walls are the same whitewash as outside but cleaner, with fewer cracks. Six rows of dark wood benches line up either side of an aisle pointing arrow-straight to a low altar covered with white cloth. For the first time since she left France, homesickness touches Clementine. This room could be in Lyon or Grenoble, but for the faint mist of dust that hovers golden in the yellow light.
A pale-skinned woman, the first she’s seen since she arrived, appears from a doorway in the wall behind the altar. She wears a simple brown robe tied at the waist with a cord. Her short, red hair is cut like a man’s in a style that would mark her as sexually deviant at home, but maybe the rules are different here. The shaven sides show her ears fully, but there is no glint of metal in either of them. For whatever reason, this woman does not embrace the technology the locals favour. She smiles in a manner that grants limited, conditional acceptance of Clementine’s right to be here and waits for her to speak.
The silence is wrongfooting. The conversational gambits she’d been running through on her way here all seem too obviously false now. This woman’s stern simplicity demands repayment in the same currency. Clementine’s concocted stories of a struggle against oppression, of loss and abandonment, evaporate, replaced by a single statement. ‘I want to disappear.’
The woman’s eyes wander over Clementine’s pale skin and inappropriate, form-fitting European clothes. There’s a glimmer of something that might be sympathy. ‘Are you ready to embrace our Saviour?’
A simple, binary question, loaded with two millennia of history, packed with an infinity of agendas. Which one does this unremarkable woman serve? What will it demand? Choice is a luxury reserved for those already possessed of food and shelter. Clementine does not hesitate. ‘With all my heart.’
The woman’s smile warms, but her eyes are still calculating. ‘I am Hilda. You can help in the kitchen for now. I’m afraid you’ll have to stay in the hostel dormitory tonight. You’ll need to change out of those clothes. They’ll bring trouble we don’t need.’ She walks with slow, smooth steps, leading the way to a darkened glass door behind the altar. It opens to reveal a small vestry that looks as if it serves as a bedroom. Despite conspicuous cleanliness, it is a tableau of a life improvised. Piles of things, mostly books and papers, cover every available flat surface, including a narrow, hard-looking bed. Hilda reaches into one of the piles, pulls out a brown robe identical to her own, and passes it over. For a moment Clementine watches dumbly as the reality of what she’s doing settles on her. Holy orders. Will there be a vow? Some sort of ritual? Will they accept someone like her? All she has is this woman’s tacit acceptance. Instead of hopelessness, the thought inspires a wave of calm. This is all she has. Perhaps a freedom from choice is the gift of the Holy City.
There is a pang of loss as she strips off her smart-fabric leggings and vest. Inappropriate they may be, but the temperature-sensitive weave and adjustable wicking properties made them valuable in any climate. The variable colour shift was a useless legacy of her old life – it wouldn’t hide her in the city. Clothes like this were hard to find, even in Europe, since the war on the Ural frontier had started up again. The gossamer network of goods between continents necessary for such sophisticated products had taken years to re-emerge after the first war, and now it was gone again.
She hesitates, wary of nakedness in front of a stranger, until Hilda looks away. The world goes dark as the robe slides over Clementine’s head. It’s heavy, and the coarse fabric scratches her skin where it touches. Her head emerges to see Hilda smiling now, perhaps in amusement at the sight of the slight woman swaddled in fabric, perhaps at something else. The benign opacity of her expression is a mask that could hide anything, or anyone.
The kitchen is spotless but tired. The stainless-steel surfaces are scored with the passage of a decade of cutlery. A small, dark woman stirs two big pots of something surprisingly appetizing. She doesn’t wear robes and she seems surprised to see Clementine, but silently accepts her presence, handing her an apron and a dented ladle. From the other side of a green plastic folding shutter comes the sound of moving bodies and murmuring, the stilted conversations of the hopeless, not listening to each other, hitting dead ends, repeating themselves.
The cook leans across the counter and pulls at the centre of the shutter. It clacks noisily up into a hidden recess. The people on the other side are mostly men, already in a line. They know how this works. A few glance up, noticing the unexpected robed figure, but most are focused on the food. They shuffle past blindly as Clementine ladles bowls full of aromatic stew. There’s a faint waft of sumac and bursts of something else more exotic, a spice that leaves an almost uncomfortable heat on the tongue. Still, it’s good food. The homeless in Europe have been killing rats for more than a decade now. An unwanted memory sends a shudder through her: not just the homeless.
The act of serving becomes automatic and she stops noticing the faces in front of her until one of them hisses thanks. She looks up to see the yellow eyes that watched her in the doorway. They see through the disguise of her robe. The features around them are hidden behind shadows and layers of ragged cloth, the blotched red wrist of the hand that takes the bowl seems almost to strobe out of existence in the flickering yellow ceiling light, but the scars of radiation sickness are unmistakeable.
Clementine suppresses a start of surprise and resumes the mechanistic act of filling the bowls, looking around her to see if anyone else has noticed the stranger. The cook wrestles the dead weight of the second pot, oblivious. The homeless continue their dead-man shuffle.
A few make attempts at conversation when she steps out from behind the counter to gather bowls and spoons, but they’re nonsensical, or perhaps in some dialect of the damned she doesn’t understand. She smiles dumbly; none of her language training prepared her for this. As she clears away, she looks in vain for the yellow-eyed stranger.
The small, dark cook makes empty conversation as they share the duties of washing up and putting away. She answers Clementine’s questions about recipes and ingredients with gentle incredulity at her ignorance, unable to grasp the exoticism of her fare to someone who comes from a place where spices will not grow. The rest of her talk is platitudes and local gossip: political scandals, acts of outrage by a cult she calls ‘the Machine people’. The stories mean nothing to Clementine. There is no threat of meaningful dialogue. She has already disappeared.
She follows the cook’s directions to the dormitory. A windowless corridor floored with colourless, hard lino takes her there. The geography of this place is unsettling, hard to follow even for someone like her. It doesn’t correspond at all to the featureless white box visible from the outside. Walls have been knocked away into nearby buildings and tunnels dug between to link them. It is a warren of the faithful with many entrances. The exteriors are all facades. It makes her wonder who else is hiding here. Or is this just what pragmatism looks like in the ruins of the Holy City?
The hostel dormitory is small and cramped compared to the cavernous dining hall. There are people already here, most dressed in the ragged uniform of the poor. Some chat with cautious familiarity. Hilda had explained the hostel’s twelve beds were allocated on the basis of a benignly rigged lottery. At 5 p.m. every day applicants were invited to draw straws for a place. Recent winners, and known substance abusers, chose from a lot that contained no long straws. Some perhaps suspected their fate was sealed, but it was fairer than chance. Clementine had bypassed the lottery entirely, for reasons as yet unclear.
Fully half her roommates are women: the lottery’s work again. They look genderless in the garb of poverty and the skin of their faces and hands is hard from days spent outside in the streets. The eyes of the men follow her hungrily across the room to an empty bed in one corner. Their scrutiny is relentless, their thoughts obvious, but signs proclaiming the Mission’s code of conduct hang like silent sentinels on the walls. Nobody wants to find themselves losing the lottery.
Nobody undresses. Instead, there are token gestures towards the rituals of preparing
