A Handful of Nails

Unbeknownst to the children, I added wood shavings to their turnip stew last night: pine to be exact, which I grated meticulously as if it were a hard cheese. At my most desperate, I've had to do such things because my children, like most children, don't understand deprivation, they understand only their own appetites--which is what makes children so appealing: they are all desire, wide-eyed and voracious.
       "Mama, can I have this?" Lori asks, my eleven-year-old.
             She holds in both hands for my inspection an oil-soaked sock which looks, I suppose, delectable. Her siblings are watching her hopefully. Recently they made a meal of wallpaper paste--a glutinous soup, heavily salted and peppered--and only the three youngest got sick. The others sat around afterwards and pretended not to gloat, though they looked very pleased with themselves. I suspect they all suffered stomach cramps.
      Lori's my serious one, the child who looks most like me, a small crooked nose, green-green eyes, a swanlike neck but the stocky build of a field hockey player. She knows better than to eat a sock; it's obviously a sock. But the odorous oil, dark as molasses, might have her fooled; I recall how the heady smell of gasoline often tantalized me as a child.
      "No," I tell her, "you can't have this."
      I take the sock from her, having to tug it from her grasp, then I toss it into the fireplace, where last night's embers ignite the sock in a splendid burst of blue flame. Lori weeps, hands over her eyes as if painfully blinded. The others join her. And I have a roomful of sobbing children. Thirteen, to be exact.
      Some nights I dream that I cut off my left arm for the children's dinner and roast it for hours like a succulent leg of lamb, basting it with a thick gravy of my own blood, the house redolent with its sweet baking. I'm not usually inclined to thoughts as melodramatic as that, but the war itself is melodrama and all of us feel the strain. My husband, gone over a year now, was drafted by the bullies of the Revolutionary Militia and my eldest son, Lofe, only fifteen, joined shortly thereafter because, I fear, he liked the look of the uniforms. Families, I've heard, have resorted to eating their house pets, something we don't have, fortunately, and a number of children have run away because, apparently, they felt they'd find better elsewhere.
      Had you asked me, when I was a teenager, what would become of my life, I would have told you any number of fantasies, none of which have come true. I was good at math and took for granted that I would be a scientist. It would be too easy to say that love did me in, but I must admit that, for a time, love made it seem that being in love was enough. When I met Marcel at the two-year Poly-tech, where those of us without connections or money went, he was by no means the handsomest or the smartest. To speak the truth, I was the smartest in our class of six hundred.
      Marcel (pronounced MAR-cel because he thought Mar-CEL too effeminate) is a thoroughly good man, not the type to play hard-to-get nor the type to tell you one thing when he means another. In other words, he was not the type I was attracted to. The uncertainty other young men cultivated, their callous disregard of my feelings, their adolescent self-absorption, made for an edgy excitement that I'd almost found addicting. I had dated about twenty boys before I met Marcel, who sat next to me in calculus. At first I thought his lack of guile was an act, the way he'd blink at me and say, "Don't you look lovely today!" After we started going out, I realized that he was eminently trustworthy. It was such a novelty to be with someone like that, soon I couldn't imagine being with anyone else.
      Love sneaked up on me, it seemed, threw a hood over my head, kidnapped me--I found myself doing things I never imagined I'd do, like opening a small computer-repair business with Marcel instead of going on for a degree in advanced mathematics, like living in a city flat instead of a country home where I might have awakened every morning to birdsong instead of bus horns, like having fourteen children instead of two. Sometimes I feel buoyed by my children as, during my girlhood summers, I felt buoyed by our too-salty sea--there is a comfort in my crowd of family. But increasingly I have a fear of the depths my feet cannot reach. Call it a fear of drowning.
      Every day I wonder: What will become of us?
      "Metal Man! Metal Man!" the children start screaming. They are clustered at the window. No tears now. The Metal Man, as they call him, is an officer of the Revolutionary Militia who makes the rounds once a week--unannounced--to collect metal for the RM's weaponry. It is the citizenry's job to gather an offering of nails, shrapnel, rebar, tin cans, anything for the cause. And Heaven help you if the Officer finds a cooking pot hidden in your kitchen.
