Choice, page 18
At dawn, they had stopped by roadside vendors selling beles – these sellers used to be Tigrayan women before the war began – and gorged themselves on the fruit. Medhanie had said, ‘Careful, the stones will bung you up, then you’ll need to be unclogged,’ the last action accompanied by an elaborate gesture. Several tittered, but no one held back from stuffing his face, even the unit commander, Fesseha, whom they did not trust one bit but had no choice except to obey unquestioningly. Salim would never forget the time when Fesseha had caught a group of them – Salim, Abu, Dawit, a young Somali from Ogaden – sneaking in roadkill to their barracks to cook and eat. He had reported them to the other, more senior officers, who had then confiscated the bloody rabbit and eaten it themselves. In the end, it was the constant monitoring of how much Salim and his fellow-fighters ate that wore them down. How could they fight wars if they were kept on the brink of starvation? Dawit had said, ‘When they wanted to recruit us, it was warsai this, warsai that, the fate of the nation depends on the bravery of the warsai’ – he had mimicked the lieutenant commander who had conscripted them – ‘but these old soldiers are jealous of us, of our youth. They starve us to keep us under their control. They suffered during the liberation war, so they’ll make us suffer now. Don’t you see how a shadow falls across their faces when they see us, how their lips become thin with resentment?’ Salim had nodded in agreement. As Fesseha had kept eating beles one after another, like a man possessed, Salim had thought, ‘You are afflicted by the same hunger as we are,’ then Medhanie’s joking warning had reminded Salim of his grandmother’s remedy for constipation resulting from eating too many beles – having berbere water squirted up the bottom – and the image of Fesseha’s hole on fire from the berbere water had brought a fleeting satisfaction.
But now, in Assab, Salim and his unit were confused about what they had been brought here for. It was not as if they were the real warsai, trained at Sawa, as all these soldiers in the trenches around the port seemed to be. They, on the other hand, had been plucked from their homes and thrown into the war, ordered to do their bit for the hard-won country. In fact, there was never a time when Salim hadn’t known war. All through his childhood, there was the war for freedom that seemed like the long birth pangs of his nation trying to be born. He hardly remembered a time when the television was not blaring out martial music, songs from the freedom struggle, footage of warriors. Every year, his school organized a trip to Asmara to see the gigantic shida, a memorial to the EPLF martyrs. Martyrs’ Day was barely one month after Independence Day. And now they were in the dark about what their next mission was. There was only one ship docked in the harbour; all the busy trade for and with Ethiopia had come to a halt, like the metal limbs of the cranes, all frozen in mid-air. There was a big sign on the side of the ship: USAID. Later, Medhanie would tell them all what it meant, but Salim let the fancy pass through his head that they had been brought to Assab to be put on the ship and sent away to . . . here his imagination failed him – shipped where? If they were going to be put on a ship, it was only going to be to another place to fight, to clear dead bodies, rob the Ethiopian dead of their papers and anything else that was worth stealing, whereas Salim allowed himself the cruel luxury of fantasizing that the ship was going to take him away to freedom.
And then began, again, what was Salim’s most abiding experience since being conscripted: not fighting, not killing, not hiding, but waiting. Killing time. One of the training exercises they had endured early on was to stand straight with their arms stretched out in front of them, loosely, palms upwards, and have heavy objects – small sacks of salt or cement, boxes of bricks – placed on their hands. Then the weight had been increased – one sack, two, three . . . you had to keep standing erect, and you couldn’t drop the weight. If it was more than you could bear, you had to bend down slowly and put the sacks on the ground without curving your spine. But there were few who hadn’t dropped the whole ratcheting load when it got too much. In between all the action, they had learned that they were subjected to a similar exercise with time, with all the waiting, all the lying about, all the inaction, and time got heavier and heavier but there was no way it could be dropped. They talked, they slept odd hours, they went out in twos and threes and fours, they even had the radio on all the time which mostly broadcast patriotic songs and speeches from the tegadelay and current commanders, they sat or lay down, looking at nothing, and time got heavier and heavier, but they couldn’t drop it, and their insides filled up with an unending scream.
