This was the precursor to the celebrations of the dawning fourth millennium.
Many other divisions were already in place, preparing to attack. We would be moving to reinforce them shortly.
Two nights later, sure enough, we were put once more into trucks and transported to the south, towards the freezing southern uplands. We took up position, dug ourselves as deep as possible into the permafrost, concealed and ranged our grenade launchers. By now uncaring of what happened to me, made wretched by the physical circumstances and rootless by the lack of mental cohesion, I waited with the others in a mixture of fear and boredom. As I froze, I dreamed of hot islands.
On clear days we could glimpse the peaks of the ice mountains close to the horizon, but there was no sign of enemy activity.
Twenty days after we had taken up our positions in the frozen tundra we were ordered to retreat once more. It was now less than ten days to the millennium.
We moved away, rushing to reinforce major skirmishes then said to be taking place by the coast. Reports of dead and wounded were horrifying but all was quiet by the time we arrived. We took up defensive lines along the cliffs. It was so familiar, this senseless repositioning, manoeuvring. I turned my back against the sea, not wanting to look northwards to where the unattainable islands lay.
Only eight days remained until the dreaded anniversary of the war’s beginning and already we were taking delivery of more supplies of armour, ammunition and grenades than I had ever seen before. The tension in our ranks was insupportable. I was convinced that this time our generals were not bluffing, that real action was only days, perhaps hours, away.
I sensed the closeness of the sea. If I was to discharge myself, the moment had arrived.
That night I left my tent and skidded down the loose shale and gravel of the sloping cliff to the beach. My back pocket was stuffed with all the unspent army pay I had accumulated. In the ranks we always joked that the paper was worthless, but now I thought it might at last be useful.
I walked until dawn, hid all day in the tough undergrowth that spread across the high ground behind the littoral, resting when I could. My unsleeping mind recited island names.
During the following night I managed to find a track worn by the tyres of trucks. I guessed it was used by the army so I followed it with immense care, taking cover at the first sign of any approaching traffic. I continued to travel by night, sleeping as I could by day.
I was in poor physical condition by the time I reached one of the military ports. Although I had been able to find water I had eaten nothing solid for four days. I was in every way exhausted and ready to turn myself in.
Close to the harbour, in a narrow, unlit street, not at the first attempt but after several hours of risky searching, I found the building I was seeking. I reached the brothel not long before dawn, when business was slow and most of the whores were sleeping. They took me in, they immediately understood the gravity of my situation. They relieved me of all my army money.
I remained hidden in the whorehouse for three days, regaining my strength. They gave me civilian clothes to wear – rather raffish, I thought, but I had no experience of the civilian world. I did not wonder how the women had come by them, or who else’s clothes they might once have been. In the long hours I was alone in my tiny borrowed room I would repeatedly try on my new clothes and hold a mirror at arm’s length, admiring what I could see of myself in the limited compass of the glass. To be rid of the army fatigues at last, the thick, coarse fabric, the heavy webbing and the cumbersome patches of body armour, was like freedom in itself.
Whores visited me nightly, taking turns.
Early in the fourth night, the war’s millennial night, four of the whores, together with their male minder, took me down to the harbour. They rowed me a distance out to sea, where a motor launch was waiting in the darkly heaving waters beyond the headland. There were no lights on the boat, but in the glow from the town I could see that there were already several other men aboard the launch. They too were rakishly dressed, with frilled shirts, slouching hats, golden bracelets, velveteen jackets. They rested their elbows on the rail and stared down towards the water with waiting eyes. None of them looked at me, or at each other. There were no greetings, no recognitions. Money changed hands, from the whores in my boat to two agile young men in dark clothes in the other. I was allowed to board.
I squeezed into a position on the deck between other men, grateful for the warmth of the pressure against me. The rowing boat slipped away into the dark. I stared after it, regretting I could not remain with those young harlots. I was reminiscing already about their lithe, overworked bodies, their delicious mouths and slithering tongues, their careless, eager skills.
The launch waited in its silent position for the rest of the night, the crew taking on board more men at intervals, making them find somewhere to squeeze themselves, handling the money. We remained silent, staring at the deck, waiting to leave. I dozed for a while, but every time more people came aboard we had to shift around to make room.
They lifted the anchor before dawn and turned the boat out to sea. We were heavily loaded and running low in the water. Once we were away from the shelter of the headland we made heavy weather in the running swell, the bow of the launch crashing cumbersomely into the walls of the waves, taking on water with every lurching recovery. I was soon soaked through, hungry, frightened, exhausted, and desperate to reach solid land.
We headed north, shaking the salt water from our eyes. The litany of island names ran on ceaselessly in my mind, urging me to return.
I escaped from the launch at the earliest opportunity, which was when we reached the first inhabited island. No one seemed to know which one it was. I went ashore in my rakish clothes, feeling shabby and dishevelled in spite of their stylish fit. The constant soakings in the boat had bleached most of the colour from the material, had stretched and shrunk the different kinds of fabric. I had no money, no name, no past, no future.
‘What is this island called?’ I said to the first person I met, an elderly woman sweeping up refuse on the quayside. She looked at me as if I was mad.
