The tyrant had been born in a city in the far northeast of the empire, in the Kalygar mountain range, a ripple of creases in the earth made by the Garamdi subcontinental shelf as it pressed, and continues to press, at the rate of several centimeters each year, into the larger body of the continent. I visited it one cold, grey spring years after my time in Varrenia, working on a story about the aftermath of the Moiraivian civil war. The city sits on a plain encircled entirely by mountains, but these mountains are set at an immense distance, and the plain extends for leagues. The desolation of the place is difficult to describe. A line of stunted trees gathers thirstily along the banks of Liakvhari River, which waters the city, but so little rain falls each year that the plain itself is treeless, and it seemed that one could not find in it a single hollow which might have afforded even the memory of warmth. The landscape’s prevailing colors were emerald and slate and grey, the grass so short that it had the smoothness of stone, and this gave the landscape a slightly fantastical appearance, as if it were a carved sheet of alien marble, the landscape of an extra-planetary moon, and as unfit for human habitation. It is always from the fringes of empires that great leaders are born, Mahmiin had argued to me once. Their childhoods bear the stamp of indoctrination, the avowals, the personality cults, the mystery religions, that these men uneasily shed as they gather their power. As adults, that least substantial of things, the mirage that hangs suspended over every populated territory of the earth, the myth of the nation, is the last superstition to disappear, and it is this superstition that guides them as leaders. In the imperial capitals, the mandarins understand the powerful draw of nationality, and divert propaganda to the empire’s far reaches, just as they would draw up plans for waterworks to irrigate a dry stretch of hinterland. For them, to lands that they have never journeyed, for whom the provinces of the empire are color-binding lines on a map, what is human is contingent, to be molded, set aright.
After the Garamdi abandoned Kalygar mountains, G__ran was paid little attention to by the outside world. Like many of the cities in the east, following the revolution, it was industrialized, but only halfheartedly so, its factories manned by peasant farmers and shepherds from a society that the Garamdi had done little expand beyond the stone age, who would have had no hope of understanding how to maintain the machines they’d been gifted. In the town I saw piles of nameless machinery, the rudiments of factories, heaped in odd corners of the city, as if they had grown deformed by the inhospitable climate, with sagging cancerous accumulation of scrap iron to replace sheeting that had been lost to old age. Of some of the factories only concrete retaining walls remained exposing their innards to the elements. On the bus ride along the river, we passed a steel foundry, lifeless and supine like a poisoned insect, its rusty pylons stretched meekly towards the pallid, indifferent sky. These existed alongside cottages with tiles and bricks that were so irregular they might well have been handmade. Apartment blocks with rotting gashes in their outer skin of painted concrete, exposing the cracked brickwork underneath. Over this plain, monumental grey clouds gathered, and then passed by, as indifferent to the earth as the gods are to men. It might have been different in high summer, and my impression of the city might have been different under a warmer sun, but I saw a city that seemed to have been forsaken in every age. A capital in which there was light, warmth, the promise of sense, one that was described in books, or glimpsed in (the reproductions of) paintings (Hazyk had been born several decades before the invention of television, at roughly the same time as the introduction of black and white photography), this must have seemed like a metaphysical necessity to a boy who had grown up in this town. Perhaps the only propaganda that was needed was to gaze out at that long stretch of lunar landscape that surrounded the city at all sides, as impassable as an ocean, and this was sufficient fuel for the yearning that drives great men into the world.
