Bitter Eden

by Tatamkhulu Afrika

  ‘Where did you get these?’ Astonished, I gape as though he had put a snake in my hand.

  ‘When we got split up last night, I went over to the barracks to see if you were there, and these two Ite brass were getting out of their gear and into civvies, but fast, meaning to make for the hills and home. So they toss me these two guns because they don’t want to maybe be caught with them and be found out for what they were.’

  ‘So why give me one? You wanting us to take on the Jerry army on our own?’

  ‘No, mate, I was going to give you one, anyway. To take home, like I said, for a souvenir. But now I’m mostly giving it because it will be easier for me to get one past the Jerries than two. Which goes for you as well.’

  ‘No way will we get them through! Not even with one.’

  ‘I think we can. There’s a lot of blokes that’s got to go through those gates and I can see the Krauts maybe searching our balls, but I can’t see them going through our kit. Not with our guys already on their tail. So we stuff them deep and have a go.’

  I consider that while he watches me, then he says with an earnestness that compels, stirs the primal roots of my hairs, ‘Look, Tom, these are not the desert blokes that were not so bad. These are the spit-and-polish boys from home base and the story goes that they are prime turds. So we don’t know how many kinds of hell may be waiting for us out there and we may be glad someday that we stashed a bullet that can end it for us like you end it for a dog that’s been run over in the road.’

  ‘Proper little ray of sunshine, you are!’ I try to mock, but I am still hearing those shots outside and my flesh crawls.

  ‘Don’t, mate,’ he warns and his voice is quiet, yet it tears through me like a yell. ‘I don’t know how much real action you’ve seen and I don’t want to know. But don’t forget I was with the tanks and we didn’t sit around polishing our guns. I’ve seen dead men and I have seen men dying with their guts hanging out and begging for a bullet in the brain. So try and get your gun through and don’t waste the bullet it’s loaded with now because there are no more where it came from, and you never know.’

  He sits quietly, then, his eyes neutral and calm, waiting for me to decide, and at last I get up and stash the gun at the bottom of the hulk’s bag.

  ‘Tell me,’ I say when he has also hidden his and we are back on the bottom bunk, ‘what would you do if I did put a bullet in my brain?’ and I am regretting the question even as I ask it because it is a cheap shot aimed at starting a sloppy exchange, but he considers it carefully and with that dispassion that I have come to realize is the other side of the coin.

  ‘I would follow you,’ he says, his voice matter-of-fact as though he is saying he will join me on a walk, which is perhaps exactly what he does mean, he adding, ‘Death is no big deal when it’s a bullet in the brain. Now you’re here, now you are flesh and blood. Boom-bang and you’re on the other side, and, though I’m no choirboy, I think there is an other side because too many blokes were going out as though they were seeing things.’

  ‘But what about your mum? Your wife? Would you not be thinking about them?’

  ‘Sure, I’d be thinking about them, but in my own way, and if there wasn’t that own way, I wouldn’t be sitting alongside of you now. Take my missus. Sure, I love her and if we had had a kid, I might not be giving you the answer I’m giving you now. I don’t know. But I do know that she’s got a better graft than me and she would get herself another man if I died, like I would get myself another wife if she died. But a mate, who’s been through a war or the camps with you, is the only one of his kind, like a mum is the only one of her kind. But me mum’ – is the ‘me’ instead of ‘my’ a slip of the tongue or a surfacing of a deeper he? – ‘is old and could be gone before I ever get out of here, but meantime she has her pension and her house and she is the one who would best understand. My mum has been a great mum and my missus has been a great missus, so they’ll be OK when they get on that other side, but my poor mate who’s shot himself, he will be wandering about on his own, all shaken up and reaching out for his other half that’s still back here. Which other half is me?

  I stare at him, stunned by the wild, relentless splendour of his world, longing to be of it, yet cravenly afraid.

  As relentlessly as his world, he probes, ‘You would do the same for me?’

  Automaton, though still fiercely wanting, I nod and he seizes my hand.

  ‘Swear?’ he insists, and again I nod, feeling his wanting flood into me through his hand, and his face opens and I walk into his world.

