Guatemala – Journey into Evil

by David Monnery

  She looked up at him, both pleasure and surprise in her expression. ‘You know birds?’ she asked doubtfully. Everything she had ever learned about the gringo world suggested a distrust of nature.

  ‘Yes, I do. I watch them wherever I go.’

  ‘I watch wherever I go.’

  They smiled at each other. ‘I have a book with me,’ Chris said, ‘with pictures of birds that live in Costa Rica. And many of them live here in Guatemala too. Would you like to see it?’

  ‘Pictures of birds?’ she echoed, her eyes lighting up. ‘Please, yes.’ They started back down through the trees together. ‘I am Emelia Xicay,’ she said. ‘My brother Tomás walk with you from Tziaca.’

  ‘I am Chris Martinson,’ he said.

  They found Razor in the act of waking up. ‘I dreamed I was Doctor Who,’ he said, and then noticed Emelia. ‘But your dream was obviously better than mine,’ he told Chris, who was delving into his bag for Birds of Costa Rica.

  Emelia took the proffered book with both hands, almost as if she was receiving a religious object. Then she squatted down and began slowly turning the pages, holding her eyes close in the declining light, a finger working its way through each gallery of birds. Chris and Razor watched her, both wondering the same thing – how could this be the woman who had piled a mountain path high with Kaibil dead in not much more than a minute?

  ‘This is beautiful,’ she said, in a voice which suggested the word itself was utterly inadequate.

  Chris was only prevented from giving her the book on the spot by the appearance of her brother. ‘Emelia,’ he said, surprised to find her there.

  ‘Tomás, look at this,’ she said.

  He did so, and made a mental note to find her something like it the next time he was in the city. Though where the money would come from…

  ‘Yes it is,’ he agreed, and turned to tell the Englishmen that the Old Man wanted to see them.

  They left Emelia fighting a losing battle with the light and walked diagonally down through the forest for some three hundred metres. The Old Man was sitting with his back against a tree, thoughtfully smoking a cigarette, a book in his lap. From the camouflaged dug-out nearby came the unmistakable drone of a generator.

  ‘Sounds good, doesn’t it,’ he said as they approached. ‘If Jorge can fix it properly, and we can find enough fuel, I shall retire up here and watch football on TV.’ His face screwed up in self-amusement, and then abruptly grew serious again. ‘Sit down,’ he told them, indicating the neatly stacked cut logs which obviously served as seating for guerrilla conferences. ‘Your wife is safe,’ he told Razor without further preamble.

  Razor closed his eyes and clenched a fist. ‘Where?’ he asked.

  ‘She’s in Chichicastenango at the moment. About forty-five kilometres south of here. But I’m afraid it looks like she’ll have to stay there for several days, maybe even weeks.’

  Razor waited for the explanation, saying nothing.

  ‘The people who got her out of Panajachel are Cakchiquel, and though they go to the market in Chichicastenango they do not know the Quiche lands or speak Quiche. It is one of the curses of our struggle, that we are united in everything but language. Men like Tomás here, who speak Spanish and more than one of our native languages, are very rare.’ He sighed. ‘So, the people who are looking after your wife would find it difficult at the best of times to bring her north to us, and these are not the best of times.’ He grinned suddenly. ‘Depending on your point of view, that is. Your action in killing the Kaibil colonel has not gone unnoticed, my friends. In fact, it has been like throwing a very big stone into a lake, and the ripples are still spreading. The authorities know that your wife has gone into hiding, and they know she must try to reach a border or an embassy or us. And as part of making sure she doesn’t reach us, the Army is searching every town and blocking every road between Atitlán and the Cuchumatanes. If she stays where she is I think she will be safe, but if she tries to move…’ He shrugged. ‘Better she stays.’

  Razor looked doubtful. ‘So what do we do – just wait?’

  ‘No. I think you two should start for Mexico tonight. Two of our compañeros will go with you and…’ He stopped, noticing the look on Razor’s face. ‘Once you two are in Mexico they will not need your wife for leverage,’ he said.

