Landlocked (26 page)

Martha waited, then as Thomas didn’t say any more, she said: ‘Well, I know it’s—ridiculous. But that’s all it is. That’s what this country’s like, isn’t it—’ She realized she was apologizing for it, as if she were responsible for it.

After a time Thomas said: ‘I found out recently that Tressell is in the CID these days.’

Martha, absorbing this, discovered that she had not taken a breath for some time. She set her breathing going again, unknotted tensed muscles, drank a mouthful of muddy coffee, sat back. Here it was…there was always a point at which anything—loving someone, a friendship, politics: one went over the edge into…but she did not understand into what. Neither the nature of the gulf nor what caused it, did she understand. But a note was struck—and that it
would
strike could be counted on. And after that…

When they occurred, these sharp, improbable moments, one felt as if they had nothing in common with what had gone before; that they were of a consistency, a substance, that were foreign. Yet later, looking back, it was always precisely these turning-points, or moments, which contained or announced the truth—harshly and improbably, because up till that time one had refused to acknowledge
their possibility. And afterwards, it was not the moments like these, whose common quality was a suddenness, a dislocation, that were wrong, faulty; but one’s way of looking at what had led up to them. There had been a failure of imagination. A failure of sympathy. Her way of seeing Thomas, his life—it was that which had been wrong, at fault.

Thomas said: ‘You’re thinking: Thomas is paranoid.’

She said: ‘Something like that. But what does it matter?’

‘Except for one thing, Tressell
is
in the CID.’

She was watching his hand. It was a fist, and he was pressing down on the stained cloth with the weight of his powerful body behind it. It trembled with the force he was putting into it.

She wanted to stroke the hand, or to lift it and hold it against her cheek. But there was nothing to be done.

‘And what now?’ she said.

‘Martha, are you suggesting that Tressell would be incapable of it?’

‘Look,’ she said carefully. ‘A fool, an idiot—something reminds him of a man who irritated him when he was in the army. He thinks: how can I get my own back? He has an idea, and he rings up a country office from his town desk and he says: Drop over to the Black Ox Farm and find out if the man who owns it has anything to do with anti-British activities in Palestine. The local man says: Oh, hell, just when I said I’d take my girl out swimming. But I suppose orders are orders. So he takes one of the troopers and out they go to the Black Ox Farm. The people on the farm obviously know nothing about it. The Sergeant thinks: Oh, Christ, those fools in the town office, what do they think they’re doing? He rings up the town office and tells Tressell he’s been out to the Black Ox Farm. Tressell thinks: Well, I’ve given that bastard Thomas Stern an uncomfortable afternoon, that’s something. And off he goes to play golf.’

While Martha brought this out, in a voice which she tried to keep ‘humorous’, she watched his frowning face. He was hardly listening to her.

‘I’m going to Israel the day after tomorrow.’

‘For good?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve got a cousin in Haifa. And my wife’s got relatives everywhere.’

He beckoned to Johnny Capetenakis, who came over with his little pencil and his little pad, and made out the bill. Thomas handed him a note, and said, getting up: ‘Keep the change—for the Royalist cause.’

He walked out of the restaurant. The Greek looked at Martha—bitter, reproachful. He pushed across the change at her. After a moment she picked it up and said: ‘Everybody’s upset today.’ Her voice sounded weak and false.

She went out after Thomas. The lorry stood in a filthysmelling side street that was full of old paper, bits of vegetables, and stacked bicycles.

Thomas stood by the door to the driver’s seat. Martha went up to him and said: ‘Well, goodbye.’

‘Goodbye,’ he said. He looked at her, severe. Then he smiled. She saw that his eyes were full of tears, and she felt her cheeks were cold and wet.

He said: ‘I’m not going to kiss you, because what’s the point? I’ll write to you, Martha.’

Then he got into the lorry and Martha stood on the pavement and watched him manoeuvre the machine back out of a mess of bicycles and a handcart. Some small black boys came running out to shout: ‘Ticky, baas, sixpence, baas, sixpence, baas, baas, baas!’

