Bitter Eden

by Tatamkhulu Afrika

  Sometimes I try to face up to the amorphous beast of how I feel, lend it shape, substance, of which I can ask questions, have hope of a reply. Already my mind, recalcitrant rebel that it is, has framed such unspeakable questions as, ‘Am I one of them? Am I in love with a man?’ But I beat these questions back with the desperateness of one under siege, then with a deliberate crudeness dwell on the mechanics of sex between males. ‘Comes out all covered with shit!’ I think and shudder with a quite genuine disgust, yet am none the less still uncomfortably aware that the question of love itself stays unresolved, is being linked by me to the sexual act in the simplistic and grubby-minded manner of adolescents in order that I may frighten myself back into the cosy straitjacket into which I was born and raised. From there it is an easy step to the usual acrimonious diversions, such as, ‘Who does the little fart think he is, anyway?’ and, ‘Fuck him! Why should I worry about a fucking pom?’ But, again, there is no real anger in me – only a far echo of a child’s longing for a taken-away toy.

  But then there is a diversion of quite another kind as the long fuse of the hungry and powerless at last flares to its end and ignites us into rising up in a cause that has a far from lofty aim. Or is loftiness as frailly relative as are space and time? Whatever, the hut bosses put out the word that we are all to gather at the main gate at the next day’s dawn, then start marching in ranks of ten, arms linked, round and round the fence, demanding that our huts be debugged and vowing to not stop, no matter what, until the Ites have agreed to our demand. Which is not as crazy as it sounds because the Ites have a very real dread of inspections by Red Cross officials – thus carefully papering over all cracks before each visit – and a mass murder of legitimately protesting prisoners is hardly the scenario they would choose. But we are more than a little jittery, all the same, and lie awake till late, chirruping like bats and alternating between bravado and fear.

  In the morning, the still half-asleep guards do not at first grasp what is going on as we noiselessly muster, then begin to march with a sudden challenging roar that we had not guessed we still had the breath to sustain. Then the guards are very much awake, lancing us with searchlights from the raised-up sentry boxes and, on the ground, scampering beside us, fence between, in a ludicrous parallel march that would make us laugh were we not so shit-scared inside. But our nerves steady as we sense that the Ites’ shrieks are tinged with as much of our fear as their rage, and we grow positively cocky as the bullets continue to whine well clear of our heads and we see the commandant is coming out, still buttoning his tunic as he mounts the steps to a sentry box, loud-hailer in his hand.

  He bellows for silence, and the hut bosses signal for that, so we give him silence, and he rages on and on, rising onto his toes, sinking back onto his heels, huffing himself up like a pigeon with the hots, clawing at the heavens with quivering hands. Then he passes the loud-hailer to the interpreter siding him, clumps down from the box, struts back to the barracks, buttocks jiggling like a whore’s, and the interpreter, in a single sentence of staccato but otherwise impeccable English, tells us that the commandant has agreed to our request – carefully he sidesteps ‘demand’ – and will we now fuck off back to our huts before he changes his mind? The sun is now well up and we wilt, the adrenalin, that we had thought to be energy, gone as though it had never been, and, in us, a hollowness as though a cosmic breath had sucked the very marrow from our bones, and we begin to dawdle our way back to the huts and the torpor that infests them with a malevolence that even the bugs cannot match.

  They are upon us before we can run, shield, rebuff. Clubbing at us with their rifle-butts, yelling as though the once wild hills had resurrected their barbarous hordes, the Ite guards are clearly out to reassert their hold over us, beat us back into the necessary submissiveness and fear, which, strangely enough, I can understand, although that does not help me any as a rifle-butt crashes into the side of my head and a carnival of lights explodes in my brain.

  Looking up at the bow legs straddling me, I see that they belong to a more than usually runty Ite whose face is neither brutish nor innocent, merely peasant and dull, and, above the stolid set of the lips, is a thin smudge of a moustache that suggests that he has a way with women and devotes himself to that with a simple passion that could have endeared him to me at some other time and in some other place. I also notice that there is a dark stain in the crotch of his blue-grey uniform’s pants that could be a sweat of the fear that he is wishing for me, and there is a pathos to that that still does not dissuade me from wanting to grab at and crush his testicles with all the strength of the enemy that I am, but my head is spinning as if the threads of the anchoring neck have stripped and I close my eyes and steel myself for the butt’s follow-up blow.

