Heaven's Edge

by Romesh Gunesekera

  ‘Zeng? You went back to Maravil?’

  ‘No, to his commune, but he’d been taken. They were executing anyone they had the slightest suspicion about.’ She let the breath she’d held in rush out; her eyes folded once more. ‘A nightmare.’

  I remembered the exhilaration escaping with Jaz while Maravil burned; I hadn’t worried about anybody else at the time. Certainly not Zeng. ‘I went to him. I thought he could help me find out if you were caught or already on your way here. He was the one who got me underground. They must have found out.’ I wanted her to reassure me that somehow all that had happened was worthwhile, that all her comrades knew the risks they were taking, and that the grip of the military had been weakened by its own desire for vengeance.

  Uva did not respond; she stared at her hands, deaf to me. ‘The only way I could see to get through to the jungle and round the hill country was to become a soldier myself She paused again. Her fingers clenched tight. I put my hand over her fist. It quivered under my fingers as if about to explode. She was shivering some more. ‘Do you understand?’

  ‘A soldier?’

  With a frown, she slowed down her breathing until the shaking stopped. The skin around her eyes was still weary; puffy. Her breath became shallow. ‘I took the clothes, the identity of one of them. He was an officer. I picked him up in a slut bar by the minefields. He was due to take charge of a new batch of youngsters. They were going to train in the jungle for a new offensive. Perfect for me.’ She turned and gazed out across the treetops; she would not look at me any more. Her eyes were glassy. Her voice rose. ‘I killed him. I frigged him out of his uniform and while he was wiping his prick I killed him.’ Her fist jerked free and jabbed upward towards my chest, swift and sure. ‘I stabbed him four times in the heart.’

  I grabbed her hand, this time with both of mine, and forced it back down on to the table. ‘It’s over now. You are here. Put it out of your mind. You have to forget it.’ At that moment I didn’t care what she had done to reach me.

  She wrested her hand away, toppling her spoon from the table. ‘Forget? How can you say that? You of all people.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled. The spoon lay like a metal eye coated with sand where she had wet it with her saliva. I stared at it. Everything was sliding out of reach. Who was she now? Who was I? Why did it feel like the world was a trap? Have I, like my father, and perhaps even my grandfather, wanted too much? Wanted too much in coming here? Wanted too much in Uva? Wanted too much to make the brief life we had last for ever? Wanted too much to find her, and myself, after wanting so little for so long? ‘Look, I’ll get you another spoon.’ I stood up determined to keep steady and left her, quickly, in a silence that was as painful as it was invasive. How could I tell her to forget when all I ever wanted in my life was to remember, and to be remembered? How could I? Now I wanted only to help her, and for her to help me. I knew she needed to tell me all the things I didn’t want to hear; she needed me like she had never needed me before. When I saw that, it made me feel even more alive than I had felt with her by the sea; as if somehow our real journey that had been interrupted at the beach hotel could finally begin again at a higher pitch despite her seeming to be, at that moment, further away than she had ever been from me.

  Sunlight streamed through the sweeping fronds and butterfly bushes: warm, tempered, life-giving. Shadows ripened across the sand. The garden was blooming. A sparrow flitted between two spidery shrubs. We had been given the chance to renew our lives. I wanted to tell her that here she could be released from all the wrongs of the past; I just didn’t know how to. Not yet. To live, perhaps we have to learn to lie.

  By the time I returned, she had left the table. She was at the well, washing her face. She finished and, wrapping a towel around her bare body, strolled over to the edge of the garden. There she collected some dry brown leaves, a few broken twigs, and piled them up in a small pyre. When I went over, she asked me to light it.

  ‘Why?’

  She waited until the flames caught before replying. ‘I want to burn this. Burn it like everything else that has come between us.’ She threw her uniform on to the fire. ‘Two tucks and that uniform did everything for me. Everything. I became a real leader. I took command of his squad of new recruits. They didn’t know what to expect, but I knew that with them I could get out. They were young. Just boys in awe of big stripes, the cat’s eye. Orphans from a village. Children without hope. I planned an expedition to take us right across the mountains. I thought that they too might find a new life, if we could get free.’ She watched the smoke drift up into the coconut.

