by Roma Tearne
Giulia listened to Rohan’s breathing. Since Nulani had left he had not rested but now she hoped he was asleep. The doctor had told him it was too soon to visit the beach house.
‘Wait a little,’ he had said. ‘I’ll be able to find out more from a reliable source soon,’ he had said. ‘Be patient. It might be dangerous if you go now.’
Giulia was frightened. She was frightened for Rohan. She couldn’t believe Theo was still alive. People didn’t survive disappearances in this place. It was well known. The army came for them in the night, and then they vanished. Years later, having waited in vain, having finally given up all hope, the relatives received news. Years later the clothes of the missing were sent back. A bundle of torn and bloodied cloth, a pair of shoes with soles hardly worn, a wallet with a photograph in it was all the word they had of an unmarked death. It had happened so many times. Nobody said anything any more, no one dared. Giulia felt grief, suppressed and lead-weighted as a curtain, held back until now for Nulani’s sake, beginning to break. Theo had been their closest friend. And now she had another secret worry. Supposing something were to happen to Rohan, too? It was selfish of her, she knew, but she was paralysed by fear. I want to leave this place, she thought. I hate it here. She knew Rohan was still too angry, too hopeful of finding Theo to have planned much beyond this point. When the enormity of what had happened really hit him his reactions would be unpredictable. She was frightened of this and also of her treacherous, selfish thoughts. She wanted to go back to Italy. The idea having taken hold of her ate away, unnoticed. Like acid on one of Rohan’s etching plates, it corroded her days. Was it so wrong that she wanted them to survive?
Since Nulani had left, Giulia had slept badly, waking in the small hours of the morning thinking of the girl flying thirty-four thousand feet above the Italian Alps, dry-eyed, bewildered and alone. Imagining her watching Europe unfold, passing over Lake Geneva, the vastness of France, Paris, the English Channel, and then across the Thames estuary, following the tailwind to line up towards London’s Heathrow. What sense could Nulani possibly make of any of it? What sense was there to be made, catapulted as she had been from one life to another? I can’t stand any more, thought Giulia. She was reaching breaking point, she knew, despair was closing around her, walling her in. All I want is to go home.
Rohan, lying awake beside her, facing the wall, remained silent, grappling with thoughts of his own.
Towards late afternoon the convoy of jeeps began to slow down. The sun had moved and the light filtering through the slats was muted. As the trees thinned out, patches of sky became visible. Theo guessed it must be about four o’clock. Hunger gnawed at him and his arms ached from being tied behind his back. Finally, after another hour, they came to a standstill. The driver opened the back of the jeep and placed a black hood roughly over his head. Immediately Theo felt he was suffocating. He began to pant. As he shuffled forward he smelt the sweat of the fabric. He was still struggling with the nausea that enveloped him, when an unexpected slap sent him reeling. He felt his right eye open up. For some reason he had thought he was standing on the edge of some stairs and feared he would fall, but instead he hit a wall. He felt a warm stickiness gluing the hood against his face. In the distance he could hear the muffled sound of crying.
When he came to, he was sitting on the floor. Someone was talking to him. It was a man’s voice but for a moment Theo did not understand which language it was. His thinking seemed to have completely slowed down and he asked for some water in English. The words continued, pleasantly questioning. He struggled to understand. The voice dropped to almost a whisper.
‘Tiger Lily?’ asked the Singhalese voice, pleasantly. ‘A good name for a book, ah?’ The man laughed easily. ‘You must sign my copy when you can.’
Theo tried to speak but his lips would not move properly.
‘I understand,’ said the man soothingly. ‘It’s a great pity of course, because you write so well.’
The voice went on repeating something, over and over again, and dimly he knew the word being used was ‘traitor’. But he still had no idea which language he was being addressed in. He asked in English for some water again, and again a hand slapped him across the face. Sharp pains shot across his lips. He was pulled up by his arm and handcuffed to a hook high above his head. He felt as though his arm was being pulled out of its socket and this time he knew that the screaming came from deep within him. Then he passed out again.
