Grand Union

by Zadie Smith

  “So many people come to see your Maud. Does the soul good.”

  “How are you, Aggie, love? Bearing up?”

  “They took her from the sky. Boom! ‘Public depravity.’ I mean, I ask you!”

  “Come here, Aggs, give us a hug.”

  “Who’s that with her?”

  “Look, that’s the little sis. Saw it all. Poor little thing.”

  “She’s in the back room, child. You go straight through. You’ve more right than anybody.”

  All Bill Peek knew is that many bodies were lying on the ground and a space was being made for him to approach. He stepped forward like a king. The President saluted him. The two men shook hands. But the light was failing, and then failed again; the celebrations were lost in infuriating darkness . . . The boy touched his temple, hot with rage: a low-ceilinged parlor came into view, with its filthy window, further shaded by a ragged net curtain, the whole musty hovel lit by candles. He couldn’t even extend an arm—there were people everywhere, local, offensive to the nose, to all other senses. He tried to locate Agatha Hanwell, but her precise coordinates were of no use here; she was packed deep into this crowd—he could no more get to her than to the moon. A fat man put a hand on his shoulder and asked, “You in the right place, boy?” A distressing female with few teeth said, “Leave him be.” Bill Peek felt himself being pushed forward, deeper into the darkness. A song was being sung, by human voices, and though each individual sang softly, when placed side by side like this, like rows of wheat in the wind, they formed a weird unity, heavy and light at the same time. “Because I do not hope to turn again . . . Because I do not hope . . .” In one voice, like a great beast moaning. A single craft carrying the right hardware could take out the lot of them, but they seemed to have no fear of that. Swaying, singing.

  Bill Peek touched his sweaty temple and tried to focus on a long message from his father—something about a successful inspection and Mexico in the morning—but he was being pushed by many hands, ever forward, until he reached the back wall where a long box, made of the kind of wood you saw washed up on the beach, sat on a simple table, with candles all around it. The singing grew ever louder. Still, as he passed through their number, it seemed that no man or woman among them sang above a whisper. Then, cutting across it all like a stick through the sand, a child’s voice wailed, an acute, high-pitched sound, such as a small animal makes when, out of sheer boredom, you break its leg. Onward they pushed him; he saw it all perfectly clearly in the candlelight—the people in black, weeping, and Aggie on her knees by the table, and inside the driftwood box the lifeless body of a real girl, the first object of its kind that young Bill Peek had ever seen. Her hair was red and set in large, infantile curls, her skin very white, and her eyes wide open and green. A slight smile revealed the gaps in her teeth, and suggested secret knowledge, the kind of smile he had seen before on the successful sons of powerful men with full clearance—the boys who never lose. Yet none of it struck him quite as much as the sensation that there was someone or something else in that grim room, both unseen and present, and coming for him as much as for anybody.

  TWO MEN ARRIVE IN A VILLAGE

  Sometimes on horseback, sometimes by foot, in a car or astride motorbikes, occasionally in a tank—having strayed far from the main phalanx—and every now and then from above, in helicopters. But if we look at the largest possible picture, the longest view, we must admit that it is by foot that they have mostly come, and so in this sense, at least, our example is representative; in fact, it has the perfection of parable. Two men arrive in a village by foot, and always a village, never a town. If two men arrive in a town they will obviously arrive with more men, and far more in the way of supplies—that’s simple common sense. But when two men arrive in a village their only tools may be their own dark or light hands, depending, though most often they will have in these hands a blade of some kind, a spear, a long sword, a dagger, a flick-knife, a machete, or just a couple of rusty old razors. Sometimes a gun. It has depended, and continues to depend. What we can say with surety is that when these two men arrived in the village we spotted them at once, at the horizon point where the long road that leads to the next village meets the setting sun. And we understood what they meant by coming at this time. Sunset has, historically, been a good time for the two men, wherever they have arrived, for at sunset we are all still together: the women are only just back from the desert, or the farms, or the city offices, or the icy mountains, the children are playing in dust near the chickens or in the communal garden outside the towering apartment block, the boys are lying in the shade of cashew trees, seeking relief from the terrible heat—if they are not in a far colder country, tagging the underside of a railway bridge—and, most important, perhaps, the teenage girls are out in front of their huts or houses, wearing their jeans or their saris or their veils or their Lycra miniskirts, cleaning or preparing food or grinding meat or texting on their phones. Depending. And the able-bodied men are not yet back from wherever they have been.

