I The Villa

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    In memory of Skip and Mary Dison For Quintin and Griffin  And for Louise Dennys, with thanks  ‘Most of you, I am sure, remember the tragic circumstances of the death of Geoffrey Clifton at Gilf Kebir, followed later by the disappearance of his wife, Katharine Clifton, which took place during the 1939 desert expedition in search of Zerzura.

    “I ot begin this meeting tonight without referring very sympathetically to those tragic occurrences.

    “The lecture this evening ...”  From the minutes of the Geographical Society meeting of November 194-, London

    I

    The Villa

    SHE STANDS UP in the garden where she has been w and looks into the distance. She has sensed a shift in the weather.

    There is anust of wind, a buckle of noise in the air, and the tall cypresses sway. She turns and moves uphill towards the house, climbing over a low wall, feeling the first drops of rain on her bare arms. She crosses the loggia and quickly ehe house.

    I she doesn’t pause but goes through it and climbs the stairs which are in darkness and then tinues along the long hall, at the end of which is a wedge of light from an open door.

    She turns into the room which is anarden—this one made up of trees and bowers painted over its walls and ceiling.

    The man lies on the bed, his body exposed to the breeze, aurns his head slowly towards her as she enters.

    Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet. She wets a washcloth and holding it above his ankles squeezes the water onto him, looking up as he murmurs, seeing his smile. Above the shins the burns are worst. Beyond purple. Bone.

    She has nursed him for months and she knows the body well, the penis sleeping like a sea horse, the thin tight hips.

    Hipbones of Christ, she thinks. He is her despairing saint. He lies flat on his bao pillow, looking up at the foliage painted onto the ceiling, its opy of branches, and above that, blue sky.

    She pours calamine in stripes across his chest where he is less burned, where she  touch him. She loves the hollow below the lowest rib, its cliff of skin. Reag his shoulders she blows cool air onto his neck, aters.

    What? she asks, ing out of her tration.

    He turns his dark face with its grey eyes towards her. She puts her hand into her pocket. She unskins the plum with her teeth, withdraws the stone and passes the flesh of the fruit into his mouth.

    He whispers again, dragging the listeni of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory he kept plunging int those months before he died.

    There are stories the maes quietly into the room which slip from level to level like a hawk. He wakes in the painted arbour that surrounds him with its spilling flowers, arms of great trees. He remembers piics, a woman who kissed parts of his body that now are burned into the colour of aubergine.

    I have spent weeks in the desert, fetting to look at the moon, he says, as a married man may spend days never looking into the face of his wife. These are not sins of omission but signs of preoccupation.

    His eyes loto the young woman’s face. If she moves her head, his stare will travel alongside her into the wall. She leans forward. How were you burned

    It is late afternoon. His hands play with a piece of sheet, the back of his fingers caressing it.

    I fell burning into the desert.

    They found my body and made me a boat of sticks and dragged me across the desert. We were in the Sand Sea, now and then crossing dry riverbeds. Nomads, you see. Bedouin. I flew down and the sand itself caught fire. They saw me stand up naked out of it. The leather helmet on my head in flames. They strapped me onto a cradle, a carcass boat, ahudded along as they ran with me. I had broken the spareness of the desert.

    The Bedouin knew about fire. They knew about plahat since 1939 had been falling out of the sky. Some of their tools and utensik were made from the metal of crashed planes and tanks. It was the time of the war in heaven. They could reize the drone of a wounded plahey knew how to pick their way through such shipwrecks. A small bolt from a cockpit became jewellery. I erhaps the first oo stand up alive out of a burning mae. A man whose head was on fire. They didn’t know my name. I didn’t know their tribe.

    Who are you?

    I don’t know. You keep asking me.

    You said you were English.

    At night he is ired enough to sleep. She reads to him from whatever book she is able to find in the library downstairs.

    The dle flickers over the page and over the young alking face, barely revealing at this hour the trees and vista that decorate the walls. He listens to her, swallowing her words like water.

    If it is cold she moves carefully into the bed and lies beside him. She  plao weight upon him without giving him pain, not evehin wrist.

    Sometimes at two a.m. he is not yet asleep, his eyes open in the darkness.

