by Ward Just
His mission was straightforward, textbook stuff. Harry would meet his counterpart and either something would come of it or nothing would. Probably nothing would, yet there was value in observing the enemy up close, listening to what he had to say and how he said it. What was important to him. That was the ambassador’s point, simply to begin a conversation and see where it led. Words could lead anywhere. We have to begin somewhere, the ambassador said. There will be negotiations, sometime, somewhere, and we must look on this as the necessary prelude. The clearing of throats. If we decline a parley, Harry said, isn’t that a show of weakness? Danger was minimal. What would they gain by holding captive or harming a junior foreign service officer? Give me a brief, I’ll follow it to the letter. Mostly I’ll listen. As he ruminated, Harry wondered if he wasn’t back around the campfire in the Connecticut woods, spinning tales about pirates beyond the circle of light. But he had to admit also his backthought: If he was successful, what a coup! Harry was the first mate with the blue parrot on his shoulder and a double-edged sword at his waist, the one who came from nowhere to settle whatever scores needed settling. During their last conversation the ambassador recounted the Secretary’s doubts. Are you certain that Sanders is the man for this mission? He’s awfully young. A bit brash, isn’t he? Yes to all of the above, the ambassador replied. But he’s an awfully bright lad. Not lacking in ambition. More to the point, not lacking in mettle. And he won’t go beyond the brief. I’d say it’s worth the chance. What do we have to lose?
Harry heard a stirring in the camp, and from somewhere in the jungle the cry of a bird, and next, from far away, the thut-thut of a helicopter’s rotor—but the sound may well have been something else, a truck perhaps, or a farm vehicle. As if there were Deere tractors in the far south of the wretched Delta, a swamp, notoriously difficult of access. But if it was a truck, that would mean a road, and Harry had seen no roads en route to the camp. It occurred to him then—such were the uncertainties of the jungle atmosphere—that the thut-thut was a motorbike come to fetch the captain. Harry scurried back to his own hut and smoked a cigarette. He heard chatter among the guards and some laughter. The thut-thut ceased. But soon enough it began again, receding as the motorbike sped away in the direction it had come from. Harry was disappointed that the comrade captain had not thought to say goodbye, nor to explain the “arrangements.”
He dozed in the morning, then spent the rest of the day reading Conrad’s novella A Smile of Fortune, in which a young sea captain is attracted to a strange monosyllabic young woman, with its scenes of high erotic power that put Harry in mind of Sieglinde. But she was never very far from his thoughts. That evening Comrade Thin, a carbine over his shoulder, took up station a few yards from Harry’s hut. Madame Mao appeared from the darkness to hand him a plate of rice with a bit of fish on the side, along with a glass of lukewarm water. Harry ate the rice and part of the fish, undercooked and tasteless except for the smell. He drank the water and when he went outside to take a leak the soldier with the carbine was at his elbow. Harry went back to the hut and climbed into the string hammock. Sleep came surprisingly quickly, though it did not last for long. Sometime after midnight he fell from the hammock, retching, drenched in sweat. The smell was foul. He cried out and someone came to the hut’s entrance and looked in but did not speak. He went away and Harry heard soft voices and then no voices at all. He retched again and again until he came up dry, and then he slept, still sweating. He began to shiver.
