Heaven's Edge

by Romesh Gunesekera

  Each day, thereafter, I would go to the waterhole and watch it shrink another crimped ripline, imagining it was her duckweed pond in mourning. Each day, using my pair of ruby binoculars, I would search the trees before the pulping of the sun, looking for an ash dove or another green imperial pigeon, but there were none of her feathered souls anywhere to be seen. I wanted to believe they would reappear, re-adorned, singing for a greener world, as she must, but all I ever saw was the erratic dive of a single mutilated tree-frog, or a stray fox-bat riding a heatwave. I had to accept the compound was much further inland than I had ever been with her.

  Every evening I would wait by the mudrim for seepal-flares to light and only then retrace my steps to the concrete compound, dreaming sometimes that I might find myself returning to the safe suburb where I had been born.

  On my tenth evening at the waterhole, watching the sun sink, I saw a pair of stretched leather wings collapse midway to nowhere; a fox snout swung. A sharp explosion echoed and the creature back-flapped, stalled, fell two cubits before regaining the lift needed to glide in on a lower warmstream to the dry scrub and ghost trees of the jungle. A few minutes later, a jeep came careering through the dark blaring announcements in English and several other languages that I couldn’t quite make out. There was to be a market day in Maravil. Everyone in the area was allowed to go on the morning bus. I could hardly believe it: a chance to go into the city where Uva had friends. A chance to find out if she, at least, had managed to get away. All evening I watched small deformed geckos twitch their plasma tails to the beat of crippled, brainless gnats hoping, like them, for a change in tempo.

  I was up before the whistle blew the next morning. I had time to prepare – to squat, to rinse, to breakfast on stale bread – before setting out.

  On the way to the main road, I caught sight of two buffaloes. One was trying to mount the other. The cow stumbled and the two beasts crashed into the trees. Then, behind the animals, a troop of soldiers appeared, jeering. They fired a few shots into the huddle. The male keeled over and the cow bolted, ripping the skin of her belly.

  I have never been one easily angered, but my blood began to rise. If I had a gun, I suppose I might have used it. Then I remembered my grandfather piously quoting a pundit of his youth, ‘Violence can only condemn you to more violence.’ I understood that, but in my head I also heard my dead father, Lee, retort, ‘Sometimes doing nothing condemns you more.’

  The soldiers fired again, and went after the cow.

  * * *

  The bus appeared as a small yellow shimmering glob shaking itself out of a mirage pool. At the checkpoint a soldier ran a stick instrument under the vehicle. After he completed the inspection, one of his colleagues got on and the bus shuddered forward to the loading point. I was the only person waiting; my neighbours were at their own stop. The soldier checked me and allowed me to climb in.

  Small fluorescent dots flashed on a screen by the steering wheel. The driver took no notice. He shoved another cud into his mouth and revved the engine. That morning there were no signs of any provisions. Only a few silent, weary people glued to rough vinyl benches. I sat by a window which had been smeared with oil and dust and stared out as if to carve my own route through the hot air.

  A solitary drongo dropped from the sky and settled on the road ahead, its Y-tail sweeping a small arc in the dust. From Uva I thought, trying hard to contain my excitement. A messenger like the swallows I used to watch in my childhood; couriers from afar who had seemed to bear on each feather a signal for me from my absent father. It waited, without a sound, and took off when we began to move.

  After picking up more silent passengers at the next stop, we rumbled down through a grove of stripped jacaranda trees and, eventually, reached an iron bridge built over a river of slow-moving green goo. The geometric shapes of the metal girders and the slabs of rock and mud were like the images in the glossy, chromatic photos I used to slip out of my father’s envelopes as a child. He must have been here, I remember thinking, before this entire area degenerated.

  On the other side of the river were the remains of an oil-palm plantation. I hadn’t seen any before, but Uva had said that there were vast tracts of these inland. Each tree had been puffed to a regulation height before being allowed to wither either as a result of mismanagement, or by being junked as a project of an earlier regime.

