Some Kind of Grace, page 12
They looked at one another.
‘You cannot have it,’ said Blackbeard.
‘But I am a traveller. I need my passport.’
‘We need no passports.’
‘If you were to cross the border into another country, you would need them.’
Blackbeard grinned at his men who grinned back. One of them slipped away. Others meantime had carried out the man who had died on his knees.
As they waited, McLeod wondered what had happened to the fat son. Likely he had found very few to support him. Blackbeard for weeks must have been preparing this coup.
The passport suggested what might have happened to the legal heir. It was sodden with blood. An effort had been made to dry and clean it, but it was still sticky and moist, and between some of the pages the blood was still fresh enough to run. McLeod held it by a corner with distaste. It made little difference whose blood it was; what mattered was that it wasn’t his own. He dropped the passport into the fire and rubbed his hands on his trousers.
The others laughed, Blackbeard among them. They went outside with him to watch him in the moonlight climb on to the horse and, with his two escorts, ride away. Other horsemen rode in the gate as they rode out; these shouted what McLeod took to be allegiance to Blackbeard. The whole village was roused, and the other villages through which they passed on the way to the car.
His guards were silent, but when they reached the Land-Rover and their two comrades there they became gleefully communicative. With his own sword, they shouted to the stars, the chief’s son’s head had been cut off by Blackbeard. It had fallen like a child’s ball on to the old man’s breast, where the feringhee’s passport had been lying.
When they had gone McLeod was glad to creep down to the river and plunge his hands into it. But the sight and feel and even the smell of all that blood could not so easily be washed away. As he crouched there by the river, in his mind the blood was spurting not from the headless trunk of the eunuch, but from the bodies of Kemp and Margaret Duncan. It wasn’t necessary for him to go to that village now, he was at last convinced.
Eleven
That night he slept badly and had another terrifying dream. In it the small Minister stood in the middle of a vast desert, smiling, and pulling the petals off yellow roses to let them drift down upon the faces of the young mother and her dead baby. In it, too, the fat eunuch’s head kept falling from the head of the great Buddha at Kalak, falling, but never reaching the ground where McLeod, passport in hand, waited in a rain of blood with the teacher, the headmaster, and the Governor’s secretary.
Next day he remained by the river to rest and prepare for the long journey back, but found he could not rest, in body or mind. He wandered along the river-bank and into the poplar woods, gazing for half an hour at a time at the water or the green leaves, and not knowing what, if anything, he hoped to see. When he thought of Kemp and Margaret Duncan they were as little weight in his mind as the leaves that he broke off the thin, silver-barked trees were in his hand.
Next morning early when he suddenly began, in a frenzy he could not control, to strike camp he did not know until the last moment that when he drove off it would not be back towards the capital but onwards to the village.
For four hours he drove across that bleak, steppe-like country where there were no roads, no trees, no thorn-bushes, no flowers, no insects even. Yet there were times when he felt the high, shimmering yellow plateau was thronged, as if an army was marching across it. So strong was that illusion sometimes that he had to stop the car, in a kind of paralysis, until those thousands of men became again dust and rock and shadow and emptiness. There were other hazards and obstacles which usually he would have faced with stoicism; but now these bogs of soft, tawny dust three feet deep, these ripples of hard sand, and these great humps of rock like gigantic clots of blood, had in them a conscious malevolence that again and again unnerved him.
The silence, too, was hostile: the noise of the engine and the crunch of the wheels were its attendants merely; they added to rather than broke it. To break it he shouted; gibberish it must have been, for he could not remember it afterwards. Once he fired his revolver. And once he stopped the car, jumped out eagerly, and began trudging through the ankle-deep dust. He was almost a hundred yards from the car before he stopped, sobbing, and found he had no purpose at all. There as he stood, sweating and panting, he saw quite close a small heap of bones, and could hardly convince himself they were not his.
