Текст книги "Wall of Days"

Автор книги: Alastair Bruce

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 14 страниц)

9

I sleep for a short time. I wake when people should be starting the working day. Andalus has not eaten the food I brought back. I help myself to half of it.

He is awake. I say to him, ‘We are going to the Marshal’s office now.

I will get answers from him. It will be easier if you talk.’ He sits with his hands on his legs, palms upwards. His feet are within touching distance. Sun glints through tears in the canvas behind him.

‘You need to explain yourself, my friend. I cannot look after you forever. Sooner or later you will be on your own.’

It is no surprise to me when he does not answer.

We go out into the sunshine and walk the short distance to the complex. There are four people in the courtyard of the town hall.

The Marshal is in conversation with another man. He is tall, wears a hood and I cannot see any of his features. The Marshal is the only one who faces me. The other two, I am convinced, are Elba and Amhara.

Though it is a little distance away and they have their backs to me and are wearing scarves over their heads, I am convinced. As soon as I enter the courtyard the Marshal notices me. He seems to whisper something to the three. They straighten up but do not turn. They walk through the open door behind the Marshal, the tall man leading the other two. The girl seems to hang back and begins to turn but the woman places a hand on her back and guides her through the door, which closes after them.

The Marshal waits for me, his hands crossed in front of him, unlike a soldier.

‘What can I help you with today?’ he asks.

Enough is enough, I decide. ‘We had an appointment yesterday.’

‘Did we?’

‘You mean to say you don’t remember?’

He shrugs.

‘Do you recognise me yet?’ I ask. I wonder if he notes my sarcastic tone. ‘You have had time to think, time to remember. I do not, I’m afraid, recognise you. You were perhaps a minor official when I left.’

The Marshal remains standing, not answering my question, waiting for me to finish.

‘I think you know who I am,’ I continue. ‘I think you know very well. What I can’t decide is why you would choose not to acknowledge me. Throughout my life I have been either hero or villain, depending on your political leanings. I have never been an object of indifference.’

The Marshal allows a smile to cross his lips.

‘But I am not the only issue here. The man I brought with me is one that has to be reckoned with. He is perhaps now of little use, of little consequence. Perhaps what he has seen has driven the life force from him but what he represents is important. The possibilities encased in his being here are what should be of interest. Perhaps the man Andalus is gone but we should understand why there is that void, the void in the space where he stands.’

‘You’re a philosopher,’ says the Marshal. ‘Or a poet.’

I do not respond to this.

‘Where is this man, then, this Andalus?’ He emphasises the second syllable, whereas he should know to emphasise the third. It is a mistake some of my less well-informed people used to make.

I do not correct him. I turn around, reaching out to Andalus who I assume is behind me. He is not. There is no sign of him.

I turn back to the Marshal. ‘He was here. He has wandered off.’

The Marshal smiles and turns to go.

‘I am not finished,’ I say. I have raised my voice.

He turns back. The smile has vanished.

‘Where are Elba and Amhara?’

‘Who do you mean?’

‘You know she doesn’t want to be a part of your plan. Hesitant at the very least.’

The Marshal looks at me without replying. His face is blank.

‘I saw them go inside.’

‘They are not who you say they are.’

I decide not to pursue that. Instead I say, ‘I would like to talk about my situation. I would like a decision from you. A deadline, at the least.’

‘You would like to talk,’ says the Marshal. It is not a question.

Before I can reply he stands aside and motions me through the door.

I walk straight ahead towards the staircase leading to the Marshal’s office. There is no sign of Elba and Amhara. Through a corridor I see the hall I was in last night. I think about going straight in there and questioning the meaning of the erasure of my name. But that can wait.

I walk up the stairs, past the doors to offices belonging to clerks and lower officials and straight through the door to the Marshal’s office.

Inside, things have changed slightly. There is a rug on the floor that wasn’ t there before and a cabinet against the right-hand wall. I notice too my portrait has been removed from above the desk. The space where it used to hang is darker than the surrounds. The desk and chair are the same and showing their age. I run my fingers over a scratch in the desk’ s surface. I remember making it – a slip of a knife. I remember it becoming dark with age. I turn to face the Marshal who just now appears in the door.

‘You seem to know your way around.’

