by David Malouf
They cheered and laughed and, leaping up, tried to make their own shadows appear.
The marionette was not to be outdone. Improvising now, he included the insolent spectator in his abuse. The children subsided. There was more laughter and some catcalling, and when the foolish youth rose again he was hauled down, but was replaced, almost at once by another, whose voice drowned the puppet's violent squawking— then by a third. There was a regular commotion.
The little stage-man, maddened beyond endurance, raged up and down waving his dagger and the whole stage shook; over on the wings there was the sound of argument, and a sudden scuffling.
They could see very little of this from where they were pressed in hard against the wall, but the crowd between them and the far-off disturbance began to be mobile. It surged. Suddenly things were out of hand. The children in front, who were being crowded forward around the stage, took panic and began to wail for their parents. There were shouts, screams, the sound of hard blows. In less than a minute the whole square was in confusion and the church wall now was alive with big, ugly shadows that merged in waves of darkness, out of which heads emerged, fists poked up, then more heads. Sylvia found herself separated from Alec by a dozen heaving bodies that appeared to be pulled in different directions and by opposing passions. She called out, but it was like shouting against the sea. Alec and Jason were nowhere to be seen.
Meanwhile the stage, with its gaudy trappings, had been struck away and the little blustering figure was gone. In its place an old man in a singlet appeared, black-haired and toothless, his scrawny body clenched with fury and his mouth a hole. He was screaming without change of breath in the same doll-like voice as the puppet, a high-pitched squawking that he varied at times with grunts and roars. He was inhabited now not only by the puppet's voice but by its tormentors’ as well, a pack of violent spirits of opposing factions like the crowd, and was the vehicle first of one, then of another. His thin shoulders wrenched and jerked as if he too was being worked by strings. Sylvia had one clear sight of him before she was picked up and carried, on a great new surging of the crowd, towards the back wall of one of the quayside restaurants, then down what must have been a corridor and on to the quay. In the very last moment before she was free, she saw before her a man covered with blood. Then dizzy from lack of breath, and from the speed with which all this had occurred, she found herself at the water's edge. There was air. There was the safe little bay. And there too were Alec and the boy.
They were badly shaken, but not after all harmed, and in just a few minutes the crowd had dispersed and the quayside was restored to its usual order. A few young men stood about in small groups, arguing or shaking their heads or gesticulating towards the square, but the affair was clearly over. Waiters appeared. They smiled, offering empty tables. People settled and gave orders. They too decided that it might be best, for the child's sake, if they simply behaved as usual. They ordered and ate.
They saw the young sailor who watched for sharks. He and a friend from the village were with a group of girls, and Jason was delighted when the boy recognised them and gave a smart, mock-formal salute. All the girls laughed.
It was then that Sylvia remembered the man she had seen with blood on him. It was the older waiter from the hotel.
“I don't think so,” Alec said “You just thought it was because he's someone you know.” He seemed anxious, in his cool, down-to-earth way, not to involve them, even tangentially, in what was a local affair. He frowned and shook his head: not in front of the boy.
“No, I'm sure of it,” she insisted. “Absolutely sure.”
But next morning, at breakfast, there he was quite unharmed, waving them towards their usual table.
“I must have imagined it after all,” Sylvia admitted to herself. And in the clear light of day, with the breakfast tables gleaming white and the eternal sea in the window frames, the events of the previous night did seem unreal.
There was talk about what had happened among the hotel people and some of the guests from the Cabins, but nothing was clear. It was part of a local feud about fishing rights, or it was political—the puppet-man was a known troublemaker from another village—or the whole thing had no point at all; it was one of those episodes that explode out of nowhere in the electric south, having no cause and therefore requiring no explanation, but gathering up into itself all sorts of hostilities— personal, political, some with their roots in nothing more than youthful high-spirits and the frustrations and closeness of village life at the end of a hot spell. Up on the terraces women were carding wool. Goats nibbled among the rocks, finding rubbery thistles in impossible places. The fishermen's nets, black, brown, umber, were stretched on poles in the sun; and the sea, as if suspended between the same slender uprights, rose smooth, dark, heavy, fading where it imperceptibly touched the sky into mother-of-pearl.
But today the hippies did not appear, and by afternoon the news was abroad that their caves had been raided. In the early hours, before it was light, they had been driven out of town and given a firm warning that they were not to return.
The port that night was quiet. A wind had sprung up, and waves could be heard on the breakwater. The lights swayed overhead, casting uneasy shadows over the rough stones of the promenade and the faces of the few tourists who had chosen to eat. It wasn't cold, but the air was full of sharp little grits and the tablecloths had been damped to keep them from lifting. The locals knew when to come out and when not to. They were right.
The wind fell again overnight. Sylvia, waking briefly, heard it suddenly drop and the silence begin.
The new day was sparklingly clear. There was just breeze enough, a gentle lapping of air, to make the waves gleam silver at the edge of the sand and to set the flag fluttering on its staff, high up on the cliff where the sailor, the same one, was watching for sharks. Jason went to talk to him after paying his usual visit to the fishermen.
