Bitter Eden

by Tatamkhulu Afrika

  His eyes, though, hold no ambivalence, interpret all else. Sunk deep in his skull, ringed by the bruises of a sleepless night, crinkled at the corners as though he laughs a lot or is a lot older than his flawless, clearly still natural teeth would have me believe, they are gentle – and conciliatory – and understanding – and every other damned innocuous quality that can sometimes so set my teeth on edge.

  No, even with those eyes, his face is not intolerable, and his body is not laden with any belly and his legs go down straight and his arms, though no weightlifter’s, are reasonably muscled and male. What does put me off are his movements: the little almost dancing steps he takes even when, supposedly, he is standing still, the delicate, frenetic gestures of his hands, the almost womanliness of him that threatens to touch – and touch – and touch – and I have already told of my feelings concerning that.

  But then I look around me at the facelessness of the crowd, the namelessness of it because there are so many to name, the stemming of us into this sweating, defecating mass by the single thin wire strung on makeshift posts pushed into the dispassionate sand; and the alienness of it all, of this scarred and dying world that holds nothing of the green exhilaration of my own heart’s land, overwhelms even my solitariness and I look at him with something of a despairing and say, ‘Yes, I’m from Div. H.Q.’

  ‘I knew I’d seen you there!’ he exclaims and his hands flutter like exuberant wings. ‘I was a clerk in Intelligence. Typing and files. That sort of thing. What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing much,’ I lie. ‘Emptying the generals’ pisspots most of the time.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says, a little thrown. ‘But you are joking, aren’t you now?’ Then: ‘Well, I think we chaps from Div. must stick together, don’t you? At the moment I feel more like a child out of school than anything else and yesterday I quite sinfully enjoyed destroying all those stuffy files! But the feeling won’t last because God alone knows where to from here. So,’ and he thrusts out his hand, ‘my name is Douglas – Douglas Summerfield. What is yours?’

  ‘Tom – Tom Smith,’ I say, struggling to get my hand back from his lingering clasp and naming my names as coarsely as I can in the hope that this will emphasize their commonness as opposed to the grandiloquence of his and so, from the start, abort a relationship upon which he seems ferociously intent, but from which my entire ego quails. I do have enough of a conscience left, however, to remember with some measure of guilt that the names on my birth certificate (and which I hardly ever spell out to anyone) are Thomas Aloysius Smythe.

  The small, mean ploy fails. When I sit down on the dead hulk’s kit, he sits down on his – next to me – and talks and talks, not irrelevantly or even tediously, but with a bright hungering for communication with – grappling to – another that bewilders me and draws me even deeper into a shell which he does not seem able to sense is there. Or does he and is it that which is spurring him on to ever more determined efforts to break me down?

  There are moments, always brief, when he falls silent, takes a rosary from a button-down pocket of the tunic with its three stripes of the rank that we share and, running the rosary through his fingers, mutters under his breath with an intensity that unsettles me even more than the usual prattling of his tongue. And sometimes a sudden surging of the crowd will separate us and I will try to slip away from him through the bodies standing densely packed as mealies in a field, but always, somehow, he finds me again, either suddenly reappearing at my side, fine white teeth smiling and glad, or waving to me over the intervening heads like – I savagely think – a drowning clown or a tart desperate for trade.

  Later in the day, the Jerries begin to truck us out of the temporary camp, travelling in slow convoy along the coastal road, the sea sometimes seen, sometimes only the salt of it crying ‘Here!’, and Douglas is again right there beside me in the truck, having held onto my arm with a bruising stubbornness throughout the crazed battling to get aboard. Why, I am wondering, did we so object to being left behind when, so Jerry tells us, we will tomorrow morning be handed over to the Ites who, we are assured, are something else again?

  Dusk shading into night, the convoy stops as at a sign and the trucks melt into the side of the road. Ours crashes in under a low, almost leafless tree and the driver-guard whisks a camouflage net over the still protruding bonnet with the deftness of an old angler casting his line. Why, I do not know, because the sky has been clear of our planes all day. Have we still got any planes? Are the Jerries, the Ites and us all that is left of humankind? Where are the wogs to whom this soil belongs?

