The Great Fire

by Shirley Hazzard

  However that might be, it was the first day of the year, quite mild, and the first time that Helen had come with him, passing through the small clearing where a man had died. He handed her down over a last wet carpet of slithered leaves into the brief ground near the entrance, at which they removed their shoes. The guardian was not visible, though possibly nearby—perhaps deterred by the presence of a Western woman or by this show of implicit weakness in the hitherto solitary male.

  Or he might have been indoors, indistinguishable among the effigies in burnished rows. Drier leaves had scuttled through the entrance; and shifted in a patch of sunlight. The smells of camphor, incense, sandalwood, enclosure were not churchly. He and she did not speak or stalk about, or otherwise lord it over the unresisting place. In the formal effect of silence, the waterfall played, without paradox, its part.

  Returning, they separated to climb the path in single file, he reaching back to take her hand. In the fair weather, they were without coats. In those days, their bodies were taking reciprocal shape, tentative, delectable. He had never yet said Love: the Rubicon word, with its transforming powers.

  Helen was to go alone to her parents’ rooms, where Benedict would also be brought and lunch would be prepared. The Driscolls, man and wife, were leaving for some commemorative occasion—there was often an event of the kind, which they unfailingly attended, leaving Dench in charge. Thus, at the top of the path, Helen walked on by herself, straight into that other existence where she had less and less place. As she walked, she put her hand to her mouth to hold his kiss, and to her breast to enclose his touch.

  The man, instead, went to his own room and to his table—to those papers where the ruined continents and cultures and existences that had consumed his mind and body for years had given place to her story and his. He could not consider this a reduction—the one theme having embroiled the century and the world, and the other recasting his single fleeting miraculous life. Having expected, repeatedly, to die from the great fires into which his times had pitched him, he had discovered a desire to live completely; by which he meant, with her.

  BENEDICT now had someone to care for him in the night, an older Japanese with medical training. Aki himself stayed longer hours, even when Helen was present, for she did not have the strength to move her brother or help him rise, and such things were increasingly required. At Ben’s request, she still read to him, although more and more he drifted into half-sleep, looking for her as he woke; at once recalling, even so, what they had read and where they’d left off. His speech was indistinct, except to her, who understood and interpreted. Benedict continued to do the British puzzles sent to him by Bertram, but now she told him the questions and inscribed his answers, his hand being ineffectual.

  Aldred, coming in one morning and finding them laughing—Helen with the crossword puzzle in her hand—was told of their new method: “His idea was that I should read out the number of letters, and then the clue. But he’s taken to giving me the answers before he hears the question.

  “I told him: three-three-three-two-three-three. And he said, ‘The Old Man of the Sea. What’s the question?’” Leith sat beside her, and they were, all three, for the moment, amused and healed. Benedict said, “Like old times”—meaning, a matter of weeks ago. Pleasures did not exhaust him. He said, suddenly and distinctly, “You must manage it, somehow.”

  In the short daylight he and she would walk on the farther slopes, from which you saw the sea. It was January, but they invented warmth outdoors in secluded places. He knew that if they were to meet in his room, he would take her to his bed. He knew that, however many times they walked about the hills and dales, this would ultimately occur.

  It appeared to him that, in his scruples and forebodings, he was assuming the role of apprehensive maiden; while the girl became the embodiment of loving impulse. She was on a dangerous margin where she would do whatever he asked, because he asked it. Meantime, among the groves and saplings and angled trees, he had touched and seen her body.

  He must speak to her as he had not yet spoken. He would talk to her parents. Concealment galled them. Unready for scenes and accusations, he and she might end by precipitating these in order to be open.

  One morning, among the hills, Leith said, “Discovery by Dench would be too bad.”

  “We’d hear his cough beforehand.” She had thought it out.

  “I think he fancies you.”

  She nodded.

  It is hard to surprise women in these matters.

  “Has he bothered you?”

  “No. Just creepy.”

  “Everything underhand. The new power in the world. Like that man Slater.”