When, in the heat of the afternoon, he arrived at the small valley where the village was situated, he found it even more barren than he had expected. It was a mystery why any people should have chosen to settle there. No stream could be seen, and the small fields must be watered by hand from a deep well. In the lee of the high red cliff was the village, a cluster of mud hovels; and at the foot of the cliff were the dark holes of caves. In one of those Kemp and Margaret Duncan had been murdered.
As he sat in the car, listening to birds that sang with an inexplicable insistent joy, he watched the village lead its life. Some dots of red and blue were women and girls working in the fields. Men carried on their shoulders skins of water from a well in the centre of the community, and emptied them into canals that ramified through the fields. In the distance he thought he could make out a small herd of sheep and goats.
On a hillside near by children tended some bony cattle. One played a pipe. Its music, amidst the happiness of the birds, was happy, too. The others, though aware of the car, laughed and gabbled shrilly; then three of them, boys about ten or twelve, came cautiously towards it. Their friends screamed advice and warning. The boldest of the three, the one who kept in front, unlike his two companions had no loin cloth, only a dirty white shirt. As he waited for them, impatient at their slowness, he kept scratching at his privates.
McLeod stared at them in disgust and aversion. With their shaven heads, dark faces, and clawing hands, they were more like a species of monkey than human children. To prove it, when they were about thirty yards away, they began to grub in the earth, for stones to throw at the car, McLeod was sure. He got out his gun ready to fire it above their heads and scare them off. They raced and leapt about in their search, picking up stones, examining them, and dropping them again. Now and then one pleased them and they kept it. Did they think, thought McLeod, that stones of some particular colour or shape had a magical power to shatter glass and metal?
In about ten minutes they came together and began a laughing argument, with glances at McLeod. At last the one naked from the navel took all the stones they had selected and walked shyly towards the car. He kept grinning. Behind him his two friends leapt up and down, their fists clenched. On the hillside a cow lowed sourly, and the child went on piping.
Suddenly, when he was about fifteen yards from the car, the boy raced forward, with his skinny arm outstretched. Lying in the palm of his hand were three pebbles, as smooth and oval as birds’ eggs, and as delicately coloured. He waited outside the car for half a minute; then, when McLeod made no move to accept the gifts, he placed them on the bonnet, which was so hot from the sun he snatched away his hand and grinned up at McLeod, who could not grin back.
This child, he thought, this kind of monkey that knew how to offer gifts, also knew treachery and murder. The gaunt head, noticeable ribs, and swollen penis, were so hideous to him at that moment that he could have shot the boy without any compunction. Did he not look so like Jamil, the confessed murderer, that he was probably his son? But then, every child in this village was a murderer’s.
Starting the car, McLeod drove slowly down the track among the fields and houses. The women in their red and blue rags stood close together and hid their faces. The men had stopped their work, too, and were staring towards the car, with expressions of fear. One who had been relieving himself behind a boulder stood up. Some children, alarmed by the adults’ stillness, ran excitedly about, looking for parents.
When he stopped in an open space beside the well, McLeod noticed that one of the stones placed on the bonnet by the boy was still there. Close to the well was a shrine, the usual jumble of stones, sticks, and rags. Behind it, on the slope up to the caves, were many sharp stones that indicated graves.
Slowly they gathered, and approached. If ever he had been doubtful about their guilt, their cringing meekness, their expectation of punishment, would have ended it. Amidst all the signs of poverty, malnutrition, and disease, were others: bruises, useless arms, limping legs, bodies uncomfortable with pain. A few, the boldest, tried to smile a ghastly welcome. Three young girls even tried to ogle him from behind their filthy hoods. They seemed to McLeod as sexually repellent as female baboons. If these had been raped by the police, for whom had been the punishment?
He sat there, leaning on the driving-wheel, wondering why he had come, and wishing he hadn’t. Once he felt for his revolver in his pocket, but it was obvious that as long as he left before darkness he was safe enough from these human jackals. The only danger from them in sunlight was that they might transmit a loathsome disease. He saw one man half of whose face was shrivelled away.
