The Sheep Look Up Page 6

  And all this because a sea had died which she had never seen ...

  At one of the two rickety tables which, apart from chairs, constituted the entire furniture of the office, a tall thin sergeant was adding up figures on a printed form. Major Obou rapped an order at him, and from a battered olive-green ammunition case he dug out a bottle of good French brandy and a tin cup. Handing Lucy two fingers of the liquor, the major raised the bottle to his broad lips.

  “Here’s how!” he said. “And do sit down!”

  She complied. The drink was too strong for her; after half a mouthful she set the cup on her knees and held it with both hands to stop herself trembling from fatigue. She thought of asking for water to dilute it, but decided it wouldn’t be fair to involve the sergeant in that much trouble. Drinkable water was hard to find in Noshri. Rain, caught in buckets and tanks, was safe if you added a purifying tablet, but the rivers were sour with defoliants from the campaign of last summer and the invaders had filled most of the wells with carrion as they retreated.

  “That should put—if you forgive the remark—a little color in your cheeks,” encouraged Major Obou. She forced a smile in reply, and wondered for the latest of many times what she should make of this handsome dark man who took such pains to salt his English with bookish idioms, right or wrong. Her eyes were very tired from the heat and dust of the day, so she closed them. But that was no help. Behind the lids she saw the sights she had encountered wherever she went in this formerly flourishing town: a crossroads where a mortar shell had exploded squarely on a bus, leaving a shallow pit hemmed with smashed metal; charred roof-beams jutting over the ashes of what had been furniture and possibly people; trees curtailed by the wing of a crashing aircraft, shot down by a patrolling fighter because it was suspected of carrying arms, though she had seen for herself it contained only medical supplies ...

  She touched the base of her left thumbnail. Salvaging what she could from the wreckage, she had cut herself and had to have three stitches in the wound. A nerve had been severed, and there was a patch a quarter-inch on a side where she would never feel anything again.

  At least she’d been inoculated against tetanus.

  In one corner of the office a back-pack radio suddenly said something in the local language of which even yet Lucy had learned only a few words. Major Obou answered it, and rose.

  “Drink up, Miss Ramage. There will be a government plane in one hour and I must be on hand. Before that I shall keep my promise to convey you home.”

  “There’s no need to—”

  “But there is.” His face was suddenly stern. “I know it makes no sense to lay blame at anybody’s door, and the causes of our war were very complex. But the people here have understood one thing, that it was the greed and carelessness of—forgive me—people like you which poisoned the Mediterranean and started the chain of events which led to our neighbors from the north invading us. So long as they were apathetic from hunger they were silent. Now that they have been fed, one fears that they will remember what they have been taught by agitators. I am aware that you come from New Zealand, very far away, with good motives. But a man seething with rage because he lost his home, his wife, his children, would not stop to ask where you come from if he met you in the road.”

  “Yes.” Lucy gave a nod and, nearly choking, gulped down her drink.

  “Splendid,” the major said, instantly his usual affable self, and ushered her outside. His jeep was waiting near the door. He gestured the driver to get in back with the machinegunner, and took the wheel himself with Lucy at his side. Starting off with a roar, he crossed the boundary of the airstrip at nearly forty and they went bumping down the shell-pocked road to the town with all lights blazing.

  “Ah, one day, Miss Ramage,” he shouted, “when we have reconstructed the country, I hope I shall have a chance to entertain you more conventionally! Indeed I heard today one may again apply for leave. If you’d care to be shown—uh—more appetizing aspects of my homeland, I’d be delighted. One does not wish strangers to go away thinking this is the country where all the time people shoot each other, hm?”

  It dawned on Lucy, belatedly because all that kind of thing seemed to belong in another universe, that he was propositioning her. She felt briefly astonished. At home one simply never came in social contact with black people, and seldom even with Maoris. Then she was annoyed at her own astonishment. She hunted for a polite way to formulate her answer, but before she managed it, when they were crossing what had been the main street of Noshri and was now an avenue of ruins, he braked abruptly.

  “Ah, someone else realized it was a Christmas present we have received!”

  At the side of the road a parody of a Christmas tree had been erected: branches that must have taken hours to collect because the nearby terrain had been sterilized with herbicides, tied to a pole and lit with three candles. On a strip of white cloth, probably a bandage, someone had written VIVE LA PAIX JOYEUX NOEL.

  “Are you Christian, Miss Ramage?”

  Lucy was too tired to discuss theological doubts. She gave a nod.

  “I also, of course.” Obou accelerated around a bend in the direction of the relatively undamaged houses that had been assigned to the overseas aid workers, UN observers, and the most senior of the government officials supervising mopping-up operations. “You know, though, it was a strange thing when I first went to Europe, finding so few people there attend a church. Here it had always been for me and my family the—the right thing, the better thing. In the provinces, right here for example, it was known the people still made idols, still believed in ghosts and juju. But the educated people you took for granted to be Moslems or Christians. I think, though, it will now be hard for Christians in our country. Knowing it has been the greed of Christian countries which—Ah, look! See already what a change your work has made in this sad place!”