  But then Douglas is yelling at him with a sassiness that is strange, that reaches to me through the swaddling pain, and the Ite, as strangely, leaves us alone, and Douglas is helping me to my feet and steadying me with a mothering hand. ‘You poor man!’ he is saying, a phrase, this, which he has used before and which I loathe as much now as I did then, but, after what he has done, I am not so boorish as to let it show and even let him drape my arm about his neck so that he can more easily half-drag me along. And it is then that I look up and Danny is standing in the doorway of his hut and watching us pass with eyes that say he is as disinterested in my bludgeoned and blundering state as he would be in a stray dog struck down by a car, and, at last, the true anger for which I have been searching possesses me and I stare back at him with a hatred no words can hold, and would know a catharsis, then, were it not for a slyness in me that asks, ‘Why so violent a hate if nothing is there?’

  For once, the Ites are true to their word, although they do not keep it without some measure of their usual spite, ordering us out of the huts before dawn in order, no doubt, to pay us back for our dawn disruption of the previous day, then making us stand around in the sun till it sets while they debug the huts with the minimum of energy they are prepared to expend. But, at least, it gets done and, in a further placatory move, the commandant produces a full round of Red Cross food parcels from the fuck alone knows where, and we go into festive overdrive about this even though it strengthens a longstanding rumour that the Ites are sitting on a mountain of parcels and slowly white-anting them away.

  We deal with this unexpected and, probably, one-off distribution in one of two ways – consume it lingeringly over as many days as your lust can stand, or follow the ex-magistrate who also consumes his slowly but all at once in a binge that lasts nightlong, then vomits it out again and knows neither regret nor shame. For the overwhelming majority of us, the latter course is little short of blasphemy, while the former can best be likened to an erection’s gradual and agonizingly delicious inching into the final thrust and flurry that are, then, all the more abandoned for having been reined in for so long. Douglas is rather proud of the way he and I manage and thinks it wonderful that the camp should so soon again be sitting up and taking nourishment, and I am thinking he has a point there – Camel again reaching for his pencil, eyes quickening with visions of genitals, and Tony fantasising about another show – but then I’m changing my mind and I say, ‘Nah! Why wonderful? All it’s saying is that there is no spirit without the meat. Starve the belly and that’s all we are – meat wanting more meat so that it can go on being meat!’ and Douglas says I am cynical and I know that he is right while I am wishing that he was wrong.

  So life is back like the last faint flush summoned by a dying face, sleep is deep in the bugless huts and I am again eating from a dixie that shines from Douglas’ scrubbing it with sand. Convinced now that nothing better is coming my way and far too introverted to go out and search for anything other from my side, I reattune myself to my relationship with Douglas, arguing that although it may be about as exhilarating as warmed-over swill, there are certain creature comforts attached to it and any relationship is better than, say, our interloper’s drifting in his limbo for the alone.

  Then
, of a sudden, wrenching us out of our easygoing flowing with the stream, the old rumour of lice is up and running again, and we are conscious that there is still an itchiness to us though the bugs are gone, and there is a camp-wide furtive checking on crotches and a finding of the telltale nits and even the odd pallid adult’s insolent clambering over the pubic hairs.

  Needless to say, Douglas, male nurse dixie-scrubber that he is, howls the loudest at this ultimate subversion of his personal hygiene. ‘Shit!’ he babbles, almost weeping. ‘I am infested!’ and, despite my own condition, I am more than a little pitilessly amused that it should have taken a louse to provoke him into the first gritty word I have yet heard him use.

  The tussle over the bedbugs has taught us that suffering in silence is not the way to go, so the hut bosses haul arse to see our go-between and he comes back to them and says the Ites are expecting an inspection by high-ranking Red Cross officials, which is why they gave in so easily about the bedbugs, and they are nipping straws now that he’s told them about the lice and threatened that the camp will be marching again. But it never comes to that because, the next morning, the Ites’ croupy bugle is summoning us to a mustering of the huts on the open ground in front of the main gates, and the Ites are fanning out amongst us and we are dropping our pants like it’s a short arm inspection in the forgotten times.

