Heaven's Edge

by Romesh Gunesekera

  Eldon and Cleo were married after the war. By then Cleo had no one else; her brother had been killed in action, her parents were both dead. Eldon was no war hero but, I suppose, she must have seen something in him she recognised. A commitment to her. He sold his fancy Alvis and started a small air service business to earn a modest, but autonomous, livelihood in a country he was beginning to call his own. For a marriage like theirs, he said, post-war Britain despite the soot, the rancid fog and the ration cards seemed to be the only place. By then, he said, he had realised the prejudices of his old home towards a bond like theirs would be even harder to break.

  For me my grandfather’s inadvertent migration and awkward pacifism was all the more poignant for being rejected by his only son, my father.

  When I was a little older I asked Eldon what he believed was really at stake in that early war he’d tried to shun.

  ‘In some ways everything, just as in the conflicts we have today. The dividing line between what is right and what is wrong.’ Eldon tapped a column of ash off his cigarette into an empty teacup. ‘Look around you now. There are some things people do that are very clearly right, and some very clearly wrong. But there are a great many things we do that are easily confused, especially by ourselves.’

  I didn’t know what he was getting at. It seemed to me he was the one confused. I tried to pin him down. ‘Do you really think there was an alternative then?’

  He brushed aside some specks of ash that had drifted on to the table. ‘During those years not everyone understood what was going on, or why. So much was bungled to begin with that the motives became quite mixed up. Sometimes, it seemed to me, fighting was fuelled more by xenophobia …’

  ‘That’s not really true, is it?’ I protested, not quite sure of the word, but certain that it was unfair. Perhaps it was his old age, I thought, muddying the past. ‘Anti-fascism, wasn’t it? There’s no real choice, is there, about tolerating tyrants? You have to fight evil.’ Appeasement, I had learned, could not be right. Everyone talked of the need for strength. How you can’t give up the fight. I had the beat in my blood.

  He looked at me a little in surprise. ‘Yes, of course, but the question is how do you do it? By fighting for peace? By violent retaliation? Revenge?’ He waited for the words to sink in. Then, in the silence, his gaze dimmed. I felt something retract. He continued in a quieter voice, as if to himself. ‘We now know don’t we, that if you hit someone to teach him a lesson, the lesson you teach is how to hit.’

  I could see that, but I couldn’t make sense of it. ‘But if you destroy the monster, isn’t that the end of it? It’s not a lesson.’

  Eldon hesitated. ‘Have you heard of the Hydra?’

  ‘It was eventually killed, wasn’t it?’ I replied. ‘Not tamed.’

  He wasn’t listening. ‘We have yet to learn the true cost of a bomb: how it accrues over years, decades, lives. I like to believe we can learn – that the young will see more clearly.’ He fixed his eyes on me again. ‘You must do better in your life.’

  I went cold when he said that.

  ‘The art of killing cannot be our finest achievement,’ he added, cupping his hands to light another cigarette. ‘At least, I could never accept that. Not then, not now. Not even in the most ancient battles of the world. It can’t be right. Nothing is inevitable. Not even history. There is always an alternative.’

  I remember looking at him then and thinking, he still doesn’t know what he should have done; what anyone should have done. The uncertainty had troubled him all his life, and maybe through him also affected my father’s. The thought frightened me. I wondered whether all my father’s heroic sorties were only a reaction against Eldon’s opinions. I tried to imagine what he would have said in my place, what his real convictions were. Why did he not bale out on that last flight? Doubt, it seemed to me then, could be a flaw.

  But there were moments of doubt for me too – and culpability, I now know – when clips of muted bombs and missiles were shown on TV. I’d see a child’s face, like mine, dodging behind the screen, behind the indiscriminate incendiaries. Eldon would sink back in his chair after watching with me. ‘How can they kill ordinary men, women and children for the sake of an idea planted in their heads? Destroy one life to save another? How can anyone believe in such a hierarchy of souls?’

  Perhaps, as he claimed, it has something to do with the face you know, and the one you don’t. Could it be that easy? Or is there a need to help the innocent, the weak, against the strong? Sometimes maybe we have to work out what is the greater good, however inadequate our mathematics. But he wasn’t there to argue with by the time I came to think of that.

