Heads were everything, he said. Heads were power. Heads were the source of a tribe’s meaning and its art. The possession of heads meant fertility, for men and for their crops. It was prophylactic against disease. All skulls contained the magic they needed. All were equally efficacious, and in times of need a newly taken skull might be broken up and the fragments shared or traded between clans or even allied tribes, the front parts most valued as these held the most power.
Oh God, she thought, feeling the baby within her, its skull so complete, pressing deep in her womb. She looked to Charlie but he wasn’t seeing her. He was caught up in some thought of his own.
The doctor had said that the baby had turned – he or she – his head, her head, in position, ready, almost, to come out into the world. It was so big now that its movements were no longer somersaults or kicks but upheavals in the depths of her, where she had not known she could feel. She must go now, she thought. He or she – they, herself as well – they two, she and the baby, must remove themselves from this room where the words disturbed her in her depths, take themselves to bed, to silence and darkness and sleep.
Why, look at the clock, it’s late, I really must go up now. Yawning, lifting herself, saying goodnight. I put water in your room. I think that you should have everything you need.
It’s not true, what you say. Charlie had watched her padding away, the fragile weight of her that he found at that moment so beautiful. He did not speak until the door was closed. It’s all murder. War, whatever. Whatever you choose to call it.
Hussey leant further forward and bowed his head in his hands. He began speaking like that, through his hands, and then raised his head and there was pain in his eyes.
A terrible thing happened just before I left. I suppose, in a way, we knew it was coming. It had been building, I suppose, for months. All through the war it had been becoming more possible. Everything was disturbed. People had fled to the jungle. Crops hadn’t been planted, or where they had, the Japs came through and took everything, slaughtered the mithun, the chickens, any of the people who resisted. How could we expect that once the war was over there would be nothing but peace?
And there were the guns. We’d flooded the place with guns. For every dead soldier in the jungle, a gun. A trail of dead soldiers and of guns all the way into Burma. It wasn’t only the tigers that benefited from all the dead. You know how I used to try to control the spread of guns? Well, we weren’t going to be around to do that any more, were we? We weren’t going to be there to keep order, to carry out our punitive raids, to do anything at all. Everyone knew that. There was talk. All last year there was talk. We were up in the mountains, as if we were in another country. We’d been a long way from the horrors in Calcutta, we were further still from the Punjab, but the news got to us all the same. The British were leaving, and everyone was killing everyone.
There was an old chief who came to me. His name was Chui-ong. The Raj is gone, he said. Sir, we must all have guns. Or we will be gone too. Finished like you. But we last remnant of the Raj stuck to our principles – I nearly said guns, Charlie, that we stuck to our guns. Of course, we are British and we stick to our guns. Even at a time like that, when actually we are sneaking away, we have to keep up appearances, don’t we? So we stuck to our guns and no, we didn’t give them guns. In fact, we took their guns away. Because that was our policy. Don’t let children play with dangerous toys. Don’t worry if other children have them next door. We’re better than them. It’s the principle that counts.
I stayed on, as you know, last autumn. We were gone, but we weren’t gone. I was still in post. Not Britain behind me but the new India now, men in Delhi who had never heard of Nagas and didn’t feel any debt to them for their help in the war.
Another chief came to me. You should have seen him. A regal figure in a blanket covered with large printed tigers, clamouring for guns. Did he want them to defend his village or to raid another, or to start a war for independence from India? I didn’t know. I wasn’t giving out any guns. I had my orders. I even went to his village later and took what guns he had away. Why do you do this, sir? he said. I think I tried to say something about peace. Your British peace is not our peace, he said. Of course I knew that he was right. It never was, was it?
I don’t know, Charlie said. I thought that was what you were doing, Pax Britannica and all that.
I thought we’d achieved something there. That our presence, the flag, meant something. But it didn’t, did it? There were cracks all along, only we chose not to see them. And a society can break apart so fast.
There was a pause in which Charlie heard no more than the wuther of the flames. Claire had left her shoes askew on the red rug at the foot of the sofa.
We had been drawing our nice little lines. Peace here, just so far, then a line. Beyond, the barbarians.
Like Hadrian.
Only we didn’t build a wall. We didn’t protect them on our side.
No.
How do you draw a line across civilisation, anyway? Set some boundary, wherever it seems practical, civilise the people on one side of it and not those on the other? It was all so arbitrary.
Charlie had not known there was such anger in him. He had thought Hussey a type of the colonial official, emanating security and calm.
I hadn’t seen it like that.
No, of course you hadn’t. No one did. It doesn’t suit to see it that way. The truth was, civilising a village just made it vulnerable to attack. All the more so if it seemed peaceful and prosperous. The next village along just became more envious, envious of the others’ lives, their crops, their heads.
Yes, now you say it, I see, of course, Charlie said. He thought of the village where he had stayed. How he would have envied that. But by Hussey’s argument it didn’t count. It must have been beyond the wall, if there had been a wall. Lucky village. If only it would remain so.
Mind if I light a pipe?
Go ahead, Charlie said. Another drink?
No.
