CHAPTER 21
Seven hours gone, and seven to go: it was a long watch, two workdays wrapped up in the parcel of one black night. The air in the hut had left off being air and turned to sweat. Talk about dead-beat! This is what trade unions is good for, but they’re all verboten in this Belsen. He screwed up his eyes so that they opened wide when the pressure of his knuckles lifted, adjusted a few of the dozen dials to get spot-on frequency, and tapped out a legible two-letter call-sign KB KB KB — more to fill his own earphones with a companionable noise than drag other and distant operators from their stolen half-burnt slumber. The morse lacked energy, like his eyes and mind. Singapore was silent down the steps of latitude: Saigon, Karachi, Negombo — meaningless ghosts beyond the periphery of consciousness. He wrote his call in the log: half-past three, wanting five hours still to be back in camp and under the sluicing cold bite of a shower. Most of all, he wanted the bullock cart of the year to take off its brakes and roll quickly into next week, for he and Knotman had formed a jungle-rescue team and arranged that its initial exercise be an attempt to climb Gunong Barat from the south. He’d done weeks of work, had drafted charts to show how the grub-tins and biscuits would be divided between the six donkey-backs of the team, and had already plotted each night’s camping position on a three-inch map he’d spent a week drawing in the camp library. “Planning the trip’ll be the easiest part of it,” Knotman said. “Don’t bank on three miles a day. Make it two.” I suppose he should know, Brian thought. Even so, we’ll do more than two: I could go that far on my head. At Transmitters the wireless mechanic was breathing life into a walkie-talkie, and Brian had more overlapping maps to sketch and trace, and would have to queue in a day or two for injections against typhus and typhoid. Camp monotony was broken, a thing of the past — and as a team ever after they could be called on to trek and search for the survivors of any kite that belly-dived in the north Malayan jungle.
A month ago he had gone by air-sea-rescue pinnace as relief sparks to a buoy-laying scheme off the Barat coast. The pinnace made tracks like a well-polished beetle around tiny jungle islands, while Brian’s morse kept a couple of rusty and worn-out naval tugs in touch with Kota Libis. There were few messages to send, and he spent most of the day on deck, reading by the donkey engine. At night the pinnace was moored a few yards out from an island, a half-sphere of grapefruit jungle with no more than six feet of sand for a beach. He did anchor-watch, and looking down in the darkness, there was nothing in the sea but grey humps of giant jellyfish, stationary and sinister below the surface as if waiting for a sleep-laden inhabitant of the boat to lose his footing and provide a meal for them. Now and again he swung the leadweight, sounding fathoms to make sure the boat didn’t drag its anchor. At seven he watched the sun feeling its way up the jungle of Gunong Barat, showing him at this close range secret valleys and subsidiary hilltops invisible from the camp, and coastal knolls coming almost down to the still night-laden sea. The sun poured yellow fire on to each pinnacle and dyed the greyish villages red as if they were in some nightmare waterless land of iron ore, then hardened to a purple and crimson. Yellow grew out it, came towards green, until the sun broke through its barrier and slowly turned the water around the pinnace into a sea of blood.
He slung down his pencil, restless from the memory of that fabulous dawn, felt feverish in the dank tobacco-soaked air on which insects seemed content to draw their calories of existence. Kicking open the door, he smelled the warm stillness of the tiger-night, took up the rifle and walked outside, feeling the tall brittle blades of elephant grass chafing his knees as he made his way slowly towards the far wall of trees. I hope I don’t put my foot on a snake, he thought, going slower so as to give any comfortably curled-up krait or cobra time to make its getaway. Half a mile off was an open shed in which an airman armed with a wooden club was set to guard petrol and tools. A few nights ago, Brian reminded himself, the poor sod had seen the face of a full-grown tomcat tiger gimletting from tall grass outside. With no doors to hold it back should the tiger roam around, he nearly curled up and died at the shock, but was able to use the field telephone and explain with garbled obscenity to some officer at the mess that they’d better come and get him before he was chewed to bone and gristle. Half an hour later a jeep of drunken officers roared up the runway firing Stens — by which time the tiger was safe in its hide-out jungle.
Maybe I’ll meet that tiger: he slid a bullet up the spout. My claws are as sharp as his while I’ve got this.303 in my fist. The fear livened him and he walked on, though slowly, as if a cord were tied to his feet. The grass moved, bent into a hollow. He peered and saw nothing, a shadow of wind perhaps, though his.303 burst against it, sending a hemisphere of deafening noise shaking towards the hills.
Back in the hut, he switched the tuning dial from its allotted wave-length to find some music, hoping no plane would choose to send an SOS while he wasn’t listening. The needle flickered across graduated readings behind the glass, settled on a station whose music he eventually recognized (able to follow the tune, though static made mincemeat of crotchets and semi-quavers) as Bizet’s “L’Arlésienne Suite.” He remembered hearing it first when he was fourteen, alone in the house as it played in the interval of Daudet’s play, the same music now wavily crossing the Pacific. The sad melody had haunted him ever since, bringing sharply before his eyes the vision of a sun going down over the flat grey land of the Camargue, where the air is cool and still to the insane cry of someone dying of love.
When the first hearing of the music finished, he was in tears, a shameless unfair desecration of his working manhood. It was an evening in summer before the advent of darkness, when children had stopped screaming along the asphalt path by the lavatories, and the group of women who normally gossiped at the yard-end had gone in to give them their teas. No anti-aircraft guns belted away at illusive aeroplanes and no sirens wailed their warning song. It was the dead hour between tea and supper, light and dark, between the end of barking dogs and the start of lad-gangs calling at passing girls from unlit lamp-posts. The feeling of poetry and death was broken as his mother said, having suddenly walked in: “What’s up, Brian? You’re never crying, are you?”
“No,” he answered. “The sun hurt my eyes today when I was out up Trent.”
The same music came to him now, in places distorted or impossible to hear, so that he tried to tune it clearer, using all his skill to bring it free from the murderous inundations of atmospherics. He allied himself to the music, related it to the workings of his own brain. In the enervating damp heat of Malaya, both thought and action took place in a kind of haze, and he sensed strongly that his mind could be far deeper and sharper than it was. The only practical way, it seemed, of reaching this occasionally perceived and ideal state in the near future was to get back to England, for he imagined that in a colder and clearer temperature his thoughts and perceptions would deepen and increase.