Continent

by Jim Crace

  More strange are the electricians, clean workers with hard fingers, who have come from the city in neat trucks and taken up noisy residence in Awni’s best rooms. Hear these men sing and argue as they work! They bury flayed mechanical limbs of wire deep into wall plaster. They handle the tendons and sinews, the long red arteries, the blue veins, with the intimacy of surgeons. The children stand close to dive and wrestle for snips of wire and plastic which fall to the ground. How will it be, they ask, when the Minister and the President of the Company arrive to switch on the current? Will the electricity flow like water, first lighting dull lamps and spinning slow fans close to the generator, then running through those thin and shiny filaments to the police station, the school, along the Rest House veranda – mango by mango – until it reaches the hospital to drip and spurt, like a farmer’s furthest tap, amongst the sickbeds? Not like water, explain the electricians. ‘But strong and all at once.’

  The children do not understand. How can electricity be instantaneous, no sooner in the town centre than on its fringes? How can it be so heedlessly rapid when it has been so slow, when it has taken so many years to reach us here at all?

  ‘Which is nearest to your brain, your nose or your arse?’ tease the electricians. Children slap their noses. ‘But which can you twitch first? Let’s race. Boys, be noses; girls, be bums. And when we say Now send a message from your brain, to twitch and shake. Who will win?’ Boys and girls – and old men, too – twitch and shake. The noses cannot beat the bums. ‘So now you understand,’ say the electricians. ‘It takes exactly as long for a message to travel from here to here’ (an electrician’s fingers span the prettiest girl’s face from forehead to nose) ‘as it does from here to here!’ (Now he stoops and stretches, touching her buttocks and head.) ‘Electricity is like that. Like a message from the brain, no sooner sent than received.’ The President of the Company presses a lever and every light on the veranda will shine. The hospital will be bright as soon as the police station. The fan in the schoolhouse will turn no sooner than the wheel of the water pump on Nepruolo land. At home that night, by candlelight, mothers and fathers gravely twitch and shake for their educated children.

  ‘BEWARE OF electricity,’ says the schoolteacher. ‘You will become addicts.’ His comments are directed at Awni, who has been polishing his mangoes and listing the electrical equipment which he has ordered (cheaply and furtively) from the electricians: a modern icebox, table lamps, a liquidizer for expensive drinks. ‘Kittle beetle,’ he says, but the teacher persists. He has lived in the city; he has travelled abroad and trained in Denmark. He is playful in the European manner, joking but not laughing. He alone in the town has lived with science and light. ‘Beware, beware.’

  What must it be like to have sharp, strong light at hand, on the flick of a finger? To have cool fresh air fanning the Dry middays? To have ice in every drink? To be visited, like other towns, by the cinema truck? ‘Addictive,’ repeats the teacher. He recalls for us a day in Denmark. ‘I was reading in the conservatory,’ he says. ‘I was alone in the house. Jens was teaching. Lotte was teaching. Their children, Christoffer and Kirsten, were at school. I was being economical at the request of the Minister of Power, who complained daily in the newspapers and on the television that Danes had become reckless with electricity. All that comforted me was fire, a radio and a reading lamp.’ He shows how the appliances were ranged around him, how leads led to plugs, how plugs fitted tightly into sockets on the Jorgensen walls. He demonstrates with a saucer how the energy disc on the electric meter was spinning as gently as a seed mast, its calibrations individually distinct. The saucer turns precariously on the teacher’s finger.

  ‘There was nothing I could do,’ he says, ‘to stop that disc from spinning; eating power, eating money.’ If he disconnected the lamp and fire and radio still the flat metal monitor crept anticlockwise, notching up amperes on the digital display. Elsewhere in the Jorgensen home gadgets slumbered, drip-fed by electricity: the fridge, the fish tank, the doorbell, the telephone-answering machine, the yoghurt-maker, the deep-freeze in the garage, the kitchen clock, the water-heater. (With the naming of each item we beg for explanations.) ‘But if I could not stop it,’ he says, ‘then I could make it go fast. One flick at the side of the electric fire with my toe. More heat! And the energy disc begins to trot. What fun we would have when the children came home. Christoffer, Kirsten and I had devised an experiment.’

