The Tent (7 page)

Horatio’s Version

Absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story . . .

These were Hamlet’s last words to me. Well, almost the last. I didn’t know at the time that this wasn’t a request but a command – in effect, a clever and twisted curse. I would be doomed to stay alive until I
did
tell the story. Which is why you are reading my own words, in this very newspaper, today.

Yes, this is Horatio speaking: friend, confidant, ear-for-loan, eternal bystander at the festivities and debacles of the great and bloodthirsty. I have to say that I did my best as second banana during the Elsinore affair. I listened to Hamlet’s outpourings, which at times bordered on lunacy; I sympathized; I offered what I hoped was sage advice. And then I got stuck with cleaning up the not inconsiderable mess.

Or not so much cleaning it up: wrapping it up. I was supposed to set down the events truthfully, as they had occurred, though showing Hamlet in a more or less favourable light, the light that shines on every protagonist. I hoped to wring some poetry out of these events, darkish poetry it would have to be. Perhaps I could add some philosophical musings about the human condition. I also hoped to come up with a plausible resolution to the story.

But what
was
the story? It was a tale of revenge, that much was clear. A wrong had been done, or it appeared to have been done. Hamlet said, as I recall, “O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right,” or something like that. But through morose dithering combined with sudden rash actions, he ended up killing quite a few more people than ought to have been killed, even according to the rather loose guidelines of honour as then constituted.

This often happens, as I’ve observed during the course of my now entirely too-long life. The Hatfields and the McCoys go at it, turn and turn about, until no one’s left standing. Countries are similar. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” I have often said while standing deliberately in the line of fire during these small, medium, and large payback events, but few have ever listened to me. An eye for an eye is their idea. A head for a head, a bomb for a bomb, a city for a city. Human beings – I’ve observed – are hot-wired for scorekeeping, and since they like to win, they’re always going one better than the other fellow.

Excuse me. Not one better. One more.

I started out well enough at the outset. I found a fresh piece of parchment, I ground some ink.
Once upon a time there was a well-meaning but knotted-up prince called Hamlet,
I wrote. But that didn’t sound quite right. Then I thought I might do it as a sort of play.
Elsinore. A Platform before the Castle,
I wrote. Then I dried up.

Trouble is, I started thinking about the story behind the story, which was not that Claudius had murdered Hamlet the Elder, but that Hamlet the Elder had murdered another king called Fortinbras. Well, not murdered exactly: slain in single combat, thus getting hold of a wad of Fortinbras territory. But the upshot of all of Hamlet Junior’s machinations was that he himself ended up dead and Fortinbras the Second got hold of everything – not only his father’s lost lands, but all of Hamlet’s lands as well.

So if it was a revenge story it was a strange revenge. The only person to benefit from it was someone who hadn’t been directly involved. That often happens too, I’ve noticed. Maybe instead of being a revenger’s tragedy the Hamlet saga was a story about subconscious guilt – Hamlet realizes the Hamlet family has done dirt to the Fortinbras clan, and obliterates his own kinfolk and scuppers his inheritance in a spectacular act of self-sabotage.

While I was chewing on my quill, dozens of years went by. Then some jumped-up English playwright chose to dramatize this whole fracas. I was annoyed – he hadn’t even been alive at the time, and he put in a bunch of stuff he couldn’t possibly have known anything about. If he’d come to me I might have set him straight; but he didn’t, and he published first. He filched my material and appropriated my voice and exploited a human tragedy that was really none of his business.

Anyway his play was too long.

My own writer’s block got worse than ever. Hamlet’s well-known procrastination had rubbed off on me. I began asking difficult questions.
Why me? Why should I have to write
Hamlet’s
story? Why not my own?
But there’s nothing much to mine, really. Come to think of it, is there anything much to Hamlet’s? By this time we were well into the seventeenth century, and Oliver Cromwell had gone on the rampage, and Charles the First had had his head cut off, and thousands of soldiers and civilians had died cruel and ghastly deaths, with their intestines wound out of their bodies and their heads stuck up on stakes. I’d seen a lot of that up close, so a few slashed and drowned and poisoned bodies littering the Danish court were no longer very horrifying to me by comparison.

Somehow I no longer wanted to tell Hamlet’s story. I wanted to tell something a little more – what’s the term? Human, inhuman? Something bigger. But statistics pall after a time. We’re not programmed to register more than a hundred corpses. In heaps they simply become a landscape feature.

So I went back to the stories of individuals. I’ve covered the ground, I can tell you. The French Revolution, the Terror, the slave trade, the Spanish wars, Australia, Cuba, North America, Africa, Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, the Middle East, Cambodia – you name it, I was there. Sometimes I was a peddler of supplies, sometimes a dispatch runner, sometimes a neutral observer, sometimes a provider of aid; more recently I’ve been working for the newspapers. I’ve talked to famine victims, war orphans, survivors of massacres and rapes, perpetrators of them – all sorts of people, with clean hands and dirty.

You’ve heard of injustice collecting? That’s what I’ve become – an injustice collector. It’s like a tax collector, only there’s nothing to be done with the injustices once you’ve collected them except to pass them on, as best you can; though there’s always the possibility that merely telling such stories will make people angry and thus give rise to other injustices. Still, after four centuries, I think I’m prepared to speak. To tell how things are, now, on this earth. Finally, I’m ready to begin.

