To the Volcano

by Elleke Boehmer

  It is properly dark now. There is a light drifting mist, no longer quite rain. It’s not cold enough for her scarf. She undoes its knot. As soon as her arm comes back down from untying it, the security guard again touches her elbow. In fact he pinches her elbow, not hard, not tight, but with his fingers in a narrow pincer shape. His knuckles touch her ribs, graze her ribs almost. She pulls away, her feet sliding, but still she feels the pressure.

  She thinks of Coupeau putting no pressure, yet putting pressure. She can step away at any minute. Any minute a taxi will come.

  See what you can see, she tells herself again. She has made it here, it is enough. This is Paris, the Goutte d’Or, the Rue des Poissonniers, it must be, she must have seen the sign.

  The soft mist is settling in her hair and on her sleeves. She is touched by the mist of Paris like Gervaise will have been touched, or Virginie, or Nana, the wet silvering their hair, the flowers on their bonnets, and Goujet’s beard, and Lantin’s top hat.

  She holds her free sleeve to her mouth and tastes the beads of wet, their woolliness and their coldness, and feels herself smiling at the silliness and the insanity and the coming together of all this, the mist and her books and her dreams and the sounds of the traffic here on the very long Rue des Poissonniers running south, north like her highway at home.

  The man adjusts the position of his hand on her elbow. He’s still here! She takes a longer step, more of a jolt than a step. The droplets on the edge of her hood fall like silver beads. But still she feels his thumb on the outer bit of her elbow and his fingers on the inside, against her ribs.

  Someone catches up with them and passes close by and overtakes—a tall man, but not the man in the denim jacket, she’s sure. Still, her fear comes back, dries her mouth. In the mist it’s difficult to make sure.

  She falls back into step with the guard. At some point a taxi will come, she tells herself. J’espère que… It is Paris. There will be the yellow light of a taxi saying Libre. When she sees it she will have to raise her hand very quickly. If it is travelling in the wrong direction, north, it will make a big loop. Then it will draw up alongside, pointing south, and she will quickly drag open the door, free her elbow, throw herself into the back seat. She will not say goodbye.

  At the thought of the taxi and its friendly yellow sign she feels suddenly in tune with these pedestrians, the guard and all these others, their bowed heads coursing down this long street shining in the wetness. She and these others, they are flowing in a single current, neither left nor right, the drizzle lightly drifting and glittering under the street lights overhead and the mist cold on their lips.

  And then she knows for sure that something in her life that once gaped open has been filled—in fact it’s brimming with ice-blue light, it’s flowing smoothly forward like a tide into this present instant, it’s welling up through the cracks between the paving stones and it’s bearing on its breast eucalyptus leaves and bits of wiry twig and curling bark and the smell of diesel and desert sand and the reflection of a traffic light turning red to yellow to green without a single car passing.

  A taxi suddenly draws up, its yellow light shining on her boots. Lise wrenches open the door, the security guard still beside her, holding onto her elbow.

  ‘Rue de Rivoli, the youth hostel,’ she jerks away. ‘Merci,’ she says into his dark-brown eyes, ‘Merci, merci, merci.’

  To the Volcano

  THE FIELDTRIP PLAN kicked off that hot winter’s day with a rumour shared over the 3.30pm tea trolley in the staffroom. Later, no one could remember if it was Bob Savage the cultural critic or the geologist Sid Duncan who had mentioned it first, the old extinct volcano a few miles off the highway to the north. Or perhaps it was Eddie Adams, the new lecturer in environmental history, who had said something in passing while admiring the laden tea trolley.

  ‘One of the wives?’ Eddie asked, looking at the outsize teapot, the Marie biscuits on their floral plate, the cake tin full of fresh coconut-ice slices and cherry buns.

  ‘Our usual modest but surprising Thursday spread,’ someone had said, probably Danie Price the statistician. ‘We owe it each time to one of the wives. They do the baking. Thanks to them our teas are pretty good out here, considering, you know, we’re a further-education college out in the sticks.’

  ‘One of the wives?’ Eddie asked again. It was her first Thursday tea-time and she was trying to get acquainted. ‘So, does that mean I should bake, too, one Thursday? I don’t have a wife.’