  Then the Krauts, as distinct from the Jerries, are screaming, ‘Raus! Raus!’ and by nightfall we are down at the little station beyond the hill and are being crammed into the waiting cattle-trucks like sausage meat into its skin, and, sometime in the far night, Danny beside me and the guns still undetected in our gear, I feel the trucks shudder and sway as they labour over the mountains into Krautland, the ice and snow on the towering peaks singing like devils as they thread through our bones.

  We have lost all sense of space and time, the significance of what we pass, only peripherally observe. Pines, stark as pikes, approach, recede, as though it is they that move, tell us that there is a perspective to the white paper of the snow, but we, too, are paper, stay paper, two-dimensionally and blessedly unaware. Each day we slosh through the snow that is not snow, each night lie down in it, the flakes covering us like the bugs in that land, now two years dead, where I cannot remember it ever having rained, though, of course, it did, the unchanging sun shining in my mind alone.

  How slowly, prissily, we move, putting each foot down as though its bones are broken or a priceless glass, but the guards don’t seem to mind, seem to understand that we are barely this side of sense, that no amount of shouting, or belabouring with rifle-butts, will quicken flesh already busied with its death. The two loaves of bread, dozen boiled potatoes and a Red Cross food parcel each with which we started out have long since been desperately, sparingly, eaten and returned to the earth in the shape of our minute, difficult turds, and all that is left to us are the occasional, seemingly abandoned turnip fields that the guards permit us to rifle, phlegmatically watching as we claw out the turning-woody turnips and gnaw at them with teeth that, each day, seem less rooted in our gums.

  We ask the guards how much further and they shrug. We ask them what is the purpose of the march and, mostly, they again shrug, but some say we are going to a better camp down south, but don’t look at us while they are saying this, a tightness to their mouths that disturbs. We pass through a city which we are dimly aware has fallen in upon itself like a pack of cards, only a cathedral’s steeple still standing as though it witnessed to the indestructibility of truth – or is it myth? – and people are scuttling in and out of the ruins and going about their business with the imperviousness of ants, and we ask the guards what city is this, but now they do not shrug or answer, just look at us with a loathing that rears its head with the swiftness and deadliness of a snake.

  Each night, bodies thick as slugs with all the clothing we still possess, Danny and I bed down together, grappling each other for warmth with the awkwardness of mating snails, and sometimes we fumble back through the two years since we rocked down the last gradient into a countryside of lawns that were virgin grass, and storybook houses for pixies and elves, and we rank and sodden from lying, interlaced as packaged fish, in the shit and piss that anxious anuses and bladders were no longer able to restrain. It is then that we realize that the past can be as truly past as it is truly present, so much of it already fading from the immediate memory like a writing in water or sand, but that which remains as vividly terrible or pleasant as though yesterday and today were forever one, and Danny tells me that his mum says that, now that she is growing old, she is remembering yesterday more wholly and frighteningly than today.

  There is no consistency or predictability, though, in what we recall. I will mention something that I think, laughingly – or as close to a laugh as I can s
till get – is trivial and he will think it meaningful, or he will mention something that he thinks is meaningful and I will think it’s trivial, and so it goes. All, though, from a tapestry of the past that, whether agonizing or satisfying, is preferable to the intolerable present, not to speak of a future which seems to hold in it more of death than life, and there is a time in which I whisper – hardly daring to speak even that softly of it – that maybe we should use the bullets to end it now. But Danny does not answer and we go on plucking bits and pieces from nostalgia’s shrivelling flesh, trying to find in them a sequentiality less final than the now forebodes – trying, impossibly, to forget.

  So we are back in the cattle-trucks, lolloping to the camp on a remote eastern border that we left Christ knows how many aeons ago now, but half-way we stop, the night stretched thin, are shunted off onto a sidetrack, the sounds of a city widely around, but the truck itself, after the clash of couplings, screeching of wheels, seeming to hold in a sweet power of silence that overrides all outer noise. Heaving up out of the sleeping crush of bodies on the floor, Danny and I stay where we stand, knowing that if we don’t we will never be able to lie down again, and peer through the truck’s air vents at leaves scuttling across streetlights and know from that that our planes are here still but a rumouring of the wind. Further off is an intense wash of blue-white light under a roof’s iron overhang, and there is a ceaseless clangour as of a thousand tinsmiths banging on their anvils, and a harsh Kraut voice, magnified to that of a god or demon, is exhorting the workers to greater efforts in the cause of the Reich that will last a thousand years.

