by Damon Galgut
A few minutes later a policeman came into the office. There was a threadbare place in the carpet which other feet had worn down and the policeman stood here too. ‘Captain – ’ he said.
Captain Mong didn’t look up. ‘Can nobody feed the fucking fish,’ he said. ‘It’s only been three days.’
‘Captain, they’ve got him. We’ve just heard. In the town.’
Now he did look up, eyes brilliant and steady. ‘Got who?’
‘The prisoner, Captain.’
He dropped his eyes again. ‘The prisoner,’ he said. He looked tired.
‘They’ve got him down at the café in the main road.’
‘Ja,’ he said. ‘Ja.’
‘Are we going to get him, Captain? Or must we –’
‘Ja,’ he said again. ‘Ja.’
The strips of light coming in through the blinds were diminishing steadily in power.
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‘The darkest place in the world.’
‘Here?’
‘On this side. On the other side it’s night.’
‘Here?’
‘When?’
‘Now. The light’s going already, you can see.’
‘I can’t see.’
‘Look.’
‘I can see.’
‘Look!’
‘Is it him?’
‘What?’
‘It is. Look at him. It is.’
‘Where?’
‘There. What’s the matter with him?’
‘Who? Who? Who?’
‘It’s him.’
‘What’s the matter with him?’
‘Let’s get him.’
‘With what? What with?’
‘With this.’
‘And this.’
‘Let’s get him.’
‘Yes.’
‘Come.’
‘Yes.’
41
Valentine woke alone in the box-car with a regular metallic gonging sounding in his ears from somewhere. He drank down a bottle of the bright yellow cooldrink and pocketed another for later. He climbed down out of the car. There was a man a little distance away who was bent down at the wheels of the engine and striking at them with a hammer. Valentine went past the mad musician and on. The siding was in an empty lot that was rank and thick with weeds and he walked across several rows of tracks that crossed each other crazily like ladders piled up and went through a hole in the fence. There was a flat marsh in front of him and beyond it a town sketched thinly on the sky. He went towards the town.
There were weeds with plumed tips like brushes but the sky had no colour in it. He came out of the marsh into the street. It was a town like the town he had lived in but also like no town he’d seen. The light that came down was diffused and spectral and the outlines of buildings unclear. The air was still and dead and hot as if in the aftermath of lightning.
There was something in Valentine that was altered. He carried his head like a beaker filled with water and indeed his eyes were liquid and centreless. He came slowly down the pavement with his exaggerated gait and when he came to the corner opposite the café he stopped. He stood there on the corner, shaking his head and looking around.
He had been there for three or four minutes when the people came out of the café. There were four men and two women and they advanced on him in a phalanx. One of them was carrying a crowbar and one of them had a stick. He thought that one other had a gun. He watched their progress with interest. They came over the street and up on to the pavement towards him. They moved with purpose and they encircled him and took hold of him with their hands. They were speaking harshly to him though their voices seemed wordless and their faces were hard with their thoughts. He went with them across the street to the café and the light was greatly lessened by now.
42
He walked away from the white church down a side-street but there were people a little way ahead on the pavement and he turned again and went back. He went down another street. He went only a little way before he sat down abruptly on the kerb and bowed his head suddenly into his hands.
He sat there quite still for a minute and then he stood up again and walked with intent. He went round the side of the white church. The road to the township ran on level and straight with grass on either side.
He walked to the west of the road to avoid people travelling on it. He went north towards the township. In the dead place where the circus tent had been there was a family sitting in deck-chairs around a blanket. The mother looked curiously at him with a black ring around her eye from the burnt glass she was holding. He went past. As he came closer to the township he walked more warily till on the outskirts he paused. There was a boy in the road throwing a tennis ball up and catching it. He called the boy over to him. They spoke briefly. He asked the boy if he knew the woman and the boy said that he did. He asked him to call her. The boy said that he would and he fumbled through his pockets for payment but he didn’t own anything to give. In the end he held out one of the bottles of cooldrink and the boy took it and walked away between the houses.
He waited for fifteen minutes before he knew the boy wasn’t returning. He sat down again where he was to consider. He spoke a few words softly to himself. Then he got up again and walked in the direction that the boy had gone in, walking between the houses, going slowly. The light had thickened greatly by now.
He came to the edge of the plaza midway between the police-station and the house. He looked at the police-station but the sandbags and the hanging flag were static and he could see nobody outside. He looked the other way to the church. The church was gone. He looked at the rubble strewn and blackened and the single charred wall with its irregular edge and the footprints crossing hither and thither. He looked for a long time and then he raised one hand to the side of his head and dropped it.
