Submergence

by Ledgard, J. M.

  They dug a pit and buried her in it up to her neck. The cleric called out that he was doing Allah’s instructions. ‘I’m not going!’ the girl screamed. ‘Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!’

  They gagged her, put sacking over her head and a veil over the sacking, so the world was blacked out. They poured perfume over the sacking. Her waters span impossibly fast, she was retching from within and her hearing must have become more acute, so that immediately after prayers were ended she might have heard the men walking across the square – fifty men in all, each of them picking up rocks – and a crowd of hundreds watching, chattering, wailing. She was fourteen years old. She might have heard the men being assembled behind a line drawn in the sand and how each of them dropped their stones at their feet and arranged them in a pile. She might have heard the crowd drawing breath as the men picked up the rocks and at a command hurled them at her head. What a mess they made of it, with their gangly arms, uncoordinated even in the levelling. So many of the rocks missed. And if the girl was never to be saved, if there was no way of going back in time, then the single service that could have been done for her would have been to replace those men with others who could throw and who would choose each stone carefully and throw straight and true, telling themselves the more accurate the throw the more merciful the sentence. That would have ended it. Instead those useless men managed only one strike in the face, smashing the girl’s front teeth. They were ordered to pick up their stones and move closer. The crowd surged in anger and there was screaming from the girl’s relatives. A young boy sprinted across the square. He was one of her cousins. They had grown up in the same house. He almost got close enough to touch her, but was shot dead just short. The men threw more stones. Some of them hit. Nurses were brought in. The girl was pulled out of the pit. She was examined and found to be still alive, so they slid her back into the hole and packed the sand and gravel around her and the stoning continued. The crowd went quiet. The girl was pulled out once more and declared dead. Her body was laid under the sun, on the world. The nurses shielded her from the men who had stoned her. They wiped the blood and fragments from her face and chest with a wet cloth and washed her for burial. They prayed over her. She was buried under a fig tree in a street near where the boys played table football. Her feet were pointed towards the ocean, her head to the square. She had been sentenced for adultery, after reporting to the religious authorities that she had been gang-raped.

  A biblical scene – no, a Koranic scene – the clerics, the men standing behind the piles of stones, the exclamations, the strange trees casting their shapes, the dust itself, the stones flying and missing. It was ancient, also new. The sermon that followed was played over loudspeakers in the town. He had pushed the bird away and listened. Barbed wire was drawn across the square, the gun on one of the Land Cruisers was directed at the crowd. There was a camera recording it for a website. They downloaded the video onto a phone and forced him to watch. No matter how many times it was sped up or slowed down, no matter the cutaway or close-ups, there was no way to correct it: it was an injustice that could never be corrected. If you paused it, he thought, the stones would not stop in the air. If you muted it, the sound would continue.

  When the feeding of the people in the port was over, he walked across the town square with the fighters. The moon was out. The square was ashen. The pit was still there. One of the fighters pointed it out. It was filled in with darker earth. A pock.

  He fainted one afternoon in the surgery, in the white, and saw Yusuf al-Afghani standing in a wadi in the Somali desert. Clouds passed over. Yusuf’s arms were sunk to his elbows in a jar of spermaceti. It shifted, and Yusuf was on the deck of a ship, a sea captain, a brigand, the ship standing still, the sails limp, it was before a tropical storm, all the air sucked out. Then the ship was gone, sunk, and Yusuf stood under a palm tree and he saw the smooth black hands entering into spermaceti. They must be there in the white jar, they could not disappear, but how was it possible to know? What was Yusuf doing? Was he going to anoint himself with a mark of spermaceti oil on his forehead, a blessing at a coronation, or was he going to bring handfuls of the white stuff to his mouth and eat it softly like calf’s brain? He watched and was made cognisant of another image, of the Finnish painter Hugo Simberg’s wounded angel, carried by two boys, a painting he had seen as a young man in a Helsinki summer long ago, and which forever changed the way he saw the world.

