Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

  It was a time when my mother and I were not close. The domestic ease we loved during those weeks before she abandoned my sister and me no longer existed. I could not erase my distrust, given her deceptive departure. It would be much later that I found out that once, or possibly twice, on returning to England to receive new orders, she had cleared her schedule to come and watch me dance, chaotic and Dionysian, at a Bromley jazz club with a girl she did not know, who leapt into and out of my arms.

  The lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out. But during my late teens when I would stay with my mother at White Paint, I discovered no clues. Until one day I came home early from work, walked into the kitchen, where she, in shirtsleeves, was scrubbing a pot in the sink. She must have assumed she was safely alone. She nearly always wore a blue cardigan. I thought it was used to hide her thinness. Now I saw a row of livid scars like those cut into the bark of a tree by some mechanical gardening tool—ending suddenly, as if innocently, in the rubber gloves she was wearing to protect her hands from dish soap. I was never to know how many other scars there were on her, but here were these slate-red ones down the soft flesh of her arm, evidence from that missing time. It’s nothing, she’d muttered. Just the street of the small daggers…

  She said nothing more about how she got those wounds. I did not know at that time that my mother, Rose Williams, after the attack on us had ended all contact with Intelligence. Although the fracas at the Bark Theatre had been quickly hushed up by authorities, there were hints of my mother’s wartime work in the newspapers that gave her a brief but anonymous celebrity. The press had only got hold of her code name, Viola. Depending on their political persuasion, the newspapers referred to the unidentified woman as either an English heroine or a bad example of post-war government intrigue abroad. No connection was ever actually made to my mother. Her anonymity was secure enough that when she returned to White Paint, locals would still refer to the family home as belonging to her late father, who had worked in the Admiralty. The unknown Viola was soon forgotten.

  * * *

  A decade after my mother’s death, I received an invitation to apply to the Foreign Office. My recruitment for such a post seemed initially strange. I participated in several interviews on my first day. One conversation was with an “intelligence collection body,” another with an “intelligence assessment outfit”; both, I was informed, were separate bodies seated at the high table of British Intelligence. No one told me why I had been approached, and there was no one I knew among those who questioned me intricately but seemingly casually. My earlier spotted academic record did not cause them as much concern as I had expected. I assumed that nepotism and my bloodline must have been considered a reliable entrance into a profession that trusted lineage and the possibly inherited quality of secrecy. And they were impressed by my knowledge of languages. They never mentioned my mother during the interviews, and neither did I.

  The job I was being offered was to review various files in the archives covering the war and post-war years. Whatever I unearthed during my research and whatever conclusions I might draw were to remain confidential. I was to hand my findings over only to my immediate superior, who would assess them. Each superior had two rubber stamps on his desk. One said Improve, the other Redeemed. If your work was “redeemed,” it would progress to a higher level. Where, I had no idea—my small landscape of work was only in the warren of archives on the second floor of a nameless building close to Hyde Park.

  It sounded like drudge work. But accepting a job that included sifting through the details of the war might, I thought, be a way of discovering what my mother had been doing during the period she left us under the guardianship of The Moth. We knew only the stories of her radio broadcasts from the Bird’s Nest on the roof of the Grosvenor House Hotel during the early stages of the war, or of a night drive to the coast, when she was kept awake by chocolate and the cold night air. We had known no more than that. Perhaps there was now a chance of discovering that missing sequence in her life. It was the possibility of an inheritance. In any case, this was the government job I had enigmatically referred to that afternoon in Mrs. Malakite’s garden while the bees moved uncertainly in their hives and she had forgotten who I was.

  I read through mounds of files brought up daily from the archives. They contained mostly reports from men and women who had operated on the periphery of war, about journeys that criss-crossed Europe and later the Middle East, as well as various post-war skirmishes—especially between 1945 and early 1947. I began to realize that an unauthorized and still violent war had continued after the armistice, a time when the rules and negotiations were still half lit and acts of war continued beyond public hearing. On the continent, guerrilla groups and Partisan fighters had emerged from hiding, refusing defeat. Fascist and German supporters were being hunted down by people who had suffered for five or more years. The retaliations and acts of revenge back and forth devastated small villages, leaving further grief in their wake. They were committed by as many sides as there were ethnic groups across the newly liberated map of Europe.

  Along with a handful of others, I sifted through the files and dossiers that still remained, assessing what had been successfully achieved against what had perhaps gone wrong, in order to make recommendations as to what might need to be re-archived or now eradicated. This was referred to as The Silent Correction.