  At last the twins returned from school. Christoffer was apprehensive. (What if his parents arrived mid-escapade?) Kirsten was overexcited and impatient. She wished to begin immediately, haphazardly. ‘But I insisted on scientific strategy and order,’ says the schoolmaster. ‘We started in our own rooms and worked outwards and downwards to the spinning disc in the conservatory. Everything electric, from the lights to typewriters, we set in motion.’ He traces a quickening circle in the air with a chalky finger. He grins at the memory. The energy disc was gaining speed. Bedside lamps, electric blankets, convector heaters, a tape-recorder, a train set, a sewing machine. The downstairs rooms were the most prized. Kirsten was the first to lay claim to the clamorous appliances in the toilet and the laundry room. The washing-machine embarked upon its longest, most warlike cycle. The tumble-dryer barrelled a tornado of hot air. The water-heater catered silently for pipes. Towel-rails and steam-irons shared overloaded sockets with sun-lamps and electric toothbrushes. Kirsten was too small to reach the toiletry cabinet. The schoolteacher was summoned. He opened it and handed down her father’s shaver and her mother’s hair-dryer. They dangle-danced from their high socket on springing cords, bouncing, blowing and chewing at the bathroom rug.

  Christoffer was busy in the Jorgensen living room. ‘Table lamp, standard lamp, fire, television,’ he yelled, patiently turning silence into buzz and buzz into roar. ‘Stereo, video, radio.’ And then, to the shudder of a rudimentary, over-amplified chord, ‘Guitar!’

  Now they hurried to reach the kitchen: cooker, toaster, mixer, grinder, blender, carver, polisher, sweeper, dishwasher, kettle. Another radio, another fire, another small television set. Fountain. Fairy lights. At last, they were done. Together, they dispatched the garden mower down the lawn. At the extent of its lead, it tugged and growled at the free, long grass beyond its reach, like a tethered, liverish goat. The house and garden were a powered cauldron of heat and light and sound.

  How did the spinning disc survive this onslaught? The teacher lowers his voice and leans forward to tell. ‘It had disappeared,’ he says. ‘It was moving so fast that we could no longer see it. I climbed on a chair and tried to view it from above. But no, nothing. Only the faint smell of scorched metal and a cloudy smoking of the glass.’ This is the point – with the teacher high on the chair, the twins holding their ears and laughing, the Jorgensen home clamouring like a nightmare – where Jens and Lotte returned. ‘We screamed our explanations. We retraced our routes and unplugged. We picked the fibres from the shaver; we unpicked the keys of typewriters; we replaced the scorched towelling on the ironing board; we rewired the lawn-mower; we patched up the burns on Lotte’s hand (she had leaned on the toaster); we apologized to neighbours; we blushed. But, now, here is a mystery. Once the house had cooled and quietened, still the energy disc was missing. The Jorgensens said it must have disintegrated at speed, like a meteorite, and its flaming pieces had fallen into the workings of the meter. Certainly the digits on the amperage counter never budged again. But I can’t accept so prosaic an explanation.’

  We look to the teacher for his explanation. But he is being playful. He has none. He is teasing us, that is all. ‘Soon,’ he says, ‘thanks to Awni’s obsequious petitions, this town, with its oil lamps, its hand pumps, its long nights, its stillness, will be a powered cauldron of heat and light and sound. It will spin with electricity. And it will disappear.’

  AWNI HAS closed the solemn inner room of the Rest House restaurant to all but electricians. He will give no explanation. Guests, travellers and those townspeople with time and m
oney now eat and drink at crowded tables on the veranda. It is marvellously successful: stranger jostles with stranger; titbits are exchanged; trays of food are passed from hand to hand to inaccessible tables; whispers are inaudible, everybody shouts.

