Continent

by Jim Crace

  And, here, a picture of me, the brother, the nervous clerk, should take its place, my polished shoes six inches from the river, my voice just audible, my manner prudent, cautious, sly – the perfect citizen of a town where jeeps and empty market stalls, sweeping motorcades of politicians in black Panache saloons and a garrison of tough and narrow conscripts made the streets wayward with apprehension. And so it was gently that I called again to ’Freti to come ashore. But she would not budge. She did not want the amusement on the faces of the soldiers to be cut short by her departure. She did not want the soldier who had kicked the water to turn his square and guileless face away. She scooped up armfuls of water and soaked her face and clothes to prolong his interest in her. I tried to pull her, but she fell, to general laughter now even from the people on the bank. She was laughing. Even I was laughing; to have shown my anger would have been to make myself visible. They thought I was her boyfriend and splashed me, too, so that we walked home, she and I, dripping wet through the narrowing streets to the district where we lived in tenements as packed and poisonous as hives.

  I saw him once again, in uniform and armed, standing at the market bar, talking drill and discipline with his army friends. How would you describe him? Unremarkable, I think. A small potato. A farmer or a trader’s seventh son, a country boy ennobled by conscription and his youth. ’Freti was at his shoulder, not quite excluded from their group. She tilted her face and smiled whenever they smiled amongst themselves. That was the way she had spent her life so far, at the edge of groups, cold-shouldered by the troupes of children in our street but tagging along alone unless she was needed as the butt of jokes.

  When Beyat made to leave the bar he turned to ’Freti, saluted her and clicked his heels in an extravagant farewell. She held on to his arm without a word and tugged him to her, like a small child weedling for a treat. Beyat prised her fingers loose and shoved her backwards. I half rose from where I was sitting and called to her to come away. I had become expert at such interventions: my tone, my manner, my keenness not to give offence. But she held his arm again, so he picked her up and lifted her to the far end of the bar and sat her down amongst the dirty glasses in a pool of spilt beer. He placed an exaggerated kiss upon her forehead. Was this just play? The soldiers applauded. All the men there were smiling. They thought it was the best of jokes. ’Freti did too. She returned for more. This time he picked her up and sat her on my table. ‘She’s yours,’ he said. ‘Take her home … and lock her up.’ ’Freti held on to Beyat, her hands clasped behind his neck. She loved it when he carried her across the bar. She was quickened by the intimacy of his grip, by the laughing and the passion that he displayed on her account, by that one kiss. I let him lift her once again. He took her from the bar and carried her across the market to the jeep which he had parked in the taxi bay. Would she have thanked me if I had run to save her?

  Beyat’s friends remained. They had been turned sullen, vulgar, by his departure. They made remarks at his and her expense. Poor old Beyat, they said, he can only make his mark with whores and simpletons. Their minds were on the jeep and on the girl. Heading where and with what in mind? They called out in the bar; rowdy, poor boys from the provinces. (Rich boys, wise boys, lived abroad or were too sickly for conscription.) Stools were toppled. Beer was spilt. That’s how young men pass their time when the only girl has gone.

  I rose to leave. They blocked the door. Have a drink with us, they said. I shook my head and smiled. Our family always smiles. They brought me a glass of American beer, nevertheless, and put it on my table. ‘Thank you,’ I said, but I left it there, untouched. If they had not been soldiers, I might have spoken up for ’Freti. But silence was best. What could protestations change? ‘Well, drink it then,’ they said, and pointed at the glass. It tasted far too strong for beer. Cheap spirits had been added to make what, I believe, is called a Stupor Stew. But I drank it all, so what?

  Once they had left, I excelled myself, I think. I spoke out. The rush of alcohol had made me careless. There were some phrases which I had learnt from the legal documents which I was paid to type. I called the soldiers rogues and rapists, but in language which only advocates would recognize. ‘Save this town from cullions and caitiffs,’ I said. ‘Protect us from the despots who tyrannize our sisters and make recompense with beer.’ There was no laughter now, except my own. People turned inwards. They hugged their glasses, raised their voices and pretended that they had no ears. Ours had become a town which had no ears: the rich built high walls around their homes and topped their iron gates with wire; bankers and diplomats drew the blinds on their limousines or travelled, drably, in disguise. Costers in the market place wouldn’t trade in rumours any more. ‘Be deaf, be happy’ is what they said.

