by Roma Tearne
‘What?’
The helicopter’s rotor blades whirled closer. It was about to land. The noise was so great that it wasn’t possible to hear anything else and then the boy threw himself on to the ground.
‘They have guns,’ he said, through clenched teeth.
Theo braced himself, shrinking into a corner of the room. But the whirling continued without attack and the searchlights moved in a circular fashion across the trees again.
‘What’s happening?’
‘They look for Gerard,’ the boy whispered from the floor. He began crawling towards the window.
‘Who?’ asked Theo. ‘Who’s looking for him? Who are these people?’
‘The Chief. He wants Gerard. He told the Tigers, Gerard is traitor. He wants find him. All day they are looking for him. They kill him when they find him.’
The boy spoke in a matter-of-fact way now, as though none of this frightened him.
‘But he’s not here,’ Theo said. He was sweating badly. ‘He hasn’t visited today.’
‘I know. He and Chief have big fight. Big fight!’ The boy seemed to be relishing this. ‘Gerard wants finish from Tigers. He tells world. Now, everyone look for him. Tigers, Singhalese, everyone.’
The boy stood up. The searchlights were back, close up, by the house and the helicopter blew a hurricane of air over the trees. Then they heard a different sound and seconds later a truck drew up. The Tamil woman was whimpering quietly. She had moved closer to the boy and was plucking at his arm but he pushed her away roughly and spoke to her in Tamil. Dimly, in spite of his state of shock, Theo realised the boy must be her son. Through the haze of fear and confusion, he saw she was frightened for the boy and he saw for the first time that the boy was very young. All the time he had been guarding the house the woman must have been frightened for his life. All the time she had served Theo his meals, or grinned at Gerard, she had been worried for the boy’s future. And then he thought, in however many months I have been here, I never cared to ask her name. The thought came to him simply, without the complications of grief or the fear of the past months. The boy was crouching by the window and had cocked his gun. The idea that they were about to die fixed itself firmly in Theo’s mind. Again the thought was uncluttered by fear. Outside the rain increased. It fell in small dashes on to the glare of the searchlights. Someone was moving against the darkest parts of the garden. Fleetingly he remembered the girl again. She appeared in his mind unsullied by the moment’s sudden real violence and by its terror. He sensed, rather than saw, a figure inch its way along the corner of the bungalow. Somebody, screened by the creepers, was breathing hard, close by. The sound was very loud and rasping as if whoever it was had been running for a long time. As if they were very frightened. Theo understood the sound, and the feeling that went with it. Next to him, the Tamil woman and the boy stood absolutely still, waiting, listening. Suddenly there was a shout, followed by running footsteps and Gerard appeared briefly in the beam of the headlights. Two men in camouflage uniform were dragging his arms back as the helicopter rose swiftly and disappeared above the trees. Now Theo could see Gerard clearly. At some point in the scuffle he had been blindfolded and his hands tied together. His mouth was working but no sound came out of it. As he watched, Theo saw two men force Gerard to his knees and in the light from the truck he saw one of them pull out a cigarette, smoking it silently and with an air of calm. Then the man threw his half-smoked cigarette away and picked up an axe from the back of the truck. With a swift movement, a wide arc of his arm, he brought the axe down sharply on Gerard’s bowed neck. Once, twice, at the third attempt, Gerard’s head rolled to the ground like a coconut.
Afterwards he had no idea for how long the three of them stood there, rooted to the spot. Silent as the dead, themselves. Luck had entered the arena and saved them. Fate had given them a hand. The men dragged Gerard’s body into the back of the truck. They wrapped his head in a green cloth, as if it were a trophy, and tossed it in. Then they drove off. Not a single shot had been fired. All was darkness once more as the rain continued to fall unnoticed. The old woman began to weep quietly.
‘We must go,’ the boy said at last. In the darkness his face looked unearthly. ‘They will come back. You must leave here. Go!’
Theo stared at him. He was incapable of moving, incapable of speech. His mind and body had seized up as though in rigor mortis.
‘Come,’ the boy urged again, his face calm. ‘I take you to the border. Then we leave. You must go. They might find you here. Just go. Back to your home.’
The old woman nodded. She wiped her eyes and Theo saw, without surprise, that her face too was devoid of expression.