‘Steffer,’ she said.
I had never heard of it.
‘Say the name again,’ I said.
‘Steffer, Steffer. You a discharger?’ I said nothing, so she grinned as if I had confirmed the information. ‘Steffer!’
‘Is that what you think I am, or is that the name of this island?’
‘Steffer!’ she said again, turning away from me.
I muttered thanks and stumbled away from her, into the town. I still had no idea where I was.
I slept rough for a while, stealing food, begging for money, then met a whore who told me there was a hostel for the homeless which helped people to find jobs. Within a day I too was sweeping up refuse in the streets. It turned out that the island was called Keeilen, a place where many steffers made their first landfall.
Winter came – I had not realized it was the autumn when I discharged myself. I managed to work my passage as a deckhand on a cargo ship sailing with supplies to the southern continent, but which, I heard, would be calling at some more northerly islands on the way. The information was true. I arrived on Fellenstel, a large island with a range of mountains that sheltered the inhabited northern side from the prevailing southern gales. I passed the winter in the mild airs of Fellenstel. I moved north again when spring came, stopping for different periods of time on Manlayl, Meequa, Emmeret, Sentier – none of these was in my litany, but I intoned them just the same.
Gradually, my life was improving. Rather than sleep rough wherever I went I was usually able to rent a room for as long as I intended to stay on each island. I had learned that the whorehouses on the islands were a chain of contacts for dischargers, a place of resort, of help. I discovered how to find temporary jobs, how to live as cheaply as possible. I was learning the island patois, quickly adjusting my knowledge as I came across the different argots that were used from one island to
the next.
No one would speak to me about the war except in the vaguest ways. I was often spotted as a steffer as soon as I landed somewhere, but the further north I moved and the warmer the weather became, the less this appeared to matter.
I was moving through the Dream Archipelago, dreaming of it as I went, imagining what island might come next, thinking it into an existence that held good so long as I required it.
By this time I had operated the islands’ black market to obtain a map, which I had realized was perhaps the most difficult kind of printed material to get hold of anywhere. My map was incomplete, many years old, faded and torn and the place and island names were written in a script I did not at first understand, but it was for all that a map of the part of the Archipelago where I was travelling.
On the edge of the map, close to a torn area, there was a small island whose name I was finally able to decipher. It was Mesterline, one of the islands my unreliable memory told me we had passed on the southward journey.
Salay, Temmil, Mesterline, Prachous … it was part of the litany, part of the route that would lead me back to Muriseay.
It took me another year of erratic travels to reach Mesterline. As soon as I landed I fell in love with the place: it was a warm island of low hills, broad valleys, wide meandering rivers and yellow beaches. Flowers grew everywhere in a riot of effulgent colours. The buildings were constructed of white-painted brick and terracotta tiles and they clustered on hilltops or against the steep sides of the cliffs above the sea. It was a rainy island: midway through most afternoons a brisk storm would sweep in from the west, drenching the countryside and the towns, running noisy rivulets through the streets. The Mester people loved these intense showers and would stand out in the streets or the public squares, their faces upturned and their arms raised, the rain coursing sensually through their long hair and drenching their flimsy clothes. Afterwards, as the hot sun returned and the ruts in the muddy streets hardened again, normal life would resume. Everyone was happier after the day’s shower and began to get ready for the languid evenings that they passed in the open-air bars and restaurants.
For the first time in my life (as I thought of it with my erratic memory), or for the first time in many years (as I suspected was the reality), I felt the urge to paint what I saw. I was dazzled by light, by colour, by the harmony of places and plants and people.
I spent the daylight hours wandering wherever I could, feasting my eyes on the brashly coloured flowers and fields, the glinting rivers, the deep shade of the trees, the blue and yellow glare of the sunlit shores, the golden skins of the Mester people. Images leapt through my mind, making me crave for some artistic outlet by which I could capture them.
That was how I began sketching, knowing I was not yet ready for paint or pigments.
By this time I was able to earn enough money to afford to live in a small rented apartment. I supported myself by working in the kitchen of one of the harbourside bars. I was eating well, sleeping regularly, coming to terms with the extra mental blankness with which the war had left me. I felt as if my four years under arms had merely been time lost, an ellipsis, another area of forgotten life. In Mesterline I began to sense a full life extending around me, an identity, a past regainable and a future that could be envisaged.
I bought paper and pencils, borrowed a tiny stool, began the habit of setting myself up in the shade of the harbour wall, quickly drawing a likeness of anyone who walked into sight. I soon discovered that the Mesters were natural exhibitionists – when they realized what I was doing most of them would laughingly pose for me, or offer to return when they had more time, or even suggest they could meet me privately so that I could draw them again and in more intimate detail. Most of these offers came from young women. Already I was finding Mester women irresistibly beautiful. The harmony between their loveliness and the drowsy contentment of the Mesterline life inspired vivid graphic images in my mind that I found endlessly alluring to try to draw. Life spread even more fully around me, happiness grew. I started dreaming in colour.
Then a troopship arrived in Mesterline Town, breaking its voyage southwards to the war, its decks crammed with young conscripts.