He looked at the house. It was closed. The door and the window were closed and in the room that he’d slept in the curtains were drawn. There was an acre of concrete between him and the house and he looked at the police-station and at the house again but there was nobody outside either.
Then a hand pulled at his shirt. He turned. It was a woman. There was another woman with her. They began to remonstrate with him in a language different to his and the first woman kept pulling at his shirt. He stared at them without comprehending. Then one of them gestured to the church and he understood that they were two of the faithful.
He took a step back. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’
They continued to talk. He sensed a hunger in them but he didn’t know what it was. He moved away from them. He went back down between the houses to the grass and walked across the grass to the road. There was another figure coming down the road from the township and when they saw one another both stopped. They stood very still in the unnatural dusk and looked at each other in the road.
43
they herded him into a corner of the shop between shelves of tins and magazines piled up and fridges humming, they leered at him, they shouted, one of them prodded him with a stick. a crowbar. one of the others was using a telephone. their voices chafed around him. he found a clear place on the floor and sat down. on the shelf that was level with his head there was a box of biscuits and he opened it, hands shaking. inside were lurid rectangles of pink blue white with animal shapes stamped out in icing on them and he ate three before he was seen.
then he was beaten. by a woman. her face was transfigured with a fury of which he was not the real object and she lashed at him with the stick while screaming out vile imprecations as if the biscuits were unspeakably priceless. every blow that landed made dust squirt out of him in jets. he tried to shield himself at first but the blows were distant and unreal. the stick broke. the top of it spun away into a corner and the woman bounded fiendishly behind it.
he leaned on one of the shelves to get up and it broke. tins and newspapers slid and splashed to the floor and he walked backwards from the gathering chaos. horrified. he went to the door. when he got there he
started to vomit. pinkwhiteblue coming out of him in spurts like the ghastly essence of himself. he staggered out in the crimson twilight and started to go down the road.
then the voices rose baying like a mad chorus and they were running behind him in a thicket of flesh, many-armed multi-eyed ravenous
44
He turned away from the policeman and started to run down the road towards the town. The policeman started running behind him. They went very quickly down the level straight road with the light ebbing steadily around them. Even the birds had gone silent
45
and clutching and dragging and pulling at him he broke free of them and ran up the main street between the solemn assembly of watchers sitting in their chairs lying on their backs standing their telescopes and cameras and fragments of coloured glass pressed to their eyes and the light was the light of some other planet with a dwarf star for a sun cooling slowly to an ember whole continents and seas below sealed up in ice preserved in the layered gloom that might have emanated from him he ran in all the thick hot stillness he was the only point of motion of frenzy
46
He ran past the white church and on. He ran down a road that joined another road that went into the main street. He ran down the middle of the street. It was almost full dark by now but the windows at the edge of the street were lit and silhouetted against them were the outlines of people squatting or lying or crouching in postures that seemed to betoken something but what. It felt that his whole life had been expended in motion, had consisted of no substance but flight
47
The policeman ran behind in his befouled and bespattered uniform and his pristine white bandages and the ruined cassock overall and while he ran he tried to pull his gun from the holster with one bullet left in it to fire
48
And ahead of him in the street he saw somebody running towards him. He couldn’t slow down or change direction so he continued to run as he was. Very straight, very fast. The other man was to one side of him, to the right, and they passed each other in the weird red dusk, both of them running at speed. If they knew each other it wasn’t spoken. He ran on and to his right there passed a collection of people in pursuit of the other man running. He saw their faces demented and yearning for blood and one of them clutched at him and then he was past. He ran on down the road. He passed the lighted window of the café on one side with shelves of goods visible behind it and then a butchery and a hair salon and then there was a darkness ahead from which came the susurration of the sea. There was a metal boom across the road. He started veering to go around the boom. When the shot came he didn’t hear it entirely, just the first edge of the report that seemed to slice off suddenly in the air and in the silence on the far side of it he was falling as if through measureless space.
The metal boom hit his cheek. Then the ground. He lay there in the road with his face pressed down to the tar and with his last strength remaining pushed down with his hands. Rolled over. He saw the sky with stars burning in it and the policeman’s head outlined against them. The sun was a dark disc punched out on the sky with one fiery rim still protruding and then it went out
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the darkness was sudden and complete and it came as he drew opposite a house there was a low fence a gate he went in through the gate there was a dustbin and he crouched down beside it on the far side of the fence in some other world altogether he heard the cries and footfalls of pursuit grow louder and then diminish and taper he moved still at a low crouch from the dustbin down the length of the wall he went down the side of the house like a blind man reading braille with his fingers there was a wall here another gate he went through and on through another garden another street and on
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‘He’s gone.’
