Memory stirs “beneath a pleasant green carpet”

Abstract

Some years after King Arthur s death, Axl and Beatrice, an elderly Briton couple, leave their hardscrabble home to search for their lost son. Why take this risk? Why now? Why do they think he is in the next town? Could it have to do with the stranger in dark rags? They cannot recall. A mysterious spell, a “mist,” impairs long-term memory throughout the land. On their travels, they meet occasional ogres, a knight in rusting armor, a Saxon warrior, a crucial dragon, and a formal, mysterious boatman. In The Buried Giant, Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, conjures a world of adventure and magic to tell a story about memory, love, betrayal, and vengeance. Arriving in the next town, the couple join forces with a Saxon warrior and a boy who suffers a presumptive ogre bite. Axl s glimpsed memories begin to cohere—war, a treaty protecting the innocents, a betrayal, carnage. A small detail delivers critical insight. When the traveling foursome is accosted by a soldier on horseback, sword drawn, the Saxon challenges him. As they face off, Axl realizes that he is himself analyzing the detailed maneuvering of the two combatants, noting distances, angles, the horse s positioning, points of risk, opportunities to strike. He realizes that combat is very familiar to him. Since Arthur s victory over the Saxons, an edgy peace has lain upon the land. Axl believes that the years of living together, sharing time, friends, and kin, will wash out a lurking enmity between Saxon and Briton. The prevalent amnesia seems to help. The warrior disagrees. “I ve seen dark hatred as bottomless as the sea on the faces of old women and tender children, and some days felt such hatred myself.” An aging Sir Gawain describes what memory may uncover. “A pleasant copse in the springtime. Dig its soil, and not far beneath the daisies and buttercups come the dead. And I don t talk, sir, only of those who received Christian burial. Beneath our soil lie the remains of old slaughter.” As the mist-produced amnesia begins to dissipate, forgotten atrocities are gradually unearthed. An ominous, chanting madness afflicts the bitten boy. Passionate vengefulness requires memory. Memories are stirring (Figure 1). Axl and Beatrice have a wise, gentle relationship that easily accommodates their repeated forgettings, repetitive questions, and consequent uncertainties. They are equals and old friends, happy in the long familiarity of each other s company. As far as they can recall. But troubling visions, reveries, and dreams crowd fragments of reminiscence. Might some memories be hurtful enough, even seen incompletely, to threaten their comfortable, deep happiness? “What Axl and I feel today in our hearts for each other tells us the path taken here can hold no danger for us, no matter that the mist hides it now,” says Beatrice. But for Axl, “a sense of unidentified loss would gnaw at his heart.” With passing time, he feels “both memory and anger growing firmer ... a stormy night, a bitter hurt, a loneliness opening before him like unfathomed water.”Memories are stirring. In a rainstorm the two duck into a crumbling Roman villa where they encounter a boatman. His job it is to ferry people to a nearby island, “a place of strange qualities, and one who arrives there will walk among its greenery and trees in solitude, never seeing another soul.” Rarely, a couple may be allowed to stay together on the island, but this “requires an unusually strong bond of love between them.” To identify such a bond, the boatman explains, he “must ask them to put their most cherished memories before me. ... Each must speak separately.” Soon, Beatrice worries that amnesia may render them unable to prove their love. Axl reassures her that “the feeling in my heart for you will be there just the same, no matter what I remember or forget. Don t you feel the same, princess?” But unspoken, he “had himself felt an unnamed fear welling up within him.” Because of a pain in her side, Beatrice is evaluated by a village medicine woman and later a wise monk. Although both reassure her, she is visibly declining. Toward the end of a long journey, she and Axl find themselves in a sheltered cove, talking to a boatman. He says that he will certainly take them to the island togetherbecause their love s strength isunmistakable. Per protocol, a mere formality says he, separate interviews are required. Axl tells of a long-ago episode of hurt, molten anger, and revenge, then of seeing his wife asleep on a recent spring morning and knowing “the last of the darkness had leftme...Boatman, I vespokenhonestly toyou,andIhope it doesn t cast your earlier judgement of us in doubt. For I suppose there s some would hear my words and think our love flawedandbroken.ButGodwill knowthe slow treadof anold couple s love for each other, and understand how black shadowsmakepartof itswhole.” Back at the boat, the waters have grown rough. The boatman says that despite the previous agreement, safety requires that he take them separately. Beatrice will go first. The couple insists on going together. (Boatmen are wellDOI: 10.1111/jgs.17175 Journal of the American Geriatrics Society