White Blood

by James Fleming

  A coffle of porters was at our disposal. Their headman was a small, dapper gentleman called Hpung.

  "Mister not his chummy self today," he said to me one noon when we'd stopped to brew tea. Despite everything, we'd been successful enough to satisfy Norman. But on reaching Nagaland, which had taken us nine months, we'd thrown in the towel, which had become sodden and slimy. Now we were heading back, through the mountainous jungle of the Chin country and the Yomas, the Chindwin river being to the east of our line of march.

  "No by God he isn't," I replied, having that morning put my leg through one of their woven rope bridges and skinned the flesh from my calf to the middle of my thigh. The insects were busy nibbling me. Every leech for miles around had scented the dish. They were standing upright on the leaves, on the tips of their tails, their bulbous sightless heads weaving as they took aim.

  And Goetz, in addition to bouts of malaria, had sprung a hernia in his lower belly, a noisome area that he now had me feel, as we were drinking our tea, for my medical education. The swelling was like a young coconut, fibred with creeping black hair, but softer than I expected. I gave it a poke with a straight finger to see if he jumped; he was having me help him undress, which I disliked.

  He was leaning back on his elbows, his shorts and disgusting underpants round his knees. He gave a great bellow. "Be gentle, sod you."

  At which Hpung, fluttering over us in his clean, white, presidential style of dhoti, piped up, "Mister's temper too near the surface. Mister no take his liver salts this morning. We make camp early. Misters put their feet up. Get rested."

  When we halted for the night—which in those parts drops with the speed of oblivion—I said to Goetz, "At least we had sunshine in those other places. You know what I look forward to most? Going to bed in thick pyjamas."

  "Once a Russian, always a Russian." He raised a leg for me to peel off his black elastic stockings, which was like skinning a dogfish. I chucked them to Hpung. Goetz waggled his toes and eyed his puffy, bitten feet, which after this period of continuous immersion had a bluish sheen like junket. "For me, roast pork with chitterlings and red cabbage. It's the rice that's caused my hernia. Made me strain. Weakened my stomach lining."

  We'd eaten, lit the mosquito coil, and were lounging beneath the flysheet, which we always extended to keep the leeches from dropping into our gruel. It took the edge off dinner having to scoop out their corpses, which floated around the billycans like rubbery croutons. We were belching and scratching and watching the fresh insect bites on our legs go bad. Our lower shins were ribboned with weeping sores. Everything was dank and mouldy. Our belts and all the leather strapping had turned chalky grey, as if powdered with cheap cigar ash. Our tempers also were crumbling.

  About half an hour of daylight remained. Rain was falling, the same purposeful cylinders, each one about twice as thick as a knitting needle. They caused the bamboo thickets to tremble and rushed in cataracts down the grooves of their bowed, narrow leaves. Drapes of mist clung to the wooded slopes around us. The air was as thick as damp wool.

  Clouds of the harmless fly they speak of as ndangi were swarming around the clearing. Their suckers hung beneath their bellies like nozzles. In separate groups, maybe on account of some prehistoric quarrel, mosquitoes were dancing jiggedly, up and down, left and right, to avoid having their puny torsos smashed to pulp by the rain. Goetz maintained they were pushed aside by the pillow of air preceding each raindrop. But to me this hopping about seemed deliberate. They'd see the raindrops coming over their shoulders, yes? They weren't idiots. But here Goetz held a high trump. For as we both knew, in a few minutes the jungle bats would flip crookedly through the dusk and pick the mosquitoes off in droves, six or seven to a mouthful. If the mosquitoes could see the raindrops coming, why couldn't they see the bats and jink out of the way?

  I countered, "Bats must have come earlier in God's scheme and so got the upper hand."

  "Of course. A mosquito, unless an idiot, should have learned to hide from bats by now. Therefore they are idiots, as I said."

  "But if bats flew in a straight line, like raindrops, they'd starve. The mosquitoes would quickly twig their game."

  "That's your silly English sense of fairness at work. That's the father in you speaking. How is any species to survive except by having better tricks than its competitors?"

