Heaven's Edge

by Romesh Gunesekera

  Finally I had discovered, it was exactly what I needed to learn too.

  That night, watching the candlelight, I couldn’t stop the final images of Jaz and Kris from returning. I tried to recall our earlier moments together instead. Especially Jaz presenting his elegant vegetarian dishes, chatting in his easy way, wheedling persistently whenever his curiosity was aroused; giving the few precious days we had in Farindola a rare charm.

  I remembered how one evening he had flourished a kitchen knife and done his little Torvill dance, using a tea-towel as a mask. ‘Look at this. It’s so sharp you could split a lentil with it.’

  Something in the way he held it spun me back.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. You just remind me of someone.’

  ‘A real devil?’

  ‘My mother, actually,’ I blurted out.

  His eyes widened, tickled by the thought. ‘Really. Tell me about her. What was she like? I bet she was gorgeous.’

  ‘It’s just the knife you were waving about. I remember her with a knife.’ A fragment of a memory from the last time I had seen my mother and my father together surfaced.

  ‘Like Uva’s?’ Jaz asked surprised.

  ‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘No, it was a kitchen knife. Like that one. She had it in her hand.’ My father was back from one of his journeys abroad. My mother was in the kitchen.

  ‘What did she do?’ Jaz asked.

  I didn’t know. I still don’t know. ‘That is all I remember,’ I said. ‘He left after that, I think. He came here for ever.’

  ‘Why?’

  I had asked my grandmother Cleo the same question when I was older. Why did he leave? Why did he never come back? Was there an argument? I remember Cleo placing her hand over mine and speaking in a slightly husky voice. ‘You see, my dear, Lee was always fascinated by the prospect of adventure. That’s why he joined the RAF. The uniform seemed so much more glamorous to him than your grandfather’s flying school kit. And Lee so loved those fast fighter planes. He wanted to go faster, you know, than his dad in his little Cessna. Faster and further. But after that Gulf effort, he said he needed to believe in something that made more sense. He seemed to think his father’s old home could give him that. I told him life grows from the inside, but I guess we all need a little prompting to start us off. He spent a whole year on the island. He met your mother there. He fell in love and wanted to make it their home one day. So a few years later, when he was asked if he would go back and do some work there, he felt he couldn’t refuse. I think they needed someone to help with air supplies for refugees, or something, but Eldon could never believe that the plane he was in that day was not military. He wouldn’t listen to anyone. Not even me. He never forgave Lee for getting into a uniform in the first place. But I’m sure Lee wanted to show us what else he could do. You see, your father always thought he could do everything, handle anything. He wasn’t really leaving you, or your mother, you know. He went because he believed he was needed there. He always said he was just going ahead, to sort a few things out. He wanted us all to be able to join him one day.’

  If only that was true. If only there was a place where we would be reunited for ever with the ones that we lose. If only this was such a place. Perhaps it is. Perhaps that is what the earth is. Our world. A place where we look for those we had lost elsewhere in our previous, less evolved, lives. Could it be? But I have found nothing of his actual life here, or of any of those whom I have missed.

  I didn’t want to dwell on him any more that night. I thought I would try to settle down in the smaller bedroom – the child’s room. The sky was visible through the window in there. I lay down looking out for the stars I knew must still be sparking somewhere. I fell asleep dreaming of fathers again; this time not mine.

