The captain was a burly giant of a man with wide, round eyes and a mustache flecked with gray. As Victor’s mother spoke, he nodded apologetically. “Madam,” the captain said when she was finished. “My sincerest apologies. I will instruct my soldiers to avoid speaking with your boys.”
“Thank you,” Victor’s mother said.
“Do you hear that, men?” the captain shouted.
A round of yessirs came from the enlisted men. They stood at attention out of respect for the women.
The apologies continued. As the captain spoke, he twirled his cap by the bill. “I’m afraid we have sullied relations with the people of this fine village,” he said, shaking his head. “We are only here to help. It is our solemn mandate.”
The women all nodded, but Victor knew the captain was only addressing his mother. He could see it in the man’s eyes. She squeezed his hand, and Victor squeezed back.
“I assure you we want nothing with your boys, madam,” the captain continued, his lips curling into a smile. “It’s this town’s women who are so beguiling.”
THAT EVENING, the canteen was crowded with soldiers. They were stripped down to their undershirts, had taken off their boots and laid them in a pile by the door. The heat that day had been an animal thing: scalding, heavy. The entire village had given in to its weight, with the evening set aside for recovery. A breeze blew now and again through the open windows of the canteen. Inside, it smelled of feet and beer. The soldiers were drinking the place dry, singing along to the radio. The wooden floor was shiny and slick. Manau was feeling gloomy, sharing liter bottles with a few disaffected, unhappy men. They grumbled about the dwindling beer supply and the thirsty soldiers. There was only one glass, so they drank in circles. “Who do these brats think they are?” Manau heard a man complain. “They’ll leave us with nothing.”
It was a real concern among the regulars. Periodically, someone offered the soldiers a rueful smile and a toast, then mumbled curses under his breath.
Nico’s father arrived, placed his stumps on the bar, and confirmed their worst fears. It would be ten days before the next truck came. “That’s if the roads aren’t washed out,” Zahir added. He knew the delivery schedules well. Whenever the beer truck or any other truck came, he lent his broad back to the driver for loading and unloading. He had a special cart that clasped around his chest so that he could be useful even without his hands.
Manau nodded at his landlord, at the gathered men, and felt tolerated. Nothing builds community like complaining. He looked Zahir in the eye and knew there was something he should tell him. What if Nico were to leave? Victor had spoken of it as a child would: without nuance, certain of right and wrong. “He doesn’t care if his family starves without him,” Victor said of his friend, horrified. Manau didn’t see it so clearly: what a place this is to grow into adulthood! No one would starve—even Zahir must know that! Of course, the boy wanted to leave. He was the oldest boy in the school by nearly two years. He had celebrated his fourteenth birthday a few months before, on a dismal, rainy day, surrounded by children who barely reached his shoulders. All the boys his age had gone off to the city. Let them, Manau thought. Let Nico go, too. It struck Manau as comic: the slow disappearance of the place, the boarded-up houses all along the streets off the muddy plaza. Padlocked, shuttered, rotting inside. Their owners don’t visit, they don’t send money. It won’t be long now; soon they’ll stop pretending, pack up en masse, and close the town for good. They’ll say a prayer, turn their backs on this place, and let the jungle surround it, colonize it, disassemble it.
After the mothers came to scatter their children, a few parents had come to Manau to complain: How is it that you let them go? Why on this day? The mothers were desperate that their children stay, because mothers are the same everywhere. What if they leave us? Manau’s mother had been worried for her child as well, had stayed up with him the night he listened nervously for his score on the radio. She had wept when it was announced; she knew what it meant. Where will they send you? she’d asked. Now here he was. Manau had felt for a while the unreality of his own actions. Nothing had the weight, the shape, or the color of real life: it was what allowed him to observe his naked, degraded body with amused detachment; to imagine, with eyes closed, Adela loving him on the creaking wooden slats of her raised hut near the river. It was what allowed him to glare now at the captain across the fetid, smoky canteen, without fear, certain that no matter what he might say or do, the town’s demoralized men would back him up. He hummed along to the radio, felt the distant beating of his own heart, and smiled to himself.