  I get off, Douglas shadowing me – who else? – stare out over the flat endlessness the other side of the road, this solitary tree. Ancient flint glints in the half-light, the earth seems tinged with as old a blood, stubborn scrub starts up out of it like terrified hair and I am crying inside. Douglas, clinging to my profile, puts out a mothering hand, but I strike it aside and he exasperatingly smiles, nodding that he understands, and I come closer to prayer, fiercely, entreatingly, wishing him gone.

  Astonishingly, the driver pours water from a jerry can into a canvas basin on a collapsible stand, invites us to wash our faces and hands, pantomiming what he means when his tongue fails. Warily as beasts too many traps have scarred, we edge closer, do as he says, but quickly, knowing that our necks are achingly exposed, and he fetches some cup-sized cans from somewhere in the cab, not fearing that we might cut and run – where to, anyway? – and begins to open them, not with a bayonet, story-book style, but with a civilized tin-opener that stabs me with thoughts of other places, other times, as poignantly as it punctures the cans.

  Then he hands us each an opened can, pantomiming ‘Eat!’ and I see that the cans contain chunks of a grainy, grey meat in a splash of thin and oily slop, and I take out a pinch of the meat with cautious fingers and taste it, and it is as though I had never known a tasting tongue before, and I bolt the meat and slurp up the slop with all the passion of the hunger I had forgotten my belly held. And Douglas, forever vigilant, looks at with me with as passionate a pitying and hands me the still uneaten half of his can, saying he is not hungry, and I am sure he is lying and make to hand the can back, but then think, as much of irritation as of hunger overcoming me, ‘What the fuck! If he wants to be a prick, then let him!’ and the Jerry picks up our two empty cans and puts them with the other empties into a sack and throws the sack into the cab, asking nothing of us, more captive than conqueror and a kind man who does not wish that we litter this small refuge that none of us might ever again have reason to disturb.

  Is it his kindness – or Douglas’? – that, too late, shames me, turning the meat in my belly into the dead flesh that it is as we lie down to sleep, I in the hulk’s greatcoat, Douglas beside me in a waterproof, the rest variously huddled as the earth cools down with the suddenness of a switched-off stove? Quietly, I turn my head. Douglas is asleep, lying on his back, his mouth slightly opened, his breath even and slow, the hands with which he earlier counted his beads composed, the almost frenziedness of his waking self subsumed by the vulnerability of the inward child. Am I too intolerant of him? Should I cut the relationship and have done? Is ‘relationship’ not too strong a word? Can there be a relationship between the pursuer and the pursued?

  I turn my head the other way, quickly now, aware of a rustling of wind or sand. The driver, unsleeping, is standing there, on guard and armed. His shape is very black, very tall, against the nearing, plunging, shower of the stars; his face, in profile, has a noble flow. Enemy and killer, yet there is a grace in him, a youthfulness and urgency that is as beautiful as it is animal and male, and I fall asleep against my will, knowing that he is there.

  I wake up, once, before we must. He is still on guard, but standing at a different angle to where I lie. A misshapen moon is now low in the sky. I do not know if it is rising or setting, suddenly do not even know where we are, never having been further than where we lost the war. Long shadows reach for me as though I am the last of living fle
sh. A bird or beast horribly howls. I am floating again on a lambent, tideless sea where, a millennium ago, we swam under a risen moon, our limbs’ pale tentacles seeking our beginnings in our ends.

  At first light, Douglas is shaking me and we are all rising and looking past each other like dead men. Even Douglas, sensing our sombreness, spares me the usual bonhomie, and the driver sets up the basin again and we wash, distasteful of ourselves as though, in the night, we had consorted with a foulness primal as the sand. And the driver hands us each a crooked doorstep of black bread, indicating that he is sorry that he cannot give more, and in the clear betraying dawn I see that he is not at all tall, and there is a scar running from the corner of an eye to under the chin and his eyes are old and stunned from having seen too much too soon.

