The Letter Bearer

by Robert Allison

  He returns the photo. ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Myself, about three months now. The others a bit longer.’

  The rider coughs, alerted once more to his vital rhythms.

  ‘I was with the First Armoured. RASC.’ Coates pulls a packet of cigarettes from his shirt and proffers one to the rider, who declines. ‘The others made their way down here after Sidi Rezegh. Their units got torn up pretty bad there. Swann was a driver with the Sharpshooters, the Third London. He reckons the rest of his guys ended up POWs. Brinkhurst doesn’t admit to much, but Swann reckons he was a captain with the Second Rifles. I figure Mawdsley threw in with him for the breakout.’ He lights a cigarette. ‘They had another guy with them at first. Cavalry guy, Hussars. He had a bullet in his gut. Hung on for a while, but . . .’ He gestures towards the gravesite. ‘Had a narrow miss myself. I was driving a rations truck to the regiment at Agedabia when we came up against pretty much the whole damn Afrika Korps. Scattered us all to hell. I strayed too far south. Damn truck bust an axle. Lucky these guys spotted me on a recce.’ He breathes in smoke. ‘We don’t have a working wireless here. I guess Brinkhurst hoped you’d have news.’

  ‘You seem well provisioned.’

  ‘I had a full truck. We picked up some stuff from a shot-up convoy on the way to Hakeim. We’ve been doing OK.’ He nods towards the chickens. ‘Better than OK if you’re partial to eggs. There’s stuff we can use for trade with the wogs, too. Sometimes we can pick up supplies from killed vehicles if we head a ways north. Fuel, ammo, med packs. Water’s a bitch.’

  ‘That’s where Swann goes?’

  Coates’ mouths flatten as he draws on the cigarette. ‘You got old birs dotted all around here, some not on the maps. Mostly dried up. Water’s usually shit but we can try and filter it. Otherwise it’s for wash-up and the radiators.’

  The rider feels a pang of envy. Swann mapping a path across the emptiness, forearm recumbent on the door sill, skin brushed in quartz. A bully with the blood of a pilgrim. He gestures towards the wheel. ‘He might at least take his pet with him.’

  ‘Swann and scorpions. He hates ’em like you and me hate flies. One stung him back at Beni Yusef and he went into shock, nearly didn’t pull through.’

  The rider finds himself warming to Rommel.

  ‘Now he’s aiming to bag himself a tarantula. Or maybe some big-ass ants. Then have himself a little prize fight, take some bets.’

  The rider points towards the POW. ‘And him?’

  ‘Lucky? Warrant Officer Ettore Lucchi. From Siena. He was a gunner in the Ariete Division. You ever been to Tuscany? My God, it’s beautiful. He came in as Swann’s prisoner.’

  ‘He doesn’t seem the type. To take prisoners.’

  ‘There’s something between them. It’s personal. Who knows?’ Coates catches sight of Lucchi signalling to him and waves back. ‘Got a game. Let me know if you’re in for a hand or two later.’

  ‘Good luck,’ says the rider, a little dismayed not to have received sympathy for his own predicament. But then perhaps it should come as no surprise, all here clearly avowed to the cause of self-interest.

  The afternoon passes without incident, the air becoming static, windless, allowing the heat to build, obliging all to retire to their tents. Swann returns early from his expedition and voices concern at the stillness, judging it the precursor to some fierce storm, as is common at the close of the Khamsin season. Best keep an eye southward, he warns, the desert will gather there. The rider’s attention meanwhile commanded by the camp’s beggarly memorial, his own likely resting place. There are only shallow graves here: the sand upheaved by the wind, bones working ineluctably to the surface, depositions of knuckle, rib and longbone distributed among the minerals and glasses of whalebacks. Only those ancients deep within their caskets fortunate enough not to be cast into the sprawling ossuary. One could think of it as a kind of immortality, a perpetuity of carbonates. It makes the yearning for individuality – an identity – seem quite futile. But he can’t stop thinking of the spit hawker’s photograph. He can’t stop thinking he might have a wife.