Six days after arriving at Assab, Medhanie told them what the sign on the ship meant, but where he had picked up the rumour that it was aid for Ethiopia, no one knew. Soon after that, the cranes came back to life and began to empty the ship of its contents: hundreds if not thousands of sacks, all marked with the blue-and-red sign that was also on the ship’s side, sacks containing rice, wheat, flour, sugar, and who knew what else. Salim had not been aware that his instinct had known what their unit’s orders were going to be, but when they did arrive, he felt a sense of recognition, of something confirmed: the men were to form a relay line to convey the cargo from where it had been placed to the trucks waiting to take it away. It was to be done from ten at night to four in the morning; the official reason for this was to protect the men from the deranging heat of the day.
So that was what they did: Salim, eighteenth or nineteenth down a line of forty or so men, spent six hours every night turning left to receive a sack then immediately turning right to pass it along to the man next in line. It was done in two days. He had lost count of the number of sacks; there were times when he felt that the amount of staples could have fed a whole country, then there were times when it seemed to him that he had become a machine, which could not think or feel, let alone count, so he had done nothing because to do something one needs to have the awareness of doing that thing and a machine part has no such knowledge. This, then, was war: looting, in however orderly a fashion, food aid sent to the enemy country. A strange satisfaction filled him, the joy of a small accomplishment well executed, of having played a tiny part. He wanted it to be counted so that when the time came, they would say, ‘You’ve done your bit, and done it well, now you’re freed from the life of a soldier. Go.’ It was at that point that he woke up from his reverie and felt the burn of ache in his buttocks, his back, his arms.
At Shepton Mallet, the week felt long; as it had never done before, Emily thought, but was quick to qualify that as a possible false memory, something invented by her present tense. After supper on the first evening, her mother said, ‘I’ve had Trevor take out the boxes with Granny’s stuff if you want to go through them. I had a quick root-around – nothing that would interest you, I think.’
There were three big cardboard boxes, a suitcase, and a large metal trunk. The trunk contained, surprisingly, clothes, some of them eaten to almost transparent frazzle by moths, although a faint cloud of mothball odour had hit her nose as soon as she opened the lid. Two shawls, clearly of very fine wool but now looking lacy with holes. Two silk sarees, one with an enormous golden paisley border. A lacquer box with a few pieces of jewellery, some Indian, most of them discoloured; Emily couldn’t tell if any was valuable or if the gemstones were real, the dull yellow metal gold. Two suits, falling apart at the folds. A heavy wooden box with silver cutlery, all of it oxidized to a shade of pewtery grey. Under the silverware, a few photographs, some stuck together, all of them sepia, even burned in patchy white flares, with age. Not one person Emily could identify – wait, there was Granny, probably, when she was in her twenties, but that too Emily couldn’t tell for sure; age made everyone entirely different people. Not a single Indian in the dozen photos: croquet on a lawn; large sun hats and bonnets; a long car; rolling low hills, densely vegetated, the colour of an English sky in February; but not one Indian in sight. The photos could have been taken in any English shire. Who decided to erase the Indians, the Indianness – the eye of the camera-holder or the camera’s eye? Who selected what to represent? The suitcase was full of empty ledger books and crumbling browning receipts and invoices, some of them headed with ‘Varugaram Tea Estate, No 7 Savithri Shanmugam Road, Race Course, Coimbatore – 641 027’. She knew from the printed name underneath, D.A. Colebrook, that the flourishing signature in fading royal blue was her grandfather’s. The loose papers looked as pointless as the ledgers: why carry this junk all the way back to England? Unless there was some meaning there that she couldn’t see, didn’t have the background knowledge or training necessary to read it. That could have been the point of entry into her new project: lacunae, staring into the lack of material for a story, then the gradual illumination, an education in the ways the apparent absence could be read in the correct way to suture together a shape, a picture, legibility, just as in the stories she had read as a child in which notes written in invisible ink had to be held in front of a fire and the warmth awakened the writing and made it visible. It would have been, to her, a new way of writing a book – her first, ‘Endlesse Worke’: The Connections of Spenser’s Epic Romance to His ‘Minor’ Poetry, had been a conventional, straightforwardly research- and theory-oriented monograph – although the fields had been so furrowed and ploughed that no doubt this approach had already yielded superabundant harvest across several areas and disciplines. Except she couldn’t even do that, for she lacked a master key, didn’t know in front of which fire to hold her invisible letter. For all she knew, it could have been just a pristine, empty page, not a secret note. She lost all interest in looking inside the cardboard boxes; she had not embarked upon this search with much of it in the first place.
