Continent

by Jim Crace

  ‘Townspeople, Secretary. They have come to admire the electricity and the Minister.’

  ‘Yes, but what is this shaking?’

  ‘Ah,’ says Awni, happy to provide the simple explanation. ‘They are sending messages from their brains. No sooner sent than received. Like electrical power!’

  Now the Secretary is convinced that his hotel will have no competition. The Warden of the Rest House is as mad as a mongoose. Perhaps it would be politic – just for the day – to lock him out of sight. The Minister is a man not keen on aberrations. But the Warden has hurried off, busy with preparations and self-esteem. The Minister’s Secretary is left to deploy his soldiers (‘Subdue those shakers. Let no one pass’) and then spy out his land. Soon the ceremonial will be over and business can begin.

  THE MINISTER has arrived in a motorcade of limousines, windscreen-wipers rinsing the dust. This town has never known so eminent, so punctilious an assembly. But why so quiet? All that the townspeople can hear – they are roped off and distant – is the commotion of Awni’s servilities. He introduces his guests: he indicates his fan, his table lamps, his icebox, the coloured veranda lights, bright with polish. He applauds his foresight and planning: there is the liquidizer already filled with unmixed cocktail, its sweet gourd, mint-water, cheap Korean whisky, salt and sayoot powder, impatient for a powered whisk.

  But except for Awni the inner room is stiffly silent. The guests are tightly packed. They cannot circulate and chatter. They do not like to jostle and shout to friends with the Minister so near. What can electricians say, in whispers, when pressed so close and warmly to the president of their company? How can the policeman’s wife amuse the unsmiling pressmen and photographers when she cannot stretch her arms and sing? How intimately, how cunningly, should landowner Nepruolo address the Minister’s Secretary now that they are wedged shoulder to shoulder: as a neighbour, colleague, friend, partner, collaborator? As a stranger? Schoolteacher, policeman, barrack captain, town doctor, bullock-gelder, merchant’s wife – all are close tongued.

  ‘Let us get on,’ the Minister commands an aide. The Minister is not impressed by fans and liquidizers. What he loves most is the privacy of his limousine.

  It is now night. The townspeople stand, roped off in moonlight. The last wild flames are snuffed on candles and oil lamps in the Rest House. The Minister makes a brief speech. He has had the personal satisfaction, he says, of fighting and winning the political battles for the electrification of forgotten communities in the Flat Centre. It is a project close to his heart. How he wishes that government business was less exacting – then he could act with lizard-impulse and accept Warden Awni’s generous offer of a few days’ rest amongst the fine people of the town. (Here the Minister discharges a smile for the policeman’s wife.) But, no, he must settle for the lesser pleasure of service and duty. He must return shortly to the city. But first … ‘Let me leave you with a fond memory of your Minister.’ He grasps the ceremonial power-switch and pulls.

  It is startling how light can shorten distance. The Rest House – now a grid of hard white with a diadem of coloured lamps – has leapt towards the townspeople. Every face at the window of the inner room is distinct. Every word is clear. Even the far fields have closed in, defined by the stipples of illumination at the school, the hospital, the police station, and on Nepruolo land. The town has shrunk. Only the sky and dawn seem more distant.

  Awni’s guests are a little startled, too, though not by electricity. Most of them have stood before in false light on visits to the city. No, they are startled by Awni’s liquidizer, which slices into action almost before the lights have penetrated to the corners of the room and thrown shadows over blinking faces. They all turn to stare at the liquidizer, labouring them a cocktail, and there is laughter. Applause, too.

  It is a magic charm. Tongues are loosened. Electricians shake their President’s hand. Pressmen smile at tradesmen. The merchant’s wife – ‘not for the first time’, it is whispered – offers her cheek to the bullock-gelder. The Minister discharges more smiles for the policeman’s wife. Nepruolo and the Minister’s Secretary embrace. It is a celebration.

  ‘Now we are remembered!’ calls Awni through the open window.

  Bald men, and women with naked arms, are the first to notice that the wind is rising. The room shivers. Cigarette smoke speeds back at the smoker. Cocktail glasses rattle. ‘There will be rain’ or ‘The moon is belching’ or ‘Expect a birth in town tonight’, comment the superstitious. The rest button their jackets and send Awni to close the shutters.

  BUT THE breeze does not abate. Now it buffets the inner walls and hammers a passage between the guests. The squall is growing from within.