  “Who came with Tad.” She said, “Tad is halfway round the world.” Tad had sent a card from Cairo. Helen said, “This raincoat smells like the earth”—because they were lying on his old coat from the war.

  “Yes. And, like the earth, old and dirty. I got it back in a box of ‘effects,’ as they call it, when I was in England in’45. They’d been stored in Lincolnshire, in a barn near Branston where we spent the nights before the battle.” He said, “Getting the box, opening it, I myself as next of kin receiving the pitiful leavings of the deceased. Living the experience that my mother would have otherwise endured. This coat was the first thing, folded on top: like a body. A book, a few letters, socks, handkerchiefs, my good watch, a shaving kit—irrelevant overnight stuff. Through an oversight, I was alive to take charge of these relics, only lacking the letter from the colonel commending my valour. The colonel, who in fact had died alongside me in the action. Things, Helen, the sad silly evidence of things.” He said, “We’re told that possessions are ephemeral, yet my God how they outlast us—the clock on the bedside table, the cough drops, the diary with appointments for that very day.” And the meaning ebbing out of them, visibly.

  “I’d expected to die in that expedition. I suppose I thought of that when I bundled those things into the box and tied it up and wrote my name and number on it and got a receipt. I’ve no memory of that. When the box came back to me, the owner of those oddments was dead, I was my own survivor. It’s only lately that I’m reunited with the young man who lived before. During those postwar weeks in England, I rode a motorcycle, raced it round a track in all weathers—wearing this coat, I suppose. Exorcising immobility—the wound, the prison, the waiting.”

  “The war itself.”

  “Yes. The impotence of the defeat, that September. Battling in the mire, more like 1915 than 1944. More like Agincourt: rain, mud, the freezing cold. The enemy’s proximity, their faces, the shared intimacy with fear and death. Explosions, slaughter. With the wound, I was captured on the last day. I’d been all night in the forest, dying.”

  She was lying in his arm. He could see her adult tears.

  “In a lull, we had tried to get down to the river, but they got wise to us, we came under their fire, there was no going back or forward. They’d got close and were throwing grenades.” There was a splash, and the colonel’s head had been blown away. Himself, spattered with that bloody matter—thinking at first, unsurprised, that it was his. Then came his own wound, blowing off clothes and flesh, ribs to ankle.

  “Near dawn they came through the trees and captured me. The battle was over. There were stretchers, lorries full of their own wounded, other trucks for their dead and ours. Screaming, moaning, delirium, carnage.”

  He asked, “Why do I tell you this?”

  “You’re telling yourself.”

  “They stacked us, the wounded prisoners, into a disused barracks behind the lines. The bunks were in tiers, three tiers or four. Our medical officers were few and exhausted. The German doctors took care of their own people first, thousands of wounded on both sides. Our walking wounded did what they could. Before the battle we’d been issued with little packets of morphine, sulfanilamide; ominous supplies. Our medical men had crawled around among the dead, retrieving this stuff where possible, and we were glad of it. The wounded who’d been heaved into
the upper bunks were hard to reach. They couldn’t get down to relieve themselves. Shambles.”

  “Could you think? What were you thinking?”

  “At first it seemed easiest to go on dying. Then one imagined tetanus, gangrene, amputation. There’s a gap I can’t fill. After some hours, a German doctor came, a surgeon—another one, old with fatigue, who later became young. Told me I’d been lucky. They’d always told me that, and now I see that it’s true.” He said, “I took his name, he was decent, humane. God knows what became of him.”

  “They put you in prison.”

  “A prison hospital. Later, the camp. Then the interminable winter, recovering, shivering, hungering, learning German. Waiting for letters and books. Waiting for the war to end, which it showed no mind to. We got news, when other prisoners were brought in. Some of our lot would go out to the wire to greet the arrivals, cracking bitter jokes at them. Once in a while, there would come some chap one knew. One day, Peter Exley turned up, the damnedest thing. It was then, really, that we got close. One talked. There was time for it, God knows.”

  “And you escaped.”