‘Apparently so.’

Momentarily I feel as if I am back in my post and this man is the supplicant, instead of me. I find myself moving to the chair behind the desk but stop. I stand to one side and let the Marshal pass. He asks me to sit.

‘How may I help?’ The Marshal sits behind the desk, facing me.

‘You no doubt know who I am,’ I begin. ‘You no doubt know that according to the terms of my sentence I am not allowed to return to the settlement on pain of death. Nonetheless I have returned. You must be wondering why I have done so, why I have flouted the terms of my sentence.’

I pause but the Marshal says nothing.

‘I am surprised, I have to say, at the lack of urgency shown by you at my presence, at Andalus’ s presence indeed. I am surprised I am being left alone and not arrested. It is an agreeable turn of events in some ways but one which I would like to understand. We have things to clear up here. Firstly, you should be aware of the reasons for my presence since I believe as Marshal you have a duty to react to them.

That is my major concern, as it has always been. Secondly, I would like to understand what this means. Why has the policy of the town been to ignore me, to pretend they don’t remember, for this must be what is going on? Perhaps it is not my concern. I am, after all, no longer of this place. Nonetheless I would like to understand what it means. Will I be forced to leave again? Will I face execution? Will I have to serve time in prison within the colony? I hope for leniency, given the dangers I have faced bringing Andalus here, bringing him to your notice. Thirdly, I would like to talk about the events of the past, about what we did.’

He interrupts me. ‘Who is this man you have brought to us?’

‘You must know who he is. Andalus, the General of Axum, the one who brought near destruction on our people, as we did on his. The one I fought, the one with whom I concluded a peace.’

‘I have not seen Andalus.’ This time he changes his pronunciation.

‘He appears to be traumatised. He is certainly not the same man who led Axum. Something has happened and I believe we need to try to discover what it is. In the time since I found him he has not spoken, has not said a word. He is docile. Quite tame. Much like a dog, you might say. He does what you tell him. Every now and then I can see a glimmer in his eyes of who he used to be. There was an instance on the island when I was chopping wood. He came up behind me, like a ghost, and the expression in his eyes… I did not trust him for a while after that but he seems harmless.’

‘You were on an island?’

‘Yes.’ I look at him unblinking. ‘I survived.’

‘Tell me about this island.’

I contain my irritation at the changing of the subject and decide to humour him. ‘My calculations told me I was on the very edge of our territories as agreed with Axum. Any further and I would have been in violation of the Treaty and you could have been back at war. Banished by the town I saved, for carrying out what was necessary to save them, only to initiate war as a result of my banishment. You did not think of that possibility when you gave me a raft and a few provisions.’

‘I gave you a raft?’

I make a point of maintaining my patience. ‘Not you personally, though I’m sure you had some role in the whole proceeding. Not you but your office, specifically the man who occupied that seat before you, Marshal Abel.’

‘Abel?’

‘Yes, Abel. You are not going to tell me you have forgotten him as well.’

The Marshal smiles and looks down at his desk. ‘So, tell me about the island.’

Again I feel this is a waste of time but it is dawning on me that my people have lost a sense of urgency. Things have slowed down. I begin:

‘The island is a dead place or to be accurate, a dying place. It is like a body lying face down in a pool of muddy water, slowly sinking, slowly drowning.’ I stop myself.

‘The island I have documented well. I have brought my notes with me.’ I tap the bag that I hold. ‘My intention was to hand over the notes to the town’ s geographer. Though the island is disappearing there is knowledge there and since we have lost such a lot, a little is valuable.’

The Marshal holds up his hand to stop me opening the bag. ‘That can wait,’ he says.

I fix him with a stare. ‘You are right. There is little of interest on the island. The island is not the story here, or at least not the main story. What is of interest is Andalus and what is to be done with him.’

‘Still, humour me. How long were you on the island and how did you come to return to us?’

‘Ten years. I arrived there about three weeks after being sent away from here. It was the first dry land I had seen. Relatively dry at least.

