Heaven's Edge

by Romesh Gunesekera

  I saw my mother. She had sunglasses wrapped around her eyes. We were staying in a hotel with pink walls and pine trees in the garden and steps leading down to hot white sand. I remember her mostly from a photograph of that summer. Sitting on a wall, searching the sea through her thick black sunglasses, twisting the loops of a gold thread in her fingers. A wordless figure who made me always feel I was a trespasser in her life. The Mediterranean, I was told, was what she was looking at; she preferred it to any other sea. I remembered Grandma Cleo coaxing her, ‘Penny, my dear, you must give him time. All we can ever give each other in this life is time.’

  In the morning, down by the well, I found the monkey scrabbling around Uva’s refilled trench. It had pawed away some of the earth and rolled a coconut into a dip at one end, like a skull. When it saw me, it started hooting as if to call up the dead. I was furious. I shouted at it and kicked the coconut out. The monkey hobbled away, chattering.

  Uva heard us and came to the railing upstairs. She called out to me, worried. ‘What’s the matter? Don’t scold the poor thing. What’s it done?’

  I didn’t answer; I was relieved to see that familiar concern on her face again.

  With each passing day she seemed to go a little further into the garden. She’d spend days examining the stems, the leaves, the flowers I had tended. She’d say very little, but I’d listen to every word. I asked her more about what will happen than what had happened. Simple questions about the life of plants: which of them will flower tomorrow, and which next week? Which will produce fruit? And when? I thought it was better to get her to look ahead. It seemed to work. She had no difficulty identifying ones which I had found no trace of in my gardener’s annuals. Slowly, as she followed me, she began to pull out weeds, train the beans and the marrow. Sometimes she’d step in and space out the plants that seem destined to become entangled with each other, and succour those that needed more nursing. Soon she was drawing patterns for crossbreeding like some gene-genie on the loose.

  By the afternoon though, when the sky turned lazurite, she’d flag; the whole garden would subside. Then, as now, I would sit by her, listening for her breath. The earth itself was in need of repose. In the stillness, the quiet, the sense of being reprieved seemed, for the moment, to alleviate all the suffering of the world. I knew this could not be true, but I needed to believe it might be.

  When the sun dropped, and the day became a little cooler, we’d sometimes walk together up to the lake where we had been reunited. I showed her where I first came ashore, where I took apart the aircraft. I showed her my early trails, the signs I had made for her and she pointed out the one that had alerted her. Beneath the tree on which I had carved my first initial, she found a hefty green melon.

  ‘Is it edible?’ I had to ask.

  She split it open with her knife. ‘What you have to do is suck it and see,’ she explained patiently.

  She flicked a few black seeds out of the wedge before lifting it to her mouth and sucking it, hard. The red flesh turned white. ‘If it is bitter you spit the poison out; if it is nectar you take it all.’

  As her skin healed, a residue of that sparkle I had first seen in her by the pond near the Palm Beach Hotel slowly returned to her eyes. When she walked past the empty pool, I wished it were full again, as it must have been once, to reflect her on its undulating surface and fill every element with her moving shape. The emerald pigeons, the flying fish, the baskets of fruit all seemed close once more.

  ‘What do you think about this pool?’ I asked her one evening. She was stretched out on a planter’s chair, under the pergola teeming with ever more white trumpets in the failing light; her breasts flat underneath the thin muslin of an old shawl. She had started to listen more, as though at last the explosions in her ears had died away. ‘I wanted to clean it – all that dried algae – and fill it. I had a grand plan: an Archimedean screw, a windmill, a cistern with aqueducts. A tremendous plan, but then I was afraid it might attract too much attention if it was spotted from the air.’

  She smiled for the first time since she arrived. ‘A pool would not make such a difference. They say there are old ponds and pools dotted all over from here to the coast. But Archimedean? Why so complicated?’

  ‘I didn’t think I could fill it just using a pail.’

