Closer to Stone

by Cleary, Simon

  It wasn’t that she resisted Logan. Everything she said was freely given, spontaneously, unconditionally. Yet little she said satisfied him. She may have had other duties. Probably to Jack. But there was something else too, and it was only much later I realised she was being faithful to the conversation itself. As if Logan’s probing was undignified. That conversations needn’t be like this. That they could be subtle and gracious. And, perhaps, she was also cushioning Logan against the consequences of his inquisition.

  I accepted a glass of tea. It was becoming second nature now. I sipped my way through it, and the second, and the third. Always three, Sophe would tell me later. The first is bitter like life, she said. The second sweet like love, the third soft like death.

  ‘Death is soft?’ I queried.

  ‘It is living that’s hard,’ she replied.

  ‘But soft?’

  She just smiled. If I did not understand, I could not be made to understand.

  A gust of wind pressed against a wall of the tent, then sucked it out again.

  ‘I must leave,’ she said. ‘The light will soon be gone and I must prepare for tomorrow’s classes.’

  ‘When will you finish?’ asked Logan, still unfulfilled, suspicious.

  ‘Will you still be here tomorrow?’ she asked, directing the question to me.

  I nodded.

  ‘Come again after school.’

  TWO

  Logan and I prowled the camp the next day, wandering down its alleyways, peering into doorways, asking the women and children what they knew. There were so few men. It had been the same with my own family: when war arrived, it was the women who remained.

  We’d seen women greet the aid trucks and take the weight of the wheat sacks stamped with the names of donor countries. Women who lugged plastic containers – old oil or petrol drums filled with water – through the streets. Or who rolled gas canisters along the ground, steering them with two thin pieces of sapling. Women bent over freshly shaped bricks, arranging them in rows to dry. Or walking in pairs across wide patches of sand, infants on hips, their heads leaning into each other in talk.

  Those men we did see were old, or broken. Lying in the shade as though hiding, or curved over chess pieces, or hobbling away from us on crutches. Maimed and reclining, reduced by a foot, a leg, sometimes both, their bodies re-sculpted by landmines.

  Logan had withdrawn, and was stewing, full of grunts and grinding gears, and cigarette butts flicked towards things rather than away from them. Maybe he’d already found more of Jack than he was comfortable finding. That he was alive. And was a deserter. Meanwhile I felt like a predator, so closely was I looking for traces of Jack: catching people cleaning their teeth with sticks of acacia, interrupting nurses at the corrugated-iron hospital, kicking soccer balls with kids to find out what they knew.

  During the morning we passed a doorway and glimpsed a classroom of small boys, five or six years old, rocking in their seats, reciting together. They had wooden tablets like old miniature washboards on the desks in front of them, and their fingers moved rapidly across the boards, as if reading Braille.

  ‘Learning not to think,’ Logan muttered as we passed. ‘Manufacturing kids who know the Qur’an by heart. By ten years of age they’ll be able to recite the whole thing start to finish.’

  I raised my eyebrows.

  ‘They even get their women to recite it during pregnancy so their children will have it memorised when they’re born.’

  I looked at him. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  ‘Bullshit,’ I said, though not with conviction.

  Only then did he turn, his glinting smile.

  ‘It’s having to learn it at all that’s bullshit. Opiate of the masses and all that. Drugging their kids. Yeah, that’s what they’re doing.’

  ‘You’d know.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Logan with his army drills. All those reactions trained into him by the military. So he wouldn’t have to think.

  ‘Nothing.’

  We walked the length of the widest thoroughfare after lunch, the camp’s main street. In front of one of the huts, on a hessian bag spread on the ground in the shade of an awning, was a camel’s head. It drew us, closer and closer, exerting some force greater than mere curiosity. It was only a camel, but an image came to me, a painting I must have seen in one of Mum’s books of saints – John the Baptist’s head, served up to Bathsheba on a silver platter. It was a proud head, the camel’s, the bones of its high forehead, the long snout, and the mouth gently closed, sealed by still-moist lips. A serene head. Through a doorway the rest of the carcass could be seen laid out on the floor. As I squatted before the head, three or four women with tattooed chins entered the hut and leant over the cuts of camel flesh, holding the folds of their dresses close so the hems wouldn’t brush the meat.

  Beside the butcher’s was a provisions store, Tienda written above the door. Inside, the stock was eclectic: kitchen utensils, a rack of clothes on hangers, car-tyres, oilcans, a tower of blue plastic buckets. There was food too, but not much: a few cans stacked on one of the shelves, packs of two-minute noodles, processed cheese, sweets in coloured paper wrappers. We bought some packets of dry biscuits.

  Outside the shop two boys stood barefoot on the roof of one of the mudbrick houses nearby. A gust of wind blew, and the taller of the two threw the plastic bag he had scrunched in one hand up into the air. The wind caught the plastic, opened it, turned it, and carried it upwards like a ragged orange kite, until it stopped rising and paused for a moment, then tumbled over itself as it dropped. When the boys saw us, they clambered down and ran over to where we’d squatted in the shade, leaning against a wall.

  ‘Espagnol?’ one said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Speak English?’ the boy tried again.

