Heaven's Edge

by Romesh Gunesekera

  ‘So your father didn’t fight?’ Was he like Eldon I wondered. I compared them, silently: Eldon’s chosen path of pacifism, his mask of spiritual detachment, his harking back to ancients, his desire for things to grow.

  Uva watched me for a while as if searching for a sign of my return. Then, when she was sure I was with her again, she continued. ‘War here, like everywhere else, was once about land and identity. But after the death cloud in the south everything changed. You see, we were reshaped by gangsters into new collectives held together only by conscription. You could say myopia, no? Not language, not religion, not any of those outmoded notions of nation. After so many years of fighting, violence became ingrained into our way of life. So now we have only thugs for politicians and tyranny in every tribe. Killers everywhere. You know, as a ranger my father could kill too – he knew how to hunt – but he never killed for vengeance. He didn’t do it for politics, or for pleasure like these goombahs.’

  ‘Where did he draw the line?’

  ‘In his heart, no? When he hunted, he would do it only out of love. He’d hunt a leopard to save a deer, and sometimes a deer, to save the herd. He would cull if it was necessary but for their sake, not ours. He hoped if he could provide a haven, it would be enough.’

  When she said that, I thought of my father; was that what he believed too? Was it my father, in the end, who shared the same dream? I couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t know how to put it into words, then, that would make sense to anyone.

  The next few days, every morning we would go to the farm and collect fruit and eggs. She’d tend to her animals and birds, while I prepared a salad or a sandwich out of cucumber, tomato and village bread. In the afternoons we’d lie in the shade, or on her wooden bed, and explore each other’s lives: touching, talking, discovering with our tongues whatever our lips could not.

  She told me how lucky she was that her parents had given her a taste for freedom, and I told her how in my case I had to thank my grandparents. I’d try to explain the conflict of loyalties I felt in the past, but the problem did not seem to matter that much any more.

  One afternoon, when we were gathering our things to return to the hotel for the night, I noticed a small figurine on her bedside table. The room was dark, even during the day, and I had to take it up to the window to see it properly. It turned out to be a carving of a creature half-man, half-bird. The body was painted green, the wings gold and the human arms decorated with tiny copper bracelets.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ I asked Uva.

  ‘My father was an artist, I told you. He made it. He was fascinated by the idea that the mythical creatures we imagine might come from some memory of our evolution. This one is his version of a kind of garuda. A bird becoming human.’

  ‘I suppose the story of the man who flew too close to the sun is another?’

  She took the carving from me and placed it back in the shadows. ‘He thought they were all connected, you see. Even the sun was once seen as a bird.’

  ‘Like us?’ I tried to remember how far Eldon went with his theories, but then Uva pulled me outside to show me a pair of bush-larks courting. They flew up repeating their high notes to each other and then parachuted down, legs dangling and wings uplifted.

  ‘But we can’t do that, can we?’ she said.

  I stretched out my arms. ‘Sure we can. In my family …’

  She giggled at that and tickled me. ‘Let’s see then, let’s see.’

  * * *

  A few days later, nestled with me in bed, she told me how the night her mother, her father and her home were destroyed, she was pierced in three places: in her heart, her head and her soul. She said she became determined then to carry on with their vision in secret, in disguise, in any way she could. Her voice dropped low in her thin wilting throat when she spoke of her war, as though the enemy was within her now. ‘I don’t want to talk any more about it. I can still taste that graphite dust in my mouth. What’s gone must one day come back.’ Her eyelids drooped, trapped in her parents’ web of unravelled hope.

  ‘How will you know you have done what you have to do here?’

  ‘I only want to keep their spirit alive. I’ll know when I am no longer needed. There will be birds everywhere – my mother’s emerald doves at least – and clouds of butterflies like flowers in the air. We will each have a garden of our own.’ She half-opened her eyes. ‘How will you know that you have found what you are looking for?’

  ‘I already have.’

  ‘What? You think that just because we can jiggle our hips together everything is all right?’ She squinted hard, screwing up her face. ‘Look at this seedy hotel you are stuck in, will you? You remember how it looked to you at first? What I said to you about how we survive? Just think about my muddy little hut you like so much to wallow in. That pathetic plot of sweet potato I have to dig. If we think this is the best we can do then we will have become just like them: forgetting pain and remembering nothing.’ Her words grated. But I thought I could remember everything I needed to then, as I can now: my arrival, her pond, our first conversations. The way she wafted through the hotel and tumbled into my room. Our walks together on the beach, through the forests. Her camouflaged crops, the lantana blossom, her chickens, her pigs and her goats. The coir mattress on her vermilion bed, her body in my arms, every fold and fissure within her. I could remember the sun, the moon and the stars. And far away my grandfather’s garden and my journey from his to hers.

  It is enough, I wanted to say then. It was more than I had ever dreamed was possible.

  She had shown me everything that mattered on the coast, except the city. She said she didn’t like Maravil, even though her closest friends were there.

  ‘Doing their own thing?’