So shall you hear of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts; of accidental judgments, casual slaughters; of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause; and, in the upshot, purposes mistook, fall’n on the inventors’ heads.

All this can I truly deliver.

King Log in Exile

After he had been deposed by the frogs, King Log lay disconsolately among the ferns and dead leaves a short distance from the pond. He’d had only enough energy to roll that far: he’d been King of the Pond for so long that he was heavily waterlogged. In the distance he could hear the jubilant croaking and the joyful trilling that signalled the coronation of his celebrated replacement, the experienced and efficient King Stork; and then – it seemed but a mini-second later – the shrieks of terror and the splashes of panic as King Stork set about spearing and gobbling up his new subjects.

King Log – ex–King Log – sighed. It was a squelchy sigh, the sigh of a damp hunk of wood that has been stepped on. What had he done wrong? Nothing. He himself had not murdered his citizens, as the Stork King was now doing. It was true he had done nothing right, either. He had done – in a word – nothing.

But surely his had been a benevolent inertia. As he’d drifted here and there, borne by the sluggish currents of the pond, tadpoles had sheltered beneath him and nibbled the algae that grew on him, and adult frogs had sunbathed on his back. Why then had he been so ignominiously dumped? In a
coup d’état
orchestrated by foreign powers, it went without saying; though certain factions among the frogs – stirred up by outside agitators – had been denouncing him for some time. They’d said a strong leader was needed. Well, now they had one.

There’d been that minor trade deal, of course. He’d signed it under duress, though nobody’d held a gun to his head, or what passed for his head. And hadn’t it benefited the pond? There had been a sharp upturn in exports, the chief commodity being frogs’ legs. But he himself had never been directly involved. He’d just been a facilitator. He’d tucked his cut of the profits away in a Swiss bank account, just in case.

Now the frogs were blaming him for the depredations of the Stork King. If King Log had been a better king himself, they were yelling – if he hadn’t let the rot set in – none of this would have happened.

He knew he couldn’t stay in the vicinity of the pond much longer. He must not give in to
anomie
. Already there were puffballs growing out of him, and under his bark the grubs were at work. He trundled away through the woods, the cries of amphibian anguish receding behind him. Served them right, he thought, sadly and a little bitterly.

King Log has retired to a villa in the Alps, where he is at present sprouting a fine crop of shitake mushrooms and working on his memoirs, one word at a time. Logs write slowly, and log kings more slowly than most. He has engaged a meditation guru who encourages him to visualize himself as a large pencil, but he can only get as far as the eraser.

He misses the old days. He misses the lapping of the water in the breeze, the rustling of the bulrushes. He misses the choruses of praise sung to him by the frogs in the pink light of evening. Nobody sings to him now.

Meanwhile the Stork King has eaten all the frogs and sold the tadpoles into sexual slavery. Now he is draining the pond. Soon it will be turned into desirable residential estates.

Faster

Walking was not fast enough, so we ran. Running was not fast enough, so we galloped. Galloping was not fast enough, so we sailed. Sailing was not fast enough, so we rolled merrily along on long metal tracks. Long metal tracks were not fast enough, so we drove. Driving was not fast enough, so we flew.

Flying isn’t fast enough, not fast enough for us. We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they’re not nearly fast enough, not for us, we’re way ahead of them, they’ll never catch up. That’s why we can go so fast: our souls don’t weigh us down.

Eating the Birds

We ate the birds. We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them. We speared them, we clubbed them, we tangled their feet in glue, we netted them, we spitted them, we threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because we loved them. We wanted to be one with them. We wanted to hatch out of clean, smooth, beautiful eggs, as they did, back when we were young and agile and innocent of cause and effect, we did not want the mess of being born, and so we crammed the birds into our gullets, feathers and all, but it was no use, we couldn’t sing, not effortlessly as they do, we can’t fly, not without smoke and metal, and as for the eggs we don’t stand a chance. We’re mired in gravity, we’re earthbound. We’re ankle-deep in blood, and all because we ate the birds, we ate them a long time ago, when we still had the power to say no.

Something Has Happened

Something has happened. But how? Was it overnight, or has it been creeping up on us and we’ve only just noticed? It’s the girls, the young and pretty girls. They used to sing like sirens, like mermaids, all sweet and liquid, breezy melodies, wavy melodies, but now they’re shorn of melody, though their mouths open and close as before. Have their tongues been cut out?

This is true as well of the cries of babies, the wailing at funerals, the screams that used to arise, especially at night, from the mad, from the tortured. It’s the same thing with the birds: flying as before, spreading out their feathers as before, heads thrown back, beaks gaping, but they’re mute. Mute, or muted? Who has been at work, with a great carpet of invisible snow that blots out sound?

Listen: the leaves no longer rustle, the wind no longer sighs, our hearts no longer beat. They’ve fallen silent. Fallen, as if into the earth. Or is it we who have fallen? Perhaps it’s not the world that is soundless but we who are deaf. What membrane seals us off, from the music we used to dance to? Why can’t we hear?