Nothing Sacred Part 13

"Yes?" she asked frostily, though her eyes regarded Tea with several degrees more warmth than her voice indicated.

In Tibetan, Tea informed her that I had something to say to her.

She lifted a bird-wing brow in my direction.

Also in Tibetan, I told her, "One of the lower cells in the excavation is filled with seeds. We could make a garden."

"Why would we do such a thing? Who has time for such activity? Do you not have enough to do?"

"You know that as well as I do, surely. A garden would feed us." I took a deep breath and admitted even more, not only because maybe I'd just get one punishment for two crimes that way but also because I was sick of the games and if I wanted to talk straight to her, then I had to be straight myself.

"The ones I"-I wouldn't involve the other prisoners if I could help it, remembering the Colonel's admonition-"have planted are already yielding well, and maybe you know that. You probably also know that I've seen the bulletin. Maybe the people out there are too preoccupied with the crisis in Lebanon to remember to feed us."

"The state will provide," she said smoothly. It was a stupid answer, in keeping with her role but not appropriate to the situation. I glanced at Tea in time to see him making a pained face at her, as I protested, "But the pack trains are returning empty.""The pack trains are our business," she replied loftily, "and it just so happens that we have just dispatched another one which is certain to meet with success." Then with a glance at Tea she added, "However, it occurs to me that your suggestion may have merit. You prisoners have too much time on your hands these days. A garden will be a constructive project for you and also for some of the idle staff."

To Taring she said, "You will issue the contents of the storeroom only after writing down what is dispensed to the inmates and staff members. Staff will be informed that the extra food will be issued only to those who partic.i.p.ate in planting and tending, excepting only members of the pack trains while they are in the field. Two days out of every seven should be sufficient for most. Prisoners will plant as they clear their plots and may keep a quarter of their produce for barter purposes unless I say otherwise. Yangzom, you will inventory the contents of the room and will be held accountable for it. Find those among the prisoners or staff with agricultural training-many of the Chinese prisoners have served in collectives at one time or another-and seek advice for what you do not know about where the seeds should be planted and proceed accordingly. Vanachek appears to have some opinions on the matter. She will be happy, I'm sure, to devote a few extra hours daily to helping you in addition to her regular duties.

Captain Taring has more pressing responsibilities. Now, then, I have told you what to do. Everyone has plenty of work so there is no further need for you to disturb mine."

Taring nudged me and we marched from her office. I couldn't imagine what had come over her. She had never before seemed the kind of woman to let good sense overwhelm her native tendency for gratuitous nastiness. Perhaps the doctor was softening her up or maybe it was just that killing something the day before had mellowed her.

Dolma touched my shoulder briefly when she thought Tsering wasn't looking, and Tsering watched me from the corner of her eye as if she was afraid she'd need to call for a straitjacket soon. I'm not sure whether she had trouble understanding why I didn't tell about the seeds in the first place or why I told at all.

Dolma and I spent the rest of the day with the new project.

"Lobsang says that we must inventory this room anyway for our work with him, so we may as well start now," Dolma said.

I couldn't work up any enthusiasm and I worked mechanically. We accomplished quite a bit, I'm sure, because we cataloged seeds for hours, but I felt like the princess in "Rumpelstiltskin" trying to spin roomfuls of straw into gold. No matter how many seed bags we counted, we didn't seem to make a dent in the room. Toward late afternoon, Samdup arrived, escorting a fragile-looking Chinese man. 'Tsering has been interrogating the prisoners. This man has been a prisoner at four agricultural work camps. He will help us dispense any seeds already covered by your inventory and direct how they may be planted.

Tsering has also located four other persons with appropriate experience, but she is still convincing them to admit it."

"She's not torturing them surely?" I asked, alarmed.

"No. She wished to, I think, but instead she has instructed Pema to work beside the suspects and be inquisitive. Since the lion attack, everyone talks to Pema."

The Chinese man gave a small shaky smile and said in a voice as thin as the air. "Even me. And I pride myself on trusting no one. Is it true? Are we to have extra food?"Dolma nodded sharply. "Yes, but you must help. Everyone must work extra hours planting and clearing more ground. Over here"-she indicated the pitifully small pile-"are the seeds we have inventoried."