  IF I HAD been calm and in command I would have reminded Corporal Beyat of that day when he had taken my witless sister, as he called her, for a ride and she had returned bruised and ecstatic late at night. But I was crying from the beating they had given me, and shaking, too, from fear. ‘Why am I here?’ I asked. He shook his head. ‘For nothing much,’ he said. ‘For talking with your mouth open, like all the others here. That’s what happens nowadays if you grumble with your drinks. There’s someone paid to listen hard in every bar – and we’ve lots of room down here for all the big mouths in the town. You’ll see.’ But he was only talking tough. He knew nothing. Perhaps my name and photograph had appeared one evening on a list and a squad had been sent to seek me out. For what? Perhaps I had been mistaken for another man, one wanted by the police. Perhaps I had simply been unlucky – the wrong face in the wrong place when the word went out there were dissidents at large. A car door had swung open as I was walking from the market with a newspaper and a bag of manac beans. They were expert at abduction. I was pulled onto the back seat and the car was in motion before I had a chance to cry out for help to the old men who sat in the shade of their porches and watched the traffic pass. The beans spilled onto the floor and cushions as expert blows to the chin, hardly hurting, kept me dazed and silent as we drove out of our gaunt and pungent streets to the wide catalpa’d avenues and to my cell.

  ‘Count yourself as lucky,’ said Beyat. ‘You’ve got me to keep an eye on you. And this cell, it’s got a window, see. You can watch the soldiers marching in the yard. This is a five-star cell. Until yesterday a government minister was here. They came, they asked some questions, they let him go perhaps. Or he was transferred. No one stays for long.’ At his instruction I took off my clothes and watch and packed them in a plastic bag. My five-star cell – a mat, a bunk, a bucket – was no smaller than my room at home. And it was clean and odourless. ‘Your sister,’ he said, checking between my legs and in my mouth for money, weapons, false teeth, drugs. ‘She’s no great catch, you know, not for a soldier. We take our pick. If there are girls about, then count me in. But ’Freti, she’s got mushrooms for a brain. She got what she was after. And now she should clear off.’ He was talking as if we had just met in a bar, conspiratorial strangers, boastful with anonymity and drink. ‘Is that why you’ve brought me here,’ I asked, ‘to talk about my sister? Does she know I’m here?’ He laughed: ‘No one knows you’re here, that’s our job. You’ve gone missing. You’ve taken off to join the insurrection. You’re dead. You couldn’t stand your witless sister any more, so you cut your throat and climbed into a hole.’ He handed me some brown overalls and a pair of plastic sandals. ‘Put them on,’ he said. ‘Stop shaking. You’re getting on my nerves.’

  I HAVE stood at the window and watched Corporal Beyat as he goes off duty through the wire gate. The women press forward and shout the names of the sons and husbands who have disappeared. They push leaflets into his pockets. They whisper subversion as he squeezes through them and out onto the open pavement of Government Drive. ’Freti tags along without a word from him. Once he turned and shouted, ‘Keep away’ perhaps, or ‘Leave me alone. You’re getting on my nerves.’ Might he have mentioned me? He pushed her back. But she took no notice. She had found s
omeone to love and that was that. By the time they had taken ten steps they were out of sight, masked by the wall of the regimental offices, and I could only guess at my sister’s insistent courtship, her coquetry, her blandishments, the candour of her face.

  I can only guess, too, at what will happen to me here. No one has come to ask me questions. There has been no opportunity for me to clear my name, or to answer any charges or complaints. Those other young men whom I meet in the latrines or in the shower block are firebrands from the university or leafleteers or the sort who pontificate on platforms. They sing defiant songs as they wash. I do not know the words – or tunes. From them I hear about ‘the kitchen’ where, they say, all prisoners are overwhelmed, stretched out naked on an unhinged door and clipped by ear and toe to magnetos. There are hoods and chains and electric prods. There is a punishment called the crate. Another called the handstand. Sometimes it is silent in the kitchen; that is when, they say, electrodes have been placed upon a detainee’s teeth and the current switched on. Then, no one ever screams.