When Maresh Hazyk was a child, there had been an old imperial garrison quartered a few kilometers from the town, in the caves of an outcropping of stone hills that lay near the town. These caves were said to be a kind of primitive castle from which the rulers of an ancient kingdom that controlled the plain held its court. As far as I can tell, this kingdom has no name, no written history, but it has in these caves, left a singular legacy. There are carvings in the rock face around and inside the caves. They are impressive, impossibly monumental… columns, and pediments carved into the face of the rock. The lack of human representations in those carvings is both reassuring and unnerving… as if they’d been formed spontaneously from the mind of the world, nor have the hieroglyphs that adorn these carvings ever, to my knowledge, been deciphered. The soldiers of the garrison, all imperial conscripts from villages and city slums, uneducated youths, found their only pastime in defacing these carvings with graffiti, carving their names and initials, the hometowns they’d hailed from, the names of distant sweethearts, promised for marriage or merely pined for, into the rock face. Perhaps it was because a pastime, any pastime was deemed beneficial for morale, but the officers did nothing to stop these depredations, their own hours were spent in cursing the city’s lack of brothels, its. hordes of shifty, suspicious men, its punitive weather. Occasionally an imperial official, a tax-collector, or a priest, or a teacher would come by to visit the caves, and record in his diaries or his memoirs some pretty words about the ephemerality of kingdoms and empires or express a bitter disappointment in the depredations made by the garrison, playing at historian or literatus and send letters home to a provincial city, speculating on the origins of that lost kingdom, and lamenting its slow effacement, accelerated by the garrison, from the memory of the world.
It was to one of the officers of this garrison that Maresh owed his escape from G___ran. An officer, an artilleryman who kept an apartment in the city gave lessons in advanced mathematics at G___an upper school, and recognizing in Maresh a precocious knack for mathematics after watching him master a pair of textbooks, on trigonometry and dynamic physics, the officer recommended him for a scholarship in an imperial academy in a neighboring province. As for Maresh, his father was a teknikarton, an all-encompassing term meaning carpenter, handyman, or even cobbler, and as for the evidence of what this term meant, economically, the sight of their house, a stone, whose stones, as they’d settled into the mortar, gave it a sagging appearance … The little stone house, as modest. A monumental apparatus had been built around the house to shelter it from the elements: four huge steel columns reached up to a kind of stained-glass roof that let in light. The thick glass was cracked in some places and was dusty with not having been clean. As to the comforts of that house, it is enough to consider that the purpose of the monument was to shelter the house from the elements.
What Maresh had won, at age twelve, was a scholarship to an imperial academy in the neighboring province of R___alka. He studied at the school for three years before being expelled for “misbehavior.” In his pseudo-memoir, entitled, without apparent irony, Dictates, he writes with ambivalence and love of his schoolboy days. It had given him his first taste of friendship, his taste of intellectual fervor, and, perhaps, of national awareness. A provincial capital, one with real apartment buildings, with linden-tree-lined boulevards, the rudiments of a cafe culture. To have been sent back was an ignomy that … he would have chafed against. But there were a pair of consolations. The library of the imperial administrator was made available to him when he returned to G___ran… and he spent hours each day reading from the stock of books. In the city, he affected the dandyishness that made him a laughingstock, then, briefly, attempted to run with a gang of rougher boys. The young man was too big for his britches. He was beaten for attempting to usurp control over the group. At seventeen, seeing no other options, he volunteered to serve in the imperial army.
There were, at that time, no shortage of imperial provinces in need of fresh recruits. The empire was in its dying days, beset by independence movements in every province outside of the Garamdi subcontinent and harassed by Rhiennese incursions, and Maresh was stationed in a barracks in the Moirovian capital. The city afforded him his first taste of alcohol, and of women. He marched to the killing fields of Moiraivia and saw dying around him in swarms. Perhaps it was this early exposure to charnel slaughter that made Hazyk into the ruler he was: ruthless, profligate with human life. The shadow of history clouds his personality, but it was revived by the conversations that I had with Madelỳna, who spoke of him admiringly. Of course she had been only a schoolgirl when Hazyk had died. And the lesson of her adolescent years was an immediate reversal of the cult of personality that Hazyk had cultivated during his decades-long reign over the Varreni-Moiraivian Union.