He and Samdup departed loaded down with bags of seed. I watched them go and sighed.

Dolma said to me, "It is very good that you found this room, Viva. Aren't you happy that we will have more to eat? Wu was very pleased, I think, though of course she never shows it."

"She should have been pleased," I said. "For some reason she and Good Old Lobsang Tea Taring had it arranged between them that I would be the one to find the seeds so that it would be up to me if the camp starved or not. They knew all along that room was there. Taring as much as told me so. I though he was different. I thought you were-"

She dumped her seed bag onto the inventoried pile, dusted her hands noisily on her hips and glared at me for half a second before lowering her bottle-lensed eyes, her mouth set in a hard line. We worked in silence for what seemed like hours before she said, in a voice as tight as the rope between a mountaineer who has fallen and the one attached to him on the cliff above, "Did it ever occur to you that perhaps we had no way of knowing if you, too, could be trusted?"

"Well, I can't," I told her, "so forget it. I'm a prisoner of war just like my cellmates, just like those men out there. And you're one of my guards. Taring is one of my guards. My loyalty is to my fellow prisoners and I only told because I-"

"Because you don't really see the difference, do you?" Taring asked softly in Tibetan from the doorway. He nodded to Dolma as if to say, "You see?" and walked off, his shoulders a little tighter than usual but otherwise totally unconcerned.

I returned to the cell late last night to find Marsh apparently already asleep, his face to the wall, and Danielson waiting up for me.

His voice was quiet-too quiet-and in the dark I could feel him clenching and unclenching his fists as he said, "They wormed it out of you, huh?" he asked. "They found all the other vegetables and confiscated them for the camp pot. Your momo is over there. It has vegetables in it tonight. I hope you're happy."

The accusation in his voice matched that in my own head but I was, of course, immediately on the defensive. When someone who can break your neck as easily as looking at you is peeved with you, defensiveness seems only smart. I talked fast. "Not really, but they knew about it already. Mmm, good momo. You've got to admit the veggies have improved the chow." I keep forgetting Du has no sense of humor. The fists were clenched now and despite his quiet voice I thought he'd be pacing if there had been room. "Look," I said more seriously, "it's not going to be so bad. Apparently they were testing me somehow or other and they were pleased that I told them about the seeds."

"I'll bet. Now they probably figure they can get you to tell anything."

"Maybe that's what they think and maybe that's what you think but what in the h.e.l.l is there to tell?

They know all about you guys, right down to the memorials that have been named after you since you were captured. Did you know there's a crematory mound named after you?"

"What are you talking about?" His hands remained open, though on his hips. His voice was a little louder now, more normal."I saw it on the camp computer. And there's some kind of peace prize given in Marsh's name. And Thibideaux has orphanages and hospitals named after him."

"Bulls.h.i.t."

"I tell you I saw it on the computer. And you know what else I saw?" I told him about the situation in Lebanon.

He shrugged. "That kind of s.h.i.t's always going on."

Marsh sat up suddenly. He hadn't been sleeping, just listening. "Sounds worse than usual to me, Du." He asked me to repeat everything I could remember about the communique, said, "Hmm," and rolled back over to face the wall again.

"Look, you guys are all some kind of heroes and I'm just a washed-up perpetual student," I said as Danielson continued looking stormy and Marsh feigned sleep. "They knew about the seeds already and I didn't see why people should go hungry-G.o.d, Marsh, surely you can relate to that. For pity's sake, I wouldn't tell them anything that could hurt any of you ..."

Marsh sat up again and said in a careful, overly patient voice everybody seemed to be using with me that day, "Look, Vanachek, these people may not be quite up to the old Khmer Rouge or the SS standards as prison guards but that's what they are. The strategy for "reeducating" prisoners is very devious. There's always a trick. Probably they'll let us plant the food and then take it away from us. Or use the barter portions to establish power cliques within the prisoner ranks and divide us against each other that way. While it's true we've never been as badly fed as in other places and have been treated pretty mildly, as these places go, they don't always use physical means to get to us. They've left us alone before except for the work but now one part of that's winding down. So maybe the game plan is changing. The thing in Lebanon worries me a little."

