Wall of Days

by Alastair Bruce

  They seem to be trying to forget. That would be a tragedy. It is only the weak who forget their past. If you kill a man who has no memory of his place in the world, none of the ties that bind him to his community, can you say you have really killed a man at all? What is a man but his past and his companions? There would be no loss felt. With peoples too. Only a weak people forgets its past, a nation that can be wiped out and restarted without anyone noticing. In place of a history, only a silence with no one to hear it. A pathetic people and if that is what they choose then they deserve what comes to them.

  My people have been given a history by war. They were trimmed down the better to face an inhospitable world. That is the history of these people. The man running away, the one who knocked me over, the people sitting in the kitchens ignoring me, the Marshal, Elba, they should not forget where they came from. Born of hunger and necessity they are the survivors, they are the ones that had to bear the burden of the future, a future that the weak impinged upon. Do they feel guilt?

  That is not their burden. There is no question of guilt anywhere in this land, there has been no guilt since we first started fighting, since we first started slitting each other’s throats in a frantic bid to survive.

  These people do not have the imagination to feel guilt. They do not have the right to feel it.

  Is it simply a case of forcing them into remembrance, forced memory? Is it simply a case of gathering enough proof so they cannot deny me, until they take a breath and pluck up the courage to stare the past – and me – in the face?

  Duty is what they should feel. Not guilt but duty. They have a duty as the last representatives of a once-dominant species to remember that which came before. For we have nothing else.

  It is disappointing to me what they seem to have become. Shadows.

  Ghosts. Have I created them like this? Have I scared them into hiding in the corners like children? No. I too am the product of a shattered world. But I showed how it can be mended, how it can be pulled together piece by bloody piece.

  I see them approach from afar, one much taller than the other. Elba and Amhara. They have already seen me. I stop and wait for them to come closer. Amhara wears a red coat. Again I am reminded of when I first saw her. I have the same feeling now I had then.

  ‘Morning,’ Elba says.

  ‘Hello Elba. Hello Amhara.’ The girl looks at the ground.

  Elba continues, ‘I am sorry if I was abrupt last night.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Would you like to try again?’ she asks.

  ‘Try calling again?’

  ‘No. Well, yes. I am trying to invite you to dinner again,’ she says.

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘I would like that,’ I reply.

  ‘Good.’ She does not say goodbye but turns and is off. I watch them make their way down the street. At the corner, Amhara turns to look at me. I wave at her. She does not wave back.

  There is a limit to what I can do during daylight but there are at least two things. I can start knocking on doors, trying to find someone who I recognise or someone who will talk to me. I can also head back into the orange groves and to the clearing in the middle of it, the place where we hanged the weak.

  Of course there is the risk that they will shut the gates when I am out and not allow me back in but I will have to take that risk. I want to find evidence of my work. Some documents were stored in a hut on the site and if they are still there might help my case.

  On my way to the gates I see Andalus in the distance. I am annoyed at his wanderings but I cannot keep him close, in my vision, all the time and still pursue the truth.

  I am not used to limitations. On the island the limits were only of my choosing.

  I call to him but he is too far off. He is a grey shape in the distance, a shape broken up by the heat mirage. I am reminded of the first morning at the town gates. I run to catch up with him. He turns a corner and is gone. I beat the wall of a house with my fist. The door to the house opens. It opens towards me. I can see a man’ s shadow between gap and frame. I wait for him to show his face. He does not come out. The door begins to close. I shout and run towards it but I am too late.

  I walk through the trees, through the dappled, green light, dragging my hands through the grass and along the bark of the trees.

  I walk through the light, the sun cooled by the shade of the citrus leaves. I lift my hands to my face. I smell the acids, the oils. I realise, in some ways I am entranced by my old town, by what it has become. Entranced and frustrated. Can one give oneself over to love completely that which is not perfect, that which is wrong?

