Gone to the Forest A Novel

3



Across the border there is a mountain—and one morning the mountain explodes. First there is an enormous boom. The boom is not hollow but dense with noise. The natives come out of their quarters. They are standing outside, looking and listening, when the boom repeats and then dissolves into a rumble. They are watching when the top of the mountain opens and disgorges fire.

They have never seen this before. Violence from men they understand well, but from the land itself—the mountain now retching, the innards of the earth shooting up—they do not know what to think or how to understand it. A giant cloud of smoke pushes up and covers the sky. Bolts of lightning snap through the cloud. A column of red and orange forms in the middle. The fire pours straight into the sky and fills it.

They feel the explosions that follow from across the border. The ground bucking beneath their feet. They thrust their hands into the air. They try to regain balance. The explosions follow in quick succession and above them the sky is purple and orange and gray and white. They watch. Their hands are shaking and they kneel—are thrust to the ground—in prayer. Even the ones who have no religion to speak of.

The volcano erupts for four days. In the chaos of the four days and darkness the farmers let go of their routine. The livestock go unfed and then are fed at strange hours of the night. It makes them bellow in fear. They stampede across the lot and then huddle together and then stampede again. Also, they shit constantly. Streams of shit pouring out of their bodies as they squeal and grunt.

The natives are sent out to calm the herds. They press themselves between the animal bodies. They step into soft piles of shit—the shit goes as high as their ankles, it goes as high as their calves. They stroke and soothe and croon but cannot take their eyes from the sky. They wonder if it will last forever. If it will never stop. The animals can sense their distraction and are not comforted.

When four days pass the mountain’s contractions slow. It takes another two days for the cloud to ease and they see patches of sky for the first time. There is sunlight. The contractions slow again and then stop. The animals are calm—the natives and farmers alike take that to be a sign, but they still doubt the sun and sky. Four days and they are numb to the life that came before.

The mountain had been silent for a thousand years. They did not know it could explode. They had been trained to worry about other things. The ravages of colonialism. Man-made apocalypse, nuclear disaster—they have seen pictures, they have heard stories. They are not educated people in the valley and the natives in particular are prone to modern superstition. They worry about their skin and hair and wonder if they will drop dead in ten years’ time, a reaction delayed.

They are reading the wrong signs. The right signs have nothing to do with history or culture. Two days before the eruption the snakes fled down the mountain. They slid, then dropped into the river and drowned. Within hours they were washing up on the dirt banks of the river. Stiff and twisted like small branches of wood, their bodies rigid in death.

The news of the snakes moved slowly. The villagers in the neighboring country were too busy gathering the bodies of the snakes, which they collected with their bare hands in baskets and then threw onto the fire like wood. They were too busy and so the volcano came to the valley first, before the news of the snakes that slithered down the mountain. The news of the snakes came with the ash. The ash and the slow clearing sky.

ON THE EIGHTH day the ash arrives in the country. It is quiet for four days. The mountain belching only a pocket or two of black smoke. The ground staying still. But then the ash happens.

It creeps across the border and into the country. It does it in the night, by stealth. The farmers in the valley wake and there is a thick layer of gray on the ground and in the air. They are baffled. It looks like snow but it is still hot outside and the gray is too fine. It is hard to see, almost invisible to the eye. Like a dry fog. Dry to the touch and everywhere in the air. They wave their hands through the air and their skin is parched.

By noon the valley is lost to a blizzard of ash. The children and the local imbeciles put on swimming trunks and goggles and run through the ash. They try to make balls of it. The ash balls fall to pieces in their hands and they throw handfuls of dust instead. They run across the fields and their feet slip and they choke on the dust. In places they fall to their waists in ash. They are laughing like loons, their minds cracked.

The ash continues to fall and the layer grows higher. It does not freeze into solid tranches. It does no melting of any kind. It only accumulates. The roads and tracks close themselves up. The car motors eat up dust and die. The bicycle wheels do not turn. They try to clear paths but the ash keeps falling. It is up to their waists, up to their necks. Two children disappear into the ash and are not found.

After two days, there is a brief respite in the ash fall and the men go out into the landscape. They try to clear paths. They fill wheelbarrows with the ash and cart it away, briefly they try to make order of it. Then the storm picks up and the ash plain grows higher and they retreat inside again. From the houses the windows show nothing but a field of gray without sky or ground. They look out the windows and give up. They bar themselves in their homes and watch the ash horizon climb up the walls of the houses.

One week later the ash slows. The farmers and natives step out into the monochrome landscape. Which was once their home. Which is all they know. They wear scarves and gas masks to protect themselves from the swirl of ash in the air. The particles minute and lingering. Then they embark on the task of rescuing the landscape from the ash. Digging it out like an archeological site: the evidence of their lives.

