Heaven's Edge

by Romesh Gunesekera

  Closing my eyes I can see again the yellow tree on the video behind my father’s voice. Why did he not follow his mother Cleo’s dancing drumbeat rather than Eldon’s suppressed thakita-tha? Why didn’t I? A different time must mean a different place. And yet by being here now I know this land and its tragic past – its ruined children – become, like the whole of the tainted world, as much mine as anybody else’s.

  The others had assembled outside a kitchen; the cooks were dishing out a concoction of rice mixed with sour fruit. They had salt-stones, and pastes of chilli and vinegar. Jaz was prattling zappily between mouthfuls about the coloured kafs and bakeries of his underground mall, delighted to have an appreciative audience again, even if only a bevy of grey-haired women with spellbound kids.

  * * *

  Later I asked Jaz to help me talk to the oldest woman in the camp – Mukti.

  ‘Questioning, questioning, all the time questioning. Why? What is it you want to know so much?’

  ‘I want to understand what has happened here. Did she ever see fighting in the sky? Aerial bombing? Warplanes shot down?’

  Mukti looked to be at least ninety. Her face was puckered into pouches, her skin mottled; she had no teeth, but her voice was strong and her babbling faster than even Jaz’s. Her conversation was difficult to follow and left Jaz stranded between the events of the previous century and a past that might have been only days old.

  ‘I don’t know what she means,’ he complained helplessly. ‘Her words are too old. She says that yesterday’s water was bitter but better.’ The span of her life seemed beyond anything Jaz could imagine.

  ‘Where does she come from?’ I asked. ‘Where does she belong?’

  Jaz understood her to be saying that her father fought in the first war here. Her family, like the whole village, was on one side for that one, and the other side for the next. He asked if she meant the dark war with the cloud. The old woman looked baffled.

  ‘The Great War?’ I suggested, but this time Jaz was stumped.

  When we were alone, I took Jaz by the arm and steered him towards the edge of the camp. ‘You know, I think that place with the school – where at least our Mukti seems to have once belonged – is much older than it seems.’ We could glimpse the pond in the distance, and the roof of the schoolhouse. ‘That little pond – the tank – could be from the ancient days. The village must have been inhabited and abandoned many, many times.’

  ‘What? Like this? A bunch of people hiding out, scratching a living until they are scratched out. Over and again?’

  ‘This is a jungle that must have been fought over a hundred times, if not more.’ I picked up some earth and crumbled the rusty soil between my thumb and two fingers, thinking of Uva’s description of warlords thriving on each other’s crimes. ‘Killing and maiming again and again. It’s like some kind of disease.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. Perhaps something in the air? Some infection. Or maybe it’s the water so steeped in the past.’ I remembered Eldon’s poem.

  The teardrops of the original inhabitants,

  our old gods,

  destroyed by invaders,

  wreak perpetual revenge on their descendants …

  The words absorbing, renewing, however dispiriting the story; performing our only true human magic: transforming even pain into a line, a scrap of verse, a rhyme. A greater design.

  Jaz plucked at his ear, his larger one, contemplating me. ‘You just love that, Marc, don’t you? Poems and all that. But the fighting here is not because of some hoary old demon, you know. Don’t they fight just as much where you come from? It’s just that when people think too much of themselves, their tongues get too fat and they can’t talk but shit. That pond may not be anything so mysterious. It’s probably just a crater, you know, where some anal dropped another bomb and blew a great big hole in the ground.’

  * * *

  In the evening the three of us were given rope beds in a small hut. I asked whose place we had taken, uneasy about us too displacing someone.

  ‘Never mind whose, at least we can sleep in some velvet tonight.’ Jaz tested one. He lay down and patted the bed next to his. ‘Come, Marc. Take this one. Lie down and tell me a nice, cosy story.’

  I shook my head, tight-lipped. I lit the lamp we had been given and adjusted the flame. I didn’t have any tales to tell. I had spent too many years holed up alone, stuffing my head with straw and somnambulants, to suddenly start spouting some crappy little yarn for him.