It appeared he did not see them. Martha gave the largest child the change Johnny had pushed back at her. He gaped at the sight of so much money. The other children came clustering around, their faces stunned into immobility by awe. Then they rushed off with their haul, screaming like birds.

Thomas, shaking with the shaking of the machine, sat frowning at Martha. A car hooted behind him. The lorry shot forward and disappeared into the stream of traffic in Founders’ Street.

A large tree stood in the middle of the avenue, in an island of earth and grass around which the tarmac flowed in two streams that were almost as wide as the street itself. A hundred yards up, a fine clump of indigenous trees spared by the road engineers grew so near the street that a close look showed it made a slight bend South to accommodate them. On the map, though, and even in people’s minds, North Avenue ran as straight and as measured as all the other streets in this grid of streets.

Standing under the tree, looking West, the street arranged itself as a double line of trees which, since many of them were jacarandas and it was October again, looked as if bouquets of airy blossom had taken root beside garden fences. From the sky, the town would announce itself as much by trees as by buildings, and at night, from the air, transparent-seeming shells of building rose from dark or illuminated foliage. Night or day, it was trees, then buildings, that showed where man had staked his claim on the grass-covered high veld. Buildings and trees covered the veld for a mile North, though not so long ago this street marked the extreme boundary of the city, and in five years would have spread another five, and in ten years…But now, the city was a few-miles-wide patch of trees and buildings in a landscape mostly grass. Looking from the air, or from a tall hill, even now, in moonlight, it would seem as if for leagues the wind raised and flattened grasses which whitened or moved into dark under racing cloud shadows. (Although it was October, the clouds were not yet rain clouds, they were unstable and fled in illuminated shreds and streamers from horizon to horizon.) Just so, looking
from the hill on the farm, the hundred-acres field beneath it reflected the movements of wind or cloud on a surface of rippling foliage. Just so, a patch of lawn in a suburban garden shimmers a vivid liquid green, currents of air violently agitating each individual blade exactly as the minute hairs on the back of a leaf flatten and shine when it is held into a draught or when you blow across it.

Nearly a hundred miles away, in the red earth district, the old house had sunk to its knees under the blows of the first wet season after the Quests had left it, as if the shambling structure had been held upright only by the spirit of the family in it. Already it had been absorbed into a welter of damp growth and it was hard to tell, so Marnie Van Rensberg said her father said (he had bought the Quests’ farm to run his cattle on), where the old house had stood. But morning glory and golden shower creeper festooned the trees in blue and gold all over the hill. It was wet and sultry on that hill, because of the heavy growth, although a thousand winds poured over it, and so walls and roof had rotted years ago in a fierce compost. The wet heat spawned, and the undersides of rafters sprouted fungus, and mosquitoes bred in old shoes. But here, if this city were to be emptied, nothing would happen for a long time, except that dust would slowly film the roofs which now stood glistening in the changeable October moonlight. Then dust would fill the corners of verandas and pile up around the trunks of trees. This city, if emptied, would be conquered at last by dust, not by wet; its enemy would be dryness, the spirit of the high veld where tall, dry grasses have grown since—well, long before man first stood upright here, that’s certain. For how many millions of years has the central plateau stood high and dry, dry above all, lifting upwards to the drought-giving skies? Where Martha stood on dry dust beneath the great tree, bones of drought-bred creatures had lain for—but what use was it to say words like
millions
, if she couldn’t imagine, really feel them, longer (say) than twenty thousand? Dryness, dryness—the air snapped with it, she could feel the pressure of dryness shaping her substance, the dust was its creature and the air of October
gritted on her tongue. Yes, this city would be like the minute, brittle, transparent cases that have held insects and now lie blowing about on the sand. It would be like the carcass of a stick insect, so light it can be lifted into an eddy of air and up into the empty sky in columns of glistening trash to drift until the rains come to wash the air clean. Standing waist-deep in long, dry grass, a small rivulet of white sand appears beneath gold-brown stems that grow as clean as if from clean water. On the white sand minute, faint-brown stains move—the shadows of leaves of grass, tiny, dry fragments of leaf that flutter on long, powerful stems. They lie on the sand, small shadows so faint that the sunlight
almost
is stronger than they, grains of sand sparkle in the shadow as if the shadow itself were of a specially thin texture, a kind of light rather than a depth of shade. But it is not a leaf-shadow, no: the carcass of a grasshopper lies on the sand, lifting, moving slightly as the wind breathes among the grass-stems. It looks like a minute insect modelled in Perspex, all complete, with even its big eyes staring, but empty.

