Heaven's Edge

by Romesh Gunesekera

  Occasionally I came across useless huts and only once another house of a more substantial nature. I immediately stripped it of fire-lighters and stores. The whole area had been completely depopulated, but it didn’t dishearten me. I wrote my initial wherever I went, convinced that one day Uva would come and see my mark and know that I was here, faithfully waiting. With Kris’s knife I carved the letter like a bush-lark’s wings on tree trunks, I drew it with charcoal and even wrote it in the sand.

  During the nights, though, doubts did return. How would she know I’d escaped? She might have thought that, even if I had, I would never make it this far. Maybe I had been too slow in getting to Samandia, just as I had been too slow to save her at our Palm Beach Hotel. The odds were against us there. I should have realised it. The odds were against us all along.

  In daylight I didn’t let such thoughts deflect me from turning the whole plantation into a self-sustaining refuge. A garden husbanded for her: full of flowering bushes, arboreal vines, thick yellow-bordered, succulent leaves. I embedded red crabclaws in between and arranged bursts of blue tumefied lances in the pots.

  Working with the trails of pink and orange and purple that wafted in the warm breeze like butterflies nourished me; those translucent wings gave me a pleasure unlike any of the more utilitarian tasks I had done earlier. Sometimes I would see Jaz in the lazy lift of a dazzling arm, or catch Uva’s moist perfume in the cracks between the petals.

  I wanted space and order, light and colour. I wanted the place teeming with a hundred different types of birds, of bees, of squirrels. I wanted them all to come, drawn by a lodestone of passion and the heady, overpowering scent of a garden in the middle of a jungle; to bring Uva with them, and if she could not come here, I wanted the garden to become her.

  * * *

  Each day I cut a notch on a tree by the well; each night I worked on a crude map using an old table-top and ink made out of charcoal and water.

  I dreamt of building a cistern, with an intricate network of bamboo aqueducts hovering just above ground level, perfectly pitched to achieve an overall gradient of a few centimetres. I wanted a smooth even flow which, with little valves and contraflow switches, would measure out the right douche for every one of my favourite plants. I imagined opening the watergate, like an olden-day rajah, as the sun collapsed releasing a perfect benevolent flood. The small electric motor from the aircraft would have been ideal for pumping up the water from the well, except that I couldn’t get it to work. I fantasised about harnessing a team of wild oxen to an Archimedean screw, but the practical solution I finally came up with was a windmill to power the spindle on the well.

  I designed a set of four sails out of palm fronds and bed linen. I made them to fit the broken propellor from the plane, planning to fix the whole thing to the coconut tree by the well. Only when all the components were in place, on the ground, did I realise that I hadn’t worked out how I would get it up high enough. I was furious with myself. While I vented my frustration, the monkey scuttled away to the breadfruit tree at the end of the garden. But my luck held, it seemed then, once again. What was it the old man used to say? ‘The difference between the impossible and the possible is sometimes simply a matter of geography.’

  The breadfruit tree was fifty paces from the well; with its graduated limbs, it looked like a stairway to the sky. The branches were prodigious: the gnarled limbs more solid than the earth itself. They offered easy footholds and the tree hardly moved as I hauled myself up. I clambered one more level and edged towards a little gap of clear air. It seemed perfect. I took one last look and was horrified to see the glint of a steel blade hacking through the saplings on the other side of the stretch of open scrubland.

  A small figure in khaki emerged wielding the machete. I could see a gun slung over one shoulder, The figure moved slowly, testing each step, each breath of air. The monkey huddled up to me. I didn’t know what I should do. I only had the little butterfly knife with me, more a talisman than a weapon.

  The figure stopped, unstrapped a knapsack and perched on a boulder. The gun was placed next to the knapsack. With the cap also off, it looked like a woman. Her hair fell to her shoulders. She consulted a small device from her knapsack, tapping at it. I was desperate to shield the house, the garden, my fruit trees and crops. If I had my rifle, I thought, would this be the time to use it? To stalk, get close, and then shoot to kill? Wasn’t self-protection my right.