When he regained consciousness he was in a cell with a number of others. It was dark, apart from a sickly neon light that seeped in from the outside. The air was thick with the humidity made worse by the overcrowding; it was fetid with the smell of the overflowing hole in the ground that was the only latrine. In that moment, in the fading light, surrounded by the curious stares of his fellow prisoners, he knew with chilling certainty that he had entered a dark and terrible place where an ineluctable and malevolent fate had swallowed him whole. Survival of this nightmare depended solely on his ability to keep his mind clear. Nothing else remained except his faltering sanity. How long he would keep it depended only on his instincts. And luck. But luck, he saw with slow realisation, was in short supply.
Sleep was impossible in the cramped painful position he was in. Towards dawn the guard unlocked the door and called out the name of four prisoners. When they had left, the others reshuffled in the space, squatting or leaning against the wall or each other. The fraction of extra room brought a false atmosphere of optimism. The opening of the door had let in a small rush of fresh air and breathing was marginally easier for a brief moment. Daylight arrived unnoticed. A heavy-jawed, thickset man of about thirty stared at Theo.
‘Are you Burgher?’
Theo shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. His voice was barely above a whisper. He no longer recognised it as his own. ‘I’m Singhalese.’
‘Don’t say anything,’ someone cried warningly from the back of the cell. ‘They are all bloody spies here. Don’t tell anyone anything.’
For the first time he became aware of the number of people packed into the small cell. A very old man in a dirty sarong and bare feet, head bowed silently, stared at the ground. Two Tamil men with broken noses were looking curiously at him. After a while they introduced themselves. They were brothers, they said. Theo stared blankly. He had no idea what they were saying.
‘We were at the medical school in Colombo,’ one of them said. ‘But new laws forced us to leave just as we were about to be qualified, you know.’
There had been medics in their family for generations, they told Theo. Their father and their grandfather before them had been surgeons. ‘Our younger sister managed to escape to England. She’s training to become a doctor there,’ they said.
One day, someone had approached them with a view to recruit them to the Tigers, they told Theo. They had refused but after that their house had been watched. Then the Singhalese army arrived with a warrant for their arrest.
‘They said we were Tamil spies.’
Their mother had watched as her sons were taken away. They had been here for three months now. The beatings had stopped after a while and they were optimistic that their release would come soon.
Theo stared without responding. Nothing in this conversation made any sense. Nothing of what was happening seemed real. Sweat poured from his face.
‘Let me look at your eye,’ said one of the brothers.
‘He’s our own house doctor,’ chuckled the old man, rousing himself suddenly, grinning at Theo. ‘Go on, let him, men. He knows what he’s talking about!’
The medical students looked uncertainly at Theo, then one of them shuffled towards him and peered at his eye.
‘You’re in shock,’ he said quietly. ‘Everyone arrives like this. But don’t worry about the eye. It will heal naturally. I promise you. I won’t touch it,’ he added, ‘in case I hurt you.’
Someone, a small, bald-headed man standing in the far corner by the latrine, hooted with manic laughter. ‘It�
��ll heal so long as you don’t get beaten again!’
Still Theo said nothing.
‘I’ve seen your photo in the papers,’ continued the student.
His voice was gentle. ‘Are you a politician?’
‘I know who he is,’ the man by the latrine cried. ‘You’re that novelist fellow, aren’t you? Didn’t you write a book about the war, huh?’
‘Leave him,’ the student said. ‘He’ll tell you when he’s ready.’
At that the others in the cell lost interest. Only the man by the latrine kept grumbling. He had been arrested for reasons he did not understand, he said. That was nearly a year ago. He was still waiting for a trial. Each time he asked about his case, he got nowhere.
‘I keep asking them when I will be released but of course they’re only guards. How do they know?’ But at least, he admitted, he had never been beaten.
‘It is because you’re a Singhalese, men. You are one of them,’ said the student.