  I nodded, consenting to a conversation.

  ‘What is your name? What is your country? What is your job?’

  He rattled the questions off, running them together so they sounded like an incantation. Were these boys Sophe’s students?

  I answered each question. They couldn’t understand what I said, but were delighted all the same – perhaps more so, in the simple pleasure of cause and effect: that learning to make sounds in a certain way could cause a westerner to respond. They were learning to exert this power that could shape the world.

  I laughed with them and gave them a biscuit each. They scoffed them down, so I offered the whole packet. As they peeled the pack wider I noticed their t-shirts – one featured a matador from Seville in a billowing red cape, and the other was black with KISS emblazoned across the front.

  In the camp over the following days I saw Astro Boy, and teddy bears and heart-shapes and cowboys on horses. So much clothing distributed by the international charities. The logos and colours of football teams. Cities and their festivals, the whole of the world in faded t-shirts: The Big Apple, and The Windy City and Je t’aime Paris and the Calgary Rodeo. You can get to know someone through what they donate. I wondered what the kids imagined these cities looked like, cities I’d never been to either. What the words meant to them. Natural Life. Walk Against Want. Go Your Own Way.

  *

  When the time came to meet Sophe after school I feared what Logan might do to the conversation now he was burning out. It was too important, so I started.

  ‘What else can you tell us about Jack?’ I said.

  My abruptness startled her.

  ‘What would you like to know?’

  I sat down in one of the seats in the front row of her classroom.

  ‘Anything,’ I said. ‘The most important thing.’

  She settled back at her desk. Her hair was beneath a new headscarf, patterned though also yellow. From the few strands pressed against her forehead, and the honey-wax colour of her eye
brows, I guessed her hair was light. There was an elegance in her cheekbones, and the line of her nose. In the way her cheeks filled and lifted when she smiled. Her eyes were light blue, the colour of some sky I’d once seen.

  ‘It was a surprise when he left,’ she said. ‘I thought he might stay . . . because of the kids. He spent his three weeks talking with them, wherever he found them, teaching them. He played soccer with them, and when they’d gone to their homes after dark he’d join me here and prepare materials, or lessons, or write out exam papers, one for each child.’

  She reached into her desk drawer and produced a piece of paper, holding it out to me. I rose and took it, standing close. It was the alphabet, written in Jack’s hand between two sets of ruled lines, both capitals and lower case. Then below Jack’s alphabet all fifty-two of his letters had been copied, each crudely, painstakingly imitated by a child. I handed it to Logan to see.

  ‘He spent hours teaching them to write. It was slow work, but I think it calmed him. It was almost a meditation.’

  ‘Well,’ I said.

  ‘And the kids loved him. Look.’

  She pointed to some drawings taped to the wall. Kids’ crayon drawings like you’d find in any classroom anywhere in the world: faces and stick figures and suns in the sky.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘What am I looking for?’

  She led me to the wall, and pointed to the words Mr Adams at the foot of one drawing after another. Twenty-odd portraits of my brother.

  ‘They did them the day before he left . . . they adored him.’

  ‘You realise Adams is a soldier, ma’am?’

  Logan’s brooding had broken through. She turned to him.

  ‘A soldier,’ Logan repeated, ‘not a child-minder, ma’am.’

  She paused, unsure how to meet Logan’s challenge, the fragile restraint in the words he’d chosen.

  ‘I understood, from talking with him, that he had – how can I say it? – left the army.’

  ‘Really, ma’am?’

  ‘I may not have described it properly.’

  ‘Use his words then. What exactly did Adams say?’

  ‘I can’t remember . . . the . . . exact words.’

  ‘Give it your best shot,’ he snapped. ‘What did Adams say?’

  ‘You could show some respect, Sergeant. His name is Jack.’

  Logan snorted.

  ‘Is that how people earn respect in your world, ma’am? With little shows of courtesy? What did he say?’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘What he said, he said to me. Not you. But what I can do for you, soldier, is tell you what I think. And you can take it, or you can leave it. How does that sound?’

  Logan glared at her.

  ‘What I think is that it dawned on Jack that there was more to life than soldiering. He wanted more. Needed more. Urgently. I think the life in him was shrivelling, and that if he’d stayed a moment longer, there’d have been nothing left.’

  ‘Stayed where?’ Logan replied. ‘With us, or with you?’

  He meant to hurt her, but she’d faced that already. She wasn’t hiding from it.

  ‘Both,’ she said eventually. ‘When he first arrived – he hitched in with some of the Saharawi fighters who came for a few days with their families – you could see him coming to life . . . filling with vitality. As if he was recuperating.’

  ‘He wasn’t injured, though?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing physical.’

  ‘But . . . ?’

  ‘His need was like a wound.’

  ‘And you were his nurse?’ Logan snarled, unable to let up.

  She rose, and carefully put away the papers left on the desk. Pressing the folds of yellow robes against her hips, she started for the door. There she turned.

  ‘Sergeant Logan,’ she said, ‘Jack talked about you. He had no regrets about walking away from the army, but he felt sorry about leaving you. He didn’t know how else to do it. He didn’t want you – I don’t know if this is the right word, either – implicated. But he was dying inside, and he had the courage to choose another life.’