  She drank from a water canteen, her head flung back. Then she donned her equipment and retreated back into the jungle.

  I released my breath. She had turned away from the house, and towards the dried-out river in the south. I reckoned there was enough time to collect the rifle and still catch up with her at the river bend. I dropped to the ground and ran; the little monkey gripping my back. Slipping into the house, I grabbed the rifle and took a short cut past the anthills, checking all the time for signs of any other intruders.

  When I reached the river bed the woman was already at the door of a small Explorer Gadfly – a single-seat mini-helicopter – parked in the sand. She packed the back of it with her equipment and then, loosening her uniform, squatted down. I stretched out on the ground, my heart pounding the warm earth. My father, I knew, was an expert marksman. I clipped the telescopic sights into place and lifted the rifle to my shoulder. The stock against my cheek and the steel trigger beneath my finger both felt wet and slippery. My beard prickled. She was now unarmed, motionless; well within range. The cross-hairs on the magnified lens divided her slim figure into four segments. With one bullet her body could be punctured. It would collapse, dehydrate and wilt in the baking sun. Feed our hungry land. Do it now, Jaz implored. If I do this now, will I be safe? Will I save this place? I asked myself. Yes, Kris hissed. If you kill her now, whoever she is, you will at least have some reprieve, and her flying machine to escape in if they ever come looking for her. The little monkey beside me covered its eyes with its small maggoty hands. But I didn’t squeeze the trigger. The woman rose, fixed her clothes and climbed into the Gadfly. A moment later it took off with a quick whirr. I remembered how Eldon, my father’s father, said he had never even killed an ant. Then, and only then, did I think of Uva.

  That evening I persuaded myself that the woman I had seen was only a scout who had temporarily lost her bearings. The geographic, even the military, interest in abandoned coconut plantations for any of the island’s warlords must surely be very limited. She must have just stopped to relieve herself on a long cross-country flight. I was sure she had seen nothing worth coming back for, but even so her appearance troubled me. Although I convinced myself there would be no more scouts, I knew I should be more cautious about the signs and markings I made for Uva, the careful cultivation and my programme of renovation. Any stray flight overhead, a re-routed satellite, would notice the vegetable plot, the orchard, the garden and the repaired roof of the house.

  In the end I pinned my hopes on the possibility that such an isolated and primitive homestead as mine would be ignored if ever seen from the air. Nevertheless I knew I needed a balance between order and ruin to give me peace on all fronts. The beguiling windmill, my dreams of toil-free irrigation, had to be abandoned. The labour of the bucket soothed my nerves, tired me out so that I could sleep a little more soundly at night. The case of old arrack I had found helped, but it also made me jittery. The screech of the parakeets at sundown, the cries of new jungle birds discovering the orchard sometimes rattled me. The evenings turned fraught. I couldn’t stop myself from recalling the figure of the intruder: adjusting her height, her hair, her movement. Comparing it to what I could visualise of Uva. The worst was when I imagined she might have been the one in my sights and that I had not recognised her. I wondered then whether she would have recognised me? A gunman with sunburnt skin and hair in dreadlocks? Perhaps the days had been too many.

  Every evening I’d tot up the score on my wooden calendar, again and again, as though they were the beads of a liturgy.

 
Then one night, having lost count several times, I tripped over my solar lamp. It burst into a thousand sharp stars in the empty pool.

  VI

  Chrysalis

  I woke up to find the garden full of butterflies. An invasion of small, lace-winged yellow insects hovered over the pool, tumbled off the blossom, sucked and crinkled; they settled on the veranda, the patio, the railings. They seemed to be everywhere, touching, lapping, moistening every surface.

  I watched them stretch out over the fence, and on through the lines of coconut trees in a stream of shimmering yellow petals. Feeding, flying, feeding. I went downstairs and waded into the garden. I could feel their wings against my bare skin, brushing soft glitter on my arms and chest. The air was thick with the powder. I was enthralled. I wanted to find their fountainhead. With my sarong hitched up above my knees, I headed for the gate. A few, like saffron droplets, clung on.

