Wall of Days

207

Face me, for I am in all of you.’ I yell this so the crowd can hear.

Abel grabs me by the shirt. He whispers, ‘All your talk of paradise, of better ways, of a once-again powerful human race, and now you want to crush it? You say we are afraid of the past but what of the future? What is it you want, Bran? Do you know?’

I do not say anything.

He laughs, ‘You caught me off-guard at first when you re-appeared.

I have some repair work to do now. I may have erred by not killing you when we first saw you climbing the mountain. But you cannot kill ghosts, at least not in the open.’

He lets me go and whispers again, ‘Make-believe. How does it feel to be make-believe.’ It is not a question. He pats me on the shoulder.

His hand lingers for a second.

He drops it and strides off towards the town.

‘Wait!’ I call out. ‘My daughter. Amhara. What have you told her about me?’

Abel stops and turns to me. ‘Your daughter knows nothing of you, Bran, and will never know anything of you. She is our future now.’ He turns again and walks off.

I watch him go. He is a way off now, walking back towards the town. Only the two soldiers accompany me.

And then I see her. There amongst the people, two rows back, lit by torches. It is her. It has to be. Someone I know so well, someone who was such a part of my life: a friend, a lover, a traitor. ‘Tora!’ I shout as loud as I can, ‘Tora!’ The faces in the sea of people stare straight at me and I know it is her. She is far off but it has to be. Are there people holding her back? I shout to her again and now I try to run. I try to run through the soldiers but they block my way. I struggle through their 208

grasp and am clear to the town but one trips me and puts his boot into my back and I taste dust in my mouth. I wriggle almost free and am on my feet again but one of the soldiers draws back his fist with his hand gripping my throat and that is all I remember.

209

12

When I come to it is dawn. I can taste blood and dust and I cannot breathe through my nose. My eye is swollen and I have grazes along the side of my face. Looking back towards the town I can just make it out in the distance. There is a trail leading across the sand from where I lie. I realise they have dragged me almost a mile away from the town.

Though I can barely make it out I believe the gates have been closed and the people are gone.

After a while I notice that there are more tracks than just mine and those of the two soldiers leading away from the town. They are fresh. People must have passed me in the night. One set of tracks is like a furrow. As if someone was being dragged. Tied-up. I follow them.

I don’t recall the first moment I notice them.

Out of the white noon light they appear, not suddenly but as if by osmosis. A mirage. My legs give way.

I do not speak. I do not think.

Then I get up and run. I start to run towards the tree, the one where 210

Andalus and I stopped, the one where Tora and I spent those hours together years ago.

Andalus stands beneath the tree. I jog up to him. He stands with his back to me but I am not looking at him. I stop a few metres away.

He is looking up at the tree. As am I.

He stands looking up at the body hanging from the dead branches of the tree.

A sound escapes my throat.

Tora. My Tora. She looks the same as she did all those years ago when last I saw her on the beach, looking after me, the salty breeze in her hair.

All I can hear now are waves, like the ocean over the mountains.

There is a drop of blood in the corner of her mouth. A bit lip. A punch. Vomited up from the throat.

I am sorry. I am sorry.

She swings slowly from the branch.

Andalus stands still. He is fading away now.

I feel for my knife. I do not have it.

I reach out for Tora’s legs. I hold on to them. I sniff them. They still feel warm. They smell like her. Like living flesh. I look up at her. The sun, filtering through the branches, blocks her face. She is just a few hours dead.

Another sound from me.

I pick up a stone. I climb into the tree and saw through the rope with the stone. It takes a long time. Her body falls to the ground. Tora’s dress covers her face, her legs naked, dead.

Andalus does not move.

I get down from the tree and go up to him. I put my hand on his shoulder.

211

And then I hit him. I still have the rock in my hand that I used to cut down Tora. I lift up my arm and hit him on the temple. He sees it coming. He does not struggle. I watch his eyes as I bring down my hand upon him. I watch his eyes, and they widen but he does not scream, he does not say a thing. Again and again I hit him. Some blows slap against blood – a stone dropping into a pool. Some blows miss altogether. More and more miss. After a while there is no more sound. Nothing. And there is nothing in my arms, nothing at my feet. Just nothing.

I fall to my knees again. Then roll over. I am breathing heavily. I cover my face with my arm.

I lie there for a long time.

I stand up.

I stand up and walk away. I do not stop for two hours.

Then I go back.

I go back to the tree, back to the body. There is just one. Where Andalus ’s should have been is nothing. No blood. No body. Nothing.

I understand now. What he was.

Or, I already understood but did not know I did. Did not admit I did.

I scrape out a hole in the dirt. I place her in it. I cover her with rocks, starting from her feet. I look at her face with every stone I place on her.

I do not hurry. She looks peaceful. Her skin is grey, tight. She looks dead. A bug crawls from her mouth. I bury her facing upwards, naked, open to the earth. It is our custom.

