Closer to Stone

by Cleary, Simon

  ‘They call it the Devil’s Garden,’ Logan muttered.

  ‘The Sahara?’

  Logan glanced into the rear-view mirror. There was nothing to see, no realistic chance there would have been anything back there. It was something subconscious, like a tic.

  ‘We’ve got just the one word,’ he said. ‘They have many. They see deserts we are blind to.’

  I looked at him, this odd thing he’d just said.

  ‘Who’s they?’

  Logan gestured out the window with the back of his hand, a dismissive flick.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I pressed.

  ‘It was something Adams said once.’

  ‘What?’

  Logan didn’t answer straight away, lit a cigarette instead and sucked it in hard.

  ‘Adams became obsessed with the desert. Talked with whoever he could about it. Not just us, but the locals too: Arabs, Berbers, the Polisario, the Tuareg.’

  ‘Tuareg?’

  ‘The desert nomads. Anyway,’ Logan continued, ‘Adams also read whatever he could. Then he’d practise what he’d learnt, on me. Even got hold of a dictionary some French missionary wrote a hundred years ago, when their language was first written down, the Tuareg’s. It was in French, the dictionary. Still –’

  Logan sounded a series of words for me, proof of some knowledge Jack had discovered and passed on to him. He told me the word for sand dunes, and the word for newly created dunes, and the one for a plain of gravel. A different word for a rough plain that had a few boulders on it, another for a salt plain, and yet another to describe country with enough scrub for a camel to survive. Evidence of his friendship with Jack.

  ‘There’s a story about another missionary,’ Logan said. ‘An Englishwoman who spent a quarter of a century in the desert translating the Bible for the Tuareg. Though she was advised not to, she added vowels to the written language to make it more intelligible. To make it better, yeah? Well, she continued adding vowels over the years, creating, in the end, her own language. A language of one. A Bible no one could read except her! Can you believe it?’

  Was that what the UN was doing too, making this all intelligible to no one but itself?

  Old car-tyres, half buried in the sand, began to appear beside the piste, not distance markers but reminders of where to find the track if one was to lose it.

  ‘What else was Jack interested in?’ I asked. ‘Besides the desert.’

  ‘It started with the desert. It drew him in. He liked the quiet, the solitude. But if you’re a solitary sort of bloke –’ Logan shot a look at me to see, I think, if I’d challenge him.

  ‘If you’re comfortable with your own company,’ he continued, ‘the desert’s not necessarily the best place for you.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘It can make you look for things you don’t need. Find things that aren’t there.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Logan lit a cigarette, smoked it, and lit another. I thought he was ignoring my question. The sound of the tyres on the piste was a steady murmur. There was something reassuring about it and I’d closed my eyes by the time Logan spoke again.

  ‘So Adams started getting interested in all sorts of things over here. The desert was just the start of it. After the dunes and the winds and the vegetation and the seasons and the whole damn geography of the place, he wanted to learn about the locals, and their way of life. Their culture. Their religion. He started talking with them, not to win their hearts and minds, not as part of what we were doing here. Not for curiosity’s sake either. It was as if he needed to know for himself, yeah?’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  ‘You can lose yourself out here, Sebastian. In the desert. You can go native, if you’re not careful. Can get to the point where you don’t know what you stand for. What you believe. Who you are.’

  ‘Is that what happened to Jack?’

  Logan smoked.

  ‘It’s a question of balance.’

  My right forearm – my mallet arm – was larger, more muscular, than my left. But I could balance my favourite chisel across the bridge of my hand, poised between tipping and falling, the handle and blade competing, my hand keeping them apart, holding them together.

  *

  There was a border crossing to get to the camps, but as soon as we’d passed through, the experience lost its shape. The crude barrier of piping that had swung down across the piste, the cluster of low huts and the goats tethered to the carcass of an old truck, and the two utes with anti-aircraft guns set in their trays – all of it drifted by like a trick of the mind – and perhaps there had, in fact, been nothing there to interrupt our journey across the remorseless hamada.

  ‘Will we get there today?’ I asked Logan after hours of silence between us.

  ‘Inshallah,’ he said, half turning, a hint of mockery, something of a smile.

  ‘You know what the funny thing is?’

  I waited for him to tell me.

  ‘The funny thing is the Arabs say we’re as fatalistic as them.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Good die. Good die. Good die, mate.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘G’day, mate,’ Logan said, changing the tone, exaggerating it. ‘Get it? G’day. Good die.’

  Later, the stones thinned before disappearing entirely. There weren’t even any rocks to break the monotony of the land, no object shaped by wind or hand in that absolute barrenness. We seemed to float through the impartial light. The engine’s unchanging pitch. The landscape’s perfected flatness. The distant blue of the sky. One could drift. Dream. Leave yourself behind.

  FIFTEEN

  We paused before entering the camp, pulling up on a small rise overlooking the settlement, a discolouration of the land. Late-afternoon and it was still down there, only the shrouded figures passing slowly between nomad goatskin tents or the lighter canvas ones, all pegged wide and lean into the sand. Cluster upon cluster of mudbrick huts the colour of the sand, and their desert-tent annexes, huddled in their thousands against the vast, treeless desert.