  Beyond the trees they began to thin out. Their source appeared to be the lake. When I reached the water’s edge only a sprinkling of yellow dots remained, steaming in small pools of sunlight. The ground was honeycombed with discarded pupal shells and the lake glistened in the silence. I watched one of the last of the newborn unstretch, hardening a pair of wings for its first flight.

  Then the surface of the water broke in a sudden spray of stripped silver: her closely cropped head, then her gleaming naked body shot up in a terrific breathtaking breach. The whole lake convulsed as it released her ripples.

  She pulled me to her, pressing the knot of my sarong against her breasts. I cradled her head, my fingers finding a hard crust of blood behind her ear; ridges and indentations at the rim of her injured skull. I held her close and slipped down to be closer still. In our embrace her skin seemed to become my own. The water of the lake swirled both inside and outside ourselves. She pulled me further into the water, wrapping her legs and arms around me, cupping water with her hand, pouring, sipping. Her breath warm, her lips warm.

  I wanted to sing from my heart out, but didn’t dare break the moment with a sound.

  Her face, streaming, lightened; her eyes flickered, searching behind me, before settling on mine. Her pupils dilated and her flesh untightened. I pulled back and looked again at her face. Her skin was limp beneath the veil of water. There were scratches and grazes on her cheeks and her forehead. I wiped the blood brought to the surface. I ran my fingers around her throat, hoping that what was before me was true and yet not true, her body renewable and herself everlasting. I held her face, waiting for its smile, her words to replace our lost time. ‘Did you send them to me? The butterflies?’

  She stared at me as though she was stripping back the days, the weeks, the months since we first saw each other by that other stretch of cool green water.

  Her fingers moved across mine. ‘I need your tongue.’ Her voice was hoarse, barely audible. She put her warm wet mouth around mine, pulling back my skin and drawing the sky down around us.

  I had been waiting for her for so long that I no longer knew what to say. It was like before, but where were the birds? Her cage? We climbed on to the rock where she had laid out her clothes to dry. She straightened the sleeves of a flat khaki tunic. There were holes among the dark splotches in the front.

  ‘Uniform?’

  Uva stared at the water dribbling down from the ends of my hair. When she spoke, her voice was like a disengaged motor. ‘I had no choice. Sometimes you have to act as if life in itself is of no value, unless it be your own. To be controlled is to be debased.’ Then she lowered her eyes.

  I remembered the scout, the uniforms in Farindola. The bursting charge in Kris’s grenade that would have blown a hole as big as the pool in my garden when it exploded. I took her hand, tentatively, and we walked back between the coconut trees, following the trail of pulsing yellow confetti to the home I said I had made for us. I kept looking at her as we walked; she kept looking all around her like a cat, watchful, carefully stepping between the congregations of butterflies resting their unyoked wings. When we reached the house, I brought out a chair for her; lit the fire, offered her pounded yam and wild aubergines. I wanted to show her every aspect of the house: the refurbished interior, the nursery with its toy cupboard, my haven upstairs, the flowers in my garden, the birds that flock to the fruit trees, the well of clear water, but her eyes were practically closed. ‘I must sleep.’ She swallowed a black wad in her mouth; she was exhausted.

  * * *

  Her naked body, stretched out before me, looked as though it had been mauled. There were bruises all down her side, her thighs, her breasts, and sores cast like nets on both her shoulders. Every time she breathed the wounds swelled with her expanding skin, oozing a yellowish pus. I adjusted her arms and legs and tried to apply a balm to each of them. Her face hardly flinched.

  I sat by her then as I do now, cross-legged, and watched for hours as dream after dream broke under the thin lids of her eyes. I was prepared to wait.

  If we had lived in another place, another time, would it have been different? Our sense of life? Would we have been happier walking a towpath beside the Thames? In a garden by Kew? Would we have been safer with rosemary and thyme? Rosebuds? Swallows from Africa? Or are we, like the birds, what we are, no matter where we happen to be?