  ‘My fan!’ says Awni. ‘I had forgotten.’

  How could he forget his centrepiece, his gift to the town? It has responded slowly to power – its wooden arms too broad and heavy to rotate freely. It has spun like a seed mast, gradually picking up speed, gradually herding and pocketing the air in the Rest House. Now it is in command.

  ‘That is a large fan,’ says Nepruolo. ‘It’s as wide as the room …’ All conversation has stopped and Awni’s fan is the centre of attention.

  ‘Minister,’ demands Awni. ‘Have you ever seen such a fan before, in all your travels, in all the fine buildings you have visited … ?’

  ‘Never,’ says the Minister, thinking of the discreet, silent air-conditioning in his own office, home and car. ‘I believe this fan to be unique.’

  ‘I dedicate this unique fan to the Minister,’ declaims Awni, ‘in thanks for the provision of electrical power …’

  The guests – their faces chilled and rosy from staring windward – feel obliged to applaud both Minister and fan.

  Still the giant blades are gaining speed. They shovel air from the heights of the room and pitch it at the heads of honoured guests.

  ‘See, see!’ cries Awni, blocking all escape through the veranda door. ‘Now everyone is cool. Feel how cool we are!’

  The fan’s shadow, cast darkly across the ceiling by electric light, beats and flaps, reaches and dips, like a flail-dancer, spinning faster and giddier. The fan has outstripped electricity: it is self-propelled, driven by its own turbulence. Clothes tug tightly on bodies, eyes are lashed with tears, plates and glasses tumble from shelves and shatter, as squall gusts into gale and gale into cyclone. Who there does not fear the electrical storm?

  ‘One place is safe,’ says the Minister, putting his arm around the policeman’s wife with the intimacy of an uncle. ‘At the hub.’ They labour against the blast and stand as close as doves in the narrow column of stillness directly beneath the fan.

  ‘It is simple physics,’ explains the Minister, relishing the plump songstress in his arms. ‘Locate the eye of the storm and escape all turbulence. Here, we are quite safe.’

  Their fellow guests recede further from them, flattened and crouching against the Rest House walls. Those who dare watch the ceiling, but they can see no fan. It is moving so fast that it has disappeared. They cup their eyes against the wind and look again. But no, nothing. Only the faint smell of scorched wires, and a cloudy smoking of the air.

  The first indication that the storm has peaked is a crack in the ceiling. The second is a shower of crumbled plaster: half settles lightly on the Minister and his ward, half is pulled into the windy vortex and turned into stinging grapeshot. The third is a sharp detonation. The ceiling can no longer withstand the weight and pressure. It releases Warden Awni’s fan. A blade hits the Rest House wall and splinters into a thousand needles of best tarbony. The cyclone is armed.

  ‘Switch off the current,’ commands an electrician. (He and his comrades are squashed safely behind the restaurant counter.) But too late. The jagged vanguard of needles reaches the guests. Splinters of tarbony slice flesh and chip wall-plaster; missiles of wood lacerate the New York skylines of table lamps and shatter bulbs; a salvo strikes the icebox; a single, knotted bolt of timber finishes the cocktail, showering electri
cians in mint-water, whisky and liquidizer. What remains of the fan kicks and cracks against the ceiling and then, snapping its wiring, falls. The Minister and the policeman’s wife – those two doves at the eye of the storm – receive the great weight of the wreckage. One by one, the mangoes on the veranda smoke, burn and fail. Now the only light is the occasional flash of a pressman’s camera.

  THAT MOONLIT veranda … what travellers gather there, now that the Rest House has closed and we have the Huntsman Hotel with its garden bar, its pool, its patio restaurant, its cane settees and glass-topped tables? Bats, lizards, goats, ghosts. The children dare not venture too close; their parents, nervous of cracking timber and sagging walls, warn against the truculent spirits of electricity. Awni – turned shopkeeper – petitions for compensation, restitution, revenge.

  The schoolteacher is more forgiving. He has time on his hands and his own stool at the Huntsman bar.

  ‘It is a simple matter,’ he says, lifting the patch to display the contour of scars across his eye. ‘The fan was too large and wilful. It ran too fast.’ A saucer turns precariously on the teacher’s finger. ‘That little Rest House could not take the pressure. The fan disintegrated at speed, like a meteorite.’

  Visitors from the city see the logic of this – but the townspeople, avoiding those places where electricity is installed, cannot accept so prosaic an explanation.

