Land of the Living

by Georgina Harding

  Now and then the young man lifted his head a little and his eyes shifted from the fire and cast about, just as his own did, and then for an instant their looks met, and Charlie saw suddenly who, what, he was. And then his head dropped and he was playing with the twig, snapping it into neat little matchsticks in his fingers.

  Neither of them moved. Charlie looked, and the Jap looked down. The talk of the Nagas rolled in waves about them, and the shadows moved on the walls, and the fire burned on and a brown hand reached forward to feed a new branch into it, and the silvery dog raised its head at the movement beside it, then settled again. How did a Jap come to be in this village, masquerading as a Naga? Much as he did, he guessed. There would be some story possibly very like his own. Some attack or ambush, some wandering down there beneath the clouds. And here they were – so close, yards apart, each of them in his own terror. They would sit the evening through, not showing themselves or their fear, playing with sticks or swilling rice beer in a tin mug, waiting until the jokes and the stories were done and the Nagas turned in. Then they would lie down to sleep but likely not sleep, yards apart, with the others on the long benches beside the walls, bamboo walls that creaked with the wind or with men’s restlessness, and the hearth still red in the centre of the dark room.

  All night it seemed he was aware of the room and the walls, the play of shadows that had crossed the walls, the Jap lying there, wondering if the Jap saw what he saw. He was aware that someone had fed the fire with great branches to keep it burning through the night, not looking to see, only glad that the fire was there to warm them against whatever dreams they might have and against the cold mist that seeped through the cracks in the plaited walls. When there was a faint grey light in the cracks he decided that he dared to move. Softly, he rose. He went to the door of the hut but the door was barred. It would have made too much noise to open it, so he crept instead to the far end of the hut and out to the bamboo platform at the back. That creaked too. The floor was made of the same material as the walls, strong broad strips of plaited bamboo that flexed with every movement. There was nothing to see, only air just beginning to be grey, the night almost at an end but the village swathed in cloud. Yet this grey air was cleansing after the oppression of the hut. He could make out the railing at the edge of the platform, black lines in the grey. He took careful steps towards it, one after another, out to where the view would fall if there were a view to be seen.

  There, squatting on his hunkers, was the Jap. He had thought it was a dark bundle on the floor, but no, it was the crouching figure of a man, perched right at the edge looking into nothingness. The Jap must have noticed the creak and quiver of the floor, but he showed no sign of it. He might have pushed him then, so easily, he thought, put a hand to his crouched back and rolled him like a ball beneath the rail and out into the cloud. Why would he do that? Because they were enemies. But he didn’t. He squatted down a little way off, in much the same position, legs folded, hands dropped between his knees, and watched with him as the grey grew infinitesimally paler. Behind them in the village, dogs barked and cocks crowed. From far below came the waking calls of the unseen jungle.

  They crouched there for whatever time it took for light to begin to penetrate the cloud. The air whitened above, and below them a gash broke open so that they looked down suddenly into what seemed to be a swirling vortex, deep and black and plunging to infinity. The sight made him unsteady. He moved his weight, stood, stepped back. The Jap stayed put, balanced on the balls of his feet, faintly rocking. Just a touch, it would take – or the slightest tilt of his own body.

  It’s all right, he said to the Jap. It’s all right. I won’t tell. It’s okay.

  If he didn’t get the words, he might understand the tone of them.

  And the Jap looked up from the vortex, directly at him, eyes wide in his round, smooth face, which was all the smoother perhaps for the early light which reduced detail and colour, so that it seemed no more than the smooth face of a schoolboy. He didn’t know Japs. He knew they didn’t grow much in the way of beards. Maybe they always tended to look younger than Europeans. He was sure that this one was anyway younger than he was. He put out his two hands before him, apart and with the palms open in what he thought must be a universal sign that a man holds no weapon and means no harm.

  The Jap stood then and stepped close, and bowed to him.

  He gave a kind of a bow in return, and the Jap bowed again, lower, so low that he saw the back of his neck, with the Naga hair upon it, but a Jap neck not a Naga neck. He was close enough to know the smell of him. He had the face of a boy but he smelled like a fat old man, of sour sweat and drink or perhaps it was fear seeping through his pores.

  The boy turned his eyes away to the horizon.

  The sun had yet to rise, but the cloud had pulled back. It was all there to see now, the jungle and the hills, which seemed to go on for ever. It seemed colder in that moment than it had been at any time in the night. He shivered. He didn’t want this day to come. He was afraid of it, this day in particular, as this boy beside him was afraid. As if something about it was evil.

  The dark of the house and the closeness of the men, which the night before had in themselves been cause for fear, seemed like safety now. As the first streak of yellow appeared on the horizon, he went back in, to his place on the sleeping bench. The space had shrunk, as the Viking had moved in his sleep to fill it. He squeezed in and wrapped himself once again in his blanket, as every man there was wrapped in his blanket. He didn’t expect to sleep any more but only to find some warmth. He lay tight in the blanket and looked up to the blackness of the roof, knowing the black softness of the soot, how it coated the cobwebs, how the thatch was stained with years of smoke. How long had that boy been here? Long enough for his hair to grow to a Naga length. Since the battle then. But had he got lost, or had he fled? The latter, by his look. That was what it was that distinguished him most from the Nagas, more than his features or his lack of tattoos, the shame in him. That was it, he saw it now. In all the Nagas, there was pride, more than in any other group of men that he had known. In this man, there was shame.

