Читать книгу The Book of Strange New Things - Michel Faber - Страница 15

7

Approved, transmitted

‘Well,’ said Grainger, ‘here we are.’ Sometimes a statement of the bloody obvious was the only appropriate way forward. As if to give life ceremonious permission to proceed.

‘Are you OK?’ she asked.

‘Uh . . . yes,’ he said, swaying in his seat. The dizziness he’d felt back at the base had come over him again. ‘I’m probably over-excited. It’s my first time, after all.’

She gave him a look he recognised very well, a look he’d seen on thousands of faces during his years as a pastor, a look that said: Nothing is worth getting excited about; everything is a disappointment. He would have to try to do something about that look, if he could, later.

In the meantime, he had to admit that their surroundings were not exactly awesomely impressive. The Oasan settlement wasn’t what you’d call a city. More like a suburb, erected in the middle of a wasteland. There were no streets in the formal sense, no pavements, no signs, no vehicles, and – despite the dim light and broad shadows of early dawn – no lamps, or any evidence of electricity or fire. Just a community of buildings resting on bare ground. How many dwellings altogether? Peter couldn’t guess. Maybe five hundred. Maybe more. They were spread out in unruly clusters, ranging in scale from single-storey to three-floor blocks, all flat-roofed. The buildings were brick, obviously made of the same clay as the earth, but baked marble-smooth and caramel-coloured. There was not a soul to be seen. All the doors and windows were shut. Well, that wasn’t quite true: the doors weren’t made of wood nor the windows of glass; they were merely holes in the buildings, shrouded with bead curtains. The beads were crystalline, like extravagant strings of jewellery. They swayed gently in the breeze. But there was nobody parting those curtains to peek out, nobody walking through the doorways.

Grainger parked the vehicle right in front of a building which looked like all the others except that it was marked by a painted white star, the bottom point of which had trickled slightly and dried that way. Peter and Grainger stepped out and submitted to the atmosphere’s embrace. Grainger wrapped her scarf around her face, covering her mouth and nose, as though she considered the air impure. From a pocket of her slacks she removed a metal gadget which Peter assumed was a weapon. She pointed it at the vehicle and pressed the trigger twice. The engine switched off and a hatch in the back flipped open.

In the absence of motor noise, the sounds of the Oasan settlement ventured onto the airwaves like opportunistic wildlife. The burble of running water, from an invisible source. The occasional muffled clank or clunk, suggesting routine struggles with domestic objects. Distant squeaks and chortles that might be birds or children or machinery. And, closer by, the unintelligible murmur of voices, subtle and diffuse, emanating from the buildings like a hum. This place, despite outward appearances, was no ghost town.

‘So, do we just yell hello?’ said Peter.

‘They know we’re here,’ said Grainger. ‘That’s why they’re hiding.’ Her voice, muffled slightly by the scarf, sounded tense. She had her arms folded, and he could see a tongue of dark sweat in the armpit of her smock.

‘How many times have you been here?’ he asked.

‘Dozens. I bring them their drug supply.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘I’m a pharmacist.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

She sighed. ‘Looks like I totally wasted my breath when we first met. You didn’t absorb a word I said, did you? My big speech of welcome, my detailed explanation of the procedure for getting stuff from the pharmacy if you need it.’

‘Sorry, my brains must have been scrambled.’

‘The Jump does that to some people.’

‘The wimpy ones, huh?’

‘I didn’t say that.’ Grainger hugged herself tightly, squeezing her upper arms in stress. ‘Come on, let’s get this over with.’ This last was not addressed to him; she was staring at the building with the star painted on it.

‘Are we in any danger?’

‘None that I know of.’

Peter leaned against the crash-bar of the vehicle and made a more careful study of what he could see of the settlement. The buildings, although rectangular, had no hard edges: each brick was a well-buffed lozenge, a glassy loaf of amber. The mortar had no grit to it; it was like plastic sealant. There wasn’t a hard angle anywhere, nothing sharp or corrugated. It was as though the architect’s aesthetics had been formed in homage to children’s play centres. Not that these buildings were in any way infantile or crass: they had their own uniform dignity, and they were obviously rock-solid, and the warm colours were . . . well . . . warm. But Peter couldn’t say he found the overall effect attractive. If God blessed him with the opportunity to build a church here, it would have to strike a different note, stand out against the squatness all around. At the very least it would need to have . . . Yes, that’s it: he’d worked out what was so dispiriting about this place. There was no attempt to reach up into the heavens. No tower, no turret, no flagpole, not even a modest triangular roof. Oh, for a spire!

