The Music

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Oh, that so much might be brought back! The Academy, naturally, resurrected itself in a jiffy but the Adeptus’s priceless tabori collection within was smashed beyond saving. The man himself lay for two weeks beneath the boulder on the mountainside before his body was discovered by searching students many days after foxes and ravens had made the same discovery. No-one had known of the dell’s existence, which is why they took so long to find it; and once having found it they couldn’t recognise it for what it was. In their defence it must be said that the earthquake had ruined the stream’s course, displacing aquifers, blocking off springs and opening new channels everywhere so that the escaping waters had resumed their course in the old bed. Needless to say, the dell has never been acknowledged as a musical instrument and now probably never will be. I – who might have learned from my master the exact techniques for tuning a landscape – I never did, and am now a pariah and a renegade and no-one would listen if I told them of the Adeptus’s discovery any more than they would if I said it was high time to close down the Academy, for students and teachers alike to lay aside their instruments, abandon their finger exercises and spend a long sabbatical listening most carefully to water. No, it is so much easier for them to become virtuosos.

  My last grief is most nearly that of son for father, which makes it the more intense. The Adeptus taught me everything I am; but he wouldn’t recognise what I have become. He was indeed like a father to me; yet he would surely deny his offspring. I owe him everything; he would refuse the debt. Can anything be sadder than this? That he would consider my love had turned into betrayal when I am daily discovering the importance of all he taught me? Away beyond the mountains I make my own wilful sounds which he would never have accepted as music. ‘What are these strange effects, these monstrous wailings like the winter wind, going nowhere and doing nothing but spreading a chill?’ I can imagine him saying. But I only make them because years ago I heard something he himself never heard, something subversive in what the water said. It’s there and he missed it. Underneath, though, there’s truth in what he knew: that people hear but they don’t know how to listen, just as they can speak yet can’t bear to remain silent.

  Knight

  THE BOY had never understood why they hadn’t taken the Major north of the DMZ to the Hanoi Hilton or whatever place of long-term imprisonment. Surely it would have been easier than lugging him along like unopened baggage whose contents – if ever they could be disclosed – would now hardly justify his dead weight? He had watched the Major trying to adapt to each phase of the new life which had begun the moment he stopped falling from the sky. A month of improvised tiger cages would be followed by shapeless weeks of forced marches along mountain trails. After that might come a period of comparative ease bivouacked on a steep forest floor, tethered like a goat to a tree. He was familiar with dead sticks for legs after being made to crouch all night; with blindfolds; with tied hands. Foreign words hurtled at him and past him until this world into which he had descended blurred beyond being a succession of places into a waste of pain and apprehension.

  The Major was stubborn. He had known what to expect and for the first month had clung mentally to the place he had abruptly left, the floating city within sight of the coast where he had been an aristocrat, a knight steeped in knightly codes and valour. Ham and eggs, toast and jelly were still undigested in his stomach as he dropped like a helpless god into a land of rice and rotted fish sauce. He had fallen into a paddy, embedded to the hips and taken easily by what seemed to be chattering children in straw hats. At the very moment when his F4’s arrestor hook ought to have been snagging the cable, allowing him to climb down (triumphant gladiator) to the rubber-streaked deck and go below for debriefing and real brewed coffee, the Major was lying trussed and slimy in a hut. Outside, the selfsame morning wore on. Only the universe was changed in a discontinuity so shocking as to seem part of a dream. Just as an infantryman watched in his mind’s eye a comrade treading on a mine, so a pilot envisaged only other pilots being shot down. Imagination was a movie whose principal actor arranged for disaster to strike a limitless cast of shadowy stand-ins while he sat in the stalls chewing popcorn. When this rule was violently overturned and he found himself rudely dumped through the screen up to his waist in pigshit his mind couldn’t take it in. He sought refuge in his training. The interrogations began and he gave only the information which could be read on his dog-tags, sometimes whispered, often screamed. He lost consciousness with his own name on his lips and revived to hear his mouth chanting his rank and number.