I remember what Madelỳna had said to me once: “In order to build a nation, it is necessary to destroy the old one. The old memories must be destroyed, and they are here.” Here she tapped her temple. “Hazyk was a true revolutionary. Do you know the myth of the nation of slaves upon liberating themselves, wandered for forty years to find a new homeland for themselves? When a people are created, they must wander for forty years in the wilderness, and do you know why? It is so that the people are remade. The old generation dies off, and with it is the old way of thinking. They must be made to forget what it was like to be a slave. But now in days, we haven’t the time for that. Now, the revolutions are so much shorter. The demand is for us. to change, and immediately.
“For the citizens of my parents’ generation and our grandparent’s generation, of course he became a villain, because they were the ones who had to suffer under his regime, but you must understand that I lived .
“From when we are young, we are taught to hate. You know, the revolution happened when I was a child, so they made us hate the dictator. Do you think we wouldn’t think for ourselves?”
But how can you say this, as a monarchist?
“Ah, but do not be naive. A military dictator is a true king. If we Varrenians made a mistake, it was that our dictator could not be a king, and our king believed that he was a dictator.”
I replied that it seemed odd for her to be supportive of autocratic rule, of any form, given the many episodes of its failure that had been experienced in the history of her country.
“Aha! It’s true, and for that reason, I am more of a monarchist than the king! What is monarchism anymore than a belief? Or it is a false belief or it is an illusion. Why do people follow a king?”
“I suppose because he is a good ruler.”
“And you say that the people have a right to throw out a king if he is a poor ruler?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“Aha, and this is where you are mistaken! A king does not acquire his right to be the king by being a good king. A king is the king because the people have accepted that they will be ruled by a king. If the king is good, they will be happy, and if the king is a bad king, then the people will suffer. But always, he will be their king and can never shed that right. And what do the people gain when they have a king. It is one thing, but it is a very great thing, which is that they will have a certainty to know who is their ruler. And this is no small thing. Because there is much bloodshed when a ruler must assert control over the people.
“Really, you have this idea that the people can rule themselves. Not true. In no democracy do the people rule themselves! For a king to be a true monarch, he must act as one. He must not try to do what is appealing. It is no use to appeal to the people. One must assert to the people. The only problem that Hazyk had was that he was a king without the apparatus of a monarchy. Thus, the only way to assert his rule was through violence. It was not only, but the sending of a message: ‘I am the ruler here.’ Such a message can be sent only as a letter signed in blood.”
The discussions that I had with Madelỳna about Hazyk were inspired by his most consequential legacy: the Moiraivian Civil War. It was strange to me to see it develop in the way that it did. I experienced the war through television, and as the subject of repeated conversation when I lived in Varrenia. I watched the war on the nightly news in Vira’s living room, where we boarders began to take our meals, so that we could always have the war in the background, and the segments about the crisis in Moiravia escalated with alarming rapidity. We (my fellow boarders, the international community), had thought that the war would end quickly: that the protests against the government would peter out rather than become an armed protest, that the armed protest would be be put down rather than evolve into an armed resistance movement, that the insurgents’ demands would have to be agreed to or accommodated in some way, that a ceasefire would be called before the fighting got too bad, the situation irreversible — as it turns out there was a ceasefire, but it it was constantly violated by both sides, and when it did, the violence engulfed the entire country.
Among the Varrenians, there was a sense that the Moiraivian Civil War was a thing that the Moiraivians had done to themselves. It was history, they said, that explained it. Varrenia had once been a Rhiennese suzerainty, and been granted the gift of enlightened Rhiennese rule, which had lifted up the Varrenians from their barbarous, feudal existence, but the Moiraivians had been incorporated as a backwater province to the Garamdi empire — the Garamdi had imposed on them a central government by decree, resulting in a “chattel mindset,” which atrophied the Moiraivians’ capacity for self-rule. Oh certainly, the two people, Moiraivians and Varrenians, had once been one, but the Moiraivians had been spoiled, the Varrenians whom I spoke to said, by the long centuries of Garamdi domination. The Moiraivians had had a warrior nobility as fierce and as powerful as that of the Varrenians, and Moiraivia was once a land of many kings (which were called dukes by the Amarguese), but these were all suppressed by the Garamdi, who murdered the nobility and sent in its own governors to administer the benighted province.
