Closer to Stone

by Cleary, Simon

  The Beards had dumped me at the edge of town after nightfall, a new emptiness. In the morning, a boy and a goat, the animal chewing my bootlaces as I hunched rocking in the sand. The flare of locals that followed. The men who lifted me the short distance to the guesthouse. The swirling faces: the police and the army and the embassies and that question – who are you? Until Jack and Sophe were discovered a few days later in a nearby oued.

  TWO

  The army arranges for Jack’s body to return home, the honourable thing to do. Sophe’s people have already taken hers. I follow Jack. I am no more than a body myself.

  *

  He is lowered next to Mum in the cemetery at The Springs. The whole town comes out for it, the autumn sky retreating with each passing minute, each late fly that buzzes at the corner of our mouths, each word of requiem. But Jack and Mum: the two of them there, side by side. The weight of my responsibility. The crushing, suffocating weight of it. Both of them.

  Logan drives me back to the house after the funeral.

  ‘You going to be alright?’

  ‘You going to be alright yourself?’ I parrot, beyond even wondering what the words mean.

  He looks at me and sighs.

  ‘So this is where he grew up?’ He peers past me through the car window, over the hedge of roses to the timber cottage.

  Em’s car, with my father in the passenger seat, stops just beyond us at the top of the driveway. Em’s head turns to my father’s momentarily before she gets out and comes across to us.

  ‘It was good of you to come, Sergeant,’ she says through Logan’s window.

  He shakes his head.

  ‘It was good of the army to let me, ma’am. By rights Lieutenant-Colonel Grose shouldn’t have approved my leave. And I owed it to Jack, ma’am.’

  ‘Do you want . . . ?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’ve got to get back.’

  Tears well in his eyes.

  I open the door and swing my foot down onto the road.

  ‘He was a good soldier,’ I hear Logan say to Em. ‘It may not have been right for him, but he was a good soldier. Make sure Mr Adams understands that.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell him, Sergeant?’

  ‘I told him at the cemetery.’

  ‘Tell him again, will you? Please.’

  In the sunroom Em pours tea from her best china teapot. First Logan because he is the visitor, then Dad, then me, Em last of all. I watch the milk jug as it hovers above each teacup before moving on to the next, avalanches of sugar crystals sliding off silver teaspoons. I see four wisps of steam, like the corner-posts of some ghostly edifice rising in the afternoon light.

  I watch their lips move. The sound has been switched off. What is Logan saying? Dad and Em nod. She looks grateful. But where has the sound gone? What’s the low buzzing in my ear? I lift the teacup to my mouth. My tongue curls and I splutter. My thigh knocks against the coffee table as I rise and turn, and stumble, retching, for the bathroom.

  *

  The afternoons shorten.

  Em asks me to stay, begs me to, but my father is silent. I stand at the back stairs looking out at that giant block of carved sandstone, quiescent now beneath a flapping tarpaulin. Just a few weeks ago I’d resented having to leave it, but now it is huge and my chisels are blunt or too heavy to lift. I’ve become someone else’s message.

  My ancient creature is a stranger to me, lost like everything else in those blinding flashes of Sophe’s opened neck and Jack’s, and the loved bodies hunched and blood spilt and Allahu Akbar screeching through all waking and sleeping. The smell of blood in my nostrils at night, the feel of it in my throat. I choke in my sleep from the mask of blood that covers my face and I wake in terror and I gasp for breath, for the very rudiments of life, and I vomit until I am dry and exhausted.

  Pursued by blood. That’s how it feels. Jack’s and Sophe’s – whatever it is I carried with me of Jack and Sophe on my shirt, on my trousers, on my boots. What part of her fell on my skin, and seeped into my open pores, entering me. How much sprayed onto the hairs of my forearms to dry in the desert wind.

  I am not coherent, and the great vital dragon is buried in the stone. That man who cut it has gone. Only my father and Em are left.

