Heaven's Edge (12 page)

‘Dreaming of smetana.'

‘Where is your camp?' I asked the boy, passing over Jaz's cryptic comment.

‘You don't know his language?' Jaz interrupted. ‘They don't speak English out here.'

‘Why, what does he speak?'

‘A junghi-bhasa.'

‘And you know it?'

Jaz's eyes lit up. ‘I know them all. New recruits sometimes
don't have a city language. They come with all sorts of jungle cocktails. But in my line of business you have to be able to communicate with anyone. The tongue is everything, you know.'

‘Ask him, then, where all the village people are.'

Jaz translated. The boy sulked at first, but then grunted out an answer.

‘He says they are hiding in the jungle.'

‘Why?'

The boy didn't reply when Jaz asked him, but Jaz took the boy's hand in his and gently urged him. The boy listened apprehensively. All at once his whole face seemed to surge with emotion, and words blubbed out. Eventually Jaz turned to me. ‘Because of attacks.'

‘Who attacks them?'

‘He doesn't know.'

‘How many of them are there?'

Having opened up, the boy seemed unable to withhold anything from Jaz. According to the boy there were about seventy of them in a settlement. Some were refugees from this village, some from others. Mostly children. They lived in woven huts which they dismantled and shifted from time to time, whenever smokeseed poisoned the air, or wailing. He had no idea how long they had lived in this makeshift manner.

‘What's his name?'

‘What does that matter?'

‘I'd like to know. He must have a name. I'd like to know who he is.'

‘But a name will tell you nothing about who he is.' Jaz raised his eyes. He asked the boy, nevertheless.

‘Ismail.' The boy wiped the sweat from around his mouth
with his arm. Ismail meant something to me, although not to Jaz.

‘Did he go to this school?' I wanted to know whether he was connected with the place.

Yes, was the answer. Once.

‘Is the schoolmaster still here? The headmaster? An imam?'

Ismail looked confused.

‘I don't think there are any older men left.' Jaz spoke slowly, as though he was solving a riddle in his young charge's eyes.

Kris fixed the boy's gun, fascinated by its quaint mechanism. He showed the boy how to dismantle the trigger and refit it, how to release the jammed magazine. Only then did Ismail agree to take us to his refugee camp. He sat on the roof of the cruiser, directing the way. As we approached a small hill, gashed by a landslip on one side, a crowd of scruffy children appeared.

When we finally stopped, several of the children came close. They seemed to be peculiarly fearless, but it was perhaps the lack of any reaction, a deadening in the eyes, that gave the impression of fearlessness. One child, a boy with a shaved head, picked up a stick and pretended to shoot us: ‘Da-da-da-da-da-da, pschew, pschew, pschew, da-da-da-da-da-da.' The other children observed him, and us, as though they were watchful moths.

Ismail rolled off the cruiser. The younger children scurried up the slopes; the older ones shuffled back a few steps. The boy with the stick pointed it at Ismail and pretended to shoot again. ‘Da-da-da-da-da-da.' He then dropped the stick and quickly picked up a handful of pebbles. He moved
to one side of the cruiser and crouched. Across the road several empty cans were lined up on a broken culvert. He threw his pebbles hard, knocking one, two, three in quick succession.

Ismail called out and several women emerged out of the bush. They all looked prematurely aged: the nearest, a white-haired mother with a small child tugging at her, immediately began to berate Ismail. She lifted her face, bobbing her chin at the vehicle. Ismail talked back with obvious vehemence, but her expression remained one of suspicion. Only when he reloaded his gun in front of her and she saw that we made no effort to disarm him did she relent. She watched and then she took the gun off him before turning to Jaz. Her voice was sharp but she invited us up into a makeshift community hall hidden behind the trees: a large thatched hut with a few pieces of tatty furniture purloined from the schoolhouse down the road.

The three of us were ushered to a bench behind a table. Ismail half-knelt on a stool. Children and mothers slowly filled the shelter. A red clay pot of water and three cracked plastic cups were placed on the table in front of us. Ismail poured out a small amount of water into each and offered the cups around. He explained to Jaz that this was for us to drink. He looked relieved to be back in a crowd, even a crowd as weary and despondent as this.

