Land of the Living

by Georgina Harding

  Now the Viking pressed him on. They still had a way to go.

  Another climb. Out of the cloud. Clear sky. Again, a high pass. They crossed a watershed, though he would not know that until later. Nor did he know that they had entered British-administered territory. He would know these things only when he traced the route with Hussey, putting the point of a pencil to a map. The rivers this side of the pass ran to the Brahmaputra, those on the other, to the Chindwin. It must have been here, sir, he would say, this pass. Here on the map. And this must have been the next village where we stopped. Yes, sir, this must have been the way we came. He would soon enough be saying these rational things and marvelling at the clipped sound of his own voice.

  In this village, a random sign of civilisation: rice beer, clear and frothy, served to him in a tin mug with chipped white enamel. In the flame-light of the chief’s hut, before the central hearth, with the shields and skulls and trophies shadowy on the walls, the white mug offered like a prize.

  One day a man turned up and led me away, he had said to Claire. And I followed.

  Just like that? she said.

  He thought she would have liked to have seen the Viking.

  This man who led me out, he said to her, he looked rather distinguished. I wish I had a picture to show you. He wore a headdress with two boar’s tusks sticking out of it. I never knew his name. I just called him the Viking to myself because of that headdress.

  He heard himself as he spoke, heard his own words, heard how the words reduced the man to an exotic curiosity. A picture wouldn’t have helped. He had not begun to mention the ill fit of his shorts or the gaps in his teeth. He did not know how to speak of him, or any of this, and make it true.

  He was rather dignified actually, he said then. Rather a good man, and astonishingly at ease in the jungle. He must have had the most amazing sense of direction. He knew the tracks for miles, and when we got out of his area and he had to ask the way, he memorised everything he was told and never seemed to go wrong. It was as if he put together a map in his head. He even spoke a little English, just a smattering, but it was more than almost anyone else knew. The first day or two it was just the two of us, walking on our own, though we stopped at various villages, and then sometimes a man or men from that village came on with us for a stretch, but he was with me all the way.

  That’s nice, she said. Just like that. Sounds like you were just going for a stroll.

  Well, yes, pretty much, he said. His eyes were on hers and his lips didn’t quite close on the statement, he looking hopeful like a child who was fibbing and hoped his fib would be accepted. Their eyes exchanged what they both knew: that he wouldn’t tell it all and that she would humour him by pretending there was no more to tell, she smiling but her eyes creasing just so little at the corners as if to look into the distance.

  Were you sad to leave? I think you were, weren’t you?

  Well, it had been a kind of haven, I told you that. And I was leaving but I didn’t know where I was going, did I? I just knew I had to go sometime, I couldn’t stay there for ever.

  But you wanted to come home.

  There was the war between home and where I was. Though the war wasn’t really imaginable any more. Nor was home, for that matter.

  Oh.

  But I knew the war had to end sometime and that home would still be there.

  He didn’t mention the dread. He felt it when he drank out of the tin mug. He didn’t know how it would be when he was back.

  The journey up to that point had been entirely without names. Even when he attempted to trace it, there were no names, no places to be marked on any map. Only ridge, valley, river, village, jungle, mist, sky, day, night, sun, stars, repeating.

  When he got to Hussey, Hussey would draw a conjectural line. Back in the direction he had noted on his compass, across tangles of contours to the place where his trek might have begun.

  What did they call themselves, your tribe?

  I don’t know.

  We should have a name for them. Tell me about them.

  With Hussey there would be names. Words, story, a route, flattened onto a map on a plain wooden table. Electric light over the table, so long as the generator kept working, but under the bright light a dimension was lost. There was so much more to all of this than what could be said.

  Hussey would take notes, on rough pages, the back of some child’s schoolwork, since paper was short in the war.

  I think they’d never seen a white man before.

  What else?

  They were rather fine people. Fine, lively, noble even – not savage once you knew them.

  Then we’ll call them the Belgae, until we have some better name.

  Why’s that?

  Didn’t you read your Caesar? Hussey had read Classics before he joined the Service. He had not lost his academic turn of mind. The evidence of it filled his study which was the one room in the bungalow that seemed truly lived in – too lived in, crammed with ethnographic clutter, headgear and blankets and necklaces and carved wooden skulls still thick with the soot of long-houses, and woven cane belts and penis-guards and a musty stuffed hornbill, piles of papers and books on every surface. Here was Hussey standing on a chair to take down from a high shelf a slim blue volume of The Gallic Wars. Translating: Of all these peoples the most courageous are the Belgae because they are farthest removed from the culture and civilisation of the Province and least often visited by merchants introducing the commodities that make for effeminacy. Or missionaries, he added. I imagine Caesar would have put them in too, if they’d been about at the time.

  I wouldn’t have used the word courageous. I don’t know if they were courageous.

  Well, this is Caesar speaking. He was a soldier after all.