  ‘They brought you here? Children?’ I watched her lower lip draw in; thin frets gather around her mouth.

  ‘I told them this was no game; I told them we were surrounded by enemies. I could speak their language. I told them we have to move like shadows. Take out bridges, trax, watchtowers if we have to. Commandos are what we are, I said. Very special commandos. The boys asked no questions. They were quick to learn. We did two hits and then broke out of the cordon. Crossed the river to the south. They love strong leadership. Clarity. They were good, devoted boys: Pambu, the youngest, was our baby, then there was Muwan, the most beautiful boy, and Kadu, second-in-command, strong and caring. Each one was a hero.’ She spoke with both pride and sorrow in her voice. I thought of Ismail and the youngsters in the jungle. If only we could live in a world that valued its children, and protected their childhood.

  ‘Where are they? What’s happened to your boys?’ I asked.

  ‘I forgot the air. My big, big mistake. We were attacked from the air. I didn’t even know who they were. Everywhere fireballs whooshed. The ground disappeared. I was scouting ahead. Leading us out of danger, I thought. Out of danger … I just didn’t imagine it would come from the air: strafing, bombing, burning. Annihilation.’

  ‘None of them survived?’

  ‘I raced back to them. I was screaming. I tried to drag Kadu out of the flames but his arms had been ripped off by a blast. And then Muwan …’ Uva squeezed her eyes shut. ‘His head exploded right in front of me. Pieces of him went everywhere.’ She tugged at her non-existent hair.

  ‘Pambu’s stomach was sliced open. He was trying to hold it together but the stuff was spilling out of his hands. When he looked up I saw he had only half his face left. He had no mouth. My baby. I shot him, looking at him. He could see me with his one eye. Do you know what I’m saying? I had to pump the bullets into his brain to stop his pain … I can’t bear it.’ She jammed a hand to her mouth and turned to walk back up to the house alone.

  * * *

  I waited for the remnants of her gruesome journey to turn to ash. The uniform burnt slowly; the white smoke billowed up obscuring the blossom I had trailed across a small archway separating the orange from the lilac. I realised then that between the moment I fell, shot by a soldier, and her reappearance from the waters of the lake, having been a soldier, too many deaths had blotched our separate lives to allow for a simple return to our beginnings. I poked the embers with a stick, turning them over. Another piece of cloth caught fire and for a moment I could see, in the flame, the figure of the man whose place she had taken, and the flickering outlines of the other men whose lives she had had to take. I shut my eyes trying to fill my head with the wild lime, the coconut, the exuberance of the flowers of my cherished garden. Now that she was here, I told myself, nothing else must matter.

  When the fire burnt itself out, I raked over the cinders. Although few hardy branches remained, all of the cloth had gone.

  Using a picker I had made, I lopped a young coconut and took it back up to the house. Uva was sitting by the empty pool, legs drawn up, clasping her feet. I gave her coconut water to drink. She cradled the husk with both hands and drank out of the hole I had punched until a small stream leaked out of the side of her mouth. I tried to stem it with mine, but she jerked her head back.

  ‘The uniform is all burnt,’ I said to mollify her and, perhaps, protect myself.
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br />   She studied me as though she was looking at something so long lost that she could no longer remember what it was.

  ‘What’s happened, has happened. We can’t change it. But now we have a future together.’ I tried to kiss her again. ‘We are the only ones here.’

  She pushed me away, muttering under her breath.

  She wouldn’t speak again all day but that night, in bed, her hands moved over me, under me. Her fingers were thin and bony; her nails sharp, uneven and torn.

  She placed her hard lips over mine, her vulva on my knee. Her tongue in my mouth was bitter, as though tears had dripped inside her. The cracks in her skin had not yet healed but all of a sudden she regained her strength: her fingers dug into me. She pulled my whole body around hers even as she enfolded mine.

  In the morning the flowers all around the garden looked jostled. A big black bumble-bee droned out of one and wobbled, heavily, into another. High up above us a lapwing called. In all the time I had been alone, I had never heard the lapwing’s tease. I thought thankfully things must have changed.

