Continent

by Jim Crace

  ‘Well, his father and friends had a good laugh. “The city has gone to your head,” they told him. “Did you get knocked down by a lorry? Or is the city drink too strong for you?” But the young man was insistent. What did they know about the big, wide world? He’d show them up for what they were! Ignorant bumpkins. He’d bring the skull to the village. Then they would eat their words. “Bring it, then,” an uncle told him. “But don’t forget the way you have insulted us. Don’t come back without your talking skull or you will bring shame on yourself and your family.”

  ‘So he returned to the city. He went to the spot where he had found the skull and, yes, it was still there, exactly as he had left it. “What brought you here?” he asked. Silence. Silence. “What brought you here? What brought you here?” Still the skull was silent.

  ‘Our clever young friend returned each day and tried to strike up conversation. No luck. What could he do? How could he return home without his talking skull? How could he remain in the city without the support of his family? All he could do was persist with the skull. He went without food and work and shelter. Nobody helped him. Why should they? He was a stranger, a crazy stranger who talked to bones. “What brought you here? What brought you here?” He got hungrier. Dirtier. Thinner. Weaker. More desperate. And then, of course, he died, dropping to the ground next to the old human skull. Now, at last, it opened its yellow jaws and asked, “What brought you here?” What do you suppose the young man’s corpse replied?’

  ‘Chatter,’ says my father.

  ‘“Talking brought me here”,’ I recite dutifully.

  My father’s friend has embarrassed me to hide his own embarrassment. His is more than just a social visit. He has come on business. His passions are in tumult. On the one hand, he is a man shamed by a wife so sick of pregnancy that she refuses to share his bed. On the other, he is a vaunting lover with designs on a local widow. How to succeed with this woman, half his age? ‘Let me take something with me, old friend,’ he says, ‘to win her heart.’ My father makes a great show of thought and then he advises a cunning double application of freemartin milk. What else?

  ‘Passion between men and women is a complicated matter,’ he explains. ‘Who can unravel such a tangle? My milk can help – but who can say why or how? You’ll make your head ache looking for answers. Just trust in the experience of a thousand others. Take one jar for your widow. Add it secretly to her fresh milk. She will begin to think of love. But her love will be indiscriminate. My milk cannot work miracles. I cannot make her prefer you to all others. But if you are constantly there, well then, when she grows tender you will have the advantage. The second jar is for your wife. Maybe she will reconsider.’

  My father’s friend takes banknotes from his saddlebag and puts them under the almost empty bottle. ‘Make sure you give me only the freshest and richest milk,’ he says.

  It is almost midnight and these two old friends drag an unwilling freemartin out of her sleep and into the light of the stables. She is ugly and malformed and resentful. My father stoops and tugs at her shrunken udders. He works hard in his own shadow, his back blocking his friend’s view. Eventually he turns to show a bowl half full of some opaque liquid, a little urine, perhaps, mixed with thick bovine secretions. The cow’s udders are rough and sore. My father applies a poultice of mullein and then stands to display what he has managed to coax from the cow’s vestigial teats. ‘Milk,’ he says. ‘Good and fresh!’

  ‘Freemartins don’t produce milk,’ I say. ‘They can’t and they don’t.’

  Both men chuckle. ‘Talking skull,’ says my father.

  TODAY a helicopter has been circling the village. It lifts a dust devil of dry earth and grass in its path. Foxes, owls and night voles which should be sleeping in holes and hollows flee from the helicopter’s storm of agitated air. The pilot is searching for a level landing spot. The machine settles at last on the edge of the village. Its engine is cut and all that can be heard for a moment is the complaint of a calf separated from the herd. All the villagers have hurried to touch the machine. It is the first aircraft to have landed here.

  A woman climbs from the helicopter. She has an old tanned face and young blonde hair. Who speaks German or English or French, she wants to know.

  ‘English,’ I say. ‘Some French. I am at your service, of course. Je ne demande pas mieux. Cela va sans dire.’

  ‘Excellent. Tell me, do you know the man who has the herd of freemartin cows?’

