by Paul Theroux
Two boys were coming towards them in the road, laboring up the hill from the direction of the valley. They were in a bend in the road the sun never reached: banks topped with grassy cliffs and scored with rain gullies rose up on either side, and pools of tracked-over mud had collected where the gullies met the road. In that damp shadow the boys were two forlorn figures, stooping with their loads and scuffing the mud as they went along. Their hair was mussed, and tufts of it stuck up like owls’ horns; they had a dirty rumpled look, as if they had been sleeping outdoors in a nest of leaves. The taller one, who was not more than eleven or twelve, had large unlaced shoes on his sockless feet and wore a man’s pinstriped suit jacket which flopped open to his torn shirt; the younger one, who was half his size, wore a checked woolen jacket that was much too small for him, and red mud-smeared boots. They both wore shrunken shorts and now Munday saw they were carrying empty beer bottles in their arms.
“Hello there,” said Munday.
The taller one giggled and dropped his eyes, the other put his head down shyly and both walked a bit faster. It was their color that appalled Munday; their pinched faces were that pale luminous white that is almost blue, and their knees, so absurdly larger than their skinny legs, were also bluish. They had the round shoulders and the gait of very old men, and shining mustaches of snot, and their bottles clinked as they splashed past, seeming to hurry.
“Terrible,” whispered Emma. “The poor things. Did you see their teeth?”
Munday had not realized how cold it was until he had seen those ragged boys in shorts. Now he noticed it was near freezing. He said, “They should be in school.”
“Where do you suppose they’re going?”
“Obviously to The Yew Tree, to return those bottles. Get a few pence.”
“They must live down there in those cottages,” said Emma, starting down the hill.
They walked around the bend in the road, squelching through the mud, to the row of cottages. What had looked so charming from behind their house, the sweep of the valley coming up to meet the thatched cottages with the smoking chimneys, the quilt of fields, the browsing sheep, now lost all its simplicity. The thatch was torn and partially mended, bristling brooms of new straw stuck out from the eaves, sheets of chicken wire held it together on the roof peak. The wall of the end cottage bulged, seams of cement had burst, and the foundation at one comer had cracked and come loose. The. fields were sodden and crisscrossed by deep ruts, the sheep was spattered with mud, and their yellow wool, the texture of elderly hair, was painted with crude red symbols. A dog bounded past the sheep, scattering them, and then ran to the Mundays and barked fiercely, holding itself low on the ground, crouching and inching closer as he snarled.
“There, there.” Emma spoke softly to the dog and reached over to stroke its head. It lifted its jaws and snapped at her hand and continued to bark. Emma stepped away, but still murmured her gentle disappointment, hoping to calm the dog.
“No friendlier than anyone else around here,” said Munday. He held his walking stick tightly and he noted a spot at the back of the dog’s head where he would land the blow.
“Aw, he won’t hurt you.”
The voice, Hosmer’s—they looked up and saw him in the yard, peering at them from under his hat brim—was flat, without encouragement or welcome. He was just above them, leaning on a shovel, in a green jacket with the pockets tom and flapping, wearing high gumboots.
“Likes to play, he does,” said Hosmer.
The dog had mounted Emma’s leg and left streaked paw prints on the light mac she had bought especially for these walks. She took the dog by its forelegs and pushed at its slavering mouth. She said, “Naughty— stop it!”
“Off ’er!” said Hosmer sharply to the dog. It pulled out of Emma’s grasp and bounded a few feet away and yelped and shook itself, turning in circles.
“So this is where you live,” said Munday, starting up the bank towards Hosmer. It was the bluff, genial tone he used with Africans in their bush compounds. “Very nice indeed. Your garden?”
“Yes, sir,” said Hosmer, straightening on his shovel and speaking with a guarded respect Munday felt might be impossible to penetrate with any friendliness.
“It’s a perfect site,” said Emma. She brushed at the paw prints with the heel of her hand.
“Mr. Awdry’s,” said Hosmer. “He owns the lot. We rent her, this end of the cottage. One of Duddle’s tenants has the other half.”
“But you get the sun,” said Emma.
“When she’s out,” said Hosmer.
“It’s a beautiful view.”
