I must presume that, when the glass fell outwards from my cell and dropped like broken ice into the barracks yard, someone at the wire gate was staring down the channel between the pinkstone building and the back of the regimental offices seeking out the window in my block where, perhaps, a husband or a brother or a son was missing home. When I stood on the upturned bed and looked out on the sky, the trees, the town in the distance, I could see a woman pointing through the gate in my direction. A soldier going out into the town had stopped, too, and was turning. I pushed my head and shoulders out and screamed at all the people. The air, the voice, the paper, the pressure of the window frame upon my chest, the consternation of my lungs, conspired to produce a sound of such velocity and volume that the letter to my sister shot out into the air high above the yard, heavy with saliva, pink with blood, and bounced far beyond the puddles of shattered glass. Now all the placards and the banners of the women were in the air and I could hear them calling to me and see them pressing hard against the wire gate. ‘’Freti,’ I screamed. ‘ ’Freti, ‘Freti.’ But, in the melee of women and the columns of militia running and the first blows struck, I could not detect my sister’s vivid clothes.
Then I spotted her, a woman no longer standing back from all the mayhem I had caused (her arms crossed, her chin down, her mouth agape, waiting for a soldier). She was clamouring now amongst the women and calling out a name. Whose name I cannot say. There was too much passion, and too much noise, and I am far too distant from the gate.
THREE. Cross-country
HOW HAD they reacted, these people, when the young teacher came to the valley, earnest and eager? Old Loti brought him down to the village on horseback on his second day and took him round to shake grave hands at the mayor’s house and informal ones at the village store. People smiled at him smiling and waited until they got to know his particular ways before they showed any warmth to the newcomer, the ‘volunteer’ from Canada. His pupils due back at school within a week, kept away but watched. The men who had met foreigners before, while working in the mines or in the markets and warehouses of the city, stayed close but silent. Those that shook his hand saw that his horse did not like him and that he sat awkwardly on it and pulled too closely on the reins. The horse was reserving judgement, looking for something to trust, and so would they. Horses knew a lot. Did not the white horse escape the flood which drowned the shepherdess?
They did not see him on a horse again, though all the young men of the mountains rode horses, for on the fourth day, at dusk, Eddy Rivette took his shorts and running shoes from their bag and set off at a soft pace across the compound of the school. He tested the ground and the stones and the thorns until he was sure of them, and then, lengthening his step, turned to the steep ridge which separated his half-valley from that of the village and the store. Alone on the tracks worn by animals and borrowed by men, he encountered everything which he had expected: sunset, warm earth, a sense of liberation amongst a landscape and a people equally dispossessed. He picked his way, running all the time but choosing, heading for landmarks and favouring distance to the hard work of gradients. By the time he was in sight of the store and was surprising those who sat outside, Eddy Rivette had followed for the first time the track which he was to run every day for the fifteen months he stayed in the hills.
‘What’s that teacher doing, running half-dressed across the hard ground of the hills?’
Old Loti could not give the answer. Men walked or rode in the village but perhaps in Canada they ran in white shorts. He did not know.
‘Perhaps in Canada they don’t have horses,’ he said, and the men nodded that this was so because they remembered how the teacher had sat on his horse two days before.
‘Children run,’ said the storekeeper. ‘They run just for the pleasure of it.’
‘Yes, but not alone,’ said Loti. ‘And anyway, watch him. He doesn’t run like a child. He runs as if he has some purpose … but without any urgency. That’s Canada for you.’
But they got used to it and after a while began to look forward to it, like anything reliable and harmless. Within an hour of the children from the school slowly picking their way down the hillside towards the village at the end of their day, the slim, tense figure of their teacher would appear briefly at the summit of the ridge above the village, disappear into the slip of an erosion gulley and then come in view again lower down the hill where the track was quite flat. There, the teacher came forward on his toes, head down and fists clenched, and ran the last two hundred metres in a sprint, not slowing and stopping until he had passed the smiles and grins of the men who sat at the store. Then he turned, cool and with breath to spare, and smiled himself and said hello to all who had been watching.
He got to be quite famous. But fame is something different from popularity. It is less demanding for a start and has more to do with talent than virtue. But not even much to do with talent. The fame which Eddy Rivette enjoyed was just that of someone behaving strangely but purposefully in a place where there were enough old men with the leisure to watch. When they smiled and clapped at his daily approach at the store it was not with affection or welcome but at what he was providing for their day If they had genuinely known and liked him, the running would have embarrassed them. It was strange. It was quirky. It separated them from him. Not to be wished of a friend.
’Isra-kone, however, was a friend of the village. He was a young man, uneducated in school ways but knowing and intelligent and, best of all, a fine talker and a great horseman. These two things mattered to the men of the village who were too old to be judged by the recent talents which were taught at the school. ’Isra was one of the last initiates of the valley, having spent twelve days, two of them drugged unconscious, at the circumcision lodge in the mountains. He knew the secret songs in the old Siddilic, drummed endlessly at him and his fellows at the lodge. They had repeated the words, their stomachs pressed to the walls to ease the pains of hunger. After ’Isra’s lodge the old mayor had died and the new mayor, old Loti’s brother, discontinued circumcision of the young villagers and the lodges and the secret alliances which sprang from them, not because he was modern but because he feared the new directives of the government officers in the city more than he feared the criticism of the old gossips in the village.
And so ’Isra and the young poor men of his age were the last ‘brotherhood’ and the old gossips whom the mayor didn’t fear put their hopes on them. It was foolish, for the younger, uncircumcised brothers and sons of the ‘brotherhood’ were better for the village. They read and wrote and spoke English with the runner at the school as if it were their own language. But still the old men preferred ’Isra and his friends. And secretly they mistrusted the ponderous troupe of pupils who left with their pens and books for the school at eight each day.
Of the brotherhood ’Isra was their favourite, more popular than their own mayor’s son who had gone away to colleges in England and Italy and got new wild ideas. They didn’t need much excuse to like ’Isra. He was so easy. But when they retold how he had ridden his white mare that night of the rains across the hills to bring help for the mayor’s chest, where his heart was beating and flapping like a trapped bird, they found all the excuse to like him thoroughly. The helicopter had come from the town on to the flat edge of the village and taken the mayor away to hospital. Four foreign doctors had slaved to quiet his heart and keep the mayorship with this old fearful man and away from the wild ideas of his wild college son. And ’Isra had returned to tell of his ride and that the chief would be well. Even the smallest children will say it. ’Isra-kone is the finest horseman in the valley.