A Tree on Fire (19 page)

Frank saw now how naive he had been to imagine that a man of intelligence and scholarship might not have the stamina for a trip like this; saw in fact, that accompanying him turned out to be a way of proving himself. It had taken the brawn from his middle height, and he hadn't bothered to cut his hair since Tangier, in spite of the heat. His blue-grey eyes had sunk deeper, and his cheekbones were high and more prominent, yellowish under fair hair that carried on from the denser growth below. He didn't want to know what he looked like, but felt that his face had been eaten away, that there were only eyes, mouth and nose which served the body as various instruments of a conningtower head. In the wilderness, you shared the consciousness of those with whom you happened to be, walked along with common nullities, sank to shallow levels of the same uniting thought, paradoxically joined by being alone. As the day went on, sun moving with micrometer slowness down white-blue sky, Frank veered from collective preoccupations nearer to his own geologic levels of introspection and escape, all-absorbed and zombie-like on his walk as he drew on deeper spiritual reserves to get his body over the last few miles, not able to propel himself even slowly on the joined enthusiasms that had set them going in the morning.

The slaghills of Nottinghamshire multiplied a thousand times as far as the eye could see, humps and pyramids of grey dust and shale covering the plain, not so geometrically pure and satisfying as those in the wayback of home but something to draw in the breath at and wonder if this was to be your last sight of earth. A small, sharp stone worked between his toes, and he knelt to extract it. He disliked the encumbrance of the rifle near the worn-out ending of the day, but it had to be carried, more as a burden of self-discipline than for the use to which it might some time be put in spitting out the unseen bullets of ambush, though the bomb-jelly of fire was likely to get him, he felt, before he could draw its clumsiness up to his shoulder and fire. It was good in attack, but would you ever have the chance to defend yourself with it? Mokhtar carried a revolver, Shelley a small machine-gun resembling a Sten. He walked on with it, quick to set his fifty paces from the man behind. A dogwind worried, swirling fine dust into clothes and faces, as if somewhere a giant egg-timer had been smashed and its contents were dispersing over this terrible extent of windswept land. His only impulse was to talk against the irritation of it, but he couldn't walk with the man in front, or open his mouth in case it choked him. There was a thin, ululating piping of the wind, a weird demonic tune whose insistence beat on the eyes and brain to make you want to he down and sleep, a surface dust disturbing the earth without killing visibility. The sun could be seen, dimmed and ringed, able to stifle but not scorch, and those in front lost their clear desert definitions and became blurred, laboured figures bending forward, safe at least from patrols or planes. Grit stung his eyes, and his throat turned to rock, blocked by one of those shale hillocks that reminded him of Nottingham slagheaps. It was no use stopping, lying down to let it pass, because it spun in this dust-bowl and would bury you, never pass. You had to pass it, fight your way to sky and clear land. It was the worst day so far, a lingering torment of desolation. No conscripts fighting for a lost cause could undergo this. Mokhtar imparts faith to nomads and wanderers, talks to lop-eyed, underfed people of hamlets and encampments, tin-towns and cave-villages. They listen and agree, laugh and shake our hands, look longingly at the guns, take pamphlets even if they cannot read and hide them as soon as we have gone. Can you create a dust-commune in this unhallowed spot on which the unmerciful clappers of heaven have ceased to open? Yet there was water underneath it all, and if the peasants worked by the sweat of their breaking backs for another twenty years, maybe they could buy the machinery to extract it.

It became as deep as snow, black snow, hot snow, filling all the inlets of his sandals, grating on to the fingers that gripped his rifle, swirled in circles as if they were beating at last towards the centre of it, the blackest eye of the earthly death that was to draw them in and through. The sun was out of sight and they pulled close so as not to lose each other in obscurity. Shadowy black buffs were nearer on either side as if they had strayed into a sinister cul-de-sac, but Frank noticed that less dust was blowing. They climbed over drifts or waded it.

Shelley stumbled. The gap widened ahead. Beyond, milk-white cloud filled the sky. The only relief was change – either danger or speculation. The brain had died, perished in dust and the effort to choke through. Thought was coming back, but the thin whistle of the wind went on as if warning them of impending earthquake, and grit flew in ordinary contemptible rolls. They gathered under a rock, sheltered from the immediate dust-storm but baking in its oven.

