THAT'S WHEN I CRIED
There were only seven of us left; grief and relief alternated. We had come to know one another, living in incredible filth and untenable intimacy, in a cage barely adequate for twenty men, much less eighty; the deaths of our companions had lessened the intimacy, if not the filth, but had broken our hearts – and frightened us, too. Who would be next? Whom would we lose? Each of us thought: what if it's me?
Our Thlynktan captors set up a banquet table every night outside our cage, to taunt us. We got fed about every third day but we were plied with water, and if we didn't drink enough to suit them, it was funneled down our throats. At first I thought it was to make us mess ourselves more, to humiliate us more completely, but it was actually to keep us from becoming dehydrated. Kindness was not a factor in that effort; they needed our tears for their national dish, more specifically for its sauce. I can't tell you what it tasted like or even whether the Thlynktans enjoyed its flavor. (We were fed native weeds, and we ate them gladly even though they never came close to filling us.) I can tell you it invigorated them; it was like a drug. For them, it was a drug.
I didn't know specifically where they held the ones they took away – likely in the castle, but where? The Dungeon? The kitchen? It was a big castle; no one ever came back. They only took those of us who cried. They didn't mind informing us of their use for our tears (which, incidentally, were the same as theirs would have been, could they have produced any; their tear ducts, through a cruel trick of genetics, had shriveled away). What could we do with that knowledge, after all? Besides, we were under round-the-clock surveillance – privacy simply didn't exist - so we couldn't cry secretly. Eventually almost everyone ended up weeping, and was taken away. We seven had resisted.
It wasn't easy. We tried telling jokes but laughing is so near to crying that tears sometimes spilled over and that was the end, for someone. Reciting the alphabet, reciting it backwards, counting down from a hundred, counting down from a thousand, these all worked a bit better. We sang silly songs, or ballads, avoiding the sentimental and concentrating on the ones that were the most difficult to learn, either because the range was beyond most of us or because the lyrics were too tricky, or numerous. Why we seven fared better than the rest, well, maybe it wasn't the same for each of us. For myself, it was a matter of faith: faith in one individual. I knew, I had to believe, that I would be rescued. My TARDIS would find me.
Of course, the Thlynktans didn't wait around for us to cry. I'd rather not delineate the painful and degrading punishments we suffered for not crying. Suffice it to say it was all done publicly, for maximum effect on all of us. Sometimes the man being tortured was not the one to cry; someone witnessing his agony broke down and was taken away in his stead. That was the worst part of being the victim du jour: my torment often moved one of my fellow prisoners to let out a wail and be hauled off. I knew I had no control over that and yet my feelings of guilt each time it happened almost overwhelmed me; I needed, at any rate, to maintain control over myself, and at such times I was always one gulp away from failure, one lump in the throat away from death.
Long before we were down to the last seven, some of us (not me) made a pact. Since one weeper at a time seemed to satisfy our tormentors and call off the evening's punishment, everyone in that group drew straws to decide who would nip the next day's victim's suffering in the bud by bursting into tears and sacrificing himself. Later, we could hear screams from the chapel adjacent to the castle. I talked my friends (by which I mean the four I'd been visiting when we were rounded up in Crovan, along with other civilians taken in that raid, as well as several I knew by virtue of being incarcerated cheek by jowl with them for two years) out of throwing their lives away, even nobly; my TARDIS would find me and take us all home.
When there was more than just breathing room between us, we decided on feeding day to improve our lives in captivity. We finished our meals, licked the pans in which they were served, and (before they could be collected) used them to push our waste out of the cage. We urinated out between the bars anyway and no amount of violence against us on that account could discourage us. With so little food and so much water, our solid waste wasn't so solid, but we were not equipped to aim it outside of the cage. It did dry, eventually, and the evening we did our housecleaning, we freed ourselves of it. Of course, this was more symbolic than practical; we had messed ourselves for so long we barely noticed it. However, there was now room to lie down, so we had made not exactly a sanitary spot but a less obstructive one in which to lie down. (When there were eighty of us, we had slept back to back, standing up, but leaning on one another.)
After we "cleaned" our cage, each of us was take from it, one at a time, hustled up to the moat and had his head held under water while a guard counted off a Thlynktan minute, sixty Thlynktan seconds, which for some reason lasted about ninety seconds by almost any planetary standard. There were some twenty-five of us at the time. Most of us knew to take a deep breath before being dunked, but only nineteen of us came back.
