Marshlands (9 page)

A common hut would suffice, but the marshmen refuse me even that. It's not considered proper for a potentate to sleep in a common hut. So instead of a light and airy haven, I'm welcomed by the bottled heat of my tent, redolent of bug spray and kerosene. The girl has laid out a rug for me and sits by it, her shapely legs tucked obediently to the side, a sweating clay pitcher of water in hand.

It is for me to speak first.
The hunt was good
, I say.

She welcomes me and readies my plate. When I tell her I'm too hot to eat, she clucks her tongue. It's the reaction of a much older woman, something she has seen her mother do, perhaps. She watches me very closely to make sure she hasn't overstepped. She's exceedingly lovely, but I find her youth off-putting. At times, I feel I'm playing house with a child.

She wouldn't be here at all if I hadn't intervened with some soldiers who were molesting her by the main gate. That night, I took her under my protection. We've been trying to agree on proper compensation ever since. Officially, she's my servant, but everyone assumes we're lovers. Such arrangements are the norm here. I don't bother trying to quell the rumors. Truth be told, her beauty has enhanced my reputation in the surgery.

She has asked me to call her “Betty,” a name plucked from some fashion magazine. I would prefer simply calling her my tent girl, but she insists on the foreign name.
Tent girl
seems more honest to me. I wouldn't presume to call her by her marsh name, although surely an outsider would think that was more sensitive. Come to think of it, I don't even know her marsh name. I could find out easily enough, but that would feel like a kind of invasion. Imagine, being squeamish about such a petty invasion, after forcing open an entire country!

Betty pours me a cup of water and sits silently while I drink. She's bursting with news, but it isn't the custom here to speak of news before a traveler has watered and fed.

The water is flat and metallic—“military grade”—meaning it has been boiled in one of the old brick ovens by the mess. I prefer the water the marshmen drink, despite its deplorable sanitation. It has never made me ill, at least not seriously, and I've always enjoyed the idea of drinking from the ancient river.

Betty used to be perfectly happy drinking river water, but now she'll only drink military grade. She's proud of this new affectation. I suppose she makes trouble when she visits her home village, demanding that her water be boiled. And they probably boil it for her. Being my tent girl has raised her status to the heavens.

She serves the meal, brushing me with her ample breasts as often as possible. It doesn't matter that I've said I'm not hungry. That's the way it is with her people. A marshman is always hungry, no matter how he might try to deny it.

Her arms move slowly, as if she has a secret aversion to the food she's serving. It isn't her turn to eat, but that's of no concern; neither will she eat later. She's very proud of her figure, and equally critical of the tent girls who let themselves go once they've created a stable position in camp.

Betty's cooking is lazy. It doesn't take much effort to boil a pot of rice and break a roasted chicken on top of it. I happen to know that she pays another woman to roast her chickens, but I don't mention it. She's easily embarrassed. Ours is not an intimacy that allows for much teasing.

I eat as much as I can, then announce that I'm tired and would like to sleep. In this kind of heat, I'd much prefer sleeping in the rough under some mosquito netting. But it wouldn't do for the administrator to be mistaken for a marshman in the camp. As comfortable as we've grown with each other, certain distinctions must be maintained.

Not long after I've stretched out on my pallet, Betty begins her predictable assault. Perhaps outside, in the stirring breeze, far from my gloomy thoughts about the rice farmer, I might be vulnerable to a gentle caress. But not here, in this oven of a tent. I tell her I'm too tired, which is true. I tell her the food is heavy in my belly.

She's put out. Her inability to arouse me is a blow to her prestige. Not that she cares for personal reasons. I know I'm unappealing to her. I've overheard her saying as much to her friends. I'm fat. I'm not jolly. I'm stingy with her allowance. She uses obscure marsh idioms to express all these things. Even if I don't understand the precise reference, I get the gist.