  ‘Be patient,’ Awni tells his customers. ‘Soon these inconveniences will be forgotten and my rooms reopened …’ But those on the veranda are not listening. A bat-moth is flapping wildly amongst the tables and customers are trying to read its signs. It pauses for an instant of rest on a plate of pomatoes and is caught. An upturned glass jug – hastily emptied of water over veranda floor and customer shoes – is lowered over the moth’s arched black wings. The eaters and drinkers gather round and wait. For a minute or so, the moth strikes the jug with its wings, and quivers – but then it quietens, spreads itself across the fruit, and plays dead. Now the customers are as equally still and silent. All eyes trace a line along the bat-moth’s body and down its red-tipped tail spike. The spike is pointing at the policeman’s wife. The moth is telling her fortune. She counts the grey smudges along the moth’s still back: seven children! She measures its wing-latch: long life! She peers closely and nervously at the four black wings: the love wing, the money wing, the pleasure wing are perfect. But one hind wing is ragged at the edge, an injury. ‘Bad health,’ says the policeman’s wife. She lifts the glass jug and the bat-moth flaps and spirals once again amongst the tables.

  ‘Soon these inconveniences will be forgotten,’ repeats Awni, striking at the moth with his hand. But still his customers are not listening. Now the policeman’s wife is standing with her back against the shuttered window of the restaurant (her face lit like an actress by the bending flames of candle and lamps) and is singing.

  ‘The night is warm,

  The night is long;

  We are alone, alone, alone.’

  There are tears in the electricians’ eyes as they stand at their table on the veranda and raise their glasses to the singer. These are the times that their grandfathers spoke of: music, food and good humour. ‘Soon,’ says Awni, ‘there will be improvements.’

  IN DAYLIGHT, the veranda becomes a workplace. The electricians rest their reels of wire against chairs and spread their drills and screws and fittings on tables. They are working on the electrification of the inner room and on its preparation for the opening ceremony. Warden Awni has tacked a notice (hand-decorated and lettered by a calligrapher in the city) on the veranda wall: ‘The Warden of this Rest House, in pursuance of his Honoured Duties towards Residents and Travellers, announces that, to mark the Advent of Electrical Power, Modernizations are in process with all the Urgency required to secure their completion in time for the Visit to these Premises of our Friend and Benefactor, the Minister, and Representatives …’

  Who can read any further without first resting, drawing breath and sneaking forward to explore within? None of the townspeople, certainly. Curiosity impels them along the veranda to the open door, through which electricians are passing with the fussing preoccupation of weevils in cake. There, just as Awni has promised, is the box of glass mangoes, dull and disappointing. A wooden crate, the size of four coffins, contains what the children have identified as a small white truck. It is the new icebox. Cartons of cola and beer and fruit drinks await refrigeration. Table lamps with New York skylines as a friezed motif are packed in shredded bark. A liquidizer gleams beside its newly fitted socket. And against the far wall is a square, flat box, as wide as a demon’s cartwheel. ‘This is my centrepiece,’ says Awni, but will say no more. ‘It is the world’s largest petition,’ suggests the teacher. ‘Awni is respectfully requesting the provision of a wetter climate. Next time it rains Awni will take the credit.’ But the children know better. They have climbed on tables and peered into the open top of the box. Inside are a set of aeroplane propellers, cut from the heaviest, the most polished and tiger-grained tarbony, each blade the height of a man.

  There are no secrets in this town (‘At least, none that we know of ’). So when Awni banishes all the children from the veranda and herds them at the rim of the Rest House land with the youngest and cruellest of the electricians to stand guard, we all leave our homes and our fields to join the crowd and call out, ‘What’s the fuss? What are we missing?’ ‘Keep back,’ says Awni. ‘You’ll find out in good time.’ ‘Find out what? Won’t you tell?’

  Awni closes the door from the veranda to the restaurant. All we can hear now is the hammering and chipping and nailing of electricians at work. He stands with his back to the door facing out over the veranda towards the crowd. The youngest and the cruellest electrician can control children with stern words but he cannot hold the crowd. It edges forward until it lines the veranda steps.

  ‘What’s the fuss, Awni?’

  ‘There is no fuss. You’re making the fuss. Go home!’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing … improvements …’

  ‘What improvements? Why can’t the children see? What are they making for you in there? An electric woman?’

  Even Awni laughs at this.

  ‘Listen,’ he says, coming close to us. ‘Be patient. You see these?’ He points to the petitions and lofty announcements which decorate the wall. ‘Now this town is on the map. We have electricity. Soon the road will be made up. Then we will have an airstrip, a cinema, a radio transmitter, a factory, our own abattoir. But first we have electricity … so let us be ambitious, let us have the best electricity in the world. Let the Minister come here and see how we excel with electricity. Then he will nod and say to himself, “Ah, that town has vision. Send engineers, send aeronauts, send projectionists, send radio operators, send industrialists, send slaughtermen. Send money. Turn that town into a city!”’

