Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

  That autumn our boat journeys must have been a glimpse of unattainable childhood for her—weekends with a boyfriend and his father. Agnes would chant, “Oh, I love your dad! You must love him too!” Then she would become curious again about my mother. The Darter, having never met her, was prone to excessive descriptions of her outfits as well as hairstyles. When it became clear he was modelling my mother on Olive Lawrence, it was easier for me to join in and insert more details beside his. With the help of such false information our life on the barge became even more domestic. In spite of its sparseness, the boat provided more furniture than the places where Agnes and I usually met. And there were now lock keepers she recognized and waved to as we passed. She brought a few pamphlets about the trees and about pond life, nameless to her until now. Then one about Waltham Abbey, so she could rattle off information about what had been created there—guncotton in the 1860s, then bolt-action rifles, carbines, submachine guns, flare pistols, mortar shells, all of them made only miles north of the Thames at that monastery. Agnes was a dry sponge for information, and after one or two trips knew more about what had gone on at the abbey than the lock keepers we passed. It was a monk, she told us, a monk! in the thirteenth century who wrote about the formation of gunpowder, though being fearful of this discovery he had written out the details in Latin.

  * * *

  —

  There are times when I want to place those moments when we were in the cuts and canals north of the Thames into other hands, in order to understand what was happening to us. I had lived a mostly harboured life. Now, cut loose by my parents, I was consuming everything around me. Whatever our mother was doing and wherever she was, I was strangely content. Even though things were being kept from us.

  I remember dancing with Agnes one night at a jazz club in Bromley, The White Hart. It was a crowded dance floor, and somewhere on the periphery I thought I caught sight of my mother. I wheeled around but she was gone. All I hold from that moment is the blur of a curious face, watching me.

  “What is it? What is it?” Agnes asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I thought I saw my mother.”

  “I thought she was away somewhere?”

  “Yes, that’s what I thought.”

  I stood very still, rigid on the heaving dance floor.

  * * *

  —

  Is this how we discover the truth, evolve? By gathering together such unconfirmed fragments? Not only of my mother, but of Agnes, Rachel, Mr. Nkoma (and where is he now?). Will all of them who have remained incomplete and lost to me become clear and evident when I look back? Otherwise how do we survive that forty miles of bad terrain during adolescence that we crossed without any truthful awareness of ourselves? “The self is not the principal thing,” was a half-wisdom Olive Lawrence murmured to me once.

  I think now of those mysterious lorries that drove up to meet us in order to collect the unlabelled crates in silence, of the woman watching me dance with Agnes with, it seems in retrospect, such curiosity and pleasure. And the departure of Olive Lawrence, the entrance of Arthur McCash, the range of silences in The Moth…You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing. Unless of course you wish, like my sister, to damn and enact revenge on the whole pack of them.

  Schwer

  It was almost Christmas and Rachel was in the back seat of the Morris with me. The Moth was taking us in The Darter’s car to a small theatre called the Bark. We were supposed to meet him there. The Moth had parked in an alley alongside the theatre when a man got into the front seat beside him, put a hand behind his head and swung it forward, banging it against the steering wheel then against the door, pulled it back and did it again, even as someone else slid in next to Rachel and covered her face with a cloth, holding it there as she struggled, all the while watching me. “Nathaniel Williams, right?” It was the man on the bus when I was with Agnes, and again that night in the lift. Rachel’s body collapsed into his lap. He reached over, grabbed my hair and put the same cloth over my face, saying, “Nathaniel and Rachel, right?” I already knew it must be chloroform and I didn’t breathe, until I had to gasp it in. The schwer, I’d have thought if I had been conscious.

  I woke in a large, barely lit room. I could hear singing. It felt miles away. I tried to mouth “the man on the bus” to myself so I would remember. Where was my sister? Then I must have slept again. A hand touched me in the darkness to pull me awake.

  “Hello, Stitch.”

  I recognized my mother’s voice. Then I heard her walk away. I lifted my head. I saw her dragging a chair across the floor. At a long table, at the other end of the room, I saw Arthur McCash sitting hunched over, blood on his white shirt. My mother sat down next to him.

  “The blood,” my mother said. “Whose is it?”

  “Mine. Maybe Walter’s too. When I picked him up. His head…”

  “Not Rachel?”

  “No.”

  “Are you certain?” she said.

  “My blood, Rose.” I was surprised he knew my mother’s name. “Rachel’s safe, somewhere in the theatre. I saw her carried inside. And we now have the boy.’’

  She looked back and stared at me on the couch. I don’t think she knew I was awake. She turned back to McCash and lowered her voice. “Because if she is not, I will publicly turn against all of you, none of you will be safe. This was your responsibility. This was the bargain. How did they get so close to my children?”

  McCash pulled the sides of his jacket close together as if to keep himself secure. “We knew they were following Nathaniel. A group from Yugoslavia. Perhaps Italians. We’re not sure yet.”

