Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

  “Perhaps, but hers is the only name we have. Not a general or an officer, just her code name, Viola. No other name.”

  “What happened in those villages?” Felon asks in the dark, though he knows the answer.

  The large arc light is turned on.

  “You know what we call it now? ‘Bloody autumn.’ When you threw your support behind the Partisans to crush the Germans, we were all—Croats, Serbs, Hungarians, Italians—categorized by you as Fascists, and German sympathizers. Ordinary people were now criminals of war. Some of us had been your allies, now we were the enemy. A shift of wind in London, some political whisper, so everything changed. Our villages were turned into ground. There’s no evidence of them now. People were lined up in front of common graves, bound with wire so they couldn’t run. Old feuds now an excuse for murder. Other villages also erased. In Sivac. In Adorjan. The Partisans always circling closer to Trieste, until they could drive us into the city, where there would be more annihilation. Italians, Slovenes, Yugoslavs. All of them. All of us.”

  Felon asks, “What was the name of that first village? Your uncle’s village?”

  “It no longer has a name.”

  * * *

  Rose and the soldier were moving fast over the rough terrain, wet from the constant river crossings, hurrying to reach the location before it got dark, uncertain where exactly it was. Just a few more valleys, she thought, and she told the soldier that. Everything was in flux. They could not carry a shortwave radio, only the hastily made identity papers they had been given. The man beside her had a gun. They were searching for a hill, a hut at its base, and they eventually saw the structure an hour later.

  Their arrival surprised the ones who were there. When Rose and the soldier entered the hut, shivering, their clothes wet, she saw Felon, looking immaculate, fully dry. He was wordless for a moment, then annoyed. “What are you doing…?”

  She waved the question away as if to postpone it. She saw another man and a woman, and they stepped towards her, she knew them. There was a kit bag at Felon’s feet and he gestured with almost comic aloofness, as if providing clothing was his only role in being there. “Use whatever you want, I suppose,” he said. “Get dry.” And he walked out. They divided the clothes between the two of them. A heavy shirt was taken by the soldier. She took a pair of pyjamas and what she knew was Felon’s Harris Tweed jacket. She had often seen him wear it in London.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked again when she came outside.

  “They’ve taken control of the airwaves, so there’s radio silence. You could not be reached. So I came myself. They’ve been tracking our communiqués. They know where you are. I’ve been sent to tell you you have to get out.”

  “This is not safe for you here, Rose.”

  “None of you are safe. That’s the point. They have your names, they know where you’re headed. They’ve got Connolly and Jacobs. They also claim to know who Viola is.” She referred to herself in the third person, as if someone might be listening.

  “We’ll stay the night,” he said.

  “Why? Because you have a girl here?”

  He laughed. “No. Because we also just arrived.”

  * * *

  —

  They ate close to the fire. The talk among them was careful, each uncertain how much the others knew. Each of them had always created a border between themselves and others so that a destination or purpose would not be exposed if any one of them was caught. No one else here knew she was Viola. Or that the man she was travelling with was her bodyguard. Her soldier was shy, as she’d discovered in her attempts at conversation on their sudden two-day journey, even when she asked him where he had grown up. He had no idea what her mission was. Just that she was a woman he had to safeguard.

  When she and Felon stepped outside again to talk after the meal, the soldier came too and she asked him to move away so she and Felon could speak privately. He walked off and lit a cigarette in the distance, and she watched the faint pulse of it over Felon’s shoulder whenever he inhaled. They could hear the others laughing inside.

  “Why?” Felon said it with a tired sigh of judgement. It was almost not a question. “It didn’t have to be you.”

  “You would not have listened to anyone else. And you know too much—everyone’s at risk if you’re caught. We’re without rules of war now. You’d be interrogated as a spy, then you’d disappear. We’re not much better than terrorists these days.” She said it bitterly.

  Felon said nothing, trying to find a weapon, some utensil, to get back into the argument. She reached out and put her hand on him and they stood very still in the dark. A faint light from the fire inside the hut flickered on his shoulders. Everything seemed peaceful, still, as when, during a long-ago evening in Suffolk, a barn owl, white, with a huge head, had floated silently to the earth near them, picked up a small animal—a rodent? or a shrew?—as if a piece of litter on the lawn, and glided up into a dark tree without breaking the arc of movement. “If you come upon their nests,” he’d told her then, “you’ll find they eat everything. The head of a rabbit, the remnants of a bat, a meadowlark. They’re powerful. Their wingspan—you just saw it—what is it—almost four feet? Yet if you ever get to hold one…there is no weight at all behind the strength.”

  “How did you get to hold one?”

  “One of my brothers found a barn owl, it had been electrocuted. He passed it over to me. It was large with its beautiful range of feathers, as if scalloped. Yet it weighed nothing at all. When he put it in my hands, my hands lifted, because there wasn’t the resistance I was expecting….Are you warm enough, Rose? Shall we go in?” When he spoke to her now suddenly in the present, she had to remember where she was, outside a hut, somewhere near Naples.