  * * *

  I dreamed of a big man, sturdily built, with a large broad chest and an impressive mane of thick black hair. He wore an orange sarong and a copper armband. He carried a scythe with one hand and held a bronze spear in the other. He was standing barefoot on a beach. At his feet a peacock struggled with a silver arrow in its throat. The sky was pitch-black and there was water, impending water, everywhere. He spoke, but his words were in a language I did not understand. He knelt down and tried to remove the arrow from the bird. The arrowhead was caught in the cords of its throat. Each time he pulled the shaft, the bird would rise trying to cry but the only sound came from its flapping feathers. Beneath them the barbed wings of a steel warplane glinted. He put his foot on the bird’s thin blue neck and yanked the arrow once more. The moment it came out, another arrow rushed through the air. This one pierced his own throat. Both arrows looked as though they had once belonged in his leather quiver. As he fell, he seemed to change shape into a leopard. I heard Uva cry out, calling him father. I looked around and saw her bathing in a stream. She had a cloth wrapped around her and knotted above her breasts. The cloth was wet and clung to her skin. With each bowlful of water that she poured, she seemed to dissolve. I shouted out to her but my voice couldn’t reach her. The air thickened with a curtain of rain between us. The river-bank I stood on began to erode. The dotted pattern in the cloth washed away, then the cloth itself melted, leaving her naked in the brief light before her figure too went. The rain, like the waters of the river, turned red; a familiar contaminated waterhole-red. I kept calling to her. I could hear her murmuring; I floated on the contours of the sound. From the shore I entered my cell in the compound outside Maravil and tripped over a polythene bag. Inside it were her remains: a silk skin. In my ear her voice echoed singing the praises of a cocoon.

  ‘Where are you?’ I shouted, knowing that her presence could not have been only in that discarded shape. Her life was not just breath, but an incarnation surely of a soul wishing; wishing still to share our temporary illumination.

  I heard her cry out again. The sound woke me.

  I was in a sweat: my face and hands had been bitten all over. Warnings about maladies and fatal infections, the rows upon rows of repellents and prophylactics I had ignored at the chemist back at the terminal before I set off, whizzed around mocking me. My arms ached; my head was swollen. The insides of my thighs hurt. All my muscles seemed to have been twisted in the night. As I tried to unstretch, the sole of my left foot curled in a spasm. It was unbearable. I wanted to pull it apart; turn my body inside out and tear it to shreds. My skin was burning, itching, retreating. I flung off the sheet and saw my body had erupted. I tried to bend my toes but they were like stumps. I could see horns protruding, yellowed and ridged. My bones being extruded. The journey from life to death, I realised then, was an unpeeling. The converting of an inner life into an outer.

  Where was the boatman who stripped back the layers?

  I felt sure Uva was dead. I wanted to plunge into her darkest, thickest jungle to die too and rot; fertilise her wretched earth if nothing else.

  Then an excruciating, gut-wrenching cramp wrung every tube in the pit of my body. I wanted to scream to do something to ease the pain.

  I staggered out of the house into the trees, trying to keep moving. As I blundered about the jungle, punching at leaves, the sounds that had plagued me slowly receded, the gripe eased. But even there it seemed Eldon had to have the last word. I don’t know why, or how, he came to be the arbiter of my whole life. I couldn’t stop him. ‘We all have a vision of the world as it should be, and our place in it.’ He launched into another of his little sermons. ‘But for most of us it takes a lifetime to discover it.’ Good, I was exhausted. My life was over. I wanted no more of his dodgy homilies. I wanted everything to be over. There seemed no point in drawing it out. Stop breathing, I told myself, and soon it would end. But then, a little further on, I heard the sound of another breath: a lung exhaling, inhaling. Slow, deliberate, difficult breathing. There was nothing to be seen that could be making the sound until, in a clump of overgrown roots, I spied a small brown huddle. A foot clawed the air as if trying to get a hold of something to push it further into
the centre. The creature tired quickly and lay with its eyes half closed. I made a soothing, clucking sound and pushed some leaves towards it. There was no reaction. I touched it. The fur was warm. It still did not react. I thought it must have died, sapped by its last effort to escape, and touched it again, feeling warm meat underneath. This time it did move, revealing a wound on its arm. I tried to shift the awkward limb and the monkey whimpered. It is sometimes kinder to kill, I remembered.

  I couldn’t. I felt a bond. Evolution was not the survival of the fittest. Our evolution must come from the survival of the weak, retrieved against the odds, I realised. It must matter, otherwise why would we care about anyone? How could I have felt anything meaningful for Uva, if we were only the random firing of some scattered neurones; the accidental binding of chemicals in a pointless law of cosmic efficiency? I could see then why I had to value life over death. Any life, including mine.

