The Weight of Numbers

by Simon Ings

  In deference to his injured back he spends afternoons helping the women in the packing plant. Packing the oranges means laying them in straw, in crates stamped with the name of the kibbutz in dark, blood-like ink. The time he spends bent over box after box, hardly moving, does his back no good at all. It is only with the greatest pain and difficulty that he is able to sit down to his evening meal, rounded off, as always, with a sharp, pippy orange.

  The next morning, the orange crates are driven by truck to the market in Haifa, Red Haifa, where the leaders of the United Workers’ Party crowd the cafés and talk of revolution and, looking north, anticipate the day when Soviet tanks will lumber into town, bringing to fulfilment the socialist paradise towards which they work so very hard. The men of Haifa imagine laying palm leaves before the tanks. The women of Haifa dream of throwing garlands of orange blossom up to the boys on the tanks. This constant expectation occasions an atmosphere of permanent festival in Haifa. It is the hysteria of a community living always on the brink of millennium.

  Something of this telegraphs itself even to the impassive kibbutzniks of Migdal Tikvah, on the day the lorries leave for Haifa. Women run from the terraces with covered baskets and lift them, smiling, up into the hands of the drivers sitting high up in the cabs of their lorries. Under chequered cloths lies a rich abundance of oranges for the drivers and their mates to eat as they go on their way, the juice spitting and spurting over their rough woollen jumpers, the seats, the dashboard, the windscreen and down their sunburnt cheeks. All the way to Haifa, roadside wasps, launch themselves in desperate dives through cracks in the truck windows, and even through the air vents, to get at the oranges within.

  Anthony looks forward to these runs to Haifa, in spite of the market, the tiers of crated oranges, the littorals and dunes of loose oranges, the clouds of wasps.

  He looks forward to the cafés most of all: sweet coffee and cakes to soothe his burned and bitten mouth. There is, in spite of the sight of so many muscular sun-loving Jews, an atmosphere, or at any rate a saving shred, of luxe about the cafés of Haifa. A feeling conducive to conversation, even to thought.

  Anthony remembers thought, what it felt like. He recollects how anxious he was, once, to stop thinking, how treacherous thought had proved. He is beginning to wonder whether his decision to stop thinking was entirely wise.

  As a man who has been on vacation too long – a man whose languor has begun to turn to a ponderousness that he cannot enjoy – Anthony, sat outside his favourite café overlooking the market square in Haifa, begins to toy with the idea of ideas.

  He writes: ‘I used to think the individual was redundant. Groups of people, working in concert, were the future. Together, people knew more, and this made them wiser; this is what I believed. And when at last everyone was joined to everyone else by a length of telegraph wire, on that day, everything would be known by everyone.’

  He wonders for whom he is writing.

  ‘I thought this would be a good thing. A coming together. A final wordless reconciliation between people and their world. An end to Others, and to the messy business of living.’

  Yes, this is true. He is aware now of his limitations. If nothing else, Pál’s treatments have levelled his moods and cleared his head. He may not have very much to say any more. Few dreams, and fewer hopes. What little he has to say, he can say it now. Now that it is too late.

  The fag-end of the war and its aftermath are a grey sea of disconnected memories.

  His back kept giving out, again and again.

  He remembers lying in a hospital bed, quite crippled.

  He remembers begging his old schoolfriend, John Arven, to take a compassionate interest in his wife.

  He remembers – this must have been in 1948 – waking up after a delicate operation to correct his fused spine. John Arven was in the recovery room when he woke from the anaesthetic. He was so sore and stiff he couldn’t show any expression, which was lucky, as there was no expression he especially wanted to show.

  ‘Shall I pull the blinds?’ John asked, already moving to the window.

  ‘God, no,’ Anthony croaked.

  John looked around him at the curtains, the flowers, the machinery that kept Anthony’s back in torsion. ‘Up in no time!’ he cried, desperately. ‘Back on your feet!’

  As though, by these efforts, he might conceal the fact that Rachel was not there.

