Bitter Eden

by Tatamkhulu Afrika

  Not everybody there is a swapper, though. Many, myself and Douglas included, go there for the one commodity that is for the taking, namely, the reverse of the tedium that is the very essence – and curse – of our purposeless lives. Now and again, we may go hunting for soap – not the latherless Ite soap that smells like a whore and bites like a snake that our mafia clients get for us from the guards, then deduct the price from our fee, but that genuine soap that, like so much that was once commonplace, now glows with the luminance of myth or dream.

  Like the Ite soap which is the most necessary element of it, the laundering process is very far removed from myth and dream. It is, instead, one of those ultimately harsh and demeaning realities from which, had it not been for Douglas’ pacing me with his clinical attitude of the male nurse, I would long since have fled. My hands no longer blister from the scrubbing, but, at day’s end, their skin is pallid and puffy as that of a waterlogged corpse, and I keep smelling my fingers as though I expect to find on them the lingering miasmas of all the snot, shit and even sperm that they have wrung – as though they wrung the neck of loathesomeness itself – from the most intimate garments of those from whom I could not be more estranged. Or have I, through such handling of their pitiful effluents, subtly and irreversibly grown closer to them than even the most passionate of lovers could?

  But there is more. Mondays, if we have won the race for the slabs, as today we did, we have to arrange with the hut boss for him to fetch our midday swill and hold it in the hut till we return, there being no question of our leaving our slab for anything more than a quick piss, let alone to have a leisurely lunch or brew ourselves a mug of tea. To do so would be to find ourselves deprived of our slab with no hope of its return, that being the law of the camp and the name of the game, besides which the washing must be hung, dried, folded and delivered before sunset, there being no space in the huts for working with washing and any attempt to retrieve washing still on the fences after dark liable to be construed as a break-out and met by a bullet in the brain. Even the hanging of washing on the fences in daylight caused the commandant to, at first, squeal like a slaughterhouse hog, but, eventually, we wore him down.

  So the upshot of it all is that, this Monday, the last foldings of laundry delivered, Douglas and I return to the hut to count the day’s takings and eat lunchtime’s hardening shit with a relish that is nought on a scale of that to ten, and we consider brewing tea to wash down the accompanying rolls, but tiredly decide to drink water instead, and, from my bunk, I watch Douglas readying himself for sleep and there is a resurgence in me of liking and respect whose very fullness illustrates how severe the ebbing had lately become. Then the Ites cut the old-bone yellow of the lights and Douglas sets out on his litany of prayers, but I plunge straight away into sleep, still fully clothed and, for once, oblivious of the bugs.

  And it seems as though I had only just closed my eyes, when someone is calling my name, and I start up as from a dream, but it is no dream, but Danny standing in the doorway of the hut and crying out in a low yet carrying voice, ‘Tom! Wake up! Wake up!’ and I am out and hurrying, driven not only by the urgency of his tone but by the fact that this is the first time that Danny has ever come to our hut – a strangeness, this, which he and I have never discussed, tacitly agreeing that to do so would be to precipitate a crisis in a three-way relationship which none of us was as yet prepared to confront. Or was he now so prepared?

  Descending from my bunk, I see that Douglas is still asleep in his, but the rest of the bunks – even the interloper’s – seem empty and there is a hollowness to the hut as a whole that smacks of abandonment in the face of some peril of a fearsome shape. I reach the door and Danny seizes my arm, almost dragging me out, and I am about to irritably break free, when I see that a host of thousands of us are standing between the huts, motionlessly and silently as though bewitched, faces upturned under the full moon to the flank of the nearby hill, eyes staring as before the advent of a presence of a celestial kind.

  ‘What is it?’ I instinctively whisper, but Danny does not answer, only grips my arm the harder, secretively smiles.

  Then it again sounds and my hairs are hackles and my flesh crawls.

  ‘A nightingale,’ Danny now whispers back, hand not loosing my arm. ‘Bet you never heard one before. Even in Blighty you don’t hear them so much any more.’