Hence the protests in the capital during my time in Varrenia, which were, no longer held against the king, but against the possibility of Varrenian involvement in the war. Let the Amarguese go in and try to fix things, or the Rhiennese — this was the sentiment expressed most commonly when I spoke to people in Varrenia about the war in Moiraivia. When I lived in Varrenia, news had been leaked to the media that a proposal had been made by the Amarguese and the Rhiennese to arm the Varrenians and send them in as a peacekeeping force to be interposed between the government and the insurgents. Long before the insurgency was able to march on the capital and attempt a siege of Moiraivia City, this proposal seemed the only hope for peace. Outside of Varrenia, this seemed a sensible solution, but the Varrenians refused to endanger themselves for the sake of the Moiraivians, less so for the Amarguese who were viewed as pulling the strings of the plan. Vira, who was horrified by the war, and who did announce always that “something must be done” for peace, would nevertheless have been scandalized at the thought of sending “our Varrenian boys over there to fight for the Amarguese.” Madelỳna, for her part, argued that the king should not do what the people wanted, and that, though she herself did not want Amarguese soldiers to go there, the king should go above Parliament and send in the force.
As for myself, I came to feel that I was removed from the emotional immediacy of the war. I could not feel the deaths in the same way that Vira could. Nor could I feel the outrage about the situation that Madelỳna seemed to feel. The war seemed both awesome and terrible, but in a way that was abstract, and I found a kind of dark beauty in the images presented by Varrenian state media, which used the war as a way to shore up the legitimacy of the monarchy. The lurid images of chaos, of the failure of a society without an undisputed central power were used as an implicit message (though the case was often made explicitly) that the monarchy was the best form of government.
I remember the scatter of anti-aircraft fire… that had rained inversely from the buildings … that made the night sky above Moirovia City a smokey, glittering confection. I’d found the war, not horrifying, but beautiful and poignant. And I was ashamed, then, of my detachment from the war, as much as I was, years later, when I lived in Garamdal during the war with the Daari insurgency.
When people turned the question in its reverse and asked me what I thought should be done, I could think of no answer. Later on, during my career as a journalist, I would look back on this time as one when I was very attuned to the world, and that career has been an attempt to find an answer to that question.
*
Garamdi domination of the Moiraivian lands had begun with the Battle of the Plain of the White Hill. After King Reopoldus IV’s flight from the battlefield, the armies of the Varrenians and Moiraivians were crushed, and the Garamdi took control of all of Moiraivia. Had it not been for the death of the Garamdi emperor, the Garamdi army might very well have gone on to conquer the entire continent; as it happened, the army was recalled to the Garamdi capital and the generals made to swear fealty to the adolescent new emperor. The regents, already squabbling amongst themselves, wary of a new foreign adventure and the investments necessary to commence a new military campaign, abandoned the march to the west.
The Rhiennese swiftly moved into Varrenia, building fortifications along the border with Moiraivia. If the process of Rhiennification in Varrenia, which saw the nobility adopting Rhiennese language, advanced apace in Varrenia, the Garamdi treated Moiraivia with a distaste that promoted a kind of neglect. The Garamdi imposed onerous levies which assured that the Moiraivians were always at the brink of poverty, instituted harsh, autocratic governorships, but never truly developed Moiraivia. The Moiraivians were not made to learn Garamdi or adopt Garamdi customs, and there was never a need, as there had been in Varrenia, for a Moiraivian national restoration.