  Thus we fell to bickering. He was in bad shape, with the hernia, malaria, and our brandy having run out. I wasn't in what you'd call mint condition either. We couldn't get away from each other. It was hell being with him in our Skyproof tent. There were times I wanted to strangle his fat throat.

  The porters were a stone's throw away on the far side of the clearing. With their jungle knives they'd knocked up a bamboo pavilion, the work of seconds. They were squatting on their heels round a cooking fire, arguing shrilly. A pipe was doing the rounds. Their swaggy loincloths bulged with contentment. So clean were they always, so damned clean, supple and enviable.

  I said, "I'm going to give them an earful. I can't stand watching them being so happy."

  Putting on my rotting boots, I padded towards them through the gloom and the hovering ndangi. Bats rent and vibrated the air above me.

  Goetz called out, "Don't kick them around. This isn't Russia."

  I said to Hpung, thinking to put him in the wrong with an impossible request, "Got a woman for me?"

  His eyes, dazed by the business with the pipe, were as big as moons as he looked up at me, six foot two, stained, bearded, warlike. "Mister desire woman?"

  Now that I'd thought about it, I had a very great need for a spill. "Yes, Hpung, and not any old hag. A young widow would suit me."

  His next expression: was it politeness, interest, admiration or what in those brown, firelit eyes? There was no telling as he said evenly, "Other mister also? Share lady fifty-fifty?"

  "Christ no. Besides, he has a hernia."

  "Fetched to this place?"

  "No."

  He rose with a wondrous elasticity of limb. "Woman very good for mister. Makes him whole again. Takes all nasty feelings inside herself and buries them in the dark. Bad memoirs all gone into woman's secret place. Mister become chummy again. But no widow. Widows difficult in this land."

  "Fine, no widow. What now?"

  There was a general chuckling as Hpung spoke rapidly to the porter we called Longman, a tall emaciated fellow whose ribs stood out like those of a sunken ship. He got to his feet, poured oil into a pannikin, stuck a lump of fat in the middle and lit it with a taper from the fire. Pointing at me, he said something to the circle of shadowed faces, at which there was more laughter.

  "He say, three miles to village. Nice fat woman. Good jig-a-jig. Coming back will seem like five, mister being somewhat tired."

  I thought that wasn't what had been said, but the smiles and the sense of conspiracy belonged to the brotherhood of man and it didn't matter.

  "Jig-a-jig how much?"

  "Five rupees for travellers," Hpung said quickly. I clapped the rascal on the back and galumphed over to the tent for money. Goetz told me not to wake him up when I got back. He wasn't a bit envious of me, just a sick man of middle age who was tired of jungle life.

  "See if you can make something to help his hernia, to hold it in," I said to Hpung. Then Longman came over. I followed his bobbing oil lamp out of the clearing—and as if by magic the rain ceased.

  He led me along one darkened forest trail after another, always downhill, until dogs barked and I smelled water and curing fish. The tree canopy opened up, the night paled and I saw we were beside a lake of invisible extent. A line of posts—perhaps twelve or fifteen, not very many—stretched out from the bank. A small houseboat was tied to each, making a row of dumpy black beetles. Planks connected them. Longman indicated for me to take my boots off to get a better grip on the planks; that he'd stand watch over them until I returned; that my popsy was on the farthest boat.

  I did as he said. Dogs sniffed at me and turned away. I thought, sure
ly I can't smell any worse than the curing fish?

  The planks had cross-members secured with hemp, which felt like hairy sandpaper beneath my soles. Whole families were sleeping on deck, upon thin quilts, robed according to age. The old people sat up, sheeted and spectral, and called after me mellifluous unalarmed greetings as I rocked their boats with my lustful tread.

  The night was cooling. A rag of wind was on my cheek. The water slapped against the hulls and ran lisping up the beach to the curing shed. In place of a moon was a speck of lamplight on the farthest boat. From plank to plank, over the bodies of this weary tribe of fisherfolk, I bounded to the flame, my loins bubbling.

  She was waiting on deck, cross-legged, smoking a pipe. I strode up the last plank, a foul and odorous boarding party, nine months of celibacy tapping at my belt buckle.

  "Where? Here?"