She takes my labored, heat-seared breathing as a sign of encouragement and redoubles her efforts. Her stroking is mechanical, as if she's milking a buffalo. That's what I am to her: a beast in need of tiresome milking. I feel the intensity of her gaze upon my cheek. If I were to become dissatisfied with her, the entire economy she has built around my patronage would crumble. She views the easy camaraderie I share with my canoe boys as a mortal threat.

I roll onto my stomach, which causes her at last to leave me in peace. She withdraws to her straw tick with a series of petulant sighs. Soon I hear her steady breathing. Betty falls asleep quickly and completely, like a true child of the marshes. I envy her this deep forgetful slumber, which seems to cover her in an imperturbable layer of silt.

She offers herself again the next morning. She perches on the edge of my pallet, opens her sleeping shift, and clasps her hands behind her head. I told her once that I thought she looked quite fetching lying that way, and now she uses the pose as a way of pressing her case:
This is what you like
, her sleepy eyes insist.

But I'm prepared for this. I rise and wash, and, while I'm up, fetch a gift from my knapsack, an ancient ceramic seal shaped like a cylinder, about the size of her forefinger.

This is for you
, I say. I explain that it's probably three thousand years old. I point out the high-prowed canoe that has been incised in the clay. It looks just like mine, which was built only a decade ago. My voice catches as I tell her this. The way the marshman's culture has resisted the ravages of time moves me deeply.

She studies my offering with barely concealed disappointment.
Is it valuable?
she asks. Now it's my turn to shrug. I tell her I thought of her when I saw it.
You're very kind
, she says.

She fills me in on the camp gossip. One of my surgeons has impregnated his girlfriend, a thickset creature with enormous breasts and thighs, like the crude fertility figurines they sell as souvenirs in the port city. This is happy news for him. His wife back home is infertile. Now he'll have a child.

I ask Betty her opinion of the news. Does she imagine the surgeon will invite his tent girl to return home with him? Would the surgeon's wife accept such an arrangement? Is removing a child to a distant country as simple as transplanting an exotic tree?

But Betty has already moved on to the next subject.
That rice farmer you found was the son of a camp laundress
, she says.
Perhaps you've seen her in one of the lean-tos by the river
.

The speed at which news travels in the marshes has always amazed me. Early on, our forces spent considerable time and effort trying to disrupt the “reed telegraph,” a vast informal web of communications that the insurgency used to great tactical advantage. The war planners soon realized it was hopeless; one might just as well try to silence the songbirds and crickets.

As for Betty's laundress, I have noticed washerwomen by the river, but never individually. The constant wet slap of laundry against boulders is a sound I accepted years ago and no longer even hear.

This laundress is trouble
, she says.
She was born under an unlucky star
.

An unlucky star?
I say.
Now you're a soothsayer?

Betty leans over and rubs my upper lip with her thumb.
She has a cleft
, she says, drawing a V with her nail.

And girls with clefts are considered unclean
. I use a very ugly word for “unclean,” one usually reserved for whores.

Exactly
, she says.

Now she has lost her son
, I say.
Is that what she deserved, this laundress, for being born with a simple defect?

We're both surprised by my vehemence.
No one deserves that
, Betty says, but it's clear she's unmoved by the laundress's loss.
You know
, she says,
in olden times, a cleft woman had it a lot worse. The whole tribe would heap its sins on her, and then, when they couldn't stand the sight of her any longer, they'd declare a feast day and stone her to death
.

And what do you make of this ritual?
I ask, as neutrally as I can. Sometimes I tire even myself with this teaching impulse.

It hasn't happened for a long time
, she says, yawning.
At least, not around here. I thought they still did it out in the bush, in places like the laundress's village, but I guess not.

Betty can't wait for me to leave so she can take her morning nap. She stretches voluptuously, taunting me with flashes of pale private skin. She's fully aware of her powers. She thinks I'm a fool for pretending not to notice them.

*   *   *

A new general has taken command down at the palace, a modern ziggurat overlooking the river thirty kilometers south of us. They say he's “old school,” this general; in other words, a stickler for rules. Before Chigger and I left for the hunt, I ordered the camp to be readied for a surprise inspection.