    He could smell the oasis before he saw it. The liquid in the air. The rustle of things. Palms and bridles. The banging of tin s whose deep pitch revealed they were full of water.

    They poured oil onte pieces of soft cloth and placed them on him. He was anointed.

    He could sehe one silent man who always remained beside him, the flavour of his breath when he bent down to un him every twenty-four hours at nightfall, to examine his skin in the dark.

    Unclothed he was once again the man naked beside the blazing aircraft. They spread the layers of grey felt over him. What great nation had found him, he wondered. What try ied such soft dates to be chewed by the man beside him and then passed from that mouth into his. During this time with these people, he could not remember where he was from. He could have been, for all he khe enemy he had been fighting from the air.

    Later, at the hospital in Pisa, he thought he saw beside him the face that had e eaight and chewed and softehe dates and passed them down into his mouth.

    There was no colour during those nights. No speech or song. The Bedouin silehemselves when he was awake. He was on an altar of hammod he imagined in his vanity hundreds of them around him and there may have been just two who had found him, plucked the antlered hat of fire from his head. Those two he knew only by the taste of saliva that entered him along with the date or by the sound of their feet running.

    She would sit and read, the book uhe waver of light. She would glanow and then down the hall of the villa that had been a war hospital, where she had lived with the other nurses before they had all transferred out gradually, the war moving north, the war almost over.

    This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world. She sat at the night table, hunched over, reading of the young boy in India who learo memorize diverse jewels and objects on a tray, tossed from teacher to teacher—those who taught him dialect those who taught him memory those who taught him to escape the hypnotic.

    The book lay on her lap. She realized that for more than five minutes she had been looking at the porousness of the paper, the crease at the er of page 17 whieone had folded over as a mark. She brushed her hand over its skin. A scurry in her mind like a mouse in the ceiling, a moth on the night window. She looked down the hall, though there was no one else living there now, no one except the English patient and herself in the Villa San Girolamo. She had enough vegetables planted in the bombed-out orchard above the house for them to survive, a man ing now and then from the town with whom she would trade soap and sheets and whatever there was left in this war hospital for other essentials. Some beans, some meats. The man had left her two bottles of wine, and eaight after she had lain with the Englishman and he was asleep, she would ceremoniously pour herself a small beaker and carry it back to the night table just outside the three-quarter-closed door and sip away further into whatever book she was reading.

    So the books for the Englishman, as he listened ily or not, had gaps of plot like ses of a road washed out by storms, missing is as if locusts had ed a se of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.

    The villa that she and the Englishman inhabited now was much like that. Some rooms could not be entered because of rubble. One bomb crater allowed moon and rain into the library downstairs—where there was in one er a permaly soaked armchair.

    She was not ed about the Englishman as far as the gaps in plot were ed. She gave no summary of the missing chapters. She simply brought out the book and said “page y-six” or “page one hundred and eleven.” That was the only locator. She lifted both of his hands to her fad smelled them—the odour of siess still in them.

    Your hands are getting rough, he said.

    The weeds and thistles and digging.

    Be careful. I warned you about the dangers.

    I know.

    Then she began to read.

    Her father had taught her about hands. About a dog’s paws. Whenever her father was aloh a dog in a house he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw. This, he would say, as if ing away from a brandy snifter, is the greatest smell in the world! A bouquet! Great rumours of travel! She would pretend disgust, but the dog’s paw was a wohe smell of it never suggested dirt. It’s a cathedral! her father had said, so-and-so’s garden, that field of grasses, a walk through cyclamen—a tration of hints of all the paths the animal had taken during the day.

    A scurry in the ceiling like a mouse, and she looked up from the book again.

    They uned the mask of herbs from his face. The day of the eclipse. They were waiting for it. Where was he? What civilisation wa<big></big>s this that uood the predis of weather and light? El Ahmar or El Abyadd, for they must be one of the northwest desert tribes. Those who could catch a man out of the sky, who covered his face with a mask of oasis reeds kogether. He had now a bearing of grass. His favourite garden in the world had been the grass garden at Kew, the colours so delicate and various, like levels of ash on a hill.