  Then they were talking about places I didn’t know. She slipped her scarf off her neck and wrapped it like a bandage round his wrist.

  “Where else?”

  He pointed to his chest. “Mostly here,” he said.

  She moved closer. “All right. Oh, all right…all right.” She kept saying those words as she opened up his shirt, tugging it free of the drying blood.

  She reached for a vase on the table, threw the few flowers out and poured water from it onto his bare chest so she could see the cuts better. “Always knives,” she murmured. “Felon often said they were going to come after us. Revenge. If not the survivors, the relatives, their children.” She was swabbing the cuts on his stomach. I realized he must have got them protecting Rachel and me. “People don’t forget. Not even children. Why should they….” She sounded bitter.

  McCash said nothing.

  “What about Walter?”

  “He might not make it. You need to take the boy and the girl away from here. There may be others.”

  “Yes…All right. All right…” She walked over to me, and bent down. She put her hand on my face, then lay beside me for a moment on the couch. “Hello.”

  “Hello. Where were you?”

  “I’m back now.”

  “Such a curious dream…” I cannot remember now which one of us said that, which one of us murmured it into the arms of the other. I heard Arthur McCash stand up.

  “I’ll find Rachel.” He passed us and disappeared. I heard later that he climbed every level of the narrow building, searching for my sister, hidden somewhere with The Darter. At first he couldn’t find them. He went along the unlit hallways not sure if there were others still dangerous in the building. He entered rooms and whispered “Wren,” which was what my mother told him to say. If a door was sealed he broke it open and entered. He was bleeding again. He listened for breathing, said “Wren” again, as if a password, giving her time to believe him. “Wren.” “Wren.” Again and again, until “Yes,” she replied, not really sure, and so he found her crouched behind a painted stage landscape le
aning against a wall, in The Darter’s arms.

  Sometime afterwards Rachel and I came down the carpeted stairs together. A small group was gathered in the lobby. Our mother, half a dozen men in plainclothes, who she said were there to protect us, McCash, The Darter. Two men in handcuffs lay on the ground, and separately a third, partially covered with a blanket, the face bloody, unrecognizable, gazing towards us. There was a gasp from Rachel. “Who is that?” A policeman bent down and pulled the blanket up over the face. Rachel began screaming. Then someone covered my sister’s head and mine with coats so we were anonymous as we were led out onto the street. I could hear Rachel’s muffled crying as we were bundled into separate vans, to be delivered to separate destinations.

  Where were we going? Into another life.

  PART TWO

  INHERITANCE

  In November of 1959, when I was twenty-eight, after some years of what had felt like wilderness, I bought a home for myself in a Suffolk village that could be reached by a few hours’ train ride from London. It was a modest house with a walled garden. I purchased it without bartering over the cost with the owner, a Mrs. Malakite. I did not wish to argue with someone obviously distressed at having to sell the home she had lived in for most of her life. I also did not want to risk losing that particular property. It was a house I loved.

  She did not remember me when she opened the door. “I am Nathaniel,” I said, and reminded her of our appointment. We stood for a moment by the door, then walked into the parlour. I said, “You have a walled garden,” and she stopped in her tracks.

  “How do you know that?”

  She shook her head and walked on. She had been preparing to surprise me perhaps with the beauty of her garden when compared with the actual house. I had spoiled the revelation.

  I told her quickly that I agreed to the proposed price. And because I knew there were plans for her to move soon into a retirement home, I arranged to come back and walk through the garden with her. She could show me the invisible details of it all then, give me some pointers about caring for the place.

  I returned a few days later and once again I could see she barely remembered me. I brought a sketch pad and explained I wished her to help me locate where certain seeds of plants and vegetables were now buried. She liked the idea of that. As far as she was concerned, it might have been the first smart thing I had said. So together we created a map of the garden, copying it down from her memory, along with quick notes as to when certain plants would appear, and in which beds. I listed the vegetables that hemmed the greenhouse and skirted the brick wall. Her knowledge was detailed, clearly accurate. That was the segment in her memory from far in the past that she could still reach. It was also clear she had continued with the upkeep of the garden since the death of her husband, Mr. Malakite, two years earlier. Only the recent memories, with no one now to share them, had begun to evaporate.

  We walked between the white-painted beehives and she produced from her apron pocket a wedge to raise the sodden ribs of wood so we could look into the lower level of the hive, the bees assaulted suddenly by sunlight. The old queen had been murdered, she told me casually. The hive would need a new one. I watched her stuff a piece of rag into the smoker and light it, and soon the queenless bees were quivering under the fumes she was puffing down on them. Then she sorted through the two levels of half-conscious bees. It was strange to consider their world being organized in such a godlike way by a woman who was remembering less and less of her own universe. Still it was clear watching and listening to her that details about the care of her garden and the three beehives and the heating of the angular greenhouse would be the last things forgotten.

