Stone Kingdoms (27 page)

We lay there all day trapped in our silence, starting at every sound that came close, our movements brushed by leaf and stem, and I wondered what memories she sifted through. Sometimes her face was turned towards me, so close I could have stretched out a hand and touched it, and then suddenly, despite everything I knew about her, despite the time we had spent together, I realized there were great areas of her past and present that I knew nothing of. She lay so close, and yet I didn't know what world her mind wandered through or what future she constructed for herself. I looked at her eyes, ebony, beautiful, and the olive sheen of her skin and wondered in what place or time our lives could touch. Because by then I wanted our lives to touch. I had known this for a long time but had tried to keep it hidden, preserved in the memory of a cloud of grain falling softly across her face and the touch of her hand on my hair. When they had brought me back from the place of the dead, hers was the only face I wanted to see, her voice the one I wanted to hear. Her absence had freed the truth. Every day we were together I added another image of her to my secret store, preserved in memory and studied like the photographs we had taken of the children in the camp. Sometimes words came to
my
lips, words that came from somewhere I didn't know, but I stifled them and pushed them back into a nervous silence. For there was another voice, a voice like the one my father used when he spoke for God, and it warned and mocked what it insisted was an unutterable foolishness, perhaps even the greatest and most dangerous of all. I heard its insistent thud, like a hammer hitting an anvil, and sometimes it vanquished all other words. But sometimes too, that grip would slip and I fastened only on the blink of her eyes, the white whorled skin on the tips of her fingers, the electric rustle of her hair, and I would feel the life that coursed through all my being.

I stared at her through the drill of sunflowers, the silhouette of her face framed by the ornate decoration of leaf, and I was frightened that what I felt might only serve to hurt her. He had said that we wanted to buy his people with our food and make them our slaves, to have power over them. How could I love her – for by that time I had allowed the word to remain in my consciousness – and not let that love seek to take away her freedom or subsume her into a world that was mine but could never be hers? She stirred in the gully between the drills, propping her head on the pillow of one hand and fanning away flies with the other, and when she smiled I felt a shard of shame for the thoughts my returning smile disguised. It seemed like a deception, another example of self-assumed superiority patronizing with half-truths and lies. What would she do or say if she knew? I touched her gold bracelet on my wrist but when I searched amidst the shared moments which had brought us to that place there was only the slow shift of uncertainty.

As the day lengthened and seemed to stretch into its own eternity I wanted to speak to her, to let our voices pass through the barred stems of the plants. I started to whisper but the long silence and the heat had dried my voice, and when I went to speak the words croaked out too loudly and suddenly she silenced me with a finger across her lips. I read her eyes and the turn of her head and knew she had heard something and as I
listened
I heard it too – at first no more than the gentle brush and rustle of plants disturbed by the wind, but the air was heavy and still. Then slightly louder, somewhere in the far corner of the planting. We lifted and turned our heads, straining to catch the slightest disturbance, but for a few moments the stillness settled again. Just an animal perhaps, even our imagination, but as we relaxed we heard it once more. Footsteps, slow footsteps, the rustle and brush of plant. Coming further into the crop. She stretched her hand to me and I gripped it, trying to stem the fear, but as we held each other the sounds faded once more and suddenly I was conscious only of my breathing. A small bird, its breast and plumage an electric shock of blue, shot over our heads, making our eyes lift skyward to the blue swathe of sky, and then into the silence slipped the sound of music, a tumble of notes on a flute which seemed to snake and lilt between the plants until it circled and held us tightly in its grasp. I turned from Nadra and scurried along the drill, propelling myself forward with kicking movements then easing through the rows, following the music. I saw them through the curtain of plants, standing at the edge of the flowers, Ahmed's flute rising and falling in rhythm with the music. When they saw my face the music stopped, but only for a second, and from inside the tattered rags of his clothes Iman passed me a plastic canister of water and a little parcel of dried meat. Then without words being spoken they turned and walked away, my final memory of them obscured behind a screen of leaf and flower.