I lay down next to her. The night draws in and I wrap my coat around me. I feel beetles scraping at my ears. I sleep fitfully, shivering. I dig into 212

the earth with one hand. It is warm. I lie asleep with one hand buried and the dust sifts over me.

In the morning I see them. Twenty, thirty of them. They are far off.

They shimmer. Disappear, re-appear. They carry sticks, clubs, spears.

I begin to run.

Whenever I look over my shoulder I see them. I dare not stop nor think. I grab fruit from trees as I jog past. I drink heavily at streams.

The black bodies on the horizon chase me onwards. At the top of the mountain I see them spread out in the plain below. From the bottom I see them at the top, each one silhouetted against a white sky.

I sleep. I have to. But only for a few minutes at a time. I sleep on my haunches.

I run.

I run until I reach the shore and I put out to sea.

I watch them line the shore. They stand still. They do not gesture at me. I can see their eyes.

I watch them until they are over the horizon.

It is thirteen days since I arrived.

213

13

It is like coming home. I cannot deny it. The island, I want to say, looms out of the mist as I approach. But it does not loom. It floats to the surface of my vision early one morning as I lie in my almost becalmed boat.

A home I wished I would never see again.

It has been a hard crossing, a hard time of it. I left with little water, without catching any food. I grabbed as much fruit as I could. I have had one a day. The last were shrivelled. There was one fish left in the boat. It was covered in mould. Three days off the coast it began to rain.

That saved my life. I collected water using the sail. I tied a line to the side of the boat. Once a fish was enticed to the bare lure.

If I passed over the ruins and the statue again I did not notice. I was completely on my own.

I set my course due east. I did not expect to hit the island. Even with a compass, finding a small patch of turf in this immense ocean is a miracle. The island, it seems, has brought me home.

I feel my heart beat a little faster as I get closer. I think of the marshes, of the peat bogs, of the forest. I think of the quiet here, 214

broken only by the occasional gull. I think of my cave, empty now.

I approach from the side of the cliffs. Their collapse has not halted while I’ve been away. Great swathes of rock and mud have slipped into the waters below. I see the large white rock on the sand.

The rain has not stopped either. It is light, very light. I am not sure whether it is rain or mist.

I put to shore in the same spot from which I left eight weeks ago.

The first thing I do is dig up some roots. I eat them raw.

It is like someone else has been here. An axe and a spade leaning against the cave wall. My water container standing out in the open, overflowing. Marks in the sedge. Marks on the rock. Things are where I left them but it seems so long ago it may as well be a stranger who did those things.

The cave smells. I notice in the corners, under the grasses, fish, rotting tubers, a bowl of gruel. I do not wonder at why they are there. I think back to the ghost of Andalus. I clear the food away. I am done with him now.

I come across some of my old notes. Without an almost constant fire, they have absorbed moisture and are damp to the touch, though still readable. I think of all the tasks I have: collecting food, digging peat, making notes. For a brief time I thought my days might not end on this sinking island. But it was not to be. Now I have to work out when the end will come, whether my absence has accelerated the end or postponed it. I lean against the wall. A choke escapes my throat.

215

I find I am struggling to remember Elba. Tora is the one I remember.

Her black hair, skin so translucent as to be grey. Eyes so dark sometimes you could not see the pupils. It is her I remember, her I think of. Her alive, I mean. I try not to think of the other. She is with me now more than ever.

I remember her standing at the shore looking after me. I remember her standing at the gate of the town, held by burly soldiers, as a fist hit me in the face. I can taste her fear. It sickens me.

And I remember Abel. I remember the night before I was arrested the first time. I remember my hand around his throat. His hoarse, harsh words, my stomach torn in two. I remember his words and my realisation that it was him, that it was all him. I remember him slumped in the chair as I left, staring after me but with eyes blazing, triumphant.

I struggle still to see the sense in it, to see the rightness of it.

I remember him in the hall three weeks ago. The same expression on an older face. The anger, the righteousness, the incomplete answers. I think back to Jura’s glances to the side, the closed doors, dropped eyes, shadows in the streets. Abel all the time, pulling the strings.

A man with a vision of a new world. I trained him well. A new world with no space for the old, no space for shadows.

What did it take to order the death of Tora? At which point was it decided: my return, her letter, her word to me from behind the locked door, her compassion for me, or was it simply my presence, my refusal to disappear?

I wonder how it happened. Did a crowd of men approach with blazing torches and strong wills? Did they shout out at her? And what 216

did they do to her? The concubine of the hated. Did they punch her?

Threaten her? And when she was strung up did she cry out? I think not. I think she would have looked at the people with scorn. Brave to the end.

Perhaps she asked to go with me.

A new world, beginning like the old with a murder. The anchoring sin.

He was wrong. You can kill a ghost.

I go back to the field of stone. I stand in the middle with them all around me. They rise up again. I am in a fog of the dead. This is where they belong now. This is home.