But Charlie had the bottle already in his hand.
Yes then, why not?
They sat in silence for a while. There was the fire, the slow tick of the clock between the mithun head and the figurines, the odd creaks of the old farmhouse. Claire’s shoes on the floor. She had gone padding upstairs, Charlie thought, like a Naga. Now that she was pregnant she carried her weight differently, like those women there. Or perhaps it was only that she had given up wearing high heels, he thought, perhaps that was all the difference. A pregnant woman was a pregnant woman, anywhere. That quiet power in them, something invulnerable despite their vulnerability. Some ancient piece of goddess.
You didn’t tell me what happened.
What? Hussey’s eyes were on the floor as well. On that little sign of the woman present but gone.
The terrible thing.
No, I didn’t, did I?
The story began on the veranda. Hussey called outside before he had finished his breakfast. The valley filled with morning mist, layers of cloud above, and away to the east a dark column of smoke, rising into the cloud and turning it brown and yellow and sullen.
You remember where Choknyu was?
Choknyu? I’m not sure that I do. Did we go there?
It’s a village on a ridge to the east. Just outside our administrative district. We trekked there one day, went to see an old rascal of a chief sodden with opium.
Oh yes, I remember now.
It was on fire. The whole village was burning. A hundred houses and granaries all going up together. The flames so tall that you could see them from where we were, so far off, streaks of orange beneath the smoke. Strange though, you couldn’t hear a thing. Somehow if you see something like that you expect to hear, but there was only the fire and the smoke and the cloud, and the meaning of it.
Hussey standing on the veranda. Everyone from the bungalow gathered there, watching. Below them in the town they haven’t seen it yet. The morning goes on as mornings do in Mokokchung, the sounds
the usual sounds of people and dogs and chickens, and maybe someone cutting wood.
What did you do?
There was nothing I could do. Not straight away. We just watched. We knew what was there, all those headless corpses that would be lying there. I might have put a party together, sent it off in hot pursuit. Perhaps they would have caught up with the raiders, I don’t know. But I had to telegraph for permission to enter the area. So we watched, Charlie. We watched in utter and abject horror. Now and then a new building caught alight, and there were new flames and another column of smoke, and then the fire would die back and blend in again with the clouds. It was too late anyway. The damage was done.
Even as they first saw it, the climax of the raid was past. The heads were already taken. The burning would be the end of it. What could Hussey have done but make a show? Keep up for one last moment the façade of rule. As it was, he waited for his permission and then he did assemble men, and they marched the three hours, down into the valley and up to the village as it still burned. And all along the march they met others who had seen the smoke, who shouted to them in excitement. That was why the façade still mattered. Why it had to be kept up. Because the people were as excited about the raid as their ancestors would ever have been. Civilisation had only damped them down. There was nothing so much as a headhunting raid, Hussey said, to rekindle zest for life. He saw proof of it now. He accepted that was the theory, what the anthropologists said, but somehow he had not expected it of his own people, of people whose faces and names he knew, and even ones he’d seen going to church. Perhaps it is always so, that you expect that others, even when you know that they are different, will see the world as you do. Share your taboos and your horrors. But it was not so. For days to come, villages in the region would be celebrating the great raid, beating drums and dancing, some of them trading with the raiders for heads and parts of heads.
Hussey’s voice was worn out. He needed the wet of the whisky just to speak any more. His look drifted across the floor. Charlie wasn’t sure that he was seeing anything in the room any more, not himself, not the rug, not Claire’s shoes. Claire and her kind were outside all that mattered to Hussey now; Claire, women, family, things of his past. What had mattered to him these last years had all been bound up in his work: his people, the care of his people who seemed to him to be threatened by every influence that came their way – the bureaucrats and missionaries who wanted to change them, the anthropologists who wanted to isolate them – and his private work too, the study of his people, the notes he wrote up through those lonely nights, in those early mornings, clacking away at his typewriter, recording every detail he could find of a story over which he had no power. Hussey wasn’t seeing what was before him here, the room, the house, the farm. He was only seeing the story. If he had briefly forgotten it at dinner, then he had remembered again now that it was late and the glow of the drink had faded and left him so low. How old was he? Fifty, sixty, Charlie wasn’t sure. He looked very old now.
These people were like the crowd at the Colosseum, Hussey said. Only the spectacle was spontaneous and they hadn’t had to buy tickets. We’re a bloodthirsty lot, we humans.
Yes, Charlie answered. I think we are.
Silence then.
Was this why Hussey had taken up his invitation? To come here and tell him this? To tell his horror to another who had been where he had been and might understand, even if he wasn’t there any more and was making himself into someone else, into some bluff Norfolk farmer who didn’t think about those sorts of things any more. Who had come home intact, hair, fingernails and all, head on his neck, though his memory slipped now and then, jolted out into the open.
It was well past midnight. Charlie topped up the glasses once more, and then the fire, squatted a moment before it as a fresh log began to catch. Should these things be said, or not be said? If they were said in this dead time of the night, would the night take them away? As if the blackness might absorb the black and then in the morning it would be gone, but he also perhaps gone, sucked away in it.