The real miracle is the fact that so many of the animals survived. The prescient put them in the barns. They left a native to stay with them through the ash storm. Feeding them daily. Avoiding them when they bucked and stomped in panic. Finally the ash stops falling and they release them into the open air. Onto the gray plain. Their legs buckle and their knees give into the dust. But they press forward, they find their footing, and disappear across the field.

THE FIRST DAY the mountain exploded, the old man held drinks at the farm. Among the whites, across the valley, there was a mood of hilarity. The girl said that company was what they needed and word was sent out. Dinner was ordered and the liquor trolley stocked. The neighboring whites—those who remained and were not afraid to travel—came at dusk and Jose served drinks on the veranda.

The men came without their wives, this being no time for a woman to travel. They stood with a drink in their hand and admired the view. On the whole the old man did not fraternize with these small landowners. These whites owned small plots of land and were therefore considered grasping. They had survived in the land through bluntness and cunning and were now starting to come into their own, what with the change taking place in the province.

They were men suited to this new age of violence. They were mobile and unreliable, with a reputation for physical brutality. There were fistfights and beatings on their farms and there had been shootings. The old man said they were men who did not understand the boundaries of behavior. But the girl liked society and they were now what passed for society in the valley. Therefore they had been invited to the farm.

It was almost a gathering like the old days, before the first departures and the unrest, before the rumors of possible rebellion. There was candlelight and crystal. There was in front of them a vast expanse of land. However, the men were tense. They stood on the veranda and watched the mountain tear into the sky. They talked but mostly drank from nervousness. They began with cocktails and then there was wine at dinner. After dinner there were ports and liqueurs.

The girl played jazz records on the gramophone and watched as the nervous men grew drunk. The scene loosened into a facsimile of the life back home. A poor one, the blacks and grays blurring into the white. A certain amount of play acting being involved. That play acting being imprecise. The girl smiled when the men made toasts to the mountain. She smiled again when the old man brought out a box of cigars and the men made toasts to the cigars.

Jose filled their glasses. The night progressed. The men were drunk but still restrained. The girl also. She had no intention of being reckless. She stood up and walked the veranda. She was not wearing very much. Her body exposed by her dress (his mother’s dress). Tom watched her and grew an ache in his throat and groin. She saw him watching and went to the old man. She sat down beside him on a stool.

In the morning, the men were still on the veranda. They had passed out in their armchairs. The old man ordered lunch for the party. The men nodded thanks without getting to their feet, and did not think of leaving the farm. Then it was noon and the sky was still dark and lit with fire. Lightning cracked up through the sky. They could see rivers of lava and the black cap of smoke continued to grow up above.

The men sat in the old man’s house and watched the mountain explode. Jose moved down the line of armchairs. He pushed a cart of drinks and then brought trays of cold food. The men ate and drank. The air now bearing permissiveness of a new kind. The men visibly inhaling it. It was hot, and they untucked and unbuttoned their shirts. There was not much conversation. One of the men said they might bring their wives for dinner, the roads seeming safe enough. He used the telephone to ring back to his farm and word was sent round.

There were eight men on the veranda that day and all eight stayed into the night. At dusk their wives were driven to the farm by their natives. They had dressed for the special occasion. With satin dresses and wraps to protect against the night air. A table was set in the dining room and dinner was served. Now that the women had come the atmosphere of nervous privilege was restored. The men made toasts to that privilege and proceeded to drink themselves blind.

After dinner the gramophone was switched on again and there was dancing and more drink. The girl came down after dinner. She had stayed in her room all day—trays were sent at mealtimes and endless pots of tea—but now she emerged. She was wearing a new dress, she had arranged her hair so that it looked like it was falling but was not. There was rouge on her cheeks and lips and she had put kohl on her eyes and smelled strongly of scent.

She was not even the most beautiful woman on the veranda. But she wove through the crowd and she had been emboldened by the previous night and there are things besides beauty. For example, the drunken lust of men. Which filled the veranda. Having been so good, the girl was now restless. The presence of the other women had spurred her instinct for competition. Therefore she moved across the veranda and she made the other women disappear. Nothing doing with their lace and ribbon and powder.

Abruptly, the old man stood up. He announced he was retiring for the night. He had no intimation of what was to come, such a thing being impossible for his arrogance to fathom. The other men nodded and watched him disappear across the veranda. The sour stench rising from their armpits. They had done no more than stand in the washroom and sponge their faces and necks. Their clothes still smelled of alcohol and animal must. They were forgetting where they were and making themselves at home.