She and her mother spent a sunny day in Bath, which was seething with tourists. The blazing sand-coloured stone failed to charm her this time. Could she have brought Salim here? Would she have been less distracted, less detached from her immediate surroundings, with him around? What would her mother have thought? Emily would never find out because her mother would never say, never give a clue through any action, expression, passing shadow over her face, a perfectly timed pause preceding a word. What would he have made of it? How alienated, out of place would he have felt? She had come close to giving in to the impulse when she had joined him at another hospital appointment and he had asked, ‘Why you do this?’ She noted that he had never called her by her name. It was at that instant the words had nearly escaped her mouth, ‘Salim, come with me to Somerset, I’m going to visit my mother for a few days,’ and, as instantly his reply, imagined by her, had arrived: ‘What is Somerset?’ She had desisted, thank god.
‘A penny for your thoughts,’ her mother now said.
‘How funny. A friend used that expression not that long ago. You know, Granny used to say that to me when I was little.’
Jostled by tourists, they ate ice cream sitting on wobbly metal chairs in a colonnade under enormous Georgian pillars, Emily put out by the crowds and wondering if that Mona Lisa smile on her mother’s face was because she liked this bustle or whether she was just happy, easily happy, at the fact that she had company. There was a pink dot of strawberry ice cream on the tip of her nose; Emily did not tell her to wipe it off.
On another sunny morning, her mother drove them to a private garden, open to the public, in Cold Ashton. Emily did not offer to drive, but later thought that perhaps being in the driver’s seat would have been fractionally less tense than being a passenger and immediately dismissed the idea as ridiculous. By mid-morning, the garden had begun to feel crowded too. She bought her mother two Thalictrums from the shop, then they left, Emily murmuring, ‘I don’t see why we can’t sit in your beautiful garden, which is free of crowds.’ That is what they proceeded to do, eating fried halloumi salad and chasing away wasps. Emily went up to the apple tree when her mother had gone inside with the empty dishes and bowls. There, if you looked very closely, if you knew where to look, were scratch marks near the base of the trunk, about six or ten inches up, where Teapot had regularly sharpened her claws and pushed off for her climb up to the tree’s lower branches.
But she was unsettled. In the in-between times of the day, she worried about the barrage of physical and psychological tests awaiting her on her return to London, and she wrote, or tried to write, managing no more than a constipatedly produced hundred or hundred and fifty words a day which she undid on the following. She waited and waited for the sensation of being in her childhood home, and the kind of regression to safety and security and mindlessness it promised, to wrap her in its cocoon, but it didn’t arrive, not even when she was lying in her old bed, trying to summon that woodcut of three birds flying over the dark clump of a wood, that certain slant of light, but no, the comfort adamantly withheld itself.
