To the Islands

by Randolph Stow

  ‘No, you, Djediben.’

  ‘Ali, sister!’ screeched Djediben, convulsed with laughter, and came and embraced her with thin black arms, touching gently with her palms Helen’s breasts and shoulders, circling her waist with a spider arm. ‘Sister,’ she sighed lovingly, hiding her face against Helen’s neck.

  ‘You old smoodger,’ Helen said.

  Gunn asked: ‘Where’s Dambena, Djediben? Still camping in the bush?’

  ‘Eh, Nambal—that way.’

  ‘He likes the bush, eh?’

  ‘Jau, ’im like ’im budj.’

  ‘You’d better go and see him. He’ll be getting off with another old woman pretty soon.’

  ‘Jau,’ screamed Djediben, ‘’nother old woman. Brother.’

  As she stifled her amusement against Helen’s neck a wad of chewed tobacco dropped from behind her ear and fell in the dust. With a wail she fell on her knees to search for it and having found it sat crouched in grief over her thin hand. ‘Worai, worai,’ she lamented, rocking slowly with desolation. ‘Mundju all binidj!’

  ‘It’s only dusty,’ Helen said consolingly over the keening, ‘and this is ration day, you’ll get more this afternoon.’

  ‘Aaaah,’ crooned Djediben.

  ‘Mire badi,’ Gunn said. ‘Never mind.’

  Suddenly, as if a tap had been turned off, all lamentation ceased. The woman got to her feet, put the tobacco in her mouth, and walked silently away.

  ‘Funny old thing,’ Helen said. ‘So many moods in one little woman. It’s a wonder she didn’t stay. She must have known if she kept wailing long enough I’d give her a cigarette to chew.’

  ‘Eldritch is the only word for Djediben.’

  ‘That sounds a bit sinister.’

  ‘She is, I think. Intelligent and inscrutable. Lots of dark depths under the smooth manner.’

  ‘She’s Rex’s mother. You know, the famous Rex.’

  ‘Rex’s mother?’ Gunn asked sharply. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘I found it in an old file. It might explain some things about Rex.’

  Looking along the baobab avenue to where, in the shade-stippled dust, Djediben had sat herself down, Gunn said slowly: ‘I’m feeling a bit worried.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Rex.’

  ‘What has he done now?’

  ‘He’s come back.’

  Helen turned her head and stared, so that the light, falling through the leaves, filled her eyes and the clear, honey-coloured depths of them. ‘Here?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Well, Stephen was coming back, that was all arranged, and somehow Rex got hold of him and persuaded him to introduce him to Terry. And of course Terry didn’t know anything about Rex, and finished up by bringing him back in the boat last night.’

  ‘Oh, Lord. What will Mr Heriot do?’

  ‘I can’t think. But he can’t blame Terry—I mean, it was his first trip, and he says no one told him about picking up stray passengers. It was just his lousy luck that it had to be Rex.’

  ‘But I can’t understand why Rex should want to come back, not after everything that happened before. He knows what Mr Heriot thinks of him.’

  ‘I think it’s just that he scores off the white man by being here at all. Especially off Terry.’

  ‘Poor Terry,’ Helen murmured.

  There was a kind of amusement in her voice, not for the first time when speaking to Gunn of Dixon. Oddly, Gunn found himself resenting it, on behalf of the older man, whose simplicity made him feel fraternal.

  Behind her the altar cross and candlesticks glinted in the shadowy sanctuary. She was pretty; but at times so intensely serious that he found himself withdrawing a little. He could guess that she had been used to success, her schooldays probably a litter of trophies, so that her one failure, as a medical student, had hit her hard. And now, as a mission nurse on a salary of sixty pounds a year, she was determined not to fail again. She was perhaps a fanatic of sorts, like a nun.

  ‘You’re looking tired,’ she said.

  ‘I was up in the middle of the night,’ he said, ‘to meet the boat and unload.’

  ‘You have a hand in everything,’ she said. ‘There’s no need for you to do so much work, all you need do is run the school.’

  ‘How can you not get involved?’ he said. ‘It grows on you.’