  Sometimes I talk to a man who is more my own age. He, too, like me, was taken from the street. But he was carrying posters and a pot of paste. Our only hope, he says, is the women at the wire gate. If only our names could be smuggled those few yards, then we would be safe. Do I know people who could set us free? But others warn me not to answer. They say this man is a soldier in disguise, an informer. Then they engage me, too, in whispers. Which soldiers do I think would take a bribe to carry a note outside or to mutter a name at the gate? To what lawyers in the town should they address their messages? What am I, other than a legal clerk, unmarried, underpaid, unremarkable in every way? What faction do I represent? They do not trust my answers – so I tell them about Beyat, my sister and my hope that he has taken word of me to her. ‘You must talk to him,’ they say, insisting that I remember all their names. ‘Perhaps he will be our postman.’

  FOR MUCH OF the day I stand on my bunk and look out, with one eye shut, upon the town. I have devised my own clock by the comings and the goings at the gate, by the shifts of soldiers passing through the frontier of wire, by the exercising squads in the barracks yard, by the times when the kerosene lanterns are lit on the nut stalls in the street. I know that when the raffia screen is lifted in the nearest window of the regimental offices, the woman clerk who sits there will light a cigarette to start her working day. A match flares in the glass. I know that when the klaxon calls, conscripts will run across the yard below to queue for their soup and potato at the canteen door. I know which conscripts will squat in a circle, playing dice, which will kick a ball against my wall, and which will sit alone. I know when work is done: the raffia screen comes down again, the office workers and the off-duty soldiers make their way into town, the army chauffeurs button their coats and start the engines of the government cars, and the soldiers at the wire gate push back the women waiting there. There is the woman with the headscarf. She comes at lunch time and stands immobile with an unfurled portrait of a man. There are the white-haired women in the black clothes who have the energy of pedlars, blocking the way of every man who exits, holding up their lists. There is the fat girl with the flag, the tall woman with three children, the bandy one, the girl with short hair, the stocky woman who bangs on the bonnets of passing cars. There is the pulse of flame from their charcoal brazier at night.

  ‘HOW’S my sister?’ I asked Beyat while he stood and supervised the cleaning of my cell. ‘Old Slobberjowl?’ he said, and made a gaping, lovelorn face. ‘She hangs around outside the barracks. Where I go, she goes. She makes a fool of me.’ ‘You made a fool of her,’ I said. Beyat nodded. He was embarrassed. He was only half to blame, he claimed. She was a temptress for all her innocence. She had clung to him, had she not? She had let him lift her and transport her round the bar. She had behaved, well, like a whore, tugging at his arm and pulling at his uniform. Was he to blame if he had weakened for a little fun? Any soldier in the bar would have done the same, would – so provoked – have carried ’Freti to the jeep and driven off to find a spot amongst the trees of Deliverance Park, where lovers who could not afford a hotel room could lie amongst the shrubs. They did have sex, he said. And endearments were exchanged, polite and intimate as suited such a time, with my sister’s bright and grotesque clothes cast off, the soldier tender-tough, intractable, and shanty boys (attracted to the place by the abandoned army jeep) watching and whistling from behind the trees.

  ‘She’d led me on,’ he said. ‘And I told her so, after we had done. I told her that I had a girl back home. She said it didn’t matter, that she could be my girl in town.’ Once again he made a gaping, lovelorn face. How could she be his girl in town, with a mouth and eyes like that? He listed all the times when he had turned his back on her, when he had passed her in the street or at the gate. Only once, when he was drunk, and she had trapped him in a bar, defences down, had they visited the Park again, at night. Two other soldiers had come, too. ‘See what she has started?’ he said, and I believe he could have wept at the anguish that she caused if the captain had not entered at that time and led me to the kitchen.

