Bitter Eden

by Tatamkhulu Afrika

  I can remember no lonelier sound, nor one that so painfully proclaims the absoluteness of our banishment from a world that each day slips further from us like the dream’s fleeing my brain; each day increasingly seems the unreality and the myth and our bitter Eden the only solid anchorage under the sun. Distressed, I stir, struggle against the blanket’s suddenly imprisoning me, and Danny reverses sides, facing me now, but still sleeping, an arm across my chest, his breath, faintly on my cheek, smelling only of itself and his one knee resting on my thigh. He is bearing down on my arm that lies straightly between us, palm upwards, and I try to withdraw it, but the knee on my thigh slips over further, angling him more sharply towards me, and his genitals flop down into my palm, the pubic hairs bristling against my wrist, but the penis and testicles slack and warm as a plucked but still living bird.

  Unlike the genitals, his body is cold, its saddening boniness trembling slightly against my own rebellious bones, and I lie, crucified on a crossroads of indecision as to what to do. Should I push him away, thus surely waking him and reminding him of the day when I flinched from his finger’s touching my cheek, or should I try to quietly withdraw my hand and arm and run the risk of his waking then and thinking – with fatal consequences – that I have just finished fondling his crotch? Interminable moments pass, a bird cries from the hill’s slope, but it is no nightingale, and then irritation overtakes me – and a less predictable compassion for the vulnerable huddle in my palm – and I curve my fingers lightly over the core of his maleness with its waning warmth and think, ‘To hell with it!’ and sleep, his breath a trusting on my cheek.

  When I again wake, the sun is up, but the air is still chill and the dew is heavy as a rain on the grass. Danny again has his back to me and could be asleep, except that there is about him a subtle stillness as of the watchfully awake, and I have this feeling that if I were to suddenly confront him, I would find his eyes sightless and staring as glass. Did he turn away from me in his sleep, thus releasing his genitals without his ever knowing where they had lain, or did he wake before that and find them entrapped in an unconsciously tightening hold? Anxiety mounts in me and I sit up with a deliberate abruptness, jiggling him, but he does not stir, and now I know that he is awake and his stillness is a sullenness, else why does he not speak or turn?

  Sick with guilt, cursing myself for an impulse that I should have known would land me in the shit, I fumble out from under the blanket and make for the corner of the paddock where the goats have huddled in a final stand. My bladder is full and I piss with an exuberance that is far removed from how I feel, but the goats seem to relate to it and go back to their grazing as though I had proven to be of their primordial kin. A pom, whose face I have seen but whose name I do not know, is crapping nearby, his lard-white buttocks splayed, his hands bearing down on his knees and his face contorted like a woman in labour as he urges out the finger-thin turd of the semi-starved. I turn away, feeling sicker than I was, as he begins to wipe his arse with a snatch of the grass and see Douglas sitting up in his blanket in the place which we had decided would be ours, and am sure that he has seen me too, because he at once begins to babble and gesture with a vivaciousness that is as pathetic as it is alienating, and sometimes he pushes at the still blanketed form beside him and laughs, his head thrown back and his mouth as gaping as a hole.

  ‘Like a whore,’ I think and go back to where Danny is now sitting on the edge of the blanket and staring at the grass between his toes, and think to greet him, but then decide that I won’t, will wait instead to see if he will do so first, but he gets up and brushes past me and, like me, goes to piss, and I steel myself for the outburst and final bust-up that must surely come when he returns. But then the Ites are fanning our clothes out all over the grass and shouting that we have an hour to get dressed before they herd us back to camp, and there is a milling and bickering that brings out the beast in us as we try to identify what is ours, and, once, two poms even come to blows, but, all the time I am searching, finding, shrugging on, I am thinking, ‘Christ! What do I do now? Go back to Douglas with no card to play? Walk on my knees?’ and again I am trying to find a hatred for Danny as I watch him pawing over the clothes, the very twist and stoop of his still naked back telling me I am dung.

  Clothes found, I start to walk over to where we are forming up according to the huts to which we belong, and Danny is closing up on me from behind, is walking alongside me, is touching my arm, is saying in a tone that leaves no distance between us, ‘See you later, mate?’ and I nod, not daring to say anything because whatever I say will be saying too much, but I do lightly punch his arm and he goes into boxer-stance, then swerves away to join the poms.

  The Ites count us, panic, count us again, then start us walking back to the camp, but I make no attempt to latch onto Douglas and, in fact, could not do that even if I would because he has latched onto whoever it is that shared his blanket if the over-loud dialogue is to be believed. Covertly I study the guy, wondering why I don’t know him if he is from our hut, then do recognize him as one of the stagehands with quarters in the theatre who – because he was the only one from the theatre to be infested – was allowed to tag onto whatever group he pleased. A sallow youth with long hair but no beard, pointy elfin ears and a narrow-eyed narrow face redeemed only by a lush, almost womanly-red mouth, he is not my cup of tea and I can’t imagine him really being Douglas’ either, but, charade or not, preference or not, I am not caring two fucks any more about anything Douglas does.