  Jaz shifted his gaze and looked out of the open door. The sun had dropped; a few strands of stars showed between the planets unbuttoned in the sky. He seemed to be searching for something. ‘How about a big mega-epic then, about a world out of this world, huh, Marc?’ His face had an appealing delicacy, despite the multiple layers of souring cream.

  ‘I can’t.’ I shook my head again. I really couldn’t then. I didn’t even know where to begin. Not then.

  ‘You are as bad as Kris.’ Jaz pouted, more than a little peeved. He opened his pouch and took out a tube of Vaseline. He squeezed a little on to his fingers. ‘What is his problem anyway? Does he never relax?’

  Kris was outside, scowling at the sky, pacing up and down.

  I told Jaz about the first time I had seen Kris. A small cameo to appease him. It was the best I could do. ‘Working his sheets of metal, sharpening his tools; making something out of the passing of time: that’s what he needs to relax.’

  I was about to mention the butterfly knife when Jaz butted in. ‘Like me. My relaxation is also my work, you know. Working the sheets. A bend in the flesh. Shall I show you?’ He reached out.

  I pushed his hand away. ‘Stop it. Do you know where you are?’

  He drew back, docile and dutiful. ‘Close, Marc, close to the very last planet. The very end …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The end of my tether.’ He looked down and solemnly made a mudra with his fingers like a mendicant soliciting solace; then he broke into a laugh, reddening in the glow of the lamp. ‘Oh, maybe it is the Amazon then. Is it?’

  ‘Be serious.’

  ‘Why?’ His head popped up. ‘Why?’ Both his eyes welled up. ‘If I was, I would cry.’

  I realised then that I knew nothing about what he must be feeling stuck in the camp. Perhaps he too was once a waif from a place like this? His face was always expressive of every nuance of every moment, but he never betrayed anything of his past, or the world hidden beneath the eloquence of his body. At that moment he seemed to be clinging to the surface because he was frightened of what lay below. I should have asked him something, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I didn’t want to get so close.

  Outside I heard the hiss of fresh torches being lit, and someone checking the bells and chimes strung around the camp. They were trying, at least, to save what they could of their lives.

  I went out to join Kris. A few minutes later Jaz also came out.

  ‘Tomorrow we must go,’ I announced to a small group that had gathered around us. Before Jaz could translate there was a scream in the outer darkness. The women sitting at the centre of the camp scrambled to their feet. Several grabbed flaming torches and began to run in circles while others brought out drums from their huts and began to pound them. The rushing flames and the furious drumbeats speeded up frantically until the wailing began to fade, as though a tortured infant was being carried away. Driven away.

  ‘Devil,’ Mukti, the old woman, spat out.

  At dawn, the whole camp was on the move. Huts were dismantled, carts loaded, cattle harnessed. Jaz learned that the cry of the banshee-bird was believed to be a harbinger of catastrophe. The women said they had to move whenever the devil’s voice was heard. Otherwise they’d be attacked.

  ‘Where will they go?’

  ‘They won’t tell me. They think the bird is something to do with us. They are terrified of it.’ Jaz kept wringing his hands. ‘Even Ismail seems to think it has somethin
g to do with me.’ His lips, his cheeks, his whole face drooped.

  I clasped his hands in mine. ‘I guess they have lived in terror all their lives. They can’t help but suspect us.’ I wished I could do something more for them, or for him.

  Kris was all ready to go; I led Jaz to our vehicle. We left with no farewell, no words, the wind low in the west.

  I drove slowly, unsure of the veracity of old jungle omens. The road disappeared from time to time, but I followed Kris’s directions and it reappeared in fits and starts under the wheels. The jungle with its fatherless children faded behind us in twists of temporary oblivion. We travelled through a more arid zone until finally we reached the lush humps of the hill country. The temperature dropped. I stopped the cruiser and suggested we stretch our legs.

  ‘Here?’ Jaz shied away from the door like an animal that had been tricked too often.

  I said I needed a break and leant back, putting my hands behind my head. The metal tag was still pinned to my ear and I began to fiddle with it. Much to my surprise it came away in my hand; I couldn’t stop the smile spreading across my face. ‘It’s gone.’

  ‘What?’ Jaz took a sidelong look.

  ‘It’s come off.’ I held up the tag like a Lilliputian trophy.