  I couldn’t live without Uva, but if I was to die without her, I would have to come back and start again. Samandia was the only safe place I knew she knew. We have to live in hope. It was clear to me then that I had to help the animal to survive. I stripped off my shirt to use as a sack to carry it. Only when I lifted the creature up did I notice one of its legs was also hurt. It was not going to be easy.

  Back at the house I cleaned the wounds with lime and gunpowder extracted from a cartridge. I even made a cradle for it out of coconut fronds.

  The monkey was too feeble to do anything. I gave it water, and tried to feed it fruit.

  ‘You’ll waste away,’ I said when it refused to eat, idiotically pleased to be able to address another even with this dire warning, even if it had no understanding of my words. I had made my choice.

  Although I still felt a little ill, by evening I was able to coax a small banana into the monkey’s mouth. It seemed grateful, and I felt grateful myself for its presence, its vulnerability.

  With the monkey dependent on me, my priorities became clear. I thought we would both sleep better on the upper floor where the air was fresher. In a cupboard I found a set of mosquito nets and I rigged one up from a roof beam. I lugged up a mattress for me and a basket for the monkey. It was like becoming a child again, when novelty could so easily displace anxiety.

  I felt safer on a solid floor that had escaped the tug of the earth. I wanted to defy the earth. To live with the weightiest things floating above the ground: to bring boulders and rocks, a bathful of water, tubs of flowering shrubs, a garden plot, anything and everything upstairs. All to float in a world above a world. To live in the gracious memory of our antenatal flights; our seeking of natural light.

  The next morning, rested and collected, I could see a whole day’s work fall into place. How I would have to stamp my own mark on the house, shape it to my needs. I felt I should redesign the whole place, become an inventor, an artist and a carpenter. Become my own Kris – even a Crusoe: plunder the wreck, explore the surroundings. There could be other houses around, possibly even inhabited. I felt an urgent need to know more, and to be in control once again. I felt a strength I had not felt before.

  The path I had first cut from the lake was still plain to see. Perhaps too plain. Fortunately fresh leaves were beginning to unfurl at the edges, and in the bare patches new life had emerged: oddly shaped black beetles, a line of tottering leaf-cutters, corrugated caterpillars. I picked my way warily around the edge of the lake in case it had already become a trap, but there was nothing to fear.

  Pulling the half-beached aircraft right out of the water, I saw again how painstakingly Kris had installed the two solar panels on the wings using bright brass hexagonal screws, how he had replaced the rubber wheels on the fuselage and renovated the padding in the cockpit. It was not so long ago, but already these were the very things that needed to be removed. To be utilitarian – to recycle, to waste not – seemed undeniably right, and yet required a measure of ruthlessness which seemed mercenary. I had to look at everything in that way; those were the values I needed to survive. Need now for ever.

  Then, just before I closed up the cockpit, I saw a small parcel lodged between the seat and the safety harness; a piece of silk tied around it.

  I had to force the lump in my throat down, hard. Picking up the parcel I slowly unwrapped it.

  My first thought was that this time the knife really was Uva’s. But again her symbol was not on it. It had to be Kris’s. He must have died without it. It floated in my hand, a pair of furled wings. A gift? I climbed out of the aircraft and, once on the ground, flicked it open the way I remembered Kris, and Uva before him, do; like an eye flashing. I stared at it as though by looking I could decipher all its secrets, return all the blood it had let: to the soldier in his workshop, to the bats in the cave, to the old couple in Farindola. By the water’s edge I knelt and rinsed the blade. Closing it firmly I placed it in my breast pocket and felt an echo of Uva’s hand on it, as though she had reached through the skin of another to touch me again. Warm and close. She would want me to be a survivor; she’d be relying on me to be here. This time I knew I must.

  Within a few days I managed to fix the pantry door, refit the pulleys for the broken tat, clear the drains and even re-hang the metal gates, buckled as they were, discovering practical skills I never knew I had. I went back to the aircraft and completely dismantled it. Every mechanical bit, every scrap of wire, wood, strut and bar that might come in useful, I brought back to the sheds around the house and stacked up in a stupendous jigsaw puzzle never to be reconstructed. I made birdhouses to entice barbets, the way Eldon did for his robins and finches, and feeding trays and birdbaths. ‘My father must have been the robin,’ I quipped to my speechless companion as work displaced despair. ‘And I am the son.’