  We were in fact the second wave of “correction.” I discovered that during the closing stages of the war and with the arrival of peace, a determined, almost apocalyptic censorship had taken place. There had been, after all, myriad operations it was wiser the public never know about, and so the most compromising evidence was, as far as possible, swiftly destroyed—in both Allied and Axis Intelligence headquarters around the globe. A famous example had been the runaway fire in the Baker Street offices of the Special Operations Executive. Such deliberate conflagrations would be worldwide. When the British eventually departed Delhi, “burning officers,” as they called themselves, took on the job of incinerating all compromising records, setting fire to them night and day in the central square of the Red Fort.

  The British were not alone in this instinct to conceal certain truths of war. In Italy, the Nazis had destroyed the smokestacks of Trieste’s Risiera di San Sabba, the rice mill they had turned into a concentration camp where thousands of Jews, Slovenes, Croats, and anti-Fascist political prisoners were tortured and killed. Similarly, no records were kept of the mass graves in the karst sinkholes in the hills above Trieste where Yugoslav Partisans disposed of the bodies of those who had opposed the Communist takeover, or of the thousands deported who perished in Yugoslav detention camps. There was a hasty, determined destruction of evidence by all sides. Anything questionable was burned or shredded under myriad hands. So revisionist histories could begin.

  But fragments of truth remained among families or in villages that had been almost wiped off the map. Any Balkan village, as I overheard my mother once say to Arthur McCash, had cause to seek revenge against its neighbour—or whoever it was they believed had once been their enemy—the Partisans, the Fascists, or us, the Allies. Such were the repercussions of peace.

  And so for us, a generation later in the 1950s, the job was to unearth whatever evidence might still remain of actions that history might consider untoward, and which could still be found in stray reports and unofficial papers. In this post-war world twelve years later, it felt to some of us, our heads bent over the files brought to us daily, that it was no longer possible to see who held a correct moral position. And a good many who worked in that government warren would in fact leave within a year.

  The Saints

  I bought the house from Mrs. Malakite, and on my first day as its owner walked across the fields towards White Paint, where my mother had been raised and which had now been sold to strangers. I stood on a rise on the perimeter of what had once been her land, with the slow meander of a riv
er in the distance. And I decided to write down what little I knew of her time in this place, even if the house and the landscape that once belonged to her family had never been the true map of her life. The girl who had grown up beside a small Suffolk village was in fact well travelled.

  When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually towards you. “A memoir is the lost inheritance,” you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine.

  * * *

  —

  They were a country family who lived a modest and unassuming life in that recognizable era captured in the films made during the war. For some time that is how I imagined my grandparents and my mother, as they might have been represented in such films, although recently, watching the contained sexuality of those demure heroines, I was reminded of the statues that had travelled with the boy I once was, ascending and descending in the lift at the Criterion.

  My grandfather, being born within a family of older sisters, was content to be surrounded by the company of women. Even when he eventually reached the rank of admiral, with no doubt draconian control of the men who obeyed his rigorous demands at sea, he relished his time in Suffolk and was at ease in the domestic habits of his wife and daughter. I wondered if this combination of a “domestic life” and a “life away” was what led my mother to first accept and then change the path of her life. For she herself would eventually insist on something more, so her married and then her professional life echoed the two worlds her father simultaneously inhabited.

  Knowing he would spend most of his active life with the navy, my grandfather had intentionally bought a house in Suffolk that was not beside an “active river.” So where my mother was taught to fish as a teenager was a wide but quiet stream. There was no rush to it. Water meadows sloped down towards it from the house. Now and then in the distance one heard a bell from one of the Norman churches, the same toll earlier generations had heard across those fields.

  The region was made up of a cluster of small villages, a few miles from one another. The roads between them were often unnamed, causing confusion to travellers, not helped by the fact that the villages were similarly named—St. John, St. Margaret, St. Cross. There were in fact two communities of Saints—the South Elmham Saints, made up of eight villages, and the Ilketshal Saints, which had half that number. A further problem was that the mileage on any signpost in the region was guesswork. A sign announced the journey between one Saint and another as two miles, so after three and a half miles a traveller would turn back assuming he had missed a turn, when in fact he needed to continue another half mile to reach the slyly hidden Saint. The miles felt long in The Saints. There was no assurance in the landscape. And for those growing up there, assurance felt similarly hidden. Since I spent some of my early years there, it might explain why as a boy in London I was obsessively drawing maps of our neighbourhood in order to feel secure. I thought that what I could not see or record would cease to exist, just as it often felt I’d misplaced my mother and father in one of those small villages flung down randomly onto the ground with too similar a name and with no reliable mileage towards it.