  Douglas has readied his kit – and mine – and is now standing staring in the direction of the barely audible sea, fingering his beads and muttering what I have learned are ‘Hail Marys’, and, although I say nothing, having been taught respect for other people’s faiths, I wish he would stop because, to me, prayers are a private affair and he is as embarrassing to me as though I had come upon him with his pants down and shitting behind one of these stones.

  Maybe Douglas has a point, though, because he is just dropping the beads back into his pocket when the Jerry points to dust-covered truck after ditto-covered truck rounding the far western bend of the road and says ‘Mussolinis’ as though the word leaves a bad taste on his tongue. Then, his eyes gravely compassionate, he makes this-way-that motions with his hands that indicate a switching-round and my heart is darting in the cage of my throat and the bread in my belly is a black pregnancy of unease.

  ‘Hey, Yank! You got a watch? I get you cheese and chocolate for watch.’

  Where I am lying is next to the highwire fence and the speaker is so close that almost I feel his breath on my cheek. But I don’t turn my head to look at him because I know who it is. It’s the particularly scruffy little Ite guard with a face like the mummy walks again, his eyes alone belying that with their glitter like needles and the quickness of spiders on the run. To him, all prisoners are Yanks and have watches all the time and, like me, are suckers for chocolate and cheese, and his breaking in on my thoughts so peculiarly on cue worries the little extrasensory worm I inherited through my mother’s genes.

  ‘Fuck off!’ I say and turn my back on him and the bolt of his rifle clicks as he screams, ‘You fuck me? I fuck you!’ but I know he will not shoot and the ou beside me laughs an honest laugh that I could like, but Douglas has already taken his place in the ramshackle Ite truck rattling its way westwards under a lowering sun.

  That night, we are herded into a cemetery with a fence around it that is as impregnable as any prison’s, and although I am aware of random lights filtering through inadequate blackout shields, there does not seem to be any ongoing activity save ours and the night is as unidentifiably about us as the middle sea. The graves are clearly those of wogs, and believing wogs at that because the mounds of earth are mostly unadorned in compliance with a faith as austere as the desert in which it was first proclaimed, and, in the still moonless night, I stumble and fall as from a reaching of hands and know a horror at our desecration that no agnostic should. Douglas, though, is undisturbed, ensconced as he is behind the barricade of his beads.

  ‘Herding’ is too harsh a word? Hardly so. Jerry was right about the Ites. Runts in ragged uniforms that uniformly don’t fit, egged on by foppish officers who porcinely, tediously scream, they flail into us with boots, fists, rifle-butts, their zest the tired simulations of children playing a game long since no longer new.

  I am generalizing the way xenophobes do? Perhaps I will ask myself that question, maybe even answer it, in some later, more gracious time – supposing, of course, that such a time can ever again be – but at the moment, in a night that never ends, my only philosophy is that of the living who would not be dead as these we are now trampling under their crumbling mounds.

  As the incoming trucks disgorge more and more of us into the burial ground’s inelastic space, cramming us against each other and the dangerous discomfort of the barbed wire fence, I say to myself that this cannot go on and, when the moon at last rises, I see from Douglas’ face that he is telling himself the same thing, his eyes disbelieving and stunned, but – and this stays with me – his soft, garrulous mouth set as tightly as mine in his determination to stay alive. Hell, I am thinking, he is not all piss and wind.

  Sometime in time’s long standing still, stasis is reached as we stare with faces pressed against even the inside of the only gate and the guards know that to open it would be to unleash an onrush as involuntary as the bursting of a dam. I am locked into the arse before me as though I sodomized it and am locked from behind in as final a negation of the privacy of my flesh, and Douglas’ hip is jutting into mine like a broken-off iron and my own bones are lattices of pain that hold back my knotting body’s unending scream.

  Somebody farts, raucously as a wordless shout, and a gusting stench of urine and shit tells of another who, despairing and ashamed, has let slip the beast of his need. But nobody laughs and I am thinking this can only be the Hell in which I have never believed, and, as we suddenly, and as though impelled by a single consciousness, tilt gatewards, then spinecrackingly whip back, there are howls as of souls in torment – and garglings into silences that as terribly sound.

