A Tree on Fire (47 page)

‘And you helped them, I think.'

‘I wanted to. What else could I do? A friend of mine died, an American. When I get out I must write to his father, even though they loathed each other. I must write to his girl-friend as well.'

‘Did you want to die?'

Frank laughed. ‘You're bringing the wrong values in. That was always an irrelevant question.'

‘Still, I'm asking it.'

The sight of John, his clothes, speech, manner, face and body with the air of externalised living still on them made him hungry. The sparse diet he had grown used to seemed not enough at the apparition of this man newly-arrived from the outside world. He had a wild craving for food, for pork, cheese, sugar, cake. The desire went through his whole body and he laughed aloud at this strongest material sensation he'd had for months. He mentioned it to John.

‘I suppose that answers my question. It's a good sign.'

‘I don't believe in signs. It'll pass, this unnatural unnecessary hunger. I'd like to stay here with these people, right to the end. I believe in their cause. I've been with them so long that it's mine as well. There's nothing false about it any more.'

‘It's also mine,' said John, ‘though I needn't say it. But I came here to find you, and to see that you got safely back to England. Myra wants to see you. She's never known in the last year whether you were dead or not. She's grieving for you.'

‘I tried to send a letter,' said Frank. ‘I thought she might have stopped caring. Yet I never did, really. You can never be sure of these things. The morning I left her in Tangier was a dream I was always trying to get back to. I managed it only when I was most desolate and disembodied. I must see her soon, or I will die completely. It's funny, but I was strong before you came, but now I feel as if I'm caving in. I'm human again, weak. No, it's all right, John. Don't despair! I always was, but I kept it down. It was always a fight, for me. I've never been half so strong as I think I am. But I feel strong in realising that. I want to go away for a while, because I know that a rest from this will never weaken me towards it.'

He lit another cigarette. ‘Myra wants to see you. We all do.'

‘I'm busy here. I love Myra, but I believe in what we are trying to do in this country. How can a person be in love, and fight, and still be sane? Don't you have to give up one or the other? Can any dedicated man, even a poet, say, claim to be in love with someone while he is writing his verses? Still, maybe you don't have to believe that love is dead to draw enough strength to fight for a cause you believe in. Otherwise you're not a whole man. I can get out of here for a while to see Myra, and then come back quite easily if I want to, or go to another war like this. There'll be plenty in my lifetime.'

‘You seem determined.'

‘But this one will soon be finished. France can't go on. I can't understand why you came out to look for me, John.'

‘I wanted to see what kind of a man you were. The glimpse I had of you when you came into my room by mistake wasn't enough. I frightened you off with a gun then. I don't think I could do the same now.'

‘So you won't tell me?'

Both were silent. Explosions vibrated through the cold black night. ‘You know,' John said at last, ‘we don't want you to perish out here.'

‘Perish! What language. It's good to be talking English again. But how can one perish? You mean die. What does dying mean? I once knew a man who had cancer six times but didn't die. Each time he went right to the point of death, and then became completely cured – by the guiding hand of his own spirit, as far as anybody knew. He went down from fifteen stones to five. Worked in our shop at the factory, and we got fed up visiting him and having collections for a wreath. He developed anti-bodies when close to pegging out, then his weight shot up to normal for another few years. Nothing could get him, but everything had a try. He even had TB as a young man. Then syphilis between two bouts of cancer. Lost the use of his kidneys once. In the end, when he was nearly sixty, he got run over by a loaded furniture-van. I don't suppose he could stand old age. So don't talk to me about perishing or death. Why should I worry about that when I'm not yet thirty?'

Chapter Thirty-one

Half-a-dozen grey-haired donkeys as small as dogs were strung along the footpath laden heavily with baskets of mortar-shells, cartridge-belts, food and oil. A roll of cloud that hid the great drop below looked firm and solid, as if any legs that lost foothold or balance would not be let down by it. They ascended towards more wet cloud, then crossed a plateau so deep in snow that the donkeys, led by an old man, were barely visible.

‘It seems we forgot our skis,' John said, hurrying after them. ‘But never mind. Perhaps we'll come back one day for winter sports.' Frank had made an overcoat from his only blanket, cut arm-gaps and head-hole and drawn it around him with a length of rope. John had at first insisted he take his sheepskin coat.