  The recollection makes Anthony shudder. A breeze is picking up around the market square. He smoothes out the paper and writes:

  The War fascinated me. The movements of money and machines and people, the strategies, the shifts in the global balance of power. Of course, the longer the war went on, the more innovative it became, the more scientific, the more apparent it was that no one was in charge; that the war would have to play itself out across the world in its own way; that even Churchill was dwarfed by events, no more, by then, than just another cog in a vast economic ‘metabolism’.

  The coldness of these sentiments makes him shiver. He imagines what Rachel would make of these easy, inadequate abstractions. What any passing Jew would make of them. Any girl from Terezen with a number on her wrist.

  He puts down his pen and watches the business of the town. The oranges. A sudden gust blows his paper away. He tries to leap up, to follow the paper, and his back sings with pain. He falls back into his seat, gasping. Everything he has written vanishes.

  A second later, another breeze blows a paper liner past him – the sort used to cover orange crates. It wraps itself around a table leg. Gingerly, Anthony bends down and picks it up. The printed side shows a smiling buxom girl in a headscarf, plucking big juicy oranges from a tree. Anthony shudders and turns the paper over. The other side is blank.

  Strange, the give and take of the world.

  He spreads the paper across his table. He picks up his pen, and finishes his thought: no matter that the start of it is lost. What does it signify, after all? Having the idea is what counts.

  He writes: ‘My life has changed since the war, and I no longer enjoy the luxury of distance.’

  It is harder, and for that reason more admirable, to think of things at a human scale. It is difficult to be honest.

  He begins: ‘In Palestine I have buried my marriage, and I have uncovered my heart.’

  One of many long letters he is writing to a man he can no longer call his friend.

  He remembers the lengths to which John Arven went to explain Rachel’s absence. How Rachel had moved to the country, in order to create a separation between herself and her London circle: ‘She knows that moving to Palestine will effect a very great change in the pace of her life.’

  Such casuistry. Anthony, bedridden, reached inside himself for a sympathetic word or two. He found nothing but bile: ‘It seems she has chosen to emigrate by degrees.’

  ‘What she is doing,’ Arven said, annoyed at his friend’s flippancy, ‘is waiting for you.’

  Why hadn’t she come to see him? Why did she not write?

  ‘Just bite the bullet,’ John Arven insisted. ‘It’s time for you to take up the reins of your marriage again. I’ll be there with you, if it helps.’

  So he was, standing there on the station platform to meet the London train, scruffy as usual, his shirt-sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He drove them to the cottage – with a nice care, and very slowly – in Rachel’s car.

  There were rhododendrons in the front garden. The lawn was new, a slightly sickly yellow-green in the weak, overcast light. The house, by contrast, was big and hunched in on itself with honeysuckle over the door and old roses, with wicked thorns. Next door to the cottage stood a hideous, white concrete shell of a garage. There was a lawnmower out, a pair of shears, a fork stuck in the earth with an old tweed jacket draped over the back of it. As they walked up the path, Arven stepped casually over, rescued the jacket, and slipped it on over his shirt.

  Anthony could not have said what it was about that moment. Was there something casual or proprietorial a
bout John’s action? He did not know. But he sensed it contained a meaning which excluded him.

  John led the way through the back door into the kitchen.

  Rachel was kneading dough in a large china bowl. Her arms were dusted in flour up to her elbows. She looked up. There was a streak of flour, like war paint, under her right eye. Everything about her had a sheen. She had grown out her hair. Anthony had never seen her looking more beautiful. He couldn’t say anything. He couldn’t move.

  She smiled, seeing John enter the room.

  Then she saw Anthony.

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  She had not been expecting him. John had not told her.

  ‘So you’re here, then,’ she said.

  Remembering all this, he writes: ‘I miss you, Sage, my darling. I hope with all my heart that you have found happiness together. I do not blame you for making love to Rachel. But how I wish you had fallen in love with me!’

  5

  It is 20 July 1969, and evening in Lourenço Marques, colonial capital of Mozambique. The street-sellers are packing their wares into suitcases: batteries, handbags and carved hardwood boxes. Toy cars made of cans, random pharmaceuticals, fried cakes, combs, cheap make-up from Hong Kong. Pictures of saints. Pictures of Elvis Presley.