  But I am barely aware of him now, hear only ‘nightingale’, am of these spellbound under the witches’ moon. ‘So small a throat!’ I am thinking. ‘So small a throat!’ as the soaring gusts of sound, pitched a note’s breadth this side of sense, flood, copiously as the moon’s light, effortlessly as that which needs no struggling breath nor fiddling hand, out over hills, churches, shrines, our rag-bag selves. There is no pattern to the song, yet it holds the whole of melody and the totality of an endlessness of form, and it runs a thread of molten yet cool-as-water silver through my every artery, sinew, vein, and I search for a humanness in it, but there is nothing, and now I am thinking, ‘An angel!’ Strayed from Eden’s gates without its sword!’ and for a moment I am near again to the child that so easily believed.

  ‘Douglas must hear this, too,’ I say and make to go, caution overturned, meanness yielding its ground in the face of that pure sound.

  But he does not loose my arm. ‘I came to wake you, not him,’ he says, his voice challenging and cold, and I stand, irresolute, a choosing come upon me that I had not planned.

  ‘Anyway,’ he adds, ‘he’s already awake,’ and he jerks his head and I see Douglas is standing a few paces to the right of us, his own head turning even as I turn mine and the three of us playing one of those seemingly silly games with a sting in the tail, Russian roulette being the one.

  Covertly, I try to glean from Douglas’ profile whether he has, indeed, seen us and, if so, what his reaction is likely to be, but he is now staring steadfastly and apparently raptly at the hill, and continues to do so until the singing again stops and there is an almost audible draining of earth and sky – and an almost tangible quality to the ensuing void – that tell us that the bird has flown, and Douglas turns, quietly but decisively, and goes back into the hut without once glancing our way, and it is only then that I notice that Danny is no longer holding my arm.

  ‘Ah, young Tom,’ says Camel as though the earth beside me had opened to let him out. Then, belatedly, ‘And friend. But why so pensive? It was only a bird, you know.’

  ‘All the more reason to be humble, Camel,’ I lash back, nerves frayed, and he winces, getting what I mean.

  ‘Subtle, young Tom. But not nice. Nor you. Are we not, then, still friends?’

  I decide it is to be peace, not war. ‘Come on, Camel. I thought you knew me by now.’

  ‘Oh, I do. I do. Though not in the way I would prefer.’ Then, looking at Danny but addressing me, ‘Did you ever pass on my message to your friend?’

  I’m cornered and know it, so can but bluster as best I know how. ‘Christ, no. What with the play being on and the Red Cross not coming through like it should, it’s as if I’ve been in another world. But, in any case, you haven’t finished doing me yet, so why do you want him as well?’

  ‘But I have finished you. Only I’m not giving you what I have done. Do you expect me to after all the shitty things you had to say? And what makes you think I can’t do more than one painting at a time? I have got two hands, haven’t I?’ and he gives his little cackle that sounds like dry leaves blowing over sand.

  ‘Who’s this goon?’ Danny chips in, his tone warning me that another crisis is heading my way. ‘And what’s the gab about a message I didn’t get?’

  ‘This,’ and I try to keep my voice casual, though a quake is beginning in me somewhere deep down, ‘is Camel. He paints. Portraits, not walls. Those who are supposed to know about these things say he has got class. I wouldn’t know. All I know is that he’s done a picture of me and I look like a steak that’s looking for an eye. He says that’s because he paints people without their skins
. Paints them the way they really are, not the way they think they are. So,’ and I breathe deep before I leap, ‘just before the play, he asked me to tell you that he wants to paint you too.’

  ‘So? Why didn’t you tell me, then?’

  My mind scuttles round like a rat in a cellar with the door closed. ‘Because I was sure he would make as big a mess of you as he did of me.’

  ‘Not quite true, young Tom,’ Camel chides. ‘Are you and Douglas still sharing the chow?’ and it takes me far too long to work out what this apparent non sequitur means.

  But Danny again breaks in, turning to Camel for the first time, a tautness to him that evokes an equal tautness in me. ‘So how, then, would you be seeing me if I said OK?’

  And Camel laughs his rustling, dry laugh and I am thinking he may or may not be a good painter, but he most certainly is going to be one helluva fool. ‘Naked!’ he crows, clearly remembering that ‘goon’, raddled eyes alight with perceptiveness and the laugh a meaningless noise. ‘Naked and playing with your prissy little balls.’

