The Devil's Garden Read online

  I stood and asked: ‘Do you know how long your work here will go on?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you’re getting in the way.’

  Dusk had stolen upon us.

  ‘What’s the Colonel really doing here?’ I pressed. ‘Why are there so many patrols?’

  ‘Doing – that’s the word.’ The Judge rolled his rug under his arm. ‘The Colonel is keeping order and fashioning the future. And what could be more admirable than that? Ah, here she is.’

  A military boat came into view. We watched it gliding in.

  ‘His men are his responsibility,’ I continued. ‘And they were behaving like animals the other night.’

  ‘You should meet Rafaela,’ he said.

  I hesitated. A woman in a red floral dress was sat between two khaki soldiers. One of the men stood to reach for the jetty below.

  ‘You will like her, Doctor. There are those women who understand men and there are those who do not; and there is no way of accounting for this, nor explaining one to the other. A drink later on?’

  ‘Not this evening. I want to work.’

  ‘Ah, yes: your work.’

  Again, I hesitated. ‘But will your wife be staying with us a while?’

  Amusement danced in his eyes. ‘Rafaela is not my wife.’

  Dark-haired, she appeared at the top of the ladder and stepped towards him with all the assurance of a milonga queen. She smiled but said nothing.

  ‘Rafaela, this is Dr Forle. He tells everyone that he is a scientist.’

  II

  The following day, Felipe and I arrived back from the field earlier than had become usual. We emerged from the river path and approached the comedor with by now routine circumspection, braced for the Colonel or the Judge, uncertain as to whether we would wish to stay for dinner. We were both surprised to see everyone gathered: Kim behind the bar, Lothar in one of the lounge chairs, smoke curling from beneath his hat, Sole fixing the wire mesh in the little doors of the kitchen hatch that kept the squirrel monkeys out. Though the mood was subdued and had nothing of its old ease, I was pleased to feel some sense of our communality at least. Estrela and Jorge were working together at the dining table again, soaking two mighty birds in steaming hot water, a blue tarpaulin spread out to protect the wood from the feathers and innards.

  I stood on the steps. ‘Where are our new friends?’ I asked, addressing nobody in particular.

  To my surprise, Tord appeared from where he must have been lurking at the back beyond the bar with Kim. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘the Judge is at Tupki’s place. He has set up for the afternoon, I think.’

  ‘Hello, Tord.’ I had no previous love of the missionary but our new circumstances had polarized my view of people and, as our only visitor prior to the arrivals, I saw him now as one of us. ‘You mean he is registering people there?’

  ‘Apparently, yes.’ Tord had a way of loosely binding his fingers before him, even when he was walking, as if on the cusp of prayer. ‘Not that many people are going, though.’

  ‘And the Colonel?’

  ‘Now that, I am afraid, I do not know. Good to see you, Dr Forle,’ he said.

  Tord’s smile was brief and wan and never the consequence of humour – though his eyes were quick and green and intelligent. His hair, which was the colour of pale straw, was always exactly the same length all over – serviceable, sensible – with his fringe a feathery and irritating half-centimetre above his brow. He suffered from mild eczema and his skin was pitted and reddened here and there with the vestiges of acne. There was something disconcerting in his overall bearing, I always thought, a disjunction between the resilience that his life required and the wispiness of his appearance. I had never seen him undo more than a single button of his shirt.

  ‘We’ve been missing you and the Lord, Tord,’ I said. ‘There’s been a lot of excitement and sin around here these last couple of weeks.’

  ‘So I understand.’ He placed a second pastoral palm over his handshake.

  I addressed Lothar by way of antidote. ‘When do we expect them back?’

  Lothar shrugged. ‘I have not heard anything. I came straight back here. There was nobody in the bathing huts when I went to scourge myself half an hour ago.’

  ‘Jorge?’

  Jorge did not look up to answer me but worked his hand at the smoothness of his bald head as though trying to rub out his birthmark: ‘They went out this morning about an hour after you. First the Judge – with a couple of them. And then the Colonel with the rest.’

  I wanted to force Jorge to engage with me. ‘But they didn’t mention where they were going?’

