Glorious Boy, page 24
When morning finally arrives Kuli calls the others to him, excluding Naila, but their voices carry like cinders across the camp. To Naila’s surprise, Obeyo speaks first. Low and rasping, she begins to chant the legend about a stranger who visited Lady Turtle and so admired her son that he asked to take him away. When Lady Turtle refused, the stranger bit her young son’s arm. Then the stranger left, and that son died. Obeyo believes this legend was truth and the murdered son was her own.
Naila knows the true story. The skull Obeyo wears belonged to a boy who had a bad foot, and the one time Doctor Shep came to Behalla he wanted to take him to Port Blair to fix it. Obeyo refused to let the child go. Then Obeyo’s son died. Obeyo wishes to blame Doctor Shep, but Naila thinks this must be so she does not have to blame herself.
Leyo interrupts to remind the others of the legend’s ending: Lady Turtle in her grief destroyed everything the stranger had touched, and this so displeased the god Puluga that he killed the entire tribe.
Naila listens for some sign from Kuli, some hint that the others will heed Leyo’s warning, but she hears only rustling and clearing of throats and then Ekko’s piping whine. The next familiar tale, in the girl’s telling, claims new and terrible meaning.
“Lady Snake climbed a coti tree to steal its fruit for herself. Other people came and begged her to throw down fruit for them too, but Lady Snake told them to go away or she would call Jirmu, the beast of the forest, to kill them. The people would not go, so Jirmu ate them all. Only Lady Snake was spared.”
Ekko points across the distance at Naila: Lady Snake.
Two hard days pass. Naila and Ty both are treated as pariahs by everyone except Leyo and Kuli. Even Mam Golat keeps her distance. Leyo tells her not to worry, that Kuli is fair and just, that she’s done nothing wrong, but Doctor Shep’s voice keeps roaring in her ears.
You stupid, stupid girl.
Everything she’s done is wrong. Everything.
On the third night Kuli insists that Naila and Ty chew some tabeno seeds to help them sleep and forget.
She awakens late. The day already is bright and hot. At first, she thinks her acute sense of emptiness must be caused by the drug. But unless she still is asleep and dreaming, her eyes tell her something is wrong. Outside in the pit the fire burns, but the camp has been stripped of its mats, buckets, baskets, and pots. And occupants.
She sits up. Everyone is gone.
They’ve taken Ty Babu in exchange for Artam. They’ve taken him and left Naila to die.
She begins to shake then, holding herself, and lets out a wail.
“Naila!” Leyo’s voice rises behind her. He grabs her by the shoulders. “Stop. Ty Babu is here. I am here.”
He comes around and crouches in front of her, and for several seconds they stare at each other as strangers.
“Get up,” he says finally, flipping his hands as if to shed her fear.
She stands with his help and sees Ty squatting in the far corner where Artam’s family slept. Busy, the boy has his back to her. But all the others—even the dogs—truly have gone.
“It is Kuli’s decision.”
“To leave us?”
He blows on the embers and adds wood to keep the fire going. The others have left them one pot, which Leyo fills with water from the cistern and sets over the flame. “To heal the tribe.”
“She hated me from the start, Ekko.” But as soon as the name reaches her lips, she feels her mistake and braces for Leyo’s rebuke.
Instead he takes her hand. “You are not the problem.”
His gaze slides across the hut in Ty’s direction, and he squeezes her fingers. “All our troubles began with his people. To Imulu and Sempe and the others, the Japanese are only the white man’s Jirmu. Japanese, Europeans, Indians, all are one enemy here. All outsiders.”
“But Porubi said the Japanese killed Doctor Shep.” As she says the word Naila sees little Artam’s body again, yet she still cannot imagine Doctor saab dead.
Leyo sighs. “Obeyo never would speak to Mem, all those times she came. And Ty now is the age her Jodo was when he died. Jodo and Artam both, yet Ty Babu lives.”
Naila shivers. “We should never have come.”
“That may be true, but where else?”
“But Ty loved Artam.”
“That’s why . . . Jirmu take her to keep her for Ty only.”
