“We’ve all heard the line ‘A little child’ll lead them’? The question is whether those of us old enough to remember have the courage to follow. This is . . .”
Kraft camped out that night in the roofless sala, all the shelter he wanted. He sat toying with a giant chalk protractor, convenient tool for projecting Euclidean circles into the arcless bush. The whole project felt suddenly cruel—laying this foundation, then retreating to the City of Angels without supplying the one thing needed to touch off the genesis: a teacher. He rummaged through the boxes of supplies looking for a fuse, but only came up with a stack of fraction-wedged pie pans, a thick-mounted jigsaw of the world (“Mideast,” “Southeast Asia,” each a single cartoon balloon, for easy assembly), and a softball-sized heart with cutaway flaps that he clapped together like the slack jaw of a ventriloquist’s dummy.
A shuffle announced the arrival, in the dark, of a few other ad hoc Security Councillors. Jien, Bandele—he couldn’t make them out. “They’re looking for you, buster,” someone who sounded like Eleni Katzourakis said. “The adults. Headmaster. Herr Springer.”
Figures spread around the unfinished room, squeezing into the matrix of desks that had been shoved to the side to avoid construction damage. “Hey, Kraft.” That was Farouk. “That little speech of yours . . .” He gave a half-whistle of admiration and disbelief.
“Yeah,” a Janie shape and an Elaine voice said together. Then, again stereo: “Jinx!” As if it were easy, here in the unfinished dark, to pretend still to immaturity.
Gopal chuckled. “Not bad for a liberal lackey.”
Whatever other votes of confidence the delegation had come to give him were drowned by the arrival of Lok, leading a pack of rabble who had managed to slip out of restraints under cover of darkness. The townies burst in, rollicking but stealthy, a sampler of deficiencies whose only revenge was a know-no-better amusement.
Lok tore over to Kraft, spitting in hill dialect delight, “Hey, do that again!” That bit of extended sass, mouthing off to the pod of helicopters that had come bringing nothing at all, not cigarettes, not opiates, not candy.
Nam Chai’s future proceeded to parade about the room, rooting through the forbidden containers and demanding an explanation for every arcane item. They found and unspread a cartoon, room-encircling alphabet banner: kh as in bottle; k as in water buffalo. From the bottom of one eclectic crate came a book from the empire’s sunset years, destined for Malaya or Burma but ending up here, in the one country that had never been anyone’s colonial possession.
Kraft, folk hero of the hour, was made to read. He had to repeat Messrs. Rat and Toad a thousand times for the little ones, who hadn’t a clue, even in hasty translation, what the words meant, but who knew a funny voice when they heard one. Calls of “Encore,” even from the ironically amused anglophones, were punctuated by fanatical cries for “Bed-jah!” from Lok, for whom badgers and moles were monster fantasies as outrageous as monkey generals or demon kings. What was the appeal of a story that meandered, messing about in boats, going nowhere? Kraft went on doing the voices, the creatures’ falsettos and growls, all the explanation ever granted.
Only waiting until the contingent had gathered, a face appeared at one of the unfinished openings. One look at her hushed the hilarity, confiscated it like an intercepted note. The stalk of body stood wrapped in a dress cut from an old rice sack, the stenciled brand still visible, swallowed up in a dart. The burlap makeshift lent the wearer the aura of escaped animal kingdom. The Northerners thought at first that she was a local, but she left the village children even more surprised.
Two Instituters undid the wall’s hinges, but the creature wouldn’t enter. Like a velvety automatic weapon, she repeated two singsong syllables. It was not Free, nor any language Kraft had ever heard. “What’s she saying?” he asked Lok.
Lok answered in dialect, an aggressive but entranced “Who the hell knows?”
Just as suddenly, Kraft heard, although the syllables remained impenetrable. The rice sack girl was chanting, in some form of Ur-pali, the same words that had issued from the abbot’s crabbed statue the instant before he’d smashed it to the floor: “Come away!” Come away.
