Glorious Boy, page 26
Once Leyo told her that his people believe night was created as punishment. Before the creation of night, the ancestors knew only daylight. Then one day an ancestor named Sir Lizard went into the jungle to dig for yams, and he discovered a cicada, which he brought back to camp and rubbed to death. The cicada screeched and the world went dark. Then the ancestors made torches and danced and sang to bring back the light, but daytime would not come until they engaged the bulbul and finally the ant. It required the industry and cooperation of all these creatures to restore the day after night.
As the memory of Leyo’s smooth voice lulls her, she takes Ty into her arms, and they lie in the shade against Shep’s chest with the waves easing over the sand. Finally, she sleeps.
The Christians, Leyo says, have the story of Adam and Eve. The Biya have a similar story of Biliku and her husband Tarai. Biliku and Tarai, like Adam and Eve, lived alone in the forest and made a family with their son Perjido, needing no one else. These first families lived as he and Naila and Ty must now, creating their own rules and rhythms. In this way Leyo shows that their situation is not so strange, not so sad or difficult as it might seem.
They agree that Ty should start hunting with Leyo, since the boy will need to know how to shoot and hold a spear. Naila will stay close to camp and forage, gather wood and tend the fire. At night, Ty lies between them.
He whimpers for Artam only at first. Soon he sleeps soundly, Leyo’s presence a balm for his grief. But Naila senses that Leyo is becoming something else for her.
She truly is grateful and glad and relieved that he is here, but just as she doesn’t like to stand too close to the front of the ledge, she can’t trust herself to meet Leyo’s gaze or sit too close to his body. Is it that she can’t trust him? Some nights she lies awake, so alert to his nearness that she can hear him blink in the darkness. She can smell him sleep. Never before did she notice his scent, but its essence now seems to follow her even when he is gone, and this new awareness of her old friend troubles her.
She tries to push such thoughts away, because the one thing she knows for certain is that she and Ty both depend on him, but she does put back on the clothing the Biya shamed her into abandoning. She tears her old green skirt into a short sarong, and although the yellow blouse that her mother sewed is splitting at the seams, within its shell she feels closer to her true self.
And braver. For the longer she is away from the other Biya, the more likely it seems that the world outside the forest will one day welcome her home.
As if he senses this, too, Ty Babu also edges back into his old ways. Leyo has replaced his clay sticks with chalk-like stones, which are easier for Ty’s small hands, and soon the floor blooms with his memories. A cluster of little elephants. The white spider that had such a beautiful scent. The striped tiger with the open snout, and the little yellow monkey that Doctor Shep made sing. Ty absorbed everything, Naila thinks. Everything that he chose to.
She searches her own memory, then one day takes a stone and writes above the elephant flower: Aerides—
Ty looks to see what she is doing, and she gestures for him to take over. He carefully sets down his red stone and accepts her white one. Without hesitation he completes the name: Aerides odorata. Just as Doctor Shep instructed Naila to write it in Port Blair.
“Yche,” Leyo says. God.
But Naila smiles and shakes her head. “Atota.” Son.
And then one night when Ty is asleep, she wakes to find Leyo kneeling beside her. She raises herself in alarm, but he reassures her by running his palm lightly over her cheek and shoulder. He takes her hands and signals for her to follow.
A full moon has risen outside. He brings his sleeping mat into its light and sits down with his legs outstretched, then pulls her gently by the hips until she is seated on his lap. He presses his face against her neck and encircles her. As if they were her own, his arms cross in front of her breasts, his hands resting on her shoulders. For several minutes they sit without moving as the light of the moon and the pulse of the forest surround them. She is conscious of his skin against hers and the rise and fall of his breath, of his body beneath her, and the forest and moon and herself, and soon they all become inseparable. And this feeling of connection unlocks a sensation that no one could ever describe to her.
Leyo laughs as she slowly turns in his arms, but he stops when he feels her shaking. He takes her palm and holds it to his chest so that she can feel his own steady rhythm. This, she understands, is his promise.