  Anthony sees none of this. He is still sat opposite Gregor in the offices of the Institute of Distance and Field Education, and he still has no clue why he is being kept here. Plus, the knot in his back feels like a hot coal wedged in his bones.

  The tension in the room has been building up all week. Strangeness has followed strangeness. Anthony has arrived at the office to find the place locked up, while silent figures moved behind the frosted glass door panel, ignoring him and the rap of his stick against the frame. Other times, Gregor has welcomed Anthony into the room with the sort of smothering friendliness a murderer in a stage farce might adopt, desperate to draw attention away from the body in the corner.

  On these occasions, Gregor has kept Anthony talking after office hours, long into the night, regaling him with stories drawn from his wartime experiences. Gregor is an explosives expert by training, skilled in defusing enemy ordnance. Earnestly, and at great length, he has described to Anthony how various trigger devices succumbed, one by one, to his craft.

  At 3 p.m., with the tension at breaking point, Gregor, trembling, turns on the little Bush radio he keeps on the sill of the window. Slumped, his back turned, he resembles the deputy headmaster of an unsuccessful public school.

  As the Junta’s power has seeped away, so the station’s staffers, one by one, have drifted off. Gregor, by contrast, is a man whose keenness for everything borders on the abject. He has assumed the role of caretaker for the defunct office with the punctilious enthusiasm with which he approaches everything: a piece of paperwork, a telephone call. Why has Gregor remained? Can his energy not be harnessed to more useful work? Perhaps now the mystery will be solved.

  The radio is tuned to the local government station but the news, as ever, is focused on a glorified tin can, 240,000 miles away. Anthony struggles to hear the American English of Houston’s mission controller over the garbled real-time Portuguese translation:

  ‘… You might be interested in knowing, since you are already on the way, that a Houston astrologer, Ruby Graham, says that all the signs are right for your trip to the moon. She says that Neil is clever; Mike has good judgement and Buzz can work out intricate problems. She also says that Neil tends to see the world through rose-coloured glasses but he is always ready to help the afflicted or distressed.’

  At twenty minutes past five, a newsflash interrupts the broadcast. ‘International black fanatic’ Jorge Katalayo has died in an explosion at a ‘suspected terrorist cell’ on the outskirts of Lourenço Marques.

  Gregor makes a sound deep in his throat.

  Anthony, annoyed by the announcer’s boorish interruption, assumes Gregor is voicing a like frustration. He is about to make some bland remark about the radio station when Gregor falls to his knees.

  Anthony’s next thought is that Gregor is having a heart attack. When he hurries over and sees that Gregor, far from falling at random, has flung himself down before the institute’s fire safe, he is momentarily reassured. Has Gregor remembered something? Something urgent? What? ‘Gregor?’

  Gregor claws at the safe; his fingers tremble as he rattles through the secret combination.

  So many of Gregor’s recent actions have left Anthony nonplussed, he hardly sees the importance of this one. It is only as Gregor swings open the great steel door and begins pulling out documents in great handfuls, that Anthony wonders whether his employer’s actions might not be connected to the recent newsflash.

  As Gregor rifles through the papers, Anthony takes advantage of his absorption, stealing forward to study the institute’s secrets.

  From a sea of bills, receipts and final demands, Gregor plucks a slim white envelope. He tears it open, and unfolds the contents within. He hands a sheet to Anthony, stuffs another in his trouser pocket, crumples up the remainder and the envelope and throws them back into the safe.

  He says, without looking at Anthony, ‘Do exactly what it says. Don’t ask questions. Don’t wait here. Don’t go home.’

  Anthony scans the paper. Typed on a faded ribbon are the details of an escape route. The name of a shipping company. A telephone number. The accompanying instructions are so infantile, they can only be a kind of code:

  If time allows, be sure to obtain a sufficiency of warm clothing.

  Do not under any circumstances accept rides from strangers.

  Discard your house keys.

  Avoid intercourse.

  Stout shoes must be worn.

  Once the papers are back in the safe, Gregor bends awkwardly, reaches into the top right corner of the safe, and pulls out a metal pineapple.

