Chroniques du Pays des Mères
Élisabeth Vonarburg
(Excerpt chapter 3, p. 67-73)
Lisbeï went and sat down in front of the desk.
The Capta opened the door and an old Blue entered, carrying a tray covered with strange objects. The Blue put the objects on the desk, one by one. There were little vials and things that looked like pen-holders, and white compresses. The old Blue told Lisbeï to undo her tunic and bare her shoulders.
Lisbeï obeyed.
"This won't hurt much," murmured the old Blue.
"Lisbeï of Bethely-Callenbasch, our daughter and our sister in Elli," said the Capta coldly, not looking at Lisbeï, "welcome to our midst."
When Lisbeï left the Capta's office, she bore the marks of her Lines: the blue triangle with wavy yellow lines denoting Bethely, and the two small black stars, one lower than the other, inside a red square, the mark of Callenbasch. The old Blue had lied or else she had forgotten: it hurt. But not a cry, not a moan had escaped Lisbeï. She had stared straight ahead the whole time. The Capta had stood in front of her throughout the tattooing, arms folded. Lisbeï stared at the Capta's belly, invisible beneath the folds of the long red dress. The belly where Tula had grown.
Much later, she would realise that during this first meeting Selva had never said she was Lisbeï's mother as well.***
Lisbeï could have loved Selva. For years, however, she would have to be content with confused and revolving feelings of respect, admiration and hate.
The Book of Bethely was very big and thick. It was bound in tawny leather and bore the gilded stamp of Bethely on its cover and spine. The pages were stiff and had to be turned slowly, with care and reverence, releasing an odour that Lisbeï soon linked with History and with knowledge in general: the smell of leather, ink, paper, glue, and especially of the pictures with their protective sheets of thin, rustling onionskin. Every once in a while there were printed pages. There were very old drawings, some of them rather awkward, then engravings, and as you went further into the Book, a different kind of picture - blurred and yellowed, a kind of thick board held between two glued pages with a rectangle cut out. Later they weren't so thick and the images were sharper, with contrasting ochres and sepias: "photographs" (a word Lisbeï had difficulty spelling for a long time). They were exact reproductions of History, a piece magically torn from space and time, or so she thought at first.
The first lesson lasted for a long time. Selva had taken Lisbeï in her arms to lift her onto the stool in front of the lectern (the light was there, but all too brief, distant and forbidden). And Selva began turning the pages and telling Lisbeï the story of Bethely. All the drawings, engravings and photographs showed the same thing: the Towers, hard to recognize at first, but as the pages turned they were transformed into their familiar selves. The ruins that first surrounded them disappeared, and there were fields, trees growing, trails becoming paths, then roads. Triangular palisades with walkways and turrets rose up and were dismantled. The earth walls on which they had stood spread into a mound. New palisades arose, only to disappear in turn. Grass covered the old earthworks, and animals grazed there - brown dots for the wicows, golden yellow for the ovinas. Now it was the familiar round, flat-topped hill with roads snaking this way and that, beyond which gardens and orchards spread in concentric rings. The porticos running around the base of each Tower were recent additions, not visible in the first photographs. By contrast, the three aerial walk-ways linking the three Towers were old, and had already been visible in the drawings.
One, ten, twenty pages: twenty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty years, translated Selva. Like a calendar, thought Lisbeï suddenly. The pages kept turning: here was the central court being renovated, the porticos growing bit by bit around the Tower bases, the outside staircases proliferating like spidawebs and now it looked like Bethely. This was three hundred and sixty-eight years ago, at the time of Alicia, first Capta of Bethely.
Selva could very well have begun Lisbeï's education in some other way, or have used some other book of History. But she knew what she was doing. Her mother before her had done it.
History, mused Lisbei that night as she lay in bed telling herself about her day. History was like stories, and like stories it was true, only in a different way. Just as the Word of Elli explained why the world existed, why there was something instead of nothing, so History explained why now existed, and how yesterday became now. Until this point, Lisbeï had thought vaguely that she and Tula had their origin in the belly where they had grown. These bellies, these "wombs," these mothers, had grown in other mothers, other wombs, and so on in a series stretching back to Elli. She used to think only people had origins. But here were places and things with origins of their own, inextricably bound up with the origins of people. That was History, too, a sort of huge, invisible womb just like Elli's. Or rather, inside the First Womb that was Elli's. The Word and History made a whole, with History making the chain of links between the first woman created by Elli and this young Red, mother of Tula and Lisbeï, severe, unapproachable and powerful, the Mother of Bethely.
