The Wild Girls (6 page)

When the sun rose, the people of Belen House ceased to hear the ghost. They made ready for the wedding festival as best they could.

The people of Bal House came. Mal was brought out from behind the yellow curtain, wearing voluminous unsewn brocaded silks and golden jewelry, her transparent veil like rain about her head. She looked very small in the elaborate draperies, straight-backed, her gaze held down. Ralo ten Bal was resplendent in puffed and sequined velvet. Tudju lighted the wedding fire and began the rites.

Modh listened, listened, not to the words Tudju chanted. She heard nothing.

The wedding party was brief, strained, everything done with the utmost formality. The guests left soon after the ceremony, following the bride and groom to Bal House, where there was to be more dancing and music. Tudju and Hehum, Alo and Nata went with them for civility’s sake. Bela stayed home. He and Modh said almost nothing to each other. They took off their finery and lay silent in their bed, taking comfort in each other’s warmth, trying not to listen for the wail of the child. They heard nothing, only the others returning, and then silence.

Tudju was to return to the Temple the next day. Early in the morning she came to Bela and Modh’s apartments. Modh had just risen.

“Where is my sword, Modh?”

“You put it in the box in the dancing room.”

“Your bronze one is there, not mine.”

Modh looked at her in silence. Her heart began to beat heavily.

There was a noise, shouting, beating at the doors of the house.

Modh ran to the hanan, to the room she and Mal had slept in, and hid in the corner, her hands over her ears.

Bela found her there later. He raised her up, holding her wrists gently. She remembered how he had dragged her by the wrists up the hill through the trees. “Mal killed Ralo,” he said. “She had Tudju’s sword hidden under her dress. They strangled her.”

“Where did she kill him?”

“On her bed,” Bela said bleakly. “He never did keep his promises.”

“Who will bury her?”

“No one,” Bela said, after a long pause. “She was a Dirt woman. She murdered a Crown. They’ll throw her body in the butchers’ pit for the wild dogs.”

“Oh, no,” Modh said. She slipped her wrists from his grip. “No,” she said. “She will be buried.”

Bela shook his head.

“Will you throw everything away, Bela?”

“There is nothing I can do,” he said.

She leaped up, but he caught and held her.

He told the others that Modh was mad with grief. They kept her locked in the house, and kept watch over her.

Bidh knew what troubled her. He lied to her, trying to give her comfort; he said he had gone to the butcher’s pit at night, found Mal’s body, and buried it out past the Fields of the City. He said he had spoken what words he could remember that might be spoken to a spirit. He described Mal’s grave vividly, the oak trees, the flowering bushes. He promised to take Modh there when she was well. She listened and smiled and thanked him. She knew he lied. Mal came to her every night and lay in the silence beside her.

Bela knew she came. He did not try to come to that bed again.

All through her pregnancy Modh was locked in Belen House. She did not go into labor until almost ten months had passed. The baby was too large; it would not be born, and with its death killed her.

Bela ten Belen buried his wife and unborn son with the Belen dead in the holy grounds of the Temple, for though she was only a Dirt woman, she had a dead god in her womb.

L
OOK OUT, BOOKS.
You’re dodos, again. Or anyhow turkeys. The Associated Press, using an AP-Ipsos poll of 1,003 adults and claiming an error margin of plus or minus 3% points (the kind of solemn statistic meant to silence such questions as which 1,003 adults? and what’s the error margin of your error margin?) has announced that 27% of Americans haven’t read a book all year.
*
Of those who did read, two-thirds cited the Bible and other religious works and barely half said they’d read anything describable as literature.

To reinforce the dire news the article refers to a 2004 NEA report that 43% of their respondents had spent a year entirely book-free. The NEA blamed the decline of reading on TV, movies, and the Internet. Understandably. We all know that the Average Adult American spends from sixteen to twenty-eight hours a day watching TV (my margin of error there may be a little broad) and the rest of the time ordering stuff from eBay and blogging.