  ‘Shit!’ I whisper to Danny. ‘A thousand years in a cattle-truck!’ and laugh, but there is hysteria in the laugh, but he whispers back that there is still the bullet for the brain and there is no hysteria in him. Then, suddenly, a sheet-white face is looking up from a clot of darkness that could be a hat or scarf, and a hand is reaching up, proffering, urging that we take what it holds, and I do and face and hand are gone, soundlessly as they came. Carefully, I feel, smell, touch my tongue to what the hand gave and my starving stomach – the commandant never having had the chance to distribute the promised parcels before they shot him dead – knows it for what it is. ‘Eat!’ it yells and I whisper-shout to Danny, ‘Bacon!’ and we take turns lingeringly nibbling at the rich, raw fat and lean meat, then halve the six by two inches of rind and chew on it till no taste is left, then wolf it down whole.

  The eastern border turns out to be, as Danny pungently puts it, the unwiped arsehole of the world. Flat, dispiriting plains stretch to as dispiriting skylines, the monotony broken, although hardly inspiringly so, by occasional plantations of regimented pines, or frowsty huddles of indigenous woods so small that one leaves as one enters, and, worst of all, stacks of sudden factories from which billow endless streamers of oily and contaminating smoke. ‘They boil the corpses there,’ quips one wag, humour not yet quite dead, and we laugh, but with a shudder down the spine.

  The camp, though, is not all that bad, is in fact better than the Ites’, though some of the elements are the same. Long barracks-like buildings of sooty but decently-laid brick house many hundreds of men, but there is an ablution and laundering room in the centre of each and the several outside toilets, though still open-pit with multiple seats, are roofed and durable structures that invite the illusion that one is crapping in a slightly less barbarous style. Bunks are again three-tiered, but somewhat wider with wider aisles between, and Danny and I push, then shove, until he gets the bottom and I the middle bunk in the same tier.

  Outside, cobbled paths crisscross between the blocks with the mathematical exactness that the Krauts so love, and we are each issued, amazingly, with a pair of wooden clogs, which we at once put on so as to prolong the life of our already worse for wear, once forever army boots, then clack around on the cobbles uneasily and gigglingly as little kids trying out their roller skates for the first time. Beyond one of the two longer fences, with their mandatory barbs and searchlights on heron-like towers, is a plantation of pines that, should the wind be right, aromatically brood on their precisely-spaced shadows and out of which a woodcutter, or whatever, will sometimes suddenly emerge, look startled and flee.

  The food is partly better, partly horrendously worse than the Ites’, but there is more of it and there are two feeding periods a day. In the morning, we get a hunk each of coarse black bread and a half a dixie of saccharin-sweetened coffee which those in the know say is brewed from acorns – or is it chestnuts? – but, whichever, has certainly never known a coffee-bean; and, at any time after noon, we get a dixie of turnip swill – which is as execrable as it sounds and goes to ground under a yellow scum if you let it stand too long – plus a handful of potatoes boiled in their skins, a medallion of ‘cheese’ which smells like rotting fish or feet, a pat of ‘butter’ which again the know-alls say is made from coal and evaporates as summarily as water should you melt it for a fry, and a tablespoon of jam that really is made from sugar beet and is the closest to being OK. But why not all this together with the bread?

