They drank home — brew and talked general politics in a distracted fashion, for Shinza was twice called out (in the sun, men waited like horses, moved away to speak with him), the girl and baby were about. None of these things was allowed to interrupt the talk, not because Shinza was giving Bray his full attention but because all that passed between them was peripheral, to Shinza.
The second time Shinza returned to the hut, Bray stopped him as he came in: “How far did it go with the boy?”
Shinza made a pantomime of jerking his head, blinking. “What?”
“‘Questions,’ you said. Enough ‘questions’?”
Shinza kept the cold butt of the cigar in his mouth. “Oh you know what questions amount to, James.”
“Do I?”
“And after all, Mweta’s your man, you have certain ideas about him, about us ….”
Bray hardened in the indifference as flesh contracts in a cool breeze.
“Questions’ve got to get answers. Somehow. If not one way then the other. You know.”
“I want to know what happened.”
Shinza said, explaining to a child, “James, his head wouldn’t answer, so they put their questions on his back.”
“I see.”
“You can see the questions on his back. You want to see them? I’ll fetch him for you.” As if to get it over with, he became whimsically determined, now, to have Bray examine the exhibit. “I don’t want you to believe any wild stories from the bush — I’ll fetch him and you can look. No, no, you stay, I’ll fetch him for you.”
Bray was left standing alone in the presence of Shinza’s things. The girl was quiet behind the curtain — it seemed that she was listening; she did not come out.
Quickly Shinza was in the room again, marshalling the youngster ahead. The boy gave no sign of recognition — Bray’s greeting died, irrelevant. Shinza said in Gala, “Bend over.” He lifted the boy’s shirt. The boy stood, legs apart, hands braced on his knees. He did not look round. From his waist, narrowed by the weight of his body falling away from the spine, his back broadened to the muscles under the shoulder, yellowish round the waist, powder — grey in the shallow ditch on either side of the vertebrae, stale brown over the muscles and shoulders. The pores of the skin were raised, grainy with hardened sebaceous secretion that had not been released by fresh air and sun for a long time. Skin that had lost its gloss like the coat of an animal kept in confinement; Bray knew that skin; had not seen it since the days when he was on the magistrate’s bench, as D.C., and prisoners had come before him. In the house in Wiltshire, such things — the reality of such things had no existence.
He was so awakened by the fact of the skin that the weals that had healed across it, tender, slightly puckered strips with the satiny look of lips, scarcely gave up their meaning. Scars, yes, wounds, yes, the protest, the long memory of the body for all that is done to it — the anger of pimples, rough patches, all recording, like messages scratched on the bark of a tree. The small depression in the rib cage, low down on the left — hand side, for instance: where did that come from? A congenital deformation? A stunting of the bone through some early nutritional deficiency? — He ran his finger over the braille of a scar — then took it away, burned with embarrassment. The boy remained bent, an object, as he must have been made to bend for the blows themselves. Some of the scars were no more than faint marks left paler than the surrounding skin, blending into it, forgetting, soon to link imperceptibly with the other skin cells. That one must have gone deep and gaped on the flesh, to have had to make such a thick ribbon of scar tissue to make it whole. Suddenly he saw the pattern of the blows, sliced regularly across the back as the cuts in a piece of larded meat. On the calf — muscle of one strong, rachitically bowed leg another pale slash showed through the sparse hairs. Bray described it in the air an inch or two away from the flesh, looking at Shinza: and that?
“Somebody missed,” Shinza said. His lips lifted, the parenthesis of surrounding beard moved back; he showed his teeth a moment, and then the grin sank away as the lips slid down over the teeth again.
It might have been an old scar from some innocent injury — a fall, an accident — unconnected with the prison at Gala, but Shinza had no time for such niceties of distinction. Bray saw that to him all wounds were one; and that his own.
“What could they get from him that was worth this.”
And now Shinza really grinned, putting his palm on the boy’s rump as on a trophy. He said with the pleasure of being proved right, “Good old James, just the same as ever.”
Bray said in Gala, “Why doesn’t he get up—” and Shinza, recalled to something unimportant, gave the rump a friendly clap and said in English, “Okay. That’s it.”
The boy pushed his shirt into his shorts. Bray wanted to say something to him but when he looked at him the boy at once fixed his eyes on Shinza.
“Well then,” Bray said, “what did he have to keep to himself that would make him take this?”
“James, James. You see a hero behind every bush, when you come back here. He told them whatever he knew as soon as they took him. Right away. Without a scratch. But they had some questions he didn’t know the answers to. It’s a method; if someone won’t talk, never mind why, you’re not expected to know why — let him have it. It’s routine.”
“We know. Of course it’s happening all over the world. But in what sort of places.”
Shinza said, “This place, James.” And he gave a short laugh and added, “Ay?”
Bray said, “It’s still possible Mweta doesn’t know.”
Shinza considered an academic question; “Not about this one, no — keep up with every little instance, you can’t expect that.” To the boy, “All right.”
The boy looked at Bray at last, and gave him the polite form of leavetaking, in Gala. Shinza recalled him and tossed over a packet of the cigarettes he had put aside for the cigars. The boy took them without a word and left.
Bray said, “The thing to do is to take a statement. A statement made before both of us.”
Shinza was looking at him almost with fondness. “Those days are over.”
“You give up too easily, Shinza.” Bray took on in mock submission the naïveté imputed to him. He waited for Shinza to accept this form of refutation, to begin to speak.
“Oh yes,” Shinza said, “I’m just a lazy bastard, rusting away. Plotting. No, no, not plotting, rotting. Whatever they like to think, it’s up to them. A case for lung cancer. Some say liver. — Tell me, how’s old Dando? And the old crowd, in London? I hear from Cameron now and then, if you ever see him, tell him where I am we use the talking drums, that’s why I don’t write.” The girl came out with the baby, now wide awake again, and they sat, lordly, drinking more beer and talking the sort of joking nonsense between old friends that admits a third presence.
Shinza left open no way that led to himself. But leaving, Bray said, “I’ll be back.” It hung in the air, a remark in bad taste. Of course Shinza understood that he meant to see Mweta; but Shinza was merely lingering politely at the reed fence, smiling, his attention cocked, like a dog’s ears pointed backward, elsewhere. “You making a long stay this time?” he remarked absently to Mweta’s guest.
“If I thought I could achieve anything.”
Shinza ignored the question implied. “What’s it again, James — schools? Wha’d’you know about schoolmastering.”
“I’m working with Sampson Malemba on the schools, for one thing — looking at the whole educational system, really; technical schools, trades schools, that’s what’s needed, too — a modest start with adult education for the new sort of youngsters coming along with a bit of industry going, now, in Gala itself.”