  Back in the hut, we don’t speak to each other, don’t even look at each other, and I grab my sliver of soap and tatty towel and hurry down to the ablution block to bath under a tap before every other lousy bastard gets the same idea, which adjective, I notice with relief after washing my crotch clear of whatever the white powder was, no longer applies. Then Douglas, pointedly waiting till I return, goes to bath and, at chow call, we, for the first time ever, each fetch our own swill and eat it each in our own bunk, after which I hang up my still – pointedly – unwashed dixie and turn over to get some much-needed proper kip.

  But Douglas is having none of it. Balancing on the edge of the interloper’s bunk – he, for once, not being there – he addresses my back, his voice unsteady but not giving in. ‘Why did you make such a fool of me last night? What did I do to you that you should hurt me like you did?’

  The namby-pamby second question at once ignites me like a match a flare. ‘What do you mean – hurt you? You seemed to be having a good enough time with what you picked up! And, anyway, I told you what it was all about.’

  ‘You lied, Tom. Lied like you did about the shorts. And about you not seeing who hugged you after the show. And about your not waking me to hear that bird sing. All this time, Tom, you have been lying and lying while you have been running after that what’s-his-name who, I am now sure, was the one you had in mind when you wanted us to open up our laundry business and you fed me that fancy talk about infrastructure when all you wanted was to have him with you all the time.’

  ‘That is where you made your big mistake! If you had let him in instead of reacting like a jealous wife, maybe you and I wouldn’t be breaking up the way we are now.’

  ‘So you’re saying it – openly – at last? That we’re breaking up? That that is what you want?’

  ‘Well, what does it look like to you? That we are on our second honeymoon?’

  ‘Stop talking like that! This is not the time for stupid jokes!’

  ‘Who says I am joking? I am giving it to you straight.’

  For a moment he is silent and even my back knows that I have cut him down, that he is slithering about as in a flood of tears still struggling to be shed. But he tries again, game to the end – or just unable to accept that the show is over and the world on the stage is back to being painted cardboard and prettied-up wood? ‘How can you possibly so soon forget? Does it mean nothing to you that I cleaned you up each time you dirtied yourself in that horrible boat, that I worked it so that we got
double rations at the infirmary down south, that I was there with the aspirins when that stupid dentist would have let you bleed to death, and again, only the other day, when that guard would have beaten you to a pulp if I hadn’t chased him away? What sort of a man are you that you now can turn your back on me as if I’m trash?’

  Now I am seeing red, can hardly wait for him to take a breath. ‘What is it, then, that you want? Payment for favours done?’

  ‘You know I’m not wanting that. All I’m asking is that you have the decency to stick with someone who has stuck with you and not go running off with every new pair of fancy pants.’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ and now I whip around, almost incoherent with rage. ‘Who the fuck are you to talk to me as though I’m some kind of a rough stud? Don’t forget it’s not me that hitched up with you, but the other way around. I never wanted you for a mate, did my best to give you the slip, but you kept on sucking up to me like a goddam tick till I gave up and let you have your way. And, talking about payment for favours, let me remind you that I beat up that poor mad wanker for wanting to take away your beads and, while you’re throwing a favour here and a favour there in my face, I have been doing you a favour all the time by letting you mother me like a little girl getting her kicks out of her doll!’

  ‘Why, you filthy beast!’ he almost shrieks and the hut is all ears. ‘I have got a good mind to – to –’

  ‘To what, you bloody old cow?’ I howl. ‘You couldn’t hurt pussy, let alone anything with balls! Now get the fuck away from me before I kick you in the teeth!’

  His face disappears at that and I strain to hear if there will be any sounds of incontinent grief since such a sissyness will entrench me in my anger and contempt, but the silence below is so accusingly stoical and profound that I begin to feel several kinds of a heel, though not for long, my relief at the severance of the umbilical cord too overwhelming to be that easily subdued.

  The next two days I spend with Danny, partly because that is where I want to be and partly because living with Douglas is like a killer cohabiting with the victim of his crime. I do not tell Danny anything about what is going on because I am still not sure what the final outcome will be, but, at chow time of the third day, when I go to fetch my dixie from our hut, Douglas’ bunk is stripped and what I am sure is the exact half of our remaining stock of Red Cross food and cigarettes is laid out on mine. Only then, staring at the abandoned bunk, do I fleetingly but sincerely grieve, and only then do I tell Danny all, and he looks at me as though assessing me for any lingering regrets, then nods and swats at a particularly pestiferous fly.

  The next day, more curious than concerned, I visit Tony and he looks at me as I walk in and at once says, ‘Yes, he’s here and if you’re worried – which I doubt – then don’t be, because we look after our own.’

  Then I bribe the hut boss with the cigarettes that Douglas left and he fixes it so that Danny can move in, and, in a final act of irony, the interloper moves downstairs so that Danny can have his bunk and almost smiles as he says that maybe he always wanted the bottom bunk anyway.

