Aria Remains
CHAPTER TWENTY

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No bombs fell upon the village. No searchlights scanned the night sky, no sirens rang fear through the darkness. There was not even the most marginal threat of incursion from any external force or hazard, yet the news of the world and the fatuous combat into which it had fallen still reached its inhabitants like a cruel, insidious wind crawling across a sealed room.

‘The Archduke has been assassinated,’ was the first real account shared amongst the villagers, reported by a young and resilient Serbian man who had stowed away on board the last merchant vessel to depart the continent and which had been laden with vats of coffee and tea, of sugar and cotton, spices and timber, and which met rough seas that caused it to break apart. A quiet and somewhat plain, but extremely valiant young woman, who was the descendant of a priest who had visited the village many years before and had found his faith not equal to the test of corporeal passion, came across the Serb as he washed ashore on the same morning that a twenty-two year old undergraduate began his legendarium, introducing Eärendil and opening the doors to new territories.

The dauntless woman dragged the man from the water and received permission for him to enter the village since he had much more to tell them all, later teaching them the use of ten decimal digits in the stead of binary ones, as were used by previous automated calculators, and revealing to them the ways of his countrymen, whom he missed very much, so that the villagers became entranced by legends and mythology and learned how the soul moves and initiates all things and then, following death, reincarnates into stone, wood, animals and people. Following a brief and unspiritual courtship the pair were married, celebrated with vigour and determination by the entire village since it was all they could do to show their solidarity with the millions upon millions of people who were suffering beyond its borders. The Serbian, who came to be known as новине since he always had something new and interesting to tell them, continued to advise them all of the failed Schlieffen Plan, the progress of the Entente and the October Revolution. Although no one could be certain from where he was obtaining his information it seemed to them, sheltered within their cocoon from the atrocities without, a question of such low importance it was not worth dwelling upon.

That was until an old woman, who often appeared from within one of the narrow Victorian terrace houses although nobody ever thought she actually lived there, since none had been invited inside nor seen any indications of life behind its netted windows, began speculating to herself as she wandered the streets that новине was, in fact, a spy of the German Imperial Army and that all the things he had been telling them were nothing but fiction, rooted amongst the conniving tangles of a nefarious garden. Despite her assumed instability and the fact that not a single soul in the village ever remembered hearing her say a word directly to anyone other than the small dog who was never far from her side, by her will the cruel idea began to spread and, against their better judgement and in an altered atmosphere all would come to regret with great remorse, they turned their back upon the young married couple, ostracising them to such an extent that, some months before Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated, they were forced to flea.

Not content with this fallacious perfidiousness the old woman, known only as Mrs Tage and with nothing better to do since she had grown bored with her preoccupation of collecting souls so that they would not go on to reincarnate into stone or wood or animals or people, and who had become fascinated with the foul workings of conflict on the grandest scale, inflicted upon the village a drought that lasted for thirty-six months. The fierce heat that beleaguered the long weeks of summer and autumn scorched the earth and made brittle the grasses and vegetation, and even the winter that followed saw almost no precipitation at all. It was a pattern that continued for a further two years until, the old woman now feeling as though a change was coming and that a memory drowned amongst the mist of existence long ago was struggling to replace its way to the surface, grew weary of the project and allowed the rains to return so that the villagers could step back from the precipice of extinction. The impact of the terrible drought, the lack of pasture and hay, the backward crops of barley and oats and beans and peas, the failure of the potatoes, the emptying ponds, the trees that lost their leaves for want of moisture, the suffering of the sheep and cattle and the species of worm that destroyed what was left of the grass all took an almost unbearably heavy toll on the village, yet after it all they were to discover something they had never expected.

‘I have seen something, something that must have been there but was not there before,’ announced an elderly man who, following the death of his lifelong companion, had fallen into a deep trough of loneliness from which he knew there would likely be no escape, since even amongst the pioneering enlightenment of the village which was now fortified following their perplexity over the новине affair, he had still felt the need to conceal his predilections.