“That’s Shave’s Cross,” said Hosmer, choosing to indicate a smudge of squares on the landscape, a small cluster of distant gray cottages in the miles and miles of green farmland and trees. It occurred to Munday that a Bwamba might have done the same. Hosmer said, “Over there’s Lyme Regis.” It was a purpling hill, a promonotory at the horizon.
Munday was looking at the cottages. “I see,” he said. “Each of these three buildings is divided in half. That would make five more families living here. Almost a hamlet.”
“Four others,” said Hosmer. “Last one’s standing empty.”
“You’re a lucky man,” said Munday. “There are people in London who’d give anything to have a place like this.”
“Would they?” said Hosmer gruffly. “Well, they can stop where they are.”
“They’re not so bad,” Munday joked. “Once you get used to them.”
“I don’t get used to them,” said Hosmer. “Twenty guineas a week they pay—for a cottage! All that whisky, and the things they do. They want us in the council houses. Bloody nuisance, I say. They can bloody stop where they are.”
“They put the prices up, that it?” said Munday. He smiled; it was an African remark, made of foreign visitors.
Hosmer said, “And my back.”
“Is this all your garden?” asked Emma.
“Yes, ma’m.”
“May we look around?”
“Mind the mud,” said Hosmer. “Been raining. The cows come through here and chums it up.”
“You still have sprouts!” Emma showed Munday the tall plants with the pale green bulbs on their stalks.
“No bloody good to me,” said Hosmer. “Growing into flowers and rotting.” He turned on his shovel and watched the Mundays stroll to the bottom of the garden, Emma looking at the view, Munday lifting a tangle of vines with his walking stick for a better look at the marrows.
“It’s magnificent,” said Emma. She faced the sea where the low sun, wreathed in a gray shallow cloud, still shimmered on the water.
Munday headed for the back of the cottages. He heard Hosmer say, “Sorry I can’t offer you anything,” and Emma reply, “Oh, we were just out for a walk—” In the straw-clumps behind the cottages Munday saw rusting tools, an unused generator black with oil, a gutted motor, and tractor parts, a crankshaft, bolts and wheel-rims and a pile of lumber. He poked at them with his stick. A line of washing, faded overalls, yellow underwear, and blue shirts 'whitened with bleach stains blew noisily, the arms and legs filling with wind, and the line itself lifted. Munday crossed the humpy ground to the fence at the edge of Hosmer’s property to get a better look at the valley, and he was standing trying to memorize the rhythm of the hills, the play of light and shadow, when his thoughts were interrupted by a ribbon of decay leaking past his nose. He sniffed and lost it and then smelled it powerfully, the ribbon growing to a whole rag of stink.
A few feet away, just by a wire fence, was a little platform covered by an old brown piece of canvas. He saw that Hosmer and Emma were out of sight; he stepped over to it and lifted one comer with his stick. He saw white flesh, narrow sinews and the tight bundles of muscle. His first thought was that it was a human corpse, and that fear of discovering a dead man lessened the shock of seeing the hairy rug, the paws, and—lifting the stiff canvas higher—the two dead dogs, lying side by side on the wooden platform. They had been killed, an
d Munday thought flayed (the word came to him before he actually saw the slashes), and they lay there on the shelf, speckled by decay, beside their own folded pelts.
Munday dropped the canvas and hurried to the side of the cottage, where Hosmer and Emma were still standing and talking.
“I was just telling your missus,” said Hosmer, squinting. “That end cottage—she’s rented.”
Walking home Emma said, “Those were his boys. I asked him. I wish there were something we could do.”
“Bring them to the attention of Oxfam,” he said. “Alfred.”
“There’s nothing,” he said. “He doesn’t even want us around.”
“They look so beaten.”
“Not beaten,” he said. “Detribalized.”
“It’s so ironic,” Emma said, “living in such squalor with that magnificent view.”
Munday said, “Let’s keep to the road this time, shall we?”
And he knew as they talked about the early twilight, the dusk falling on the hills around them, that he would say nothing about the dead dogs. That baffling scene he understood only as an enactment of violence, but something no usual motive could properly explain or make less beastly was another secret he would have to keep from her and beat alone. It was like a hidden infidelity, a habit of faithlessness he was starting to learn, suppressing what frightened him so that Emma would not be alarmed.