I set up camp. I found water. I caught fish. I made fire from peat and from wood found in a small forest. I harvested grains and tubers. I caught seagulls every now and then. They were mostly dead already. I worked out how long the island would last, how quickly it was slipping into the water. I noted the rates at which food stocks dwindled – the fish, the birds – and worked out how long my fuel sources would last. I made annotations on the types of fish I caught, the varieties of grains I found, the earth, the rocks. I did not plant more because I did not need more. My life I realised would run out with the island’s. That was how it was for all the time I was there.

‘One day Andalus washed ashore. There he was, a large white being stranded on my shore. It took me a while to recognise him but eventually I did. He showed no signs of recognising me. In fact he showed no signs of noticing what was around him at all.

‘I began to realise what his presence might mean and decided I should do what was right and face death by bringing him to your attention. And here I am.’

‘And here you are.’ He pauses, then asks, ‘And how long do you plan to stay?’

I shake my head. ‘There are still questions, things to be done.’ I lean in towards the Marshal. ‘What have you done with Marshal Abel?

What have you done with his lover, Tora?’

‘Tora?’

‘My lover, before I left.’

‘You think I should know you?’

‘If you don’t, you are a simpleton.’

His expression changes. ‘You are a guest in this town. Do not forget.’

‘A guest you don’t know what to do with. You have choices: give him the best room, or, try to ignore him in the hope that he will go away, or, take him outside into the orange groves, set on him, slit his throat, bury him so no one can see.’

‘We will not kill you. We are a good people, a forward-looking people.’ With that the Marshal leans back in his chair, folds his arms behind his head and looks up at the ceiling. He speaks again. ‘You were here last night.’

This throws me slightly. ‘How did you know it was me?’

‘Your footprints were all over the place.’

‘How did you know they were mine?’

The Marshal shrugs. ‘Who else?’

‘The door was open.’

He says nothing.

‘I walked into the hall. I have seen what you’ve done.’

‘What have I done?’

‘You have erased my name from the wall of names.’

‘Erased, you say?’

‘Erased. Perhaps a joke. Perhaps some ill-advised conception of public good.’

‘Explain?’

‘Someone, you, the real Marshal, someone, not liking what we did, chose to eliminate traces of the person most closely associated with the error. Error, as they saw it.’

‘What error is that?’

I hesitate, wondering if he is being deliberately obtuse, or is admitting that he too sees the merits of what we did. ‘The error, as some like to call it, of eliminating the weak, of following the policy that killed some yet saved so many. The policy designed to fix our world, broken in an original sin. The policy that some called a cull.’

The Marshal stares at me for a few moments. ‘Why were you here?’

‘Why was I here? I was passing. The door was open. I was curious.

I wanted to see my old rooms again. I wanted to see my name on the list.’

‘And you were disappointed when you did not see your name?’

‘Of course. You do not erase history simply because you do not ap prove, simply because you wish you had another and this is clearly what has happened here.’

‘By removing names from a wall?’

‘It’s emblematic. The removal of the names stands in the stead of something greater, something darker.’

‘You think we should keep telling ourselves the stories that frighten us?’

I think I might be on the verge of extracting a confession from the Marshal.

‘Why should you be afraid of it? The past has as much power over you as you allow it. Punish if you like. Crucify if you must. Burn the guilty and throw their ashes to the wind, blacken their names and cast out their families. Do not sweep under the carpet. Avenge guilt and move on. Even the guilty deserve to be remembered, deserve the status of being guilty.’ Too much, I tell myself.

The Marshal betrays no emotion. After a while he looks down at the table and says, ‘Let’s go down to the hall then. Let’s see if what you’re saying has merit.’ I want to remark that what I say has merit regardless of what is on the wall but I hold my tongue.

We do not talk again until we are in the Great Hall. I am about to point out the error when the Marshal says, ‘Madara, Abel. Not a long line yet, though an auspicious one.’

I am surprised to say the least. ‘The first is not the right name. You must know that. And you have an Abel there but no end date to his rule. Tell me, where is he, what has become of him? And why is your name not there? Are you not proud to be Marshal?

He snaps at me. ‘I have more important things to do than write my name on a wall. It will get done soon enough.’

‘Regardless, Madara is still wrong.’

‘What should be written on the wall?’

‘I think you know the answer to that but I will indulge you,’ I say. ‘The first Marshal of Bran was Bran. Me, the man named for the settlement. The second Marshal was Abel, my second-in-command.