  Night, too, has its advantages, and no one can deny that the two men have arrived in the middle of the night on horseback, or barefoot, or clinging to each other on a Suzuki scooter, or riding atop a commandeered government jeep, therefore taking advantage of the element of surprise. But darkness also has its disadvantages, and because the two men always arrive in villages and never in towns, if they come by night they are almost always met with absolute darkness, no matter where in the world or their long history you may come across them. And in such darkness you cannot be exactly sure whose ankle it is you have hold of: a crone, a wife, or a girl in the first flush of youth.

  It goes without saying that one of the men is tall, rather handsome—in a vulgar way—a little dim and vicious, while the other man is shorter, weasel-faced, and sly. This short, sly man leaned on the Coca-Cola hoarding that marked the entrance to the village and raised a hand in friendly greeting, while his companion took the small stick that he had, up to that point, been chewing, threw it on the ground, and smiled. They could just as well have been leaning on a lamppost and chewing gum, and the smell of borscht could have been in the air, but in our village we do not make borscht—we eat couscous and tilefish and that was the smell in the air, tilefish, which even to this day we can hardly bear to smell because it reminds us of the day the two men arrived in the village.

  The tall one raised his hand in friendly greeting. At which moment the cousin of the wife of the chief—who happened to be crossing the long road that leads to the next village—felt she had no choice but to stop opposite the tall man, his machete glorious in the sun, and raise her hand, though her whole arm shook as she did so.

  The two men like to arrive in this manner, with a more or less friendly greeting, and this might remind us of the fact that all humans, no matter what they do, like very much to be liked, even if it’s for only an hour or so before they are feared or hated—or maybe it would be better to say that they like the fear that they inspire to be leavened with other things, such as desire or curiosity, even if, in the final analysis, fear is always the greater part of what they want. Food is cooked for them. We offer to make them food or else they demand it, depending. At other times, on the fourteenth floor of a derelict apartment building covered in snow—in which a village lives vertically—the two men will squeeze onto a family’s sofa, in front of their television, and watch the new government’s broadcast, the new government they have just established by coup, and the two men will laugh at their new leader, marching up and down the parade ground in that stupid hat, and as they laugh they will hold the oldest girl watching television by her shoulder, in a supposedly comradely manner but a little too tightly, while she weeps. (“Aren’t we friends?” the tall, dim man will ask her. “Aren’t we all friends here?”)

  This is one way they arrive, though they did not arrive that way here, we have no televisions here and no snow and have never lived above the level of the ground. And yet th
e effect was the same: the dread stillness and the anticipation. Another girl, younger, brought the plates of food for the two men, or, as is the custom in our village, the single bowl. “This is good shit!” the tall handsome stupid one said, scooping up tilefish with his dirty fingers, and the little sly one with the face of a rat said, “Ah, my mother used to make it like this, God rest her shitty old soul!” And as they ate they bounced a girl each on their laps while the older women pressed themselves against the compound walls and wept.