  ‘He is my father.’

  Now she is delighted. She holds out a broad hand. ‘My name is Anna,’ she says. ‘And yours?’

  ‘Lowdo.’ (‘Lowdo, Lowdo,’ repeat my neighbours, recognizing a word.) She is a Swedish film-maker, she says. She is making a documentary. Would it be possible to film in the village, to talk to my father, to see the freemartin herd? I turn and ask my neighbours. Yes, yes, they say. Let her film in the village. Our house is her house. Now she introduces the pilot, her cameraman and her sound recordist. They grin and wave as I translate their names and their occupations.

  ‘Who’d like a ride in the helicopter?’ the pilot asks. ‘You could see your village from above.’ Nobody volunteers.

  I lead Anna and her crew along the track to our compound. She is animated and delighted with everything she sees. She makes notes. She asks the names of flowers and small children. I explain the significance of the cattle necklaces and help her with the pronunciation of some common words. She is, she says, interested in living folklore. She has filmed in thirty countries but still she hasn’t lost her sense of wonder. ‘As soon as I heard just half a whisper of this freemartin business,’ she says, ‘I just dropped everything and flew right out. It’s all so magical, so naive.’ But, no, she isn’t criticizing. Naivety she admires. It is a quality missing in Sweden. Have I ever visited Stockholm? No? Then it must be arranged. She will talk about it to a man she knows at the embassy. But first she asks for all my help with her film. Will I do that for her? Will I persuade my father to agree to the filming?

  My father is unimpressed (or so he claims) by the fuss and commotion. It is all inconvenient. Already, he complains, customers have been scared away. He has lost money; he has lost time; his milk does not last for ever; the clatter of the helicopter has upset his herd.

  ‘Tell him that this film is very important to us,’ instructs Anna.

  ‘Ask her how important,’ says my father.

  Anna offers fifty American dollars but they are worthless away from the city and the banks. My father points at the bags and boxes of the film crew. Each one is opened. He inspects cameras and lenses and film cans. Clothes and camping gear are unpacked and displayed. He touches a hurricane lamp, a camping stove, a torch, an inflatable mattress and the aluminium tent-poles. These are his fee. Anna nods: ‘Tell your father that these are our gifts to him when we leave. These are his only when all the film is in the can.’

  I work hard for Anna and her film. My father is not easily managed. He does not understand the requirements of the cameraman. He does not have the patience for the repetitions of filming. But he has set his heart on the tent-poles and is grumpily cooperative. He is filmed selling milk to a shy bridegroom. He is filmed feeding the herd. I translate Anna’s questions to him and paraphrase his rough answers for the film’s subtitles. I arrange for the film crew to visit a woman who says she was barren before she took my father’s milk. Now she is pregnant and has a two-year-old son. I coax the cattle to remain still while the camera examines their organs and udders.

  In the evening Anna stands me with my back to the herd and my face to the camera and asks me to talk about my childhood. I recount the loneliness of life without mother, brothers or sisters. I describe long days spent watching the herd. And short, happy days as a schoolboy at the college in paradise valley.

  ‘Talk of the freemartins,’ says Anna. ‘Are they sacred to the people here? What is the magic of their milk? Tell it in your own words. Tell us what you learned as a child.’

 
‘They’re not sacred,’ I say. ‘They upset the herds, that’s all. They’re eccentric. They’re licentious. They’re lunatic cows. People fear them. And where there is fear there is also superstition. It all began generations ago. Nobody can say how and why.’

  ‘Can you suggest how and why?’

  ‘People like to be reassured,’ I say. ‘They like to believe that solutions to problems can be bought by the jar.’

  ‘But when your father dies, you will follow the tradition of your family and take over the herd?’