It did not dock in the harbour of the town but moored a distance offshore. Lighters came ashore bringing hard currency to buy food and other materials and to replenish water supplies. While the transactions went on, an escouade of black-caps prowled the streets, staring intently at all men of military age, their synaptic batons at the ready. At first paralysed with fear at the sight of them, I managed to hide from them in the attic room of the town’s only brothel, dreading what would happen if they found me.
After they had gone and the troopship had departed, I walked around Mesterline Town in a state of dread and disquiet.
My litany of names had a meaning after all. It was not simply an incantation of imagined names with a ghostly reality. It constituted a memory of my actual experience. The islands were connected but not in the way I had been trusting – a code of my own past, which when deciphered would restore me to myself. It was more prosaic than that: it was the route the troopships took to the south.
Yet it remained an unconscious message. I had made it mine, I had recited it when no one else could know it.
I had been planning to stay indefinitely in Mesterline, but the unexpected arrival of the troopship soured everything. When I tried next to draw beneath the harbour wall I felt myself exposed and nervous. My hand would no longer respond to my inner eye. I wasted paper, broke pencils, lost friends. I had reverted to being a steffer.
On the day I left Mesterline the youngest of the whores came to the quay. She gave me a list of names, not of islands but of her friends who were working in other parts of the Dream Archipelago. As we sailed I committed the names to memory, then threw the scrap of paper in the sea.
Fifteen days later I was on Piqay, an island I liked but which I found too similar to Mesterline, too full of memories that I was transplanting from the shallow soil of my memory. I moved on from Piqay to Paneron, a long journey that passed several other islands and the Coast of Helvard’s Passion, a stupendous reef of towering rock, shadowing the coast of the island interior that lay beyond.
I had by this time travelled so far that I was off the edge of the map I had purchased, so I had only my memory of the names to guide me. I waited eagerly for each island to appear.
Paneron at first repelled me: much of its landscape was formed from volcanic rock, black and jagged and unwelcoming, but on the western side there was an enormous area of fertile land choked with rainforest that spread back from the shore as far as I could see. The coast was fringed with palms. I decided to rest in Paneron Town for a while.
Ahead lay the Swirl, beyond that vast chain of reefs and skerries were the Aubracs, beyond even those was the island I still yearned to find: Muriseay, home of my most vivid imaginings, birthplace of Rascar Acizzone.
The place, the artist – these were the only realities I knew, the only experience I thought I could call my own.
Another year of travel. I was confounded by the thirty-five islands of the Aubrac Group: work and accommodation were difficult to find in these underpopulated islets and I lacked the funds simply to sail past or around them. I had to make my way slowly through the group, island by island, working for subsistence, sweltering under the tropical sun. Now that I was travelling again my interest in drawing returned. In some of the busier Aubrac ports I would again set up my easel, draw for hire, for centimes and sous.
On AntiAubracia, close to the heart of the group of islands, I bought some pigments, oils and brushes. The Aubracs were a place largely devoid of colour: the flat, uninteresting islands lay under bleaching sunlight, the sand and pale gravel of the inland plains drifted into the towns on the constant winds, the pallid eggshell blue of the shallow lagoons could be glimpsed with every turn of the head. The absence of bright hues was a challenge to see and paint in colour.
I saw no more troopships, altho
ugh I was always on my guard for their passing or arrival. I was still following their route because when I asked the island people about the ships they knew at once what I meant and therefore what my background must be. But reliable information about the army was hard to glean. Sometimes I was told that the troopships had stopped travelling south; sometimes that they had switched to a different route; sometimes I was told they only passed in the night.
My fear of the black-caps kept me on the move.
Finally, I made a last sea-crossing and arrived one night on a coal-carrier in Muriseay Town. From the upper deck, as we moved slowly through the wide bay that led to the harbour mouth, I viewed the place with a feeling of anticipation. I could make a fresh start here – what had happened during the long-ago shore leave was insignificant. I leaned on the rail, watching the reflections of coloured lights from the town darting on the dark water. I could hear the roar of engines, the hubbub of voices, the traces of distorted music. Heat rolled around me, as once before it had rolled from the town.
There were delays in docking the ship and by the time I was ashore it was after midnight. Finding somewhere to sleep for the night was a priority. Because of recent hardships I was unable to pay to stay anywhere. I had faced the same problem many times in the past, slept rough more often than not, but I was nonetheless tired.
I headed through the clamouring traffic to the back streets, looking for brothels. I was assaulted by a range of sensations: breathless equatorial heat, tropical perfumes of flowers and incense, the endless racket of cars, motorbikes and pedicabs, the smell of spicy meat being cooked on smoking sidewalk stalls, the continuous flash and dazzle of neon advertising, the beat of pop music blaring out tinnily from radios on the food stalls and from every window and open doorway. I stood for a while on one of the street corners, laden down with my baggage and my painting equipment. I turned a full circle, relishing the exciting racket, then put down my baggage and, like the Mester people savouring the rains, I raised my arms in exaltation and lifted my face to the glancing night-time sky, orange-hued above me, reflecting the dancing lights of the city.