Peter’s vision of a church steeple shone in his mind just long enough for him to be oblivious to a movement in the bead curtain of the nearest doorway. By the time he blinked and focused, the figure had already stepped out and was confronting Grainger. The event had occurred too suddenly, he felt; it lacked the drama appropriate to his first sighting of an Oasan native. It ought to have happened with ceremonial slowness, in an amphitheatre, or at the summit of a long staircase. Instead, the encounter was already under way, and Peter had missed its beginning.

The creature – the person – stood upright, but not tall. Five foot three, maybe five foot four. (Funny how those imperial measurements – inches, miles – stubbornly refused to be left behind.) Anyway, he, or she, was delicate. Small-boned, narrow-shouldered, an unassuming presence – not at all the fearsome figure Peter had prepared himself to confront. As foretold, a hood and monkish robes – made of a pastel-blue fabric disconcertingly like bathtowel – covered almost all of the body, its hems brushing the toes of soft leather boots. There was no swell of bosom, so Peter – aware that this was flimsy evidence on which to base a judgement, but unwilling to clutter his brain with unwieldy repetitions of ‘he or she’ – decided to think of the creature as male.

‘Hi,’ said Grainger, extending her hand.

The Oasan extended his hand in return, but did not grasp Grainger’s; rather he touched her gently on the wrist with his fingertips. He was gloved. The gloves had five digits.

‘You, here, now . . . ’ he said. ‘A surprise.’ His voice was soft, reedy, asthmatic-sounding. Where the ‘s’s should have been, there was a noise like a ripe fruit being thumbed into two halves.

‘Not a bad surprise, I hope,’ said Grainger.

‘I hope together with you.’

The Oasan turned to look at Peter, tilted his head slightly so that the shadows from the hood slid back. Peter, having been lulled by the Oasan’s familiar shape and five-fingered hands into expecting a more-or-less human face, flinched.

Here was a face that was nothing like a face. Instead, it was a massive whitish-pink walnut kernel. Or no: even more, it resembled a placenta with two foetuses – maybe three-month-old twins, hairless and blind – nestled head to head, knee to knee. Their swollen heads constituted the Oasan’s clefted forehead, so to speak; their puny ribbed backs formed his cheeks, their spindly arms and webbed feet merged in a tangle of translucent flesh that might contain – in some form unrecognisable to him – a mouth, nose, eyes.

Of course, there were no foetuses there, not really: the face was what it was, the face of an Oasan, nothing else. But try as he might, Peter couldn’t decode it on its own terms; he could only compare it to something he knew. He had to see it as a grotesque pair of foetuses perched on someone’s shoulders, half-shrouded in a cowl. Because if he didn’t allow it to resemble that, he would probably always have to stare at it dumbfounded, reliving the initial shock, dizzy with the vertigo of unsupported falling, in that gut-wrenching instant before a solid comparison is found to clasp onto.

‘You and I,’ said the Oasan. ‘Never before now.’ The vertical cleft in the middle of his face squirmed slightly as he formed the words. The foetuses rubbed knees, so to speak. Peter smiled but could not summon a response.

‘He means he hasn’t met you before,’ said Grainger. ‘In other words, he’s saying hello.’

‘Hello,’ said Peter. ‘I’m Peter.’

The Oasan nodded. ‘You are Peter. I will remember.’ He turned back to Grainger. ‘You bring medisine?’

‘A little.’

‘How litle?’

‘I’ll show you,’ said Grainger, walking around to the back of the vehicle and lifting the hatch. She rummaged in the jumbled contents – bottles of water, toilet paper, canvas bags, tools, tarps – and extracted a plastic tub no bigger than a schoolchild’s lunch-box. The Oasan followed every movement, although Peter was still unable to work out which parts of the face were its eyes. His eyes, sorry.

‘This is all I could get from our pharmacy,’ said Grainger. ‘Today is not one of the official supply days, you understand? We’re here for a different reason. But I didn’t want to come with nothing. So this’ – she handed him the tub – ‘is extra. A gift.’