  I know her face will age, as mine; her skin freckle and warp, our love shored and shriven between each fold. Her mouth will wrinkle, her lips crease, I know, even her fingertips. Her eyes will cloud one day, as mine, and conceal what to each other we had revealed – but I thought we had a chance to be ourselves until that true and lasting peace.

  I wanted to speak to her, even as she slept, to soothe her; to bring her into the world I had retrieved and to disarm the demons of her past. ‘This will be our refuge,’ I whispered and kissed the blisters on her lips. I wanted the words to enter her and assuage the pain of her slow recuperation, replenish her memory with my own. Sleep can heal; must. She always said she had its need, a dreamer’s need.

  Her own words had been few but then a stream of them bubbled close to her lips. She slept the rest of the day and the whole of the night, twitching from time to time. I listened, but could not make out the meaning. I held her hand.

  Later I slipped away and placed Kris’s knife in a drawer. Now that she was here, with her own, I did not want it to intrude. We each must have our own home, I thought.

  I remembered Eldon poking at the rich brown earth under the tall tropical trees of his favourite Palm House. ‘This is English soil, isn’t it? So how do the roots survive? At some point they must reach that winter outside, don’t you think? And get cold?’

  ‘They adapt,’ I said with the curt clarity of early adolescence. ‘Everything learns to take what it needs.’

  ‘Like babies.’ Eldon seemed lost in his thoughts, then he quickly continued. ‘I like babies. It is good, you know, to see a baby grow, a son turn into a man. I used to bring your father here when he was growing up. I used to tell him that because of him, I have a place here. A place to belong.’

  ‘I thought you were the one who was meant to give him that.’ I was genuinely puzzled.

  ‘I gave him Latin.’

  I shrugged. ‘Oh, yeah. So?’

  ‘Horace. They change their climate not their disposition, those who rush across the sea. They don’t teach such things any more, I suppose.’

  ‘Languages?’

  ‘But you see, I didn’t understand he was already in too much of a hurry. He’s not like you. Lee sees something, he goes for it. He needs to learn patience.’ Then he noticed an orange hibiscus bush. ‘You know, I think my shoe-flowers are much better than these. They grow outside. To some they might seem flowers of idleness – you know who said that?’ He paused. ‘Never mind. To me they prove you can change the world.’ He touched a petal. ‘The place where you think you belong sometimes belongs to you, sometimes it doesn’t. But in the end it is the individuals you love that matter, not the place you happen to meet them.’

  ‘I thought you w
ere dead,’ Uva moaned the next morning. She screwed her eyes shut against the light. ‘I heard shots. Saw you fall. Nothing I could think to do then, but run.’

  When she opened her eyes again she looked confused. I didn’t know what to think. Our one road seemed irrevocably divided. Her life before we met at her duckweed pond had seemed unreachable; now it seemed most of her life afterwards might be too. But at least she was alive, and so was I.

  Out on the veranda I laid out fruit and water for her. I cut open a papaw and removed the black spawn. I squeezed a slice of freckled lime to make small transparent beads over the bright, curved flesh, inanely elated despite the story I had to relate. I thought maybe this time, with my words, we could reclaim what we had lost. I told her how after the soldier got me with his dart, I was taken to a hospital, then a solitary compound. ‘I didn’t know what had happened to you. I looked for you wherever I could. I even got into the underground mall.’

  Uva touched the squashed segment of lime with a finger, and tasted it. ‘I know. I was hiding in a village. I heard about the riot. The whisper was of three rebels on the run. From the rumours I knew one had to be you. I knew you would head down here. Jaz I also recognised, difficult though it was to believe he’d do anything so daring off a catwalk.’ She paused, surprised by her own torrent. Her sharp brows knitted together as though she was drawing two worlds into one, her tongue was stuck between her teeth. Then she shivered and the rest of her words sputtered out. ‘I tried to follow you, but it was impossible. No one could move. Our network came apart. Everyone who could help was gone. All disappeared. Not a soul was left to trust … Even Zeng was gone. Disappeared.’