They expected an unheated church hall, so Munday wore a zippered cardigan under his thick tweed suit, and Emma her wool dress and jacket; she carried her mac carefully folded on the arm because of the paw prints. But it was very warm in the hall, Munday felt the heat as soon as he stepped inside, and he commented on it to the vicar.
“They like it this way,” said Crawshaw. He smiled at the seated people as he spoke, and led Munday to the stage. “Pensioners, you see—they really feel the cold. It’s why we have these monthly talks. The central heating in here is so expensive. We put some of the proceeds toward the fuel bill. It’s oil-fired. One day we’ll have a new hall.”
Munday said, “If anyone asks me whether it’s hot in Africa I’ll say, ‘No hotter than this room!’ ” There was also a dusty sweetness in the air, like flower scent but cloying, the odor of talcum, cologne, and bay rum, perfumes Of the aged that rubbed against Munday’s eyes.
Every seat was taken. Some people turned and stared as Munday and the vicar walked up the center aisle, but he saw most of them from the back, the suspended lamps lighting their white hair and giving it the thin wispiness of little nest-:like caps of illuminated cobwebs. The bald spots shone. It might have been a gathering for a church service they were so still, almost prayerful; and that look of piety was somehow intensified by the size of their heads, which were very small and set on disproportionately large shoulders.
When Munday reached the front of the hall and mounted the stage he saw the reason for this—they were all dressed for outdoors, each person wore a heavy winter coat. From the front, bundled up in this way, they looked defiant to Munday, annoyed in their cumbersome winter clothes. But there was a general unbuttoning and opening of the coats when they saw Munday and the vicar.
A man on stage was fumbling with a screen, trying to set it up. Crawshaw introduced him to Munday as Chester Lennit.
“Sorry I don’t have a free hand,” said Lennit, flashing Munday a faintly sheepish smile. “Be through in a minute, though,” he said, but as he spoke the tripod collapsed, and the telescoping upright shot down with a great clatter. Heads bobbed in the audience. Lennit pulled it again into position and said, “Bally thing won’t hold.”
The people in the audience watched with bright eyes.
“Mr. Lennit is in charge of our visual aids,” said Crawshaw.
“Not trained for it, or anything like that,” said Lennit. “I used to be with British Rail, on the accounts side, in London. For years.”
“Perhaps I can give you a hand,” said Munday.
“No, I’ve done this lots of times before,” said Lennit. He wouldn’t let himself be helped. He said, “Very fiddly, these things. You just have to know the right combination.” He looped the screen once again onto the upright and nudged the tripod into place with his foot. It crashed again. “Oh, God,” he muttered, and his grip on the apparatus became strangulatory.
Crawshaw turned to the audience: “While Mr. Lennit’s putting the screen into shape, I’d like to make a few announcements. First, Mrs. Crawshaw asked me to thank all of you who kindly brought fresh flowers for the memorial service last Sunday. Those of you who spent Saturday afternoon polishing the brasses deserve a special vote of thanks. The Christmas supper is scheduled for the twenty-second, and may I just say a word about our charity drive for the less fortunate in Four Ashes? It’s not too early to start thinking about setting tins and warm clothes aside—”
Emma, in the front row, was listening to the vicar. Munday tried to catch her eye—he wanted her to wink at him; she turned and smiled slightly and went back to the vicar. She looked calm, but after the walk that evening she had stopped in the courtyard of the house and said, “I don’t want to go in.” Munday had entered first. He called to her; there was nothing. Behind her now, making her seem almost girlish in her Indian silk scarf, the rows of elderly listeners hunched in their dark coats received the vicar’s news without reacting. Then Munday realized that they were not looking at the vicar, but rather at Mr. Lennit who at the back of the stage was stretching the screen into position for the fourth time.
Munday, scowling in the heat, was struck by their certain age, which he took to be around seventy, and by the uniformity of their appearance. They looked so similar, they shared so many features: their faces were small, bony, skull-like, some of the women’s faces looked dusted with flour, and yet none gave the impression of being sickly. Their postures were the same; they sat on the folding chairs, their hands clutched in their laps, bent slightly forward, as if straining to hear, or perhaps to get a better view of Mr. Lennit. Many of the men wore lapel pins, some two or three, and the women small corsages, sprigs of winter flowers on their coats. It was a vision for Munday of old age crowded in a hall, like a council convened by the geriatrics in a village convinced of their own doom. There were such villages on remote African hillsides, from which all the young people had fled in a time of famine or drought, leaving the aged ones to resist, huddled in broken huts. Munday had seen them crouched in shadows, facing fields parching in a killing sun.