  But no one paid attention. They were listening to Bob, who had just said something about magma. Bob was a one-time Shakespearean who now worked on celebrity icons like Monroe, Guevara, and logos of global interest, the Apple apple, for example. Volcanos, though—they were something else, Bob said, powerful symbols, sure, but actually the real thing, too. Magma was pretty dangerous, pretty real.

  He scratched the air with his fingers when he said ‘real thing’, the fingers not holding the cup. He’d heard about the old volcano from his neighbour, a hiker with a side interest in seismology.

  ‘Today little of the crater is left,’ said Bob, ‘What we see are mainly the magma pipes—they’re like the volcano’s plumbing, millions upon millions of years old.’

  ‘Rings a distant bell,’ said Sid Duncan, catching his teasoftened Marie biscuit on his tongue before it broke. ‘It will be one of the few dormant volcanos we have this far south. I’ve never seen it, but it’s in the textbooks.’

  Eddie turned away from the tea trolley and, as it was her first Thursday tea, tried again to step into the conversation.

  Yes, she ventured, talking to the wall, a bell was ringing for her too. Her boyfriend Jamie—her on-off boyfriend the barfly Jamie, she might have said—had met a trucker once. He was always talking to truckers. The trucker had this story of an ancient crater far out on the savannah to the north. The locals avoided it, he said, it was a bewitched place.

  ‘That’s what I also heard, it’s ancient and it’s bewitched,’ Bob turned to her, grateful for her interest. ‘Nearby, you wouldn’t know it was there. When you pass by, my neighbour said, it looks like no more than a low hill, rubbed back into the landscape. But when you go over the top, they say, into the crater, it’s another world.’

  ‘Jamie said it was where a meteor struck,’ Eddie poured herself a second cup of tea. ‘He said the crater is an impact crater, not a dormant volcano.’

  ‘It’s definitely a volcano, long extinct,’ Sid said sharply. Who was this young woman to know anything about it? Environmental history wasn’t even a proper subject. He remembered her boyfriend, the longhaired guy at the start-of-year party who’d put out his cigarettes in a plastic cup of wine. ‘If we were there I could show you, all of you. The land folds around the rim of the crater, indicating the long-ago volcanic activity.’

  ‘The idea of a field trip impresses itself irresistibly upon me, colleagues,’ said Bob, suddenly excited, ruddy. ‘Open to students in all subjects. There won’t be a crush. Most of our students don’t know what field work is. They have no idea. They think geography is elsewhere and history is elsewhere. And they wouldn’t be far wrong. Culture is certainly elsewhere. Even the transition feels like it happened in another country. But this history is close by, it’s there for the viewing. Let’s do it—a proper field trip, a talk by Sid on the coach, lunch boxes, the whole package.’

  ‘Hire us a bus, Sid,’ said Texas Mpe the lab technician. The whole time he had stood smoking silently at the open door. He was allowed, because he was still the only black academic staff-member. ‘We can make it a joint trip, senior students, perhaps a couple of first years, a good complement of staff. You’d get the history kids along, wouldn’t you, Eddie?’

  ‘If there was something to argue about, yes,’ she said. ‘Meteor crater over volcanic crater, that kind of thing. Earth history from above and below.’

  The plans were in place by the time the Marie biscuits and coconut-ice slices were eaten. They pinpointed Friday week. Sid
contacted the coach company before he went home that afternoon. Bob phoned the college principal who straight away gave his blessing. The principal mentioned a hitherto undisclosed funding pot earmarked for field trips. He regretted he could not himself make it. Eddie put up a poster on the history noticeboard calling all interested students.

  At morning tea the next day Bob left a sign-up list on the trolley—eight staff places only. When it was almost full, bar one place, he gave the list to his wife Sue to type up. She left an underline for the extra place. Everyone who had been around the tea trolley that day had decided to come, plus a colleague in Sid’s department—Arnott Sergeant, an earth scientist.

