Land of the Living

by Georgina Harding

  How was your bath?

  Lukewarm.

  I’m sorry, darling, I must have used too much water for mine.

  Waves of rain moved across the village, exposed on its high ridge. At times it sounded to him like the sea. Those first days he thought that it rained without ceasing. He could not say how much time passed. He slept and he woke and it rained. Slowly he recovered but still the days blurred with the rain. When the rain stopped, time seemed to start up again. The cocks crowed. Even within the hut it lightened. Light penetrated between the woven strips of the walls, pinpoints of light all about the hut, shafts spilling through the umber.

  He went out. He looked out to the washed horizon, the violet clouds, the endlessness of the hills. He walked through the village to the men’s platforms. Where the cloud had withdrawn the terraces lay revealed like rippled sand when the tide has receded, ripple below ripple as if a whole ocean had pulled back from its green floor.

  He saw them going down, women with baskets held by straps across their foreheads, men with daos on their shoulders – hoe and machete and sword all in one so that they might as well have been going to fight as to work. Other groups of men with old muzzle-loaders or boys with catapults went hunting in the forest. A few always stayed behind like himself, watching from the heights the small figures down below, listening to their calls, old warriors who seemed to have earned the right to watch and not to work as the tattoos merged into their ageing skin. At the hut, the oldest remained and the youngest, seated outside now when there was sunshine. They seemed glad to have him join them there, smiling to see his increasing strength. There was only the simplest communication between them, of look and gesture. He tried to pick up what he thought were the words for the commonest things. Water. Tea. Names of foods. He wanted to know the names of the family but they confused him with their variety of names and seeming names, or perhaps some of these were not names but other words meaning sister, brother, mother, girl, boy, baby, little one, darling, sweetheart, so that he was never sure what to call them. As for himself, he did not know if they had a name for him. Sometimes he thought they did, but this too may only have been a term.

  My name is Charlie, he said. So they began to call him that. The word sounded quite different on their lips. This Charlie was unlike any Charlie he had been before.

  He thought that he knew what the girl was called. Henlong. But then other people called her other things. Could it be that they had more names than one, for the different people they might be? Better if he too were to have more names.

  Rain. That was a word he would like to have known. There seemed to be too many words that might have meant rain.

  The clouds swept in. It rained. They moved back inside the huts.

  Fire. That word too. The fires were kept going all day inside the huts, the smoke filtering up through the thatch. When the rain ceased and he went out, he saw the blue haze of smoke above the thatch as if the whole hut was steaming.

  There were looks and signs that were clear indications. This. That. You. Me. And imperative verbs were clear also. Go. Come. Drink. Sleep.

  When eventually he got to Hussey, Hussey would want to transcribe all he knew of the language they spoke. Yet he had brought so few words with him. He seemed to have used so few words in all the time that he was there, and many of them he was unsure of, out of context. I think, sir, that this was the word. Or perhaps it was this one. Water, at least, I can tell you the word for water. Does that word occur in any dialect that you know? Does that help you identify the tribe?

  But it wouldn’t. These days would remain without name or place or time. There would be only immediacies, moments, that would come back to him later as if they were still in the present. The fire, a brown hand reaching forward to tend it, this moment repeated again and again as the logs were pushed deeper into the burning heart and the fire burned on through all the day. The feeding of the tiny baby in the firelight, he sitting so close that in the brightness of the flame he could see the fontanelle pulsing beneath almost transparent newborn skin; it was the soul they saw there, Hussey would tell him, dancing beneath the membrane, only lightly contained within the skull, the soul that was the power for which heads were hunted. And there was the old woman eating slowly, continuing to eat after the others had finished, eating like a cat tiny pawfuls of rice, and yawning after, like a cat, and in the yawn was the soul’s impatience to leave its ageing shell of bone.