Keeping her eye on the child as he made his round of the beach, Sylvia read a little, dozed off, and must for a moment have fallen asleep where Jason had half-buried her in the sand. She was startled into uneasy wakefulness by a hard, clear, cracking sound that she couldn't account for, and was still saying to herself, in the split-second of starting up, Where am I? Where is Jason?, when she caught, out of the heel of her eye, the white of his shorts where he was just making his way up the cliff face to his sailor; and in the same instant saw the sailor, above him, sag at the knees, clutching with both hands at the centre of himself, then hang for a long moment in mid-air and fall.
In a flash she was on her feet and stumbling to where the child, crouching on all fours, had come to a halt, and might have been preparing, since he couldn't have seen what had happened, to go on.
It was only afterwards, when she had caught him in her arms and they were huddled together under the ledge, that she recalled how her flight across the beach had been accompanied by a burst of machine-gun fire from the village. Now, from the direction of the Naval College, came an explosion that made the earth shake.
None of this, from the moment of her sitting up in the sand till the return of her senses to the full enormity of the thing, had lasted more than a minute by the clock, and she had difficulty at first in convincing herself that she was fully awake. Somewhere in the depths of herself she kept starting up in that flash of time before the sailor fell, remarking how hot it was, recording the flapping of a sheet of paper in Alec's abandoned typewriter—he must have gone snorkeling or into the village for a drink—and the emptiness of the dazzling sea. Where am I? Where is Jason? Then it would begin all over again. It was in going over it the second time, with the child already safe in her arms, that she began to tremble and had to cover her mouth not to cry out.
Suddenly two men dropped into the sand below them. They carried guns. Sylvia and the child, and two or three others who must have been in the water, were driven at gun-point towards the village. There was a lot of gesticulation, and some muttering that under the circumstances seemed
hostile, but no actual violence.
They were pushed, silent and unprotesting, into the crowded square. Alec was already there. They moved quickly together, too shocked to do more than touch briefly and stand quietly side by side.
There were nearly a hundred people crushed in among the pine trees, about a third of them tourists. It was unnaturally quiet, save for the abrupt starting up of the cicadas with their deafening beat; then, as at a signal, their abrupt shutting off again. Men with guns were going through the crowd, choosing some and pushing them roughly away towards the quay; leaving others. Those who were left stared immediately ahead, seeing nothing.
One of the first to go was the young waiter from the hotel. As the crowd gave way a little to let him pass, he met Sylvia's eye, and she too looked quickly away; but would not forget his face with the deep vertical lines below the cheekbones and the steady gaze.
There was no trouble. At last about twenty men had been taken and a smaller number of women. The square was full of open spaces. Their group, and the other groups of tourists, looked terribly exposed. Among these dark strangers involved in whatever business they were about— women in coarse black dresses and shawls, men in dungarees—they stood barefoot in briefs and bikinis, showing too much flesh, as in some dream in which they had turned up for an important occasion without their clothes. It was this sense of being both there and not that made the thing for Sylvia so frighteningly unreal. They might have been invisible. She kept waiting to come awake, or waiting for someone else to come awake and release her from a dream that was not her own, which she had wandered into by mistake and in which she must play a watcher's part.
Now one of the gunmen was making an announcement. There was a pause. Then several of those who were left gave a faint cheer.
The foreigners, who had understood nothing of what the gunman said, huddled together in the centre of the square and saw only slowly that the episode was now over; they were free to go. They were of no concern to anyone here. They never had been. They were, in their odd nakedness, as incidental to what had taken place as the pine trees, the little painted ikon in its niche in the church wall, and all those other mute, unseeing objects before whom such scenes are played.
Alec took her arm and they went quickly down the alley to the quay. Groups of armed men were there, standing about in the sun. Most of them were young, and one, a schoolboy in shorts with a machine-gun in his hand, was being berated by a woman who must have been his mother. She launched a torrent of abuse at him, and then began slapping him about the head while he cringed and protested, hugging his machine-gun but making no attempt to protect himself or move away.
4
There had been a coup. One of the Germans informed them of it the moment they came into the lobby. He had heard it on his transistor. What they had seen was just the furthest ripple of it, way out at the edge. It had all, it seemed, been bloodless, or nearly so. The hotel manager, bland and smiling as ever, scouring his ear with an elongated fingernail, assured them there was nothing to worry about. A change of government, what was that? They would find everything—the beach, the village—just the same, only more orderly. It didn't concern them.
But one of the Swedes, who had something to do with the legation, had been advised from the capital to get out as soon as possible, and the news passed quickly to the rest. Later that night a boat would call at a harbour further up the coast. The Club had hired a bus and was taking its foreign guests to meet it, but could not take the hotel people as well.
“What will we do?” Sylvia asked, sitting on the high bed in the early afternoon, with the shutters drawn and the village, as far as one could tell, sleeping quietly below. She was holding herself in.
“We must get that boat,” Alec told her. They kept their voices low so as not to alarm the child. “There won't be another one till the end of the week.”