As it happens, Varrenia became a center of nationalist feeling. The Varrenians lost their language to the Rhiennese, and most of their culture, but by the turn of the century, when Rhiennese culture was at its height, the Varrenians attempted to revive their language. Linguists were invited from Moiraivia, and the old folk tales were collected from the countryside. Writers like Borin Kundra, whose first works were written in Rhiennese, turned to Varrenian as a literary language. The flow of cultural influence happened in the reverse as well. Varrenian nationalism, increasingly heated, increasingly political, began to influence Moiraivian nationalism. Varrenian irredentist were setting up societies to discuss the increased ties between the two countries. Varrenian volunteers, trained by the Rhiennese, had begun to infiltrate the border with Moiraivia and
The stage was set for an all-out revolt against the Garamdi overlords, now a fully decadent power, plagued by internal conflicts and by outside powers. The Daari, the Vilinians, the Rhiennese, these were all challenges to the Garamdi imperial army, which was increasingly stressed thin, and which was growing increasingly demoralized. In Moiraivia, the revolutionary movement was centered around the Moiraivian National Society, a confederation of fighters, intellectuals, and revolutionaries who dreamed of restoring an independent Moiraivia. Armed intermittently by the Rhiennese and the Varrenians, the society had already begun in the mountainous border region between Moiraivia and Varrenia. It was into this milieu that Hazyk came into power.
Hazyk was an obscure lieutenant of a Garamdi artillery corps charged with campaigning against the revolutionaries at their base in the mountains bordering Varrenia. He mutinied at the critical moment and pledged his soldiers to the cause of Moiraivian independence. Having spent the early part of his career putting down insurgencies on behalf of the Garamdi, he had learned the methods for conducting one. Supplied by the Rhiennese who imagined that he could be a puppet leader for a new Rhiennese-aligned Moiraivia, he defeated the demoralized Garamdi in every engagement they were able to hold him to. There were other fighters at that time, of course, and the leadership of the MNS looked upon Hazyk as a military asset, rather than a political peer. When the MNS moved to incorporate Varrenia, the task was given to Hazyk to march on Varrenia. The Rhiennese embroiled in their own war with the Garamdi and dependent on Varrenians to defend themselves were expelled from Varrenia by a cheering Varrenian populaced, already full of nationalist fervor. A year after being sent to put down an insurgency in the western mountains of Moiraivia, Hazyk announced, in Moiraivia City, the creation of the Varreni-Moiraivian Union.
Had he died, he might have been remembered as a war hero. Instead, he lived. The MNS council believed that Hazyk could be controlled, but he outmaneuvered every one of its members. For the Moiraivians, his status as an outsider was presumed to make him unacceptable as a political candidate, for the “Varrenians,” i.e. those who advocated for the incorporation of Varrenia into the Moiraivian nationalist project, he was viewed as ‘merely’ a military figure. When he was elected as chairman of the MNS, he began a methodical process of consolidating his power. The first rank of elder leaders was powerless to resist the charismatic general who now commanded the largest army among the revolutionaries’ forces. Still, the divisions at the height of the power structure in the revolutionary society had not yet been addressed. Would Varrenia be independent? Would Moiraivia be democratic? The national question was caught up with a pressing economic question. The landowners and capitalists who had prospered under Garamdi rule and Rhiennese domination had been wary of major change, but the workers were clamoring for it. The revolution acquired its economic as well as its purely political dimensions. Perhaps Hazyk was merely an opportunist, as his detractors claim. Perhaps he was a true believer: the son of a cobbler and a washerwoman who sought to address the plight of the working people. In any case, he aligned himself with the workers’ faction and began the systematic purging of the other factions within the MNS, and the other loci of power in the countries that he had conquered.
*
When Hazyk died, the entirety of his regime collapsed. Varreni-Moiraivia, his dream of a united people, who could forget their long history of imperial subjugation by alien empires, who could forget everything prior to the year zero of his inauguration as leader of the country. Far in the hinterland of Varrenian society, little fuss was made about the revolution. One day, Hazyk’s portrait hung on the wall of the classroom where Madelỳna went to school, the next day, it had been quietly taken down.
