Level 7

So now the parents are outside, not looking for their daughter, but preferring to shorten their lives and die where they were born, in the sunshine.

I have just listened to their latest report. She is driving now, while he does the talking.

They feel more or less all right again. This often happens with radiation sickness. After the initial shock, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea, a few symptom-free days may follow. But the symptoms will come back.

They are driving on all the time. But there is not much to report. Every now and then they see the remains of a steel frame sticking out of the ground, sometimes twisted into a strange shape. One such piece seemed to catch the painter’s imagination. He found it beautiful and said it would be quite in place in a museum of modern art. He thought an appropriate title would be ‘The Martyred Steel’.

They are good reporters, both of them. They do not dramatise. Certainly they are not melodramatic. They do not shed tears, they just report facts. With a little artistic colouring added.

Only there is so little to report. Complete destruction is complete destruction. To try to describe how complete such complete destruction is, is to be reduced to playing with words—or with what was and is no more.

But these two are not playing. They are looking for something that may have been spared. And all they can find is a tortured steel frame.

JUNE 27

They are still driving on and reporting, though they complain of fatigue.

This morning they came across a Level 1 shelter, a rather shallow and relatively small one. It must have been a good way from a ground zero, but there were cracks in the concrete roof. They tried to get into the shelter, but the entrance was blocked by big chunks of concrete and steel, so they had to give up. There was nobody still alive there, of course. Still, it would have been interesting to know whether the people inside had died of blast, burns or radiation.

As the couple go on their reports are becoming less frequent. Because they feel tired, and because there is nothing to report.

People down here are rather disappointed. This trip to the surface seems to be a very boring affair, even more boring than life underground!

The people who thought the whole idea rather silly at the outset have started calling them cranks again. “Fools, to be more precise,” said P when we met this afternoon. “Fancy paying for such a boring trip with twenty-five years of life! Behaviour like that isn’t just neurotic, it’s plain folly.”

Interest in the escapade wanes steadily. It is still the main topic of conversation, but it is no longer discussed with quite the same fervour as before.

If their trip goes on for a few more days, people will probably give up listening to their scanty reports altogether. They will die for us even before they are really dead.

JUNE 28

The brave and foolish pair have decided to stop where they are and go no farther. They themselves seem to be bored. The scene in one place is identical with the scene any where else. There is no point in moving around. Even if they could circle the world, it would probably be the same story. They must have realised that.

And they are exhausted—tired by the driving and weakened by the sickness within them.

So they just sit in the car, resting, and occasionally transmitting some personal impressions. These become less and less descriptive and more and more emotional as time goes on. At times almost poetic—or perhaps delirious. They must be an interesting pair. And very sick by now.

There is something about the quality of these occasional talks which makes people listen again. Interest in the couple revives—interest in them personally, rather than in the surface of the earth.

Here comes one of their talks now. I will try to scribble down their exact words. It all sounds pretty odd. Delirious already, perhaps.

She: “We’re a pair of doves, sent out by Noah to see if the flood has gone down.”

He: “The flood is still around us, the water is deep. We’re the doves which didn’t fly back.”

She: “But the dove which didn’t return to Noah was a sign that the flood was over. It was a sign of life and hope when it stayed away from the ark.”

He: “How right you are, my dove! We’ll stay here, outside the shelter, until it’s all over. For this is a much worse flood than the one God made. Men caused this tide of blood to rise and leave no hope for man or dove.”

She: “Listen to us, you people down there in the caves. Hear what we have to tell you. The flood is around you, the poison is trying to get inside you. Your blood is still red, but the world is black. Stay below in your man-made caves as long as there is air to breathe, as long as water seeps so deep, as long as spirits don’t go down and drag you up!”

He: “Stay in the ark for ever!”