Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

  It was nearly always a wet, pitch-black universe when The Darter drove the cumbersome nitroglycerine lorries, passing gardens with their Anderson shelters, his left hand at the gears, shifting them in the dark, aiming the missile-like vehicle towards a warehouse in London. It was two in the morning, there was the map in his head, so he could travel at ridiculous speeds through the night.

  I spent the afternoon with these discovered dossiers. Learning about the make of the lorries, the weight of the nitro transported on each journey, how during the night certain streets had muted blue lights to discreetly illuminate a sudden turn. For most of his life The Darter’s careers had been camouflaged, unknown to others. The illegal boxing rings in Pimlico, the dog tracks, the smuggling. But in his wartime career he had been watched and fully known. He needed to sign in, have his face confirmed against a photograph, then sign out at Lower Thames Street. His every night journey recorded. For the first and only time in his life, he was “in the books.” He who had been so proud of not appearing in that encyclopaedic manual listing dog-track criminals. Three journeys a night from the Gunpowder Mills, back and forth, when most of the East End of the city was asleep and unaware of the existence and danger of what was happening on night roads. But always recorded. So now, these years later, in that room of hanging maps, I was able to find the marked-up routes, aware how similar the journeys were to those we had taken those nights from the East End, from somewhere near Limehouse Basin to the centre of the City.

  I stood in the empty map room, the banners swaying as if touched by a sudden breeze. I knew somewhere there would be a file on all the drivers. I remembered him still only as The Pimlico Darter, but along with a passport-sized photograph would be his real name. In an adjacent room I pulled open cabinet drawers, looking at index cards of black-and-white photographs of gaunt men still in their youth. Until there was the name I had not remembered, beside a face I did. Norman Marshall. My Darter. “Norman!” I now recalled The Moth yelling in our crowded living room in Ruvigny Gardens. It was a fifteen-year-old picture of him with, somehow obsessively beside it, his updated address.

  Here was The Darter.

  There would be a lit cigarette in his left hand resting on the wheel as he swerved those corners, his right elbow on the open window frame so his arm was wet from the harsh rain that was keeping him alert. There was no company to talk to on those nights, and he was no doubt singing that old song to stay awake, about a dame, who was known as the flame.

  * * *

  Our heroes do not usually, after a certain age, teach or guide us anymore. They choose instead to protect the last territory where they find themselves. Adventurous thought is replaced with almost invisible needs. Those who once mocked the traditions they fought against with laughter now provide only the laughter, not the mockery. Was this what I came to believe about The Darter the last time I saw him? After I had become an adult? I am still not sure. I now had an address for where he was, and went to see him.

  But during that final meeting, I could not tell if he was simply uninterested in me, or whether there was a hurt or an anger towards me. I had after all upped and left his world suddenly years ago. And now here I was, no longer that boy. And while I remembered my adventures with him during that confused and vivid dream of my youth, The Darter would not speak of the past as I wished him to do. I had wanted to catch up on all of them, but he kept steering me back to the present. What was I doing now? Where did I live? Was I…? So all that I could really do was interpret the visit by recognizing the conversational barriers he set up. Just as I noticed that he seemed obsessively careful of where things existed and needed to remain in his kitchen, so if I picked up something—for instance a glass, a coaster—he recalled where it had to be returned to.

  He had not been expecting me to arrive at his door that day, at that hour, in fact had not been expecting me at all. So the order in his flat was clearly an everyday habit, whereas my memory of The Darter, which I admit may have become exaggerated over the years, was of a man around whom things got lost or fell to pieces. But here was a welcome mat on which you needed to brush the soles of your shoes before entering, a neatly folded tea towel, and down the hall two doors that I saw him carefully close as we walked back to the kitchen to put on the kettle.

  I was living a solitary life, so I recognize solitary, as well as the small dimensions of order that come with that. The Darter was not solitary. He had a family now: a wife named Sophie, he said, and a daughter. This surprised me. I tried to guess which of his paramours had ensnared him or had been ensnared by him. Surely not the argumentative Russian. In any case, that afternoon he was alone in the flat and I did not meet Sophie.

  The fact that he was married and had a child was as far back as he would go in speaking of the past. He refused to talk about the war and brushed off my laughing questions about the dog trade. He said he remembered little of that time. I asked if he had seen the programme Olive Lawrence had done for the BBC. “No,” he said quietly. “I missed it.”

  I did not want to believe him. I hoped he was just continuing to be evasive. I could forgive that, that he had not forgotten but had shut her out of his life as well, rather than that he could not be bothered to turn on a television. Or perhaps I was the only one left who remembered those times, those lives. And so he kept placing obstacles on the road back to our past, that wouldn’t allow me to reach it, though he could see that was why I had come. He seemed nervous too—I wondered at first if he assumed I was judging whether he had done well or had made a disappointing choice in life.