  I reckoned we travelled about twenty-five kilometres before reaching the coast where the plantation reverted back to coconut and lime. The sand was white with pulverised sea skeletons. There were white flecks in the sea too; small sodium pennants gathering together to rush the shore.

  We came to a lagoon and I felt a hint of the optimism of my sea-crossing seep back into me. Uva had told me about a lagoon. Wrinkling up her face in distaste, she had explained that between the hotel and Maravil was a lagoon with a factory fish farm. Despite her disapproval, I felt a little less lost; but when I breathed in, the stink of prawns simmering made me want to retch. The land ahead was bent into a finger that seemed to reach right into my throat.

  A little later the bus took another turn. Ahead of us the white cupolas of Maravil rose out of the scrag. High above another drongo circled, crying for its mate.

  Most of Maravil had been built quickly after the older cities of the province had been destroyed. Therefore the main buildings were all formed out of identical cheap concrete blocks. The only distinguishing feature I could see were the domed roofs that a few of the taller ones had. According to Uva, the market square and the underground mall, originally a tourist project, were all that remained of the old town.

  The bus slowed down. There were several vehicles on the road: we passed a lorry full of onions, a motor-cart heaped with coconuts, a sweaty refrigerated prawn truck, all gibbering towards the centre.

  At a massive monument of a soldier, the bus turned left and ran alongside a canal until it reached the depot. About half a dozen other run-down buses had been crammed in, and more people than I had ever seen on the island. I climbed down from the bus and went over to a display board: a simplified map of the city and its surroundings with large areas to the north and the south blanked out. The canal and the market hall were outlined in red. I worked out our route. The compound, I figured, was in the shaded circle at the eastern end of the road. The Palm Beach Hotel and the village, therefore, had to be one of the settlements in the green stretch north of the lagoon. I stepped back to take in more of the map at a glance.

  ‘You need pass?’ A small, plump man peered from behind the board. ‘Night pass, valid sundown-sunup. For Carnival Mall.’

  I remembered Uva explaining that the mall was where her Jaz worked. ‘Let’s see?’ I asked the tout.

  The man’s mouth shifted into a crude hook. ‘Come, now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come.’ The man pulled out a round metal clam and prised it open. He checked the time. ‘You do for me my asking for this much.’ He indicated the passing of an illicit hour.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘First agree.’

  I shook my head, even though I was tempted.

  ‘No hard work,’ the man leered. ‘Only pig stick.’

  I didn’t know what he meant. All I could think of was the barbaric pastime where hunters on horseback stuck spears into squealing hogs. I couldn’t see this man doing that.

  ‘Maybe later,’ I said.

  The little man’s nose twitched as the wind broke behind him. ‘Later may be too late. Passes go fast. This be the rub-rub night. But do what you like. No problem for me.’

  I felt a small flutter of uncertainty inside, but I crushed it and moved on.

  I could hear the market before I reached it. A low drone of electricity and the flapping of tarpaulins punctuated by the occasional sharp cry of a hawker. The street that led down to it was strewn with garbage and litter. A Roman arch framed the entrance and there was a soldier on duty outside it. He watched me pass through without stopping me.

  The square ins
ide was lined with small handcarts selling dubious-looking snacks and beverages: burnt gram, yeasty juices, dried molasses, wrinkled sausage sticks. Throngs of dishevelled people mooched about, looking rather than buying. The first vendor I passed sparked out of his mouth, ‘Fizz, fizz, fizz.’ Others near him then began to ululate softly, swaying from side to side. They looked as malnourished as the people milling around, especially compared to the young soldiers stationed on the steps.

  The main hall was a type of structure I recognised from Eldon’s history books, favoured in the past for recurrent displays of collective hubris: a large rectangular plinth with a series of columns supporting an angular roof. Under it, the area seemed to be divided into blocks. I could see vegetable stalls in the first row. Flesh, I noticed, was sold in a separate shed, where I supposed the smell of blood would not cloud the minds of the new recruits patrolling outside.