Outside, Victor, Nico, and a few other boys stood on plastic crates, looking through the window at the canteen. Nico’s sister, Joanna, was there, with a friend, teasing the boys. “Monkeys,” the girls pronounced. “No minds of your own.” The boys shrugged off the charge. Nico had been at it all day, stalking the soldiers around town, even following a few who went off into the jungle on a reconnaissance exercise. He returned, not a little disappointed, and told Victor that they hadn’t fired their guns.
“Not even once,” he said.
The canteen was bursting with noise and life. It was such an odd sight: these fifteen strangers, and in the background, a few of the regulars nearly hidden behind a curtain of smoke. Someone sang tunelessly, the melody soon eclipsed by whistles and laughter. Victor stood on his tiptoes to take it all in. Was that his teacher there, now turned away, now smirking toward the soldiers? The captain who had smiled at Victor’s mother sat in the center of a circle of soldiers, their eyes glistening with reverence. He told war stories that contained no corpses, no dead: only long stretches of marching with guns at the ready. “Nothing to shoot at. Just walking. Enough to wear out two pairs of boots. Enough to rot your feet.”
“You never found a battle?”
“The jungle is endless,” he said. “We called our squadron leader Moses. We were the wandering tribe.”
Victor strained to see. Nico, by contrast, could rest his elbows on the ledge. Still, Victor could hear all of it, and now he looked at his friend, unimpressed by these mundane accounts of the soldiering life. “That’s what you want to do?” he asked. “Walk around?”
Nico shrugged. “What do you know about anything?” he said. “There’s no war anyway.”
“It sounds stupid.”
“You sound stupid,” Nico snapped. “At least they go places.”
Victor punched him in the arm, and his friend tumbled off his crate. He hadn’t meant to do it. The other boys stepped back, hushed.
Nico stood up. One of the younger boys started to wipe the dirt off his back, but Nico slapped his hand away. He was smiling. “An accident, huh?” Nico said.
“Yeah.”
“You’re good at those, aren’t you?”
Victor didn’t speak. He didn’t breathe.
“Say you’re sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” Victor muttered. He held his hand out, then felt Nico’s open palms shove his chest. He fell back, his head bumping hard against the wall. He heard a gasp. He was sure that one of the girls screamed. It was dark, then light. Victor gasped for air. He blinked: Nico was over him, along with a dozen others. There were haloes of light around all these young, familiar faces.
“You can’t tell anyone.”
“He’s fine.”
“You killed him…”
Once, climbing trees over the river, Victor and Nico had seen a helicopter skirting the treetops downstream, bobbing unsteadily in the sky. A vision from a long-ago windy day. They had climbed the tree hurriedly, nearly falling twice, to get a better look at it. Transfixed by its motion, Victor wondered where it would land, where it was headed. He hadn’t considered for a moment that the machine held people inside; to him, it was shiny and steel and alive of its own accord. It was male and female, a being unto itself. He saw its past and its future. It lived on a mountain top overlooking the city. It had blood inside and a beating heart. And then, just before it faded from vie
w, the helicopter caught the sun’s reflection: an explosion of silver light, like a star against the bright morning sky. The distant whirring trailed off, but for minutes after, Victor blinked and could still see the helicopter’s glow etched in red, burning against the black insides of his eyelids.
It was only when he dived into the cool river that the last traces of the moment had passed.
Strange, Victor thought, that they were even friends.
Noise, shouting; his peers forming a wall around him. Nico crouched by his side. “I’m sorry, Vic,” he said. “Are you okay?” Victor felt himself nod. One of the girls ran her fingers through his hair, and he felt he loved her.