    He gazed onto the landscape uhe eclipse. They had taught him by now to raise his arms and drag strength into his body from the universe, the way the desert pulled down planes. He was carried in a palanquin of felt and branch. He saw the moving veins of flamingos across his sight in the half-darkness of the covered sun.

    Always there were ois, or darkness, against his skin. One night he heard what seemed to be wind chimes high in the air, and after a while it stopped and he fell asleep with a hunger for it, that noise like the slowed-down sound from the throat of a bird, perhaps flamingo, or a desert fox, whie of the me in a sewn-half-closed pocket in his burnoose.

    The  day he heard snatches of the glassy sound as he lay once more covered in cloth. A  of the darkness. At twilight the felt was uned and he saw a man’s head on a table moving towards him, then realized the man wore a giant yoke from which hung hundreds of small bottles on differehs of string and wire. Moving as if part of a glass curtain, his   body enveloped within that sphere.

    The figure resembled most of all those drawings of argels he had tried to copy as a schoolboy, never solving how one body could have space for the muscles of such wings. The man moved with a long, slow gait, so smoothly there was hardly a tilt itles. A wave of glass, an argel, all the ois withitles warmed from the sun, so when they were rubbed onto skin they seemed to have beeed especially for a wound. Behind him was translated light—blues and other colours shivering in the haze and sand. The faint glass noise and the diverse colours and the regal walk and his face like a lean dark gun.

    Up close the glass was rough and sandblasted, glass that had lost its civilisation. Each bottle had a minute cork the man plucked out with his teeth a in his lips while mixing otle’s tents with another’s, a sed cork also in his teeth.

    He stood over the supine burned body with his wings, sank two sticks deep into the sand and then moved away free of the six-foot yoke, which balanow within the crutches of the two sticks. He stepped out from under his shop. He sank to his knees and came towards the burned pilot and put his cold hands on his ned held them there.

    He was known to everyone along the camel route from the Sudan north to Giza, the Forty Days Road. He met the caravans, traded spid liquid, and moved between oases and water camps. He walked through sandstorms with this coat of bottles, his ears plugged with two other small corks so he seemed a vessel to himself, this mert doctor, this king of oils and perfumes and panaceas, this baptist. He would enter a camp a up the curtain of bottles in front of whoever was sick.

    He crouched by the burned man. He made a skin cup with the soles of his feet and leaned back to pluck, without even looking, certain bottles. With the unc of each tiny bottle the perfumes fell out. There was an odour of the sea. The smell of rust. Indigo. Ink. River-mud arrow-wood formaldehyde paraffiher. The tide of airs chaotic. There were screams of camels in the distance as they picked up the sts. He began treen-black paste onto the rib cage. It was ground peacock bone, bartered for in a medina to the west or the south—the most potent healer of skin.

    Betwee and the destroyed chapel a door led into an oval-shaped library. The spaside seemed safe except for a large hole at portrait level in the far wall, caused by mortar-shell atta the villa two months earlier. The rest of the room had adapted itself to this wound, accepting the habits of weather, evening stars, the sound of birds. There was a sofa, a piano covered in a grey sheet, the head of a stuffed bear and high walls of books. The shelves he torn wall bowed with the rain, which had doubled the weight of the books. Lightning came into the room too, again and again, falling across the covered piano and carpet.

    At the far end were French doors that were boarded up. If they had been open she could have walked from the library to the loggia, then down thirty-six pe steps past the chapel towards what had been an a meadow, scarred now by phosphorus bombs and explosions. The German army had mined many of the houses they retreated from, so most rooms not needed, like this one, had been sealed for safety, the doors hammered into their frames.

    She khese dangers when she slid into the room, walking into its afternoon darkness. She stood scious suddenly of her weight on the wooden floor, thinking it robably enough ter whatever meism was there. Her feet in dust.

    The only light poured through the jagged mortar circle that looked onto the sky.

    With a crack of separation, as if it were being dismantled from one single unit, she pulled out The Last of the Mohis and even in this half-light was cheered by the aquamarine sky and lake on the cover illustration, the Indian in the fround. And then, as if there were someone in the room who was not to be disturbed, she walked backwards, stepping on her own footprints, for safety, but also as part of a private game, so it would seem from the steps that she had ehe room and then the corporeal body had disappeared. She closed the door and replaced the seal of warning.