  I watched him pour tea into each of our cups.

  “I heard from someone that Agnes had a difficult time. I tried to find her but couldn’t.”

  “I think we all went our own way,” he said. “I moved to the Midlands for a while. I could be a new face there, if you know what I mean. Someone without a past.”

  “I remember those nights with you on the barge, with the dogs. Most of all.”

  “Do you? Is that what you remember most?”

  “Yes.”

  He raised his cup in a silent ironic toast. He would not return to those years. “So how long are you here? What do you do with yourself?”

  It felt to me that both questions, side by side, showed a lack of interest. So I told him without too much detail where I was living, what I did. I invented something for Rachel. Why did I lie? It may have just been the way he asked me. As if all the questions were insignificant. He appeared to want nothing from me. “Do you still import things?” I asked. He waved the remark away. “Oh, I go up to Birmingham once a week. I’m older, not travelling much now. And Sophie works in London.” He stopped there.

  His hand smoothed the tablecloth and I got up eventually after too much silence from the man whose company I had at one time grown to love, after first disliking him and then fearing him. I thought I had experienced every aspect of him, the roughness, then the generosity. So it was difficult now to see him so static, to have every sentence of mine swept cleverly away to a dead end.

  “I should go.”

  “All right, Nathaniel.”

  I asked if I could use his bathroom for a moment and went down the narrow hall.

  I looked at my face in his mirror, no longer the boy who had travelled with him on those midnight roads, whose sister he had once helped save from an attack. I turned around in that small space as if the room had an unbroken seal, was the only place that might reveal something more of my wild, unreliable hero from the past, my teacher. I tried to imagine what kind of woman he had married. I picked up the three toothbrushes on the edge of the sink and balanced them on my palm. I touched and smelled his shaving soap on the shelf. I saw three folded towels. Sophie, whoever she was, had brought order to his life.

  All this was surprising to me. All this was sad. He’d been an adventurer, and now I stood there, claustrophobic within his life. How calm and
content he had appeared, pouring the tea, stroking the tablecloth. He who was always taking bites out of other people’s sandwiches while rushing to some questionable meeting, excitedly picking up someone’s dropped playing card on a street or waterfront, tossing the peel from a banana over his shoulder into the back seat of the Morris, where Rachel and I sat with the dogs.

  I went out into the narrow hall and looked for a while at a framed piece of cloth embroidered with words. I don’t know how long I stood there looking at it, reading it, and rereading it. I put my fingers on it, then pulled myself away and very slowly walked to the kitchen. As if this was certain to be the last time I was here.

  At the front door of The Darter’s flat, about to leave, I turned to say, “Thanks for the tea….” I was still not sure what to call him. I had never called him by his real name. The Darter nodded with a precise smile, enough of a smile so as not to appear rude or angry with me for invading his privacy, then closed the door on me.

  * * *

  —

  I was miles away, caught up in the noise of the train back to Suffolk, before I allowed myself to gather our lives through the prism of that afternoon visit. There had been no attempt to forgive or punish me. It was worse. He did not wish me in any way to understand what I had done, with my quick and unwarned disappearance those years ago.

  What led me to understand what had taken place in his flat was remembering what a great liar The Darter was. How, when surprised by a policeman or security guard at a warehouse or museum, he would improvise an unplanned lie that was so intricate and even so ridiculous that he would be laughing at it himself. People did not usually lie and find it funny at the same time, that was his disguise. “Never plan a lie,” he told me during one of those night journeys. “Invent as you go along. It’s more believable.” The famous counterpunch. And the way he always breasted his cards. The Darter had poured the tea so calmly, while his mind and heart must have been on fire. He barely looked at me as he spoke. He watched only the thin stream of ochre-coloured tea.

  There was always care in Agnes for those around her. This is what I remembered most about her. She could be loud, argumentative. Tender with her parents. She clutched at all aspects of the world, but there was care. She had drawn the little portrait of us at our meal, then double-folded the butcher paper, so it was contained in what looked like a frame, and put it in my pocket. That is how she would hand over a gift, even something as worthless, as priceless, as that, saying, “Here, Nathaniel, for you.” And I, who was still a naïve, coarse fifteen-year-old, had received it and kept it in silence.

  We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here. But who did I hurt to get here? Who guided me to something better? Or accepted the few small things I was competent at? Who taught me to laugh as I lied? And who was it made me hesitate about what I had come to believe about The Moth? Who made me move from just an interest in “characters” to what they would do to others? But above all, most of all, how much damage did I do?

  There had been a closed door ahead of me as I stepped from The Darter’s bathroom. Beside it, on the wall, was a framed piece of cloth with an embroidered blue sentence.