  “No credit whatever for that. Things were on the move, we were preparing. Bombs fell, and in the pandemonium a few of us got away. Even so, it was slow going, and two weeks before I reached our lines. Where by luck I was taken under an influential wing. They had a job for me, and I was sent to Paris, then to Caen. In Europe, war was ending terribly; in Asia, terribly continuing. We knew nothing of the Bomb. The concentration camps were opened, taking the lid off hell.”

  He held her close in her coat, saying, “I’ve never had generalised feelings about any of it. One is compelled to act collectively, yet revulsion, compassion will be felt privately, reciprocally. Can you understand me, Helen? In England, in that spring of 1945, I saw my people, saw my friends—what was left of them—and rode the motorcycle round the track. The first renewal was coming East. China drives all else to a periphery, for a time.”

  When they got to their feet, he kissed her, and gave his hand as they walked downhill. He said, “All that came out of unpacking the box from Branston.”

  “It came from your earthy coat.”

  “Which has now been exorcised and blessed, and must be cleaned.” The stained coat, once boxed as his shroud.

  She had to go to her brother, and it seemed that they might not exchange another word. However, when they reached his door, he said, “Helen, come in for a moment,” in the most sombre way in the world. She sat on his bed, and he beside her, as they had on the day of the suicide. He was mindful of how she’d seemed to him then, a child; mindful of his impulse to embrace her. He held her hands and said, “I make you old, with telling you grim things. When I should only have said that all my past has been displaced, now, by this love.”

  Her expression—considerate, apprehensive—remained unchanged, so that he was nearly moved to specify: our love, yours and mine. As if there could be some mistake. But she, finding nothing incomprehensible, lifted her hands to his face and actually laughed, saying “Love” in return, before exchanging their grave, preoccupied kiss. She said, “We are being so serious.”

  He said, “As this has happened to us, we should talk of what’s to come. Not just of our difficulties, darling, but of our selves, our happiness, our adventure.” He could not bring himself, then, to speak of her brother’s crisis, but told her, “If you agree, we should first tell Ben.”

  “Who knows already, and is glad.”

  “We must think, too, how best to approach your parents.” Who loomed, in that moment.

  When she got up to go, he said that he would come that evening. They parted as at some long separation. She said again, “We are so solemn.”

  “I must get used to gladness,” he said.

  14

  WHEN THE COLD WEATHER CAME to Hong Kong, after Christmas, it surprised less by severity than by its effect of clearing the air. Looking across the strait, you now saw, as if from a great height, the interior life of the mainland: grouped habitations, laborious paddies, serpentine paths, and the smoke of small necessary fires. There was the detailed foreground; far off, the forms and colours of other, unsuspected hills; and, like a signal, the mountain called Tai Mo Shan.

  Such a scene must hold experiences, if one had the nerve to elicit them. The island itself was less fictitious now, newly populated, as it seemed, by quilted crowds, newly smelling at dusk of charcoal and wood smoke. You were no longer out from Europe or out from anywhere, but drawn inward to a continent. You approached the immense reality, or your own acceptance of it. One January night, passing under the arcades—where, beside fine shops selling chocolate truffles and crystallised fruits, small families had set braziers on the flagstones—Peter Exley realised that there was nowhere he would prefer to be. And that fact itself was happiness. He was aware that his deeper dreams might be considered exorbitant.

  The intense cold lasted little more than a month. With the Chinese New Year, which fell that year on Shrove Tuesday, the days grew longer but less revelatory. Clarity departed like hallucination. And you drew away again, from cold China, cold Russia; away from that interlude of climatic seriousness in which dailiness had seemed a spiritual condition.

  Peter Exley said to Rita Xavier, “Perhaps cold places really are more self-respecting, as one is taught to believe.”

  “One is taught to believe that,” she said, “only in cold places.”

  “Not in my own case. We looked to the cold north for instruction. North was the place to be.” We were lolling down there at the Antipodes, hurt, hot, unresolved.

  Attempts, with Rita Xavier, to deliver something of his soul always miscarried. But he returned to them—because he could not help believing in the sensibility of wounded persons. Or because he could not leave well enough alone.