  ‘Just for revenge,’ Razor said. ‘I’m sorry, I know what you say makes sense, but I can’t leave her behind. I can’t. I won’t. If this Chichi-place is only forty-five kilometres away then all I need is a good map. I can get there across country in two nights.’

  ‘We can,’ Chris corrected him.

  ‘No way,’ Razor said. ‘You should either head for Mexico or stay here, because if both of us are taken then there’ll be no one to call in the cavalry.’

  ‘And which cavalry is that then?’

  ‘You know what I mean. People disappear in this country, and I kind of like the idea that someone will know to look for me.’

  ‘Yeah, OK.’

  ‘But I will go with you,’ Tomás said unexpectedly. He owed the Englishmen his life, he thought. And he owed them for Emelia’s too. But most of all he felt a fascination with this strange gringo, this soldier who had decided on the spur of the moment to risk everything for a village he had never seen before, and who danced like a madman to lure a helicopter to its destruction.

  He turned to the Old Man. ‘If the unit can spare me,’ he added, by way of asking permission.

  The Old Man looked at him, and seemed to guess what was in his heart. ‘We can spare you,’ he said, ‘but not permanently. Be careful.’

  10

  The sky was clear as the two men began their journey, their path down the mountain illuminated by a piercing moon. Far below them coils of mist shone like silver snakes in the dark folds of the foothills.

  Razor’s initial sense of relief at discovering Hajrija was safe had worn off, and anxiety was gnawing away at the edges of his mind. The authorities might not have found her in Panajachel, but if the Old Man’s sources were accurate, they were not going to stop looking. At this very moment they might be battering down the door of the house in which she was hiding.

  He asked himself for the hundredth time how he could have put her in such danger. He should never have let her come to Guatemala with them. Such bloody arrogance. And now here he was heading out to rescue her like a knight in fucking armour. Was this another mistake? More overconfidence? For the first time in his professional life Razor felt besieged by self-doubt.

  He knew that his effectiveness in situations like this had often come from an almost ludicrous surfeit of confidence. They all laughed at the Regimental motto, but in his case it had been almost prophetic. Every time he had dared, he had won. The trouble was, in order to make the dare effective you had to be prepared to lose, and he only had to think about it for five seconds to know that he wasn’t prepared to lose Hajrija.

  If Cabrera had given him another five seconds to consider the consequences he might still be alive.

  Still, Razor had confidence in his companion. Tomás reminded him a little of Trooper Damien Robson, who had been part of the Bosnian team. ‘The Dame’ had carried himself with the same air of self-containment, and performed with the same quiet efficiency, as the Guatemalan. He had also, as Razor remembered from one conversation in Bosnia, been as protective of his sisters as Tomás seemed to be of Emelia. Razor found himself hoping that his new companion would have a longer life than the Dame.

  It took them an hour and a half to reach the road which wound its way through the foothills, and another hour of easier walking before they came to their first major water obstacle. Nature had provided the first few stepping-stones, humankind a few more, and even in the thickening mist they had no trouble crossing the tumbling river.

  ‘Another hour and we will have a short rest,’ Tomás told him on the far bank. Two days ago he would have expected an argument, but that was before he discovered that these gringos could walk like Indians.
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br />   The going was uphill now, and soon they found themselves emerging from the mist, the fuzzy white arc of the moon growing sharper with each climbing stride. It took almost an hour to reach the next ridge-line, and here they stopped, sitting on some convenient rocks at the top of a pass, staring down at the lakes of mist on either side.

  Tomás took a small stack of tortillas from his pack and passed half across. ‘Why did you become a soldier?’ he asked, hoping the answer would give him the chance to ask the question which really interested him.

  Razor shrugged. ‘I just drifted into it. Couldn’t think of anything else to do, I suppose. And I enjoyed the life.’

  Tomás took a swig of water from the canteen and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. ‘Can I ask you a personal question?’ he asked.