She shakes her head. “I can’t believe that Kuli—”
“Kuli chooses this way for you and Ty Babu to be safe.”
“Safe?”
“From the others. Until they finish their grief.”
His voice is so tender, his hands so sure, she wants to rest her head on his chest and weep there. Leyo would hold her and rock her like a small child, and she craves this rocking now more than she can say.
But she is not the small child. If he’s right, she wasn’t even the reason the others left.
Ty comes to the front of the round house holding two sticks tipped in clay. The color has dried but he drags the clay across the smooth stone, drawing as he used to with chalk on the veranda of the Ross bungalow or with sticks in the dirt at the white house and inside the freedom tree. It has been months, Naila realizes. Artam and the Bibi dogs were too restless for such quiet activities. Now that they are gone, and Ty is alone with her and Leyo again, he is starting over, back to his old self. This thought makes her ache.
The sticks are too long. Leyo breaks them to the length of a pencil, then pours a handful of water into each pot of dried color. Ty sits cross-legged and promptly immerses himself. With the same focus he gave to yam digging while Artam wandered off to her death, he now draws lines that mirror those her parents drew on her body.
“Why did you stay?” she asks Leyo. “Ekko didn’t want Tika. She wanted you.”
He drops his gaze, then returns to her shyly. “But I know you.”
And the simplicity of this statement coupled with the slight quaver in his voice fills her with tenderness. It is true. He knows her better than she knows herself.
Before she can think how to answer him, he shifts. “When the monsoon comes again, Kuli will bring the others back. You will see.” The water has begun to boil. He fills a bowl for her. “Then everything will be new.”
February 1943
Ward comes for Claire in the General’s Austin sedan. “I thought this whole thing was supposed to be low key,” she chides him.
“Good evening, Claire,” he replies. “You’re looking well—and you smell heavenly.”
“What happened to your hair?” He’s been shaved clean to the scalp, which accentuates the heavy shelf of his forehead and makes his eyes look like small, feral predators. The effect isn’t helped by his uniform shirt and shorts, which look as if he slept in them—
He does bring out the mean in her. Really, she ought to kiss the ground this man walks on, but if by some miracle Operation Balderdash succeeds, she, along with the entire Eastern Command, will have to, because Major Ward will demand it.
“Let it go,” he says, and the sudden drop of his voice recalls the sensation of creepers and thorns, the tendrils of sticky vine catching her sleeve, the massive webs that over the last two weeks have left her feeling as if she’s infested with mites. Her own shorn locks are only an inch or two longer than Ward’s.
They drive in silence then. Off in the distance, the dockyards bombed last April are a blackened gash beneath the blazing red sunset, but couples and families stroll the Galle Face as ever, dodging strafe pits along the parkway in exchange for the tepid ocean breeze. Some children even carry balloons, and the yellow, green, and pink of the women’s saris pop in the sidelong light. The war has tilted in the past seven months, though it’s still far from turning.
“Having second thoughts?” Ward asks.
“I can’t afford to give you the satisfaction.”
“No skin off my teeth.”
“Well, that’s big of you. Considering.” Considering what’s at stake. But she won’t keep this going. Not here and not now.
Bolger I (their team’s SOE codename; Operation Balderdash, if successful, will bring additional Bolger landing parties to the Andamans in future) was met at Pembroke thirteen days ago by two seasoned Burmese saboteurs. They were issued camouflage trousers, shirts, and bush hats and taken into the Sinharaja jungle to learn the art of trekking without leaving a trail. They climbed vines to hidden lookouts, foraged for hidden sources of food and water, and practiced unpacking, paddling, and collapsing folboats—folding kayaks—in raging rivers. They also lay motionless in sand burrows in triple-digit heat and ran up stream beds at forty-degree angles under thirty- to fifty-pound packs.
Hari and Luke were deferential at first, offering Claire chances to rest, drink water, or reduce her pack, but Ward would have none of it. Even before she could object, he reminded them, “The last one standing has to be able to go on alone. And any of us could be the last.” Claire and Hari Khan, being the smallest of the four, had the disadvantage in portage, but they’d proven far nimbler than Ward and Luke when it came to climbing and falling.