  Would the boy think he was a deserter too? He wouldn’t be sure. He was still wearing his uniform, however worn and filthy. God knows, he could perhaps be imagined to be on some Army business. Now he thought about it, he wasn’t sure himself. He thought of the others and how he came to be alone, and he thought, well, yes, one might well think that was what he was. Perhaps he also had the look of a deserter, if the boy were to look at him as he looked at the boy. Perhaps it showed, the guilt in him.

  The men about him were moving now. He heard someone go to the doorway and pull back the wooden bar that closed it, and saw the sheen of daylight spill along the walls as the doors were pulled open. He turned his head and saw the boy slip out. He must have come back in without his seeing, and been waiting close to the door to make his escape. Maybe he would hide himself until the British soldier was gone. Or he would run into the jungle again, if he had not trusted his words.

  He would tell about the Jap later, but it would be a different matter by then.

  I think he was a deserter. It’s not true, what people say, that Japs never desert. He was very young. Honestly, he looked like a schoolboy. They must have schoolboys fighting for them now.

  Speaking with Hussey would be a way of fixing things, extracting them from formless experience and setting shape about them.

  The Nagas had dressed him up as one of them, he would say. Undressed, rather. He was almost naked – just a kilt about his hips, and necklaces and armlets, his hair grown out and left long at the top and shaved at the sides. Knowing them, they probably had fun doing it. I think they might have done it to me if there’d been half a chance of making a fair-haired Englishman look like a Naga.

  No, he wouldn’t have made a good Naga. Nor would Hussey – the two of them pale, knobbly, English. Give them painted tattoos and headdresses and spears, and they might be comically dressed for the
Governor’s fancy-dress ball at Shillong. It was strange to be speaking with an Englishman again, the words spilling out before him, heard and understood, and spilling on, with all their implications. How absurd the thought of a Naga would seem to everyone at the ball. But not here. Hussey knew that. There was nothing funny about them here, nothing the slightest bit funny.

  Coming to Hussey he would see his own world again, but turned about, so that every familiar piece in it would be strange to him. There would be the initial shock of the half-timbered bungalow, with the hedges and the flowerbeds, like a lodge you might find beside the gates to some country house, in the Lakes or in Wales, somewhere where trees hung damp and whitewash swiftly greyed. Then the man in the long cane chair, unravelling his outstretched legs and standing as they approached, putting down his pipe and walking to the top of the steps.

  Good Lord! A clear English voice. A man with the look of a schoolmaster, bony face, light blue eyes, thinning sandy hair; his voice one that has learned an authority that has not come to it naturally, as if from the habit of speaking to boys and across a classroom or an assembly hall. Hello, and where have you come from?

  And he would stutter. The words failed in his throat. He was Lieutenant Charles Ashe, that was who he was; and he couldn’t say where he’d come from but only wave a trembling hand towards the hills and the clouds.

  Come on up, my boy, sit yourself down. Hussey guided him up the steps to the veranda as a master might have guided him into his study, indicating a seat. But before joining him he called a servant to bring some refreshment to the two Nagas who’d brought him, the Viking who stood at the foot of the steps, ill at ease, and the other who squatted so confidently beside the marigolds with his basket on his back.

  He would be barely able to speak, that first day. He would have his bath, his familiar unimaginable hot bath, and after that he would let Hussey do the talking. He would not begin his story until the next morning, by which time the man would be all of a night’s march away, and free of his load.

  He would see that Hussey had already been up for hours. No doubt things had been dealt with and reports had been written, but Hussey had waited for him before sitting down to his daily boiled eggs and tea and toast and marmalade. When they had finished and the servant had cleared the things away Hussey did not move but stayed where he was sitting, lit his pipe, looked to him, expectant. He would turn his chair then, just slightly so that he could look away from his listener to the hills and the clouds that poured across them. And he would begin. Sometimes he would raise his legs and put his feet to the latticed wooden veranda rail and gaze out there, sometimes pull them tight beneath the chair and put his head to his hands. He would tell the story of the Jap first. That was as much as he could deal with now. One thing at a time.

  I wouldn’t have told, you know. I’d have let him be. He could have lived through all of the rest of the war out there and no one would have known. He could have lived there for ever if he liked.

  They waited on a wide dark wood bench beneath the porch of the chief’s hut, where the roof reared up above the carved pillars. The mist had quite gone. The sky was blue and the low morning sunlight penetrated almost to the back of the porch. There should have been nothing to menace him any more, not in the crude carvings nor in the circle of tall grey stones set in the bare mud before the house and the head post with its bizarre trophies, strung through the nose sockets, looking now squalid and paltry beneath the directness of the light. These things were nothing to do with him, with his culture or time. They would soon be the past, and he would move on into the present which was where he belonged – and sometime not too far off, whenever the war was over, the present must surely come here also, and these things would be buried and gone, so that there would be only the stones standing and the memory, and grass growing about them and they tilting as the ground in which they stood subsided. It was morning. The sun was getting warm and he was ready to leave. He shifted position and took out his watch. He had got into the habit of keeping the watch deep in his trouser pocket. On his wrist it attracted too much attention from the Nagas and he had feared he might lose it to one of them. The time it told wasn’t necessarily correct – there had been days in these months when he had failed or simply ceased to wind it, and whenever he had set it again he had done so by guesswork around sunrise. But whatever the hour it told, it reckoned the passage of time as well as it had ever done, and it had that way that watches have of slowing the minutes the more you looked at it.

