Bitter Eden Read online

  He is as right as he is wrong. The sun sets – and rises and sets – and still we live, although dying is all we think about, strive against, as no summons to move on comes, and the skeletons we pretended we did not have begin to show, and our lips crack like the old mud’s heaving apart, and our tongues are the tumescences our loins no longer need.

  In a stray quirk of fertility, near where the trucks still wait under their camouflage nets for the planes that never fly, is a spring that surfaces into a wide, shallow pool, then again runs underground. The pool is ringed with grass of an almost unbearably brilliant green, and there are small honey-scented flowers and hovering, doubtlessly rowdy, bees. We passed it with a quick wonder when we were driven into the flats; now we stare at it all the time, quivering with the intensity of dogs held back from a bitch in heat as the Ites man the machine guns they have set up round the pool and occasionally, with the casual sadism of children, splash themselves with water, empty their water bottles onto the burning iron of the earth. Someone who called the guns’ bluff is still lying out there, minus his face, silent under the shifting coverlet of the flies.

  At noon of the third day, the sun is a struck gong in our skulls. A second man, lured by the shimmering siren of the pool, weaves out towards the guns. They shoot him too, the reports flat as a toy pistol’s popped cork, no bird starting in terror from the crackling salt.

  We rise, then, as one, mindlessly march to a beat of the blood only we hear, a heedlessness of death our desperate armour for the insane. As from some other earth, we apprehend the flawed flats’ shuddering under our steps, hear the senseless whisperings of our swollen tongues, knot our every tissue against the bullets that must surely come.

  But the guns are silent and the Ites are hauling them back to the trucks as they concede us the pool, and we are a mob again, breaking ranks, rushing upon the spring with an incontinence that strips us of the brief dignity we had donned. Douglas, his face raptor as the rest, beak of a nose scything the air, mouth set as a trap, starts from my side with a fleetness I would never have guessed at and wriggles his length into the writhing mass of bodies covering the pool, his jostlings ruthless and maddened as any, and I cannot decide whether I am feeling smugness at his degradation or disappointment and shame.

  When at last our thirst is stilled and some are vomiting, their bellies dangerously ballooned, there is as little left of the spring as of our pride. The grass is crushed, the flowers effaced without trace, the once crystal water turned to a tired sludge, and we trudge spiritlessly back to the trucks when summoned, no thought in us of escape, leaving behind us a scarring we now inescapably bear in our own selves.

  Douglas is strangely silent as we again trundle westwards, his beads slipping, dutifully, through his fingers, but his lips unmoving and his mind patently elsewhere.

  ‘I suppose you don’t think much of me any more,’ he at last says, his tone wistful and his eyes misty with a not-quite-tearfulness that irritates me as profoundly as the beads.

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ I snap, laying on the harshness, partly because I am feeling pissed off – although I do not quite know why – and partly because I suspect that any softness on my part will have him blubbering on my shoulder like a little boy. Or should that be ‘little girl’?

  ‘About the way I behaved at the spring,’ he says, his fingers juggling the beads almost frantically now, aggravating my mood.

  ‘What makes you think you behaved any differently from everybody else? Including me?’

  ‘Yes, but I left you behind. I never once thought about you. I thought only of myself.’

  ‘For Chrissakes!’ I explode in a whisper so as not to share this slush with the rest of the truck. ‘Will you stop mothering me as though I were a little kid? You’re not that old! And anyway, I don’t need you. I don’t need anybody. I’ve looked after myself nearly all of my goddam life!’

  ‘You said “mothering”,’ he cuts in. ‘Why did you say “mothering”? Do you think I’m one of those?’

  ‘Those what?’ I nag, though I know perfectly well what he means.

  But he doesn’t answer that; only stares at the blank, cab side of the truck as though there’s nothing there. Then he turns me right around, the whine in his voice quite gone.

  ‘I can’t help how I am. I have got this way of moving and speaking, and I have got this way of caring about people. That’s why I became a male nurse and why I was glad to get into H.Q. and handle files instead of guns. But I have a wife and son whom I try not to think about all the time and I’m hoping that these,’ and he flips the beads, ‘will see to it that I get back to them one day.’