  As if by mutual agreement, Douglas and I keep out of one another’s way as much as that is possible in a camp as crowded as ours, but I still often see him, either from afar or relatively near, and usually he is with the sallow youth who seems animated and dependent enough to make him a better companion for Douglas than I ever could have been. As for Danny and me, the new and constant closeness does not pose any problems or throw up any disillusionments because we acknowledge that we are both solitary birds and respect each other’s occasional urge to stand on one leg and alone. Also, we share the barely controlled sloppiness common to most ‘bachelors’ which, to me, is a relief after Douglas’ fussiness, as it is a relief to be rid of the incessant chatter to which his new companion appears to be equally prone. There are, of course, the bouts of snappishness that empty stomachs breed, but Danny’s innate sense of fun always restores the equilibrium and is bringing out in me a capacity for laughter that I never knew was mine. Whether the never discussed night in the ‘decontamination’ paddock has anything to do with it, I shall never know, but it is so that we are increasingly also easier with each other in the physical sense, often draping an arm about a neck or jabbing an elbow into a side, and sometimes we even wrestle a little as kids do, getting to know each other’s texture and smell, but that does not happen too often, the boniness of us warningly in the way.

  Then, perplexingly, there is a shifting in the pattern of our lives, an almost crackling in the air as though a log jam is yielding to a flowing’s urge.

  There is another unexpected distribution of parcels though no Red Cross trucks are seen to be entering or leaving the camp – something, this, which our greedy vigilance would never have missed – and, even more inexplicably, there is suddenly meat in the swill and, on odd days, a truly generous chunk each of the tangy Ite cheese. Food aside, the Ites themselves are getting weird, the guards nodding and grinning and trading their wretched English across the fences with none of the mercenary intentions to which we are used; and we are still asking each other, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ when, on a night, what seems to be all the church bells in the world are clanging like crazy, and sounding louder and louder, till we are thinking the churches are marching up over the hills to squat around the camp, and all the Madonnas will be waving from the windows and smiling their sad not-saying-anything smiles.

  And then the bugle is blaring for us to assemble at the gates, and the commandant is climbing up onto one of the observation towers, loud-hailer in hand, but no interpreter, and a searchlight from the barracks is swivelling across to spotlight him, and he stands there, looking a little lost and not at all like the boss man we thought we knew. We hush and he speaks, his English – English? – ‘Sly old bastard,’ Danny whispers in my ear – broken and halting but wholly intelligible, and we hear that the war is over, for the Ites at any rate, and the gates will be left open as of now, but we are advised to stay close to the camp because there are marauding bands about and our people can at any time arrive to organize our going home. Meanwhile, he adds, our link man will arrange for the distribution of the last of the parcels which he has been holding in the store that we might celebrate this night in style – ‘Fucking old liar,’ Danny again whispers, but there is more of affection than venom in the words – and there is vino for the taking at the barracks, but our own men must staff the canteen so that the wine can be served to us in a manner befitting gentlemen and – he pauses – winners in war. Then he salutes, quickly, his calm coming apart at the seams, and the light switches off and he might never have been.

  For a moment, we stand, buttocks to crotch, irresolute and stunned as at a tidings of death, not joy. Then a roar erupts, and I hear myself yelling, and Danny is kissing me on the lips, and I am kissing him back and knowing no discomfort at that, it seeming the inevitable and only way to say what heart and tongue can no longer hold.

  Not all of us behave like ‘gentlemen and winners in war’. Some take bunks and bedding from the huts and set them alight and dance around the flames till exhaustion and drunkenness drag them down. Others wander aimlessly through the flickering dark, grinning with the vacuous delight of the insane and uttering meaningless cries, and some few have to be cast off from their slobbering latching onto every passing neck, huge eyes begging proof that they do not dream. The Ite guards join in, stripping off their badges of unit and rank, handing them out as souvenirs, sometimes brandishing flagons of wine in excess of the canteen’s, passing these around, themselves drinking till they reel in a bizarre delirium of love for the once loathed. Churned up by the milling feet, dust clouds the camp in a pale, peppery mist through which we blunder or prowl, mutter or howl, appear, disappear, like guilt-ridden ghosts, and sometimes fight, settling old scores in a bloodying with fists that turns the festivities into nightmare and victory into defeat.

  Some hours before dawn, the camp at last stills, many sleeping where they dropped, an
d Danny and I, tipsy as any and meeting again after having been parted by the crowd, help each other up onto my bunk where we lie together, grinning into each other’s faces like lobotomized fools. Then the grins fade as we succumb to what we have all the time suppressed – the knowledge that our freedom is synonymous with our separation, that, within days, maybe even in the morning, we will be parted to be flown, or shipped, back to where we belong, the oceans endlessly between. ‘So the bitter Eden ends,’ I think. ‘So fucking soon,’ and I feel my mouth twist and he touches it with as grieving a hand. Then we turn into each other, breath to breath, and sleep, entwined.

  Sun high, we wake, go out, come quickly back in. The Jerries have moved in from the north, are ringing the camp, are lining up the commandant and the guards, and the first shots ring out even as we huddle down onto the interloper’s bunk, he nowhere to be found. ‘Christ,’ says Danny and we stare at each other as though it’s the first time. Then he remembers something, and feels in the two baggy pockets of the old tunic he is wearing, and takes out two Ite service pistols and hands me one.

  ‘A souvenir,’ he says and actually grins.