In Another Country (22 page)

The nurse sat in the open doorway and read her magazine. Madeleine and Mr. Kramer faced each other across the small table. All the same, said Madeleine through her lattice of black cuts, I've made a start. Shall I read it? Yes, said Mr. Kramer. Madeleine read:

Samuel lived with his mother. The soldiers had killed his father. Some of the soldiers were only little boys. Samuel and his mother hid in the forest. Every day she had to leave him for several hours to go and look for food and water. He waited in fear that she would not come back. There was nothing to do. He curled up in the little shelter, waiting. One day Samuel's mother did not come back. He waited all night and all the next day and all the next night. Then he decided he must go and look for her or for some food and water at least because the emergency supplies she had left him were all gone. He followed the trail his mother had made day after day. It came to a road. She had told him that the road was very dangerous. But beyond the road were fields and in them, if you were lucky, you might find some things to eat that the farmers had planted before the soldiers came and burned their village. Samuel halted at the road. It was long and straight in both directions and very dusty. A little way off he saw a truck burning and another truck upside down in the ditch. But there were no soldiers. Samuel hurried across. Quite soon, just as his mother had said, he saw women and girls in blue and white clothes moving slowly over the land looking for food. Perhaps his mother would be among them after all? At the very least, somebody would surely give him food and water.

 

Madeleine lifted her face. That's as far as I got, she said. It's crap, isn't it? No, said Mr. Kramer, it is very good. Crap, said Madeleine. Tell me, Madeleine, said Mr. Kramer, did you write this before or after you did that to your face? After, said Madeleine. I wrote it this morning. I did my face two nights ago, after they brought me back here from the hospital. Good, said Mr. Kramer. That's a very good thing. It means you can sympathize with other people's lives even when your own distresses you so much you cut your face. I know the rest, said Madeleine with a sudden eagerness. I know how it goes on and how it ends. Shall I tell you?—Will you still be able to write it if you tell?—Yes, yes.—You promise?—Yes, I
promise.—Tell then.

She laid her sleeves, in which her hands were hiding, flat on the table and began to speak, rapidly, staring into his eyes, transfixing him with the eagerness of her fiction.

 

In among the people looking for food he meets a girl. She's my age. Her name is Ruth. The soldiers have killed her father too. Ruth's mother hid with her and when the soldiers came looking she made Ruth stay in hiding and gave herself up to them. That was the end of her. But Ruth was taken by the other women and hid with them and went looking for food when it was safe. When Samuel came into the fields Ruth decided to look after him. She was like a sister to Samuel, a good big sister, or a mother, a good and loving mother. When it was safe to light a fire she cooked for him, the best meal she could. After a while the soldiers came back again, the fields were too dangerous, all the women hid in the forest but Ruth had heard that if you could only get to the coast you could maybe find someone with a boat who would carry you across the sea to Italy and the European Union, where it was really safe. So that's what she did, with Samuel, she set off for the coast, only travelling at night, on foot, by moonlight and starlight, steering clear of the villages in flames.

 

Sounds good, said Mr. Kramer. Sounds very exciting. All you have to do now is write it. You've looked at a map, I suppose? The nearest coast is no use at all. That's where the pirates are. You need the north coast really, through the desert. And crossing the desert is said to be a terrible thing. You have to pay truckers to take you, I believe. Yes, said Madeleine, I thought she'd do better on the east coast, with the pirates. A pirate chief says he'll take her and Samuel all the way to Libya but it will cost her a lot of money. When she says she has no money he says she can marry him, for payment that is, until they get to Libya, then he'll sell her to a friend of his, who will take her and Samuel into the European Union, which is like the Promised Land, he says, and there she will be safe, but she'll have to marry his friend as well, for the voyage from Libya into Italy. I asked Rema would she do it and she said she wouldn't, she couldn't, because of the things at home, but she said I could, Ruth in my story should, it would save the two of them, they would have a new life in the European Union and God would mercifully forgive her the sin. She says Hi, by the way. She asked me to ask you are you all right. She said it seemed to her you were a bit lonely sometimes. Thank you, said Mr. Kramer, I'm fine. And guess what, said Madeleine, she doesn't want to do the hajj any more, not till she's an old woman, and she doesn't want to make Dr. Khan have her back here either. No, she's decided she'll be a primary school teacher. Plus she's down to four stone. So it's all lies as usual
.

A primary school teacher is a very good idea, said Mr. Kramer. But of course you have to be strong for that. As strong as for a pilgrimage.

I told her that, said Madeleine. So she's still a liar. Anyway, another thing about Ruth is that when she's with the first pirate, as his prostitute, all the way up the Red Sea he sends her ashore to the markets—Samuel he keeps on board as a hostage—and she has to go and buy all the ingredients for his favourite meals, I've researched it, baby okra and lamb in tomato stew, for example, onion pancakes, fish and peppers, shoelace pastry, spicy creamy cheeses, all delicious, up the coast to Suez. So she makes her Lord and Master happy and Samuel gets strong.