  * * *

  The jungle expired and we broke out into a stretch of parched fields. The road broadened. We passed a few broken-down houses. Kris peered out and said it was OK to continue. There was no sign of anybody around. We came to a village pond and a schoolhouse. In the centre of the grounds, a tall empty flagpole held up a patch of dirty sky. On the periphery large tamarind trees spread a speckled shade and dry gunge covered the ground.

  ‘There may be something we can use here. Something to eat even,’ I said to the others and parked by the gate.

  Kris got down and looked around for a food store. I went straight into the school office and opened the cupboard I found in there. It was empty. ‘Who would have been here?’ I asked Jaz who had followed me in.

  ‘Maybe it is not yet occupied, you know? Maybe it is one of those new villages they are always planning and then forgetting to copulate. I mean populate.’ He laughed nervously. ‘Sorry. Just a joke.’

  I ignored the comment and stared out of the doorway. From the office I could see the whole compound: the rusted earth, the trees, the glimmer of the pond on the other side of the road stuffed with big grey leaves rotting in the heat. Not a single sound stung the air.

  Jaz flicked a stray cowlick back and walked hesitantly away. By the window he stopped and seemed to perk up. He shut his eyes and sniffed the air; his crushed bustle rose fetchingly off his haunch. ‘This way,’ he exclaimed and set off at a brisk trot.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The perfume, darling, the perfume. Can’t you smell it?’ He wagged his head in exasperation. Quickening his pace, he disappeared around a corner excitedly invoking young sailors and the scent of sun-warmed smegma.

  I was glad to be left alone. I tried to imagine what might have been taught in this desolate school. History? The past choked with wars, disputes, borders as pointless as chalk lines in water. Ideology? Doctrines bloated with blood and bones, perverted by power. My own lessons, I realised, had taken too long to learn; I guess it was nobody’s fault but mine.

  Then Jaz returned, beaming, with a bedraggled, bare-bodied boy at his side. ‘Look what I found.’ He had one hand on the nape of the boy’s neck and in the other an old-fashioned automatic. He threw the gun to me.

  The boy had no shirt, he was wearing torn khaki drills and grubby Shanghai trainers. He had a belt of bullets masking his narrow waist and a brown rag wrapped around his head. His skin was sunburnt. A wispy beard blurred the edge of a pretty, thin face dominated by dark protruding eyes. He reminded me of an early hero of mine whose poster had been on my wall for years: a cover version of his song about shooting the sheriff came to me. Eldon, I remember, did not like it one little bit.

  ‘He says he is a fighter, but that gun of his doesn’t even work.’

  I tried to open the cartridge chamber. ‘What’s he doing hiding here?’

  ‘Dreaming of smetana.’

  ‘Where is your camp?’ I asked the boy, passing over Jaz’s cryptic comment.

  ‘You don’t know his language?’ Jaz interrupted. ‘They don’t speak English out here.’

  ‘Why, what does he speak?’

  ‘A junghi-bhasa.’

  ‘And you know it?’

  Jaz’s eyes lit up. ‘I know them all. New recruits sometimes don’t have a city language. They come with all sorts of jungle cockt
ails. But in my line of business you have to be able to communicate with anyone. The tongue is everything, you know.’

  ‘Ask him, then, where all the village people are.’

  Jaz translated. The boy sulked at first, but then grunted out an answer.

  ‘He says they are hiding in the jungle.’

  ‘Why?’

  The boy didn’t reply when Jaz asked him, but Jaz took the boy’s hand in his and gently urged him. The boy listened apprehensively. All at once his whole face seemed to surge with emotion, and words blubbed out. Eventually Jaz turned to me. ‘Because of attacks.’

  ‘Who attacks them?’

  ‘He doesn’t know.’

  ‘How many of them are there?’

  Having opened up, the boy seemed unable to withhold anything from Jaz. According to the boy there were about seventy of them in a settlement. Some were refugees from this village, some from others. Mostly children. They lived in woven huts which they dismantled and shifted from time to time, whenever smokeseed poisoned the air, or wailing. He had no idea how long they had lived in this makeshift manner.