‘You need it more than me,' Frank said.

‘I'd be honoured if you take it, though.' There was a glint of compassion and self-sacrifice in John's eyes that irritated him, a blackmailing mothering solicitousness that smouldered like a lamp about to tip over and ignite. It was an English attempt at dominance that he had not met from anyone in Algeria, a final feeble wish to make contact with another human being by the only means left to him, which in this case would mean John sickening from exposure. He felt sorry for him, but would not give in. ‘I'm warm enough, thanks. I've toughened up a bit this last year.'

‘Really,' said John, hurriedly taking it off. ‘I shan't need it.' His sharp face was thinned by the fires that burned in him, giving the temporary impression that he could cross Siberia naked and survive.

‘If I faint from hunger,' Frank said, ‘I might ask you for a loan of it, but not now.' He swung his own blanket-overcoat around himself and drew in the rope. John had thrown away his suitcase and fitted the remains of his belongings into a copious but lightweight pack in which he still carried his loaded service revolver. He levelled this at Frank: ‘Take my coat,' he cried. ‘Take my coat. You need it more than I do.' His hand shook, and he rubbed sweat from his face.

Frank snatched the gun. ‘You should give this to somebody who has better use for it.' But he laughed at the argument and gave it him back, and John put it into the pocket. ‘You wear it the first week,' Frank said, ‘and I'll wear it the second – if you still want us to share it.'

‘We'll be on the ship in three days.'

‘That's what they say. It'll be more like three or four weeks.'

Saturated by snow up to the waist they followed the track of the donkeys. John had learned enough to know that Frank was looked on with special favour by the FLN. He was not one of the thousands of Germans who deserted in such numbers from the Foreign Legion merely to be repatriated back to the cushier life of the economic miracle in the hope that their war crimes had been forgotten. Dawley had actually driven a huge cargo of arms from Morocco south of the Monice Line, and stayed on to fight with them.

‘You can stuff personal comfort,' Frank said at that night's resting-place, ‘as far as I'm concerned. Black bread or white bread, it makes no difference to me, as long as I can think on it and move on it.'

The northern slopes of the Grande Kabylie, well-covered with cork and olive-trees, ran sharply down towards the sea. Frank and John Handley shared a cave with other soldiers. They entered through a maze of thorn-bushes – though the area was completely free of the enemy – into a space large enough to stand up in, a hideout running twenty feet back into the hillside. A further compartment which burrowed out at an angle was used as a storeroom for food, arms and ammunition. They walked down towards the sea, but were turned back by Sten-armed FLN pickets.

Winter mist that spread along the coast gave Frank sore guts and rheumatism. White chops foamed on the sea, and passing ships were invisible though their hooters sounded – lost, melancholy, but determined at any cost to make tracks away from this inhospitable and stricken coast. He didn't blame them, wishing he could also leave it, in his present mood. ‘I'd like to live on a ship, John, be the only passenger on a large cargo-boat that goes around the world, on every route and eventually to all parts of it. I'd have a cabin and part of the deck to myself, and would see all regions of the earth from the ship: Spitzbergen, Macassar, Valparaiso, Odessa, Yokohama, New York, Socotra, Buenos Aires, Singapore, Sydney, Archangel, Java. I'd never go ashore again, but I would see people. That ship would be a bit of everything, monastery, brothel, zoo, office, hotel, floating beer-hall, workshop. Lots of people would pass through it. Yet no, as soon as people start coming into it the idea loses its attraction. I'd like to be a hermit-figure on that ship. In the end I'd want to die at sea, dropped into the warm tropical tin-opened ocean. How's that for the end of the world, John? You never expected me to say such things, and I suppose it all comes from the miserable moth-eaten all-consuming past, and meeting someone like yourself who has just come out of it, and is trying to show me my place in it again. Such pipe-dreams have to be put in their place, pulled and stamped on if you can't burn them while they're still inside. And if you want to fight against the extinction of your better self you've got to scorch out the sort of past that can only give you such paltry and hollow pipe-dreams when you're at the end of your tether for a day or two. Plough the past under the rubble, and sow the best sea-salt in it – that's the only thing to do.'

