INTERNAL EXILE

In February, 1989, Marianne Wiggins became, to use a phrase Moscow once favored for those it banished to Siberia, an internal exile--from literary London to pastoral Wales. The American-born author of two warmly reviewed books of fiction had just published her most ambitious effort yet, the novel “John Dollar.� But Wiggins was married to the Indian-born novelist Salman Rushdie, whose new novel, “The Satanic Verses,� had brought an Iranian death sentence down on his head. Already emigres, the two writers became true exiles when they went into hiding in Wales, that little country so regularly and so wrongly counted among the English-speaking peoples.

The pages that follow were written two months later and may be read as a meditation by, on and from an exile. Since then, Wiggins and Rushdie have left Wales. Wiggins has returned to London where, still married to Rushdie but no longer in hiding with him, she is at work on a historical novel about the Bill of Rights.

WE WERE ON the lam in Wales, running through the Black Mountains like unarmed smugglers from the righteous with their guns. Everywhere we went, there were slate tombstones, upright shadows on the hills. In the towns, there were slate houses, plastered-over slate walls with slate roofs. There was darkness, dead as coal, behind the windows of the houses. There were ravens in the fields and on the roads. English words from a Welsh poet seemed to sit on the horizon like an advertisement for the land: “This sad distracted abstract of my woe.�

The mountains wore a beard of snow, even as the pussy willows in the valleys bloomed. Pussy-willow trees in Wales are called goat willows, I found out, because goats like to eat their leaves. Only the male trees, with their yellow catkins, are called pussy willows. Where we’d found a hide-out for a while, there was a male goat-willow tree in bloom that I looked onto from my window. I cut some of its branches for a jar that I placed in the window in the kitchen of the house, but then the catkins, turning golden, made me sneeze. I learned about the goat name for the tree from a book called “Trees of Britain� that I’d found on the bookshelf in the kitchen next to cookbooks and some novels by Alistair MacLean.

That’s how I knew about the catkins, but I didn’t know what catkin meant. I looked it up in the dictionary that I always travel with. Anyone who knows me knows that I can’t spell. I have to keep a dictionary within reach even for something as simple as writing a letter. There are times when I can’t spell sincerely. At home, where we used to live, I had a dictionary in each room. Now I have a single one and a good thing, too--the people who are with us now depend on it for Scrabble. A catkin, I can tell you, is an inflorescence. I depend on books for meaning. I depend on them for definition. A catkin is a thing defined as “a reduced flower of either sex.�

Following the definition of catkin in my dictionary, there was the advice: “See ament .� I didn’t feel like seeing ament . Instead, I watched the thaw of snow across the tops of the mountains. The Welsh say that when there’s snow on the mountains, it’s an indication there’ll be more. I learned that from a book about Welsh legends. Eventually I did see ament , and its definition was “another word for catkin. “ Its second definition, ament II , was “Noun. Psychiatry . A mentally deficient person.�

Next to the houses built of plastered-over slate along the roads, the houses with dark windows, there were hedgerows, yews and daffodils. No kitchen gardens grew. A kitchen garden--chamomile, dill, parsley, carrots, rue--is an English affectation; in Wales, the land around a house is purely land, no frippery, no spices. The potato did not root in Wales until a century post-Raleigh, and even in the middle of the 18th Century at the Aberystwyth market, potatoes were as expensive as the local cheese. Oats were what the Welsh ate then, in a porridge they called bwdram . Cawl , a vegetable hot pot with potatoes and a bit of bacon or a sheep joint added to it, is the traditional dish in Wales. Sheep are the common stock. Walking up a hill one morning, I found a sheep skull, embedded in the earth beside a corkscrew holly. Sheep were everywhere. We laughed sometimes and called the scenery the Big Sheep.

On days when it wasn’t pelting hail or rain or snowing, on days when they allowed me to, I walked and walked, straight up sheer hills, out of anger, up over turfy, lichen-strewn terrain punctuated now and then by those wind-bleached sheep skulls beached like whelks and by foxholes and those twisted holly trees surprising the horizon. Above me at scarifying intervals: jump jets, a Harrier’s harangue, RAF, unmarked, some of them dark green and some of them with red-and-white striped bellies. These were the Hunters, I learned. And I learned other things: That a sheep can recognize another sheep but can’t differentiate between a horse and a human. That a swede is a rutabaga and is used for cattle fodder. That sheep eat beetroots and molasses. That great tracts of Wales are designated by Great Britain solely for the practice of war games. Near where we were hiding, there was a Ministry of Defense training camp where paratroopers trained. Young men in green track suits with “Combat ‘89� stenciled on their sweat shirts practiced calisthenics in our road, and military Land Rovers outnumbered every other sort of vehicle I saw.