‘You’re distracted, dear,’ her mother said, during an aimless late afternoon walk in the town. Emily had always thought of the place as shabby and down-at-heel, especially with its ghastly neo-Gothic market cross that added to the air of grubbiness, and nowhere near as picturesque as a market town in this part of the world could be. Now, outside the vintage clothing store at the bottom of Town Street, with its enormous planter of all the kitsch municipal plants (petunias, pansies, asters), she felt pity flit through her chest, pity at the name of the shop, an anagram of Shepton Mallet, pity at the place’s provinciality, its attempts to spruce up while managing to achieve only something resolutely second-rate. She wanted her mother to hold her in this moment of sadness and say, like she used to when Emily was little and had scratched her knee or knocked her head, ‘There, there, darling, it’ll be all right, here’s a kiss to make it better.’ The moment passed.
‘Oh, am I?’ Emily returned to her mother’s observation. ‘It’s nothing,’ she wanted to add, but didn’t.
‘Is it because you’re a bit disappointed that you didn’t find what you were looking for in Granny’s stuff?’
The question, so uncharacteristically direct and enquiring, even inquisitive, surprised Emily; she hadn’t seen it coming.
‘No, it’s not that,’ she said, and immediately withdrew it, ‘Well, yes, a little bit, to be honest’ – then looking at her mother and smiling – ‘just a tiny bit.’ The retraction would save her from more questions.
‘I’m sorry,’ her mother said.
‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing, ’twas always thus with research,’ Emily reassured her mother, speaking too much. ‘Let’s see if we can find a bottle of Mitsouko for you in this . . . little town.’
Inwardly, she mocked her own feeling that this visit had a somewhat valedictory air about it; how absurdly self-pitying – she was only going in for a more or less routine procedure, not undergoing a serious, possibly life-threatening, medical intervention.
In August, the only month of the year when some respite was to be had from the ever-grinding machinery of admin and e-mail, when everyone went away on holiday having activated their part-wishful part-defiant ‘out of office’ auto-replies, Emily researched, imagined, and wrote, imprisoning herself in her flat, content to look out at the sentry-stand of giant plane trees and the dusty common behind it. The sun had never held any appeal for her; she was happier with its presence, to be sure, but that was only for the light, not the warmth. The unchanging and monotonous grooves in which her life shuttled back and forth, back and forth: were all lives, looked at closely enough, this boring? Was it fiction, the way things were selected to be represented, that led us to believe that lives were interesting, had legible shapes? Perhaps things were interesting only in the stylization, when they were narrated within the bounds of form, not in the living. In which case, the stylization, or the modelling, if you will, had a fundamental falsehood at its heart.
When the autumn term began, she realized that she only saw Salim nowadays in the medical context of hospital visits. (Her own phalanx of tests she showed up for alone.) Behind that understanding was a more melancholy, more shadowy one: her decision had put them both on a trajectory where seeing each other had become even more constrained by awkwardness, by an even weightier implied obligation than the accident – it seemed so long ago, as if it belonged to a former life that she could only dream about in fleeting flashes – had imposed upon them.
Was it four years ago or five that he had looked all around him at night and thought, ‘This is a sea of sand. There’s nowhere to run, like there’s nowhere to run in the middle of the sea – the sand, like water, would kill you. Maybe one drowned in water faster, but sand promised the same fate, only a little more delayed.’ All things were beginning to become what they were not: sand became water, water caught fire. They were all signs. And that’s when you knew that your life had taken a wrong turn, and it was going to go on like this, on the wrong path, until your breath left your body. That’s what Medhanie had said, all those years ago, so many that he felt all that had happened to a different person, so distant was that young man to what he was now. Crouched in the dinghy, he was reminded of those cold nights in the desert, the sky a black sheet stretched out far above him, except that it was not black at all, but with patchy smears and trails of what looked like dense whitish dust, as if someone had taken out an old black cloth and strung it up without shaking it out first. If you focused on the dust, you knew that they were stars, but if you allowed your eyes to swim a bit, they became dust again. No, not dust – it was like smoke, as if whitish smoke had got stuck to that black cloth and become like particles. And then he had that drowning, falling feeling again, except he didn’t know whether he had fallen upwards and was drowning in that dusty sheet above or in the black sand under and around him stretching away forever and forever in all directions.