He became Marshal when I was banished. You may very well be the third Marshal but I cannot say for sure.’

‘You cannot say.’

‘Cannot say whether you’re the third, the fourth, the fifth. You know very well what I mean. The names on that list, if there are three, should be Bran, Abel, Jura. That is the error. The wrong names, the wrong number.’

The Marshal walks up to the wall, stands with his nose almost touching it, looking at the names. He puts his hand to them and rubs his fingertips over the gold lettering. ‘You asked if I was proud. I am very proud to be Marshal of Bran and to follow such men. Madara then Abel, a man even greater than the first.’ He pauses. ‘On wood such as this you would have to be extremely careful sanding it if your alterations were not to stand out. Extremely careful. It has such a soft texture, is so finely grained that only an expert craftsman would be able to remove paint and then repaint without leaving any traces of his work. Come and have a look.’

I step closer.

‘Do you see any marks?’ He points to the name Madara. ‘Do you see any difference in the wood?’

I have to admit I do not.

‘Then,’ he says, barely bothering to conceal his triumph, ‘You have to concede that you are wrong.’

‘You said yourself an expert craftsman could have done it.’

‘You misunderstand. But, never mind.’ He turns away from me, his back to the wall. ‘You say you know a great deal about history but I am not sure you have learnt from it. Nevertheless it has been a pleasure talking with you. I enjoy the exchange of ideas. You must come again and we can continue our discussion. Of course you should announce yourself when you do and not walk around like a thief.’ I cannot tell if he is serious or not. ‘But for now you must go.’ He walks off.

At the entrance to the hall he turns around, looks me in the eyes and says, ‘Madara was our first ruler. In some ways a truly great man.

He wrote our constitution. He saved us all from starvation. But he was brutal, too brutal. Perhaps a man of his time. Then that time ended and he could no longer be a man of his time. He had to go. He had to end. That is his story. Abel took over. His was the true vision, a vision that healed us and gave us stability and a sense of purpose, an identity we have come to cherish.’

I am too stunned to reply. I can only watch the Marshal leave. But then I shout, ‘You cannot deny me forever, Jura. You will have to reckon with me in the end.’

I turn back to the wall, run my palm over the wood again. I walk out of the room, out of the building, out of the courtyard. As I go I look up at the window. Perhaps a shadow, a hand, a pale face. Perhaps nothing.

I have left without answers but I will be back. If I can’t get answers from the Marshal, I will find them myself. I will find proof of what is being done here. I will find Abel and Tora.

I walk quickly to Abel’s house again. I knock hard at the door, place my ear to the wood and listen intently. There is nothing. Once more I knock and listen.

After a few moments I tiptoe away from the door to the window. I cannot see through it. The sun shines brightly on the pane and blinds me. I place my face against the glass. At first I can see nothing. One by one objects become visible: the stone floor, a chair, a table, a chest against a wall. On the chest a jug and basin. At the far end of the room a passageway deeper into the house. The chair has been knocked over.

Peering to my left I can make out where the door should be but cannot see it as it is just behind a wall that juts out, blocking my vision. I imagine someone standing there, waiting for me to leave. I press further into the glass, using my hands placed around my face to block out the glare of the sun. The floor is covered in a grey film of dust. It is thin, just a few days old.

It is obvious to me by now that I will get no easy answers. Few people look at me in the streets. One, the judge, has run away from me.

The two, three hundred people whose names I knew have vanished. A Marshal who is plainly not a leader of men. A woman who pretends not to know me or her predecessor, pretends reluctantly perhaps, out of duty, obligation. That I do not know.

They seem to be trying to forget. That would be a tragedy. It is only the weak who forget their past. If you kill a man who has no memory of his place in the world, none of the ties that bind him to his community, can you say you have really killed a man at all? What is a man but his past and his companions? There would be no loss felt. With peoples too. Only a weak people forgets its past, a nation that can be wiped out and restarted without anyone noticing. In place of a history, only a silence with no one to hear it. A pathetic people and if that is what they choose then they deserve what comes to them.

My people have been given a history by war. They were trimmed down the better to face an inhospitable world. That is the history of these people. The man running away, the one who knocked me over, the people sitting in the kitchens ignoring me, the Marshal, Elba, they should not forget where they came from. Born of hunger and necessity they are the survivors, they are the ones that had to bear the burden of the future, a future that the weak impinged upon. Do they feel guilt?