  It was a melting in him, visually. There was John More swallowed by a sperm whale off the Patagonian coast and Yusuf with his forearms sunk in a jar of spermaceti, and there was Simberg’s angel, and he could not see the connection, except in the whiteness of the windows in the surgery, of the jar, of John More cut by flensers from the whale’s belly, the whiteness of the angel’s bandage, and the wound beneath; and there was the face of the boy in the Simberg painting, who stared at him as he passed by, a face that could have been his own.

  She walked by herself on the beach the next morning. She had left him asleep in her bed – their bed, perhaps – and felt the need to be scoured by the wind, to see the Atlantic, to feel its rhythm, the way the water met and was contained by the land. It was colder than when she had swum and the wind was at her back and seemed to lift her along the shore.

  The lighthouse was white with a band of black and a band of orange around the light itself. It was built beyond the breakers on the higher side of a reef. The reef’s dingy cracks were infested with insects and molluscs and its plunging walls, rank with glistening seaweed, resembled the palm of a hand outstretched from France, resisting the storms. The door of the lighthouse was high above the reef, approached by slimy steps, and the light was often obscured in the mists. How was it built? First, they raised an iron drum on wooden stilts. Men worked on the lighthouse in fair weather and sheltered in the drum during storms and at night, singing songs and playing the accordion in the dreadful echoing wet. After several years, the windows in the lighthouse were put in and sealed and the workmen rowed back to the shore, leaving a beacon to swing across the bay and out to sea.

  She could see the jagged rocks further out to sea on which many ships had foundered. The sailors, fearing being drowned so close to shore, must have called out for an acre of barren ground; broom, furze, anything, in their fear.

  The waves were messy, porridgy, falling off before the lighthouse. There were no surfers. She knew how deep it was out there at the horizon. She had these other languages of numbers and sonar. She saw the deepness that was at the edge of France and it made the beach under her feel like a ledge on a cliff.

  When she turned around and began walking back towards the Hotel Atlantic the wind almost knocked her over. It was like the skiing in Scotland in her undergraduate days, where the wind came so hard that even dropped into a schuss on the steep slopes she barely moved.

  The longest golf drive recorded was hit on the moon. Man has yet to return to the Challenger Deep. The lesson from this is that it is easier for human beings to push outwards than it is for them to explore inwards. The wind that carries you away like a kite will blow you on your back if you turn to face it. Consider how the surface area of a balloon grows when air is blown into it. When we push out, we create new frontiers we might populate. When we take the air out of a balloon, it deflates, and becomes shrivelled.

  Millions and millions of years ago we lived in the ocean. When we emerged we had to move in two dimensions, instead of three. That was painful at first. No up, nor any down. We learned to drag ourselves along without legs then with them, going faster and faster, and faster again, by any means. The lack of a third dimension is one explanation for our need to head out over the horizon. Another explanation is that we were raised up from chemosynthetic life in the deep ocean to become photosynthetic life at the top. Having ascended from the eternal night we cannot stop ourselves from heading towards the light. We are moths in the thrall of the sun and the stars, shedding off darkness. That is our instinct, but our conscious nature is also to be drawn t
o the unknown. We want to know what is behind the wood, what the next valley looks like, and the valley beyond that. We want to know what is in the sky and what is behind the sky. These have been our obsessions since our beginnings, yet the curiosity does not extend to the ocean. We forget there is so much darkness in our world, and to be out on a beach is to be lucky. We know the tides, because they cover the edges of our countries and swell our river mouths and fill our fishing nets, but the connection with the ocean has been lost. If it is described at all, it is as a tomb or a hiding place. Even Tennyson needed the Kraken to batter huge sea worms in its sleep until the last fires heated the deep. Moby-Dick is the greatest novel in the English language about the sea. It is not concerned with the ocean. Only at the end of the book is there a sense of sinking and what is beneath, when the Pequod twists into a whirlpool and a death shroud of water closes over it and calms, rolling as it did 5000 years ago. You may have read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The distance in the title refers to the journey taken across, not down. If you read it as a child, it would have been an adventure story. As a grown-up, you might be more interested in Captain Nemo’s background as an Indian national embittered by the Sepoy mutiny. At any rate, there is nothing of oceanography to be learned from the book. Nemo steers the Nautilus down deep, but Jules Verne makes the deep hospitable! There is no weighing of atmospheres, no crushing pressure, no eternal night. When Nemo takes Professor Aronnax on an underwater hike to sunken Atlantis, Verne asks the reader to imagine a forested slope in the Harz mountains in Germany, only underwater.