Yes, emptied, this town would stand slowly desiccating, filling with drifts of dust, white, pink, yellow, until…

In Europe, it was more than two years since the war ended, and cities still stood in ruins and people in the cities expected a hungry winter. Last winter had been disastrously cold and now the world grain harvests were one-fourth less than had been expected.

Chance, luck, had kept this city whole and peopled, and now allowed its citizens to sleep at night with full stomachs. Chance might just as easily…forty-four million people had died in the last war. (But what was the use of saying forty-four million, as Athen—presumably now dead—had pointed out, when one could not
feel
more than, let’s say, half a million, and even that with difficulty, after long strain.) During five years of Martha’s time, of days when, for the most part, she had been bored, waiting for life to start, forty-four million humans had died, had been murdered by their own kind. The world was peopled by a race of murderers who had done their best to annihilate each other
—but Martha, by chance, had not been where the fighting was; she had been in this city where lived a couple of hundred thousand, the sort of figure one would not bother to tack on to a figure like a
million—
though a million were not enough to bother about, ‘about’ forty million people had been killed in the years 1939 to 1945.

Suppose that in the newspapers tomorrow headlines said that two hundred thousand people in a city on the central plateau of Africa had suddenly vanished into the earth. They’d say, how awful. If in this city, white and black began murdering each other, then it would be another city in the grip of war, that’s all, just as these mornings one read that in Israel another British soldier had been shot in ambush by men presumed to be members of the Irgun or Stern gangs.

Since Thomas had left a few weeks ago, Martha’s life had been turned inside out. Once her life was a day-time life, she woke to a day in which she would probably see Thomas. But now the days had lost their meaning, and it was at night that she came awake and lived. She walked through the streets of the little town, watching it empty. First, a hurrying and emptying before the curfew hour of nine, when black people must be behind their own doors. Then, again at eleven, cars sped home in streams of moving light from the cinemas. After eleven, most windows were dark. But the town was all light—reflected from roofs, from glittering masses of foliage, and now, in October, from the jacaranda trees whose masses of blossom looked like crystallized light—the sober trunks lifted millions of tiny bells of hard, cool light. Above, starlight and moonlight, great spaces of remote light; below squatted the town with its windows low and square and yellow, and the street lamps shedding a thick, low, yellow where Martha walked as if wading through stale water. Martha walked, walked, down one street, up another, into the avenues, down one avenue, up another—one could hop from intersection to intersection like a child playing hopscotch, one could walk from the centre of the city to its edge in a slow hour and see no one but an occasional patrolling black policeman. A quiet city this, here, in its white reaches, a city without violence, where an
occasional policeman was enough to impose order on straight, regularly crossing streets.

Thomas had not written after a first letter in which he had said he was no writer, and in any case, what was there to say she did not know. He thought of her, he said. He knew she thought of him. ‘Last week I nearly wrote. I was visiting my teacher. I told you about him. He is a clerk in Tel Aviv now, but he was the Rabbi in Sochaczen. I wanted to be educated. The local school was not enough. He was supposed to teach me religion. I wanted him to teach me Latin and science. He said to me, what do you want with Latin and science? All the idiots in Europe have been learning Latin for hundreds of years. And science—do you know how electricity works yet? Can you mend a fuse? Every day I sat on his doorstep and said: teach me. He said, so you want science? For most people, Copernicus is not yet born. I tell you, you want to learn science? Then every morning you wake and think: the sun is a great mass of white light, and in the sun’s light a dozen small particles of substance spin around. You live in a small bit of sun-substance and you spin around the sun. Now
feel
it. I said to him: Teach me about Einstein. He said: Every time in the day you come to yourself, think where you are—imagine the earth and the planets and you on a planet spinning around. When you wake in the dark at night, think how your half of the earth is turned away from the sun and how the slopes of the Hindu Kush are just coming into the light. He said, think how in the dark sea, the fishes sink to the depths of the sea, and as the light comes, they rise to the surface to the light. Think of the birds moving all over the earth, backwards and forwards, summer and winter. That’s science. He said, think of the trees breathing in at night, out at day. Feel it. Feel the earth turning under you and the planets moving around together. When you feel this, feel it with every bit of you, so that every minute this is how you feel life, then come to me and we will talk about Einstein. I said all right then, teach me Latin. He taught me Latin, and he said I was a child of pre-Copernicus. He said it was evolution, that the next thing for man was to feel the stars and their times and their
spaces. Otherwise he was a maggot in dirt. When the war started, he was first in a Russian prison camp, and then he walked hundreds of miles in snow, and his feet rotted under him. At last he got to Israel. I said to him: And how’s evolution with you, my teacher? And he said to me: Is that you, Thomas Stern? Are you still working hard at your Latin? Well, Martha?’