"I told you, Marsh," Danielson began, "new countries are always getting nukes."

"Not anymore, Du. I told you about that part of my work. Even NACAF doesn't have the nuclear force it once had, and neither does the PRC or the Soviets. Disarmament took care of the overstock and NACAF has been taking care of the situation in the allied countries-and that's nearly everybody, for quite a while now. I should know. I don't like the idea of a wild nuke in a place like Lebanon, where there is a tradition of not giving a s.h.i.t."

"I guess a lot of water has gone under the bridge since I got taken out, huh?" Danielson asked.

"I guess so."

Danielson lay down too. "Vanachek?"

"What?"

"A crematory mound? Named after me? I wonder if Sherry was there. I guess she must think I'm dead."

Sleep did not come easily. I lay awake listening to Danielson breathe lest he change his mind again and decide to kill me after all just to be on the safe side. As I listened, my own breathing and heart rate slowed to match his.I lay on my left side, facing him, watching the silhouette of his rib cage rise and fall, deeper darkness in the darkness surrounding us. My ear rested on the stone of my cot and as I lay there watching, I began to hear the echo of my heart, my breath, Danielson's breath, rising through the stone, reverberating in my ear.

I had one of the sort of dreams I had when I was in solitary, and afterward, when I was sick. I haven't had any in a long time. I've missed them. This one wasn't exactly like the others. There were no people this time, only an awareness of a vast place filled with something that started out as a heartbeat, a respiration, and swelled to become not just a chant but a song. Visually, I don't remember much except for a pattern of many interlocking segments shifting slowly, realigning into something that caused me to wake up smiling, before the men, to jot all of this down in my journal.

PLANTING THE GARDEN, DAY 1.

I spent today aboveground with the other prisoners. Marsh was setting charges, blowing up boulders under the supervision of armed guards, and the other prisoners and I hauled the fragments away. The ground is mostly clear now. The huge boulders were the last of it. Many had been broken up before with sledgehammers, and there's a good open s.p.a.ce to plant. Soft waves in the ground remain where ancient terraces held garden before.

The terraces puzzle me. Much of Nepal is still sharply terraced in places where it hasn't been farmed for years. Perhaps here it's because of the avalanche ripping away so much of the soil and piling it up in other places that the earth has begun in such a short time to regain more natural contours. But that's just one of the things that puzzle me. While it's not inconceivable that so much work would get done in such a short time with the technology available NAC-side, all of this has been done by hand. It must have taken a long time, though I admit I'm unaccustomed to hand-done processes and have no clear idea just what kind of time would have to be involved.

And it's not just Danielson's picture that bothers me. There's the business with Marsh too; the Tropical American Park Service (TAPS) was established before I was born. Marsh remembers his father being killed during the depopulation. And there's Thibideaux's story too. Although eco-reclamation is still definitely the top domestic industry of NAC, there have been no oil tankers in my lifetime. What little oil is needed these days is piped underground and underwater with the best technology money can buy.

I'm a little more aware of the reclamation stuff than many people because it's how my grandparents made their money and the reason they lived in a cabin in the woods-they planted the woods. Granddad put in the first seedlings on the site of a former state forest clear-cut by what he called the lumber maggots of the previous century. Technocrats and the military may have little use for wood, but civilians like it, both cut and growing, as a status-building and landscaping component. All of which meant-what? Danielson's picture, Marsh's father, Thibideaux's bird-cleaning youth-none of them fit in with my knowledge of what NAC was. Maybe it was a regional thing. Since I come from what was traditionally timber country, maybe I only knew about timber. But Puget Sound had once had its share of oil spills too, and Washington soldiers had helped with the "mopping up" of what was now TAPS, and Washington peace activists had been arrested and even executed for aiding refugees. Something else too.

Something about the memorials.