  Very calmly she put aside the pipe and pointed to my swollen feet. Her lamp was so feeble I couldn't make out her features. She rose and made to walk past me, hips undulating. Not tall, up to my top rib. Black buttered hair to below the shoulders, tinted by the little gleaming light. Bare feet, taking her noiselessly past me. "Hey"—and catching her I bent and whipped her shift up to see what I'd got. Without emotion she delayed her pace to help me. The shift snagged on her chin or thereabouts. As I tugged at it, I hefted the nearest breast to put an age on her. I got her naked. She became invisible against the dark of the night. "For Christ's sake what is this, hide and seek?" I cried impatiently. She replied God knows what, but in such a lovely rustling voice, like the wind speeding through barley whiskers, that I was instantly penitent. In moments she was in front of me again with a glinting dipper of oil. She had me sit. Crouching, she began to anoint my feet, pulling at my toes, getting the oil right between them, freeing them up. Those were terrible times, she so composed and neatly breasted as she took my appalling feet into her naked lap and there kneaded them. It was too much. I had to stand up, to take some action. I towered above her. A whole teak tree was growing in my shorts, I was on the brink of Krakatoa. I grabbed her buttery hair and tried to pull her up. She clung to my ankles and made more magical sounds. "Come on, you bitch, let me in." But still she twittered, and I held off.

  At last she finished with my feet. She lowered the plank overboard with a rope so as to prevent her neighbours' slumber being jarred, and led me by the hand down a few steps into a timbered stateroom that smelled of resin from its native woods. The latticework at the stern was wide open to the breeze.

  She lit another lamp, set out more dippers. Whisperingly she unbuckled and unbuttoned me. She guided my Empire shorts to the floor. There I stood, as rampant as any man could be. Any man. I was in danger of bursting the membrane. But no, again she was murmuring. With perfumed palms she began to oil and polish my tool. I could take no more. I threw her down and on a mat I impaled her, this husky, practised, stupendous woman. I spiked her with my bad tempers. Goetz, the leeches, the beige flood from my bowels, the sheer waste in my life of this expedition, she inhumed them all, ungrudgingly, jutting her slick loins. As dawn struck the lake, marvellous clumps of pink on black, she engulfed me for the last time. Riding me beneath the wide stern window, the colour of her skin gradually abated to a light chestnut. Her face became clear for the first time and I saw that she was beautiful.

  She made me a dish of bitter tea from a wild plant called tookin hereabouts. The hills also had been cleansed. The rain clouds had gone. Every leaf on every tree wore a sparkle as if dressed to go dancing. Canoes, two men to each, were setting off for the fishing grounds. Children were scuffling in the water. Bright women chattered as they washed their pots.

  I gave her my money, all that I had, ten rupees in singles. She bowed, palms folded. She fished up the plank and I departed whistling, from one boat to the next, to where Longman was waiting with my boots.

  I asked him the name of the lake. Mayanga. And of the girl? Phula, which is the small blue and yellow flower of the open hill in Burma, similar to heartsease.

  Seven

  Longman delivered me back to the camp with a certain grandeur. After I'd paid him he went and held court beside the pavilion. He raised his fist and opened it the full five.

  "Wah!"

  "You gave her too much," Goetz grunted.

  "Too much for what?" I said, and turned back to Longman who had allowed himself the teasing pause to which the sole possessor of interesting information is entitled. His companions shouted at him, begging for the full accounting. He eyed them from his great height. Then he raised his fist a second time. One by one, slowly and solemnly, he disclosed each long brown finger.

  "Ten rupees! Wah!" Chattering among themselves and glancing at me, the men started to break camp.

  This did my standing no harm. But Goetz was furious. Called me bumptious and said they'd think we were made of money. "And on a woman at that," he said more than once, as if a dog would have been better value. When we began the day's march he insisted on walking alone, behind the porters, which is no place for a naturalist.

  Hpung said they'd tried and failed to make a truss out of bamboo splints. But, he continued, "Biggest trouble this. Mister have good time at jig-a-jig. Too much good time, too much glory—yes?"

  "Glory?"