  Slowing again, he waved at a group of ten or a dozen people, including a couple of women, who had lit a fire in the open air before what had once been a handsome house and were dancing in a ring, clapping their hands for music. They were all barefoot. Lucy thought one of the women must be drunk; her gaudy wraparound dress had fallen from her bosom and her slack breasts shook as she stamped and swayed.

  “Ah, they’re good people,” Major Obou said. “Simple, perhaps, but good-natured. I’m so glad this damned war is over. And”—with a trace of boldness—“glad that it has brought us friends like you from outside.”

  He stopped the jeep. They had reached her quarters, one of a cluster of houses originally built by one of the Paris-based companies operating here for its lower-ranking employees. Then they had enjoyed the privacy of dense greenery. Now the shrubs and trees were gone, victims of defoliants, and the ground was newly scarred with shell-holes. When Lucy had arrived the place had stunk of carrion, mostly human. It still stank, but mainly of the exhaust of trucks and planes.

  The major handed her down from the jeep with old-world formality. She almost giggled at the spectacle she must present, dirty and ragged. She was a trifle lightheaded from the brandy.

  “You will remember what I suggested, won’t you?” he murmured, squeezing her hand. Then he let it go, saluted, and jumped back in his seat.

  The maid Maua prepared a passable meal: canned beans, reconstituted eggs, canned fruit. Meantime Lucy changed her soiled clothes for a toweling robe and rubbed herself over with impregnated cleansing tissues. Water for washing was almost as scarce as that for drinking. Noises reached her as other occupants of this row of houses returned—Swedish and Czech doctors, a Mexican agronomist and UN officials attached to the Commission on Refugees were her near neighbors. Further along were some Italian nuns. She had never become used to seeing them in shirts and pants but still with their funny coifs on top. What for? To discourage the attention of men?

  Which, as she picked at her food, reminded her. Obou had extended an invitation. She didn’t feel inclined to accept. Why not—because he was black? She thought not. She ho
ped not. Because right now she couldn’t think of anything like that with real attention? Very likely. The major, after all, was good-looking, well educated, obviously intelligent if he spoke both French and English as well as his mother tongue ...

  Mother!

  Her stomach suddenly convulsed. It was the worst thing to remember while eating. Blindly she ran for the latrine at the back of the house, and there wasted the food she had forced down. Maybe, she thought as she knelt retching, it wasn’t the memory which nauseated me, but too much brandy. It made no difference.

  So many of those children: dead at birth, mercifully because they were deformed! You’d think that after Vietnam ... But people don’t think, most of the time. Riot gases, tear smoke, sleep gas, defoliants, nerve gas, all the armory of chemicals used in modern war, had saturated the tissues of these people as they had the ground. Once she had delivered three malformed babies in succession among a party of refugees who thought they had found safety at last. But along the way they had sustained themselves on leaves and roots.

  She stumbled back eventually, not to the room where she had been eating but to the bedroom, and fell into a stuporous slumber.

  Thinking, in the dead middle of the night, that the noise she was hearing belonged to nightmare—her dreams were regularly haunted by the fear that fighting might break out anew—she forced herself awake. Found she was awake. The noise was real. Gunfire.

  Horrified, she sat up and strained her ears. The room was absolutely dark, the windows curtained. Her instant of panic passed. There were indeed shots to be heard, but there was a random, almost a cheerful quality to the rattling racket, like strings of firecrackers. Also, at the very edge of hearing, she could discern drumming—possibly even singing.

  She made to inch her way toward the window, and was immediately distracted by the discovery that her thighs were wet. Christ. Her period had begun. Funnily, since coming to Noshri, she had stopped suffering the advance warning pains she had been accustomed to at home, as though her mind were so taken up with matters of life and death she had no attention to spare for the complaints of her own body.

  She found tissues to wipe herself and called for Maua. Waiting for the maid to enter, she went to the window overlooking the town and peered past the curtains. Oh, yes. Bonfires. Wasteful, but excusable. Liquor had been concealed somewhere, no doubt—she’d seen that drunken woman dancing—or possibly made from garbage. And with Christmas so close ...

  Bonfires?

  The patterns of light suddenly acquired perspective. The yellow flames were not small and near, but far and huge. In the direction of the airstrip.

  A plane burning!

  “Maua!” she cried, and ran in search of the flashlight she kept by her bed. Finding it, she hurried to the lean-to room where the girl slept. The pallet there was empty.

  “Oh, Christ!” Lucy whispered.

  She dashed back to the bedroom, intending to seize clothes, Tampax, the little .22 pistol her father had given her which she’d never used. But a moment later there was a slam from the living-room as the outer door was flung open, and she settled for just the gun. She still had on the toweling robe she had slumped asleep in.

  Mouth dry, hands shaking, she switched off the flashlight and crept on silent bare feet to the living room.

  “Hands up!” she shouted, switching on the torch again, and was instantly appalled by the way her finger was tightening on the trigger. Across the threshold lay a form which mingled khaki, dark-brown, bright-red. The red was blood. It was Major Obou, sprawled on his belly, his right hand limp beside his automatic, his left shoulder slashed to the bone.