  The boy had first appeared the evening they invaded the Major’s body with a piece of bamboo. It was a lengthy session, designed to break him rather than to elicit military secrets. Those humiliations had dragged on for weeks until infection set in, then fever, and in his emaciated state they had to give him doses of antibiotics looted from US medical supplies. The boy stood outside and watched the Major leave his body and take up residence in him. Together they observed the knight gyrate and yell and not break. And all the while, they could see, there was a single humiliation he feared still more, which was the sight of himself filmed in harsh studio lighting, confessing his guilt and denouncing his countrymen. The Major had seen such films. The captives were docile, unrecognisable, speaking in unmodulated voices as they read out prepared confessions which always began ‘My name is — and I am making this statement of my own free will.’

  No military secrets, then, because he knew none to divulge, other than ephemeral ones of shifting tactics and the radio codes of a week long past. But secrets of a different kind were dislodged by the battering of his personality. The knight went on calling out his name and number even as he lost all sense of what the words meant or to whom they referred. Elsewhere within, lumps of this gallant construct, the fighting man, fell off to reveal the child he had been (timid of his father, quick to cry, idolising his piano teacher when his classmates were full of their baseball heroes. Never effeminate, merely radically gentle). And then the long haul of adolescence when he had put together this workable trick of concealment. He had become more competitive than his fellows; had dated the prettiest girls and driven the hottest cars over the old moonshine roads of his native Virginia. He had missed Korea by miles but flew himself up through the ranks while his father, the frustrated cold war warrior, finally glowed and proudly shook his red wattles. He had nearly piloted the U-2 in which Gary Powers was shot down in 1960, having been posted to Europe and the shrouded world of reconnaissance. From a succession of air bases ringing the Iron Curtain he had flown bloodless high-altitude missions for a short while. Back in New Mexico he had tested blind landing systems, had hardened into a husband and moved into married quarters. He was thought too quiet. People were suspicious of privacy even as they defended it as an inalienable right. He was not unpopular, but neither was he greatly loved. His artful student gregariousness had long worn off. Colleagues obscurely felt his remoteness might actually be disdain, but since he was an exceptionally fine pilot they ascribed it to dedication: that and the tense, lonely hours spent eighteen miles above the lunar landscape of Kazakhstan or wherever, expecting a heat-seeking missile. Still, his wife Cathy was a college graduate. How many pilots in 1964 married experts in French literature? Not that she gave herself airs and graces. Just that you couldn’t help noticing if you dropped in that there were shelves of books everywhere and string quartets and stuff playing quietly. Unusual, anyway.

  So in a sense the possibility of being shot down had been on the agenda for some years. That it finally happened in Indochina instead of somewhere in the USSR was a mere detail. For too long he had been a man out of place, straying far over territory whose inhabitants believed fervently he had no business there but whose anger was held at bay on the far side of a fail-safe screen of technology. Now it had failed, and he wasn’t safe at all, though the fact that he hadn’t yet been killed did suggest he was of value to someone. It was probably lucky that the Vietcong cadres through whose hands he had
passed in the first few days had been in close contact with an NVA unit. Well-trained professional officers had taken him over from the peasant guerrillas and had marched him away along the endless trails which led to wherever he now was. Gaunt, feverish and tottering, he had been inherited by one unit after another, as far as he could judge, all the while getting no nearer to a proper camp for prisoners-of-war or to that dreaded studio in Hanoi where drugs, emotional blackmail or more terrible inducements might lead to him pressing the chicken switch on film, for all the world to see and despise, for his father to watch.