  I used often to lie awake

  through the whole night,

  and wish for a large pearl.

  Below it, stitched with thread of a different colour, was a birthdate, with the month and the year. Thirteen years ago. There was no reason why The Darter should have known that a piece of embroidered cloth would give it away. “Sophie,” his wife, had made it for herself and the child. It was something she used to say to herself before she fell asleep. I remember. She probably would not even recall she had said the line to me once, or if she still remembered that night when we talked to each other in the darkness of that borrowed house. Even I had forgotten it until now. Besides, she would never have assumed I would reappear one afternoon, in her home, and see that wish of hers so evident on the wall.

  And now a landslide, from a simple stitched sentence. I did not know what to do. Hers had been the story I never followed. How could I travel back through time to Agnes of Battersea, to Agnes of Limeburner’s Yard, where she’d lost that cocktail dress. To Agnes and Pearl of Mill Hill.

  * * *

  —

  If a wound is great you cannot turn it into something that is spoken, it can barely be written. I know where they live now, on a treeless street. I need to be there at night and yell her name out so she can hear it, her eyes opening silently from sleep, and sit up in the darkness.

  What is it? He will say to her.

  I heard…

  What?

  I don’t know.

  Go to sleep.

  I suppose so. No. There it is again.

  I keep calling and wait for her response.

  * * *

  —

  I had not been told anything, but like my sister with her theatrical inventions, or Olive Lawrence, I know how to fill in a story from a grain of sand or a fragment of discovered truth. In retrospect the grains of sand had always been there: the fact that no one had spoken to me of Agnes when I assumed they might have, the now understandable cold-blooded silence of The Darter in his flat towards me. And the folded towels—she had after all been a waitress, a washer and cleaner like me in various kitchens, and lived in a small council flat, where neatness was a necessity. The Darter must have been amazed by such rules and beliefs in a pregnant seventeen-year-old girl who would go on to cordon off the bad habits of his life so efficiently.

  I imagine the two of them—with what? Envy? Relief? Guilt that I had not known what I was responsible for till now? I thought how they must have judged me. Or was I the unspoken subject in much the way The Darter had responded to Olive Lawrence’s television programme, as well as her book that he had never picked up. A dismissal of us all…he didn’t have time now, he needed to travel to the Midlands once a week, there was a child to raise, the times were sparse and hard.

  A few weeks after Agnes discovered she was pregnant, and with no one else she felt able to speak to about it, she had taken one bus, then another, and got off near The Pelican Stairs, where The Darter lived. She had not seen me for over a month and assumed that was where I was. It was dinnertime. There was no answer at the door, so she sat on the steps while the street darkened around her. When he did return home she was asleep. He touched her awake, she didn’t know where she was, then recognized my father. So that upstairs, when she told him her situation, not knowing where I was or where I had gone to, The Darter had needed to confess another truth, as to who he really was, and the way he really knew me, and where I might have gone or been taken.

  They sat there all night in his narrow flat, beside a gas fire; it was like a confessional. And during and after the several repeated and circular conversations to calm her disbelief, did he tell her what he did, what his profession was?

  A short while ago I saw an old film revived in a cinema where the central character, an innocent man, is wrongly convicted and his life ruined. He escapes from a chain gang but will be forever on the run. In the last scene of the film he meets the woman he loved in his earlier life but can be with her only briefly, knowing he is in danger of being caught. As he steps back, away from her into the darkness, she cries out, “How do you live?” And our hero, played by Paul Muni, says, “I steal.” And with that last sentence the movie ends, and the film darkens, closing on his face. When I saw that film, I thought of Agnes and The Darter, and wondered when and how she had discovered the illegality of what he did. How she had dealt with this knowledge of her husband’s insecure criminality in their life together, in order that they could survive. Everything I remembered about A
gnes I still loved. She had pulled me out from my youthful privacy by making me so fully aware of her. But she also was the most truthful person I knew. She and I had broken into houses, stolen food from the restaurants we worked in, but we were harmless. She argued at dishonesty or unfairness. She was truthful. You did not damage others. What a wondrous code to already have at that age.

  So I thought of Agnes and this man she had liked so much, the one she believed was my father. When and how did she discover what he did? There are so many questions I want answered by some version of the truth.

  “How do you live?”

  “I steal.”

  Or did he keep that from her a little longer, until another meeting on another night in that narrow Pelican Stairs flat? One solution, one resolution at a time. First this. And then that. And only afterwards would he say what he was willing to do, and it was no longer one of those moments in a love song he hummed to himself about how everything occurred spontaneously through quick cause and effect, so that one fell in love while down by the shore an orchestra was playing. No longer the simplicity of coincidence, happenstance. There was, I knew, a great affection between them. They had that to go forward with, alongside their different ages and suddenly different roles. There was no one else, in any case.