I was afraid I would be recognized. Once a military Land Rover passed me on our road and slowed down and stopped and waited, and I took off, changed direction and headed back across the meadows. When I told this to the people with whom we have to live now, they told me that it wasn’t that the person in the Land Rover had identified me as the person I am but that he had identified me as a woman . The people with whom we have to live now have taught me a few things about an all-male camp: For example, they like to look at women. Men do. So I’m told. Then once, too, I thought the woman in the health-food store in the market town I shopped in had recognized me, owing to the way she stared at me. But the people with whom we have to live now told me that she stared at me, most likely, because I have an accent. One of the people with whom we have to live now asked me, “Say, do you know Neil Schreiber?� No, I said. Who’s Neil Schreiber? “Chap I know. American. He has an accent just like yours. I thought maybe you knew him.� But in my village , I was tempted to reply, there are two-hundred-million people.

Another one of the people with whom we have to live now told me that when his wife, who’s Thai, came to live in England, she thought the sheep were a foreign breed of dog. There were so many sheep where we were hiding that 100,000 were stolen last year around the town of Brecon. Brecon is a market town. At the Brecon market, there are barren cows, fat bulls, fat ewes, fat hoggets, weaned calves, breeding cows, bulling heifers, cull bulls, pedigree beef bulls and rams. I learned this by reading local papers. While we were in hiding, I read the papers like someone on a river, like the colonel in Garcia Marquez’s story who reads the papers that come on the boat once a week, out-of-date papers from elsewhere, who reads every word of them, chronologically, front to back, everything, even the ads.

The local paper that I looked forward to the most was published every week on Thursdays. Thursdays, then, held definite excitement. The paper cost 24 pence. No other journal--not El Pais or Applausos or The Observer--was more eagerly awaited by me than The Brecon-Radnor Express & Powys County Times, 16 pages every week. It was through that paper that I learned location, began to find out about where I was and who the people were that sometimes passed me on the road. I was not allowed to hold a conversation with a stranger. When I went into a store one day to buy some coal to fire the stove that heated the house where we were hiding, the question “Are you staying in the village?� prevented me from ever going back. I was the American--Americans in those parts were few. Why was I there? What was my purpose?

The coal stove in the kitchen was a Bosky. I learned about the different sizes of anthracite that one can buy. I learned why many of the sheep are painted colors--blue, magenta, orange, like flash cards on the hills. One color means they’ve lambed; another means the ram has visited. Dafad is the Welsh word meaning “sheep,� and dyfodol is the Welsh word meaning “future.� I know this because in Brecon one day I bought a dictionary and a book called “Welsh for Learners.�

I wanted to find out how the daffodil became a symbol of the Welsh. I knew about the leek because a leek is on pound coins. There are three imprints of pound coins in Great Britain: One of them is English, one is Scottish, one is Welsh. All bear the Queen’s profile on one side, although on the English and the Scottish coins, her image is much younger-looking than on the Welsh coin. The Scottish pound coin has, verso, a thistle set inside a crown. Around the edge of the Scottish version, there’s the motto Nemo Me Impune Lacessit : “No one touches me without unpleasant consequences.� On the verso of the English one, there’s the coat of arms of England and a lot of French-- Honi Soit Qui Mal y Pense and Dieu et Mon Droit-- and around the edge of it, there are the Latin words Decus et Tutamen. On the Welsh pound coin, there’s a fancy leek, looking like a fleur-de-lis, with its stem stuck through a crown just like the Scottish thistle. Around its edge are etched the words Pleidiol Wyf I’m Gwlad. I needed to find out what Pleidiol Wyf I’m Gwlad meant. Its meaning became a sort of test, a sort of project for me.

My days were filled with projects: One day I cooked a swede, for instance. It seemed to take forever. One day, too, I catalogued the differences among the sorts of lichen I had found. One day I tried to learn about the game of rugby. I made a project out of watching birds for about a minute every other day, or when I saw an interesting, bright-colored one. A nuthatch--or something blue and yellow-breasted--liked to feed on certain catkins in the tree outside my window. And I learned the border-country legend that says one magpie brings you rotten luck, but when you see two magpies on the wing together, you’re going to get a treat. So every time you see a single magpie, you’re supposed to say, “Where’s your mistress, Mr. Magpie?� and the magpie is assumed to answer, “By my side, but you can’t see her.� One day we got a letter from a friend in Canada whose 8-year-old daughter wrote that she was working on a project about blinking. This was a subject that I filed away for future use.