That is not their burden. There is no question of guilt anywhere in this land, there has been no guilt since we first started fighting, since we first started slitting each other’s throats in a frantic bid to survive.

These people do not have the imagination to feel guilt. They do not have the right to feel it.

Is it simply a case of forcing them into remembrance, forced memory? Is it simply a case of gathering enough proof so they cannot deny me, until they take a breath and pluck up the courage to stare the past – and me – in the face?

Duty is what they should feel. Not guilt but duty. They have a duty as the last representatives of a once-dominant species to remember that which came before. For we have nothing else.

It is disappointing to me what they seem to have become. Shadows.

Ghosts. Have I created them like this? Have I scared them into hiding in the corners like children? No. I too am the product of a shattered world. But I showed how it can be mended, how it can be pulled together piece by bloody piece.

I see them approach from afar, one much taller than the other. Elba and Amhara. They have already seen me. I stop and wait for them to come closer. Amhara wears a red coat. Again I am reminded of when I first saw her. I have the same feeling now I had then.

‘Morning,’ Elba says.

‘Hello Elba. Hello Amhara.’ The girl looks at the ground.

Elba continues, ‘I am sorry if I was abrupt last night.’

I shake my head.

‘Would you like to try again?’ she asks.

‘Try calling again?’

‘No. Well, yes. I am trying to invite you to dinner again,’ she says.

‘Tonight?’

‘I would like that,’ I reply.

‘Good.’ She does not say goodbye but turns and is off. I watch them make their way down the street. At the corner, Amhara turns to look at me. I wave at her. She does not wave back.

There is a limit to what I can do during daylight but there are at least two things. I can start knocking on doors, trying to find someone who I recognise or someone who will talk to me. I can also head back into the orange groves and to the clearing in the middle of it, the place where we hanged the weak.

Of course there is the risk that they will shut the gates when I am out and not allow me back in but I will have to take that risk. I want to find evidence of my work. Some documents were stored in a hut on the site and if they are still there might help my case.

On my way to the gates I see Andalus in the distance. I am annoyed at his wanderings but I cannot keep him close, in my vision, all the time and still pursue the truth.

I am not used to limitations. On the island the limits were only of my choosing.

I call to him but he is too far off. He is a grey shape in the distance, a shape broken up by the heat mirage. I am reminded of the first morning at the town gates. I run to catch up with him. He turns a corner and is gone. I beat the wall of a house with my fist. The door to the house opens. It opens towards me. I can see a man’ s shadow between gap and frame. I wait for him to show his face. He does not come out. The door begins to close. I shout and run towards it but I am too late.

I walk through the trees, through the dappled, green light, dragging my hands through the grass and along the bark of the trees.

I walk through the light, the sun cooled by the shade of the citrus leaves. I lift my hands to my face. I smell the acids, the oils. I realise, in some ways I am entranced by my old town, by what it has become. Entranced and frustrated. Can one give oneself over to love completely that which is not perfect, that which is wrong?

I want to say yes. Part of me wants to yield to the town. I know I could slip back into its embrace, yield myself to the caresses of Elba, forget about Abel, about Tora, about my part in all this. I could raise the girl, perhaps start a family of my own. Begin over.

Though that may not be possible. Elba has reached the age where it would be dangerous for her to give birth. A surrogate family then. Something not perfect, something incomplete, impure. Too far on in history for purity.

And too many questions. Too many things left unfinished for there to be satisfaction in a quiet life.

Some of the fruit is so low I have to duck as I walk under the branches. In places the thick foliage makes it dark. I walk deep into the orchard seeing no one. There is no sound other than my footsteps. I am amazed at the abundance of fruit. Some of it is overripe, as if they have more than enough and could not be bothered to pick it. In my day we harvested what we could and kept watch over it to prevent theft. But there is no one here.

I break through the trees suddenly and find myself in a sun-filled clearing. Trees give way to long green grass, and in the centre, quite incongruous for our settlement, a stone hut, about four by four metres.