  Inside, the fire was nearly out. She rolled herself into a blanket and lay there. She could hear the others adapting themselves to comfortable positions. She had mentioned to Felon that she was confused about the location, and he’d quickly sketched a map on a loose sheet of paper to clarify where they were. So her mind was racing over the drawn landscape stretching away from this hut till it reached their two possible escape routes, one of them a harbour where she had to contact a person named Carmen if things went wrong. She could smell the steam from their wet clothes by the fire, and Felon’s jacket was rough against her body. There was whispering. The previous year, working with him, she suspected he was involved with Hardwick, the other woman in the hut. Now she could make out muffled talk and movement in the corner of the room where he had bedded down. She forced her mind back to the landscape and imagined the journey ahead with her bodyguard. When she woke it was first light.

  Rising early was another remnant of her education with Felon, from the times they used to go wildfowling, or hiking along a river to fish. She sat up and looked towards the darker end of the hut and saw Felon watching her, his companion asleep next to him. She rolled out of the blanket, gathered her dry clothes, and went outside to dress in private. A minute later the bodyguard discreetly followed her.

  Felon was up and the rest were awake when she came back in. She went over and gave him back his jacket. She had felt the heaviness of it against her all night. During their quick breakfast he was courteous with her, as if she, not he, were the authority in the group. It had begun earlier, when his eyes watched her from across the hut, while she imagined him in the shadow of his involvement with the other woman.

  It would be a few days later that Felon was captured and interrogated, just as she had warned him.

  * * *

  “You are a married man, are you not?”

  “Yes,” he lies.

  “I think you’re good with women. Was she your lover?”

  “Met her just once.”

  “Was she married? Children?”

  “I really don’t know.”

  “What was it made her attract
ive? Her youth?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” He shrugs. “Perhaps her gait?”

  “What is ‘gait’?”

  “A way of walking, the way one walks. You know people by their gait.”

  “You like ‘gait’ in women?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do. That’s really all I remember about her.”

  “There must have been something else…her hair?”

  “Red.” He is pleased with his quick fiction, though perhaps he has been too quick.

  “When you said ‘mole’ a while ago, I thought you meant like the animals!”

  “Ha!”

  “Yes, you confused me. What is it, exactly?”

  “Oh, you know, they…they are like birthmarks, on skin.”

  “Ah! One or two birthmarks?”

  “I didn’t count them,” he says quietly.

  “I don’t believe the red hair,” she says.

  By now Rose would be in Naples, Felon thinks. Safe.

  “Also I think she is very attractive.” The woman laughs. “Otherwise you wouldn’t avoid admitting it.”

  They let him go then, rather to his surprise. It is not him they are after, and by then they have located and identified Viola. With his help.

  The Street of Small Daggers

  She wakes, her face against the word ACQUEDOTTO, a burning pain in her arm, her mind scrambling to know where she is, the hour. Instead she remembers another time, hearing a cicada. It had been six in the evening then and she’d woken to find herself lying on grass, almost the same position she is in now, her cheek against her upper arm. She’d been fully aware of her senses then. All that was wrong with her that time was tiredness. She had walked many miles into the town to meet Felon and having to wait a few hours found a small park beside a footpath and slept, then woke suddenly to hear the mournful cicada. But at first, similarly, she had been unaware of what she was doing there. She had been waiting that time for him in a small park.

  Confusing her now is the word acquedotto, meaning a path for water, a drain. She raises her head off the drain cover. She needs clarity, to know why she is here like this, needs to think. She sees the range of still-wet cuts on her arm. If there is something voicing itself mournfully now, it is in her. She holds up her wrist, wipes blood off her broken watch, a star of glass, it says it is five or six, early in the morning. She looks at the sky. She begins to remember slowly. She needs to reach a safe house. There is a woman named Carmen she must make contact with, in case she needs help. Rose stands, raises a fold of the dark skirt, holds it in her teeth, and rips the lower third off with her good hand so she can bandage her arm tightly against the pain. Then crouches, breathing heavily. Now downhill to the harbour to find Carmen, wherever she is, and get to a boat. There are always miracles here, they say about Naples.

  She leaves the street of the small daggers and recovers the map in her head. Posillipo is the name for the rich part of the city, meaning “break from sorrow.” A Greek word, still used in Italy. And she needs to get to the Spaccanapoli, the street that splits the city in two. She moves downhill repeating the names—Spaccanapoli and Posillipo. The racket of seagulls is loud, meaning water. Find Carmen, then the harbour. There’s light in the sky now. But what is most alive is her left arm, where the pain is, the bandage already heavy with blood. She remembers now the small knives they used on her. They had discovered her and the soldier after the group separated to take different routes out of the country. How? Who gave something away? As she had entered the outskirts of the city they identified her, killed the soldier. He was just a boy. In some building they began cutting open her arm with each question. After an hour they stopped, left her. She must have somehow got away, crawled onto the street. They would be looking for her. Were they finished with her? Now she is walking downhill, thinking, her senses returning. “A break from sorrow.” “A rest from grief.” What is tombiro? She turns a corner and realizes she has stumbled awkwardly into a brightly lit square.