  ‘No harm in asking, as my mum used to say.’

  ‘To be in an Army that is for the government – does that not sometimes, well, trouble you?’

  ‘No…well, it never used to. The British Government is not like the one here. And most of the time we think of our Army as defending us against foreigners of one sort or another, from outside Britain. Your Army seems more interested in fighting its own people.’

  ‘We are not their people.’

  ‘Yeah, I know…’

  ‘I understand what you say,’ Tomás went on, ‘but for me it is important to know what we are fighting for, and – forgive me – but when you are sent here to help this government of butchers and torturers I cannot help wondering what it is you think you are fighting for.’

  Razor could see his point. To say he was just obeying orders didn’t sound like much of a reason. ‘I guess I have to believe that my government has the interests of the British people at heart, and that sending us here was part of promoting those interests.’

  Put like that, he thought, it sounded lamer than lame. He made a mental note not to apply for a job in Army Recruitment.

  Tomás was smiling at him though. ‘I think your heart told you what you wish to fight for on the day you kill the Kaibil colonel. It is justice.’

  Razor grimaced. ‘That was one moment. And a personal thing.’ He didn’t really want to think about why. Or what the British Army really was for these days. It was something of a stretch to see it as an instrument of justice.

  Tomás took the hint, and even felt a little sorry for the Englishman. Clarity of purpose was something he had always felt grateful for, even when the cost had seemed so high.

  They resumed their journey, hiking down into the misty valley and up towards another moonlit crest. It was midnight when they reached it, and over half the night’s projected forty kilometres were behind them. Another long slope, this time heavily forested, led them down into another valley, and to another bridge of stones across a rushing river. For some reason the mist was much thinner here, and Razor could see the shapes of buildings looming in front of them.

  Ruined buildings. The façade of a small adobe church was still standing among the weeds, its walls scorched by the fire that had apparently destroyed it. Twenty metres away a jumble of concrete blocks was all that remained of another building.

  ‘What happened here?’ Razor asked, although he had already guessed the answer.

  ‘The Army came,’ Tomás said shortly. ‘See here,’ he added, pointing at the ground in front of the church, where a large number of flower petals had been recently strewn. ‘They are marigolds – the death flower. They have been left here to honour those who were killed.’

  The two men walked on, the ghostly ruins fading behind them. Razor told Tomás about the model village the Army had shown him and Chris in the mountains near Uspantan.

  ‘I know the place,’ Tomás said.

  ‘What happened there?’ Razor asked.

  Tomás told him the story in clipped sentences, as if any extravagance of language would somehow mitigate the crimes which had been committed there. ‘The Army came to the area,’ he began, and Razor could feel the terrible weight of those few words. Groups of soldiers had started coming to the village looking for subversivos, and soon people began to disappear, their mutilated bodies turning up by the side of the road. Eventually the soldiers came in force, truckloads of them, with machine-guns. All the villagers were herded into the space in front of the church, and then the men were crammed into the small village hall, from where they could hear the women being first raped and then shot. After that the only sound for a while was the weeping of the children, and then the soldiers had cut out the little ones’ stomachs one by one, opening the door of the hall so the men could see what was happening. The soldiers screamed that these children were the seeds of future subversivos, and that this was the only way to cleanse the country of such sickness. Then they took out the stunned men and slit their throats. The bodies had all been piled into the well to rot so that no one could live in the village again.

  ‘That is what happened there,’ Tomás said.

  In the silence that followed Razor felt the mist like a cloak of sadness. How could such things happen? How could men behave like that? He remembered the same questions filling his mind in the villages above Zavik, but in Bosnia it had not been difficult for him and the others to justify their participation in the war. After all, the suits in Whitehall had not sent them in to help the Serb irregulars with their ethnic cleansing.