A few hours into the sixth morning’s march, Ward, in the lead, stops abruptly and signals everyone to freeze. Through the vines he’s spotted a cluster of lean-tos.
The clearing is empty, but smoke still rises from a pit at its center. Near the fire lie cooking implements and a pile of vegetables. Near the vegetables prints of small bare feet mark the earth. Red fibers like those that Bathana and her daughter wound around their foreheads hang drying in the sun.
Claire mouths to Ward: Jarawa.
The wise move would be to pull back and skirt the camp, but Bolger I’s food supplies are dwindling, and none of the team have sufficient familiarity with this part of the forest to know which plants are edible. All four of them turn slowly, scanning the forest wall, but the birds continue to twitter and the sweat to flow, and no one appears to menace them.
Holding his sten at the ready, Ward signals Hari to collect the food, but Claire whispers, “Stealing will make us their enemy. They’re probably watching.”
She moves forward. “Hari, come, but just look.”
“Like yam, manioc, jackfruit, dugong eggs, taro.” Hari ticks off the foods he knows to resemble those before him. “But these berries and nuts I do not know.” He looks up and spots some of them in the surrounding branches. “And this cane.” He looks closer to memorize the markings.
Claire reaches into her pocket and brings out a handful of Charms candies, rattles them like dice, and thinks better of it. She remembers how Bathana and her daughter refused to touch any food that was unfamiliar.
“What do you have to leave for them?” she whispers to Hari.
He roots in his pocket. “Only a charm.”
“They won’t want them.”
“No.” He opens his palm to reveal an iron arrowhead with a scroll design worked into it. “From home.”
“Good. Place it there.” She indicates a mortar stone beside the fire. Hari hesitates, then reluctantly lays the token down.
“You’ll be sorry when that lands in your neck,” Ward says.
“If these are your Topsy’s people, it’s more likely to home in on you,” she says.
“You and your bleeding heart.”
But as they move on, the wealth of food in the foliage around them becomes evident, and the Jarawa’s cane turns out to be a woody vine filled, like coconut, with water. Even Ward has to admit that the Jarawa camp was a lucky find and, whether because of Hari’s charm or not, they proceed unmolested.
That night they reach a hill from which they can see the signal crane shape of Mount Koiob silhouetted against the lavender sky to the south. Ferrargunj is now just a few hours away. And, Claire calculates, Behalla is due east from the spot where she now stands.
Ward lays out his plan. “We need to make sure that Pandu’s still there—and Tojo isn’t. Four’s too many for recon. Besides, this hill should give you decent reception.”
Marching orders. It’s more than a role she is playing, though too often Claire forgets that. Especially now, so close, the temptation to bolt and risk everything nearly overwhelms her. But other than filling her arms and heart—and quite possibly getting herself killed—what could she accomplish alone? Between the lines of his terse instructions, Ward is constantly warning: Shep and Ty are only two of the five who now rely on her—and vice versa.
So, while Ward and Luke slip off in the dark to Ferrargunj, she and Hari set up the TBX. Hari hand-pedals the generator, and she focuses on the crackles coming through her headset as she locates frequencies and adjusts the man-pack’s antenna. The signals are mostly in Morse, but in their second hour a man’s voice breaks through the high-pitched pulses. Her hand flies off the dial as the unmistakable tonality of Japanese barks through her headset. The clearer the signal, the closer the operator.
Alarmed, Hari stops pedaling.
The most difficult thing is to remember that the enemy is human. She pulls herself together and motions him to go on.
The voice is too indistinct to represent a direct threat. It has to be coming from Port Blair, but it belongs only to an operator, not anyone who’d have direct contact with Allied prisoners. She listens, rapt, as the quiet, halting intonations sign off and pictures this Japanese soldier boy in the seat vacated by young Tom Lutty. Not literally, of course. Colonel Hastings said the North Point wireless station was destroyed, per protocol, on the eve of occupation, now ten months ago.