‘Come,’ the boy said again, seeing Theo could not understand. ‘Before they return.’
The old woman began to speak in Tamil.
‘What’s she saying?’ asked Theo. He was terrified.
‘She says we are not normal. We cannot speak in normal voices ever again. Even if the peace comes,’ the boy said, ‘there is no peace for us.’
Together they stepped out into the rain, and hurried away from the house, towards the gate, where a battered jeep was hidden in the undergrowth. The old woman was still muttering and the boy turned to Theo.
‘She says, peace is a jack tree that grows on the blood that has been spilt,’ he said. ‘It is an old Tamil saying.’
All around was an eerie silence. Above was a splattering of stars. The jungle appeared before them in the headlights of the jeep, immense and impenetrable. And as they drove into it, Theo saw that all the time he had been standing at the window, all the time his heart had been tied up with fear, he had been clutching the exercise books in which were the salvaged remains of his life.
Rohan had begun to paint. Giulia was not sure how this happened, but he had found a small warehouse in Dorsoduro and turned it into a studio. His early-morning trips to the Lido had stopped as abruptly as they had begun. And he was working seriously again. Too much time had been lost already, he told Giulia. He didn’t want any more distractions.
‘People will come and go. Only art survives,’ he told her, airily.
Giulia said nothing. In the end even she had been unable to trace the girl. On the day Giulia had seen Rohan laughing with the unknown woman she had rung Sheffield University in search of Jim Mendis. But there she had drawn a blank. Jim Mendis had graduated a year earlier and moved on. He had left no forwarding address. Next, Giulia had tried contacting a fellow student, a contemporary of his. But the student had only known Jim slightly, and had no idea where he could be or if he had a sister. With no other clue there was nothing else Giulia could do. Perhaps, she thought, sadly, Rohan was right, and it was time to give up on this hopeless cause. The girl had been swallowed up by an indifferent world.
‘Time has passed, events have moved on,’ Rohan said briskly, seeing her looking at the notebooks. ‘Put them away, forget about it now.’
Giulia smiled, agreeing, but the smile did not reach her eyes. Although she did not blame him, Rohan’s coldness towards her brought an unbearable loneliness in its wake. She was glad he was painting again; glad to see him so busy. But every night when he returned home exhausted and preoccupied with his work, she looked for signs of other distractions, fearful of what she might see.
Outwardly Rohan appeared happier. He was relieved to be painting at last. He had missed his work. When he stretched his first canvas he hoped he would be able to pick up exactly where he had left off, using the colour grey, painting the large, soft abstracts he once had. But he found this was impossible. Life had taken him to a different place. So instead, he began to paint in dark austere tones. He painted blocks of flats from which light seeped out and formless human presence, ghosts sitting patiently, waiting for or guarding some unseen treasure. He hardly knew what he was doing. The size of his canvases had become smaller too, partly because of the cramped nature of his studio and partly because what he wanted to say was more intimate, more secretive. He had the st
rangest feeling of living in a closed box, from which no light could escape. Loneliness preoccupied him, and the blank empty spaces of loss. The twilight world of the displaced interested him in a way quite different from before, the slow disquiet of the homeless. All that had been familiar and certain vanished from his work. The war was embossed on Rohan’s life like a watermark, visible only under close scrutiny. His palette changed. Ignoring the soft tones of the Adriatic, the blues and the greens, he began to use crimson and pink. He refused to look at other colours. Giulia thought the surfaces of his paintings were like bruised flesh, visceral and close to death. But fearful of Rohan’s sudden bursts of anger, she dared not say anything. She was aware he was drinking too much, but she could not stop this either, and whenever they were alone together he became bad-tempered and argumentative. Dimly aware of his new, unspoken dislike of her, Giulia merely hid her own unhappiness under an air of false cheerfulness, refusing to question it. Privately, she believed, the war in Sri Lanka had become her war too. Sometimes on a busy calle, in broad daylight, she would become lost in a daydream, caught up in some unresolved memory. She would stop walking and stand absolutely still as passers-by stepped around her irritably. I’m no use, she would think, rising from her reverie, scurrying home with pounding heart. And it was at these moments that she saw clearly how her husband’s country had wormed its way under her skin, invading her life, incapacitating her. It had carved out its violence on her too, so although she still loved Rohan, showing this love was gradually becoming a complicated and reluctant thing.