Hussey spoke to his back. We were responsible, you know. I knew that, all the time we were marching there. It was our fault. My fault. There’d been some minor incident a couple of months earlier, the sort of petty head-taking that was going on all the time, that’s been common these last few years, and to punish the village I had to go and take all their guns away. They couldn’t even defend themselves. It was a massacre, you know. When we finally got there we counted four hundred bodies.
He didn’t turn round. He didn’t want to meet Hussey’s eyes. No, he thought, the things shouldn’t be said. How could you live in the morning with what you had said in the night?
Well, we’ve left now. You’ve left. What’ll you do now?
I don’t know. Retire, perhaps. There’s only me, I could eke out my pension. There was a possibility of a post in Kenya but I don’t know if I could start anywhere else.
The conversation was coming back to some kind of normality.
Have you been to Africa?
No. It would be quite new.
They say the Kenyan highlands are beautiful.
So are the Cotswolds.
Yes.
So much listening he had done. Not speaking but only seeing. Seeing what he did not want to see, things that seemed scarcely possible, seen from here. Drinking his drink. The fire dying down, his wife going to bed, this man here speaking whom he really did not know very well, who did not know him, did not know who he was here but only who he might have been somewhere else, whose dry words tugged at the nightmare, pulled it this way and that. Words were so dry, weren’t they, always? No blood to them. No breath. Only bone. Empty skulls. And the bodies were left without heads. And the heads were taken away.
There was one last thing he suddenly thought to say, before they went to bed. He, like Hussey, was drunk, but so numbly now that he didn’t know he was drunk any more.
You remember that fellow who came with me, he said, who brought the head? How did he take it, not getting his medal? I think I couldn’t bear to ask you about him at the time.
Nonchalantly. Hussey said the word slowly, pausing on each syllable. The wretch just shrugged his shoulders and left. Didn’t seem to think it was very serious. I was almost afraid he might come back later with another one. Like a cat dropping a mouse at your feet.
It was my fault.
Why?
If I hadn’t turned up there, he wouldn’t have had the idea.
Not your fault at all. His idea.
And then another thought struck him and he began to smile.
Do you know what I called him, to myself, what I called him from the moment I saw him? The scrum-half.
Did you know about the head when you called him that?
No.
Suddenly it was funny. He saw the burly little scrum-half running, dodging, passing between them, a small tank of a man. Zigzagging this way and that with the head like a rugger ball under his arm, diving to the ground, sliding on the green grass before the marigolds. Scoring a try.
Two men’s laughter carried up the stairs.
Claire heard them through her sleep. How could they laugh? She woke from a dream. The baby was lying asleep on the jungle floor, and Charlie was abandoning it. She saw the back of him walking away laughing, a shadow ahead of him that might have been Hussey, and she stood by and could not pick it up, and though she did not see them, there were naked Nagas and tigers about them in the jungle. She woke, and felt for the baby’s head. It must be there. She couldn’t feel it yet she knew that it was there, wedged as the doctor said. What she could feel was not the baby’s head but only its legs, doubled-up like those of a trussed chicken.
Her sleep was so broken these nights, disturbed by the baby or her bladder, or just the difficulty of making her body comfortable for any length of time. She felt that she had been aware for hours that they were still down there talking, hearing at moments the murmur of their voices from the sitting room, befo
re this silly laughter and the creaking on the stairs. Now she had woken afraid. She didn’t remember having any dreams these last months. She had thought this was because her body had taken over. She had come to know herself as an entirely physical creature, like an animal, with sharp sense of smell, sharp revulsions, sharp hungers, instinctive responses. But animals dreamt, didn’t they? Dogs, anyway. It seemed to her that Jess had dreams, and sometimes stirred in them, and woke afraid. She turned again in the bed, moved to the side so that there would be space for Charlie, put a pillow beneath where she was most uncomfortable. She felt that the baby was awake now. Did the baby hear what she heard? There would be the hum of her own body first, between the baby and the silly men. She rested a hand where it was, low, where the pain most often came, close to the head.
When Charlie came into the bed he lay on his back and almost instantly began to snore. Gently she spoke to him and he obeyed, turned onto his side and was silent. She didn’t sleep again for a long time. She lay awake keeping company with the baby.
Mrs T said it was a boy, because she was big behind, big all round. Mrs T talking away as she polished the dining-room table, bent over the gleaming mahogany as it would have been impossible for her to do now with all this bulk. You and Mr Ashe’ll be wanting a boy, won’t you, on account of the farm?
Someone to take over the farm, yes. But that was a long time off.
She had been used to envying the men since she had come to live here. Perhaps she had always envied the men the physicality of their existence. Men did and made. Men fought the war. Men farmed the land and came back in with their physical exhaustion and their physical satisfaction. She had felt insubstantial beside them, flimsy as the dresses she wore, the skirts that lifted and blew in the wind. That she must hold down with her hands.
Now with the baby there was gravity in her. The head low, the weight of the baby in the depths of her.
Yes, she had thought, a boy would be good. She would be grounded in boys.
Land of the Living Page 16