Land of the Living

by Georgina Harding

  On the last climb before Mokokchung it came on very hot. Sweat poured off him. The jungle sound amplified in his ears. The figure of the scrum-half drove on ahead, grotesque and relentless.

  Rain, the Viking said.

  How, rain, when it was so hot?

  Within minutes the shower came and pelted down, and went, and took the tension from the air and left it clean.

  Mokokchung looked new-washed when he first saw it, the town spilling down the green hills, roof tiles and thatch shining, the white mission church like absolution.

  There was the bungalow, black and white, the orange flowers before it, the Englishman on the veranda with his legs loosely crossed on the long arms of the chair.

  Homecoming. The Englishman putting his feet to the floor, rising, putting out a hand. The feel of the cool English hand shaking his, a freckled bony hand in his own sweating one. His beige cotton shirt. The smell of his pipe. Suddenly he and the Englishman were up on the veranda and there was a gulf between them and the two Nagas, one of them shy and the other bold; the Viking shifting from one foot to the other at the base of the steps, and the scrum-half squatting behind his basket like a trader with something sought-after to sell.

  Handshake. Name. Regiment. Story – no, that too complicated. Leave the story for later. Take a bath. This kind man with the cool hand offered him tea, and after tea, a bath, and a servant to run the bath for him, and to bring him towels, many-times-washed no-longer-white towels, and then he was alone, and he washed each piece of himself and lay back in the bath and saw his body from that angle, so slightly distorted, and wondered at its being his, the sunburnt bits and the pale bits, the bony knees, the filthy toes which would need to be scrubbed some more and have the nails trimmed, the hands likewise, the slack penis nudged by the movement of his hand in the water. (And even when he has come home, again and again, there will be moments of such strangeness, as if the homecoming will never be completed. Again, when he is really at home, coming in from the farm – and there is no work more physically connected to the place that is home than the work of the farm – he will go upstairs and run hot water loud into the cast-iron bath, and step in with the water still running, and when the bath is full he will reach to turn off the taps, and regard himself again as a stranger, lifting the soap from the wooden bath rack, standing to wash, seeing himself in the long mirror above the basin.)

  Clean then. Beard not shaven yet – let that wait for the barber tomorrow. A glass of whisky put in his hand, and the kind man offered a cigarette.

  In Mokokchung there were words. For the unspeakable as well as all the other things. For what was in the basket as for the flowers beneath which they had walked.

  Head.

  Jap’s head.

  Beheaded.

  Wisteria.

  Hussey had books in which he might find the descriptions and the names of the flowers and the plants and birds he had seen, some of them having names in both English and Latin, and those that did not yet but would soon enough be given botanical names having them in one or other of the Naga dialects, or already a variety of names in different dialects which Hussey had noted down.

  He sat with Hussey in the bungalow, that first evening, when he had bathed, the servant closing doors and windows and lighting the coals in the narrow fireplace since the nights so quickly grew cool, and tried to find the names for things. He felt marvellously clean and held a tumbler of Scottish whisky in his hand. That had a name: Glenfiddich. Supplies of whisky were short because of the war. Hussey had been saving the bottle for visitors and enjoyed the opportunity to pour a second glass.

  Damn fellow wanted a medal, Hussey said. I sent him packing.

  He’s gone then, he thought. He had no reply. He took a sip of the whisky, looked about the room, at the muted prints on the walls of Indian palaces and temples, which might have been Hussey’s or might have been inherited from a predecessor, at the faded backs of books which he assumed were Hussey’s own. So he need never see that man again.

  Well, what would you have done? Hussey asked of his silence.

  I don’t know.

  Would you say he committed a crime?

  Of course it was a crime. It was murder.

  Hussey looked tired, muted and foxed like the prints.

  There’s a war going on.

  He had been without words and now the words he heard confused him. These Nagas were headhunters, after all. That was what people called them. That man was a Naga. He is a headhunter, and we are fighting a war. So where does the crime begin?

  It’s a muddle, Hussey said. It’s a bloody muddle, all of it.

  He put a hand to his brow. It was pale for the hand of a man who had spent thirty years in the East, but spotted and freckled.

  How can they hope to get it straight when we bring them this muddle? We tried to stop it. At the start of the war here, we told them not to take Japanese heads. How are they to understand our rules?

  What did you do with him?

  I told you, I sent him packing.

  No. I mean the Jap.

  Best to have the thing buried.

  Where?

  In the cemetery.

  Hussey digressed then, moving the subject tactfully elsewhere. He sensed that Hussey must be a tactful man.

  The Angami Nagas, Hussey was saying, in the voice of the ethnographer he liked to be when he was not being a colonial official, a musing thread of a voice which seemed somehow more natural to him. You will have seen some of the Angami, of course, they will have been the first you met when you came to the country, they live in the area about Kohima, we’ve known the Angami for longer and know rather more about them than we know about other tribes, and they’re educated now too, you know, and Christians, since the missionaries have been with them for years, and their lives are changing so it’s worth making the effort to record what we can of the old beliefs before they disappear – well, the Angami, and very likely other tribes too, I should think, have rather a nice custom that if a man dies away from home, a lock of his hair is brought back and attached to a wooden image that is substituted for his body at a funeral ceremony. I’ve read that the Japanese do something similar. It need be no more than a few strands of hair or a nail clipping, but it’s taken home so that the family can commemorate the dead, each year on the day when they celebrate their ancestors. The basis is in ancestor worship, of course. I think you will find variants of this custom throughout Asia.