  The Viking sat out the wait with his Gothic patience. Time didn’t seem to matter to the Viking, or to anyone there as much as himself – except for that Jap. It would matter to him. That boy must have been desperate for him to be gone, as soon and as far away as he could go. He wondered where he had got to, if he was hiding in some other hut in the village, watching as he did the minutes pass, or out in the jungle where time like air so swiftly became dense and ancient. He felt the kinship between them. What would he have done if the situation had been reversed? He would have longed to be alone again with the Nagas, for safety, and for anonymity: no one there would see into him and know what he was. Because the Jap must have seen into him as he thought he had seen into the Jap; as the Viking could never do, for all their familiarity, because the Viking lived in a different time.

  A thin ginger cat arched its back and rubbed past his leg. He put out a hand to stroke it but it recoiled. Again, he looked at his watch, and to the Viking who sat so still.

  He dropped his hand once more in invitation, and slowly the cat came forward to it. He could feel the ribs beneath its fur, the purr which like the watch stretched out the seconds.

  The cat was gone soon as the other man came. He came fast, firmly towards them, slightly bow-legged, a short stocky man with a blanket over his shoulder and a basket on his back, and the cat slipped away.

  The man had a bold swirling pattern of tattoos on his face and he wore tusks in his ears, and no hat but a thick mop of very black hair, and a necklace of five brass heads, and broad white ivory arm and leg rings that accentuated the muscularity of his limbs. Charlie had noticed him the night before, close to the fire in the hut, a bold fellow but one who didn’t stare, as if he had known already what British people were. A tough one, he thought. Built like a rugger player, a good man for a scrum, with sloping shoulders and a thick neck and a head like a nut. He saw how athletic the man was as they left the village, at the threshold stone beyond the gate, where he made a sudden vertical bound, knees folded up, arms spread wide, and flew in the air. He didn’t know then that it was a leap from a Naga dance, that this man was an admired dancer. He wouldn’t know anything about the dancing until he was with Hussey, but the single move was stunning. He caught the elation of it, some brimming excitement in the man, and almost the man danced again as he sauntered ahead of them down the first steep descent, down steps and slopes and loops, down into the gorge he had seen from the bamboo platform – and after all that wait it was an exhilarating plunge into the early morning’s vortex – that was so lush and green now that the mist was gone. Once they paused – it was rare that the scrum-half paused – and he felt his head throb with the beauty of it, as they climbed a rock that looked out over the gorge. They were so much lower here that the air was already dense and hot. The jungle sounds were close beneath. They could hear the hidden river and the distant roar of the waterfall that fed it, and turning to look upstream he saw the white thread falling hundreds of feet down the cliff.

  That first stretch, he will remember, was the most beautiful stretch that he walked in all of that trek. There was the waterfall so luminous in the sunlight. A hint of rainbow in the air above it. The tangle of the vegetation that encrusted the cliff. The eagles that hung in the sky. The lightness in him, at being released from the village and the thought of the Jap – so swiftly he had forgotten that Japanese boy – and at the pace which the scrum-half had set, slaloming downhill. When they came lower and entered the jungle it was the sort o
f jungle he would one day wish that he could describe to Claire, if he could ever describe to Claire anything of those next two days: the green dusk, the bronze of the earth floor, the orchids which grew thick on these trees, the cool rush of the river when they came to the foot of the torrent and found a bridge. And after they had crossed they rested on long smooth rocks. The scrum-half put down his basket before him and smiled, some heavy package in it the size of a football wrapped round with a cloth, visible through the openwork of the weave. When the scrum-half smiled the lines of his tattoos distorted his face into a clown’s. He smiled broadly and put his strong hand to Charlie’s arm and spoke: You British, give me medal.

  Maybe, Charlie said, wondering if he’d wear it beside the five brass heads on his chest. Not mentioning that the feat of bringing him in would hardly be considered such as to merit a medal.

  Then the man stood, and swung his basket onto his back, shedding a cloud of flies that had fastened to the cloth-covered bundle.

  Suddenly Charlie understood.

  Beyond the river they walked through a thicket of bright green reeds tall above their heads. The path between them was tight. The scrum-half led. The Viking came at the rear. They walked close there and in single file. Then they were back in the forest but the path widened, and he could fall back and walk beside his guide. All he could know was what he read in the Viking’s eyes. He saw that the Viking also knew. He must have known it even when they were waiting that morning. And he saw that they must keep with this man. The thing in the basket and the medal were their insurance that they would get to where they were going. They walked under a bower of wild wisteria, the sweet scent all about them.