  Culled and counted, it turns out that only several hundred of us are actually ‘unclean’ – Douglas’ word, not mine – and these mostly from the huts in the immediate vicinity of the pommy hut – does the hare of my rage flare its ears? – which is the most heavily infested, this leading to a pointing of fingers that promises we are to be a far from happy band. Clearly, there has been an infestation more of the minds than of the groins, but the Ites (give them their due) are determined to do a good job with what they have, and we are told to fetch the rest of our clothes from our huts and report back, when we are marched out of the camp and into a grassy paddock at the back of the barracks where devil-eyed goats stare at us with the malevolence of their kind.

  ‘Strip,’ says what appears to be a medical orderly who speaks a little English helped by eloquent hands, and we strip, some lightheartedly, some grimly and a few, like Douglas, primly, and the Ites gather up our clothes, both the just shed and the spare, and pile them onto pushcarts and trundle them across to the hospital which looks more like a factory with its cracked and dust-laden panes and annexe with a stack where, presumably, the clothes will be deloused. Ten pairs of scissors are handed out at random and we are told to snip short our pubic hairs, which takes the usual trillion years, then our shorn crotches are puffed full of a white powder which could be cake flour or quicklime for all we know, and we are ordered into yet another queue, this time for the chow that we missed at noon, only it is not swill, our dixies still being in the huts, but a double ration of rolls and a chunk of the Ite cheese that is to die for and that we haven’t seen since I don’t know when.

  There are taps outside the infirmary, so we wash the rolls down with water from there, and nobody is worrying about us much because although to make a break with a naked snake is possible, this is not the age of runaway satyrs and the Ites would not have much difficulty following our scandalizing spoor. By now, the sun is low and we are getting goose skin from the first chill, and although we try not to look at each other too openly, a sidelong glance at a sudden flurry of activity on the part of Douglas tells me that he has produced a handkerchief – from a hand held clenched all this while? – and is trussing up his penis and balls, which should be funny enough to make me piss myself, but which only boundlessly embitters me that I should have such an old aunty for a mate.

  Relentlessly, the sun slips lower, seems to flutter a moment on the spine of the hill, is gone, and the goats start to bed down, still watching us with mingled curiosity and mistrust, and we start to shout for our clothes, but the Ites make us form another queue instead and begin to dish out blankets, one for every two men, and it becomes plain that we are to spend the night among the goats, and I think of all those snipped-off pubic hairs with their nits and the crawling crabs of their lice that I imagine we are trampling on, will maybe be sleeping on, and my stomach heaves and, for a moment, I am no better than Aunty Douglas with her bandaged-up balls.

  Douglas it is that says he will fetch our blanket and I can stand guard over the place in the shortest of the goat-cropped grass – I insisting on that – where we have decided to kip, and I say, ‘OK,’ and he goes and I stand watching the first stars check in and thinking of that city beside the sea where the wanker is maybe still grappling with the demon in his loins.

  ‘You want to share my blanket?’ he asks and I turn and he is standing a pace away, a blanket over his arm.

  My first impulse is to turn away again and my tongue gropes to shout, ‘Fuck off!’ but his eyes stay me, though they neither coerce nor invite, merely wait without any particular expectancy for me to say either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, and there is a great rushing between us as of a wind’s passing, though nothing stirs. Frantically I reach out to Douglas, seeking an anchorage in his frustrating faithfulness, seeking it in even his foibles that aggravate me most, but I am standing in a bright water of wanting that is washing away the sand beneath me as though it, too, is a water that will not be denied.

  ‘Wait here,’ I hear myself say, my voice distant and rustling as that sea’s reaching for the city in an irretrievable time, and I go up the queue to where Douglas is standing and, with a last of decency left in me, do that which is as cowardly as it is brave.