Frank wondered how he looked, so observed them, and at the sight of each other they too wondered how close they were to dying of thirst, wandering destitute paupers of the desert supposed to be battleworthy guerrilla soldiers ready at a moment for ambush or stab-in-the-back. ‘Come on,' Frank said to Shelley, ‘now that we're really in a bad way, recite us the
Communist Manifesto
!'.

His boots were off, purple scabs and iodine feet. ‘Oh, you irrepressible bastard. Always ready with a joke when the sky falls in and the earth knocks you in the crotch.'

‘Recite it in Arabic,' Frank said, ‘if you like. I'll get the gist of it. We're all brothers after all. This rest is killing me. I've got the strength to walk but not to uncork my bottle for a swig. Are you all right?'

‘The same as you.'

Ahmed took a handful of beans from his pack, passed them under each face before eating some himself. Frank took one, donkey-food, chewed through the sugary straw-like covering and sucked at the hard beans inside. His stomach gripped them with tigerish hunger.

‘They've sent us out as bait,' Shelley said, ‘but we'll surprise them by getting this long march over. Honourable bait, however. It's all in the game and the book. Somebody's got to do it, and I'd have accepted it out of my own will and wiles. They want to keep the wilderness alive – and they do. I don't think we're the first lot.'

‘You wouldn't trust your own brother,' Frank said.

‘Him least of all. I'd trust everyone else.'

‘If we're bait it's for the shite-hawks and dust. We got that French truck, but burst all the tyres with our own fire and smashed the steering. Then the planes nearly got us, or would have if we hadn't rabbited south for two days and nights.'

‘The game is to trust them completely,' Shelley said, ‘and to distrust them completely. It exercises the mind. I'm a realistic idealist. I do it with the FLN,
and
the French. We'll never forgive each other when we all wake up.'

Three hours before dusk. How can the mind live when you must learn to walk without hoping to get anywhere, never a point or picture set at or beyond the horizon on which you can visualise and feed? Not even the shape of a hut or well, the outline of a tree-cleft or hillock, not a cloud that kept form and colour. It was easy. He would match it with what life had been like when he was in the factory where he'd worked twelve years, except that now the landmarks were unknown and unimaginable so that one could hope, whereas then they had been fitted into place by three generations of family which engendered nothing but despair. He'd grown old in that life, knew it all, with wife and two children and the whole mass of housing-estate inhabitants to smoke out his giant idealisms. He'd woken up, and the joy of it was in his head, thrust him young again so that the pain of it went only to his feet and half-starved body. The crossing of the frontier had been survived and, even better, surveyed. At first, he'd been like a manipulated dead man, forgetting ideals while obeying orders, marauding and killing when the rare possibility arose. He could not think, carried a brain blacked out except for cunning and the long control of his body lurking in ambush. At the time he seemed to observe everything from a plane of normal spiritual reflection, but he had been an ant-zombie in the transition from a life in which he had grown old to a new life in which he had not yet learned to live, needing the nimble rock-scrambling feet of a goat, the locked forgotten loins of a hermit, the narrowed barely-surviving guts of an ant, the heart and brain of a newborn man who now wanted to be on his own. And even this was given to him in the never-ending march.

A huge overhanging rock made a lean-to, and they formed a circle, while Ahmed and Idris drew a smoke fire and poured water into a kettle. The strong aroma of brittle mint revived them. Frank climbed a rock and looked at the vermilion earth as far as the horizon, where the sun had almost set. The whole sky was bruised and dark, as if the sun were slowly descending right on to them, seeping invisibly down into the earth they camped on. It grew redder as he looked, then fell black in the space of a few minutes, so pitch that an inexperienced man might not have found his way back to the camp.

A glass of scalding tea was put into his hands. The fire was out, last smoke drifting, mixing with the sweet smell of mint from each glass. They fed on a mess of chickpeas and rancid mutton, biscuits and dates. ‘It didn't bother me to see the tree burn,' Shelley said, ‘but it sure surprised me to find it there in the first place. Must be water not far under it.'

