Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

  I trusted each step I took with him. He knew the names of all the grasses he walked over. He’d be carrying two heavy buckets of chalk and clay towards a garden, but I knew he was also listening to a certain bird. A swallow knocked dead or unconscious from hitting a window silenced him for half a day. It remained with him, that bird’s world, its fate. If I said something later that encroached on the event, I’d see a shadow in him. He would turn from our conversation and I’d have lost him, find myself suddenly alone, even if he was beside me, driving his truck. He always knew the layered grief of the world as well as its pleasures. He tugged off a sprig from every bush of rosemary he passed, smelled it, and preserved it in his shirt pocket. Any river he came to distracted him. On hot days he removed his boots and clothes and swam through reeds, cigarette smoke still escaping from his mouth. He taught me where to find those rare parasol mushrooms like fawn-coloured umbrellas, with their pale gills underneath, that are to be found in open fields. “Only in open fields,” Sam Malakite would say, holding up a glass of water as if making a toast. Years later when I heard he had died, I held up my glass and said, “Only in open fields.” I was alone in a restaurant when I said this.

  The shade of his one large mulberry tree. We used to work mostly in vigorous sunlight, so now it is the shade I think of, not the tree. Just its symmetrical dark existence, and its depth and silence, where he talked to me long and lazily about his early days, until it was time to go back to wheelbarrows and hoes. The breeze lifted itself over the shallow hill and entered what felt like our dark room, rustling against us. Could have stayed there forever, under that mulberry. The ants in the grass climbing their green towers.

  In the Archives

  I worked each day in a fractional corner of that nameless seven-storey building. There was only one man I knew there and he kept his distance. One day he entered a lift I had just stepped into, said, “Hello, Sherlock!” as if the name and greeting were enough of a code between us, and as if the exclamation point that his voice provided would be enough to satisfy the person surprisingly discovered in such a place. Tall, still bespectacled, the same sloping shoulders, as boyish as ever, Arthur McCash got off on the next floor, and I stepped out briefly to watch him wander away from me to some office or other. I knew, as very few probably did, that under his white shirt there were three or four deep scars on his stomach, a bevelled permanence on his white skin.

  I was coming into London by train and staying during the week at a rented one-room flat near Guy’s Hospital. There was less chaos in the city now, a sense of people reordering their lives. On weekends I returned to Suffolk. I was living in two worlds as well as two eras. This was the city where I half believed I might catch sight of a certain pale blue Morris belonging to The Darter. I recalled its military-looking crest on the bonnet, the amber-coloured indicator lights clicking up to signal a right- or left-hand turn, then withdrawing back into the structure of the door frame like the ears of a greyhound in aerodynamic flight. And how The Darter, as if a sensitive owl, would catch a false note in the timbre of the engine, a murmur in its heart, so that within minutes he’d be out and removing the valve cover on the 918 cc engine in order to brighten the points of the spark plugs with a strip of sandpaper. The Morris, I recalled, was his flawed joy, and any women he escorted in it needed to accept the fact that he showed it more love and concern than he would ever give them.

  But I had no idea if The Darter still owned such a car, or how I might track him down. I’d attempted to visit him at The Pelican Stairs but he had moved away. The only person who had known The Darter well was The Forger of Letchworth, and I sought him out, but he too had disappeared. The truth was, I missed that remarkable table full of strangers who had altered Rachel and me more than our disappeared parents. Where was Agnes? There seemed no way of finding her. When I went to her parents’ flat, they were no longer there. The restaurant in World’s End did not remember her, the polytechnic had no address for her. So my eyes were constantly on the lookout for that familiar blue outline of a two-door Morris.

  Months passed at my job. I began to realize that whatever papers might have contained material on my mother would never be revealed to me. Her activities were either already destroyed or deliberately withheld from me. A black hood seemed to have been placed over her war career and I would continue to remain in the dark.

  To escape the confines of work I had begun walking the north bank of the Thames at night, sidling past old Anderson shelters where The Darter had once kept dogs. But there was no longer a bark or a scuffle within. I passed various docks, the St. Katharine’s, the East India and the Royal Docks. The war long over, they were no longer padlocked so one night I entered, set the three-minute timer on a lock gate, borrowed a skiff, and caught the tide change.

  The river was barely inhabited. It was two or three in the morning and I was alone. Just a tug now and then, towing rubbish out to the Isle of Dogs. I was conscious of the eddies caused by tunnels that ran underwater, so I had to row hard, barely staying in place, almost sucked towards Ratcliffe Cross or the Limehouse Pier. One night the boat I took had a motor, so I travelled as far as Bow Creek and into the two northern arms of that river, almost believing I would find my allies in those dark tributaries. I anchored the stolen boat so that on another night I might use it again to continue upstream into further cuts and canals. Then I walked back into the city, and by eight-thirty in the morning arrived at the office, refreshed.