It rained in the morning, a steady clatter on the bamboo roof of the hut. Little rivulets found their way to the interior and soon his shorts were soaked. The water was cold. His head was on fire and he had no medicine to ease it. What he needed was aspirin, a simple over-the-counter bottle available anywhere. He tried to climb back into the string hammock but found he had no strength. For most of the day he lay in vomit and rainwater, and late in the afternoon he slept once more. He had terrible dreams the second night, fantastic shapes and colors he could not identify. He believed he was lying on the steep slope of a mountain of the sort depicted in Japanese scroll paintings, gnarled trees clinging to a high precipice, a straw hut dead center, an old man in a kimono leaning on a crook and looking skyward. Pigeons whirled above the old man and seemed to mock him. Harry tried to bring the picture closer but it receded as he looked at it and finally disappeared altogether. He thought he was losing his mind. He heard some movement in the camp but had no idea who it was. His vision was furred and fractured as if he were looking through cracked glass with someone else’s eyes. He lay a long time trying to focus, wondering if all this was a nightmare. With effort Harry raised his head and saw a bristly dragon the size of a calf, and when the beast turned toward him he saw it was an ordinary barnyard pig, black in color, rooting around the other huts, snorting as he went. Harry had the idea the pig was a creature from Asian mythology, the counterpart of a unicorn or a centaur. Rats figured in there somewhere. Snow-white hares. A brown bear. A yellow snake was coiled beside the campfire, its flat head moving from side to side. The smell of it all was ghastly, rotting flesh and something more besides. Harry was certain he was losing his mind and still he wondered why no one was there to shoo away the pig. His mouth was as dry and thick as parchment. His head was still afire as if his brain were frying. Smoke from the dying campfire burned his eyes, the scene before him indistinct and without meaning. He was in a zone of no meaning and was very much afraid. He had no idea where he was or how he had come to be there. When next he looked the pig had gone away. The rats and hares and the brown bear had vanished. The snake crawled into the firepit. He tried to remember the name of the girl in Conrad’s story, the monosyllabic girl indifferent to the ship captain’s charms. The name was gone. He slept, dreamlessly this time. When he awoke his head was almost free of pain and his eyes mostly focused except for the fur. He gagged again but nothing came up. He was empty inside, the interior of him a kind of wasteland or battlefield, scorched earth. Harry stretched both his arms and crawled to the entrance of the hut and saw that he was utterly alone. He was very weak but pulled himself upright.
He said softly, Hello? But there was no answer to that.
Who’s there? But no answer to that either.
He stood with his back resting against the hut but after a moment he sank to his haunches and waited, breathing heavily. He watched an insect alight on his wrist. Harry moved his thumbnail, thinking of it as a miniature guillotine, a way of asserting control. Appreciating the situation. Then he thought better of it, the insect was a pretty creature, feathery blue wings and a black body. Harry moved his wrist and the insect flew off, leaving a tiny spot of blood. He wondered if it was a tsetse fly and then remembered that tsetse flies were native to Africa. He wiped the blood away and squeezed the spot dry. He remained on his haunches looking at the dead campfire and thinking about the comrade captain and the girl guard, Madame Mao, the one with the plate of rice and rotten fish. She never smiled, not once. They were anonymous to him. He did not know their names or where they came from. They were surely local militia, otherwise they would have been supplied with Kalashnikovs. The carbines were no doubt stolen from one of the many American arsenals. The guards were disciplined, though, keeping to themselves, rarely speaking or smiling. Their sexual adventures at night were a diversion. Harry remembered the underdone fish and the rice thick as glue and the cup of warm water. He knew also that he had been abandoned and would have to leave this place alone and at once.
He returned to the hut and put on shorts and a clean shirt from the rucksack. He shook loose a cigarette from the pack and with difficulty—his hands were shaking—lit it and immediately began to retch. But the spasm passed and he sat for a while blowing smoke rings and wondering what came next. Tobacco smoke was a comfort, gathering in the hut as it would in a badly ventilated tavern. All that was missing was a jukebox and a sympathetic bartender in a white apron, someone feeding quarters into the jukebox. He held that thought, remembering the bar near Columbia that he an
d his roommates went to. There were two shuffleboard machines and a dartboard, Sinatra on the jukebox, also Mabel Mercer and Billie Holiday, the Benny Goodman Orchestra. It was a hell of a good jukebox, best in the neighborhood. Beer on tap. No fights. The bartender’s name was Fred and he had a daughter, Fredda, a pretty girl enrolled at Barnard. An aspiring poet, Fredda often helped her father behind the bar. Those were good times, none better. But they didn’t teach survival skills at Columbia. Shortsighted of them.