  Later, Brinkhurst visits with a selection of clean clothing. The tent, he explains, had previously been occupied by Lucchi, the Italian having recently been bivouacked by the truck. But as the rider no longer requires undisturbed rest, they can now share. It won’t be a problem.

  The Italian’s belongings are scant – a small Bible, a candle and holder and woollen bedroll – and he is reinstalled with a minimum of fuss, offering nothing but a polite nod throughout. When the rehousing is complete, he unfolds himself with quiet grace upon his bunk and stares upward as though the canvas might narrow to some distant window. A man withdrawn from the burdens of partisanship, decides the rider. But unsure whether to mourn the loss.

  In the late evening he wakes to find the Italian scrabbling around the floor, his face a mask of dismay. He has opened the tent flaps to allow moonlight in and is using his candle as a flashlight, shading it with his hand so as not to compromise the statutory blackout. ‘Il mio orologio,’ he whispers, tapping his wrist. His watch: he’s lost his watch. The rider raises himself up onto his elbow and peers into the shadows, his fingers straying to his own empty wrist. Perhaps he ought to help. If he means to have any sleep, that is. But then the Italian manages to find the missing watch and holds it up in a display of relief, allowing the rider to settle again and look on with half-closed eyes as he pulls the wedding ring from his finger and places it beside the candle and the watch on a locker. When the appointed time arrives he closes his eyes and touches his breast and lips, the meaning of it undisguised. This hour stands untouched. I marry you again in the moment.

  The rider shifts beneath his blanket, turning away from the ceremony, suddenly envious of his tent-mate: that he should possess such clear evidence of himself.

  Tomorrow he will ask Brinkhurst for the return of his postbag. Tomorrow he will read the letters.

  4

  A sandstorm is coming. Swann is first to give warning, rushing into one tent after another to raise the alarm while Lucchi shakes the rider’s arm to urge him from sleep, both of them hurrying outside to find the early-morning air cold and heavy, laid like a charge.

  They join the others in gazing southward, where they can see beyond the ellipse of basalt a vast wall of cloud rolling towards them, chimneys of dust spiralling upward across its breadth, its hues tumbling as it gathers in the light, pinks becoming golds becoming ochres, each shift appearing to the rider as a magmatic glower. A seismicity only at this range, signalled beyond the register of the human ear, it can be no more than a dozen miles distant, billowing towards them at ungaugable speed. There’s little time to prepare.

  Each man hurries to his task, sealing the tents at their south-facing entrances, weighting the canvas with rocks and sandbags and opening the north-facing exits. They collect up any tools and implements lying loose, stowing or rolling them beneath the chassis of the Fordson – entrenching tools, pots and mugs, oilcans, water cans, garments pulled from the washing line – while lesser or smaller items are left unchecked and abandoned: spark plugs, a paperback novel, muslin fuel filters, paper chess pieces. Swann throws a sheet of corrugated tin over his scorpion arena – there’s to be no escape for Rommel. They fasten up the cookhouse with sheets of canvas, weighting them with ammunition boxes, then Swann and Brinkhurst raise the Fordson’s windows and secure the tie ropes for its tarp while Coates hauls the remainder of the corrugated sheets from the gas-burner ditch and stacks them against the Quad.

  All retreat to their respective tents.

  The chickens! Lucchi is first to realise the oversight and dashes from his shelter. For a few minutes he scrambles around the pen with one bird under his arm while comically pursuing its flapping companion. He thrusts both into the cab of the Fordson and races back.

  The storm bears upon them as a darkening, the entire camp falling into shadow. The smaller grains lifted first, followed by the larger,
as though subject to some inverted gravity, each article rived upward by order of mass. And then at once they are enveloped, a shrill canticle descending about them as the tents are snatched violently back and forth in the currents, all within obliged to shield their eyes, mouths and noses from the barrage of grit. There seems no limit in girth or weight that such a force might transport, and for a brief time each man fears being torn from his anchorage and pirouetted up into the fury.

  The storm persists for several hours, the worst at last giving way to a coma of more moderate breezes, allowing the deserters to emerge from their protracted encagement. Each man beguiled now by the gentle abrasion of sand over uncovered skin.