One day as they stood waiting for the others at the crest of a ridge, Hari told Claire he’d grown up watching the monkeys of Mussoorie, learning their tricks, and before he was ten he could shinny up the side of a house, raise the window, and steal inside just as the little apes did. Now he no longer stole, but he still liked to swing through the trees.
“Like Hanuman,” he said.
“Like Tarzan,” she countered.
“Is that a type of monkey?”
“Only in America.”
“I often miss my home in Mussoorie. Do you miss America?”
She had to think very hard. “I don’t remember anymore.”
They climbed higher into the rain forest, based out of camp there for a week, and Claire felt for the first time in a very long while that she was back in familiar territory. The shrill plumage of the birds, the mist that draped itself high through the canopy, those heartstoppingly beautiful butterflies. Vipers the color of lemons and rubies slithered through the undergrowth. The monkeys here had purple faces, and the deer barked their alarm. And orchids bloomed seemingly on every tree trunk. She tried to picture the joy on Shep’s face if he could have seen them, his ecstasy of discovery, but he kept dissolving into a mirage of Ty and Naila holding hands as they danced among the ferns.
Then the training shifted to a cove outside Colombo where the team were to be drilled in entering and exiting a surfaced submarine—and swimming down to enter the escape chamber in case enemy fire or surveillance prevented the sub from surfacing. At this point it dawned on her that she’d need either to use her underwear as swimming wear, or vice versa.
In her billet, a beachfront hotel she was sharing with a dozen Wrens, she found a Life magazine with a photograph of a two-piece bathing suit that, in her circumstances, could serve both functions. Fortunately, the local durzi needed only a couple of hours to crank out two of the suits in black jersey.
But that was the sole concession to her sex that she was willing to make. So, mud became her cosmetic, DDT her perfume, and sulfa ointment her skin crème of choice. Her only jewelry, her wedding band, was sewn into her breast pocket. She would not give Denis Ward one ounce of ammunition.
Two miles inland the car turns through the now familiar iron gates and starts up the gravel drive to Pembroke College. Mustangs, Lightnings, and P-38s careen overhead, on their way down to or up from the Racecourse Aerodrome. Under the silvering sky the greens of the requisitioned campus stretch absurdly, like cut velvet on a dowager bride. This last supper, too, is a charade, but what isn’t these days? Every foreigner and most of the working locals in Colombo are codebreakers, signal operators, intercept telegraphers, cryptologists, or intelligence officers, all masquerading as secretaries.
The car stops in front of the boys’ school turned intercept and code-breaking headquarters, and the Sinhalese doorman offers a white-gloved hand to help Claire down from the running board. The insult of long-sleeved uniform jackets and ridiculously plumed turbans in this climate never ceases to mortify her, but she returns the man’s smile and accepts his assistance. His dark young eyes remind her of Leyo.
She follows Ward down the marble loggia and into the drawing room. Here, with blackouts pulled, and fans at maximum spin overhead, the team will wrap up their preparations before embarking tomorrow at dawn.
Claire gets to work making her final tests of the TBX-8 transceiver pack, which will be her primary responsibility, and the SCR-536 mobile Handy-Talkie that Ward will use for voice communication back to the TBX. Ward and Luke pore over maps of their intended landing site. And Hari squats over the equipment spread across the floor, ticking off items against his master list of field supplies, which include such provisions as morphine, boric acid, water purification tablets, Prontosil, Atabrine, signaling mirrors and pistols, flares, jungle knives, mess kits, a net for catching fish, vegetarian rations (including ghee, dehydrated potatoes, pumpkin, and rice enough for the first eight meals, plus chocolate D-rations), a shovel for digging and covering latrines, three pup tents, two folboats, four ponchos, mosquito nets, two Mark II stenguns, and a Welrod silenced pistol.
At nine Claire notices the clock on the wall. Its matter-of-factness stuns her. Eight hours from now they’ll board a Dutch O-boat bound for Flat Island. There will be no turning back for eight weeks. That’s all they know for certain.