He returned to his discovery in the company of several villagers who very much liked him and, being well aware that he and his friend shared much more than brotherly camaraderie, entertained no prejudice and, not wishing to broach the subject themselves for fear of showing poor taste, would have been happy to tell him so should he ever have asked. As they reached the place they had always known as the shoreline they gasped and pointed as one because, revealed before them, where the water had once been, was a previously unmapped dockside and a graveyard of broken buildings, positioned exactly as they had been for almost four hundred years.

‘How have we not noticed this before?’ queried Mrs Hansen, who was well known for never being short of questions without once offering an solution.

‘It has been concealed from us,’ said Reverend Timmins solemnly, having joined the group as he was on his way to offer succour to those few in the village who required it. When pressed by several of the villagers as to why it had been so hidden he replied with his usual portentousness (as was his way when he had no real idea), ‘It is god’s will.’

‘What do you think it is?’ the elderly man asked no one in particular.

‘It is our past,’ the Reverend replied, feeling on safer ground.

Investigations were arranged, mariners and scientists with a comprehension of active sonar technology were invited to explore the revelations and the site became the focus of the inhabitants throughout the several weeks it was scrutinised. Eventually it was broadcast that the buildings dated from the middle of the sixteenth century and pointed to an antiquity of which none were previously aware. The lack of any historical record, although not unexpected, proved a frustration to everyone and so, as the mariners and scientists prepared to take their leave, it was generally accepted that no further knowledge would be garnered from the unexpected exposure of the past.

Late one spring afternoon, as the sun wrapped around its shoulders the golden cloak it always chose to wear in preparation for its journey southwards, the elderly man returned to look again at the vestiges of yesterday and to contemplate the narrowing passageway to his tomorrows. As he sat upon a verge that overlooked the water, which was now beginning to renegotiate its way back to its more familiar boundaries as a consequence of the heavy rainfall that, for several weeks throughout January and February, appeared to be set in for a decade, he thought he saw something approaching the old docks. His eyes, no longer what they once were, at first found it impossible to perceive the truth of what he was seeing but, eventually, he realised it was the dark figure of a person, struggling across the thick sludge of mud that surrounded the decaying buildings.

It was Mrs Tage, the old woman who had seen to the departure of the young married couple and the arrival of the drought, picking through the remnants of eradication like a crooked, senescent vulture descending upon its carrion. As she slopped and wallowed from one broken structure to the next she paused at each as though savouring the memories every building held, before negotiating a path that allowed a more certain footing through the mire, stopping by the docks and looking up and down the scene as a grim and unpleasant smile dug a trajectory across her face. It was as if, the elderly man thought, leaning forward and watching her closely with his chin in his hand, she had found a place of tranquility, a place she could not have been more gratified to have returned to. What he did not see, what he was unable to see, was the shimmering band that condensed around her, looking to the ground as she was looking, although their expressions were dour and occupied by regret, their hearts pierced, their spirits deplenished. He was not close enough to her to be able to hear her mutterings and mumblings as she recalled the distant night when the waters first expanded, thrown down by a storm that embraced the land, swallowing the buildings and stubbornly refusing to let them breathe again until now.

The figures that stood around her, familiar with her by a different name, one that had sufficed for many centuries until she had reappeared amongst the brick houses and cobbled streets and sparks of electricity and which, driven by her loneliness and a plague of uncertain remembrances that hovered just beyond her reach and had made her question her own identity to such an extent that she had decided to change it, recoiled from the torture of this uncovering of their killing ground. But, as they relived the terrible night upon which they had been slain with such viciousness, they began to comprehend something of her murmurings, started to learn things they had not known before. She spoke, occasionally in garbled and hushed undertones that fell into a stream of gibberish, of an agreement she had reached and of the hitherto unrevealed consequences it entailed. Those around her looked to one another in fearful astonishment at this disclosure, knowing immediately its significance and wanting to ascertain its validity from sources only known by, and accessible to, the dead.