  Engrossed in these functional tasks, I didn’t worry about what might lie ahead. There had been no sign of any other inhabitants; no sign of any danger. All I was concerned with was to make this place my home and hers: a magnet for our endangered souls.

  When the monkey grew strong enough to move I let it wander about the garden. It never wanted to stray very far. It limped about, mimicking me by collecting firewood, bunches of beans, brinjals and bananas.

  It wasn’t long before I felt the need to tackle the walled crop garden and bring it under proper control too. There was so much I could have learnt from my grandfather about gardening, but all I could recall then was the old man’s enthusiasm for watering and for pruning.

  ‘These green suckers have to be taken out,’ Eldon used to say, carefully parting the roses. ‘Otherwise the whole bush turns to jungle.’ As a child I would watch him open his red secateurs and clip the bright new shoots bristling with giant thorns and chuck them to the side of the lawn. ‘You see, my boy, you have to look after the old if you want to foster the young.’

  He was so proud of his rose garden. He had about two dozen rose bushes: Nymphenburgs, Nur Mahals, Golden Wings and Moonbeams. He was not an expert, but he enjoyed his flowers and tended them with real care. Every month, and sometimes even more frequently, he would visit Kew Gardens to check how well his roses were doing in comparison with those propagated by the professionals. He would pick up tips from the rose beds by the Palm House and marvel at the regimental discipline and unwavering control displayed there. I remember the year he managed to beat the pros for the first bloom. He had celebrated with a chilled bottle of Cava from his local wine shop, where he couldn’t stop himself from mentioning it to the young sales assistant. I was with him, choosing a packet of crisps for my treat. ‘The bloom,’ he had said raising the bottle. ‘For the bloom.’

  For him the passage of time was marked in a hundred different ways: by plants that blossomed perennially, biannually, diurnally, bushes that fixed the seasons, buds that breathed by the week, the day, the hour, and over them all every few minutes aircraft, kin to his own, that would swing like the carriages of a galactic wheel. He had been a pilot training pilots for most of his life, and a gardener for only his last years. Every four minutes,
then every three, and sometimes every two minutes, the roar of a passing aircraft brought back to him his lifelong involvement with the sky, just as each bud in the garden drew him down again to his abiding earth.

  ‘The future,’ he was fond of saying, ‘is not something you can imagine. You can only rearrange the past in your mind, you know, to look like it is still to come. We have to bathe in a pool of memory, and play little tricks with its surface, just to live another day. We think we are going forwards, but really we are always on a journey going back to find something that we might once almost have had.’

  Thinking of my own future, I set about locating the cinnamon and the turmeric that I was sure were growing somewhere around. I found chilli and tomato. I needed more nourishment. I cleared an area bigger than the whole of Eldon’s old garden and squeezed seeds wherever I could. I wanted to tame the plot to produce all that I needed, and exactly when I needed it, as ambitious agriculturists the world over have done so often before. All that was required, I believed, was time and keen observation: measurement and calculation, skills I reckoned I must surely have inherited from my fastidious forebears.

  By the end of the day I was exhausted; my hands were sore from digging and my skin stung, but I could see I had made a real impression on my surroundings: the ploughed land exuded a sense of real vigour from those wilful acts of ownership. The wilderness was in retreat, but even Uva could only commend me on the flowering it was bound to leave in its wake.

  In the days that followed, I became obsessed: planting, replanting, transplanting. I cut an irrigation channel from the well so that even the runoff from my daily wash-bucket ended up watering the crops. I became expert in recognising subtle variations in the podzolic soil. I uncovered a store of rock phosphate in a shed and worked out how to use coconut husks for moisture retention, fibre as mulch, recycle waste through organic compost-generation. I dreamt of domesticating the jungle fowl I had seen running around the lake. I made traps and plans for extensive re-fencing, bringing more and more of the land under my care.