satisfaction to replace them in a wall together, as they once were. And the shoots of blossoming weed that spring up beneath the stones please me too. Surely the growing things must indicate that the mountain has been dug down to its original soil?

This outdoor work also gives me an opportunity to study the other prisoners. Yesterday I worked with an Indian or perhaps Pakistani woman on one side, a couple of Chinese men uphill from me, a young boy who looked vaguely Mongolian to my right and another Caucasian woman, blond and st.u.r.dy, downhill from me. She grunted a lot, deliberately chose the biggest stones to carry, and swore copiously in Russian. More of these various sorts of people were scattered down the hillside, along with Danielson, Merridew, Thibideaux and Marsh. It's been good being with other female prisoners, seeing that they seem confident and in quite good shape despite the fact that at least two of them are pregnant. One carries a baby on her back, and, most unexpected of all, there are about ten children from the toddling age to that of the young Mongolian water boy interspersed with the adults. The children also carry rocks, some with great diligence, some chiefly lifting the stones to throw at each other or imaginary targets, playfulness benignly ignored and even smiled at by the guards, as long as they aren't the targets. One little girl seems to belong to the scowling female guard, but she nevertheless dutifully carries an occasional stone if she can lift and deposit it with one hand. With the other hand, she supports the baby she carries on her hip. I think the baby belongs to the Indian woman, since she is the one who has brought it to the field every morning and sets it on the ground beside her. The first time it squalls, however, there's the guard's little girl, hoisting it onto her hip and wiping its snotty face with her forearm.

Of course, I didn't want that fetus I lost. It would have been terrible to bear the child of rape into a prison and besides, I'm too old and having it probably would have produced a monster and killed me all at once. Still, watching these children, I think that at least it would have had company-at least I would have had company, selfish thought-and children have had even uglier places than this prison camp to grow up in. Not farsighted of me, I guess. Stupid really, but I can't help wondering, as I watch those other kids.

NEW JOURNAL, DAY 35.