‘We are disappointful,’ said the Oasan. ‘And in the same breath we are grateful.’

There was a pause. The Oasan stood holding his plastic tub; Grainger and Peter stood watching him hold it. A ray of sunlight found its way to the roof of the vehicle, making it glow.

‘So . . . uh . . . How are you?’ said Grainger. Sweat twinkled in her eyebrows and on her cheeks.

‘I alone?’ enquired the Oasan. ‘Or I and we together?’ He gestured vaguely at the settlement behind him.

‘All of you.’

The Oasan appeared to give this a great deal of thought. At last he said: ‘Good.’

There was another pause.

‘Is anyone else coming out today?’ asked Grainger. ‘To see us, I mean?’

Again, the Oasan mulled over the question as though it were immensely complex.

‘No,’ he concluded. ‘I today am only one.’ He gestured solemnly at both Grainger and Peter, in acknowledgement, perhaps, of his regret for the 2:1 imbalance between number of visitors and welcoming party.

‘Peter here is a special guest of USIC,’ said Grainger. ‘He’s a . . . he’s a Christian missionary. He wants to . . . uh . . . live with you.’ She glanced at Peter for uneasy confirmation. ‘If I’ve got that right.’

‘Yes,’ said Peter, brightly. There was a glistening, champignon-like thing roughly halfway down the central cleft of the Oasan’s face that he’d decided was the Oasan’s eye, and he looked straight at that, doing his best to radiate friendliness. ‘I have good news to tell you. The best news you’ve ever heard.’

The Oasan cocked his head to one side. The two foetuses – no, not foetuses, his brow and cheeks, please! – blushed, revealing a spidery network of capillaries just beneath the skin. His voice, when it came, was even more asthmatic-sounding than before. ‘The Gospel?’

The words hung in the whispering air for a second before Peter was able to take them in. He couldn’t believe he’d heard correctly. Then he noticed that the Oasan’s gloved hands had been pressed together in a steeple shape.

‘Yes!’ Peter cried, dizzy with elation. ‘Praise Jesus!’

The Oasan turned to Grainger again. His gloved hands were trembling against the tub he held. ‘We have waited long for the man Peter,’ he said. ‘Thank you, Grainger.’ And without further explanation he hurried through the doorway, leaving the crystalline beads swinging in his wake.

‘Well I’ll be damned,’ said Grainger, yanking her scarf loose and wiping her face with it. ‘He never called me by name before.’

They stood waiting for twenty minutes or so. The sun continued to rise, a sliver of brilliant burning orange, like a great bubble of lava on the horizon. The walls of the buildings glowed as if each brick had a light inside.

At last, the Oasan returned, still clutching the plastic tub, which was now empty. He handed it back to Grainger, very slowly and carefully, only letting it go when her grip on it was secure.

‘Medisine have all gone,’ he said. ‘Gone inside the grateful.’

‘I’m sorry there wasn’t more,’ said Grainger. ‘There’ll be more next time.’

The Oasan nodded. ‘We abide.’

Grainger, stiff with unease, walked to the rear of the vehicle to stow the tub back in the trunk. As soon as her back was turned, the Oasan sidled up to Peter, bringing them face to face.

‘Have you the book?’

‘The book?’

‘The Book of strange New Things.’

Peter blinked and tried to breathe normally. Up close, the Oasan’s flesh smelled sweet: not the sweet of rot, but sweet like fresh fruit.

‘You mean the Bible,’ he said.

‘We speak never the name. Power of the book forbid. Flame give warmth . . . ’ With outstretched hands, he mimed the action of warming oneself on a fire, getting too close, and being burned.

‘But you mean the Word of God,’ said Peter. ‘The Gospel.’

‘The Gospel. The technique of Jesus.’

Peter nodded, but it took him a few seconds to decode the last word from its impeded passage through the Oasan’s head cleft.

‘Jesus,’ he echoed in wonder.

The Oasan reached out one hand, and, with an unmistakably tender motion, stroked Peter’s cheek with the tip of a glove. ‘We pray Jesus for your coming,’ he said.

Grainger’s failure to rejoin them was, by now, obvious. Peter glanced round and saw her leaning on the back of the vehicle, pretending to study the gadget with which she’d unlocked the trunk. In that fraction of a second before he turned back to the Oasan, he felt the full intensity of her embarrassment.

