You speak to me as if I was a kaffir.
The silence of cold countries at the approach of winter. On an island of mud, still standing where a village track parts like two locks of wet hair, a war memorial is crowned with the emblem of a lost occupying empire that has been succeeded by others, and still others. Under one or the other they lived, mending shoes and watches. Eating garlic and sleeping round the stove. In the graveyard stones lean against one another and sink at levels from one occupation and revolution to the next, the Zobos tick them off, the old woman shelling peas on the bench and the bearded man at the dockside are in mounds that are all cenotaphs because the script that records their names is a language he forgot and his daughters never knew. A burst of children out of school alights like pigeons round the monument. How is it possible that they cannot be understood as they stare, giggle and — the bold ones — question. As with the man in the train: from the tone, the expression on the faces, the curiosity, meaning is clear.
Who are you?
Where do you come from?
A map of Africa drawn with a stick in the mud.
Africa! The children punch each other and jig in recognition. They close in. One of them tugs at the gilt ring glinting in the ear of a little girl dark and hairy-curly as a poodle. They point: gold.
Those others knew about gold, long ago; for the poor and despised there is always the idea of gold somewhere else. That’s why they packed him off when he was thirteen and according to their beliefs, a man.
At four in the afternoon the old moon bleeds radiance into the grey sky. In the wood a thick plumage of fallen oak leaves is laid reverentially as the feathers of the dead pheasants swinging from the beaters’ belts. The beaters are coming across the great fields of maize in the first light of the moon. The guns probe its halo. Where I wait, apart, out of the way, hidden, I hear the rustle of fear among creatures. Their feathers swish against stalks and leaves. The clucking to gather in the young; the spurting squawks of terror as the men with their thrashing sticks drive the prey racing on, rushing this way and that, no way where there are not men and sticks, men and guns. They have wings but dare not fly and reveal themselves, there was nowhere to run to from the village to the fields as they came on and on, the kick of a cossack’s mount ready to strike creeping heads, the thrust of a bayonet lifting a man by the heart like a piece of meat on a fork. Death advancing and nowhere to go. Blindness coming by fire or shot and no way out to see, shelling peas by feel. Cracks of detonation and wild agony of flutter all around me, I crouch away from the sound and sight, only a spectator, only a spectator, please, but the cossacks’ hooves rode those pleading wretches down. A bird thuds dead, striking my shoulder before it hits the soft bed of leaves beside me.
Six leaves from my father’s country.
When I began to know him, in his shop, as someone distinct from a lap I sat on, he shouted at the black man on the other side of the counter who swept the floor and ran errands, and he threw the man’s weekly pay grudgingly at him. I saw there was someone my father had made afraid of him. A child understands fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
I gathered the leaves for their pretty autumn stains, not out of any sentiment. This village where we’ve rented the State hunting lodge is not my father’s village. I don’t know where, in his country, it was, only the name of the port at which he left it behind. I didn’t ask him about his village. He never told me; or I didn’t listen. I have the leaves in my hand. I did not know that I would find, here in the wood, the beaters advancing, advancing across the world.
Some Are Born to Sweet Delight
Some are Born to sweet delight,
Some are Born to Endless Night
They took him in. Since their son had got himself signed up at sea for eighteen months on an oil rig, the boy’s cubbyhole of a room was vacant; and the rent money was a help. There had rubbed off on the braid of the commissionaire father’s uniform, through the contact of club members’ coats and briefcases he relieved them of, loyal consciousness of the danger of bombs affixed under the cars of members of parliament and financiers. The father said ‘I’ve no quarrel with that’ when the owners of the house whose basement flat the family occupied stipulated ‘No Irish’. But to discriminate against any other foreigners from the old Empire was against the principles of the house owners, who were also the mother’s employers — cleaning three times a week and baby-sitting through the childhood of three boys she thought of as her own. So it was a way of pleasing Upstairs to let the room to this young man, a foreigner who likely had been turned away from other vacancies posted on a board at the supermarket. He was clean and tidy enough; and he didn’t hang around the kitchen, hoping to be asked to eat with the family, the way one of their own kind would. He didn’t eye Vera.
Vera was seventeen, and a filing clerk with prospects of advancement; her father had got her started in an important firm through the kindness of one of his gentlemen at the club. A word in the right place; and now it was up to her to become a secretary, maybe one day even a private secretary to someone like the members of the club, and travel to the Continent, America — anywhere.
— You have to dress decently for a firm like that. Let others show their backsides.—
— Dad! — The flat was small, the walls thin — suppose the lodger heard him. Her pupils dilated with a blush, half shyness, half annoyance. On Friday and Saturday nights she wore T-shirts with spangled graffiti across her breasts and went with girl-friends to the discothèque, although she’d had to let the pink side of her hair grow out. On Sundays they sat on wooden benches outside the pub with teasing local boys, drinking beer shandies. Once it was straight beer laced with something and they made her drunk, but her father had been engaged as doorman for a private party and her mother had taken the Upstairs children to the zoo, so nobody heard her vomiting in the bathroom.
So she thought.
He was in the kitchen when she went, wiping the slime from her panting mouth, to drink water. He always addressed her as ‘miss’—Good afternoon, miss. — He was himself filling a glass.
She stopped where she was; sourness was in her mouth and nose, oozing towards the foreign stranger, she mustn’t go a step nearer. Shame tingled over nausea and tears. Shame heaved in her stomach, her throat opened, and she just reached the sink in time to disgorge the final remains of a pizza minced by her teeth and digestive juices, floating in beer. — Go away. Go away! — her hand flung in rejection behind her. She opened both taps to blast her shame down the drain. — Get out!—
He was there beside her, in the disgusting stink of her, and he had wetted a dish-towel and was wiping her face, her dirty mouth, her tears. He was steadying her by the arm and sitting her down at the kitchen table. And she knew that his kind didn’t even drink, he probably never had smelled alcohol before. If it had been one of her own crowd it would have been different.
She began to cry again. Very quietly, slowly, he put his hand on hers, taking charge of the wrist like a doctor preparing to follow the measure of a heart in a pulse-beat. Slowly — the pace was his — she quietened; she looked down, without moving her head, at the hand. Slowly, she drew her own hand from underneath, in parting.