In the meantime, I learned that plismon is the Welsh word for “policeman.� But as for Pleidiol Wyf I’m Gwlad , I was having trouble cracking it. Gwlad , I found out, means “country.� But the rest, the other words . . . the closest I could come to pleidiol was pledio , the verb that means “to plead.� In hiding, as I was, the signs, the symbols, slogans, took on added meaning: I remembered a short story by Paul Bowles in which some Buddhists in (back then) Ceylon ask some Western gentlemen whom they encounter on a bus about the meaning of the stripes and colors of their ties. What did the stripes and colors signify? Why did some men wear ties while others did not?

“Who can believe the story?� “Who can remember?� “What’s reasonable these days?� These were sample questions from the book called “Welsh for Learners.� “What’s cooking in the oven?� “Who’s perfect?� “What’s in the soil?� “What’s better than this?� “Who was collecting stones?� “Who had been crying?� “Which ones had failed?� “Who cleaned the edges?� Some sample sentences employing the conditional were “We could have purposely deceived them.� “I should have taken the bitter medicine.� “The woman should have suffered it.� “They should pay half at least.� I liked especially the Welsh expression yn eich elfen , which means “in your element,� elfen meaning “element� but sounding small, manlike and mischievous.

I made a project of learning to translate Welsh place names. I’d grown up in Pennsylvania never knowing that Bryn Mawr is Welsh for “big hill.� I made a project of Welsh sounds. Bwl is easier to say when you know that it’s the word for “bull,� when you know that bwcl is the word for “buckle,� bwm for “boom,� bwlb for “bulb,� bwrdd sgor , “scoreboard,� bwrdd sbring , “trampoline.� Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is the longest place name on the map. It means “Saint Mary’s Church of the pool of the white hazel near the rushing whirlpool of Saint Tysylw’s Church, near the red cave.� What’s a red cave? I wrote down in my notebook. What makes it red? I kept trying to make sense from nothing. What is the name of that bird? I kept thinking to myself, What if these are the limits of life, what if this is the all of what is?

Once a month, The Brecon-Radnor Express had a page called “W. I. News.� “W. I.,� I found out, stood for Women’s Institute. Women’s Institute was the name of a club, a service club, and hundreds of them were scattered throughout Wales. Once a month on the “W. I.� page, I could read the reports from the clubs in the county--from Three Cocks and Llanwrtyd and Aberhonddu and Bwlch and Defynnog and Garth. “A pleasant half-hour was spent looking at local and holiday slides taken by members, which proved to be very interesting. Japan is densely populated, but Mrs. Scutt saw no litter and found the people polite and friendly. Mrs. Ursula Pumphrey proposed a vote of thanks. . . .� From Crickhowell: “The competition, a Valentine verse based on bread, was won by Mrs. Freda Jones.� From Builth Wells: “The competition ‘Most Artistically Folded Napkin’ was won by Mrs. Dilys Jones.� From Penderyn: “The competition ‘The Most Unusual Teapot’ was won by Mrs. Cooke.� From Llangasty: “Refreshments were served and there followed a ‘social time,’ organized by Mrs. Wendy Griffith, during which members had some fun demonstrating how ambidextrous they were.� From Garth: “The competition was for the longest apple peel.� From Defynnog: “The competition for the most unusual button was. . . .� From Glasbury: “The competition for an unusual pebble was. . . .� From Tretower: “Competition winners for the best covered coat-hanger were. . . .�

There was an article one week called “From Sheep to Shells,� about a woman in the Brecon hills who had decided that her small holding would not provide her with a decent living raising sheep, so she had sold them and invested in a 100-breeder-strong conurbation of land snails, African ones, said to be more tender and less rubbery than their North European cousins. It was by reading this article that I learned that the African land snail gestates in four months as compared to two years for the European species, and that Eastern European snails have been contaminated ever since Chernobyl. It was in The Brecon-Radnor Express, too, that I read that “a farmer who staggered into a neighbor’s house half-naked, covered in blue dye, with his hands and testicles bound with rubber bands, has been cleared of the charges that he planted a hoax bomb and wasted police time. . . . Stephen Gilmore Williams said that he had crossed two fences with his hands tied behind his back and his testicles bound in a rubber band, but Detective Inspector D. A. Davies of Ammanford had tried to do the same but had failed to do so.� Talk about your projects. . . .