  ‘What about the pipe? They must have had some system. They didn’t have slaves here, did they?’

  ‘The pipes are there.’ I pointed to the grilles on each wall. ‘But there is no tap.’

  She shook her head, bemused. ‘I don’t know how you’ve survived on your own for so long.’ She stood up and inspected the stonework around the pool. Then she went straight to a slab at one corner. It was loose. She moved it; underneath was the wheel of a valve. ‘Look, here it is. The inlet from the lake. They must have a pipe up there to divert the waters into the pool. Then, when you want, you open one on the other side to let it drain out. Into the garden. It goes out and lifts up the water table. That is why you have those big trees over there. Those are thirsty trees. You can see how they were growing years ago when this house was once before like your little pleasure dome.’ She opened the valve but nothing flowed. ‘We have to find the stopcock up at the lake.’

  ‘Where? How can you trace the pipe? There is no sign on the ground to show where it goes. I can’t see anything. You’d have to be a water diviner.’

  Uva stepped back with her hands on her hips, exasperated, but looking much more like her old self. ‘Diviner? No, an engineer. Where would you connect it up?’

  She too was a real fixer.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Where’s your map?’

  We went over to my painted board.

  She pointed out where she reckoned the pipe would be. ‘Let’s go.’

  It took us less than an hour to locate it. There was another small wheel set in a culvert grown over with maidenhair. She hit the spindle with a stick to loosen it. ‘Be careful,’ I warned but the valve opened. I heard the water flow.

  We filled the pool to the brim so that when we slipped in, the water ran over and darkened the sand with its abundance. Yellow flowers floated between us. When Uva came out of the water they stuck to her like the butterflies who had appeared before on their brief, dazzling pilgrimage home.

  That evening we ate pumpkin, cowpea and cassava. For fruit she had picked mangosteen and a durian.

  ‘Have you tried?’ She asked me with a hint of the mischief she used to display at the beach.

  I was a little apprehensive of the durian’s prickly shape and its odour. She scoffed at my reluctance. ‘It is so rare to find these still growing. Even in the old days a really fresh durian was the most sought-after aphrodisiac.’

  ‘Really?’ I was not convinced.

  ‘Here, try the mangosteen first then.’ She smiled again, breaking the purple shell in her hand to reveal snowdrops from heaven.

  Later we watched the moon bob in the pool, licked by the flames of the candles I had floated for her.

  ‘Will we live here for ever?’ Her voice slipped over me, her lips warm and thick like an engorged flower.

  I held her in my hands and pressed her. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And when there are no more matches for the fire?’

  ‘We’ll have to keep burning all the time.’ I wished, too late, I had not said it.

  She rescued a mynah with a damaged wing, and a mongoose trapped in the cowshed. She nursed them until the monkey, the mynah and the young mongoose all ate right out of her hand. She even drew the bees from their hives. ‘I wish I had some milk,’ she said and blinked at the look that passed over my face. ‘No, not from me – I was spiked.’

  I didn’t know what she meant, but I could sense the walls around her early traumas crumbling. She tried to purse her lips, but the words gushed out.

  ‘During the Emergency, anyone whom the authorities deemed rebellious was sterilised. Spiked. Spayed. It happened at school. First a dart, like yours, you
know? Then a scraper. That was when my parents decided we had to escape up into the hills. To Farindola. But Kris wouldn’t come. He was mad. He was mad at my father. Kris didn’t agree with anything he said or did. Our school system had warped him much sooner than my parents expected; before they realised it. You see, he thought my father wanted to control him. He didn’t understand my father was only trying to encourage some spirit, grow back the wildness in us, no? My parents believed that diversity gave us strength; that love grew stronger when it had to hold things together: unity in diversity. It’s true. But Kris saw everything differently. For months my parents tried to persuade him to leave the city and come and join us in Farindola. But every time he came he would quarrel and storm off. He didn’t see the corruption. He didn’t believe that the bush squads who broke the bones of their victims one by one, beat them and burnt them with firebrands, pulped the organs of infants, were officials doing their duty. He saw us as the destroyers. He went and informed. They came then with an executioner and took over Farindola for themselves.’ She hunched her shoulders, shrinking. ‘All I could do then was to go from town to town like a little hothouse breeder – the last of our line – carrying plants, small animals. Wild viruses to infect their whole regime.’ She hammered her knees with her fists and straightened up as though she had to inspire another army.