  There is also no doubt that Danny is every bit as good a boxer as he claims. Now Camel is still standing, not grinning with his slash of a mouth, then he is crashing back against the side of our hut, mouth chewing on a rose of his blood, and probably a tooth or two, and some from the hut, Douglas not among them, are cluttering up the step and wondering what the fuck is going on.

  Fists raised, Danny waits for Camel to get up so that he can give him another go, but Camel, quick to learn now that it is too late, stays where he is, and Danny turns to me, his face inward as a stone. ‘I made a mistake,’ he says, his voice matching his face. ‘If this is the kind of friends you keep, then you are not one of mine,’ and goes.

  A gravity of misery settles in me, anchoring me to where I stand, then one of my flashy rages seizes me and I yell, ‘Who said I was one of your friends, anyway?’ and turn back to Camel, not knowing whether I am going to help him up or let him lie.

  But he is already up, swaying a little, spitting out blood, reaching for my arm. ‘Christ, Tom,’ he mumbles through the ruin of his mouth. ‘I’m sorry, man. So sorry. I never meant it to be like this.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ I mumble back, wrenching loose, but there is no spirit in that and I go into the hut, dragging my misery with me like a busted leg.

  Sitting on his bunk, Douglas is watching his hands as though they might at any moment cut and run. But I take no notice of him, only struggle my way up onto my own bunk and flop down on it, face to the light, arm over my eyes.

  But Douglas is not one to leave well alone. ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’ he asks in a voice as distant as the wrong side of the moon.

  ‘Don’t you start now!’ I seethe and turn onto my side, spine to the aisle.

  ‘I’m not starting anything,’ he persists. ‘I’m just asking why you didn’t wake me up?’

  ‘Why should I have woken you up when I didn’t know what was going on till I got outside?’

  ‘Well, why didn’t you wake me up then?’

  ‘You heard, didn’t you?’ I say, and need to say no more because, despite my deviousness and distress, there is a resurgence in me, as in my voice, of the just past wonderment and awe.

  Then I wait for him to ask the really awkward questions, but he skirts around them as though they were a poisoned bait, and later, when everyone is asleep, I go out and sit on the step, waiting for the bird to sing again, though knowing with a knowing that is not of the mind that silence is all I am going to hear.

  I am thinking that it is Danny who said something that meant, ‘Take away the Red Cross cigarette and our economy is dead.’ As then, inevitably, we also will be.

  I am remembering this – while I am trying to not remember him – because this is no longer a postulate but a fact. The deliveries of Red Cross cigarettes and food have become so erratic and scarce that starvation is a spectre no further than my neighbour’s face and his breath is the corruption that is death’s. The stalls run out of stocks, which means the cigarette’s buying power nose-dives and you might as well smoke it yourself and so anaesthetize your mind into believing that you are not as hungry as you are. So not only the stalls close down, but the gambling kings, most of whom are heavy smokers, choose to smoke rather than gamble and the laundrymen like Douglas and me no longer have a trade. The gamblers embarrassedly start washing their own underpants, and Douglas and I, neither of us being smokers, stash away whatever cigarettes we still have in the hope that they will still be of use someday, then join the noonday swill queue with increasingly the same avidity as the common herd. The great leveller that is indigence is amongst us and the only truly classless society begins to grow independently of our volition as a cancer or age.

  We crack the irreverent jokes of the cast-out and the condemned, only they are not jokes – more like little kids’ shouting at the bogeyman in the hope that that will make him go away. Each day there are events of minor horror that we know will stay with us longer than slaughter for the very reason that they are so minor, even hilarious, like when our hut boss, weak with incipient dysentery, sits too long on one of the seats over the shit pit and a rat, from those swarming down there, jumps up and bites him in the balls. For days afterwards, we howl with laughter about that; or about the one of us with the usually outsized eyes that now have grown huge, who looks over the edge of his bunk and despairingly gapes, but only contrives to look more like a nestling waiting to be fed a worm; or about the no longer portly and pontificating ex-magistrate who, for hours on end, will sit on his bunk with his trademark tiny wooden spoon and scoop out margarine that is no longer there from an old Red Cross margarine can, then smack his lips with a relish that is ghoulishly unfeigned.