  The reports of the firebrands and the leafleteers had been exaggerated. The room was no more than an office – a desk, a table lamp, two chairs, a cabinet, a sink. The captain stood behind me at the door. A man in an open-necked shirt sat at the desk with a pile of folders. ‘We have some simple questions, then you can be released or transferred to another place,’ he said. ‘Please sit.’ He asked my name, my occupation, my address in the town. And then: ‘With which political groupings are you associated?’ I told him, None. He nodded and wrote for a few moments. ‘Well, we are in no hurry,’ he said. ‘We will take our time. Come and see me here tomorrow. And in the meantime give some thought to your position. If you will not answer questions then our hands are tied. We might need to be more forceful. Either way, it’s up to you, so long as we have answers. Think of yourself – there’s no one else to keep an eye on you. No one knows you’re here.’ ‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘Perhaps, my sister knows I’m here. She’s with the women at the gate.’ He smiled. ‘My family knows I’m here,’ I added. ‘The lawyers at my office know I’m here. The women at the gate have all the names.’ The captain shook his head. ‘You think that it’s not possible,’ I said. ‘We have our postmen. I have friends inside and out who can attest that I am innocent of everything.’ I extemporized the petitions and the affidavits that they might expect if I were not released. Once again I used words and phrases which I had typed in legal papers. ‘Such bravado,’ said the man in the shirt, ‘does not impress.’ He signalled to the captain that I should leave. The captain led me back along the corridor and up the stairs to my cell. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘who are the postmen?’ I thought of my splashed clothes, of the beer that I’d been forced to drink, of Beyat and the two soldiers, the parked jeep amongst the trees, ’Freti with her loose eyes and the indelible smile. Was it too late to intervene? ‘Who do you think?’ I said. ‘Who’s sleeping with whose sister?’

  BEYAT came again, as I stood on the bunk watching the women at the gate. ‘What’s going on?’ he said. ‘What did you tell the captain? He wants to know if there are soldiers who have any contact with the sister of a prisoner. You’re going to get a beating if you’ve played the big mouth once again.’ I shook my head. ‘Know who’s to blame?’ he said. ‘Your witless sister. You know what’ll happen, don’t you? I’ll get posted to some upcountry dump, thanks to you and her.’ I nodded at the window and said, ‘You see, she’s waiting for you all the time. Sooner or later the captain was bound to know.’ He stepped up to stand beside me and look out. ‘Press your head against the wall,’ I told him, ‘and shut one eye.’ ‘She’s there again,’ he said. He pushed me up against the wall and jabbed at my stomach with each word: ‘And what suggestions has the witless brother got for clearing up this mess?’ ‘Why don’t you let me have a word with her?’ I said.

  ‘You have a word with her?’ Beyat thought
that funny. ‘How will you have a word with her? You’re in here, and she’s out there.’ ‘I’ll write,’ I said. He tore a sheet from his report book and handed me a pencil: ‘It’d better work!’ I wrote five lines and pushed the square of paper into Beyat’s uniform pocket. He took it out and read it. I had written, ‘Dear ’Freti, I’m in the barracks, in a cell. Corporal Beyat is one of my warders and he will see that I come to no harm. But if he is spotted with you, my sister, then who knows what his officers might think? You place him and me in danger – so, I beg you, if you love us, stay away. Please show this letter to my mother and our friends. Your devoted brother.’ ‘That might cool her off,’ I said, ‘though she can’t read. You’ll have to read it to her.’

  Later that day, I watched from the window as for the first time Beyat acknowledged ’Freti at the gate and they walked off side by side.

  WITHIN an hour he had returned. The captain brought him to the cell. ‘What’s this?’ he said, holding up the page from Beyat’s report book. ‘A letter for your postman?’ He crumpled up the note and tossed it to Beyat. ‘What kind of barracks are we running here?’ I looked at Beyat for the answer. Had he gone straight with my note to the captain? Or had they followed him, scooped him from my sister’s side, in their expert fashion, as he took the note from his pocket, read my words to her and pressed it in her hand? And my sister, did she stand, slack-mouthed, wide-eyed and silent, as the car with Beyat sped out of sight? Or did she struggle with them in the street, screaming out to leave her love alone? What would she do now that he was gone? Beyat’s face said nothing, except that he was fearful and that there were bruises on his cheek and chin. I kept silent, too. I stood with my mouth open and waited. ‘Know who you look like? Your witless sister,’ he said. He stepped forward and popped the crumpled note into my open mouth. ‘That’s his mouth,’ said the captain. ‘What did I say? I said, take it back and ram it down his throat. That was an order. That wasn’t pleasantries.’ Beyat turned again to me. ‘Swallow,’ he said. I didn’t swallow. I spat it out.