  Hpung stuck out one hand—flat, palm upward. "Here is woman." He slapped his other hand onto it, palm down and wriggled it around. "Here is man. Woman have room for only one man at a time. You that man, not him. He bit old, bit fat, bit ill—Mister Less-and-less. So woman give you all the glory, make you top fellow. You see now, Mister Doig?"

  It was not sedition I saw in Hpung's smooth face but the certainty of somebody stating the obvious, that Goetz was no longer up to the job.

  And two marches later, when we reached a fork in the track, it was to me that Hpung turned. Downward, to the east, in the valley of the Chindwin, was Kani. We'd passed through it on our outward journey. A queer, inferior township; two strips of wooden houses astride a single street, the whole outfit squeezed onto a narrow spur of gravel curving into the river. Was the resident population two hundred? Certainly no more. Yet it was the headquarters of the district commissioner. His name was Reynolds.

  The rains had been at their heaviest when we arrived, and the river had flooded some of the lower houses. Reynolds had invited us to his bungalow for supper and billiards.

  The water was up to the slate, which Reynolds, a bachelor, said was quite normal. We paddled ourselves round the table in coracles that he'd had made with this situation in mind. Bamboo wrack, chunks of timber, root curls and dead fish were floating in the brown floodwater. Rush lights swung from the rafters, casting a moth-infested glow on the proceedings. The baize was rippled by damp and pocked by insects. A strong wrist action was needed. Two house boys waded through the flotsam to hold our coracles when we had a shot. Afterwards they chalked our cues. A third acted as scorer. Reynolds, delighted to have company, put up a bottle of brandy as the stake. And Goetz had won it, spinning round the moat in a fever of excitement and urging the ball into the pocket with thunderous German exhortations.

  This he now remembered, and the hilarity of those three nights, and the fact that a steamer of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company called there.

  "Down," he pointed, "down we shall go at last, Doig."

  Hpung, standing a couple of paces away, looked Goetz over with his muddy eyes and said without force, "Not the boating period, mister. Too much water yet."

  "Who asked you? Look, Doig, I'm not a well man. Reynolds will have medicine. He'll know someone who can push back my hernia. There's bound to be a native trick to it. And we can have some decent food—tins straight from the Army 8c Navy. He had a case of jellied ham in his office, behind the door. Didn't you see it? Hiding it from us, I expect. You could do with a square meal. Both of us could. Down, I say."

  I looked at Goetz's burly jowls and glaring nostrils. And at that moment I knew that what I wanted was my own expedition, as number one and no dissent. Beauty. Mo
ney. Fame. And a dry climate. My temper rose and I can't say what might have happened had not Goetz made a sudden grab at Hpung and cried out, spittling at him, "That's it, I can see by your creep-arse look that you and Doig have been plotting against me."

  Not even trying to get out of Goetz's grip, Hpung said, "No boats at Kani for many whiles yet. Only one-eighty miles to Chaungwa. One eight zero. Much bigger place—post office, boat once per week, regular. Better you stay up here with us. Quicker by and by."

  I told Goetz I'd have a stretcher knocked up for him—and suddenly he surrendered. In a conversation lasting no more than forty-five seconds he handed over responsibility for everything, obliging me only to sign a chitty for the cash box and accepting it in scrawled pencil. That done he sat himself down beneath a wild fig tree and looked upon us softly, as if we were all his children, while a stretcher was rigged up out of bamboo poles and my spare clothing.

  It was like a Visigoth chieftain that we conveyed him to Chaungwa, where the expedition disbanded and Hpung was murdered.

  Eight

  This is what happened. We were to have had five days there before the steamer arrived—the Glorious Ina. We started by repacking our specimens, throwing out any that had been damaged by rain or insects, and arranging our passage from Rangoon to Calcutta and thus back to Britain. This we did through Nicholson's, the shipping agents Norman had instructed us to employ. They had an office and godowns at Edward's Wharf. They owned pretty well all the waterfront.

  The river was running high—level nine on the white marker post on Ayub Island, a small wooded island that had once been a leper colony. It was opposite Nicholson's main warehouse.

  Everyone turned out to watch the Glorious Ina berth. The Chindwin was rat grey in colour, voracious, heaving, licking along. The week before the vessel had had to turn back. Nicholson's men were keeping their fingers crossed.