  ‘Yes, traders, and … Jaz.’ She said he was the best friend she’d ever had. ‘He is always able to make me feel good when I’m down.’

  ‘I’d like to meet him then,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘You wouldn’t understand him.’ She described Jaz as Maravil’s most erogenous creature; ensconced in the exclusive Carnival Mall – a restricted leisure centre – he could do practically anything except set himself free. ‘No one can reach beneath his surface,’ she explained.

  I said I’d like to try.

  ‘The mall is for pass-holders only, but you need an official ID even to get into the city – unless it is a market day. You have to be registered by birth or trade. Or branded like one of their captives.’

  ‘What about foreigners? I thought there were some there?’

  ‘Sometimes they keep foreigners like pets. Usually some dumb diplomat who steps outside their special enclave, or one of the rare tourists from the quarantined north resort who goes too far.’ She grinned. ‘They tag you then. You would be free to remain but not to leave our warlord’s domain.’

  It figured. I told her Eldon’s story. ‘He used to say there is a long tradition of washed-up tourists suffering what he called inescapable hospitality here: the Argonauts, seventeenth-century sailors. The odd globetrotter, you know?’ Only then, in the retelling, did it strike me. ‘I think he really believed that in any country it is only the foreigner who can feel a genuine sense of belonging, of arrival, of arriving home. We become committed: perpetually enchanted or permanently detained.’ I began to wonder about ancient mariners, traders and travellers. But was he right? We were all foreigners once. And what about the history of slavery? Enforced migration? Escape and exile? Uva? The stuff that was going on around us? It’s not just a matter of who you are, or where you are; surely how you got there must make a difference? What he meant, perhaps, was people like himself. Was that what I was beginning to feel too? ‘Perhaps people like me,’ I added. ‘We feel committed.’

  She laughed. ‘Desire, my love, is all you feel.’

  She parted my tight curls and moistened a path of enchantment with her silver-studded tongue from my throat down to my navel. Then, in her retreat, she undid the weave of her homespun cloth exp
osing every curve and cleft of her uncoated flesh, the whole spine of her hidden plume.

  Her body was always warmer than mine. In the early hours of the morning the warmth drew me to her under our gossamer net. And when we had water to shower with, her warm surface melted mine into a sea of concupiscence rippled by her bluish tongue. Her silver anklet would pierce my back; I would hear the sound of feathers pressed to her perfume, buried between her stride, her fingers tugging at my hair, her whole body buoyed up in my hands. But I failed her when she needed me most. Too slow, too uncertain; my hopes that day, at our palm beach, were what let me down.

  Uva had gone back to the farm, alone, to collect our daily basket of fruit; I was in my room trying to make sense of a map she had managed to get for me. Four weeks had passed and I was beginning to feel I should make an effort to see a bit more of the region inland, even if I couldn’t get to all the places I had first wanted to. Locating the hotel on the local map and matching the details to the older one I had brought with me on the boat was proving difficult. I had barely managed to identify the region where Eldon’s Eden, perhaps even Lee’s graveyard, might be when she rushed in and locked the door behind her. Her eyes were swollen, her voice shrivelled. ‘Kill me, Marc, before I really become like one of those bastards.’

  I tried to soothe her, but she twisted around and unstrapped her butterfly knife. ‘Quickly,’ she hissed, ‘now, before it’s too late.’ I had to grasp her hand and force her fingers apart as only a lover could, tearing the skin on the web between her thumb and forefinger.

  ‘Let go. It’s my knife.’ Her face was thin, tense; watching me while watching out. ‘They’ve destroyed the hatchery, my seedlings, the nursery, everything.’

  Was that smoke in her hair? My hand seemed to burn where I touched her, but I did not let go.

  ‘I want to kill every one of them. Tusker, that bastard first …’ She bit her lip until blood appeared.

  I wanted then, as I do now, to lick it clean; staunch the flow. Her pulse was in my hands. She dug into my skin with her fingers. I untangled the strands of her long warm hair. ‘I don’t believe in death,’ the rich comforting voice of my childhood’s guardian echoed in my throat. ‘You know that.’

  She pulled away from me and moved slowly to the window. Beyond the bare, parched lawn of the hotel garden, the beach cowered as the surf smashed the shore, splitting each grain of sand against each other. ‘They’ve destroyed the whole farm. All the animals. Every little bird. The hut was blazing. My garuda … everything gone. Now they’ll be after me.’

  I saw again the burnt farmstead she’d shown me, and tried to keep her vale from merging into it in my mind. ‘We’d better get to that special enclave in the city, an embassy.’

  She stared at me as if I was mad. ‘They won’t help me. You know secret farmers like me are not their interest. Even Jaz …’

  ‘What about that place in the south then, where you said no one goes any more?’

  A stray sunbeam lit her eye. ‘Samandia? Yes, we might be safe in Samandia.’ She wiped her hand across her face. There was ash on her cheek.