‘The book? You have the book?’ the Oasan repeated.

‘Uh . . . not on me right now,’ said Peter, chastising himself for leaving his Bible back at the base. ‘But yes, of course. Of course!’

The Oasan clapped his hands in a gesture of delight, or prayer, or both. ‘Comfort and joy. Glad day. Come back soon, Peter, oh very soon, sooner than you can. Read for us the Book of strange New Things, read and read and read until we understand. In reward we give you . . . give you . . . ’ The Oasan trembled with the effort of finding adequate words, then threw his hands wide, as if to indicate everything under the sun.

‘Yes,’ said Peter, laying a reassuring hand on the Oasan’s shoulder. ‘Soon.’

The Oasan’s brow – the heads of the foetuses, so to speak – swelled slightly. Peter decided that this, in these miraculous new people, was a smile.

Dear Peter, wrote Beatrice.

I love you and hope you are well but I must start this letter with some very bad news.

It was like running towards an open doorway in a state of high enthusiasm and colliding with a pane of glass. He had spent the entire journey back to the base almost levitating with excitement; it was a wonder he hadn’t floated straight through the roof of Grainger’s vehicle. Dear Bea . . . God be praised . . . We ask for a small break and God gives us a miracle . . . these were some of the ways he’d thought of beginning his message to Beatrice upon returning to his room. His fingers were poised to type at delirious speed, to shoot his delight through space, mistakes and all.

There has been a terrible tragedy in the Maldives. A tidal wave. It was the height of the tourist season. The place was teeming with visitors and it’s got a population of about a third of a million. Had. You know how when disasters happen, usually the media talks about how many people are estimated to have died? In this one, they’re talking about how many people may be LEFT ALIVE. It’s one vast swamp of bodies. You see it on the news footage but you can’t take it in. All those people with individual quirks and family secrets and special ways of wearing their hair, etc, reduced to what looks like a huge bog of meat that goes on for miles.

The Maldives has (HAD . . .) lots of islands, most of them at risk of flooding, so the government had been pushing for years to get the population to relocate to the biggest, best-fortified atoll. By coincidence, there was a TV documentary crew making a film about a few islanders on one of the smaller atolls who were protesting at being rehoused. The cameras were rolling when the tsunami hit. I’ve seen clips on my phone. You cannot believe what you are seeing. One second, an American anchorperson voice is saying something about papaya groves, and the next second, a zillion tons of seawater smashes across the screen. Rescue crews saved some of the Americans, a few tourists, a few of the locals. And the cameras, of course. That sounds cynical. I think they did what they could.

Our church is considering what we can do to help. Sending people over there isn’t an option. There’s nothing we can achieve. Most of the islands are wiped off, there is nothing left except humps in the ocean. Even the biggest islands are probably never going to recover. All the fresh water has been fouled. There is not one fully intact, usable building. There is nowhere safe to land, nowhere to set up a hospital, no way of burying the dead. Helicopters are buzzing around like seagulls over an oilspill full of dead fish. At this stage, all we can do is pray for the relatives of Maldivans everywhere. And maybe, in time, there’ll be refugees.

I’m sorry to start this way. You can imagine my head and heart are full of it. It doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking of you.

Peter leaned back in his chair, lifted his face to the ceiling. The electric light was still on, superfluous now that the sunshine was beaming in, almost too bright to bear. He shivered, feeling the dampness in his clothes turning chilly in the air conditioning. He felt grief for the people of the Maldives, but, to his shame, the grief was mingled with a purely selfish pang: the sense that he and Beatrice, for the first time since the beginning of their relationship, were not going through the same things together. In the past, whatever happened would happen to them both, like a power blackout or a late-night visit from a distressed friend or a rattling window-frame while they were trying to sleep. Or like sex.

I miss you, wrote Beatrice. This Maldives thing wouldn’t have upset me so much if you’d been here. Tell me more about your mission. Is it horrendously difficult? Remember that unexpected breakthroughs often come directly after everything has seemed impossible. The ones who insist they don’t want or need God are the ones who want and need Him most.

