Bitter Eden: A Novel (3 page)

Is it his kindness – or Douglas’? – that, too late, shames me, turning the meat in my belly into the dead flesh that it is as we lie down to sleep, I in the hulk’s greatcoat, Douglas beside me in a waterproof, the rest variously huddled as the earth cools down with the suddenness of a switched-off stove? Quietly, I turn my head. Douglas is asleep, lying on his back, his mouth slightly opened, his breath even and slow, the hands with which he earlier counted his beads composed, the almost frenziedness of his waking self subsumed by the vulnerability of the inward child. Am I too intolerant of him? Should I cut the relationship and have done? Is ‘relationship’ not too strong a word? Can there
be
a relationship between the pursuer and the pursued?

I turn my head the other way, quickly now, aware of a rustling of wind or sand. The driver, unsleeping, is standing there, on guard and armed. His shape is very black, very tall, against the nearing, plunging, shower of the stars; his face, in profile, has a noble flow. Enemy and killer, yet there is a grace in him, a youthfulness and urgency that is as beautiful as it is animal and male, and I fall asleep against my will, knowing that he is there.

I wake up, once, before we must. He is still on guard, but standing at a different angle to where I lie. A misshapen moon is now low in the sky. I do not know if it is rising or setting, suddenly do not even know where we are, never having been further than where we lost the war. Long shadows reach for me as though I am the last of living flesh. A bird or beast horribly howls. I am floating again on a lambent, tideless sea where, a millennium ago, we swam under a risen moon, our limbs’ pale tentacles seeking our beginnings in our ends.

At first light, Douglas is shaking me and we are all rising and looking past each other like dead men. Even Douglas, sensing our sombreness, spares me the usual bonhomie, and the driver sets up the basin again and we wash, distasteful of ourselves as though, in the night, we had consorted with a foulness primal as the sand. And the driver hands us each a crooked doorstep of black bread, indicating that he is sorry that he cannot give more, and in the clear betraying dawn I see that he is not at all tall, and there is a scar running from the corner of an eye to under the chin and his eyes are old and stunned from having seen too much too soon.

Douglas has readied his kit – and mine – and is now standing staring in the direction of the barely audible sea, fingering his beads and muttering what I have learned are ‘Hail Marys’, and, although I say nothing, having been taught respect for other people’s faiths, I wish he would stop because, to me, prayers are a private affair and he is as embarrassing to me as though I had come upon him with his pants down and shitting behind one of these stones.

Maybe Douglas has a point, though, because he is just dropping the beads back into his pocket when the Jerry points to dust-covered truck after ditto-covered truck rounding the far western bend of the road and says ‘Mussolinis’ as though the word leaves a bad taste on his tongue. Then, his eyes gravely compassionate, he makes this-way-that motions with his hands that indicate a switching-round and my heart is darting in the cage of my throat and the bread in my belly is a black pregnancy of unease.

‘Hey, Yank! You got a watch? I get you cheese and chocolate for watch.’

Where I am lying is next to the highwire fence and the speaker is so close that I almost feel his breath on my cheek. But I don’t turn my head to look at him because I know who it is. It’s the particularly scruffy little Ite guard with a face like the mummy walks again, his eyes alone belying that with their glitter like needles and the quickness of spiders on the run. To him, all prisoners are Yanks and have watches all the time and, like me, are suckers for chocolate and cheese, and his breaking in on my thoughts so peculiarly on cue worries the little extrasensory worm I inherited through my mother’s genes.

‘Fuck off!’ I say and turn my back on him and the bolt of his rifle clicks as he screams, ‘You fuck me? I fuck you!’ but I know he will not shoot and the ou beside me laughs an honest laugh that I could like, but Douglas has already taken his place in the ramshackle Ite truck rattling its way westwards under a lowering sun.

That night, we are herded into a cemetery with a fence around it that is as impregnable as any prison’s, and although I am aware of random lights filtering through inadequate blackout shields, there does not seem to be any ongoing activity save ours and the night is as unidentifiably about us as the middle sea. The graves are clearly those of wogs, and believing wogs at that because the mounds of earth are mostly unadorned in compliance with a faith as austere as the desert in which it was first proclaimed, and, in the still moonless night, I stumble and fall as from a reaching of hands and know a horror at our desecration that no agnostic should. Douglas, though, is undisturbed, ensconced as he is behind the barricade of his beads.

‘Herding’ is too harsh a word? Hardly so. Jerry was right about the Ites. Runts in ragged uniforms that uniformly don’t fit, egged on by foppish officers who porcinely, tediously scream, they flail into us with boots, fists, rifle-butts, their zest the tired simulations of children playing a game long since no longer new.

I am generalizing the way xenophobes do? Perhaps I will ask myself that question, maybe even answer it, in some later, more gracious time – supposing, of course, that such a time can ever again
be
– but at the moment, in a night that never ends, my only philosophy is that of the living who would not be dead as these we are now trampling under their crumbling mounds.

