Land of the Living

by Georgina Harding

  He wanted to be precise in his descriptions, so that she might begin to see this place that he had seen. Though the valley fields were already in shade and whoever had worked there in the day had left, he would tell her, the green of the rice still glowed in the dusk. (But how could it be so green, when the light was going, how was it that blades of rice held colour when the sun had gone? Was it only in memory that it was so green, so that what he would tell her now would not in fact be what he saw?)

  I walked along the rims of the terraces, on down towards the river. The terraces were beautifully made, with walls of stone and copings of pressed mud strong enough to withstand even these monsoon rains, and channels between for the water to flow – this true, accurately observed, but he did not see it then, his attention then only on the ground beneath his feet, step by step along the slippery paths, along those narrow copings between and around the fields. All of this place was so surprisingly ordered and well maintained – this such a strange and surprising thing to him that first evening, so that he could not quite believe that it was a real place and not some dream into which he was descending – and here and there among the terraces were fruit trees – such a kind and pleasant thing, he would think in the days to come, that trees were planted prettily, for fruit but also for shade, where a worker might want to rest and look down at the soil and the crop and at the view and at the river gushing below – and there were big stones set upright in the ground, singly or sometimes in groups, territorial markers or memorials, or some kind of god-stones. In one place, beside just such a group of stones, in the bend of a tributary that went down to the river, there was a hut.

  This was all he saw at the time. This all that mattered.

  I found a hut where the village had its fields at the bottom of the valley. Just a rough kind of hut, a place for tools or for workers to rest in the heat of the day. More like a tent, with a rough thatched roof so low I couldn’t stand up straight in it, but there was a wall of planks at the back that kept out the rain, and a kind of platform of logs raised above the wet earth floor, and pieces of bamboo matting on it and cloth, almost dry. It was cold but it was pretty much dry. It was the driest place I could have found. I was getting shaky, beginning to come down with fever. So I crawled in, and took off the rain cape, and spread out the scraps of cotton and matting, and slept.

  It was the first night he had slept in any man-made structure since they had gone out on patrol, and as he lay there all the days and nights between, the terrifying nights in the jungle, merged and sank down within him. He shivered and listened, and slowly his body stilled. The sounds were different here. For the first night in all those nights he was not afraid to think that he must close his eyes in order to sleep. The sounds were the clear sounds that occurred in open space, the murmur of the stream close by, the roar of the river below. He slept and woke and slept, as the air chilled and a mist rose from the river, intensifying the cold.

  He must have already been feverish when they found him. He could not take it in at first.

  Daylight, he told her, and there was an old woman squatting a spear’s distance away. An old woman laughing, prodding him with the tip of a spear. It was just a faint grey kind of daylight seeping in from the open end of the hut, but he could see that she was naked except for a strip of cloth tied about her hips, strings of beads about her neck and pieces of horn sticking out of her hair, and the strap of his gun across her shoulder. She was old, wrinkled, woman only by the leathery flaps of her breasts, and her black-toothed mouth was wide open with laughter. She prodded him once more and then sprang up, quick for her age, went out and shouted for others to come. She was spry and little and gristly, he said, so little that the gun reached to her knees. Then the others came, he said, and it was dark again. They crowded across the opening and took all his light away. They were whooping and shouting. They were a blur of black heaving shapes. He tried to sit up and to speak, but the fever had made his head so heavy that he fell back again, and at that the blur whooped and shuddered some more.

  Naked savages. In jungle stories the savages take the white man and boil him in a pot.

  Claire stopped in her walk for a moment, turned to him, put her hand to his arm.

  But, Charlie, weren’t you afraid?

  I don’t think so, I think I was too ill to be afraid.

  The crowd calmed and the old woman came back to him, and another old woman with her, two old witches squatting before him with elephant skin and sagging breasts, wide grins splitting their faces, and somehow he trusted them. The second witch put her hand up across his eyes and felt his forehead, and her hand felt cool and slow as a lizard on ice, and he believed that it understood as well as felt. She lifted his head and gave him something to drink from a gourd, then laying him down again she placed a cool cloth across his forehead and his eyes, murmuring as she did so, and there was a piney smell in the cloth that made him think of trees, not jungle but trees, lines and lines of tall straight trees. He heard it begin to rain, soft on the thatch like rain in a pine forest, and he slept again.

  Around noon the first old woman came in, and two younger women with her, and they squatted in the entrance to eat from a basketwork tiffin, three generations of women successively wrinkled and bent, each wet as the other from the rain, but the youngest one had smooth skin and small taut breasts, and the rain made her slick as she moved against the light.

  Wasn’t it odd, darling, being surrounded by all those naked women? Wasn’t it just a little bit tantalising?

  No, it wasn’t at all odd. You just took them as they were. They wore their skin less self-consciously than clothes.

  What he said was true in a way but there was a lie there also, the first of the little lies that he would tell her.