When it was my turn, I took a deep breath as my face was about to break the surface, then broke free and dove. I swam under water, came up for air to find I was being followed by three laughing soldiers, dove again, no longer with any expectation of escaping (to where?) but feeling so free, and clean, that I could have gone on for hours, days, had they not finally got so bored watching me that they hauled me in with a long hooked pole, and beat me with it, too, before dragging me back to the cage.
The Thlynktan climate being temperate and this being the warmer season anyway, I wasn't shivering much in my soaking clothes, and I was the envy of all my friends, some of whom insisted, periodically, upon smelling me.
Of the nineteen survivors of that incident, there were three I knew disliked me, probably because they were among those who had made the self-sacrificing pact and resented my discouraging others from joining them, although I suppose they just might not have liked offworlders. These three tried to get my clothes off so they could give the floor a good scrubbing; everyone had gotten wet, but not substantially below the armpits. I was sopping wet. They'd got my coat halfway down my arms (immobilizing me) when the other prisoners started to pull my attackers off me. Outnumbered, the three slunk away (they couldn't slink far but they made it clear they'd given up). My friends guarded me all night and only left me alone when my clothes were too dry to interest anyone.
It is possible that my fellow prisoners saved my life that night. If so, then Pinya, my best friend among them all, definitely saved it twice.
I had been visiting four friends in Crovan but lots of other people, most of whom I didn't know, had gathered in the home of Firti and his Asnian wife, Milta; their guests included my friends Arpo and Efnit, who lived next door, and the new couple from down the path, Pinya and Cater, among those I had never met. The Thlynktan raiders took only the men, all Crovanite except me. Are women's tears so different?
"They can't put us in there!" exclaimed Efnit, clinging to Arpo as about eighteen of us were shoved into that impossibly packed cage, where our noses and lungs were assaulted by an odor we would only slowly learn to ignore. Firti appeared to be in shock. Pinya gently and apologetically pushed prisoners aside, cutting a path for us to the center of the throng.
"But we can't see anything," I protested.
"We don't want to see," Pinya said. "We especially don't want to be seen."
We didn't yet realize that there was a camera at the top of the cage.
Efnit was taken in the first month. Arpo withdrew, but didn't cry. No one pressed him; sometimes Pinya stood silently with him, one hand on his shoulder. Sometimes he stood with me, but we were not usually silent. We talked about books we'd read, people he'd known, planets I'd visited, but never how much he missed Cater and their children, never how hopeless our situation was, never anything that could possibly evoke tears. We invented new knock-knock jokes. (Firti knew some old ones and joined us.) My favorite wasn't even funny:
Knock knock.
Who's there?
The Doctor.
The Doctor who?
Just the Doctor.
That's right. I was just the Doctor. Not a hero, not a villain, not the only Time Lord in the universe, or even the smartest one, possibly the funniest one, not feeling especially funny just then with my clothes hanging off me and my stomach doing all the crying for me, but still alive and determined to remain so.
At first, whenever enough prisoners had been removed (for crying) that we had a modicum of breathing space, more prisoners were brought in. After several months, we speculated that either the Thlynktan raids were becoming less successful or Crovan was running out of men; either way, the population in our cage slowly thinned… I mean there were fewer prisoners, but I also mean that each of us (much less slowly) became thinner, lost muscle tone, in some cases became frail. Our filthy clothing was too big for us but it was all we had.
We marched in place. We took turns doing standing push-ups against the bars. There is only so much muscle you can maintain, much less build, on a triduan diet of weeds.
The raids must have picked up after the first year, because the cage filled up once more and we lost a lot of our breathing space. Exercising became difficult, then all but impossible. A few months later we could take turns exercising again.
Then the first rains came.
Thlynkt was not a desert but it was having a dry spell; rain had not fallen at all during our first year in the cage, and now it was just a low drizzle, mixed blessing for us, as it muddied up our floor and barely dampened our clothing but felt good on our skin. We'd rarely thought about rain; the Thlynktans had not been stingy with water, so they must have been prepared for a long drought and stored quite a lot. Surely they were storing it now, too; it rained every day for a month, sometimes (not often) more than a drizzle but never a real downpour, and then it stopped. No one knew whether to expect rain any time soon or not for another year or two (or whether we would be around to see it). By the time we got dunked, though, the moat was full enough. I don't know how they kept it that way. But well before that, the month it rained, Pinya saved my life.