  After eating, and drinking—if it is a village in which alcohol is permitted—the two men will take a walk around, to see what is to be seen. This is the time of stealing. The two men will always steal things, though for some reason they do not like to use this word and, as they reach out for your watch or cigarettes or wallet or phone or daughter, the short one, in particular, will say solemn things like “Thank you for your gift” or “We appreciate the sacrifice you are making for the cause,” though this will set the tall one laughing and thus ruin whatever dignified effect the short one was trying to achieve. At some point, as they move from home to home, taking whatever they please, a brave boy will leap out from behind his mother’s skirts and try to overpower the short, sly man. In our village this boy was a fourteen-year-old we all used to call King Frog, owing to the fact that once, when he was four or five years old, somebody asked him who had the most power in our village and he pointed to a big ugly toad in the yard and said, “Him, King Frog,” and when asked why explained, “Because even my father is afraid of him!” At fourteen he was brave but reckless, which was why his wide-hipped mother had thought to tuck him behind her skirts as if he were a baby. But there is such a thing as physical courage, real, persistent, very hard to explain, existing in tiny pockets here, there and everywhere, and though almost always useless it is still something you don’t easily forget once you’ve seen it—like a very beautiful face or a giant mountain range, it sets a limit somehow on your own hopes for yourself—and, sensing this, maybe, the tall, dim one raised his gleaming machete and, with the same fluid yet effortless gesture with which you might take the head off a flower, separated the boy from his life.

  Once blood has been shed, especially such a quantity of blood, a kind of wildness descends, a bloody chaos, into which all the formal gestures of welcome and food and threat seem instantly to dissolve. More drink is generally taken at this point, and what is strange is that the old men in the village—who, though men, have no defense—will often now grab at the bottles themselves, drinking deeply and weeping, for you need courage not only to commit bloody chaos but also to sit by and watch it happen. But the women! How proud we are, in retrospect, of our women, who stood in formation, arms linked the one to the next, in a ring around our girls, as the tall, dim man became agitated and spat on the floor—“What’s wrong with these bitches? Waiting is over. Any longer and I’ll be too drunk!”—and the short sly one stroked the face of the chief’s wife’s cousin (the chief’s wife was in the next village, visiting family) and spoke in low, conspiratorial tones of the coming babies of the revolution. We understand that women stood so in ancient times, beside white stone and blue seas, and more recently in the villages of the elephant god and in many other places, old and new. Still, there was something especially moving about the pointless courage of our women at that moment, though it could not keep two men from arriving in the village and doing their worst—it never has and never will—and yet there came that brief moment when the tall, dim one seemed cowed and unsure, as if the woman now spitting at him were his own mother, which passed soon enough when the short, sly one kicked the spitting woman in her groin and the formation broke and bloody chaos found no more obstruction to its usual plans.

  The next day the story of what happened is retold, in partial, broken versions that change depending very much on who is asking: a soldier, a husband, a woman with a clipboard, a morbidly curious visitor from the next village, or the chief’s wife, returned from her sister-in-law’s compound. Most will put a great emphasis on certain questions—“Who were they?” “Who were these men?” “What were their names?” “What language did they speak?” “What marks were on their hands and faces?”—but in our village we are very fortunate to have no rigid bureaucrats but instead the chief’s wife, who is, when all is said and done, more of a chief to us than the chief has ever been. She is tall and handsome and sly and courageous. She believes in the ga haramata, that wind which blows here hot, here cold, depending, and which everybody breathes in—you cannot help but breathe it in—though only some will breathe out in bloody chaos. For her such people become nothing more than ga haramata, they lose themselves, their names and faces, and can no longer claim merely to bring the whirlwind, they are that wind. This is of course a metaphor. But she lives by it. She went straight to the girls and asked for their account and found one who, encouraged by the sympathetic manner of the chief’s wife, told her story in full, the end of which was the most strange, for the short, sly one had thought himself in love and, afterward, laying his sweaty head on this girl’s bare chest, had told her that he, too, was an orphan—though it was harder for him, for he had been an orphan for many years rather than mere hours—and that he had a name and a life and was not just a monster but a boy who had suffered as all men suffer, and had seen horror and wanted now only to have babies with this girl from our village, many boy babies, strong and beautiful, and girls, too, yes, why not girls! And live far from all villages and towns, with this army of children encircling and protecting the couple all their days. “He wanted me to know his name!” the girl exclaimed, still stunned by the idea. “He had no shame! He said he did not want to think that he had passed through my village, through my body, without anybody caring what he was called. It is probably not his real name but he said his name was—”

  But our chief’s wife stood up suddenly, left the room, and walked out into the yard.