  In the nights he would hear Hussey at work. The walls of the bungalow were thin, simple white-painted wooden partitions dividing room from room off the central corridor, the two impersonal front rooms opening onto the veranda, the bedrooms and study at the back. So often in the night, during the weeks that he lingered as Hussey’s guest, he would wake in his narrow bed to hear on the other side of the partition the tap of his typewriter or the creak of his movement. Hussey did not seem to sleep much, except for the siesta he took each afternoon, feet up in a planter’s chair on the veranda. His face was not the face of a man who slept, papery and drained of vitality, though his eyes were quick. He spent the small hours of the night in ethnography, arranging and typing out whatever notes he had taken in their conversations, whatever contributions Charlie had brought with him to be added to the files of existing knowledge of the Nagas. The days were dedicated to his official work.

  He would give Hussey every material detail that he could remember. How they reached the watershed. Every valley and village through which they passed on the way. The rivers they crossed. Whatever encounters they had. One encounter in particular. A cultivated valley, a river, a meeting beside a bridge, and the next climb made in company with four young warriors who wore shorts and carried guns over their shoulders.

  What kind of guns? Hussey in his official capacity was concerned about the spread of guns among the tribes.

  Old muzzle-loaders, he said, not rifles.

  Ah, Hussey said. But perhaps not so old. They make their own, you know, surprisingly skilfully, and fire them with toy caps. I’ve written to the Governor to ask if we can ban the sale of caps in the markets here. Amazing what little things they pick up from us.

  Really, sir? Actually, sir, what I said is not correct, now I think about it. Only two of them carried guns. The other two had crossbows. They wore some pieces of European clothing but all of them had tattoos on their faces and chests.

  Where were they going? Were they out hunting?

  I don’t know. I don’t think so, sir. Because they came with us all the way to the beginning of the next village’s land, a full day’s march, and then they turned back. I think they just came as guides, or perhaps for protection. They came as far as a place w
here there was a bamboo pole stuck in the ground by the path, and there was a hand strung from it. I saw something a bit like it once before, only it wasn’t a human hand that time. When they saw that, they turned double quick and went back, almost running. I think they could have run back in a fraction of the time it had taken us to walk there.

  And Hussey would say in his studious way, There will have been some genna.

  If not a tribal feud then some taboo – some contamination, something forbidden, some line which these other warriors might not cross. Hussey had been observing the tribes and noting their genna for a decade.

  Genna. It was a foreign word, quite new to him, and yet he thought he could understand it. There were lines drawn in the world. Crossing such a line brought its consequence. Even a civilised man was aware of that sort of thing.

  Were you afraid?

  Yes, I was afraid. I had thought – it had seemed reasonable to think – that they were taking me to someone like you, to the Army or to some missionaries perhaps, and suddenly there was this grisly hand.

  And the man with you?

  He just walked on.

  He would think, his own line had been crossed already, back there with Tommy and the others. Every tribe has its genna.

  The Viking gave the hand barely a glance. The two of them walked on without so much as a change of pace.

  He suddenly feared that they were not making progress at all. They were walking in circles – or if not in circles then in spirals, ascending and descending, scenes repeating. Things seen before would be seen again.

  They climbed on steeply, into the territory of whoever had put that sign there. To some other village, some other ridge from which they would again look down on the dark ocean of hills. They would be there by sunset, in a village as well defended as the first he had come to, with stone walls and a gate as great as that other. They would look down as all the sky above turned lilac, and the cloud rolled below as if it would go on for ever, and he would wonder how many other soldiers like himself were circling out there in the mist, how many little bands of warriors, of whatever kind, living and dead.

  We’re all bloody well the same, Walter, men are all the same, when it comes down to it. We saw that, didn’t we?

  At the gate a near-naked man crouched with a spear. At his challenge the Viking spoke what he supposed was a name, of someone he knew or to whom he had an introduction. Walter would have been amused to see it. The way he spoke, he might have given his card to the butler of the big house where Walter was keeper. Nakedness didn’t make it any less formal. They waited, as callers might at the entrance to the big house, to be invited in.

  It looked a powerful village. He could see its strength in the fortifications, and in the way men carried themselves. The head post that stood beside a circle of standing stones at the centre of the village carried clean white skulls alongside the older yellowing ones, and the chief’s house to which they were taken was of great length, with a tremendous roof of greyed thatch and gables that soared out over the entrance like the prow of an ark, topped by great carved mithun horns. He knew now that one must enter these long-houses slowly, to allow one’s eyes to adjust to the light. It was like entering a tunnel, seeing at first only the pinpoints of light that came through the woven cane walls and the glow of the fire at the centre, and only then the half-lit figures of the handful of men who sat beside it. And to those men one appeared first as a blurred shadow against the light, so that it was a politeness to them also to enter without causing alarm until one’s face could be seen. Only then, greetings. And sitting by the hearth, on the hard earth floor or on an ankle-high stool, and taking in two hands the proffered cup of rice beer or bitter tea. Gradually the long room showed itself: great roof posts that seemed to be carved out from whole tree trunks, carved like totem poles with stylised male figures with tall phalluses and flat moon faces; beams carved with heads and tigers and hornbills; actual heads, skulls of men and of mithun, strung along the walls, and shields and weapons, crossbows, spears and daos, and an array of guns.