  I want to say yes. Part of me wants to yield to the town. I know I could slip back into its embrace, yield myself to the caresses of Elba, forget about Abel, about Tora, about my part in all this. I could raise the girl, perhaps start a family of my own. Begin over.

  Though that may not be possible. Elba has reached the age where it would be dangerous for her to give birth. A surrogate family then. Something not perfect, something incomplete, impure. Too far on in history for purity.

  And too many questions. Too many things left unfinished for there to be satisfaction in a quiet life.

  Some of the fruit is so low I have to duck as I walk under the branches. In places the thick foliage makes it dark. I walk deep into the orchard seeing no one. There is no sound other than my footsteps. I am amazed at the abundance of fruit. Some of it is overripe, as if they have more than enough and could not be bothered to pick it. In my day we harvested what we could and kept watch over it to prevent theft. But there is no one here.

  I break through the trees suddenly and find myself in a sun-filled clearing. Trees give way to long green grass, and in the centre, quite incongruous for our settlement, a stone hut, about four by four metres.

  Though the surrounds have changed much, somehow I have found my way here easily. All those years ago there were just a few trees. Trees that were sturdier than orange trees. A few of these are still standing, I notice, still standing in a circle around the hut.

  I kept this place fenced off. It was a mile from the settlement gates, not quite out of sight. I have been walking over the graves for the last hundred metres. We used to bury them here, here where they died. We started at the hut and buried them in circles, spiralling away from the centre as we had to bury more and more.

  We buried them in shallow graves with their faces pointing skywards. That way, some believed, they could rise again to join a better world, a world made possible by their passing. Often several bodies to a grave. We buried them but our burial was not a forgetting, was not meant to be a forgetting. I am angry that the markers seem to have been removed. We were careful to mark the graves with a small pile of stones. But they have not been moved. I scuff the grass with my foot and disturb a pile. Not moved, just buried and forgotten. At least they are still here but they should not be overgrown like this. If there was so much fuss about what we did to these people, why then have they not been remembered? This is not remembrance, leaving the graves to be overgrown by grass and fruit trees. I have a vision of a corpse in the earth. The roots of an orange tree pierce the earth, pierce the bag, pierce the flesh of man. The fruit of the trees that feed the town nourished by the death of our ancestors.

  On the other hand, better a fruit orchard and undisturbed peace than dry ground, a baking sun and a few small stones as a monument in a bleak landscape.

  I have brought the island stone with me. I remove it from my bag and look around the clearing for somewhere to put it. There is no obvious place. It seems a hollow gesture but I place the stone on the ground before me. It is darker than the others I have disturbed. I straighten up and take a deep breath. I am left feeling flat.

  I walk up to the hut. The one window is boarded up though not entirely. Two planks form an x. The door has been nailed shut. I peer in. It takes a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. There is not much to see. At first glance it seems everything has been rem
oved.

  But not everything. A white shape lies sprawled across the table inside.

  I jerk back. The shape of a head, two lumps at the end for feet, an arm hanging down at one side. It does not move. I know of course it is not a body. But the sight of it brought it back. Real enough. An imagined body standing in place of hundreds before it. It fills the space of the dead.

  I kick the door in. I approach the shape slowly, walking through dust. There are dust motes in the air like flies. They shimmer in the shaft of light coming through the doorway. I walk up to it, reach out my hand, touch it. It gives in easily when I touch it. It is one of the bags we stored people in before burial. For a moment I think I will see Tora’s mother when I tear it open, as if she had died yesterday, but all I see inside are more of the bags. They seem to have been arranged to look like a corpse. Why I don’t know. I pull them out one by one. More dust.

  There is a scuttling from behind me. I wheel around sharply but see nothing. At the door I squint against the light. I can see no one. ‘Who’s there?’ I shout. No answer. I walk around the hut to the other side but there is nothing and I hear no more sounds. A rabbit, I assume. I re-enter the hut and dismantle the pretend corpse. I find myself sneezing from the dust. The noise startles me again.