Joshua is still playing his tricks. I’m seriously considering slipping him a Mickey Finn in his evening milk. Or hitting him on the head with a mallet when he wakes me up yet again at 4 AM. Alternatively, maybe I should make a life-size dummy of you to lie next to me in the bed. That might fool him. Sadly, it wouldn’t fool me.

The Mirah situation is under control now. I got together with a Muslim social worker, Khadija, who liaises with the imam at Mirah’s local mosque. Basically we’re trying to sell it to the imam as a human decency issue (the husband’s violence/lack of respect) rather than a religion vs religion issue. It’s hardcore diplomacy, as you can imagine, like brokering a peace deal between Syria and the USA. But Khadija is brilliant.

I got a message from USIC saying you’re fine. How would they know? I suppose they mean they can verify you didn’t get vaporised. The message was sent by Alex Grainger. Have you met him? Tell him he can’t spell ‘liaise’. Or maybe there’s a simplified American way of spelling it now? Bitch, bitch, bitch. But I’ve been tolerant all day, honest! (Very difficult new patient on the ward. Supposedly transferred down from Psych for medical reasons but I think they were just desperate to get rid of her.) Anyway, I feel like being outrageously unfair to someone for just three minutes, to let it rip. I won’t, of course. I’ll be very nice, even to Joshua when he wakes me up AGAIN in the small hours.

Seriously, I’m missing you terribly. Wish I could spend just a few minutes in your arms. (OK, maybe an hour.) Weather is better, lovely sunshine today, but it’s not cheering me up. Went to the supermarket for some comfort food (chocolate mousse, tiramisu, you know the sort of thing). Turns out lots of other people had the same idea. Everything I wanted was out of stock, a blank space on the shelf. Settled for one of those rollette things with the fake cream inside.

Head full of Maldives tragedy, stomach full of dessert. What fortunate people we are in our Western playground . . . We watch the footage of foreign dead on video clips and then mosey out to the supermarket in search of our favourite treats. Of course when I say ‘we’, I can’t speak for you right now. You are far from all of this. Far from me.

Ignore this self-pitying prattle, I’ll be fine by tomorrow. Let me know how you’re going. I’m so proud of you.

Kisses, hugs (I wish!)

Beatrice

PS: Want a cat?

My dear Bea, he wrote back.

I hardly know what to say. How dreadful about the Maldives. The scale of such a tragedy is, as you say, almost impossible to imagine. I’ll pray for them.

Those sentences, short as they were, took him a long while to write. A full three to five minutes for each. He racked his brains for an additional sentence that would make a dignified transition from the disaster to his own glad tidings. Nothing came.

I have had my first meeting with an Oasan native, he went on, trusting that Bea would understand. Contrary to my wildest hopes they are hungry for Christ. They know of the Bible. I didn’t have mine with me at the time – that’ll teach me never to go anywhere without it! I don’t know why I left it behind. I suppose I assumed that the first visit would be basically reconnaissance, and that the response would be negative. But as Jesus says in John 4,’ Say not ye, There are yet four months before the harvest; behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes and look upon the fields, for they are ripe already!’

The settlement is not at all what I expected. There is no evidence of industrialisation, it could be the Middle East in the middle ages (with different architecture, of course). No electricity, apparently! It’s also in the middle of nowhere, a long, long way from the USIC base. I don’t think it will be feasible for me to live here and travel there on a regular basis. I will have to go and live with the Oasans. And as soon as possible. I haven’t discussed any of the practicalities. (Yes, yes, I know . . . I really need you with me. But God is well aware that I’m clueless in that area.) I’ll have to trust that everything will fall into place. There seems plenty of reason to hope that it will!

The Oasans – assuming the one I met was typical – are average height and look remarkably like us, except for their faces which are a gruesome sort of jumble, impossible to describe really, like foetuses. You don’t know what to look at when you’re talking to them. They speak English with a strong accent. Well, the one I met did. Maybe he’s the only one who speaks any English, and my original assumption – that I would spend several months learning the language before I made any headway – will still be borne out. But I have a feeling that God has been at work here already, more than I dared imagine.

Anyway, I’m going straight back there as soon as I can. I was going to say ‘tomorrow’, but with the periods of daylight being several ‘days’ long here, the word ‘tomorrow’ is a problem. I must find out what the USIC personnel do to get round that one. I’m sure they have a solution. I’ll ask Grainger during the drive, if I remember. My mind’s a bit over-excited, as you can imagine! I’m just raring to go back to that settlement, take my place amongst these extraordinary people and satisfy their thirst for the Gospel.

