Guerrillas (2 page)

The road curved, and they saw a big cleared area, walled on three sides by forest, the forest walls seemingly knit together by the thin white trunks and white branches of softwood trees. The cleared land had been ridged and furrowed from end to end. The furrows were full of shiny green weeds; and the ridges, one or two of which showed haphazard, failed planting, were light brown and looked as dry as bone. Far from the road, against a forest wall, there was a low open shed, thatched with whole branches of carat palm. Near this, and half into the forest, was a red tractor: it looked as abandoned there as those rusting automobiles in the tall grass below the embankment of the highway. The field looked abandoned as well. But presently Jane saw three men, then a fourth, working at the far end, camouflaged against the forest.

Roche said, “That’s laid on for us. Or laid on for you. It’s their official rest period now. No one works in the fields at this time of the afternoon.”

After the cleared area there was forest again, threaded with the thin white branches of softwood trees and pillared with forest palms, their straight trunks bristling with black needles, hung with dead spiky fronds, and with clusters of yellow nuts breaking out of gray-green husks the shape of boats. Then the forest opened out again into clearings on both sides of the road. On one side the forest had been cut down to stumps and low bush. On the other side of the road the land was bare and clean, stripped of trees and palms and bush, the earth in places scraped down to pale red clay. At some distance from the road, on this side, on a smooth brown slope, there was a long hut with concrete-block walls and a pitched roof of corrugated iron. It stood alone in the emptiness. The roof was dazzling and hot to look at; it barely projected over the wall and cast no shadow.

The car stopped and there was silence. Even when the car doors slammed no one came out of the hut. There was no wind; the forest wall, dead green, was still; the asphalt road was soft below the gravel. Jane and Roche crossed the dry ditch by the bridge
of three logs lashed together. The stripped land baked. Jane wanted shade; and the only shade lay within the dark, almost black, doorway of the long hut.

She walked ahead of Roche, as though, as always, she knew the way. He had paused to look about him. When he saw Jane walking up the slight slope to the hut door he felt, as he had feared, that her presence there was wrong and looked like an intrusion. The flowered blouse, through which her brassiere could be seen, the tight trousers that modeled stomach, groin, and cleft in a single, sudden curve: that could pass in the city, and in the shopping plaza of the Ridge would be hardly noticeable, but here it seemed provocative, overcasual enough to be dressy: London, foreign, wrong. And again it occurred to Roche that she was very white, with a color that wasn’t at all like the color of local white people. She was white enough to be unreadable; even her age might not be guessed. He walked quickly toward her, protectively. A fawn-colored pariah dog, ribby and sharp-faced, came round from the back of the hut and stood and watched, without expectation.

At first it seemed cool in the hut; and, after the glare outside, it seemed dark. They saw, as they entered, stepping up directly from clay to concrete floor, a steel filing cabinet in an unswept corner, an old kitchen chair, and a dusty table with what looked like a junked typewriter, a junked duplicator, and some metal trays. Then, as their eyes became accustomed to the interior light, they saw two rows of metal beds all the way down the concrete floor of the hut. Not all the beds were made up; some had mattresses alone, thin, with striped ticking. Clothes hung on nails above the beds that were in use: colored shirts of shiny synthetic material, jerseys, the jeans that looked so aggressive on, so shoddy off.

Four or five of the beds were occupied. The boys or young men who lay on them looked at Jane and Roche and then looked up at the corrugated iron or at the opposite wall. Their shiny black faces were blank; they did nothing to acknowledge the presence of strangers in the hut.

Roche said, “Mannie.”

The boy spoken to said without moving, “Mr. Ahmed bathing.”

Roche laughed. “Bathing? Jimmy’s been working with you?”

Mannie didn’t reply.

Jane could feel the grit on the concrete floor through the soles of her shoes; it set her teeth on edge.

Roche said to Jane, and it was as if he were speaking to the boys, “They built everything themselves.” He took off his dark glasses and looked less of a clown; he looked more withdrawn than his voice or manner suggested. He sucked at the end of one temple of the glasses. “Mannie, you were the mason, weren’t you?”

Mannie sat up and let his feet hang over the bed. He was small and slender. Beside his bed, on a gunny sack on the floor, there were about a dozen green tomatoes.