“Of course the teachers explained nothing to us. Everyone was afraid to speak, still, because no one was sure which faction would prevail. It was only later, after the restoration, that they taught us about Hazyk’s crimes. Everyone had to hate him now, because of what he did to the opposition, because of what he did to . They all swallowed up this new slop. But it wasn’t like we couldn’t see that the king was no better.”
What I came to understand about their views, Mahmiin’s and Madelỳna’s, about leaders and men was that they were complementary. Mahmiin’s interest lay primarily in the crowd, the mass. His interest was in how that crowd could be harnessed, how it could be manipulated. Madelỳna’s interest lay in the leader, in the question of what kind of man was best suited to be a leader. For Mahmiin, leaders were vessels for ideas, madmen, whose chief reason for being leaders was their own madness. Madelỳna thought of leaders in terms of their relation to “greatness,” a combination of strength, charisma, and vision. Because she set the standards so high, the great leaders existed, inevitably, only in the distant past.
I think of how similar the two were, in some ways. Mahmiin and Madelỳna shared a distrust of the masses, a cynicism that led to their was a kind of idealism at a higher level. They both had the same moral demands of people, and because their standards were so stringent, they had a sort of contempt for people that was also a demand for people to be their better selves.
When either of them praised me, I felt lifted higher: I had crossed the threshold of their stringent demands on people.
The contrast might have been drawn between a leader like Hazur Mufendis and a leader like Maresh Hazyk. One was an indisputable dictator, a tyrant, the other a visionary revolutionary who led his nation out of the chaos of the collapse of an empire. It was the Rhiennese and Vilinian landing forces that had murdered the imperial family. Would Mufendis have gone the same way as Hazyk had he come to rule Republican Garamdal?
I sense that the answer is no. There was in Mufendis, a spirit of optimism, a gentlemanly distaste for the particulars of battle. A gallant officer whose milieu was peacetime. He could have been a king, but he stepped aside for democratic norms. In his speeches, he is . The conflict with the Rhiennese, and even with the Vilinians, was, he declared, a conflict of the empire, one that he would bury so that to all would be extended the fruits of peace. And he did try to make peace, as uncomfortable as it was, even though he himself had seen the massacres of the invasion of Garamdal.
Perhaps he would have settled the Daari question, had he lived longer. The “minorities problem,” that Mahmiin had mentioned to me was a problem that Mufendis had been aware of. Perhaps he would have uncovered a solution that the Garamdi government was unable to find for itself.
Madelỳna was right, in a way. Mufendis, who had earned his position as the leader of the new Garamdi republic was hailed in the way of a beloved king. Hazyk, in contrast, although he had military credentials, had had to strive to get to the top of a heap of warring factions, had had to outmaneuver his opponents and to cultivate. There were other revolutionaries, other politicians, even other generals, who Hazyk had had to compete with, outmaneuver, defeat. Hazyk’s cunning is not prefigured in the biographical details of his childhood and adolescence — he was nothing more than a child on the outskirts of an empire, with a slight talent for mathematics and a dilettante’s interest in poetry. But in having to find his place among the internecine conflicts of the revolutionary and liberationist parties and factions, he had learned the necessity of bloodshed.
Iriane used to tease me for the interest that I took in Mufendis’ biography. It was “old-fashioned” she declared, the worshipfulness he was treated with in the country. Whereas it was true that Mufendis had modernized the country, to treat his ideas today as though they were the forefront of what it meant to be modern was a mistake. And it was the only thing the Nationalist Party had to its credit, she declared. Mufendis was still an ethno-nationalist, and he had carved out of the center of the Garamdi empire, a Garamdi identity that would not admit the Daari. Why, if the Garamdi were a mongrel race, mixed with their subject people, could it not simply allow for the Daari to be a part of it?