The elderly man decided he had seen enough and started to arrange his stiff and aching body so that he could stand from the verge and, in doing so, succumbed to a brief fit of viscous coughing. Having been unaware she was not alone, invested so heavily in her delight at the thought of that tempestuous night that she had not noticed either the old man or the gathering of visitants about her, Mrs Tage raised her head and, for a moment, considered drawing revenge for his unsolicited audience. Yet, as she brought her hand level with her cadaverous waist in preparation of launching upon him some kind of iniquitous conjuration, something that would, perhaps, rob him of his sight or send him spiralling down the hillside, she paused.

She paused to listen as an echoing voice at the back of her mind called to her, beseeching her to stop, to bring an end to her odious misdoings. It said to her that such conduct was wrong, was unnecessary, and it was these very ideas, this rotten seam of poison coursing through her that had been responsible for bringing her such unhappiness. As the shimmering presence departed in search of their legitimacy, leaving nothing but their sorrow behind them, and as the elderly man picked a careful route across the slippery grass with the cough still caught in his throat and rattling against his ribs, she closed her eyes, trying to focus on the voice, trying to recognise it because it seemed to her to be the sweet voice of someone she had once known, someone she had lost at some point amongst the appended concatenation of her existence. She quickly became consumed by the chase to catch up with things passed and lingered where she was, by the immemorial dock that had once enabled such fresh and exotic commodities ashore, for many hours, not noticing the demure darkness filling the night or the gathering encroachment of the waters that now rose to her instep.

‘It be now time for thee to retire from this place,’ the echo in her mind said to her at last.

‘And wouldst thou accompany me, should I leave?’ the old woman asked quietly, gravel in her tone, a bittersweet sensation in the unfilled place where her marcescent heart beat thinly, struggling for merit. It was a sensation she did not understand and would not learn to decipher for another hundred years.

‘Of course, for I be always here,’ came the echo, ‘and shall stay until thee replaces the capacity with which to embrace me completely.’

Confused by the messages she was receiving and being unable to make sense of those that came after, the old woman finally left the suffocated buildings to the silence of the night and returned to the village and to the narrow Victorian house that looked the same as all the other houses in the terrace. She remained there for almost thirty years, her ennui a thick sludge that pinned her to the only piece of furniture in the place, a single wooden chair that squatted within like a trap. Occasionally she would force herself to venture into the street, confronted by the effects of modernity and of gentrification, but she could no longer replace the echo and became resigned to an internal struggle that drained her to such a degree that, in the end, all she could do was to travel north, to return to the place where the body of her mother lay, surrounded by restive beetles and vegetation that clung to life with the same sceptical obligation as she. Just before she left she brought under her dominion a local woman who, without knowledge or memory of her intrication, played the role of Mrs Tage’s daughter in the dealings of the rental of the house, making arrangements for the transaction with a solemn young man whose wife was currently away visiting her sister. The fees were paid into an account held at a bank several miles from the village, which the old woman never bothered to audit. Each seven shillings and sixpence, after consideration of inflation and other pecuniary evaluations, eventually amounted to a cache of more than one million pounds, which was then appropriated by a group of bank robbers who had implemented their astute plan of burrowing beneath the bank so they could drain its contents without ever being seen. They made away with the fortunes of many wealthy customers, only to meet their end as their getaway concluded more abruptly than they had foreseen, their van colliding with a low railway bridge when the driver swerved to avoid a tufted ground squirrel who had left a packet of cookies on the other side of the road. The squirrel survived unscathed; the bank robbers were crushed into jambalaya.

The elderly man, who had been watching Mrs Tage from the verge, succumbed to an infection that ravaged his chest and introduced him to the dark angel without ever again knowing the caress of another or the understanding and compassion of those who cared not of his clandestinity but of their desire to be able to tell him so. All they could do was mourn his passing with the same vexatious despondency as they had mourned those innocents who had been so pointlessly killed at the hand of politics and economics, since the distance they felt from the elderly man was just as the distance at which the village stood from the Somme and from Buchenwald. It was the price they had to pay for living in seclusion, their safety and purdah entwined forever in their abstraction from the rest of the world.