Though the surrounds have changed much, somehow I have found my way here easily. All those years ago there were just a few trees. Trees that were sturdier than orange trees. A few of these are still standing, I notice, still standing in a circle around the hut.

I kept this place fenced off. It was a mile from the settlement gates, not quite out of sight. I have been walking over the graves for the last hundred metres. We used to bury them here, here where they died. We started at the hut and buried them in circles, spiralling away from the centre as we had to bury more and more.

We buried them in shallow graves with their faces pointing skywards. That way, some believed, they could rise again to join a better world, a world made possible by their passing. Often several bodies to a grave. We buried them but our burial was not a forgetting, was not meant to be a forgetting. I am angry that the markers seem to have been removed. We were careful to mark the graves with a small pile of stones. But they have not been moved. I scuff the grass with my foot and disturb a pile. Not moved, just buried and forgotten. At least they are still here but they should not be overgrown like this. If there was so much fuss about what we did to these people, why then have they not been remembered? This is not remembrance, leaving the graves to be overgrown by grass and fruit trees. I have a vision of a corpse in the earth. The roots of an orange tree pierce the earth, pierce the bag, pierce the flesh of man. The fruit of the trees that feed the town nourished by the death of our ancestors.

On the other hand, better a fruit orchard and undisturbed peace than dry ground, a baking sun and a few small stones as a monument in a bleak landscape.

I have brought the island stone with me. I remove it from my bag and look around the clearing for somewhere to put it. There is no obvious place. It seems a hollow gesture but I place the stone on the ground before me. It is darker than the others I have disturbed. I straighten up and take a deep breath. I am left feeling flat.

I walk up to the hut. The one window is boarded up though not entirely. Two planks form an x. The door has been nailed shut. I peer in. It takes a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. There is not much to see. At first glance it seems everything has been removed.

But not everything. A white shape lies sprawled across the table inside.

I jerk back. The shape of a head, two lumps at the end for feet, an arm hanging down at one side. It does not move. I know of course it is not a body. But the sight of it brought it back. Real enough. An imagined body standing in place of hundreds before it. It fills the space of the dead.

I kick the door in. I approach the shape slowly, walking through dust. There are dust motes in the air like flies. They shimmer in the shaft of light coming through the doorway. I walk up to it, reach out my hand, touch it. It gives in easily when I touch it. It is one of the bags we stored people in before burial. For a moment I think I will see Tora’s mother when I tear it open, as if she had died yesterday, but all I see inside are more of the bags. They seem to have been arranged to look like a corpse. Why I don’t know. I pull them out one by one. More dust.

There is a scuttling from behind me. I wheel around sharply but see nothing. At the door I squint against the light. I can see no one. ‘Who’s there?’ I shout. No answer. I walk around the hut to the other side but there is nothing and I hear no more sounds. A rabbit, I assume. I re-enter the hut and dismantle the pretend corpse. I find myself sneezing from the dust. The noise startles me again.

I look around the room. Everything has been removed, except for the table and the bags. There was never much call for equipment. A chair, a table, a small platform, a cabinet, some rope, a stove for heating food for the guards, knives, twine, bags. That was it.

The cabinet, which used to contain records, is gone.

I walk to the far wall. I raise my hand to it. I run my fingers over the marks. We made a small mark with a stone on the wall of the hut.

The seventh line we drew crossed the previous six. At the end of fifty-two of these we started a new row. Why we measured the dead in this way, the way we measured time, I cannot recall. Did each death mean another day’s life granted to the settlement? Perhaps. But it is a sign of respect too. A mark, inscribed in stone, will never die.

I step back. The marks reach across the wall and from floor to ceiling. I am surrounded by them. Suffocated.

I know how many of them there are. I do not have to count. There are nine hundred and seventeen scratches on the wall.

I can remember the name behind the first mark, the name behind the last, some in between. I tried on the island to remember more. I lay on my bed each night and went over the names, glancing over at the cave wall. I willed myself to remember more. After a while I’d force myself to stop by listening only to the wind, the waves. I did not think about Bran, about Tora, Abel, about my banishment. Just the names.

Only the names. The faces, mostly blank, nameless, pushed against the rock of my cave, against the wall of days, straining to get through. I shut my eyes to keep them out.

When Tora came to me after I hanged her mother I held her close.