I think of the town. It sleeps now I feel. I can hear the crickets, smell the smoke, taste the oranges. I can see Amhara running through the streets, disappearing into the shadows, Elba calling after her. I see Elba sitting, her back to me, hunched over at a table. Her friend is buried.

The curtains are drawn, the house unknown to me.

I see the bodies in their graves, their bones yellow now.

What have they told Amhara about her mother?

Elba sits at the table, day after day, crying silently.

There are too many dead.

Amhara runs through the streets, her mother under the earth, the ghost of her father watching over her. The father she never knew.

Though she sensed something I think. The way she looked at me when she took my hand.

She runs through the streets, runs headlong into the walls of the town, over and over again. She feels for cracks in the wall, ignoring the splinters. The streets she runs through and beyond the walls, the plains, 217

the oceans: a small world soaked in blood. Dirty. But it is something.

She makes it something. It is perhaps more than we deserve. More than I deserve.

I see her again. I am with her this time. Her and her mother.

We are out on the vast plains beyond the gates of Bran. We are caught in a snowstorm. Our heads are down. I lead my wife and our daughter to a ravine out of the worst of the snow. I wrap my arms around them and my breath warms their hands. I shelter them from the cold.

There is a sudden breeze. I am on the island again, wet through.

I go back to the woods. There it is as quiet as it always was. As quiet as I remember. The chippings line the floor, still yellow and smelling of pine, as if I was here just a few moments ago. I look behind me, over my shoulder. I remember seeing Andalus, the last time I did that, sitting there on the tree stump, staring at me, staring at my back. I run my hand over the bark. It is sticky with resin.

I could sail to Axum. Seek him out. Tell my story there. But I know that will not happen. They cannot give me what I want.

It takes me a few hours to chop the wood and with it I dry out the cave. I arrange my possessions on the stone shelves. I catch a fish and haul the boat high up the shore. I don’t know what to do with it. I do not need it to catch fish and I will not be going anywhere. Yet I don’t want to dismantle it just yet. There is something about that, something that I cannot face. For now it must stay on the beach.

218

I wake several times during the night. In the morning I eat cold fish while I sharpen my blade. The spade has gathered some rust. Things weather quickly here.

I push the door open and a cold gust hits me. The island is cooler than I remember. I pull my coat closer and set off down the hill.

I smell the grasses, feel the wet strands brush against my skin, soaking me. My spade I sling over my shoulder. The soft rain trickles down the shaft and down my back. I shiver.

I think when I am out there, down in the sea of wet grass, I think. I realise why I have never planted crops, why I have never cultivated the grasses and roots to ensure a more plentiful supply. I did not plan on staying forever. Through my ten years in exile I was always going to go back. I just did not know it. The inevitability of guilt.

Soon I am at work slicing into the turf. The water running down my back changes from rain to sweat. I take off my coat, laying the spade in the bog. I watch as steam rises from my skin. I feel a tightness in my chest. It has not taken very long for me to lose strength and fitness. I look at my forearms. The veins bulge. I see the same skin, the same moles, the same scars that have been with me for so many years.

It is like I am doing it in slow motion when it happens. I have drawn the spade above my shoulders. I know precisely where I need to cut. I throw it down into the peat and water from the spade flies off into my face, into my eyes and the blade cuts through water and into something that straight away I know isn’t peat. I fling the spade from me onto dry ground and drop to my knees. I reach both hands into the water and feel around in it and close the thing in my hands and draw it out, the water pouring from it in torrents down its forehead, through its eyes and nostrils, mud slaking off its cheeks. It all comes 219

out as easily as that. I reach into the water. My one hand finds a head, the other an arm and I pull and the torso lifts free of the water like a child drowned and the water pours from it. There is too much water in the body.

I lay it on the grass. My heart is beating wildly. The body is complete.

The spade has sliced through part of its shoulder but everything is there: limbs, hands, head. The body is brown, the colour of peat. It has hair, stained reddish-brown, again the colour of peat. Round its neck is a noose of some kind.

I stare at the man. There is only the noise of gulls. And then he moves. Or rather the eye does. An eyelid slides partly open. I jump to my feet and there’s a scream and it can only have come from me but I do not realise I make it at the time. The eyelid reveals an eyeball, yellowish white in colour with a black iris. It stares at the rain. I catch myself peering closer at the face and waving my hand in front of it.

Stupid, I think to myself. It is just the action of the rain, the trauma of being forced from the silt, the new angle of the head. The other eyelid remains closed, seemingly welded to the cheek. As I continue looking I see something else. There is a thin line across his throat reaching from one side of his neck to the other.

How did this man die? I wonder. The noose or the knife? Perhaps the noose first then the knife for good measure, or the other way round.

I look closer at his neck. It is hard to say. The noose is thin, quite flimsy, it could even be a necklace – decoration, not a murder weapon. But then the slightest thing can kill a man.

I lean in closer and sniff the body. I am only half aware of what I’m doing. It smells of peat. It smells of earth, of water, silt, mud. It smells of the island.