    She sat in the window alcove in the English patient’s room, the painted walls on one side of her, the valley oher. She opehe book. The pages were joiogether in a stiff wave. She felt like Crusoe finding a drowned book that had washed up and dried itself on the shore. A Narrative of 1757. Illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. As in all of the best books, there was the important page with the list of illustrations, a line of text for each of them.

    She ehe story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.

    Their Italian hill towio the northwest route, had been besieged for more than a month, the barrage fog upowo villas and the monastery surrounded by apple and plum orchards. There was the Villa Medici, where the generals lived.

    Just above it the Villa San Girolamo, previously a nunnery, whose castlelike battlements had made it the last stronghold of the German army. It had housed a huroops. As the hill town began to be torn apart like a battleship at sea, by fire shells, the troops moved from the barrack tents in the orchard into the now crowded bedrooms of the old nunnery. Ses of the chapel were blown up. Parts of the top storey of the villa crumbled under explosions. When the Allies finally took over the building and made it a hospital, the steps leading to the third level were sealed off, though a se of ey and roof survived.

    She and the Englishman had insisted on remaining behind wheher nurses and patients moved to a safer location in the south. During this time they were very cold, without electricity. Some rooms faced onto the valley with no walls at all. She would open a door and see just a sodden bed huddled against a er, covered with leaves. Doors opened into landscape.

    Some rooms had bee an open aviary.

    The staircase had lost its lower steps during the fire that was set before the soldiers left. She had goo the library, removed twenty books and hem to the floor and then onto each other, in this way rebuilding the two lowest steps. Most of the chairs had been used for fires. The armchair in the library was left there because it was always wet, drenched by evening storms that came in through the mortar hole. Whatever was wet escaped burning during that April of 1945. There were few beds left. She herself preferred to be nomadi the house with her pallet or hammock, sleeping sometimes in the English patient’s room, sometimes in the hall, depending on temperature or wind ht. In the m she rolled up her mattress and tied it into a wheel with string. Now it was warmer and she ening more rooms, airing the dark reaches, letting sunlight   dry all the dampness. Some nights she opened doors and slept in rooms that had walls missing. She lay on the pallet on the very edge of the room, fag the drifting landscape of stars, moving clouds, wakened by the growl of thunder and lightning.

    She was twenty years old and mad and uned with safety during this time, having no qualms about the dangers of the possibly mined library or the thuhat startled her in the night. She was restless after the onths, when she had been limited to dark, protected spaces. She entered rooms that had been soiled by soldiers, rooms whose furniture had been burned within them. She cleared out leaves and shit and urine and charred tables. She was living like a vagrant, while elsewhere the English patient reposed in his bed like a king.

    From outside, the place seemed devastated. An outdoor staircase disappeared in midair, its railing hanging off. Their life was fing aive safety. They used only essential dlelight at night because of the brigands who annihilated everything they came across. They were protected by the simple fact that the villa seemed a ruin. But she felt safe here, half adult and half child. ing out of what had happeo her during the war, she drew her own few rules to herself. She would not be ordered again or carry out duties for the greater good. She would care only for the burned patient. She would read to him and bathe him and give him his doses of morphine—her only unication was with him.

    She worked in the garden and orchard. She carried the six-foot crucifix from the bombed chapel and used it to build a scarecrow above her seedbed, hangiy sardine s from it which clattered and ked whehe wind lifted.

    Within the villa she would step from rubble to a dlelit alcove where there was her ly packed suitcase, which held little besides some letters, a few rolled-up clothes, a metal box of medical supplies. She had cleared just small ses of the villa, and all this she could burn down if she wished.

    She lights a mat the dark hall and moves it onto the wick of the dle. Light lifts itself onto her shoulders. She is on her knees. She puts her hands ohighs and breathes in the smell of the sulphur. She imagines she also breathes in light.