  Even in that moment, through feverish and half-closed eyes, with behind her the shimmering screen of the rain falling across the entrance, he saw how the girl’s stomach was long and smooth beneath the dark-tipped cones of her breasts and beneath her thick strings of necklaces – or at least he remembered it so. She gave him rice to eat from her fingers, and he took it feebly, and the rice was musky with the smell of her. Again he took a drink from the gourd, then she took her warmth and her scent away from him and once more he slept.

  How long did he sleep? Was there medicine in the drink, some herb or potion brought by the witch, or was it only rice beer? He wanted to tell the story with precision here, to cover up the gaps. He could say only that he slept for an unspecified time, for minutes or hours, and that when he woke he felt a bit stronger. There was still that screen of rain across the entrance to the hut, and when at last he went to look out, the screen moved only as far away as the rims of the rice terraces where they fell to the river. No jungle, no hills beyond, but only these little scalloped fields and the people working across them weeding between the lines of rice, bent double beneath rain shields of woven bamboo that they wore tied across their backs.

  They looked like so many beetles, he said. Working the fields bit by bit.

  Beetles, inching through the green. Water pouring off the edges of their closed amber wings. He standing, shivering, before the hut. The fever in him, so he thought that in a blink they might open their wings and launch into rattling flight.

  If they were naked, couldn’t they just get wet?

  She’s playing, he thought. Not taking him seriously, not listening closely enough. For all that he had said, Claire still had no sense of the cold there. She assumed it was hot because it was the jungle, it was India. She was so sure of her preconceptions, of the Nagas and of him, of who she knew he was. And so she thought that the Nagas went naked because they were savages of course but also because people do not need clothes in the heat. She had not seen how a naked Naga could shiver. The rain there can be cold, he had to say again. This place is high and the mists are chilly and the rain too, so the bamboo shields, which stretch from the head to the hips, will keep their bodies warm as well as dry, holding their warmth about them as they wo
rk.

  And some of them had little baskets tied to them for frogs, he said, and she laughed at this. To snatch up the frogs they found in the fields.

  What for, she asked, to eat?

  And he said, yes, but the French eat frogs too, don’t they? And the French are quite civilised.

  This was the way that it was easiest to tell her the story, to fill it with curious details, to describe appearances and customs, these people and what they wore and how they decorated themselves, their ornaments and hairstyles and tattoos – but these he had not noted yet, the tattoos faded on old skin, those of the first old women seeming to him no more than a smudging or bruising on their brown and wrinkled cheeks and arms and legs. Later and in sunlight he would observe all these things. He would see a girl held down by five women and writhing in pain, and the blood running as the tattooist smeared blue dye on her skin and stabbed a pattern into it with a long sharp thorn. The tattooist worked a broad band of pattern all round her upper leg, into the tender hollow at the back of her knee, the blood running through the blue of the dye. He will describe all that to her some other time.

  My darling Claire, you have no idea how these women will suffer for beauty, he will say, you with your nail varnish and your powder and your rouge and your lipstick, you suffer no more pain than that of tweezers.

  The men had tattoos as well. Many of the men had tattoos on their faces, dense blue mask-like patterns drawn across forehead and cheeks and about the mouth, and over their chests and limbs. The older the men, the grander but more blurred the designs. These tattoos also he would note. He did not know what they meant. He would not know that until he met Hussey who had spoken with anthropologists and studied every tribe that he encountered. It was better then that he did not know, or he would have been more afraid.

  The beetles worked on, and it was a long time before the rain ceased. The stream rushed beside the hut, the river in its narrow gorge below. He could hear the sound of the waters beneath the rain. He knew the source of the sound and yet it seemed to come only from a swirling torrent within his head. When finally the Nagas finished work and took him with them up to the village, he would cross the river on a swaying bamboo bridge, feet in ungainly boots first one then the other over the brown dizzy blur, looking down because he had to, focusing on those feet that seemed clown’s feet, out of proportion and almost detached from himself, feet that would become heavier, step by step, as he climbed all the way to that village he had seen on the ridge.

  I haven’t said, have I, why the Naga villages are all situated on ridges? It’s because of the raids. The headhunting. It’s true, you know. They do hunt heads. They always have.

  Not really, not now, surely? Not any more?

  Yes, some of them. Even now. So their villages are built on the high ridges, even if this means they have to walk down a thousand or two thousand feet to their fields, even if they have to go a long way for water. But they think nothing of it. They’d be surprised to see how people in England like to live in the valleys. Perhaps they’d be afraid to live in a valley, or in flat country like this where they could see no views. Those women there – most of the farm work is done by the women there – they walk down for an hour, an hour and a half, to begin work in the morning, and do hard physical labour all day, and walk back up in the evening, even the old ones, tough old birds, with baskets on their backs with crops in them, or fruit, or firewood. I was hard put to follow, so weak as I was. We skirted the terraces, and met other villagers coming in, other women and some men too, crazy, wild-looking fellows, most of them carrying daos with wicked-looking blades. They all got terribly excited to see me, laughing and chattering. Sometimes they got so excited with talking about me that they skittered on and didn’t notice that they left me behind them walking alone. It didn’t matter. There was nothing I could do but follow them. Nothing else I’d have thought of doing. The terraces came to an end in groves of bamboo and thin forest, but the path went up clear and straight. I couldn’t be lost even though they’d gone on so fast ahead.