  An old woman tipped a wicker basket containing a couple of deformed moon radishes towards me and waved her fingers in the air. ‘Two one, two one.’ Her loose breasts wobbled perilously in a cradle of dirty lace. Her face was streaked with a bitter, dark stain. I ignored her. I wanted information, not vegetables: something to help me find Uva, or her friends, or a consul.

  Skirting a scattering of blemished aubergines and a few convoluted runner beans, I headed for the centre of the hall. There was no fruit anywhere to be seen. I remembered how Uva had explained to me that the authorities stipulated what could be grown and at what price it could be sold. She could not, however, explain to me why they didn’t allow fruit. Why were her fruits and eggs and birds such a threat? When I said it made no sense to me she replied, ‘Sense is not what they are about.’

  The layout inside the hall was familiar. Markets have not changed, Eldon liked to say, in three thousand years; not in design, purpose or ethics.

  Right in the middle I found a stall with a sign in English: Zengporium. An owlish man wearing spectacles was serving two elderly men. Uva had spoken about a trader called Zeng, but I couldn’t be sure this was the same man. I took my time and sauntered up to the counter, hoping to hear something. The transaction was completed with hardly a word and the two customers shuffled away. The trader seemed very cool. I examined the small cellophane packets of arrowroot he had in front and then decided to take a chance. ‘Uva says you have passes for the Carnival.’

  He didn’t move a muscle.

  ‘Do you?’

  His face contracted a little. ‘Where’d she go?’

  I figured there was nothing to lose by then. ‘She disappeared about ten days ago,’ I explained. ‘I’m trying to find her.’

  He inspected me over the tops of his spectacles. Then, with a loud exhalation, he pulled out a tin of spice grits and slid it across the counter. ‘Meet me at the fountain plaza just iffore sundown.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘By the Victory monument. The stone soldier, you know?’

  I picked up the can and nodded, ‘OK.’ I mentally ticked another box, but I still wasn’t sure how much I could trust him.

  Zeng withdrew and I decided to look over the rest of the hall. I wanted to find out if anyone sold instruments, implements or utensils. Survival tools.

  In the far corner of the hall, overlooking the canal, I came across a display of shields, lamps, cups, plates – all made of metal – and a selection of knives including what looked like a switchblade. I was surprised. Everything else looked strictly utilitarian. The copperware, though, was very elegantly done: sophisticated designs, careful workmanship. Each piece was flawless; each seam perfect and straight. Behind the counter a young man was decorating a brass tray with an intricate pattern of geese circling the moon.

  ‘That’s beautiful,’ I said. I wanted to compliment the artisan. He was the first person I had come across since I arrived, besides Uva, who seemed to do anything with passion: an inner intensity.

  He bowed his head of bushy, frazzled hair.

  ‘You learn to do this here?’

  He took a long noisy breath. His lips squirmed as though he was trying to find the right word to spit out.

  ‘I mean, in this city?’

  I could see he understood me, but he gave up on the word he was struggling to find and set to work on a sheet of metal instead. Placing it in a vice clamped on to a worktable, he folded the sheet over and smoothed down the edge with a wooden block. He then reversed it and put the other edge in to create a mirror groove. After smoothing that down too, he took the sheet of metal out and hooked one curled edge to the other to form a cylinder. He slid the shining copper cylinder over an iron mould so that the locked edges were held in place on top. Pulling out a small hammer from a shelf underneath, he proceeded to hammer down the seam to seal and harden it. I was fascinated by the deftness with which he transformed a flat sheet into a polished three-dimensional vessel. When he finished, he placed the piece next to the others and ran his fingers against them, tinkling them like the tubes of a wind chime. Then he pulled out the tray of knives and placed it on the worktop in front of me.

  While I toyed with the switchblade, he pulled out a pair of familiar metal-capped ebony sticks from his pocket and flicked them apart. Carefully he placed the butterfly knife on his outstretched finger; the split hilt on one side and the blade on the other. It floated in the air, perfectly balanced. He lifted it up and the knife levitated, drawing him to his feet after it. A moment later he threw it, up in the air, and caught it by the handle. He then twirled it back into its sheath. Although he seemed tense and tongue-tied, I could see this was someone whose knife might easily have pricked more than one heart.