  A nuclear submarine is a killing machine, a destroyer of worlds, yet it is fragile. It implodes when it sinks out of its depth. In 1963, the United States submarine Thresher was wrecked with such violence that parts of it were scattered across an area several kilometres wide. There is no comparison between the technology of a submarine going across and the unadorned submersible diving deep. This is because our world is firstly about power and only secondly about knowledge.

  Unsurprisingly, most advances in submersible technology have come from secret military projects. The United States Navy developed its own submersibles to clear up its own submarines and to locate and recover fragments of sunken Soviet submarines. A Soviet missile, if recovered, would have been worth years of spying on land. One of these submersibles was called Deep View. It had a glass nose and dived into the Sea of Okhotsk. Later there was the NR-1. It was powered by a small nuclear reactor and could stay submerged for weeks. The director of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Programme handpicked its crew of two scientists and ten sailors. It was NR-1 that recovered a gold sextant from the debris of a Soviet sub, from which the navigator was able to calculate the sub’s position, according to the stars.

  The Challenger Deep of the Marianas Trench is named after Her Majesty’s ship Challenger, a Royal Naval vessel whose 1872–75 voyage was the first and greatest oceanographic expedition. Challenger’s mission was to plumb the remote seas and trawl them for new life. It was backbreaking and tedious work, but tens of thousands of new species were discovered. Sometimes a hundred creatures never seen before were returned in a single dredge, then nothing for days on end except the commonest fish and whale bones adorned with nodules of metal. Yet we know now that the slime which covered the inside of the dredge each time it was brought up was not the unexceptional ooze the ship’s scientist believed it to be. Not whale snot, either. It was all that remained of the most exquisite forms of millions of sea squirts, salp, and jellies, whose diaphanous musculature – more remarkable than any alien species yet conceived – had lost its form in air.

  To push inwards is hard, to descend even more so; it challenges our sense of who we are and where we came from. This is why, even though we are inundated with seawater, the advances of our oceanographic agencies do not match those of our space agencies.

  He had tracked the family of a senior al-Qaeda commander in Africa to an island off Madagascar. The terrorist’s mother lived in a neighbourhood on the slopes of a volcano above the island’s capital. It was a steep walk up from the town. The air grew thin, there were showers of hail. The massif rose lividly above the shacks. Smoking lines of lava ran down it and were glowing welts at night.

  The terrorist was near the top of the FBI’s most wanted list. There was a $5 million bounty on his head. He was elusive: the New York Times reported him dead on the day of a State of the Union address. The missile was not even close. He moved between Somalia and Kenya on foot, on donkey, in lorries and on dhows. According to the FBI, he was a bomb maker, an expert in urban warfare, a computer hacker, a forger, and a master of disguise who spoke many languages. The bureau could not accept that it was easy to buy a new identity in Kenya and move up and down the Swahili coast and that several languages were spoken there. His information indicated the terrorist was running scared. He thought of the man as an untrained hunter who had wounded an animal and then did not know what to do. He knew he was hidden in Somalia, in rooms where the television played all day, shaping him in new and unexpected ways.