  Is it done? he blurted out, interrupting and rising unsteadily. Is it buried already?

  I should hope so. Not a thing you want to keep hanging around.

  No, of course not. It’s good that it’s buried. Otherwise—

  He went out, leaving Hussey by the fire. He walked to the edge of the veranda and stood looking into the dark. Where the sun would rise in the morning, that way was Japan. As if, otherwise, he must take it there, or some hairs of it at least, soon as the war was over.

  Plough

  She caught him staring, as if she didn’t exist. As if she might pass her hand before his eyes and he wouldn’t so much as blink. Not even the shadow of her hand might touch him, or the air displaced by its passing.

  He was so much there, so physically there in the room, but unblinking, unseeing.

  She had curled her hair and dressed for him but he didn’t see it. Before she came downstairs she had sat and put on her woman’s face before the mirror with the window and the flat land and the outlines of the bare trees outside. As if lipstick made her more visible.

  Did you hear the weather forecast? she said.

  Weather should matter to him. After all, it was weather that shaped his days.

  They say there’s a blizzard on the way. They say there’s a cold winter ahead.

  What’s that?

  He was too far away even for weather.

  They say it’ll be a cold winter.

  Ah, is that so? Not good then, if they’re right. Better get going and do all we can before the blizzards
arrive.

  He left his cup on the table and went down the passage and took his big coat from the hook by the door, and his scarf and gloves and cap from the shelf above it, and put on his boots and went out.

  He was out all morning. He came in briefly for lunch then wrapped up and went out again, as the clouds began to weigh in the sky.

  She took Jess out and saw the clouds, saw that the forecast was accurate, that the snow would be with them soon. She could hear his tractor across the fields tearing up the ground.

  He saw her walking there, saw the dog and the clouds. Only the clouds mattered. In whatever time remained before the snow came, all that mattered was the work – the doing of it, the concentration, the steadiness, the looking ahead along the line, the looking back to see the soil thrown up slick and chocolate-dark where his blades had gone, the slow pulling of twenty-odd horsepower through the earth. But it was cold. The cold got to him as the hours passed and the weather moved in. He grew numb, as if he was only a part of the groaning machine. There was a precision to this work that he was still learning, that made it a good thing to do. He needed to align the furrows precisely for each stetch that he ploughed, turn the tractor along the headland, align again for the return. At each headland he held still a moment, while the throb of the engine continued and the smoke of the exhaust rose before him, the smell of it in his nostrils as it had been all of the day.

  There are moments when the world changes shape, distorts, blackens. When the shape into which it turns seems so complete and so entirely credible that you are convinced by it even though you know that the appearance is temporary and will pass. So he set out the next furrows, ploughing into the dark earth as the snow began to fall.

  It came in fine flakes at first, out of the bruised sky. The flakes melted soon as they touched the earth, making it blacker, not white. The trees stood out more black than ever above the hedges, the taller elms like crooked fingers, that had been planted to give him the lines to which he must work. The snow thickened. He reached the headland again. Drove the tractor along to the next pointing finger, churning the soil as the snow fell to heal it. One last time across the field, he told himself, then home to the yard. The flakes had become icy chips, swirling about the bare trees. There was no sky now, no land, but only the snow. A piece of him wanted to keep on at the work, as if there was no other choice but to remain. If he were to go on, the flakes would pare him away, his face, his skin, down to metal and bone.

  Darling, you look so cold.

  He went straight to his study, closing the door.

  Why don’t you come in the kitchen where it’s warm?

  No, it’s fine. Won’t be here long.

  Let her go, he thought. Let her not fuss.

  He stared at his hands on the desk. Numb hands, frozen fingertips, reddened knuckles, slowly warming as he flexed them. Then he lifted his head. He looked all round the room. It was his room but not his room. All these things in it, so many of the things in it, not only the furniture but the lamp, the blotter, the pen stand, the paper knife, these things were Uncle Ralph’s. The ugly bulbous glass ashtray that Mrs T had emptied that morning. So many of the papers even, in drawers and on shelves in piles and in boxes, Ralph’s. And the books on the shelves were his and Ralph’s mixed together, books on country pursuits and military history, old leather-bound volumes of Gibbon and Shakespeare and Dickens, and the heroic stories he used to read when he was a boy, Orczy and Dumas and Buchan, and King Solomon’s Mines and The Prisoner of Zenda.