That we read so little appears to be newsworthy, even shocking, yet the tone of the article is almost congratulatory. The AP story quotes a project manager for a telecommunications company in Dallas: “I just get sleepy when I read,” adding, “a habit with which millions of Americans doubtless can identify.” Self-satisfaction with the inability to remain conscious when faced with printed matter seems misplaced. But I think the assumption—whether gloomy or faintly jubilant—of the imminent disappearance of reading is misplaced too.

The thing is, not very many people ever did read much. Why should we think they do, or ought to, now?

For a long, long time most people couldn’t read at all. Literacy was not encouraged among the lower classes, laymen, or women. It was not only a demarcator between the powerful and the powerless, it was power itself. Pleasure was not an issue. The ability to maintain and understand commercial records, the ability to communicate across distance and in code, the ability to keep the word of God to yourself and transmit it only at your own will and in your own time—these are formidable means of control over others and aggrandizement of self. Every literate society began with literacy as a constitutive prerogative of the ruling class.

Only gradually, if at all, did writing-and-reading filter downward, becoming less sacred as it became less secret, and less directly potent as it became more popular. The Chinese Empire kept it as an effective tool of governmental control, basing advancement in the bureaucratic hierarchy strictly on a series of literary tests. The Romans, far less systematic, ended up letting slaves, women, and such rabble read and write; but they got their comeuppance from the religion-based society that succeeded them. In the Dark Ages, to be a Christian priest usually meant you could read at least a little, but to be a layman meant you probably didn’t, and to be almost any kind of woman meant you couldn’t. Not only didn’t, but couldn’t—weren’t allowed to. As in some Muslim societies today.

In the West, one can see the Middle Ages as a kind of slow broadening of the light of the written word, which brightens into the Renaissance, and shines out with Gutenberg. Then, before you know it, women slaves are reading and writing, and revolutions are made with pieces of paper called Declarations of this and that, and schoolmarms replace gunslingers all across the Wild West, and people are mobbing the steamer bringing the latest installment of a new novel to New York, crying, “Is Little Nell dead? Is she dead?”

I have no statistics to support what I am about to say (and if I did I wouldn’t trust their margin of error) but it appears to me that the high point of reading in the United States was from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, with a kind of peak in the early twentieth. I think of the period as the century of the book. From around the 1850’s on, as the public school came to be considered fundamental to democracy, and as libraries went public and flourished, financed by local businessmen and multimillionaires, reading was assumed to be something we shared in common. And the central part of the curriculum from first grade on was “English,” not only because immigrants wanted their children fluent in it, but because literature—fiction, scientific works, history, poetry—was a major form of social currency.

It’s interesting, even a little scary, to look at old textbooks, schoolbooks from the 1890’s, 1900, 1910, like the McGuffey’s Readers of which a couple of battered copies still lay around the house when I was a child, or the
Fifty Famous Stories
(and
Fifty More Famous Stories
) from which my brothers and I, in the 1930’s, learned much of what we still know about Western Civilization. The level both of literacy and of general cultural knowledge expected of a ten-year-old will almost certainly surprise you if you look at these books; it awed me a little even then.

On the evidence of such texts and of school curricula—for instance, the novels kids were expected to read in high school up through the 1960’s—it appears that people really wanted and expected their children not only to be able to read, but to do it, and not to fall asleep doing it. Why?

Well, obviously, because literacy was pretty much the front door to any kind of individual economic advancement and class status; but also, I think, because reading was an important social activity. The shared experience of books was a genuine bond. To be sure, a person reading seems to be cut off from everything around them, almost as much as the person shouting banalities into a cell phone as they ram their car into your car. That’s the private element in reading. But there is a large public one too, which consists in what you and others have read.