  Texas offered to get t-shirts printed with the words Volcanic Fieldtrip or something similar, but there was no time to push through the order. In any case, only Refile Masimong the communications officer had shown interest in the t-shirts and the admin team wasn’t officially invited on the trip.

  ‘I’ll have a yellow one, Tex,’ Refile said, bumping into him at the staffroom door where she had no business. She lit her cigarette off his. ‘I know about that crater, it’s my part of the world, my stamping ground. I’d like a picture of it on my t-shirt smoking away, like this’—she blew a smoke ring—‘not extinct.’

  Then she caught his listening look and followed his gaze into the dark recesses of the staffroom. They saw people milling around the tea trolley, the list lying on it.

  ‘Honest truth, Tex,’ she said. ‘I know that area. Ask those folks to have me along, what’s to lose? I can tell stories about the place as we drive. As kids, playing, we always made sure the volcano ridge was behind us, where we couldn’t see it. It weighs on you, you’ll see. It’s a powerful place.’

  ‘Put down my name,’ she persisted later in the smoking area outside her office, the place where they usually met. ‘I can be the extra, the eighth. So what if there’s no t-shirt? Just take me. Barley in accounts can mind the shop.’

  At that moment Bob walked past in the direction of the car park. He nodded at Tex, then more slowly at Refile, a deep, slow nod.

  ‘I’d say she comes along, Texas,’ he said over his shoulder, then stopped and turned back. ‘Refile, isn’t it? You can write up the trip for the newsletter. Get Texas to put your name on the list. There’s a place waiting for you.’

  ~

  The group gathered around the coach early that Friday morning. Though the sun was up, frost still sparkled on the ground. Refile had printed out the day’s weather stats on a sheet of A4. Her first job each day was to send around a local weather report by college email. Today she had printed out a copy.

  19oC/7oC. Sunny. Wind 8 mph from the south. Humidity 29%.

  Holding on to the paper with cold hands, she squeezed her way through the students clustered at the coach door. Sid Duncan was talking to the group, handing out a fact sheet.

  She clambered in and found Bob already sitting in the front seat behind the driver. She stuck the weather report on the glass panel between them, then took a seat across the aisle. She watched Bob read her notice.

  ‘The weather stubs give me starting points for newsletter stories,’ she folded her arms inside her anorak. ‘I don’t like the sound of that cold south wind, though. It’s an ill wind…’

  ‘There’ll be no wind in the crater,’ Bob looked at her levelly. ‘You go over the rim, I’m reliably told, and it’s a different world. In there, it’s always summer.’

  ‘I know,’ said Ref. ‘I know the area. And I say, bring it on. Growing up, we never went to the volcano. It was zwifho, so our parents forbade it.’

  ~

  By the time the field-trip party reached the grassy area at the base of the volcano, it was nearly noon. The reports had been correct. The crater ridge was low and long and difficult to discern even from a few miles’ distance. They had to stop every so often to get their bearings and each time Sid needed Arnott Sergeant’s help to trace out the crater’s shape. Close to, the road curved unexpectedly around the ridge and approached from the north.

  Refile had slept all the way, waking up dehydrated when the driver turned off the engine. She found her head pillowed on Bob’s folded jersey.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said from across the aisle, holding out a bottle of water, ‘I couldn’t stand to see you sleeping without a support for your head.’

  ‘I missed giving the guided tour,’ she said, frowning, cricking her neck.

  Getting lost was the order of the day, Refile later wrote in her newsletter article. Confusion too, getting confused. Three parties went into the crater, and four returned, in different groupings from those that went in. No one got back at the agreed time. All brought different stories. Some spoke of scrubland, others of lush grass and willows, others again of a reedy lake, a kind of vlei, you might even say billabong, yellow-green in colour. But everyone spoke of a weird other world, iridescent green, windless, sweltering, silent—without birds, without cicadas, with no animal tracks in evidence at all.

  The driver alone did not enter the crater. He stayed with the coach and did not appear in Refile’s article. Once his last passenger had climbed down, he locked up, stretched himself under an acacia and went to sleep. He slept until Eddie and Texas woke him. They were the first people to return.

