Gone to the Forest: A Novel (18 page)

The girl appears, rubbing her hair with a towel. She has changed into a dress and sweater, she wears boots and carries a bag. Jose looks up.

“We should go.”

She nods. Jose briefly surveys the room. Then he picks up the satchel and rifle. They go downstairs in a line, Jose and then Carine and then Tom. When they reach the front entrance, Jose looks at the girl. He grips the gun in his arms and nods to her.

“You aren’t staying.”

“Here? No.”

“Then you may as well come.”

“Yes,” she says. “Yes. I may as well come.”

T
he horses are still tied to the
Wallaces’ gate. Tom helps the girl mount and then he and Jose mount their rides.
Jose leading the fourth horse. The girl holds out her hand.

“Give me a gun.”

Jose looks at her. She keeps her hand out and stares back at him.

“I mean it.”

He reaches into the back of his trousers and pulls out a pistol, which he
hands to her. The AK-47 remains on his lap. The girl’s hands tremble a little. She
checks the magazine for bullets and thumbs the safety, then tucks the pistol into her
boot. She nods to Jose. He hesitates, then brings out another pistol and hands it to
Tom.

“Here.”

Tom takes the gun. There is powder at the barrel. He grips the gun and the
reins and nods to both of them. The weight of the gun in his fingers.

“Let’s go.”

They go back through the village. In order to return
to the farm they must retrace their steps. It is nearly noon. The sun is directly
overhead. The bodies are melting in the sun. Already there are flies gathering in the
holes and crevices of the corpses. The smell is awful. The horses are calm, preferring
the smell of rot to the smell of blood, but to the humans, the smell is unbearable.

Jose looks back at them.

“Cover your nose and mouth.”

The girl’s body loses balance and momentarily she sways in the
saddle. Her belly plunging her sideways. Jose wrenches her upright. He holds her there
as he pulls a cloth from his pocket and wraps it around her face. She presses the cloth
with her fingers. She grips the saddle with the other hand and nods to him.

“Do not look. Keep your head down.”

She nods again and sinks down into the saddle. Jose leads the horses over
the bodies in the road, past the bodies hanging from the trees, past the overturned army
truck. The girl is quiet, she sits still and careful in the saddle, face masked in
cloth.

Tom would like to be riding behind her. He would like to climb up onto the
horse, he would like to slide his arms around her belly and press his face into her back
and sleep. Curled around the curve of her back. Instead he sits alone and sniffs as the
smell of his urine grows sweet in the heat, sweet against the horse sweat and leather.
Animal, vegetable, mineral. He is turning to stone as he sits astride this horse.

They could wait until dusk, he thinks. They could
wait until it is dark and it is safer. It would be best for all of them. They are in a
state of shock. Consider the girl, in her condition—it would be better to wait.
This heat, and this smell. As it is the girl is not moving, she is sitting perfectly
still and letting the horse carry her through the village massacre.

He acknowledges that they now have the morphine. He knows that he is still
alive, more or less. But he has paid a price. He would like to unsee what he has seen
but he already knows that is not possible. He has made his acquaintance with the
contingent world, he knows now that it is a place built of madness. Past the farm there
lies nothing at all. It unfolds and extends without reason. He, who has seen so little,
can now see future’s history, that is going to happen in this country.

There is no life for him there. The last of his illusions slipping away.
Jose says to them that they must continue. He says they cannot afford to wait until
dusk. The girl, her face muffled by the cloth, does not respond. Tom is also silent.
They will continue. They will go back to the farm. But it is like he has left a limb in
the village, a hand or a leg or a foot. The world he has believed in has gone. It is
lying by the side of the road in a puddle of blood. Therefore he is no longer innocent;
his fetishes have been taken away.

W
HEN THE THREE
approach the farm, it is
morning, or nearly morning. The girl sits bolt upright, having removed the cloth from
her face and gripped the reins, which now drape over
her belly. She
stares into darkness, into the night, as they ride down the back roads.