      "Get your nails," I tell the children. We spend a couple of hours every morning picking through the debris of the latest bombings, of which there are many lately. While the children, under the close supervision of my most responsible--Lori, Nadia, and Simon--scavenge for metal scrap, nails from wallboard and aluminum from window frames, I scavenge for copper wire and, if I am especially lucky, terminal boards, relay switches, network junctions, PC monitors. You never know what you'll find.
      The metals officer--his family name is Hermes, an alteration of a compromising ethnic name, I suppose--wears an aluminum stewpot which he's fashioned, through prodigious hammering, into a helmet. It bears a high, scratchy shine and sits a little too low on his head. He is a surprisingly young man, younger than I, to be exact, with one of those sweet rosy faces, whiskers only on his chin. I wonder what is wrong with him that he isn't in the fighting.
      The children open the door before he knocks. He bows ever so slightly when he sees me. I think he finds me somewhat attractive, though I don't know why, a mother of fourteen. I've lost weight, it's true, and I've noticed that a streak of gray at my left temple, which seems to have appeared over night, gives me a haunted look, the kind of startled allure you might expect of the heroine of a romance novel.
      Since his visit last week, Officer Hermes has lost another tooth up front. Bad diet, I think. He's always chewing on toffee. His increasing toothlessness gives him a goofy look, like one of those retarded beggars I'd see on the Avenue of the Saints every morning on the way to the market. Before the war. There is no market now, except the black market, friends of friends who know friends who can get you this or that for the right price or barter.
      "Good morning, kiddies, what gifts have you for me today?" He holds open his canvas bag like a child at Halloween, his jaw working a wad of toffee.
      "Can we have some candy?" the children whine. I think of chicks in a nest, always hungry, mouths gaping. The children grasp at the Officer's shiny polyester shirt, his leather belt, his rubber boots, his new blue jeans, which seem proof that he's keeping some collections for himself.
      He's well fed, anybody can see, a little paunch above his belt. Something I'd like to punch, just to feel how soft it really is.
      "Where would I get candy?" he asks cheerfully.
      "You're eating it!"
      "You're an official!" Nadia says. "You can get anything!"
      That's the problem, I've decided, the "officials" of the world assuming more than their fair share.
      "Get your nails," I tell the children again. Each child has a few handfuls and, as usual, we make a production of our offering, the children parading one after the other to the Officer's open bag. As the nails accumulate, their collective noise like the sound of someone going through a change purse, I think of the money Marcel and I hoarded before he was forced to join the RM--big paper bills which featured the President's smiling face over the slogan that made him popular so many years ago: "Let's grow smart, let's grow rich!" I try not to think of the many ways I could have spent our horde before it became worthless. Now the bills paper our leaky wall seams, and my children are wearing sandals I've fashioned from video cassette cases and package string. Boys and girls alike wear shifts I've stapled together from plastic shower curtains. Have I failed them?
      "Nice, very nice," Officer Hermes is saying, nodding his head agreeably at each handful of nails.
      Just then we hear a crash from the kitchen and I fear the worst, that Lori has not finished hiding the cookware.
      "Sounded like a pan to me," says the Officer.
      "That would be surprising," I say.
      He purses his lips at me, suppressing a smile. "Let's take a look."
      The children surround him, waving their hands and hopping in protest. "We don't have any pans!" "We're not hiding!" "Nobody's in there!" All of which make a convincing show of our guilt. But I can't help but love the children for trying.
      When Officer Hermes opens the kitchen door, whose hinges are solid brass, by the way (such are the details that our dull-witted officials overlook), Lori is at the kitchen sink scrubbing a plastic bowl furiously.
      "Little Miss, why aren't you out here to greet me." Officer Hermes sounds like a storybook character. A wolf or an unctuous ogre.
      "I'm being punished," Lori says matter-of-factly, "because I tried to eat a sock this morning."