“—I think,” said the vicar, glancing behind him, “that Mr. Lennit has succeeded in putting up his awfully complicated cinema screen. Before we begin I must ask you to avoid stepping on the cord to the slide projector. We don’t want a repetition of the Hardy talk!”
A mirthful hum vibrated in the audience, and chairs clanked as people shifted in their seats.
The vicar said to Munday, “Someone plunged us into darkness that night. Gave some of the good ladies here quite a shock.”
Munday nodded and said, “Rather.”
“This evening,” said the vicar, raising his voice, “we are privileged to have with us a man who has spent a good part of his life in some very sticky places. Africa has always had a strange fascination for the English. We explored its jungles, we fought there— many Englishmen still lie buried there—we cplonized and brought light to that dark continent. A few of you here tonight have yourselves been to Africa and can claim some credit for these accomplishments. Today, Her Majesty no longer rules over Africa, and the territories that flew the Union Jack now have their own flags of various colors. From what we read in the papers they seem terribly confusing—”
The introduction went on for several more minutes and continued to embarrass Munday, and when the vicar said, “I give you—Doctor Munday,” he stepped forward to the dry clapping and realized how inappropriate the opening remarks he had prepared were, how scholarly and ill-suited to the mood of this provincial place. So he began by saying, “The vicar called it sticky. It’s only that in the literal se
nse, never very dangerous. In fact I should say it’s a good deal safer than London!”
They laughed at this, and he went on, encouraged by their amusement, trying to find a way into the talk he had prepared. “They say Africa gets into one’s blood. It’s probably truer to say it gets under one’s skin!” This time he paused for the laughter, but it was slighter than before, and scattered, and he quickly resumed, “Unless you’re a chap like me who rather enjoys poking his nose in all sorts of out-of-the-way places. It’s a queer kind of community, an African village, but in many ways no different from your own village. The social organization is quite similar, there are meeting places like this church hall, and shops, and village elders to whom, like the vicar here, people look for counsel. So when you think of an African village, don’t think of a great mass of gibbering black people with bones in their noses, shaking spears and beating on tom-toms”—here there was some laughter, but Munday pressed on without acknowledging it— “think of yourselves.”
And then he said, “You understand in Four Ashes what it’s like to be a bit off the map, and tonight I’m going to talk to you about another remote people—” He sensed a slackening in the audience’s attention right away, an adjustment to heaviness in them he tried to shift with his voice; fighting for their .eyes made his tone preachy and somewhat strident. Emma had advised him to pick one person and speak to him. He did this: the man was in the third row, and was distinguished by a fine tweed coat, lighter than all the others. Munday continued speaking; the man put his chin in his hand reflectively; his head tilted to the side and the hand seemed to tip the head onto his shoulder. Asleep, he seemed especially aged. Munday searched the hall for another face.
“It’s a law of nature,” he was saying, “that once a group of people has been cut off from the world they begin to change. Their direction alters—though they have no sense of having turned. They have nothing, no one, to measure themselves by, except a distant feeble memory of the way things were once done. You must bear in mind that certain activities put us in touch with other people—trade, selling our skills and goods, travel, reading, even warfare helps us to come to an understanding of the world outside the village. But where there is little saleable skill, a subsistence economy, a reluctance to travel, and where people are entirely self-sufficient, they withdraw to a shadowy interior world. This inspires certain fears —irrational fear, you might say, is a penalty of that isolation. Who can verify it or tell you it doesn’t matter? Who can witness this decline? The remote people begin to act in a manner that looks very strange indeed to an outsider. Their sense of time, for example, is slowed down. The sameness of the days makes them easy to forget and so history goes unwitnessed. It’s a kind of sleep. There is ‘little innovation because really there is no need for it. What is not understood—and this can be as simple and casual as a tree falling across the road in a storm—is called magic. And this happens in more places than the witch-ridden society of semi-pygmies at the latter end of the world.