  I squint into the sun and shake my head. I stand, dear friends in the city, at the centre of my inheritance. Now, at last, you see it. Intangible. Incredible. Uncashable. Each year my father hands me bundles of banknotes from the safe and packs me off to the city and the university. He does not grasp the meaning of this money. All he understands is the ritual of transaction. All that he expects in return is that, when he is old, I will come back to his hollow of land and pummel these barren teats for local rewards. His is wealth at the expense of science. His are riches that exile freedom. What must I do, fellow students? Decay here by the light of a thousand oil lamps? Or cast off my inheritance, remain with you and your fathers, put my faith in science and modernity?

  ‘I will not accept the burden,’ I say to the camera and the people of Sweden. ‘My father is the last in line.’

  YOUR FATHERS have been solicitous. Still I am invited to their tables at nightclubs and to their air-conditioned lounges at home. They serve freshly ground coffee from Colombia and delicate liqueurs from far-flung airport shops. Since the television transmission in Sweden I have become a bar-room celebrity. My photograph has appeared in local papers. One government minister condemns my people for their barbarous superstition. Another applauds them for their sense of tradition. A zoologist on the radio argues that the isolation of freemartins makes good sense as their presence unnerves the docility of cows. Another claims that they should be prized above all others as they are good beef cattle, putting on meat with eunuch ease. A scientific commission should be formed, he says, to investigate ways of breeding freemartins. Rival editorials in the newpapers call either for Government Help to Protect National Traditions or for A Battle Against Quackery. It is no longer possible for me, fellow students, to hide my inheritance from you. I abandon my reticence. Instead, I exaggerate my lofty manner and the precision of my dress. I have my hands manicured, and powder my forehead. I grow a moustache in the European fashion. I suppress my telltale ps and bs. Any enquiries about the herd I refer to my father. It is his business, not mine. My business is the mastery of Biology.

  It is your father, Feni, who suggests the rationalization of my inheritance. ‘Don’t sniff at money, Lowdo,’ he tells me, ‘especially your own. Remain intimate with your wealth. You want to be a city boy with an office, a bank account, and a Peugeot. You admire scientific curiosity, business initiative, modern industriousness. But all our business fortunes are based as much as yours on superstition. What is superstition but misdirected reverence? Your clients overvalue bogus milk. Ours overvalue transistors, motor cars, fashionable clothes, travel. This is the key to business. Unearth what is overvalued, amass it and sell at inflated prices. Your forefathers were the first of the modern businessmen. They grasped this basic principle of trade. You should be boastful, not shamefaced. What will you do? Renounce your inheritance and its possibilities and live in modesty here? How will you survive? Where will you work? Who needs biologists in a city of trade?’ He points at my polished shoes, my expensive jacket, my jewellery, the weightless antique coffee cups on the glass-top table, at you, Feni, sitting quietly in your best silk dress in the courtyard with a Parisian magazine. ‘What will become of this?’

  And so he advises me to modernize, to deputize, to expand. ‘When your father dies,’ he says, ‘keep the herd, but stay here in the city, a free man, at ease, comfortable, amongst your own kind, and run those freemartins, as a business.’

  ‘But the milk is no good!’

  Your father laughs. ‘This coffee is no good,’ he says. ‘It makes my heart race. It tastes bitter. Why do I drink it? Habit and superstition. I believe it sobers me when I have been drinking. I believe it sharpens me up when I am tired. I believe that an offer of coffee to friends equals the hospitality of a thousand welcomes. You and science would tell me that coffee doesn’t sober, doesn’t relax, doesn’t revive, doesn’t welcome, that it shortens my life, costs a fortune, disrupts the economy of Brazil, and if left too long in the coffee pot will corrode the silver. But try to stop me drinking it! I don’t care for the dictatorship of science. Nor do your neighbours. Freedom of choice. Deceive yourself at will, that’s the motto of the nation. Harness superstition. Turn it to your advantage. Milk it dry!’

  NOWADAYS I do not dream of the wide valley and the ragged heads of sunflowers but of a white, cool office with banks of telephones and the clatter of tills and typists. I see myself with friends in an anteroom. I rehearse long conversations with the fellow students of my own sons and daughters at the university. I am unhurried with them and gently inquisitive. They love so much to sit and talk with me about their studies or their trips to Europe.