The hut that had at first felt cool now felt less so; Jane was aware that the corrugated iron was radiating heat. And the hut was more open than she had thought, was really full of light. Oblong windows, fitted with frosted-glass louvers in aluminum frames, were spaced out at the top of the wall that faced the road. Everything was exposed, lit up, and open for inspection: the boys, their faces, their clothes, the narrow beds, the floor below the beds.

On the wall next to the filing cabinet what had looked like a large chart could now be read as a timetable. Jane was considering it—ablutions, tea, field duties, barrack duties, field duties, breakfast, rest, barrack duties, dinner, discussion—when she heard Roche say “Jimmy,” and she looked and saw a man in the doorway at the far end of the hut.

The man was at first in silhouette against the white light outside. When he came into the hut he could be seen to be naked from the waist up, with a towel over one shoulder. As he came down the wide aisle between the metal beds, moving with short, light steps, he gave an increasing impression of physical neatness. The neatness was suggested by the slenderness of his waist, the width of his shoulders, by the closed expression of his face, by his full, closely shaved cheeks, by his trimmed mustache, and by his trousers, which were of a smooth, fawn-colored material, and tight, so that he seemed smooth and tight from waist to shoes. The shoes themselves were thin-soled, pointed, and shining below a powdering of red dust.

Jane had been expecting someone more physically awkward and more Negroid, someone at least as black as the boys. She saw someone who, close up, looked distinctly Chinese. The heavy mustache masked the shape of his top lip and stressed the jut rather than the fullness of his lower lip. His eyes were small, black, and blank; that, and the mustache, which suggested a mouth clamped shut, made him seem buttoned up, tense, unreadable.

To Roche he said, “Massa.” He nodded to Jane without seeming to see her. Not hurrying, indifferent to the silence, he took the green towel from his shoulder and put it on the back of the kitchen chair, and took a gray-blue-green tunic from a nail on the wall. The drab color killed the contrast between his face and his paler chest and made him less disturbing. Dressed at last, he pulled at the table drawer and said, “Yes, massa. As you see, we’re still holding out.”

Jane said, “I see you have a duplicating machine.”

“Secondhand from Sablich’s,” Jimmy said. “More like last hand.”

Roche said, “It would be a help if you learned to use it.”

“Yes, massa.” He took out some duplicated sheets from the drawer and gave them to Jane. “This will fill you in on background.”

The top sheet was dog-eared and felt dusty. Jane read:
Communiqué No. 1. CLASSIFIED
.

Roche said, “That’s the fairy story. I see the tractor’s still out of action, Jimmy. Didn’t Donaldson come?”

“Hmm. Is that what they told you at Sablich’s?”

“Didn’t he come?”

“Yes, massa. Donaldson came.”

Roche let the subject drop. He said, “All right. Let’s go and see what you’ve been doing about the septic tank.”

The two men went out into the sunlight. Jane stayed behind. She felt the eyes of the boys on her now, and she looked at the duplicated sheets in her hand.

All revolutions begin with the land. Men are born on the earth, every man has his one spot, it is his birthright, and men must claim their portion of the earth in brotherhood and harmony
.
In this spirit we came an intrepid band to virgin forest, it is the life style and philosophy of Thrushcross Grange
.

That was how the communiqué began. But Jane, reading on, found that it soon became what Roche had said: a fairy story, a school composition, ungrammatical and confused, about life in the forest, about the anxieties, dangers, and needs of isolated men, about the absence of water, electricity, and transportation. And then it was full of complaints, about people and firms who had made promises they hadn’t then kept, about gift equipment that had turned out to be defective.

Jane, looking up from the duplicated sheets, caught the eyes of one of the boys. On the wall above his bed she saw a poster: a pen drawing of Jimmy Ahmed that made him all hair, eyes and mustache, and more Negroid than he was, with roughly lettered words below:
I’m Nobody’s Slave or Stallion, I’m a Warrior and Torch Bearer—Haji James Ahmed
.

The oblong windows showed a colorless sky. But Jane had a sense now of more than heat; she had a sense of desolation. Later, on the Ridge, in London, this visit to Thrushcross Grange might be a story. But now, in that hut, with the junked office equipment on the table, the posters and black pinups from newspapers on the walls, with the boys on the metal beds, with the light and the emptiness outside and the encircling forest, she felt she had entered another, complete world.