  THREE

  A second time I leave The Springs, with as little choice as when my father sent me away to Africa. Less. But this time I have my statuette of Sophe, tangible and intact. There are some things that cannot be held tight enough, some things one clings to for life itself. Things without which we would fall away.

  I track down her parents in a quiet midwest home near one of the great lakes. It is summer, and strange insects buzz above the hedges, their loud wings beating in my ears. I climb five enormous steps from the front path to the porch and the white door and the ornate bronze knocker are warm from the sun. I breathe.

  Like a soldier keeping his promise, I’ve phoned. So they are waiting for me, Sophe’s broken parents. Both of them come to the door. I think from the way their eyes widen as it swings open, the way their shoulders straighten and their heads lift, that they hope Sophia herself will be standing out here on the porch, her spirit returned to them. It is like watching the earth’s last spark go out.

  The emptiness in that house as they lead me inside feels absolute.

  I sit on a chair with a floral print and tell them about the camp and Sophe’s vocation. About the children she taught, the women she befriended, the honour they gave her of hennaing her hands. That her students loved her. The generosity of her spirit. I tell them about the rituals of tea under canvas roofs, and the long days we spent hitching towards the mountains. That with my antibiotics she’d saved a girl who was dying at the side of the road. I know it’s not true but that’s what I tell them. Because if I’d listened to her that’s what would have happened.

  ‘She’s a better person than me.’

  Sophe’s father’s eyes don’t leave mine, but her mother gazes only at the wall, her hair pulled back tight from her forehead.

  ‘What does that matter?’ he says.

  When I don’t answer, her father takes out an atlas and lays it on the coffee table between us, moving a bowl of rose petals to make room.

  ‘Show me the route you took,’ he says, Sophe’s mother still sitting upright in her armchair, looking away, her perfume, her pale makeup on her pale skin.

  I lean over the atlas and catch my breath. It’s the first time I’ve seen a map of Africa since I left. The shock of its shape in that wallpapered sitting room. Seeing for the first time – Sophe’s story fresh in my throat – that Africa is a disembodied head stripped of its flesh. Bone and skull, the profile was laid out there on the page, coloured in with the pastels of nation-states, the borders between the cranium and the frontal and parietal bones, the mandible. With an elongated jaw and long chin, a little devil’s horn where the blunt nose bone would normally be, and the island off the coast a loose bone-chip – Africa is clearly, unmistakeably, the skull of some primitive hominid, some time-blasted ancestor of ours, gazing off to the east, blank and emotionless.

  I baulk.

  ‘We know the camp is here,’ her father insists, pointing. ‘Where did you go after that?’

  My hand is shaking, but I show him, tracing the line of our route. East, south, east, south. Down, down, down.

  ‘The girl she saved,’ her father says, ‘where was that?’

  I swallow and show him a place.

  ‘And then?’

  And then. This is what the Beards left me with, their directive. Don’t forget. You tell your people. Tell. It is what the Beards want.

  ‘I can’t remember everything, Mr Maddison,’ I say, pulling away. ‘I can’t remember what happened . . . at the end. I’ve blanked it out, I’m sorry.’

  Not just because I won
’t give the Beards their victory. But because it is the merciful thing to do, surely, a responsibility I have to her parents. Though there is more to it than that: I also just don’t have the words. And the story can neither soothe her parents’ anguish, nor atone for my guilt.

  ‘What about your brother?’

  I point out where the hermitage is, name it for them.

  ‘He’d become a monk,’ I say.

  ‘It didn’t save him, though.’

  ‘Save him?’

  ‘He was in the army before, wasn’t he? Confronting death every day?’

  I nod, but let it pass. I’ve come for Sophe, not to defend Jack.

  ‘I’m going to go,’ her father says, raising his voice, a growing vehemence in it. ‘The government says it’d be suicide to go now, but when things settle down I want to see it with my own two eyes. I’ll go to her camp myself, Sebastian. I’ll go to that hotel too.’

