Foreign Soil

by Maxine Beneba Clarke

Loretta tidies the stack of envelopes on the table, absentmindedly taps her pen a few times, looks around. At the table next to her, two men in smart suits are chatting animatedly with a new arrival. By their name tags and the heavy black books they carry, Loretta guesses the two men are from a religious group of some kind. The misery of this place feeds the nutbags. They flock to the unhappiness, like bowerbirds to blue.

  A shadow falls over Loretta’s notepad. When she looks up, a young man, seventeen or eighteen maybe, meets her gaze. He’s tall, skin and bone, thick, wavy black hair falling into his eyes. Loretta stands to greet him, smiles, but he doesn’t reciprocate—just stands there, in the middle of the visiting room, slowly taking her in.

  * * *

  10:16:55. Asanka waits until the lawyer lady is seated again. She has red hair, like Chaminda said. Not red like blood, though, orange-red like sunset. Asanka hasn’t seen that before. Not in real life and close enough to touch.

  In this country, you look at a person and you know them. It is the inside-out way the people of this country wear their soul. In their eyes you can find civilizations of honesty or sweeping fields of lies. It’s taken some getting used to but now Asanka likes it—this casual unguardedness that comes from never really knowing fear.

  10:17:10. It takes Asanka only a few moments to commit her to memory. The Tigers taught him that—scanning for threats in a single moment. But the Tigers are long gone and he’s still doing it now, in here. He will never be rid of whom they have made him. Never. Asanka wants the bar of soap in his mouth again, wants to feel the burn of it traveling down into his stomach.

  She looks new, this lawyer lady. She looks new all over, and neat, and clean, and shiny. She looks like her clothes have just come from the shop, as if she has just run a comb through her hair this very minute. Her skin is pale and flecked with light brown freckles. It reminds Asanka of his mother’s kukul mas curry, of how the tender chicken looks when the gingery sauce has been slurped off, of soft meat that will fall apart on his tongue.

  10:17:51. Asanka wants to reach out and touch her. In this place, something so unbroken does not seem real.

  * * *

  Ponytail shakes his head as if he thinks Asanka’s crazy, but Chaminda runs a hand over his graying hair and turns to look in the direction Asanka’s pointing. He walks toward the cabin, the boat lurching as he goes. Asanka watches after Chaminda as he reaches out to steady himself, trails one hand against the outside wall of the cabin for balance until he reaches the small ladder. His friend climbs slowly up the rungs, crouches precariously on the roof.

  Asanka drags himself shakily up to kneeling position. His stomach has stopped convulsing now. His naked legs ache. The wind is cold around his private parts. They flap in the wind like a flag. One of the other men laughs, gathers Asanka’s discarded shorts and underwear from the deck and throws them at him.

  * * *

  “Chaminda is dead,” the young man says, looking her square in the face, and Loretta realizes who he must be.

  “Asanka.” The boy she’s heard so much about. The boy Chaminda insisted was actually a boy. She’s heard that story several times before at the center—enough to assume this particular young man might also be spinning Chaminda and Immigration a yarn about his age.

  “You need to come through to the bedroom and see Asanka,” Chaminda had begged her on one of the last occasions they’d met here.

  “Chaminda, I’m really sorry. I can’t go into that part of the center. You’ll have to get him to come out here.” She hadn’t taken it any further. Hadn’t asked after him.

  Asanka’s sizing her up, staring unblinkingly, the shiny black of his pupils indistinguishable from his cloudy black irises. “Yes. Chaminda, he told me about you too,” the young man says. “The red-haired lawyer who is going to get him free.” He glances quickly at his watch then—an ugly, bright blue plastic thing that looks like it might have come from a two-dollar shop. He looks back up at her, then down at the watch again, as if time’s passing too quickly and he’s in a hurry to be somewhere.

  “Do you want to sit?” Loretta gestures at the chair. It’s right in front of him, but he doesn’t seem to see it. He looks so young. So young. And now Chaminda’s not in here with him. Ever since she heard, Loretta’s been trying to push the whole thing to the back of her mind. The night she came back from the new job and heard Viv’s message on the answering machine she’d collapsed on the kitchen floor.