  “Major?” she tried to say, and found her voice wasn’t there. She saw his good hand, like a colossal spider, scrabbling for the lost gun.

  “Major Obou!”

  He heard her and rolled his head on the reed matting of the floor. “Vaut rien,” he said thickly, and corrected himself. “No good. No more bullet.”

  “But what’s happening?” She put down her own gun and stooped with her flashlight playing on his wound, her mind spinning with thirty different things each as urgent as another: call out her neighbor the Swedish doctor, cleanse the cut, close the outside door, make sure he hadn’t been followed by his attacker ...

  He summoned a supreme effort and seized her by the wrist as she made to rise and shut the door.

  “Don’t go out, miss! Don’t go there! All mad, all crazy! Look, my arm! One of my men did that, my own men! See, I caught him take bowl food from widow with baby, and corporal say it third time tonight, so I order with my gun give back, go find more at airstrip for poor others he rob. Right for officer to say, no? Your food not for soldiers, for poor starve devils in town! So he took that axe and hit me, see? Oh, but it hurts!”

  “Let me get bandages!” Lucy cried, but he seemed not to hear. Large, staring, his eyes were fixed on nowhere. He tightened his grip and words poured out frantically, his careful European syntax giving way to the grammar of his own language.

  “No, not go! Gone crazy, say! Shout the town is full ghosts, ghosts everywhere, shoot at them, fire guns all time at shadow, anything! Say kill ghosts, kill ghosts, kill kill ghosts!”

  Outside there were footsteps. Lucy tried again to release her hand so she could close the door, failed, and thought at least of switching off the flashlight so that would not attract a mad prowler. What Obou had said made no sense, but the firing was louder and closer and through the open door she could see that more and still more flames were springing up, as though the town were turning into a volcano.

  Footsteps again. Nearer. And her .22 was out of reach and Obou’s gun was empty. At first gently, then in growing panic, she fought to make him let go. A new bright light shone in the doorway. The instant before it dazzled her she saw a white man in a white shirt holding a pistol; the instant after, she realized what the torch-beam would show—a white girl in the grip of a black man, her thighs apart and smeared with blood, a case of rape.

  She started to shout, “Don’t—!”

  And was too late. The gun exploded. The bullet spattered her with bits of Obou.

  Later someone kept trying to say to her—it was the Swedish doctor, Bertil—“But we didn’t know you were here! When the trouble started we saw Maua and she swore you weren’t in the house. We went down into the town, and all these madmen came at us with guns and hatchets, screaming that we were evil ghosts, kill the ghosts!”

  I heard that before. Listless, Lucy rocked back and forth, eyes shut, right hand mechanically rubbing the spot on her left arm where she had been given some sort of injection, the two rhythms crisscrossing the lilt of Bertil’s accent.

  “Be glad you didn’t see what we saw: the whole town gone insane, looting and burning and killing!”

  The person I saw killing was you. You shot a nice man. I was going on leave with him. I liked his smile. He had a round dark face with funny stripes on his cheeks. He’s dead. You killed him.

  She moaned and fell to the floor.

  JANUARY

  MARCHING ORDERS

  “Go ye and bring the Light

  To savage strands afar.

  Take ye the Law of Right

  Where’er the unblest are.

  °“Heathens and stubborn Jews,

  Lovers of Juggernaut,

  Give them the chance to choose

  That which the Saviour taught.

  “Go where the gentle Lord

  Is still as yet unknown,

  There where the tribes ignored

  Strive in the dark alone.

  “Arm ye to face the foe,

  Carib and cannibal,

  Men who must live as low

  As any animal

  °“Cover the naked limb,

  Shoe ye the unshod foot,

  Silence the pagan hymn,

  Conquer the godless brute.

  “Tell them the news of Love,

  Preach them the Prince of Peace,

  Tear down their pagan g
rove,

  Give them divine release.”

  —“The Sacred Sower: Being a Collection of Hymns and Devout Songs Adapted to the Use of Missionary Societies”, 1887; verses marked ° may be omitted if desired.

  ABOVE THE SOUND OF SPEED

  RM-1808, out of Phoenix for Seattle, had reported acute catting—clear air turbulence—in the vicinity of Salt Lake City. Hearing of this, the navigator of TW-6036, the Montreal-Los Angeles direct SST, punched the keys of his computer and passed a course-correction to the pilot. Then he leaned back to resume his snooze.

  They would be super for over a thousand miles yet.

  SNOW JOB

  Disregarded, the twenty-nine-inch color TV displayed images of today’s violence. The camera lingeringly swept the gutters of far-off Noshri, pausing occasionally at corpses. A dog, miraculous survivor of the period last summer when people had paid a hundred local francs for a rat, fifty for a handful of mealies, was seen snuffling the body of a child, and a tall black soldier broke its back with the butt of his carbine.

  “Shit! You see what that black mother did to that poor dog?”

  “What?”

  But the screen had switched to the wreckage of a plane.