  But there is a wildness to the howling, a whimpering in its ebbing, that have nothing to do with laughter and everything to do with the hollow-flanked beast with its red bat’s-eyes that has become our familiar and follows us with the passion of a predator its prey. Camel, who each day prepares his easel and paints, then sits staring at them as though stricken by a curse, tells me that the beast has finally caught up with the one man in their hut who could still make them laugh on an empty gut.

  ‘Real clown, he was,’ he says. ‘Should have been on the stage. Now he’s stashed away in the Ites’ loony bin.’ I ask him what happened and he asks if I remember the lone tap beside the theatre where you can stop for a quick drink, and I nod and he says they caught him there, hiding round a corner of the theatre and shaking like a jelly because of the funniness of what, it turned out, he had been doing for a long time. ‘He would take some shit from the shit pit,’ Camel explains. ‘How he got it from down there, don’t ask me. Or maybe he just sat himself down anywhere and had a shit and used some of his own stuff. Whatever, he would then roll the shit into little balls and line them up behind the theatre so’s he could keep popping them up the tap and watch while the drinkers took a suck at the tap like it’s a titty and out comes the crap,’ and he can’t help snickering a little himself, but my flesh crawls.

  Sometimes I go down to the theatre, but no one is interested in plays any more, and Tony is as listlessly idle as Camel and the old shed booms like a cavern of despair. I will touch the props or the band’s still valiantly glittering brass, but the dust on my fingers is a weeping and the air whispers of irreclaimable dreams. Occasionally, Tony’s eyes behind the pince-nez will light up with a ghost of the old enthusiasm and he will speak of London and its theatres before the war, but it is all only an exercise in nostalgia and soon there is a turning inwards again, and a switching-off of the light as after a show, and I know that it is time for me to go.

  Douglas and I, of course, are the most graphic mirrors, each to the other, of how we change – the sharpening features, the eyes’ remotenesses alternating with anxious immediacies, the sagging skins of belly and dugs, the hands now comatose, now breaking into the transient, frenzied life of leaves whipped by a gusting wind. There are also changes of habit that leave as te
lling a spoor – my innate untidiness’ sliding into slovenliness, Douglas’ still cleaning the dixies but no longer scouring them till they shine, and, most poignantly of all, his grown laboured reading with its long pauses for staring into nothing at all.

  As I watch Douglas so change, what do I feel? Grief? Grief is a very heavy word. Regret, certainly, and a measure of pain. Pity, too, although that, with typical selfishness, is as much for me as for him. Perhaps I could have reacted more expansively had there not been other changes in him which have nothing whatever to do with hunger and merely irritate me in much the manner of the bugs, which have not ceased to feed on us though we must, by now, be proffering them a far from fortifying blood. That very next morning, at the latest, he must have heard about Danny’s fight with Camel and the ensuing bust-up between Danny and me, which will explain why, ever since, he has treated me with a mixture of compassion and triumphalism that cannot but arouse in me an endemic if suppressed annoyance that seriously tempers any feelings of pity I may now be having for him.

  Now that I have told myself that I am finished with Danny, that I never want to see him again, I seem destined to see him nearly every day – on the toilet, at the taps, startlingly rounding a corner as I kill time on my occasional slow prowlings round the camp. Should I happen – or so I put it to myself – to walk past the grass-patch with its warming sun, I will invariably see him lying there, though no longer where we used to lie with touching sides, and his body fully clothed as if he would conceal the shaming insurgencies of its bones. Emotion never fails to seize me then, shake me like a puppy a ball or doll, and I try to tell myself that it is anger that I feel, though I know it is pain, otherwise why is there in me such a clear relief that he has, seemingly, stopped his daily shambling round the fence and so spared me the turning away that anger surely should have reversed? Also, and more subtly, why should I then always be comparing that emotion, its intensity and intractability, with the lacklustre concern I have for Douglas’ slide into the skeletal and, by so doing, realize anew that I am entrapped in a limbo whose name I am not yet ready to hear?