  But hadn’t that just been a matter of luck? If British interests had required victory for the Serbs then there was a good chance he and the others would have ended up fighting alongside them. It occurred to Razor that until now he had never really needed to ask himself the question which Tomás had asked, but that this period of grace was over, and that when he got back to England – he gave a wry smile in the dark – he would need to devote some thought to what exactly it was that he was fighting for.

  For the moment, at least, he had no doubts. He was fighting for his own life and that of his wife. The fact that once again he seemed to be on the side of the angels was just a bonus.

  It was now more than twenty-four hours since Lara had brought Hajrija to the house on the town’s outskirts, and she was beginning to feel the strain of confinement. The old couple who lived there could not have been more welcoming – when she arrived both had embraced her like a long-lost favourite daughter – but their English was even more sparse than Hajrija’s Spanish, and verbal communication was more or less impossible. So far, Lara had not returned.

  On the previous day Hajrija had helped out with the cleaning, finished the small mountain of sewing jobs which had been waiting for the couple’s daughter, and gone to bed early. Since waking up that morning she had spent most of her time pacing to and fro, trying to keep her mind occupied. She had already made up several stories about a big ginger cat named Hoddle that she would one day read to her daughter, and now she was telling the unborn baby about herself and Razor, how they had met, and where they both came from. She was just describing the house in Zavik where she had grown up, when there was a light rap on the door.

  It was Lara. ‘I have news,’ she said. ‘Your husband, he come and fetch you.’

  ‘Not alone!?’

  ‘No, no, he will be lost. One of the compañeros bring him. They hope to be here Monday morning. Before the sun comes.’

  ‘What day is it today?’

  Lara laughed. ‘Saturday, of course.’

  Hajrija felt joy bubbling up inside her at the prospect.

  ‘I go,’ Lara said, getting up. ‘The soldiers are everywhere today, like swarm of hornets.’

  Once the compañera had left Hajrija discovered that her joy had evaporated, and that new anxieties were busy tying a thick knot in her stomach.

  Both men were woken in the late afternoon by the sound of the two Chinooks. They came no nearer than half a kilometre, dark shapes against the deep-blue eastern sky, headed for the towering bulk of the Cuchumatanes.

  Sated with sleep, the two men waited in their covered hide for the light to fade before continuing their journey. T
his time there was chilli with the tortillas, but only water to drink. Razor would have killed for a cup of tea, but lighting a fire would have been akin to signing a suicide note.

  ‘When will we reach Chichi-whatsit?’ he asked.

  ‘Chi-chi-cas-ten-ango,’ Tomás said slowly, as if he was teaching a small child, and then grinned. ‘Tomorrow night, I hope. If things go well we can get your wife out of the town before dawn on the next day.’

  Razor brought a picture of Hajrija to his mind, the water from the shower running down her laughing face, the love in her eyes, and the now familiar wave of panic threatened to engulf him. Think about something else, he told himself. Anything else. ‘So why did you become a soldier?’ he asked Tomás.

  ‘I decided to fight for my people,’ Tomás said simply.

  ‘I understand that. But there are lots of your people who don’t choose to do that. Why did you?’

  ‘Ah, I see what you mean. I suppose most of us in the mountains have just come to a point where we can take no more, where we have no choice but to fight if we wish to consider ourselves human.’

  ‘Are your parents alive?’

  ‘No. The Army killed them both. My father, he was a good man who could not understand what was happening in our village. He just could not believe that the authorities would let things go on the way they were if they knew what was happening.’ Tomás smiled sadly. ‘Of course they knew exactly what was happening, and one day my father did not come home.’ He sighed, and idly drew a circle in the dust.

  ‘My mother understood,’ he said quietly, ‘but she went looking for justice. Not because she expected to find it, but because she wanted others to see that it could not be found in the way things are. At least, that is how I think she worked it out.’ He gave Razor a rueful smile, but there was no disguising the pain in his eyes. ‘She was kidnapped by the Army and raped by many men, and tortured. They cut off her ears and her nose and her breasts and they left her dying on a hillside, with soldiers there to make sure no one could try to lessen her pain.’