  He is staring at me, boring into me, a fever in him.

  ‘I’ll stay in that same goddamn room. Just see if I don’t.’

  I rise to leave. Sophe’s mother looks at me for the first time since I’ve been in their sitting room.

  ‘Was there . . . something . . . between you?’ she asks.

  I go to speak but there is nothing there, just my gaping mouth, and their eyes. I turn away, and go down the hallway, not knowing what else to do. I will not deny her.

  Her parents follow silently.

  ‘May I visit her grave?’ I ask at the door.

  ‘We cremated her,’ her father says. Then, as if to ward me off for good, ‘And we spread her ashes.’

  The responsibility he takes for it. There are so few decisions left for them. I think about Sophe’s scattered ashes, set upon the breezes that blow across this town she was born in, this country which raised her. How desperately I’d hoped there’d be a headstone I could touch, an inscription I could read with my hands, a delicate limestone angel. A conversation of some sort I might begin.

  I reach for the door handle. Her mother leans round and grips my wrist.

  ‘But why?’ she says, a horror in her eyes I cannot meet. ‘Why Sophia?’

  FOUR

  Why? The blood-smeared question that curves back again, and again. It has a new shape each time. It refuses all dealing, can neither be looked at straight, nor ignored. It fragments under its own weight – Why Jack? Why me? Why Sophe? – It divides, like a cell, again and again. Magnitudes of complexity, a different why in everything.

  I am a drowner in a sea of question.

  I go east to where Sophe lived, New York. Take a room at a YMCA on West 34th Street – a creaking lift rising through fourteen floors of long, dark corridors and small, cramped rooms.

  I wander Sophe’s university and the city streets in widening loops, avoiding the lawyers and bankers and traders in their suits, the certainty of their stride. Stepping back from all the dizzying men and women, from the smell of blood.

  One day there’s a wilted rose on the ground. I look up, at a wall of opaque glass. At first I don’t realise that it is a memorial, because our war memorials are obelisks, set in parks, or at the end of avenues of honour – towers reaching for heaven.

  People are leaning forward, their faces close to the glass tiles, reading the words cut into the wall. A hundred letters from Vietnam, our father’s war. Letters home from soldiers, from parents to their boys, from sweethearts in Kentucky and Connecticut and Phoenix:

  I feel different now after seeing some horrible things and I’ll never forget them. To kill somebody, turn your head and walk away isn’t hard, it’s watching him die that’s hard, and even harder when it’s one of your own men.

  Might my own father have written a letter like this to his parents, I think? I read to the end of the wall, and discover another behind it, a second layer of letters, more pleas.

  By the time this arrives I will have told all my hairy war stories and shown you my scar. One thing that worries me . . . will people believe me?

  There are a thousand letters to be lost in, a thousand clear voices.

  Several times a week we visit the hospital. We see fellows with their arms and legs blown off, their heads smashed in and pieced together, eyes lost and hearts completely broken. The biggest gift we can give them is a human female hand and some cheerful words. Like ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ We’re not in the business of giving sympathy. We have to treat them as if nothing is wrong at all. Absolutely nothing. . . .

  Finally I look up, gasping for breath. But everything is still unutterably wrong.

  An Arab family is standing beside me: a tall man in white robes with a black cord around his white-scarved head, and polished shoes. And the beard. His wife is standing behind him, and his two daughters in their pretty dresses, ten or twelve years old, bobby clips with pink plastic flowers keeping their straight dark hair out of their polite dark eyes.

  That fucking beard.

  He peers hard, his nose close to the glass, to all those lives etched there. His neck stretches forward; the wife standing, waiting. He shakes his head, his face just inches away from the last words of a nineteen-year-old soldier from Idaho. He couldn’t have read them, he isn’t there long enough. He steps along, glancing at letter after letter. Begins stroking his beard with his hand, one of his daughters looking at him, watching as he mumbles to himself. I can tell there is no feeling in his straight, haughty back, no respect. He turns and says something, not looking at any of them, his disdain for what is in front of him, for everything. His ignorance. I see the prayer beads he’s looped around his wrist slide from under the sleeve of his robe and catch on the flesh of his palm.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  He gives me a blank look. As if he doesn’t know what I mean.