  I look around the room. Everything has been removed, except for the table and the bags. There was never much call for equipment. A chair, a table, a small platform, a cabinet, some rope, a stove for heating food for the guards, knives, twine, bags. That was it.

  The cabinet, which used to contain records, is gone.

  I walk to the far wall. I raise my hand to it. I run my fingers over the marks. We made a small mark with a stone on the wall of the hut.

  The seventh line we drew crossed the previous six. At the end of fifty-two of these we started a new row. Why we measured the dead in this way, the way we measured time, I cannot recall. Did each death mean another day’s life granted to the settlement? Perhaps. But it is a sign of respect too. A mark, inscribed in stone, will never die.

  I step back. The marks reach across the wall and from floor to ceiling. I am surrounded by them. Suffocated.

  I know how many of them there are. I do not have to count. There are nine hundred and seventeen scratches on the wall.

  I can remember the name behind the first mark, the name behind the last, some in between. I tried on the island to remember more. I lay on my bed each night and went over the names, glancing over at the cave wall. I willed myself to remember more. After a while I’d force myself to stop by listening only to the wind, the waves. I did not think about Bran, about Tora, Abel, about my banishment. Just the names.

  Only the names. The faces, mostly blank, nameless, pushed against the rock of my cave, against the wall of days, straining to get through. I shut my eyes to keep them out.

  When Tora came to me after I hanged her mother I held her close.

  I hugged her and felt my heart leap. But then I looked at my hands on her back. I remembered the blood, the blood of her mother on my hands, hands separated from Tora’s skin by just a thin dress. I let go of her with that hand, held on tighter with the other. I think though, it seemed as if I wanted to let her go. I did not. I wanted to carry on holding her. On and on. She looked hurt. I could not explain. She broke my grip, brushed past me and went to pour herself a glass of water.

  For each one of the nine hundred and seventeen I gave to myself the task of pronouncing the c-grade. I took this on myself. For each I pronounced death. Some cried. Some tried to attack me. Most were too feeble. I have been cursed a thousand times.

  I close the door and go outside and again walk round the back of the hut. It is overgrown, the trees unpruned. My feet bury themselves in rotting fruit, weeds, dead branches. Like mud. I kick at it. My boots dislodge something hard. I bend down to pick it up. It is a few centimetres long and caked in brown earth. It is not wood, it is much too hard for that. I wipe off some of the earth. I can see the pores now. It is bone, of that I’m sure. From what I do not know. It could be anything: dog, human. I kick away more of the earth and get down to my hands and knees and dig a little deeper. The digging is tough and I can only go a short way down, barely scratching the surface. With better implements I could, I know, uncover whole skeletons. But what would that prove? Without names it proves nothing. But I do find another. I pull it out. It is from the leg of a human. I wrench it out of the earth, stones and leaves scattering as I do. I stand there with it. I stand there with the bone of a man’s leg in my hand and I tilt my head back and my eyes shut against the light.

  There are patterns on my eyelids made by the light. I open and close them, again and again, hoping the shapes will go away. They return brighter and brighter. I begin to see their faces. Their faces start to come back. I am surrounded by trees. From each branch hangs a corpse. Ants crawl over their skin. The corpses stretch back into the grove, back far into the dark of the orchard. The black bodies sway gently in the breeze. I can hear the ropes creak.

  It is late afternoon when I get back to the town. I make my way to the shelter. Andalus has re-appeared. He is dozing in the late sun, leaning against a wall. I sit next to him, our shoulders touching. He wakes but does not move. I tilt my head towards him. In a way his bulk is comforting. Real. I pat him on the hand. ‘Andalus,’ I say. ‘Andalus. I am getting nowhere. I came here to save us but I am getting nowhere.’