  Sent there by the Education Department, to stay a year or two, he had never intended to be involved. But the country had taken him in. There was first of all the easy affection of the children, brought up to expect from an adult nothing else but affection. And from them his feeling had extended to their parents and older siblings, the bush nomads, the rock and waters of the land itself. The phrase ‘gre ngaianangga, my country’, so often in their mouths, would keep recurring to his mind.

  At times he chafed at his life there, the goldfish-bowl existence of a white man. It would be good, he thought on empty nights, to get drunk with a friend like Terry Dixon, to flirt, or something more, with a girl like Helen. But there was around them that fence of vocation. And he was being drawn within it. The country and Heriot, between them, were taking possession of him like a colony.

  Her hair would be soft to touch. He would have liked to cup his hands around her face.

  One night he dreamed that Heriot was making magic on him. And he woke rebelling. I’m too young, he was telling Heriot. I want to fool around, live the life that Terry has given up, away from blackboards and from church.

  At the camp the barking of many dogs commented on some arrival or departure. A child shouted at the far end of the village. He looked at the white goats deep in pasture, beyond them the encircling blue of the hills.

  ‘Look at Djediben,’ Helen remarked. ‘Asleep again.’

  He pushed himself off the tree and stretched. ‘I could join her, too,’ through a yawn.

  ‘Don’t go to sleep near Djediben. She murdered her second husband, or helped her third husband to do it.’

  ‘Helped Dambena?’ he asked, startled.

  ‘Dambena’s the fifth, Mabel says.’

  ‘Gosh, what a woman. No wonder Rex is no good.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, her voice far away, ‘Rex. What now, I wonder.’

  ‘We’ll find out.’

  ‘I must go and see if Mr Heriot has any letters for me.’

  ‘Don’t tell him,’ Gunn said quickly, ‘if he doesn’t know.’

  She smiled and said: ‘I no monkey, brother,’ and walked away through the track in the grass, through Heriot’s gate, along the path bordered with pink and white vincas. She wore sandals and her legs were tanned; her dark hair was cut short around her neck because of the heat. The watch on her wrist caught the sun and flashed it back to him in time to the swing of her bare arms.

  Standing in the shadow of the baobab, feeling the bark with his thumbs, he thought: Why am I always watching them, Helen, Heriot? And where is this point of peace around which I should have my orbit?

  At his desk, behind piles of letters, Heriot sat staring at nothing with a blue, veined eye. A cigarette burned away between his stained fingers, his mouth was set in a line that somehow accentuated the unexpected sensitivity of his lips. So far away he seemed that Helen, standing in the doorway shadowed by tall poinciana trees, considered leaving and returning later when he too should have returned to the house of his vacated body.

  But his mind came home again, slowly, first noting the filtered sunlight suspending dust above the floor, then her feet, then quickly her face. When he looked into the light his eyes were very old, faded and blue. ‘Helen,’ he said, slowly. ‘I was many miles away.’

  ‘I know, I hated to disturb you.’

  ‘You needn’t have. I wanted to be woken.’

  ‘I came,’ she said, opposite him at the desk, ‘to see if there was any mail for me. Also to ask if you’d slept well.’

  He pushed some letters towards her and said: ‘Yes, very well. That stuff is good.
’

  ‘I hoped it would be. Try it for a week or two, you’ll probably feel much better.’

  ‘Why, I’m not sick, am I?’

  ‘No, very well—for your age. But sleep—’

  ‘It is a blessed thing.’

  ‘And no more dreams?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ she said. ‘No need to worry.’

  ‘It’s you who worry, Helen.’

  ‘And soon,’ she said, ‘you’ll be free, at last.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not free, not yet,’ looking blindly past her through the door. ‘Not as easily as that.’

  ‘How—?’

  ‘Do I know?’ he asked, slapping on the desk with his broad palm. ‘From this, this effusion from the council. They regret to say they’ve interviewed the two applicants and found them impossible. One confesses openly he’s agnostic, and the other, even worse, isn’t one of us at all, he’s a lapsed Methodist.’

  ‘Oh, really,’ she said, ‘that smug little bunch of clerics and do-gooders by proxy—’

  But he regretted already having let her see his discontent, and said nothing, only glanced at her with his bitter blue eyes from the depths of silence.

