Towers

The young man glanced up.  “The towers aren’t as tall as I expected.”

“They were taller once,” replied the old man, “Long ago.”   And then they sat in silence for a while, and the dust shifted on the deserted streets, and birds landed near them and took off again.  “Why have you come here?”

“I don’t know really.”  A shrug.  “I suppose I wanted to see what it used to be like.  Before, you know.”  He paused.  “I didn’t realise everything was ruined.”

“Yes, everything ruined.  Not much left here.  Nobody comes here anymore.”  A longer pause.  “How are things, how is everything, out there?”  He waved his hand, indicating the world beyond the bounds of the empty city.

“Oh, fine.  Fine.”  And then, after a moment’s reflection, “Of course, there’s the war.”

“Of course.  The war.”

“It is pretty awful, I think.  I don’t know.  It doesn’t really affect me.”  He shifted uncomfortably.  “They say that you remember things.”

The old man looked sideways at his companion.  “I do remember.  Not everything.  There is a lot that I have forgotten.  But I remember the forgetting.  I cannot remember, anymore, what it was like when people lived here, or when the streets were full.  I know it was like that once, but I cannot recall the pictures to my mind.”  A long silence.  “But I remember when we all left.  I remember when the streets emptied and the people were all gone.”

“Why did they leave?”

“We left to build taller towers.  We left because we wanted to forget, and this place...”  He looked around at the empty square, the columns and the temples.  “This place reminded us.  In the end, we couldn’t bear it, the memory.  I was gone for years; I nearly forgot.  But when I returned...”  A pause.  “When I returned something came back to me.  I remembered something.  I remembered that we had forgotten.  I don’t suppose anyone else remembers, anymore.”

The young man reached into his rucksack, pulled out a water bottle.  He drank, offered it across.  The old man declined.  The young man sat, flipped the lid of the bottle open and shut, open and shut.  “What was it you forgot?  Why did you want to forget so badly?”

For a long time there was no answer.  Open, shut.  Open, shut.  And then the old man spoke quietly, almost in a whisper.  “How could we forget?  How could we try?”  And then in a louder voice, to his companion, “We wanted to forget ourselves.  We wanted to forget who we were.  We couldn’t bear to remember anymore.  I don’t suppose you can understand.  We didn’t want to know ourselves.”  The young man was silent.  He did not understand.

“Tell me,” the old man continued after a while, “do they still build towers?”

“Yes,” he replied.  “Yes, they build them.  They are taller and taller.  They build them of glass, now.  Where I live – well, I can look from my window and see dozens of towers, and the cranes building new ones all the time.”

The old man fixed him with a deep stare.  “Do you know why they build them?”

A pause, and then the young man could hold his gaze no longer.  “No.”

“No.  Of course not.  But we knew.  We knew why we had built the towers.  And we could not bear it.  We had done our best, before.  We built them as tall as we could, these ruins.  But it wasn’t high enough.  They meant something, and because they meant something they were failures, these towers.  We had to forget them.  We couldn’t live here, in the midst of our failures.  They had to become ruins so that we would not know.”

“Would not know what?”

“So that we would not know that we were ruins, too.  So that we would not have to remember that we had failed and fallen.  We could build bigger towers, start again.  But we would forget what they were for.  We would forget.  And now they have forgotten the forgetting, and only I am left.”

The old man fell into silence, gazing at the dusty cobbles.  The young man, too, was silent for a while.  A couple of times he opened his mouth as if to speak, but did not.  He took another swig from his bottle.

And then at last, “why did you build them?  Why did you build the towers?”

The old man did not reply at once, and when he did his voice wavered.

“I don’t know.  I don’t know.  I forgot, we all forgot.  What good does it do to remember?  I tried to fix them, for a while, after I came back.  But it was just me.  I was alone, and I did not know how.  And...”  A long pause.  “And I could not remember why.”

And the young man and the old sat silently in the shadows of the decaying towers as the sun went slowly down.

Prisoner of Hope

Perpetua was woken, as usual, by the warmth of the sunlight slipping in between the bars on her solitary high window.  She rose immediately, and began to pace the perimeter of the round cell.  This was the best part of the day, and there was no knowing when it would end.  In earlier times, in the first weeks and months - years? - after she had arrived here, morning had been the time for prayer.  She still prayed, but now she paced as well.  Important to exercise.

It was only minutes before the heavy oak door opened.  As usual, there were two figures waiting in the doorway.  As usual, they were masked.  Perpetua remembered when they had not worn masks; she remembered human faces.  Now just blank masks, which made her wonder, in her few idle moments, how the people under them could see.  But she did not ask about the masks.  Any questions along those lines brought punishment.  Instead she rose and, as usual, followed the figures out of the cell, under the stone lintel which was carved on the inside with a single word: hope.  This, after all, was the doorway out of prison.

One of the two figures walked ahead of her, whilst the other took the usual place behind.  Perpetua knew the route and walked it without thinking.  She briefly wondered whether the figure ahead of her was not that of a woman, but about that too it was forbidden to ask or speculate, and she quickly killed the thought process.  Better not to think what she could not say.  She shuffled slowly - why did they always walk so slowly now? - down the dark corridor, noticing again the broken statues which stood along the edges in the deeper shadows.  They had no heads.  Perpetua knew what was coming.

The darkness of the corridor opened up into the light of the arena, and the silence was replaced by the murmur of thousands of human voices.  The first time she had been brought here, they had roared with anger.  Now the volume barely rose as she entered and followed her guide to the centre of the arena.  Why did they keep coming here to see her?  From the noise they seemed uninterested.  She wished she could see their faces.

Perpetua's two escorts retreated, leaving her standing alone in the middle of the sand-covered floor of the vast arena.  She turned to face the far side, where there was another opening to another corridor.  She knew what to expect now.  After a few minutes the first one appeared.  She did not know how they moved or by what mechanism they were made to speak.  They appeared to be half-carved statues, but she knew that they were really ancient figures.  When first she came here they had been complete, and colourful - some beautiful, some gaudy, images of animals and people and things.  Now they looked weathered and indistinct, as if they had been exposed to the elements for centuries.  How long had it been?  How could they have changed so fast?

The voices had changed too, but not the demand.  The first time - the first hundred times - she had been here, the statues had spoken with varied voices, one seductive, one commanding, one pleading, but all with the same demand: 'worship me!'  Back then, she had proudly defied them.  Now she did not respond at all as the first mis-shapen thing ground its way towards her and uttered its demand, in a broken, hissing voice that seemed as weathered as the statue itself.  After a few seconds, as usual, the thing moved away from her to the edge of the arena.  Perpetua waited.  There would be another, and another.  Hundreds of broken statues, all with the same demand.  She would not listen.

Soon the edge of the open arena was lined with objects, all hissing together: worship us!  Perpetua waited for it to end.  It always ended.  But today seemed longer than usual, and the voices seemed to be rising higher.  She knew that nothing was served by speaking, and she tried to remain silent, but the hissing, creaking voices...  Why wouldn't they stop?  A cry burst from her.

'How can I worship you when I don't know what you are?  Do you even know what you are?  Are you anything at all?'

There was silence in the arena.  Absolute silence.

And then the two masked figures were there, one on either side of her.  They took an arm each, not too gently, and dragged her away, back to the door from which she had entered the arena.  The spectators made no sound; the broken statues were still. It was over for today.

As they reached the door to the cell, Perpetua glanced upward, as she always did.  Here on the outside, the lintel was also carved with one word: surely.

'Even so' she muttered as she passed underneath, and the heavy door swung shut behind her.