  Intent on the sensation, the rider moves to leave his tent only to be halted by a caution from Mawdsley. The shifting pressures and soiled air might overtax his lungs, he is warned, precipitating that waterless drowning, the last feeble quickening of heart muscle. As if such a thing might daunt a man whose fate has already been prescribed. What other defiance, after all, remains to him? Crouching at the exit of the tent, he lifts the blanket from his shoulders and steps out into the wind.

  There is at first a moment of calm, a charitable euphoria. He stands bare-chested, his arms outstretched, his eyes closed, feeling the coolness of the air, fine sand alighting upon his skin like ash. He hangs like a puppet in the drafts, a child’s idea of an aeroplane, sensing only the vestibular yaw, the loss of compass. Soon he hopes to feel the suffusing of minerals through his skin, into his bones. He might become solid before his lungs seize, before his heart stops. He might – like Lot’s wife – become a pillar of salt. Or a statue of himself, a final irony.

  He takes a deep breath and folds double with coughing just as Lucchi reaches him, the Italian hefting him onto his shoulder like a rolled carpet. He pulls him from the clouds and back inside the tent, where he lays him choking on the floor. The rider coughs up a slurried spit then lapses into silence, staring up at the tent’s warped apex. Lucchi holding his hand, as though that small tenderness might repair him. ‘Pazzo,’ he murmurs, shaking his head. Crazy.

  The sandstorm persists with lesser severity into early afternoon, the sun maintaining its pallor, dense flurries stalling any excavation of the camp. For Swann the inactivity is purgatory, the lance corporal bringing his face to his tent’s opening every half-hour in the hope of clearer air. The others content to wait, resigned to their enforced idleness. Other than Mawdsley, only Brinkhurst deigns to visit the rider, bringing with him the requested postbag of letters along with a roll of shaving implements and soap. A man will find his temper and self-regard improved if he attends to his appearance: it’s a proven fact. The rider accepts with grace, cognisant that those tissues growing most readily will be the last to decay post-mortem: the hair, the nails. They might one day name a man from his hair.

  Within the shaving kit is a mirror, which he takes up with some trepidation, viewing himself at arm’s length before moving it closer. Nothing of what he sees encouraging any recall. Not the lacerated brow, the contusioned and swollen cheeks, the bearded jaw. One disguise on top of another. He might just as well study those inscrutable marbles of antiquity as discover himself in so spoilt a mask.

  Brinkhurst leaves him in the company of Lucchi, seated across from him on his mattress, his field cap tight in his hands. Perhaps the Italian had expected recognition for his chivalry and is mystified at the ingratitude. If they could converse in any meaningful way they might explain one another. Instead there can only be codes and sketches, an improvised shorthand, both remaining for the most part mysterious, unable to secure any base for friendship.

  The rider takes up the postbag, pausing momentarily before emptying it. For the patient whose lungs are nearing exhaustion it might be kinder to remain unknowing, reset to this blank state, insulated from grief. Were it not for curiosity . . .

  He gently tips the letters onto the mattress and sorts them alphabetically: Fitzhugh (two under that name) – Hopgood-Banks – Lindqvuist (two also) – Oxburgh – Tuck (two again, but with different handwriting) – Warren. Six names in total among nine letters, nearly all belonging to soldiers of the Third Royal Tank Regiment. All of them enlisted men except for a single officer. Most are written on lightweight, self-sealing airmail letter cards, some bearing the flat-rate threepenny stamp, with several showing burn marks or dark staining. The rest penned on air-graph forms, intended to be photographed and sent in bulk as rolls of microfilm. He finds the majority of the letters unsealed, and is surprised. Has he read them already? He can’t remember doing so. Brinkhurst, perhaps? That would be an unconscionable trespass, to look as a mere distraction into the thoughts of these men who have crept into trenches and turrets and turned to words as a defence.

  And there is no mistaking the purpose here, even allowing for the occasional joviality or robustness of spirit among them. Each composed with thoughtful deliberation as a message of farewell. Private longings at last declared, a final invocation of hopes and wishes. Letters written in preparation for the worst, but displaying a quiet grace in the surrender.

