Gods and Soldiers (6 page)

“Waiter!” he barks, his mouth full of fish, startling her. “Bring another bottle of wine.”

“No. I am all right, really,” she says firmly, putting down her chopsticks.

 

After the meal, which has been quite delicious, he lifts the tiny, wine-filled porcelain cup before him and says: “To you. And me.”

She sips her drink, avoiding his eyes.

“I love you, Janice. Very much. I know you think I am not serious. That I only want to suck. The juice and throw away the peel. No.” He suddenly dips his hand into the pocket of his well-ironed white kaftan and brings out a yellow paper.

“Read and see.” He pushes the paper across the table to her. “I wrote it. For you. A poem.”

She opens the paper. It smells faintly of sandalwood. She looks at the title: “Three Words.” She reaches past the vase and its single, white rose, past the wine bottle, the wine glasses, and covers his hairy hand with hers briefly. “Thank you.”

She reads the poem, shifting in her seat towards the swaying light of the lantern:

With his third or fourth poem for the superintendent, Lomba began to send Janice cryptic messages. She seemed to possess an insatiable appetite for love poems. Every day a warder came to the cell, in the evening, with the same request from the superintendent: “The poem.” When he finally ran out of original poems, Lomba began to plagiarize the masters from memory. Here are the opening lines of one:

Another one starts:

But it was Lomba's bowdlerization of Sappho's “Ode” that brought the superintendent to the cell door:

He came to the cell door less than twenty minutes after the poem had reached him, waving the paper in the air, a real smile splitting his granite face.

“Lomba, come out!” he hollered through the iron bars. Lomba was lying on his wafer-thin mattress, on his back, trying to imagine figures out of the rain designs on the ceiling. The door officer hastily threw open the door.

The superintendent threw a friendly arm over Lomba's shoulders. He was unable to stand still. He walked Lomba up and down the grassy courtyard.

“This poem. Excellent. With this poem. After. I'll ask her for marriage.” He was incoherent in his excitement. He raised the paper and read aloud the first line, straining his eyes in the dying light: “ ‘A peer of goddesses she seems to me.' Yes. Excellent. She will be happy. Do you think I should ask her for. Marriage. Today?”

He stood before Lomba, bent forward expectantly, his legs planted in their characteristic A formation.

“Why not?” Lomba answered. A passing warder stared at the superintendent and the prisoner curiously. Twilight fell dully on the broken bottles studded in the concrete of the prison wall.

“Yes. Why not. Good.” The superintendent walked up and down, his hands clasped behind him, his head bowed in thought. Finally, he stopped before Lomba and declared gravely: “Tonight. I'll ask her.”

Lomba smiled at him, sadly. The superintendent saw the smile; he did not see the sadness.

“Good. You are happy. I am happy too. I'll send you a packet of cigarettes. Two packets. Today. Enjoy. Now go back inside.”

He turned abruptly on his heels and marched away.

 

September

Janice came to see me two days after I wrote her the Sappho. I thought, she has discovered my secret messages, my scriptive Morse tucked innocently in the lines of the poems I've written her.

Two o'clock is compulsory siesta time. The opening of the cell door brought me awake. My limbs felt heavy and lifeless. I feared I might have an infection. The warder came directly to me.

“Oya, get up. The superintendent wan see you.” His skin was coarse, coal black. He was fat and his speech came out in laboured gasps. “Oya, get up. Get up,” he repeated impatiently.

I was in that lethargic, somnambulistic state condemned people surely fall into when, in total inanition and despair, they await their fate—without fear or hope, because nothing can be changed. No dew-wet finger of light would come poking into the parched gloom of the abyss they tenant. I did not want to write any more poems for the superintendent's lover. I did not want any more of his cigarettes. I was tired of being pointed at behind my back, of being whispered about by the other inmates as the superintendent's informer, his fetch-water. I wanted to recover my lost dignity. Now I realized that I really had no “self” to express; that self had flown away from me the day the chains touched my hands. What is left here is nothing but a mass of protruding bones, unkempt hair and tearful eyes; an asshole for shitting and farting, and a penis that in the mornings grows turgid in vain. This leftover self, this sea-bleached wreck panting on the iron-filing sands of the shores of this penal island is nothing but hot air, and hair, and ears cocked, hopeful . . .

So I said to the warder, “I don't want to see him today. Tell him I'm sick.”

The fat face contorted. He raised his baton in Pavlovian response. “What!” But our eyes met. He was smart enough to decipher the bold “No Trespassing” sign written in mine. Smart enough to obey. He moved back, shrugging. “Na you go suffer!” he blustered, and left.

I was aware of the curious eyes staring at me. I closed mine. I willed my mind over the prison walls to other places. Free. I dreamt of standing under the stars, my hands raised, their tips touching the blinking, pulsating electricity of the stars. The rain would be falling. There'd be nothing else: just me and rain and stars and my feet on the wet, downy grass earthing the electricity of freedom.