  SEVEN

  The Prospect from the Silver Hill

  THE COMPANY agent – friendless, single, far from home – passed most days alone in a cabin at Ibela-hoy, the Hill Without a Hat. His work was simple. Equipped with a rudimentary knowledge of mineralogy, neat, laborious handwriting and a skill with ledgers, he had been posted to the high lands to identify the precious metals, the stones, the ores, that (everybody said) were buried there.

  This was his life: awake at dawn, awake all day, awake all night. Phrenetic Insomnia was the term. But there were no friends or doctors to make the diagnosis. The agent simply – like a swift, a shark – dared not sleep. He kept moving. He did not close his eyes. At night, at dawn, in the tall heat of the day, he looked out over the land and, watching the shades and colours of the hill and its valley accelerate and reel, he constructed for himself a family and a life less solitary than the one that he was forced to live. He took pills. He drank what little spirit arrived each month with his provisions. He exhausted himself with long, aimless walks amongst the boulders and dry beds. Sometimes he fell forward at work, his nose flattened amongst the gravels on the table, his papers dampened by saliva, his tongue slack. But he did not sleep or close his eyes, though he was still troubled by chimeras, daydreams, which broke his concentration and (because he was conscious) seemed more substantial and coherent than sleeping dreams. As the men had already remarked amongst themselves when they saw the sacs of tiredness spreading across his upper cheeks and listened to his conversation, the company agent either had a fever or the devil had swapped sawdust for his brain.

  Several times a week one of the survey gangs arrived in a company mobile to deposit drill cores of augered rock and sand, pumice and shale, and provide the company agent with a profile of the world twenty metres below his feet. He sorted clays as milky as nutsap and eggstones as worn and weathered as a saint’s bead into sample bags. Each rock, each smudge of soil, was condemned. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. A trace of tin. Nothing.

  Once, when he had been at Ibela-hoy for a few weeks only, one of the survey gangs offered to take him down to the lumber station where the woodsmen had established a good still and an understanding with some local women. He sat in the cab of the mobile drilling rig and talked nonstop. That’s the loneliest place, he told them, as the mobile descended from the cabin. There aren’t even ghosts. He spoke, too, about the wife and children, the companionable life, which he had concocted in his daydreams. How he wished he had a camera at home, he told the men. Then he could have shown them photographs of his family, of his garden in the city, his car, his wedding day.

  The men indulged him. He was still a stranger, they reasoned, and starved of company, missing home. He would quieten down once he had a glass in his hand. But they had been wrong. He became louder with every sip. He spoke in a voice which sent the women back into their homes, which sent the men early to bed. The voice said, My sadness is stronger than your drink. Nothing can relieve it. Nothing. A trace of tin. Nothing.

  He daydreamed: a lifetime of finding nothing. He dreamed of prospecting the night sky and locating a planet of diamonds or an old, cooled sun of solid gold. But then the company had no need for diamonds or gold. Find us sand, they instructed. Find us brown mud. Send us a palmful of pebbles. He dreamed again, and produced a twist of earth and stone which contained new colours, a seam of creamy nougat in a funnel of tar. His dream delivered the funnel to his company offices. Soon secretaries typed Ibela-hoy for the first time – and a name was coined for the new mineral which he had unearthed. Then his dream transported friends and family to Ibela-hoy. They walked behind him as he set out to map the creamy seam. Together they charted an area the shape of a toadstool. A toadstool of the newest mineral in the world. His daydream provided a telephone and a line of poles. He telephoned the company with the good news. They referred him to the Agency and then to the Ministry. His calls were bounced and routed between switchboards and operators and his story retold a dozen times – but nobody was found with sufficient authority to accept such momentous information or to order his return to home, to sleep.

  Send me a dream, he said aloud, in which my wife and my children are brought to the cabin. When I wake, they are there. When I sleep, they are there. We sit at the same table. The two boys tumble on the bed. The baby stands on my thighs with crescent legs and tugs at my nose and hair. My wife and I sit together slicing vegetables at the table. But when he had finished speaking there was no reply from amongst the rocks, no promises. He spoke again, in whispers. Have pity, he said.

  Sometimes he wrapped his arms round boulders, warmed by the sun, and embraced them. My wife, he said. He kissed boulders.