  I was crestfallen. Here, in this garden, I had imagined we might become the beginning of something new. The core of a story told and retold, imagined as I had so often imagined my own parents meeting, or my grandparents – Eldon and Cleo – discovering, in their inexplicable wartime courtship along the Strand, that yellow birds and dragonflies were not unique to the air currents of their separate island homes. The stuff of legends, like even Uva’s own transformation from farmer to warrior to farmer again. I recalled Pushpa, the little girl in the camp, and wished she could have been reborn to us here and have at least a glimpse of a world free from strife.

  The animal in Uva’s arms whined; she stroked it, calming the mongoose, and herself, down. ‘This little pup needs some real nourishment.’

  She nurtured it with water, wild herbs and crushed fruit until the mongoose and the monkey learnt to play with each other in the sand, around the pool, and among the coconut trees as children might in a garden of trust.

  As more flowers and fruit trees blossomed, more birds appeared. Each day a new flash of colour, a different melody in the garden. Uva would sit up in bed with a cotton sheet wrapped around her and listen in wonder. The patterns in the air became increasingly vivid and complex. As one song ascended, another descended; elaborating first light, day by day.

  ‘Where do they come from?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t believe it, at first. There are salaleenas, parakeets, wagtails and bee-eaters.’

  ‘Wagtails?’

  ‘Sure. Why not?’

  She laughed then, bursting a warm pod within her; a sound I had not heard for longer than I could remember, a sound from the edge of heaven. I felt that we were, at last, where we belonged. Among trees mute yet more perfect than us; their roots nourished by the whole of the earth’s past, and harbouring the future already in their buds. And that in time there might even be children from the forest who would come to us and grant our lives too a sense of perpetuity.

  The next day Uva showed me how to extract dyes from vegetables; to turn straw into cloth like a weaverbird; to make soap out of coconut and oil for cooking, for massaging the inner and the outer flesh, for lighting the lamps at nights and lubricating all the spinning chakras in a body. She tapped a rubber tree, slashing it with her knife, and collected the sticky milk in a coconut shell. Dipping her fingers in raw latex she painted the bearded aurora around my nipples, and laughed again when the tree above squeaked, rocked by the wind that blew from the ocean churning far away.

  One night she pressed her head back against me and opened my palm. ‘My mother should have seen you.’

  ‘Like this?’

  ‘Your hand.’ She traced my knotted heartline with her fingernail and ran her teeth along the edge of my palm.

  I pulled my hand away. ‘Why?’

  ‘Her grandmother had always told her about a man with a hand like this. See these three crosses. Someone who will change the world they lived in for ever.’

  ‘Did it ever happen?’

  She turned her head and looked up drowsily, before closing her eyes. ‘I never could stay awake long enough to hear the end of her stories.’

  In the dark I mulled over her words. I thought about my own mother and father: their insomnia in a world spinning noisily out of control. The throb of traffic, aeroplanes, babies; the threat of cyclones from nowhere. What did they wish for? A change for the better? Did they too live their lives with a growing sense of unease about the world they would bequeath? But how did he ever think that a fighter plane’s brash pre-emptive strike, blowing up somebody else’s home, could improve it? And she that her death would? Then I recalled Eldon’s words about how we each go our own way to seek the light we need, how we each find the balance that becomes survival. We have to. But what did his life amount to: basking pointlessly above the clouds for years and coming down only to grow flowers in a foreign land. I could imagine his reply: mutato nomine de te fabula narratur … Change but the name and the tale is of you.