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘What does that matter?’

  ‘I’d like to know. He must have a name. I’d like to know who he is.’

  ‘But a name will tell you nothing about who he is.’ Jaz raised his eyes. He asked the boy, nevertheless.

  ‘Ismail.’ The boy wiped the sweat from around his mouth with his arm. Ismail meant something to me, although not to Jaz.

  ‘Did he go to this school?’ I wanted to know whether he was connected with the place.

  Yes, was the answer. Once.

  ‘Is the schoolmaster still here? The headmaster? An imam?’

  Ismail looked confused.

  ‘I don’t think there are any older men left.’ Jaz spoke slowly, as though he was solving a riddle in his young charge’s eyes.

  Kris fixed the boy’s gun, fascinated by its quaint mechanism. He showed the boy how to dismantle the trigger and refit it, how to release the jammed magazine. Only then did Ismail agree to take us to his refugee camp. He sat on the roof of the cruiser, directing the way. As we approached a small hill, gashed by a landslip on one side, a crowd of scruffy children appeared.

  When we finally stopped, several of the children came close. They seemed to be peculiarly fearless, but it was perhaps the lack of any reaction, a deadening in the eyes, that gave the impression of fearlessness. One child, a boy with a shaved head, picked up a stick and pretended to shoot us: ‘Da-da-da-da-da-da, pschew, pschew, pschew, da-da-da-da-da-da.’ The other children observed him, and us, as though they were watchful moths.

  Ismail rolled off the cruiser. The younger children scurried up the slopes; the older ones shuffled back a few steps. The boy with the stick pointed it at Ismail and pretended to shoot again. ‘Da-da-da-da-da-da.’ He then dropped the stick and quickly picked up a handful of pebbles. He moved to one side of the cruiser and crouched. Across the road several empty cans were lined up on a broken culvert. He threw his pebbles hard, knocking one, two, three in quick succession.

  Ismail called out and several women emerged out of the bush. They all looked prematurely aged: the nearest, a white-haired mother with a small child tugging at her, immediately began to berate Ismail. She lifted her face, bobbing her chin at the vehicle. Ismail talked back with obvious vehemence, but her expression remained one of suspicion. Only when he reloaded his gun in front of her and she saw that we made no effort to disarm him did she relent. She watched and then she took the gun off him before turning to Jaz. Her voice was sharp but she invited us up into a makeshift community hall hidden behind the trees: a large thatched hut with a few pieces of tatty furniture purloined from the schoolhouse down the road.

  The three of us were ushered to a bench behind a table. Ismail half-knelt on a stool. Children and mothers slowly filled the shelter. A red clay pot of water and three cracked plastic cups were placed on the table in front of us. Ismail poured out a small amount of water into each and offered the cups around. He explained to Jaz that this was for us to drink. He looked relieved to be back in a crowd, even a crowd as weary and despondent as this.

  Silence seemed to grow between us as we each took our sips. The children watched, awed by the sight of strange men drinking water.

  I felt their eyes congregate on me. Even Jaz and Kris were looking for me to say something. What could I say? I didn’t want to alarm them, nor did I want us to become unwitting hostages. Eventually I started to tell them about us, asking Jaz to translate; pausing, from time to time, to gauge their reactions while Jaz tried to catch up. They listened without a flicker of emotion as I explained that the three of us were refugees too, escaped from the city on the coast. That we meant no harm and wanted only information: news of danger, soldiers, military reconnaissance, risks.

  ‘Rice,’ one of the older mothers interjected from the side.

  Jaz brightened. ‘She can see we are hungry for rice. Her name is Karuna.’

  ‘Where do they get rice?’ I had not noticed any paddy cultivation on our journey.

  Karuna explained that the abandoned villages in the area all had granaries which they had emptied into large canisters and buried as secret stores. Last season they had also tried planting red rice – patchai-p 2462/11, she recited the name of the variety as though it were a benediction. The numbers were in English. She said they had a small secret mud patch behind the schoolhouse from which they hoped to gather a quick harvest before a passing skyplane picked up the trace and bombed them. Vegetables they grew under removable camouflage thatch with watchers on shift, throughout the day, to let the sunshine in and warn of cloudbursts.