  ‘No.’ He wiped at his sweating neck. ‘I made breakfast for them.’

  There was a whisper of a challenge in this. We were provided with food and a cook. But I paid personally for extra provisions to make our diet less monotonous. Kim and Lothar contributed, too. There was now a question, therefore, as to what food Jorge could cook for whom.

  ‘Did they say if they were coming back?’

  ‘No.’ Jorge continued to pluck at his bird.

  ‘Well, did anyone think to look at the guest huts to see if they have left anything?’

  Kim came out from behind the bar, carrying the board of fruit she had been preparing. ‘Their personal things are still there. If you can call porn magazines personal. So I’m guessing they will be back at some point. Who wants cherimoya?’

  ‘Yes, please.’ Felipe’s voice was determinedly cheerful.

  ‘Actually . . .’ Tord enjoyed this word as no other for it signalled that he was in the business of correction. ‘Actually, the villages all think that the Judge will be staying here for a while longer.’

  Lothar leant forward to fold out his cigarette. ‘If the tribes think he can overrule their own laws, then pretty soon the entire state will be bringing him their lives to deal with. Land disputes. Boat crashes. Divorces. Children. It is going to get very Italian down there. The Judge will be bribing them to vote. They will be bribing him to judge.’

  ‘Justice.’ Kim twisted her free hand in front of her face the better to lick between her fingers.

  I smiled. Then, because my hands were still in the straps of my pack, she held out a piece of her favourite fruit on the end of a fork. The gesture was obscurely intimate. The fruit tasted of strawberries and custard.

  I caught Estrela’s eye. She was pulling the intestine from the bird, wielding her favourite carcass knife – a blade so ferociously sharp that when she took their heads, her poultry could have known nothing about it until they looked up from the earth and saw their own bodies still gripped in her thick fist above them.

  ‘When do we get to eat those?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re for the soldiers,’ Jorge said. ‘When they come back.’

  III

  A hundred shades of khaki were darkening along the walls of the forest by the time Felipe and I reached the lab. At the door, I put down my pack carefully, conscious of the test-tubes I was carrying. I took out my flashlight. I was annoyed to be bothering with our flimsy padlock. Unlike the huts, the lab, which was built years later, had no key. Quinn was nothing if not an idealist.

  I left Felipe to unpack and walked through the plastic screen into the ‘dry room’, the area that Lothar and Quinn had painstakingly dry-sealed to hold its twice-daily air conditioning and the place where we stored our meagre computer equipment, our papers, our vials, our refrigerator unit and our microscopes – anything that the inexhaustible mould would thrive upon.

  I turned on the monitor. Felipe pushed his head through the plastic to say that he was leaving. I thanked him for all his help and turned back to the screen. But he lingered a moment.

  ‘Shall I fill up the water bucket?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, if it’s empty.’

  It was a strange question. We kept a wooden pail of water for moisturizing our formicarium and squirting drops into the bottom of the test-tubes which contained various specimens we had collec
ted in the field. Keeping this pail full was about the least important task in the entire laboratory. I turned but did not help him out of his discomfort.

  ‘While the Judge is here . . .’ He hesitated. ‘Could you ask Mr Rebaque – if he replies – to confirm that I’m still supposed to work alongside you, Dr Forle? Or should I be guiding our other guests as well?’

  ‘He hasn’t replied to any of the emails I have sent, Felipe. Anyway, you should ask him yourself.’

  I worked quickly and efficiently. I connected my camera and transferred the latest batch of pictures. I entered my data and my notes.

  Our usual routine was to return to the Station in good time to do the lab work, write everything up and prepare for the next day long before nightfall. We had power for two hours every evening, but we preferred not to consume the oil for the generators with unnecessary lighting. Each evening, we recharged the computer’s battery. Then, when the power went off, we ran it down halfway again. This way we could use it for four hours rather than two.

  We took turns in staying late to send email or do any personal work or correspondence and that night was mine. So I set about trying to read and then rewrite a draft of one of the early sections of my book, struggling to make simple the complexity and implications of the ant’s reproductive system. But even my notes would not hold to their purpose. Pages wandered and my tone and observations became tangled. The advances I had been making prior to the arrival seemed to have halted; it was as if the jungle had started colonizing the clearing of my own mind, confusing me, distracting me, planting a hundred rogue seeds in what should have been the clean-kempt prose of scientific method.