He had only the vaguest idea where he was, and when he stubbed out the cigarette he realized that the smell inside the hut was appalling and so he shuffled out into the dusk, stumbling once, weak as any invalid. Adieu Columbia. Adieu Fredda. The dying sunlight hurt his eyes and he heard once again the cry of a bird and, less distinct, the usual jungle rustle. He saw green everywhere around him and butterflies here and there. The trees were tightly wound with vines and all of it had the aspect of a botanical prison. The other two huts were empty, with nothing left behind except a crumpled cigarette pack, Chesterfields. No food, no water. Dusk came quickly as it always did. He thought of dusk as a shroud pulled by invisible hands and when he looked up he saw a starless sky. He checked his rucksack and saw that his stash of Chesterfields was missing. Furious, digging deeper, he discovered the ambassador’s golden compass where he’d left it. His wallet was undisturbed. The envelope containing one thousand U.S. was there, too, everything present and accounted for except the Chesterfields. Enemy cadres were said to be puritanical, a quality essential to their self-image as liberators and egalitarians, hard-wired, as opposed to the selfish ethics and opportunism of the oppressors, worse than the corrupt French. All the same, Harry decided to count the money and found it all there. Probably they had decided that at some fine ideological level Chesterfields wanted to be free, a kind of indemnification for looking after the American. Where he came from, cigarettes were plentiful and cheap. It was not theft. The cigarettes were communal property. This was well known. Then he remembered they also had his wristwatch.
Harry had no idea how long he had been sick, surely two days, maybe longer. For all he knew it might have been a week, a decade, the war over and done with. He was Crusoe with no Friday. His gut was still knotted and he continued to sweat, his back and his chest, his stubbled face. When he put his hand to his forehead he knew he had a fever, not high, a low-grade annoyance. Now time moved in slow motion, an eternity between one second and the next. Then time hastened, almost a swoon. Suddenly he was on the ground once again and retching and moments later in deep sleep. Harry woke up a dozen times during the night, hearing strange noises, blackness all around. The jungle vanished. His thoughts were discontinuous, rapid arrivals and departures in all directions. The voice in Harry’s head was not his own, but it was insistent and personal, a warning of the perils ahead. He heard the voice but could not see the face of the speaker. Was it true that vines contained water? The speaker had no idea. He had never seen a jungle. He lived in Connecticut and there were no jungles in Connecticut, only stone walls and fields that rolled off to the west. The speaker shrugged and in a moment was gone, back to wherever he had come from. Harry was alone in an empty house, blood-red walls and bone-white ceilings, no windows. He wondered how he had come to this misfortune and then recollected his reliance on denial. The means by which a young man got on in life day to day, a pretend world of danger and folly that always yielded to illusion, if the illusion was powerful enough. Illusion always defeated fact. He was the piano with the broken string, way up high on the treble clef, the one that promised a melodic lightness of spirit, counterpoint to the ceremony of the bass. Harry fell asleep again, dreaming now of evenings at Fred’s bar, the first mate with the blue parrot on his shoulder, a moment that slid easily into a slender girl with an emerald necklace rattling Liszt’s cage. The applause went on and on, Sieglinde beside him now clapping furiously. So it was evident that Harry was not done with illusion after all.
He was awake at first light, mostly clearheaded and without rancor. It occurred to him to brush his teeth. He found another pair of shorts and a clean shirt and stepped into the morning sunlight. The jungle’s green curtain did not move. Harry thought it wore the tortured face of one of El Greco’s saints. A godforsaken face, morose and resigned, and behind it somewhere a Bach fugue, austerity itself. An agitated silence gathered around him.
The place was cursed.
There was one path out and he took it, moving with caution, pausing often to rest. It did seem to him that the jungle had eyes, thousands of them, staring at him with blank indifference. One of the species of palm bore fruit and he decided on no evidence at all that the fruit was sweet, meaning not deadly. He ate it one small mouthful at a time and felt better at once, his parchment mouth softening. Harry was careful where he put his feet and after a while, perhaps fifteen minutes, perhaps an hour, he realized he was barefoot. The sandals were back in camp, and that mistake nearly brought him to tears, but he moved ahead nonetheless, there being no satisfactory alternative. Each step was identical to the step before. The jungle vegetation was unchanging. He knew he was not thinking straight but there seemed no alternative to that, either. When the sun was high he took a long rest, settling under one of the giant palm trees. He looked up to see a beautifully woven spider’s web, the spider dead center and waiting one foot above his head. The creature was the size of his thumb, black and yellow markings. He did not have the strength to move and hoped that was also true of the spider. His feet hurt and his vision was blurred. He dozed, and when he opened his eyes the spider was still there, dead center in its web, something imperious about it. He glanced at the trail, a few signs of use, not many. It was not a trail designed for civilians, too narrow, frequent detours for no apparent reason, no litter. Then Harry noticed a tire track about the width of a motorbike’s. He had missed that and wondered what else he had missed. Lost and confused, not alert, his only resource was his head, and his head was crippled, as clumsy as a clubfoot. If he was not careful he would find himself stumbling into a base camp, the wrong base camp, and he would be worse off than ever, a captive once again; and a captive without “arrangements,” including the false promise of safe passage.