She heard a hiss. It was one of the street noises she had grown to recognize on the island. It was how a man called to someone far away: this hiss could penetrate the sound of traffic on a busy road. The hiss came from a boy on one of the beds. She knew it was meant for her, but she paid no attention and tried to go on reading.

“Sister.”

She didn’t look up.

“White lady.”

She looked up. She took a step toward the beds. Then, made bold by this movement, she walked between the beds, looking for the boy who had spoken.

Only Mannie was sitting up; all the other boys were lying
down. One boy seemed to stare through her as she passed his bed. But then she heard him say softly, as though he was speaking to himself, “So you know your name.” And the boy on the next bed said more loudly, and in an abrupt tone, not looking at her, his shining face resting on one side on his thin pillow, his close-set bloodshot eyes fixed on the back doorway: “Give me a dollar.”

His face was oddly narrow, and twisted on one side, as though he had been damaged at birth. The eye on the twisted side was half-closed; the bumps on his forehead and his cheekbones were prominent and shining. His hair was done in little pigtails: a Medusa’s head.

She took out a purse from her shoulder bag and offered a red dollar note, folded in four. Raising his arm, but not changing his position on the bed, still not looking at her, he took the note, let his hand fall on the bed, and said, “Thank you, white lady.” And then there was nothing more to do or say. She walked back past the beds, feeling the silence behind her, and went out into the sunlight, stepping from the concrete floor of the hut onto red, hot clay.

She considered the forest palms, their straight trunks hazy with black needles, their living, rotting hearts bandaged, it seemed, with tattered sacking. The land was shaved and bare and bright all the way down to the road and up to the forest wall. But the land at the back of the long hut already seemed derelict and half abandoned. She saw empty chicken-coops, roughly knocked together with old boards and with sagging walls of soft wire netting, like the chicken-coops in the open yards of the redevelopment project in the city, so that already, in the midst of bush, the effect was of urban slum. She saw piles of old scantlings and corrugated-iron sheets, rolls of old wire, drums: back yard junk. She saw a pit of some sort: dried-up mounds of clay, a heap of concrete blocks. At the edge of the clearing there was a corrugated-iron latrine on a high concrete base. It was silver in the hard light, and the door was open. A thatched roof had been fixed to the back wall of the concrete hut, at the far end. It began halfway up the wall and sloped down almost to the ground. In the black shade of the thatch, on a wash stand made of trimmed branches, there were unwashed enamel
bowls and plates and basins; the ground below was dark and scummy. Desolation: she had the urge now to get away.

When she saw Roche and Jimmy Ahmed coming to where she was, she could tell, from the melancholy and irritation in Roche’s face, that he had been quarreling with Jimmy. But Jimmy was as expressionless as before, his mouth as seemingly clamped shut below his mustache.

Roche said, “You’re going to have an epidemic on your hands one of these days.”

Jimmy said, “Yes, massa.”

Roche smiled at Jane. His irritation was like her own; but his smile depressed her. That smile of his, which had once seemed so full of melancholy and irony, issuing out of the largest vision of the world, now seemed to hold only a fixed, meaningless irony. And less than that: it held sarcasm, frustration, pettishness.

They walked to the car to drive to the field. Jane sat with Roche; Jimmy sat in the back. Too soon for Jane, who would have preferred to consider the visit over, they got out, to the renewed shock of heat and glare, and crossed from the road to the path at the edge of the leveled field, beside the wall of forest. They walked one behind the other: Roche, Jane, Jimmy. Roche was still irritable. Jimmy’s impassivity had turned to something like calm. To Jane he was even considerate: she was immediately aware of that.

He said, in his light voice, “How did you get on with the boys?”

“We didn’t say very much.”

Roche said without turning round, “They don’t have too much to talk about.”

Jimmy gave his grunt. “Hmm.”

The sun was full on them and full on the forest wall, less green, drier, and more pierced than it appeared from a distance. There was no play of air. The path was hard and bumpy and they kicked up dust as they walked. Jane was sweating; dust stuck to her skin.