Salt (33 page)

So, jean-Pierre tried to pull back, but found that by chance or skill a cadre of the enemy had made their way behind him. Many of our
men were cut down by enemy needles. The reports speak of them falling stuck with many needles, and firing back as they fell.

With jean-Pierre’s skills, the troop was able to regroup, and fight back out of the engagement. They then fell back, but under fire at all times and being pursued by a much larger force. They retreated in good order, and finally broke through to the more open ground that slanted down towards the sea-plain on which the New Towns were visible. Three-quarters of the band were lost, and not a man free of injury, but my jean-Pierre had survived, and was able to lead his men down the final stretch with dignity. And this is the bitterness. Within sight of the sanctuaries, a few moments away from the heroic welcome for his good work, a needle felled my mighty warrior. The reports manage some of the banality of it, the way tragedy sometimes masks itself as comedy. They say they had dropped from the rock to the salt plain, that they were within a few hundred metres of the first gate, with their comrades’ faces clearly visible on guard duty, when jean-Pierre (not that they call him that, of course; but I cannot chill this narrative by referring to him only by his rank), jean-Pierre suddenly tripped and sprawled, like a child. There was even some laughter, I believe (soldiers are hearty laughers). But he did not rise. Then an ensign stooped to help him to his feet, and he stood up and danced backwards, crying with pain. Some of the others laughed at him too, but this was no matter for laughing. The ensign had been shot through the shoulder, and my beloved jean-Pierre was dead, shot through the back of his neck, with the needle sticking a half-metre out of his Adam’s apple. And this is where I leave him, as his comrades dive for cover in the salt and try to return fire (but where?); as his fellows, with whom he had fought so valiantly, scatter away from him in all directions. How could the sniper have chosen jean-Pierre? He was not to be distinguished from his subordinates by dress, for that would be to give the enemy the chance to slice off the head of the military unit. He wore the same deep blue combat fatigues, the same whole-mask. How did the serpent in the wilderness know whom to bite to cause such hurt? Satan has luck; God’s people are luckless, because only then can their faith be tested. So said a
religious man of my acquaintance. Do I believe him? Do I believe? He is still dead, my boy.

But a war must go on, Freedom cannot go without its champion for the death of one man, even if he be the greatest. I ordered the body flown home, and a magnificent state funeral was paid for from my personal fortune. I had him interred in a saltstone tomb (he was a hero! A hero’s body cannot be simply dumped into the compost bins, to help grow the meanest vegetables! My enemies in Senaar seem unable to grasp this distinction: one law for all! Ironic! Who was it that protected that law, that upheld it? It was him). I visited his tomb this very morning, prior to writing this.

But there is a bitterness even here. When I think of the crowds of cheering Senaarians who gathered at the founding ceremonies of our great nation, I was shocked and personally hurt at the meagreness of the popular show. My enemies tell me that many stayed away in protest at my handling of the war, at the fact of the war at all! Mendacity. How easily cancer breaks into the body politic. But I can still see that littering of thin pale bodies along the route, an insult to a great man. There were so few of them bothered to turn up, and those that did wore such ragged clothing, and seemed to be protesting and preaching sedition with the very boniness of their arms and legs, the very drawn and skull-visible faces. The people are the limb of my body. I will not have it.

But he was so fine.

I am dying, now. The pain is fiery in me, and vodjaa helps little. But I have fought and fought. I have become what I despised and I am content that I have done good, because it has brought death to so many. Now the habit of command is second-nature to me, and I think in terms of having and owning. In this fashion does the war go on. The last of the birds died last week. Only a handful had survived the attack, and those few were in small cages. They did not
prosper. The last of them, a linnet, lost its feathers and finally refused feeding.

Many people have made their way right around the northern coast and have settled, to some degree, in Smith. This is no concern of mine. Some stay in the mountains with us. But people are different from the way they were before. They have been infected with the ways of the hierarchy, or so it seems to me. Couples cohabit, couples stay with one another during childbirth. It seems somehow wrong.