  Did I feel myself slipping into the old lassitude? Certainly, this lack of progress frustrated me. After all, this was supposed to be my side of the partnership with Quinn. He did most of the practical work. I wrote up our findings and kept our studies in the front pages of the influential science journals. And the harsh truth was that I had never relished the field. I was a talented collator – collegiate, collaborative – the communicator. But I was not really a scientist of any originality save on paper – and even then, it was seven years since I had written anything of depth or value. Anything new.

  Quinn, though . . . Quinn was forever fearless and unbound – in his imagination, in his work and in his relations with his fellow human beings. He carried with him some great affirmation towards life. Ideas just poured out of him as though from a never-empty bottle; you pulled the cork and there they came – dancing and chattering and laughing and frothing; silly, mad, serious, insightful, profound, primitive, emotional, glorious, foolish, generous ideas; about man and God, science and myths, creation and extinction, and always – always – his own ideas.

  I know that I’m painting a flattering picture of my friend. And I do myself down the more to do him up. (It is true: Quinn could not write or structure his thinking.) And yet the larger part of the portrait is accurate. I have come to believe that the greatest divide in humanity is neither age nor race nor gender but between those few who possess self-belief and the rest who must thrash about in uncertainty or communal delusion.

  Most of all, I was conscious that Quinn would have dealt with the Judge and the Colonel differently and that he would not suddenly be finding our work . . . inconsequential, minor. Perhaps I was annoyed with Felipe, too. I disliked the way he sought to hide behind me – or, rather, to confer jurisdiction on me when I had none. Nonetheless, having given up on my book, I wrote another email to Rebaque – my third without a reply – and another to the head of administration in my department. Our satellite connection was slow, fragile and intermittent – we had long ago abandoned trying to send our photographs and heavy data files – and, after the third attempt, I rose and went through the plastic rather than sit waiting for the confirmation that they had gone through.

  I stooped to look into one of the thin sealed glass tanks in which we kept a colony of my favourite ants: Daceton armigerum, a strange-looking species – voracious, omnivorous, powerful – and yet with these sad and oddly beautiful heart-shaped heads.

  ‘Hello, Dr Forle. I am sorry to disturb you.’

  Tord appeared unctuously around the door.

  ‘I’ve finished for the day,’ I said.

  He had the trick of watching me closely and yet when I sought his eye he was looking away.

  ‘How is the project going?’ he asked.

  ‘Well. We are on the right path – but, of course, proof takes time.’

  He nodded slowly. He affected to take an interest. But he addressed us like we were all well-meaning children – vague and deluded and a long way from what was important, but good-hearted all the same and not necessarily exiled from hope for all eternity. Perhaps he was merely reflecting our opinion of him back at us.

  ‘Who told you the Judge was at Tupki’s?’ I asked.

  ‘I gave one of the villagers a lift on my boat. Everyone is talking about it.’ He said this to emphasize that he alone could speak the Indian languages well enough to know what they were discussing among themselves.

  ‘What do you think is going on, Tord?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. Nor can I be sure whether it is for good or for evil.’

  ‘That must be awkward for you.’

  ‘I’m not saying that I cannot be guided by the Light once I have learned the true nature of events. Just that I have yet to learn that nature.’ He closed his eyes a moment as if to make inward enquiry of whichever Evangelist might recently have begun to whisper within his breast. ‘Kim says that the Judge is rude, that the Colonel barely talks and that the soldiers are disgusting.’

  ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged, Tord.’

  ‘Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more then the things of this life?’

  I admired his quickness. ‘Maybe you should ask one of them to deliver the homily at the next get-together of your mission, Tord, how about the Sermon on the Mount? Blessed are the pure in heart.’

  He joined his hands. ‘You seem even more subversive than usual tonight, if I might say so, Dr Forle.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Maybe it’s just that I never really understood the Sermon on the Mount.’