Silence seemed to grow between us as we each took our sips. The children watched, awed by the sight of strange men drinking water.

I felt their eyes congregate on me. Even Jaz and Kris were looking for me to say something. What could I say? I didn't want to alarm them, nor did I want us to become unwitting hostages. Eventually I started to tell them about us, asking Jaz to translate; pausing, from time to time, to gauge
their reactions while Jaz tried to catch up. They listened without a flicker of emotion as I explained that the three of us were refugees too, escaped from the city on the coast. That we meant no harm and wanted only information: news of danger, soldiers, military reconnaissance, risks.

‘Rice,' one of the older mothers interjected from the side.

Jaz brightened. ‘She can see we are hungry for rice. Her name is Karuna.'

‘Where do they get rice?' I had not noticed any paddy cultivation on our journey.

Karuna explained that the abandoned villages in the area all had granaries which they had emptied into large canisters and buried as secret stores. Last season they had also tried planting red rice –
patchai-p 2462/11,
she recited the name of the variety as though it were a benediction. The numbers were in English. She said they had a small secret mud patch behind the schoolhouse from which they hoped to gather a quick harvest before a passing skyplane picked up the trace and bombed them. Vegetables they grew under removable camouflage thatch with watchers on shift, throughout the day, to let the sunshine in and warn of cloudbursts.

‘The children are secret farmers, she says,' Jaz explained excitedly.

Uva's dream children? I wondered. ‘Do you think they know her?'

Kris, who was fidgeting on the bench, knotting his fingers around each other, jerked his head up. In his glance I could feel the edge of a knife. He snorted and buried his eyes back in the hard, stamped earth of the hut.

‘Uva?' Jaz looked doubtful.

Two of the women left the group and slipped out.

‘Ask who taught them how to farm. Where do they get their seed?'

‘It's not her. They say they find what they need. They go from one plundered village to another collecting whatever's left.'

Only then did I notice that all the younger women were nursing babies.

Jaz was the one who asked about the men. Karuna told him that there were none. They've been killed or have gone to fight as rebels. They rarely return.

‘She says her group is a band of mothers and children.' Jaz's voice dropped lower. ‘The bigger kids are stolen by marauders. Six boys and four girls were taken last time. The rest, the weak are butchered, the women who are caught are raped …'

The marauders had not been seen for three seasons but the mothers remained vigilant. ‘They will be back.' There was no doubt in Karuna's voice. ‘They always come back.' The women had no weapons for protection, Jaz was told, but they had learnt to move fast. Ismail had found his gun only the other day and wanted the youngsters to learn to fight. Some of the older ones had already gone to try to find a rebel group to join. The women didn't approve. They wanted Ismail to get rid of his gun. They felt it hampered them, distracted them from better strategies.

As the talk increased, the children began to shift about, looking at each other more than at us, picking at their sores. Suddenly one child started to sing. It was impossible to tell his age: he could have been five, or six, or seven. The voice more hurt than young. Jaz whispered that the boy was singing a nursery song about flowers floating in a pond. A couple of other children joined the chorus, but then the first child came to an unexpected stop.

His mother stifled her sobs in her hands. We learnt that the child had seen his two elder brothers and a baby hacked to death in their home by the village pond. The murderers included a man who had come before. One who had raped her; the baby's father. She still had her life only because she seemed to have died the second time.

The child's eyes were dull, even though his voice had trembled.

Another woman brought forward a slightly older child. This one did not speak any more, Jaz was told. ‘Pushpa is ten,' he explained. ‘They dread the day she will see her own blood.'

The child's face was beautiful, clear and fresh, but she was lame and her legs were scarred by jagged rips. There were thick welts across her back, clearly visible through the straps of her dress. The marauders had used a bayonet on her, to pitch her from one to another. The woman unbuttoned the back of the dress to show us a pit the size of a fist by the girl's lower spine where her lacerated flesh had been scooped out. It was a miracle that she had survived.