  But was it hers? Or was it a copy?

  ‘You made that too?’

  The young man’s head moved back.

  I did not want to think of her captured, although it was impossible not to. Perhaps he was another friend. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Kris.’

  She’d never mentioned him. I looked around. I could see a flight of steps leading down to a paved parapet of concrete humps overlooking the canal. The water was thick with rubbish. A couple of soldiers were standing on the other side. I felt I had to have the butterfly blade. I turned back and threw ten of my tokens on to the counter. ‘For that knife.’

  ‘No.’ Kris pushed them back at me. ‘Mine is not for sale.’

  On our last night together in the hotel, Uva had used her knife to whittle the bone of a sweetsop into a nautch-knot, a serpent’s coil. When she finished, she spun the handle, bringing the two parts together, and said, ‘Only by coming together can the blade be closed.’

  I feared for her safety, separated from her weapon. I tried to visualise it and, in the end, decided the knife I had seen was not the same one. It was a close match, but I hadn’t seen the ankh on it: the looped cross, the symbol of eternal life, her gender and our most important first metal.

  Across the city sunlight intensified, bouncing off one white building after another. Even the oily water of the canal seemed to seethe in the heat.

  The midday whistle blew twice; the metalworker quickly shut up his stall and headed towards the cafeteria where I could see some people assembling. I followed him, anxious but uncertain whether I should ask him about Uva. I stepped between a mat strewn with dried reptiles and a collection of battered, broken flashlights. The next moment, I lost sight of him. He had vanished.

  I was hungry and joined a queue of men in overalls who seemed to be the only people able to afford a meal. I handed over the tokens required and was given a clump of overcooked brown seaweed and fried rubber rings.

  Although there were about fifteen other people in the cafeteria with their tin bowls, hardly a word was spoken above the slurp and splutter of soporific feeding. The whole place was in a stupor. Even the flies had slowed down and toppled from one rim to another like drunks in a daze. The hot air around me and the warm blubber made me drowsy. If only Uva had been more careful, I remember thinking then … If only I had been too.

&nb
sp; When they began to close up the cafeteria, I decided to take one more look around the market before the stalls were taken down. I couldn’t find Kris again, nor Zeng. There was nothing more to help me. In the end I bought a cucumber and a cabbage to supplement my diet at the compound, and a small string bag to carry them in.

  There was still quite a bit of time, I reckoned, before I was due to meet Zeng. The bus back to the compound was meant to leave soon after the final whistle heralded the shrouding of the city. I wasn’t sure how I was going to manage. I’d have to collect the pass, and then run back to the depot to catch the bus. Then I’d have to find a way of coming back … Of course I was being naive; Zeng might not even turn up. I had to check out what else was possible.

  I left the market by another gate and headed towards some bigger buildings, hoping some sign would lead me to the special enclave Uva had mentioned. I thought something might be possible there, despite her scepticism.

  After about two hundred metres, I came to a security cordon. The soldiers looked hostile; they didn’t speak but it was clear I was not allowed to go through. I tried a couple of other streets with similar results.

  Eventually I found myself back at the bus depot. It was already quite empty; even the morning’s tout had withdrawn. My options were closing fast. Straight ahead, the light in the sky was turning lurid as though blood was pumping out of a wound. A large tulip tree began to stir as small rodents prepared for nightfall.

  I quickly retraced the route the bus took in the morning, along the canal, and found the monument and the fountain plaza. The monument was more complex than I had noticed from the bus. The stone military hero seemed to be celebrating a victory over several garuda-like warriors he had slain. It was out of their wounds that the fountain spurted.

  Some real soldiers were taking a break, sipping beer with their guns half-cocked, on the benches. There was no sign of Zeng. I went and sat on the wall around a smaller fountain from where I could see the whole of the plaza, feeling quite spent.