  He took up a packet of cigarettes from the desk, lit one, dropped the match in the clean ashtray. The picture above the fireplace had been Ralph’s. A landscape – or perhaps you called it a seascape – pale dunes tufted with grass and waves breaking before them. It was by someone good, Ralph had told him, though he had forgotten the painter’s name. There were Ralph’s guns in the cubby-hole in the corner that Ralph had called his gun room; Ralph’s treasured Purdey, which he hardly ever used, which was perhaps the most valuable thing there, a fine shotgun from the most famous gunmaker in Mayfair, the sort of gun that merited a room to itself. He was tempted to take it out, if only to hold it. He had handled it enough to know the sure feel of it, its weight, the polished wood of the stock, bespoke for Ralph, the engraved metal of the trigger-guard, the dense leafy pattern scrolling about his initials. He would put his touch where Ralph’s had been.

  He felt his uncle at his shoulder now, the tobacco-and-tweed smell of him. Time, Ralph would say, it takes time. Patience, boy. Ralph had taught him to shoot, in the winter holidays when he came to visit. Ralph stood beside him in the field as the pheasants were driven towards them. Wait. Don’t fire too soon. Pick out your bird and watch it, and let it pass overhead. There’s more of a target then. One bird separated from the others, one black cross against the sky. Stock against his shoulder, hand steadying the barrel, finger poised.

  It was dark outside the window, the curtains not drawn. It was so dark that you couldn’t see the snow but only the reflection of the room and the man at the desk. A reflection that was not Ralph, but some other gentleman farmer come home from war. Was that him? Was that him, here, at this other man’s desk?

  Claire came in with tea on a tray.

  Really you should light the fire, it’s so cold in here.

  She went to draw the curtains and the reflection was gone.

  Would Ralph have understood about the genna? If he did understand he wouldn’t have spoken about it. Men like him didn’t have words for things like that. Only a shrug, a set of the mouth, a turning away to some practical matter.

  If you hold too long and don’t shoot, the bird will pass. You hold your gun and watch it glide on without another beat of its wings, like a paper dart released and flying straight, losing height so gradually that you barely notice it drop, gliding where it is aimed towards the dark far trees where no guns are.

  His body was cold, coming beneath the sheet, letting in a slice of cold air.

  They had been warm by the fire, in the sitting room after supper, he with his book lying open on the arm of his chair, eyes closed, mouth a little open. Dozing after a long day out in the field. She nudged him gently but he moved with a jolt and the book slipped to the floor. She said she’d put a hot-water bottle in the bed. He should go up. She’d just take the dog out first.

  No, I’ll go. I’ll take Jess. I think I left a barn door open.

  He spoke with urgency, though she couldn’t see the cause for it.

  Anyway, he said, I’d like to see how much snow there’s been.

  What had it mattered? Snow was snow. And however much snow was there now, that was not the snow that they would find in the morning. There was all of a night between then and morning.

  Now his body was cold, closing on hers to borrow her warmth. You asleep?

  I was waiting for you. What were you doing, all that time?

  She shuddered at his icy fingers, pushed them back against his body, took her own warm hands to him instead. As they made love she pulled the sheet and the heavy blankets over them into a cave, holding the warmth they made about them, holding tight, not letting it out, not letting the cold get in.

  Then he was really asleep, a weight on her. She must shift his body away, pull back her arm that lay beneath his shoulder. Whatever he had brought to her, she could not rid herself of it: the cold, the black-and-whiteness of the night. She curled up, away from him, hands to her naked belly and between her legs. She wondered if she would know, if she were to conceive. If a child might be conceived in such cold. How such a child would be. She lay awake until the wind dropped and the blizzard seemed to have passed. If it was still snowing, the snow would lie smooth now. Even so, she barely slept. Soon as there was light she got up and looked out, and went outside.

  He had a gun in his hand. Only it was just a toy gun, a little weightless thing that fired caps – snap, snap, snap, and the smell of gunpowder. Hussey was there, and the Governor from Shillong. He didn’t run this tim
e. He shot into the mist, and where he shot holes opened, and vapour puffed out through the bullet holes like men’s warm breath when they stand out in the cold. They’re only percussion caps, the Governor said. He’s not doing any harm.

  The room was strangely white when he woke, that bareness to it that comes when light reflects off snow. Her pillow was cold and the curtain at one of the windows was half drawn. He saw how she had been awake early, and drawn back the curtain to look out, as he did now. There were her tracks in the snow, running from the front door – she had gone out from the front, unbolting the big black front door that they so rarely used so that she could make her path directly out across the centre of the whiteness – a bold straight path like some determination in her that led, he could see now, to her bundled black figure out there before the trees. The path made it hers, all that ground hers, she the first to tread the snow. As he watched, she turned and took a careful look back across the garden towards the house, and for a moment stretched out her arms with raised beckoning fingers, like a distant conductor calling her orchestra in, calling the instruments to order, then slowly let them drop, and spun round, and went on. He stood before the cold glass of the window and watched as she did that and then walked away through the trees out of sight, and he stayed there growing colder when there was no one to see, no movement anywhere, but only the snow and the dull white sky. He looked out to the fields. You could not tell any more what was grass and what was stubble and what was plough. No harm. All that dark earth he had ploughed had been covered over.