  Now the men kept their distance. They were polite but no longer generous. There were no more invitations to visit the lumber station – and they became watchful on those occasions when they brought drill cores to the cabin. Does this man know his business? they asked amongst themselves. Can he be trusted to know marl from marble? They waited awkwardly at his door or stood at his window as their plugs of earth were spread and sorted on his bench, the soils washed and sieved, the stones stunned and cracked, the unusual flakes of rocks matched with the specimens in the mineral trays. His fatigue – the second stage – had hardened his concentration. He was engrossed. He lowered his head and smelled the soil. He sucked the roundest pebbles. He rubbed stones on the thighs of his trousers and held them to the light. No, nothing, he told them. But when they sat in their camps and looked up from the valley late at night, a light still burned in the agent’s cabin and they could see him holding their stones to his oil flame and talking to their earth in his skinned and weary voice.

  At first the sorted, worthless plugs were dumped each day in a rough pile at the side of the cabin. The clays of the valley consorted with the volcanic earths of Ibela-hoy. Flints jostled sandstones, topsoils ran loose amongst clods, the rounded pebbles of the river bed bubbled in the wasteland shales. He was struck how – held and turned in the daylight – each stone was a landscape. Here was a planet, a globe, with the continents grey and peninsular, the seas cold and smooth to the touch. And here a coastline, one face the beach, four faces cliff, and a rivulet of green where the children and donkeys could make their descent. And here, twisted and smoothed by the survey drill, were the muddied banks of rivers and the barks of trees modelled and reduced in deep, toffee earth. But in the dump, their shapes and colours clashed and were indecent. He remembered how, when he was a child, they had buried his father. The grave was open when the body came. There were clays and flints piled on the yellow grass. The bottom of his father’s trenc
h had filled with water. The digger’s spade had severed stones. They said that in ancient times, when humankind went naked and twigged for termites and ate raw meat, the dead were left where they fell. What the animals did not eat became topsoil, loam. The company agent had wished for that, had dreamed of his father free of his grave and spread out on the unbroken ground as calm and breathless as frost. But he could not look at that open grave, those wounded flints, without tears. He could not look at roadworks, either. Or a ploughed field. Or a broken wall. And whenever he had stared at that squinting corner of his room where the ceiling plaster had fallen and the broken roof laths stuck through, his chest (what was the phrase?) shivered like a parched pea and he dared not sleep. The ceiling doesn’t leak, his mother said. It’s you that leaks, not it.

  Now he wept when he passed the waste pile, when he was drawn at night to stand before it with a lamp or summoned to salvage one lonely stone for his pocket or his table. Sometimes it seemed that the pile was an open wound or an abattoir of stones. But the longer he stood the more it seemed that a piece of the world had been misplaced and abandoned at his cabin side.

  Then he took a spade and dug a pit behind the waste pile. First he gathered the chipped yellow stones which lay on the surface and placed them together in a bucket. And then he removed the thin soil crust and piled it neatly onto a tarpaulin. Each individual layer was dug out and piled separately, until the pit was shoulder deep. The continents and planets, the landscapes and coastlines of the waste dump were shovelled into the pit and one by one, in order, the layers of Ibela-hoy were put back in place. Then he scattered the chipped yellow stones on to the bulging ground.

  When the gangs delivered drill cores they noticed that the waste had gone. I buried it, he said. I put it back. He showed them where the swollen ground was settling. Well, they said, that’s very neat and tidy. Or, Is that what you’re paid to do, fool about with spades? His replies made no sense to them. They continued to talk with him roughly or to humour him with banter. What should we do for him, they asked amongst themselves, to bring him back to earth? Should we write, they wondered, to his wife and children or to the boss? Should we let him be and let the illness pass? Some of the kinder, older men went to talk with him, to offer help, to exchange a word or two about the samples on his bench. Yet he seemed indifferent to them and those funnels of earth and stone which could earn them all a fortune. Was that the yellow of bauxite or the rose of cinnabar or the fire-blue of opal? The company agent did not seem to share their excitement or their interest. But when at last they left him in peace he turned to the samples on his bench and sorted through them with unbroken attention. A stone of apple-green he removed and walked with it into the valley where in a cave there were lichens of the same colour. A fistful of grit he scattered in the grass so that it fell amongst the leaf joints like sleet. A round stone he placed on the river bed with other round stones. A grey landscape in an inch of granite he stood in the shadow of the greyest rock. A chip of pitchblende was reunited with black soil.