  Sam had found her there half an hour later. When she told him why she was so upset, he’d lost it. “Jesus, Lorri! For fuck’s sake, I thought there was something really fucking seriously wrong. These people, some of them just aren’t right in the head. It’s not surprising. But really, it’s ridiculous to be blaming yourself.”

  “I’m . . . not . . . blaming . . . my . . . self.” Loretta was sobbing. “I’m just . . . fuck, Sam, I’m upset. Somebody I know . . . knew . . . liked . . . is dead.” It’d felt like ice-cold fingers were closing around her lungs.

  Chaminda’s case file had been almost closed the day Loretta left the center. The departmental recommendation was that he be placed in the community within the month. Release memoranda had a habit of getting lost on their way down from the Secretary of Immigration, so Loretta had taped a fluoro-green reminder note to Viv’s computer monitor. She should have fucking known, though—better than that. It was emergency after emergency at the center, every working minute. Post-its got scribbled over, knocked off noticeboards, stuck to soles of shoes, used as coffee coasters, inadvertently ignored.

  “Yes,” Asanka says. “I will sit.” Sighing, as if under the sheer weight of this decision, he slides into the seat across from her, looks quickly around the room then back at his watch again.

  * * *

  10:19:09. The lawyer woman looked sad when she heard Chaminda’s name, the cloud moving across her face like the promise of rain. 10:19:19. She asked him to sit, so he is sitting. But Asanka wants to kneel down. He wants to put his arms around the lawyer lady’s waist and lean his head into her shoulder. He wants to feel her feathery hair brushing against his cheek. He wants to cry against her blue-and-white T-shirt. She is comforting to Asanka somehow, like the smell of slow-cooking kiribath.

  Chaminda made them both kiribath the night before he died. He’d begged the volunteer worker from the Brotherhood of St Laurence to bring in the coconut milk and rice. The grains had been firm from using the common room microwave. Still, when Asanka sat down to eat it with his friend, rice scalding their eager fingertips, steam swirling round their heads as they bent over the red plastic bowl, it was as if they were digging their way back home.

  “How are you?” she asks.

  10:20:03. Asanka stares at her thin white fingers. Her eyes are the color of the ocean when it is very, very calm. Her cheeks are coloring now, slowly turning red, like the just-sliced throat of a fish. How is he?

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Thank you for asking me,” he says, looking down at a small wad of blackened chewing gum squashed into the visiting room floor. “I am not good.”

  * * *

  Asanka’s legs are still numb with cold. He sits on the bench and rubs at them. The rest of the men gather at the side of the boat, staring across the ocean. The other boat is not like one Asanka has ever seen. It looks like it’s made of metal, a dull-bullet gray. The boat swoops into a sharp point at the front—it is all lines and triangles and scaffolding. The boat steers closer, riding low in the water. It’s almost camouflaged, even this close up. The other men laugh, pat each other on the back. Two of them are crying.

  “How did he see this boat?” Mustache says to Ponytail. “From so far away.”

  “The stilt fishermen,” Asanka says. “They showed me.”

  They both turn to look at him.

  “Everybody be reminded,” says Ponytail to the men, “do not say anything about us. We will make sure your families are notified that you have arrived. Remember: do not say anything about us.”r />
  The other boat’s moving toward them faster now, as if beneath the surface the ocean’s many fingers are hurriedly passing it over to them. Asanka stands, pain shooting down his legs. He moves closer to the huddle of men at the side of the boat. If they had a boat like that other one, they could have come here in just two weeks. They would have had enough water if they had a boat like that. They would not have had to drink dead fish.

  The boat pulls up alongside theirs. The two vessels float next to each other for a few minutes. The men on the fishing boat run to the side, pointing and laughing excitedly. Suddenly, Asanka notices weapons trained on them.