“Only Jesus Saves,� I saw one day painted on a railroad bridge when we were driving somewhere on the run near Merthyr Tydfil, and the plismon in my company remarked, “Not on our bloody pensions, Jesus couldn’t.� “Wales Is Not for Sale,� I saw painted on some rocks in the Black Mountains. I learned that there had been an increase in the incidence of arson, that Welsh Nationalists were setting fire to the summer homes owned by the English. And there was murder, too. And racial violence. From The Express, I learned about the findings of an inquest--�Jury Returns Verdict That Youth Who Died in River Plunge Was Unlawfully Killed�--into the death of a 20-year-old boy from Trenewydd, Llanfaes, who had fallen 20 feet from the Llanfaes Bridge in Brecon into the River Usk the previous December. A Home Office pathologist had found that the deceased had died of brain damage resulting from a fractured skull. The doctor had discovered no evidence of drowning. The report, which I read in my room at my place of hiding, said, “Passing Christ College, the two defendants, who were quite merry by then, began singing a Max Boyce song about the English not being able to raise a rugby team to beat the Welsh. It was fairly rude, they added.� Who’s Max Boyce? I wrote down in my notebook. It was the 47th item on my list of things to find out, learn and do. No. 46 was Try to get a copy to reread Hal IV, Part I, re: Owen Glendower. No. 45, crossed out, had been Find out the diff betw scree and slag.

“As they were a quarter-way across Llanfaes Bridge, still singing,� the article continued, “a witness noticed two other youths on the opposite side of the bridge who were carrying paper-wrapped portions of fish and chips and eating from them. ‘Because we thought we might have offended them,’ the defendants said, ‘we shouted, “Are you English?� ’ Then all of a sudden, they testified, the blond-haired person charged across the bridge and grabbed one of them by the collar and was abusive towards him, calling him ‘a wanker.’ Aware that the other person, the deceased, had come across the bridge as well, one of the defendants testified, ‘Something caught my eye, and I saw him against the railings. He flipped over backwards over the bridge. The whole incident happened within seconds.’ At the outset of his summing up, the coroner told the jury what verdicts they could consider appropriate to return. The choices facing them, he said, were a) unlawful killing, b) accidental death or death by misadventure, and c) an open verdict.� “Unlawful killing,� the article went on to teach me, “means manslaughter or murder.� What’s an open verdict? I wrote down. I looked it up. An open verdict is a finding of death by a coroner’s jury without stating the cause. Death by unstated causes: Death by death, in other words. Marw is the word in Welsh that translates “dead.� It sounds like mort when spoken. Marwoldeb is the word that means “mortality�; marwol is the word for “lethal�; marwor is the word for “cinder, a dead fire.�

One night, watching news from elsewhere on the television, I saw the president of a bankrupt desert nation speak into a microphone while an English-accented, male voice translated his, the president’s, intent to send a black arrow of revenge from that distant desert into my husband’s heart.

We were hiding in a legendary place, a place where legends grew from ground, Arthurian, Tolkienate. To learn to write was an ancient Celtic fear, an accomplishment charged with retribution and with danger. Caesar, encountering the Celts, judged their belief to be that knowledge, rite, wisdom, rune--those who could write of those things held power; those who could write of the arcane, of rite and of worship, were people who deserved to be, who must be, feared. Hiding one’s name, never writing it down, never committing one’s name into symbol, is still a recurring motif in Welsh legends and stories. It’s still dangerous to put one’s name on paper.

Warplanes fly sideways through the valleys. We wait for one aged psychopath to die. We try to study and to learn. Names of things. One legend says that Welsh fairies are afraid of iron because the fairies are the lost survivors of a tribe of never-aging children whose ancestors fell victim to a race of conquerors who conquered them with weapons made of iron. What is the name of that bird? What is ink made of? Could I write in blood? What are words made of?

One time, long ago, I wrote a book about adventures on a desert island. Isn’t that a laugh? Crusoe used to go around his desert island and, as Orlando did, Crusoe used to carve his name in trees. Crusoe and Orlando were both fictions. They weren’t men. Others made them up and wrote them down. Tomorrow, in a book called “The Oxford Companion to the Mind,� I will read an essay titled “Chinese Evidence on the Evolution of Language� so I can learn about the use of pictograms. Tomorrow, I will shout at planes and jets that come at us like arrows. Tomorrow, I will burn myself on what I take to be a cinder. Tomorrow, I will find the picture with the diagram inside the book that tells me finally, simply and beyond a doubt--the way religion tells some things to some people-- This tiny thing of beauty in the tree outside your window is a chaffinch, Marianne.