“And those stories had a strong effect on me,” he said. “I realise now that it was literature, it was written testimony that drew me into my life – and into war.”
“You were in the right place!”
“There’s some truth to that,” he laughed. “And maybe I found my way there by some attraction – but I don’t believe anyone who says they know exactly what the chains of cause and circumstance are in life. I see, instead, a kind of nudge and push by fate – I can feel the margins and percentages of cause; things that lead you towards the future, and you can decline them, or accept.”
He found work at Wattay airport, just outside Vientiane; there was a rifle range there, where the US special forces trained. Since childhood, Galvin had been a marksman: he could hit the centre of a target from 700 metres out. One afternoon, he rigged up a .50 calibre machine gun with telescopic sights and brought it to the range. With it, he could fire steady out to two kilometres – and immediately he caught the eye of the old Wehrmacht commander who was in charge.
“Is there anyone in this story,” I broke in, at that point, “who hasn’t stepped straight from central casting? It’s not like life, it’s like a movie, complete with every stereotype.”
“The flow went the other way,” said Galvin, rather sadly. “That’s how things were: art was still imitating reality. Remember, they weren’t post-modern times – although that’s very much the way it was going. In fact, you could make a case that that was what we were fighting for: to initiate that era. At any rate – I came in; I joined in, with them.”
“With who?”
And then he told me – in his most circling, elaborate manner, in ellipses, disclosures and feints, until the story was like a trail of smoke rings, each dissipating within the orbit of its predecessor and changing its contours, and a tone, a mood of confession and reassessment, had permeated that dry beachfront air. Coolly, punctiliously, he described his years with the Special Operations Group – the clandestine army that was active at that time in the jungle reaches of the border between Laos and Vietnam. They were vivid tales. They centred, always, on insight, fear and death. They had the quality of moral episodes. Each illustrated some key theme of that secret life: never give up before the end of the firefight; never look directly at your target when you spot him in the jungle; never walk the trails too long.
“What?”
“For a long time,” he said, “I’d wanted to know my limit, to reach the frontier: where the mind and the body refuse; where you feel fear’s presence in its purest form. And we were told, constantly, in Vientiane: if you walk the trails long enough, your time will come.”
“And it did?”
He sighed, and in that sigh, together with regret, there was a certain scorn for linear ways of understanding life and time. He circled back, to the beginning of his Vientiane days and the beliefs of his Khmer friends in the special forces. When death was close, they always placed a tiny Buddha figurine between their teeth. They thought of death as a woman, young and beautiful, they had seen her – and once Galvin thought he had too, when he was sent out in pursuit of a female sniper near the firebases of Kon-tum. Most of all, though, his missions were case studies in control: control of body, control of instinct, control of thought. What use could thought be? Statistics made the rules. Everyone on the teams knew the figures: four bomb-damage assessment trips up the trail, and your time had come. Galvin had completed his third when the day came for him. He knew the jungle intimately by then – he could sense the presence of “the others” – his adversaries, those veiled, masked dwellers beneath the tree canopy, who had walked the trails so long their skins were lily white. And he could feel them near, that morning, near the end of a short, successful mission, at the wheel of a 1952 Citroën Avant, as he was driving his team back towards Vientiane. They were already on the edge of Pathet Lao territory, and close to home. They had avoided two roadblock ambushes. They hit a third. It was well designed – they were caught, the mortars opened up. An armoured half-track was blocking almost all the road’s width – a river bridge lay straight ahead. Galvin drove for the gap at top speed – a shell landed to the right of them. It tore through the vehicle; it killed the other members of his team at once. Its shrapnel cut through the body of the man beside him, and into his – into his right side, his legs, hips, arms. The Citroën collided with the half-track, its front sheared off, it lost a wheel, it careered on: it struck the concrete of the bridge support. Galvin reached behind him, as best he could. He seized the morphine and survival kit; he took his AK-47; he ran, staggering, bleeding, through the jungle. He collapsed beneath a lush overarching banyan tree. He hid between its roots. The Pathet Lao hunted him for eighteen hours, stealthily, silently, combing the country, listening. He lay there, morphinated, quite distanced from himself. He could feel the wounds; he traced his hands over the blood coagulating, forming its mats upon his skin. He became aware of a file of green ants, moving up his body, onto his face. They walked across his eyeballs, gazing down. They seemed like giant dragons or monsters – but some instinct told him they were there for him. He picked off a few; he put them in his mouth; he felt them biting and stinging as they went down his throat. Long afterwards, he learned they had antiseptic properties. He came to feel they had saved his life, and in years to come he treated green ants in the Australian bush with tenderness and with respect.