He'd forgotten the tree, and it burned again, blindingly over his eyes, flashing and sparking through the all-enveloping blanket of his exhaustion. He could hear it falling to pieces, cosmically destroyed now that no roaring bomb-spilling plane interfered with his pure vision of recollection. He took the bolt out of his rifle, spread the materials of a cleaning-tin at his feet – rag, pull-through, phial of oil, a mechanical action by which he hoped to shake off the white light of the tree. He didn't know whether it made a good or bad memory. Wholly good, or wholly bad, it had not yet played itself out, but the nagging uncertainty of its portent palled on him. His hands and feet were cold, but the sheltering rock held off the worst raging bitterness of the night, now a few dozen degrees down on the fetid dustfire of the day. They were busy, making guns to slick in all parts as good as new, knowing that the first hour of the next march would blemish them once more. Ahmed, Idris and Mohamed had said their prayers towards Mecca. Mokhtar grinned, did not believe in it, and Frank was glad, since it took the insult out of his own grin. Shelley, having performed the ablutions on his gun, passed his flashlight over the map. One day maybe I'll tell Myra what the Israelites felt on their way out of Egypt. They, too, had to fight a war before taking over the promised land.

‘Did you ever think you'd be a soldier,' Shelley said, mocking the loving care he was showing his rifle, though he'd lavished even more consideration on his own.

‘I'm a communist first,' Frank said. ‘It's not the same thing as you mean.'

‘Tell that to the Mecca boys.'

‘Mokhtar's a communist. You remember?' A few weeks ago, Mokhtar had assembled the score or so people at a village along the route and lectured them on the coming liberation, throwing in some choice bait on land-reform and common ownership, according to the running translation Shelley made in Frank's ear. One old man lifted a blunderbuss, which looked as if it would blast dangerously but not quite kill. Frank sprang and the gun fell without exploding. The man was covered by them, while Mokhtar went on with his talk, grinning and full of good nature. He agreed to forgive the man who had wanted to kill him, providing he repented before them and promised to work for the benefit of the revolution. The man, who looked to Frank as if he wasn't fit to do much work for anything, agreed, glad to get off so easily. Mokhtar wasn't satisfied, wanted the verdict of the whole village, which, after an hour's discussion, considered that Mokhtar was just and good, and that his judgment should stand. Mokhtar was pleased. ‘In that case the man must accompany my soldiers to the next village, in order to show his faith in us.' They set off before dusk, and two days later, Mokhtar killed him while he was asleep.

‘Are you as good as he is?' said Shelley.

‘I am,' said Frank. ‘And so are you, I suppose. The lion of Judah, he breaks every chain, but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't Mokhtar's turn one day.'

‘One bark at a time,' Shelley said. ‘That's all every dog gets that has his day. Not that I'm an animal lover.'

‘If you don't trust Mokhtar why don't you peel off?'

Frank rolled his one cigarette of the day, hoping that the small bag of tobacco would last until more might come along. Shelley smoked a long shallow-bowled pipe. ‘My life depends on him. I wouldn't survive for a week in this land on my own. I'd get my throat cut at the first village I stumbled into and crowed for a drop of water. It's a thin lifeline we've got.'

‘You've got,' said Frank. ‘You're right not to light off.' He kicked a stone, and it rolled down the slope, dragging several others with it, leaving silence but for their own soft speech.

‘All I remember about my childhood,' said Shelley, ‘is snow. Long winters and snow. In the books about such days the writers tell us how warm it was, and how long the summer lasted.'

Frank pulled the blanket closer to his shoulders. ‘I can't stand the tune of this bloody wind. It's pulling like a knife at my tripes. I remember summers as well, though, because we had six weeks out of school. It was when I grew up that the snow fell. It was O.K. in the factory, where I was in with the right sort of blokes. But even when I was a kid I'd had ideas as to what the world should be like and how it should be run, and after so long I could stand it no longer, came up against a dead-end, a brick wall that I had to get through.'

‘And now you're through it,' Shelley said, ‘into the sandpit, gave up wife, kids and country because you were burning with a subconscious desire to help the world's underdogs? Drop dead.'