The child twisted her hands together and slipped back behind the woman. I wanted to call her by her name, Pushpa, and promise her a life she need not fear. But I couldn't. She dropped down on her knees and peeped out. I felt ashamed. This was not the world she should have been born to see.

‘She has seen too much.' Jaz looked away, unable to stop the tears. ‘Her eyes have destroyed her tongue.'

There was no more singing. A warm wind blew through the hut. Karuna offered to show us around the settlement while the food was being prepared. The children filed out,
the mutilated remains of an assortment of communities where pain had passed like a malady from one jumbled generation to the next. These were children who had to nurse a numbness to their past; condemned to destroy their progenitors, or remain fractured themselves for ever.

I stayed behind for a few minutes, alone in the hut, unable to shake off the idea that perhaps my own father might have cast the shadow under which these children, or the ones before them, had lived: Lee the veteran bomber. What had he been doing flying over here? Cleo believed one thing, Eldon another. Who was he really helping? I wished then, for the first time, that I hadn't come. This was not at all what I had wanted to learn. With Uva, I had hoped things might become simple; I suppose nothing ever is.

Closing my eyes I can see again the yellow tree on the video behind my father's voice. Why did he not follow his mother Cleo's dancing drumbeat rather than Eldon's suppressed
thakita-tha?
Why didn't I? A different time must mean a different place. And yet by being here now I know this land and its tragic past – its ruined children – become, like the whole of the tainted world, as much mine as anybody else's.

The others had assembled outside a kitchen; the cooks were dishing out a concoction of rice mixed with sour fruit. They had salt-stones, and pastes of chilli and vinegar. Jaz was prattling zappily between mouthfuls about the coloured kafs and bakeries of his underground mall, delighted to have an appreciative audience again, even if only a bevy of grey-haired women with spellbound kids.

*    *    *

Later I asked Jaz to help me talk to the oldest woman in the camp – Mukti.

‘Questioning, questioning, all the time questioning. Why? What is it you want to know so much?'

‘I want to understand what has happened here. Did she ever see fighting in the sky? Aerial bombing? Warplanes shot down?'

Mukti looked to be at least ninety. Her face was puckered into pouches, her skin mottled; she had no teeth, but her voice was strong and her babbling faster than even Jaz's. Her conversation was difficult to follow and left Jaz stranded between the events of the previous century and a past that might have been only days old.

‘I don't know what she means,' he complained helplessly. ‘Her words are too old. She says that yesterday's water was bitter but better.' The span of her life seemed beyond anything Jaz could imagine.

‘Where does she come from?' I asked. ‘Where does she belong?'

Jaz understood her to be saying that her father fought in the first war here. Her family, like the whole village, was on one side for that one, and the other side for the next. He asked if she meant the dark war with the cloud. The old woman looked baffled.

‘The Great War?' I suggested, but this time Jaz was stumped.

When we were alone, I took Jaz by the arm and steered him towards the edge of the camp. ‘You know, I think that place with the school – where at least our Mukti seems to have once belonged – is much older than it seems.' We could glimpse the pond in the distance, and the roof of the schoolhouse. ‘That little pond – the tank – could be from the ancient days. The village must have been inhabited and abandoned many, many times.'

‘What? Like this? A bunch of people hiding out, scratching a living until they are scratched out. Over and again?'

‘This is a jungle that must have been fought over a hundred times, if not more.' I picked up some earth and crumbled the rusty soil between my thumb and two fingers, thinking of Uva's description of warlords thriving on each other's crimes. ‘Killing and maiming again and again. It's like some kind of disease.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I don't know. I really don't know. Perhaps something in the air? Some infection. Or maybe it's the water so steeped in the past.' I remembered Eldon's poem.

The teardrops of the original inhabitants,
our old gods,
destroyed by invaders,
wreak perpetual revenge on their descendants …

The words absorbing, renewing, however dispiriting the story; performing our only true human magic: transforming even pain into a line, a scrap of verse, a rhyme. A greater design.