    She moves backwards a few feet and with a piece of white chalk draws a regle onto the wood floor. Then tinues backwards, drawing more regles, so there is a pyramid of them, sihen double then single, her left hand braced flat on <mark>9９ｌｉb?</mark>the floor, her head down, serious. She moves farther and farther away from the light. Till she leans bato her heels and sits croug.

    She drops the chalk into the pocket of her dress. She stands and pulls up the looseness of her skirt and ties it around her waist. She pulls from another pocket a pieetal and flings it out in front of her so it falls just beyond the farthest square.

    She leaps forward, her legs smashing down, her shadow behind her curling into the depth of the hall. She is very quick, her tennis shoes skidding on the numbers she has drawn into each regle, one foot landing, then two feet, then one again, until she reaches the last square.

    She bends doicks up the pieetal, pauses in that position, motionless, her skirt still tucked up above her thighs, hands hanging down loose, breathing hard. She takes a gulp of air and blows out the dle.

    Now she is in darkness. Just a smell of smoke.

    She leaps up and in midair turns so she lands fag the other way, then skips forward even wilder now down the black hall, still landing on squares she knows are there, her tennis shoes banging and slamming onto the dark floor—so the sound echoes out into the far reaches of the deserted Italian villa, out towards the moon and the scar of a ravihat half circles the building.

    Sometimes at night the burned man hears a faint shudder in the building. He turns up his hearing aid to draw in a banging noise he still ot interpret or place.

    She picks up the notebook that lies on the small table beside his bed. It is the book he brought with him through the fire— a copy of The Histories by Herodotus that he has added to, cutting and gluing in pages from other books or writing in his own observations—so they all are cradled withiext of Herodotus.

    She begins to read his small gnarled handwriting.

    There is a whirlwind in southern Morocco, the aajej, against which the fellahin defend themselves with khere is the africo, which has at times reached into the city of Rome. The aim, a fall wind out of Yugoslavia. The arifi, also christened are/or rifi, which scorches with numerous tohese are perma winds that live in the present tense.

    There are other, less stant winds that ge dire, that  knock down horse and rider and realign themselves anticlockwise. The bist roz leaps into Afghanistan for 170 days —burying villages. There is the hot, dry ghibli from Tunis, which rolls and rolls and produces a nervous dition. The haboob—a Sudan dust storm that dresses in bright yellow walls a thousares high and is followed by rain. The harmattan, which blows aually drowns itself into the Atlantic.  Imbat, a sea breeze in North Africa. Some w<bdi>.99lib.</bdi>inds that just sigh towards the sky. Night dust storms that e with the cold. The khamsin, a dust i from Maray, named after the Arabic word for “fifty,” blooming for fifty days—the ninth plague of Egypt. The datoo out of Gibraltar, which carries fragrance.

    There is also the ———, the secret wind of the desert, whose name was erased by a king after his son died within it.

    And the nafliat—a blast out of Arabia. The mezzar-ifoullousen —a violent and cold southwesterly known to Berbers as “that which plucks the fowls.” The beshabar, a blad dry northeasterly out of the Caucasus, “black wind.” The Samiel from Turkey, “poison and wind,” used often in battle. As well as the other “poison winds,” the simoom, of North Africa, and the solano, whose dust plucks off rare petals, causing giddiness.

    Other, private winds.

    Travelling along the ground like a flood. Blasting off paint, throwing down telephone poles, transp stones and statue heads. The harmattan blows across the Sahara filled with red dust, dust as fire, as flour, entering and coagulating in the locks of rifles. Mariners called this red wind the “sea of darkness.” Red sand fogs out of the Sahara were deposited as far north as wall and Devon, produg showers of mud so great this was also mistaken for blood. “Blood rains were widely reported   in Pal and Spain in 1901.” There are always millions of tons of dust in the air, just as there are millions of cubes of air in the earth and more living flesh in the soil (worms, beetles, underground creatures) than there is grazing aing on it. Herodotus records the death of various armies engulfed in the simoom who were never seen again. Oion was “sed by this evil wind that they declared war on it and marched out in full battle array, only to be rapidly and pletely interred.” Dust storms in three shapes. The whirl. The n. The sheet. In the first the horizon is lost. In the sed you are surrounded by “waltzing Ginns.” The third, the sheet, is “copper-tinted. Nature seems to be on fire.”  She looks up from the book and sees his eyes on her. He begins to talk across the darkness.

