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15.
"Our home," Lindy. They regarded the rounded, tower-like entrance of a yellowish stuccoed multistory building overgrown with ivy on all sides. A large structure, it appeared to be melded with some ancient city walls of gray dressed stones overlooking neighborhoods several stories below.
"That is the university," Lindy said, pointing to a mass of glass buildings with aluminum spires and domes on the other side of a small valley. "We'll be working there together. First, let's get you acquainted with your new home." Lindy pushed through a heavy old wooden door with wrought-iron bars and thick glass panels. Tedda followed her through the round tower lobby with its creaking wooden floors and over-papered bulletin boards on either side. "I'll show you the refectory and the other common rooms like the basement laundry shortly."
They marched up a gloomy flight of stairs, past the open doors of rooms in which silent women sat knitting or paring an apple or washing hands endlessly or just staring out of shell-shocked eyes that didn't blink. They had come to the topmost room along the spiral staircase and Lindy had thrown it open. Now they stood before a room with two beds. Lindy stepped aside, and Tedda stepped inside. The wooden floorboards groaned in faint, tiny voices as she stepped about.
"Not much to see," Tedda said, picking uncertainly at this or that.
"Yeah, well it grows on you." Lindy slipped the door shut and turned the key. "You learn to lock things up or they walk off. Some of these sluts are here for theft, burglary, you name it. Not all get treated well either, if they aren't important."
"Looks comfortable enough," Tedda said, walking around the room touching this and that. To the right was Lindy's bed, with a ragged and faded quilt over it.
"I salvaged that from a family who moved through here last year," Lindy said nervously. "Their child died, and they left me her quilt." She shrugged.
Tedda shrugged. "Yeah. That's tough." She ached inside. Moving to the window, she looked down through trees on a grassy hillside on which rabbits played.
Lindy looked over her shoulders. "The rabbits are stupid. Watka goes hunting here on the estate. I like it when they have rabbit cooked in red wine and onions. It's not often."
"What do you eat usually?" Tedda asked as she sat and bounced on her dry little mattress with a stack of aseptic sheets, blankets, and pillow; pretty much the same rubric as upstairs in the hospital room.
"Yuck," Lindy said, sitting down beside her. "Potatoes this, potatoes that. Sometimes we have meat, sometimes we don't. Depends on how the war is going. There is always cabbage. Sometimes we have carrots, which are good. We get salt and pepper to put on everything. Fruits, sometimes. A banana or a lemon, very rarely. Apples. There are orchards near here. Oranges so we don't get scurvy, but they are often on the verge of being brown and rotten."
They both bounced on the creaking mattress and springs, and laughed. Lindy bounced to her feet and skittered across the room. She reached under her mattress and pulled out a flat pint bottle of some cloudy yellow liquid. "Potato schnapps." She giggled. "Want a sip?
Tedda shook her head. "Makes me giddy. I want to have a clear mind right now, what's left of it."
"I agree." Lindy stashed it back under the mattress. "We have to meet your co-workers. Come."
"You're kidding," Tedda said.
"Nope." Lindy held out a hand. "You'll like them." A gong sounded, deep and resonant but faint, as if underwater. Lindy made a face as they bounded down the stairs. "I forgot. It's dinner time."
"I am kind of hungry," Tedda said following her. She felt a little unsteady and held her left hand against the cracked plaster wall in the curving stairwell.
"I hope you like the cast of characters," Lindy said. "Let's stop in and pay our respects." They went down past the ground floor to a lower level that smelled of cabbage and onions. The wooden floor had a weird smell, as if its untreated, raw tobacco-brown surface were soaked in vinegar. A row of disconsolate women stood silently in line holding battered aluminum trays. Most wore the standard bleach-blue jumpsuit. A few wore other odds and ends, like a faded sweater two sizes too big or two small, or a steel woolish scarf like Lindy. At least one woman had vacant eyes and a scar around the top of her forehead; Lindy whispered: "They unscrewed her dashboard and took out a few of the lights." One women, a large shmeery blonde with hungry eyes and some kind of red lipstick, wore a knitted purple hat-thing with mysterious lumps over each ear. "Looks like she can screw horns in if she wants," Lindy whispered about the wool knit lumps. Tedda squinted more closely and realized the lumps were intended to represent flowers. Two women got in an elbow-jamming fight near the French doors leading into the drab, industrial feeding area. Two others quietly hung back and held hands. Tedda already hated the place, and could understand Lindy's distaste. "How long exactly have you been here?" she asked her new friend and roommate.
"Too long. A little over seven years."
"And for how long?"
Lindy regarded her oddly. "Well, that's part of the punishment. They don't tell you." Seeing Tedda's shocked look, she nodded. "You don't know what a torture it is. Every day you wake up and think this is the day they let you go. After a few thousand disappointments, you quit hoping."
Tedda felt that awful jolt of urgency again, like something cutting her inside. She held her hands to her temples.
"You okay?"
Tedda felt as if all her blood had flowed away, leaving her skin cold and pale.
"You look terrible," Lindy said in alarm.
"It will pass," Tedda said. There was no way to understand or deal with these sudden bursts of need or urgency or duty or whatever it was.
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