  ‘Listen,’ I whisper, ‘there’s a personal matter I have to settle with a guy who’s here now. So I’ll be sharing a blanket with him tonight to thrash the thing out. See you tomorrow at the hut,’ and I grip his shoulder in a show of intimacy that shames but does not make me break step in my drive for what I want, and I hear Douglas draw in his breath as though he feels a blade slide into his side.

  Danny is still standing where I left him, a solidness to the standing as of one who belongs, his eyes aware of my decision and distress as though I had spoken aloud, and he jerks his head and I follow him to a place as far removed as we can find from where Douglas and I would have slept. Not speaking, we sit down, then lie back, faces to the now full night, and he throws the blanket over us and I tuck it in on my side and he on his, and the silence goes on till, without turning my head, I ask, ‘Why?’

  He does not ask, ‘Why what?’ or play games, at once replies, ‘I’m trusting your hands. I told you how I am.’

  That I did not expect. What did I expect? A profession of undying friendship, of contrition for stalking off into the night or watching me being beaten up by the Ite? My knowledge of him tells me I’m a fool for even thinking that he would expose himself in such a way, but I’m disappointed all the same and cannot resist letting it show. ‘Well, you proved to me how good you are with your fists, so why couldn’t you just clobber anyone who tried to muck you around?’

  ‘I’d sooner just sleep,’ he says, his voice amused as though he’s guessed what I’m really wanting from him, and turns onto his side, his back to me, his buttocks warmly against my thigh, and I check myself for the usual dislike of that, but there is nothing, and I think, then, of Douglas, wonder if some gritty pom was all that he could find, try to feel the low-down bum that I am. But it is hard now that there is so much of a repleteness in me, so much of a wholeness after a limping alone, and it is harder still when I think of how little I would have liked it had it been Douglas’ buttocks that were warming my thigh.

  As though aware of my warring selves, Danny starts to shake, startling me since I had thought he slept. Or is he sleeping and dreams? Uncertainly, I make to wake him, then see he is laughing and ask, ‘What’s the joke?’ and he says, ‘Us. Two blokes and all this time we are spiting each other like we’re two bints!’ and I know from the hollowness behind the laugh that that is the closest he is going to get to admitting he was a cunt.

  Then, in quit
e a different tone, ‘You chose tonight,’ and I know with a fearful clarity what he means, but draw back from the final step, and he repeats, ‘I said you chose tonight,’ and now I take a half a step: ‘Maybe,’ I say, and he whirls around with the swiftness of an angered cat and his face almost touches mine and his eyes blaze. ‘Don’t give me that! You did choose! Between me and that twit with the handkerchief round his cock!’

  ‘That’s cruel.’ How I sometimes can sound just like an old aunty myself, I think. Has so much of Douglas rubbed off onto me? ‘We’ve wronged the poor guy enough as it is.’

  ‘Cruel? What do you mean “cruel”? It’s cruel that you’re hitched up to a biddy like that. But now either you’re my mate or you get your arse out of here and go back to whatever’s his name.’

  ‘All right!’ I whisper-shout. ‘So I am your mate, goddammit!’

  ‘As though I would have let you go, anyway,’ he grunts and turns back onto his side, settling down with a fussy shuffling of limbs.

  ‘I hope you don’t treat your wife this way,’ I rebuke, hardly hiding how I really feel.

  ‘She’s not complaining,’ and again the back shakes, and I punch it and it pretends to cringe and we sleep.

  In what I sense is a sliding towards morning, I wake, aroused by the deepening cold. A moon, slumping into its crescent, is about to set behind the hill, its light brilliantly in my eyes, a dream slipping from me like water from a skin. A few paces off, an Ite is standing guard, his rifle’s barrel jutting up behind him like an overgrown spine, his silhouette dark and motionless as one of the paddock’s posts, and, for a moment, I am back in the desert, Douglas instead of Danny beside me and the dawning of the second day of our shaming only hours away. A goat bleats as though it, too, had dreamt, but the sleepers about us are motionless as a massacre, and, for the first time since our arrival in the camp – the even midnight busyness of the huts no longer worrying my ears – I hear a train’s wheels clicking as it passes through the little station where, a year back, they herded us from the trucks and we began the long straggle up to the camp.