  The mysterious ‘cheese’, however, is what intrigues us the most and Danny and I who, like many others, have managed to bring our blower-stove with us, take it, a dixie, a lick of margarine from the Red Cross parcels – which seem to be more regular here – and a round of the ‘cheese’ which we then try to ‘toast’ in the margarine, and end up with a gummy mess that surely can only be molten animal horn? Worst of all, it takes forever to get the dixie clean again and it is the one ‘food’ that, eventually, no one – not even the ex-magistrate, which says it all – any longer wants to have, and Danny’s bunk is shaking with his whooping it up when I suggest that, in the toilet’s noisome depths, there must by this time surely be a mountain of discarded ‘cheese’ that, horror-movie-wise, is slyly mutating into the monster that yet, like the rats in Iteland, will have us by our balls.

  Children of colonizers, we, too, are colonizers to the manner born, bringing with us not only our blower-stoves, but all the rest of the infrastructure which we need to found a new and, hopefully, less bitter Eden in which we can live, or, unbiblically, die. So, almost from touchdown, the old systems are again being put in place: the gambling kings, bleary-eyed and bitter-lipped, slapping down their cards till late, the mini-traders, ebullient and eloquent, touting their wares, the laundrymen licking arses for work, Tony negotiating with the Krauts for a theatre and getting it, and Camel chancing his arm with an ‘exhibition’ of drawings of nude groins – ‘Pay your cigarette before you look,’ says the notice tacked to his bunk – but no one heeds, there being enough naked cocks around for free.

  One thing that cannot be revived, however, is the camp band, our last sighting of the instruments being when – shortly before our leaving for the cattle-trucks the other side of the hill – they were being loaded onto a Kraut truck and destined for anywhere save here. But a revival that gladdens me most is when Danny starts slowly but steadily running again, the relatively generous quantities of solid if often unpalatable food putting a little flesh back on his bones.

  Then there is also the wholly new activity of classes, which the several civvy street teachers in our midst offer to give for a variety of reasons ranging from nostalgia to keeping their hand in to simply slaughtering time. I opt for the German language classes, partly because it might be useful, although in what way – philosophical discussions with the Kommandant? – I am not at all sure, and partly because German sounds like Afrikaans and should be the easy way to go, and somehow I stick to it even when I find out that a fork is female and a spoon is male. ‘For Chrissakes,’ I say to Danny, ‘surely that should be the other way around?’ Danny, however, astonishes me by choosing botany and goes around mumbling Latin names for shrubs and flowers he has never seen – or perhaps has but didn’t know – and when I ask him, ‘Why botany?’ stressing the word as though it is a slug on my tongue, he explains, silencing me, that there is a field behind their house that’s full of flowers in spring
and learning about ‘flowers and stuff’ will remind him of home.

  On a more practical level, a Spam-and-potato potency sparking in me as in Danny, I decide to go back into the laundry business and wheedle Danny into siding with me in this, although I will not allow myself to be persuaded to run. He makes it clear, though, that he is only going along with the idea because, even if he said ‘No,’ he would still be sharing in the material benefits accruing from my sweat and that would make him feel like – as he puts it – a kept man. So I find myself working with the human equivalent of a racehorse hitched to a plough – or, to put it less poetically, an incurably embarrassed grumbler who moans all the time that washing is for women, not men, and, in the end, I give up on him and solve the problem of the kept man by telling him that he can be the manager – hanging up the washing for drying, taking it down again, folding it, delivering it, extorting payment like extracting teeth, negotiating new business, and any number of other duties that will be a sop to his pride and still have us together in our increasing clinging to each other like two castaways in a tricky sea.

  ‘Well, if only one of us is to be the woman in this deal, then it looks like it’s got to be me,’ I pretend to, in my turn, complain, and his eyes flick down, and as slyly up, as he hits back, ‘Pity it’s the wrong water-works or we could have us a ball.’

  For a moment, I don’t get it, then do and an original me rears, outraged, then as quickly is felled and I am laughing without strain.

  ‘So!’ I taunt, a triumphalism in me that I do not quite understand, cannot control. ‘How now your story about the right hole?’

  ‘Blokes and bints don’t feel the same,’ he grunts. ‘A bloke can take what’s on the plate and nothing’s changed,’ and again he glances down as though at balls not seen, then turns, sharply, away. ‘What is this?’ the far-off me again exclaims, not so much because of what it has heard, but because of a sudden gush of warmth where no warmth should be.