When Rohan had done about a dozen paintings, he told Giulia he had decided to find a gallery to represent him. Venice was a small town filled with tourists and the contemporary art available mostly serviced this industry. It was easier to find a meaningless painting in Venice than not, Rohan complained. Then one day he introduced Giulia to a woman. He had met her in the piazza, he said, where he took his morning coffee. The woman ran a small gallery tucked away behind the Calle del Forno. She represented only Venetian artists, serious artists, but, because he lived here, because his wife was from these parts, the woman told Giulia unsmilingly, she was prepared to take Rohan’s work. They were sitting in his studio sharing a bottle of wine. Giulia had a feeling she had seen the woman somewhere before.
A month later two of Rohan’s paintings sold for a substantial sum of money.
‘I’m so proud of you,’ Giulia said, after that first sale. ‘See, there’s hope.’
She spoke sadly, for she now remembered where she had seen the woman before. Rohan pulled a face. He had banished hope.
Two storks nested on the roof of the beach house. There had never been storks there before. Mother, father and the nest waited patiently for the egg to hatch. Maybe they felt the house was vacant so they felt safer here, or maybe they liked the uninterrupted view with nothing as far as the eye could see. Only Antarctica lay beyond the ocean. The seagulls left them alone; they were too big to be argued with. Inside the house all was quiet but not empty. Inside the house was a life, of sorts. There were small signs, small stirrings of living, ebbing and flowing feebly. For inside the house was Theo Samarajeeva. He was home at last. It had taken almost four years but he was back. He had been back for some time, days, months. Time did not matter much, he had no train to catch, no appointment to keep. Mostly he slept on a bed, the bed; it had belonged to him once long ago. It was his again. And he was back now and sleeping on it, all day and all night, hardly ever getting up. There was no one to recognise him and no one to care. There wasn’t a soul around, just the storks. Soon the egg hatched and the baby stork breathed fresh sea air. It breathed the same air as Theo. Neither of them cared much if the air was free. They both just breathed it.
Had Sugi been there he would have told Theo it was good luck to have storks nesting on the roof. Sugi would have seen it as an omen. He would have cleaned the house and polished the floor with coconut scrapings, and made Sir some milk tea, bringing it out to the veranda on a silver tray. He would have fixed the doors and shutters that hung limply on their broken hinges, and then he would have picked up the stone lions that had crashed to the ground. But Sugi wasn’t there. And the house, neglected and vandalised, remained uncared for.
On that first day of his return, Theo waited for Sugi. He had been patient for nearly four years, another day or so made no difference. Sugi would be back soon, he was certain. The girl, he hoped, was somewhere safe, waiting for news of him. He was too nervous to try the lights on that first night; he simply waited. When Sugi did not appear the next day or the next or even the day after that, he began to stumble around the house, dragging his lame leg against what furniture remained. He opened the tins of food in the larder, which by some miracle had not been stolen, and when he could no longer stop shaking he tried to eat a little. But his throat had closed up to food. Only the bottles of whisky, hidden away with a few documents inside the covered-over garden well, held his interest. And this was how Thercy found him.
Thercy still lived in the town. She was no longer the person she once was, and the town, too, had changed. With new developments further up the coast most of those who lived here now were newcomers, indifferent to its history. Four years and two assassinated prime ministers had altered the way the war was fought. Loyalties had changed, and changed again. Blood had cooled. Four years had buried the past. Only the ghosts stayed on. Thercy was like a ghost, she had meant to leave long ago, but apathy had stopped her. She had aged, walking up the hill wasn’t easy any more, but when she saw a light in the beach house something stirred within her. Something she had never thought to feel again. Thinking of her dead friend, panting, she walked slowly towards the house.
‘Aiyo!’ she said. ‘Mr Samarajeeva!’ and then she stopped, unable to go on.
She had recognised him, but only just. Theo looked back at her. He was frightened. The woman stood in the doorway, blocking his escape.
‘I was Sugi’s friend,’ Thercy said, barely above a whisper, staring at this remnant of a man. Mr Samarajeeva looked like a ghost. ‘What has happened to you?’