‘No, no,’ the man disagreed, chuckling as though the thought amused him. ‘That’s the last thing I am.’
11
THEO SAMARAJEEVA REMAINED IN THE SAME cell for nearly fourteen months. Apart from the overcrowding, the complete lack of privacy and the stench of the latrine, the main peril was utter boredom. Nothing changed. Day after endless day passed in interminable monotony. Time stood still. He could barely eat. The foul odours of sweat and filth, and the cramped conditions made the very act of eating repugnant. A few prisoners were removed; others arrived. Several contracted dysentery, and with the return of the mosquitoes there was a constant fear of fever. Most of the inmates soon had faces covered with bites and at night, often the worst time of all, the groaning and cursing were combined with the sound of frantic scratching. The medical students begged the guards for clean water so at least they could wash their hands, but any water they were allowed was for both drinking and washing in. Next the students tried to organise a rota, asking everyone to drink first from the bucket before washing, but inevitably this did not work either. Added to this, the tension and the inactivity caused arguments to erupt suddenly and with ferocious unpredictability, turning, occasionally, from verbal attacks to full-scale fights. When this happened a guard would simply unlock the cell door, drag out whoever was nearest and beat him relentlessly. Once or twice an innocent bystander was reduced to a bloodied pulp before being thrown into solitary confinement.
As far as they were able, the Tamil brothers, the medics, tried to prevent these incidents. But without any outlet to their frustrations this, too, was not easy. Yet in spite of this they remained optimistic, full of stories of their life before the arrest and of their younger sister in England. When she had been a little girl, they said, she had wanted to train as a Kandyan dancer. But then one day she had seen a man soaked in kerosene and left to burn in a ditch. It was the end of her dancing days. From then on she had wanted only to study medicine. She had wanted to save the lives that others tried to destroy, she had told her parents. The whole family had been amazed but she had never wavered in this decision. For the sounds of a man’s screams, her brothers told their cell audience, could not be erased so easily. She had been thirteen at the time. Now she was almost twenty.
‘When the war is over she will come back and marry her childhood sweetheart.’
The war could not last for ever, the brothers said. They could not be left in this place indefinitely. Soon, all of them would be released.
‘We have only to be patient,’ they said. ‘There is talk of peace negotiations, and there will be the general election in the new year. However long it takes, men, things can’t stay this way for ever.’
In the beginning Theo did not join in any of these conversations. His shock and sense of disorientation were so great he barely registered what was going on. All his anger had been wiped out, crushed by agonising anxiety for the girl’s safety. The intensity, and the violence of his recent experiences, had sapped him of his usual optimism. His fearlessness seemed a thing of the past. He no longer recognised himself. Having become a prisoner, he began to behave as though he had been one for ever. The conditions in the cell were so appalling that survival was all he had energy for. Paralysed by his situation, terrified by what might happen next, he was unable to go beyond the one, unanswered question of why he was here. Added to this was the sense of being on a roller-coaster. He was trapped in a nightmare from which there appeared no possible escape. At night endless shadows flickered across the cell wall and the shrill cries of monkeys from some distance outside confused him further, making him shake convulsively.
After the brutality of the first hours and days following his arrival, he had lost track of how long they had beaten him. The guards ignored him, and he was too cowed, too grateful at being left alone, that he could not bring himself to ask them for any explanation. The everyday had receded to a point out of sight. In fact, he had stopped thinking in days for at any moment he expected to be hauled out and beaten again. By now, his capacity to respond had slowed down, made worse by the fact that his glasses had been broken. He could no longer focus on anything any more.