As the incoming trucks disgorge more and more of us into the burial ground’s inelastic space, cramming us against each other and the dangerous discomfort of the barbed wire fence, I say to myself that this cannot go on and, when the moon at last rises, I see from Douglas’ face that he is telling himself the same thing, his eyes disbelieving and stunned, but – and this stays with me – his soft, garrulous mouth set as tightly as mine in his determination to stay alive. Hell, I am thinking, he is
not
all piss and wind.

Sometime in time’s long standing still, stasis is reached as we stare with faces pressed against even the inside of the only gate and the guards know that to open it would be to unleash an onrush as involuntary as the bursting of a dam. I am locked into the arse before me as though I sodomized it and am locked from behind in as final a negation of the privacy of my flesh, and Douglas’ hip is jutting into mine like a broken-off iron and my own bones are lattices of pain that hold back my knotting body’s unending scream.

Somebody farts, raucously as a wordless shout, and a gusting stench of urine and shit tells of another who, despairing and ashamed, has let slip the beast of his need. But nobody laughs and I am thinking this can only be the Hell in which I have never believed, and, as we suddenly, and as though impelled by a single consciousness, tilt gatewards, then spinecrackingly whip back, there are howls as of souls in torment – and garglings into silences that as terribly sound.

Incredibly, then, there is light in the east and the trucks are stuttering into life, and the gate is crashing open and there is an exploding out into a measureless space. But before I reach the gate, my one boot sinks into a crackling softness that I cannot bring myself to look down at because I know it is a crushed-dead man, and it is only when we have been cuffed back into our truck that I lift up the boot and uncontrollably shudder as I see that it is splattered with blood and fragments of what could be flesh and bone. Wordlessly, Douglas gropes around on the truck’s littered floor and comes up with a piece of paper and – as wordlessly and expressionlessly, and without any by-my-leave – lifts up my foot and wipes the boot clean.

The truck jerks itself off and trundles past a meagre complex of prefabs lining a side track that leads back onto the coast road, and there is a silence between Douglas and me that, for once, drags on with no sign that Douglas will be the first to speak.

But I am burdened by something I must ask and, at last, I do: ‘What was your job before the war?’

He looks at me, surprised by this first ever question from my side. ‘A male nurse. Why?’

‘Just asking,’ I say and watch the ball of paper, bloodied by my boot, rolling around. But my mind is changing gears with the grinding reluctance of the truck that, like all the Ite trucks, seems likely to at any moment topple over and die. Which is an unfortunate image after what I have just been through.

The salt flats glitter all the way to the blue smear of the sea and the sun is not much past noon when the convoy suddenly stops and we scramble out of the trucks to the usual accompaniment of clicking rifle-bolts and hysterical yells. Bewilderedly, we mill about, ant-like under the vast brass of the sky, wondering why, and Douglas puts on his Intelligence cap and says maybe there’s been an operational shift, that our forces have regrouped and are now retaking the conquered sand. I snort at that though, secretly, I hope, and one of the others from our truck irritably asks why the Ites can never do anything without kicking up such a fucking fuss, and Douglas rather meanderingly says that the little dark ones are from the south and the taller, paler ones – who seem to comprise their officer class – are from the north and the two are as different from one another as vinegar from wine. Which is a rather refreshing variation of the usual chalk-and-cheese cliché and again the gears are shifting in my brain.

The Ites are not prone to giving us toilet breaks, compelling us to, en route, piss or shit from the inside looking out, which usually means to jut buttocks or cocks over the trucks’ sides and do our thing to the Ites’ inexhaustible – and adolescent – delight. So, now we decide that this unexpected stop is to be our toilet break and there is a general pissing and dropping of pants where we stand, but the Ites will have none of it and furiously begin to drive us deeper into the flats.

As in the just-past night, only terror tinged with a dull anger stirs in us as the normally ludicrous takes on a shape of nightmare under even so high and revealing a sun, and no laughter moves in us with its saving grace as we watch the beatings as of beasts of those still struggling to free themselves from the hobbles of their pants, and the face of our Jerry driver floats out before me like the fragment of a dream already ages old, and I reach out as to a lost and redeeming friend, but the emptiness in me is the emptier for its finding only the Now.

The ground is firm enough under our boots, but there is a hollow ring to it as of water warningly close, and I am reckoning it will be bitter and salt as the crystals strewn like some malignant frost over the curiously ochre earth. Also, there are shallow depressions of cracking mud that tell of water in some other time, a surging, perhaps, of a capricious tide. The occasional scrub is twisted and black as though a fire had swept it or an enervating poison gripped its roots, and the even scarcer grass is cancerous and brittle as a dying man’s hair, and I am hearing the usual silence that even our frenetic trampling cannot shatter or obscure.

Is this a place for a killing, a cutting off from them of a flesh that is conquered but for which they have no use? The thought is upon me like an assassin in a private place and I look at Douglas and, for the first time, there is a true communion between us as I see that he is thinking the same thing though not wanting to, and he is shaking his head and assuring, ‘No. It
is
just an operational trick. You’ll see. They’ll be moving us on again soon,’ but there is a stridency to what he is saying of one who secretly does not believe.

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.