“I am ready,” he said. He went with the Captain to the waiting lorry, where he climbed in beside the driver’s seat and not, as the Captain had expected, into the back of the lorry. When they had arrived at the parade-ground the officers had left a message that the Captain would be personally responsible for Michele and for the village. Also for the hundred or so labourers who were sitting around on the grass verges waiting for orders.
The Captain explained what was wanted. Michele nodded. Then he waved his hand at the Africans. “I do not want these,” he said.
“You will do it yourself—a village?”
“Yes.”
“With no help?”
Michele smiled for the first time. “I will do it.”
The Captain hesitated. He disapproved on principle of white men doing heavy manual labour. He said: “I will keep six to do the heavy work.”
Michele shrugged; and the Captain went over and dismissed all but six of the Africans. He came back with them to Michele.
“It is hot,” said Michele.
“Very,” said the Captain. They were standing in the middle of the parade-ground. Around its edge trees, grass, gulfs of shadow. Here, nothing but reddish dust, drifting and lifting in a low hot breeze.
“I am thirsty,” said Michele. He grinned. The Captain felt his stiff lips loosen unwillingly in reply. The two pairs of eyes met. It was a moment of understanding. For the Captain, the little Italian had suddenly become human. “I will arrange it,” he said, and went off down-town. By the time he had explained the position to the right people, filled in forms and made arrangements, it was late afternoon. He returned to the parade-ground with a case of Cape brandy, to find Michele and the six black men seated together under a tree. Michele was singing an Italian song to them, and they were harmonizing with him. The sight affected the Captain like an attack of nausea. He came up, and the Africans stood to attention. Michele continued to sit.
“You said you would do the work yourself?”
“Yes, I said so.”
The Captain then dismissed the Africans. They departed, with friendly looks towards Michele, who waved at them. The Captain was beef-red with anger. “You have not started yet?”
“How long have I?”
“Three weeks.”
“Then there is plenty of time,” said Michele, looking at the bottle of brandy in the Captain’s hand. In the other were two glasses. “It is evening,” he pointed out. The Captain stood frowning for a moment. Then he sat down on the grass, and poured out two brandies.
“Ciao,” said Michele.
“Cheers,” said the Captain. Three weeks, he was thinking. Three weeks with this damned little Itie! He drained his glass and refilled it, and set it in the grass. The grass was cool and soft. A tree was flowering somewhere close—hot waves of perfume came on the breeze.
“It is nice here,” said Michele. “We will have a good time together. Even in a war, there are times of happiness. And of friendship. I drink to the end of the war.”
Next day, the Captain did not arrive at the parade-ground until after lunch. He found Michele under the trees with a bottle. Sheets of ceiling board had been erected at one end of the parade-ground in such a way that they formed two walls and part of a third, and a slant of steep roof supported on struts.
“What’s that?” said the Captain, furious.
“The church,” said Michele.
“Wha-at?”
“You will see. Later. It is very hot.” He looked at the brandy bottle that lay on its side on the ground. The Captain went to the lorry and returned with the case of brandy. They drank. Time passed. It was a long time since the Captain had sat on grass under a tree. It was a long time, for that matter, since he had drunk so much. He always drank a great deal, but it was regulated to the times and seasons. He was a disciplined man. Here, sitting on the grass beside this little man whom he still could not help thinking of as an enemy, it was not that he let his self-discipline go, but that he felt himself to be something different: he was temporarily set outside his normal behaviour. Michele did not count. He listened to Michele talking about Italy, and it seemed to him he was listening to a savage speaking: as if he heard tales from the mythical South Sea islands where a man like himself might very well go just once in his life. He found himself saying he would like to make a trip to Italy after the war. Actually, he was attracted only by the North and by Northern people. He had visited Germany, under Hitler, and though it was not the time to say so, had found it very satisfactory. Then Michele sang him some Italian songs. He sang Michele some English songs. Then Michele took out photographs of his wife and children, who lived in a village in the mountains of North Italy. He asked the Captain if he were married. The Captain never spoke about his private affairs.
He had spent all his life in one or other of the African colonies as a policeman, magistrate, native commissioner, or in some other useful capacity. When the war started, military life came easily to him. But he hated city life, and had his own reasons for wishing the war over. Mostly, he had been in bush-stations with one or two other white men, or by himself, far from the rigours of civilisation. He had relations with native women; and from time to time visited the city where his wife lived with her parents and the children. He was always tormented by the idea that she was unfaithful to him. Recently he had even appointed a private detective to watch her; he was convinced the detective was inefficient. Army friends coming from L——— where his wife was, spoke of her at parties, enjoying herself. When the war ended, she would not find it so easy to have a good time. And why did he not simply live with her and be done with it? The fact was, he could not. And his long exile to remote bush-stations was because he needed the excuse not to. He could not bear to think of his wife for too long; she was that part of his life he had never been able, so to speak, to bring to heel.
Yet he spoke of her now to Michele, and of his favourite bush-wife, Nadya. He told Michele the story of his life, until he realized that the shadows from the trees they sat under had stretched right across the parade-ground to the grandstand. He got unsteadily to his feet, and said: “There is work to be done. You are being paid to work.”