  ‘Did you hear it?’ I asked her, but she didn’t even smile. She could find nothing amusing in the birdcall, or in anything else in our lives any more.

  A small greenish bird with a curved honey bill whirred, hanging in the air; a blue-tailed bee-eater swooped out of the yellow-blossom tree.

  She came up to me, later in the day, while I was watering the flowers. Her knife was in a necklace hanging between her breasts.

  ‘You haven’t told me what happened to my Jaz? And who the other man was? Where did they go?’

  I emptied the bucket into a bed of cannas and placed it upside-down on the ground. I took her hand; she let me stroke each finger, one at a time. I imagined her fist around other flesh, younger, and felt a yearning for a wholeness to be where there was only a hollow. With emptiness, I now know, we lose balance. My early suspicions about Kris and Uva resurfaced. I didn’t want to bring him to where we were. I didn’t want to revive him, or any pain. I wished that his knife had been destroyed along with everything else up in Farindola so that nothing remained of the past. But for her sake I had to explain something of what had happened. Slowly I reconstructed the bare facts of our journey, avoiding Kris’s actual name. I told her how Jaz kept us going, joking, talking, feeding, and how he held back the soldiers in Farindola, shooting until he was shot. Suppressing the brutality of Jaz’s body’s being ripped apart, blotting out those images, I repeated instead Jaz’s last words about her, reclaiming a world of love, reshaping as he would our momentary lives.

  ‘Farindola. That was where my parents wanted to remake the world,’ Uva said quietly, as though this piece of history might provide some comfort. ‘My mother said that at the top of the world we could begin again, a world more worthwhile, a way of life that would flow down across the whole island, right down to the coast, like a great river of alluvial water.’

  ‘You know it then.’ I tried to see her other life behind her eyes. ‘There was something about that place. I wondered whether you might have been there. We could have stayed in Farindola, except we started out all wrong …’

  ‘How did you find it?’ Curiosity seemed to overcome any sign of grief for Jaz.

  I was glad and yet uncomfortable that she found it so easy. ‘We were following the only road we could. Our guide thought it would lead us down here …’

  ‘But who was it? You haven’t told me.’

  The muscles in my stomach tightened. What could I say without dragging all of what had gone before into the free space I wanted to preserve for us? But then I thought, what could it matter now? He was gone. All of that was over. Our life was nothing, surely, if it could be overshadowed by a ghost. ‘You knew him too,’ I sighed. ‘Kris, the metalworker.’

  ‘Kris?’ Her face turned hard, disbelieving.

  Does it matter? Does it matter? The old mantra jingled in my ear.

  ‘Kris took you to Farindola?’ She spoke as if to herself.

  ‘It seemed the only way to go; he didn’t know the road stopped at the top.’

  ‘He knew it all right.’

  I tried to swallow my disbelief. ‘Was he expecting you there?’

  ‘He’d rather see me dead than in Farindola.’

  She was wrong. ‘No, he wanted to help …’

  ‘Kris has never helped anyone but himself in his whole life.’

  ‘But he helped us all along.’

  ‘You he needed, until he needed you no more. He was in a hole in Maravil. He just used you to escape. I know him.’ Uva gripped my hand and hissed. ‘Believe me, I do.’

  If it was ever love, I wondered, how could it turn to such loathing? I pictured the knife he had carried in devotion. ‘Come, I have something to show you.’ I led her quickly up to the house. From the dresser drawer I pulled out his knife. ‘Look.’ I thrust it at her. ‘This matches yours, doesn’t it? He made it because he loved you.’

  She grabbed the knife. ‘No, he didn’t. My father made this. And he made mine. How did you get it?’

  ‘It was in the plane he was fixing.’

  ‘Plane?’

  I told her about the aircraft.

  ‘His escape …’

  ‘I don’t think so. The knife was wrapped up like a gift. It was a gift. I am sure of it. He knew how much I wanted it. I knew it was a sort of twin …’

  ‘Was he not the one who was going to fly your peacock plane? Was he not the one who brought those soldiers to you?’ Uva peered into my eyes, grasping me with both her hands. ‘Can’t you see what he was up to?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I released myself from her grip.