  Kris grinned. For a moment he was almost charming. Then he was out of the vehicle, checking the headlamps, the radiator, the aerials.

  Jaz leant over and examined the place where the tag had been. ‘You’ll have such a cute scar, Marc.’

  The brief illusion of freedom, unshackled, was bliss. I hadn’t realised how much the metal had been affecting me.

  Eldon often invoked the hill country when, as a child, I would help him stir the sweetener in his tea on the patio. ‘Tcha, just like in the old days, no? A fine cup of tea, roses, trimmed lawns. The comfort of illusions.’ Eldon would launch into a treatise on tea production, even though for me, at that age, tea was only something textual – far down the alphabet – rather than a matter of taste. ‘Two leaves and a bud, that’s what they pick, you see. From bushes about the size of you. Tick, tick, tick.’ The old man would pretend to pluck them off my head. ‘Then it goes into this huge factory with a wonderful aroma, where the leaves are dried and roasted and rolled and packed off to tickle the fantasies of a global network of humpty-tum addicts.’ It took me years to recognise the freshness of that vacuum-packed bouquet he was so fond of, and the reveries it induced, but by then the natural product was on the wane and Eldon’s quirky disquisition quite out of date.

  I wasn’t too happy driving at dusk but Kris was keen that we press on. I switched the headlights on. As we swung around each hairpin bend I saw how the roots of stunted tea bushes gripped the earth. We came to a drive leading down to a factory that, in the fading light, looked as though it had been deserted for decades. Without waiting for Kris to say anything, I turned the cruiser in through the entrance.

  ‘What’s this?’ Jaz demanded, rested and much more himself.

  ‘A tea factory.’

  ‘Oh, how divine. Happy tea?’

  ‘No. Just tea.’ He was incorrigible. I locked the wheel and the cruiser lit the front of the factory in full beam. The windows of the building all had grilles but most had rusted through.

  ‘Just what?’

  Kris jumped from the cruiser to check the place out.

  I began to tell Jaz how tea had been the major export from the island until synthetics made traditional forms of tea production obsolete everywhere. How tea estates around the globe had turned into tourist museums until real-time museums themselves were superseded by more successful resorts concentrating solely on hedonism …

  Jaz seemed to be watching my mouth, more than listening. ‘Like our underground Carnival?’ he asked dreamily.

  Jaz knew so little of what had happened in his own environment, to care so little for the past. I wished I could give him the bigger picture in some easy dose. ‘You see, then they became a subject of organic archaeology, and the best of them were remoulded into evocation centres. That is until war made the air of some tea-hills too ghastly to breathe …’ As I was speaking I realised war may not have been the only scourge here; perhaps a reign of autocrats and blunderers coupled to an oligarchy of bloodsucking dorks, as Uva would put it, might have been the bigger curse.

  Before I could go on Jaz nudged me. ‘Hey, I do like that teapot.’ There was a silhouette of a giant teapot at the far end of the factory. ‘With a spout like that, it must be happy tea, sweetie.’

  At this I lost my temper. I banged the heel of my hand on the steering wheel. ‘No, no, no.’ I slapped the dashboard. ‘This is an ordinary tea factory. Out of commission. Dead. Don’t you understand anything? Don’t you care about anything?’ I shouted at him. ‘What the hell am I doing here, I don’t know. I am tired out driving this shitty little wagon, trying and trying to give you something of your own miserable history to understand. All to no bloody avail. I just don’t want any more sweetie this and darling that from you, sitting there, stroking yourself like God’s own head is stuck in your pants. No more, you hear, no more.’

  Jaz had recoiled at the outburst. He leaned towards me when I stopped and patted my shoulders gently. ‘OK, there, there, simmer down. I was just trying to keep our spirits up, you know. That’s all.’

  I stared at him, feeling both sorry and upset. It was impossible to stay angry with him. He looked troubled; his flamboyant mask besieged by a thin fuzz of mannish bristles sprouting out of control. I thought again about how the last two days could not have been easy for him. But I was fed up too. I wanted to be alone. I wished I was back in my mousy flat, where I could bask in the comfort of drip-feed dreams and deep screen insulation. It was too late now. I was tired. ‘We have to stay here tonight. I’m sorry. I need some quiet. I must sleep.’ I didn’t care if I sounded like a flatulent old grouch, I wanted to be still.