  I told her to slip out around the side of the hotel and wait by the gate while I fetched the keys to the hotel jeep from the bellboy’s box. She nodded, looking for once, a little uncertain. Her breath, warm, tinged with blood, seemed to be still. I left her as I never ever want to leave her again.

  When I couldn’t find the keys in the box, I stupidly searched all the drawers of the unattended reception desk instead of going into the office straight away. I was in a panic. I wished I hadn’t let her keep her knife, given the state she was in. By the time I found the keys and raced to the gate, I was too late. I turned to look back once more at the old hotel and saw a shadow on the terrace raise a gun. I jumped, crying out. The path turned red, the insides of my eyelids redder. An icy chemical flooded the pores of my shoulder before I even felt the puncture of the soldier’s dart; a cool, light, feeling of night descending, a curdled sky swelling in my veins. There was pain. My every membrane quivered like a pricked inner ear.

  II

  Maravil

  When I regained consciousness, I found myself on a metal bed. It was daylight, and hot. I could see only sky through the small windows of the grey wall opposite. There were ten beds in the ward and one other patient: a small figure with a bandage around his chest. A stout woman in a nurse’s uniform guarded the door. I wasn’t sure whether I should show I was awake.

  I was in a sleeveless smock and there was a small dressing taped to my shoulder. I tried to remember whether I had seen Uva running towards me or away.

  A doctor came in, looking rather harassed. He hurried over to the other patient and leafed through the papers on the clipboard dangling at the end of the bed. He said something to the nurse who had followed behind and then scribbled on the board. Then he turned towards me.

  He was a young man with a worried face. ‘Feeling better?’ he asked and checked my pulse.

  I asked him where I was, and what had happened.

  Using his thumbs he pulled my lower lids down and examined my eyes. ‘A minor accident. You’ve been sedated.’ He asked to see my tongue. Then he told me to turn my head to one side on the pillow. I felt him do something with my ear.

  ‘Is that a tag?’

  ‘Think of it as an earring,’ he replied. Quickly he removed the dressing from my shoulder. The plaster strips coming off hurt more than whatever he’d done before. He jotted down something on my clipboard too and handed it to the nurse.

  Later I was given some bread and radish curry to eat. When I finished, the nurse brought me my clothes. She didn’t speak, but it was obvious that I was meant to get dressed. I was then escorted to the doctor’s office.

  ‘You’ll be taken to your quarters now,’ the doctor said, scribbling some more on a pad. He went on to explain that I was not a prisoner, but only temporarily restricted. ‘You’ll get what you need, until a decision is made. You see, you were an unfortunate obstruction in an incident yesterday.’ My dollars and my watch had been confiscated, but he assured me that I would be given a ration of tokens to use in due course. He discharged me into the custody of two soldiers who were lounging outside. ‘Your suitcase is in the van already.’

  The back of the vehicle had no windows. I couldn’t see where we were going. When we stopped and I was let out, I didn’t recognise the area at all. It was bleaker and dryer than anywhere I’d been. There was no hint of the sea.

  I was led into a compound of concrete cells. Each with one barred window and a metal door. There were about a dozen of them; none of them looked occupied.

  A soldier pointed mine out and also showed me the standpipe and the latrine. The other informed me that food would be brought once a day to the sentry-point on the main road at the end of the lane. He used his gun to indicate the direction I should take. ‘Come at first whistle.’

  ‘I can walk there?’ I asked.

  He nodded. ‘But fences are electric,’ he warned.

  After the soldiers left, I saw some dark figures scuttling in and out of another compound, across the way. I tried make some contact, wondering if Uva might be among them, but no one responded. I gave up. I couldn’t see any women there, and the men looked as though they belonged to some religious sect. We may not have been in prison but each area was fenced in; theirs did not seem to have a gate opening on to the same dusty lane that mine did. I guessed the only entrance was via the main road, and presumably restricted.

  I was still in a state of shock, I suppose, and went to sleep before dark.

  The military whistle in the morning was a siren designed to oppress as much as awake. With each passing minute heat rose and the vibrating air thickened. I got myself ready as quickly as I could, but when I stepped out into the lane I felt the sun had already warped the earth. In the phosphorus dust by the gate a big black beetle lay upside-down, its thorax chewed into a crater. I stuck to the edge, walking beneath the trees, a shade or two less in te
mperature. The border bristled with brittle weeds, clumps of spearheads. In places I could see nests of red termites devouring the earth.

  At the sentry-point I found I was the only one there to collect provisions. The soldier on guard pointed some device at my head, presumably to check my ID against his register.

  There wasn’t much to eat; only bread and a coconut mix – no fruit, no vegetables, no meat – but I knew it would have to do for the whole day.

  On the other side of the main road, I could see the boundary of an army camp. I thought I could feel the ground shudder all morning to the ritual stomp of boots there.

  Some time later, the whistle blew again – two blasts – to denote midday, I guessed.

  When the sun finally began to drop, I walked down the lane going in the opposite direction to the main road. I found a wood-apple rotting on a barbed wire, and then, at the end of the lane, a shrunken waterhole that reminded me of where I had first seen Uva.