  ‘So?’ I ask, fending him off, but sensing I’m going to lose.

  ‘So I’m a talking fool who was hoping to find, at least, a friend to go with me into the God knows how many years yet of this,’ and he gestures about the truck with those too graceful hands. ‘So do you want me to sit somewhere else from now on?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I say, my voice curt and dismissive, but he seems to understand that I am only being me.

  A shadow falls across me, clotting the slits of sun that still anchor me to the present, and Douglas’ voice says, ‘Tom,’ and I ask, ‘What?’ and Douglas asks if I have seen his rosary, and I say it was lying on his bedding and he probably folded it up into his blankets as he has done so many times before. And Douglas says, ‘Of course!’ and the sun is shining in the slits again.

  ‘He one of the funnies?’ asks the pommy voice close to my left ear, and I know exactly what is meant by ‘funnies’ and am not amused. But I don’t work up a sweat about it either because everybody reacts to Douglas in that way the first time around, then ends up liking him for the guileless fool that he seems.

  So I pretend that I had not heard, but the voice persists, ‘He your mate?’ and there is a slight emphasis on the ‘mate’ that does get my goat and I mumble, ‘Mind your own business,’ and would take the matter further, but I am already an ocean away as the convoy finally stops in the late afternoon of the following day and we are left to infest the multitude of brown army tents that have been erected for us on a waste of sand white as bone.

  The sea is near – its tang enticing on the windless, still torrid air – and, for a moment, the sand beneath my boots is beach sand, and I am a boy again. Also there is a city – seemingly so close that a stone, thrown at it, would rebound, clattering, from the nearest wall. But that is a trick of light and air and actually it is a long walk away, sunken in a depression beside the sea, only the upper floors of the taller buildings and the domes and minarets of the many mosques towering up with a shining, magical whiteness that matches our own still pristine sand.

  But there is illusion upon illusion because, as the light fades and the shadows gather like mauve water in every angle and hollow, I begin to see that it is a paintless city with many paneless windows and fault-lines in the walls that tell of bombs in the days – the years? – when our planes still had a say in the skies. But then a muezzin in a minaret is calling the always absent wogs to prayer and there is a sweetness and foreverness about it that heals, and hope is walking back to me like some old friend with a half-forgotten face – or should that be half a face? – and I watch with something like satisfaction as Douglas lays out our private space in a tent that must surely house a hundred sleeping in the round.

  Douglas is still ‘mothering’ me? I have given in to him like the macho weakling that I am? Yes, but the ‘weakness’ is more like a rare kindness in me, I having come to understand that, for Douglas, to not mother someone is to not breathe. And then, this first night in a place with a roof of sorts and a double body’s length of sand we can call ‘his’ and ‘mine’, there is an appearance of domesticity, of a home, and a home is a bipolar thing, balanced between his yin and my yang.

  All of which is, of course, a load of bull and is quickly shown to be so. A rumour floats – and refuses to blow away – that any day, without warning, we will be ship
ped off to Mussoliniland, and, at once, the illusion of permanence – or even semi-permanence – is shattered and we stand again amongst the graves and the sand between the tents is a slyness of salt that has claimed us for its own.

  As though to drive the point home, the Ites’ taunting of us resumes in a manner that is frighteningly known. Once a day – usually when the sun is at its highest and we are stripped to the underpants many of us no longer have – the water trailers circle the camp in round after round of mindless sadism, water sloshing and chuckling with a delicious liquidness that unfailingly lures us out to the milling and yelling of the captive beasts at feeding time that we have become. Only then do the trailers take up their stations about the camp and we complete our degradation as we jostle and bicker – and all too often bloodily fight – in a queueless rush to fill our water bottles and whatever other containers we have been able to scrounge.

  There is also a minor, more in-the-face, version of the game that so turns the Ites on, which sends murder bellowing through my brain. An Ite guard, prowling the camp’s perimeters, looks out for the last of our watches flashing on some innocent’s arm, offers a whole multi-litre can of water for the watch, brings the can, slopping water onto the sand, takes the watch, then upends the can, laughing like fuck as the innocent, more often than not, breaks down and weeps like some little kid that’s seen his world end before its time.