During all this time, the heat did not let up. And at night, when it cooled slightly, Theo began to experience blinding headaches. But he felt safer at night, more private, less exposed. There were fewer sounds to startle him so that in the darkness he began, fearfully and at last, to piece together his thoughts about the girl. What had his disappearance done to her? Where was she; what was she thinking now? What could she think, except that he was dead? Sugi would by now believe he was dead. Sugi would have heard what had happened and assumed the worst. Theo was tormented by these thoughts. The agony of not knowing what the girl would have done when she woke continued to haunt him. Had she slept at all since he left her? Was she at this very moment searching for him? Was she too in danger? And then he thought, I am to blame, this is all my fault. Nothing could take away his guilt. Questions chased around his head, refusing to be stilled. He imagined her waking, bewildered, then slowly becoming distraught. He imagined her running across the beach, staring at the sea; not knowing what she should do next. And he thought with sickness of how he had left her, sleeping, peacefully, bathed in moonlight, believing that at last she was safe. Fear twisted in him like a sand worm burrowing in the ground. Fear washed him like a wave on a shell. It broke against the brittle spine of his sanity. His only hope was that Sugi had taken her to Colombo. But what if in the panic he had forgotten the documents or the money? What then? There had been a passport. It was forged; if Sugi had been found with it on his person then he would go to prison. Briefly Theo was struck by the irony of this. The passport had only been a last resort. Oh God, he thought, what is happening to them? And then, the one terrible thought he had been avoiding all this time, unleashed at last, broke free and devoured him. Will I ever see her again?
Every night the questions marched towards him, relentless as an army of soldiers, drumming against his head, leaving him with no respite. During the day he managed somehow to block all thoughts of the girl, but then as darkness fell, in the stifling air, he conjured her up like a magician, and walked an imaginary beach with her. In this way he both sustained and punished himself every night. And at these moments, under cover of the unlit cell, he broke down soundlessly. He thought he was silent. One night, as he was beginning his slow agonising discourse, he felt a hand on his shoulder.
‘Why don’t you talk to us?’ a voice asked.
Theo froze.
‘We’re all the same, men, in this wretched place. Why are you so proud? Everyone understands, there’s no shame in what you feel, you know.’
In the darkness Theo felt a hand, roughened and sandpapery, move across his face.
‘I’ve read your book,’ the voice continued. ‘The one they say has been made into a film. You’re a courageous man.’
Caught unawares, Theo shook his head. He felt himself unravel swiftly, sliding out like a thread from a piece of cloth. Silently, h
e shook with sobs. Something small and hard and bitter, deep within him, dissolved. The others in the cell moved uneasily.
Soon after this they began to speak to him, and for the first time Theo understood they were addressing him in Singhalese. The medical students too shuffled over and began asking him about his film. Was it like the book? Where was it shot? Who acted in it? Were they Sri Lankan actors? Would it ever be shown in this country?
They sensed he both was, and was not, one of them. So they turned, all together, standing close to him, like weary cattle waiting for a storm to break, nudging him with their hot breath, giving him comfort in the only way left to them. After a while, unasked, he began to talk a little about his life. The very act of speech ignited some hope.
‘My wife,’ he said, ‘was Italian.’
He saw it suddenly, as though it were a thousand years ago. Anna, and the watery city. Italy was a puzzle to them, further maybe than the moon. Italy had no history to offer them, no tradition, either good or bad. But England was another matter. England interested them. So he talked about London instead. In the darkness he talked of the greyness and the poverty of the big city. He told them that it was possible to find warmth in spite of the cold but that you had to hunt for it and some luck was always necessary.
‘It is not luck,’ said the old man who had first spoken to him. ‘It’s just a person’s karma.’
He talked of his novels.
‘Writing them was easy. Once I started I realised I had many things inside me that needed to be said. In fact, later on,’ he added, slowly, ‘when things were bad, writing was easier than living.’
Old memories stirred in him and he remembered with unforgiving clarity all that had happened. An animal, he said, he had been like an animal, howling for its dead. Then, because he had started, and also because the night made these things possible, hesitantly, he told them how Anna had died.
‘There was no warning,’ he said. ‘She was walking home on an ordinary winter’s night. It was not very dark; she had been working late. She often worked late. I had cooked a meal, nothing much. Pasta, tomato sauce, cheese. That’s all. I turned the lights on and waited. But she never came.’