The headman was there, a long, skinny, glaikit, grey-haired fellow whose loin swathings trailed behind him like a tail. He knew it was his duty to go forward and speak to the stranger, but he lacked the courage. Imbecilely sniggering, he stood with his right hand pressed against his breast; or rather with half his hand, because three fingers were missing; a bayonet could have sliced them off.
McLeod decided to come out of the car. As he did so, they all cried out and crept back; but one little girl of about seven, with her bare-bottomed brother of three clinging froglike to her back, came boldly forward and stood gazing up at him. He ignored her and knocked the pebble off the bonnet of the car. She followed him.
‘Hallo,’ she said, without a smile. ‘Hallo. Hallo.’
He frowned down at her. The infant on her back, frightened, began to wail.
‘Hallo,’ the child repeated, still as dourly.
She must surely have learned the word from Donald and Margaret. Children in the capital used it often enough, to help them in their begging; but then, they encountered many foreigners in the streets. Here English-speaking travellers might pass once in a lifetime. The last such travellers had been Kemp and Margaret Duncan.
‘Hallo.’ It was now a challenge.
Still he could not bring himself to respond.
An old woman, assisted by another not just as old, was standing beside the headman. She must have been telling him what to do, for soon he came shuffling and sniggering towards McLeod. On his left cheek was a large sore, probably syphilitic, but it could also have been a wound gone bad; a blow with the butt of a gun could have caused it. At first he couldn’t speak, his mouth was so parched with fear. When he did manage to make sounds, to McLeod they were unintelligible, so that he wondered if these people spoke a dialect he wouldn’t be able to understand. Yet he had understood Jamil in prison well enough. Gap-toothed and big-tongued, the headman kept trying.
The old woman screeched from the background: ‘Welcome to our village, sahib.’
The rest muttered among themselves and looked at her in terrified reproach. She was certainly not speaking for them. No stranger would ever be welcome in their village again.
She screamed furiously at them: ‘Are you beasts or people? We shall give the stranger tea, and then he will go.’
McLeod addressed the headman. The little girl, with her weeping brother on her back, kept staring as if she had a loaded gun directed at his heart, and in a moment would fire it.
‘I do not want tea,’ said McLeod harshly. ‘I shall tell you why I have come.’ He raised his voice so that all of them could hear him. ‘Four months ago two friends of mine, an Englishman and his wife, came here to this village, just as I have come today. Perhaps you offered them tea, too. But in the night, when the snow was falling, you killed them. In the prison in the city I have spoken to the two men from your village who used the knives; but all of you were guilty, and I have come to see what kind of people you are who welcome strangers and afterwards murder them in the dark.’
While the rest whimpered and turned their faces away, the old woman in a rage hobbled up to him; her attendant, afraid, held back. She pulled her cotton hood aside. One of her eyes was white and sightless, but the other glittered with a far-sighted determination. Her skin was so tight and transparent the shape of her skull was seen before the features of her face.
‘You have spoken to Jamil?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘He is my son.’
‘Old woman, he was your son.’
Sharp to see his meaning, she smiled. ‘He is dead?’
‘Yes, he is dead.’
She kept smiling. It was a smile he was never afterwards to forget. By it she accepted and forgave, and then passed beyond acceptance and forgiveness.
‘God’s will be done,’ she said. ‘And Sarwar, too?’
‘Yes.’ Then he surprised himself, but apparently not her, by demanding to see the families of the two murderers.
‘You have looked at us, sahib,’ she said. ‘You have seen that we are very poor and miserable. It has pleased you. But surely there has been enough punishment?’
‘Can there ever be enough punishment for such a crime?’
She put her hand on the little girl’s head. ‘This is Jamil’s daughter,’ she said. ‘The boy is his son. They are my grand-children.’