  ‘He was my brother. He betrayed my father. He fancied he’d be the hero and get to run all my father’s projects – make Farindola his own. The bastards used him to get my father and then they dumped him.’

  ‘Your brother?’ His strained movements immediately began to fit a pattern I had never before imagined. His sharp looks, his constant tenseness, the inner drive. Even so I couldn’t work him out. If only I had known he was her brother. ‘He never said anything.’ I retrieved the knife and weighed it in my hand. It was as light as a prayer. ‘I don’t know what he was thinking of doing, but he was on our side, I am sure of it. I think he wanted to stay in Farindola. He was fixing the plane for Jaz and me. For us to leave him there. Maybe to make his amends alone. He had changed from the person you knew, I am sure of it. He blew himself up to let me escape.’

  For the rest of the day we moved in awkward uncertain circles, intersecting only when I went to fill another bucket and had to cross the trench she was digging between the crop garden and the well. She dug with fanatical determination, heaping the soil around her in a succession of small pyramids.

  I wanted to ask her more about Kris and their parents. Why had she never mentioned a brother before? Why had he betrayed their father? How? What was their father really like, for Kris to turn so against him? But I resisted for fear of upsetting her. ‘What is it? What are you digging?’ I asked instead.

  She wouldn’t answer; she continued attacking the earth single-mindedly, the way Kris would sometimes continue with something he was intent on, with no sign of communication. I began to see similarities in the way she moved, the way she gripped a handle. I couldn’t understand how could they grow in such apparently different directions.

  She wouldn’t stop digging until the trench was as big as her. Then she climbed out and went to the remains of the fire where the previous day she had burnt her uniform. She undid her sarong and scooped up all the ashes in it; she carried it, like an offering, to the trench. She laid it lengthways and folded one half over the ash and cinders. Then she buried it all, shovelling back the earth she had dug up, stamping on it with her bare feet.

  When she finally finished she crouched down, ready to pounce on anything that might move, her whole naked body wet with her labour.

  The sun was setting over the orchard. I didn’t know how to reach her. ‘Come t
o the well,’ I entreated. ‘Let me bathe you.’ I wanted a hundred pails of water to wash away those tears, her wounds. I wanted her to heal soon, and myself too, and drop all the scabs of her ugly past.

  * * *

  That third night she lay sleepless next to me staring out at the sky, her body tired and yet tense as it must have been for months. I ran my fingers along a weal on her shoulder. She made no response. ‘Are you thinking of Kris?’ I asked. She rolled the other way; back taut, hot, choking in pain, or rage. I waited, breathing as close to her as possible until each of our exhalations seemed to be in unison. When her breath was finally steady again, she muttered, ‘I can’t sleep. I know I must, but I can’t. Every time I close my eyes I see …’ Her voice receded.

  I tried to hold on to it. ‘You see what?’

  Her breath stopped.

  ‘Tell me. What do you see?’

  ‘Them. In pieces all over. Lumps burning.’

  I saw the bodies of Jaz and Kris before the grenade detonated; but Uva, I guess, saw many, many more. Her dismembered children exploding, spewing blood; her mother, her father.

  I waited for her breathing to slow down again before speaking. ‘It is not your fault.’

  ‘But it is. I should have known better. I should have done something. I let it happen to my parents. Then I let it happen to them, my children.’

  ‘You can’t blame yourself for everything. You did what you could. You are lucky to have survived. There is no wrong in it. We are here now. At least we have each other.’ I held her tighter. What more could I say? It would be her words that would heal her, I knew, not mine.

  Outside, the leaves of the coconut, the jak, the breadfruit tree shifted in the breeze, unmasking the stars whose light began to pierce the gloom of the night even as they died in their own place. Blood flooded the inside of my head like a tide released by the moon to revive the beach that was nearly our own. There was pain in each of our breaths; but with every pulse that pushed my blood another fraction further through the cycle of this earth, I felt able to believe a little more that our lives somehow will be replenished.