“I will show you my church when the light goes.”
The sun dropped, darkness fell, and Michele made the Captain drive his lorry on to the parade-ground a couple of hundred yards away and switch on his lights. Instantly, a white church sprang up from the shapes and shadows of the bits of board.
“Tomorrow, some houses,” said Michele cheerfully.
At the end of a week, the space at the end of the parade-ground had crazy gawky constructions of lath and board over it, that looked in the sunlight like nothing on this earth. Privately, it upset the Captain; it was like a nightmare that these skeleton-like shapes should be able to persuade him, with the illusions of light and dark, that they were a village. At night, the Captain drove up his lorry, switched on the lights, and there it was, the village, solid and real against a background of full green trees. Then, in the morning sunlight, there was nothing there, just bits of board stuck in the sand.
“It is finished,” said Michele.
“You were engaged for three weeks,” said the Captain. He did not want it to end, this holiday from himself.
Michele shrugged. “The army is rich,” he said. Now, to avoid curious eyes, they sat inside the shade of the church, with the case of brandy between them. The Captain talked, talked endlessly, about his wife, about women. He could not stop talking.
Michele listened. Once he said: “When I go home—when I go home—I shall open my arms . . .” He opened them, wide. He closed his eyes. Tears ran down his cheeks. “I shall take my wife in my arms, and I shall ask nothing, nothing. I do not care. It is enough to be together. That is what the war has taught me. It is enough, it is enough. I shall ask no questions and I shall be happy.”
The Captain stared before him, suffering. He thought how he dreaded his wife. She was a scornful creature, gay and hard,
who laughed at him. She had been laughing at him ever since they married. Since the war, she had taken to calling him names like Little Hitler, and Storm-trooper. “Go ahead, my little Hitler,” she had cried last time they met. “Go ahead, my Storm-trooper. If you want to waste your money on private detectives, go ahead. But don’t think I don’t know what you do when you’re in the bush. I don’t care what you do, but remember that I know it . . .”
The Captain remembered her saying it. And there sat Michele on his packing-case, saying: “It’s a pleasure for the rich, my friend, detectives and the law. Even jealousy is a pleasure I don’t want any more. Ah, my friend, to be together with my wife again, and the children, that is all I ask of life. That and wine and food and singing in the evenings.” And the tears wetted his cheeks and splashed on to his shirt.
That a man should cry, good lord! thought the Captain. And without shame! He seized the bottle and drank.
Three days before the great occasion, some high-ranking officers came strolling through the dust, and found Michele and the Captain sitting together on the packing-case, singing. The Captain’s shirt was open down the front, and there were stains on it.
The Captain stood to attention with the bottle in his hand, and Michele stood to attention too, out of sympathy with his friend. Then the officers drew the Captain aside—they were all cronies of his—and said, what the hell did he think he was doing? And why wasn’t the village finished?
Then they went away.
“Tell them it is finished,” said Michele. “Tell them I want to go.”
“No,” said the Captain, “no. Michele, what would you do if your wife . . .”
“This world is a good place. We should be happy—that is all.”
“Michele . . .”
“I want to go. There is nothing to do. They paid me yesterday.”
“Sit down, Michele. Three more days, and then it’s finished.”
“Then I shall paint the inside of the church as I painted the one in the camp.”
The Captain laid himself down on some boards and went to sleep. When he woke, Michele was surrounded by the pots of paint he had used on the outside of the village. Just in front of the Captain was a picture of a black girl. She was young and plump. She wore a patterned blue dress and her shoulders came soft and bare out of it. On her back was a baby slung in a band of red stuff. Her face was turned towards the Captain and she was smiling.
“That’s Nadya,” said the Captain. “Nadya . . .” He groaned loudly. He looked at the black child and shut his eyes. He opened them, and mother and child were still there. Michele was very carefully drawing thin yellow circles around the heads of the black girl and her child.
“Good God,” said the Captain, “you can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t have a black Madonna.”
“She was a peasant. This is a peasant. Black peasant Madonna for black country.”
“This is a German village,” said the Captain.
“This is my Madonna,” said Michele angrily. “Your German village and my Madonna. I paint this picture as an offering to the Madonna. She is pleased—I feel it.”
The Captain lay down again. He was feeling ill. He went back to sleep. When he woke for the second time it was dark. Michele had brought in a flaring paraffin lamp, and by its light was working on the long wall. A bottle of brandy stood beside him. He painted until long after midnight, and the Captain lay on his side and watched, as passive as a man suffering a dream. Then they both went to sleep on the boards. The whole of the next day Michele stood painting black Madonnas, black saints, black angels. Outside, troops were practising in the sunlight, bands were blaring and motorcyclists roared up and down. But Michele painted on, drunk and oblivious. The Captain lay on his back, drinking and muttering about his wife. Then he would say “Nadya, Nadya,” and burst into sobs.
Towards nightfall the troops went away. The officers came back, and the Captain went off with them to show how the village sprang into being when the great lights at the end of the parade-ground were switched on. They all looked at the village in silence. They switched the lights off, and there were only the tall angular boards leaning like gravestones in the moonlight. On went the lights—and there was the village. They were silent, as if suspicious. Like the Captain, they seemed to feel it was not right. Uncanny it certainly was, but that was not it. Unfair—that was the word. It was cheating. And profoundly disturbing.