Her furious gestures confirmed him. Asian, yet pale, luminous, she glowed like an impatient filament. She circled and yipped, dashing a few paces into the bush before doubling back to see what was keeping them. Every so often, she released explanatory bursts, pleas that might have meant anything: a parent prostrate on the path with snakebite, a house on fire, or a feast just one village over, replete with pipat band and unlimited roasted bananas. Her choreography proved the size of the prize, as a bee’s dance spells out to the hive a massive find.
The children stared at the dancer, then at one another. Even the upper forms deferred to Kraft, as if his taboo-breaking incantation of that afternoon had summoned up this sprite. Kraft took a breath, although there was never any choice, not even briefly. “So. Who’s up for it?” he asked in English. Then, once more, in the five tones: “Bai mai?”
It surprised no one that she led them toward the neighboring disaster. Even the Northerners began to realize that the trek wound them slowly down to the river, the imaginary buffer between the one country that until then had gone officially unscathed and the other, already smeared by the nightmare adjacent to it. But the specific destination Kraft could only imagine. It took the shape, in his sleep-heavy head, of an improvised emergency paradise, a forced regrouping along an itinerary of true amazement, a swelling river settlement full of the napalmed and claymored, driven from their lives.
A camp of children, he thought. She has come for the newest batch of recruits, new lives to boost the ones already assembled there. These thoughts contended with the rattan and fern, the shadowy plants scraping his face on the dark path. The girl knew the terrain, keeping to the best track, a packed mound both dry and open, yet not too exposed to bare moonlight. They walked long enough to lose track of time, and only the gibbon whoops from distant canopies convinced Kraft that they moved at all.
Although he was older than their guide, he felt like the little girl’s infant. How many kilometers now? Are we there yet? It occurred to him that they might not make it there and back again before Nam Chai awoke to miss them.
A sound like twigs snapping underfoot grew gradually as they walked until he had to recognize it: sporadic small-arms fire. Then, pitching over a sharp rise, they saw it. She had led them right up to the river at its narrowest, the same river that meandered to the senile dowager city a thousand kilometers downstream, at its gum-diseased mouth. Here it was narrow enough to skip a lucky coin over. Before they had time to take in the sight, the girl, twenty meters in the vanguard, slipped her rice sack off and paddled into the current, her shift held over her head.
On the other side, she dressed hastily. Annoyed at the others’ failure to follow, she made that odd hand gesture, palm downward and out, fingers curling repeatedly. To the Euro-offspring, the wave meant good-bye, auf, au rev . . . , we will never see each other again. But in the region, the fingerpumping was fiercely unambiguous: ma nee, get a move on, what’s keeping you? A cold, deadly Red Rover.
Lok was first in after her. He slipped into the water as if it were a buffalo patty pool. Kraft watched terrified as Janie Hawkins stripped and lowered herself in after. Then the other student shadows began to shed their shock, and the party became a filament of frog kick and dog paddle, as silent as tension permitted, a cortege of clothes held above bobbing heads under the angled and eerie moon.
Compulsion brushed away the risk. Swimmers peeled off one by one, the group crumbling like a heel of hard bread. Kraft stood with the group riveted on the Free side by their failure of nerve or inability to swim. They had been brought here for life’s one classic examination: turn back to camp now, to a life of empty safety, or press on, on nothing, following an apparition that might just as easily be malicious as revealing.
Kraft, answerable for every life in the water-snaking con
ga line, gauged the instant. The girl, whose Oxfam face made her the perfect insurgent, had come to lead a unit of foreign imperialists into ambush. She had suffered some Special Forces Pentecost from the air and had wandered stunned for days until she found the only people she could trust, minors, whom she now led back to a scene of unimaginable hideousness. She was It in a trillion-hectare, multinational kick-the-can, the globewide game that every child knows is taking place without him, and finding them assembled late at night, she decided to cut them in. She was the recruiting arm of a child cartel intent on stopping the war where the adults had failed, and she took them now, untrained and flawless, to the front. She was a shape changer, a demon from the Ramakien, come to teach them what the tales really meant.
