A Dream of Lights (17 page)

I didn’t open my eyes as I felt him lift off me. Nor as I listened to his heavy boots across our floor, or when the door banged shut and silence grew around me.

I just lay there. I could feel the pill, huge and thick, like a knot in my throat, easing down so slowly.

How long?
I thought again.
How painful? If only I could drift back to sleep and never wake. That would be so much easier.

I calmed my breathing and drifted around in the blackness behind my eyes and in my head.

Not long
, I thought.
Not long.

I felt so tired, so tired, of fighting, of trying, of working, of struggling, of hunger and pain and death waiting for me. It would be so easy to just lie there, and wait, and everything,
everything
, would be gone.

Gone.

I opened my eyes, shaking my head, scrambling to all fours. “Grandfather,” I said as loud as I could. But he was already coming towards me.

“What did he do to you? Oh, Yoora, I’m so sorry I didn’t wake. I didn’t hear him, not until he was going. What did he do?”

Panic was taking over me, my lungs burning as I sucked in breath after breath, my head spinning and everything blurring.

I don’t want to die
, I thought.
Not like this, not here.

“Yoora, calm down, breathe, talk to me.”

I lifted a hand and pointed to my mouth, touching my lips. “He…” I gasped. “A tablet… or… he…”

“He gave you a tablet?”

I nodded. Sweat dripped from me, as still I struggled to breathe; the room, Grandfather, everything was spinning and tipping and I could feel myself slipping from consciousness.

“Yoora, calm down, breathe. Or you’re going to pass out. Look at me.” He held my face in his hands. “Did you swallow it?”

I stared at him with my mouth wide, trying to concentrate on what he was saying, slow my breathing. I nodded. “I had to.”

Suddenly his fingers were in my mouth and down my throat, and I was retching again and again.

“It won’t have dissolved yet,” he said. “If we’re quick. If we can get it out.”

My chest and stomach pulled and ached as I retched again, so little to bring back up. But I felt it rising up my throat and into my mouth, and I spat it out on to the floor. A big fat white pill. Grandfather’s arms went round me, pulling me towards him and holding me.

“What is it?” I whispered.

He prodded it with his finger. “I don’t know. Poison maybe.” He shrugged. “But it hasn’t started dissolving. You’ll be all right.”

“Why, Grandfather?” I asked. “Why do you think he did that?”

He looked at me for a moment, pushing back my hair from my sweaty face, wiping the tears from my cheeks. “Because he can,” he whispered.

I don’t think for the rest of the night that either of us slept. I closed my eyes and my thoughts drifted, but it was never to anywhere nice and was never without worries. The same ones over and over. The guard would be expecting me to be dead. There was no way to hide or pretend. How long would it be before he found out? What would he think then? What would he do? How many days would it be before he tried it again?

At the beginning of every day, I woke thankful to still be breathing. And at the end of every day, I sighed with relief, for that fraction more time, even in the most terrible of places.

I was certain the guard knew by now, certain he would be planning, watching, waiting, that he would come again, when he was ready.

Grandfather took to bringing something back with him from the fields every evening – a stone that was a strange shape or reminded him of something, a broken stick with bark the colour of our old front door, or a thick blade of grass that he held between his thumbs and blew on to make a noise. Things to cheer me, I think. I appreciated it.

I knew a week had passed since the attack because he brought home the seventh thing.

“Look, Yoora,” he said with a smile on his face. “I found a feather.”

I held it between my fingers, long and graceful and sleek, then brushed it down my palm.

“We need to leave, Grandfather,” I said. “It’s the only thing we can do. He’s going to come back for me, and you too probably. At least this way we have a chance, we can try, we can find the hole in the fence again, and crawl through, and we can jump the ditch, and… and… we have to try.”

“They’ve probably fixed it,” he replied, turning away.

“But they might not have done. We can go and try, and if they have, we can come back.”

His sigh was heavy and long and despondent. I watched his back as his head slumped and his hand ran through his hair.

“Grandfather,” I whispered. “Please. We have to try.”

He didn’t turn to look at me; he just shook his head. “Not yet, Yoora, not yet.”

Then when?
I wanted to say.
When?

I didn’t know what month it was when I woke that morning, or what day. I had rubbed away all the marks on my wall, smoothed away the days and weeks and months I had spent there. I didn’t want to keep track of my life disappearing as one season bled into another and another.

I woke that morning to find that the sickness was back, with a ferocity I could never have imagined.

I woke in pain. More than pain. With my stomach turning inside out and my back trying to bend me double. I woke certain I was dying.

I rolled on to my side and over to my knees, crawling and staggering from my bed and to the door, scrabbling at the handle and pulling myself outside. Crouching on the ground, I retched and retched, steam lifting from the puddle of sick at my feet, bile stinging through my nostrils. I couldn’t move. Daren’t move in case it hurt more. I just wanted to cry and curl up and disappear.

I felt Grandfather’s arm sneak round my waist, and try to lift me to standing, my body coiled tight as he tried to hold me up and guide me back inside.

“Lie down,” he whispered, and eased me on to the bed.

I stared up at him.
What is that look in his eyes?
I thought.
What is he keeping from me?

“Grandfather?” I breathed. “I think I’m dying.” Tears streamed down my face and my body shook and trembled and I clasped at my stomach again, lurching forward. “Please.”

