Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Ivan lies next to her, loudly snoring. She had invited him over for dinner to discuss her future, their future, and he quickly assented. She had sent Graciella home, as Ivan would be responsible for the night. “You are still beautiful,” he told her, as he bent over her and stroked her now silver stubble of hair growing back. But she knows: she has aged a hundred years in six months. There is an air of mourning hanging over him. He holds her, then blurts out: denounce that music, please! He is beyond agitated, strained. He is terribly worried about her social tracking score, with her defiance about her silly old music—on with the new! Isabelle does not reveal the big lie about her tumor but now understands perfectly why it was left inside her skull to kill her. An old reactionary like her was simply not worthy of saving. And Ivan, a university functionary, as weak as anyone would be singled out by the senior guardians, had agreed to try to convince her. “Of course,” she assures him, “only now do I see the wisdom of this course,” of moving on from the past in this great movement into a glorious future.
She slips out of bed and slides open her desk drawer and withdraws a syringe. There is enough pain medication to keep anyone asleep for hours. She slips back to the bed, waits for him to settle, and then injects the potion into his arm. He starts, then shudders, as his arm slides off the bed and his breathing slows to a contented purr.
She tiptoes out to the car and looks out at the night sky, black and moonless. A perfect night for a burning. She passes through the gate and out toward the country. The street lights don’t reach the meadow so the hard line between sky and earth bleed into each other at this moment, like the world is gently breaking apart.
All the carefully constructed lies lay bare at her feet: Ivan informed on her, Graciella is a spy, the chemo never happened. They need her to renounce the past, that much is clear. But the stubborn deity she cannot ignore, or maybe Beethoven himself, has planted a germ of awareness in her heart, maybe when she was born, which grows with every year. She would live, she would die, but what is her purpose in the intervening comically short interval?
She walks slowly towards the small crowd at the bonfire. The stars and the moon are still hiding. Onlookers hold up candles to light her way. Graciella hands her a golden tray stacked with her DVDs and tapes. Isabelle walks towards the fire; she knows what is expected of her. She turns to face the crowd and begins: “Music is beauty, a reflection and homage to the divine.”
The crowd look at her blankly. The murmurs grow.
“What do you mean, divine?” she hears.
“There is no God!”
“Science proves that.”
She holds up her arms to quiet them. “You banished the music, you tore down the statues, of God and shattered them into a thousand pieces. But to no avail. Now you have a thousand little gods instead!” she answers. “You cannot escape it. You can’t escape your yearning, your humanity, your soul.”
Graciella moves towards her, with a face contorted by rare emotion, but hesitates as Isabelle moves closer to the fire. “Please, Isabelle,” Graciella shouts. “This is wrong! You could do so much good!”
“That’s a lie,” she says, sadly to Graciella. She turns back to the crowd. “And the lie will not live through me,” she shouts.
A squad of guardians rush to her and grab at her arms, her legs, as she rushes towards the fire. She throws the trays and the DVDs and tapes into the crowd who fall back from them in shock. Isabelle manages to free her leg, so the guardian tug at her tunic in desperation. The tunic tears away from her and she falls onto her knees, a sign of prayer of or victory, then allows herself to fall like a swan into the flames. As the crowd runs to the edge of the pyre Graciella looks warily at the crowd, then silently scoops up as many tapes as she can, hides them in her satchel and runs.