  I wished I could tell him that I did learn some of that stuff too, when I needed to.

  When my father left, he went without saying a word; not a word to me. He mussed my hair, patted the dog, and that was it. All I ever heard was my mother’s excuses for his absence, repeated again and again. ‘It’s his work: aviation advice, training, that sort of thing. An opportunity he could not afford to miss.’ A quick smile, a wave out of an open sunroof, and he had gone. But he had told his own mother, Cleo, a slightly different story. ‘I have some things to sort out. For him, you know. His past is my future.’ For some reason I had always assumed that he had meant me in saying this, but now I know he had meant his father, not his son.

  ‘I think in the end you have to learn to live on your own.’ Uva ruminated as if to herself, sitting on the steps of the veranda. She had carved another figurine with her knife and was lifting it up to the light to examine the wings.

  ‘But you are with me now.’ I was busy refitting a wheel to an old pushcart.

  ‘I know. But the more I see you, the more I can see how empty life would be without you now.’

  ‘You shouldn’t think like that. We should be thankful for what we have been given.’ I pushed the retaining pin in; the wheel spun freely.

  ‘My mother wanted to be connected to everything around her, and yet she did everything to be completely self-sufficient.’ Uva looked around her as though she was seeing her mother’s home again. ‘The centre of our house was a processing plant: we made our own flour, our own furniture, our own cloth … everything. And now we have to do it here, again.’

  I put down the pushcart and went over to her. I took her by the hand. ‘But you are not alone. We are never entirely on our own, even here. We rely on people who were here before us. We have to. Look at this house, the chairs, the roof, the bed, the pushcart. We repair, rebuild …’

  ‘Like scavengers?’ She looked at me doubtfully.

  ‘Sure, why not? Scavenge. Salvage. We must use what we discover. Make it our history.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Leave things a little bit better for those who come after us.’

  Her face hardened again. ‘There’ll be nobody after us here.’

  ‘But there will be. Others like us. Others who escape, who break through. Maybe even orphans from the forest. They will need all the help they can get.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To build a life. A little time for themselves. If they find this place, they will know it is possible to be free. To love. To find each other.’

  She ran a finger down the side of her nose slowly, brooding over the prospect of strangers i
n our midst. ‘I think our time is too short. I don’t want anybody else to come even near here, ever. No rebels, no refugees, no orphans, no soldiers, not even a scout. Never.’

  For a moment, my heart failed.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  I told her about the scout who had come in the Gadfly.

  ‘You let her go back?’

  ‘She was only looking …’

  ‘Did she have a gun?’

  I nodded. ‘But if she didn’t go back, others would have come looking for her –’

  ‘She had a gun,’ Uva cut in. ‘She’d have used it on you, if she had seen you. They are killers. The only way to stop a killer is by killing her, or him, first.’ She took my face in her hands, her expression fixed as though each point she was about to make was linked inexorably to the next. ‘Sometimes you have to sacrifice your innocence to protect this world that you care so much for, that you believe in. Sometimes we have to risk going too far, otherwise we risk losing everything. You must understand that, after all we’ve been through.’ Her own eyes closed in the shadow of the orchard trees. ‘One bullet in the right place might have saved both my father and my mother. There is a link between life and death; Kris’s and theirs. We all need to discover who we are and where we stand; find our own special balance between what we know ought to be, and what we can see has to be done.’

  Her thin, creased lids trembled behind her welded lashes. I remembered the mothers with their children; Ismail and his band of urchins with their contorted lives and their sad, unflinching eyes. Were they then driven too late to the gun? Perhaps she was right, but then was Kris right too? What is balance? To protect according to your own need, to avenge as the old gods do? Were they all correct and Eldon wrong? Maybe the bullet does fly both ways when you pull a trigger, maybe each time we do learn a little more about what it is to be alive, just as we see more clearly between each blink of an eye, each lapse.