  “Where do the bees travel, when they are let out?”

  “Oh…” She just gestured at the hills. “That sedge over there. Even as far as Halesworth, I wouldn’t be surprised.” She appeared sure about their tastes and familiar urges.

  Her name was Linette and she was seventy-six. I knew that.

  “You must feel you can always come back, Mrs. Malakite, to see the garden, your bees….”

  She turned from me without a word. Without even shaking her head she made it evident that it was a foolish thing to suggest, to return to where she’d lived all these years with her husband. There was much I could have said, but it would have insulted her more. And I had already been too sentimental.

  “Are you from America?” she retaliated.

  “I was there, once. But I grew up in London. For a while I lived near this village.”

  She was surprised by this and did not quite believe it.

  “What do you do?”

  “I work in the city. Three days a week.”

  “At what? Money, I suppose.”

  “No, it is sort of government work.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Ah, that’s the question. Various things…” I paused. I sounded ridiculous. I said, “I’ve always been comforted by the security of a walled garden, ever since my teens.” I watched for any sign of interest from her, but all I could feel was that I was not making a good impression, she appeared to have lost all faith in me, this seemingly random fellow who had bought this place out from under her so casually. I tugged a sprig of rosemary off a bush, rubbed it between my fingers, inhaled it, and put it in my shirt pocket. I saw her watching my actions, as if trying to remember something. I held on to the diagram of the garden I’d drawn hastily that showed where she had planted leeks, snowdrops, asters, and phlox. Beyond the wall I could see the great spread of their mulberry tree.

  The afternoon sunlight filled the walled garden, built to hold back tradewinds from the east coast. I had thought of this place so often. The warmth within its walls, its shaded light, the sense of safety I always found here. She kept watching me, as if I was a stranger in her garden, but in fact I could have composed her life. I knew a good deal about her years in this small Suffolk village with her husband. I could have entered and roamed within the story of their marriage as easily as I might have within the lives of others who had surrounded me in my youth, who were part of my self-portrait, composed from the way they had caught glimpses of me. Just as I now reflected Mrs. Malakite, standing in her cared-for garden during the last days of her ownership of it.

  I used to wonder how affectionate and close the bond was between the Malakites. They were, after all, the only couple I saw regularly in my late teens, during those school breaks when I would stay with my mother. I had no other examples. Was theirs a relationship based on contentment? Did they irritate each other? I was never certain, for I was usually alone with Mr. Malakite, working in his fields or in what had once been victory gardens. He had his terrain, his certainties about soil, weather, and was somehow more at ease and varied when working alone. I used to hear him talking to my mother, and it was a different voice that spoke to her. He would actively propose she remove a hedge from the east side of her lawn, often laugh at her innocence about the natural world. Whereas with Mrs. Malakite he tended to leave the plans for an evening and the paths of conversations up to her.

  Sam Malakite remained a mystery to me. No one really understands another’s life or even death. I knew a veterinarian who had two parrots. The birds had lived together for years, even before she inherited them. Their feathers had a mixture of green and dark brown I found beautiful. I do not like parrots, but I liked the look of these two. Eventually one of them died. I sent a note of condolence to the veterinarian. And a week later, seeing her, I asked if the surviving bird was in a state of depression or at least at a loss. “Oh no,” she said, “he’s overjoyed!”

  In any case, a couple of years after Mr. Malakite died, I bought and moved into their small timbered house protected by that walled garden. It had been a long time since I’d visited it regularly, but almost immediately a past that felt completely erased began returning. And there was a hunger towards it I never had when days had slipped
past me at the speed of a blink. I was in The Darter’s Morris and it was summer and the cloth roof of his car stretched up and folded back slowly. I was at a football match with Mr. Nkoma. I was in mid-river eating sandwiches with Sam Malakite. “Listen,” Sam Malakite says. “A thrush.” And Agnes naked, to feel fully undressed, was pulling a green ribbon out of her hair.

  That unforgotten thrush. That unforgettable ribbon.

  * * *

  After the attack in London, Rachel was enrolled quickly by my mother into a boarding school on the Welsh border, and I was spirited away for safety’s sake to a school in America, where nothing felt familiar to me. I was distanced abruptly from the world I had belonged to, where The Darter and Agnes and the ever mysterious Moth had existed. In certain ways it felt a greater loss than when my mother had gone away. I’d lost my youth, I was unmoored. After a month I ran away from the school without any clear idea where I was going, since I knew almost no one there. I was found, then shuttled back urgently to another school, this time in the north of England, where I remained in a similar isolation. When our spring term ended, a large man picked me up at the school and drove me from Northumberland south for six hours to Suffolk, barely invading my distrustful silence. I was being brought to join my mother, who was living in White Paint, the house that had once been her parents’, in the region called The Saints. It was in light-filled open country, about a mile from the nearest village, where, that summer, I would get a job with the large man who had picked me up at the school, whose name was Malakite.