One of the problems with this type of captivity is all you can do is think… think and feel. You can numb yourself if you try hard enough, but how do you shut your brain off? The only way to stop thinking about something is to think about something else, but there is no such thing as a safe thing to think. Even the alphabet holds traps. Even numbers do. We make associations. Four might be your family: parents and two kids. "B" might be the initial of someone you love and miss, or an enemy, or the town in which you were born, or…. Colors are evocative. Music is evocative.
Drugs were unavailable. We depended on one another as much for distraction as for anything else.
The month it rained, the skies were black instead of their usual deep ochre. (We called it the corn field in the sky.) It was hard to see. Our captors had trouble seeing, too – specifically, whether anyone was crying, as drizzle dripped down our faces and sometimes looked a bit like tears. They didn't want to waste their energies on someone who wasn't likely to cry for them, but the guards did have quotas, so sometimes they just grabbed the man with the wettest face. One day, that was me.
Pinya was standing nearby and saw two guards making a beeline for me. "Sneeze!" he said. I conjured up a pretty convincing sneeze for him. Then I reached for my embroidered handkerchief, once the property of Louis XVI, and realized, not for the first time but with the disappointment that attended every reminder, that my pockets had been emptied upon my arrival. Pinya wore a hanky in his jacket pocket and miraculously had been allowed to keep it. He quickly wiped my nose for me and discreetly dried my face as well. His little ruse entertained the guards and they stopped for a moment, but then they came to collect me anyway. Pinya jumped between me and them and offered one of the guards a bright red scarf. The guard took it, laughing, and put it in his own pocket, but found, to his astonishment, that a royal blue scarf followed it, and a banana yellow one after that. His colleague grabbed the kelly green scarf attached to the yellow one and pulled. A plum scarf, then a shocking pink one, followed by one of deep aqua, all came flowing from Pinya's hand.
All together, eighteen scarves were the guards' haul, and they left us alone… not entirely, of course. Later they chose someone to torture, one of the pact people wept to save him and the guards were happy to have him.
"How did you get to keep all of those?" I was amazed.
"The lining," he explained.
"What else have you got in there?"
"That's for me to know," he grinned, "and for them to find out… or not."
I gave his arm a squeeze. What I meant was "thank you" but for some reason I didn't utter the words.
Arpo turned out to be stronger than we could have imagined after Efnit was taken. Yes, at first he withdrew into himself, but eventually he emerged as a veritable rock; he had always been the most practical of my Crovan friends, the one who saw through scams first, spoke calmly when others were upset, and won the most blackjack games, at the least risk. In the cage he kept an eye on everyone. If a man looked to be on the verge of tears, Arpo's big gentle thumb would be in his eye, clearing it. If someone was about to drop, Arpo offered his back to lean on. He and Firti led us in memory games, word puzzles, tongue-twisters, even small pantomimes.
And where was I in all this? I participated; I did not lead. It was a relief not to lead. I felt I could lead my fellow prisoners into such danger – didn't I always? I couldn't rescue anyone. I couldn't save anyone. The best I could do was to lie low and try not to cause anyone's suffering, anyone's death. I had too much time to reflect on my guilt, over the course of my regenerations, even within my own incarnation, to feel comfortable telling these people what to do, how to survive, when they already had such competent leadership. The only exception was my advice regarding the sacrificial pact. It was, however, enough of an exception to draw unwanted attention my way, and despite my lying low, the unraveling began.
After I swam, and was beaten, and was the beneficiary of those who repelled my attackers within the cage, and recovered from the beating (but not so well recovered from the discovery that my opponents in one matter were now actual enemies who felt free to attack me), I suppose you could say my faith wavered. I suppose you could say I was depressed. I wasn't especially fearful - I had general support within the cage – at least no more fearful than any of us were on a moment-to-moment basis. One gets used to that fear, barely notices it. Thinking rationally, though, is overrated. I thought, how is the TARDIS going to find me? Why hasn't she already found me? She has not sprung to my aid in the past, not the way I am expecting her to, now. Why am I so sure she will come and save me? Am I really so sure?
Being rational was driving me mad.
I guess Pinya saved my life three times.
When you have no privacy, you make your own privacy. Days passed without anyone's saying anything beyond "Uh, oh, here they come" or "Excuse me." Eye contact was made or avoided according to our needs and if we needed it and someone else didn't, well, there were plenty of eyes waiting for contact, and no point in wasting energy on being offended. There were, of course, also days of banter, philosophy, desperate attempts to remember song lyrics and so on, and of course the efforts of Arpo and Firti. Pinya must have noticed how quiet I had become – something I had not noticed about myself.