  The hum of generators was the only sound.

  After a while a water truck appeared on the northern approach road, its long white tank pitching hypnotically from side to side on the uneven piste. We climbed back into the landcruiser, started up and followed the truck down to the bleak settlement.

  In the centre of the camp the water truck stopped at a row of silver tanks, great gleaming metal cubes. We stopped beside it and got out. Logan spoke to the driver while he pumped water from the truck.

  As I stood stretching and looking around, a child approached, a girl with crow-black hair.

  ‘One pen?’ she said. I reached for my breast pocket, surprised by her English as much as the request. She watched my fingers unhitch the single button of the pocket and disappear for a moment – before producing the pen, suspended in midair between us. Her eyes were so sharp, so intent upon it that she seemed to be willing gravity to slip.

  I handed it to her. I expected she would turn and run, or shriek with delight and hold it aloft, her trophy. Instead she did a strange thing. She curtsied. It was stiff – a grasping of the sides of her long skirt with both hands, a step back with one foot, bowing her head, and bending – but the elements were all there.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I replied.

  By then a crowd of children was gathering, jostling against each other, pushing closer.

  ‘Are you America?’ a boy asked.

  ‘No. Australia.’

  He looked blankly at me, then turned to the others to see if anyone else had understood.

  ‘Kangaroo,’ I said, raising my hands together in front of my chest, and cocking my wrists like they
were paws.

  ‘Australia!’ someone hooted, a distorted echo. And then everyone was laughing and mimicking me, the children turning into kangaroos hopping barefoot all around, muttering ‘Australia’ as if it was the sound kangaroos make when they jump.

  ‘Do you go to school?’ I asked the girl who’d curtsied, not knowing what else to say.

  She laughed and spoke to her friends. They broke into a babble of mirth, before turning and running.

  She held out her hand. I reached for it, but she pulled away at the last moment. Even though I’d mistaken her gesture, she still waited for me.

  ‘Come on,’ I said to Logan, who’d turned back to the vehicle.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let’s follow the kids.’

  ‘There’s no shortage of them here, mate.’

  ‘Come on. She wants to show us something.’

  ‘Alright,’ he shrugged, and locked the landcruiser.

  The girl led us to a simple building not far from the row of water tanks. It was set apart from the huts and the tents all around, and was freshly whitewashed. Above the doorway was a rough sign. One word stencil-burnt onto a piece of timber: University. At my shoulder Logan said, not even a whisper:

  ‘You know the Arabic word for “university” is the same for “toilet”?’

  ‘Really?’ I turned towards him, to confirm. But he was looking at me hard, pitiless.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘not really.’

  I swung towards the doorway, angry. If he was closer I could have pushed past him with my shoulder, knocked him off balance. Logan didn’t even speak Arabic and couldn’t possibly know. But what did he know of me that even I didn’t know? Enough to feed me, contemptuously, to throw out a lure he suspected I’d lunge towards, as I had.

  Bending my head to pass through the low doorway I was distracted by a counter-thought – Hadn’t I heard that the first universities were Arabic? That the Arabs had invented universities. But was even that true? Or was this hastily formed fact just some guilty consolation for having been fooled, and having allowed the possibility of Logan’s suggestion?

  *

  The room was empty except for a woman bent over her work at the teacher’s desk. She didn’t look up. She must have known we were there, yet something about her required silence. Her covered, bowed head seemed vulnerable, yet sure. The yellow, unpatterned material flowed around her, enveloping her. From beneath the folds I saw her hands. One rested still on the desk. The other was tattooed with dark henna, a pencil moving calmly across a sheet of paper.

  PART TWO

  ONE

  Her calm that first moment was absolute. Her veiled hair, the smoothness of her face, the serenity of her bowed head. She was more than a teacher preparing lessons, seemed to hold within her some perfectly clear and timeless vitality.

  Yet, when she looked up, her equilibrium faltered. Her eyes widened and her lips parted. She gasped and lifted her hennaed hand to her mouth.

  What was it that startled her? I wondered. Not the fact of two men being there – she must have heard our voices outside the door, and been aware of us lowering our heads at the threshold and entering. Perhaps, I thought, it was the surprise at seeing other westerners here on the fringes of the world. Or did she see something in me that first moment? That’s certainly how it was for me, when she lifted her head and widened her eyes.

  But I know now, of course, that she also saw at once my likeness to my brother.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, offering him to her with my first words, ‘I’m looking for a man by the name of Jack Adams.’

  She smiled. She was already composing herself.

  ‘Have you seen him?’ I asked, not yet even sure she spoke English.

  Her eyes began to glow. I thought she might even laugh, might invite me to laugh with her. I would have.

  ‘Come,’ she said, ‘see for yourself.’