Will they stay in Italy, Mr. Kramer asked, if the second pirate keeps his word and carries her across the Mediterranean? No, said Madeleine, breathless on her story, they're heading for Swansea. There's quite an old Somali community in Swansea. I've researched it. They've been there a hundred years. At first she'll live in a hostel, doing the cooking for everybody so that everybody likes her. Samuel goes to school and as soon as he's settled Ruth will go to the CFE and get some qualifications.

 

Madeleine, said Mr. Kramer, it's very hard to enter the United Kingdom. Ruth and Samuel will need passports. I've thought of that, said Madeleine. The first pirate chief has a locker full of passports from people who died on his boat and because Ruth is such a good cook he gives her a couple and swears they'll get her and Samuel through Immigration, no problem.

 

Rema should go to the CFE, said Mr. Kramer. I believe the Home Office would extend her visa if she was in full-time education. And if she trained as a primary school teacher, who knows what might happen?

She's a liar, said Madeleine, very white, almost translucent her face through the savage ornamentation of her cuts. She's supposed to be my friend. If she was really my friend she'd come back here. Then we'd both be all right like we were before she left me.

You want to stay here?

Yes, said Madeleine. It's safer here.

Why overdose? Why cut yourself?

 

The nurse was watching and listening.

Because I'm frightened.

My daughter was frightened, said Mr. Kramer, and she's twice your age. All the time her mother was ill, four and a half years, she got more and more frightened. And now she's gone to the Ukraine, would you believe it, all on her own and not speaking the language, to research our family history. She phoned me the other night from the place itself, a terrible place, I never want to go there, all on her own, at midnight, in a hotel. Write your story, won't you? You promised me. Somalia is very likely the worst place in the world and Swansea is a very good place, by all accounts. What an achievement it will be if you can get Ruth and Samuel safely there!

 

Madeleine's white hands with their bitten nails still hid in her sleeves. All the animation had gone out of her. I'll never get to Swansea from Somalia, she said. Never, never, never. I can't even want to get out of here.

 

First the story, Madeleine, said Mr. Kramer. First comes the fiction. Get Ruth and Samuel out of the killing fields, get them by the cruelty and kindness of pirates into a holding camp on the heel of Italy, get them north among strangers, not speaking a word of the language—devise it, work out the necessary means. You promised. Who knows what might happen if you get that lucky pair to Swansea?
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wishing Well

 

 

 

H
appiness. Some lines came back to him: ‘What are we? Beings of a day / Shadows of a dream. But when / The light, god-given, the light / When that comes / Brightness is on us, brightness / And life is lovely.' And so it was: light coming, alighting, playing over all, but over the two of them in particular, like tongues. Well-being—in which he was aware of the passing away of trouble and tension, so that although light had indeed come over him, it was also like passing out of a sunlight that had been too brilliant into a grateful shade and suddenly feeling, under a dappling coverlet of leaves, a release and a relief, so that the features knew, with a shock, how tense and strained they had been and for too long. Lightness of spirit.

He looked about him. Rhos in summer is a busy place, busy and ordinary, and everything he looked at pleased him, especially the little harbour which had not made any effort to keep up with the world. He liked that. And that they were strangers here and he could sit with her at a table in the public view and take her hand when he pleased and they could stroll along.

She watched his enjoyment. He was quite transparent. She saw quite clearly what it felt like in him as his feelings climbed and held and he looked about him, pleased. He saw her watching. He knew that her own enjoyment at that moment consisted mostly in being amused by the sight of him. But he was not downcast and felt he could carry her away with him on his feelings, just as soon as he wished.

There's a lot you don't know about me, she said.

He was grateful for this topic into which he could direct his happiness. He answered that he was glad, they were at the beginning, it was an outset, he loved outsets, he would learn and learn and the more there still was to know about her, the better.

When I fell in love with you, she said, it grieved me that there were so many years of your life before my time, that I could never belong to and I could only learn about if I asked you and you told me.

Telling is good, he said. For both of us. When I tell you things you didn't know, I feel I hardly knew them myself before I told you. It's as though they are only becoming clear to me now, in the light of you.

And then—because of course this was at the heart of his happiness, this was lighting up the ordinary seaside town, lightening his spirits, relaxing the strain that for so long had tensed his features—then he couldn't hold back and he said: And after tonight, after we've slept together, it won't grieve you any more, once we know each other like that the rest won't trouble you, you'll see it the way I see it now, life for the asking, more and more, nowhere refused.