    The Bedouin were keeping me alive for a reason. I was useful, you see. Someohere had assumed I had a skill when my plane crashed in the desert. I am a man who  reize an uown by its skeletal shape on a map. I have always had information like a sea in me. I am a person who if left alone in someone’s home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and i. So history enters us. I knes of the sea floor, maps that depict weaknesses in the shield of the earth, charts painted on skin that tain the various routes of the Crusades.

    So I kheir place before I crashed among them, knew when Alexander had traversed it in an earlier age, for this cause or that greed. I khe s of nomads besotted by silk or wells. Oribe dyed a whole valley floor, blaing it to increase ve and thereby the possibility of rainfall, and built high structures to pierce the belly of a cloud. There were some tribes who held up their open palm against the beginnings of wind. Who believed that if this was do the right moment they could deflect a storm into an adjat sphere of the desert, towards another, less loved tribe. There were tinual drownings, tribes suddenly made historical with sand across their gasp.

    In the desert it is easy to lose a sense of demarcation. When I came out of the air and crashed into the desert, into those troughs of yellow, all I kept thinking was, I must build a raft... I must build a raft.

    And here, though I was in the dry sands, I knew I was among water people.

    In Tassili I have seen rogravings from a time when the Sahara people hunted water horses from reed boats. In Wadi Sura I saw caves whose walls were covered with paintings of swimmers. Here there had been a lake. I could draw its shape on a wall for them. I could lead them to its edge, six thousand years ago.

    Ask a mariner what is the oldest known sail, and he will describe a trapezoidal one hung from the mast of a reed boat that  be seen in rock drawings in Nubia. Pre-dynastic. Harpoons are still found in the desert. These were water people. Even today caravans look like a river. Still, today it is water who is the stranger here. Water is the exile, carried ba s and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth.

    When I was lost among them, unsure of where I was, all I needed was the name of a small ridge, a local , a cell of this historical animal, and the map of the world would slide into place.

    What did most of us know of such parts of Africa? The armies of the Nile moved bad forth—a battlefield eight hundred miles deep into the desert. Whippet tanks, Blenheim medium-range bladiator biplane fighters. Eight thousand men.

    But who was the enemy? Who were the allies of this place—the fertile lands of aica, the salt marshes of El Agheila? All of Europe were fighting their wars in North Africa, in Sidi Rezegh, in Baguoh.

    He travelled on a skid behind the Bedouin for five days in darkness, the hood over his body. He lay within this oil-doused cloth. Then suddenly the temperature fell. They had reached the valley within the red high yon walls, joining the rest of the desert’s water tribe that spilled and slid over sand and stoheir blue robes shifting like a spray of milk or a wing. They lifted the soft cloth off him, off the suck of his body. He was within the larger womb of the yon. The buzzards high above them slipping down a thousand years into this crack of stone where they camped.

    In the m they took him to the far reach of the siq. They  were  talking loudly  around  him  now.   The dialect suddenly clarifying. He was here because of the buried guns.

    He was carried towards something, his blindfolded face looking straight ahead, and his hand made to reach out a yard or so.

    After days of travel, to move this one yard. To lean towards and touething with a purpose, his arm still held, his palm fag down and opeouched the Sten barrel and the ha go of him. A pause among the voices. He was there to translate the guns.

    “Twelve-millimetre Breda mae gun. From Italy.” He pulled back the bolt, ied his fio find no bullet, pushed it bad pulled the trigger. Puht. “Famous gun,” he muttered. He was moved fain.

    “French seven-point-five-millimetre Chattelerault. Light mae gun. eey-four.” “German seven-point-nine-millimetre MG-Fifteen air service.

    He was brought to each of the guns. The ons seemed to be from different time periods and from many tries, a museum in the desert. He brushed the tours of the stod magazine or fihe sight. He spoke out the gun’s hen was carried to anu ons formally hao him. He called the names out loud, speaking in Frend theribe’s own language. But what did that matter to them? Perhaps they needed not the  to know that he knew what the gun was.