  This was the light in the sky all the time. Not the dawn. But families and other groups surrounding a bar, eating and drinking in the night air, a ten-year-old girl singing in their midst. It is a familiar song, one she sang to her son years before in another language. The scene in front of her could be any evening hour, but it is not early morning. Her watch must have stopped earlier when they interrogated her, the watch said five or six but it meant late afternoon, not the hour before dawn. It must still be before midnight. But the seagulls? Were they attracted only to the light in this crowded square?

  She leans against a table, a stranger, watching them talk and laugh, while the girl on a woman’s lap sings. It feels medieval, the kind of canvas of a master Felon loved to describe, pointing out its hidden structures, how a crowd radiates out and fills the canvas from something as small as a loaf of bread, which gives it all an anchor. That is how the world interacts, he would say. Here, for her, the loaf of bread is the small girl singing with private joy. It is how she herself feels having come into this loud gathering by following the Spaccanapoli towards where she is supposed to find Carmen. She could take one step forward and be more exposed, but instead she pulls out a chair and sits, resting her wounded arm on the table, the continuous mural around her. She has not lived such a life, of families and community, for a very long time. She has accepted a world of secretiveness, where there is a different power, where there is no generosity.

  A woman behind her places her hands gently on her shoulders. “There are always miracles here,” the woman says to her.

  * * *

  Some months later Felon walks with Rose, as he had once promised they would, into the Bibliothèque Mazarine. They have lunched at La Coupole long into the afternoon, watching each other swallow oysters, drink champagne from slender flutes, until they finish their meal with a crêpe they share. When she reaches out for a fork, he sees the scar above her wrist.

  “A toast,” she says. “Our war is over.”

  Felon doesn’t raise his glass. “And the next war? You will go back to England, and I shall stay here. Wars are never over. ‘Seville to wound. Córdoba to die in.’ Remember?”

  In a taxi, dizzy, she will lean against him. Where are they going? They swerve onto the Boulevard Raspail, then the Quai de Conti. She is full of uncertain senses, tethered still to this man, guided by him. The past hours have slid into each other unaccountably. She has woken alone across her bed so wide she believed she was drifting on a raft, just as at La Coupole this afternoon the hundred or so empty tables spread in front of her like an abandoned city.

  He puts his hand on her shoulder as they walk into the brown building—the great library of Mazarin, who, he announces, was “the default ruler of France after Richelieu’s demise.” Only Felon, she believes, would use the word “demise” so unconsciously, this man with barely an education before the age of sixteen. The word from a secondary vocabulary he memorized, just as he re-trained his own handwriting away from the coarse script she’d seen in his childhood notebooks beside those precisely sketched molluscs and lizards he would draw from the natural world. A self-made man. An arriviste. Therefore not trusted as authentic by some in the trade, not even himself.

  Entering the Bibliothèque, Rose realizes she is, well, vaguely drunk. Her mind drifts from the sentences he is speaking. Three flutes of champagne in the early afternoon anchored by the weight of nine oysters. And now they have somehow entered the fifteenth century, with a thousand or so remnants confiscated from monasteries or surrendered by overthrown aristocracies, even incunabula from the infancy of printing. All of it gathered and protected here after once being damned and therefore hidden for generations. “This is the great afterlife,” Felon tells her.

  On an upper floor he watches her silhouette move against the luminous windows of the building as if she were being passed by a lit train. Then she is standing in front of a great map of France with its thousan
d churches, just as he once imagined she would, so this feels like it is a replica of an earlier desire in him. Those maps always oppressive with faith, as if the only purpose in life was to journey from one church altar to another rather than cross the meticulous blue of a river to reach a distant friend. He prefers older maps that are cityless, marked only by contour lines so they can even now be used for accurate reconnaissance.

  Felon stands beside a gathering of marble scholars and philosophers, turning quickly as if he might catch a look or a thought in them. He loves the permanent judgement on the faces of statues, their clear weakness or deviousness. In Naples he stood before a brutal emperor, and he remembers still how the eyes in that evasive stone face never met his, no matter how much he moved from side to side in order to catch his attention. There are times he feels he has become that man. Rose prods him with her fingers and he turns to her. They walk beside a row of antique desks, each lit with its own amber light. One reveals the hurried handwriting of a saint, another that of one executed in his youth. A chair holds Montaigne’s folded jacket.

  Rose inhales everything. It feels like the continuation of their meal, the taste of oyster suddenly alongside the smell of desk varnish and ancient paper porous in the air. She has barely spoken since arriving here. And when he points out a detail, she does not respond, eager to discover only what this means for herself. She has adored this man all her life but feels the clash of herself against this ancient place. This is the great afterlife. Just as she perhaps is his. Did he always see her this way? She’s drunk with this small perception.

  * * *

  —

  She ignores a light rain as she walks the city alone, having slipped his leash. When she loses her way, she does not ask for directions, intent on uncertainty, laughing as she passes the same fountain twice. She wants accident, freedom. She has been brought into this city for a seduction. She can imagine everything, how it will occur. His clearly visible ribs that she will lean her head against. Her hand on the fur of his belly, rising with the twitch of it. Her mouth open with praise and kindness as he turns, enters her. She crosses a bridge. It is four in the morning when she comes back to her room.