They waited for the ship to come. Myra's letter had dropped to pieces, soaked and creased to extinction, and he left the remains of it in the hollow bole of an olive-tree. It was a simple letter, giving news of Mark, wanting him to come back, and hoping he was alive and well. But it was warmly written, and he longed to see her and his son. He also wanted to visit Nottingham to find Nancy and his two other children. The only thing out of your past that was ineradicable was children. After three years he had a blind and painful yearning to see them again and help them, somehow wanted to live where they could all be close to him, an insane proposition that haunted him on this wild, saturating and hungry coast while he waited for some boat to take him off it.

On waking in the morning he climbed to a lookout rock and scanned the sea with John's binoculars hoping for some spectacular scene to fill his eyes – other than the usual files of men and donkeys. Perhaps one dawn I'll see a huge P & O liner stranded on the rocks below. Or maybe I'd wake in the night, startled by the grinding noise of its collision, then by hordes of destitute Algerians streaming by the cave intent on loot, and materials for the army. And I would go out and join them, walk down to the great liner and help them strip it of its luxury for their subsistence against the all-beating elements.

During the long days of waiting they talked little, considering how much each had to say, as if saving the flood of it for the safety of Lincolnshire. He hoped the storm would let go its fury, for he wanted to cross on a leaden calm. The prospect of gliding along over a great watery placidity attracted him after the torment and turbulence of the last year. Or perhaps it's my only hope of a rest, he thought, before the greater confusion to come. What right had anybody got to a peaceful life?

‘Does Albert know you've come out here?' he asked, on a walk they took together through the drizzling mist.

‘The less I talk, the more I do. I only discuss what I'm not going to do. But on this occasion we were all having dinner, including Myra, and I did tell them I was coming here.'

‘What did he say?'

‘That I was a fool. But I felt sufficiently in control of myself to agree with them, and still set off.'

‘Don't you think you were lucky to find me?'

‘I believe in fate. I was fated to.'

‘You just happened to meet me.'

‘Fate.' John snapped out the word, like a saw going through wood.

‘Suit yourself.'

‘Albert will judge when we get back.'

He smiled, careful to make it compassionate should John take it into his occasionally muddled and paranoid head to snatch at the revolver bulging under his torn and stained coat. ‘I might be more inclined to talk about it in Lincolnshire,' Frank said. ‘Let's hope we get through that black sea. We might be in for months of gales. Makhlouf told me it was sometimes like this all winter.'

After dark he couldn't sleep. It was still raining, a night laden with blackness. John slept in the shelter wrapped in coat and blanket, oblivious to the chill, stretched out straight and peaceful as if still in his army bed in England. It seemed that nothing could trouble his sleep, and Frank envied such animal-like capacity for indulging in it. He himself had lost it, being on his way out, while John took to slumber as if he might be here for good, which made Frank superstitiously wonder whether or not he'd ever feel the deck of a good steamer under his feet.

The sea was boiling up, as if the devil would make tea with it. Stretch out your arm with a kettle on the end and it would get snapped off. The wind was a mad steamroller, could push down trees, throw a helicopter against a cliff-face like so much spit. It roared along the coast and over the sea out of control, dangerous because of the night, crushing stars and pine-cones – though ships were moving through it. The roar was so great he expected boulders to be thrown up into the forest. The ship must attack the storm if it is not to be smashed itself. It sets out on an offensive against nature in which survival is a great victory. From a fish in water he would become a ship if and when he left Algeria, set out on his fight against the all-conditioning soul-moulding world. To fight was the only way to combat extinction, to mount the totality of his mind and body against annihilation by the sedate and backward sliding world. Yet he felt, in his agony of suspense, and the infinite postponement of getting away, in the tormented state of mind at being forced to leave and yet not wanting to, that for him complete victory was impossible because he had not been tempered in the true steel of the materialist world. In fact just plain victory was out of the question. You can conceivably break through the enemy lines, but you die on the barbed wire. Or, at most, you cut out your enclave in no-man's-land, and hold off all comers, friend and enemy alike, until you have dug galleries and catacombs in which to work out your ideas to the bitter end. The conception of wide-open spaces beyond the bloody lines of battle and death is only a dream, valuable only for drawing you into the conflict in the first place. But it is a conflict in which neither armistice nor surrender is ever possible to contemplate.