*
At Vira’s house, we watched the news with hope and expectation … In the halls of power in the Amarguese League countries, support for intervention ultimately collapsed. It was argued that, because of the misrule of Hazyk, or the centuries of domination by the Garamdi, that the Moiraivians had never learned how to do politics properly, that no political resolution could be reached, and that it was inevitable that the Moiraivians would fight with each other. The bitter fighting raged for a full year, and then the battle lines remained static, with the terrible siege of Moiraivia City. The atrocities that marked the, and which later shocked the world were revealed a… A sense of tragedy prevailed, and when the war ended, it was left to the people to pick up the pieces.
Nothing happened the way that the forecasters predicted.
Years later, when I was reporting in Moiraivia after the war, interviewing … a supporter of the revolution. “It wasn’t worth it,” she’d declared to me ruefully. “All the children who died. It might have been worth it, if not for those children.” There were few who thought that the outcome was worth the bloodshed.
*
When I left Varrenia, it was with a sense of sorrow. Vira appraising me with her watery eyes, and foisting upon me, at the last minute, a little plastic bag where she’d wrapped, in wax paper slices of smoked ham and salted cakes that she had baked the night before — still warm in the ghostly bundle she presented to me. “Of course, you are a rolling stone. We could never keep you here for long.”
“I only hope that you will find a place that you will love to stay in. You will find the right person some day.” The first sentence was an expression of a wish, the second a prophecy, one that remains unfulfilled.
And I felt ashamed when she said this, to be loved so, without condition or reservation, without my having done anything, it seemed, to deserve it. That life, cruel, deceiving, disappointing life, was softened by the hands of those in my life, intermixed with bouts of tenderness from them. The time that we’d spent together, when she was “only” my landlady, and, occasionally, my ennabler, I had failed to consider that I had accumulated, in her eyes, some of that human closeness that I have understood is the only currency of any value.
Madelỳna treated me with the same look of vulpine irony that . “Well, then old man [I had just turned thirty], I hope that the girls in Garamdal are kinder to you than they have been here.”
I laughed, “And who says that the women here have been unkind to me?”
“But it was you! You were the one who always complained about your love life.”
I admitted to her that she was right.
“You’ll write me a love story, then, won’t you?”
“Oh, you know I can’t do that.”
“And why not?”
“Because I’d have to live one first. And I’ve never been in love with someone, or at least, not in the way that would befit a love story.”
“Oh, tosh! You’re always so dramatic about things!”
“But you’re the one,” I countered, “who always claims that love is impossible.”
“Yes! But it’s unbecoming in a man to see him act so self-pityingly. Well now, what if you wrote a true love story? One that said the truth about things: That love is difficult. And we won’t always, live up to its ideals. You’re with someone for a moment, and, alas, it cannot stay. I should like to read a love story like that.”
“No happy ending, then?”
“It should end,” she declared confidently, that same self-assuredness and confidence with which she had stepped towards me that early autumn afternoon, when I’d showed up at the university, the proud click of her heels on marble, “in tears.”
In my final days in Varrenia, I made one last trip to the High Castle. It was a castle from the pre-Rhiennese times, and for that reason, had been dismantled by the Rhiennese. The architecture lacks the sophisticated martial quality of the fortresses built by the Rhiennese. It had been a construction of old stone, meant for the varezh.
My project to translate Kundra, begun with such optimism, had stalled. Madelỳna had deemed the work I had done: “acceptable.” I wonder if, had she expressed more enthusiasm, I might have gone on to finish the work. Ah well. It remains one of the neglected projects of my wasted youth. And though the abandonment of it fills me with feeling, I do not truly have much sense of loss for it anymore.
The journey could be done by train though Moiraivia to the coast, and from there, a ferry service carried one to the Garamdi west coast. I made the journey in less than a week, feeling, with all of my belongings in a suitcase and a knapsack, rather like a vagabond. In the dining car, I nursed a cup of tea under the glum watch of an attendant.
The landscape from the train was like a slow emergence from a dream. Had I really put a country behind me? I felt that I carried it with me still, in a way, would hold onto it forever.
At the end of it, I wondered if I had transformed into a different person. Away from my laxness, from my inability to be with people, there seemed the possibility for another mode of being.