  Incredibly, then, there is light in the east and the trucks are stuttering into life, and the gate is crashing open and there is an exploding out into a measureless space. But before I reach the gate, my one boot sinks into a crackling softness that I cannot bring myself to look down at because I know it is a crushed-dead man, and it is only when we have been cuffed back into our truck that I lift up the boot and uncontrollably shudder as I see that it is splattered with blood and fragments of what could be flesh and bone. Wordlessly, Douglas gropes around on the truck’s littered floor and comes up with a piece of paper and – as wordlessly and expressionlessly, and without any by-my-leave – lifts up my foot and wipes the boot clean.

  The truck jerks itself off and trundles past a meagre complex of prefabs lining a side track that leads back onto the coast road, and there is a silence between Douglas and me that, for once, drags on with no sign that Douglas will be the first to speak.

  But I am burdened by something I must ask and, at last, I do: ‘What was your job before the war?’

  He looks at me, surprised by this first ever question from my side. ‘A male nurse. Why?’

  ‘Just asking,’ I say and watch the ball of paper, bloodied by my boot, rolling around. But my mind is changing gears with the grinding reluctance of the truck that, like all the Ite trucks, seems likely to at any moment topple over and die. Which is an unfortunate image after what I have just been through.

  The salt flats glitter all the way to the blue smear of the sea and the sun is not much past noon when the convoy suddenly stops and we scramble out of the trucks to the usual accompaniment of clicking rifle-bolts and hysterical yells. Bewilderedly, we mill about, ant-like under the vast brass of the sky, wondering why, and Douglas puts on his Intelligence cap and says maybe there’s been an operational shift, that our forces have regrouped and are now retaking the conquered sand. I snort at that though, secretly, I hope, and one of the others from our truck irritably asks why the Ites can never do anything without kicking up such a fucking fuss, and Douglas rather meanderingly says that the little dark ones are from the south and the taller, paler ones – who seem to comprise their officer class – are from the north and the two are as different from one another as vinegar from wine. Which is a rather refreshing variation of the usual chalk-and-cheese cliché and again the gears are shifting in my brain.

  The Ites are not prone to giving us toilet breaks, compelling us to, en route, piss or shit from the inside looking out, which usually means to jut buttocks or cocks over the trucks’ sides and do our thing to the Ites’ inexhaustible – and adolescent –
delight. So, now we decide that this unexpected stop is to be our toilet break and there is a general pissing and dropping of pants where we stand, but the Ites will have none of it and furiously begin to drive us deeper into the flats.

  As in the just-past night, only terror tinged with a dull anger stirs in us as the normally ludicrous takes on a shape of nightmare under even so high and revealing a sun, and no laughter moves in us with its saving grace as we watch the beatings as of beasts of those still struggling to free themselves from the hobbles of their pants, and the face of our Jerry driver floats out before me like the fragment of a dream already ages old, and I reach out as to a lost and redeeming friend, but the emptiness in me is the emptier for its finding only the Now.

  The ground is firm enough under our boots, but there is a hollow ring to it as of water warningly close, and I am reckoning it will be bitter and salt as the crystals strewn like some malignant frost over the curiously ochre earth. Also, there are shallow depressions of cracking mud that tell of water in some other time, a surging, perhaps, of a capricious tide. The occasional scrub is twisted and black as though a fire had swept it or an enervating poison gripped its roots, and the even scarcer grass is cancerous and brittle as a dying man’s hair, and I am hearing the usual silence that even our frenetic trampling cannot shatter or obscure.

  Is this a place for a killing, a cutting off from them of a flesh that is conquered but for which they have no use? The thought is upon me like an assassin in a private place and I look at Douglas and, for the first time, there is a true communion between us as I see that he is thinking the same thing though not wanting to, and he is shaking his head and assuring, ‘No. It is just an operational trick. You’ll see. They’ll be moving us on again soon,’ but there is a stridency to what he is saying of one who secretly does not believe.