“Clever chap, that Italian of yours,” said the General.
The Captain, who had been woodenly correct until this moment, suddenly came rocking up to the General, and steadied himself by laying his hand on the august shoulder. “Bloody Wops,” he said. “Bloody kaffirs. Bloody . . . Tell you what, though, there’s one Itie that’s some good. Yes, there is. I’m telling you. He’s a friend of mine, actually.”
The General looked at him. Then he nodded at his underlings. The Captain was taken away for disciplinary purposes. It was decided, however, that he must be ill, nothing else could account for such behaviour. He was put to bed in his own room with a nurse to watch him.
He woke twenty-four hours later, sober for the first time in weeks. He slowly remembered what had happened. Then he sprang out of bed and rushed into his clothes. The nurse was just in time to see him run down the path and leap into his lorry.
He drove at top speed to the parade-ground, which was flooded with light in such a way that the village did not exist. Everything was in full swing. The cars were three deep around the square, with people on the running-boards and even the roofs. The grandstand was packed. Women dressed up as gipsies, country girls, Elizabethan court dames, and so on, wandered about with trays of ginger beer and sausage-rolls and programmes at five shillings each in aid of the war effort. On the square, troops deployed, obsolete machine-guns were being dragged up and down, bands played, and motorcyclists roared through flames.
As the Captain parked the lorry, all this activity ceased, and the lights went out. The Captain began running around the outside of the square to reach the place where the guns were hidden in a mess of net and branches. He was sobbing with the effort. He was a big man, and unused to exercise, and sodden with brandy. He had only one idea in his mind—to stop the guns firing, to stop them at all costs.
Luckily, there seemed to be a hitch. The lights were still out. The unearthly graveyard at the end of the square glittered white in the moonlight. Then the lights briefly switched on, and the village sprang into existence for just long enough to show large red crosses all over a white building beside the church. Then moonlight flooded everything again, and the crosses vanished. “Oh, the bloody fool!” sobbed the Captain, running, running as if for his life. He was no longer trying to reach the guns. He was cutting across a corner of the square direct to the church. He could hear some officers cursing behind him: “Who put those red crosses there? Who? We can’t fire on the Red Cross.”
The Captain reached the church as the searchlights burst on. Inside, Michele was kneeling on the earth looking at his first Madonna. “They are going to kill my Madonna,” he said miserably.
“Come away, Michele, come away.”
“They’re going to . . .”
The Captain grabbed his arm and pulled. Michele wrenched himself free and grabbed a saw. He began hacking at the ceiling board. There was a dead silence outside. They heard a voice booming through the loudspeakers: “The village that is about to be shelled is an English village, not as represented on the programme, a German village. Repeat, the village that is about to be shelled is . . .”
Michele had cut through two sides of a square around the Madonna.
“Michele,” sobbed the Captain, “get out of here.”
Michele dropped the saw, took hold of the raw edges of the board and tugged. As he did so, the church began to quiver and lean. An irregular patch of board ripped out and Michele staggered back into the Captain’s arms. There was a roar. The church seemed to dissolve around th
em into flame. Then they were running away from it, the Captain holding Michele tight by the arm. “Get down,” he shouted suddenly, and threw Michele to the earth. He flung himself down beside him. Looking from under the crook of his arm, he heard the explosion, saw a great pillar of smoke and flame, and the village disintegrated in a flying mass of debris. Michele was on his knees gazing at his Madonna in the light from the flames. She was unrecognizable, blotted out with dust. He looked horrible, quite white, and a trickle of blood soaked from his hair down one cheek.
“They shelled my Madonna,” he said.
“Oh, damn it, you can paint another one,” said the Captain. His own voice seemed to him strange, like a dream voice. He was certainly crazy, as mad as Michele himself . . . He got up, pulled Michele to his feet, and marched him towards the edge of the field. There they were met by the ambulance people. Michele was taken off to hospital, and the Captain was sent back to bed.
A week passed. The Captain was in a darkened room. That he was having some kind of a breakdown was clear, and two nurses stood guard over him. Sometimes he lay quiet. Sometimes he muttered to himself. Sometimes he sang in a thick clumsy voice bits out of opera, fragments from Italian songs, and—over and over again—“There’s a Long Long Trail.” He was not thinking of anything at all. He shied away from the thought of Michele as if it were dangerous. When, therefore, a cheerful female voice announced that a friend had come to cheer him up, and it would do him good to have some company, and he saw a white bandage moving towards him in the gloom, he turned sharp over on to his side, face to the wall.
“Go away,” he said. “Go away, Michele.”
“I have come to see you,” said Michele. “I have brought you a present.”
The Captain slowly turned over. There was Michele, a cheerful ghost in the dark room. “You fool,” he said. “You messed everything up. What did you paint those crosses for?”
“It was a hospital,” said Michele. “In a village there is a hospital, and on the hospital the Red Cross, the beautiful Red Cross—no?”
African Stories Page 2