I'm too tired to think about it anymore and my head still aches from being out in the sun all day. It was a beautiful day, the mountains sharp and frosted as etched gla.s.s. Since I failed to conveniently find a storeroom full of hoes, shovels, rakes, harrows and such when I found the seeds, we dug furrows withour hands, and hauled water from the pond located where the lake used to be. My hands and back are killing me, have been killing me all day, but I must say I enjoy coming out of the closet with this farmwork business. I've had lots of worthless jobs in my life and studied a lot of subjects that prepared me for absolutely nothing, and by contrast it's a pleasure to make lovely rows and feel nice warm dirt still gritty from the dust of the stones.

Everyone else seemed to enjoy the change of pace too. At first some of the guards seemed to feel a sense of lese-majeste about performing the same task as the prisoners, and stood around posing with their weapons as usual, but then Dr. Terton strolled out among us, grinned as if somebody had given her a huge present, and squatted down to scoop out a row of her own, calling to Tsering, who was guarding the seed bags, to bring her some spinach, adding that she was partial to spinach and hoped it would grow quickly. Tsering took the spinach seeds to her, then began digging another row with the stock of her rifle, barking at her little girl Pema to move the stones in her path. The stones that were too big for the child to move, Tsering detoured around. And then another plane overflew us within hearing distance and one of the guards who was still guarding yelled and pointed us all back up toward the cover of the canopy. We didn't make it, but Dr. Terton and all of the guards. .h.i.t the ground and we prisoners automatically did the same, as if we were no more anxious to have the camp discovered than the guards and wanted the plane to perceive us, if at all, as corpses strewn on a fresh battlefield. I felt the sudden coolness as the plane's shadow obscured the sunlight but it flew heedlessly on and since I was lying facedown I didn't see how near it came.

PLANTING, DAY 10: FRESH CORN AND MERRIDEW'S MIRACLE.

Maybe that comparison with Mother Teresa in Thibideaux's file isn't so farfetched after all, since he seems to have wrought a miracle cure. I got permission to take some vegetables to the infirmary today to make a broth for the Colonel, thinking he might be able to absorb a little if I trickled it into his mouth. The vegetables are growing like bad weeds, at an accelerated rate I don't recall reading about in any horticulture books anywhere, so I was able to claim onions, carrots, celery and some of the first of the doctor's spinach, which sprang up as if at her command.

Thibideaux, wearing a rather stunned grin, met me at the door and when I looked around him, I saw why. The Colonel, who was supposed to have two crunched cervical vertebrae, which should have paralyzed him, and a broken leg and scrambled brains, and who has lain immobile on the cot ever since the lion attack, painfully propped himself up on one elbow and rasped a hoa.r.s.e greeting.

"My G.o.d," I whispered to Thibideaux, "what did you do to him."

"I told you I got the healin' hands, dollin'," Thibideaux replied, sounding as if he didn't quite believe the explanation himself. "Ol' Doc Terton, she's got 'em too. I guess this time what with the two of us and all, we put a little more juice into it and- uh-well, you see how the Colonel is. Course, I suppose I could have been wrong about how bad hurt he was to begin with but I'da sworn on a stack of Bibles I was right." He shook his head wonderingly and stepped aside so that I could greet Merridew.

"h.e.l.lo, sir. Welcome back to the land of the living," I said with sickroom cheeriness, setting down my vegetables and kneeling beside the cot, so the Colonel wouldn't have to strain his voice to talk to me.

He gave me a long look out of eyes that on a Caucasian would have been black and blue but on him were a deeper, swollen dark purple stain on his brown face. Around his irises, both eyes were red and yellow as eggs that had been incubated too long, but as direct and intelligent as they ever had been. His head was much less misshapen and the places where Thibideaux had sewed his scalp back together werehealing so well he looked less like something out of a horror vid and more as if he had a touch of mange.

"G.o.d, Vanachek," he said after returning my scrutiny. "You're filthy."

I smiled at him. He was definitely returning to normal. "We farmers are like that, sir. Nevertheless, as I'm sure you've heard, we're the salt of the earth. Speaking of salt, I forgot it, but I've brought something for a recovery celebration dinner."

I prepared the broth, allowing it to become vegetable soup since the Colonel could now eat in the regular way. Thibideaux stayed on long enough past his usual shift to eat with us, and with the soup to supplement our normal ration of momos, the three of us ate sumptuously, though we made sure the Colonel ate most of the soup himself. Thibideaux had been collecting the Colonel's ration of momos every day from a guard who didn't have the wit to think that an unconscious man had no need of his food ration.

