Jim Crace - Continent

‘Count yourself as lucky,’ said Beyat. ‘You’ve got me to keep an eye on you. And this cell, it’s got a window, see. You can watch the soldiers marching in the yard. This is a five-star cell. Until yesterday a government minister was here. They came, they asked some questions, they let him go perhaps. Or he was transferred. No one stays for long.’ At his instruction I took off my clothes and watch and packed them in a plastic bag. My five-star cell — a mat, a bunk, a bucket — was no smaller than my room at home. And it was clean and odourless. ‘Your sister,’ he said, checking between my legs and in my mouth for money, weapons, false teeth, drugs. ‘She’s no great catch, you know, not for a soldier. We take our pick. If there are girls about, then count me in. But ’Freti, she’s got mushrooms for a brain. She got what she was after. And now she should clear off.’ He was talking as if we had just met in a bar, conspiratorial strangers, boastful with anonymity and drink. ‘Is that why you’ve brought me here,’ I asked, ‘to talk about my sister? Does she know I’m here?’ He laughed: ‘No one knows you’re here, that’s our job. You’ve gone missing. You’ve taken off to join the insurrection. You’re dead. You couldn’t stand your witless sister any more, so you cut your throat and climbed into a hole.’ He handed me some brown overalls and a pair of plastic sandals. ‘Put them on,’ he said. ‘Stop shaking. You’re getting on my nerves.’

I HAVE stood at the window and watched Corporal Beyat as he goes off duty through the wire gate. The women press forward and shout the names of the sons and husbands who have disappeared. They push leaflets into his pockets. They whisper subversion as he squeezes through them and out onto the open pavement of Government Drive. ’Freti tags along without a word from him. Once he turned and shouted, ‘Keep away’ perhaps, or ‘Leave me alone. You’re getting on my nerves.’ Might he have mentioned me? He pushed her back. But she took no notice. She had found someone to love and that was that. By the time they had taken ten steps they were out of sight, masked by the wall of the regimental offices, and I could only guess at my sister’s insistent courtship, her coquetry, her blandishments, the candour of her face.

I can only guess, too, at what will happen to me here. No one has come to ask me questions. There has been no opportunity for me to clear my name, or to answer any charges or complaints. Those other young men whom I meet in the latrines or in the shower block are firebrands from the university or leafleteers or the sort who pontificate on platforms. They sing defiant songs as they wash. I do not know the words — or tunes. From them I hear about ‘the kitchen’ where, they say, all prisoners are overwhelmed, stretched out naked on an unhinged door and clipped by ear and toe to magnetos. There are hoods and chains and electric prods. There is a punishment called the crate. Another called the handstand. Sometimes it is silent in the kitchen; that is when, they say, electrodes have been placed upon a detainee’s teeth and the current switched on. Then, no one ever screams.

Sometimes I talk to a man who is more my own age. He, too, like me, was taken from the street. But he was carrying posters and a pot of paste. Our only hope, he says, is the women at the wire gate. If only our names could be smuggled those few yards, then we would be safe. Do I know people who could set us free? But others warn me not to answer. They say this man is a soldier in disguise, an informer. Then they engage me, too, in whispers. Which soldiers do I think would take a bribe to carry a note outside or to mutter a name at the gate? To what lawyers in the town should they address their messages? What am I, other than a legal clerk, unmarried, underpaid, unremarkable in every way? What faction do I represent? They do not trust my answers — so I tell them about Beyat, my sister and my hope that he has taken word of me to her. ‘You must talk to him,’ they say, insisting that I remember all their names. ‘Perhaps he will be our postman.’