He knew what he needed to do. Break off, bring the contingent back. Instead, by the dark riverside, he began to undo his shirt. As he touched his collar, a sound wafted across the stilled air, the lightest of clicks. He knew, on the envelope’s attack, what the snap was. The girl had just stepped on that kind of mine, pointlessly polite, that warned the victim by the cock of the firing pin.
In her excitement to keep the file moving, the girl had dropped her guard just long enough to miss the telltale artificial mound. Kraft had no moment to shout stop, nor did he know the word in her language. He didn’t need to. She knew what she had triggered as soon as the click rippled up through her foot.
It caught her in her stride’s downbeat. So drilled was she in stories of such a noise that she froze before the fatal follow-through. She stood, pinned to the spot, unable to so much as shift her body’s weight.
Like a wet appliance that clamps a hand onto killing amperage, dread clamped the children electrically to the riverbed. Everything infancy suspects is true: there is no floor, no ceiling, no warmth, no reassuring voices from the next room, no bed but what hides under it. There is just one lullaby, waiting to detain you.
Every one of them was mature enough to panic. Those in the water swung in midcurrent for the Free shore. Those still on land braced or hit the earth. Ricky, ever the boy who shouts “Look out behind you!” at the Punch and Judy, ran toward her. He began to call out whatever commands came into his head. Hold still; we’ll come and slip a rock onto the pin. Breathe imperceptibly, slow your heart, while someone runs back to the village. Keep calm. Keep your weight centered. Rub your leg if it stiffens. Tell us what you need and we’ll bring it.
The words were gibberish. They unraveled in the air before reaching her. She heard nothing; so the boy had to tell himself in later years. She wavered a moment between sense and need. She knelt and clawed at the ground hiding the mine, mewling like a trapped animal. The others yelled at her to stop. She did not even look around. She began to whimper, looking off in the direction she had been taking them, at an invisible hole, some epochal, closing chance. She fidgeted, twitching her thighs as if confined at a desk in that new school prison. Children wailed at her, in every language they knew, not to bounce, not to jitter. Her agitation accumulated, and the demand to be off, now, while there was yet time, increased until simply holding still would have killed her as certainly as moving.
A faction was already tearing back through the undergrowth. Another group, coaxing, circled warily toward her, threading through death’s bulb nursery, knowing their impotence even if they reached her. The best they could do was hold her to the mine, bring her food, carry away her waste for decades until she died of old age.
In the time it took to bounce a ball and sweep up a single jack, Kraft rejected all other choices. He broke for the river and in a few strides had topped his best fifty meters. He ran full out, silently. It seemed to him a searing slow motion. His eye worked faster than his legs could pump, and three paces from the river he saw that she was going to move. He stopped to yell, but could not force the air through his throat until she was already away.
She lit out for a spot in the clearing, flinging her whole body off the trigger as if safety depended on a further deadline. The sight on the near horizon compelled her to fly or be annihilated anyway. She knew, and never turned her back. The light that she touched off by leaving lit up the jungle canopy.
Even years later, there was never any sound. The first noise he could ever remember was the spatter of clods drizzling back onto the ground they had just failed to escape. But that came long after. First he had to witness, reflected like a shadow puppet epic against the scrim of indifferent air, the vision the girl was after. The explosion transfigured the girl in a sky-wall of visuals as fractured as a fly’s convex eye. That endless interval of flash condensed in vivid, live coverage the campaign under way all over the globe.
The mine, planted in the sober calculation that it might well take such a girl, took along the soul of everyone in the blast perimeter. It opened up a hole in the night air into which they stood transfixed and looked. Poking through some warp in the firmament, on the biggest of big screens, lay the surprise destination of every child Gypsy ever rounded up and quicklimed.
Before Kraft could force himself to look away, he saw. The old story had been mangled in word of mouth. What had always been reported as an interdicted vision of bliss, a glimpse at child heaven sadistically denied those left behind, was really this: a first look at the staging ground where the worst afflicted gathered. And the locked-out grief of those left behind was the anguish of those whose enlistment is refused.