‘I thought I saw –’
‘No, he’s gone.’
‘Somebody ran the other way.’
‘Was it him?’
‘Look everywhere. Look more. Look, look.’
‘He’s gone.’
‘What about that other one running?’
‘That was somebody else.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘How do you know?’
51
The body lay in the road next to the metal boom for less than five minutes in all. Then somebody brought a stretcher. They loaded it on to the stretcher with its face looking up and hands hanging loose at its sides. There wasn’t a lot of blood. Somebody else brought a blanket and they threw it over the body and two youths were conscripted to carry it. The little cortège went slowly down the street, Captain Mong limping ahead. Along the sides of the road the spectators gathered to watch and it was as if somebody important was gone and they had come to pay homage. The procession went all the way up the main street and through two side roads past the church. On along the road to the township. They moved very slowly and the sun came back quickly and by the time they reached the plaza it was light.
52
She came out of the house with her suitcase in her hand. She was wearing jeans and a shirt. She put the suitcase down for a moment. She closed the door behind her and stood with her hands on her hips, looking around. The plaza. The sandbags. The blackened foundations with the part of one wall left standing. There was a boy playing with a tennis ball in the rubble, throwing it up and catching it. When he saw her he stopped and watched her. After a moment he came over.
‘There was another uncle,’ he said. ‘He was looking for you.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Today?’
‘No,’ the boy said. ‘I think it was another day.’
She looked through her pockets for money and took out a coin. She gave it to him. He walked away holding it. She watched the tiny figure diminish till distance had consumed it entirely. There were other children playing and they stood up with ashened faces and looked at her. She picked up the suitcase and walked stiffly away over the plaza. The sound of her feet on the concrete became softer and softer and then she came to the edge of the plaza and her feet made no sound at all. She disappeared between buildings, walking fast.
53
In the cell at the edge of the plaza Small lay on the bed on his back. He had been lying in this position for some hours now, hands clasped on his stomach and the heels of his feet placed together. He was looking up at the ceiling.
In the ceiling he could see a face that had been made by water long ago. It was indistinct and distorted but he could see in it the places for eyes nose and mouth and he had projected a nature upon it. He stared intently at the face. He didn’t move at all except to breathe. It was hot in the cell but as the afternoon went by it became gradually cooler and the sunlight that slanted in moved from the bed to the wall.
He had written his name on the wall.
Then the sun faded and it started to get dark and he couldn’t see the face any more. Still he lay there on the bed, not moving. The electric light came on overhead and he shifted his position abruptly. He crossed one leg over the other leg and placed his hands at his sides. Valentine. Where are you Valentine.
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He was walking at the edge of a tar road that ran like a stripe from horizon to horizon. The land was flat. The road went south across the flat land. He came along walking slowly, dragging his feet, and every now and then he would stop completely and stand there looking around. Then he started walking again.
Later when he heard a car behind him he moved off the road into the grass and crouched down till the car had gone past. When he stood up again he was holding a broken parasol that he’d found in the grass. He walked out into the road with it, turning it round in his hands, looking at it.
It was buckled and tattered but it opened and he held it over him and walked in its shadow. He held it in his left hand because the right still hurt from the fire. The cloth had come off and the blister was weeping in the centre of his palm like a religious marking of some kind. He himself looked crazed and messianic in his rags and his filth and his hair. He had only been on the r
oad for three days but already he had taken into himself some of its logic, its lore. His sole destination was motion. He was thinner and stronger than he had used to be. There was a certain look in his eye.
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He was buried in an unmarked grave in the corner of the graveyard next to the body of the minister. There was no service and nobody came to mourn. The coffin was a plain pine box and it was delivered to the cemetery in the morning by two policemen in a van. They carried it, cursing and slipping, to where the grave had been dug. They lowered the coffin on ropes and pulled the ropes out of the hole and went.
Then the gravedigger called Jonas got up from the flat rock where he’d been sitting and started to fill in the hole. He had been doing this job for thirty-seven years with unvarying punctiliousness and diligence. The graves were all the same depth and took the same time to dig and to fill. When he had finished he beat the earth flat with the back of the spade and propped up the spade against a tree. He went back to the flat rock and sat. He took tobacco out of his overall pocket and rolled a cigarette for himself. He was in the warm sunlight, smoking, looking out on the little crosses in the ground.