AT THE bar, the men of the town listened with their backs to the soldiers. War stories. Manau noticed his landlord had dropped his head down into his chest, as if he were trying to see into the workings of his heart. It was his turn to drink, and he was taking his time. Another man was rubbing his back, and it was a long moment before Manau’s landlord looked up. He was squinting. “I don’t like this talk,” he said. He lifted his glass between his two stumps, effortlessly, raised it to his lips, and drank. Not a drop was spilled. He passed the glass to Manau.
What elegance, Manau thought. He emptied the foam on the floor, nodded to his landlord. The soldiers were boisterous and happy, and Manau was sure he hated them. They would come and go, they would forget. He would stay. We will stay, Manau thought, and that pronoun crackled in his brain. In the local dialect, there were two kinds of we: we that included you, and another, which did not. Barely anyone spoke that language anymore—a few of the ancient women of the village, and no one else. But some of the old words had slipped into the national language, including these. We that includes you was one of Manau’s favorite words. On this evening, as he watched his landlord raise a glass and lament the distant war, he felt something like kinship. It was the drink. It was the heat blurring everything into a gauzy half-light. The soldiers were unrepentant strangers, the captain a morbid comedian, but Manau belonged.
Victor’s mother stepped into the canteen. She was met with cheers from the soldiers. The captain, his ruddy face beaming, proposed a toast—To the children! he shouted importantly. Manau watched Adela blush and then frown. Were they making fun of her? The idea scandalized him. She wore a simple blue skirt and a thin white T-shirt decorated with a sailboat. The shirt was old, the neck stretched wide enough to reveal her right shoulder. She was barefoot. When the toast had finished, the captain insisted she sit with them. “For only a moment, madam,” he said. She demurred, instead walked up to Manau and asked if she could speak to him. In private.
It took his breath away. “Of course,” he said too quickly. He almost added, “madam,” then didn’t. He wondered if it were bad taste. Did his breath smell of beer? Did he seem drunk? He offered her a smile and pushed these thoughts aside. Was there a trace of romance in her tightly pursed lips?
He followed her outside. The children didn’t bother scattering. They stood crowded around the window, surely up to no good. Tonight, he thought, we are the carnival. We are the circus at the center of the world. Let the generator hum and the music play; the glasses clink and the bottles clang! God bless the coarse men and their churlish grins, the soldiers stupefied by drink—they are the children’s heroes! Again, the word we passed ahead of him, a fluttering banner, and Manau made a decision to improve his posture starting the very next day. It was a beginning, a place to start. He would improve everything about himself. Become a better man and make his mother proud. He followed Adela into the darkness that began just a few meters beyond the canteen. She held him by the arm, as if he might get away. “Your son is a good student,” he said as they walked. Was he slurring? “A real smart one.”
“I see him reading all the time,” she said. “Old books his father brought him.”
They were a distance now from the canteen. It hadn’t rained all day long, and the air was humid and full of insects. They walked slowly along the town’s empty paths, almost to the end, where the forest began.
“You asked him, Mr. Manau? About my boy’s father?”
“I did.”
“Why?” she asked.
There was a strength to her he admired. When she passed through town, Manau always noticed her calves, her supple leg muscles. They made him feel weak. Her hand was wrapped loosely around his bicep, but he knew she had him. His body, no matter how disfigured or warped by the heat, would never be to her liking. An itchy patch of skin smoldered beneath her faint touch. He had the irresistible urge to be honest. It didn’t come often.
“I’m lonely,” he whispered, shutting his eyes.
He opened them a little later—a few seconds, a minute—and she was still there. Adela had softened a bit, or seemed to. It was hard to tell in the weak light. She touched his face. “Our teachers never last very long,” she said. “It’s not easy.”
“It isn’t,” he insisted in a low voice.