She looked at him wonderingly. Such innocence. He seemed to walk on faith without fear of disappointment. The very spectacle of him made her fearful. How was any mortal supposed to live up to a part in that? Then she thought him not innocent but, for all his intelligence, obtuse; and beginning to say, I hope you won't be disappointed, she felt almost a wish that he should be, that he should grow up, and she halted the sentence, shaking her head. And perhaps he was right. Certainly she had no more worries about the place. The place they had decided on was certainly right, she was on firm ground where she had feared she might sink in. That was one good stepping stone, she would believe him, the other stones would be there, step by step.

She stood up. I'll go and pay, she said. When she came out again she saw a hesitancy in his manner, as though in the brief absence her lingering anxiety had touched him. She took him by the hand. The well, she said. I have to show you the well. I have to begin showing you and telling you. Today's the day and tonight is the night.

Coming back is risky. He was glad to be a stranger there, with no memories. Soon she let go of his hand and walked apart, wholly given up to an anxious looking. This wasn't here then, she muttered. The sea came right in. To him the wall, the railing, the further defences were unexceptionable. But she said crossly, as though he were to blame, It was a shore, the sea came right up. There were floods, he said. You told me about them. They had to build a wall. Yes, yes, she said, they had to. Don't they always have to?

They had walked too far. She was wringing her hands, almost in tears. Don't say it's gone. Nobody would do a thing like that. Chapel and well. Nobody would raze a chapel and fill in a well. She turned and walked back, hurrying away from him. It's here, he said. He had to shout after her. She had hurried on. How lovely. He was leaning over the railing, looking down. The tiny humped chapel, squat and solid, crouched under the wall, out of sight of the road, like a shell, like something that would have housed a naked hermit crab. Between it and high tide ran a bulwark of quarry stones.

But it was on the beach, she said. Just above high water. Not protected at all. Why does everything have to be protected? Once or twice the sea came in. I know that. And my father told me he had read of other occasions. Seaweed on the flagstones, salt water on the fresh under the altar. But they cleaned it out. The sea went away again. The freshwater well renewed itself. Stink of salt and weed in that thick shell for months. Like being in a sea cave. But it freshened again, the sun came in, a breeze, people brought wildflowers. Why put a wall around it? He shrugged. Things are getting worse, he said. You know that. The floods further up the coast were terrible.

Slowly she was reconciled. She took his hand again. Come and see, she said, come down. I'm so happy that we are here together and I can show you the well.

Temenos
, a little precinct—which he liked. She clung to her picture of a sacred house on the beach, just above high water, but conceded that the enclosure was decent. Inside, the memory took her by the throat, seized her around the heart with a hand of ice, the hairs on her neck stood up ‘in holy dread.' One window by the altar, another in the north wall broadside on to the sea, a saint in each. An utter simplicity. It was a cave, a shell, the carapace of a spirit, furnished humanly with a table and a few chairs, not asking to be thought beautiful. The thick walls, rough as the hands that had fitted them, enclosed a presence of—of what, exactly? Human impress, people at their most serious, their most given up and most wishful. She went on her knees and pulled him down by her, not at the altar—which she disregarded—but at the well beneath the stone roof that the altar made. A square of clear water, as though a flagstone had been removed and there was the water, quietly arrived and waiting. She dipped in her hands, raised them up to his mouth. Drink, she said, drink and wish hard. He did as she asked, all the water, he lapped at her wet palms, drank and loved her and wished hard, looking into her eyes over the bowl of her hands. He had never seen her so sure and demanding. Now me, she said. Offer me. So he did, raised up some water in his cupped hands to her mouth. She drank, wished hard, looked him hard in the eyes.

Then she stood up, as abruptly as she had from their café table, and took him to the window that looked out towards the sea. The window was thin and the saint himself, in the coloured glass, rather blocked the view. But it was not so much a matter of looking and seeing, more of listening, of her murmuring and his listening.

We played down there, she said. You and your friend? What was she called, your friend? She was called Awen. A name like yours, he said. We were very like, she said. We came after school when the evenings were long and at weekends summer and winter when we chose. Nobody minded in those days. She was from here, I was an incomer, but I learned her language at school and together we never spoke anything else. Except we had our own speech too. Speech within a speech, foreign and secret. We used that sometimes, for the things which mattered most. When we found anything especially pretty we brought it in here, splashed it from the well, and laid it on the altar. A flower you mean? Or a shell? A shell, a flower, a starfish, a bit of whitened wood, anything pretty or especially strange. We wetted it and laid it on the altar under that saint's window. Nobody minded in those days. And if we found any creature that had died we brought that in too, splashed it and buried it outside, close under the western wall, and made a little mound of stones. An oiled-up seagull, a fish, even a crab or a rat, anything that had lived the way humans live and was dead. We looked out for such things as keenly as for pretty things fit to go on the table top. And always we drank, lifting our hands to one another, just as you and I have done now. And every time we drank we looked each other in the eyes and made a wish. There's a lot you don't know about me, and one thing is this: that I am afraid my friend Awen is dying. Do you have a pen? Do you have a scrap of paper? I didn't think I would do this but now I feel I must.