  But where was he? The Major thought he had probably walked the Ho Chi Minh trail in all its tributaries and in every direction, starting westward over the hills into Cambodia. ‘Walked’; but there was no real word to cover being dragged at the end of a rope while wearing a wooden yoke, being prodded with bayonets into a shambling trot, being rolled down a thorn-tangled slope into a clear stream amid laughter. And then unexpectedly finding himself being strolled in a comradely way along a trail one beautiful morning. When had that been? Months ago. Like being reborn. The early sun dappling the clearings through which they passed; the generous bowl of rice gruel for breakfast; the scent of freshly lit Marlboro cigarettes (how did an NVA field unit far from home get those?); the young captain who spoke French and English chatting beside him like a campus friend. A brief intermission, that. All part of the softening-up process, he thought. But ‘walked’? No, you had to invent a new verb, something like ‘forced-wandered’. Resisting (only just) the blandishments of company, the Major still clung to his old formula: name, rank, number. Inwardly he felt a pang like a lover’s on learning that the friendly captain had been posted away.

  But where was he? The strength of human intelligence is that it can dwell in the imagination while also taking an acute interest in its physical surroundings. The Major clung to the thought of seeing Cathy again, but in other respects he had switched worlds. Now it was the aircraft carrier and his former life which hovered like something dreamt, something once seen on television. He had even switched sides – or, at least, the whole issue of side-taking seemed an invention. For much of the time, day and night, month after month, his forced wanderings had been accompanied by explosions, often beyond the horizon but sometimes frighteningly close. These were the bombs dropped by B-52s out of Thailand, Guam, who knew where, up and down the Trail. Countless tons of high explosive falling from airplanes so high they could neither be seen nor heard. H & I. Everywhere were enormous craters full of stagnant water, patches of forest reduced to matchwood, in one place a river casually re-routed by a collapsed ravine. Harassment and Interdiction; and it was the Major who was being harassed. In combat ‘friendly fire’ might describe a tragic mistake, malfunctioning equipment, incorrect orders, blind panic and even revenge. But this was not a combat zone in the usual sense. Half the time it wasn’t even Vietnamese territory. Bombs simply rained endlessly down into a rural backwater where they harassed and interdicted duck farmers, monkeys, virgin forest, conscript children pushing bicycles laden with howitzer parts or medical supplies, downed US Air Force majors. The issue of side-taking became blurred as he and his captors alike hugged the ground and was made no clearer afterwards when confronting the effects, ears still singing. Strangely, on the rare occasions when the bombs hit people the survivors never rounded on him in vengeance. It was as if to have lived through it was enough to be going on with; as if also his own bleeding and muddied body showed which side he was really on. The Major, like most airmen, had never witnessed ground combat first-hand. All he knew of war’s cost was, by chance, what he was now seeing: mainly peasants and boys in uniform doggedly rebuilding huts and bridges and replanting ricefields and carrying on. Some vast Gulliver had chanced to lie down on their world and they were either stealthily pegging him down, strand by imperceptible strand, or else they knew it was only a matter of time before he rolled over in another direction and they would be free again, like crushed grass crinking itself upright. For the moment, though, Gulliver was everything and everywhere, in the form of looted ‘C’ rations, Marlboros, field dressings, ponchos, even the woks and saucepans beaten out of the airframes of crashed American planes.

  So the Major moved nowhere, month after month, covering great distances in great pain, losing sides.

  *

  He was taking it a day at a time, sometimes still capable of admiring a dawn and often amazed to see another dusk. He was certainly able to reflect (he told the boy) that it had been a close call with the young captain. His entire life had been wrenched apart and restructured, a highly emotional business: he longed for an alliance with another human being. A fatal weakness, of course. They’d sniffed that out and no doubt ordered the captain to befriend him, to saunter alongside his hobble to talk about Le Grand Meaulnes, or why Edward Lear had painted better parrots than Audubon, offering him Marlboros, avoiding all mention of politics except to make a few risky quasinationalist remarks about how many centuries of enmity lay between the Vietnamese and the Chinese. This, the Major had guessed, was calculated to make him lower his guard. Were they not both of them educated and sophisticated men who knew that the emptiness of Communist rhetoric about a thousand years of friendship was simply the counterpart of White House blarney about impending victory? What survived, of course, was culture of a deeper sort, an observant human irony which transcended the idiocies of local dialectics. Men of the world, in short, finding that world savage and opaque and hoping to establish a small island of mutual sanity … And how nearly the Major had been suckered into yielding! The beautiful French, the touchingly flawed British English (where had the young captain learned that?), a comprehensible language at last in which – had he not caught himself in time – he might have begun to express himself in other than parrot fashion.