  The thought tightens his stomach: all these testimonies put somehow into his care, that fate which their authors had anticipated having presumably arrived upon them. A postman. A great thing.

  But had that been his true office? He had worn no courier’s apparel, had owned no rider’s helmet. No thought or instinct of that commission ever falling upon him. Perhaps, then, one of the writers? A lone survivor? Though none of the names is familiar to him, as might be expected. So he practises for a little while in his own hand, penning examples of the upstroke, the downstroke, the cursive bridge, the arabesque, comparing each to those he finds. But nowhere among them can he see a match, his not quite the same as an , his not matching a . Could the brain when damaged possibly reassign the force and influence of each finger, the entire graphology rebalanced?

  Brinkhurst returns to the tent with news. The air is clearer now, blue sky again visible, a plume of smoke sighted north of the camp. Possibly a plane crash, an unfortunate pilot caught out by the storm, obliging a reconnaissance of the site. The others are already digging out the vehicles, with Lucchi made to help. Better however for the rider to stay behind. Because he ‘needs to rest’ and because ‘it could be a rough run’. And an enterprise ill suited to those inclined towards lackadaisical suicide.

  Within twenty minutes the vehicles are ready and loaded, and the rider moves to the opening of his tent to watch as they navigate the submerged archaeology of the camp. Swann conspicuous in displaying his insignia, he notes, the others having stripped away their emblems of rank, leaving only the lance corporal certain in the idea of himself. In a more admirable soul it might be a virtue.

  By the time the sound of the engines has faded, he is back among the letters, oblivious to the heat and the resurgent flies.

  5

  So what process for this enquiry? Where to begin?

  He lays out the letters with each opening page side by side, looking at first to each greeting in the hope of a familiar endearment. My dear/My darling/Sweetheart/My beloved wife/Dearest mother. None pricking at his memory, each custom as impersonal to him as the next. Perhaps, then, something in the voices?

  Most seem of similar character, being neither angry nor bitter in tone but offering only gentle apologies for their own end. I am sorry this must fall upon you, or I fear this will put you in an awful way, or My regret is to have let you down. No talk of homecoming among them, nor of reunion, but rather entreaties to fortitude, an encouragement to endure. Please look after Mother and Father/Your darling sister will help you through the worst/This must not bring you to despair, Mother dear. Others almost businesslike in addressing the matter of bequeathals, the blunt details of will and testament. There is the remaining £1,250 from the sale of my parents’ house/My life insurance policy with Pearl/The £26 in my Post Office Savings account.

  I could not be such a man, he decides. Not so well disposed to a cold reckoning. />
  Rather he finds himself drawn to those who think instead of family, ordaining their hopes and wishes for children soon to be fatherless.

  I should like for him to know the countryside, to spend some time in unspoilt air . . .

  And,

  . . . it would please me if he might in his studies learn something of the wider world . . .

  I might ask the very same things, he thinks, as this . . . ‘Cpl Keaton Fitzhugh’, had I a son to ask them for. But how would I know? Would I remember him? One imagines such a knowledge inscribed upon one’s very being, a question of spirit rather than biology.

  But then had all fathers known their sons?

  Thank you . . .

  Writes ‘Cpl Graham Lindqvuist’,

  . . . for sending me a lock of his hair, which still surprises me for being so fair. Though I suppose it may darken, as mine did. Such an odd business, this choice of character. I hope you can at least find me in those blue-grey eyes you speak of. And in other ways as the years gather on him.

  He scans for the boy’s name. Ben. Benjamin. The shape and sound of it eliciting nothing. He puts the letter aside and takes up another, this one from a ‘Trooper Edward Oxburgh’ (to his sweetheart?)

  I have thought of you so very much in writing this, and have brought the sense and picture of you so close to me that I do not think that I can ever be put apart from you. All my prayers . . .

  A deferral to God. Could one ever forget His grace, if one had known it? He picks another.

  I must try to think of this in the best way I can – as a way to let you know with absolute certainty that I was not afraid, and that everything I faced here was made easier by the thought of you with me. Throughout all you have been my best armour and keenest sense, and my resolve here would have been by far the poorer without you.