Harry decided some exploration was necessary, so he ventured off the trail and into the bush, thick underfoot and thick at eye level but better above, though difficult to see clearly. The sun was barely visible above the canopy. The terrain was brutal, impassable in bare feet with no machete. The only way forward was the trail, so he retraced his steps to the spider’s web, noting that the spider had vanished. He could see no more than fifteen feet ahead where the trail jogged right. He had no choice but to follow it wherever it led. Then he heard voices behind him and quickly crouched, his knees sinking into the damp soil, his body hidden by an umbrella-sized palm frond. He remained there as two girls dressed in black cotton trousers and black sandals passed by. He could see only their lower legs and feet. They appeared to be unarmed but soldiers of the revolution nonetheless. They walked as if out for an afternoon stroll. One of them was humming to herself, keeping time to the slap of her sandals. Harry remained a minute or more until the girls were well beyond him. Then he stepped back onto the trail and trudged on. The girls had shapely ankles and tiny feet. Probably they were couriers. He wondered if they were caught up in the revolutionary spirit, foulmouthed, revering Che. What the hell. They wouldn’t know who Che was. Che appealed to American girls. The sun was lowering and Harry knew he must find a bivouac for the night, someplace safe. He wouldn’t know what was safe and what wasn’t safe. There was no safe place. He craved a cigarette but there were no cigarettes, and if he had one and lit it he might as well send up a flare. Almost without him noticing, his eyes closed and he was asleep.
At dawn Harry woke with a start, uncertain where he was. He had used his arm for a pillow and now the arm was asleep and tingling. He heard the cry of a bird and a rustle somewhere in the bush. His joints creaked as he rose, trying to ignore his thirst
and ravaged feet. He moved off staggering and an hour later paused for rest. But no sleep came and he went on, the trail twisting, filled with butterflies, unless they too were an illusion. And then he saw that the trail branched. He had no idea what lay beyond. The trails were without markings of any kind. Harry knelt and saw right away the tire tracks bearing right. So the decision was made for him and he turned left. He had to believe that luck was with him. Scant evidence of that so far except that he was still on his feet. He knew he didn’t have much left. He had been walking since daybreak and for all he knew he had been going in circles, but now the trail branched and he actually had a choice to make. He had been lucky so far, although he had made many mistakes. He had made every mistake in the book, beginning with leaving his sandals behind. Oh, Christ, and the rucksack also, with the envelope with one thousand U.S. and the ambassador’s gold compass. His wristwatch was gone and he couldn’t recollect if they had taken it or he had lost it or simply left it behind. And where was Conrad? No doubt in the comrade captain’s pocket and the question now was whether he would find Conrad logical and correct or counterfeit coin, one more Polish aristocrat playing at politics, the usual colonialist propaganda . . . Harry wanted to think he was one up on the comrade captain because otherwise his own incompetence was breathtaking. Again and again he turned a word over in his mind. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. He looked around him, the jungle bushes closing in on the trail. His surroundings now seemed to him more than feral. They were malicious. But even so he moved on, remembering a story Tolstoy told in one of his novels. A holy man charged with the duty to lay his hand on a woman in order to cure her was instructed to place his other hand in fire and keep it there until his fingers were cinders. That was to ward off temptation. The holy man said, I would rather ruin my fingers than ruin my soul. Harry examined the story this way and that, believing it had some strange relevance to his own situation, a story of blind faith after all. But where was his own temptation, unless it was the mission itself? In the past temptation had been his friend, more or less. Now, instead of cindered fingers he had ruined feet. In any case, the mission was kaput. Idiot.