It was Selva who opened the Book, who opened History for Lisbeï, Selva who gave her Bethely (and soon, step by step, all of Maerlande). And was it not Selva who had created Tula for her, who had given her Tula in spite of everything? It was as though the movement set in motion by Tula's appearance, all those shiftings, meetings, and followings, had led inevitably to this little dark-panelled room where Lisbeï, the future Mother of Bethely, had only to take her place in an order of things beyond her understanding, but which had awaited her from the beginning of time.
Everybody (starting with Selva) seemed so quietly confident that things were just as they should be. How could Lisbeï, far from Tula, resist the invisible and constant pressure of all those presences - Bethely, the Family, the world? It was so reassuring to know who you were, what you had to do, where you were going. Now Lisbeï went about the Tower with new confidence, feeling a kind of vague but enveloping affection for everything she saw. Sometimes, when she was by herself, she would trail a hand along the wainscoting on the corridor walls, scrutinizing the mosaics, fingering and sniffing the curtains. One day she'd be the Mother, one day she'd be Bethely. The corridors, the rooms, the great staircase, the little hidden stairs, all of them formed one big body that would be the image of her own: a living body, breathing rhythmically - the first wave of workas going out into the dawn at six o'clock, the last at nine; the coming and going of the three sittings of each meal; the exodus of the afternoon workas and the crosscurrents at the end of the day, when the last afternoon teams flowed in past the outgoing teams of the evening; and finally, at ten at night, the lingering voices in the corridors as the great body of Bethely settled down before sleep
And if Lisbeï wasn't already asleep, she could sometimes think of Tula without too much pain. Since she was studying with the Mother and the Memory, she was allowed to have a big notebook for her homework. Each night she filled sheets torn from the notebook with tiny handwriting, making the precious paper last as long as possible. She wrote down the important events of the day. Sometimes she copied down the workas' timetables or drew a detailed map of each Tower, level by level. Bethely was like the little puzzle-box that helped you learn letters and figures in the Garderie: you pushed wooden squares around, mixing everything up until you got the squares in the proper order, left to right and top to bottom, A-B-C-D, 1-2-3-4, the Levels, the hours, the days Bethely was merely a bigger puzzle-box, and you moved yourself from space to space. The empty space, the one that allowed you to move around, was the Garderie. You filled the empty space with different squares until everything was in order and the empty space stopped after the Z or the zero. The space was a door - a door through which (because Lisbeï had earned this reward) Tula would one day come. And when she came, Lisbeï would give her the secret journal. She'd give her Bethely, and since she, Lisbeï, was Bethely, Tula would know her as well. Tula wouldn't be angry because Lisbeï hadn't tried to reach her in the Garderie no matter what. Tula would understand.
Lisbei had indeed thought about sending messages to Tula. But how? Who would carry them? She couldn't risk taking another dotta into her confidence. Would Mooreï or Antonë do it? Too dangerous. After all, she had to admit they'd given her away to Selva already. She didn't blame them too much, now that she understood how impossible it was to arrange secret meetings with Tula. They were two years apart. They couldn't have seen each other in secret for two whole years! They'd been lucky in the Garderie. Five months had been too short for anyone to have suspected anything. To try getting to Tula from the Tower, though Sooner or later she'd be caught and that wouldn't help anyone, would it? No, Tula would surely understand. Anyway, this was the unspoken pact between Lisbeï and Selva, or at least what Lisbei imagined it to be: she would give up Tula for the time being, and in exchange she would have Bethely with Tula, later.
She tried not to dwell too much on what Tula might be thinking or feeling. When the sadness, the sense of helplessness, became too much to bear, she tried to find comfort in the thought that one day she would work up the courage to ask Antonë to speak to Tula. The young Blue seemed more likely to help her than Mooreï. One day she'd ask her, once she'd proved her good faith so well to them all that the Mother couldn't blame her for wanting to console Tula a little. Later. Time was on her side. The tide that had brought her Tula and then separated them would surely bring her back again. Time in fact was like a big staircase, thought Lisbeï as she gradually dropped off to sleep, just like the now silent, great body of Bethely. A big, predictable staircase, going toward tomorrow and tomorrow and knowing exactly what tomorrow would be. One day soon (she checked off the squares on the tiny calendar she had surreptitiously made), Tula would be seven and then she'd come and be with Lisbeï. They'd stay together, of course, because they were both daughters of the Mother of Bethely. And then one day they'd become Reds and Lisbeï would be Mother of Bethely and they'd make their babies together and never, never be parted...
© 1999 Éditions Alire & Élisabeth Vonarburg
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