So at the back of my mind was the thought of the good I might be able to do for him. And the good that could be done if I could find a way to link him up with the people in the plane.
The way things looked, he had at most two years to live. Perhaps less. Sooner or later he’d wind up in the clearing where they’d put Tuvik.
Each fall before the ground froze, the guards marched half a dozen prisoners out to the woods to dig a deep hole. Come the thaw, they marched them out again to put the earth back over the fifteen or twenty bodies that had been dumped there over the winter. There was no ceremony to the burials. A couple of guards would slip the body into a sack and haul it out on a cart, toss it in the hole and throw powdered lime on it. It waited there uncovered until the next one.
Weighing it up in my heart, I felt like I had a duty to do right by Shamsudin. There are reasons behind reasons, of course, and if you go into them too deeply you end up tripping over yourself. Looking back at it now, I see I had some kind of feelings for him, since he was the first person to show me an ounce of kindness since Ping. And he had a way about him that reminded me of my father, I think, and I wonder if maybe I was trying to go back and save him. But if I search behind that, I come up against a plainer reason. Since Ping died, it felt like I had lost the knack of being alone.
When I was a child, there was an old man in the woods who lived alone, miles from anyone, who we were warned from visiting. He was a Russian called Pankov who did big wooden carvings that he stood in his yard. We would sneak over to spy on him, and he would yell and chase us away if he caught us there. Being children, that wa sport to us. ‘Madder than an outhouse rat,’ my father called him, and he slippered us when Charlo blurted out that we’d been over there.
Pankov died when I was about twelve, and a party of elders from our town buried him in his yard. The hut he’d lived in fell a little more apart each year after that, until it was all flattened, as though something big had sat on it.
I went there once or twice in the years that followed. Pankov had sculpted whole tree trunks into big, busy columns of snakes, and demons, and wriggling, bosomy women that the elders politely ignored when they went to inter him.
Whatever had flattened the house — snow? woodworm? — had scattered its contents around the yard. And amid all the stuff you’d expect — torn bed sheets, candlesticks, mouldy shoes, broken glass — was page upon page of musical scores, piles of them, with their pretty lines and black dots. What must they have meant to him, that he went to the trouble of carrying all that paper out there with him, and keeping it, year after year, where there was no one to share it with, not an instrument, only the silence, and the little creaks and whirrs of his own body failing bit by bit?
I didn’t want to be like Pankov, sitting out years like a man in a waiting room, marking time until the fall that killed me, or the accident that left me unable to feed myself. But I could see how I might end up that way. Between the world of my youth, and the world I was in now, was a gap so big I was finding it harder and harder to cross it even in my imagination.
Had I dreamed a world where people flew, and food was plentiful, and we, the settlers in the north, were seen as primitives?
Life in the base gave you all the evidence you needed of men’s beastliness. And yet, looking back on long passages of my life, it felt like it was the solitary parts of it that made the least sense.
2
WHEN I WAS strong enough, I took my meals in the guards’ mess, where they served meat and some kind of almost-coffee alongside the things they gave the prisoners. The other guards seemed less surprised by Boathwaite’s raising me up than I was.
It wasn’t the paradise the prisoners imagined, but we had better food, and solitude. Strangely, there was a wariness between the guards themselves that I couldn’t fathom. They had a few things: a steam bath, a little store where we could buy stuff with paper tickets. And there was indeed a whorehouse. I never had need of it, and even to look at the women on the stoop in daytime, chattering and brushing their hair out, put me too much in mind of Ping.
We all lived within the base, but there was a higher order of guard who lived in the village. Some of them had taken wives and settled down.
I hadn’t changed my intention of slipping out of that place in the spring. In fact, now it would be easier. I had a greasy old side-arm they’d given me with a couple of bullets in it. And I knew where I could probably steal a horse. But there was something I wanted to attend to first.
*
In February, Boathwaite called a few of us together and told us he was sending a detachment of men to work in the Zone. There would be ten guards escorting them and I would be one of them. The Russian called Tolya who acted as Boathwaite’s deputy at the base was leading the party. He had been to the Zone many times. Of the nine others in the party, four including myself had never been there before, but even among the guards it wasn’t the style to seem too curious or ask too many questions. We acted like it was the most normal thing in the world and we just did what the others did.
At the morning line-up, each of us picked two men from the prisoners in the yard.
The experienced guards went to some trouble to choose the strongest men, feeling through their clothes for muscles and checking their eyes for clearness.
When it was my turn, I went slowly along the line, trying not to dwell on the desperation in the faces of the men in front of me, acting like I was sizing them up. It was strange how different they looked at me now I had some power over them. I havered for a while to make it seem that I was weighing up my choices, then I nodded at Shamsudin and Zulfugar to step out of the line.
*
The prisoners who had been chosen were allowed to fall out and given two minutes to collect their things from the huts. They regrouped in the parade ground and four of us marched them out, all twenty of them, through the central gate of the base, across the clearing around it, and into a low two-storey building that stood on the fringe of the guards’ village. There were two big rooms on the lower floor. One was a refectory where they were served the same food as the guards got, only a little colder because it had to be carried over there. Next to it was a sleeping room with bunks that were sprung and more generous than the ones at the base.
For the next two hours they ate and were allowed to exercise out in the clearing. It was unaccustomed freedom to all of them. Next to being made a guard it was the best that any of them could have hoped for. Most didn’t try to hide their delight at being chosen.
It was unseasonably warm and bright. Just for a moment, the idea that some of us were prisoners and some guards seemed to fade. I was filled with a rare hope. From here to the Zone seemed like an easy step. I had no fixed notion of the future, but I could feel its shape, and for once it seemed like it wasn’t a thing to be dreaded.
Shamsudin stood alone, eyes shut, face into the sun, his shoulders rising and falling with his breathing. At the edge of the clearing, the sunshine had melted the thin snow cover under the trees. Zulfugar squatted down in a mess of fallen oak leaves and dug at something with a stick.
He looked up and saw me watching and waved me over with his free hand. Just as I got to him, he yanked something out of the ground.
In his hand was a warty black ball about the size of a walnut. He held it out to me.
I took it from him. It was hard and somewhat like a nutmeg to touch. Zulfugar motioned me to smell it. ‘Al-kamat,’ he said. ‘The Prophet said it is good for the eyes.’ There was a glint of his gold teeth as he smiled.