  Anthony blinks.

  It is a grenade.

  Gregor pulls the pin, tosses the grenade into the safe and heaves the door shut.

  The door is heavy. It takes a second to close. In that second, the grenade rolls off the papers piled willy-nilly inside the safe, and falls onto the floor. Anthony gasps. Gregor heaves the door open again on smooth, silent hinges, plucks up the grenade as though it is hot, and places it on the papers, all the while pushing at the door to close it again.

  The door slams shut.

  The grenade goes off. The safe is well built, and the explosion makes no more impact than if someone had rapped it with a spanner.

  Far louder is Gregor’s wail as he spins up and away. The stub of his amputated forefinger drizzles blood across the floor, the table, Gregor’s trousers, his shoes, Anthony’s shoes, the door and the door-handle, leaving a trail for Anthony to follow, as Gregor makes his getaway.

  Anthony, mystified, follows Gregor out of the building, only to lose his trail across a busy junction. He wonders where to go. He pulls out his paper and reads: ‘If time allows, be sure to obtain a sufficiency of warm clothing… Stout shoes must be worn.’

  He wonders if he shouldn’t just go home. He wonders what is going on, and what it has to do with him. Of course he should go home.

  And tomorrow?

  What should he do tomorrow? Should he come into work? What will he find? Will Gregor be there, his hand in bandages, full of apologies and explanations? Or will the place be locked up, secured by the police, surrounded by military vehicles and PIDE men in dark ill-fitting suits?

  Or will the room be empty, unlocked, just as they left it, a chaos of imported newspapers and out-of-date gazetteers? If it is, should he sit down? Should he wait for the phone to ring?

  Utterly at sea, Anthony thrusts the mysterious paper into his trouser pocket and sets off at random through the town.

  In his rush to follow Gregor, Anthony has forgotten his stick. He wants to go back for it. He wants to return and sit down with a cup of tea and listen some more to the little Bush radio on the office window sill; to hear again the miraculous conversation,
conducted over a distance of some quarter of a million miles, with the men who will soon be setting foot on the moon. But he is afraid: Gregor’s panic and the strange, minatory instructions in his pocket have taken hold of his imagination. There is no way he can go back.

  In the yard beside a rundown hotel two old women stand beneath a fig tree, pounding maize for nsima. In the street opposite, another woman stirs a pot of caril de amendoim – he can smell it from here. The cook’s face is covered with the garish white pan-stick make-up you see women use in Tete, against the sun.

  He comes to the bluff overlooking the bay. A woman calls to him from a doorway. He knows that if he looks at her, her smile will break his heart.

  There is nothing from which he has to run away. There is no need for him to flee. Flee what? Yet he keeps on walking.

  ‘Do not under any circumstances accept rides from strangers.’

  Well, really.

  He looks around him. This is not the way home. This is not the way back to the office. It is not that he is consciously walking away from these places, exactly. On the contrary, when he analyses what few feelings he can muster in response to these bizarre events, it seems to him that he is walking towards…

  Towards what he doesn’t know: whatever shadowy existence is implied by the strange paper in his hand.

  ‘Christ,’ he says aloud, reading his instructions over for the third or fourth time. He is not sure whether to be disgusted or amused; it has just dawned on him that this list could just as well double as an account of his life: ‘Discard your house keys… Avoid intercourse.’

  The shipping office occupies the first floor of an old Portuguese villa to the north of the port. The room’s shelves are lined with old fabric-bound ledgers, and its heavy furniture swims in a dark, resinous light. Near the window, a white girl pecks at a typewriter. She glances at him, then returns to study the keys before her. Her tongue edges between her lips and glistens in the nicotinic light.

  He hands over his paper. The girl’s tongue withdraws, leaving a wet trail upon her lower lip. Idly, she waves at a connecting door, lays the paper down on her desk and goes back to her typing. Anthony reaches over for the paper. The girl’s hand shoots out and slaps the paper, keeping it from him. He meets the girl’s belligerent eyes, but lets his gaze slide away. Asking her a question will force her to speak, and he is afraid of what her voice will sound like.