  ‘After so many years,’ she said, ‘to treat your resignation so lightly—’

  ‘Certainly not lightly. They’re treating it very seriously indeed.’

  ‘And aren’t you,’ she asked boldly, ‘aren’t you disappointed?’

  ‘Of course. But not,’ he said with a faint twist of the lips, ‘scandalized.’

  She smiled then, catching his eyes, and standing there in front of his table with her letters in her hand, looked suddenly much younger, like a strong-minded schoolgirl. ‘You make me sound very bumptious sometimes.’

  ‘I enjoy it. It’s unusual.’

  A bell rang.

  ‘Breakfast,’ he said. ‘Young Gunn looks tired.’

  ‘So I told him. He met the boat last night.’

  ‘He’s younger than you, isn’t he?’

  He was stone and iron, she thought, impassive, accustomed through decades to deal with wooings, marriages, disputes. There was nothing which did not concern him, no situation on which he might not be called from his remoteness to arbitrate.

  ‘He’s twenty-two,’ she said, smiling stiffly. ‘I’m twenty-four. And we scarcely know each other.’

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t suggesting—’

  ‘I’m sorry then if I—’

  Watching the colour deepen under her tanned skin he smiled with genuine amusement, showing the crude, ill-fitting teeth some wandering dentist years ago had made him. ‘How suspicious you are, Sister Bond. Do I look like a matchmaker?’

  ‘Anything but that.’

  ‘Too sour, do you think?’

  ‘Too rocklike,’ she said, slightly uneasy.

  ‘Like a crumbling cliff?’

  ‘No, not crumbling. A foundation. Or monument. Or something. You’re making me feel very bumptious now.’

  ‘Someday I must go,’ Heriot said quietly. ‘When I do, I like to know—have some faint idea—what will happen after. And who will do it. And all this wretched morning my head’s been full of poetry.’

  A hen, half-bald, mounted the steps to the doorway, peered in and fled. The flurry of its going merged with the crying crows, the weak and unreal invasion of sound on the earth’s essential silence.

  ‘Have, get, before it cloy,

  Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,

  Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy—’

  His voice, husky but not old, proceeded towards the still light which his eyes so intently watched; his hands, moving, burned suddenly in a pool of sun.

  No, I won’t, she thought, won’t be his puppet, won’t let him force me into his service. ‘Bob Gunn doesn’t belong to the mission.’

  ‘He might be persuaded.’

  ‘No, I don’t think he would.’

  ‘He seems a good young man. I don’t know, it’s hard to tell.’

  ‘He wants to go home at the end of the year.’

  ‘Home? What is home?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, strangely tried. ‘I really don’t know.’

  The silence folded itself once more around her words.

  ‘Am I,’ he asked after a time, ‘keeping you from your breakfast?’

  ‘Perhaps I should be there. Yes.’ She turned to the door and stopped, looking down from the step. ‘Oh, here’s someone waiting. I think I’ve forgotten his name.’

  But though she smiled at him, the dark man outside said nothing. He waited until she had gone, through the patterned shade of poincianas and between the vincas, towards the kitchen. He thought she was pretty and strong and unhappy. Then softly he mounted to the doorway and stood there, with deference, in a patch of sunlight.

  The eyes of Heriot, fixed on the floor, took in vaguely the broad black dusty feet. Then mounted to the face.

  The eyes of the young man, fixed on Heriot’s hand, saw it suddenly tense.

  ‘Stephen,’ said Heriot.

  ‘Yes, brother. I come back to my country.’

  2

  In the eyes of Heriot the young man melted and disappeared and formed again as a bare child, a child with almond eyes and a small hawk nose betraying the distant legacy of an Afghan trader in the blood. But the child was a girl child, so slight, so perfectly formed. There had been a beauty there which hit his heart, now, when it was gone, with a blow of reverberating grief, calling his memory back to that worst bereavement and most bitter defeat which all that morning had been feeding his despair. ‘Stephen,’ he said again. ‘Of course.’

  ‘You know I was coming, brother?’

  ‘Yes, yes, I knew. I’d forgotten. I’ve been sick, a little bit. You came last night.’