  ‘But what are you hiding, Warden Awni?’

  ‘I will show you,’ he says. We crowd behind him as he throws back the door to the inner room of the restaurant. Inside, the electricians are standing on chairs and tables, their arms lifting and pushing towards the ceiling.

  ‘Let us see. What is it? What is it?’

  A thin girl crawls past Awni into the room and walks into the centre of the circle of electricians. She looks up and then returns to the crowd at the door.

  ‘They’re fixing the propeller to the ceiling,’ she says. ‘They’re making an aeroplane.’

  Awni stands aside for us all to enter and admire. ‘It is my gift to this town,’ he says, ‘to mark the visit of the Minister and the installation of electrical power. It is the largest, the finest fan in the land.’

  The last screw of the fitting which attaches Awni’s fan to the ceiling is tightened. An electrician pushes against one of the huge polished blades. It turns resentfully, unpowered, its tip nearly reaching the restaurant walls. Its shadow, cast by the light from the veranda windows, is a huge black moth. ‘Solid wood, solid metal,’ says Awni boastfully. ‘A monumental fan.’

  THE FIRST to arrive is the Minister’s Secretary. His black Peugeot has been dusted grey by the journey over bad, dry roads. He has seen maned deer, quibbling flocks of ground-thrush, a mesmerized bandicoot caught mid-carriageway by the engine roar. He sees gnawed gourds and damaged saplings – the work of Baird tapirs and their comic snouts. All good pot animals, and sitting targets, too. The thought of land here becomes more attractive. The comfortable family lodge with a small gourd farm transforms into a hotel for hunters, weekend marksmen keen on game but untempted by treks and danger and patience. Is there profit here, good business? When he first sees the Rest House he becomes more certain. This is no competition for his hotel: it is a timid, wind-swept little coop in wood and plaster, badly situated and poorly equipped. What idiot arranged for the Minister to switch on the current from there? Tin-pot town. Tin-pot people.

  The Minister’s Secretary waits in his car a field’s distance from the Rest House. Soon the army jeeps will arrive with the soldiers and ceremonial equipment.

  The Secretary is free to scheme. Later that day he will investigate Nepruolo land and
select a good site, close to the road and the police station, but wind and neighbour free. Electricity has come; the gourds will fatten. Nepruolo will be kept to his promise. Landowner and Secretary, as ever, will see eye-to-eye – particularly as they now share interests in the same town. A newly surfaced road – now, that would benefit both. Remove those potholes. Lay that dust with tarmac. Weekending huntsmen, purses full and game bags empty, speed to the country: they pass brimming convoys of Nepruolo trucks delivering plump-as-dove candy gourds to city wholesalers. The Secretary can see it all. He will speak dreams to his colleagues, the secretaries of appropriate ministries.

  Once the jeeps and the black car draw up outside the Rest House the crowd begins to gather. They will wait all day for the Minister to arrive. They babble and laugh and miss nothing. The Minister’s Secretary is perplexed. He turns to the commander of the six soldiers for explanations. ‘What are they doing?’ he asks.

  ‘They’re shaking their backsides and snitching their noses.’

  And who is this?’ Awni has come out onto his veranda and begun an oration.

  ‘Honoured Minister and friend,’ he says. ‘We welcome you …’

  ‘Not yet. Save your prostrations. I am not the Minister. I am his Secretary.’

  Awni beams and clasps the visitor by the elbow. ‘Then we have corresponded,’ he says, and points to his gallery of documents. ‘I am Warden Awni. Here is my petition for electricity, you remember? And here, today, is the outcome.’ He raises his arms in self-congratulation and swings the newly hung glass lanterns in yellow, green and orange. ‘But I cannot claim all the credit. The Minister, too, deserves our thanks …’

  The Minister’s Secretary begins to wonder whether he is the victim of some subtle irony. ‘These people?’ He indicates those few in the crowd who are still racing bums and noses. ‘What is the point which they are making? Who are they?’