But where did her jitterbugging partner go? Ten months. An eternity.
She and Hari do not set up camp. Nor do they discuss their orders to retreat should Ward and Luke fail to return. But Hari does offer her one of the Jarawa fruits, which he’s peeled for her. The flesh is gelatinous and astringent. Naila would say it tastes green. Ty would purse his mouth like a fish.
To ward off the ambush of memory, Claire concentrates her thoughts on Hari, squatting now, elbows on knees, looking past her into the darkness. Only inches away, she senses more than she sees or hears him. His smells mostly meld with the rawness of the earth, but she is always aware of the sharp essence of his sweat, distinct from Ward’s fishy odor and Luke’s darker, gamier scent—and her own stink of jungle rot. More than that, though, she’s aware of Hari’s internal balance, like a coin poised on its rim, attuned in equal measures to past and future, the present a movable fulcrum.
Once, during their training in Colombo, she asked about his family. No children yet, he confessed, but then beamed with pride as he described his wife, a girl by his report of exquisite beauty who at eighteen consented of her own free will to marry him, but only on the condition that she first complete her studies at Calcutta University to become an oculist. She means to give sight to others. That is something rare and wonderful, I think. Claire told him his wife was a lucky girl.
Now through the leaning treetops a band of galaxy glitters, and a cuticle moon. Child of ours, Claire recites to herself. Friend’s shelter in the deep forest. Men thire mele ing nola timiukoon.
Hari places his hands together against his cheek. When he turns his wrist, the luminescence of his watch reads three o’clock. She’s about to tell him to go ahead and sleep, when the headset rasps: Bobulu.
This Biya word for ghost is their code for safe return, the signal from Ward’s Handy-Talkie insurance against mistaking the returning men for an enemy patrol. Minutes later he elbows through the screen of thorns. Luke follows, breathing as if he’s just climbed Annapurna. A building storm and the swaying forest gave them cover.
It’s too dark to see, let alone read, Ward’s face, and before he can say whether they made contact, the sharp wind trailing them unleashes its torrents. He points to a depression where they can bivouac, hidden from anyone climbing the hill, and they all set to moving the gear.
The downpour quickly liquifies the mud. Claire has to wrestle her mat flat as she digs in her poles, yanks the tarp over, and secures it. When she tosses her pack inside, Luke and Hari are still fighting the wind. Ward, however, has made quick work of his own tent and vanished inside it.
She pushes back the flaps to find him on his back. In the darkness she can just make out the forearm across his face. When he refuses to move, she drops and knees him in the hip. His hand finds her thigh, and she nearly throws it off but is stopped by its utter lifelessness.
Ward’s breath deepens as he sits up. “They’re gone.” His voice sags under the weight he carries. “Shep and Alfred, both.” The words, disembodied. “In front of the Browning Club.” In the absence of light. “Pandu’s brother saw it. Claire, I—”
No! The word pounces, landing hard at the back of her skull, then begins to repeat. No. No. No. No. She peels away from the tent and staggers out into the wind.
Water immediately fills her ears, her eyes, her boots. It pastes her clothes and hair to her skin. The night, she notes with abrupt detachment, has a plastic quality, one minute bending, the next breaking in two, then smashing to smithereens.
Shep stands in the darkness, a moonless night on Ferar Beach, as phosphorescence plays in the waves. More than once, he’s saying, his father took him to see how barbarians administered justice. How old were you? Five, six. Old enough to learn a lesson. There by the gate to the old city, an executioner’s block. Don’t look away, old boy, don’t you dare look away. The eyes had turned white rolling back in the rolling skull, but the severed head was still that of a man. I didn’t know which was more unspeakable, the execution, or the father who’d take his son to the execution grounds.
Unspeakable.
Ward behind her, Claire spins and demands, “What about Ty?”
“He wasn’t there. No one’s seen him or the girl. Not since before you left.”