And now, the first morning back, I inspect it myself, asserting whatever authority is left in me. Usually, I walk at the head of a parade of noisy children, some of them in rags, but mostly naked, aping my stride and begging for spent cartridges, which the marshmen reload or, if the casing is too thin, hammer into jewelry. But today, children are banished from the dirt avenues, which have been smoothed and wet down for the occasion. The surface feels like the hard sand at the edge of an ocean, into which a foot can sink, but just slightly.

My tour starts with the soldiers' ward. There are only a few patients today: a wrist lacerated by a piece of reinforcing bar; a twisted ankle; and our current celebrity, an actual gunshot wound to the shoulder, the first such wound our sleepy hospital has seen since the first days of the occupation.

The patient is a big, jovial fellow, a former traveling salesman. He's a victim not of the insurgency, which can no longer be said to exist, but of his own corpsman, who drank himself unconscious, and then, woken by some fumbling in the dark, mistook friend for foe.

Despite our endless entreaties, the orderlies have thrown open the windows and filled the ward with flies. They've brought in a local boy and promised him a bounty for each dead fly. The orderlies are very proud of their system of pest control. They say it's to help the boy earn a bit of spending money, but I happen to know that the mother is one of the new dancing girls, fresh from the interior. No doubt she has promised her favors to the man who can bring her son closer to opportunities in camp.

He's a nice-looking boy, honey-skinned, long in the limb, respectful of the peace that hangs heavily over the empty beds. He has woven a flyswatter from some rattan skins. To make it look store-bought, like the tool of a professional fly hunter, he has lined the edges with black electrical tape.

His bare feet patter pleasantly on the concrete floor. He holds the swatter at attention, resting it on his shoulder like a little rifleman. His mother must have coached him to make a good impression on the administrator.

When I ask his name, and he answers, “Paul,” the orderlies explode with laughter. The foreign name sounds pretentious to them.

I tell him that Paul is a fine name and thank him for helping to keep the ward sanitary.

He gives me a salute, then shows me his catch: a few dead flies at the bottom of a huge plastic jar, a cast-off from the mess. Perhaps it's the only vessel he could find, but I'd rather think of its size as a reflection of his eagerness, of a boundless desire to please.

After the soldiers' ward, I look in on the makeshift clinic where we treat marshmen, a mess tent that was pressed into temporary service years ago, but which has become a more or less permanent fixture. Treating the civilian population is strictly forbidden, with one exception: injuries related to combat. Of course, the case could be made that virtually all of the health problems we see fall into that category. Open hostilities may have ended long ago, but poverty and disease—stepchildren of the war—are endemic, and no less deadly than bullets or shrapnel.

It's an argument I've rehearsed over the years, but the truth is that no one really cares what we do up here on the northern border. Months go by when it seems we're all but forgotten.

Today, the clinic is quiet. A few elderly patients being treated for cirrhosis doze under sweating IV bags. Even the orderlies, usually a spirited and mischievous lot, have given in to torpor. The overhead fan has once again seized up. Everything is still, except for Paul, who creeps like a lizard behind the empty cots, hunting for flies.

The living quarters are my next stop. The officers have taken my orders seriously. Their tents have all been properly squared and swept. But then, they've always hired local women to do this work.

The soldiers' barracks, on the other hand, are as squalid as ever. It's nearly noon, and half the garrison is still lying abed. One of them eyes me insolently from behind a girlie magazine.

These bored, overmuscled lads have never listened to me. I can't really blame them; nevertheless, I launch into a speech about the new general. Just as I'm asking for their cooperation, one of the men interrupts me to announce that the laundry has arrived.

And, indeed, a monstrous basket of folded clothes floats through the doorway. Once inside, the basket begins its descent. It's an amazing balancing act: the laundress lowers a knee to the ground, then uses the prodigious power of her neck and shoulder to tilt the basket, very slowly, to the precise angle that allows her to slide it to her trembling thigh.