I have fought and fought. More recently, my legs have been disused. My cancers poisoned my lymphatic veins and channels, and the treatment was not as successful as possible. My arms still function but my legs are withered and blackened, as much with the treatment as with the sickness. It is little loss. For months before the operation it was agony to walk on my legs, as if my joints were filled with acid; and they were swollen and ugly. Now, after it, I have them strapped up against my chest, and make of myself a tiny parcel; and then I go on the back of Hamar, an old friend. Hamar is a large man, although he has lost much of his hair to the effects of radiation. But he still has much of his strength, and he carries me like a backpack. The voodoo of war is such that I am now talismanic; people are happy to think of themselves as my people, as my beings.

Hamar is dead, of course, but you knew that. He was bearing me through a skirmish, and I was waving people round the flank of one of the new Senaarian hovercars. They deploy them poorly. They fly up, but then they park and the machine is left stationary: and so we can go round it and destroy it. It had happened once, and then again it happened days ago. We held the attention of the enemy from the large scree and an agile force slipped away and behind. We destroyed the car, it was easy work because the hover-skirt is a weak place. But Hamar fell, still carrying me. A needle went through his lung, which is not a fatal wound in itself, but he bled into his lungs and up to his mouth, until his mask was filled with blood and he drowned.
Normally, high in the mountains as I was, I would have pulled away his mask for him and allowed him to spit out the blood and breathe, because usually the mountains are relatively free of chlorine. But this war has liberated a deal of chlorine: and the enemy bring dischargers that pump it into the battlefield. Their masks are better than ours, and even if they lose them they have sinus-filters, so they use the gas as a weapon of war. We do lose people to chlorine, if their masks are knocked off, or if like Hamar they bleed from their mouths or vomit into them. It is a stupid way to die.

But we have destroyed the car and killed the soldiers, so it was a good day. And Hamar is dead, but I will soon be with him. Every day I kill some Senaarians I thank my private God that I have lived another day, that I survived long enough to kill more of them. And when I die I know that it will be in my heart to rage that I have not been granted one more day to kill some more.

We were able to retrieve three more needlerifles and some heavier projectile guns from the engagement in which Hamar and Capal and three others died.

Textualising these memories has had one curious effect. I have recalled the time before we made war. It has made me realise how war becomes a simple way of living, how it seems to provide all that a human needs as material and spiritual membrane, wrapped tightly around them. It is the reason to go on living; it is what to do, how to do it; it is how to arrange the priorities; it is the end of the day and the beginning of wisdom; it is the left hand and the right hand. I might almost say I am glad to be dying before the war comes to the end, for what would I do afterwards?

Mostly I feel the pain in my bones themselves. My arms do swell a little, and sometimes my teeth come away from their sockets and wiggle. Several teeth have dropped away altogether, but mostly now I eat well-cooked salt eels, where the flesh can be broken off only with the gums, and soft pasta, and some soups. I still have my hair, unlike many of us. But for much of my time since the cancer, I have found the pain a help to war-making. There is a step, a shelf, from feeling unhappy and unmotivated with misery, to suddenly leaping up to
energy and killing-fury, where the pain is a goad. Hopping up this step gets harder with each sortie, but I manage it.

I must sleep now. That is the thing. Sleep.

I have dreamt, much more than I used to do. I would say it is my mind putting the events in an ordered sequence, tidying before closing down. Who can say? Sometimes I sleep only to jerk awake. The sensation is as of the world tipping, angling; and I lurch spastically awake. My dreams are of needles, of people dying beside me, of all the stench and pain of war. But if the pain has rooted in the bed of sleep, then the beauty is in a purer place, in my waking imagination.

But then I find myself thinking: is this war? Sometimes the memories arrange themselves as strange, as comical; a circus-war, a war with balloons and strange colours; a war set in a landscape of white, whipped up like peaks of cream. I find myself shrinking, collapsing in on myself so rapidly it feels like falling: and then I am a speck, a pollen-grain-sized man. Here, then: amongst the grains of salt, in all their geometric precision. The universe is filled with them, choked and cluttered with the cubes, the spheres, the rhomboids and the pyramids, all in their bridal white, all in their funeral white. And still I shrink, until my world is only the world between the shapes. I run along the ledge of a grain of salt, and hop from it onto a great ball of salt. White shapes looming huge, and all the rest a blackness.

