“You will die very soon,” I said, “like the boy you killed. I know you don't understand me.” I pointed to the boy lying beside the rifle and bayonet. “Like him.”
It seemed his slight nod was meant to offer acknowledgment or agreement or resignation. He didn't say a word.
I sat beside him while he died. It took only a few minutes. He whispered softly, and I touched his face and said, “There you go.”
I hoisted our guide over my shoulder and started down the hill. It was easy going at first. He was so slight that I barely noticed him. Returning to the stream where we'd begun our expedition the evening before, I walked over the hard, uneven ground, and soon began to feel his weight in my knees, then as a pain in my shoulders. I laid the boy on the ground and sat down for a minute, breathing heavily. I didn't know how much farther I had to go before I would find Tung and the others in my party. I was wondering about the odds of my survival, alone and unarmed, with very little food and water, when again I thought of that nighttime journey through the mud-fields of Belgium a full lifetime ago. Was it my turn to die now? Why had I survived these extra twenty years when others had been in the ground all this time? Why, in my third war, was I still alive?
I pulled the boy back up onto my opposite shoulder and started walking again, as fast as I could, no longer certain that I wasn't moving deeper into the occupied north. The dead boy's head was bumping against my midsection, legs kicking against my back. The rhythmical bouncing of his knees and feet began to play on me and I started hearing his voice echoing up through my body. He didn't like being held upside-down for such a long period of time, he said. I should stop so we both could rest. I did not listen to him. I kept on, and he kept asking to be put down. I said my first words to the boy. “Shut up,” I said. “You're no longer living and have no right to speak. Just stay as you are, and I'll get you back so they can do what must be done. But just stop talking so much, someone's going to hear us.”
He fell silent for a time. I tried to walk with less of a bounce to keep him quiet. But the path grew difficult and again his feet pounded into me and his voice rang into my gut and up into my inner ear.
“No,” I said, “I believe I have every right to be here. No, I shouldn't have died twenty years ago. No, it's not just that others died and I lived. Of course not. There's no plan out there. There is no fairness. You step into a roomful of Spanish flu and come out with not so much as a cough. Some people get out without a scratch. It's not about being deserving or skillful or even lucky because luck implies something too. It's only about random chance. It's a roulette wheel, this world.
He didn't answer, and I just kept walking. I came to what I believed was the stream where we'd met this boy the night before. I didn't know if he was still talking. I'd stopped listening. I stood on the bank, wondering if my remaining strength would allow me to ford the stream. I stepped in and began the crossing. The stream was rocky and swift but not deep. In the middle I stopped, exhausted, and sat down in the water. I leaned back on the boy to end his talking for good. His mouth filled with water, and then I fell asleep, my face turned up to the sky.
In the morning I dug his grave beside the stream with the five members of his band who'd discovered me bobbing in the shallow water, still hoisted up on his body. They shook my hand to thank me for returning their comrade to them. They knew of me, the White One Who Comes. It was their camp we'd been destined for, fifteen miles west of where they found me. I examined each of the men after we put the boy in the ground. They suffered from malnutrition, two of them from abscesses in the teeth, one from an improperly dressed flesh wound on the hand. I administered what care I could with the few supplies I carried. Then we sat and fed ourselves, not far from the fresh grave. I kept looking over at it, wondering if he was listening to his friends' conversation. In the daylight it all seemed ludicrous, and I dismissed the night as an eventful hallucination. I had been close to an exhausted collapse for two weeks. The partisans took me to Chin-kang K'u, eight miles downstream, transferred me to the care of a medical team Id recently inspected there and bade me farewell.
I have not thought of that boy's words until now, tonight. The dead do not have words. I know that. Only the dying have words, and those who are still to come.
*
No sleep again tonight. It is past two in the morning. Today I operated for seventeen hours. How strange it is that the mind controls the body so, even when the body can barely hold itself upright. But I am thinking, of course, always thinking.
I can see your mother now as she would have awoken on the morning of my interrogation. The thugs were coming.
She sat up when the door was thrown open. The men occupied the room with a borrowed authority. The questions began immediately, from a bespectacled, leather-coated man who bobbed on his toes as he waited for the preferred response. He leaned into her face, smiling and threatening as he looked into the eyes of a woman who, before the war, he would have approachedâif he'd dared to at allâlike a timorous boy. Who would have caused him more fear than outrage. The war is a lucky place for some, as he might have known, a field of opportunity. What delightful turns of fortune we find in these times. A woman alone in her room.
His associate, a shorter, uglier man, sifted through her possessions. Her clothing, books and toiletries came alive most pleasurably in his hands. When he picked up Kajsa's hairbrush from beside a half-full glass of water, he noticed on the pale pine desk by the bathroom door a book that held the envelope containing the photographs.
*
I have been thinking much about how value is ascribed to one's life after the act of living is done. Not deeds or accomplishments. What I mean is that a part of me will live on in you even though I will not have had the privilege and responsibility of being part of your life, at least not fully. Even if I live to meet you there will always be this gulf, which is why I need to write this history for you. That is a failure of the first order. You see, there are so many things I will miss telling you, as a father would, through the years as you grow into adulthood. The small and inconsequential things and moments that make up the great quilt of your existence. What would we have learned from each other had we shared but one walk through an August rainstorm? What infinitesimal yet lasting truth would you have taken with you and remembered over my grave had we tossed a baseball back and forth on a Sunday afternoon? Well, what do you have now? You have none of that. Only the dry touch of these pages.
*
I found out about your mother at the hotel bar in New York. I've been trying to think of a better way of telling you about this, but have not been able to, and I'm sorry that I have to tell you now. I think I've been trying to protect you. Though you have every right to know the circumstances, it seems I have only been picking away at subtleties, stalling, hoping to wake up and find all of this nothing more than a terrible dream. It is proper and respectful, then, at this point, to be as forthright as possible. All my life revolves in a mysterious circle. At the beginning and the end and in the centre is the story that begins now.