  I do not know what it was that altered me by my taking those journeys again up and down the river where we had once collected groups of dogs. I think it was becoming clear that it was not just my mother’s past that had become buried and anonymous. I felt I too had disappeared. I had lost my youth. I walked through the familiar archive rooms with a new preoccupation. I’d spent the first months of my job knowing I was being watched as we gathered the detritus of a not yet fully censored war. I had never spoken of my mother. When her name was briefly mentioned by a senior official I’d simply shrugged. I had not been trusted then, but now I was, and I knew the specific hours when I would be alone in the archives. I’d learned enough in my youth to be someone unreliable, good at loosening information from an official source, whether it was my school reports or greyhound papers I stole under the guidance of The Darter. His wallet contained slender tools that could be used for any entrance or exit, and I had watched him curiously, had once even seen him adeptly release a dog trap with a chicken bone. A minor anarchy was still in me. But till now I had had no access to the censored row of Double A files, concealed from innocents like me.

  It was the veterinarian, the one who had inherited the two parrots, who taught me how to open locks on a filing cabinet. I had met her years earlier through The Darter and she was the only one I had managed to locate from that time. She befriended me on my return to London. I explained my problem and she recommended a powerful anaesthetic used on damaged hooves and bones that I could apply around a lock until a white condensation appeared. The freezing would slow down the lock’s resistance to any trespass and allow me to carry out my next stage of attack. This was a Steinmann pin, which in a more legal world provided skeletal traction and protected the damaged bones of a racing greyhound. The smooth stainless-steel intramedullary pins, petite and efficient, were almost instantly successful, and the locks on the cabinets barely paused before they slipped open with their secrets. I began breaking into the locked files; and, in the usually deserted map room, where I ate my lunch alone, I pulled the borrowed papers out of my shirt and read them. An hour later I returned them to their padlocked homes. If my mother existed in this building, I would discover her.

  I said nothing about my new knowledge, except to telephone Rachel to tell her of my discoveries. But she had no desire to reenter our youth. Rachel in her own way had abandoned us, did not wish to go back to what was for her a dangerous and unreliable time.

  I had not been there when our mother
was taken to see her after she had been found safe in The Darter’s arms behind the large painting at the Bark Theatre. The after-effects of the chloroform were still in me. But apparently when my mother entered the room, Rachel would not leave The Darter. She clung to him and turned away from our mother. She had had a seizure during the kidnapping. I did not know the details. What happened that night was mostly kept from me. Perhaps they felt I would be upset, whereas their silence made it worse, more horrific. Rachel later would say nothing but I hate my mother! In any case, when The Darter had risen with her in his arms, and attempted to hand her over to my mother, my sister had begun to weep as if in close proximity to a demon.

  She was not in her right mind, of course, then. She was exhausted. A seizure had been activated in her and she was probably never clear about the details of what had happened. I used to witness that often, when she’d look at me during the moments following a fit as if I were an actual devil. As if one of those love potions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream had been applied, only what you first saw on waking was not a love object but a source of fear, the source of a pummelling you had been through minutes before.

  But this could not have been true for Rachel in that moment. Because the person she saw first was The Darter holding her in his arms, placating her, doing whatever was the right thing in order to guide her to a state of safety, as he had in her bedroom once, when he told me that unlikely story of his epileptic dog.

  And another thing. No matter how my sister responded to me just after a fit, whether with suspicion or anger, a few hours later she would be playing cards with me or helping me with my maths homework. This did not happen with our mother. Rachel’s rough judgement of our mother would never abate. Rachel closed the door on her. She went instead to another boarding school that she disliked, in order to be away from her. “I hate my mother,” she would continue to say fiercely. I had imagined that our mother’s return would bring us back into her arms. But my sister’s hurt was irreconcilable. And when she saw the body of The Moth in the Bark Theatre lobby, she turned and began screaming at our mother, and it feels as if she has never stopped. Our family, already splintered, was splintered again. From then on, Rachel felt safer with strangers. It had been strangers who saved her.

  That was the night The Moth finally left us. He had promised me once, by the light of a gas fire in Ruvigny Gardens, that he would stay with me until my mother came back. And he had. Then he slipped away from all of us that night when my mother returned.

  * * *

  One day, I left the Archives early to attend one of Rachel’s theatrical performances. We had not seen each other in a long time. I was aware of her avoiding me and I did not wish to invade her life. I knew she worked with a small puppet-theatre group, and heard she was living with someone, though she had never mentioned it to me. But now I had received a courteous if terse and noncommittal message from her, about a play she was involved with. She said I should not feel it was really necessary to be there, but the work was playing for three nights in an old barrel-maker’s factory. I found her message heart-breaking in its cautiousness.

  The audience took up only a third of the seats, so people tried ushering us forward at the last minute into the front rows. I myself always sit at the back, especially during any show where a relative or a magician is involved, so I remained where I was. We sat in darkness for a long time, then the play began.

  When the performance was over I waited by the exit. Rachel did not appear so I worked my way back through various doors and temporary curtains. There were two stagehands smoking in a cleared space, speaking a language I didn’t recognize. I mentioned my sister’s name and they pointed to a door. Rachel was looking at herself in a small hand mirror, removing the white paste she had worn from her face. There was a baby in a small basket beside her.

