The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(51)
Opiates suppress sexual desire, but I knew that Akinleye kissed me. We were not young lovers any more, but then it didn’t matter, for our love was a thing which, like euphoria, could not be explained to those who did not experience it. I knew that the maid was dancing, and so Akinleye and I danced too, and then the maid danced down the length of the deck, whirling and spinning, until she reached the prow of the ship. We followed, my legs too heavy to move by themselves, so I dragged myself along the floor with my arms, face down on my belly, craning my neck to see Akinleye put her lips to the maid’s neck and whisper the secrets of the universe into her ears. Then the maid laughed some more, stood up on the railing that ran round the edge of the ship, spread her arms wide and let her own weight take her down, face first into the water.
Her corpse washed up two days later on the beach.
The coroner’s ruling was suicide.
She was buried in an unmarked grave, no family to mourn her. Akinleye had left the port without telling me her servant’s name. Three hours after the coffin was covered, I went to Israel, signing on as a worker in a settlement beneath the turbulent ranges of the Golan Heights. I was not Jewish and had no political affection for the state, but a farmer had offered me the chance to pick oranges for him over the summer, and I had nowhere better to go. For seven months I woke at dawn and worked with a basket on my back, ate flat bread at supper and read no words, watched no TV, heard no radio and spoke to no one beyond the settlement walls. I was housed with thirteen other workers in a wooden shack of low bunk beds, and when I failed to do a satisfactory job accepted the chiding of the farmer like a little boy. The family whispered that I was mentally damaged in some way, unable to understand why this white-haired Englishman would have travelled to the sun-drenched hills of a foreign land to crawl in dust and dirt for his days. Sometimes the boys from the local villages would come and stare, and none of us went outside the settlement alone for fear of being attacked by the families whose land the settlement had taken. In time, none of us left the settlement at all, but hid behind the high white-stone walls from a hostile society only a bullet away from retribution.
I worked until the day the farmer’s wife sat down beside me and said,
“I think you need to let it go.”
She was a large woman, a black wig on her head, a black apron around her belly.
“This thing you carry inside you,” she said at last. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t know where you got it. But Harry,” and her hand slipped round the inside of my thigh as she spoke, “the past is the past. You are alive today. That is all that matters. You must remember, because it is who you are, but as it is who you are, you must never, ever regret. To regret your past is to regret your soul.”
Her hand wandered up my leg. I caught it by the wrist before it could finish its journey and laid it carefully down in her lap. She sighed, turning her head slightly away, her shoulders to the side. “It was only a second,” she explained. “For a second my hand touched yours, but that second is gone, and cannot be seen, heard or felt ever again. This second is gone too, the moment in which I spoke by your side. It is dead. Let it die.”
So saying, she stood up briskly, patted down her apron, the skirt around her buttocks and back, and went back to work.
I left in the night, leaving not a sign behind.
Chapter 42
Fifteen years earlier, and a few centuries later, and Pietrok-112 reminded me of that farm in Israel. Silence in the night, long, low sheds of bunks for its workers, a fence to cut it off from the rest of the world–a hostile, frightening world of darkness and things that rattled in the night. Where the Golan Heights had stood above us as a monument to the god of another tribe, in Pietrok-112 the mountains were of unmarked concrete, temples to a new, rational deity of atoms and numbers.
I walked at the self-important speed of all managers visiting an insubordinate. There were more guards on duty by the first gate into that concrete canyon, which extended as far down into the earth as it did up. They looked at me with suspicion, but the deference of my escort gave me a certain credibility, and they asked no more.
Corridors of concrete beneath white strip lights; signs gave no more indication of which way to go than B1 or G2. Notices on the wall advised that radiation badges must be worn at all times, but it was no nuclear testing site. A poster showing the triad of scientist, soldier and happy industrial worker leading the way across golden fields, the sun glowing at their backs, reminded all passers-by of the bigger picture. Civilians were plentiful, mixed in among the guards. Lab coats were out, heavy quilted jackets were in, but the place was no industrial warehouse. Heavy shutters isolated the more sensitive areas, or access to them, with giant warnings proclaiming, NO UNAUTHORISED ACCESS.
The commander’s office was a small raised room overlooking a delivery platform that led to the outside world. A black and white picture on the desk showed a man holding a very large machine gun, strings of bullets slung across his shoulders like a gangster’s fashion prize. The radio was playing greatest communist hits of the 1940s, songs with refrains such as “We march through our brother’s blood, raise our children to the sun” or “In the motherland we work for our loved ones and our comrades” and other poetic statements of intent. The commander himself was a man who’d been compressed to thinness–a protruding nose and squashed face sat on a matchstick frame that could only have been achieved through some horrific medical accident. His brown eyes flashed up from a bank of telephones as we entered, and at the sight of me he barked, “What is this?”