“Last chance,” Ward says to her as they stow the last of their gear for transport to the sub.
She smiles. “Still trying to get rid of me?”
“You’ve managed to keep to yourself through all of this, tight quarters and all.”
“I can follow orders.”
“The men like you.” Ward gestures with his head for her to follow him out front, where the moonless night obscures them both. “It’s a gutsy thing you’re about to do.”
“One minute you’re pushing me overboard, the next you’re serving up flattery. Best decide which side you’re on.”
“The first time we met, your short hair should have tipped me off, but somehow, I never would have pegged you for a real American dame.”
“We’d better get one thing straight,” Claire says. “I’ve made it my job to watch and listen to others, but I’ve absolutely no interest in other people’s observations of me. Especially not now. If you’re giving me an order, please get on with it. Are you, Major?”
The General’s Austin is long gone, and all along the dark avenue coconut lamps on rickshaws glow like fireflies spiting the blackout. She’ll need to rouse one of the pullers to run her back to her billet.
Ward steps back and snaps his fingers. A thin shadow peels itself from a nearby tree and walks to a jeep parked across from the rickshaws. The driver opens the passenger door.
“Yes,” Ward gives her a gallant bow. “Go get some sleep.”
He waits for the driver to step away. “See you bright and early.”
The sailors who give Bolger I safe passage form a motley crew. All men, of course. Two dozen, give or take, with overbites and thick necks, wooly eyebrows and trim mustaches, biceps like Popeye’s and oatmeal complexions. Despite the close quarters, Claire keeps her distance—with the aid of Captain Maikel van Dulm. “The men,” van Dulm tells her, “you must forgive them, beauty is not a frequent passenger on a submarine at war.”
The captain is too tall for his boat, forcibly stooped at thirty-four (the second night out they celebrate his birthday along with Claire’s twenty-eighth). His most striking feature is his hair, which rolls in waves like polished brass back over his crown. A rare amalgam of gentility and virility, van Dulm has most of Bolger I’s respect as soon as they learn that he safely landed another Special Operations shore party in Sumatra back in December.
Only Ward takes longer. He grouses that the captain’s mother was Austrian, and that van Dulm didn’t flee to Britain until Germany occupied Holland in ’40. The rivalry is a familiar one of wartime distrust fueled by colonial class and circumstance. If van Dulm were an East Indian Dutchman, the major would likely feel more affinity, Ward having grown up in Lahore as the son of a jute manufacturer. But the captain knows how to buoy men’s egos, even abrasive ones like Ward’s. The two soon bond over the major’s obsession with strategy and maps—and the bottle of Macallan single malt that the captain keeps in his wardroom.
The first couple of days, cruising at surface speeds, Claire stands on deck and watches pods of dolphins leaping—and sharks circling. The war seems metaphoric. From the third day they have to stay submerged during daylight hours, but the captain’s easy manner retains a standard of calm that proves contagious.
In the wardroom their last evening, van Dulm says, “The most difficult thing is to remember that the enemy is human, but this is also the most important.”
“I hope we won’t have occasion to remind ourselves of this wisdom,” Ward says.
“I find that I must remind myself constantly,” the captain replies. “Especially when I find myself being my own worst enemy.”
“Does that happen often?” Claire asks.
Van Dulm smiles and ducks his head. “It is a daily conversation.”
The submarine surfaces off Flat Island that night, then eases in toward Middle Andaman under a full moon. Their target is a wild stretch of beach near a stream that needles into the forest, and just for an instant as she breathes in the darkness, Claire remembers her very first glimpse of these shores—her unexpected terror at their dark immensity, and Shep’s childish quip: No see-ums.
She shakes the memory like water from her ears and bends to work. The sub is partially shielded by an islet thick with mangroves, and the roar of the surf swallows the noise of their loading and unloading the dinghies and dragging supplies up the sand. Within half an hour they have all their gear ashore and the Dutch crew gives them a silent salute and are gone.
Before midnight Bolger I has set up a staging camp, invisible from shore or inlet but within easy reach of fresh water. Claire knows better, but the others make cracks about claiming virgin territory.