  Whichever version of the game, it is then that we again foul the clear pool of our human genes, and the sand beneath our boots bares its myriad teeth of bitter salt and I am thinking it would have been best if they had shot us back there and buried us, or left us to rot, in the last shreds of a dignity we were never fit to wear.

  And then there is the food – the one ladle a day equals a three-quarter dixie of strangely grey macaroni drenched with an oily soup, two bread rolls no bigger than the standard ‘English’ bun and a to-be-saved and delicately, lingeringly eaten two-inch cube of oddly superior cheese. Sufficient to sustain life if not spirit, this is a diet that encourages the body to a new equilibrium of skin and bone, limits conversation to fantasies about food, goads whatever spirit is still left into the vitriolic intolerance of each other of too many scorpions in a jar, and often I go out and sit and stare at the city whose name I now know but will not disclose because that will destroy its timelessness, as it will destroy the timelessness of all that is happening here.

  It is not surprising, then, that this morning I have this trouble with the guy that sleeps next to Douglas and me. He was a war correspondent for a Jo’burg paper – or so he says – and is an almost runt with a long, narrow face and a matching nose that twitches in tune with a world of stimuli he alone prowls. The once rakish moustache now straggles and is stippling out to its subsuming by as flourishing and bristling a beard, and the eyes, black and liquid as olives, scuttle far back in sockets ringed with shadows heavy as mascara on a whore.

  His eyes are like that because he masturbates, masturbates with a frequency and ferocity that is neither hilarious nor titillating, merely drearily, sickeningly obscene. Lying on his side, jerking and whimpering like a ridden-over dog, he sometimes milks that pitiful cock twice in one day and I am having difficulty remembering any day when he left the fucking thing alone. Even between wanks, he’s juggling his balls or fiddling with his foreskin, his mood petulant as a kid that wants to play after the other kid’s called it a day, and I say to Douglas that, Jesus, this has got to stop, and he says, no, to leave the ‘poor man’ alone because he’s seen this before and it’s like a disease.

  This morning, though, confrontation comes at us like life skidding on a wet road. It is still early and the tent is mostly quiet, sleeping being one way of not being here, and I am not listening to Douglas fingering his beads and whispering his Ave Marias, and I am trying to not listen to the wanker having it off with his cock. But as his grappling goes on and on, it begins to seep through to me that something is wrong, that he is weakening without anything happening, that the starving body is at last rebelling against the lust that is more in his mind than in his loins.

  So it is that suddenly he slumps and a long groan drags out of him like the final exhalation of a dying man and I’m thinking, ‘Thank Christ, maybe there will be one nut less here from now on,’ but then he is whipping round and glaring at Douglas who is lying between him and me and his eyes are white with hatred and rage. ‘It is you!’ he hisses. ‘You with those goddam beads that’s spoiling it for me!’ and he lunges to snatch the rosary, but I am over Douglas and on him, and we are entwined and rolling, but skeletally and slowly, our breaths snuffling and noisy as pigs’, our bodies the leaden baggage in a nightmare that will not end. But then his genitals, balls swinging beneath the sad, shortening erection, have flopped through the split crotch of his underpants, are dangling within the reach of my hand, and I grasp them, wholly and viciously, driven by a sadism born of my own deprivation and despair.

  ‘No!’ he shrieks on a note so high that the sleepers wake as one, and I loose him and he lies, coiled and sobbing, his hand clutching his groin as though it was his smashed, favourite toy, and I am expecting Douglas to chide me for treating the ‘poor man’ so, but he is looking at me with glowing eyes, the womanishness in him strutting as never before.

  ‘Shut up!’ I snarl as though he had spoken aloud, and turn over and, amazingly, sleep, and when I again wake up, the wanker is gone and Douglas, still proudly glancing at me from the sides of his eyes, says he walked out, muttering, an hour ago, and late in the afternoon a guard comes to fetch his kit and tells us he will not be back because he was flashing his cock to all the guards about the camp and complaining that it had died, so they took him to the Ite doc who pronounced him crazy as a coot and is having him sent to an asylum in the city where he can play with himself for the rest of the war.