Always a bad sign. The gramophone cranked. The girl danced down the length of the veranda. The men watched with drunken intent and the women watched, too. The girl did not notice about the men but did about the women. She laughed. Never having had a husband, she had therefore never worried about losing one. She was a little drunk. One of the women abruptly rose to her feet and crossed the veranda.

The other women followed. They were not going to sit and watch their husbands with the girl. The husbands’ thoughts being legible to the wives. The wives knowing what the husbands were capable of, having had a lifetime to learn. The women were outraged but the outrage was a cover—there were things happening that they had no interest in seeing. As they left they were aware of having stayed too long as was.

The men were left alone with the girl and she gave a special shimmy to celebrate her victory. Laughter rang out across the veranda. The girl turned up the volume on the gramophone and said something about cigars. One of the men found the box and lighter. The girl passed the box around and the men lit their cigars. Which smoldered and smoked as they watched her. She had stopped dancing and stood smiling as she rubbed her wrists against the jut of her hip.

The record on the gramophone clicked off. The men smoked their cigars in silence and looked at the girl. When they had met her the day before she had stood between the old man and his son and blushed for the duration of the introduction. They hadn’t known what to think. The girl seemed simple enough but what was happening between the two men was nothing simple. Not a rivalry as such. For a time they could not understand it.

But now that confusion lifted and they saw the girl for what she was: a spreader of unrest and confusion. The girl was a woman. She was a body—just a body, and evidently a gifted one. All the parts being in working order. The shoulder and neck, the legs and waist and back. (The girl also enjoyed her body. She had faith in it. It was hard as a rock and impenetrable, and thus far it had served her well.)

The girl stood before the men. One stood and came to her and she smiled as he approached. He laid a hand on her shoulder. Gently, he pushed one strap down and then the other. In a manner that was almost inconsequential. He chucked her under the chin and looked into her face. The girl was still smiling as he stepped back and looked at his handiwork and then the girl stopped.

Doubt crossed her face, if anyone had been there to notice. But there was no one—the room was empty in that respect. So the doubt stayed on her face. Doubt as to what was presently unfolding. It was on her face when she kicked off one shoe and then the other shoe (they were pinching, they were hurting so, she did not think she could stay in them one second longer). It was on her face as the shoes skittered across the floor and came to a stop.

The men stared at the shoes. They were tiny. Tiny things of leather and satin. There was a logic to the shoes. Quality and all that. Standards. Propriety. Everything that was currently escaping them—the very idea of being civilized itself—as they sat in their armchairs and watched the girl. They stared at the shoes and then they raised their eyes and looked at the girl.

WHO WAS NOT having an easy time of it and therefore kept her head high and her back rigid. She was conscious of the cool tile beneath her bare feet. The gust of wind through her armpits. The dress was now hanging off her nipples, her nipples were now all that stood between decency and nakedness and lucky for her they were spectacularly erect. Her nipples were a matter of note. Always had been.

She laughed. It sounded hysterical in the silence and she stopped, mouth dry. Truth be told her sense of humor had deserted her. There was plenty to laugh about but she wasn’t laughing. She could see the humor, she could see the jokes and punch lines. A woman standing in front of a man, that was already good for some laughs. But she was not in the mood for laughter. She shivered, even though it was hot.

One month ago she arrived in the country and she saw there was nothing here she could not handle, nothing beyond the arid air. She had been warned that it was wild country going wilder, but she had already survived the drawing rooms at home. Home being a ruthless territory, cruelty on display with the silk and china. She had almost been relieved by the barren expanse of country. She had not thought—did not think—that men could be changed by means of landscape.

But now here she was and for the first time she sensed that this was something different, of which she did not have the measure. Something she did not currently understand. Later she would look back on this moment and she would see that there were a hundred things she might have done, at this moment as with any moment, at this moment which was just like any other moment. But then her mind was blank. Small and hard and blank. Like a pebble. Her mind was a pebble. Nothing adhered to its surface.

So she did what she always did. When her mind was blank, when the sickness set in, when her skin began to itch and burn. What she always did, a woman’s only purchase on power. She took her clothes off. She reached up her hands and undid the hook and eye closure. She pulled down the zipper of her dress, this cunningly designed dress, more expensive than anything she had ever owned.

It was going to happen anyway so she might as well be the one to do it. Not that she was a fatalist but the zipper slid down without protest and now the dress was hanging off her back. Taking off your clothes was easy. Putting them back on was the hard part. Now look. She was down to her skivvies and they were not clean. It didn’t matter. She could sing a song and nobody would notice. Children should be seen and not heard. The saying referred strictly to the girls, the girls who would grow up to be ladies.