  ‘You right, mate?’

  But I don’t want him to understand me.

  ‘I said, you bloody-well right, mate?’

  There is no question in it. I am yelling, and all the pilgrims at the wall turn away from it to look at me instead.

  ‘So what does it say, mate? How much of that do you understand?’

  I poke my finger into his chest. Then begin hissing at him – Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! – forcing him back against the glass, one of his daughters crying and tugging at my shirt.

  Two policemen appear. They pull me off him. Their hard peaked hats and golden badges. Their dark blue uniforms, almost black, a cold hard baton pressed against my throat.

  ‘Are you alright, sir?’ one of them says when we are separated.

  I think he is talking to me.

  *

  I try telling my story in the lock-up, squatting on the hard floor surrounded by sleeping men with cracks in the soles of their feet and pieces of string for belts. One of the policemen on night shift encourages me, curious about my accent.

  ‘You’re saying he killed your brother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That man this afternoon?’

  ‘Him. His brothers. His fellow-believers. That’s the whole point! It’s the same thing. It doesn’t matter.’

  He shakes his head, mutters, bends his head again to the magazine in his lap.

  ‘Want my advice?’ he says. ‘Give it up. That’s my advice to you. Give it up.’

  But it is impossible.

  FIVE

  I lean against a wall for a second day. Across the street is a mosque. The street vendors ignore me and I count the Beards as they come and go, the whole teeming nest of them.

  It is midafternoon when one of them steps out the door of the mosque alone, pauses on the sidewalk and looks straight across at me. He has a fitted skullcap and wears a black suit with a white shirt beneath his coat. There is no tie, and I can’t tell if he has buttoned his collar – his beard is too th
ick, wiry like a bushranger’s. He steps onto the road in a break in traffic and comes closer. I see a streak of white in his dark beard. My throat constricts. I swallow to breathe. I would turn and run if I could, but am rooted to the ground as once I was on a cliff-face not so many years before. My eyes swim, and the Beard loses focus as he steps up onto the sidewalk in front of me and I ready myself. You. Go. Tell. I expect him to lean close, his foul breath on my cheeks, and scream. I close my eyes and turn my head.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he asks.

  But it does not register.

  ‘Can I help you, sir?’

  He tries again, his perfect English and his American accent adding to my confusion.

  I open my eyes and look at him. His black, shining eyes, his full glossy lips.

  ‘Sir, you have been sitting here watching now for many hours. Are you interested in us, sir? Won’t you come in. Perhaps we can talk. Would you like to talk? Sir, would you like to learn about Islam?’

  A muscle in my face pulls involuntarily, and my left eyelid begins to twitch. He mistakes my agitation for embarrassment.

  ‘Ah! You want to learn about Islam! We have lessons. You can come to a lesson in our teaching hall.’

  I shake my head urgently, my eyes widening. Can he not see my horror?

  He pauses, considering, then turns and steps back onto the road, holding up his hand to the traffic as he crosses. When he returns a few minutes later he is bearing a book.

  ‘We have lessons every Sunday. You are welcome. But . . .’ and he pauses to see if I have reconsidered while he was away, ‘if you don’t want to join us for a lesson, you may have this. It is the Holy Qur’an.’

  I feel sick.

  ‘If you can’t read it in Arabic, read this. It is not a translation, because the Qur’an cannot be translated, but it contains the teachings of Almighty Allah. It is by Marmaduke Pickthall, an Englishman. The Qur’an should be read in Arabic, but, this . . .’

  The imam holds the book out but doesn’t give it to me yet, as if he is weighing the two wrongs: the risk of my misinterpretation against my ongoing ignorance of Allah.