The little girl still stared up. She had shot him dead a dozen times, and she wished him dead again.
‘Which one is their mother?’ he asked.
‘She is not here. She is in her house, sick. If you have a child in your belly, it is not good if men with heavy boots kick you, whether the kicks be just or not.’
The last thing he had expected was irony, if it was irony.
‘Just enough,’ he muttered; but, he thought, nothing in the world could make them just.
‘So she is sick. When I tell her her husband is dead, perhaps she will get well again. It is bad to be afraid that a thing is going to happen; but after it has happened, when nothing can be done to prevent it, when God has decided, you are able to live again.’
Her other son, the headman, feeling it was time he earned his eminence, approached again.
‘Sahib,’ he whined, ‘my people beg you not to bring the policemen back.’
The whole village then burst into a monkey-like lamentation.
The old woman listened in scorn. McLeod felt sure that the Colonel and his men had not dared to harm her; she had the spiritual force that Mrs. Bryson had seen in Donald Kemp. Yet, being their brain and heart, had not the evil to propose the murders and the courage to carry them out originated in her? It might well have been that most of them, from sheer pusilla-nimousness, had not been willing, but had been forced into it by her. He could imagine her making each one handle the knives before, and touch the blood after.
But how to show hatred to an old woman half-blind and smelling of disease? He knew he should get into his car and drive away from this place; but he could not; here, awake, he was having his most hideous dream.
‘If you show me the place where it happened,’ he cried, ‘I shall go. The police will not come back.’
If he had asked for a dozen of them to be shot before his eyes, there couldn’t have been greater consternation. The headman covered his face with his hands and wept. Others did the same. Everywhere McLeod looked men and women were covering their faces and weeping. Except in one place: in front of him the old woman and her grand-daughter were dry-eyed and scornful. Because of them, he thought the contrition and terror of the others must be genuine.
‘You will show me,’ he said to the old woman. He turned and looked up with a shudder at the caves in the foot of the cliff.
‘Yes, I shall show you,’ she replied, and lifting her head she cried to the rest not to follow but to go back to their work. She would show the sahib what he wanted to see, and then he would go away.
Then she told her grand-daughter to put the infant down, and help her to climb the path. The child at once obeyed, and let her brother slip down to the ground, where he sat bawling. Ignoring him, she placed her grandmother’s hand on her shoulders and both of them set out slowly towards the path that led up to the caves.
McLeod let them get about fifty yards ahead before he followed them, keeping the same distance away. The path passed boulders which were the village latrines; behind every one were sun-dried excrements. It passed, too, a corner of the graveyard with tombstones sharp as slates, without inscriptions.
Some of the caves were inhabited. Out of one a naked child tottered to meet the old woman. She bent and patted its matted, filthy head, and then shouted to its mother who, suckling a baby, crept timidly out to seize the child and drag it howling into the hole in the rock.
No wonder, thought McLeod, murder had been done here. These people had not reached the stage of morality; baboons he had thought of, baboons he thought of again.
In front, the old woman and the little girl had stopped outside a cave. It must be the one.
He did not hurry. He halted to look back down at the village. No one was working; everyone was staring up at him. Then, outwardly calm but with his heart thumping audibly, he went on and stood at the entrance to the cave for half a minute before suddenly stooping and entering. It was more like a cell than a cave, with a stink of dung and urine. The floor was of the same red rock as the walls. There was just room for two persons to lie stretched out, if they lay close together. He imagined Donald and Margaret asleep there, their feet towards the entrance; and it was easy after that to imagine the two chosen men creep in, their movements softened by the snow, their knives ready. Well, Margaret had been spared the terror of death; she must have been killed in her sleep; and Donald too had passed straight into whatever after-world he had condescended to believe in. It would certainly not be the same as Purdie’s, with angels in white nightshirts strolling amidst flowers, and blessing the sweet celestial picnickers.
