The road curved, and they saw a big cleared area, walled on three sides by forest, the forest walls seemingly knit together by the thin white trunks and white branches of softwood trees. The cleared land had been ridged and furrowed from end to end. The furrows were full of shiny green weeds; and the ridges, one or two of which showed haphazard, failed planting, were light brown and looked as dry as bone. Far from the road, against a forest wall, there was a low open shed, thatched with whole branches of carat palm. Near this, and half into the forest, was a red tractor: it looked as abandoned there as those rusting automobiles in the tall grass below the embankment of the highway. The field looked abandoned as well. But presently Jane saw three men, then a fourth, working at the far end, camouflaged against the forest.
Roche said, “That’s laid on for us. Or laid on for you. It’s their official rest period now. No one works in the fields at this time of the afternoon.”
After the cleared area there was forest again, threaded with the thin white branches of softwood trees and pillared with forest palms, their straight trunks bristling with black needles, hung with dead spiky fronds, and with clusters of yellow nuts breaking out of gray-green husks the shape of boats. Then the forest opened out again into clearings on both sides of the road. On one side the forest had been cut down to stumps and low bush. On the other side of the road the land was bare and clean, stripped of trees and palms and bush, the earth in places scraped down to pale red clay. At some distance from the road, on this side, on a smooth brown slope, there was a long hut with concrete-block walls and a pitched roof of corrugated iron. It stood alone in the emptiness. The roof was dazzling and hot to look at; it barely projected over the wall and cast no shadow.
The car stopped and there was silence. Even when the car doors slammed no one came out of the hut. There was no wind; the forest wall, dead green, was still; the asphalt road was soft below the gravel. Jane and Roche crossed the dry ditch by the bridge of three logs lashed together. The stripped land baked. Jane wanted shade; and the only shade lay within the dark, almost black, doorway of the long hut.
She walked ahead of Roche, as though, as always, she knew the way. He had paused to look about him. When he saw Jane walking up the slight slope to the hut door he felt, as he had feared, that her presence there was wrong and looked like an intrusion. The flowered blouse, through which her brassiere could be seen, the tight trousers that modeled stomach, groin, and cleft in a single, sudden curve: that could pass in the city, and in the shopping plaza of the Ridge would be hardly noticeable, but here it seemed provocative, overcasual enough to be dressy: London, foreign, wrong. And again it occurred to Roche that she was very white, with a color that wasn’t at all like the color of local white people. She was white enough to be unreadable; even her age might not be guessed. He walked quickly toward her, protectively. A fawn-colored pariah dog, ribby and sharp-faced, came round from the back of the hut and stood and watched, without expectation.
At first it seemed cool in the hut; and, after the glare outside, it seemed dark. They saw, as they entered, stepping up directly from clay to concrete floor, a steel filing cabinet in an unswept corner, an old kitchen chair, and a dusty table with what looked like a junked typewriter, a junked duplicator, and some metal trays. Then, as their eyes became accustomed to the interior light, they saw two rows of metal beds all the way down the concrete floor of the hut. Not all the beds were made up; some had mattresses alone, thin, with striped ticking. Clothes hung on nails above the beds that were in use: colored shirts of shiny synthetic material, jerseys, the jeans that looked so aggressive on, so shoddy off.
Four or five of the beds were occupied. The boys or young men who lay on them looked at Jane and Roche and then looked up at the corrugated iron or at the opposite wall. Their shiny black faces were blank; they did nothing to acknowledge the presence of strangers in the hut.
Roche said, “Mannie.”
The boy spoken to said without moving, “Mr. Ahmed bathing.”
Roche laughed. “Bathing? Jimmy’s been working with you?”
Mannie didn’t reply.
Jane could feel the grit on the concrete floor through the soles of her shoes; it set her teeth on edge.
Roche said to Jane, and it was as if he were speaking to the boys, “They built everything themselves.” He took off his dark glasses and looked less of a clown; he looked more withdrawn than his voice or manner suggested. He sucked at the end of one temple of the glasses. “Mannie, you were the mason, weren’t you?”
Mannie sat up and let his feet hang over the bed. He was small and slender. Beside his bed, on a gunny sack on the floor, there were about a dozen green tomatoes.
The hut that had at first felt cool now felt less so; Jane was aware that the corrugated iron was radiating heat. And the hut was more open than she had thought, was really full of light. Oblong windows, fitted with frosted-glass louvers in aluminum frames, were spaced out at the top of the wall that faced the road. Everything was exposed, lit up, and open for inspection: the boys, their faces, their clothes, the narrow beds, the floor below the beds.
On the wall next to the filing cabinet what had looked like a large chart could now be read as a timetable. Jane was considering it — ablutions, tea, field duties, barrack duties, field duties, breakfast, rest, barrack duties, dinner, discussion — when she heard Roche say “Jimmy,” and she looked and saw a man in the doorway at the far end of the hut.
The man was at first in silhouette against the white light outside. When he came into the hut he could be seen to be naked from the waist up, with a towel over one shoulder. As he came down the wide aisle between the metal beds, moving with short, light steps, he gave an increasing impression of physical neatness. The neatness was suggested by the slenderness of his waist, the width of his shoulders, by the closed expression of his face, by his full, closely shaved cheeks, by his trimmed mustache, and by his trousers, which were of a smooth, fawn-colored material, and tight, so that he seemed smooth and tight from waist to shoes. The shoes themselves were thin-soled, pointed, and shining below a powdering of red dust.
Jane had been expecting someone more physically awkward and more Negroid, someone at least as black as the boys. She saw someone who, close up, looked distinctly Chinese. The heavy mustache masked the shape of his top lip and stressed the jut rather than the fullness of his lower lip. His eyes were small, black, and blank; that, and the mustache, which suggested a mouth clamped shut, made him seem buttoned up, tense, unreadable.
To Roche he said, “Massa.” He nodded to Jane without seeming to see her. Not hurrying, indifferent to the silence, he took the green towel from his shoulder and put it on the back of the kitchen chair, and took a gray-blue-green tunic from a nail on the wall. The drab color killed the contrast between his face and his paler chest and made him less disturbing. Dressed at last, he pulled at the table drawer and said, “Yes, massa. As you see, we’re still holding out.”
Jane said, “I see you have a duplicating machine.”
“Secondhand from Sablich’s,” Jimmy said. “More like last hand.”
Roche said, “It would be a help if you learned to use it.”
“Yes, massa.” He took out some duplicated sheets from the drawer and gave them to Jane. “This will fill you in on background.”
The top sheet was dog-eared and felt dusty. Jane read: Communiqué No. 1. CLASSIFIED.
Roche said, “That’s the fairy story. I see the tractor’s still out of action, Jimmy. Didn’t Donaldson come?”
“Hmm. Is that what they told you at Sablich’s?”
“Didn’t he come?”