The Lily Hand and Other Stories (19 page)

The queer thing is that I knew a few phrases of the language, but I never even tried to use them. I knew they wouldn't be enough to do anything more than take the edge off the situation, and that, you see, wasn't necessary. I had no edge. There we were, and there was no third party to suspect, or discern, or create any constraint between us. I suppose in the next few days and nights we spoke perhaps three times in all, and then it was deliberately for the comfort of hearing a voice, not for communication. Between the thunder of guns and bombs a voice was sanity regained. The words didn't matter.

I had some emergency rations on me, chocolate, and compressed fruit, and biscuit. I took it out and offered him the contents in return for the fire. He understood perfectly. He had a flask of water, and so had I, and he added to our pantry some blackish bread and some hard grey cheese. We ate a little, and fed the fire sparingly, because he had only a small heap of wood and sticks in a corner of his cave. You'd be surprised how difficult it was to find anything burnable in those wastes, where trees were few to begin with and all shattered long ago, where the rare huts had been abandoned more than a year previously, and their thatch and wooden walls hadn't survived a month after they were once deserted. In winter here fuel is just as much life as water is, or food, and just as hard to come by.

The small hours came on, and the cold went into the bone, driving us into the fire until we crouched and touched over it, trembling. We drew nearer, edging flank to flank. Sleep is something that doesn't happen in a cold like the cold of this country.

After a while we huddled together, lying along the ground, body against body, hugging each other for the warmth given and received; and when he felt how comparatively thin my clothes were, he unfastened his own loose skin coat, and wound it round us both, and we lay shaking in each other's arms, and breathing into each other's faces, and all of him was welcome: the strong smell, the pressing flesh, the cheese-heavy breath. I daresay he suffered my stench as gladly. We survived the night, and hour by hour we fed the fire just enough to keep it alive, because we could afford no more.

The light came, and we had not slept, but even the coming of winter light seems to refresh a man who has lived through the killing clasp of a night like that. It was still quiet, too, only a few planes passed over. We uncoupled ourselves painfully, almost too stiff to move, and I think he meant to make a break for it that day, for he began to divide the food we had, pushing a scrupulous half towards me. But I was too sick and weak to be able to go anywhere alone, I could hardly make my legs go one before the other for the agony of the cold in my battered muscles after the fall of earth on me.

I lay and looked at him, and the tears ran out of my eyes and froze on my cheeks because I thought he was going to leave me, and then I knew I should die. He waited for me, looking back at every slow step, until he saw I could not follow him out of the foxhole; and he seemed for a little while to be wondering what to do, but in the end he put back the food he had rolled into the front of his padded jacket, and when he climbed out of the cave it was only to scour the ground around for more wood or dryish grass, or anything that would burn. He brought back the first twigs he found, to show me that he was not departing. He nodded and smiled, and shook his shaggy hair at me, and then I had courage to claw my way out after him somehow and help him in the search.

It took me infinite ages to crawl across the fifty yards of frozen ground, ridged like petrified sea; but my nearness to the earth was my aid, and it was I who found a place where a conduit had once been shored up with wood, and dug out some of the splintered fragments with my nails, and took them home in triumph.

We did well that day, we had a better fire, and at least enough water and food to keep us going, if not by any means enough to satisfy us. We looked at each other's injuries in the middle of the day, when the incredible sun was out for a little while and the ferocity of the cold was tempered by the very look of it. He had two or three ugly but not dangerous flesh wounds, and had bled a good deal. I used my emergency dressings on the worst of the gashes, and cleaned up the rest as well as I could. In return he worked on me, chafing and kneading my back and legs until I actually fell asleep. Yes, it was a pretty good day. Early in the afternoon he shot a bird, some species I didn't know, though I've seen it often enough since. I never noticed the birds until then. He skinned it, and we cooked it in a hollow in the side of our fire, in thick ashes.

I had my mind back before night, only my body was still unwilling to exert itself, because of the curious, intricate pain he had been busy working out through my clothes with his hard, grimy fingers. I thought that by next day I could make an effort to get back to my own people.

It never occurred to me for a moment to suppose that he would try to stop me. A great many things were clear to me about that man. I never knew his name, he never needed one, no one else will ever be simply ‘he' to me as
he
was. Never since I became a separate being have I lived in such close proximity to anyone, brothers, or parents, or wife, or children, as I did to him.

That night the guns began again. At first it was only theirs, and the range was short, and only the reverberations, shaking down loose earth and stones, tormented us. Then ours began to reply – I use the old terminology of ours and theirs purely to make myself clear – and soon they were both plastering that belt of waste territory with high explosive, because neither of them knew if the other was still entrenched there. You know how prodigal of bombs and shells the United Nations Command became about that time – anything to end it quickly, but of course it did not end.

But have you ever been a mole in the target area, as we were? It went on at tremendous pressure all night, and by day the bombers came, flight after flight. The earth groaned and quaked, and our walls silted down over us, but we dared not go out of cover, we could only dig ourselves free and wait for it to end. And it did not end. By dawn our fire was out, and we could not hunt for fuel all that day, nor recover the second water-bottle, which lay under the wreckage of our softest wall. We rolled together into the ashes of the fire, scorching our clothes but finding no warmth, smelling the smell of our own burning while we died slowly of the cold.

There was another day of this, and another night. Have you heard enough? If we had not clung together closer than lovers we should both have died.

I loved him as you love only someone you have tried to the limit, and found sound, and he loved me as his own flesh, and kept the life in me as jealously.