  The mother’s neighbourhood was filled with music and interspersed with Jurassic-looking trees. Volcanic ash fell on its corrugated iron roofs, lava flowed around it. The people were a Creole particular to that island, descended from runaway slaves and pirates who had landed there. She ran a kiosk a few steps back from the street. It was the kind of shack where most of the world goes each day to buy its milk, tomatoes and sundries. She sat on a stool outside, watching the passers-by. She wore a blue dress and crescent moon earrings. She was not veiled. She looked like she was about to pluck a goose, hands on knees, legs set wide apart. He climbed the steps and asked for a drink. She knew immediately why he was there. He followed her into the shack. She pulled a Coke bottle from a bucket of iced water and opened it for him.

  ‘I’ll give you nothing,’ she said, refusing to look him in the eye. ‘We paid for his education and not a sou did we get. He didn’t even turn up for his father’s funeral.’

  She minded very much being found. He could not remember whether her voice had been rough, or not, only that she had struck him like a character in a fairytale – a cottager in a forest – not someone in a shack on the side of a tropical volcano.

  He had zigzagged down to the town, pushing away large moths that brushed his face and stumbled into a courtyard where old men were slapping down dominoes on a wooden table under a swaying streetlight. The capital was built with its back to the sea. There were no beaches. The escaped settlers had chosen to face the volcano which sooner or later would spell their doom. There were hardly any animals left on the island. The mongooses had killed the snakes, the people had killed the mongooses. The islanders were ruled by superstitions. There was a miracle mosque that had built itself at night and a crater lake which granted wishes into which a Belgian scuba-diving expedition had gone down and never come back up. There were witches in every village who were paid to cast spells: for a successful visa application to visit France for instance. It was an extreme case of islandism, with no reference to the surrounding ocean. It was as if the rest of the world did not properly exist.

  The next day, he remembered, hot ash had fallen on the town and out to sea. Apparently this was quite normal. It was difficult to breathe and the tarmac on the roads bubbled. He met with the terrorist’s sister in a café across from a tennis club called Roland Garros, which had beautiful red clay courts. Her name was Monique. She was more forthcoming.

  ‘I don’t want money or that,’ she said. ‘You can buy me breakfast if you like.’

  She was a hairdresser. She wore a miniskirt and sunglasses with plastic diamonds glued to the sides.

  ‘The thing about my brother is he’s really shy. At least he was,’ she corrected herself, ‘I haven’t seen him in years.’

  The volcano was still rumbling under the town. The morning was heavy with languor. She lit a cigarette and inhaled. The magma, the weather, himself; everything felt saved up.

  ‘He was the best stud
ent in his class. For some reason the French didn’t give him a scholarship. That’s how he ended up in Pakistan. If France had come through for him, he’d probably be a maths teacher now.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘He liked maths. This word terrorist. I don’t like it. My brother only fights to support his family. The rest is made up.’

  ‘Your mother says she hasn’t had any money from him.’

  ‘Don’t listen to a word she says. I bet she was wearing the earrings he sent her.’

  ‘Crescent moons?’

  ‘That’s them. He sends money every month. His wife and kids live with me. She gets money transfers too. We’re a close family.’

  She was unguarded. She even told him which money bureau the terrorist’s wife picked the transfers up from.

  ‘Has your brother ever come back to the island?’ he asked.

  ‘Course not! The police would have him in a minute. He’s gone for good. He’s an important man now.’

  ‘Do you find yourself embarrassed to talk about him? He’s killed a lot of innocent people.’

  She shrugged. ‘Why should I be embarrassed? He has his cause. He wants to help the Palestinians. Who else is fighting for them?’

  ‘You said he was fighting for the family.’

  ‘Come on now.’

  The French news played on a television. He ordered another coffee and a pastry. It was winter in France. There were blizzards in Auvergne. There was a picture of a ski slope, of snow blowing over a road and sheep huddled by a wall.

  ‘A lot of snow in France this year,’ she remarked.

  When they came out of the café there were soldiers on the street. They belonged to the national army but looked like French paratroopers, with fatigues tucked into their boots, short-barrelled machine guns on their backs and some wearing mirrored sunglasses. There were no jobs on the island. There were always coups. Another one was on its way.