  Yet without knowing it the Major had failed. He had not asked himself why they had tried this tactic. Why hadn’t the captain talked about baseball or A. J. Foyt’s chances of winning the Indy 500? Why hadn’t he chatted about Zappa or Jagger or Diana Ross? How much, in short, did they already know about him? But stupefied as he was by his pains and loss, it never occurred to him that he might not be as anonymous in his rural backwater as it was to him. He tried talking to Cathy, but she skidded into the young Vietnamese captain, jaunty with bleak quotations from Baudelaire. She was too far away. He could feel her rendered vague by distance, thinning and wavering. The boy he had been, though, was made of more enduring stuff, surviving his father’s anger as he now was managing to survive, day by endless day, the general fury ranged against him. Inflexible as ever with his captors, he had moved inside himself, going backwards. ‘Of course,’ the boy told him reasonably, ‘it wouldn’t matter any longer if you did make a bogus confession. Nobody would believe it. Nobody in the States would believe it any more than the Vietnamese themselves. It would just be an exercise in pure rhetoric. Only you would believe in it, in fact. We’ve seen the real war now, right? We’ve seen what’s really happening on the ground, how little it has to do with issues of ideology and principle and everything to do with atrocious error, with expediency and face-saving. And we genuinely are sorry, aren’t we? Contrite and ashamed to be part of something so lethal and catastrophic, breaking open the lives of distant innocents who did nothing to deserve it. Not so much a personal repentance, perhaps, as a hopeless cultural regret.’

  He came to a place which had just been bombed. Jagged shards of metal were embedded in tree trunks, blued by intense heat, cauterising the wounds they made. The air reeked of high explosive, something like fart and pepper. Not a bird called. Chunks of red laterite still detached themselves from the craters’ lips and rolled towards the bottom, smoking. After ten months in the jungle he knew that smell from a distance. Even with the blindfold on he could recognise the scent of punished landscape, the sap and boiled earth. There seemed no point to the damage. The Major was accustomed to the fighter pilot’s honed view: precise targets on which cannon fire, missiles, or even
shiny napalm canisters converged. But this strategic bombing of a jungle in no country he could define felt less like an inaccurate weapon than an inaccurate war. Still he clung to his name, rank and number even though by now he was getting the gist of some of the words which flew past him like shrapnel.

  On the fringes of bombed areas immediately after a strike it was sometimes possible to find dead or injured animals such as snakes, monkeys, tree lizards and birds, all of which his captors would eagerly roast. The Major’s treatment had now risen to that of a dog, tossed the odd bone with a benign indifference. He had been inherited by different captors often enough for his ex-combatant status to have worn off. His clothes were so filthy and ragged, his head so bearded and thatched, that the knight of the air had vanished into a wild man of the woods, a species of feral mascot tugged behind on a light cord. And still he wouldn’t speak except to mutter his name and rank and number.

  One evening they came to the edge of a citrus grove. The Major was done for, his feet bleeding. He collapsed in a faint at the foot of a tree. He was woken by a soldier who brought him a bowl of music. The Major drank and his head cleared a little and still he heard the music. It was the sound of a piano. In the dusk, among the frogs and lizards calling, someone was playing Bach. He stared at the bowl. ‘I’m hallucinating,’ he told the boy. ‘I can’t last.’ ‘No, no,’ the boy urged him. ‘It’s real. Just listen.’