  He does not answer. He has his arms resting on his legs. An image crosses my mind. I saw this picture as a child. I found it in a ruin my group came across as we moved south. In the picture were creatures shaped like men but with bigger jaws and heavier foreheads. They were covered in black hair and standing in a forest of the lushest green. To my child’s mind they were both frightening and alluring. If I think back, perhaps that is what helped make me more curious about the past than others: a picture of strange beasts in a strange land. I showed it to no one. My parents had been dead a long time – I only ever had a vague idea of what they looked like – and I had few friends. But it was something I would not have shared even if things had been different.

  I kept it for years. One of the animals was sitting in exactly the same position as Andalus is now. How has he come to this? I am beginning to believe he is not simply traumatised by whatever happened to him in Axum but has lost his reason as well. The possibility has to exist that nothing happened to him. No big trauma, no big event, no mutiny, uprising or trial. Perhaps he lost his reason and simply wandered off one day never to return. Kept alive by the colony as an indication of humanity to a once-great ruler, one day he simply slipped his velvet shackles and sloped off. A not entirely unreasonable explanation.

  I think again of another possibility. He is cleverer than I am. He spies me on an island, begins an act, an elaborate ruse. I bring him back, he worms his way into favour here and leads an army back across the seas and the plains to re-conquer Axum, take it back from the mutineers, from the third force, and impose law and order. He is biding his time, waiting for the right moment to speak. In the end his play will out.

  I wonder how it would be if the situation was reversed. If I had been exiled, sailed unknowing into Axum territory, encountered Andalus alone on an island, what would I have done?

  I continue: ‘They are hiding from us, Andalus. Of that I am becoming convinced. What other explanation could there be? It has only been ten years. They have locked away Abel and Tora. Either that or Abel is directing it. His name is still on the wall. Anyone who knows me well remains out of sight while I wander the streets. While I am here their lives are in hiatus. The only people allowed on the street are children and the ones they know I won’t know.’

  I lean my head against the wall.

  ‘Of course, I have no proof of this. It is merely a theory. And I don’t understand why. Why not put an arrow through me and be done with it? Why not face me and say, “No, you are not allowed. Be gone.” It seems weak. A mark of weakness.’

  I look over to him. ‘I need yo
ur help, Andalus. I will get to the truth.

  I will force it out of these people one way or the other. I will force them to acknowledge me, like I, like we in fact, forced them to face the truth of our situation all those years ago. But it will be quicker if you help.’

  I turn to him. ‘Don’t you want to fix things? Don’t you want an end to all this? To all the thoughts, all the ghosts, the hundreds of ghosts?’

  And then he shakes his head. It is so slight I might have imagined it. I wait but there is no further movement.

  ‘Is that your answer, Andalus? Is that your answer? No? Don’t you feel anything?’

  His head is pointed away from me now. It is still. Perhaps he was just moving to get away. Not answering. His eyes are closed. I pull his face towards me and they open. ‘Did you give me an answer?’

  His eyes have a vacant look. They remind me of the ocean we sailed across. Blue-grey. Lifeless. But somewhere in there, drowned perhaps, a sapphire city, a memorial to a great man, a memory, a history.

  When I arrive at Elba’s later, Amhara opens the door. Before I can say anything she has run off leaving me to enter the flat on my own.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘In here. In the kitchen.’

  Elba is bent over a small stove.

  ‘I thought all those had long since been confiscated,’ I say, nodding in the direction of the stove.

  She laughs. ‘No. We are allowed now.’

  ‘So you do acknowledge things have changed,’ I say.

  She looks around, a puzzled expression on her face. ‘Of course. Things change all the time.’ It is as if she is challenging me. There is a smell in the kitchen that makes my stomach rumble. I have not eaten all day. Amhara rushes in and goes straight to her mother, whispering in her ear.

  Elba turns around. ‘My daughter would like you to tell her a story.’

  She smiles apologetically. Amhara turns sharply and looks angrily at her mother. It is only momentarily though and I might be mistaken. I decide to ignore it.