20

The
closer the past comes to the present, the less certain it becomes. Things blur a little, sometimes blend with dreams and take on new forms so I have to struggle to order their shape, try to pare away what belongs to the distortion of memory. Maybe it is the drugs they give me to ease the pain which cloud and layer those days and mix the memories with some other world outside time. But to remember, to remember clearly, is one of the things that is important, and I remember the rising hysteria of the cicadas, the sky above our heads slowly branding itself with a fiery filament of light, the dark buzz of mosquitoes looking for a feast and across the drill of plants her eyes like amber, the patina of her skin dulled by the softening of the light. Soon it would be time – and we waited, rubbed our legs and stretched them into life, sipped a little of the tepid water, using our tongues to push it round the dryness of our mouths. Already the night birds had started their guttural cawing and from time to time voices ricocheted across to us from the camp. The falling of darkness seemed to stir a stronger scent from the sunflowers, and shadows drifted into the gullies where a faint breeze stirred the rows. Stirred them like a whisper, rippling through the field like little tongues of sound, and suddenly there was a security in the shelter of where we lay. Beyond that security extended an uncertain journey, and into that uncertainty flowed the fear-driven imaginings that made me want to delay our departure. The hundred or so metres' stretch of open ground to the river bed
magnified
itself in those final moments, assuming the proportions of an epic journey which would surely thrust us into the spotlight of searching eyes.

But there was no other way, and I tried to counter my fears with the knowledge that each step would take us further from our pursuers. Through the filter of leaf, the moon seemed sunk deep in the sky, its scarred surface brushed lightly by yellow, vaporous mist, and about it a scattered spray of bone-white stars. The air was still warm and thick, but drained of humidity and weight, it pressed down on us making the movements of our bodies seem slow and heavy. A stronger breeze riddled the leaning rows. We started to scuttle along the gullies towards the edge of the crop. When we reached it we paused and peered through the final wisps of plant at the open stretch of scrub which separated us from the river bed. There was nothing to be seen except the lazy flitter of moths and the fine clouding of insects around some bushes but we both hesitated, waiting for the other to make the first move, and in the night sky the stars hung frozen and trapped in their remote silence. I touched her arm and nodded that I would go first, and as I rose to a crouch the journey flashed in front of me – a nightmare of flailing limbs, a slow-motion run, the opening of the clouds like curtains in a theatre pulled back to reveal a light-drenched stage, the bitter mocking laughter of the audience. I saw again the faces of the soldiers as they sat staring at me in the clinic and suddenly I hated them for filling me with that fear, that sickening loosening of the stomach, the unravelling reel of images projected across the stretched screen of my senses. I hated them with an intensity that fired energy and strength into my body and I set off, pounding my anger into the dust, indifferent to the rough, uneven ground below my feet, holding my face up to the sky and drinking in the sudden sense of space. Sometimes I almost tripped over stones, and thorns brushed my legs, but I knew nothing would make me fall or stop even for a second, and a few moments later I was sliding down the
shaly
sides of the river bank, tumbling and rolling in an ecstasy of relief.

For a few seconds I lay there staring at the night sky, and then I clambered up the slope with my feet dislodging little avalanches of earth and stone, to crouch where bank and plain met. I waved my arm at the oscillating shadows that were the field of sunflowers and waited for her to emerge. I waved again, my arm working stiffly like a metronome, calling her forward, but there was no parting of the shadows, no one emerging from the slow tremor of plant. Rising to my knees I waved more frantically, listening all the time for some sign of her approach. I wanted to call out and knew I couldn't but just when I thought of going back I saw her soft shape slewing a path through the moonlight, and I willed her on, starting forward each time she stumbled but making myself hold back, watching as her features slowly formed in the darkness. As she ran I listened desperately for the sound of an engine or a warning shot, but none came, and then she was dropping on to the soft bed of the bank, gasping for breath. We lay on our backs and stared into the sky until she was able to speak.

‘I almost fell,' she said. ‘I tripped over something, I thought I would fall.'

For some reason I laughed, and after first pretending to be angry she did too, until the laughter screwed up our eyes. And then the words came tumbling out, flooding the long silence we had endured and which had held us separate. Only the moon-washed river bed coiling below us reminded of a time beyond the present.

