Tommy Wieringa - Little Caesar

By the time we headed for a spot of light amid the trees, I was counting on nothing. A clearing, columns of smoke rising skywards between the stumps. We stepped out of the shadows into the last daylight — I took a deep breath. Between a handful of huts lay dogs, there were no people anywhere. We walked past the paltry thatched shelters. There was washing hanging outside them. The settlement was suffused with the general messiness of temporary, improvised living. All the trees around the plot had been cut down, elephant grass was shooting up between the fallen trunks. This was an outpost, they were taking me further. Uphill we went now, again we slipped into the trees, this time along a winding path of footprints on the moist ground. Night was falling, I heard loud, mechanical sounds. The song of stone against steel, the strain of powerful engines. Then we were standing at the edge of a scene that would come back in my dreams — a grated, tortured landscape, a work of systematic hatred. A lone, steep mountain, the face of which on our side was eaten away by a malicious brand of erosion. A bulldozer labored across the violated surface of the earth, a plain of ground stone. A truck was flattening out the mountain’s remains. Fires were burning in oil drums, smoking, flaring. Above all this, at the edge of the quarry, was where we stood. We descended along a winding path into the depths. I felt numb and without expectations. He might be there, he might not be. What had I hoped all this would lead to?

We were heading towards a central barrack. The bulldozer came to a halt, only the one yellow eye of the truck still crept over the terrain. Ibarra and I waited outside the long hut as the workers entered, drawn by the paltry light that burned inside. A few men came out again, tattered and dirty from head to toe like mineworkers. They looked at me, as though trying to see a resemblance with him. They exchanged words, seemed to hesitate about what to do. One of them had to take me to Schultz, none of them was eager to do so. In the end, an old Indian — his face weathered as a gravestone — was given the task. Beneath his unbuttoned shirt you could see his hairless chest, the wrinkled, round belly beneath that. He was my escort for the last stage of this journey. He walked away without looking back, the men pushed me after him. We crossed the dead ground, there was a slope we climbed, I saw the contours of a little building in the darkness. Reddish light inside. I stumbled after the Indian. My heart leapt in my throat, a boulder rolled down the slope. At a little distance from the hut, the Indian stopped in his tracks. In his frail, lonesome voice he called out, ‘ Señor Schultz, discúlpame!’

It seemed that all the currents in my life had been meant to arrive at this moment, here, under the forest at the top of the slope, up to the red half-light coming from the windows and the cracks around the door of flattened tins; it was for this that it had all existed. Señor Schultz, discúlpame . . the open sesame that would reveal a father, the veils would be parted. Bumping around, then the door opened, shrieking softly on its hinges. A man peered into the darkness and said, ‘ Qué hay? Qué quiere?’

The Indian stepped back and disappeared quickly. The man took a step forward, mumbling, uncertain about the shape in the darkness.

‘Mr. Schultz,’ I said.

‘Who’s there? Who are you?’

I broke the inertia by taking a step, by saying, ‘I’ve come here to talk to you.’

We were facing each other now. It occurred to me that he might be night blind, or simply nearsighted as all get-out, because he still seemed to see nothing but shadows.

‘Shall we go inside?’ I asked.

He backed through the doorway, I stooped and followed him. I found myself standing in a shabby, low-ceilinged room, the hut of a castaway. A man, my height, his beard streaked with gray. He said nothing, just looked. My voice was even and clear when I said, ‘I’m Ludwig Unger.’

And, as though to refresh his memory, ‘Your son.’

The silence reverberated between my ears. The man ran his hand over his beard, then laid it on the back of his neck. He walked to the table and sat down. The back of the chair creaked, his gaze swept the ceiling, the kerosene lamp above the table. I thought I heard him making a sound beneath his breath, a thought that couldn’t make it past his lips. There inside him an arranging was going on, the disposition of the things that, on one evening out of a million, had fallen on his head.

‘You look like her,’ he said then.

Again he withdrew inside himself, looking for words, for something to say.

‘You always were your mother’s baby.’

His shack was that of a cynical philosopher, a cur.

‘Cat got your tongue, boy? Sit down.’

There was another chair in the room, beside the bed, covered in clothes and papers. Next to the mattress was the butt of a candle in a tin can, and an almost-consumed green spiral to ward off insects. Now we were sitting across from each other, Bodo Schultz and Ludwig Unger, separated by a lifetime, my lifetime, and it was at that of all moments that my tongue seemed to lie paralyzed in my mouth. He was so much older than I had imagined him. Father, is that you? He filled two glasses from a bottle with no label.

‘Maybe this will make you a little more talkative.’

Ay, the burning in my guts! He assessed me, squinting, as though his eyes were indeed bad.

‘How’s your mother doing?’

I exhaled loudly through my nostrils.

‘Not good,’ I said. ‘She’s dead.’

‘Dead,’ he echoed.

‘Cancer.’

He nodded like a turtle.

‘Marthe dead. When?’

‘May of last year.’

‘May. What month is it now?’

‘January.’

‘Did she suffer?’

‘She suffered.’

‘There isn’t any other way.’

‘Perhaps not.’

He drank. Drops remained hanging in his beard.

‘That’s fucked,’ he said.

And a little later, ‘How did you get here?’

‘A man brought me. He showed me the way.’

‘It’s hard not to be found in this world.’

I had no other repertoire at my disposal but the primal questions. They were burning in my soul like phosphor.

‘Why did you go away? From Alexandria, I mean. Without. . anything.’

A laugh, scornful, insulting.

‘Did you come all this way just to lecture me on marital ethics, boy? Is that it? Then I can probably expect a few more of your sort to show up here, don’t you think?’

I drew in my breath.

‘I don’t know about your life. I just have a couple of questions. Then I’ll go away.’

‘You could have called.’

He nodded at the satellite phone on the shelf behind him.

‘I didn’t have your number, I’m sorry.’

When he grinned you could see the black holes in his teeth.

‘You came here because you want to find out something,’ he said. ‘Do you want to know what you could have figured out anyway, or do you want to know about what you can’t even fathom right now? The point where nothing’s left. Beyond that. Beyond people. Beyond everything. Where cosmic loneliness is your reward. Knowledge in its most supreme form. No more prospects, only chasms.’

‘All I want to know is what reason was good enough to leave your wife and child alone.’

He refilled the glasses. His hand shook.

‘Siddhartha Gautama looks at his sleeping wife and child. Rahula, that was the child’s name. Ball, chain. Gautama sneaks out of the house and never comes back. He becomes an ascetic in the wilderness. Some people become Buddha. Others anti-Buddha.’

‘Ball and chain.’

‘Your mother got pregnant. Dozens, hundreds of men had poured their seed into her, I made her pregnant.’