He leant towards me. “Sssshhhhh,” he whispered. And with his face close to mine, he stroked my hair, his breathing soft and slow on my cheek, measured and relaxed. “You’re not going to die,” he said. “Not here. Not yet.” His fingers rubbed down my cheek, so rough and dry, but so calm, and that calm seeped into me and I felt myself relax, and felt the pain subside a little.

I was hot and cold, clammy and shaky. “What did we eat yesterday?” I asked.

He shrugged and placed his hands on my stomach, then on my sides, and I watched his frown grow and listened to his heavy sigh. He didn’t smile, he just stared at me, with a thoughtfulness that worried me, and he kissed me on the forehead, stood up and moved to the window, staring out. “Snow’s coming,” he whispered.

I curled up on top of the blanket, my back aching, my body hurting all over. “I just want to sleep,” I whispered. My eyes were closed, but I felt him next to me and I heard a bowl put in front of me, but I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t want to see yet more cornmeal.

“You have to eat,” he said. “Even if you throw it back up again. You have to try.”

I opened my eyes a crack and through the blurriness I tried to focus on the bowl. It didn’t look like cornmeal; it looked like, and I could barely believe it, noodles. A bowl of noodles. But no, it couldn’t be, I knew it couldn’t. My eyes peered open more. “Dried worms,” I stated.

“I’ve been saving them.” He sat next to me, his cornmeal in front of him.

“Why aren’t you having any?”

“I’m not ill,” he replied.

“But—”

His head was shaking. “No arguments.” He eased me up to sitting and propped me against the wall, and with hands still trembling, I dropped a worm into my mouth and chewed. He lifted a cup of water to my lips and the coolness of it felt wonderful on my tongue and down my throat.

I knew I had to go to work and I knew it would be better, easier, if there was something in my stomach, some energy I hoped. And so one by one, I took each worm, chewed and swallowed.

The pain subsided, but still I ached, and still I felt sick and weak, but we walked together, me and Grandfather, along the path to work, quiet but for the footsteps of hundreds if not thousands of other prisoners, not a word from their lips – no gossip, no chatter, no news or anything. And not a word from ours.

I remember that morning so well. I was gripped by a fear so complete, a knowledge so unquestionable, that it would be my last. The words playing over and over in my head –
I will not take this walk tomorrow.
And no matter how much I tried to reason with myself, I couldn’t shake it. I felt so ill. I was dying. I was certain.

Grandfather turned off at the fields and I continued away from him with tears stinging my eyes. As I reached the break in the path, I turned back to see him. He was standing, quite still, watching me go, and we held each other’s gaze for a moment, the air stagnant as something unseen passed across the space between us, a knowledge or recognition, an answer to a question never asked.

“I love you, Grandfather,” I breathed, and I wished the words would carry on the wind. I wished I could go back to him. I wished I could tell a guard I was ill, that I needed to lie down, rest for the day. But there were no sick days. There were just alive days or dead days.

We stared at each other across the empty fields, and I watched a guard march up to him. But Grandfather was oblivious to the questions even I could hear as to why he was doing nothing, or the guard shouting to get back to work, and I hoped he was oblivious to the pain gripping my stomach and feeding into my back, my body trembling as I tried not to stagger forward, or curl over, or shout out. Because I would not allow him to see what was happening to me or how much I was hurting.

Again the guard shouted, and he lifted his stick, and I watched it come down across Grandfather’s back, but I didn’t move or shout or scream. I waited instead for him to stand up, then I turned and walked away.

Because I had to.

The factory loomed up in front of me, the smell of rubber turning my stomach as I headed through the doors, the heat like a slap in the face that took your breath away. My head was spinning, darkness in front of my eyes with lights speckling, a fuzzy head, a thick throat; the presses, the people, the vats of liquid rubber, the conveyor belts, the cutting blades, the strip lights high above me, all looming in and out of focus, back and forth in my vision.

The heat, stifling, constricting, suffocating.

Someone, a woman, loomed close to me, her eyes sharp and narrow, her face a skeleton, peering at me, frowning at me, her head shaking.
What?
I thought or maybe said, confused.

Sickness came again, and I ran outside, falling to the ground, retching and retching until a worm came up: my breakfast.

“You stinking dog!” shouted a guard and I felt a boot in my leg. “Get up, get back to work, you have a quota to make. You want to let down our Dear Leader?”

I felt my head shake, heard my words of innocence and saw, somehow, his boots trudge away from me. Then kind hands lifted me to standing, fingers pushing back the hair from my face, eyes filled with compassion looking into mine.

“Your grandfather loves you very much,” she whispered.

The fog cleared from in front of my eyes and I saw her, an old face, the woman from near our hut who had helped us way back on our arrival here. Her eyes were full of pain, yet survival, her skin fragile like it would split if she smiled, her body so frail that if I breathed on her, I thought she’d fall.

“He asked me to look after you. To make sure you get back tonight. Promised me food, he did. And good food. Cockroaches, slops from the pigs.”

I remembered her, remembered her daughter who had died not long ago. She was one of those who had eaten the clay.

“I can’t remember your name,” I said.

She shook her head. “You never knew it.” And before we passed back through the doors, before we were surrounded by a million eyes watching and judging, she stared hard into my face and put a hand upon my stomach. “Hurt much now?”

“Eased a little,” I replied.

She followed me over to the presses, the sheets of rubber formed, turned over, the shapes pressed out. “Happens like that though, I think,” I muttered, more to myself than to her. “Food poisoning. Comes and goes, I think. The pain.”

She gave me the strangest of looks from the corner of her eye, then she nodded, a slow, silent movement, her eyes flicking over me, watching me.