For a long time she believed there was security in land, but now she sees
there is no place with land in the country, she understands the land is receding from
them all. Without property, the terrain becomes senseless. The country becomes a maze,
the landscape now unrecognizable, the markers slipping away. And she is moving in
widening circles, she is trapped inside a growing labyrinth.

As if there is only the farm (although it is shrinking). And there are
only these men (although they are fading). She could travel the country and she would
always end up back where she had started. It was not entirely as she had seen it to be.
Around her the country splinters and fragments. There are deep shudders of violence
while inside her the baby grows, shrinking the world down as it does. Without the baby
things would be different. Without the baby she would be free.

But she is not free. None of them are. Such a thing no longer exists in
the country. Instead they are retreating to the relative quiet of the valley. They have
never crossed the land so quickly. Two whites and a native—a bad combination, at a
time when whites and natives alike are being shot down. They are running for their lives
and that is no metaphor. It is no longer the time for metaphor in the country, the girl
thinks. Now there is only the thing itself.

When they come upon the farm in the morning it looks the same. The farm is
quiet and the valley is empty. The rebellion has not yet arrived. They are safe. They
are on their own
land—land that is theirs, temporarily, they
remind themselves that everything is now temporary, including and especially the land.
But the farm, the property, still has its effect. False though it may be. They feel the
chaos begin to recede before they are through the gate.

They stable the horses and Tom clutches the canvas bag with the morphine.
He is exhausted and sleepless. His memories of the land in turmoil merge with fragments
of the old man: the fits of pain, the medicine running low, the eyes crawling the
ceiling and wall. The old man is the last surviving link to the old world, the old
order, that they have recently seen crumbling. He is the last collection and already a
ruin, but Tom reminds himself that he has the morphine, that at least here there is
something yet he can do.

He starts walking up the drive to the house. Jose and the girl follow and
together they enter. Where there is death throughout. They have been surrounded by death
at top speed and now—now they are in the midst of death in slow motion, death that
is slow as treacle. It is something different but no less gruesome. The house is filled
with its smell: like all the doors and windows have been kept shut for the sole purpose
of keeping the stink trapped inside.

Celeste runs to the door and pushes them back outside.

“Low. Keep your voices low.”

Although they were saying nothing. Although they were completely silent.
Her face is stricken and in it all is there to see. She proceeds to tell them
anyway.

That the past thirty-six hours have been very bad. All day
he was in pain and screaming for the pills. She fed them to him,
she kept feeding him pills until the pain was gone and he could rest. Then the pills
wore off and then she heard thumps and pounding and she ran to his room and he was
there, thrashing in the bed, screaming in agony, hitting his head against the wall and
headboard, and she fed him more pills.

At nightfall he went mute. He opened his mouth but his voice was gone. His
tongue flap-flapped in the air but no sound came out. She stood by the side of the bed.
He motioned with his hand for more pills. She told him she had no more. He motioned for
the pills again. She asked if he would like some water, some soup, some milk. If he
would like her to rub his feet. He opened his mouth but could not scream.

She is glad that they are back. She is very glad. Tom nods and
swallows.

“Is he sleeping? How is he now?”

“He is no longer himself.”

“I will go and see him.”

“Yes.”

He hands her the canvas bag.

“There is medicine in there.”

Jose takes the bag from Celeste and looks at Tom.

“You should sit down and recover from the journey. I will give him
the morphine.”

He disappears. Now Celeste leads them, Tom and the pregnant girl, into the
kitchen. She makes them sit down, she boils some water for tea.

“The old man is no longer himself. You must be prepared.”

“I am sorry we left you alone.”

Celeste makes a cup of tea and Tom drinks it. She finds a piece of cake
and brings it to him. Celeste, who does not seem surprised to see the girl, offers her a
piece. The girl refuses. She lets the cup of tea cool in front of her. Celeste sits down
and eats the girl’s slice of cake. Tom takes a bite of the cake. His eyes are
vacant.

