Now and again, while I was working there, I noticed someone in the house watching. I’d hear voices, too — women’s voices, and the quick scattering sound of feet in the house. But the strangest thing was this: one day in the fall, when I had stayed longer than usual, and I was gathering up my tools in the half-dark, I heard a humming sound. I turned around, and the windows of the house were blazing with yellow electric light.
*
In March the garden burst into life. It felt like winter had passed in a heartbeat. That was good for me, because spring meant more solitary work in the garden, but it made me think how things had altered.
Seeing the flowers in that garden bloom so early, and the trees bud so much sooner than they ought, it struck me that a change had happened deep down in the fibre of things, and it put me in mind of the Tungus who said the world needs to sleep through the winter, or it wakes angry, like a shatoon, and tears up everything in its path.
*
Through spring and summer, I cut the grass of the lawn every other day with a push-mower. It was old and rusty and the devil to roll. In the July heat, with all the bugs out, it was hard work, and I’d break from time to time to mop my face with a rag. It doesn’t hurt me, but the salt in sweat makes my scarring flare up worse.
More and more, it was one or other of the guards, but not both of them. Today it was Abelman, who I liked less, leaning up agains the wall of the kitchen, his gun on his lap, and using a twig to tease the house-cat.
I heard the slap-bang of the screen door opening, and suddenly Abelman shuffled to his feet, all simpering and friendly, like a dog that can smell sausages.
There was a little girl of about ten stood there in a blue check dress holding a glass of water.
She handed me the glass. She was brave enough not to startle when she saw my face, but her hand shook a little as she lifted the glass, and something clinked in it.
‘We’ve got a refrigerator,’ she said.
The water was almost too cold to drink. The ringing came from the ice cubes bobbling against the sides of the glass.
‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ she said.
I sipped the water. She was a pretty thing, not a tomboy like me. ‘I’m a girl,’ I said.
‘What happened to your face?’
‘Isn’t it rude to be always asking questions?’ I said.
‘Do you want some more ice?’
‘Yes, please.’
She came back out of the house with a whole tray of icecubes. I had to help her break them out of there. The metal was furred with ice-crystals, and it stuck to the wet on my hand. When the cubes were free, she handed them to me and Abelman like candy. Abelman held his in his hand until they melted and dripped out.
A woman’s low voice called through the screen door for Natasha to come back inside now. Natasha took the glass and the ice-tray and skipped back into the house. ‘Bye, Natasha,’ Abelman called out in his sickly buttery voice.
When the door slapped shut for the last time, I turned to him. ‘Where do they get power for a refrigerator?’ I asked. But he was back to fooling the cat again. There was no more butter in his voice and he threw my words back at me: ‘Isn’t it rude to be always asking questions?’
*
The next time I came back, I saw they’d put a bench in the garden and hung a swing. Natasha came out to me that time carrying a bowl with something in it.
‘I saved this for you,’ she said.
It was canned peaches, four slices of them. I grabbed a piece. The flesh wobbled like something living and naked.
She watched me eat it, the way you would if you’d brought home a wounded bird to feed and pet.
It was as gold as sunset and sweeter than honey. ‘Thank you,’ I said, and I wiped my fingers clean on my pants-leg.
She giggled delightedly and ran back into the house. After that, she was always bringing me little things.
Another time when I was working in the heat, Abelman dropped off to sleep and began to snore. The first thing that went through my head was the thought of escape. I let my rake drop and walked towards the rearouse to see if the road in front was clear both ways. I moved with that all-purpose prison shuffle, nothing urgent about it, but already my mind was haring off, figuring out if it would be possible to break off my chains, maybe steal a knife, hustle together enough food to start the long trek north, until I came level with the back of the house and I heard the tinkle of a child’s laughter.
I followed the sound to the window and peered in: Natasha was sitting at the kitchen table with her hair wet and a sheet over her shoulders while her mother moved around her with a pair of scissors, snipping off a little here, a little there — tiny tufts like powder which she let fall to the floor. The mother had her back to me and I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but every now and again it seemed like the two of them shared a joke, and one or other of them fell about laughing.
There was nothing special about the place. I mean I must have been in fifty different kitchens in my life and all of them looked pretty much like that, but something about the scene just glued me there, until the next thing I knew, Abelman was pressing his piece in the small of my back and telling me to get back to work.
*
The next few times that Natasha came out to me, her mother hung back in the kitchen, just sticking her head round the door to call her daughter back in so I could get down to some work. But towards the end of summer, in late August, when most of the flowers had blown, she came out to visit with me in the garden.
She was a tall, lean, handsome woman, a little younger than me.
‘Natasha and I are very grateful for the work you’ve done here,’ she said. ‘You’ve made this place beautiful.’
I never count myself inferior to anyone, but something in me went squirming and servile while I was with her. I was conscious of my smell, and my filthy torn clothes, and the earth ground into my hands and fingernails — and there she was, all clean, and sweeter than a spray of apple-blossom.
‘Well, it’s been its own reward,’ I said.
We were both stuck there for a while, her with a million questions that she didn’t know how to ask, and me desperate to get back to my pruning, just so long as I didn’t have to stand there, facing the ghost of what might have been, and mired in the shame of what I’d become.
I stared at the ground and watched her scrunching the long brown toes of her bare feet in the grass.
‘Well, thank you again,’ she said finally, and went inside.
*
At reveille the next morning, I refused to move and stayed put in bed. Men had been flogged for less, but I told the guards it was my monthly time and for some reason this made them leave me be.
After lunch I went to the byre, and when Abelman came for me, I told him I didn’t care what they did to me, but I wasn’t doing any more gardening. He tried to talk me round, but I wasn’t having any of it, so he went to get a couple more guards and they frogmarched me to a punishment cell and tossed me inside. I beat on the door for a while, and then I fell asleep. I didn’t know what crainess had got into me.
It happened now and again that a kind of madness descended on a man and they would lock him up and beat him till his head went straight again. I was almost looking forward to their coming in, but when the door finally opened, who should walk in but Boathwaite himself.
Boathwaite signalled to the guard to help me to my feet and he told me to follow him. He had a wide-kneed, horseman’s swagger.
I went with him to a two-storey building on the other side of the parade ground. Most of its windows still had their glass in them. ‘This used to be a military base,’ he said. ‘I expect you knew that.’