As the years fell away and the world beyond the borders of the village succumbed to further insecurities and instability, as economies crumbled and perimeters were reassigned or disregarded completely, as expansion and appeasement and the endorsing of pacts led irrevocably to engagement once again, an air of vacillating expectation crackled through the air. Following the displacement of the young Serb and his wife, who would eventually return to the village in their dotage forty years before the expectation was finally met, the only information brought to them now came in the form of indistinct and erratic whispers conveyed by visiting merchants who had all been mandated to undertake a vow of taciturnity by the outside authorities since, as most of them would apologetically repeat, loose lips sink ships. So it was that the village continued its life without any infringement of the calamitous struggles in Europe, existing as a non-existent thing, akin to the golden mountain and the fountain of youth, something real that was only knowable and discoverable by a select few. It would only be years later, after fusillades of the abyss were unleashed upon the virtuous citizens of Japan, precipitating the capitulation of barbarians, that an arrangement was secured to allow the delivery of a daily newspaper to the outskirts of the village, where the blue jacaranda grew sixty feet tall in a grove like a violet corridor to nirvana and where a young girl with long dark hair and pale blue eyes was tasked with collecting the stack of periodicals at six every morning and distributing them amongst the homes and businesses so that the residents could see for themselves what kind of spin a selection of hacks were applying to the world’s events. The young girl grew to be an untrammelled and perspicacious woman who continued disseminating the papers until the villagers tired of such skewed and myopic reportage, as they all knew there was more honour and courtesy and hope in life than was being portrayed within the stained print of their daily bulletins. Consequently the papers were left to pile and decompose, eventually forming into an enormous and biodegradable palace of pulp in which many thousands of worms lived and worked for almost three years, until the free-spirited woman was called away to another life where she would be assigned a much more significant endeavour.

On the cool, bright May morning that old Mrs Tage left the shell of her home for the final time a raw-boned, bespectacled man called Cole Framingham walked with confidence and good cheer through the village, past the docks and straight into the water, not emerging again for many days. Although this caused some concern for his safety amongst the villagers, they knew that he was a good swimmer and he had already proved that he could hold his breath under water for several hours in a contest to decide who should lead an expedition to chart the sea bed, because they had never lost their curiosity for its archaic mysteries ever since the time the water drained and revealed the ancient buildings within. Unable to wait until July for the enterprise to begin, Cole had taken it upon himself to start the exploration unilaterally, telling everyone on his return that rather than uncover any of the village’s secrets he had, instead, discovered a long section of road which could only be the road to Atlantis. It was made from thousands of yellow bricks, he explained, and went on for many miles, so many miles that it was only when he became fatigued from walking against the tides beneath the surface, since it put such pressure on his legs and took so long to take each step, that he had to turn back before he could replace the great city.

‘One day,’ he vowed to an engrossed audience who filled the newly-built coffee shop that had once, a very long time before, been the site of a popular and inventive tavern, ‘I shall construct an apparatus that will allow me to walk more easily beneath the water so that I can visit Atlantis and ask its citizens if they will share with me the secret to life’s happiness,’ but he was never able to fulfil his promise as he soon came to the realisation that he should marry the girl he had loved since he had been little more than a child because it might be that road, the golden path he had already set upon at such a young age, that would actually be the one to lead him to unlock the enigma. On their wedding night his wife said - and although still quite tender in years, Framingham was already aware that a man should always pay heed to his wife - with a tender look in her eyes and an amorous touch to his hand that she would rather he did not make the journey, that she worried he might meet a beautiful Atlantean and she would never see him again. And so he conceded his plans, recognising that it was more important to stay with the one you truly love than it was to waste time searching for what you might never replace and most likely never really wanted, and together they lived a life of joy and wonder, thankful each morning for one another’s company and for the honour and respect they shared.

The old woman, no longer with any need for the name Tage since she would encounter no one for whom she might continue the pretence for a great period of time, endured in her tiny hut as the particles of memory swam in the coagulated air around her. She lost all interest in living, her sedentariness fossilising and enervating her so that all she could do was sift through her many centuries of evocation as she tried in vain to pinpoint the agency of the echo that still sometimes sounded inside her mind like a clarion.