The girl watches him. She sees how much he has been changed. She raises
the cup of tea to her lips and then abruptly drops it back into the saucer. She stands
and leaves the kitchen. She is not going to wait any longer. Whatever has to be faced
will be faced now. After all, what does it matter to her—what is the old man to
her, what is this place, this boy and this woman, what do they matter to her, of all
people—

She goes into the bedroom and it is more or less like a wall swinging into
her face and then she remembers. She actually flinches at the sight. Tom comes rushing
down the hall behind her and it is too late—she cannot go running, she cannot back
out or tell him not to enter, he is literally blocking the door behind her. There is no
way to go but forward and so they enter the room together.

And yes. They are aghast. The old man lies on the bed and more than ever
he secretes the toxic charisma of the dying. He sprays the air with it like a cat. They
cannot look away. They stare instead at the limbs that have collapsed, the face that has
gone yellow, the shallow mounds beneath the bed sheets that are now the old
man—they are pretty damn sure he is dying at last.

It is plain as anything. The reality of the dying and
the reality of the larger situation. Which is equally dire. There is no way around it.
The old man is dying and the farm will die with him. Tom has run out of time. He has
been running out of time for days and weeks. He is a fool. The world outside is beyond
all control but the man in front of him—he sees the body stretched out before him
and knows there will never be the time to say, what was it he intended to say? What
would he have said, if he had found the time?

He does not know, that is part of the problem. He is crying. The girl is
dry-eyed and passes Tom a handkerchief. She tells him to blow his nose and get a grip.
He takes the handkerchief and blows his nose. He gives the handkerchief back to the girl
but still does not have a grip on the situation. And the girl needs him to hurry up, she
needs him to pull himself together, because as it is he is not helping.

The two of them and the world outside and the old man in the bed. The old
man, who has lost the power of speech and no longer retains the power of movement, whose
limbs lie frozen—the old man is glaring at Tom. It is not their imagination. The
old man has had enough. The old man is dying and he is not happy about it. When he
glares at Tom it is not a trick of the dying physiognomy. It is the absolute truth of
what he is feeling.

It is therefore too much for Tom. Who will never be able to say what he
feels. Who would gladly trade ten years of his own life for one of his father’s,
for another month, another week or day or hour, but who knows such transactions are
impossible.
The feeling, his willingness, has never had anywhere to
go, and now more than ever he does not know where to put it. Pressing his hands to hide
his face, his body heavy with this deadlock, Tom leaves the room.

The girl closes the door behind him. She goes to the side of the bed. She
stares down at the old man, dry-eyed. He glares back up at her, dry-eyed. They remain
like this until the old man’s eyes empty and his head falls back into the pillow.
He closes his eyes. The girl places her palm on his forehead, she grips his wrist
between her fingers. He has slipped away again.

She adjusts the covers. She thinks, You wanted to die here and you did not
even know that you were dying. You wanted to come home and die. That is more than what
they got. The men and women and children who were hacked to their deaths. Also the
soldiers. Also the un-soldiers. And now I am here, too, and I am backed into a corner
but at least I am still living. Me and the one inside me. For what that is worth.

Not much, she thinks. It is not worth very much. She lets go of the cover.
She turns and leaves the room. She does not want to see Tom or the others so she wanders
the halls instead. For lack of anything better to do. She enters the wings that have
been closed for months. She leaves the zone of dying where they have been sequestered
all these weeks. She walks through the wings (closed but not locked). She opens doors
and passes through corridors.

Here she finds rooms emptied of their contents. The walls are masked with
sheets of plastic and white cloth. She can
barely recognize it as
the house she used to know. She looks and sees. Here is the room where this happened.
Here is the hall where that happened. It looks nothing like what it once was. It looks
like it is all ending. Like it has already ended and they are as extraneous as
ghosts.