FOR MUCH OF the day I stand on my bunk and look out, with one eye shut, upon the town. I have devised my own clock by the comings and the goings at the gate, by the shifts of soldiers passing through the frontier of wire, by the exercising squads in the barracks yard, by the times when the kerosene lanterns are lit on the nut stalls in the street. I know that when the raffia screen is lifted in the nearest window of the regimental offices, the woman clerk who sits there will light a cigarette to start her working day. A match flares in the glass. I know that when the klaxon calls, conscripts will run across the yard below to queue for their soup and potato at the canteen door. I know which conscripts will squat in a circle, playing dice, which will kick a ball against my wall, and which will sit alone. I know when work is done: the raffia screen comes down again, the office workers and the off-duty soldiers make their way into town, the army chauffeurs button their coats and start the engines of the government cars, and the soldiers at the wire gate push back the women waiting there. There is the woman with the headscarf. She comes at lunch time and stands immobile with an unfurled portrait of a man. There are the white-haired women in the black clothes who have the energy of pedlars, blocking the way of every man who exits, holding up their lists. There is the fat girl with the flag, the tall woman with three children, the bandy one, the girl with short hair, the stocky woman who bangs on the bonnets of passing cars. There is the pulse of flame from their charcoal brazier at night.

‘HOW’S my sister?’ I asked Beyat while he stood and supervised the cleaning of my cell. ‘Old Slobberjowl?’ he said, and made a gaping, lovelorn face. ‘She hangs around outside the barracks. Where I go, she goes. She makes a fool of me.’ ‘You made a fool of her,’ I said. Beyat nodded. He was embarrassed. He was only half to blame, he claimed. She was a temptress for all her innocence. She had clung to him, had she not? She had let him lift her and transport her round the bar. She had behaved, well, like a whore, tugging at his arm and pulling at his uniform. Was he to blame if he had weakened for a little fun? Any soldier in the bar would have done the same, would — so provoked — have carried ’Freti to the jeep and driven off to find a spot amongst the trees of Deliverance Park, where lovers who could not afford a hotel room could lie amongst the shrubs. They did have sex, he said. And endearments were exchanged, polite and intimate as suited such a time, with my sister’s bright and grotesque clothes cast off, the soldier tender-tough, intractable, and shanty boys (attracted to the place by the abandoned army jeep) watching and whistling from behind the trees.

‘She’d led me on,’ he said. ‘And I told her so, after we had done. I told her that I had a girl back home. She said it didn’t matter, that she could be my girl in town.’ Once again he made a gaping, lovelorn face. How could she be his girl in town, with a mouth and eyes like that? He listed all the times when he had turned his back on her, when he had passed her in the street or at the gate. Only once, when he was drunk, and she had trapped him in a bar, defences down, had they visited the Park again, at night. Two other soldiers had come, too. ‘See what she has started?’ he said, and I believe he could have wept at the anguish that she caused if the captain had not entered at that time and led me to the kitchen.

The reports of the firebrands and the leafleteers had been exaggerated. The room was no more than an office — a desk, a table lamp, two chairs, a cabinet, a sink. The captain stood behind me at the door. A man in an open-necked shirt sat at the desk with a pile of folders. ‘We have some simple questions, then you can be released or transferred to another place,’ he said. ‘Please sit.’ He asked my name, my occupation, my address in the town. And then: ‘With which political groupings are you associated?’ I told him, None. He nodded and wrote for a few moments. ‘Well, we are in no hurry,’ he said. ‘We will take our time. Come and see me here tomorrow. And in the meantime give some thought to your position. If you will not answer questions then our hands are tied. We might need to be more forceful. Either way, it’s up to you, so long as we have answers. Think of yourself — there’s no one else to keep an eye on you. No one knows you’re here.’ ‘You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘Perhaps, my sister knows I’m here. She’s with the women at the gate.’ He smiled. ‘My family knows I’m here,’ I added. ‘The lawyers at my office know I’m here. The women at the gate have all the names.’ The captain shook his head. ‘You think that it’s not possible,’ I said. ‘We have our postmen. I have friends inside and out who can attest that I am innocent of everything.’ I extemporized the petitions and the affidavits that they might expect if I were not released. Once again I used words and phrases which I had typed in legal papers. ‘Such bravado,’ said the man in the shirt, ‘does not impress.’ He signalled to the captain that I should leave. The captain led me back along the corridor and up the stairs to my cell. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘who are the postmen?’ I thought of my splashed clothes, of the beer that I’d been forced to drink, of Beyat and the two soldiers, the parked jeep amongst the trees, ’Freti with her loose eyes and the indelible smile. Was it too late to intervene? ‘Who do you think?’ I said. ‘Who’s sleeping with whose sister?’