  THREE

  ‘She’s wrong, you know,’ Logan said as he climbed into his landcruiser the next morning, the third in a convoy heading back to Tifariti. The other two had already started their engines and Logan had to raise his voice, making it sound more certain than I suspect he was. ‘This isn’t about me.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know where he’s gone?’ I asked.

  ‘Mate, it’s bloody obvious, isn’t it? He doesn’t want us to know. He doesn’t even want her to know. Fair enough then. And good luck to him.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Sure. Good luck with his hiding, and his finding, and his turning himself into whatever it is he wants to become. Once a man’s gone native . . .’

  Logan opened the glove box and pulled his sunglasses from their case.

  ‘So what are you going to say?’ I asked.

  ‘You mean to Grose?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Mate,’ he said, ‘what she described is no man the army can do anything with.’

  ‘But it might’ve done things to him.’

  Logan looked at me.

  ‘I’m in a difficult position here. He’s been a friend, yeah? But you can’t court-martial someone you can’t find. That’s how it seems to me.’

  So those had been his orders.

  ‘And if we’d found him?’ I asked. ‘If he’d been here and didn’t want to go back . . . ?’

  ‘Lucky that didn’t happen,’ he grimaced.

  Logan stepped out of the vehicle, bent and drew a hard black case from beneath the driver’s seat. He lifted it onto the seat and snapped the latches open, letting me see inside – a pistol and a pair of handcuffs, some other objects I can’t remember. Logan looked up at me, then pressed the lid shut again.

  ‘But he’s not here, and I’ve got to draw the line somewhere.’

  ‘You were hoping I’d lead you to him?’

  Logan shrugged. It didn’t matter anymore.

  ‘I’ll tell him the lead went nowhere. That we couldn’t keep looking forever. Caesar and his coins.’

  ‘And if I find him?’

  ‘Then you find him. And if you do . . .’

  Logan looked away, sighed.

  ‘. . . say hello. But look, Sebastian. Take care will you? You’re a long way from home.’ He offered the formality of his hand.

  The tinted glass of Logan’s window slowly rose and sealed. His silhouette leant forward to turn on the air-conditioning, then the white UN landcruiser followed the other two out of the liaison office compound. He was a soldier. If there was more to Jack’s story, he could not chase it. Part of me felt some victory of blood over country and friendship. But I’d miss him, and I was vulnerable all over again.

  *

  Sophe wasn’t surprised to see me return. She found me a bed without asking how long I was staying, a hut rented by one of the Spanish aid agencies. She’d done the same for Jack, she said, the same hut. I slept on a foam mattress on the ground and wondered if it was the one Jack had slept on a month earlier.

  So now I wandered alone through the camp each day. After the journey to get there – after the noise of the medinas and souks and bus-stations, after El Ayouune and after the police and the army and all the miles, all the tension, all the frustrations – the camp was a sanctuary. And Sophe was its calm centre.

  Along the paths of the camp, the sand between the buildings was patterned by each new day’s foot traffic. Some mornings I tracked the imprints of boots, not because I was following anyone, but out of curiosity, taken by the thought it might be possible to trace someone’s entire day through the marks they left in the sand. But each path I followed
ended in a pile of sandals at the doorway of a hut, or was obliterated by more recent steppings, or by tyre-tracks on the larger paths, or by overnight wind swept down the camp’s desolate alleys like a broom. Except for my own footprints, which followed me each day to her classroom.

  He’d left without warning, Sophe said, starting again.

  ‘The children presented him with their drawings, and the next day he was gone. Maybe their portraits triggered something . . . like a mirror held up to him.’

  With Logan gone Sophe opened up even more, a flower unfolding. She told me she’d found out what she could about Jack’s movements on the morning he left – that a social worker from one of the international charities had given him a lift out of the camp to the nearest town. That from there he got another ride, with a truck driver returning to the capital with an empty tanker. But that was where the trail ended.

  She couldn’t stop wondering, she told me. She’d tried to guess. She had spent nearly a month with Jack, watching the life come back into him.

  ‘So where might a man newly alive go?’

  *

  We were sitting together early one evening, just after sunset, when the mosque’s loudspeaker crackled and the muezzin’s call to prayer reached out above the tents and huts.

  Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar.

  ‘Jack liked the sound,’ Sophe said.

  Ash-had al-la ilaha illa Ilah. Ash-had al-la ilaha illa Ilah. Ash-hadu anna Muhammadan rasulullah . . .

  ‘I’m growing used to it now, too.’

  ‘It was more than that for Jack. He found it soothing. He used to stop what he was doing when he heard it, and close his eyes.’

  I thought of our national ritual, the scrupulous minute’s silence we kept each Armistice Day.

  ‘What do you make of that?’ I asked.

  ‘I think he was gathering himself.’

  The things she’d observed I wanted to know, anything that might be a clue to where he’d gone. And she in turn asked about his childhood, his life before the camp. Sophe was trying to work out not where he’d gone, but where he’d come from.