The night seemed to be momentarily empty of all sound. It was her hand on his face, and only that. In an instant, it had passed. She withdrew her touch and, in the darkness, he followed her hand with his eyes. It dangled by her side, a glowing thing, and then she clasped it with the other and hid them both behind her back.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Adela shook her head. “Victor doesn’t know the whole story. He was very young.”
“I won’t ask again,” he promised.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You didn’t know. I’ll tell him. Soon.”
“I should be going.”
“Of course,” she said.
He wanted to leave—he meant to—but instead found himself looking down at his feet, immobile, planted in the earth before her. He met her gaze. She was waiting for him.
“Yes?”
“It’s a terrible thing to ask of you.”
She shook her head, not understanding.
“It’s my skin,” he said. “I itch.”
Her head turned almost imperceptibly. “Are you asking me to scratch you?”
He nodded—was she smiling?
“Where?” Adela asked.
They were hardly a hundred meters from the canteen, from the children and the soldiers and the war stories. It was a universe away. The night was pierced with stars. When she died, he would remember this, this touch: her fingers clawing his back, softly at first, then vigorously, as if she were digging in the earth for treasure.
THERE WERE dozens of children by the time he made it back, so Manau had to wade through them to get to the door of the canteen. It was as if they had become drunk just by being near the place. They were all his students. “Mr. Manau,” they yelled. “No school tomorrow! No school!” He smiled and felt buoyant. Some of the children pulled at his pant legs. A soldier’s head poked out from the window and nodded at him. Manau didn’t spot Victor or Nico among them, and again, the idea flashed through his head that he should tell his handless landlord about the boy, but the thought lingered for just a moment, and then he was inside.
In fact, Victor was there, hidden among the children, leaning against the wall of the canteen. He was fine, he told himself, but there was a softness to everything, a pliability that he found startling. He felt that he could look at something and bend it—a tree, a rock, a cloud—and it worried him. Gingerly, he touched the knot on his head. There was no blood, only this heat within him. He felt faint. The canteen’s walls quivered, the entire structure shaking with laughter.
Inside, everything had come unmoored. Drunkenness had exploded inside, and no one had been saved. The soldiers had spread about the room like ivy, a couple of them leaned over the open window, chatting with the children, blowing smoke above their heads; the men from the bar had joined the smaller group in an oblong orbit around the captain. When Manau entered, Nico’s father raised a shout, and soon everyone was applauding the teacher. The scratching still warm on his back, the burning trails of Adela’s fingers, and now this: he felt like weeping.
Manau accepted the ovation with a raised hand, and took a seat between his landlord and the captain. A glass was poured, and he raised it to his lips, nodding first at the men gathered around him.
“Mr. Zahir was just telling us about his hands,” the captain said as Manau drank. “Weren’t you?”
Manau’s landlord nodded and cleared his throat. He was hopelessly drunk, his gaze scattered and diffuse. “It wasn’t far from here, you know.” He motioned with a waving stump, and Manau saw the scarred flesh, dimpled and leathery, that closed around the place where his arms ended so abruptly.
The captain poured Zahir a glass. “Terrible,” he said.
“I was accused of stealing from the communal plot. It’s overgrown now, and no one tends to it, but it used to be at the edge of the town, just past the plaza. They did tadek.”
Tadek, Manau thought, shaking his head. “Here? Who?”
“Why, the IL, my friend. Who else would commit such an atrocity?” the captain said. “Please, go on.”
“It was Adela’s boy that chose me,” Zahir said. “He was only four years old. Let’s go, they said. I went.” He motioned for more beer, and one of the soldiers filled the glass and passed it to him. Zahir began the balancing act, but the glass slipped from between his wrists. He stopped. “But why speak of this?” he cried, turning to the captain.
“These soldiers don’t remember, Don Zahir. They don’t know. Even this teacher of yours, this learned man—even he doesn’t remember.”
“But I didn’t live here then. I’m from the city.”
“Of course.”
“And in the city,” Zahir said, “everything was fine?”
Lost City Radio Page 10