  And with that she rose. She left the exercise book where it was on the desk, her pencil resting across its pages, and crossed the room to where I was standing at the door.

  ‘Come,’ she said, her voice low, almost a whisper. There was no excess in her.

  I followed. There was no question. I would have followed her anyway, but it seemed she might, that very moment, lead us to Jack . . .

  Logan and I bowed our heads and again were outside.

  The sun was falling fast. We left the school and crossed an open patch of sand. A boy – barefoot, closely cropped hair, perhaps ten – was balancing on the remains of a bike, stripped of its wheels and chain and cabling. Its blue forks rested on two stones that lifted the pedals from the ground, the stones where the wheels would have been. Hamid – the name she called him as we passed – stood on the pedals, driving one or two rotations, wobbling, then putting a foot on the ground to prevent the bike from toppling. He laughed and waved.

  We reached a row of mudbrick rooms. Beside the last of them was a large sand-coloured tent. We stopped outside, anticipation sharpening. She bowed her head at the threshold – we heard her speak to someone inside – then turned back and motioned for us to enter. She slid off her slippers and disappeared. Logan and I looked at each other, then bent to untie our laces, that awkward custom. My heart was beating fast. I almost overbalanced fumbling with my boots, then dropped them outside, to the right of the entrance. I paused and bent again, putting it off, the possibility that Jack might be inside – and tied my boots together. After all our rivalry, Logan put his hand on my shoulderblade, allowing me this entrance. I lowered my head, drew a deep breath of dry air, and stepped into the tent.

  She was already seated on the carpet, whispering to three women whose veils loosely covered their hair; perhaps they’d only just been pulled into place. Their faces were open, exposed. A baby lay on its stomach in front of one of the women, playing with the knotted hair of an old Barbie doll that was missing one of its long smooth legs. The women watched us as we entered, taking us in.

  A single timber pole, rough-hewn but straight, held the ceiling of the tent three metres above the ground. The inside walls were covered in hanging drapes, the exterior walls sewn tight onto a canvas floor. There were chests in the corners of the tent, and layered mattresses stacked against one of the walls, but the floor of the tent was the most intriguing. It was like a carpet emporium. There must have been twenty or thirty rugs laid end-to-end, overlapping across the floor, a dozen shades of red, so many patterns: stripes and florals and intertwining motifs repeated endlessly. I sat down and rested my hand on one of them, feeling the texture of it. The particles of sand caught in the weave.

  One of the women clapped her hands and called out over her left shoulder through the walls of the tent. Soon a boy appeared in the doorway, followed by a second, both tall and lanky, energy coming off them. They slipped out of their shoes. Seeing us they tightened. I assumed it was Logan’s uniform. The woman spoke and the taller boy lifted an arm – an instinctive action – gripping the opposite shoulder with his hand in a diagonal across his torso. He stood in this suddenly defensive poise, looking uncertainly at me.

  ‘There,’ said the teacher. ‘There’s Jack for you.’

  I didn’t understand. Not her words, nor her smile. I didn’t understand why these boys with their too-large shirts and their jeans rolled at the cuffs had been dragged away from their soccer game in the street to be paraded before us.

  ‘You recognise them?’

  I looked at her. I’d followed her, trusted her, but what was this? How could I possibly have ever seen these boys before?

  But Logan understood.

  ‘Bugger me,’ he muttered.

  She turned to the boy with his arm across his chest. He was tense, his eyes fixed on Logan. She said something to him in Arabic, her voice low, reassuring. After a while he loosened, and dropped his arm, the khaki shirt no longer
obscured. And there, stitched onto the breast, I saw my name, Adams.

  I began to nod my head, not because I understood yet, but because I was beginning to take it in. I looked then at the yellow t-shirt the other boy was wearing and saw the familiar four red Xs of a local Brisbane beer and the stylised image of the brewery itself.

  ‘Half the boys in the camp are wearing Jack’s clothes,’ she said.

  She spoke to the boys again. They went towards the door of the tent, but then the one bearing my name turned back to face me. He spoke, a few sentences I didn’t understand, some formality he felt compelled to undertake. Whatever it was he said, his address seemed to please the women, who murmured and nodded to each other. But I was lost.

  *

  ‘He was here for nearly three weeks,’ Sophia Maddison said.

  ‘How long ago?’

  She smiled at Logan. A tin kettle came to the boil on a small gas burner. One of the women lifted the lid and dropped in some tea-leaves. Another placed six small glasses onto a silver tray on short legs. The third woman repositioned the child who was squirming out of reach. These distractions. Really there was only Sophe, and what she knew.

  Logan did the asking, all the questions he wanted answers to. It was enough for me to listen, and to observe her equanimity. Like a lawyer he examined her, after dates and times, and what – precisely – was said, and what was meant by it. She gave gentle, yet deliberate, responses: when he’d arrived, where he’d stayed, when he’d left. These things she could give. But where he’d gone when he left here nearly a month ago she could not or would not say. The boundaries of what she told us were clear, sharp as a country’s borders drawn on a map.