It was Ruby who told me about the drowned boy. He and his friends had been playing (she said) on one of the hulks, climbing onto the derelict structure, diving off into the water. They liked the hulk, of course, because it was well away from the shore, and well away from the scums of hard salt that accumulate there. But it was the depth out there that did for him. He dived and the mask he was wearing came
off, and because there was so much chlorine on the water’s surface he choked and went under.

At first I felt an awful, physical sense of horror at the story, as if a fist were clutching at my heart with its nails inwards. Partly this was Ruby’s manner of telling it. Her wide face was red with the effort of hurrying up the main plaza and coming to the office, and she looked flushed and excited. Of course she was horrified too, but the impression she gave was of somebody over-delighted to have this piece of gossip. I remember thinking: some small boy’s death has this value, that it can be exchanged for an afternoon’s chatter in an office. But perhaps I felt bad because, despite myself, the news sucked me in, started my heart rapping. It was the news, and also the environment, the bustling of women about me. I was caught up, and along with the rest of them I hurried out of the office and down the main road to the seashore to watch the army diver bring the body ashore.

I had a hemp handkerchief, and I was blotting my eyes continually; the faint sting of the air simply swelling the sense of how utterly appropriate tears were, of how everybody was crying. I am not saying I cried because everybody was crying; that’s not exactly it. It was rather as if some shadowy permission had been granted, and a faucet turned, so that a great pressure of salty water could be relieved. Once, on Earth (how fine those words are! How they captivate the younger people when I talk to them) . . . once, on Earth, at my father’s farm, I had seen a vet deal with sheep. The sheep had some sort of intestinal complaint. The complaint seems exactly the right word, because that was what the sheep did: bleated querulously with the discomfort and the fixity of it. They were all lying on their sides, and every one of their sheep bellies was horribly distended, swelled as if with an enormous, monstrous pregnancy. Except that when I went to touch them (I was nine or ten) these bellies felt nothing like the comfortable yielding of my mother’s tummy, in which my brother was still hidden. The sheep felt hot and hard, with no give at all, and only a painful-looking sense of absolute bloat. I remember feeling scared that the sheep were going to explode; not so far-fetched an idea, said the vet. And when he arrived, flying over the hills, he said there was
no time to lose. With the mixture of open fascination and inscrutable horror of the nine-year-old child I clung to my father’s knees and watched the vet go about his work. This is what he did: he took a large hypodermic from his bag, and then he pulled away the plunger and got rid of it, so that he had only the needle and the open phial at the end of it. Then he went from sheep to sheep, rubbing at a place on the wide pressurised belly, and sliding the needle in swiftly. And as he did this, there was
hush
sound, the trapped air inside came out, and the belly sagged and subsided, until it was only a loose sag of skin under the wool. He went from sheep to sheep doing this, and the miracle was as soon as the belly had been deflated, each sheep hopped to his feet and began again at his endless task of munching the grass over the hillside. There was something wonderful in this, to the eyes of a child. Afterwards, the vet took me from sheep to sheep as he fed each one some pill, to help clear the blockage that had caused the problem in the first place, and talked to me kindly. I think now that perhaps he was a little in awe of my father, and that this chatting with the little girl was a way of approaching the great man without having actually to address him. He was an intimidating man, my father; at least he was to other men.

But the memory of the sheep came to me that day, by the waters’ edge, because in a sense that was how the tears felt. There was that same mingling of physical necessity combined with a slightly shameful, even absurd and vulgar, voiding. My tears were releasing an intolerable internal compression, and so I could simultaneously hate them for the indignity, for the display, as if they were some appalling escape of wind: and yet at the same time feel so thankful for them that I almost offered up a silent prayer. The day was waning, and the sun was starting to blush slightly as it approached the horizon. Quite a crowd had gathered down by the seashore, and us at the forefront.