    He was held by the wrist again and his hand sunk into a box of cartridges. In another box to the right were more shells, seven-millimetre shells this time. Then others.

    When he was a child he had grown up with an aunt, and on the grass of her lawn she had scattered a deck of cards face down and taught him the game of Pelmanism. Each player allowed to turn up two cards aually, through memory pairing them off. This had been in another landscape, of trout streams, birdcalls that he could reize from a halting fragment. A fully named world. Now, with his face blindfolded in a mask of grass fibres, he picked up a shell and moved with his carriers, guiding them towards a gun, ied the bullet, bolted it, and holding it up in the air fired. The noise crag crazily down the   yon walls. “For echo is the soul of the voice exg itself in hollow places.” A man thought to be sullen and mad had written that sentence down in an English hospital. And he, now in this desert, was sane, with clear thought, pig up the cards, bringing them together with ease, his grin flung out to his aunt, and firing each successful bination into the air, and gradually the unseen men around him replied to each rifle shot with a cheer. He would turn to fae dire, then move back to the Breda this time on his strange human palanquin, followed by a man with a knife who carved a parallel code on shell bo<samp>99lib.</samp>x and gun stock. He thrived on it—the movement and the cheering after the solitude. This ayment with his skill for the men who had saved him for such a purpose.

    There are villages he will travel into with them where there are no women. His knowledge is passed like a ter of use-fulness from tribe to tribe. Tribes representi thousand individuals. He enters specific s and specific music.

    Mostly blindfolded he hears the water-drawing songs of the Mzina tribe with their exultations, dahhiya dances, pipe-flutes which are used for carrying messages in times of emergency, the makruna double pipe (one pipe stantly sounding a drone).

    Then into the territory of five-stringed lyres. A village or oasis of preludes and interludes. Hand-clapping. Antiph-onal dance.

    He is given sight only after dusk, when he  witness his captors and saviours. Now he knows where he is. For some he dras that go beyond their own boundaries and for other tribes too he explains the meics of guns. The musis sit across the fire from him. The simsimiya lyre notes flung away by a gust of breeze. Or the notes shift towards him over the flames. There is a boy dang, who in this light is the most desirable thing he has seen. His thin shoulders white as papyrus, light from the fire refleg sweat on his stomaakedness glimpsed through openings in the blue linen he wears as a lure from o ankle, revealing himself as a line of brown lightning.

    The night desert surrounds them, traversed by a loose order of storms and caravans. There are always secrets and dangers around him, as when blind he moved his hand and cut himself on a double-edged razor in the sand. At times he doesn’t know if these are dreams, the cut so  it leaves no pain, and he must wipe the blood on his skull (his face still untouchable) to signal the wound to his captors. This village of no women he has been brought into in plete silence, or the whole month when he did not see the moon. Was this ied? Dreamed by him while ed in oil a and darkness

    They had passed wells where water was cursed. In some open spaces there were hidden towns, and he waited while they dug through sand into the buried rooms or waited while they dug into s of water. And the pure beauty of an i dang boy, like sound from a boy chorister, which he remembered as the purest of sounds, the clearest river water, the most transpareh of the sea. Here in the desert, which had been an old sea where nothing was strapped down or perma, everything drifted—like the shift of linen across the boy as if he were embrag or freeing himself from an o or his own blu<u></u>e afterbirth. A boy arousing himself, his genitals against the colour of fire.

    Then the fire is sanded over, its smoke withering around them. The fall of musical instruments like a pulse or rain. The boy puts his arm across, through the lost fire, to silehe pipe-flutes. There is no boy, there are no footsteps when he leaves. Just the borrowed rags. One of the men crawls forward and collects the semen which has fallen on the sand. He brings it over to the white translator of guns and passes it into his hands. In the desert you celebrate nothing but water.

    She stands over the sink, gripping it, looking at the stucco wall. She has removed all mirrors and stacked them away in ay room. She grips the sink and moves her head from side to side, releasing a movement of shadow. She wets her hands and bs water into her hair till it is pletely wet. This cools her and she likes it when she goes outside and the breezes hit her, erasing the thunder.

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