The Colonel insisted that Thibideaux take some of the extra food back to the others, although Thibideaux kept half of it back so that the Colonel would have a full, rather than half, ration during his recuperation.

"Good to have you with us again, Colonel," I said, a little awkwardly, when Thibideaux had gone.

Thibideaux has an intense energy about him, especially since he's been caring for the Colonel. Without him, the atmosphere grew uncomfortably quiet.

"Thanks, Viv."

"I hope you weren't in much pain?"

"Not much, no. Actually, I was just telling Thibideaux, I had the d.a.m.nedest dreams."

His voice sounded as if he was drawing it out of a deep-dug well.

"Of your home, sir? Your family?" I asked the conventional questions, although I wondered right away if the Colonel's dreams had been anything like mine while I was in solitary, sick, and just lately.

Until I knew, it seemed best to remain conventional with a man whose straight and narrow rigidity of purpose had been his backbone through all he'd suffered.

"No, not my family," he said. "I don't like to admit this, even to you, but I stopped dreaming about them years ago. I think they're all gone now, if you want to know the truth."

"Why do you think that?"

He sank back onto the table and ran a hand over his eyes, trying to rub but lacking the strength.

"Well, they were old to begin with. And my dad, he never was in very good shape once he switched to a command post in Lebanon."

I considered telling him about the current situation in Lebanon and decided to wait until he was stronger, instead saying, "That's right. You did mention that your father was career military too."

"He certainly was. My grandfather too. An officer, Grandfather. A general. I meant to make it that high myself but I got captured first."

"Cheer up. Maybe you've been promoted while you've been in here.""Long as I've been here, I should be Commander in Chief by now if that was so."

"How long is that, Colonel?"

He waved his hand around vaguely, then dropped it. "Dunno. Can't think. Long time. Years. I know that. Help me get settled here, will you? My head hurts like a sonofab.i.t.c.h. You know, you can say one thing for these people. Lotsa prisons you get sick, you keep working or you're dead. I'm surprised they let me live."

"It's hard to farm while you're unconscious," I said.

"Farm? They found the seeds?"

"Well, yeah ..."

"You didn't tell them?"

"Not exactly..."

"They didn't torture you?"

"No sir, don't worry."

"They should have had to torture you to get that out of you. I'm sorry, soldier, but you collaborated with the enemy. You offered aid and comfort... My old man always did say no good would come of letting women in the military same as the men. Okay for you to be clerk typists and nurses and so on but you got no pride, no loyalty, no sense of place. I'd have to have you shot if we were back home, and I will testify against you, make no mistake of that, but I understand it. I read a few books in my time too, you know. Anthropology, history. Got to know your past and know your enemy. See, you women were always getting carried off to live with other people-wives, slaves, spoils of war, what have you. Women are practical people-have to be, I suppose, with children and all. You don't really have a country, just switch sides to be on whichever one your family's on. That's your loyalty. No patriotism in women to speak of. Not that some of you don't defend your country once you decide to but by and large there are just some jobs you shouldn't hold."

"Like being a prisoner of war, for instance?" I asked. "I didn't exactly sign up for the position, sir.

And I'm not the only one who's practical and thinks about children. You set the example by saving little Pema. If you can save one person, I didn't think it was such a stretch to save all of our lives by making sure we have enough to eat until the supplies arrive."

"You know what our troops used to do when they came through the villages, young lady? Strip and burn, that's what."

"Yes, sir, I majored in history-among other things. But somehow that policy didn't seem appropriate in this case. Besides, as a result of your action and maybe mine, it seems to me they're a little more lenient. The guard whose child you saved was very grateful and has been helpful."

"I didn't intend to do that, you know," he said. "It was just reflex."

"You would have wanted someone to do as much for your children, sir."

"I don't have any children, soldier. A good commander's 'children,' his sole responsibility, shouldbe his troops, not some civilians left behind the lines in the care of a woman he sees once a year and who is around to draw his pension if he's killed."