Not that she was a lady. She was, however, a product of her society. It was getting hard to think, hard to figure it out, because now there was wetness growing. A slick between her legs and the thrall of physical longing. Well, a woman felt the weight of a man looking, a woman liked to be wanted, and here were several men, here a group of men. Who could see the wetness for all she knew.

She exhaled and tried to keep her head straight. Lust and the mistakes that were made in its wake. A trail of them, each bigger than the last. Desire was what plagued women, it was what tripped them up. She thought: a woman should seek out dry land. Be rid of lust at last. Which made nothing good or clear. Which only gathered around a woman, inutile and collecting dust. Men did not like the women who wanted it. Men would rather force themselves on the women who didn’t. The logic being dismal but clear.

At the same time, a man would take what he could get and always did. One of the men stood up. She raised her head to look at him. He was plain, he was nothing as a man. He moved slowly, with both hands spread before him. Like he thought she was a rabbit or a rabid animal. She watched and saw the gleam flicker into his eyes. Her body relaxed a notch. After all they were men. After all they were the same. She smiled and then she watched his face harden in front of her and the smile died on her lips.

She stood in the blast of hunger that came from his body and the hatred coming from his eyes. Hatred for her as a woman. She became afraid. Panic swung through her body and then she changed her mind. A woman can change her mind, she thought. A woman can get wet between the legs and loosen her dress and she still has the right to change her mind. Doesn’t she? Isn’t that what they said?

She felt the situation slipping out of her control. She stumbled and tried to guess at the damage. There was the old man. They were afraid of him—that could work for her or against her, likely against. She had seen the store of resentment in the faces of the men. Built over time and carefully fortified. Brick by brick and then the wall broke and wiped out whatever stood in its way. Due to either bad luck or stupidity.

She had made a situation for herself on the farm and a good one. But now it was turning to mud and faster than she could believe. It was not fate and not inevitable but it was what was going to happen. Now the man was standing in front of her. He walked his eyes across her body and then to her face. The interest being more knot than attraction. His lust being caught up in complicated things. Like power and shame and fear. She thought: we are not so different. I know you, there are things that we share.

She wasn’t even convincing herself. His gaze slid around her neck to her back and his body followed, his body circled round. He stood behind her. She closed her eyes as he gripped her neck. With the other hand he yanked her to him. Held her by the neck and pushed her dress aside. Rooted downstairs. Poked a finger in. Slapped it with an open hand. Hard, not teasing like, not affectionate. She gasped and winced in pain. She thought: surely not here, in front of all of them. Surely not like this.

He unbuckled his trousers and shoved right into her but she was wet so it wasn’t rape. Which gave him no pleasure or less pleasure or a different pleasure to the one he was wanting. So that was a point for the girl. Just one but who was counting, you grasped at straws when you were trying to keep your head on your shoulders. Now he was calling her a whore cunt bitch but she’d heard it all before. Nothing new under the sun, nothing he could tell or show her. With his idiot thrusting. Like a dog or rat or pig. Quick as a dog, too, and it was on to the next one.

So that was how it was going to be. So she was going to be sore but she had her pills. A whole bottle of them on the bed stand in her room. One of the men slapped her face and pushed her to the ground. She concentrated on the pills. She should have counted how many. How many pills and how many men. In case there was an equivalence lurking in the numbers. Back when this began, which already felt like a long time ago.

Were they all going to take their turn? Was every one of them going to line up for a poke and a stab? Or had some of the group left—scared by what they wanted to see and what they would imagine for weeks to come, what they almost saw and did. She tried to keep count. It took her mind off things, which were quickly becoming painful back there. Desire ran out on you and then the f*cking started. You could disconnect but there was nothing like pain to bring you back.

Not that she wanted them to stop. She couldn’t think a thought so clearly. She couldn’t think her way past the situation at hand, she could no longer fathom what happened next.

To give her credit: she was not waiting to be saved. She was not waiting for the shout of a man coming to save her from another man. (Which would have had nothing to do with her. A man saved a woman and he was only saving some idea of himself. A man was nothing but a continent of ideas. Whereas a woman lived on shifting ground. Therefore it was easy to slip between the cracks. They’d been warning her since she was a child. She couldn’t say she hadn’t been told.)

There was no sound of feet. No slam of door. No anger. No stopping. It went on. What a body can take is always more than a body can take until it isn’t. Until the body says it can do no more. Her body went past that point and she knew nothing about it. Her head had disconnected from her body and was floating in space. Her arms and legs were next and then it was just her torso—she’d forgotten her torso, she had left it behind. With the wolf pack snapping at her heels. Snapping and then biting and then eating and she was gone.

Outside, the mountain was decapitated by flame. The smoke cloud blotted out the sky. None of the men on the veranda looked at the mountain. They were otherwise occupied.