  Then there was the brightness when he stepped outside after the burrow-closeness of the hut. The dazzling blue distance. The girl-woman standing out in the sunlight wearing only strings of beads and the barest strip of a skirt, wiping away with the back of her hand a trickle of blood that seeped down the inside of her thigh.

  He, once, must have screamed in the night.

  He was awake, bathed in sweat, back in the jungle with the others. A hand came, he did not know whose hand it was, stroked his fear back inside himself until he was whole once more. A voice soothed him with murmured unintelligible words. A body lay alongside his until he slept.

  I was there some months, he would tell Hussey in the bungalow at Mokokchung. Through the last of the rains and then after the rains ended. I quite lost track of time.

  Hussey’s bungalow would surprise him with its familiarity, the furnishings and words and flavours which spilled into him like memories and brought him back to who he had been so that he heard his own voice speaking and identified the man that he was, and identified him not only as himself but as an Englishman with a name and a distant home and a regiment. Lieutenant Charles Ashe of the Royal Norfolks, his hand placing a teacup onto a willow-patterned saucer.

  If you give me a calendar I suppose I can work it out. So many days in the jungle before I got there, so many days on the trek after, each night in a different village. I was ill at first, feverish, sleeping off and on, probably delirious, perhaps for days on end, I have no idea how long that lasted. There was some kind of medicine woman, some wrinkled old witch, who came and looked at me and prescribed teas made from jungle plants, I don’t know what, and I don’t know if they had any effect or not, maybe they did, actually I think that they must have had an effect. Or perhaps I would have recovered anyway. The fever came and went, and then it went altogether and I got stronger, and when I was fit to make the walk I started to go down with them and help in the fields.

  He would take a cigarette from the box that Hussey offered and sit back and light it as Hussey’s servant, a trim silent Naga in white shirt and khaki shorts, put the tea things, one by one and carefully, onto a tray to clear them away. He had not smoked English cigarettes since they first went out on patrol. He paused, closed his eyes to savour the draw and the exhalation.

  It’s strange, you know, I didn’t think about leaving. I just went on, from day to day. One day just followed another, one day very much like another. He felt the hit of the tobacco. He could easily have counted the days, but he hadn’t. The only reason to do that would have been if they were wanted or expected to end. Now his hand, the hand of this Englishman that was himself, as it went to tip the ash from the end of the cigarette into the ashtray, began to shake.

  Then when did you leave? Hussey would ask. How did it come about?

  Hussey held on to his pipe with an earnest look. Hussey smoked a pipe, not cigarettes, held his pipe even when it was not alight, ease in the way he held it, like some housemaster listening to him, Hussey who looked familiar as a master from some minor public school, only the more lined and leaner from years spent not in any English school but out here on trek in these hills. Perhaps Hussey was the one man who might have understood.

  What happened then? How did you get here, to me?

  It should have been easier to speak to Hussey than to anyone. But already the story was beginning to change shape, the village becoming more distant and exotic, slipping between his words.

  A man came from some other tribe.

  The smoke moved away from him blue in the sunlight. />
  Perhaps he came by chance, but I think that they must have sent for him. I left with him the next morning.

  There it was. He must hold it down to plain facts.

  There had been the usual evening in the hut. Every such evening much the same, Hussey would know that. The talk about the fire, as always in the evenings the men closer to the flames, the women receding into the shadows. This particular evening, the rice beer offered around a little more generously on account of the visitor, a thin supple man who wore on his head something like a Viking helmet constructed of cane and bristly black boar’s skin and stuck with tusks; but what was most striking about him, in these surroundings, was the fact that he wore oversized British military-issue khaki shorts – it did not bear thinking where he might have rustled them up – and a red blanket such as the British gave to interpreters, though he spoke so very little English.

  Good morning, he said, though it was night.

  Good morning, Charlie said in reply, and put out his hand, and the slender Viking knew, if somewhat theatrically, how to shake it.