  The chief was a thin old man with narrow hips and a proud chest on which the ribs showed, and a thin pointed face, and such complex tattoos across torso and face that only wide circles were left bare about his eyes, with the effect of making him look, Charlie thought, like a rather regal ant (as he would later say to Hussey, and by the description Hussey would think that he knew the man), and he had acquired a minute pair of shorts, and just a few words of English, but it didn’t take many to compliment him on the size of his house, a look of admiration and an expansive gesture of the hands were enough to do that; and he took the compliment and gave Charlie a tour, showing the poles and the carvings and the weaponry, and, wrapping his black-and-white-striped blanket about himself since the air cooled fast in the evening (he, too, knew how to wear a blanket grandly as a toga), taking him out to the bamboo platform at the back of the hut, which cantilevered spectacularly out over a precipice shaggy with jungle, where they watched the sun go down. They stood out there, the old chief like an ancient king, and the Viking and himself, on the flimsy-seeming platform of bamboo, and he looked down and thought of falling. The lilac went from the sky. Mist settled in the rifts between the mountains. The forest canopy directly below grew black – so densely, spongily black, that if he were to step off the edge of the platform, he thought, the fall would be soft, like time. He would be falling a hundred feet through the air and into the softness of the trees, falling slowly, turning over and over, down through the primeval tangle, until he was no more than white bones on the forest floor. He would be like the rest of them, already so many white bones down there. The Viking put a hand to his arm. Perhaps he had swayed forward, just so much. Perhaps they had travelled together so long that the Viking had seen the dream in him. His hand was warm, real. In a moment the swift dusk was gone, and with it, the depths.

  When they went back in, the light of the fire was the brighter for the darkness outside.

  The chief’s great house was packed that night. There might have been a gathering like that every evening, for all he knew, but he doubted it. He suspected that his presence was the draw. So many men flooded in, so many eyes on him at first, men touching him, putting out their fingers just to feel his hair and his white skin, but, as usual in these encounters, his novelty soon wore off. Soon enough he was left in his own silence watching them drink and talk, following none of it, and though he drank also he only fell deeper into his silence. He would not know until he rose how drunk he had become.

  He sat, close to the fire and feeling its heat, watching the men talk, bronze faces in the glow, dimmer bodies back from the flame. He watched the bamboo cups passed from man to man, and the pipes, watched the smoke rise to the soot-blackened roof and diffuse along it, seeping out not through any chimney or hole but through the thatch itself, like the house’s breath. The underside of the thatch and the roof rafters were encrusted with many years’ layers of soot, and anything that had been in the room for any length of time had acquired a blackening of smoke – himself, he thought, included, coughing now and then when the acridity caught the back of his throat, clearing his throat with the cloudy beer for which he had by now acquired a taste.

  There was the fire and there were dogs curled close to the fire. That was the best thing to look at, the flames and the glow of embers, and a long silvery dog sleeping beside the chief’s gnarled feet. But he was too watchful to rest his eyes in one place for long. There were so many faces. Faces, not masks, though they might have been taken for masks, each one alive with shining eyes beneath its tattoos and its strange and ingenious headdress. Faces framed with necklaces of skulls. Ears stuck with antlers and horns through their hugely extended lobes. Shadows of the horns falling across the faces as they moved. Shadows of the headdresses on the walls. The walls dark – dark umber, but yet not so dark that the heads and the headdresses did not cast shadows there across the arrays of weapons and skulls, a monstrous black dance of shadows as the
fire was fed and bright flames leapt up. At moments some movement or shadow or leap of the flames sent a wave of fear running through him. He didn’t know if it was because of some difference in this house or tribe, or something in himself. Even the Viking at such moments seemed satanic, with his tusked helmet. He felt the flooding fear, and tried to deal with the fear. He looked back to the silvery dog. Its nose was tucked between its paws. Calm, he told himself, there is no immediate threat here. This is hospitality, not war. Look, these men have almost forgotten your presence. They are like all the others, just drinking and telling stories as men do everywhere when they drink. There is no danger in that. Yet his eyes went on ranging about the room. And then as two men moved and parted, he noticed, squeezed into a space behind them, another figure who sat as still as the dog and himself. He had not noticed him before. He was young, smooth-faced, and he sat cross-legged gazing into the fire. His stillness was arresting, as was his simplicity. He wore only the simplest bead necklaces, no tattoos and no headdress, his black hair in the usual pudding-basin cut. He sat very still and inconspicuous, and yet this separated him from the rest. There was a difference in him, in his posture and in his face, and in his hands, which fidgeted with a twig that he must have picked up from the earth floor, and which did not seem as tough as the hands of a Naga.