As people these days can maintain nonthreatening, unloaded, sociable conversation by talking about who’s murdered whom on the latest big TV cop or mafia show, so strangers on the train or co-workers on the job in 1840 could talk perfectly unaffectedly together about
The Old Curiosity Shop
and whether poor Little Nell was going to cop it. Books provided a shared field of entertainment and enjoyment facilitating conversation. Since public school education, fairly standardized and also widely shared, was pretty heavy on poetry and various literary classics all through that period, a lot of people would recognize and enjoy a reference to or a quote from Tennyson, or Scott, or Shakespeare, those works being properties in common, a social meeting ground. A man might be less likely to boast about falling asleep at the sight of a Dickens novel than to feel left out of things by not having read it.

Even now literature keeps that social quality, for some; people do ask, “Read a good book lately?” And it is institutionalized, mildly, in book groups and in the popularity of bestsellers. Publishers get away with making dull, stupid, baloney-mill novels into bestsellers via mere PR, because people need bestsellers. It is not a literary need. It is a social need. We want books everybody is reading (and nobody finishes) so we can talk about them. Movies and TV don’t fill quite the same slot, especially for women.

The occasional exception proves my rule: the genuine grassroots bestseller, like the first Harry Potter book. It hit a slot the PR people didn’t even know existed: adults hungry for the kind of fantasy they’d stopped reading at ten. This was a readership Tolkien, despite his permanent bestsellerdom (an entirely different matter, unrecognized by the PR crowd), couldn’t satisfy, because Tolkien’s trilogy is for grownups, and these grownups didn’t want grownup fantasy. They wanted a school story, where you can look down on outsiders because they’re all despicable Muggles. And they wanted to talk to each other about it. When the kids really got in on it, this became the extraordinary phenomenon, fully exploited by the book’s publishers of course but neither predictable nor truly manageable by them, exhibited in the excitement at the publication of each new book of the series. If we brought books over from England by ship these days, crowds would have swarmed on the docks of New York to greet the final volume, crying, “Did she kill him? Is he dead?” It was a genuine social phenomenon, as is the worship of rock stars and the whole subculture of popular music, which offers the adolescent/young adult both an exclusive in-group and a shared social experience. And it was about books.

I think that people have not talked enough about books as social vectors, and that publishers have been stupid in not at least trying to understand how they work. They never even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them.

But the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless. They think they can sell books as commodities.

Corporations are moneymaking entities controlled by obscenely rich executives and their anonymous accountants, which have acquired most previously independent publishing houses with the notion of making quick money by selling works of art and information.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that such people “get sleepy when they read.” But within the corporate whale are many luckless Jonahs who were swallowed alive with their old publishing house—editors and such anachronisms—people who read wide awake. Some of them are so alert they can scent out promising new writers. Some of them have their eyes so wide open they can even proofread. But it doesn’t do them much good. For years now, most editors have had to waste most of their time on a very unlevel playing field, fighting Sales and Accounting. In those departments, beloved by the CEOs, a “good book” means a high gross and a “good writer” is one whose next book can be guaranteed to sell better than the last one. That there are no such writers is of no matter to the corporationeers, who don’t comprehend fiction even if they run their lives by it. Their interest in books is self-interest, the profit that can be made out of them. Or occasionally, for the top execs, the Murdochs and other Merdles, the political power they can wield through them; but that is merely self-interest again, personal profit.

And not only profit. Growth. Capitalism As We Know It depends (as we know) on growth. The stockholder’s holdings must increase yearly, monthly, daily, hourly. Capitalism is a body that judges its well-being by the size of its growth.

Endless growth, limitless growth, as in obesity? Or growth as in a lump on the skin or in the breast, cancer? The size of our growth is a strange way to judge our wellbeing.

The AP article used the word “flat”—book sales have been “flat” in recent years, it said. Smooth, in other words, like a healthy skin, or flat like a non-bulging belly? But no; fat’s good, flat’s bad. Just ask McDonald’s.

Analysts attribute the listlessness to competition from the Internet and other media, the unsteady economy and a well-established industry with limited opportunity for expansion.