He carried a pencil. It fitted into the spine of a handy blue notebook. He tore out a page, handed her the pencil, she used the altar as a desk and wrote: Please wish for my dear friend Awen who is very ill. She folded the note and slotted it in among others in a sort of lattice on the south wall.

Now come out, she said. I want to show you the sea properly, not through a narrow window. But as soon as they were out and had climbed over the rampart of new rocks and had broached the empty sands, she halted, turned to him and alarmed him by her helpless agitation. What is it? he asked. Oh, I should have written it in Welsh, she answered. But more people will understand it in English. But it's closer to her in Welsh. And it may work better. Do it then. And he handed her the notebook with the pencil fitted in. Can I even? Do I even know the words any more? Try. She closed her eyes, faced him, waited. Then said in a rush:
Gwnewch ddymuniad i Awen wella—mae hi'n sâl iawn
. Good, he said. Now go back and write it.

It seemed he waited quite some time. When she came out of the chapel she was barefoot, carrying her shoes. So he took his off also, stuffed the socks into them, laced them together, watched her cross the rocks. Your notebook is full of things, she said. So much I don't know. Then she took his hand and led him—so it felt—out where the sea must be.

I came out here with my father once, she said, with Awen, he walked between us, holding our hands. He didn't speak Welsh, though he knew many of the words because of his studies in local history. It was strange to be with Awen speaking English. My father asked her questions. I could tell that he liked the way she talked. She was very pretty. You would have liked her too. My father had read that before they built the chapel on the beach they built one out on the flats in what was then a forest. He asked Awen was it true. She said she believed it was. My father wanted to see evidence of the forest, if not of the chapel, and on that afternoon when, according to his chart, the tides were exceptionally big, he took us out, the two of us, to have a look. We walked and walked, like now, the sea was quite invisible. We were the only people out. I don't think he should have taken us there, do you? But he consulted his watch very often and kept an eye on the horizon, where the sea must be. And at last we did come to the forest, the stumps and traces of it, a sort of herd, emergent or disappearing, over a vast area of sand, as I remember now. We shan't go so far today. I'm not sure of the tide. But another day when the tides are very big we'll work it out exactly and I'll take you to where you can see the stumps of that great forest, if they are still to be seen. The sand moves, you know. It covers and uncovers. But the tide comes in very fast. Faster than a man can run, so my father said. He told us that out there in that vast graveyard of a forest. I don't think he should have told us that, do you? He told Awen particularly. I didn't like him doing that. So if there really was a forest, he said, perhaps there really was a chapel too, with its own well, of course, like the one on the beach. But we'd never find it, he said, not in a hundred years and we looked every day. Stones under the sand, a mouth of fresh water stopped up under the sand. My father! There was still no sign of the sea. You could almost believe it had withdrawn for good. But my father said we must go home. By his calculations we were still entirely safe, but we must go back in and not linger.

When we turned, then I was frightened. The shore looked to be infinitely far away. I couldn't make out the chapel at all. The distance looked to be quite beyond my strength. But Awen seemed unconcerned. She laughed and looked up at my father and he held her hand very tightly and said nothing to worry about we'd be safe home in no time. My hand he held tightly too, but I felt he hadn't even noticed how frightened I was because he and Awen were being so jolly together. We were the only people out there, the only upright things in all that flat space. You'd think with your own father if he said nothing to worry about, you'd believe him, wouldn't you? But I kept looking back, to see if the sea was coming after us, faster than a man could run.

My father said the chapel out here was the first building and the chapel on the beach just above high water was the second. And the third, he said, was a proper church, at Llandrillo, about a mile inland, on a rocky hill, quite safe from the sea. I knew about that church already. Awen had told me. And I knew something else as well, that she had told me. And suddenly out here on the sands, in English, she told my father the thing I thought was a secret between her and me: that a tunnel went from the church on the hill to the chapel on the beach, an escape way to Ireland, when the old believers were in danger from the new. I heard her tell him that in English when I had kept it secret even though he was my own father and I knew how much it would have interested him. And indeed he was very interested. He stopped dead in his tracks out here on the sands and said, Goodness me, what a thing! We must find it, this tunnel, you must take me and show me where you think it is. We have found the forest together, and we believe there was once a chapel in that forest, and now you tell me there's a secret tunnel from the chapel on the beach to the church on the hill, so certainly we must go and find that together. I was hurt by Awen. Across him, I said to her in Welsh, You shouldn't have told him that. It was our secret. Why did you tell him that? But all she answered was, Will if I like. And we set off again, him between us, and I couldn't get over it and hoped the sea would come at a lick and drown us all.