  “Hello, Wren.” I moved forward and looked down at the baby, Rachel watching me. It was not her usual stare but a look balanced on two or more emotions, waiting for me to say something.

  “A girl.”

  “No, a boy. His name is Walter.”

  Our eyes caught, held like that. It was safer to be without words just then. Omissions and silences had surrounded our growing up. As if what was still unrevealed could only be guessed at, in the way we had needed to interpret the mute contents of a trunk full of clothes. She and I had lost each other long ago in those confusions and silences. But now, beside this infant, we were within an intimacy, as when sweat covered her face after a seizure and I would hug her to me. When being wordless had been best.

  “Walter,” I said quietly.

  “Yes, dear Walter,” she said.

  I asked her what it was like for her when we were under The Moth’s spell, admitting I always felt unsure around him. She turned on me. “Spell? He cared about us. You had no idea what was happening. He was the one protecting us. He was the one taking me to the hospital, again and again. You managed to ignore what our parents had done to us.”

  She started to gather her things. “I have to go. I’m being picked up.”

  I asked her what the music had been at one moment in the play, when she was left alone on stage, embracing a large puppet. It had almost brought me to tears. It was not really important, but there was so much I wanted to ask my sister that I knew she would not respond to. Now she touched my shoulder as she answered.

  “Schumann’s ‘Mein Herz ist schwer.’ You know it, Nathaniel. It’s what we used to hear once or twice a week in our house, late at night, with the piano like a thread in the darkness. When you told me you imagined our mother’s voice joining in. That was the schwer.

  “We were damaged, Nathaniel. Recognize that.” She pushed me gently to the door. “What happened to the girl you never told me about?”

  I turned away. “I don’t know.”

  “You can look. Your name is Nathaniel, not Stitch. I’m not Wren. Wren and Stitch were abandoned. Choose your own life. Even your friend The Darter told you that.”

  She was carrying her baby and used the child’s small hand to give me a half wave. She had meant me to see her son, not to talk to me. I left the small room and found myself in darkness again. Only a thin line of light under the door I had just closed behind me.

  Arthur McCash

  What I came upon first was a cache of records of Rose’s early activities as a radio operator during the war, beginning with her work as that supposed fire watcher on the roof of the Grosvenor House Hotel; then later at Chicksands Priory, where she intercepted enciphered German signals and sent them on to Bletchley Park for decoding as directed by the “deceivers in London.” She had also made journeys to Dover to identify, among those giant aerials along the coast, the individual rhythms of specific German Morse operators—the art of being able to recognize the touch of a key being one noted example of her skills.

  It was only in later files, buried deeper and more enigmatically, that it became clear she had also worked abroad after the war ended. Her name cropped up, for instance, in the investigation of the bombing at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, as well as in fragments of other reports involving Italy, Yugoslavia, and elsewhere in the Balkans. One report noted that she had been based briefly with a small unit near Naples, two men and a woman sent in, the report bluntly stated, to “loosen the linch-pins” of a group still covertly operating. Some of her unit had been captured or killed. There was mention of a possible betrayal.

  But most of the time I found only the names of cities stamped blurrily in her passports, along with fictional names she’d used, with the dates erased or crosshatched, so I gave up being certain where she had been exactly and when she had been there. I realized the wounds on her arm were the only real evidence I had.

  * * *

  —

  I ran into Arthur McCash a second time. He had been abroad, and after a cautious conversation we went out for a meal. He never asked me what I was doing th
ere, just as I did not ask him where he had been posted. I was adept by now in the social codes of the building and knew our conversational path at dinner that evening would need to avoid all significant mountains. I did at one point, feeling it was acceptable and on the innocent side of the information boundary, wonder out loud about The Moth’s part in our lives. McCash waved the question away. We were in a restaurant a good distance from our office but he instantly looked around. “I cannot talk about this, Nathaniel.”

  Our days and nights at Ruvigny Gardens had taken place far from Whitehall territory, but McCash still felt he couldn’t discuss a person I assumed had nothing to do with government secrets. Whereas it had everything to do with Rachel and me. We sat in silence for a while. I did not wish to give in or change the subject, annoyed that we were forced to be formal strangers to each other. Half taunting him, I asked if he remembered a beekeeper who often came to our house, a Mr. Florence. I needed, I said, to reach him. I now had bees in Suffolk and needed some advice. Did he have a contact for him?

  Silence.

  “He’s just a beekeeper! I have a dead queen to replace. You’re being ridiculous.”

  “Perhaps.” McCash shrugged. “I should not even be having this meal, this repast, with you.” He moved his fork closer to the plate and was silent while we were being served, then began talking again as he watched the waiter depart.

  “There is something I do want to say to you, Nathaniel….When your mother left the Service, she did so eliminating every trail behind her for one reason only. It was so that no one could come after you and Rachel again. And there were guardians around you, always. I essentially began arriving at Ruvigny Gardens a couple of times a week to keep an eye on you. I was the one who brought your mother—when she was briefly in England—to watch you dance at that club in Bromley so she might see you, from a distance at least. Also you must know the people she worked with, even after the war was supposedly over, people like Felon, Connolly, were crucial shields and spear-carriers for us.”