  “They have guns! They have come with guns!” There are guns pointing at them. Big machine guns stuck to the roof of the boat. Asanka lets his body fall, hits the deck hard, crouches into a ball. He screams and screams and screams. The men on the other boat are not Sri Lankans. They are not Tamil, and not government soldiers either. They are wearing uniforms. The men on the other boat are soldiers. Asanka has been a soldier, knows what soldiers are capable of. The wail comes from deep down inside his belly, but Asanka doesn’t recognize the sound. The sound is not coming from his body, but through it. Something is howling through him, through his mouth.

  Chaminda’s kneeling next to him. He pulls Asanka into his lap, holds him to his chest, clutches him so tightly he can barely move. “There are no guns,” Chaminda says. “There are no guns, little man. They are government people. And the government people in this country are not like they are in our country. They will help us.”

  * * *

  “You going to help me get out of here?” The young man shifts in his seat, scanning the room skittishly.

  “How old are you, Asanka?” Loretta asks.

  “I don’t know,” he says, glancing up at the bare white ceiling as if expecting to find something there. “When the Tigers took me, I was fourteen. I forget how long it’s been since then. There have been no birthdays. On the boat, we were thirty-seven days before they picked us up. I have been put in here for four hundred and twenty-one. I know this. I make marks. I make them inside the top drawer in my room. To count. The department saying they’re sending me back to Sri Lanka, but Chaminda said you can get me out of here.”

  She can’t get him out of here. She can’t even try. It’s not her job anymore. He wouldn’t understand, even if she explains it. He’s just a kid. He is a kid.

  “Chaminda said you would help me.” He fidgets his legs around under the table, checks his watch again. Then, with a suddenness that startles Loretta, Asanka stretches out both arms before him, splaying his hands across the writing pad in front of her. The thumb and pinky finger of his left hand are missing.

  “When the Tigers first made me fight with them, they brought me a girl from one of the villages. They told me I needed to have her, but she was so little and frightened that instead I helped her run from them. That day, the Tigers took my thumb.” The young man rubs the thick black stump at the inside edge of his hand. “The other finger they took later, when they caught me trying to run. There was no medicine. I used sewing needle and thread.”

  Loretta stares down at Asanka’s mangled hand, bile rising in her throat.

  “They keep coming, the Immigration,” he says. “They are asking me the same questions. They don’t listen. It is like I have no tongue.” His eyes are shadowed with that hopelessness that makes Loretta remember why she had wanted to do this work in the first place.

  “Uhh . . . I had a bag of sweets, but they . . . they made me leave them at the door.” As soon as she speaks, she feels foolish for even mentioning the treats.

  Asanka motions to where her handbag hangs over the back of the plastic chair. Loretta passes it over to him, embarrassed. Inside, there is almost nothing: purse, tissues, bobby pins, dental floss. Asanka rummages around, quickly pockets a few items, pushes the bag back toward her.

  “Sorry,” she offers again.

  There’s a commotion at the doorway of the visitors room. A group of six or so men and women, mostly suit-clad, are making their way into the room. They stop a few meters inside the doorway, quietly talking among themselves.

  “Why are they here?” Asanka gestures at them, looks at his watch again.

  That bloody watch. Chaminda was right, the kid is like a caged animal. Still jiggling his leg, he looks over at the noticeboard on the wall. Loretta follows his eyes to the aerial image of the earth. The globe is tilted to show Australia and the whole of the Pacific region. It’s been ripped out of a National Geographic or something. Loretta swears under her breath, wonders whether a staff member has placed it there as a taunt.

  “I’m not sure.” She sits for a moment, watching Asanka survey the well-dressed group.

  “They’re filming again. Outside the yard there. The government people.” He says it softly, as if talking to himself. Loretta can feel the heat of his anger from across the table. She reaches up, tucks her hair behind her ears, doesn’t know what to say next.

  Asanka cocks his head to one side, smiles, stares up at the ceiling. “I have to go now,” he says.

  Loretta stares after him. He walks in the opposite direction to the new visitors, heads through the doorway leading back into the center. When he reaches the hallway he slows, looks down at his feet, places one directly in front of the other, heel touching toe, as if balancing on a tightrope.

  * * *

  Asanka turns on the tap, lowers his head, takes a long drink. No matter where he drinks from—bottle, shower, tap, face upturned to the rain in the recreation yard—the water always tastes like fish blood. Like sand and salt.

