The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s. Brian Aldiss

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      In the camp outside Catenzaro, NUNSACS housed ten thousand men and women. Most of them were Russian, most had been brought from one small district of the USSR. Charteris had got his job on the rehabilitation staff by virtue of his fluent Russian, which was in many respects almost identical with his native tongue.

      The ten thousand caused little trouble. Almost all of them were confined within the tiny republics of their own psyches. The PCA Bombs had been ideal weapons. The psychedelic drugs used by both sides were tasteless, odourless, colourless, and hence virtually undetectable. They were cheaply made. They were equally effective whether inhaled, drunk, or filtered through the pores of the skin. They were enormously potent. The after-effects, dependent on size of dose, could last a lifetime.

      So the ten thousand crawled about the camp, smiling, laughing, scowling, whispering, as bemused with themselves and their fellows as they had been directly after the bombing. Some recovered. Others over the months revealed depressing character changes.

      The drugs passed through the human system unimpaired in strength. Human wastes had to be rigorously collected – in itself a considerable undertaking among people no longer responsible for their own actions – and subjected to rigorous processing before the complex psychochemical molecules could be broken down. Inevitably, some of the NUNSACS staff picked up the contagion.

      And I, thought Charteris, I with that sad and lovely Natrina …

      I am going psychedelic. That vision must have come from the drug.

      He had moved some way towards the Hotel des Invalides, dragging his fingers across the rough faces of the buildings as if to convince himself that matter was still matter. When Angelina came up to him, he scarcely recognised her.

      ‘You were waiting for me,’ she said accusingly. ‘You are deliberately waylaying me. You’d better go to your room before Madame locks up.’

      ‘I – I may be ill! You must help me.’

      ‘Speak Italian. I told you, I don’t understand German.’

      ‘Help me, Angelina. I must be ill.’

      ‘You were well enough before.’

      ‘I swear … I had a vision. I can’t face my room. I don’t want to be alone. Let me come back to your room!’

      ‘Oh no! You must think I am a fool, Signor!’

      He pulled himself together.

      ‘Look, I’m ill, I think. Come and sit in my car with me for ten minutes. I need to get my strength back. If you don’t trust me, I’ll smoke a cigar all the time. You never knew a man kiss a pretty girl with a cigar in his mouth, did you?’

      They sat in the car, she beside him looking at him rather anxiously. Charteris could see her eyes gleam in the thick orange light – the very hue of time congealed! – bouncing off the walls of the cathedral. He sucked the rich sharp smoke down into his being, trying to fumigate it against the terrible visions of his psyche.

      ‘I’m going back to Italy soon,’ she said. ‘Now the war’s over, I may work in Milano. My uncle writes that it’s booming there again now. Is that so?’

      ‘Booming.’ A very curious word. Not blooming, not booing. Booming.

      ‘Really, I’m not Italian. Not by ancestry. Everyone in our village is descended from Albanians. When the Turks invaded Albania five centuries ago, many Albanians fled in ships across to the south of Italy to start life anew. The old customs were preserved from generation to generation. Did you hear of such a thing in Catenzaro?’

      ‘No.’ In Catenzaro he had heard the legends and phobias of the Caucasus, chopped and distorted by the kaleidoscopes of hallucination. It was a Slav, and not a Latin, purgatory of alienation.

      ‘As a little girl, I was bilingual. We spoke Squiptar in the home and Italian everywhere else. Now I can hardly remember one word of Squiptar! My uncles have all forgotten too. Only my old aunt, who is also called Angelina, remembers. It’s sad, isn’t it, not to recall the language of your childhood? Like an exile?’

      ‘Oh, shut up! To hell with it!’

      By that, she was reassured. Perhaps she believed that a man who took so little care to please could not want to rape her. Perhaps she was right. While Charteris nursed his head and tried to understand what was inside it, she chattered on a new tack.

      ‘I’ll go back to Milano in the autumn, in September when it’s not so hot. They’re not good Catholics here. Are you a good Catholic? The French priests – ugh, I don’t like them, the way they look at you! Sometimes I hardly seem to believe any more … Do you believe in God, Signor?’

      He turned and looked painfully at her orange eyes, trying to see what she was really saying. She was a terrible bore, this girl.

      ‘If you are really interested, I believe we each have Gods within us, and we must follow those.’

      ‘That’s stupid! Those gods would just be reflections of ourselves and we should be indulging in egotism.’

      He was surprised by her answer. Neither his Italian nor his theology was good enough for him to reply as he would have liked. He said briefly, ‘And your god – he is just an externalisation of egotism. Better to keep it inside!’

      ‘What terrible, wicked blasphemy for a Catholic to utter!’

      ‘You little idiot, I’m no Catholic! I’m a Communist. I’ve never seen any sign of your God marching about the world.’

      ‘Then you are indeed sick!’

      Laughing angrily, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her towards him. As she struggled, he shouted, ‘Let’s make a little investigation!’

      She brought her skull forward and struck him on the nose. His head seemed to turn cathedral-size on the instant, flood-lit with pain. He hardly realised she had broken from his grip and was running across the square, leaving the Banshee’s passenger door swinging open.

      After a minute or two, Charteris locked the car door, climbed out, and made his way across to the hotel. The door was locked; Madame would be in bed, dreaming dreams of locked chests. Looking through the window into the bar, he saw that M’sieur still sat at his special table, drinking wine with a crony. Madame’s wretched dog sprawled by the radiator, still restlessly changing its position. Charteris tapped on the window.

      After a minute or two, M’sieur unlocked the door from inside and appeared in his shirtsleeves. He stroked his tiny puff of beard and nodded to himself, as if something significant had been confirmed.

      ‘You were fortunate I was still up, M’sieur. Madame my wife does not like to be disturbed when once she has locked up the premises. My friend and I were just fighting some of our old campaigns before bed.’

      ‘Perhaps I have been doing the same thing.’

      He went up to his room. It was filled with noise. As he walked over to the window and looked out, he saw that a lock on the dry canal had been opened. Now it was full of rushing water, coursing over the car body and other rubbish, slowly moving them downstream. All the long uncomfortable night, Charteris slept uneasily to the noise of the purging water.

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