She nodded. Alec would talk to the manager about a taxi.
She held on. She dared not think, or close her eyes even for a moment, though she was very tired. If she did it would start all over again. She would see the sailor standing white under the flagpole; then he would cover his belly with his hands and begin to fall. Carefully repacking their cases, laying out shirts and sweaters on the high bed, she never allowed herself to evaluate the day's events by what she had seen. She clung instead to Alec's view, who had seen nothing; and to the manager's, who insisted that except for a change in the administration two hundred miles away things were just as they had always been. The child, understanding that it was serious, played one of his solemn games.
When she caught him looking at her once he turned away and rolled his Dinky car over the worn carpet. “Hrummm, hrummm,” he went. But quietly. He was being good.
Suddenly there was a burst of gunfire.
She rushed to the window, and pushing the child back thrust her face up close to the slats; but only a corner of the village was visible from here. The view was filled with the sea, which remained utterly calm. When the second burst came, rather longer than the first, she still couldn't tell whether it came from the village or the Naval College or from the hills.
Each time, the rapid clatter was like an iron shutter coming down. It would be so quick.
She turned away to the centre of the room, and almost immediately the door opened and Alec rushed in. He was flushed, and oddly, boyishly exhilarated. He had his typewriter under his arm.
“I'm all right,” he said when he saw her face. “There's no firing in the village. It's back in the hills. I went to get my stuff.”
There was something in him, some reckless pleasure in his own daring, that scared her. She looked at the blue Olivetti, the folder of notes, and felt for a moment like slapping him, as that woman on the quay had slapped her schoolboy son—she was so angry, so affronted by whatever it was he had been up to out there, which had nothing to do with his typewriter and papers and had put them all at risk.
“Don't be upset,” he told her sheepishly. “It was nothing. There was no danger.” But his own state of excitement denied it. The danger was in him.
The taxi,an old grey Mercedes, did not arrive till nearly eight. Loaded at last with their luggage it bumped its way into the village.
The scene there was of utter confusion. The bus from the Club, which should have left an hour before, was halted at the side of the road and was being searched. Suitcases were strewn about all over the pavements, some of them open and spilling their contents, others, it seemed, broken or slashed. One of the Club guests had been badly beaten. He was wandering up the middle of the road with blood on his face and a pair of bent spectacles dangling from his ear, plaintively complaining. A woman with grey hair was screaming and being pushed about by two other women and a man—other tourists.
“Oh my God,” Alec said, but Sylvia said nothing. When a boy with a machine-gun appeared they got out quietly and stood at the side of the car, trying not to see what was going on further up the road, as if their situation was entirely different. Their suitcases were opened, their passports examined.
The two gunmen seemed undangerous. One of them laid his hand affectionately on the child's head. Sylvia tried not to scream.
At last they were told to get back into the car, given their passports, smiled at and sent on their way. The pretence of normality was terrifying. They turned away from the village and up the dusty track that Alec had walked each evening to the palace. Thistles poked up in the moonlight, all silver barbs. Dust smoked among sharp stones. Sylvia sank back into the depths of the car and closed her eyes. It was almost over. For the first time in hours she felt her body relax in a sigh.
It was perhaps that same sense of relaxation and relief, an assurance that they had passed the last obstacle, that made Alec reckless again.
“Stop a minute,” he told the driver.
They had come to the top of the ridge. The palace, on its high terrace, lay sixty or seventy metres away across a shallow gully.
“What is it?” Sylvia sho
uted, springing suddenly awake. The car had turned, gone on a little, and stopped.
“No, nothing,” he said. “I just wanted a last look.”
“Alec—" she began as their headlamps flooded the valley. But before she could say more the lights cut, the driver backed, turned, swung sharply on to the road and they were roaring away at a terrible speed into moonless dark.
The few seconds of sudden illumination had been just enough to leave suspended back there—over the hastily covered bodies, with dust already stripping from them to reveal a cheek, a foot, the line of a rising knee—her long, unuttered cry.
She gasped and took the breath back into her. Jason, half-turned in the seat, was peering out of the back window. She dared not look at Alec.
The car took them fast round bend after bend of the high cliff road, bringing sickening views of the sea tumbling white a hundred feet below in a series of abrupt turns that took all the driver's attention and flung them about so violently in the back of the car that she and Jason had to cling to one another to stay upright. At last, still dizzy with flight, they sank down rapidly to sea level. The driver threw open the door of the car, tumbled out their luggage, and was gone before Alec had even produced the money to pay.
“Alec—" she began.
“No,” he said, "not now. Later.”
There was no harbour, just a narrow stretch of shingle and a concrete mole. The crowd they found themselves among was packed in so close under the cliff that there was barely room to move. A stiff breeze was blowing and the breakers sent spray over their heads, each wave, as it broke on the concrete slipway, accompanied by a great cry from the crowd, a salty breath. They were drenched, cold, miserable. More taxis arrived. Then the bus. At last, after what seemed hours, a light appeared far out in the blackness and the ship came in, so high out of the water that it bounced on the raging surface like a cork.