  His mobile phone held high in the air, Sid led the first group into the crater with Arnott beside him. Sid’s group was the largest and included most of the students. Four stayed back with Texas to have a smoke. Sid pointed out various features as they climbed—that concentric fracturing, these ‘onion ring’ rocks of different ages.

  ‘You’ve got to imagine this as a great old navel in the ground,’ Sid said, turning to the students and throwing open his arms. ‘Imagine the mighty mountain that once stood here rearing above us, its top aflame. What you see now is the worn-down base of what stood here then.’

  The second party left the grassy area with Bob at its head and Eddie bringing up the rear. At first, Refile had rushed to catch Sid’s group, wanting to make notes from his commentary, but they were going too fast, so she joined the second. She sat on a rock waiting for them and wrote Sid’s image of the great old navel into her notebook.

  Texas hung back, hoping Ref might dawdle also, pause for a smoke. But then he spotted her yellow top receding up the slope and turned to gather together the third group, the smokers, Danie and the four students. They took their time walking up and entered the crater over a low declivity that gave a view onto grassland stretching down to reedy water, mirages dancing in mid-air.

  From here, they saw Sid’s group making a zigzag line through the thorn scrub, and Eddie standing at the vlei’s reedy edge, beside a clump of willows, shading her eyes against the glittering light coming off the water. Ref’s yellow top was nowhere to be seen.

  Texas remembered this view later, on his way back. He had split away from the smokers and ran into Eddie scrambling over the crater’s edge.

  ‘Have you seen Bob?’ she asked. ‘He got out of breath and we left him resting in some shade, but now he’s no longer there. Or we’ve been searching around the wrong trees.’

  They waited till the whole group had gathered back at the coach—Sid and the students, the stragglers from what had been Bob’s party, the smokers’ group now joined by Refile. She had seen them leaving the crater and followed them out. She volunteered now to go back in to find him.

  ‘I found some good shade by some willows,’ she said, ‘He’s most likely there.’

  Texas followed her for a distance, but she went too fast. He remembered that she knew the area, she grew up here. He watched her crossing the crater’s edge, dark against the white late-afternoon light.

  Refile returned with Bob leaning on her arm, his hands in hers. It didn’t take too long now, did it? she said. He’d been by the willows all along, just as she’d thought. He was waking up as she arrived, a little sunburnt and confused but basically fine.

  Sid and Eddie shepherded the students on to the coach
.

  ‘You were talking about the willows, weren’t you, Dr Savage?’ Ref said gently, guiding Bob to the coach door. ‘Willow, willow, you said. You think willows give good shade?’

  His foot on the first step of the coach, Bob grabbed hold of her arm and looked into her face.

  ‘I have had such a dream,’ he whispered. Refile put her finger to her lips but he ignored her. He had repeated these words many times all the way down the ridge. ‘I have had a dream and a most rare vision, lady. And I would sing it to you, for you were in it.’

  ~

  ‘It was like stepping into another world,’ Eddie said in the bar that night, her face aflame with sunburn, ‘Really. The minute you went over the crater edge.’

  ‘Made by a meteor,’ said her boyfriend Jamie.

  ‘Made by whatever. You clambered in, not really noticing much at first, you had to watch your step on the rocks and the path went down steeply, and then suddenly it was five degrees warmer and the wind died away. It was so green in there, radioactive green, with different plants than on the outside. Succulent plants, tangled.’

  ‘A lot of divisive energy in craters,’ Jamie stared into his beer, ‘Impact or explosion.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Eddie said, and threw her scorched arms suddenly around him, drawing him close. ‘The weirdest thing was, we all immediately lost each other, the scrubland was so dense. The second you got left behind, you were lost. I was in a small group and we thought we were kind of contained, held inside the crater, but we were quickly separated. We wandered around in circles for hours.’

  Jamie shifted on his barstool, releasing the lock of Eddie’s arms.

  ‘The more I hear, the more I think your lot must be right,’ he said. ‘It’s a volcano crater, not from a meteor. I’d like to see it. What do you say that next weekend we take a bottle of tequila, drive over there and get wasted? See what happens. Maybe we’ll feel something, hear the ancestral spirits singing from the vlei—’