  ‘With Brother Terry, brother.’

  ‘Where are you living?’

  ‘With Ella. She my cousin, brother.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to work and give Ella and Justin some money to feed you. And behave yourself this time,’ Heriot said wearily.

  ‘Yes, brother.’

  ‘It’s no use saying: “Yes, brother.” I’ve heard that before, too often. You were one I thought I could believe.’

  Stephen, in his pool of gold, shifted his feet and searched with his eyes for some place in the room not accusing, not discomfiting. ‘Yes, brother.’ His voice was low and very calm, beautiful in its accent.

  ‘Why did you do that, Stephen?’

  The young man shook his head.

  ‘Why steal when you had a job? You were making more money than your people here have ever seen. Who taught you to be so much of a fool?’

  ‘I don’t know, brother.’

  ‘Well, you’ve finished with gaol now, you won’t go back, if you’re wise.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I won’t say anything more. But it was a great—a great sorrow to me, to hear what you’d done. Your father was my good friend, my brother. He would have been very much ashamed.’

  At this reference to the dead, Stephen moved uneasily. ‘Yes, brother.’

  ‘And when he was dead I was your father, and that—that little girl’s. I was ashamed. I was ashamed,’ Heriot said loudly, staring with his veined eyes. ‘And for that little girl, Stephen. Have you forgotten her?’

  ‘No, brother,’ Stephen murmured, husky-voiced, tense, wishing to fly finally from this accusing and terrifying old man with his constant talk of the dead. ‘Brother, I go now?’

  ‘Yes, go. Have Ella and Justin given you breakfast?’

  ‘Yes, brother.’

  ‘You’ll be at the work parade, I’ll see you there. No, wait, walk with me to Father Way’s house; I haven’t eaten yet.’ Rising from his chair he appeared larger, broader, wilder-haired than before to Stephen, standing nervously in the doorway. ‘You both went everywhere with me once,’ Heriot said, coming beside him.

  ‘Yes, brother.’

  ‘You grew up t
oo quickly, Stephen. Do you know how old you are?’

  ‘No, brother.’

  ‘Twenty-two. I remember when you were born. I was your godfather. And the little girl’s. And my wife was your godmother. She thought you were handsomer than any baby she’d seen.’

  ‘Yes, brother?’

  ‘But she died soon, she didn’t see the little girl.’

  They were walking down the road, in the shadow of baobabs, both silent-footed on the soft dust. The village was still, only blue smoke moved now and then upwards from behind mud-brick houses and into the sky, the huge sky.

  ‘Brother,’ Stephen said, ‘that little girl, she—’

  ‘She’s dead. I know. I won’t talk about her any more.’

  Leaning against a tree farther down the road a man, a black man in a scarlet shirt, waited. ‘Does he want you or me?’ Heriot asked.

  ‘He want me, brother.’

  Uneasy, Heriot thought, always uneasy. What is he afraid of now, why is he always afraid? ‘Who is it? Justin?’

  ‘No, brother.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘That—Rex, brother.’

  They had stopped, were standing looking towards the long-legged man down the road, Heriot so still that Stephen grew desperate, would have liked never to have taken the brown tide home to his country where Heriot was. ‘Brother—’ he said.

  Heriot turned on him savagely and seized his arms. ‘Who brought him here?’

  ‘Brother Terry—’

  ‘Who told Brother Terry he belonged here? You did. Didn’t you?’

  ‘Brother, I—’

  ‘Who did you steal for?’

  ‘I di’n’t steal for nobody.’

  ‘Oh yes you did,’ Heriot said quietly. ‘Rex told you. Didn’t he, Stephen? Rex is your djuari, isn’t he? Your devil-devil, you do what he tells you.’

  With Heriot’s veined eyes boring into his, Heriot’s thumbs boring into his flesh, the dark man weakened, dropped his calm, and became a frightened boy, begging: ‘Brother—’

  ‘You ought never to have seen him again, you ought to have hated him for what he did to Esther. Oh, I’m not afraid to say her name, I’ll say it again, Esther, Esther, Esther, and hope her spirit comes back to curse you for a bad brother. Rex killed Esther, you know that.’