  KELSO DECONSTRUCTED

  The people are Kelso and Olivia, a couple. The setting a shabby rented room on the Bevington Road, in Portobello. It was Kelso’s room, until five weeks ago, when Olivia moved in. Kelso is from Antigua, originally. He is a carpenter. Olivia is a trainee nurse from Jamaica. They are engaged to be married, although they will never marry: by the time the next sentence arrives it will be Saturday, 16 May 1959, the last day of Kelso’s life. One thing about the last day of our lives is we almost never know that it is the last day—from here stems “dramatic irony”—and no more did Kelso know it. His mind was full of the pain in his thumb and the heat in the room. The break was unusual, low down, in the final joint: underneath the doctor’s makeshift splint he could feel the bone still moving. The pain was hard to bear, somehow shameful. He didn’t want to bore her complaining about a thumb, nor to be unable to open a window while she looked on, but the frame had been painted carelessly, it was sealed shut, there seemed to be no moving it. She stood at his shoulder, desperate for air on a sweltering afternoon. Kelso put the hub of his palms to the sash. Braced himself.

  “P’raps you should just call this Mr. Reynolds and ask him . . .”

  “Oh, I will, Livvy, I certainly will.”

  They both knew he’d do no such thing. Reynolds considered himself a saint for renting to them in the first place (“Plenty wouldn’t!”) and never lifted a finger on any account, not even for the Irish on the second floor. Now as Kelso bent his knees a little, to get more purchase on the frame—and Livvy begged him not to bother with it—his right hand slipped, bumping the thumb against the lock. His moan was long and pitiful. Bent over himself, he watched her step forward and force the sash. Little flecks of dry paint went flying to the carpet. The air moved a little, not much.

  “Hoo! Strong woman I’m marrying!”

  “If you want to see true true muscle, go see about my Auntie P in Dalton. She pick you up! High up! If you think I’m strong you don’t know.”

  “See, maybe I propose to the wrong Miss Ellington aft
er all that. But wait one minute: what does this Auntie P look like I wonder?”

  Olivia cracked up: “Broad as three men side by side.”

  “I see, I see . . .”

  Kelso put his good hand round Olivia’s waist and leaned into her. They looked out together, over Notting Hill. It was Whitsun Bank Holiday, hottest day of the year so far, and the streets were relatively empty, excepting the little half-moons of people gathered outside the doors of the pubs and the dominoes place on the next corner. He was conscious of the fact that many people were presently boarding trains and coaches on their way to the seaside or other pleasant locations. He could not offer her any of that, but still their Saturdays were precious, as they are to all working people, and when the hammer fell on his thumb in the workshop on Wednesday that had been his first thought: let this be brief. Whatever this is about to be—pain, doctors, pharmacy visits, all of that business—Lord, pray let it be done with by Friday night. But all this morning, wandering with Olivia through the Saturday market, as he smiled and nodded whenever she pointed out a nice basket, or a good-looking mango, or a brass carriage clock, his only true thought had been: thumb thumb thumb thumb. It was the same when his younger brother, Mal, came by. His little brother had not neglected to bring the ginger wine, he arrived laden with fresh gossip from back home and amusing, off-color stories from the factory floor at McVitie’s, but Kelso could not get any of the usual pleasure from it. He sat glumly in his chair, his hand very still, pressed between his thigh and the armrest, a copy of the Reader’s Digest open in his lap. It was left to Mal to commandeer Kelso’s precious Dansette, upon which he now played half a dozen melancholy jazz standards—“I’ll be Seeing You,” “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” “The Very Thought of You”—each one about loss and death and love, and therefore thematically consistent with what was about to occur.