He was still. The pain rose. After spells of drowsy sleep, and a time when, as it seemed to him, he was drifting freely between life and death, inspecting the margins of both worlds, he began to make out a set of shapes before him, above him. They were blurred, in silhouette; they became distinct. The light had taken on a rich, grainy texture, there was a rose-pink colour to the background sky. The figures came closer – he saw their faces: it was a cavalcade, a procession of mounted, armoured knights, with shields and weapons in their hands. They carried banners, too – each one rich with crosses, a mesh of crosses, red, white, interlinked. The tableau had a tension – the knights were still, but their limbs were taut, they clutched their swords and lances, their pause was momentary, they resembled the frozen knights in battle paintings from the Renaissance, and the colours had a startling, painted quality as well: there was a copper sheen about the silvered metal of the helmets; there were pale glinting yellows on the shield-rims, the trailing cloaks were indigo, the grey chain-mail had a bluish tinge. Those figures gazed towards him with indifference, and quite without hostile intent – their eyes were cold, indeed they scarcely seemed to notice him at all, though he was stretched out beneath them, helpless – and he realised they must be staring across a battleground towards another heraldic army, before the onset of some deadly clash. The picture receded. The sounds from his pursuers had gone. He waited for darkness, then half-walked, half-crawled his way back into Vientiane. He was helicoptered out. They took him to a military base in Thailand. He lapsed into a coma. When, after two days, he came round, the doctors stared at him as if he were a ghost; the nurses padded gently past his bed. No one thought you’d pull through, one murmured to him: your heartbeat was like a constant whisper – that phrase stuck in his mind – there was a stumbling in your pulse.
“And that was the cue for me to come to Darwin,” Galvin said.
“Pre-cyclone Darwin?”
“That’s right: that dreamy place – before tall buildings and the lure of progress came. I already knew the town, in fact, quite well. We used it often, at the start of operations. We’d go through Customs then with cases full of automatics and high-powered weaponry, no questions asked. This time, though, I was jangled, and torn up, inside and out. Pretty soon, I gravitated towards Lameroo.”
“The beach?”
Galvin gave a smile.
“In those days, it was an important place. I’m not sure it wasn’t the most beautiful place I’ve ever come across, the happiest as well. It was an unusual scene. Darwin was still quite small, and full of alcoholic public servants wearing shorts and long white s
ocks. On the slope beneath the Esplanade, though, the counterculture had taken hold. There was a hidden world of tree-houses and cliff-side shacks poised half in the air, and elaborate, interconnecting structures ran between them all: walkways, lookouts, overhangs – and each house was always being improved by the succeeding groups of occupants. One had been worked on by a pair of Swedish architecture students, and even there, in the filtered shadows from the mahoganies and raintrees, and with mangroves growing up around it, it had a very stripped-down, Scandinavian feel. Beach and town rarely mixed, though. There was a degree of hostility, and that was understandable: they were worlds apart. Town was for the drinkers, and in the beach houses, marijuana consumption was very much the order of the day. It was a lovely, carefree jungle.”
“The opposite of where you’d been!”
“Listen – I don’t know that you should read your patterns into everything. That’s just where I ended up. But I stayed there for a while. I started working at the Darwin Hotel, as the supervisor in the gardens. I used to walk the cliffs, and gaze out at the harbour, and let that landscape settle in my mind; so Darwin, and the clouds of the build-up, and those liquid sunsets were the backdrop for my return as well – and everything that you were saying about your experiences hit home and brought those days back to me.”