The sound and light show, the event rim of the burst, collapsed just as quickly back into the blast’s confusion. The girl and Lok both fell to the far side of the explosion, allowing Kraft for an instant to believe the fiction that they had been blown clear, with just the stray limb lost, the disfigurement shared by a quarter of the population in these parts. In the space that it took the air’s shock to settle, he had healed them already, frenziedly restored them to prosthetic life. Then compensation dissolved, and he hurled himself into the river, gulping water as he thrashed toward the crater.
When the adults arrived—Headmaster, chaperons, villagers, alerted by incoherent messengers—they set to their rehearsed worst-case procedures. By dawn, every child that had left Nam Chai the previous night was accounted for, except for the boy Lok and the foreign girl, whose existence the adults only half credited. The blasted ground bore no trace of bone or pulp. The mine had cleaned all implicating evidence. Hurried reparations were made in the Institute’s name to the lost boy’s parents, deeded over at the same time as the soccer balls, T-shirts, and streamed elementary readers.
The school building was deemed complete enough to be finished with local resources, appropriate technologies—whatever the current euphemism for abandonment. The Institute scholars were hustled onto the bus caravan back to the City of Angels, this time without layovers. For a year or two, those who had taken part were fed occasional accounts of the progress of the sister school they had helped found. Children were learning things, the reports agreed. Exactly what they learned went unsaid.
The boy: of course. You want to know what became of the boy with the beautiful idea. By the slightest of accidents, he slipped in between conscriptions, lived out his twenties in an anomalous interlude of what the North called peace. Sent back to a home he could not assimilate to, he was schooled there in the impossible art of putting bodies back together. After long banishment, he slowly came to think of the upcountry expedition, Operation Santa Claus, the Land of the Free, as bits of myth to be dealt with only on call-troubled nights.
As for the City of Angels, where he had lived out belonging’s last years: he read about it in the papers now and then, when he read a paper. Bangkok had newly industrialized, paid passage into the dominant camp, gone Little Tokyo. By all accounts, it had grown into a skylined, sprawling, runaway, AIDS-infested needled nest. It had become a child-peddling shambles. Some hundred thousand juvenile whores of both sexes made a living in the place, the murder capital of the exotic East, the Golden Triangle’s peddler, catamite to the slickest tourist classes, gutted by CarniCruze junkets and semi
conductor sweat shops, glistening in fat postcolonialism, clear-cutting its irreplaceable upcountry forest to support its habit.
From his stateside confinement—the man with a country, the nightmare opposite of that morality tale they terrorize you with in these parts in the sixth grade, when you are most vulnerable—the boy read of Free students dying in bulk, their blood flushing the streets, sacrificed in trying to reclaim the old round of corruption and coup, dying, and for what? For politics, the Wheel’s worst illusion.
The place became a figment of childhood, a site on an itinerary that from the first had been no more than an extension of authority’s vocation, his parents’ dream. They too revealed themselves to him in time. His mother acquired the status of a filed form, and he passed her by in age. And Kraft Sr., Wandering Soul’s conductor if not engineer, entered the old age due him: a nursing home apartment full of Post-it notes to himself: “Stove top?” “Cigarette butts?” “Turn off lights?” Here and there across the walls, greeting the boy on his filial visits, mental jogs mapped a track of terror in the wake of the ephemeral words slipping away from the man: “mollify,” “onus,” “evensong.”
Occasionally, a letter from Dad would arrive, overposted with a police lineup of stamps, addressed in a loopy handwriting that resembled the boy’s earliest attempts at onion-skin tracing: “Dear Richie, The enclosed article beautifully explains the wonders of laser light. FYI. Thought you might like to know.” Dragged back to the first condition, just prior to permanent exile.
So the boy grew older, simpler, sleepier, until one day the pupils of that forgotten jungle school came back for him. They returned, one for one, back from all those years held in some detainees’ transit Westerbork (the murals of which, you must sooner or later learn, depicted a brightly colored, larger-than-life piper going about his eternal job description). He grew until waylaid by you, my old friends, tomorrow’s casualties, today’s belated show-and-tells.
Operation Wandering Soul Page 39