The next day it became almost quiet, only a few planes combing the area, so it seemed both sides were satisfied the ground was vacant. We came out of our burrow like sleepwalkers, and gathered enough wood to make a last fire, and thaw our half-dead and wholly stupefied bodies into movement. The noise in our heads never stopped, but it did not prevent us from hearing the little sounds of our own clumsy motions, as if we existed in two planes. We had nothing to eat, and no water, but we could walk. We knew that we had to get back to our own people, but even then it felt to me like a paradox, for no man had ever been mine as he was mine. Compared with my enemy, the men of my own company were strangers, speaking another tongue.

We separated about ten in the morning, having come some way together. He knew the ground better than I, and his head was clearer; he set me on my way with an emphatic pointing gesture of his whole arm, and made me a ceremonial bow, and I returned it. Then we went away from each other without breaking the silence which had been our only communication throughout.

I wandered for several hours, walking the way the sun was declining, before I made contact with a patrol, and came back into camp with them. After that it was almost as if it had never happened at all. An attitude soon recaptures you, once you have regained the ground on which it seemed valid. I didn't even go sick; they were moving up again over the same old ground, and I went back with them. It didn't strike me as absurd at the time.

But for all this recovered normality, he was still there in me.

The night of the preliminary probe I was out with a patrol, and we touched off one of theirs. It was nothing much, just a brush and they drew off again, and so did we. But the contact came with rather a shock, and all at once a man heaved up out of the darkness in front of me, and it was he. I recognized him, and I shot him.

I've often tried to work out the real sequence of what happened. He had his rifle trained before him, and he didn't fire it; I've wondered about that. Did he not know me, and quite simply never have time to pull the trigger? Or did he recognize me, and still intend to shoot, but react too late to save himself? Or did he recognize me, and deliberately refrain? You see my difficulty. I've tried to determine whether recognition came first with me, or the instinctive tightening of the finger, and I think that I knew him before I fired, and still fired. I was conditioned to react in certain ways. He was wearing the clothes at which I knew I had to fire, and I fired. Recognition, though more instantaneous still, had to fall back on thought, and thought was too slow.

I believe I am being honest, and that is the truth of it. But in any case, it does not matter. It was relevant for an instant, then it fell away into something much bigger.

He dropped, and lay still, and when I reached him he was dead.

I stood looking at him, and there was one moment of intense personal grief and regret, but I lost it very soon, because there was something else happening in me. I saw that this had been from the beginning inevitable, because it was necessary in order to complete the experience that I should kill him or he should kill me. We were not creatures of thought. It was only then that I began to see what had happened as ground for thought, only then that the seed which might have died off in the ground began to germinate. Perhaps it needed the blood of one of us; and after all, it mattered very little which one, we were one flesh.

I do not know that I believe in survival, General, but I know that I am at peace about it, and that seems to me more than enough. I know that while I exist, he exists, and while he endures, I endure. I know that it was never part of any will or desire of mine to kill him, and that my membership in him did not cease when I fired the shot. And what I know, he also knows. No words of mine can truly comprehend the complex paradoxes of our duality and our unity.

The same night, as we went back towards camp, I detached myself very quietly in the darkness, and walked away from them. I dropped my rifle into a ditch, and went back empty-handed towards the enemy, and after a long while I was fired at. I showed my empty hands and still went forward towards them; and they accepted me as a prisoner. It was desertion, I know, and desertion was foreign to my well-trained military conscience; but it was the only certain way I could think of never having to do that again.

We have nearly arrived now, General, for you can already see, being the person you are, how my present position arises from this, and how naturally. I was a prisoner of war for nearly a year, until the armistice delivered me, with all the rest, to your door. I think I lived usefully in the camp. There were constrictions, there were hardships, but I had no gun, and I possessed myself for the first time. And when it was my turn to be asked the question, I declined to be repatriated to England, declined to travel to any other country, wished and wish only to be here, where I am, and here to live as I may.

For why should I put anyone to the trouble to convey me across the world, or waste the weeks of the passage, in order to get home? I am home. Not because this was his country – don't misunderstand me, there is no dedicated sentiment about me – but because my home is where I am, at any moment of time, in any place. Language is no limitation to me, frontiers do not contain me. Oh, yes, I can be hated, here or anywhere, I can be killed, if need be. Divergents have a thin time anywhere, and to be without country or nationality is to be outcast everywhere. I can be killed, but I cannot be violated. And while I live, work and people are everywhere, here as well as in any other place.

Tell them, if they ask you, if they say I have changed sides, that I have reached the simplification of no longer acknowledging that the taking of sides is possible. If they cry that I have deserted my friends and my family, say that they are here with me, that my family are all who have need of me, and my friends all whom I meet in the street.

Tell them all this, not for my sake, but because they need to be shown, while there is still time, that there is in reality only one side, that they had better stop playing with guns, because bullets are boomerangs. Tell them that if they do not open their hearth to the enemy they will soon be without fuel. Say that if they hunt together they will get enough to keep them alive through the day, and if they sleep in one another's arms they will survive the killing cold of the night, and if they do not they will die. It is as simple as that.

But do not bother to defend me, for I have joined the ranks of the most despised and persecuted of all racial minorities. I am the Jew, the negro, the aboriginal. I am the enemy. My race is the human race.

The Lily Hand

The day Felipe died the women stopped the traffic in New Bond Street, weeping and fainting and having hysterics round that classy shop of his almost as if he were another Valentino.

I was there myself, covering the story.

During his lifetime, of course, Felipe had done everything he could to build himself up into a legend. There were all the tales about his lavish public life, his fabulous clothes, his beautiful friends, and the bare room where he hid himself when he went home, like a monk's cell, with a fine ebony coffin standing beside the bed. His fans refused to believe this was a publicity stunt. They said he was sincere, a religious mystic: it was the other side to his profession as a great cosmetician.