  Asanka searches his jeans pocket and pulls out one of the lawyer’s thin black hairpins. He peers closely at it under the fluorescent lights. Two wavy red strands of the lawyer’s hair are caught in its crook. With his good hand, Asanka carefully pulls the hairs from the thin piece of metal. He watches, mesmerized, as they float to the floor.

  Asanka bends the pin straight. There’s a plastic bubble on one end of it, to stop it from hurting her head when she pins her hair back. Asanka drags the rounded end of the hairpin across the brick bathroom wall. He coughs loudly to disguise the sound. He scrapes and scrapes until the round plastic ends have come off, keeps scraping until the metal underneath has been formed into sharp points. Coughs. Holds the hairpin up to the light, jabs the pointy metal ends hard into his finger until he punctures the skin. He can’t feel anything. He is already dead. He does not exist anymore. If he slipped quietly into the water in the dead of night, if he disappeared off the boat, then in the morning, people would wonder whether he was ever actually there at all. They would not even remember his name.

  Asanka can hear the fishermen swishing with their rods, can hear their stilts shifting against the wind. He looks past the bathroom entrance, scans the bedroom, but he can’t see them anywhere.

  He searches his pocket for the teeth-cleaning thread. There is a red sticker on the small white plastic packet, showing a white lady’s chin. Her mouth is lipstick-red. Her teeth are white and straight, and she is smiling. It does not look like a pretend smile. The smile looks real and happy. Asanka tears off a long section of teeth thread with the metal cutter, winds the middle of it tightly around the center of the bobby pin six or seven times.

  The ends of the hairpin are sharp now, but the center of it is still so thick that the flesh on Asanka’s bottom lip bulges shiny-tight as he makes the first incision. He pulls the pin all the way through his lip. It leaves a bloody hole, but does not hurt. Not like his fingers did. Asanka moves the hairpin in and out, dabs the blood away with the tissues from the lawyer lady’s bag. The tissues are so soft in his fingers. Asanka hasn’t felt tissues this soft since he lived in Dehiwala, in his parents’ house. Asanka wonders if his father’s still alive. He checks for the time. The watch isn’t on his wrist. He checks the bathroom sink, but it’s not there either. It could be in the hallway. Maybe it fell off while he was talking to her. Could be the fishermen hook
ed it off his wrist as he passed under them.

  Asanka leans forward, blood all over his fingertips, dripping into the sink. He clumsily ties a knot in the thread, drawing the stitches tight, tugging his lips together. Beads of blood gather beneath his bottom lip and above the top one, ringing his mouth in red. He doesn’t feel anything. The head doctor was right—the blood isn’t there. He is safe. He stops for a moment, admiring the eight perfectly vertical mint-scented stitches. They remind him of his mother, of the embroidery she used to do on the dish towels she made for their kitchen.

  Asanka holds a wad of tissue to his mouth, bows his head low as he walks back toward the visitors room. The fishermen are back. They are waiting for him, upside down, on the ceiling. They wave, smile, shake their fish bags at him.

  The government people are in the outside visiting area now, by the tables and chairs. Asanka holds the tissue to his mouth, walks quickly past the people gathered in the visiting room, steps through the sliding doors to the outside area. He can’t feel the ground beneath his feet. The whole world is quiet, distant. From the other side of the silence Asanka can hear Atlas, gasping for breath.

  * * *

  From the deck of the Australians’ boat, the fishing boat Asanka came on seems so small. The Australians are climbing over it, roping it behind their boat. The fisher bobs up and down as if trying to escape, as though if it could only break free of them it would be able to find its way back home. It wants to backtrack through the black, uncertain, violent nights, through the impossibly golden sunrises. It wants to bob home unmanned across the flat, to that deserted beach just around the coast from Galle.

  The blanket the Australian wrapped around Asanka is scratchy against his raw, wet skin. They are passing out bottles of water, unscrewing the caps. The way they move about from person to person, speaking softly to them, handing out blankets and water, makes Asanka realize they have done this many times before.