  The fire before them. Heat in the fire and light. The darkness behind so deep and close that he felt the touch of it on the back of his neck. The beer was passed around in long bamboo cups. Now and then one of the men took up a thin metal pipe, put it to the fire and blew through it – the sound low and fluting – to bring up the flames. Briefly the shadows lightened. Faces glowed with the drink and the fire. The traveller had tales to tell. His gestures were expressive, his long hands moving across the firelight. The helmet cast a strange horned shadow. Broad white bands of ivory glinted high on his arms. The others listened to his tales, nodded, drank. A man prepared opium to smoke, bringing out a scrap of cloth, melting the opium from it, warming it in a spoon above the fire, the process like a ritual; the blending of the black oil with herbs, the filling of the bamboo water pipe, all done with deft brown priestly fingers; the lighting of it.

  The pipe passed from man to man. It came to him and he took it softly as the other men did, drew, paused, passed it on. He listened to their speech, saw their eyes gleaming, watched the fire, felt the darkness at his back.

  He knew the darkness and the skulls on the walls behind him, the glare of eye sockets, the grin of broken jaws. The flesh was long gone from them. The dead were dead, far from him now.

  He rose and went outside. He felt unseen as if the dark had filled him. No moon that night. The sky clear, the stars very bright but their brightness all in the sky and not on the ground. That was velvety black, mud soft beneath his feet, the long low huts between which he walked shaggy sphinxes holding black space between their paws. Sometimes in the nights he would hear the rustle and pant of couples there where there were benches beneath the eaves, see figures slink beneath the overhang of thatch, and he had walked by with a sense that he himself was no more than a shadow while only they in the darkness were flesh and blood and real. He was no one, a white man, invisible, passing by. And if he was invisible, then the whisper he heard could not be directed at him. Yet the whisper repeated itself. It was a girl’s whisper, coming from the darkness. He could not have distinguished whether he knew her first by her whisper or her outline or her touch or her smell. They made love as if it was not the first time at all, as if he had through all these days known what it was to make love to her, her body, her movement, the smoky taste of her, since that first moment when she had given him rice to eat from her fingers.

  Home soon, my darling

  Really, she might have said, if she had had some other woman there to speak to, to whom she might have attempted to explain how it had come about that she was living this life which did not seem to be her own life but some other woman’s. Really, she had known him so little before they were married.

  They had met in London, in other people’s houses, at parties and in restaurants. They had been attracted from the first moment. They had walked miles on the streets and that was how they had been alone at first, walking side by side and in step and surrounded by others, he with his hand hot to her waist or hers skimming his arm, or in the park when they met in the daytime or in the illusory intimacy of the cinema. How do you know a man in London and then know him all alone, just the two of you, out here where there’s no one else? No background, no noise. And not the war there either, thrumming behind all they did. There had been so little thought to getting engaged.

  He seemed beautiful to her when he came back. She thought that he must have spent all his days on the ship in a deckchair gazing at the blue. He was thinner, his face thinner so that the structure of it stood out, and he was tanned and his hair had gone very blond which made his eyes the colour of that ocean she thought he had seen and sky. He brought her a present of an exotic necklace heavy with silver and cornelian beads – not the kind of thing she’d wear but a lovely thing to handle and to hang from her dressing-table mirror – and she thought that he must have brought it back from India and the jungle but he said no, only from the bazaar in Port Said on the way home. I was thinking of you, he said. All the way home. I was thinking of you too, she said, but she did not say how she had learnt to put the thought away, as one did, as a girl must, in all that time in which there was no word of him. I knew you would come back, she said, though it wasn’t true, everyone knew that Burma was bad and a piece of her hadn’t expected him back at all. So here he was, Charlie, when she met him alone at Southampton, across the glossy dining table when he came to stay that first night with her parents in Clapham, his blue eyes looking as if from a distance as he humoured her father’s views on the forthcoming election, holding the silver knife and fork loose in his long tanned fingers as if none of it actually mattered, the food, the manners, the appearances, and he might just let them drop. In the morning they walked on the lawn in the summer sunshine, before he left to go and see his mother in the country. Her parents were inside behind the French windows. He gave her that gift. To her parents looking out they must have looked like any engaged couple should have looked, he handing her the gift, the two of them kissing in the sunshine. If there was some strangeness in the moment, some sense that even this moment was only loosely held, then she told herself it was just the strangeness for him of coming home. It’s the war. It’s all he’s been through, all that we won’t speak of, that the men don’t speak about when they come home, war-illness-battle-jungle-Japs.