‘We have to travel by night, hide during the day, until we are far from here,' she said.

‘They will search for us, won't they?'

‘Yes, they will search. You are worth much money to them. They will try to find us.'

‘They're probably out there right now.' And as I spoke I knew that they would punish me through her. Standing up, I
helped
her to her feet and we slithered down the steep slope to the dried-up bed below. In the gauzy, flint-coloured light we started to follow its sinuous course. Sometimes we stumbled over clusters of stones or the tattered brambles of some thorn which had taken root. As we walked, the black buzz of mosquitoes hunted our steps. The ground below our feet was yielding, as if we were walking on a cushion of sand, but this only increased the feeling of uncertainty that each step brought. Gradually, too, the steep slopes on either side disappeared, to be replaced by broad borders of scrub, and so our progress was more exposed but we kept on walking, encouraging each other with looks and gestures.

After about an hour we passed through a section which was littered with limestone rocks and large stones, and then our feet would slip and slither over the loose scree, banging and bruising our ankles and draining our strength. We sat on a dome-shaped rock and rested, pressing our hands to the knobs of our ankles and trying not to scratch where the mosquitoes had bitten. By then all the water and dried meat had gone, and the rest brought the first pangs of thirst, but to think about it made it worse and after a short while we pushed on, knowing that we needed to cover many more miles before dawn. Once we came across a solitary waterbuck sniffing the cold memory of water before it took off into the bush, its sudden speed through the silvery light like the tremble of mercury. And on the plain, acacia trees were framed and frozen by the monochrome light, while on either side of us the distance stretched like a bleached moonscape.

We walked on, taking rests only when we had to, the warmth of our bodies dropping with the falling temperature. It felt like a dream, a dream world, in which I had slipped from my bed which faced the sea and walked through the door my father had secured and bolted, then passed through the funnel of coarse-spiked dunes until I walked along the shore. Spectral, my body diffused only by the grit and grain of light, blown by
every
breeze and current, unshaped or formed by any consciousness other than the sift of dream, I walked in a trance, the journey passing through me, gnawing at only the edges of my senses. I remembered the walks on the beach when I followed my father's footsteps, his shoes sunk deep in the crust of sand, the wide stretch of my legs as I tried to follow in his stride, the whine of wind splashing my face and slapping back my hair. Trying to narrow the gap between us to shelter in his broad wake as he strode through it, his head unbowed or distracted from its forward gaze as he headed for the black ligaments of rocks which marked the end of the beach and his turning point. Sometimes I wished I could be younger still, small enough for him to lift and carry inside the folds of his coat.

But now as he walks I move about him, made of nothing but silver particles of light, and I speak to him in a voice that breaks inside his head like the heave and fall of the sea, and I ask him about love and show him the photograph of my mother, the wedding dress flowing round her feet like surf. And we stand together on a pavement and watch her move shoes in a window, move them gently while the light glistens on the bright leather and buckles. We come close to the glass and stare through our own reflections into the world which stands behind her – the rows of green and white boxes on wooden shelves which reach to the ceiling, the steps with their long upright arm, the little sloping footstools with green leather centres – and suddenly she looks up and sees us both and smiles. It is a smile of love and it falls back on us equally, and we're standing so close to the glass that our breath clouds the glass and I have to rub it clear to see her perfectly again.

I move about him silently, invisible, made of nothing but light and the wind that whips the sand into little fists, and I ask him how love feels. And I see their bed that first time and feel their fear, the strangeness of solitary lives meeting in a moment that can never be rehearsed, and I ask did he put his love in words. And I look through the window again where my prints
have
smeared the glass and I see her climbing to the top step, scanning the rows of boxes, then stretching for the right one. I see the care with which she handles the box and holds it in the palm of her hand like an offering and when she opens the lid there is a sprinkling of coloured tissue. And then she kneels and lifts the lid away and offers the shoes and I ask again did he ever put his love in words. And when he looks through me with his eyes full of the grey swell of the sea, I ask him why that love was not enough to heal him.