I recall distinctly how my arms and fingers began to tingle and the room shifted slightly forward when I learned of your mother's death. As a boy I used to love walking through grass tall enough to reach over my head. It was the sensation of being hidden from the world, yet so thoroughly immersed in it. No one for miles around could see me, even from a high point on a hill or rooftop, so connected was I to the earth and its elements. That's something like the sensation of losing someone. You are never in your life so alive, and so aware of being alive, yet so isolated and abandoned, as when a loved one is taken from you. The planet will move right through you like wind through stalks of grass.
*
There are so many unexplored shadows.
In New York, Pitcairn leaned into the table and said, “Get in touch with the FAI, with the Mujeres Libres, Norman. The war won't go on forever. Wait till the war is over, then go back there. Go to the orphanage where Kajsa got work for those street girls.” He paused. “They waited.”
I said, “For what?”
“They waited until your daughter was born.”
*
Today I remembered Genesis. I stood in the footprints of Abraham and understood the brutality of the world. It is man's first and last state. “And he looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.” Say what you will, they knew what they were talking about. I marvel sometimes at how spot-on the Good Book really is. The only instinct that rivals our urge to scour this planet with its own blood is this urge to weep.
*
We, too, are eating dog now. I suppose enemies in all the wars of all the ages have shared one another's basic miseries. It tastes the same in my mouth as it does in theirs. Certainly more binds us together than separates us, isn't that the point? Isn't it a fact that it's only the strength of ideas that wrenches us worlds apart? Yet how strange it is that we're willing to kill for ideas. In peace-time an idea can be bought and sold with money, argument, dismissal. It can be ignored outright and no one bats an eye. Not in war. How undervalued life becomes out here, and how precious the idea.
Ho has just now presented himself and sits on the upturned trunk, waiting. I have pulled out a couple of new drawings. He seems impressed.
You know, I think he's beginning to learn something from these drawings. This pleases me.
I am pleased, too, when the peasant farmer turned training nurse learns quickly and asks intelligent questions. Such are my accomplishments now. I am pleased when Ho sits with me, watching me write or flipping through these drawings of mine. I am pleased when only one arm and not two must be amputated, when there are only three deaths and not sixteen. Beyond my most basic needs, I enjoy little physical comfort. I don't mind this so much, though I am lonely. It seems I have been in training for this life for a long time.
*
It strikes me with brutal force that I don't know myself nearly as well as a man my age should, especially considering how close I am to death on any given day. I'm forty-nine years old. Isn't that old enough? How long is a man supposed to wait before he knows for certain that no ray of light will shine from above, that no eternal rest or emptiness will come, that his life was well spent or wasted?
I can say with confidence that my life here is spent well. At least I know that. But on balance? What about everything that preceded my work here? Can one good year make up for so much lost time? I am happy. Is that good enough? I am happy and lonely and not convinced either that I will return to you or that I will not.
Will I have the strength to see that you receive this story?
My physical presence has been diminished somewhat. If you'd known the before and after versions of your father you would be quite shocked, I am sure. I'm very near skeletal and half-deaf and always chilled. These clothes I have brought from home, I noticed just this morning, are now baggy beyond recognition. My teeth ache, my energy's low and I've been battling a deep, persistent cough. Yet on occasion I feel a sense of destiny waiting for me here, though I cannot account for it. If I have time in the mornings I go walking. I enjoy watching the sun come up, and when its orange and yellow light touches the mountains I feel as blessed with purpose as this planet is with beauty. Make some good use of your life, I was told. Well, here I am. In these moments I'm confident that this is what I was born to do, to stand here at the edge of existence in the light of a new day and heal with these hands those who can be healed and commit to the unknown those who cannot. It is as if it's no longer up to me. My mother, in the end, was probably right. These talents of mine are only on loan.
I think you know Spain was my great disappointment, the death of my idealism and of part of me. But I can assure you there will be no second failure. I have learned my lesson. There are rumours that things again are teetering on the edge in Europe. Will there soon be a time when only the dead enjoy their peace, when one war will follow another, with another after that, and so on, with no end in sight? War might be for your generation as it was for mine, but I certainly hope that is not the case.
Please do not misunderstand. Does it sound as if I've given up? I have not. Remember what I said: We do not go down without a fight, we Bethunes. What I see here gives me reason to hope. I am not planning on dying a martyr's death in China or anywhere else. I'm deeply committed to this struggle, nothing more. I would give my life for it, and might end up doing just that, but I will take no joy in it. I am, I think, too in love with all this Creation out here.
Despite the lice and hunger and the ignorance and poverty and withering solitude, I confess to a devotion stronger than anything I've ever known. I even feel privileged for it. I hope you understand what I'm trying to say. Perhaps you think less of me for this life I have taken on. Surely you will feel some resentment. But you can see the good in it, too, can't you? There isn't a bone of common sense left unbroken in my body; you'd be right on the money about that, if it's crossed your mind. But do you remember what I said to your mother that day, that common sense and ideals don't often go hand in hand? Well, I think that just about sums up my life.
*
This morning Ho came to me with my favourite breakfast. He has finally perfected the boiled egg! The poor boy, how I ride him. How he wants to please me! And the abuse I dole out in return! I made such a fuss when I saw that egg. I suppose I was trying to make it up to him. He was very proud. After a hundred attempts here it was. For six months he has, when in possession of an egg, slaughtered it, so to speak, with his overzealous ways. Perhaps he is a poet, after all. Hapless in the domestic arena, prone to episodes of daydream, lost in those hot-water bubbles.