  ‘The children are secret farmers, she says,’ Jaz explained excitedly.

  Uva’s dream children? I wondered. ‘Do you think they know her?’

  Kris, who was fidgeting on the bench, knotting his fingers around each other, jerked his head up. In his glance I could feel the edge of a knife. He snorted and buried his eyes back in the hard, stamped earth of the hut.

  ‘Uva?’ Jaz looked doubtful.

  Two of the women left the group and slipped out.

  ‘Ask who taught them how to farm. Where do they get their seed?’

  ‘It’s not her. They say they find what they need. They go from one plundered village to another collecting whatever’s left.’

  Only then did I notice that all the younger women were nursing babies.

  Jaz was the one who asked about the men. Karuna told him that there were none. They’ve been killed or have gone to fight as rebels. They rarely return.

  ‘She says her group is a band of mothers and children.’ Jaz’s voice dropped lower. ‘The bigger kids are stolen by marauders. Six boys and four girls were taken last time. The rest, the weak are butchered, the women who are caught are raped …’

  The marauders had not been seen for three seasons but the mothers remained vigilant. ‘They will be back.’ There was no doubt in Karuna’s voice. ‘They always come back.’ The women had no weapons for protection, Jaz was told, but they had learnt to move fast. Ismail had found his gun only the other day and wanted the youngsters to learn to fight. Some of the older ones had already gone to try to find a rebel group to join. The women didn’t approve. They wanted Ismail to get rid of his gun. They felt it hampered them, distracted them from better strategies.

  As the talk increased, the children began to shift about, looking at each other more than at us, picking at their sores. Suddenly one child started to sing. It was impossible to tell his age: he could have been five, or six, or seven. The voice more hurt than young. Jaz whispered that the boy was singing a nursery song about flowers floating in a pond. A couple of other children joined the chorus, but then the first child came to an unexpected stop.

  His mother stifled her sobs in her hands. We learnt that the child had seen his two elder brothers and a baby hacked to death in their home by the village pond. The murderers included a man who had come
before. One who had raped her; the baby’s father. She still had her life only because she seemed to have died the second time.

  The child’s eyes were dull, even though his voice had trembled.

  Another woman brought forward a slightly older child. This one did not speak any more, Jaz was told. ‘Pushpa is ten,’ he explained. ‘They dread the day she will see her own blood.’

  The child’s face was beautiful, clear and fresh, but she was lame and her legs were scarred by jagged rips. There were thick welts across her back, clearly visible through the straps of her dress. The marauders had used a bayonet on her, to pitch her from one to another. The woman unbuttoned the back of the dress to show us a pit the size of a fist by the girl’s lower spine where her lacerated flesh had been scooped out. It was a miracle that she had survived.

  The child twisted her hands together and slipped back behind the woman. I wanted to call her by her name, Pushpa, and promise her a life she need not fear. But I couldn’t. She dropped down on her knees and peeped out. I felt ashamed. This was not the world she should have been born to see.

  ‘She has seen too much.’ Jaz looked away, unable to stop the tears. ‘Her eyes have destroyed her tongue.’

  There was no more singing. A warm wind blew through the hut. Karuna offered to show us around the settlement while the food was being prepared. The children filed out, the mutilated remains of an assortment of communities where pain had passed like a malady from one jumbled generation to the next. These were children who had to nurse a numbness to their past; condemned to destroy their progenitors, or remain fractured themselves for ever.

  I stayed behind for a few minutes, alone in the hut, unable to shake off the idea that perhaps my own father might have cast the shadow under which these children, or the ones before them, had lived: Lee the veteran bomber. What had he been doing flying over here? Cleo believed one thing, Eldon another. Who was he really helping? I wished then, for the first time, that I hadn’t come. This was not at all what I had wanted to learn. With Uva, I had hoped things might become simple; I suppose nothing ever is.