  During the war, The Saints, being near to the coast, had taken on an even greater secretiveness. All signposts, however inaccurate, were removed in preparation for a possible German invasion. The region became signless overnight. There would in fact be no invasion, but American airmen assigned to the recently built RAF airfields were as a result constantly getting lost when they tried to get back from the pubs at night and were often found searching frantically for the correct aerodrome the next morning. Pilots crossing the Big Dog Ferry travelled unnamed lanes and found themselves crossing the Big Dog Ferry again going the other way, still attempting to stumble on their airfield. At Thetford the army created a life-sized model of a German town, which Allied troops were trained to surround and attack before their invasion of Germany. It was a strange contrast: English soldiers carefully memorizing the structure of a German town, while German troops were preparing to enter a bewildering Suffolk landscape where not one road sign existed. Coastal towns were secretly removed from maps. Military zones officially disappeared.

  Much of the war work in which my mother and others participated was carried out, it is now clear, with a similar invisibility, the real motives camouflaged, the way childhood is. Thirty-two aerodromes, along with decoy airfields to confuse the enemy, were built almost overnight in Suffolk. Most of those flesh-and-blood airfields would never exist on a map, even if they appeared in several short-lived barroom songs. And eventually by war’s end, the aerodromes disappeared, in much the way four thousand air force servicemen would leave the region as if nothing untoward had happened there. The Saints slipped back into everyday life.

  * * *

  —

  As a teenager I would hear about those temporarily un-mapped towns from Mr. Malakite as he drove me to and from work on what had once, long ago, been Roman roads. For on the periphery of the abandoned airfield at Metfield he was now growing vegetables, and it was on those old grass-covered runways that I once again was taught to drive, legally this time. Where the Malakites lived was called a “Thankful Village,” for it had lost no men during the two wars; and it would be to that same village that I returned to live, a decade or so after my mother’s death, in the small timbered house with its walled garden where I had always felt secure.

  I used to wake early at White Paint and walk towards the village, knowing Sam Malakite would drive up alongside me, light a cigarette, and watch as I climbed in beside him. Then we’d be off to various town squares such as Butter Cross in Bungay, heap his produce onto the trestle tables, and work till noon. On the hottest days of summer we stopped at the Ellingham Mill where the river was shallow and stood in it, water up to our waists, eating Mrs. Malakite’s sandwiches—tomato, cheese, onion, with honey from her own bees. A combination I’ve never tasted since. That his wife had made this lunch for us that morning several miles away felt parental.

  He wore bottle-thick spectacles. His ox-like stature made him distinct. He had a long lowland “badger coat,” made out of several skins, which smelled of bracken, sometimes of earthworms. And he and his wife were my watched example of marital stability. His wife no doubt felt I lingered around too much. She was organized, ardently neat, whereas he was the rabbit’s wild brother, leaving what looked like the path of an undressing hurricane wherever he went. He dropped his shoes, badger coat, cigarette ash, a dish towel, plant journals, trowels, on the floor behind him, left washed-off mud from potatoes in the sink. Whatever he came upon would be eaten, wrestled with, read, tossed away, the discarded becoming invisible to him. Whatever his wife said about this incorrigible flaw did no good. I suspect, in fact, she took pleasure in suffering his nature. Though give him credit, Mr. Malakite’s fields were immaculate. No plant left its bed and wandered off as a “volunteer.” He scrubbed the radishes under the thin stream of a hose. He spread his wares neatly on the trestle table at the Saturday market.

  It became the pattern of my spring and summers. I earned a modest wage and it meant I did not have to spend much time on one side of that seemingly uncrossable distance between me and my mother. There was a distrust on my part and a secretiveness on hers. So it was Sam Malakite who became the centre of my life. If we worked late I would have an evening meal with him. My life with The Moth, Olive Lawrence, the smoke-like Darter, my river-leaping Agnes, had been replaced by the easygoing and reliable Sam Malakite, oak strong as they used to say then.

  During winter months, Mr. Malakite’s fields slept. It was
just a caretaking world for him then, with a cover crop of mustard with yellow flowers to build up organic material in the soil. Winters were quiet and still for him. By the time I returned the fields were already filling with vegetables and fruit. We began work early, had a noon lunch and a brief nap under his mulberry tree, then continued until seven or eight. We gathered green beans in five-gallon buckets and chard in a wheelbarrow. The plums in the walled garden behind the house would eventually be made into jam by Mrs. Malakite. The Stupice tomatoes that grew near the sea had an intense taste. I was back within the seasonal subculture of market gardeners and the endless discussions across the trestle tables about blights or the failure of spring rains. I would sit silently, listening to Mr. Malakite’s gift of the gab with his customers. If we were alone he’d inquire about what I was reading, what I was studying at college. There was no mockery about my other world. He saw that whatever I was learning there came from some desire in me, though when I was with him I seldom thought about what I had been doing academically. I wished to be part of his universe. With him those indistinct maps from childhood now became reliable and exact.