  ‘Yes, swee … tea. Yes, you must.’ He spotted Kris skulking around the building with his flashlight. ‘Kris will discover a way in. He perked up. ‘He’ll find us somewhere inside to sleep.’

  Kris identified the bunkhouse at the back of the factory and broke into it. I followed him in, brushing aside the cobwebs and gunny flakes. The room was empty. Jaz retreated at once into a corner. He dusted a bit of the floor and sat down with his torch. He started to file his nails using the tiny emery board he always carried with him. Kris offered round a packet of biscuits from the cruiser’s emergency rations and then settled into a private meditation of his own, nodding to the rasp from Jaz’s fingers. I bit into the digestive and let it slowly disintegrate in my mouth. Our plight had blunted my hunger. Jaz seemed too subdued now. I wanted to comfort him but didn’t know how. What would become of him? He was not a cross-country trekker, whatever his origins. And Kris? Always so aloof. What would he do when we reached our destination? Uva, I realised, was the only one who could merge us into any kind of a community.

  ‘This hill road will take us over the central mountains to Samandia, won’t it, Kris?’ I tried hard to stop my voice from betraying my concern.

  Kris, fiddling with his butterfly knife on the other bunk, looked up as though thwarted or something, but then quickly regained his composure. Nothing else gave in his eyes. Watching him open and close the knife I wanted again to hold it; draw closer to her through the metal clone. ‘She knows the way there, doesn’t she?’ I asked, seeking some reassurance. ‘Uva?’

  From the other side of the room Jaz stifled a yawn. ‘Uhuh, sure she knows. She’s always been one for the great outdoors.’ He put away his nail-file. ‘But a rainforest is not really for me, you know. I like a place with a little electricity. A shaving point at least. Some indoor life.’ He let out a heavy sigh. ‘Your Samandia is not exactly famous for its bars, you know.’

  The next morning the sun was a smoky grey. I made my way on to the main factory floor. The place was gutted. All the machines had been removed, but the interior still smelled of tea. It rose out of the floorboards and o
ff the walls and seemed to stain the air with the odour of old ghosts.

  In its heyday who would have been here? Sometimes it is so difficult to remember who belongs where, when. Or why. Whose was the labour, and whose the capital? There would have been blasts of hot air and the noise of dryers and rollers; wheels turning, the smell of burning, roasting tea. Narcotic sweat. There was a time when the sound of machines would have filled the air all around the hills. Factories in full swing. A steam train chugging up to the central hill towns. Eldon loved to recall those scenes, complete with sound effects: the clacking of wheels, the hoot of the engine, the constant gabble of conversations between strangers. It was a land full of talk, he would explain. ‘Everyone always wanted to place everybody else. People would speak to bridge the gulf between them. We had hope, you know, in those days. We all shared the same vision, the same sense of order even if not all our wealth.’

  Sanctimonious claptrap, I suppose, but for me that morning there was no sound in the factory, or outside, other than the sound of my own breath misting the air. No words, no birds. Nothing. It seemed as though there was no one else left in the world. Not that I wanted hordes; all I wanted was Uva. A life that was our own.

  I tried to picture her journey. Would she have a vehicle? A cart? A bullock? Anything? Survival with no provisions, only a knife for a weapon, I feared would be impossible however close to the earth she might feel. For an instant then I even doubted if she had understood the plan that had seemed so clear to me. But she must have thought as I did: Samandia was our only hope. I remembered the scent of her body as though she had just passed by, leaving a spoor – an urgent pheromonal odour – for me to follow. But is our lake a pool of sorrow now? I see her curled up in a basket of leaves; her head turned in, her neck bared. My arms are empty; they encompass nothing but air, thinning with each passing moment, and yet I can feel the shape of her being from our last embrace: imperfect but strong. The warmth seeping from her leg curled around mine, the curve of her back, and the painlessness of giving in, falling into a new-found deep, dark past. If I could live my life again, I would wish it to be shorter. Let it end with her, quickly, rather than last so long – these interminable hours of her pain; my vigil, remembering, giving breath to our loosening lives.