A person who has gone away is still here as long as one can hear what he says; Martha could hear what Thomas said. She argued with him. Ten times a day she caught herself in discussion with Thomas.

When he went away, it was, he said, to visit his wife (who had now returned) and his wife’s relations in Israel. Presumably he would in due course come back after the most ordinary occurrence, a visit to relatives.

But what Martha was saying to Thomas was: ‘Thomas, you shouldn’t do it, it won’t achieve anything.’

Thomas said: ‘After a war in which six million Jews were murdered by Europeans—that is, murdered by the most civilized and advanced section of the human race, or so we believe we are—British policemen with guns prevent Jews from reaching safe soil in Israel. Yes—do you agree?—do you think that is an unfair way of putting it? Am I being a propagandist when I say that? But Martha says to me, don’t be violent, Thomas, it won’t achieve anything.’

She said to him: ‘Thomas, if you do this, you’ll put yourself outside everything you believe.’

‘Are you telling me what I believe, Martha? What difference does it make what I believe? In the last decade forty million human beings were murdered and so many millions crippled, wounded, starved, stunted and driven mad that we’ll never count them. You’re following me, Martha? Right. Tell me, what difference did it make, Thomas Stern learning Latin and my teacher telling me about the stars?’

‘But, Thomas, you know what I’m saying is true—violence does not achieve anything.’

‘Two years ago the British and the Americans dropped an atom bomb on the Japanese out of military curiosity, so it turns out, because the war could have been brought to an
end without that, our enemies were suing for peace, though of course, our rulers did not tell us that at the time. We dropped two atom bombs on them just to see how this brave, new weapon would work. You’re with me, Martha? But Martha doesn’t believe in violence.’

‘No, and neither do you.’

‘There’s a civil war in China, at this moment millions of people are involved in a civil war in China, but Martha does not believe in violence.’

‘It doesn’t matter how much you give me lectures, Thomas—the fact that I’m right is proved because all I can say is this—you know yourself you shouldn’t do it.’

‘And there’s the Soviet Union too—but I’m not going to criticize my own side. That’s a joke, Martha—that’s the kind of joke non-violent, idealistic people make.’

‘You shouldn’t do it, Thomas.’

‘Martha doesn’t believe in violence—go on, tell me about it, I’m listening. Martha doesn’t believe in violence.’

Where the tree stood in the middle of the street lay thick shadow. A street lamp a few paces off intensified the shade, lacing the tree’s leaves with black and gold. Under it, one stood in dark, looking up into mixed lights and thicknesses of dark, one looked out along a street that ran light like a river. Insects crawled around invisibly on the bark, sometimes a night bird arrived on the tree and, sensing the human, lifted its wings and went off down the street to the safer, thicker clump. The tense, fighting smell of October, like cordite; a tension like the invisible balances of electricity; a smell of dry leaves were the sap rose fast towards the rains which lay surely ahead, even though the skies were dry still and the clouds as fast and skittish as running horses. A few days after Thomas had left, Martha heard herself arguing with him, and knew why he had gone. She knew suddenly; though of course she had known perfectly well all the time, but had not wanted to know. Thomas had gone to Israel to get his own back on Sergeant Tressell.