  Douglas does, then, again speak of him as ‘that poor man’ but not too forcefully so, and I try to feel a proper guilt for the part I have played in putting the guy where he now is, but then think, fuck it, he’s probably better off there and, in any case, I am as edgy as a fox when it comes to probing into motivations that may turn out to be quite other than they seem.

  Douglas, though, has no problems with that. To him, I am just the selfless friend who leapt to his defence in the hour of his need, and this discovery of so unexpected a depth in me encourages him to complain that I have never told him anything about myself, whereas he has told me all about his sterling silver upbringing and his as sterling silver, still living and doting mum and dad, and has shown me photos of his wife and kid, she a clearly breathy dumpling of a woman who would drive me crazy in a week and the kid looking just like all the other kids I have ever known. So I tell him my mother was a gypsy who told fortunes in a tent she pitched in her flat in Hillbrow, and my father did time for flogging stolen watches in the street, and, when they died early on in my life, I paid my way through university with the loot I earned at night from running with a gang whose mark is still on my shoulder, and I show him what looks like a branding with a hot iron, and he looks at me disbelievingly and a little affronted, although it just might all be true.

  ‘I got to piss,’ says the guy I had forgotten was still there. ‘Keep my place for me, will you?’ and I nod without looking, listening as he swishes away through the grass, then no longer listening as we clamber out of the stripped shell of the cargo boat and the first stones from the crowds lining the streets of the southernmost Ite town thud into us with a hating that hurts the heart rather than the bones. I, like the most of us, walk hunched and flinching, pretending I do not hear the cries that accompany the stones and that clearly are curses because, here and there, I can make out the few dirty words that are the only Ite-speak that I know. Douglas, though, strides out with a certain majesty, rosary plainly in his hands, and no stones seem to be striking him, which could be a miracle but is more likely to be because the Ites are also Catholics and are not sure whether he is one of ours or one of theirs, and inevitab
ly – and hopefully unworthily – the thought comes that there could be one smart cookie behind the beads.

  But now there is a settling down beside me again and a proffering of thanks to prove that the right man is back, and I am thinking that I must have dozed off there because I never heard him coming through the grass. And I am remembering also that he said he was going for a piss and for the rest of my life, hearing that word – or ‘shit’ – I will be back in the ship that brought us from a sand I had never thought I could love to a land lush with leaves and holy bells as a new Eden overlying Hell.

  And always, then, that horror in me of a whole flesh that sleeps, then wakes to a rotting in a sudden leper’s skin.

  Truth is, I do not want to think about that ship, anytime, anywhere. But, however briefly, I have to because it is a link in a sequence of events that I sense is rushing me to an end that is as unpredictable yet ordained as that of a car whose brakes have failed on a long hill. With each thinking back, the aversion grows and the details become less, the conscious me beavering the easily movable items such as the days at sea, faces that crowded us, guards that yelled, into the lumber-room of the subconscious where, hopefully, everything will one day lie mumbling but chained.

  At the moment, though, it is as I said – the operative words are still vividly ‘shit’ and ‘piss’ and I was of the very many who had the shits the day we boarded the ship. Not Douglas, though – male nurses being exempt from indignities such as a runny gut. We thought we were being clever when we battled our way to the front of the queue. Would this not, then, ensure us a choice space on deck? Instead, we found ourselves at the bottom of the booming, cavernous hull, beside us a single iron ladder that reared up past the encircling higher decks to a hatchway that was closed most of the time but which, when not, held a circlet of sky as distant and surreal as the mouth of a well. Up this, by day and at night when the hull was lit by the minimum of naked bulbs that cast more shadows than light, passed the despairing, embattled sufferers of dysentery or diarrhoea. The hatchway would open and close, open and close, and the number of times that I managed to win through and, as in the case of the trucks in the desert, jut cock and arse over the swaying ship’s rail and try to shit out the porcupine of pain that was the cramp in my gut while the guard shrieked at me to have done, is one of the details that my mind mercifully no longer yields.