  I imagine, too, my homelands far off in the scrub. There, a salaried farm-manager minds my herd and sells measured jars of freemartin milk at fixed prices (cash only) to newly-weds and the childless. I see a lorry with my name on its side collecting supplies of milk each month and bringing it to my shop in the city. Freemartin milk and fresh mullein are now available to all. My best customers here are the tourists who, if they are too timid or cynical to invest in a sachet of dried milk, are eager to spend dollars and francs and marks on coloured postcards of the herd and ‘lucky’ scraps of freemartin hide. I have written and had printed an illustrated booklet on our family and its traditions. It sells well. My dream flowers and expands. My sons and daughters consider their inheritances with placid equanimity.

  But in more sober moments I do not dream. I mark time. Each year I visit my father during the Harvest Vacation and contemplate our cattle, infertile and refractory, as they butt and low amongst the tough grasses and the stunted thorns. In the village now they call me Talking Skull. My neighbours are always keen to share my father’s jokes. They mean no harm. My father, rather than weakening and ageing, seems to grow stronger and more vigorous. Has he grown a little taller, even? He has no grey hairs. His back is square and straight. His teeth and eyesight have not deteriorated. I fancy that he fears his heirs and has determined to live for ever.

  TWO

  The World with One Eye Shut

  THE SOLDIERS say that I am fortunate. I have the best cell in the block. Its window (if I stand on my bunk with my head pressed close to the outer wall and one eye shut) allows a view of the outside world, the medley, careless, trading town from which they have removed me. My open eye can follow an angle which cuts across the barracks yard and squeezes between the back of the regimental offices and the pinkstone building which faces on to the town. Beyond is my view, a thin, upright oblong topped by the sky with, once in a while, the ornament of a plane or helicopter or hawk. Diluted in the distance are the hilltop houses where the bigwigs and the lordlings live, the hotels of the bankside district, the trees of Deliverance Park, the river where all of this began.

  In the foreground is the wire gate of the barracks. I can see the bustle of the women there, the placards, the photographs of missing sons and husbands, the soldiers and the militia squeezing through on foot and motorbikes to visit bars and brothels in the town, the uniforms, the ministerial and military cars, the plain-clothes men.

  My sister ’Freti is at the wire gate each evening. I can recognize the exaggerated colours of her wardrobe and the way she stands with her arms crossed over her chest and her chin resting on the back of a hand. I have called to her, ‘’Freti, I’m here.’ But that was a waste. How can she hear me beyond the glass at that distance with all the din of the women at the gate, their singing, their cries, and the traff
ic on Government Drive? I tell myself she’s there for me, that she has spotted my thin face and thinner hair framed in this window, that she wears my name on a badge on her chest, that she is one of the women who have embraced the barracks with their jostling demands for family news. But ’Freti stands apart, hanging her face at the edge of the crowd. She’s got wall eyes. They float. They pop and bubble. And her mouth hangs loose. She grins. I have caught her, sometimes, snoozing in our yard at home, mouth and eyes shut. Then she is beautiful. But awake, slack faced and vacant, she looks and is a simpleton. She’s not the sort to join parades or picket lines. She’s at the gate because she’s set her heart upon a soldier.

  WHAT KIND OF man is he, this Corporal Beyat? ‘I know you,’ he said, the night they brought me in. ‘You’ve got that witless sister.’ I knew his face, too, from that splashing circle of young and skittish conscripts who swam at the river on warm evenings, diving from the cycle bridge or bragging with handstands and cartwheels on the grass. I remember ’Freti standing in the shallows, with her shoes clasped to her chest. She watched the conscripts as they played noisily and roughly in the river. And then, this Beyat had kicked a flirting loop of water over her. It was there, knee deep, with dripping shoes, that her devotion to him began. My mother always told me, ‘Keep an eye on ’Freti. She’ll do herself some harm one day.’ And so I left my colleagues from the legal offices (we had been sitting, carping, on the bank) and beckoned to my sister to leave the water.