He gave me a quick glance; the fire was down by now – I could scarcely see his eyes.
“Most of all, though,” he went on, “I remember the water, the turquoise of the water, and the trips I used to make each afternoon. I had a kayak, to build up my strength, and I used to head out across the harbour in it, to Mica Beach, straight opposite, eight kilometres, fighting the tide, then back over, through the lightning and the storms. There was an old World War II US rest camp there, with accommodation buildings and even a dance hall, overlooking the sand – I don’t think they came through Tracy in too good a state. Shells used to wash up there – large, wind-scoured trochus shells, and corals that looked like X-ray photos of the sun. The waves rolled in, slowly, so slowly it was sometimes as if they were still, and fixed, and time had ceased at that very moment in its flow. Yet I often had the feeling, when I was on Mica Beach, looking back to town, that I could see a rhythm to life, and I could feel the seasons were advancing – that from disaster, light could come, and in sadness, in the heart of sadness you could find joy – and I thought I’d tell you that story – and it would be my gift to you, and it might help to bring you, somehow, home.”
I climbed into my swag, slept, dreamed heavily, and woke before the dawn. There was a pale light on the horizon; the landscape’s layers, blurry, like the bandings in a carpet, reached away. I made out the edge of the scrub; the mangrove line; the sands, the promontory and its cliff, the glowing sky. Nothing human; an emptiness. I walked over to the troop-carrier, and then, by some odd impulse, after sitting in its passenger seat for some minutes, watching the light’s slow change, I switched on the radio – though the last thing I longed for at that moment was the world and all its woes. Silence: I turned the dial. Suddenly there was a hiss of interference, then a voice: a woman’s voice, in a timbre of dark, deep passion, singing. It was a cantata’s opening theme – it was vaguely familiar, I began to place it; the voice, too – and soon enough I realised that I was listening to a performance by Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, the Californian mezzo, whose artistry had always seemed bound up, for me, with the illness that served as a companion in her life. She sang, through the surge of interference, through the waves of ionospheric storms, her voice shook and hung, it fragmented and faded. An announcer came on. I had tuned to an American classical music station, its signal thrown, by some mystery of climatics, right around the world.
“The sublime Lorraine Hunt Lieberson,” said the announcer’s voice in heartfelt manner. “And we heard her famous rendition of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Leipzig cantata, number 82 in the catalogue – first given in 1727: a fitting piece for today, with all its intimations of mortality – sung there on stage, in a concert at the international festival of music in Lucerne, by the Californian who began her career as a violist, and died, after a long and unavailing struggle with cancer, this Monday morning at her home in Santa Fe. And all those who loved her will doubtless remember where they were on hearing the news, much as a former generation remembered what they were doing when they learned that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas, so many years ago.”
I switched the radio off, shocked by the casual speed with which it dealt its blows, and walked on for a while up the beach. There was a faint humming inside the silence – so soft it seemed almost to reach me, like some whisper of the bloodstream, from within the curving chambers of the ear. I listened for it. My mind was full of wandering thoughts: the idea came to me that one day, soon, recorded music will be like an archive of shadows and memory, and there will be more dead voices than live ones to choose from, if this has not already happened; that the performers we most respond to are more than actors, much more: they give life to the artists they interpret, they bring them back – and a word is nothing without a mouth to speak it, or an eye to read – and what we love is constantly being taken from us, and returned in memory, and so our longings gain their final shape.
I reached the cliff’s edge: it was a maze of sharp, eroded, twisted rocks. Beach curlews and terns flew before me. The sun was up. Its disc had touched the lowest layers of the cloud – and what was that, out on the mudflats, where the salt crystals gleamed, and the line of sandbars shook and quivered in the haze? There: halfway to the horizon – the low shape of a vessel, dark gun-metal grey, drifting inwards; drifting towards me on the tide.
The Red Highway Page 28