‘Sugi? Where has he gone? Tell him, I’m home.’
‘Aiyo!’ said Thercy softly. ‘Sugi is gone, my Sir. He’s dead.’
It was the word ‘Sir’ that Theo heard first. And it was the first notch of his undoing.
‘Nulani,’ he said. ‘Nulani Mendis…’
‘I…don’t know, Sir. Maybe she’s…’ and Thercy caught his crumpled body as he fell.
Later, she cleaned the house for him and made some mulligatawny chicken soup. Later, when he was less frightened, she talked some more. Soothingly, as though he was her child.
‘Nulani’s uncle has gone,’ she said. ‘The people who bought the house have divided it up. There are two families who share the garden now.’
It seemed that the lane down which Theo had driven, on that carefree distant night, was almost unrecognisable. Someone had cleared the path of all but memories. The Mendis family might as well not have existed. Other things, Thercy told him, had changed too. The convent school and the boys’ school, having joined forces under new staff, had moved up the coast. Nothing remained of its former self. New schoolchildren took the bus to school now. Young girls in faded skirts and with ribbons in their hair walked chattering down the road.
‘And the traffic island, Sir,’ Thercy said, ‘d’you remember, Miss Nulani used to say it was her father’s headstone? Well, that has gone too.’ Even the hospital, she told Theo, had been relocated to another place. Theo listened. He hardly responded, but he watched her as she served his broth, and swept the floor, and collected the empty arrack bottles. Then she told him she would be back tomorrow with some food.
Thercy came every day, after that. She came with rice, and with dhal and with string-hopper pancakes. She made more mulligatawny soup, and she asked Theo if there was anything else she could buy for him. She went to the bank at his request and drew out the money he wanted. She told him, no one had been in the l
east interested in his name. And all the while she talked to him, telling him about the changes in the town.
‘Sumaner House is changed, Sir,’ she told Theo one day. ‘The owner had it boarded up and now it’s waiting to be sold. I never liked it much, although when the orphan was there at least it was a good job. Plenty of money for me, then. But after the boy disappeared, his guardian saw no point in returning to our useless island. Why should he, when work was plentiful elsewhere? He gave me a pension and I now live in Bazaar Street, behind the railway station.’
Thercy talked determinedly on. She hid her shock, having quickly got accustomed to the frailness of this man, and did whatever she could to help him. Besides, she felt he was getting stronger daily. Every time she visited, she thought of another little snippet of information. To waken his interest in life.
‘D’you remember the gem store, Sir?’ she asked him one morning. ‘It used to be so popular with tourists. One night, about a year ago, the police came without warning, raided it, and shut it up for good.’ She raised her hands heavenwards, shrugging. ‘There were stories about what had gone on in there for a while, terrible rumours about the man who owned it. But so many things have happened in this wretched town that one more story means nothing. No one is surprised for long.’
She was silent, not wanting to say more, aware of Theo’s unspoken desire to know how Sugi had died.
At night, because there was no longer a curfew, when he was alone, Theo would walk for hours on the beach, listening to the sea. Then, the depression he had held in check all day descended. In his headlong flight, chasing his freedom to the coast, snatching at its tail feathers, touching but never quite catching it, he had not thought about the future. After the Tamil boy dropped him at the border, he had simply headed for the sea, the sound of it, the smell of it. His heart had yearned for the girl; his arms had ached with the need to hold her. But now all he had was a pair of broken straw sandals and a notebook lying open with all its stories gone. The wind had whisked them away; the rain had washed them out. Time had rendered them useless, making them old stories from long ago. It dawned on him that recovery would not be easy, maybe even that these stories were unrecoverable. At moments like this, despair grew like sea cacti, piercing his heart. He stared at the sea; it was a blank canvas of nothingness. It moved with the richness of silk but, he felt, underneath it was cruel. Often at night, after Thercy left, reality rocked against the walls of the beach house, and at these times, Theo discovered forbidden thoughts. They rotted like fruit beside his silent typewriter where once his manuscript had been. Then, staring at the undulating phosphorescent water, he understood at last that freedom was a double-edged thing, which, like innocence once lost, was unrecoverable.