David Malouf - The Great World

A little away from the camp, in a jungle clearing, they had their burning-place. Each day there were new dead to be cremated, and because he was in reasonable shape, except for his ulcer, Digger did it. The wood had to be chopped the day before. The bodies were carried on rice sacks on bamboo poles.

Entering the place Digger felt a sleepiness come over him. It began the moment you stepped off the common path that the work parties used and took this one that led sharply away from it and then a hundred yards or more, in impenetrable gloom, into the forest. Only the dead came this way, except for those who carried them. To enter here you too had to become one of the dead, at least in spirit — the place demanded it. A sleepiness came over you, a torpor of the mind, though your limbs worked well enough.

You were in the antechamber here of the next world — that’s what the perpetual blue-grey gloom and the external dampness of the place told you; and the stillness, the suspension of all activity, including the fall of the ever-falling bamboo leaves.

You were at the furthest point now from where you had come from, wherever it was, and could bring no human qualities with you. The place did not recognise them, had never known them from the beginning of time. It was a primeval place of a vegetable dampness where nothing human had yet been conceived.

The air was blueish and so cold that your breath went always before you, as if spirit here had more substance man flesh.

The leaves kept up a slow drizzle, and long streamers of mist floated through just at head level. More breath.

The slowness of the blood that overcame you belonged to lizard life, reptile life. To stand upright and take on the sensations of men might be fatal here; no space had been prepared for it. You preserved yourself by letting a reptile sleepiness come over you and your spirit sink down towards the earth.

There were no ceremonies. The words would have blown back damp against your mouth.

All the more terrifying then that the dead, who after twenty-four hours were no more than the driest sticks, should suddenly, when the teak logs under them roared into flame, sigh and sit upright, start bolt upright in the midst of the flames. This recovery, and the heat that came from it, was too much. You found your limbs and hobbled away as fast as breath would take you. You fled.

‘LISTEN MATE,’ VIC whispered. What was he doing here? ‘I heard about something. One of the other blokes tried it and it worked on him. Can you hear me Digger? I’m gunna get you up. Sorry about this.’

The place was full of voices. In the attap roof where rain dripped continuously small lives were on the move, lizards, mice, scorpions, cockroaches — occasionally one of them fell and you would hear a man cry out in alarm and claw at himself to drive it off.

The other hospital inmates, if they could drag themselves to their feet, were never still — that’s how it seemed to Digger. They were forever trotting off to the boreholes, five or six times a night some of them, or restlessly wandering up and down between the bunks, in violent conversation with themselves.

Bugs rattled in the folds of his rags, he could hear them. They clattered against one another in the joints of the rack. Sighs, groans, a burst of shouting out of some man’s nightmare.

Get up? He would never get up, that’s what they had told him. Not on two legs anyway; one maybe. He had begun a light-headed descent towards a place of light, and had decided to go with it. He was letting his body have its own way now. That was the best thing.

‘Digger? C’m on . I’m going to get you up, right? It’ll hurt, I know. I’m sorry. But it’s our only shot. You don’t want t’ lose ya leg, do you?’

It was Vic’s voice but the tone was his mother’s. He wondered what Vic had been tuning into that allowed him to get it off so perfectly, but was not surprised. The walls between things had been breaking down for a while now.

‘Digger?’

He was being hauled up, away from the light. When his eyes opened it was dark. The hospital hut was all shadows of men moving against the light outside.

‘What are you doing ?’ he complained, feeling Vic’s arm hooked under his own and hauling him up. He was light enough, but was surprised just the same that Vic could manage it. ‘I can’t walk .’

Vic ignored this. He had him up and hanging. Digger could hear Vic panting and could smell his breath. He began to drag him out under the overlap of the attap roof into starlight. Other men, ghostlike, were wandering about out here but took no notice of them.

‘Where are we goin’?’ he asked when they had crossed the open space in front of the huts and entered a thicket.

Vic was grunting. He did not reply. ‘This is the hard bit now,’ he said at last, after they had come some way into the thickening forest. ‘Hang on, eh Dig? Digger? Dig?’

They were at the edge of a muddy bank that sloped steeply to a glint of water where blackness swirled. Digger looked out across the wide expanse of it. The river.

‘Listen,’ Vic was telling him. ‘I’m gunna put you down on your backside, right? You gotta slide. It’ll hurt, Dig, I know that. I’m sorry. But it’s the only way. You ready now?’

He had no power to resist. He felt himself settled with his legs over the edge of the bank, then he was sliding. His bones wrenched. They would break, they must; he was waiting to hear what he had heard often enough in the hospital hut, the unspeakable sound of a legbone snapping, crack! where some bloke turned in the dark. But there was only a shock of pain that he blacked out on, and he was in thick mud. It was oozing all round him. It was in his mouth and eyes, stinking. But he did not have enough weight for it to take him down. No pack, no boots, and there was no meat on him. So in his own case gravity did not function. He floated on top of it, floundering, and the mud was grey-black river-slime with roots in it.

‘Digger? Are you OK, Dig?’

That was that Vic again. ‘For Christ’s sake,’ Digger thought, ‘doesn’ ’e know any other name? Why doesn’ ’e torment some other bastard?’

‘All right,’ Vic said, ‘all right, we can rest a bit, no hurry, Dig. You have a rest.’

Vic lay with his face in the mud. It stank, he thought, like an old slate-rag at school. He was sweating. ‘No, there’s no hurry,’ he thought.

He was light-headed. That was the pain. But more than that it was the revulsion he felt that part of him stank worse even than this river-slime, and had the stink of a dead body. He was carrying the beginnings of a dead body along with his live one.

There was no hurry, but he couldn’t wait just the same. Another moment of this death touch on him and he’d go crazy now that the cure was so near. But Digger couldn’t move again. Not just yet.

‘I can wait,’ he told himself. ‘There’s no hurry. The fishes’ll wait. If I can just get my ear out of the mud’ (he lifted his head) ‘I’ll be able to hear them.’ The tiddlers, he meant, in their shoals at the edge of the river; swishing their tails, waving their gills to breathe, and smelling them: flesh. He reached out and touched the edge of the water. Very gently it tripped over his fingers. It was going somewhere. It would clean them, even if it was itself thick with mud.

‘Digger?’

He pulled himself up, put his face close to Digger, who was all mud, and, as if he could by sheer willpower breathe life into him, said, ‘Listen, mate, I’m gunna get you up again, right? Digger? Dig?’

Digger rolled his head a little. There were stars, big ones, very close, and so bright that it hurt. They were heavy, he knew that. Tons and tons of gas and luminous minerals burning, rolling, travelling fast but managing to stay up. The weight of them, that light balancing act, was an encouragement.