  ‘If I thought that there was anything other than your usual mischief behind that statement I would offer to sit down and have a right and proper conversation with you about it.’

  ‘Sorry, Tord. Not tonight. I have to check my emails have gone through.’ I crossed back to the dry room. I was, I realized, obscurely pleased by Tord’s visit. The screen told me they had been sent. I sat down and logged out.

  Tord had followed me. ‘It must be very disruptive,’ he said, gentle almost.

  I looked up. ‘Kim is right – about the Judge and the Colonel. And yes – I’m anxious about the work and I don’t like the idea of the Station turning into some sort of cod-military base while we are here. But there’s nothing we can do and there’s no reason why it should affect us.’ I was suddenly desperate for soap and our lukewarm water. I sat waiting a moment but still his eyes were fixed above my head. ‘What can I do for you, Tord? I’m guessing you didn’t come here to hear all about my progress on the questions of multi-level evolutionary selection?’

  ‘Oh, I wondered if you would mind if I borrowed the computer again. Just for fifteen minutes or so.’

  ‘Be my guest.’ I stood and gestured toward the chair. ‘Shut it down when you have finished.’

  ‘Thank you kindly.’

  I stepped through the plastic but could not resist adding over my shoulder: ‘Keep it clean, though, Tord, keep it clean.’

  I realized that I had covertly been looking forward to my single malt all day. I did not stint. I collected fresh clothes. I regretted not putting a password on the new sections of my book since they included some more diary-like side observations about the Station and how the others were getting on – nothing that I needed to hide but still Tord was inquisitive to the point of deviousness and he intuited things astonishi
ngly well. Many of the missionaries did. Their work required a great deal of non-verbal perception. They spread their lethal cult-lore (and their lethal viruses) among the tribes with patience and great perspicacity. Our region, because of its remoteness, was host to the best of them. And Tord’s sect was among the most steadfast and sophisticated. They operated under the burnished fig leaves of health, education and an improvement in living standards. They founded schools and hospitals. Most of all, they studied the languages. They affected that the linguistic emphasis was coincidental or academic, but the simple truth was that they sought keenly to translate the Bible. Indeed, this was why Tord was great amongst them – he was already at work on rendering the Gospels into the hitherto unbreached language of the Yora. In the tribe of the missionaries, these were the feathers of highest distinction

  I stepped out of my hut into the trill of the forest night. Why was I so pleased to see him? The answer further dismayed me: it was because I was hoping for moral support in the event of any further brutality. I was hoping that Tord’s indignation – partaking, as it must, in the wider indignation of the Son of God – would be righteous and forceful and that I would be able to ally myself with him and splint up my own conviction. For one thing I was sure of: if Tord was here, he would not let evil pass. And though I knew that his convictions were based on enduring falsehoods, I was – it seemed – profoundly grateful for the cover those same falsehoods provided for me.

  IV

  I was awoken by the violence of her kick. I said her name but she was deaf to me. Her anger had dissipated but we had not been the same together since the night of the fire.

  There were unfamiliar noises coming from the direction of the comedor – the intermittent sound of men and alcohol, cries, raucousness, the repetitive grunt of music just audible beneath. The soldiers must have returned. Where had they been so late? I had slept for no more than two hours – less. With all my being, I longed for the Station to be returned to us.

  Something was rustling in the dry leaves below the hut. We were drowning in the lack of rain and it was impossible to breathe. Sole shuddered; dreams were passing through her, whispering their solicitudes one to the next. I sat up. The darkness was close in the room, but here and there a faint pearl light pooled. The moon must have risen above the forest. She stirred. I was still. I waited. Her murmuring became words I neither understood nor recognized. A frown passed across her brow. Then she curled deeper into her sleep. I thumbed her hair from her face; it was unwaveringly straight and so black that in the sunlight it seemed almost blue. Aside from a year in the capital, she had lived mostly in the physical world of the river and the trees and her body was dense with such a life; sure, strong and well-proportioned. Sometimes, when everyone else was asleep, we went to the bathing huts to wash one another by the dim light of a hanging lamp and I found that my fingers rose and fell across the muscled contour of her shoulders and that her calves were full to my palm. She slept without a pillow.