"Where have you gone, Doctor?"
"What? I'm right here!"
"No," insisted Pinya. "You're far away."
"I wish!"
"Don't we all? But this is different. You are farther away than usual. I am worried, my friend."
"Don't worry about me. I'm all right."
"No, you're not. Not that any of us are all right, but you are especially not-all-right just now. Therefore, Doctor," and he stuck his chest out in mock pride, "I am going to be the doctor and you can be the patient. Agreed?"
I had to smile. Pinya could tell you the world was ending and still be funny.
"All right, then. And what does the doctor order?"
"I didn't order…."
"Not you, fool! Me! What do I order! And I'll tell you: two heaping tablespoons of story."
"Story?"
"Story. But first, did you know I have some Earth ancestry?"
"No, Pinya, I didn't know that. Do you know where on Earth?"
"Yes, of course. Our family history has been preserved with great care. We come from the Polish town of Chelm."
"The mythical town of Chelm?"
"You've heard of it, then! But yes and no. There is a real town of Chelm and for some reason it was chosen to represent the mythical town of Chelm, where only fools live. So my ancestors were fools."
"In the sense of being stupid or in the sense of being jesters?"
Pinya laughed. "You decide!"
"All right, you're from both Chelms. You're a double-Chelmer."
"See? I haven't got to the actual story yet and you're coming out of your shell."
"I have no shell." My own words hit me so hard that I gasped, and then both Pinya and I looked around to make sure no guards had noticed and were going to scrutinize me for potential tears. "I think I need a shell but I have no shell."
"That's because you're not a turtle. Are you ready for the story?"
"Yes, please proceed." We were sitting on the not-sterile-but-not-crappy cement floor, side by side, me crosslegged, him with his legs pulled up and his arms around them, both of us with our backs to the bars. I rested my chin on my folded hands and listened.
"There are a few versions of this story. I used to know two but I only remember one so I'll tell you the one I remember. Okay?" I nodded. "Okay. There was, in Chelm, the town of fools, a man named Pinya."
"Your name. An ancestor?"
"This is the mythical Pinya, but yes, I was named after him. So anyway Pinya was a married man with a child, so he was considered one of the wisest men in Chelm, and he didn't argue the point. That's why one day the seven elders of the town called upon him and asked for a huge favor. 'Pinya,' they said, respectfully. 'You are a wise man.' Pinya nodded; he could not disagree. 'We need your help on an important matter. Chelm has no fire department. We have no idea how to put out fires.'
"'Is something on fire?' Pinya looked around anxiously.
"'No,' the elders reassured him. 'But what if something was on fire? We need to be prepared. Could we send you to Warsaw to find out how they put fires out there? It would really be a blessing!'"
I was listening so intently that I forgot to laugh, so Pinya laughed on my behalf and continued.
"Pinya agreed to go – on foot, of course – and accordingly, he packed a small bindle, put it on a stick, slung it over his left shoulder, kissed his wife and little boy goodbye, and set off for Warsaw.
"Warsaw was a good distance away and there was a fearsome forest between Chelm and Warsaw. It would take more than a day to get there. Pinya, being wise, was prepared. He had food with him, and he knew better than to walk through the forest in the dark. When daylight began to fade, he sat himself down by a tree, ate the supper his wife had packed, then took off his shoes." Pinya looked at me and no doubt was gratified by the puzzled expression I must have had on my face, for I was indeed puzzled. "You are wondering why he took off his shoes." I nodded. "He took off his shoes and set them in the middle of what could almost be called a path, pointing in the direction he had been walking, so he wouldn't get turned around when he awoke."
"Ah," I said, "I think I have done something like this myself."
It was Pinya's turn to look puzzled, but then he laughed. "Guess what happened?" I shook my head and shrugged. "Another traveler happened to be in the same part of the forest and came upon the sleeping man and the funny shoes in the middle of the almost-path…."
I lifted my chin off my hands and declared, "He turned the shoes around!"
"That's right! He turned the shoes around and went on his way, highly pleased with himself. Well, Pinya woke up in the morning, had a nice stretch, ate a little more of the food his wife had packed, threw his bindle across his left shoulder, put the shoes back on and started that day's journey toward Warsaw.