  Where the mountain grew steeper, the path turned to steps. He could see the file of field workers high above him on the steps, a long stone staircase so well laid and mossed and lichened that it might have been built by some ancient civilisation.

  It was as if I’d gone back centuries, Claire. There I was, struggling up from the terraces down below to the village above, and the people walked ahead of me the way they must have walked each day for centuries, all the way up and all the way down, these files of brown naked figures like slaves in an Egyptian painting – only they weren’t slaves, they were a tribe, a community, and they seemed such a fine community when I got to know them, good-humoured and equal and happy.

  Of course he was not thinking any of that at the time. At the time he was conscious only of the effort of the climb, the weight of his legs and the pounding inside his head. There were platforms set at intervals alongside the steps, and on one of these his particular women waited for him. They let him rest and then the strongest of them, the middle one, took up his pack and added it to the load in her basket, which she carried by a strap across her forehead, and he was too weak to refuse though he saw that her basket had weight in it already. Slowly, she went on, bent low and with the girl beside her, and he followed, and the old woman came behind, still wearing his gun and chivvying him with gruff single words such as at home one spoke to animals. As they climbed on, the sky cleared above so that he could begin to see the huts of the village spread along the crest of the ridge, a sheen of light on tobacco-coloured palm-leaf roofs.

  Close beneath the village the path narrowed and ran between high stone walls. There was a stone gateway with a wooden door made from a single huge slab of wood.

  It was this thick, he said, holding out his hand splayed with the palm towards her. The whole front of the door was carved, with a design of a skull and huge horns, painted like a mask in red and white and black, a scary mask to repel intruders – or perhaps it was more than that, perhaps it had magical power, I don’t know – and two men waited at the door. I think that they were waiting for us, because when we had entered they swung the massive door shut and barred it for the night. Beyond the gate was a steep narrow passage, rising and turning between high walls – part of the defences, I suppose, like the passage at the entrance of a castle, that would have been hard to fight through, if any attacker had made it through the gate. Later I saw all this properly and understood its purpose, how the whole village was built like a fort. At the time I was just walking blindly, putting a hand to the wall for support, as we climbed more steps, steep, up and up, until we came out at the top of the ridge, at an open circular platform that looked out over the valley. There were men seated all round the edge of the platform, and the old woman led me into the centre of the circle. I stood there panting. Dazed as if I had been brought out from the dark. The men stayed squatting where they were and looked at me, the sky so bright behind them that I couldn’t see their faces so much as their forms against it, bizarre outlines they made with their headgear of tusks and horns and fur and feathers. I wish you could imagine the moment, he said, picturing it to himself as he had not seen it then: this high place, a horizon all round of endlessly receding jungle ridges, the sun going down, one lost white man surrounded by a crowd of natives, they jabbering among themselves, arguing by the sound of it, currents of speech swirling across this way and that, utterly unintelligible.

  Again she asked, but wasn’t he afraid?

  He told her that he was scarcely conscious enough for fear.

  His mind was removed from himself, so that he knew sensation and not thought, knew only the sensations of that moment without before or after. Perhaps without sense of time there is no fear. Not even identity. He had seen that in battle, known it, known only the immediate moment. The absence of time and the absence of self. So now in this moment of which he spoke he stood reeling, and yes, he must have been aware somewhere in his consciousness that the great gate
was barred behind him, that these men were headhunters and that he Charlie Ashe was the cause of the hubbub, but what was most in his mind, the memory that he had taken away and that came back to him, was nothing personal but only a sense of space, of endless wheeling space. He felt it even as he spoke to her, as if he was on a cliff high above and she was far and small below. Yet it wasn’t the looking down that gave him vertigo but the looking up – the shock, after such a climb, of having nothing but sky above, and such a vast sky as this one. Vast, pale at this moment of sunset, clear to the first stars. When he looked down to earth again the figures of the men as they came and pressed in close seemed almost insignificant.

  Say no more for a while. The dog walked quiet at their heels, knowing they were nearly home.

  Darkness. Hands on him. Voices of women, not men. Women giggling. In the darkness, a flicker of light as of a candle flame – no, more light than that, the flames of a fire. A fire burned some yards away from him, the women moving between the place where he lay and the fire. There was no sky any more. He was in a hut and there was only the light of the fire, these women leaning over him as they untied the laces on his boots, clumsy as they didn’t know where to pull, as they fumbled at the buttons on his shirt and his shorts. Hands lifted his back. They took his shirt off him, the cotton clinging where it was wet with sweat. He recognised the youngest of the women from the field. There were other faces besides hers, coming and going, he was not sure how many. One girl put out a bold hand and stroked the hairs of his chest. There was light enough to see that she was pretty, there was light on her cheeks and her eyes. She laughed, a light airy laugh, but her mouth was a black hole.

  The women of that tribe paint their teeth black, you know, to be beautiful.

  Sounds rather ugly to me. Claire’s smile was the whiter for the red of her lipstick. She had taken off her headscarf and put her fingers through her hair as she went to fill a bowl of water for the dog.