      Officer Hermes nods his head as if this made sense. That metal-heavy canvas bag at his shoulder, he strolls the length of the kitchen, sizing it up like a prospective tenant, then he opens the stove, which we haven't used in months, since there's no gas. Major appliances will be the next thing to go, I suppose.
      "I could use these oven racks," he says.
      The children crowd around us. They are silent, watchful.
      "You think we'll never cook with gas again?" I ask. "Is that what you're saying, that the quality of life under the RM--provided the RM wins--will be so meager?"
      The Officer rights himself, his face flushed: "I didn't say anything like that. Life will be better, everybody knows life will be better. But first--"he glances at the children as if to warn them, "but first we have to finish winning the war, don't we? We can't hold back, can we? Everybody has to sacrifice, don't they?"
      Finish winning the war. How careful he is.
      "We sacrifice plenty," says Simon, aware of the implicit blame.
      "Bring a written order from Home Base," I say, "and we'll give you our oven racks."
      "I don't need a written order," says Officer Hermes. Why is he suddenly angry? Do we threaten him somehow? "I have the mandate to take anything that can be spared."
      "You've got plenty from us already," I insist. Now I'm getting angry, though I realize that an argument's only going to put the family at a disadvantage. Calm the man, I tell myself. Flatter him. "You're right, Officer Hermes, you can do anything you please, but today's not the day for oven grills. Tomorrow maybe."
      The young man looks at me for a moment as if trying to determine the depth of my disdain. Perhaps my motherly authority daunts him; perhaps he wants me to respond to his male charm, whatever he thinks that may be. In any event, he stoops into the open oven and pulls out the two racks.
      "This will suffice," he says.
      Why I start crying at this point is complicated. I've never respected women who resort easily to tears and I myself usually have a tremendous reserve of patience. In this instance, however, I feel overwhelmed--so much has been taken from me already, I can see myself and the children reduced to living in a burned-out bus, as I've heard some families have resorted to doing on the west side of the Capital.
      When the fighting started, I was convinced that life under the RM would be no different from life under the PM, and Officer Hermes seems to epitomize my conviction. This candy-mouthed, pot-bellied, soft-shouldered boy of a man has the gall to stand in my kitchen and, without a twinge of compunction or conscience, take from me, take from my children. And it's just the start, isn't it?
      My face covered with my hands, I try to retrieve my tears with a ragged breath--I don't want to give the Officer the satisfaction of my anguish.
      "What's this?" I hear him say. "How dare you!"
      I look: one of the children, Tomin, has smacked him in the back of the neck with a wooden spoon. Before I can admonish Tomin, Nadia strikes him with a small fist in the stomach and then--a horror to behold--the children fall upon the man, pummeling him. He's so surprised, he offers no resistance, only covers his face with his arms and shouts, "Oh!" And I'm so shocked it takes me a moment--no more than a moment, I swear--to yell at the children: "Stop right this minute!" But this hardly sounds strong enough. I start pulling them away. They are furious. Have my tears incited them? "Please stop!" I'm screaming through the rain of fists. The man is down, balled up on the floor. Again I hear him say, "Oh!" The children themselves are hollering a babble of protest: I hear "candy!" "give me!" "unfair!" "nasty!"
      I peel the children away, so furious I lash out with one arm, smacking Nadia across the mouth. She wails in pain and this brings the children to attention at last. They step back, panting, several of them teary-eyed, noses runny. Nadia's lower lip is bloody. Lori dabs at it with the wet cloth she was using at the sink earlier.
      I stoop to help up Officer Hermes but he won't budge, balled up as if he feared for his life, though certainly the children's attack, while painful, was hardly life-threatening. I am reminded of those histrionic soccer players who make a show of their injury on the field in order to stop the game and gain everyone's attention. Big babies, I've always thought.
      An apology is half out of my mouth--"Officer Hermes, please understand how upset the children are"--when I realize that the man has passed out and yet managed, at the same time, to hold his position. Is that possible? "Get some water," I say.
      One of the children brings over a full glass and, before I can take it from her, dumps it over Officer Hermes's helmeted head.
      "A lot of good that does!" I yell. "Get some more."

[Continued]