What a privilege to

He stopped typing, midway through ‘What a privilege to serve the Lord’. He had remembered the Maldives, or, more to the point, he’d become aware that he’d forgotten all about them in his enthusiasm. Bea’s uneasy, almost anxious mood – so unlike her! – was at odds with his exuberance, like a funeral dirge interrupted by the cheery hootings of a passing carnival. Re-reading the opening line of his letter, he could see that his acknowledgement of her distress was pretty cursory. In normal circumstances, he would have embraced her; the pressure of his arms against her back and the nudge of his cheek against her hair would have said it all. But now, the written word was all he had.

He considered elaborating on how he felt about the Maldives. But he didn’t feel much, at least not about the Maldives themselves. His feelings were largely regret – disappointment, even – that the tragedy had affected Beatrice so badly, just when he wanted her to be happy and all right and getting on with things as usual and receptive to his wonderful news about the Oasans.

His stomach gurgled loudly. He hadn’t eaten since the drive back from the settlement, when he and Grainger had nibbled at the dried-out remainder of the raisin bread. (‘Five bucks a slice,’ she’d remarked ruefully. He hadn’t asked who was footing the bill.) As if by mutual agreement, they had not discussed the Oasan’s extraordinary response to Peter. Instead, Grainger explained various routine procedures relating to laundry, electric appliances, availability of vehicles, canteen etiquette. She was irritable, insisting that she’d briefed him on these things before, when she first escorted him off the ship. The forgiveness joke didn’t work a third time.

Peter stood up and walked to the window. The sun – egg-yellow and hazy-edged at this time of day – was clearly visible from his quarters, right in the middle of the sky. It was four or five times bigger than the sun he’d grown up with, and it cast a rim of golden light along the contours of the airport compound’s drab buildings. Puddles of rainwater, left by last night’s deluge, had been evaporating steadily since then. The vapours twirled and danced as they flew off the ground and past the rooftops into oblivion, as if the puddles were blowing sophisticated smoke rings.

The air conditioning in his room was unnecessarily cool. He found that if he stepped closer to the window, almost pressing his body against it, the warmth from outside radiated through the glass and permeated his clothing. He would have to ask Grainger about adjusting the air-con; it was one of the points they hadn’t covered.

Back at the message screen, he finished typing serve the Lord and started a fresh paragraph.

Even in my joy at this wonderful opportunity that God has laid before me, I feel an ache of grief that I can’t hold you and comfort you. I only realised today that this is the first time you & I have been apart for longer than a couple of nights. Couldn’t I have gone on a mini-mission to Manchester or Cardiff first, as a practice exercise, before coming all the way here?

I think you would find Oasis as beautiful as I do. The sun is huge and yellow. The air swirls around constantly and slips in and out of your clothes. That may sound unpleasant, I know, but you get used to it. The water is green and my urine comes out orange. I’m doing a great job of selling the place to you, aren’t I? I should have taken a course in novel-writing before I volunteered for this. I should have insisted to USIC that we went together or I didn’t go at all.

Maybe, if we’d bent their arm on that one, we could then have insisted that Joshua came along too. Not sure how he would have fared in the Jump, though. Probably would have been transformed into a furry tea cosy.

Feeble cat jokes. My equivalent of your chocolate rollettes, I suppose.

Darling, I love you. Keep well. Take the wise advice that you’ve given me so often: don’t be hard on yourself, and don’t let the bad blind you to the good. I’ll join you in prayer for the relatives of the dead in the Maldives. Join me in prayer for the people here, who are thrilled at the prospect of a new life in Christ. Oh, and also: there is a girl in Oskaloosa called Coretta whose father has recently died and whose mother has hit the booze. Pray for her too, if you remember.

Love,

Peter

He read the text of his message over, but didn’t tinker with it any further, feeling suddenly faint with hunger and fatigue. He pressed a button. For several minutes, his 793 inadequate words hung there, trembling slightly, as if unsure what to do. That was normal for the Shoot, he’d found. The process kept you in suspense each time, tempting you to fear that it would fail. Then his words vanished and the screen went blank, except for the automated logo that said: APPROVED, TRANSMITTED.