"To his surprise, Warsaw turned out to be closer than he had imagined. He could see the gates to Warsaw clearly and hastened toward them. They looked exactly like the gates to Chelm, and that surprised him, but he thought to himself, well, a gate is a gate. Why shouldn't two gates look alike? Are there so many different kinds of gate in the world? He passed through the gate and to his shock, all the streets he could see appeared to be laid out just like the streets of Chelm!"
A guard went by behind us so we sat in silence for a long minute. When Pinya resumed, his voice was softer and he waved his hands about less.
"Pinya knew he was there to find out how to put out fires, but he couldn't resist: he had to see whether there was a street corresponding to the one he lived on. He walked the oddly familiar streets of Warsaw until he came to what looked like his own street, right where he would have expected it to be. Not only that, but there was a house just like his own, right where his own house should be. Not only that, but there was a woman in front of the house scolding a little boy and they sure looked an awful lot like his own wife and child!
"To cap off this incredible coincidence, the woman saw him and yelled, 'Pinya, what are you doing back so soon? Did you forget something?'
"'Daddy Daddy Daddy!' shouted the little boy. 'Daddy's home! Daddy's home!'"
I had stopped smiling and ducked my head back down. This was dangerous stuff, but I felt I should listen.
"'Malka!' cried Pinya. 'Dovid! What are you doing here in Warsaw! How did you get here before I did, and why?'
"'Don't be silly, Pinya, or at least don't be any sillier than usual. We are in Chelm.'
"'No, we're in Warsaw!'
"'Chelm!'
"'Warsaw!'
"They argued about it for a while and then Pinya had an idea. 'Let's ask the rabbi,' he suggested, and his wife agreed. She took Dovid's hand and together the family went up to the synagogue at the top of the hill.
"The beadle let them into the synagogue and took them to see the rabbi. They explained their confusion and the rabbi thought for a long time about what they had said. He sat thinking so long that Pinya and his family thought he might have fallen asleep but then he sat up, alert, and said, 'This is a dilemma that won't be so easy to resolve. It really seems that the entire town of Chelm has been magically transported to Warsaw. I will have to think longer about this matter and figure out how we can all get back home.'
"'But while you think, rabbi,' cried Pinya, in great distress, 'we won't know where we are! How long can we stand not knowing where we are?'
"Then the beadle timidly spoke up. 'Why don't we go check the cornerstone of the synagogue and see if it says Chelm or Warsaw?'
"Everyone eagerly agreed, and they all went outside to check the cornerstone of the synagogue, which in fact said: 'This synagogue was built by, and dedicated to, the town and the people of Chelm.'
"You ask," said Pinya, dreamily, "why this should matter. If a whole town and its population can be transported, why not the cornerstone of a synagogue, or a synagogue itself?" I couldn't answer. "For the same reason the townspeople of Chelm demanded a similar dedication for the synagogue stove: 'This stove belongs to the synagogue of Chelm.' So it wouldn't be stolen!"
I grinned.
"So you see, now Pinya and Malka and Dovid and the rabbi and the beadle and the small crowd that had gathered, all worried that they were in Warsaw, now knew they were back in Chelm, because even a magical power that could transport a whole village all the way to Warsaw wouldn't dare steal a cornerstone bearing such an inscription of ownership!"
I think he only meant to distract me with an engaging story, and to make me laugh, but I sat bolt upright and stared at him. "That's it!" I cried. Then I whispered, "Pinya, let's find out who has metal-tipped shoelaces."
Our task wasn't difficult. We were down to seven now: me, Pinya, Arpo, Firti, twin brothers named Delmore and Kelsey, and Carti, the only survivor among the three pact-men who'd attacked me. Carti was the only one of us who had metal-tipped laces. I traded my white laces for his, even though his were purple. Then I handed one purple lace to Pinya and the other to Firti.
While they were scratching their names in the cement, I clutched the item I had removed from one of my shoelaces before handing them to Carti: my TARDIS key. Each man borrowed a lace, scratched his name in the cement as Pinya and Firti had, and passed the lace on. It didn't take long. While they did this, I wrote with my key, slowly, laboriously, and eventually with the others ranged around me, watching, "This cage is dedicated to the people of Crovan and must never leave Thlynkt. Do not steal this cage!"
I had just finished scratching "The Doctor" into the cement when that beloved groaning sound startled everyone but me as the TARDIS materialized around us. She settled completely, sat for a moment and then groaned again as she dematerialized with all seven of us in the console room and that cage left behind. Even the TARDIS wouldn't dare steal a cage bearing such an inscription of ownership.
That's when I cried.
THE END