  From the Western world, the talk was all of war: America and Russia would grapple across the prostrate body of Europe. Meanwhile, China was poised in her own colossal concerns. Peter wrote to Aldred Leith:

  You will have seen that Shamien burned, in January—the consulate, the trading houses. If it is, as said, a reprisal for imperialism at Hong Kong, surely this is anachronism? By year’s end, Hong Kong will be China’s only window on the world. They will turn inwards. The United States will seal them off.

  He said that his war crimes cases were coming to their end, and he would soon set a date for his journey to Japan. He was writing Audrey Fellowes to the same effect. Meantime: “We’ve had bright winter here: l’hiver lucide.”

  One Saturday of returning heat, Peter was walking towards Queen’s Road, in the course of afternoon errands. At the corner, he ran into Rita, about to cross. She was going to the King’s Theatre. After weeks of Margaret Lockwood, there was a new film—hours long, Chinese.

  They stood in the shade under a scaffolding. Everything was in repair now, festooned with straw flaps, framed by bamboo rods. Grey stucco was blotched with white. The air was granulated dust, with plaster smells of some great prosperity astir.

  “Would you mind if I joined you?”

  She said, “It doesn’t begin till three.”

  They stood aside from the crowd, and from all that noisy life they might have liked to join—if they could do so just occasionally and set their terms. Or, Peter thought, if there were someone to draw me in.

  Rita said, “I was going to have something to eat. I’ve had no lunch.” There was a restaurant in the theatre, one flight up.

  “I’m on my way to the tailor.” He pointed out the sign: OLD BOND’S TREAT. She did not smile, but agreed to meet him in the restaurant fifteen minutes later.

  At the entry to a shop that sold materials, shabby stairs led to the tailor’s door. This door, usually open, was today closed and locked. Exley rapped on the frosted glass. A Chinese in American clothes, coming from the floor above, smiled in passing and made a gesture to his head.

  Exley asked, “What’s wrong?”

  The youth, surprised, replied
in Cantonese, “Liu isn’t working today.”

  “Is he there?”

  The tailor lived in the shop with his wife and child. Exley had never seen the woman, although the little girl at times ran out from behind a plywood partition and could often be heard prattling or crying there. He’d been told that the wife was kept in seclusion.

  The man on the stairs said, “Yes. There, but not working.” Another smile, another gesture of seersucker sleeve.

  “I only have to collect a package.”

  The man passed on down the stairs. Peter thought how puzzling they were, even such small encounters with the unfamiliar. Recalling his arrangement with Rita, he was about to leave, when there was the rasp of a bolt slowly drawn and a shadow blurred the glass. When he tried the door again, it opened.

  The tailor’s wife was standing immediately inside. She wore the black clothes of an amah, jacket and pantaloons. On the crown of her head, the braids were coiled and lacquered in a formal structure contrasting with a primitive commotion of expression. Exley had never seen a more afflicted face. He crossed the threshold. The windows were covered with rattan blinds, and the room smelt vilely of opium and uncleanness. Liu, lying sideways on a bench where customers usually sat, gave Exley a blinded, anaesthetised smile.

  Exley said to the woman, “Is he ill?” He couldn’t understand her grief—as if she wept without sound or tears. He said, “Tell me.”

  Behind the partition, in household clutter, a child was lying on an arrangement of clothes and rags. The bed, improvised from remnants of materials, was all plaids and florals and striped shirtings. He knew that this must be Liu’s daughter, but could not recognise the sunken face, or the tiny, diminished body, perfectly still, head turned at an unlikely angle, showing a small gold hoop through the ear. Mouth slackly open, eyes closed. Exley thought, The child is dead.

  Seeing his thought, the woman spoke. At the same moment, Peter saw the child draw breath. He said, “What about a doctor, what about a hospital?” and, squatting, lifted the child a little. The limbs resettled like wayward sticks, and there was an aroused stench of untended illness. He asked, “How many days?”