He returned almost immediately. There was a smirk on his fat face as he handed me a note. I recognized the superintendent's clumsy scrawl. It was brief, a one-liner:
Janice is here. Come. Now.
Truncated, even in writing. I got up and pulled on my sweat-grimed shirt. I slipped my feet into my old, worn-out slippers. I followed the warder. We passed the parade ground, and the convicted men's compound. An iron gate, far to our right, locked permanently, led to the women's wing of the prison. We passed the old laundry, which now served as a barber's shop on Saturdays—the prison's sanitation day. A gun-carrying warder opened a tiny door in the huge gate that led into a foreyard where the prison officials had their offices. I had been here before, once, on my first day in prison. There were cars parked before the offices; cadets in their well-starched uniforms came and went, their young faces looking comically stern. Female secretaries with time on their hands stood in the corridors gossiping. The superintendent's office was not far from the gate; a flight of three concrete steps led up to a thick wooden door, which bore the single word: SUPERINTENDENT.

My guide knocked on it timidly before turning the handle.

“The superintendent wan see am,” he informed the secretary. She barely looked up from her typewriter; she nodded. Her eyes were bored, uncurious.

“Enter,” the warder said to me, pointing to a curtained doorway beside the secretary's table. I entered. A lady sat in one of the two visitor's armchairs. Back to the door, her elbows rested on the huge Formica-topped table before her. Janice. She was alone. When she turned, I noted that my mental image of her was almost accurate. She was plump. Her face was warm and homely. She came halfway out of her chair, turning it slightly so that it faced the other chair. There was a tentative smile on her face as she asked, “Mr. Lomba?”

I almost said no, surprised by the “Mr.” I nodded.

She pointed at the empty chair. “Please sit down.” She extended a soft, pudgy hand to me. I took it and marveled at its softness. She was a teacher; the hardness would be in the fingers: the tips of the thumb and middle finger, and the side of the index finger.

“Muftau—the superintendent—will be here soon. He just stepped out,” she said. Her voice was clear, a little high-pitched. Her English was correct, each word carefully pronounced and projected. Like in a classroom. I was struck by how clean she looked, squeaky clean; her skin glowed like a child's after a bath. She had obviously taken a lot of trouble with her appearance: her blue evening dress looked almost new, but a slash of red lipstick extended to the left cheek after missing the curve of the lip. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, tapping the left foot on the floor. She was nervous. That was when I realized I had not said a word since I entered.

“Welcome to the prison,” I said, unable to think of anything else.

She nodded. “Thank you. I told Muftau I wanted to see you. The poems, I just knew it wasn't him writing them. I went along with it for a while, but later I told him.”

She opened the tiny handbag in her lap and took out some papers. The poems. She put them on the table and unfolded them, smoothing out the creases, uncurling the edges. “After the Sappho I decided I must see you. It was my favourite poem in school, and I like your version of it.”

“Thank you,” I said. I liked her directness, her sense of humour.

“So I told him—look, I know who the writer is, he is one of the prisoners, isn't he? That surprised him. He couldn't figure out how I knew. But I was glad he didn't deny it. I told him that. And if we are getting married, there shouldn't be secrets between us, should there?”

Ah, I thought, so my Sappho has worked the magic. Aloud I said, “Congratulations.”

She nodded. “Thanks. Muftau is a nice person, really, when you get to know him. His son, Farouk, was in my class—he's finished now—really, you should see them together. So touching. I know he has his awkward side, and that he was once married—but I don't care. After all, I have a little past too. Who doesn't?” she added the last quickly, as if scared she was revealing too much to a stranger. Her left hand went up and down as she spoke, like a hypnotist, like a conductor. After a brief pause, she continued, “After all the pain he's been through with his other wife, he deserves some happiness. She was in the hospital a whole year before she died.”

Muftau. The superintendent had a name, and a history, maybe even a soul. I looked at his portrait hanging on the wall. He looked young in it, serious-faced and smart, like the cadet warders outside. I turned to her and said suddenly and sincerely, “I am glad you came. Thanks.”

Her face broke into a wide, dimpled smile. She was actually pretty. A little past her prime, past her sell-by date, but still nice, still viable. “Oh, no. I am the one that should be glad. I love meeting poets. I love your poems. Really I do.”

“Not all of them are mine.”

“I know—but you give them a different feel, a different tone. And also, I discovered your S.O.S. I had to come . . .” She picked the poems off the table and handed them to me. There were thirteen of them. Seven were my originals, six were purloined. She had carefully underlined in red ink certain lines of them—the same line, actually, recurring.

There was a waiting-to-be-congratulated smile on her face as she awaited my comment.

“You noticed,” I said.

“Of course I did. S.O.S. It wasn't apparent at first. I began to notice the repetition with the fifth poem. ‘Save my soul, a prisoner.' ”

“Save my soul, a prisoner” . . . The first time I put down the words, in the third poem, it had been non-deliberate, I was just making alliteration. Then I began to repeat it in the subsequent poems. But how could I tell her that the message wasn't really for her, or for anyone else? It was for myself, perhaps, written by me to my own soul, to every other soul, the collective soul of the universe.