A cicada screeches and the world goes dark. One light on an island burns. The mother who would leave her son at the execution grounds.
Luke pulls her to silence. He’s come into her tent and taken her by the shoulders, and when she opens her eyes, his expression threatens to drown her.
“Sorry,” he says and lets go at once.
She lies back, more exhausted even than she felt last night.
“Dr. Durant,” Luke says. “He was one of the best.”
“You believe it.”
“I am so sorry.” He lowers his gaze.
But he flinches when she grabs his wrist. “Were you there? Did you hear Pandu say it?”
Luke stares at her hand. “I was keeping watch outside the village.”
“Then I’m sorry. I won’t believe it.”
He gently pries her hand off his wrist as he murmurs something about God. And then he’s gone.
Outside, the forest is screaming, the day’s heat already throbbing. Ward let her sleep, a dangerous concession, for she sees now what she couldn’t last night. This is Ward’s doing, his word only. He refused to let her come and meet his informant, refused to mention Behalla. He even made her surrender her L-tablet. As if she’d kill herself because of his lies.
It’s a matter of will now, not faith. With or without Ward, she’ll get to Behalla. But he’ll be watching. She has to be careful, play the good soldier, the secret agent. Yes.
When she comes out of her tent, Ward glances up with a look of resignation and motions for her to finish the nuts and dried fish that pass for breakfast. He’s laying out next steps.
Pandu’s promised to scout the enemy installations around the port. He suggested a hollow rain tree north of Ferrargunj as their “postal drop.” Ward and Luke will return in a week for a pickup. In the meantime, Bolger I will proceed northwest in search of a signal hill on the coast.
For Claire, the west coast is the wrong direction. She only knows how to reach Behalla from the east, from waters most likely seething with enemy patrol boats.
But Ward and Luke are trackers. They found their way to Ferrargunj, and the only signs of Japanese they’ve detected in this approach so far are those outliers in the Strait. None in the interior. Which means that Ty—and Shep, she insists—should be safe where they are. Safer than she can keep them until the O-boat returns six weeks from now.
They’re in Behalla. They have to be. And when the time comes, Luke will know how to get there, with or without Ward’s blessing.
Leyo insists on calling her Yulu, and this no longer annoys her. She’s as changed as if she were reborn, and this name seems to suit her new form, movements, and longings. Before, she didn’t understand the logic of taking the name of a tree coming into bloom. Now she can feel herself blooming each time Leyo touches or even breathes beside her.
Ty Babu, too, notices the change, at once jealously guarding his place between them and smirking at their dazed expressions. For the first time, she feels modest around the boy, which is ridiculous after having gone nearly naked for months, but everything seems to have turned upside down. She even sees their abandonment in a new light. If the others were still here, would she dare to lie with Leyo each night? Would she dream of taking him inside her? She thinks with disgust of Ekko’s lewd finger movements, but not even the memory of that awful day can destroy the joy she feels now.
The change reminds her of Teacher Sen’s spectacles. One day when she arrived early for school Saar had been standing at the window rubbing his eyes, and she picked up the glasses from his desk and tried them on. She cannot remember what she expected, only her shock at the world’s sudden transformation when she looked through his lenses. The classroom’s crisp clean lines suddenly appeared as blurs, and the view from the window collapsed into a painful kaleidoscope of color and light. Teacher Sen laughed when he saw her, then gave her a private lesson on optics and the human eye.
Without these, he said tapping his spectacles, I am virtually blind. And yet with them, he could see the same things she saw, but in an entirely different way.
Now, as she moves between Ty and Leyo, she feels as if she’s continually putting on and taking off different lenses. One minute the two of them look as familiar to her and to each other as brothers; the next they appear as father and son. Then a cloud will pass over the sun, or a flutter of light ignites the green of Ty’s eyes, and all she can see is a white boy standing beside a black man with whom he has nothing but nakedness in common. She is confounded and also, in these moments, profoundly grateful that she cannot see her own length or face.