  That last was the worst, by all accounts. But the war with the Japs was still going on, you knew it went on even as there was peace here. You knew that the awfulness continued and that there would be more to come. And it did come, some weeks later, a bomb that was more awful than anything that had gone before, and yet when you first heard of it, it seemed a marvel in what it ended; and in the months after that so many other stories seeping in, of prisoners and atrocities – the railway, thank goodness he was spared that. She did say once, almost offhand, sometime much later, the thought slipped out, how the bomb seemed like God’s vengeance on the Japanese. Oh no, Claire, he said then, suddenly stiff and fierce as she had never seen him before. Oh no, Claire, you can’t say that, don’t let me ever hear you say anything like that, you who spent all of the war here, only here, and read it in The Times. It was the first time she had seen him angry.

  No, she said, her arms tight to her sides, retracting and yet longing at that same moment to hold him. No, you’re right, I’m sorry, darling, that was thoughtless of me. She meant that she had been thoughtless not just of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but of him and whatever he must have experienced.

  He had recognised her instantly in the crowd, her slight figure distinct even at a distance, even in her hat and big woollen coat. She was so known: her look, the smell of her when they kissed. And yet, not known at all. Her voice was surprising to him yet it must be the same voice it had always been.

  Charlie darling, she had said, and kissed him and hugged him tight, and he had felt the neatness of her body against his, her smallness as she reached up to him, and how her hat was
dislodged by the kiss. He spoke in return only the plainest things. Hello. Claire. She put up her two hands to rearrange her hat. Where do we go now? London. When does the train leave? Is there time to catch it? On the journey silence could be concealed by the sound of the train. It was only later, when they were there in London in her family’s house, that he had unpacked and taken out the necklace he meant to give her, and looked about in himself for things to say.

  All her letters had been forwarded when he got to Hussey’s at Mokokchung. They had been bundled together wherever the regiment bundled letters for the missing, and came to him with string about them and a blur and a tropical warp to each page from waiting out the rains. Darling Charlie, she wrote. London does look grim in the war. Grim on these winter evenings like when I last saw you, with all the blackout, but grimmer somehow even than during the Blitz because it seems permanent now, it’s been so long. Grim on the streets, but so gay inside! For a treat I went to the Criterion with Mary and a gang of friends – Andrew was there, by the way, he says hello, he’s been around a while, he was wounded but he’s fine now, going back any day – and it was five o’clock on a February afternoon but so bright and gay once you were through the doors. Darling Charlie, Hoping the war is going well where you are. You must have heard, we’re in Europe now! I thought it was coming. Mary and Jack stole a weekend away in the West Country before he went back to his ship, and they didn’t say right away but Mary told me after how they saw thousands of soldiers there, thousands and thousands of Americans on the move and camped out, everywhere they went, so they knew there was a big push on. Darling, Blast those beastly Japs! The news here is so full of hope, but no news of you! Darling Charlie, I saw a film, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Gary Cooper unbearably romantic in Spain, and thought of you, thought I’d write the moment I got home. My darling, Hoping the postal service is on strike in Burma and that’s why I don’t get any letters, sacks and sacks of envelopes heaped up in the post offices and the Burmese postmen with their feet up on the tables smoking opium or whatever it is they do there. But I hear it’s the monsoon. Maybe they all got washed away? Harry Browne spent some time in Burma before the war. He said the rivers are so big you can’t see across them. Big brown rivers with waves in them and our letters tossing about like paper boats.